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| author | Roger Frank <rfrank@pglaf.org> | 2025-10-15 04:37:34 -0700 |
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diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6833f05 --- /dev/null +++ b/.gitattributes @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +* text=auto +*.txt text +*.md text diff --git a/11675-0.txt b/11675-0.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2cf966f --- /dev/null +++ b/11675-0.txt @@ -0,0 +1,9030 @@ +*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 11675 *** + +Vanishing Roads +And Other Essays + + +By + +Richard Le Gallienne + + +1915 + + + + + TO + + ROBERT HOBART DAVIS + +DEAR BOB: It is quite a long time now since you and I first caught +sight of each other and became fellow wayfarers on this Vanishing Road +of the world. O quite a lot of years now, Bob! Yet I control my tendency +to shiver at their number from the fact that we have travelled them, +always within hailing distance of each other, I with the comfortable +knowledge that near by I had so good a comrade, so true a friend. + +For this once, by your leave, we won't "can" the sentiment,--to use an +idiom in which you are the master-artist on this continent,--but I, at +least, will luxuriate in retrospect, as I write your name by way of +dedication to this volume of essays, for some of which your quick-firing +mind is somewhat more than editorially responsible. You were one of the +first to make me welcome to a country of which, even as a boy, I used +prophetically to dream as my "promised land," little knowing that it was +indeed to be my home, the home of my spirit, as well as the final +resting-place of my household gods; and, having you so early for my +friend, is it to be wondered at if I soon came to regard the American +humourist as the noblest work of God? + +There is yet, I trust, much left of the Vanishing Road for us to travel +together; and I hope that, when the time comes for us both to vanish +over the horizon line, we may exit still within hail of each other,--so +that we may have a reasonable chance of hitting the trail together on +the next route, whatever it is going to be. + +Always yours, + RICHARD LE GALLIENNE. + +Rowayton, December 25, 1914. + + + + +For their discernment in giving the following essays their first +opportunity with the reader the writer desires to thank the editors of +_The North American Review_, _Harper's Magazine_, _The Century_, _The +Smart Set_, _Munsey's_, _The Out-Door World_, and _The Forum_. + + + + +CONTENTS + + CHAPTER + I.--VANISHING ROADS + II.--WOMAN AS A SUPERNATURAL BEING + III.--THE LACK OF IMAGINATION AMONG MILLIONAIRES + IV.--THE PASSING OF MRS. GRUNDY + V.--MODERN AIDS TO ROMANCE + VI.--THE LAST CALL + VII.--THE PERSECUTIONS OF BEAUTY + VIII.--THE MANY FACES--THE ONE DREAM + IX.--THE SNOWS OF YESTER-YEAR + X.--THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GOSSIP + XI.--THE PASSING AWAY OF THE EDITOR + XII.--THE SPIRIT OF THE OPEN + XIII.--AN OLD AMERICAN TOW-PATH + XIV.--A MODERN SAINT FRANCIS + XV.--THE LITTLE GHOST IN THE GARDEN + XVI.--THE ENGLISH COUNTRYSIDE + XVII.--LONDON--CHANGING AND UNCHANGING + XVIII.--THE HAUNTED RESTAURANT + XIX.--THE NEW PYRAMUS AND THISBE + XX.--TWO WONDERFUL OLD LADIES + XXI.--A CHRISTMAS MEDITATION + XXII.--ON RE-READING WALTER PATER + XXIII.--THE MYSTERY OF "FIONA MACLEOD" + XXIV.--FORBES-ROBERTSON: AN APPRECIATION + XXV.--A MEMORY OF FRÉDÉRIC MISTRAL + XXVI.--IMPERISHABLE FICTION + XXVII.--THE MAN BEHIND THE PEN + XXVIII.--BULLS IN CHINA-SHOPS + XXIX.--THE BIBLE AND THE BUTTERFLY + + + +Vanishing Roads + + + + +I + +VANISHING ROADS + + +Though actually the work of man's hands--or, more properly speaking, the +work of his travelling feet,--roads have long since come to seem so much +a part of Nature that we have grown to think of them as a feature of the +landscape no less natural than rocks and trees. Nature has adopted them +among her own works, and the road that mounts the hill to meet the +sky-line, or winds away into mystery through the woodland, seems to be +veritably her own highway leading us to the stars, luring us to her +secret places. And just as her rocks and trees, we know not how or why, +have come to have for us a strange spiritual suggestiveness, so the +vanishing road has gained a meaning for us beyond its use as the avenue +of mortal wayfaring, the link of communication between village and +village and city and city; and some roads indeed seem so lonely, and so +beautiful in their loneliness, that one feels they were meant to be +travelled only by the soul. All roads indeed lead to Rome, but theirs +also is a more mystical destination, some bourne of which no traveller +knows the name, some city, they all seem to hint, even more eternal. + +Never more than when we tread some far-spreading solitude and mark the +road stretching on and on into infinite space, or the eye loses it in +some wistful curve behind the fateful foliage of lofty storm-stirred +trees, or as it merely loiters in sunny indolence through leafy copses +and ferny hollows, whatever its mood or its whim, by moonlight or at +morning; never more than thus, eagerly afoot or idly contemplative, are +we impressed by that something that Nature seems to have to tell us, +that something of solemn, lovely import behind her visible face. If we +could follow that vanishing road to its far mysterious end! Should we +find that meaning there? Should we know why it stops at no mere +market-town, nor comes to an end at any seaport? Should we come at last +to the radiant door, and know at last the purpose of all our travel? +Meanwhile the road beckons us on and on, and we walk we know not why or +whither. + +Vanishing roads do actually stir such thoughts, not merely by way of +similitude, but just in the same way that everything in Nature similarly +stirs thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls; as moonlit waters stir +them, or the rising of the sun. As I have said, they have come to seem +a part of natural phenomena, and, as such, may prove as suggestive a +starting-point as any other for those speculations which Nature is all +the time provoking in us as to why she affects us thus and thus. These +mighty hills of multitudinous rock, piled confusedly against the sky--so +much granite and iron and copper and crystal, says one. But to the soul, +strangely something besides, so much more. These rolling shapes of +cloud, so fantastically massed and moulded, moving in rhythmic change +like painted music in the heaven, radiant with ineffable glories or +monstrous with inconceivable doom. This sea of silver, "hushed and +halcyon," or this sea of wrath and ravin, wild as Judgment Day. So much +vapour and sunshine and wind and water, says one. + +Yet to the soul how much more! + +And why? Answer me that if you can. There, truly, we set our feet on the +vanishing road. + +Whatever reality, much or little, the personifications of Greek +Nature-worship had for the ancient world, there is no doubt that for a +certain modern temperament, more frequently met with every day, those +personifications are becoming increasingly significant, and one might +almost say veritably alive. Forgotten poets may, in the first instance, +have been responsible for the particular forms they took, their names +and stories, yet even so they but clothed with legend presences of wood +and water, of earth and sea and sky, which man dimly felt to have a +real existence; and these presences, forgotten or banished for a while +in prosaic periods, or under Puritanic repression, are once more being +felt as spiritual realities by a world coming more and more to evoke its +divinities by individual meditation on, and responsiveness to, the +mysterious so-called natural influences by which it feels itself +surrounded. Thus the first religion of the world seems likely to be its +last. In other words, the modern tendency, with spiritually sensitive +folk, is for us to go direct to the fountain-head of all theologies, +Nature herself, and, prostrating ourselves before her mystery, strive to +interpret it according to our individual "intimations," listening, +attent, for ourselves to her oracles, and making, to use the phrase of +one of the profoundest of modern Nature-seers, our own "reading of +earth." Such was Wordsworth's initiative, and, as some one has said, "we +are all Wordsworthians today." That pagan creed, in which Wordsworth +passionately wished himself suckled, is not "outworn." He himself, in +his own austere way, has, more than any one man, verified it for us, so +that indeed we do once more nowadays + + Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; + Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn. + +Nor have the dryads and the fauns been frighted away for good. All over +the world they are trooping back to the woods, and whoso has eyes may +catch sight, any summer day, of "the breast of the nymph in the brake." +Imagery, of course; but imagery that is coming to have a profounder +meaning, and a still greater expressive value, than it ever had for +Greece and Rome. All myths that are something more than fancies gain +rather than lose in value with time, by reason of the accretions of +human experience. The mysteries of Eleusis would mean more for a modern +man than for an ancient Greek, and in our modern groves of Dodona the +voice of the god has meanings for us stranger than ever reached his +ears. Maybe the meanings have a purport less definite, but they have at +least the suggestiveness of a nobler mystery. But surely the Greeks were +right, and we do but follow them as we listen to the murmur of the wind +in the lofty oaks, convinced as they of the near presence of the divine. + + The word by seers or sibyls told + In groves of oak or fanes of gold, + Still floats upon the morning wind, + Still whispers to the willing mind. + +Nor was it a vain thing to watch the flight of birds across the sky, and +augur this or that of their strange ways. We too still watch them in a +like mood, and, though we do not interpret them with a like exactitude, +we are very sure that they mean something important to our souls, as +they speed along their vanishing roads. + +This modern feeling of ours is quite different from the outworn +"pathetic fallacy," which was a purely sentimental attitude. We have, of +course, long since ceased to think of Nature as the sympathetic mirror +of our moods, or to imagine that she has any concern with the temporal +affairs of man. We no longer seek to appease her in her terrible moods +with prayer and sacrifice. We know that she is not thinking of us, but +we do know that for all her moods there is in us an answering thrill of +correspondence, which is not merely fanciful or imaginative, but of the +very essence of our beings. It is not that we are reading our thoughts +into her. Rather we feel that we are receiving her thoughts into +ourselves, and that, in certain receptive hours, we are, by some avenue +simpler and profounder than reason, made aware of certitudes we cannot +formulate, but which nevertheless siderealize into a faith beyond the +reach of common doubt--a faith, indeed, unelaborate, a faith, one might +say, of one tenet: belief in the spiritual sublimity of all Nature, and, +therefore, of our own being as a part thereof. + +In such hours we feel too, with a singular lucidity of conviction, that +those forces which thus give us that mystical assurance are all the time +moulding us accordingly as we give up ourselves to their influence, and +that we are literally and not fancifully what winds and waters make us; +that the poetry, for instance, of Wordsworth was literally first +somewhere in the universe, and thence transmitted to him by processes no +less natural than those which produced his bodily frame, gave him form +and feature, and coloured his eyes and hair. + +It is not man that has "poetized" the world, it is the world that has +made a poet out of man, by infinite processes of evolution, precisely in +the same way that it has shaped a rose and filled it with perfume, or +shaped a nightingale and filled it with song. One has often heard it +said that man has endowed Nature with his own feelings, that the pathos +or grandeur of the evening sky, for instance, are the illusions of his +humanizing fancy, and have no real existence. The exact contrary is +probably the truth--that man has no feelings of his own that were not +Nature's first, and that all that stirs in him at such spectacles is but +a translation into his own being of cosmic emotions which he shares in +varying degrees with all created things. Into man's strange heart Nature +has distilled her essences, as elsewhere she has distilled them in +colour and perfume. He is, so to say, one of the nerve-centres of cosmic +experience. In the process of the suns he has become a veritable +microcosm of the universe. It was not man that placed that tenderness in +the evening sky. It has been the evening skies of millions of years that +have at length placed tenderness in the heart of man. It has passed into +him as that "beauty born of murmuring sound" passed into the face of +Wordsworth's maiden. + +Perhaps we too seldom reflect how much the life of Nature is one with +the life of man, how unimportant or indeed merely seeming, the +difference between them. Who can set a seed in the ground, and watch it +put up a green shoot, and blossom and fructify and wither and pass, +without reflecting, not as imagery but as fact, that he has come into +existence, run his course, and is going out of existence again, by +precisely the same process? With so serious a correspondence between +their vital experience, the fact of one being a tree and the other a man +seems of comparatively small importance. The life process has but used +different material for its expression. And as man and Nature are so like +in such primal conditions, is it not to be supposed that they are alike +too in other and subtler ways, and that, at all events, as it thus +clearly appears that man is as much a natural growth as an apple-tree, +alike dependent on sun and rain, may not, or rather must not, the +thoughts that come to him strangely out of earth and sky, the sap-like +stirrings of his spirit, the sudden inner music that streams through him +before the beauty of the world, be no less authentically the working of +Nature within him than his more obviously physical processes, and, say, +a belief in God be as inevitable a blossom of the human tree as +apple-blossom of the apple? + +If this oracular office of Nature be indeed a truth, our contemplation +of her beauty and marvel is seen to be a method of illumination, and her +varied spectacle actually a sacred book in picture-writing, a revelation +through the eye of the soul of the stupendous purport of the universe. +The sun and the moon are the torches by which we study its splendid +pages, turning diurnally for our perusal, and in star and flower alike +dwells the lore which we cannot formulate into thought, but can only +come indescribably to know by loving the pictures. "The meaning of all +things that are" is there, if we can only find it. It flames in the +sunset, or flits by us in the twilight moth, thunders or moans or +whispers in the sea, unveils its bosom in the moonrise, affirms itself +in mountain-range and rooted oak, sings to itself in solitary places, +dreams in still waters, nods and beckons amid sunny foliage, and laughs +its great green laugh in the wide sincerity of the grass. + +As the pictures in this strange and lovely book are infinite, so +endlessly varied are the ways in which they impress us. In our highest +moments they seem to be definitely, almost consciously, sacerdotal, as +though the symbolic acts of a solemn cosmic ritual, in which the +universe is revealed visibly at worship. Were man to make a practice of +rising at dawn and contemplating in silence and alone the rising of the +sun, he would need no other religion. The rest of the day would be +hallowed for him by that morning memory and his actions would partake of +the largeness and chastity of that lustral hour. Moonlight, again, seems +to be the very holiness of Nature, welling out ecstatically from +fountains of ineffable purity and blessedness. Of some moonlight nights +we feel that if we did what our spirits prompt us, we should pass them +on our knees, as in some chapel of the Grail. To attempt to realize in +thought the rapture and purification of such a vigil is to wonder that +we so seldom pay heed to such inner promptings. So much we lose of the +best kind of joy by spiritual inertia, or plain physical sloth; and some +day it will be too late to get up and see the sunrise, or to follow the +white feet of the moon as she treads her vanishing road of silver across +the sea. This involuntary conscience that reproaches us with such laxity +in our Nature-worship witnesses how instinctive that worship is, and how +much we unconsciously depend on Nature for our impulses and our moods. + +Another definitely religious operation of Nature within us is expressed +in that immense gratitude which throws open the gates of the spirit as +we contemplate some example of her loveliness or grandeur. Who that +has stood by some still lake and watched a stretch of water-lilies +opening in the dawn but has sent out somewhere into space a profound +thankfulness to "whatever gods there be" that he has been allowed to +gaze on so fair a sight. Whatever the struggle or sorrow of our lives, +we feel in such moments our great good fortune at having been born into +a world that contains such marvels. It is sufficient success in life, +whatever our minor failures, to have beheld such beauty; and mankind at +large witnesses to this feeling by the value it everywhere attaches to +scenes in Nature exceptionally noble or exquisite. Though the American +traveller does not so express it, his sentiment toward such natural +spectacles as the Grand Cañon or Niagara Falls is that of an intense +reverence. Such places are veritable holy places, and man's heart +instinctively acknowledges them as sacred. His repugnance to any +violation of them by materialistic interests is precisely the same +feeling as the horror with which Christendom regarded the Turkish +violation of the Holy Sepulchre. And this feeling will increase rather +than decrease in proportion as religion is recognized as having its +shrines and oracles not only in Jerusalem, or in St. Peter's, but +wherever Nature has erected her altars on the hills or wafted her +incense through the woodlands. + +After all, are not all religions but the theological symbolization of +natural phenomena; and the sacraments, the festivals, and fasts of all +the churches have their counterparts in the mysterious processes and +manifestations of Nature? and is the contemplation of the resurrection +of Adonis or Thammuz more edifying to the soul than to meditate the +strange return of the spring which their legends but ecclesiastically +celebrate? He who has watched and waited at the white grave of winter, +and hears at last the first faint singing among the boughs, or the first +strange "peeping" of frogs in the marshes; or watches the ghost-like +return of insects, stealing, still half asleep, from one knows not +where--the first butterfly suddenly fluttering helplessly on the +window-pane, or the first mud-wasp crawling out into the sun in a dazed, +bewildered way; or comes upon the violet in the woods, shining at the +door of its wintry sepulchre: he who meditates these marvels, and all +the magic processional of the months, as they march with pomp and pathos +along their vanishing roads, will come to the end of the year with a +lofty, illuminated sense of having assisted at a solemn religious +service, and a realization that, in no mere fancy of the poets, but in +very deed, "day unto day uttereth speech and night unto night sheweth +knowledge." + +Apart from this generally religious influence of Nature, she seems at +times in certain of her aspects and moods specifically to illustrate or +externalize states of the human soul. Sometimes in still, moonlit +nights, standing, as it were, on the brink of the universe, we seem to +be like one standing on the edge of a pool, who, gazing in, sees his own +soul gazing back at him. Tiny creatures though we be, the whole solemn +and majestic spectacle seems to be an extension of our own reverie, and +we to enfold it all in some strange way within our own infinitesimal +consciousness. So a self-conscious dewdrop might feel that it enfolded +the morning sky, and such probably is the meaning of the Buddhist seer +when he declares that "the universe grows I." + +Such are some of the more august impressions made upon us by the +pictures in the cosmic picture-book; but there are also times and +places when Nature seems to wear a look less mystic than dramatic in its +suggestiveness, as though she were a stage-setting for some portentous +human happening past or to come--the fall of kings or the tragic clash +of empires. As Whitman says, "Here a great personal deed has room." Some +landscapes seem to prophesy, some to commemorate. In some places not +marked by monuments, or otherwise definitely connected with history, we +have a curious haunted sense of prodigious far-off events once enacted +in this quiet grassy solitude--prehistoric battles or terrible +sacrifices. About others hangs a fateful atmosphere of impending +disaster, as though weighted with a gathering doom. Sometimes we seem +conscious of sinister presences, as though veritably in the abode of +evil spirits. The place seems somehow not quite friendly to humanity, +not quite good to linger in, lest its genius should cast its perilous +shadow over the heart. On the other hand, some places breathe an +ineffable sense of blessedness, of unearthly promise. We feel as though +some hushed and happy secret were about to be whispered to us out of the +air, some wonderful piece of good fortune on the edge of happening. Some +hand seems to beckon us, some voice to call, to mysterious paradises of +inconceivable green freshness and supernaturally beautiful flowers, +fairy fastnesses of fragrance and hidden castles of the dew. In such +hours the Well at the World's End seems no mere poet's dream. It awaits +us yonder in the forest glade, amid the brooding solitudes of silent +fern, and the gate of the Earthly Paradise is surely there in yonder +vale hidden among the violet hills. + +Various as are these impressions, it is strange and worth thinking on +that the dominant suggestion of Nature through all her changes, whether +her mood be stormy or sunny, melancholy or jubilant, is one of presage +and promise. She seems to be ever holding out to us an immortal +invitation to follow and endure, to endure and to enjoy. She seems to +say that what she brings us is but an earnest of what she holds for us +out there along the vanishing road. There is nothing, indeed, she will +not promise us, and no promise, we feel, she cannot keep. Even in her +tragic and bodeful seasons, in her elegiac autumns and stern winters, +there is an energy of sorrow and sacrifice that elevates and inspires, +and in the darkest hours hints at immortal mornings. She may terrify, +but she never deadens, the soul. In earthquake and eclipse she seems to +be less busy with destruction than with renewed creation. She is but +wrecking the old, that + + ... there shall be + Beautiful things made new, for the surprise + Of the sky-children. + +As I have thus mused along with the reader, a reader I hope not too +imaginary, the manner in which the phrase with which I began has +recurred to my pen has been no mere accident, nor yet has it been a +mere literary device. It seemed to wait for one at every turn of one's +theme, inevitably presenting itself. For wherever in Nature we set our +foot, she seems to be endlessly the centre of vanishing roads, radiating +in every direction into space and time. Nature is forever arriving and +forever departing, forever approaching, forever vanishing; but in her +vanishings there seems to be ever the waving of a hand, in all her +partings a promise of meetings farther along the road. She would seem to +say not so much _Ave atque vale_, as _Vale atque ave_. In all this +rhythmic drift of things, this perpetual flux of atoms flowing on and on +into Infinity, we feel less the sense of loss than of a musical +progression of which we too are notes. + +We are all treading the vanishing road of a song in the air, the +vanishing road of the spring flowers and the winter snows, the vanishing +roads of the winds and the streams, the vanishing road of beloved faces. +But in this great company of vanishing things there is a reassuring +comradeship. We feel that we are units in a vast ever-moving army, the +vanguard of which is in Eternity. The road still stretches ahead of us. +For a little while yet we shall experience all the zest and bustle of +marching feet. The swift-running seasons, like couriers bound for the +front, shall still find us on the road, and shower on us in passing +their blossoms and their snows. For a while the murmur of the running +stream of Time shall be our fellow-wayfarer--till, at last, up there +against the sky-line, we too turn and wave our hands, and know for +ourselves where the road wends as it goes to meet the stars. And others +will stand as we today and watch us reach the top of the ridge and +disappear, and wonder how it seemed to us to turn that radiant corner +and vanish with the rest along the vanishing road. + + + + +II + +WOMAN AS A SUPERNATURAL BEING + + +The boy's first hushed enchantment, blent with a sort of religious awe, +as in his earliest love affair he awakens to the delicious mystery we +call woman, a being half fairy and half flower, made out of moonlight +and water lilies, of elfin music and thrilling fragrance, of divine +whiteness and softness and rustle as of dewy rose gardens, a being of +unearthly eyes and terribly sweet marvel of hair; such, too, through +life, and through the ages, however confused or overlaid by use and +wont, is man's perpetual attitude of astonishment before the apparition +woman. + +Though she may work at his side, the comrade of his sublunary +occupations, he never, deep down, thinks of her as quite real. Though +his wife, she remains an apparition, a being of another element, an +Undine. She is never quite credible, never quite loses that first nimbus +of the supernatural. + +This is true not merely for poets; it is true for all men, though, of +course, all men may not be conscious of its truth, or realize the truth +in just this way. Poets, being endowed with exceptional sensitiveness of +feeling and expression, say the wonderful thing in the wonderful way, +bring to it words more nearly adequate than others can bring; but it is +an error to suppose that any beauty of expression can exaggerate, can +indeed more than suggest, the beauty of its truth. Woman is all that +poets have said of her, and all that poets can never say: + + Always incredible hath seemed the rose, + And inconceivable the nightingale-- + +and the poet's adoration of her is but the articulate voice of man's +love since the beginning, a love which is as mysterious as she herself +is a mystery. + +However some may try to analyse man's love for woman, to explain it, or +explain it away, belittle it, nay, even resent and befoul it, it remains +an unaccountable phenomenon, a "mystery we make darker with a name." +Biology, cynically pointing at certain of its processes, makes the +miracle rather more miraculous than otherwise. Musical instruments are +no explanation of music. "Is it not strange that sheep's guts should +hale souls out of men's bodies?" says Benedick, in _Much Ado About +Nothing_, commenting on Balthazar's music. But they do, for all that, +though no one considers sheep's gut the explanation. To cry "sex" and to +talk of nature's mad preoccupation with the species throws no light on +the matter, and robs it of no whit of its magic. The rainbow remains a +rainbow, for all the sciences. And woman, with or without the suffrage, +stenographer or princess, is of the rainbow. She is beauty made flesh +and dwelling amongst us, and whatever the meaning and message of beauty +may be, such is the meaning of woman on the earth--her meaning, at all +events, for men. That is, she is the embodiment, more than any other +creature, of that divine something, whatever it may be, behind matter, +that spiritual element out of which all proceeds, and which mysteriously +gives its solemn, lovely and tragic significance to our mortal day. + +If you tell some women this of themselves, they will smile at you. Men +are such children. They are so simple. Dear innocents, how easily they +are fooled! A little make-up, a touch of rouge, a dash of henna--and you +are an angel. Some women seem really to think this; for, naturally, they +know nothing of their own mystery, and imagine that it resides in a few +feminine tricks, the superficial cleverness with which some of them know +how to make the most of the strange something about them which they +understand even less than men understand it. + +Other women indeed resent man's religious attitude toward them as +sentimental, old-fashioned. They prefer to be regarded merely as +fellow-men. To show consciousness of their sex is to risk offence, and +to busy one's eyes with their magnificent hair, instead of the +magnificent brains beneath it, is to insult them. Yet when, in that old +court of law, Phryne bared her bosom as her complete case for the +defence, she proved herself a greater lawyer than will ever be made by +law examinations and bachelor's degrees; and even when women become +judges of the Supreme Court, a development easily within sight, they +will still retain the greater importance of being merely women. Yes, and +one can easily imagine some future woman President of the United States, +for all the acknowledged brilliancy of her administration, being +esteemed even more for her superb figure. + +It is no use. Woman, if she would, "cannot shake off the god." She must +make up her mind, whatever other distinctions she may achieve, to her +inalienable distinction of being woman; nothing she can do will change +man's eternal attitude toward her, as a being made to be worshipped and +to be loved, a being of beauty and mystery, as strange and as lovely as +the moon, the goddess and the mother of lunatics. What a wonderful +destiny is hers! In addition to being the first of human beings, all +that a man can be, to be so much else as well; to be, so to say, the +president of a railroad and yet a priestess of nature's mysteries; a +stenographer at so many dollars a week and yet a nymph of the forest +pools--woman, "and yet a spirit still." Not without meaning has myth +endowed woman with the power of metamorphosis, to change at will like +the maidens in the legend into wild white swans, or like Syrinx, fleeing +from the too ardent pursuit of Pan, into a flowering reed, or like +Lamia, into a jewelled serpent-- + + Eyed like a peacock, and all crimson barr'd; + And full of silver moons. + +Modern conditions are still more favourable than antique story for the +exhibition of this protean quality of woman, providing her with +opportunities of still more startling contrasts of transformation. Will +it not be a wonderful sight in that near future to watch that woman +judge of the Supreme Court, in the midst of some learned tangle of +inter-state argument, turn aside for a moment, in response to a +plaintive cry, and, unfastening her bodice, give the little clamourer +the silver solace it demands! What a hush will fall upon the assembled +court! To think of such a genius for jurisprudence, such a legal brain, +working in harmony--with such a bosom! So august a pillar of the law, +yet so divine a mother. + +As it is, how piquant the contrast between woman inside and outside her +office hours! As you take her out to dinner, and watch her there seated +before you, a perfumed radiance, a dewy dazzling vision, an evening star +swathed in gauzy convolutions of silk and lace--can it be the same +creature who an hour or two ago sat primly with notebook and pencil at +your desk side, and took down your specification for fireproofing that +new steel-constructed building on Broadway? You, except for your evening +clothes, are not changed; but she--well, your clients couldn't possibly +recognize her. As with Browning's lover, you are on the other side of +the moon, "side unseen" of office boy or of subway throng; you are in +the presence of those "silent silver lights and darks undreamed of" by +the gross members of your board of directors. By day--but ah! at evening +under the electric lights, to the delicate strains of the palm-shaded +orchestra! Man is incapable of these exquisite transformations. By day a +gruff and hurried machine--at evening, at best, a rapt and laconic poker +player. A change with no suggestion of the miraculous. + +Do not let us for a moment imagine that because man is ceasing to remove +his hat at her entrance into crowded elevators, or because he hustles +her or allows her to hang by the straps in crowded cars, that he is +tending to forget this supernaturalism of woman. Such change in his +manners merely means his respect for her disguise, her disguise as a +business woman. By day she desires to be regarded as just that, and she +resents as untimely the recognition of her sex, her mystery, and her +marvel during business hours. Man's apparent impoliteness, therefore, is +actually a delicate modern form of chivalry. But of course his real +feelings are only respectfully masked, and, let her be in any danger or +real discomfort, or let any language be uttered unseemly for her ears, +and we know what promptly happens. Barring such accidents, man tacitly +understands that her incognito is to be respected--till the charming +moment comes when she chooses to put it aside and take at his hands her +immemorial tribute. + +So, you see, she is able to go about the rough ways, taking part even in +the rough work of the world, literally bearing what the fairy tales call +a charmed life. And this, of course, gives her no small advantage in the +human conflict. So protected, she is enabled, when need arises, to take +the offensive, with a minimum of danger. Consider her recent campaign +for suffrage, for example. Does any one suppose that, had she been +anything but woman, a sacrosanct being, immune from clubs and bullets, +that she would have been allowed to carry matters with such high +victorious hand as in England--and more power to her!--she has of late +been doing. Let men attempt such tactics, and their shrift is +uncomplimentarily short. It may be said that woman enjoys this immunity +with children and curates, but, even so, it may be held that these +latter participate in a less degree in that divine nature with which +woman is so completely armoured. + + How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea, + Whose action is no stronger than a flower? + +exclaims Shakespeare. + +But there is indeed the mystery, for, though its "action is no stronger +than a flower," the power wielded by beauty in this world, and therefore +by woman as its most dynamic embodiment, is as undeniable as it is +irresistible. "Terrible as an army with banners" was no mere figure of +lovesick speech. It is as plain a truth as the properties of radium, +and belongs to the same order of marvel. Such scientific discoveries are +particularly welcome as demonstrating the power of the finer, as +contrasted with the more brutally obvious, manifestations of force; for +they thus illustrate the probable nature of those spiritual forces whose +operations we can plainly see, without being able to account for them. A +foolish phrase has it that "a woman's strength is in her helplessness." +"Helplessness" is a curious term to use for a mysteriously concentrated +or super-refined form of strength. "Whose action is no stronger than a +flower." But is the action of a flower any less strong because it is not +the action of a fist? As a motive force a flower may be, and indeed has +time and again been, stronger than a thousand fists. And what then shall +we say of the action of that flower of flowers that is woman--that +flower that not only once or twice in history has + + ... launched a thousand ships + And burned the topless towers of Ilium. + +Woman's helplessness, forsooth! On the contrary, woman is the best +equipped fighting machine that ever went to battle. And she is this, not +from any sufferance on the part of man, not from any consideration on +his part toward her "weakness," but merely because he cannot help +himself, because nature has so made her. + +No simple reasoning will account for her influence over man. It is not +an influence he allows. It is an influence he cannot resist, and it is +an influence which he cannot explain, though he may make believe to do +so. That "protection," for example, which he extends to her from the +common physical perils with which he is more muscularly constituted to +cope--why is it extended? Merely out of pity to a weaker being than +himself? Does other weakness always command his pity? We know that it +does not. No, this "protection" is but a part of an instinctive +reverence, for which he can give no reason, the same kind of reverence +which he has always given to divine beings, to any manifestation or +vessel of the mysteriously sacred something in human life. He respects +and protects woman from the same instinct which makes him shrink from +profaning an altar or robbing a church, or sends him on his knees before +any apparition supposedly divine. Priests and women are often classed +together, but not because the priests are regarded as effeminately +"helpless"; rather because both are recognized as ministers of sacred +mysteries, both belong to the spiritual sphere, and have commerce with +the occult holiness of things. Also be it remarked that this +"protection" is chiefly needed against the brutality and bestiality of +man's own heart, which woman and religion alike rather hold in +subjection by their mysterious influence than have to thank for any +favours of self-control. Man "protects" woman because he first worships +her, because, if she has for him not always the beauty of holiness, she +at least always suggests the holiness of beauty. + +Now when has man ever suggested holiness to the most adoring woman? I do +not refer to the professional holiness of saints and ecclesiastics, but +to that sense of hallowed strangeness, of mystic purity, of spiritual +exquisiteness, which breathes from a beautiful woman and makes the touch +of her hand a religious ecstasy, and her very garments a thrilling +mystery. How impossible it is to imagine a woman writing the _Vita +Nuova_, or a girl feeling toward a boy such feelings of awe and worship +as set the boy Dante a-tremble at his first sight of the girl Beatrice. + + At that moment [he writes], I say most truly that the spirit of + life, which hath its dwelling in the secretest chamber of the heart, + began to tremble so violently that the least pulse of my body shook + therewith; and in trembling it said these words: "_Ecce deus fortior + me, qui veniens dominabitur mihi_. (Here is a deity stronger than I, + who, coming, shall rule over me.)" + +And, loverlike, he records of "this youngest of the angels" that "her +dress on that day was of a most noble colour, a subdued and goodly +crimson, girdled and adorned in such sort as best suited with her very +tender age." Ah! that "little frock," that sacred little frock we first +saw her in! Don't we all know it? And the little handkerchief, scented +like the breath of heaven, we begged as a sacred relic! And-- + + Long after you are dead + I will kiss the shoes of your feet.... + +Yes! anything she has worn or touched; for, as a modern writer has said: + + Everything a woman wears or touches immediately incarnates something + of herself. A handkerchief, a glove, a flower--with a breath she + endows them with immortal souls. + +Waller with his girdle, Donne with "that subtle wreath of hair about his +arm," the mediaeval knight riding at tourney with his lady's sleeve at +his helm, and all relic-worshipping lovers through the ages bear witness +to that divine supernaturalism of woman. To touch the hem of that little +frock, to kiss the mere imprint of those little feet, is to be purified +and exalted. But when did man affect woman in that way? I am tolerably +well read in the poetry of woman's emotions, but I recall no parallel +expressions of feeling. No passionate apostrophes of his golf stockings +come to my mind, nor wistful recollections of the trousers he wore on +that never-to-be-forgotten afternoon. The immaculate collar that spanned +his muscular throat finds no Waller to sing it: + + A narrow compass--and yet there + Dwelt all that's good, and all that's fair, + +and probably the smartest negligée shirt that ever sported with the +summer winds on a clothes-line has never caused the smallest flutter in +feminine bosoms. The very suggestion is, of course, absurd--whereas with +women, in very deed, it is as with the temple in Keats's lines: + + ... even as the trees + That whisper round a temple become soon + Dear as the temple's self. + +Properly understood, therefore, the cult of the skirt-dancer has a +religious significance, and man's preoccupation with petticoats is but +the popular recognition of the divinity of woman. All that she is and +does and wears has a ritualistic character, and she herself commands our +reverence because we feel her to be the vessel of sacred mysteries, the +earthly representative of unearthly powers, with which she enjoys an +intimacy of communication denied to man. It is not a reasonable feeling, +or one to be reasoned about; and that is why we very properly exempt +woman from the necessity of being reasonable. She is not, we say, a +reasonable being, and in so saying we pay her a profound compliment. For +she transcends reason, and on that very account is mysteriously wise, +the wisest of created things--mother-wise. When we say "mother-wit," we +mean something deeper than we realize--for what in the universe is wiser +than a mother, fed as she is through the strange channels of her being +with that lore of the infinite which seems to enter her body by means of +organs subtler than the brain? + +A certain famous novelist meant well when recently he celebrated woman +as "the mother of the male," but such celebration, while ludicrously +masculine in its egotistic limitation, would have fallen short even if +he had stopped to mention that she was the mother of the female, too; +for not merely in the fact that she is the mother of the race resides +the essential mystery of her motherhood. We do not value woman merely, +if one may be permitted the expression, as a brood mare, an economic +factor controlling the census returns. Her gift of motherhood is +stranger than that, and includes spiritual affinities and significances +not entirely represented by visible babes. Her motherhood is mysterious +because it seems to be one with the universal motherhood of nature, one +with the motherhood that guards and warms to life the eggs in the nest +and the seeds in the hollows of the hills, the motherhood of the whole +strange vital process, wherever and howsoever it moves and dreams and +breaks into song and flower. And, as nature is something more than a +mother, so is woman. She is a vision, an outward and visible sign of an +inward and spiritual grace and goodness at the heart of life; and her +beauty is the sacred seal which the gods have set upon her in token of +her supernatural meaning and mission; for all beauty is the message of +the immortal to mortality. Always when man has been in doubt concerning +his gods, or in despair amid the darkness of his destiny, his heart has +been revived by some beatific vision; + + Some shape of beauty moves away the pall + From our dark spirits. + +Woman is our permanent Beatific Vision in the darkness of the world. + + + + +III + +THE LACK OF IMAGINATION AMONG MILLIONAIRES + + +Considering the truly magical power of money, it must often have struck +the meditative mind--particularly that class of meditative mind whose +wealth consists chiefly in meditation--to what thoroughly commonplace +uses the modern millionaire applies the power that is his: in brief, +with what little originality, with what a pitiful lack of imagination, +he spends his money. One seldom hears of his doing a novel or striking +thing with it. + +On the contrary, he buys precisely the same things as his +fellow-millionaires, the same stereotyped possessions--houses in Fifth +Avenue and Newport, racehorses, automobiles, boxes at the opera, +diamonds and dancing girls; and whether, as the phrase is, he makes good +use of his wealth, or squanders it on his pleasures, the so-called good +or bad uses are alike drearily devoid of individuality. Philanthropist +or profligate, the modern millionaire is one and the same in his lack of +initiative. Saint or sinner, he is one or the other in the same tame +imitative way. + +The rich men of the past, the splendid spendthrifts of antiquity, seem +usually to have combined a gift of fancy with their wealth, often even +something like poetry; and their extravagances, however extreme, had +usually a saving grace of personal whim to recommend them to lovers of +the picturesque. Sardanapalus and Heliogabalus may have been whatever +else you please, but they were assuredly not commonplace; and the mere +mention of their names vibrates with mankind's perennial gratitude for +splendour and colossal display, however perverse, and even absurd. The +princes of the Italian Renaissance were, of course, notable examples of +the rich man as fantast, probably because they had the good sense to +seek the skilled advice of poets and painters as to how best to make an +artistic display of their possessions. Alas, no millionaire today asks a +poet's or painter's assistance in spending his money; yet, were the +modern millionaire to do so, the world might once more be delighted with +such spectacles as Leonardo devised for the entertainments at the Villa +Medici--those fanciful banquets, where, instead of a mere vulgar display +of Medici money--"a hundred dollars a plate," so to say--whimsical wit +and beauty entered into the creation of the very dishes. Leicester's +famous welcoming of Elizabeth to Kenilworth was perhaps the last +spectacular "revel" of its kind to strike the imagination; though we +must not fail to remember with gratitude the magnificent Beckford, with +his glorious "rich man's folly" of Fonthill Abbey, a lordly pleasure +house which naturally sprang from the same Aladdin-like fancy which +produced "Vathek." + +I but mention one or two such typical examples at random to illustrate +the difference between past and present. At present the rich man's +paucity of originality is so painful that we even welcome a certain +millionaire's _penchant_ for collecting fleas--he, it is rumoured, +having paid as much as a thousand dollars for specimens of a +particularly rare species. It is a passion perhaps hard to understand, +but, at least, as we say, it is "different." Mr. Carnegie's more +comprehensible hobby for building libraries shows also no little +originality in a man of a class which is not as a rule devoted to +literature. Another millionaire I recently read of, who refused to pay +the smallest account till it had run for five years, and would then +gladly pay it, with compound interest at five per cent., has something +refreshing about him; while still another rich eccentric, who has lived +on his yacht anchored near the English coast for some fifteen years or +so in order to avoid payment of his American taxes, and who occasionally +amuses himself by having gold pieces heated white hot and thrown into +the sea for diving boys to pick them up, shows a quaint ingenuity which +deserves our gratitude. Another modern example of how to spend, or +waste, one's money picturesquely was provided by the late Marquis of +Anglesey, a young lord generally regarded as crazy by an ungrateful +England. Perhaps it was a little crazy in him to spend so much money in +the comparatively commonplace adventure of taking an amateur dramatic +company through the English provinces, he himself, I believe, playing +but minor rôles; but lovers of Gautier's _Le Capitaine Fracasse_ will +see in that but a charmingly boyish desire to translate a beloved dream +into a reality--though his creditors probably did not take that view. +Neither, one can surmise, did those gentlemen sufficiently appreciate +his passion for amassing amazing waistcoats, of which some seven hundred +were found in his wardrobe at his lamented death; or strange and +beautiful walking sticks, a like prodigious collection of which were +among the fantastic assets which represented his originally large +personal fortune on the winding up of his earthly affairs. Among these +unimaginative creditors were, doubtless, many jewellers who found it +hard to sympathize with his lordship's genial after-dinner habit, +particularly when in the society of fair women, of plunging his hand +into his trousers pocket and bringing it forth again brimming over with +uncut precious stones of many colours, at the same time begging his +companion to take her choice of the moonlit rainbowed things. The +Marquis of Anglesey died at the early age of twenty-nine, much lamented, +as I have hinted--by his creditors, but no less sincerely lamented, too, +by those for whom his flamboyant personality and bizarre whims added to +that gaiety of nations sadly in need today of such figures. A friend of +mine owns two of the wonderful waistcoats. Sometimes he wears one as we +lunch together, and on such occasions we always drink in silence to the +memory of his fantastic lordship. + +These examples of rich men of our own time who have known how to spend +their money with whim and fancy and flourish are but exceptions to my +argument, lights shining, so to say, in a great darkness. As a general +rule, it is the poor or comparatively poor man, the man lacking the very +necessary material of the art, who is an artist of this kind. It is the +man with but little money who more often provides examples of the +delightful way of spending it. I trust that Mr. Richard Harding Davis +will not resent my recalling a charming feat of his in this connection. +Of course Mr. Davis is by no means a poor man, as all we who admire his +writings are glad to know. Still, successful writer as he is, he is not +yet, I presume, on a Carnegie or Rockefeller rating; and, at the time +which I am about to recall, while already famous and comparatively +prosperous, he had not attained that security of position which is +happily his today. Well, I suppose it was some twelve or fifteen years +ago--and of course I am only recalling a story well known to all the +world--that, chancing to be in London, and wishing to send a surprise +message to a lady in Chicago who afterward became his wife, he conceived +the idea of sending it by messenger boy from Charing Cross to Michigan +Avenue; and so the little lad, in the well-known uniform of hurry, sped +across the sea, as casually as though he were on an errand from Charing +Cross to Chancery Lane, raced across nearly half the continent, as +casually as though he were on an errand from Wall Street to Park Row, +and finding the proper number in Michigan Avenue, placed the far +travelled letter in the lady's hand, no doubt casually asking for a +receipt. This I consider one of the most romantic compliments ever paid +by a lover to his lady. What millionaire ever had a fancy like that? + +Or what millionaire ever had a fancy like this? There was living in New +York some ten years ago a charming actor, not unknown to the public and +much loved by his friends for, among his other qualities, his quaint +whims. Good actor as he was, like many other good actors he was usually +out of an engagement, and he was invariably poor. It was always his +poorest moment that he would choose for the indulgence of an odd, and +surely kindly, eccentricity. He would half starve himself, go without +drinks, forswear tobacco, deny himself car fares, till at last he had +saved up five dollars. This by no means easy feat accomplished, he would +have his five-dollar bill changed into five hundred pennies, filling his +pockets with which, he would sally forth from his lodging, and, seeking +neighbourhoods in which children most abound, he would scatter his +arduously accumulated largess among the scrambling boys and girls, +literally happy as a king to watch the glee on the young faces at the +miraculous windfall. We often wondered that he was not arrested for +creating a riot in the public streets, a disturber of the public +traffic. Had some millionaire passed by on one of those ecstatic +occasions, there is no question but that he would have been promptly +removed to Bellevue as a dangerous lunatic. + +Or what millionaire ever had a fancy like this? Passing along +Forty-second Street one afternoon, I came upon a little crowd, and +joining it I found that it was grouped in amused curiosity, and with a +certain kindness, round an old hatless Irishman, who was leaning against +a shop front, weeping bitterly, and, of course, grotesquely. The old man +was very evidently drunk, but there was something in his weeping deeply +pitiful for all that. He was drunk, for certain; but no less certainly +he was very unhappy--unhappy over some mysterious something that one or +two kindly questioners tried in vain to discover. As we all stood +helplessly looking on and wondering, a tall, brisk young man, of the +lean, rapid, few-worded American type, pushed in among us, took a swift +look at the old man, thrust a dollar bill into his hand, said "Forget +it"--no more--and was gone like a flash on his way. The old man fumbled +the note in a daze, but what chiefly interested me was the amazed look +on the faces of the little crowd. It was almost as if something +supernatural had happened. All eyes turned quickly to catch sight of +that strange young man; but he was already far off striding swiftly up +the street. I have often regretted that I checked my impulse to catch up +with him--for it seemed to me, too, that I had never seen a stranger +thing. Pity or whim or whatever it was, did ever a millionaire do the +like with a dollar, create such a sensation or have so much fun with so +small a sum? No; millionaires never have fancies like that. + +Another poor man's fancy is that of a friend of mine, a very poor young +lawyer, whose custom it is to walk uptown from his office at evening, +studying the faces of the passers-by. He is too poor to afford dollar +bills. He must work his miracles with twenty-five-cent pieces, or even +smaller coins; but it is with this art of spending money as with any +other art: the greatness of the artist is shown by his command over an +economy of material; and the amount of human happiness to be evoked by +the dispensation of a quarter into the carefully selected hand, at the +artistically chosen moment, almost passes belief. Suppose, for example, +you were a sandwich man on a bleak winter day, an old weary man, with +hope so long since faded out of your heart that you would hardly know +what the word meant if you chanced to read it in print. Thought, too, is +dead within you, and feeling even so numbed that you hardly suffer any +more. Practically you are a man who ought to be in your coffin--at peace +in Potter's field--who, by the mere mechanic habit of existence, +mournfully parades the public streets, holding up a banner with some +strange device, the scoff of the pitiless wayfarer--as like as not +supporting against an empty stomach the savoury advertisement of some +newly opened restaurant. Suppose you were that man, and suddenly through +the thick hopelessness, muffling you around as with a spiritual +deafness, there should penetrate a kind voice saying: "Try and keep up +your heart, friend; there are better days ahead"; and with the voice a +hand slipping into yours a coin, and with both a kind smile, a cheery +"Good-bye," and a tall, broad-shouldered figure, striding with long, so +to say, kindly legs up the street--gone almost before you knew he was +there. I think it would hardly matter to you whether the coin were a +quarter or a dime; but what would matter would be your amazement that +there still was any kindness left on the earth; and perhaps you might +almost be tempted to believe in God again. And then--well, what would it +matter to any one what you did with your miraculous coin? This is my +friend's favourite way of spending his money. To the extent of his poor +means he has constituted himself the Haroun Al Raschid of the sandwich +men. + +After all, I suppose that most of us, if put into the possession of +great wealth, would find our greatest satisfaction in the spending of it +much after the fashion of my poor lawyer friend--that is, in the +artistic distribution of human happiness. I do not, of course, for a +moment include in that phrase those soulless systems of philanthropy by +which a solid block of money on the one side is applied to the relief of +a solid block of human misery on the other, useful and much to be +appreciated as such mechanical charity of course is. It is not, indeed, +the pious use of money that is my theme, but rather how to get the most +fun, the most personal and original fun, out of it. + +The mention of the great caliph suggests a rôle which is open to any +rich man to play, the rôle of the Haroun Al Raschid of New York. What a +wonderful part to play! Instead of loitering away one's evenings at the +club, to doff one's magnificence and lose oneself in the great nightly +multitude of the great city, wandering hither and thither, watching and +listening, and, with one's cheque-book for a wand, play the magician of +human destinies--bringing unhoped-for justice to the oppressed, succour +as out of heaven to the outcast, and swift retribution, as of sudden +lightning, to the oppressor. To play Providence in some tragic crisis of +human lives; at the moment when all seemed lost to step out of the +darkness and set all right with a touch of that magic wand. To walk by +the side of lost and lonely men, an unexpected friend; to scribble a +word on a card and say, "Present this tomorrow morning at such a number +Broadway and see what will happen," and then to disappear once again +into the darkness. To talk with sad, wandering girls, and arrange that +wonderful new hats and other forms of feminine hope shall fall out of +the sky into their lonely rooms on the morrow. To be the friend of weary +workmen and all that toil by night while the world is asleep in soft +beds. To come upon the hobo as he lies asleep on the park bench and slip +a purse into his tattered coat, and perhaps be somewhere by to see him +wake up in the dawn, and watch the strange antics of his joy--all +unsuspected as its cause. To go up to the poor push-cart man, as he is +being hurried from street corner to street corner by the police, and +say: "Would you like to go back to Italy? Here is a steamer ticket. A +boat sails for Genoa tomorrow. And here is a thousand dollars. It will +buy you a vineyard in Sicily. Go home and bid the signora get ready." +And then to disappear once more, like Harlequin, to flash your wand in +some other corner of the human multitude. Oh, there would be fun for +one's money, something worth while having money for! + +I offer this suggestion to any rich man who may care to take it up, free +of charge. It is a fascinating opportunity, and its rewards would be +incalculable. At the end of the year how wise one would be in the human +story--how filled to overflowing his heart with the thought of the joy +he would thus have brought to so many lives--all, too, in pure fun, +himself having had such a good time all the while! + + + + +IV + +THE PASSING OF MRS. GRUNDY + + +"Death of Mrs. Grundy!" Imagine opening one's newspaper some morning and +finding in sensational headlines that welcome news. One recalls the +beautiful old legend of the death of Pan, and how--false report though +it happily was--there once ran echoing through the world a long +heartbroken sigh, and a mysterious voice was heard wailing three times +from land to land, "Great Pan is dead!" Similarly, on that happy morning +I have imagined, one can imagine, too, another sigh passing from land to +land, the sigh of a vast relief, of a great thankfulness for the lifting +of an ineffable burden, as though the earth stretched its limbs and drew +great draughts of a new freedom. How wildly the birds would sing that +morning! And I believe that even the church bells would ring of +themselves! + +Such definite news is not mine to proclaim, but if it cannot be +announced with certitude that Mrs. Grundy is no more, it may, at all +events, be affirmed without hesitation that she is on her deathbed, and +that surely, if slowly, she is breathing her last. Yes, that poisonous +breath, which has so long pervaded like numbing miasma the free air of +the world, will soon be out of her foolish, hypocritical old body; and +though it may still linger on here and there in provincial backwoods and +suburban fastnesses, from the great air centres of civilization it will +have passed away forever. + +The origin of Mrs. Grundy is shrouded in mystery. In fact, though one +thus speaks of her as so potent a personification, she has of course +never had any real existence. For that very reason she has been so hard +to kill. Nothing is so long-lived as a chimera, nothing so difficult to +lay as a ghost. From her first appearance, or rather mention, in +literature, Mrs. Grundy has been a mere hearsay, a bugaboo being +invented to frighten society, as "black men" and other goblins have been +wickedly invented by nurses to frighten children. In the old play itself +where we first find her mentioned by name, she herself never comes on +the stage. She is only referred to in frightened whispers. "_What will +Mrs. Grundy say?_" is the nervous catchword of one of the characters, +much in the same way as Mrs. Gamp was wont to defer to the censorious +standards of her invisible friend "Mrs. Harris." In the case of the last +named chimera, it will be recalled that the awful moment came when Mrs. +Gamp's boon companion, Batsey Prig, was sacrilegious enough to declare +her belief that no such person as "Mrs. Harris" was, or ever had been, +in existence. So the awful atheistic moment has come for Mrs. Grundy, +too, and an oppressed world at last takes courage to say that no such +being as Mrs. Grundy has ever really existed, or that, even if she has, +she shall exist no more. _What will Mrs. Grundy say?_ Who cares +nowadays--and so long as nobody cares, the good lady is as dead as need +be. + +Mrs. Grundy, of course, is man's embodied fear of his neighbour, the +creation of timid souls who are afraid of being themselves, and who, +instead of living their lives after their own fashion and desires, +choose to live them in hypocritical discomfort according to the +standards of others, standards which in their turn may be held +insincerely enough from fear of someone else, and so on without end--a +vicious circle of insincere living being thus created, in which no man +is or does anything real, or as he himself would naturally prefer to be +and to do. It is evident that such a state of mutual intimidation can +exist only in small communities, economically interdependent, and among +people with narrow boundaries and no horizons. If you live in a village, +for example, and are dependent on the good opinion of your neighbours +for your means of existence, your morals and your religious belief must +be those of the village, or you are liable to starve. It is only the +rich man in a village who can do as he pleases. The only thing for the +dependent individualist in a village to do is to go somewhere else, to +some place where a man may at the same time hold his job and his +opinions, a place too big to keep track of its units, too busy to ask +irrelevant questions, and so diverse in its constituents as to have +generated tolerance and free operation for all. + +Now, in spite of its bigness, the world was till quite recently little +more than a village, curiously held in subjection by village +superstitions and village ethics, narrow conceptions of life and +conduct; but the last twenty years have seen a remarkable enlargement of +the human spirit, a reassertion of the natural rights of man as against +the figments of prurient and emasculate conventions, to which there is +no parallel since the Renaissance. Voices have been heard and truths +told, and multitudes have listened gladly that aforetime must take +shelter either in overawed silence or in utterance so private that they +exerted no influence; and the literature of the day alone, literature of +wide and greedy acceptance, is sufficient warrant for the obituary +announcement which, if not yet, as I said, officially made, is already +writing in the hearts, and even in the actions, of society. The +popularity of such writers as Meredith and Hardy, Ibsen and Nietzsche, +Maeterlinck and Walt Whitman, constitutes a writing on the wall the +significance of which cannot be gainsaid. The vogue alone of Mr. Bernard +Shaw, apostle to the Philistines, is a portent sufficiently conclusive. +To regard Mr. Shaw either as a great dramatist or an original +philosopher is, of course, absurd. He, of all men, must surely be the +last to imagine such a vain thing about himself; but even should he be +so self-deluded, his immense coarse usefulness to his day and generation +remains, and the value of it can hardly be overestimated. What others +have said for years as in a glass darkly, with noble seriousness of +utterance, he proclaims again through his brazen megaphone, with all the +imperturbable _aplomb_ of an impudent showman, having as little +self-respect as he has respect for his public; and, as a consequence, +that vast herd of middle-class minds to whom finer spirits appeal in +vain hear for the first time truths as old as philosophy, and answer to +them with assenting instincts as old as humanity. Truth, like many +another excellent commodity, needs a vulgar advertisement, if it is +to become operative in the masses. Mr. Shaw is truth's vulgar +advertisement. He is a brilliant, carrying noise on behalf of freedom of +thought; and his special equipment for his peculiar revivalist mission +comes of his gift for revealing to the common mind not merely the +untruth of hypocrisy, but the laughableness of hypocrisy, first of all. +He takes some popular convention, that of medicine or marriage or what +you will, and shows you not merely how false it is but how ludicrously +false. He purges the soul, not with the terror and pity of tragedy, but +with the irresistible laughter of rough-and-tumble farce. To think +wrongly is, first of all, so absurd. He proves it by putting wrong +thinking on the stage, where you see it for yourself in action, and +laugh immoderately. Perhaps you had never thought how droll wrong +thinking or no thinking was before; and while you laugh with Shaw +at your side-splitting discovery, the serious message glides in +unostentatiously--wrong thinking is not merely laughable; it is also +dangerous, and very uncomfortable. And so the showman has done his work, +the advertiser has sold his goods, and there is so much more truth in +circulation in unfamiliar areas of society. + +That word "society" naturally claims some attention at the hands of one +who would speak of Mrs. Grundy, particularly as she has owed her long +existence to a general misconception as to what constitutes "society," +and to a superstitious terror as to its powers over the individual. +Society--using the word in its broad sense--has heretofore been regarded +as a vague tremendous entity imposing a uniformity of opinion and action +on the individual, under penalty of a like vague tremendous disapproval +for insubordination. Independent minds, however, have from time to time, +and in ever increasing numbers, ventured to do their own will and +pleasure in disregard of this vague tremendous disapproval, and have, +strange to say, found no sign of the terrible consequences threatened +them, with the result that they, and the onlookers, have come to the +conclusion that this fear of society is just one more bugaboo of +timorous minds, with no power over the courageous spirit. From a +multitude of such observations men and women have come more and more to +draw the conclusion that the solidarity of society is nothing but a +myth, and that so-called society is merely a loosely connected series of +independent societies, formed by natural selection among their members, +each with its own codes and satisfactions; and that a man not welcome in +one society may readily find a home for himself in another, or indeed, +if necessary, and if he be strong enough, rest content with his own +society of one. + +There was a time when a doubt as to the credibility of the book of +Genesis or a belief in the book of Darwin made the heretic a lonely man, +but nowadays he is hardly likely to go without friends. Besides, men and +women of strong personal character are not usually indiscriminately +gregarious. On the contrary, they are apt to welcome any disparity +between them and their neighbours which tends to safeguard their leisure +and protect them against the social inroads of irrelevant persons. I +recall the case of a famous novelist, who, himself jealous of his own +proper seclusion, permitted the amenities of his neighbours to pleasure +his wife who was more sociably inclined, and smilingly allowed himself +to be sacrificed once a week on the altar of a domestic "at home" day. +It was amusing to see him in his drawing-room on Fridays, surrounded by +every possible form of human irrelevancy--men and women well enough in +their way, of course, but absolutely unrelated, if not antipathetic to +him and all he stood for--heroically doing his best to seem really "at +home." But there came a time when he published a book of decidedly +"dangerous" tendencies, if not worse, and then it was a delight to see +how those various nobodies fled his contact as they would the plague. +His drawing-room suddenly became a desert, and when you dropped in on +Fridays you found there--only the people he wanted. "Is not this," he +would laughingly say, "a triumph of natural selection? See how simply, +by one honest action, I have cut off the bores!" + +To cut off the bores! Yes, that is the desperate attempt that any man or +woman who would live their own lives rather than the lives of others is +constantly engaged in making; and more and more all men and women are +realizing that there is only one society that really counts, the society +of people we want, rather than the people who want us or don't want us +or whom we don't want. And nowadays the man or woman must be +uncomfortable or undesirable, indeed, who cannot find all the society he +or she can profitably or conveniently handle, be their opinions and +actions never so anti-Grundy. Thus the one great fear that more than any +other has kept Mrs. Grundy alive, the fear of being alone in the world, +cut off from such intercourse with our fellows as most of us feel the +need of at times, has been put an end to by the ever increasing +subdivision of "society" into friendly seclusions and self-dependent +communities of men and women with like ways and points of view, however +disapproved in alien circles. What "shocks" one circle will seem +perfectly natural in another; and one great truth should always be held +firmly in mind--that the approval of one's neighbours has never yet paid +a man's bills. So long as he can go on paying those, and retain the +regard of the only society he values--that of himself and a few +friends--he can tell Mrs. Grundy to go--where she belongs. And this +happily is--almost--as true nowadays for woman as for man; which is the +main consideration, for, it need hardly be said, that it has been on her +own sex that the tyranny of Mrs. Grundy has weighed peculiarly hard. + +Had that tyranny been based on a genuine moral ideal, one would have +some respect for it, but, as the world has always known, it has been +nothing of the sort. On the contrary, it has all along been an organized +hypocrisy which condoned all it professed to censure on condition that +it was done in unhealthy secrecy, behind the closed doors of a lying +"respectability." All manner of uncleanness had been sanctioned so long +as it wore a mask of "propriety," whereas essentially clean and +wholesome expressions of human nature, undisguised manifestations of the +joy and romance of life, have been suppressed and confounded with their +base counterfeits merely because they have sought the sunlight of +sincerity rather than the shade where evil does well to hide. Man's +proper delight in the senses, the natural joy of men and women in each +other, the love of beauty, naked and unashamed, the romantic emotions, +and all that passionate vitality that dreams and builds and glorifies +the human story: all this, forsooth, it has been deemed wrong even to +speak of, save in colourless euphemisms, and their various drama has had +to be carried on by evasion and subterfuge pitiably silly indeed in this +robustly procreative world. Silly, but how preposterous, too, and no +longer to be endured. + +It was a gain indeed to drag these vital human interests into the arena +of undaunted discussion, but things are clearly seen to have already +passed beyond that stage. Discussion has already set free in the world +braver and truer ideals, ideals no longer afraid of life, but, in the +courage of their joyousness, feasibly close to all its breathing facts. +Men and women refuse any longer to allow their most vital instincts to +be branded with obloquy, and the fulness of their lives to be thwarted +at the bidding of an impure and irrational fiction of propriety. On +every hand we find the right to happiness asserted in deeds as well as +words. The essential purity of actions and relations to which a merely +technical or superstitious irregularity attaches is being more and more +acknowledged, and the fanciful barriers to human happiness are +everywhere giving way before the daylight of common sense. Love and +youth and pleasure are asserting their sacred natural rights, rights as +elemental as those forces of the universe by which the stars are +preserved from wrong, and the merely legal and ecclesiastical fictions +which have so long overawed them are fleeing like phantoms at cockcrow. +It is no longer sinful to be happy--even in one's own way; and the +extravagances of passion, the ebullitions of youth, and the vagaries of +pleasure are no longer frowned down by a sour-visaged public opinion, +but encouraged, or, if necessary, condoned, as the dramatic play of +natural forces, and as welcome additions to the gaiety of nations. The +true sins against humanity are, on the other hand, being exposed and +pilloried with a scientific eye for their essential qualities. + + ... The cold heart, and the murderous tongue, + The wintry soul that hates to hear a song, + The close-shut fist, the mean and measuring eye, + And all the little poisoned ways of wrong. + +Man's virtues and vices are being subjected to a re-classification, in +the course of which they are entertainingly seen, in no few instances, +to be changing places. The standards of punishment applied by Dante to +his inferno of lost souls is being, every year, more closely +approximated; warm-blooded sins of instinct and impulse, as having +usually some "relish of salvation" in them, are being judged lightly, +when they are accounted sins at all, and the cold-hearted sins of +essential selfishness, the sins of cruelty and calculation and +cowardice, are being nailed up as the real crimes against God and man. +The individual is being allowed more and more to be the judge of his own +actions, and all actions are being estimated more in regard to their +special relation and environment, as the relativity of right and wrong, +that most just of modern conceptions, is becoming understood. The hidden +sins of the pious and respectable are coming disastrously into the +light, and it no longer avails for a man to be a pillar of orthodoxy on +Sundays if he be a pillar of oppression all the rest of the week; while +the negative virtues of abstinence from the common human pleasures go +for less than nothing in a world that no longer regards the theatre, the +race course, and the card table, or even a beautiful woman, as under the +especial wrath of God. No, the Grundy "virtues" are fast disappearing, +and piano legs are once more being worn in their natural nudity. The +general trend is unmistakable and irresistible, and such apparent +contradictions of it as occasionally get into the newspapers are of no +general significance; as when, for example, some exquisitely refined +Irish police officer suppresses a play of genius, or blushingly covers +up the nakedness of a beautiful statue, or comes out strong on the +question of woman's bathing dress when some sensible girl has the +courage to go into the water with somewhat less than her entire walking +costume; or, again, when some crank invokes the blue laws against Sunday +golf or tennis; or some spinster association puts itself on record +against woman's smoking: all these are merely provincial or parochial +exceptions to the onward movement of morals and manners, mere spasmodic +twitchings, so to say, of the poor old lady on her deathbed. We know +well enough that she who would so sternly set her face against the +feminine cigarette would have no objection to one of her votaries +carrying on an affair with another woman's husband--not the least in the +world, so long as she was careful to keep it out of the courts. And such +is a sample of her morality in all her dealings. Humanity will lose no +real sanctity or safeguard by her demise; only false shame and false +morality will go--but true modesty, "the modesty of nature," true +propriety, true religion--and incidentally true love and true +marriage--will all be immeasurably the gainers by the death of this +hypocritical, nasty-minded old lady. + + + + +V + +MODERN AIDS TO ROMANCE + + +There have, of course, in all ages been those who made a business of +running down the times in which they lived--tiresome people for whom +everything had gone to the dogs--or was rapidly going--uncomfortable +critics who could never make themselves at home in their own century, +and whose weary shibboleth was that of some legendary perfect past. + +In Rome this particular kind of bore went by the name of _laudator +temporis acti_; and, if we have no such concise Anglo-Saxon phrase for +the type, we still have the type no less ubiquitously with us. The +bugbear of such is "modern science," or "modern thought," a monster +which, we are frequently assured, is fast devouring all the beautiful +and good in human life, a Moloch fed on the dreams and ideals and noble +faiths of man. Modernity! For such "modernity" has taken the place of +"Anti-Christ." These sad, nervous people have no eye for the beautiful +patterns and fantasies of change, none of that faith which rejoices to +watch "the roaring loom of time" weaving ever new garments for the +unchanging eternal gods. In new temples, strangely enough, they see +only atheism, instead of the vitality of spiritual evolution; in new +affirmations they scent only dangerous denials. With the more grave +misgivings of these folk of little faith this is not the place to deal, +though actually, if there were any ground for belief in a modern decay +of religion, we might seriously begin to believe in the alleged decay of +romance. + +Yes, romance, we not infrequently hear, is dead. Modern science has +killed it. It is essentially a "thing of the past"--an affair presumably +of stage-coaches, powdered wigs, and lace ruffles. It cannot breathe in +what is spoken of as "this materialistic age." + +The dullards who repeat these platitudes of the muddle-headed multitude +are surely the only people for whom they are true. It is they alone who +are the materialists, confusing as they do the spirit of romance with +its worn-out garments of bygone fashions. Such people are so clearly out +of court as not to be worth controverting, except for the opportunity +they give one of confidently making the joyous affirmation that, far +from romance being dead in our day, there never was a more romantic age +than ours, and that never since the world began has it offered so many +opportunities, so many facilities for romance as at the present time. + +In fact, a very little thinking will show that of all those benefited by +"the blessings of modern science," it is the lovers of the community +who as a body have most to be thankful for. Indeed, so true is this that +it might almost seem as though the modern laboratory has been run +primarily from romantic motives, to the end that the old reproach should +be removed and the course of true love run magically smooth. Valuable as +the telephone may be in business affairs, it is simply invaluable in the +affairs of love; and mechanicians the world over are absorbed in the +problem of aerial flight, whether they know it or not, chiefly to +provide Love with wings as swift as his desire. + +Distance may lend enchantment to those whom we prefer to appreciate from +afar, but nearness is the real enchantment to your true lover, and +distance is his natural enemy. Distance and the slow-footedness of Time +are his immemorial evils. Both of these modern science has all but +annihilated. Consider for a moment the conditions under which love was +carried on in those old days which some people find so romantic. Think +what a comparatively short distance meant then, with snail-paced +precarious mails, and the only means of communication horses by land, +and sailing ships by sea. How men and women had the courage to go on +long journeys at all away from each other in those days is hard to +realize, knowing what an impenetrable curtain of silence and mystery +immediately fell between them with the winding of the coach horn, or the +last wave of the plumed hat as it disappeared behind the last turning +of the road--leaving those at home with nothing for company but the +yearning horizon and the aching, uncommunicative hours. Days, weeks, +months, even years, must go by in waiting for a word--and when at last +it came, brought on lumbering wheels or at best by some courier on his +steaming mud-splashed mount, precious as it was, it was already grown +old and cold and perhaps long since untrue. + +Imagine perhaps being dependent for one's heart news on some chance +soldier limping back from the wars, or some pilgrim from the Holy Land +with scallop shell and staff! + +Distance was indeed a form of death under such conditions--no wonder men +made their wills as they set out on a journey--and when actual physical +death did not intervene, how much of that slow death-in-life, that +fading of the memory and that numbing of the affections which absence +too often brings, was even still more to be feared. The loved face might +indeed return, looking much the same as when it went away, but what of +the heart that went a-journeying, too? What even of the hearts that +remained at home? + +The chances of death and disaster not even modern science can forestall, +though even these it has considerably lessened; but that other death of +the heart, which comes of the slow starvation of silence and absence, it +may be held to have all but vanquished. Thanks to its weird magicians, +you may be seas or continents away from her whom your soul loveth, yet +"at her window bid good-morrow" as punctually as if you lived next door; +or serenade her by electricity--at all hours of the night. If you sigh +in New York, she can hear you and sigh back in San Francisco; and soon +her very face will be carried to you at any moment of the day along the +magic wires. Nor will you need to wait for the postman, but be able to +read her flowerlike words as they write themselves out on the luminous +slate before you, at the very moment as she leans her fragrant bosom +upon her electric desk three thousand miles away. If this isn't +romantic, one may well ask what is! + +To take the telephone alone, surely the romance of Pyramus and Thisbe, +with their primitive hole in the wall, was a tame affair compared with +the possibilities of this magic toy, by means of which you can talk with +your love not merely through a wall but through the Rocky Mountains. You +can whisper sweet nothings to her across the sounding sea, and bid her +"sleep well" over leagues of primeval forest, and through the +stoniest-hearted city her soft voice will find its way. Even in +mid-ocean the "wireless" will bring you news of her _mal-de-mer_. And +more than that; should you wish to carry her voice with you from place +to place, science is once more at your service with another magic +toy--the phonograph--by which indeed she can still go on speaking to +you, if you have the courage to listen, from beyond the grave. + +The telegraph, the telephone, the "wireless," the phonograph, the +electric letter writer--such are the modern "conveniences" of romance; +and, should an elopement be on foot, what are the fastest post-chaise or +the fleetest horses compared with a high-powered automobile? And when +the airship really comes, what romance that has ever been will compare +for excitement with an elopement through the sky? + +Apart from the practical conveniences of these various new devices, +there is a poetic quality about the mere devices themselves which is +full of fascination and charm. Whether we call up our sweetheart or our +stockbroker, what a thing of enchantment the telephone is merely in +itself! Such devices turn the veriest prose of life into poetry; and, +indeed, the more prosaic the uses to which we put them, the more +marvellous by contrast their marvel seems. Even our businesses are +carried on by agencies more mysterious and truly magical than anything +in the _Arabian Nights_, and all day long we are playing with mysterious +natural laws and exquisite natural forces as, in a small way, when boys +we used to delight in our experiments with oxygen and hydrogen and +Leyden jars. Science has thus brought an element of romantic "fun," so +to speak, even into our stores and our counting-houses. I wonder if +"Central" realizes what a truly romantic employment is hers? + +But, pressed into the high service of love, one sees at once what a +poetic fitness there is in their employ, and how our much-abused modern +science has found at last for that fastidious god an appropriately +dignified and beautiful ministrant. Coarse and vulgar indeed seem the +ancient servitors and the uncouth machinery by which the divine business +of the god was carried on of old. Today, through the skill of science, +the august lightning has become his messenger, and the hidden gnomes of +air and sea hasten to do his bidding. + +Modern science, then, so far from being an enemy of romance, is seen on +every hand to be its sympathetic and resourceful friend, its swift and +irresistible helper in its serious need, and an indulgent minister to +its lighter fancies. Be it whim or emergency, the modern laboratory is +equally at the service of romance, equally ready to gratify mankind with +a torpedo or a toy. + +Not only, however, has modern science thus put itself at the service of +romance, by supplying it with its various magic machinery of +communication, but modern thought--that much maligned bugbear of +timorous minds--has generated an atmosphere increasingly favourable to +and sympathetic with the romantic expression of human nature in all its +forms. + +The world has unmistakably grown younger again during the last twenty +years, as though--which, indeed, is the fact--it had thrown off an +accumulation of mopishness, shaken itself free from imaginary +middle-aged restrictions and preoccupations. All over the world there is +a wind of youth blowing such as has not freshened the air of time since +the days of Elizabeth. Once more the spring of a new Renaissance of +Human Nature is upon us. It is the fashion to be young, and the age of +romance both for men and women has been indefinitely extended. No one +gives up the game, or is expected to, till he is genuinely tired of +playing it. Mopish conventions are less and less allowed to restrict +that free and joyous play of vitality dear to the modern heart, which is +the essence of all romance. More and more the world is growing to love a +lover, and one has only to read the newspapers to see how sympathetic +are the times to any generous and adventurous display of the passions. + +This more humane temper is the result of many causes. The disintegration +of religious superstition, and the substitution in its stead of +spiritual ideals closer to the facts of life, is one of these. All that +was good in Puritanism has been retained by the modern spirit, while +its narrowing and numbing features, its anti-human, self-mortifying, +provincial side have passed or are passing in the regenerating sunlight +of what one might call a spiritual paganism, which conceives of natural +forces and natural laws as inherently pure and mysteriously sacred. Thus +the way of a man with a maid is no longer a shamefaced affair, but it +is more and more realized that in its romance and its multifarious +refinements of development are the "law and the prophets," the "eternal +meanings" of natural religion and social spirituality. + +Then, too, the spread of democracy, resulting in the breaking down of +caste barriers, is all to the good of romance. Swiftly and surely Guelph +and Ghibelline and break-neck orchard walls are passing away. If Romeo +and Juliet make a tragedy of it nowadays, they have only to blame their +own mismanagement, for the world is with them as it has never been +before, and all sensible fathers and mothers know it. + +Again, the freer intercourse between the sexes tends incalculably to +smooth that course of true love once so proverbially rough, but now +indeed in danger of being made too unexcitingly smooth. Yet if, as a +result, certain old combinations of romance are becoming obsolete, new +ones, no less picturesque, and even more vital in their drama, are being +evolved every day by the new conditions. Those very inroads being so +rapidly and successfully made by woman into the immemorial business of +man, which are superficially regarded by some as dangerous to the +tenderer sentiments between men and women, are, on the contrary, merely +widening the area of romance, and will eventually develop, as they can +be seen already developing, a new chivalry and a new poetry of the sexes +no less deep and far more many-sided than the old. The robuster +comradeship between the two already resulting from the more active +sharing of common interests cannot but tend to a deeper and more +exhilarating union of man and woman, a completer, intenser marriage +literally of true minds as well as bodies than was possible in the old +régime, when the masculine and feminine "spheres" were kept so jealously +distinct and only allowed to touch at the elementary points of +relationship. There has always been a thrill of adventure when either +has been admitted a little farther into the other's world than was +customary. How thrilling, therefore, will it be when men and women +entirely share in each other's lives, without fictitious reserves and +mysteries, and face the whole adventure of life squarely and completely +together, all the more husband and wife for being comrades as well--as +many men and women of the new era are already joyously doing. + +And, merely on the surface, what a new romantic element woman has +introduced into the daily drudgery of men's lives by her mere presence +in their offices! She cannot always be beautiful, poor dear, and she is +not invariably gracious, it is true; yet, on the whole, how much the +atmosphere of office life has gained in amenity by the coming of the +stenographer, the typewriter, and the telephone girl, not to speak of +her frequent decorative value in a world that has hitherto been +uncompromisingly harsh and unadorned! Men may affect to ignore this, and +cannot afford indeed to be too sensitive to these flowery presences that +have so considerably supplanted those misbegotten young miscreants known +as office-boys, a vanishing race of human terror; yet there she is, all +the same, in spite of her businesslike airs and her prosaic tasks, +silently diffusing about her that eternal mystery which she can never +lose, be her occupations never so masculine. + +There she is with her subtly wreathed hair and her absurd little lace +handkerchiefs and her furtive powder puff and her bits of immemorial +ornaments and the soft sound of her skirts and all the rest of it. Never +mind how grimly and even brusquely you may be dictating to her +specifications for steel rails or the like, little wafts of perfume +cannot help floating across to your rolltop desk, and you are a man and +she is a woman, for all that; and, instead of having her with you at fag +ends of your days, you have her with you all day long now--and your +sisters and your sweethearts are so much the nearer to you all day for +her presence, and, whether you know it or not, you are so much the less +a brute because she is there. + +Where the loss to romance comes in in these admirable new arrangements +of modern commerce it is hard to see. Of course a new element of danger +is thus introduced into the routine of our daily lives, but when was +danger an enemy to romance? The "bright face" of this particular +"danger" who would be without? The beloved essayist from whom that last +phrase is, of course, adapted, declared, as we all know, that to marry +is "to domesticate the recording angel." One might say that the modern +business man has officialized the ministering angel--perhaps some other +forms of angel as well. + +In their work, then, as in their play, men and women are more and more +coming to share with each other as comrades, and really the fun of life +seems in no wise diminished as a consequence. Rather the contrary, it +would seem, if one is to judge from the "Decameron" of the newspapers. +Yet it is not very long ago that man looked askance at woman's wistful +plea to take part even in his play. He had the old boyish fear that she +would spoil the game. However, it didn't take him long to find out his +mistake and to know woman for the true "sport" that she can be. And in +that discovery it was another invention of that wicked modern science +that was the chief, if humble seeming, factor, no less than that +eclipsed but inexpressibly useful instrument (of flirtation) in the +hands of a kind providence, the bicycle. + +The service of the bicycle to the "emancipation of woman" movements has +perhaps never been acknowledged by the philosopher; but a little thought +will make evident how far-reaching that service has been. When that near +day arrives on which woman shall call herself absolutely "free," should +she feel inclined to celebrate her freedom by some monument of her +gratitude, let the monument be neither to man nor woman, however valiant +in the fight, but simply let it take the form of an enthroned and +laurelled bicycle--for the moment woman mounted that apparently innocent +machine, it carried her on the high-road to freedom. On that she could +go not only where she pleased, but--what is even more to the point--with +whom she pleased. The free companionship of man and woman had begun. +Then and forever ended the old system of courtship, which seems so +laughable and even incredible today. One was no longer expected to pay +court to one's beloved, sitting stiffly on straight-backed chairs in a +chill drawing-room in the non-conducting, or non-conducive, presence of +still chillier maiden aunts. The doom of the _duenna_ was sounded; the +chill drawing-room was exchanged for "the open road" and the whispering +woodland; and soon it is to come about that a man shall propose to his +wife high up in the blue heavens, in an airship softly swaying at anchor +in the wake of the evening star. + + + + +VI + +THE LAST CALL + + +I don't know whether or not the cry "Last call for the dining-car" +affects others as it affects me, but for me it always has a stern, +fateful sound, suggestive of momentous opportunity fast slipping away, +opportunity that can never come again; and, on the occasions when I have +disregarded it, I have been haunted with a sense of the neglected +"might-have-been." + +Not, indeed, that the formless regret has been connected with any +illusions as to the mysterious quality of the dinner that I have thus +foregone. I have been well enough aware that the only actual opportunity +thus evaded has been most probably that of an unusually bad dinner, +exorbitantly paid for. The dinner itself has had nothing to do with my +feeling, which, indeed, has come of a suggestiveness in the cry beyond +the occasion, a sense conveyed by the words, in combination with the +swift speeding along of the train, of the inexorable swift passage and +gliding away of all things. Ah! so soon it will be the last call--for so +many pleasant things--that we would fain arrest and enjoy a little +longer in a world that with tragic velocity is flowing away from us, +each moment, "like the waters of the torrent." O yes, all too soon it +will be the "last call" in dead earnest--the last call for the joy of +life and the glory of the world. The grass is already withering, the +flower already fading; and that bird of time, with so short a way to +flutter, is relentlessly on the wing. + +Now some natures hear this call from the beginning of their lives. Even +their opulent spendthrift youth is "made the more mindful that the sweet +days die," by every strain of music, by every gathered flower. All their +joy is haunted, like the poetry of William Morris, with the wistful +burden of mortality. Even the summer woodlands, with all their pomp and +riot of exuberant green and gold, are anything but safe from this low +sweet singing, and in the white arms of beauty, pressed desperately +close as if to imprison the divine fugitive moment, the song seems to +come nearest. Who has not held some loved face in his hands, and gazed +into it with an almost agonizing effort to realize its reality, to make +eternally sure of it, somehow to wrest possession of it and the +transfiguring moment for ever, all the time pierced with the melancholy +knowledge that tomorrow all will be as if this had never been, and life +once more its dull disenchanted self? + + Too soon shall morning take the stars away, + And all the world be up and open-eyed, + This magic night be turned to common day-- + Under the willows on the riverside. + +Youth, however, can afford to enjoy even its melancholy; for the +ultimate fact of which that melancholy is a prophecy is a long way off. +If one enchanted moment runs to an end, it may be reasonably sure for a +long time yet of many more enchanted moments to come. It has as yet only +taken a bite or two into the wonderful cake. And, though its poets may +warn it that "youth's a stuff does not endure," it doesn't seriously +believe it. Others may have come to an end of their cake, but its cake +is going to last for ever. Alas, for the day when it is borne in upon us +with a tragic suddenness, like a miser who awakens to find that he has +been robbed of his hoard, that unaccountably the best part of the cake +has been eaten, that perhaps indeed only a few desperate crumbs remain. +A bleak laughter blends now with that once luxurious melancholy. There +is a song at our window, terribly like the mockery of Mephistopheles. +Our blood runs cold. We listen in sudden fear. It is life singing out +its last call. + +The time of this call, the occasion and the manner of it, mercifully +vary with individuals. Some fortunate ones, indeed, never hear it till +they lie on their deathbeds. Such have either been gifted with such a +generous-sized cake of youth that it has lasted all their lives, or +they have possessed a great art in the eating of it. Though I may add +here that a cautious husbanding of your cake is no good way. That way +you are liable to find it grown mouldy on your hands. No, oddly enough, +it is often seen that those who all their lives have eaten their cake +most eagerly have quite a little of it left at the end. There are no +hard and fast rules for the eating of your cake. One can only find out +by eating it; and, as I have said, it may be your luck to disprove the +proverb and both eat your cake and have it. + +For a dreary majority, however, the cake does come to an end, and for +them henceforth, as Stevenson grimly put it, the road lies long and +straight and dusty to the grave. For them that last call is apt to come +usually before sunset--and the great American question arises: What are +they going to do about it? That, of course, every one must decide for +himself, according to his inclinations and his opportunities. But a few +general considerations may be of comfort and even of greater value. + +There is one thing of importance to know about this last call, that we +are apt to imagine we hear it before we actually do, from a nervous +sense that it is about time for it to sound. Our hair perhaps is growing +grey, and our years beginning to accumulate. We hypnotize ourselves with +our chronology, and say with Emerson: + + It is time to grow old, + To take in sail. + +Well and good, if it is and we feel like it; but may be it isn't, and we +don't. Youth is largely a habit. So is romance. And, unless we allow +ourselves to be influenced by musty conventions and superstitions, both +habits may be prolonged far beyond the moping limits of custom, and need +never be abandoned unless we become sincerely and unregretfully tired of +them. I can well conceive of an old age like that of Sophocles, as +reported by Plato, who likened the fading of the passions with the +advance of age to "being set free from service to a band of madmen." + +When a man feels so, all is well and comfortable with him. He has +retired of his own free will from the banquet of life, having had his +fill, and is content. Our image of the last call does not apply to him, +but rather to those who, with appetites still keen, are sternly warned +that for them, willy-nilly, the banquet must soon end, and the prison +fare of prosaic middle age be henceforth their portion. No more ortolans +and transporting vintages for them. Nothing but Scotch oatmeal and +occasional sarsaparilla to the end of the chapter. No wonder that some, +hearing this dread sentence, go half crazy in a frenzied effort to +clutch at what remains, run amok, so to say, in their despairing +determination to have, if need be, a last "good time" and die. Their +efforts are apt to be either distasteful or pathetically comic, and the +world is apt to be cynically contemptuous of the "romantic" outbursts of +aging people. For myself, I always feel for them a deep and tender +sympathy. I know that they have heard that last fearful call to the +dining-car of life--and, poor souls, they have probably found it closed. +Their mistake has been in waiting so long for the call. From various +causes, they have mismanaged their lives. They have probably lived in a +numbing fear of their neighbours, who have told them that it is bad +manners to eat one's cake in public, and wicked to eat it in private; +and any one who is fool enough to allow his neighbours to live his life +for him instead of living it himself deserves what he gets, or rather +doesn't get. + +A wholesome oblivion of one's neighbours is the beginning of wisdom. +Neighbours, at the best, are an impertinent encroachment on one's +privacy, and, at the worst, an unnatural hindrance to our development. +Generally speaking, it is the man or woman who has lived with least fear +of his neighbours, who is least likely to hear that last call. Nothing +in retrospect is so barren as a life lived in accordance with the +hypocrisies of society. For those who have never lived, and are now fain +to begin living when it is too late, that last call comes indeed with a +ghastly irony. But for those who have fearlessly lived their lives, as +they came along, with Catullus singing their _vivamus atque amemus_, and +practising it, too; for those, if indeed the last call must come, they +will be able to support it by the thought that, often as in the past +life has called to them, it has never called to them in vain. We are apt +sometimes to belittle our memories, but actually they are worth a good +deal; and should the time come when we have little to look forward to, +it will be no small comfort to have something to look back on. And it +won't be the days when we _didn't_ that we shall recall with a sense of +possession, but the days and nights when we most emphatically _did_. +Thank God, we did for once hold that face in our hands in the woodland! +Thank God, we did get divinely drunk that wild night of nights in the +city! + + Wilt thou yet take all, Galilean? But these thou + shalt not take, + The laurel, the palms and the paean, the breast of the + nymphs in the brake. + +It is the fine excesses of life that make it worth living. The stalks of +the days are endurable only because they occasionally break into flower. +It is our sins of omission alone that we come in the end to regret. The +temptations we resisted in our youth make themselves rods to scourge our +middle age. I regret the paradoxical form these platitudes have +unconsciously taken, for that they are the simplest truth any honest +dying man would tell you. And that phrase recalls a beautiful poem by +"E. Nesbit" which has haunted me all my life, a poem I shall beg leave +to quote here, because, though it is to be found in that poet's volume, +it is not, I believe, as well known as it deserves to be by those who +need its lesson. I quote it, too, from memory, so I trust that the +length of time I have remembered it may be set to my credit against any +verbal mistakes I make. + + "If, on some balmy summer night, + You rowed across the moon path white, + And saw the shining sea grow fair + With silver scales and golden hair, + What would you do?" + + "I would be wise + And shut my ears and shut my eyes, + Lest I should leap into the tide + And clasp the seamaid as I died." + + "But if you thus were strong to flee + From sweet spells woven of moon and sea, + Are you quite sure that you would reach, + Without one backward look, the beach?" + + "I might look back, my dear, and then + Row straight into the snare again, + Or, if I safely got away-- + Regret it to my dying day." + +He who liveth his life shall live it. It is a grave error to give +ourselves grudgingly to our experiences. Only in a whole-hearted +surrender of ourselves to the heaven-sent moment do we receive back all +it has to give us, and by the active receptivity of our natures attract +toward us other such moments, as it were, out of the sky. An ever-ready +romantic attitude toward life is the best preservative against the +_ennui_ of the years. Adventures, as the proverb says, are to the +adventurous, and, as the old song goes: + + He either fears his fate too much + Or his deserts are small, + That dares not put it to the touch + To gain or lose it all. + +And the spirit of the times is happily growing more clement toward a +greater fulness and variety of life. The world is growing kinder toward +the fun and foolishness of existence, and the energetic pursuit of joy +is no longer frowned down by anaemic and hypocritical philosophies. The +old gods of energy and joy are coming to their own again, and the lives +of strong men and fair women are no longer ruled over by a hierarchy of +curates and maiden aunts; in fact, the maiden aunt has begun to find out +her mistake, and is out for her share of the fun and the foolishness +with the rest. Negative morality is fast becoming discredited, and many +an old "Thou shalt not" is coming to seem as absurd as the famous Blue +Laws of Connecticut. "Self-development, not self-sacrifice,"--a +favourite dictum of Grant Allen's,--is growing more and more to be the +formula of the modern world; and, if a certain amount of self-sacrifice +is of necessity included in a healthy self-development, the proportion +is being reduced to a rational limit. One form of self-sacrifice, at all +events, is no longer demanded of us--the wholesale sacrifice of our own +opinions. The possibility that there may be two opinions or a dozen or a +hundred on one matter, and that they may be all different, yet each one +of them right in its proper application, has dawned forcibly on the +world, with the conception of the relativity of experience and the +modification of conditions. Nowadays we recognize that there are as many +"rights" and as many "wrongs" as there are individuals; and to be happy +in our own way, instead of somebody else's, is one of the first laws of +nature, health, and virtue. Many an ancient restriction on personal +vitality is going the way of the old sumptuary laws. We have all of us +amusing memories of those severe old housekeepers who for no inclemency +of the weather would allow a fire in the grate before the first of +October, and who regarded a fire before that date as a positive breach +of the moral law. Such old wives are a type of certain old-fashioned +moralists whose icy clutch on our warm-blooded humanity we no longer +suffer. Nowadays we light our fires as we have a mind to, and if we +prefer to keep them going all the year round, it is no one's business +but our own. Happy is the man who, when the end comes, can say with +Landor: + + I warmed both hands before the fire of life; + It sinks and I am ready to depart. + +Such a one will have little need to fear that last call of which I have +been writing. In Kipling's phrase, he has taken his fun where he found +it, and his barns are well stocked with the various harvests of the +years. Not his the wild regret for having "safely got away." Rather he +laughs to remember how often he was taken captive by the enchantments of +the world, how whenever there was any piece of wildness afoot he was +always found in the thick of it. When the bacchantes were out on Mount +Cithaeron, and the mad _Evoe! Evoe!_ rang through the moonstruck woods, +be sure he was up and away, with ardent hands clutched in the flying +tresses. Ah! the vine leaves and the tiger skins and the ivory bodies, +the clash of the cymbals and the dithyramb shrilling up to the stars! +"If I forget thee, O golden Aphrodite!" He is no hypocrite, no weary +"king ecclesiast," shaking his head over the orgies of sap and song in +which he can no longer share. He frankly acknowledges that then came in +the sweet o' the year, and he is still as young as the youngest by +virtue of having drunk deep of the only elixir, the Dionysiac cup of +life. + +At the same time, while he may not ungratefully rejoice with Sophocles +at being "set free from service to a band of madmen," that ripening of +his nature which comes most fruitfully of a generous exercise of +its powers will have instinctively taught him that secret of the +transmutation of the passions which is one of the most precious rewards +of experience. It is quite possible for a lifelong passion for fair +women to become insensibly and unregretfully transmuted into a passion +for first editions, and you may become quite sincerely content that a +younger fellow catch the flying maiden, if only you can catch yon +flitting butterfly for your collection. And, strangest of all, your +grand passion for your own remarkable self may suffer a miraculous +transformation into a warm appreciation for other people. It is true +that you may smile a little sadly to find them even more interesting +than yourself. But such passing sadness has the relish of salvation in +it. Self is a weary throne, and the abdication of the ego is to be free +of one of the burdens rather than the pleasures of existence. + +But, to conclude, it is all too possible that you who read this may have +no such assets of a wilful well spent life to draw on as he whom I have +pictured. It may be that you have starved your emotions and fled your +opportunities, or you may simply have had bad luck. The golden moments +seldom came your way. The wilderness of life has seldom blossomed with a +rose. "The breast of the nymph in the brake" and "the chimes at +midnight" were not for you. And there is a menacing murmur of autumn in +the air. The days are shortening, and the twilight comes early, with a +chilly breath. The crickets have stopped singing, and the garden is sad +with elegiac blooms. The chrysanthemum is growing on the grave of the +rose. Perhaps already it is too late--too late for life and joy. You +must take to first editions and entomology and other people's interests +in good earnest. But no! Suddenly on the wind there comes a cry--a sound +of cymbals and flutes and dancing feet. It is life's last call. You have +one chance left. There is still Indian summer. It is better than +nothing. Hurry and join the music, ere it be too late. For this is the +last call! + + When time lets slip a little perfect hour, + Take it, for it will not come again. + + + + +VII + +THE PERSECUTIONS OF BEAUTY + + +All religions have periods in their history which are looked back to +with retrospective fear and trembling as eras of persecution, and each +religion has its own book of martyrs. The religion of beauty is no +exception. Far from it. For most other religions, however they may have +differed among themselves, have agreed in fearing beauty, and even in +Greece there were stern sanctuaries and ascetic academes where the white +bosom of Phryne would have pleaded in vain. Christianity has not been +beauty's only enemy, by any means; though, when the Book of Martyrs of +Beauty comes to be written, it will, doubtless, be the Christian +persecutions of beauty that will bulk largest in the record--for the +Beauty of Holiness and the Holiness of Beauty have been warring creeds +from the beginning. + +At the present moment, there is reason to fear, or to rejoice--according +to one's individual leanings--that the Religion of Beauty is gaining +upon its ancient rival; for perhaps never since the Renaissance has +there been such a widespread impulse to assert Beauty and Joy as the +ideals of human life. As evidence one has but to turn one's eyes on the +youth of both sexes, as they rainbow the city thoroughfares with their +laughing, heartless faces, evident children of beauty and joy, "pagan" +to the core of them, however ostensibly Christian their homes and their +country. In our time, at all events, Beauty has never walked the streets +with so frank a radiance, so confident an air of security, and in her +eyes and in her carriage, as in her subtly shaped and subtly scented +garments, so conspicuous a challenge to the musty, outworn, proprieties +to frown upon her all they please. From the humblest shop-girl to the +greatest lady, there is apparent an intention to be beautiful, sweet +maid, and let who will be hum-drum, at whatever cost, by whatever means. +This, of course, at all periods, has been woman's chief thought, but +till recently, in our times, she has more or less affected a certain +secrecy in her intention. She has hinted rather than fully expressed it, +as though fearing a certain flagrancy in too public an exhibition of her +enchantments. It has hardly seemed proper to her heretofore to be as +beautiful in the public gaze as in the sanctuary of her boudoir. But +now, bless you, she has no such misgivings, and the flower-like effect +upon the city streets is as dazzling as if, some fine morning in +Constantinople, all the ladies of the various harems should suddenly +appear abroad without their yashmaks, setting fire to the hearts and +turning the heads of the unaccustomed male. Or, to make comparison +nearer home, it is almost as startling as if the ladies of the various +musical comedies in town should suddenly be let loose upon our senses in +broad daylight, in all the adorable sorceries of "make-up" and +diaphanous draperies. I swear that it can be no more thrilling to +penetrate into that mysterious paradise "behind the scenes," than to +walk up Fifth Avenue one of these summer afternoons, in the present year +of grace,--humming to one's self that wistful old song, which goes +something like this: + + The girls that never can be mine! + In every lane and street + I hear the rustle of their gowns, + The whisper of their feet; + The sweetness of their passing by, + Their glances strong as wine, + Provoke the unpossessive sigh-- + Ah! girls that never can be mine. + +So audacious has Beauty become in these latter days, so proudly she +walks abroad, making so superb an appeal to the desire of the eye, +thighed like Artemis, and bosomed like Aphrodite, or at whiles a fairy +creature of ivory and gossamer and fragrance, with a look in her eyes of +secret gardens; and so much is the wide world at her feet, and one with +her in the vanity of her fairness--that I sometimes fear an impending +_dies irae_, when the dormant spirit of Puritanism will reassert itself, +and some stern priests thunder from the pulpit of worldly vanities and +the wrath to come. Indeed, I can well imagine in the near future some +modern Savonarola presiding over a new Bonfire of Vanities in Madison +Square, on which, to the droning of Moody and Sankey's hymns, shall be +cast all the fascinating Parisian creations, the puffs and rats, the +powder and the rouge, the darling stockings, and all such concomitant +bewitcheries that today make Manhattan a veritable Isle of Circe, all to +go up in savage sectarian flame, before the eyes of melancholy young +men, and filling all the city with the perfume of beauty's holocaust. At +street corners too will stand great books in which weeping maidens will +sign their names, swearing before high heaven, to wear nothing but +gingham and bed-ticking for the dreary remainder of their lives. Such a +day may well come, as it has often come before, and certainly will, if +women persist in being so deliberately beautiful as they are at present. + +It is curious how, from time immemorial, man seems to have associated +the idea of evil with beauty, shrunk from it with a sort of ghostly +fear, while, at the same time drawn to it by force of its hypnotic +attraction. Strangely enough, beauty has been regarded as the most +dangerous enemy of the soul, and the powers of darkness that are +supposed to lie in wait for that frail and fluttering psyche, so +precious and apparently so perishable, are usually represented as taking +shapes of beguiling loveliness--lamias, loreleis, wood nymphs, and +witches with blue flowers for their eyes. Lurking in its most innocent +forms, the grim ascetic has affected to find a leaven of concupiscence, +and whenever any reformation is afoot, it is always beauty that is made +the first victim, whether it take the form of a statue, a stained-glass +window, or a hair-ribbon. "Homeliness is next to Godliness," though not +officially stated as an article of the Christian creed, has been one of +the most active of all Christian tenets. It has always been easier far +for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than a gloriously +beautiful woman. Presumably such a one might be in danger of corrupting +the saints, somewhat unaccustomed to such apparitions. + +In this Christian fear and hatred of beauty the democratic origin of the +Christian religion is suggestively illustrated, for beauty, wherever +found, is always mysteriously aristocratic, and thus instinctively +excites the fear and jealousy of the common people. When, in the third +century, Christian mobs set about their vandalistic work of destroying +the "Pagan" temples, tearing down the beautiful calm gods and goddesses +from their pedestals, and breaking their exquisite marble limbs with +brutish mallets, it was not, we may be sure, of the danger to their +precious souls they were thinking, but of their patrician masters who +had worshipped these fair images, and paid great sums to famous +sculptors for such adornment of their sanctuaries. Perhaps it was human +enough, for to those mobs beauty had long been associated with +oppression. Yet how painful to picture those golden marbles, in all +their immortal fairness, confronted with the hideousness of those +fanatic ill-smelling multitudes. Wonderful religionists, forsooth, that +thus break with foolish hands and trample with swinish hoofs the sacred +vessels of divine dreams. Who would not + + rather be + A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn,-- + So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, + Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; + Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; + Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn. + +One can imagine the priest of such a violated sanctuary stealing back in +the quiet moonlight, when all the mob fury had passed away, seeking amid +all the wrack of fallen columns, and shattered carvings, for any poor +fragments of god or goddess at whose tranquil fair-ordered altar he had +ministered so long; and gathering such as he might find,--maybe a mighty +hand, still the hand of a god, albeit in overthrow, or some marble curls +of the sculptured ambrosial locks, or maybe the bruised breast of the +goddess, white as a water-lily in the moon. Then, seeking out some +secret corner of the sacred grove, how reverently he would bury the +precious fragments away from profane eyes, and go forth homeless into a +mysterious changing world, from which glory and loveliness were thus +surely passing away. Other priests, as we know, more fortunate than he, +had forewarnings of such impending sacrilege, and were able to +anticipate the mob, and bury their beautiful images in safe and secret +places, there to await, after the lapse of twelve centuries, the +glorious resurrection of the Renaissance. A resurrection, however, by no +means free from danger, even in that resplendent dawn of intelligence; +for Christianity was still the enemy of beauty, save in the Vatican, and +the ignorant priest of the remote village where the spade of the peasant +had revealed the sleeping marble was certain to declare the beautiful +image an evil spirit, and have it broken up forthwith and ground for +mortar, unless some influential scholar, or powerful lord touched with +"the new learning," chanced to be on hand to save it from destruction. +Yes! even at that time when beauty was being victoriously born again, +the mad fear of her raged with such panic in certain minds that, when +Savonarola lit his great bonfire so subtle a servant of beauty as +Botticelli, fallen into a sort of religious dotage, cast his own +paintings into the flames--to the lugubrious rejoicings of the +sanctimonious Piagnoni--as Savonarola's followers were called; +predecessors of those still gloomier zealots who, two centuries later, +were to turn England into a sort of whitewashed prison, with crop-headed +psalm-singing religious maniacs for gaolers. When Charles the First + + bow'd his comely head + Down, as upon a bed, + +at Whitehall, Beauty also laid her head upon the block at his side. +Ugliness, parading as piety, took her place, and once more the breaking +of images began, the banishment of music, the excommunication of grace, +and gentle manners, and personal adornments. Gaiety became penal, and a +happy heart or a beautiful smile was of the devil,--something like +hanging matters--but happy hearts and beautiful smiles must have been +rare things in England during the Puritan Commonwealth. Such as were +left had taken refuge in France, where men might worship God and Beauty +in the same church, and where it was not necessary, as at Oxford, to +bury your stained-glass windows out of the reach of the mob--those + + Storied windows richly dight + Casting a dim religious light, + +which even the Puritan Milton could thus celebrate. Doubtless, that +English Puritan persecution was the severest that Beauty has been called +upon to endure. She still suffers from it, need one say, to this day, +particularly in New England, where if the sculptured images of goddess +and nymph are not exactly broken to pieces by the populace, it is from +no goodwill towards them, but rather from an ingrained reverence for +any form of property, even though it be nude, and where, at all events, +they are under the strict surveillance of a highly proper and +respectable police, those distinguished guardians of American morals. + +It is worth while to try and get at the reason for this wide-spread, +deep-rooted, fear of beauty: for some reason there must surely be. Such +instinctive feelings, on so broad a scale, are not accidental. And so +soon as one begins to analyse the attitude of religion towards beauty, +the reason is not far to seek. + +All religions are made up of a spiritual element and a moral element, +the moral element being the temporary, practical, so to say, working +side of religion, concerned with this present world, and the limitations +and necessities of the various societies that compose it. The spiritual +element, the really important part of religion, has no concern with Time +and Space, temporary mundane laws, or conduct. It concerns itself only +with the eternal properties of things. Its business is the contemplation +and worship of the mystery of life, "the mystery we make darker with a +name." + +Now, great popular religions, designed as they are for the discipline +and control of the great brute masses of humanity, are almost entirely +occupied with morality, and what passes in them for spirituality is +merely mythology, an element of picturesque supernaturalism calculated +to enforce the morality with the multitude. Christianity is such a +religion. It is mostly a matter of conduct here and now upon the earth. +Its mystic side does not properly belong to it, and is foreign to, not +to speak of its being practically ignored by, the average "Christian." +It is a religion designed to work hand in hand with a given state of +society, making for the preservation of such laws and manners and +customs as are best fitted to make that society a success here and now, +a worldly success in the best sense of the term. Mohammedanism is a +similar religion calculated for the needs of a different society. +Whatever the words or intentions of the founders of such religions, +their kingdoms are essentially of this world. They are not mystic, or +spiritual, or in anyway concerned with infinite and eternal things. +Their business is the moral policing of humanity. Morality, as of course +its name implies, is a mere matter of custom, and therefore varies with +the variations of races and climates. It has nothing to do with +spirituality, and, in fact, the best morals are often the least +spiritual, and _vice versa_. It will be understood then that any force +which is apt to disturb this moral, or more exactly speaking social, +order will meet at once with the opposition of organized "religions" so +called, and the more spiritual it is, the greater will be the +opposition, for it will thus be the more dangerous. + +Now one begins to see why Beauty is necessarily the bugbear, more or +less, of all religions, or, as I prefer to regard them, "organized +moralities"; for Beauty is neither moral nor immoral, being as she is a +purely spiritual force, with no relations to man's little schemes of +being good and making money and being knighted and so forth. For those +who have eyes to see, she is the supreme spiritual vision vouchsafed to +us upon the earth--and, as that, she is necessarily the supreme danger +to that materialistic use and wont by which alone a materialistic +society remains possible. For this reason our young men and +maidens--particularly our young men--must be guarded against her, for +her beauty sets us adream, prevents our doing our day's work, makes us +forget the soulless occupations in which we wither away our lives. The +man who loves beauty will never be mayor of his city, or even sit on the +Board of Aldermen. Nor is he likely to own a railroad, or be a captain +of industry. Nor will he marry, for her money, a woman he does not love. +The face of beauty makes all such achievements seem small and absurd. +Such so-called successes seem to him the dreariest forms of failure. In +short, Beauty has made him divinely discontented with the limited human +world about him, divinely incapable of taking it seriously, or heeding +its standards or conditions. No wonder society should look upon Beauty +as dangerous, for she is constantly upsetting its equilibrium and +playing havoc with its smooth schemes and smug conventions. She outrages +the "proprieties" with "the innocence of nature," and disintegrates +"select" and "exclusive" circles with the wand of Romance. For earthly +possessions or rewards she has no heed. For her they are meaningless +things, mere idle dust and withered leaves. Her only real estate is in +the moon, and the one article of her simple creed--"Love is enough." + + Love is enough: though the world be a-waning + And the woods have no voice but the voice of complaining, + Though the sky be too dark for dim eyes to discover + The gold-cups and daisies fair blooming thereunder, + Though the hills beheld shadows, and the sea a dark wonder + And this day draw a veil over all deeds passed over, + Yet their hands shall not tremble, their feet shall not falter; + The void shall not weary, the fear shall not alter + These lips and these eyes of the loved and the lover. + +Those who have looked into her eyes see limitless horizons undreamed of +by those who know her not, horizons summoning the soul to radiant +adventures beyond the bounds of Space and Time. The world is so far +right in regarding beauty with a sort of superstitious dread, as a +presence almost uncanny among our mere mortal concerns, a daemonic +thing,--which is what the world has meant when it has, not unnaturally, +confused it with the spirits of evil; for surely it is a supernatural +stranger in our midst, a fairy element, and, like the lorelei and the +lamia, it does beckon its votaries to enchanted realms away and afar +from "all the uses of the world." Therefore, to them also it brings the +thrill of a different and nobler fear--the thrill of the mortal in +presence of the immortal. A strange feeling of destiny seems to come +over us as we first look into the beautiful face we were born to love. +It seems veritably an apparition from another and lovelier world, to +which it summons us to go with it. That is what we mean when we say that +Love and Death are one; for Death, to the thought of Love, is but one of +the gates to that other world, a gate to which we instinctively feel +Love has the key. That surely is the meaning of the old fairy-stories of +men who have come upon the white woman in the woodland, and followed +her, never to be seen again of their fellows, or of those who, like +Hylas, have met the water-nymph by the lilied spring, and sunk with her +down into the crystal deeps. The strange earth on which we live is just +such a place of enchantment, neither more nor less, and some of us have +met that fair face, with a strange suddenness of joy and fear, and +followed and followed it on till it vanished beyond the limits of the +world. But our failure was that we did not follow that last white +beckoning of the hand-- + + And I awoke and found me here + On the cold hill's side. + + + + +VIII + +THE MANY FACES--THE ONE DREAM + + +Among the many advantages of being very young is one's absolute +certainty that there is only one type of beautiful girl in the world. +That type we make a religion. We are its pugnacious champions, and the +idea of our falling in love with any other is too preposterous even for +discussion. If our tastes happen to be for blondness, brunettes simply +do not exist for us; and if we affect the slim and willowy in figure, +our contempt for the plump and rounded is too sincere for expression. +Usually the type we choose is one whose beauty is somewhat esoteric to +other eyes. We are well aware that photographs do it no justice, and +that the man in the street--who, strangely enough, we conceive as having +no eye for beauty--can see nothing in it. Thank Heaven, she is not the +type that any common eye can see. Heads are not turned in her wake as +she passes along. Her beauty is not "obvious." On the contrary, it is of +that rare and exquisite quality which only a few favoured ones can +apprehend--like the beauty of a Whistler or a Corot, and we have been +chosen to be its high-priest and evangelist. It is our secret, this +beautiful face that we love, and we wonder how any one can be found to +love the other faces. We even pity them, those rosy, rounded faces, with +their bright unmysterious eyes and straight noses and dimpled chins. How +fortunate for them that the secret of the beauty we love has been hidden +from their lovers. Sheer Bouguereau! Neither more nor less. + +In fact, the beauty we affect is aggressively spiritual, and in so far +as beauty is demonstrably physical we dismiss it with disdain. Our +ideal, indeed, might be said to consist in a beauty which is beautiful +in spite of the body rather than by means of it; a beauty defiantly +clothed, so to say, in the dowdiest of fleshly garments--radiantly +independent of such carnal conditions as features or complexion. Our +ideal of figure might be said to be negative rather than positive, and +that "little sister" mentioned in Solomon's Song would bring us no +disappointment. + +We are often heard to say that beauty consists chiefly, if not entirely, +in expression, that it is a transfiguration from within rather than a +gracious condition of the surface, that the shape of a nose is no +matter, and that a beautifully rounded chin or a fine throat has nothing +to do with it--indeed, is rather in the way than otherwise. We point +to the fact--which is true enough--that the most famous beauties +of antiquity were plain women--plain, that is, according to the +conventional standards. + +We also maintain--again with perfect truth--that mystery is more than +half of beauty, the element of strangeness that stirs the senses through +the imagination. These and other perfectly true truths about beauty we +discover through our devotion to the one face that we love--and we +should hardly have discovered them had we begun with the merely +cherry-ripe. It is with faces much as it is with books. There is no way +of attaining a vital catholic taste in literature so good as to begin by +mastering some difficult beautiful classic, by devoting ourselves in the +ardent receptive period of youth to one or two masterpieces which will +serve as touchstones for us in all our subsequent reading. Some books +engage all our faculties for their appreciation, and through the keen +attentiveness we are compelled to give them we make personal discovery +of those principles and qualities of all fine literature which otherwise +we might never have apprehended, or in which, at all events, we should +have been less securely grounded. + +So with faces: it is through the absorbed worship, the jealous study, of +one face that we best learn to see the beauty in all the other +faces--though the mere thought that our apprehension of its beauty could +ever lead us to so infidel a conclusion would seem heresy indeed during +the period of our dedication. The subtler the type, the more caviare it +is to the general, the more we learn from it. We become in a sense +discoverers, original thinkers, of beauty, taking nothing on authority, +but making trial and investigation always for ourselves. Such beauty +brings us nearer than the more explicit types to that mysterious +threshold over which beauty steps down to earth and dwells among us; +that well-spring of its wonder; the point where first its shining +essence pours its radiance into the earthly vessel. + +The perfect physical type hides no little of its own miracle through its +sheer perfection, as in the case of those masterpieces which, as we say, +conceal their art. It is often through the face externally less perfect, +faces, so to say, in process of becoming beautiful, that we get glimpses +of the interior light in its divine operation. We seem to look into the +very alembic of beauty, and see all the precious elements in the act of +combination. No wonder we should deem these faces the most beautiful of +all, for through them we see, not beauty made flesh, but beauty while it +is still spirit. In our eager fanaticism, indeed, we cannot conceive +that there can be beauty in any other types as well. Yet, because we +chance to have fallen under the spell of Botticelli, shall there be no +more Titian? Our taste is for a beauty of dim silver and faded stars, a +wistful twilight beauty made of sorrow and dreams, a beauty always half +in the shadow, a white flower in the moonlight. We cannot conceive how +beauty, for others, can be a thing of the hot sun, a thing of purple and +orange and the hot sun, a thing of firm outlines, superbly concrete, +marmoreal, sumptuous, magnificently animal. + +The beauty we love is very silent. It smiles softly to itself, but never +speaks. How should we understand a beauty that is vociferously gay, a +beauty of dash and dance, a beauty of swift and brilliant ways, +victoriously alive? + +Perhaps it were well for us that we should never understand, well for us +that we should preserve our singleness of taste through life. Some +contrive to do this, and never as long as they live are unfaithful to +the angel-blue eyes of their boyish love. Moralists have perhaps not +realized how much continence is due to a narrowness of aesthetic taste. +Obviously the man who sees beauty only in blue eyes is securer from +temptation than the man who can see beauty in brown or green eyes as +well; and how perilous is his state for whom danger lurks in all +beautiful eyes, irrespective of shape, size, or colour! And, alas! it is +to this state of eclecticism that most of us are led step by step by the +Mephistopheles of experience. + +As great politicians in their maturity are usually found in the exact +opposite party to that which they espoused in their youth, so men who +loved blondness in boyhood are almost certain to be found at the feet of +the raven-haired in their middle age, and _vice versa_. The change is +but a part of that general change which overtakes us with the years, +substituting in us a catholic appreciation of the world as it is for +idealist notions of the world as we see it, or desire it to be. It is a +part of that gradual abdication of the ego which comes of the slow +realization that other people are quite as interesting as ourselves--in +fact, a little more so,--and their tastes and ways of looking at things +may be worth pondering, after all. But, O when we have arrived at this +stage, what a bewildering world of seductive new impressions spreads for +us its multitudinous snares! No longer mere individuals, we have not +merely an individual's temptations to guard against, but the temptations +of all the world. Instead of being able to see only that one type of +beauty which first appealed to us, our eyes have become so instructed +that we now see the beauty of all the other types as well; and we no +longer scorn as Philistine the taste of the man in the street for the +beauty that is robustly vital and flamboyantly contoured. Once we called +it obvious. Now we say it is "barbaric," and call attention to its +perfection of type. + +The remembrance of our former injustice to it may even awaken a certain +tenderness towards it in our hearts, and soon we find ourselves making +love to it, partly from a vague desire to make reparation to a slighted +type, and partly from the experimental pleasure of loving a beauty the +attraction of which it was once impossible for us to imagine. So we feel +when the charm of some old master, hitherto unsympathetic, is suddenly +revealed to us. Ah! it was this they saw. How blind they must have +thought us! + +Brown eyes that I love, will you forgive me that I once looked into blue +eyes as I am looking now into yours? Hair black as Erebus, will you +forgive these hands that once loved to bathe in a brook of rippled gold? +Ah! they did not know. It was in ignorance they sinned. They did not +know. + +O my beautiful cypress, stately queen of the garden of the world, +forgive me that once I gave to the little shrub-like women the worship +that is rightly yours! + +Lady, whose loveliness is like white velvet, a vineyard heavy with +golden grapes, abundant as an orchard of apple blossoms, forgive that +once I loved the shadow women, the sad wreathing mists of beauty, the +silvery uncorseted phantoms of womanhood. It was in ignorance I sinned. +I did not know. + +Ah! That Mephistopheles of experience! How he has led us from one fair +face to another, teaching us, one by one, the beauty of all. No longer +lonely sectarians of beauty, pale prophets of one lovely face, there is +now no type whose secret is hidden from us. The world has become a +garden of beautiful faces. The flowers are different, but they are all +beautiful. How is it possible for us, now that we know the charm of each +one, to be indifferent to any, or to set the beauty of one above the +other? We have learned the beauty of the orchid, but surely we have not +unlearned the rose; and would you say that orchid or rose is more +beautiful than the lily? Surely not. They are differently beautiful, +that is all. + +Are blue eyes more beautiful than brown? I thought so once, but now I +see that they are differently beautiful, that is all. Nor is gold hair +more beautiful than black any more, or black than gold. They are +differently beautiful, that is all. Nor is thy white skin, O Saxon lady, +more beautiful than hers of tropic bronze. + +Come sad, or come with laughter, beautiful faces; come like stars in +dreams, or come vivid as fruit upon the bough; come softly like a timid +fawn, or terrible as an army with banners; come silent, come singing ... +you are all beautiful, and none is fairer than another--only differently +fair. + +And yet ... and yet ... Experience is indeed Mephistopheles in this: We +must pay him for all this wisdom. Is it the old price? Is it our souls? +I wonder. + +This at least is true: that, while indeed he has opened our eyes to all +this beauty that was hidden to us, shown us beauty, indeed, where we +could see but evil before, we miss something from our delight in these +faces. We can appreciate more beauty, but do we appreciate any quite as +much as in those old days when we were such passionate monotheists of +the beautiful? Alas! We are priests no more, are we even lovers? But we +are wonderful connoisseurs. + +It is our souls. + + + + +IX + +THE SNOWS OF YESTER-YEAR + + +_Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?_ As I transcribe once more that +ancient sigh, perhaps the most real sigh in all literature, it is high +mid-summer, and the woodland surrounding the little cabin in which I am +writing lies in a trance of green and gold, hot and fragrant and dizzy +with the whirring of cicadas, under the might of the July sun. Bees buzz +in and out through my door, and sometimes a butterfly flits in, flutters +a while about my bookshelves, and presently is gone again, in search of +sweets more to his taste than those of the muses, though Catullus is +there, with + + Songs sweeter than wild honey dripping down, + Which once in Rome to Lesbia he sang. + +As I am caught by the dream-drowsy spell of the hot murmuring afternoon, +and my eyes rest on the thick vines clustering over the rocks, and the +lush grasses and innumerable underbrush, so spendthrift in their +crowding luxuriance, I try to imagine the ground as it was but four +months ago still in the grasp of winter, when the tiniest blade of +grass, or smallest speck of creeping green leaf, seemed like a miracle, +and it was impossible to realize that under the broad snowdrifts a +million seeds, like hidden treasure, were waiting to reveal their +painted jewels to the April winds. Snow was plentiful then, to be had by +the ton--but now, the thought suddenly strikes me, and brings home with +new illuminating force Villon's old refrain, that though I sought the +woodland from end to end, ransacked its most secret places, not one +vestige of that snow, so lately here in such plenty, would it be +possible to find. Though you were to offer me a million dollars for as +much as would fill the cup of a wild rose, say even a hundred million, I +should have to see all that money pass me by. I can think of hardly +anything that it couldn't buy--but such a simple thing as last year's +snow! + +Could there be a more poignant symbol of irreclaimable vanished things +than that so happily hit on by the old ballade-maker: + + Nay, never ask this week, fair lord, + Where they are gone, nor yet this year, + Save with thus much for an overword-- + But where are the snows of yester-year? + +Villon, as we know, has a melancholy fondness for asking these sad, +hopeless questions of snow and wind. He muses not only of the drift of +fair faces, but of the passing of mighty princes and all the arrogant +pride and pomp of the earth--"pursuivants, trumpeters, heralds, hey!" +"Ah! where is the doughty Charlemagne?" They, even as the humblest, "the +wind has carried them all away." They have vanished utterly as the snow, +gone--who knows where?--on the wind. "'Dead and gone'--a sorry burden of +the Ballad of Life," as Thomas Lowell Beddoes has it in his _Death's +Jest Book_. "Dead and gone!" as Andrew Lang re-echoes in a sweetly +mournful ballade: + + Through the mad world's scene + We are drifting on, + To this tune, I ween, + "They are dead and gone!" + +"Nought so sweet as melancholy," sings an old poet, and, while the +melancholy of the exercise is undoubted, there is at the same time an +undeniable charm attaching to those moods of imaginative retrospect in +which we summon up shapes and happenings of the vanished past, a tragic +charm indeed similar to that we experience in mournful music or elegiac +poetry. + +For, it is impossible to turn our eyes on any point of the starlit vista +of human history, without being overwhelmed with a heart-breaking sense +of the immense treasure of radiant human lives that has gone to its +making, the innumerable dramatic careers now shrunk to a mere mention, +the divinely passionate destinies, once all wild dream and dancing +blood, now nought but a name huddled with a thousand such in some dusty +index, seldom turned to even by the scholar, and as unknown to the world +at large as the moss-grown name on some sunken headstone in a country +churchyard. What an appallingly exuberant and spendthrift universe it +seems, pouring out its multitudinous generations of men and women with +the same wasteful hand as it has filled this woodland with millions of +exquisite lives, marvellously devised, patterned with inexhaustible +fancy, mysteriously furnished with subtle organs after their needs, +crowned with fairy blossoms, and ripening with magic seeds,--such a vast +treasure of fragrant sunlit leafage, all produced with such elaborate +care, and long travail, and all so soon to vanish utterly away! + +Along with this crushing sense of cosmic prodigality, and somewhat +lighting up its melancholy, comes the inspiring realization of the +splendid spectacle of human achievement, the bewildering array of all +the glorious lives that have been lived, of all the glorious happenings, +under the sun. Ah! what men this world has seen, and--what women! What +divine actors have trod this old stage, and in what tremendous dramas +have they taken part! And how strange it is, reading some great dramatic +career, of Caesar, say, or Luther, or Napoleon, or Byron, to realize +that there was a time when they were not, then a time when they were +beginning to be strange new names in men's ears, then all the romantic +excitement of their developing destinies, and the thunder and lightning +of the great resounding moments of their lives--moments made out of +real, actual, prosaic time, just as our own moments are made, yet once +so splendidly shining on the top of the world, as though to stay there +forever, moments so glorious that it would seem that Time must have +paused to watch and prolong them, jealous that they should ever pass and +give place to lesser moments! + +Think too of those other fateful moments of history, moments not +confined to a few godlike individuals, but participated in by whole +nations, such moments as that of the great Armada, the French +Revolution, or the Declaration of American Independence. How strangely +it comes upon one that these past happenings were once only just taking +place, just as at the moment of my writing other things are taking +place, and clocks were ticking and water flowing, just as they are doing +now! How wonderful, it seems to us, to have been alive then, as we are +alive now, to have shared in those vast national enthusiasms, "in those +great deeds to have had some little part"; and is it not a sort of poor +anti-climax for a world that has gone through such noble excitement to +have sunk back to this level of every day! Alas! all those lava-like +moments of human exaltation--what are they now, but, so to say, the +pumice-stone of history. They have passed as the summer flowers are +passing, they are gone with last year's snow. + +But the last year's snow of our personal lives--what a wistful business +it is, when we get thinking of that! To recall certain magic moments out +of the past is to run a risk of making the happiest present seem like a +desert; and for most men, I imagine, such retrospect is usually busied +with some fair face, or perhaps--being men--with several fair faces, +once so near and dear, and now so far. How poignantly and unprofitably +real memory can make them--all but bring them back--how vividly +reconstruct immortal occasions of happiness that we said could not, must +not, pass away; while all the time our hearts were aching with the sure +knowledge that they were even then, as we wildly clutched at them, +slipping from our grasp! + +That summer afternoon,--do you too still remember it, Miranda?--when, +under the whispering woodland, we ate our lunch together with such +prodigious appetite, and O! such happy laughter, yet never took our eyes +from each other; and, when the meal was ended, how we wandered along the +stream-side down the rocky glen, till we came to an enchanted pool among +the boulders, all hushed with moss and ferns and overhanging boughs--do +you remember what happened then, Miranda? Ah! nymphs of the forest +pools, it is no use asking me to forget. + +And, all the time, my heart was saying to my eyes:--"This fairy hour--so +real, so magical, now--some day will be in the far past; you will sit +right away on the lonely outside of it, and recall it only with the +anguish of beautiful vanished things." And here I am today surely +enough, years away from it, solitary on its lonely outside! + +I suppose that the river, this summer day, is making the same music +along its rocky bed, and the leafy boughs are rustling over that haunted +pool just the same as when--but where are the laughing ripples--ah! +Miranda--that broke with laughter over the divinely troubled water, and +the broken reflections, as of startled water-lilies, that rocked to and +fro in a panic of dazzling alabaster? + +They are with last year's snow. + +Meriel of the solemn eyes, with the heart and the laughter of a child, +and soul like the starlit sky, where should one look for the snows of +yester-year if not in your bosom, fairy girl my eyes shall never see +again. Wherever you are, lost to me somewhere among the winding paths of +this strange wood of the world, do you ever, as the moonlight falls over +the sea, give a thought to that night when we sat together by a window +overlooking the ocean, veiled in a haze of moonlit pearl, and, dimly +seen near shore, a boat was floating, like some mystic barge, as we +said, in our happy childishness, waiting to take us to the _Land East of +the Sun and West of the Moon_? Ah! how was it we lingered and lingered +till the boat was no more there, and it was too late? Perhaps it was +that we seemed to be already there, as you turned and placed your hand +in mine and said: "My life is in your hand." And we both believed it +true. Yes! wherever we went together in those days, we were always in +that enchanted land--whether we rode side by side through London streets +in a hansom--"a two-wheeled heaven" we called it--(for our dream +stretches as far back as that prehistoric day--How old one of us seems +to be growing! You, dear face, can never grow old)--or sat and laughed +at clowns in London music halls, or wandered in Surrey lanes, or gazed +at each other, as if our hearts would break for joy, over the snow-white +napery of some country inn, and maybe quoted Omar to each other, as we +drank his red wine to the immortality of our love. Perhaps we were +right, after all. Perhaps it could never die, and Time and Distance are +perhaps merely illusions, and you and I have never been apart. Who knows +but that you are looking over my shoulder as I write, though you seem so +far away, lost in that starlit silence that you loved. Ah! Meriel, is it +well with you, this summer day? A sigh seems to pass through the sunlit +grasses. They are waving and whispering as I have seen them waving and +whispering over graves. + +Such moments as these I have recalled all men have had in their lives, +moments when life seemed to have come to miraculous flower, attained +that perfect fulfilment of its promise which else we find only in +dreams. Beyond doubt there is something in the flawless blessedness of +such moments that links our mortality with super-terrestrial states of +being. We do, in very deed, gaze through invisible doors into the ether +of eternal existences, and, for the brief hour, live as they, drinking +deep of that music of the infinite which is the divine food of the +enfranchised soul. Thence comes our exaltation, and our wild longing to +hold the moment for ever; for, while it is with us, we have literally +escaped from the everyday earth, and have found the way into some other +dimension of being, and its passing means our sad return to the +prison-house of Time, the place of meetings and partings, of distance +and death. + +Part of the pang of recalling such moments is a remorseful sense that +perhaps we might have held them fast, after all. If only we might bring +them back, surely we would find some way to dwell in them for ever. They +came upon us so suddenly out of heaven, like some dazzling bird, and we +were so bewildered with the wonder of their coming that we stretched out +our hands to seize them, only when they were already spreading their +wings for flight. But O if the divine bird would but visit us again! +What golden nets we would spread for him! What a golden cage of worship +we would make ready! Our eyes would never leave his strange plumage, nor +would we miss one note of his strange song. But alas! now that we are +grown wise and watchful, that "moment eternal" comes to us no more. +Perhaps too that sad wisdom which has come to us with the years would +least of all avail us, should such moments by some magic chance suddenly +return. For it is one of the dangers of the retrospective habit that it +incapacitates us for the realization of the present hour. Much dwelling +on last year's snow will make us forget the summer flowers. Dreaming of +fair faces that are gone, we will look with unseeing eyes into the fair +faces that companion us still. To the Spring we say: "What of all your +blossom, and all your singing! Autumn is already at your heels, like a +shadow; and Winter waits for you like a marble tomb." To the hope that +still may beckon we say: "Well, what though you be fulfilled, you will +pass, like the rest. I shall see you come. We shall dwell together for a +while, and then you will go; and all will be as it was before, all as if +you had never come at all." For the retrospective mood, of necessity, +begets the anticipatory; we see everything finished before it is begun, +and welcome and valediction blend together on our lips. "That which hath +been is now; and that which is to be hath already been." + + In every kiss sealed fast + To feel the first kiss and forebode the last-- + +that is the shadow that haunts every joy, and sicklies o'er every action +of him whom life has thus taught to look before and after. + +Youth is not like that, and therein, for older eyes, lies its tragic +pathos. Superficial--or, if you prefer it, more normal--observers are +made happy by the spectacle of eager and confident young lives, all +abloom and adream, turning towards the future with plumed impatient +feet. But for some of us there is nothing quite so sad as young joy. The +playing of children is perhaps the most unbearably sad thing in the +world. Who can look on young lovers, without tears in their eyes? With +what innocent faith they are taking in all the radiant lies of life! But +perhaps a young mother with her new-born babe on her breast is the most +tragical of all pictures of unsuspecting joy, for none of all the +trusting sons and daughters of men is destined in the end to find +herself so tragically, one might say cynically, fooled. + +Cynically, I said; for indeed sometimes, as one ponders the lavish +heartless use life seems to make of all its divinely precious +material--were it but the flowers in one meadow, or the butterflies of a +single summer day--it does seem as though a cruel cynicism inhered +somewhere in the scheme of things, delighting to destroy and +disillusionize, to create loveliness in order to scatter it to the +winds, and inspire joy in order to mock it with desolation. Sometimes it +seems as though the mysterious spirit of life was hardly worthy of the +vessels it has called into being, hardly treats them fairly, uses them +with an ignoble disdain. For, how generously we give ourselves up to +life, how innocently we put our trust in it, do its bidding with such +fine ardours, striving after beauty and goodness, fain to be heroic and +clean of heart--yet "what hath man of all his labours, and of the +vexation of his heart, wherein he hath laboured under the sun." Yea, +dust, and fallen rose-leaves, and last year's snow. + +And yet and yet, for all this drift and dishonoured decay of things, +that retrospective mood of ours will sometimes take another turn, and, +so rare and precious in the memory seem the treasure that it has lost, +and yet in imagination still holds, that it will not resign itself to +mortal thoughts of such manifest immortalities. The snows of +yester-year! Who knows if, after all, they have so utterly vanished as +they seem. Who can say but that there may be somewhere in the universe +secret treasuries where all that has ever been precious is precious +still, safely garnered and guarded for us against some wonderful moment +which shall gather up for us in one transfiguring apocalypse all the +wonderful moments that have but preceded us into eternity. Perhaps, as +nothing is lost in the world, so-called, of matter, nothing is lost too +in the world of love and dream. + + O vanished loveliness of flowers and faces, + Treasure of hair, and great immortal eyes, + Are there for these no safe and secret places? + And is it true that beauty never dies? + Soldiers and saints, haughty and lovely names, + Women who set the whole wide world in flames, + Poets who sang their passion to the skies, + And lovers wild and wise: + Fought they and prayed for some poor flitting gleam + Was all they loved and worshipped but a dream? + Is Love a lie and fame indeed a breath? + And is there no sure thing in life--but death? + +Ah! perhaps we shall find all such lost and lovely things when we come +at length to the Land of Last Year's Snow. + + + + +X + +THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GOSSIP + + +According to the old Scandinavian fable of the cosmos, the whole world +is encircled in the coils of a vast serpent. The ancient name for it was +the Midgard serpent, and doubtless, for the old myth-maker, it had +another significance. Today, however, the symbol may still hold good of +a certain terrible and hideous reality. + +Still, as of old, the world is encircled in the coils of a vast serpent; +and the name of the serpent is Gossip. Wherever man is, there may you +hear its sibilant whisper, and its foul spawn squirm and sting and +poison in nests of hidden noisomeness, myriad as the spores of +corruption in a putrefying carcass, varying in size from some +hydra-headed infamy endangering whole nations and even races with its +deadly breath, to the microscopic wrigglers that multiply, a million a +minute, in the covered cesspools of private life. + +Printed history is so infested with this vermin, in the form of secret +memoirs, back-stairs diarists, and boudoir eavesdroppers, that it is +almost impossible to feel sure of the actual fact of any history +whatsoever. The fame of great personages may be literally compared to +the heroic figures in the well-known group of the Laocoön, battling in +vain with the strangling coils of the sea-serpent of Poseidon. We +scarcely know what to believe of the dead; and for the living, is it not +true, as Tennyson puts it, that "each man walks with his head in a cloud +of poisonous flies"? + +What is this evil leaven that seems to have been mixed in with man's +clay at the very beginning, making one almost ready to believe in the +old Manichean heresy of a principle of evil operating through nature, +everywhere doing battle with the good? Even from the courts of heaven, +as we learn from the Book of Job, the gossip was not excluded; and how +eternally true to the methods of the gossip in all ages was Satan's way +of going to work in that immortal allegory! Let us recall the familiar +scene with a quoted verse or two: + + Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves + before the Lord, and Satan [otherwise, the Adversary] came also + among them. + + And the Lord said unto Satan, "Whence comest thou?" Then Satan + answered the Lord, and said: "From going to and fro in the earth, + and from walking up and down in it." + + And the Lord said unto Satan: "Hast thou considered my servant Job, + that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright + man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil?" + + Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, "Doth Job fear God for + nought?" + +Here we have in a nutshell the whole _modus operandi_ of the gossip in +all ages, and as he may be observed at any hour of the day or night, +slimily engaged in his cowardly business. "Going to and fro in the +earth, walking up and down in it," everywhere peering and listening, +smiling and shrugging, here and there dropping a hint, sowing a seed, +leering an innuendo; seldom saying, only implying; leaving everywhere +trails of slime, yet trails too vague and broken to track him by, secure +in his very cowardice. + +"Doth Job fear God for nought?" He only asks, observe. Affirms nothing. +Only innocently wonders. Sows a doubt, that's all--and leaves it to +work. + +The victim may possibly be set right in the end, as was Job; but +meanwhile he has lost his flocks and his herds, his sons and his +daughters, and suffered no little inconvenience from a loathsome plague +of boils. Actually--life not being, like the Book of Job, an +allegory--he very seldom is set right, but must bear his losses and his +boils with what philosophy he can master till the end of the chapter. + +The race to which Job belonged presents perhaps the most conspicuous +example of a whole people burdened throughout its history with a +heritage of malignant gossip. In the town of Lincoln, in England, there +exists to this day, as one of its show places, the famous "Jew's House," +associated with the gruesome legend of "the boy of Lincoln"--a child, +it was whispered, sacrificed by the Jews at one of their pastoral +feasts. Such a wild belief in child-sacrifice by the Jews was widespread +in the Middle Ages, and is largely responsible, I understand, even at +the present day, for the Jewish massacres in Russia. + +Think of the wild liar who first put that fearful thought into the mind +of Europe! Think of the holocausts of human lives, and all the attendant +agony of which his diabolical invention has been the cause! What +criminal in history compares in infamy with that unknown--gossip? + +A similar madness of superstition, responsible for a like cruel +sacrifice of innocent lives, was the terrible belief in witchcraft. +Having its origin in ignorance and fear, it was chiefly the creation of +hearsay carried from lip to lip, beginning with the deliberate invention +of lying tongues, delighting in evil for its own sake, or taking +advantage of a ready weapon to pay off scores of personal enmity. At any +time to a period as near to our own day as the early eighteenth century, +nothing was easier than to rid oneself of an enemy by starting a whisper +going that he or she held secret commerce with evil spirits, was a +reader of magical books, and could at will cast spells of disease and +death upon the neighbours or their cattle. + +You had but to be recluse in your habits and eccentric in your +appearance, with perhaps a little more wisdom in your head and your +conversation than your fellows, to be at the mercy of the first fool or +knave who could gather a mob at his heels, and hale you to the nearest +horse-pond. Statement and proof were one, and how ready, and indeed +eager, human nature was to believe the wildest nonsense told by witless +fool or unscrupulous liar, the records of such manias as the famous +Salem trials appallingly evidence. Men high in the state, as well as +helpless old women in their dotage, disfigured with "witch-moles" or +incriminating beards on their withered faces, were equally vulnerable to +this most fearful of weapons ever placed by ignorance in the hands of +the malignant gossip. + +In such epidemics of tragic gossip we see plainly that, whatever +individuals are originally responsible, society at large is all too +culpably _particeps criminis_ in this phenomenon under consideration. If +the prosperity of a jest be in the ears that hear it, the like is +certainly true of any piece of gossip. Whoever it may be that sows the +evil seed of slander, the human soil is all too evilly ready to receive +it, to give it nurture, and to reproduce it in crops persistent as the +wild carrot and flamboyant as the wild mustard. + +There is something mean in human nature that prefers to think evil, that +gives a willing ear and a ready welcome to calumny, a sort of jealousy +of goodness and greatness and things of good report. + +Races and nations are thus ever ready to believe the worst of one +another. In all times it has been in this field of inter-racial and +international prejudice that the gossip has found the widest scope for +his gleeful activity, sowing broadcast dissensions and misunderstandings +which have persisted for centuries. They are the fruitful cause of wars, +insuperable barriers to progress, fabulous growths which the +enlightenment of the world painfully labours to weed out, but will +perhaps never entirely eradicate. + +Race-hatred is undoubtedly nine-tenths the heritage of ancient gossip. +Think of the generations of ill-feeling that kept England and France, +though divided but by a narrow strait, "natural enemies" and +misunderstood monsters to each other. In a less degree, the friendship +of England and America has been retarded by international gossips on +both sides. And as for races and nations more widely separated by +distance or customs, no lies have been bad enough for them to believe +about one another. + +It is only of late years that Europe has come to regard the peoples of +the Orient as human beings at all. And all this misunderstanding has +largely been the work of gossip acting upon ignorance. + +It is easy to see how in the days of difficult communication, before +nations were able to get about in really representative numbers to make +mutual acquaintance, they were completely at the mercy of a few +irresponsible travellers, who said or wrote what they pleased, and had +no compunction about lying in the interests of entertainment. The +proverbial "gaiety of nations" has always, in a great degree, consisted +in each nation believing that it was superior to all others, and that +the natives of other countries were invariably hopelessly dirty and +immoral, to say the least. Such reports the traveller was expected to +bring home with him, and such he seldom failed to bring. + +Even at the present time, when intercourse is so cosmopolitan, and some +approach to a sense of human brotherhood has been arrived at, the old +misconceptions die hard. Nations need still to be constantly on their +guard in believing all that the telegraph or the wireless is willing to +tell them about other countries. Electricity, many as are its advantages +for cosmopolitan _rapprochements_, is not invariably employed in the +interests of truth, and newspaper correspondents, if not watched, are +liable to be an even more dangerous form of international gossip than +the more leisurely fabulist of ancient time. + +When we come to consider the operation of gossip in the lives of +individuals, the disposition of human nature to relish discrediting +rumour is pitifully conspicuous. We know _Hamlet's_ opinion on the +matter: + + Let Hercules himself do what he may, + The cat will mew, and dog will have his day. + +And again: + + Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, + Thou shalt not escape calumny. + +This, it is to be feared, is merely the sad truth, for mankind, while it +admires both greatness and goodness, would seem to resent the one and +only half believe in the other. At all events, nothing is more to its +taste than the rumour that detracts from the great or sullies the good; +and so long as the rumour be entertaining, it has little concern for its +truth. + +Froude, in writing of Caesar, has this to say admirably to our purpose: + + In ages which we call heroic, the saint works miracles, the warrior + performs exploits beyond the strength of natural man. In ages less + visionary, which are given to ease and enjoyment, the tendency is to + bring a great man down to the common level, and to discover or + invent faults which shall show that he is or was but a little man + after all. Our vanity is soothed by evidence that those who have + eclipsed us in the race of life are no better than ourselves, or in + some respects worse than ourselves; and if to these general impulses + be added political or personal animosity, accusations of depravity + are circulated as surely about such men, and are credited as readily + as under other influences are the marvellous achievements of a Cid + or a St. Francis. + + The absurdity of a calumny may be as evident as the absurdity of a + miracle; the ground for belief may be no more than a lightness of + mind, and a less pardonable wish that it may be true. But the idle + tale floats in society, and by and by is written down in books and + passes into the region of established realities. + +The proportion of such idle tales seriously printed as history can +never, of course, be computed. Sometimes one is tempted to think that +history is mainly "whole cloth." Certainly the lives of such men as +Caesar are largely made up of what one might term illustrative fictions +rather than actual facts. The story of Caesar and Cleopatra is probably +such an "illustrative fiction," representing something that might very +well have happened to Caesar, whether it did so or not. At all events, +it does his fame no great harm, unlike another calumny, which, as it +does not seem "illustrative"--that is, not in keeping with his general +character--we are at liberty to reject. Both alike, however, were +the product of the gossip, the embodied littleness of human nature +endeavouring then, as always, to minimize and discredit the strong man, +who, whatever his actual faults, at least strenuously shoulders for his +fellows the hard work of the world. + +The great have usually been strong enough to smile contempt on their +traducers--Caesar's answer to an infamous epigram of the poet Catullus +was to ask him to dinner--but even so, at what extra cost, what "expense +of spirit in a waste of shame," have their achievements been bought, +because of these curs that bark forever at the heels of fame! + +And not always have they thus prevailed against the pack. Too often has +the sorry spectacle been seen of greatness and goodness going down +before the poisonous tongues and the licking jaws. Even Caesar himself +had to fall at last, his strong soul perhaps not sorry to escape through +his dagger-wounds from so pitiably small a world; and the poison in the +death-cup of Socrates was not so much the juice of the hemlock as the +venom of the gossips of Athens. + +In later times, no service to his country, no greatness of character, +can save the noble Raleigh from the tongues determined to bring him to +the block; and, when the haughty head of Marie Antoinette must bow at +last upon the scaffold, the true guillotine was the guillotine of +gossip. It was such lying tales as that of the diamond necklace that had +brought her there. All Queen Elizabeth's popularity could not save her +from the ribaldry of scandal, nor Shakespeare's genius protect his name +from the foulest of stains. + +In our own time, the mere mention of the name of Dreyfus suffices to +remind us of the terrible nets woven by this dark spinner. Within the +last year or two, have we not seen the loved king of a great nation +driven to seek protection from the spectre of innuendo in the courts of +law? But gossip laughs at such tribunals. It knows that where once it +has affixed its foul stain, the mark remains forever, indelible as that +imaginary stain which not all the multitudinous seas could wash from the +little hand of Lady Macbeth. The more the stain is washed, the more +persistently it reappears, like Rizzio's blood, as they say, in Holyrood +Palace. To deny a rumour is but to spread it. An action for libel, +however it may be decided, has at least the one inevitable result of +perpetuating it. + +Take the historical case of the Man with the Iron Mask. Out of pure +deviltry, it would appear, Voltaire started the story, as mere a fiction +as one of his written romances, that the mysterious prisoner was no less +than a half-brother of Louis XIV; and Dumas, seeing the dramatic +possibilities of the legend, picturesquely elaborates it in _Le Vicomte +de Bragelonne_. Never, probably, was so impudent an invention, and +surely never one so successful; for it is in vain that historians expose +it over and over again. Learned editors have proved with no shadow of a +doubt that the real man of the mask was an obscure Italian political +adventurer; but though scholars may be convinced, the world will have +nothing of your Count Matthioli, and will probably go on believing +Voltaire's story to the end of time. + +"At least there must have been something in it" is always the last word +on such debatable matters; and the curious thing is that, whenever a +doubt of the truth is expressed, it is never the victim, but always the +scandal, to which the benefit of the doubt is extended. Whatever the +proven fact, the world always prefers to hold fast by the disreputable +doubt. + +All that is necessary is to find the dog a bad name. The world will see +that he never loses it. In this regard the oft-reiterated confidence of +the dead in the justice of posterity is one of the most pathetic of +illusions. "Posterity will see me righted," cries some poor victim of +human wrong, as he goes down into the darkness; but of all appeals, the +appeal to posterity is the most hopeless. + +What posterity relishes is rather new scandals about its immortals than +tiresome belated justifications. It prefers its villains to grow blacker +with time, and welcomes proof of fallibility and frailty in its immortal +exemplars. For rehabilitation it has neither time nor inclination, +and it pursues certain luckless reputations beyond the grave with a +mysterious malignity. + +Such a reputation is that of Edgar Allan Poe. One would have thought +that posterity would be eager to make up to his shade for the criminal +animus of Rufus Griswold, his first biographer. On the contrary, it +prefers to perpetuate the lying portrait; and no consideration of the +bequests of Poe's genius, or of his tragic struggles with adverse +conditions, no editorial advocacy, or documentary evidence in his +favour, has persuaded posterity to reverse the unduly harsh judgment of +his fatuous contemporaries. + +Fortunately, it all matters nothing to Poe now. It is only to us that it +matters. + +Saddening, surely, it is, to say the least, to realize that the humanity +of which we are a part is tainted with so subtle a disease of lying, and +so depraved an appetite for lies. Under such conditions, it is +surprising that greatness and goodness are ever found willing to serve +humanity at all, and that any but scoundrels can be found to dare the +risks of the high places of the world. For this social disease of gossip +resembles that distemper which, at the present moment, threatens the +chestnut forests of America. It first attacks the noblest trees. Like +it, too, it would seem to baffle all remedies, and like it, it would +seem to be the work of indestructible microscopic worms. + +It is this vermicular insignificance of the gossip that makes his +detection so difficult, and gives him his security. A great reputation +may feel itself worm-eaten, and may suddenly go down with a crash, but +it will look around in vain for the social vermin that have brought +about its fall. It is the cowardice of gossip that its victims have +seldom an opportunity of coming face to face with their destroyers; for +the gossip is as small as he is ubiquitous-- + + Not half so big as a round little worm + Prick'd from the lazy finger of a maid. + +In all societies, there are men and women who are vaguely known as +gossips; but they are seldom caught red-handed. For one thing, they do +not often speak at first hand. They profess only to repeat something +that they have heard--something, they are careful to add, which is +probably quite untrue, and which they themselves do not believe for a +moment. + +Then the fact stated or hinted is probably no concern of ours. It is not +for us to sift its truth, or to bring it to the attention of the +individual it tarnishes. Obviously, society would become altogether +impossible if each one of us were to constitute ourselves a sort of +social police to arraign every accuser before the accused. We should +thus, it is to be feared, only make things worse, and involuntarily play +the gossip's own game. The best we can do is as far as possible to +banish the tattle from our minds, and, at all events, to keep our own +mouths shut. + +Even so, however, some harm will have been done. We shall never be quite +sure but that the rumour was true, and when we next meet the person +concerned, it will probably in some degree colour our attitude toward +him. + +And with others, less high-minded than ourselves, the gossip will have +had greater success. Not, of course, meaning any harm, they will inquire +of someone else if what So-and-so hinted of So-and-so can possibly be +true. And so it will go on _ad infinitum_. The formula is simple, and it +is only a matter of arithmetical progression for a private lie, once +started on its journey, to become a public scandal, with a reputation +gone, and no one visibly responsible. + +Of course, not all gossip is purposely harmful in its intention. The +deliberate, creative gossip is probably rare. In fact, gossip usually +represents the need of a bored world to be entertained at any price, the +restless _ennui_ that must be forever talking or listening to fill the +vacuity of its existence, to supply its lack of really vital interests. +This demand naturally creates a supply of idle talkers, whose social +existence depends on their ability to provide the entertainment desired; +and nothing would seem to be so well-pleasing to the idle human ear as +the whisper that discredits, or the story that ridicules, the +distinction it envies, and the goodness it cannot understand. + +The mystery of gossip is bound up with the mysterious human need of +talking. Talk we must, though we say nothing, or talk evil from sheer +lack of subject-matter. When we know why man talks so much, apparently +for the mere sake of talking, we shall probably be nearer to knowing why +he prefers to speak and hear evil rather than good of his fellows. + +Possibly the gossip would be just as ready to speak well of his victims, +to circulate stories to their credit rather than the reverse, but for +the melancholy fact that he would thus be left without an audience. For +the world has no anxiety to hear good of its neighbour, and there is no +piquancy in the disclosure of hidden virtues. + +'Tis true, 'tis pity; pity 'tis, 'tis true; and the only poor +consolation to be got out of it is that the victims of gossip may, if +they feel so inclined, feel flattered rather than angered by its +attentions; for, at all events, it argues their possession of gifts +and qualities transcending the common. At least it presupposes +individuality; and, all things considered, it may be held as true that +those most gossiped about are usually those who can best afford to pay +this tax levied by society on any form of distinction. + +After all, the great and good man has his greatness and goodness to +support him, though the world should unite in depreciating him. The +artist has his genius, the beautiful woman has her beauty. 'Tis in +ourselves that we are thus and thus; and if fame must have gossip for +its seamy side, there are some satisfactions that cannot be stolen away, +and some laurels that defy the worm. + + + + +XI + +THE PASSING AWAY OF THE EDITOR + + +The word "editor" as applied to the conductors of magazines and +newspapers is rapidly becoming a mere courtesy title; for the powers and +functions formerly exercised by editors, properly so called, are being +more and more usurped by the capitalist proprietor. There are not a few +magazines where the "editor" has hardly more say in the acceptance of a +manuscript than the contributor who sends it in. Few are the editors +left who uphold the magisterial dignity and awe with which the name of +editor was wont to be invested. These survive owing chiefly to the +prestige of long service, and even they are not always free from the +encroachments of the new method. The proprietor still feels the irksome +necessity of treating their editorial policies with respect, though +secretly chafing for the moment when they shall give place to more +manageable, modern tools. + +The "new" editor, in fact, is little more than a clerk doing the bidding +of his proprietor, and the proprietor's idea of editing is slavishly to +truckle to the public taste--or rather to his crude conception of the +public taste. The only real editors of today are the capitalist and the +public. The nominal editor is merely an office-boy of larger growth, and +slightly larger salary. + +Innocent souls still, of course, imagine him clothed with divine powers, +and letters of introduction to him are still sought after by the +superstitious beginner. Alas! the chances are that the better he thinks +of your MS. the less likely is it to be accepted by--the proprietor; for +Mr. Snooks, the proprietor, has decided tastes of his own, and a +peculiar distaste for anything remotely savouring of the "literary." His +broad editorial axiom is that a popular magazine should be everything +and anything but--"literature." For any signs of the literary taint he +keeps open a stern and ever-watchful eye, and the "editor" or "editorial +assistant"--to make a distinction without a difference--whom he should +suspect of literary leanings has but a short shrift. Mr. Snooks is +seldom much of a reader himself. His activities have been exclusively +financial, and he has drifted into the magazine business as he might +have drifted into pork or theatres--from purely financial reasons. His +literary needs are bounded on the north by a detective story, and on the +south by a scientific article. The old masters of literature are as much +foolishness to him as the old masters of painting. In short, he is just +a common, ignorant man with money invested in a magazine; and who shall +blame him if he goes on the principle that he who pays the piper calls +the tune. When he starts in he not infrequently begins by entrusting +his magazine to some young man with real editorial ability and ambition +to make a really good thing. This young man gathers about him a group of +kindred spirits, and the result is that after the publication of the +second number Mr. Snooks decides to edit the magazine himself, with the +aid of a secretary and a few typewriters. His bright young men hadn't +understood "what the public wants" at all. They were too high-toned, too +"literary." What the public wants is short stories and pictures of +actresses; and the short stories, like the actresses, must be no better +than they should be. Even short stories when they are masterpieces are +not "what the public wants." So the bright young men go into outer +darkness, sadly looking for new jobs, and with its third number +_Snooks's Monthly_ has fallen into line with the indistinguishable ruck +of monthly magazines, only indeed distinguishable one from the other by +the euphonious names of their proprietors. + +Now, a proprietor's right to have his property managed according to his +own ideas needs no emphasizing. The sad thing is that such proprietors +should get hold of such property. It all comes, of course, of the +modern vulgarization of wealth. Time was when even mere wealth was +aristocratic, and its possession, more or less implied in its possessors +the possession, too, of refinement and culture. The rich men of the past +knew enough to encourage and support the finer arts of life, and were +interested in maintaining high standards of public taste and feeling. +Thus they were capable of sparing some of their wealth for investment in +objects which brought them a finer kind of reward than the financial. +Among other things, they understood and respected the dignity of +literature, and would not have expected an editor to run a literary +venture in the interests of the illiterate. The further degradation of +the public taste was not then the avowed object of popular magazines. +Indeed--strange as it sounds nowadays--it was rather the education than +the degradation of the public taste at which the editor aimed, and in +that aim he found the support of intelligent proprietors. + +Today, however, all this is changed. Wealth has become democratic, and +it is only here and there, in its traditional possessors, that it +retains its traditional aristocracy of taste. As the commonest man can +be a multi-millionaire, so the commonest man can own a magazine, and +have it edited in the commonest fashion for the common good. + +As a result, the editor's occupation, in the true sense, will soon be +gone. There is, need one say, no lack today of men with real editorial +individuality--but editorial individuality is the last thing the +capitalist proprietors want. It is just that they are determined to +stamp out. Therefore, your real editor must either swallow his pride and +submit to ignorant dictation, or make way for the little band of +automatic sorters of manuscript, which, as nine tailors make a man, +nowadays constitute a sort of composite editor under the direction of +the proprietor. + +With the elimination of editorial individuality necessarily follows +elimination of individuality in the magazine. More and more, every day, +magazines are conforming to the same monotonous type; so that, except +for name and cover, it is impossible to tell one magazine from another. +Happily one or two--_rari nantes in gurgito vasto_--survive amid the +democratic welter; and all who have at heart not only the interests of +literature, but the true interests of the public taste, will pray that +they will have the courage to maintain their distinction, unseduced by +the moneyed voice of the mob--a distinction to which, after all, they +have owed, and will continue to owe, their success. The names of these +magazines will readily occur to the reader, and, as they occur, he +cannot but reflect that it was just editorial individuality and a high +standard of policy that made them what they are, and what, it is +ardently to be hoped, they will still continue to be. Plutus and Demos +are the worst possible editors for a magazine; and in the end, even, it +is the best magazine that always makes the most money. + + + + +XII + +THE SPIRIT OF THE OPEN + + +I often think, as I sit here in my green office in the woodland--too +often diverted from some serious literary business with the moon or the +morning stars, or a red squirrel who is the familiar spirit of my +wood-pile, or having my thoughts carried out to sea by the river which +runs so freshly and so truantly, with so strong a current of temptation, +a hundred yards away from my window--I often think that the strong +necessity that compelled me to do my work, to ply my pen and inkpot out +here in the leafy, blue-eyed wilderness, instead of doing it by +typewriter in some forty-two-storey building in the city, is one of +those encouraging signs of the times which links one with the great +brotherhood of men and women that have heard the call of the great god +Pan, as he sits by the river-- + + Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan! + Piercing sweet by the river! + Blinding sweet, O great god Pan! + +And I go on thinking to this effect: that this impulse that has come to +so many of us, and has, incidentally, wrought such a harmony in our +lives, is something more than duck-shooting, trout-fishing, +butterfly-collecting, or a sentimental passion for sunsets, but is +indeed something not so very far removed from religion, romantic +religion. At all events, it is something that makes us happy, and keeps +us straight. That combination of results can only come by the +satisfaction of the undeniable religious instinct in all of us: an +instinct that seeks goodness, but seeks happiness too. Now, there are +creeds by which you can be good without being happy; and creeds by which +you can be happy without being good. But, perhaps, there is only one +creed by which you can be both at once--the creed of the growing grass, +and the blue sky and the running river, the creed of the dog-wood and +the skunk-cabbage, the creed of the red-wing and the blue heron--the +creed of the great god Pan. + +Pan, being one of the oldest of the gods, might well, in an age eager +for novelty, expect to be the latest fashion; but the revival of his +worship is something far more than a mere vogue. It was rumoured, as, of +course, we all know, early in the Christian era, that he was dead. The +pilot Thomas, ran the legend, as told by Plutarch, sailing near Pascos, +with a boatful of merchants, heard in the twilight a mighty voice +calling from the land, bidding him proclaim to all the world that Pan +was dead. "Pan is dead!"--three times ran the strange shuddering cry +through the darkness, as though the very earth itself wailed the passing +of the god. + +But Pan, of course, could only die with the earth itself, and so long as +the lichen and the moss keep quietly at their work on the grey boulder, +and the lightning zigzags down through the hemlocks, and the arrowhead +guards its waxen blossom in the streams; so long as the earth shakes +with the thunder of hoofs, or pours out its heart in the song of the +veery-thrush, or bares its bosom in the wild rose, so long will there be +little chapels to Pan in the woodland--chapels on the lintels of which +you shall read, as Virgil wrote: _Happy is he who knows the rural gods, +Pan, and old Sylvanus, and the sister nymphs_. + +It is strange to see how in every country, but more particularly in +America and in England, the modern man is finding his religion as it was +found by those first worshippers of the beautiful mystery of the visible +universe, those who first caught glimpses of + + Nymphs in the coppice, Naiads in the fountain, + Gods on the craggy height and roaring sea. + +First thoughts are proverbially the best; at all events, they are the +bravest. And man's first thoughts of the world and the strangely +romantic life he is suddenly called up, out of nothingness, to live, +unconsulted, uninstructed, left to feel his way in the blinding +radiance up into which he has been mysteriously thrust; those first +thoughts of his are nowadays being corroborated in every direction by +the last thoughts of the latest thinker. Mr. Jack London, one of +Nature's own writers, one of those writers too, through whom the Future +speaks, has given a name to this stirring of the human soul--"The Call +of the Wild." Following his lead, others have written of "The Lure," of +this and that in nature, and all mean the same thing: that the salvation +of man is to be found on, and by means of, the green earth out of which +he was born, and that, as there is no ill of his body which may not be +healed by the magic juices of herb and flower, or the stern potency of +minerals, so there is no sickness of his soul that may not be cured by +the sound of the sea, the rustle of leaves, or the songs of birds. + +Thirty or forty years ago the soul of the world was very sick. It had +lost religion in a night of misunderstood "materialism," so-called. But +since then that mere "matter" which seemed to eclipse the soul has grown +strangely radiant to deep-seeing eyes, and, whereas then one had to +doubt everything, dupes of superficial disillusionment, now there is no +old dream that has not the look of coming true, no hope too wild and +strange and beautiful to be confidently entertained. Even, if you wish +to believe in fairies, science will hardly say you nay. Those dryads and +fauns, which Keats saw "frightened away" by the prosaic times in which +it was his misfortune to be alive and unrecognized, are trooping back in +every American woodland, and the god whose name I have invoked has +become more than ever + + the leaven + That spreading in this dull and clodded earth + Gives it a touch ethereal. + +His worship is all the more sincere because it is not self-conscious. +If you were to tell the trout-fisher, or the duck-shooter, or the +camper-out, that he is a worshipper of Pan, he would look at you in a +kindly bewilderment. He would seem a little anxious about you, but it +would be only a verbal misunderstanding. It would not take him long to +realize that you were only putting in terms of a creed the intuitive and +inarticulate faith of his heart. Perhaps the most convincing sign of +this new-old faith in nature is the unconsciousness of the believer. He +has no idea that he is believing or having faith in anything. He is +simply loving the green earth and the blue sea, and the ways of birds +and fish and animals; but he is so happy in his innocent, ignorant joy +that he seems almost to shine with his happiness. There is, literally, a +light about him--that light which edges with brightness all sincere +action. The trout, or the wild duck, or the sea bass is only an innocent +excuse to be alone with the Infinite. To be alone. To be afar. Men sail +precarious craft in perilous waters for no reason they could tell +of. They may think that trawling, or dredging, or whaling is the +explanation: the real reason is the mystery we call the Sea. + +Ostensibly, of course, the angler is a man who goes out to catch fish; +yet there is a great difference between an angler and a fishmonger. +Though the angler catches no fish, though his creel be empty as he +returns home at evening, there is a curious happiness and peace about +him which a mere fishmonger would be at a loss to explain. Fish, as I +said, were merely an excuse; and, as he vainly waited for fish, without +knowing it, he was learning the rhythm of the stream, and the silence of +ferns was entering into his soul, and the calm and patience of meadows +were dreamily becoming a part of him. Suddenly, too, in the silence, +maybe he caught sight of a strange, hairy, masterful presence, sitting +by the stream, whittling reeds, and blowing his breath into them here +and there, and finally binding them together with rushes, till he had +made out of the empty reeds and rushes an instrument that sang +everything that can be sung and told you everything that can be told. + + The sun on the hill forgot to die. + And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly + Came back to dream on the river. + +Do you really think that the huntsman hunts only the deer? He, himself, +doubtless thinks that the trophy of the antlers was all he went out +into the woods to win. But there came a day to him when he missed the +deer, and caught a glimpse instead of the divine huntress, Diana, +high-buskined, short-kirtled, speeding with her hounds through the +lonely woodland, and his thoughts ran no more on venison for that day. + +The same truth is true of all men who go out into the green, blue-eyed +wilderness, whether they go there in pursuit of game or butterflies. +They find something stranger and better than what they went out to seek, +and, if they come home disappointed in the day's bag or catch, there is +yet something in their eyes, and across their brows, a light of peace, +an enchanted calm, which tells those who understand that they, at all +events, have seen the great god Pan, and heard the music he can make out +of the pipy hemlocks or the lonely pines. + + + + +XIII + +AN OLD AMERICAN TOW-PATH + + +The charm of an old canal is one which every one seems to feel. Men who +care nothing about ruined castles or Gothic cathedrals light up with +romantic enthusiasm if you tell them of some old disused or seldom-used +canal, grass-grown and tree-shaded, along which, hardly oftener than +once a week, a leisurely barge--towed by an equally leisurely mule, with +its fellow there on deck taking his rest, preparatory to his next +eight-mile "shift"--sleepily dreams its way, presumably on some errand +and to some destination, yet indeed hinting of no purpose or object +other than its loitering passage through a summer afternoon. I have even +heard millionaires express envy of the life lived by the little family +hanging out its washing and smoking its pipe and cultivating its +floating garden of nasturtiums and geraniums, with children playing and +a house-dog to keep guard, all in that toy house of a dozen or so feet, +whose foundations are played about by fishes, and whose sides are +brushed by whispering reeds. But the charm of an old canal is perhaps +yet more its own when even so tranquil a happening as the passage of a +barge is no longer looked for, and the quiet water is called upon for no +more arduous usefulness than the reflection of the willows or the +ferrying across of summer clouds. Nature herself seems to wield a new +peculiar spell in such association--old quarries, the rusting tramways +choked with fern; forgotten mines with the wild vine twining tenderly +about the old iron of dismantled pit-tackle, grown as green as itself +with the summer rains; roads once dusty with haste over which only the +moss and the trailing arbutus now leisurely travel. Wherever Nature is +thus seen to be taking to herself, making her own, what man has first +made and grown tired of, she is twice an enchantress, strangely +combining in one charm the magic of a wistful, all but forgotten, past +with her own sibyl-line mystery. + +The symbol of that combined charm is that poppy of oblivion of which Sir +Thomas Browne so movingly wrote: but, though along that old canal of +which I am thinking and by which I walked a summer day, no poppies were +growing, the freshest grass, the bluest flowers, the new-born rustling +leafage of the innumerable trees, all alike seemed to whisper of +forgetfulness, to be brooding, even thus in the very heyday of the mad +young year, over time past. And this eloquently retrospective air of +Nature made me realize, with something of the sense of discovery, how +much of what we call antiquity is really a trick of Nature. She is as +clever at the manufacture of antiques as some expert of "old masters." +A little moss here and there, a network of ivy, a judicious use of ferns +and grass, a careless display of weeds and wild flowers, and in twenty +years Nature can make a modern building look as if it dated from the +Norman Conquest. I came upon this reflection because, actually, my canal +is not very old, though from the way it impressed me, and from the +manner in which I have introduced it, the reader might well imagine it +as old as Venice and no younger than Holland, and may find it as hard to +believe as I did that its age is but some eighty years, and that it has +its romantic being between Newark Bay and Phillipsburg, on the Delaware +River. + +One has always to be careful not to give too much importance to one's +own associative fancies in regard to the names of places. To me, for +instance, "Perth Amboy" has always had a romantic sound, and I believe +that a certain majesty in the collocation of the two noble words would +survive that visit to the place itself which I have been told is all +that is necessary for disillusionment. On the other hand, for reasons +less explainable, Hackensack, Paterson, Newark, and even Passaic are +names that had touched me with no such romantic thrill. Wrongfully, no +doubt, I had associated them with absurdity, anarchy, and railroads. +Never having visited them, it was perhaps not surprising that I should +not have associated them with such loveliness and luxury of Nature as I +now unforgettably recall; and I cannot help feeling that in the case of +places thus unfortunately named, Nature might well bring an action for +damages, robbed as she thus undoubtedly is of a flock of worshippers. + +At all events, I believe that my surprise and even incredulity will be +understood when an artist friend of mine told me that by taking the Fort +Lee ferry, and trolleying from the Palisades through Hackensack to +Paterson, I might find--a dream canal. It was as though he had said that +I had but to cross over to Hoboken to find the Well at the World's End. +But it was true, for all that--quite fairy-tale true. It was one of +those surprises of peace, deep, ancient peace, in America, of which +there are many, and of which more needs to be told. I can conceive of no +more suggestive and piquant contrast than that of the old canal gliding +through water-lilies and spreading pastures, in the bosom of hills +clothed with trees that scatter the sunshine or gather the darkness, the +haunt of every bird that sings or flashes strange plumage and is gone, +gliding past flowering rushes and blue dragon-flies, not + + Flowing down to Camelot, + +as one might well believe, but between Newark and Phillipsburg, touching +Paterson midway with its dreaming hand. + +Following my friend's directions, we had met at Paterson, and, desirous +of finding our green pasture and still waters with the least possible +delay, we took a trolley running in the Newark direction, and were +presently dropped at a quaint, quiet little village called Little Falls, +the last we were to see of the modern work-a-day world for several +miles. A hundred yards or so beyond, and it is as though you had entered +some secret green door into a pastoral dream-land. Great trees, like +rustling walls of verdure, enclose an apparently endless roadway of +gleaming water, a narrow strip of tow-path keeping it company, +buttressed in from the surrounding fields with thickets of every species +of bush and luxurious undergrowth, and starred with every summer flower. + +Presently, by the side of the path, one comes to an object which seems +romantically in keeping with the general character of the scene--a long +block of stone, lying among the grasses and the wild geraniums, on +which, as one nears it, one descries carved scroll-work and quaint, +deep-cut lettering. Is it the tomb of dead lovers, the memorial of some +great deed, or an altar to the _genius loci_? The willows whisper about +it, and the great elms and maples sway and murmur no less impressively +than if the inscription were in Latin of two thousand years ago. Nor is +it in me to regret that the stone and its inscription, instead of +celebrating the rural Pan, commemorate the men to whom I owe this lane +of dreaming water and all its marginal green solitude: to wit--the +"MORRIS CANAL AND BANKING CO., A.D. 1829," represented by its +president, its cashier, its canal commissioner, and a score of other +names of directors, engineers, and builders. Peace, therefore, to the +souls of those dead directors, who, having only in mind their banking +and engineering project, yet unconsciously wrought, nearly a century +ago, so poetic a thing, and may their rest be lulled by such leafy +murmurs and swaying of tendrilled shadows as all the day through stir +and sway along the old canal! + +A few yards beyond this monumental stone, there comes a great opening in +the sky, a sense of depth and height and spacious freshness in the air, +such as we feel on approaching the gorge of a great river; and in fact +the canal has arrived at the Passaic and is about to be carried across +it in a sort of long, wooden trough, supported by a noble bridge that +might well pass for a genuine antique, owing to that collaborating hand +of Nature which has filled the interstices of its massive masonry with +fern, and so loosened it here and there that some of the canal escapes +in long, ribbon-like cascades into the rocky bed of the river below. An +aqueduct has always seemed to me, though it would be hard to say why, a +most romantic thing. The idea of carrying running water across a bridge +in this way--water which it is so hard to think of as imprisoned or +controlled, and which, too, however shallow, one always associates with +mysterious depth--the idea of thus carrying it across a valley high up +in the air, so that one may look underneath it, underneath the bed in +which it runs, and think of the fishes and the water-weeds and the +waterbugs all being carried across with it, too--this, I confess, has +always seemed to me engagingly marvellous. And I like, too, to think +that the canal, whose daily business is to be a "common carrier" of +others, thus occasionally tastes the luxury of being carried itself; as +sometimes one sees on a freight car a new buggy, or automobile, or +sometimes a locomotive, being luxuriously ridden along--as though out +for a holiday--instead of riding others. + +And talking of freight-cars, it came to me with a sense of illumination +how different the word "Passaic" looks printed in white letters on the +grey sides of grim produce-vans in begrimed procession, from the way it +looks as it writes its name in wonderful white waterfalls, or murmurs it +through corridors of that strange pillared and cake-shaped rock, amid +the golden pomp of a perfect summer day. For a short distance the +Passaic and the canal run side by side, but presently they part company, +and mile after mile the canal seems to have the world to itself, once in +a great while finding human companionship in a shingled cottage half +hidden among willows, a sleepy brick-field run on principles as ancient +as itself, shy little girls picking flowers on its banks, or saucy boys +disporting themselves in the old swimming-hole; and + + Sometimes an angler comes and drops his hook + Within its hidden depths, and 'gainst a tree + Leaning his rod, reads in some pleasant book, + Forgetting soon his pride of fishery; + And dreams or falls asleep, + While curious fishes peep + About his nibbled bait or scornfully + Dart off and rise and leap. + +Once a year, indeed, every one goes a-fishing along the old canal--men, +women, boys, and girls. That is in spring, when the canal is emptied for +repairs, the patching up of leaks, and so forth. Then the fish lie +glittering in the shallow pools, as good as caught, and happy children +go home with strings of sunfish,--"pumpkin-seeds" they call +them,--cat-fish, and the like picturesque unprofitable spoils, while +graver fisher-folk take count of pickerel and bream. This merry festival +was over and gone, and the canal was all brimming with the lustral +renewal of its waters, its depths flashing now and again with the +passage of wary survivors of that spring _battue_. + +It is essential to the appreciation of an old canal that one should not +expect it to provide excitement, that it be understood between it and +its fellow-pilgrim that there is very little to say and nothing to +record. Along the old tow-path you must be content with a few simple, +elemental, mysterious things. To enter into its spirit you must be +somewhat of a monastic turn of mind, and have spiritual affiliations, +above all, with La Trappe. For the presiding muse of an old canal is +Silence; yet, as at La Trappe, a silence far indeed from being a dumb +silence, but a silence that contains all speech. My friend and I spoke +hardly at all as we walked along, easily obedient to the spirit of the +hour and the place. For there were so few of those little gossipy +accidents and occurrences by the way that make those interruptions we +call conversation, and such overwhelming golden-handed presences of +sunlit woodlands, flashing water-meadows, shining, singing air, and +distant purple hills--all the blowing, rippling, leafy glory and mighty +laughter of a summer day--that we were glad enough to let the birds do +such talking as Nature deemed necessary; and I seem never to have heard +or seen so many birds, of so many varieties, as haunt that old canal. + +As we chose our momentary camping-place under a buttonwood-tree, from +out an exuberant swamp of yellow water-lilies and the rearing +sword-blades of the coming cat-tail, a swamp blackbird, on his glossy +black orange-tipped wings, flung us defiance with his long, keen, full, +saucy note; and as we sat down under our buttonwood and spread upon the +sward our pastoral meal, the veery-thrush--sadder and stranger than any +nightingale--played for us, unseen, on an instrument like those old +water-organs played on by the flow and ebb of the tide, a flute of +silver in which some strange magician has somewhere hidden tears. I +wondered, as he sang, if the veery was the thrush that, to Walt +Whitman's fancy, "in the swamp in secluded recesses" mourned the death +of Lincoln: + + Solitary the thrush, + The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements, + Sings to himself a song. + +But when the veery had flown with his heart-break to some distant copse, +two song-sparrows came to persuade us with their blithe melody that life +was worth living, after all; and cheerful little domestic birds, like +the jenny-wren and the chipping-sparrow, pecked about and put in between +whiles their little chit-chat across the boughs, while the bobolink +called to us like a comrade, and the phoebe-bird gave us a series of +imitations, and the scarlet tanager and the wild canary put in a vivid +appearance, to show what can be done with colour, though they have no +song. + +Yet, while one was grateful for such long, green silence as we found +along that old canal, one could not help feeling how hard it would be +to put into words an experience so infinite and yet so undramatic. Birds +and birds, and trees and trees, and the long, silent water! Prose has +seldom been adequate for such moments. So, as my friend and I took up +our walk again, I sang him this little song of the Silence of the Way: + + Silence, whose drowsy eyelids are soft leaves, + And whose half-sleeping eyes are the blue flowers, + On whose still breast the water-lily heaves, + And all her speech the whisper of the showers. + + Made of all things that in the water sway, + The quiet reed kissing the arrowhead, + The willows murmuring, all a summer day, + "Silence"--sweet word, and ne'er so softly said + + As here along this path of brooding peace, + Where all things dream, and nothing else is done + But all such gentle businesses as these + Of leaves and rippling wind, and setting sun + + Turning the stream to a long lane of gold, + Where the young moon shall walk with feet of pearl, + And, framed in sleeping lilies, fold on fold. + Gaze at herself like any mortal girl. + +But, after all, trees are perhaps the best expression of silence, massed +as they are with the merest hint of movement, and breathing the merest +suggestion of a sigh; and seldom have I seen such abundance and variety +of trees as along our old canal--cedars and hemlocks and hickory +dominating green slopes of rocky pasture, with here and there a clump of +silver birches bent over with the strain of last year's snow; and all +along, near by the water, beech and basswood, blue-gum and pin-oak, ash, +and even chestnut flourishing still, in defiance of blight. Nor have I +ever seen such sheets of water-lilies as starred the swampy thickets, in +which elder and hazels and every conceivable bush and shrub and giant +grass and cane make wildernesses pathless indeed save to the mink and +the water-snake, and the imagination that would fain explore their +glimmering recesses. + +No, nothing except birds and trees, water-lilies and such like +happenings, ever happens along the old canal; and our nearest to a human +event was our meeting with a lonely, melancholy man, sitting near a +moss-grown water-wheel, smoking a corn-cob pipe, and gazing wistfully +across at the Ramapo Hills, over which great sunlit clouds were +billowing and casting slow-moving shadows. Stopping, we passed him the +time of day and inquired when the next barge was due. For answer he took +a long draw at his corn-cob, and, taking his eyes for a moment from the +landscape, said in a far-away manner that it might be due any time now, +as the spring had come and gone, and implying, with a sort of sad humour +in his eyes, that spring makes all things possible, brings all things +back, even an old slow-moving barge along the old canal. + +"What do they carry on the canal?" I asked the melancholy man, the +romantic green hush and the gleaming water not irrelevantly flashing on +my fancy that far-away immortal picture of the lily-maid of Astolat on +her strange journey, with a letter in her hand for Lancelot. + +"Coal," was his answer; and, again drawing at his corn-cob, he added, +with a sad and understanding smile, "once in a great while." Like most +melancholy men, he seemed to have brains, in his way, and to have no +particular work on hand, except, like ourselves, to dream. + +"Suppose," said I, "that a barge should come along, and need to be drawn +up this 'plane'--would the old machinery work?" and I pointed to six +hundred feet of sloping grass, down which a tramway stretches and a +cable runs on little wheels--technically known, it appeared, as a +"plane." + +Then the honour of the ancient company for which he had once worked +seemed to stir his blood, and he awakened to something like enthusiasm +as he explained the antique, picturesque device by which it is still +really possible for a barge to climb six hundred feet of grass and +fern--drawn up in a long "cradle," instead of being raised by locks in +the customary way. + +Then he took us into the old building where, in the mossed and dripping +darkness, we could discern the great water-wheels that work this +fascinating piece of ancient engineering; and added that there would +probably be a barge coming along in three or four days, if we should +happen to be in the neighbourhood. He might have added that the old +canal is one of the few places where "time and tide" wait for any one +and everybody--but alas! on this occasion we could not wait for them. + +Our walk was nearing its end when we came upon a pathetic reminder that, +though the old canal is so far from being a stormy sea, there have been +wrecks even in those quiet waters. In a backwater whispered over by +willows and sung over by birds, a sort of water-side graveyard, eleven +old barges were ingloriously rotting, unwept and unhonoured. The hulks +of old men-of-war, forgotten as they may seem, have still their annual +days of bunting and the salutes of cannon; but to these old servitors of +peace come no such memorial recognitions. + +"Unwept and unhonoured, may be," said I to my friend, "but they shall +not go all unsung, though humble be the rhyme"; so here is the rhyme I +affixed to an old nail on the mouldering side of the _Janita C. +Williams_: + + You who have done your work and asked no praise, + Mouldering in these unhonoured waterways, + Carrying but simple peace and quiet fire, + Doing a small day's work for a small hire-- + You need not praise, nor guns, nor flags unfurled, + Nor all such cloudy glories of the world; + The laurel of a simple duty done + Is the best laurel underneath the sun, + Yet would two strangers passing by this spot + Whisper, "Old boat--you are not all forgot!" + + + + +XIV + +A MODERN SAINT FRANCIS + + +We were neither of us fox-hunting ourselves, but chanced both to be out +on our morning walk and to be crossing a breezy Surrey common at the +same moment, when the huntsmen and huntresses of the Slumberfold Hunt +were blithely congregating for a day's run. A meet is always an +attractive sight, and we had both come to a halt within a yard or two of +each other, and stood watching the gallant company of fine ladies and +gentlemen on their beautiful, impatient mounts, keeping up a prancing +conversation, till the exciting moment should arrive when the cry would +go up that the fox had been started, and the whole field would sweep +away, a cataract of hounds, red-coats, riding habits, and dog-carts. + +The moment came. The fox had been found in a spinney running down to +Withy Brook, and his race for life had begun. With a happy shout, the +hunt was up and off in a twinkling, and the stranger and I were left +alone on the broad common. + +I had scanned him furtively as he stood near me; a tall, slightly build +man of about fifty, with perfectly white hair, and strangely gentle +blue eyes. There was a curious, sad distinction over him, and he had +watched the scene with a smile of blended humour and pity. + +Turning to me, as we were left alone, and speaking almost as though to +himself: "It is a strange sight," he said with a sigh. "I wonder if it +seems as strange to you? Think of all those grown-up, so-called +civilized people being so ferociously intent on chasing one poor little +animal for its life--and feeling, when at last the huntsman holds up his +poor brush, with absurd pride (if indeed the fox is not too sly for +them), that they have really done something clever, in that with so many +horses and dogs and so much noise, they have actually contrived to catch +and kill one fox!" + +"It is strange!" I said, for I had been thinking just that very thing. + +"Of course, they always tell you," he continued, as we took the road +together, "that the fox really enjoys being hunted, and that he feels +his occupation gone if there are no hounds to track him, and finally to +tear him to pieces. What wonderful stories human nature will tell itself +in its own justification! Can one imagine any created thing _enjoying_ +being pursued for its life, with all that loud terror of men and horses +and savage dogs at its heels? No doubt--if we can imagine even a fox so +self-conscious--it would take a certain pride in its own cunning and +skill, if the whole thing were a game; but a race with death is too +deadly in earnest for a fox even to relish his own stratagems. Happily +for the fox, it is probable that he does not feel so much for himself as +some of us feel for him; but any one who knows the wild things knows too +what terror they are capable of feeling, and how the fear of death is +always with them. No! you may be sure that a fox prefers a cosy +hen-roost to the finest run with the hounds ever made." + +"But even if he should enjoy being hunted," I added, "the even stranger +thing to me is that civilized men and women should enjoy hunting him." + +"Isn't it strange?" answered my companion eagerly, his face lighting up +at finding a sympathizer. "When will people realize that there is so +much more fun in studying wild things than in killing them!..." + +He stopped suddenly in his walk, to gather a small weed which had +caught his quick eye by the roadside, and which he examined for a +moment through a little pocket microscope which I noticed, hanging +like an eyeglass round his neck, and which I learned afterward quite +affectionately to associate with him. Then, as we walked on, he +remarked: + +"But, of course, we are yet very imperfectly civilized. Humanity is a +lesson learned very slowly by the human race. Yet we are learning it by +degrees, yes! we are learning it," and he threw out his long stride more +emphatically--the stride of one accustomed to long daily tramps on the +hills. + +"Strange, that principle of cruelty in the universe!" he resumed, after +a pause in which he had walked on in silence. "Very strange. To me it is +the most mysterious of all things--though, I suppose, after all, it is +no more mysterious than pity. When, I wonder, did pity begin? Who was +the first human being to pity another? How strange he must have seemed +to the others, how incomprehensible and ridiculous--not to say +dangerous! There can be little doubt that he was promptly dispatched +with stone axes as an enemy of a respectable murderous society." + +"I expect," said I "that our friends the fox-hunters would take a +similar view of our remarks on their sport." + +"No doubt--and perhaps turn their hounds on us! A man hunt! 'Give me the +hunting of man!' as a brutal young poet we know of recently sang." + +"How different was the spirit of Emerson's old verse," I said: + + "Hast thou named all the birds without a gun? + Loved the wood-rose, and left it on its stalk?... + O be my friend, and teach me to be thine!" + +"That is one of my mottoes!" cried my companion with evident pleasure. +"Let us go and quote it to our fox-hunters!" + +"I wonder how the fox is getting on," I said. + +"If he is any sort of fox, he is safe enough as yet, we may be sure. +They are wonderful creatures. It is not surprising that mankind has +always looked upon Reynard as almost a human being--if not more--for +there is something quite uncanny in his instincts, and the cool, +calculating way in which he uses them. He is come and gone like a ghost. +One moment you were sure you saw him clearly close by and the next he is +gone--who knows where? He can run almost as swiftly as light, and as +softly as a shadow; and in his wildest dash, what a sure judgment he has +for the lie of the ground, how unerringly--and at a moment when a +mistake is death--he selects his cover! How learned, too, he is in +his knowledge of the countryside! There is not a dry ditch, or a +water-course, or an old drain, or a hole in a bank for miles around that +is not mysteriously set down in the map he carries in his graceful, +clever head; and one need hardly say that all the suitable hiding-places +in and around farm-yards are equally well known to him. Then withal he +is so brave. How splendidly, when wearied out, and hopelessly tracked +down, with the game quite up, he will turn on his pursuers, and die with +his teeth fast in his enemy's throat!" + +"I believe you are a fox-hunter in disguise," I laughed. + +"Well, I have hunted as a boy," he said, "and I know something of what +those red-coated gentlemen are feeling. But soon I got more interested +in studying nature than killing it, and when I became a naturalist I +ceased to be a hunter. You get to love the things so that it seems like +killing little children. They come so close to you, are so beautiful and +so clever; and sometimes there seems such a curious pathos about them. +How any one can kill a deer with that woman's look in its eyes, I don't +know. I should always expect the deer to change into a fairy princess, +and die in my arms with the red blood running from her white breast. And +pigeons, too, with their soft sunny coo all the summer afternoon, or the +sudden lapping of sleepy wings round the chimneys--how can any one trap +or shoot them with blood-curdling rapidity, and not expect to see +ghosts!" + +"Of course, there is this difference about the fox," I said, "that it is +really in a sense born to be hunted. For not only is it a fierce hunter +itself, but it would not be allowed to exist at all, so to say, unless +it consented to being hunted. Like a gladiator it accepts a comfortable +living for a certain time, on condition of its providing at last a +spirited exhibition of dying. In other words, it is preserved entirely +for the purpose of being hunted. It must accept life on that condition +or be extirpated as destructive vermin by the plundered farmer. Life is +sweet, after all, and to be a kind of protected highwayman of the +poultry-yard, for a few sweet toothsome years, taking one's chances of +being surely brought to book at last, may perhaps seem worth while." + +"Yes! but how does your image of the protected gladiator reflect on +those who protect him? There, of course, is the point. The gladiator, as +you say, is willing to take his chances in exchange for fat living and +idleness, as long as he lives. You may even say that his profession is +good for him, develops fine qualities of mind even as well as body--but +what of the people who crowd with blood-thirsty eagerness to watch those +qualities exhibited in so tragic a fashion for their amusement? Do they +gain any of his qualities of skill and courage, and strength and +fearlessness in the face of death? No, they are merely brutalized by +cruel excitement--and while they applaud his skill and admire his +courage, they long most to watch him die. So--is it not?--with our +friend the fox. The huntsman invariably compliments him on his spirit +and his cunning, but what he wants is--the brush. He wants the +excitement of hunting the living thing to its death; and, let huntsmen +say what they will about the exhilaration of the horse exercise across +country as being the main thing, they know better--and, if it be true, +why don't they take it without the fox?" + +"They do in America, as, of course, you know. There a man walks across +country trailing a stick, at the end of which is a piece of cloth +impregnated with some pungent scent which hounds love and mistake for +the real thing." + +"Hard on the poor hounds!" smiled my friend. "Even worse than a red +herring. You could hardly blame the dogs if they mistook the man for +Actaeon and tore him to pieces." + +"And I suspect that the huntsmen are no better satisfied." + +"Yet, as we were saying, if the secret spring of their sport is not the +cruel delight of pursuing a living thing to its death, that American +plan should serve all the purposes, and give all the satisfaction for +which they claim to follow the hounds: the keen pleasure of a gallop +across country, the excitement of its danger, the pluck and pride of +taking a bad fence, and equally, too, the pleasure of watching the +hounds cleverly at work with their mysterious gift of scent. All the +same, I suspect there are few sportsmen who would not vote it a tame +substitute. Without something being killed, the zest, the 'snap,' is +gone. It is as depressing as a sham fight." + +"Yes, that mysterious shedding of blood! what a part it has played in +human history! Even religion countenances it, and war glorifies it. Men +are never in higher spirits than when they are going to kill, or be +killed themselves, or see something else killed. Tennyson's 'ape and +tiger' die very hard in the tamest of us." + +"Alas, indeed they do!" said my friend with a sigh. "But I do believe +that they are dying none the less. Just of late there has been a +reaction in favour of brute force, and people like you and me have been +ridiculed as old-fashioned sentimentalists. But reaction is one of the +laws of advance. Human progress always takes a step backwards after it +has taken two forward. And so it must be here too. In the end, it is the +highest type among men and nations that count, and the highest types +among both today are those which show most humanity, shrink most from +the infliction of pain. When one thinks of the horrible cruelties that +were the legal punishment of criminals, even within the last two hundred +years, and not merely brutal criminals, but also political offenders or +so-called heretics--how every one thought it the natural and proper +thing to break a man on the wheel for a difference of opinion, or +torture him with hideous ingenuity into a better frame of mind, and +how the pettiest larcenies were punished by death; it seems as if we +of today, even the least sensitive of us, cannot belong to the same +race--and it is impossible to deny that the heart of the world has grown +softer and that pity is becoming more and more a natural instinct in +human nature. I believe that some day it will have thrust out cruelty +altogether, and that the voluntary infliction of pain upon another will +be unknown. The idea of any one killing for pleasure will seem too +preposterous to be believed, and soldiers and fox-hunters and +pigeon-shooters will be spoken of as nowadays we speak of cannibals. +But, of course, I am a dreamer," he concluded, his face shining with his +gentle dream, as though he had been a veritable saint of the calendar. + +"Yes, a dream," he added presently, "and yet--" In that "and yet" +there was a world of invincible faith that made it impossible not to +share his dream, even see it building before one's eyes--such is the +magnetic power of a passionate personal conviction. + +"Of course," he went on again, "we all know that 'nature is one with +rapine, a harm no preacher can heal.' But because the fox runs off with +the goose, or the hawk swoops down on the chicken, and 'yon whole little +wood is a world of plunder and prey'--is that any reason why we should +be content to plunder and prey too? And after all, the cruelty of Nature +is only one-sided. There is lots of pity in Nature too. These strange +little wild lives around us are not entirely bent on killing and eating +each other. They know the tenderness of motherhood, the sweetness of +building a home together, and I believe there is far more comradeship +and mutual help amongst them than we know of. Yes, even in wild Nature +there is a principle of love working no less than a principle of hate. +Nature is not all-devouring and destroying. She is loving and building +too. Nature is more constructive than destructive, and she is ever at +work evolving and evolving a higher dream. Surely it is not for man, to +whom, so far as we know, Nature has entrusted the working out of her +finest impulses, and whom she has endowed with all the fairy apparatus +of the soul; it is not for him, whose eyes--of all her children--Nature +has opened, the one child she has taken into her confidence and to whom +she has whispered her secret hopes and purposes; surely it is not for +man voluntarily to deny his higher lot, and, because the wolf and he +have come from the same great mother, say: 'I am no better than the +wolf. Why should I not live the life of a wolf--and kill and devour like +my brother?' Surely it is not for the cruel things in Nature to teach +man cruelty--rather, if it were possible," and the saint smiled at his +fancy, "would it be the mission of man to teach them kindness: rather +should he preach pity to the hawk and peace between the panther and the +bear. It is not the bad lessons of Nature, but the good, that are meant +for man--though, as you must have noticed, man seldom appeals to the +precedents of Nature except to excuse that in him which is Nature at her +worst. When we say, 'it is only natural,' we almost invariably refer to +that in Nature of which Nature herself has entrusted the refinement or +the elimination to man. It is Nature's bad we copy, not Nature's good; +and always we forget that we ourselves are a part of Nature--Nature's +vicegerent, so to say, upon the earth--" + +As we talked, we had been approaching a house built high among the +heather, with windows looking over all the surrounding country. +Presently, the saint stopped in front of it. + +"This is my house," he said. "Won't you come in and see me some +time?--and, by the way, I am going to talk to some of the village +children about the wild things, bird's nesting, and so forth, up at the +schoolhouse on Thursday. I wish you'd come and help me. One's only hope +is with the children. The grown-up are too far gone. Mind you come." + +So we parted, and, as I walked across the hill homeward, haunted by that +gentle face, I thought of Melampus, that old philosopher who loved the +wild things so and had made such friends with them, that they had taught +him their language and told him all their secrets: + + With love exceeding a simple love of the things + That glide in grasses and rubble of woody wreck; + Or change their perch on a beat of quivering wings + From branch to branch, only restful to pipe and peck; + Or, bridled, curl at a touch their snouts in a ball; + Or cast their web between bramble and thorny hook; + The good physician, Melampus, loving them all, + Among them walked, as a scholar who reads a book. + +As I dipped into the little thick-set wood that surrounds my house, +something stood for a second in one of the openings, then was gone like +a shadow. I was glad to think how full of bracken and hollows, and +mysterious holes and corners of mossed and lichened safety was our old +wood--for the shadow was a fox. I like to think it was the very fox we +had been talking about come to find shelter with me--and, if he stole a +meal out of our hen-roost, I gave it him before he asked it, with all +the will in the world. I hope he chose a good fat hen, and not one of +your tough old capons that sometimes come to table. + + + + +XV + +THE LITTLE GHOST IN THE GARDEN + + +I don't know in what corner of the garden his busy little life now takes +its everlasting rest. None of us had the courage to stand by, that +summer morning, when Morris, our old negro man, buried him, and we felt +sympathetic for Morris that the sad job should fall upon him, for Morris +loved him just as we did. Perhaps if we had loved him less, more +sentimentally than deeply, we should have indulged in some sort of +appropriate ceremonial, and marked his grave with a little stone. But, +as I have said, his grave, like that of the great prophet, is a secret +to this day. None of us has ever asked Morris about it, and his grief +has been as reticent as our own. I wondered the other night, as I walked +the garden in a veiled moonlight, whether it was near the lotus-tanks he +was lying--for I remembered how he would stand there, almost by the +hour, watching the goldfish that we had engaged to protect us against +mosquitoes, moving mysteriously under the shadows of the great flat +leaves. In his short life he grew to understand much of this strange +world, but he never got used to those goldfish; and often I have seen +him, after a long wistful contemplation of them, turn away with a sort +of half-frightened, puzzled bark, as though to say that he gave it up. +Or, does he lie, I wonder, somewhere among the long grass of the +salt-marsh, that borders our garden, and in perigee tides widens out +into a lake. There indeed would be his appropriate country, for there +was the happy hunting-ground through which in life he was never tired of +roaming, in the inextinguishable hope of mink, and with the occasional +certainty of a water-rat. + +He had come to us almost as mysteriously as he went away; a fox-terrier +puppy wandered out of the Infinite to the neighbourhood of our ice-box, +one November morning, and now wandered back again. Technically, he was +just graduating out of puppyhood, though, like the most charming human +beings, he never really grew up, and remained, in behaviour and +imagination, a puppy to the end. He was a dog of good breed and good +manners, evidently with gentlemanly antecedents canine and human. There +were those more learned in canine aristocracy than ourselves who said +that his large leaf-like, but very becoming, ears meant a bar sinister +somewhere in his pedigree, but to our eyes those only made him +better-looking; and, for the rest of him, he was race--race nervous, +sensitive, refined, and courageous--from the point of his all-searching +nose to the end of his stub of a tail, which the conventional docking +had seemed but to make the more expressive. We had already one dog in +the family when he arrived, and two Maltese cats. With the cats he was +never able to make friends, in spite of persistent well-intentioned +efforts. It was evident to us that his advances were all made in the +spirit of play, and from a desire of comradeship, the two crowning needs +of his blithe sociable spirit. But the cats received them in an attitude +of invincible distrust, of which his poor nose frequently bore the sorry +signature. Yet they had become friendly enough with the other dog, an +elderly setter, by name Teddy, whose calm, lordly, slow-moving ways were +due to a combination of natural dignity, vast experience of life, and +some rheumatism. As Teddy would sit philosophizing by the hearth of an +evening, immovable and plunged in memories, yet alert on the instant to +a footfall a quarter of a mile away, they would rub their sinuous +smoke-grey bodies to and fro beneath his jaws, just as though he were a +piece of furniture; and he would take as little notice of them as though +he were the leg of the piano; though sometimes he would wag his tail +gently to and fro, or rap it softly on the floor, as though appreciating +the delicate attention. + + * * * * * + +Of Teddy's reception of the newcomer we had at first some slight +misgiving, for, amiable as we have just seen him with his Maltese +companions, and indeed as he is generally by nature, his is the +amiability that comes of conscious power, and is his, so to say, by +right of conquest; for of all neighbouring dogs he is the acknowledged +king. The reverse of quarrelsome, the peace of his declining years has +been won by much historical fighting, and his reputation among the dogs +of his acquaintance is such that it is seldom necessary for him to +assert his position. It is only some hapless stranger ignorant of his +standing that will occasionally provoke him to a display of those +fighting qualities he grows more and more reluctant to employ. Even with +such he is comparatively merciful; stern, but never brutal. Usually all +that is necessary is for him to look at them steadfastly for a few +moments in a peculiar way. This seems to convince them that, after all, +discretion is the better part, and slowly and sadly they turn around in +a curious cowed way, and walk off, apparently too scared to run, with +Teddy, like Fate, grimly at their heels, steadily "pointing" them off +the premises. We were a little anxious, therefore, as to how Teddy would +take our little terrier, with his fussy, youthful self-importance, and +eternal restless poking into other folks' affairs. But Teddy, as we +might have told ourselves, had had a long and varied experience of +terriers, and had nothing to learn from us. Yet I have no doubt that, +with his instinctive courtesy, he divined the wishes of the family in +regard to the newcomer, and was, therefore, predisposed in his favour. +This, however, did not save the evidently much overawed youngster from a +stern and searching examination, the most trying part of which seemed +to be that long, silent, hypnotizing contemplation of him, which is +Teddy's way of asserting his dignity. The little dog visibly trembled +beneath the great one's gaze, his tongue hanging out of his mouth, and +his eyes wandering helplessly from side to side; and he seemed to be +saying, in his dog way: "O yes! I know you are a very great and +important personage--and I am only a poor little puppy of no importance. +Only please let me go on living--and you will see how well I will +behave." Teddy seemed to be satisfied that some such recognition and +submission had been tendered him; so presently he wagged his tail, that +had up till then been rigid as a ramrod, and not only the little +terrier, but all of us, breathed again. Yet it was some time before +Teddy would admit him into anything like what one might call intimacy, +and premature attempts at gamesome familiarity were checked by the +gathering thunder of a lazy growl that unmistakably bade the youngster +keep his place. But real friendship eventually grew between them, +on Teddy's side a sort of big-brother affectionate tutelage and +guardianship, and on Puppy's--for, though we tried many, we never found +any other satisfactory name for him but "Puppy"--a reverent admiration +and watchful worshipping imitation. No great man was ever more anxiously +copied by some slavish flatterer than that old sleepy carelessly-great +setter by that eager, ambitious little terrier. The occasions when to +bark and when not to bark, for example. One could actually see Puppy +studying the old dog's face on doubtful occasions of the kind. Boiling +over, as he visibly was, with the desire to bark his soul out, yet he +could be seen unmistakably restraining himself, till Teddy, after some +preliminary soliloquizing in deep undertones, had made up his mind that +the suspicious shuffling-by of probably some inoffensive Italian workman +demanded investigation, and lumberingly risen to his feet and made for +the door. Then, like a bunch of firecrackers, Puppy was at the heels, +all officious assistance, and the two would disappear like an old and a +young thunderbolt into the resounding distance. + + * * * * * + +Teddy's friendship had seemed to be definitely won on an occasion which +brought home to one the quaint resemblance between the codes and ways of +dogs and those of schoolboys. When the winter came on, a rather severe +one, it soon became evident that the little short-haired fellow suffered +considerably from the cold. Out on walks, he was visibly shivering, +though he made no fuss about it. So one of the angels in the house +knitted for him a sort of woollen sweater buttoned down his neck and +under his belly, and trimmed it with some white fur that gave it an +exceedingly smart appearance. Teddy did not happen to be there when it +was first tried on, and, for the moment, Puppy had to be content with +our admiration, and his own vast sense of importance. Certainly, a more +self-satisfied terrier never was than he who presently sped out, to air +his new finery before an astonished neighbourhood. But alas! you should +have seen him a few minutes afterwards. We had had the curiosity to +stroll out to see how he had got on, and presently, in a bit of rocky +woodland near by, we came upon a curious scene. In the midst of a clump +of red cedars, three great dogs, our Teddy, a wicked old black +retriever, and a bustling be-wigged and be-furred collie, stood in a +circle round Puppy, seated on his haunches, trembling with fear, tongue +lolling and eyes wandering, for all the world as though they were +holding a court-martial, or, at all events, a hazing-party. The offence +evidently lay with that dandified new sweater. One and another of the +dogs smelt at it, then tugged at it in evident disgust; and, as each +time Puppy made a move to get away, all girt him round with guttural +thunder of disapproval, as much as to say: "Do you call that a thing for +a manly dog to go around in? You ought to be ashamed of yourself, you +miserable dandy." + +We couldn't help reflecting that it was all very well for those great +comfortable long-haired dogs to talk, naturally protected as they were +from the cold. Yet that evidently cut no figure with them, and they went +on sniffing and tugging and growling, till we thought our poor Puppy's +eyes and tongue would drop out with fear. Yet, all the time, they +seemed to be enjoying his plight, seemed to be smiling grimly together, +wicked old experienced brutes as they were. + +Presently the idea of the thing seemed to occur to Puppy, or out of his +extremity a new soul was born within him, for suddenly an infinite +disgust of his new foppery seemed to take possession of him too, and, +regaining his courage, he turned savagely upon it, ripping it this way +and that, and struggling with might and main to rid himself of the +accursed thing. Presently he stood free, and barks of approval at once +went up from his judges. He had come through his ordeal, and was once +more a dog among dogs. Great was the rejoicing among his friends, and +the occasion having been duly celebrated by joint destruction and +contumely of the offending garment, Teddy and he returned home, friends +for life. + + * * * * * + +It is to be feared that that friendship, deep and tender as it grew to +be on both sides, perhaps particularly on Teddy's, was the indirect +cause of Puppy's death. I have referred to Teddy's bark, and how he is +not wont to waste it on trivial occasions, or without due thought. On +the other hand, he is proud of it, and loves to practice it--just for +its own sake, particularly on early mornings, when, however fine a bark +it is, most of our neighbours would rather continue sleeping than wake +up to listen to it. There is no doubt at all, for those who understand +him, that it is a purely artistic bark. He means no harm to any one by +it. When the milkman, his private enemy, comes at seven, the bark is +quite different. This barking of Teddy's seems to be literally at +nothing. Around five o'clock on summer mornings, he plants himself on a +knob of rock overlooking the salt marsh and barks, possibly in honour of +the rising sun, but with no other perceptible purpose. So have I heard +men rise in the dawn to practice the cornet--but they were men, so they +ran no risk of their lives. Teddy's practicing, however, has now been +carried on for several years in the teeth of no little peril; and, had +it not been for much human influence employed on his behalf, he would +long since have antedated his little friend in Paradise. When that +little friend, however, came to assist and emulate him in those morning +recitals, adding to his bark an occasional--I am convinced purely +playful--bite, I am inclined to think that a sentiment grew in the +neighbourhood that one dog at a time was enough. At all events, Teddy +still barks at dawn as of old, but our little Puppy barks no more. + +Before the final quietus came to him, there were several occasions on +which the Black dog, called Death, had almost caught him in his jaws. +One there was in especial. He had, I believe, no hatred for any living +thing save Italian workmen and automobiles. I have seen an Italian +workman throw his pick-axe at him, and then take to his heels in +grotesque flight. But the pick-axe missed him, as did many another +clumsily hurled missile. + + * * * * * + +An automobile, however, on one occasion, came nearer its mark. Like +every other dog that ever barked, particularly terriers, Puppy delighted +to harass the feet of fast trotting horses, mockingly running ahead of +them, barking with affected savagery, and by a miracle evading their +on-coming hoofs--which to him, tiny thing as he was, must have seemed +like trip-hammers pounding down from the sky. But horses understand such +gaiety in terriers. They understand that it is only their foolish fun. +Automobiles are different. They have no souls. They see nothing engaging +in having their tires snapped at, as they whirl swiftly by; and, one +day, after Puppy had flung himself in a fine fury at the tires of one of +these soulless things, he gave a sharp yelp--"not cowardly!"--and lay a +moment on the roadside. But only a moment; then he went limping off on +his three sound legs, and hid himself away from all sympathy, in some +unknown spot. It was in vain we called and sought him, and only after +two days was he discovered, in the remotest corner of a great rocky +cellar, determined apparently to die alone in an almost inaccessible +privacy of wood and coal. Yet, when at last we persuaded him that life +was still sweet and carried him upstairs into the great living-room, and +the beautiful grandmother, who knows the sorrows of animals almost as +the old Roman seer knew the languages of beasts and birds, had taken +him in charge and made a cosy nest of comforters for him by the fire, +and tempted his languid appetite--to which the very thought of bones +was, of course, an offence--with warm, savory-smelling soup; then, he +who had certainly been no coward--for his thigh was a cruel lump of pain +which no human being would have kept so patiently to himself--became +suddenly, like many human invalids, a perfect glutton of self-pity; and +when we smoothed and patted him and told him how sorry we were, it was +laughable, and almost uncanny, how he suddenly set up a sort of moaning +talk to us, as much as to say that he certainly had had a pretty bad +time, was really something of a hero, and deserved all the sympathy we +would give him. So far as one can be sure about anything so mysterious +as animals, I am sure that from then on he luxuriated in his little +hospital by the fireside, and played upon the feelings of his beautiful +nurse, and of his various solicitous visitors, with all the histrionic +skill of the spoiled and petted convalescent. Suddenly, however, one +day, he forgot his part. He heard some inspiring barking going on +nearby--and, in a flash, his comforters were thrust aside, and he was +off and away to join the fun. Then, of course, we knew that he was well +again; though he still went briskly about his various business on three +legs for several days. + +His manner was quite different, however, the afternoon he had so +evidently come home to die. There was no pose about the little forlorn +figure, which, after a mysterious absence of two days, suddenly +appeared, as we were taking tea on the veranda, already the very ghost +of himself. Wearily he sought the cave of the beautiful grandmother's +skirts, where, whenever he had had a scolding, he was wont always to +take refuge--barking, fiercely, as from an inaccessible fortress, at his +enemies. + + * * * * * + +But, this afternoon, there was evidently no bark in him, poor little +fellow; everything about him said that he had just managed to crawl home +to die. His brisk white coat seemed dank with cold dews, and there was +something shadowy about him and strangely quiet. His eyes, always so +alert, were strangely heavy and indifferent, yet questioning and somehow +accusing. He seemed to be asking us why a little dog should suffer so, +and what was going to happen to him, and what did it all mean. Alas! We +could not tell him; and none of us dare say to each other that our +little comrade in the mystery of life was going to die. But a silence +fell over us all, and the beautiful grandmother took him into her care, +and so well did her great and wise heart nurse him through the night +that next morning it almost seemed as though we had been wrong; for a +flash of his old spirit was in him again, and, though his little legs +shook under him, it was plain that he wanted to try and be up at his +day's work on the veranda, warning off the passer-by, or in the garden +carrying on his eternal investigations, or farther afield in the +councils and expeditions of his fellows. So we let him have his way, and +for a while he seemed happier and stronger for the sunshine, and the old +familiar scents and sounds. But the one little tired husky bark he gave +at his old enemy, the Italian workman, passing by, would have broken +your heart; and the effort he made with a bone, as he visited the +well-remembered neighbourhood of the ice-box for the last time, was +piteous beyond telling. Those sharp, strong teeth that once could bite +and grind through anything could do nothing with it now. To lick it +sadly with tired lips, in a sort of hopeless way, was all that was left; +and there was really a look in his face as though he accepted this +mortal defeat, as he lay down, evidently exhausted with his exertions, +on a bank nearby. But once more his spirit seemed to revive, and he +scrambled to his legs again and wearily crawled to the back of the +house, where the beautiful grandmother loves to sit and look over the +glittering salt-marsh in the summer afternoons. + + * * * * * + +Of course, he knew that she was there. She had been his best friend in +this strange world. His last effort was naturally to be near her again. +Almost he reached that kind cave of her skirts. Only another yard or two +and he had been there. But the energy that had seemed irrepressible and +everlasting had come to its end, and the little body had to give in at +last, and lie down wearily once more with no life left but the love in +its fading eyes. + +There are some, I suppose, who may wonder how one can write about the +death of a mere dog like this; and cannot understand how the death of a +little terrier can make the world seem a lonelier place. But there are +others, I know, who will scarce need telling, men and women with little +ghosts of their own haunting their moonlit gardens; strange, appealing, +faithful companions, kind little friendly beings that journeyed with +them awhile the pilgrimage of the soul. + +I often wonder if Teddy misses his little busy playfellow and disciple +as we do; if, perhaps, as he barks over the marsh of a morning, he is +sending him a message. He goes about the place with nonchalant greatness +as of old, and the Maltese cats still rub their sinuous smoke-grey +bodies to and fro beneath his jaws at evening. There is no sign of +sorrow upon him. But he is old and very wise, and keeps strange +knowledge to himself. So, who can say? + + + + +XVI + +THE ENGLISH COUNTRYSIDE + + +For the genuine lover of nature, as distinct from the connoisseur of +dainty or spectacular "scenery," nature has always and everywhere some +charm or satisfaction. He will find it no less--some say more--in winter +than in summer, and I have little doubt that the great Alkali Desert is +not entirely without its enthusiasts. The nature among which we spent +our childhood is apt to have a lasting hold on us, in defiance of +showier competition, and I suppose there is no land with soul so dead +that it does not boast itself the fairest under heaven. + +I am writing this surrounded by a natural scene which I would not +exchange for the Swiss lakes, yet I presume it is undeniable that +Switzerland has a more universal reputation for natural beauty than +Connecticut. It is, as we say, one of the show places of the earth. So +Niagara Falls, the Grand Cañon, the Rockies, and California generally +lord it over America. Italy has such a reputation for beauty that it is +almost unfair to expect her to live up to it. I once ventured to say +that the Alps must be greasy with being climbed, and it says much for +such stock pieces in nature's repertoire, that, in spite of all the wear +and tear of sentimental travellers, the mock-admiration of generations, +the batteries of amateur cameras, the Riviera, the English lakes, the +Welsh mountains, the Highlands of Scotland, and other tourist-trodden +classics of the picturesque, still remain haunts of beauty and joys +forever. God's masterpieces do not easily wear out. + +Every country does something supremely well, and England may be said to +have a patent for a certain kind of scenery which Americans are the +first to admire. English scenery has no more passionate pilgrim than the +traveller from the United States, as the visitors' books of its various +show-places voluminously attest. Perhaps it is not difficult, when one +has lived in both countries, to understand why. + +While America, apart from its impressive natural splendours, is rich +also in idyllic and pastoral landscape, it has, as yet, but little +"countryside." I say, as yet, because "the countryside," I think I am +right in feeling, is not entirely a thing of nature's making, but +rather a collaboration resulting from nature and man living so long in +partnership together. In England, with which the word is peculiarly, if +not exclusively, associated, God is not entirely to be credited with +making the country. Man has for generations also done his share. + +It is perhaps not without significance that the word "countryside" +was not to be found in Webster's dictionary, till a recent edition. +Originally, doubtless, it was used with reference to those rural +districts in the vicinity of a town; as one might say the country side +of the town. Not wild or solitary nature was meant, but nature +humanized, made companionable by the presence and occupations of man; a +nature which had made the winding highway, the farm, and the pasture, +even the hamlet, with its church tower and its ancient inn, one with +herself. + +The American, speeding up to London from his landing either at Liverpool +or Southampton, always exclaims on the gardenlike aspect, the deep, rich +greenness of the landscape. It is not so much the specific evidences of +cultivation, though those, of course, are plentifully present, but a +general air of ripeness and order. Even the land not visible under +cultivation suggests immemorial care and fertility. We feel that this +land has been fought over and ploughed over, nibbled over by sheep, sown +and reaped, planted and drained, walked over, hunted over, and very much +beloved, for centuries. It is not fanciful to see in it a land to +which its people have been stubbornly and tenderly devoted--still +"Shakespeare's England," still his favoured "isle set in the silver +sea." + +As seen from the railway-carriage window, one is struck, too, by the +comparative tidiness of the English landscape. There are few loose ends, +and the outskirts of villages are not those distressing dump-heaps +which they too often are in America. Yet there is no excessive air of +trimness. The order and grooming seem a part of nature's processes. +There is, too, a casual charm about the villages themselves, the +graceful, accidental grouping of houses and gardens, which suggests +growth rather than premeditation. The general harmony does not preclude, +but rather comes of, the greatest variety of individual character. + +Herein the English village strikingly differs from the typical New +England village, where the charm comes of a prim uniformity, and +individuality is made to give place to a general parking of lawns and +shade-trees in rectangular blocks and avenues. A New England village +suggests some large institution disposed in separate uniform buildings, +placed on one level carpet of green, each with a definite number of +trees, and the very sunlight portioned out into gleaming allotments. +The effect gained is for me one of great charm--the charm of a vivid, +exquisitely ordered, green silence, with a touch of monastic, or +Quakerish, decorum. I would not have it otherwise, and I speak of it +only to suggest by contrast the different, desultory charm of an old +English village, where beauty has not been so much planned, as has just +"occurred." + +Of course, this is the natural result of the long occupation of the +land. Each century in succession has had a hand in shaping the +countryside to its present aspect, and English history is literally a +living visible part of English scenery. Here the thirteenth century has +left a church, here the fourteenth a castle, here the sixteenth, with +its suppression of the monasteries, a ruined abbey. Here is an inn where +Chaucer's pilgrims stopped on the way to Canterbury. Here, in a field +covered over by a cow-shed, is a piece of tessellated pavement which was +once the floor of an old country house occupied by one of Caesar's +generals. + +Those strange grassy mounds breaking the soft sky-line of the rolling +South Downs are the tombs of Saxon chieftains, that rubble of stones at +the top of yonder hill was once a British camp, and those curious ridges +terracing yonder green slope mark the trenches of some prehistoric +battlefield. All these in the process of time have become part and +parcel of the English countryside, as necessary to its "English" +character as its trees and its wild flowers. + +How much, too, the English countryside owes for its beauty to the many +old manor-houses, gabled and moated, with their quaint, mossy-walled +gardens and great forestlike parks. Whatever we may think of the English +territorial system as economics, its service to English scenery has been +incalculable. Without English traditionalism we should hardly have had +the English countryside. + +The conservation of great estates, entailing a certain conservatism in +the treatment of farm lands from generation to generation, and the +upholding, too, of game-preserves, however obnoxious to the land +reformer, have been all to the good of the nature-lover. We owe no +little of the beauty of the English woodland to the English pheasant; +and with the coming of land nationalization we may expect to see +considerable changes in the English countryside. Meanwhile, in spite of, +or perhaps because of, the feudalistic character of English landlordism, +the Englishman enjoys a right of walking over his native land of which +no capitalist can rob him. Hence results another charming feature of the +English countryside--the footpaths you see everywhere winding over hill +and dale, through field and coppice. The ancient rights of these are +safeguarded to the people forever by statute no wealth can defy; and, +let any _nouveau riche_ of a landlord try to close one of them, and +he has to reckon with one of the pluckiest and most persistent +organizations of English John Hampdens, the society that makes the +protection of these traditional pathways its particular care. So the +rich man cannot lock up his trees and his woodland glades all for +himself, but is compelled to share them to the extent of allowing the +poorest pedestrian to walk through them--which is about all the rich man +can do with them himself. + +These footpaths, in conjunction with English lanes, have made the charm +of walking tours in England proverbial. Certain counties particularly +pride themselves on their lands. Surrey and Devonshire are the great +rivals in this respect. We say "Surrey lanes" or "Devonshire lanes," +as we speak of "Italian skies" or "Southern hospitality." Other +counties--Warwickshire, for example--doubtless have lanes no less +lovely, but Surrey and Devonshire have, so to say, got the decision; +and, if an American traveller wants to see a typical English lane, he +goes to Surrey or Devonshire, just as, if he wants a typical English +pork-pie, he sends to Melton Mowbray. + +And the English lane has come honestly by its reputation. You may be +disappointed in Venice, but you will be hard to please if you are not +caught by the spell of an English lane. Of course, you must not expect +to feel that spell if you tear through it in a motor-car. It was made +for the loiterer, as its whimsical twists and turns plainly show. If you +are in a hurry, you had better keep to the king's highway, stretching +swift and white on the king's business. The English lane was made for +the leisurely meandering of cows to and from pasture, for the dreamy +snail-pace of time-forgetting lovers, for children gathering primroses +or wild strawberries, or for the knap-sacked wayfarer to whom time and +space are no objects, whose destination is anywhere and nowhere, whose +only clocks are the rising sun and the evening star, and to whom the way +means more than the goal. + +I should not have spoken of it as "made," for, when it is most +characteristic, an English lane has no suggestion of ever having been +man-made like other roads. It seems as much a natural feature as the +woods or meadows through which it passes; and sometimes, as in Surrey, +when it runs between high banks, tunnelling its way under green boughs, +it seems more like an old river-bed than a road, whose sides nature has +tapestried with ferns and flowers. Of all roads in the world it is the +dreamer's road, luring on the wayfarer with perpetual romantic promise +and surprise, winding on and on, one can well believe, into the very +heart of fairy-land. Everything beautiful seems to be waiting for us +somewhere in the turnings of an English lane. + +Had I sat down to write of the English countryside two years ago, I +should have done so with a certain amount of cautious skepticism. I +should have said to myself: "You have not visited England for over ten +years. Are you quite sure that your impressions of its natural beauties +are not the rose-coloured exaggerations of memory? Are not time and +distance lending their proverbial enchantment?" In fact, as I set sail +to revisit England, the spring before last, it was in some such mood of +anticipatory disillusion. + +After all, I had said to myself, is not the English countryside the work +of the English poets--the English spring, the English wild flowers, the +English lark, the English nightingale, and so forth? That longing of +Browning expressed in the lines, + + O to be in England + Now that April's there! + +was, after all, the cry of a homesick versifier, thinking "Home +Thoughts, from Abroad"; and are Herrick and Wordsworth quite to be +trusted on the subject of daffodils? + +Well, I am glad to have to own that my revisiting my native land +resulted in an agreeable disappointment. With a critical American eye, +jealously on my guard against sentimental superstition, I surveyed the +English landscape and examined its various vaunted beauties and +fascinations, as though making their acquaintance for the first time. +No, my youthful raptures had not been at fault, and the poets were once +more justified. The poets are seldom far wrong. If they see anything, it +is usually there. If we cannot see it, too, it is the fault of our eyes. + +Take the English hawthorn, for instance. As its fragrance is wafted to +you from the bushes where it hangs like the fairest of white linen, you +will hardly, I think, quarrel with its praises. Yet, though it is, if I +am not mistaken, of rare occurrence in America, it is not absolutely +necessary to go to England for the hawthorn. Any one who cares to go +a-Maying along the banks of the Hudson, in the neighbourhood of +Peekskill, will find it there. But for the primrose and the cowslip you +must cross the sea; and, if you come upon such a wood as I strayed into, +my last visit, you will count it worth the trip. It was literally +carpeted with clumps of primroses and violets (violets that smell, too) +so thickly massed together in the mossy turf that there was scarcely +room to tread. There are no words rich or abundant enough to suggest the +sense of innocent luxury brought one by such a natural Persian carpet of +soft gold and dewy purple, at once so gorgeous and yet so gentle. In all +this lavish loveliness of English wild flowers there is, indeed, a +peculiar tenderness. The innocence of children seems to be in them, and +the tenderness of lovers. + + A lover would not tread + A cowslip on the head-- + +How appropriately such lines come to mind as one carefully picks one's +way down a green hillside yellow with cowslips, and breathing perhaps +the most delicate of all flowery fragrances. Yet again, as we pass into +another stretch of woodland, another profusion and another fragrance +await us, the winey perfume and the spectral blue sheen of the wild +hyacinth. As one comes upon stretches of these hyacinths in the woods, +they seem at first glance like pools of blue water or fallen pieces of +the sky. Here, for once, the poets are left behind, and, of them all, +Shakespeare and Milton alone have come near to suggesting the +loveliness, at once so spiritual and so warmly and sweetly of the earth, +that belongs to English wild flowers. I know not if Sheffield steel +still keeps its position among the eternal verities, but in an age when +so many of one's cherished beliefs are threatened with the scrap-heap, +I count it of no small importance to be able to retain one's faith in +the English lark and English wild flowers. + +But the English countryside is not all greenness and softness, blossomy +lanes, moated granges, and idyllic villages. It by no means always +suggests the gardener, the farmer, or the gamekeeper. It is rich, too, +in wildness and solitude, in melancholy fens and lonely moorlands. To +the American accustomed to the vast areas of his own enormous continent, +it would come as a surprise to realize that a land far smaller than many +of his States can in certain places give one so profound a sense of the +wilderness. Yet I doubt if a man could feel lonelier anywhere in the +world than on a Yorkshire moor or on Salisbury Plain. + +After all, we are apt to forget that, even on the largest continent, we +can see only a limited portion of the earth at once. When one is in the +middle of Lake Erie we are as much out of sight of land, as impressed by +the illusion of boundless water, as if we were in the middle of the +Pacific Ocean. So, on Salisbury Plain, with nothing but rolling billows +of close-cropped turf, springy and noiseless to the tread, as far as the +eye can see, one feels as alone with the universe as in the middle of +some Asian desert. In addition to the actual loneliness of the scene, +and a silence broken only by the occasional tinkle of sheep-bells, as a +flock moves like a fleecy cloud across the grass, is an imaginative +loneliness induced by the overwhelming sense of boundless unrecorded +time, the "dim-grey-grown ages," of which the mysterious boulders of +Stonehenge are the voiceless witnesses. To experience this feeling to +the full one should come upon an old Roman road in the twilight, +grass-grown, choked with underbrush, but still running straight and +clearly defined as when it shook to the tread of Roman legions. It is +eery to follow one of these haunted roads, filled with the far-off +thoughts and fancies it naturally evokes, and then suddenly to come out +again into the world of today, as it joins the highway once more, and +the lights of a wayside inn welcome us back to humanity, with perhaps a +touring car standing at the door. + +One need hardly say that the English wayside inn is as much a feature of +the English countryside as the English hawthorn. Its praises have been +the theme of essayists and poets for generations, and at its best there +is a cosiness and cheer about it which warm the heart, as its quaintness +and savour of past days keep alive the sense of romantic travel. There +the spirit of ancient hospitality still survives, and, though the +motor-car has replaced the stage-coach, that is, after all, but a +detail, and the old, low-ceilinged rooms, the bay windows with their +leaded panes, the tap-room with its shining vessels, the great kitchen, +the solid English fare, the brass candlesticks at bedtime, and the +lavendered sheets, still preserve the atmosphere of a novel by Fielding +or an essay by Addison. + +There still, as in Shakespeare's day, one can take one's ease at one's +inn, as perhaps in the hostelries of no other land. It is the frequency +and excellence of these English inns that make it charmingly possible to +see England, as it is best seen, on foot or on a bicycle. It is not a +country of isolated wonders, with long stretches of mere road between. +Every mile counts for something. But, if the luxury of walking it with +stick and knapsack is denied us, and we must needs see it by motor-car, +we cannot fail to make one observation, that of the surprising variety +of natural scenery packed in so small a space. Between Land's End and +the Tweed the eye and the imagination have encountered every form of the +picturesque. In an area some three hundred and fifty miles long by three +hundred broad are contained the ruggedness of Cornwall, the idyllic +softness of Devon, the dreamy solitudes of the South Downs, with their +billowy, chalky contours, the agricultural fertility of Kent and +Middlesex, the romantic woodlands and hilly pastures of Surrey, the +melancholy fens of Lincolnshire, the broad, bosky levels of the +midlands, the sudden wildness of Wales, with her mountains and glens, +Yorkshire, with its grim, heather-clad moors, Westmoreland, with its +fells and Wordsworthian "Lakes"; every note in the gamut of natural +beauty has been struck, from honeysuckle prettiness to savage grandeur. + +Yet, although all these contrasts are included in the English scene, it +is not of solitude or grandeur that we think when we speak of the +English countryside. They are the exceptions to the rule of a gentler, +more humanized natural beauty, in which the village church and the +ivy-clad ruin play their part. Perhaps some such formula as this would +represent the typical scene that springs to the mind's eye with the +phrase "the English countryside": a village green, with some geese +stringing out across it. A straggle of quaint thatched cottages, roses +climbing about the windows, and in front little, carefully kept gardens, +with hollyhocks standing in rows, stocks and sweet-williams and such +old-fashioned flowers. At one end of the village, rising out of a clump +of yews, the mouldering church-tower, with mossy gravestones on one side +and a trim rectory on the other. At the other end of the village a +gabled inn, with a great stable-yard, busy with horses and waggons. +Above the village, the slopes of gently rising pastures, intersected +with footpaths and shadowed with woodlands. A little way out of the +village, an old mill with a lilied mill-pond, a great, dripping +water-wheel, and the murmur of the escaping stream. And winding on +into the green, sun-steeped distance, the blossom-hung English lanes. + + + + +XVII + +LONDON--CHANGING AND UNCHANGING + + +I find it an unexpectedly strange experience to be in London again +after ten years in New York. I had no idea it could be so strange. Of +course, there are men to whom one great city is as another--commercial +travellers, impresarios, globe-trotting millionaires. Being none of +these, I am not as much at home in St. Petersburg as in Buda-Pesth, in +Berlin as in Paris, and, while once I might have envied such plastic +cosmopolitanism, I am realizing, this last day or two in London, that, +were such an accomplishment mine, it had been impossible for me to feel +as deeply as I do my brief reincarnation into a city and a country with +which I was once so intimate, and which now seems so romantically +strange, while remaining so poignantly familiar. The man who is at home +everywhere has nowhere any home. My home was once this London--this +England--in which I am writing; but nothing so much as being in London +again could make me realize that my home now is New York, and how long +and how instinctively, without knowing it, I have been an American. It +is not indeed that I love New York and America more than I love London +and England. In fact, London has never seemed so wonderful to me in the +past as she has seemed during these days of my wistful momentary return +to her strange great heart. But this very freshness of her marvel to one +who once deemed that he knew her so well proves but the completeness of +my spiritual acclimatization into another land. I seem to be seeing her +face, hearing her voice, for the first time; while, all the while, my +heart is full with unforgotten memories, and my eyes have scarce the +hardihood to gaze with the decorum befitting the public streets on many +a landmark of vanished hours. To find London almost as new and strange +to me as New York once seemed when I first sighted her soaring morning +towers, and yet to know her for an enchanted Ghost-Land; to be able to +find my way through her streets--in spite of the new Kingsway and +Aldwych!--with closed eyes, and yet to see her, it almost seems, for the +first time: surely it is a curious, almost uncanny, experience. + +Do I find London changed?--I am asked. I have been so busy in +rediscovering what I had half-forgotten, in finding engaging novelties +in things anciently familiar, that the question is one which I feel +hardly competent to answer. For instance, I had all but forgotten that +there was so noble a thing in the world as an old-fashioned English +pork-pie. Yesterday I saw one in a window, with a thrill of recognition, +that made a friend with whom I was walking think for a moment that I +had seen a ghost. He knows nothing of the human heart who cannot realize +how tremulous with ancient heart-break may seem an old-fashioned English +pork-pie--after ten years in America. + +And, again, how curiously novel and charming seemed the soft and +courteous English voices--with or without aitches--all about one in +the streets and in the shops--I had almost said the "stores." I am +enamoured of the American accent, these many years, and--the calumny of +superficial observation to the contrary--I will maintain, so far as my +own experience goes, that there is as much courtesy broadcast in America +as in any land; more, I am inclined to think than in France. Yet, for +all that, that something or other in the English voice which I had heard +long since and lost awhile smote me with a peculiar pleasure, and, +though I like the comradely American "Cap" or "Professor," and am hoping +soon to hear it again--yet the novelty of being addressed once more as +"Sir" has had, I must own, a certain antiquarian charm. + +Wandering in a quaint by-street near my hotel, and reading the names and +signs on one or two of the neat old-world "places of business," I came +on the word "sweep." I believe it was on a brass-plate. For a moment, I +wondered what it meant; and then I realized, with a great gratitude, +that London had not changed so much, after all, since the days of +Charles Lamb. As I emerged into a broader thoroughfare, my ears were +smitten with the sound of minstrelsy. It is true that the tune was +changed. It was unmistakably rag-time. Yet, there was the old +piano-organ, and in a broad circle of spectators, suspended awhile from +their various wayfaring, a young man in tennis flannels was performing a +spirited Apache dance with a quite comely short-skirted young woman, who +rightly enough felt that she had no need to be ashamed of her legs. +Across the extemporized stage, every now and then, taxicabs tooted +cautiously, longing in their hearts to stay; and once a motor +coal-waggon, like a sort of amateur freight-train, thundered across; but +not even these could break the spell that held that ring of enchanted +loiterers, from which presently the pennies fell like rain--the eternal +spell--still operating, I was glad to see, under the protection of the +only human police in the world--of the strolling player in London town. +Just before the players turned to seek fresh squares and alleys new, I +noticed on the edge of the crowd what seemed, in the gathering twilight, +to be a group of uplifted spears. Spears or halberds, were they? It was +a little company of the ancient brotherhood of lamp-lighters, seduced, +like the rest of us, from the strict pursuance of duty by the vagabond +music. + +To me this thought is full of reassurance, whatever be the murmurs of +change: London has still her sweeps, her strolling minstrels, and her +lamp-lighters. + +Of course, I missed at once the old busses, yet there are far more +horses left than I had dared to hope, and the hansom is far from +extinct. In fact, there seems to be some promise of its renaissance, and +even yet, in the words of the ancient bard, despite the competition of +taxis-- + + Like dragon-flies, + The hansoms hover + With jewelled eyes, + To catch the lover. + +Further,--the quietude of the Temple remains undisturbed, the lawns of +Gray's Inn are green as of old, the Elizabethanism of Staple Inn is +unchanged, about the cornices of the British Museum the pigeons still +flutter and coo, and the old clocks chime sweetly as of old from their +mysterious stations aloft somewhere in the morning and the evening sky. + +Changes, of course, there are. It is easier to telephone in London today +than it was ten years ago--almost as easy as in some little provincial +town in Connecticut. Various minor human conveniences have been +improved. The electric lighting is better. Some of the elevators--I +mean the "lifts"--almost remind one of New York. The problem of "rapid +transit" has been simplified. All which things, however, have nothing to +do with national characteristics, but are now the common property of the +civilized, or rather, I should say, the commercialized, world, and are +probably to be found no less in full swing in Timbuctoo. No one--save, +maybe, the citizens of some small imitative nation--confounds these +things with change, or calls them "progress." The soul of a great old +nation adopts all such contrivances as in the past it has adopted new +weapons, or new modes of conveyance. Only a Hottentot or a Cook's +Tourist can consider such superficial developments as evidences of +"change." + +There are, of course, some new theatres--though I have heard of no new +great actor or actress. The old "favourites" still seem to dominate the +play-bills, as they did ten years ago. There is Mr. Hammerstein's Opera +House in the Kingsway. I looked upon it with pathos. Yet, surely, it is +a monument not so much of changing London as of that London which sees +no necessity of change. + +In regard to the great new roadways, Kingsway, Aldwych, and the +broadening of the Strand, I have been grateful for the temper which +seems to have presided over their making--a temper combining the +necessary readjustment of past and present, with a spirit of sensitive +conservation for those buildings which more and more England will +realize as having a lasting value for her spirit. + +So far as I have observed, London has been guilty of no such vandalism +as is responsible for the new Boulevard Raspail in Paris, and similar +heartless destructiveness, in a city which belongs less to France than +to the human soul. Such cities as London and Paris are among the eternal +spiritual possessions of mankind. If only those temporarily in charge of +them could be forced somehow to remember that, when their brief mayoral, +or otherwise official, lives are past, there will be found those who +will need to look upon what they have destroyed, and who will curse them +in their graves. + +Putting aside such merely superficial "changes" as new streets, new +theatres, and new conveniences, there does seem to me one change of a +far higher importance for which I have no direct evidence, and which I +can only hint at, even to myself, as "something in the air." It is, of +course, nothing new either to London or to England. It is rather the +reawakening of an old temper to which England's history has so often and +so momentously given expression. I seem to find it in a new alertness in +the way men and women walk and talk in the streets, a braced-up +expectancy and readiness for some approaching development in England's +destiny, a new quickening of that old indomitable spirit that has faced +not merely external dangers, but grappled with and resolved her own +internal problems. London seems to me like a city that has heard a voice +crying "Arise, thou that sleepest!" and is answering to the cry with +girt loins and sloth-purged heart and blithe readiness for some new +unknown summons of a future that can but develop the glory of her past. + +England seems to be no more sleepily resting on her laurels, as she was +some twenty years ago. Nor does she seem, on the other hand, to show the +least anxiety that she could ever lose them. She is merely realizing +that the time is at hand when she is to win others--that one more of +those many re-births of England, so to speak, out of her own womb, +approaches, and that once more she is about to prove herself eternally +young. + +New countries are apt to speak of old countries as though they are +dying, merely because they have lived so long. Yet there is a longevity +which is one of the surest evidences of youth. Such I seem to feel once +more is England's--as from my window I watch the same old English May +weather: the falling rain and the rich gloom, within which moves always, +shouldering the darkest hour, an oceanic radiance, a deathless principle +of celestial fire. + +LONDON, May, 1913. + + + + +XVIII + +THE HAUNTED RESTAURANT + + +Were one to tell the proprietors of the very prosperous and flamboyant +restaurant of which I am thinking that it is haunted--yea, that ghosts +sit at its well appointed tables, and lost voices laugh and wail and +sing low to themselves through its halls--they would probably take one +for a lunatic--a servant of the moon. + +Certainly, to all appearance, few places would seem less to suggest the +word "haunted" than that restaurant, as one comes upon it, in one of the +busiest of London thoroughfares, spreading as it does for blocks around, +like a conflagration, the festive glare of its electrically emblazoned +façade. Yet no ruined mansion, with the moon shining in through its +shattered roof, the owl nesting in its banqueting hall, and the snake +gliding through its bed chambers, was ever more peopled with phantoms +than this radiant palace of prandial gaiety, apparently filled with the +festive murmur of happy diners, the jocund strains of its vigorous +orchestra, the subdued clash of knives and forks and delicate dishes, +the rustle of women's gowns and the fairy music of women's voices. For +me its portico, flaming like a vortex of dizzy engulfing light, upon +which, as upon a swift current, gay men and women, alighting from motor +and hansom, are swept inward to glittering tables of snow-white napery, +fair with flowers--for me the mouth of the grave is not less dread, +and the walls of a sepulchre are not so painted with dead faces +or so inscribed with elegiac memories. I could spend a night in +Père-la-Chaise, and still be less aware of the presence of the dead +than I was a short time ago, when, greatly daring, I crossed with a +shudder that once so familiar threshold. + +It was twelve years since I had been in London, so I felt no little of a +ghost myself, and I knew too well that it would be vain to look for the +old faces. Yes, gone was the huge good-natured commissionaire, who so +often in the past, on my arrival in company with some human flower, had +flung open the apron of our cab with such reverential alacrity, and on +our departure had so gently tucked in the petals of her skirts, smiling +the while a respectfully knowing benediction on the prospective +continuance of our evening's adventure. Another stood in his place, and +watched my lonely arrival with careless indifference. Glancing through +the window of the treasurer's office to the right of the hall, I could +see that an unfamiliar figure sat at the desk, where in the past so many +a cheque had been cashed for me with eager _bonhomie_. Now I reflected +that considerable identification would be necessary for that once +light-hearted transaction. It is true that I was welcomed with courtesy +by a bowing majordomo, but alas, my welcome was that of a stranger; and +when I mounted the ornate, marble-walled staircase leading to the +gallery where I had always preferred to sit, I realized that my hat and +cane must pass into alien keeping, and that no waiter's face would light +up as he saw me threading my way to the sacred table, withdrawn in a +nook of the balcony, where one could see and hear all, participate in +the general human stir and atmosphere, and yet remain apart. + +Ah! no; for the friendly Cockney that once greeted me with an enfolding +paternal kindness was substituted broken English of a less companionable +accent. A polite young Greek it was who stood waiting respectfully for +my order, knowing nothing of all it meant for me--_me_--to be seated at +that table again--whereas, had he been one of half a dozen of the +waiters of yester-year, he would have known almost as much as I of the +"secret memoirs" of that historic table. + +In ordering my meal I made no attempt at sentiment, for my mood went far +deeper than sentiment. Indeed, though, every second of the time, I was +living so vividly, so cruelly, in the past, I made one heartbroken +acknowledgment of the present by beginning with the anachronism of a +dry Martini cocktail, which, twelve years previous, was unknown and +unattainable in that haunted gallery. That cocktail was a sort of +desperate epitaph. It meant that I was alone--alone with my ghosts. Yet +it had a certain resurrecting influence, and as I sat there proceeding +dreamily with my meal, one face and another would flash before me, and +memory after memory re-enact itself in the theatre of my fancy. So +much in my actual surroundings brought back the past with an aching +distinctness--particularly the entrance of two charming young people, +making rainbows all about them, as, ushered by a smiling waiter, who was +evidently no stranger to their felicity, they seated themselves at a +neighbouring table with a happy sigh, and neglected the menu for a +moment or two while they gazed, rapt and lost, into each other's eyes. +How well I knew it all; how easily I could have taken the young man's +place, and played the part for which this evening he was so fortunately +cast! As I looked at them, I instinctively summoned to my side the +radiant shade of Aurea, for indeed she had seemed made of gold--gold and +water lilies. And, as of old, when I had called to her, she came swiftly +with a luxurious rustle of fragrant skirts, like the sound of the west +wind among the summer trees, or the swish and sway of the foam about the +feet of Aphrodite. There she sat facing me once more, "a feasting +presence made of light"--her hair like a golden wheat sheaf, her +eyes like blue flowers amid the wheat, and her bosom, by no means +parsimoniously concealed, literally suggesting that the loveliness of +all the water lilies in the world was amassed there within her corset +as in some precious casket. Ours was not one of the great tragic loves, +but I know I shall think of Aurea's bosom on my death-bed. At her coming +I had ordered champagne--we always drank champagne together, because, as +we said, it matched so well with her hair--champagne of a no longer +fashionable brand. The waiter seemed a little surprised to hear it asked +for, but it had been the only _chic_ brand in 19--. + +"Look at those two yonder," I said presently, after we had drunk to +each other, smiling long into each other's eyes over the brims of our +glasses. "You and I were once as they. It is their first wonderful +dinner together. Watch them--the poor darlings; it is enough to break +one's heart." + +"Do you remember ours?" asked Aurea quite needlessly. + +"I wonder what else I was thinking of--dear idiot!" said I, with tender +elegance, as in the old days. + +As I said before, Aurea and I had not been tragic in our love. It was +more a matter of life--than death; warm, pagan, light-hearted life. Ours +was perhaps that most satisfactory of relationships between men and +women, which contrives to enjoy the happiness, the fun, even the +ecstasy, of loving, while evading its heartache. It was, I suppose, what +one would call a healthy physical enchantment, with lots of tenderness +and kindness in it, but no possibility of hurt to each other. There was +nothing Aurea would not have done for me, or I for Aurea, except--marry +each other; and, as a matter of fact, there were certain difficulties on +both sides in the way of our doing that, difficulties, however, which I +am sure neither of us regretted. + +Yes, Aurea and I understood thoroughly what was going on in those young +hearts, as we watched them, our eyes starry with remembrance. Who better +than we should know that hush and wonder, that sense of enchanted +intimacy, which belongs of all moments perhaps in the progress of a +passion to that moment when two standing tiptoe on the brink of golden +surrender, sit down to their first ambrosial meal together--delicious +adventure!--with all the world to watch them, if it choose, and yet +aloof in a magic loneliness, as of youthful divinities wrapped in a +roseate cloud! Hours of divine expectancy, at once promise and +fulfilment. Happy were it for you, lovers, could you thus sit forever, +nor pass beyond this moment, touched by some immortalizing wand as those +lovers on the Grecian Urn: + + Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss. + Though winning near the goal--yet, do not grieve; + She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss. + Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair! + +"See," said Aurea presently, "they are getting ready to go. The waiter +has brought the bill, and is looking away, suddenly lost in profound +meditation. Let us see how he pays the bill. I am sure she is anxious." + +"Your old test!" said I. "Do you remember?" + +"Yes! And it's one that never fails," said Aurea with decision. "When a +woman goes out to dinner with a man for the first time, he little knows +how much is going to depend on his way of paying the bill. If, as with +some men one meets, he studies it through a microscope and adds it +up with anxious brow--meanwhile quite evidently forgetting your +presence--how your heart sinks, sinks and hardens--but you are glad all +the same, and next day you congratulate yourself on your narrow escape!" + +"Was I like that?" said I. + +"Did we escape?" asked Aurea. Then she added, touching my arm as with a +touch of honeyed fire: "O I'm so glad! He did it delightfully--quite _en +prince_. Just the right nonchalance--and perhaps, poor dear, he's as +poor--" + +"As we often were," I added. + +And then through the corners of our eyes we saw the young lovers rise +from the table, and the man enfold his treasure in her opera cloak, O so +reverently, O so tenderly, as though he were wrapping up some holy +flower. And O those deep eyes she gave him, half turning her head as he +did so! + +"That look," whispered Aurea, quoting Tennyson, "'had been a clinging +kiss but for the street.'" + +Then suddenly they were gone, caught up like Enoch, into heaven--some +little heaven, maybe, like one that Aurea and I remember, high up under +the ancient London roofs. + +But, with their going, alas, Aurea had vanished too, and I was left +alone with my Greek waiter, who was asking me what cheese I would +prefer. + +With the coming of coffee and cognac, I lit my cigar and settled down to +deliberate reverie, as an opium smoker gives himself up to his dream. I +savoured the bitter-sweetness of my memories; I took a strange pleasure +in stimulating the ache of my heart with vividly recalled pictures of +innumerable dead hours. I systematically passed from table to table all +around that spacious peristyle. There was scarcely one at which I +had not sat with some vanished companion in those years of ardent, +irresponsible living which could never come again. Not always a woman +had been the companion whose form I thus conjured out of the past, too +often out of the grave; for the noble friendship of youth haunted those +tables as well, with its generous starry-eyed enthusiasms and passionate +loyalties. Poets of whom but their songs remain, themselves by tragic +pathways descended into the hollow land, had read their verses to me +there, still glittering with the dawn dew of their creation, as we sat +together over the wine and talked of the only matters then--and perhaps +even yet--worth talking of: love and literature. Of these but one can +still be met in London streets, but all now wear crowns of varying +brightness-- + + Where the oldest bard is as the young, + And the pipe is ever dropping honey, + And the lyre's strings are ever strung. + +Dear boon fellows of life as well as literature, how often have we risen +from those tables, to pursue together the not too swiftly flying +petticoat, through the terrestrial firmament of shining streets, aglow +with the midnight sun of pleasure, a-dazzle with eyes brighter far than +the city lamps--passionate pilgrims of the morning star! Ah! we go on +such quests no more--"another race hath been and other palms are won." + +No, not always women--but naturally women nearly always, for it was the +time of rosebuds, and we were wisely gathering them while we might-- + + Through the many to the one-- + O so many! + Kissing all and missing none, + Loving any. + +Every man who has lived a life worthy the name of living has his own +private dream of fair women, the memory of whom is as a provision laid +up against the lean years that must come at last, however long they may +be postponed by some special grace of the gods, which is, it is good to +remember, granted to some--the years when one has reluctantly to +accept that the lovely game is almost, if not quite at an end, and to +watch the bloom and abundance of fragrant young creatures pass us, +unregarding, by. And, indeed, it may happen that a man who has won what +is for him the fairest of all fair faces, and has it still by his side, +may enter sometimes, without disloyalty, that secret gallery of those +other fair faces that were his before hers, in whom they are all summed +up and surpassed, had dawned upon his life. We shall hardly be loyal to +the present if we are coldly disloyal to the past. In the lover's +calendar, while there is but one Madonna, there must still be minor +saints, to whom it is meet, at certain times and seasons, to offer +retrospective candles--saints that, after the manner of many saints, +were once such charming sinners for our sakes, that utter forgetfulness +of them were an impious boorishness surely unacceptable to the most +jealous of Madonnas. Public worship of them is not, of course, +desirable, but occasional private celebrations are surely more than +permissible--such celebrations as that "night of memory and tears" which +Landor consecrated to Rose Aylmer, or that song which Thackeray +consecrated to certain loves of the long ago-- + + Gillian's dead, God rest her bier, + How I loved her twenty years syne! + Marian's married, but I sit here, + Alone and merry at forty year, + Dipping my nose in the Gascon wine. + +So I, seated in my haunted restaurant, brought the burnt offerings of +several cigars, and poured out various libations to my own private +Gillians and Marians, and in fancy sat and looked into Angelica's eyes +at this table, and caressed Myrtle's opaled hand at that, and read +Sylvia a poem I had just written for her at still another. "Whose names +are five sweet symphonies," wrote Rossetti. Yes, symphonies, indeed, in +the ears of memory are the names of the lightest loves that flittered +butterfly-like across our path in the golden summer of our lives, +each name calling up its human counterpart, with her own endearing +personality distinguishing her from all other girls, her way of +smiling, her way of talking, her way of being serious, all the little +originalities on which she prided herself, her so solemnly held +differentia of tastes and manners--all, in a word, that made you realize +that you were dining with Corinna and not with Chloe. What a service of +contrast each--all unwittingly, need one say--did the other, just in the +same fashion as contrasting colours accentuate the special quality one +of the other. To have dined last night with Amaryllis, with her Titian +red hair and green eyes, her tropic languor and honey-drowsy ways, +was to feel all the keener zest in the presence of Callithoe on +the following evening, with her delicate soul-lit face, and eager +responsiveness of look and gesture--_blonde cendré_, and _fausse +maigre_--a being one of the hot noon, the other a creature of the +starlight. But I disclaim the sultanesque savour of thus writing of +these dear bearers of symphonic names. To talk of them as flowers and +fruit, as colour and perfume, as ivory and velvet, is to seem to forget +the best of them, and the best part of loving them and being loved +again; for that consisted in their comradeship, their enchanted +comradeship, the sense of shared adventure, the snatching of a fearful +joy together. For a little while we had escaped from the drab and +songless world, and, cost what it might, we were determined to take +possession, for a while at least, of that paradise which sprang into +existence at the moment when "male and female created He them." Such +divine foolishness, let discretion warn, or morality frown, or society +play the censorious hypocrite, "were wisdom in the scorn of +consequence." + +"Ah, then," says every man to himself of such hours, as I said to myself +in my haunted restaurant--"ah, then came in the sweet o' the year." + +But lovely and pleasant as were the memories over which I thus sat +musing, there was one face immeasurably beyond all others that I had +come there hoping and yet fearing to meet again, hers of whom for years +that seem past counting all the awe and wonder and loveliness of the +world have seemed but the metaphor. Endless years ago she and I had sat +at this table where I was now sitting and had risen from it with +breaking hearts, never to see each other's face, hear each other's voice +again. Voluntarily, for another's sake, we were breaking our hearts, +renouncing each other, putting from us all the rapture and religion +of our loving, dying then and there that another might live--vain +sacrifice! Once and again, long silences apart, a word or two would wing +its way across lands and seas and tell us both that we were still +under the same sky and were still what nature had made us from the +beginning--each other's. But long since that veil of darkness unpierced +of my star has fallen between us, and no longer do I hear the rustle of +her gown in the autumn woods, nor do the spring winds carry me the +sweetness of her faithful thoughts any more. So I dreamed maybe that, +after the manner of phantoms, we might meet again on the spot where we +had both died--but alas, though the wraiths of lighter loving came gaily +to my call, she of the starlit silence and the tragic eyes came not, +though I sat long awaiting her--sat on till the tables began to be +deserted, and the interregnum between dinner and after-theatre supper +had arrived. No, I began to understand that she could no longer come +to me: we must both wait till I could go to her. + +And with this thought in my mind, I set about preparing to take my leave, +but at that moment I was startled--almost superstitiously--startled by +a touch on my shoulder. I was not to leave those once familiar halls +without one recognition, after all. It was our old waiter of all +those years ago, who, with an almost paternal gladness, was telling +me how good it was to see me again, and, with consolatory mendacity, +was assuring me that I had hardly changed a bit. God bless him--he +will never know what good it did me to have his honest recognition. +The whole world was not yet quite dead and buried, after all, nor +was I quite such an unremembered ghost as I had seemed. Dear old Jim +Lewis! So some of the old guard were still on deck, after all! And, +I was thinking as I looked at him: "He, too, has looked upon her +face. He it was who poured out our wine, that last time together." +Then I had a whim. My waiter had been used to them in the old days. + +"Jim," I said, "I want you to give this half-sovereign to the bandmaster +and ask him to play Chopin's _Funeral March_. There are not many people +in the place, so perhaps he won't mind. Tell him it's for an old friend +of yours, and in memory of all the happy dinners he had here long ago." + +So to the strains of that death music, which so strangely blends the +piercing pathos of lost things with a springlike sense of resurrection, +a spheral melody of immortal promise, I passed once more through the +radiant portals of my necropolitan restaurant into the resounding +thoroughfares of still living and still loving humanity. + + + + +XIX + +THE NEW PYRAMUS AND THISBE + + +There never was a shallower or more short-sighted criticism than that +which has held that science is the enemy of romance. Ruskin, with +all the April showers of his rhetoric, discredited himself as an +authoritative thinker when he screamed his old-maidish diatribes against +that pioneer of modern romantic communication, the railroad. Just as +surely his idol Turner proved himself a romantic painter, not by his +rainbows, or his Italian sunsets, but by that picture of _Storm, Rain, +and Speed_--an old-fashioned express fighting its way through wind, +rain, and of course rainbows--in the English National Gallery. + +With all his love of that light that never was on sea or land, Turner +was yet able to see the romance of that new thing of iron and steam so +affrighting to other men of his generation. A lover of light in all its +swift prismatic changes, he was naturally a lover of speed. He realized +that speed was one of the two most romantic things in the world. The +other is immobility. At present the two extremes of romantic expression +are the Sphinx and--the automobile. Unless you can realize that an +automobile is more romantic than a stage-coach, you know nothing +about romance. Soon the automobile will have its nose put out by the +air-ship, and we shall not need to be long-lived to see the day when +we shall hear old-timers lamenting the good old easy-going past of +the seventy-miles-an-hour automobile--just as we have heard our +grand-fathers talk of postilions and the Bath "flyer." + +Romance is made of two opposites: Change, and That Which Changeth Not. +In spite of foolish sentimentalism, who needs be told that love is one +of those forces of the universe that is the same yesterday, today, and +forever--the same today as when Dido broke her heart, as when Leander +swam the Hellespont? Gravitation is not more inherent in the cosmic +scheme, nor fire nor water more unchangeable in their qualities. + +But Love, contrary to the old notion that he is unpractical, is a +business-like god, and is ever on the lookout for the latest modern +appliances that can in anyway serve his purposes. True love is far from +being old-fashioned. On the contrary, true love is always up-to-date. +True love has its telephone, its phonograph, its automobile, and soon it +will have its air-ship. In the telephone alone what a debt love owes to +its supposed enemy, modern science! One wonders how lovers in the old +days managed to live at all without the telephone. + +We often hear how our modern appliances wear upon our nerves. But think +how the lack of modern appliances must have worn upon the nerves of our +forefathers, and particularly our foremothers! Think what distance meant +in the Middle Ages, when the news of a battle took days to travel, +though carried by the swiftest horses. Horses! Think again of news being +carried by--horses! And once more think, with a prayer of gratitude to +two magicians named Edison and Bell, and with a due sense of your being +the spoiled and petted offspring of the painful ages, that should your +love be in Omaha this night and you in New York City, you can say +good-night to her through the wall of your apartment, and hear her sigh +back her good-night to you across two thousand miles of the American +flag. Or should your love be on the sea, you can interrupt her +flirtations all the way across with your persistent wireless +conversation. Contrast your luxurious communicativeness with the case of +the lovers of old-time. Say that you have just married a young woman, +and you are happy together in your castle in the heart of the forest. +Suddenly the courier of war is at your gates, and you must up and arm +and away with your men to the distant danger. You must follow the Cross +into the savage Kingdom of the Crescent. The husband must become the +crusader, and the Lord Christ alone knows when he shall look on the +child's face of his wife again. Through goblin-haunted wildernesses he +must go, through unmapped no-man's lands, and vacuum solitudes of the +world's end, and peril and pestilence meet in every form, the face of +his foe the friendliest thing in all his mysterious travel. Not a +pay-station as yet in all the wide world, and fully five hundred years +to the nearest telegraph office! + +And think of the young wife meanwhile, alone with her maids and her +tapestry in the dank isolation of her lonely, listening castle. Not a +leaf falls in the wood, but she hears it. Not a footstep snaps the +silence, but her eyes are at the sleepless slit of light which is her +window in the armoured stone of her fortified bridal tower. The only +news of her husband she can hope for in a full year or more will be +the pleasing lies of some flattering minstrel, or broken soldier, or +imaginative pilgrim. On such rumours she must feed her famishing +heart--and all the time her husband's bones may be whitening unepitaphed +outside the walls of Ascalon or Joppa. + +There is an old Danish ballad which quaintly tells the tale of such old +long-distance days, with that blending of humour and pathos that forever +goes to the heart of man. A certain Danish lord had but yesterday taken +unto himself a young wife, and on the morrow of his marriage there came +to him the summons to war. Then, as now, there was no arguing with the +trumpets of martial duty. The soldier's trumpet heeds not the soldier's +tears. The war was far away and likely to be long. Months, even years, +might go by before that Danish lord would look on the face of his bride +again. So much might happen meanwhile! A little boy, or a little girl, +might be born to the castle, and the father, fighting far away, know +nothing of the beautiful news. And there was no telephone in the castle, +and it was five hundred years to the nearest telegraph office. + +So the husband and wife agreed upon a facetious signal of their own. The +castle stood upon a ridge of hills which could be seen fifty miles away, +and on the ridge the bride promised to build a church. If the child that +was to be born proved to be a boy, the church would be builded with a +tower; if a girl, with a steeple. So the husband went his way, and three +years passed, and at length he returned with his pennons and his +men-at-arms to his own country. Scanning the horizon line, he hurried +impatiently toward the heliographic ridge. And lo! when at last it came +in sight against the rising sun, there was a new church builded stately +there--with two towers. + +So it was with the most important of all news in the Middle Ages; and +yet today, as I said, you in New York City have only to knock good-night +on your wall, to be heard by your true love in Omaha, and hear her knock +back three times the length of France; Pyramus and Thisbe--with this +difference: that the wall is no longer a barrier, but a sensitive +messenger. It has become, indeed, in the words of Demetrius in _A +Midsummer Night's Dream_, the wittiest of partitions, and the modern +Pyramus may apostrophize it in grateful earnest: + + "Thou wall, O wall, O sweet and lovely wall ... + Thanks, courteous wall. Jove shield thee well for this!" + +So at least I always feel toward the wall of my apartment every time I +call up her whom my soul loveth that dwelleth far away in Massachusetts. +She being a Capulet and I a Montague, it would go hard with us for +communication, were it not for this long-distance wall; and any one +who knows anything of love knows that the primal need of lovers is +communication. Lovers have so deep a distrust of each other's love that +they need to be assured of it from hour to hour. To the philosopher it +may well seem strange that this certitude should thus be in need of +progressive corroboration. But so it is, and the pampered modern lover +may well wonder how his great-grandfather and great-grandmother +supported the days, or even kept their love alive, on such famine +rations as a letter once a month. A letter once a month! They must have +had enormous faith in each other, those lovers of old-time, or they must +have suffered as we can hardly bear to think of--we, who write to each +other twice a day, telegraph three times, telephone six, and transmit a +phonographic record of our sighs to each other night and morn. The +telephone has made a toy of distance and made of absence, in many cases, +a sufficient presence. It is almost worth while to be apart on occasion +just for the sake of bringing each other so magically near. It is the +Arabian Nights come true. As in them, you have only to say a word, and +the jinn of the electric fire is waiting for your commands. The word +has changed. Once it was "Abracadabra." Now it is "Central." But the +miracle is just the same. + +One might almost venture upon the generalization that most tragedies +have come about from lack of a telephone. Of course, there are +exceptions, but as a rule tragedies happen through delays in +communication. + +If there had been a telephone in Mantua, Romeo would never have bought +poison of the apothecary. Instead, he would have asked leave to use his +long-distance telephone. Calling up Verona, he would first cautiously +disguise his voice. If, as usual, the old nurse answered, all well; but +if a bearded voice set all the wires a-trembling, he would, of course, +hastily ring off, and abuse "Central" for giving him the wrong number. +And "Central" would understand. Then Romeo would wait an hour or two +till he was sure that Lord Capulet had gone to the Council, and ring up +again. This time he would probably get the nurse and confide to her his +number in Mantua. Next morning Juliet and her nurse had only to drop in +at the nearest drug store, and confide to Romeo the whole plot which +Balthazar so sadly bungled. All that was needed was a telephone, and +Romeo would have understood that Juliet was only feigning death for the +sake of life with him. + +But, as in the case of our Danish knight, there was not a pay-station +as yet in all the wide world, and it was fully five hundred years +to the nearest telegraph office. Another point in this tragedy is +worth considering by the modern mind: that not only would the final +catastrophe have been averted by the telephone, but that those beautiful +speeches to and from Juliet's balcony, made at such desperate risk to +both lovers, had the telephone only been in existence, could have +been made in complete security from the seclusion of their distant +apartments. + +Seriously speaking, there are few love tragedies, few serious historic +crises of any kind, that might not have been averted by the telephone. +Strange indeed, when one considers a little, is that fallacy of +sentimentalism which calls science the enemy of love. + +Far from being its enemy, science is easily seen to be its most romantic +servant; for all its strenuous and delicate learning it brings to the +feet of love for a plaything. Not only will it carry the voice of love +across space and time, but it will even bring it back to you from +eternity. It will not only carry to your ears the voices of the living, +but it will also keep safe for you the sweeter voices of the dead. In +fact, it would almost seem as though science had made all its +discoveries for the sake of love. + + + + +XX + +TWO WONDERFUL OLD LADIES + + +It is a pity that our language has no other word to indicate that one +has lived seventy, eighty, or ninety years, than the word "old"; for the +word "old" carries with it implications of "senility" and decrepitude, +which many merely chronologically "old" people very properly resent. The +word "young," similarly, needs the assistance of another word, for we +all know individuals of thirty and forty, sometimes even only twenty, +whom it is as absurd to call "young" as it is to call those others of +seventy, eighty, or ninety, "old." + +"Youth" is too large and rich a word to serve the limited purpose of +numbering the years of undeveloped boys and girls. It should stand +rather for the vital principle in men and women, ever expanding, and +rebuilding, and refreshing the human organism, partly a physical, but +perhaps in a greater degree a spiritual energy. + +I am not writing this out of any compliment to two wonderful "old" +ladies of whom I am particularly thinking. They would consider me a +dunce were they to suspect me of any such commonplace intent. No! I am +not going to call them "eighty years young," or employ any of those +banal euphemisms with which would-be "tactful" but really club-footed +sentimentalists insult the intelligence of the so-called "old." Of +course, I know that they are both eighty or thereabouts, and they know +very well that I know. We make no secret of it. Why should we? Actually +though the number of my years falls short of eighty, I feel so much +older than either of them, that it never occurs to me to think of them +as "old," and often as I contemplate their really glowing energetic +youth, I grow melancholy for myself, and wonder what has become of my +own. + +They were schoolgirls together. Luccia married Irene's brother--for they +allow me the privilege of calling them by their Christian names--and +they have been friends all their lives. Sometimes I see them together, +though oftener apart, for Luccia and her white-haired poet husband--no +"older" than herself,--are neighbours of mine in the country, and Irene +lives for the most part in New York--as much in love with its giant +developments as though she did not also cherish memories of that quaint, +almost vanished, New York of her girlhood days; for she is nothing if +not progressive. + +But I will tell about Luccia first, and the first thing it is natural to +speak of--so every one else finds too--is her beauty. They say that she +was beautiful when she was young (I am compelled sometimes, under +protest, to use the words "young" and "old" thus chronologically) and, +of course, she must have been. I have, however, seen some of her early +portraits, before her hair was its present beautiful colour, and I must +confess that the Luccia of an earlier day does not compare with the +Luccia of today. I don't think I should have fallen in love with her +then, whereas now it is impossible to take one's eyes off her. She seems +to have grown more flower-like with the years, and while her lovely +indestructible profile has gathered distinction, and a lifelong habit of +thinking beautiful thoughts, and contemplating beautiful things, has +drawn honeyed lines as in silver point about her eyes and mouth, the +wild-roses of her cheeks still go on blooming--like wild-roses in +moonlight. And over all glow her great clear witty eyes, the eyes of a +_grand dame_ who has still remained a girl. Her humour, no doubt, has +much to do with her youth, and I have seen strangers no little +surprised, even disconcerted, at finding so keen a humour in one so +beautiful; for beauty and humour are seldom found together in so +irresistible a combination. Is it to be wondered at that often on summer +days when I feel the need of a companion, I go in search of Luccia, and +take tea with her on the veranda? Sometimes I will find her in the +garden seated in front of her easel, making one of her delicate +water-colour sketches--for she was once a student in Paris and has +romantic Latin-quarter memories. Or I will find her with her magnifying +glass, trying to classify some weed she has come upon in the garden, +for she is a learned botanist; and sometimes we will turn over the pages +of books in which she hoards the pressed flowers gathered by her and her +husband in Italy and Switzerland up till but a year or two ago, +memorials of a life together that has been that flawless romance which +love sometimes grants to his faithful servants. + +At other times we will talk politics, and I wish you could hear the +advanced views of this "old" lady of eighty. Indeed, generally speaking, +I find that nowadays the only real progressives are the "old" people. It +seems to be the fashion with the "young" to be reactionary. Luccia, +however, has been a radical and a rebel since her girlhood, and, years +before the word "feminist" was invented, was fighting the battle of +the freedom of woman. And what a splendid Democrat she is, and how +thoroughly she understands and fearlessly faces the problems and +developments of the moment! She is of the stuff the old Chartist women +and the women of the French Revolution were made of, and in her heart +the old faith in Liberty and the people burns as brightly as though she +were some young Russian student ready to give her life for the cause. +When the revolution comes to America, stern masculine authority will be +needed to keep her--her friend Irene too--from the barricades. + +"Stern masculine authority"! As I write that phrase, how plainly I can +hear her mocking laughter; for she is never more delightful than when +pouring out her raillery on the magisterial pretensions of man. To hear +her talk! The idea of a mere man daring to assume any authority or +direction over a woman! Yet we who know her smile and whisper to +ourselves that, for all her witty tirades, she is perhaps of all women +the most feminine, and really the most "obedient" of wives--a rebel in +all else save to the mild tyranny of the poet she has loved, honoured, +and yes! obeyed, all these wonderful years. + +Perhaps in nothing is the reality of her youthfulness so expressive as +in her adorable gaiety. Like a clear fresh spring, it is ever brimming +up from the heart into her mischief-loving eyes. By her side merely +technically young people seem heavy and serious. And nothing amuses her +more than gravely to mystify, or even bewilderingly shock, some proper +acquaintance, or some respectable strangers, with her carefully designed +mock improprieties of speech or action. To look at the loveliest of +grand-mothers, it is naturally somewhat perplexing to the uninitiated +visitor to hear her talk, with her rarely distinguished manner, of +frivolous matters with which they assume she has long since done. + +A short while ago, when I was taking tea with her, she had for visitor a +staid old-maidish lady, little more than half her age, whom she had +known as a girl, but had not seen for some years. In the course of +conversation, she turned to her guest, with her grand air: + +"Have you done much dancing this season?" she asked. + +"O indeed no," answered the other unsuspiciously, "my dancing days are +over." + +"At your age!" commented Luccia with surprise. "Nonsense! You must let +me teach you to dance the tango. I have enjoyed it immensely this +winter." + +"Really?" gasped the other in astonishment, with that intonation in the +voice naturally so gratifying to the "old" suggesting that the person +talking with them really regards them as dead and buried. + +"Of course, why not?" asks Luccia with perfect seriousness. "I dance it +with my grandsons. My husband doesn't care to dance it. He prefers the +polka." + +Not knowing what to think, the poor old maid--actually "old" compared +with Luccia--looked from her to the beautiful venerable figure of her +polka-dancing husband seemingly meditating over his pipe, a little +withdrawn from them on the veranda, but inwardly shaken with mirth at +the darling nonsense of her who is still the same madcap girl he first +fell in love with so many years ago. + +When the guest had departed, with a puzzled, questioning look still +lingering on her face, Luccia turned to me, her eyes bright pools of +merriment: + +"It was quite true, wasn't it? Come, let us try it." + +And, nimble as a girl, she was on her feet, and we executed quite a +passable tango up and down the veranda, to the accompaniment of her +husband's--"Luccia! Luccia! what a wild thing you are!" + +A certain reputation for "wildness," a savour of innocent Bohemianism, +has clung to Luccia, and Irene too, all through their lives, as a legacy +from that far-off legendary time when, scarcely out of their girlhood, +they were fellow art-students together in Paris. Belonging both to +aristocratic, rather straitlaced New England families, I have often +wondered how they contrived to accomplish that adventure in a day when +such independent action on the part of two pretty young ladies was an +adventure indeed. But it was the time when the first vigorous spring of +feminine revolt was in the air. Rosa Bonheur, George Eliot, Elizabeth +Cady Stanton, and other leaders were setting the pace for the advanced +women, and George Sand was still a popular romancer. As a reminiscence +of George Sand, Luccia to this day pretends that she prefers to smoke +cigars to cigarettes, though, as a matter of fact, she has never smoked +either, and has, indeed, an ultra-feminine detestation of tobacco--even +in the form of her husband's pipe. She only says it, of course, for +the fun of seeming "naughty"; which recalls to my mind her shocking +behaviour one day when I went with her to call on some very prim +cousins in New York. It was a household of an excessively brown-stone +respectability, just the atmosphere to rouse the wickedness in Luccia. +As we sat together in an upright conversation that sounded like the +rustling of dried leaves in a cemetery, why! Luccia, for all her eighty +years, seemed like a young wild-rose bush filling the tomb-like room +with living light and fragrance. I could see the wickedness in her +surging for an outburst. She was well aware that those respectable +connections of hers had always looked upon her as a sort of "artistic" +black sheep in the family. Presently her opportunity came. As our visit +dragged mournfully towards its end, the butler entered, in pursuance of +the early Victorian ritual on such occasions, bearing a tray on which +was a decanter of sherry, some tiny wine-glasses, and some dry biscuits +of a truly early Victorian dryness. This ghostly hospitality was duly +dispensed, and Luccia, who seldom drinks anything but tea, instead of +sipping her sherry with a lady-like aloofness, drained her glass with a +sudden devil-may-care abandon, and, to the evident amazement even of the +furniture, held it out to be refilled. Such pagan behaviour had never +disgraced that scandalized drawing-room before. And when to her action +she added words, the room absolutely refused to believe its ears. "I +feel," she said, with a deep-down mirth in her eyes which only I could +suspect rather than see, "I feel today as if I should like to go on a +real spree. Do you ever feel that way?" + +A palpable shudder passed through the room. + +"Cousin Luccia!" cried out the three outraged mummies; the brother with +actual sternness, and the sisters in plain fear. Had their eccentric +cousin really gone out of her mind at last? + +"Never feel that way?" she added, delighting in the havoc she was +making. "You should. It's a wonderful feeling." + +Then she drained her second glass, and to the evident relief of all +three, rose to go. How we laughed together, as we sped away in our +taxicab. "It's as well to live up to one's reputation with such people," +she said, that dear, fantastic Luccia. + +_À propos_ that early Parisian adventure, Rosa Bonheur had been one of +Luccia's and Irene's great exemplars, and one might say, in one +particular connection,--heroes. I refer to the great painter's adoption +of masculine costume. Why two unusually pretty young women should burn +to discard the traditional flower-furniture of their sex, in exchange +for the uncouth envelopes of man, is hard to understand. But it was +the day of Mrs. Bloomer, as well as Rosa Bonheur; and earnest young +"intellectuals" among women had a notion, I fancy, that to shake off +their silks and laces was, symbolically, at all events, to shake off the +general disabilities of their sex, and was somehow an assertion of a +mental equality with man. At all events, it was a form of defiance +against their sex's immemorial tyrant, which seems to have appealed to +the imaginations of some young women of the period. Another woman's +weakness to be sternly discarded was that scriptural "glory" of her +hair. That must be ruthlessly lopped. So it is easy to imagine the +horror of such relatives as I have hinted at when our two beautiful +adventuresses returned from Paris, and appeared before their families in +great Spanish cloaks, picturesque, coquettish enough you may be sure, +veiling with some show of discretion those hideous compromises with +trousers invented and worn by the strong-minded Mrs. Bloomer, and +wearing their hair after the manner of Florentine boys. To face one's +family, and to walk New York streets so garbed, must have needed real +courage in those days; yet the two friends did both, and even for +a while accepted persecution for vagaries which for them had the +dead-seriousness of youth. + +Passionate young propagandists as they were, they even preferred to +abandon their homes for a while--rather than their bloomers--and, taking +a studio together in New York, started out to earn their own living by +the teaching of art. Those were the days of the really brave women. + +But to return to the less abstract topic of the bloomers, I often tease +Luccia and Irene about them, seeking for further information as to why +they ever came to retrograde from a position so heroically taken, one of +such serious import to human progress, and to condescend once more to +don the livery of feminine servitude, and appear, as they do today, in +delicate draperies which the eye searches in vain for any hint of +sanguinary revolution. Luccia always looks shamefaced at the question. +She still feels guilty, I can see, of a traitorous backsliding and +occasionally threatens to make up for it by a return to masculine +costume--looking the most exquisite piece of Dresden china as she says +it. I have seen that masculine tyrant of hers smiling knowingly to +himself on such occasions, and it has not been difficult to guess why +and when those historic bloomers disappeared into the limbo of lost +causes. There is little doubt that when Love came in by the door, the +bloomers went out, so to speak, by the window. + +Irene seems to have held out longer, and, doubtless, scornful of her +more frivolous comrade's defection, steadfastly kept the faith awhile +unsupported, walking the world in bloomered loneliness--till a like +event overtook her. Such is the end of every maid's revolt! But Irene, +to this day, retains more of her student seriousness than her more +worldly-minded friend. Her face is of the round cherubic type, and her +large heavy-lidded eyes have a touch of demureness veiling humour no +less deep than Luccia's, but more reflective, chuckling quietly to +itself, though on occasion I know no one better to laugh with, even +giggle with, than Irene. But, whereas Luccia will talk gaily of +revolution and even anarchy for the fun of it, and in the next breath +talk hats with real seriousness, Irene still remains the purposeful +revolutionary student she was as a girl; while Luccia contents herself +with flashing generalizations, Irene seriously studies the latest +developments of thought and society, reads all the new books, sees all +the new plays and pictures, and has all the new movements of whatever +kind--art, philosophy, and sociology--at her finger ends; and I may add +that her favourite writer is Anatole France. Whenever I need light on +the latest artistic or philosophic nonsense calling itself a movement +(cubism, futurism, Bergsonism, syndicalism, or the like) I go to her, +certain that she will know all about it. Nothing is too "modern" for +this wonderful "old" lady of seventy-nine; and, whenever I am in town, +we always go together to the most "advanced" play in the newest of new +theatres. + +_À propos_ our theatre-going together, I must not forget a story about +her which goes back to that bloomer period. A little while ago, calling +to take tea with her, I found her seated with a fine soldierly +white-haired "old" man, and they were in such merry talk that I felt +that perhaps I was interrupting old memories. But they generously took +me into the circle of their reminiscence. They had been laughing as I +came in--"Shall I tell him, General?" she said, "what we were laughing +about?" Then she did. She and the General had been girl and boy +together, and as they came to eighteen and nineteen had been +semi-serious sweethearts. The embryo General--no doubt because of her +pretty face--had taken all her student vagaries with lover-like +seriousness, and had, on one occasion, assisted in a notable enterprise. +The bloomers had not been definitely donned at that time, but they were +on the way, glimmering ahead as a discussed ideal. Whether it was as a +preliminary experiment, or only in consequence of a "dare," I am not +quite sure. I think it was a little of both, and that the General had +dared Irene to go with him to the opera (in the gallery) dressed in +boy's clothes. She accepted the challenge, borrowing a suit of clothes +from her brother for the purpose. Her figure, according to the General's +account, had looked anything but masculine, and her hair, tucked up +under her boy's hat as best she could, was a peculiar peril. How her +heart had almost stopped beating as a policeman had turned upon the +youthful pair a suspicious scrutiny, how they had taken to their heels +at his glance, how she had crimsoned at the box-office, and hid her face +behind a fat man as they had scurried past the ticket-attendant, and how +during the whole performance a keen-faced woman had glanced at her with +a knowing persistency that seemed to threaten her with imminent exposure +and arrest, and how wonderful the whole thing had been--just to be in +boy's clothes and go in them to the theatre with one's sweetheart. O +youth! youth! youth! + +As I looked at the General with his white hair, and Irene with her +quaint little old lady's cap over her girlish face, and visualized for +myself those two figures before me as they had appeared on the night of +that escapade, I realized that the real romance of life is made by +memory, and that for these two old friends to be able thus to recall +together across all those years that laughing freak of their young blood +was still more romantic than the original escapade. But as I went on +looking at Irene, with the bloom of her immortal youth upon her, I grew +jealous of the General's share in that historic night. Well, never mind, +it is I who take her to the theatre nowadays--and, after all, I think I +prefer her to go dressed just as she is. + + + + +XXI + +A CHRISTMAS MEDITATION + + +Christmas already! However welcome its coming, Christmas always seems to +take us by surprise. Is the year really so soon at the end of its +journey? Why, it seems only yesterday that it needed a special effort of +remembrance to date our letters with the new "_anno domini_." And have +you noticed that one always does that reluctantly, with something almost +of misgiving? The figures of the old year have a warm human look, but +those of the new wear a chill, unfamiliar, almost menacing expression. +Nineteen hundred and--we know. It is nearly "all in." It has done its +best--and its worst. Between Christmas Day and New-Year it has hardly +time to change its character. Good or bad, as it may have been, we feel +at home with it, and we are fain to keep the old almanac a little longer +on the wall. But the last leaves are falling, the days are shortening. +There is a smell of coming snow in the air, and for weeks past it has +already been Christmas in the shops. + +Yes, however it strikes us, we are a year older. On the first of January +last we had twelve brand-new months of a brand-new year to spend, and +now the last of them is all but spent. We had a new spring to look out +for, like the coming of one's sweetheart, a new summer bounteous in +prospect with inexhaustible wealth of royal sunshine, a new autumn, with +ruddy orchards and the glory of the tapestried woods; and now of the +four new seasons that were to be ours but one remains: + + And here is but December left and I, + To wonder if the hawthorn bloomed in May, + And if the wild rose with so fine a flush + Mantled the cheek of June, and if the way + The stream went singing foamed with meadow sweet, + And if the throstle sang in yonder bush, + And if the lark dizzied with song the sky. + I watched and listened--yet so sweet, so fleet, + The mad young year went by! + +Strange, that feeling at the end of the year that somehow we have missed +it, have failed to experience it all to the full, taken it too +carelessly, not dwelt sufficiently on its rich, expressive hours. Each +year we feel the same, and however intent we may have been, however we +have watched and listened, sensitively eager to hold and exhaust each +passing moment, when the year-end has come, we seem somehow to have been +cheated after all. Who, at the beginning of each year, has not promised +himself a stricter attentiveness to his experience? This year he will +"load every rift with ore." + + This year, I said, when first along the lane + With tiny nipples of the tender green + The winter-blackened hedge grew bright again, + This year I watch and listen; I have seen + So many springs steal profitless away, + This year I garner every sound and sweet. + And you, young year, make not such haste to bring + Hawthorn and rose; nor jumble, indiscreet, + Treasure on treasure of the precious spring; + But bring all softly forth upon the air, + Unhasting to be fair... + +Yet, for all our watchfulness, the year seems to have escaped us. We +know that the birds sang, that the flowers bloomed, that the grass was +green, but it seems to us that we did not take our joy of them with +sufficient keenness; our sweetheart came, but we did not look deep +enough into her eyes. If only we live to see the wild rose again! But +meanwhile here is the snow. + +Unless we are still numbered among those happy people for whom +Christmas-trees are laden and lit, this annual prematurity of Christmas +cannot but make us a little meditative amid our mirth, and if, while +Santa Claus is dispensing his glittering treasures, our thoughts grow a +little wistful, they will not necessarily be mournful thoughts, or on +that account less seasonable in character; for Christmas is essentially +a retrospective feast, and we may, with fitness, with indeed a proper +piety of unforgetfulness, bring even our sad memories, as it were to +cheer themselves, within the glow of its festivity. Ghosts have always +been invited to Christmas parties, and whether they are seen or not, +they always come; nor is any form of story so popular by the Christmas +fire as the ghost-story--which, when one thinks of it, is rather odd, +considering the mirthful character of the time. Yet, after all, what are +our memories but ghost-stories? Ah! the beautiful ghosts that come to +the Christmas fire! + +Christmas too is pre-eminently the Feast of the Absent, the Festival of +the Far-Away, for the most prosperous ingathering of beloved faces about +the Christmas fire can but include a small number of those we would fain +have there; and have you ever realized that the absent are ghosts? That +is, they live with us sheerly as spiritual presences, dependent upon our +faithful remembrance for their embodiment. We may not, with our physical +eyes, see them once a year; we may not even have so seen them for twenty +years; it may be decreed that we shall never see them again; we seldom, +perhaps never, write to each other; all we know of each other is that we +are alive and love each other across space and time. Alive--but how? +Scarce otherwise, surely, than the unforgotten dead are alive--alive in +unforgetting love. + +It is rather strange, if you will give it a thought, how much of our +real life is thus literally a ghost-story. Probably it happens with the +majority of us that those who mean most to us, by the necessities of +existence, must be far away, met but now and then in brief flashes +of meeting that often seem to say so much less than absence; our +intercourse is an intercourse of the imagination--yet how real! They +belong to the unseen in our lives, and have all its power over us. The +intercourse of a mother and a son--is it not often like that in a world +which sends its men on the four winds, to build and fight, while the +mother must stay in the old nest? Seldom at Christmas can a mother +gather all her children beneath the wing of her smile. Her big boys are +seven seas away, and even her girls have Christmas-trees of their own. +But motherhood is in its very nature a ghostly, a spiritual, thing, and +the big boys and the old mother are not really divided. They meet +unseen by the Christmas fire, as they meet all the year round in that +mysterious ether of the soul, where space and time are not. + +Yes, it is strange to think how small a proportion of our lives we spend +with those we love; even when we say that we spend all our time with +them. Husband and wife even--how much of the nearness of the closest of +human relations is, and must be, what Rossetti has called "parted +presence!" The man must go forth to his labour until the evening. How +few of the twenty-four hours can these two beings who have given their +whole lives to each other really give! Husband and wife even must be +content to be ghosts to each other for the greater part of each day. +As Rossetti says in his poem, eyes, hands, voice, lips, can meet so +strangely seldom in the happiest marriage; only in the invisible home of +the heart can the most fortunate husband and wife be always together: + + Your heart is never away, + But ever with mine, forever, + Forever without endeavour, + Tomorrow, love, as today; + Two blent hearts never astray, + Two souls no power may sever, + Together, O my love, forever! + +When I said that the absent were ghosts, I don't think you quite liked +the saying. It gave you a little shiver. It seemed rather grimly +fantastic. But do you not begin to see what I meant? Begin to see the +comfort in the thought? begin to see the inner connection between +Christmas and the ghost-story? Yes, the real lesson of Christmas is the +ever presence of the absent through love; the ghostly, that is to say +the spiritual, nature of all human intercourse. Our realities can exist +only in and through our imaginations, and the most important part of our +lives is lived in a dream with dream-faces, the faces of the absent and +the dead--who, in the consolation of this thought, are alike brought +near. + +I have a friend who is dead--but I say to myself that he is in New +Zealand; for, if he were really in New Zealand, we should hardly seem +less distant, or be in more frequent communication. We should say that +we were both busy men, that the mails were infrequent, but that between +us there was no need of words, that we both "understood." That is what I +say now. It is just as appropriate. Perhaps he says it too. And--we +shall meet by the Christmas fire. + +I have a friend who is alive. He is alive in England. We have not met +for twelve years. He never writes, and I never write. Perhaps we shall +never meet, never even write to each other, again. It is our way, the +way of many a friendship, none the less real for its silence--friendship +by faith, one might say, rather than by correspondence. My dead friend +is not more dumb, not more invisible. When these two friends meet me +by the Christmas fire, will they not both alike be ghosts--both, in a +sense, dead, but both, in a truer sense, alive? + +It is so that, without our thinking of it, our simple human feelings one +for another at Christmas-time corroborate the mystical message which +it is the church's meaning to convey by this festival of "peace and +good-will to men"--the power of the Invisible Love; from the mystical +love of God for His world, to the no less, mystical love of mother and +child, of lover and lover, of friend and friend. + +And, when you think of it, is not this festival founded upon what, +without irreverence, we may call the Divine Ghost-Story of Christmas? +Was there ever another ghost-story so strange, so full of marvels, a +story with so thrilling a message from the unseen? Taken just as a +story, is there anything in the _Arabian Nights_ so marvellous as this +ghost-story of Christmas? The world was all marble and blood and bronze, +against a pitiless sky of pitiless gods. The world was Rome. No rule +ever stood builded so impregnably from earth to stars--a merciless wall +of power. Strength never planted upon the earth so stern a foot. Never +was tyranny so invincibly bastioned to the cowed and conquered eye. + +And against all this marble and blood and bronze, what frail fantastic +attack is this? What quaint expedition from fairy-land that comes so +insignificantly against these battlements on which the Roman helmets +catch the setting sun? + +A Star in the Sky. Some Shepherds from Judea. Three Wise Men from the +East. Some Frankincense and Myrrh. A Mother and Child. + +Yes, a fairy-tale procession--but these are to conquer Rome, and that +child at his mother's breast has but to speak three words, for all that +marble and bronze to melt away: "Love One Another." + +It may well have seemed an almost ludicrous weapon--three gentle words. +So one might attack a fortress with a flower. But Rome fell before them, +for all that, and cruel as the world still is, so cruel a world can +never be again. The history of Christianity from Christ to Tolstoi +is the history of a ghost-story; and as Rome fell before the men it +martyred, so Russia has been compelled at last to open its prison doors +by the passive imperative of the three gentle words. Stone and iron are +terribly strong to the eye and even to the arm of man, but they are as +vapour before the breath of the soul. Many enthroned and magisterial +authorities seem so much more important and powerful than the simple +human heart, but let the trial of strength come, and we see the might of +the delicate invisible energy that wells up out of the infinite mystery +to support the dreams of man. + +Christmas is the friendly human announcement of this ghostly truth; its +holly and boar's-head are but a rough-and-tumble emblazonment of that +mystic gospel of--The Three Words; the Gospel of the Unseen Love. + +And how well has the church chosen this particular season of the year +for this most subtly spiritual of all its festivals, so subtle because +its ghostly message is so ruddily disguised in human mirth, and thus the +more unconsciously operative in human hearts! + +Winter, itself so ghostly a thing, so spiritual in its beauty, was +indeed the season to catch our ears with this ghost-story of the +Invisible and Invincible Love. The other seasons are full of sensuous +charm and seductiveness. With endless variety of form and colour and +fragrance, they weave "a flowery band to bind us to the earth." They are +running over with the pride of sap, the luxury of green leaves, and the +intoxicating fulness of life. The summer earth is like some voluptuous +enchantress, all ardour and perfume, and soft dazzle of moted sunshine. +But the beauty of winter seems a spiritual, almost a supernatural, +thing, austere and forbidding at first, but on a nearer approach found +to be rich in exquisite exhilaration, in rare and lofty discoveries and +satisfactions of the soul. Winter naturally has found less favour with +the poets than the other seasons. Praise of it has usually a strained +air, as though the poet were making the best of a barren theme, like a +portrait-painter reluctantly flattering some unattractive sitter. But +one poet has seen and seized the mysterious beauty of winter with +unforced sympathy--Coventry Patmore, whose "Odes," in particular, +containing as they do some of the most rarely spiritual meditation in +English poetry, are all too little known. In one of these he has these +beautiful lines, which I quote, I hope correctly, from memory: + + I, singularly moved + To love the lovely that are not beloved, + Of all the seasons, most love winter, and to trace + The sense of the Trophonian pallor of her face. + It is not death, but plenitude of peace; + And this dim cloud which doth the earth enfold + Hath less the characters of dark and cold + Than light and warmth asleep, + And intermittent breathing still doth keep + With the infant harvest heaving soft below + Its eider coverlet of snow. + +The beauty of winter is like the beauty of certain austere classics of +literature and art, and as with them, also, it demands a certain almost +moral strenuousness of application before it reveals itself. The +loftiest masterpieces have something aloof and cheerless about them at +our first approach, something of the cold breath of those starry spaces +into which they soar, and to which they uplift our spirits. When we +first open Dante or Milton, we miss the flowers and the birds and the +human glow of the more sensuous and earth-dwelling poets. But after +awhile, after our first rather bleak introduction to them, we grow aware +that these apparently undecorated and unmusical masterpieces are radiant +and resounding with a beauty and a music which "eye hath not seen nor +ear heard." For flowers we are given stars, for the song of birds the +music of the spheres, and for that human glow a spiritual ecstasy. + +Similarly with winter. It has indeed a strange beauty peculiar to +itself, but it is a beauty we must be at some pains to enjoy. The beauty +of the other seasons comes to us, offers itself to us, without effort. +To study the beauty of summer, it is enough to lie under green boughs +with half-closed eyes, and listen to the running stream and the murmur +of a million wings. But winter's is no such idle lesson. In summer we +can hardly stay indoors, but in winter we can hardly be persuaded to +go out. We must gird ourselves to overcome that first disinclination, +else we shall know nothing of winter but its churlish wind and its +ice-in-the-pail. But, the effort made, and once out of doors on a +sunlit winter's morning, how soon are we finding out the mistake we +were making, coddling ourselves in the steam-heat! Indoors, indeed, +the prospect had its Christmas-card picturesqueness; snow-clad roofs, +snow-laden boughs, silhouetted tracery of leafless trees; but we said +that it was a soulless spectacular display, the beauty of death, and +the abhorred coldness thereof. We have hardly walked a hundred yards, +however, before impressions very different are crowding upon us, +among which the impression of cold is forgotten, or only retained as +pleasantly heightening the rest. + +Far from the world's being dead, as it had seemed indoors, we are +presently, in some strange indefinable way, made intensely conscious of +a curious overwhelming sense of life in the air, as though the crystal +atmosphere was, so to say, ecstatically charged with the invisible +energy of spiritual forces. In the enchanted stillness of the snow, we +seem to hear the very breathing of the spirit of life. The cessation of +all the myriad little sounds that rise so merrily and so musically from +the summer surface of the earth seems to allow us to hear the solemn +beat of the very heart of earth itself. We seem very near to the sacred +mystery of being, nearer than at any other season of the year, for in +other seasons we are distracted by its pleasurable phenomena, but in +winter we seem close to the very mystery itself; for the world seems to +have put on robes of pure spirit and ascended into a diviner ether. + +The very phenomena of winter have a spiritual air which those of summer +lack, a phantom-like strangeness. How mysterious this ice, how ghostly +this snow, and all the beautiful fantastic shapes taken by both; the +dream-like foliage, and feathers and furs of the snow, the Gothic +diablerie of icicled eaves, all the fairy fancies of the frost, the +fretted crystal shapes that hang the brook-side with rarer than Venetian +glass, the strange flowers that stealthily overlay the windows, even +while we watch in vain for the unseen hand! No flowers of summer seem so +strange as these, make us feel so weirdly conscious of the mystery of +life. As the ghostly artist covers the pane, is it not as though a +spirit passed? + +As we walk on through the shining morning, we ourselves seem to grow +rarefied as the air. Our senses seem to grow finer, purged to a keener +sensitiveness. Our eyes and ears seem to become spiritual rather than +physical organs, and an exquisite elation, as though we were walking on +shining air, or winging through celestial space, fills all our being. +The material earth and our material selves seem to grow joyously +transparent, and while we are conscious of our earthly shoe-leather +ringing out on the iron-bound highway, we seem, nevertheless, to be +spirits moving without effort, in a world of spirit. Seldom, if ever, +in summer are we thus made conscious of, so to say, our own ghosts, +thus lifted up out of our material selves with a happy sense of +disembodiment. + +There would, indeed, seem to be some relation between temperature and +the soul, and something literally purifying about cold. Certain it is +that we return from our winter's walk with something sacred in our +hearts and something shining in our faces, which we seldom, if ever, +bring back with us in summer. Without understanding the process, we seem +to have been brought nearer to the invisible mystery, and a solemn peace +of happy insight seems for a little while at least to possess our souls. +Our white walk in the snow-bright air has in some way quickened the +half-torpid immortal within us, revived awhile our sluggish sense of our +spiritual significance and destiny, made us once more, if only for a +little, attractively mysterious to ourselves. Yes! there is what one +might call a certain monastic discipline about winter which impels the +least spiritual minded to meditation on his mortal lot and its immortal +meanings; and thus, as I said, the Church has done wisely to choose +winter for its most Christian festival. The heart of man, thus prepared +by the very elements, is the more open to the message of the miraculous +love, and the more ready to translate it into terms of human goodness. +And thus, I hope, the ghostly significance of mince-pie is made clear. + +But enough of ghostly, grown-up thoughts. Let us end with a song for +the children: + + O the big red sun, + And the wide white world, + And the nursery window + Mother-of-pearled; + + And the houses all + In hoods of snow, + And the mince-pies, + And the mistletoe; + + And Christmas pudding, + And berries red, + And stockings hung + At the foot of the bed; + + And carol-singers, + And nothing but play-- + O baby, this is + Christmas Day! + + + + +XXII + +ON RE-READING WALTER PATER + + +It is with no small satisfaction, and with a sense of reassurance of +which one may, in moods of misgiving, have felt the need during +two decades of the Literature of Noise, that one sees a writer so +pre-eminently a master of the Literature of Meditation coming, for all +the captains and the shouting, so surely into his own. The acceptance +of Walter Pater is not merely widening all the time, but it is more +and more becoming an acceptance such as he himself would have most +valued, an acceptance in accordance with the full significance of his +work rather than a one-sided appreciation of some of its Corinthian +characteristics. The Doric qualities of his work are becoming recognized +also, and he is being read, as he has always been read by his true +disciples--so not inappropriately to name those who have come under his +graver spell--not merely as a _prosateur_ of purple patches, or a +sophist of honeyed counsels tragically easy to misapply, but as an +artist of the interpretative imagination of rare insight and magic, a +writer of deep humanity as well as aesthetic beauty, and the teacher of +a way of life at once ennobling and exquisite. It is no longer possible +to parody him--after the fashion of Mr. Mallock's brilliancy in _The New +Republic_--as a writer of "all manner and no matter," nor is it possible +any longer to confuse his philosophy with those gospels of unrestrained +libertinism which have taken in vain the name of Epicurus. His highly +wrought, sensitively coloured, and musically expressive style is seen to +be what it is because of its truth to a matter profound and delicate and +intensely meditated, and such faults as it has come rather of too much +matter than too little; while his teaching, far from being that of +a facile "Epicureanism," is seen, properly understood, to involve +something like the austerity of a fastidious Puritanism, and to result +in a jealous asceticism of the senses rather than in their indulgence. +"Slight as was the burden of positive moral obligation with which he had +entered Rome," he writes of Marius, as on his first evening in Rome the +murmur comes to him of "the lively, reckless call to 'play,' from the +sons and daughters of foolishness," "it was to no wasteful and vagrant +affections, such as these, that his Epicureanism had committed him." +Such warnings against misunderstanding Pater is careful to place, at, so +to say, all the cross-roads in his books, so scrupulously concerned is +he lest any reader should take the wrong turning. Few writers, indeed, +manifest so constant a consideration for, and, in minor matters, +such a sensitive courtesy toward, their readers, while in matters +of conscience Pater seems to feel for them an actual pastoral +responsibility. His well-known withdrawal of the "Conclusion" to _The +Renaissance_ from its second edition, from a fear that "it might +possibly mislead some of those young men into whose hands it might +fall," is but one of many examples of his solicitude; and surely such as +have gone astray after such painstaking guidance have but their own +natures to blame. As he justly says, again of Marius, "in the reception +of metaphysical _formula_, all depends, as regards their actual and +ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human +nature into which they fall--the company they find already present +there, on their admission into the house of thought." + +That Pater's philosophy could ever have been misunderstood is not to be +entertained with patience by any one who has read him with even ordinary +attention; that it may have been misapplied, in spite of all his care, +is, of course, possible; but if a writer is to be called to account for +all the misapplications, or distortions, of his philosophy, writing may +as well come to an end. Yet, inconceivable as it may sound, a critic +very properly held in popular esteem recently gave it as his opinion +that the teaching of Walter Pater was responsible for the tragic career +of the author of _The Picture of Dorian Gray_. Certainly that remarkable +man was an "epicurean"--but one, to quote Meredith, "whom Epicurus would +have scourged out of his garden"; and the statement made by the critic +in question that _The Renaissance_ is the book referred to in _The +Picture of Dorian Gray_ as having had a sinister influence over its hero +is so easily disposed of by a reference to that romance itself that it +is hard to understand its ever having been made. Here is the passage +describing the demoralizing book in question: + + His eye fell on the yellow book that Lord Henry had sent him.... It + was the strangest book he had ever read. It seemed to him that in + exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of + the world were passing in dumb show before him. Things that he had + dimly dreamed of were suddenly made real to him. Things of which he + had never dreamed were gradually revealed. + + It was a novel without a plot, and with only one character, being, + indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian who + spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the + passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except + his own, and to sum up, as it were, in himself the various moods + through which the world-spirit had ever passed, loving for their + mere artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called + virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call + sin. The style in which it was written was that curious jewelled + style, vivid and obscure at once, full of _argot_ and of archaisms, + of technical expressions and of elaborate paraphrases, that + characterizes the work of some of the finest artists of the French + school of _Décandents._ There were in it metaphors as monstrous as + orchids, and as evil in colour. The life of the senses was described + in the terms of mystical philosophy. One hardly knew at times + whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some medieval + saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner. It was a + poisonous book. The heavy odour of incense seemed to cling about its + pages and to trouble the brain. The mere cadence of the sentences, + the subtle monotony of their music, so full as it was of complex + refrains and movements elaborately repeated, produced in the mind of + the lad, as he passed from chapter to chapter, a form of reverie, a + malady of dreaming, that made him unconscious of the falling day and + the creeping shadows.... + + For years Dorian Gray could not free himself from the memory of this + book. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he never + sought to free himself from it. He procured from Paris no less than + five large paper copies of the first edition, and had them bound in + different colours, so that they might suit his various moods and the + changing fancies of a nature over which he seemed, at times, to have + almost entirely lost control. + +The book thus characterized is obviously by a French writer--I have +good reason for thinking that it was _À Rebours_ by Huysmans--and how +any responsible reader can have imagined that Walter Pater's _The +Renaissance_ answers to this description passes all understanding. A +critic guilty of so patent a misstatement must either never have read +_The Picture of Dorian Gray_, or never have read _The Renaissance_. On +the other hand, if on other more reliable evidence it can be found that +Oscar Wilde was one of those "young men" misled by Pater's book, for +whose spiritual safety Pater, as we have seen, was so solicitous, one +can only remind oneself again of the phrase quoted above in regard to +"that soil of human nature" into which a writer casts his seed. If that +which was sown a lily comes up a toadstool, there is evidently something +wrong with the soil. + +Let us briefly recall what this apparently so "dangerous" philosophy +of Pater's is, and we cannot do better than examine it in its most +concentrated and famous utterance, this oft-quoted passage from that +once-suppressed "Conclusion" to _The Renaissance_: + + Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A + counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated + dramatic life. How may we see in them all that there is to be seen + in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from + point to point, and be present always at the focus where the + greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? To + burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this + ecstasy, is success in life.... While all melts under our feet, we + may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to + knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for + a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange + colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the + face of one's friend. With this sense of the splendor of our + experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one + desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make + theories about the things we see and touch.... Well! we are all + _condamnés_, as Victor Hugo says; we are all under sentence of + death, but with a sort of indefinite reprieve--_les hommes sont tous + condamnés à mort avec des sursis indéfinis_: we have an interval, + and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in + listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among "the + children of this world," in art and song. For our one chance lies in + expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible + into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened + sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of + enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come + naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion--that it does + yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of + such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of + art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing + frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as + they pass, and simply for those moments' sake. + +Now, if it be true that the application, or rather the misapplication, +of this philosophy led Oscar Wilde to Reading Gaol, it is none the +less true that another application of it led Marius to something like +Christian martyrdom, and Walter Pater himself along an ever loftier and +serener path of spiritual vision. + +Nothing short of wilful misconstruction can make of the counsel thus +offered, with so priestly a concern that the writer's exact meaning be +brought home to his reader, other than an inspiration toward a noble +employment of that mysterious opportunity we call life. For those of us, +perhaps more than a few, who have no assurance of the leisure of an +eternity for idleness or experiment, this expansion and elevation of the +doctrine of the moment, carrying a merely sensual and trivial moral in +the Horatian maxim of _carpe diem_, is one thrillingly charged with +exhilaration and sounding a solemn and yet seductive challenge to us to +make the most indeed, but also to make the best, of our little day. To +make the most, and to make the best of life! Those who misinterpret or +misapply Pater forget his constant insistence on the second half of that +precept. We are to get "as many pulsations as possible into the given +time," but we are to be very careful that our use of those pulsations +shall be the finest. Whether or not it is "simply for those moments' +sake," our attempt must be to give "_the highest quality_," remember, to +those "moments as they pass." And who can fail to remark the fastidious +care with which Pater selects various typical interests which he deems +most worthy of dignifying the moment? The senses are, indeed, of natural +right, to have their part; but those interests on which the accent of +Pater's pleading most persuasively falls are not so much the "strange +dyes, strange colours, and curious odours," but rather "the face of +one's friend," ending his subtly musical sentence with a characteristic +shock of simplicity, almost incongruity--or "some mood of passion or +insight or intellectual excitement," or "any contribution to knowledge +that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment." +There is surely a great gulf fixed between this lofty preoccupation with +great human emotions and high spiritual and intellectual excitements, +and a vulgar gospel of "eat, drink, for tomorrow we die," whether or not +both counsels start out from a realization of "the awful brevity" of our +mortal day. That realization may prompt certain natures to unbridled +sensuality. Doomed to perish as the beasts, they choose, it would seem +with no marked reluctance, to live the life of the beast, a life +apparently not without its satisfactions. But it is as stupid as it is +infamous to pretend that such natures as these find any warrant for +their tragic libertinism in Walter Pater. They may, indeed, have found +aesthetic pleasure in the reading of his prose, but the truth of which +that prose is but the beautiful garment has passed them by. For such +it can hardly be claimed that they have translated into action the +aspiration of this tenderly religious passage: + + Given the hardest terms, supposing our days are indeed but a shadow, + even so we may well adorn and beautify, in scrupulous self-respect, + our souls and whatever our souls touch upon--these wonderful bodies, + these material dwelling-places through which the shadows pass + together for a while, the very raiment we wear, our very pastimes, + and the intercourse of society. + +Here in this passage from _Marius_ we find, to use Pater's own words +once more, "the spectacle of one of the happiest temperaments coming, +so to speak, to an understanding with the most depressing of theories." +That theory, of course, was the doctrine of the perpetual flux of things +as taught by Aristippus of Cyrene, making a man of the world's practical +application of the old Heraclitean formula, his influence depending on +this, "that in him an abstract doctrine, originally somewhat acrid, had +fallen upon a rich and genial nature well fitted to transform it into a +theory of practice of considerable stimulative power toward a fair +life." Such, too, was Pater's nature, and such his practical usefulness +as what one might call a philosophical artist. Meredith, Emerson, +Browning, and even Carlyle were artists so far related to him and each +other in that each of them wrought a certain optimism, or, at all +events, a courageous and even blithe working theory of life and conduct, +out of the unrelenting facts of existence unflinchingly faced, rather +than ecclesiastically smoothed over--the facts of death and pain and +struggle, and even the cruel mystery that surrounds with darkness and +terror our mortal lot. Each one of them deliberately faced the worst, +and with each, after his own nature, the worst returned to laughter. The +force of all these men was in their artistic or poetic embodiment of +philosophical conceptions, but, had they not been artists and poets, +their philosophical conceptions would have made but little way. And it +is time to recall, what critics preoccupied with his "message" leave +unduly in the background, that Pater was an artist of remarkable power +and fascination, a maker of beautiful things, which, whatever their +philosophical content, have for our spirits the refreshment and +edification which all beauty mysteriously brings us, merely because it +is beauty. _Marius the Epicurean_ is a great and wonderful book, not +merely on account of its teaching, but because it is simply one of the +most _beautiful_ books, perhaps the most beautiful book, written in +English. It is beautiful in many ways. It is beautiful, first of all, in +the uniquely personal quality of its prose, prose which is at once +austere and sensuous, simple at once and elaborate, scientifically exact +and yet mystically suggestive, cool and hushed as sanctuary marble, +sweet-smelling as sanctuary incense; prose that has at once the +qualities of painting and of music, rich in firmly visualized pictures, +yet moving to subtle, half-submerged rhythms, and expressive with every +delicate accent and cadence; prose highly wrought, and yet singularly +surprising one at times with, so to say, sudden innocencies, artless and +instinctive beneath all its sedulous art. It is no longer necessary, as +I hinted above, to fight the battle of this prose. Whether it appeal to +one not, no critic worth attention any longer disparages it as mere +ornate and perfumed verbiage, the elaborate mannerism of a writer hiding +the poverty of his thought beneath a pretentious raiment of decorated +expression. It is understood to be the organic utterance of one with a +vision of the world all his own striving through words, as he best can, +to make that vision visible to others as nearly as possible as he +himself sees it. Pater himself has expounded his theory and practice of +prose, doubtless with a side-thought of self-justification, in various +places up and down his writings, notably in his pregnant essay on +"Style," and perhaps even more persuasively in the chapter called +"Euphuism" in _Marius_. In this last he thus goes to the root of the +matter: + + That preoccupation of the _dilettante_ with what might seem mere + details of form, after all, did but serve the purpose of bringing + to the surface, sincerely and in their integrity, certain strong + personal intuitions, a certain vision or apprehension of things + as really being, with important results, thus, rather than + thus--intuitions which the artistic or literary faculty was called + upon to follow, with the exactness of wax or clay, clothing the + model within. + +This striving to express the truth that is in him has resulted in a +beauty of prose which for individual quality must be ranked with the +prose of such masters as De Quincey and Lamb, and, to make a not +irrelevant comparison, above the very fine prose of his contemporary +Stevenson, by virtue of its greater personal sincerity. + +There is neither space here, nor need, to illustrate this opinion by +quotation, though it may not be amiss, the musical and decorative +qualities of Pater's prose having been so generally dwelt upon, to +remind the reader of the magical simplicities by which it is no less +frequently characterized. Some of his quietest, simplest phrases have a +wonderful evocative power: "the long reign of these quiet Antonines," +for example; "the thunder which had sounded all day among the hills"; +"far into the night, when heavy rain-drops had driven the last lingerers +home"; "Flavian was no more. The little marble chest with its dust and +tears lay cold among the faded flowers." What could be simpler than +these brief sentences, yet how peculiarly suggestive they are; +what immediate pictures they make! And this magical simplicity is +particularly successful in his descriptive passages, notably of natural +effects, effects caught with an instinctively selected touch or two, +an expressive detail, a grey or coloured word. How lightly sketched, +and yet how clearly realized in the imagination, is the ancestral +country-house of Marius's boyhood, "White-Nights," "that exquisite +fragment of a once large and sumptuous villa"--"Two centuries of the +play of the sea-wind were in the velvet of the mosses which lay along +its inaccessible ledges and angles." Take again this picture: + + The cottagers still lingered at their doors for a few minutes as the + shadows grew larger, and went to rest early; though there was still + a glow along the road through the shorn corn-fields, and the birds + were still awake about the crumbling grey heights of an old temple. + +And again this picture of a wayside inn: + + The room in which he sat down to supper, unlike the ordinary + Roman inns at that day, was trim and sweet. The firelight danced + cheerfully upon the polished three-wicked _lucernae_ burning cleanly + with the best oil, upon the whitewashed walls, and the bunches of + scarlet carnations set in glass goblets. The white wine of the place + put before him, of the true colour and flavour of the grape, and + with a ring of delicate foam as it mounted in the cup, had a + reviving edge or freshness he had found in no other wine. + +Those who judge of Pater's writing by a few purple passages such as the +famous rhapsody on the _Mona Lisa_, conceiving it as always thus heavy +with narcotic perfume, know but one side of him, and miss his gift +for conveying freshness, his constant happiness in light and air and +particularly running water, "green fields--or children's faces." His +lovely chapter on the temple of Aesculapius seems to be made entirely +of morning light, bubbling springs, and pure mountain air; and the +religious influence of these lustral elements is his constant theme. +For him they have a natural sacramental value, and it is through +them and such other influences that Pater seeks for his hero the +sanctification of the senses and the evolution of the spirit. In his +preoccupation with them, and all things lovely to the eye and to the +intelligence, it is that the secret lies of the singular purity of +atmosphere which pervades his _Marius_, an atmosphere which might be +termed the soul-beauty of the book, as distinct from its, so to say, +body-beauty as beautiful prose. + +Considering _Marius_ as a story, a work of imagination, one finds the +same evocative method used in the telling of it, and in the portrayal +of character, as Pater employs in its descriptive passages. Owing +to certain violent, cinematographic methods of story-telling and +character-drawing to which we have become accustomed, it is too often +assumed that stories cannot be told or characters drawn in any other +way. Actually, of course, as many an old masterpiece admonishes us, +there is no one canon in this matter, but, on the contrary, no limit to +the variety of method and manner a creative artist is at liberty to +employ in his imaginative treatment of human life. All one asks is that +the work should live, the characters and scenes appear real to us, and +the story be told. And Pater's _Marius_ entirely satisfies this demand +for those to whom such a pilgrimage of the soul will alone appeal. It is +a real story, no mere German scholar's attempt to animate the dry bones +of his erudition; and the personages and the scenes do actually live +for us, as by some delicate magic of hint and suggestion; and, though at +first they may seem shadowy, they have a curious way of persisting, and, +as it were, growing more and more alive in our memories. The figure of +Marcus Aurelius, for example, though so delicately sketched, is a +masterpiece of historical portraiture, as the pictures of Roman life, +done with so little, seem to me far more convincing than the like +over-elaborated pictures of antiquity, so choked with learned detail, +of Flaubert and of Gautier. Swinburne's famous praise of Gautier's +_Mademoiselle de Maupin_ applies with far greater fitness to Pater's +masterpiece; for, if ever a book deserved to be described as + + The golden book of spirit and sense, + The holy writ of beauty, + +it is _Marius the Epicurean_. + +It has been natural to dwell so long on this "golden book," because +Pater's various gifts are concentrated in it, to make what is, of +course, his masterpiece; though some one or other of these gifts is to +be found employed with greater mastery in other of his writings, notably +that delicate dramatic gift of embodying in a symbolic story certain +subtle states of mind and refinements of temperament which reaches its +perfection in _Imaginary Portraits_, to which the later "Apollo in +Picardy" and "Hippolytus Veiled" properly belong. It is only necessary +to recall the exquisitely austere "Sebastian Van Storck" and the +strangely contrasting Dionysiac "Denys L'Auxerrois" to justify one's +claim for Pater as a creative artist of a rare kind, with a singular and +fascinating power of incarnating a philosophic formula, a formula no +less dry than Spinoza's, or a mood of the human spirit, in living, +breathing types and persuasive tragic fables. This genius for creative +interpretation is the soul and significance of all his criticism. It +gives their value to the studies of _The Renaissance_, but perhaps its +finest flower is to be found in the later _Greek Studies_. To Flavian, +Pater had said in _Marius_, "old mythology seemed as full of untried, +unexpressed motives and interest as human life itself," and with what +marvellous skill and evocative application of learning, he himself later +developed sundry of those "untried, unexpressed motives," as in his +studies of the myths of Dionysus--"The spirit of fire and dew, alive and +leaping in a thousand vines"--and Demeter and Persephone--"the peculiar +creation of country people of a high impressibility, dreaming over their +work in spring or autumn, half consciously touched by a sense of its +sacredness, and a sort of mystery about it"--no reader of Pater needs to +be told. This same creative interpretation gives a like value to his +studies of Plato; and so by virtue of this gift, active throughout the +ten volumes which constitute his collected work, Pater proved himself +to be of the company of the great humanists. + +Along with all the other constituents of his work, its sacerdotalism, +its subtle reverie, its sensuous colour and perfume, its marmoreal +austerity, its honeyed music, its frequent preoccupation with the +haunted recesses of thought, there go an endearing homeliness and +simplicity, a deep human tenderness, a gentle friendliness, a something +childlike. He has written of her, "the presence that rose thus so +strangely beside the waters," to whom all experience had been "but as +the sound of lyres and flutes," and he has written of "The Child in the +House." Among all "the strange dyes, strange colours, and curious +odours, and work of the artist's hands," one never misses "the face of +one's friend"; and, in all its wanderings, the soul never strays far +from the white temples of the gods and the sound of running water. + +It is by virtue of this combination of humanity, edification, and +aesthetic delight that Walter Pater is unique among the great teachers +and artists of our time. + + + + +XXIII + +THE MYSTERY OF "FIONA MACLEOD" [1] + + + [1]_William Sharp (Fiona Macleod)_. A Memoir, compiled + by his wife, Elizabeth A. Sharp. (Duffield & Co.) + _The Writings of Fiona Macleod_. Uniform edition. Arranged + by Mrs. William Sharp. (Duffield & Co.) + +In the fascinating memoir of her husband, which Mrs. William Sharp has +written with so much dignity and tact, and general biographic skill, she +dwells with particular fondness of recollection on the two years of +their life at Phenice Croft, a charming cottage they had taken in the +summer of 1892 at Rudgwick in Sussex, seven miles from Horsham, the +birthplace of Shelley. Still fresh in my memory is a delightful visit I +paid them there, and I was soon afterwards to recall with special +significance a conversation I had with Mrs. Sharp, as four of us walked +out one evening after dinner in a somewhat melancholy twilight, the +glow-worms here and there trimming their ghostly lamps by the wayside, +and the nightjar churring its hoarse lovesong somewhere in the +thickening dusk. + +"Will," Mrs. Sharp confided to me, was soon to have a surprise for his +friends in a fuller and truer expression of himself than his work had +so far attained, but the nature of that expression Mrs. Sharp did not +confide--more than to hint that there were powers and qualities in her +husband's make-up that had hitherto lain dormant, or had, at all events, +been but little drawn upon. + +Mrs. Sharp was thus vaguely hinting at the future "Fiona Macleod," +for it was at Rudgwick, we learn, that that so long mysterious +literary entity sprang into imaginative being with _Pharais_. _Pharais_ +was published in 1894, and I remember that early copies of it came +simultaneously to myself and Grant Allen, with whom I was then staying, +and how we were both somewhat _intrigué_ by a certain air of mystery +which seemed to attach to the little volume. We were both intimate +friends of William Sharp, but I was better acquainted with Sharp's +earlier poetry than Grant Allen, and it was my detection in _Pharais_ +of one or two subtly observed natural images, the use of which had +previously struck me in one of his _Romantic Ballads and Poems of +Phantasy_, that brought to my mind in a flash of understanding that +Rudgwick conversation with Mrs. Sharp, and thus made me doubly certain +that "Fiona Macleod" and William Sharp were one, if not the same. +Conceiving no reason for secrecy, and only too happy to find that my +friend had fulfilled his wife's prophecy by such fuller and finer +expression of himself, I stated my belief as to its authorship in a +review I wrote for the London _Star_. My review brought me an urgent +telegram from Sharp, begging me, for God's sake, to shut my mouth--or +words to that effect. Needless to say, I did my best to atone for +having thus put my foot in it, by a subsequent severe silence till +now unbroken; though I was often hard driven by curious inquirers to +preserve the secret which my friend afterwards confided to me. + +When I say "confided to me," I must add that in the many confidences +William Sharp made to me on the matter, I was always aware of a reserve +of fanciful mystification, and I am by no means sure, even now, that I, +or any of us--with the possible exception of Mrs. Sharp--know the whole +truth about "Fiona Macleod." Indeed it is clear from Mrs. Sharp's +interesting revelations of her husband's temperament that "the whole +truth" could hardly be known even to William Sharp himself; for, very +evidently in "Fiona Macleod" we have to deal not merely with a literary +mystification, but with a psychological mystery. Here it is pertinent to +quote the message written to be delivered to certain of his friends +after his death: "This will reach you," he says, "after my death. You +will think I have wholly deceived you about Fiona Macleod. But, in an +intimate sense this is not so, though (and inevitably) in certain +details I have misled you. Only, it is a mystery. I cannot explain. +Perhaps you will intuitively understand or may come to understand. 'The +rest is silence.' Farewell. WILLIAM SHARP." + +"It is only right, however, to add that I, and I only, was the +author--in the literal and literary sense--of all written under the +name of 'Fiona Macleod.'" + +"Only, it is a mystery. I cannot explain." Does "I cannot explain" mean +"I must not explain," or merely just what it says? I am inclined to +think it means both; but, if so, the "must not" would refer to the +purely personal mystification on which, of course, none would desire to +intrude, and the "cannot" would refer to that psychological mystery +which we are at liberty to investigate. + +William Sharp's explanation to myself--as I believe to others of his +friends--was to the same tenor as this posthumous statement. He and he +only had actually _written_ the "Fiona Macleod" fantasies and poems, +but--yes! there was a real "Fiona Macleod" as well. She was a beautiful +cousin of his, living much in solitude and dreams, and seldom visiting +cities. Between her and him there was a singular spiritual kinship, +which by some inexplicable process, so to say, of psychic collaboration, +had resulted in the writings to which he had given her name. They were +hers as well as his, his as well as hers. Several times he even went so +far as to say that Miss Macleod was contemplating a visit to London, but +that her visit was to be kept a profound secret, and that he intended +introducing her to three of his friends and no more--George Meredith, +W.B. Yeats, and myself. Probably he made the same mock-confidence to +other friends, as a part of his general scheme of mystification. On one +occasion, when I was sitting with him in his study, he pointed to the +framed portrait of a beautiful woman which stood on top of a revolving +book-case, and said "That is Fiona!" I affected belief, but, rightly or +wrongly, it was my strong impression that the portrait thus labelled was +that of a well-known Irish lady prominently identified with Home Rule +politics, and I smiled to myself at the audacious white lie. Mrs. Sharp, +whose remembrance of her husband goes back to "a merry, mischievous +little boy in his eighth year, with light-brown curly hair, blue-grey +eyes, and a laughing face, and dressed in a tweed kilt," tells us that +this "love not only of mystery for its own sake, but of mystification +also," was a marked characteristic of his nature--a characteristic +developed even in childhood by the necessity he always felt of hiding +away from his companions that visionary side of his life which was +almost painfully vivid with him, and the sacredness of which in late +years he felt compelled to screen under his pseudonym. + +That William Sharp's affirmation of an actual living and breathing +"Fiona Macleod" was, however, virtually true is confided by this +significant and illuminating passage in Mrs. Sharp's biography. Mrs. +Sharp is speaking of a sojourn together in Rome during the spring of +1891, in which her husband had experienced an unusual exaltation and +exuberance of vital and creative energy. + + There, at last [she says], he had found the desired incentive + towards a true expression of himself, in the stimulus and + sympathetic understanding of the friend to whom he dedicated the + first of the books published under his pseudonym. This friendship + began in Rome and lasted throughout the remainder of his life. And + though this new phase of his work was at no time the result of + collaboration, as certain of his critics have suggested, he was + deeply conscious of his indebtedness to this friend, for--as he + stated to me in a letter of instructions, written before he went to + America in 1896, concerning his wishes in the event of his death--he + realized that it was "to her I owe my development as 'Fiona + Macleod,' though in a sense of course that began long before I + knew her, and indeed while I was still a child," and that, as he + believed, "without her there would have been no 'Fiona Macleod.'" + Because of her beauty, her strong sense of life and of the joy of + life; because of her keen intuitions and mental alertness, her + personality stood for him as a symbol of the heroic women of Greek + and Celtic days, a symbol that, as he expressed it, unlocked new + doors in his mind and put him "in touch with ancestral memories" of + his race. So, for a time, he stilled the critical, intellectual mood + of William Sharp, to give play to the development of this new-found + expression of subtle emotions, towards which he had been moving with + all the ardour of his nature. + +From this statement of Mrs. Sharp one naturally turns to the dedication +of _Pharais_ to which she refers, finding a dedicatory letter +to "E.W.R." dealing for the most part with "Celtic" matters, but +containing these more personal passages: + + Dear friend [the letter begins], while you gratify me by your + pleasure in this inscription, you modestly deprecate the dedication + to you of this study of alien life--of that unfamiliar island-life + so alien in all ways from the life of cities, and, let me add, from + that of the great mass of the nation to which, in the communal + sense, we both belong. But in the Domhan-Tòir of friendship there + are resting-places where all barriers of race, training, and + circumstances fall away in dust. At one of these places we met, a + long while ago, and found that we loved the same things, and in the + same way. + +The letter ends with this: "There is another Pà ras (Paradise) than that +seen of Alastair of Innisròn--the Tir-Nan-Oigh of friendship. Therein we +both have seen beautiful visions and dreamed dreams. Take, then, out of +my heart, this book of vision and dream." + +"Fiona Macleod," then, would appear to be the collective name given to +a sort of collaborative Three-in-One mysteriously working together: an +inspiring Muse with the initials E.W.R.; that psychical "other self" +of whose existence and struggle for expression William Sharp had been +conscious all his life; and William Sharp, general _littérateur_, as +known to his friends and reading public. "Fiona Macleod" would seem to +have always existed as a sort of spiritual prisoner within that comely +and magnetic earthly tenement of clay known as William Sharp, but +whom William Sharp had been powerless to free in words, till, at +the wand-like touch of E.W.R.--the creative stimulus of a profound +imaginative friendship--a new power of expression had been given to +him--a power of expression strangely missing from William Sharp's +previous acknowledged writings. + +To speak faithfully, it was the comparative mediocrity, and occasional +even positive badness, of the work done over his own name that formed +one of the stumbling-blocks to the acceptance of the theory that William +Sharp _could_ be "Fiona Macleod." Of course, his work had been that of +an accomplished widely-read man of letters, his life of Heine being +perhaps his most notable achievement in prose; and his verse had not +been without intermittent flashes and felicities, suggestive of +smouldering poetic fires, particularly in his _Sospiri di Roma_; but, +for the most part, it had lacked any personal force or savour, and was +entirely devoid of that magnetism with which William Sharp, the man, was +so generously endowed. In fact, its disappointing inadequacy was a +secret source of distress to the innumerable friends who loved him +with a deep attachment, to which the many letters making one of the +delightful features of Mrs. Sharp's biography bear witness. In himself +William Sharp was so prodigiously a personality, so conquering in the +romantic flamboyance of his sun-like vitality, so overflowing with the +charm of a finely sensitive, richly nurtured temperament, so essentially +a poet in all he felt and did and said, that it was impossible patiently +to accept his writings as any fair expression of himself. He was, as we +say, so much more than his books--so immeasurably and delightfully +more--that, compared with himself, his books practically amounted to +nothing; and one was inclined to say of him in one's heart, as one does +sometimes say of such imperfectly articulate artistic natures: "What +a pity he troubles to write at all! Why not be satisfied with being +William Sharp? Why spoil 'William Sharp' by this inadequate and +misleading translation?" + +The curious thing, too, was that the work he did over his own name, +after "Fiona Macleod" had escaped into the freedom of her own beautiful +individual utterance, showed no improvement in quality, no marks of +having sprung from the same mental womb where it had lain side by side +with so fair a sister. But, of course, one can readily understand that +such work would naturally lack spontaneity of impulse, having to be +done, more or less, against the grain, from reasons of expediency: so +long as "Fiona Macleod" must remain a secret, William Sharp must produce +something to show for himself, in order to go on protecting that secret, +which would, also, be all the better kept by William Sharp continuing in +his original mediocrity. Of this dual activity, Mrs. Sharp thus writes +with much insight: + + From then till the end of his life [she says] there was a continual + play of the two forces in him, or of the two sides of his nature: of + the intellectually observant, reasoning mind--the actor, and of the + intuitively observant, spiritual mind--the dreamer, which + differentiated more and more one from the other, and required + different conditions, different environment, different stimuli, + until he seemed to be two personalities in one. It was a development + which, as it proceeded, produced a tremendous strain on his physical + and mental resources, and at one time between 1897-8 threatened him + with a complete nervous collapse. And there was for a time distinct + opposition between those two natures which made it extremely + difficult for him to adjust his life, for the two conditions were + equally imperative in their demands upon him. + + His preference, naturally, was for the intimate creative work which + he knew grew out of his inner self; though the exigencies of life, + his dependence on his pen for his livelihood, and, moreover, the + keen active interest "William Sharp" took in all the movements of + the day, literary and political, at home and abroad, required of + him a great amount of applied study and work. + +The strain must indeed have been enormous, and one cannot but feel that +much of it was a needless, even trivial "expense of spirit," and regret +that, when "Fiona Macleod" had so manifestly come into her own, William +Sharp should have continued to keep up the mystification, entailing as +it did such an elaborate machinery of concealment, not the least taxing +of which must have been the necessity of keeping up "Fiona Macleod's" +correspondence as well as his own. Better, so to say, to have thrown +William Sharp overboard, and to have reserved the energies of a +temperament almost abnormally active, but physically delusive and +precarious, for the finer productiveness of "Fiona Macleod." But William +Sharp deemed otherwise. He was wont to say, "Should the secret be found +out, Fiona dies," and in a letter to Mrs. Thomas A. Janvier--she and her +husband being among the earliest confidants of his secret--he makes this +interesting statement: "I can write out of my heart in a way I could +not do as William Sharp, and indeed I could not do so if I were the +woman Fiona Macleod is supposed to be, unless veiled in scrupulous +anonymity.... This rapt sense of oneness with nature, this _cosmic +ecstasy_ and elation, this wayfaring along the extreme verges of the +common world, all this is so wrought up with the romance of life that +I could not bring myself to expression by my outer self, insistent and +tyrannical as that need is.... My truest self, the self who is below +all other selves, and my most intimate life and joys and sufferings, +thoughts, emotions, and dreams, _must_ find expression, yet I cannot +save in this hidden way...." + +Later he wrote: "Sometimes I am tempted to believe I am half a woman, +and so far saved as I am by the hazard of chance from what a woman can +be made to suffer if one let the light of the common day illuminate the +avenues and vistas of her heart...." + +At one time, I thought that William Sharp's assumption of a feminine +pseudonym was a quite legitimate device to steal a march on his critics, +and to win from them, thus disguised, that recognition which he must +have been aware he had failed to win in his own person. Indeed, it is +doubtful whether, if he had published the "Fiona Macleod" writings under +his own name, they would have received fair critical treatment. I am +very sure that they would not; for there is quite a considerable amount +of so-called "criticism" which is really foregone conclusion based on +personal prejudice, or biassed preconception, and the refusal to admit +(employing a homely image) that an old dog does occasionally learn new +tricks. Many well-known writers have resorted to this device, sometimes +with considerable success. Since reading Mrs. Sharp's biography, +however, I conclude that this motive had but little, if any, influence +on William Sharp, and that his statement to Mrs. Janvier must be taken +as virtually sincere. + +A certain histrionism, which was one of his charms, and is perhaps +inseparable from imaginative temperaments, doubtless had its share in +his consciousness of that "dual nature" of which we hear so much, +and which it is difficult sometimes to take with Sharp's "Celtic" +seriousness. Take, for example, this letter to his wife, when, having +left London, precipitately, in response to the call of the Isles, he +wrote: "The following morning we (for a kinswoman was with me) stood on +the Greenock pier waiting for the Hebridean steamer, and before long +were landed on an island, almost the nearest we could reach, that I +loved so well." Mrs. Sharp dutifully comments: "The 'we' who stood on +the pier at Greenock is himself in his dual capacity; his 'kinswoman' is +his other self." Later he writes, on his arrival in the Isle of Arran: +"There is something of a strange excitement in the knowledge that two +people are here: so intimate and yet so far off. For it is with me as +though Fiona were asleep in another room. I catch myself listening +for her step sometimes, for the sudden opening of a door. It is +unawaredly that she whispers to me. I am eager to see what she will +do--particularly in _The Mountain Lovers_. It seems passing strange +to be here with her alone at last...." I confess that this strikes +me disagreeably. It is one thing to be conscious of a "dual +personality"--after all, consciousness of dual personality is by no +means uncommon, and it is a commonplace that, spiritually, men of genius +are largely feminine--but it is another to dramatize one's consciousness +in this rather childish fashion. There seems more than a suspicion of +pose in such writing: though one cannot but feel that William Sharp was +right in thinking that the real "Fiona Macleod" was asleep at the +moment. At the same time, William Sharp seems unmistakably to have been +endowed with what I suppose one has to call "psychic" powers--though the +word has been "soiled with all ignoble use"--and to be the possessor +in a considerable degree of that mysterious "sight" or sixth sense +attributed to men and women of Gaelic blood. Mrs. Sharp tells a curious +story of his mood immediately preceding that flight to the Isles of +which I have been writing. He had been haunted the night before by the +sound of the sea. It seemed to him that he heard it splashing in the +night against the walls of his London dwelling. So real it had seemed +that he had risen from his bed and looked out of the window, and even in +the following afternoon, in his study, he could still hear the waves +dashing against the house. "A telegram had come for him that morning," +writes Mrs. Sharp, "and I took it to his study. I could get no answer. +I knocked, louder, then louder,--at last he opened the door with a +curiously dazed look in his face. I explained. He answered: 'Ah, I +could not hear you for the sound of the waves!'" + +His last spoken words have an eerie suggestiveness in this connection. +Writing of his death on the 12th of December, 1905, Mrs. Sharp says: +"About three o'clock, with his devoted friend Alec Hood by his side, he +suddenly leant forward with shining eyes and exclaimed in a tone of +joyous recognition, 'Oh, the beautiful "Green Life," again!' and the +next moment sank back in my arms with the contented sigh, 'Ah, all is +well!'" + +"The green life" was a phrase often on Sharp's lips, and stood for him +for that mysterious life of elemental things to which he was almost +uncannily sensitive, and into which he seemed able strangely to merge +himself, of which too his writings as "Fiona Macleod" prove him to have +had "invisible keys." It is this, so to say, conscious pantheism, +this kinship with the secret forces and subtle moods of nature, this +responsiveness to her mystic spiritual "intimations," that give to those +writings their peculiar significance and value. In the external lore of +nature William Sharp was exceptionally learned. Probably no writer in +English, with the exceptions of George Meredith and Grant Allen, was his +equal here, and his knowledge had been gained, as such knowledge can +only be gained, in that receptive period of an adventurous boyhood of +which he has thus written: "From fifteen to eighteen I sailed up every +loch, fjord, and inlet in the Western Highlands and islands, from Arran +and Colonsay to Skye and the Northern Hebrides, from the Rhinns of +Galloway to the Ord of Sutherland. Wherever I went I eagerly associated +myself with fishermen, sailors, shepherds, gamekeepers, poachers, +gypsies, wandering pipers, and other musicians." For two months he had +"taken the heather" with, and had been "star-brother" and "sun-brother" +to, a tribe of gypsies, and in later years he had wandered variously in +many lands, absorbing the wonder and the beauty of the world. Well +might he write to Mrs. Janvier: "I have had a very varied, and, to use a +much abused word, a very romantic life in its internal as well as in its +external aspects." Few men have drunk so deep of the cup of life, and +from such pure sky-reflecting springs, and if it be true, in the words +of his friend Walter Pater, that "to burn ever with this hard gem-like +flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life," then indeed the +life of William Sharp was a nobly joyous success. + +And to those who loved him it is a great happiness to know that he was +able to crown this ecstasy of living with that victory of expression for +which his soul had so long travailed, and to leave behind him not only a +lovely monument of star-lit words, but a spiritual legacy of perennial +refreshment, a fragrant treasure-house of recaptured dreams, and +hallowed secrets of the winds of time: for such are _The Writings of +"Fiona Macleod"_. + + + + +XXIV + +FORBES-ROBERTSON: AN APPRECIATION + + +The voluntary abdication of power in its zenith has always fascinated +and "intrigued" the imagination of mankind. We are so accustomed to +kings and other gifted persons holding on to their sceptres with a +desperate tenacity, even through those waning years when younger men, +beholding their present feebleness, wonder whether their previous might +was not a fancy of their fathers, whether, in fact, they were ever +really kings or gifted persons at all. In so many cases we have to rely +on a legend of past accomplishment to preserve our reverence. Therefore, +when a Sulla or a Charles V. or a Mary Anderson, leave their thrones at +the moment when their sway over us is most assured and brilliant, we +wonder--wonder at a phenomenon rare in humanity, and suggestive of +romantic reserves of power which seal not only our allegiance to them, +but that of posterity. The mystery which resides in all greatness, in +all charm, is not violated by the cynical explanations of decay. They +remain fortunate as those whom the gods loved, wearing the aureoles of +immortal promise. + +Few artists have been wise in this respect; poets, for example, very +seldom. Thus we find the works of most of them encumbered with the +débris of their senility. Coventry Patmore was a rare example of a poet +who laid down his pen deliberately, not merely as an artist in words, +but as an artist in life, having, as he said in the memorable preface to +the collected edition of his poems, completed that work which in his +youth he had set before him. His readers, therefore, are not saddened by +any pathetic gleanings from a once-rich harvest-field, or the carefully +picked-up shakings of November boughs. + +Forbes-Robertson is one of those artists who has chosen to bid farewell +to his art while he is still indisputably its master. One or two other +distinguished actors before him have thus chosen, and a greater number +have bade us, those professional "farewells" that remind one of that +dream of De Quincey in which he heard reverberated "Everlasting +farewells! and again and yet again reverberated--everlasting farewells!" +In Forbes-Robertson's case, however, apart from our courteous taking the +word of his management, we know that the news is sadly true. There is +a curious personal honour and sincerity breathing through all his +impersonations that make us feel, so to say, that not only would we take +the ghost's word for a thousand pounds, but that between him and his art +is such an austere compact that he would be incapable of humiliating it +by any mere advertising devices; and beyond that, those who have seen +him play this time (1914) in New York must have been aware that in the +very texture of all his performances was woven like a sigh the word +"farewell." His very art, as I shall have later to emphasize, is an art +of farewell; but, apart from that general quality, it seemed to me, +though, indeed, it may have been mere sympathetic fancy, that in these +last New York performances, as in the performances last spring in +London, I heard a personal valedictory note. Forbes-Robertson seemed to +be saying good-by at once to his audience and to his art. + +In doing this, along with the inevitable sadness that must accompany +such a step, one cannot but think there will be a certain private +whimsical satisfaction for him in being able to go about the world in +after years with his great gift still his, hidden away, but still his to +use at any moment, and to know not only that he has been, but still is, +as it were, in secret, the supreme Hamlet of his time. Something +like that, one may imagine, must be the private fun of abdication. +Forbes-Robertson, as he himself has told us, lays down one art only to +take up another to which he has long been devoted, and of his early +affiliation to which the figure of Love Kissing Beatrice in Rossetti's +"Dante's Dream" bears illustrious and significant witness. As, one +recalls that he was the model for that figure one realizes that even +then he was the young lord Hamlet, born to be _par excellence_ the actor +of sorrow and renunciation. + +It is not my province to write here of Forbes-Robertson from the point +of view of the reminiscent playgoer or of the technical critic of +acting. Others, obviously, are far better qualified to undertake those +offices for his fame. I would merely offer him the tribute of one to +whom for many years his acting has been something more than acting, as +usually understood, something to class with great poetry, and all the +spiritual exaltation which "great poetry" implies. From first to last, +however associated with that whimsical comedy of which, too, he is +appropriately a master, he has struck for me that note of almost +heartbreaking spiritual intensity which, under all its superficial +materialism and cynicism, is the key-note of the modern world. + +When I say "first," I am thinking of the first time I saw him, on the +first night of _The Profligate_ by Pinero, in its day one of the plays +that blazed the trail for that social, or, rather, I should say, +sociological, drama since become even more deadly in earnest, though +perhaps less deadly in skill. Incidentally, I remember that Miss Olga +Nethersole, then quite unknown, made a striking impression of evil, +though playing only a small part. It was Forbes-Robertson, however, for +me, and I think for all the playgoing London of the time, that gave the +play its chief value by making us startlingly aware, through the +poignancy of his personality, of what one might call the voice of the +modern conscience. To associate that thrillingly beautiful and profound +voice of his with anything that sounds so prosaic as a "modern +conscience" may seem unkind, but actually our modern conscience is +anything but prosaic, and combines within it something at once poetic +and prophetic, of which that something ghostly in Forbes-Robertson's +acting is peculiarly expressive. That quality of other-worldliness which +at once scared and fascinated the lodgers in _The Passing of the Third +Floor Back_ is present in all Forbes-Robertson's acting. It was that +which strangely stirred us, that first night of _The Profligate_. We +meet it again with the blind Dick Heldar in _The Light That Failed_, and +of course we meet it supremely in _Hamlet_. In fact, it is that quality +which, chief among others, makes Forbes-Robertson's Hamlet the classical +Hamlet of his time. + +Forbes-Robertson has of course played innumerable parts. Years before +_The Profligate_, he had won distinction as the colleague of Irving and +Mary Anderson. He may be said to have played everything under the sun. +His merely theatric experience has thus enriched and equipped his +temperament with a superb technique. It would probably be impossible for +him to play any part badly, and of the various successes he has made, to +which his present repertoire bears insufficient witness, others, as I +have said, can point out the excellences. My concern here is with his +art in its fullest and finest expression, in its essence; and therefore +it is unnecessary for me to dwell upon any other of his impersonations +than that of Hamlet. When a man can play _Hamlet_ so supremely, it may +be taken for granted, I presume, that he can play _Mice and Men_, or +even that masterpiece of all masterpieces, _Caesar and Cleopatra_. I +trust that it is no disrespect to the distinguished authors of these two +plays to say that such plays in a great actor's repertoire represent +less his versatility than his responsibilities, that pot-boiling +necessity which hampers every art, and that of the actor, perhaps, most +of all. + +To my thinking, the chief interest of all Forbes-Robertson's other parts +is that they have "fed" his Hamlet; and, indeed, many of his best parts +may be said to be studies for various sides of Hamlet, his fine _Romeo_, +for example, which, unfortunately, he no longer plays. In _Hamlet_ all +his qualities converge, and in him the tradition of the stage that all +an ambitious actor's experience is only to fit him to play Hamlet is for +once justified. But, of course, the chief reason of that success is that +nature meant Forbes-Robertson to play Hamlet. Temperament, personality, +experience, and training have so worked together that he does not merely +play, but _is_, Hamlet. Such, at all events, is the complete illusion he +is able to produce. + +Of course, one has heard from them of old time that an actor's +personality must have nothing to do with the part he is playing; that he +only is an actor who can most successfully play the exact opposite of +himself. That is the academic theory of "character-acting," and of +course the half-truth of it is obvious. It represents the weariness +induced in audiences by handsome persons who merely, in the stage +phrase, "bring their bodies on"; yet it would go hard with some of our +most delightful comedians were it the whole truth about acting. As a +matter of fact, of course, a great actor includes a multiplicity of +selves, so that he may play many parts, yet always be playing himself. +Beyond himself no artist, whatever his art, has ever gone. + +What reduplication of personality is necessary for the man who plays +Hamlet need hardly be said, what wide range of humanity and variety of +accomplishment; for, as Anatole France has finely said of Hamlet, "He is +a man, he is man, he is the whole of man." + +Time was when _Hamlet_ was little more than an opportunity for some +robustious periwig-pated fellow, or it gave the semi-learned actor the +chance to conceal his imaginative incapacity by a display of "new +readings." For example, instead of saying: + + The air bites shrewdly; it is very cold, + +you diverted attention from your acting by an appeal to the literary +antiquarianism of your audience, and, out of one or other of the +quartos, read the line: + + The air bites shrewdly; _is_ it very cold? + +with the implication that there was a whole world of suggestion in the +difference. + +One has known actors, far from unillustrious, who staked their whole +performance on some such learned triviality or some trifling novelty of +business, when, for example, in Hamlet's scene with his mother, the +prince comes to: + + Look here upon this picture, and on this. + +An actor who deserves better than he has yet received in the tradition +of the acted _Hamlet_--I mean Wilson Barrett--used to make much of +taking a miniature of his father from his bosom to point the contrast. + +But all such things in the end are of no account. New readings, new +business, avail less and less. Nor does painstaking archaeology of +scenery or dresses any longer throw dust in our eyes. We are for the +play, the living soul of the play. Give us that, and your properties may +be no more elaborate than those of a _guignol_ in the Champs-Elysées. + +Forbes-Robertson's acting is so imaginative, creating the scene about +him as he plays, that one almost resents any stage-settings for him at +all, however learnedly accurate and beautifully painted. + +His soul seems to do so much for us that we almost wish it could be +left to do it all, and he act for us as they acted in Elizabeth's day, +with only a curtain for scenery, and a placard at the side of the stage +saying, "This is Elsinore." + +One could hardly say more for one's sense of the reality of +Forbes-Robertson's acting, as, naturally, one is not unaware that +distressing experiments have been made to reproduce the Elizabethan +theatre by actors who, on the other hand, were sadly in need of all +that scenery, archaeology, or orchestra could do for them. + +With a world overcrowded with treatises on the theme, from, and before, +Gervinus, with the commentary of _Wilhelm Meister_ in our minds, not to +speak of the starlit text ever there for our reading, there is surely no +need to traverse the character of Hamlet. He has meant so much to our +fathers--though he can never have meant so much to them as he does to us +of today--that he is, so to say, in our blood. He is strangely near to +our hearts by sheer inheritance. And perhaps the most beautiful thing +Forbes-Robertson's Hamlet does for us is that it commands our love for a +great gentleman doing his gentlest and bravest and noblest with a sad +smile and a gay humour, in not merely a complicated, wicked, absurd, and +tiresome, but, also, a ghostly world. + +When we think of Hamlet, we think of him as two who knew him very well +thought of him,--Ophelia and Horatio,--and as one who saw him only as he +sat at last on his throne, dead, with the crown of Denmark on his +knees. + +Ophelia's + + Courtier's, soldier's, scholar's eye, tongue, sword, + The expectancy and rose of the fair state; + +the "sweet prince" of Horatio's "good-night"--the soldier for whose +passage Fortinbras commanded + + The soldier's music and the rites of war. + +We think of him, too, as the haunted son of a dear father murdered, a +philosophic spectator of the grotesque brutality of life, suddenly by a +ghostly summons called on to take part in it; a prince, a philosopher, a +lover, a soldier, a sad humourist. + +Were one asked what aspects of Hamlet does Forbes-Robertson specially +embody, I should say, in the first place, his princeliness, his +ghostliness, then his cynical and occasionally madcap humour, as where, +at the end of the play-scene, he capers behind the throne in a terrible +boyish glee. No actor that I have seen expresses so well that scholarly +irony of the Renaissance permeating the whole play. His scene with +Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and the recorders is masterly: the silken +sternness of it, the fine hauteur, the half-appeal as of lost ideals +still pleading with the vulgarity of life, the fierce humour of its +disillusion, and behind, as always, the heartbreak--that side of which +comes of the recognition of what it is to be a gentleman in such a +world. + +In this scene, too, as in others, Forbes-Robertson makes it clear that +that final tribute of Fortinbras was fairly won. + +The soldier--if necessary, the fighter--is there as supple and strong as +a Damascus blade. One is always aware of the "something dangerous," for +all his princely manners and scholarly ways. One is never left in doubt +as to how this Hamlet will play the man. It is all too easy for him to +draw his sword and make an end of the whole fantastic business. Because +this philosophic swordsman holds the sword, let no one think that he +knows not how to wield it. All this gentleness--have a care!--is that of +an unusually masculine restraint. + +In the scene with Ophelia, Forbes-Robertson's tenderness was almost +terrible. It came from such a height of pity upon that little +uncomprehending flower! + +"I never gave you aught," as Forbes-Robertson said it, seemed to mean: +"I gave you all--all that you could not understand." "Yet are not you +and I in the toils of that destiny there that moves the arras. _Is_ it +your father?" + +Along with Forbes-Robertson's spiritual interpretation of Shakespeare +goes pre-eminently, and doubtless as a contributive part of it, his +imaginative revitalization of the great old lines--lines worn like a +highway with the passage of the generations. As a friend of mine +graphically phrased it, "How he revives for us the splendour of the +text!" + +The splendour of the text! It is a good phrase, and how splendid the +text is we, of course, all know--know so well that we take it for +granted, and so fall into forgetfulness of its significance; forgetting +what central fires of soul and intellect must have gone to the creation +of such a world of transcendent words. + +Yet how living the lines still are, though the generations have almost +quoted the life out of them, no man who has spoken them on the stage in +our day, except Forbes-Robertson, has had the gift to show. + +It is more than elocution, masterly elocution as it is, more than the +superbly modulated voice: the power comes of spiritual springs welling +up beneath the voice--springs fed from those infinite sources which "lie +beyond the reaches of our souls." + +Merely to take the phrase I have just quoted, how few actors--or readers +of Shakespeare, or members of any Shakespearian audience, for that +matter--have any personal conception of what it means! They may make a +fine crescendo with it, but that is all. They have never stood, +shrinking and appalled, yet drawn with a divine temptation, upon the +brink of that vastness along the margin of which, it is evident, that +Hamlet often wandered. It is in vain they tell their audiences and +Horatio: + + There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, + Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. + +We are quite sure that they know nothing of what they are saying; and +that, as a matter of fact, there are few things for them in heaven or +earth except the theatre they are playing in, their actors' club, and, +generally, their genial mundane lives; and, of course, one rather +congratulates them on the simplicity of their lives, congratulates them +on their ignorance of such haunted regions of the mind. Yet, all the +same, that simplicity seems to disqualify them from playing _Hamlet_. + +Few Shakespearian actors seem to remember what they are +playing--Shakespeare. One would think that to be held a worthy +interpreter of so great a dramatist, so mysterious a mind, and so +golden a poet, were enough distinction. Oscar Wilde, in a fine +sonnet, addressed Henry Irving as + + Thou trumpet set for Shakespeare's lips to blow, + +and we may be sure that Irving appreciated the honour thus paid him, he +who so wonderfully interpreted so many of Shakespeare's moods, so well +understood the irony of his intellect, even the breadth of his humanity, +yet in _Hamlet_, at all events, so strangely missed his soul. + +Most of us have seen many Hamlets die. We have watched them squirming +through those scientific contortions of dissolution, to copy which they +had very evidently walked the hospitals in a businesslike quest of +death-agonies, as certain histrionic connoisseurs of madness in France +lovingly haunt the Saltpétrière. As I look back, I wonder how we +tolerated their wriggling absurdity. I suppose it was that the hand of +tradition was still upon us, as upon them. And, let us not forget, the +words were there, the immortal words, and an atmosphere of tragic death +and immortality that only such words could create: + + Absent thee from felicity awhile, + And in the harsh world draw thy breath in pain + To hear my story ... + The rest is silence.... + +How different it is when Forbes-Robertson's Hamlet dies! All my life I +seem to have been asking my friends, those I loved best, those who +valued the dearest, the kindest, the greatest, and the strongest in our +strange human life, to come with me and see Forbes-Robertson die in +_Hamlet_. I asked them because, as that strange young dead king sat +upon his throne, there was something, whatever it meant--death, life, +immortality, what you will--of a surpassing loveliness, something +transfiguring the poor passing moment of trivial, brutal murder into a +beauty to which it was quite natural that that stern Northern warrior, +with his winged helmet, should bend the knee. I would not exchange +anything I have ever read or seen for Forbes-Robertson as he sits there +so still and starlit upon the throne of Denmark. + +Forbes-Robertson is not merely a great Shakespearian actor; he is a +great spiritual actor. The one doubtless implies the other, though the +implication has not always appeared to be obvious. + +He is prophetic of what the stage will some day be, and what we can see +it here and there preparing to become. In all the welter of the dramatic +conditions of the moment there emerges one fact, that of the growing +importance of the stage as a vehicle for what one may term general +culture. The stage, with its half-sister, the cinema, is strangely, +by how long and circuitous a route, returning of course, with an +immeasurably developed equipment, to its starting-point, ending +curiously where it began as the handmaid of the church. As with the old +moralities or miracle-plays, it is becoming once more our teacher. The +lessons of truth and beauty, as those of plain gaiety and delight, are +relying more and more upon the actor for their expression, and less on +the accredited doctors of divinity or literature. Even the dancers are +doing much for our souls. Our duties as citizens are being taught us by +well-advertised plays, and if we wish to abolish Tammany or change our +police commissioner, we enforce our desire by the object-lesson of a +play. The great new plays may not yet be here, but the public once more +is going to the theatre, as it went long ago in Athens, to be delighted +and amused, of course, but also to be instructed in national and civic +affairs, and, most important of all, to be purified by pity and terror. + + + + +XXV + +A MEMORY OF FRÉDÉRIC MISTRAL + + +There are many signs that poetry is coming into its own again--even +here in America, which, while actually one of the most romantic and +sentimental of countries, fondly imagines itself the most prosaic. + +Kipling, to name but one instance, has, by his clarion-tongued +quickening of the British Empire, shown so convincingly what dynamic +force still belongs to the right kind of singing, and the poet in +general seems to be winning back some of that serious respect from his +fellow-citizens which, under a misapprehension of his effeminacy and +general uselessness, he had lost awhile. The poet is not so much a joke +to the multitude as he was a few years ago, and the term "minor poet" +seems to have fallen into desuetude. + +Still for all this, I doubt if it is in the Anglo-Saxon blood, nowadays +at all events, to make a national hero of a poet, one might say a +veritable king, such as Frédéric Mistral is today in Provence. In our +time, Björnson in Norway was perhaps the only parallel figure, and he +held his position as actual "father of his people" for very much the +same reasons. At once a commanding and lovable personality, he and his +work were absolutely identified with his country and his countrymen. He +was simply Norway incarnate. + +So, today in Provence, it is with Frédéric Mistral. He is not only a +poet of Provence. He is Provence incarnate, and, apart from the noble +quality of his work, his position as the foremost representative of his +compatriots is romantically unique. No other country today, pointing to +its greatest man, would point out--a poet; whereas Mistral, were he not +as unspoiled as he is laurelled, might, with literal truth, say: + + "_Provence--c'est moi!_" + +We had hardly set foot in Provence this last spring, my wife and I, +before we realized, with grateful wonder, that we had come to a country +that has a poet for a king. + +On arriving at Marseilles almost the first word we heard was +"Mistral"--not the bitter wind of the same name, but the name of the +honey-tongued "Master." Our innkeeper--O the delightful innkeepers of +France!--on our consulting him as to our project of a walking trip +through the Midi--as Frenchmen usually speak of Provence--said, for his +first aid to the traveller: "Then, of course, you will see our great +poet, Mistral." And he promptly produced a copy of _Mirèio_, which he +begged me to use till I had bought a copy for myself. + +"Ah! Mistral," he cried, with Gallic enthusiasm, using the words I have +borrowed from his lips, "Mistral is the King of Provence!" + +Marseilles had not always been so enthusiastic over Mistral and his +fellows. And Mistral, in his memoirs, gives an amusing account of a +philological battle fought over the letter "s" in a room behind one of +the Marseilles bookshops between "the amateurs of trivialities, the +rhymers of the white beard, the jealous, the grumblers," and the young +innovators of the "félibrige." + +But that was over fifty years ago, and the battle of those young +enthusiasts has long since been won. What that battle was and what an +extraordinary victory came of it must needs be told for the significance +of Mistral in Provence to be properly understood. + +The story is one of the most romantic in the history of literature. +Briefly, it is this: + +The Provençal language, the "langue d'oc," was, of course, once the +courtly and lettered language of Europe, the language of the great +troubadours, and through them the vehicle of the culture and refinement +of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. From it may be said to have +sprung the beginnings of Italian literature. + +But, owing to various historical vicissitudes, the language of Northern +France, the "langue d'oil," gradually took its place, and when Mistral +was born, in 1830, Provençal had long been regarded as little more than +a _patois_. + +Now it was the young Mistral's dream, as a school-boy in the old convent +school of Saint Michael de Frigolet, at Avignon, to restore his native +tongue to its former high estate, to make it once more a literary +language, and it chanced that one of his masters, Joseph Roumanille, was +secretly cherishing the same dream. + +The master, looking over his pupil's shoulder one day, found that, +instead of working at his prescribed task, he was busily engaged in +translating the Penitential Psalms into Provençal. Instead of punishing +him, the master gratefully hailed a kindred spirit, and presently +confided Provençal verses of his own making. From that moment, though +there was a dozen years' difference between their ages, Mistral and +Roumanille began a friendship which was to last till Roumanille's death, +a friendship of half a century. + +Soon their dream attracted other recruits, and presently seven friends, +whose names are all famous now, and most of whom have statues in Arles +or in Avignon--Roumanille, Mistral, Aubanel, Mathieu, Giéra, Brunet, and +Tavan--after the manner of Ronsard's "Pléiade," and Rossetti's +"P.R.B."--formed themselves into a brotherhood to carry on the great +work of regeneration. + +They needed a name to call themselves by. They had all met together to +talk things over in the old castle of Font-Ségugne, or, as Mistral more +picturesquely puts it: "It was written in heaven that one blossoming +Sunday, the twenty-first of May, 1854, in the full springtide of life +and of the year, seven poets should come to meet together in the castle +of Font-Ségugne." Several suggestions were made for a name for this +brotherhood, but presently Mistral announced that in an old folk-story +he had collected at his birthplace, Maillane, he believed that he had +found the word they were in search of. In this folk-story the boy Christ +is represented as discoursing in the temple with "the seven félibres of +the Law." + +"Why, that is us!" exclaimed the enthusiastic young men as Mistral +finished, and there on the spot "félibre" was adopted as the password of +their order, Mistral coining the word "félibrige" to represent the work +they aimed to do, and also their association. The name stuck, and has +now for many years been the banner-word for the vigorous school of +Provençal literature and the allied arts of painting and sculpture which +has responded with such eager vitality to Mistral's rallying cry. + +But, excellent as are the other poets which the school has produced--and +one need only glance through a recent _Anthologie du Félibrige_ to +realize what a wealth of true poetry the word "félibrige" now stands +for--there can be no question that its greatest asset still remains +Mistral's own work, as it was his first great poem, _Mirèio_, which +first drew the eyes of literary Paris, more than inclined to be +contemptuous, to the Provençal renaissance. + +Adolphe Dumas had been sent to Provence in the year 1856 by the Minister +of Public Instruction to collect the folk-songs of the people, and +calling on Mistral (then twenty-six), living quietly with his widowed +mother at Maillane, he had found him at work on _Mirèio_. Mistral read +some passages to him, with the result that the generous Dumas returned +to Paris excitedly to proclaim the advent of a new poet. Presently, +Mistral accepted his invitation to visit Paris, was introduced to the +great Lamartine--who has left some charming pages descriptive of his +visit,--read some of _Mirèio_ to him, and was hailed by him as "the +Homer of Provence." + +The press, however, had its little fling at the new-comer. "The Mistral +it appears," said one pitiful punster, "has been incarnated in a poem. +We shall soon see whether it is anything else but wind." Such has been +the invariable welcome of great men in a small world. + +But Mistral had no taste for Paris, either as a lion or a butt, and, +after a few days' stay, we find him once more quietly at home at +Maillane. Yet he had brought back with him one precious trophy--the +praise of Lamartine; and when, in the course of a year or two (1859), +_Mirèio_ came to be published at Avignon, it bore, as it still bears, +this heart-felt dedication to Lamartine: + +"To thee I dedicate _Mirèio_; it is my heart and my soul; it is the +flower of my years; it is a bunch of grapes from Crau with all its +leaves--a rustic's offering." + +With the publication of _Mirèio_ Mistral instantly "arrived," instantly +found himself on that throne which, as year has followed year, has +become more securely his own. Since then he has written much noble +poetry, all embodying and vitalizing the legendary lore of his native +land, a land richer in momentous history, perhaps, than any other +section of Europe. But in addition to his poetry he has, single-handed, +carried through the tremendous scholarly task of compiling a dictionary +of the Provençal language--a _Thesaurus of the Félibrige_, for which +work the Institute awarded him a prize of ten thousand francs. + +In 1904, he was awarded the Nobel prize of 100,000 francs, but such is +his devotion to his fellow-countrymen that he did not keep that prize +for himself, but used it to found the Musée Arlésien at Arles, a museum +designed as a treasure house of anything and everything pertaining to +the history and life of Provence--antiquities, furniture, costumes, +paintings, and so forth. + +It was in Arles in 1909, the fiftieth birthday of _Mirèio_, that +Mistral, then seventy-nine years old, may be said to have reached the +summit of his romantic fame. A great festival was held in his honour, in +which the most distinguished men of France took part. A dramatized +version of his _Mirèio_ was played in the old Roman amphitheatre, and a +striking statue of him was unveiled in the antique public square, the +Place du Forum, with the shade of Constantine looking on, one might +feel, from his mouldering palace hard by. + +In Arles Mistral is a well-known, beloved figure, for it is his custom, +every Saturday, to come there from Maillane, to cast his eye over the +progress of his museum, the pet scheme of his old age. One wonders how +it must seem to pass that figure of himself, pedestaled high in the old +square. To few men is it given to pass by their own statues in the +street. Sang a very different poet-- + + They grind us to the dust with poverty, + And build us statues when we come to die. + +But poor Villon had the misfortune to be a poet of the "langue d'oil," +and the Montfaucon gibbet was the only monument of which he stood in +daily expectation. Could the lines of two poets offer a greater +contrast? Blessed indeed is he who serves the rural gods, Pan and Old +Sylvanus and the sister nymphs--as Virgil sang; and Virgilian indeed has +been the golden calm, and sunlit fortunes, as Virgilian, rather than +Homeric, is the gracious art, of the poet whom his first Parisian +admirer, Adolphe Dumas, called "the Homer of Provence"--as Virgilian, +too, seemed the landscape through which at length, one April afternoon, +we found ourselves on pilgrimage to the home of him whose name had been +on the lips of every innkeeper, shopkeeper, and peasant, all the way +from Marseilles to Tarascon. + +Yes! the same golden peace that lies like a charm across every page +of his greatest poem lay across that sun-steeped, fertile plain, +with its walls of cypress trees, its lines of poplars, its delicate, +tapestry-like designs of almond trees in blossom, on a sombre background +of formal olive orchards, its green meadows, lit up with singing +water-courses, or gleaming irrigation canals, starred here and there +with the awakening kingcup, or sweet with the returning violet--here +and there a farmhouse ("mas," as they call them in Provence) snugly +sheltered from the mistral by their screens of foliage--and far aloft in +the distance, floating like a silver dream, the snow-white shoulder of +Mont Ventoux--the Fuji Yama of Provence. + +At last the old, time-worn village came in sight--it lies about ten +miles north-east of Tartarin's Tarascon--and we entered it, as was +proper, with the "Master's" words on our lips: "Maillane is beautiful, +well-pleasing is Maillane; and it grows more and more beautiful every +day. Maillane is the honour of the countryside, and takes its name from +the month of May. + +"Who would be in Paris or in Rome? Poor conscripts! There is nothing to +charm one there; but Maillane has its equal nowhere--and one would +rather eat an apple in Maillane than a partridge in Paris." + +It was Sunday afternoon, and the streets were full of young people in +their Sunday finery, the girls wearing the pretty Arlésien caps. At +first sight of us, with our knapsacks, they were prepared to be amused, +and saucy lads called out things in mock English; but when it was +understood that we were seeking the house of the "Master" we inspired +immediate respect, and a dozen eager volunteers put themselves at our +service and accompanied us in a body to where, at the eastern edge of +the village, there stands an unpretentious square stone house of no +great antiquity, surrounded by a garden and half hidden with trees. + +We stood silently looking at the house for a few minutes, trying to +realize that there a great poet had gone on living and working, in +single-minded devotion to his art and his people, for full fifty +years--there in that green, out-of-the-way corner of the world. The +idea of a life so rooted in contentment, so continuously happy in the +lifelong prosecution of a task set to itself in boyhood, and so +independent of change, is one not readily grasped by the hurrying +American mind. + +Then we pushed open the iron gate and passed into the garden. A paved +walk led up to the front door, but that had an unused look, and, gaining +no response there, we walked through a shrubbery around the side of the +house, and as we turned the corner came on what was evidently the real +entrance, facing a sunny slope of garden where hyacinths and violets +told of the coming of spring. Here we were greeted by some half a dozen +friendly dogs, whose demonstrations brought to the door a neat little, +keen-eyed peasant woman, with an expression in her face that suggested +that she was the real watch dog, on behalf of her master, standing +between him and an intrusive world. As a matter of fact, as we afterward +learned, that is one of her many self-imposed offices, for, having been +in the Mistral household for many years, she has long since been as much +a family friend as a servant, and generally looks after the Master and +Mme. Mistral as if they were her children, nursing and "bossing" them by +turns. "Elise"--I think her name is--is a "character" almost as well +known in Provence as the Master himself. + +So she looked sharply at us, while I produced a letter to M. Mistral +which had been given me by a humble associate of the "félibres," a +delightful _chansonnier_ we had met at Les Baux. With this she went +indoors, presently to return with a face of still cautious welcome, and +invited us in to a little square hall hung with photographs of various +distinguished friends of the poet and two bronze medallions of himself, +one representing him with his favourite dog. + +Then a door to the right opened, revealing a typical scholar's study, +lined with books from ceiling to floor, books and papers on tables and +chairs, and framed photographs again on the free wall space. The spring +sunshine poured in through long windows, and in this characteristic +setting stood a tall old man, astonishingly erect, his distinguished +head, with its sparse white locks, its keen eyes, and strong yet +delicate aquiline features, pointed white beard and mustache, +suggesting pictures of some military grand seigneur of old time. His +carriage had the same blending of soldier and nobleman, and the stately +kindliness with which he bade us welcome belonged, alas! to another day. + +At his side stood a tall, handsome lady, with remarkable, dark, kind +eyes, evidently many years his junior. This was Mme. Mistral, in her day +one of those "queens of beauty" whom the "félibres" elect every seven +years at their floral fêtes. Mme. Mistral was no less gracious to us +than her husband, and joined in the talk that followed with much +animation and charm. + +We had a little feared that M. Mistral, as he declines to write in +anything but Provençal, might carry his artistic creed into his +conversation too. To our relief, however, he spoke in the most polished +French--for you may know French very well, but be quite unable to +understand Provençal, either printed or spoken. This had sometimes made +our journeying difficult, as we inquired our way of peasants along the +road. + +It was natural to talk first to Mistral of literature. We inquired +whether he read much English. He shook his head, smiling. No! outside of +one or two of the great classics, Shakespeare and Milton, for example, +he had read little. Yes! he had read one American author--Fenimore +Cooper. _Le Feu-Follet_ had been a favourite book of his boyhood. This +we identified as _The Fire-Fly_. + +He seemed to wish to talk about America rather than literature, and +seemed immensely interested in the fact that we were Americans, and he +raised his eyes, with an expression of French wonderment, at the fact +of our walking our way through the country--as also at the length of +the journey from America. Evidently it seemed to him a tremendous +undertaking. + +"You Americans," he said, "are a wonderful people. You think nothing of +going around the world." + +We were surprised to find that he took the keenest interest in American +politics. + +"It must be a terribly difficult country to govern," he said. And then +he asked us eagerly for news of our "extraordinary President." We +suggested Mr. Wilson. + +"Oh, no! no!" he explained. "The extraordinary man who was President +before him." + +"Colonel Roosevelt?" + +Yes, that was the man--a most remarkable man that! So Colonel Roosevelt +may be interested to hear that the poet-king of Provence is an +enthusiastic Bull Mooser. + +Of course, we talked too of the "félibrige," and it was beautiful to see +how M. Mistral's face softened at the mention of his friend Joseph +Roumanille, and with what generosity he attributed the origin of the +great movement to his dead friend. + +"But you must by all means call on Mme. Roumanille," said he, "when you +go to Avignon, and say that I sent you"--for Roumanille's widow still +lives, one of the most honoured muses of the "félibrige." + +When it was time for us to go on our way, nothing would satisfy M. and +Mme. Mistral but that we drink a glass of a cordial which is made by +"Elise" from Mistral's own recipe; and as we raised the tiny glasses of +the innocent liqueur in our hands, Mistral drank "A l'Amérique!" + +Then, taking a great slouch hat from a rack in the hall, and looking as +though it was his statue from Aries accompanying us, the stately old man +led us out into the road, and pointed us the way to Avignon. + +On the 30th of this coming September that great old man--the memory of +whose noble presence and beautiful courtesy will remain with us +forever--will be eighty-three. + +February, 1913. + + + + +XXVI + +IMPERISHABLE FICTION + + +The longevity of trees is said to be in proportion to the slowness of +their growth. It has to do no little as well with the depth and area of +their roots and the richness of the soil in which they find themselves. +When the sower went forth to sow, it will be remembered, that which soon +sprang up as soon withered away. It was the seed that was content to +"bring forth fruit with patience" that finally won out and survived the +others. + +These humble, old-fashioned illustrations occur to me as I apply myself +to the consideration of the question provoked by the lightning +over-production of modern fiction and modern literature generally: the +question of the flourishing longevity of the fiction of the past as +compared with the swift oblivion which seems almost invariably to +over-take the much-advertised "masterpieces" of the present. + +I read somewhere a ballade asking--where are the "best sellers" of +yesteryear? The ballad-maker might well ask, and one might re-echo with +Villon: "Mother of God, ah! where are they?" During the last twenty +years they have been as the sands on the seashore for multitude, yet I +think one would be hard set to name a dozen of them whose titles even +are still on the lips of men--whereas several quieter books published +during that same period, unheralded by trumpet or fire-balloon, are seen +serenely to be ascending to a sure place in the literary firmament. + +What can be the reason? Can the decay of these forgotten phenomena of +modern fiction, so lavishly crowned with laurels manufactured in the +offices of their own publishers, have anything to do with the hectic +rapidity of their growth, and may there be some truth in the supposition +that the novels, and books generally, that live longest are those that +took the longest to write, or, at all events underwent the longest +periods of gestation? + +Some fifteen years or so ago one of the most successful manufacturers of +best sellers was Guy Boothby, whose _Dr. Nikola_ is perhaps still +remembered. Unhappily he did not live long to enjoy the fruits of his +industrious dexterity. I bring his case to mind as typical of the modern +machine-made methods. + +I had read in a newspaper that he did his "writing" by phonograph, and +chancing to meet him somewhere, asked him about it. His response was to +invite me to come down to his charming country house on the Thames and +see how he did it. Boothby was a fine, manly fellow, utterly without +"side" or any illusions as to the quality of his work. He loved good +literature too well--Walter Pater, incongruously enough, was one of his +idols--to dream that he could make it. Nor was the making of literature +by any means his first preoccupation, as he made clear, with winning +frankness, within a few moments of my arriving at his home. + +Taking me out into his grounds, he brought me to some extensive kennels, +where he showed me with pride some fifty or so prize dogs; then he took +me to his stables, his face shining with pleasure in his thoroughbreds; +and again he led the way to a vast hennery, populated with innumerable +prize fowls. + +"These are the things I care about," he said, "and I write the stuff for +which it appears I have a certain knack only because it enables me to +buy them!" + +Would that all writers of best sellers were as engagingly honest. No few +of them, however, write no better and affect the airs of genius into the +bargain. + +Then Boothby took me into his "study," the entire literary apparatus of +which consisted of three phonographs; and he explained that, when he had +dictated a certain amount of a novel into one of them, he handed it over +to his secretary in another room, who set it going and transcribed what +he had spoken into the machine; he, meanwhile, proceeding to fill up +another record. And he concluded airily by saying with a laugh that he +had a novel of 60,000 words to deliver in ten days, and was just on the +point of beginning it! + +Boothby's method was, I believe, somewhat unusual in those days. Since +then it has become something like the rule. Not so much as regards +the phonograph, perhaps, but with respect to the breathless speed of +production. + +I am informed by an editor, associated with magazines that use no less +than a million and a half words of fiction a month, that he has among +his contributors more than one writer on whom he can rely to turn off a +novel of 60,000 words in six days, and that he can put his finger on +twenty novelists who think nothing of writing a novel of a hundred +thousand words in anywhere from sixty to ninety days. He recalled to me, +too, the case of a well-known novelist who has recently contracted to +supply a publisher with four novels in one year, each novel to run to +not less than a hundred thousand words. One thinks of the Scotsman with +his "Where's your Willie Shakespeare now?" + +Even Balzac's titanic industry must hide its diminished head before such +appalling fecundity; and what would Horace have to say to such frog-like +verbal spawning, with his famous "labour of the file" and his counsel to +writers "to take a subject equal to your powers, and consider long what +your shoulders refuse, what they are able to bear." It is to be feared +that "the monument more enduring than brass" is not erected with such +rapidity. The only brass associated with the modern best seller is to +be found in the advertisements; and, indeed, all that both purveyor and +consumer seem to care about may well be summed up in the publisher's +recommendation quoted by Professor Phelps: "This book goes with a rush +and ends with a smash." Such, one might add, is the beginning and ending +of all literary rockets. + +Now let us recall some fiction that has been in the world anywhere from, +say, three hundred years to fifty years and is yet vigorously alive, +and, in many instances, to be classed still with the best sellers. + +_Don Quixote_, for example, was published in 1605, but is still actively +selling. Why? May it perhaps be that it was some six years in the +writing, and that a great man, who was soldier as well as writer, +charged it with the vitality of all his blood and tears and laughter, +all the hard-won humanity of years of manful living, those five years as +a slave in Algiers (actually beginning it in prison once more at La +Mancha), and all the stern struggle of a storm-tossed life faced with +heroic steadfastness and gaiety of heart? + +Take another book which, if it is not read as much as it used to be, and +still deserves to be, is certainly far from being forgotten--_Gil Blas_. +Published in 1715--that is, its first two parts--it has now two +centuries of popularity to its credit, and is still as racy with +humanity as ever; but, though Le Sage was a rapid and voluminous writer, +over this one book which alone the world remembers it is significant to +note that he expended unusual time and pains. He was forty-seven years +old when the first two parts were published. The third part was not +published till 1724, and eleven years more were to elapse before the +issue of the fourth and final part in 1735. + +A still older book that is still one of the world's best sellers, _The +Pilgrim's Progress_, can hardly be conceived as being dashed off in +sixty or ninety days, and would hardly have endured so long had not +Bunyan put into it those twelve years of soul torment in Bedford gaol. +_Robinson Crusoe_ still sells its annual thousands, whereas others of +its author's books no less skilfully written are practically forgotten, +doubtless because Defoe, fifty-eight years old at its publication, had +concentrated in it the ripe experience of a lifetime. Though a boy's +book to us, he clearly intended it for an allegory of his own arduous, +solitary life. + +"I, Robinson Crusoe," we read, "do affirm that the story, though +allegorical, is also historical, and that it is the beautiful +representation of a life of unexampled misfortune, and of a variety +not to be met with in this world." + +_The Vicar of Wakefield_, as we know, was no hurried piece of work. +Indeed, Goldsmith went about it in so leisurely a fashion as to leave it +neglected in a drawer of his desk, till Johnson rescued it, according to +the proverbial anecdote; and even then its publisher, Newbery, was in +no hurry, for he kept it by him another two years before giving it to +the printer and to immortality. It was certainly one of those fruits +"brought forth with patience" all round. + +_Tom Jones_ is another such slow-growing masterpiece. Written in the +sad years immediately following the death of his dearly loved wife, +Fielding, dedicating it to Lord Lyttelton, says: "I here present you +with the labours of some years of my life"; and it need scarcely +be added that the book, as in the case of all real masterpieces, +represented not merely the time expended on it, but all the accumulated +experience of Fielding's very human history. + +Yes! Whistler's famous answer to Ruskin's counsel holds good of all +imperishable literature. Had he the assurance to ask two hundred guineas +for a picture that only took a day to paint? No, replied Whistler, he +asked it for "the training of a lifetime"; and it is this training of a +lifetime, in addition to the actual time expended on composition, that +constitutes the reserve force of all great works of fiction, and is +entirely lacking in most modern novels, however superficially brilliant +be their workmanship. + +For this reason books like George Borrow's _Lavengro_ and _Romany Rye_, +failures on their publication, grow greater rather than less with the +passage of time. Their writers, out of the sheer sincerity of their +natures, furnished them, as by magic, with an inexhaustible provision of +life-giving "ichor." To quote from Milton, "a good book is the precious +life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a +life beyond life." + +Of this immortality principle in literature Milton himself, it need +hardly be said, is one of the great exemplars. He was but thirty-two +when he first projected _Paradise Lost_, and through all the intervening +years of hazardous political industry he had kept the seed warm in his +heart, its fruit only to be brought forth with tragic patience in those +seven years of blindness and imminent peril of the scaffold which +followed his fiftieth birthday. + +The case of poets is not irrelevant to our theme, for the conditions of +all great literature, whatever its nature, are the same. Therefore, +we may recall Dante, whose _Divine Comedy_ was with him from his +thirty-fifth year till the year of his death, the bitter-sweet companion +of twenty years of exile. Goethe, again, finished at eighty the _Faust_ +he had conceived at twenty. + +Spenser was at work on his _Faerie Queene_, alongside his preoccupation +with state business, for nearly twenty years. Pope was twelve years +translating Homer, and I think there is little doubt that Gray's _Elegy_ +owes much of its staying power to the Horatian deliberation with which +Gray polished and repolished it through eight years. + +If we are to believe Poe's _Philosophy of Composition_, and there is, I +think, more truth in it than is generally allowed, the vitality of _The +Raven_, as that, too, of his genuinely imperishable fictions, is less +due to inspiration than to the mathematical painstaking of their +composition. + +But, perhaps, of all poets, the story of Virgil is most instructive for +an age of "get-rich-quick" _littérateurs_. On his _Georgics_ alone he +worked seven years, and, after working eleven years on the _Aeneid_, he +was still so dissatisfied with it that on his death-bed he besought his +friends to burn it, and on their refusal, commanded his servants to +bring the manuscript that he might burn it himself. But, fortunately, +Augustus had heard portions of it, and the imperial veto overpowered the +poet's infanticidal desire. + +But, to return to the novelists, it may at first sight seem that the +great writer who, with the Waverley Novels, inaugurated the modern era +of cyclonic booms and mammoth sales, was an exception to the classic +formula of creation which we are endeavouring to make good. Stevenson, +we have been told, used to despair as he thought of Scott's "immense +fecundity of invention" and "careless, masterly ease." + +"I cannot compete with that," he says--"what makes me sick is to think +of Scott turning out _Guy Mannering_ in three weeks." + +Scott's speed is, indeed, one of the marvels of literary history, yet +in his case, perhaps more than in that of any other novelist, it must +be remembered that this speed had, in an unusual degree, that "training +of a lifetime" to rely upon; as from his earliest boyhood all Scott's +faculties had been consciously as well as unconsciously engaged in +absorbing and, by the aid of his astonishing memory, preserving the +vast materials on which he was able thus carelessly to draw. + +Moreover, those who have read his manly autobiography know that this +speed was by no means all "ease," as witness the almost tragic +composition of _The Bride of Lammermoor_. If ever a writer scorned +delights and lived laborious days, it was Walter Scott. At the same time +the condition of his fame in the present day bears out the general truth +of my contention, for there is little doubt that he would be more widely +read than he is were it not for those too frequent _longueurs_ and inert +paddings which resulted from his too hurried workmanship. + +Jane Austen is another example of comparatively rapid creation, writing +three of her best-known novels, _Pride and Prejudice_, _Sense and +Sensibility_, and _Northanger Abbey_ between the ages of twenty-one and +twenty-three. Yet _Pride and Prejudice_, which practically survives the +others, took her ten months to complete, and all her writings, it has +again to be said, had first been deeply and intimately "lived." + +Charlotte Brontë was a year in writing _Jane Eyre_, spurred on to new +effort by the recent rejection of _The Professor_; but to write such a +book in a year cannot be called over-hasty production when one considers +how much of _Jane Eyre_ was drawn from Charlotte Brontë's own life, and +also how she and her sisters had been experimenting with literature from +their earliest childhood. + +Thackeray considered an allowance of two years sufficient for the +writing of a good novel, but that seems little enough when one takes +into account the length of his best-known books, not to mention the +perfection of their craftsmanship. Dickens, for all the prodigious bulk +of his output, was rather a steady than a rapid writer. "He considered," +says Forster, "three of his not very large manuscript pages a good, and +four an excellent, day's work." + +_David Copperfield_ was about a year and nine months in the writing, +having been begun in the opening of 1849 and completed in October, 1850. +_Bleak House_ took a little longer, having been begun in November, 1851, +and completed in August, 1853. _Hard Times_ was a hasty piece of work, +written between the winter of 1853, and the summer of 1854, and it +cannot be considered one of Dickens's notable successes. + +George Meredith wrote four of his greatest novels in seven years, +_Richard Feverel_, _Evan Harrington_, _Sandra Belloni_, and _Rhoda +Fleming_ being produced between 1859 and 1866. His poem, _Modern Love_, +was also written during that period. + +George Eliot was a much-meditating, painstaking writer, though _Adam +Bede_ cost her little more than a year's work. Her novels, however, as +a rule, did not come forth without prayer and fasting, and, in the +course of their creation, she used often to suffer from "hopelessness +and melancholy." _Romola_, to which she devoted long and studious +preparation, she was often on the point of giving up, and in regard to +it she gives expression to a literary ideal to which the gentleman with +the contract for four novels a year, referred to in the outset of this +paper, is probably a stranger. + + It may turn out [she says], that I can't work freely and fully + enough in the medium I have chosen, and in that case I must give + it up; for I will never write anything to which my whole heart, + mind, and conscience don't consent; so that I may feel it was + something--however small--which wanted to be done in this world, + and that I am just the organ for that small bit of work. + +Charles Kingsley who, if not a great novelist, has to his credit in +_Westward Ho!_ one romance at least which, in the old phrase, "the world +will not willingly let die," was as conscientious in his work as he was +brilliant. + +Says a friend who was with him while he was writing _Hypatia_: + +"He took extraordinary pains to be accurate. We spent one whole day in +searching the four folio volumes of Synesius for a fact he thought was +there, and which was found there at last." + +The writer of perhaps the greatest historical novel in the English +language, _The Cloister and the Hearth_, was what one might call a +glutton for thoroughness. Of himself Charles Reade has said: "I studied +the great art of fiction closely for fifteen years before I presumed +to write a line. I was a ripe critic before I became an artist." His +commonplace books, on the entries in which and the indexing he was +accustomed to spend one whole day out of each week, cataloguing the +notes of his multifarious reading and pasting in cuttings from +newspapers likely to be useful in novel-building, completely filled +one of the rooms in his house. In his will he left these open to the +inspection of literary students who cared to study the methods which +he had found so serviceable. + +To name one or two more English novelists: Thomas Hardy's novels would +seem to have the slow growth of deep-rooted things. His greatest work, +_The Return of the Native_, was on the stocks for four years, though a +year seems to have sufficed for _Far from the Madding Crowd_. + +The meticulous practice of Stevenson is proverbial, but this glimpse of +his method is worth catching again. + + The first draft of a story [records Mr. Charles D. Lanier], + Stevenson wrote out roughly, or dictated to Lloyd Osbourne. When all + the colours were in hand for the complete picture, he invariably + penned it himself, with exceeding care.... If the first copy did not + please him, he patiently made a second or a third draft. In his + stern, self-imposed apprenticeship of phrase-making he had prepared + himself for these workmanlike methods by the practice of rewriting + his trial stories into dramas and then reworking them into stories + again. + +Nathaniel Hawthorne brought the devoted, one might say, the devotional, +spirit of the true artist to all his work, but _The Scarlet Letter_ was +written at a good pace when once started, though, as usual, the germ +had been in Hawthorne's mind for many years. The story of its beginning +is one of the many touching anecdotes in that history of authorship +which Carlyle compared to the Newgate Calendar. Incidentally, too, it +witnesses that an author occasionally meets with a good wife. + +One wintry autumn day in Salem, Hawthorne returned home earlier than +usual from the custom-house. With pale lips, he said to his wife: "I am +turned out of office." To which she--God bless her!--cheerily replied: +"Very well! now you can write your book!" and immediately set about +lighting his study fire and generally making things comfortable for his +work. + +The book was _The Scarlet Letter_, and was completed by the following +February, Hawthorne, as his wife said, writing "immensely" on it day +after day, nine hours a day. When finished, Hawthorne seems to have been +dispirited about the story, and put it away in a drawer; but the good +James T. Fields chanced soon to call on him, and asked him if he had +anything for him to publish. + +"Who," asked Hawthorne gloomily, "would risk publishing a book from me, +the most unpopular writer in America?" + +"I would," was Field's rejoinder, and after some further sparring, +Hawthorne owned up. + +"As you have found me out," said he, "take what I have written and tell +me if it is good for anything"; and Fields went away with the manuscript +of what is, without any question, America's greatest novel. + +Turning to the great novelists of France, with one or two exceptions, +they all bear out the theory of longevity in literature which I have +been endeavouring to support. It must reluctantly be confessed that one +of the most fascinatingly vital of them all, Alexandre Dumas, is one of +the exceptions, born improvisator as he was; yet immense research, it +needs hardly be said, went to the making of his enormous library of +romance--even though, it be allowed, that much of that work was done for +him by his "disciples." + +George Sand was another facile, all too facile, writer. Here is a +description of her method: + + To write novels was to her only a process of nature. She seated + herself before her table at ten o'clock, with scarcely a plot and + only the slightest acquaintance with her characters, and until five + in the evening, while her hand guided a pen, the novel wrote itself. + Next day, and the next, it was the same. By and by the novel had + written itself in full and another was unfolding. + +Whether George Sand is still alive as a novelist, apart from her place +as an historic personality, I leave others to decide; but I am very sure +that she would be read a great deal more than she is if she had not so +confidently left her novels--to write themselves. Different, indeed, was +the method of Balzac, toiling year after year at his colossal task of +_The Human Comedy_, sometimes working eighteen hours a day, and never +less than twelve, and that "in the midst of protested bills, business +annoyances, the most cruel financial straits, in utter solitude and lack +of all consolation." But then Balzac was sustained by one of those great +dreams, without whose aid no lasting literature is produced, the dream, +"by infinite patience and courage, to compose for the France of the +nineteenth century, that history of morals which the old civilizations +of Rome, Athens, Memphis, and India have left untold." + +To fulfil this he was able to live, for a long period, on a daily +expenditure of "three sous for bread, two for milk, and three for +firing." But doubtless it had been different if his dream had been +prize puppies, a garage full of motor-cars, or a translation into the +Four Hundred. + +Victor Hugo, again, was one of the herculean artists, working, in +Emerson's phrase, "in a sad sincerity," with the patience of an ant and +the energy of a volcano. Of his _Les Misérables_--perhaps the greatest +novel ever written, as it is, I suppose, easily the longest--he said, +"it takes me nearly as long to publish a book as to write one"; and he +was at work on _Les Misérables_, off and on, for nearly fifteen years. +Of his writing _Notre Dame_ (that other colossus of fiction) this quaint +picture has been preserved. He had made vast historical preparations for +it, but ever there seemed still more to make, till at length his +publisher grew impatient, and under his pressure Hugo at last made a +start--after this fashion: + + He purchased a great grey woollen wrapper that covered him from head + to foot, he locked up all his clothes lest he should be tempted to + go out, and, carrying off his ink-bottle to his study, applied + himself to his labour just as if he had been in prison. He never + left the table except for food and sleep, and the sole recreation + that he allowed himself was an hour's chat after dinner with M. + Pierre Leroux, or any other friend who might drop in, and to whom he + would occasionally read over his day's work. + +Daudet, whose _Tartarin_ bids fair to remain one of the world's types, +like _Don Quixote_ or _Mr. Micawber_, for all his natural Provençal +gift of improvisation and, indeed, from his self-recognized necessity +of keeping it in check, was another strenuous artist. He wrote each +manuscript three times over, he told his biographer, and would write it +as many more if he could; and his son, in writing of him, has this truth +to say of his, as of all living work: + + The fact is that labour does not begin at the moment when the + artist takes his pen. It begins in sustained reflection and in the + thought which accumulates images and sifts them, garners and winnows + them out, and compels life to keep control over imagination, and + imagination to expand and enlarge life. + +Zola is perhaps unduly depreciated nowadays, but certainly, if Carlyle's +"infinite capacity for taking pains" as a recipe for genius ever was put +to the test, it was by the author of the Rougon-Macquart series. Talking +of rewriting, Prosper Mérimée, best known for _Carmen_, is said to have +rewritten his _Colomba_ no less than sixteen times; as our Anglo-Saxon +Kipling, it used to be told, wrote his short stories seven times over. + +But, of course, the classical example of the artist-fanatic in modern +times was Gustave Flaubert. His agonies in quest of the _mot propre_, +the one and only word, are proverbial, and are said literally to have +broken down his nerves. Mr. Huneker has told of him that "he would +annotate three hundred volumes for a page of facts.... In twenty pages +he sometimes saved three or four from destruction," and, in the course +of twenty-six years' polishing and pruning of _The Temptation of Saint +Anthony_, he reduced his original manuscript of 540 pages down to 136, +even reducing it still further after its first publication. + +On _Madame Bovary_ he worked six years, and in writing _Salâmmbo_, +which, took him no less time, he studied the scenery on the spot and +exhausted the resources of the Imperial Library in his search for +documentary evidences. + +Flaubert may be said to have carried his passion for perfection to the +point of mania, and it will be a question with some whether, with all +his pains, he can be called a great novelist, after all. But that he was +a great stylist and a master in the art of making terrible and beautiful +bas-reliefs admits of no doubt. + +To be a great world-novelist you need an all-embracing humanity as well, +such as we find in Tolstoy's _War and Peace_--but that great book, need +one say, came of no slipshod speed of improvisation. On the contrary, +Tolstoy corrected and recorrected it so often that his wife, who acted +as his amanuensis, is said to have copied the whole enormous manuscript +no less than seven times! + +Yes! though it be doubtless true, in Mr. Kipling's famous phrase, that + + There are nine and sixty ways + Of inditing tribal lays, + And every blessed one of them is right, + +I think that the whole nine and sixty of them include somewhere in their +method those sole preservative virtues of truth to life and passionate +artistic integrity. The longest-lived books, whatever their nature, have +usually been the longest growing; and even those lasting things of +literature that have seemed, as it were, to spring up in a night, have +been long in secret preparation in a soil mysteriously enriched and +refined by the hid processes of time. + + + + +XXVII + +THE MAN BEHIND THE PEN + + +Bulwer's deservedly famous phrase, "The pen is mightier than the sword," +beneath its surface application, if you think it over, has this further +suggestion to make to the believer in literature--that, as the sword is +of no value as a weapon apart from the man that wields it, so, and no +less so, is it with the pen. A mere pen, a mere sword--of what use are +they, save as mural decorations, without a man behind them? + +And that recalls a memory of mine, which, as both great men are now +drinking wine in Valhalla out of the skulls of their critics, there can +be no harm in recalling. + +Some years ago I was on an unforgettable visit to Björnson, at his +country home of Aulestad, near Lillehammer. This is not the moment to +relive that beautiful memory as a whole. All that is pertinent to my +present purpose is a remark in regard to Ibsen that Björnson flashed out +one day, shaking his great white mane with earnestness, his noble face +alight with the spirit of battle. We had been talking of his possibly +too successful attempt to sever Norway from Sweden, and Ibsen came in +somehow incidentally. + +"Ibsen," said he, "is not a man. He is only a pen." + +There is no necessity to discuss the justice of the dictum. Probably, if +ever there was a man behind a pen, it was Ibsen; but Ibsen's manhood +concentrated itself entirely behind his pen, whereas Björnson's employed +other weapons also, such as his gift of oratory, and was generally more +dramatically in evidence. Björnson and Ibsen, as we know, did not agree +on a number of things. Thus Björnson, like a human being, was unjust. +But his phrase was a useful one, and I am using it. It was misapplied to +Ibsen; but, put in the form of a question, I know of no better single +test to apply to writers, dead or alive, than-- + +"Is this a man? Or is it only a pen?" + +Said Walt Whitman, in his familiar "So Long" to _Leaves of Grass_: + + Camerado, this is no book; + Who touches this touches a man. + +And, of course, Walt was right about his own book, whether you like the +man behind _Leaves of Grass_ or not; but also that assertion of his +might be chalked as a sort of customs "O.K." on all literary baggage +whatsoever that has passed free into immortality. There is positively no +writer that has withstood the searching examination of time, on whose +book that final stamp of literary reality may not be placed. On every +classic, Time has scrawled ineffaceably: + + This is no book; + Who touches this touches a man. + +I raise the question of reality in literature in no merely academic +spirit. For those who not only love books, but care for literature as a +living thing, the question is a particularly live issue at the present +time, when not only the quantity of writing is so enormous, but the +average quality of it is so astonishingly good, when technique that +would almost humble the masters, and would certainly dazzle them, is an +accomplishment all but commonplace. At any rate, it is so usual as to +create no special surprise. If people write at all, it is taken for +granted, nowadays, that they write well. And the number of people at the +present time writing not only well, but wonderfully well, is little +short of appalling. + +In this, for those who ponder the phenomena of literature, there is less +matter for congratulation than would seem likely at first sight. There +is, indeed, no little bewilderment, and some disquietude. Confronted +with short stories--and novels also, for that matter--told with a skill +which makes the old masters of fiction look like clumsy amateurs; +confronted, too, with a thousand poets--the number is scarcely an +exaggeration--with accomplishments of metre and style that make some +famous singers seem like clodhoppers of the muse, one is obliged to ask +oneself: + +"Are these brilliant writers really greater than those that went +before?" + +If for some reason, felt at first rather than defined, we answer "no," +we are forced to the conclusion that, after all, literature must be +something more than a mere matter of writing. If so, we are constrained +to ask ourselves, what is it? + +The men who deal with manuscripts--editors, publishers' readers, and +publishers, men not only expert witnesses in regard to the printed +literature of the day, but also curiously learned in the story of the +book unborn, the vast mass of writing that never arrives at print--are +even more impressed by what one might call the uncanny literary +brilliance of the time. They are also puzzled by the lack of a certain +something missing in work which otherwise possesses every nameable +quality of literary excellence. One of these, an editor with an eye as +sympathetic as it is keen, told me of an instance to the point, typical +of a hundred others. + +He had been unusually struck by a story sent in to him by an unknown +writer. It was, he told me, amazing from every purely literary point of +view--plot, characterization, colour, and economy of language. It had so +much that it seemed strange that anything at all should be lacking. He +sent for the writer, and told him just what he thought. + +"But," he ended, after praise such as an editor seldom risks, "there is +something the matter with it, after all. I wonder if you can tell me +what it is." + +The writer was, for a writer so flattered, strangely modest. All he +could say, he answered, was that he had done his best. The editor, +agreeing that he certainly seemed to have done that, was all the more +curious to find out how it was that a man who could do so well had not +been able to add to his achievement the final "something" that was +missing. + +"What puzzles me," said the editor finally, "is that, with all the +rest, you were not able to add--humanity. Your story seems to have +been written by a wonderful literary machine, instead of by a man." + +And, no doubt, the young story-writer went away sorrowful, in spite of +the acceptance of his story--which, after all, was only lacking in that +quality which you will find lacking in all the writing of the day, save +in that by one or two exceptional writers, who, by their isolation, the +more forcibly point the moral. + +A wonderful literary machine! The editor's phrase very nearly hits off +the situation. As we have the linotype to set up the written words with +a minimum of human agency, we really seem to be within measurable +distance of a similar automaton that will produce the literature to be +set up without the intrusion of any flesh-and-blood author. In this +connection I may perhaps be permitted to quote a sentence or two from +myself, written _à propos_ a certain chameleonesque writer whose +deservedly popular works are among the contemporary books that I most +value: + + A peculiar skill seems to have been developed among writers during + the last twenty years--that of writing in the manner of some master, + not merely with mimetic cleverness, but with genuine creative power. + We have poets who write so like Wordsworth and Milton that one can + hardly differentiate them from their masters; and yet--for this is + my point--they are no mere imitators, but original poets, choosing, + it would seem, some old mask of immortality through which to express + themselves. In a different way from that of Guy de Maupassant they + have chosen to suppress themselves, or rather, I should say, that, + whereas De Maupassant strove to suppress, to eliminate, himself, + their method is that of disguise. + + In some respects they remind one of the hermit-crab, who annexes + some beautiful ready-made house, instead of making one for himself. + But then they annex it so brilliantly, with such delightful + consequences for the reader, that not only is there no ground for + complaint, but the reader almost forgets that the house does not + really belong to them, and that they are merely entertaining tenants + on a short lease. + +It is not that one is not grateful to writers of this type. Indeed one +is. They not only provide us with genuine entertainment, but, by the +skill born of their fine culture, they make us re-taste of the old +masters in their brilliant variations. One has no complaint against +them. Far from it. Only one wonders why they trouble to attach their own +merely personal names to their volumes, for, so far as those volumes are +concerned, there is no one to be found in them answering to the name of +the ostensible author. + +Suppose, for example, that the author's name on the title-page is +"Brown." Well, so far as we can find out by reading, "Brown" might just +as well be "Green." In fact, there is no "Brown" discoverable--no +individual man behind the pen that wrote, not out of the fulness of the +heart, or the originality of the brain, from any experience or knowledge +or temperament peculiar to "Brown," but out of the fulness of what one +might call a creatively assimilated education, and by the aid of a +special talent for the combination of literary influences. + +We have had a great deal of pleasure in the reading, we have admired +this and that, we may even have been astonished, but I repeat--there is +no "Brown." In private life "Brown" may be a forceful and fascinating +personality, but, so far as literature is concerned, he is merely a +"wonderful literary machine." He has been able, by his remarkable skill, +to conjure every other writer into his book--except himself. The name +"Brown" on his title-page means nothing. He has not "made his name." + +The phrase "to make a name" has become so dulled with long usage that it +is worth while to pause and consider what a reality it stands for. What +it really means, of course, is that certain men and women, by the +personal force or quality of their lives, have succeeded in charging +their names--names given them originally haphazard, as names are given +to all of us--with a permanent significance as unmistakable as that +belonging to the commonest noun. The name "Byron" has a meaning as clear +and unmistakable as the word "mutton." The words "dog" and "cat" have a +meaning hardly more clearly defined than the name "Burns" or "Voltaire." +An oak-tree can no more be mistaken for a willow than Shakespeare can be +confused with Spenser. If we say "Coleridge," there is no possibility of +any one thinking that perhaps we meant "Browning." + +The reason, of course, is that these names are as unmistakably "made" +as a Krupp gun or a Sheffield razor. Sincere, intense life has passed +into them, life lived as the men who bore those names either chose, or +were forced, to live it; individual experience, stern or gentle, in +combination with an individual gift of expression. + +All names that are really "made" are made in the same way. You may make +a name as Napoleon made his, through war, or you may make it as Keats +made his, by listening to the nightingale and worshipping the moon. Or +you may make it as Charles Lamb made his, merely by loving old folios, +whist, and roast pig. All that is necessary--granted, of course, the +gift of literary expression--is sincerity, an unshakable faithfulness to +yourself. + +In really great writers--or, at all events, in those writings of theirs +by which they immortally exist--there is not one insincere word. The +perishable parts of great writers will, without exception, be found to +be those writings which they attempted either in insincere moments, or +at the instigation of some surface talent that had no real connection +with their deep-down selves. + +All real writing has got to be lived before it is written--lived not +only once or twice, but lived over and over again. Mere reporting won't +do in literature, nor the records of easy voyaging through perilous +seas. Dante had to walk through hell before he could write of it, and +men today who would write either of hell or of heaven will never do it +by a study of fashionable drawing-rooms, or prolonged sojourns in the +country houses of the great. + +On the other hand, if you wish to write convincingly about what we call +"society," those lords and ladies, for example, who are just as real in +their strange way as coal-heavers and mechanics, it is of no use your +trying, unless you were fortunate enough to be born among them, or have +been unfortunately associated with them all your life. To write with +reality about the most artificial condition necessitates an intimate +acquaintance with it that, at its best, is tragic. Those who would write +about the depths and the heights must have dared them, not merely as +visitors, but as awestricken inhabitants. Similarly, those who would +write about the plain, the long, low levels of commonplace human life, +must have dwelt in them, have possessed the dreary, unlaurelled courage +of the good bourgeois, have known what it is to live out the day just +for the day's sake, with the blessed hope of a reasonably respectable +and comfortable conclusion. + +Probably it seldom occurs to us to think what a tremendously rooted life +is needed to make even one lasting lyric, though the strangeness of the +process is but the same strangeness that accompanies the antecedent +preparation of a flower. + + How many suns it takes + To make one speedwell blue-- + +was no mere fancy of a poet. It is a fact of the long sifting and +kneading to which time subjects the material of its perfect things. + +One could not get a better example of what I mean than Lovelace's song +_To Lucasta, Going to the Wars_, without which no anthology of English +verse could possibly be published. Why does generation after generation +say over and over, and hand on to its children: + + Yet this inconstancy is such + As you too shall adore; + I could not love thee, dear, so much + Loved I not honour more. + +Is it merely because it is so well written, or because it embodies a +highly moral sentiment suitable to the education of young men? No, it is +because the sword and the pen for once met together in the hand of a +man, because a soldier and a lover and a poet met together in a song. +One might almost say that Lovelace wrote his lyric first with his sword, +and merely copied it out with his pen. At all events, he was first a man +and incidentally a poet; and every real poet that ever sang, whether or +not he wielded the weapons of physical warfare, has been just the same. +Otherwise he could not have been a poet. + +When one speaks of the man behind the pen, one does not necessarily mean +that the writer must be a man of dominant personality, suggestive in +every sentence of "the strenuous life," and muscle, and "punch." +Literature might be described as the world in words, and as it takes all +kinds of men to make a world, so with the world of literature. All we +ask is that we should be made aware of some kind of a man. Numerous +other qualities besides "the punch" go to the making of living +literature, though blood and brawn, not to say brutality, have of late +had it so much their own way in the fashionable literature of the +day--written by muscular literary gentlemen who seem to write rather +with their fists than their pens--that we are in danger of forgetting +the reassuring truth. + +J.M. Barrie long ago made a criticism on Rudyard Kipling which has +always stayed by me as one of the most useful of critical touchstones. + +"Mr. Kipling," said he, "has yet to learn that a man may know more of +life staying at home by his mother's knee than swaggering in bad company +over three continents." + +Nor is successful literature necessarily the record of the successful +temperament. Some writers, not a few, owe their significance to the fact +that they have found humanly intimate expression for their own failure, +or set down their weakness in such a way as to make themselves the +consoling companions of human frailty and disappointment through the +generations. It is the paradox of such natures that they should express +themselves in the very record of their frustration. Amiel may be taken +as the type of such writers. In confiding to his _Journal_ his hopeless +inability for expressing his high thought, he expressed what is +infinitely more valuable to us--himself. + +Nor, again, does it follow that the man who thus gets himself +individualized in literature is the kind of man we care about or approve +of. Often it is quite the contrary, and we may think that it had been +just as well if some human types had not been able so forcibly to +project into literature their unworthy and undesirable selves. Yet this +is God's world, and nothing human must be foreign to the philosophical +student of it. + +All the "specimens" in a natural history museum are not things of +beauty or joy. So it is in the world of books. François Villon cannot +be called an edifying specimen of the human family, yet he unmistakably +belongs there, and it was to that prince of scalawags that we owe not +merely that loveliest sigh in literature--"Where are the snows of +yester-year?"--but so striking a picture of the underworld of medieval +Paris that without it we should hardly be able to know the times as +they were. + +The same applies to Benvenuto Cellini--bully, assassin, insufferable +egoist, and so forth, as well as artist. If he had not been sufficiently +in love with his own swashbuckler rascality to write his amazing +autobiography, how dim to our imaginations, comparatively, would have +been the world of the Italian Renaissance! + +Again, in our own day, take Baudelaire, a personality even less +agreeable still--morbid, diseased, if you will, wasting, you may deem, +immense poetic powers on revealing the beauty of those "flowers of evil" +which had as well been left in their native shade. Yet, it is because he +saw them so vividly, cared to see little else, dwelt in his own strange +corner of the world with such an intensity of experience, that he +is--Baudelaire. Like him or not, his name is "made." A queer kind of +man, indeed, but not "only a pen." + +Certain writers have made a cult of "impersonality" in literature. They +would do their utmost to keep themselves out of sight, to let their +subject-matter tell its own tale. But such a feat is an impossibility. +They might as well try to get out of their own skins. The mere effort +at suppression ends in a form of revelation. Their mere choice of +themes and manner of presentation, let them keep behind the scenes as +assiduously as they may, will in the end stamp them. However much a man +may hide behind his pen, so that indeed his personality, compared with +that of more subjective writers, remains always somewhat enigmatic, yet +when the pen is wielded by a man, whatever his reticence or his mask, we +know that a man is there--and that is all that concerns us. + +On the other hand, of course, there are companionable, sympathetic +writers whose whole stock-in-trade is themselves, their personal charm, +their personal way of looking at things. Of these, Montaigne and Charles +Lamb are among the great examples. It matters to us little or nothing +what they are writing about; for their subjects, so far as they are +concerned, are only important in relation to themselves, as revealing +to us by reflection two uncommonly "human" human beings, whom it is +impossible to mistake for any one else; just as we enjoy the society of +some whimsical talker among our living friends, valuing him not so much +for what he says, but for the way he says it, and because it is he, and +no one else, that is talking. + +Again, there are other men whose names, in addition to their personal +suggestion, have an impersonal significance as marking new eras of human +development, such as Erasmus or Rousseau or Darwin; men who embodied +the time-spirit at crucial moments of world change, men who announced +rather than created, the heralds of epochs, men who first took the new +roads along which the rest of mankind were presently to travel, men who +felt or saw something new for the first time, prophets of dawn while yet +their fellows slept. + +Sometimes a man will come to stand for a whole nation, like Robert Burns +or Cervantes; or a great, half-legendary age of the world, like Homer; +or some permanent attitude of the human spirit, like Plato. + +No fixed star, great or small, in the firmament of literature ever +got there without some vital reason, or merely by writing, however +remarkable. The idea that literature is a mere matter of writing is seen +to be the hollowest of misconceptions the moment you run over any list +of enduring names. Try any such that you can think of, and in every case +you will find that the name stands for something more than a writer. Of +course, the man had to have his own peculiar genius for writing, but the +peculiarity was but the result of his individual being, his own special +way of living his life or viewing the world. + +Take Horace, for example. Does he live merely because of his unique +style, his masterly use of the Latin tongue? By means of that, of +course, but only secondarily. Primarily, he is as alive today as he +was when he sauntered through the streets of Rome, because he was so +absolutely the type of the well-bred man of the world in all countries +and times. He lived seriously in the social world as he found it, and +felt no idealistic craving to have it remoulded nearer to the heart's +desire. He was satisfied with its pleasures, and at one with its +philosophy. Thus he is as much at home in modern Paris or London or +New York as in ancient Rome, and his book is, therefore, forever +immortal as the man of the world's Bible. + +Take a name so different as that of Shelley. We have but to speak it +to define all it now stands for. Though no one should read a line of +Shelley's any more, the dream he dreamed has passed into the very +life-blood of mankind. Wherever men strive for freedom, or seek to +attune their lives to the strange spiritual music that breathes through +all things--music that none ever heard more clearly than he--there is +Shelley like the morning star to guide them and inspire. + +Think what Wordsworth means to the spiritual thought of the modern +world. In his own day he was one of the most lonely and laughed at of +poets, moping among his lakes and mountains and shepherds. Yet, as +Matthew Arnold said, "we are all Wordsworthians nowadays," and the +religion of nature that he found there for himself in his solitude bids +fair to be the final religion of the modern world. + +It is the same with every other great name one can think of, be it +Bunyan or Heine, Schopenhauer or Izaak Walton. One has but to cast +one's eyes over one's shelves to realize, as we see the familiar +names, how literally the books that bear them are living men, merely +transmigrated from their fleshly forms into the printed word. +Shakespeare and Milton, yes, even Pope; Johnson, Fielding, Sterne, +Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Carlyle, Dumas, Balzac, Emerson, Thoreau, +Hawthorne, Poe--their very faces seem to look out at us from the +bindings, such vividly human beings were they, with a vision of the +world, or a definition of character, so much their own and no one +else's. One might almost call them patented human beings--patentees of +spiritual discoveries, or of aspects of humanity, whose patents can +never be infringed for all our cleverness. + +Said Tennyson, in bitter answer to criticism that began to depreciate +him because of the glibness of his imitators: + + All can grow the flower now, + For all have got the seed. + +And certainly, as I have already said, the art of literary impersonation +is carried to a pitch today that almost amounts to genius. Yet you have +only to compare the real flower with the imitation, and you will soon +understand the difference. + +Take Walter Scott. It is a commonplace to say how much better we do the +historical novel nowadays than he did. At first sight, we may seem to; +in certain particulars, no doubt we do; but read him again, read _Rob +Roy_ or _Quentin Durward_ again, and you will not be quite so sure. You +will realize what an immortal difference there is, after all, between +the pen with a man behind it, and the most brilliant literary machine. + +Yes, "the mob of gentlemen that write with ease" is once more with us, +but no real book was ever yet written with ease, and no book has ever +survived, or ever can, in which we do not feel the presence of the +fighting, dreaming, or merely enjoying soul of a man. + + + + +XXVIII + +BULLS IN CHINA-SHOPS + + +There are some people of great value and importance in their own +spheres, who, on the strength of the distinction gained there, are apt +to intrude on other spheres of which they have no knowledge, where in +fact they are irrelevant, and often indeed ridiculously out of place. +This, however, does not prevent their trying to assert an authority +gained in their own sphere in those other spheres where they simply do +not belong; and such is the power of a name that is won for any one +thing that the multitude, unaccustomed to make distinctions, accepts +them as authorities on the hundred other things of which they know +nothing. Thus, to take a crude example, the New York Police, which is, +without doubt, learned in its own world, and well-adapted and equipped +for asserting its authority there, sometimes intrudes, with its +well-known _bonhomie_, into the worlds of drama and sculpture, and, +because it is an acknowledged judge of crooks and grafters, presumes +to be a judge and censor also of new plays and nude statues. + +Of course, the New York Police is absurd in such a character, absurd as +a bull in a china-shop is absurd; yet, as in the case of the bull with +the china, it is capable of doing quite a lot of damage. + +I take the New York Police merely, as I said, as a crude example of, +doubtless, well-meant, but entirely misplaced energy. Actually, however, +it is scarcely more absurd than many similar, if more distinguished, +bulls gaily crashing about on higher planes. + +Such are statesmen who, because they are Prime Ministers or Presidents, +deem themselves authorities on everything within the four winds, doctors +of divinity, and general _arbitri elegantiarum_. + +Such a bull in a china-shop in regard to literature was the late Mr. +Gladstone. It is no disrespect towards his great and estimable character +to say, that while, of course, he was technically a scholar--"great +Homeric scholar" was the accepted phrase for him--there were probably +few men in England so devoid of the literary sense. Yet for an author to +receive a post-card of commendation from Mr. Gladstone meant at least +the sale of an edition or two, and a certain permanency in public +appreciation. Her late Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria was Mr. +Gladstone's only rival as the literary destiny of the time. To Mr. +Gladstone we owe Mrs. Humphry Ward, to Her Majesty we owe Miss Marie +Corelli. + +John Ruskin, much as we may admire him for his moral influence, and +admire, or not admire, him for his prose, was a bull in a china-shop +when he made his famous criticism on Whistler, and thus inadvertantly +added to the gaiety of nations by provoking that delightful trial, +which, farcical as it seemed at the moment, not merely evoked from +Whistler himself some imperishable dicta on art and the relation of +critics to art, but really did something towards the long-drawn +awakening of that mysterious somnolence called the public consciousness +on the strange mission of beauty in this world, and, incidentally of the +status of those "eccentric" ministers of it called artists. + +I do not mean to say that bulls in china-shops are without their uses. +John Ruskin is a shining example to the contrary. + +One of his contemporaries, Thomas Carlyle, for all his genius, was on +one important subject--that of poetry--as much of a bull in a china-shop +as Ruskin was in art. Great friends as were he and Tennyson, the famous +anecdote _à propos_ of Tennyson's publication of _The Idylls of the +King_--"all very fine, Alfred, but when are you going to do some +work"--and many other such written deliverances suffice to show how +absolutely out of court a great tragic humorist and rhetorician may +be on an art practised by writers at least as valuable to English +literature as himself, say Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge, and Keats. +Carlyle was a great writer, but the names of these four gentlemen who, +according to his standard, never did any "work" have a strangely +permanent look about them compared with that of the prophet-journalist +of Chelsea and Ecclefechan. + +A similar "sage," another of the great conversational brow-beaters of +English literature, Samuel Johnson, though it was his chief business to +be a critic of poetry, was hardly more in court on the matter than +Carlyle. In fact, Dr. Johnson might with truth be described as the King +Bull of all the Bulls of all the China-shops. There was no subject, +however remote from his knowledge or experience on which he would +hesitate to pronounce, and if necessary bludgeon forth, his opinion. +But in his case, there is one important distinction to be made, a +distinction that has made him immortal. + +He disported his huge bulk about the china-shop with such quaintness, +with such engaging sturdiness of character, strangely displaying all the +time so unique a wisdom of that world that lies outside and encloses all +china-shops, so unparalleled a genius of common sense, oddly linked +with that good old-time quality called "the fear of God," that in +his case we felt that the china, after all, didn't matter, but that +Dr. Samuel Johnson, "the great lexicographer," supremely did. His +opinions of Scotsmen or his opinions of poetry in themselves amount to +little--though they are far from being without their shrewd insight--and +much of the china--such as Milton's poetry--among which he gambolled, +after the manner of Behemoth, chanced to be indestructible. Any china +he broke was all to the ultimate good of the china-shop. Yet, if we +accept him so, is it not because he was such a wonderful bull in the +china-shop of the world? + +There have been other such bulls but hardly another so great, and with +his name I will, for the moment at least, put personalities aside, and +refer to droves rather than to individual bulls. A familiar type of +the bull in the china-shop is the modern clergyman, who, apparently, +insecure in his status of saint-hood, dissatisfied with that spiritual +sphere which so many confiding human beings have given into his +keeping, will be forever pushing his way like an unwelcome, yet quite +unauthoritative, policeman, into that turmoil of human affairs--of which +politics is a sort of summary--where his opinion is not of the smallest +value, though, perforce, it is received with a certain momentary +respect--as though some beautiful old lady should stroll up to a battery +of artillery, engaged in some difficult and dangerous attack, and offer +her advice as to the sighting and management of the guns. The modern +clergyman's interference in the working out of the secular problems +of modern life has no such picturesque beauty--and it is even less +effective. + +One would have thought that to have the care of men's souls would be +enough. What a world of suggestiveness there was in the old phrase "a +cure of souls"! Men's souls need saving as much today as ever. Perhaps +they were never in greater danger. Therefore, as the proverbial place +for the cobbler is his last, so more than ever the place for the +clergyman is his church, his pulpit, and those various spiritual offices +for which he is presumably "chosen." His vows do not call upon him +either to be a politician or a matinée idol, nor is it his business to +sow doubt where he is paid for preaching faith. If the Church is losing +its influence, it is largely because of its inefficient interference +in secular affairs, and because of the small percentage of real +spirituality amongst its clergy. + +But there is a worse intrusion than that of clergymen into secular +affairs. There is the intrusion of the cheap atheist, the small +materialistic thinker, into a sphere of which certainly no clergyman or +priest has any monopoly, that sphere of what we call the spiritual life, +which, however undemonstrable by physical tests, has been real to so +many men and women whose intellects can hardly be called negligible, +from Plato to Newman. I have too much respect for their courageous +sincerity, their nobility of character, as well as for the necessary, if +superficial, destructive work they did, when to do such work meant no +little personal peril and obloquy to themselves, to class Robert +Ingersoll and Charles Bradlaugh with the small fry that resemble them +merely in their imitative negations; yet this is certainly true of both +of them that they were bulls in the china-shop to this extent--that they +confounded real religion with the defective historical evidences of one +religion, and the mythologic assertions and incongruities of its sacred +book. They did splendid work in their iconoclastic criticism of "the +letter" that "killeth," but of "the spirit" that "giveth life" they seem +to have had but little inkling. To make fun of Jonah and the whale, or +"the Mistakes of Moses," had no doubt a certain usefulness, but it was +no valid argument against the existence of God, nor did it explain away +the mysterious religious sense in man--however, or wherever expressed. +Neither Ingersoll nor Bradlaugh saw that the crudest Mumbo-Jumbo +idolatry of the savage does really stand for some point of rapport +between the seen and the unseen, and that, so long as the mysterious +sacredness of life is acknowledged and reverenced, it matters little by +what symbols we acknowledge it and do it reverence. + +One may consider that the present age is an age of spiritual eclipse, +though that is not the writer's opinion, and question with Matthew +Arnold: + + What girl + Now reads in her bosom as clear + As Rebekah read, when she sate + At eve by the palm-shaded well? + Who guards in her breast + As deep, as pellucid a spring + Of feeling, as tranquil, as sure? + What bard, + At the height of his vision, can deem + Of God, of the world, of the soul, + With a plainness as near, + As flashing as Moses felt + When he lay in the night by his flock + On the starlit Arabian waste? + Can rise and obey + The beck of the Spirit like him. + +Yet the sight of one who sees is worth more than the blindness of a +hundred that cannot see. Some people are born with spiritual antennae +and some without. There is much delicate wonder in the universe that +needs special organizations for its apprehension. "One eye," you +remember, that of Browning's _Sordello_-- + + one eye + In all Verona cared for the soft sky. + +In these imponderable and invisible matters, many are in a like case +with Hamlet's mother, when she was unable to see the ghost of his +father which he so plainly saw. "Yet all there is I see!" exclaimed the +queen--though she was quite wrong, as wrong as Mr. Ruskin when he could +see nothing in that painting of Whistler's but a cocks-comb throwing a +paint-pot at a canvas and calling it a picture! + +Many people who have sharp enough eyes and ears for their own worlds are +absolutely blind and deaf when introduced into other worlds for which +nature has not equipped them. But this by no means prevents their +pronouncing authoritative opinions in those worlds, opinions which +would be amazing if they were not so impertinent. Many literary people +proclaim their indifference to and even contempt for music--as if their +announcement meant anything more than their music deafness, their +unfortunate exclusion from a great art. Mark Twain used to advertise his +preference for the pianola over the piano--as if that proved anything +against the playing of Paderewski. Similarly, he acted the bull in the +china-shop in regard to Christian Science, which cannot be the accepted +creed of millions of men and women of intelligence and social value +without deserving even in a critic the approach of some respect. + +But humorists are privileged persons. That, no doubt, accounts for the +astonishing toleration of Bernard Shaw. Were it not that he is a +_farceur_, born to write knock-about comedies--his plays, by the way, +might be termed knock-about comedies of the middle-class mind--he would +never have got a hearing for his common-place blasphemies, and cheap +intellectual antics. He is undeniably "funny," so we cannot help +laughing, though we are often ashamed of ourselves for our laughter; for +to him there is nothing sacred--except his press-notices, and--his +royalties. + +His so-called "philosophy" has an air of dangerous novelty only to those +innocent middle-classes born but yesterday, to whom any form of thought +is a novelty. Methusaleh himself was not older than Mr. Shaw's "original +ideas." In England, twenty years ago, we were long since weary of his +egotistic buffooneries. Of anything "fine" in literature or art he is +contemptuously ignorant, and from understanding of any of the finer +shades of human life, or of the meaning of such words as "honour," +"gentleman," "beauty," "religion," he is by nature utterly shut out. He +laughs and sneers to make up for his deficiencies, like that Pietro +Aretino who threw his perishable mud at Michael Angelo. So is it always +with the vulgarian out of his sphere. Once he dared to talk vulgarly of +God to a great man who believed in God--Count Tolstoi. + +He had written to Tolstoi _à propos_ his insignificant little play _The +Showing up of Blanco Posnet_, and in the course of his letter had said: +"Suppose the world were only one of God's jokes, would you work any less +to make it a good joke instead of a bad one?" Tolstoi had hitherto been +favourably inclined towards Shaw, owing to his friend and biographer Mr. +Aylmer Maude; but this cheap-jack sacrilege was too much for the great +old man, who seemed to know God with almost Matthew Arnold's + + plainness as near + As flashing as Moses felt, + +and he closed the correspondence with a rebuke which would have abashed +any one but the man to whom it was sent. + +Tolstoi was like Walt Whitman--he "argued not concerning God." It is a +point of view which people like Mr. Shaw can never understand; any more +than he or his like can comprehend that there are areas of human feeling +over which for him and other such bulls in china-shops should be posted +the delicate Americanism--KEEP OUT. + + + + +XXIX + +THE BIBLE AND THE BUTTERFLY + + +Once, in my old book-hunting days, I picked up, on the Quai Voltaire, a +copy of the _Proverbs of King Solomon_. Then it was more possible than +today to make finds in that quaint open-air library which, still more +than any library housed within governmental or diplomaed walls, is +haunted by the spirit of those passionate, dream-led scholars that +made the Renaissance, and crowded to those lectures filled with that +dangerous new charm which always belongs to the poetic presentation of +new knowledge--those lectures, "musical as is Apollo's lute," being +given up on the hill nearby, by a romantic young priest named Abelard. + +My copy of the Great King's Wisdom was of no particular bibliographical +value, but it was one of those thick-set, old-calf duodecimos "black +with tarnished gold" which Austin Dobson has sung, books that, one +imagines, must have once made even the Latin Grammar attractive. The +text was the Vulgate, a rivulet of Latin text surrounded by meadows of +marginal comments of the Fathers translated into French,--the whole +presided over, for the edification of the young novice, to whom my copy +evidently belonged, by a distinguished Monseigneur who, in French of the +time of Bossuet, told exactly how these young minds should understand +the wisdom of Solomon, told it with a magisterial style which suggested +that Solomon lived long ago--and, yet, was one of the pillars of the +church. But what particularly interested me about the book, however, as +I turned over its yellow pages, was a tiny thing pressed between them, a +thing the Fathers and the Monseigneur would surely have regarded as +curiously alien to their wisdom, a thing once of a bright, but now of a +paler yellow, and of a frailer texture than it had once been in its +sunlit life--a flower, I thought at first, but, on looking closer, I saw +it was, or had once been, a yellow butterfly. + +What young priest was it, I wondered, that had thus, with a breaking +heart, crushed the joy of life between these pages! On what spring +morning had this silent little messenger hovered a while over the high +garden-walls of St. Sulpice, flitting and fluttering, and at last darted +and alighted on the page of this old book, at that moment held in the +hands of a young priest walking to and fro amid the tall whispering +trees--delivering at last to him on the two small painted pages of its +wings a message he must not read.... + +The temptation was severe, for spring was calling all over Paris, and +the words of another book of the Great King whose wisdom he held in his +hand said to him in the Latin that came easily to all manner of men in +those days: _Lo! the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the +flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, +and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.... Arise, my love, my +fair one, and come away._ + +The little fluttering thing seemed to be saying that to him as it poised +on the page, and, as his eyes went into a dream, began to crawl softly, +like a rope-walker, up one of his fingers, with a frail, half-frightened +hold, while, high up, over the walls of the garden the poplars were +discreetly swaying to the southern wind, and the lilac-bushes were +carelessly tossing this way and that their fragrance, as altar-boys +swing their censers in the hushed chancel,--but ah! so different an +incense. + +_The flowers appear on the earth_, he repeated to himself, beguiled for +a moment, _the flowers appear on the earth; and the time of the singing +of birds is come...._ + +But, suddenly, for his help against that tiny yellow butterfly there +came to him other stern everlasting words: + +_The grass withereth, the flower fadeth, but the word of our Lord +endureth forever._ + +Then it was, if I imagine aright from my old book, that my young novice +of St. Sulpice crushed the joy of life, in the frail form of its little +messenger, between the pages of the book he held in his hand just then, +the book I held in my hand for a while a hundred and fifty years or so +after--the book I bought that morning on the Quai Voltaire--guarding +that little dead butterfly even more than the wisdom of Solomon. I +wonder if, as he crushed that butterfly, he said to himself--in words +that have grown commonplace since his time--the words of that strange +emperor Hadrian--_Animula, vagula, blandula_! + +Perhaps I should not have remembered that book-hunting morning in Old +Paris on the Quai Voltaire, when I bought that beautiful old copy of the +_Proverbs of Solomon_--with the butterfly so strangely crushed between +its pages--had it not been for a circumstance that happened to me, the +other day, in the subway, which seemed to me of the nature of a marvel. +Many weary men and women were travelling--in an enforced, yet in some +way humorously understanding, society--from Brooklyn Bridge to the +Bronx. I got in at Wall Street. The "crush-hour" was near, for it was +4:25--still, as yet, there were time and space granted us to observe +our neighbours. In the particular car in which I was sitting, there +was room still left to look about and admire the courage of your +fellow-passengers. Weary men going home--many of them having used them +all day long--have little wish to use their eyes, so all the men in my +car sat silently and sadly, contemplating the future. As I looked at +them, it seemed to me that they were thinking over the day's work they +had done, and the innumerable days' work they had still to do. No one +smiled. No one observed the other. An automatic courtesy gave a seat +here and there, but no one gave any attention to any business but his +own thoughts and his own sad station. + +It was a car, if I remember aright, occupied almost entirely by +men-passengers, and, so far as I could see, there were no evidences that +men knew women from men, or _vice versa_, yet, at last, there seemed to +dawn on four men sitting in a row that there was a wonderful creature +reading a book on the other side of the aisle--a lovely young woman, +with all the fabled beauty of the sea-shell, and the rainbow, that +enchantment in her calm pearl-like face, and in the woven stillness of +her hair, that has in all times and countries made men throw up sails +and dare the unknown sea, and the unknown Fates. The beauty, too, that +nature had given her was clothed in the subdued enchantments of the +rarest art. All unconscious of the admiration surrounding her, she sat +in that subway car, like a lonely butterfly, strangely there in her +incongruous surroundings, for a mysterious moment,--to vanish as swiftly +as she had come--and, as she stepped from the car, leaving it dark and +dazzled-- + + bright with her past presence yet-- + +I, who had fortunately, and fearfully, sat by her side was aware that +the book she had been reading was lying forgotten on the seat. It was +mine by right of accident,--treasure-trove. So I picked it up, braving +the glares of the four sad men facing me. + +Naturally, I had wondered what book it was; but its being bound in +tooled and jewelled morocco, evidently by one of the great bookbinders +of Paris, made it unprofitable to hazard a guess. + +I leave to the imagination of lovers of books what book one would +naturally expect to find in hands so fair. Perhaps _Ronsard_--or some +other poet from the Rose-Garden of old France. No! it was a charmingly +printed copy of The New Testament. + +The paradox of the discovery hushed me for a few moments, and then I +began to turn over the pages, several of which I noticed were dog eared +after the manner of beautiful women in all ages. A pencil here and there +had marked certain passages. _Come unto me_, ran one of the underlined +passages, _all ye that are heavy laden, and I will give you rest_,--and +I thought how strange it was that she whose face was so calm and still +should have needed to mark that. And another marked passage I noted--_He +was in the world, and the world was made by Him, and the world knew Him +not_. Then I put down the book with a feeling of awe--such as the Bible +had never brought to me before, though I had been accustomed to it from +my boyhood, and I said to myself: "How very strange!" And I meant how +strange it was to find this wonderful old book in the hands of this +wonderful young beauty. + +It had seemed strange to find that butterfly in that old copy of the +_Proverbs of King Solomon_, but how much stranger to find the New +Testament in the hands, or, so to speak, between the wings, of an +American butterfly. + +I found something written in the book at least as wonderful to me as +the sacred text. It was the name of the butterfly--a name almost as +beautiful as herself. So I was enabled to return her book to her. There +is, of course, no need to mention a name as well-known for good works as +good looks. It will suffice to say that it was the name of the most +beautiful actress in the world. + +There is a moral to this story. Morals--to stories--are once more +coming into fashion. The Bible, in my boyhood, came to us with no such +associations as I have recalled. There were no butterflies between its +pages, nor was it presented to us by fair or gracious hands. It was a +very grim and minatory book, wielded, as it seemed to one's childish +ignorance, for the purpose which that young priest of St. Sulpice had +used the pages of his copy of the _Proverbs of King Solomon_, that of +crushing out the joy of life. + +My first acquaintance with it as I remember, was in a Methodist chapel +in Staffordshire, England, where three small boys, including myself, +prisoned in an old-fashioned high-back pew, were endeavouring to relieve +the apparently endless _ennui_ of the service by eating surreptitious +apples. Suddenly upon our three young heads descended what seemed like a +heavy block of wood, wielded by an ancient deacon who did not approve +of boys. We were, each of us, no more than eight years old, and the book +which had thus descended upon our heads was nothing more to us than a +very weighty book--to be dodged if possible, for we were still in that +happy time of life when we hated all books. We knew nothing of its +contents--to us it was only a schoolmaster's cane, beating us into +silence and good behaviour. + +So the Bible has been for many generations of boys a book even more +terrible than Caesar's _Commentaries_ or the _Aeneid_ of Virgil--the +dull thud of a mysterious cudgel upon the shoulders of youth which you +bore as courageously as you could. + +So many of us grew up with what one might call a natural prejudice +against the Bible. + +Then some of us who cared for literature took it up casually and found +its poetic beauty. We read the _Book of Job_--which, by the way, Mr. +Swinburne is said to have known by heart; and as we read it even the +stars themselves seemed less wonderful than this description of their +marvel and mystery: + +_Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades or loose the hands of +Orion?_ + +_Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his season? or canst thou guide +Arcturus with his sons?_ + +Or we read in the 37th chapter of the _Book of Ezekiel_ of that weird +valley that was full of bones--"_and as I prophesied, there was a noise, +and behold a shaking, and the bones came together bone to bone_," +surely one of the most wonderful visions of the imagination in all +literature. + +Or we read the marvellous denunciatory rhetoric of Jeremiah and Isaiah, +or the music of the melodious heart-strings of King David; we read the +solemn adjuration of the "King Ecclesiast" to remember our Creator in +the days of our youth, with its haunting picture of old age: and the +loveliness of _The Song of Songs_ passed into our lives forever. + +To this purely literary love of the Bible there has been added within +the last few years a certain renewed regard for it as the profoundest +book of the soul, and for some minds not conventionally religious it has +regained even some of its old authority as a spiritual guide and stay. +And I will confess for myself that sometimes, as I fall asleep at +night, I wonder if even Bernard Shaw has written anything to equal the +Twenty-third Psalm. + + +THE END + + + + + + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Vanishing Roads and Other Essays +by Richard Le Gallienne + +*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 11675 *** diff --git a/11675-h/11675-h.htm b/11675-h/11675-h.htm new file mode 100644 index 0000000..10e4a19 --- /dev/null +++ b/11675-h/11675-h.htm @@ -0,0 +1,10127 @@ +<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> +<html> +<head> +<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" + content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"> +<meta content="pg2html (binary version 0.12a)" + name="generator"> +<title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of + Vanishing Roads and Other Essays, + by Richard Le Gallienne. +</title> +<style type="text/css"> + <!-- + * { font-family: Times; + } + P { text-indent: 1em; + margin-top: .75em; + font-size: 12pt; + text-align: justify; + margin-bottom: .75em; + margin-left: 15%; + margin-right: 15%; } + + H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; } + HR { width: 33%; } + .ar {text-align: right } + .toc { margin-left: 25%; font-size: 10pt; margin-bottom: 0em; } + .note {text-indent: 0em; margin-left: 25%; margin-right: 25%; + font-size: 10pt; background: #ffecdb } + .noindent { text-indent: 0em; } + BLOCKQUOTE { font-size: 11pt; margin-left: 20%; + margin-right: 15%; text-align: justify; } + PRE { margin-left: 30%; font-family: Times; font-size: 12pt; } + PRE.si { margin-left: 25%; font-family: Times; font-size: 12pt; ) + + CENTER { padding: 10px;} + // --> +</style> +</head> +<body> +<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 11675 ***</div> + +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<HR> +<p> </p> + +<h1> + Vanishing Roads<br> + And Other Essays +</h1> + +<p> </p> + +<h3> + By +</h3> +<p> </p> + +<h2> + Richard Le Gallienne +</h2> +<p> </p> + <p> </p> + + +<h4> + 1915 +</h4> + +<hr> +<p> </p> + + +<center> <big><i>TO<br><br> + +ROBERT HOBART DAVIS</i></big> +</center> + +<p> + <i>DEAR BOB: It is quite a long time now since you and I first caught + sight of each other and became fellow wayfarers on this Vanishing Road + of the world. O quite a lot of years now, Bob! Yet I control my tendency + to shiver at their number from the fact that we have travelled them, + always within hailing distance of each other, I with the comfortable + knowledge that near by I had so good a comrade, so true a friend.</i> +</p> +<p> + <i>For this once, by your leave, we won't "can" the sentiment,—to use an + idiom in which you are the master-artist on this continent,—but I, at + least, will luxuriate in retrospect, as I write your name by way of + dedication to this volume of essays, for some of which your quick-firing + mind is somewhat more than editorially responsible. You were one of the + first to make me welcome to a country of which, even as a boy, I used + prophetically to dream as my "promised land," little knowing that it was + indeed to be my home, the home of my spirit, as well as the final + resting-place of my household gods; and, having you so early for my + friend, is it to be wondered at if I soon came to regard the American + humourist as the noblest work of God?</i> +</p> +<p> + <i>There is yet, I trust, much left of the Vanishing Road for us to travel + together; and I hope that, when the time comes for us both to vanish + over the horizon line, we may exit still within hail of each other,—so + that we may have a reasonable chance of hitting the trail together on + the next route, whatever it is going to be.</i> +</p> + + +<p class="ar"><i>Always yours</I>, </p> + + <p class="ar">R<small>ICHARD</small> L<small>E</small> G<small>ALLIENNE</small>. +<p> + <I>Rowayton, December 25, 1914</i>. +</p> +<hr> + <p> </p> + <p> + For their discernment in giving the following essays their first + opportunity with the reader the writer desires to thank the editors of + <i>The North American Review</i>, <i>Harper's Magazine</i>, <i>The Century</i>, <i>The Smart Set</i>, <i>Munsey's</i>, <i>The Out-Door World</i>, and <i>The Forum</i>. +</p> + +<p> </p> + +<hr> + <p> </p> + + +<h2>CONTENTS</H2> + + +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_4"> +I.—VANISHING ROADS +</a></p> +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_5"> +II.—WOMAN AS A SUPERNATURAL BEING</a></p> +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_6"> +III.—THE LACK OF IMAGINATION AMONG MILLIONAIRES +</a></p> +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_7"> +IV.—THE PASSING OF MRS. GRUNDY +</a></p> +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_8"> +V.—MODERN AIDS TO ROMANCE +</a></p> +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_9"> +VI.—THE LAST CALL +</a></p> +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_10"> +VII.—THE PERSECUTIONS OF BEAUTY +</a></p> +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_11"> +VIII.—THE MANY FACES—THE ONE DREAM +</a></p> +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_12"> +IX.—THE SNOWS OF YESTER-YEAR +</a></p> +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_14"> +X.—THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GOSSIP +</a></p> +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_15"> +XI.—THE PASSING AWAY OF THE EDITOR +</a></p> +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_16"> +XII.—THE SPIRIT OF THE OPEN +</a></p> +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_17"> +XIII.—AN OLD AMERICAN TOW-PATH +</a></p> +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_18"> +XIV.—A MODERN SAINT FRANCIS +</a></p> +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_19"> +XV.—THE LITTLE GHOST IN THE GARDEN +</a></p> +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_20"> +XVI.—THE ENGLISH COUNTRYSIDE +</a></p> +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_21"> +XVII.—LONDON—CHANGING AND UNCHANGING +</a></p> +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_22"> +XVIII.—THE HAUNTED RESTAURANT +</a></p> +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_23"> +XIX.—THE NEW PYRAMUS AND THISBE +</a></p> +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_24"> +XX.—TWO WONDERFUL OLD LADIES +</a></p> +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_25"> +XXI.—A CHRISTMAS MEDITATION +</a></p> +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_26"> +XXII.—ON RE-READING WALTER PATER +</a></p> +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_27"> +XXIII.—THE MYSTERY OF "FIONA MACLEOD" +</a></p> +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_28"> +XXIV.—FORBES-ROBERTSON: AN APPRECIATION +</a></p> +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_29"> +XXV.—A MEMORY OF FRÉDÉRIC MISTRAL +</a></p> +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_30"> +XXVI.—IMPERISHABLE FICTION +</a></p> +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_31"> +XXVII.—THE MAN BEHIND THE PEN +</a></p> +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_32"> +XXVIII.—BULLS IN CHINA-SHOPS +</a></p> +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_33"> +XXIX.—THE BIBLE AND THE BUTTERFLY +</a></p> +<p> </p> + +<hr> + + +<p> </p> +<h1> + Vanishing Roads +</h1> +<a name="2H_4_4"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> + +<p> </p> +<h2> + I +</h2> +<h3> + VANISHING ROADS +</h3> +<p> </p> + +<p> + Though actually the work of man's hands—or, more properly speaking, the + work of his travelling feet,—roads have long since come to seem so much + a part of Nature that we have grown to think of them as a feature of the + landscape no less natural than rocks and trees. Nature has adopted them + among her own works, and the road that mounts the hill to meet the + sky-line, or winds away into mystery through the woodland, seems to be + veritably her own highway leading us to the stars, luring us to her + secret places. And just as her rocks and trees, we know not how or why, + have come to have for us a strange spiritual suggestiveness, so the + vanishing road has gained a meaning for us beyond its use as the avenue + of mortal wayfaring, the link of communication between village and + village and city and city; and some roads indeed seem so lonely, and so + beautiful in their loneliness, that one feels they were meant to be + travelled only by the soul. All roads indeed lead to Rome, but theirs + also is a more mystical destination, some bourne of which no traveller + knows the name, some city, they all seem to hint, even more eternal. +</p> +<p> + Never more than when we tread some far-spreading solitude and mark the + road stretching on and on into infinite space, or the eye loses it in + some wistful curve behind the fateful foliage of lofty storm-stirred + trees, or as it merely loiters in sunny indolence through leafy copses + and ferny hollows, whatever its mood or its whim, by moonlight or at + morning; never more than thus, eagerly afoot or idly contemplative, are + we impressed by that something that Nature seems to have to tell us, + that something of solemn, lovely import behind her visible face. If we + could follow that vanishing road to its far mysterious end! Should we + find that meaning there? Should we know why it stops at no mere + market-town, nor comes to an end at any seaport? Should we come at last + to the radiant door, and know at last the purpose of all our travel? + Meanwhile the road beckons us on and on, and we walk we know not why or + whither. +</p> +<p> + Vanishing roads do actually stir such thoughts, not merely by way of + similitude, but just in the same way that everything in Nature similarly + stirs thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls; as moonlit waters stir + them, or the rising of the sun. As I have said, they have come to seem + a part of natural phenomena, and, as such, may prove as suggestive a + starting-point as any other for those speculations which Nature is all + the time provoking in us as to why she affects us thus and thus. These + mighty hills of multitudinous rock, piled confusedly against the sky—so + much granite and iron and copper and crystal, says one. But to the soul, + strangely something besides, so much more. These rolling shapes of + cloud, so fantastically massed and moulded, moving in rhythmic change + like painted music in the heaven, radiant with ineffable glories or + monstrous with inconceivable doom. This sea of silver, "hushed and + halcyon," or this sea of wrath and ravin, wild as Judgment Day. So much + vapour and sunshine and wind and water, says one. +</p> +<p> + Yet to the soul how much more! +</p> +<p> + And why? Answer me that if you can. There, truly, we set our feet on the + vanishing road. +</p> +<p> + Whatever reality, much or little, the personifications of Greek + Nature-worship had for the ancient world, there is no doubt that for a + certain modern temperament, more frequently met with every day, those + personifications are becoming increasingly significant, and one might + almost say veritably alive. Forgotten poets may, in the first instance, + have been responsible for the particular forms they took, their names + and stories, yet even so they but clothed with legend presences of wood + and water, of earth and sea and sky, which man dimly felt to have a + real existence; and these presences, forgotten or banished for a while + in prosaic periods, or under Puritanic repression, are once more being + felt as spiritual realities by a world coming more and more to evoke its + divinities by individual meditation on, and responsiveness to, the + mysterious so-called natural influences by which it feels itself + surrounded. Thus the first religion of the world seems likely to be its + last. In other words, the modern tendency, with spiritually sensitive + folk, is for us to go direct to the fountain-head of all theologies, + Nature herself, and, prostrating ourselves before her mystery, strive to + interpret it according to our individual "intimations," listening, + attent, for ourselves to her oracles, and making, to use the phrase of + one of the profoundest of modern Nature-seers, our own "reading of + earth." Such was Wordsworth's initiative, and, as some one has said, "we + are all Wordsworthians today." That pagan creed, in which Wordsworth + passionately wished himself suckled, is not "outworn." He himself, in + his own austere way, has, more than any one man, verified it for us, so + that indeed we do once more nowadays +</p> +<pre> + Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; + Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn. +</pre> +<p> + Nor have the dryads and the fauns been frighted away for good. All over + the world they are trooping back to the woods, and whoso has eyes may + catch sight, any summer day, of "the breast of the nymph in the brake." + Imagery, of course; but imagery that is coming to have a profounder + meaning, and a still greater expressive value, than it ever had for + Greece and Rome. All myths that are something more than fancies gain + rather than lose in value with time, by reason of the accretions of + human experience. The mysteries of Eleusis would mean more for a modern + man than for an ancient Greek, and in our modern groves of Dodona the + voice of the god has meanings for us stranger than ever reached his + ears. Maybe the meanings have a purport less definite, but they have at + least the suggestiveness of a nobler mystery. But surely the Greeks were + right, and we do but follow them as we listen to the murmur of the wind + in the lofty oaks, convinced as they of the near presence of the divine. +</p> +<pre> + The word by seers or sibyls told + In groves of oak or fanes of gold, + Still floats upon the morning wind, + Still whispers to the willing mind. +</pre> +<p> + Nor was it a vain thing to watch the flight of birds across the sky, and + augur this or that of their strange ways. We too still watch them in a + like mood, and, though we do not interpret them with a like exactitude, + we are very sure that they mean something important to our souls, as + they speed along their vanishing roads. +</p> +<p> + This modern feeling of ours is quite different from the outworn + "pathetic fallacy," which was a purely sentimental attitude. We have, of + course, long since ceased to think of Nature as the sympathetic mirror + of our moods, or to imagine that she has any concern with the temporal + affairs of man. We no longer seek to appease her in her terrible moods + with prayer and sacrifice. We know that she is not thinking of us, but + we do know that for all her moods there is in us an answering thrill of + correspondence, which is not merely fanciful or imaginative, but of the + very essence of our beings. It is not that we are reading our thoughts + into her. Rather we feel that we are receiving her thoughts into + ourselves, and that, in certain receptive hours, we are, by some avenue + simpler and profounder than reason, made aware of certitudes we cannot + formulate, but which nevertheless siderealize into a faith beyond the + reach of common doubt—a faith, indeed, unelaborate, a faith, one might + say, of one tenet: belief in the spiritual sublimity of all Nature, and, + therefore, of our own being as a part thereof. +</p> +<p> + In such hours we feel too, with a singular lucidity of conviction, that + those forces which thus give us that mystical assurance are all the time + moulding us accordingly as we give up ourselves to their influence, and + that we are literally and not fancifully what winds and waters make us; + that the poetry, for instance, of Wordsworth was literally first + somewhere in the universe, and thence transmitted to him by processes no + less natural than those which produced his bodily frame, gave him form + and feature, and coloured his eyes and hair. +</p> +<p> + It is not man that has "poetized" the world, it is the world that has + made a poet out of man, by infinite processes of evolution, precisely in + the same way that it has shaped a rose and filled it with perfume, or + shaped a nightingale and filled it with song. One has often heard it + said that man has endowed Nature with his own feelings, that the pathos + or grandeur of the evening sky, for instance, are the illusions of his + humanizing fancy, and have no real existence. The exact contrary is + probably the truth—that man has no feelings of his own that were not + Nature's first, and that all that stirs in him at such spectacles is but + a translation into his own being of cosmic emotions which he shares in + varying degrees with all created things. Into man's strange heart Nature + has distilled her essences, as elsewhere she has distilled them in + colour and perfume. He is, so to say, one of the nerve-centres of cosmic + experience. In the process of the suns he has become a veritable + microcosm of the universe. It was not man that placed that tenderness in + the evening sky. It has been the evening skies of millions of years that + have at length placed tenderness in the heart of man. It has passed into + him as that "beauty born of murmuring sound" passed into the face of + Wordsworth's maiden. +</p> +<p> + Perhaps we too seldom reflect how much the life of Nature is one with + the life of man, how unimportant or indeed merely seeming, the + difference between them. Who can set a seed in the ground, and watch it + put up a green shoot, and blossom and fructify and wither and pass, + without reflecting, not as imagery but as fact, that he has come into + existence, run his course, and is going out of existence again, by + precisely the same process? With so serious a correspondence between + their vital experience, the fact of one being a tree and the other a man + seems of comparatively small importance. The life process has but used + different material for its expression. And as man and Nature are so like + in such primal conditions, is it not to be supposed that they are alike + too in other and subtler ways, and that, at all events, as it thus + clearly appears that man is as much a natural growth as an apple-tree, + alike dependent on sun and rain, may not, or rather must not, the + thoughts that come to him strangely out of earth and sky, the sap-like + stirrings of his spirit, the sudden inner music that streams through him + before the beauty of the world, be no less authentically the working of + Nature within him than his more obviously physical processes, and, say, + a belief in God be as inevitable a blossom of the human tree as + apple-blossom of the apple? +</p> +<p> + If this oracular office of Nature be indeed a truth, our contemplation + of her beauty and marvel is seen to be a method of illumination, and her + varied spectacle actually a sacred book in picture-writing, a revelation + through the eye of the soul of the stupendous purport of the universe. + The sun and the moon are the torches by which we study its splendid + pages, turning diurnally for our perusal, and in star and flower alike + dwells the lore which we cannot formulate into thought, but can only + come indescribably to know by loving the pictures. "The meaning of all + things that are" is there, if we can only find it. It flames in the + sunset, or flits by us in the twilight moth, thunders or moans or + whispers in the sea, unveils its bosom in the moonrise, affirms itself + in mountain-range and rooted oak, sings to itself in solitary places, + dreams in still waters, nods and beckons amid sunny foliage, and laughs + its great green laugh in the wide sincerity of the grass. +</p> +<p> + As the pictures in this strange and lovely book are infinite, so + endlessly varied are the ways in which they impress us. In our highest + moments they seem to be definitely, almost consciously, sacerdotal, as + though the symbolic acts of a solemn cosmic ritual, in which the + universe is revealed visibly at worship. Were man to make a practice of + rising at dawn and contemplating in silence and alone the rising of the + sun, he would need no other religion. The rest of the day would be + hallowed for him by that morning memory and his actions would partake of + the largeness and chastity of that lustral hour. Moonlight, again, seems + to be the very holiness of Nature, welling out ecstatically from + fountains of ineffable purity and blessedness. Of some moonlight nights + we feel that if we did what our spirits prompt us, we should pass them + on our knees, as in some chapel of the Grail. To attempt to realize in + thought the rapture and purification of such a vigil is to wonder that + we so seldom pay heed to such inner promptings. So much we lose of the + best kind of joy by spiritual inertia, or plain physical sloth; and some + day it will be too late to get up and see the sunrise, or to follow the + white feet of the moon as she treads her vanishing road of silver across + the sea. This involuntary conscience that reproaches us with such laxity + in our Nature-worship witnesses how instinctive that worship is, and how + much we unconsciously depend on Nature for our impulses and our moods. +</p> +<p> + Another definitely religious operation of Nature within us is expressed + in that immense gratitude which throws open the gates of the spirit as + we contemplate some example of her loveliness or grandeur. Who that + has stood by some still lake and watched a stretch of water-lilies + opening in the dawn but has sent out somewhere into space a profound + thankfulness to "whatever gods there be" that he has been allowed to + gaze on so fair a sight. Whatever the struggle or sorrow of our lives, + we feel in such moments our great good fortune at having been born into + a world that contains such marvels. It is sufficient success in life, + whatever our minor failures, to have beheld such beauty; and mankind at + large witnesses to this feeling by the value it everywhere attaches to + scenes in Nature exceptionally noble or exquisite. Though the American + traveller does not so express it, his sentiment toward such natural + spectacles as the Grand Cañon or Niagara Falls is that of an intense + reverence. Such places are veritable holy places, and man's heart + instinctively acknowledges them as sacred. His repugnance to any + violation of them by materialistic interests is precisely the same + feeling as the horror with which Christendom regarded the Turkish + violation of the Holy Sepulchre. And this feeling will increase rather + than decrease in proportion as religion is recognized as having its + shrines and oracles not only in Jerusalem, or in St. Peter's, but + wherever Nature has erected her altars on the hills or wafted her + incense through the woodlands. +</p> +<p> + After all, are not all religions but the theological symbolization of + natural phenomena; and the sacraments, the festivals, and fasts of all + the churches have their counterparts in the mysterious processes and + manifestations of Nature? and is the contemplation of the resurrection + of Adonis or Thammuz more edifying to the soul than to meditate the + strange return of the spring which their legends but ecclesiastically + celebrate? He who has watched and waited at the white grave of winter, + and hears at last the first faint singing among the boughs, or the first + strange "peeping" of frogs in the marshes; or watches the ghost-like + return of insects, stealing, still half asleep, from one knows not + where—the first butterfly suddenly fluttering helplessly on the + window-pane, or the first mud-wasp crawling out into the sun in a dazed, + bewildered way; or comes upon the violet in the woods, shining at the + door of its wintry sepulchre: he who meditates these marvels, and all + the magic processional of the months, as they march with pomp and pathos + along their vanishing roads, will come to the end of the year with a + lofty, illuminated sense of having assisted at a solemn religious + service, and a realization that, in no mere fancy of the poets, but in + very deed, "day unto day uttereth speech and night unto night sheweth + knowledge." +</p> +<p> + Apart from this generally religious influence of Nature, she seems at + times in certain of her aspects and moods specifically to illustrate or + externalize states of the human soul. Sometimes in still, moonlit + nights, standing, as it were, on the brink of the universe, we seem to + be like one standing on the edge of a pool, who, gazing in, sees his own + soul gazing back at him. Tiny creatures though we be, the whole solemn + and majestic spectacle seems to be an extension of our own reverie, and + we to enfold it all in some strange way within our own infinitesimal + consciousness. So a self-conscious dewdrop might feel that it enfolded + the morning sky, and such probably is the meaning of the Buddhist seer + when he declares that "the universe grows I." +</p> +<p> + Such are some of the more august impressions made upon us by the + pictures in the cosmic picture-book; but there are also times and + places when Nature seems to wear a look less mystic than dramatic in its + suggestiveness, as though she were a stage-setting for some portentous + human happening past or to come—the fall of kings or the tragic clash + of empires. As Whitman says, "Here a great personal deed has room." Some + landscapes seem to prophesy, some to commemorate. In some places not + marked by monuments, or otherwise definitely connected with history, we + have a curious haunted sense of prodigious far-off events once enacted + in this quiet grassy solitude—prehistoric battles or terrible + sacrifices. About others hangs a fateful atmosphere of impending + disaster, as though weighted with a gathering doom. Sometimes we seem + conscious of sinister presences, as though veritably in the abode of + evil spirits. The place seems somehow not quite friendly to humanity, + not quite good to linger in, lest its genius should cast its perilous + shadow over the heart. On the other hand, some places breathe an + ineffable sense of blessedness, of unearthly promise. We feel as though + some hushed and happy secret were about to be whispered to us out of the + air, some wonderful piece of good fortune on the edge of happening. Some + hand seems to beckon us, some voice to call, to mysterious paradises of + inconceivable green freshness and supernaturally beautiful flowers, + fairy fastnesses of fragrance and hidden castles of the dew. In such + hours the Well at the World's End seems no mere poet's dream. It awaits + us yonder in the forest glade, amid the brooding solitudes of silent + fern, and the gate of the Earthly Paradise is surely there in yonder + vale hidden among the violet hills. +</p> +<p> + Various as are these impressions, it is strange and worth thinking on + that the dominant suggestion of Nature through all her changes, whether + her mood be stormy or sunny, melancholy or jubilant, is one of presage + and promise. She seems to be ever holding out to us an immortal + invitation to follow and endure, to endure and to enjoy. She seems to + say that what she brings us is but an earnest of what she holds for us + out there along the vanishing road. There is nothing, indeed, she will + not promise us, and no promise, we feel, she cannot keep. Even in her + tragic and bodeful seasons, in her elegiac autumns and stern winters, + there is an energy of sorrow and sacrifice that elevates and inspires, + and in the darkest hours hints at immortal mornings. She may terrify, + but she never deadens, the soul. In earthquake and eclipse she seems to + be less busy with destruction than with renewed creation. She is but + wrecking the old, that +</p> +<pre> + ... there shall be + Beautiful things made new, for the surprise + Of the sky-children. +</pre> +<p> + As I have thus mused along with the reader, a reader I hope not too + imaginary, the manner in which the phrase with which I began has + recurred to my pen has been no mere accident, nor yet has it been a + mere literary device. It seemed to wait for one at every turn of one's + theme, inevitably presenting itself. For wherever in Nature we set our + foot, she seems to be endlessly the centre of vanishing roads, radiating + in every direction into space and time. Nature is forever arriving and + forever departing, forever approaching, forever vanishing; but in her + vanishings there seems to be ever the waving of a hand, in all her + partings a promise of meetings farther along the road. She would seem to + say not so much <i>Ave atque vale</i>, as <i>Vale atque ave</i>. In all this + rhythmic drift of things, this perpetual flux of atoms flowing on and on + into Infinity, we feel less the sense of loss than of a musical + progression of which we too are notes. +</p> +<p> + We are all treading the vanishing road of a song in the air, the + vanishing road of the spring flowers and the winter snows, the vanishing + roads of the winds and the streams, the vanishing road of beloved faces. + But in this great company of vanishing things there is a reassuring + comradeship. We feel that we are units in a vast ever-moving army, the + vanguard of which is in Eternity. The road still stretches ahead of us. + For a little while yet we shall experience all the zest and bustle of + marching feet. The swift-running seasons, like couriers bound for the + front, shall still find us on the road, and shower on us in passing + their blossoms and their snows. For a while the murmur of the running + stream of Time shall be our fellow-wayfarer—till, at last, up there + against the sky-line, we too turn and wave our hands, and know for + ourselves where the road wends as it goes to meet the stars. And others + will stand as we today and watch us reach the top of the ridge and + disappear, and wonder how it seemed to us to turn that radiant corner + and vanish with the rest along the vanishing road. +</p> +<a name="2H_4_5"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<h2> + II +</h2> +<h3> + WOMAN AS A SUPERNATURAL BEING +</h3> +<p> </p> + +<p> + The boy's first hushed enchantment, blent with a sort of religious awe, + as in his earliest love affair he awakens to the delicious mystery we + call woman, a being half fairy and half flower, made out of moonlight + and water lilies, of elfin music and thrilling fragrance, of divine + whiteness and softness and rustle as of dewy rose gardens, a being of + unearthly eyes and terribly sweet marvel of hair; such, too, through + life, and through the ages, however confused or overlaid by use and + wont, is man's perpetual attitude of astonishment before the apparition + woman. +</p> +<p> + Though she may work at his side, the comrade of his sublunary + occupations, he never, deep down, thinks of her as quite real. Though + his wife, she remains an apparition, a being of another element, an + Undine. She is never quite credible, never quite loses that first nimbus + of the supernatural. +</p> +<p> + This is true not merely for poets; it is true for all men, though, of + course, all men may not be conscious of its truth, or realize the truth + in just this way. Poets, being endowed with exceptional sensitiveness of + feeling and expression, say the wonderful thing in the wonderful way, + bring to it words more nearly adequate than others can bring; but it is + an error to suppose that any beauty of expression can exaggerate, can + indeed more than suggest, the beauty of its truth. Woman is all that + poets have said of her, and all that poets can never say: +</p> +<pre> + Always incredible hath seemed the rose, + And inconceivable the nightingale— +</pre> +<p class="noindent"> + and the poet's adoration of her is but the articulate voice of man's + love since the beginning, a love which is as mysterious as she herself + is a mystery. +</p> +<p> + However some may try to analyse man's love for woman, to explain it, or + explain it away, belittle it, nay, even resent and befoul it, it remains + an unaccountable phenomenon, a "mystery we make darker with a name." + Biology, cynically pointing at certain of its processes, makes the + miracle rather more miraculous than otherwise. Musical instruments are + no explanation of music. "Is it not strange that sheep's guts should + hale souls out of men's bodies?" says Benedick, in <i>Much Ado About + Nothing</i>, commenting on Balthazar's music. But they do, for all that, + though no one considers sheep's gut the explanation. To cry "sex" and to + talk of nature's mad preoccupation with the species throws no light on + the matter, and robs it of no whit of its magic. The rainbow remains a + rainbow, for all the sciences. And woman, with or without the suffrage, + stenographer or princess, is of the rainbow. She is beauty made flesh + and dwelling amongst us, and whatever the meaning and message of beauty + may be, such is the meaning of woman on the earth—her meaning, at all + events, for men. That is, she is the embodiment, more than any other + creature, of that divine something, whatever it may be, behind matter, + that spiritual element out of which all proceeds, and which mysteriously + gives its solemn, lovely and tragic significance to our mortal day. +</p> +<p> + If you tell some women this of themselves, they will smile at you. Men + are such children. They are so simple. Dear innocents, how easily they + are fooled! A little make-up, a touch of rouge, a dash of henna—and you + are an angel. Some women seem really to think this; for, naturally, they + know nothing of their own mystery, and imagine that it resides in a few + feminine tricks, the superficial cleverness with which some of them know + how to make the most of the strange something about them which they + understand even less than men understand it. +</p> +<p> + Other women indeed resent man's religious attitude toward them as + sentimental, old-fashioned. They prefer to be regarded merely as + fellow-men. To show consciousness of their sex is to risk offence, and + to busy one's eyes with their magnificent hair, instead of the + magnificent brains beneath it, is to insult them. Yet when, in that old + court of law, Phryne bared her bosom as her complete case for the + defence, she proved herself a greater lawyer than will ever be made by + law examinations and bachelor's degrees; and even when women become + judges of the Supreme Court, a development easily within sight, they + will still retain the greater importance of being merely women. Yes, and + one can easily imagine some future woman President of the United States, + for all the acknowledged brilliancy of her administration, being + esteemed even more for her superb figure. +</p> +<p> + It is no use. Woman, if she would, "cannot shake off the god." She must + make up her mind, whatever other distinctions she may achieve, to her + inalienable distinction of being woman; nothing she can do will change + man's eternal attitude toward her, as a being made to be worshipped and + to be loved, a being of beauty and mystery, as strange and as lovely as + the moon, the goddess and the mother of lunatics. What a wonderful + destiny is hers! In addition to being the first of human beings, all + that a man can be, to be so much else as well; to be, so to say, the + president of a railroad and yet a priestess of nature's mysteries; a + stenographer at so many dollars a week and yet a nymph of the forest + pools—woman, "and yet a spirit still." Not without meaning has myth + endowed woman with the power of metamorphosis, to change at will like + the maidens in the legend into wild white swans, or like Syrinx, fleeing + from the too ardent pursuit of Pan, into a flowering reed, or like + Lamia, into a jewelled serpent— +</p> +<pre> + Eyed like a peacock, and all crimson barr'd; + And full of silver moons. +</pre> +<p> + Modern conditions are still more favourable than antique story for the + exhibition of this protean quality of woman, providing her with + opportunities of still more startling contrasts of transformation. Will + it not be a wonderful sight in that near future to watch that woman + judge of the Supreme Court, in the midst of some learned tangle of + inter-state argument, turn aside for a moment, in response to a + plaintive cry, and, unfastening her bodice, give the little clamourer + the silver solace it demands! What a hush will fall upon the assembled + court! To think of such a genius for jurisprudence, such a legal brain, + working in harmony—with such a bosom! So august a pillar of the law, + yet so divine a mother. +</p> +<p> + As it is, how piquant the contrast between woman inside and outside her + office hours! As you take her out to dinner, and watch her there seated + before you, a perfumed radiance, a dewy dazzling vision, an evening star + swathed in gauzy convolutions of silk and lace—can it be the same + creature who an hour or two ago sat primly with notebook and pencil at + your desk side, and took down your specification for fireproofing that + new steel-constructed building on Broadway? You, except for your evening + clothes, are not changed; but she—well, your clients couldn't possibly + recognize her. As with Browning's lover, you are on the other side of + the moon, "side unseen" of office boy or of subway throng; you are in + the presence of those "silent silver lights and darks undreamed of" by + the gross members of your board of directors. By day—but ah! at evening + under the electric lights, to the delicate strains of the palm-shaded + orchestra! Man is incapable of these exquisite transformations. By day a + gruff and hurried machine—at evening, at best, a rapt and laconic poker + player. A change with no suggestion of the miraculous. +</p> +<p> + Do not let us for a moment imagine that because man is ceasing to remove + his hat at her entrance into crowded elevators, or because he hustles + her or allows her to hang by the straps in crowded cars, that he is + tending to forget this supernaturalism of woman. Such change in his + manners merely means his respect for her disguise, her disguise as a + business woman. By day she desires to be regarded as just that, and she + resents as untimely the recognition of her sex, her mystery, and her + marvel during business hours. Man's apparent impoliteness, therefore, is + actually a delicate modern form of chivalry. But of course his real + feelings are only respectfully masked, and, let her be in any danger or + real discomfort, or let any language be uttered unseemly for her ears, + and we know what promptly happens. Barring such accidents, man tacitly + understands that her incognito is to be respected—till the charming + moment comes when she chooses to put it aside and take at his hands her + immemorial tribute. +</p> +<p> + So, you see, she is able to go about the rough ways, taking part even in + the rough work of the world, literally bearing what the fairy tales call + a charmed life. And this, of course, gives her no small advantage in the + human conflict. So protected, she is enabled, when need arises, to take + the offensive, with a minimum of danger. Consider her recent campaign + for suffrage, for example. Does any one suppose that, had she been + anything but woman, a sacrosanct being, immune from clubs and bullets, + that she would have been allowed to carry matters with such high + victorious hand as in England—and more power to her!—she has of late + been doing. Let men attempt such tactics, and their shrift is + uncomplimentarily short. It may be said that woman enjoys this immunity + with children and curates, but, even so, it may be held that these + latter participate in a less degree in that divine nature with which + woman is so completely armoured. +</p> +<pre class="si"> + How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea, + Whose action is no stronger than a flower? +</pre> +<p class="noindent"> + exclaims Shakespeare. +</p> +<p> + But there is indeed the mystery, for, though its "action is no stronger + than a flower," the power wielded by beauty in this world, and therefore + by woman as its most dynamic embodiment, is as undeniable as it is + irresistible. "Terrible as an army with banners" was no mere figure of + lovesick speech. It is as plain a truth as the properties of radium, + and belongs to the same order of marvel. Such scientific discoveries are + particularly welcome as demonstrating the power of the finer, as + contrasted with the more brutally obvious, manifestations of force; for + they thus illustrate the probable nature of those spiritual forces whose + operations we can plainly see, without being able to account for them. A + foolish phrase has it that "a woman's strength is in her helplessness." + "Helplessness" is a curious term to use for a mysteriously concentrated + or super-refined form of strength. "Whose action is no stronger than a + flower." But is the action of a flower any less strong because it is not + the action of a fist? As a motive force a flower may be, and indeed has + time and again been, stronger than a thousand fists. And what then shall + we say of the action of that flower of flowers that is woman—that + flower that not only once or twice in history has +</p> +<pre> + ... launched a thousand ships + And burned the topless towers of Ilium. +</pre> +<p> + Woman's helplessness, forsooth! On the contrary, woman is the best + equipped fighting machine that ever went to battle. And she is this, not + from any sufferance on the part of man, not from any consideration on + his part toward her "weakness," but merely because he cannot help + himself, because nature has so made her. +</p> +<p> + No simple reasoning will account for her influence over man. It is not + an influence he allows. It is an influence he cannot resist, and it is + an influence which he cannot explain, though he may make believe to do + so. That "protection," for example, which he extends to her from the + common physical perils with which he is more muscularly constituted to + cope—why is it extended? Merely out of pity to a weaker being than + himself? Does other weakness always command his pity? We know that it + does not. No, this "protection" is but a part of an instinctive + reverence, for which he can give no reason, the same kind of reverence + which he has always given to divine beings, to any manifestation or + vessel of the mysteriously sacred something in human life. He respects + and protects woman from the same instinct which makes him shrink from + profaning an altar or robbing a church, or sends him on his knees before + any apparition supposedly divine. Priests and women are often classed + together, but not because the priests are regarded as effeminately + "helpless"; rather because both are recognized as ministers of sacred + mysteries, both belong to the spiritual sphere, and have commerce with + the occult holiness of things. Also be it remarked that this + "protection" is chiefly needed against the brutality and bestiality of + man's own heart, which woman and religion alike rather hold in + subjection by their mysterious influence than have to thank for any + favours of self-control. Man "protects" woman because he first worships + her, because, if she has for him not always the beauty of holiness, she + at least always suggests the holiness of beauty. +</p> +<p> + Now when has man ever suggested holiness to the most adoring woman? I do + not refer to the professional holiness of saints and ecclesiastics, but + to that sense of hallowed strangeness, of mystic purity, of spiritual + exquisiteness, which breathes from a beautiful woman and makes the touch + of her hand a religious ecstasy, and her very garments a thrilling + mystery. How impossible it is to imagine a woman writing the <i>Vita + Nuova</i>, or a girl feeling toward a boy such feelings of awe and worship + as set the boy Dante a-tremble at his first sight of the girl Beatrice. +</p> +<blockquote> + At that moment [he writes], I say most truly that the spirit of + life, which hath its dwelling in the secretest chamber of the heart, + began to tremble so violently that the least pulse of my body shook + therewith; and in trembling it said these words: "<i>Ecce deus fortior + me, qui veniens dominabitur mihi</i>. (Here is a deity stronger than I, + who, coming, shall rule over me.)" +</blockquote> +<p> + And, loverlike, he records of "this youngest of the angels" that "her + dress on that day was of a most noble colour, a subdued and goodly + crimson, girdled and adorned in such sort as best suited with her very + tender age." Ah! that "little frock," that sacred little frock we first + saw her in! Don't we all know it? And the little handkerchief, scented + like the breath of heaven, we begged as a sacred relic! And— +</p> +<pre> + Long after you are dead + I will kiss the shoes of your feet.... +</pre> +<p class="noindent"> + Yes! anything she has worn or touched; for, as a modern writer has said: +</p> +<blockquote> + Everything a woman wears or touches immediately incarnates something + of herself. A handkerchief, a glove, a flower—with a breath she + endows them with immortal souls. +</blockquote> +<p> + Waller with his girdle, Donne with "that subtle wreath of hair about his + arm," the mediaeval knight riding at tourney with his lady's sleeve at + his helm, and all relic-worshipping lovers through the ages bear witness + to that divine supernaturalism of woman. To touch the hem of that little + frock, to kiss the mere imprint of those little feet, is to be purified + and exalted. But when did man affect woman in that way? I am tolerably + well read in the poetry of woman's emotions, but I recall no parallel + expressions of feeling. No passionate apostrophes of his golf stockings + come to my mind, nor wistful recollections of the trousers he wore on + that never-to-be-forgotten afternoon. The immaculate collar that spanned + his muscular throat finds no Waller to sing it: +</p> +<pre> + A narrow compass—and yet there + Dwelt all that's good, and all that's fair, +</pre> +<p class="noindent"> + and probably the smartest negligée shirt that ever sported with the + summer winds on a clothes-line has never caused the smallest flutter in + feminine bosoms. The very suggestion is, of course, absurd—whereas with + women, in very deed, it is as with the temple in Keats's lines: +</p> +<pre> + ... even as the trees + That whisper round a temple become soon + Dear as the temple's self. +</pre> +<p> + Properly understood, therefore, the cult of the skirt-dancer has a + religious significance, and man's preoccupation with petticoats is but + the popular recognition of the divinity of woman. All that she is and + does and wears has a ritualistic character, and she herself commands our + reverence because we feel her to be the vessel of sacred mysteries, the + earthly representative of unearthly powers, with which she enjoys an + intimacy of communication denied to man. It is not a reasonable feeling, + or one to be reasoned about; and that is why we very properly exempt + woman from the necessity of being reasonable. She is not, we say, a + reasonable being, and in so saying we pay her a profound compliment. For + she transcends reason, and on that very account is mysteriously wise, + the wisest of created things—mother-wise. When we say "mother-wit," we + mean something deeper than we realize—for what in the universe is wiser + than a mother, fed as she is through the strange channels of her being + with that lore of the infinite which seems to enter her body by means of + organs subtler than the brain? +</p> +<p> + A certain famous novelist meant well when recently he celebrated woman + as "the mother of the male," but such celebration, while ludicrously + masculine in its egotistic limitation, would have fallen short even if + he had stopped to mention that she was the mother of the female, too; + for not merely in the fact that she is the mother of the race resides + the essential mystery of her motherhood. We do not value woman merely, + if one may be permitted the expression, as a brood mare, an economic + factor controlling the census returns. Her gift of motherhood is + stranger than that, and includes spiritual affinities and significances + not entirely represented by visible babes. Her motherhood is mysterious + because it seems to be one with the universal motherhood of nature, one + with the motherhood that guards and warms to life the eggs in the nest + and the seeds in the hollows of the hills, the motherhood of the whole + strange vital process, wherever and howsoever it moves and dreams and + breaks into song and flower. And, as nature is something more than a + mother, so is woman. She is a vision, an outward and visible sign of an + inward and spiritual grace and goodness at the heart of life; and her + beauty is the sacred seal which the gods have set upon her in token of + her supernatural meaning and mission; for all beauty is the message of + the immortal to mortality. Always when man has been in doubt concerning + his gods, or in despair amid the darkness of his destiny, his heart has + been revived by some beatific vision; +</p> +<pre> + Some shape of beauty moves away the pall + From our dark spirits. +</pre> +<p> + Woman is our permanent Beatific Vision in the darkness of the world. +</p> +<a name="2H_4_6"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<h2> + III +</h2> +<h3> + THE LACK OF IMAGINATION AMONG MILLIONAIRES +</h3> +<p> </p> + +<p> + Considering the truly magical power of money, it must often have struck + the meditative mind—particularly that class of meditative mind whose + wealth consists chiefly in meditation—to what thoroughly commonplace + uses the modern millionaire applies the power that is his: in brief, + with what little originality, with what a pitiful lack of imagination, + he spends his money. One seldom hears of his doing a novel or striking + thing with it. +</p> +<p> + On the contrary, he buys precisely the same things as his + fellow-millionaires, the same stereotyped possessions—houses in Fifth + Avenue and Newport, racehorses, automobiles, boxes at the opera, + diamonds and dancing girls; and whether, as the phrase is, he makes good + use of his wealth, or squanders it on his pleasures, the so-called good + or bad uses are alike drearily devoid of individuality. Philanthropist + or profligate, the modern millionaire is one and the same in his lack of + initiative. Saint or sinner, he is one or the other in the same tame + imitative way. +</p> +<p> + The rich men of the past, the splendid spendthrifts of antiquity, seem + usually to have combined a gift of fancy with their wealth, often even + something like poetry; and their extravagances, however extreme, had + usually a saving grace of personal whim to recommend them to lovers of + the picturesque. Sardanapalus and Heliogabalus may have been whatever + else you please, but they were assuredly not commonplace; and the mere + mention of their names vibrates with mankind's perennial gratitude for + splendour and colossal display, however perverse, and even absurd. The + princes of the Italian Renaissance were, of course, notable examples of + the rich man as fantast, probably because they had the good sense to + seek the skilled advice of poets and painters as to how best to make an + artistic display of their possessions. Alas, no millionaire today asks a + poet's or painter's assistance in spending his money; yet, were the + modern millionaire to do so, the world might once more be delighted with + such spectacles as Leonardo devised for the entertainments at the Villa + Medici—those fanciful banquets, where, instead of a mere vulgar display + of Medici money—"a hundred dollars a plate," so to say—whimsical wit + and beauty entered into the creation of the very dishes. Leicester's + famous welcoming of Elizabeth to Kenilworth was perhaps the last + spectacular "revel" of its kind to strike the imagination; though we + must not fail to remember with gratitude the magnificent Beckford, with + his glorious "rich man's folly" of Fonthill Abbey, a lordly pleasure + house which naturally sprang from the same Aladdin-like fancy which + produced "Vathek." +</p> +<p> + I but mention one or two such typical examples at random to illustrate + the difference between past and present. At present the rich man's + paucity of originality is so painful that we even welcome a certain + millionaire's <i>penchant</i> for collecting fleas—he, it is rumoured, + having paid as much as a thousand dollars for specimens of a + particularly rare species. It is a passion perhaps hard to understand, + but, at least, as we say, it is "different." Mr. Carnegie's more + comprehensible hobby for building libraries shows also no little + originality in a man of a class which is not as a rule devoted to + literature. Another millionaire I recently read of, who refused to pay + the smallest account till it had run for five years, and would then + gladly pay it, with compound interest at five per cent., has something + refreshing about him; while still another rich eccentric, who has lived + on his yacht anchored near the English coast for some fifteen years or + so in order to avoid payment of his American taxes, and who occasionally + amuses himself by having gold pieces heated white hot and thrown into + the sea for diving boys to pick them up, shows a quaint ingenuity which + deserves our gratitude. Another modern example of how to spend, or + waste, one's money picturesquely was provided by the late Marquis of + Anglesey, a young lord generally regarded as crazy by an ungrateful + England. Perhaps it was a little crazy in him to spend so much money in + the comparatively commonplace adventure of taking an amateur dramatic + company through the English provinces, he himself, I believe, playing + but minor rôles; but lovers of Gautier's <i>Le Capitaine Fracasse</i> will + see in that but a charmingly boyish desire to translate a beloved dream + into a reality—though his creditors probably did not take that view. + Neither, one can surmise, did those gentlemen sufficiently appreciate + his passion for amassing amazing waistcoats, of which some seven hundred + were found in his wardrobe at his lamented death; or strange and + beautiful walking sticks, a like prodigious collection of which were + among the fantastic assets which represented his originally large + personal fortune on the winding up of his earthly affairs. Among these + unimaginative creditors were, doubtless, many jewellers who found it + hard to sympathize with his lordship's genial after-dinner habit, + particularly when in the society of fair women, of plunging his hand + into his trousers pocket and bringing it forth again brimming over with + uncut precious stones of many colours, at the same time begging his + companion to take her choice of the moonlit rainbowed things. The + Marquis of Anglesey died at the early age of twenty-nine, much lamented, + as I have hinted—by his creditors, but no less sincerely lamented, too, + by those for whom his flamboyant personality and bizarre whims added to + that gaiety of nations sadly in need today of such figures. A friend of + mine owns two of the wonderful waistcoats. Sometimes he wears one as we + lunch together, and on such occasions we always drink in silence to the + memory of his fantastic lordship. +</p> +<p> + These examples of rich men of our own time who have known how to spend + their money with whim and fancy and flourish are but exceptions to my + argument, lights shining, so to say, in a great darkness. As a general + rule, it is the poor or comparatively poor man, the man lacking the very + necessary material of the art, who is an artist of this kind. It is the + man with but little money who more often provides examples of the + delightful way of spending it. I trust that Mr. Richard Harding Davis + will not resent my recalling a charming feat of his in this connection. + Of course Mr. Davis is by no means a poor man, as all we who admire his + writings are glad to know. Still, successful writer as he is, he is not + yet, I presume, on a Carnegie or Rockefeller rating; and, at the time + which I am about to recall, while already famous and comparatively + prosperous, he had not attained that security of position which is + happily his today. Well, I suppose it was some twelve or fifteen years + ago—and of course I am only recalling a story well known to all the + world—that, chancing to be in London, and wishing to send a surprise + message to a lady in Chicago who afterward became his wife, he conceived + the idea of sending it by messenger boy from Charing Cross to Michigan + Avenue; and so the little lad, in the well-known uniform of hurry, sped + across the sea, as casually as though he were on an errand from Charing + Cross to Chancery Lane, raced across nearly half the continent, as + casually as though he were on an errand from Wall Street to Park Row, + and finding the proper number in Michigan Avenue, placed the far + travelled letter in the lady's hand, no doubt casually asking for a + receipt. This I consider one of the most romantic compliments ever paid + by a lover to his lady. What millionaire ever had a fancy like that? +</p> +<p> + Or what millionaire ever had a fancy like this? There was living in New + York some ten years ago a charming actor, not unknown to the public and + much loved by his friends for, among his other qualities, his quaint + whims. Good actor as he was, like many other good actors he was usually + out of an engagement, and he was invariably poor. It was always his + poorest moment that he would choose for the indulgence of an odd, and + surely kindly, eccentricity. He would half starve himself, go without + drinks, forswear tobacco, deny himself car fares, till at last he had + saved up five dollars. This by no means easy feat accomplished, he would + have his five-dollar bill changed into five hundred pennies, filling his + pockets with which, he would sally forth from his lodging, and, seeking + neighbourhoods in which children most abound, he would scatter his + arduously accumulated largess among the scrambling boys and girls, + literally happy as a king to watch the glee on the young faces at the + miraculous windfall. We often wondered that he was not arrested for + creating a riot in the public streets, a disturber of the public + traffic. Had some millionaire passed by on one of those ecstatic + occasions, there is no question but that he would have been promptly + removed to Bellevue as a dangerous lunatic. +</p> +<p> + Or what millionaire ever had a fancy like this? Passing along + Forty-second Street one afternoon, I came upon a little crowd, and + joining it I found that it was grouped in amused curiosity, and with a + certain kindness, round an old hatless Irishman, who was leaning against + a shop front, weeping bitterly, and, of course, grotesquely. The old man + was very evidently drunk, but there was something in his weeping deeply + pitiful for all that. He was drunk, for certain; but no less certainly + he was very unhappy—unhappy over some mysterious something that one or + two kindly questioners tried in vain to discover. As we all stood + helplessly looking on and wondering, a tall, brisk young man, of the + lean, rapid, few-worded American type, pushed in among us, took a swift + look at the old man, thrust a dollar bill into his hand, said "Forget + it"—no more—and was gone like a flash on his way. The old man fumbled + the note in a daze, but what chiefly interested me was the amazed look + on the faces of the little crowd. It was almost as if something + supernatural had happened. All eyes turned quickly to catch sight of + that strange young man; but he was already far off striding swiftly up + the street. I have often regretted that I checked my impulse to catch up + with him—for it seemed to me, too, that I had never seen a stranger + thing. Pity or whim or whatever it was, did ever a millionaire do the + like with a dollar, create such a sensation or have so much fun with so + small a sum? No; millionaires never have fancies like that. +</p> +<p> + Another poor man's fancy is that of a friend of mine, a very poor young + lawyer, whose custom it is to walk uptown from his office at evening, + studying the faces of the passers-by. He is too poor to afford dollar + bills. He must work his miracles with twenty-five-cent pieces, or even + smaller coins; but it is with this art of spending money as with any + other art: the greatness of the artist is shown by his command over an + economy of material; and the amount of human happiness to be evoked by + the dispensation of a quarter into the carefully selected hand, at the + artistically chosen moment, almost passes belief. Suppose, for example, + you were a sandwich man on a bleak winter day, an old weary man, with + hope so long since faded out of your heart that you would hardly know + what the word meant if you chanced to read it in print. Thought, too, is + dead within you, and feeling even so numbed that you hardly suffer any + more. Practically you are a man who ought to be in your coffin—at peace + in Potter's field—who, by the mere mechanic habit of existence, + mournfully parades the public streets, holding up a banner with some + strange device, the scoff of the pitiless wayfarer—as like as not + supporting against an empty stomach the savoury advertisement of some + newly opened restaurant. Suppose you were that man, and suddenly through + the thick hopelessness, muffling you around as with a spiritual + deafness, there should penetrate a kind voice saying: "Try and keep up + your heart, friend; there are better days ahead"; and with the voice a + hand slipping into yours a coin, and with both a kind smile, a cheery + "Good-bye," and a tall, broad-shouldered figure, striding with long, so + to say, kindly legs up the street—gone almost before you knew he was + there. I think it would hardly matter to you whether the coin were a + quarter or a dime; but what would matter would be your amazement that + there still was any kindness left on the earth; and perhaps you might + almost be tempted to believe in God again. And then—well, what would it + matter to any one what you did with your miraculous coin? This is my + friend's favourite way of spending his money. To the extent of his poor + means he has constituted himself the Haroun Al Raschid of the sandwich + men. +</p> +<p> + After all, I suppose that most of us, if put into the possession of + great wealth, would find our greatest satisfaction in the spending of it + much after the fashion of my poor lawyer friend—that is, in the + artistic distribution of human happiness. I do not, of course, for a + moment include in that phrase those soulless systems of philanthropy by + which a solid block of money on the one side is applied to the relief of + a solid block of human misery on the other, useful and much to be + appreciated as such mechanical charity of course is. It is not, indeed, + the pious use of money that is my theme, but rather how to get the most + fun, the most personal and original fun, out of it. +</p> +<p> + The mention of the great caliph suggests a rôle which is open to any + rich man to play, the rôle of the Haroun Al Raschid of New York. What a + wonderful part to play! Instead of loitering away one's evenings at the + club, to doff one's magnificence and lose oneself in the great nightly + multitude of the great city, wandering hither and thither, watching and + listening, and, with one's cheque-book for a wand, play the magician of + human destinies—bringing unhoped-for justice to the oppressed, succour + as out of heaven to the outcast, and swift retribution, as of sudden + lightning, to the oppressor. To play Providence in some tragic crisis of + human lives; at the moment when all seemed lost to step out of the + darkness and set all right with a touch of that magic wand. To walk by + the side of lost and lonely men, an unexpected friend; to scribble a + word on a card and say, "Present this tomorrow morning at such a number + Broadway and see what will happen," and then to disappear once again + into the darkness. To talk with sad, wandering girls, and arrange that + wonderful new hats and other forms of feminine hope shall fall out of + the sky into their lonely rooms on the morrow. To be the friend of weary + workmen and all that toil by night while the world is asleep in soft + beds. To come upon the hobo as he lies asleep on the park bench and slip + a purse into his tattered coat, and perhaps be somewhere by to see him + wake up in the dawn, and watch the strange antics of his joy—all + unsuspected as its cause. To go up to the poor push-cart man, as he is + being hurried from street corner to street corner by the police, and + say: "Would you like to go back to Italy? Here is a steamer ticket. A + boat sails for Genoa tomorrow. And here is a thousand dollars. It will + buy you a vineyard in Sicily. Go home and bid the signora get ready." + And then to disappear once more, like Harlequin, to flash your wand in + some other corner of the human multitude. Oh, there would be fun for + one's money, something worth while having money for! +</p> +<p> + I offer this suggestion to any rich man who may care to take it up, free + of charge. It is a fascinating opportunity, and its rewards would be + incalculable. At the end of the year how wise one would be in the human + story—how filled to overflowing his heart with the thought of the joy + he would thus have brought to so many lives—all, too, in pure fun, + himself having had such a good time all the while! +</p> +<a name="2H_4_7"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<h2> + IV +</h2> +<h3> + THE PASSING OF MRS. GRUNDY +</h3> +<p> </p> + +<p> + "Death of Mrs. Grundy!" Imagine opening one's newspaper some morning and + finding in sensational headlines that welcome news. One recalls the + beautiful old legend of the death of Pan, and how—false report though + it happily was—there once ran echoing through the world a long + heartbroken sigh, and a mysterious voice was heard wailing three times + from land to land, "Great Pan is dead!" Similarly, on that happy morning + I have imagined, one can imagine, too, another sigh passing from land to + land, the sigh of a vast relief, of a great thankfulness for the lifting + of an ineffable burden, as though the earth stretched its limbs and drew + great draughts of a new freedom. How wildly the birds would sing that + morning! And I believe that even the church bells would ring of + themselves! +</p> +<p> + Such definite news is not mine to proclaim, but if it cannot be + announced with certitude that Mrs. Grundy is no more, it may, at all + events, be affirmed without hesitation that she is on her deathbed, and + that surely, if slowly, she is breathing her last. Yes, that poisonous + breath, which has so long pervaded like numbing miasma the free air of + the world, will soon be out of her foolish, hypocritical old body; and + though it may still linger on here and there in provincial backwoods and + suburban fastnesses, from the great air centres of civilization it will + have passed away forever. +</p> +<p> + The origin of Mrs. Grundy is shrouded in mystery. In fact, though one + thus speaks of her as so potent a personification, she has of course + never had any real existence. For that very reason she has been so hard + to kill. Nothing is so long-lived as a chimera, nothing so difficult to + lay as a ghost. From her first appearance, or rather mention, in + literature, Mrs. Grundy has been a mere hearsay, a bugaboo being + invented to frighten society, as "black men" and other goblins have been + wickedly invented by nurses to frighten children. In the old play itself + where we first find her mentioned by name, she herself never comes on + the stage. She is only referred to in frightened whispers. "<i>What will + Mrs. Grundy say?</i>" is the nervous catchword of one of the characters, + much in the same way as Mrs. Gamp was wont to defer to the censorious + standards of her invisible friend "Mrs. Harris." In the case of the last + named chimera, it will be recalled that the awful moment came when Mrs. + Gamp's boon companion, Batsey Prig, was sacrilegious enough to declare + her belief that no such person as "Mrs. Harris" was, or ever had been, + in existence. So the awful atheistic moment has come for Mrs. Grundy, + too, and an oppressed world at last takes courage to say that no such + being as Mrs. Grundy has ever really existed, or that, even if she has, + she shall exist no more. <i>What will Mrs. Grundy say?</i> Who cares + nowadays—and so long as nobody cares, the good lady is as dead as need + be. +</p> +<p> + Mrs. Grundy, of course, is man's embodied fear of his neighbour, the + creation of timid souls who are afraid of being themselves, and who, + instead of living their lives after their own fashion and desires, + choose to live them in hypocritical discomfort according to the + standards of others, standards which in their turn may be held + insincerely enough from fear of someone else, and so on without end—a + vicious circle of insincere living being thus created, in which no man + is or does anything real, or as he himself would naturally prefer to be + and to do. It is evident that such a state of mutual intimidation can + exist only in small communities, economically interdependent, and among + people with narrow boundaries and no horizons. If you live in a village, + for example, and are dependent on the good opinion of your neighbours + for your means of existence, your morals and your religious belief must + be those of the village, or you are liable to starve. It is only the + rich man in a village who can do as he pleases. The only thing for the + dependent individualist in a village to do is to go somewhere else, to + some place where a man may at the same time hold his job and his + opinions, a place too big to keep track of its units, too busy to ask + irrelevant questions, and so diverse in its constituents as to have + generated tolerance and free operation for all. +</p> +<p> + Now, in spite of its bigness, the world was till quite recently little + more than a village, curiously held in subjection by village + superstitions and village ethics, narrow conceptions of life and + conduct; but the last twenty years have seen a remarkable enlargement of + the human spirit, a reassertion of the natural rights of man as against + the figments of prurient and emasculate conventions, to which there is + no parallel since the Renaissance. Voices have been heard and truths + told, and multitudes have listened gladly that aforetime must take + shelter either in overawed silence or in utterance so private that they + exerted no influence; and the literature of the day alone, literature of + wide and greedy acceptance, is sufficient warrant for the obituary + announcement which, if not yet, as I said, officially made, is already + writing in the hearts, and even in the actions, of society. The + popularity of such writers as Meredith and Hardy, Ibsen and Nietzsche, + Maeterlinck and Walt Whitman, constitutes a writing on the wall the + significance of which cannot be gainsaid. The vogue alone of Mr. Bernard + Shaw, apostle to the Philistines, is a portent sufficiently conclusive. + To regard Mr. Shaw either as a great dramatist or an original + philosopher is, of course, absurd. He, of all men, must surely be the + last to imagine such a vain thing about himself; but even should he be + so self-deluded, his immense coarse usefulness to his day and generation + remains, and the value of it can hardly be overestimated. What others + have said for years as in a glass darkly, with noble seriousness of + utterance, he proclaims again through his brazen megaphone, with all the + imperturbable <i>aplomb</i> of an impudent showman, having as little + self-respect as he has respect for his public; and, as a consequence, + that vast herd of middle-class minds to whom finer spirits appeal in + vain hear for the first time truths as old as philosophy, and answer to + them with assenting instincts as old as humanity. Truth, like many + another excellent commodity, needs a vulgar advertisement, if it is + to become operative in the masses. Mr. Shaw is truth's vulgar + advertisement. He is a brilliant, carrying noise on behalf of freedom of + thought; and his special equipment for his peculiar revivalist mission + comes of his gift for revealing to the common mind not merely the + untruth of hypocrisy, but the laughableness of hypocrisy, first of all. + He takes some popular convention, that of medicine or marriage or what + you will, and shows you not merely how false it is but how ludicrously + false. He purges the soul, not with the terror and pity of tragedy, but + with the irresistible laughter of rough-and-tumble farce. To think + wrongly is, first of all, so absurd. He proves it by putting wrong + thinking on the stage, where you see it for yourself in action, and + laugh immoderately. Perhaps you had never thought how droll wrong + thinking or no thinking was before; and while you laugh with Shaw + at your side-splitting discovery, the serious message glides in + unostentatiously—wrong thinking is not merely laughable; it is also + dangerous, and very uncomfortable. And so the showman has done his work, + the advertiser has sold his goods, and there is so much more truth in + circulation in unfamiliar areas of society. +</p> +<p> + That word "society" naturally claims some attention at the hands of one + who would speak of Mrs. Grundy, particularly as she has owed her long + existence to a general misconception as to what constitutes "society," + and to a superstitious terror as to its powers over the individual. + Society—using the word in its broad sense—has heretofore been regarded + as a vague tremendous entity imposing a uniformity of opinion and action + on the individual, under penalty of a like vague tremendous disapproval + for insubordination. Independent minds, however, have from time to time, + and in ever increasing numbers, ventured to do their own will and + pleasure in disregard of this vague tremendous disapproval, and have, + strange to say, found no sign of the terrible consequences threatened + them, with the result that they, and the onlookers, have come to the + conclusion that this fear of society is just one more bugaboo of + timorous minds, with no power over the courageous spirit. From a + multitude of such observations men and women have come more and more to + draw the conclusion that the solidarity of society is nothing but a + myth, and that so-called society is merely a loosely connected series of + independent societies, formed by natural selection among their members, + each with its own codes and satisfactions; and that a man not welcome in + one society may readily find a home for himself in another, or indeed, + if necessary, and if he be strong enough, rest content with his own + society of one. +</p> +<p> + There was a time when a doubt as to the credibility of the book of + Genesis or a belief in the book of Darwin made the heretic a lonely man, + but nowadays he is hardly likely to go without friends. Besides, men and + women of strong personal character are not usually indiscriminately + gregarious. On the contrary, they are apt to welcome any disparity + between them and their neighbours which tends to safeguard their leisure + and protect them against the social inroads of irrelevant persons. I + recall the case of a famous novelist, who, himself jealous of his own + proper seclusion, permitted the amenities of his neighbours to pleasure + his wife who was more sociably inclined, and smilingly allowed himself + to be sacrificed once a week on the altar of a domestic "at home" day. + It was amusing to see him in his drawing-room on Fridays, surrounded by + every possible form of human irrelevancy—men and women well enough in + their way, of course, but absolutely unrelated, if not antipathetic to + him and all he stood for—heroically doing his best to seem really "at + home." But there came a time when he published a book of decidedly + "dangerous" tendencies, if not worse, and then it was a delight to see + how those various nobodies fled his contact as they would the plague. + His drawing-room suddenly became a desert, and when you dropped in on + Fridays you found there—only the people he wanted. "Is not this," he + would laughingly say, "a triumph of natural selection? See how simply, + by one honest action, I have cut off the bores!" +</p> +<p> + To cut off the bores! Yes, that is the desperate attempt that any man or + woman who would live their own lives rather than the lives of others is + constantly engaged in making; and more and more all men and women are + realizing that there is only one society that really counts, the society + of people we want, rather than the people who want us or don't want us + or whom we don't want. And nowadays the man or woman must be + uncomfortable or undesirable, indeed, who cannot find all the society he + or she can profitably or conveniently handle, be their opinions and + actions never so anti-Grundy. Thus the one great fear that more than any + other has kept Mrs. Grundy alive, the fear of being alone in the world, + cut off from such intercourse with our fellows as most of us feel the + need of at times, has been put an end to by the ever increasing + subdivision of "society" into friendly seclusions and self-dependent + communities of men and women with like ways and points of view, however + disapproved in alien circles. What "shocks" one circle will seem + perfectly natural in another; and one great truth should always be held + firmly in mind—that the approval of one's neighbours has never yet paid + a man's bills. So long as he can go on paying those, and retain the + regard of the only society he values—that of himself and a few + friends—he can tell Mrs. Grundy to go—where she belongs. And this + happily is—almost—as true nowadays for woman as for man; which is the + main consideration, for, it need hardly be said, that it has been on her + own sex that the tyranny of Mrs. Grundy has weighed peculiarly hard. +</p> +<p> + Had that tyranny been based on a genuine moral ideal, one would have + some respect for it, but, as the world has always known, it has been + nothing of the sort. On the contrary, it has all along been an organized + hypocrisy which condoned all it professed to censure on condition that + it was done in unhealthy secrecy, behind the closed doors of a lying + "respectability." All manner of uncleanness had been sanctioned so long + as it wore a mask of "propriety," whereas essentially clean and + wholesome expressions of human nature, undisguised manifestations of the + joy and romance of life, have been suppressed and confounded with their + base counterfeits merely because they have sought the sunlight of + sincerity rather than the shade where evil does well to hide. Man's + proper delight in the senses, the natural joy of men and women in each + other, the love of beauty, naked and unashamed, the romantic emotions, + and all that passionate vitality that dreams and builds and glorifies + the human story: all this, forsooth, it has been deemed wrong even to + speak of, save in colourless euphemisms, and their various drama has had + to be carried on by evasion and subterfuge pitiably silly indeed in this + robustly procreative world. Silly, but how preposterous, too, and no + longer to be endured. +</p> +<p> + It was a gain indeed to drag these vital human interests into the arena + of undaunted discussion, but things are clearly seen to have already + passed beyond that stage. Discussion has already set free in the world + braver and truer ideals, ideals no longer afraid of life, but, in the + courage of their joyousness, feasibly close to all its breathing facts. + Men and women refuse any longer to allow their most vital instincts to + be branded with obloquy, and the fulness of their lives to be thwarted + at the bidding of an impure and irrational fiction of propriety. On + every hand we find the right to happiness asserted in deeds as well as + words. The essential purity of actions and relations to which a merely + technical or superstitious irregularity attaches is being more and more + acknowledged, and the fanciful barriers to human happiness are + everywhere giving way before the daylight of common sense. Love and + youth and pleasure are asserting their sacred natural rights, rights as + elemental as those forces of the universe by which the stars are + preserved from wrong, and the merely legal and ecclesiastical fictions + which have so long overawed them are fleeing like phantoms at cockcrow. + It is no longer sinful to be happy—even in one's own way; and the + extravagances of passion, the ebullitions of youth, and the vagaries of + pleasure are no longer frowned down by a sour-visaged public opinion, + but encouraged, or, if necessary, condoned, as the dramatic play of + natural forces, and as welcome additions to the gaiety of nations. The + true sins against humanity are, on the other hand, being exposed and + pilloried with a scientific eye for their essential qualities. +</p> +<pre class="si"> + ... The cold heart, and the murderous tongue, + The wintry soul that hates to hear a song, + The close-shut fist, the mean and measuring eye, + And all the little poisoned ways of wrong. +</pre> +<p> + Man's virtues and vices are being subjected to a re-classification, in + the course of which they are entertainingly seen, in no few instances, + to be changing places. The standards of punishment applied by Dante to + his inferno of lost souls is being, every year, more closely + approximated; warm-blooded sins of instinct and impulse, as having + usually some "relish of salvation" in them, are being judged lightly, + when they are accounted sins at all, and the cold-hearted sins of + essential selfishness, the sins of cruelty and calculation and + cowardice, are being nailed up as the real crimes against God and man. + The individual is being allowed more and more to be the judge of his own + actions, and all actions are being estimated more in regard to their + special relation and environment, as the relativity of right and wrong, + that most just of modern conceptions, is becoming understood. The hidden + sins of the pious and respectable are coming disastrously into the + light, and it no longer avails for a man to be a pillar of orthodoxy on + Sundays if he be a pillar of oppression all the rest of the week; while + the negative virtues of abstinence from the common human pleasures go + for less than nothing in a world that no longer regards the theatre, the + race course, and the card table, or even a beautiful woman, as under the + especial wrath of God. No, the Grundy "virtues" are fast disappearing, + and piano legs are once more being worn in their natural nudity. The + general trend is unmistakable and irresistible, and such apparent + contradictions of it as occasionally get into the newspapers are of no + general significance; as when, for example, some exquisitely refined + Irish police officer suppresses a play of genius, or blushingly covers + up the nakedness of a beautiful statue, or comes out strong on the + question of woman's bathing dress when some sensible girl has the + courage to go into the water with somewhat less than her entire walking + costume; or, again, when some crank invokes the blue laws against Sunday + golf or tennis; or some spinster association puts itself on record + against woman's smoking: all these are merely provincial or parochial + exceptions to the onward movement of morals and manners, mere spasmodic + twitchings, so to say, of the poor old lady on her deathbed. We know + well enough that she who would so sternly set her face against the + feminine cigarette would have no objection to one of her votaries + carrying on an affair with another woman's husband—not the least in the + world, so long as she was careful to keep it out of the courts. And such + is a sample of her morality in all her dealings. Humanity will lose no + real sanctity or safeguard by her demise; only false shame and false + morality will go—but true modesty, "the modesty of nature," true + propriety, true religion—and incidentally true love and true + marriage—will all be immeasurably the gainers by the death of this + hypocritical, nasty-minded old lady. +</p> +<a name="2H_4_8"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<h2> + V +</h2> +<h3> + MODERN AIDS TO ROMANCE +</h3> +<p> </p> + +<p> + There have, of course, in all ages been those who made a business of + running down the times in which they lived—tiresome people for whom + everything had gone to the dogs—or was rapidly going—uncomfortable + critics who could never make themselves at home in their own century, + and whose weary shibboleth was that of some legendary perfect past. +</p> +<p> + In Rome this particular kind of bore went by the name of <i>laudator + temporis acti</i>; and, if we have no such concise Anglo-Saxon phrase for + the type, we still have the type no less ubiquitously with us. The + bugbear of such is "modern science," or "modern thought," a monster + which, we are frequently assured, is fast devouring all the beautiful + and good in human life, a Moloch fed on the dreams and ideals and noble + faiths of man. Modernity! For such "modernity" has taken the place of + "Anti-Christ." These sad, nervous people have no eye for the beautiful + patterns and fantasies of change, none of that faith which rejoices to + watch "the roaring loom of time" weaving ever new garments for the + unchanging eternal gods. In new temples, strangely enough, they see + only atheism, instead of the vitality of spiritual evolution; in new + affirmations they scent only dangerous denials. With the more grave + misgivings of these folk of little faith this is not the place to deal, + though actually, if there were any ground for belief in a modern decay + of religion, we might seriously begin to believe in the alleged decay of + romance. +</p> +<p> + Yes, romance, we not infrequently hear, is dead. Modern science has + killed it. It is essentially a "thing of the past"—an affair presumably + of stage-coaches, powdered wigs, and lace ruffles. It cannot breathe in + what is spoken of as "this materialistic age." +</p> +<p> + The dullards who repeat these platitudes of the muddle-headed multitude + are surely the only people for whom they are true. It is they alone who + are the materialists, confusing as they do the spirit of romance with + its worn-out garments of bygone fashions. Such people are so clearly out + of court as not to be worth controverting, except for the opportunity + they give one of confidently making the joyous affirmation that, far + from romance being dead in our day, there never was a more romantic age + than ours, and that never since the world began has it offered so many + opportunities, so many facilities for romance as at the present time. +</p> +<p> + In fact, a very little thinking will show that of all those benefited by + "the blessings of modern science," it is the lovers of the community + who as a body have most to be thankful for. Indeed, so true is this that + it might almost seem as though the modern laboratory has been run + primarily from romantic motives, to the end that the old reproach should + be removed and the course of true love run magically smooth. Valuable as + the telephone may be in business affairs, it is simply invaluable in the + affairs of love; and mechanicians the world over are absorbed in the + problem of aerial flight, whether they know it or not, chiefly to + provide Love with wings as swift as his desire. +</p> +<p> + Distance may lend enchantment to those whom we prefer to appreciate from + afar, but nearness is the real enchantment to your true lover, and + distance is his natural enemy. Distance and the slow-footedness of Time + are his immemorial evils. Both of these modern science has all but + annihilated. Consider for a moment the conditions under which love was + carried on in those old days which some people find so romantic. Think + what a comparatively short distance meant then, with snail-paced + precarious mails, and the only means of communication horses by land, + and sailing ships by sea. How men and women had the courage to go on + long journeys at all away from each other in those days is hard to + realize, knowing what an impenetrable curtain of silence and mystery + immediately fell between them with the winding of the coach horn, or the + last wave of the plumed hat as it disappeared behind the last turning + of the road—leaving those at home with nothing for company but the + yearning horizon and the aching, uncommunicative hours. Days, weeks, + months, even years, must go by in waiting for a word—and when at last + it came, brought on lumbering wheels or at best by some courier on his + steaming mud-splashed mount, precious as it was, it was already grown + old and cold and perhaps long since untrue. +</p> +<p> + Imagine perhaps being dependent for one's heart news on some chance + soldier limping back from the wars, or some pilgrim from the Holy Land + with scallop shell and staff! +</p> +<p> + Distance was indeed a form of death under such conditions—no wonder men + made their wills as they set out on a journey—and when actual physical + death did not intervene, how much of that slow death-in-life, that + fading of the memory and that numbing of the affections which absence + too often brings, was even still more to be feared. The loved face might + indeed return, looking much the same as when it went away, but what of + the heart that went a-journeying, too? What even of the hearts that + remained at home? +</p> +<p> + The chances of death and disaster not even modern science can forestall, + though even these it has considerably lessened; but that other death of + the heart, which comes of the slow starvation of silence and absence, it + may be held to have all but vanquished. Thanks to its weird magicians, + you may be seas or continents away from her whom your soul loveth, yet + "at her window bid good-morrow" as punctually as if you lived next door; + or serenade her by electricity—at all hours of the night. If you sigh + in New York, she can hear you and sigh back in San Francisco; and soon + her very face will be carried to you at any moment of the day along the + magic wires. Nor will you need to wait for the postman, but be able to + read her flowerlike words as they write themselves out on the luminous + slate before you, at the very moment as she leans her fragrant bosom + upon her electric desk three thousand miles away. If this isn't + romantic, one may well ask what is! +</p> +<p> + To take the telephone alone, surely the romance of Pyramus and Thisbe, + with their primitive hole in the wall, was a tame affair compared with + the possibilities of this magic toy, by means of which you can talk with + your love not merely through a wall but through the Rocky Mountains. You + can whisper sweet nothings to her across the sounding sea, and bid her + "sleep well" over leagues of primeval forest, and through the + stoniest-hearted city her soft voice will find its way. Even in + mid-ocean the "wireless" will bring you news of her <i>mal-de-mer</i>. And + more than that; should you wish to carry her voice with you from place + to place, science is once more at your service with another magic + toy—the phonograph—by which indeed she can still go on speaking to + you, if you have the courage to listen, from beyond the grave. +</p> +<p> + The telegraph, the telephone, the "wireless," the phonograph, the + electric letter writer—such are the modern "conveniences" of romance; + and, should an elopement be on foot, what are the fastest post-chaise or + the fleetest horses compared with a high-powered automobile? And when + the airship really comes, what romance that has ever been will compare + for excitement with an elopement through the sky? +</p> +<p> + Apart from the practical conveniences of these various new devices, + there is a poetic quality about the mere devices themselves which is + full of fascination and charm. Whether we call up our sweetheart or our + stockbroker, what a thing of enchantment the telephone is merely in + itself! Such devices turn the veriest prose of life into poetry; and, + indeed, the more prosaic the uses to which we put them, the more + marvellous by contrast their marvel seems. Even our businesses are + carried on by agencies more mysterious and truly magical than anything + in the <i>Arabian Nights</i>, and all day long we are playing with mysterious + natural laws and exquisite natural forces as, in a small way, when boys + we used to delight in our experiments with oxygen and hydrogen and + Leyden jars. Science has thus brought an element of romantic "fun," so + to speak, even into our stores and our counting-houses. I wonder if + "Central" realizes what a truly romantic employment is hers? +</p> +<p> + But, pressed into the high service of love, one sees at once what a + poetic fitness there is in their employ, and how our much-abused modern + science has found at last for that fastidious god an appropriately + dignified and beautiful ministrant. Coarse and vulgar indeed seem the + ancient servitors and the uncouth machinery by which the divine business + of the god was carried on of old. Today, through the skill of science, + the august lightning has become his messenger, and the hidden gnomes of + air and sea hasten to do his bidding. +</p> +<p> + Modern science, then, so far from being an enemy of romance, is seen on + every hand to be its sympathetic and resourceful friend, its swift and + irresistible helper in its serious need, and an indulgent minister to + its lighter fancies. Be it whim or emergency, the modern laboratory is + equally at the service of romance, equally ready to gratify mankind with + a torpedo or a toy. +</p> +<p> + Not only, however, has modern science thus put itself at the service of + romance, by supplying it with its various magic machinery of + communication, but modern thought—that much maligned bugbear of + timorous minds—has generated an atmosphere increasingly favourable to + and sympathetic with the romantic expression of human nature in all its + forms. +</p> +<p> + The world has unmistakably grown younger again during the last twenty + years, as though—which, indeed, is the fact—it had thrown off an + accumulation of mopishness, shaken itself free from imaginary + middle-aged restrictions and preoccupations. All over the world there is + a wind of youth blowing such as has not freshened the air of time since + the days of Elizabeth. Once more the spring of a new Renaissance of + Human Nature is upon us. It is the fashion to be young, and the age of + romance both for men and women has been indefinitely extended. No one + gives up the game, or is expected to, till he is genuinely tired of + playing it. Mopish conventions are less and less allowed to restrict + that free and joyous play of vitality dear to the modern heart, which is + the essence of all romance. More and more the world is growing to love a + lover, and one has only to read the newspapers to see how sympathetic + are the times to any generous and adventurous display of the passions. +</p> +<p> + This more humane temper is the result of many causes. The disintegration + of religious superstition, and the substitution in its stead of + spiritual ideals closer to the facts of life, is one of these. All that + was good in Puritanism has been retained by the modern spirit, while + its narrowing and numbing features, its anti-human, self-mortifying, + provincial side have passed or are passing in the regenerating sunlight + of what one might call a spiritual paganism, which conceives of natural + forces and natural laws as inherently pure and mysteriously sacred. Thus + the way of a man with a maid is no longer a shamefaced affair, but it + is more and more realized that in its romance and its multifarious + refinements of development are the "law and the prophets," the "eternal + meanings" of natural religion and social spirituality. +</p> +<p> + Then, too, the spread of democracy, resulting in the breaking down of + caste barriers, is all to the good of romance. Swiftly and surely Guelph + and Ghibelline and break-neck orchard walls are passing away. If Romeo + and Juliet make a tragedy of it nowadays, they have only to blame their + own mismanagement, for the world is with them as it has never been + before, and all sensible fathers and mothers know it. +</p> +<p> + Again, the freer intercourse between the sexes tends incalculably to + smooth that course of true love once so proverbially rough, but now + indeed in danger of being made too unexcitingly smooth. Yet if, as a + result, certain old combinations of romance are becoming obsolete, new + ones, no less picturesque, and even more vital in their drama, are being + evolved every day by the new conditions. Those very inroads being so + rapidly and successfully made by woman into the immemorial business of + man, which are superficially regarded by some as dangerous to the + tenderer sentiments between men and women, are, on the contrary, merely + widening the area of romance, and will eventually develop, as they can + be seen already developing, a new chivalry and a new poetry of the sexes + no less deep and far more many-sided than the old. The robuster + comradeship between the two already resulting from the more active + sharing of common interests cannot but tend to a deeper and more + exhilarating union of man and woman, a completer, intenser marriage + literally of true minds as well as bodies than was possible in the old + régime, when the masculine and feminine "spheres" were kept so jealously + distinct and only allowed to touch at the elementary points of + relationship. There has always been a thrill of adventure when either + has been admitted a little farther into the other's world than was + customary. How thrilling, therefore, will it be when men and women + entirely share in each other's lives, without fictitious reserves and + mysteries, and face the whole adventure of life squarely and completely + together, all the more husband and wife for being comrades as well—as + many men and women of the new era are already joyously doing. +</p> +<p> + And, merely on the surface, what a new romantic element woman has + introduced into the daily drudgery of men's lives by her mere presence + in their offices! She cannot always be beautiful, poor dear, and she is + not invariably gracious, it is true; yet, on the whole, how much the + atmosphere of office life has gained in amenity by the coming of the + stenographer, the typewriter, and the telephone girl, not to speak of + her frequent decorative value in a world that has hitherto been + uncompromisingly harsh and unadorned! Men may affect to ignore this, and + cannot afford indeed to be too sensitive to these flowery presences that + have so considerably supplanted those misbegotten young miscreants known + as office-boys, a vanishing race of human terror; yet there she is, all + the same, in spite of her businesslike airs and her prosaic tasks, + silently diffusing about her that eternal mystery which she can never + lose, be her occupations never so masculine. +</p> +<p> + There she is with her subtly wreathed hair and her absurd little lace + handkerchiefs and her furtive powder puff and her bits of immemorial + ornaments and the soft sound of her skirts and all the rest of it. Never + mind how grimly and even brusquely you may be dictating to her + specifications for steel rails or the like, little wafts of perfume + cannot help floating across to your rolltop desk, and you are a man and + she is a woman, for all that; and, instead of having her with you at fag + ends of your days, you have her with you all day long now—and your + sisters and your sweethearts are so much the nearer to you all day for + her presence, and, whether you know it or not, you are so much the less + a brute because she is there. +</p> +<p> + Where the loss to romance comes in in these admirable new arrangements + of modern commerce it is hard to see. Of course a new element of danger + is thus introduced into the routine of our daily lives, but when was + danger an enemy to romance? The "bright face" of this particular + "danger" who would be without? The beloved essayist from whom that last + phrase is, of course, adapted, declared, as we all know, that to marry + is "to domesticate the recording angel." One might say that the modern + business man has officialized the ministering angel—perhaps some other + forms of angel as well. +</p> +<p> + In their work, then, as in their play, men and women are more and more + coming to share with each other as comrades, and really the fun of life + seems in no wise diminished as a consequence. Rather the contrary, it + would seem, if one is to judge from the "Decameron" of the newspapers. + Yet it is not very long ago that man looked askance at woman's wistful + plea to take part even in his play. He had the old boyish fear that she + would spoil the game. However, it didn't take him long to find out his + mistake and to know woman for the true "sport" that she can be. And in + that discovery it was another invention of that wicked modern science + that was the chief, if humble seeming, factor, no less than that + eclipsed but inexpressibly useful instrument (of flirtation) in the + hands of a kind providence, the bicycle. +</p> +<p> + The service of the bicycle to the "emancipation of woman" movements has + perhaps never been acknowledged by the philosopher; but a little thought + will make evident how far-reaching that service has been. When that near + day arrives on which woman shall call herself absolutely "free," should + she feel inclined to celebrate her freedom by some monument of her + gratitude, let the monument be neither to man nor woman, however valiant + in the fight, but simply let it take the form of an enthroned and + laurelled bicycle—for the moment woman mounted that apparently innocent + machine, it carried her on the high-road to freedom. On that she could + go not only where she pleased, but—what is even more to the point—with + whom she pleased. The free companionship of man and woman had begun. + Then and forever ended the old system of courtship, which seems so + laughable and even incredible today. One was no longer expected to pay + court to one's beloved, sitting stiffly on straight-backed chairs in a + chill drawing-room in the non-conducting, or non-conducive, presence of + still chillier maiden aunts. The doom of the <i>duenna</i> was sounded; the + chill drawing-room was exchanged for "the open road" and the whispering + woodland; and soon it is to come about that a man shall propose to his + wife high up in the blue heavens, in an airship softly swaying at anchor + in the wake of the evening star. +</p> +<a name="2H_4_9"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<h2> + VI +</h2> +<h3> + THE LAST CALL +</h3> +<p> </p> + +<p> + I don't know whether or not the cry "Last call for the dining-car" + affects others as it affects me, but for me it always has a stern, + fateful sound, suggestive of momentous opportunity fast slipping away, + opportunity that can never come again; and, on the occasions when I have + disregarded it, I have been haunted with a sense of the neglected + "might-have-been." +</p> +<p> + Not, indeed, that the formless regret has been connected with any + illusions as to the mysterious quality of the dinner that I have thus + foregone. I have been well enough aware that the only actual opportunity + thus evaded has been most probably that of an unusually bad dinner, + exorbitantly paid for. The dinner itself has had nothing to do with my + feeling, which, indeed, has come of a suggestiveness in the cry beyond + the occasion, a sense conveyed by the words, in combination with the + swift speeding along of the train, of the inexorable swift passage and + gliding away of all things. Ah! so soon it will be the last call—for so + many pleasant things—that we would fain arrest and enjoy a little + longer in a world that with tragic velocity is flowing away from us, + each moment, "like the waters of the torrent." O yes, all too soon it + will be the "last call" in dead earnest—the last call for the joy of + life and the glory of the world. The grass is already withering, the + flower already fading; and that bird of time, with so short a way to + flutter, is relentlessly on the wing. +</p> +<p> + Now some natures hear this call from the beginning of their lives. Even + their opulent spendthrift youth is "made the more mindful that the sweet + days die," by every strain of music, by every gathered flower. All their + joy is haunted, like the poetry of William Morris, with the wistful + burden of mortality. Even the summer woodlands, with all their pomp and + riot of exuberant green and gold, are anything but safe from this low + sweet singing, and in the white arms of beauty, pressed desperately + close as if to imprison the divine fugitive moment, the song seems to + come nearest. Who has not held some loved face in his hands, and gazed + into it with an almost agonizing effort to realize its reality, to make + eternally sure of it, somehow to wrest possession of it and the + transfiguring moment for ever, all the time pierced with the melancholy + knowledge that tomorrow all will be as if this had never been, and life + once more its dull disenchanted self? +</p> +<pre class="si"> + Too soon shall morning take the stars away, + And all the world be up and open-eyed, + This magic night be turned to common day— + Under the willows on the riverside. +</pre> +<p> + Youth, however, can afford to enjoy even its melancholy; for the + ultimate fact of which that melancholy is a prophecy is a long way off. + If one enchanted moment runs to an end, it may be reasonably sure for a + long time yet of many more enchanted moments to come. It has as yet only + taken a bite or two into the wonderful cake. And, though its poets may + warn it that "youth's a stuff does not endure," it doesn't seriously + believe it. Others may have come to an end of their cake, but its cake + is going to last for ever. Alas, for the day when it is borne in upon us + with a tragic suddenness, like a miser who awakens to find that he has + been robbed of his hoard, that unaccountably the best part of the cake + has been eaten, that perhaps indeed only a few desperate crumbs remain. + A bleak laughter blends now with that once luxurious melancholy. There + is a song at our window, terribly like the mockery of Mephistopheles. + Our blood runs cold. We listen in sudden fear. It is life singing out + its last call. +</p> +<p> + The time of this call, the occasion and the manner of it, mercifully + vary with individuals. Some fortunate ones, indeed, never hear it till + they lie on their deathbeds. Such have either been gifted with such a + generous-sized cake of youth that it has lasted all their lives, or + they have possessed a great art in the eating of it. Though I may add + here that a cautious husbanding of your cake is no good way. That way + you are liable to find it grown mouldy on your hands. No, oddly enough, + it is often seen that those who all their lives have eaten their cake + most eagerly have quite a little of it left at the end. There are no + hard and fast rules for the eating of your cake. One can only find out + by eating it; and, as I have said, it may be your luck to disprove the + proverb and both eat your cake and have it. +</p> +<p> + For a dreary majority, however, the cake does come to an end, and for + them henceforth, as Stevenson grimly put it, the road lies long and + straight and dusty to the grave. For them that last call is apt to come + usually before sunset—and the great American question arises: What are + they going to do about it? That, of course, every one must decide for + himself, according to his inclinations and his opportunities. But a few + general considerations may be of comfort and even of greater value. +</p> +<p> + There is one thing of importance to know about this last call, that we + are apt to imagine we hear it before we actually do, from a nervous + sense that it is about time for it to sound. Our hair perhaps is growing + grey, and our years beginning to accumulate. We hypnotize ourselves with + our chronology, and say with Emerson: +</p> +<pre> + It is time to grow old, + To take in sail. +</pre> +<p> + Well and good, if it is and we feel like it; but may be it isn't, and we + don't. Youth is largely a habit. So is romance. And, unless we allow + ourselves to be influenced by musty conventions and superstitions, both + habits may be prolonged far beyond the moping limits of custom, and need + never be abandoned unless we become sincerely and unregretfully tired of + them. I can well conceive of an old age like that of Sophocles, as + reported by Plato, who likened the fading of the passions with the + advance of age to "being set free from service to a band of madmen." +</p> +<p> + When a man feels so, all is well and comfortable with him. He has + retired of his own free will from the banquet of life, having had his + fill, and is content. Our image of the last call does not apply to him, + but rather to those who, with appetites still keen, are sternly warned + that for them, willy-nilly, the banquet must soon end, and the prison + fare of prosaic middle age be henceforth their portion. No more ortolans + and transporting vintages for them. Nothing but Scotch oatmeal and + occasional sarsaparilla to the end of the chapter. No wonder that some, + hearing this dread sentence, go half crazy in a frenzied effort to + clutch at what remains, run amok, so to say, in their despairing + determination to have, if need be, a last "good time" and die. Their + efforts are apt to be either distasteful or pathetically comic, and the + world is apt to be cynically contemptuous of the "romantic" outbursts of + aging people. For myself, I always feel for them a deep and tender + sympathy. I know that they have heard that last fearful call to the + dining-car of life—and, poor souls, they have probably found it closed. + Their mistake has been in waiting so long for the call. From various + causes, they have mismanaged their lives. They have probably lived in a + numbing fear of their neighbours, who have told them that it is bad + manners to eat one's cake in public, and wicked to eat it in private; + and any one who is fool enough to allow his neighbours to live his life + for him instead of living it himself deserves what he gets, or rather + doesn't get. +</p> +<p> + A wholesome oblivion of one's neighbours is the beginning of wisdom. + Neighbours, at the best, are an impertinent encroachment on one's + privacy, and, at the worst, an unnatural hindrance to our development. + Generally speaking, it is the man or woman who has lived with least fear + of his neighbours, who is least likely to hear that last call. Nothing + in retrospect is so barren as a life lived in accordance with the + hypocrisies of society. For those who have never lived, and are now fain + to begin living when it is too late, that last call comes indeed with a + ghastly irony. But for those who have fearlessly lived their lives, as + they came along, with Catullus singing their <i>vivamus atque amemus</i>, and + practising it, too; for those, if indeed the last call must come, they + will be able to support it by the thought that, often as in the past + life has called to them, it has never called to them in vain. We are apt + sometimes to belittle our memories, but actually they are worth a good + deal; and should the time come when we have little to look forward to, + it will be no small comfort to have something to look back on. And it + won't be the days when we <i>didn't</i> that we shall recall with a sense of + possession, but the days and nights when we most emphatically <i>did</i>. + Thank God, we did for once hold that face in our hands in the woodland! + Thank God, we did get divinely drunk that wild night of nights in the + city! +</p> +<pre class="si"> + Wilt thou yet take all, Galilean? But these thou + shalt not take, + The laurel, the palms and the paean, the breast of the + nymphs in the brake. +</pre> +<p> + It is the fine excesses of life that make it worth living. The stalks of + the days are endurable only because they occasionally break into flower. + It is our sins of omission alone that we come in the end to regret. The + temptations we resisted in our youth make themselves rods to scourge our + middle age. I regret the paradoxical form these platitudes have + unconsciously taken, for that they are the simplest truth any honest + dying man would tell you. And that phrase recalls a beautiful poem by + "E. Nesbit" which has haunted me all my life, a poem I shall beg leave + to quote here, because, though it is to be found in that poet's volume, + it is not, I believe, as well known as it deserves to be by those who + need its lesson. I quote it, too, from memory, so I trust that the + length of time I have remembered it may be set to my credit against any + verbal mistakes I make. +</p> +<pre> + "If, on some balmy summer night, + You rowed across the moon path white, + And saw the shining sea grow fair + With silver scales and golden hair, + What would you do?" + + "I would be wise + And shut my ears and shut my eyes, + Lest I should leap into the tide + And clasp the seamaid as I died." + + "But if you thus were strong to flee + From sweet spells woven of moon and sea, + Are you quite sure that you would reach, + Without one backward look, the beach?" + + "I might look back, my dear, and then + Row straight into the snare again, + Or, if I safely got away— + Regret it to my dying day." +</pre> +<p> + He who liveth his life shall live it. It is a grave error to give + ourselves grudgingly to our experiences. Only in a whole-hearted + surrender of ourselves to the heaven-sent moment do we receive back all + it has to give us, and by the active receptivity of our natures attract + toward us other such moments, as it were, out of the sky. An ever-ready + romantic attitude toward life is the best preservative against the + <i>ennui</i> of the years. Adventures, as the proverb says, are to the + adventurous, and, as the old song goes: +</p> +<pre> + He either fears his fate too much + Or his deserts are small, + That dares not put it to the touch + To gain or lose it all. +</pre> +<p> + And the spirit of the times is happily growing more clement toward a + greater fulness and variety of life. The world is growing kinder toward + the fun and foolishness of existence, and the energetic pursuit of joy + is no longer frowned down by anaemic and hypocritical philosophies. The + old gods of energy and joy are coming to their own again, and the lives + of strong men and fair women are no longer ruled over by a hierarchy of + curates and maiden aunts; in fact, the maiden aunt has begun to find out + her mistake, and is out for her share of the fun and the foolishness + with the rest. Negative morality is fast becoming discredited, and many + an old "Thou shalt not" is coming to seem as absurd as the famous Blue + Laws of Connecticut. "Self-development, not self-sacrifice,"—a + favourite dictum of Grant Allen's,—is growing more and more to be the + formula of the modern world; and, if a certain amount of self-sacrifice + is of necessity included in a healthy self-development, the proportion + is being reduced to a rational limit. One form of self-sacrifice, at all + events, is no longer demanded of us—the wholesale sacrifice of our own + opinions. The possibility that there may be two opinions or a dozen or a + hundred on one matter, and that they may be all different, yet each one + of them right in its proper application, has dawned forcibly on the + world, with the conception of the relativity of experience and the + modification of conditions. Nowadays we recognize that there are as many + "rights" and as many "wrongs" as there are individuals; and to be happy + in our own way, instead of somebody else's, is one of the first laws of + nature, health, and virtue. Many an ancient restriction on personal + vitality is going the way of the old sumptuary laws. We have all of us + amusing memories of those severe old housekeepers who for no inclemency + of the weather would allow a fire in the grate before the first of + October, and who regarded a fire before that date as a positive breach + of the moral law. Such old wives are a type of certain old-fashioned + moralists whose icy clutch on our warm-blooded humanity we no longer + suffer. Nowadays we light our fires as we have a mind to, and if we + prefer to keep them going all the year round, it is no one's business + but our own. Happy is the man who, when the end comes, can say with + Landor: +</p> +<pre class="si"> + I warmed both hands before the fire of life; + It sinks and I am ready to depart. +</pre> +<p> + Such a one will have little need to fear that last call of which I have + been writing. In Kipling's phrase, he has taken his fun where he found + it, and his barns are well stocked with the various harvests of the + years. Not his the wild regret for having "safely got away." Rather he + laughs to remember how often he was taken captive by the enchantments of + the world, how whenever there was any piece of wildness afoot he was + always found in the thick of it. When the bacchantes were out on Mount + Cithaeron, and the mad <i>Evoe! Evoe!</i> rang through the moonstruck woods, + be sure he was up and away, with ardent hands clutched in the flying + tresses. Ah! the vine leaves and the tiger skins and the ivory bodies, + the clash of the cymbals and the dithyramb shrilling up to the stars! + "If I forget thee, O golden Aphrodite!" He is no hypocrite, no weary + "king ecclesiast," shaking his head over the orgies of sap and song in + which he can no longer share. He frankly acknowledges that then came in + the sweet o' the year, and he is still as young as the youngest by + virtue of having drunk deep of the only elixir, the Dionysiac cup of + life. +</p> +<p> + At the same time, while he may not ungratefully rejoice with Sophocles + at being "set free from service to a band of madmen," that ripening of + his nature which comes most fruitfully of a generous exercise of + its powers will have instinctively taught him that secret of the + transmutation of the passions which is one of the most precious rewards + of experience. It is quite possible for a lifelong passion for fair + women to become insensibly and unregretfully transmuted into a passion + for first editions, and you may become quite sincerely content that a + younger fellow catch the flying maiden, if only you can catch yon + flitting butterfly for your collection. And, strangest of all, your + grand passion for your own remarkable self may suffer a miraculous + transformation into a warm appreciation for other people. It is true + that you may smile a little sadly to find them even more interesting + than yourself. But such passing sadness has the relish of salvation in + it. Self is a weary throne, and the abdication of the ego is to be free + of one of the burdens rather than the pleasures of existence. +</p> +<p> + But, to conclude, it is all too possible that you who read this may have + no such assets of a wilful well spent life to draw on as he whom I have + pictured. It may be that you have starved your emotions and fled your + opportunities, or you may simply have had bad luck. The golden moments + seldom came your way. The wilderness of life has seldom blossomed with a + rose. "The breast of the nymph in the brake" and "the chimes at + midnight" were not for you. And there is a menacing murmur of autumn in + the air. The days are shortening, and the twilight comes early, with a + chilly breath. The crickets have stopped singing, and the garden is sad + with elegiac blooms. The chrysanthemum is growing on the grave of the + rose. Perhaps already it is too late—too late for life and joy. You + must take to first editions and entomology and other people's interests + in good earnest. But no! Suddenly on the wind there comes a cry—a sound + of cymbals and flutes and dancing feet. It is life's last call. You have + one chance left. There is still Indian summer. It is better than + nothing. Hurry and join the music, ere it be too late. For this is the + last call! +</p> +<pre> + When time lets slip a little perfect hour, + Take it, for it will not come again. +</pre> +<a name="2H_4_10"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<h2> + VII +</h2> +<h3> + THE PERSECUTIONS OF BEAUTY +</h3> +<p> </p> + +<p> + All religions have periods in their history which are looked back to + with retrospective fear and trembling as eras of persecution, and each + religion has its own book of martyrs. The religion of beauty is no + exception. Far from it. For most other religions, however they may have + differed among themselves, have agreed in fearing beauty, and even in + Greece there were stern sanctuaries and ascetic academes where the white + bosom of Phryne would have pleaded in vain. Christianity has not been + beauty's only enemy, by any means; though, when the Book of Martyrs of + Beauty comes to be written, it will, doubtless, be the Christian + persecutions of beauty that will bulk largest in the record—for the + Beauty of Holiness and the Holiness of Beauty have been warring creeds + from the beginning. +</p> +<p> + At the present moment, there is reason to fear, or to rejoice—according + to one's individual leanings—that the Religion of Beauty is gaining + upon its ancient rival; for perhaps never since the Renaissance has + there been such a widespread impulse to assert Beauty and Joy as the + ideals of human life. As evidence one has but to turn one's eyes on the + youth of both sexes, as they rainbow the city thoroughfares with their + laughing, heartless faces, evident children of beauty and joy, "pagan" + to the core of them, however ostensibly Christian their homes and their + country. In our time, at all events, Beauty has never walked the streets + with so frank a radiance, so confident an air of security, and in her + eyes and in her carriage, as in her subtly shaped and subtly scented + garments, so conspicuous a challenge to the musty, outworn, proprieties + to frown upon her all they please. From the humblest shop-girl to the + greatest lady, there is apparent an intention to be beautiful, sweet + maid, and let who will be hum-drum, at whatever cost, by whatever means. + This, of course, at all periods, has been woman's chief thought, but + till recently, in our times, she has more or less affected a certain + secrecy in her intention. She has hinted rather than fully expressed it, + as though fearing a certain flagrancy in too public an exhibition of her + enchantments. It has hardly seemed proper to her heretofore to be as + beautiful in the public gaze as in the sanctuary of her boudoir. But + now, bless you, she has no such misgivings, and the flower-like effect + upon the city streets is as dazzling as if, some fine morning in + Constantinople, all the ladies of the various harems should suddenly + appear abroad without their yashmaks, setting fire to the hearts and + turning the heads of the unaccustomed male. Or, to make comparison + nearer home, it is almost as startling as if the ladies of the various + musical comedies in town should suddenly be let loose upon our senses in + broad daylight, in all the adorable sorceries of "make-up" and + diaphanous draperies. I swear that it can be no more thrilling to + penetrate into that mysterious paradise "behind the scenes," than to + walk up Fifth Avenue one of these summer afternoons, in the present year + of grace,—humming to one's self that wistful old song, which goes + something like this: +</p> +<pre> + The girls that never can be mine! + In every lane and street + I hear the rustle of their gowns, + The whisper of their feet; + The sweetness of their passing by, + Their glances strong as wine, + Provoke the unpossessive sigh— + Ah! girls that never can be mine. +</pre> +<p> + So audacious has Beauty become in these latter days, so proudly she + walks abroad, making so superb an appeal to the desire of the eye, + thighed like Artemis, and bosomed like Aphrodite, or at whiles a fairy + creature of ivory and gossamer and fragrance, with a look in her eyes of + secret gardens; and so much is the wide world at her feet, and one with + her in the vanity of her fairness—that I sometimes fear an impending + <i>dies irae</i>, when the dormant spirit of Puritanism will reassert itself, + and some stern priests thunder from the pulpit of worldly vanities and + the wrath to come. Indeed, I can well imagine in the near future some + modern Savonarola presiding over a new Bonfire of Vanities in Madison + Square, on which, to the droning of Moody and Sankey's hymns, shall be + cast all the fascinating Parisian creations, the puffs and rats, the + powder and the rouge, the darling stockings, and all such concomitant + bewitcheries that today make Manhattan a veritable Isle of Circe, all to + go up in savage sectarian flame, before the eyes of melancholy young + men, and filling all the city with the perfume of beauty's holocaust. At + street corners too will stand great books in which weeping maidens will + sign their names, swearing before high heaven, to wear nothing but + gingham and bed-ticking for the dreary remainder of their lives. Such a + day may well come, as it has often come before, and certainly will, if + women persist in being so deliberately beautiful as they are at present. +</p> +<p> + It is curious how, from time immemorial, man seems to have associated + the idea of evil with beauty, shrunk from it with a sort of ghostly + fear, while, at the same time drawn to it by force of its hypnotic + attraction. Strangely enough, beauty has been regarded as the most + dangerous enemy of the soul, and the powers of darkness that are + supposed to lie in wait for that frail and fluttering psyche, so + precious and apparently so perishable, are usually represented as taking + shapes of beguiling loveliness—lamias, loreleis, wood nymphs, and + witches with blue flowers for their eyes. Lurking in its most innocent + forms, the grim ascetic has affected to find a leaven of concupiscence, + and whenever any reformation is afoot, it is always beauty that is made + the first victim, whether it take the form of a statue, a stained-glass + window, or a hair-ribbon. "Homeliness is next to Godliness," though not + officially stated as an article of the Christian creed, has been one of + the most active of all Christian tenets. It has always been easier far + for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than a gloriously + beautiful woman. Presumably such a one might be in danger of corrupting + the saints, somewhat unaccustomed to such apparitions. +</p> +<p> + In this Christian fear and hatred of beauty the democratic origin of the + Christian religion is suggestively illustrated, for beauty, wherever + found, is always mysteriously aristocratic, and thus instinctively + excites the fear and jealousy of the common people. When, in the third + century, Christian mobs set about their vandalistic work of destroying + the "Pagan" temples, tearing down the beautiful calm gods and goddesses + from their pedestals, and breaking their exquisite marble limbs with + brutish mallets, it was not, we may be sure, of the danger to their + precious souls they were thinking, but of their patrician masters who + had worshipped these fair images, and paid great sums to famous + sculptors for such adornment of their sanctuaries. Perhaps it was human + enough, for to those mobs beauty had long been associated with + oppression. Yet how painful to picture those golden marbles, in all + their immortal fairness, confronted with the hideousness of those + fanatic ill-smelling multitudes. Wonderful religionists, forsooth, that + thus break with foolish hands and trample with swinish hoofs the sacred + vessels of divine dreams. Who would not +</p> +<pre> + rather be + A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn,— + So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, + Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; + Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; + Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn. +</pre> +<p> + One can imagine the priest of such a violated sanctuary stealing back in + the quiet moonlight, when all the mob fury had passed away, seeking amid + all the wrack of fallen columns, and shattered carvings, for any poor + fragments of god or goddess at whose tranquil fair-ordered altar he had + ministered so long; and gathering such as he might find,—maybe a mighty + hand, still the hand of a god, albeit in overthrow, or some marble curls + of the sculptured ambrosial locks, or maybe the bruised breast of the + goddess, white as a water-lily in the moon. Then, seeking out some + secret corner of the sacred grove, how reverently he would bury the + precious fragments away from profane eyes, and go forth homeless into a + mysterious changing world, from which glory and loveliness were thus + surely passing away. Other priests, as we know, more fortunate than he, + had forewarnings of such impending sacrilege, and were able to + anticipate the mob, and bury their beautiful images in safe and secret + places, there to await, after the lapse of twelve centuries, the + glorious resurrection of the Renaissance. A resurrection, however, by no + means free from danger, even in that resplendent dawn of intelligence; + for Christianity was still the enemy of beauty, save in the Vatican, and + the ignorant priest of the remote village where the spade of the peasant + had revealed the sleeping marble was certain to declare the beautiful + image an evil spirit, and have it broken up forthwith and ground for + mortar, unless some influential scholar, or powerful lord touched with + "the new learning," chanced to be on hand to save it from destruction. + Yes! even at that time when beauty was being victoriously born again, + the mad fear of her raged with such panic in certain minds that, when + Savonarola lit his great bonfire so subtle a servant of beauty as + Botticelli, fallen into a sort of religious dotage, cast his own + paintings into the flames—to the lugubrious rejoicings of the + sanctimonious Piagnoni—as Savonarola's followers were called; + predecessors of those still gloomier zealots who, two centuries later, + were to turn England into a sort of whitewashed prison, with crop-headed + psalm-singing religious maniacs for gaolers. When Charles the First +</p> +<pre> + bow'd his comely head + Down, as upon a bed, +</pre> +<p class="noindent"> + at Whitehall, Beauty also laid her head upon the block at his side. + Ugliness, parading as piety, took her place, and once more the breaking + of images began, the banishment of music, the excommunication of grace, + and gentle manners, and personal adornments. Gaiety became penal, and a + happy heart or a beautiful smile was of the devil,—something like + hanging matters—but happy hearts and beautiful smiles must have been + rare things in England during the Puritan Commonwealth. Such as were + left had taken refuge in France, where men might worship God and Beauty + in the same church, and where it was not necessary, as at Oxford, to + bury your stained-glass windows out of the reach of the mob—those +</p> +<pre> + Storied windows richly dight + Casting a dim religious light, +</pre> +<p class="noindent"> + which even the Puritan Milton could thus celebrate. Doubtless, that + English Puritan persecution was the severest that Beauty has been called + upon to endure. She still suffers from it, need one say, to this day, + particularly in New England, where if the sculptured images of goddess + and nymph are not exactly broken to pieces by the populace, it is from + no goodwill towards them, but rather from an ingrained reverence for + any form of property, even though it be nude, and where, at all events, + they are under the strict surveillance of a highly proper and + respectable police, those distinguished guardians of American morals. +</p> +<p> + It is worth while to try and get at the reason for this wide-spread, + deep-rooted, fear of beauty: for some reason there must surely be. Such + instinctive feelings, on so broad a scale, are not accidental. And so + soon as one begins to analyse the attitude of religion towards beauty, + the reason is not far to seek. +</p> +<p> + All religions are made up of a spiritual element and a moral element, + the moral element being the temporary, practical, so to say, working + side of religion, concerned with this present world, and the limitations + and necessities of the various societies that compose it. The spiritual + element, the really important part of religion, has no concern with Time + and Space, temporary mundane laws, or conduct. It concerns itself only + with the eternal properties of things. Its business is the contemplation + and worship of the mystery of life, "the mystery we make darker with a + name." +</p> +<p> + Now, great popular religions, designed as they are for the discipline + and control of the great brute masses of humanity, are almost entirely + occupied with morality, and what passes in them for spirituality is + merely mythology, an element of picturesque supernaturalism calculated + to enforce the morality with the multitude. Christianity is such a + religion. It is mostly a matter of conduct here and now upon the earth. + Its mystic side does not properly belong to it, and is foreign to, not + to speak of its being practically ignored by, the average "Christian." + It is a religion designed to work hand in hand with a given state of + society, making for the preservation of such laws and manners and + customs as are best fitted to make that society a success here and now, + a worldly success in the best sense of the term. Mohammedanism is a + similar religion calculated for the needs of a different society. + Whatever the words or intentions of the founders of such religions, + their kingdoms are essentially of this world. They are not mystic, or + spiritual, or in anyway concerned with infinite and eternal things. + Their business is the moral policing of humanity. Morality, as of course + its name implies, is a mere matter of custom, and therefore varies with + the variations of races and climates. It has nothing to do with + spirituality, and, in fact, the best morals are often the least + spiritual, and <i>vice versa</i>. It will be understood then that any force + which is apt to disturb this moral, or more exactly speaking social, + order will meet at once with the opposition of organized "religions" so + called, and the more spiritual it is, the greater will be the + opposition, for it will thus be the more dangerous. +</p> +<p> + Now one begins to see why Beauty is necessarily the bugbear, more or + less, of all religions, or, as I prefer to regard them, "organized + moralities"; for Beauty is neither moral nor immoral, being as she is a + purely spiritual force, with no relations to man's little schemes of + being good and making money and being knighted and so forth. For those + who have eyes to see, she is the supreme spiritual vision vouchsafed to + us upon the earth—and, as that, she is necessarily the supreme danger + to that materialistic use and wont by which alone a materialistic + society remains possible. For this reason our young men and + maidens—particularly our young men—must be guarded against her, for + her beauty sets us adream, prevents our doing our day's work, makes us + forget the soulless occupations in which we wither away our lives. The + man who loves beauty will never be mayor of his city, or even sit on the + Board of Aldermen. Nor is he likely to own a railroad, or be a captain + of industry. Nor will he marry, for her money, a woman he does not love. + The face of beauty makes all such achievements seem small and absurd. + Such so-called successes seem to him the dreariest forms of failure. In + short, Beauty has made him divinely discontented with the limited human + world about him, divinely incapable of taking it seriously, or heeding + its standards or conditions. No wonder society should look upon Beauty + as dangerous, for she is constantly upsetting its equilibrium and + playing havoc with its smooth schemes and smug conventions. She outrages + the "proprieties" with "the innocence of nature," and disintegrates + "select" and "exclusive" circles with the wand of Romance. For earthly + possessions or rewards she has no heed. For her they are meaningless + things, mere idle dust and withered leaves. Her only real estate is in + the moon, and the one article of her simple creed—"Love is enough." +</p> +<pre class="si"> + Love is enough: though the world be a-waning + And the woods have no voice but the voice of complaining, + Though the sky be too dark for dim eyes to discover + The gold-cups and daisies fair blooming thereunder, + Though the hills beheld shadows, and the sea a dark wonder + And this day draw a veil over all deeds passed over, + Yet their hands shall not tremble, their feet shall not falter; + The void shall not weary, the fear shall not alter + These lips and these eyes of the loved and the lover. +</pre> +<p> + Those who have looked into her eyes see limitless horizons undreamed of + by those who know her not, horizons summoning the soul to radiant + adventures beyond the bounds of Space and Time. The world is so far + right in regarding beauty with a sort of superstitious dread, as a + presence almost uncanny among our mere mortal concerns, a daemonic + thing,—which is what the world has meant when it has, not unnaturally, + confused it with the spirits of evil; for surely it is a supernatural + stranger in our midst, a fairy element, and, like the lorelei and the + lamia, it does beckon its votaries to enchanted realms away and afar + from "all the uses of the world." Therefore, to them also it brings the + thrill of a different and nobler fear—the thrill of the mortal in + presence of the immortal. A strange feeling of destiny seems to come + over us as we first look into the beautiful face we were born to love. + It seems veritably an apparition from another and lovelier world, to + which it summons us to go with it. That is what we mean when we say that + Love and Death are one; for Death, to the thought of Love, is but one of + the gates to that other world, a gate to which we instinctively feel + Love has the key. That surely is the meaning of the old fairy-stories of + men who have come upon the white woman in the woodland, and followed + her, never to be seen again of their fellows, or of those who, like + Hylas, have met the water-nymph by the lilied spring, and sunk with her + down into the crystal deeps. The strange earth on which we live is just + such a place of enchantment, neither more nor less, and some of us have + met that fair face, with a strange suddenness of joy and fear, and + followed and followed it on till it vanished beyond the limits of the + world. But our failure was that we did not follow that last white + beckoning of the hand— +</p> +<pre> + And I awoke and found me here + On the cold hill's side. +</pre> +<a name="2H_4_11"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<h2> + VIII +</h2> +<h3> + THE MANY FACES—THE ONE DREAM +</h3> +<p> </p> + +<p> + Among the many advantages of being very young is one's absolute + certainty that there is only one type of beautiful girl in the world. + That type we make a religion. We are its pugnacious champions, and the + idea of our falling in love with any other is too preposterous even for + discussion. If our tastes happen to be for blondness, brunettes simply + do not exist for us; and if we affect the slim and willowy in figure, + our contempt for the plump and rounded is too sincere for expression. + Usually the type we choose is one whose beauty is somewhat esoteric to + other eyes. We are well aware that photographs do it no justice, and + that the man in the street—who, strangely enough, we conceive as having + no eye for beauty—can see nothing in it. Thank Heaven, she is not the + type that any common eye can see. Heads are not turned in her wake as + she passes along. Her beauty is not "obvious." On the contrary, it is of + that rare and exquisite quality which only a few favoured ones can + apprehend—like the beauty of a Whistler or a Corot, and we have been + chosen to be its high-priest and evangelist. It is our secret, this + beautiful face that we love, and we wonder how any one can be found to + love the other faces. We even pity them, those rosy, rounded faces, with + their bright unmysterious eyes and straight noses and dimpled chins. How + fortunate for them that the secret of the beauty we love has been hidden + from their lovers. Sheer Bouguereau! Neither more nor less. +</p> +<p> + In fact, the beauty we affect is aggressively spiritual, and in so far + as beauty is demonstrably physical we dismiss it with disdain. Our + ideal, indeed, might be said to consist in a beauty which is beautiful + in spite of the body rather than by means of it; a beauty defiantly + clothed, so to say, in the dowdiest of fleshly garments—radiantly + independent of such carnal conditions as features or complexion. Our + ideal of figure might be said to be negative rather than positive, and + that "little sister" mentioned in Solomon's Song would bring us no + disappointment. +</p> +<p> + We are often heard to say that beauty consists chiefly, if not entirely, + in expression, that it is a transfiguration from within rather than a + gracious condition of the surface, that the shape of a nose is no + matter, and that a beautifully rounded chin or a fine throat has nothing + to do with it—indeed, is rather in the way than otherwise. We point + to the fact—which is true enough—that the most famous beauties + of antiquity were plain women—plain, that is, according to the + conventional standards. +</p> +<p> + We also maintain—again with perfect truth—that mystery is more than + half of beauty, the element of strangeness that stirs the senses through + the imagination. These and other perfectly true truths about beauty we + discover through our devotion to the one face that we love—and we + should hardly have discovered them had we begun with the merely + cherry-ripe. It is with faces much as it is with books. There is no way + of attaining a vital catholic taste in literature so good as to begin by + mastering some difficult beautiful classic, by devoting ourselves in the + ardent receptive period of youth to one or two masterpieces which will + serve as touchstones for us in all our subsequent reading. Some books + engage all our faculties for their appreciation, and through the keen + attentiveness we are compelled to give them we make personal discovery + of those principles and qualities of all fine literature which otherwise + we might never have apprehended, or in which, at all events, we should + have been less securely grounded. +</p> +<p> + So with faces: it is through the absorbed worship, the jealous study, of + one face that we best learn to see the beauty in all the other + faces—though the mere thought that our apprehension of its beauty could + ever lead us to so infidel a conclusion would seem heresy indeed during + the period of our dedication. The subtler the type, the more caviare it + is to the general, the more we learn from it. We become in a sense + discoverers, original thinkers, of beauty, taking nothing on authority, + but making trial and investigation always for ourselves. Such beauty + brings us nearer than the more explicit types to that mysterious + threshold over which beauty steps down to earth and dwells among us; + that well-spring of its wonder; the point where first its shining + essence pours its radiance into the earthly vessel. +</p> +<p> + The perfect physical type hides no little of its own miracle through its + sheer perfection, as in the case of those masterpieces which, as we say, + conceal their art. It is often through the face externally less perfect, + faces, so to say, in process of becoming beautiful, that we get glimpses + of the interior light in its divine operation. We seem to look into the + very alembic of beauty, and see all the precious elements in the act of + combination. No wonder we should deem these faces the most beautiful of + all, for through them we see, not beauty made flesh, but beauty while it + is still spirit. In our eager fanaticism, indeed, we cannot conceive + that there can be beauty in any other types as well. Yet, because we + chance to have fallen under the spell of Botticelli, shall there be no + more Titian? Our taste is for a beauty of dim silver and faded stars, a + wistful twilight beauty made of sorrow and dreams, a beauty always half + in the shadow, a white flower in the moonlight. We cannot conceive how + beauty, for others, can be a thing of the hot sun, a thing of purple and + orange and the hot sun, a thing of firm outlines, superbly concrete, + marmoreal, sumptuous, magnificently animal. +</p> +<p> + The beauty we love is very silent. It smiles softly to itself, but never + speaks. How should we understand a beauty that is vociferously gay, a + beauty of dash and dance, a beauty of swift and brilliant ways, + victoriously alive? +</p> +<p> + Perhaps it were well for us that we should never understand, well for us + that we should preserve our singleness of taste through life. Some + contrive to do this, and never as long as they live are unfaithful to + the angel-blue eyes of their boyish love. Moralists have perhaps not + realized how much continence is due to a narrowness of aesthetic taste. + Obviously the man who sees beauty only in blue eyes is securer from + temptation than the man who can see beauty in brown or green eyes as + well; and how perilous is his state for whom danger lurks in all + beautiful eyes, irrespective of shape, size, or colour! And, alas! it is + to this state of eclecticism that most of us are led step by step by the + Mephistopheles of experience. +</p> +<p> + As great politicians in their maturity are usually found in the exact + opposite party to that which they espoused in their youth, so men who + loved blondness in boyhood are almost certain to be found at the feet of + the raven-haired in their middle age, and <i>vice versa</i>. The change is + but a part of that general change which overtakes us with the years, + substituting in us a catholic appreciation of the world as it is for + idealist notions of the world as we see it, or desire it to be. It is a + part of that gradual abdication of the ego which comes of the slow + realization that other people are quite as interesting as ourselves—in + fact, a little more so,—and their tastes and ways of looking at things + may be worth pondering, after all. But, O when we have arrived at this + stage, what a bewildering world of seductive new impressions spreads for + us its multitudinous snares! No longer mere individuals, we have not + merely an individual's temptations to guard against, but the temptations + of all the world. Instead of being able to see only that one type of + beauty which first appealed to us, our eyes have become so instructed + that we now see the beauty of all the other types as well; and we no + longer scorn as Philistine the taste of the man in the street for the + beauty that is robustly vital and flamboyantly contoured. Once we called + it obvious. Now we say it is "barbaric," and call attention to its + perfection of type. +</p> +<p> + The remembrance of our former injustice to it may even awaken a certain + tenderness towards it in our hearts, and soon we find ourselves making + love to it, partly from a vague desire to make reparation to a slighted + type, and partly from the experimental pleasure of loving a beauty the + attraction of which it was once impossible for us to imagine. So we feel + when the charm of some old master, hitherto unsympathetic, is suddenly + revealed to us. Ah! it was this they saw. How blind they must have + thought us! +</p> +<p> + Brown eyes that I love, will you forgive me that I once looked into blue + eyes as I am looking now into yours? Hair black as Erebus, will you + forgive these hands that once loved to bathe in a brook of rippled gold? + Ah! they did not know. It was in ignorance they sinned. They did not + know. +</p> +<p> + O my beautiful cypress, stately queen of the garden of the world, + forgive me that once I gave to the little shrub-like women the worship + that is rightly yours! +</p> +<p> + Lady, whose loveliness is like white velvet, a vineyard heavy with + golden grapes, abundant as an orchard of apple blossoms, forgive that + once I loved the shadow women, the sad wreathing mists of beauty, the + silvery uncorseted phantoms of womanhood. It was in ignorance I sinned. + I did not know. +</p> +<p> + Ah! That Mephistopheles of experience! How he has led us from one fair + face to another, teaching us, one by one, the beauty of all. No longer + lonely sectarians of beauty, pale prophets of one lovely face, there is + now no type whose secret is hidden from us. The world has become a + garden of beautiful faces. The flowers are different, but they are all + beautiful. How is it possible for us, now that we know the charm of each + one, to be indifferent to any, or to set the beauty of one above the + other? We have learned the beauty of the orchid, but surely we have not + unlearned the rose; and would you say that orchid or rose is more + beautiful than the lily? Surely not. They are differently beautiful, + that is all. +</p> +<p> + Are blue eyes more beautiful than brown? I thought so once, but now I + see that they are differently beautiful, that is all. Nor is gold hair + more beautiful than black any more, or black than gold. They are + differently beautiful, that is all. Nor is thy white skin, O Saxon lady, + more beautiful than hers of tropic bronze. +</p> +<p> + Come sad, or come with laughter, beautiful faces; come like stars in + dreams, or come vivid as fruit upon the bough; come softly like a timid + fawn, or terrible as an army with banners; come silent, come singing ... + you are all beautiful, and none is fairer than another—only differently + fair. +</p> +<p> + And yet ... and yet ... Experience is indeed Mephistopheles in this: We + must pay him for all this wisdom. Is it the old price? Is it our souls? + I wonder. +</p> +<p> + This at least is true: that, while indeed he has opened our eyes to all + this beauty that was hidden to us, shown us beauty, indeed, where we + could see but evil before, we miss something from our delight in these + faces. We can appreciate more beauty, but do we appreciate any quite as + much as in those old days when we were such passionate monotheists of + the beautiful? Alas! We are priests no more, are we even lovers? But we + are wonderful connoisseurs. +</p> +<p> + It is our souls. +</p> +<a name="2H_4_12"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<h2> + IX +</h2> +<h3> + THE SNOWS OF YESTER-YEAR +</h3> +<p> </p> + +<p> + <i>Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?</i> As I transcribe once more that + ancient sigh, perhaps the most real sigh in all literature, it is high + mid-summer, and the woodland surrounding the little cabin in which I am + writing lies in a trance of green and gold, hot and fragrant and dizzy + with the whirring of cicadas, under the might of the July sun. Bees buzz + in and out through my door, and sometimes a butterfly flits in, flutters + a while about my bookshelves, and presently is gone again, in search of + sweets more to his taste than those of the muses, though Catullus is + there, with +</p> +<pre class="si"> + Songs sweeter than wild honey dripping down, + Which once in Rome to Lesbia he sang. +</pre> +<p> + As I am caught by the dream-drowsy spell of the hot murmuring afternoon, + and my eyes rest on the thick vines clustering over the rocks, and the + lush grasses and innumerable underbrush, so spendthrift in their + crowding luxuriance, I try to imagine the ground as it was but four + months ago still in the grasp of winter, when the tiniest blade of + grass, or smallest speck of creeping green leaf, seemed like a miracle, + and it was impossible to realize that under the broad snowdrifts a + million seeds, like hidden treasure, were waiting to reveal their + painted jewels to the April winds. Snow was plentiful then, to be had by + the ton—but now, the thought suddenly strikes me, and brings home with + new illuminating force Villon's old refrain, that though I sought the + woodland from end to end, ransacked its most secret places, not one + vestige of that snow, so lately here in such plenty, would it be + possible to find. Though you were to offer me a million dollars for as + much as would fill the cup of a wild rose, say even a hundred million, I + should have to see all that money pass me by. I can think of hardly + anything that it couldn't buy—but such a simple thing as last year's + snow! +</p> +<p> + Could there be a more poignant symbol of irreclaimable vanished things + than that so happily hit on by the old ballade-maker: +</p> +<pre> + Nay, never ask this week, fair lord, + Where they are gone, nor yet this year, + Save with thus much for an overword— + But where are the snows of yester-year? +</pre> +<p> + Villon, as we know, has a melancholy fondness for asking these sad, + hopeless questions of snow and wind. He muses not only of the drift of + fair faces, but of the passing of mighty princes and all the arrogant + pride and pomp of the earth—"pursuivants, trumpeters, heralds, hey!" + "Ah! where is the doughty Charlemagne?" They, even as the humblest, "the + wind has carried them all away." They have vanished utterly as the snow, + gone—who knows where?—on the wind. "'Dead and gone'—a sorry burden of + the Ballad of Life," as Thomas Lowell Beddoes has it in his <i>Death's + Jest Book</i>. "Dead and gone!" as Andrew Lang re-echoes in a sweetly + mournful ballade: +</p> +<pre> + Through the mad world's scene + We are drifting on, + To this tune, I ween, + "They are dead and gone!" +</pre> +<p> + "Nought so sweet as melancholy," sings an old poet, and, while the + melancholy of the exercise is undoubted, there is at the same time an + undeniable charm attaching to those moods of imaginative retrospect in + which we summon up shapes and happenings of the vanished past, a tragic + charm indeed similar to that we experience in mournful music or elegiac + poetry. +</p> +<p> + For, it is impossible to turn our eyes on any point of the starlit vista + of human history, without being overwhelmed with a heart-breaking sense + of the immense treasure of radiant human lives that has gone to its + making, the innumerable dramatic careers now shrunk to a mere mention, + the divinely passionate destinies, once all wild dream and dancing + blood, now nought but a name huddled with a thousand such in some dusty + index, seldom turned to even by the scholar, and as unknown to the world + at large as the moss-grown name on some sunken headstone in a country + churchyard. What an appallingly exuberant and spendthrift universe it + seems, pouring out its multitudinous generations of men and women with + the same wasteful hand as it has filled this woodland with millions of + exquisite lives, marvellously devised, patterned with inexhaustible + fancy, mysteriously furnished with subtle organs after their needs, + crowned with fairy blossoms, and ripening with magic seeds,—such a vast + treasure of fragrant sunlit leafage, all produced with such elaborate + care, and long travail, and all so soon to vanish utterly away! +</p> +<p> + Along with this crushing sense of cosmic prodigality, and somewhat + lighting up its melancholy, comes the inspiring realization of the + splendid spectacle of human achievement, the bewildering array of all + the glorious lives that have been lived, of all the glorious happenings, + under the sun. Ah! what men this world has seen, and—what women! What + divine actors have trod this old stage, and in what tremendous dramas + have they taken part! And how strange it is, reading some great dramatic + career, of Caesar, say, or Luther, or Napoleon, or Byron, to realize + that there was a time when they were not, then a time when they were + beginning to be strange new names in men's ears, then all the romantic + excitement of their developing destinies, and the thunder and lightning + of the great resounding moments of their lives—moments made out of + real, actual, prosaic time, just as our own moments are made, yet once + so splendidly shining on the top of the world, as though to stay there + forever, moments so glorious that it would seem that Time must have + paused to watch and prolong them, jealous that they should ever pass and + give place to lesser moments! +</p> +<p> + Think too of those other fateful moments of history, moments not + confined to a few godlike individuals, but participated in by whole + nations, such moments as that of the great Armada, the French + Revolution, or the Declaration of American Independence. How strangely + it comes upon one that these past happenings were once only just taking + place, just as at the moment of my writing other things are taking + place, and clocks were ticking and water flowing, just as they are doing + now! How wonderful, it seems to us, to have been alive then, as we are + alive now, to have shared in those vast national enthusiasms, "in those + great deeds to have had some little part"; and is it not a sort of poor + anti-climax for a world that has gone through such noble excitement to + have sunk back to this level of every day! Alas! all those lava-like + moments of human exaltation—what are they now, but, so to say, the + pumice-stone of history. They have passed as the summer flowers are + passing, they are gone with last year's snow. +</p> +<p> + But the last year's snow of our personal lives—what a wistful business + it is, when we get thinking of that! To recall certain magic moments out + of the past is to run a risk of making the happiest present seem like a + desert; and for most men, I imagine, such retrospect is usually busied + with some fair face, or perhaps—being men—with several fair faces, + once so near and dear, and now so far. How poignantly and unprofitably + real memory can make them—all but bring them back—how vividly + reconstruct immortal occasions of happiness that we said could not, must + not, pass away; while all the time our hearts were aching with the sure + knowledge that they were even then, as we wildly clutched at them, + slipping from our grasp! +</p> +<p> + That summer afternoon,—do you too still remember it, Miranda?—when, + under the whispering woodland, we ate our lunch together with such + prodigious appetite, and O! such happy laughter, yet never took our eyes + from each other; and, when the meal was ended, how we wandered along the + stream-side down the rocky glen, till we came to an enchanted pool among + the boulders, all hushed with moss and ferns and overhanging boughs—do + you remember what happened then, Miranda? Ah! nymphs of the forest + pools, it is no use asking me to forget. +</p> +<p> + And, all the time, my heart was saying to my eyes:—"This fairy hour—so + real, so magical, now—some day will be in the far past; you will sit + right away on the lonely outside of it, and recall it only with the + anguish of beautiful vanished things." And here I am today surely + enough, years away from it, solitary on its lonely outside! +</p> +<p> + I suppose that the river, this summer day, is making the same music + along its rocky bed, and the leafy boughs are rustling over that haunted + pool just the same as when—but where are the laughing ripples—ah! + Miranda—that broke with laughter over the divinely troubled water, and + the broken reflections, as of startled water-lilies, that rocked to and + fro in a panic of dazzling alabaster? +</p> +<p> + They are with last year's snow. +</p> +<p> + Meriel of the solemn eyes, with the heart and the laughter of a child, + and soul like the starlit sky, where should one look for the snows of + yester-year if not in your bosom, fairy girl my eyes shall never see + again. Wherever you are, lost to me somewhere among the winding paths of + this strange wood of the world, do you ever, as the moonlight falls over + the sea, give a thought to that night when we sat together by a window + overlooking the ocean, veiled in a haze of moonlit pearl, and, dimly + seen near shore, a boat was floating, like some mystic barge, as we + said, in our happy childishness, waiting to take us to the <i>Land East of + the Sun and West of the Moon</i>? Ah! how was it we lingered and lingered + till the boat was no more there, and it was too late? Perhaps it was + that we seemed to be already there, as you turned and placed your hand + in mine and said: "My life is in your hand." And we both believed it + true. Yes! wherever we went together in those days, we were always in + that enchanted land—whether we rode side by side through London streets + in a hansom—"a two-wheeled heaven" we called it—(for our dream + stretches as far back as that prehistoric day—How old one of us seems + to be growing! You, dear face, can never grow old)—or sat and laughed + at clowns in London music halls, or wandered in Surrey lanes, or gazed + at each other, as if our hearts would break for joy, over the snow-white + napery of some country inn, and maybe quoted Omar to each other, as we + drank his red wine to the immortality of our love. Perhaps we were + right, after all. Perhaps it could never die, and Time and Distance are + perhaps merely illusions, and you and I have never been apart. Who knows + but that you are looking over my shoulder as I write, though you seem so + far away, lost in that starlit silence that you loved. Ah! Meriel, is it + well with you, this summer day? A sigh seems to pass through the sunlit + grasses. They are waving and whispering as I have seen them waving and + whispering over graves. +</p> +<p> + Such moments as these I have recalled all men have had in their lives, + moments when life seemed to have come to miraculous flower, attained + that perfect fulfilment of its promise which else we find only in + dreams. Beyond doubt there is something in the flawless blessedness of + such moments that links our mortality with super-terrestrial states of + being. We do, in very deed, gaze through invisible doors into the ether + of eternal existences, and, for the brief hour, live as they, drinking + deep of that music of the infinite which is the divine food of the + enfranchised soul. Thence comes our exaltation, and our wild longing to + hold the moment for ever; for, while it is with us, we have literally + escaped from the everyday earth, and have found the way into some other + dimension of being, and its passing means our sad return to the + prison-house of Time, the place of meetings and partings, of distance + and death. +</p> +<p> + Part of the pang of recalling such moments is a remorseful sense that + perhaps we might have held them fast, after all. If only we might bring + them back, surely we would find some way to dwell in them for ever. They + came upon us so suddenly out of heaven, like some dazzling bird, and we + were so bewildered with the wonder of their coming that we stretched out + our hands to seize them, only when they were already spreading their + wings for flight. But O if the divine bird would but visit us again! + What golden nets we would spread for him! What a golden cage of worship + we would make ready! Our eyes would never leave his strange plumage, nor + would we miss one note of his strange song. But alas! now that we are + grown wise and watchful, that "moment eternal" comes to us no more. + Perhaps too that sad wisdom which has come to us with the years would + least of all avail us, should such moments by some magic chance suddenly + return. For it is one of the dangers of the retrospective habit that it + incapacitates us for the realization of the present hour. Much dwelling + on last year's snow will make us forget the summer flowers. Dreaming of + fair faces that are gone, we will look with unseeing eyes into the fair + faces that companion us still. To the Spring we say: "What of all your + blossom, and all your singing! Autumn is already at your heels, like a + shadow; and Winter waits for you like a marble tomb." To the hope that + still may beckon we say: "Well, what though you be fulfilled, you will + pass, like the rest. I shall see you come. We shall dwell together for a + while, and then you will go; and all will be as it was before, all as if + you had never come at all." For the retrospective mood, of necessity, + begets the anticipatory; we see everything finished before it is begun, + and welcome and valediction blend together on our lips. "That which hath + been is now; and that which is to be hath already been." +</p> +<pre class="si"> + In every kiss sealed fast + To feel the first kiss and forebode the last— +</pre> +<p class="noindent"> + that is the shadow that haunts every joy, and sicklies o'er every action + of him whom life has thus taught to look before and after. +</p> +<p> + Youth is not like that, and therein, for older eyes, lies its tragic + pathos. Superficial—or, if you prefer it, more normal—observers are + made happy by the spectacle of eager and confident young lives, all + abloom and adream, turning towards the future with plumed impatient + feet. But for some of us there is nothing quite so sad as young joy. The + playing of children is perhaps the most unbearably sad thing in the + world. Who can look on young lovers, without tears in their eyes? With + what innocent faith they are taking in all the radiant lies of life! But + perhaps a young mother with her new-born babe on her breast is the most + tragical of all pictures of unsuspecting joy, for none of all the + trusting sons and daughters of men is destined in the end to find + herself so tragically, one might say cynically, fooled. +</p> +<p> + Cynically, I said; for indeed sometimes, as one ponders the lavish + heartless use life seems to make of all its divinely precious + material—were it but the flowers in one meadow, or the butterflies of a + single summer day—it does seem as though a cruel cynicism inhered + somewhere in the scheme of things, delighting to destroy and + disillusionize, to create loveliness in order to scatter it to the + winds, and inspire joy in order to mock it with desolation. Sometimes it + seems as though the mysterious spirit of life was hardly worthy of the + vessels it has called into being, hardly treats them fairly, uses them + with an ignoble disdain. For, how generously we give ourselves up to + life, how innocently we put our trust in it, do its bidding with such + fine ardours, striving after beauty and goodness, fain to be heroic and + clean of heart—yet "what hath man of all his labours, and of the + vexation of his heart, wherein he hath laboured under the sun." Yea, + dust, and fallen rose-leaves, and last year's snow. +</p> +<p> + And yet and yet, for all this drift and dishonoured decay of things, + that retrospective mood of ours will sometimes take another turn, and, + so rare and precious in the memory seem the treasure that it has lost, + and yet in imagination still holds, that it will not resign itself to + mortal thoughts of such manifest immortalities. The snows of + yester-year! Who knows if, after all, they have so utterly vanished as + they seem. Who can say but that there may be somewhere in the universe + secret treasuries where all that has ever been precious is precious + still, safely garnered and guarded for us against some wonderful moment + which shall gather up for us in one transfiguring apocalypse all the + wonderful moments that have but preceded us into eternity. Perhaps, as + nothing is lost in the world, so-called, of matter, nothing is lost too + in the world of love and dream. +</p> +<pre class="si"> + O vanished loveliness of flowers and faces, + Treasure of hair, and great immortal eyes, + Are there for these no safe and secret places? + And is it true that beauty never dies? + Soldiers and saints, haughty and lovely names, + Women who set the whole wide world in flames, + Poets who sang their passion to the skies, + And lovers wild and wise: + Fought they and prayed for some poor flitting gleam + Was all they loved and worshipped but a dream? + Is Love a lie and fame indeed a breath? + And is there no sure thing in life—but death? +</pre> +<p> + Ah! perhaps we shall find all such lost and lovely things when we come + at length to the Land of Last Year's Snow. +</p> +<a name="2H_4_14"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<h2> + X +</h2> +<h3> + THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GOSSIP +</h3> +<p> </p> + +<p> + According to the old Scandinavian fable of the cosmos, the whole world + is encircled in the coils of a vast serpent. The ancient name for it was + the Midgard serpent, and doubtless, for the old myth-maker, it had + another significance. Today, however, the symbol may still hold good of + a certain terrible and hideous reality. +</p> +<p> + Still, as of old, the world is encircled in the coils of a vast serpent; + and the name of the serpent is Gossip. Wherever man is, there may you + hear its sibilant whisper, and its foul spawn squirm and sting and + poison in nests of hidden noisomeness, myriad as the spores of + corruption in a putrefying carcass, varying in size from some + hydra-headed infamy endangering whole nations and even races with its + deadly breath, to the microscopic wrigglers that multiply, a million a + minute, in the covered cesspools of private life. +</p> +<p> + Printed history is so infested with this vermin, in the form of secret + memoirs, back-stairs diarists, and boudoir eavesdroppers, that it is + almost impossible to feel sure of the actual fact of any history + whatsoever. The fame of great personages may be literally compared to + the heroic figures in the well-known group of the Laocoön, battling in + vain with the strangling coils of the sea-serpent of Poseidon. We + scarcely know what to believe of the dead; and for the living, is it not + true, as Tennyson puts it, that "each man walks with his head in a cloud + of poisonous flies"? +</p> +<p> + What is this evil leaven that seems to have been mixed in with man's + clay at the very beginning, making one almost ready to believe in the + old Manichean heresy of a principle of evil operating through nature, + everywhere doing battle with the good? Even from the courts of heaven, + as we learn from the Book of Job, the gossip was not excluded; and how + eternally true to the methods of the gossip in all ages was Satan's way + of going to work in that immortal allegory! Let us recall the familiar + scene with a quoted verse or two: +</p> +<blockquote> + Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves + before the Lord, and Satan [otherwise, the Adversary] came also + among them.<br><br> + + And the Lord said unto Satan, "Whence comest thou?" Then Satan + answered the Lord, and said: "From going to and fro in the earth, + and from walking up and down in it."<br><br> + + And the Lord said unto Satan: "Hast thou considered my servant Job, + that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright + man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil?"<br><br> + + Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, "Doth Job fear God for + nought?" +</blockquote> +<p> + Here we have in a nutshell the whole <i>modus operandi</i> of the gossip in + all ages, and as he may be observed at any hour of the day or night, + slimily engaged in his cowardly business. "Going to and fro in the + earth, walking up and down in it," everywhere peering and listening, + smiling and shrugging, here and there dropping a hint, sowing a seed, + leering an innuendo; seldom saying, only implying; leaving everywhere + trails of slime, yet trails too vague and broken to track him by, secure + in his very cowardice. +</p> +<p> + "Doth Job fear God for nought?" He only asks, observe. Affirms nothing. + Only innocently wonders. Sows a doubt, that's all—and leaves it to + work. +</p> +<p> + The victim may possibly be set right in the end, as was Job; but + meanwhile he has lost his flocks and his herds, his sons and his + daughters, and suffered no little inconvenience from a loathsome plague + of boils. Actually—life not being, like the Book of Job, an + allegory—he very seldom is set right, but must bear his losses and his + boils with what philosophy he can master till the end of the chapter. +</p> +<p> + The race to which Job belonged presents perhaps the most conspicuous + example of a whole people burdened throughout its history with a + heritage of malignant gossip. In the town of Lincoln, in England, there + exists to this day, as one of its show places, the famous "Jew's House," + associated with the gruesome legend of "the boy of Lincoln"—a child, + it was whispered, sacrificed by the Jews at one of their pastoral + feasts. Such a wild belief in child-sacrifice by the Jews was widespread + in the Middle Ages, and is largely responsible, I understand, even at + the present day, for the Jewish massacres in Russia. +</p> +<p> + Think of the wild liar who first put that fearful thought into the mind + of Europe! Think of the holocausts of human lives, and all the attendant + agony of which his diabolical invention has been the cause! What + criminal in history compares in infamy with that unknown—gossip? +</p> +<p> + A similar madness of superstition, responsible for a like cruel + sacrifice of innocent lives, was the terrible belief in witchcraft. + Having its origin in ignorance and fear, it was chiefly the creation of + hearsay carried from lip to lip, beginning with the deliberate invention + of lying tongues, delighting in evil for its own sake, or taking + advantage of a ready weapon to pay off scores of personal enmity. At any + time to a period as near to our own day as the early eighteenth century, + nothing was easier than to rid oneself of an enemy by starting a whisper + going that he or she held secret commerce with evil spirits, was a + reader of magical books, and could at will cast spells of disease and + death upon the neighbours or their cattle. +</p> +<p> + You had but to be recluse in your habits and eccentric in your + appearance, with perhaps a little more wisdom in your head and your + conversation than your fellows, to be at the mercy of the first fool or + knave who could gather a mob at his heels, and hale you to the nearest + horse-pond. Statement and proof were one, and how ready, and indeed + eager, human nature was to believe the wildest nonsense told by witless + fool or unscrupulous liar, the records of such manias as the famous + Salem trials appallingly evidence. Men high in the state, as well as + helpless old women in their dotage, disfigured with "witch-moles" or + incriminating beards on their withered faces, were equally vulnerable to + this most fearful of weapons ever placed by ignorance in the hands of + the malignant gossip. +</p> +<p> + In such epidemics of tragic gossip we see plainly that, whatever + individuals are originally responsible, society at large is all too + culpably <i>particeps criminis</i> in this phenomenon under consideration. If + the prosperity of a jest be in the ears that hear it, the like is + certainly true of any piece of gossip. Whoever it may be that sows the + evil seed of slander, the human soil is all too evilly ready to receive + it, to give it nurture, and to reproduce it in crops persistent as the + wild carrot and flamboyant as the wild mustard. +</p> +<p> + There is something mean in human nature that prefers to think evil, that + gives a willing ear and a ready welcome to calumny, a sort of jealousy + of goodness and greatness and things of good report. +</p> +<p> + Races and nations are thus ever ready to believe the worst of one + another. In all times it has been in this field of inter-racial and + international prejudice that the gossip has found the widest scope for + his gleeful activity, sowing broadcast dissensions and misunderstandings + which have persisted for centuries. They are the fruitful cause of wars, + insuperable barriers to progress, fabulous growths which the + enlightenment of the world painfully labours to weed out, but will + perhaps never entirely eradicate. +</p> +<p> + Race-hatred is undoubtedly nine-tenths the heritage of ancient gossip. + Think of the generations of ill-feeling that kept England and France, + though divided but by a narrow strait, "natural enemies" and + misunderstood monsters to each other. In a less degree, the friendship + of England and America has been retarded by international gossips on + both sides. And as for races and nations more widely separated by + distance or customs, no lies have been bad enough for them to believe + about one another. +</p> +<p> + It is only of late years that Europe has come to regard the peoples of + the Orient as human beings at all. And all this misunderstanding has + largely been the work of gossip acting upon ignorance. +</p> +<p> + It is easy to see how in the days of difficult communication, before + nations were able to get about in really representative numbers to make + mutual acquaintance, they were completely at the mercy of a few + irresponsible travellers, who said or wrote what they pleased, and had + no compunction about lying in the interests of entertainment. The + proverbial "gaiety of nations" has always, in a great degree, consisted + in each nation believing that it was superior to all others, and that + the natives of other countries were invariably hopelessly dirty and + immoral, to say the least. Such reports the traveller was expected to + bring home with him, and such he seldom failed to bring. +</p> +<p> + Even at the present time, when intercourse is so cosmopolitan, and some + approach to a sense of human brotherhood has been arrived at, the old + misconceptions die hard. Nations need still to be constantly on their + guard in believing all that the telegraph or the wireless is willing to + tell them about other countries. Electricity, many as are its advantages + for cosmopolitan <i>rapprochements</i>, is not invariably employed in the + interests of truth, and newspaper correspondents, if not watched, are + liable to be an even more dangerous form of international gossip than + the more leisurely fabulist of ancient time. +</p> +<p> + When we come to consider the operation of gossip in the lives of + individuals, the disposition of human nature to relish discrediting + rumour is pitifully conspicuous. We know <i>Hamlet's</i> opinion on the + matter: +</p> +<pre> + Let Hercules himself do what he may, + The cat will mew, and dog will have his day. +</pre> +<p> + And again: +</p> +<pre> + Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, + Thou shalt not escape calumny. +</pre> +<p> + This, it is to be feared, is merely the sad truth, for mankind, while it + admires both greatness and goodness, would seem to resent the one and + only half believe in the other. At all events, nothing is more to its + taste than the rumour that detracts from the great or sullies the good; + and so long as the rumour be entertaining, it has little concern for its + truth. +</p> +<p> + Froude, in writing of Caesar, has this to say admirably to our purpose: +</p> +<blockquote> + In ages which we call heroic, the saint works miracles, the warrior + performs exploits beyond the strength of natural man. In ages less + visionary, which are given to ease and enjoyment, the tendency is to + bring a great man down to the common level, and to discover or + invent faults which shall show that he is or was but a little man + after all. Our vanity is soothed by evidence that those who have + eclipsed us in the race of life are no better than ourselves, or in + some respects worse than ourselves; and if to these general impulses + be added political or personal animosity, accusations of depravity + are circulated as surely about such men, and are credited as readily + as under other influences are the marvellous achievements of a Cid + or a St. Francis.<br><br> + + The absurdity of a calumny may be as evident as the absurdity of a + miracle; the ground for belief may be no more than a lightness of + mind, and a less pardonable wish that it may be true. But the idle + tale floats in society, and by and by is written down in books and + passes into the region of established realities. +</blockquote> +<p> + The proportion of such idle tales seriously printed as history can + never, of course, be computed. Sometimes one is tempted to think that + history is mainly "whole cloth." Certainly the lives of such men as + Caesar are largely made up of what one might term illustrative fictions + rather than actual facts. The story of Caesar and Cleopatra is probably + such an "illustrative fiction," representing something that might very + well have happened to Caesar, whether it did so or not. At all events, + it does his fame no great harm, unlike another calumny, which, as it + does not seem "illustrative"—that is, not in keeping with his general + character—we are at liberty to reject. Both alike, however, were + the product of the gossip, the embodied littleness of human nature + endeavouring then, as always, to minimize and discredit the strong man, + who, whatever his actual faults, at least strenuously shoulders for his + fellows the hard work of the world. +</p> +<p> + The great have usually been strong enough to smile contempt on their + traducers—Caesar's answer to an infamous epigram of the poet Catullus + was to ask him to dinner—but even so, at what extra cost, what "expense + of spirit in a waste of shame," have their achievements been bought, + because of these curs that bark forever at the heels of fame! +</p> +<p> + And not always have they thus prevailed against the pack. Too often has + the sorry spectacle been seen of greatness and goodness going down + before the poisonous tongues and the licking jaws. Even Caesar himself + had to fall at last, his strong soul perhaps not sorry to escape through + his dagger-wounds from so pitiably small a world; and the poison in the + death-cup of Socrates was not so much the juice of the hemlock as the + venom of the gossips of Athens. +</p> +<p> + In later times, no service to his country, no greatness of character, + can save the noble Raleigh from the tongues determined to bring him to + the block; and, when the haughty head of Marie Antoinette must bow at + last upon the scaffold, the true guillotine was the guillotine of + gossip. It was such lying tales as that of the diamond necklace that had + brought her there. All Queen Elizabeth's popularity could not save her + from the ribaldry of scandal, nor Shakespeare's genius protect his name + from the foulest of stains. +</p> +<p> + In our own time, the mere mention of the name of Dreyfus suffices to + remind us of the terrible nets woven by this dark spinner. Within the + last year or two, have we not seen the loved king of a great nation + driven to seek protection from the spectre of innuendo in the courts of + law? But gossip laughs at such tribunals. It knows that where once it + has affixed its foul stain, the mark remains forever, indelible as that + imaginary stain which not all the multitudinous seas could wash from the + little hand of Lady Macbeth. The more the stain is washed, the more + persistently it reappears, like Rizzio's blood, as they say, in Holyrood + Palace. To deny a rumour is but to spread it. An action for libel, + however it may be decided, has at least the one inevitable result of + perpetuating it. +</p> +<p> + Take the historical case of the Man with the Iron Mask. Out of pure + deviltry, it would appear, Voltaire started the story, as mere a fiction + as one of his written romances, that the mysterious prisoner was no less + than a half-brother of Louis XIV; and Dumas, seeing the dramatic + possibilities of the legend, picturesquely elaborates it in <i>Le Vicomte + de Bragelonne</i>. Never, probably, was so impudent an invention, and + surely never one so successful; for it is in vain that historians expose + it over and over again. Learned editors have proved with no shadow of a + doubt that the real man of the mask was an obscure Italian political + adventurer; but though scholars may be convinced, the world will have + nothing of your Count Matthioli, and will probably go on believing + Voltaire's story to the end of time. +</p> +<p> + "At least there must have been something in it" is always the last word + on such debatable matters; and the curious thing is that, whenever a + doubt of the truth is expressed, it is never the victim, but always the + scandal, to which the benefit of the doubt is extended. Whatever the + proven fact, the world always prefers to hold fast by the disreputable + doubt. +</p> +<p> + All that is necessary is to find the dog a bad name. The world will see + that he never loses it. In this regard the oft-reiterated confidence of + the dead in the justice of posterity is one of the most pathetic of + illusions. "Posterity will see me righted," cries some poor victim of + human wrong, as he goes down into the darkness; but of all appeals, the + appeal to posterity is the most hopeless. +</p> +<p> + What posterity relishes is rather new scandals about its immortals than + tiresome belated justifications. It prefers its villains to grow blacker + with time, and welcomes proof of fallibility and frailty in its immortal + exemplars. For rehabilitation it has neither time nor inclination, + and it pursues certain luckless reputations beyond the grave with a + mysterious malignity. +</p> +<p> + Such a reputation is that of Edgar Allan Poe. One would have thought + that posterity would be eager to make up to his shade for the criminal + animus of Rufus Griswold, his first biographer. On the contrary, it + prefers to perpetuate the lying portrait; and no consideration of the + bequests of Poe's genius, or of his tragic struggles with adverse + conditions, no editorial advocacy, or documentary evidence in his + favour, has persuaded posterity to reverse the unduly harsh judgment of + his fatuous contemporaries. +</p> +<p> + Fortunately, it all matters nothing to Poe now. It is only to us that it + matters. +</p> +<p> + Saddening, surely, it is, to say the least, to realize that the humanity + of which we are a part is tainted with so subtle a disease of lying, and + so depraved an appetite for lies. Under such conditions, it is + surprising that greatness and goodness are ever found willing to serve + humanity at all, and that any but scoundrels can be found to dare the + risks of the high places of the world. For this social disease of gossip + resembles that distemper which, at the present moment, threatens the + chestnut forests of America. It first attacks the noblest trees. Like + it, too, it would seem to baffle all remedies, and like it, it would + seem to be the work of indestructible microscopic worms. +</p> +<p> + It is this vermicular insignificance of the gossip that makes his + detection so difficult, and gives him his security. A great reputation + may feel itself worm-eaten, and may suddenly go down with a crash, but + it will look around in vain for the social vermin that have brought + about its fall. It is the cowardice of gossip that its victims have + seldom an opportunity of coming face to face with their destroyers; for + the gossip is as small as he is ubiquitous— +</p> +<pre> + Not half so big as a round little worm + Prick'd from the lazy finger of a maid. +</pre> +<p> + In all societies, there are men and women who are vaguely known as + gossips; but they are seldom caught red-handed. For one thing, they do + not often speak at first hand. They profess only to repeat something + that they have heard—something, they are careful to add, which is + probably quite untrue, and which they themselves do not believe for a + moment. +</p> +<p> + Then the fact stated or hinted is probably no concern of ours. It is not + for us to sift its truth, or to bring it to the attention of the + individual it tarnishes. Obviously, society would become altogether + impossible if each one of us were to constitute ourselves a sort of + social police to arraign every accuser before the accused. We should + thus, it is to be feared, only make things worse, and involuntarily play + the gossip's own game. The best we can do is as far as possible to + banish the tattle from our minds, and, at all events, to keep our own + mouths shut. +</p> +<p> + Even so, however, some harm will have been done. We shall never be quite + sure but that the rumour was true, and when we next meet the person + concerned, it will probably in some degree colour our attitude toward + him. +</p> +<p> + And with others, less high-minded than ourselves, the gossip will have + had greater success. Not, of course, meaning any harm, they will inquire + of someone else if what So-and-so hinted of So-and-so can possibly be + true. And so it will go on <i>ad infinitum</i>. The formula is simple, and it + is only a matter of arithmetical progression for a private lie, once + started on its journey, to become a public scandal, with a reputation + gone, and no one visibly responsible. +</p> +<p> + Of course, not all gossip is purposely harmful in its intention. The + deliberate, creative gossip is probably rare. In fact, gossip usually + represents the need of a bored world to be entertained at any price, the + restless <i>ennui</i> that must be forever talking or listening to fill the + vacuity of its existence, to supply its lack of really vital interests. + This demand naturally creates a supply of idle talkers, whose social + existence depends on their ability to provide the entertainment desired; + and nothing would seem to be so well-pleasing to the idle human ear as + the whisper that discredits, or the story that ridicules, the + distinction it envies, and the goodness it cannot understand. +</p> +<p> + The mystery of gossip is bound up with the mysterious human need of + talking. Talk we must, though we say nothing, or talk evil from sheer + lack of subject-matter. When we know why man talks so much, apparently + for the mere sake of talking, we shall probably be nearer to knowing why + he prefers to speak and hear evil rather than good of his fellows. +</p> +<p> + Possibly the gossip would be just as ready to speak well of his victims, + to circulate stories to their credit rather than the reverse, but for + the melancholy fact that he would thus be left without an audience. For + the world has no anxiety to hear good of its neighbour, and there is no + piquancy in the disclosure of hidden virtues. +</p> +<p> + 'Tis true, 'tis pity; pity 'tis, 'tis true; and the only poor + consolation to be got out of it is that the victims of gossip may, if + they feel so inclined, feel flattered rather than angered by its + attentions; for, at all events, it argues their possession of gifts + and qualities transcending the common. At least it presupposes + individuality; and, all things considered, it may be held as true that + those most gossiped about are usually those who can best afford to pay + this tax levied by society on any form of distinction. +</p> +<p> + After all, the great and good man has his greatness and goodness to + support him, though the world should unite in depreciating him. The + artist has his genius, the beautiful woman has her beauty. 'Tis in + ourselves that we are thus and thus; and if fame must have gossip for + its seamy side, there are some satisfactions that cannot be stolen away, + and some laurels that defy the worm. +</p> +<a name="2H_4_15"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<h2> + XI +</h2> +<h3> + THE PASSING AWAY OF THE EDITOR +</h3> +<p> </p> + +<p> + The word "editor" as applied to the conductors of magazines and + newspapers is rapidly becoming a mere courtesy title; for the powers and + functions formerly exercised by editors, properly so called, are being + more and more usurped by the capitalist proprietor. There are not a few + magazines where the "editor" has hardly more say in the acceptance of a + manuscript than the contributor who sends it in. Few are the editors + left who uphold the magisterial dignity and awe with which the name of + editor was wont to be invested. These survive owing chiefly to the + prestige of long service, and even they are not always free from the + encroachments of the new method. The proprietor still feels the irksome + necessity of treating their editorial policies with respect, though + secretly chafing for the moment when they shall give place to more + manageable, modern tools. +</p> +<p> + The "new" editor, in fact, is little more than a clerk doing the bidding + of his proprietor, and the proprietor's idea of editing is slavishly to + truckle to the public taste—or rather to his crude conception of the + public taste. The only real editors of today are the capitalist and the + public. The nominal editor is merely an office-boy of larger growth, and + slightly larger salary. +</p> +<p> + Innocent souls still, of course, imagine him clothed with divine powers, + and letters of introduction to him are still sought after by the + superstitious beginner. Alas! the chances are that the better he thinks + of your MS. the less likely is it to be accepted by—the proprietor; for + Mr. Snooks, the proprietor, has decided tastes of his own, and a + peculiar distaste for anything remotely savouring of the "literary." His + broad editorial axiom is that a popular magazine should be everything + and anything but—"literature." For any signs of the literary taint he + keeps open a stern and ever-watchful eye, and the "editor" or "editorial + assistant"—to make a distinction without a difference—whom he should + suspect of literary leanings has but a short shrift. Mr. Snooks is + seldom much of a reader himself. His activities have been exclusively + financial, and he has drifted into the magazine business as he might + have drifted into pork or theatres—from purely financial reasons. His + literary needs are bounded on the north by a detective story, and on the + south by a scientific article. The old masters of literature are as much + foolishness to him as the old masters of painting. In short, he is just + a common, ignorant man with money invested in a magazine; and who shall + blame him if he goes on the principle that he who pays the piper calls + the tune. When he starts in he not infrequently begins by entrusting + his magazine to some young man with real editorial ability and ambition + to make a really good thing. This young man gathers about him a group of + kindred spirits, and the result is that after the publication of the + second number Mr. Snooks decides to edit the magazine himself, with the + aid of a secretary and a few typewriters. His bright young men hadn't + understood "what the public wants" at all. They were too high-toned, too + "literary." What the public wants is short stories and pictures of + actresses; and the short stories, like the actresses, must be no better + than they should be. Even short stories when they are masterpieces are + not "what the public wants." So the bright young men go into outer + darkness, sadly looking for new jobs, and with its third number + <i>Snooks's Monthly</i> has fallen into line with the indistinguishable ruck + of monthly magazines, only indeed distinguishable one from the other by + the euphonious names of their proprietors. +</p> +<p> + Now, a proprietor's right to have his property managed according to his + own ideas needs no emphasizing. The sad thing is that such proprietors + should get hold of such property. It all comes, of course, of the + modern vulgarization of wealth. Time was when even mere wealth was + aristocratic, and its possession, more or less implied in its possessors + the possession, too, of refinement and culture. The rich men of the past + knew enough to encourage and support the finer arts of life, and were + interested in maintaining high standards of public taste and feeling. + Thus they were capable of sparing some of their wealth for investment in + objects which brought them a finer kind of reward than the financial. + Among other things, they understood and respected the dignity of + literature, and would not have expected an editor to run a literary + venture in the interests of the illiterate. The further degradation of + the public taste was not then the avowed object of popular magazines. + Indeed—strange as it sounds nowadays—it was rather the education than + the degradation of the public taste at which the editor aimed, and in + that aim he found the support of intelligent proprietors. +</p> +<p> + Today, however, all this is changed. Wealth has become democratic, and + it is only here and there, in its traditional possessors, that it + retains its traditional aristocracy of taste. As the commonest man can + be a multi-millionaire, so the commonest man can own a magazine, and + have it edited in the commonest fashion for the common good. +</p> +<p> + As a result, the editor's occupation, in the true sense, will soon be + gone. There is, need one say, no lack today of men with real editorial + individuality—but editorial individuality is the last thing the + capitalist proprietors want. It is just that they are determined to + stamp out. Therefore, your real editor must either swallow his pride and + submit to ignorant dictation, or make way for the little band of + automatic sorters of manuscript, which, as nine tailors make a man, + nowadays constitute a sort of composite editor under the direction of + the proprietor. +</p> +<p> + With the elimination of editorial individuality necessarily follows + elimination of individuality in the magazine. More and more, every day, + magazines are conforming to the same monotonous type; so that, except + for name and cover, it is impossible to tell one magazine from another. + Happily one or two—<i>rari nantes in gurgito vasto</i>—survive amid the + democratic welter; and all who have at heart not only the interests of + literature, but the true interests of the public taste, will pray that + they will have the courage to maintain their distinction, unseduced by + the moneyed voice of the mob—a distinction to which, after all, they + have owed, and will continue to owe, their success. The names of these + magazines will readily occur to the reader, and, as they occur, he + cannot but reflect that it was just editorial individuality and a high + standard of policy that made them what they are, and what, it is + ardently to be hoped, they will still continue to be. Plutus and Demos + are the worst possible editors for a magazine; and in the end, even, it + is the best magazine that always makes the most money. +</p> +<a name="2H_4_16"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<h2> + XII +</h2> +<h3> + THE SPIRIT OF THE OPEN +</h3> +<p> </p> + +<p> + I often think, as I sit here in my green office in the woodland—too + often diverted from some serious literary business with the moon or the + morning stars, or a red squirrel who is the familiar spirit of my + wood-pile, or having my thoughts carried out to sea by the river which + runs so freshly and so truantly, with so strong a current of temptation, + a hundred yards away from my window—I often think that the strong + necessity that compelled me to do my work, to ply my pen and inkpot out + here in the leafy, blue-eyed wilderness, instead of doing it by + typewriter in some forty-two-storey building in the city, is one of + those encouraging signs of the times which links one with the great + brotherhood of men and women that have heard the call of the great god + Pan, as he sits by the river— +</p> +<pre> + Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan! + Piercing sweet by the river! + Blinding sweet, O great god Pan! +</pre> +<p> + And I go on thinking to this effect: that this impulse that has come to + so many of us, and has, incidentally, wrought such a harmony in our + lives, is something more than duck-shooting, trout-fishing, + butterfly-collecting, or a sentimental passion for sunsets, but is + indeed something not so very far removed from religion, romantic + religion. At all events, it is something that makes us happy, and keeps + us straight. That combination of results can only come by the + satisfaction of the undeniable religious instinct in all of us: an + instinct that seeks goodness, but seeks happiness too. Now, there are + creeds by which you can be good without being happy; and creeds by which + you can be happy without being good. But, perhaps, there is only one + creed by which you can be both at once—the creed of the growing grass, + and the blue sky and the running river, the creed of the dog-wood and + the skunk-cabbage, the creed of the red-wing and the blue heron—the + creed of the great god Pan. +</p> +<p> + Pan, being one of the oldest of the gods, might well, in an age eager + for novelty, expect to be the latest fashion; but the revival of his + worship is something far more than a mere vogue. It was rumoured, as, of + course, we all know, early in the Christian era, that he was dead. The + pilot Thomas, ran the legend, as told by Plutarch, sailing near Pascos, + with a boatful of merchants, heard in the twilight a mighty voice + calling from the land, bidding him proclaim to all the world that Pan + was dead. "Pan is dead!"—three times ran the strange shuddering cry + through the darkness, as though the very earth itself wailed the passing + of the god. +</p> +<p> + But Pan, of course, could only die with the earth itself, and so long as + the lichen and the moss keep quietly at their work on the grey boulder, + and the lightning zigzags down through the hemlocks, and the arrowhead + guards its waxen blossom in the streams; so long as the earth shakes + with the thunder of hoofs, or pours out its heart in the song of the + veery-thrush, or bares its bosom in the wild rose, so long will there be + little chapels to Pan in the woodland—chapels on the lintels of which + you shall read, as Virgil wrote: <i>Happy is he who knows the rural gods, + Pan, and old Sylvanus, and the sister nymphs</i>. +</p> +<p> + It is strange to see how in every country, but more particularly in + America and in England, the modern man is finding his religion as it was + found by those first worshippers of the beautiful mystery of the visible + universe, those who first caught glimpses of +</p> +<pre class="si"> + Nymphs in the coppice, Naiads in the fountain, + Gods on the craggy height and roaring sea. +</pre> +<p> + First thoughts are proverbially the best; at all events, they are the + bravest. And man's first thoughts of the world and the strangely + romantic life he is suddenly called up, out of nothingness, to live, + unconsulted, uninstructed, left to feel his way in the blinding + radiance up into which he has been mysteriously thrust; those first + thoughts of his are nowadays being corroborated in every direction by + the last thoughts of the latest thinker. Mr. Jack London, one of + Nature's own writers, one of those writers too, through whom the Future + speaks, has given a name to this stirring of the human soul—"The Call + of the Wild." Following his lead, others have written of "The Lure," of + this and that in nature, and all mean the same thing: that the salvation + of man is to be found on, and by means of, the green earth out of which + he was born, and that, as there is no ill of his body which may not be + healed by the magic juices of herb and flower, or the stern potency of + minerals, so there is no sickness of his soul that may not be cured by + the sound of the sea, the rustle of leaves, or the songs of birds. +</p> +<p> + Thirty or forty years ago the soul of the world was very sick. It had + lost religion in a night of misunderstood "materialism," so-called. But + since then that mere "matter" which seemed to eclipse the soul has grown + strangely radiant to deep-seeing eyes, and, whereas then one had to + doubt everything, dupes of superficial disillusionment, now there is no + old dream that has not the look of coming true, no hope too wild and + strange and beautiful to be confidently entertained. Even, if you wish + to believe in fairies, science will hardly say you nay. Those dryads and + fauns, which Keats saw "frightened away" by the prosaic times in which + it was his misfortune to be alive and unrecognized, are trooping back in + every American woodland, and the god whose name I have invoked has + become more than ever +</p> +<pre> + the leaven + That spreading in this dull and clodded earth + Gives it a touch ethereal. +</pre> +<p> + His worship is all the more sincere because it is not self-conscious. + If you were to tell the trout-fisher, or the duck-shooter, or the + camper-out, that he is a worshipper of Pan, he would look at you in a + kindly bewilderment. He would seem a little anxious about you, but it + would be only a verbal misunderstanding. It would not take him long to + realize that you were only putting in terms of a creed the intuitive and + inarticulate faith of his heart. Perhaps the most convincing sign of + this new-old faith in nature is the unconsciousness of the believer. He + has no idea that he is believing or having faith in anything. He is + simply loving the green earth and the blue sea, and the ways of birds + and fish and animals; but he is so happy in his innocent, ignorant joy + that he seems almost to shine with his happiness. There is, literally, a + light about him—that light which edges with brightness all sincere + action. The trout, or the wild duck, or the sea bass is only an innocent + excuse to be alone with the Infinite. To be alone. To be afar. Men sail + precarious craft in perilous waters for no reason they could tell + of. They may think that trawling, or dredging, or whaling is the + explanation: the real reason is the mystery we call the Sea. +</p> +<p> + Ostensibly, of course, the angler is a man who goes out to catch fish; + yet there is a great difference between an angler and a fishmonger. + Though the angler catches no fish, though his creel be empty as he + returns home at evening, there is a curious happiness and peace about + him which a mere fishmonger would be at a loss to explain. Fish, as I + said, were merely an excuse; and, as he vainly waited for fish, without + knowing it, he was learning the rhythm of the stream, and the silence of + ferns was entering into his soul, and the calm and patience of meadows + were dreamily becoming a part of him. Suddenly, too, in the silence, + maybe he caught sight of a strange, hairy, masterful presence, sitting + by the stream, whittling reeds, and blowing his breath into them here + and there, and finally binding them together with rushes, till he had + made out of the empty reeds and rushes an instrument that sang + everything that can be sung and told you everything that can be told. +</p> +<pre> + The sun on the hill forgot to die. + And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly + Came back to dream on the river. +</pre> +<p> + Do you really think that the huntsman hunts only the deer? He, himself, + doubtless thinks that the trophy of the antlers was all he went out + into the woods to win. But there came a day to him when he missed the + deer, and caught a glimpse instead of the divine huntress, Diana, + high-buskined, short-kirtled, speeding with her hounds through the + lonely woodland, and his thoughts ran no more on venison for that day. +</p> +<p> + The same truth is true of all men who go out into the green, blue-eyed + wilderness, whether they go there in pursuit of game or butterflies. + They find something stranger and better than what they went out to seek, + and, if they come home disappointed in the day's bag or catch, there is + yet something in their eyes, and across their brows, a light of peace, + an enchanted calm, which tells those who understand that they, at all + events, have seen the great god Pan, and heard the music he can make out + of the pipy hemlocks or the lonely pines. +</p> +<a name="2H_4_17"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<h2> + XIII +</h2> +<h3> + AN OLD AMERICAN TOW-PATH +</h3> +<p> </p> + +<p> + The charm of an old canal is one which every one seems to feel. Men who + care nothing about ruined castles or Gothic cathedrals light up with + romantic enthusiasm if you tell them of some old disused or seldom-used + canal, grass-grown and tree-shaded, along which, hardly oftener than + once a week, a leisurely barge—towed by an equally leisurely mule, with + its fellow there on deck taking his rest, preparatory to his next + eight-mile "shift"—sleepily dreams its way, presumably on some errand + and to some destination, yet indeed hinting of no purpose or object + other than its loitering passage through a summer afternoon. I have even + heard millionaires express envy of the life lived by the little family + hanging out its washing and smoking its pipe and cultivating its + floating garden of nasturtiums and geraniums, with children playing and + a house-dog to keep guard, all in that toy house of a dozen or so feet, + whose foundations are played about by fishes, and whose sides are + brushed by whispering reeds. But the charm of an old canal is perhaps + yet more its own when even so tranquil a happening as the passage of a + barge is no longer looked for, and the quiet water is called upon for no + more arduous usefulness than the reflection of the willows or the + ferrying across of summer clouds. Nature herself seems to wield a new + peculiar spell in such association—old quarries, the rusting tramways + choked with fern; forgotten mines with the wild vine twining tenderly + about the old iron of dismantled pit-tackle, grown as green as itself + with the summer rains; roads once dusty with haste over which only the + moss and the trailing arbutus now leisurely travel. Wherever Nature is + thus seen to be taking to herself, making her own, what man has first + made and grown tired of, she is twice an enchantress, strangely + combining in one charm the magic of a wistful, all but forgotten, past + with her own sibyl-line mystery. +</p> +<p> + The symbol of that combined charm is that poppy of oblivion of which Sir + Thomas Browne so movingly wrote: but, though along that old canal of + which I am thinking and by which I walked a summer day, no poppies were + growing, the freshest grass, the bluest flowers, the new-born rustling + leafage of the innumerable trees, all alike seemed to whisper of + forgetfulness, to be brooding, even thus in the very heyday of the mad + young year, over time past. And this eloquently retrospective air of + Nature made me realize, with something of the sense of discovery, how + much of what we call antiquity is really a trick of Nature. She is as + clever at the manufacture of antiques as some expert of "old masters." + A little moss here and there, a network of ivy, a judicious use of ferns + and grass, a careless display of weeds and wild flowers, and in twenty + years Nature can make a modern building look as if it dated from the + Norman Conquest. I came upon this reflection because, actually, my canal + is not very old, though from the way it impressed me, and from the + manner in which I have introduced it, the reader might well imagine it + as old as Venice and no younger than Holland, and may find it as hard to + believe as I did that its age is but some eighty years, and that it has + its romantic being between Newark Bay and Phillipsburg, on the Delaware + River. +</p> +<p> + One has always to be careful not to give too much importance to one's + own associative fancies in regard to the names of places. To me, for + instance, "Perth Amboy" has always had a romantic sound, and I believe + that a certain majesty in the collocation of the two noble words would + survive that visit to the place itself which I have been told is all + that is necessary for disillusionment. On the other hand, for reasons + less explainable, Hackensack, Paterson, Newark, and even Passaic are + names that had touched me with no such romantic thrill. Wrongfully, no + doubt, I had associated them with absurdity, anarchy, and railroads. + Never having visited them, it was perhaps not surprising that I should + not have associated them with such loveliness and luxury of Nature as I + now unforgettably recall; and I cannot help feeling that in the case of + places thus unfortunately named, Nature might well bring an action for + damages, robbed as she thus undoubtedly is of a flock of worshippers. +</p> +<p> + At all events, I believe that my surprise and even incredulity will be + understood when an artist friend of mine told me that by taking the Fort + Lee ferry, and trolleying from the Palisades through Hackensack to + Paterson, I might find—a dream canal. It was as though he had said that + I had but to cross over to Hoboken to find the Well at the World's End. + But it was true, for all that—quite fairy-tale true. It was one of + those surprises of peace, deep, ancient peace, in America, of which + there are many, and of which more needs to be told. I can conceive of no + more suggestive and piquant contrast than that of the old canal gliding + through water-lilies and spreading pastures, in the bosom of hills + clothed with trees that scatter the sunshine or gather the darkness, the + haunt of every bird that sings or flashes strange plumage and is gone, + gliding past flowering rushes and blue dragon-flies, not +</p> +<pre> + Flowing down to Camelot, +</pre> +<p class="noindent"> + as one might well believe, but between Newark and Phillipsburg, touching + Paterson midway with its dreaming hand. +</p> +<p> + Following my friend's directions, we had met at Paterson, and, desirous + of finding our green pasture and still waters with the least possible + delay, we took a trolley running in the Newark direction, and were + presently dropped at a quaint, quiet little village called Little Falls, + the last we were to see of the modern work-a-day world for several + miles. A hundred yards or so beyond, and it is as though you had entered + some secret green door into a pastoral dream-land. Great trees, like + rustling walls of verdure, enclose an apparently endless roadway of + gleaming water, a narrow strip of tow-path keeping it company, + buttressed in from the surrounding fields with thickets of every species + of bush and luxurious undergrowth, and starred with every summer flower. +</p> +<p> + Presently, by the side of the path, one comes to an object which seems + romantically in keeping with the general character of the scene—a long + block of stone, lying among the grasses and the wild geraniums, on + which, as one nears it, one descries carved scroll-work and quaint, + deep-cut lettering. Is it the tomb of dead lovers, the memorial of some + great deed, or an altar to the <i>genius loci</i>? The willows whisper about + it, and the great elms and maples sway and murmur no less impressively + than if the inscription were in Latin of two thousand years ago. Nor is + it in me to regret that the stone and its inscription, instead of + celebrating the rural Pan, commemorate the men to whom I owe this lane + of dreaming water and all its marginal green solitude: to wit—the + "MORRIS CANAL AND BANKING CO., A.D. 1829," represented by its + president, its cashier, its canal commissioner, and a score of other + names of directors, engineers, and builders. Peace, therefore, to the + souls of those dead directors, who, having only in mind their banking + and engineering project, yet unconsciously wrought, nearly a century + ago, so poetic a thing, and may their rest be lulled by such leafy + murmurs and swaying of tendrilled shadows as all the day through stir + and sway along the old canal! +</p> +<p> + A few yards beyond this monumental stone, there comes a great opening in + the sky, a sense of depth and height and spacious freshness in the air, + such as we feel on approaching the gorge of a great river; and in fact + the canal has arrived at the Passaic and is about to be carried across + it in a sort of long, wooden trough, supported by a noble bridge that + might well pass for a genuine antique, owing to that collaborating hand + of Nature which has filled the interstices of its massive masonry with + fern, and so loosened it here and there that some of the canal escapes + in long, ribbon-like cascades into the rocky bed of the river below. An + aqueduct has always seemed to me, though it would be hard to say why, a + most romantic thing. The idea of carrying running water across a bridge + in this way—water which it is so hard to think of as imprisoned or + controlled, and which, too, however shallow, one always associates with + mysterious depth—the idea of thus carrying it across a valley high up + in the air, so that one may look underneath it, underneath the bed in + which it runs, and think of the fishes and the water-weeds and the + waterbugs all being carried across with it, too—this, I confess, has + always seemed to me engagingly marvellous. And I like, too, to think + that the canal, whose daily business is to be a "common carrier" of + others, thus occasionally tastes the luxury of being carried itself; as + sometimes one sees on a freight car a new buggy, or automobile, or + sometimes a locomotive, being luxuriously ridden along—as though out + for a holiday—instead of riding others. +</p> +<p> + And talking of freight-cars, it came to me with a sense of illumination + how different the word "Passaic" looks printed in white letters on the + grey sides of grim produce-vans in begrimed procession, from the way it + looks as it writes its name in wonderful white waterfalls, or murmurs it + through corridors of that strange pillared and cake-shaped rock, amid + the golden pomp of a perfect summer day. For a short distance the + Passaic and the canal run side by side, but presently they part company, + and mile after mile the canal seems to have the world to itself, once in + a great while finding human companionship in a shingled cottage half + hidden among willows, a sleepy brick-field run on principles as ancient + as itself, shy little girls picking flowers on its banks, or saucy boys + disporting themselves in the old swimming-hole; and +</p> +<pre class="si"> + Sometimes an angler comes and drops his hook + Within its hidden depths, and 'gainst a tree + Leaning his rod, reads in some pleasant book, + Forgetting soon his pride of fishery; + And dreams or falls asleep, + While curious fishes peep + About his nibbled bait or scornfully + Dart off and rise and leap. +</pre> +<p> + Once a year, indeed, every one goes a-fishing along the old canal—men, + women, boys, and girls. That is in spring, when the canal is emptied for + repairs, the patching up of leaks, and so forth. Then the fish lie + glittering in the shallow pools, as good as caught, and happy children + go home with strings of sunfish,—"pumpkin-seeds" they call + them,—cat-fish, and the like picturesque unprofitable spoils, while + graver fisher-folk take count of pickerel and bream. This merry festival + was over and gone, and the canal was all brimming with the lustral + renewal of its waters, its depths flashing now and again with the + passage of wary survivors of that spring <i>battue</i>. +</p> +<p> + It is essential to the appreciation of an old canal that one should not + expect it to provide excitement, that it be understood between it and + its fellow-pilgrim that there is very little to say and nothing to + record. Along the old tow-path you must be content with a few simple, + elemental, mysterious things. To enter into its spirit you must be + somewhat of a monastic turn of mind, and have spiritual affiliations, + above all, with La Trappe. For the presiding muse of an old canal is + Silence; yet, as at La Trappe, a silence far indeed from being a dumb + silence, but a silence that contains all speech. My friend and I spoke + hardly at all as we walked along, easily obedient to the spirit of the + hour and the place. For there were so few of those little gossipy + accidents and occurrences by the way that make those interruptions we + call conversation, and such overwhelming golden-handed presences of + sunlit woodlands, flashing water-meadows, shining, singing air, and + distant purple hills—all the blowing, rippling, leafy glory and mighty + laughter of a summer day—that we were glad enough to let the birds do + such talking as Nature deemed necessary; and I seem never to have heard + or seen so many birds, of so many varieties, as haunt that old canal. +</p> +<p> + As we chose our momentary camping-place under a buttonwood-tree, from + out an exuberant swamp of yellow water-lilies and the rearing + sword-blades of the coming cat-tail, a swamp blackbird, on his glossy + black orange-tipped wings, flung us defiance with his long, keen, full, + saucy note; and as we sat down under our buttonwood and spread upon the + sward our pastoral meal, the veery-thrush—sadder and stranger than any + nightingale—played for us, unseen, on an instrument like those old + water-organs played on by the flow and ebb of the tide, a flute of + silver in which some strange magician has somewhere hidden tears. I + wondered, as he sang, if the veery was the thrush that, to Walt + Whitman's fancy, "in the swamp in secluded recesses" mourned the death + of Lincoln: +</p> +<pre class="si"> + Solitary the thrush, + The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements, + Sings to himself a song. +</pre> +<p> + But when the veery had flown with his heart-break to some distant copse, + two song-sparrows came to persuade us with their blithe melody that life + was worth living, after all; and cheerful little domestic birds, like + the jenny-wren and the chipping-sparrow, pecked about and put in between + whiles their little chit-chat across the boughs, while the bobolink + called to us like a comrade, and the phoebe-bird gave us a series of + imitations, and the scarlet tanager and the wild canary put in a vivid + appearance, to show what can be done with colour, though they have no + song. +</p> +<p> + Yet, while one was grateful for such long, green silence as we found + along that old canal, one could not help feeling how hard it would be + to put into words an experience so infinite and yet so undramatic. Birds + and birds, and trees and trees, and the long, silent water! Prose has + seldom been adequate for such moments. So, as my friend and I took up + our walk again, I sang him this little song of the Silence of the Way: +</p> +<pre class="si"> + Silence, whose drowsy eyelids are soft leaves, + And whose half-sleeping eyes are the blue flowers, + On whose still breast the water-lily heaves, + And all her speech the whisper of the showers. + + Made of all things that in the water sway, + The quiet reed kissing the arrowhead, + The willows murmuring, all a summer day, + "Silence"—sweet word, and ne'er so softly said + + As here along this path of brooding peace, + Where all things dream, and nothing else is done + But all such gentle businesses as these + Of leaves and rippling wind, and setting sun + + Turning the stream to a long lane of gold, + Where the young moon shall walk with feet of pearl, + And, framed in sleeping lilies, fold on fold. + Gaze at herself like any mortal girl. +</pre> +<p> + But, after all, trees are perhaps the best expression of silence, massed + as they are with the merest hint of movement, and breathing the merest + suggestion of a sigh; and seldom have I seen such abundance and variety + of trees as along our old canal—cedars and hemlocks and hickory + dominating green slopes of rocky pasture, with here and there a clump of + silver birches bent over with the strain of last year's snow; and all + along, near by the water, beech and basswood, blue-gum and pin-oak, ash, + and even chestnut flourishing still, in defiance of blight. Nor have I + ever seen such sheets of water-lilies as starred the swampy thickets, in + which elder and hazels and every conceivable bush and shrub and giant + grass and cane make wildernesses pathless indeed save to the mink and + the water-snake, and the imagination that would fain explore their + glimmering recesses. +</p> +<p> + No, nothing except birds and trees, water-lilies and such like + happenings, ever happens along the old canal; and our nearest to a human + event was our meeting with a lonely, melancholy man, sitting near a + moss-grown water-wheel, smoking a corn-cob pipe, and gazing wistfully + across at the Ramapo Hills, over which great sunlit clouds were + billowing and casting slow-moving shadows. Stopping, we passed him the + time of day and inquired when the next barge was due. For answer he took + a long draw at his corn-cob, and, taking his eyes for a moment from the + landscape, said in a far-away manner that it might be due any time now, + as the spring had come and gone, and implying, with a sort of sad humour + in his eyes, that spring makes all things possible, brings all things + back, even an old slow-moving barge along the old canal. +</p> +<p> + "What do they carry on the canal?" I asked the melancholy man, the + romantic green hush and the gleaming water not irrelevantly flashing on + my fancy that far-away immortal picture of the lily-maid of Astolat on + her strange journey, with a letter in her hand for Lancelot. +</p> +<p> + "Coal," was his answer; and, again drawing at his corn-cob, he added, + with a sad and understanding smile, "once in a great while." Like most + melancholy men, he seemed to have brains, in his way, and to have no + particular work on hand, except, like ourselves, to dream. +</p> +<p> + "Suppose," said I, "that a barge should come along, and need to be drawn + up this 'plane'—would the old machinery work?" and I pointed to six + hundred feet of sloping grass, down which a tramway stretches and a + cable runs on little wheels—technically known, it appeared, as a + "plane." +</p> +<p> + Then the honour of the ancient company for which he had once worked + seemed to stir his blood, and he awakened to something like enthusiasm + as he explained the antique, picturesque device by which it is still + really possible for a barge to climb six hundred feet of grass and + fern—drawn up in a long "cradle," instead of being raised by locks in + the customary way. +</p> +<p> + Then he took us into the old building where, in the mossed and dripping + darkness, we could discern the great water-wheels that work this + fascinating piece of ancient engineering; and added that there would + probably be a barge coming along in three or four days, if we should + happen to be in the neighbourhood. He might have added that the old + canal is one of the few places where "time and tide" wait for any one + and everybody—but alas! on this occasion we could not wait for them. +</p> +<p> + Our walk was nearing its end when we came upon a pathetic reminder that, + though the old canal is so far from being a stormy sea, there have been + wrecks even in those quiet waters. In a backwater whispered over by + willows and sung over by birds, a sort of water-side graveyard, eleven + old barges were ingloriously rotting, unwept and unhonoured. The hulks + of old men-of-war, forgotten as they may seem, have still their annual + days of bunting and the salutes of cannon; but to these old servitors of + peace come no such memorial recognitions. +</p> +<p> + "Unwept and unhonoured, may be," said I to my friend, "but they shall + not go all unsung, though humble be the rhyme"; so here is the rhyme I + affixed to an old nail on the mouldering side of the <i>Janita C. + Williams</i>: +</p> +<pre class="si"> + You who have done your work and asked no praise, + Mouldering in these unhonoured waterways, + Carrying but simple peace and quiet fire, + Doing a small day's work for a small hire— + You need not praise, nor guns, nor flags unfurled, + Nor all such cloudy glories of the world; + The laurel of a simple duty done + Is the best laurel underneath the sun, + Yet would two strangers passing by this spot + Whisper, "Old boat—you are not all forgot!" +</pre> +<a name="2H_4_18"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<h2> + XIV +</h2> +<h3> + A MODERN SAINT FRANCIS +</h3> +<p> </p> + +<p> + We were neither of us fox-hunting ourselves, but chanced both to be out + on our morning walk and to be crossing a breezy Surrey common at the + same moment, when the huntsmen and huntresses of the Slumberfold Hunt + were blithely congregating for a day's run. A meet is always an + attractive sight, and we had both come to a halt within a yard or two of + each other, and stood watching the gallant company of fine ladies and + gentlemen on their beautiful, impatient mounts, keeping up a prancing + conversation, till the exciting moment should arrive when the cry would + go up that the fox had been started, and the whole field would sweep + away, a cataract of hounds, red-coats, riding habits, and dog-carts. +</p> +<p> + The moment came. The fox had been found in a spinney running down to + Withy Brook, and his race for life had begun. With a happy shout, the + hunt was up and off in a twinkling, and the stranger and I were left + alone on the broad common. +</p> +<p> + I had scanned him furtively as he stood near me; a tall, slightly build + man of about fifty, with perfectly white hair, and strangely gentle + blue eyes. There was a curious, sad distinction over him, and he had + watched the scene with a smile of blended humour and pity. +</p> +<p> + Turning to me, as we were left alone, and speaking almost as though to + himself: "It is a strange sight," he said with a sigh. "I wonder if it + seems as strange to you? Think of all those grown-up, so-called + civilized people being so ferociously intent on chasing one poor little + animal for its life—and feeling, when at last the huntsman holds up his + poor brush, with absurd pride (if indeed the fox is not too sly for + them), that they have really done something clever, in that with so many + horses and dogs and so much noise, they have actually contrived to catch + and kill one fox!" +</p> +<p> + "It is strange!" I said, for I had been thinking just that very thing. +</p> +<p> + "Of course, they always tell you," he continued, as we took the road + together, "that the fox really enjoys being hunted, and that he feels + his occupation gone if there are no hounds to track him, and finally to + tear him to pieces. What wonderful stories human nature will tell itself + in its own justification! Can one imagine any created thing <i>enjoying</i> + being pursued for its life, with all that loud terror of men and horses + and savage dogs at its heels? No doubt—if we can imagine even a fox so + self-conscious—it would take a certain pride in its own cunning and + skill, if the whole thing were a game; but a race with death is too + deadly in earnest for a fox even to relish his own stratagems. Happily + for the fox, it is probable that he does not feel so much for himself as + some of us feel for him; but any one who knows the wild things knows too + what terror they are capable of feeling, and how the fear of death is + always with them. No! you may be sure that a fox prefers a cosy + hen-roost to the finest run with the hounds ever made." +</p> +<p> + "But even if he should enjoy being hunted," I added, "the even stranger + thing to me is that civilized men and women should enjoy hunting him." +</p> +<p> + "Isn't it strange?" answered my companion eagerly, his face lighting up + at finding a sympathizer. "When will people realize that there is so + much more fun in studying wild things than in killing them!..." +</p> +<p> + He stopped suddenly in his walk, to gather a small weed which had + caught his quick eye by the roadside, and which he examined for a + moment through a little pocket microscope which I noticed, hanging + like an eyeglass round his neck, and which I learned afterward quite + affectionately to associate with him. Then, as we walked on, he + remarked: +</p> +<p> + "But, of course, we are yet very imperfectly civilized. Humanity is a + lesson learned very slowly by the human race. Yet we are learning it by + degrees, yes! we are learning it," and he threw out his long stride more + emphatically—the stride of one accustomed to long daily tramps on the + hills. +</p> +<p> + "Strange, that principle of cruelty in the universe!" he resumed, after + a pause in which he had walked on in silence. "Very strange. To me it is + the most mysterious of all things—though, I suppose, after all, it is + no more mysterious than pity. When, I wonder, did pity begin? Who was + the first human being to pity another? How strange he must have seemed + to the others, how incomprehensible and ridiculous—not to say + dangerous! There can be little doubt that he was promptly dispatched + with stone axes as an enemy of a respectable murderous society." +</p> +<p> + "I expect," said I "that our friends the fox-hunters would take a + similar view of our remarks on their sport." +</p> +<p> + "No doubt—and perhaps turn their hounds on us! A man hunt! 'Give me the + hunting of man!' as a brutal young poet we know of recently sang." +</p> +<p> + "How different was the spirit of Emerson's old verse," I said: +</p> +<pre class="si"> + "Hast thou named all the birds without a gun? + Loved the wood-rose, and left it on its stalk?... + O be my friend, and teach me to be thine!" +</pre> +<p> + "That is one of my mottoes!" cried my companion with evident pleasure. + "Let us go and quote it to our fox-hunters!" +</p> +<p> + "I wonder how the fox is getting on," I said. +</p> +<p> + "If he is any sort of fox, he is safe enough as yet, we may be sure. + They are wonderful creatures. It is not surprising that mankind has + always looked upon Reynard as almost a human being—if not more—for + there is something quite uncanny in his instincts, and the cool, + calculating way in which he uses them. He is come and gone like a ghost. + One moment you were sure you saw him clearly close by and the next he is + gone—who knows where? He can run almost as swiftly as light, and as + softly as a shadow; and in his wildest dash, what a sure judgment he has + for the lie of the ground, how unerringly—and at a moment when a + mistake is death—he selects his cover! How learned, too, he is in + his knowledge of the countryside! There is not a dry ditch, or a + water-course, or an old drain, or a hole in a bank for miles around that + is not mysteriously set down in the map he carries in his graceful, + clever head; and one need hardly say that all the suitable hiding-places + in and around farm-yards are equally well known to him. Then withal he + is so brave. How splendidly, when wearied out, and hopelessly tracked + down, with the game quite up, he will turn on his pursuers, and die with + his teeth fast in his enemy's throat!" +</p> +<p> + "I believe you are a fox-hunter in disguise," I laughed. +</p> +<p> + "Well, I have hunted as a boy," he said, "and I know something of what + those red-coated gentlemen are feeling. But soon I got more interested + in studying nature than killing it, and when I became a naturalist I + ceased to be a hunter. You get to love the things so that it seems like + killing little children. They come so close to you, are so beautiful and + so clever; and sometimes there seems such a curious pathos about them. + How any one can kill a deer with that woman's look in its eyes, I don't + know. I should always expect the deer to change into a fairy princess, + and die in my arms with the red blood running from her white breast. And + pigeons, too, with their soft sunny coo all the summer afternoon, or the + sudden lapping of sleepy wings round the chimneys—how can any one trap + or shoot them with blood-curdling rapidity, and not expect to see + ghosts!" +</p> +<p> + "Of course, there is this difference about the fox," I said, "that it is + really in a sense born to be hunted. For not only is it a fierce hunter + itself, but it would not be allowed to exist at all, so to say, unless + it consented to being hunted. Like a gladiator it accepts a comfortable + living for a certain time, on condition of its providing at last a + spirited exhibition of dying. In other words, it is preserved entirely + for the purpose of being hunted. It must accept life on that condition + or be extirpated as destructive vermin by the plundered farmer. Life is + sweet, after all, and to be a kind of protected highwayman of the + poultry-yard, for a few sweet toothsome years, taking one's chances of + being surely brought to book at last, may perhaps seem worth while." +</p> +<p> + "Yes! but how does your image of the protected gladiator reflect on + those who protect him? There, of course, is the point. The gladiator, as + you say, is willing to take his chances in exchange for fat living and + idleness, as long as he lives. You may even say that his profession is + good for him, develops fine qualities of mind even as well as body—but + what of the people who crowd with blood-thirsty eagerness to watch those + qualities exhibited in so tragic a fashion for their amusement? Do they + gain any of his qualities of skill and courage, and strength and + fearlessness in the face of death? No, they are merely brutalized by + cruel excitement—and while they applaud his skill and admire his + courage, they long most to watch him die. So—is it not?—with our + friend the fox. The huntsman invariably compliments him on his spirit + and his cunning, but what he wants is—the brush. He wants the + excitement of hunting the living thing to its death; and, let huntsmen + say what they will about the exhilaration of the horse exercise across + country as being the main thing, they know better—and, if it be true, + why don't they take it without the fox?" +</p> +<p> + "They do in America, as, of course, you know. There a man walks across + country trailing a stick, at the end of which is a piece of cloth + impregnated with some pungent scent which hounds love and mistake for + the real thing." +</p> +<p> + "Hard on the poor hounds!" smiled my friend. "Even worse than a red + herring. You could hardly blame the dogs if they mistook the man for + Actaeon and tore him to pieces." +</p> +<p> + "And I suspect that the huntsmen are no better satisfied." +</p> +<p> + "Yet, as we were saying, if the secret spring of their sport is not the + cruel delight of pursuing a living thing to its death, that American + plan should serve all the purposes, and give all the satisfaction for + which they claim to follow the hounds: the keen pleasure of a gallop + across country, the excitement of its danger, the pluck and pride of + taking a bad fence, and equally, too, the pleasure of watching the + hounds cleverly at work with their mysterious gift of scent. All the + same, I suspect there are few sportsmen who would not vote it a tame + substitute. Without something being killed, the zest, the 'snap,' is + gone. It is as depressing as a sham fight." +</p> +<p> + "Yes, that mysterious shedding of blood! what a part it has played in + human history! Even religion countenances it, and war glorifies it. Men + are never in higher spirits than when they are going to kill, or be + killed themselves, or see something else killed. Tennyson's 'ape and + tiger' die very hard in the tamest of us." +</p> +<p> + "Alas, indeed they do!" said my friend with a sigh. "But I do believe + that they are dying none the less. Just of late there has been a + reaction in favour of brute force, and people like you and me have been + ridiculed as old-fashioned sentimentalists. But reaction is one of the + laws of advance. Human progress always takes a step backwards after it + has taken two forward. And so it must be here too. In the end, it is the + highest type among men and nations that count, and the highest types + among both today are those which show most humanity, shrink most from + the infliction of pain. When one thinks of the horrible cruelties that + were the legal punishment of criminals, even within the last two hundred + years, and not merely brutal criminals, but also political offenders or + so-called heretics—how every one thought it the natural and proper + thing to break a man on the wheel for a difference of opinion, or + torture him with hideous ingenuity into a better frame of mind, and + how the pettiest larcenies were punished by death; it seems as if we + of today, even the least sensitive of us, cannot belong to the same + race—and it is impossible to deny that the heart of the world has grown + softer and that pity is becoming more and more a natural instinct in + human nature. I believe that some day it will have thrust out cruelty + altogether, and that the voluntary infliction of pain upon another will + be unknown. The idea of any one killing for pleasure will seem too + preposterous to be believed, and soldiers and fox-hunters and + pigeon-shooters will be spoken of as nowadays we speak of cannibals. + But, of course, I am a dreamer," he concluded, his face shining with his + gentle dream, as though he had been a veritable saint of the calendar. +</p> +<p> + "Yes, a dream," he added presently, "and yet—" In that "and yet" + there was a world of invincible faith that made it impossible not to + share his dream, even see it building before one's eyes—such is the + magnetic power of a passionate personal conviction. +</p> +<p> + "Of course," he went on again, "we all know that 'nature is one with + rapine, a harm no preacher can heal.' But because the fox runs off with + the goose, or the hawk swoops down on the chicken, and 'yon whole little + wood is a world of plunder and prey'—is that any reason why we should + be content to plunder and prey too? And after all, the cruelty of Nature + is only one-sided. There is lots of pity in Nature too. These strange + little wild lives around us are not entirely bent on killing and eating + each other. They know the tenderness of motherhood, the sweetness of + building a home together, and I believe there is far more comradeship + and mutual help amongst them than we know of. Yes, even in wild Nature + there is a principle of love working no less than a principle of hate. + Nature is not all-devouring and destroying. She is loving and building + too. Nature is more constructive than destructive, and she is ever at + work evolving and evolving a higher dream. Surely it is not for man, to + whom, so far as we know, Nature has entrusted the working out of her + finest impulses, and whom she has endowed with all the fairy apparatus + of the soul; it is not for him, whose eyes—of all her children—Nature + has opened, the one child she has taken into her confidence and to whom + she has whispered her secret hopes and purposes; surely it is not for + man voluntarily to deny his higher lot, and, because the wolf and he + have come from the same great mother, say: 'I am no better than the + wolf. Why should I not live the life of a wolf—and kill and devour like + my brother?' Surely it is not for the cruel things in Nature to teach + man cruelty—rather, if it were possible," and the saint smiled at his + fancy, "would it be the mission of man to teach them kindness: rather + should he preach pity to the hawk and peace between the panther and the + bear. It is not the bad lessons of Nature, but the good, that are meant + for man—though, as you must have noticed, man seldom appeals to the + precedents of Nature except to excuse that in him which is Nature at her + worst. When we say, 'it is only natural,' we almost invariably refer to + that in Nature of which Nature herself has entrusted the refinement or + the elimination to man. It is Nature's bad we copy, not Nature's good; + and always we forget that we ourselves are a part of Nature—Nature's + vicegerent, so to say, upon the earth—" +</p> +<p> + As we talked, we had been approaching a house built high among the + heather, with windows looking over all the surrounding country. + Presently, the saint stopped in front of it. +</p> +<p> + "This is my house," he said. "Won't you come in and see me some + time?—and, by the way, I am going to talk to some of the village + children about the wild things, bird's nesting, and so forth, up at the + schoolhouse on Thursday. I wish you'd come and help me. One's only hope + is with the children. The grown-up are too far gone. Mind you come." +</p> +<p> + So we parted, and, as I walked across the hill homeward, haunted by that + gentle face, I thought of Melampus, that old philosopher who loved the + wild things so and had made such friends with them, that they had taught + him their language and told him all their secrets: +</p> +<pre class="si"> + With love exceeding a simple love of the things + That glide in grasses and rubble of woody wreck; + Or change their perch on a beat of quivering wings + From branch to branch, only restful to pipe and peck; + Or, bridled, curl at a touch their snouts in a ball; + Or cast their web between bramble and thorny hook; + The good physician, Melampus, loving them all, + Among them walked, as a scholar who reads a book. +</pre> +<p> + As I dipped into the little thick-set wood that surrounds my house, + something stood for a second in one of the openings, then was gone like + a shadow. I was glad to think how full of bracken and hollows, and + mysterious holes and corners of mossed and lichened safety was our old + wood—for the shadow was a fox. I like to think it was the very fox we + had been talking about come to find shelter with me—and, if he stole a + meal out of our hen-roost, I gave it him before he asked it, with all + the will in the world. I hope he chose a good fat hen, and not one of + your tough old capons that sometimes come to table. +</p> +<a name="2H_4_19"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<h2> + XV +</h2> +<h3> + THE LITTLE GHOST IN THE GARDEN +</h3> +<p> </p> + +<p> + I don't know in what corner of the garden his busy little life now takes + its everlasting rest. None of us had the courage to stand by, that + summer morning, when Morris, our old negro man, buried him, and we felt + sympathetic for Morris that the sad job should fall upon him, for Morris + loved him just as we did. Perhaps if we had loved him less, more + sentimentally than deeply, we should have indulged in some sort of + appropriate ceremonial, and marked his grave with a little stone. But, + as I have said, his grave, like that of the great prophet, is a secret + to this day. None of us has ever asked Morris about it, and his grief + has been as reticent as our own. I wondered the other night, as I walked + the garden in a veiled moonlight, whether it was near the lotus-tanks he + was lying—for I remembered how he would stand there, almost by the + hour, watching the goldfish that we had engaged to protect us against + mosquitoes, moving mysteriously under the shadows of the great flat + leaves. In his short life he grew to understand much of this strange + world, but he never got used to those goldfish; and often I have seen + him, after a long wistful contemplation of them, turn away with a sort + of half-frightened, puzzled bark, as though to say that he gave it up. + Or, does he lie, I wonder, somewhere among the long grass of the + salt-marsh, that borders our garden, and in perigee tides widens out + into a lake. There indeed would be his appropriate country, for there + was the happy hunting-ground through which in life he was never tired of + roaming, in the inextinguishable hope of mink, and with the occasional + certainty of a water-rat. +</p> +<p> + He had come to us almost as mysteriously as he went away; a fox-terrier + puppy wandered out of the Infinite to the neighbourhood of our ice-box, + one November morning, and now wandered back again. Technically, he was + just graduating out of puppyhood, though, like the most charming human + beings, he never really grew up, and remained, in behaviour and + imagination, a puppy to the end. He was a dog of good breed and good + manners, evidently with gentlemanly antecedents canine and human. There + were those more learned in canine aristocracy than ourselves who said + that his large leaf-like, but very becoming, ears meant a bar sinister + somewhere in his pedigree, but to our eyes those only made him + better-looking; and, for the rest of him, he was race—race nervous, + sensitive, refined, and courageous—from the point of his all-searching + nose to the end of his stub of a tail, which the conventional docking + had seemed but to make the more expressive. We had already one dog in + the family when he arrived, and two Maltese cats. With the cats he was + never able to make friends, in spite of persistent well-intentioned + efforts. It was evident to us that his advances were all made in the + spirit of play, and from a desire of comradeship, the two crowning needs + of his blithe sociable spirit. But the cats received them in an attitude + of invincible distrust, of which his poor nose frequently bore the sorry + signature. Yet they had become friendly enough with the other dog, an + elderly setter, by name Teddy, whose calm, lordly, slow-moving ways were + due to a combination of natural dignity, vast experience of life, and + some rheumatism. As Teddy would sit philosophizing by the hearth of an + evening, immovable and plunged in memories, yet alert on the instant to + a footfall a quarter of a mile away, they would rub their sinuous + smoke-grey bodies to and fro beneath his jaws, just as though he were a + piece of furniture; and he would take as little notice of them as though + he were the leg of the piano; though sometimes he would wag his tail + gently to and fro, or rap it softly on the floor, as though appreciating + the delicate attention. +</p> +<p> </p> +<p> + Of Teddy's reception of the newcomer we had at first some slight + misgiving, for, amiable as we have just seen him with his Maltese + companions, and indeed as he is generally by nature, his is the + amiability that comes of conscious power, and is his, so to say, by + right of conquest; for of all neighbouring dogs he is the acknowledged + king. The reverse of quarrelsome, the peace of his declining years has + been won by much historical fighting, and his reputation among the dogs + of his acquaintance is such that it is seldom necessary for him to + assert his position. It is only some hapless stranger ignorant of his + standing that will occasionally provoke him to a display of those + fighting qualities he grows more and more reluctant to employ. Even with + such he is comparatively merciful; stern, but never brutal. Usually all + that is necessary is for him to look at them steadfastly for a few + moments in a peculiar way. This seems to convince them that, after all, + discretion is the better part, and slowly and sadly they turn around in + a curious cowed way, and walk off, apparently too scared to run, with + Teddy, like Fate, grimly at their heels, steadily "pointing" them off + the premises. We were a little anxious, therefore, as to how Teddy would + take our little terrier, with his fussy, youthful self-importance, and + eternal restless poking into other folks' affairs. But Teddy, as we + might have told ourselves, had had a long and varied experience of + terriers, and had nothing to learn from us. Yet I have no doubt that, + with his instinctive courtesy, he divined the wishes of the family in + regard to the newcomer, and was, therefore, predisposed in his favour. + This, however, did not save the evidently much overawed youngster from a + stern and searching examination, the most trying part of which seemed + to be that long, silent, hypnotizing contemplation of him, which is + Teddy's way of asserting his dignity. The little dog visibly trembled + beneath the great one's gaze, his tongue hanging out of his mouth, and + his eyes wandering helplessly from side to side; and he seemed to be + saying, in his dog way: "O yes! I know you are a very great and + important personage—and I am only a poor little puppy of no importance. + Only please let me go on living—and you will see how well I will + behave." Teddy seemed to be satisfied that some such recognition and + submission had been tendered him; so presently he wagged his tail, that + had up till then been rigid as a ramrod, and not only the little + terrier, but all of us, breathed again. Yet it was some time before + Teddy would admit him into anything like what one might call intimacy, + and premature attempts at gamesome familiarity were checked by the + gathering thunder of a lazy growl that unmistakably bade the youngster + keep his place. But real friendship eventually grew between them, + on Teddy's side a sort of big-brother affectionate tutelage and + guardianship, and on Puppy's—for, though we tried many, we never found + any other satisfactory name for him but "Puppy"—a reverent admiration + and watchful worshipping imitation. No great man was ever more anxiously + copied by some slavish flatterer than that old sleepy carelessly-great + setter by that eager, ambitious little terrier. The occasions when to + bark and when not to bark, for example. One could actually see Puppy + studying the old dog's face on doubtful occasions of the kind. Boiling + over, as he visibly was, with the desire to bark his soul out, yet he + could be seen unmistakably restraining himself, till Teddy, after some + preliminary soliloquizing in deep undertones, had made up his mind that + the suspicious shuffling-by of probably some inoffensive Italian workman + demanded investigation, and lumberingly risen to his feet and made for + the door. Then, like a bunch of firecrackers, Puppy was at the heels, + all officious assistance, and the two would disappear like an old and a + young thunderbolt into the resounding distance. +</p> +<p> </p> +<p> + Teddy's friendship had seemed to be definitely won on an occasion which + brought home to one the quaint resemblance between the codes and ways of + dogs and those of schoolboys. When the winter came on, a rather severe + one, it soon became evident that the little short-haired fellow suffered + considerably from the cold. Out on walks, he was visibly shivering, + though he made no fuss about it. So one of the angels in the house + knitted for him a sort of woollen sweater buttoned down his neck and + under his belly, and trimmed it with some white fur that gave it an + exceedingly smart appearance. Teddy did not happen to be there when it + was first tried on, and, for the moment, Puppy had to be content with + our admiration, and his own vast sense of importance. Certainly, a more + self-satisfied terrier never was than he who presently sped out, to air + his new finery before an astonished neighbourhood. But alas! you should + have seen him a few minutes afterwards. We had had the curiosity to + stroll out to see how he had got on, and presently, in a bit of rocky + woodland near by, we came upon a curious scene. In the midst of a clump + of red cedars, three great dogs, our Teddy, a wicked old black + retriever, and a bustling be-wigged and be-furred collie, stood in a + circle round Puppy, seated on his haunches, trembling with fear, tongue + lolling and eyes wandering, for all the world as though they were + holding a court-martial, or, at all events, a hazing-party. The offence + evidently lay with that dandified new sweater. One and another of the + dogs smelt at it, then tugged at it in evident disgust; and, as each + time Puppy made a move to get away, all girt him round with guttural + thunder of disapproval, as much as to say: "Do you call that a thing for + a manly dog to go around in? You ought to be ashamed of yourself, you + miserable dandy." +</p> +<p> + We couldn't help reflecting that it was all very well for those great + comfortable long-haired dogs to talk, naturally protected as they were + from the cold. Yet that evidently cut no figure with them, and they went + on sniffing and tugging and growling, till we thought our poor Puppy's + eyes and tongue would drop out with fear. Yet, all the time, they + seemed to be enjoying his plight, seemed to be smiling grimly together, + wicked old experienced brutes as they were. +</p> +<p> + Presently the idea of the thing seemed to occur to Puppy, or out of his + extremity a new soul was born within him, for suddenly an infinite + disgust of his new foppery seemed to take possession of him too, and, + regaining his courage, he turned savagely upon it, ripping it this way + and that, and struggling with might and main to rid himself of the + accursed thing. Presently he stood free, and barks of approval at once + went up from his judges. He had come through his ordeal, and was once + more a dog among dogs. Great was the rejoicing among his friends, and + the occasion having been duly celebrated by joint destruction and + contumely of the offending garment, Teddy and he returned home, friends + for life. +</p> +<p> </p> +<p> + It is to be feared that that friendship, deep and tender as it grew to + be on both sides, perhaps particularly on Teddy's, was the indirect + cause of Puppy's death. I have referred to Teddy's bark, and how he is + not wont to waste it on trivial occasions, or without due thought. On + the other hand, he is proud of it, and loves to practice it—just for + its own sake, particularly on early mornings, when, however fine a bark + it is, most of our neighbours would rather continue sleeping than wake + up to listen to it. There is no doubt at all, for those who understand + him, that it is a purely artistic bark. He means no harm to any one by + it. When the milkman, his private enemy, comes at seven, the bark is + quite different. This barking of Teddy's seems to be literally at + nothing. Around five o'clock on summer mornings, he plants himself on a + knob of rock overlooking the salt marsh and barks, possibly in honour of + the rising sun, but with no other perceptible purpose. So have I heard + men rise in the dawn to practice the cornet—but they were men, so they + ran no risk of their lives. Teddy's practicing, however, has now been + carried on for several years in the teeth of no little peril; and, had + it not been for much human influence employed on his behalf, he would + long since have antedated his little friend in Paradise. When that + little friend, however, came to assist and emulate him in those morning + recitals, adding to his bark an occasional—I am convinced purely + playful—bite, I am inclined to think that a sentiment grew in the + neighbourhood that one dog at a time was enough. At all events, Teddy + still barks at dawn as of old, but our little Puppy barks no more. +</p> +<p> + Before the final quietus came to him, there were several occasions on + which the Black dog, called Death, had almost caught him in his jaws. + One there was in especial. He had, I believe, no hatred for any living + thing save Italian workmen and automobiles. I have seen an Italian + workman throw his pick-axe at him, and then take to his heels in + grotesque flight. But the pick-axe missed him, as did many another + clumsily hurled missile. +</p> +<p> </p> +<p> + An automobile, however, on one occasion, came nearer its mark. Like + every other dog that ever barked, particularly terriers, Puppy delighted + to harass the feet of fast trotting horses, mockingly running ahead of + them, barking with affected savagery, and by a miracle evading their + on-coming hoofs—which to him, tiny thing as he was, must have seemed + like trip-hammers pounding down from the sky. But horses understand such + gaiety in terriers. They understand that it is only their foolish fun. + Automobiles are different. They have no souls. They see nothing engaging + in having their tires snapped at, as they whirl swiftly by; and, one + day, after Puppy had flung himself in a fine fury at the tires of one of + these soulless things, he gave a sharp yelp—"not cowardly!"—and lay a + moment on the roadside. But only a moment; then he went limping off on + his three sound legs, and hid himself away from all sympathy, in some + unknown spot. It was in vain we called and sought him, and only after + two days was he discovered, in the remotest corner of a great rocky + cellar, determined apparently to die alone in an almost inaccessible + privacy of wood and coal. Yet, when at last we persuaded him that life + was still sweet and carried him upstairs into the great living-room, and + the beautiful grandmother, who knows the sorrows of animals almost as + the old Roman seer knew the languages of beasts and birds, had taken + him in charge and made a cosy nest of comforters for him by the fire, + and tempted his languid appetite—to which the very thought of bones + was, of course, an offence—with warm, savory-smelling soup; then, he + who had certainly been no coward—for his thigh was a cruel lump of pain + which no human being would have kept so patiently to himself—became + suddenly, like many human invalids, a perfect glutton of self-pity; and + when we smoothed and patted him and told him how sorry we were, it was + laughable, and almost uncanny, how he suddenly set up a sort of moaning + talk to us, as much as to say that he certainly had had a pretty bad + time, was really something of a hero, and deserved all the sympathy we + would give him. So far as one can be sure about anything so mysterious + as animals, I am sure that from then on he luxuriated in his little + hospital by the fireside, and played upon the feelings of his beautiful + nurse, and of his various solicitous visitors, with all the histrionic + skill of the spoiled and petted convalescent. Suddenly, however, one + day, he forgot his part. He heard some inspiring barking going on + nearby—and, in a flash, his comforters were thrust aside, and he was + off and away to join the fun. Then, of course, we knew that he was well + again; though he still went briskly about his various business on three + legs for several days. +</p> +<p> + His manner was quite different, however, the afternoon he had so + evidently come home to die. There was no pose about the little forlorn + figure, which, after a mysterious absence of two days, suddenly + appeared, as we were taking tea on the veranda, already the very ghost + of himself. Wearily he sought the cave of the beautiful grandmother's + skirts, where, whenever he had had a scolding, he was wont always to + take refuge—barking, fiercely, as from an inaccessible fortress, at his + enemies. +</p> +<p> </p> +<p> + But, this afternoon, there was evidently no bark in him, poor little + fellow; everything about him said that he had just managed to crawl home + to die. His brisk white coat seemed dank with cold dews, and there was + something shadowy about him and strangely quiet. His eyes, always so + alert, were strangely heavy and indifferent, yet questioning and somehow + accusing. He seemed to be asking us why a little dog should suffer so, + and what was going to happen to him, and what did it all mean. Alas! We + could not tell him; and none of us dare say to each other that our + little comrade in the mystery of life was going to die. But a silence + fell over us all, and the beautiful grandmother took him into her care, + and so well did her great and wise heart nurse him through the night + that next morning it almost seemed as though we had been wrong; for a + flash of his old spirit was in him again, and, though his little legs + shook under him, it was plain that he wanted to try and be up at his + day's work on the veranda, warning off the passer-by, or in the garden + carrying on his eternal investigations, or farther afield in the + councils and expeditions of his fellows. So we let him have his way, and + for a while he seemed happier and stronger for the sunshine, and the old + familiar scents and sounds. But the one little tired husky bark he gave + at his old enemy, the Italian workman, passing by, would have broken + your heart; and the effort he made with a bone, as he visited the + well-remembered neighbourhood of the ice-box for the last time, was + piteous beyond telling. Those sharp, strong teeth that once could bite + and grind through anything could do nothing with it now. To lick it + sadly with tired lips, in a sort of hopeless way, was all that was left; + and there was really a look in his face as though he accepted this + mortal defeat, as he lay down, evidently exhausted with his exertions, + on a bank nearby. But once more his spirit seemed to revive, and he + scrambled to his legs again and wearily crawled to the back of the + house, where the beautiful grandmother loves to sit and look over the + glittering salt-marsh in the summer afternoons. +</p> +<p> </p> +<p> + Of course, he knew that she was there. She had been his best friend in + this strange world. His last effort was naturally to be near her again. + Almost he reached that kind cave of her skirts. Only another yard or two + and he had been there. But the energy that had seemed irrepressible and + everlasting had come to its end, and the little body had to give in at + last, and lie down wearily once more with no life left but the love in + its fading eyes. +</p> +<p> + There are some, I suppose, who may wonder how one can write about the + death of a mere dog like this; and cannot understand how the death of a + little terrier can make the world seem a lonelier place. But there are + others, I know, who will scarce need telling, men and women with little + ghosts of their own haunting their moonlit gardens; strange, appealing, + faithful companions, kind little friendly beings that journeyed with + them awhile the pilgrimage of the soul. +</p> +<p> + I often wonder if Teddy misses his little busy playfellow and disciple + as we do; if, perhaps, as he barks over the marsh of a morning, he is + sending him a message. He goes about the place with nonchalant greatness + as of old, and the Maltese cats still rub their sinuous smoke-grey + bodies to and fro beneath his jaws at evening. There is no sign of + sorrow upon him. But he is old and very wise, and keeps strange + knowledge to himself. So, who can say? +</p> +<a name="2H_4_20"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<h2> + XVI +</h2> +<h3> + THE ENGLISH COUNTRYSIDE +</h3> +<p> </p> + +<p> + For the genuine lover of nature, as distinct from the connoisseur of + dainty or spectacular "scenery," nature has always and everywhere some + charm or satisfaction. He will find it no less—some say more—in winter + than in summer, and I have little doubt that the great Alkali Desert is + not entirely without its enthusiasts. The nature among which we spent + our childhood is apt to have a lasting hold on us, in defiance of + showier competition, and I suppose there is no land with soul so dead + that it does not boast itself the fairest under heaven. +</p> +<p> + I am writing this surrounded by a natural scene which I would not + exchange for the Swiss lakes, yet I presume it is undeniable that + Switzerland has a more universal reputation for natural beauty than + Connecticut. It is, as we say, one of the show places of the earth. So + Niagara Falls, the Grand Cañon, the Rockies, and California generally + lord it over America. Italy has such a reputation for beauty that it is + almost unfair to expect her to live up to it. I once ventured to say + that the Alps must be greasy with being climbed, and it says much for + such stock pieces in nature's repertoire, that, in spite of all the wear + and tear of sentimental travellers, the mock-admiration of generations, + the batteries of amateur cameras, the Riviera, the English lakes, the + Welsh mountains, the Highlands of Scotland, and other tourist-trodden + classics of the picturesque, still remain haunts of beauty and joys + forever. God's masterpieces do not easily wear out. +</p> +<p> + Every country does something supremely well, and England may be said to + have a patent for a certain kind of scenery which Americans are the + first to admire. English scenery has no more passionate pilgrim than the + traveller from the United States, as the visitors' books of its various + show-places voluminously attest. Perhaps it is not difficult, when one + has lived in both countries, to understand why. +</p> +<p> + While America, apart from its impressive natural splendours, is rich + also in idyllic and pastoral landscape, it has, as yet, but little + "countryside." I say, as yet, because "the countryside," I think I am + right in feeling, is not entirely a thing of nature's making, but + rather a collaboration resulting from nature and man living so long in + partnership together. In England, with which the word is peculiarly, if + not exclusively, associated, God is not entirely to be credited with + making the country. Man has for generations also done his share. +</p> +<p> + It is perhaps not without significance that the word "countryside" + was not to be found in Webster's dictionary, till a recent edition. + Originally, doubtless, it was used with reference to those rural + districts in the vicinity of a town; as one might say the country side + of the town. Not wild or solitary nature was meant, but nature + humanized, made companionable by the presence and occupations of man; a + nature which had made the winding highway, the farm, and the pasture, + even the hamlet, with its church tower and its ancient inn, one with + herself. +</p> +<p> + The American, speeding up to London from his landing either at Liverpool + or Southampton, always exclaims on the gardenlike aspect, the deep, rich + greenness of the landscape. It is not so much the specific evidences of + cultivation, though those, of course, are plentifully present, but a + general air of ripeness and order. Even the land not visible under + cultivation suggests immemorial care and fertility. We feel that this + land has been fought over and ploughed over, nibbled over by sheep, sown + and reaped, planted and drained, walked over, hunted over, and very much + beloved, for centuries. It is not fanciful to see in it a land to + which its people have been stubbornly and tenderly devoted—still + "Shakespeare's England," still his favoured "isle set in the silver + sea." +</p> +<p> + As seen from the railway-carriage window, one is struck, too, by the + comparative tidiness of the English landscape. There are few loose ends, + and the outskirts of villages are not those distressing dump-heaps + which they too often are in America. Yet there is no excessive air of + trimness. The order and grooming seem a part of nature's processes. + There is, too, a casual charm about the villages themselves, the + graceful, accidental grouping of houses and gardens, which suggests + growth rather than premeditation. The general harmony does not preclude, + but rather comes of, the greatest variety of individual character. +</p> +<p> + Herein the English village strikingly differs from the typical New + England village, where the charm comes of a prim uniformity, and + individuality is made to give place to a general parking of lawns and + shade-trees in rectangular blocks and avenues. A New England village + suggests some large institution disposed in separate uniform buildings, + placed on one level carpet of green, each with a definite number of + trees, and the very sunlight portioned out into gleaming allotments. + The effect gained is for me one of great charm—the charm of a vivid, + exquisitely ordered, green silence, with a touch of monastic, or + Quakerish, decorum. I would not have it otherwise, and I speak of it + only to suggest by contrast the different, desultory charm of an old + English village, where beauty has not been so much planned, as has just + "occurred." +</p> +<p> + Of course, this is the natural result of the long occupation of the + land. Each century in succession has had a hand in shaping the + countryside to its present aspect, and English history is literally a + living visible part of English scenery. Here the thirteenth century has + left a church, here the fourteenth a castle, here the sixteenth, with + its suppression of the monasteries, a ruined abbey. Here is an inn where + Chaucer's pilgrims stopped on the way to Canterbury. Here, in a field + covered over by a cow-shed, is a piece of tessellated pavement which was + once the floor of an old country house occupied by one of Caesar's + generals. +</p> +<p> + Those strange grassy mounds breaking the soft sky-line of the rolling + South Downs are the tombs of Saxon chieftains, that rubble of stones at + the top of yonder hill was once a British camp, and those curious ridges + terracing yonder green slope mark the trenches of some prehistoric + battlefield. All these in the process of time have become part and + parcel of the English countryside, as necessary to its "English" + character as its trees and its wild flowers. +</p> +<p> + How much, too, the English countryside owes for its beauty to the many + old manor-houses, gabled and moated, with their quaint, mossy-walled + gardens and great forestlike parks. Whatever we may think of the English + territorial system as economics, its service to English scenery has been + incalculable. Without English traditionalism we should hardly have had + the English countryside. +</p> +<p> + The conservation of great estates, entailing a certain conservatism in + the treatment of farm lands from generation to generation, and the + upholding, too, of game-preserves, however obnoxious to the land + reformer, have been all to the good of the nature-lover. We owe no + little of the beauty of the English woodland to the English pheasant; + and with the coming of land nationalization we may expect to see + considerable changes in the English countryside. Meanwhile, in spite of, + or perhaps because of, the feudalistic character of English landlordism, + the Englishman enjoys a right of walking over his native land of which + no capitalist can rob him. Hence results another charming feature of the + English countryside—the footpaths you see everywhere winding over hill + and dale, through field and coppice. The ancient rights of these are + safeguarded to the people forever by statute no wealth can defy; and, + let any <i>nouveau riche</i> of a landlord try to close one of them, and + he has to reckon with one of the pluckiest and most persistent + organizations of English John Hampdens, the society that makes the + protection of these traditional pathways its particular care. So the + rich man cannot lock up his trees and his woodland glades all for + himself, but is compelled to share them to the extent of allowing the + poorest pedestrian to walk through them—which is about all the rich man + can do with them himself. +</p> +<p> + These footpaths, in conjunction with English lanes, have made the charm + of walking tours in England proverbial. Certain counties particularly + pride themselves on their lands. Surrey and Devonshire are the great + rivals in this respect. We say "Surrey lanes" or "Devonshire lanes," + as we speak of "Italian skies" or "Southern hospitality." Other + counties—Warwickshire, for example—doubtless have lanes no less + lovely, but Surrey and Devonshire have, so to say, got the decision; + and, if an American traveller wants to see a typical English lane, he + goes to Surrey or Devonshire, just as, if he wants a typical English + pork-pie, he sends to Melton Mowbray. +</p> +<p> + And the English lane has come honestly by its reputation. You may be + disappointed in Venice, but you will be hard to please if you are not + caught by the spell of an English lane. Of course, you must not expect + to feel that spell if you tear through it in a motor-car. It was made + for the loiterer, as its whimsical twists and turns plainly show. If you + are in a hurry, you had better keep to the king's highway, stretching + swift and white on the king's business. The English lane was made for + the leisurely meandering of cows to and from pasture, for the dreamy + snail-pace of time-forgetting lovers, for children gathering primroses + or wild strawberries, or for the knap-sacked wayfarer to whom time and + space are no objects, whose destination is anywhere and nowhere, whose + only clocks are the rising sun and the evening star, and to whom the way + means more than the goal. +</p> +<p> + I should not have spoken of it as "made," for, when it is most + characteristic, an English lane has no suggestion of ever having been + man-made like other roads. It seems as much a natural feature as the + woods or meadows through which it passes; and sometimes, as in Surrey, + when it runs between high banks, tunnelling its way under green boughs, + it seems more like an old river-bed than a road, whose sides nature has + tapestried with ferns and flowers. Of all roads in the world it is the + dreamer's road, luring on the wayfarer with perpetual romantic promise + and surprise, winding on and on, one can well believe, into the very + heart of fairy-land. Everything beautiful seems to be waiting for us + somewhere in the turnings of an English lane. +</p> +<p> + Had I sat down to write of the English countryside two years ago, I + should have done so with a certain amount of cautious skepticism. I + should have said to myself: "You have not visited England for over ten + years. Are you quite sure that your impressions of its natural beauties + are not the rose-coloured exaggerations of memory? Are not time and + distance lending their proverbial enchantment?" In fact, as I set sail + to revisit England, the spring before last, it was in some such mood of + anticipatory disillusion. +</p> +<p> + After all, I had said to myself, is not the English countryside the work + of the English poets—the English spring, the English wild flowers, the + English lark, the English nightingale, and so forth? That longing of + Browning expressed in the lines, +</p> +<pre> + O to be in England + Now that April's there! +</pre> +<p class="noindent"> + was, after all, the cry of a homesick versifier, thinking "Home + Thoughts, from Abroad"; and are Herrick and Wordsworth quite to be + trusted on the subject of daffodils? +</p> +<p> + Well, I am glad to have to own that my revisiting my native land + resulted in an agreeable disappointment. With a critical American eye, + jealously on my guard against sentimental superstition, I surveyed the + English landscape and examined its various vaunted beauties and + fascinations, as though making their acquaintance for the first time. + No, my youthful raptures had not been at fault, and the poets were once + more justified. The poets are seldom far wrong. If they see anything, it + is usually there. If we cannot see it, too, it is the fault of our eyes. +</p> +<p> + Take the English hawthorn, for instance. As its fragrance is wafted to + you from the bushes where it hangs like the fairest of white linen, you + will hardly, I think, quarrel with its praises. Yet, though it is, if I + am not mistaken, of rare occurrence in America, it is not absolutely + necessary to go to England for the hawthorn. Any one who cares to go + a-Maying along the banks of the Hudson, in the neighbourhood of + Peekskill, will find it there. But for the primrose and the cowslip you + must cross the sea; and, if you come upon such a wood as I strayed into, + my last visit, you will count it worth the trip. It was literally + carpeted with clumps of primroses and violets (violets that smell, too) + so thickly massed together in the mossy turf that there was scarcely + room to tread. There are no words rich or abundant enough to suggest the + sense of innocent luxury brought one by such a natural Persian carpet of + soft gold and dewy purple, at once so gorgeous and yet so gentle. In all + this lavish loveliness of English wild flowers there is, indeed, a + peculiar tenderness. The innocence of children seems to be in them, and + the tenderness of lovers. +</p> +<pre> + A lover would not tread + A cowslip on the head— +</pre> +<p> + How appropriately such lines come to mind as one carefully picks one's + way down a green hillside yellow with cowslips, and breathing perhaps + the most delicate of all flowery fragrances. Yet again, as we pass into + another stretch of woodland, another profusion and another fragrance + await us, the winey perfume and the spectral blue sheen of the wild + hyacinth. As one comes upon stretches of these hyacinths in the woods, + they seem at first glance like pools of blue water or fallen pieces of + the sky. Here, for once, the poets are left behind, and, of them all, + Shakespeare and Milton alone have come near to suggesting the + loveliness, at once so spiritual and so warmly and sweetly of the earth, + that belongs to English wild flowers. I know not if Sheffield steel + still keeps its position among the eternal verities, but in an age when + so many of one's cherished beliefs are threatened with the scrap-heap, + I count it of no small importance to be able to retain one's faith in + the English lark and English wild flowers. +</p> +<p> + But the English countryside is not all greenness and softness, blossomy + lanes, moated granges, and idyllic villages. It by no means always + suggests the gardener, the farmer, or the gamekeeper. It is rich, too, + in wildness and solitude, in melancholy fens and lonely moorlands. To + the American accustomed to the vast areas of his own enormous continent, + it would come as a surprise to realize that a land far smaller than many + of his States can in certain places give one so profound a sense of the + wilderness. Yet I doubt if a man could feel lonelier anywhere in the + world than on a Yorkshire moor or on Salisbury Plain. +</p> +<p> + After all, we are apt to forget that, even on the largest continent, we + can see only a limited portion of the earth at once. When one is in the + middle of Lake Erie we are as much out of sight of land, as impressed by + the illusion of boundless water, as if we were in the middle of the + Pacific Ocean. So, on Salisbury Plain, with nothing but rolling billows + of close-cropped turf, springy and noiseless to the tread, as far as the + eye can see, one feels as alone with the universe as in the middle of + some Asian desert. In addition to the actual loneliness of the scene, + and a silence broken only by the occasional tinkle of sheep-bells, as a + flock moves like a fleecy cloud across the grass, is an imaginative + loneliness induced by the overwhelming sense of boundless unrecorded + time, the "dim-grey-grown ages," of which the mysterious boulders of + Stonehenge are the voiceless witnesses. To experience this feeling to + the full one should come upon an old Roman road in the twilight, + grass-grown, choked with underbrush, but still running straight and + clearly defined as when it shook to the tread of Roman legions. It is + eery to follow one of these haunted roads, filled with the far-off + thoughts and fancies it naturally evokes, and then suddenly to come out + again into the world of today, as it joins the highway once more, and + the lights of a wayside inn welcome us back to humanity, with perhaps a + touring car standing at the door. +</p> +<p> + One need hardly say that the English wayside inn is as much a feature of + the English countryside as the English hawthorn. Its praises have been + the theme of essayists and poets for generations, and at its best there + is a cosiness and cheer about it which warm the heart, as its quaintness + and savour of past days keep alive the sense of romantic travel. There + the spirit of ancient hospitality still survives, and, though the + motor-car has replaced the stage-coach, that is, after all, but a + detail, and the old, low-ceilinged rooms, the bay windows with their + leaded panes, the tap-room with its shining vessels, the great kitchen, + the solid English fare, the brass candlesticks at bedtime, and the + lavendered sheets, still preserve the atmosphere of a novel by Fielding + or an essay by Addison. +</p> +<p> + There still, as in Shakespeare's day, one can take one's ease at one's + inn, as perhaps in the hostelries of no other land. It is the frequency + and excellence of these English inns that make it charmingly possible to + see England, as it is best seen, on foot or on a bicycle. It is not a + country of isolated wonders, with long stretches of mere road between. + Every mile counts for something. But, if the luxury of walking it with + stick and knapsack is denied us, and we must needs see it by motor-car, + we cannot fail to make one observation, that of the surprising variety + of natural scenery packed in so small a space. Between Land's End and + the Tweed the eye and the imagination have encountered every form of the + picturesque. In an area some three hundred and fifty miles long by three + hundred broad are contained the ruggedness of Cornwall, the idyllic + softness of Devon, the dreamy solitudes of the South Downs, with their + billowy, chalky contours, the agricultural fertility of Kent and + Middlesex, the romantic woodlands and hilly pastures of Surrey, the + melancholy fens of Lincolnshire, the broad, bosky levels of the + midlands, the sudden wildness of Wales, with her mountains and glens, + Yorkshire, with its grim, heather-clad moors, Westmoreland, with its + fells and Wordsworthian "Lakes"; every note in the gamut of natural + beauty has been struck, from honeysuckle prettiness to savage grandeur. +</p> +<p> + Yet, although all these contrasts are included in the English scene, it + is not of solitude or grandeur that we think when we speak of the + English countryside. They are the exceptions to the rule of a gentler, + more humanized natural beauty, in which the village church and the + ivy-clad ruin play their part. Perhaps some such formula as this would + represent the typical scene that springs to the mind's eye with the + phrase "the English countryside": a village green, with some geese + stringing out across it. A straggle of quaint thatched cottages, roses + climbing about the windows, and in front little, carefully kept gardens, + with hollyhocks standing in rows, stocks and sweet-williams and such + old-fashioned flowers. At one end of the village, rising out of a clump + of yews, the mouldering church-tower, with mossy gravestones on one side + and a trim rectory on the other. At the other end of the village a + gabled inn, with a great stable-yard, busy with horses and waggons. + Above the village, the slopes of gently rising pastures, intersected + with footpaths and shadowed with woodlands. A little way out of the + village, an old mill with a lilied mill-pond, a great, dripping + water-wheel, and the murmur of the escaping stream. And winding on + into the green, sun-steeped distance, the blossom-hung English lanes. +</p> +<a name="2H_4_21"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<h2> + XVII +</h2> +<h3> + LONDON—CHANGING AND UNCHANGING +</h3> +<p> </p> + +<p> + I find it an unexpectedly strange experience to be in London again + after ten years in New York. I had no idea it could be so strange. Of + course, there are men to whom one great city is as another—commercial + travellers, impresarios, globe-trotting millionaires. Being none of + these, I am not as much at home in St. Petersburg as in Buda-Pesth, in + Berlin as in Paris, and, while once I might have envied such plastic + cosmopolitanism, I am realizing, this last day or two in London, that, + were such an accomplishment mine, it had been impossible for me to feel + as deeply as I do my brief reincarnation into a city and a country with + which I was once so intimate, and which now seems so romantically + strange, while remaining so poignantly familiar. The man who is at home + everywhere has nowhere any home. My home was once this London—this + England—in which I am writing; but nothing so much as being in London + again could make me realize that my home now is New York, and how long + and how instinctively, without knowing it, I have been an American. It + is not indeed that I love New York and America more than I love London + and England. In fact, London has never seemed so wonderful to me in the + past as she has seemed during these days of my wistful momentary return + to her strange great heart. But this very freshness of her marvel to one + who once deemed that he knew her so well proves but the completeness of + my spiritual acclimatization into another land. I seem to be seeing her + face, hearing her voice, for the first time; while, all the while, my + heart is full with unforgotten memories, and my eyes have scarce the + hardihood to gaze with the decorum befitting the public streets on many + a landmark of vanished hours. To find London almost as new and strange + to me as New York once seemed when I first sighted her soaring morning + towers, and yet to know her for an enchanted Ghost-Land; to be able to + find my way through her streets—in spite of the new Kingsway and + Aldwych!—with closed eyes, and yet to see her, it almost seems, for the + first time: surely it is a curious, almost uncanny, experience. +</p> +<p> + Do I find London changed?—I am asked. I have been so busy in + rediscovering what I had half-forgotten, in finding engaging novelties + in things anciently familiar, that the question is one which I feel + hardly competent to answer. For instance, I had all but forgotten that + there was so noble a thing in the world as an old-fashioned English + pork-pie. Yesterday I saw one in a window, with a thrill of recognition, + that made a friend with whom I was walking think for a moment that I + had seen a ghost. He knows nothing of the human heart who cannot realize + how tremulous with ancient heart-break may seem an old-fashioned English + pork-pie—after ten years in America. +</p> +<p> + And, again, how curiously novel and charming seemed the soft and + courteous English voices—with or without aitches—all about one in + the streets and in the shops—I had almost said the "stores." I am + enamoured of the American accent, these many years, and—the calumny of + superficial observation to the contrary—I will maintain, so far as my + own experience goes, that there is as much courtesy broadcast in America + as in any land; more, I am inclined to think than in France. Yet, for + all that, that something or other in the English voice which I had heard + long since and lost awhile smote me with a peculiar pleasure, and, + though I like the comradely American "Cap" or "Professor," and am hoping + soon to hear it again—yet the novelty of being addressed once more as + "Sir" has had, I must own, a certain antiquarian charm. +</p> +<p> + Wandering in a quaint by-street near my hotel, and reading the names and + signs on one or two of the neat old-world "places of business," I came + on the word "sweep." I believe it was on a brass-plate. For a moment, I + wondered what it meant; and then I realized, with a great gratitude, + that London had not changed so much, after all, since the days of + Charles Lamb. As I emerged into a broader thoroughfare, my ears were + smitten with the sound of minstrelsy. It is true that the tune was + changed. It was unmistakably rag-time. Yet, there was the old + piano-organ, and in a broad circle of spectators, suspended awhile from + their various wayfaring, a young man in tennis flannels was performing a + spirited Apache dance with a quite comely short-skirted young woman, who + rightly enough felt that she had no need to be ashamed of her legs. + Across the extemporized stage, every now and then, taxicabs tooted + cautiously, longing in their hearts to stay; and once a motor + coal-waggon, like a sort of amateur freight-train, thundered across; but + not even these could break the spell that held that ring of enchanted + loiterers, from which presently the pennies fell like rain—the eternal + spell—still operating, I was glad to see, under the protection of the + only human police in the world—of the strolling player in London town. + Just before the players turned to seek fresh squares and alleys new, I + noticed on the edge of the crowd what seemed, in the gathering twilight, + to be a group of uplifted spears. Spears or halberds, were they? It was + a little company of the ancient brotherhood of lamp-lighters, seduced, + like the rest of us, from the strict pursuance of duty by the vagabond + music. +</p> +<p> + To me this thought is full of reassurance, whatever be the murmurs of + change: London has still her sweeps, her strolling minstrels, and her + lamp-lighters. +</p> +<p> + Of course, I missed at once the old busses, yet there are far more + horses left than I had dared to hope, and the hansom is far from + extinct. In fact, there seems to be some promise of its renaissance, and + even yet, in the words of the ancient bard, despite the competition of + taxis— +</p> +<pre> + Like dragon-flies, + The hansoms hover + With jewelled eyes, + To catch the lover. +</pre> +<p> + Further,—the quietude of the Temple remains undisturbed, the lawns of + Gray's Inn are green as of old, the Elizabethanism of Staple Inn is + unchanged, about the cornices of the British Museum the pigeons still + flutter and coo, and the old clocks chime sweetly as of old from their + mysterious stations aloft somewhere in the morning and the evening sky. +</p> +<p> + Changes, of course, there are. It is easier to telephone in London today + than it was ten years ago—almost as easy as in some little provincial + town in Connecticut. Various minor human conveniences have been + improved. The electric lighting is better. Some of the elevators—I + mean the "lifts"—almost remind one of New York. The problem of "rapid + transit" has been simplified. All which things, however, have nothing to + do with national characteristics, but are now the common property of the + civilized, or rather, I should say, the commercialized, world, and are + probably to be found no less in full swing in Timbuctoo. No one—save, + maybe, the citizens of some small imitative nation—confounds these + things with change, or calls them "progress." The soul of a great old + nation adopts all such contrivances as in the past it has adopted new + weapons, or new modes of conveyance. Only a Hottentot or a Cook's + Tourist can consider such superficial developments as evidences of + "change." +</p> +<p> + There are, of course, some new theatres—though I have heard of no new + great actor or actress. The old "favourites" still seem to dominate the + play-bills, as they did ten years ago. There is Mr. Hammerstein's Opera + House in the Kingsway. I looked upon it with pathos. Yet, surely, it is + a monument not so much of changing London as of that London which sees + no necessity of change. +</p> +<p> + In regard to the great new roadways, Kingsway, Aldwych, and the + broadening of the Strand, I have been grateful for the temper which + seems to have presided over their making—a temper combining the + necessary readjustment of past and present, with a spirit of sensitive + conservation for those buildings which more and more England will + realize as having a lasting value for her spirit. +</p> +<p> + So far as I have observed, London has been guilty of no such vandalism + as is responsible for the new Boulevard Raspail in Paris, and similar + heartless destructiveness, in a city which belongs less to France than + to the human soul. Such cities as London and Paris are among the eternal + spiritual possessions of mankind. If only those temporarily in charge of + them could be forced somehow to remember that, when their brief mayoral, + or otherwise official, lives are past, there will be found those who + will need to look upon what they have destroyed, and who will curse them + in their graves. +</p> +<p> + Putting aside such merely superficial "changes" as new streets, new + theatres, and new conveniences, there does seem to me one change of a + far higher importance for which I have no direct evidence, and which I + can only hint at, even to myself, as "something in the air." It is, of + course, nothing new either to London or to England. It is rather the + reawakening of an old temper to which England's history has so often and + so momentously given expression. I seem to find it in a new alertness in + the way men and women walk and talk in the streets, a braced-up + expectancy and readiness for some approaching development in England's + destiny, a new quickening of that old indomitable spirit that has faced + not merely external dangers, but grappled with and resolved her own + internal problems. London seems to me like a city that has heard a voice + crying "Arise, thou that sleepest!" and is answering to the cry with + girt loins and sloth-purged heart and blithe readiness for some new + unknown summons of a future that can but develop the glory of her past. +</p> +<p> + England seems to be no more sleepily resting on her laurels, as she was + some twenty years ago. Nor does she seem, on the other hand, to show the + least anxiety that she could ever lose them. She is merely realizing + that the time is at hand when she is to win others—that one more of + those many re-births of England, so to speak, out of her own womb, + approaches, and that once more she is about to prove herself eternally + young. +</p> +<p> + New countries are apt to speak of old countries as though they are + dying, merely because they have lived so long. Yet there is a longevity + which is one of the surest evidences of youth. Such I seem to feel once + more is England's—as from my window I watch the same old English May + weather: the falling rain and the rich gloom, within which moves always, + shouldering the darkest hour, an oceanic radiance, a deathless principle + of celestial fire. +</p> +<p> + LONDON, May, 1913. +</p> +<a name="2H_4_22"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<h2> + XVIII +</h2> +<h3> + THE HAUNTED RESTAURANT +</h3> +<p> </p> + +<p> + Were one to tell the proprietors of the very prosperous and flamboyant + restaurant of which I am thinking that it is haunted—yea, that ghosts + sit at its well appointed tables, and lost voices laugh and wail and + sing low to themselves through its halls—they would probably take one + for a lunatic—a servant of the moon. +</p> +<p> + Certainly, to all appearance, few places would seem less to suggest the + word "haunted" than that restaurant, as one comes upon it, in one of the + busiest of London thoroughfares, spreading as it does for blocks around, + like a conflagration, the festive glare of its electrically emblazoned + façade. Yet no ruined mansion, with the moon shining in through its + shattered roof, the owl nesting in its banqueting hall, and the snake + gliding through its bed chambers, was ever more peopled with phantoms + than this radiant palace of prandial gaiety, apparently filled with the + festive murmur of happy diners, the jocund strains of its vigorous + orchestra, the subdued clash of knives and forks and delicate dishes, + the rustle of women's gowns and the fairy music of women's voices. For + me its portico, flaming like a vortex of dizzy engulfing light, upon + which, as upon a swift current, gay men and women, alighting from motor + and hansom, are swept inward to glittering tables of snow-white napery, + fair with flowers—for me the mouth of the grave is not less dread, + and the walls of a sepulchre are not so painted with dead faces + or so inscribed with elegiac memories. I could spend a night in + Père-la-Chaise, and still be less aware of the presence of the dead + than I was a short time ago, when, greatly daring, I crossed with a + shudder that once so familiar threshold. +</p> +<p> + It was twelve years since I had been in London, so I felt no little of a + ghost myself, and I knew too well that it would be vain to look for the + old faces. Yes, gone was the huge good-natured commissionaire, who so + often in the past, on my arrival in company with some human flower, had + flung open the apron of our cab with such reverential alacrity, and on + our departure had so gently tucked in the petals of her skirts, smiling + the while a respectfully knowing benediction on the prospective + continuance of our evening's adventure. Another stood in his place, and + watched my lonely arrival with careless indifference. Glancing through + the window of the treasurer's office to the right of the hall, I could + see that an unfamiliar figure sat at the desk, where in the past so many + a cheque had been cashed for me with eager <i>bonhomie</i>. Now I reflected + that considerable identification would be necessary for that once + light-hearted transaction. It is true that I was welcomed with courtesy + by a bowing majordomo, but alas, my welcome was that of a stranger; and + when I mounted the ornate, marble-walled staircase leading to the + gallery where I had always preferred to sit, I realized that my hat and + cane must pass into alien keeping, and that no waiter's face would light + up as he saw me threading my way to the sacred table, withdrawn in a + nook of the balcony, where one could see and hear all, participate in + the general human stir and atmosphere, and yet remain apart. +</p> +<p> + Ah! no; for the friendly Cockney that once greeted me with an enfolding + paternal kindness was substituted broken English of a less companionable + accent. A polite young Greek it was who stood waiting respectfully for + my order, knowing nothing of all it meant for me—<i>me</i>—to be seated at + that table again—whereas, had he been one of half a dozen of the + waiters of yester-year, he would have known almost as much as I of the + "secret memoirs" of that historic table. +</p> +<p> + In ordering my meal I made no attempt at sentiment, for my mood went far + deeper than sentiment. Indeed, though, every second of the time, I was + living so vividly, so cruelly, in the past, I made one heartbroken + acknowledgment of the present by beginning with the anachronism of a + dry Martini cocktail, which, twelve years previous, was unknown and + unattainable in that haunted gallery. That cocktail was a sort of + desperate epitaph. It meant that I was alone—alone with my ghosts. Yet + it had a certain resurrecting influence, and as I sat there proceeding + dreamily with my meal, one face and another would flash before me, and + memory after memory re-enact itself in the theatre of my fancy. So + much in my actual surroundings brought back the past with an aching + distinctness—particularly the entrance of two charming young people, + making rainbows all about them, as, ushered by a smiling waiter, who was + evidently no stranger to their felicity, they seated themselves at a + neighbouring table with a happy sigh, and neglected the menu for a + moment or two while they gazed, rapt and lost, into each other's eyes. + How well I knew it all; how easily I could have taken the young man's + place, and played the part for which this evening he was so fortunately + cast! As I looked at them, I instinctively summoned to my side the + radiant shade of Aurea, for indeed she had seemed made of gold—gold and + water lilies. And, as of old, when I had called to her, she came swiftly + with a luxurious rustle of fragrant skirts, like the sound of the west + wind among the summer trees, or the swish and sway of the foam about the + feet of Aphrodite. There she sat facing me once more, "a feasting + presence made of light"—her hair like a golden wheat sheaf, her + eyes like blue flowers amid the wheat, and her bosom, by no means + parsimoniously concealed, literally suggesting that the loveliness of + all the water lilies in the world was amassed there within her corset + as in some precious casket. Ours was not one of the great tragic loves, + but I know I shall think of Aurea's bosom on my death-bed. At her coming + I had ordered champagne—we always drank champagne together, because, as + we said, it matched so well with her hair—champagne of a no longer + fashionable brand. The waiter seemed a little surprised to hear it asked + for, but it had been the only <i>chic</i> brand in 19—. +</p> +<p> + "Look at those two yonder," I said presently, after we had drunk to + each other, smiling long into each other's eyes over the brims of our + glasses. "You and I were once as they. It is their first wonderful + dinner together. Watch them—the poor darlings; it is enough to break + one's heart." +</p> +<p> + "Do you remember ours?" asked Aurea quite needlessly. +</p> +<p> + "I wonder what else I was thinking of—dear idiot!" said I, with tender + elegance, as in the old days. +</p> +<p> + As I said before, Aurea and I had not been tragic in our love. It was + more a matter of life—than death; warm, pagan, light-hearted life. Ours + was perhaps that most satisfactory of relationships between men and + women, which contrives to enjoy the happiness, the fun, even the + ecstasy, of loving, while evading its heartache. It was, I suppose, what + one would call a healthy physical enchantment, with lots of tenderness + and kindness in it, but no possibility of hurt to each other. There was + nothing Aurea would not have done for me, or I for Aurea, except—marry + each other; and, as a matter of fact, there were certain difficulties on + both sides in the way of our doing that, difficulties, however, which I + am sure neither of us regretted. +</p> +<p> + Yes, Aurea and I understood thoroughly what was going on in those young + hearts, as we watched them, our eyes starry with remembrance. Who better + than we should know that hush and wonder, that sense of enchanted + intimacy, which belongs of all moments perhaps in the progress of a + passion to that moment when two standing tiptoe on the brink of golden + surrender, sit down to their first ambrosial meal together—delicious + adventure!—with all the world to watch them, if it choose, and yet + aloof in a magic loneliness, as of youthful divinities wrapped in a + roseate cloud! Hours of divine expectancy, at once promise and + fulfilment. Happy were it for you, lovers, could you thus sit forever, + nor pass beyond this moment, touched by some immortalizing wand as those + lovers on the Grecian Urn: +</p> +<pre class="si"> + Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss. + Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve; + She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss. + Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair! +</pre> +<p> + "See," said Aurea presently, "they are getting ready to go. The waiter + has brought the bill, and is looking away, suddenly lost in profound + meditation. Let us see how he pays the bill. I am sure she is anxious." +</p> +<p> + "Your old test!" said I. "Do you remember?" +</p> +<p> + "Yes! And it's one that never fails," said Aurea with decision. "When a + woman goes out to dinner with a man for the first time, he little knows + how much is going to depend on his way of paying the bill. If, as with + some men one meets, he studies it through a microscope and adds it + up with anxious brow—meanwhile quite evidently forgetting your + presence—how your heart sinks, sinks and hardens—but you are glad all + the same, and next day you congratulate yourself on your narrow escape!" +</p> +<p> + "Was I like that?" said I. +</p> +<p> + "Did we escape?" asked Aurea. Then she added, touching my arm as with a + touch of honeyed fire: "O I'm so glad! He did it delightfully—quite <i>en + prince</i>. Just the right nonchalance—and perhaps, poor dear, he's as + poor—" +</p> +<p> + "As we often were," I added. +</p> +<p> + And then through the corners of our eyes we saw the young lovers rise + from the table, and the man enfold his treasure in her opera cloak, O so + reverently, O so tenderly, as though he were wrapping up some holy + flower. And O those deep eyes she gave him, half turning her head as he + did so! +</p> +<p> + "That look," whispered Aurea, quoting Tennyson, "'had been a clinging + kiss but for the street.'" +</p> +<p> + Then suddenly they were gone, caught up like Enoch, into heaven—some + little heaven, maybe, like one that Aurea and I remember, high up under + the ancient London roofs. +</p> +<p> + But, with their going, alas, Aurea had vanished too, and I was left + alone with my Greek waiter, who was asking me what cheese I would + prefer. +</p> +<p> + With the coming of coffee and cognac, I lit my cigar and settled down to + deliberate reverie, as an opium smoker gives himself up to his dream. I + savoured the bitter-sweetness of my memories; I took a strange pleasure + in stimulating the ache of my heart with vividly recalled pictures of + innumerable dead hours. I systematically passed from table to table all + around that spacious peristyle. There was scarcely one at which I + had not sat with some vanished companion in those years of ardent, + irresponsible living which could never come again. Not always a woman + had been the companion whose form I thus conjured out of the past, too + often out of the grave; for the noble friendship of youth haunted those + tables as well, with its generous starry-eyed enthusiasms and passionate + loyalties. Poets of whom but their songs remain, themselves by tragic + pathways descended into the hollow land, had read their verses to me + there, still glittering with the dawn dew of their creation, as we sat + together over the wine and talked of the only matters then—and perhaps + even yet—worth talking of: love and literature. Of these but one can + still be met in London streets, but all now wear crowns of varying + brightness— +</p> +<pre> + Where the oldest bard is as the young, + And the pipe is ever dropping honey, + And the lyre's strings are ever strung. +</pre> +<p> + Dear boon fellows of life as well as literature, how often have we risen + from those tables, to pursue together the not too swiftly flying + petticoat, through the terrestrial firmament of shining streets, aglow + with the midnight sun of pleasure, a-dazzle with eyes brighter far than + the city lamps—passionate pilgrims of the morning star! Ah! we go on + such quests no more—"another race hath been and other palms are won." +</p> +<p> + No, not always women—but naturally women nearly always, for it was the + time of rosebuds, and we were wisely gathering them while we might— +</p> +<pre> + Through the many to the one— + O so many! + Kissing all and missing none, + Loving any. +</pre> +<p> + Every man who has lived a life worthy the name of living has his own + private dream of fair women, the memory of whom is as a provision laid + up against the lean years that must come at last, however long they may + be postponed by some special grace of the gods, which is, it is good to + remember, granted to some—the years when one has reluctantly to + accept that the lovely game is almost, if not quite at an end, and to + watch the bloom and abundance of fragrant young creatures pass us, + unregarding, by. And, indeed, it may happen that a man who has won what + is for him the fairest of all fair faces, and has it still by his side, + may enter sometimes, without disloyalty, that secret gallery of those + other fair faces that were his before hers, in whom they are all summed + up and surpassed, had dawned upon his life. We shall hardly be loyal to + the present if we are coldly disloyal to the past. In the lover's + calendar, while there is but one Madonna, there must still be minor + saints, to whom it is meet, at certain times and seasons, to offer + retrospective candles—saints that, after the manner of many saints, + were once such charming sinners for our sakes, that utter forgetfulness + of them were an impious boorishness surely unacceptable to the most + jealous of Madonnas. Public worship of them is not, of course, + desirable, but occasional private celebrations are surely more than + permissible—such celebrations as that "night of memory and tears" which + Landor consecrated to Rose Aylmer, or that song which Thackeray + consecrated to certain loves of the long ago— +</p> +<pre> + Gillian's dead, God rest her bier, + How I loved her twenty years syne! + Marian's married, but I sit here, + Alone and merry at forty year, + Dipping my nose in the Gascon wine. +</pre> +<p> + So I, seated in my haunted restaurant, brought the burnt offerings of + several cigars, and poured out various libations to my own private + Gillians and Marians, and in fancy sat and looked into Angelica's eyes + at this table, and caressed Myrtle's opaled hand at that, and read + Sylvia a poem I had just written for her at still another. "Whose names + are five sweet symphonies," wrote Rossetti. Yes, symphonies, indeed, in + the ears of memory are the names of the lightest loves that flittered + butterfly-like across our path in the golden summer of our lives, + each name calling up its human counterpart, with her own endearing + personality distinguishing her from all other girls, her way of + smiling, her way of talking, her way of being serious, all the little + originalities on which she prided herself, her so solemnly held + differentia of tastes and manners—all, in a word, that made you realize + that you were dining with Corinna and not with Chloe. What a service of + contrast each—all unwittingly, need one say—did the other, just in the + same fashion as contrasting colours accentuate the special quality one + of the other. To have dined last night with Amaryllis, with her Titian + red hair and green eyes, her tropic languor and honey-drowsy ways, + was to feel all the keener zest in the presence of Callithoe on + the following evening, with her delicate soul-lit face, and eager + responsiveness of look and gesture—<i>blonde cendré</i>, and <i>fausse + maigre</i>—a being one of the hot noon, the other a creature of the + starlight. But I disclaim the sultanesque savour of thus writing of + these dear bearers of symphonic names. To talk of them as flowers and + fruit, as colour and perfume, as ivory and velvet, is to seem to forget + the best of them, and the best part of loving them and being loved + again; for that consisted in their comradeship, their enchanted + comradeship, the sense of shared adventure, the snatching of a fearful + joy together. For a little while we had escaped from the drab and + songless world, and, cost what it might, we were determined to take + possession, for a while at least, of that paradise which sprang into + existence at the moment when "male and female created He them." Such + divine foolishness, let discretion warn, or morality frown, or society + play the censorious hypocrite, "were wisdom in the scorn of + consequence." +</p> +<p> + "Ah, then," says every man to himself of such hours, as I said to myself + in my haunted restaurant—"ah, then came in the sweet o' the year." +</p> +<p> + But lovely and pleasant as were the memories over which I thus sat + musing, there was one face immeasurably beyond all others that I had + come there hoping and yet fearing to meet again, hers of whom for years + that seem past counting all the awe and wonder and loveliness of the + world have seemed but the metaphor. Endless years ago she and I had sat + at this table where I was now sitting and had risen from it with + breaking hearts, never to see each other's face, hear each other's voice + again. Voluntarily, for another's sake, we were breaking our hearts, + renouncing each other, putting from us all the rapture and religion + of our loving, dying then and there that another might live—vain + sacrifice! Once and again, long silences apart, a word or two would wing + its way across lands and seas and tell us both that we were still + under the same sky and were still what nature had made us from the + beginning—each other's. But long since that veil of darkness unpierced + of my star has fallen between us, and no longer do I hear the rustle of + her gown in the autumn woods, nor do the spring winds carry me the + sweetness of her faithful thoughts any more. So I dreamed maybe that, + after the manner of phantoms, we might meet again on the spot where we + had both died—but alas, though the wraiths of lighter loving came gaily + to my call, she of the starlit silence and the tragic eyes came not, + though I sat long awaiting her—sat on till the tables began to be + deserted, and the interregnum between dinner and after-theatre supper + had arrived. No, I began to understand that she could no longer come + to me: we must both wait till I could go to her. +</p> +<p> + And with this thought in my mind, I set about preparing to take my leave, + but at that moment I was startled—almost superstitiously—startled by + a touch on my shoulder. I was not to leave those once familiar halls + without one recognition, after all. It was our old waiter of all + those years ago, who, with an almost paternal gladness, was telling + me how good it was to see me again, and, with consolatory mendacity, + was assuring me that I had hardly changed a bit. God bless him—he + will never know what good it did me to have his honest recognition. + The whole world was not yet quite dead and buried, after all, nor + was I quite such an unremembered ghost as I had seemed. Dear old Jim + Lewis! So some of the old guard were still on deck, after all! And, + I was thinking as I looked at him: "He, too, has looked upon her + face. He it was who poured out our wine, that last time together." + Then I had a whim. My waiter had been used to them in the old days. +</p> +<p> + "Jim," I said, "I want you to give this half-sovereign to the bandmaster + and ask him to play Chopin's <i>Funeral March</i>. There are not many people + in the place, so perhaps he won't mind. Tell him it's for an old friend + of yours, and in memory of all the happy dinners he had here long ago." +</p> +<p> + So to the strains of that death music, which so strangely blends the + piercing pathos of lost things with a springlike sense of resurrection, + a spheral melody of immortal promise, I passed once more through the + radiant portals of my necropolitan restaurant into the resounding + thoroughfares of still living and still loving humanity. +</p> +<a name="2H_4_23"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<h2> + XIX +</h2> +<h3> + THE NEW PYRAMUS AND THISBE +</h3> +<p> </p> + +<p> + There never was a shallower or more short-sighted criticism than that + which has held that science is the enemy of romance. Ruskin, with + all the April showers of his rhetoric, discredited himself as an + authoritative thinker when he screamed his old-maidish diatribes against + that pioneer of modern romantic communication, the railroad. Just as + surely his idol Turner proved himself a romantic painter, not by his + rainbows, or his Italian sunsets, but by that picture of <i>Storm, Rain, + and Speed</i>—an old-fashioned express fighting its way through wind, + rain, and of course rainbows—in the English National Gallery. +</p> +<p> + With all his love of that light that never was on sea or land, Turner + was yet able to see the romance of that new thing of iron and steam so + affrighting to other men of his generation. A lover of light in all its + swift prismatic changes, he was naturally a lover of speed. He realized + that speed was one of the two most romantic things in the world. The + other is immobility. At present the two extremes of romantic expression + are the Sphinx and—the automobile. Unless you can realize that an + automobile is more romantic than a stage-coach, you know nothing + about romance. Soon the automobile will have its nose put out by the + air-ship, and we shall not need to be long-lived to see the day when + we shall hear old-timers lamenting the good old easy-going past of + the seventy-miles-an-hour automobile—just as we have heard our + grand-fathers talk of postilions and the Bath "flyer." +</p> +<p> + Romance is made of two opposites: Change, and That Which Changeth Not. + In spite of foolish sentimentalism, who needs be told that love is one + of those forces of the universe that is the same yesterday, today, and + forever—the same today as when Dido broke her heart, as when Leander + swam the Hellespont? Gravitation is not more inherent in the cosmic + scheme, nor fire nor water more unchangeable in their qualities. +</p> +<p> + But Love, contrary to the old notion that he is unpractical, is a + business-like god, and is ever on the lookout for the latest modern + appliances that can in anyway serve his purposes. True love is far from + being old-fashioned. On the contrary, true love is always up-to-date. + True love has its telephone, its phonograph, its automobile, and soon it + will have its air-ship. In the telephone alone what a debt love owes to + its supposed enemy, modern science! One wonders how lovers in the old + days managed to live at all without the telephone. +</p> +<p> + We often hear how our modern appliances wear upon our nerves. But think + how the lack of modern appliances must have worn upon the nerves of our + forefathers, and particularly our foremothers! Think what distance meant + in the Middle Ages, when the news of a battle took days to travel, + though carried by the swiftest horses. Horses! Think again of news being + carried by—horses! And once more think, with a prayer of gratitude to + two magicians named Edison and Bell, and with a due sense of your being + the spoiled and petted offspring of the painful ages, that should your + love be in Omaha this night and you in New York City, you can say + good-night to her through the wall of your apartment, and hear her sigh + back her good-night to you across two thousand miles of the American + flag. Or should your love be on the sea, you can interrupt her + flirtations all the way across with your persistent wireless + conversation. Contrast your luxurious communicativeness with the case of + the lovers of old-time. Say that you have just married a young woman, + and you are happy together in your castle in the heart of the forest. + Suddenly the courier of war is at your gates, and you must up and arm + and away with your men to the distant danger. You must follow the Cross + into the savage Kingdom of the Crescent. The husband must become the + crusader, and the Lord Christ alone knows when he shall look on the + child's face of his wife again. Through goblin-haunted wildernesses he + must go, through unmapped no-man's lands, and vacuum solitudes of the + world's end, and peril and pestilence meet in every form, the face of + his foe the friendliest thing in all his mysterious travel. Not a + pay-station as yet in all the wide world, and fully five hundred years + to the nearest telegraph office! +</p> +<p> + And think of the young wife meanwhile, alone with her maids and her + tapestry in the dank isolation of her lonely, listening castle. Not a + leaf falls in the wood, but she hears it. Not a footstep snaps the + silence, but her eyes are at the sleepless slit of light which is her + window in the armoured stone of her fortified bridal tower. The only + news of her husband she can hope for in a full year or more will be + the pleasing lies of some flattering minstrel, or broken soldier, or + imaginative pilgrim. On such rumours she must feed her famishing + heart—and all the time her husband's bones may be whitening unepitaphed + outside the walls of Ascalon or Joppa. +</p> +<p> + There is an old Danish ballad which quaintly tells the tale of such old + long-distance days, with that blending of humour and pathos that forever + goes to the heart of man. A certain Danish lord had but yesterday taken + unto himself a young wife, and on the morrow of his marriage there came + to him the summons to war. Then, as now, there was no arguing with the + trumpets of martial duty. The soldier's trumpet heeds not the soldier's + tears. The war was far away and likely to be long. Months, even years, + might go by before that Danish lord would look on the face of his bride + again. So much might happen meanwhile! A little boy, or a little girl, + might be born to the castle, and the father, fighting far away, know + nothing of the beautiful news. And there was no telephone in the castle, + and it was five hundred years to the nearest telegraph office. +</p> +<p> + So the husband and wife agreed upon a facetious signal of their own. The + castle stood upon a ridge of hills which could be seen fifty miles away, + and on the ridge the bride promised to build a church. If the child that + was to be born proved to be a boy, the church would be builded with a + tower; if a girl, with a steeple. So the husband went his way, and three + years passed, and at length he returned with his pennons and his + men-at-arms to his own country. Scanning the horizon line, he hurried + impatiently toward the heliographic ridge. And lo! when at last it came + in sight against the rising sun, there was a new church builded stately + there—with two towers. +</p> +<p> + So it was with the most important of all news in the Middle Ages; and + yet today, as I said, you in New York City have only to knock good-night + on your wall, to be heard by your true love in Omaha, and hear her knock + back three times the length of France; Pyramus and Thisbe—with this + difference: that the wall is no longer a barrier, but a sensitive + messenger. It has become, indeed, in the words of Demetrius in <i>A + Midsummer Night's Dream</i>, the wittiest of partitions, and the modern + Pyramus may apostrophize it in grateful earnest: +</p> +<pre class="si"> + "Thou wall, O wall, O sweet and lovely wall ... + Thanks, courteous wall. Jove shield thee well for this!" +</pre> +<p> + So at least I always feel toward the wall of my apartment every time I + call up her whom my soul loveth that dwelleth far away in Massachusetts. + She being a Capulet and I a Montague, it would go hard with us for + communication, were it not for this long-distance wall; and any one + who knows anything of love knows that the primal need of lovers is + communication. Lovers have so deep a distrust of each other's love that + they need to be assured of it from hour to hour. To the philosopher it + may well seem strange that this certitude should thus be in need of + progressive corroboration. But so it is, and the pampered modern lover + may well wonder how his great-grandfather and great-grandmother + supported the days, or even kept their love alive, on such famine + rations as a letter once a month. A letter once a month! They must have + had enormous faith in each other, those lovers of old-time, or they must + have suffered as we can hardly bear to think of—we, who write to each + other twice a day, telegraph three times, telephone six, and transmit a + phonographic record of our sighs to each other night and morn. The + telephone has made a toy of distance and made of absence, in many cases, + a sufficient presence. It is almost worth while to be apart on occasion + just for the sake of bringing each other so magically near. It is the + Arabian Nights come true. As in them, you have only to say a word, and + the jinn of the electric fire is waiting for your commands. The word + has changed. Once it was "Abracadabra." Now it is "Central." But the + miracle is just the same. +</p> +<p> + One might almost venture upon the generalization that most tragedies + have come about from lack of a telephone. Of course, there are + exceptions, but as a rule tragedies happen through delays in + communication. +</p> +<p> + If there had been a telephone in Mantua, Romeo would never have bought + poison of the apothecary. Instead, he would have asked leave to use his + long-distance telephone. Calling up Verona, he would first cautiously + disguise his voice. If, as usual, the old nurse answered, all well; but + if a bearded voice set all the wires a-trembling, he would, of course, + hastily ring off, and abuse "Central" for giving him the wrong number. + And "Central" would understand. Then Romeo would wait an hour or two + till he was sure that Lord Capulet had gone to the Council, and ring up + again. This time he would probably get the nurse and confide to her his + number in Mantua. Next morning Juliet and her nurse had only to drop in + at the nearest drug store, and confide to Romeo the whole plot which + Balthazar so sadly bungled. All that was needed was a telephone, and + Romeo would have understood that Juliet was only feigning death for the + sake of life with him. +</p> +<p> + But, as in the case of our Danish knight, there was not a pay-station + as yet in all the wide world, and it was fully five hundred years + to the nearest telegraph office. Another point in this tragedy is + worth considering by the modern mind: that not only would the final + catastrophe have been averted by the telephone, but that those beautiful + speeches to and from Juliet's balcony, made at such desperate risk to + both lovers, had the telephone only been in existence, could have + been made in complete security from the seclusion of their distant + apartments. +</p> +<p> + Seriously speaking, there are few love tragedies, few serious historic + crises of any kind, that might not have been averted by the telephone. + Strange indeed, when one considers a little, is that fallacy of + sentimentalism which calls science the enemy of love. +</p> +<p> + Far from being its enemy, science is easily seen to be its most romantic + servant; for all its strenuous and delicate learning it brings to the + feet of love for a plaything. Not only will it carry the voice of love + across space and time, but it will even bring it back to you from + eternity. It will not only carry to your ears the voices of the living, + but it will also keep safe for you the sweeter voices of the dead. In + fact, it would almost seem as though science had made all its + discoveries for the sake of love. +</p> +<a name="2H_4_24"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<h2> + XX +</h2> +<h3> + TWO WONDERFUL OLD LADIES +</h3> +<p> </p> + +<p> + It is a pity that our language has no other word to indicate that one + has lived seventy, eighty, or ninety years, than the word "old"; for the + word "old" carries with it implications of "senility" and decrepitude, + which many merely chronologically "old" people very properly resent. The + word "young," similarly, needs the assistance of another word, for we + all know individuals of thirty and forty, sometimes even only twenty, + whom it is as absurd to call "young" as it is to call those others of + seventy, eighty, or ninety, "old." +</p> +<p> + "Youth" is too large and rich a word to serve the limited purpose of + numbering the years of undeveloped boys and girls. It should stand + rather for the vital principle in men and women, ever expanding, and + rebuilding, and refreshing the human organism, partly a physical, but + perhaps in a greater degree a spiritual energy. +</p> +<p> + I am not writing this out of any compliment to two wonderful "old" + ladies of whom I am particularly thinking. They would consider me a + dunce were they to suspect me of any such commonplace intent. No! I am + not going to call them "eighty years young," or employ any of those + banal euphemisms with which would-be "tactful" but really club-footed + sentimentalists insult the intelligence of the so-called "old." Of + course, I know that they are both eighty or thereabouts, and they know + very well that I know. We make no secret of it. Why should we? Actually + though the number of my years falls short of eighty, I feel so much + older than either of them, that it never occurs to me to think of them + as "old," and often as I contemplate their really glowing energetic + youth, I grow melancholy for myself, and wonder what has become of my + own. +</p> +<p> + They were schoolgirls together. Luccia married Irene's brother—for they + allow me the privilege of calling them by their Christian names—and + they have been friends all their lives. Sometimes I see them together, + though oftener apart, for Luccia and her white-haired poet husband—no + "older" than herself,—are neighbours of mine in the country, and Irene + lives for the most part in New York—as much in love with its giant + developments as though she did not also cherish memories of that quaint, + almost vanished, New York of her girlhood days; for she is nothing if + not progressive. +</p> +<p> + But I will tell about Luccia first, and the first thing it is natural to + speak of—so every one else finds too—is her beauty. They say that she + was beautiful when she was young (I am compelled sometimes, under + protest, to use the words "young" and "old" thus chronologically) and, + of course, she must have been. I have, however, seen some of her early + portraits, before her hair was its present beautiful colour, and I must + confess that the Luccia of an earlier day does not compare with the + Luccia of today. I don't think I should have fallen in love with her + then, whereas now it is impossible to take one's eyes off her. She seems + to have grown more flower-like with the years, and while her lovely + indestructible profile has gathered distinction, and a lifelong habit of + thinking beautiful thoughts, and contemplating beautiful things, has + drawn honeyed lines as in silver point about her eyes and mouth, the + wild-roses of her cheeks still go on blooming—like wild-roses in + moonlight. And over all glow her great clear witty eyes, the eyes of a + <i>grand dame</i> who has still remained a girl. Her humour, no doubt, has + much to do with her youth, and I have seen strangers no little + surprised, even disconcerted, at finding so keen a humour in one so + beautiful; for beauty and humour are seldom found together in so + irresistible a combination. Is it to be wondered at that often on summer + days when I feel the need of a companion, I go in search of Luccia, and + take tea with her on the veranda? Sometimes I will find her in the + garden seated in front of her easel, making one of her delicate + water-colour sketches—for she was once a student in Paris and has + romantic Latin-quarter memories. Or I will find her with her magnifying + glass, trying to classify some weed she has come upon in the garden, + for she is a learned botanist; and sometimes we will turn over the pages + of books in which she hoards the pressed flowers gathered by her and her + husband in Italy and Switzerland up till but a year or two ago, + memorials of a life together that has been that flawless romance which + love sometimes grants to his faithful servants. +</p> +<p> + At other times we will talk politics, and I wish you could hear the + advanced views of this "old" lady of eighty. Indeed, generally speaking, + I find that nowadays the only real progressives are the "old" people. It + seems to be the fashion with the "young" to be reactionary. Luccia, + however, has been a radical and a rebel since her girlhood, and, years + before the word "feminist" was invented, was fighting the battle of + the freedom of woman. And what a splendid Democrat she is, and how + thoroughly she understands and fearlessly faces the problems and + developments of the moment! She is of the stuff the old Chartist women + and the women of the French Revolution were made of, and in her heart + the old faith in Liberty and the people burns as brightly as though she + were some young Russian student ready to give her life for the cause. + When the revolution comes to America, stern masculine authority will be + needed to keep her—her friend Irene too—from the barricades. +</p> +<p> + "Stern masculine authority"! As I write that phrase, how plainly I can + hear her mocking laughter; for she is never more delightful than when + pouring out her raillery on the magisterial pretensions of man. To hear + her talk! The idea of a mere man daring to assume any authority or + direction over a woman! Yet we who know her smile and whisper to + ourselves that, for all her witty tirades, she is perhaps of all women + the most feminine, and really the most "obedient" of wives—a rebel in + all else save to the mild tyranny of the poet she has loved, honoured, + and yes! obeyed, all these wonderful years. +</p> +<p> + Perhaps in nothing is the reality of her youthfulness so expressive as + in her adorable gaiety. Like a clear fresh spring, it is ever brimming + up from the heart into her mischief-loving eyes. By her side merely + technically young people seem heavy and serious. And nothing amuses her + more than gravely to mystify, or even bewilderingly shock, some proper + acquaintance, or some respectable strangers, with her carefully designed + mock improprieties of speech or action. To look at the loveliest of + grand-mothers, it is naturally somewhat perplexing to the uninitiated + visitor to hear her talk, with her rarely distinguished manner, of + frivolous matters with which they assume she has long since done. +</p> +<p> + A short while ago, when I was taking tea with her, she had for visitor a + staid old-maidish lady, little more than half her age, whom she had + known as a girl, but had not seen for some years. In the course of + conversation, she turned to her guest, with her grand air: +</p> +<p> + "Have you done much dancing this season?" she asked. +</p> +<p> + "O indeed no," answered the other unsuspiciously, "my dancing days are + over." +</p> +<p> + "At your age!" commented Luccia with surprise. "Nonsense! You must let + me teach you to dance the tango. I have enjoyed it immensely this + winter." +</p> +<p> + "Really?" gasped the other in astonishment, with that intonation in the + voice naturally so gratifying to the "old" suggesting that the person + talking with them really regards them as dead and buried. +</p> +<p> + "Of course, why not?" asks Luccia with perfect seriousness. "I dance it + with my grandsons. My husband doesn't care to dance it. He prefers the + polka." +</p> +<p> + Not knowing what to think, the poor old maid—actually "old" compared + with Luccia—looked from her to the beautiful venerable figure of her + polka-dancing husband seemingly meditating over his pipe, a little + withdrawn from them on the veranda, but inwardly shaken with mirth at + the darling nonsense of her who is still the same madcap girl he first + fell in love with so many years ago. +</p> +<p> + When the guest had departed, with a puzzled, questioning look still + lingering on her face, Luccia turned to me, her eyes bright pools of + merriment: +</p> +<p> + "It was quite true, wasn't it? Come, let us try it." +</p> +<p> + And, nimble as a girl, she was on her feet, and we executed quite a + passable tango up and down the veranda, to the accompaniment of her + husband's—"Luccia! Luccia! what a wild thing you are!" +</p> +<p> + A certain reputation for "wildness," a savour of innocent Bohemianism, + has clung to Luccia, and Irene too, all through their lives, as a legacy + from that far-off legendary time when, scarcely out of their girlhood, + they were fellow art-students together in Paris. Belonging both to + aristocratic, rather straitlaced New England families, I have often + wondered how they contrived to accomplish that adventure in a day when + such independent action on the part of two pretty young ladies was an + adventure indeed. But it was the time when the first vigorous spring of + feminine revolt was in the air. Rosa Bonheur, George Eliot, Elizabeth + Cady Stanton, and other leaders were setting the pace for the advanced + women, and George Sand was still a popular romancer. As a reminiscence + of George Sand, Luccia to this day pretends that she prefers to smoke + cigars to cigarettes, though, as a matter of fact, she has never smoked + either, and has, indeed, an ultra-feminine detestation of tobacco—even + in the form of her husband's pipe. She only says it, of course, for + the fun of seeming "naughty"; which recalls to my mind her shocking + behaviour one day when I went with her to call on some very prim + cousins in New York. It was a household of an excessively brown-stone + respectability, just the atmosphere to rouse the wickedness in Luccia. + As we sat together in an upright conversation that sounded like the + rustling of dried leaves in a cemetery, why! Luccia, for all her eighty + years, seemed like a young wild-rose bush filling the tomb-like room + with living light and fragrance. I could see the wickedness in her + surging for an outburst. She was well aware that those respectable + connections of hers had always looked upon her as a sort of "artistic" + black sheep in the family. Presently her opportunity came. As our visit + dragged mournfully towards its end, the butler entered, in pursuance of + the early Victorian ritual on such occasions, bearing a tray on which + was a decanter of sherry, some tiny wine-glasses, and some dry biscuits + of a truly early Victorian dryness. This ghostly hospitality was duly + dispensed, and Luccia, who seldom drinks anything but tea, instead of + sipping her sherry with a lady-like aloofness, drained her glass with a + sudden devil-may-care abandon, and, to the evident amazement even of the + furniture, held it out to be refilled. Such pagan behaviour had never + disgraced that scandalized drawing-room before. And when to her action + she added words, the room absolutely refused to believe its ears. "I + feel," she said, with a deep-down mirth in her eyes which only I could + suspect rather than see, "I feel today as if I should like to go on a + real spree. Do you ever feel that way?" +</p> +<p> + A palpable shudder passed through the room. +</p> +<p> + "Cousin Luccia!" cried out the three outraged mummies; the brother with + actual sternness, and the sisters in plain fear. Had their eccentric + cousin really gone out of her mind at last? +</p> +<p> + "Never feel that way?" she added, delighting in the havoc she was + making. "You should. It's a wonderful feeling." +</p> +<p> + Then she drained her second glass, and to the evident relief of all + three, rose to go. How we laughed together, as we sped away in our + taxicab. "It's as well to live up to one's reputation with such people," + she said, that dear, fantastic Luccia. +</p> +<p> + <i>À propos</i> that early Parisian adventure, Rosa Bonheur had been one of + Luccia's and Irene's great exemplars, and one might say, in one + particular connection,—heroes. I refer to the great painter's adoption + of masculine costume. Why two unusually pretty young women should burn + to discard the traditional flower-furniture of their sex, in exchange + for the uncouth envelopes of man, is hard to understand. But it was + the day of Mrs. Bloomer, as well as Rosa Bonheur; and earnest young + "intellectuals" among women had a notion, I fancy, that to shake off + their silks and laces was, symbolically, at all events, to shake off the + general disabilities of their sex, and was somehow an assertion of a + mental equality with man. At all events, it was a form of defiance + against their sex's immemorial tyrant, which seems to have appealed to + the imaginations of some young women of the period. Another woman's + weakness to be sternly discarded was that scriptural "glory" of her + hair. That must be ruthlessly lopped. So it is easy to imagine the + horror of such relatives as I have hinted at when our two beautiful + adventuresses returned from Paris, and appeared before their families in + great Spanish cloaks, picturesque, coquettish enough you may be sure, + veiling with some show of discretion those hideous compromises with + trousers invented and worn by the strong-minded Mrs. Bloomer, and + wearing their hair after the manner of Florentine boys. To face one's + family, and to walk New York streets so garbed, must have needed real + courage in those days; yet the two friends did both, and even for + a while accepted persecution for vagaries which for them had the + dead-seriousness of youth. +</p> +<p> + Passionate young propagandists as they were, they even preferred to + abandon their homes for a while—rather than their bloomers—and, taking + a studio together in New York, started out to earn their own living by + the teaching of art. Those were the days of the really brave women. +</p> +<p> + But to return to the less abstract topic of the bloomers, I often tease + Luccia and Irene about them, seeking for further information as to why + they ever came to retrograde from a position so heroically taken, one of + such serious import to human progress, and to condescend once more to + don the livery of feminine servitude, and appear, as they do today, in + delicate draperies which the eye searches in vain for any hint of + sanguinary revolution. Luccia always looks shamefaced at the question. + She still feels guilty, I can see, of a traitorous backsliding and + occasionally threatens to make up for it by a return to masculine + costume—looking the most exquisite piece of Dresden china as she says + it. I have seen that masculine tyrant of hers smiling knowingly to + himself on such occasions, and it has not been difficult to guess why + and when those historic bloomers disappeared into the limbo of lost + causes. There is little doubt that when Love came in by the door, the + bloomers went out, so to speak, by the window. +</p> +<p> + Irene seems to have held out longer, and, doubtless, scornful of her + more frivolous comrade's defection, steadfastly kept the faith awhile + unsupported, walking the world in bloomered loneliness—till a like + event overtook her. Such is the end of every maid's revolt! But Irene, + to this day, retains more of her student seriousness than her more + worldly-minded friend. Her face is of the round cherubic type, and her + large heavy-lidded eyes have a touch of demureness veiling humour no + less deep than Luccia's, but more reflective, chuckling quietly to + itself, though on occasion I know no one better to laugh with, even + giggle with, than Irene. But, whereas Luccia will talk gaily of + revolution and even anarchy for the fun of it, and in the next breath + talk hats with real seriousness, Irene still remains the purposeful + revolutionary student she was as a girl; while Luccia contents herself + with flashing generalizations, Irene seriously studies the latest + developments of thought and society, reads all the new books, sees all + the new plays and pictures, and has all the new movements of whatever + kind—art, philosophy, and sociology—at her finger ends; and I may add + that her favourite writer is Anatole France. Whenever I need light on + the latest artistic or philosophic nonsense calling itself a movement + (cubism, futurism, Bergsonism, syndicalism, or the like) I go to her, + certain that she will know all about it. Nothing is too "modern" for + this wonderful "old" lady of seventy-nine; and, whenever I am in town, + we always go together to the most "advanced" play in the newest of new + theatres. +</p> +<p> + <i>À propos</i> our theatre-going together, I must not forget a story about + her which goes back to that bloomer period. A little while ago, calling + to take tea with her, I found her seated with a fine soldierly + white-haired "old" man, and they were in such merry talk that I felt + that perhaps I was interrupting old memories. But they generously took + me into the circle of their reminiscence. They had been laughing as I + came in—"Shall I tell him, General?" she said, "what we were laughing + about?" Then she did. She and the General had been girl and boy + together, and as they came to eighteen and nineteen had been + semi-serious sweethearts. The embryo General—no doubt because of her + pretty face—had taken all her student vagaries with lover-like + seriousness, and had, on one occasion, assisted in a notable enterprise. + The bloomers had not been definitely donned at that time, but they were + on the way, glimmering ahead as a discussed ideal. Whether it was as a + preliminary experiment, or only in consequence of a "dare," I am not + quite sure. I think it was a little of both, and that the General had + dared Irene to go with him to the opera (in the gallery) dressed in + boy's clothes. She accepted the challenge, borrowing a suit of clothes + from her brother for the purpose. Her figure, according to the General's + account, had looked anything but masculine, and her hair, tucked up + under her boy's hat as best she could, was a peculiar peril. How her + heart had almost stopped beating as a policeman had turned upon the + youthful pair a suspicious scrutiny, how they had taken to their heels + at his glance, how she had crimsoned at the box-office, and hid her face + behind a fat man as they had scurried past the ticket-attendant, and how + during the whole performance a keen-faced woman had glanced at her with + a knowing persistency that seemed to threaten her with imminent exposure + and arrest, and how wonderful the whole thing had been—just to be in + boy's clothes and go in them to the theatre with one's sweetheart. O + youth! youth! youth! +</p> +<p> + As I looked at the General with his white hair, and Irene with her + quaint little old lady's cap over her girlish face, and visualized for + myself those two figures before me as they had appeared on the night of + that escapade, I realized that the real romance of life is made by + memory, and that for these two old friends to be able thus to recall + together across all those years that laughing freak of their young blood + was still more romantic than the original escapade. But as I went on + looking at Irene, with the bloom of her immortal youth upon her, I grew + jealous of the General's share in that historic night. Well, never mind, + it is I who take her to the theatre nowadays—and, after all, I think I + prefer her to go dressed just as she is. +</p> +<a name="2H_4_25"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<h2> + XXI +</h2> +<h3> + A CHRISTMAS MEDITATION +</h3> +<p> </p> + +<p> + Christmas already! However welcome its coming, Christmas always seems to + take us by surprise. Is the year really so soon at the end of its + journey? Why, it seems only yesterday that it needed a special effort of + remembrance to date our letters with the new "<i>anno domini</i>." And have + you noticed that one always does that reluctantly, with something almost + of misgiving? The figures of the old year have a warm human look, but + those of the new wear a chill, unfamiliar, almost menacing expression. + Nineteen hundred and—we know. It is nearly "all in." It has done its + best—and its worst. Between Christmas Day and New-Year it has hardly + time to change its character. Good or bad, as it may have been, we feel + at home with it, and we are fain to keep the old almanac a little longer + on the wall. But the last leaves are falling, the days are shortening. + There is a smell of coming snow in the air, and for weeks past it has + already been Christmas in the shops. +</p> +<p> + Yes, however it strikes us, we are a year older. On the first of January + last we had twelve brand-new months of a brand-new year to spend, and + now the last of them is all but spent. We had a new spring to look out + for, like the coming of one's sweetheart, a new summer bounteous in + prospect with inexhaustible wealth of royal sunshine, a new autumn, with + ruddy orchards and the glory of the tapestried woods; and now of the + four new seasons that were to be ours but one remains: +</p> +<pre class="si"> + And here is but December left and I, + To wonder if the hawthorn bloomed in May, + And if the wild rose with so fine a flush + Mantled the cheek of June, and if the way + The stream went singing foamed with meadow sweet, + And if the throstle sang in yonder bush, + And if the lark dizzied with song the sky. + I watched and listened—yet so sweet, so fleet, + The mad young year went by! +</pre> +<p> + Strange, that feeling at the end of the year that somehow we have missed + it, have failed to experience it all to the full, taken it too + carelessly, not dwelt sufficiently on its rich, expressive hours. Each + year we feel the same, and however intent we may have been, however we + have watched and listened, sensitively eager to hold and exhaust each + passing moment, when the year-end has come, we seem somehow to have been + cheated after all. Who, at the beginning of each year, has not promised + himself a stricter attentiveness to his experience? This year he will + "load every rift with ore." +</p> +<pre class="si"> + This year, I said, when first along the lane + With tiny nipples of the tender green + The winter-blackened hedge grew bright again, + This year I watch and listen; I have seen + So many springs steal profitless away, + This year I garner every sound and sweet. + And you, young year, make not such haste to bring + Hawthorn and rose; nor jumble, indiscreet, + Treasure on treasure of the precious spring; + But bring all softly forth upon the air, + Unhasting to be fair... +</pre> +<p> + Yet, for all our watchfulness, the year seems to have escaped us. We + know that the birds sang, that the flowers bloomed, that the grass was + green, but it seems to us that we did not take our joy of them with + sufficient keenness; our sweetheart came, but we did not look deep + enough into her eyes. If only we live to see the wild rose again! But + meanwhile here is the snow. +</p> +<p> + Unless we are still numbered among those happy people for whom + Christmas-trees are laden and lit, this annual prematurity of Christmas + cannot but make us a little meditative amid our mirth, and if, while + Santa Claus is dispensing his glittering treasures, our thoughts grow a + little wistful, they will not necessarily be mournful thoughts, or on + that account less seasonable in character; for Christmas is essentially + a retrospective feast, and we may, with fitness, with indeed a proper + piety of unforgetfulness, bring even our sad memories, as it were to + cheer themselves, within the glow of its festivity. Ghosts have always + been invited to Christmas parties, and whether they are seen or not, + they always come; nor is any form of story so popular by the Christmas + fire as the ghost-story—which, when one thinks of it, is rather odd, + considering the mirthful character of the time. Yet, after all, what are + our memories but ghost-stories? Ah! the beautiful ghosts that come to + the Christmas fire! +</p> +<p> + Christmas too is pre-eminently the Feast of the Absent, the Festival of + the Far-Away, for the most prosperous ingathering of beloved faces about + the Christmas fire can but include a small number of those we would fain + have there; and have you ever realized that the absent are ghosts? That + is, they live with us sheerly as spiritual presences, dependent upon our + faithful remembrance for their embodiment. We may not, with our physical + eyes, see them once a year; we may not even have so seen them for twenty + years; it may be decreed that we shall never see them again; we seldom, + perhaps never, write to each other; all we know of each other is that we + are alive and love each other across space and time. Alive—but how? + Scarce otherwise, surely, than the unforgotten dead are alive—alive in + unforgetting love. +</p> +<p> + It is rather strange, if you will give it a thought, how much of our + real life is thus literally a ghost-story. Probably it happens with the + majority of us that those who mean most to us, by the necessities of + existence, must be far away, met but now and then in brief flashes + of meeting that often seem to say so much less than absence; our + intercourse is an intercourse of the imagination—yet how real! They + belong to the unseen in our lives, and have all its power over us. The + intercourse of a mother and a son—is it not often like that in a world + which sends its men on the four winds, to build and fight, while the + mother must stay in the old nest? Seldom at Christmas can a mother + gather all her children beneath the wing of her smile. Her big boys are + seven seas away, and even her girls have Christmas-trees of their own. + But motherhood is in its very nature a ghostly, a spiritual, thing, and + the big boys and the old mother are not really divided. They meet + unseen by the Christmas fire, as they meet all the year round in that + mysterious ether of the soul, where space and time are not. +</p> +<p> + Yes, it is strange to think how small a proportion of our lives we spend + with those we love; even when we say that we spend all our time with + them. Husband and wife even—how much of the nearness of the closest of + human relations is, and must be, what Rossetti has called "parted + presence!" The man must go forth to his labour until the evening. How + few of the twenty-four hours can these two beings who have given their + whole lives to each other really give! Husband and wife even must be + content to be ghosts to each other for the greater part of each day. + As Rossetti says in his poem, eyes, hands, voice, lips, can meet so + strangely seldom in the happiest marriage; only in the invisible home of + the heart can the most fortunate husband and wife be always together: +</p> +<pre> + Your heart is never away, + But ever with mine, forever, + Forever without endeavour, + Tomorrow, love, as today; + Two blent hearts never astray, + Two souls no power may sever, + Together, O my love, forever! +</pre> +<p> + When I said that the absent were ghosts, I don't think you quite liked + the saying. It gave you a little shiver. It seemed rather grimly + fantastic. But do you not begin to see what I meant? Begin to see the + comfort in the thought? begin to see the inner connection between + Christmas and the ghost-story? Yes, the real lesson of Christmas is the + ever presence of the absent through love; the ghostly, that is to say + the spiritual, nature of all human intercourse. Our realities can exist + only in and through our imaginations, and the most important part of our + lives is lived in a dream with dream-faces, the faces of the absent and + the dead—who, in the consolation of this thought, are alike brought + near. +</p> +<p> + I have a friend who is dead—but I say to myself that he is in New + Zealand; for, if he were really in New Zealand, we should hardly seem + less distant, or be in more frequent communication. We should say that + we were both busy men, that the mails were infrequent, but that between + us there was no need of words, that we both "understood." That is what I + say now. It is just as appropriate. Perhaps he says it too. And—we + shall meet by the Christmas fire. +</p> +<p> + I have a friend who is alive. He is alive in England. We have not met + for twelve years. He never writes, and I never write. Perhaps we shall + never meet, never even write to each other, again. It is our way, the + way of many a friendship, none the less real for its silence—friendship + by faith, one might say, rather than by correspondence. My dead friend + is not more dumb, not more invisible. When these two friends meet me + by the Christmas fire, will they not both alike be ghosts—both, in a + sense, dead, but both, in a truer sense, alive? +</p> +<p> + It is so that, without our thinking of it, our simple human feelings one + for another at Christmas-time corroborate the mystical message which + it is the church's meaning to convey by this festival of "peace and + good-will to men"—the power of the Invisible Love; from the mystical + love of God for His world, to the no less, mystical love of mother and + child, of lover and lover, of friend and friend. +</p> +<p> + And, when you think of it, is not this festival founded upon what, + without irreverence, we may call the Divine Ghost-Story of Christmas? + Was there ever another ghost-story so strange, so full of marvels, a + story with so thrilling a message from the unseen? Taken just as a + story, is there anything in the <i>Arabian Nights</i> so marvellous as this + ghost-story of Christmas? The world was all marble and blood and bronze, + against a pitiless sky of pitiless gods. The world was Rome. No rule + ever stood builded so impregnably from earth to stars—a merciless wall + of power. Strength never planted upon the earth so stern a foot. Never + was tyranny so invincibly bastioned to the cowed and conquered eye. +</p> +<p> + And against all this marble and blood and bronze, what frail fantastic + attack is this? What quaint expedition from fairy-land that comes so + insignificantly against these battlements on which the Roman helmets + catch the setting sun? +</p> +<p> + A Star in the Sky. Some Shepherds from Judea. Three Wise Men from the + East. Some Frankincense and Myrrh. A Mother and Child. +</p> +<p> + Yes, a fairy-tale procession—but these are to conquer Rome, and that + child at his mother's breast has but to speak three words, for all that + marble and bronze to melt away: "Love One Another." +</p> +<p> + It may well have seemed an almost ludicrous weapon—three gentle words. + So one might attack a fortress with a flower. But Rome fell before them, + for all that, and cruel as the world still is, so cruel a world can + never be again. The history of Christianity from Christ to Tolstoi + is the history of a ghost-story; and as Rome fell before the men it + martyred, so Russia has been compelled at last to open its prison doors + by the passive imperative of the three gentle words. Stone and iron are + terribly strong to the eye and even to the arm of man, but they are as + vapour before the breath of the soul. Many enthroned and magisterial + authorities seem so much more important and powerful than the simple + human heart, but let the trial of strength come, and we see the might of + the delicate invisible energy that wells up out of the infinite mystery + to support the dreams of man. +</p> +<p> + Christmas is the friendly human announcement of this ghostly truth; its + holly and boar's-head are but a rough-and-tumble emblazonment of that + mystic gospel of—The Three Words; the Gospel of the Unseen Love. +</p> +<p> + And how well has the church chosen this particular season of the year + for this most subtly spiritual of all its festivals, so subtle because + its ghostly message is so ruddily disguised in human mirth, and thus the + more unconsciously operative in human hearts! +</p> +<p> + Winter, itself so ghostly a thing, so spiritual in its beauty, was + indeed the season to catch our ears with this ghost-story of the + Invisible and Invincible Love. The other seasons are full of sensuous + charm and seductiveness. With endless variety of form and colour and + fragrance, they weave "a flowery band to bind us to the earth." They are + running over with the pride of sap, the luxury of green leaves, and the + intoxicating fulness of life. The summer earth is like some voluptuous + enchantress, all ardour and perfume, and soft dazzle of moted sunshine. + But the beauty of winter seems a spiritual, almost a supernatural, + thing, austere and forbidding at first, but on a nearer approach found + to be rich in exquisite exhilaration, in rare and lofty discoveries and + satisfactions of the soul. Winter naturally has found less favour with + the poets than the other seasons. Praise of it has usually a strained + air, as though the poet were making the best of a barren theme, like a + portrait-painter reluctantly flattering some unattractive sitter. But + one poet has seen and seized the mysterious beauty of winter with + unforced sympathy—Coventry Patmore, whose "Odes," in particular, + containing as they do some of the most rarely spiritual meditation in + English poetry, are all too little known. In one of these he has these + beautiful lines, which I quote, I hope correctly, from memory: +</p> +<pre class="si"> + I, singularly moved + To love the lovely that are not beloved, + Of all the seasons, most love winter, and to trace + The sense of the Trophonian pallor of her face. + It is not death, but plenitude of peace; + And this dim cloud which doth the earth enfold + Hath less the characters of dark and cold + Than light and warmth asleep, + And intermittent breathing still doth keep + With the infant harvest heaving soft below + Its eider coverlet of snow. +</pre> +<p> + The beauty of winter is like the beauty of certain austere classics of + literature and art, and as with them, also, it demands a certain almost + moral strenuousness of application before it reveals itself. The + loftiest masterpieces have something aloof and cheerless about them at + our first approach, something of the cold breath of those starry spaces + into which they soar, and to which they uplift our spirits. When we + first open Dante or Milton, we miss the flowers and the birds and the + human glow of the more sensuous and earth-dwelling poets. But after + awhile, after our first rather bleak introduction to them, we grow aware + that these apparently undecorated and unmusical masterpieces are radiant + and resounding with a beauty and a music which "eye hath not seen nor + ear heard." For flowers we are given stars, for the song of birds the + music of the spheres, and for that human glow a spiritual ecstasy. +</p> +<p> + Similarly with winter. It has indeed a strange beauty peculiar to + itself, but it is a beauty we must be at some pains to enjoy. The beauty + of the other seasons comes to us, offers itself to us, without effort. + To study the beauty of summer, it is enough to lie under green boughs + with half-closed eyes, and listen to the running stream and the murmur + of a million wings. But winter's is no such idle lesson. In summer we + can hardly stay indoors, but in winter we can hardly be persuaded to + go out. We must gird ourselves to overcome that first disinclination, + else we shall know nothing of winter but its churlish wind and its + ice-in-the-pail. But, the effort made, and once out of doors on a + sunlit winter's morning, how soon are we finding out the mistake we + were making, coddling ourselves in the steam-heat! Indoors, indeed, + the prospect had its Christmas-card picturesqueness; snow-clad roofs, + snow-laden boughs, silhouetted tracery of leafless trees; but we said + that it was a soulless spectacular display, the beauty of death, and + the abhorred coldness thereof. We have hardly walked a hundred yards, + however, before impressions very different are crowding upon us, + among which the impression of cold is forgotten, or only retained as + pleasantly heightening the rest. +</p> +<p> + Far from the world's being dead, as it had seemed indoors, we are + presently, in some strange indefinable way, made intensely conscious of + a curious overwhelming sense of life in the air, as though the crystal + atmosphere was, so to say, ecstatically charged with the invisible + energy of spiritual forces. In the enchanted stillness of the snow, we + seem to hear the very breathing of the spirit of life. The cessation of + all the myriad little sounds that rise so merrily and so musically from + the summer surface of the earth seems to allow us to hear the solemn + beat of the very heart of earth itself. We seem very near to the sacred + mystery of being, nearer than at any other season of the year, for in + other seasons we are distracted by its pleasurable phenomena, but in + winter we seem close to the very mystery itself; for the world seems to + have put on robes of pure spirit and ascended into a diviner ether. +</p> +<p> + The very phenomena of winter have a spiritual air which those of summer + lack, a phantom-like strangeness. How mysterious this ice, how ghostly + this snow, and all the beautiful fantastic shapes taken by both; the + dream-like foliage, and feathers and furs of the snow, the Gothic + diablerie of icicled eaves, all the fairy fancies of the frost, the + fretted crystal shapes that hang the brook-side with rarer than Venetian + glass, the strange flowers that stealthily overlay the windows, even + while we watch in vain for the unseen hand! No flowers of summer seem so + strange as these, make us feel so weirdly conscious of the mystery of + life. As the ghostly artist covers the pane, is it not as though a + spirit passed? +</p> +<p> + As we walk on through the shining morning, we ourselves seem to grow + rarefied as the air. Our senses seem to grow finer, purged to a keener + sensitiveness. Our eyes and ears seem to become spiritual rather than + physical organs, and an exquisite elation, as though we were walking on + shining air, or winging through celestial space, fills all our being. + The material earth and our material selves seem to grow joyously + transparent, and while we are conscious of our earthly shoe-leather + ringing out on the iron-bound highway, we seem, nevertheless, to be + spirits moving without effort, in a world of spirit. Seldom, if ever, + in summer are we thus made conscious of, so to say, our own ghosts, + thus lifted up out of our material selves with a happy sense of + disembodiment. +</p> +<p> + There would, indeed, seem to be some relation between temperature and + the soul, and something literally purifying about cold. Certain it is + that we return from our winter's walk with something sacred in our + hearts and something shining in our faces, which we seldom, if ever, + bring back with us in summer. Without understanding the process, we seem + to have been brought nearer to the invisible mystery, and a solemn peace + of happy insight seems for a little while at least to possess our souls. + Our white walk in the snow-bright air has in some way quickened the + half-torpid immortal within us, revived awhile our sluggish sense of our + spiritual significance and destiny, made us once more, if only for a + little, attractively mysterious to ourselves. Yes! there is what one + might call a certain monastic discipline about winter which impels the + least spiritual minded to meditation on his mortal lot and its immortal + meanings; and thus, as I said, the Church has done wisely to choose + winter for its most Christian festival. The heart of man, thus prepared + by the very elements, is the more open to the message of the miraculous + love, and the more ready to translate it into terms of human goodness. + And thus, I hope, the ghostly significance of mince-pie is made clear. +</p> +<p> + But enough of ghostly, grown-up thoughts. Let us end with a song for + the children: +</p> +<pre> + O the big red sun, + And the wide white world, + And the nursery window + Mother-of-pearled; + + And the houses all + In hoods of snow, + And the mince-pies, + And the mistletoe; + + And Christmas pudding, + And berries red, + And stockings hung + At the foot of the bed; + + And carol-singers, + And nothing but play— + O baby, this is + Christmas Day! +</pre> +<a name="2H_4_26"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<h2> + XXII +</h2> +<h3> + ON RE-READING WALTER PATER +</h3> +<p> </p> + +<p> + It is with no small satisfaction, and with a sense of reassurance of + which one may, in moods of misgiving, have felt the need during + two decades of the Literature of Noise, that one sees a writer so + pre-eminently a master of the Literature of Meditation coming, for all + the captains and the shouting, so surely into his own. The acceptance + of Walter Pater is not merely widening all the time, but it is more + and more becoming an acceptance such as he himself would have most + valued, an acceptance in accordance with the full significance of his + work rather than a one-sided appreciation of some of its Corinthian + characteristics. The Doric qualities of his work are becoming recognized + also, and he is being read, as he has always been read by his true + disciples—so not inappropriately to name those who have come under his + graver spell—not merely as a <i>prosateur</i> of purple patches, or a + sophist of honeyed counsels tragically easy to misapply, but as an + artist of the interpretative imagination of rare insight and magic, a + writer of deep humanity as well as aesthetic beauty, and the teacher of + a way of life at once ennobling and exquisite. It is no longer possible + to parody him—after the fashion of Mr. Mallock's brilliancy in <i>The New + Republic</i>—as a writer of "all manner and no matter," nor is it possible + any longer to confuse his philosophy with those gospels of unrestrained + libertinism which have taken in vain the name of Epicurus. His highly + wrought, sensitively coloured, and musically expressive style is seen to + be what it is because of its truth to a matter profound and delicate and + intensely meditated, and such faults as it has come rather of too much + matter than too little; while his teaching, far from being that of + a facile "Epicureanism," is seen, properly understood, to involve + something like the austerity of a fastidious Puritanism, and to result + in a jealous asceticism of the senses rather than in their indulgence. + "Slight as was the burden of positive moral obligation with which he had + entered Rome," he writes of Marius, as on his first evening in Rome the + murmur comes to him of "the lively, reckless call to 'play,' from the + sons and daughters of foolishness," "it was to no wasteful and vagrant + affections, such as these, that his Epicureanism had committed him." + Such warnings against misunderstanding Pater is careful to place, at, so + to say, all the cross-roads in his books, so scrupulously concerned is + he lest any reader should take the wrong turning. Few writers, indeed, + manifest so constant a consideration for, and, in minor matters, + such a sensitive courtesy toward, their readers, while in matters + of conscience Pater seems to feel for them an actual pastoral + responsibility. His well-known withdrawal of the "Conclusion" to <i>The + Renaissance</i> from its second edition, from a fear that "it might + possibly mislead some of those young men into whose hands it might + fall," is but one of many examples of his solicitude; and surely such as + have gone astray after such painstaking guidance have but their own + natures to blame. As he justly says, again of Marius, "in the reception + of metaphysical <i>formula</i>, all depends, as regards their actual and + ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human + nature into which they fall—the company they find already present + there, on their admission into the house of thought." +</p> +<p> + That Pater's philosophy could ever have been misunderstood is not to be + entertained with patience by any one who has read him with even ordinary + attention; that it may have been misapplied, in spite of all his care, + is, of course, possible; but if a writer is to be called to account for + all the misapplications, or distortions, of his philosophy, writing may + as well come to an end. Yet, inconceivable as it may sound, a critic + very properly held in popular esteem recently gave it as his opinion + that the teaching of Walter Pater was responsible for the tragic career + of the author of <i>The Picture of Dorian Gray</i>. Certainly that remarkable + man was an "epicurean"—but one, to quote Meredith, "whom Epicurus would + have scourged out of his garden"; and the statement made by the critic + in question that <i>The Renaissance</i> is the book referred to in <i>The + Picture of Dorian Gray</i> as having had a sinister influence over its hero + is so easily disposed of by a reference to that romance itself that it + is hard to understand its ever having been made. Here is the passage + describing the demoralizing book in question: +</p> +<blockquote> + His eye fell on the yellow book that Lord Henry had sent him.... It + was the strangest book he had ever read. It seemed to him that in + exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of + the world were passing in dumb show before him. Things that he had + dimly dreamed of were suddenly made real to him. Things of which he + had never dreamed were gradually revealed.<br><br> + + It was a novel without a plot, and with only one character, being, + indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian who + spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the + passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except + his own, and to sum up, as it were, in himself the various moods + through which the world-spirit had ever passed, loving for their + mere artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called + virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call + sin. The style in which it was written was that curious jewelled + style, vivid and obscure at once, full of <i>argot</i> and of archaisms, + of technical expressions and of elaborate paraphrases, that + characterizes the work of some of the finest artists of the French + school of <i>Décandents.</i> There were in it metaphors as monstrous as + orchids, and as evil in colour. The life of the senses was described + in the terms of mystical philosophy. One hardly knew at times + whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some medieval + saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner. It was a + poisonous book. The heavy odour of incense seemed to cling about its + pages and to trouble the brain. The mere cadence of the sentences, + the subtle monotony of their music, so full as it was of complex + refrains and movements elaborately repeated, produced in the mind of + the lad, as he passed from chapter to chapter, a form of reverie, a + malady of dreaming, that made him unconscious of the falling day and + the creeping shadows....<br><br> + + For years Dorian Gray could not free himself from the memory of this + book. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he never + sought to free himself from it. He procured from Paris no less than + five large paper copies of the first edition, and had them bound in + different colours, so that they might suit his various moods and the + changing fancies of a nature over which he seemed, at times, to have + almost entirely lost control. +</blockquote> +<p> + The book thus characterized is obviously by a French writer—I have + good reason for thinking that it was <i>À Rebours</i> by Huysmans—and how + any responsible reader can have imagined that Walter Pater's <i>The + Renaissance</i> answers to this description passes all understanding. A + critic guilty of so patent a misstatement must either never have read + <i>The Picture of Dorian Gray</i>, or never have read <i>The Renaissance</i>. On + the other hand, if on other more reliable evidence it can be found that + Oscar Wilde was one of those "young men" misled by Pater's book, for + whose spiritual safety Pater, as we have seen, was so solicitous, one + can only remind oneself again of the phrase quoted above in regard to + "that soil of human nature" into which a writer casts his seed. If that + which was sown a lily comes up a toadstool, there is evidently something + wrong with the soil. +</p> +<p> + Let us briefly recall what this apparently so "dangerous" philosophy + of Pater's is, and we cannot do better than examine it in its most + concentrated and famous utterance, this oft-quoted passage from that + once-suppressed "Conclusion" to <i>The Renaissance</i>: +</p> +<blockquote> + Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A + counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated + dramatic life. How may we see in them all that there is to be seen + in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from + point to point, and be present always at the focus where the + greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? To + burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this + ecstasy, is success in life.... While all melts under our feet, we + may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to + knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for + a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange + colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the + face of one's friend. With this sense of the splendor of our + experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one + desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make + theories about the things we see and touch.... Well! we are all + <i>condamnés</i>, as Victor Hugo says; we are all under sentence of + death, but with a sort of indefinite reprieve—<i>les hommes sont tous + condamnés à mort avec des sursis indéfinis</i>: we have an interval, + and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in + listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among "the + children of this world," in art and song. For our one chance lies in + expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible + into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened + sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of + enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come + naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion—that it does + yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of + such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of + art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing + frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as + they pass, and simply for those moments' sake. +</blockquote> +<p> + Now, if it be true that the application, or rather the misapplication, + of this philosophy led Oscar Wilde to Reading Gaol, it is none the + less true that another application of it led Marius to something like + Christian martyrdom, and Walter Pater himself along an ever loftier and + serener path of spiritual vision. +</p> +<p> + Nothing short of wilful misconstruction can make of the counsel thus + offered, with so priestly a concern that the writer's exact meaning be + brought home to his reader, other than an inspiration toward a noble + employment of that mysterious opportunity we call life. For those of us, + perhaps more than a few, who have no assurance of the leisure of an + eternity for idleness or experiment, this expansion and elevation of the + doctrine of the moment, carrying a merely sensual and trivial moral in + the Horatian maxim of <i>carpe diem</i>, is one thrillingly charged with + exhilaration and sounding a solemn and yet seductive challenge to us to + make the most indeed, but also to make the best, of our little day. To + make the most, and to make the best of life! Those who misinterpret or + misapply Pater forget his constant insistence on the second half of that + precept. We are to get "as many pulsations as possible into the given + time," but we are to be very careful that our use of those pulsations + shall be the finest. Whether or not it is "simply for those moments' + sake," our attempt must be to give "<i>the highest quality</i>," remember, to + those "moments as they pass." And who can fail to remark the fastidious + care with which Pater selects various typical interests which he deems + most worthy of dignifying the moment? The senses are, indeed, of natural + right, to have their part; but those interests on which the accent of + Pater's pleading most persuasively falls are not so much the "strange + dyes, strange colours, and curious odours," but rather "the face of + one's friend," ending his subtly musical sentence with a characteristic + shock of simplicity, almost incongruity—or "some mood of passion or + insight or intellectual excitement," or "any contribution to knowledge + that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment." + There is surely a great gulf fixed between this lofty preoccupation with + great human emotions and high spiritual and intellectual excitements, + and a vulgar gospel of "eat, drink, for tomorrow we die," whether or not + both counsels start out from a realization of "the awful brevity" of our + mortal day. That realization may prompt certain natures to unbridled + sensuality. Doomed to perish as the beasts, they choose, it would seem + with no marked reluctance, to live the life of the beast, a life + apparently not without its satisfactions. But it is as stupid as it is + infamous to pretend that such natures as these find any warrant for + their tragic libertinism in Walter Pater. They may, indeed, have found + aesthetic pleasure in the reading of his prose, but the truth of which + that prose is but the beautiful garment has passed them by. For such + it can hardly be claimed that they have translated into action the + aspiration of this tenderly religious passage: +</p> +<blockquote> + Given the hardest terms, supposing our days are indeed but a shadow, + even so we may well adorn and beautify, in scrupulous self-respect, + our souls and whatever our souls touch upon—these wonderful bodies, + these material dwelling-places through which the shadows pass + together for a while, the very raiment we wear, our very pastimes, + and the intercourse of society. +</blockquote> +<p> + Here in this passage from <i>Marius</i> we find, to use Pater's own words + once more, "the spectacle of one of the happiest temperaments coming, + so to speak, to an understanding with the most depressing of theories." + That theory, of course, was the doctrine of the perpetual flux of things + as taught by Aristippus of Cyrene, making a man of the world's practical + application of the old Heraclitean formula, his influence depending on + this, "that in him an abstract doctrine, originally somewhat acrid, had + fallen upon a rich and genial nature well fitted to transform it into a + theory of practice of considerable stimulative power toward a fair + life." Such, too, was Pater's nature, and such his practical usefulness + as what one might call a philosophical artist. Meredith, Emerson, + Browning, and even Carlyle were artists so far related to him and each + other in that each of them wrought a certain optimism, or, at all + events, a courageous and even blithe working theory of life and conduct, + out of the unrelenting facts of existence unflinchingly faced, rather + than ecclesiastically smoothed over—the facts of death and pain and + struggle, and even the cruel mystery that surrounds with darkness and + terror our mortal lot. Each one of them deliberately faced the worst, + and with each, after his own nature, the worst returned to laughter. The + force of all these men was in their artistic or poetic embodiment of + philosophical conceptions, but, had they not been artists and poets, + their philosophical conceptions would have made but little way. And it + is time to recall, what critics preoccupied with his "message" leave + unduly in the background, that Pater was an artist of remarkable power + and fascination, a maker of beautiful things, which, whatever their + philosophical content, have for our spirits the refreshment and + edification which all beauty mysteriously brings us, merely because it + is beauty. <i>Marius the Epicurean</i> is a great and wonderful book, not + merely on account of its teaching, but because it is simply one of the + most <i>beautiful</i> books, perhaps the most beautiful book, written in + English. It is beautiful in many ways. It is beautiful, first of all, in + the uniquely personal quality of its prose, prose which is at once + austere and sensuous, simple at once and elaborate, scientifically exact + and yet mystically suggestive, cool and hushed as sanctuary marble, + sweet-smelling as sanctuary incense; prose that has at once the + qualities of painting and of music, rich in firmly visualized pictures, + yet moving to subtle, half-submerged rhythms, and expressive with every + delicate accent and cadence; prose highly wrought, and yet singularly + surprising one at times with, so to say, sudden innocencies, artless and + instinctive beneath all its sedulous art. It is no longer necessary, as + I hinted above, to fight the battle of this prose. Whether it appeal to + one not, no critic worth attention any longer disparages it as mere + ornate and perfumed verbiage, the elaborate mannerism of a writer hiding + the poverty of his thought beneath a pretentious raiment of decorated + expression. It is understood to be the organic utterance of one with a + vision of the world all his own striving through words, as he best can, + to make that vision visible to others as nearly as possible as he + himself sees it. Pater himself has expounded his theory and practice of + prose, doubtless with a side-thought of self-justification, in various + places up and down his writings, notably in his pregnant essay on + "Style," and perhaps even more persuasively in the chapter called + "Euphuism" in <i>Marius</i>. In this last he thus goes to the root of the + matter: +</p> +<blockquote> + That preoccupation of the <i>dilettante</i> with what might seem mere + details of form, after all, did but serve the purpose of bringing + to the surface, sincerely and in their integrity, certain strong + personal intuitions, a certain vision or apprehension of things + as really being, with important results, thus, rather than + thus—intuitions which the artistic or literary faculty was called + upon to follow, with the exactness of wax or clay, clothing the + model within. +</blockquote> +<p> + This striving to express the truth that is in him has resulted in a + beauty of prose which for individual quality must be ranked with the + prose of such masters as De Quincey and Lamb, and, to make a not + irrelevant comparison, above the very fine prose of his contemporary + Stevenson, by virtue of its greater personal sincerity. +</p> +<p> + There is neither space here, nor need, to illustrate this opinion by + quotation, though it may not be amiss, the musical and decorative + qualities of Pater's prose having been so generally dwelt upon, to + remind the reader of the magical simplicities by which it is no less + frequently characterized. Some of his quietest, simplest phrases have a + wonderful evocative power: "the long reign of these quiet Antonines," + for example; "the thunder which had sounded all day among the hills"; + "far into the night, when heavy rain-drops had driven the last lingerers + home"; "Flavian was no more. The little marble chest with its dust and + tears lay cold among the faded flowers." What could be simpler than + these brief sentences, yet how peculiarly suggestive they are; + what immediate pictures they make! And this magical simplicity is + particularly successful in his descriptive passages, notably of natural + effects, effects caught with an instinctively selected touch or two, + an expressive detail, a grey or coloured word. How lightly sketched, + and yet how clearly realized in the imagination, is the ancestral + country-house of Marius's boyhood, "White-Nights," "that exquisite + fragment of a once large and sumptuous villa"—"Two centuries of the + play of the sea-wind were in the velvet of the mosses which lay along + its inaccessible ledges and angles." Take again this picture: +</p> +<blockquote> + The cottagers still lingered at their doors for a few minutes as the + shadows grew larger, and went to rest early; though there was still + a glow along the road through the shorn corn-fields, and the birds + were still awake about the crumbling grey heights of an old temple. +</blockquote> +<p> + And again this picture of a wayside inn: +</p> +<blockquote> + The room in which he sat down to supper, unlike the ordinary + Roman inns at that day, was trim and sweet. The firelight danced + cheerfully upon the polished three-wicked <i>lucernae</i> burning cleanly + with the best oil, upon the whitewashed walls, and the bunches of + scarlet carnations set in glass goblets. The white wine of the place + put before him, of the true colour and flavour of the grape, and + with a ring of delicate foam as it mounted in the cup, had a + reviving edge or freshness he had found in no other wine. +</blockquote> +<p> + Those who judge of Pater's writing by a few purple passages such as the + famous rhapsody on the <i>Mona Lisa</i>, conceiving it as always thus heavy + with narcotic perfume, know but one side of him, and miss his gift + for conveying freshness, his constant happiness in light and air and + particularly running water, "green fields—or children's faces." His + lovely chapter on the temple of Aesculapius seems to be made entirely + of morning light, bubbling springs, and pure mountain air; and the + religious influence of these lustral elements is his constant theme. + For him they have a natural sacramental value, and it is through + them and such other influences that Pater seeks for his hero the + sanctification of the senses and the evolution of the spirit. In his + preoccupation with them, and all things lovely to the eye and to the + intelligence, it is that the secret lies of the singular purity of + atmosphere which pervades his <i>Marius</i>, an atmosphere which might be + termed the soul-beauty of the book, as distinct from its, so to say, + body-beauty as beautiful prose. +</p> +<p> + Considering <i>Marius</i> as a story, a work of imagination, one finds the + same evocative method used in the telling of it, and in the portrayal + of character, as Pater employs in its descriptive passages. Owing + to certain violent, cinematographic methods of story-telling and + character-drawing to which we have become accustomed, it is too often + assumed that stories cannot be told or characters drawn in any other + way. Actually, of course, as many an old masterpiece admonishes us, + there is no one canon in this matter, but, on the contrary, no limit to + the variety of method and manner a creative artist is at liberty to + employ in his imaginative treatment of human life. All one asks is that + the work should live, the characters and scenes appear real to us, and + the story be told. And Pater's <i>Marius</i> entirely satisfies this demand + for those to whom such a pilgrimage of the soul will alone appeal. It is + a real story, no mere German scholar's attempt to animate the dry bones + of his erudition; and the personages and the scenes do actually live + for us, as by some delicate magic of hint and suggestion; and, though at + first they may seem shadowy, they have a curious way of persisting, and, + as it were, growing more and more alive in our memories. The figure of + Marcus Aurelius, for example, though so delicately sketched, is a + masterpiece of historical portraiture, as the pictures of Roman life, + done with so little, seem to me far more convincing than the like + over-elaborated pictures of antiquity, so choked with learned detail, + of Flaubert and of Gautier. Swinburne's famous praise of Gautier's + <i>Mademoiselle de Maupin</i> applies with far greater fitness to Pater's + masterpiece; for, if ever a book deserved to be described as +</p> +<pre> + The golden book of spirit and sense, + The holy writ of beauty, +</pre> +<p class="noindent"> + it is <i>Marius the Epicurean</i>. +</p> +<p> + It has been natural to dwell so long on this "golden book," because + Pater's various gifts are concentrated in it, to make what is, of + course, his masterpiece; though some one or other of these gifts is to + be found employed with greater mastery in other of his writings, notably + that delicate dramatic gift of embodying in a symbolic story certain + subtle states of mind and refinements of temperament which reaches its + perfection in <i>Imaginary Portraits</i>, to which the later "Apollo in + Picardy" and "Hippolytus Veiled" properly belong. It is only necessary + to recall the exquisitely austere "Sebastian Van Storck" and the + strangely contrasting Dionysiac "Denys L'Auxerrois" to justify one's + claim for Pater as a creative artist of a rare kind, with a singular and + fascinating power of incarnating a philosophic formula, a formula no + less dry than Spinoza's, or a mood of the human spirit, in living, + breathing types and persuasive tragic fables. This genius for creative + interpretation is the soul and significance of all his criticism. It + gives their value to the studies of <i>The Renaissance</i>, but perhaps its + finest flower is to be found in the later <i>Greek Studies</i>. To Flavian, + Pater had said in <i>Marius</i>, "old mythology seemed as full of untried, + unexpressed motives and interest as human life itself," and with what + marvellous skill and evocative application of learning, he himself later + developed sundry of those "untried, unexpressed motives," as in his + studies of the myths of Dionysus—"The spirit of fire and dew, alive and + leaping in a thousand vines"—and Demeter and Persephone—"the peculiar + creation of country people of a high impressibility, dreaming over their + work in spring or autumn, half consciously touched by a sense of its + sacredness, and a sort of mystery about it"—no reader of Pater needs to + be told. This same creative interpretation gives a like value to his + studies of Plato; and so by virtue of this gift, active throughout the + ten volumes which constitute his collected work, Pater proved himself + to be of the company of the great humanists. +</p> +<p> + Along with all the other constituents of his work, its sacerdotalism, + its subtle reverie, its sensuous colour and perfume, its marmoreal + austerity, its honeyed music, its frequent preoccupation with the + haunted recesses of thought, there go an endearing homeliness and + simplicity, a deep human tenderness, a gentle friendliness, a something + childlike. He has written of her, "the presence that rose thus so + strangely beside the waters," to whom all experience had been "but as + the sound of lyres and flutes," and he has written of "The Child in the + House." Among all "the strange dyes, strange colours, and curious + odours, and work of the artist's hands," one never misses "the face of + one's friend"; and, in all its wanderings, the soul never strays far + from the white temples of the gods and the sound of running water. +</p> +<p> + It is by virtue of this combination of humanity, edification, and + aesthetic delight that Walter Pater is unique among the great teachers + and artists of our time. +</p> +<a name="2H_4_27"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<h2> + XXIII +</h2> +<h3> + THE MYSTERY OF "FIONA MACLEOD" <small><sup>1</sup></small> +</h3> + + +<p> </p> + + +<p class="note"> + <sup><b>1</b></sup><i>William Sharp (Fiona Macleod)</i>. A Memoir, compiled by + his wife, Elizabeth A. Sharp. (Duffield & Co.)<br> + <i>The Writings of Fiona Macleod</i>. Uniform edition. Arranged by Mrs. + William Sharp. (Duffield & Co.) +<p> + +<p> + In the fascinating memoir of her husband, which Mrs. William Sharp has + written with so much dignity and tact, and general biographic skill, she + dwells with particular fondness of recollection on the two years of + their life at Phenice Croft, a charming cottage they had taken in the + summer of 1892 at Rudgwick in Sussex, seven miles from Horsham, the + birthplace of Shelley. Still fresh in my memory is a delightful visit I + paid them there, and I was soon afterwards to recall with special + significance a conversation I had with Mrs. Sharp, as four of us walked + out one evening after dinner in a somewhat melancholy twilight, the + glow-worms here and there trimming their ghostly lamps by the wayside, + and the nightjar churring its hoarse lovesong somewhere in the + thickening dusk. +</p> +<p> + "Will," Mrs. Sharp confided to me, was soon to have a surprise for his + friends in a fuller and truer expression of himself than his work had + so far attained, but the nature of that expression Mrs. Sharp did not + confide—more than to hint that there were powers and qualities in her + husband's make-up that had hitherto lain dormant, or had, at all events, + been but little drawn upon. +</p> +<p> + Mrs. Sharp was thus vaguely hinting at the future "Fiona Macleod," + for it was at Rudgwick, we learn, that that so long mysterious + literary entity sprang into imaginative being with <i>Pharais</i>. <i>Pharais</i> + was published in 1894, and I remember that early copies of it came + simultaneously to myself and Grant Allen, with whom I was then staying, + and how we were both somewhat <i>intrigué</i> by a certain air of mystery + which seemed to attach to the little volume. We were both intimate + friends of William Sharp, but I was better acquainted with Sharp's + earlier poetry than Grant Allen, and it was my detection in <i>Pharais</i> + of one or two subtly observed natural images, the use of which had + previously struck me in one of his <i>Romantic Ballads and Poems of + Phantasy</i>, that brought to my mind in a flash of understanding that + Rudgwick conversation with Mrs. Sharp, and thus made me doubly certain + that "Fiona Macleod" and William Sharp were one, if not the same. + Conceiving no reason for secrecy, and only too happy to find that my + friend had fulfilled his wife's prophecy by such fuller and finer + expression of himself, I stated my belief as to its authorship in a + review I wrote for the London <i>Star</i>. My review brought me an urgent + telegram from Sharp, begging me, for God's sake, to shut my mouth—or + words to that effect. Needless to say, I did my best to atone for + having thus put my foot in it, by a subsequent severe silence till + now unbroken; though I was often hard driven by curious inquirers to + preserve the secret which my friend afterwards confided to me. +</p> +<p> + When I say "confided to me," I must add that in the many confidences + William Sharp made to me on the matter, I was always aware of a reserve + of fanciful mystification, and I am by no means sure, even now, that I, + or any of us—with the possible exception of Mrs. Sharp—know the whole + truth about "Fiona Macleod." Indeed it is clear from Mrs. Sharp's + interesting revelations of her husband's temperament that "the whole + truth" could hardly be known even to William Sharp himself; for, very + evidently in "Fiona Macleod" we have to deal not merely with a literary + mystification, but with a psychological mystery. Here it is pertinent to + quote the message written to be delivered to certain of his friends + after his death: "This will reach you," he says, "after my death. You + will think I have wholly deceived you about Fiona Macleod. But, in an + intimate sense this is not so, though (and inevitably) in certain + details I have misled you. Only, it is a mystery. I cannot explain. + Perhaps you will intuitively understand or may come to understand. 'The + rest is silence.' Farewell. WILLIAM SHARP." +</p> +<p> + "It is only right, however, to add that I, and I only, was the + author—in the literal and literary sense—of all written under the + name of 'Fiona Macleod.'" +</p> +<p> + "Only, it is a mystery. I cannot explain." Does "I cannot explain" mean + "I must not explain," or merely just what it says? I am inclined to + think it means both; but, if so, the "must not" would refer to the + purely personal mystification on which, of course, none would desire to + intrude, and the "cannot" would refer to that psychological mystery + which we are at liberty to investigate. +</p> +<p> + William Sharp's explanation to myself—as I believe to others of his + friends—was to the same tenor as this posthumous statement. He and he + only had actually <i>written</i> the "Fiona Macleod" fantasies and poems, + but—yes! there was a real "Fiona Macleod" as well. She was a beautiful + cousin of his, living much in solitude and dreams, and seldom visiting + cities. Between her and him there was a singular spiritual kinship, + which by some inexplicable process, so to say, of psychic collaboration, + had resulted in the writings to which he had given her name. They were + hers as well as his, his as well as hers. Several times he even went so + far as to say that Miss Macleod was contemplating a visit to London, but + that her visit was to be kept a profound secret, and that he intended + introducing her to three of his friends and no more—George Meredith, + W.B. Yeats, and myself. Probably he made the same mock-confidence to + other friends, as a part of his general scheme of mystification. On one + occasion, when I was sitting with him in his study, he pointed to the + framed portrait of a beautiful woman which stood on top of a revolving + book-case, and said "That is Fiona!" I affected belief, but, rightly or + wrongly, it was my strong impression that the portrait thus labelled was + that of a well-known Irish lady prominently identified with Home Rule + politics, and I smiled to myself at the audacious white lie. Mrs. Sharp, + whose remembrance of her husband goes back to "a merry, mischievous + little boy in his eighth year, with light-brown curly hair, blue-grey + eyes, and a laughing face, and dressed in a tweed kilt," tells us that + this "love not only of mystery for its own sake, but of mystification + also," was a marked characteristic of his nature—a characteristic + developed even in childhood by the necessity he always felt of hiding + away from his companions that visionary side of his life which was + almost painfully vivid with him, and the sacredness of which in late + years he felt compelled to screen under his pseudonym. +</p> +<p> + That William Sharp's affirmation of an actual living and breathing + "Fiona Macleod" was, however, virtually true is confided by this + significant and illuminating passage in Mrs. Sharp's biography. Mrs. + Sharp is speaking of a sojourn together in Rome during the spring of + 1891, in which her husband had experienced an unusual exaltation and + exuberance of vital and creative energy. +</p> +<blockquote> + There, at last [she says], he had found the desired incentive + towards a true expression of himself, in the stimulus and + sympathetic understanding of the friend to whom he dedicated the + first of the books published under his pseudonym. This friendship + began in Rome and lasted throughout the remainder of his life. And + though this new phase of his work was at no time the result of + collaboration, as certain of his critics have suggested, he was + deeply conscious of his indebtedness to this friend, for—as he + stated to me in a letter of instructions, written before he went to + America in 1896, concerning his wishes in the event of his death—he + realized that it was "to her I owe my development as 'Fiona + Macleod,' though in a sense of course that began long before I + knew her, and indeed while I was still a child," and that, as he + believed, "without her there would have been no 'Fiona Macleod.'" + Because of her beauty, her strong sense of life and of the joy of + life; because of her keen intuitions and mental alertness, her + personality stood for him as a symbol of the heroic women of Greek + and Celtic days, a symbol that, as he expressed it, unlocked new + doors in his mind and put him "in touch with ancestral memories" of + his race. So, for a time, he stilled the critical, intellectual mood + of William Sharp, to give play to the development of this new-found + expression of subtle emotions, towards which he had been moving with + all the ardour of his nature. +</blockquote> +<p> + From this statement of Mrs. Sharp one naturally turns to the dedication + of <i>Pharais</i> to which she refers, finding a dedicatory letter + to "E.W.R." dealing for the most part with "Celtic" matters, but + containing these more personal passages: +</p> +<blockquote> + Dear friend [the letter begins], while you gratify me by your + pleasure in this inscription, you modestly deprecate the dedication + to you of this study of alien life—of that unfamiliar island-life + so alien in all ways from the life of cities, and, let me add, from + that of the great mass of the nation to which, in the communal + sense, we both belong. But in the Domhan-Tòir of friendship there + are resting-places where all barriers of race, training, and + circumstances fall away in dust. At one of these places we met, a + long while ago, and found that we loved the same things, and in the + same way. +</blockquote> +<p> + The letter ends with this: "There is another Pà ras (Paradise) than that + seen of Alastair of Innisròn—the Tir-Nan-Oigh of friendship. Therein we + both have seen beautiful visions and dreamed dreams. Take, then, out of + my heart, this book of vision and dream." +</p> +<p> + "Fiona Macleod," then, would appear to be the collective name given to + a sort of collaborative Three-in-One mysteriously working together: an + inspiring Muse with the initials E.W.R.; that psychical "other self" + of whose existence and struggle for expression William Sharp had been + conscious all his life; and William Sharp, general <i>littérateur</i>, as + known to his friends and reading public. "Fiona Macleod" would seem to + have always existed as a sort of spiritual prisoner within that comely + and magnetic earthly tenement of clay known as William Sharp, but + whom William Sharp had been powerless to free in words, till, at + the wand-like touch of E.W.R.—the creative stimulus of a profound + imaginative friendship—a new power of expression had been given to + him—a power of expression strangely missing from William Sharp's + previous acknowledged writings. +</p> +<p> + To speak faithfully, it was the comparative mediocrity, and occasional + even positive badness, of the work done over his own name that formed + one of the stumbling-blocks to the acceptance of the theory that William + Sharp <i>could</i> be "Fiona Macleod." Of course, his work had been that of + an accomplished widely-read man of letters, his life of Heine being + perhaps his most notable achievement in prose; and his verse had not + been without intermittent flashes and felicities, suggestive of + smouldering poetic fires, particularly in his <i>Sospiri di Roma</i>; but, + for the most part, it had lacked any personal force or savour, and was + entirely devoid of that magnetism with which William Sharp, the man, was + so generously endowed. In fact, its disappointing inadequacy was a + secret source of distress to the innumerable friends who loved him + with a deep attachment, to which the many letters making one of the + delightful features of Mrs. Sharp's biography bear witness. In himself + William Sharp was so prodigiously a personality, so conquering in the + romantic flamboyance of his sun-like vitality, so overflowing with the + charm of a finely sensitive, richly nurtured temperament, so essentially + a poet in all he felt and did and said, that it was impossible patiently + to accept his writings as any fair expression of himself. He was, as we + say, so much more than his books—so immeasurably and delightfully + more—that, compared with himself, his books practically amounted to + nothing; and one was inclined to say of him in one's heart, as one does + sometimes say of such imperfectly articulate artistic natures: "What + a pity he troubles to write at all! Why not be satisfied with being + William Sharp? Why spoil 'William Sharp' by this inadequate and + misleading translation?" +</p> +<p> + The curious thing, too, was that the work he did over his own name, + after "Fiona Macleod" had escaped into the freedom of her own beautiful + individual utterance, showed no improvement in quality, no marks of + having sprung from the same mental womb where it had lain side by side + with so fair a sister. But, of course, one can readily understand that + such work would naturally lack spontaneity of impulse, having to be + done, more or less, against the grain, from reasons of expediency: so + long as "Fiona Macleod" must remain a secret, William Sharp must produce + something to show for himself, in order to go on protecting that secret, + which would, also, be all the better kept by William Sharp continuing in + his original mediocrity. Of this dual activity, Mrs. Sharp thus writes + with much insight: +</p> +<blockquote> + From then till the end of his life [she says] there was a continual + play of the two forces in him, or of the two sides of his nature: of + the intellectually observant, reasoning mind—the actor, and of the + intuitively observant, spiritual mind—the dreamer, which + differentiated more and more one from the other, and required + different conditions, different environment, different stimuli, + until he seemed to be two personalities in one. It was a development + which, as it proceeded, produced a tremendous strain on his physical + and mental resources, and at one time between 1897-8 threatened him + with a complete nervous collapse. And there was for a time distinct + opposition between those two natures which made it extremely + difficult for him to adjust his life, for the two conditions were + equally imperative in their demands upon him.<br><br> + + His preference, naturally, was for the intimate creative work which + he knew grew out of his inner self; though the exigencies of life, + his dependence on his pen for his livelihood, and, moreover, the + keen active interest "William Sharp" took in all the movements of + the day, literary and political, at home and abroad, required of + him a great amount of applied study and work. +</blockquote> +<p> + The strain must indeed have been enormous, and one cannot but feel that + much of it was a needless, even trivial "expense of spirit," and regret + that, when "Fiona Macleod" had so manifestly come into her own, William + Sharp should have continued to keep up the mystification, entailing as + it did such an elaborate machinery of concealment, not the least taxing + of which must have been the necessity of keeping up "Fiona Macleod's" + correspondence as well as his own. Better, so to say, to have thrown + William Sharp overboard, and to have reserved the energies of a + temperament almost abnormally active, but physically delusive and + precarious, for the finer productiveness of "Fiona Macleod." But William + Sharp deemed otherwise. He was wont to say, "Should the secret be found + out, Fiona dies," and in a letter to Mrs. Thomas A. Janvier—she and her + husband being among the earliest confidants of his secret—he makes this + interesting statement: "I can write out of my heart in a way I could + not do as William Sharp, and indeed I could not do so if I were the + woman Fiona Macleod is supposed to be, unless veiled in scrupulous + anonymity.... This rapt sense of oneness with nature, this <i>cosmic + ecstasy</i> and elation, this wayfaring along the extreme verges of the + common world, all this is so wrought up with the romance of life that + I could not bring myself to expression by my outer self, insistent and + tyrannical as that need is.... My truest self, the self who is below + all other selves, and my most intimate life and joys and sufferings, + thoughts, emotions, and dreams, <i>must</i> find expression, yet I cannot + save in this hidden way...." +</p> +<p> + Later he wrote: "Sometimes I am tempted to believe I am half a woman, + and so far saved as I am by the hazard of chance from what a woman can + be made to suffer if one let the light of the common day illuminate the + avenues and vistas of her heart...." +</p> +<p> + At one time, I thought that William Sharp's assumption of a feminine + pseudonym was a quite legitimate device to steal a march on his critics, + and to win from them, thus disguised, that recognition which he must + have been aware he had failed to win in his own person. Indeed, it is + doubtful whether, if he had published the "Fiona Macleod" writings under + his own name, they would have received fair critical treatment. I am + very sure that they would not; for there is quite a considerable amount + of so-called "criticism" which is really foregone conclusion based on + personal prejudice, or biassed preconception, and the refusal to admit + (employing a homely image) that an old dog does occasionally learn new + tricks. Many well-known writers have resorted to this device, sometimes + with considerable success. Since reading Mrs. Sharp's biography, + however, I conclude that this motive had but little, if any, influence + on William Sharp, and that his statement to Mrs. Janvier must be taken + as virtually sincere. +</p> +<p> + A certain histrionism, which was one of his charms, and is perhaps + inseparable from imaginative temperaments, doubtless had its share in + his consciousness of that "dual nature" of which we hear so much, + and which it is difficult sometimes to take with Sharp's "Celtic" + seriousness. Take, for example, this letter to his wife, when, having + left London, precipitately, in response to the call of the Isles, he + wrote: "The following morning we (for a kinswoman was with me) stood on + the Greenock pier waiting for the Hebridean steamer, and before long + were landed on an island, almost the nearest we could reach, that I + loved so well." Mrs. Sharp dutifully comments: "The 'we' who stood on + the pier at Greenock is himself in his dual capacity; his 'kinswoman' is + his other self." Later he writes, on his arrival in the Isle of Arran: + "There is something of a strange excitement in the knowledge that two + people are here: so intimate and yet so far off. For it is with me as + though Fiona were asleep in another room. I catch myself listening + for her step sometimes, for the sudden opening of a door. It is + unawaredly that she whispers to me. I am eager to see what she will + do—particularly in <i>The Mountain Lovers</i>. It seems passing strange + to be here with her alone at last...." I confess that this strikes + me disagreeably. It is one thing to be conscious of a "dual + personality"—after all, consciousness of dual personality is by no + means uncommon, and it is a commonplace that, spiritually, men of genius + are largely feminine—but it is another to dramatize one's consciousness + in this rather childish fashion. There seems more than a suspicion of + pose in such writing: though one cannot but feel that William Sharp was + right in thinking that the real "Fiona Macleod" was asleep at the + moment. At the same time, William Sharp seems unmistakably to have been + endowed with what I suppose one has to call "psychic" powers—though the + word has been "soiled with all ignoble use"—and to be the possessor + in a considerable degree of that mysterious "sight" or sixth sense + attributed to men and women of Gaelic blood. Mrs. Sharp tells a curious + story of his mood immediately preceding that flight to the Isles of + which I have been writing. He had been haunted the night before by the + sound of the sea. It seemed to him that he heard it splashing in the + night against the walls of his London dwelling. So real it had seemed + that he had risen from his bed and looked out of the window, and even in + the following afternoon, in his study, he could still hear the waves + dashing against the house. "A telegram had come for him that morning," + writes Mrs. Sharp, "and I took it to his study. I could get no answer. + I knocked, louder, then louder,—at last he opened the door with a + curiously dazed look in his face. I explained. He answered: 'Ah, I + could not hear you for the sound of the waves!'" +</p> +<p> + His last spoken words have an eerie suggestiveness in this connection. + Writing of his death on the 12th of December, 1905, Mrs. Sharp says: + "About three o'clock, with his devoted friend Alec Hood by his side, he + suddenly leant forward with shining eyes and exclaimed in a tone of + joyous recognition, 'Oh, the beautiful "Green Life," again!' and the + next moment sank back in my arms with the contented sigh, 'Ah, all is + well!'" +</p> +<p> + "The green life" was a phrase often on Sharp's lips, and stood for him + for that mysterious life of elemental things to which he was almost + uncannily sensitive, and into which he seemed able strangely to merge + himself, of which too his writings as "Fiona Macleod" prove him to have + had "invisible keys." It is this, so to say, conscious pantheism, + this kinship with the secret forces and subtle moods of nature, this + responsiveness to her mystic spiritual "intimations," that give to those + writings their peculiar significance and value. In the external lore of + nature William Sharp was exceptionally learned. Probably no writer in + English, with the exceptions of George Meredith and Grant Allen, was his + equal here, and his knowledge had been gained, as such knowledge can + only be gained, in that receptive period of an adventurous boyhood of + which he has thus written: "From fifteen to eighteen I sailed up every + loch, fjord, and inlet in the Western Highlands and islands, from Arran + and Colonsay to Skye and the Northern Hebrides, from the Rhinns of + Galloway to the Ord of Sutherland. Wherever I went I eagerly associated + myself with fishermen, sailors, shepherds, gamekeepers, poachers, + gypsies, wandering pipers, and other musicians." For two months he had + "taken the heather" with, and had been "star-brother" and "sun-brother" + to, a tribe of gypsies, and in later years he had wandered variously in + many lands, absorbing the wonder and the beauty of the world. Well + might he write to Mrs. Janvier: "I have had a very varied, and, to use a + much abused word, a very romantic life in its internal as well as in its + external aspects." Few men have drunk so deep of the cup of life, and + from such pure sky-reflecting springs, and if it be true, in the words + of his friend Walter Pater, that "to burn ever with this hard gem-like + flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life," then indeed the + life of William Sharp was a nobly joyous success. +</p> +<p> + And to those who loved him it is a great happiness to know that he was + able to crown this ecstasy of living with that victory of expression for + which his soul had so long travailed, and to leave behind him not only a + lovely monument of star-lit words, but a spiritual legacy of perennial + refreshment, a fragrant treasure-house of recaptured dreams, and + hallowed secrets of the winds of time: for such are <i>The Writings of + "Fiona Macleod"</i>. +</p> +<a name="2H_4_28"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<h2> + XXIV +</h2> +<h3> + FORBES-ROBERTSON: AN APPRECIATION +</h3> +<p> </p> + + +<p> + The voluntary abdication of power in its zenith has always fascinated + and "intrigued" the imagination of mankind. We are so accustomed to + kings and other gifted persons holding on to their sceptres with a + desperate tenacity, even through those waning years when younger men, + beholding their present feebleness, wonder whether their previous might + was not a fancy of their fathers, whether, in fact, they were ever + really kings or gifted persons at all. In so many cases we have to rely + on a legend of past accomplishment to preserve our reverence. Therefore, + when a Sulla or a Charles V. or a Mary Anderson, leave their thrones at + the moment when their sway over us is most assured and brilliant, we + wonder—wonder at a phenomenon rare in humanity, and suggestive of + romantic reserves of power which seal not only our allegiance to them, + but that of posterity. The mystery which resides in all greatness, in + all charm, is not violated by the cynical explanations of decay. They + remain fortunate as those whom the gods loved, wearing the aureoles of + immortal promise. +</p> +<p> + Few artists have been wise in this respect; poets, for example, very + seldom. Thus we find the works of most of them encumbered with the + débris of their senility. Coventry Patmore was a rare example of a poet + who laid down his pen deliberately, not merely as an artist in words, + but as an artist in life, having, as he said in the memorable preface to + the collected edition of his poems, completed that work which in his + youth he had set before him. His readers, therefore, are not saddened by + any pathetic gleanings from a once-rich harvest-field, or the carefully + picked-up shakings of November boughs. +</p> +<p> + Forbes-Robertson is one of those artists who has chosen to bid farewell + to his art while he is still indisputably its master. One or two other + distinguished actors before him have thus chosen, and a greater number + have bade us, those professional "farewells" that remind one of that + dream of De Quincey in which he heard reverberated "Everlasting + farewells! and again and yet again reverberated—everlasting farewells!" + In Forbes-Robertson's case, however, apart from our courteous taking the + word of his management, we know that the news is sadly true. There is + a curious personal honour and sincerity breathing through all his + impersonations that make us feel, so to say, that not only would we take + the ghost's word for a thousand pounds, but that between him and his art + is such an austere compact that he would be incapable of humiliating it + by any mere advertising devices; and beyond that, those who have seen + him play this time (1914) in New York must have been aware that in the + very texture of all his performances was woven like a sigh the word + "farewell." His very art, as I shall have later to emphasize, is an art + of farewell; but, apart from that general quality, it seemed to me, + though, indeed, it may have been mere sympathetic fancy, that in these + last New York performances, as in the performances last spring in + London, I heard a personal valedictory note. Forbes-Robertson seemed to + be saying good-by at once to his audience and to his art. +</p> +<p> + In doing this, along with the inevitable sadness that must accompany + such a step, one cannot but think there will be a certain private + whimsical satisfaction for him in being able to go about the world in + after years with his great gift still his, hidden away, but still his to + use at any moment, and to know not only that he has been, but still is, + as it were, in secret, the supreme Hamlet of his time. Something + like that, one may imagine, must be the private fun of abdication. + Forbes-Robertson, as he himself has told us, lays down one art only to + take up another to which he has long been devoted, and of his early + affiliation to which the figure of Love Kissing Beatrice in Rossetti's + "Dante's Dream" bears illustrious and significant witness. As, one + recalls that he was the model for that figure one realizes that even + then he was the young lord Hamlet, born to be <i>par excellence</i> the actor + of sorrow and renunciation. +</p> +<p> + It is not my province to write here of Forbes-Robertson from the point + of view of the reminiscent playgoer or of the technical critic of + acting. Others, obviously, are far better qualified to undertake those + offices for his fame. I would merely offer him the tribute of one to + whom for many years his acting has been something more than acting, as + usually understood, something to class with great poetry, and all the + spiritual exaltation which "great poetry" implies. From first to last, + however associated with that whimsical comedy of which, too, he is + appropriately a master, he has struck for me that note of almost + heartbreaking spiritual intensity which, under all its superficial + materialism and cynicism, is the key-note of the modern world. +</p> +<p> + When I say "first," I am thinking of the first time I saw him, on the + first night of <i>The Profligate</i> by Pinero, in its day one of the plays + that blazed the trail for that social, or, rather, I should say, + sociological, drama since become even more deadly in earnest, though + perhaps less deadly in skill. Incidentally, I remember that Miss Olga + Nethersole, then quite unknown, made a striking impression of evil, + though playing only a small part. It was Forbes-Robertson, however, for + me, and I think for all the playgoing London of the time, that gave the + play its chief value by making us startlingly aware, through the + poignancy of his personality, of what one might call the voice of the + modern conscience. To associate that thrillingly beautiful and profound + voice of his with anything that sounds so prosaic as a "modern + conscience" may seem unkind, but actually our modern conscience is + anything but prosaic, and combines within it something at once poetic + and prophetic, of which that something ghostly in Forbes-Robertson's + acting is peculiarly expressive. That quality of other-worldliness which + at once scared and fascinated the lodgers in <i>The Passing of the Third + Floor Back</i> is present in all Forbes-Robertson's acting. It was that + which strangely stirred us, that first night of <i>The Profligate</i>. We + meet it again with the blind Dick Heldar in <i>The Light That Failed</i>, and + of course we meet it supremely in <i>Hamlet</i>. In fact, it is that quality + which, chief among others, makes Forbes-Robertson's Hamlet the classical + Hamlet of his time. +</p> +<p> + Forbes-Robertson has of course played innumerable parts. Years before + <i>The Profligate</i>, he had won distinction as the colleague of Irving and + Mary Anderson. He may be said to have played everything under the sun. + His merely theatric experience has thus enriched and equipped his + temperament with a superb technique. It would probably be impossible for + him to play any part badly, and of the various successes he has made, to + which his present repertoire bears insufficient witness, others, as I + have said, can point out the excellences. My concern here is with his + art in its fullest and finest expression, in its essence; and therefore + it is unnecessary for me to dwell upon any other of his impersonations + than that of Hamlet. When a man can play <i>Hamlet</i> so supremely, it may + be taken for granted, I presume, that he can play <i>Mice and Men</i>, or + even that masterpiece of all masterpieces, <i>Caesar and Cleopatra</i>. I + trust that it is no disrespect to the distinguished authors of these two + plays to say that such plays in a great actor's repertoire represent + less his versatility than his responsibilities, that pot-boiling + necessity which hampers every art, and that of the actor, perhaps, most + of all. +</p> +<p> + To my thinking, the chief interest of all Forbes-Robertson's other parts + is that they have "fed" his Hamlet; and, indeed, many of his best parts + may be said to be studies for various sides of Hamlet, his fine <i>Romeo</i>, + for example, which, unfortunately, he no longer plays. In <i>Hamlet</i> all + his qualities converge, and in him the tradition of the stage that all + an ambitious actor's experience is only to fit him to play Hamlet is for + once justified. But, of course, the chief reason of that success is that + nature meant Forbes-Robertson to play Hamlet. Temperament, personality, + experience, and training have so worked together that he does not merely + play, but <i>is</i>, Hamlet. Such, at all events, is the complete illusion he + is able to produce. +</p> +<p> + Of course, one has heard from them of old time that an actor's + personality must have nothing to do with the part he is playing; that he + only is an actor who can most successfully play the exact opposite of + himself. That is the academic theory of "character-acting," and of + course the half-truth of it is obvious. It represents the weariness + induced in audiences by handsome persons who merely, in the stage + phrase, "bring their bodies on"; yet it would go hard with some of our + most delightful comedians were it the whole truth about acting. As a + matter of fact, of course, a great actor includes a multiplicity of + selves, so that he may play many parts, yet always be playing himself. + Beyond himself no artist, whatever his art, has ever gone. +</p> +<p> + What reduplication of personality is necessary for the man who plays + Hamlet need hardly be said, what wide range of humanity and variety of + accomplishment; for, as Anatole France has finely said of Hamlet, "He is + a man, he is man, he is the whole of man." +</p> +<p> + Time was when <i>Hamlet</i> was little more than an opportunity for some + robustious periwig-pated fellow, or it gave the semi-learned actor the + chance to conceal his imaginative incapacity by a display of "new + readings." For example, instead of saying: +</p> +<pre> + The air bites shrewdly; it is very cold, +</pre> +<p class="noindent"> + you diverted attention from your acting by an appeal to the literary + antiquarianism of your audience, and, out of one or other of the + quartos, read the line: +</p> +<pre> + The air bites shrewdly; <i>is</i> it very cold? +</pre> +<p class="noindent"> + with the implication that there was a whole world of suggestion in the + difference. +</p> +<p> + One has known actors, far from unillustrious, who staked their whole + performance on some such learned triviality or some trifling novelty of + business, when, for example, in Hamlet's scene with his mother, the + prince comes to: +</p> +<pre> + Look here upon this picture, and on this. +</pre> +<p> + An actor who deserves better than he has yet received in the tradition + of the acted <i>Hamlet</i>—I mean Wilson Barrett—used to make much of + taking a miniature of his father from his bosom to point the contrast. +</p> +<p> + But all such things in the end are of no account. New readings, new + business, avail less and less. Nor does painstaking archaeology of + scenery or dresses any longer throw dust in our eyes. We are for the + play, the living soul of the play. Give us that, and your properties may + be no more elaborate than those of a <i>guignol</i> in the Champs-Elysées. +</p> +<p> + Forbes-Robertson's acting is so imaginative, creating the scene about + him as he plays, that one almost resents any stage-settings for him at + all, however learnedly accurate and beautifully painted. +</p> +<p> + His soul seems to do so much for us that we almost wish it could be + left to do it all, and he act for us as they acted in Elizabeth's day, + with only a curtain for scenery, and a placard at the side of the stage + saying, "This is Elsinore." +</p> +<p> + One could hardly say more for one's sense of the reality of + Forbes-Robertson's acting, as, naturally, one is not unaware that + distressing experiments have been made to reproduce the Elizabethan + theatre by actors who, on the other hand, were sadly in need of all + that scenery, archaeology, or orchestra could do for them. +</p> +<p> + With a world overcrowded with treatises on the theme, from, and before, + Gervinus, with the commentary of <i>Wilhelm Meister</i> in our minds, not to + speak of the starlit text ever there for our reading, there is surely no + need to traverse the character of Hamlet. He has meant so much to our + fathers—though he can never have meant so much to them as he does to us + of today—that he is, so to say, in our blood. He is strangely near to + our hearts by sheer inheritance. And perhaps the most beautiful thing + Forbes-Robertson's Hamlet does for us is that it commands our love for a + great gentleman doing his gentlest and bravest and noblest with a sad + smile and a gay humour, in not merely a complicated, wicked, absurd, and + tiresome, but, also, a ghostly world. +</p> +<p> + When we think of Hamlet, we think of him as two who knew him very well + thought of him,—Ophelia and Horatio,—and as one who saw him only as he + sat at last on his throne, dead, with the crown of Denmark on his + knees. +</p> +<p> + Ophelia's +</p> +<pre class="si"> + Courtier's, soldier's, scholar's eye, tongue, sword, + The expectancy and rose of the fair state; +</pre> +<p class="noindent"> + the "sweet prince" of Horatio's "good-night"—the soldier for whose + passage Fortinbras commanded +</p> +<pre class="si"> + The soldier's music and the rites of war. +</pre> +<p> + We think of him, too, as the haunted son of a dear father murdered, a + philosophic spectator of the grotesque brutality of life, suddenly by a + ghostly summons called on to take part in it; a prince, a philosopher, a + lover, a soldier, a sad humourist. +</p> +<p> + Were one asked what aspects of Hamlet does Forbes-Robertson specially + embody, I should say, in the first place, his princeliness, his + ghostliness, then his cynical and occasionally madcap humour, as where, + at the end of the play-scene, he capers behind the throne in a terrible + boyish glee. No actor that I have seen expresses so well that scholarly + irony of the Renaissance permeating the whole play. His scene with + Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and the recorders is masterly: the silken + sternness of it, the fine hauteur, the half-appeal as of lost ideals + still pleading with the vulgarity of life, the fierce humour of its + disillusion, and behind, as always, the heartbreak—that side of which + comes of the recognition of what it is to be a gentleman in such a + world. +</p> +<p> + In this scene, too, as in others, Forbes-Robertson makes it clear that + that final tribute of Fortinbras was fairly won. +</p> +<p> + The soldier—if necessary, the fighter—is there as supple and strong as + a Damascus blade. One is always aware of the "something dangerous," for + all his princely manners and scholarly ways. One is never left in doubt + as to how this Hamlet will play the man. It is all too easy for him to + draw his sword and make an end of the whole fantastic business. Because + this philosophic swordsman holds the sword, let no one think that he + knows not how to wield it. All this gentleness—have a care!—is that of + an unusually masculine restraint. +</p> +<p> + In the scene with Ophelia, Forbes-Robertson's tenderness was almost + terrible. It came from such a height of pity upon that little + uncomprehending flower! +</p> +<p> + "I never gave you aught," as Forbes-Robertson said it, seemed to mean: + "I gave you all—all that you could not understand." "Yet are not you + and I in the toils of that destiny there that moves the arras. <i>Is</i> it + your father?" +</p> +<p> + Along with Forbes-Robertson's spiritual interpretation of Shakespeare + goes pre-eminently, and doubtless as a contributive part of it, his + imaginative revitalization of the great old lines—lines worn like a + highway with the passage of the generations. As a friend of mine + graphically phrased it, "How he revives for us the splendour of the + text!" +</p> +<p> + The splendour of the text! It is a good phrase, and how splendid the + text is we, of course, all know—know so well that we take it for + granted, and so fall into forgetfulness of its significance; forgetting + what central fires of soul and intellect must have gone to the creation + of such a world of transcendent words. +</p> +<p> + Yet how living the lines still are, though the generations have almost + quoted the life out of them, no man who has spoken them on the stage in + our day, except Forbes-Robertson, has had the gift to show. +</p> +<p> + It is more than elocution, masterly elocution as it is, more than the + superbly modulated voice: the power comes of spiritual springs welling + up beneath the voice—springs fed from those infinite sources which "lie + beyond the reaches of our souls." +</p> +<p> + Merely to take the phrase I have just quoted, how few actors—or readers + of Shakespeare, or members of any Shakespearian audience, for that + matter—have any personal conception of what it means! They may make a + fine crescendo with it, but that is all. They have never stood, + shrinking and appalled, yet drawn with a divine temptation, upon the + brink of that vastness along the margin of which, it is evident, that + Hamlet often wandered. It is in vain they tell their audiences and + Horatio: +</p> +<pre class="si"> + There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, + Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. +</pre> +<p> + We are quite sure that they know nothing of what they are saying; and + that, as a matter of fact, there are few things for them in heaven or + earth except the theatre they are playing in, their actors' club, and, + generally, their genial mundane lives; and, of course, one rather + congratulates them on the simplicity of their lives, congratulates them + on their ignorance of such haunted regions of the mind. Yet, all the + same, that simplicity seems to disqualify them from playing <i>Hamlet</i>. +</p> +<p> + Few Shakespearian actors seem to remember what they are + playing—Shakespeare. One would think that to be held a worthy + interpreter of so great a dramatist, so mysterious a mind, and so + golden a poet, were enough distinction. Oscar Wilde, in a fine + sonnet, addressed Henry Irving as +</p> +<pre class="si"> + Thou trumpet set for Shakespeare's lips to blow, +</pre> +<p class="noindent"> + and we may be sure that Irving appreciated the honour thus paid him, he + who so wonderfully interpreted so many of Shakespeare's moods, so well + understood the irony of his intellect, even the breadth of his humanity, + yet in <i>Hamlet</i>, at all events, so strangely missed his soul. +</p> +<p> + Most of us have seen many Hamlets die. We have watched them squirming + through those scientific contortions of dissolution, to copy which they + had very evidently walked the hospitals in a businesslike quest of + death-agonies, as certain histrionic connoisseurs of madness in France + lovingly haunt the Saltpétrière. As I look back, I wonder how we + tolerated their wriggling absurdity. I suppose it was that the hand of + tradition was still upon us, as upon them. And, let us not forget, the + words were there, the immortal words, and an atmosphere of tragic death + and immortality that only such words could create: +</p> +<pre class="si"> + Absent thee from felicity awhile, + And in the harsh world draw thy breath in pain + To hear my story ... + The rest is silence.... +</pre> +<p> + How different it is when Forbes-Robertson's Hamlet dies! All my life I + seem to have been asking my friends, those I loved best, those who + valued the dearest, the kindest, the greatest, and the strongest in our + strange human life, to come with me and see Forbes-Robertson die in + <i>Hamlet</i>. I asked them because, as that strange young dead king sat + upon his throne, there was something, whatever it meant—death, life, + immortality, what you will—of a surpassing loveliness, something + transfiguring the poor passing moment of trivial, brutal murder into a + beauty to which it was quite natural that that stern Northern warrior, + with his winged helmet, should bend the knee. I would not exchange + anything I have ever read or seen for Forbes-Robertson as he sits there + so still and starlit upon the throne of Denmark. +</p> +<p> + Forbes-Robertson is not merely a great Shakespearian actor; he is a + great spiritual actor. The one doubtless implies the other, though the + implication has not always appeared to be obvious. +</p> +<p> + He is prophetic of what the stage will some day be, and what we can see + it here and there preparing to become. In all the welter of the dramatic + conditions of the moment there emerges one fact, that of the growing + importance of the stage as a vehicle for what one may term general + culture. The stage, with its half-sister, the cinema, is strangely, + by how long and circuitous a route, returning of course, with an + immeasurably developed equipment, to its starting-point, ending + curiously where it began as the handmaid of the church. As with the old + moralities or miracle-plays, it is becoming once more our teacher. The + lessons of truth and beauty, as those of plain gaiety and delight, are + relying more and more upon the actor for their expression, and less on + the accredited doctors of divinity or literature. Even the dancers are + doing much for our souls. Our duties as citizens are being taught us by + well-advertised plays, and if we wish to abolish Tammany or change our + police commissioner, we enforce our desire by the object-lesson of a + play. The great new plays may not yet be here, but the public once more + is going to the theatre, as it went long ago in Athens, to be delighted + and amused, of course, but also to be instructed in national and civic + affairs, and, most important of all, to be purified by pity and terror. +</p> +<a name="2H_4_29"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<h2> + XXV +</h2> +<h3> + A MEMORY OF FRÉDÉRIC MISTRAL +</h3> +<p> </p> + +<p> + There are many signs that poetry is coming into its own again—even + here in America, which, while actually one of the most romantic and + sentimental of countries, fondly imagines itself the most prosaic. +</p> +<p> + Kipling, to name but one instance, has, by his clarion-tongued + quickening of the British Empire, shown so convincingly what dynamic + force still belongs to the right kind of singing, and the poet in + general seems to be winning back some of that serious respect from his + fellow-citizens which, under a misapprehension of his effeminacy and + general uselessness, he had lost awhile. The poet is not so much a joke + to the multitude as he was a few years ago, and the term "minor poet" + seems to have fallen into desuetude. +</p> +<p> + Still for all this, I doubt if it is in the Anglo-Saxon blood, nowadays + at all events, to make a national hero of a poet, one might say a + veritable king, such as Frédéric Mistral is today in Provence. In our + time, Björnson in Norway was perhaps the only parallel figure, and he + held his position as actual "father of his people" for very much the + same reasons. At once a commanding and lovable personality, he and his + work were absolutely identified with his country and his countrymen. He + was simply Norway incarnate. +</p> +<p> + So, today in Provence, it is with Frédéric Mistral. He is not only a + poet of Provence. He is Provence incarnate, and, apart from the noble + quality of his work, his position as the foremost representative of his + compatriots is romantically unique. No other country today, pointing to + its greatest man, would point out—a poet; whereas Mistral, were he not + as unspoiled as he is laurelled, might, with literal truth, say: +</p> +<pre> + "<i>Provence—c'est moi!</i>" +</pre> +<p> + We had hardly set foot in Provence this last spring, my wife and I, + before we realized, with grateful wonder, that we had come to a country + that has a poet for a king. +</p> +<p> + On arriving at Marseilles almost the first word we heard was + "Mistral"—not the bitter wind of the same name, but the name of the + honey-tongued "Master." Our innkeeper—O the delightful innkeepers of + France!—on our consulting him as to our project of a walking trip + through the Midi—as Frenchmen usually speak of Provence—said, for his + first aid to the traveller: "Then, of course, you will see our great + poet, Mistral." And he promptly produced a copy of <i>Mirèio</i>, which he + begged me to use till I had bought a copy for myself. +</p> +<p> + "Ah! Mistral," he cried, with Gallic enthusiasm, using the words I have + borrowed from his lips, "Mistral is the King of Provence!" +</p> +<p> + Marseilles had not always been so enthusiastic over Mistral and his + fellows. And Mistral, in his memoirs, gives an amusing account of a + philological battle fought over the letter "s" in a room behind one of + the Marseilles bookshops between "the amateurs of trivialities, the + rhymers of the white beard, the jealous, the grumblers," and the young + innovators of the "félibrige." +</p> +<p> + But that was over fifty years ago, and the battle of those young + enthusiasts has long since been won. What that battle was and what an + extraordinary victory came of it must needs be told for the significance + of Mistral in Provence to be properly understood. +</p> +<p> + The story is one of the most romantic in the history of literature. + Briefly, it is this: +</p> +<p> + The Provençal language, the "langue d'oc," was, of course, once the + courtly and lettered language of Europe, the language of the great + troubadours, and through them the vehicle of the culture and refinement + of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. From it may be said to have + sprung the beginnings of Italian literature. +</p> +<p> + But, owing to various historical vicissitudes, the language of Northern + France, the "langue d'oil," gradually took its place, and when Mistral + was born, in 1830, Provençal had long been regarded as little more than + a <i>patois</i>. +</p> +<p> + Now it was the young Mistral's dream, as a school-boy in the old convent + school of Saint Michael de Frigolet, at Avignon, to restore his native + tongue to its former high estate, to make it once more a literary + language, and it chanced that one of his masters, Joseph Roumanille, was + secretly cherishing the same dream. +</p> +<p> + The master, looking over his pupil's shoulder one day, found that, + instead of working at his prescribed task, he was busily engaged in + translating the Penitential Psalms into Provençal. Instead of punishing + him, the master gratefully hailed a kindred spirit, and presently + confided Provençal verses of his own making. From that moment, though + there was a dozen years' difference between their ages, Mistral and + Roumanille began a friendship which was to last till Roumanille's death, + a friendship of half a century. +</p> +<p> + Soon their dream attracted other recruits, and presently seven friends, + whose names are all famous now, and most of whom have statues in Arles + or in Avignon—Roumanille, Mistral, Aubanel, Mathieu, Giéra, Brunet, and + Tavan—after the manner of Ronsard's "Pléiade," and Rossetti's + "P.R.B."—formed themselves into a brotherhood to carry on the great + work of regeneration. +</p> +<p> + They needed a name to call themselves by. They had all met together to + talk things over in the old castle of Font-Ségugne, or, as Mistral more + picturesquely puts it: "It was written in heaven that one blossoming + Sunday, the twenty-first of May, 1854, in the full springtide of life + and of the year, seven poets should come to meet together in the castle + of Font-Ségugne." Several suggestions were made for a name for this + brotherhood, but presently Mistral announced that in an old folk-story + he had collected at his birthplace, Maillane, he believed that he had + found the word they were in search of. In this folk-story the boy Christ + is represented as discoursing in the temple with "the seven félibres of + the Law." +</p> +<p> + "Why, that is us!" exclaimed the enthusiastic young men as Mistral + finished, and there on the spot "félibre" was adopted as the password of + their order, Mistral coining the word "félibrige" to represent the work + they aimed to do, and also their association. The name stuck, and has + now for many years been the banner-word for the vigorous school of + Provençal literature and the allied arts of painting and sculpture which + has responded with such eager vitality to Mistral's rallying cry. +</p> +<p> + But, excellent as are the other poets which the school has produced—and + one need only glance through a recent <i>Anthologie du Félibrige</i> to + realize what a wealth of true poetry the word "félibrige" now stands + for—there can be no question that its greatest asset still remains + Mistral's own work, as it was his first great poem, <i>Mirèio</i>, which + first drew the eyes of literary Paris, more than inclined to be + contemptuous, to the Provençal renaissance. +</p> +<p> + Adolphe Dumas had been sent to Provence in the year 1856 by the Minister + of Public Instruction to collect the folk-songs of the people, and + calling on Mistral (then twenty-six), living quietly with his widowed + mother at Maillane, he had found him at work on <i>Mirèio</i>. Mistral read + some passages to him, with the result that the generous Dumas returned + to Paris excitedly to proclaim the advent of a new poet. Presently, + Mistral accepted his invitation to visit Paris, was introduced to the + great Lamartine—who has left some charming pages descriptive of his + visit,—read some of <i>Mirèio</i> to him, and was hailed by him as "the + Homer of Provence." +</p> +<p> + The press, however, had its little fling at the new-comer. "The Mistral + it appears," said one pitiful punster, "has been incarnated in a poem. + We shall soon see whether it is anything else but wind." Such has been + the invariable welcome of great men in a small world. +</p> +<p> + But Mistral had no taste for Paris, either as a lion or a butt, and, + after a few days' stay, we find him once more quietly at home at + Maillane. Yet he had brought back with him one precious trophy—the + praise of Lamartine; and when, in the course of a year or two (1859), + <i>Mirèio</i> came to be published at Avignon, it bore, as it still bears, + this heart-felt dedication to Lamartine: +</p> +<p> + "To thee I dedicate <i>Mirèio</i>; it is my heart and my soul; it is the + flower of my years; it is a bunch of grapes from Crau with all its + leaves—a rustic's offering." +</p> +<p> + With the publication of <i>Mirèio</i> Mistral instantly "arrived," instantly + found himself on that throne which, as year has followed year, has + become more securely his own. Since then he has written much noble + poetry, all embodying and vitalizing the legendary lore of his native + land, a land richer in momentous history, perhaps, than any other + section of Europe. But in addition to his poetry he has, single-handed, + carried through the tremendous scholarly task of compiling a dictionary + of the Provençal language—a <i>Thesaurus of the Félibrige</i>, for which + work the Institute awarded him a prize of ten thousand francs. +</p> +<p> + In 1904, he was awarded the Nobel prize of 100,000 francs, but such is + his devotion to his fellow-countrymen that he did not keep that prize + for himself, but used it to found the Musée Arlésien at Arles, a museum + designed as a treasure house of anything and everything pertaining to + the history and life of Provence—antiquities, furniture, costumes, + paintings, and so forth. +</p> +<p> + It was in Arles in 1909, the fiftieth birthday of <i>Mirèio</i>, that + Mistral, then seventy-nine years old, may be said to have reached the + summit of his romantic fame. A great festival was held in his honour, in + which the most distinguished men of France took part. A dramatized + version of his <i>Mirèio</i> was played in the old Roman amphitheatre, and a + striking statue of him was unveiled in the antique public square, the + Place du Forum, with the shade of Constantine looking on, one might + feel, from his mouldering palace hard by. +</p> +<p> + In Arles Mistral is a well-known, beloved figure, for it is his custom, + every Saturday, to come there from Maillane, to cast his eye over the + progress of his museum, the pet scheme of his old age. One wonders how + it must seem to pass that figure of himself, pedestaled high in the old + square. To few men is it given to pass by their own statues in the + street. Sang a very different poet— +</p> +<pre class="si"> + They grind us to the dust with poverty, + And build us statues when we come to die. +</pre> +<p> + But poor Villon had the misfortune to be a poet of the "langue d'oil," + and the Montfaucon gibbet was the only monument of which he stood in + daily expectation. Could the lines of two poets offer a greater + contrast? Blessed indeed is he who serves the rural gods, Pan and Old + Sylvanus and the sister nymphs—as Virgil sang; and Virgilian indeed has + been the golden calm, and sunlit fortunes, as Virgilian, rather than + Homeric, is the gracious art, of the poet whom his first Parisian + admirer, Adolphe Dumas, called "the Homer of Provence"—as Virgilian, + too, seemed the landscape through which at length, one April afternoon, + we found ourselves on pilgrimage to the home of him whose name had been + on the lips of every innkeeper, shopkeeper, and peasant, all the way + from Marseilles to Tarascon. +</p> +<p> + Yes! the same golden peace that lies like a charm across every page + of his greatest poem lay across that sun-steeped, fertile plain, + with its walls of cypress trees, its lines of poplars, its delicate, + tapestry-like designs of almond trees in blossom, on a sombre background + of formal olive orchards, its green meadows, lit up with singing + water-courses, or gleaming irrigation canals, starred here and there + with the awakening kingcup, or sweet with the returning violet—here + and there a farmhouse ("mas," as they call them in Provence) snugly + sheltered from the mistral by their screens of foliage—and far aloft in + the distance, floating like a silver dream, the snow-white shoulder of + Mont Ventoux—the Fuji Yama of Provence. +</p> +<p> + At last the old, time-worn village came in sight—it lies about ten + miles north-east of Tartarin's Tarascon—and we entered it, as was + proper, with the "Master's" words on our lips: "Maillane is beautiful, + well-pleasing is Maillane; and it grows more and more beautiful every + day. Maillane is the honour of the countryside, and takes its name from + the month of May. +</p> +<p> + "Who would be in Paris or in Rome? Poor conscripts! There is nothing to + charm one there; but Maillane has its equal nowhere—and one would + rather eat an apple in Maillane than a partridge in Paris." +</p> +<p> + It was Sunday afternoon, and the streets were full of young people in + their Sunday finery, the girls wearing the pretty Arlésien caps. At + first sight of us, with our knapsacks, they were prepared to be amused, + and saucy lads called out things in mock English; but when it was + understood that we were seeking the house of the "Master" we inspired + immediate respect, and a dozen eager volunteers put themselves at our + service and accompanied us in a body to where, at the eastern edge of + the village, there stands an unpretentious square stone house of no + great antiquity, surrounded by a garden and half hidden with trees. +</p> +<p> + We stood silently looking at the house for a few minutes, trying to + realize that there a great poet had gone on living and working, in + single-minded devotion to his art and his people, for full fifty + years—there in that green, out-of-the-way corner of the world. The + idea of a life so rooted in contentment, so continuously happy in the + lifelong prosecution of a task set to itself in boyhood, and so + independent of change, is one not readily grasped by the hurrying + American mind. +</p> +<p> + Then we pushed open the iron gate and passed into the garden. A paved + walk led up to the front door, but that had an unused look, and, gaining + no response there, we walked through a shrubbery around the side of the + house, and as we turned the corner came on what was evidently the real + entrance, facing a sunny slope of garden where hyacinths and violets + told of the coming of spring. Here we were greeted by some half a dozen + friendly dogs, whose demonstrations brought to the door a neat little, + keen-eyed peasant woman, with an expression in her face that suggested + that she was the real watch dog, on behalf of her master, standing + between him and an intrusive world. As a matter of fact, as we afterward + learned, that is one of her many self-imposed offices, for, having been + in the Mistral household for many years, she has long since been as much + a family friend as a servant, and generally looks after the Master and + Mme. Mistral as if they were her children, nursing and "bossing" them by + turns. "Elise"—I think her name is—is a "character" almost as well + known in Provence as the Master himself. +</p> +<p> + So she looked sharply at us, while I produced a letter to M. Mistral + which had been given me by a humble associate of the "félibres," a + delightful <i>chansonnier</i> we had met at Les Baux. With this she went + indoors, presently to return with a face of still cautious welcome, and + invited us in to a little square hall hung with photographs of various + distinguished friends of the poet and two bronze medallions of himself, + one representing him with his favourite dog. +</p> +<p> + Then a door to the right opened, revealing a typical scholar's study, + lined with books from ceiling to floor, books and papers on tables and + chairs, and framed photographs again on the free wall space. The spring + sunshine poured in through long windows, and in this characteristic + setting stood a tall old man, astonishingly erect, his distinguished + head, with its sparse white locks, its keen eyes, and strong yet + delicate aquiline features, pointed white beard and mustache, + suggesting pictures of some military grand seigneur of old time. His + carriage had the same blending of soldier and nobleman, and the stately + kindliness with which he bade us welcome belonged, alas! to another day. +</p> +<p> + At his side stood a tall, handsome lady, with remarkable, dark, kind + eyes, evidently many years his junior. This was Mme. Mistral, in her day + one of those "queens of beauty" whom the "félibres" elect every seven + years at their floral fêtes. Mme. Mistral was no less gracious to us + than her husband, and joined in the talk that followed with much + animation and charm. +</p> +<p> + We had a little feared that M. Mistral, as he declines to write in + anything but Provençal, might carry his artistic creed into his + conversation too. To our relief, however, he spoke in the most polished + French—for you may know French very well, but be quite unable to + understand Provençal, either printed or spoken. This had sometimes made + our journeying difficult, as we inquired our way of peasants along the + road. +</p> +<p> + It was natural to talk first to Mistral of literature. We inquired + whether he read much English. He shook his head, smiling. No! outside of + one or two of the great classics, Shakespeare and Milton, for example, + he had read little. Yes! he had read one American author—Fenimore + Cooper. <i>Le Feu-Follet</i> had been a favourite book of his boyhood. This + we identified as <i>The Fire-Fly</i>. +</p> +<p> + He seemed to wish to talk about America rather than literature, and + seemed immensely interested in the fact that we were Americans, and he + raised his eyes, with an expression of French wonderment, at the fact + of our walking our way through the country—as also at the length of + the journey from America. Evidently it seemed to him a tremendous + undertaking. +</p> +<p> + "You Americans," he said, "are a wonderful people. You think nothing of + going around the world." +</p> +<p> + We were surprised to find that he took the keenest interest in American + politics. +</p> +<p> + "It must be a terribly difficult country to govern," he said. And then + he asked us eagerly for news of our "extraordinary President." We + suggested Mr. Wilson. +</p> +<p> + "Oh, no! no!" he explained. "The extraordinary man who was President + before him." +</p> +<p> + "Colonel Roosevelt?" +</p> +<p> + Yes, that was the man—a most remarkable man that! So Colonel Roosevelt + may be interested to hear that the poet-king of Provence is an + enthusiastic Bull Mooser. +</p> +<p> + Of course, we talked too of the "félibrige," and it was beautiful to see + how M. Mistral's face softened at the mention of his friend Joseph + Roumanille, and with what generosity he attributed the origin of the + great movement to his dead friend. +</p> +<p> + "But you must by all means call on Mme. Roumanille," said he, "when you + go to Avignon, and say that I sent you"—for Roumanille's widow still + lives, one of the most honoured muses of the "félibrige." +</p> +<p> + When it was time for us to go on our way, nothing would satisfy M. and + Mme. Mistral but that we drink a glass of a cordial which is made by + "Elise" from Mistral's own recipe; and as we raised the tiny glasses of + the innocent liqueur in our hands, Mistral drank "A l'Amérique!" +</p> +<p> + Then, taking a great slouch hat from a rack in the hall, and looking as + though it was his statue from Aries accompanying us, the stately old man + led us out into the road, and pointed us the way to Avignon. +</p> +<p> + On the 30th of this coming September that great old man—the memory of + whose noble presence and beautiful courtesy will remain with us + forever—will be eighty-three. +</p> +<p> + February, 1913. +</p> +<a name="2H_4_30"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<h2> + XXVI +</h2> +<h3> + IMPERISHABLE FICTION +</h3> +<p> </p> + +<p> + The longevity of trees is said to be in proportion to the slowness of + their growth. It has to do no little as well with the depth and area of + their roots and the richness of the soil in which they find themselves. + When the sower went forth to sow, it will be remembered, that which soon + sprang up as soon withered away. It was the seed that was content to + "bring forth fruit with patience" that finally won out and survived the + others. +</p> +<p> + These humble, old-fashioned illustrations occur to me as I apply myself + to the consideration of the question provoked by the lightning + over-production of modern fiction and modern literature generally: the + question of the flourishing longevity of the fiction of the past as + compared with the swift oblivion which seems almost invariably to + over-take the much-advertised "masterpieces" of the present. +</p> +<p> + I read somewhere a ballade asking—where are the "best sellers" of + yesteryear? The ballad-maker might well ask, and one might re-echo with + Villon: "Mother of God, ah! where are they?" During the last twenty + years they have been as the sands on the seashore for multitude, yet I + think one would be hard set to name a dozen of them whose titles even + are still on the lips of men—whereas several quieter books published + during that same period, unheralded by trumpet or fire-balloon, are seen + serenely to be ascending to a sure place in the literary firmament. +</p> +<p> + What can be the reason? Can the decay of these forgotten phenomena of + modern fiction, so lavishly crowned with laurels manufactured in the + offices of their own publishers, have anything to do with the hectic + rapidity of their growth, and may there be some truth in the supposition + that the novels, and books generally, that live longest are those that + took the longest to write, or, at all events underwent the longest + periods of gestation? +</p> +<p> + Some fifteen years or so ago one of the most successful manufacturers of + best sellers was Guy Boothby, whose <i>Dr. Nikola</i> is perhaps still + remembered. Unhappily he did not live long to enjoy the fruits of his + industrious dexterity. I bring his case to mind as typical of the modern + machine-made methods. +</p> +<p> + I had read in a newspaper that he did his "writing" by phonograph, and + chancing to meet him somewhere, asked him about it. His response was to + invite me to come down to his charming country house on the Thames and + see how he did it. Boothby was a fine, manly fellow, utterly without + "side" or any illusions as to the quality of his work. He loved good + literature too well—Walter Pater, incongruously enough, was one of his + idols—to dream that he could make it. Nor was the making of literature + by any means his first preoccupation, as he made clear, with winning + frankness, within a few moments of my arriving at his home. +</p> +<p> + Taking me out into his grounds, he brought me to some extensive kennels, + where he showed me with pride some fifty or so prize dogs; then he took + me to his stables, his face shining with pleasure in his thoroughbreds; + and again he led the way to a vast hennery, populated with innumerable + prize fowls. +</p> +<p> + "These are the things I care about," he said, "and I write the stuff for + which it appears I have a certain knack only because it enables me to + buy them!" +</p> +<p> + Would that all writers of best sellers were as engagingly honest. No few + of them, however, write no better and affect the airs of genius into the + bargain. +</p> +<p> + Then Boothby took me into his "study," the entire literary apparatus of + which consisted of three phonographs; and he explained that, when he had + dictated a certain amount of a novel into one of them, he handed it over + to his secretary in another room, who set it going and transcribed what + he had spoken into the machine; he, meanwhile, proceeding to fill up + another record. And he concluded airily by saying with a laugh that he + had a novel of 60,000 words to deliver in ten days, and was just on the + point of beginning it! +</p> +<p> + Boothby's method was, I believe, somewhat unusual in those days. Since + then it has become something like the rule. Not so much as regards + the phonograph, perhaps, but with respect to the breathless speed of + production. +</p> +<p> + I am informed by an editor, associated with magazines that use no less + than a million and a half words of fiction a month, that he has among + his contributors more than one writer on whom he can rely to turn off a + novel of 60,000 words in six days, and that he can put his finger on + twenty novelists who think nothing of writing a novel of a hundred + thousand words in anywhere from sixty to ninety days. He recalled to me, + too, the case of a well-known novelist who has recently contracted to + supply a publisher with four novels in one year, each novel to run to + not less than a hundred thousand words. One thinks of the Scotsman with + his "Where's your Willie Shakespeare now?" +</p> +<p> + Even Balzac's titanic industry must hide its diminished head before such + appalling fecundity; and what would Horace have to say to such frog-like + verbal spawning, with his famous "labour of the file" and his counsel to + writers "to take a subject equal to your powers, and consider long what + your shoulders refuse, what they are able to bear." It is to be feared + that "the monument more enduring than brass" is not erected with such + rapidity. The only brass associated with the modern best seller is to + be found in the advertisements; and, indeed, all that both purveyor and + consumer seem to care about may well be summed up in the publisher's + recommendation quoted by Professor Phelps: "This book goes with a rush + and ends with a smash." Such, one might add, is the beginning and ending + of all literary rockets. +</p> +<p> + Now let us recall some fiction that has been in the world anywhere from, + say, three hundred years to fifty years and is yet vigorously alive, + and, in many instances, to be classed still with the best sellers. +</p> +<p> + <i>Don Quixote</i>, for example, was published in 1605, but is still actively + selling. Why? May it perhaps be that it was some six years in the + writing, and that a great man, who was soldier as well as writer, + charged it with the vitality of all his blood and tears and laughter, + all the hard-won humanity of years of manful living, those five years as + a slave in Algiers (actually beginning it in prison once more at La + Mancha), and all the stern struggle of a storm-tossed life faced with + heroic steadfastness and gaiety of heart? +</p> +<p> + Take another book which, if it is not read as much as it used to be, and + still deserves to be, is certainly far from being forgotten—<i>Gil Blas</i>. + Published in 1715—that is, its first two parts—it has now two + centuries of popularity to its credit, and is still as racy with + humanity as ever; but, though Le Sage was a rapid and voluminous writer, + over this one book which alone the world remembers it is significant to + note that he expended unusual time and pains. He was forty-seven years + old when the first two parts were published. The third part was not + published till 1724, and eleven years more were to elapse before the + issue of the fourth and final part in 1735. +</p> +<p> + A still older book that is still one of the world's best sellers, <i>The + Pilgrim's Progress</i>, can hardly be conceived as being dashed off in + sixty or ninety days, and would hardly have endured so long had not + Bunyan put into it those twelve years of soul torment in Bedford gaol. + <i>Robinson Crusoe</i> still sells its annual thousands, whereas others of + its author's books no less skilfully written are practically forgotten, + doubtless because Defoe, fifty-eight years old at its publication, had + concentrated in it the ripe experience of a lifetime. Though a boy's + book to us, he clearly intended it for an allegory of his own arduous, + solitary life. +</p> +<p> + "I, Robinson Crusoe," we read, "do affirm that the story, though + allegorical, is also historical, and that it is the beautiful + representation of a life of unexampled misfortune, and of a variety + not to be met with in this world." +</p> +<p> + <i>The Vicar of Wakefield</i>, as we know, was no hurried piece of work. + Indeed, Goldsmith went about it in so leisurely a fashion as to leave it + neglected in a drawer of his desk, till Johnson rescued it, according to + the proverbial anecdote; and even then its publisher, Newbery, was in + no hurry, for he kept it by him another two years before giving it to + the printer and to immortality. It was certainly one of those fruits + "brought forth with patience" all round. +</p> +<p> + <i>Tom Jones</i> is another such slow-growing masterpiece. Written in the + sad years immediately following the death of his dearly loved wife, + Fielding, dedicating it to Lord Lyttelton, says: "I here present you + with the labours of some years of my life"; and it need scarcely + be added that the book, as in the case of all real masterpieces, + represented not merely the time expended on it, but all the accumulated + experience of Fielding's very human history. +</p> +<p> + Yes! Whistler's famous answer to Ruskin's counsel holds good of all + imperishable literature. Had he the assurance to ask two hundred guineas + for a picture that only took a day to paint? No, replied Whistler, he + asked it for "the training of a lifetime"; and it is this training of a + lifetime, in addition to the actual time expended on composition, that + constitutes the reserve force of all great works of fiction, and is + entirely lacking in most modern novels, however superficially brilliant + be their workmanship. +</p> +<p> + For this reason books like George Borrow's <i>Lavengro</i> and <i>Romany Rye</i>, + failures on their publication, grow greater rather than less with the + passage of time. Their writers, out of the sheer sincerity of their + natures, furnished them, as by magic, with an inexhaustible provision of + life-giving "ichor." To quote from Milton, "a good book is the precious + life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a + life beyond life." +</p> +<p> + Of this immortality principle in literature Milton himself, it need + hardly be said, is one of the great exemplars. He was but thirty-two + when he first projected <i>Paradise Lost</i>, and through all the intervening + years of hazardous political industry he had kept the seed warm in his + heart, its fruit only to be brought forth with tragic patience in those + seven years of blindness and imminent peril of the scaffold which + followed his fiftieth birthday. +</p> +<p> + The case of poets is not irrelevant to our theme, for the conditions of + all great literature, whatever its nature, are the same. Therefore, + we may recall Dante, whose <i>Divine Comedy</i> was with him from his + thirty-fifth year till the year of his death, the bitter-sweet companion + of twenty years of exile. Goethe, again, finished at eighty the <i>Faust</i> + he had conceived at twenty. +</p> +<p> + Spenser was at work on his <i>Faerie Queene</i>, alongside his preoccupation + with state business, for nearly twenty years. Pope was twelve years + translating Homer, and I think there is little doubt that Gray's <i>Elegy</i> + owes much of its staying power to the Horatian deliberation with which + Gray polished and repolished it through eight years. +</p> +<p> + If we are to believe Poe's <i>Philosophy of Composition</i>, and there is, I + think, more truth in it than is generally allowed, the vitality of <i>The + Raven</i>, as that, too, of his genuinely imperishable fictions, is less + due to inspiration than to the mathematical painstaking of their + composition. +</p> +<p> + But, perhaps, of all poets, the story of Virgil is most instructive for + an age of "get-rich-quick" <i>littérateurs</i>. On his <i>Georgics</i> alone he + worked seven years, and, after working eleven years on the <i>Aeneid</i>, he + was still so dissatisfied with it that on his death-bed he besought his + friends to burn it, and on their refusal, commanded his servants to + bring the manuscript that he might burn it himself. But, fortunately, + Augustus had heard portions of it, and the imperial veto overpowered the + poet's infanticidal desire. +</p> +<p> + But, to return to the novelists, it may at first sight seem that the + great writer who, with the Waverley Novels, inaugurated the modern era + of cyclonic booms and mammoth sales, was an exception to the classic + formula of creation which we are endeavouring to make good. Stevenson, + we have been told, used to despair as he thought of Scott's "immense + fecundity of invention" and "careless, masterly ease." +</p> +<p> + "I cannot compete with that," he says—"what makes me sick is to think + of Scott turning out <i>Guy Mannering</i> in three weeks." +</p> +<p> + Scott's speed is, indeed, one of the marvels of literary history, yet + in his case, perhaps more than in that of any other novelist, it must + be remembered that this speed had, in an unusual degree, that "training + of a lifetime" to rely upon; as from his earliest boyhood all Scott's + faculties had been consciously as well as unconsciously engaged in + absorbing and, by the aid of his astonishing memory, preserving the + vast materials on which he was able thus carelessly to draw. +</p> +<p> + Moreover, those who have read his manly autobiography know that this + speed was by no means all "ease," as witness the almost tragic + composition of <i>The Bride of Lammermoor</i>. If ever a writer scorned + delights and lived laborious days, it was Walter Scott. At the same time + the condition of his fame in the present day bears out the general truth + of my contention, for there is little doubt that he would be more widely + read than he is were it not for those too frequent <i>longueurs</i> and inert + paddings which resulted from his too hurried workmanship. +</p> +<p> + Jane Austen is another example of comparatively rapid creation, writing + three of her best-known novels, <i>Pride and Prejudice</i>, <i>Sense and + Sensibility</i>, and <i>Northanger Abbey</i> between the ages of twenty-one and + twenty-three. Yet <i>Pride and Prejudice</i>, which practically survives the + others, took her ten months to complete, and all her writings, it has + again to be said, had first been deeply and intimately "lived." +</p> +<p> + Charlotte Brontë was a year in writing <i>Jane Eyre</i>, spurred on to new + effort by the recent rejection of <i>The Professor</i>; but to write such a + book in a year cannot be called over-hasty production when one considers + how much of <i>Jane Eyre</i> was drawn from Charlotte Brontë's own life, and + also how she and her sisters had been experimenting with literature from + their earliest childhood. +</p> +<p> + Thackeray considered an allowance of two years sufficient for the + writing of a good novel, but that seems little enough when one takes + into account the length of his best-known books, not to mention the + perfection of their craftsmanship. Dickens, for all the prodigious bulk + of his output, was rather a steady than a rapid writer. "He considered," + says Forster, "three of his not very large manuscript pages a good, and + four an excellent, day's work." +</p> +<p> + <i>David Copperfield</i> was about a year and nine months in the writing, + having been begun in the opening of 1849 and completed in October, 1850. + <i>Bleak House</i> took a little longer, having been begun in November, 1851, + and completed in August, 1853. <i>Hard Times</i> was a hasty piece of work, + written between the winter of 1853, and the summer of 1854, and it + cannot be considered one of Dickens's notable successes. +</p> +<p> + George Meredith wrote four of his greatest novels in seven years, + <i>Richard Feverel</i>, <i>Evan Harrington</i>, <i>Sandra Belloni</i>, and <i>Rhoda + Fleming</i> being produced between 1859 and 1866. His poem, <i>Modern Love</i>, + was also written during that period. +</p> +<p> + George Eliot was a much-meditating, painstaking writer, though <i>Adam + Bede</i> cost her little more than a year's work. Her novels, however, as + a rule, did not come forth without prayer and fasting, and, in the + course of their creation, she used often to suffer from "hopelessness + and melancholy." <i>Romola</i>, to which she devoted long and studious + preparation, she was often on the point of giving up, and in regard to + it she gives expression to a literary ideal to which the gentleman with + the contract for four novels a year, referred to in the outset of this + paper, is probably a stranger. +</p> +<blockquote> + It may turn out [she says], that I can't work freely and fully + enough in the medium I have chosen, and in that case I must give + it up; for I will never write anything to which my whole heart, + mind, and conscience don't consent; so that I may feel it was + something—however small—which wanted to be done in this world, + and that I am just the organ for that small bit of work. +</blockquote> +<p> + Charles Kingsley who, if not a great novelist, has to his credit in + <i>Westward Ho!</i> one romance at least which, in the old phrase, "the world + will not willingly let die," was as conscientious in his work as he was + brilliant. +</p> +<p> + Says a friend who was with him while he was writing <i>Hypatia</i>: +</p> +<p> + "He took extraordinary pains to be accurate. We spent one whole day in + searching the four folio volumes of Synesius for a fact he thought was + there, and which was found there at last." +</p> +<p> + The writer of perhaps the greatest historical novel in the English + language, <i>The Cloister and the Hearth</i>, was what one might call a + glutton for thoroughness. Of himself Charles Reade has said: "I studied + the great art of fiction closely for fifteen years before I presumed + to write a line. I was a ripe critic before I became an artist." His + commonplace books, on the entries in which and the indexing he was + accustomed to spend one whole day out of each week, cataloguing the + notes of his multifarious reading and pasting in cuttings from + newspapers likely to be useful in novel-building, completely filled + one of the rooms in his house. In his will he left these open to the + inspection of literary students who cared to study the methods which + he had found so serviceable. +</p> +<p> + To name one or two more English novelists: Thomas Hardy's novels would + seem to have the slow growth of deep-rooted things. His greatest work, + <i>The Return of the Native</i>, was on the stocks for four years, though a + year seems to have sufficed for <i>Far from the Madding Crowd</i>. +</p> +<p> + The meticulous practice of Stevenson is proverbial, but this glimpse of + his method is worth catching again. +</p> +<blockquote> + The first draft of a story [records Mr. Charles D. Lanier], + Stevenson wrote out roughly, or dictated to Lloyd Osbourne. When all + the colours were in hand for the complete picture, he invariably + penned it himself, with exceeding care.... If the first copy did not + please him, he patiently made a second or a third draft. In his + stern, self-imposed apprenticeship of phrase-making he had prepared + himself for these workmanlike methods by the practice of rewriting + his trial stories into dramas and then reworking them into stories + again. +</blockquote> +<p> + Nathaniel Hawthorne brought the devoted, one might say, the devotional, + spirit of the true artist to all his work, but <i>The Scarlet Letter</i> was + written at a good pace when once started, though, as usual, the germ + had been in Hawthorne's mind for many years. The story of its beginning + is one of the many touching anecdotes in that history of authorship + which Carlyle compared to the Newgate Calendar. Incidentally, too, it + witnesses that an author occasionally meets with a good wife. +</p> +<p> + One wintry autumn day in Salem, Hawthorne returned home earlier than + usual from the custom-house. With pale lips, he said to his wife: "I am + turned out of office." To which she—God bless her!—cheerily replied: + "Very well! now you can write your book!" and immediately set about + lighting his study fire and generally making things comfortable for his + work. +</p> +<p> + The book was <i>The Scarlet Letter</i>, and was completed by the following + February, Hawthorne, as his wife said, writing "immensely" on it day + after day, nine hours a day. When finished, Hawthorne seems to have been + dispirited about the story, and put it away in a drawer; but the good + James T. Fields chanced soon to call on him, and asked him if he had + anything for him to publish. +</p> +<p> + "Who," asked Hawthorne gloomily, "would risk publishing a book from me, + the most unpopular writer in America?" +</p> +<p> + "I would," was Field's rejoinder, and after some further sparring, + Hawthorne owned up. +</p> +<p> + "As you have found me out," said he, "take what I have written and tell + me if it is good for anything"; and Fields went away with the manuscript + of what is, without any question, America's greatest novel. +</p> +<p> + Turning to the great novelists of France, with one or two exceptions, + they all bear out the theory of longevity in literature which I have + been endeavouring to support. It must reluctantly be confessed that one + of the most fascinatingly vital of them all, Alexandre Dumas, is one of + the exceptions, born improvisator as he was; yet immense research, it + needs hardly be said, went to the making of his enormous library of + romance—even though, it be allowed, that much of that work was done for + him by his "disciples." +</p> +<p> + George Sand was another facile, all too facile, writer. Here is a + description of her method: +</p> +<blockquote> + To write novels was to her only a process of nature. She seated + herself before her table at ten o'clock, with scarcely a plot and + only the slightest acquaintance with her characters, and until five + in the evening, while her hand guided a pen, the novel wrote itself. + Next day, and the next, it was the same. By and by the novel had + written itself in full and another was unfolding. +</blockquote> +<p> + Whether George Sand is still alive as a novelist, apart from her place + as an historic personality, I leave others to decide; but I am very sure + that she would be read a great deal more than she is if she had not so + confidently left her novels—to write themselves. Different, indeed, was + the method of Balzac, toiling year after year at his colossal task of + <i>The Human Comedy</i>, sometimes working eighteen hours a day, and never + less than twelve, and that "in the midst of protested bills, business + annoyances, the most cruel financial straits, in utter solitude and lack + of all consolation." But then Balzac was sustained by one of those great + dreams, without whose aid no lasting literature is produced, the dream, + "by infinite patience and courage, to compose for the France of the + nineteenth century, that history of morals which the old civilizations + of Rome, Athens, Memphis, and India have left untold." +</p> +<p> + To fulfil this he was able to live, for a long period, on a daily + expenditure of "three sous for bread, two for milk, and three for + firing." But doubtless it had been different if his dream had been + prize puppies, a garage full of motor-cars, or a translation into the + Four Hundred. +</p> +<p> + Victor Hugo, again, was one of the herculean artists, working, in + Emerson's phrase, "in a sad sincerity," with the patience of an ant and + the energy of a volcano. Of his <i>Les Misérables</i>—perhaps the greatest + novel ever written, as it is, I suppose, easily the longest—he said, + "it takes me nearly as long to publish a book as to write one"; and he + was at work on <i>Les Misérables</i>, off and on, for nearly fifteen years. + Of his writing <i>Notre Dame</i> (that other colossus of fiction) this quaint + picture has been preserved. He had made vast historical preparations for + it, but ever there seemed still more to make, till at length his + publisher grew impatient, and under his pressure Hugo at last made a + start—after this fashion: +</p> +<blockquote> + He purchased a great grey woollen wrapper that covered him from head + to foot, he locked up all his clothes lest he should be tempted to + go out, and, carrying off his ink-bottle to his study, applied + himself to his labour just as if he had been in prison. He never + left the table except for food and sleep, and the sole recreation + that he allowed himself was an hour's chat after dinner with M. + Pierre Leroux, or any other friend who might drop in, and to whom he + would occasionally read over his day's work. +</blockquote> +<p> + Daudet, whose <i>Tartarin</i> bids fair to remain one of the world's types, + like <i>Don Quixote</i> or <i>Mr. Micawber</i>, for all his natural Provençal + gift of improvisation and, indeed, from his self-recognized necessity + of keeping it in check, was another strenuous artist. He wrote each + manuscript three times over, he told his biographer, and would write it + as many more if he could; and his son, in writing of him, has this truth + to say of his, as of all living work: +</p> +<blockquote> + The fact is that labour does not begin at the moment when the + artist takes his pen. It begins in sustained reflection and in the + thought which accumulates images and sifts them, garners and winnows + them out, and compels life to keep control over imagination, and + imagination to expand and enlarge life. +</blockquote> +<p> + Zola is perhaps unduly depreciated nowadays, but certainly, if Carlyle's + "infinite capacity for taking pains" as a recipe for genius ever was put + to the test, it was by the author of the Rougon-Macquart series. Talking + of rewriting, Prosper Mérimée, best known for <i>Carmen</i>, is said to have + rewritten his <i>Colomba</i> no less than sixteen times; as our Anglo-Saxon + Kipling, it used to be told, wrote his short stories seven times over. +</p> +<p> + But, of course, the classical example of the artist-fanatic in modern + times was Gustave Flaubert. His agonies in quest of the <i>mot propre</i>, + the one and only word, are proverbial, and are said literally to have + broken down his nerves. Mr. Huneker has told of him that "he would + annotate three hundred volumes for a page of facts.... In twenty pages + he sometimes saved three or four from destruction," and, in the course + of twenty-six years' polishing and pruning of <i>The Temptation of Saint + Anthony</i>, he reduced his original manuscript of 540 pages down to 136, + even reducing it still further after its first publication. +</p> +<p> + On <i>Madame Bovary</i> he worked six years, and in writing <i>Salâmmbo</i>, + which, took him no less time, he studied the scenery on the spot and + exhausted the resources of the Imperial Library in his search for + documentary evidences. +</p> +<p> + Flaubert may be said to have carried his passion for perfection to the + point of mania, and it will be a question with some whether, with all + his pains, he can be called a great novelist, after all. But that he was + a great stylist and a master in the art of making terrible and beautiful + bas-reliefs admits of no doubt. +</p> +<p> + To be a great world-novelist you need an all-embracing humanity as well, + such as we find in Tolstoy's <i>War and Peace</i>—but that great book, need + one say, came of no slipshod speed of improvisation. On the contrary, + Tolstoy corrected and recorrected it so often that his wife, who acted + as his amanuensis, is said to have copied the whole enormous manuscript + no less than seven times! +</p> +<p> + Yes! though it be doubtless true, in Mr. Kipling's famous phrase, that +</p> +<pre> + There are nine and sixty ways + Of inditing tribal lays, + And every blessed one of them is right, +</pre> +<p class="noindent"> + I think that the whole nine and sixty of them include somewhere in their + method those sole preservative virtues of truth to life and passionate + artistic integrity. The longest-lived books, whatever their nature, have + usually been the longest growing; and even those lasting things of + literature that have seemed, as it were, to spring up in a night, have + been long in secret preparation in a soil mysteriously enriched and + refined by the hid processes of time. +</p> +<a name="2H_4_31"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<h2> + XXVII +</h2> +<h3> + THE MAN BEHIND THE PEN +</h3> +<p> </p> + +<p> + Bulwer's deservedly famous phrase, "The pen is mightier than the sword," + beneath its surface application, if you think it over, has this further + suggestion to make to the believer in literature—that, as the sword is + of no value as a weapon apart from the man that wields it, so, and no + less so, is it with the pen. A mere pen, a mere sword—of what use are + they, save as mural decorations, without a man behind them? +</p> +<p> + And that recalls a memory of mine, which, as both great men are now + drinking wine in Valhalla out of the skulls of their critics, there can + be no harm in recalling. +</p> +<p> + Some years ago I was on an unforgettable visit to Björnson, at his + country home of Aulestad, near Lillehammer. This is not the moment to + relive that beautiful memory as a whole. All that is pertinent to my + present purpose is a remark in regard to Ibsen that Björnson flashed out + one day, shaking his great white mane with earnestness, his noble face + alight with the spirit of battle. We had been talking of his possibly + too successful attempt to sever Norway from Sweden, and Ibsen came in + somehow incidentally. +</p> +<p> + "Ibsen," said he, "is not a man. He is only a pen." +</p> +<p> + There is no necessity to discuss the justice of the dictum. Probably, if + ever there was a man behind a pen, it was Ibsen; but Ibsen's manhood + concentrated itself entirely behind his pen, whereas Björnson's employed + other weapons also, such as his gift of oratory, and was generally more + dramatically in evidence. Björnson and Ibsen, as we know, did not agree + on a number of things. Thus Björnson, like a human being, was unjust. + But his phrase was a useful one, and I am using it. It was misapplied to + Ibsen; but, put in the form of a question, I know of no better single + test to apply to writers, dead or alive, than— +</p> +<p> + "Is this a man? Or is it only a pen?" +</p> +<p> + Said Walt Whitman, in his familiar "So Long" to <i>Leaves of Grass</i>: +</p> +<pre> + Camerado, this is no book; + Who touches this touches a man. +</pre> +<p> + And, of course, Walt was right about his own book, whether you like the + man behind <i>Leaves of Grass</i> or not; but also that assertion of his + might be chalked as a sort of customs "O.K." on all literary baggage + whatsoever that has passed free into immortality. There is positively no + writer that has withstood the searching examination of time, on whose + book that final stamp of literary reality may not be placed. On every + classic, Time has scrawled ineffaceably: +</p> +<pre> + This is no book; + Who touches this touches a man. +</pre> +<p> + I raise the question of reality in literature in no merely academic + spirit. For those who not only love books, but care for literature as a + living thing, the question is a particularly live issue at the present + time, when not only the quantity of writing is so enormous, but the + average quality of it is so astonishingly good, when technique that + would almost humble the masters, and would certainly dazzle them, is an + accomplishment all but commonplace. At any rate, it is so usual as to + create no special surprise. If people write at all, it is taken for + granted, nowadays, that they write well. And the number of people at the + present time writing not only well, but wonderfully well, is little + short of appalling. +</p> +<p> + In this, for those who ponder the phenomena of literature, there is less + matter for congratulation than would seem likely at first sight. There + is, indeed, no little bewilderment, and some disquietude. Confronted + with short stories—and novels also, for that matter—told with a skill + which makes the old masters of fiction look like clumsy amateurs; + confronted, too, with a thousand poets—the number is scarcely an + exaggeration—with accomplishments of metre and style that make some + famous singers seem like clodhoppers of the muse, one is obliged to ask + oneself: +</p> +<p> + "Are these brilliant writers really greater than those that went + before?" +</p> +<p> + If for some reason, felt at first rather than defined, we answer "no," + we are forced to the conclusion that, after all, literature must be + something more than a mere matter of writing. If so, we are constrained + to ask ourselves, what is it? +</p> +<p> + The men who deal with manuscripts—editors, publishers' readers, and + publishers, men not only expert witnesses in regard to the printed + literature of the day, but also curiously learned in the story of the + book unborn, the vast mass of writing that never arrives at print—are + even more impressed by what one might call the uncanny literary + brilliance of the time. They are also puzzled by the lack of a certain + something missing in work which otherwise possesses every nameable + quality of literary excellence. One of these, an editor with an eye as + sympathetic as it is keen, told me of an instance to the point, typical + of a hundred others. +</p> +<p> + He had been unusually struck by a story sent in to him by an unknown + writer. It was, he told me, amazing from every purely literary point of + view—plot, characterization, colour, and economy of language. It had so + much that it seemed strange that anything at all should be lacking. He + sent for the writer, and told him just what he thought. +</p> +<p> + "But," he ended, after praise such as an editor seldom risks, "there is + something the matter with it, after all. I wonder if you can tell me + what it is." +</p> +<p> + The writer was, for a writer so flattered, strangely modest. All he + could say, he answered, was that he had done his best. The editor, + agreeing that he certainly seemed to have done that, was all the more + curious to find out how it was that a man who could do so well had not + been able to add to his achievement the final "something" that was + missing. +</p> +<p> + "What puzzles me," said the editor finally, "is that, with all the + rest, you were not able to add—humanity. Your story seems to have + been written by a wonderful literary machine, instead of by a man." +</p> +<p> + And, no doubt, the young story-writer went away sorrowful, in spite of + the acceptance of his story—which, after all, was only lacking in that + quality which you will find lacking in all the writing of the day, save + in that by one or two exceptional writers, who, by their isolation, the + more forcibly point the moral. +</p> +<p> + A wonderful literary machine! The editor's phrase very nearly hits off + the situation. As we have the linotype to set up the written words with + a minimum of human agency, we really seem to be within measurable + distance of a similar automaton that will produce the literature to be + set up without the intrusion of any flesh-and-blood author. In this + connection I may perhaps be permitted to quote a sentence or two from + myself, written <i>à propos</i> a certain chameleonesque writer whose + deservedly popular works are among the contemporary books that I most + value: +</p> +<blockquote> + A peculiar skill seems to have been developed among writers during + the last twenty years—that of writing in the manner of some master, + not merely with mimetic cleverness, but with genuine creative power. + We have poets who write so like Wordsworth and Milton that one can + hardly differentiate them from their masters; and yet—for this is + my point—they are no mere imitators, but original poets, choosing, + it would seem, some old mask of immortality through which to express + themselves. In a different way from that of Guy de Maupassant they + have chosen to suppress themselves, or rather, I should say, that, + whereas De Maupassant strove to suppress, to eliminate, himself, + their method is that of disguise.<br><br> + + In some respects they remind one of the hermit-crab, who annexes + some beautiful ready-made house, instead of making one for himself. + But then they annex it so brilliantly, with such delightful + consequences for the reader, that not only is there no ground for + complaint, but the reader almost forgets that the house does not + really belong to them, and that they are merely entertaining tenants + on a short lease. +</blockquote> +<p> + It is not that one is not grateful to writers of this type. Indeed one + is. They not only provide us with genuine entertainment, but, by the + skill born of their fine culture, they make us re-taste of the old + masters in their brilliant variations. One has no complaint against + them. Far from it. Only one wonders why they trouble to attach their own + merely personal names to their volumes, for, so far as those volumes are + concerned, there is no one to be found in them answering to the name of + the ostensible author. +</p> +<p> + Suppose, for example, that the author's name on the title-page is + "Brown." Well, so far as we can find out by reading, "Brown" might just + as well be "Green." In fact, there is no "Brown" discoverable—no + individual man behind the pen that wrote, not out of the fulness of the + heart, or the originality of the brain, from any experience or knowledge + or temperament peculiar to "Brown," but out of the fulness of what one + might call a creatively assimilated education, and by the aid of a + special talent for the combination of literary influences. +</p> +<p> + We have had a great deal of pleasure in the reading, we have admired + this and that, we may even have been astonished, but I repeat—there is + no "Brown." In private life "Brown" may be a forceful and fascinating + personality, but, so far as literature is concerned, he is merely a + "wonderful literary machine." He has been able, by his remarkable skill, + to conjure every other writer into his book—except himself. The name + "Brown" on his title-page means nothing. He has not "made his name." +</p> +<p> + The phrase "to make a name" has become so dulled with long usage that it + is worth while to pause and consider what a reality it stands for. What + it really means, of course, is that certain men and women, by the + personal force or quality of their lives, have succeeded in charging + their names—names given them originally haphazard, as names are given + to all of us—with a permanent significance as unmistakable as that + belonging to the commonest noun. The name "Byron" has a meaning as clear + and unmistakable as the word "mutton." The words "dog" and "cat" have a + meaning hardly more clearly defined than the name "Burns" or "Voltaire." + An oak-tree can no more be mistaken for a willow than Shakespeare can be + confused with Spenser. If we say "Coleridge," there is no possibility of + any one thinking that perhaps we meant "Browning." +</p> +<p> + The reason, of course, is that these names are as unmistakably "made" + as a Krupp gun or a Sheffield razor. Sincere, intense life has passed + into them, life lived as the men who bore those names either chose, or + were forced, to live it; individual experience, stern or gentle, in + combination with an individual gift of expression. +</p> +<p> + All names that are really "made" are made in the same way. You may make + a name as Napoleon made his, through war, or you may make it as Keats + made his, by listening to the nightingale and worshipping the moon. Or + you may make it as Charles Lamb made his, merely by loving old folios, + whist, and roast pig. All that is necessary—granted, of course, the + gift of literary expression—is sincerity, an unshakable faithfulness to + yourself. +</p> +<p> + In really great writers—or, at all events, in those writings of theirs + by which they immortally exist—there is not one insincere word. The + perishable parts of great writers will, without exception, be found to + be those writings which they attempted either in insincere moments, or + at the instigation of some surface talent that had no real connection + with their deep-down selves. +</p> +<p> + All real writing has got to be lived before it is written—lived not + only once or twice, but lived over and over again. Mere reporting won't + do in literature, nor the records of easy voyaging through perilous + seas. Dante had to walk through hell before he could write of it, and + men today who would write either of hell or of heaven will never do it + by a study of fashionable drawing-rooms, or prolonged sojourns in the + country houses of the great. +</p> +<p> + On the other hand, if you wish to write convincingly about what we call + "society," those lords and ladies, for example, who are just as real in + their strange way as coal-heavers and mechanics, it is of no use your + trying, unless you were fortunate enough to be born among them, or have + been unfortunately associated with them all your life. To write with + reality about the most artificial condition necessitates an intimate + acquaintance with it that, at its best, is tragic. Those who would write + about the depths and the heights must have dared them, not merely as + visitors, but as awestricken inhabitants. Similarly, those who would + write about the plain, the long, low levels of commonplace human life, + must have dwelt in them, have possessed the dreary, unlaurelled courage + of the good bourgeois, have known what it is to live out the day just + for the day's sake, with the blessed hope of a reasonably respectable + and comfortable conclusion. +</p> +<p> + Probably it seldom occurs to us to think what a tremendously rooted life + is needed to make even one lasting lyric, though the strangeness of the + process is but the same strangeness that accompanies the antecedent + preparation of a flower. +</p> +<pre> + How many suns it takes + To make one speedwell blue— +</pre> +<p class="noindent"> + was no mere fancy of a poet. It is a fact of the long sifting and + kneading to which time subjects the material of its perfect things. +</p> +<p> + One could not get a better example of what I mean than Lovelace's song + <i>To Lucasta, Going to the Wars</i>, without which no anthology of English + verse could possibly be published. Why does generation after generation + say over and over, and hand on to its children: +</p> +<pre> + Yet this inconstancy is such + As you too shall adore; + I could not love thee, dear, so much + Loved I not honour more. +</pre> +<p> + Is it merely because it is so well written, or because it embodies a + highly moral sentiment suitable to the education of young men? No, it is + because the sword and the pen for once met together in the hand of a + man, because a soldier and a lover and a poet met together in a song. + One might almost say that Lovelace wrote his lyric first with his sword, + and merely copied it out with his pen. At all events, he was first a man + and incidentally a poet; and every real poet that ever sang, whether or + not he wielded the weapons of physical warfare, has been just the same. + Otherwise he could not have been a poet. +</p> +<p> + When one speaks of the man behind the pen, one does not necessarily mean + that the writer must be a man of dominant personality, suggestive in + every sentence of "the strenuous life," and muscle, and "punch." + Literature might be described as the world in words, and as it takes all + kinds of men to make a world, so with the world of literature. All we + ask is that we should be made aware of some kind of a man. Numerous + other qualities besides "the punch" go to the making of living + literature, though blood and brawn, not to say brutality, have of late + had it so much their own way in the fashionable literature of the + day—written by muscular literary gentlemen who seem to write rather + with their fists than their pens—that we are in danger of forgetting + the reassuring truth. +</p> +<p> + J.M. Barrie long ago made a criticism on Rudyard Kipling which has + always stayed by me as one of the most useful of critical touchstones. +</p> +<p> + "Mr. Kipling," said he, "has yet to learn that a man may know more of + life staying at home by his mother's knee than swaggering in bad company + over three continents." +</p> +<p> + Nor is successful literature necessarily the record of the successful + temperament. Some writers, not a few, owe their significance to the fact + that they have found humanly intimate expression for their own failure, + or set down their weakness in such a way as to make themselves the + consoling companions of human frailty and disappointment through the + generations. It is the paradox of such natures that they should express + themselves in the very record of their frustration. Amiel may be taken + as the type of such writers. In confiding to his <i>Journal</i> his hopeless + inability for expressing his high thought, he expressed what is + infinitely more valuable to us—himself. +</p> +<p> + Nor, again, does it follow that the man who thus gets himself + individualized in literature is the kind of man we care about or approve + of. Often it is quite the contrary, and we may think that it had been + just as well if some human types had not been able so forcibly to + project into literature their unworthy and undesirable selves. Yet this + is God's world, and nothing human must be foreign to the philosophical + student of it. +</p> +<p> + All the "specimens" in a natural history museum are not things of + beauty or joy. So it is in the world of books. François Villon cannot + be called an edifying specimen of the human family, yet he unmistakably + belongs there, and it was to that prince of scalawags that we owe not + merely that loveliest sigh in literature—"Where are the snows of + yester-year?"—but so striking a picture of the underworld of medieval + Paris that without it we should hardly be able to know the times as + they were. +</p> +<p> + The same applies to Benvenuto Cellini—bully, assassin, insufferable + egoist, and so forth, as well as artist. If he had not been sufficiently + in love with his own swashbuckler rascality to write his amazing + autobiography, how dim to our imaginations, comparatively, would have + been the world of the Italian Renaissance! +</p> +<p> + Again, in our own day, take Baudelaire, a personality even less + agreeable still—morbid, diseased, if you will, wasting, you may deem, + immense poetic powers on revealing the beauty of those "flowers of evil" + which had as well been left in their native shade. Yet, it is because he + saw them so vividly, cared to see little else, dwelt in his own strange + corner of the world with such an intensity of experience, that he + is—Baudelaire. Like him or not, his name is "made." A queer kind of + man, indeed, but not "only a pen." +</p> +<p> + Certain writers have made a cult of "impersonality" in literature. They + would do their utmost to keep themselves out of sight, to let their + subject-matter tell its own tale. But such a feat is an impossibility. + They might as well try to get out of their own skins. The mere effort + at suppression ends in a form of revelation. Their mere choice of + themes and manner of presentation, let them keep behind the scenes as + assiduously as they may, will in the end stamp them. However much a man + may hide behind his pen, so that indeed his personality, compared with + that of more subjective writers, remains always somewhat enigmatic, yet + when the pen is wielded by a man, whatever his reticence or his mask, we + know that a man is there—and that is all that concerns us. +</p> +<p> + On the other hand, of course, there are companionable, sympathetic + writers whose whole stock-in-trade is themselves, their personal charm, + their personal way of looking at things. Of these, Montaigne and Charles + Lamb are among the great examples. It matters to us little or nothing + what they are writing about; for their subjects, so far as they are + concerned, are only important in relation to themselves, as revealing + to us by reflection two uncommonly "human" human beings, whom it is + impossible to mistake for any one else; just as we enjoy the society of + some whimsical talker among our living friends, valuing him not so much + for what he says, but for the way he says it, and because it is he, and + no one else, that is talking. +</p> +<p> + Again, there are other men whose names, in addition to their personal + suggestion, have an impersonal significance as marking new eras of human + development, such as Erasmus or Rousseau or Darwin; men who embodied + the time-spirit at crucial moments of world change, men who announced + rather than created, the heralds of epochs, men who first took the new + roads along which the rest of mankind were presently to travel, men who + felt or saw something new for the first time, prophets of dawn while yet + their fellows slept. +</p> +<p> + Sometimes a man will come to stand for a whole nation, like Robert Burns + or Cervantes; or a great, half-legendary age of the world, like Homer; + or some permanent attitude of the human spirit, like Plato. +</p> +<p> + No fixed star, great or small, in the firmament of literature ever + got there without some vital reason, or merely by writing, however + remarkable. The idea that literature is a mere matter of writing is seen + to be the hollowest of misconceptions the moment you run over any list + of enduring names. Try any such that you can think of, and in every case + you will find that the name stands for something more than a writer. Of + course, the man had to have his own peculiar genius for writing, but the + peculiarity was but the result of his individual being, his own special + way of living his life or viewing the world. +</p> +<p> + Take Horace, for example. Does he live merely because of his unique + style, his masterly use of the Latin tongue? By means of that, of + course, but only secondarily. Primarily, he is as alive today as he + was when he sauntered through the streets of Rome, because he was so + absolutely the type of the well-bred man of the world in all countries + and times. He lived seriously in the social world as he found it, and + felt no idealistic craving to have it remoulded nearer to the heart's + desire. He was satisfied with its pleasures, and at one with its + philosophy. Thus he is as much at home in modern Paris or London or + New York as in ancient Rome, and his book is, therefore, forever + immortal as the man of the world's Bible. +</p> +<p> + Take a name so different as that of Shelley. We have but to speak it + to define all it now stands for. Though no one should read a line of + Shelley's any more, the dream he dreamed has passed into the very + life-blood of mankind. Wherever men strive for freedom, or seek to + attune their lives to the strange spiritual music that breathes through + all things—music that none ever heard more clearly than he—there is + Shelley like the morning star to guide them and inspire. +</p> +<p> + Think what Wordsworth means to the spiritual thought of the modern + world. In his own day he was one of the most lonely and laughed at of + poets, moping among his lakes and mountains and shepherds. Yet, as + Matthew Arnold said, "we are all Wordsworthians nowadays," and the + religion of nature that he found there for himself in his solitude bids + fair to be the final religion of the modern world. +</p> +<p> + It is the same with every other great name one can think of, be it + Bunyan or Heine, Schopenhauer or Izaak Walton. One has but to cast + one's eyes over one's shelves to realize, as we see the familiar + names, how literally the books that bear them are living men, merely + transmigrated from their fleshly forms into the printed word. + Shakespeare and Milton, yes, even Pope; Johnson, Fielding, Sterne, + Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Carlyle, Dumas, Balzac, Emerson, Thoreau, + Hawthorne, Poe—their very faces seem to look out at us from the + bindings, such vividly human beings were they, with a vision of the + world, or a definition of character, so much their own and no one + else's. One might almost call them patented human beings—patentees of + spiritual discoveries, or of aspects of humanity, whose patents can + never be infringed for all our cleverness. +</p> +<p> + Said Tennyson, in bitter answer to criticism that began to depreciate + him because of the glibness of his imitators: +</p> +<pre> + All can grow the flower now, + For all have got the seed. +</pre> +<p> + And certainly, as I have already said, the art of literary impersonation + is carried to a pitch today that almost amounts to genius. Yet you have + only to compare the real flower with the imitation, and you will soon + understand the difference. +</p> +<p> + Take Walter Scott. It is a commonplace to say how much better we do the + historical novel nowadays than he did. At first sight, we may seem to; + in certain particulars, no doubt we do; but read him again, read <i>Rob + Roy</i> or <i>Quentin Durward</i> again, and you will not be quite so sure. You + will realize what an immortal difference there is, after all, between + the pen with a man behind it, and the most brilliant literary machine. +</p> +<p> + Yes, "the mob of gentlemen that write with ease" is once more with us, + but no real book was ever yet written with ease, and no book has ever + survived, or ever can, in which we do not feel the presence of the + fighting, dreaming, or merely enjoying soul of a man. +</p> +<a name="2H_4_32"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<h2> + XXVIII +</h2> +<h3> + BULLS IN CHINA-SHOPS +</h3> +<p> </p> + +<p> + There are some people of great value and importance in their own + spheres, who, on the strength of the distinction gained there, are apt + to intrude on other spheres of which they have no knowledge, where in + fact they are irrelevant, and often indeed ridiculously out of place. + This, however, does not prevent their trying to assert an authority + gained in their own sphere in those other spheres where they simply do + not belong; and such is the power of a name that is won for any one + thing that the multitude, unaccustomed to make distinctions, accepts + them as authorities on the hundred other things of which they know + nothing. Thus, to take a crude example, the New York Police, which is, + without doubt, learned in its own world, and well-adapted and equipped + for asserting its authority there, sometimes intrudes, with its + well-known <i>bonhomie</i>, into the worlds of drama and sculpture, and, + because it is an acknowledged judge of crooks and grafters, presumes + to be a judge and censor also of new plays and nude statues. +</p> +<p> + Of course, the New York Police is absurd in such a character, absurd as + a bull in a china-shop is absurd; yet, as in the case of the bull with + the china, it is capable of doing quite a lot of damage. +</p> +<p> + I take the New York Police merely, as I said, as a crude example of, + doubtless, well-meant, but entirely misplaced energy. Actually, however, + it is scarcely more absurd than many similar, if more distinguished, + bulls gaily crashing about on higher planes. +</p> +<p> + Such are statesmen who, because they are Prime Ministers or Presidents, + deem themselves authorities on everything within the four winds, doctors + of divinity, and general <i>arbitri elegantiarum</i>. +</p> +<p> + Such a bull in a china-shop in regard to literature was the late Mr. + Gladstone. It is no disrespect towards his great and estimable character + to say, that while, of course, he was technically a scholar—"great + Homeric scholar" was the accepted phrase for him—there were probably + few men in England so devoid of the literary sense. Yet for an author to + receive a post-card of commendation from Mr. Gladstone meant at least + the sale of an edition or two, and a certain permanency in public + appreciation. Her late Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria was Mr. + Gladstone's only rival as the literary destiny of the time. To Mr. + Gladstone we owe Mrs. Humphry Ward, to Her Majesty we owe Miss Marie + Corelli. +</p> +<p> + John Ruskin, much as we may admire him for his moral influence, and + admire, or not admire, him for his prose, was a bull in a china-shop + when he made his famous criticism on Whistler, and thus inadvertantly + added to the gaiety of nations by provoking that delightful trial, + which, farcical as it seemed at the moment, not merely evoked from + Whistler himself some imperishable dicta on art and the relation of + critics to art, but really did something towards the long-drawn + awakening of that mysterious somnolence called the public consciousness + on the strange mission of beauty in this world, and, incidentally of the + status of those "eccentric" ministers of it called artists. +</p> +<p> + I do not mean to say that bulls in china-shops are without their uses. + John Ruskin is a shining example to the contrary. +</p> +<p> + One of his contemporaries, Thomas Carlyle, for all his genius, was on + one important subject—that of poetry—as much of a bull in a china-shop + as Ruskin was in art. Great friends as were he and Tennyson, the famous + anecdote <i>à propos</i> of Tennyson's publication of <i>The Idylls of the + King</i>—"all very fine, Alfred, but when are you going to do some + work"—and many other such written deliverances suffice to show how + absolutely out of court a great tragic humorist and rhetorician may + be on an art practised by writers at least as valuable to English + literature as himself, say Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge, and Keats. + Carlyle was a great writer, but the names of these four gentlemen who, + according to his standard, never did any "work" have a strangely + permanent look about them compared with that of the prophet-journalist + of Chelsea and Ecclefechan. +</p> +<p> + A similar "sage," another of the great conversational brow-beaters of + English literature, Samuel Johnson, though it was his chief business to + be a critic of poetry, was hardly more in court on the matter than + Carlyle. In fact, Dr. Johnson might with truth be described as the King + Bull of all the Bulls of all the China-shops. There was no subject, + however remote from his knowledge or experience on which he would + hesitate to pronounce, and if necessary bludgeon forth, his opinion. + But in his case, there is one important distinction to be made, a + distinction that has made him immortal. +</p> +<p> + He disported his huge bulk about the china-shop with such quaintness, + with such engaging sturdiness of character, strangely displaying all the + time so unique a wisdom of that world that lies outside and encloses all + china-shops, so unparalleled a genius of common sense, oddly linked + with that good old-time quality called "the fear of God," that in + his case we felt that the china, after all, didn't matter, but that + Dr. Samuel Johnson, "the great lexicographer," supremely did. His + opinions of Scotsmen or his opinions of poetry in themselves amount to + little—though they are far from being without their shrewd insight—and + much of the china—such as Milton's poetry—among which he gambolled, + after the manner of Behemoth, chanced to be indestructible. Any china + he broke was all to the ultimate good of the china-shop. Yet, if we + accept him so, is it not because he was such a wonderful bull in the + china-shop of the world? +</p> +<p> + There have been other such bulls but hardly another so great, and with + his name I will, for the moment at least, put personalities aside, and + refer to droves rather than to individual bulls. A familiar type of + the bull in the china-shop is the modern clergyman, who, apparently, + insecure in his status of saint-hood, dissatisfied with that spiritual + sphere which so many confiding human beings have given into his + keeping, will be forever pushing his way like an unwelcome, yet quite + unauthoritative, policeman, into that turmoil of human affairs—of which + politics is a sort of summary—where his opinion is not of the smallest + value, though, perforce, it is received with a certain momentary + respect—as though some beautiful old lady should stroll up to a battery + of artillery, engaged in some difficult and dangerous attack, and offer + her advice as to the sighting and management of the guns. The modern + clergyman's interference in the working out of the secular problems + of modern life has no such picturesque beauty—and it is even less + effective. +</p> +<p> + One would have thought that to have the care of men's souls would be + enough. What a world of suggestiveness there was in the old phrase "a + cure of souls"! Men's souls need saving as much today as ever. Perhaps + they were never in greater danger. Therefore, as the proverbial place + for the cobbler is his last, so more than ever the place for the + clergyman is his church, his pulpit, and those various spiritual offices + for which he is presumably "chosen." His vows do not call upon him + either to be a politician or a matinée idol, nor is it his business to + sow doubt where he is paid for preaching faith. If the Church is losing + its influence, it is largely because of its inefficient interference + in secular affairs, and because of the small percentage of real + spirituality amongst its clergy. +</p> +<p> + But there is a worse intrusion than that of clergymen into secular + affairs. There is the intrusion of the cheap atheist, the small + materialistic thinker, into a sphere of which certainly no clergyman or + priest has any monopoly, that sphere of what we call the spiritual life, + which, however undemonstrable by physical tests, has been real to so + many men and women whose intellects can hardly be called negligible, + from Plato to Newman. I have too much respect for their courageous + sincerity, their nobility of character, as well as for the necessary, if + superficial, destructive work they did, when to do such work meant no + little personal peril and obloquy to themselves, to class Robert + Ingersoll and Charles Bradlaugh with the small fry that resemble them + merely in their imitative negations; yet this is certainly true of both + of them that they were bulls in the china-shop to this extent—that they + confounded real religion with the defective historical evidences of one + religion, and the mythologic assertions and incongruities of its sacred + book. They did splendid work in their iconoclastic criticism of "the + letter" that "killeth," but of "the spirit" that "giveth life" they seem + to have had but little inkling. To make fun of Jonah and the whale, or + "the Mistakes of Moses," had no doubt a certain usefulness, but it was + no valid argument against the existence of God, nor did it explain away + the mysterious religious sense in man—however, or wherever expressed. + Neither Ingersoll nor Bradlaugh saw that the crudest Mumbo-Jumbo + idolatry of the savage does really stand for some point of rapport + between the seen and the unseen, and that, so long as the mysterious + sacredness of life is acknowledged and reverenced, it matters little by + what symbols we acknowledge it and do it reverence. +</p> +<p> + One may consider that the present age is an age of spiritual eclipse, + though that is not the writer's opinion, and question with Matthew + Arnold: +</p> +<pre> + What girl + Now reads in her bosom as clear + As Rebekah read, when she sate + At eve by the palm-shaded well? + Who guards in her breast + As deep, as pellucid a spring + Of feeling, as tranquil, as sure? + What bard, + At the height of his vision, can deem + Of God, of the world, of the soul, + With a plainness as near, + As flashing as Moses felt + When he lay in the night by his flock + On the starlit Arabian waste? + Can rise and obey + The beck of the Spirit like him. +</pre> +<p> + Yet the sight of one who sees is worth more than the blindness of a + hundred that cannot see. Some people are born with spiritual antennae + and some without. There is much delicate wonder in the universe that + needs special organizations for its apprehension. "One eye," you + remember, that of Browning's <i>Sordello</i>— +</p> +<pre> + one eye + In all Verona cared for the soft sky. +</pre> +<p> + In these imponderable and invisible matters, many are in a like case + with Hamlet's mother, when she was unable to see the ghost of his + father which he so plainly saw. "Yet all there is I see!" exclaimed the + queen—though she was quite wrong, as wrong as Mr. Ruskin when he could + see nothing in that painting of Whistler's but a cocks-comb throwing a + paint-pot at a canvas and calling it a picture! +</p> +<p> + Many people who have sharp enough eyes and ears for their own worlds are + absolutely blind and deaf when introduced into other worlds for which + nature has not equipped them. But this by no means prevents their + pronouncing authoritative opinions in those worlds, opinions which + would be amazing if they were not so impertinent. Many literary people + proclaim their indifference to and even contempt for music—as if their + announcement meant anything more than their music deafness, their + unfortunate exclusion from a great art. Mark Twain used to advertise his + preference for the pianola over the piano—as if that proved anything + against the playing of Paderewski. Similarly, he acted the bull in the + china-shop in regard to Christian Science, which cannot be the accepted + creed of millions of men and women of intelligence and social value + without deserving even in a critic the approach of some respect. +</p> +<p> + But humorists are privileged persons. That, no doubt, accounts for the + astonishing toleration of Bernard Shaw. Were it not that he is a + <i>farceur</i>, born to write knock-about comedies—his plays, by the way, + might be termed knock-about comedies of the middle-class mind—he would + never have got a hearing for his common-place blasphemies, and cheap + intellectual antics. He is undeniably "funny," so we cannot help + laughing, though we are often ashamed of ourselves for our laughter; for + to him there is nothing sacred—except his press-notices, and—his + royalties. +</p> +<p> + His so-called "philosophy" has an air of dangerous novelty only to those + innocent middle-classes born but yesterday, to whom any form of thought + is a novelty. Methusaleh himself was not older than Mr. Shaw's "original + ideas." In England, twenty years ago, we were long since weary of his + egotistic buffooneries. Of anything "fine" in literature or art he is + contemptuously ignorant, and from understanding of any of the finer + shades of human life, or of the meaning of such words as "honour," + "gentleman," "beauty," "religion," he is by nature utterly shut out. He + laughs and sneers to make up for his deficiencies, like that Pietro + Aretino who threw his perishable mud at Michael Angelo. So is it always + with the vulgarian out of his sphere. Once he dared to talk vulgarly of + God to a great man who believed in God—Count Tolstoi. +</p> +<p> + He had written to Tolstoi <i>à propos</i> his insignificant little play <i>The + Showing up of Blanco Posnet</i>, and in the course of his letter had said: + "Suppose the world were only one of God's jokes, would you work any less + to make it a good joke instead of a bad one?" Tolstoi had hitherto been + favourably inclined towards Shaw, owing to his friend and biographer Mr. + Aylmer Maude; but this cheap-jack sacrilege was too much for the great + old man, who seemed to know God with almost Matthew Arnold's +</p> +<pre> + plainness as near + As flashing as Moses felt, +</pre> +<p class="noindent"> + and he closed the correspondence with a rebuke which would have abashed + any one but the man to whom it was sent. +</p> +<p> + Tolstoi was like Walt Whitman—he "argued not concerning God." It is a + point of view which people like Mr. Shaw can never understand; any more + than he or his like can comprehend that there are areas of human feeling + over which for him and other such bulls in china-shops should be posted + the delicate Americanism—<small>KEEP OUT</small>. +</p> +<a name="2H_4_33"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<h2> + XXIX +</h2> +<h3> + THE BIBLE AND THE BUTTERFLY +</h3> +<p> </p> + +<p> + Once, in my old book-hunting days, I picked up, on the Quai Voltaire, a + copy of the <i>Proverbs of King Solomon</i>. Then it was more possible than + today to make finds in that quaint open-air library which, still more + than any library housed within governmental or diplomaed walls, is + haunted by the spirit of those passionate, dream-led scholars that + made the Renaissance, and crowded to those lectures filled with that + dangerous new charm which always belongs to the poetic presentation of + new knowledge—those lectures, "musical as is Apollo's lute," being + given up on the hill nearby, by a romantic young priest named Abelard. +</p> +<p> + My copy of the Great King's Wisdom was of no particular bibliographical + value, but it was one of those thick-set, old-calf duodecimos "black + with tarnished gold" which Austin Dobson has sung, books that, one + imagines, must have once made even the Latin Grammar attractive. The + text was the Vulgate, a rivulet of Latin text surrounded by meadows of + marginal comments of the Fathers translated into French,—the whole + presided over, for the edification of the young novice, to whom my copy + evidently belonged, by a distinguished Monseigneur who, in French of the + time of Bossuet, told exactly how these young minds should understand + the wisdom of Solomon, told it with a magisterial style which suggested + that Solomon lived long ago—and, yet, was one of the pillars of the + church. But what particularly interested me about the book, however, as + I turned over its yellow pages, was a tiny thing pressed between them, a + thing the Fathers and the Monseigneur would surely have regarded as + curiously alien to their wisdom, a thing once of a bright, but now of a + paler yellow, and of a frailer texture than it had once been in its + sunlit life—a flower, I thought at first, but, on looking closer, I saw + it was, or had once been, a yellow butterfly. +</p> +<p> + What young priest was it, I wondered, that had thus, with a breaking + heart, crushed the joy of life between these pages! On what spring + morning had this silent little messenger hovered a while over the high + garden-walls of St. Sulpice, flitting and fluttering, and at last darted + and alighted on the page of this old book, at that moment held in the + hands of a young priest walking to and fro amid the tall whispering + trees—delivering at last to him on the two small painted pages of its + wings a message he must not read.... +</p> +<p> + The temptation was severe, for spring was calling all over Paris, and + the words of another book of the Great King whose wisdom he held in his + hand said to him in the Latin that came easily to all manner of men in + those days: <i>Lo! the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the + flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, + and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.... Arise, my love, my + fair one, and come away.</i> +</p> +<p> + The little fluttering thing seemed to be saying that to him as it poised + on the page, and, as his eyes went into a dream, began to crawl softly, + like a rope-walker, up one of his fingers, with a frail, half-frightened + hold, while, high up, over the walls of the garden the poplars were + discreetly swaying to the southern wind, and the lilac-bushes were + carelessly tossing this way and that their fragrance, as altar-boys + swing their censers in the hushed chancel,—but ah! so different an + incense. +</p> +<p> + <i>The flowers appear on the earth</i>, he repeated to himself, beguiled for + a moment, <i>the flowers appear on the earth; and the time of the singing + of birds is come....</i> +</p> +<p> + But, suddenly, for his help against that tiny yellow butterfly there + came to him other stern everlasting words: +</p> +<p> + <i>The grass withereth, the flower fadeth, but the word of our Lord + endureth forever.</i> +</p> +<p> + Then it was, if I imagine aright from my old book, that my young novice + of St. Sulpice crushed the joy of life, in the frail form of its little + messenger, between the pages of the book he held in his hand just then, + the book I held in my hand for a while a hundred and fifty years or so + after—the book I bought that morning on the Quai Voltaire—guarding + that little dead butterfly even more than the wisdom of Solomon. I + wonder if, as he crushed that butterfly, he said to himself—in words + that have grown commonplace since his time—the words of that strange + emperor Hadrian—<i>Animula, vagula, blandula</i>! +</p> +<p> + Perhaps I should not have remembered that book-hunting morning in Old + Paris on the Quai Voltaire, when I bought that beautiful old copy of the + <i>Proverbs of Solomon</i>—with the butterfly so strangely crushed between + its pages—had it not been for a circumstance that happened to me, the + other day, in the subway, which seemed to me of the nature of a marvel. + Many weary men and women were travelling—in an enforced, yet in some + way humorously understanding, society—from Brooklyn Bridge to the + Bronx. I got in at Wall Street. The "crush-hour" was near, for it was + 4:25—still, as yet, there were time and space granted us to observe + our neighbours. In the particular car in which I was sitting, there + was room still left to look about and admire the courage of your + fellow-passengers. Weary men going home—many of them having used them + all day long—have little wish to use their eyes, so all the men in my + car sat silently and sadly, contemplating the future. As I looked at + them, it seemed to me that they were thinking over the day's work they + had done, and the innumerable days' work they had still to do. No one + smiled. No one observed the other. An automatic courtesy gave a seat + here and there, but no one gave any attention to any business but his + own thoughts and his own sad station. +</p> +<p> + It was a car, if I remember aright, occupied almost entirely by + men-passengers, and, so far as I could see, there were no evidences that + men knew women from men, or <i>vice versa</i>, yet, at last, there seemed to + dawn on four men sitting in a row that there was a wonderful creature + reading a book on the other side of the aisle—a lovely young woman, + with all the fabled beauty of the sea-shell, and the rainbow, that + enchantment in her calm pearl-like face, and in the woven stillness of + her hair, that has in all times and countries made men throw up sails + and dare the unknown sea, and the unknown Fates. The beauty, too, that + nature had given her was clothed in the subdued enchantments of the + rarest art. All unconscious of the admiration surrounding her, she sat + in that subway car, like a lonely butterfly, strangely there in her + incongruous surroundings, for a mysterious moment,—to vanish as swiftly + as she had come—and, as she stepped from the car, leaving it dark and + dazzled— +</p> +<pre> + bright with her past presence yet— +</pre> +<p class="noindent"> + I, who had fortunately, and fearfully, sat by her side was aware that + the book she had been reading was lying forgotten on the seat. It was + mine by right of accident,—treasure-trove. So I picked it up, braving + the glares of the four sad men facing me. +</p> +<p> + Naturally, I had wondered what book it was; but its being bound in + tooled and jewelled morocco, evidently by one of the great bookbinders + of Paris, made it unprofitable to hazard a guess. +</p> +<p> + I leave to the imagination of lovers of books what book one would + naturally expect to find in hands so fair. Perhaps <i>Ronsard</i>—or some + other poet from the Rose-Garden of old France. No! it was a charmingly + printed copy of The New Testament. +</p> +<p> + The paradox of the discovery hushed me for a few moments, and then I + began to turn over the pages, several of which I noticed were dog eared + after the manner of beautiful women in all ages. A pencil here and there + had marked certain passages. <i>Come unto me</i>, ran one of the underlined + passages, <i>all ye that are heavy laden, and I will give you rest</i>,—and + I thought how strange it was that she whose face was so calm and still + should have needed to mark that. And another marked passage I noted—<i>He + was in the world, and the world was made by Him, and the world knew Him + not</i>. Then I put down the book with a feeling of awe—such as the Bible + had never brought to me before, though I had been accustomed to it from + my boyhood, and I said to myself: "How very strange!" And I meant how + strange it was to find this wonderful old book in the hands of this + wonderful young beauty. +</p> +<p> + It had seemed strange to find that butterfly in that old copy of the + <i>Proverbs of King Solomon</i>, but how much stranger to find the New + Testament in the hands, or, so to speak, between the wings, of an + American butterfly. +</p> +<p> + I found something written in the book at least as wonderful to me as + the sacred text. It was the name of the butterfly—a name almost as + beautiful as herself. So I was enabled to return her book to her. There + is, of course, no need to mention a name as well-known for good works as + good looks. It will suffice to say that it was the name of the most + beautiful actress in the world. +</p> +<p> + There is a moral to this story. Morals—to stories—are once more + coming into fashion. The Bible, in my boyhood, came to us with no such + associations as I have recalled. There were no butterflies between its + pages, nor was it presented to us by fair or gracious hands. It was a + very grim and minatory book, wielded, as it seemed to one's childish + ignorance, for the purpose which that young priest of St. Sulpice had + used the pages of his copy of the <i>Proverbs of King Solomon</i>, that of + crushing out the joy of life. +</p> +<p> + My first acquaintance with it as I remember, was in a Methodist chapel + in Staffordshire, England, where three small boys, including myself, + prisoned in an old-fashioned high-back pew, were endeavouring to relieve + the apparently endless <i>ennui</i> of the service by eating surreptitious + apples. Suddenly upon our three young heads descended what seemed like a + heavy block of wood, wielded by an ancient deacon who did not approve + of boys. We were, each of us, no more than eight years old, and the book + which had thus descended upon our heads was nothing more to us than a + very weighty book—to be dodged if possible, for we were still in that + happy time of life when we hated all books. We knew nothing of its + contents—to us it was only a schoolmaster's cane, beating us into + silence and good behaviour. +</p> +<p> + So the Bible has been for many generations of boys a book even more + terrible than Caesar's <i>Commentaries</i> or the <i>Aeneid</i> of Virgil—the + dull thud of a mysterious cudgel upon the shoulders of youth which you + bore as courageously as you could. +</p> +<p> + So many of us grew up with what one might call a natural prejudice + against the Bible. +</p> +<p> + Then some of us who cared for literature took it up casually and found + its poetic beauty. We read the <i>Book of Job</i>—which, by the way, Mr. + Swinburne is said to have known by heart; and as we read it even the + stars themselves seemed less wonderful than this description of their + marvel and mystery: +</p> +<p> + <i>Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades or loose the hands of + Orion?</i> +</p> +<p> + <i>Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his season? or canst thou guide + Arcturus with his sons?</i> +</p> +<p> + Or we read in the 37th chapter of the <i>Book of Ezekiel</i> of that weird + valley that was full of bones—"<i>and as I prophesied, there was a noise, + and behold a shaking, and the bones came together bone to bone</i>," + surely one of the most wonderful visions of the imagination in all + literature. +</p> +<p> + Or we read the marvellous denunciatory rhetoric of Jeremiah and Isaiah, + or the music of the melodious heart-strings of King David; we read the + solemn adjuration of the "King Ecclesiast" to remember our Creator in + the days of our youth, with its haunting picture of old age: and the + loveliness of <i>The Song of Songs</i> passed into our lives forever. +</p> +<p> + To this purely literary love of the Bible there has been added within + the last few years a certain renewed regard for it as the profoundest + book of the soul, and for some minds not conventionally religious it has + regained even some of its old authority as a spiritual guide and stay. + And I will confess for myself that sometimes, as I fall asleep at + night, I wonder if even Bernard Shaw has written anything to equal the + Twenty-third Psalm. +</p> +<p> </p> + +<center> +<big>THE END</big> +</center> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> + +<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 11675 ***</div> +</body> +</html> diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6312041 --- /dev/null +++ b/LICENSE.txt @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements, +metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be +in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES. + +Procedures for determining public domain status are described in +the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org. + +No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in +jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize +this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright +status under the laws that apply to them. diff --git a/README.md b/README.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..205f5d6 --- /dev/null +++ b/README.md @@ -0,0 +1,2 @@ +Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for +eBook #11675 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11675) diff --git a/old/11675-8.txt b/old/11675-8.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f88d4e9 --- /dev/null +++ b/old/11675-8.txt @@ -0,0 +1,9452 @@ +Project Gutenberg's Vanishing Roads and Other Essays, by Richard Le Gallienne + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: Vanishing Roads and Other Essays + +Author: Richard Le Gallienne + +Release Date: March 22, 2004 [EBook #11675] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VANISHING ROADS AND OTHER ESSAYS *** + + + + +Produced by Janet Kegg and PG Distributed Proofreaders + + + + + + + + +Vanishing Roads +And Other Essays + + +By + +Richard Le Gallienne + + +1915 + + + + + TO + + ROBERT HOBART DAVIS + +DEAR BOB: It is quite a long time now since you and I first caught +sight of each other and became fellow wayfarers on this Vanishing Road +of the world. O quite a lot of years now, Bob! Yet I control my tendency +to shiver at their number from the fact that we have travelled them, +always within hailing distance of each other, I with the comfortable +knowledge that near by I had so good a comrade, so true a friend. + +For this once, by your leave, we won't "can" the sentiment,--to use an +idiom in which you are the master-artist on this continent,--but I, at +least, will luxuriate in retrospect, as I write your name by way of +dedication to this volume of essays, for some of which your quick-firing +mind is somewhat more than editorially responsible. You were one of the +first to make me welcome to a country of which, even as a boy, I used +prophetically to dream as my "promised land," little knowing that it was +indeed to be my home, the home of my spirit, as well as the final +resting-place of my household gods; and, having you so early for my +friend, is it to be wondered at if I soon came to regard the American +humourist as the noblest work of God? + +There is yet, I trust, much left of the Vanishing Road for us to travel +together; and I hope that, when the time comes for us both to vanish +over the horizon line, we may exit still within hail of each other,--so +that we may have a reasonable chance of hitting the trail together on +the next route, whatever it is going to be. + +Always yours, + RICHARD LE GALLIENNE. + +Rowayton, December 25, 1914. + + + + +For their discernment in giving the following essays their first +opportunity with the reader the writer desires to thank the editors of +_The North American Review_, _Harper's Magazine_, _The Century_, _The +Smart Set_, _Munsey's_, _The Out-Door World_, and _The Forum_. + + + + +CONTENTS + + CHAPTER + I.--VANISHING ROADS + II.--WOMAN AS A SUPERNATURAL BEING + III.--THE LACK OF IMAGINATION AMONG MILLIONAIRES + IV.--THE PASSING OF MRS. GRUNDY + V.--MODERN AIDS TO ROMANCE + VI.--THE LAST CALL + VII.--THE PERSECUTIONS OF BEAUTY + VIII.--THE MANY FACES--THE ONE DREAM + IX.--THE SNOWS OF YESTER-YEAR + X.--THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GOSSIP + XI.--THE PASSING AWAY OF THE EDITOR + XII.--THE SPIRIT OF THE OPEN + XIII.--AN OLD AMERICAN TOW-PATH + XIV.--A MODERN SAINT FRANCIS + XV.--THE LITTLE GHOST IN THE GARDEN + XVI.--THE ENGLISH COUNTRYSIDE + XVII.--LONDON--CHANGING AND UNCHANGING + XVIII.--THE HAUNTED RESTAURANT + XIX.--THE NEW PYRAMUS AND THISBE + XX.--TWO WONDERFUL OLD LADIES + XXI.--A CHRISTMAS MEDITATION + XXII.--ON RE-READING WALTER PATER + XXIII.--THE MYSTERY OF "FIONA MACLEOD" + XXIV.--FORBES-ROBERTSON: AN APPRECIATION + XXV.--A MEMORY OF FRÉDÉRIC MISTRAL + XXVI.--IMPERISHABLE FICTION + XXVII.--THE MAN BEHIND THE PEN + XXVIII.--BULLS IN CHINA-SHOPS + XXIX.--THE BIBLE AND THE BUTTERFLY + + + +Vanishing Roads + + + + +I + +VANISHING ROADS + + +Though actually the work of man's hands--or, more properly speaking, the +work of his travelling feet,--roads have long since come to seem so much +a part of Nature that we have grown to think of them as a feature of the +landscape no less natural than rocks and trees. Nature has adopted them +among her own works, and the road that mounts the hill to meet the +sky-line, or winds away into mystery through the woodland, seems to be +veritably her own highway leading us to the stars, luring us to her +secret places. And just as her rocks and trees, we know not how or why, +have come to have for us a strange spiritual suggestiveness, so the +vanishing road has gained a meaning for us beyond its use as the avenue +of mortal wayfaring, the link of communication between village and +village and city and city; and some roads indeed seem so lonely, and so +beautiful in their loneliness, that one feels they were meant to be +travelled only by the soul. All roads indeed lead to Rome, but theirs +also is a more mystical destination, some bourne of which no traveller +knows the name, some city, they all seem to hint, even more eternal. + +Never more than when we tread some far-spreading solitude and mark the +road stretching on and on into infinite space, or the eye loses it in +some wistful curve behind the fateful foliage of lofty storm-stirred +trees, or as it merely loiters in sunny indolence through leafy copses +and ferny hollows, whatever its mood or its whim, by moonlight or at +morning; never more than thus, eagerly afoot or idly contemplative, are +we impressed by that something that Nature seems to have to tell us, +that something of solemn, lovely import behind her visible face. If we +could follow that vanishing road to its far mysterious end! Should we +find that meaning there? Should we know why it stops at no mere +market-town, nor comes to an end at any seaport? Should we come at last +to the radiant door, and know at last the purpose of all our travel? +Meanwhile the road beckons us on and on, and we walk we know not why or +whither. + +Vanishing roads do actually stir such thoughts, not merely by way of +similitude, but just in the same way that everything in Nature similarly +stirs thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls; as moonlit waters stir +them, or the rising of the sun. As I have said, they have come to seem +a part of natural phenomena, and, as such, may prove as suggestive a +starting-point as any other for those speculations which Nature is all +the time provoking in us as to why she affects us thus and thus. These +mighty hills of multitudinous rock, piled confusedly against the sky--so +much granite and iron and copper and crystal, says one. But to the soul, +strangely something besides, so much more. These rolling shapes of +cloud, so fantastically massed and moulded, moving in rhythmic change +like painted music in the heaven, radiant with ineffable glories or +monstrous with inconceivable doom. This sea of silver, "hushed and +halcyon," or this sea of wrath and ravin, wild as Judgment Day. So much +vapour and sunshine and wind and water, says one. + +Yet to the soul how much more! + +And why? Answer me that if you can. There, truly, we set our feet on the +vanishing road. + +Whatever reality, much or little, the personifications of Greek +Nature-worship had for the ancient world, there is no doubt that for a +certain modern temperament, more frequently met with every day, those +personifications are becoming increasingly significant, and one might +almost say veritably alive. Forgotten poets may, in the first instance, +have been responsible for the particular forms they took, their names +and stories, yet even so they but clothed with legend presences of wood +and water, of earth and sea and sky, which man dimly felt to have a +real existence; and these presences, forgotten or banished for a while +in prosaic periods, or under Puritanic repression, are once more being +felt as spiritual realities by a world coming more and more to evoke its +divinities by individual meditation on, and responsiveness to, the +mysterious so-called natural influences by which it feels itself +surrounded. Thus the first religion of the world seems likely to be its +last. In other words, the modern tendency, with spiritually sensitive +folk, is for us to go direct to the fountain-head of all theologies, +Nature herself, and, prostrating ourselves before her mystery, strive to +interpret it according to our individual "intimations," listening, +attent, for ourselves to her oracles, and making, to use the phrase of +one of the profoundest of modern Nature-seers, our own "reading of +earth." Such was Wordsworth's initiative, and, as some one has said, "we +are all Wordsworthians today." That pagan creed, in which Wordsworth +passionately wished himself suckled, is not "outworn." He himself, in +his own austere way, has, more than any one man, verified it for us, so +that indeed we do once more nowadays + + Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; + Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn. + +Nor have the dryads and the fauns been frighted away for good. All over +the world they are trooping back to the woods, and whoso has eyes may +catch sight, any summer day, of "the breast of the nymph in the brake." +Imagery, of course; but imagery that is coming to have a profounder +meaning, and a still greater expressive value, than it ever had for +Greece and Rome. All myths that are something more than fancies gain +rather than lose in value with time, by reason of the accretions of +human experience. The mysteries of Eleusis would mean more for a modern +man than for an ancient Greek, and in our modern groves of Dodona the +voice of the god has meanings for us stranger than ever reached his +ears. Maybe the meanings have a purport less definite, but they have at +least the suggestiveness of a nobler mystery. But surely the Greeks were +right, and we do but follow them as we listen to the murmur of the wind +in the lofty oaks, convinced as they of the near presence of the divine. + + The word by seers or sibyls told + In groves of oak or fanes of gold, + Still floats upon the morning wind, + Still whispers to the willing mind. + +Nor was it a vain thing to watch the flight of birds across the sky, and +augur this or that of their strange ways. We too still watch them in a +like mood, and, though we do not interpret them with a like exactitude, +we are very sure that they mean something important to our souls, as +they speed along their vanishing roads. + +This modern feeling of ours is quite different from the outworn +"pathetic fallacy," which was a purely sentimental attitude. We have, of +course, long since ceased to think of Nature as the sympathetic mirror +of our moods, or to imagine that she has any concern with the temporal +affairs of man. We no longer seek to appease her in her terrible moods +with prayer and sacrifice. We know that she is not thinking of us, but +we do know that for all her moods there is in us an answering thrill of +correspondence, which is not merely fanciful or imaginative, but of the +very essence of our beings. It is not that we are reading our thoughts +into her. Rather we feel that we are receiving her thoughts into +ourselves, and that, in certain receptive hours, we are, by some avenue +simpler and profounder than reason, made aware of certitudes we cannot +formulate, but which nevertheless siderealize into a faith beyond the +reach of common doubt--a faith, indeed, unelaborate, a faith, one might +say, of one tenet: belief in the spiritual sublimity of all Nature, and, +therefore, of our own being as a part thereof. + +In such hours we feel too, with a singular lucidity of conviction, that +those forces which thus give us that mystical assurance are all the time +moulding us accordingly as we give up ourselves to their influence, and +that we are literally and not fancifully what winds and waters make us; +that the poetry, for instance, of Wordsworth was literally first +somewhere in the universe, and thence transmitted to him by processes no +less natural than those which produced his bodily frame, gave him form +and feature, and coloured his eyes and hair. + +It is not man that has "poetized" the world, it is the world that has +made a poet out of man, by infinite processes of evolution, precisely in +the same way that it has shaped a rose and filled it with perfume, or +shaped a nightingale and filled it with song. One has often heard it +said that man has endowed Nature with his own feelings, that the pathos +or grandeur of the evening sky, for instance, are the illusions of his +humanizing fancy, and have no real existence. The exact contrary is +probably the truth--that man has no feelings of his own that were not +Nature's first, and that all that stirs in him at such spectacles is but +a translation into his own being of cosmic emotions which he shares in +varying degrees with all created things. Into man's strange heart Nature +has distilled her essences, as elsewhere she has distilled them in +colour and perfume. He is, so to say, one of the nerve-centres of cosmic +experience. In the process of the suns he has become a veritable +microcosm of the universe. It was not man that placed that tenderness in +the evening sky. It has been the evening skies of millions of years that +have at length placed tenderness in the heart of man. It has passed into +him as that "beauty born of murmuring sound" passed into the face of +Wordsworth's maiden. + +Perhaps we too seldom reflect how much the life of Nature is one with +the life of man, how unimportant or indeed merely seeming, the +difference between them. Who can set a seed in the ground, and watch it +put up a green shoot, and blossom and fructify and wither and pass, +without reflecting, not as imagery but as fact, that he has come into +existence, run his course, and is going out of existence again, by +precisely the same process? With so serious a correspondence between +their vital experience, the fact of one being a tree and the other a man +seems of comparatively small importance. The life process has but used +different material for its expression. And as man and Nature are so like +in such primal conditions, is it not to be supposed that they are alike +too in other and subtler ways, and that, at all events, as it thus +clearly appears that man is as much a natural growth as an apple-tree, +alike dependent on sun and rain, may not, or rather must not, the +thoughts that come to him strangely out of earth and sky, the sap-like +stirrings of his spirit, the sudden inner music that streams through him +before the beauty of the world, be no less authentically the working of +Nature within him than his more obviously physical processes, and, say, +a belief in God be as inevitable a blossom of the human tree as +apple-blossom of the apple? + +If this oracular office of Nature be indeed a truth, our contemplation +of her beauty and marvel is seen to be a method of illumination, and her +varied spectacle actually a sacred book in picture-writing, a revelation +through the eye of the soul of the stupendous purport of the universe. +The sun and the moon are the torches by which we study its splendid +pages, turning diurnally for our perusal, and in star and flower alike +dwells the lore which we cannot formulate into thought, but can only +come indescribably to know by loving the pictures. "The meaning of all +things that are" is there, if we can only find it. It flames in the +sunset, or flits by us in the twilight moth, thunders or moans or +whispers in the sea, unveils its bosom in the moonrise, affirms itself +in mountain-range and rooted oak, sings to itself in solitary places, +dreams in still waters, nods and beckons amid sunny foliage, and laughs +its great green laugh in the wide sincerity of the grass. + +As the pictures in this strange and lovely book are infinite, so +endlessly varied are the ways in which they impress us. In our highest +moments they seem to be definitely, almost consciously, sacerdotal, as +though the symbolic acts of a solemn cosmic ritual, in which the +universe is revealed visibly at worship. Were man to make a practice of +rising at dawn and contemplating in silence and alone the rising of the +sun, he would need no other religion. The rest of the day would be +hallowed for him by that morning memory and his actions would partake of +the largeness and chastity of that lustral hour. Moonlight, again, seems +to be the very holiness of Nature, welling out ecstatically from +fountains of ineffable purity and blessedness. Of some moonlight nights +we feel that if we did what our spirits prompt us, we should pass them +on our knees, as in some chapel of the Grail. To attempt to realize in +thought the rapture and purification of such a vigil is to wonder that +we so seldom pay heed to such inner promptings. So much we lose of the +best kind of joy by spiritual inertia, or plain physical sloth; and some +day it will be too late to get up and see the sunrise, or to follow the +white feet of the moon as she treads her vanishing road of silver across +the sea. This involuntary conscience that reproaches us with such laxity +in our Nature-worship witnesses how instinctive that worship is, and how +much we unconsciously depend on Nature for our impulses and our moods. + +Another definitely religious operation of Nature within us is expressed +in that immense gratitude which throws open the gates of the spirit as +we contemplate some example of her loveliness or grandeur. Who that +has stood by some still lake and watched a stretch of water-lilies +opening in the dawn but has sent out somewhere into space a profound +thankfulness to "whatever gods there be" that he has been allowed to +gaze on so fair a sight. Whatever the struggle or sorrow of our lives, +we feel in such moments our great good fortune at having been born into +a world that contains such marvels. It is sufficient success in life, +whatever our minor failures, to have beheld such beauty; and mankind at +large witnesses to this feeling by the value it everywhere attaches to +scenes in Nature exceptionally noble or exquisite. Though the American +traveller does not so express it, his sentiment toward such natural +spectacles as the Grand Cañon or Niagara Falls is that of an intense +reverence. Such places are veritable holy places, and man's heart +instinctively acknowledges them as sacred. His repugnance to any +violation of them by materialistic interests is precisely the same +feeling as the horror with which Christendom regarded the Turkish +violation of the Holy Sepulchre. And this feeling will increase rather +than decrease in proportion as religion is recognized as having its +shrines and oracles not only in Jerusalem, or in St. Peter's, but +wherever Nature has erected her altars on the hills or wafted her +incense through the woodlands. + +After all, are not all religions but the theological symbolization of +natural phenomena; and the sacraments, the festivals, and fasts of all +the churches have their counterparts in the mysterious processes and +manifestations of Nature? and is the contemplation of the resurrection +of Adonis or Thammuz more edifying to the soul than to meditate the +strange return of the spring which their legends but ecclesiastically +celebrate? He who has watched and waited at the white grave of winter, +and hears at last the first faint singing among the boughs, or the first +strange "peeping" of frogs in the marshes; or watches the ghost-like +return of insects, stealing, still half asleep, from one knows not +where--the first butterfly suddenly fluttering helplessly on the +window-pane, or the first mud-wasp crawling out into the sun in a dazed, +bewildered way; or comes upon the violet in the woods, shining at the +door of its wintry sepulchre: he who meditates these marvels, and all +the magic processional of the months, as they march with pomp and pathos +along their vanishing roads, will come to the end of the year with a +lofty, illuminated sense of having assisted at a solemn religious +service, and a realization that, in no mere fancy of the poets, but in +very deed, "day unto day uttereth speech and night unto night sheweth +knowledge." + +Apart from this generally religious influence of Nature, she seems at +times in certain of her aspects and moods specifically to illustrate or +externalize states of the human soul. Sometimes in still, moonlit +nights, standing, as it were, on the brink of the universe, we seem to +be like one standing on the edge of a pool, who, gazing in, sees his own +soul gazing back at him. Tiny creatures though we be, the whole solemn +and majestic spectacle seems to be an extension of our own reverie, and +we to enfold it all in some strange way within our own infinitesimal +consciousness. So a self-conscious dewdrop might feel that it enfolded +the morning sky, and such probably is the meaning of the Buddhist seer +when he declares that "the universe grows I." + +Such are some of the more august impressions made upon us by the +pictures in the cosmic picture-book; but there are also times and +places when Nature seems to wear a look less mystic than dramatic in its +suggestiveness, as though she were a stage-setting for some portentous +human happening past or to come--the fall of kings or the tragic clash +of empires. As Whitman says, "Here a great personal deed has room." Some +landscapes seem to prophesy, some to commemorate. In some places not +marked by monuments, or otherwise definitely connected with history, we +have a curious haunted sense of prodigious far-off events once enacted +in this quiet grassy solitude--prehistoric battles or terrible +sacrifices. About others hangs a fateful atmosphere of impending +disaster, as though weighted with a gathering doom. Sometimes we seem +conscious of sinister presences, as though veritably in the abode of +evil spirits. The place seems somehow not quite friendly to humanity, +not quite good to linger in, lest its genius should cast its perilous +shadow over the heart. On the other hand, some places breathe an +ineffable sense of blessedness, of unearthly promise. We feel as though +some hushed and happy secret were about to be whispered to us out of the +air, some wonderful piece of good fortune on the edge of happening. Some +hand seems to beckon us, some voice to call, to mysterious paradises of +inconceivable green freshness and supernaturally beautiful flowers, +fairy fastnesses of fragrance and hidden castles of the dew. In such +hours the Well at the World's End seems no mere poet's dream. It awaits +us yonder in the forest glade, amid the brooding solitudes of silent +fern, and the gate of the Earthly Paradise is surely there in yonder +vale hidden among the violet hills. + +Various as are these impressions, it is strange and worth thinking on +that the dominant suggestion of Nature through all her changes, whether +her mood be stormy or sunny, melancholy or jubilant, is one of presage +and promise. She seems to be ever holding out to us an immortal +invitation to follow and endure, to endure and to enjoy. She seems to +say that what she brings us is but an earnest of what she holds for us +out there along the vanishing road. There is nothing, indeed, she will +not promise us, and no promise, we feel, she cannot keep. Even in her +tragic and bodeful seasons, in her elegiac autumns and stern winters, +there is an energy of sorrow and sacrifice that elevates and inspires, +and in the darkest hours hints at immortal mornings. She may terrify, +but she never deadens, the soul. In earthquake and eclipse she seems to +be less busy with destruction than with renewed creation. She is but +wrecking the old, that + + ... there shall be + Beautiful things made new, for the surprise + Of the sky-children. + +As I have thus mused along with the reader, a reader I hope not too +imaginary, the manner in which the phrase with which I began has +recurred to my pen has been no mere accident, nor yet has it been a +mere literary device. It seemed to wait for one at every turn of one's +theme, inevitably presenting itself. For wherever in Nature we set our +foot, she seems to be endlessly the centre of vanishing roads, radiating +in every direction into space and time. Nature is forever arriving and +forever departing, forever approaching, forever vanishing; but in her +vanishings there seems to be ever the waving of a hand, in all her +partings a promise of meetings farther along the road. She would seem to +say not so much _Ave atque vale_, as _Vale atque ave_. In all this +rhythmic drift of things, this perpetual flux of atoms flowing on and on +into Infinity, we feel less the sense of loss than of a musical +progression of which we too are notes. + +We are all treading the vanishing road of a song in the air, the +vanishing road of the spring flowers and the winter snows, the vanishing +roads of the winds and the streams, the vanishing road of beloved faces. +But in this great company of vanishing things there is a reassuring +comradeship. We feel that we are units in a vast ever-moving army, the +vanguard of which is in Eternity. The road still stretches ahead of us. +For a little while yet we shall experience all the zest and bustle of +marching feet. The swift-running seasons, like couriers bound for the +front, shall still find us on the road, and shower on us in passing +their blossoms and their snows. For a while the murmur of the running +stream of Time shall be our fellow-wayfarer--till, at last, up there +against the sky-line, we too turn and wave our hands, and know for +ourselves where the road wends as it goes to meet the stars. And others +will stand as we today and watch us reach the top of the ridge and +disappear, and wonder how it seemed to us to turn that radiant corner +and vanish with the rest along the vanishing road. + + + + +II + +WOMAN AS A SUPERNATURAL BEING + + +The boy's first hushed enchantment, blent with a sort of religious awe, +as in his earliest love affair he awakens to the delicious mystery we +call woman, a being half fairy and half flower, made out of moonlight +and water lilies, of elfin music and thrilling fragrance, of divine +whiteness and softness and rustle as of dewy rose gardens, a being of +unearthly eyes and terribly sweet marvel of hair; such, too, through +life, and through the ages, however confused or overlaid by use and +wont, is man's perpetual attitude of astonishment before the apparition +woman. + +Though she may work at his side, the comrade of his sublunary +occupations, he never, deep down, thinks of her as quite real. Though +his wife, she remains an apparition, a being of another element, an +Undine. She is never quite credible, never quite loses that first nimbus +of the supernatural. + +This is true not merely for poets; it is true for all men, though, of +course, all men may not be conscious of its truth, or realize the truth +in just this way. Poets, being endowed with exceptional sensitiveness of +feeling and expression, say the wonderful thing in the wonderful way, +bring to it words more nearly adequate than others can bring; but it is +an error to suppose that any beauty of expression can exaggerate, can +indeed more than suggest, the beauty of its truth. Woman is all that +poets have said of her, and all that poets can never say: + + Always incredible hath seemed the rose, + And inconceivable the nightingale-- + +and the poet's adoration of her is but the articulate voice of man's +love since the beginning, a love which is as mysterious as she herself +is a mystery. + +However some may try to analyse man's love for woman, to explain it, or +explain it away, belittle it, nay, even resent and befoul it, it remains +an unaccountable phenomenon, a "mystery we make darker with a name." +Biology, cynically pointing at certain of its processes, makes the +miracle rather more miraculous than otherwise. Musical instruments are +no explanation of music. "Is it not strange that sheep's guts should +hale souls out of men's bodies?" says Benedick, in _Much Ado About +Nothing_, commenting on Balthazar's music. But they do, for all that, +though no one considers sheep's gut the explanation. To cry "sex" and to +talk of nature's mad preoccupation with the species throws no light on +the matter, and robs it of no whit of its magic. The rainbow remains a +rainbow, for all the sciences. And woman, with or without the suffrage, +stenographer or princess, is of the rainbow. She is beauty made flesh +and dwelling amongst us, and whatever the meaning and message of beauty +may be, such is the meaning of woman on the earth--her meaning, at all +events, for men. That is, she is the embodiment, more than any other +creature, of that divine something, whatever it may be, behind matter, +that spiritual element out of which all proceeds, and which mysteriously +gives its solemn, lovely and tragic significance to our mortal day. + +If you tell some women this of themselves, they will smile at you. Men +are such children. They are so simple. Dear innocents, how easily they +are fooled! A little make-up, a touch of rouge, a dash of henna--and you +are an angel. Some women seem really to think this; for, naturally, they +know nothing of their own mystery, and imagine that it resides in a few +feminine tricks, the superficial cleverness with which some of them know +how to make the most of the strange something about them which they +understand even less than men understand it. + +Other women indeed resent man's religious attitude toward them as +sentimental, old-fashioned. They prefer to be regarded merely as +fellow-men. To show consciousness of their sex is to risk offence, and +to busy one's eyes with their magnificent hair, instead of the +magnificent brains beneath it, is to insult them. Yet when, in that old +court of law, Phryne bared her bosom as her complete case for the +defence, she proved herself a greater lawyer than will ever be made by +law examinations and bachelor's degrees; and even when women become +judges of the Supreme Court, a development easily within sight, they +will still retain the greater importance of being merely women. Yes, and +one can easily imagine some future woman President of the United States, +for all the acknowledged brilliancy of her administration, being +esteemed even more for her superb figure. + +It is no use. Woman, if she would, "cannot shake off the god." She must +make up her mind, whatever other distinctions she may achieve, to her +inalienable distinction of being woman; nothing she can do will change +man's eternal attitude toward her, as a being made to be worshipped and +to be loved, a being of beauty and mystery, as strange and as lovely as +the moon, the goddess and the mother of lunatics. What a wonderful +destiny is hers! In addition to being the first of human beings, all +that a man can be, to be so much else as well; to be, so to say, the +president of a railroad and yet a priestess of nature's mysteries; a +stenographer at so many dollars a week and yet a nymph of the forest +pools--woman, "and yet a spirit still." Not without meaning has myth +endowed woman with the power of metamorphosis, to change at will like +the maidens in the legend into wild white swans, or like Syrinx, fleeing +from the too ardent pursuit of Pan, into a flowering reed, or like +Lamia, into a jewelled serpent-- + + Eyed like a peacock, and all crimson barr'd; + And full of silver moons. + +Modern conditions are still more favourable than antique story for the +exhibition of this protean quality of woman, providing her with +opportunities of still more startling contrasts of transformation. Will +it not be a wonderful sight in that near future to watch that woman +judge of the Supreme Court, in the midst of some learned tangle of +inter-state argument, turn aside for a moment, in response to a +plaintive cry, and, unfastening her bodice, give the little clamourer +the silver solace it demands! What a hush will fall upon the assembled +court! To think of such a genius for jurisprudence, such a legal brain, +working in harmony--with such a bosom! So august a pillar of the law, +yet so divine a mother. + +As it is, how piquant the contrast between woman inside and outside her +office hours! As you take her out to dinner, and watch her there seated +before you, a perfumed radiance, a dewy dazzling vision, an evening star +swathed in gauzy convolutions of silk and lace--can it be the same +creature who an hour or two ago sat primly with notebook and pencil at +your desk side, and took down your specification for fireproofing that +new steel-constructed building on Broadway? You, except for your evening +clothes, are not changed; but she--well, your clients couldn't possibly +recognize her. As with Browning's lover, you are on the other side of +the moon, "side unseen" of office boy or of subway throng; you are in +the presence of those "silent silver lights and darks undreamed of" by +the gross members of your board of directors. By day--but ah! at evening +under the electric lights, to the delicate strains of the palm-shaded +orchestra! Man is incapable of these exquisite transformations. By day a +gruff and hurried machine--at evening, at best, a rapt and laconic poker +player. A change with no suggestion of the miraculous. + +Do not let us for a moment imagine that because man is ceasing to remove +his hat at her entrance into crowded elevators, or because he hustles +her or allows her to hang by the straps in crowded cars, that he is +tending to forget this supernaturalism of woman. Such change in his +manners merely means his respect for her disguise, her disguise as a +business woman. By day she desires to be regarded as just that, and she +resents as untimely the recognition of her sex, her mystery, and her +marvel during business hours. Man's apparent impoliteness, therefore, is +actually a delicate modern form of chivalry. But of course his real +feelings are only respectfully masked, and, let her be in any danger or +real discomfort, or let any language be uttered unseemly for her ears, +and we know what promptly happens. Barring such accidents, man tacitly +understands that her incognito is to be respected--till the charming +moment comes when she chooses to put it aside and take at his hands her +immemorial tribute. + +So, you see, she is able to go about the rough ways, taking part even in +the rough work of the world, literally bearing what the fairy tales call +a charmed life. And this, of course, gives her no small advantage in the +human conflict. So protected, she is enabled, when need arises, to take +the offensive, with a minimum of danger. Consider her recent campaign +for suffrage, for example. Does any one suppose that, had she been +anything but woman, a sacrosanct being, immune from clubs and bullets, +that she would have been allowed to carry matters with such high +victorious hand as in England--and more power to her!--she has of late +been doing. Let men attempt such tactics, and their shrift is +uncomplimentarily short. It may be said that woman enjoys this immunity +with children and curates, but, even so, it may be held that these +latter participate in a less degree in that divine nature with which +woman is so completely armoured. + + How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea, + Whose action is no stronger than a flower? + +exclaims Shakespeare. + +But there is indeed the mystery, for, though its "action is no stronger +than a flower," the power wielded by beauty in this world, and therefore +by woman as its most dynamic embodiment, is as undeniable as it is +irresistible. "Terrible as an army with banners" was no mere figure of +lovesick speech. It is as plain a truth as the properties of radium, +and belongs to the same order of marvel. Such scientific discoveries are +particularly welcome as demonstrating the power of the finer, as +contrasted with the more brutally obvious, manifestations of force; for +they thus illustrate the probable nature of those spiritual forces whose +operations we can plainly see, without being able to account for them. A +foolish phrase has it that "a woman's strength is in her helplessness." +"Helplessness" is a curious term to use for a mysteriously concentrated +or super-refined form of strength. "Whose action is no stronger than a +flower." But is the action of a flower any less strong because it is not +the action of a fist? As a motive force a flower may be, and indeed has +time and again been, stronger than a thousand fists. And what then shall +we say of the action of that flower of flowers that is woman--that +flower that not only once or twice in history has + + ... launched a thousand ships + And burned the topless towers of Ilium. + +Woman's helplessness, forsooth! On the contrary, woman is the best +equipped fighting machine that ever went to battle. And she is this, not +from any sufferance on the part of man, not from any consideration on +his part toward her "weakness," but merely because he cannot help +himself, because nature has so made her. + +No simple reasoning will account for her influence over man. It is not +an influence he allows. It is an influence he cannot resist, and it is +an influence which he cannot explain, though he may make believe to do +so. That "protection," for example, which he extends to her from the +common physical perils with which he is more muscularly constituted to +cope--why is it extended? Merely out of pity to a weaker being than +himself? Does other weakness always command his pity? We know that it +does not. No, this "protection" is but a part of an instinctive +reverence, for which he can give no reason, the same kind of reverence +which he has always given to divine beings, to any manifestation or +vessel of the mysteriously sacred something in human life. He respects +and protects woman from the same instinct which makes him shrink from +profaning an altar or robbing a church, or sends him on his knees before +any apparition supposedly divine. Priests and women are often classed +together, but not because the priests are regarded as effeminately +"helpless"; rather because both are recognized as ministers of sacred +mysteries, both belong to the spiritual sphere, and have commerce with +the occult holiness of things. Also be it remarked that this +"protection" is chiefly needed against the brutality and bestiality of +man's own heart, which woman and religion alike rather hold in +subjection by their mysterious influence than have to thank for any +favours of self-control. Man "protects" woman because he first worships +her, because, if she has for him not always the beauty of holiness, she +at least always suggests the holiness of beauty. + +Now when has man ever suggested holiness to the most adoring woman? I do +not refer to the professional holiness of saints and ecclesiastics, but +to that sense of hallowed strangeness, of mystic purity, of spiritual +exquisiteness, which breathes from a beautiful woman and makes the touch +of her hand a religious ecstasy, and her very garments a thrilling +mystery. How impossible it is to imagine a woman writing the _Vita +Nuova_, or a girl feeling toward a boy such feelings of awe and worship +as set the boy Dante a-tremble at his first sight of the girl Beatrice. + + At that moment [he writes], I say most truly that the spirit of + life, which hath its dwelling in the secretest chamber of the heart, + began to tremble so violently that the least pulse of my body shook + therewith; and in trembling it said these words: "_Ecce deus fortior + me, qui veniens dominabitur mihi_. (Here is a deity stronger than I, + who, coming, shall rule over me.)" + +And, loverlike, he records of "this youngest of the angels" that "her +dress on that day was of a most noble colour, a subdued and goodly +crimson, girdled and adorned in such sort as best suited with her very +tender age." Ah! that "little frock," that sacred little frock we first +saw her in! Don't we all know it? And the little handkerchief, scented +like the breath of heaven, we begged as a sacred relic! And-- + + Long after you are dead + I will kiss the shoes of your feet.... + +Yes! anything she has worn or touched; for, as a modern writer has said: + + Everything a woman wears or touches immediately incarnates something + of herself. A handkerchief, a glove, a flower--with a breath she + endows them with immortal souls. + +Waller with his girdle, Donne with "that subtle wreath of hair about his +arm," the mediaeval knight riding at tourney with his lady's sleeve at +his helm, and all relic-worshipping lovers through the ages bear witness +to that divine supernaturalism of woman. To touch the hem of that little +frock, to kiss the mere imprint of those little feet, is to be purified +and exalted. But when did man affect woman in that way? I am tolerably +well read in the poetry of woman's emotions, but I recall no parallel +expressions of feeling. No passionate apostrophes of his golf stockings +come to my mind, nor wistful recollections of the trousers he wore on +that never-to-be-forgotten afternoon. The immaculate collar that spanned +his muscular throat finds no Waller to sing it: + + A narrow compass--and yet there + Dwelt all that's good, and all that's fair, + +and probably the smartest negligée shirt that ever sported with the +summer winds on a clothes-line has never caused the smallest flutter in +feminine bosoms. The very suggestion is, of course, absurd--whereas with +women, in very deed, it is as with the temple in Keats's lines: + + ... even as the trees + That whisper round a temple become soon + Dear as the temple's self. + +Properly understood, therefore, the cult of the skirt-dancer has a +religious significance, and man's preoccupation with petticoats is but +the popular recognition of the divinity of woman. All that she is and +does and wears has a ritualistic character, and she herself commands our +reverence because we feel her to be the vessel of sacred mysteries, the +earthly representative of unearthly powers, with which she enjoys an +intimacy of communication denied to man. It is not a reasonable feeling, +or one to be reasoned about; and that is why we very properly exempt +woman from the necessity of being reasonable. She is not, we say, a +reasonable being, and in so saying we pay her a profound compliment. For +she transcends reason, and on that very account is mysteriously wise, +the wisest of created things--mother-wise. When we say "mother-wit," we +mean something deeper than we realize--for what in the universe is wiser +than a mother, fed as she is through the strange channels of her being +with that lore of the infinite which seems to enter her body by means of +organs subtler than the brain? + +A certain famous novelist meant well when recently he celebrated woman +as "the mother of the male," but such celebration, while ludicrously +masculine in its egotistic limitation, would have fallen short even if +he had stopped to mention that she was the mother of the female, too; +for not merely in the fact that she is the mother of the race resides +the essential mystery of her motherhood. We do not value woman merely, +if one may be permitted the expression, as a brood mare, an economic +factor controlling the census returns. Her gift of motherhood is +stranger than that, and includes spiritual affinities and significances +not entirely represented by visible babes. Her motherhood is mysterious +because it seems to be one with the universal motherhood of nature, one +with the motherhood that guards and warms to life the eggs in the nest +and the seeds in the hollows of the hills, the motherhood of the whole +strange vital process, wherever and howsoever it moves and dreams and +breaks into song and flower. And, as nature is something more than a +mother, so is woman. She is a vision, an outward and visible sign of an +inward and spiritual grace and goodness at the heart of life; and her +beauty is the sacred seal which the gods have set upon her in token of +her supernatural meaning and mission; for all beauty is the message of +the immortal to mortality. Always when man has been in doubt concerning +his gods, or in despair amid the darkness of his destiny, his heart has +been revived by some beatific vision; + + Some shape of beauty moves away the pall + From our dark spirits. + +Woman is our permanent Beatific Vision in the darkness of the world. + + + + +III + +THE LACK OF IMAGINATION AMONG MILLIONAIRES + + +Considering the truly magical power of money, it must often have struck +the meditative mind--particularly that class of meditative mind whose +wealth consists chiefly in meditation--to what thoroughly commonplace +uses the modern millionaire applies the power that is his: in brief, +with what little originality, with what a pitiful lack of imagination, +he spends his money. One seldom hears of his doing a novel or striking +thing with it. + +On the contrary, he buys precisely the same things as his +fellow-millionaires, the same stereotyped possessions--houses in Fifth +Avenue and Newport, racehorses, automobiles, boxes at the opera, +diamonds and dancing girls; and whether, as the phrase is, he makes good +use of his wealth, or squanders it on his pleasures, the so-called good +or bad uses are alike drearily devoid of individuality. Philanthropist +or profligate, the modern millionaire is one and the same in his lack of +initiative. Saint or sinner, he is one or the other in the same tame +imitative way. + +The rich men of the past, the splendid spendthrifts of antiquity, seem +usually to have combined a gift of fancy with their wealth, often even +something like poetry; and their extravagances, however extreme, had +usually a saving grace of personal whim to recommend them to lovers of +the picturesque. Sardanapalus and Heliogabalus may have been whatever +else you please, but they were assuredly not commonplace; and the mere +mention of their names vibrates with mankind's perennial gratitude for +splendour and colossal display, however perverse, and even absurd. The +princes of the Italian Renaissance were, of course, notable examples of +the rich man as fantast, probably because they had the good sense to +seek the skilled advice of poets and painters as to how best to make an +artistic display of their possessions. Alas, no millionaire today asks a +poet's or painter's assistance in spending his money; yet, were the +modern millionaire to do so, the world might once more be delighted with +such spectacles as Leonardo devised for the entertainments at the Villa +Medici--those fanciful banquets, where, instead of a mere vulgar display +of Medici money--"a hundred dollars a plate," so to say--whimsical wit +and beauty entered into the creation of the very dishes. Leicester's +famous welcoming of Elizabeth to Kenilworth was perhaps the last +spectacular "revel" of its kind to strike the imagination; though we +must not fail to remember with gratitude the magnificent Beckford, with +his glorious "rich man's folly" of Fonthill Abbey, a lordly pleasure +house which naturally sprang from the same Aladdin-like fancy which +produced "Vathek." + +I but mention one or two such typical examples at random to illustrate +the difference between past and present. At present the rich man's +paucity of originality is so painful that we even welcome a certain +millionaire's _penchant_ for collecting fleas--he, it is rumoured, +having paid as much as a thousand dollars for specimens of a +particularly rare species. It is a passion perhaps hard to understand, +but, at least, as we say, it is "different." Mr. Carnegie's more +comprehensible hobby for building libraries shows also no little +originality in a man of a class which is not as a rule devoted to +literature. Another millionaire I recently read of, who refused to pay +the smallest account till it had run for five years, and would then +gladly pay it, with compound interest at five per cent., has something +refreshing about him; while still another rich eccentric, who has lived +on his yacht anchored near the English coast for some fifteen years or +so in order to avoid payment of his American taxes, and who occasionally +amuses himself by having gold pieces heated white hot and thrown into +the sea for diving boys to pick them up, shows a quaint ingenuity which +deserves our gratitude. Another modern example of how to spend, or +waste, one's money picturesquely was provided by the late Marquis of +Anglesey, a young lord generally regarded as crazy by an ungrateful +England. Perhaps it was a little crazy in him to spend so much money in +the comparatively commonplace adventure of taking an amateur dramatic +company through the English provinces, he himself, I believe, playing +but minor rôles; but lovers of Gautier's _Le Capitaine Fracasse_ will +see in that but a charmingly boyish desire to translate a beloved dream +into a reality--though his creditors probably did not take that view. +Neither, one can surmise, did those gentlemen sufficiently appreciate +his passion for amassing amazing waistcoats, of which some seven hundred +were found in his wardrobe at his lamented death; or strange and +beautiful walking sticks, a like prodigious collection of which were +among the fantastic assets which represented his originally large +personal fortune on the winding up of his earthly affairs. Among these +unimaginative creditors were, doubtless, many jewellers who found it +hard to sympathize with his lordship's genial after-dinner habit, +particularly when in the society of fair women, of plunging his hand +into his trousers pocket and bringing it forth again brimming over with +uncut precious stones of many colours, at the same time begging his +companion to take her choice of the moonlit rainbowed things. The +Marquis of Anglesey died at the early age of twenty-nine, much lamented, +as I have hinted--by his creditors, but no less sincerely lamented, too, +by those for whom his flamboyant personality and bizarre whims added to +that gaiety of nations sadly in need today of such figures. A friend of +mine owns two of the wonderful waistcoats. Sometimes he wears one as we +lunch together, and on such occasions we always drink in silence to the +memory of his fantastic lordship. + +These examples of rich men of our own time who have known how to spend +their money with whim and fancy and flourish are but exceptions to my +argument, lights shining, so to say, in a great darkness. As a general +rule, it is the poor or comparatively poor man, the man lacking the very +necessary material of the art, who is an artist of this kind. It is the +man with but little money who more often provides examples of the +delightful way of spending it. I trust that Mr. Richard Harding Davis +will not resent my recalling a charming feat of his in this connection. +Of course Mr. Davis is by no means a poor man, as all we who admire his +writings are glad to know. Still, successful writer as he is, he is not +yet, I presume, on a Carnegie or Rockefeller rating; and, at the time +which I am about to recall, while already famous and comparatively +prosperous, he had not attained that security of position which is +happily his today. Well, I suppose it was some twelve or fifteen years +ago--and of course I am only recalling a story well known to all the +world--that, chancing to be in London, and wishing to send a surprise +message to a lady in Chicago who afterward became his wife, he conceived +the idea of sending it by messenger boy from Charing Cross to Michigan +Avenue; and so the little lad, in the well-known uniform of hurry, sped +across the sea, as casually as though he were on an errand from Charing +Cross to Chancery Lane, raced across nearly half the continent, as +casually as though he were on an errand from Wall Street to Park Row, +and finding the proper number in Michigan Avenue, placed the far +travelled letter in the lady's hand, no doubt casually asking for a +receipt. This I consider one of the most romantic compliments ever paid +by a lover to his lady. What millionaire ever had a fancy like that? + +Or what millionaire ever had a fancy like this? There was living in New +York some ten years ago a charming actor, not unknown to the public and +much loved by his friends for, among his other qualities, his quaint +whims. Good actor as he was, like many other good actors he was usually +out of an engagement, and he was invariably poor. It was always his +poorest moment that he would choose for the indulgence of an odd, and +surely kindly, eccentricity. He would half starve himself, go without +drinks, forswear tobacco, deny himself car fares, till at last he had +saved up five dollars. This by no means easy feat accomplished, he would +have his five-dollar bill changed into five hundred pennies, filling his +pockets with which, he would sally forth from his lodging, and, seeking +neighbourhoods in which children most abound, he would scatter his +arduously accumulated largess among the scrambling boys and girls, +literally happy as a king to watch the glee on the young faces at the +miraculous windfall. We often wondered that he was not arrested for +creating a riot in the public streets, a disturber of the public +traffic. Had some millionaire passed by on one of those ecstatic +occasions, there is no question but that he would have been promptly +removed to Bellevue as a dangerous lunatic. + +Or what millionaire ever had a fancy like this? Passing along +Forty-second Street one afternoon, I came upon a little crowd, and +joining it I found that it was grouped in amused curiosity, and with a +certain kindness, round an old hatless Irishman, who was leaning against +a shop front, weeping bitterly, and, of course, grotesquely. The old man +was very evidently drunk, but there was something in his weeping deeply +pitiful for all that. He was drunk, for certain; but no less certainly +he was very unhappy--unhappy over some mysterious something that one or +two kindly questioners tried in vain to discover. As we all stood +helplessly looking on and wondering, a tall, brisk young man, of the +lean, rapid, few-worded American type, pushed in among us, took a swift +look at the old man, thrust a dollar bill into his hand, said "Forget +it"--no more--and was gone like a flash on his way. The old man fumbled +the note in a daze, but what chiefly interested me was the amazed look +on the faces of the little crowd. It was almost as if something +supernatural had happened. All eyes turned quickly to catch sight of +that strange young man; but he was already far off striding swiftly up +the street. I have often regretted that I checked my impulse to catch up +with him--for it seemed to me, too, that I had never seen a stranger +thing. Pity or whim or whatever it was, did ever a millionaire do the +like with a dollar, create such a sensation or have so much fun with so +small a sum? No; millionaires never have fancies like that. + +Another poor man's fancy is that of a friend of mine, a very poor young +lawyer, whose custom it is to walk uptown from his office at evening, +studying the faces of the passers-by. He is too poor to afford dollar +bills. He must work his miracles with twenty-five-cent pieces, or even +smaller coins; but it is with this art of spending money as with any +other art: the greatness of the artist is shown by his command over an +economy of material; and the amount of human happiness to be evoked by +the dispensation of a quarter into the carefully selected hand, at the +artistically chosen moment, almost passes belief. Suppose, for example, +you were a sandwich man on a bleak winter day, an old weary man, with +hope so long since faded out of your heart that you would hardly know +what the word meant if you chanced to read it in print. Thought, too, is +dead within you, and feeling even so numbed that you hardly suffer any +more. Practically you are a man who ought to be in your coffin--at peace +in Potter's field--who, by the mere mechanic habit of existence, +mournfully parades the public streets, holding up a banner with some +strange device, the scoff of the pitiless wayfarer--as like as not +supporting against an empty stomach the savoury advertisement of some +newly opened restaurant. Suppose you were that man, and suddenly through +the thick hopelessness, muffling you around as with a spiritual +deafness, there should penetrate a kind voice saying: "Try and keep up +your heart, friend; there are better days ahead"; and with the voice a +hand slipping into yours a coin, and with both a kind smile, a cheery +"Good-bye," and a tall, broad-shouldered figure, striding with long, so +to say, kindly legs up the street--gone almost before you knew he was +there. I think it would hardly matter to you whether the coin were a +quarter or a dime; but what would matter would be your amazement that +there still was any kindness left on the earth; and perhaps you might +almost be tempted to believe in God again. And then--well, what would it +matter to any one what you did with your miraculous coin? This is my +friend's favourite way of spending his money. To the extent of his poor +means he has constituted himself the Haroun Al Raschid of the sandwich +men. + +After all, I suppose that most of us, if put into the possession of +great wealth, would find our greatest satisfaction in the spending of it +much after the fashion of my poor lawyer friend--that is, in the +artistic distribution of human happiness. I do not, of course, for a +moment include in that phrase those soulless systems of philanthropy by +which a solid block of money on the one side is applied to the relief of +a solid block of human misery on the other, useful and much to be +appreciated as such mechanical charity of course is. It is not, indeed, +the pious use of money that is my theme, but rather how to get the most +fun, the most personal and original fun, out of it. + +The mention of the great caliph suggests a rôle which is open to any +rich man to play, the rôle of the Haroun Al Raschid of New York. What a +wonderful part to play! Instead of loitering away one's evenings at the +club, to doff one's magnificence and lose oneself in the great nightly +multitude of the great city, wandering hither and thither, watching and +listening, and, with one's cheque-book for a wand, play the magician of +human destinies--bringing unhoped-for justice to the oppressed, succour +as out of heaven to the outcast, and swift retribution, as of sudden +lightning, to the oppressor. To play Providence in some tragic crisis of +human lives; at the moment when all seemed lost to step out of the +darkness and set all right with a touch of that magic wand. To walk by +the side of lost and lonely men, an unexpected friend; to scribble a +word on a card and say, "Present this tomorrow morning at such a number +Broadway and see what will happen," and then to disappear once again +into the darkness. To talk with sad, wandering girls, and arrange that +wonderful new hats and other forms of feminine hope shall fall out of +the sky into their lonely rooms on the morrow. To be the friend of weary +workmen and all that toil by night while the world is asleep in soft +beds. To come upon the hobo as he lies asleep on the park bench and slip +a purse into his tattered coat, and perhaps be somewhere by to see him +wake up in the dawn, and watch the strange antics of his joy--all +unsuspected as its cause. To go up to the poor push-cart man, as he is +being hurried from street corner to street corner by the police, and +say: "Would you like to go back to Italy? Here is a steamer ticket. A +boat sails for Genoa tomorrow. And here is a thousand dollars. It will +buy you a vineyard in Sicily. Go home and bid the signora get ready." +And then to disappear once more, like Harlequin, to flash your wand in +some other corner of the human multitude. Oh, there would be fun for +one's money, something worth while having money for! + +I offer this suggestion to any rich man who may care to take it up, free +of charge. It is a fascinating opportunity, and its rewards would be +incalculable. At the end of the year how wise one would be in the human +story--how filled to overflowing his heart with the thought of the joy +he would thus have brought to so many lives--all, too, in pure fun, +himself having had such a good time all the while! + + + + +IV + +THE PASSING OF MRS. GRUNDY + + +"Death of Mrs. Grundy!" Imagine opening one's newspaper some morning and +finding in sensational headlines that welcome news. One recalls the +beautiful old legend of the death of Pan, and how--false report though +it happily was--there once ran echoing through the world a long +heartbroken sigh, and a mysterious voice was heard wailing three times +from land to land, "Great Pan is dead!" Similarly, on that happy morning +I have imagined, one can imagine, too, another sigh passing from land to +land, the sigh of a vast relief, of a great thankfulness for the lifting +of an ineffable burden, as though the earth stretched its limbs and drew +great draughts of a new freedom. How wildly the birds would sing that +morning! And I believe that even the church bells would ring of +themselves! + +Such definite news is not mine to proclaim, but if it cannot be +announced with certitude that Mrs. Grundy is no more, it may, at all +events, be affirmed without hesitation that she is on her deathbed, and +that surely, if slowly, she is breathing her last. Yes, that poisonous +breath, which has so long pervaded like numbing miasma the free air of +the world, will soon be out of her foolish, hypocritical old body; and +though it may still linger on here and there in provincial backwoods and +suburban fastnesses, from the great air centres of civilization it will +have passed away forever. + +The origin of Mrs. Grundy is shrouded in mystery. In fact, though one +thus speaks of her as so potent a personification, she has of course +never had any real existence. For that very reason she has been so hard +to kill. Nothing is so long-lived as a chimera, nothing so difficult to +lay as a ghost. From her first appearance, or rather mention, in +literature, Mrs. Grundy has been a mere hearsay, a bugaboo being +invented to frighten society, as "black men" and other goblins have been +wickedly invented by nurses to frighten children. In the old play itself +where we first find her mentioned by name, she herself never comes on +the stage. She is only referred to in frightened whispers. "_What will +Mrs. Grundy say?_" is the nervous catchword of one of the characters, +much in the same way as Mrs. Gamp was wont to defer to the censorious +standards of her invisible friend "Mrs. Harris." In the case of the last +named chimera, it will be recalled that the awful moment came when Mrs. +Gamp's boon companion, Batsey Prig, was sacrilegious enough to declare +her belief that no such person as "Mrs. Harris" was, or ever had been, +in existence. So the awful atheistic moment has come for Mrs. Grundy, +too, and an oppressed world at last takes courage to say that no such +being as Mrs. Grundy has ever really existed, or that, even if she has, +she shall exist no more. _What will Mrs. Grundy say?_ Who cares +nowadays--and so long as nobody cares, the good lady is as dead as need +be. + +Mrs. Grundy, of course, is man's embodied fear of his neighbour, the +creation of timid souls who are afraid of being themselves, and who, +instead of living their lives after their own fashion and desires, +choose to live them in hypocritical discomfort according to the +standards of others, standards which in their turn may be held +insincerely enough from fear of someone else, and so on without end--a +vicious circle of insincere living being thus created, in which no man +is or does anything real, or as he himself would naturally prefer to be +and to do. It is evident that such a state of mutual intimidation can +exist only in small communities, economically interdependent, and among +people with narrow boundaries and no horizons. If you live in a village, +for example, and are dependent on the good opinion of your neighbours +for your means of existence, your morals and your religious belief must +be those of the village, or you are liable to starve. It is only the +rich man in a village who can do as he pleases. The only thing for the +dependent individualist in a village to do is to go somewhere else, to +some place where a man may at the same time hold his job and his +opinions, a place too big to keep track of its units, too busy to ask +irrelevant questions, and so diverse in its constituents as to have +generated tolerance and free operation for all. + +Now, in spite of its bigness, the world was till quite recently little +more than a village, curiously held in subjection by village +superstitions and village ethics, narrow conceptions of life and +conduct; but the last twenty years have seen a remarkable enlargement of +the human spirit, a reassertion of the natural rights of man as against +the figments of prurient and emasculate conventions, to which there is +no parallel since the Renaissance. Voices have been heard and truths +told, and multitudes have listened gladly that aforetime must take +shelter either in overawed silence or in utterance so private that they +exerted no influence; and the literature of the day alone, literature of +wide and greedy acceptance, is sufficient warrant for the obituary +announcement which, if not yet, as I said, officially made, is already +writing in the hearts, and even in the actions, of society. The +popularity of such writers as Meredith and Hardy, Ibsen and Nietzsche, +Maeterlinck and Walt Whitman, constitutes a writing on the wall the +significance of which cannot be gainsaid. The vogue alone of Mr. Bernard +Shaw, apostle to the Philistines, is a portent sufficiently conclusive. +To regard Mr. Shaw either as a great dramatist or an original +philosopher is, of course, absurd. He, of all men, must surely be the +last to imagine such a vain thing about himself; but even should he be +so self-deluded, his immense coarse usefulness to his day and generation +remains, and the value of it can hardly be overestimated. What others +have said for years as in a glass darkly, with noble seriousness of +utterance, he proclaims again through his brazen megaphone, with all the +imperturbable _aplomb_ of an impudent showman, having as little +self-respect as he has respect for his public; and, as a consequence, +that vast herd of middle-class minds to whom finer spirits appeal in +vain hear for the first time truths as old as philosophy, and answer to +them with assenting instincts as old as humanity. Truth, like many +another excellent commodity, needs a vulgar advertisement, if it is +to become operative in the masses. Mr. Shaw is truth's vulgar +advertisement. He is a brilliant, carrying noise on behalf of freedom of +thought; and his special equipment for his peculiar revivalist mission +comes of his gift for revealing to the common mind not merely the +untruth of hypocrisy, but the laughableness of hypocrisy, first of all. +He takes some popular convention, that of medicine or marriage or what +you will, and shows you not merely how false it is but how ludicrously +false. He purges the soul, not with the terror and pity of tragedy, but +with the irresistible laughter of rough-and-tumble farce. To think +wrongly is, first of all, so absurd. He proves it by putting wrong +thinking on the stage, where you see it for yourself in action, and +laugh immoderately. Perhaps you had never thought how droll wrong +thinking or no thinking was before; and while you laugh with Shaw +at your side-splitting discovery, the serious message glides in +unostentatiously--wrong thinking is not merely laughable; it is also +dangerous, and very uncomfortable. And so the showman has done his work, +the advertiser has sold his goods, and there is so much more truth in +circulation in unfamiliar areas of society. + +That word "society" naturally claims some attention at the hands of one +who would speak of Mrs. Grundy, particularly as she has owed her long +existence to a general misconception as to what constitutes "society," +and to a superstitious terror as to its powers over the individual. +Society--using the word in its broad sense--has heretofore been regarded +as a vague tremendous entity imposing a uniformity of opinion and action +on the individual, under penalty of a like vague tremendous disapproval +for insubordination. Independent minds, however, have from time to time, +and in ever increasing numbers, ventured to do their own will and +pleasure in disregard of this vague tremendous disapproval, and have, +strange to say, found no sign of the terrible consequences threatened +them, with the result that they, and the onlookers, have come to the +conclusion that this fear of society is just one more bugaboo of +timorous minds, with no power over the courageous spirit. From a +multitude of such observations men and women have come more and more to +draw the conclusion that the solidarity of society is nothing but a +myth, and that so-called society is merely a loosely connected series of +independent societies, formed by natural selection among their members, +each with its own codes and satisfactions; and that a man not welcome in +one society may readily find a home for himself in another, or indeed, +if necessary, and if he be strong enough, rest content with his own +society of one. + +There was a time when a doubt as to the credibility of the book of +Genesis or a belief in the book of Darwin made the heretic a lonely man, +but nowadays he is hardly likely to go without friends. Besides, men and +women of strong personal character are not usually indiscriminately +gregarious. On the contrary, they are apt to welcome any disparity +between them and their neighbours which tends to safeguard their leisure +and protect them against the social inroads of irrelevant persons. I +recall the case of a famous novelist, who, himself jealous of his own +proper seclusion, permitted the amenities of his neighbours to pleasure +his wife who was more sociably inclined, and smilingly allowed himself +to be sacrificed once a week on the altar of a domestic "at home" day. +It was amusing to see him in his drawing-room on Fridays, surrounded by +every possible form of human irrelevancy--men and women well enough in +their way, of course, but absolutely unrelated, if not antipathetic to +him and all he stood for--heroically doing his best to seem really "at +home." But there came a time when he published a book of decidedly +"dangerous" tendencies, if not worse, and then it was a delight to see +how those various nobodies fled his contact as they would the plague. +His drawing-room suddenly became a desert, and when you dropped in on +Fridays you found there--only the people he wanted. "Is not this," he +would laughingly say, "a triumph of natural selection? See how simply, +by one honest action, I have cut off the bores!" + +To cut off the bores! Yes, that is the desperate attempt that any man or +woman who would live their own lives rather than the lives of others is +constantly engaged in making; and more and more all men and women are +realizing that there is only one society that really counts, the society +of people we want, rather than the people who want us or don't want us +or whom we don't want. And nowadays the man or woman must be +uncomfortable or undesirable, indeed, who cannot find all the society he +or she can profitably or conveniently handle, be their opinions and +actions never so anti-Grundy. Thus the one great fear that more than any +other has kept Mrs. Grundy alive, the fear of being alone in the world, +cut off from such intercourse with our fellows as most of us feel the +need of at times, has been put an end to by the ever increasing +subdivision of "society" into friendly seclusions and self-dependent +communities of men and women with like ways and points of view, however +disapproved in alien circles. What "shocks" one circle will seem +perfectly natural in another; and one great truth should always be held +firmly in mind--that the approval of one's neighbours has never yet paid +a man's bills. So long as he can go on paying those, and retain the +regard of the only society he values--that of himself and a few +friends--he can tell Mrs. Grundy to go--where she belongs. And this +happily is--almost--as true nowadays for woman as for man; which is the +main consideration, for, it need hardly be said, that it has been on her +own sex that the tyranny of Mrs. Grundy has weighed peculiarly hard. + +Had that tyranny been based on a genuine moral ideal, one would have +some respect for it, but, as the world has always known, it has been +nothing of the sort. On the contrary, it has all along been an organized +hypocrisy which condoned all it professed to censure on condition that +it was done in unhealthy secrecy, behind the closed doors of a lying +"respectability." All manner of uncleanness had been sanctioned so long +as it wore a mask of "propriety," whereas essentially clean and +wholesome expressions of human nature, undisguised manifestations of the +joy and romance of life, have been suppressed and confounded with their +base counterfeits merely because they have sought the sunlight of +sincerity rather than the shade where evil does well to hide. Man's +proper delight in the senses, the natural joy of men and women in each +other, the love of beauty, naked and unashamed, the romantic emotions, +and all that passionate vitality that dreams and builds and glorifies +the human story: all this, forsooth, it has been deemed wrong even to +speak of, save in colourless euphemisms, and their various drama has had +to be carried on by evasion and subterfuge pitiably silly indeed in this +robustly procreative world. Silly, but how preposterous, too, and no +longer to be endured. + +It was a gain indeed to drag these vital human interests into the arena +of undaunted discussion, but things are clearly seen to have already +passed beyond that stage. Discussion has already set free in the world +braver and truer ideals, ideals no longer afraid of life, but, in the +courage of their joyousness, feasibly close to all its breathing facts. +Men and women refuse any longer to allow their most vital instincts to +be branded with obloquy, and the fulness of their lives to be thwarted +at the bidding of an impure and irrational fiction of propriety. On +every hand we find the right to happiness asserted in deeds as well as +words. The essential purity of actions and relations to which a merely +technical or superstitious irregularity attaches is being more and more +acknowledged, and the fanciful barriers to human happiness are +everywhere giving way before the daylight of common sense. Love and +youth and pleasure are asserting their sacred natural rights, rights as +elemental as those forces of the universe by which the stars are +preserved from wrong, and the merely legal and ecclesiastical fictions +which have so long overawed them are fleeing like phantoms at cockcrow. +It is no longer sinful to be happy--even in one's own way; and the +extravagances of passion, the ebullitions of youth, and the vagaries of +pleasure are no longer frowned down by a sour-visaged public opinion, +but encouraged, or, if necessary, condoned, as the dramatic play of +natural forces, and as welcome additions to the gaiety of nations. The +true sins against humanity are, on the other hand, being exposed and +pilloried with a scientific eye for their essential qualities. + + ... The cold heart, and the murderous tongue, + The wintry soul that hates to hear a song, + The close-shut fist, the mean and measuring eye, + And all the little poisoned ways of wrong. + +Man's virtues and vices are being subjected to a re-classification, in +the course of which they are entertainingly seen, in no few instances, +to be changing places. The standards of punishment applied by Dante to +his inferno of lost souls is being, every year, more closely +approximated; warm-blooded sins of instinct and impulse, as having +usually some "relish of salvation" in them, are being judged lightly, +when they are accounted sins at all, and the cold-hearted sins of +essential selfishness, the sins of cruelty and calculation and +cowardice, are being nailed up as the real crimes against God and man. +The individual is being allowed more and more to be the judge of his own +actions, and all actions are being estimated more in regard to their +special relation and environment, as the relativity of right and wrong, +that most just of modern conceptions, is becoming understood. The hidden +sins of the pious and respectable are coming disastrously into the +light, and it no longer avails for a man to be a pillar of orthodoxy on +Sundays if he be a pillar of oppression all the rest of the week; while +the negative virtues of abstinence from the common human pleasures go +for less than nothing in a world that no longer regards the theatre, the +race course, and the card table, or even a beautiful woman, as under the +especial wrath of God. No, the Grundy "virtues" are fast disappearing, +and piano legs are once more being worn in their natural nudity. The +general trend is unmistakable and irresistible, and such apparent +contradictions of it as occasionally get into the newspapers are of no +general significance; as when, for example, some exquisitely refined +Irish police officer suppresses a play of genius, or blushingly covers +up the nakedness of a beautiful statue, or comes out strong on the +question of woman's bathing dress when some sensible girl has the +courage to go into the water with somewhat less than her entire walking +costume; or, again, when some crank invokes the blue laws against Sunday +golf or tennis; or some spinster association puts itself on record +against woman's smoking: all these are merely provincial or parochial +exceptions to the onward movement of morals and manners, mere spasmodic +twitchings, so to say, of the poor old lady on her deathbed. We know +well enough that she who would so sternly set her face against the +feminine cigarette would have no objection to one of her votaries +carrying on an affair with another woman's husband--not the least in the +world, so long as she was careful to keep it out of the courts. And such +is a sample of her morality in all her dealings. Humanity will lose no +real sanctity or safeguard by her demise; only false shame and false +morality will go--but true modesty, "the modesty of nature," true +propriety, true religion--and incidentally true love and true +marriage--will all be immeasurably the gainers by the death of this +hypocritical, nasty-minded old lady. + + + + +V + +MODERN AIDS TO ROMANCE + + +There have, of course, in all ages been those who made a business of +running down the times in which they lived--tiresome people for whom +everything had gone to the dogs--or was rapidly going--uncomfortable +critics who could never make themselves at home in their own century, +and whose weary shibboleth was that of some legendary perfect past. + +In Rome this particular kind of bore went by the name of _laudator +temporis acti_; and, if we have no such concise Anglo-Saxon phrase for +the type, we still have the type no less ubiquitously with us. The +bugbear of such is "modern science," or "modern thought," a monster +which, we are frequently assured, is fast devouring all the beautiful +and good in human life, a Moloch fed on the dreams and ideals and noble +faiths of man. Modernity! For such "modernity" has taken the place of +"Anti-Christ." These sad, nervous people have no eye for the beautiful +patterns and fantasies of change, none of that faith which rejoices to +watch "the roaring loom of time" weaving ever new garments for the +unchanging eternal gods. In new temples, strangely enough, they see +only atheism, instead of the vitality of spiritual evolution; in new +affirmations they scent only dangerous denials. With the more grave +misgivings of these folk of little faith this is not the place to deal, +though actually, if there were any ground for belief in a modern decay +of religion, we might seriously begin to believe in the alleged decay of +romance. + +Yes, romance, we not infrequently hear, is dead. Modern science has +killed it. It is essentially a "thing of the past"--an affair presumably +of stage-coaches, powdered wigs, and lace ruffles. It cannot breathe in +what is spoken of as "this materialistic age." + +The dullards who repeat these platitudes of the muddle-headed multitude +are surely the only people for whom they are true. It is they alone who +are the materialists, confusing as they do the spirit of romance with +its worn-out garments of bygone fashions. Such people are so clearly out +of court as not to be worth controverting, except for the opportunity +they give one of confidently making the joyous affirmation that, far +from romance being dead in our day, there never was a more romantic age +than ours, and that never since the world began has it offered so many +opportunities, so many facilities for romance as at the present time. + +In fact, a very little thinking will show that of all those benefited by +"the blessings of modern science," it is the lovers of the community +who as a body have most to be thankful for. Indeed, so true is this that +it might almost seem as though the modern laboratory has been run +primarily from romantic motives, to the end that the old reproach should +be removed and the course of true love run magically smooth. Valuable as +the telephone may be in business affairs, it is simply invaluable in the +affairs of love; and mechanicians the world over are absorbed in the +problem of aerial flight, whether they know it or not, chiefly to +provide Love with wings as swift as his desire. + +Distance may lend enchantment to those whom we prefer to appreciate from +afar, but nearness is the real enchantment to your true lover, and +distance is his natural enemy. Distance and the slow-footedness of Time +are his immemorial evils. Both of these modern science has all but +annihilated. Consider for a moment the conditions under which love was +carried on in those old days which some people find so romantic. Think +what a comparatively short distance meant then, with snail-paced +precarious mails, and the only means of communication horses by land, +and sailing ships by sea. How men and women had the courage to go on +long journeys at all away from each other in those days is hard to +realize, knowing what an impenetrable curtain of silence and mystery +immediately fell between them with the winding of the coach horn, or the +last wave of the plumed hat as it disappeared behind the last turning +of the road--leaving those at home with nothing for company but the +yearning horizon and the aching, uncommunicative hours. Days, weeks, +months, even years, must go by in waiting for a word--and when at last +it came, brought on lumbering wheels or at best by some courier on his +steaming mud-splashed mount, precious as it was, it was already grown +old and cold and perhaps long since untrue. + +Imagine perhaps being dependent for one's heart news on some chance +soldier limping back from the wars, or some pilgrim from the Holy Land +with scallop shell and staff! + +Distance was indeed a form of death under such conditions--no wonder men +made their wills as they set out on a journey--and when actual physical +death did not intervene, how much of that slow death-in-life, that +fading of the memory and that numbing of the affections which absence +too often brings, was even still more to be feared. The loved face might +indeed return, looking much the same as when it went away, but what of +the heart that went a-journeying, too? What even of the hearts that +remained at home? + +The chances of death and disaster not even modern science can forestall, +though even these it has considerably lessened; but that other death of +the heart, which comes of the slow starvation of silence and absence, it +may be held to have all but vanquished. Thanks to its weird magicians, +you may be seas or continents away from her whom your soul loveth, yet +"at her window bid good-morrow" as punctually as if you lived next door; +or serenade her by electricity--at all hours of the night. If you sigh +in New York, she can hear you and sigh back in San Francisco; and soon +her very face will be carried to you at any moment of the day along the +magic wires. Nor will you need to wait for the postman, but be able to +read her flowerlike words as they write themselves out on the luminous +slate before you, at the very moment as she leans her fragrant bosom +upon her electric desk three thousand miles away. If this isn't +romantic, one may well ask what is! + +To take the telephone alone, surely the romance of Pyramus and Thisbe, +with their primitive hole in the wall, was a tame affair compared with +the possibilities of this magic toy, by means of which you can talk with +your love not merely through a wall but through the Rocky Mountains. You +can whisper sweet nothings to her across the sounding sea, and bid her +"sleep well" over leagues of primeval forest, and through the +stoniest-hearted city her soft voice will find its way. Even in +mid-ocean the "wireless" will bring you news of her _mal-de-mer_. And +more than that; should you wish to carry her voice with you from place +to place, science is once more at your service with another magic +toy--the phonograph--by which indeed she can still go on speaking to +you, if you have the courage to listen, from beyond the grave. + +The telegraph, the telephone, the "wireless," the phonograph, the +electric letter writer--such are the modern "conveniences" of romance; +and, should an elopement be on foot, what are the fastest post-chaise or +the fleetest horses compared with a high-powered automobile? And when +the airship really comes, what romance that has ever been will compare +for excitement with an elopement through the sky? + +Apart from the practical conveniences of these various new devices, +there is a poetic quality about the mere devices themselves which is +full of fascination and charm. Whether we call up our sweetheart or our +stockbroker, what a thing of enchantment the telephone is merely in +itself! Such devices turn the veriest prose of life into poetry; and, +indeed, the more prosaic the uses to which we put them, the more +marvellous by contrast their marvel seems. Even our businesses are +carried on by agencies more mysterious and truly magical than anything +in the _Arabian Nights_, and all day long we are playing with mysterious +natural laws and exquisite natural forces as, in a small way, when boys +we used to delight in our experiments with oxygen and hydrogen and +Leyden jars. Science has thus brought an element of romantic "fun," so +to speak, even into our stores and our counting-houses. I wonder if +"Central" realizes what a truly romantic employment is hers? + +But, pressed into the high service of love, one sees at once what a +poetic fitness there is in their employ, and how our much-abused modern +science has found at last for that fastidious god an appropriately +dignified and beautiful ministrant. Coarse and vulgar indeed seem the +ancient servitors and the uncouth machinery by which the divine business +of the god was carried on of old. Today, through the skill of science, +the august lightning has become his messenger, and the hidden gnomes of +air and sea hasten to do his bidding. + +Modern science, then, so far from being an enemy of romance, is seen on +every hand to be its sympathetic and resourceful friend, its swift and +irresistible helper in its serious need, and an indulgent minister to +its lighter fancies. Be it whim or emergency, the modern laboratory is +equally at the service of romance, equally ready to gratify mankind with +a torpedo or a toy. + +Not only, however, has modern science thus put itself at the service of +romance, by supplying it with its various magic machinery of +communication, but modern thought--that much maligned bugbear of +timorous minds--has generated an atmosphere increasingly favourable to +and sympathetic with the romantic expression of human nature in all its +forms. + +The world has unmistakably grown younger again during the last twenty +years, as though--which, indeed, is the fact--it had thrown off an +accumulation of mopishness, shaken itself free from imaginary +middle-aged restrictions and preoccupations. All over the world there is +a wind of youth blowing such as has not freshened the air of time since +the days of Elizabeth. Once more the spring of a new Renaissance of +Human Nature is upon us. It is the fashion to be young, and the age of +romance both for men and women has been indefinitely extended. No one +gives up the game, or is expected to, till he is genuinely tired of +playing it. Mopish conventions are less and less allowed to restrict +that free and joyous play of vitality dear to the modern heart, which is +the essence of all romance. More and more the world is growing to love a +lover, and one has only to read the newspapers to see how sympathetic +are the times to any generous and adventurous display of the passions. + +This more humane temper is the result of many causes. The disintegration +of religious superstition, and the substitution in its stead of +spiritual ideals closer to the facts of life, is one of these. All that +was good in Puritanism has been retained by the modern spirit, while +its narrowing and numbing features, its anti-human, self-mortifying, +provincial side have passed or are passing in the regenerating sunlight +of what one might call a spiritual paganism, which conceives of natural +forces and natural laws as inherently pure and mysteriously sacred. Thus +the way of a man with a maid is no longer a shamefaced affair, but it +is more and more realized that in its romance and its multifarious +refinements of development are the "law and the prophets," the "eternal +meanings" of natural religion and social spirituality. + +Then, too, the spread of democracy, resulting in the breaking down of +caste barriers, is all to the good of romance. Swiftly and surely Guelph +and Ghibelline and break-neck orchard walls are passing away. If Romeo +and Juliet make a tragedy of it nowadays, they have only to blame their +own mismanagement, for the world is with them as it has never been +before, and all sensible fathers and mothers know it. + +Again, the freer intercourse between the sexes tends incalculably to +smooth that course of true love once so proverbially rough, but now +indeed in danger of being made too unexcitingly smooth. Yet if, as a +result, certain old combinations of romance are becoming obsolete, new +ones, no less picturesque, and even more vital in their drama, are being +evolved every day by the new conditions. Those very inroads being so +rapidly and successfully made by woman into the immemorial business of +man, which are superficially regarded by some as dangerous to the +tenderer sentiments between men and women, are, on the contrary, merely +widening the area of romance, and will eventually develop, as they can +be seen already developing, a new chivalry and a new poetry of the sexes +no less deep and far more many-sided than the old. The robuster +comradeship between the two already resulting from the more active +sharing of common interests cannot but tend to a deeper and more +exhilarating union of man and woman, a completer, intenser marriage +literally of true minds as well as bodies than was possible in the old +régime, when the masculine and feminine "spheres" were kept so jealously +distinct and only allowed to touch at the elementary points of +relationship. There has always been a thrill of adventure when either +has been admitted a little farther into the other's world than was +customary. How thrilling, therefore, will it be when men and women +entirely share in each other's lives, without fictitious reserves and +mysteries, and face the whole adventure of life squarely and completely +together, all the more husband and wife for being comrades as well--as +many men and women of the new era are already joyously doing. + +And, merely on the surface, what a new romantic element woman has +introduced into the daily drudgery of men's lives by her mere presence +in their offices! She cannot always be beautiful, poor dear, and she is +not invariably gracious, it is true; yet, on the whole, how much the +atmosphere of office life has gained in amenity by the coming of the +stenographer, the typewriter, and the telephone girl, not to speak of +her frequent decorative value in a world that has hitherto been +uncompromisingly harsh and unadorned! Men may affect to ignore this, and +cannot afford indeed to be too sensitive to these flowery presences that +have so considerably supplanted those misbegotten young miscreants known +as office-boys, a vanishing race of human terror; yet there she is, all +the same, in spite of her businesslike airs and her prosaic tasks, +silently diffusing about her that eternal mystery which she can never +lose, be her occupations never so masculine. + +There she is with her subtly wreathed hair and her absurd little lace +handkerchiefs and her furtive powder puff and her bits of immemorial +ornaments and the soft sound of her skirts and all the rest of it. Never +mind how grimly and even brusquely you may be dictating to her +specifications for steel rails or the like, little wafts of perfume +cannot help floating across to your rolltop desk, and you are a man and +she is a woman, for all that; and, instead of having her with you at fag +ends of your days, you have her with you all day long now--and your +sisters and your sweethearts are so much the nearer to you all day for +her presence, and, whether you know it or not, you are so much the less +a brute because she is there. + +Where the loss to romance comes in in these admirable new arrangements +of modern commerce it is hard to see. Of course a new element of danger +is thus introduced into the routine of our daily lives, but when was +danger an enemy to romance? The "bright face" of this particular +"danger" who would be without? The beloved essayist from whom that last +phrase is, of course, adapted, declared, as we all know, that to marry +is "to domesticate the recording angel." One might say that the modern +business man has officialized the ministering angel--perhaps some other +forms of angel as well. + +In their work, then, as in their play, men and women are more and more +coming to share with each other as comrades, and really the fun of life +seems in no wise diminished as a consequence. Rather the contrary, it +would seem, if one is to judge from the "Decameron" of the newspapers. +Yet it is not very long ago that man looked askance at woman's wistful +plea to take part even in his play. He had the old boyish fear that she +would spoil the game. However, it didn't take him long to find out his +mistake and to know woman for the true "sport" that she can be. And in +that discovery it was another invention of that wicked modern science +that was the chief, if humble seeming, factor, no less than that +eclipsed but inexpressibly useful instrument (of flirtation) in the +hands of a kind providence, the bicycle. + +The service of the bicycle to the "emancipation of woman" movements has +perhaps never been acknowledged by the philosopher; but a little thought +will make evident how far-reaching that service has been. When that near +day arrives on which woman shall call herself absolutely "free," should +she feel inclined to celebrate her freedom by some monument of her +gratitude, let the monument be neither to man nor woman, however valiant +in the fight, but simply let it take the form of an enthroned and +laurelled bicycle--for the moment woman mounted that apparently innocent +machine, it carried her on the high-road to freedom. On that she could +go not only where she pleased, but--what is even more to the point--with +whom she pleased. The free companionship of man and woman had begun. +Then and forever ended the old system of courtship, which seems so +laughable and even incredible today. One was no longer expected to pay +court to one's beloved, sitting stiffly on straight-backed chairs in a +chill drawing-room in the non-conducting, or non-conducive, presence of +still chillier maiden aunts. The doom of the _duenna_ was sounded; the +chill drawing-room was exchanged for "the open road" and the whispering +woodland; and soon it is to come about that a man shall propose to his +wife high up in the blue heavens, in an airship softly swaying at anchor +in the wake of the evening star. + + + + +VI + +THE LAST CALL + + +I don't know whether or not the cry "Last call for the dining-car" +affects others as it affects me, but for me it always has a stern, +fateful sound, suggestive of momentous opportunity fast slipping away, +opportunity that can never come again; and, on the occasions when I have +disregarded it, I have been haunted with a sense of the neglected +"might-have-been." + +Not, indeed, that the formless regret has been connected with any +illusions as to the mysterious quality of the dinner that I have thus +foregone. I have been well enough aware that the only actual opportunity +thus evaded has been most probably that of an unusually bad dinner, +exorbitantly paid for. The dinner itself has had nothing to do with my +feeling, which, indeed, has come of a suggestiveness in the cry beyond +the occasion, a sense conveyed by the words, in combination with the +swift speeding along of the train, of the inexorable swift passage and +gliding away of all things. Ah! so soon it will be the last call--for so +many pleasant things--that we would fain arrest and enjoy a little +longer in a world that with tragic velocity is flowing away from us, +each moment, "like the waters of the torrent." O yes, all too soon it +will be the "last call" in dead earnest--the last call for the joy of +life and the glory of the world. The grass is already withering, the +flower already fading; and that bird of time, with so short a way to +flutter, is relentlessly on the wing. + +Now some natures hear this call from the beginning of their lives. Even +their opulent spendthrift youth is "made the more mindful that the sweet +days die," by every strain of music, by every gathered flower. All their +joy is haunted, like the poetry of William Morris, with the wistful +burden of mortality. Even the summer woodlands, with all their pomp and +riot of exuberant green and gold, are anything but safe from this low +sweet singing, and in the white arms of beauty, pressed desperately +close as if to imprison the divine fugitive moment, the song seems to +come nearest. Who has not held some loved face in his hands, and gazed +into it with an almost agonizing effort to realize its reality, to make +eternally sure of it, somehow to wrest possession of it and the +transfiguring moment for ever, all the time pierced with the melancholy +knowledge that tomorrow all will be as if this had never been, and life +once more its dull disenchanted self? + + Too soon shall morning take the stars away, + And all the world be up and open-eyed, + This magic night be turned to common day-- + Under the willows on the riverside. + +Youth, however, can afford to enjoy even its melancholy; for the +ultimate fact of which that melancholy is a prophecy is a long way off. +If one enchanted moment runs to an end, it may be reasonably sure for a +long time yet of many more enchanted moments to come. It has as yet only +taken a bite or two into the wonderful cake. And, though its poets may +warn it that "youth's a stuff does not endure," it doesn't seriously +believe it. Others may have come to an end of their cake, but its cake +is going to last for ever. Alas, for the day when it is borne in upon us +with a tragic suddenness, like a miser who awakens to find that he has +been robbed of his hoard, that unaccountably the best part of the cake +has been eaten, that perhaps indeed only a few desperate crumbs remain. +A bleak laughter blends now with that once luxurious melancholy. There +is a song at our window, terribly like the mockery of Mephistopheles. +Our blood runs cold. We listen in sudden fear. It is life singing out +its last call. + +The time of this call, the occasion and the manner of it, mercifully +vary with individuals. Some fortunate ones, indeed, never hear it till +they lie on their deathbeds. Such have either been gifted with such a +generous-sized cake of youth that it has lasted all their lives, or +they have possessed a great art in the eating of it. Though I may add +here that a cautious husbanding of your cake is no good way. That way +you are liable to find it grown mouldy on your hands. No, oddly enough, +it is often seen that those who all their lives have eaten their cake +most eagerly have quite a little of it left at the end. There are no +hard and fast rules for the eating of your cake. One can only find out +by eating it; and, as I have said, it may be your luck to disprove the +proverb and both eat your cake and have it. + +For a dreary majority, however, the cake does come to an end, and for +them henceforth, as Stevenson grimly put it, the road lies long and +straight and dusty to the grave. For them that last call is apt to come +usually before sunset--and the great American question arises: What are +they going to do about it? That, of course, every one must decide for +himself, according to his inclinations and his opportunities. But a few +general considerations may be of comfort and even of greater value. + +There is one thing of importance to know about this last call, that we +are apt to imagine we hear it before we actually do, from a nervous +sense that it is about time for it to sound. Our hair perhaps is growing +grey, and our years beginning to accumulate. We hypnotize ourselves with +our chronology, and say with Emerson: + + It is time to grow old, + To take in sail. + +Well and good, if it is and we feel like it; but may be it isn't, and we +don't. Youth is largely a habit. So is romance. And, unless we allow +ourselves to be influenced by musty conventions and superstitions, both +habits may be prolonged far beyond the moping limits of custom, and need +never be abandoned unless we become sincerely and unregretfully tired of +them. I can well conceive of an old age like that of Sophocles, as +reported by Plato, who likened the fading of the passions with the +advance of age to "being set free from service to a band of madmen." + +When a man feels so, all is well and comfortable with him. He has +retired of his own free will from the banquet of life, having had his +fill, and is content. Our image of the last call does not apply to him, +but rather to those who, with appetites still keen, are sternly warned +that for them, willy-nilly, the banquet must soon end, and the prison +fare of prosaic middle age be henceforth their portion. No more ortolans +and transporting vintages for them. Nothing but Scotch oatmeal and +occasional sarsaparilla to the end of the chapter. No wonder that some, +hearing this dread sentence, go half crazy in a frenzied effort to +clutch at what remains, run amok, so to say, in their despairing +determination to have, if need be, a last "good time" and die. Their +efforts are apt to be either distasteful or pathetically comic, and the +world is apt to be cynically contemptuous of the "romantic" outbursts of +aging people. For myself, I always feel for them a deep and tender +sympathy. I know that they have heard that last fearful call to the +dining-car of life--and, poor souls, they have probably found it closed. +Their mistake has been in waiting so long for the call. From various +causes, they have mismanaged their lives. They have probably lived in a +numbing fear of their neighbours, who have told them that it is bad +manners to eat one's cake in public, and wicked to eat it in private; +and any one who is fool enough to allow his neighbours to live his life +for him instead of living it himself deserves what he gets, or rather +doesn't get. + +A wholesome oblivion of one's neighbours is the beginning of wisdom. +Neighbours, at the best, are an impertinent encroachment on one's +privacy, and, at the worst, an unnatural hindrance to our development. +Generally speaking, it is the man or woman who has lived with least fear +of his neighbours, who is least likely to hear that last call. Nothing +in retrospect is so barren as a life lived in accordance with the +hypocrisies of society. For those who have never lived, and are now fain +to begin living when it is too late, that last call comes indeed with a +ghastly irony. But for those who have fearlessly lived their lives, as +they came along, with Catullus singing their _vivamus atque amemus_, and +practising it, too; for those, if indeed the last call must come, they +will be able to support it by the thought that, often as in the past +life has called to them, it has never called to them in vain. We are apt +sometimes to belittle our memories, but actually they are worth a good +deal; and should the time come when we have little to look forward to, +it will be no small comfort to have something to look back on. And it +won't be the days when we _didn't_ that we shall recall with a sense of +possession, but the days and nights when we most emphatically _did_. +Thank God, we did for once hold that face in our hands in the woodland! +Thank God, we did get divinely drunk that wild night of nights in the +city! + + Wilt thou yet take all, Galilean? But these thou + shalt not take, + The laurel, the palms and the paean, the breast of the + nymphs in the brake. + +It is the fine excesses of life that make it worth living. The stalks of +the days are endurable only because they occasionally break into flower. +It is our sins of omission alone that we come in the end to regret. The +temptations we resisted in our youth make themselves rods to scourge our +middle age. I regret the paradoxical form these platitudes have +unconsciously taken, for that they are the simplest truth any honest +dying man would tell you. And that phrase recalls a beautiful poem by +"E. Nesbit" which has haunted me all my life, a poem I shall beg leave +to quote here, because, though it is to be found in that poet's volume, +it is not, I believe, as well known as it deserves to be by those who +need its lesson. I quote it, too, from memory, so I trust that the +length of time I have remembered it may be set to my credit against any +verbal mistakes I make. + + "If, on some balmy summer night, + You rowed across the moon path white, + And saw the shining sea grow fair + With silver scales and golden hair, + What would you do?" + + "I would be wise + And shut my ears and shut my eyes, + Lest I should leap into the tide + And clasp the seamaid as I died." + + "But if you thus were strong to flee + From sweet spells woven of moon and sea, + Are you quite sure that you would reach, + Without one backward look, the beach?" + + "I might look back, my dear, and then + Row straight into the snare again, + Or, if I safely got away-- + Regret it to my dying day." + +He who liveth his life shall live it. It is a grave error to give +ourselves grudgingly to our experiences. Only in a whole-hearted +surrender of ourselves to the heaven-sent moment do we receive back all +it has to give us, and by the active receptivity of our natures attract +toward us other such moments, as it were, out of the sky. An ever-ready +romantic attitude toward life is the best preservative against the +_ennui_ of the years. Adventures, as the proverb says, are to the +adventurous, and, as the old song goes: + + He either fears his fate too much + Or his deserts are small, + That dares not put it to the touch + To gain or lose it all. + +And the spirit of the times is happily growing more clement toward a +greater fulness and variety of life. The world is growing kinder toward +the fun and foolishness of existence, and the energetic pursuit of joy +is no longer frowned down by anaemic and hypocritical philosophies. The +old gods of energy and joy are coming to their own again, and the lives +of strong men and fair women are no longer ruled over by a hierarchy of +curates and maiden aunts; in fact, the maiden aunt has begun to find out +her mistake, and is out for her share of the fun and the foolishness +with the rest. Negative morality is fast becoming discredited, and many +an old "Thou shalt not" is coming to seem as absurd as the famous Blue +Laws of Connecticut. "Self-development, not self-sacrifice,"--a +favourite dictum of Grant Allen's,--is growing more and more to be the +formula of the modern world; and, if a certain amount of self-sacrifice +is of necessity included in a healthy self-development, the proportion +is being reduced to a rational limit. One form of self-sacrifice, at all +events, is no longer demanded of us--the wholesale sacrifice of our own +opinions. The possibility that there may be two opinions or a dozen or a +hundred on one matter, and that they may be all different, yet each one +of them right in its proper application, has dawned forcibly on the +world, with the conception of the relativity of experience and the +modification of conditions. Nowadays we recognize that there are as many +"rights" and as many "wrongs" as there are individuals; and to be happy +in our own way, instead of somebody else's, is one of the first laws of +nature, health, and virtue. Many an ancient restriction on personal +vitality is going the way of the old sumptuary laws. We have all of us +amusing memories of those severe old housekeepers who for no inclemency +of the weather would allow a fire in the grate before the first of +October, and who regarded a fire before that date as a positive breach +of the moral law. Such old wives are a type of certain old-fashioned +moralists whose icy clutch on our warm-blooded humanity we no longer +suffer. Nowadays we light our fires as we have a mind to, and if we +prefer to keep them going all the year round, it is no one's business +but our own. Happy is the man who, when the end comes, can say with +Landor: + + I warmed both hands before the fire of life; + It sinks and I am ready to depart. + +Such a one will have little need to fear that last call of which I have +been writing. In Kipling's phrase, he has taken his fun where he found +it, and his barns are well stocked with the various harvests of the +years. Not his the wild regret for having "safely got away." Rather he +laughs to remember how often he was taken captive by the enchantments of +the world, how whenever there was any piece of wildness afoot he was +always found in the thick of it. When the bacchantes were out on Mount +Cithaeron, and the mad _Evoe! Evoe!_ rang through the moonstruck woods, +be sure he was up and away, with ardent hands clutched in the flying +tresses. Ah! the vine leaves and the tiger skins and the ivory bodies, +the clash of the cymbals and the dithyramb shrilling up to the stars! +"If I forget thee, O golden Aphrodite!" He is no hypocrite, no weary +"king ecclesiast," shaking his head over the orgies of sap and song in +which he can no longer share. He frankly acknowledges that then came in +the sweet o' the year, and he is still as young as the youngest by +virtue of having drunk deep of the only elixir, the Dionysiac cup of +life. + +At the same time, while he may not ungratefully rejoice with Sophocles +at being "set free from service to a band of madmen," that ripening of +his nature which comes most fruitfully of a generous exercise of +its powers will have instinctively taught him that secret of the +transmutation of the passions which is one of the most precious rewards +of experience. It is quite possible for a lifelong passion for fair +women to become insensibly and unregretfully transmuted into a passion +for first editions, and you may become quite sincerely content that a +younger fellow catch the flying maiden, if only you can catch yon +flitting butterfly for your collection. And, strangest of all, your +grand passion for your own remarkable self may suffer a miraculous +transformation into a warm appreciation for other people. It is true +that you may smile a little sadly to find them even more interesting +than yourself. But such passing sadness has the relish of salvation in +it. Self is a weary throne, and the abdication of the ego is to be free +of one of the burdens rather than the pleasures of existence. + +But, to conclude, it is all too possible that you who read this may have +no such assets of a wilful well spent life to draw on as he whom I have +pictured. It may be that you have starved your emotions and fled your +opportunities, or you may simply have had bad luck. The golden moments +seldom came your way. The wilderness of life has seldom blossomed with a +rose. "The breast of the nymph in the brake" and "the chimes at +midnight" were not for you. And there is a menacing murmur of autumn in +the air. The days are shortening, and the twilight comes early, with a +chilly breath. The crickets have stopped singing, and the garden is sad +with elegiac blooms. The chrysanthemum is growing on the grave of the +rose. Perhaps already it is too late--too late for life and joy. You +must take to first editions and entomology and other people's interests +in good earnest. But no! Suddenly on the wind there comes a cry--a sound +of cymbals and flutes and dancing feet. It is life's last call. You have +one chance left. There is still Indian summer. It is better than +nothing. Hurry and join the music, ere it be too late. For this is the +last call! + + When time lets slip a little perfect hour, + Take it, for it will not come again. + + + + +VII + +THE PERSECUTIONS OF BEAUTY + + +All religions have periods in their history which are looked back to +with retrospective fear and trembling as eras of persecution, and each +religion has its own book of martyrs. The religion of beauty is no +exception. Far from it. For most other religions, however they may have +differed among themselves, have agreed in fearing beauty, and even in +Greece there were stern sanctuaries and ascetic academes where the white +bosom of Phryne would have pleaded in vain. Christianity has not been +beauty's only enemy, by any means; though, when the Book of Martyrs of +Beauty comes to be written, it will, doubtless, be the Christian +persecutions of beauty that will bulk largest in the record--for the +Beauty of Holiness and the Holiness of Beauty have been warring creeds +from the beginning. + +At the present moment, there is reason to fear, or to rejoice--according +to one's individual leanings--that the Religion of Beauty is gaining +upon its ancient rival; for perhaps never since the Renaissance has +there been such a widespread impulse to assert Beauty and Joy as the +ideals of human life. As evidence one has but to turn one's eyes on the +youth of both sexes, as they rainbow the city thoroughfares with their +laughing, heartless faces, evident children of beauty and joy, "pagan" +to the core of them, however ostensibly Christian their homes and their +country. In our time, at all events, Beauty has never walked the streets +with so frank a radiance, so confident an air of security, and in her +eyes and in her carriage, as in her subtly shaped and subtly scented +garments, so conspicuous a challenge to the musty, outworn, proprieties +to frown upon her all they please. From the humblest shop-girl to the +greatest lady, there is apparent an intention to be beautiful, sweet +maid, and let who will be hum-drum, at whatever cost, by whatever means. +This, of course, at all periods, has been woman's chief thought, but +till recently, in our times, she has more or less affected a certain +secrecy in her intention. She has hinted rather than fully expressed it, +as though fearing a certain flagrancy in too public an exhibition of her +enchantments. It has hardly seemed proper to her heretofore to be as +beautiful in the public gaze as in the sanctuary of her boudoir. But +now, bless you, she has no such misgivings, and the flower-like effect +upon the city streets is as dazzling as if, some fine morning in +Constantinople, all the ladies of the various harems should suddenly +appear abroad without their yashmaks, setting fire to the hearts and +turning the heads of the unaccustomed male. Or, to make comparison +nearer home, it is almost as startling as if the ladies of the various +musical comedies in town should suddenly be let loose upon our senses in +broad daylight, in all the adorable sorceries of "make-up" and +diaphanous draperies. I swear that it can be no more thrilling to +penetrate into that mysterious paradise "behind the scenes," than to +walk up Fifth Avenue one of these summer afternoons, in the present year +of grace,--humming to one's self that wistful old song, which goes +something like this: + + The girls that never can be mine! + In every lane and street + I hear the rustle of their gowns, + The whisper of their feet; + The sweetness of their passing by, + Their glances strong as wine, + Provoke the unpossessive sigh-- + Ah! girls that never can be mine. + +So audacious has Beauty become in these latter days, so proudly she +walks abroad, making so superb an appeal to the desire of the eye, +thighed like Artemis, and bosomed like Aphrodite, or at whiles a fairy +creature of ivory and gossamer and fragrance, with a look in her eyes of +secret gardens; and so much is the wide world at her feet, and one with +her in the vanity of her fairness--that I sometimes fear an impending +_dies irae_, when the dormant spirit of Puritanism will reassert itself, +and some stern priests thunder from the pulpit of worldly vanities and +the wrath to come. Indeed, I can well imagine in the near future some +modern Savonarola presiding over a new Bonfire of Vanities in Madison +Square, on which, to the droning of Moody and Sankey's hymns, shall be +cast all the fascinating Parisian creations, the puffs and rats, the +powder and the rouge, the darling stockings, and all such concomitant +bewitcheries that today make Manhattan a veritable Isle of Circe, all to +go up in savage sectarian flame, before the eyes of melancholy young +men, and filling all the city with the perfume of beauty's holocaust. At +street corners too will stand great books in which weeping maidens will +sign their names, swearing before high heaven, to wear nothing but +gingham and bed-ticking for the dreary remainder of their lives. Such a +day may well come, as it has often come before, and certainly will, if +women persist in being so deliberately beautiful as they are at present. + +It is curious how, from time immemorial, man seems to have associated +the idea of evil with beauty, shrunk from it with a sort of ghostly +fear, while, at the same time drawn to it by force of its hypnotic +attraction. Strangely enough, beauty has been regarded as the most +dangerous enemy of the soul, and the powers of darkness that are +supposed to lie in wait for that frail and fluttering psyche, so +precious and apparently so perishable, are usually represented as taking +shapes of beguiling loveliness--lamias, loreleis, wood nymphs, and +witches with blue flowers for their eyes. Lurking in its most innocent +forms, the grim ascetic has affected to find a leaven of concupiscence, +and whenever any reformation is afoot, it is always beauty that is made +the first victim, whether it take the form of a statue, a stained-glass +window, or a hair-ribbon. "Homeliness is next to Godliness," though not +officially stated as an article of the Christian creed, has been one of +the most active of all Christian tenets. It has always been easier far +for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than a gloriously +beautiful woman. Presumably such a one might be in danger of corrupting +the saints, somewhat unaccustomed to such apparitions. + +In this Christian fear and hatred of beauty the democratic origin of the +Christian religion is suggestively illustrated, for beauty, wherever +found, is always mysteriously aristocratic, and thus instinctively +excites the fear and jealousy of the common people. When, in the third +century, Christian mobs set about their vandalistic work of destroying +the "Pagan" temples, tearing down the beautiful calm gods and goddesses +from their pedestals, and breaking their exquisite marble limbs with +brutish mallets, it was not, we may be sure, of the danger to their +precious souls they were thinking, but of their patrician masters who +had worshipped these fair images, and paid great sums to famous +sculptors for such adornment of their sanctuaries. Perhaps it was human +enough, for to those mobs beauty had long been associated with +oppression. Yet how painful to picture those golden marbles, in all +their immortal fairness, confronted with the hideousness of those +fanatic ill-smelling multitudes. Wonderful religionists, forsooth, that +thus break with foolish hands and trample with swinish hoofs the sacred +vessels of divine dreams. Who would not + + rather be + A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn,-- + So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, + Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; + Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; + Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn. + +One can imagine the priest of such a violated sanctuary stealing back in +the quiet moonlight, when all the mob fury had passed away, seeking amid +all the wrack of fallen columns, and shattered carvings, for any poor +fragments of god or goddess at whose tranquil fair-ordered altar he had +ministered so long; and gathering such as he might find,--maybe a mighty +hand, still the hand of a god, albeit in overthrow, or some marble curls +of the sculptured ambrosial locks, or maybe the bruised breast of the +goddess, white as a water-lily in the moon. Then, seeking out some +secret corner of the sacred grove, how reverently he would bury the +precious fragments away from profane eyes, and go forth homeless into a +mysterious changing world, from which glory and loveliness were thus +surely passing away. Other priests, as we know, more fortunate than he, +had forewarnings of such impending sacrilege, and were able to +anticipate the mob, and bury their beautiful images in safe and secret +places, there to await, after the lapse of twelve centuries, the +glorious resurrection of the Renaissance. A resurrection, however, by no +means free from danger, even in that resplendent dawn of intelligence; +for Christianity was still the enemy of beauty, save in the Vatican, and +the ignorant priest of the remote village where the spade of the peasant +had revealed the sleeping marble was certain to declare the beautiful +image an evil spirit, and have it broken up forthwith and ground for +mortar, unless some influential scholar, or powerful lord touched with +"the new learning," chanced to be on hand to save it from destruction. +Yes! even at that time when beauty was being victoriously born again, +the mad fear of her raged with such panic in certain minds that, when +Savonarola lit his great bonfire so subtle a servant of beauty as +Botticelli, fallen into a sort of religious dotage, cast his own +paintings into the flames--to the lugubrious rejoicings of the +sanctimonious Piagnoni--as Savonarola's followers were called; +predecessors of those still gloomier zealots who, two centuries later, +were to turn England into a sort of whitewashed prison, with crop-headed +psalm-singing religious maniacs for gaolers. When Charles the First + + bow'd his comely head + Down, as upon a bed, + +at Whitehall, Beauty also laid her head upon the block at his side. +Ugliness, parading as piety, took her place, and once more the breaking +of images began, the banishment of music, the excommunication of grace, +and gentle manners, and personal adornments. Gaiety became penal, and a +happy heart or a beautiful smile was of the devil,--something like +hanging matters--but happy hearts and beautiful smiles must have been +rare things in England during the Puritan Commonwealth. Such as were +left had taken refuge in France, where men might worship God and Beauty +in the same church, and where it was not necessary, as at Oxford, to +bury your stained-glass windows out of the reach of the mob--those + + Storied windows richly dight + Casting a dim religious light, + +which even the Puritan Milton could thus celebrate. Doubtless, that +English Puritan persecution was the severest that Beauty has been called +upon to endure. She still suffers from it, need one say, to this day, +particularly in New England, where if the sculptured images of goddess +and nymph are not exactly broken to pieces by the populace, it is from +no goodwill towards them, but rather from an ingrained reverence for +any form of property, even though it be nude, and where, at all events, +they are under the strict surveillance of a highly proper and +respectable police, those distinguished guardians of American morals. + +It is worth while to try and get at the reason for this wide-spread, +deep-rooted, fear of beauty: for some reason there must surely be. Such +instinctive feelings, on so broad a scale, are not accidental. And so +soon as one begins to analyse the attitude of religion towards beauty, +the reason is not far to seek. + +All religions are made up of a spiritual element and a moral element, +the moral element being the temporary, practical, so to say, working +side of religion, concerned with this present world, and the limitations +and necessities of the various societies that compose it. The spiritual +element, the really important part of religion, has no concern with Time +and Space, temporary mundane laws, or conduct. It concerns itself only +with the eternal properties of things. Its business is the contemplation +and worship of the mystery of life, "the mystery we make darker with a +name." + +Now, great popular religions, designed as they are for the discipline +and control of the great brute masses of humanity, are almost entirely +occupied with morality, and what passes in them for spirituality is +merely mythology, an element of picturesque supernaturalism calculated +to enforce the morality with the multitude. Christianity is such a +religion. It is mostly a matter of conduct here and now upon the earth. +Its mystic side does not properly belong to it, and is foreign to, not +to speak of its being practically ignored by, the average "Christian." +It is a religion designed to work hand in hand with a given state of +society, making for the preservation of such laws and manners and +customs as are best fitted to make that society a success here and now, +a worldly success in the best sense of the term. Mohammedanism is a +similar religion calculated for the needs of a different society. +Whatever the words or intentions of the founders of such religions, +their kingdoms are essentially of this world. They are not mystic, or +spiritual, or in anyway concerned with infinite and eternal things. +Their business is the moral policing of humanity. Morality, as of course +its name implies, is a mere matter of custom, and therefore varies with +the variations of races and climates. It has nothing to do with +spirituality, and, in fact, the best morals are often the least +spiritual, and _vice versa_. It will be understood then that any force +which is apt to disturb this moral, or more exactly speaking social, +order will meet at once with the opposition of organized "religions" so +called, and the more spiritual it is, the greater will be the +opposition, for it will thus be the more dangerous. + +Now one begins to see why Beauty is necessarily the bugbear, more or +less, of all religions, or, as I prefer to regard them, "organized +moralities"; for Beauty is neither moral nor immoral, being as she is a +purely spiritual force, with no relations to man's little schemes of +being good and making money and being knighted and so forth. For those +who have eyes to see, she is the supreme spiritual vision vouchsafed to +us upon the earth--and, as that, she is necessarily the supreme danger +to that materialistic use and wont by which alone a materialistic +society remains possible. For this reason our young men and +maidens--particularly our young men--must be guarded against her, for +her beauty sets us adream, prevents our doing our day's work, makes us +forget the soulless occupations in which we wither away our lives. The +man who loves beauty will never be mayor of his city, or even sit on the +Board of Aldermen. Nor is he likely to own a railroad, or be a captain +of industry. Nor will he marry, for her money, a woman he does not love. +The face of beauty makes all such achievements seem small and absurd. +Such so-called successes seem to him the dreariest forms of failure. In +short, Beauty has made him divinely discontented with the limited human +world about him, divinely incapable of taking it seriously, or heeding +its standards or conditions. No wonder society should look upon Beauty +as dangerous, for she is constantly upsetting its equilibrium and +playing havoc with its smooth schemes and smug conventions. She outrages +the "proprieties" with "the innocence of nature," and disintegrates +"select" and "exclusive" circles with the wand of Romance. For earthly +possessions or rewards she has no heed. For her they are meaningless +things, mere idle dust and withered leaves. Her only real estate is in +the moon, and the one article of her simple creed--"Love is enough." + + Love is enough: though the world be a-waning + And the woods have no voice but the voice of complaining, + Though the sky be too dark for dim eyes to discover + The gold-cups and daisies fair blooming thereunder, + Though the hills beheld shadows, and the sea a dark wonder + And this day draw a veil over all deeds passed over, + Yet their hands shall not tremble, their feet shall not falter; + The void shall not weary, the fear shall not alter + These lips and these eyes of the loved and the lover. + +Those who have looked into her eyes see limitless horizons undreamed of +by those who know her not, horizons summoning the soul to radiant +adventures beyond the bounds of Space and Time. The world is so far +right in regarding beauty with a sort of superstitious dread, as a +presence almost uncanny among our mere mortal concerns, a daemonic +thing,--which is what the world has meant when it has, not unnaturally, +confused it with the spirits of evil; for surely it is a supernatural +stranger in our midst, a fairy element, and, like the lorelei and the +lamia, it does beckon its votaries to enchanted realms away and afar +from "all the uses of the world." Therefore, to them also it brings the +thrill of a different and nobler fear--the thrill of the mortal in +presence of the immortal. A strange feeling of destiny seems to come +over us as we first look into the beautiful face we were born to love. +It seems veritably an apparition from another and lovelier world, to +which it summons us to go with it. That is what we mean when we say that +Love and Death are one; for Death, to the thought of Love, is but one of +the gates to that other world, a gate to which we instinctively feel +Love has the key. That surely is the meaning of the old fairy-stories of +men who have come upon the white woman in the woodland, and followed +her, never to be seen again of their fellows, or of those who, like +Hylas, have met the water-nymph by the lilied spring, and sunk with her +down into the crystal deeps. The strange earth on which we live is just +such a place of enchantment, neither more nor less, and some of us have +met that fair face, with a strange suddenness of joy and fear, and +followed and followed it on till it vanished beyond the limits of the +world. But our failure was that we did not follow that last white +beckoning of the hand-- + + And I awoke and found me here + On the cold hill's side. + + + + +VIII + +THE MANY FACES--THE ONE DREAM + + +Among the many advantages of being very young is one's absolute +certainty that there is only one type of beautiful girl in the world. +That type we make a religion. We are its pugnacious champions, and the +idea of our falling in love with any other is too preposterous even for +discussion. If our tastes happen to be for blondness, brunettes simply +do not exist for us; and if we affect the slim and willowy in figure, +our contempt for the plump and rounded is too sincere for expression. +Usually the type we choose is one whose beauty is somewhat esoteric to +other eyes. We are well aware that photographs do it no justice, and +that the man in the street--who, strangely enough, we conceive as having +no eye for beauty--can see nothing in it. Thank Heaven, she is not the +type that any common eye can see. Heads are not turned in her wake as +she passes along. Her beauty is not "obvious." On the contrary, it is of +that rare and exquisite quality which only a few favoured ones can +apprehend--like the beauty of a Whistler or a Corot, and we have been +chosen to be its high-priest and evangelist. It is our secret, this +beautiful face that we love, and we wonder how any one can be found to +love the other faces. We even pity them, those rosy, rounded faces, with +their bright unmysterious eyes and straight noses and dimpled chins. How +fortunate for them that the secret of the beauty we love has been hidden +from their lovers. Sheer Bouguereau! Neither more nor less. + +In fact, the beauty we affect is aggressively spiritual, and in so far +as beauty is demonstrably physical we dismiss it with disdain. Our +ideal, indeed, might be said to consist in a beauty which is beautiful +in spite of the body rather than by means of it; a beauty defiantly +clothed, so to say, in the dowdiest of fleshly garments--radiantly +independent of such carnal conditions as features or complexion. Our +ideal of figure might be said to be negative rather than positive, and +that "little sister" mentioned in Solomon's Song would bring us no +disappointment. + +We are often heard to say that beauty consists chiefly, if not entirely, +in expression, that it is a transfiguration from within rather than a +gracious condition of the surface, that the shape of a nose is no +matter, and that a beautifully rounded chin or a fine throat has nothing +to do with it--indeed, is rather in the way than otherwise. We point +to the fact--which is true enough--that the most famous beauties +of antiquity were plain women--plain, that is, according to the +conventional standards. + +We also maintain--again with perfect truth--that mystery is more than +half of beauty, the element of strangeness that stirs the senses through +the imagination. These and other perfectly true truths about beauty we +discover through our devotion to the one face that we love--and we +should hardly have discovered them had we begun with the merely +cherry-ripe. It is with faces much as it is with books. There is no way +of attaining a vital catholic taste in literature so good as to begin by +mastering some difficult beautiful classic, by devoting ourselves in the +ardent receptive period of youth to one or two masterpieces which will +serve as touchstones for us in all our subsequent reading. Some books +engage all our faculties for their appreciation, and through the keen +attentiveness we are compelled to give them we make personal discovery +of those principles and qualities of all fine literature which otherwise +we might never have apprehended, or in which, at all events, we should +have been less securely grounded. + +So with faces: it is through the absorbed worship, the jealous study, of +one face that we best learn to see the beauty in all the other +faces--though the mere thought that our apprehension of its beauty could +ever lead us to so infidel a conclusion would seem heresy indeed during +the period of our dedication. The subtler the type, the more caviare it +is to the general, the more we learn from it. We become in a sense +discoverers, original thinkers, of beauty, taking nothing on authority, +but making trial and investigation always for ourselves. Such beauty +brings us nearer than the more explicit types to that mysterious +threshold over which beauty steps down to earth and dwells among us; +that well-spring of its wonder; the point where first its shining +essence pours its radiance into the earthly vessel. + +The perfect physical type hides no little of its own miracle through its +sheer perfection, as in the case of those masterpieces which, as we say, +conceal their art. It is often through the face externally less perfect, +faces, so to say, in process of becoming beautiful, that we get glimpses +of the interior light in its divine operation. We seem to look into the +very alembic of beauty, and see all the precious elements in the act of +combination. No wonder we should deem these faces the most beautiful of +all, for through them we see, not beauty made flesh, but beauty while it +is still spirit. In our eager fanaticism, indeed, we cannot conceive +that there can be beauty in any other types as well. Yet, because we +chance to have fallen under the spell of Botticelli, shall there be no +more Titian? Our taste is for a beauty of dim silver and faded stars, a +wistful twilight beauty made of sorrow and dreams, a beauty always half +in the shadow, a white flower in the moonlight. We cannot conceive how +beauty, for others, can be a thing of the hot sun, a thing of purple and +orange and the hot sun, a thing of firm outlines, superbly concrete, +marmoreal, sumptuous, magnificently animal. + +The beauty we love is very silent. It smiles softly to itself, but never +speaks. How should we understand a beauty that is vociferously gay, a +beauty of dash and dance, a beauty of swift and brilliant ways, +victoriously alive? + +Perhaps it were well for us that we should never understand, well for us +that we should preserve our singleness of taste through life. Some +contrive to do this, and never as long as they live are unfaithful to +the angel-blue eyes of their boyish love. Moralists have perhaps not +realized how much continence is due to a narrowness of aesthetic taste. +Obviously the man who sees beauty only in blue eyes is securer from +temptation than the man who can see beauty in brown or green eyes as +well; and how perilous is his state for whom danger lurks in all +beautiful eyes, irrespective of shape, size, or colour! And, alas! it is +to this state of eclecticism that most of us are led step by step by the +Mephistopheles of experience. + +As great politicians in their maturity are usually found in the exact +opposite party to that which they espoused in their youth, so men who +loved blondness in boyhood are almost certain to be found at the feet of +the raven-haired in their middle age, and _vice versa_. The change is +but a part of that general change which overtakes us with the years, +substituting in us a catholic appreciation of the world as it is for +idealist notions of the world as we see it, or desire it to be. It is a +part of that gradual abdication of the ego which comes of the slow +realization that other people are quite as interesting as ourselves--in +fact, a little more so,--and their tastes and ways of looking at things +may be worth pondering, after all. But, O when we have arrived at this +stage, what a bewildering world of seductive new impressions spreads for +us its multitudinous snares! No longer mere individuals, we have not +merely an individual's temptations to guard against, but the temptations +of all the world. Instead of being able to see only that one type of +beauty which first appealed to us, our eyes have become so instructed +that we now see the beauty of all the other types as well; and we no +longer scorn as Philistine the taste of the man in the street for the +beauty that is robustly vital and flamboyantly contoured. Once we called +it obvious. Now we say it is "barbaric," and call attention to its +perfection of type. + +The remembrance of our former injustice to it may even awaken a certain +tenderness towards it in our hearts, and soon we find ourselves making +love to it, partly from a vague desire to make reparation to a slighted +type, and partly from the experimental pleasure of loving a beauty the +attraction of which it was once impossible for us to imagine. So we feel +when the charm of some old master, hitherto unsympathetic, is suddenly +revealed to us. Ah! it was this they saw. How blind they must have +thought us! + +Brown eyes that I love, will you forgive me that I once looked into blue +eyes as I am looking now into yours? Hair black as Erebus, will you +forgive these hands that once loved to bathe in a brook of rippled gold? +Ah! they did not know. It was in ignorance they sinned. They did not +know. + +O my beautiful cypress, stately queen of the garden of the world, +forgive me that once I gave to the little shrub-like women the worship +that is rightly yours! + +Lady, whose loveliness is like white velvet, a vineyard heavy with +golden grapes, abundant as an orchard of apple blossoms, forgive that +once I loved the shadow women, the sad wreathing mists of beauty, the +silvery uncorseted phantoms of womanhood. It was in ignorance I sinned. +I did not know. + +Ah! That Mephistopheles of experience! How he has led us from one fair +face to another, teaching us, one by one, the beauty of all. No longer +lonely sectarians of beauty, pale prophets of one lovely face, there is +now no type whose secret is hidden from us. The world has become a +garden of beautiful faces. The flowers are different, but they are all +beautiful. How is it possible for us, now that we know the charm of each +one, to be indifferent to any, or to set the beauty of one above the +other? We have learned the beauty of the orchid, but surely we have not +unlearned the rose; and would you say that orchid or rose is more +beautiful than the lily? Surely not. They are differently beautiful, +that is all. + +Are blue eyes more beautiful than brown? I thought so once, but now I +see that they are differently beautiful, that is all. Nor is gold hair +more beautiful than black any more, or black than gold. They are +differently beautiful, that is all. Nor is thy white skin, O Saxon lady, +more beautiful than hers of tropic bronze. + +Come sad, or come with laughter, beautiful faces; come like stars in +dreams, or come vivid as fruit upon the bough; come softly like a timid +fawn, or terrible as an army with banners; come silent, come singing ... +you are all beautiful, and none is fairer than another--only differently +fair. + +And yet ... and yet ... Experience is indeed Mephistopheles in this: We +must pay him for all this wisdom. Is it the old price? Is it our souls? +I wonder. + +This at least is true: that, while indeed he has opened our eyes to all +this beauty that was hidden to us, shown us beauty, indeed, where we +could see but evil before, we miss something from our delight in these +faces. We can appreciate more beauty, but do we appreciate any quite as +much as in those old days when we were such passionate monotheists of +the beautiful? Alas! We are priests no more, are we even lovers? But we +are wonderful connoisseurs. + +It is our souls. + + + + +IX + +THE SNOWS OF YESTER-YEAR + + +_Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?_ As I transcribe once more that +ancient sigh, perhaps the most real sigh in all literature, it is high +mid-summer, and the woodland surrounding the little cabin in which I am +writing lies in a trance of green and gold, hot and fragrant and dizzy +with the whirring of cicadas, under the might of the July sun. Bees buzz +in and out through my door, and sometimes a butterfly flits in, flutters +a while about my bookshelves, and presently is gone again, in search of +sweets more to his taste than those of the muses, though Catullus is +there, with + + Songs sweeter than wild honey dripping down, + Which once in Rome to Lesbia he sang. + +As I am caught by the dream-drowsy spell of the hot murmuring afternoon, +and my eyes rest on the thick vines clustering over the rocks, and the +lush grasses and innumerable underbrush, so spendthrift in their +crowding luxuriance, I try to imagine the ground as it was but four +months ago still in the grasp of winter, when the tiniest blade of +grass, or smallest speck of creeping green leaf, seemed like a miracle, +and it was impossible to realize that under the broad snowdrifts a +million seeds, like hidden treasure, were waiting to reveal their +painted jewels to the April winds. Snow was plentiful then, to be had by +the ton--but now, the thought suddenly strikes me, and brings home with +new illuminating force Villon's old refrain, that though I sought the +woodland from end to end, ransacked its most secret places, not one +vestige of that snow, so lately here in such plenty, would it be +possible to find. Though you were to offer me a million dollars for as +much as would fill the cup of a wild rose, say even a hundred million, I +should have to see all that money pass me by. I can think of hardly +anything that it couldn't buy--but such a simple thing as last year's +snow! + +Could there be a more poignant symbol of irreclaimable vanished things +than that so happily hit on by the old ballade-maker: + + Nay, never ask this week, fair lord, + Where they are gone, nor yet this year, + Save with thus much for an overword-- + But where are the snows of yester-year? + +Villon, as we know, has a melancholy fondness for asking these sad, +hopeless questions of snow and wind. He muses not only of the drift of +fair faces, but of the passing of mighty princes and all the arrogant +pride and pomp of the earth--"pursuivants, trumpeters, heralds, hey!" +"Ah! where is the doughty Charlemagne?" They, even as the humblest, "the +wind has carried them all away." They have vanished utterly as the snow, +gone--who knows where?--on the wind. "'Dead and gone'--a sorry burden of +the Ballad of Life," as Thomas Lowell Beddoes has it in his _Death's +Jest Book_. "Dead and gone!" as Andrew Lang re-echoes in a sweetly +mournful ballade: + + Through the mad world's scene + We are drifting on, + To this tune, I ween, + "They are dead and gone!" + +"Nought so sweet as melancholy," sings an old poet, and, while the +melancholy of the exercise is undoubted, there is at the same time an +undeniable charm attaching to those moods of imaginative retrospect in +which we summon up shapes and happenings of the vanished past, a tragic +charm indeed similar to that we experience in mournful music or elegiac +poetry. + +For, it is impossible to turn our eyes on any point of the starlit vista +of human history, without being overwhelmed with a heart-breaking sense +of the immense treasure of radiant human lives that has gone to its +making, the innumerable dramatic careers now shrunk to a mere mention, +the divinely passionate destinies, once all wild dream and dancing +blood, now nought but a name huddled with a thousand such in some dusty +index, seldom turned to even by the scholar, and as unknown to the world +at large as the moss-grown name on some sunken headstone in a country +churchyard. What an appallingly exuberant and spendthrift universe it +seems, pouring out its multitudinous generations of men and women with +the same wasteful hand as it has filled this woodland with millions of +exquisite lives, marvellously devised, patterned with inexhaustible +fancy, mysteriously furnished with subtle organs after their needs, +crowned with fairy blossoms, and ripening with magic seeds,--such a vast +treasure of fragrant sunlit leafage, all produced with such elaborate +care, and long travail, and all so soon to vanish utterly away! + +Along with this crushing sense of cosmic prodigality, and somewhat +lighting up its melancholy, comes the inspiring realization of the +splendid spectacle of human achievement, the bewildering array of all +the glorious lives that have been lived, of all the glorious happenings, +under the sun. Ah! what men this world has seen, and--what women! What +divine actors have trod this old stage, and in what tremendous dramas +have they taken part! And how strange it is, reading some great dramatic +career, of Caesar, say, or Luther, or Napoleon, or Byron, to realize +that there was a time when they were not, then a time when they were +beginning to be strange new names in men's ears, then all the romantic +excitement of their developing destinies, and the thunder and lightning +of the great resounding moments of their lives--moments made out of +real, actual, prosaic time, just as our own moments are made, yet once +so splendidly shining on the top of the world, as though to stay there +forever, moments so glorious that it would seem that Time must have +paused to watch and prolong them, jealous that they should ever pass and +give place to lesser moments! + +Think too of those other fateful moments of history, moments not +confined to a few godlike individuals, but participated in by whole +nations, such moments as that of the great Armada, the French +Revolution, or the Declaration of American Independence. How strangely +it comes upon one that these past happenings were once only just taking +place, just as at the moment of my writing other things are taking +place, and clocks were ticking and water flowing, just as they are doing +now! How wonderful, it seems to us, to have been alive then, as we are +alive now, to have shared in those vast national enthusiasms, "in those +great deeds to have had some little part"; and is it not a sort of poor +anti-climax for a world that has gone through such noble excitement to +have sunk back to this level of every day! Alas! all those lava-like +moments of human exaltation--what are they now, but, so to say, the +pumice-stone of history. They have passed as the summer flowers are +passing, they are gone with last year's snow. + +But the last year's snow of our personal lives--what a wistful business +it is, when we get thinking of that! To recall certain magic moments out +of the past is to run a risk of making the happiest present seem like a +desert; and for most men, I imagine, such retrospect is usually busied +with some fair face, or perhaps--being men--with several fair faces, +once so near and dear, and now so far. How poignantly and unprofitably +real memory can make them--all but bring them back--how vividly +reconstruct immortal occasions of happiness that we said could not, must +not, pass away; while all the time our hearts were aching with the sure +knowledge that they were even then, as we wildly clutched at them, +slipping from our grasp! + +That summer afternoon,--do you too still remember it, Miranda?--when, +under the whispering woodland, we ate our lunch together with such +prodigious appetite, and O! such happy laughter, yet never took our eyes +from each other; and, when the meal was ended, how we wandered along the +stream-side down the rocky glen, till we came to an enchanted pool among +the boulders, all hushed with moss and ferns and overhanging boughs--do +you remember what happened then, Miranda? Ah! nymphs of the forest +pools, it is no use asking me to forget. + +And, all the time, my heart was saying to my eyes:--"This fairy hour--so +real, so magical, now--some day will be in the far past; you will sit +right away on the lonely outside of it, and recall it only with the +anguish of beautiful vanished things." And here I am today surely +enough, years away from it, solitary on its lonely outside! + +I suppose that the river, this summer day, is making the same music +along its rocky bed, and the leafy boughs are rustling over that haunted +pool just the same as when--but where are the laughing ripples--ah! +Miranda--that broke with laughter over the divinely troubled water, and +the broken reflections, as of startled water-lilies, that rocked to and +fro in a panic of dazzling alabaster? + +They are with last year's snow. + +Meriel of the solemn eyes, with the heart and the laughter of a child, +and soul like the starlit sky, where should one look for the snows of +yester-year if not in your bosom, fairy girl my eyes shall never see +again. Wherever you are, lost to me somewhere among the winding paths of +this strange wood of the world, do you ever, as the moonlight falls over +the sea, give a thought to that night when we sat together by a window +overlooking the ocean, veiled in a haze of moonlit pearl, and, dimly +seen near shore, a boat was floating, like some mystic barge, as we +said, in our happy childishness, waiting to take us to the _Land East of +the Sun and West of the Moon_? Ah! how was it we lingered and lingered +till the boat was no more there, and it was too late? Perhaps it was +that we seemed to be already there, as you turned and placed your hand +in mine and said: "My life is in your hand." And we both believed it +true. Yes! wherever we went together in those days, we were always in +that enchanted land--whether we rode side by side through London streets +in a hansom--"a two-wheeled heaven" we called it--(for our dream +stretches as far back as that prehistoric day--How old one of us seems +to be growing! You, dear face, can never grow old)--or sat and laughed +at clowns in London music halls, or wandered in Surrey lanes, or gazed +at each other, as if our hearts would break for joy, over the snow-white +napery of some country inn, and maybe quoted Omar to each other, as we +drank his red wine to the immortality of our love. Perhaps we were +right, after all. Perhaps it could never die, and Time and Distance are +perhaps merely illusions, and you and I have never been apart. Who knows +but that you are looking over my shoulder as I write, though you seem so +far away, lost in that starlit silence that you loved. Ah! Meriel, is it +well with you, this summer day? A sigh seems to pass through the sunlit +grasses. They are waving and whispering as I have seen them waving and +whispering over graves. + +Such moments as these I have recalled all men have had in their lives, +moments when life seemed to have come to miraculous flower, attained +that perfect fulfilment of its promise which else we find only in +dreams. Beyond doubt there is something in the flawless blessedness of +such moments that links our mortality with super-terrestrial states of +being. We do, in very deed, gaze through invisible doors into the ether +of eternal existences, and, for the brief hour, live as they, drinking +deep of that music of the infinite which is the divine food of the +enfranchised soul. Thence comes our exaltation, and our wild longing to +hold the moment for ever; for, while it is with us, we have literally +escaped from the everyday earth, and have found the way into some other +dimension of being, and its passing means our sad return to the +prison-house of Time, the place of meetings and partings, of distance +and death. + +Part of the pang of recalling such moments is a remorseful sense that +perhaps we might have held them fast, after all. If only we might bring +them back, surely we would find some way to dwell in them for ever. They +came upon us so suddenly out of heaven, like some dazzling bird, and we +were so bewildered with the wonder of their coming that we stretched out +our hands to seize them, only when they were already spreading their +wings for flight. But O if the divine bird would but visit us again! +What golden nets we would spread for him! What a golden cage of worship +we would make ready! Our eyes would never leave his strange plumage, nor +would we miss one note of his strange song. But alas! now that we are +grown wise and watchful, that "moment eternal" comes to us no more. +Perhaps too that sad wisdom which has come to us with the years would +least of all avail us, should such moments by some magic chance suddenly +return. For it is one of the dangers of the retrospective habit that it +incapacitates us for the realization of the present hour. Much dwelling +on last year's snow will make us forget the summer flowers. Dreaming of +fair faces that are gone, we will look with unseeing eyes into the fair +faces that companion us still. To the Spring we say: "What of all your +blossom, and all your singing! Autumn is already at your heels, like a +shadow; and Winter waits for you like a marble tomb." To the hope that +still may beckon we say: "Well, what though you be fulfilled, you will +pass, like the rest. I shall see you come. We shall dwell together for a +while, and then you will go; and all will be as it was before, all as if +you had never come at all." For the retrospective mood, of necessity, +begets the anticipatory; we see everything finished before it is begun, +and welcome and valediction blend together on our lips. "That which hath +been is now; and that which is to be hath already been." + + In every kiss sealed fast + To feel the first kiss and forebode the last-- + +that is the shadow that haunts every joy, and sicklies o'er every action +of him whom life has thus taught to look before and after. + +Youth is not like that, and therein, for older eyes, lies its tragic +pathos. Superficial--or, if you prefer it, more normal--observers are +made happy by the spectacle of eager and confident young lives, all +abloom and adream, turning towards the future with plumed impatient +feet. But for some of us there is nothing quite so sad as young joy. The +playing of children is perhaps the most unbearably sad thing in the +world. Who can look on young lovers, without tears in their eyes? With +what innocent faith they are taking in all the radiant lies of life! But +perhaps a young mother with her new-born babe on her breast is the most +tragical of all pictures of unsuspecting joy, for none of all the +trusting sons and daughters of men is destined in the end to find +herself so tragically, one might say cynically, fooled. + +Cynically, I said; for indeed sometimes, as one ponders the lavish +heartless use life seems to make of all its divinely precious +material--were it but the flowers in one meadow, or the butterflies of a +single summer day--it does seem as though a cruel cynicism inhered +somewhere in the scheme of things, delighting to destroy and +disillusionize, to create loveliness in order to scatter it to the +winds, and inspire joy in order to mock it with desolation. Sometimes it +seems as though the mysterious spirit of life was hardly worthy of the +vessels it has called into being, hardly treats them fairly, uses them +with an ignoble disdain. For, how generously we give ourselves up to +life, how innocently we put our trust in it, do its bidding with such +fine ardours, striving after beauty and goodness, fain to be heroic and +clean of heart--yet "what hath man of all his labours, and of the +vexation of his heart, wherein he hath laboured under the sun." Yea, +dust, and fallen rose-leaves, and last year's snow. + +And yet and yet, for all this drift and dishonoured decay of things, +that retrospective mood of ours will sometimes take another turn, and, +so rare and precious in the memory seem the treasure that it has lost, +and yet in imagination still holds, that it will not resign itself to +mortal thoughts of such manifest immortalities. The snows of +yester-year! Who knows if, after all, they have so utterly vanished as +they seem. Who can say but that there may be somewhere in the universe +secret treasuries where all that has ever been precious is precious +still, safely garnered and guarded for us against some wonderful moment +which shall gather up for us in one transfiguring apocalypse all the +wonderful moments that have but preceded us into eternity. Perhaps, as +nothing is lost in the world, so-called, of matter, nothing is lost too +in the world of love and dream. + + O vanished loveliness of flowers and faces, + Treasure of hair, and great immortal eyes, + Are there for these no safe and secret places? + And is it true that beauty never dies? + Soldiers and saints, haughty and lovely names, + Women who set the whole wide world in flames, + Poets who sang their passion to the skies, + And lovers wild and wise: + Fought they and prayed for some poor flitting gleam + Was all they loved and worshipped but a dream? + Is Love a lie and fame indeed a breath? + And is there no sure thing in life--but death? + +Ah! perhaps we shall find all such lost and lovely things when we come +at length to the Land of Last Year's Snow. + + + + +X + +THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GOSSIP + + +According to the old Scandinavian fable of the cosmos, the whole world +is encircled in the coils of a vast serpent. The ancient name for it was +the Midgard serpent, and doubtless, for the old myth-maker, it had +another significance. Today, however, the symbol may still hold good of +a certain terrible and hideous reality. + +Still, as of old, the world is encircled in the coils of a vast serpent; +and the name of the serpent is Gossip. Wherever man is, there may you +hear its sibilant whisper, and its foul spawn squirm and sting and +poison in nests of hidden noisomeness, myriad as the spores of +corruption in a putrefying carcass, varying in size from some +hydra-headed infamy endangering whole nations and even races with its +deadly breath, to the microscopic wrigglers that multiply, a million a +minute, in the covered cesspools of private life. + +Printed history is so infested with this vermin, in the form of secret +memoirs, back-stairs diarists, and boudoir eavesdroppers, that it is +almost impossible to feel sure of the actual fact of any history +whatsoever. The fame of great personages may be literally compared to +the heroic figures in the well-known group of the Laocoön, battling in +vain with the strangling coils of the sea-serpent of Poseidon. We +scarcely know what to believe of the dead; and for the living, is it not +true, as Tennyson puts it, that "each man walks with his head in a cloud +of poisonous flies"? + +What is this evil leaven that seems to have been mixed in with man's +clay at the very beginning, making one almost ready to believe in the +old Manichean heresy of a principle of evil operating through nature, +everywhere doing battle with the good? Even from the courts of heaven, +as we learn from the Book of Job, the gossip was not excluded; and how +eternally true to the methods of the gossip in all ages was Satan's way +of going to work in that immortal allegory! Let us recall the familiar +scene with a quoted verse or two: + + Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves + before the Lord, and Satan [otherwise, the Adversary] came also + among them. + + And the Lord said unto Satan, "Whence comest thou?" Then Satan + answered the Lord, and said: "From going to and fro in the earth, + and from walking up and down in it." + + And the Lord said unto Satan: "Hast thou considered my servant Job, + that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright + man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil?" + + Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, "Doth Job fear God for + nought?" + +Here we have in a nutshell the whole _modus operandi_ of the gossip in +all ages, and as he may be observed at any hour of the day or night, +slimily engaged in his cowardly business. "Going to and fro in the +earth, walking up and down in it," everywhere peering and listening, +smiling and shrugging, here and there dropping a hint, sowing a seed, +leering an innuendo; seldom saying, only implying; leaving everywhere +trails of slime, yet trails too vague and broken to track him by, secure +in his very cowardice. + +"Doth Job fear God for nought?" He only asks, observe. Affirms nothing. +Only innocently wonders. Sows a doubt, that's all--and leaves it to +work. + +The victim may possibly be set right in the end, as was Job; but +meanwhile he has lost his flocks and his herds, his sons and his +daughters, and suffered no little inconvenience from a loathsome plague +of boils. Actually--life not being, like the Book of Job, an +allegory--he very seldom is set right, but must bear his losses and his +boils with what philosophy he can master till the end of the chapter. + +The race to which Job belonged presents perhaps the most conspicuous +example of a whole people burdened throughout its history with a +heritage of malignant gossip. In the town of Lincoln, in England, there +exists to this day, as one of its show places, the famous "Jew's House," +associated with the gruesome legend of "the boy of Lincoln"--a child, +it was whispered, sacrificed by the Jews at one of their pastoral +feasts. Such a wild belief in child-sacrifice by the Jews was widespread +in the Middle Ages, and is largely responsible, I understand, even at +the present day, for the Jewish massacres in Russia. + +Think of the wild liar who first put that fearful thought into the mind +of Europe! Think of the holocausts of human lives, and all the attendant +agony of which his diabolical invention has been the cause! What +criminal in history compares in infamy with that unknown--gossip? + +A similar madness of superstition, responsible for a like cruel +sacrifice of innocent lives, was the terrible belief in witchcraft. +Having its origin in ignorance and fear, it was chiefly the creation of +hearsay carried from lip to lip, beginning with the deliberate invention +of lying tongues, delighting in evil for its own sake, or taking +advantage of a ready weapon to pay off scores of personal enmity. At any +time to a period as near to our own day as the early eighteenth century, +nothing was easier than to rid oneself of an enemy by starting a whisper +going that he or she held secret commerce with evil spirits, was a +reader of magical books, and could at will cast spells of disease and +death upon the neighbours or their cattle. + +You had but to be recluse in your habits and eccentric in your +appearance, with perhaps a little more wisdom in your head and your +conversation than your fellows, to be at the mercy of the first fool or +knave who could gather a mob at his heels, and hale you to the nearest +horse-pond. Statement and proof were one, and how ready, and indeed +eager, human nature was to believe the wildest nonsense told by witless +fool or unscrupulous liar, the records of such manias as the famous +Salem trials appallingly evidence. Men high in the state, as well as +helpless old women in their dotage, disfigured with "witch-moles" or +incriminating beards on their withered faces, were equally vulnerable to +this most fearful of weapons ever placed by ignorance in the hands of +the malignant gossip. + +In such epidemics of tragic gossip we see plainly that, whatever +individuals are originally responsible, society at large is all too +culpably _particeps criminis_ in this phenomenon under consideration. If +the prosperity of a jest be in the ears that hear it, the like is +certainly true of any piece of gossip. Whoever it may be that sows the +evil seed of slander, the human soil is all too evilly ready to receive +it, to give it nurture, and to reproduce it in crops persistent as the +wild carrot and flamboyant as the wild mustard. + +There is something mean in human nature that prefers to think evil, that +gives a willing ear and a ready welcome to calumny, a sort of jealousy +of goodness and greatness and things of good report. + +Races and nations are thus ever ready to believe the worst of one +another. In all times it has been in this field of inter-racial and +international prejudice that the gossip has found the widest scope for +his gleeful activity, sowing broadcast dissensions and misunderstandings +which have persisted for centuries. They are the fruitful cause of wars, +insuperable barriers to progress, fabulous growths which the +enlightenment of the world painfully labours to weed out, but will +perhaps never entirely eradicate. + +Race-hatred is undoubtedly nine-tenths the heritage of ancient gossip. +Think of the generations of ill-feeling that kept England and France, +though divided but by a narrow strait, "natural enemies" and +misunderstood monsters to each other. In a less degree, the friendship +of England and America has been retarded by international gossips on +both sides. And as for races and nations more widely separated by +distance or customs, no lies have been bad enough for them to believe +about one another. + +It is only of late years that Europe has come to regard the peoples of +the Orient as human beings at all. And all this misunderstanding has +largely been the work of gossip acting upon ignorance. + +It is easy to see how in the days of difficult communication, before +nations were able to get about in really representative numbers to make +mutual acquaintance, they were completely at the mercy of a few +irresponsible travellers, who said or wrote what they pleased, and had +no compunction about lying in the interests of entertainment. The +proverbial "gaiety of nations" has always, in a great degree, consisted +in each nation believing that it was superior to all others, and that +the natives of other countries were invariably hopelessly dirty and +immoral, to say the least. Such reports the traveller was expected to +bring home with him, and such he seldom failed to bring. + +Even at the present time, when intercourse is so cosmopolitan, and some +approach to a sense of human brotherhood has been arrived at, the old +misconceptions die hard. Nations need still to be constantly on their +guard in believing all that the telegraph or the wireless is willing to +tell them about other countries. Electricity, many as are its advantages +for cosmopolitan _rapprochements_, is not invariably employed in the +interests of truth, and newspaper correspondents, if not watched, are +liable to be an even more dangerous form of international gossip than +the more leisurely fabulist of ancient time. + +When we come to consider the operation of gossip in the lives of +individuals, the disposition of human nature to relish discrediting +rumour is pitifully conspicuous. We know _Hamlet's_ opinion on the +matter: + + Let Hercules himself do what he may, + The cat will mew, and dog will have his day. + +And again: + + Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, + Thou shalt not escape calumny. + +This, it is to be feared, is merely the sad truth, for mankind, while it +admires both greatness and goodness, would seem to resent the one and +only half believe in the other. At all events, nothing is more to its +taste than the rumour that detracts from the great or sullies the good; +and so long as the rumour be entertaining, it has little concern for its +truth. + +Froude, in writing of Caesar, has this to say admirably to our purpose: + + In ages which we call heroic, the saint works miracles, the warrior + performs exploits beyond the strength of natural man. In ages less + visionary, which are given to ease and enjoyment, the tendency is to + bring a great man down to the common level, and to discover or + invent faults which shall show that he is or was but a little man + after all. Our vanity is soothed by evidence that those who have + eclipsed us in the race of life are no better than ourselves, or in + some respects worse than ourselves; and if to these general impulses + be added political or personal animosity, accusations of depravity + are circulated as surely about such men, and are credited as readily + as under other influences are the marvellous achievements of a Cid + or a St. Francis. + + The absurdity of a calumny may be as evident as the absurdity of a + miracle; the ground for belief may be no more than a lightness of + mind, and a less pardonable wish that it may be true. But the idle + tale floats in society, and by and by is written down in books and + passes into the region of established realities. + +The proportion of such idle tales seriously printed as history can +never, of course, be computed. Sometimes one is tempted to think that +history is mainly "whole cloth." Certainly the lives of such men as +Caesar are largely made up of what one might term illustrative fictions +rather than actual facts. The story of Caesar and Cleopatra is probably +such an "illustrative fiction," representing something that might very +well have happened to Caesar, whether it did so or not. At all events, +it does his fame no great harm, unlike another calumny, which, as it +does not seem "illustrative"--that is, not in keeping with his general +character--we are at liberty to reject. Both alike, however, were +the product of the gossip, the embodied littleness of human nature +endeavouring then, as always, to minimize and discredit the strong man, +who, whatever his actual faults, at least strenuously shoulders for his +fellows the hard work of the world. + +The great have usually been strong enough to smile contempt on their +traducers--Caesar's answer to an infamous epigram of the poet Catullus +was to ask him to dinner--but even so, at what extra cost, what "expense +of spirit in a waste of shame," have their achievements been bought, +because of these curs that bark forever at the heels of fame! + +And not always have they thus prevailed against the pack. Too often has +the sorry spectacle been seen of greatness and goodness going down +before the poisonous tongues and the licking jaws. Even Caesar himself +had to fall at last, his strong soul perhaps not sorry to escape through +his dagger-wounds from so pitiably small a world; and the poison in the +death-cup of Socrates was not so much the juice of the hemlock as the +venom of the gossips of Athens. + +In later times, no service to his country, no greatness of character, +can save the noble Raleigh from the tongues determined to bring him to +the block; and, when the haughty head of Marie Antoinette must bow at +last upon the scaffold, the true guillotine was the guillotine of +gossip. It was such lying tales as that of the diamond necklace that had +brought her there. All Queen Elizabeth's popularity could not save her +from the ribaldry of scandal, nor Shakespeare's genius protect his name +from the foulest of stains. + +In our own time, the mere mention of the name of Dreyfus suffices to +remind us of the terrible nets woven by this dark spinner. Within the +last year or two, have we not seen the loved king of a great nation +driven to seek protection from the spectre of innuendo in the courts of +law? But gossip laughs at such tribunals. It knows that where once it +has affixed its foul stain, the mark remains forever, indelible as that +imaginary stain which not all the multitudinous seas could wash from the +little hand of Lady Macbeth. The more the stain is washed, the more +persistently it reappears, like Rizzio's blood, as they say, in Holyrood +Palace. To deny a rumour is but to spread it. An action for libel, +however it may be decided, has at least the one inevitable result of +perpetuating it. + +Take the historical case of the Man with the Iron Mask. Out of pure +deviltry, it would appear, Voltaire started the story, as mere a fiction +as one of his written romances, that the mysterious prisoner was no less +than a half-brother of Louis XIV; and Dumas, seeing the dramatic +possibilities of the legend, picturesquely elaborates it in _Le Vicomte +de Bragelonne_. Never, probably, was so impudent an invention, and +surely never one so successful; for it is in vain that historians expose +it over and over again. Learned editors have proved with no shadow of a +doubt that the real man of the mask was an obscure Italian political +adventurer; but though scholars may be convinced, the world will have +nothing of your Count Matthioli, and will probably go on believing +Voltaire's story to the end of time. + +"At least there must have been something in it" is always the last word +on such debatable matters; and the curious thing is that, whenever a +doubt of the truth is expressed, it is never the victim, but always the +scandal, to which the benefit of the doubt is extended. Whatever the +proven fact, the world always prefers to hold fast by the disreputable +doubt. + +All that is necessary is to find the dog a bad name. The world will see +that he never loses it. In this regard the oft-reiterated confidence of +the dead in the justice of posterity is one of the most pathetic of +illusions. "Posterity will see me righted," cries some poor victim of +human wrong, as he goes down into the darkness; but of all appeals, the +appeal to posterity is the most hopeless. + +What posterity relishes is rather new scandals about its immortals than +tiresome belated justifications. It prefers its villains to grow blacker +with time, and welcomes proof of fallibility and frailty in its immortal +exemplars. For rehabilitation it has neither time nor inclination, +and it pursues certain luckless reputations beyond the grave with a +mysterious malignity. + +Such a reputation is that of Edgar Allan Poe. One would have thought +that posterity would be eager to make up to his shade for the criminal +animus of Rufus Griswold, his first biographer. On the contrary, it +prefers to perpetuate the lying portrait; and no consideration of the +bequests of Poe's genius, or of his tragic struggles with adverse +conditions, no editorial advocacy, or documentary evidence in his +favour, has persuaded posterity to reverse the unduly harsh judgment of +his fatuous contemporaries. + +Fortunately, it all matters nothing to Poe now. It is only to us that it +matters. + +Saddening, surely, it is, to say the least, to realize that the humanity +of which we are a part is tainted with so subtle a disease of lying, and +so depraved an appetite for lies. Under such conditions, it is +surprising that greatness and goodness are ever found willing to serve +humanity at all, and that any but scoundrels can be found to dare the +risks of the high places of the world. For this social disease of gossip +resembles that distemper which, at the present moment, threatens the +chestnut forests of America. It first attacks the noblest trees. Like +it, too, it would seem to baffle all remedies, and like it, it would +seem to be the work of indestructible microscopic worms. + +It is this vermicular insignificance of the gossip that makes his +detection so difficult, and gives him his security. A great reputation +may feel itself worm-eaten, and may suddenly go down with a crash, but +it will look around in vain for the social vermin that have brought +about its fall. It is the cowardice of gossip that its victims have +seldom an opportunity of coming face to face with their destroyers; for +the gossip is as small as he is ubiquitous-- + + Not half so big as a round little worm + Prick'd from the lazy finger of a maid. + +In all societies, there are men and women who are vaguely known as +gossips; but they are seldom caught red-handed. For one thing, they do +not often speak at first hand. They profess only to repeat something +that they have heard--something, they are careful to add, which is +probably quite untrue, and which they themselves do not believe for a +moment. + +Then the fact stated or hinted is probably no concern of ours. It is not +for us to sift its truth, or to bring it to the attention of the +individual it tarnishes. Obviously, society would become altogether +impossible if each one of us were to constitute ourselves a sort of +social police to arraign every accuser before the accused. We should +thus, it is to be feared, only make things worse, and involuntarily play +the gossip's own game. The best we can do is as far as possible to +banish the tattle from our minds, and, at all events, to keep our own +mouths shut. + +Even so, however, some harm will have been done. We shall never be quite +sure but that the rumour was true, and when we next meet the person +concerned, it will probably in some degree colour our attitude toward +him. + +And with others, less high-minded than ourselves, the gossip will have +had greater success. Not, of course, meaning any harm, they will inquire +of someone else if what So-and-so hinted of So-and-so can possibly be +true. And so it will go on _ad infinitum_. The formula is simple, and it +is only a matter of arithmetical progression for a private lie, once +started on its journey, to become a public scandal, with a reputation +gone, and no one visibly responsible. + +Of course, not all gossip is purposely harmful in its intention. The +deliberate, creative gossip is probably rare. In fact, gossip usually +represents the need of a bored world to be entertained at any price, the +restless _ennui_ that must be forever talking or listening to fill the +vacuity of its existence, to supply its lack of really vital interests. +This demand naturally creates a supply of idle talkers, whose social +existence depends on their ability to provide the entertainment desired; +and nothing would seem to be so well-pleasing to the idle human ear as +the whisper that discredits, or the story that ridicules, the +distinction it envies, and the goodness it cannot understand. + +The mystery of gossip is bound up with the mysterious human need of +talking. Talk we must, though we say nothing, or talk evil from sheer +lack of subject-matter. When we know why man talks so much, apparently +for the mere sake of talking, we shall probably be nearer to knowing why +he prefers to speak and hear evil rather than good of his fellows. + +Possibly the gossip would be just as ready to speak well of his victims, +to circulate stories to their credit rather than the reverse, but for +the melancholy fact that he would thus be left without an audience. For +the world has no anxiety to hear good of its neighbour, and there is no +piquancy in the disclosure of hidden virtues. + +'Tis true, 'tis pity; pity 'tis, 'tis true; and the only poor +consolation to be got out of it is that the victims of gossip may, if +they feel so inclined, feel flattered rather than angered by its +attentions; for, at all events, it argues their possession of gifts +and qualities transcending the common. At least it presupposes +individuality; and, all things considered, it may be held as true that +those most gossiped about are usually those who can best afford to pay +this tax levied by society on any form of distinction. + +After all, the great and good man has his greatness and goodness to +support him, though the world should unite in depreciating him. The +artist has his genius, the beautiful woman has her beauty. 'Tis in +ourselves that we are thus and thus; and if fame must have gossip for +its seamy side, there are some satisfactions that cannot be stolen away, +and some laurels that defy the worm. + + + + +XI + +THE PASSING AWAY OF THE EDITOR + + +The word "editor" as applied to the conductors of magazines and +newspapers is rapidly becoming a mere courtesy title; for the powers and +functions formerly exercised by editors, properly so called, are being +more and more usurped by the capitalist proprietor. There are not a few +magazines where the "editor" has hardly more say in the acceptance of a +manuscript than the contributor who sends it in. Few are the editors +left who uphold the magisterial dignity and awe with which the name of +editor was wont to be invested. These survive owing chiefly to the +prestige of long service, and even they are not always free from the +encroachments of the new method. The proprietor still feels the irksome +necessity of treating their editorial policies with respect, though +secretly chafing for the moment when they shall give place to more +manageable, modern tools. + +The "new" editor, in fact, is little more than a clerk doing the bidding +of his proprietor, and the proprietor's idea of editing is slavishly to +truckle to the public taste--or rather to his crude conception of the +public taste. The only real editors of today are the capitalist and the +public. The nominal editor is merely an office-boy of larger growth, and +slightly larger salary. + +Innocent souls still, of course, imagine him clothed with divine powers, +and letters of introduction to him are still sought after by the +superstitious beginner. Alas! the chances are that the better he thinks +of your MS. the less likely is it to be accepted by--the proprietor; for +Mr. Snooks, the proprietor, has decided tastes of his own, and a +peculiar distaste for anything remotely savouring of the "literary." His +broad editorial axiom is that a popular magazine should be everything +and anything but--"literature." For any signs of the literary taint he +keeps open a stern and ever-watchful eye, and the "editor" or "editorial +assistant"--to make a distinction without a difference--whom he should +suspect of literary leanings has but a short shrift. Mr. Snooks is +seldom much of a reader himself. His activities have been exclusively +financial, and he has drifted into the magazine business as he might +have drifted into pork or theatres--from purely financial reasons. His +literary needs are bounded on the north by a detective story, and on the +south by a scientific article. The old masters of literature are as much +foolishness to him as the old masters of painting. In short, he is just +a common, ignorant man with money invested in a magazine; and who shall +blame him if he goes on the principle that he who pays the piper calls +the tune. When he starts in he not infrequently begins by entrusting +his magazine to some young man with real editorial ability and ambition +to make a really good thing. This young man gathers about him a group of +kindred spirits, and the result is that after the publication of the +second number Mr. Snooks decides to edit the magazine himself, with the +aid of a secretary and a few typewriters. His bright young men hadn't +understood "what the public wants" at all. They were too high-toned, too +"literary." What the public wants is short stories and pictures of +actresses; and the short stories, like the actresses, must be no better +than they should be. Even short stories when they are masterpieces are +not "what the public wants." So the bright young men go into outer +darkness, sadly looking for new jobs, and with its third number +_Snooks's Monthly_ has fallen into line with the indistinguishable ruck +of monthly magazines, only indeed distinguishable one from the other by +the euphonious names of their proprietors. + +Now, a proprietor's right to have his property managed according to his +own ideas needs no emphasizing. The sad thing is that such proprietors +should get hold of such property. It all comes, of course, of the +modern vulgarization of wealth. Time was when even mere wealth was +aristocratic, and its possession, more or less implied in its possessors +the possession, too, of refinement and culture. The rich men of the past +knew enough to encourage and support the finer arts of life, and were +interested in maintaining high standards of public taste and feeling. +Thus they were capable of sparing some of their wealth for investment in +objects which brought them a finer kind of reward than the financial. +Among other things, they understood and respected the dignity of +literature, and would not have expected an editor to run a literary +venture in the interests of the illiterate. The further degradation of +the public taste was not then the avowed object of popular magazines. +Indeed--strange as it sounds nowadays--it was rather the education than +the degradation of the public taste at which the editor aimed, and in +that aim he found the support of intelligent proprietors. + +Today, however, all this is changed. Wealth has become democratic, and +it is only here and there, in its traditional possessors, that it +retains its traditional aristocracy of taste. As the commonest man can +be a multi-millionaire, so the commonest man can own a magazine, and +have it edited in the commonest fashion for the common good. + +As a result, the editor's occupation, in the true sense, will soon be +gone. There is, need one say, no lack today of men with real editorial +individuality--but editorial individuality is the last thing the +capitalist proprietors want. It is just that they are determined to +stamp out. Therefore, your real editor must either swallow his pride and +submit to ignorant dictation, or make way for the little band of +automatic sorters of manuscript, which, as nine tailors make a man, +nowadays constitute a sort of composite editor under the direction of +the proprietor. + +With the elimination of editorial individuality necessarily follows +elimination of individuality in the magazine. More and more, every day, +magazines are conforming to the same monotonous type; so that, except +for name and cover, it is impossible to tell one magazine from another. +Happily one or two--_rari nantes in gurgito vasto_--survive amid the +democratic welter; and all who have at heart not only the interests of +literature, but the true interests of the public taste, will pray that +they will have the courage to maintain their distinction, unseduced by +the moneyed voice of the mob--a distinction to which, after all, they +have owed, and will continue to owe, their success. The names of these +magazines will readily occur to the reader, and, as they occur, he +cannot but reflect that it was just editorial individuality and a high +standard of policy that made them what they are, and what, it is +ardently to be hoped, they will still continue to be. Plutus and Demos +are the worst possible editors for a magazine; and in the end, even, it +is the best magazine that always makes the most money. + + + + +XII + +THE SPIRIT OF THE OPEN + + +I often think, as I sit here in my green office in the woodland--too +often diverted from some serious literary business with the moon or the +morning stars, or a red squirrel who is the familiar spirit of my +wood-pile, or having my thoughts carried out to sea by the river which +runs so freshly and so truantly, with so strong a current of temptation, +a hundred yards away from my window--I often think that the strong +necessity that compelled me to do my work, to ply my pen and inkpot out +here in the leafy, blue-eyed wilderness, instead of doing it by +typewriter in some forty-two-storey building in the city, is one of +those encouraging signs of the times which links one with the great +brotherhood of men and women that have heard the call of the great god +Pan, as he sits by the river-- + + Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan! + Piercing sweet by the river! + Blinding sweet, O great god Pan! + +And I go on thinking to this effect: that this impulse that has come to +so many of us, and has, incidentally, wrought such a harmony in our +lives, is something more than duck-shooting, trout-fishing, +butterfly-collecting, or a sentimental passion for sunsets, but is +indeed something not so very far removed from religion, romantic +religion. At all events, it is something that makes us happy, and keeps +us straight. That combination of results can only come by the +satisfaction of the undeniable religious instinct in all of us: an +instinct that seeks goodness, but seeks happiness too. Now, there are +creeds by which you can be good without being happy; and creeds by which +you can be happy without being good. But, perhaps, there is only one +creed by which you can be both at once--the creed of the growing grass, +and the blue sky and the running river, the creed of the dog-wood and +the skunk-cabbage, the creed of the red-wing and the blue heron--the +creed of the great god Pan. + +Pan, being one of the oldest of the gods, might well, in an age eager +for novelty, expect to be the latest fashion; but the revival of his +worship is something far more than a mere vogue. It was rumoured, as, of +course, we all know, early in the Christian era, that he was dead. The +pilot Thomas, ran the legend, as told by Plutarch, sailing near Pascos, +with a boatful of merchants, heard in the twilight a mighty voice +calling from the land, bidding him proclaim to all the world that Pan +was dead. "Pan is dead!"--three times ran the strange shuddering cry +through the darkness, as though the very earth itself wailed the passing +of the god. + +But Pan, of course, could only die with the earth itself, and so long as +the lichen and the moss keep quietly at their work on the grey boulder, +and the lightning zigzags down through the hemlocks, and the arrowhead +guards its waxen blossom in the streams; so long as the earth shakes +with the thunder of hoofs, or pours out its heart in the song of the +veery-thrush, or bares its bosom in the wild rose, so long will there be +little chapels to Pan in the woodland--chapels on the lintels of which +you shall read, as Virgil wrote: _Happy is he who knows the rural gods, +Pan, and old Sylvanus, and the sister nymphs_. + +It is strange to see how in every country, but more particularly in +America and in England, the modern man is finding his religion as it was +found by those first worshippers of the beautiful mystery of the visible +universe, those who first caught glimpses of + + Nymphs in the coppice, Naiads in the fountain, + Gods on the craggy height and roaring sea. + +First thoughts are proverbially the best; at all events, they are the +bravest. And man's first thoughts of the world and the strangely +romantic life he is suddenly called up, out of nothingness, to live, +unconsulted, uninstructed, left to feel his way in the blinding +radiance up into which he has been mysteriously thrust; those first +thoughts of his are nowadays being corroborated in every direction by +the last thoughts of the latest thinker. Mr. Jack London, one of +Nature's own writers, one of those writers too, through whom the Future +speaks, has given a name to this stirring of the human soul--"The Call +of the Wild." Following his lead, others have written of "The Lure," of +this and that in nature, and all mean the same thing: that the salvation +of man is to be found on, and by means of, the green earth out of which +he was born, and that, as there is no ill of his body which may not be +healed by the magic juices of herb and flower, or the stern potency of +minerals, so there is no sickness of his soul that may not be cured by +the sound of the sea, the rustle of leaves, or the songs of birds. + +Thirty or forty years ago the soul of the world was very sick. It had +lost religion in a night of misunderstood "materialism," so-called. But +since then that mere "matter" which seemed to eclipse the soul has grown +strangely radiant to deep-seeing eyes, and, whereas then one had to +doubt everything, dupes of superficial disillusionment, now there is no +old dream that has not the look of coming true, no hope too wild and +strange and beautiful to be confidently entertained. Even, if you wish +to believe in fairies, science will hardly say you nay. Those dryads and +fauns, which Keats saw "frightened away" by the prosaic times in which +it was his misfortune to be alive and unrecognized, are trooping back in +every American woodland, and the god whose name I have invoked has +become more than ever + + the leaven + That spreading in this dull and clodded earth + Gives it a touch ethereal. + +His worship is all the more sincere because it is not self-conscious. +If you were to tell the trout-fisher, or the duck-shooter, or the +camper-out, that he is a worshipper of Pan, he would look at you in a +kindly bewilderment. He would seem a little anxious about you, but it +would be only a verbal misunderstanding. It would not take him long to +realize that you were only putting in terms of a creed the intuitive and +inarticulate faith of his heart. Perhaps the most convincing sign of +this new-old faith in nature is the unconsciousness of the believer. He +has no idea that he is believing or having faith in anything. He is +simply loving the green earth and the blue sea, and the ways of birds +and fish and animals; but he is so happy in his innocent, ignorant joy +that he seems almost to shine with his happiness. There is, literally, a +light about him--that light which edges with brightness all sincere +action. The trout, or the wild duck, or the sea bass is only an innocent +excuse to be alone with the Infinite. To be alone. To be afar. Men sail +precarious craft in perilous waters for no reason they could tell +of. They may think that trawling, or dredging, or whaling is the +explanation: the real reason is the mystery we call the Sea. + +Ostensibly, of course, the angler is a man who goes out to catch fish; +yet there is a great difference between an angler and a fishmonger. +Though the angler catches no fish, though his creel be empty as he +returns home at evening, there is a curious happiness and peace about +him which a mere fishmonger would be at a loss to explain. Fish, as I +said, were merely an excuse; and, as he vainly waited for fish, without +knowing it, he was learning the rhythm of the stream, and the silence of +ferns was entering into his soul, and the calm and patience of meadows +were dreamily becoming a part of him. Suddenly, too, in the silence, +maybe he caught sight of a strange, hairy, masterful presence, sitting +by the stream, whittling reeds, and blowing his breath into them here +and there, and finally binding them together with rushes, till he had +made out of the empty reeds and rushes an instrument that sang +everything that can be sung and told you everything that can be told. + + The sun on the hill forgot to die. + And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly + Came back to dream on the river. + +Do you really think that the huntsman hunts only the deer? He, himself, +doubtless thinks that the trophy of the antlers was all he went out +into the woods to win. But there came a day to him when he missed the +deer, and caught a glimpse instead of the divine huntress, Diana, +high-buskined, short-kirtled, speeding with her hounds through the +lonely woodland, and his thoughts ran no more on venison for that day. + +The same truth is true of all men who go out into the green, blue-eyed +wilderness, whether they go there in pursuit of game or butterflies. +They find something stranger and better than what they went out to seek, +and, if they come home disappointed in the day's bag or catch, there is +yet something in their eyes, and across their brows, a light of peace, +an enchanted calm, which tells those who understand that they, at all +events, have seen the great god Pan, and heard the music he can make out +of the pipy hemlocks or the lonely pines. + + + + +XIII + +AN OLD AMERICAN TOW-PATH + + +The charm of an old canal is one which every one seems to feel. Men who +care nothing about ruined castles or Gothic cathedrals light up with +romantic enthusiasm if you tell them of some old disused or seldom-used +canal, grass-grown and tree-shaded, along which, hardly oftener than +once a week, a leisurely barge--towed by an equally leisurely mule, with +its fellow there on deck taking his rest, preparatory to his next +eight-mile "shift"--sleepily dreams its way, presumably on some errand +and to some destination, yet indeed hinting of no purpose or object +other than its loitering passage through a summer afternoon. I have even +heard millionaires express envy of the life lived by the little family +hanging out its washing and smoking its pipe and cultivating its +floating garden of nasturtiums and geraniums, with children playing and +a house-dog to keep guard, all in that toy house of a dozen or so feet, +whose foundations are played about by fishes, and whose sides are +brushed by whispering reeds. But the charm of an old canal is perhaps +yet more its own when even so tranquil a happening as the passage of a +barge is no longer looked for, and the quiet water is called upon for no +more arduous usefulness than the reflection of the willows or the +ferrying across of summer clouds. Nature herself seems to wield a new +peculiar spell in such association--old quarries, the rusting tramways +choked with fern; forgotten mines with the wild vine twining tenderly +about the old iron of dismantled pit-tackle, grown as green as itself +with the summer rains; roads once dusty with haste over which only the +moss and the trailing arbutus now leisurely travel. Wherever Nature is +thus seen to be taking to herself, making her own, what man has first +made and grown tired of, she is twice an enchantress, strangely +combining in one charm the magic of a wistful, all but forgotten, past +with her own sibyl-line mystery. + +The symbol of that combined charm is that poppy of oblivion of which Sir +Thomas Browne so movingly wrote: but, though along that old canal of +which I am thinking and by which I walked a summer day, no poppies were +growing, the freshest grass, the bluest flowers, the new-born rustling +leafage of the innumerable trees, all alike seemed to whisper of +forgetfulness, to be brooding, even thus in the very heyday of the mad +young year, over time past. And this eloquently retrospective air of +Nature made me realize, with something of the sense of discovery, how +much of what we call antiquity is really a trick of Nature. She is as +clever at the manufacture of antiques as some expert of "old masters." +A little moss here and there, a network of ivy, a judicious use of ferns +and grass, a careless display of weeds and wild flowers, and in twenty +years Nature can make a modern building look as if it dated from the +Norman Conquest. I came upon this reflection because, actually, my canal +is not very old, though from the way it impressed me, and from the +manner in which I have introduced it, the reader might well imagine it +as old as Venice and no younger than Holland, and may find it as hard to +believe as I did that its age is but some eighty years, and that it has +its romantic being between Newark Bay and Phillipsburg, on the Delaware +River. + +One has always to be careful not to give too much importance to one's +own associative fancies in regard to the names of places. To me, for +instance, "Perth Amboy" has always had a romantic sound, and I believe +that a certain majesty in the collocation of the two noble words would +survive that visit to the place itself which I have been told is all +that is necessary for disillusionment. On the other hand, for reasons +less explainable, Hackensack, Paterson, Newark, and even Passaic are +names that had touched me with no such romantic thrill. Wrongfully, no +doubt, I had associated them with absurdity, anarchy, and railroads. +Never having visited them, it was perhaps not surprising that I should +not have associated them with such loveliness and luxury of Nature as I +now unforgettably recall; and I cannot help feeling that in the case of +places thus unfortunately named, Nature might well bring an action for +damages, robbed as she thus undoubtedly is of a flock of worshippers. + +At all events, I believe that my surprise and even incredulity will be +understood when an artist friend of mine told me that by taking the Fort +Lee ferry, and trolleying from the Palisades through Hackensack to +Paterson, I might find--a dream canal. It was as though he had said that +I had but to cross over to Hoboken to find the Well at the World's End. +But it was true, for all that--quite fairy-tale true. It was one of +those surprises of peace, deep, ancient peace, in America, of which +there are many, and of which more needs to be told. I can conceive of no +more suggestive and piquant contrast than that of the old canal gliding +through water-lilies and spreading pastures, in the bosom of hills +clothed with trees that scatter the sunshine or gather the darkness, the +haunt of every bird that sings or flashes strange plumage and is gone, +gliding past flowering rushes and blue dragon-flies, not + + Flowing down to Camelot, + +as one might well believe, but between Newark and Phillipsburg, touching +Paterson midway with its dreaming hand. + +Following my friend's directions, we had met at Paterson, and, desirous +of finding our green pasture and still waters with the least possible +delay, we took a trolley running in the Newark direction, and were +presently dropped at a quaint, quiet little village called Little Falls, +the last we were to see of the modern work-a-day world for several +miles. A hundred yards or so beyond, and it is as though you had entered +some secret green door into a pastoral dream-land. Great trees, like +rustling walls of verdure, enclose an apparently endless roadway of +gleaming water, a narrow strip of tow-path keeping it company, +buttressed in from the surrounding fields with thickets of every species +of bush and luxurious undergrowth, and starred with every summer flower. + +Presently, by the side of the path, one comes to an object which seems +romantically in keeping with the general character of the scene--a long +block of stone, lying among the grasses and the wild geraniums, on +which, as one nears it, one descries carved scroll-work and quaint, +deep-cut lettering. Is it the tomb of dead lovers, the memorial of some +great deed, or an altar to the _genius loci_? The willows whisper about +it, and the great elms and maples sway and murmur no less impressively +than if the inscription were in Latin of two thousand years ago. Nor is +it in me to regret that the stone and its inscription, instead of +celebrating the rural Pan, commemorate the men to whom I owe this lane +of dreaming water and all its marginal green solitude: to wit--the +"MORRIS CANAL AND BANKING CO., A.D. 1829," represented by its +president, its cashier, its canal commissioner, and a score of other +names of directors, engineers, and builders. Peace, therefore, to the +souls of those dead directors, who, having only in mind their banking +and engineering project, yet unconsciously wrought, nearly a century +ago, so poetic a thing, and may their rest be lulled by such leafy +murmurs and swaying of tendrilled shadows as all the day through stir +and sway along the old canal! + +A few yards beyond this monumental stone, there comes a great opening in +the sky, a sense of depth and height and spacious freshness in the air, +such as we feel on approaching the gorge of a great river; and in fact +the canal has arrived at the Passaic and is about to be carried across +it in a sort of long, wooden trough, supported by a noble bridge that +might well pass for a genuine antique, owing to that collaborating hand +of Nature which has filled the interstices of its massive masonry with +fern, and so loosened it here and there that some of the canal escapes +in long, ribbon-like cascades into the rocky bed of the river below. An +aqueduct has always seemed to me, though it would be hard to say why, a +most romantic thing. The idea of carrying running water across a bridge +in this way--water which it is so hard to think of as imprisoned or +controlled, and which, too, however shallow, one always associates with +mysterious depth--the idea of thus carrying it across a valley high up +in the air, so that one may look underneath it, underneath the bed in +which it runs, and think of the fishes and the water-weeds and the +waterbugs all being carried across with it, too--this, I confess, has +always seemed to me engagingly marvellous. And I like, too, to think +that the canal, whose daily business is to be a "common carrier" of +others, thus occasionally tastes the luxury of being carried itself; as +sometimes one sees on a freight car a new buggy, or automobile, or +sometimes a locomotive, being luxuriously ridden along--as though out +for a holiday--instead of riding others. + +And talking of freight-cars, it came to me with a sense of illumination +how different the word "Passaic" looks printed in white letters on the +grey sides of grim produce-vans in begrimed procession, from the way it +looks as it writes its name in wonderful white waterfalls, or murmurs it +through corridors of that strange pillared and cake-shaped rock, amid +the golden pomp of a perfect summer day. For a short distance the +Passaic and the canal run side by side, but presently they part company, +and mile after mile the canal seems to have the world to itself, once in +a great while finding human companionship in a shingled cottage half +hidden among willows, a sleepy brick-field run on principles as ancient +as itself, shy little girls picking flowers on its banks, or saucy boys +disporting themselves in the old swimming-hole; and + + Sometimes an angler comes and drops his hook + Within its hidden depths, and 'gainst a tree + Leaning his rod, reads in some pleasant book, + Forgetting soon his pride of fishery; + And dreams or falls asleep, + While curious fishes peep + About his nibbled bait or scornfully + Dart off and rise and leap. + +Once a year, indeed, every one goes a-fishing along the old canal--men, +women, boys, and girls. That is in spring, when the canal is emptied for +repairs, the patching up of leaks, and so forth. Then the fish lie +glittering in the shallow pools, as good as caught, and happy children +go home with strings of sunfish,--"pumpkin-seeds" they call +them,--cat-fish, and the like picturesque unprofitable spoils, while +graver fisher-folk take count of pickerel and bream. This merry festival +was over and gone, and the canal was all brimming with the lustral +renewal of its waters, its depths flashing now and again with the +passage of wary survivors of that spring _battue_. + +It is essential to the appreciation of an old canal that one should not +expect it to provide excitement, that it be understood between it and +its fellow-pilgrim that there is very little to say and nothing to +record. Along the old tow-path you must be content with a few simple, +elemental, mysterious things. To enter into its spirit you must be +somewhat of a monastic turn of mind, and have spiritual affiliations, +above all, with La Trappe. For the presiding muse of an old canal is +Silence; yet, as at La Trappe, a silence far indeed from being a dumb +silence, but a silence that contains all speech. My friend and I spoke +hardly at all as we walked along, easily obedient to the spirit of the +hour and the place. For there were so few of those little gossipy +accidents and occurrences by the way that make those interruptions we +call conversation, and such overwhelming golden-handed presences of +sunlit woodlands, flashing water-meadows, shining, singing air, and +distant purple hills--all the blowing, rippling, leafy glory and mighty +laughter of a summer day--that we were glad enough to let the birds do +such talking as Nature deemed necessary; and I seem never to have heard +or seen so many birds, of so many varieties, as haunt that old canal. + +As we chose our momentary camping-place under a buttonwood-tree, from +out an exuberant swamp of yellow water-lilies and the rearing +sword-blades of the coming cat-tail, a swamp blackbird, on his glossy +black orange-tipped wings, flung us defiance with his long, keen, full, +saucy note; and as we sat down under our buttonwood and spread upon the +sward our pastoral meal, the veery-thrush--sadder and stranger than any +nightingale--played for us, unseen, on an instrument like those old +water-organs played on by the flow and ebb of the tide, a flute of +silver in which some strange magician has somewhere hidden tears. I +wondered, as he sang, if the veery was the thrush that, to Walt +Whitman's fancy, "in the swamp in secluded recesses" mourned the death +of Lincoln: + + Solitary the thrush, + The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements, + Sings to himself a song. + +But when the veery had flown with his heart-break to some distant copse, +two song-sparrows came to persuade us with their blithe melody that life +was worth living, after all; and cheerful little domestic birds, like +the jenny-wren and the chipping-sparrow, pecked about and put in between +whiles their little chit-chat across the boughs, while the bobolink +called to us like a comrade, and the phoebe-bird gave us a series of +imitations, and the scarlet tanager and the wild canary put in a vivid +appearance, to show what can be done with colour, though they have no +song. + +Yet, while one was grateful for such long, green silence as we found +along that old canal, one could not help feeling how hard it would be +to put into words an experience so infinite and yet so undramatic. Birds +and birds, and trees and trees, and the long, silent water! Prose has +seldom been adequate for such moments. So, as my friend and I took up +our walk again, I sang him this little song of the Silence of the Way: + + Silence, whose drowsy eyelids are soft leaves, + And whose half-sleeping eyes are the blue flowers, + On whose still breast the water-lily heaves, + And all her speech the whisper of the showers. + + Made of all things that in the water sway, + The quiet reed kissing the arrowhead, + The willows murmuring, all a summer day, + "Silence"--sweet word, and ne'er so softly said + + As here along this path of brooding peace, + Where all things dream, and nothing else is done + But all such gentle businesses as these + Of leaves and rippling wind, and setting sun + + Turning the stream to a long lane of gold, + Where the young moon shall walk with feet of pearl, + And, framed in sleeping lilies, fold on fold. + Gaze at herself like any mortal girl. + +But, after all, trees are perhaps the best expression of silence, massed +as they are with the merest hint of movement, and breathing the merest +suggestion of a sigh; and seldom have I seen such abundance and variety +of trees as along our old canal--cedars and hemlocks and hickory +dominating green slopes of rocky pasture, with here and there a clump of +silver birches bent over with the strain of last year's snow; and all +along, near by the water, beech and basswood, blue-gum and pin-oak, ash, +and even chestnut flourishing still, in defiance of blight. Nor have I +ever seen such sheets of water-lilies as starred the swampy thickets, in +which elder and hazels and every conceivable bush and shrub and giant +grass and cane make wildernesses pathless indeed save to the mink and +the water-snake, and the imagination that would fain explore their +glimmering recesses. + +No, nothing except birds and trees, water-lilies and such like +happenings, ever happens along the old canal; and our nearest to a human +event was our meeting with a lonely, melancholy man, sitting near a +moss-grown water-wheel, smoking a corn-cob pipe, and gazing wistfully +across at the Ramapo Hills, over which great sunlit clouds were +billowing and casting slow-moving shadows. Stopping, we passed him the +time of day and inquired when the next barge was due. For answer he took +a long draw at his corn-cob, and, taking his eyes for a moment from the +landscape, said in a far-away manner that it might be due any time now, +as the spring had come and gone, and implying, with a sort of sad humour +in his eyes, that spring makes all things possible, brings all things +back, even an old slow-moving barge along the old canal. + +"What do they carry on the canal?" I asked the melancholy man, the +romantic green hush and the gleaming water not irrelevantly flashing on +my fancy that far-away immortal picture of the lily-maid of Astolat on +her strange journey, with a letter in her hand for Lancelot. + +"Coal," was his answer; and, again drawing at his corn-cob, he added, +with a sad and understanding smile, "once in a great while." Like most +melancholy men, he seemed to have brains, in his way, and to have no +particular work on hand, except, like ourselves, to dream. + +"Suppose," said I, "that a barge should come along, and need to be drawn +up this 'plane'--would the old machinery work?" and I pointed to six +hundred feet of sloping grass, down which a tramway stretches and a +cable runs on little wheels--technically known, it appeared, as a +"plane." + +Then the honour of the ancient company for which he had once worked +seemed to stir his blood, and he awakened to something like enthusiasm +as he explained the antique, picturesque device by which it is still +really possible for a barge to climb six hundred feet of grass and +fern--drawn up in a long "cradle," instead of being raised by locks in +the customary way. + +Then he took us into the old building where, in the mossed and dripping +darkness, we could discern the great water-wheels that work this +fascinating piece of ancient engineering; and added that there would +probably be a barge coming along in three or four days, if we should +happen to be in the neighbourhood. He might have added that the old +canal is one of the few places where "time and tide" wait for any one +and everybody--but alas! on this occasion we could not wait for them. + +Our walk was nearing its end when we came upon a pathetic reminder that, +though the old canal is so far from being a stormy sea, there have been +wrecks even in those quiet waters. In a backwater whispered over by +willows and sung over by birds, a sort of water-side graveyard, eleven +old barges were ingloriously rotting, unwept and unhonoured. The hulks +of old men-of-war, forgotten as they may seem, have still their annual +days of bunting and the salutes of cannon; but to these old servitors of +peace come no such memorial recognitions. + +"Unwept and unhonoured, may be," said I to my friend, "but they shall +not go all unsung, though humble be the rhyme"; so here is the rhyme I +affixed to an old nail on the mouldering side of the _Janita C. +Williams_: + + You who have done your work and asked no praise, + Mouldering in these unhonoured waterways, + Carrying but simple peace and quiet fire, + Doing a small day's work for a small hire-- + You need not praise, nor guns, nor flags unfurled, + Nor all such cloudy glories of the world; + The laurel of a simple duty done + Is the best laurel underneath the sun, + Yet would two strangers passing by this spot + Whisper, "Old boat--you are not all forgot!" + + + + +XIV + +A MODERN SAINT FRANCIS + + +We were neither of us fox-hunting ourselves, but chanced both to be out +on our morning walk and to be crossing a breezy Surrey common at the +same moment, when the huntsmen and huntresses of the Slumberfold Hunt +were blithely congregating for a day's run. A meet is always an +attractive sight, and we had both come to a halt within a yard or two of +each other, and stood watching the gallant company of fine ladies and +gentlemen on their beautiful, impatient mounts, keeping up a prancing +conversation, till the exciting moment should arrive when the cry would +go up that the fox had been started, and the whole field would sweep +away, a cataract of hounds, red-coats, riding habits, and dog-carts. + +The moment came. The fox had been found in a spinney running down to +Withy Brook, and his race for life had begun. With a happy shout, the +hunt was up and off in a twinkling, and the stranger and I were left +alone on the broad common. + +I had scanned him furtively as he stood near me; a tall, slightly build +man of about fifty, with perfectly white hair, and strangely gentle +blue eyes. There was a curious, sad distinction over him, and he had +watched the scene with a smile of blended humour and pity. + +Turning to me, as we were left alone, and speaking almost as though to +himself: "It is a strange sight," he said with a sigh. "I wonder if it +seems as strange to you? Think of all those grown-up, so-called +civilized people being so ferociously intent on chasing one poor little +animal for its life--and feeling, when at last the huntsman holds up his +poor brush, with absurd pride (if indeed the fox is not too sly for +them), that they have really done something clever, in that with so many +horses and dogs and so much noise, they have actually contrived to catch +and kill one fox!" + +"It is strange!" I said, for I had been thinking just that very thing. + +"Of course, they always tell you," he continued, as we took the road +together, "that the fox really enjoys being hunted, and that he feels +his occupation gone if there are no hounds to track him, and finally to +tear him to pieces. What wonderful stories human nature will tell itself +in its own justification! Can one imagine any created thing _enjoying_ +being pursued for its life, with all that loud terror of men and horses +and savage dogs at its heels? No doubt--if we can imagine even a fox so +self-conscious--it would take a certain pride in its own cunning and +skill, if the whole thing were a game; but a race with death is too +deadly in earnest for a fox even to relish his own stratagems. Happily +for the fox, it is probable that he does not feel so much for himself as +some of us feel for him; but any one who knows the wild things knows too +what terror they are capable of feeling, and how the fear of death is +always with them. No! you may be sure that a fox prefers a cosy +hen-roost to the finest run with the hounds ever made." + +"But even if he should enjoy being hunted," I added, "the even stranger +thing to me is that civilized men and women should enjoy hunting him." + +"Isn't it strange?" answered my companion eagerly, his face lighting up +at finding a sympathizer. "When will people realize that there is so +much more fun in studying wild things than in killing them!..." + +He stopped suddenly in his walk, to gather a small weed which had +caught his quick eye by the roadside, and which he examined for a +moment through a little pocket microscope which I noticed, hanging +like an eyeglass round his neck, and which I learned afterward quite +affectionately to associate with him. Then, as we walked on, he +remarked: + +"But, of course, we are yet very imperfectly civilized. Humanity is a +lesson learned very slowly by the human race. Yet we are learning it by +degrees, yes! we are learning it," and he threw out his long stride more +emphatically--the stride of one accustomed to long daily tramps on the +hills. + +"Strange, that principle of cruelty in the universe!" he resumed, after +a pause in which he had walked on in silence. "Very strange. To me it is +the most mysterious of all things--though, I suppose, after all, it is +no more mysterious than pity. When, I wonder, did pity begin? Who was +the first human being to pity another? How strange he must have seemed +to the others, how incomprehensible and ridiculous--not to say +dangerous! There can be little doubt that he was promptly dispatched +with stone axes as an enemy of a respectable murderous society." + +"I expect," said I "that our friends the fox-hunters would take a +similar view of our remarks on their sport." + +"No doubt--and perhaps turn their hounds on us! A man hunt! 'Give me the +hunting of man!' as a brutal young poet we know of recently sang." + +"How different was the spirit of Emerson's old verse," I said: + + "Hast thou named all the birds without a gun? + Loved the wood-rose, and left it on its stalk?... + O be my friend, and teach me to be thine!" + +"That is one of my mottoes!" cried my companion with evident pleasure. +"Let us go and quote it to our fox-hunters!" + +"I wonder how the fox is getting on," I said. + +"If he is any sort of fox, he is safe enough as yet, we may be sure. +They are wonderful creatures. It is not surprising that mankind has +always looked upon Reynard as almost a human being--if not more--for +there is something quite uncanny in his instincts, and the cool, +calculating way in which he uses them. He is come and gone like a ghost. +One moment you were sure you saw him clearly close by and the next he is +gone--who knows where? He can run almost as swiftly as light, and as +softly as a shadow; and in his wildest dash, what a sure judgment he has +for the lie of the ground, how unerringly--and at a moment when a +mistake is death--he selects his cover! How learned, too, he is in +his knowledge of the countryside! There is not a dry ditch, or a +water-course, or an old drain, or a hole in a bank for miles around that +is not mysteriously set down in the map he carries in his graceful, +clever head; and one need hardly say that all the suitable hiding-places +in and around farm-yards are equally well known to him. Then withal he +is so brave. How splendidly, when wearied out, and hopelessly tracked +down, with the game quite up, he will turn on his pursuers, and die with +his teeth fast in his enemy's throat!" + +"I believe you are a fox-hunter in disguise," I laughed. + +"Well, I have hunted as a boy," he said, "and I know something of what +those red-coated gentlemen are feeling. But soon I got more interested +in studying nature than killing it, and when I became a naturalist I +ceased to be a hunter. You get to love the things so that it seems like +killing little children. They come so close to you, are so beautiful and +so clever; and sometimes there seems such a curious pathos about them. +How any one can kill a deer with that woman's look in its eyes, I don't +know. I should always expect the deer to change into a fairy princess, +and die in my arms with the red blood running from her white breast. And +pigeons, too, with their soft sunny coo all the summer afternoon, or the +sudden lapping of sleepy wings round the chimneys--how can any one trap +or shoot them with blood-curdling rapidity, and not expect to see +ghosts!" + +"Of course, there is this difference about the fox," I said, "that it is +really in a sense born to be hunted. For not only is it a fierce hunter +itself, but it would not be allowed to exist at all, so to say, unless +it consented to being hunted. Like a gladiator it accepts a comfortable +living for a certain time, on condition of its providing at last a +spirited exhibition of dying. In other words, it is preserved entirely +for the purpose of being hunted. It must accept life on that condition +or be extirpated as destructive vermin by the plundered farmer. Life is +sweet, after all, and to be a kind of protected highwayman of the +poultry-yard, for a few sweet toothsome years, taking one's chances of +being surely brought to book at last, may perhaps seem worth while." + +"Yes! but how does your image of the protected gladiator reflect on +those who protect him? There, of course, is the point. The gladiator, as +you say, is willing to take his chances in exchange for fat living and +idleness, as long as he lives. You may even say that his profession is +good for him, develops fine qualities of mind even as well as body--but +what of the people who crowd with blood-thirsty eagerness to watch those +qualities exhibited in so tragic a fashion for their amusement? Do they +gain any of his qualities of skill and courage, and strength and +fearlessness in the face of death? No, they are merely brutalized by +cruel excitement--and while they applaud his skill and admire his +courage, they long most to watch him die. So--is it not?--with our +friend the fox. The huntsman invariably compliments him on his spirit +and his cunning, but what he wants is--the brush. He wants the +excitement of hunting the living thing to its death; and, let huntsmen +say what they will about the exhilaration of the horse exercise across +country as being the main thing, they know better--and, if it be true, +why don't they take it without the fox?" + +"They do in America, as, of course, you know. There a man walks across +country trailing a stick, at the end of which is a piece of cloth +impregnated with some pungent scent which hounds love and mistake for +the real thing." + +"Hard on the poor hounds!" smiled my friend. "Even worse than a red +herring. You could hardly blame the dogs if they mistook the man for +Actaeon and tore him to pieces." + +"And I suspect that the huntsmen are no better satisfied." + +"Yet, as we were saying, if the secret spring of their sport is not the +cruel delight of pursuing a living thing to its death, that American +plan should serve all the purposes, and give all the satisfaction for +which they claim to follow the hounds: the keen pleasure of a gallop +across country, the excitement of its danger, the pluck and pride of +taking a bad fence, and equally, too, the pleasure of watching the +hounds cleverly at work with their mysterious gift of scent. All the +same, I suspect there are few sportsmen who would not vote it a tame +substitute. Without something being killed, the zest, the 'snap,' is +gone. It is as depressing as a sham fight." + +"Yes, that mysterious shedding of blood! what a part it has played in +human history! Even religion countenances it, and war glorifies it. Men +are never in higher spirits than when they are going to kill, or be +killed themselves, or see something else killed. Tennyson's 'ape and +tiger' die very hard in the tamest of us." + +"Alas, indeed they do!" said my friend with a sigh. "But I do believe +that they are dying none the less. Just of late there has been a +reaction in favour of brute force, and people like you and me have been +ridiculed as old-fashioned sentimentalists. But reaction is one of the +laws of advance. Human progress always takes a step backwards after it +has taken two forward. And so it must be here too. In the end, it is the +highest type among men and nations that count, and the highest types +among both today are those which show most humanity, shrink most from +the infliction of pain. When one thinks of the horrible cruelties that +were the legal punishment of criminals, even within the last two hundred +years, and not merely brutal criminals, but also political offenders or +so-called heretics--how every one thought it the natural and proper +thing to break a man on the wheel for a difference of opinion, or +torture him with hideous ingenuity into a better frame of mind, and +how the pettiest larcenies were punished by death; it seems as if we +of today, even the least sensitive of us, cannot belong to the same +race--and it is impossible to deny that the heart of the world has grown +softer and that pity is becoming more and more a natural instinct in +human nature. I believe that some day it will have thrust out cruelty +altogether, and that the voluntary infliction of pain upon another will +be unknown. The idea of any one killing for pleasure will seem too +preposterous to be believed, and soldiers and fox-hunters and +pigeon-shooters will be spoken of as nowadays we speak of cannibals. +But, of course, I am a dreamer," he concluded, his face shining with his +gentle dream, as though he had been a veritable saint of the calendar. + +"Yes, a dream," he added presently, "and yet--" In that "and yet" +there was a world of invincible faith that made it impossible not to +share his dream, even see it building before one's eyes--such is the +magnetic power of a passionate personal conviction. + +"Of course," he went on again, "we all know that 'nature is one with +rapine, a harm no preacher can heal.' But because the fox runs off with +the goose, or the hawk swoops down on the chicken, and 'yon whole little +wood is a world of plunder and prey'--is that any reason why we should +be content to plunder and prey too? And after all, the cruelty of Nature +is only one-sided. There is lots of pity in Nature too. These strange +little wild lives around us are not entirely bent on killing and eating +each other. They know the tenderness of motherhood, the sweetness of +building a home together, and I believe there is far more comradeship +and mutual help amongst them than we know of. Yes, even in wild Nature +there is a principle of love working no less than a principle of hate. +Nature is not all-devouring and destroying. She is loving and building +too. Nature is more constructive than destructive, and she is ever at +work evolving and evolving a higher dream. Surely it is not for man, to +whom, so far as we know, Nature has entrusted the working out of her +finest impulses, and whom she has endowed with all the fairy apparatus +of the soul; it is not for him, whose eyes--of all her children--Nature +has opened, the one child she has taken into her confidence and to whom +she has whispered her secret hopes and purposes; surely it is not for +man voluntarily to deny his higher lot, and, because the wolf and he +have come from the same great mother, say: 'I am no better than the +wolf. Why should I not live the life of a wolf--and kill and devour like +my brother?' Surely it is not for the cruel things in Nature to teach +man cruelty--rather, if it were possible," and the saint smiled at his +fancy, "would it be the mission of man to teach them kindness: rather +should he preach pity to the hawk and peace between the panther and the +bear. It is not the bad lessons of Nature, but the good, that are meant +for man--though, as you must have noticed, man seldom appeals to the +precedents of Nature except to excuse that in him which is Nature at her +worst. When we say, 'it is only natural,' we almost invariably refer to +that in Nature of which Nature herself has entrusted the refinement or +the elimination to man. It is Nature's bad we copy, not Nature's good; +and always we forget that we ourselves are a part of Nature--Nature's +vicegerent, so to say, upon the earth--" + +As we talked, we had been approaching a house built high among the +heather, with windows looking over all the surrounding country. +Presently, the saint stopped in front of it. + +"This is my house," he said. "Won't you come in and see me some +time?--and, by the way, I am going to talk to some of the village +children about the wild things, bird's nesting, and so forth, up at the +schoolhouse on Thursday. I wish you'd come and help me. One's only hope +is with the children. The grown-up are too far gone. Mind you come." + +So we parted, and, as I walked across the hill homeward, haunted by that +gentle face, I thought of Melampus, that old philosopher who loved the +wild things so and had made such friends with them, that they had taught +him their language and told him all their secrets: + + With love exceeding a simple love of the things + That glide in grasses and rubble of woody wreck; + Or change their perch on a beat of quivering wings + From branch to branch, only restful to pipe and peck; + Or, bridled, curl at a touch their snouts in a ball; + Or cast their web between bramble and thorny hook; + The good physician, Melampus, loving them all, + Among them walked, as a scholar who reads a book. + +As I dipped into the little thick-set wood that surrounds my house, +something stood for a second in one of the openings, then was gone like +a shadow. I was glad to think how full of bracken and hollows, and +mysterious holes and corners of mossed and lichened safety was our old +wood--for the shadow was a fox. I like to think it was the very fox we +had been talking about come to find shelter with me--and, if he stole a +meal out of our hen-roost, I gave it him before he asked it, with all +the will in the world. I hope he chose a good fat hen, and not one of +your tough old capons that sometimes come to table. + + + + +XV + +THE LITTLE GHOST IN THE GARDEN + + +I don't know in what corner of the garden his busy little life now takes +its everlasting rest. None of us had the courage to stand by, that +summer morning, when Morris, our old negro man, buried him, and we felt +sympathetic for Morris that the sad job should fall upon him, for Morris +loved him just as we did. Perhaps if we had loved him less, more +sentimentally than deeply, we should have indulged in some sort of +appropriate ceremonial, and marked his grave with a little stone. But, +as I have said, his grave, like that of the great prophet, is a secret +to this day. None of us has ever asked Morris about it, and his grief +has been as reticent as our own. I wondered the other night, as I walked +the garden in a veiled moonlight, whether it was near the lotus-tanks he +was lying--for I remembered how he would stand there, almost by the +hour, watching the goldfish that we had engaged to protect us against +mosquitoes, moving mysteriously under the shadows of the great flat +leaves. In his short life he grew to understand much of this strange +world, but he never got used to those goldfish; and often I have seen +him, after a long wistful contemplation of them, turn away with a sort +of half-frightened, puzzled bark, as though to say that he gave it up. +Or, does he lie, I wonder, somewhere among the long grass of the +salt-marsh, that borders our garden, and in perigee tides widens out +into a lake. There indeed would be his appropriate country, for there +was the happy hunting-ground through which in life he was never tired of +roaming, in the inextinguishable hope of mink, and with the occasional +certainty of a water-rat. + +He had come to us almost as mysteriously as he went away; a fox-terrier +puppy wandered out of the Infinite to the neighbourhood of our ice-box, +one November morning, and now wandered back again. Technically, he was +just graduating out of puppyhood, though, like the most charming human +beings, he never really grew up, and remained, in behaviour and +imagination, a puppy to the end. He was a dog of good breed and good +manners, evidently with gentlemanly antecedents canine and human. There +were those more learned in canine aristocracy than ourselves who said +that his large leaf-like, but very becoming, ears meant a bar sinister +somewhere in his pedigree, but to our eyes those only made him +better-looking; and, for the rest of him, he was race--race nervous, +sensitive, refined, and courageous--from the point of his all-searching +nose to the end of his stub of a tail, which the conventional docking +had seemed but to make the more expressive. We had already one dog in +the family when he arrived, and two Maltese cats. With the cats he was +never able to make friends, in spite of persistent well-intentioned +efforts. It was evident to us that his advances were all made in the +spirit of play, and from a desire of comradeship, the two crowning needs +of his blithe sociable spirit. But the cats received them in an attitude +of invincible distrust, of which his poor nose frequently bore the sorry +signature. Yet they had become friendly enough with the other dog, an +elderly setter, by name Teddy, whose calm, lordly, slow-moving ways were +due to a combination of natural dignity, vast experience of life, and +some rheumatism. As Teddy would sit philosophizing by the hearth of an +evening, immovable and plunged in memories, yet alert on the instant to +a footfall a quarter of a mile away, they would rub their sinuous +smoke-grey bodies to and fro beneath his jaws, just as though he were a +piece of furniture; and he would take as little notice of them as though +he were the leg of the piano; though sometimes he would wag his tail +gently to and fro, or rap it softly on the floor, as though appreciating +the delicate attention. + + * * * * * + +Of Teddy's reception of the newcomer we had at first some slight +misgiving, for, amiable as we have just seen him with his Maltese +companions, and indeed as he is generally by nature, his is the +amiability that comes of conscious power, and is his, so to say, by +right of conquest; for of all neighbouring dogs he is the acknowledged +king. The reverse of quarrelsome, the peace of his declining years has +been won by much historical fighting, and his reputation among the dogs +of his acquaintance is such that it is seldom necessary for him to +assert his position. It is only some hapless stranger ignorant of his +standing that will occasionally provoke him to a display of those +fighting qualities he grows more and more reluctant to employ. Even with +such he is comparatively merciful; stern, but never brutal. Usually all +that is necessary is for him to look at them steadfastly for a few +moments in a peculiar way. This seems to convince them that, after all, +discretion is the better part, and slowly and sadly they turn around in +a curious cowed way, and walk off, apparently too scared to run, with +Teddy, like Fate, grimly at their heels, steadily "pointing" them off +the premises. We were a little anxious, therefore, as to how Teddy would +take our little terrier, with his fussy, youthful self-importance, and +eternal restless poking into other folks' affairs. But Teddy, as we +might have told ourselves, had had a long and varied experience of +terriers, and had nothing to learn from us. Yet I have no doubt that, +with his instinctive courtesy, he divined the wishes of the family in +regard to the newcomer, and was, therefore, predisposed in his favour. +This, however, did not save the evidently much overawed youngster from a +stern and searching examination, the most trying part of which seemed +to be that long, silent, hypnotizing contemplation of him, which is +Teddy's way of asserting his dignity. The little dog visibly trembled +beneath the great one's gaze, his tongue hanging out of his mouth, and +his eyes wandering helplessly from side to side; and he seemed to be +saying, in his dog way: "O yes! I know you are a very great and +important personage--and I am only a poor little puppy of no importance. +Only please let me go on living--and you will see how well I will +behave." Teddy seemed to be satisfied that some such recognition and +submission had been tendered him; so presently he wagged his tail, that +had up till then been rigid as a ramrod, and not only the little +terrier, but all of us, breathed again. Yet it was some time before +Teddy would admit him into anything like what one might call intimacy, +and premature attempts at gamesome familiarity were checked by the +gathering thunder of a lazy growl that unmistakably bade the youngster +keep his place. But real friendship eventually grew between them, +on Teddy's side a sort of big-brother affectionate tutelage and +guardianship, and on Puppy's--for, though we tried many, we never found +any other satisfactory name for him but "Puppy"--a reverent admiration +and watchful worshipping imitation. No great man was ever more anxiously +copied by some slavish flatterer than that old sleepy carelessly-great +setter by that eager, ambitious little terrier. The occasions when to +bark and when not to bark, for example. One could actually see Puppy +studying the old dog's face on doubtful occasions of the kind. Boiling +over, as he visibly was, with the desire to bark his soul out, yet he +could be seen unmistakably restraining himself, till Teddy, after some +preliminary soliloquizing in deep undertones, had made up his mind that +the suspicious shuffling-by of probably some inoffensive Italian workman +demanded investigation, and lumberingly risen to his feet and made for +the door. Then, like a bunch of firecrackers, Puppy was at the heels, +all officious assistance, and the two would disappear like an old and a +young thunderbolt into the resounding distance. + + * * * * * + +Teddy's friendship had seemed to be definitely won on an occasion which +brought home to one the quaint resemblance between the codes and ways of +dogs and those of schoolboys. When the winter came on, a rather severe +one, it soon became evident that the little short-haired fellow suffered +considerably from the cold. Out on walks, he was visibly shivering, +though he made no fuss about it. So one of the angels in the house +knitted for him a sort of woollen sweater buttoned down his neck and +under his belly, and trimmed it with some white fur that gave it an +exceedingly smart appearance. Teddy did not happen to be there when it +was first tried on, and, for the moment, Puppy had to be content with +our admiration, and his own vast sense of importance. Certainly, a more +self-satisfied terrier never was than he who presently sped out, to air +his new finery before an astonished neighbourhood. But alas! you should +have seen him a few minutes afterwards. We had had the curiosity to +stroll out to see how he had got on, and presently, in a bit of rocky +woodland near by, we came upon a curious scene. In the midst of a clump +of red cedars, three great dogs, our Teddy, a wicked old black +retriever, and a bustling be-wigged and be-furred collie, stood in a +circle round Puppy, seated on his haunches, trembling with fear, tongue +lolling and eyes wandering, for all the world as though they were +holding a court-martial, or, at all events, a hazing-party. The offence +evidently lay with that dandified new sweater. One and another of the +dogs smelt at it, then tugged at it in evident disgust; and, as each +time Puppy made a move to get away, all girt him round with guttural +thunder of disapproval, as much as to say: "Do you call that a thing for +a manly dog to go around in? You ought to be ashamed of yourself, you +miserable dandy." + +We couldn't help reflecting that it was all very well for those great +comfortable long-haired dogs to talk, naturally protected as they were +from the cold. Yet that evidently cut no figure with them, and they went +on sniffing and tugging and growling, till we thought our poor Puppy's +eyes and tongue would drop out with fear. Yet, all the time, they +seemed to be enjoying his plight, seemed to be smiling grimly together, +wicked old experienced brutes as they were. + +Presently the idea of the thing seemed to occur to Puppy, or out of his +extremity a new soul was born within him, for suddenly an infinite +disgust of his new foppery seemed to take possession of him too, and, +regaining his courage, he turned savagely upon it, ripping it this way +and that, and struggling with might and main to rid himself of the +accursed thing. Presently he stood free, and barks of approval at once +went up from his judges. He had come through his ordeal, and was once +more a dog among dogs. Great was the rejoicing among his friends, and +the occasion having been duly celebrated by joint destruction and +contumely of the offending garment, Teddy and he returned home, friends +for life. + + * * * * * + +It is to be feared that that friendship, deep and tender as it grew to +be on both sides, perhaps particularly on Teddy's, was the indirect +cause of Puppy's death. I have referred to Teddy's bark, and how he is +not wont to waste it on trivial occasions, or without due thought. On +the other hand, he is proud of it, and loves to practice it--just for +its own sake, particularly on early mornings, when, however fine a bark +it is, most of our neighbours would rather continue sleeping than wake +up to listen to it. There is no doubt at all, for those who understand +him, that it is a purely artistic bark. He means no harm to any one by +it. When the milkman, his private enemy, comes at seven, the bark is +quite different. This barking of Teddy's seems to be literally at +nothing. Around five o'clock on summer mornings, he plants himself on a +knob of rock overlooking the salt marsh and barks, possibly in honour of +the rising sun, but with no other perceptible purpose. So have I heard +men rise in the dawn to practice the cornet--but they were men, so they +ran no risk of their lives. Teddy's practicing, however, has now been +carried on for several years in the teeth of no little peril; and, had +it not been for much human influence employed on his behalf, he would +long since have antedated his little friend in Paradise. When that +little friend, however, came to assist and emulate him in those morning +recitals, adding to his bark an occasional--I am convinced purely +playful--bite, I am inclined to think that a sentiment grew in the +neighbourhood that one dog at a time was enough. At all events, Teddy +still barks at dawn as of old, but our little Puppy barks no more. + +Before the final quietus came to him, there were several occasions on +which the Black dog, called Death, had almost caught him in his jaws. +One there was in especial. He had, I believe, no hatred for any living +thing save Italian workmen and automobiles. I have seen an Italian +workman throw his pick-axe at him, and then take to his heels in +grotesque flight. But the pick-axe missed him, as did many another +clumsily hurled missile. + + * * * * * + +An automobile, however, on one occasion, came nearer its mark. Like +every other dog that ever barked, particularly terriers, Puppy delighted +to harass the feet of fast trotting horses, mockingly running ahead of +them, barking with affected savagery, and by a miracle evading their +on-coming hoofs--which to him, tiny thing as he was, must have seemed +like trip-hammers pounding down from the sky. But horses understand such +gaiety in terriers. They understand that it is only their foolish fun. +Automobiles are different. They have no souls. They see nothing engaging +in having their tires snapped at, as they whirl swiftly by; and, one +day, after Puppy had flung himself in a fine fury at the tires of one of +these soulless things, he gave a sharp yelp--"not cowardly!"--and lay a +moment on the roadside. But only a moment; then he went limping off on +his three sound legs, and hid himself away from all sympathy, in some +unknown spot. It was in vain we called and sought him, and only after +two days was he discovered, in the remotest corner of a great rocky +cellar, determined apparently to die alone in an almost inaccessible +privacy of wood and coal. Yet, when at last we persuaded him that life +was still sweet and carried him upstairs into the great living-room, and +the beautiful grandmother, who knows the sorrows of animals almost as +the old Roman seer knew the languages of beasts and birds, had taken +him in charge and made a cosy nest of comforters for him by the fire, +and tempted his languid appetite--to which the very thought of bones +was, of course, an offence--with warm, savory-smelling soup; then, he +who had certainly been no coward--for his thigh was a cruel lump of pain +which no human being would have kept so patiently to himself--became +suddenly, like many human invalids, a perfect glutton of self-pity; and +when we smoothed and patted him and told him how sorry we were, it was +laughable, and almost uncanny, how he suddenly set up a sort of moaning +talk to us, as much as to say that he certainly had had a pretty bad +time, was really something of a hero, and deserved all the sympathy we +would give him. So far as one can be sure about anything so mysterious +as animals, I am sure that from then on he luxuriated in his little +hospital by the fireside, and played upon the feelings of his beautiful +nurse, and of his various solicitous visitors, with all the histrionic +skill of the spoiled and petted convalescent. Suddenly, however, one +day, he forgot his part. He heard some inspiring barking going on +nearby--and, in a flash, his comforters were thrust aside, and he was +off and away to join the fun. Then, of course, we knew that he was well +again; though he still went briskly about his various business on three +legs for several days. + +His manner was quite different, however, the afternoon he had so +evidently come home to die. There was no pose about the little forlorn +figure, which, after a mysterious absence of two days, suddenly +appeared, as we were taking tea on the veranda, already the very ghost +of himself. Wearily he sought the cave of the beautiful grandmother's +skirts, where, whenever he had had a scolding, he was wont always to +take refuge--barking, fiercely, as from an inaccessible fortress, at his +enemies. + + * * * * * + +But, this afternoon, there was evidently no bark in him, poor little +fellow; everything about him said that he had just managed to crawl home +to die. His brisk white coat seemed dank with cold dews, and there was +something shadowy about him and strangely quiet. His eyes, always so +alert, were strangely heavy and indifferent, yet questioning and somehow +accusing. He seemed to be asking us why a little dog should suffer so, +and what was going to happen to him, and what did it all mean. Alas! We +could not tell him; and none of us dare say to each other that our +little comrade in the mystery of life was going to die. But a silence +fell over us all, and the beautiful grandmother took him into her care, +and so well did her great and wise heart nurse him through the night +that next morning it almost seemed as though we had been wrong; for a +flash of his old spirit was in him again, and, though his little legs +shook under him, it was plain that he wanted to try and be up at his +day's work on the veranda, warning off the passer-by, or in the garden +carrying on his eternal investigations, or farther afield in the +councils and expeditions of his fellows. So we let him have his way, and +for a while he seemed happier and stronger for the sunshine, and the old +familiar scents and sounds. But the one little tired husky bark he gave +at his old enemy, the Italian workman, passing by, would have broken +your heart; and the effort he made with a bone, as he visited the +well-remembered neighbourhood of the ice-box for the last time, was +piteous beyond telling. Those sharp, strong teeth that once could bite +and grind through anything could do nothing with it now. To lick it +sadly with tired lips, in a sort of hopeless way, was all that was left; +and there was really a look in his face as though he accepted this +mortal defeat, as he lay down, evidently exhausted with his exertions, +on a bank nearby. But once more his spirit seemed to revive, and he +scrambled to his legs again and wearily crawled to the back of the +house, where the beautiful grandmother loves to sit and look over the +glittering salt-marsh in the summer afternoons. + + * * * * * + +Of course, he knew that she was there. She had been his best friend in +this strange world. His last effort was naturally to be near her again. +Almost he reached that kind cave of her skirts. Only another yard or two +and he had been there. But the energy that had seemed irrepressible and +everlasting had come to its end, and the little body had to give in at +last, and lie down wearily once more with no life left but the love in +its fading eyes. + +There are some, I suppose, who may wonder how one can write about the +death of a mere dog like this; and cannot understand how the death of a +little terrier can make the world seem a lonelier place. But there are +others, I know, who will scarce need telling, men and women with little +ghosts of their own haunting their moonlit gardens; strange, appealing, +faithful companions, kind little friendly beings that journeyed with +them awhile the pilgrimage of the soul. + +I often wonder if Teddy misses his little busy playfellow and disciple +as we do; if, perhaps, as he barks over the marsh of a morning, he is +sending him a message. He goes about the place with nonchalant greatness +as of old, and the Maltese cats still rub their sinuous smoke-grey +bodies to and fro beneath his jaws at evening. There is no sign of +sorrow upon him. But he is old and very wise, and keeps strange +knowledge to himself. So, who can say? + + + + +XVI + +THE ENGLISH COUNTRYSIDE + + +For the genuine lover of nature, as distinct from the connoisseur of +dainty or spectacular "scenery," nature has always and everywhere some +charm or satisfaction. He will find it no less--some say more--in winter +than in summer, and I have little doubt that the great Alkali Desert is +not entirely without its enthusiasts. The nature among which we spent +our childhood is apt to have a lasting hold on us, in defiance of +showier competition, and I suppose there is no land with soul so dead +that it does not boast itself the fairest under heaven. + +I am writing this surrounded by a natural scene which I would not +exchange for the Swiss lakes, yet I presume it is undeniable that +Switzerland has a more universal reputation for natural beauty than +Connecticut. It is, as we say, one of the show places of the earth. So +Niagara Falls, the Grand Cañon, the Rockies, and California generally +lord it over America. Italy has such a reputation for beauty that it is +almost unfair to expect her to live up to it. I once ventured to say +that the Alps must be greasy with being climbed, and it says much for +such stock pieces in nature's repertoire, that, in spite of all the wear +and tear of sentimental travellers, the mock-admiration of generations, +the batteries of amateur cameras, the Riviera, the English lakes, the +Welsh mountains, the Highlands of Scotland, and other tourist-trodden +classics of the picturesque, still remain haunts of beauty and joys +forever. God's masterpieces do not easily wear out. + +Every country does something supremely well, and England may be said to +have a patent for a certain kind of scenery which Americans are the +first to admire. English scenery has no more passionate pilgrim than the +traveller from the United States, as the visitors' books of its various +show-places voluminously attest. Perhaps it is not difficult, when one +has lived in both countries, to understand why. + +While America, apart from its impressive natural splendours, is rich +also in idyllic and pastoral landscape, it has, as yet, but little +"countryside." I say, as yet, because "the countryside," I think I am +right in feeling, is not entirely a thing of nature's making, but +rather a collaboration resulting from nature and man living so long in +partnership together. In England, with which the word is peculiarly, if +not exclusively, associated, God is not entirely to be credited with +making the country. Man has for generations also done his share. + +It is perhaps not without significance that the word "countryside" +was not to be found in Webster's dictionary, till a recent edition. +Originally, doubtless, it was used with reference to those rural +districts in the vicinity of a town; as one might say the country side +of the town. Not wild or solitary nature was meant, but nature +humanized, made companionable by the presence and occupations of man; a +nature which had made the winding highway, the farm, and the pasture, +even the hamlet, with its church tower and its ancient inn, one with +herself. + +The American, speeding up to London from his landing either at Liverpool +or Southampton, always exclaims on the gardenlike aspect, the deep, rich +greenness of the landscape. It is not so much the specific evidences of +cultivation, though those, of course, are plentifully present, but a +general air of ripeness and order. Even the land not visible under +cultivation suggests immemorial care and fertility. We feel that this +land has been fought over and ploughed over, nibbled over by sheep, sown +and reaped, planted and drained, walked over, hunted over, and very much +beloved, for centuries. It is not fanciful to see in it a land to +which its people have been stubbornly and tenderly devoted--still +"Shakespeare's England," still his favoured "isle set in the silver +sea." + +As seen from the railway-carriage window, one is struck, too, by the +comparative tidiness of the English landscape. There are few loose ends, +and the outskirts of villages are not those distressing dump-heaps +which they too often are in America. Yet there is no excessive air of +trimness. The order and grooming seem a part of nature's processes. +There is, too, a casual charm about the villages themselves, the +graceful, accidental grouping of houses and gardens, which suggests +growth rather than premeditation. The general harmony does not preclude, +but rather comes of, the greatest variety of individual character. + +Herein the English village strikingly differs from the typical New +England village, where the charm comes of a prim uniformity, and +individuality is made to give place to a general parking of lawns and +shade-trees in rectangular blocks and avenues. A New England village +suggests some large institution disposed in separate uniform buildings, +placed on one level carpet of green, each with a definite number of +trees, and the very sunlight portioned out into gleaming allotments. +The effect gained is for me one of great charm--the charm of a vivid, +exquisitely ordered, green silence, with a touch of monastic, or +Quakerish, decorum. I would not have it otherwise, and I speak of it +only to suggest by contrast the different, desultory charm of an old +English village, where beauty has not been so much planned, as has just +"occurred." + +Of course, this is the natural result of the long occupation of the +land. Each century in succession has had a hand in shaping the +countryside to its present aspect, and English history is literally a +living visible part of English scenery. Here the thirteenth century has +left a church, here the fourteenth a castle, here the sixteenth, with +its suppression of the monasteries, a ruined abbey. Here is an inn where +Chaucer's pilgrims stopped on the way to Canterbury. Here, in a field +covered over by a cow-shed, is a piece of tessellated pavement which was +once the floor of an old country house occupied by one of Caesar's +generals. + +Those strange grassy mounds breaking the soft sky-line of the rolling +South Downs are the tombs of Saxon chieftains, that rubble of stones at +the top of yonder hill was once a British camp, and those curious ridges +terracing yonder green slope mark the trenches of some prehistoric +battlefield. All these in the process of time have become part and +parcel of the English countryside, as necessary to its "English" +character as its trees and its wild flowers. + +How much, too, the English countryside owes for its beauty to the many +old manor-houses, gabled and moated, with their quaint, mossy-walled +gardens and great forestlike parks. Whatever we may think of the English +territorial system as economics, its service to English scenery has been +incalculable. Without English traditionalism we should hardly have had +the English countryside. + +The conservation of great estates, entailing a certain conservatism in +the treatment of farm lands from generation to generation, and the +upholding, too, of game-preserves, however obnoxious to the land +reformer, have been all to the good of the nature-lover. We owe no +little of the beauty of the English woodland to the English pheasant; +and with the coming of land nationalization we may expect to see +considerable changes in the English countryside. Meanwhile, in spite of, +or perhaps because of, the feudalistic character of English landlordism, +the Englishman enjoys a right of walking over his native land of which +no capitalist can rob him. Hence results another charming feature of the +English countryside--the footpaths you see everywhere winding over hill +and dale, through field and coppice. The ancient rights of these are +safeguarded to the people forever by statute no wealth can defy; and, +let any _nouveau riche_ of a landlord try to close one of them, and +he has to reckon with one of the pluckiest and most persistent +organizations of English John Hampdens, the society that makes the +protection of these traditional pathways its particular care. So the +rich man cannot lock up his trees and his woodland glades all for +himself, but is compelled to share them to the extent of allowing the +poorest pedestrian to walk through them--which is about all the rich man +can do with them himself. + +These footpaths, in conjunction with English lanes, have made the charm +of walking tours in England proverbial. Certain counties particularly +pride themselves on their lands. Surrey and Devonshire are the great +rivals in this respect. We say "Surrey lanes" or "Devonshire lanes," +as we speak of "Italian skies" or "Southern hospitality." Other +counties--Warwickshire, for example--doubtless have lanes no less +lovely, but Surrey and Devonshire have, so to say, got the decision; +and, if an American traveller wants to see a typical English lane, he +goes to Surrey or Devonshire, just as, if he wants a typical English +pork-pie, he sends to Melton Mowbray. + +And the English lane has come honestly by its reputation. You may be +disappointed in Venice, but you will be hard to please if you are not +caught by the spell of an English lane. Of course, you must not expect +to feel that spell if you tear through it in a motor-car. It was made +for the loiterer, as its whimsical twists and turns plainly show. If you +are in a hurry, you had better keep to the king's highway, stretching +swift and white on the king's business. The English lane was made for +the leisurely meandering of cows to and from pasture, for the dreamy +snail-pace of time-forgetting lovers, for children gathering primroses +or wild strawberries, or for the knap-sacked wayfarer to whom time and +space are no objects, whose destination is anywhere and nowhere, whose +only clocks are the rising sun and the evening star, and to whom the way +means more than the goal. + +I should not have spoken of it as "made," for, when it is most +characteristic, an English lane has no suggestion of ever having been +man-made like other roads. It seems as much a natural feature as the +woods or meadows through which it passes; and sometimes, as in Surrey, +when it runs between high banks, tunnelling its way under green boughs, +it seems more like an old river-bed than a road, whose sides nature has +tapestried with ferns and flowers. Of all roads in the world it is the +dreamer's road, luring on the wayfarer with perpetual romantic promise +and surprise, winding on and on, one can well believe, into the very +heart of fairy-land. Everything beautiful seems to be waiting for us +somewhere in the turnings of an English lane. + +Had I sat down to write of the English countryside two years ago, I +should have done so with a certain amount of cautious skepticism. I +should have said to myself: "You have not visited England for over ten +years. Are you quite sure that your impressions of its natural beauties +are not the rose-coloured exaggerations of memory? Are not time and +distance lending their proverbial enchantment?" In fact, as I set sail +to revisit England, the spring before last, it was in some such mood of +anticipatory disillusion. + +After all, I had said to myself, is not the English countryside the work +of the English poets--the English spring, the English wild flowers, the +English lark, the English nightingale, and so forth? That longing of +Browning expressed in the lines, + + O to be in England + Now that April's there! + +was, after all, the cry of a homesick versifier, thinking "Home +Thoughts, from Abroad"; and are Herrick and Wordsworth quite to be +trusted on the subject of daffodils? + +Well, I am glad to have to own that my revisiting my native land +resulted in an agreeable disappointment. With a critical American eye, +jealously on my guard against sentimental superstition, I surveyed the +English landscape and examined its various vaunted beauties and +fascinations, as though making their acquaintance for the first time. +No, my youthful raptures had not been at fault, and the poets were once +more justified. The poets are seldom far wrong. If they see anything, it +is usually there. If we cannot see it, too, it is the fault of our eyes. + +Take the English hawthorn, for instance. As its fragrance is wafted to +you from the bushes where it hangs like the fairest of white linen, you +will hardly, I think, quarrel with its praises. Yet, though it is, if I +am not mistaken, of rare occurrence in America, it is not absolutely +necessary to go to England for the hawthorn. Any one who cares to go +a-Maying along the banks of the Hudson, in the neighbourhood of +Peekskill, will find it there. But for the primrose and the cowslip you +must cross the sea; and, if you come upon such a wood as I strayed into, +my last visit, you will count it worth the trip. It was literally +carpeted with clumps of primroses and violets (violets that smell, too) +so thickly massed together in the mossy turf that there was scarcely +room to tread. There are no words rich or abundant enough to suggest the +sense of innocent luxury brought one by such a natural Persian carpet of +soft gold and dewy purple, at once so gorgeous and yet so gentle. In all +this lavish loveliness of English wild flowers there is, indeed, a +peculiar tenderness. The innocence of children seems to be in them, and +the tenderness of lovers. + + A lover would not tread + A cowslip on the head-- + +How appropriately such lines come to mind as one carefully picks one's +way down a green hillside yellow with cowslips, and breathing perhaps +the most delicate of all flowery fragrances. Yet again, as we pass into +another stretch of woodland, another profusion and another fragrance +await us, the winey perfume and the spectral blue sheen of the wild +hyacinth. As one comes upon stretches of these hyacinths in the woods, +they seem at first glance like pools of blue water or fallen pieces of +the sky. Here, for once, the poets are left behind, and, of them all, +Shakespeare and Milton alone have come near to suggesting the +loveliness, at once so spiritual and so warmly and sweetly of the earth, +that belongs to English wild flowers. I know not if Sheffield steel +still keeps its position among the eternal verities, but in an age when +so many of one's cherished beliefs are threatened with the scrap-heap, +I count it of no small importance to be able to retain one's faith in +the English lark and English wild flowers. + +But the English countryside is not all greenness and softness, blossomy +lanes, moated granges, and idyllic villages. It by no means always +suggests the gardener, the farmer, or the gamekeeper. It is rich, too, +in wildness and solitude, in melancholy fens and lonely moorlands. To +the American accustomed to the vast areas of his own enormous continent, +it would come as a surprise to realize that a land far smaller than many +of his States can in certain places give one so profound a sense of the +wilderness. Yet I doubt if a man could feel lonelier anywhere in the +world than on a Yorkshire moor or on Salisbury Plain. + +After all, we are apt to forget that, even on the largest continent, we +can see only a limited portion of the earth at once. When one is in the +middle of Lake Erie we are as much out of sight of land, as impressed by +the illusion of boundless water, as if we were in the middle of the +Pacific Ocean. So, on Salisbury Plain, with nothing but rolling billows +of close-cropped turf, springy and noiseless to the tread, as far as the +eye can see, one feels as alone with the universe as in the middle of +some Asian desert. In addition to the actual loneliness of the scene, +and a silence broken only by the occasional tinkle of sheep-bells, as a +flock moves like a fleecy cloud across the grass, is an imaginative +loneliness induced by the overwhelming sense of boundless unrecorded +time, the "dim-grey-grown ages," of which the mysterious boulders of +Stonehenge are the voiceless witnesses. To experience this feeling to +the full one should come upon an old Roman road in the twilight, +grass-grown, choked with underbrush, but still running straight and +clearly defined as when it shook to the tread of Roman legions. It is +eery to follow one of these haunted roads, filled with the far-off +thoughts and fancies it naturally evokes, and then suddenly to come out +again into the world of today, as it joins the highway once more, and +the lights of a wayside inn welcome us back to humanity, with perhaps a +touring car standing at the door. + +One need hardly say that the English wayside inn is as much a feature of +the English countryside as the English hawthorn. Its praises have been +the theme of essayists and poets for generations, and at its best there +is a cosiness and cheer about it which warm the heart, as its quaintness +and savour of past days keep alive the sense of romantic travel. There +the spirit of ancient hospitality still survives, and, though the +motor-car has replaced the stage-coach, that is, after all, but a +detail, and the old, low-ceilinged rooms, the bay windows with their +leaded panes, the tap-room with its shining vessels, the great kitchen, +the solid English fare, the brass candlesticks at bedtime, and the +lavendered sheets, still preserve the atmosphere of a novel by Fielding +or an essay by Addison. + +There still, as in Shakespeare's day, one can take one's ease at one's +inn, as perhaps in the hostelries of no other land. It is the frequency +and excellence of these English inns that make it charmingly possible to +see England, as it is best seen, on foot or on a bicycle. It is not a +country of isolated wonders, with long stretches of mere road between. +Every mile counts for something. But, if the luxury of walking it with +stick and knapsack is denied us, and we must needs see it by motor-car, +we cannot fail to make one observation, that of the surprising variety +of natural scenery packed in so small a space. Between Land's End and +the Tweed the eye and the imagination have encountered every form of the +picturesque. In an area some three hundred and fifty miles long by three +hundred broad are contained the ruggedness of Cornwall, the idyllic +softness of Devon, the dreamy solitudes of the South Downs, with their +billowy, chalky contours, the agricultural fertility of Kent and +Middlesex, the romantic woodlands and hilly pastures of Surrey, the +melancholy fens of Lincolnshire, the broad, bosky levels of the +midlands, the sudden wildness of Wales, with her mountains and glens, +Yorkshire, with its grim, heather-clad moors, Westmoreland, with its +fells and Wordsworthian "Lakes"; every note in the gamut of natural +beauty has been struck, from honeysuckle prettiness to savage grandeur. + +Yet, although all these contrasts are included in the English scene, it +is not of solitude or grandeur that we think when we speak of the +English countryside. They are the exceptions to the rule of a gentler, +more humanized natural beauty, in which the village church and the +ivy-clad ruin play their part. Perhaps some such formula as this would +represent the typical scene that springs to the mind's eye with the +phrase "the English countryside": a village green, with some geese +stringing out across it. A straggle of quaint thatched cottages, roses +climbing about the windows, and in front little, carefully kept gardens, +with hollyhocks standing in rows, stocks and sweet-williams and such +old-fashioned flowers. At one end of the village, rising out of a clump +of yews, the mouldering church-tower, with mossy gravestones on one side +and a trim rectory on the other. At the other end of the village a +gabled inn, with a great stable-yard, busy with horses and waggons. +Above the village, the slopes of gently rising pastures, intersected +with footpaths and shadowed with woodlands. A little way out of the +village, an old mill with a lilied mill-pond, a great, dripping +water-wheel, and the murmur of the escaping stream. And winding on +into the green, sun-steeped distance, the blossom-hung English lanes. + + + + +XVII + +LONDON--CHANGING AND UNCHANGING + + +I find it an unexpectedly strange experience to be in London again +after ten years in New York. I had no idea it could be so strange. Of +course, there are men to whom one great city is as another--commercial +travellers, impresarios, globe-trotting millionaires. Being none of +these, I am not as much at home in St. Petersburg as in Buda-Pesth, in +Berlin as in Paris, and, while once I might have envied such plastic +cosmopolitanism, I am realizing, this last day or two in London, that, +were such an accomplishment mine, it had been impossible for me to feel +as deeply as I do my brief reincarnation into a city and a country with +which I was once so intimate, and which now seems so romantically +strange, while remaining so poignantly familiar. The man who is at home +everywhere has nowhere any home. My home was once this London--this +England--in which I am writing; but nothing so much as being in London +again could make me realize that my home now is New York, and how long +and how instinctively, without knowing it, I have been an American. It +is not indeed that I love New York and America more than I love London +and England. In fact, London has never seemed so wonderful to me in the +past as she has seemed during these days of my wistful momentary return +to her strange great heart. But this very freshness of her marvel to one +who once deemed that he knew her so well proves but the completeness of +my spiritual acclimatization into another land. I seem to be seeing her +face, hearing her voice, for the first time; while, all the while, my +heart is full with unforgotten memories, and my eyes have scarce the +hardihood to gaze with the decorum befitting the public streets on many +a landmark of vanished hours. To find London almost as new and strange +to me as New York once seemed when I first sighted her soaring morning +towers, and yet to know her for an enchanted Ghost-Land; to be able to +find my way through her streets--in spite of the new Kingsway and +Aldwych!--with closed eyes, and yet to see her, it almost seems, for the +first time: surely it is a curious, almost uncanny, experience. + +Do I find London changed?--I am asked. I have been so busy in +rediscovering what I had half-forgotten, in finding engaging novelties +in things anciently familiar, that the question is one which I feel +hardly competent to answer. For instance, I had all but forgotten that +there was so noble a thing in the world as an old-fashioned English +pork-pie. Yesterday I saw one in a window, with a thrill of recognition, +that made a friend with whom I was walking think for a moment that I +had seen a ghost. He knows nothing of the human heart who cannot realize +how tremulous with ancient heart-break may seem an old-fashioned English +pork-pie--after ten years in America. + +And, again, how curiously novel and charming seemed the soft and +courteous English voices--with or without aitches--all about one in +the streets and in the shops--I had almost said the "stores." I am +enamoured of the American accent, these many years, and--the calumny of +superficial observation to the contrary--I will maintain, so far as my +own experience goes, that there is as much courtesy broadcast in America +as in any land; more, I am inclined to think than in France. Yet, for +all that, that something or other in the English voice which I had heard +long since and lost awhile smote me with a peculiar pleasure, and, +though I like the comradely American "Cap" or "Professor," and am hoping +soon to hear it again--yet the novelty of being addressed once more as +"Sir" has had, I must own, a certain antiquarian charm. + +Wandering in a quaint by-street near my hotel, and reading the names and +signs on one or two of the neat old-world "places of business," I came +on the word "sweep." I believe it was on a brass-plate. For a moment, I +wondered what it meant; and then I realized, with a great gratitude, +that London had not changed so much, after all, since the days of +Charles Lamb. As I emerged into a broader thoroughfare, my ears were +smitten with the sound of minstrelsy. It is true that the tune was +changed. It was unmistakably rag-time. Yet, there was the old +piano-organ, and in a broad circle of spectators, suspended awhile from +their various wayfaring, a young man in tennis flannels was performing a +spirited Apache dance with a quite comely short-skirted young woman, who +rightly enough felt that she had no need to be ashamed of her legs. +Across the extemporized stage, every now and then, taxicabs tooted +cautiously, longing in their hearts to stay; and once a motor +coal-waggon, like a sort of amateur freight-train, thundered across; but +not even these could break the spell that held that ring of enchanted +loiterers, from which presently the pennies fell like rain--the eternal +spell--still operating, I was glad to see, under the protection of the +only human police in the world--of the strolling player in London town. +Just before the players turned to seek fresh squares and alleys new, I +noticed on the edge of the crowd what seemed, in the gathering twilight, +to be a group of uplifted spears. Spears or halberds, were they? It was +a little company of the ancient brotherhood of lamp-lighters, seduced, +like the rest of us, from the strict pursuance of duty by the vagabond +music. + +To me this thought is full of reassurance, whatever be the murmurs of +change: London has still her sweeps, her strolling minstrels, and her +lamp-lighters. + +Of course, I missed at once the old busses, yet there are far more +horses left than I had dared to hope, and the hansom is far from +extinct. In fact, there seems to be some promise of its renaissance, and +even yet, in the words of the ancient bard, despite the competition of +taxis-- + + Like dragon-flies, + The hansoms hover + With jewelled eyes, + To catch the lover. + +Further,--the quietude of the Temple remains undisturbed, the lawns of +Gray's Inn are green as of old, the Elizabethanism of Staple Inn is +unchanged, about the cornices of the British Museum the pigeons still +flutter and coo, and the old clocks chime sweetly as of old from their +mysterious stations aloft somewhere in the morning and the evening sky. + +Changes, of course, there are. It is easier to telephone in London today +than it was ten years ago--almost as easy as in some little provincial +town in Connecticut. Various minor human conveniences have been +improved. The electric lighting is better. Some of the elevators--I +mean the "lifts"--almost remind one of New York. The problem of "rapid +transit" has been simplified. All which things, however, have nothing to +do with national characteristics, but are now the common property of the +civilized, or rather, I should say, the commercialized, world, and are +probably to be found no less in full swing in Timbuctoo. No one--save, +maybe, the citizens of some small imitative nation--confounds these +things with change, or calls them "progress." The soul of a great old +nation adopts all such contrivances as in the past it has adopted new +weapons, or new modes of conveyance. Only a Hottentot or a Cook's +Tourist can consider such superficial developments as evidences of +"change." + +There are, of course, some new theatres--though I have heard of no new +great actor or actress. The old "favourites" still seem to dominate the +play-bills, as they did ten years ago. There is Mr. Hammerstein's Opera +House in the Kingsway. I looked upon it with pathos. Yet, surely, it is +a monument not so much of changing London as of that London which sees +no necessity of change. + +In regard to the great new roadways, Kingsway, Aldwych, and the +broadening of the Strand, I have been grateful for the temper which +seems to have presided over their making--a temper combining the +necessary readjustment of past and present, with a spirit of sensitive +conservation for those buildings which more and more England will +realize as having a lasting value for her spirit. + +So far as I have observed, London has been guilty of no such vandalism +as is responsible for the new Boulevard Raspail in Paris, and similar +heartless destructiveness, in a city which belongs less to France than +to the human soul. Such cities as London and Paris are among the eternal +spiritual possessions of mankind. If only those temporarily in charge of +them could be forced somehow to remember that, when their brief mayoral, +or otherwise official, lives are past, there will be found those who +will need to look upon what they have destroyed, and who will curse them +in their graves. + +Putting aside such merely superficial "changes" as new streets, new +theatres, and new conveniences, there does seem to me one change of a +far higher importance for which I have no direct evidence, and which I +can only hint at, even to myself, as "something in the air." It is, of +course, nothing new either to London or to England. It is rather the +reawakening of an old temper to which England's history has so often and +so momentously given expression. I seem to find it in a new alertness in +the way men and women walk and talk in the streets, a braced-up +expectancy and readiness for some approaching development in England's +destiny, a new quickening of that old indomitable spirit that has faced +not merely external dangers, but grappled with and resolved her own +internal problems. London seems to me like a city that has heard a voice +crying "Arise, thou that sleepest!" and is answering to the cry with +girt loins and sloth-purged heart and blithe readiness for some new +unknown summons of a future that can but develop the glory of her past. + +England seems to be no more sleepily resting on her laurels, as she was +some twenty years ago. Nor does she seem, on the other hand, to show the +least anxiety that she could ever lose them. She is merely realizing +that the time is at hand when she is to win others--that one more of +those many re-births of England, so to speak, out of her own womb, +approaches, and that once more she is about to prove herself eternally +young. + +New countries are apt to speak of old countries as though they are +dying, merely because they have lived so long. Yet there is a longevity +which is one of the surest evidences of youth. Such I seem to feel once +more is England's--as from my window I watch the same old English May +weather: the falling rain and the rich gloom, within which moves always, +shouldering the darkest hour, an oceanic radiance, a deathless principle +of celestial fire. + +LONDON, May, 1913. + + + + +XVIII + +THE HAUNTED RESTAURANT + + +Were one to tell the proprietors of the very prosperous and flamboyant +restaurant of which I am thinking that it is haunted--yea, that ghosts +sit at its well appointed tables, and lost voices laugh and wail and +sing low to themselves through its halls--they would probably take one +for a lunatic--a servant of the moon. + +Certainly, to all appearance, few places would seem less to suggest the +word "haunted" than that restaurant, as one comes upon it, in one of the +busiest of London thoroughfares, spreading as it does for blocks around, +like a conflagration, the festive glare of its electrically emblazoned +façade. Yet no ruined mansion, with the moon shining in through its +shattered roof, the owl nesting in its banqueting hall, and the snake +gliding through its bed chambers, was ever more peopled with phantoms +than this radiant palace of prandial gaiety, apparently filled with the +festive murmur of happy diners, the jocund strains of its vigorous +orchestra, the subdued clash of knives and forks and delicate dishes, +the rustle of women's gowns and the fairy music of women's voices. For +me its portico, flaming like a vortex of dizzy engulfing light, upon +which, as upon a swift current, gay men and women, alighting from motor +and hansom, are swept inward to glittering tables of snow-white napery, +fair with flowers--for me the mouth of the grave is not less dread, +and the walls of a sepulchre are not so painted with dead faces +or so inscribed with elegiac memories. I could spend a night in +Père-la-Chaise, and still be less aware of the presence of the dead +than I was a short time ago, when, greatly daring, I crossed with a +shudder that once so familiar threshold. + +It was twelve years since I had been in London, so I felt no little of a +ghost myself, and I knew too well that it would be vain to look for the +old faces. Yes, gone was the huge good-natured commissionaire, who so +often in the past, on my arrival in company with some human flower, had +flung open the apron of our cab with such reverential alacrity, and on +our departure had so gently tucked in the petals of her skirts, smiling +the while a respectfully knowing benediction on the prospective +continuance of our evening's adventure. Another stood in his place, and +watched my lonely arrival with careless indifference. Glancing through +the window of the treasurer's office to the right of the hall, I could +see that an unfamiliar figure sat at the desk, where in the past so many +a cheque had been cashed for me with eager _bonhomie_. Now I reflected +that considerable identification would be necessary for that once +light-hearted transaction. It is true that I was welcomed with courtesy +by a bowing majordomo, but alas, my welcome was that of a stranger; and +when I mounted the ornate, marble-walled staircase leading to the +gallery where I had always preferred to sit, I realized that my hat and +cane must pass into alien keeping, and that no waiter's face would light +up as he saw me threading my way to the sacred table, withdrawn in a +nook of the balcony, where one could see and hear all, participate in +the general human stir and atmosphere, and yet remain apart. + +Ah! no; for the friendly Cockney that once greeted me with an enfolding +paternal kindness was substituted broken English of a less companionable +accent. A polite young Greek it was who stood waiting respectfully for +my order, knowing nothing of all it meant for me--_me_--to be seated at +that table again--whereas, had he been one of half a dozen of the +waiters of yester-year, he would have known almost as much as I of the +"secret memoirs" of that historic table. + +In ordering my meal I made no attempt at sentiment, for my mood went far +deeper than sentiment. Indeed, though, every second of the time, I was +living so vividly, so cruelly, in the past, I made one heartbroken +acknowledgment of the present by beginning with the anachronism of a +dry Martini cocktail, which, twelve years previous, was unknown and +unattainable in that haunted gallery. That cocktail was a sort of +desperate epitaph. It meant that I was alone--alone with my ghosts. Yet +it had a certain resurrecting influence, and as I sat there proceeding +dreamily with my meal, one face and another would flash before me, and +memory after memory re-enact itself in the theatre of my fancy. So +much in my actual surroundings brought back the past with an aching +distinctness--particularly the entrance of two charming young people, +making rainbows all about them, as, ushered by a smiling waiter, who was +evidently no stranger to their felicity, they seated themselves at a +neighbouring table with a happy sigh, and neglected the menu for a +moment or two while they gazed, rapt and lost, into each other's eyes. +How well I knew it all; how easily I could have taken the young man's +place, and played the part for which this evening he was so fortunately +cast! As I looked at them, I instinctively summoned to my side the +radiant shade of Aurea, for indeed she had seemed made of gold--gold and +water lilies. And, as of old, when I had called to her, she came swiftly +with a luxurious rustle of fragrant skirts, like the sound of the west +wind among the summer trees, or the swish and sway of the foam about the +feet of Aphrodite. There she sat facing me once more, "a feasting +presence made of light"--her hair like a golden wheat sheaf, her +eyes like blue flowers amid the wheat, and her bosom, by no means +parsimoniously concealed, literally suggesting that the loveliness of +all the water lilies in the world was amassed there within her corset +as in some precious casket. Ours was not one of the great tragic loves, +but I know I shall think of Aurea's bosom on my death-bed. At her coming +I had ordered champagne--we always drank champagne together, because, as +we said, it matched so well with her hair--champagne of a no longer +fashionable brand. The waiter seemed a little surprised to hear it asked +for, but it had been the only _chic_ brand in 19--. + +"Look at those two yonder," I said presently, after we had drunk to +each other, smiling long into each other's eyes over the brims of our +glasses. "You and I were once as they. It is their first wonderful +dinner together. Watch them--the poor darlings; it is enough to break +one's heart." + +"Do you remember ours?" asked Aurea quite needlessly. + +"I wonder what else I was thinking of--dear idiot!" said I, with tender +elegance, as in the old days. + +As I said before, Aurea and I had not been tragic in our love. It was +more a matter of life--than death; warm, pagan, light-hearted life. Ours +was perhaps that most satisfactory of relationships between men and +women, which contrives to enjoy the happiness, the fun, even the +ecstasy, of loving, while evading its heartache. It was, I suppose, what +one would call a healthy physical enchantment, with lots of tenderness +and kindness in it, but no possibility of hurt to each other. There was +nothing Aurea would not have done for me, or I for Aurea, except--marry +each other; and, as a matter of fact, there were certain difficulties on +both sides in the way of our doing that, difficulties, however, which I +am sure neither of us regretted. + +Yes, Aurea and I understood thoroughly what was going on in those young +hearts, as we watched them, our eyes starry with remembrance. Who better +than we should know that hush and wonder, that sense of enchanted +intimacy, which belongs of all moments perhaps in the progress of a +passion to that moment when two standing tiptoe on the brink of golden +surrender, sit down to their first ambrosial meal together--delicious +adventure!--with all the world to watch them, if it choose, and yet +aloof in a magic loneliness, as of youthful divinities wrapped in a +roseate cloud! Hours of divine expectancy, at once promise and +fulfilment. Happy were it for you, lovers, could you thus sit forever, +nor pass beyond this moment, touched by some immortalizing wand as those +lovers on the Grecian Urn: + + Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss. + Though winning near the goal--yet, do not grieve; + She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss. + Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair! + +"See," said Aurea presently, "they are getting ready to go. The waiter +has brought the bill, and is looking away, suddenly lost in profound +meditation. Let us see how he pays the bill. I am sure she is anxious." + +"Your old test!" said I. "Do you remember?" + +"Yes! And it's one that never fails," said Aurea with decision. "When a +woman goes out to dinner with a man for the first time, he little knows +how much is going to depend on his way of paying the bill. If, as with +some men one meets, he studies it through a microscope and adds it +up with anxious brow--meanwhile quite evidently forgetting your +presence--how your heart sinks, sinks and hardens--but you are glad all +the same, and next day you congratulate yourself on your narrow escape!" + +"Was I like that?" said I. + +"Did we escape?" asked Aurea. Then she added, touching my arm as with a +touch of honeyed fire: "O I'm so glad! He did it delightfully--quite _en +prince_. Just the right nonchalance--and perhaps, poor dear, he's as +poor--" + +"As we often were," I added. + +And then through the corners of our eyes we saw the young lovers rise +from the table, and the man enfold his treasure in her opera cloak, O so +reverently, O so tenderly, as though he were wrapping up some holy +flower. And O those deep eyes she gave him, half turning her head as he +did so! + +"That look," whispered Aurea, quoting Tennyson, "'had been a clinging +kiss but for the street.'" + +Then suddenly they were gone, caught up like Enoch, into heaven--some +little heaven, maybe, like one that Aurea and I remember, high up under +the ancient London roofs. + +But, with their going, alas, Aurea had vanished too, and I was left +alone with my Greek waiter, who was asking me what cheese I would +prefer. + +With the coming of coffee and cognac, I lit my cigar and settled down to +deliberate reverie, as an opium smoker gives himself up to his dream. I +savoured the bitter-sweetness of my memories; I took a strange pleasure +in stimulating the ache of my heart with vividly recalled pictures of +innumerable dead hours. I systematically passed from table to table all +around that spacious peristyle. There was scarcely one at which I +had not sat with some vanished companion in those years of ardent, +irresponsible living which could never come again. Not always a woman +had been the companion whose form I thus conjured out of the past, too +often out of the grave; for the noble friendship of youth haunted those +tables as well, with its generous starry-eyed enthusiasms and passionate +loyalties. Poets of whom but their songs remain, themselves by tragic +pathways descended into the hollow land, had read their verses to me +there, still glittering with the dawn dew of their creation, as we sat +together over the wine and talked of the only matters then--and perhaps +even yet--worth talking of: love and literature. Of these but one can +still be met in London streets, but all now wear crowns of varying +brightness-- + + Where the oldest bard is as the young, + And the pipe is ever dropping honey, + And the lyre's strings are ever strung. + +Dear boon fellows of life as well as literature, how often have we risen +from those tables, to pursue together the not too swiftly flying +petticoat, through the terrestrial firmament of shining streets, aglow +with the midnight sun of pleasure, a-dazzle with eyes brighter far than +the city lamps--passionate pilgrims of the morning star! Ah! we go on +such quests no more--"another race hath been and other palms are won." + +No, not always women--but naturally women nearly always, for it was the +time of rosebuds, and we were wisely gathering them while we might-- + + Through the many to the one-- + O so many! + Kissing all and missing none, + Loving any. + +Every man who has lived a life worthy the name of living has his own +private dream of fair women, the memory of whom is as a provision laid +up against the lean years that must come at last, however long they may +be postponed by some special grace of the gods, which is, it is good to +remember, granted to some--the years when one has reluctantly to +accept that the lovely game is almost, if not quite at an end, and to +watch the bloom and abundance of fragrant young creatures pass us, +unregarding, by. And, indeed, it may happen that a man who has won what +is for him the fairest of all fair faces, and has it still by his side, +may enter sometimes, without disloyalty, that secret gallery of those +other fair faces that were his before hers, in whom they are all summed +up and surpassed, had dawned upon his life. We shall hardly be loyal to +the present if we are coldly disloyal to the past. In the lover's +calendar, while there is but one Madonna, there must still be minor +saints, to whom it is meet, at certain times and seasons, to offer +retrospective candles--saints that, after the manner of many saints, +were once such charming sinners for our sakes, that utter forgetfulness +of them were an impious boorishness surely unacceptable to the most +jealous of Madonnas. Public worship of them is not, of course, +desirable, but occasional private celebrations are surely more than +permissible--such celebrations as that "night of memory and tears" which +Landor consecrated to Rose Aylmer, or that song which Thackeray +consecrated to certain loves of the long ago-- + + Gillian's dead, God rest her bier, + How I loved her twenty years syne! + Marian's married, but I sit here, + Alone and merry at forty year, + Dipping my nose in the Gascon wine. + +So I, seated in my haunted restaurant, brought the burnt offerings of +several cigars, and poured out various libations to my own private +Gillians and Marians, and in fancy sat and looked into Angelica's eyes +at this table, and caressed Myrtle's opaled hand at that, and read +Sylvia a poem I had just written for her at still another. "Whose names +are five sweet symphonies," wrote Rossetti. Yes, symphonies, indeed, in +the ears of memory are the names of the lightest loves that flittered +butterfly-like across our path in the golden summer of our lives, +each name calling up its human counterpart, with her own endearing +personality distinguishing her from all other girls, her way of +smiling, her way of talking, her way of being serious, all the little +originalities on which she prided herself, her so solemnly held +differentia of tastes and manners--all, in a word, that made you realize +that you were dining with Corinna and not with Chloe. What a service of +contrast each--all unwittingly, need one say--did the other, just in the +same fashion as contrasting colours accentuate the special quality one +of the other. To have dined last night with Amaryllis, with her Titian +red hair and green eyes, her tropic languor and honey-drowsy ways, +was to feel all the keener zest in the presence of Callithoe on +the following evening, with her delicate soul-lit face, and eager +responsiveness of look and gesture--_blonde cendré_, and _fausse +maigre_--a being one of the hot noon, the other a creature of the +starlight. But I disclaim the sultanesque savour of thus writing of +these dear bearers of symphonic names. To talk of them as flowers and +fruit, as colour and perfume, as ivory and velvet, is to seem to forget +the best of them, and the best part of loving them and being loved +again; for that consisted in their comradeship, their enchanted +comradeship, the sense of shared adventure, the snatching of a fearful +joy together. For a little while we had escaped from the drab and +songless world, and, cost what it might, we were determined to take +possession, for a while at least, of that paradise which sprang into +existence at the moment when "male and female created He them." Such +divine foolishness, let discretion warn, or morality frown, or society +play the censorious hypocrite, "were wisdom in the scorn of +consequence." + +"Ah, then," says every man to himself of such hours, as I said to myself +in my haunted restaurant--"ah, then came in the sweet o' the year." + +But lovely and pleasant as were the memories over which I thus sat +musing, there was one face immeasurably beyond all others that I had +come there hoping and yet fearing to meet again, hers of whom for years +that seem past counting all the awe and wonder and loveliness of the +world have seemed but the metaphor. Endless years ago she and I had sat +at this table where I was now sitting and had risen from it with +breaking hearts, never to see each other's face, hear each other's voice +again. Voluntarily, for another's sake, we were breaking our hearts, +renouncing each other, putting from us all the rapture and religion +of our loving, dying then and there that another might live--vain +sacrifice! Once and again, long silences apart, a word or two would wing +its way across lands and seas and tell us both that we were still +under the same sky and were still what nature had made us from the +beginning--each other's. But long since that veil of darkness unpierced +of my star has fallen between us, and no longer do I hear the rustle of +her gown in the autumn woods, nor do the spring winds carry me the +sweetness of her faithful thoughts any more. So I dreamed maybe that, +after the manner of phantoms, we might meet again on the spot where we +had both died--but alas, though the wraiths of lighter loving came gaily +to my call, she of the starlit silence and the tragic eyes came not, +though I sat long awaiting her--sat on till the tables began to be +deserted, and the interregnum between dinner and after-theatre supper +had arrived. No, I began to understand that she could no longer come +to me: we must both wait till I could go to her. + +And with this thought in my mind, I set about preparing to take my leave, +but at that moment I was startled--almost superstitiously--startled by +a touch on my shoulder. I was not to leave those once familiar halls +without one recognition, after all. It was our old waiter of all +those years ago, who, with an almost paternal gladness, was telling +me how good it was to see me again, and, with consolatory mendacity, +was assuring me that I had hardly changed a bit. God bless him--he +will never know what good it did me to have his honest recognition. +The whole world was not yet quite dead and buried, after all, nor +was I quite such an unremembered ghost as I had seemed. Dear old Jim +Lewis! So some of the old guard were still on deck, after all! And, +I was thinking as I looked at him: "He, too, has looked upon her +face. He it was who poured out our wine, that last time together." +Then I had a whim. My waiter had been used to them in the old days. + +"Jim," I said, "I want you to give this half-sovereign to the bandmaster +and ask him to play Chopin's _Funeral March_. There are not many people +in the place, so perhaps he won't mind. Tell him it's for an old friend +of yours, and in memory of all the happy dinners he had here long ago." + +So to the strains of that death music, which so strangely blends the +piercing pathos of lost things with a springlike sense of resurrection, +a spheral melody of immortal promise, I passed once more through the +radiant portals of my necropolitan restaurant into the resounding +thoroughfares of still living and still loving humanity. + + + + +XIX + +THE NEW PYRAMUS AND THISBE + + +There never was a shallower or more short-sighted criticism than that +which has held that science is the enemy of romance. Ruskin, with +all the April showers of his rhetoric, discredited himself as an +authoritative thinker when he screamed his old-maidish diatribes against +that pioneer of modern romantic communication, the railroad. Just as +surely his idol Turner proved himself a romantic painter, not by his +rainbows, or his Italian sunsets, but by that picture of _Storm, Rain, +and Speed_--an old-fashioned express fighting its way through wind, +rain, and of course rainbows--in the English National Gallery. + +With all his love of that light that never was on sea or land, Turner +was yet able to see the romance of that new thing of iron and steam so +affrighting to other men of his generation. A lover of light in all its +swift prismatic changes, he was naturally a lover of speed. He realized +that speed was one of the two most romantic things in the world. The +other is immobility. At present the two extremes of romantic expression +are the Sphinx and--the automobile. Unless you can realize that an +automobile is more romantic than a stage-coach, you know nothing +about romance. Soon the automobile will have its nose put out by the +air-ship, and we shall not need to be long-lived to see the day when +we shall hear old-timers lamenting the good old easy-going past of +the seventy-miles-an-hour automobile--just as we have heard our +grand-fathers talk of postilions and the Bath "flyer." + +Romance is made of two opposites: Change, and That Which Changeth Not. +In spite of foolish sentimentalism, who needs be told that love is one +of those forces of the universe that is the same yesterday, today, and +forever--the same today as when Dido broke her heart, as when Leander +swam the Hellespont? Gravitation is not more inherent in the cosmic +scheme, nor fire nor water more unchangeable in their qualities. + +But Love, contrary to the old notion that he is unpractical, is a +business-like god, and is ever on the lookout for the latest modern +appliances that can in anyway serve his purposes. True love is far from +being old-fashioned. On the contrary, true love is always up-to-date. +True love has its telephone, its phonograph, its automobile, and soon it +will have its air-ship. In the telephone alone what a debt love owes to +its supposed enemy, modern science! One wonders how lovers in the old +days managed to live at all without the telephone. + +We often hear how our modern appliances wear upon our nerves. But think +how the lack of modern appliances must have worn upon the nerves of our +forefathers, and particularly our foremothers! Think what distance meant +in the Middle Ages, when the news of a battle took days to travel, +though carried by the swiftest horses. Horses! Think again of news being +carried by--horses! And once more think, with a prayer of gratitude to +two magicians named Edison and Bell, and with a due sense of your being +the spoiled and petted offspring of the painful ages, that should your +love be in Omaha this night and you in New York City, you can say +good-night to her through the wall of your apartment, and hear her sigh +back her good-night to you across two thousand miles of the American +flag. Or should your love be on the sea, you can interrupt her +flirtations all the way across with your persistent wireless +conversation. Contrast your luxurious communicativeness with the case of +the lovers of old-time. Say that you have just married a young woman, +and you are happy together in your castle in the heart of the forest. +Suddenly the courier of war is at your gates, and you must up and arm +and away with your men to the distant danger. You must follow the Cross +into the savage Kingdom of the Crescent. The husband must become the +crusader, and the Lord Christ alone knows when he shall look on the +child's face of his wife again. Through goblin-haunted wildernesses he +must go, through unmapped no-man's lands, and vacuum solitudes of the +world's end, and peril and pestilence meet in every form, the face of +his foe the friendliest thing in all his mysterious travel. Not a +pay-station as yet in all the wide world, and fully five hundred years +to the nearest telegraph office! + +And think of the young wife meanwhile, alone with her maids and her +tapestry in the dank isolation of her lonely, listening castle. Not a +leaf falls in the wood, but she hears it. Not a footstep snaps the +silence, but her eyes are at the sleepless slit of light which is her +window in the armoured stone of her fortified bridal tower. The only +news of her husband she can hope for in a full year or more will be +the pleasing lies of some flattering minstrel, or broken soldier, or +imaginative pilgrim. On such rumours she must feed her famishing +heart--and all the time her husband's bones may be whitening unepitaphed +outside the walls of Ascalon or Joppa. + +There is an old Danish ballad which quaintly tells the tale of such old +long-distance days, with that blending of humour and pathos that forever +goes to the heart of man. A certain Danish lord had but yesterday taken +unto himself a young wife, and on the morrow of his marriage there came +to him the summons to war. Then, as now, there was no arguing with the +trumpets of martial duty. The soldier's trumpet heeds not the soldier's +tears. The war was far away and likely to be long. Months, even years, +might go by before that Danish lord would look on the face of his bride +again. So much might happen meanwhile! A little boy, or a little girl, +might be born to the castle, and the father, fighting far away, know +nothing of the beautiful news. And there was no telephone in the castle, +and it was five hundred years to the nearest telegraph office. + +So the husband and wife agreed upon a facetious signal of their own. The +castle stood upon a ridge of hills which could be seen fifty miles away, +and on the ridge the bride promised to build a church. If the child that +was to be born proved to be a boy, the church would be builded with a +tower; if a girl, with a steeple. So the husband went his way, and three +years passed, and at length he returned with his pennons and his +men-at-arms to his own country. Scanning the horizon line, he hurried +impatiently toward the heliographic ridge. And lo! when at last it came +in sight against the rising sun, there was a new church builded stately +there--with two towers. + +So it was with the most important of all news in the Middle Ages; and +yet today, as I said, you in New York City have only to knock good-night +on your wall, to be heard by your true love in Omaha, and hear her knock +back three times the length of France; Pyramus and Thisbe--with this +difference: that the wall is no longer a barrier, but a sensitive +messenger. It has become, indeed, in the words of Demetrius in _A +Midsummer Night's Dream_, the wittiest of partitions, and the modern +Pyramus may apostrophize it in grateful earnest: + + "Thou wall, O wall, O sweet and lovely wall ... + Thanks, courteous wall. Jove shield thee well for this!" + +So at least I always feel toward the wall of my apartment every time I +call up her whom my soul loveth that dwelleth far away in Massachusetts. +She being a Capulet and I a Montague, it would go hard with us for +communication, were it not for this long-distance wall; and any one +who knows anything of love knows that the primal need of lovers is +communication. Lovers have so deep a distrust of each other's love that +they need to be assured of it from hour to hour. To the philosopher it +may well seem strange that this certitude should thus be in need of +progressive corroboration. But so it is, and the pampered modern lover +may well wonder how his great-grandfather and great-grandmother +supported the days, or even kept their love alive, on such famine +rations as a letter once a month. A letter once a month! They must have +had enormous faith in each other, those lovers of old-time, or they must +have suffered as we can hardly bear to think of--we, who write to each +other twice a day, telegraph three times, telephone six, and transmit a +phonographic record of our sighs to each other night and morn. The +telephone has made a toy of distance and made of absence, in many cases, +a sufficient presence. It is almost worth while to be apart on occasion +just for the sake of bringing each other so magically near. It is the +Arabian Nights come true. As in them, you have only to say a word, and +the jinn of the electric fire is waiting for your commands. The word +has changed. Once it was "Abracadabra." Now it is "Central." But the +miracle is just the same. + +One might almost venture upon the generalization that most tragedies +have come about from lack of a telephone. Of course, there are +exceptions, but as a rule tragedies happen through delays in +communication. + +If there had been a telephone in Mantua, Romeo would never have bought +poison of the apothecary. Instead, he would have asked leave to use his +long-distance telephone. Calling up Verona, he would first cautiously +disguise his voice. If, as usual, the old nurse answered, all well; but +if a bearded voice set all the wires a-trembling, he would, of course, +hastily ring off, and abuse "Central" for giving him the wrong number. +And "Central" would understand. Then Romeo would wait an hour or two +till he was sure that Lord Capulet had gone to the Council, and ring up +again. This time he would probably get the nurse and confide to her his +number in Mantua. Next morning Juliet and her nurse had only to drop in +at the nearest drug store, and confide to Romeo the whole plot which +Balthazar so sadly bungled. All that was needed was a telephone, and +Romeo would have understood that Juliet was only feigning death for the +sake of life with him. + +But, as in the case of our Danish knight, there was not a pay-station +as yet in all the wide world, and it was fully five hundred years +to the nearest telegraph office. Another point in this tragedy is +worth considering by the modern mind: that not only would the final +catastrophe have been averted by the telephone, but that those beautiful +speeches to and from Juliet's balcony, made at such desperate risk to +both lovers, had the telephone only been in existence, could have +been made in complete security from the seclusion of their distant +apartments. + +Seriously speaking, there are few love tragedies, few serious historic +crises of any kind, that might not have been averted by the telephone. +Strange indeed, when one considers a little, is that fallacy of +sentimentalism which calls science the enemy of love. + +Far from being its enemy, science is easily seen to be its most romantic +servant; for all its strenuous and delicate learning it brings to the +feet of love for a plaything. Not only will it carry the voice of love +across space and time, but it will even bring it back to you from +eternity. It will not only carry to your ears the voices of the living, +but it will also keep safe for you the sweeter voices of the dead. In +fact, it would almost seem as though science had made all its +discoveries for the sake of love. + + + + +XX + +TWO WONDERFUL OLD LADIES + + +It is a pity that our language has no other word to indicate that one +has lived seventy, eighty, or ninety years, than the word "old"; for the +word "old" carries with it implications of "senility" and decrepitude, +which many merely chronologically "old" people very properly resent. The +word "young," similarly, needs the assistance of another word, for we +all know individuals of thirty and forty, sometimes even only twenty, +whom it is as absurd to call "young" as it is to call those others of +seventy, eighty, or ninety, "old." + +"Youth" is too large and rich a word to serve the limited purpose of +numbering the years of undeveloped boys and girls. It should stand +rather for the vital principle in men and women, ever expanding, and +rebuilding, and refreshing the human organism, partly a physical, but +perhaps in a greater degree a spiritual energy. + +I am not writing this out of any compliment to two wonderful "old" +ladies of whom I am particularly thinking. They would consider me a +dunce were they to suspect me of any such commonplace intent. No! I am +not going to call them "eighty years young," or employ any of those +banal euphemisms with which would-be "tactful" but really club-footed +sentimentalists insult the intelligence of the so-called "old." Of +course, I know that they are both eighty or thereabouts, and they know +very well that I know. We make no secret of it. Why should we? Actually +though the number of my years falls short of eighty, I feel so much +older than either of them, that it never occurs to me to think of them +as "old," and often as I contemplate their really glowing energetic +youth, I grow melancholy for myself, and wonder what has become of my +own. + +They were schoolgirls together. Luccia married Irene's brother--for they +allow me the privilege of calling them by their Christian names--and +they have been friends all their lives. Sometimes I see them together, +though oftener apart, for Luccia and her white-haired poet husband--no +"older" than herself,--are neighbours of mine in the country, and Irene +lives for the most part in New York--as much in love with its giant +developments as though she did not also cherish memories of that quaint, +almost vanished, New York of her girlhood days; for she is nothing if +not progressive. + +But I will tell about Luccia first, and the first thing it is natural to +speak of--so every one else finds too--is her beauty. They say that she +was beautiful when she was young (I am compelled sometimes, under +protest, to use the words "young" and "old" thus chronologically) and, +of course, she must have been. I have, however, seen some of her early +portraits, before her hair was its present beautiful colour, and I must +confess that the Luccia of an earlier day does not compare with the +Luccia of today. I don't think I should have fallen in love with her +then, whereas now it is impossible to take one's eyes off her. She seems +to have grown more flower-like with the years, and while her lovely +indestructible profile has gathered distinction, and a lifelong habit of +thinking beautiful thoughts, and contemplating beautiful things, has +drawn honeyed lines as in silver point about her eyes and mouth, the +wild-roses of her cheeks still go on blooming--like wild-roses in +moonlight. And over all glow her great clear witty eyes, the eyes of a +_grand dame_ who has still remained a girl. Her humour, no doubt, has +much to do with her youth, and I have seen strangers no little +surprised, even disconcerted, at finding so keen a humour in one so +beautiful; for beauty and humour are seldom found together in so +irresistible a combination. Is it to be wondered at that often on summer +days when I feel the need of a companion, I go in search of Luccia, and +take tea with her on the veranda? Sometimes I will find her in the +garden seated in front of her easel, making one of her delicate +water-colour sketches--for she was once a student in Paris and has +romantic Latin-quarter memories. Or I will find her with her magnifying +glass, trying to classify some weed she has come upon in the garden, +for she is a learned botanist; and sometimes we will turn over the pages +of books in which she hoards the pressed flowers gathered by her and her +husband in Italy and Switzerland up till but a year or two ago, +memorials of a life together that has been that flawless romance which +love sometimes grants to his faithful servants. + +At other times we will talk politics, and I wish you could hear the +advanced views of this "old" lady of eighty. Indeed, generally speaking, +I find that nowadays the only real progressives are the "old" people. It +seems to be the fashion with the "young" to be reactionary. Luccia, +however, has been a radical and a rebel since her girlhood, and, years +before the word "feminist" was invented, was fighting the battle of +the freedom of woman. And what a splendid Democrat she is, and how +thoroughly she understands and fearlessly faces the problems and +developments of the moment! She is of the stuff the old Chartist women +and the women of the French Revolution were made of, and in her heart +the old faith in Liberty and the people burns as brightly as though she +were some young Russian student ready to give her life for the cause. +When the revolution comes to America, stern masculine authority will be +needed to keep her--her friend Irene too--from the barricades. + +"Stern masculine authority"! As I write that phrase, how plainly I can +hear her mocking laughter; for she is never more delightful than when +pouring out her raillery on the magisterial pretensions of man. To hear +her talk! The idea of a mere man daring to assume any authority or +direction over a woman! Yet we who know her smile and whisper to +ourselves that, for all her witty tirades, she is perhaps of all women +the most feminine, and really the most "obedient" of wives--a rebel in +all else save to the mild tyranny of the poet she has loved, honoured, +and yes! obeyed, all these wonderful years. + +Perhaps in nothing is the reality of her youthfulness so expressive as +in her adorable gaiety. Like a clear fresh spring, it is ever brimming +up from the heart into her mischief-loving eyes. By her side merely +technically young people seem heavy and serious. And nothing amuses her +more than gravely to mystify, or even bewilderingly shock, some proper +acquaintance, or some respectable strangers, with her carefully designed +mock improprieties of speech or action. To look at the loveliest of +grand-mothers, it is naturally somewhat perplexing to the uninitiated +visitor to hear her talk, with her rarely distinguished manner, of +frivolous matters with which they assume she has long since done. + +A short while ago, when I was taking tea with her, she had for visitor a +staid old-maidish lady, little more than half her age, whom she had +known as a girl, but had not seen for some years. In the course of +conversation, she turned to her guest, with her grand air: + +"Have you done much dancing this season?" she asked. + +"O indeed no," answered the other unsuspiciously, "my dancing days are +over." + +"At your age!" commented Luccia with surprise. "Nonsense! You must let +me teach you to dance the tango. I have enjoyed it immensely this +winter." + +"Really?" gasped the other in astonishment, with that intonation in the +voice naturally so gratifying to the "old" suggesting that the person +talking with them really regards them as dead and buried. + +"Of course, why not?" asks Luccia with perfect seriousness. "I dance it +with my grandsons. My husband doesn't care to dance it. He prefers the +polka." + +Not knowing what to think, the poor old maid--actually "old" compared +with Luccia--looked from her to the beautiful venerable figure of her +polka-dancing husband seemingly meditating over his pipe, a little +withdrawn from them on the veranda, but inwardly shaken with mirth at +the darling nonsense of her who is still the same madcap girl he first +fell in love with so many years ago. + +When the guest had departed, with a puzzled, questioning look still +lingering on her face, Luccia turned to me, her eyes bright pools of +merriment: + +"It was quite true, wasn't it? Come, let us try it." + +And, nimble as a girl, she was on her feet, and we executed quite a +passable tango up and down the veranda, to the accompaniment of her +husband's--"Luccia! Luccia! what a wild thing you are!" + +A certain reputation for "wildness," a savour of innocent Bohemianism, +has clung to Luccia, and Irene too, all through their lives, as a legacy +from that far-off legendary time when, scarcely out of their girlhood, +they were fellow art-students together in Paris. Belonging both to +aristocratic, rather straitlaced New England families, I have often +wondered how they contrived to accomplish that adventure in a day when +such independent action on the part of two pretty young ladies was an +adventure indeed. But it was the time when the first vigorous spring of +feminine revolt was in the air. Rosa Bonheur, George Eliot, Elizabeth +Cady Stanton, and other leaders were setting the pace for the advanced +women, and George Sand was still a popular romancer. As a reminiscence +of George Sand, Luccia to this day pretends that she prefers to smoke +cigars to cigarettes, though, as a matter of fact, she has never smoked +either, and has, indeed, an ultra-feminine detestation of tobacco--even +in the form of her husband's pipe. She only says it, of course, for +the fun of seeming "naughty"; which recalls to my mind her shocking +behaviour one day when I went with her to call on some very prim +cousins in New York. It was a household of an excessively brown-stone +respectability, just the atmosphere to rouse the wickedness in Luccia. +As we sat together in an upright conversation that sounded like the +rustling of dried leaves in a cemetery, why! Luccia, for all her eighty +years, seemed like a young wild-rose bush filling the tomb-like room +with living light and fragrance. I could see the wickedness in her +surging for an outburst. She was well aware that those respectable +connections of hers had always looked upon her as a sort of "artistic" +black sheep in the family. Presently her opportunity came. As our visit +dragged mournfully towards its end, the butler entered, in pursuance of +the early Victorian ritual on such occasions, bearing a tray on which +was a decanter of sherry, some tiny wine-glasses, and some dry biscuits +of a truly early Victorian dryness. This ghostly hospitality was duly +dispensed, and Luccia, who seldom drinks anything but tea, instead of +sipping her sherry with a lady-like aloofness, drained her glass with a +sudden devil-may-care abandon, and, to the evident amazement even of the +furniture, held it out to be refilled. Such pagan behaviour had never +disgraced that scandalized drawing-room before. And when to her action +she added words, the room absolutely refused to believe its ears. "I +feel," she said, with a deep-down mirth in her eyes which only I could +suspect rather than see, "I feel today as if I should like to go on a +real spree. Do you ever feel that way?" + +A palpable shudder passed through the room. + +"Cousin Luccia!" cried out the three outraged mummies; the brother with +actual sternness, and the sisters in plain fear. Had their eccentric +cousin really gone out of her mind at last? + +"Never feel that way?" she added, delighting in the havoc she was +making. "You should. It's a wonderful feeling." + +Then she drained her second glass, and to the evident relief of all +three, rose to go. How we laughed together, as we sped away in our +taxicab. "It's as well to live up to one's reputation with such people," +she said, that dear, fantastic Luccia. + +_À propos_ that early Parisian adventure, Rosa Bonheur had been one of +Luccia's and Irene's great exemplars, and one might say, in one +particular connection,--heroes. I refer to the great painter's adoption +of masculine costume. Why two unusually pretty young women should burn +to discard the traditional flower-furniture of their sex, in exchange +for the uncouth envelopes of man, is hard to understand. But it was +the day of Mrs. Bloomer, as well as Rosa Bonheur; and earnest young +"intellectuals" among women had a notion, I fancy, that to shake off +their silks and laces was, symbolically, at all events, to shake off the +general disabilities of their sex, and was somehow an assertion of a +mental equality with man. At all events, it was a form of defiance +against their sex's immemorial tyrant, which seems to have appealed to +the imaginations of some young women of the period. Another woman's +weakness to be sternly discarded was that scriptural "glory" of her +hair. That must be ruthlessly lopped. So it is easy to imagine the +horror of such relatives as I have hinted at when our two beautiful +adventuresses returned from Paris, and appeared before their families in +great Spanish cloaks, picturesque, coquettish enough you may be sure, +veiling with some show of discretion those hideous compromises with +trousers invented and worn by the strong-minded Mrs. Bloomer, and +wearing their hair after the manner of Florentine boys. To face one's +family, and to walk New York streets so garbed, must have needed real +courage in those days; yet the two friends did both, and even for +a while accepted persecution for vagaries which for them had the +dead-seriousness of youth. + +Passionate young propagandists as they were, they even preferred to +abandon their homes for a while--rather than their bloomers--and, taking +a studio together in New York, started out to earn their own living by +the teaching of art. Those were the days of the really brave women. + +But to return to the less abstract topic of the bloomers, I often tease +Luccia and Irene about them, seeking for further information as to why +they ever came to retrograde from a position so heroically taken, one of +such serious import to human progress, and to condescend once more to +don the livery of feminine servitude, and appear, as they do today, in +delicate draperies which the eye searches in vain for any hint of +sanguinary revolution. Luccia always looks shamefaced at the question. +She still feels guilty, I can see, of a traitorous backsliding and +occasionally threatens to make up for it by a return to masculine +costume--looking the most exquisite piece of Dresden china as she says +it. I have seen that masculine tyrant of hers smiling knowingly to +himself on such occasions, and it has not been difficult to guess why +and when those historic bloomers disappeared into the limbo of lost +causes. There is little doubt that when Love came in by the door, the +bloomers went out, so to speak, by the window. + +Irene seems to have held out longer, and, doubtless, scornful of her +more frivolous comrade's defection, steadfastly kept the faith awhile +unsupported, walking the world in bloomered loneliness--till a like +event overtook her. Such is the end of every maid's revolt! But Irene, +to this day, retains more of her student seriousness than her more +worldly-minded friend. Her face is of the round cherubic type, and her +large heavy-lidded eyes have a touch of demureness veiling humour no +less deep than Luccia's, but more reflective, chuckling quietly to +itself, though on occasion I know no one better to laugh with, even +giggle with, than Irene. But, whereas Luccia will talk gaily of +revolution and even anarchy for the fun of it, and in the next breath +talk hats with real seriousness, Irene still remains the purposeful +revolutionary student she was as a girl; while Luccia contents herself +with flashing generalizations, Irene seriously studies the latest +developments of thought and society, reads all the new books, sees all +the new plays and pictures, and has all the new movements of whatever +kind--art, philosophy, and sociology--at her finger ends; and I may add +that her favourite writer is Anatole France. Whenever I need light on +the latest artistic or philosophic nonsense calling itself a movement +(cubism, futurism, Bergsonism, syndicalism, or the like) I go to her, +certain that she will know all about it. Nothing is too "modern" for +this wonderful "old" lady of seventy-nine; and, whenever I am in town, +we always go together to the most "advanced" play in the newest of new +theatres. + +_À propos_ our theatre-going together, I must not forget a story about +her which goes back to that bloomer period. A little while ago, calling +to take tea with her, I found her seated with a fine soldierly +white-haired "old" man, and they were in such merry talk that I felt +that perhaps I was interrupting old memories. But they generously took +me into the circle of their reminiscence. They had been laughing as I +came in--"Shall I tell him, General?" she said, "what we were laughing +about?" Then she did. She and the General had been girl and boy +together, and as they came to eighteen and nineteen had been +semi-serious sweethearts. The embryo General--no doubt because of her +pretty face--had taken all her student vagaries with lover-like +seriousness, and had, on one occasion, assisted in a notable enterprise. +The bloomers had not been definitely donned at that time, but they were +on the way, glimmering ahead as a discussed ideal. Whether it was as a +preliminary experiment, or only in consequence of a "dare," I am not +quite sure. I think it was a little of both, and that the General had +dared Irene to go with him to the opera (in the gallery) dressed in +boy's clothes. She accepted the challenge, borrowing a suit of clothes +from her brother for the purpose. Her figure, according to the General's +account, had looked anything but masculine, and her hair, tucked up +under her boy's hat as best she could, was a peculiar peril. How her +heart had almost stopped beating as a policeman had turned upon the +youthful pair a suspicious scrutiny, how they had taken to their heels +at his glance, how she had crimsoned at the box-office, and hid her face +behind a fat man as they had scurried past the ticket-attendant, and how +during the whole performance a keen-faced woman had glanced at her with +a knowing persistency that seemed to threaten her with imminent exposure +and arrest, and how wonderful the whole thing had been--just to be in +boy's clothes and go in them to the theatre with one's sweetheart. O +youth! youth! youth! + +As I looked at the General with his white hair, and Irene with her +quaint little old lady's cap over her girlish face, and visualized for +myself those two figures before me as they had appeared on the night of +that escapade, I realized that the real romance of life is made by +memory, and that for these two old friends to be able thus to recall +together across all those years that laughing freak of their young blood +was still more romantic than the original escapade. But as I went on +looking at Irene, with the bloom of her immortal youth upon her, I grew +jealous of the General's share in that historic night. Well, never mind, +it is I who take her to the theatre nowadays--and, after all, I think I +prefer her to go dressed just as she is. + + + + +XXI + +A CHRISTMAS MEDITATION + + +Christmas already! However welcome its coming, Christmas always seems to +take us by surprise. Is the year really so soon at the end of its +journey? Why, it seems only yesterday that it needed a special effort of +remembrance to date our letters with the new "_anno domini_." And have +you noticed that one always does that reluctantly, with something almost +of misgiving? The figures of the old year have a warm human look, but +those of the new wear a chill, unfamiliar, almost menacing expression. +Nineteen hundred and--we know. It is nearly "all in." It has done its +best--and its worst. Between Christmas Day and New-Year it has hardly +time to change its character. Good or bad, as it may have been, we feel +at home with it, and we are fain to keep the old almanac a little longer +on the wall. But the last leaves are falling, the days are shortening. +There is a smell of coming snow in the air, and for weeks past it has +already been Christmas in the shops. + +Yes, however it strikes us, we are a year older. On the first of January +last we had twelve brand-new months of a brand-new year to spend, and +now the last of them is all but spent. We had a new spring to look out +for, like the coming of one's sweetheart, a new summer bounteous in +prospect with inexhaustible wealth of royal sunshine, a new autumn, with +ruddy orchards and the glory of the tapestried woods; and now of the +four new seasons that were to be ours but one remains: + + And here is but December left and I, + To wonder if the hawthorn bloomed in May, + And if the wild rose with so fine a flush + Mantled the cheek of June, and if the way + The stream went singing foamed with meadow sweet, + And if the throstle sang in yonder bush, + And if the lark dizzied with song the sky. + I watched and listened--yet so sweet, so fleet, + The mad young year went by! + +Strange, that feeling at the end of the year that somehow we have missed +it, have failed to experience it all to the full, taken it too +carelessly, not dwelt sufficiently on its rich, expressive hours. Each +year we feel the same, and however intent we may have been, however we +have watched and listened, sensitively eager to hold and exhaust each +passing moment, when the year-end has come, we seem somehow to have been +cheated after all. Who, at the beginning of each year, has not promised +himself a stricter attentiveness to his experience? This year he will +"load every rift with ore." + + This year, I said, when first along the lane + With tiny nipples of the tender green + The winter-blackened hedge grew bright again, + This year I watch and listen; I have seen + So many springs steal profitless away, + This year I garner every sound and sweet. + And you, young year, make not such haste to bring + Hawthorn and rose; nor jumble, indiscreet, + Treasure on treasure of the precious spring; + But bring all softly forth upon the air, + Unhasting to be fair... + +Yet, for all our watchfulness, the year seems to have escaped us. We +know that the birds sang, that the flowers bloomed, that the grass was +green, but it seems to us that we did not take our joy of them with +sufficient keenness; our sweetheart came, but we did not look deep +enough into her eyes. If only we live to see the wild rose again! But +meanwhile here is the snow. + +Unless we are still numbered among those happy people for whom +Christmas-trees are laden and lit, this annual prematurity of Christmas +cannot but make us a little meditative amid our mirth, and if, while +Santa Claus is dispensing his glittering treasures, our thoughts grow a +little wistful, they will not necessarily be mournful thoughts, or on +that account less seasonable in character; for Christmas is essentially +a retrospective feast, and we may, with fitness, with indeed a proper +piety of unforgetfulness, bring even our sad memories, as it were to +cheer themselves, within the glow of its festivity. Ghosts have always +been invited to Christmas parties, and whether they are seen or not, +they always come; nor is any form of story so popular by the Christmas +fire as the ghost-story--which, when one thinks of it, is rather odd, +considering the mirthful character of the time. Yet, after all, what are +our memories but ghost-stories? Ah! the beautiful ghosts that come to +the Christmas fire! + +Christmas too is pre-eminently the Feast of the Absent, the Festival of +the Far-Away, for the most prosperous ingathering of beloved faces about +the Christmas fire can but include a small number of those we would fain +have there; and have you ever realized that the absent are ghosts? That +is, they live with us sheerly as spiritual presences, dependent upon our +faithful remembrance for their embodiment. We may not, with our physical +eyes, see them once a year; we may not even have so seen them for twenty +years; it may be decreed that we shall never see them again; we seldom, +perhaps never, write to each other; all we know of each other is that we +are alive and love each other across space and time. Alive--but how? +Scarce otherwise, surely, than the unforgotten dead are alive--alive in +unforgetting love. + +It is rather strange, if you will give it a thought, how much of our +real life is thus literally a ghost-story. Probably it happens with the +majority of us that those who mean most to us, by the necessities of +existence, must be far away, met but now and then in brief flashes +of meeting that often seem to say so much less than absence; our +intercourse is an intercourse of the imagination--yet how real! They +belong to the unseen in our lives, and have all its power over us. The +intercourse of a mother and a son--is it not often like that in a world +which sends its men on the four winds, to build and fight, while the +mother must stay in the old nest? Seldom at Christmas can a mother +gather all her children beneath the wing of her smile. Her big boys are +seven seas away, and even her girls have Christmas-trees of their own. +But motherhood is in its very nature a ghostly, a spiritual, thing, and +the big boys and the old mother are not really divided. They meet +unseen by the Christmas fire, as they meet all the year round in that +mysterious ether of the soul, where space and time are not. + +Yes, it is strange to think how small a proportion of our lives we spend +with those we love; even when we say that we spend all our time with +them. Husband and wife even--how much of the nearness of the closest of +human relations is, and must be, what Rossetti has called "parted +presence!" The man must go forth to his labour until the evening. How +few of the twenty-four hours can these two beings who have given their +whole lives to each other really give! Husband and wife even must be +content to be ghosts to each other for the greater part of each day. +As Rossetti says in his poem, eyes, hands, voice, lips, can meet so +strangely seldom in the happiest marriage; only in the invisible home of +the heart can the most fortunate husband and wife be always together: + + Your heart is never away, + But ever with mine, forever, + Forever without endeavour, + Tomorrow, love, as today; + Two blent hearts never astray, + Two souls no power may sever, + Together, O my love, forever! + +When I said that the absent were ghosts, I don't think you quite liked +the saying. It gave you a little shiver. It seemed rather grimly +fantastic. But do you not begin to see what I meant? Begin to see the +comfort in the thought? begin to see the inner connection between +Christmas and the ghost-story? Yes, the real lesson of Christmas is the +ever presence of the absent through love; the ghostly, that is to say +the spiritual, nature of all human intercourse. Our realities can exist +only in and through our imaginations, and the most important part of our +lives is lived in a dream with dream-faces, the faces of the absent and +the dead--who, in the consolation of this thought, are alike brought +near. + +I have a friend who is dead--but I say to myself that he is in New +Zealand; for, if he were really in New Zealand, we should hardly seem +less distant, or be in more frequent communication. We should say that +we were both busy men, that the mails were infrequent, but that between +us there was no need of words, that we both "understood." That is what I +say now. It is just as appropriate. Perhaps he says it too. And--we +shall meet by the Christmas fire. + +I have a friend who is alive. He is alive in England. We have not met +for twelve years. He never writes, and I never write. Perhaps we shall +never meet, never even write to each other, again. It is our way, the +way of many a friendship, none the less real for its silence--friendship +by faith, one might say, rather than by correspondence. My dead friend +is not more dumb, not more invisible. When these two friends meet me +by the Christmas fire, will they not both alike be ghosts--both, in a +sense, dead, but both, in a truer sense, alive? + +It is so that, without our thinking of it, our simple human feelings one +for another at Christmas-time corroborate the mystical message which +it is the church's meaning to convey by this festival of "peace and +good-will to men"--the power of the Invisible Love; from the mystical +love of God for His world, to the no less, mystical love of mother and +child, of lover and lover, of friend and friend. + +And, when you think of it, is not this festival founded upon what, +without irreverence, we may call the Divine Ghost-Story of Christmas? +Was there ever another ghost-story so strange, so full of marvels, a +story with so thrilling a message from the unseen? Taken just as a +story, is there anything in the _Arabian Nights_ so marvellous as this +ghost-story of Christmas? The world was all marble and blood and bronze, +against a pitiless sky of pitiless gods. The world was Rome. No rule +ever stood builded so impregnably from earth to stars--a merciless wall +of power. Strength never planted upon the earth so stern a foot. Never +was tyranny so invincibly bastioned to the cowed and conquered eye. + +And against all this marble and blood and bronze, what frail fantastic +attack is this? What quaint expedition from fairy-land that comes so +insignificantly against these battlements on which the Roman helmets +catch the setting sun? + +A Star in the Sky. Some Shepherds from Judea. Three Wise Men from the +East. Some Frankincense and Myrrh. A Mother and Child. + +Yes, a fairy-tale procession--but these are to conquer Rome, and that +child at his mother's breast has but to speak three words, for all that +marble and bronze to melt away: "Love One Another." + +It may well have seemed an almost ludicrous weapon--three gentle words. +So one might attack a fortress with a flower. But Rome fell before them, +for all that, and cruel as the world still is, so cruel a world can +never be again. The history of Christianity from Christ to Tolstoi +is the history of a ghost-story; and as Rome fell before the men it +martyred, so Russia has been compelled at last to open its prison doors +by the passive imperative of the three gentle words. Stone and iron are +terribly strong to the eye and even to the arm of man, but they are as +vapour before the breath of the soul. Many enthroned and magisterial +authorities seem so much more important and powerful than the simple +human heart, but let the trial of strength come, and we see the might of +the delicate invisible energy that wells up out of the infinite mystery +to support the dreams of man. + +Christmas is the friendly human announcement of this ghostly truth; its +holly and boar's-head are but a rough-and-tumble emblazonment of that +mystic gospel of--The Three Words; the Gospel of the Unseen Love. + +And how well has the church chosen this particular season of the year +for this most subtly spiritual of all its festivals, so subtle because +its ghostly message is so ruddily disguised in human mirth, and thus the +more unconsciously operative in human hearts! + +Winter, itself so ghostly a thing, so spiritual in its beauty, was +indeed the season to catch our ears with this ghost-story of the +Invisible and Invincible Love. The other seasons are full of sensuous +charm and seductiveness. With endless variety of form and colour and +fragrance, they weave "a flowery band to bind us to the earth." They are +running over with the pride of sap, the luxury of green leaves, and the +intoxicating fulness of life. The summer earth is like some voluptuous +enchantress, all ardour and perfume, and soft dazzle of moted sunshine. +But the beauty of winter seems a spiritual, almost a supernatural, +thing, austere and forbidding at first, but on a nearer approach found +to be rich in exquisite exhilaration, in rare and lofty discoveries and +satisfactions of the soul. Winter naturally has found less favour with +the poets than the other seasons. Praise of it has usually a strained +air, as though the poet were making the best of a barren theme, like a +portrait-painter reluctantly flattering some unattractive sitter. But +one poet has seen and seized the mysterious beauty of winter with +unforced sympathy--Coventry Patmore, whose "Odes," in particular, +containing as they do some of the most rarely spiritual meditation in +English poetry, are all too little known. In one of these he has these +beautiful lines, which I quote, I hope correctly, from memory: + + I, singularly moved + To love the lovely that are not beloved, + Of all the seasons, most love winter, and to trace + The sense of the Trophonian pallor of her face. + It is not death, but plenitude of peace; + And this dim cloud which doth the earth enfold + Hath less the characters of dark and cold + Than light and warmth asleep, + And intermittent breathing still doth keep + With the infant harvest heaving soft below + Its eider coverlet of snow. + +The beauty of winter is like the beauty of certain austere classics of +literature and art, and as with them, also, it demands a certain almost +moral strenuousness of application before it reveals itself. The +loftiest masterpieces have something aloof and cheerless about them at +our first approach, something of the cold breath of those starry spaces +into which they soar, and to which they uplift our spirits. When we +first open Dante or Milton, we miss the flowers and the birds and the +human glow of the more sensuous and earth-dwelling poets. But after +awhile, after our first rather bleak introduction to them, we grow aware +that these apparently undecorated and unmusical masterpieces are radiant +and resounding with a beauty and a music which "eye hath not seen nor +ear heard." For flowers we are given stars, for the song of birds the +music of the spheres, and for that human glow a spiritual ecstasy. + +Similarly with winter. It has indeed a strange beauty peculiar to +itself, but it is a beauty we must be at some pains to enjoy. The beauty +of the other seasons comes to us, offers itself to us, without effort. +To study the beauty of summer, it is enough to lie under green boughs +with half-closed eyes, and listen to the running stream and the murmur +of a million wings. But winter's is no such idle lesson. In summer we +can hardly stay indoors, but in winter we can hardly be persuaded to +go out. We must gird ourselves to overcome that first disinclination, +else we shall know nothing of winter but its churlish wind and its +ice-in-the-pail. But, the effort made, and once out of doors on a +sunlit winter's morning, how soon are we finding out the mistake we +were making, coddling ourselves in the steam-heat! Indoors, indeed, +the prospect had its Christmas-card picturesqueness; snow-clad roofs, +snow-laden boughs, silhouetted tracery of leafless trees; but we said +that it was a soulless spectacular display, the beauty of death, and +the abhorred coldness thereof. We have hardly walked a hundred yards, +however, before impressions very different are crowding upon us, +among which the impression of cold is forgotten, or only retained as +pleasantly heightening the rest. + +Far from the world's being dead, as it had seemed indoors, we are +presently, in some strange indefinable way, made intensely conscious of +a curious overwhelming sense of life in the air, as though the crystal +atmosphere was, so to say, ecstatically charged with the invisible +energy of spiritual forces. In the enchanted stillness of the snow, we +seem to hear the very breathing of the spirit of life. The cessation of +all the myriad little sounds that rise so merrily and so musically from +the summer surface of the earth seems to allow us to hear the solemn +beat of the very heart of earth itself. We seem very near to the sacred +mystery of being, nearer than at any other season of the year, for in +other seasons we are distracted by its pleasurable phenomena, but in +winter we seem close to the very mystery itself; for the world seems to +have put on robes of pure spirit and ascended into a diviner ether. + +The very phenomena of winter have a spiritual air which those of summer +lack, a phantom-like strangeness. How mysterious this ice, how ghostly +this snow, and all the beautiful fantastic shapes taken by both; the +dream-like foliage, and feathers and furs of the snow, the Gothic +diablerie of icicled eaves, all the fairy fancies of the frost, the +fretted crystal shapes that hang the brook-side with rarer than Venetian +glass, the strange flowers that stealthily overlay the windows, even +while we watch in vain for the unseen hand! No flowers of summer seem so +strange as these, make us feel so weirdly conscious of the mystery of +life. As the ghostly artist covers the pane, is it not as though a +spirit passed? + +As we walk on through the shining morning, we ourselves seem to grow +rarefied as the air. Our senses seem to grow finer, purged to a keener +sensitiveness. Our eyes and ears seem to become spiritual rather than +physical organs, and an exquisite elation, as though we were walking on +shining air, or winging through celestial space, fills all our being. +The material earth and our material selves seem to grow joyously +transparent, and while we are conscious of our earthly shoe-leather +ringing out on the iron-bound highway, we seem, nevertheless, to be +spirits moving without effort, in a world of spirit. Seldom, if ever, +in summer are we thus made conscious of, so to say, our own ghosts, +thus lifted up out of our material selves with a happy sense of +disembodiment. + +There would, indeed, seem to be some relation between temperature and +the soul, and something literally purifying about cold. Certain it is +that we return from our winter's walk with something sacred in our +hearts and something shining in our faces, which we seldom, if ever, +bring back with us in summer. Without understanding the process, we seem +to have been brought nearer to the invisible mystery, and a solemn peace +of happy insight seems for a little while at least to possess our souls. +Our white walk in the snow-bright air has in some way quickened the +half-torpid immortal within us, revived awhile our sluggish sense of our +spiritual significance and destiny, made us once more, if only for a +little, attractively mysterious to ourselves. Yes! there is what one +might call a certain monastic discipline about winter which impels the +least spiritual minded to meditation on his mortal lot and its immortal +meanings; and thus, as I said, the Church has done wisely to choose +winter for its most Christian festival. The heart of man, thus prepared +by the very elements, is the more open to the message of the miraculous +love, and the more ready to translate it into terms of human goodness. +And thus, I hope, the ghostly significance of mince-pie is made clear. + +But enough of ghostly, grown-up thoughts. Let us end with a song for +the children: + + O the big red sun, + And the wide white world, + And the nursery window + Mother-of-pearled; + + And the houses all + In hoods of snow, + And the mince-pies, + And the mistletoe; + + And Christmas pudding, + And berries red, + And stockings hung + At the foot of the bed; + + And carol-singers, + And nothing but play-- + O baby, this is + Christmas Day! + + + + +XXII + +ON RE-READING WALTER PATER + + +It is with no small satisfaction, and with a sense of reassurance of +which one may, in moods of misgiving, have felt the need during +two decades of the Literature of Noise, that one sees a writer so +pre-eminently a master of the Literature of Meditation coming, for all +the captains and the shouting, so surely into his own. The acceptance +of Walter Pater is not merely widening all the time, but it is more +and more becoming an acceptance such as he himself would have most +valued, an acceptance in accordance with the full significance of his +work rather than a one-sided appreciation of some of its Corinthian +characteristics. The Doric qualities of his work are becoming recognized +also, and he is being read, as he has always been read by his true +disciples--so not inappropriately to name those who have come under his +graver spell--not merely as a _prosateur_ of purple patches, or a +sophist of honeyed counsels tragically easy to misapply, but as an +artist of the interpretative imagination of rare insight and magic, a +writer of deep humanity as well as aesthetic beauty, and the teacher of +a way of life at once ennobling and exquisite. It is no longer possible +to parody him--after the fashion of Mr. Mallock's brilliancy in _The New +Republic_--as a writer of "all manner and no matter," nor is it possible +any longer to confuse his philosophy with those gospels of unrestrained +libertinism which have taken in vain the name of Epicurus. His highly +wrought, sensitively coloured, and musically expressive style is seen to +be what it is because of its truth to a matter profound and delicate and +intensely meditated, and such faults as it has come rather of too much +matter than too little; while his teaching, far from being that of +a facile "Epicureanism," is seen, properly understood, to involve +something like the austerity of a fastidious Puritanism, and to result +in a jealous asceticism of the senses rather than in their indulgence. +"Slight as was the burden of positive moral obligation with which he had +entered Rome," he writes of Marius, as on his first evening in Rome the +murmur comes to him of "the lively, reckless call to 'play,' from the +sons and daughters of foolishness," "it was to no wasteful and vagrant +affections, such as these, that his Epicureanism had committed him." +Such warnings against misunderstanding Pater is careful to place, at, so +to say, all the cross-roads in his books, so scrupulously concerned is +he lest any reader should take the wrong turning. Few writers, indeed, +manifest so constant a consideration for, and, in minor matters, +such a sensitive courtesy toward, their readers, while in matters +of conscience Pater seems to feel for them an actual pastoral +responsibility. His well-known withdrawal of the "Conclusion" to _The +Renaissance_ from its second edition, from a fear that "it might +possibly mislead some of those young men into whose hands it might +fall," is but one of many examples of his solicitude; and surely such as +have gone astray after such painstaking guidance have but their own +natures to blame. As he justly says, again of Marius, "in the reception +of metaphysical _formula_, all depends, as regards their actual and +ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human +nature into which they fall--the company they find already present +there, on their admission into the house of thought." + +That Pater's philosophy could ever have been misunderstood is not to be +entertained with patience by any one who has read him with even ordinary +attention; that it may have been misapplied, in spite of all his care, +is, of course, possible; but if a writer is to be called to account for +all the misapplications, or distortions, of his philosophy, writing may +as well come to an end. Yet, inconceivable as it may sound, a critic +very properly held in popular esteem recently gave it as his opinion +that the teaching of Walter Pater was responsible for the tragic career +of the author of _The Picture of Dorian Gray_. Certainly that remarkable +man was an "epicurean"--but one, to quote Meredith, "whom Epicurus would +have scourged out of his garden"; and the statement made by the critic +in question that _The Renaissance_ is the book referred to in _The +Picture of Dorian Gray_ as having had a sinister influence over its hero +is so easily disposed of by a reference to that romance itself that it +is hard to understand its ever having been made. Here is the passage +describing the demoralizing book in question: + + His eye fell on the yellow book that Lord Henry had sent him.... It + was the strangest book he had ever read. It seemed to him that in + exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of + the world were passing in dumb show before him. Things that he had + dimly dreamed of were suddenly made real to him. Things of which he + had never dreamed were gradually revealed. + + It was a novel without a plot, and with only one character, being, + indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian who + spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the + passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except + his own, and to sum up, as it were, in himself the various moods + through which the world-spirit had ever passed, loving for their + mere artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called + virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call + sin. The style in which it was written was that curious jewelled + style, vivid and obscure at once, full of _argot_ and of archaisms, + of technical expressions and of elaborate paraphrases, that + characterizes the work of some of the finest artists of the French + school of _Décandents._ There were in it metaphors as monstrous as + orchids, and as evil in colour. The life of the senses was described + in the terms of mystical philosophy. One hardly knew at times + whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some medieval + saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner. It was a + poisonous book. The heavy odour of incense seemed to cling about its + pages and to trouble the brain. The mere cadence of the sentences, + the subtle monotony of their music, so full as it was of complex + refrains and movements elaborately repeated, produced in the mind of + the lad, as he passed from chapter to chapter, a form of reverie, a + malady of dreaming, that made him unconscious of the falling day and + the creeping shadows.... + + For years Dorian Gray could not free himself from the memory of this + book. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he never + sought to free himself from it. He procured from Paris no less than + five large paper copies of the first edition, and had them bound in + different colours, so that they might suit his various moods and the + changing fancies of a nature over which he seemed, at times, to have + almost entirely lost control. + +The book thus characterized is obviously by a French writer--I have +good reason for thinking that it was _À Rebours_ by Huysmans--and how +any responsible reader can have imagined that Walter Pater's _The +Renaissance_ answers to this description passes all understanding. A +critic guilty of so patent a misstatement must either never have read +_The Picture of Dorian Gray_, or never have read _The Renaissance_. On +the other hand, if on other more reliable evidence it can be found that +Oscar Wilde was one of those "young men" misled by Pater's book, for +whose spiritual safety Pater, as we have seen, was so solicitous, one +can only remind oneself again of the phrase quoted above in regard to +"that soil of human nature" into which a writer casts his seed. If that +which was sown a lily comes up a toadstool, there is evidently something +wrong with the soil. + +Let us briefly recall what this apparently so "dangerous" philosophy +of Pater's is, and we cannot do better than examine it in its most +concentrated and famous utterance, this oft-quoted passage from that +once-suppressed "Conclusion" to _The Renaissance_: + + Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A + counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated + dramatic life. How may we see in them all that there is to be seen + in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from + point to point, and be present always at the focus where the + greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? To + burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this + ecstasy, is success in life.... While all melts under our feet, we + may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to + knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for + a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange + colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the + face of one's friend. With this sense of the splendor of our + experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one + desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make + theories about the things we see and touch.... Well! we are all + _condamnés_, as Victor Hugo says; we are all under sentence of + death, but with a sort of indefinite reprieve--_les hommes sont tous + condamnés à mort avec des sursis indéfinis_: we have an interval, + and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in + listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among "the + children of this world," in art and song. For our one chance lies in + expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible + into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened + sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of + enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come + naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion--that it does + yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of + such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of + art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing + frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as + they pass, and simply for those moments' sake. + +Now, if it be true that the application, or rather the misapplication, +of this philosophy led Oscar Wilde to Reading Gaol, it is none the +less true that another application of it led Marius to something like +Christian martyrdom, and Walter Pater himself along an ever loftier and +serener path of spiritual vision. + +Nothing short of wilful misconstruction can make of the counsel thus +offered, with so priestly a concern that the writer's exact meaning be +brought home to his reader, other than an inspiration toward a noble +employment of that mysterious opportunity we call life. For those of us, +perhaps more than a few, who have no assurance of the leisure of an +eternity for idleness or experiment, this expansion and elevation of the +doctrine of the moment, carrying a merely sensual and trivial moral in +the Horatian maxim of _carpe diem_, is one thrillingly charged with +exhilaration and sounding a solemn and yet seductive challenge to us to +make the most indeed, but also to make the best, of our little day. To +make the most, and to make the best of life! Those who misinterpret or +misapply Pater forget his constant insistence on the second half of that +precept. We are to get "as many pulsations as possible into the given +time," but we are to be very careful that our use of those pulsations +shall be the finest. Whether or not it is "simply for those moments' +sake," our attempt must be to give "_the highest quality_," remember, to +those "moments as they pass." And who can fail to remark the fastidious +care with which Pater selects various typical interests which he deems +most worthy of dignifying the moment? The senses are, indeed, of natural +right, to have their part; but those interests on which the accent of +Pater's pleading most persuasively falls are not so much the "strange +dyes, strange colours, and curious odours," but rather "the face of +one's friend," ending his subtly musical sentence with a characteristic +shock of simplicity, almost incongruity--or "some mood of passion or +insight or intellectual excitement," or "any contribution to knowledge +that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment." +There is surely a great gulf fixed between this lofty preoccupation with +great human emotions and high spiritual and intellectual excitements, +and a vulgar gospel of "eat, drink, for tomorrow we die," whether or not +both counsels start out from a realization of "the awful brevity" of our +mortal day. That realization may prompt certain natures to unbridled +sensuality. Doomed to perish as the beasts, they choose, it would seem +with no marked reluctance, to live the life of the beast, a life +apparently not without its satisfactions. But it is as stupid as it is +infamous to pretend that such natures as these find any warrant for +their tragic libertinism in Walter Pater. They may, indeed, have found +aesthetic pleasure in the reading of his prose, but the truth of which +that prose is but the beautiful garment has passed them by. For such +it can hardly be claimed that they have translated into action the +aspiration of this tenderly religious passage: + + Given the hardest terms, supposing our days are indeed but a shadow, + even so we may well adorn and beautify, in scrupulous self-respect, + our souls and whatever our souls touch upon--these wonderful bodies, + these material dwelling-places through which the shadows pass + together for a while, the very raiment we wear, our very pastimes, + and the intercourse of society. + +Here in this passage from _Marius_ we find, to use Pater's own words +once more, "the spectacle of one of the happiest temperaments coming, +so to speak, to an understanding with the most depressing of theories." +That theory, of course, was the doctrine of the perpetual flux of things +as taught by Aristippus of Cyrene, making a man of the world's practical +application of the old Heraclitean formula, his influence depending on +this, "that in him an abstract doctrine, originally somewhat acrid, had +fallen upon a rich and genial nature well fitted to transform it into a +theory of practice of considerable stimulative power toward a fair +life." Such, too, was Pater's nature, and such his practical usefulness +as what one might call a philosophical artist. Meredith, Emerson, +Browning, and even Carlyle were artists so far related to him and each +other in that each of them wrought a certain optimism, or, at all +events, a courageous and even blithe working theory of life and conduct, +out of the unrelenting facts of existence unflinchingly faced, rather +than ecclesiastically smoothed over--the facts of death and pain and +struggle, and even the cruel mystery that surrounds with darkness and +terror our mortal lot. Each one of them deliberately faced the worst, +and with each, after his own nature, the worst returned to laughter. The +force of all these men was in their artistic or poetic embodiment of +philosophical conceptions, but, had they not been artists and poets, +their philosophical conceptions would have made but little way. And it +is time to recall, what critics preoccupied with his "message" leave +unduly in the background, that Pater was an artist of remarkable power +and fascination, a maker of beautiful things, which, whatever their +philosophical content, have for our spirits the refreshment and +edification which all beauty mysteriously brings us, merely because it +is beauty. _Marius the Epicurean_ is a great and wonderful book, not +merely on account of its teaching, but because it is simply one of the +most _beautiful_ books, perhaps the most beautiful book, written in +English. It is beautiful in many ways. It is beautiful, first of all, in +the uniquely personal quality of its prose, prose which is at once +austere and sensuous, simple at once and elaborate, scientifically exact +and yet mystically suggestive, cool and hushed as sanctuary marble, +sweet-smelling as sanctuary incense; prose that has at once the +qualities of painting and of music, rich in firmly visualized pictures, +yet moving to subtle, half-submerged rhythms, and expressive with every +delicate accent and cadence; prose highly wrought, and yet singularly +surprising one at times with, so to say, sudden innocencies, artless and +instinctive beneath all its sedulous art. It is no longer necessary, as +I hinted above, to fight the battle of this prose. Whether it appeal to +one not, no critic worth attention any longer disparages it as mere +ornate and perfumed verbiage, the elaborate mannerism of a writer hiding +the poverty of his thought beneath a pretentious raiment of decorated +expression. It is understood to be the organic utterance of one with a +vision of the world all his own striving through words, as he best can, +to make that vision visible to others as nearly as possible as he +himself sees it. Pater himself has expounded his theory and practice of +prose, doubtless with a side-thought of self-justification, in various +places up and down his writings, notably in his pregnant essay on +"Style," and perhaps even more persuasively in the chapter called +"Euphuism" in _Marius_. In this last he thus goes to the root of the +matter: + + That preoccupation of the _dilettante_ with what might seem mere + details of form, after all, did but serve the purpose of bringing + to the surface, sincerely and in their integrity, certain strong + personal intuitions, a certain vision or apprehension of things + as really being, with important results, thus, rather than + thus--intuitions which the artistic or literary faculty was called + upon to follow, with the exactness of wax or clay, clothing the + model within. + +This striving to express the truth that is in him has resulted in a +beauty of prose which for individual quality must be ranked with the +prose of such masters as De Quincey and Lamb, and, to make a not +irrelevant comparison, above the very fine prose of his contemporary +Stevenson, by virtue of its greater personal sincerity. + +There is neither space here, nor need, to illustrate this opinion by +quotation, though it may not be amiss, the musical and decorative +qualities of Pater's prose having been so generally dwelt upon, to +remind the reader of the magical simplicities by which it is no less +frequently characterized. Some of his quietest, simplest phrases have a +wonderful evocative power: "the long reign of these quiet Antonines," +for example; "the thunder which had sounded all day among the hills"; +"far into the night, when heavy rain-drops had driven the last lingerers +home"; "Flavian was no more. The little marble chest with its dust and +tears lay cold among the faded flowers." What could be simpler than +these brief sentences, yet how peculiarly suggestive they are; +what immediate pictures they make! And this magical simplicity is +particularly successful in his descriptive passages, notably of natural +effects, effects caught with an instinctively selected touch or two, +an expressive detail, a grey or coloured word. How lightly sketched, +and yet how clearly realized in the imagination, is the ancestral +country-house of Marius's boyhood, "White-Nights," "that exquisite +fragment of a once large and sumptuous villa"--"Two centuries of the +play of the sea-wind were in the velvet of the mosses which lay along +its inaccessible ledges and angles." Take again this picture: + + The cottagers still lingered at their doors for a few minutes as the + shadows grew larger, and went to rest early; though there was still + a glow along the road through the shorn corn-fields, and the birds + were still awake about the crumbling grey heights of an old temple. + +And again this picture of a wayside inn: + + The room in which he sat down to supper, unlike the ordinary + Roman inns at that day, was trim and sweet. The firelight danced + cheerfully upon the polished three-wicked _lucernae_ burning cleanly + with the best oil, upon the whitewashed walls, and the bunches of + scarlet carnations set in glass goblets. The white wine of the place + put before him, of the true colour and flavour of the grape, and + with a ring of delicate foam as it mounted in the cup, had a + reviving edge or freshness he had found in no other wine. + +Those who judge of Pater's writing by a few purple passages such as the +famous rhapsody on the _Mona Lisa_, conceiving it as always thus heavy +with narcotic perfume, know but one side of him, and miss his gift +for conveying freshness, his constant happiness in light and air and +particularly running water, "green fields--or children's faces." His +lovely chapter on the temple of Aesculapius seems to be made entirely +of morning light, bubbling springs, and pure mountain air; and the +religious influence of these lustral elements is his constant theme. +For him they have a natural sacramental value, and it is through +them and such other influences that Pater seeks for his hero the +sanctification of the senses and the evolution of the spirit. In his +preoccupation with them, and all things lovely to the eye and to the +intelligence, it is that the secret lies of the singular purity of +atmosphere which pervades his _Marius_, an atmosphere which might be +termed the soul-beauty of the book, as distinct from its, so to say, +body-beauty as beautiful prose. + +Considering _Marius_ as a story, a work of imagination, one finds the +same evocative method used in the telling of it, and in the portrayal +of character, as Pater employs in its descriptive passages. Owing +to certain violent, cinematographic methods of story-telling and +character-drawing to which we have become accustomed, it is too often +assumed that stories cannot be told or characters drawn in any other +way. Actually, of course, as many an old masterpiece admonishes us, +there is no one canon in this matter, but, on the contrary, no limit to +the variety of method and manner a creative artist is at liberty to +employ in his imaginative treatment of human life. All one asks is that +the work should live, the characters and scenes appear real to us, and +the story be told. And Pater's _Marius_ entirely satisfies this demand +for those to whom such a pilgrimage of the soul will alone appeal. It is +a real story, no mere German scholar's attempt to animate the dry bones +of his erudition; and the personages and the scenes do actually live +for us, as by some delicate magic of hint and suggestion; and, though at +first they may seem shadowy, they have a curious way of persisting, and, +as it were, growing more and more alive in our memories. The figure of +Marcus Aurelius, for example, though so delicately sketched, is a +masterpiece of historical portraiture, as the pictures of Roman life, +done with so little, seem to me far more convincing than the like +over-elaborated pictures of antiquity, so choked with learned detail, +of Flaubert and of Gautier. Swinburne's famous praise of Gautier's +_Mademoiselle de Maupin_ applies with far greater fitness to Pater's +masterpiece; for, if ever a book deserved to be described as + + The golden book of spirit and sense, + The holy writ of beauty, + +it is _Marius the Epicurean_. + +It has been natural to dwell so long on this "golden book," because +Pater's various gifts are concentrated in it, to make what is, of +course, his masterpiece; though some one or other of these gifts is to +be found employed with greater mastery in other of his writings, notably +that delicate dramatic gift of embodying in a symbolic story certain +subtle states of mind and refinements of temperament which reaches its +perfection in _Imaginary Portraits_, to which the later "Apollo in +Picardy" and "Hippolytus Veiled" properly belong. It is only necessary +to recall the exquisitely austere "Sebastian Van Storck" and the +strangely contrasting Dionysiac "Denys L'Auxerrois" to justify one's +claim for Pater as a creative artist of a rare kind, with a singular and +fascinating power of incarnating a philosophic formula, a formula no +less dry than Spinoza's, or a mood of the human spirit, in living, +breathing types and persuasive tragic fables. This genius for creative +interpretation is the soul and significance of all his criticism. It +gives their value to the studies of _The Renaissance_, but perhaps its +finest flower is to be found in the later _Greek Studies_. To Flavian, +Pater had said in _Marius_, "old mythology seemed as full of untried, +unexpressed motives and interest as human life itself," and with what +marvellous skill and evocative application of learning, he himself later +developed sundry of those "untried, unexpressed motives," as in his +studies of the myths of Dionysus--"The spirit of fire and dew, alive and +leaping in a thousand vines"--and Demeter and Persephone--"the peculiar +creation of country people of a high impressibility, dreaming over their +work in spring or autumn, half consciously touched by a sense of its +sacredness, and a sort of mystery about it"--no reader of Pater needs to +be told. This same creative interpretation gives a like value to his +studies of Plato; and so by virtue of this gift, active throughout the +ten volumes which constitute his collected work, Pater proved himself +to be of the company of the great humanists. + +Along with all the other constituents of his work, its sacerdotalism, +its subtle reverie, its sensuous colour and perfume, its marmoreal +austerity, its honeyed music, its frequent preoccupation with the +haunted recesses of thought, there go an endearing homeliness and +simplicity, a deep human tenderness, a gentle friendliness, a something +childlike. He has written of her, "the presence that rose thus so +strangely beside the waters," to whom all experience had been "but as +the sound of lyres and flutes," and he has written of "The Child in the +House." Among all "the strange dyes, strange colours, and curious +odours, and work of the artist's hands," one never misses "the face of +one's friend"; and, in all its wanderings, the soul never strays far +from the white temples of the gods and the sound of running water. + +It is by virtue of this combination of humanity, edification, and +aesthetic delight that Walter Pater is unique among the great teachers +and artists of our time. + + + + +XXIII + +THE MYSTERY OF "FIONA MACLEOD" [1] + + + [1]_William Sharp (Fiona Macleod)_. A Memoir, compiled + by his wife, Elizabeth A. Sharp. (Duffield & Co.) + _The Writings of Fiona Macleod_. Uniform edition. Arranged + by Mrs. William Sharp. (Duffield & Co.) + +In the fascinating memoir of her husband, which Mrs. William Sharp has +written with so much dignity and tact, and general biographic skill, she +dwells with particular fondness of recollection on the two years of +their life at Phenice Croft, a charming cottage they had taken in the +summer of 1892 at Rudgwick in Sussex, seven miles from Horsham, the +birthplace of Shelley. Still fresh in my memory is a delightful visit I +paid them there, and I was soon afterwards to recall with special +significance a conversation I had with Mrs. Sharp, as four of us walked +out one evening after dinner in a somewhat melancholy twilight, the +glow-worms here and there trimming their ghostly lamps by the wayside, +and the nightjar churring its hoarse lovesong somewhere in the +thickening dusk. + +"Will," Mrs. Sharp confided to me, was soon to have a surprise for his +friends in a fuller and truer expression of himself than his work had +so far attained, but the nature of that expression Mrs. Sharp did not +confide--more than to hint that there were powers and qualities in her +husband's make-up that had hitherto lain dormant, or had, at all events, +been but little drawn upon. + +Mrs. Sharp was thus vaguely hinting at the future "Fiona Macleod," +for it was at Rudgwick, we learn, that that so long mysterious +literary entity sprang into imaginative being with _Pharais_. _Pharais_ +was published in 1894, and I remember that early copies of it came +simultaneously to myself and Grant Allen, with whom I was then staying, +and how we were both somewhat _intrigué_ by a certain air of mystery +which seemed to attach to the little volume. We were both intimate +friends of William Sharp, but I was better acquainted with Sharp's +earlier poetry than Grant Allen, and it was my detection in _Pharais_ +of one or two subtly observed natural images, the use of which had +previously struck me in one of his _Romantic Ballads and Poems of +Phantasy_, that brought to my mind in a flash of understanding that +Rudgwick conversation with Mrs. Sharp, and thus made me doubly certain +that "Fiona Macleod" and William Sharp were one, if not the same. +Conceiving no reason for secrecy, and only too happy to find that my +friend had fulfilled his wife's prophecy by such fuller and finer +expression of himself, I stated my belief as to its authorship in a +review I wrote for the London _Star_. My review brought me an urgent +telegram from Sharp, begging me, for God's sake, to shut my mouth--or +words to that effect. Needless to say, I did my best to atone for +having thus put my foot in it, by a subsequent severe silence till +now unbroken; though I was often hard driven by curious inquirers to +preserve the secret which my friend afterwards confided to me. + +When I say "confided to me," I must add that in the many confidences +William Sharp made to me on the matter, I was always aware of a reserve +of fanciful mystification, and I am by no means sure, even now, that I, +or any of us--with the possible exception of Mrs. Sharp--know the whole +truth about "Fiona Macleod." Indeed it is clear from Mrs. Sharp's +interesting revelations of her husband's temperament that "the whole +truth" could hardly be known even to William Sharp himself; for, very +evidently in "Fiona Macleod" we have to deal not merely with a literary +mystification, but with a psychological mystery. Here it is pertinent to +quote the message written to be delivered to certain of his friends +after his death: "This will reach you," he says, "after my death. You +will think I have wholly deceived you about Fiona Macleod. But, in an +intimate sense this is not so, though (and inevitably) in certain +details I have misled you. Only, it is a mystery. I cannot explain. +Perhaps you will intuitively understand or may come to understand. 'The +rest is silence.' Farewell. WILLIAM SHARP." + +"It is only right, however, to add that I, and I only, was the +author--in the literal and literary sense--of all written under the +name of 'Fiona Macleod.'" + +"Only, it is a mystery. I cannot explain." Does "I cannot explain" mean +"I must not explain," or merely just what it says? I am inclined to +think it means both; but, if so, the "must not" would refer to the +purely personal mystification on which, of course, none would desire to +intrude, and the "cannot" would refer to that psychological mystery +which we are at liberty to investigate. + +William Sharp's explanation to myself--as I believe to others of his +friends--was to the same tenor as this posthumous statement. He and he +only had actually _written_ the "Fiona Macleod" fantasies and poems, +but--yes! there was a real "Fiona Macleod" as well. She was a beautiful +cousin of his, living much in solitude and dreams, and seldom visiting +cities. Between her and him there was a singular spiritual kinship, +which by some inexplicable process, so to say, of psychic collaboration, +had resulted in the writings to which he had given her name. They were +hers as well as his, his as well as hers. Several times he even went so +far as to say that Miss Macleod was contemplating a visit to London, but +that her visit was to be kept a profound secret, and that he intended +introducing her to three of his friends and no more--George Meredith, +W.B. Yeats, and myself. Probably he made the same mock-confidence to +other friends, as a part of his general scheme of mystification. On one +occasion, when I was sitting with him in his study, he pointed to the +framed portrait of a beautiful woman which stood on top of a revolving +book-case, and said "That is Fiona!" I affected belief, but, rightly or +wrongly, it was my strong impression that the portrait thus labelled was +that of a well-known Irish lady prominently identified with Home Rule +politics, and I smiled to myself at the audacious white lie. Mrs. Sharp, +whose remembrance of her husband goes back to "a merry, mischievous +little boy in his eighth year, with light-brown curly hair, blue-grey +eyes, and a laughing face, and dressed in a tweed kilt," tells us that +this "love not only of mystery for its own sake, but of mystification +also," was a marked characteristic of his nature--a characteristic +developed even in childhood by the necessity he always felt of hiding +away from his companions that visionary side of his life which was +almost painfully vivid with him, and the sacredness of which in late +years he felt compelled to screen under his pseudonym. + +That William Sharp's affirmation of an actual living and breathing +"Fiona Macleod" was, however, virtually true is confided by this +significant and illuminating passage in Mrs. Sharp's biography. Mrs. +Sharp is speaking of a sojourn together in Rome during the spring of +1891, in which her husband had experienced an unusual exaltation and +exuberance of vital and creative energy. + + There, at last [she says], he had found the desired incentive + towards a true expression of himself, in the stimulus and + sympathetic understanding of the friend to whom he dedicated the + first of the books published under his pseudonym. This friendship + began in Rome and lasted throughout the remainder of his life. And + though this new phase of his work was at no time the result of + collaboration, as certain of his critics have suggested, he was + deeply conscious of his indebtedness to this friend, for--as he + stated to me in a letter of instructions, written before he went to + America in 1896, concerning his wishes in the event of his death--he + realized that it was "to her I owe my development as 'Fiona + Macleod,' though in a sense of course that began long before I + knew her, and indeed while I was still a child," and that, as he + believed, "without her there would have been no 'Fiona Macleod.'" + Because of her beauty, her strong sense of life and of the joy of + life; because of her keen intuitions and mental alertness, her + personality stood for him as a symbol of the heroic women of Greek + and Celtic days, a symbol that, as he expressed it, unlocked new + doors in his mind and put him "in touch with ancestral memories" of + his race. So, for a time, he stilled the critical, intellectual mood + of William Sharp, to give play to the development of this new-found + expression of subtle emotions, towards which he had been moving with + all the ardour of his nature. + +From this statement of Mrs. Sharp one naturally turns to the dedication +of _Pharais_ to which she refers, finding a dedicatory letter +to "E.W.R." dealing for the most part with "Celtic" matters, but +containing these more personal passages: + + Dear friend [the letter begins], while you gratify me by your + pleasure in this inscription, you modestly deprecate the dedication + to you of this study of alien life--of that unfamiliar island-life + so alien in all ways from the life of cities, and, let me add, from + that of the great mass of the nation to which, in the communal + sense, we both belong. But in the Domhan-Tòir of friendship there + are resting-places where all barriers of race, training, and + circumstances fall away in dust. At one of these places we met, a + long while ago, and found that we loved the same things, and in the + same way. + +The letter ends with this: "There is another Pàras (Paradise) than that +seen of Alastair of Innisròn--the Tir-Nan-Oigh of friendship. Therein we +both have seen beautiful visions and dreamed dreams. Take, then, out of +my heart, this book of vision and dream." + +"Fiona Macleod," then, would appear to be the collective name given to +a sort of collaborative Three-in-One mysteriously working together: an +inspiring Muse with the initials E.W.R.; that psychical "other self" +of whose existence and struggle for expression William Sharp had been +conscious all his life; and William Sharp, general _littérateur_, as +known to his friends and reading public. "Fiona Macleod" would seem to +have always existed as a sort of spiritual prisoner within that comely +and magnetic earthly tenement of clay known as William Sharp, but +whom William Sharp had been powerless to free in words, till, at +the wand-like touch of E.W.R.--the creative stimulus of a profound +imaginative friendship--a new power of expression had been given to +him--a power of expression strangely missing from William Sharp's +previous acknowledged writings. + +To speak faithfully, it was the comparative mediocrity, and occasional +even positive badness, of the work done over his own name that formed +one of the stumbling-blocks to the acceptance of the theory that William +Sharp _could_ be "Fiona Macleod." Of course, his work had been that of +an accomplished widely-read man of letters, his life of Heine being +perhaps his most notable achievement in prose; and his verse had not +been without intermittent flashes and felicities, suggestive of +smouldering poetic fires, particularly in his _Sospiri di Roma_; but, +for the most part, it had lacked any personal force or savour, and was +entirely devoid of that magnetism with which William Sharp, the man, was +so generously endowed. In fact, its disappointing inadequacy was a +secret source of distress to the innumerable friends who loved him +with a deep attachment, to which the many letters making one of the +delightful features of Mrs. Sharp's biography bear witness. In himself +William Sharp was so prodigiously a personality, so conquering in the +romantic flamboyance of his sun-like vitality, so overflowing with the +charm of a finely sensitive, richly nurtured temperament, so essentially +a poet in all he felt and did and said, that it was impossible patiently +to accept his writings as any fair expression of himself. He was, as we +say, so much more than his books--so immeasurably and delightfully +more--that, compared with himself, his books practically amounted to +nothing; and one was inclined to say of him in one's heart, as one does +sometimes say of such imperfectly articulate artistic natures: "What +a pity he troubles to write at all! Why not be satisfied with being +William Sharp? Why spoil 'William Sharp' by this inadequate and +misleading translation?" + +The curious thing, too, was that the work he did over his own name, +after "Fiona Macleod" had escaped into the freedom of her own beautiful +individual utterance, showed no improvement in quality, no marks of +having sprung from the same mental womb where it had lain side by side +with so fair a sister. But, of course, one can readily understand that +such work would naturally lack spontaneity of impulse, having to be +done, more or less, against the grain, from reasons of expediency: so +long as "Fiona Macleod" must remain a secret, William Sharp must produce +something to show for himself, in order to go on protecting that secret, +which would, also, be all the better kept by William Sharp continuing in +his original mediocrity. Of this dual activity, Mrs. Sharp thus writes +with much insight: + + From then till the end of his life [she says] there was a continual + play of the two forces in him, or of the two sides of his nature: of + the intellectually observant, reasoning mind--the actor, and of the + intuitively observant, spiritual mind--the dreamer, which + differentiated more and more one from the other, and required + different conditions, different environment, different stimuli, + until he seemed to be two personalities in one. It was a development + which, as it proceeded, produced a tremendous strain on his physical + and mental resources, and at one time between 1897-8 threatened him + with a complete nervous collapse. And there was for a time distinct + opposition between those two natures which made it extremely + difficult for him to adjust his life, for the two conditions were + equally imperative in their demands upon him. + + His preference, naturally, was for the intimate creative work which + he knew grew out of his inner self; though the exigencies of life, + his dependence on his pen for his livelihood, and, moreover, the + keen active interest "William Sharp" took in all the movements of + the day, literary and political, at home and abroad, required of + him a great amount of applied study and work. + +The strain must indeed have been enormous, and one cannot but feel that +much of it was a needless, even trivial "expense of spirit," and regret +that, when "Fiona Macleod" had so manifestly come into her own, William +Sharp should have continued to keep up the mystification, entailing as +it did such an elaborate machinery of concealment, not the least taxing +of which must have been the necessity of keeping up "Fiona Macleod's" +correspondence as well as his own. Better, so to say, to have thrown +William Sharp overboard, and to have reserved the energies of a +temperament almost abnormally active, but physically delusive and +precarious, for the finer productiveness of "Fiona Macleod." But William +Sharp deemed otherwise. He was wont to say, "Should the secret be found +out, Fiona dies," and in a letter to Mrs. Thomas A. Janvier--she and her +husband being among the earliest confidants of his secret--he makes this +interesting statement: "I can write out of my heart in a way I could +not do as William Sharp, and indeed I could not do so if I were the +woman Fiona Macleod is supposed to be, unless veiled in scrupulous +anonymity.... This rapt sense of oneness with nature, this _cosmic +ecstasy_ and elation, this wayfaring along the extreme verges of the +common world, all this is so wrought up with the romance of life that +I could not bring myself to expression by my outer self, insistent and +tyrannical as that need is.... My truest self, the self who is below +all other selves, and my most intimate life and joys and sufferings, +thoughts, emotions, and dreams, _must_ find expression, yet I cannot +save in this hidden way...." + +Later he wrote: "Sometimes I am tempted to believe I am half a woman, +and so far saved as I am by the hazard of chance from what a woman can +be made to suffer if one let the light of the common day illuminate the +avenues and vistas of her heart...." + +At one time, I thought that William Sharp's assumption of a feminine +pseudonym was a quite legitimate device to steal a march on his critics, +and to win from them, thus disguised, that recognition which he must +have been aware he had failed to win in his own person. Indeed, it is +doubtful whether, if he had published the "Fiona Macleod" writings under +his own name, they would have received fair critical treatment. I am +very sure that they would not; for there is quite a considerable amount +of so-called "criticism" which is really foregone conclusion based on +personal prejudice, or biassed preconception, and the refusal to admit +(employing a homely image) that an old dog does occasionally learn new +tricks. Many well-known writers have resorted to this device, sometimes +with considerable success. Since reading Mrs. Sharp's biography, +however, I conclude that this motive had but little, if any, influence +on William Sharp, and that his statement to Mrs. Janvier must be taken +as virtually sincere. + +A certain histrionism, which was one of his charms, and is perhaps +inseparable from imaginative temperaments, doubtless had its share in +his consciousness of that "dual nature" of which we hear so much, +and which it is difficult sometimes to take with Sharp's "Celtic" +seriousness. Take, for example, this letter to his wife, when, having +left London, precipitately, in response to the call of the Isles, he +wrote: "The following morning we (for a kinswoman was with me) stood on +the Greenock pier waiting for the Hebridean steamer, and before long +were landed on an island, almost the nearest we could reach, that I +loved so well." Mrs. Sharp dutifully comments: "The 'we' who stood on +the pier at Greenock is himself in his dual capacity; his 'kinswoman' is +his other self." Later he writes, on his arrival in the Isle of Arran: +"There is something of a strange excitement in the knowledge that two +people are here: so intimate and yet so far off. For it is with me as +though Fiona were asleep in another room. I catch myself listening +for her step sometimes, for the sudden opening of a door. It is +unawaredly that she whispers to me. I am eager to see what she will +do--particularly in _The Mountain Lovers_. It seems passing strange +to be here with her alone at last...." I confess that this strikes +me disagreeably. It is one thing to be conscious of a "dual +personality"--after all, consciousness of dual personality is by no +means uncommon, and it is a commonplace that, spiritually, men of genius +are largely feminine--but it is another to dramatize one's consciousness +in this rather childish fashion. There seems more than a suspicion of +pose in such writing: though one cannot but feel that William Sharp was +right in thinking that the real "Fiona Macleod" was asleep at the +moment. At the same time, William Sharp seems unmistakably to have been +endowed with what I suppose one has to call "psychic" powers--though the +word has been "soiled with all ignoble use"--and to be the possessor +in a considerable degree of that mysterious "sight" or sixth sense +attributed to men and women of Gaelic blood. Mrs. Sharp tells a curious +story of his mood immediately preceding that flight to the Isles of +which I have been writing. He had been haunted the night before by the +sound of the sea. It seemed to him that he heard it splashing in the +night against the walls of his London dwelling. So real it had seemed +that he had risen from his bed and looked out of the window, and even in +the following afternoon, in his study, he could still hear the waves +dashing against the house. "A telegram had come for him that morning," +writes Mrs. Sharp, "and I took it to his study. I could get no answer. +I knocked, louder, then louder,--at last he opened the door with a +curiously dazed look in his face. I explained. He answered: 'Ah, I +could not hear you for the sound of the waves!'" + +His last spoken words have an eerie suggestiveness in this connection. +Writing of his death on the 12th of December, 1905, Mrs. Sharp says: +"About three o'clock, with his devoted friend Alec Hood by his side, he +suddenly leant forward with shining eyes and exclaimed in a tone of +joyous recognition, 'Oh, the beautiful "Green Life," again!' and the +next moment sank back in my arms with the contented sigh, 'Ah, all is +well!'" + +"The green life" was a phrase often on Sharp's lips, and stood for him +for that mysterious life of elemental things to which he was almost +uncannily sensitive, and into which he seemed able strangely to merge +himself, of which too his writings as "Fiona Macleod" prove him to have +had "invisible keys." It is this, so to say, conscious pantheism, +this kinship with the secret forces and subtle moods of nature, this +responsiveness to her mystic spiritual "intimations," that give to those +writings their peculiar significance and value. In the external lore of +nature William Sharp was exceptionally learned. Probably no writer in +English, with the exceptions of George Meredith and Grant Allen, was his +equal here, and his knowledge had been gained, as such knowledge can +only be gained, in that receptive period of an adventurous boyhood of +which he has thus written: "From fifteen to eighteen I sailed up every +loch, fjord, and inlet in the Western Highlands and islands, from Arran +and Colonsay to Skye and the Northern Hebrides, from the Rhinns of +Galloway to the Ord of Sutherland. Wherever I went I eagerly associated +myself with fishermen, sailors, shepherds, gamekeepers, poachers, +gypsies, wandering pipers, and other musicians." For two months he had +"taken the heather" with, and had been "star-brother" and "sun-brother" +to, a tribe of gypsies, and in later years he had wandered variously in +many lands, absorbing the wonder and the beauty of the world. Well +might he write to Mrs. Janvier: "I have had a very varied, and, to use a +much abused word, a very romantic life in its internal as well as in its +external aspects." Few men have drunk so deep of the cup of life, and +from such pure sky-reflecting springs, and if it be true, in the words +of his friend Walter Pater, that "to burn ever with this hard gem-like +flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life," then indeed the +life of William Sharp was a nobly joyous success. + +And to those who loved him it is a great happiness to know that he was +able to crown this ecstasy of living with that victory of expression for +which his soul had so long travailed, and to leave behind him not only a +lovely monument of star-lit words, but a spiritual legacy of perennial +refreshment, a fragrant treasure-house of recaptured dreams, and +hallowed secrets of the winds of time: for such are _The Writings of +"Fiona Macleod"_. + + + + +XXIV + +FORBES-ROBERTSON: AN APPRECIATION + + +The voluntary abdication of power in its zenith has always fascinated +and "intrigued" the imagination of mankind. We are so accustomed to +kings and other gifted persons holding on to their sceptres with a +desperate tenacity, even through those waning years when younger men, +beholding their present feebleness, wonder whether their previous might +was not a fancy of their fathers, whether, in fact, they were ever +really kings or gifted persons at all. In so many cases we have to rely +on a legend of past accomplishment to preserve our reverence. Therefore, +when a Sulla or a Charles V. or a Mary Anderson, leave their thrones at +the moment when their sway over us is most assured and brilliant, we +wonder--wonder at a phenomenon rare in humanity, and suggestive of +romantic reserves of power which seal not only our allegiance to them, +but that of posterity. The mystery which resides in all greatness, in +all charm, is not violated by the cynical explanations of decay. They +remain fortunate as those whom the gods loved, wearing the aureoles of +immortal promise. + +Few artists have been wise in this respect; poets, for example, very +seldom. Thus we find the works of most of them encumbered with the +débris of their senility. Coventry Patmore was a rare example of a poet +who laid down his pen deliberately, not merely as an artist in words, +but as an artist in life, having, as he said in the memorable preface to +the collected edition of his poems, completed that work which in his +youth he had set before him. His readers, therefore, are not saddened by +any pathetic gleanings from a once-rich harvest-field, or the carefully +picked-up shakings of November boughs. + +Forbes-Robertson is one of those artists who has chosen to bid farewell +to his art while he is still indisputably its master. One or two other +distinguished actors before him have thus chosen, and a greater number +have bade us, those professional "farewells" that remind one of that +dream of De Quincey in which he heard reverberated "Everlasting +farewells! and again and yet again reverberated--everlasting farewells!" +In Forbes-Robertson's case, however, apart from our courteous taking the +word of his management, we know that the news is sadly true. There is +a curious personal honour and sincerity breathing through all his +impersonations that make us feel, so to say, that not only would we take +the ghost's word for a thousand pounds, but that between him and his art +is such an austere compact that he would be incapable of humiliating it +by any mere advertising devices; and beyond that, those who have seen +him play this time (1914) in New York must have been aware that in the +very texture of all his performances was woven like a sigh the word +"farewell." His very art, as I shall have later to emphasize, is an art +of farewell; but, apart from that general quality, it seemed to me, +though, indeed, it may have been mere sympathetic fancy, that in these +last New York performances, as in the performances last spring in +London, I heard a personal valedictory note. Forbes-Robertson seemed to +be saying good-by at once to his audience and to his art. + +In doing this, along with the inevitable sadness that must accompany +such a step, one cannot but think there will be a certain private +whimsical satisfaction for him in being able to go about the world in +after years with his great gift still his, hidden away, but still his to +use at any moment, and to know not only that he has been, but still is, +as it were, in secret, the supreme Hamlet of his time. Something +like that, one may imagine, must be the private fun of abdication. +Forbes-Robertson, as he himself has told us, lays down one art only to +take up another to which he has long been devoted, and of his early +affiliation to which the figure of Love Kissing Beatrice in Rossetti's +"Dante's Dream" bears illustrious and significant witness. As, one +recalls that he was the model for that figure one realizes that even +then he was the young lord Hamlet, born to be _par excellence_ the actor +of sorrow and renunciation. + +It is not my province to write here of Forbes-Robertson from the point +of view of the reminiscent playgoer or of the technical critic of +acting. Others, obviously, are far better qualified to undertake those +offices for his fame. I would merely offer him the tribute of one to +whom for many years his acting has been something more than acting, as +usually understood, something to class with great poetry, and all the +spiritual exaltation which "great poetry" implies. From first to last, +however associated with that whimsical comedy of which, too, he is +appropriately a master, he has struck for me that note of almost +heartbreaking spiritual intensity which, under all its superficial +materialism and cynicism, is the key-note of the modern world. + +When I say "first," I am thinking of the first time I saw him, on the +first night of _The Profligate_ by Pinero, in its day one of the plays +that blazed the trail for that social, or, rather, I should say, +sociological, drama since become even more deadly in earnest, though +perhaps less deadly in skill. Incidentally, I remember that Miss Olga +Nethersole, then quite unknown, made a striking impression of evil, +though playing only a small part. It was Forbes-Robertson, however, for +me, and I think for all the playgoing London of the time, that gave the +play its chief value by making us startlingly aware, through the +poignancy of his personality, of what one might call the voice of the +modern conscience. To associate that thrillingly beautiful and profound +voice of his with anything that sounds so prosaic as a "modern +conscience" may seem unkind, but actually our modern conscience is +anything but prosaic, and combines within it something at once poetic +and prophetic, of which that something ghostly in Forbes-Robertson's +acting is peculiarly expressive. That quality of other-worldliness which +at once scared and fascinated the lodgers in _The Passing of the Third +Floor Back_ is present in all Forbes-Robertson's acting. It was that +which strangely stirred us, that first night of _The Profligate_. We +meet it again with the blind Dick Heldar in _The Light That Failed_, and +of course we meet it supremely in _Hamlet_. In fact, it is that quality +which, chief among others, makes Forbes-Robertson's Hamlet the classical +Hamlet of his time. + +Forbes-Robertson has of course played innumerable parts. Years before +_The Profligate_, he had won distinction as the colleague of Irving and +Mary Anderson. He may be said to have played everything under the sun. +His merely theatric experience has thus enriched and equipped his +temperament with a superb technique. It would probably be impossible for +him to play any part badly, and of the various successes he has made, to +which his present repertoire bears insufficient witness, others, as I +have said, can point out the excellences. My concern here is with his +art in its fullest and finest expression, in its essence; and therefore +it is unnecessary for me to dwell upon any other of his impersonations +than that of Hamlet. When a man can play _Hamlet_ so supremely, it may +be taken for granted, I presume, that he can play _Mice and Men_, or +even that masterpiece of all masterpieces, _Caesar and Cleopatra_. I +trust that it is no disrespect to the distinguished authors of these two +plays to say that such plays in a great actor's repertoire represent +less his versatility than his responsibilities, that pot-boiling +necessity which hampers every art, and that of the actor, perhaps, most +of all. + +To my thinking, the chief interest of all Forbes-Robertson's other parts +is that they have "fed" his Hamlet; and, indeed, many of his best parts +may be said to be studies for various sides of Hamlet, his fine _Romeo_, +for example, which, unfortunately, he no longer plays. In _Hamlet_ all +his qualities converge, and in him the tradition of the stage that all +an ambitious actor's experience is only to fit him to play Hamlet is for +once justified. But, of course, the chief reason of that success is that +nature meant Forbes-Robertson to play Hamlet. Temperament, personality, +experience, and training have so worked together that he does not merely +play, but _is_, Hamlet. Such, at all events, is the complete illusion he +is able to produce. + +Of course, one has heard from them of old time that an actor's +personality must have nothing to do with the part he is playing; that he +only is an actor who can most successfully play the exact opposite of +himself. That is the academic theory of "character-acting," and of +course the half-truth of it is obvious. It represents the weariness +induced in audiences by handsome persons who merely, in the stage +phrase, "bring their bodies on"; yet it would go hard with some of our +most delightful comedians were it the whole truth about acting. As a +matter of fact, of course, a great actor includes a multiplicity of +selves, so that he may play many parts, yet always be playing himself. +Beyond himself no artist, whatever his art, has ever gone. + +What reduplication of personality is necessary for the man who plays +Hamlet need hardly be said, what wide range of humanity and variety of +accomplishment; for, as Anatole France has finely said of Hamlet, "He is +a man, he is man, he is the whole of man." + +Time was when _Hamlet_ was little more than an opportunity for some +robustious periwig-pated fellow, or it gave the semi-learned actor the +chance to conceal his imaginative incapacity by a display of "new +readings." For example, instead of saying: + + The air bites shrewdly; it is very cold, + +you diverted attention from your acting by an appeal to the literary +antiquarianism of your audience, and, out of one or other of the +quartos, read the line: + + The air bites shrewdly; _is_ it very cold? + +with the implication that there was a whole world of suggestion in the +difference. + +One has known actors, far from unillustrious, who staked their whole +performance on some such learned triviality or some trifling novelty of +business, when, for example, in Hamlet's scene with his mother, the +prince comes to: + + Look here upon this picture, and on this. + +An actor who deserves better than he has yet received in the tradition +of the acted _Hamlet_--I mean Wilson Barrett--used to make much of +taking a miniature of his father from his bosom to point the contrast. + +But all such things in the end are of no account. New readings, new +business, avail less and less. Nor does painstaking archaeology of +scenery or dresses any longer throw dust in our eyes. We are for the +play, the living soul of the play. Give us that, and your properties may +be no more elaborate than those of a _guignol_ in the Champs-Elysées. + +Forbes-Robertson's acting is so imaginative, creating the scene about +him as he plays, that one almost resents any stage-settings for him at +all, however learnedly accurate and beautifully painted. + +His soul seems to do so much for us that we almost wish it could be +left to do it all, and he act for us as they acted in Elizabeth's day, +with only a curtain for scenery, and a placard at the side of the stage +saying, "This is Elsinore." + +One could hardly say more for one's sense of the reality of +Forbes-Robertson's acting, as, naturally, one is not unaware that +distressing experiments have been made to reproduce the Elizabethan +theatre by actors who, on the other hand, were sadly in need of all +that scenery, archaeology, or orchestra could do for them. + +With a world overcrowded with treatises on the theme, from, and before, +Gervinus, with the commentary of _Wilhelm Meister_ in our minds, not to +speak of the starlit text ever there for our reading, there is surely no +need to traverse the character of Hamlet. He has meant so much to our +fathers--though he can never have meant so much to them as he does to us +of today--that he is, so to say, in our blood. He is strangely near to +our hearts by sheer inheritance. And perhaps the most beautiful thing +Forbes-Robertson's Hamlet does for us is that it commands our love for a +great gentleman doing his gentlest and bravest and noblest with a sad +smile and a gay humour, in not merely a complicated, wicked, absurd, and +tiresome, but, also, a ghostly world. + +When we think of Hamlet, we think of him as two who knew him very well +thought of him,--Ophelia and Horatio,--and as one who saw him only as he +sat at last on his throne, dead, with the crown of Denmark on his +knees. + +Ophelia's + + Courtier's, soldier's, scholar's eye, tongue, sword, + The expectancy and rose of the fair state; + +the "sweet prince" of Horatio's "good-night"--the soldier for whose +passage Fortinbras commanded + + The soldier's music and the rites of war. + +We think of him, too, as the haunted son of a dear father murdered, a +philosophic spectator of the grotesque brutality of life, suddenly by a +ghostly summons called on to take part in it; a prince, a philosopher, a +lover, a soldier, a sad humourist. + +Were one asked what aspects of Hamlet does Forbes-Robertson specially +embody, I should say, in the first place, his princeliness, his +ghostliness, then his cynical and occasionally madcap humour, as where, +at the end of the play-scene, he capers behind the throne in a terrible +boyish glee. No actor that I have seen expresses so well that scholarly +irony of the Renaissance permeating the whole play. His scene with +Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and the recorders is masterly: the silken +sternness of it, the fine hauteur, the half-appeal as of lost ideals +still pleading with the vulgarity of life, the fierce humour of its +disillusion, and behind, as always, the heartbreak--that side of which +comes of the recognition of what it is to be a gentleman in such a +world. + +In this scene, too, as in others, Forbes-Robertson makes it clear that +that final tribute of Fortinbras was fairly won. + +The soldier--if necessary, the fighter--is there as supple and strong as +a Damascus blade. One is always aware of the "something dangerous," for +all his princely manners and scholarly ways. One is never left in doubt +as to how this Hamlet will play the man. It is all too easy for him to +draw his sword and make an end of the whole fantastic business. Because +this philosophic swordsman holds the sword, let no one think that he +knows not how to wield it. All this gentleness--have a care!--is that of +an unusually masculine restraint. + +In the scene with Ophelia, Forbes-Robertson's tenderness was almost +terrible. It came from such a height of pity upon that little +uncomprehending flower! + +"I never gave you aught," as Forbes-Robertson said it, seemed to mean: +"I gave you all--all that you could not understand." "Yet are not you +and I in the toils of that destiny there that moves the arras. _Is_ it +your father?" + +Along with Forbes-Robertson's spiritual interpretation of Shakespeare +goes pre-eminently, and doubtless as a contributive part of it, his +imaginative revitalization of the great old lines--lines worn like a +highway with the passage of the generations. As a friend of mine +graphically phrased it, "How he revives for us the splendour of the +text!" + +The splendour of the text! It is a good phrase, and how splendid the +text is we, of course, all know--know so well that we take it for +granted, and so fall into forgetfulness of its significance; forgetting +what central fires of soul and intellect must have gone to the creation +of such a world of transcendent words. + +Yet how living the lines still are, though the generations have almost +quoted the life out of them, no man who has spoken them on the stage in +our day, except Forbes-Robertson, has had the gift to show. + +It is more than elocution, masterly elocution as it is, more than the +superbly modulated voice: the power comes of spiritual springs welling +up beneath the voice--springs fed from those infinite sources which "lie +beyond the reaches of our souls." + +Merely to take the phrase I have just quoted, how few actors--or readers +of Shakespeare, or members of any Shakespearian audience, for that +matter--have any personal conception of what it means! They may make a +fine crescendo with it, but that is all. They have never stood, +shrinking and appalled, yet drawn with a divine temptation, upon the +brink of that vastness along the margin of which, it is evident, that +Hamlet often wandered. It is in vain they tell their audiences and +Horatio: + + There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, + Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. + +We are quite sure that they know nothing of what they are saying; and +that, as a matter of fact, there are few things for them in heaven or +earth except the theatre they are playing in, their actors' club, and, +generally, their genial mundane lives; and, of course, one rather +congratulates them on the simplicity of their lives, congratulates them +on their ignorance of such haunted regions of the mind. Yet, all the +same, that simplicity seems to disqualify them from playing _Hamlet_. + +Few Shakespearian actors seem to remember what they are +playing--Shakespeare. One would think that to be held a worthy +interpreter of so great a dramatist, so mysterious a mind, and so +golden a poet, were enough distinction. Oscar Wilde, in a fine +sonnet, addressed Henry Irving as + + Thou trumpet set for Shakespeare's lips to blow, + +and we may be sure that Irving appreciated the honour thus paid him, he +who so wonderfully interpreted so many of Shakespeare's moods, so well +understood the irony of his intellect, even the breadth of his humanity, +yet in _Hamlet_, at all events, so strangely missed his soul. + +Most of us have seen many Hamlets die. We have watched them squirming +through those scientific contortions of dissolution, to copy which they +had very evidently walked the hospitals in a businesslike quest of +death-agonies, as certain histrionic connoisseurs of madness in France +lovingly haunt the Saltpétrière. As I look back, I wonder how we +tolerated their wriggling absurdity. I suppose it was that the hand of +tradition was still upon us, as upon them. And, let us not forget, the +words were there, the immortal words, and an atmosphere of tragic death +and immortality that only such words could create: + + Absent thee from felicity awhile, + And in the harsh world draw thy breath in pain + To hear my story ... + The rest is silence.... + +How different it is when Forbes-Robertson's Hamlet dies! All my life I +seem to have been asking my friends, those I loved best, those who +valued the dearest, the kindest, the greatest, and the strongest in our +strange human life, to come with me and see Forbes-Robertson die in +_Hamlet_. I asked them because, as that strange young dead king sat +upon his throne, there was something, whatever it meant--death, life, +immortality, what you will--of a surpassing loveliness, something +transfiguring the poor passing moment of trivial, brutal murder into a +beauty to which it was quite natural that that stern Northern warrior, +with his winged helmet, should bend the knee. I would not exchange +anything I have ever read or seen for Forbes-Robertson as he sits there +so still and starlit upon the throne of Denmark. + +Forbes-Robertson is not merely a great Shakespearian actor; he is a +great spiritual actor. The one doubtless implies the other, though the +implication has not always appeared to be obvious. + +He is prophetic of what the stage will some day be, and what we can see +it here and there preparing to become. In all the welter of the dramatic +conditions of the moment there emerges one fact, that of the growing +importance of the stage as a vehicle for what one may term general +culture. The stage, with its half-sister, the cinema, is strangely, +by how long and circuitous a route, returning of course, with an +immeasurably developed equipment, to its starting-point, ending +curiously where it began as the handmaid of the church. As with the old +moralities or miracle-plays, it is becoming once more our teacher. The +lessons of truth and beauty, as those of plain gaiety and delight, are +relying more and more upon the actor for their expression, and less on +the accredited doctors of divinity or literature. Even the dancers are +doing much for our souls. Our duties as citizens are being taught us by +well-advertised plays, and if we wish to abolish Tammany or change our +police commissioner, we enforce our desire by the object-lesson of a +play. The great new plays may not yet be here, but the public once more +is going to the theatre, as it went long ago in Athens, to be delighted +and amused, of course, but also to be instructed in national and civic +affairs, and, most important of all, to be purified by pity and terror. + + + + +XXV + +A MEMORY OF FRÉDÉRIC MISTRAL + + +There are many signs that poetry is coming into its own again--even +here in America, which, while actually one of the most romantic and +sentimental of countries, fondly imagines itself the most prosaic. + +Kipling, to name but one instance, has, by his clarion-tongued +quickening of the British Empire, shown so convincingly what dynamic +force still belongs to the right kind of singing, and the poet in +general seems to be winning back some of that serious respect from his +fellow-citizens which, under a misapprehension of his effeminacy and +general uselessness, he had lost awhile. The poet is not so much a joke +to the multitude as he was a few years ago, and the term "minor poet" +seems to have fallen into desuetude. + +Still for all this, I doubt if it is in the Anglo-Saxon blood, nowadays +at all events, to make a national hero of a poet, one might say a +veritable king, such as Frédéric Mistral is today in Provence. In our +time, Björnson in Norway was perhaps the only parallel figure, and he +held his position as actual "father of his people" for very much the +same reasons. At once a commanding and lovable personality, he and his +work were absolutely identified with his country and his countrymen. He +was simply Norway incarnate. + +So, today in Provence, it is with Frédéric Mistral. He is not only a +poet of Provence. He is Provence incarnate, and, apart from the noble +quality of his work, his position as the foremost representative of his +compatriots is romantically unique. No other country today, pointing to +its greatest man, would point out--a poet; whereas Mistral, were he not +as unspoiled as he is laurelled, might, with literal truth, say: + + "_Provence--c'est moi!_" + +We had hardly set foot in Provence this last spring, my wife and I, +before we realized, with grateful wonder, that we had come to a country +that has a poet for a king. + +On arriving at Marseilles almost the first word we heard was +"Mistral"--not the bitter wind of the same name, but the name of the +honey-tongued "Master." Our innkeeper--O the delightful innkeepers of +France!--on our consulting him as to our project of a walking trip +through the Midi--as Frenchmen usually speak of Provence--said, for his +first aid to the traveller: "Then, of course, you will see our great +poet, Mistral." And he promptly produced a copy of _Mirèio_, which he +begged me to use till I had bought a copy for myself. + +"Ah! Mistral," he cried, with Gallic enthusiasm, using the words I have +borrowed from his lips, "Mistral is the King of Provence!" + +Marseilles had not always been so enthusiastic over Mistral and his +fellows. And Mistral, in his memoirs, gives an amusing account of a +philological battle fought over the letter "s" in a room behind one of +the Marseilles bookshops between "the amateurs of trivialities, the +rhymers of the white beard, the jealous, the grumblers," and the young +innovators of the "félibrige." + +But that was over fifty years ago, and the battle of those young +enthusiasts has long since been won. What that battle was and what an +extraordinary victory came of it must needs be told for the significance +of Mistral in Provence to be properly understood. + +The story is one of the most romantic in the history of literature. +Briefly, it is this: + +The Provençal language, the "langue d'oc," was, of course, once the +courtly and lettered language of Europe, the language of the great +troubadours, and through them the vehicle of the culture and refinement +of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. From it may be said to have +sprung the beginnings of Italian literature. + +But, owing to various historical vicissitudes, the language of Northern +France, the "langue d'oil," gradually took its place, and when Mistral +was born, in 1830, Provençal had long been regarded as little more than +a _patois_. + +Now it was the young Mistral's dream, as a school-boy in the old convent +school of Saint Michael de Frigolet, at Avignon, to restore his native +tongue to its former high estate, to make it once more a literary +language, and it chanced that one of his masters, Joseph Roumanille, was +secretly cherishing the same dream. + +The master, looking over his pupil's shoulder one day, found that, +instead of working at his prescribed task, he was busily engaged in +translating the Penitential Psalms into Provençal. Instead of punishing +him, the master gratefully hailed a kindred spirit, and presently +confided Provençal verses of his own making. From that moment, though +there was a dozen years' difference between their ages, Mistral and +Roumanille began a friendship which was to last till Roumanille's death, +a friendship of half a century. + +Soon their dream attracted other recruits, and presently seven friends, +whose names are all famous now, and most of whom have statues in Arles +or in Avignon--Roumanille, Mistral, Aubanel, Mathieu, Giéra, Brunet, and +Tavan--after the manner of Ronsard's "Pléiade," and Rossetti's +"P.R.B."--formed themselves into a brotherhood to carry on the great +work of regeneration. + +They needed a name to call themselves by. They had all met together to +talk things over in the old castle of Font-Ségugne, or, as Mistral more +picturesquely puts it: "It was written in heaven that one blossoming +Sunday, the twenty-first of May, 1854, in the full springtide of life +and of the year, seven poets should come to meet together in the castle +of Font-Ségugne." Several suggestions were made for a name for this +brotherhood, but presently Mistral announced that in an old folk-story +he had collected at his birthplace, Maillane, he believed that he had +found the word they were in search of. In this folk-story the boy Christ +is represented as discoursing in the temple with "the seven félibres of +the Law." + +"Why, that is us!" exclaimed the enthusiastic young men as Mistral +finished, and there on the spot "félibre" was adopted as the password of +their order, Mistral coining the word "félibrige" to represent the work +they aimed to do, and also their association. The name stuck, and has +now for many years been the banner-word for the vigorous school of +Provençal literature and the allied arts of painting and sculpture which +has responded with such eager vitality to Mistral's rallying cry. + +But, excellent as are the other poets which the school has produced--and +one need only glance through a recent _Anthologie du Félibrige_ to +realize what a wealth of true poetry the word "félibrige" now stands +for--there can be no question that its greatest asset still remains +Mistral's own work, as it was his first great poem, _Mirèio_, which +first drew the eyes of literary Paris, more than inclined to be +contemptuous, to the Provençal renaissance. + +Adolphe Dumas had been sent to Provence in the year 1856 by the Minister +of Public Instruction to collect the folk-songs of the people, and +calling on Mistral (then twenty-six), living quietly with his widowed +mother at Maillane, he had found him at work on _Mirèio_. Mistral read +some passages to him, with the result that the generous Dumas returned +to Paris excitedly to proclaim the advent of a new poet. Presently, +Mistral accepted his invitation to visit Paris, was introduced to the +great Lamartine--who has left some charming pages descriptive of his +visit,--read some of _Mirèio_ to him, and was hailed by him as "the +Homer of Provence." + +The press, however, had its little fling at the new-comer. "The Mistral +it appears," said one pitiful punster, "has been incarnated in a poem. +We shall soon see whether it is anything else but wind." Such has been +the invariable welcome of great men in a small world. + +But Mistral had no taste for Paris, either as a lion or a butt, and, +after a few days' stay, we find him once more quietly at home at +Maillane. Yet he had brought back with him one precious trophy--the +praise of Lamartine; and when, in the course of a year or two (1859), +_Mirèio_ came to be published at Avignon, it bore, as it still bears, +this heart-felt dedication to Lamartine: + +"To thee I dedicate _Mirèio_; it is my heart and my soul; it is the +flower of my years; it is a bunch of grapes from Crau with all its +leaves--a rustic's offering." + +With the publication of _Mirèio_ Mistral instantly "arrived," instantly +found himself on that throne which, as year has followed year, has +become more securely his own. Since then he has written much noble +poetry, all embodying and vitalizing the legendary lore of his native +land, a land richer in momentous history, perhaps, than any other +section of Europe. But in addition to his poetry he has, single-handed, +carried through the tremendous scholarly task of compiling a dictionary +of the Provençal language--a _Thesaurus of the Félibrige_, for which +work the Institute awarded him a prize of ten thousand francs. + +In 1904, he was awarded the Nobel prize of 100,000 francs, but such is +his devotion to his fellow-countrymen that he did not keep that prize +for himself, but used it to found the Musée Arlésien at Arles, a museum +designed as a treasure house of anything and everything pertaining to +the history and life of Provence--antiquities, furniture, costumes, +paintings, and so forth. + +It was in Arles in 1909, the fiftieth birthday of _Mirèio_, that +Mistral, then seventy-nine years old, may be said to have reached the +summit of his romantic fame. A great festival was held in his honour, in +which the most distinguished men of France took part. A dramatized +version of his _Mirèio_ was played in the old Roman amphitheatre, and a +striking statue of him was unveiled in the antique public square, the +Place du Forum, with the shade of Constantine looking on, one might +feel, from his mouldering palace hard by. + +In Arles Mistral is a well-known, beloved figure, for it is his custom, +every Saturday, to come there from Maillane, to cast his eye over the +progress of his museum, the pet scheme of his old age. One wonders how +it must seem to pass that figure of himself, pedestaled high in the old +square. To few men is it given to pass by their own statues in the +street. Sang a very different poet-- + + They grind us to the dust with poverty, + And build us statues when we come to die. + +But poor Villon had the misfortune to be a poet of the "langue d'oil," +and the Montfaucon gibbet was the only monument of which he stood in +daily expectation. Could the lines of two poets offer a greater +contrast? Blessed indeed is he who serves the rural gods, Pan and Old +Sylvanus and the sister nymphs--as Virgil sang; and Virgilian indeed has +been the golden calm, and sunlit fortunes, as Virgilian, rather than +Homeric, is the gracious art, of the poet whom his first Parisian +admirer, Adolphe Dumas, called "the Homer of Provence"--as Virgilian, +too, seemed the landscape through which at length, one April afternoon, +we found ourselves on pilgrimage to the home of him whose name had been +on the lips of every innkeeper, shopkeeper, and peasant, all the way +from Marseilles to Tarascon. + +Yes! the same golden peace that lies like a charm across every page +of his greatest poem lay across that sun-steeped, fertile plain, +with its walls of cypress trees, its lines of poplars, its delicate, +tapestry-like designs of almond trees in blossom, on a sombre background +of formal olive orchards, its green meadows, lit up with singing +water-courses, or gleaming irrigation canals, starred here and there +with the awakening kingcup, or sweet with the returning violet--here +and there a farmhouse ("mas," as they call them in Provence) snugly +sheltered from the mistral by their screens of foliage--and far aloft in +the distance, floating like a silver dream, the snow-white shoulder of +Mont Ventoux--the Fuji Yama of Provence. + +At last the old, time-worn village came in sight--it lies about ten +miles north-east of Tartarin's Tarascon--and we entered it, as was +proper, with the "Master's" words on our lips: "Maillane is beautiful, +well-pleasing is Maillane; and it grows more and more beautiful every +day. Maillane is the honour of the countryside, and takes its name from +the month of May. + +"Who would be in Paris or in Rome? Poor conscripts! There is nothing to +charm one there; but Maillane has its equal nowhere--and one would +rather eat an apple in Maillane than a partridge in Paris." + +It was Sunday afternoon, and the streets were full of young people in +their Sunday finery, the girls wearing the pretty Arlésien caps. At +first sight of us, with our knapsacks, they were prepared to be amused, +and saucy lads called out things in mock English; but when it was +understood that we were seeking the house of the "Master" we inspired +immediate respect, and a dozen eager volunteers put themselves at our +service and accompanied us in a body to where, at the eastern edge of +the village, there stands an unpretentious square stone house of no +great antiquity, surrounded by a garden and half hidden with trees. + +We stood silently looking at the house for a few minutes, trying to +realize that there a great poet had gone on living and working, in +single-minded devotion to his art and his people, for full fifty +years--there in that green, out-of-the-way corner of the world. The +idea of a life so rooted in contentment, so continuously happy in the +lifelong prosecution of a task set to itself in boyhood, and so +independent of change, is one not readily grasped by the hurrying +American mind. + +Then we pushed open the iron gate and passed into the garden. A paved +walk led up to the front door, but that had an unused look, and, gaining +no response there, we walked through a shrubbery around the side of the +house, and as we turned the corner came on what was evidently the real +entrance, facing a sunny slope of garden where hyacinths and violets +told of the coming of spring. Here we were greeted by some half a dozen +friendly dogs, whose demonstrations brought to the door a neat little, +keen-eyed peasant woman, with an expression in her face that suggested +that she was the real watch dog, on behalf of her master, standing +between him and an intrusive world. As a matter of fact, as we afterward +learned, that is one of her many self-imposed offices, for, having been +in the Mistral household for many years, she has long since been as much +a family friend as a servant, and generally looks after the Master and +Mme. Mistral as if they were her children, nursing and "bossing" them by +turns. "Elise"--I think her name is--is a "character" almost as well +known in Provence as the Master himself. + +So she looked sharply at us, while I produced a letter to M. Mistral +which had been given me by a humble associate of the "félibres," a +delightful _chansonnier_ we had met at Les Baux. With this she went +indoors, presently to return with a face of still cautious welcome, and +invited us in to a little square hall hung with photographs of various +distinguished friends of the poet and two bronze medallions of himself, +one representing him with his favourite dog. + +Then a door to the right opened, revealing a typical scholar's study, +lined with books from ceiling to floor, books and papers on tables and +chairs, and framed photographs again on the free wall space. The spring +sunshine poured in through long windows, and in this characteristic +setting stood a tall old man, astonishingly erect, his distinguished +head, with its sparse white locks, its keen eyes, and strong yet +delicate aquiline features, pointed white beard and mustache, +suggesting pictures of some military grand seigneur of old time. His +carriage had the same blending of soldier and nobleman, and the stately +kindliness with which he bade us welcome belonged, alas! to another day. + +At his side stood a tall, handsome lady, with remarkable, dark, kind +eyes, evidently many years his junior. This was Mme. Mistral, in her day +one of those "queens of beauty" whom the "félibres" elect every seven +years at their floral fêtes. Mme. Mistral was no less gracious to us +than her husband, and joined in the talk that followed with much +animation and charm. + +We had a little feared that M. Mistral, as he declines to write in +anything but Provençal, might carry his artistic creed into his +conversation too. To our relief, however, he spoke in the most polished +French--for you may know French very well, but be quite unable to +understand Provençal, either printed or spoken. This had sometimes made +our journeying difficult, as we inquired our way of peasants along the +road. + +It was natural to talk first to Mistral of literature. We inquired +whether he read much English. He shook his head, smiling. No! outside of +one or two of the great classics, Shakespeare and Milton, for example, +he had read little. Yes! he had read one American author--Fenimore +Cooper. _Le Feu-Follet_ had been a favourite book of his boyhood. This +we identified as _The Fire-Fly_. + +He seemed to wish to talk about America rather than literature, and +seemed immensely interested in the fact that we were Americans, and he +raised his eyes, with an expression of French wonderment, at the fact +of our walking our way through the country--as also at the length of +the journey from America. Evidently it seemed to him a tremendous +undertaking. + +"You Americans," he said, "are a wonderful people. You think nothing of +going around the world." + +We were surprised to find that he took the keenest interest in American +politics. + +"It must be a terribly difficult country to govern," he said. And then +he asked us eagerly for news of our "extraordinary President." We +suggested Mr. Wilson. + +"Oh, no! no!" he explained. "The extraordinary man who was President +before him." + +"Colonel Roosevelt?" + +Yes, that was the man--a most remarkable man that! So Colonel Roosevelt +may be interested to hear that the poet-king of Provence is an +enthusiastic Bull Mooser. + +Of course, we talked too of the "félibrige," and it was beautiful to see +how M. Mistral's face softened at the mention of his friend Joseph +Roumanille, and with what generosity he attributed the origin of the +great movement to his dead friend. + +"But you must by all means call on Mme. Roumanille," said he, "when you +go to Avignon, and say that I sent you"--for Roumanille's widow still +lives, one of the most honoured muses of the "félibrige." + +When it was time for us to go on our way, nothing would satisfy M. and +Mme. Mistral but that we drink a glass of a cordial which is made by +"Elise" from Mistral's own recipe; and as we raised the tiny glasses of +the innocent liqueur in our hands, Mistral drank "A l'Amérique!" + +Then, taking a great slouch hat from a rack in the hall, and looking as +though it was his statue from Aries accompanying us, the stately old man +led us out into the road, and pointed us the way to Avignon. + +On the 30th of this coming September that great old man--the memory of +whose noble presence and beautiful courtesy will remain with us +forever--will be eighty-three. + +February, 1913. + + + + +XXVI + +IMPERISHABLE FICTION + + +The longevity of trees is said to be in proportion to the slowness of +their growth. It has to do no little as well with the depth and area of +their roots and the richness of the soil in which they find themselves. +When the sower went forth to sow, it will be remembered, that which soon +sprang up as soon withered away. It was the seed that was content to +"bring forth fruit with patience" that finally won out and survived the +others. + +These humble, old-fashioned illustrations occur to me as I apply myself +to the consideration of the question provoked by the lightning +over-production of modern fiction and modern literature generally: the +question of the flourishing longevity of the fiction of the past as +compared with the swift oblivion which seems almost invariably to +over-take the much-advertised "masterpieces" of the present. + +I read somewhere a ballade asking--where are the "best sellers" of +yesteryear? The ballad-maker might well ask, and one might re-echo with +Villon: "Mother of God, ah! where are they?" During the last twenty +years they have been as the sands on the seashore for multitude, yet I +think one would be hard set to name a dozen of them whose titles even +are still on the lips of men--whereas several quieter books published +during that same period, unheralded by trumpet or fire-balloon, are seen +serenely to be ascending to a sure place in the literary firmament. + +What can be the reason? Can the decay of these forgotten phenomena of +modern fiction, so lavishly crowned with laurels manufactured in the +offices of their own publishers, have anything to do with the hectic +rapidity of their growth, and may there be some truth in the supposition +that the novels, and books generally, that live longest are those that +took the longest to write, or, at all events underwent the longest +periods of gestation? + +Some fifteen years or so ago one of the most successful manufacturers of +best sellers was Guy Boothby, whose _Dr. Nikola_ is perhaps still +remembered. Unhappily he did not live long to enjoy the fruits of his +industrious dexterity. I bring his case to mind as typical of the modern +machine-made methods. + +I had read in a newspaper that he did his "writing" by phonograph, and +chancing to meet him somewhere, asked him about it. His response was to +invite me to come down to his charming country house on the Thames and +see how he did it. Boothby was a fine, manly fellow, utterly without +"side" or any illusions as to the quality of his work. He loved good +literature too well--Walter Pater, incongruously enough, was one of his +idols--to dream that he could make it. Nor was the making of literature +by any means his first preoccupation, as he made clear, with winning +frankness, within a few moments of my arriving at his home. + +Taking me out into his grounds, he brought me to some extensive kennels, +where he showed me with pride some fifty or so prize dogs; then he took +me to his stables, his face shining with pleasure in his thoroughbreds; +and again he led the way to a vast hennery, populated with innumerable +prize fowls. + +"These are the things I care about," he said, "and I write the stuff for +which it appears I have a certain knack only because it enables me to +buy them!" + +Would that all writers of best sellers were as engagingly honest. No few +of them, however, write no better and affect the airs of genius into the +bargain. + +Then Boothby took me into his "study," the entire literary apparatus of +which consisted of three phonographs; and he explained that, when he had +dictated a certain amount of a novel into one of them, he handed it over +to his secretary in another room, who set it going and transcribed what +he had spoken into the machine; he, meanwhile, proceeding to fill up +another record. And he concluded airily by saying with a laugh that he +had a novel of 60,000 words to deliver in ten days, and was just on the +point of beginning it! + +Boothby's method was, I believe, somewhat unusual in those days. Since +then it has become something like the rule. Not so much as regards +the phonograph, perhaps, but with respect to the breathless speed of +production. + +I am informed by an editor, associated with magazines that use no less +than a million and a half words of fiction a month, that he has among +his contributors more than one writer on whom he can rely to turn off a +novel of 60,000 words in six days, and that he can put his finger on +twenty novelists who think nothing of writing a novel of a hundred +thousand words in anywhere from sixty to ninety days. He recalled to me, +too, the case of a well-known novelist who has recently contracted to +supply a publisher with four novels in one year, each novel to run to +not less than a hundred thousand words. One thinks of the Scotsman with +his "Where's your Willie Shakespeare now?" + +Even Balzac's titanic industry must hide its diminished head before such +appalling fecundity; and what would Horace have to say to such frog-like +verbal spawning, with his famous "labour of the file" and his counsel to +writers "to take a subject equal to your powers, and consider long what +your shoulders refuse, what they are able to bear." It is to be feared +that "the monument more enduring than brass" is not erected with such +rapidity. The only brass associated with the modern best seller is to +be found in the advertisements; and, indeed, all that both purveyor and +consumer seem to care about may well be summed up in the publisher's +recommendation quoted by Professor Phelps: "This book goes with a rush +and ends with a smash." Such, one might add, is the beginning and ending +of all literary rockets. + +Now let us recall some fiction that has been in the world anywhere from, +say, three hundred years to fifty years and is yet vigorously alive, +and, in many instances, to be classed still with the best sellers. + +_Don Quixote_, for example, was published in 1605, but is still actively +selling. Why? May it perhaps be that it was some six years in the +writing, and that a great man, who was soldier as well as writer, +charged it with the vitality of all his blood and tears and laughter, +all the hard-won humanity of years of manful living, those five years as +a slave in Algiers (actually beginning it in prison once more at La +Mancha), and all the stern struggle of a storm-tossed life faced with +heroic steadfastness and gaiety of heart? + +Take another book which, if it is not read as much as it used to be, and +still deserves to be, is certainly far from being forgotten--_Gil Blas_. +Published in 1715--that is, its first two parts--it has now two +centuries of popularity to its credit, and is still as racy with +humanity as ever; but, though Le Sage was a rapid and voluminous writer, +over this one book which alone the world remembers it is significant to +note that he expended unusual time and pains. He was forty-seven years +old when the first two parts were published. The third part was not +published till 1724, and eleven years more were to elapse before the +issue of the fourth and final part in 1735. + +A still older book that is still one of the world's best sellers, _The +Pilgrim's Progress_, can hardly be conceived as being dashed off in +sixty or ninety days, and would hardly have endured so long had not +Bunyan put into it those twelve years of soul torment in Bedford gaol. +_Robinson Crusoe_ still sells its annual thousands, whereas others of +its author's books no less skilfully written are practically forgotten, +doubtless because Defoe, fifty-eight years old at its publication, had +concentrated in it the ripe experience of a lifetime. Though a boy's +book to us, he clearly intended it for an allegory of his own arduous, +solitary life. + +"I, Robinson Crusoe," we read, "do affirm that the story, though +allegorical, is also historical, and that it is the beautiful +representation of a life of unexampled misfortune, and of a variety +not to be met with in this world." + +_The Vicar of Wakefield_, as we know, was no hurried piece of work. +Indeed, Goldsmith went about it in so leisurely a fashion as to leave it +neglected in a drawer of his desk, till Johnson rescued it, according to +the proverbial anecdote; and even then its publisher, Newbery, was in +no hurry, for he kept it by him another two years before giving it to +the printer and to immortality. It was certainly one of those fruits +"brought forth with patience" all round. + +_Tom Jones_ is another such slow-growing masterpiece. Written in the +sad years immediately following the death of his dearly loved wife, +Fielding, dedicating it to Lord Lyttelton, says: "I here present you +with the labours of some years of my life"; and it need scarcely +be added that the book, as in the case of all real masterpieces, +represented not merely the time expended on it, but all the accumulated +experience of Fielding's very human history. + +Yes! Whistler's famous answer to Ruskin's counsel holds good of all +imperishable literature. Had he the assurance to ask two hundred guineas +for a picture that only took a day to paint? No, replied Whistler, he +asked it for "the training of a lifetime"; and it is this training of a +lifetime, in addition to the actual time expended on composition, that +constitutes the reserve force of all great works of fiction, and is +entirely lacking in most modern novels, however superficially brilliant +be their workmanship. + +For this reason books like George Borrow's _Lavengro_ and _Romany Rye_, +failures on their publication, grow greater rather than less with the +passage of time. Their writers, out of the sheer sincerity of their +natures, furnished them, as by magic, with an inexhaustible provision of +life-giving "ichor." To quote from Milton, "a good book is the precious +life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a +life beyond life." + +Of this immortality principle in literature Milton himself, it need +hardly be said, is one of the great exemplars. He was but thirty-two +when he first projected _Paradise Lost_, and through all the intervening +years of hazardous political industry he had kept the seed warm in his +heart, its fruit only to be brought forth with tragic patience in those +seven years of blindness and imminent peril of the scaffold which +followed his fiftieth birthday. + +The case of poets is not irrelevant to our theme, for the conditions of +all great literature, whatever its nature, are the same. Therefore, +we may recall Dante, whose _Divine Comedy_ was with him from his +thirty-fifth year till the year of his death, the bitter-sweet companion +of twenty years of exile. Goethe, again, finished at eighty the _Faust_ +he had conceived at twenty. + +Spenser was at work on his _Faerie Queene_, alongside his preoccupation +with state business, for nearly twenty years. Pope was twelve years +translating Homer, and I think there is little doubt that Gray's _Elegy_ +owes much of its staying power to the Horatian deliberation with which +Gray polished and repolished it through eight years. + +If we are to believe Poe's _Philosophy of Composition_, and there is, I +think, more truth in it than is generally allowed, the vitality of _The +Raven_, as that, too, of his genuinely imperishable fictions, is less +due to inspiration than to the mathematical painstaking of their +composition. + +But, perhaps, of all poets, the story of Virgil is most instructive for +an age of "get-rich-quick" _littérateurs_. On his _Georgics_ alone he +worked seven years, and, after working eleven years on the _Aeneid_, he +was still so dissatisfied with it that on his death-bed he besought his +friends to burn it, and on their refusal, commanded his servants to +bring the manuscript that he might burn it himself. But, fortunately, +Augustus had heard portions of it, and the imperial veto overpowered the +poet's infanticidal desire. + +But, to return to the novelists, it may at first sight seem that the +great writer who, with the Waverley Novels, inaugurated the modern era +of cyclonic booms and mammoth sales, was an exception to the classic +formula of creation which we are endeavouring to make good. Stevenson, +we have been told, used to despair as he thought of Scott's "immense +fecundity of invention" and "careless, masterly ease." + +"I cannot compete with that," he says--"what makes me sick is to think +of Scott turning out _Guy Mannering_ in three weeks." + +Scott's speed is, indeed, one of the marvels of literary history, yet +in his case, perhaps more than in that of any other novelist, it must +be remembered that this speed had, in an unusual degree, that "training +of a lifetime" to rely upon; as from his earliest boyhood all Scott's +faculties had been consciously as well as unconsciously engaged in +absorbing and, by the aid of his astonishing memory, preserving the +vast materials on which he was able thus carelessly to draw. + +Moreover, those who have read his manly autobiography know that this +speed was by no means all "ease," as witness the almost tragic +composition of _The Bride of Lammermoor_. If ever a writer scorned +delights and lived laborious days, it was Walter Scott. At the same time +the condition of his fame in the present day bears out the general truth +of my contention, for there is little doubt that he would be more widely +read than he is were it not for those too frequent _longueurs_ and inert +paddings which resulted from his too hurried workmanship. + +Jane Austen is another example of comparatively rapid creation, writing +three of her best-known novels, _Pride and Prejudice_, _Sense and +Sensibility_, and _Northanger Abbey_ between the ages of twenty-one and +twenty-three. Yet _Pride and Prejudice_, which practically survives the +others, took her ten months to complete, and all her writings, it has +again to be said, had first been deeply and intimately "lived." + +Charlotte Brontë was a year in writing _Jane Eyre_, spurred on to new +effort by the recent rejection of _The Professor_; but to write such a +book in a year cannot be called over-hasty production when one considers +how much of _Jane Eyre_ was drawn from Charlotte Brontë's own life, and +also how she and her sisters had been experimenting with literature from +their earliest childhood. + +Thackeray considered an allowance of two years sufficient for the +writing of a good novel, but that seems little enough when one takes +into account the length of his best-known books, not to mention the +perfection of their craftsmanship. Dickens, for all the prodigious bulk +of his output, was rather a steady than a rapid writer. "He considered," +says Forster, "three of his not very large manuscript pages a good, and +four an excellent, day's work." + +_David Copperfield_ was about a year and nine months in the writing, +having been begun in the opening of 1849 and completed in October, 1850. +_Bleak House_ took a little longer, having been begun in November, 1851, +and completed in August, 1853. _Hard Times_ was a hasty piece of work, +written between the winter of 1853, and the summer of 1854, and it +cannot be considered one of Dickens's notable successes. + +George Meredith wrote four of his greatest novels in seven years, +_Richard Feverel_, _Evan Harrington_, _Sandra Belloni_, and _Rhoda +Fleming_ being produced between 1859 and 1866. His poem, _Modern Love_, +was also written during that period. + +George Eliot was a much-meditating, painstaking writer, though _Adam +Bede_ cost her little more than a year's work. Her novels, however, as +a rule, did not come forth without prayer and fasting, and, in the +course of their creation, she used often to suffer from "hopelessness +and melancholy." _Romola_, to which she devoted long and studious +preparation, she was often on the point of giving up, and in regard to +it she gives expression to a literary ideal to which the gentleman with +the contract for four novels a year, referred to in the outset of this +paper, is probably a stranger. + + It may turn out [she says], that I can't work freely and fully + enough in the medium I have chosen, and in that case I must give + it up; for I will never write anything to which my whole heart, + mind, and conscience don't consent; so that I may feel it was + something--however small--which wanted to be done in this world, + and that I am just the organ for that small bit of work. + +Charles Kingsley who, if not a great novelist, has to his credit in +_Westward Ho!_ one romance at least which, in the old phrase, "the world +will not willingly let die," was as conscientious in his work as he was +brilliant. + +Says a friend who was with him while he was writing _Hypatia_: + +"He took extraordinary pains to be accurate. We spent one whole day in +searching the four folio volumes of Synesius for a fact he thought was +there, and which was found there at last." + +The writer of perhaps the greatest historical novel in the English +language, _The Cloister and the Hearth_, was what one might call a +glutton for thoroughness. Of himself Charles Reade has said: "I studied +the great art of fiction closely for fifteen years before I presumed +to write a line. I was a ripe critic before I became an artist." His +commonplace books, on the entries in which and the indexing he was +accustomed to spend one whole day out of each week, cataloguing the +notes of his multifarious reading and pasting in cuttings from +newspapers likely to be useful in novel-building, completely filled +one of the rooms in his house. In his will he left these open to the +inspection of literary students who cared to study the methods which +he had found so serviceable. + +To name one or two more English novelists: Thomas Hardy's novels would +seem to have the slow growth of deep-rooted things. His greatest work, +_The Return of the Native_, was on the stocks for four years, though a +year seems to have sufficed for _Far from the Madding Crowd_. + +The meticulous practice of Stevenson is proverbial, but this glimpse of +his method is worth catching again. + + The first draft of a story [records Mr. Charles D. Lanier], + Stevenson wrote out roughly, or dictated to Lloyd Osbourne. When all + the colours were in hand for the complete picture, he invariably + penned it himself, with exceeding care.... If the first copy did not + please him, he patiently made a second or a third draft. In his + stern, self-imposed apprenticeship of phrase-making he had prepared + himself for these workmanlike methods by the practice of rewriting + his trial stories into dramas and then reworking them into stories + again. + +Nathaniel Hawthorne brought the devoted, one might say, the devotional, +spirit of the true artist to all his work, but _The Scarlet Letter_ was +written at a good pace when once started, though, as usual, the germ +had been in Hawthorne's mind for many years. The story of its beginning +is one of the many touching anecdotes in that history of authorship +which Carlyle compared to the Newgate Calendar. Incidentally, too, it +witnesses that an author occasionally meets with a good wife. + +One wintry autumn day in Salem, Hawthorne returned home earlier than +usual from the custom-house. With pale lips, he said to his wife: "I am +turned out of office." To which she--God bless her!--cheerily replied: +"Very well! now you can write your book!" and immediately set about +lighting his study fire and generally making things comfortable for his +work. + +The book was _The Scarlet Letter_, and was completed by the following +February, Hawthorne, as his wife said, writing "immensely" on it day +after day, nine hours a day. When finished, Hawthorne seems to have been +dispirited about the story, and put it away in a drawer; but the good +James T. Fields chanced soon to call on him, and asked him if he had +anything for him to publish. + +"Who," asked Hawthorne gloomily, "would risk publishing a book from me, +the most unpopular writer in America?" + +"I would," was Field's rejoinder, and after some further sparring, +Hawthorne owned up. + +"As you have found me out," said he, "take what I have written and tell +me if it is good for anything"; and Fields went away with the manuscript +of what is, without any question, America's greatest novel. + +Turning to the great novelists of France, with one or two exceptions, +they all bear out the theory of longevity in literature which I have +been endeavouring to support. It must reluctantly be confessed that one +of the most fascinatingly vital of them all, Alexandre Dumas, is one of +the exceptions, born improvisator as he was; yet immense research, it +needs hardly be said, went to the making of his enormous library of +romance--even though, it be allowed, that much of that work was done for +him by his "disciples." + +George Sand was another facile, all too facile, writer. Here is a +description of her method: + + To write novels was to her only a process of nature. She seated + herself before her table at ten o'clock, with scarcely a plot and + only the slightest acquaintance with her characters, and until five + in the evening, while her hand guided a pen, the novel wrote itself. + Next day, and the next, it was the same. By and by the novel had + written itself in full and another was unfolding. + +Whether George Sand is still alive as a novelist, apart from her place +as an historic personality, I leave others to decide; but I am very sure +that she would be read a great deal more than she is if she had not so +confidently left her novels--to write themselves. Different, indeed, was +the method of Balzac, toiling year after year at his colossal task of +_The Human Comedy_, sometimes working eighteen hours a day, and never +less than twelve, and that "in the midst of protested bills, business +annoyances, the most cruel financial straits, in utter solitude and lack +of all consolation." But then Balzac was sustained by one of those great +dreams, without whose aid no lasting literature is produced, the dream, +"by infinite patience and courage, to compose for the France of the +nineteenth century, that history of morals which the old civilizations +of Rome, Athens, Memphis, and India have left untold." + +To fulfil this he was able to live, for a long period, on a daily +expenditure of "three sous for bread, two for milk, and three for +firing." But doubtless it had been different if his dream had been +prize puppies, a garage full of motor-cars, or a translation into the +Four Hundred. + +Victor Hugo, again, was one of the herculean artists, working, in +Emerson's phrase, "in a sad sincerity," with the patience of an ant and +the energy of a volcano. Of his _Les Misérables_--perhaps the greatest +novel ever written, as it is, I suppose, easily the longest--he said, +"it takes me nearly as long to publish a book as to write one"; and he +was at work on _Les Misérables_, off and on, for nearly fifteen years. +Of his writing _Notre Dame_ (that other colossus of fiction) this quaint +picture has been preserved. He had made vast historical preparations for +it, but ever there seemed still more to make, till at length his +publisher grew impatient, and under his pressure Hugo at last made a +start--after this fashion: + + He purchased a great grey woollen wrapper that covered him from head + to foot, he locked up all his clothes lest he should be tempted to + go out, and, carrying off his ink-bottle to his study, applied + himself to his labour just as if he had been in prison. He never + left the table except for food and sleep, and the sole recreation + that he allowed himself was an hour's chat after dinner with M. + Pierre Leroux, or any other friend who might drop in, and to whom he + would occasionally read over his day's work. + +Daudet, whose _Tartarin_ bids fair to remain one of the world's types, +like _Don Quixote_ or _Mr. Micawber_, for all his natural Provençal +gift of improvisation and, indeed, from his self-recognized necessity +of keeping it in check, was another strenuous artist. He wrote each +manuscript three times over, he told his biographer, and would write it +as many more if he could; and his son, in writing of him, has this truth +to say of his, as of all living work: + + The fact is that labour does not begin at the moment when the + artist takes his pen. It begins in sustained reflection and in the + thought which accumulates images and sifts them, garners and winnows + them out, and compels life to keep control over imagination, and + imagination to expand and enlarge life. + +Zola is perhaps unduly depreciated nowadays, but certainly, if Carlyle's +"infinite capacity for taking pains" as a recipe for genius ever was put +to the test, it was by the author of the Rougon-Macquart series. Talking +of rewriting, Prosper Mérimée, best known for _Carmen_, is said to have +rewritten his _Colomba_ no less than sixteen times; as our Anglo-Saxon +Kipling, it used to be told, wrote his short stories seven times over. + +But, of course, the classical example of the artist-fanatic in modern +times was Gustave Flaubert. His agonies in quest of the _mot propre_, +the one and only word, are proverbial, and are said literally to have +broken down his nerves. Mr. Huneker has told of him that "he would +annotate three hundred volumes for a page of facts.... In twenty pages +he sometimes saved three or four from destruction," and, in the course +of twenty-six years' polishing and pruning of _The Temptation of Saint +Anthony_, he reduced his original manuscript of 540 pages down to 136, +even reducing it still further after its first publication. + +On _Madame Bovary_ he worked six years, and in writing _Salâmmbo_, +which, took him no less time, he studied the scenery on the spot and +exhausted the resources of the Imperial Library in his search for +documentary evidences. + +Flaubert may be said to have carried his passion for perfection to the +point of mania, and it will be a question with some whether, with all +his pains, he can be called a great novelist, after all. But that he was +a great stylist and a master in the art of making terrible and beautiful +bas-reliefs admits of no doubt. + +To be a great world-novelist you need an all-embracing humanity as well, +such as we find in Tolstoy's _War and Peace_--but that great book, need +one say, came of no slipshod speed of improvisation. On the contrary, +Tolstoy corrected and recorrected it so often that his wife, who acted +as his amanuensis, is said to have copied the whole enormous manuscript +no less than seven times! + +Yes! though it be doubtless true, in Mr. Kipling's famous phrase, that + + There are nine and sixty ways + Of inditing tribal lays, + And every blessed one of them is right, + +I think that the whole nine and sixty of them include somewhere in their +method those sole preservative virtues of truth to life and passionate +artistic integrity. The longest-lived books, whatever their nature, have +usually been the longest growing; and even those lasting things of +literature that have seemed, as it were, to spring up in a night, have +been long in secret preparation in a soil mysteriously enriched and +refined by the hid processes of time. + + + + +XXVII + +THE MAN BEHIND THE PEN + + +Bulwer's deservedly famous phrase, "The pen is mightier than the sword," +beneath its surface application, if you think it over, has this further +suggestion to make to the believer in literature--that, as the sword is +of no value as a weapon apart from the man that wields it, so, and no +less so, is it with the pen. A mere pen, a mere sword--of what use are +they, save as mural decorations, without a man behind them? + +And that recalls a memory of mine, which, as both great men are now +drinking wine in Valhalla out of the skulls of their critics, there can +be no harm in recalling. + +Some years ago I was on an unforgettable visit to Björnson, at his +country home of Aulestad, near Lillehammer. This is not the moment to +relive that beautiful memory as a whole. All that is pertinent to my +present purpose is a remark in regard to Ibsen that Björnson flashed out +one day, shaking his great white mane with earnestness, his noble face +alight with the spirit of battle. We had been talking of his possibly +too successful attempt to sever Norway from Sweden, and Ibsen came in +somehow incidentally. + +"Ibsen," said he, "is not a man. He is only a pen." + +There is no necessity to discuss the justice of the dictum. Probably, if +ever there was a man behind a pen, it was Ibsen; but Ibsen's manhood +concentrated itself entirely behind his pen, whereas Björnson's employed +other weapons also, such as his gift of oratory, and was generally more +dramatically in evidence. Björnson and Ibsen, as we know, did not agree +on a number of things. Thus Björnson, like a human being, was unjust. +But his phrase was a useful one, and I am using it. It was misapplied to +Ibsen; but, put in the form of a question, I know of no better single +test to apply to writers, dead or alive, than-- + +"Is this a man? Or is it only a pen?" + +Said Walt Whitman, in his familiar "So Long" to _Leaves of Grass_: + + Camerado, this is no book; + Who touches this touches a man. + +And, of course, Walt was right about his own book, whether you like the +man behind _Leaves of Grass_ or not; but also that assertion of his +might be chalked as a sort of customs "O.K." on all literary baggage +whatsoever that has passed free into immortality. There is positively no +writer that has withstood the searching examination of time, on whose +book that final stamp of literary reality may not be placed. On every +classic, Time has scrawled ineffaceably: + + This is no book; + Who touches this touches a man. + +I raise the question of reality in literature in no merely academic +spirit. For those who not only love books, but care for literature as a +living thing, the question is a particularly live issue at the present +time, when not only the quantity of writing is so enormous, but the +average quality of it is so astonishingly good, when technique that +would almost humble the masters, and would certainly dazzle them, is an +accomplishment all but commonplace. At any rate, it is so usual as to +create no special surprise. If people write at all, it is taken for +granted, nowadays, that they write well. And the number of people at the +present time writing not only well, but wonderfully well, is little +short of appalling. + +In this, for those who ponder the phenomena of literature, there is less +matter for congratulation than would seem likely at first sight. There +is, indeed, no little bewilderment, and some disquietude. Confronted +with short stories--and novels also, for that matter--told with a skill +which makes the old masters of fiction look like clumsy amateurs; +confronted, too, with a thousand poets--the number is scarcely an +exaggeration--with accomplishments of metre and style that make some +famous singers seem like clodhoppers of the muse, one is obliged to ask +oneself: + +"Are these brilliant writers really greater than those that went +before?" + +If for some reason, felt at first rather than defined, we answer "no," +we are forced to the conclusion that, after all, literature must be +something more than a mere matter of writing. If so, we are constrained +to ask ourselves, what is it? + +The men who deal with manuscripts--editors, publishers' readers, and +publishers, men not only expert witnesses in regard to the printed +literature of the day, but also curiously learned in the story of the +book unborn, the vast mass of writing that never arrives at print--are +even more impressed by what one might call the uncanny literary +brilliance of the time. They are also puzzled by the lack of a certain +something missing in work which otherwise possesses every nameable +quality of literary excellence. One of these, an editor with an eye as +sympathetic as it is keen, told me of an instance to the point, typical +of a hundred others. + +He had been unusually struck by a story sent in to him by an unknown +writer. It was, he told me, amazing from every purely literary point of +view--plot, characterization, colour, and economy of language. It had so +much that it seemed strange that anything at all should be lacking. He +sent for the writer, and told him just what he thought. + +"But," he ended, after praise such as an editor seldom risks, "there is +something the matter with it, after all. I wonder if you can tell me +what it is." + +The writer was, for a writer so flattered, strangely modest. All he +could say, he answered, was that he had done his best. The editor, +agreeing that he certainly seemed to have done that, was all the more +curious to find out how it was that a man who could do so well had not +been able to add to his achievement the final "something" that was +missing. + +"What puzzles me," said the editor finally, "is that, with all the +rest, you were not able to add--humanity. Your story seems to have +been written by a wonderful literary machine, instead of by a man." + +And, no doubt, the young story-writer went away sorrowful, in spite of +the acceptance of his story--which, after all, was only lacking in that +quality which you will find lacking in all the writing of the day, save +in that by one or two exceptional writers, who, by their isolation, the +more forcibly point the moral. + +A wonderful literary machine! The editor's phrase very nearly hits off +the situation. As we have the linotype to set up the written words with +a minimum of human agency, we really seem to be within measurable +distance of a similar automaton that will produce the literature to be +set up without the intrusion of any flesh-and-blood author. In this +connection I may perhaps be permitted to quote a sentence or two from +myself, written _à propos_ a certain chameleonesque writer whose +deservedly popular works are among the contemporary books that I most +value: + + A peculiar skill seems to have been developed among writers during + the last twenty years--that of writing in the manner of some master, + not merely with mimetic cleverness, but with genuine creative power. + We have poets who write so like Wordsworth and Milton that one can + hardly differentiate them from their masters; and yet--for this is + my point--they are no mere imitators, but original poets, choosing, + it would seem, some old mask of immortality through which to express + themselves. In a different way from that of Guy de Maupassant they + have chosen to suppress themselves, or rather, I should say, that, + whereas De Maupassant strove to suppress, to eliminate, himself, + their method is that of disguise. + + In some respects they remind one of the hermit-crab, who annexes + some beautiful ready-made house, instead of making one for himself. + But then they annex it so brilliantly, with such delightful + consequences for the reader, that not only is there no ground for + complaint, but the reader almost forgets that the house does not + really belong to them, and that they are merely entertaining tenants + on a short lease. + +It is not that one is not grateful to writers of this type. Indeed one +is. They not only provide us with genuine entertainment, but, by the +skill born of their fine culture, they make us re-taste of the old +masters in their brilliant variations. One has no complaint against +them. Far from it. Only one wonders why they trouble to attach their own +merely personal names to their volumes, for, so far as those volumes are +concerned, there is no one to be found in them answering to the name of +the ostensible author. + +Suppose, for example, that the author's name on the title-page is +"Brown." Well, so far as we can find out by reading, "Brown" might just +as well be "Green." In fact, there is no "Brown" discoverable--no +individual man behind the pen that wrote, not out of the fulness of the +heart, or the originality of the brain, from any experience or knowledge +or temperament peculiar to "Brown," but out of the fulness of what one +might call a creatively assimilated education, and by the aid of a +special talent for the combination of literary influences. + +We have had a great deal of pleasure in the reading, we have admired +this and that, we may even have been astonished, but I repeat--there is +no "Brown." In private life "Brown" may be a forceful and fascinating +personality, but, so far as literature is concerned, he is merely a +"wonderful literary machine." He has been able, by his remarkable skill, +to conjure every other writer into his book--except himself. The name +"Brown" on his title-page means nothing. He has not "made his name." + +The phrase "to make a name" has become so dulled with long usage that it +is worth while to pause and consider what a reality it stands for. What +it really means, of course, is that certain men and women, by the +personal force or quality of their lives, have succeeded in charging +their names--names given them originally haphazard, as names are given +to all of us--with a permanent significance as unmistakable as that +belonging to the commonest noun. The name "Byron" has a meaning as clear +and unmistakable as the word "mutton." The words "dog" and "cat" have a +meaning hardly more clearly defined than the name "Burns" or "Voltaire." +An oak-tree can no more be mistaken for a willow than Shakespeare can be +confused with Spenser. If we say "Coleridge," there is no possibility of +any one thinking that perhaps we meant "Browning." + +The reason, of course, is that these names are as unmistakably "made" +as a Krupp gun or a Sheffield razor. Sincere, intense life has passed +into them, life lived as the men who bore those names either chose, or +were forced, to live it; individual experience, stern or gentle, in +combination with an individual gift of expression. + +All names that are really "made" are made in the same way. You may make +a name as Napoleon made his, through war, or you may make it as Keats +made his, by listening to the nightingale and worshipping the moon. Or +you may make it as Charles Lamb made his, merely by loving old folios, +whist, and roast pig. All that is necessary--granted, of course, the +gift of literary expression--is sincerity, an unshakable faithfulness to +yourself. + +In really great writers--or, at all events, in those writings of theirs +by which they immortally exist--there is not one insincere word. The +perishable parts of great writers will, without exception, be found to +be those writings which they attempted either in insincere moments, or +at the instigation of some surface talent that had no real connection +with their deep-down selves. + +All real writing has got to be lived before it is written--lived not +only once or twice, but lived over and over again. Mere reporting won't +do in literature, nor the records of easy voyaging through perilous +seas. Dante had to walk through hell before he could write of it, and +men today who would write either of hell or of heaven will never do it +by a study of fashionable drawing-rooms, or prolonged sojourns in the +country houses of the great. + +On the other hand, if you wish to write convincingly about what we call +"society," those lords and ladies, for example, who are just as real in +their strange way as coal-heavers and mechanics, it is of no use your +trying, unless you were fortunate enough to be born among them, or have +been unfortunately associated with them all your life. To write with +reality about the most artificial condition necessitates an intimate +acquaintance with it that, at its best, is tragic. Those who would write +about the depths and the heights must have dared them, not merely as +visitors, but as awestricken inhabitants. Similarly, those who would +write about the plain, the long, low levels of commonplace human life, +must have dwelt in them, have possessed the dreary, unlaurelled courage +of the good bourgeois, have known what it is to live out the day just +for the day's sake, with the blessed hope of a reasonably respectable +and comfortable conclusion. + +Probably it seldom occurs to us to think what a tremendously rooted life +is needed to make even one lasting lyric, though the strangeness of the +process is but the same strangeness that accompanies the antecedent +preparation of a flower. + + How many suns it takes + To make one speedwell blue-- + +was no mere fancy of a poet. It is a fact of the long sifting and +kneading to which time subjects the material of its perfect things. + +One could not get a better example of what I mean than Lovelace's song +_To Lucasta, Going to the Wars_, without which no anthology of English +verse could possibly be published. Why does generation after generation +say over and over, and hand on to its children: + + Yet this inconstancy is such + As you too shall adore; + I could not love thee, dear, so much + Loved I not honour more. + +Is it merely because it is so well written, or because it embodies a +highly moral sentiment suitable to the education of young men? No, it is +because the sword and the pen for once met together in the hand of a +man, because a soldier and a lover and a poet met together in a song. +One might almost say that Lovelace wrote his lyric first with his sword, +and merely copied it out with his pen. At all events, he was first a man +and incidentally a poet; and every real poet that ever sang, whether or +not he wielded the weapons of physical warfare, has been just the same. +Otherwise he could not have been a poet. + +When one speaks of the man behind the pen, one does not necessarily mean +that the writer must be a man of dominant personality, suggestive in +every sentence of "the strenuous life," and muscle, and "punch." +Literature might be described as the world in words, and as it takes all +kinds of men to make a world, so with the world of literature. All we +ask is that we should be made aware of some kind of a man. Numerous +other qualities besides "the punch" go to the making of living +literature, though blood and brawn, not to say brutality, have of late +had it so much their own way in the fashionable literature of the +day--written by muscular literary gentlemen who seem to write rather +with their fists than their pens--that we are in danger of forgetting +the reassuring truth. + +J.M. Barrie long ago made a criticism on Rudyard Kipling which has +always stayed by me as one of the most useful of critical touchstones. + +"Mr. Kipling," said he, "has yet to learn that a man may know more of +life staying at home by his mother's knee than swaggering in bad company +over three continents." + +Nor is successful literature necessarily the record of the successful +temperament. Some writers, not a few, owe their significance to the fact +that they have found humanly intimate expression for their own failure, +or set down their weakness in such a way as to make themselves the +consoling companions of human frailty and disappointment through the +generations. It is the paradox of such natures that they should express +themselves in the very record of their frustration. Amiel may be taken +as the type of such writers. In confiding to his _Journal_ his hopeless +inability for expressing his high thought, he expressed what is +infinitely more valuable to us--himself. + +Nor, again, does it follow that the man who thus gets himself +individualized in literature is the kind of man we care about or approve +of. Often it is quite the contrary, and we may think that it had been +just as well if some human types had not been able so forcibly to +project into literature their unworthy and undesirable selves. Yet this +is God's world, and nothing human must be foreign to the philosophical +student of it. + +All the "specimens" in a natural history museum are not things of +beauty or joy. So it is in the world of books. François Villon cannot +be called an edifying specimen of the human family, yet he unmistakably +belongs there, and it was to that prince of scalawags that we owe not +merely that loveliest sigh in literature--"Where are the snows of +yester-year?"--but so striking a picture of the underworld of medieval +Paris that without it we should hardly be able to know the times as +they were. + +The same applies to Benvenuto Cellini--bully, assassin, insufferable +egoist, and so forth, as well as artist. If he had not been sufficiently +in love with his own swashbuckler rascality to write his amazing +autobiography, how dim to our imaginations, comparatively, would have +been the world of the Italian Renaissance! + +Again, in our own day, take Baudelaire, a personality even less +agreeable still--morbid, diseased, if you will, wasting, you may deem, +immense poetic powers on revealing the beauty of those "flowers of evil" +which had as well been left in their native shade. Yet, it is because he +saw them so vividly, cared to see little else, dwelt in his own strange +corner of the world with such an intensity of experience, that he +is--Baudelaire. Like him or not, his name is "made." A queer kind of +man, indeed, but not "only a pen." + +Certain writers have made a cult of "impersonality" in literature. They +would do their utmost to keep themselves out of sight, to let their +subject-matter tell its own tale. But such a feat is an impossibility. +They might as well try to get out of their own skins. The mere effort +at suppression ends in a form of revelation. Their mere choice of +themes and manner of presentation, let them keep behind the scenes as +assiduously as they may, will in the end stamp them. However much a man +may hide behind his pen, so that indeed his personality, compared with +that of more subjective writers, remains always somewhat enigmatic, yet +when the pen is wielded by a man, whatever his reticence or his mask, we +know that a man is there--and that is all that concerns us. + +On the other hand, of course, there are companionable, sympathetic +writers whose whole stock-in-trade is themselves, their personal charm, +their personal way of looking at things. Of these, Montaigne and Charles +Lamb are among the great examples. It matters to us little or nothing +what they are writing about; for their subjects, so far as they are +concerned, are only important in relation to themselves, as revealing +to us by reflection two uncommonly "human" human beings, whom it is +impossible to mistake for any one else; just as we enjoy the society of +some whimsical talker among our living friends, valuing him not so much +for what he says, but for the way he says it, and because it is he, and +no one else, that is talking. + +Again, there are other men whose names, in addition to their personal +suggestion, have an impersonal significance as marking new eras of human +development, such as Erasmus or Rousseau or Darwin; men who embodied +the time-spirit at crucial moments of world change, men who announced +rather than created, the heralds of epochs, men who first took the new +roads along which the rest of mankind were presently to travel, men who +felt or saw something new for the first time, prophets of dawn while yet +their fellows slept. + +Sometimes a man will come to stand for a whole nation, like Robert Burns +or Cervantes; or a great, half-legendary age of the world, like Homer; +or some permanent attitude of the human spirit, like Plato. + +No fixed star, great or small, in the firmament of literature ever +got there without some vital reason, or merely by writing, however +remarkable. The idea that literature is a mere matter of writing is seen +to be the hollowest of misconceptions the moment you run over any list +of enduring names. Try any such that you can think of, and in every case +you will find that the name stands for something more than a writer. Of +course, the man had to have his own peculiar genius for writing, but the +peculiarity was but the result of his individual being, his own special +way of living his life or viewing the world. + +Take Horace, for example. Does he live merely because of his unique +style, his masterly use of the Latin tongue? By means of that, of +course, but only secondarily. Primarily, he is as alive today as he +was when he sauntered through the streets of Rome, because he was so +absolutely the type of the well-bred man of the world in all countries +and times. He lived seriously in the social world as he found it, and +felt no idealistic craving to have it remoulded nearer to the heart's +desire. He was satisfied with its pleasures, and at one with its +philosophy. Thus he is as much at home in modern Paris or London or +New York as in ancient Rome, and his book is, therefore, forever +immortal as the man of the world's Bible. + +Take a name so different as that of Shelley. We have but to speak it +to define all it now stands for. Though no one should read a line of +Shelley's any more, the dream he dreamed has passed into the very +life-blood of mankind. Wherever men strive for freedom, or seek to +attune their lives to the strange spiritual music that breathes through +all things--music that none ever heard more clearly than he--there is +Shelley like the morning star to guide them and inspire. + +Think what Wordsworth means to the spiritual thought of the modern +world. In his own day he was one of the most lonely and laughed at of +poets, moping among his lakes and mountains and shepherds. Yet, as +Matthew Arnold said, "we are all Wordsworthians nowadays," and the +religion of nature that he found there for himself in his solitude bids +fair to be the final religion of the modern world. + +It is the same with every other great name one can think of, be it +Bunyan or Heine, Schopenhauer or Izaak Walton. One has but to cast +one's eyes over one's shelves to realize, as we see the familiar +names, how literally the books that bear them are living men, merely +transmigrated from their fleshly forms into the printed word. +Shakespeare and Milton, yes, even Pope; Johnson, Fielding, Sterne, +Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Carlyle, Dumas, Balzac, Emerson, Thoreau, +Hawthorne, Poe--their very faces seem to look out at us from the +bindings, such vividly human beings were they, with a vision of the +world, or a definition of character, so much their own and no one +else's. One might almost call them patented human beings--patentees of +spiritual discoveries, or of aspects of humanity, whose patents can +never be infringed for all our cleverness. + +Said Tennyson, in bitter answer to criticism that began to depreciate +him because of the glibness of his imitators: + + All can grow the flower now, + For all have got the seed. + +And certainly, as I have already said, the art of literary impersonation +is carried to a pitch today that almost amounts to genius. Yet you have +only to compare the real flower with the imitation, and you will soon +understand the difference. + +Take Walter Scott. It is a commonplace to say how much better we do the +historical novel nowadays than he did. At first sight, we may seem to; +in certain particulars, no doubt we do; but read him again, read _Rob +Roy_ or _Quentin Durward_ again, and you will not be quite so sure. You +will realize what an immortal difference there is, after all, between +the pen with a man behind it, and the most brilliant literary machine. + +Yes, "the mob of gentlemen that write with ease" is once more with us, +but no real book was ever yet written with ease, and no book has ever +survived, or ever can, in which we do not feel the presence of the +fighting, dreaming, or merely enjoying soul of a man. + + + + +XXVIII + +BULLS IN CHINA-SHOPS + + +There are some people of great value and importance in their own +spheres, who, on the strength of the distinction gained there, are apt +to intrude on other spheres of which they have no knowledge, where in +fact they are irrelevant, and often indeed ridiculously out of place. +This, however, does not prevent their trying to assert an authority +gained in their own sphere in those other spheres where they simply do +not belong; and such is the power of a name that is won for any one +thing that the multitude, unaccustomed to make distinctions, accepts +them as authorities on the hundred other things of which they know +nothing. Thus, to take a crude example, the New York Police, which is, +without doubt, learned in its own world, and well-adapted and equipped +for asserting its authority there, sometimes intrudes, with its +well-known _bonhomie_, into the worlds of drama and sculpture, and, +because it is an acknowledged judge of crooks and grafters, presumes +to be a judge and censor also of new plays and nude statues. + +Of course, the New York Police is absurd in such a character, absurd as +a bull in a china-shop is absurd; yet, as in the case of the bull with +the china, it is capable of doing quite a lot of damage. + +I take the New York Police merely, as I said, as a crude example of, +doubtless, well-meant, but entirely misplaced energy. Actually, however, +it is scarcely more absurd than many similar, if more distinguished, +bulls gaily crashing about on higher planes. + +Such are statesmen who, because they are Prime Ministers or Presidents, +deem themselves authorities on everything within the four winds, doctors +of divinity, and general _arbitri elegantiarum_. + +Such a bull in a china-shop in regard to literature was the late Mr. +Gladstone. It is no disrespect towards his great and estimable character +to say, that while, of course, he was technically a scholar--"great +Homeric scholar" was the accepted phrase for him--there were probably +few men in England so devoid of the literary sense. Yet for an author to +receive a post-card of commendation from Mr. Gladstone meant at least +the sale of an edition or two, and a certain permanency in public +appreciation. Her late Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria was Mr. +Gladstone's only rival as the literary destiny of the time. To Mr. +Gladstone we owe Mrs. Humphry Ward, to Her Majesty we owe Miss Marie +Corelli. + +John Ruskin, much as we may admire him for his moral influence, and +admire, or not admire, him for his prose, was a bull in a china-shop +when he made his famous criticism on Whistler, and thus inadvertantly +added to the gaiety of nations by provoking that delightful trial, +which, farcical as it seemed at the moment, not merely evoked from +Whistler himself some imperishable dicta on art and the relation of +critics to art, but really did something towards the long-drawn +awakening of that mysterious somnolence called the public consciousness +on the strange mission of beauty in this world, and, incidentally of the +status of those "eccentric" ministers of it called artists. + +I do not mean to say that bulls in china-shops are without their uses. +John Ruskin is a shining example to the contrary. + +One of his contemporaries, Thomas Carlyle, for all his genius, was on +one important subject--that of poetry--as much of a bull in a china-shop +as Ruskin was in art. Great friends as were he and Tennyson, the famous +anecdote _à propos_ of Tennyson's publication of _The Idylls of the +King_--"all very fine, Alfred, but when are you going to do some +work"--and many other such written deliverances suffice to show how +absolutely out of court a great tragic humorist and rhetorician may +be on an art practised by writers at least as valuable to English +literature as himself, say Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge, and Keats. +Carlyle was a great writer, but the names of these four gentlemen who, +according to his standard, never did any "work" have a strangely +permanent look about them compared with that of the prophet-journalist +of Chelsea and Ecclefechan. + +A similar "sage," another of the great conversational brow-beaters of +English literature, Samuel Johnson, though it was his chief business to +be a critic of poetry, was hardly more in court on the matter than +Carlyle. In fact, Dr. Johnson might with truth be described as the King +Bull of all the Bulls of all the China-shops. There was no subject, +however remote from his knowledge or experience on which he would +hesitate to pronounce, and if necessary bludgeon forth, his opinion. +But in his case, there is one important distinction to be made, a +distinction that has made him immortal. + +He disported his huge bulk about the china-shop with such quaintness, +with such engaging sturdiness of character, strangely displaying all the +time so unique a wisdom of that world that lies outside and encloses all +china-shops, so unparalleled a genius of common sense, oddly linked +with that good old-time quality called "the fear of God," that in +his case we felt that the china, after all, didn't matter, but that +Dr. Samuel Johnson, "the great lexicographer," supremely did. His +opinions of Scotsmen or his opinions of poetry in themselves amount to +little--though they are far from being without their shrewd insight--and +much of the china--such as Milton's poetry--among which he gambolled, +after the manner of Behemoth, chanced to be indestructible. Any china +he broke was all to the ultimate good of the china-shop. Yet, if we +accept him so, is it not because he was such a wonderful bull in the +china-shop of the world? + +There have been other such bulls but hardly another so great, and with +his name I will, for the moment at least, put personalities aside, and +refer to droves rather than to individual bulls. A familiar type of +the bull in the china-shop is the modern clergyman, who, apparently, +insecure in his status of saint-hood, dissatisfied with that spiritual +sphere which so many confiding human beings have given into his +keeping, will be forever pushing his way like an unwelcome, yet quite +unauthoritative, policeman, into that turmoil of human affairs--of which +politics is a sort of summary--where his opinion is not of the smallest +value, though, perforce, it is received with a certain momentary +respect--as though some beautiful old lady should stroll up to a battery +of artillery, engaged in some difficult and dangerous attack, and offer +her advice as to the sighting and management of the guns. The modern +clergyman's interference in the working out of the secular problems +of modern life has no such picturesque beauty--and it is even less +effective. + +One would have thought that to have the care of men's souls would be +enough. What a world of suggestiveness there was in the old phrase "a +cure of souls"! Men's souls need saving as much today as ever. Perhaps +they were never in greater danger. Therefore, as the proverbial place +for the cobbler is his last, so more than ever the place for the +clergyman is his church, his pulpit, and those various spiritual offices +for which he is presumably "chosen." His vows do not call upon him +either to be a politician or a matinée idol, nor is it his business to +sow doubt where he is paid for preaching faith. If the Church is losing +its influence, it is largely because of its inefficient interference +in secular affairs, and because of the small percentage of real +spirituality amongst its clergy. + +But there is a worse intrusion than that of clergymen into secular +affairs. There is the intrusion of the cheap atheist, the small +materialistic thinker, into a sphere of which certainly no clergyman or +priest has any monopoly, that sphere of what we call the spiritual life, +which, however undemonstrable by physical tests, has been real to so +many men and women whose intellects can hardly be called negligible, +from Plato to Newman. I have too much respect for their courageous +sincerity, their nobility of character, as well as for the necessary, if +superficial, destructive work they did, when to do such work meant no +little personal peril and obloquy to themselves, to class Robert +Ingersoll and Charles Bradlaugh with the small fry that resemble them +merely in their imitative negations; yet this is certainly true of both +of them that they were bulls in the china-shop to this extent--that they +confounded real religion with the defective historical evidences of one +religion, and the mythologic assertions and incongruities of its sacred +book. They did splendid work in their iconoclastic criticism of "the +letter" that "killeth," but of "the spirit" that "giveth life" they seem +to have had but little inkling. To make fun of Jonah and the whale, or +"the Mistakes of Moses," had no doubt a certain usefulness, but it was +no valid argument against the existence of God, nor did it explain away +the mysterious religious sense in man--however, or wherever expressed. +Neither Ingersoll nor Bradlaugh saw that the crudest Mumbo-Jumbo +idolatry of the savage does really stand for some point of rapport +between the seen and the unseen, and that, so long as the mysterious +sacredness of life is acknowledged and reverenced, it matters little by +what symbols we acknowledge it and do it reverence. + +One may consider that the present age is an age of spiritual eclipse, +though that is not the writer's opinion, and question with Matthew +Arnold: + + What girl + Now reads in her bosom as clear + As Rebekah read, when she sate + At eve by the palm-shaded well? + Who guards in her breast + As deep, as pellucid a spring + Of feeling, as tranquil, as sure? + What bard, + At the height of his vision, can deem + Of God, of the world, of the soul, + With a plainness as near, + As flashing as Moses felt + When he lay in the night by his flock + On the starlit Arabian waste? + Can rise and obey + The beck of the Spirit like him. + +Yet the sight of one who sees is worth more than the blindness of a +hundred that cannot see. Some people are born with spiritual antennae +and some without. There is much delicate wonder in the universe that +needs special organizations for its apprehension. "One eye," you +remember, that of Browning's _Sordello_-- + + one eye + In all Verona cared for the soft sky. + +In these imponderable and invisible matters, many are in a like case +with Hamlet's mother, when she was unable to see the ghost of his +father which he so plainly saw. "Yet all there is I see!" exclaimed the +queen--though she was quite wrong, as wrong as Mr. Ruskin when he could +see nothing in that painting of Whistler's but a cocks-comb throwing a +paint-pot at a canvas and calling it a picture! + +Many people who have sharp enough eyes and ears for their own worlds are +absolutely blind and deaf when introduced into other worlds for which +nature has not equipped them. But this by no means prevents their +pronouncing authoritative opinions in those worlds, opinions which +would be amazing if they were not so impertinent. Many literary people +proclaim their indifference to and even contempt for music--as if their +announcement meant anything more than their music deafness, their +unfortunate exclusion from a great art. Mark Twain used to advertise his +preference for the pianola over the piano--as if that proved anything +against the playing of Paderewski. Similarly, he acted the bull in the +china-shop in regard to Christian Science, which cannot be the accepted +creed of millions of men and women of intelligence and social value +without deserving even in a critic the approach of some respect. + +But humorists are privileged persons. That, no doubt, accounts for the +astonishing toleration of Bernard Shaw. Were it not that he is a +_farceur_, born to write knock-about comedies--his plays, by the way, +might be termed knock-about comedies of the middle-class mind--he would +never have got a hearing for his common-place blasphemies, and cheap +intellectual antics. He is undeniably "funny," so we cannot help +laughing, though we are often ashamed of ourselves for our laughter; for +to him there is nothing sacred--except his press-notices, and--his +royalties. + +His so-called "philosophy" has an air of dangerous novelty only to those +innocent middle-classes born but yesterday, to whom any form of thought +is a novelty. Methusaleh himself was not older than Mr. Shaw's "original +ideas." In England, twenty years ago, we were long since weary of his +egotistic buffooneries. Of anything "fine" in literature or art he is +contemptuously ignorant, and from understanding of any of the finer +shades of human life, or of the meaning of such words as "honour," +"gentleman," "beauty," "religion," he is by nature utterly shut out. He +laughs and sneers to make up for his deficiencies, like that Pietro +Aretino who threw his perishable mud at Michael Angelo. So is it always +with the vulgarian out of his sphere. Once he dared to talk vulgarly of +God to a great man who believed in God--Count Tolstoi. + +He had written to Tolstoi _à propos_ his insignificant little play _The +Showing up of Blanco Posnet_, and in the course of his letter had said: +"Suppose the world were only one of God's jokes, would you work any less +to make it a good joke instead of a bad one?" Tolstoi had hitherto been +favourably inclined towards Shaw, owing to his friend and biographer Mr. +Aylmer Maude; but this cheap-jack sacrilege was too much for the great +old man, who seemed to know God with almost Matthew Arnold's + + plainness as near + As flashing as Moses felt, + +and he closed the correspondence with a rebuke which would have abashed +any one but the man to whom it was sent. + +Tolstoi was like Walt Whitman--he "argued not concerning God." It is a +point of view which people like Mr. Shaw can never understand; any more +than he or his like can comprehend that there are areas of human feeling +over which for him and other such bulls in china-shops should be posted +the delicate Americanism--KEEP OUT. + + + + +XXIX + +THE BIBLE AND THE BUTTERFLY + + +Once, in my old book-hunting days, I picked up, on the Quai Voltaire, a +copy of the _Proverbs of King Solomon_. Then it was more possible than +today to make finds in that quaint open-air library which, still more +than any library housed within governmental or diplomaed walls, is +haunted by the spirit of those passionate, dream-led scholars that +made the Renaissance, and crowded to those lectures filled with that +dangerous new charm which always belongs to the poetic presentation of +new knowledge--those lectures, "musical as is Apollo's lute," being +given up on the hill nearby, by a romantic young priest named Abelard. + +My copy of the Great King's Wisdom was of no particular bibliographical +value, but it was one of those thick-set, old-calf duodecimos "black +with tarnished gold" which Austin Dobson has sung, books that, one +imagines, must have once made even the Latin Grammar attractive. The +text was the Vulgate, a rivulet of Latin text surrounded by meadows of +marginal comments of the Fathers translated into French,--the whole +presided over, for the edification of the young novice, to whom my copy +evidently belonged, by a distinguished Monseigneur who, in French of the +time of Bossuet, told exactly how these young minds should understand +the wisdom of Solomon, told it with a magisterial style which suggested +that Solomon lived long ago--and, yet, was one of the pillars of the +church. But what particularly interested me about the book, however, as +I turned over its yellow pages, was a tiny thing pressed between them, a +thing the Fathers and the Monseigneur would surely have regarded as +curiously alien to their wisdom, a thing once of a bright, but now of a +paler yellow, and of a frailer texture than it had once been in its +sunlit life--a flower, I thought at first, but, on looking closer, I saw +it was, or had once been, a yellow butterfly. + +What young priest was it, I wondered, that had thus, with a breaking +heart, crushed the joy of life between these pages! On what spring +morning had this silent little messenger hovered a while over the high +garden-walls of St. Sulpice, flitting and fluttering, and at last darted +and alighted on the page of this old book, at that moment held in the +hands of a young priest walking to and fro amid the tall whispering +trees--delivering at last to him on the two small painted pages of its +wings a message he must not read.... + +The temptation was severe, for spring was calling all over Paris, and +the words of another book of the Great King whose wisdom he held in his +hand said to him in the Latin that came easily to all manner of men in +those days: _Lo! the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the +flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, +and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.... Arise, my love, my +fair one, and come away._ + +The little fluttering thing seemed to be saying that to him as it poised +on the page, and, as his eyes went into a dream, began to crawl softly, +like a rope-walker, up one of his fingers, with a frail, half-frightened +hold, while, high up, over the walls of the garden the poplars were +discreetly swaying to the southern wind, and the lilac-bushes were +carelessly tossing this way and that their fragrance, as altar-boys +swing their censers in the hushed chancel,--but ah! so different an +incense. + +_The flowers appear on the earth_, he repeated to himself, beguiled for +a moment, _the flowers appear on the earth; and the time of the singing +of birds is come...._ + +But, suddenly, for his help against that tiny yellow butterfly there +came to him other stern everlasting words: + +_The grass withereth, the flower fadeth, but the word of our Lord +endureth forever._ + +Then it was, if I imagine aright from my old book, that my young novice +of St. Sulpice crushed the joy of life, in the frail form of its little +messenger, between the pages of the book he held in his hand just then, +the book I held in my hand for a while a hundred and fifty years or so +after--the book I bought that morning on the Quai Voltaire--guarding +that little dead butterfly even more than the wisdom of Solomon. I +wonder if, as he crushed that butterfly, he said to himself--in words +that have grown commonplace since his time--the words of that strange +emperor Hadrian--_Animula, vagula, blandula_! + +Perhaps I should not have remembered that book-hunting morning in Old +Paris on the Quai Voltaire, when I bought that beautiful old copy of the +_Proverbs of Solomon_--with the butterfly so strangely crushed between +its pages--had it not been for a circumstance that happened to me, the +other day, in the subway, which seemed to me of the nature of a marvel. +Many weary men and women were travelling--in an enforced, yet in some +way humorously understanding, society--from Brooklyn Bridge to the +Bronx. I got in at Wall Street. The "crush-hour" was near, for it was +4:25--still, as yet, there were time and space granted us to observe +our neighbours. In the particular car in which I was sitting, there +was room still left to look about and admire the courage of your +fellow-passengers. Weary men going home--many of them having used them +all day long--have little wish to use their eyes, so all the men in my +car sat silently and sadly, contemplating the future. As I looked at +them, it seemed to me that they were thinking over the day's work they +had done, and the innumerable days' work they had still to do. No one +smiled. No one observed the other. An automatic courtesy gave a seat +here and there, but no one gave any attention to any business but his +own thoughts and his own sad station. + +It was a car, if I remember aright, occupied almost entirely by +men-passengers, and, so far as I could see, there were no evidences that +men knew women from men, or _vice versa_, yet, at last, there seemed to +dawn on four men sitting in a row that there was a wonderful creature +reading a book on the other side of the aisle--a lovely young woman, +with all the fabled beauty of the sea-shell, and the rainbow, that +enchantment in her calm pearl-like face, and in the woven stillness of +her hair, that has in all times and countries made men throw up sails +and dare the unknown sea, and the unknown Fates. The beauty, too, that +nature had given her was clothed in the subdued enchantments of the +rarest art. All unconscious of the admiration surrounding her, she sat +in that subway car, like a lonely butterfly, strangely there in her +incongruous surroundings, for a mysterious moment,--to vanish as swiftly +as she had come--and, as she stepped from the car, leaving it dark and +dazzled-- + + bright with her past presence yet-- + +I, who had fortunately, and fearfully, sat by her side was aware that +the book she had been reading was lying forgotten on the seat. It was +mine by right of accident,--treasure-trove. So I picked it up, braving +the glares of the four sad men facing me. + +Naturally, I had wondered what book it was; but its being bound in +tooled and jewelled morocco, evidently by one of the great bookbinders +of Paris, made it unprofitable to hazard a guess. + +I leave to the imagination of lovers of books what book one would +naturally expect to find in hands so fair. Perhaps _Ronsard_--or some +other poet from the Rose-Garden of old France. No! it was a charmingly +printed copy of The New Testament. + +The paradox of the discovery hushed me for a few moments, and then I +began to turn over the pages, several of which I noticed were dog eared +after the manner of beautiful women in all ages. A pencil here and there +had marked certain passages. _Come unto me_, ran one of the underlined +passages, _all ye that are heavy laden, and I will give you rest_,--and +I thought how strange it was that she whose face was so calm and still +should have needed to mark that. And another marked passage I noted--_He +was in the world, and the world was made by Him, and the world knew Him +not_. Then I put down the book with a feeling of awe--such as the Bible +had never brought to me before, though I had been accustomed to it from +my boyhood, and I said to myself: "How very strange!" And I meant how +strange it was to find this wonderful old book in the hands of this +wonderful young beauty. + +It had seemed strange to find that butterfly in that old copy of the +_Proverbs of King Solomon_, but how much stranger to find the New +Testament in the hands, or, so to speak, between the wings, of an +American butterfly. + +I found something written in the book at least as wonderful to me as +the sacred text. It was the name of the butterfly--a name almost as +beautiful as herself. So I was enabled to return her book to her. There +is, of course, no need to mention a name as well-known for good works as +good looks. It will suffice to say that it was the name of the most +beautiful actress in the world. + +There is a moral to this story. Morals--to stories--are once more +coming into fashion. The Bible, in my boyhood, came to us with no such +associations as I have recalled. There were no butterflies between its +pages, nor was it presented to us by fair or gracious hands. It was a +very grim and minatory book, wielded, as it seemed to one's childish +ignorance, for the purpose which that young priest of St. Sulpice had +used the pages of his copy of the _Proverbs of King Solomon_, that of +crushing out the joy of life. + +My first acquaintance with it as I remember, was in a Methodist chapel +in Staffordshire, England, where three small boys, including myself, +prisoned in an old-fashioned high-back pew, were endeavouring to relieve +the apparently endless _ennui_ of the service by eating surreptitious +apples. Suddenly upon our three young heads descended what seemed like a +heavy block of wood, wielded by an ancient deacon who did not approve +of boys. We were, each of us, no more than eight years old, and the book +which had thus descended upon our heads was nothing more to us than a +very weighty book--to be dodged if possible, for we were still in that +happy time of life when we hated all books. We knew nothing of its +contents--to us it was only a schoolmaster's cane, beating us into +silence and good behaviour. + +So the Bible has been for many generations of boys a book even more +terrible than Caesar's _Commentaries_ or the _Aeneid_ of Virgil--the +dull thud of a mysterious cudgel upon the shoulders of youth which you +bore as courageously as you could. + +So many of us grew up with what one might call a natural prejudice +against the Bible. + +Then some of us who cared for literature took it up casually and found +its poetic beauty. We read the _Book of Job_--which, by the way, Mr. +Swinburne is said to have known by heart; and as we read it even the +stars themselves seemed less wonderful than this description of their +marvel and mystery: + +_Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades or loose the hands of +Orion?_ + +_Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his season? or canst thou guide +Arcturus with his sons?_ + +Or we read in the 37th chapter of the _Book of Ezekiel_ of that weird +valley that was full of bones--"_and as I prophesied, there was a noise, +and behold a shaking, and the bones came together bone to bone_," +surely one of the most wonderful visions of the imagination in all +literature. + +Or we read the marvellous denunciatory rhetoric of Jeremiah and Isaiah, +or the music of the melodious heart-strings of King David; we read the +solemn adjuration of the "King Ecclesiast" to remember our Creator in +the days of our youth, with its haunting picture of old age: and the +loveliness of _The Song of Songs_ passed into our lives forever. + +To this purely literary love of the Bible there has been added within +the last few years a certain renewed regard for it as the profoundest +book of the soul, and for some minds not conventionally religious it has +regained even some of its old authority as a spiritual guide and stay. +And I will confess for myself that sometimes, as I fall asleep at +night, I wonder if even Bernard Shaw has written anything to equal the +Twenty-third Psalm. + + +THE END + + + + + + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Vanishing Roads and Other Essays +by Richard Le Gallienne + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VANISHING ROADS AND OTHER ESSAYS *** + +***** This file should be named 11675-8.txt or 11675-8.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + https://www.gutenberg.org/1/1/6/7/11675/ + +Produced by Janet Kegg and PG Distributed Proofreaders + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: Vanishing Roads and Other Essays + +Author: Richard Le Gallienne + +Release Date: March 22, 2004 [EBook #11675] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VANISHING ROADS AND OTHER ESSAYS *** + + + + +Produced by Janet Kegg and PG Distributed Proofreaders + + + + + +</pre> + +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<HR> +<p> </p> + +<h1> + Vanishing Roads<br> + And Other Essays +</h1> + +<p> </p> + +<h3> + By +</h3> +<p> </p> + +<h2> + Richard Le Gallienne +</h2> +<p> </p> + <p> </p> + + +<h4> + 1915 +</h4> + +<hr> +<p> </p> + + +<center> <big><i>TO<br><br> + +ROBERT HOBART DAVIS</i></big> +</center> + +<p> + <i>DEAR BOB: It is quite a long time now since you and I first caught + sight of each other and became fellow wayfarers on this Vanishing Road + of the world. O quite a lot of years now, Bob! Yet I control my tendency + to shiver at their number from the fact that we have travelled them, + always within hailing distance of each other, I with the comfortable + knowledge that near by I had so good a comrade, so true a friend.</i> +</p> +<p> + <i>For this once, by your leave, we won't "can" the sentiment,—to use an + idiom in which you are the master-artist on this continent,—but I, at + least, will luxuriate in retrospect, as I write your name by way of + dedication to this volume of essays, for some of which your quick-firing + mind is somewhat more than editorially responsible. You were one of the + first to make me welcome to a country of which, even as a boy, I used + prophetically to dream as my "promised land," little knowing that it was + indeed to be my home, the home of my spirit, as well as the final + resting-place of my household gods; and, having you so early for my + friend, is it to be wondered at if I soon came to regard the American + humourist as the noblest work of God?</i> +</p> +<p> + <i>There is yet, I trust, much left of the Vanishing Road for us to travel + together; and I hope that, when the time comes for us both to vanish + over the horizon line, we may exit still within hail of each other,—so + that we may have a reasonable chance of hitting the trail together on + the next route, whatever it is going to be.</i> +</p> + + +<p class="ar"><i>Always yours</I>, </p> + + <p class="ar">R<small>ICHARD</small> L<small>E</small> G<small>ALLIENNE</small>. +<p> + <I>Rowayton, December 25, 1914</i>. +</p> +<hr> + <p> </p> + <p> + For their discernment in giving the following essays their first + opportunity with the reader the writer desires to thank the editors of + <i>The North American Review</i>, <i>Harper's Magazine</i>, <i>The Century</i>, <i>The Smart Set</i>, <i>Munsey's</i>, <i>The Out-Door World</i>, and <i>The Forum</i>. +</p> + +<p> </p> + +<hr> + <p> </p> + + +<h2>CONTENTS</H2> + + +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_4"> +I.—VANISHING ROADS +</a></p> +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_5"> +II.—WOMAN AS A SUPERNATURAL BEING</a></p> +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_6"> +III.—THE LACK OF IMAGINATION AMONG MILLIONAIRES +</a></p> +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_7"> +IV.—THE PASSING OF MRS. GRUNDY +</a></p> +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_8"> +V.—MODERN AIDS TO ROMANCE +</a></p> +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_9"> +VI.—THE LAST CALL +</a></p> +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_10"> +VII.—THE PERSECUTIONS OF BEAUTY +</a></p> +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_11"> +VIII.—THE MANY FACES—THE ONE DREAM +</a></p> +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_12"> +IX.—THE SNOWS OF YESTER-YEAR +</a></p> +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_14"> +X.—THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GOSSIP +</a></p> +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_15"> +XI.—THE PASSING AWAY OF THE EDITOR +</a></p> +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_16"> +XII.—THE SPIRIT OF THE OPEN +</a></p> +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_17"> +XIII.—AN OLD AMERICAN TOW-PATH +</a></p> +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_18"> +XIV.—A MODERN SAINT FRANCIS +</a></p> +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_19"> +XV.—THE LITTLE GHOST IN THE GARDEN +</a></p> +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_20"> +XVI.—THE ENGLISH COUNTRYSIDE +</a></p> +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_21"> +XVII.—LONDON—CHANGING AND UNCHANGING +</a></p> +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_22"> +XVIII.—THE HAUNTED RESTAURANT +</a></p> +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_23"> +XIX.—THE NEW PYRAMUS AND THISBE +</a></p> +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_24"> +XX.—TWO WONDERFUL OLD LADIES +</a></p> +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_25"> +XXI.—A CHRISTMAS MEDITATION +</a></p> +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_26"> +XXII.—ON RE-READING WALTER PATER +</a></p> +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_27"> +XXIII.—THE MYSTERY OF "FIONA MACLEOD" +</a></p> +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_28"> +XXIV.—FORBES-ROBERTSON: AN APPRECIATION +</a></p> +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_29"> +XXV.—A MEMORY OF FRÉDÉRIC MISTRAL +</a></p> +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_30"> +XXVI.—IMPERISHABLE FICTION +</a></p> +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_31"> +XXVII.—THE MAN BEHIND THE PEN +</a></p> +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_32"> +XXVIII.—BULLS IN CHINA-SHOPS +</a></p> +<p class="toc"><a href="#2H_4_33"> +XXIX.—THE BIBLE AND THE BUTTERFLY +</a></p> +<p> </p> + +<hr> + + +<p> </p> +<h1> + Vanishing Roads +</h1> +<a name="2H_4_4"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> + +<p> </p> +<h2> + I +</h2> +<h3> + VANISHING ROADS +</h3> +<p> </p> + +<p> + Though actually the work of man's hands—or, more properly speaking, the + work of his travelling feet,—roads have long since come to seem so much + a part of Nature that we have grown to think of them as a feature of the + landscape no less natural than rocks and trees. Nature has adopted them + among her own works, and the road that mounts the hill to meet the + sky-line, or winds away into mystery through the woodland, seems to be + veritably her own highway leading us to the stars, luring us to her + secret places. And just as her rocks and trees, we know not how or why, + have come to have for us a strange spiritual suggestiveness, so the + vanishing road has gained a meaning for us beyond its use as the avenue + of mortal wayfaring, the link of communication between village and + village and city and city; and some roads indeed seem so lonely, and so + beautiful in their loneliness, that one feels they were meant to be + travelled only by the soul. All roads indeed lead to Rome, but theirs + also is a more mystical destination, some bourne of which no traveller + knows the name, some city, they all seem to hint, even more eternal. +</p> +<p> + Never more than when we tread some far-spreading solitude and mark the + road stretching on and on into infinite space, or the eye loses it in + some wistful curve behind the fateful foliage of lofty storm-stirred + trees, or as it merely loiters in sunny indolence through leafy copses + and ferny hollows, whatever its mood or its whim, by moonlight or at + morning; never more than thus, eagerly afoot or idly contemplative, are + we impressed by that something that Nature seems to have to tell us, + that something of solemn, lovely import behind her visible face. If we + could follow that vanishing road to its far mysterious end! Should we + find that meaning there? Should we know why it stops at no mere + market-town, nor comes to an end at any seaport? Should we come at last + to the radiant door, and know at last the purpose of all our travel? + Meanwhile the road beckons us on and on, and we walk we know not why or + whither. +</p> +<p> + Vanishing roads do actually stir such thoughts, not merely by way of + similitude, but just in the same way that everything in Nature similarly + stirs thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls; as moonlit waters stir + them, or the rising of the sun. As I have said, they have come to seem + a part of natural phenomena, and, as such, may prove as suggestive a + starting-point as any other for those speculations which Nature is all + the time provoking in us as to why she affects us thus and thus. These + mighty hills of multitudinous rock, piled confusedly against the sky—so + much granite and iron and copper and crystal, says one. But to the soul, + strangely something besides, so much more. These rolling shapes of + cloud, so fantastically massed and moulded, moving in rhythmic change + like painted music in the heaven, radiant with ineffable glories or + monstrous with inconceivable doom. This sea of silver, "hushed and + halcyon," or this sea of wrath and ravin, wild as Judgment Day. So much + vapour and sunshine and wind and water, says one. +</p> +<p> + Yet to the soul how much more! +</p> +<p> + And why? Answer me that if you can. There, truly, we set our feet on the + vanishing road. +</p> +<p> + Whatever reality, much or little, the personifications of Greek + Nature-worship had for the ancient world, there is no doubt that for a + certain modern temperament, more frequently met with every day, those + personifications are becoming increasingly significant, and one might + almost say veritably alive. Forgotten poets may, in the first instance, + have been responsible for the particular forms they took, their names + and stories, yet even so they but clothed with legend presences of wood + and water, of earth and sea and sky, which man dimly felt to have a + real existence; and these presences, forgotten or banished for a while + in prosaic periods, or under Puritanic repression, are once more being + felt as spiritual realities by a world coming more and more to evoke its + divinities by individual meditation on, and responsiveness to, the + mysterious so-called natural influences by which it feels itself + surrounded. Thus the first religion of the world seems likely to be its + last. In other words, the modern tendency, with spiritually sensitive + folk, is for us to go direct to the fountain-head of all theologies, + Nature herself, and, prostrating ourselves before her mystery, strive to + interpret it according to our individual "intimations," listening, + attent, for ourselves to her oracles, and making, to use the phrase of + one of the profoundest of modern Nature-seers, our own "reading of + earth." Such was Wordsworth's initiative, and, as some one has said, "we + are all Wordsworthians today." That pagan creed, in which Wordsworth + passionately wished himself suckled, is not "outworn." He himself, in + his own austere way, has, more than any one man, verified it for us, so + that indeed we do once more nowadays +</p> +<pre> + Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; + Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn. +</pre> +<p> + Nor have the dryads and the fauns been frighted away for good. All over + the world they are trooping back to the woods, and whoso has eyes may + catch sight, any summer day, of "the breast of the nymph in the brake." + Imagery, of course; but imagery that is coming to have a profounder + meaning, and a still greater expressive value, than it ever had for + Greece and Rome. All myths that are something more than fancies gain + rather than lose in value with time, by reason of the accretions of + human experience. The mysteries of Eleusis would mean more for a modern + man than for an ancient Greek, and in our modern groves of Dodona the + voice of the god has meanings for us stranger than ever reached his + ears. Maybe the meanings have a purport less definite, but they have at + least the suggestiveness of a nobler mystery. But surely the Greeks were + right, and we do but follow them as we listen to the murmur of the wind + in the lofty oaks, convinced as they of the near presence of the divine. +</p> +<pre> + The word by seers or sibyls told + In groves of oak or fanes of gold, + Still floats upon the morning wind, + Still whispers to the willing mind. +</pre> +<p> + Nor was it a vain thing to watch the flight of birds across the sky, and + augur this or that of their strange ways. We too still watch them in a + like mood, and, though we do not interpret them with a like exactitude, + we are very sure that they mean something important to our souls, as + they speed along their vanishing roads. +</p> +<p> + This modern feeling of ours is quite different from the outworn + "pathetic fallacy," which was a purely sentimental attitude. We have, of + course, long since ceased to think of Nature as the sympathetic mirror + of our moods, or to imagine that she has any concern with the temporal + affairs of man. We no longer seek to appease her in her terrible moods + with prayer and sacrifice. We know that she is not thinking of us, but + we do know that for all her moods there is in us an answering thrill of + correspondence, which is not merely fanciful or imaginative, but of the + very essence of our beings. It is not that we are reading our thoughts + into her. Rather we feel that we are receiving her thoughts into + ourselves, and that, in certain receptive hours, we are, by some avenue + simpler and profounder than reason, made aware of certitudes we cannot + formulate, but which nevertheless siderealize into a faith beyond the + reach of common doubt—a faith, indeed, unelaborate, a faith, one might + say, of one tenet: belief in the spiritual sublimity of all Nature, and, + therefore, of our own being as a part thereof. +</p> +<p> + In such hours we feel too, with a singular lucidity of conviction, that + those forces which thus give us that mystical assurance are all the time + moulding us accordingly as we give up ourselves to their influence, and + that we are literally and not fancifully what winds and waters make us; + that the poetry, for instance, of Wordsworth was literally first + somewhere in the universe, and thence transmitted to him by processes no + less natural than those which produced his bodily frame, gave him form + and feature, and coloured his eyes and hair. +</p> +<p> + It is not man that has "poetized" the world, it is the world that has + made a poet out of man, by infinite processes of evolution, precisely in + the same way that it has shaped a rose and filled it with perfume, or + shaped a nightingale and filled it with song. One has often heard it + said that man has endowed Nature with his own feelings, that the pathos + or grandeur of the evening sky, for instance, are the illusions of his + humanizing fancy, and have no real existence. The exact contrary is + probably the truth—that man has no feelings of his own that were not + Nature's first, and that all that stirs in him at such spectacles is but + a translation into his own being of cosmic emotions which he shares in + varying degrees with all created things. Into man's strange heart Nature + has distilled her essences, as elsewhere she has distilled them in + colour and perfume. He is, so to say, one of the nerve-centres of cosmic + experience. In the process of the suns he has become a veritable + microcosm of the universe. It was not man that placed that tenderness in + the evening sky. It has been the evening skies of millions of years that + have at length placed tenderness in the heart of man. It has passed into + him as that "beauty born of murmuring sound" passed into the face of + Wordsworth's maiden. +</p> +<p> + Perhaps we too seldom reflect how much the life of Nature is one with + the life of man, how unimportant or indeed merely seeming, the + difference between them. Who can set a seed in the ground, and watch it + put up a green shoot, and blossom and fructify and wither and pass, + without reflecting, not as imagery but as fact, that he has come into + existence, run his course, and is going out of existence again, by + precisely the same process? With so serious a correspondence between + their vital experience, the fact of one being a tree and the other a man + seems of comparatively small importance. The life process has but used + different material for its expression. And as man and Nature are so like + in such primal conditions, is it not to be supposed that they are alike + too in other and subtler ways, and that, at all events, as it thus + clearly appears that man is as much a natural growth as an apple-tree, + alike dependent on sun and rain, may not, or rather must not, the + thoughts that come to him strangely out of earth and sky, the sap-like + stirrings of his spirit, the sudden inner music that streams through him + before the beauty of the world, be no less authentically the working of + Nature within him than his more obviously physical processes, and, say, + a belief in God be as inevitable a blossom of the human tree as + apple-blossom of the apple? +</p> +<p> + If this oracular office of Nature be indeed a truth, our contemplation + of her beauty and marvel is seen to be a method of illumination, and her + varied spectacle actually a sacred book in picture-writing, a revelation + through the eye of the soul of the stupendous purport of the universe. + The sun and the moon are the torches by which we study its splendid + pages, turning diurnally for our perusal, and in star and flower alike + dwells the lore which we cannot formulate into thought, but can only + come indescribably to know by loving the pictures. "The meaning of all + things that are" is there, if we can only find it. It flames in the + sunset, or flits by us in the twilight moth, thunders or moans or + whispers in the sea, unveils its bosom in the moonrise, affirms itself + in mountain-range and rooted oak, sings to itself in solitary places, + dreams in still waters, nods and beckons amid sunny foliage, and laughs + its great green laugh in the wide sincerity of the grass. +</p> +<p> + As the pictures in this strange and lovely book are infinite, so + endlessly varied are the ways in which they impress us. In our highest + moments they seem to be definitely, almost consciously, sacerdotal, as + though the symbolic acts of a solemn cosmic ritual, in which the + universe is revealed visibly at worship. Were man to make a practice of + rising at dawn and contemplating in silence and alone the rising of the + sun, he would need no other religion. The rest of the day would be + hallowed for him by that morning memory and his actions would partake of + the largeness and chastity of that lustral hour. Moonlight, again, seems + to be the very holiness of Nature, welling out ecstatically from + fountains of ineffable purity and blessedness. Of some moonlight nights + we feel that if we did what our spirits prompt us, we should pass them + on our knees, as in some chapel of the Grail. To attempt to realize in + thought the rapture and purification of such a vigil is to wonder that + we so seldom pay heed to such inner promptings. So much we lose of the + best kind of joy by spiritual inertia, or plain physical sloth; and some + day it will be too late to get up and see the sunrise, or to follow the + white feet of the moon as she treads her vanishing road of silver across + the sea. This involuntary conscience that reproaches us with such laxity + in our Nature-worship witnesses how instinctive that worship is, and how + much we unconsciously depend on Nature for our impulses and our moods. +</p> +<p> + Another definitely religious operation of Nature within us is expressed + in that immense gratitude which throws open the gates of the spirit as + we contemplate some example of her loveliness or grandeur. Who that + has stood by some still lake and watched a stretch of water-lilies + opening in the dawn but has sent out somewhere into space a profound + thankfulness to "whatever gods there be" that he has been allowed to + gaze on so fair a sight. Whatever the struggle or sorrow of our lives, + we feel in such moments our great good fortune at having been born into + a world that contains such marvels. It is sufficient success in life, + whatever our minor failures, to have beheld such beauty; and mankind at + large witnesses to this feeling by the value it everywhere attaches to + scenes in Nature exceptionally noble or exquisite. Though the American + traveller does not so express it, his sentiment toward such natural + spectacles as the Grand Cañon or Niagara Falls is that of an intense + reverence. Such places are veritable holy places, and man's heart + instinctively acknowledges them as sacred. His repugnance to any + violation of them by materialistic interests is precisely the same + feeling as the horror with which Christendom regarded the Turkish + violation of the Holy Sepulchre. And this feeling will increase rather + than decrease in proportion as religion is recognized as having its + shrines and oracles not only in Jerusalem, or in St. Peter's, but + wherever Nature has erected her altars on the hills or wafted her + incense through the woodlands. +</p> +<p> + After all, are not all religions but the theological symbolization of + natural phenomena; and the sacraments, the festivals, and fasts of all + the churches have their counterparts in the mysterious processes and + manifestations of Nature? and is the contemplation of the resurrection + of Adonis or Thammuz more edifying to the soul than to meditate the + strange return of the spring which their legends but ecclesiastically + celebrate? He who has watched and waited at the white grave of winter, + and hears at last the first faint singing among the boughs, or the first + strange "peeping" of frogs in the marshes; or watches the ghost-like + return of insects, stealing, still half asleep, from one knows not + where—the first butterfly suddenly fluttering helplessly on the + window-pane, or the first mud-wasp crawling out into the sun in a dazed, + bewildered way; or comes upon the violet in the woods, shining at the + door of its wintry sepulchre: he who meditates these marvels, and all + the magic processional of the months, as they march with pomp and pathos + along their vanishing roads, will come to the end of the year with a + lofty, illuminated sense of having assisted at a solemn religious + service, and a realization that, in no mere fancy of the poets, but in + very deed, "day unto day uttereth speech and night unto night sheweth + knowledge." +</p> +<p> + Apart from this generally religious influence of Nature, she seems at + times in certain of her aspects and moods specifically to illustrate or + externalize states of the human soul. Sometimes in still, moonlit + nights, standing, as it were, on the brink of the universe, we seem to + be like one standing on the edge of a pool, who, gazing in, sees his own + soul gazing back at him. Tiny creatures though we be, the whole solemn + and majestic spectacle seems to be an extension of our own reverie, and + we to enfold it all in some strange way within our own infinitesimal + consciousness. So a self-conscious dewdrop might feel that it enfolded + the morning sky, and such probably is the meaning of the Buddhist seer + when he declares that "the universe grows I." +</p> +<p> + Such are some of the more august impressions made upon us by the + pictures in the cosmic picture-book; but there are also times and + places when Nature seems to wear a look less mystic than dramatic in its + suggestiveness, as though she were a stage-setting for some portentous + human happening past or to come—the fall of kings or the tragic clash + of empires. As Whitman says, "Here a great personal deed has room." Some + landscapes seem to prophesy, some to commemorate. In some places not + marked by monuments, or otherwise definitely connected with history, we + have a curious haunted sense of prodigious far-off events once enacted + in this quiet grassy solitude—prehistoric battles or terrible + sacrifices. About others hangs a fateful atmosphere of impending + disaster, as though weighted with a gathering doom. Sometimes we seem + conscious of sinister presences, as though veritably in the abode of + evil spirits. The place seems somehow not quite friendly to humanity, + not quite good to linger in, lest its genius should cast its perilous + shadow over the heart. On the other hand, some places breathe an + ineffable sense of blessedness, of unearthly promise. We feel as though + some hushed and happy secret were about to be whispered to us out of the + air, some wonderful piece of good fortune on the edge of happening. Some + hand seems to beckon us, some voice to call, to mysterious paradises of + inconceivable green freshness and supernaturally beautiful flowers, + fairy fastnesses of fragrance and hidden castles of the dew. In such + hours the Well at the World's End seems no mere poet's dream. It awaits + us yonder in the forest glade, amid the brooding solitudes of silent + fern, and the gate of the Earthly Paradise is surely there in yonder + vale hidden among the violet hills. +</p> +<p> + Various as are these impressions, it is strange and worth thinking on + that the dominant suggestion of Nature through all her changes, whether + her mood be stormy or sunny, melancholy or jubilant, is one of presage + and promise. She seems to be ever holding out to us an immortal + invitation to follow and endure, to endure and to enjoy. She seems to + say that what she brings us is but an earnest of what she holds for us + out there along the vanishing road. There is nothing, indeed, she will + not promise us, and no promise, we feel, she cannot keep. Even in her + tragic and bodeful seasons, in her elegiac autumns and stern winters, + there is an energy of sorrow and sacrifice that elevates and inspires, + and in the darkest hours hints at immortal mornings. She may terrify, + but she never deadens, the soul. In earthquake and eclipse she seems to + be less busy with destruction than with renewed creation. She is but + wrecking the old, that +</p> +<pre> + ... there shall be + Beautiful things made new, for the surprise + Of the sky-children. +</pre> +<p> + As I have thus mused along with the reader, a reader I hope not too + imaginary, the manner in which the phrase with which I began has + recurred to my pen has been no mere accident, nor yet has it been a + mere literary device. It seemed to wait for one at every turn of one's + theme, inevitably presenting itself. For wherever in Nature we set our + foot, she seems to be endlessly the centre of vanishing roads, radiating + in every direction into space and time. Nature is forever arriving and + forever departing, forever approaching, forever vanishing; but in her + vanishings there seems to be ever the waving of a hand, in all her + partings a promise of meetings farther along the road. She would seem to + say not so much <i>Ave atque vale</i>, as <i>Vale atque ave</i>. In all this + rhythmic drift of things, this perpetual flux of atoms flowing on and on + into Infinity, we feel less the sense of loss than of a musical + progression of which we too are notes. +</p> +<p> + We are all treading the vanishing road of a song in the air, the + vanishing road of the spring flowers and the winter snows, the vanishing + roads of the winds and the streams, the vanishing road of beloved faces. + But in this great company of vanishing things there is a reassuring + comradeship. We feel that we are units in a vast ever-moving army, the + vanguard of which is in Eternity. The road still stretches ahead of us. + For a little while yet we shall experience all the zest and bustle of + marching feet. The swift-running seasons, like couriers bound for the + front, shall still find us on the road, and shower on us in passing + their blossoms and their snows. For a while the murmur of the running + stream of Time shall be our fellow-wayfarer—till, at last, up there + against the sky-line, we too turn and wave our hands, and know for + ourselves where the road wends as it goes to meet the stars. And others + will stand as we today and watch us reach the top of the ridge and + disappear, and wonder how it seemed to us to turn that radiant corner + and vanish with the rest along the vanishing road. +</p> +<a name="2H_4_5"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<h2> + II +</h2> +<h3> + WOMAN AS A SUPERNATURAL BEING +</h3> +<p> </p> + +<p> + The boy's first hushed enchantment, blent with a sort of religious awe, + as in his earliest love affair he awakens to the delicious mystery we + call woman, a being half fairy and half flower, made out of moonlight + and water lilies, of elfin music and thrilling fragrance, of divine + whiteness and softness and rustle as of dewy rose gardens, a being of + unearthly eyes and terribly sweet marvel of hair; such, too, through + life, and through the ages, however confused or overlaid by use and + wont, is man's perpetual attitude of astonishment before the apparition + woman. +</p> +<p> + Though she may work at his side, the comrade of his sublunary + occupations, he never, deep down, thinks of her as quite real. Though + his wife, she remains an apparition, a being of another element, an + Undine. She is never quite credible, never quite loses that first nimbus + of the supernatural. +</p> +<p> + This is true not merely for poets; it is true for all men, though, of + course, all men may not be conscious of its truth, or realize the truth + in just this way. Poets, being endowed with exceptional sensitiveness of + feeling and expression, say the wonderful thing in the wonderful way, + bring to it words more nearly adequate than others can bring; but it is + an error to suppose that any beauty of expression can exaggerate, can + indeed more than suggest, the beauty of its truth. Woman is all that + poets have said of her, and all that poets can never say: +</p> +<pre> + Always incredible hath seemed the rose, + And inconceivable the nightingale— +</pre> +<p class="noindent"> + and the poet's adoration of her is but the articulate voice of man's + love since the beginning, a love which is as mysterious as she herself + is a mystery. +</p> +<p> + However some may try to analyse man's love for woman, to explain it, or + explain it away, belittle it, nay, even resent and befoul it, it remains + an unaccountable phenomenon, a "mystery we make darker with a name." + Biology, cynically pointing at certain of its processes, makes the + miracle rather more miraculous than otherwise. Musical instruments are + no explanation of music. "Is it not strange that sheep's guts should + hale souls out of men's bodies?" says Benedick, in <i>Much Ado About + Nothing</i>, commenting on Balthazar's music. But they do, for all that, + though no one considers sheep's gut the explanation. To cry "sex" and to + talk of nature's mad preoccupation with the species throws no light on + the matter, and robs it of no whit of its magic. The rainbow remains a + rainbow, for all the sciences. And woman, with or without the suffrage, + stenographer or princess, is of the rainbow. She is beauty made flesh + and dwelling amongst us, and whatever the meaning and message of beauty + may be, such is the meaning of woman on the earth—her meaning, at all + events, for men. That is, she is the embodiment, more than any other + creature, of that divine something, whatever it may be, behind matter, + that spiritual element out of which all proceeds, and which mysteriously + gives its solemn, lovely and tragic significance to our mortal day. +</p> +<p> + If you tell some women this of themselves, they will smile at you. Men + are such children. They are so simple. Dear innocents, how easily they + are fooled! A little make-up, a touch of rouge, a dash of henna—and you + are an angel. Some women seem really to think this; for, naturally, they + know nothing of their own mystery, and imagine that it resides in a few + feminine tricks, the superficial cleverness with which some of them know + how to make the most of the strange something about them which they + understand even less than men understand it. +</p> +<p> + Other women indeed resent man's religious attitude toward them as + sentimental, old-fashioned. They prefer to be regarded merely as + fellow-men. To show consciousness of their sex is to risk offence, and + to busy one's eyes with their magnificent hair, instead of the + magnificent brains beneath it, is to insult them. Yet when, in that old + court of law, Phryne bared her bosom as her complete case for the + defence, she proved herself a greater lawyer than will ever be made by + law examinations and bachelor's degrees; and even when women become + judges of the Supreme Court, a development easily within sight, they + will still retain the greater importance of being merely women. Yes, and + one can easily imagine some future woman President of the United States, + for all the acknowledged brilliancy of her administration, being + esteemed even more for her superb figure. +</p> +<p> + It is no use. Woman, if she would, "cannot shake off the god." She must + make up her mind, whatever other distinctions she may achieve, to her + inalienable distinction of being woman; nothing she can do will change + man's eternal attitude toward her, as a being made to be worshipped and + to be loved, a being of beauty and mystery, as strange and as lovely as + the moon, the goddess and the mother of lunatics. What a wonderful + destiny is hers! In addition to being the first of human beings, all + that a man can be, to be so much else as well; to be, so to say, the + president of a railroad and yet a priestess of nature's mysteries; a + stenographer at so many dollars a week and yet a nymph of the forest + pools—woman, "and yet a spirit still." Not without meaning has myth + endowed woman with the power of metamorphosis, to change at will like + the maidens in the legend into wild white swans, or like Syrinx, fleeing + from the too ardent pursuit of Pan, into a flowering reed, or like + Lamia, into a jewelled serpent— +</p> +<pre> + Eyed like a peacock, and all crimson barr'd; + And full of silver moons. +</pre> +<p> + Modern conditions are still more favourable than antique story for the + exhibition of this protean quality of woman, providing her with + opportunities of still more startling contrasts of transformation. Will + it not be a wonderful sight in that near future to watch that woman + judge of the Supreme Court, in the midst of some learned tangle of + inter-state argument, turn aside for a moment, in response to a + plaintive cry, and, unfastening her bodice, give the little clamourer + the silver solace it demands! What a hush will fall upon the assembled + court! To think of such a genius for jurisprudence, such a legal brain, + working in harmony—with such a bosom! So august a pillar of the law, + yet so divine a mother. +</p> +<p> + As it is, how piquant the contrast between woman inside and outside her + office hours! As you take her out to dinner, and watch her there seated + before you, a perfumed radiance, a dewy dazzling vision, an evening star + swathed in gauzy convolutions of silk and lace—can it be the same + creature who an hour or two ago sat primly with notebook and pencil at + your desk side, and took down your specification for fireproofing that + new steel-constructed building on Broadway? You, except for your evening + clothes, are not changed; but she—well, your clients couldn't possibly + recognize her. As with Browning's lover, you are on the other side of + the moon, "side unseen" of office boy or of subway throng; you are in + the presence of those "silent silver lights and darks undreamed of" by + the gross members of your board of directors. By day—but ah! at evening + under the electric lights, to the delicate strains of the palm-shaded + orchestra! Man is incapable of these exquisite transformations. By day a + gruff and hurried machine—at evening, at best, a rapt and laconic poker + player. A change with no suggestion of the miraculous. +</p> +<p> + Do not let us for a moment imagine that because man is ceasing to remove + his hat at her entrance into crowded elevators, or because he hustles + her or allows her to hang by the straps in crowded cars, that he is + tending to forget this supernaturalism of woman. Such change in his + manners merely means his respect for her disguise, her disguise as a + business woman. By day she desires to be regarded as just that, and she + resents as untimely the recognition of her sex, her mystery, and her + marvel during business hours. Man's apparent impoliteness, therefore, is + actually a delicate modern form of chivalry. But of course his real + feelings are only respectfully masked, and, let her be in any danger or + real discomfort, or let any language be uttered unseemly for her ears, + and we know what promptly happens. Barring such accidents, man tacitly + understands that her incognito is to be respected—till the charming + moment comes when she chooses to put it aside and take at his hands her + immemorial tribute. +</p> +<p> + So, you see, she is able to go about the rough ways, taking part even in + the rough work of the world, literally bearing what the fairy tales call + a charmed life. And this, of course, gives her no small advantage in the + human conflict. So protected, she is enabled, when need arises, to take + the offensive, with a minimum of danger. Consider her recent campaign + for suffrage, for example. Does any one suppose that, had she been + anything but woman, a sacrosanct being, immune from clubs and bullets, + that she would have been allowed to carry matters with such high + victorious hand as in England—and more power to her!—she has of late + been doing. Let men attempt such tactics, and their shrift is + uncomplimentarily short. It may be said that woman enjoys this immunity + with children and curates, but, even so, it may be held that these + latter participate in a less degree in that divine nature with which + woman is so completely armoured. +</p> +<pre class="si"> + How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea, + Whose action is no stronger than a flower? +</pre> +<p class="noindent"> + exclaims Shakespeare. +</p> +<p> + But there is indeed the mystery, for, though its "action is no stronger + than a flower," the power wielded by beauty in this world, and therefore + by woman as its most dynamic embodiment, is as undeniable as it is + irresistible. "Terrible as an army with banners" was no mere figure of + lovesick speech. It is as plain a truth as the properties of radium, + and belongs to the same order of marvel. Such scientific discoveries are + particularly welcome as demonstrating the power of the finer, as + contrasted with the more brutally obvious, manifestations of force; for + they thus illustrate the probable nature of those spiritual forces whose + operations we can plainly see, without being able to account for them. A + foolish phrase has it that "a woman's strength is in her helplessness." + "Helplessness" is a curious term to use for a mysteriously concentrated + or super-refined form of strength. "Whose action is no stronger than a + flower." But is the action of a flower any less strong because it is not + the action of a fist? As a motive force a flower may be, and indeed has + time and again been, stronger than a thousand fists. And what then shall + we say of the action of that flower of flowers that is woman—that + flower that not only once or twice in history has +</p> +<pre> + ... launched a thousand ships + And burned the topless towers of Ilium. +</pre> +<p> + Woman's helplessness, forsooth! On the contrary, woman is the best + equipped fighting machine that ever went to battle. And she is this, not + from any sufferance on the part of man, not from any consideration on + his part toward her "weakness," but merely because he cannot help + himself, because nature has so made her. +</p> +<p> + No simple reasoning will account for her influence over man. It is not + an influence he allows. It is an influence he cannot resist, and it is + an influence which he cannot explain, though he may make believe to do + so. That "protection," for example, which he extends to her from the + common physical perils with which he is more muscularly constituted to + cope—why is it extended? Merely out of pity to a weaker being than + himself? Does other weakness always command his pity? We know that it + does not. No, this "protection" is but a part of an instinctive + reverence, for which he can give no reason, the same kind of reverence + which he has always given to divine beings, to any manifestation or + vessel of the mysteriously sacred something in human life. He respects + and protects woman from the same instinct which makes him shrink from + profaning an altar or robbing a church, or sends him on his knees before + any apparition supposedly divine. Priests and women are often classed + together, but not because the priests are regarded as effeminately + "helpless"; rather because both are recognized as ministers of sacred + mysteries, both belong to the spiritual sphere, and have commerce with + the occult holiness of things. Also be it remarked that this + "protection" is chiefly needed against the brutality and bestiality of + man's own heart, which woman and religion alike rather hold in + subjection by their mysterious influence than have to thank for any + favours of self-control. Man "protects" woman because he first worships + her, because, if she has for him not always the beauty of holiness, she + at least always suggests the holiness of beauty. +</p> +<p> + Now when has man ever suggested holiness to the most adoring woman? I do + not refer to the professional holiness of saints and ecclesiastics, but + to that sense of hallowed strangeness, of mystic purity, of spiritual + exquisiteness, which breathes from a beautiful woman and makes the touch + of her hand a religious ecstasy, and her very garments a thrilling + mystery. How impossible it is to imagine a woman writing the <i>Vita + Nuova</i>, or a girl feeling toward a boy such feelings of awe and worship + as set the boy Dante a-tremble at his first sight of the girl Beatrice. +</p> +<blockquote> + At that moment [he writes], I say most truly that the spirit of + life, which hath its dwelling in the secretest chamber of the heart, + began to tremble so violently that the least pulse of my body shook + therewith; and in trembling it said these words: "<i>Ecce deus fortior + me, qui veniens dominabitur mihi</i>. (Here is a deity stronger than I, + who, coming, shall rule over me.)" +</blockquote> +<p> + And, loverlike, he records of "this youngest of the angels" that "her + dress on that day was of a most noble colour, a subdued and goodly + crimson, girdled and adorned in such sort as best suited with her very + tender age." Ah! that "little frock," that sacred little frock we first + saw her in! Don't we all know it? And the little handkerchief, scented + like the breath of heaven, we begged as a sacred relic! And— +</p> +<pre> + Long after you are dead + I will kiss the shoes of your feet.... +</pre> +<p class="noindent"> + Yes! anything she has worn or touched; for, as a modern writer has said: +</p> +<blockquote> + Everything a woman wears or touches immediately incarnates something + of herself. A handkerchief, a glove, a flower—with a breath she + endows them with immortal souls. +</blockquote> +<p> + Waller with his girdle, Donne with "that subtle wreath of hair about his + arm," the mediaeval knight riding at tourney with his lady's sleeve at + his helm, and all relic-worshipping lovers through the ages bear witness + to that divine supernaturalism of woman. To touch the hem of that little + frock, to kiss the mere imprint of those little feet, is to be purified + and exalted. But when did man affect woman in that way? I am tolerably + well read in the poetry of woman's emotions, but I recall no parallel + expressions of feeling. No passionate apostrophes of his golf stockings + come to my mind, nor wistful recollections of the trousers he wore on + that never-to-be-forgotten afternoon. The immaculate collar that spanned + his muscular throat finds no Waller to sing it: +</p> +<pre> + A narrow compass—and yet there + Dwelt all that's good, and all that's fair, +</pre> +<p class="noindent"> + and probably the smartest negligée shirt that ever sported with the + summer winds on a clothes-line has never caused the smallest flutter in + feminine bosoms. The very suggestion is, of course, absurd—whereas with + women, in very deed, it is as with the temple in Keats's lines: +</p> +<pre> + ... even as the trees + That whisper round a temple become soon + Dear as the temple's self. +</pre> +<p> + Properly understood, therefore, the cult of the skirt-dancer has a + religious significance, and man's preoccupation with petticoats is but + the popular recognition of the divinity of woman. All that she is and + does and wears has a ritualistic character, and she herself commands our + reverence because we feel her to be the vessel of sacred mysteries, the + earthly representative of unearthly powers, with which she enjoys an + intimacy of communication denied to man. It is not a reasonable feeling, + or one to be reasoned about; and that is why we very properly exempt + woman from the necessity of being reasonable. She is not, we say, a + reasonable being, and in so saying we pay her a profound compliment. For + she transcends reason, and on that very account is mysteriously wise, + the wisest of created things—mother-wise. When we say "mother-wit," we + mean something deeper than we realize—for what in the universe is wiser + than a mother, fed as she is through the strange channels of her being + with that lore of the infinite which seems to enter her body by means of + organs subtler than the brain? +</p> +<p> + A certain famous novelist meant well when recently he celebrated woman + as "the mother of the male," but such celebration, while ludicrously + masculine in its egotistic limitation, would have fallen short even if + he had stopped to mention that she was the mother of the female, too; + for not merely in the fact that she is the mother of the race resides + the essential mystery of her motherhood. We do not value woman merely, + if one may be permitted the expression, as a brood mare, an economic + factor controlling the census returns. Her gift of motherhood is + stranger than that, and includes spiritual affinities and significances + not entirely represented by visible babes. Her motherhood is mysterious + because it seems to be one with the universal motherhood of nature, one + with the motherhood that guards and warms to life the eggs in the nest + and the seeds in the hollows of the hills, the motherhood of the whole + strange vital process, wherever and howsoever it moves and dreams and + breaks into song and flower. And, as nature is something more than a + mother, so is woman. She is a vision, an outward and visible sign of an + inward and spiritual grace and goodness at the heart of life; and her + beauty is the sacred seal which the gods have set upon her in token of + her supernatural meaning and mission; for all beauty is the message of + the immortal to mortality. Always when man has been in doubt concerning + his gods, or in despair amid the darkness of his destiny, his heart has + been revived by some beatific vision; +</p> +<pre> + Some shape of beauty moves away the pall + From our dark spirits. +</pre> +<p> + Woman is our permanent Beatific Vision in the darkness of the world. +</p> +<a name="2H_4_6"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<h2> + III +</h2> +<h3> + THE LACK OF IMAGINATION AMONG MILLIONAIRES +</h3> +<p> </p> + +<p> + Considering the truly magical power of money, it must often have struck + the meditative mind—particularly that class of meditative mind whose + wealth consists chiefly in meditation—to what thoroughly commonplace + uses the modern millionaire applies the power that is his: in brief, + with what little originality, with what a pitiful lack of imagination, + he spends his money. One seldom hears of his doing a novel or striking + thing with it. +</p> +<p> + On the contrary, he buys precisely the same things as his + fellow-millionaires, the same stereotyped possessions—houses in Fifth + Avenue and Newport, racehorses, automobiles, boxes at the opera, + diamonds and dancing girls; and whether, as the phrase is, he makes good + use of his wealth, or squanders it on his pleasures, the so-called good + or bad uses are alike drearily devoid of individuality. Philanthropist + or profligate, the modern millionaire is one and the same in his lack of + initiative. Saint or sinner, he is one or the other in the same tame + imitative way. +</p> +<p> + The rich men of the past, the splendid spendthrifts of antiquity, seem + usually to have combined a gift of fancy with their wealth, often even + something like poetry; and their extravagances, however extreme, had + usually a saving grace of personal whim to recommend them to lovers of + the picturesque. Sardanapalus and Heliogabalus may have been whatever + else you please, but they were assuredly not commonplace; and the mere + mention of their names vibrates with mankind's perennial gratitude for + splendour and colossal display, however perverse, and even absurd. The + princes of the Italian Renaissance were, of course, notable examples of + the rich man as fantast, probably because they had the good sense to + seek the skilled advice of poets and painters as to how best to make an + artistic display of their possessions. Alas, no millionaire today asks a + poet's or painter's assistance in spending his money; yet, were the + modern millionaire to do so, the world might once more be delighted with + such spectacles as Leonardo devised for the entertainments at the Villa + Medici—those fanciful banquets, where, instead of a mere vulgar display + of Medici money—"a hundred dollars a plate," so to say—whimsical wit + and beauty entered into the creation of the very dishes. Leicester's + famous welcoming of Elizabeth to Kenilworth was perhaps the last + spectacular "revel" of its kind to strike the imagination; though we + must not fail to remember with gratitude the magnificent Beckford, with + his glorious "rich man's folly" of Fonthill Abbey, a lordly pleasure + house which naturally sprang from the same Aladdin-like fancy which + produced "Vathek." +</p> +<p> + I but mention one or two such typical examples at random to illustrate + the difference between past and present. At present the rich man's + paucity of originality is so painful that we even welcome a certain + millionaire's <i>penchant</i> for collecting fleas—he, it is rumoured, + having paid as much as a thousand dollars for specimens of a + particularly rare species. It is a passion perhaps hard to understand, + but, at least, as we say, it is "different." Mr. Carnegie's more + comprehensible hobby for building libraries shows also no little + originality in a man of a class which is not as a rule devoted to + literature. Another millionaire I recently read of, who refused to pay + the smallest account till it had run for five years, and would then + gladly pay it, with compound interest at five per cent., has something + refreshing about him; while still another rich eccentric, who has lived + on his yacht anchored near the English coast for some fifteen years or + so in order to avoid payment of his American taxes, and who occasionally + amuses himself by having gold pieces heated white hot and thrown into + the sea for diving boys to pick them up, shows a quaint ingenuity which + deserves our gratitude. Another modern example of how to spend, or + waste, one's money picturesquely was provided by the late Marquis of + Anglesey, a young lord generally regarded as crazy by an ungrateful + England. Perhaps it was a little crazy in him to spend so much money in + the comparatively commonplace adventure of taking an amateur dramatic + company through the English provinces, he himself, I believe, playing + but minor rôles; but lovers of Gautier's <i>Le Capitaine Fracasse</i> will + see in that but a charmingly boyish desire to translate a beloved dream + into a reality—though his creditors probably did not take that view. + Neither, one can surmise, did those gentlemen sufficiently appreciate + his passion for amassing amazing waistcoats, of which some seven hundred + were found in his wardrobe at his lamented death; or strange and + beautiful walking sticks, a like prodigious collection of which were + among the fantastic assets which represented his originally large + personal fortune on the winding up of his earthly affairs. Among these + unimaginative creditors were, doubtless, many jewellers who found it + hard to sympathize with his lordship's genial after-dinner habit, + particularly when in the society of fair women, of plunging his hand + into his trousers pocket and bringing it forth again brimming over with + uncut precious stones of many colours, at the same time begging his + companion to take her choice of the moonlit rainbowed things. The + Marquis of Anglesey died at the early age of twenty-nine, much lamented, + as I have hinted—by his creditors, but no less sincerely lamented, too, + by those for whom his flamboyant personality and bizarre whims added to + that gaiety of nations sadly in need today of such figures. A friend of + mine owns two of the wonderful waistcoats. Sometimes he wears one as we + lunch together, and on such occasions we always drink in silence to the + memory of his fantastic lordship. +</p> +<p> + These examples of rich men of our own time who have known how to spend + their money with whim and fancy and flourish are but exceptions to my + argument, lights shining, so to say, in a great darkness. As a general + rule, it is the poor or comparatively poor man, the man lacking the very + necessary material of the art, who is an artist of this kind. It is the + man with but little money who more often provides examples of the + delightful way of spending it. I trust that Mr. Richard Harding Davis + will not resent my recalling a charming feat of his in this connection. + Of course Mr. Davis is by no means a poor man, as all we who admire his + writings are glad to know. Still, successful writer as he is, he is not + yet, I presume, on a Carnegie or Rockefeller rating; and, at the time + which I am about to recall, while already famous and comparatively + prosperous, he had not attained that security of position which is + happily his today. Well, I suppose it was some twelve or fifteen years + ago—and of course I am only recalling a story well known to all the + world—that, chancing to be in London, and wishing to send a surprise + message to a lady in Chicago who afterward became his wife, he conceived + the idea of sending it by messenger boy from Charing Cross to Michigan + Avenue; and so the little lad, in the well-known uniform of hurry, sped + across the sea, as casually as though he were on an errand from Charing + Cross to Chancery Lane, raced across nearly half the continent, as + casually as though he were on an errand from Wall Street to Park Row, + and finding the proper number in Michigan Avenue, placed the far + travelled letter in the lady's hand, no doubt casually asking for a + receipt. This I consider one of the most romantic compliments ever paid + by a lover to his lady. What millionaire ever had a fancy like that? +</p> +<p> + Or what millionaire ever had a fancy like this? There was living in New + York some ten years ago a charming actor, not unknown to the public and + much loved by his friends for, among his other qualities, his quaint + whims. Good actor as he was, like many other good actors he was usually + out of an engagement, and he was invariably poor. It was always his + poorest moment that he would choose for the indulgence of an odd, and + surely kindly, eccentricity. He would half starve himself, go without + drinks, forswear tobacco, deny himself car fares, till at last he had + saved up five dollars. This by no means easy feat accomplished, he would + have his five-dollar bill changed into five hundred pennies, filling his + pockets with which, he would sally forth from his lodging, and, seeking + neighbourhoods in which children most abound, he would scatter his + arduously accumulated largess among the scrambling boys and girls, + literally happy as a king to watch the glee on the young faces at the + miraculous windfall. We often wondered that he was not arrested for + creating a riot in the public streets, a disturber of the public + traffic. Had some millionaire passed by on one of those ecstatic + occasions, there is no question but that he would have been promptly + removed to Bellevue as a dangerous lunatic. +</p> +<p> + Or what millionaire ever had a fancy like this? Passing along + Forty-second Street one afternoon, I came upon a little crowd, and + joining it I found that it was grouped in amused curiosity, and with a + certain kindness, round an old hatless Irishman, who was leaning against + a shop front, weeping bitterly, and, of course, grotesquely. The old man + was very evidently drunk, but there was something in his weeping deeply + pitiful for all that. He was drunk, for certain; but no less certainly + he was very unhappy—unhappy over some mysterious something that one or + two kindly questioners tried in vain to discover. As we all stood + helplessly looking on and wondering, a tall, brisk young man, of the + lean, rapid, few-worded American type, pushed in among us, took a swift + look at the old man, thrust a dollar bill into his hand, said "Forget + it"—no more—and was gone like a flash on his way. The old man fumbled + the note in a daze, but what chiefly interested me was the amazed look + on the faces of the little crowd. It was almost as if something + supernatural had happened. All eyes turned quickly to catch sight of + that strange young man; but he was already far off striding swiftly up + the street. I have often regretted that I checked my impulse to catch up + with him—for it seemed to me, too, that I had never seen a stranger + thing. Pity or whim or whatever it was, did ever a millionaire do the + like with a dollar, create such a sensation or have so much fun with so + small a sum? No; millionaires never have fancies like that. +</p> +<p> + Another poor man's fancy is that of a friend of mine, a very poor young + lawyer, whose custom it is to walk uptown from his office at evening, + studying the faces of the passers-by. He is too poor to afford dollar + bills. He must work his miracles with twenty-five-cent pieces, or even + smaller coins; but it is with this art of spending money as with any + other art: the greatness of the artist is shown by his command over an + economy of material; and the amount of human happiness to be evoked by + the dispensation of a quarter into the carefully selected hand, at the + artistically chosen moment, almost passes belief. Suppose, for example, + you were a sandwich man on a bleak winter day, an old weary man, with + hope so long since faded out of your heart that you would hardly know + what the word meant if you chanced to read it in print. Thought, too, is + dead within you, and feeling even so numbed that you hardly suffer any + more. Practically you are a man who ought to be in your coffin—at peace + in Potter's field—who, by the mere mechanic habit of existence, + mournfully parades the public streets, holding up a banner with some + strange device, the scoff of the pitiless wayfarer—as like as not + supporting against an empty stomach the savoury advertisement of some + newly opened restaurant. Suppose you were that man, and suddenly through + the thick hopelessness, muffling you around as with a spiritual + deafness, there should penetrate a kind voice saying: "Try and keep up + your heart, friend; there are better days ahead"; and with the voice a + hand slipping into yours a coin, and with both a kind smile, a cheery + "Good-bye," and a tall, broad-shouldered figure, striding with long, so + to say, kindly legs up the street—gone almost before you knew he was + there. I think it would hardly matter to you whether the coin were a + quarter or a dime; but what would matter would be your amazement that + there still was any kindness left on the earth; and perhaps you might + almost be tempted to believe in God again. And then—well, what would it + matter to any one what you did with your miraculous coin? This is my + friend's favourite way of spending his money. To the extent of his poor + means he has constituted himself the Haroun Al Raschid of the sandwich + men. +</p> +<p> + After all, I suppose that most of us, if put into the possession of + great wealth, would find our greatest satisfaction in the spending of it + much after the fashion of my poor lawyer friend—that is, in the + artistic distribution of human happiness. I do not, of course, for a + moment include in that phrase those soulless systems of philanthropy by + which a solid block of money on the one side is applied to the relief of + a solid block of human misery on the other, useful and much to be + appreciated as such mechanical charity of course is. It is not, indeed, + the pious use of money that is my theme, but rather how to get the most + fun, the most personal and original fun, out of it. +</p> +<p> + The mention of the great caliph suggests a rôle which is open to any + rich man to play, the rôle of the Haroun Al Raschid of New York. What a + wonderful part to play! Instead of loitering away one's evenings at the + club, to doff one's magnificence and lose oneself in the great nightly + multitude of the great city, wandering hither and thither, watching and + listening, and, with one's cheque-book for a wand, play the magician of + human destinies—bringing unhoped-for justice to the oppressed, succour + as out of heaven to the outcast, and swift retribution, as of sudden + lightning, to the oppressor. To play Providence in some tragic crisis of + human lives; at the moment when all seemed lost to step out of the + darkness and set all right with a touch of that magic wand. To walk by + the side of lost and lonely men, an unexpected friend; to scribble a + word on a card and say, "Present this tomorrow morning at such a number + Broadway and see what will happen," and then to disappear once again + into the darkness. To talk with sad, wandering girls, and arrange that + wonderful new hats and other forms of feminine hope shall fall out of + the sky into their lonely rooms on the morrow. To be the friend of weary + workmen and all that toil by night while the world is asleep in soft + beds. To come upon the hobo as he lies asleep on the park bench and slip + a purse into his tattered coat, and perhaps be somewhere by to see him + wake up in the dawn, and watch the strange antics of his joy—all + unsuspected as its cause. To go up to the poor push-cart man, as he is + being hurried from street corner to street corner by the police, and + say: "Would you like to go back to Italy? Here is a steamer ticket. A + boat sails for Genoa tomorrow. And here is a thousand dollars. It will + buy you a vineyard in Sicily. Go home and bid the signora get ready." + And then to disappear once more, like Harlequin, to flash your wand in + some other corner of the human multitude. Oh, there would be fun for + one's money, something worth while having money for! +</p> +<p> + I offer this suggestion to any rich man who may care to take it up, free + of charge. It is a fascinating opportunity, and its rewards would be + incalculable. At the end of the year how wise one would be in the human + story—how filled to overflowing his heart with the thought of the joy + he would thus have brought to so many lives—all, too, in pure fun, + himself having had such a good time all the while! +</p> +<a name="2H_4_7"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<h2> + IV +</h2> +<h3> + THE PASSING OF MRS. GRUNDY +</h3> +<p> </p> + +<p> + "Death of Mrs. Grundy!" Imagine opening one's newspaper some morning and + finding in sensational headlines that welcome news. One recalls the + beautiful old legend of the death of Pan, and how—false report though + it happily was—there once ran echoing through the world a long + heartbroken sigh, and a mysterious voice was heard wailing three times + from land to land, "Great Pan is dead!" Similarly, on that happy morning + I have imagined, one can imagine, too, another sigh passing from land to + land, the sigh of a vast relief, of a great thankfulness for the lifting + of an ineffable burden, as though the earth stretched its limbs and drew + great draughts of a new freedom. How wildly the birds would sing that + morning! And I believe that even the church bells would ring of + themselves! +</p> +<p> + Such definite news is not mine to proclaim, but if it cannot be + announced with certitude that Mrs. Grundy is no more, it may, at all + events, be affirmed without hesitation that she is on her deathbed, and + that surely, if slowly, she is breathing her last. Yes, that poisonous + breath, which has so long pervaded like numbing miasma the free air of + the world, will soon be out of her foolish, hypocritical old body; and + though it may still linger on here and there in provincial backwoods and + suburban fastnesses, from the great air centres of civilization it will + have passed away forever. +</p> +<p> + The origin of Mrs. Grundy is shrouded in mystery. In fact, though one + thus speaks of her as so potent a personification, she has of course + never had any real existence. For that very reason she has been so hard + to kill. Nothing is so long-lived as a chimera, nothing so difficult to + lay as a ghost. From her first appearance, or rather mention, in + literature, Mrs. Grundy has been a mere hearsay, a bugaboo being + invented to frighten society, as "black men" and other goblins have been + wickedly invented by nurses to frighten children. In the old play itself + where we first find her mentioned by name, she herself never comes on + the stage. She is only referred to in frightened whispers. "<i>What will + Mrs. Grundy say?</i>" is the nervous catchword of one of the characters, + much in the same way as Mrs. Gamp was wont to defer to the censorious + standards of her invisible friend "Mrs. Harris." In the case of the last + named chimera, it will be recalled that the awful moment came when Mrs. + Gamp's boon companion, Batsey Prig, was sacrilegious enough to declare + her belief that no such person as "Mrs. Harris" was, or ever had been, + in existence. So the awful atheistic moment has come for Mrs. Grundy, + too, and an oppressed world at last takes courage to say that no such + being as Mrs. Grundy has ever really existed, or that, even if she has, + she shall exist no more. <i>What will Mrs. Grundy say?</i> Who cares + nowadays—and so long as nobody cares, the good lady is as dead as need + be. +</p> +<p> + Mrs. Grundy, of course, is man's embodied fear of his neighbour, the + creation of timid souls who are afraid of being themselves, and who, + instead of living their lives after their own fashion and desires, + choose to live them in hypocritical discomfort according to the + standards of others, standards which in their turn may be held + insincerely enough from fear of someone else, and so on without end—a + vicious circle of insincere living being thus created, in which no man + is or does anything real, or as he himself would naturally prefer to be + and to do. It is evident that such a state of mutual intimidation can + exist only in small communities, economically interdependent, and among + people with narrow boundaries and no horizons. If you live in a village, + for example, and are dependent on the good opinion of your neighbours + for your means of existence, your morals and your religious belief must + be those of the village, or you are liable to starve. It is only the + rich man in a village who can do as he pleases. The only thing for the + dependent individualist in a village to do is to go somewhere else, to + some place where a man may at the same time hold his job and his + opinions, a place too big to keep track of its units, too busy to ask + irrelevant questions, and so diverse in its constituents as to have + generated tolerance and free operation for all. +</p> +<p> + Now, in spite of its bigness, the world was till quite recently little + more than a village, curiously held in subjection by village + superstitions and village ethics, narrow conceptions of life and + conduct; but the last twenty years have seen a remarkable enlargement of + the human spirit, a reassertion of the natural rights of man as against + the figments of prurient and emasculate conventions, to which there is + no parallel since the Renaissance. Voices have been heard and truths + told, and multitudes have listened gladly that aforetime must take + shelter either in overawed silence or in utterance so private that they + exerted no influence; and the literature of the day alone, literature of + wide and greedy acceptance, is sufficient warrant for the obituary + announcement which, if not yet, as I said, officially made, is already + writing in the hearts, and even in the actions, of society. The + popularity of such writers as Meredith and Hardy, Ibsen and Nietzsche, + Maeterlinck and Walt Whitman, constitutes a writing on the wall the + significance of which cannot be gainsaid. The vogue alone of Mr. Bernard + Shaw, apostle to the Philistines, is a portent sufficiently conclusive. + To regard Mr. Shaw either as a great dramatist or an original + philosopher is, of course, absurd. He, of all men, must surely be the + last to imagine such a vain thing about himself; but even should he be + so self-deluded, his immense coarse usefulness to his day and generation + remains, and the value of it can hardly be overestimated. What others + have said for years as in a glass darkly, with noble seriousness of + utterance, he proclaims again through his brazen megaphone, with all the + imperturbable <i>aplomb</i> of an impudent showman, having as little + self-respect as he has respect for his public; and, as a consequence, + that vast herd of middle-class minds to whom finer spirits appeal in + vain hear for the first time truths as old as philosophy, and answer to + them with assenting instincts as old as humanity. Truth, like many + another excellent commodity, needs a vulgar advertisement, if it is + to become operative in the masses. Mr. Shaw is truth's vulgar + advertisement. He is a brilliant, carrying noise on behalf of freedom of + thought; and his special equipment for his peculiar revivalist mission + comes of his gift for revealing to the common mind not merely the + untruth of hypocrisy, but the laughableness of hypocrisy, first of all. + He takes some popular convention, that of medicine or marriage or what + you will, and shows you not merely how false it is but how ludicrously + false. He purges the soul, not with the terror and pity of tragedy, but + with the irresistible laughter of rough-and-tumble farce. To think + wrongly is, first of all, so absurd. He proves it by putting wrong + thinking on the stage, where you see it for yourself in action, and + laugh immoderately. Perhaps you had never thought how droll wrong + thinking or no thinking was before; and while you laugh with Shaw + at your side-splitting discovery, the serious message glides in + unostentatiously—wrong thinking is not merely laughable; it is also + dangerous, and very uncomfortable. And so the showman has done his work, + the advertiser has sold his goods, and there is so much more truth in + circulation in unfamiliar areas of society. +</p> +<p> + That word "society" naturally claims some attention at the hands of one + who would speak of Mrs. Grundy, particularly as she has owed her long + existence to a general misconception as to what constitutes "society," + and to a superstitious terror as to its powers over the individual. + Society—using the word in its broad sense—has heretofore been regarded + as a vague tremendous entity imposing a uniformity of opinion and action + on the individual, under penalty of a like vague tremendous disapproval + for insubordination. Independent minds, however, have from time to time, + and in ever increasing numbers, ventured to do their own will and + pleasure in disregard of this vague tremendous disapproval, and have, + strange to say, found no sign of the terrible consequences threatened + them, with the result that they, and the onlookers, have come to the + conclusion that this fear of society is just one more bugaboo of + timorous minds, with no power over the courageous spirit. From a + multitude of such observations men and women have come more and more to + draw the conclusion that the solidarity of society is nothing but a + myth, and that so-called society is merely a loosely connected series of + independent societies, formed by natural selection among their members, + each with its own codes and satisfactions; and that a man not welcome in + one society may readily find a home for himself in another, or indeed, + if necessary, and if he be strong enough, rest content with his own + society of one. +</p> +<p> + There was a time when a doubt as to the credibility of the book of + Genesis or a belief in the book of Darwin made the heretic a lonely man, + but nowadays he is hardly likely to go without friends. Besides, men and + women of strong personal character are not usually indiscriminately + gregarious. On the contrary, they are apt to welcome any disparity + between them and their neighbours which tends to safeguard their leisure + and protect them against the social inroads of irrelevant persons. I + recall the case of a famous novelist, who, himself jealous of his own + proper seclusion, permitted the amenities of his neighbours to pleasure + his wife who was more sociably inclined, and smilingly allowed himself + to be sacrificed once a week on the altar of a domestic "at home" day. + It was amusing to see him in his drawing-room on Fridays, surrounded by + every possible form of human irrelevancy—men and women well enough in + their way, of course, but absolutely unrelated, if not antipathetic to + him and all he stood for—heroically doing his best to seem really "at + home." But there came a time when he published a book of decidedly + "dangerous" tendencies, if not worse, and then it was a delight to see + how those various nobodies fled his contact as they would the plague. + His drawing-room suddenly became a desert, and when you dropped in on + Fridays you found there—only the people he wanted. "Is not this," he + would laughingly say, "a triumph of natural selection? See how simply, + by one honest action, I have cut off the bores!" +</p> +<p> + To cut off the bores! Yes, that is the desperate attempt that any man or + woman who would live their own lives rather than the lives of others is + constantly engaged in making; and more and more all men and women are + realizing that there is only one society that really counts, the society + of people we want, rather than the people who want us or don't want us + or whom we don't want. And nowadays the man or woman must be + uncomfortable or undesirable, indeed, who cannot find all the society he + or she can profitably or conveniently handle, be their opinions and + actions never so anti-Grundy. Thus the one great fear that more than any + other has kept Mrs. Grundy alive, the fear of being alone in the world, + cut off from such intercourse with our fellows as most of us feel the + need of at times, has been put an end to by the ever increasing + subdivision of "society" into friendly seclusions and self-dependent + communities of men and women with like ways and points of view, however + disapproved in alien circles. What "shocks" one circle will seem + perfectly natural in another; and one great truth should always be held + firmly in mind—that the approval of one's neighbours has never yet paid + a man's bills. So long as he can go on paying those, and retain the + regard of the only society he values—that of himself and a few + friends—he can tell Mrs. Grundy to go—where she belongs. And this + happily is—almost—as true nowadays for woman as for man; which is the + main consideration, for, it need hardly be said, that it has been on her + own sex that the tyranny of Mrs. Grundy has weighed peculiarly hard. +</p> +<p> + Had that tyranny been based on a genuine moral ideal, one would have + some respect for it, but, as the world has always known, it has been + nothing of the sort. On the contrary, it has all along been an organized + hypocrisy which condoned all it professed to censure on condition that + it was done in unhealthy secrecy, behind the closed doors of a lying + "respectability." All manner of uncleanness had been sanctioned so long + as it wore a mask of "propriety," whereas essentially clean and + wholesome expressions of human nature, undisguised manifestations of the + joy and romance of life, have been suppressed and confounded with their + base counterfeits merely because they have sought the sunlight of + sincerity rather than the shade where evil does well to hide. Man's + proper delight in the senses, the natural joy of men and women in each + other, the love of beauty, naked and unashamed, the romantic emotions, + and all that passionate vitality that dreams and builds and glorifies + the human story: all this, forsooth, it has been deemed wrong even to + speak of, save in colourless euphemisms, and their various drama has had + to be carried on by evasion and subterfuge pitiably silly indeed in this + robustly procreative world. Silly, but how preposterous, too, and no + longer to be endured. +</p> +<p> + It was a gain indeed to drag these vital human interests into the arena + of undaunted discussion, but things are clearly seen to have already + passed beyond that stage. Discussion has already set free in the world + braver and truer ideals, ideals no longer afraid of life, but, in the + courage of their joyousness, feasibly close to all its breathing facts. + Men and women refuse any longer to allow their most vital instincts to + be branded with obloquy, and the fulness of their lives to be thwarted + at the bidding of an impure and irrational fiction of propriety. On + every hand we find the right to happiness asserted in deeds as well as + words. The essential purity of actions and relations to which a merely + technical or superstitious irregularity attaches is being more and more + acknowledged, and the fanciful barriers to human happiness are + everywhere giving way before the daylight of common sense. Love and + youth and pleasure are asserting their sacred natural rights, rights as + elemental as those forces of the universe by which the stars are + preserved from wrong, and the merely legal and ecclesiastical fictions + which have so long overawed them are fleeing like phantoms at cockcrow. + It is no longer sinful to be happy—even in one's own way; and the + extravagances of passion, the ebullitions of youth, and the vagaries of + pleasure are no longer frowned down by a sour-visaged public opinion, + but encouraged, or, if necessary, condoned, as the dramatic play of + natural forces, and as welcome additions to the gaiety of nations. The + true sins against humanity are, on the other hand, being exposed and + pilloried with a scientific eye for their essential qualities. +</p> +<pre class="si"> + ... The cold heart, and the murderous tongue, + The wintry soul that hates to hear a song, + The close-shut fist, the mean and measuring eye, + And all the little poisoned ways of wrong. +</pre> +<p> + Man's virtues and vices are being subjected to a re-classification, in + the course of which they are entertainingly seen, in no few instances, + to be changing places. The standards of punishment applied by Dante to + his inferno of lost souls is being, every year, more closely + approximated; warm-blooded sins of instinct and impulse, as having + usually some "relish of salvation" in them, are being judged lightly, + when they are accounted sins at all, and the cold-hearted sins of + essential selfishness, the sins of cruelty and calculation and + cowardice, are being nailed up as the real crimes against God and man. + The individual is being allowed more and more to be the judge of his own + actions, and all actions are being estimated more in regard to their + special relation and environment, as the relativity of right and wrong, + that most just of modern conceptions, is becoming understood. The hidden + sins of the pious and respectable are coming disastrously into the + light, and it no longer avails for a man to be a pillar of orthodoxy on + Sundays if he be a pillar of oppression all the rest of the week; while + the negative virtues of abstinence from the common human pleasures go + for less than nothing in a world that no longer regards the theatre, the + race course, and the card table, or even a beautiful woman, as under the + especial wrath of God. No, the Grundy "virtues" are fast disappearing, + and piano legs are once more being worn in their natural nudity. The + general trend is unmistakable and irresistible, and such apparent + contradictions of it as occasionally get into the newspapers are of no + general significance; as when, for example, some exquisitely refined + Irish police officer suppresses a play of genius, or blushingly covers + up the nakedness of a beautiful statue, or comes out strong on the + question of woman's bathing dress when some sensible girl has the + courage to go into the water with somewhat less than her entire walking + costume; or, again, when some crank invokes the blue laws against Sunday + golf or tennis; or some spinster association puts itself on record + against woman's smoking: all these are merely provincial or parochial + exceptions to the onward movement of morals and manners, mere spasmodic + twitchings, so to say, of the poor old lady on her deathbed. We know + well enough that she who would so sternly set her face against the + feminine cigarette would have no objection to one of her votaries + carrying on an affair with another woman's husband—not the least in the + world, so long as she was careful to keep it out of the courts. And such + is a sample of her morality in all her dealings. Humanity will lose no + real sanctity or safeguard by her demise; only false shame and false + morality will go—but true modesty, "the modesty of nature," true + propriety, true religion—and incidentally true love and true + marriage—will all be immeasurably the gainers by the death of this + hypocritical, nasty-minded old lady. +</p> +<a name="2H_4_8"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<h2> + V +</h2> +<h3> + MODERN AIDS TO ROMANCE +</h3> +<p> </p> + +<p> + There have, of course, in all ages been those who made a business of + running down the times in which they lived—tiresome people for whom + everything had gone to the dogs—or was rapidly going—uncomfortable + critics who could never make themselves at home in their own century, + and whose weary shibboleth was that of some legendary perfect past. +</p> +<p> + In Rome this particular kind of bore went by the name of <i>laudator + temporis acti</i>; and, if we have no such concise Anglo-Saxon phrase for + the type, we still have the type no less ubiquitously with us. The + bugbear of such is "modern science," or "modern thought," a monster + which, we are frequently assured, is fast devouring all the beautiful + and good in human life, a Moloch fed on the dreams and ideals and noble + faiths of man. Modernity! For such "modernity" has taken the place of + "Anti-Christ." These sad, nervous people have no eye for the beautiful + patterns and fantasies of change, none of that faith which rejoices to + watch "the roaring loom of time" weaving ever new garments for the + unchanging eternal gods. In new temples, strangely enough, they see + only atheism, instead of the vitality of spiritual evolution; in new + affirmations they scent only dangerous denials. With the more grave + misgivings of these folk of little faith this is not the place to deal, + though actually, if there were any ground for belief in a modern decay + of religion, we might seriously begin to believe in the alleged decay of + romance. +</p> +<p> + Yes, romance, we not infrequently hear, is dead. Modern science has + killed it. It is essentially a "thing of the past"—an affair presumably + of stage-coaches, powdered wigs, and lace ruffles. It cannot breathe in + what is spoken of as "this materialistic age." +</p> +<p> + The dullards who repeat these platitudes of the muddle-headed multitude + are surely the only people for whom they are true. It is they alone who + are the materialists, confusing as they do the spirit of romance with + its worn-out garments of bygone fashions. Such people are so clearly out + of court as not to be worth controverting, except for the opportunity + they give one of confidently making the joyous affirmation that, far + from romance being dead in our day, there never was a more romantic age + than ours, and that never since the world began has it offered so many + opportunities, so many facilities for romance as at the present time. +</p> +<p> + In fact, a very little thinking will show that of all those benefited by + "the blessings of modern science," it is the lovers of the community + who as a body have most to be thankful for. Indeed, so true is this that + it might almost seem as though the modern laboratory has been run + primarily from romantic motives, to the end that the old reproach should + be removed and the course of true love run magically smooth. Valuable as + the telephone may be in business affairs, it is simply invaluable in the + affairs of love; and mechanicians the world over are absorbed in the + problem of aerial flight, whether they know it or not, chiefly to + provide Love with wings as swift as his desire. +</p> +<p> + Distance may lend enchantment to those whom we prefer to appreciate from + afar, but nearness is the real enchantment to your true lover, and + distance is his natural enemy. Distance and the slow-footedness of Time + are his immemorial evils. Both of these modern science has all but + annihilated. Consider for a moment the conditions under which love was + carried on in those old days which some people find so romantic. Think + what a comparatively short distance meant then, with snail-paced + precarious mails, and the only means of communication horses by land, + and sailing ships by sea. How men and women had the courage to go on + long journeys at all away from each other in those days is hard to + realize, knowing what an impenetrable curtain of silence and mystery + immediately fell between them with the winding of the coach horn, or the + last wave of the plumed hat as it disappeared behind the last turning + of the road—leaving those at home with nothing for company but the + yearning horizon and the aching, uncommunicative hours. Days, weeks, + months, even years, must go by in waiting for a word—and when at last + it came, brought on lumbering wheels or at best by some courier on his + steaming mud-splashed mount, precious as it was, it was already grown + old and cold and perhaps long since untrue. +</p> +<p> + Imagine perhaps being dependent for one's heart news on some chance + soldier limping back from the wars, or some pilgrim from the Holy Land + with scallop shell and staff! +</p> +<p> + Distance was indeed a form of death under such conditions—no wonder men + made their wills as they set out on a journey—and when actual physical + death did not intervene, how much of that slow death-in-life, that + fading of the memory and that numbing of the affections which absence + too often brings, was even still more to be feared. The loved face might + indeed return, looking much the same as when it went away, but what of + the heart that went a-journeying, too? What even of the hearts that + remained at home? +</p> +<p> + The chances of death and disaster not even modern science can forestall, + though even these it has considerably lessened; but that other death of + the heart, which comes of the slow starvation of silence and absence, it + may be held to have all but vanquished. Thanks to its weird magicians, + you may be seas or continents away from her whom your soul loveth, yet + "at her window bid good-morrow" as punctually as if you lived next door; + or serenade her by electricity—at all hours of the night. If you sigh + in New York, she can hear you and sigh back in San Francisco; and soon + her very face will be carried to you at any moment of the day along the + magic wires. Nor will you need to wait for the postman, but be able to + read her flowerlike words as they write themselves out on the luminous + slate before you, at the very moment as she leans her fragrant bosom + upon her electric desk three thousand miles away. If this isn't + romantic, one may well ask what is! +</p> +<p> + To take the telephone alone, surely the romance of Pyramus and Thisbe, + with their primitive hole in the wall, was a tame affair compared with + the possibilities of this magic toy, by means of which you can talk with + your love not merely through a wall but through the Rocky Mountains. You + can whisper sweet nothings to her across the sounding sea, and bid her + "sleep well" over leagues of primeval forest, and through the + stoniest-hearted city her soft voice will find its way. Even in + mid-ocean the "wireless" will bring you news of her <i>mal-de-mer</i>. And + more than that; should you wish to carry her voice with you from place + to place, science is once more at your service with another magic + toy—the phonograph—by which indeed she can still go on speaking to + you, if you have the courage to listen, from beyond the grave. +</p> +<p> + The telegraph, the telephone, the "wireless," the phonograph, the + electric letter writer—such are the modern "conveniences" of romance; + and, should an elopement be on foot, what are the fastest post-chaise or + the fleetest horses compared with a high-powered automobile? And when + the airship really comes, what romance that has ever been will compare + for excitement with an elopement through the sky? +</p> +<p> + Apart from the practical conveniences of these various new devices, + there is a poetic quality about the mere devices themselves which is + full of fascination and charm. Whether we call up our sweetheart or our + stockbroker, what a thing of enchantment the telephone is merely in + itself! Such devices turn the veriest prose of life into poetry; and, + indeed, the more prosaic the uses to which we put them, the more + marvellous by contrast their marvel seems. Even our businesses are + carried on by agencies more mysterious and truly magical than anything + in the <i>Arabian Nights</i>, and all day long we are playing with mysterious + natural laws and exquisite natural forces as, in a small way, when boys + we used to delight in our experiments with oxygen and hydrogen and + Leyden jars. Science has thus brought an element of romantic "fun," so + to speak, even into our stores and our counting-houses. I wonder if + "Central" realizes what a truly romantic employment is hers? +</p> +<p> + But, pressed into the high service of love, one sees at once what a + poetic fitness there is in their employ, and how our much-abused modern + science has found at last for that fastidious god an appropriately + dignified and beautiful ministrant. Coarse and vulgar indeed seem the + ancient servitors and the uncouth machinery by which the divine business + of the god was carried on of old. Today, through the skill of science, + the august lightning has become his messenger, and the hidden gnomes of + air and sea hasten to do his bidding. +</p> +<p> + Modern science, then, so far from being an enemy of romance, is seen on + every hand to be its sympathetic and resourceful friend, its swift and + irresistible helper in its serious need, and an indulgent minister to + its lighter fancies. Be it whim or emergency, the modern laboratory is + equally at the service of romance, equally ready to gratify mankind with + a torpedo or a toy. +</p> +<p> + Not only, however, has modern science thus put itself at the service of + romance, by supplying it with its various magic machinery of + communication, but modern thought—that much maligned bugbear of + timorous minds—has generated an atmosphere increasingly favourable to + and sympathetic with the romantic expression of human nature in all its + forms. +</p> +<p> + The world has unmistakably grown younger again during the last twenty + years, as though—which, indeed, is the fact—it had thrown off an + accumulation of mopishness, shaken itself free from imaginary + middle-aged restrictions and preoccupations. All over the world there is + a wind of youth blowing such as has not freshened the air of time since + the days of Elizabeth. Once more the spring of a new Renaissance of + Human Nature is upon us. It is the fashion to be young, and the age of + romance both for men and women has been indefinitely extended. No one + gives up the game, or is expected to, till he is genuinely tired of + playing it. Mopish conventions are less and less allowed to restrict + that free and joyous play of vitality dear to the modern heart, which is + the essence of all romance. More and more the world is growing to love a + lover, and one has only to read the newspapers to see how sympathetic + are the times to any generous and adventurous display of the passions. +</p> +<p> + This more humane temper is the result of many causes. The disintegration + of religious superstition, and the substitution in its stead of + spiritual ideals closer to the facts of life, is one of these. All that + was good in Puritanism has been retained by the modern spirit, while + its narrowing and numbing features, its anti-human, self-mortifying, + provincial side have passed or are passing in the regenerating sunlight + of what one might call a spiritual paganism, which conceives of natural + forces and natural laws as inherently pure and mysteriously sacred. Thus + the way of a man with a maid is no longer a shamefaced affair, but it + is more and more realized that in its romance and its multifarious + refinements of development are the "law and the prophets," the "eternal + meanings" of natural religion and social spirituality. +</p> +<p> + Then, too, the spread of democracy, resulting in the breaking down of + caste barriers, is all to the good of romance. Swiftly and surely Guelph + and Ghibelline and break-neck orchard walls are passing away. If Romeo + and Juliet make a tragedy of it nowadays, they have only to blame their + own mismanagement, for the world is with them as it has never been + before, and all sensible fathers and mothers know it. +</p> +<p> + Again, the freer intercourse between the sexes tends incalculably to + smooth that course of true love once so proverbially rough, but now + indeed in danger of being made too unexcitingly smooth. Yet if, as a + result, certain old combinations of romance are becoming obsolete, new + ones, no less picturesque, and even more vital in their drama, are being + evolved every day by the new conditions. Those very inroads being so + rapidly and successfully made by woman into the immemorial business of + man, which are superficially regarded by some as dangerous to the + tenderer sentiments between men and women, are, on the contrary, merely + widening the area of romance, and will eventually develop, as they can + be seen already developing, a new chivalry and a new poetry of the sexes + no less deep and far more many-sided than the old. The robuster + comradeship between the two already resulting from the more active + sharing of common interests cannot but tend to a deeper and more + exhilarating union of man and woman, a completer, intenser marriage + literally of true minds as well as bodies than was possible in the old + régime, when the masculine and feminine "spheres" were kept so jealously + distinct and only allowed to touch at the elementary points of + relationship. There has always been a thrill of adventure when either + has been admitted a little farther into the other's world than was + customary. How thrilling, therefore, will it be when men and women + entirely share in each other's lives, without fictitious reserves and + mysteries, and face the whole adventure of life squarely and completely + together, all the more husband and wife for being comrades as well—as + many men and women of the new era are already joyously doing. +</p> +<p> + And, merely on the surface, what a new romantic element woman has + introduced into the daily drudgery of men's lives by her mere presence + in their offices! She cannot always be beautiful, poor dear, and she is + not invariably gracious, it is true; yet, on the whole, how much the + atmosphere of office life has gained in amenity by the coming of the + stenographer, the typewriter, and the telephone girl, not to speak of + her frequent decorative value in a world that has hitherto been + uncompromisingly harsh and unadorned! Men may affect to ignore this, and + cannot afford indeed to be too sensitive to these flowery presences that + have so considerably supplanted those misbegotten young miscreants known + as office-boys, a vanishing race of human terror; yet there she is, all + the same, in spite of her businesslike airs and her prosaic tasks, + silently diffusing about her that eternal mystery which she can never + lose, be her occupations never so masculine. +</p> +<p> + There she is with her subtly wreathed hair and her absurd little lace + handkerchiefs and her furtive powder puff and her bits of immemorial + ornaments and the soft sound of her skirts and all the rest of it. Never + mind how grimly and even brusquely you may be dictating to her + specifications for steel rails or the like, little wafts of perfume + cannot help floating across to your rolltop desk, and you are a man and + she is a woman, for all that; and, instead of having her with you at fag + ends of your days, you have her with you all day long now—and your + sisters and your sweethearts are so much the nearer to you all day for + her presence, and, whether you know it or not, you are so much the less + a brute because she is there. +</p> +<p> + Where the loss to romance comes in in these admirable new arrangements + of modern commerce it is hard to see. Of course a new element of danger + is thus introduced into the routine of our daily lives, but when was + danger an enemy to romance? The "bright face" of this particular + "danger" who would be without? The beloved essayist from whom that last + phrase is, of course, adapted, declared, as we all know, that to marry + is "to domesticate the recording angel." One might say that the modern + business man has officialized the ministering angel—perhaps some other + forms of angel as well. +</p> +<p> + In their work, then, as in their play, men and women are more and more + coming to share with each other as comrades, and really the fun of life + seems in no wise diminished as a consequence. Rather the contrary, it + would seem, if one is to judge from the "Decameron" of the newspapers. + Yet it is not very long ago that man looked askance at woman's wistful + plea to take part even in his play. He had the old boyish fear that she + would spoil the game. However, it didn't take him long to find out his + mistake and to know woman for the true "sport" that she can be. And in + that discovery it was another invention of that wicked modern science + that was the chief, if humble seeming, factor, no less than that + eclipsed but inexpressibly useful instrument (of flirtation) in the + hands of a kind providence, the bicycle. +</p> +<p> + The service of the bicycle to the "emancipation of woman" movements has + perhaps never been acknowledged by the philosopher; but a little thought + will make evident how far-reaching that service has been. When that near + day arrives on which woman shall call herself absolutely "free," should + she feel inclined to celebrate her freedom by some monument of her + gratitude, let the monument be neither to man nor woman, however valiant + in the fight, but simply let it take the form of an enthroned and + laurelled bicycle—for the moment woman mounted that apparently innocent + machine, it carried her on the high-road to freedom. On that she could + go not only where she pleased, but—what is even more to the point—with + whom she pleased. The free companionship of man and woman had begun. + Then and forever ended the old system of courtship, which seems so + laughable and even incredible today. One was no longer expected to pay + court to one's beloved, sitting stiffly on straight-backed chairs in a + chill drawing-room in the non-conducting, or non-conducive, presence of + still chillier maiden aunts. The doom of the <i>duenna</i> was sounded; the + chill drawing-room was exchanged for "the open road" and the whispering + woodland; and soon it is to come about that a man shall propose to his + wife high up in the blue heavens, in an airship softly swaying at anchor + in the wake of the evening star. +</p> +<a name="2H_4_9"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<h2> + VI +</h2> +<h3> + THE LAST CALL +</h3> +<p> </p> + +<p> + I don't know whether or not the cry "Last call for the dining-car" + affects others as it affects me, but for me it always has a stern, + fateful sound, suggestive of momentous opportunity fast slipping away, + opportunity that can never come again; and, on the occasions when I have + disregarded it, I have been haunted with a sense of the neglected + "might-have-been." +</p> +<p> + Not, indeed, that the formless regret has been connected with any + illusions as to the mysterious quality of the dinner that I have thus + foregone. I have been well enough aware that the only actual opportunity + thus evaded has been most probably that of an unusually bad dinner, + exorbitantly paid for. The dinner itself has had nothing to do with my + feeling, which, indeed, has come of a suggestiveness in the cry beyond + the occasion, a sense conveyed by the words, in combination with the + swift speeding along of the train, of the inexorable swift passage and + gliding away of all things. Ah! so soon it will be the last call—for so + many pleasant things—that we would fain arrest and enjoy a little + longer in a world that with tragic velocity is flowing away from us, + each moment, "like the waters of the torrent." O yes, all too soon it + will be the "last call" in dead earnest—the last call for the joy of + life and the glory of the world. The grass is already withering, the + flower already fading; and that bird of time, with so short a way to + flutter, is relentlessly on the wing. +</p> +<p> + Now some natures hear this call from the beginning of their lives. Even + their opulent spendthrift youth is "made the more mindful that the sweet + days die," by every strain of music, by every gathered flower. All their + joy is haunted, like the poetry of William Morris, with the wistful + burden of mortality. Even the summer woodlands, with all their pomp and + riot of exuberant green and gold, are anything but safe from this low + sweet singing, and in the white arms of beauty, pressed desperately + close as if to imprison the divine fugitive moment, the song seems to + come nearest. Who has not held some loved face in his hands, and gazed + into it with an almost agonizing effort to realize its reality, to make + eternally sure of it, somehow to wrest possession of it and the + transfiguring moment for ever, all the time pierced with the melancholy + knowledge that tomorrow all will be as if this had never been, and life + once more its dull disenchanted self? +</p> +<pre class="si"> + Too soon shall morning take the stars away, + And all the world be up and open-eyed, + This magic night be turned to common day— + Under the willows on the riverside. +</pre> +<p> + Youth, however, can afford to enjoy even its melancholy; for the + ultimate fact of which that melancholy is a prophecy is a long way off. + If one enchanted moment runs to an end, it may be reasonably sure for a + long time yet of many more enchanted moments to come. It has as yet only + taken a bite or two into the wonderful cake. And, though its poets may + warn it that "youth's a stuff does not endure," it doesn't seriously + believe it. Others may have come to an end of their cake, but its cake + is going to last for ever. Alas, for the day when it is borne in upon us + with a tragic suddenness, like a miser who awakens to find that he has + been robbed of his hoard, that unaccountably the best part of the cake + has been eaten, that perhaps indeed only a few desperate crumbs remain. + A bleak laughter blends now with that once luxurious melancholy. There + is a song at our window, terribly like the mockery of Mephistopheles. + Our blood runs cold. We listen in sudden fear. It is life singing out + its last call. +</p> +<p> + The time of this call, the occasion and the manner of it, mercifully + vary with individuals. Some fortunate ones, indeed, never hear it till + they lie on their deathbeds. Such have either been gifted with such a + generous-sized cake of youth that it has lasted all their lives, or + they have possessed a great art in the eating of it. Though I may add + here that a cautious husbanding of your cake is no good way. That way + you are liable to find it grown mouldy on your hands. No, oddly enough, + it is often seen that those who all their lives have eaten their cake + most eagerly have quite a little of it left at the end. There are no + hard and fast rules for the eating of your cake. One can only find out + by eating it; and, as I have said, it may be your luck to disprove the + proverb and both eat your cake and have it. +</p> +<p> + For a dreary majority, however, the cake does come to an end, and for + them henceforth, as Stevenson grimly put it, the road lies long and + straight and dusty to the grave. For them that last call is apt to come + usually before sunset—and the great American question arises: What are + they going to do about it? That, of course, every one must decide for + himself, according to his inclinations and his opportunities. But a few + general considerations may be of comfort and even of greater value. +</p> +<p> + There is one thing of importance to know about this last call, that we + are apt to imagine we hear it before we actually do, from a nervous + sense that it is about time for it to sound. Our hair perhaps is growing + grey, and our years beginning to accumulate. We hypnotize ourselves with + our chronology, and say with Emerson: +</p> +<pre> + It is time to grow old, + To take in sail. +</pre> +<p> + Well and good, if it is and we feel like it; but may be it isn't, and we + don't. Youth is largely a habit. So is romance. And, unless we allow + ourselves to be influenced by musty conventions and superstitions, both + habits may be prolonged far beyond the moping limits of custom, and need + never be abandoned unless we become sincerely and unregretfully tired of + them. I can well conceive of an old age like that of Sophocles, as + reported by Plato, who likened the fading of the passions with the + advance of age to "being set free from service to a band of madmen." +</p> +<p> + When a man feels so, all is well and comfortable with him. He has + retired of his own free will from the banquet of life, having had his + fill, and is content. Our image of the last call does not apply to him, + but rather to those who, with appetites still keen, are sternly warned + that for them, willy-nilly, the banquet must soon end, and the prison + fare of prosaic middle age be henceforth their portion. No more ortolans + and transporting vintages for them. Nothing but Scotch oatmeal and + occasional sarsaparilla to the end of the chapter. No wonder that some, + hearing this dread sentence, go half crazy in a frenzied effort to + clutch at what remains, run amok, so to say, in their despairing + determination to have, if need be, a last "good time" and die. Their + efforts are apt to be either distasteful or pathetically comic, and the + world is apt to be cynically contemptuous of the "romantic" outbursts of + aging people. For myself, I always feel for them a deep and tender + sympathy. I know that they have heard that last fearful call to the + dining-car of life—and, poor souls, they have probably found it closed. + Their mistake has been in waiting so long for the call. From various + causes, they have mismanaged their lives. They have probably lived in a + numbing fear of their neighbours, who have told them that it is bad + manners to eat one's cake in public, and wicked to eat it in private; + and any one who is fool enough to allow his neighbours to live his life + for him instead of living it himself deserves what he gets, or rather + doesn't get. +</p> +<p> + A wholesome oblivion of one's neighbours is the beginning of wisdom. + Neighbours, at the best, are an impertinent encroachment on one's + privacy, and, at the worst, an unnatural hindrance to our development. + Generally speaking, it is the man or woman who has lived with least fear + of his neighbours, who is least likely to hear that last call. Nothing + in retrospect is so barren as a life lived in accordance with the + hypocrisies of society. For those who have never lived, and are now fain + to begin living when it is too late, that last call comes indeed with a + ghastly irony. But for those who have fearlessly lived their lives, as + they came along, with Catullus singing their <i>vivamus atque amemus</i>, and + practising it, too; for those, if indeed the last call must come, they + will be able to support it by the thought that, often as in the past + life has called to them, it has never called to them in vain. We are apt + sometimes to belittle our memories, but actually they are worth a good + deal; and should the time come when we have little to look forward to, + it will be no small comfort to have something to look back on. And it + won't be the days when we <i>didn't</i> that we shall recall with a sense of + possession, but the days and nights when we most emphatically <i>did</i>. + Thank God, we did for once hold that face in our hands in the woodland! + Thank God, we did get divinely drunk that wild night of nights in the + city! +</p> +<pre class="si"> + Wilt thou yet take all, Galilean? But these thou + shalt not take, + The laurel, the palms and the paean, the breast of the + nymphs in the brake. +</pre> +<p> + It is the fine excesses of life that make it worth living. The stalks of + the days are endurable only because they occasionally break into flower. + It is our sins of omission alone that we come in the end to regret. The + temptations we resisted in our youth make themselves rods to scourge our + middle age. I regret the paradoxical form these platitudes have + unconsciously taken, for that they are the simplest truth any honest + dying man would tell you. And that phrase recalls a beautiful poem by + "E. Nesbit" which has haunted me all my life, a poem I shall beg leave + to quote here, because, though it is to be found in that poet's volume, + it is not, I believe, as well known as it deserves to be by those who + need its lesson. I quote it, too, from memory, so I trust that the + length of time I have remembered it may be set to my credit against any + verbal mistakes I make. +</p> +<pre> + "If, on some balmy summer night, + You rowed across the moon path white, + And saw the shining sea grow fair + With silver scales and golden hair, + What would you do?" + + "I would be wise + And shut my ears and shut my eyes, + Lest I should leap into the tide + And clasp the seamaid as I died." + + "But if you thus were strong to flee + From sweet spells woven of moon and sea, + Are you quite sure that you would reach, + Without one backward look, the beach?" + + "I might look back, my dear, and then + Row straight into the snare again, + Or, if I safely got away— + Regret it to my dying day." +</pre> +<p> + He who liveth his life shall live it. It is a grave error to give + ourselves grudgingly to our experiences. Only in a whole-hearted + surrender of ourselves to the heaven-sent moment do we receive back all + it has to give us, and by the active receptivity of our natures attract + toward us other such moments, as it were, out of the sky. An ever-ready + romantic attitude toward life is the best preservative against the + <i>ennui</i> of the years. Adventures, as the proverb says, are to the + adventurous, and, as the old song goes: +</p> +<pre> + He either fears his fate too much + Or his deserts are small, + That dares not put it to the touch + To gain or lose it all. +</pre> +<p> + And the spirit of the times is happily growing more clement toward a + greater fulness and variety of life. The world is growing kinder toward + the fun and foolishness of existence, and the energetic pursuit of joy + is no longer frowned down by anaemic and hypocritical philosophies. The + old gods of energy and joy are coming to their own again, and the lives + of strong men and fair women are no longer ruled over by a hierarchy of + curates and maiden aunts; in fact, the maiden aunt has begun to find out + her mistake, and is out for her share of the fun and the foolishness + with the rest. Negative morality is fast becoming discredited, and many + an old "Thou shalt not" is coming to seem as absurd as the famous Blue + Laws of Connecticut. "Self-development, not self-sacrifice,"—a + favourite dictum of Grant Allen's,—is growing more and more to be the + formula of the modern world; and, if a certain amount of self-sacrifice + is of necessity included in a healthy self-development, the proportion + is being reduced to a rational limit. One form of self-sacrifice, at all + events, is no longer demanded of us—the wholesale sacrifice of our own + opinions. The possibility that there may be two opinions or a dozen or a + hundred on one matter, and that they may be all different, yet each one + of them right in its proper application, has dawned forcibly on the + world, with the conception of the relativity of experience and the + modification of conditions. Nowadays we recognize that there are as many + "rights" and as many "wrongs" as there are individuals; and to be happy + in our own way, instead of somebody else's, is one of the first laws of + nature, health, and virtue. Many an ancient restriction on personal + vitality is going the way of the old sumptuary laws. We have all of us + amusing memories of those severe old housekeepers who for no inclemency + of the weather would allow a fire in the grate before the first of + October, and who regarded a fire before that date as a positive breach + of the moral law. Such old wives are a type of certain old-fashioned + moralists whose icy clutch on our warm-blooded humanity we no longer + suffer. Nowadays we light our fires as we have a mind to, and if we + prefer to keep them going all the year round, it is no one's business + but our own. Happy is the man who, when the end comes, can say with + Landor: +</p> +<pre class="si"> + I warmed both hands before the fire of life; + It sinks and I am ready to depart. +</pre> +<p> + Such a one will have little need to fear that last call of which I have + been writing. In Kipling's phrase, he has taken his fun where he found + it, and his barns are well stocked with the various harvests of the + years. Not his the wild regret for having "safely got away." Rather he + laughs to remember how often he was taken captive by the enchantments of + the world, how whenever there was any piece of wildness afoot he was + always found in the thick of it. When the bacchantes were out on Mount + Cithaeron, and the mad <i>Evoe! Evoe!</i> rang through the moonstruck woods, + be sure he was up and away, with ardent hands clutched in the flying + tresses. Ah! the vine leaves and the tiger skins and the ivory bodies, + the clash of the cymbals and the dithyramb shrilling up to the stars! + "If I forget thee, O golden Aphrodite!" He is no hypocrite, no weary + "king ecclesiast," shaking his head over the orgies of sap and song in + which he can no longer share. He frankly acknowledges that then came in + the sweet o' the year, and he is still as young as the youngest by + virtue of having drunk deep of the only elixir, the Dionysiac cup of + life. +</p> +<p> + At the same time, while he may not ungratefully rejoice with Sophocles + at being "set free from service to a band of madmen," that ripening of + his nature which comes most fruitfully of a generous exercise of + its powers will have instinctively taught him that secret of the + transmutation of the passions which is one of the most precious rewards + of experience. It is quite possible for a lifelong passion for fair + women to become insensibly and unregretfully transmuted into a passion + for first editions, and you may become quite sincerely content that a + younger fellow catch the flying maiden, if only you can catch yon + flitting butterfly for your collection. And, strangest of all, your + grand passion for your own remarkable self may suffer a miraculous + transformation into a warm appreciation for other people. It is true + that you may smile a little sadly to find them even more interesting + than yourself. But such passing sadness has the relish of salvation in + it. Self is a weary throne, and the abdication of the ego is to be free + of one of the burdens rather than the pleasures of existence. +</p> +<p> + But, to conclude, it is all too possible that you who read this may have + no such assets of a wilful well spent life to draw on as he whom I have + pictured. It may be that you have starved your emotions and fled your + opportunities, or you may simply have had bad luck. The golden moments + seldom came your way. The wilderness of life has seldom blossomed with a + rose. "The breast of the nymph in the brake" and "the chimes at + midnight" were not for you. And there is a menacing murmur of autumn in + the air. The days are shortening, and the twilight comes early, with a + chilly breath. The crickets have stopped singing, and the garden is sad + with elegiac blooms. The chrysanthemum is growing on the grave of the + rose. Perhaps already it is too late—too late for life and joy. You + must take to first editions and entomology and other people's interests + in good earnest. But no! Suddenly on the wind there comes a cry—a sound + of cymbals and flutes and dancing feet. It is life's last call. You have + one chance left. There is still Indian summer. It is better than + nothing. Hurry and join the music, ere it be too late. For this is the + last call! +</p> +<pre> + When time lets slip a little perfect hour, + Take it, for it will not come again. +</pre> +<a name="2H_4_10"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<h2> + VII +</h2> +<h3> + THE PERSECUTIONS OF BEAUTY +</h3> +<p> </p> + +<p> + All religions have periods in their history which are looked back to + with retrospective fear and trembling as eras of persecution, and each + religion has its own book of martyrs. The religion of beauty is no + exception. Far from it. For most other religions, however they may have + differed among themselves, have agreed in fearing beauty, and even in + Greece there were stern sanctuaries and ascetic academes where the white + bosom of Phryne would have pleaded in vain. Christianity has not been + beauty's only enemy, by any means; though, when the Book of Martyrs of + Beauty comes to be written, it will, doubtless, be the Christian + persecutions of beauty that will bulk largest in the record—for the + Beauty of Holiness and the Holiness of Beauty have been warring creeds + from the beginning. +</p> +<p> + At the present moment, there is reason to fear, or to rejoice—according + to one's individual leanings—that the Religion of Beauty is gaining + upon its ancient rival; for perhaps never since the Renaissance has + there been such a widespread impulse to assert Beauty and Joy as the + ideals of human life. As evidence one has but to turn one's eyes on the + youth of both sexes, as they rainbow the city thoroughfares with their + laughing, heartless faces, evident children of beauty and joy, "pagan" + to the core of them, however ostensibly Christian their homes and their + country. In our time, at all events, Beauty has never walked the streets + with so frank a radiance, so confident an air of security, and in her + eyes and in her carriage, as in her subtly shaped and subtly scented + garments, so conspicuous a challenge to the musty, outworn, proprieties + to frown upon her all they please. From the humblest shop-girl to the + greatest lady, there is apparent an intention to be beautiful, sweet + maid, and let who will be hum-drum, at whatever cost, by whatever means. + This, of course, at all periods, has been woman's chief thought, but + till recently, in our times, she has more or less affected a certain + secrecy in her intention. She has hinted rather than fully expressed it, + as though fearing a certain flagrancy in too public an exhibition of her + enchantments. It has hardly seemed proper to her heretofore to be as + beautiful in the public gaze as in the sanctuary of her boudoir. But + now, bless you, she has no such misgivings, and the flower-like effect + upon the city streets is as dazzling as if, some fine morning in + Constantinople, all the ladies of the various harems should suddenly + appear abroad without their yashmaks, setting fire to the hearts and + turning the heads of the unaccustomed male. Or, to make comparison + nearer home, it is almost as startling as if the ladies of the various + musical comedies in town should suddenly be let loose upon our senses in + broad daylight, in all the adorable sorceries of "make-up" and + diaphanous draperies. I swear that it can be no more thrilling to + penetrate into that mysterious paradise "behind the scenes," than to + walk up Fifth Avenue one of these summer afternoons, in the present year + of grace,—humming to one's self that wistful old song, which goes + something like this: +</p> +<pre> + The girls that never can be mine! + In every lane and street + I hear the rustle of their gowns, + The whisper of their feet; + The sweetness of their passing by, + Their glances strong as wine, + Provoke the unpossessive sigh— + Ah! girls that never can be mine. +</pre> +<p> + So audacious has Beauty become in these latter days, so proudly she + walks abroad, making so superb an appeal to the desire of the eye, + thighed like Artemis, and bosomed like Aphrodite, or at whiles a fairy + creature of ivory and gossamer and fragrance, with a look in her eyes of + secret gardens; and so much is the wide world at her feet, and one with + her in the vanity of her fairness—that I sometimes fear an impending + <i>dies irae</i>, when the dormant spirit of Puritanism will reassert itself, + and some stern priests thunder from the pulpit of worldly vanities and + the wrath to come. Indeed, I can well imagine in the near future some + modern Savonarola presiding over a new Bonfire of Vanities in Madison + Square, on which, to the droning of Moody and Sankey's hymns, shall be + cast all the fascinating Parisian creations, the puffs and rats, the + powder and the rouge, the darling stockings, and all such concomitant + bewitcheries that today make Manhattan a veritable Isle of Circe, all to + go up in savage sectarian flame, before the eyes of melancholy young + men, and filling all the city with the perfume of beauty's holocaust. At + street corners too will stand great books in which weeping maidens will + sign their names, swearing before high heaven, to wear nothing but + gingham and bed-ticking for the dreary remainder of their lives. Such a + day may well come, as it has often come before, and certainly will, if + women persist in being so deliberately beautiful as they are at present. +</p> +<p> + It is curious how, from time immemorial, man seems to have associated + the idea of evil with beauty, shrunk from it with a sort of ghostly + fear, while, at the same time drawn to it by force of its hypnotic + attraction. Strangely enough, beauty has been regarded as the most + dangerous enemy of the soul, and the powers of darkness that are + supposed to lie in wait for that frail and fluttering psyche, so + precious and apparently so perishable, are usually represented as taking + shapes of beguiling loveliness—lamias, loreleis, wood nymphs, and + witches with blue flowers for their eyes. Lurking in its most innocent + forms, the grim ascetic has affected to find a leaven of concupiscence, + and whenever any reformation is afoot, it is always beauty that is made + the first victim, whether it take the form of a statue, a stained-glass + window, or a hair-ribbon. "Homeliness is next to Godliness," though not + officially stated as an article of the Christian creed, has been one of + the most active of all Christian tenets. It has always been easier far + for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than a gloriously + beautiful woman. Presumably such a one might be in danger of corrupting + the saints, somewhat unaccustomed to such apparitions. +</p> +<p> + In this Christian fear and hatred of beauty the democratic origin of the + Christian religion is suggestively illustrated, for beauty, wherever + found, is always mysteriously aristocratic, and thus instinctively + excites the fear and jealousy of the common people. When, in the third + century, Christian mobs set about their vandalistic work of destroying + the "Pagan" temples, tearing down the beautiful calm gods and goddesses + from their pedestals, and breaking their exquisite marble limbs with + brutish mallets, it was not, we may be sure, of the danger to their + precious souls they were thinking, but of their patrician masters who + had worshipped these fair images, and paid great sums to famous + sculptors for such adornment of their sanctuaries. Perhaps it was human + enough, for to those mobs beauty had long been associated with + oppression. Yet how painful to picture those golden marbles, in all + their immortal fairness, confronted with the hideousness of those + fanatic ill-smelling multitudes. Wonderful religionists, forsooth, that + thus break with foolish hands and trample with swinish hoofs the sacred + vessels of divine dreams. Who would not +</p> +<pre> + rather be + A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn,— + So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, + Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; + Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; + Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn. +</pre> +<p> + One can imagine the priest of such a violated sanctuary stealing back in + the quiet moonlight, when all the mob fury had passed away, seeking amid + all the wrack of fallen columns, and shattered carvings, for any poor + fragments of god or goddess at whose tranquil fair-ordered altar he had + ministered so long; and gathering such as he might find,—maybe a mighty + hand, still the hand of a god, albeit in overthrow, or some marble curls + of the sculptured ambrosial locks, or maybe the bruised breast of the + goddess, white as a water-lily in the moon. Then, seeking out some + secret corner of the sacred grove, how reverently he would bury the + precious fragments away from profane eyes, and go forth homeless into a + mysterious changing world, from which glory and loveliness were thus + surely passing away. Other priests, as we know, more fortunate than he, + had forewarnings of such impending sacrilege, and were able to + anticipate the mob, and bury their beautiful images in safe and secret + places, there to await, after the lapse of twelve centuries, the + glorious resurrection of the Renaissance. A resurrection, however, by no + means free from danger, even in that resplendent dawn of intelligence; + for Christianity was still the enemy of beauty, save in the Vatican, and + the ignorant priest of the remote village where the spade of the peasant + had revealed the sleeping marble was certain to declare the beautiful + image an evil spirit, and have it broken up forthwith and ground for + mortar, unless some influential scholar, or powerful lord touched with + "the new learning," chanced to be on hand to save it from destruction. + Yes! even at that time when beauty was being victoriously born again, + the mad fear of her raged with such panic in certain minds that, when + Savonarola lit his great bonfire so subtle a servant of beauty as + Botticelli, fallen into a sort of religious dotage, cast his own + paintings into the flames—to the lugubrious rejoicings of the + sanctimonious Piagnoni—as Savonarola's followers were called; + predecessors of those still gloomier zealots who, two centuries later, + were to turn England into a sort of whitewashed prison, with crop-headed + psalm-singing religious maniacs for gaolers. When Charles the First +</p> +<pre> + bow'd his comely head + Down, as upon a bed, +</pre> +<p class="noindent"> + at Whitehall, Beauty also laid her head upon the block at his side. + Ugliness, parading as piety, took her place, and once more the breaking + of images began, the banishment of music, the excommunication of grace, + and gentle manners, and personal adornments. Gaiety became penal, and a + happy heart or a beautiful smile was of the devil,—something like + hanging matters—but happy hearts and beautiful smiles must have been + rare things in England during the Puritan Commonwealth. Such as were + left had taken refuge in France, where men might worship God and Beauty + in the same church, and where it was not necessary, as at Oxford, to + bury your stained-glass windows out of the reach of the mob—those +</p> +<pre> + Storied windows richly dight + Casting a dim religious light, +</pre> +<p class="noindent"> + which even the Puritan Milton could thus celebrate. Doubtless, that + English Puritan persecution was the severest that Beauty has been called + upon to endure. She still suffers from it, need one say, to this day, + particularly in New England, where if the sculptured images of goddess + and nymph are not exactly broken to pieces by the populace, it is from + no goodwill towards them, but rather from an ingrained reverence for + any form of property, even though it be nude, and where, at all events, + they are under the strict surveillance of a highly proper and + respectable police, those distinguished guardians of American morals. +</p> +<p> + It is worth while to try and get at the reason for this wide-spread, + deep-rooted, fear of beauty: for some reason there must surely be. Such + instinctive feelings, on so broad a scale, are not accidental. And so + soon as one begins to analyse the attitude of religion towards beauty, + the reason is not far to seek. +</p> +<p> + All religions are made up of a spiritual element and a moral element, + the moral element being the temporary, practical, so to say, working + side of religion, concerned with this present world, and the limitations + and necessities of the various societies that compose it. The spiritual + element, the really important part of religion, has no concern with Time + and Space, temporary mundane laws, or conduct. It concerns itself only + with the eternal properties of things. Its business is the contemplation + and worship of the mystery of life, "the mystery we make darker with a + name." +</p> +<p> + Now, great popular religions, designed as they are for the discipline + and control of the great brute masses of humanity, are almost entirely + occupied with morality, and what passes in them for spirituality is + merely mythology, an element of picturesque supernaturalism calculated + to enforce the morality with the multitude. Christianity is such a + religion. It is mostly a matter of conduct here and now upon the earth. + Its mystic side does not properly belong to it, and is foreign to, not + to speak of its being practically ignored by, the average "Christian." + It is a religion designed to work hand in hand with a given state of + society, making for the preservation of such laws and manners and + customs as are best fitted to make that society a success here and now, + a worldly success in the best sense of the term. Mohammedanism is a + similar religion calculated for the needs of a different society. + Whatever the words or intentions of the founders of such religions, + their kingdoms are essentially of this world. They are not mystic, or + spiritual, or in anyway concerned with infinite and eternal things. + Their business is the moral policing of humanity. Morality, as of course + its name implies, is a mere matter of custom, and therefore varies with + the variations of races and climates. It has nothing to do with + spirituality, and, in fact, the best morals are often the least + spiritual, and <i>vice versa</i>. It will be understood then that any force + which is apt to disturb this moral, or more exactly speaking social, + order will meet at once with the opposition of organized "religions" so + called, and the more spiritual it is, the greater will be the + opposition, for it will thus be the more dangerous. +</p> +<p> + Now one begins to see why Beauty is necessarily the bugbear, more or + less, of all religions, or, as I prefer to regard them, "organized + moralities"; for Beauty is neither moral nor immoral, being as she is a + purely spiritual force, with no relations to man's little schemes of + being good and making money and being knighted and so forth. For those + who have eyes to see, she is the supreme spiritual vision vouchsafed to + us upon the earth—and, as that, she is necessarily the supreme danger + to that materialistic use and wont by which alone a materialistic + society remains possible. For this reason our young men and + maidens—particularly our young men—must be guarded against her, for + her beauty sets us adream, prevents our doing our day's work, makes us + forget the soulless occupations in which we wither away our lives. The + man who loves beauty will never be mayor of his city, or even sit on the + Board of Aldermen. Nor is he likely to own a railroad, or be a captain + of industry. Nor will he marry, for her money, a woman he does not love. + The face of beauty makes all such achievements seem small and absurd. + Such so-called successes seem to him the dreariest forms of failure. In + short, Beauty has made him divinely discontented with the limited human + world about him, divinely incapable of taking it seriously, or heeding + its standards or conditions. No wonder society should look upon Beauty + as dangerous, for she is constantly upsetting its equilibrium and + playing havoc with its smooth schemes and smug conventions. She outrages + the "proprieties" with "the innocence of nature," and disintegrates + "select" and "exclusive" circles with the wand of Romance. For earthly + possessions or rewards she has no heed. For her they are meaningless + things, mere idle dust and withered leaves. Her only real estate is in + the moon, and the one article of her simple creed—"Love is enough." +</p> +<pre class="si"> + Love is enough: though the world be a-waning + And the woods have no voice but the voice of complaining, + Though the sky be too dark for dim eyes to discover + The gold-cups and daisies fair blooming thereunder, + Though the hills beheld shadows, and the sea a dark wonder + And this day draw a veil over all deeds passed over, + Yet their hands shall not tremble, their feet shall not falter; + The void shall not weary, the fear shall not alter + These lips and these eyes of the loved and the lover. +</pre> +<p> + Those who have looked into her eyes see limitless horizons undreamed of + by those who know her not, horizons summoning the soul to radiant + adventures beyond the bounds of Space and Time. The world is so far + right in regarding beauty with a sort of superstitious dread, as a + presence almost uncanny among our mere mortal concerns, a daemonic + thing,—which is what the world has meant when it has, not unnaturally, + confused it with the spirits of evil; for surely it is a supernatural + stranger in our midst, a fairy element, and, like the lorelei and the + lamia, it does beckon its votaries to enchanted realms away and afar + from "all the uses of the world." Therefore, to them also it brings the + thrill of a different and nobler fear—the thrill of the mortal in + presence of the immortal. A strange feeling of destiny seems to come + over us as we first look into the beautiful face we were born to love. + It seems veritably an apparition from another and lovelier world, to + which it summons us to go with it. That is what we mean when we say that + Love and Death are one; for Death, to the thought of Love, is but one of + the gates to that other world, a gate to which we instinctively feel + Love has the key. That surely is the meaning of the old fairy-stories of + men who have come upon the white woman in the woodland, and followed + her, never to be seen again of their fellows, or of those who, like + Hylas, have met the water-nymph by the lilied spring, and sunk with her + down into the crystal deeps. The strange earth on which we live is just + such a place of enchantment, neither more nor less, and some of us have + met that fair face, with a strange suddenness of joy and fear, and + followed and followed it on till it vanished beyond the limits of the + world. But our failure was that we did not follow that last white + beckoning of the hand— +</p> +<pre> + And I awoke and found me here + On the cold hill's side. +</pre> +<a name="2H_4_11"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<h2> + VIII +</h2> +<h3> + THE MANY FACES—THE ONE DREAM +</h3> +<p> </p> + +<p> + Among the many advantages of being very young is one's absolute + certainty that there is only one type of beautiful girl in the world. + That type we make a religion. We are its pugnacious champions, and the + idea of our falling in love with any other is too preposterous even for + discussion. If our tastes happen to be for blondness, brunettes simply + do not exist for us; and if we affect the slim and willowy in figure, + our contempt for the plump and rounded is too sincere for expression. + Usually the type we choose is one whose beauty is somewhat esoteric to + other eyes. We are well aware that photographs do it no justice, and + that the man in the street—who, strangely enough, we conceive as having + no eye for beauty—can see nothing in it. Thank Heaven, she is not the + type that any common eye can see. Heads are not turned in her wake as + she passes along. Her beauty is not "obvious." On the contrary, it is of + that rare and exquisite quality which only a few favoured ones can + apprehend—like the beauty of a Whistler or a Corot, and we have been + chosen to be its high-priest and evangelist. It is our secret, this + beautiful face that we love, and we wonder how any one can be found to + love the other faces. We even pity them, those rosy, rounded faces, with + their bright unmysterious eyes and straight noses and dimpled chins. How + fortunate for them that the secret of the beauty we love has been hidden + from their lovers. Sheer Bouguereau! Neither more nor less. +</p> +<p> + In fact, the beauty we affect is aggressively spiritual, and in so far + as beauty is demonstrably physical we dismiss it with disdain. Our + ideal, indeed, might be said to consist in a beauty which is beautiful + in spite of the body rather than by means of it; a beauty defiantly + clothed, so to say, in the dowdiest of fleshly garments—radiantly + independent of such carnal conditions as features or complexion. Our + ideal of figure might be said to be negative rather than positive, and + that "little sister" mentioned in Solomon's Song would bring us no + disappointment. +</p> +<p> + We are often heard to say that beauty consists chiefly, if not entirely, + in expression, that it is a transfiguration from within rather than a + gracious condition of the surface, that the shape of a nose is no + matter, and that a beautifully rounded chin or a fine throat has nothing + to do with it—indeed, is rather in the way than otherwise. We point + to the fact—which is true enough—that the most famous beauties + of antiquity were plain women—plain, that is, according to the + conventional standards. +</p> +<p> + We also maintain—again with perfect truth—that mystery is more than + half of beauty, the element of strangeness that stirs the senses through + the imagination. These and other perfectly true truths about beauty we + discover through our devotion to the one face that we love—and we + should hardly have discovered them had we begun with the merely + cherry-ripe. It is with faces much as it is with books. There is no way + of attaining a vital catholic taste in literature so good as to begin by + mastering some difficult beautiful classic, by devoting ourselves in the + ardent receptive period of youth to one or two masterpieces which will + serve as touchstones for us in all our subsequent reading. Some books + engage all our faculties for their appreciation, and through the keen + attentiveness we are compelled to give them we make personal discovery + of those principles and qualities of all fine literature which otherwise + we might never have apprehended, or in which, at all events, we should + have been less securely grounded. +</p> +<p> + So with faces: it is through the absorbed worship, the jealous study, of + one face that we best learn to see the beauty in all the other + faces—though the mere thought that our apprehension of its beauty could + ever lead us to so infidel a conclusion would seem heresy indeed during + the period of our dedication. The subtler the type, the more caviare it + is to the general, the more we learn from it. We become in a sense + discoverers, original thinkers, of beauty, taking nothing on authority, + but making trial and investigation always for ourselves. Such beauty + brings us nearer than the more explicit types to that mysterious + threshold over which beauty steps down to earth and dwells among us; + that well-spring of its wonder; the point where first its shining + essence pours its radiance into the earthly vessel. +</p> +<p> + The perfect physical type hides no little of its own miracle through its + sheer perfection, as in the case of those masterpieces which, as we say, + conceal their art. It is often through the face externally less perfect, + faces, so to say, in process of becoming beautiful, that we get glimpses + of the interior light in its divine operation. We seem to look into the + very alembic of beauty, and see all the precious elements in the act of + combination. No wonder we should deem these faces the most beautiful of + all, for through them we see, not beauty made flesh, but beauty while it + is still spirit. In our eager fanaticism, indeed, we cannot conceive + that there can be beauty in any other types as well. Yet, because we + chance to have fallen under the spell of Botticelli, shall there be no + more Titian? Our taste is for a beauty of dim silver and faded stars, a + wistful twilight beauty made of sorrow and dreams, a beauty always half + in the shadow, a white flower in the moonlight. We cannot conceive how + beauty, for others, can be a thing of the hot sun, a thing of purple and + orange and the hot sun, a thing of firm outlines, superbly concrete, + marmoreal, sumptuous, magnificently animal. +</p> +<p> + The beauty we love is very silent. It smiles softly to itself, but never + speaks. How should we understand a beauty that is vociferously gay, a + beauty of dash and dance, a beauty of swift and brilliant ways, + victoriously alive? +</p> +<p> + Perhaps it were well for us that we should never understand, well for us + that we should preserve our singleness of taste through life. Some + contrive to do this, and never as long as they live are unfaithful to + the angel-blue eyes of their boyish love. Moralists have perhaps not + realized how much continence is due to a narrowness of aesthetic taste. + Obviously the man who sees beauty only in blue eyes is securer from + temptation than the man who can see beauty in brown or green eyes as + well; and how perilous is his state for whom danger lurks in all + beautiful eyes, irrespective of shape, size, or colour! And, alas! it is + to this state of eclecticism that most of us are led step by step by the + Mephistopheles of experience. +</p> +<p> + As great politicians in their maturity are usually found in the exact + opposite party to that which they espoused in their youth, so men who + loved blondness in boyhood are almost certain to be found at the feet of + the raven-haired in their middle age, and <i>vice versa</i>. The change is + but a part of that general change which overtakes us with the years, + substituting in us a catholic appreciation of the world as it is for + idealist notions of the world as we see it, or desire it to be. It is a + part of that gradual abdication of the ego which comes of the slow + realization that other people are quite as interesting as ourselves—in + fact, a little more so,—and their tastes and ways of looking at things + may be worth pondering, after all. But, O when we have arrived at this + stage, what a bewildering world of seductive new impressions spreads for + us its multitudinous snares! No longer mere individuals, we have not + merely an individual's temptations to guard against, but the temptations + of all the world. Instead of being able to see only that one type of + beauty which first appealed to us, our eyes have become so instructed + that we now see the beauty of all the other types as well; and we no + longer scorn as Philistine the taste of the man in the street for the + beauty that is robustly vital and flamboyantly contoured. Once we called + it obvious. Now we say it is "barbaric," and call attention to its + perfection of type. +</p> +<p> + The remembrance of our former injustice to it may even awaken a certain + tenderness towards it in our hearts, and soon we find ourselves making + love to it, partly from a vague desire to make reparation to a slighted + type, and partly from the experimental pleasure of loving a beauty the + attraction of which it was once impossible for us to imagine. So we feel + when the charm of some old master, hitherto unsympathetic, is suddenly + revealed to us. Ah! it was this they saw. How blind they must have + thought us! +</p> +<p> + Brown eyes that I love, will you forgive me that I once looked into blue + eyes as I am looking now into yours? Hair black as Erebus, will you + forgive these hands that once loved to bathe in a brook of rippled gold? + Ah! they did not know. It was in ignorance they sinned. They did not + know. +</p> +<p> + O my beautiful cypress, stately queen of the garden of the world, + forgive me that once I gave to the little shrub-like women the worship + that is rightly yours! +</p> +<p> + Lady, whose loveliness is like white velvet, a vineyard heavy with + golden grapes, abundant as an orchard of apple blossoms, forgive that + once I loved the shadow women, the sad wreathing mists of beauty, the + silvery uncorseted phantoms of womanhood. It was in ignorance I sinned. + I did not know. +</p> +<p> + Ah! That Mephistopheles of experience! How he has led us from one fair + face to another, teaching us, one by one, the beauty of all. No longer + lonely sectarians of beauty, pale prophets of one lovely face, there is + now no type whose secret is hidden from us. The world has become a + garden of beautiful faces. The flowers are different, but they are all + beautiful. How is it possible for us, now that we know the charm of each + one, to be indifferent to any, or to set the beauty of one above the + other? We have learned the beauty of the orchid, but surely we have not + unlearned the rose; and would you say that orchid or rose is more + beautiful than the lily? Surely not. They are differently beautiful, + that is all. +</p> +<p> + Are blue eyes more beautiful than brown? I thought so once, but now I + see that they are differently beautiful, that is all. Nor is gold hair + more beautiful than black any more, or black than gold. They are + differently beautiful, that is all. Nor is thy white skin, O Saxon lady, + more beautiful than hers of tropic bronze. +</p> +<p> + Come sad, or come with laughter, beautiful faces; come like stars in + dreams, or come vivid as fruit upon the bough; come softly like a timid + fawn, or terrible as an army with banners; come silent, come singing ... + you are all beautiful, and none is fairer than another—only differently + fair. +</p> +<p> + And yet ... and yet ... Experience is indeed Mephistopheles in this: We + must pay him for all this wisdom. Is it the old price? Is it our souls? + I wonder. +</p> +<p> + This at least is true: that, while indeed he has opened our eyes to all + this beauty that was hidden to us, shown us beauty, indeed, where we + could see but evil before, we miss something from our delight in these + faces. We can appreciate more beauty, but do we appreciate any quite as + much as in those old days when we were such passionate monotheists of + the beautiful? Alas! We are priests no more, are we even lovers? But we + are wonderful connoisseurs. +</p> +<p> + It is our souls. +</p> +<a name="2H_4_12"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<h2> + IX +</h2> +<h3> + THE SNOWS OF YESTER-YEAR +</h3> +<p> </p> + +<p> + <i>Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?</i> As I transcribe once more that + ancient sigh, perhaps the most real sigh in all literature, it is high + mid-summer, and the woodland surrounding the little cabin in which I am + writing lies in a trance of green and gold, hot and fragrant and dizzy + with the whirring of cicadas, under the might of the July sun. Bees buzz + in and out through my door, and sometimes a butterfly flits in, flutters + a while about my bookshelves, and presently is gone again, in search of + sweets more to his taste than those of the muses, though Catullus is + there, with +</p> +<pre class="si"> + Songs sweeter than wild honey dripping down, + Which once in Rome to Lesbia he sang. +</pre> +<p> + As I am caught by the dream-drowsy spell of the hot murmuring afternoon, + and my eyes rest on the thick vines clustering over the rocks, and the + lush grasses and innumerable underbrush, so spendthrift in their + crowding luxuriance, I try to imagine the ground as it was but four + months ago still in the grasp of winter, when the tiniest blade of + grass, or smallest speck of creeping green leaf, seemed like a miracle, + and it was impossible to realize that under the broad snowdrifts a + million seeds, like hidden treasure, were waiting to reveal their + painted jewels to the April winds. Snow was plentiful then, to be had by + the ton—but now, the thought suddenly strikes me, and brings home with + new illuminating force Villon's old refrain, that though I sought the + woodland from end to end, ransacked its most secret places, not one + vestige of that snow, so lately here in such plenty, would it be + possible to find. Though you were to offer me a million dollars for as + much as would fill the cup of a wild rose, say even a hundred million, I + should have to see all that money pass me by. I can think of hardly + anything that it couldn't buy—but such a simple thing as last year's + snow! +</p> +<p> + Could there be a more poignant symbol of irreclaimable vanished things + than that so happily hit on by the old ballade-maker: +</p> +<pre> + Nay, never ask this week, fair lord, + Where they are gone, nor yet this year, + Save with thus much for an overword— + But where are the snows of yester-year? +</pre> +<p> + Villon, as we know, has a melancholy fondness for asking these sad, + hopeless questions of snow and wind. He muses not only of the drift of + fair faces, but of the passing of mighty princes and all the arrogant + pride and pomp of the earth—"pursuivants, trumpeters, heralds, hey!" + "Ah! where is the doughty Charlemagne?" They, even as the humblest, "the + wind has carried them all away." They have vanished utterly as the snow, + gone—who knows where?—on the wind. "'Dead and gone'—a sorry burden of + the Ballad of Life," as Thomas Lowell Beddoes has it in his <i>Death's + Jest Book</i>. "Dead and gone!" as Andrew Lang re-echoes in a sweetly + mournful ballade: +</p> +<pre> + Through the mad world's scene + We are drifting on, + To this tune, I ween, + "They are dead and gone!" +</pre> +<p> + "Nought so sweet as melancholy," sings an old poet, and, while the + melancholy of the exercise is undoubted, there is at the same time an + undeniable charm attaching to those moods of imaginative retrospect in + which we summon up shapes and happenings of the vanished past, a tragic + charm indeed similar to that we experience in mournful music or elegiac + poetry. +</p> +<p> + For, it is impossible to turn our eyes on any point of the starlit vista + of human history, without being overwhelmed with a heart-breaking sense + of the immense treasure of radiant human lives that has gone to its + making, the innumerable dramatic careers now shrunk to a mere mention, + the divinely passionate destinies, once all wild dream and dancing + blood, now nought but a name huddled with a thousand such in some dusty + index, seldom turned to even by the scholar, and as unknown to the world + at large as the moss-grown name on some sunken headstone in a country + churchyard. What an appallingly exuberant and spendthrift universe it + seems, pouring out its multitudinous generations of men and women with + the same wasteful hand as it has filled this woodland with millions of + exquisite lives, marvellously devised, patterned with inexhaustible + fancy, mysteriously furnished with subtle organs after their needs, + crowned with fairy blossoms, and ripening with magic seeds,—such a vast + treasure of fragrant sunlit leafage, all produced with such elaborate + care, and long travail, and all so soon to vanish utterly away! +</p> +<p> + Along with this crushing sense of cosmic prodigality, and somewhat + lighting up its melancholy, comes the inspiring realization of the + splendid spectacle of human achievement, the bewildering array of all + the glorious lives that have been lived, of all the glorious happenings, + under the sun. Ah! what men this world has seen, and—what women! What + divine actors have trod this old stage, and in what tremendous dramas + have they taken part! And how strange it is, reading some great dramatic + career, of Caesar, say, or Luther, or Napoleon, or Byron, to realize + that there was a time when they were not, then a time when they were + beginning to be strange new names in men's ears, then all the romantic + excitement of their developing destinies, and the thunder and lightning + of the great resounding moments of their lives—moments made out of + real, actual, prosaic time, just as our own moments are made, yet once + so splendidly shining on the top of the world, as though to stay there + forever, moments so glorious that it would seem that Time must have + paused to watch and prolong them, jealous that they should ever pass and + give place to lesser moments! +</p> +<p> + Think too of those other fateful moments of history, moments not + confined to a few godlike individuals, but participated in by whole + nations, such moments as that of the great Armada, the French + Revolution, or the Declaration of American Independence. How strangely + it comes upon one that these past happenings were once only just taking + place, just as at the moment of my writing other things are taking + place, and clocks were ticking and water flowing, just as they are doing + now! How wonderful, it seems to us, to have been alive then, as we are + alive now, to have shared in those vast national enthusiasms, "in those + great deeds to have had some little part"; and is it not a sort of poor + anti-climax for a world that has gone through such noble excitement to + have sunk back to this level of every day! Alas! all those lava-like + moments of human exaltation—what are they now, but, so to say, the + pumice-stone of history. They have passed as the summer flowers are + passing, they are gone with last year's snow. +</p> +<p> + But the last year's snow of our personal lives—what a wistful business + it is, when we get thinking of that! To recall certain magic moments out + of the past is to run a risk of making the happiest present seem like a + desert; and for most men, I imagine, such retrospect is usually busied + with some fair face, or perhaps—being men—with several fair faces, + once so near and dear, and now so far. How poignantly and unprofitably + real memory can make them—all but bring them back—how vividly + reconstruct immortal occasions of happiness that we said could not, must + not, pass away; while all the time our hearts were aching with the sure + knowledge that they were even then, as we wildly clutched at them, + slipping from our grasp! +</p> +<p> + That summer afternoon,—do you too still remember it, Miranda?—when, + under the whispering woodland, we ate our lunch together with such + prodigious appetite, and O! such happy laughter, yet never took our eyes + from each other; and, when the meal was ended, how we wandered along the + stream-side down the rocky glen, till we came to an enchanted pool among + the boulders, all hushed with moss and ferns and overhanging boughs—do + you remember what happened then, Miranda? Ah! nymphs of the forest + pools, it is no use asking me to forget. +</p> +<p> + And, all the time, my heart was saying to my eyes:—"This fairy hour—so + real, so magical, now—some day will be in the far past; you will sit + right away on the lonely outside of it, and recall it only with the + anguish of beautiful vanished things." And here I am today surely + enough, years away from it, solitary on its lonely outside! +</p> +<p> + I suppose that the river, this summer day, is making the same music + along its rocky bed, and the leafy boughs are rustling over that haunted + pool just the same as when—but where are the laughing ripples—ah! + Miranda—that broke with laughter over the divinely troubled water, and + the broken reflections, as of startled water-lilies, that rocked to and + fro in a panic of dazzling alabaster? +</p> +<p> + They are with last year's snow. +</p> +<p> + Meriel of the solemn eyes, with the heart and the laughter of a child, + and soul like the starlit sky, where should one look for the snows of + yester-year if not in your bosom, fairy girl my eyes shall never see + again. Wherever you are, lost to me somewhere among the winding paths of + this strange wood of the world, do you ever, as the moonlight falls over + the sea, give a thought to that night when we sat together by a window + overlooking the ocean, veiled in a haze of moonlit pearl, and, dimly + seen near shore, a boat was floating, like some mystic barge, as we + said, in our happy childishness, waiting to take us to the <i>Land East of + the Sun and West of the Moon</i>? Ah! how was it we lingered and lingered + till the boat was no more there, and it was too late? Perhaps it was + that we seemed to be already there, as you turned and placed your hand + in mine and said: "My life is in your hand." And we both believed it + true. Yes! wherever we went together in those days, we were always in + that enchanted land—whether we rode side by side through London streets + in a hansom—"a two-wheeled heaven" we called it—(for our dream + stretches as far back as that prehistoric day—How old one of us seems + to be growing! You, dear face, can never grow old)—or sat and laughed + at clowns in London music halls, or wandered in Surrey lanes, or gazed + at each other, as if our hearts would break for joy, over the snow-white + napery of some country inn, and maybe quoted Omar to each other, as we + drank his red wine to the immortality of our love. Perhaps we were + right, after all. Perhaps it could never die, and Time and Distance are + perhaps merely illusions, and you and I have never been apart. Who knows + but that you are looking over my shoulder as I write, though you seem so + far away, lost in that starlit silence that you loved. Ah! Meriel, is it + well with you, this summer day? A sigh seems to pass through the sunlit + grasses. They are waving and whispering as I have seen them waving and + whispering over graves. +</p> +<p> + Such moments as these I have recalled all men have had in their lives, + moments when life seemed to have come to miraculous flower, attained + that perfect fulfilment of its promise which else we find only in + dreams. Beyond doubt there is something in the flawless blessedness of + such moments that links our mortality with super-terrestrial states of + being. We do, in very deed, gaze through invisible doors into the ether + of eternal existences, and, for the brief hour, live as they, drinking + deep of that music of the infinite which is the divine food of the + enfranchised soul. Thence comes our exaltation, and our wild longing to + hold the moment for ever; for, while it is with us, we have literally + escaped from the everyday earth, and have found the way into some other + dimension of being, and its passing means our sad return to the + prison-house of Time, the place of meetings and partings, of distance + and death. +</p> +<p> + Part of the pang of recalling such moments is a remorseful sense that + perhaps we might have held them fast, after all. If only we might bring + them back, surely we would find some way to dwell in them for ever. They + came upon us so suddenly out of heaven, like some dazzling bird, and we + were so bewildered with the wonder of their coming that we stretched out + our hands to seize them, only when they were already spreading their + wings for flight. But O if the divine bird would but visit us again! + What golden nets we would spread for him! What a golden cage of worship + we would make ready! Our eyes would never leave his strange plumage, nor + would we miss one note of his strange song. But alas! now that we are + grown wise and watchful, that "moment eternal" comes to us no more. + Perhaps too that sad wisdom which has come to us with the years would + least of all avail us, should such moments by some magic chance suddenly + return. For it is one of the dangers of the retrospective habit that it + incapacitates us for the realization of the present hour. Much dwelling + on last year's snow will make us forget the summer flowers. Dreaming of + fair faces that are gone, we will look with unseeing eyes into the fair + faces that companion us still. To the Spring we say: "What of all your + blossom, and all your singing! Autumn is already at your heels, like a + shadow; and Winter waits for you like a marble tomb." To the hope that + still may beckon we say: "Well, what though you be fulfilled, you will + pass, like the rest. I shall see you come. We shall dwell together for a + while, and then you will go; and all will be as it was before, all as if + you had never come at all." For the retrospective mood, of necessity, + begets the anticipatory; we see everything finished before it is begun, + and welcome and valediction blend together on our lips. "That which hath + been is now; and that which is to be hath already been." +</p> +<pre class="si"> + In every kiss sealed fast + To feel the first kiss and forebode the last— +</pre> +<p class="noindent"> + that is the shadow that haunts every joy, and sicklies o'er every action + of him whom life has thus taught to look before and after. +</p> +<p> + Youth is not like that, and therein, for older eyes, lies its tragic + pathos. Superficial—or, if you prefer it, more normal—observers are + made happy by the spectacle of eager and confident young lives, all + abloom and adream, turning towards the future with plumed impatient + feet. But for some of us there is nothing quite so sad as young joy. The + playing of children is perhaps the most unbearably sad thing in the + world. Who can look on young lovers, without tears in their eyes? With + what innocent faith they are taking in all the radiant lies of life! But + perhaps a young mother with her new-born babe on her breast is the most + tragical of all pictures of unsuspecting joy, for none of all the + trusting sons and daughters of men is destined in the end to find + herself so tragically, one might say cynically, fooled. +</p> +<p> + Cynically, I said; for indeed sometimes, as one ponders the lavish + heartless use life seems to make of all its divinely precious + material—were it but the flowers in one meadow, or the butterflies of a + single summer day—it does seem as though a cruel cynicism inhered + somewhere in the scheme of things, delighting to destroy and + disillusionize, to create loveliness in order to scatter it to the + winds, and inspire joy in order to mock it with desolation. Sometimes it + seems as though the mysterious spirit of life was hardly worthy of the + vessels it has called into being, hardly treats them fairly, uses them + with an ignoble disdain. For, how generously we give ourselves up to + life, how innocently we put our trust in it, do its bidding with such + fine ardours, striving after beauty and goodness, fain to be heroic and + clean of heart—yet "what hath man of all his labours, and of the + vexation of his heart, wherein he hath laboured under the sun." Yea, + dust, and fallen rose-leaves, and last year's snow. +</p> +<p> + And yet and yet, for all this drift and dishonoured decay of things, + that retrospective mood of ours will sometimes take another turn, and, + so rare and precious in the memory seem the treasure that it has lost, + and yet in imagination still holds, that it will not resign itself to + mortal thoughts of such manifest immortalities. The snows of + yester-year! Who knows if, after all, they have so utterly vanished as + they seem. Who can say but that there may be somewhere in the universe + secret treasuries where all that has ever been precious is precious + still, safely garnered and guarded for us against some wonderful moment + which shall gather up for us in one transfiguring apocalypse all the + wonderful moments that have but preceded us into eternity. Perhaps, as + nothing is lost in the world, so-called, of matter, nothing is lost too + in the world of love and dream. +</p> +<pre class="si"> + O vanished loveliness of flowers and faces, + Treasure of hair, and great immortal eyes, + Are there for these no safe and secret places? + And is it true that beauty never dies? + Soldiers and saints, haughty and lovely names, + Women who set the whole wide world in flames, + Poets who sang their passion to the skies, + And lovers wild and wise: + Fought they and prayed for some poor flitting gleam + Was all they loved and worshipped but a dream? + Is Love a lie and fame indeed a breath? + And is there no sure thing in life—but death? +</pre> +<p> + Ah! perhaps we shall find all such lost and lovely things when we come + at length to the Land of Last Year's Snow. +</p> +<a name="2H_4_14"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<h2> + X +</h2> +<h3> + THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GOSSIP +</h3> +<p> </p> + +<p> + According to the old Scandinavian fable of the cosmos, the whole world + is encircled in the coils of a vast serpent. The ancient name for it was + the Midgard serpent, and doubtless, for the old myth-maker, it had + another significance. Today, however, the symbol may still hold good of + a certain terrible and hideous reality. +</p> +<p> + Still, as of old, the world is encircled in the coils of a vast serpent; + and the name of the serpent is Gossip. Wherever man is, there may you + hear its sibilant whisper, and its foul spawn squirm and sting and + poison in nests of hidden noisomeness, myriad as the spores of + corruption in a putrefying carcass, varying in size from some + hydra-headed infamy endangering whole nations and even races with its + deadly breath, to the microscopic wrigglers that multiply, a million a + minute, in the covered cesspools of private life. +</p> +<p> + Printed history is so infested with this vermin, in the form of secret + memoirs, back-stairs diarists, and boudoir eavesdroppers, that it is + almost impossible to feel sure of the actual fact of any history + whatsoever. The fame of great personages may be literally compared to + the heroic figures in the well-known group of the Laocoön, battling in + vain with the strangling coils of the sea-serpent of Poseidon. We + scarcely know what to believe of the dead; and for the living, is it not + true, as Tennyson puts it, that "each man walks with his head in a cloud + of poisonous flies"? +</p> +<p> + What is this evil leaven that seems to have been mixed in with man's + clay at the very beginning, making one almost ready to believe in the + old Manichean heresy of a principle of evil operating through nature, + everywhere doing battle with the good? Even from the courts of heaven, + as we learn from the Book of Job, the gossip was not excluded; and how + eternally true to the methods of the gossip in all ages was Satan's way + of going to work in that immortal allegory! Let us recall the familiar + scene with a quoted verse or two: +</p> +<blockquote> + Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves + before the Lord, and Satan [otherwise, the Adversary] came also + among them.<br><br> + + And the Lord said unto Satan, "Whence comest thou?" Then Satan + answered the Lord, and said: "From going to and fro in the earth, + and from walking up and down in it."<br><br> + + And the Lord said unto Satan: "Hast thou considered my servant Job, + that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright + man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil?"<br><br> + + Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, "Doth Job fear God for + nought?" +</blockquote> +<p> + Here we have in a nutshell the whole <i>modus operandi</i> of the gossip in + all ages, and as he may be observed at any hour of the day or night, + slimily engaged in his cowardly business. "Going to and fro in the + earth, walking up and down in it," everywhere peering and listening, + smiling and shrugging, here and there dropping a hint, sowing a seed, + leering an innuendo; seldom saying, only implying; leaving everywhere + trails of slime, yet trails too vague and broken to track him by, secure + in his very cowardice. +</p> +<p> + "Doth Job fear God for nought?" He only asks, observe. Affirms nothing. + Only innocently wonders. Sows a doubt, that's all—and leaves it to + work. +</p> +<p> + The victim may possibly be set right in the end, as was Job; but + meanwhile he has lost his flocks and his herds, his sons and his + daughters, and suffered no little inconvenience from a loathsome plague + of boils. Actually—life not being, like the Book of Job, an + allegory—he very seldom is set right, but must bear his losses and his + boils with what philosophy he can master till the end of the chapter. +</p> +<p> + The race to which Job belonged presents perhaps the most conspicuous + example of a whole people burdened throughout its history with a + heritage of malignant gossip. In the town of Lincoln, in England, there + exists to this day, as one of its show places, the famous "Jew's House," + associated with the gruesome legend of "the boy of Lincoln"—a child, + it was whispered, sacrificed by the Jews at one of their pastoral + feasts. Such a wild belief in child-sacrifice by the Jews was widespread + in the Middle Ages, and is largely responsible, I understand, even at + the present day, for the Jewish massacres in Russia. +</p> +<p> + Think of the wild liar who first put that fearful thought into the mind + of Europe! Think of the holocausts of human lives, and all the attendant + agony of which his diabolical invention has been the cause! What + criminal in history compares in infamy with that unknown—gossip? +</p> +<p> + A similar madness of superstition, responsible for a like cruel + sacrifice of innocent lives, was the terrible belief in witchcraft. + Having its origin in ignorance and fear, it was chiefly the creation of + hearsay carried from lip to lip, beginning with the deliberate invention + of lying tongues, delighting in evil for its own sake, or taking + advantage of a ready weapon to pay off scores of personal enmity. At any + time to a period as near to our own day as the early eighteenth century, + nothing was easier than to rid oneself of an enemy by starting a whisper + going that he or she held secret commerce with evil spirits, was a + reader of magical books, and could at will cast spells of disease and + death upon the neighbours or their cattle. +</p> +<p> + You had but to be recluse in your habits and eccentric in your + appearance, with perhaps a little more wisdom in your head and your + conversation than your fellows, to be at the mercy of the first fool or + knave who could gather a mob at his heels, and hale you to the nearest + horse-pond. Statement and proof were one, and how ready, and indeed + eager, human nature was to believe the wildest nonsense told by witless + fool or unscrupulous liar, the records of such manias as the famous + Salem trials appallingly evidence. Men high in the state, as well as + helpless old women in their dotage, disfigured with "witch-moles" or + incriminating beards on their withered faces, were equally vulnerable to + this most fearful of weapons ever placed by ignorance in the hands of + the malignant gossip. +</p> +<p> + In such epidemics of tragic gossip we see plainly that, whatever + individuals are originally responsible, society at large is all too + culpably <i>particeps criminis</i> in this phenomenon under consideration. If + the prosperity of a jest be in the ears that hear it, the like is + certainly true of any piece of gossip. Whoever it may be that sows the + evil seed of slander, the human soil is all too evilly ready to receive + it, to give it nurture, and to reproduce it in crops persistent as the + wild carrot and flamboyant as the wild mustard. +</p> +<p> + There is something mean in human nature that prefers to think evil, that + gives a willing ear and a ready welcome to calumny, a sort of jealousy + of goodness and greatness and things of good report. +</p> +<p> + Races and nations are thus ever ready to believe the worst of one + another. In all times it has been in this field of inter-racial and + international prejudice that the gossip has found the widest scope for + his gleeful activity, sowing broadcast dissensions and misunderstandings + which have persisted for centuries. They are the fruitful cause of wars, + insuperable barriers to progress, fabulous growths which the + enlightenment of the world painfully labours to weed out, but will + perhaps never entirely eradicate. +</p> +<p> + Race-hatred is undoubtedly nine-tenths the heritage of ancient gossip. + Think of the generations of ill-feeling that kept England and France, + though divided but by a narrow strait, "natural enemies" and + misunderstood monsters to each other. In a less degree, the friendship + of England and America has been retarded by international gossips on + both sides. And as for races and nations more widely separated by + distance or customs, no lies have been bad enough for them to believe + about one another. +</p> +<p> + It is only of late years that Europe has come to regard the peoples of + the Orient as human beings at all. And all this misunderstanding has + largely been the work of gossip acting upon ignorance. +</p> +<p> + It is easy to see how in the days of difficult communication, before + nations were able to get about in really representative numbers to make + mutual acquaintance, they were completely at the mercy of a few + irresponsible travellers, who said or wrote what they pleased, and had + no compunction about lying in the interests of entertainment. The + proverbial "gaiety of nations" has always, in a great degree, consisted + in each nation believing that it was superior to all others, and that + the natives of other countries were invariably hopelessly dirty and + immoral, to say the least. Such reports the traveller was expected to + bring home with him, and such he seldom failed to bring. +</p> +<p> + Even at the present time, when intercourse is so cosmopolitan, and some + approach to a sense of human brotherhood has been arrived at, the old + misconceptions die hard. Nations need still to be constantly on their + guard in believing all that the telegraph or the wireless is willing to + tell them about other countries. Electricity, many as are its advantages + for cosmopolitan <i>rapprochements</i>, is not invariably employed in the + interests of truth, and newspaper correspondents, if not watched, are + liable to be an even more dangerous form of international gossip than + the more leisurely fabulist of ancient time. +</p> +<p> + When we come to consider the operation of gossip in the lives of + individuals, the disposition of human nature to relish discrediting + rumour is pitifully conspicuous. We know <i>Hamlet's</i> opinion on the + matter: +</p> +<pre> + Let Hercules himself do what he may, + The cat will mew, and dog will have his day. +</pre> +<p> + And again: +</p> +<pre> + Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, + Thou shalt not escape calumny. +</pre> +<p> + This, it is to be feared, is merely the sad truth, for mankind, while it + admires both greatness and goodness, would seem to resent the one and + only half believe in the other. At all events, nothing is more to its + taste than the rumour that detracts from the great or sullies the good; + and so long as the rumour be entertaining, it has little concern for its + truth. +</p> +<p> + Froude, in writing of Caesar, has this to say admirably to our purpose: +</p> +<blockquote> + In ages which we call heroic, the saint works miracles, the warrior + performs exploits beyond the strength of natural man. In ages less + visionary, which are given to ease and enjoyment, the tendency is to + bring a great man down to the common level, and to discover or + invent faults which shall show that he is or was but a little man + after all. Our vanity is soothed by evidence that those who have + eclipsed us in the race of life are no better than ourselves, or in + some respects worse than ourselves; and if to these general impulses + be added political or personal animosity, accusations of depravity + are circulated as surely about such men, and are credited as readily + as under other influences are the marvellous achievements of a Cid + or a St. Francis.<br><br> + + The absurdity of a calumny may be as evident as the absurdity of a + miracle; the ground for belief may be no more than a lightness of + mind, and a less pardonable wish that it may be true. But the idle + tale floats in society, and by and by is written down in books and + passes into the region of established realities. +</blockquote> +<p> + The proportion of such idle tales seriously printed as history can + never, of course, be computed. Sometimes one is tempted to think that + history is mainly "whole cloth." Certainly the lives of such men as + Caesar are largely made up of what one might term illustrative fictions + rather than actual facts. The story of Caesar and Cleopatra is probably + such an "illustrative fiction," representing something that might very + well have happened to Caesar, whether it did so or not. At all events, + it does his fame no great harm, unlike another calumny, which, as it + does not seem "illustrative"—that is, not in keeping with his general + character—we are at liberty to reject. Both alike, however, were + the product of the gossip, the embodied littleness of human nature + endeavouring then, as always, to minimize and discredit the strong man, + who, whatever his actual faults, at least strenuously shoulders for his + fellows the hard work of the world. +</p> +<p> + The great have usually been strong enough to smile contempt on their + traducers—Caesar's answer to an infamous epigram of the poet Catullus + was to ask him to dinner—but even so, at what extra cost, what "expense + of spirit in a waste of shame," have their achievements been bought, + because of these curs that bark forever at the heels of fame! +</p> +<p> + And not always have they thus prevailed against the pack. Too often has + the sorry spectacle been seen of greatness and goodness going down + before the poisonous tongues and the licking jaws. Even Caesar himself + had to fall at last, his strong soul perhaps not sorry to escape through + his dagger-wounds from so pitiably small a world; and the poison in the + death-cup of Socrates was not so much the juice of the hemlock as the + venom of the gossips of Athens. +</p> +<p> + In later times, no service to his country, no greatness of character, + can save the noble Raleigh from the tongues determined to bring him to + the block; and, when the haughty head of Marie Antoinette must bow at + last upon the scaffold, the true guillotine was the guillotine of + gossip. It was such lying tales as that of the diamond necklace that had + brought her there. All Queen Elizabeth's popularity could not save her + from the ribaldry of scandal, nor Shakespeare's genius protect his name + from the foulest of stains. +</p> +<p> + In our own time, the mere mention of the name of Dreyfus suffices to + remind us of the terrible nets woven by this dark spinner. Within the + last year or two, have we not seen the loved king of a great nation + driven to seek protection from the spectre of innuendo in the courts of + law? But gossip laughs at such tribunals. It knows that where once it + has affixed its foul stain, the mark remains forever, indelible as that + imaginary stain which not all the multitudinous seas could wash from the + little hand of Lady Macbeth. The more the stain is washed, the more + persistently it reappears, like Rizzio's blood, as they say, in Holyrood + Palace. To deny a rumour is but to spread it. An action for libel, + however it may be decided, has at least the one inevitable result of + perpetuating it. +</p> +<p> + Take the historical case of the Man with the Iron Mask. Out of pure + deviltry, it would appear, Voltaire started the story, as mere a fiction + as one of his written romances, that the mysterious prisoner was no less + than a half-brother of Louis XIV; and Dumas, seeing the dramatic + possibilities of the legend, picturesquely elaborates it in <i>Le Vicomte + de Bragelonne</i>. Never, probably, was so impudent an invention, and + surely never one so successful; for it is in vain that historians expose + it over and over again. Learned editors have proved with no shadow of a + doubt that the real man of the mask was an obscure Italian political + adventurer; but though scholars may be convinced, the world will have + nothing of your Count Matthioli, and will probably go on believing + Voltaire's story to the end of time. +</p> +<p> + "At least there must have been something in it" is always the last word + on such debatable matters; and the curious thing is that, whenever a + doubt of the truth is expressed, it is never the victim, but always the + scandal, to which the benefit of the doubt is extended. Whatever the + proven fact, the world always prefers to hold fast by the disreputable + doubt. +</p> +<p> + All that is necessary is to find the dog a bad name. The world will see + that he never loses it. In this regard the oft-reiterated confidence of + the dead in the justice of posterity is one of the most pathetic of + illusions. "Posterity will see me righted," cries some poor victim of + human wrong, as he goes down into the darkness; but of all appeals, the + appeal to posterity is the most hopeless. +</p> +<p> + What posterity relishes is rather new scandals about its immortals than + tiresome belated justifications. It prefers its villains to grow blacker + with time, and welcomes proof of fallibility and frailty in its immortal + exemplars. For rehabilitation it has neither time nor inclination, + and it pursues certain luckless reputations beyond the grave with a + mysterious malignity. +</p> +<p> + Such a reputation is that of Edgar Allan Poe. One would have thought + that posterity would be eager to make up to his shade for the criminal + animus of Rufus Griswold, his first biographer. On the contrary, it + prefers to perpetuate the lying portrait; and no consideration of the + bequests of Poe's genius, or of his tragic struggles with adverse + conditions, no editorial advocacy, or documentary evidence in his + favour, has persuaded posterity to reverse the unduly harsh judgment of + his fatuous contemporaries. +</p> +<p> + Fortunately, it all matters nothing to Poe now. It is only to us that it + matters. +</p> +<p> + Saddening, surely, it is, to say the least, to realize that the humanity + of which we are a part is tainted with so subtle a disease of lying, and + so depraved an appetite for lies. Under such conditions, it is + surprising that greatness and goodness are ever found willing to serve + humanity at all, and that any but scoundrels can be found to dare the + risks of the high places of the world. For this social disease of gossip + resembles that distemper which, at the present moment, threatens the + chestnut forests of America. It first attacks the noblest trees. Like + it, too, it would seem to baffle all remedies, and like it, it would + seem to be the work of indestructible microscopic worms. +</p> +<p> + It is this vermicular insignificance of the gossip that makes his + detection so difficult, and gives him his security. A great reputation + may feel itself worm-eaten, and may suddenly go down with a crash, but + it will look around in vain for the social vermin that have brought + about its fall. It is the cowardice of gossip that its victims have + seldom an opportunity of coming face to face with their destroyers; for + the gossip is as small as he is ubiquitous— +</p> +<pre> + Not half so big as a round little worm + Prick'd from the lazy finger of a maid. +</pre> +<p> + In all societies, there are men and women who are vaguely known as + gossips; but they are seldom caught red-handed. For one thing, they do + not often speak at first hand. They profess only to repeat something + that they have heard—something, they are careful to add, which is + probably quite untrue, and which they themselves do not believe for a + moment. +</p> +<p> + Then the fact stated or hinted is probably no concern of ours. It is not + for us to sift its truth, or to bring it to the attention of the + individual it tarnishes. Obviously, society would become altogether + impossible if each one of us were to constitute ourselves a sort of + social police to arraign every accuser before the accused. We should + thus, it is to be feared, only make things worse, and involuntarily play + the gossip's own game. The best we can do is as far as possible to + banish the tattle from our minds, and, at all events, to keep our own + mouths shut. +</p> +<p> + Even so, however, some harm will have been done. We shall never be quite + sure but that the rumour was true, and when we next meet the person + concerned, it will probably in some degree colour our attitude toward + him. +</p> +<p> + And with others, less high-minded than ourselves, the gossip will have + had greater success. Not, of course, meaning any harm, they will inquire + of someone else if what So-and-so hinted of So-and-so can possibly be + true. And so it will go on <i>ad infinitum</i>. The formula is simple, and it + is only a matter of arithmetical progression for a private lie, once + started on its journey, to become a public scandal, with a reputation + gone, and no one visibly responsible. +</p> +<p> + Of course, not all gossip is purposely harmful in its intention. The + deliberate, creative gossip is probably rare. In fact, gossip usually + represents the need of a bored world to be entertained at any price, the + restless <i>ennui</i> that must be forever talking or listening to fill the + vacuity of its existence, to supply its lack of really vital interests. + This demand naturally creates a supply of idle talkers, whose social + existence depends on their ability to provide the entertainment desired; + and nothing would seem to be so well-pleasing to the idle human ear as + the whisper that discredits, or the story that ridicules, the + distinction it envies, and the goodness it cannot understand. +</p> +<p> + The mystery of gossip is bound up with the mysterious human need of + talking. Talk we must, though we say nothing, or talk evil from sheer + lack of subject-matter. When we know why man talks so much, apparently + for the mere sake of talking, we shall probably be nearer to knowing why + he prefers to speak and hear evil rather than good of his fellows. +</p> +<p> + Possibly the gossip would be just as ready to speak well of his victims, + to circulate stories to their credit rather than the reverse, but for + the melancholy fact that he would thus be left without an audience. For + the world has no anxiety to hear good of its neighbour, and there is no + piquancy in the disclosure of hidden virtues. +</p> +<p> + 'Tis true, 'tis pity; pity 'tis, 'tis true; and the only poor + consolation to be got out of it is that the victims of gossip may, if + they feel so inclined, feel flattered rather than angered by its + attentions; for, at all events, it argues their possession of gifts + and qualities transcending the common. At least it presupposes + individuality; and, all things considered, it may be held as true that + those most gossiped about are usually those who can best afford to pay + this tax levied by society on any form of distinction. +</p> +<p> + After all, the great and good man has his greatness and goodness to + support him, though the world should unite in depreciating him. The + artist has his genius, the beautiful woman has her beauty. 'Tis in + ourselves that we are thus and thus; and if fame must have gossip for + its seamy side, there are some satisfactions that cannot be stolen away, + and some laurels that defy the worm. +</p> +<a name="2H_4_15"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<h2> + XI +</h2> +<h3> + THE PASSING AWAY OF THE EDITOR +</h3> +<p> </p> + +<p> + The word "editor" as applied to the conductors of magazines and + newspapers is rapidly becoming a mere courtesy title; for the powers and + functions formerly exercised by editors, properly so called, are being + more and more usurped by the capitalist proprietor. There are not a few + magazines where the "editor" has hardly more say in the acceptance of a + manuscript than the contributor who sends it in. Few are the editors + left who uphold the magisterial dignity and awe with which the name of + editor was wont to be invested. These survive owing chiefly to the + prestige of long service, and even they are not always free from the + encroachments of the new method. The proprietor still feels the irksome + necessity of treating their editorial policies with respect, though + secretly chafing for the moment when they shall give place to more + manageable, modern tools. +</p> +<p> + The "new" editor, in fact, is little more than a clerk doing the bidding + of his proprietor, and the proprietor's idea of editing is slavishly to + truckle to the public taste—or rather to his crude conception of the + public taste. The only real editors of today are the capitalist and the + public. The nominal editor is merely an office-boy of larger growth, and + slightly larger salary. +</p> +<p> + Innocent souls still, of course, imagine him clothed with divine powers, + and letters of introduction to him are still sought after by the + superstitious beginner. Alas! the chances are that the better he thinks + of your MS. the less likely is it to be accepted by—the proprietor; for + Mr. Snooks, the proprietor, has decided tastes of his own, and a + peculiar distaste for anything remotely savouring of the "literary." His + broad editorial axiom is that a popular magazine should be everything + and anything but—"literature." For any signs of the literary taint he + keeps open a stern and ever-watchful eye, and the "editor" or "editorial + assistant"—to make a distinction without a difference—whom he should + suspect of literary leanings has but a short shrift. Mr. Snooks is + seldom much of a reader himself. His activities have been exclusively + financial, and he has drifted into the magazine business as he might + have drifted into pork or theatres—from purely financial reasons. His + literary needs are bounded on the north by a detective story, and on the + south by a scientific article. The old masters of literature are as much + foolishness to him as the old masters of painting. In short, he is just + a common, ignorant man with money invested in a magazine; and who shall + blame him if he goes on the principle that he who pays the piper calls + the tune. When he starts in he not infrequently begins by entrusting + his magazine to some young man with real editorial ability and ambition + to make a really good thing. This young man gathers about him a group of + kindred spirits, and the result is that after the publication of the + second number Mr. Snooks decides to edit the magazine himself, with the + aid of a secretary and a few typewriters. His bright young men hadn't + understood "what the public wants" at all. They were too high-toned, too + "literary." What the public wants is short stories and pictures of + actresses; and the short stories, like the actresses, must be no better + than they should be. Even short stories when they are masterpieces are + not "what the public wants." So the bright young men go into outer + darkness, sadly looking for new jobs, and with its third number + <i>Snooks's Monthly</i> has fallen into line with the indistinguishable ruck + of monthly magazines, only indeed distinguishable one from the other by + the euphonious names of their proprietors. +</p> +<p> + Now, a proprietor's right to have his property managed according to his + own ideas needs no emphasizing. The sad thing is that such proprietors + should get hold of such property. It all comes, of course, of the + modern vulgarization of wealth. Time was when even mere wealth was + aristocratic, and its possession, more or less implied in its possessors + the possession, too, of refinement and culture. The rich men of the past + knew enough to encourage and support the finer arts of life, and were + interested in maintaining high standards of public taste and feeling. + Thus they were capable of sparing some of their wealth for investment in + objects which brought them a finer kind of reward than the financial. + Among other things, they understood and respected the dignity of + literature, and would not have expected an editor to run a literary + venture in the interests of the illiterate. The further degradation of + the public taste was not then the avowed object of popular magazines. + Indeed—strange as it sounds nowadays—it was rather the education than + the degradation of the public taste at which the editor aimed, and in + that aim he found the support of intelligent proprietors. +</p> +<p> + Today, however, all this is changed. Wealth has become democratic, and + it is only here and there, in its traditional possessors, that it + retains its traditional aristocracy of taste. As the commonest man can + be a multi-millionaire, so the commonest man can own a magazine, and + have it edited in the commonest fashion for the common good. +</p> +<p> + As a result, the editor's occupation, in the true sense, will soon be + gone. There is, need one say, no lack today of men with real editorial + individuality—but editorial individuality is the last thing the + capitalist proprietors want. It is just that they are determined to + stamp out. Therefore, your real editor must either swallow his pride and + submit to ignorant dictation, or make way for the little band of + automatic sorters of manuscript, which, as nine tailors make a man, + nowadays constitute a sort of composite editor under the direction of + the proprietor. +</p> +<p> + With the elimination of editorial individuality necessarily follows + elimination of individuality in the magazine. More and more, every day, + magazines are conforming to the same monotonous type; so that, except + for name and cover, it is impossible to tell one magazine from another. + Happily one or two—<i>rari nantes in gurgito vasto</i>—survive amid the + democratic welter; and all who have at heart not only the interests of + literature, but the true interests of the public taste, will pray that + they will have the courage to maintain their distinction, unseduced by + the moneyed voice of the mob—a distinction to which, after all, they + have owed, and will continue to owe, their success. The names of these + magazines will readily occur to the reader, and, as they occur, he + cannot but reflect that it was just editorial individuality and a high + standard of policy that made them what they are, and what, it is + ardently to be hoped, they will still continue to be. Plutus and Demos + are the worst possible editors for a magazine; and in the end, even, it + is the best magazine that always makes the most money. +</p> +<a name="2H_4_16"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<h2> + XII +</h2> +<h3> + THE SPIRIT OF THE OPEN +</h3> +<p> </p> + +<p> + I often think, as I sit here in my green office in the woodland—too + often diverted from some serious literary business with the moon or the + morning stars, or a red squirrel who is the familiar spirit of my + wood-pile, or having my thoughts carried out to sea by the river which + runs so freshly and so truantly, with so strong a current of temptation, + a hundred yards away from my window—I often think that the strong + necessity that compelled me to do my work, to ply my pen and inkpot out + here in the leafy, blue-eyed wilderness, instead of doing it by + typewriter in some forty-two-storey building in the city, is one of + those encouraging signs of the times which links one with the great + brotherhood of men and women that have heard the call of the great god + Pan, as he sits by the river— +</p> +<pre> + Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan! + Piercing sweet by the river! + Blinding sweet, O great god Pan! +</pre> +<p> + And I go on thinking to this effect: that this impulse that has come to + so many of us, and has, incidentally, wrought such a harmony in our + lives, is something more than duck-shooting, trout-fishing, + butterfly-collecting, or a sentimental passion for sunsets, but is + indeed something not so very far removed from religion, romantic + religion. At all events, it is something that makes us happy, and keeps + us straight. That combination of results can only come by the + satisfaction of the undeniable religious instinct in all of us: an + instinct that seeks goodness, but seeks happiness too. Now, there are + creeds by which you can be good without being happy; and creeds by which + you can be happy without being good. But, perhaps, there is only one + creed by which you can be both at once—the creed of the growing grass, + and the blue sky and the running river, the creed of the dog-wood and + the skunk-cabbage, the creed of the red-wing and the blue heron—the + creed of the great god Pan. +</p> +<p> + Pan, being one of the oldest of the gods, might well, in an age eager + for novelty, expect to be the latest fashion; but the revival of his + worship is something far more than a mere vogue. It was rumoured, as, of + course, we all know, early in the Christian era, that he was dead. The + pilot Thomas, ran the legend, as told by Plutarch, sailing near Pascos, + with a boatful of merchants, heard in the twilight a mighty voice + calling from the land, bidding him proclaim to all the world that Pan + was dead. "Pan is dead!"—three times ran the strange shuddering cry + through the darkness, as though the very earth itself wailed the passing + of the god. +</p> +<p> + But Pan, of course, could only die with the earth itself, and so long as + the lichen and the moss keep quietly at their work on the grey boulder, + and the lightning zigzags down through the hemlocks, and the arrowhead + guards its waxen blossom in the streams; so long as the earth shakes + with the thunder of hoofs, or pours out its heart in the song of the + veery-thrush, or bares its bosom in the wild rose, so long will there be + little chapels to Pan in the woodland—chapels on the lintels of which + you shall read, as Virgil wrote: <i>Happy is he who knows the rural gods, + Pan, and old Sylvanus, and the sister nymphs</i>. +</p> +<p> + It is strange to see how in every country, but more particularly in + America and in England, the modern man is finding his religion as it was + found by those first worshippers of the beautiful mystery of the visible + universe, those who first caught glimpses of +</p> +<pre class="si"> + Nymphs in the coppice, Naiads in the fountain, + Gods on the craggy height and roaring sea. +</pre> +<p> + First thoughts are proverbially the best; at all events, they are the + bravest. And man's first thoughts of the world and the strangely + romantic life he is suddenly called up, out of nothingness, to live, + unconsulted, uninstructed, left to feel his way in the blinding + radiance up into which he has been mysteriously thrust; those first + thoughts of his are nowadays being corroborated in every direction by + the last thoughts of the latest thinker. Mr. Jack London, one of + Nature's own writers, one of those writers too, through whom the Future + speaks, has given a name to this stirring of the human soul—"The Call + of the Wild." Following his lead, others have written of "The Lure," of + this and that in nature, and all mean the same thing: that the salvation + of man is to be found on, and by means of, the green earth out of which + he was born, and that, as there is no ill of his body which may not be + healed by the magic juices of herb and flower, or the stern potency of + minerals, so there is no sickness of his soul that may not be cured by + the sound of the sea, the rustle of leaves, or the songs of birds. +</p> +<p> + Thirty or forty years ago the soul of the world was very sick. It had + lost religion in a night of misunderstood "materialism," so-called. But + since then that mere "matter" which seemed to eclipse the soul has grown + strangely radiant to deep-seeing eyes, and, whereas then one had to + doubt everything, dupes of superficial disillusionment, now there is no + old dream that has not the look of coming true, no hope too wild and + strange and beautiful to be confidently entertained. Even, if you wish + to believe in fairies, science will hardly say you nay. Those dryads and + fauns, which Keats saw "frightened away" by the prosaic times in which + it was his misfortune to be alive and unrecognized, are trooping back in + every American woodland, and the god whose name I have invoked has + become more than ever +</p> +<pre> + the leaven + That spreading in this dull and clodded earth + Gives it a touch ethereal. +</pre> +<p> + His worship is all the more sincere because it is not self-conscious. + If you were to tell the trout-fisher, or the duck-shooter, or the + camper-out, that he is a worshipper of Pan, he would look at you in a + kindly bewilderment. He would seem a little anxious about you, but it + would be only a verbal misunderstanding. It would not take him long to + realize that you were only putting in terms of a creed the intuitive and + inarticulate faith of his heart. Perhaps the most convincing sign of + this new-old faith in nature is the unconsciousness of the believer. He + has no idea that he is believing or having faith in anything. He is + simply loving the green earth and the blue sea, and the ways of birds + and fish and animals; but he is so happy in his innocent, ignorant joy + that he seems almost to shine with his happiness. There is, literally, a + light about him—that light which edges with brightness all sincere + action. The trout, or the wild duck, or the sea bass is only an innocent + excuse to be alone with the Infinite. To be alone. To be afar. Men sail + precarious craft in perilous waters for no reason they could tell + of. They may think that trawling, or dredging, or whaling is the + explanation: the real reason is the mystery we call the Sea. +</p> +<p> + Ostensibly, of course, the angler is a man who goes out to catch fish; + yet there is a great difference between an angler and a fishmonger. + Though the angler catches no fish, though his creel be empty as he + returns home at evening, there is a curious happiness and peace about + him which a mere fishmonger would be at a loss to explain. Fish, as I + said, were merely an excuse; and, as he vainly waited for fish, without + knowing it, he was learning the rhythm of the stream, and the silence of + ferns was entering into his soul, and the calm and patience of meadows + were dreamily becoming a part of him. Suddenly, too, in the silence, + maybe he caught sight of a strange, hairy, masterful presence, sitting + by the stream, whittling reeds, and blowing his breath into them here + and there, and finally binding them together with rushes, till he had + made out of the empty reeds and rushes an instrument that sang + everything that can be sung and told you everything that can be told. +</p> +<pre> + The sun on the hill forgot to die. + And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly + Came back to dream on the river. +</pre> +<p> + Do you really think that the huntsman hunts only the deer? He, himself, + doubtless thinks that the trophy of the antlers was all he went out + into the woods to win. But there came a day to him when he missed the + deer, and caught a glimpse instead of the divine huntress, Diana, + high-buskined, short-kirtled, speeding with her hounds through the + lonely woodland, and his thoughts ran no more on venison for that day. +</p> +<p> + The same truth is true of all men who go out into the green, blue-eyed + wilderness, whether they go there in pursuit of game or butterflies. + They find something stranger and better than what they went out to seek, + and, if they come home disappointed in the day's bag or catch, there is + yet something in their eyes, and across their brows, a light of peace, + an enchanted calm, which tells those who understand that they, at all + events, have seen the great god Pan, and heard the music he can make out + of the pipy hemlocks or the lonely pines. +</p> +<a name="2H_4_17"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<h2> + XIII +</h2> +<h3> + AN OLD AMERICAN TOW-PATH +</h3> +<p> </p> + +<p> + The charm of an old canal is one which every one seems to feel. Men who + care nothing about ruined castles or Gothic cathedrals light up with + romantic enthusiasm if you tell them of some old disused or seldom-used + canal, grass-grown and tree-shaded, along which, hardly oftener than + once a week, a leisurely barge—towed by an equally leisurely mule, with + its fellow there on deck taking his rest, preparatory to his next + eight-mile "shift"—sleepily dreams its way, presumably on some errand + and to some destination, yet indeed hinting of no purpose or object + other than its loitering passage through a summer afternoon. I have even + heard millionaires express envy of the life lived by the little family + hanging out its washing and smoking its pipe and cultivating its + floating garden of nasturtiums and geraniums, with children playing and + a house-dog to keep guard, all in that toy house of a dozen or so feet, + whose foundations are played about by fishes, and whose sides are + brushed by whispering reeds. But the charm of an old canal is perhaps + yet more its own when even so tranquil a happening as the passage of a + barge is no longer looked for, and the quiet water is called upon for no + more arduous usefulness than the reflection of the willows or the + ferrying across of summer clouds. Nature herself seems to wield a new + peculiar spell in such association—old quarries, the rusting tramways + choked with fern; forgotten mines with the wild vine twining tenderly + about the old iron of dismantled pit-tackle, grown as green as itself + with the summer rains; roads once dusty with haste over which only the + moss and the trailing arbutus now leisurely travel. Wherever Nature is + thus seen to be taking to herself, making her own, what man has first + made and grown tired of, she is twice an enchantress, strangely + combining in one charm the magic of a wistful, all but forgotten, past + with her own sibyl-line mystery. +</p> +<p> + The symbol of that combined charm is that poppy of oblivion of which Sir + Thomas Browne so movingly wrote: but, though along that old canal of + which I am thinking and by which I walked a summer day, no poppies were + growing, the freshest grass, the bluest flowers, the new-born rustling + leafage of the innumerable trees, all alike seemed to whisper of + forgetfulness, to be brooding, even thus in the very heyday of the mad + young year, over time past. And this eloquently retrospective air of + Nature made me realize, with something of the sense of discovery, how + much of what we call antiquity is really a trick of Nature. She is as + clever at the manufacture of antiques as some expert of "old masters." + A little moss here and there, a network of ivy, a judicious use of ferns + and grass, a careless display of weeds and wild flowers, and in twenty + years Nature can make a modern building look as if it dated from the + Norman Conquest. I came upon this reflection because, actually, my canal + is not very old, though from the way it impressed me, and from the + manner in which I have introduced it, the reader might well imagine it + as old as Venice and no younger than Holland, and may find it as hard to + believe as I did that its age is but some eighty years, and that it has + its romantic being between Newark Bay and Phillipsburg, on the Delaware + River. +</p> +<p> + One has always to be careful not to give too much importance to one's + own associative fancies in regard to the names of places. To me, for + instance, "Perth Amboy" has always had a romantic sound, and I believe + that a certain majesty in the collocation of the two noble words would + survive that visit to the place itself which I have been told is all + that is necessary for disillusionment. On the other hand, for reasons + less explainable, Hackensack, Paterson, Newark, and even Passaic are + names that had touched me with no such romantic thrill. Wrongfully, no + doubt, I had associated them with absurdity, anarchy, and railroads. + Never having visited them, it was perhaps not surprising that I should + not have associated them with such loveliness and luxury of Nature as I + now unforgettably recall; and I cannot help feeling that in the case of + places thus unfortunately named, Nature might well bring an action for + damages, robbed as she thus undoubtedly is of a flock of worshippers. +</p> +<p> + At all events, I believe that my surprise and even incredulity will be + understood when an artist friend of mine told me that by taking the Fort + Lee ferry, and trolleying from the Palisades through Hackensack to + Paterson, I might find—a dream canal. It was as though he had said that + I had but to cross over to Hoboken to find the Well at the World's End. + But it was true, for all that—quite fairy-tale true. It was one of + those surprises of peace, deep, ancient peace, in America, of which + there are many, and of which more needs to be told. I can conceive of no + more suggestive and piquant contrast than that of the old canal gliding + through water-lilies and spreading pastures, in the bosom of hills + clothed with trees that scatter the sunshine or gather the darkness, the + haunt of every bird that sings or flashes strange plumage and is gone, + gliding past flowering rushes and blue dragon-flies, not +</p> +<pre> + Flowing down to Camelot, +</pre> +<p class="noindent"> + as one might well believe, but between Newark and Phillipsburg, touching + Paterson midway with its dreaming hand. +</p> +<p> + Following my friend's directions, we had met at Paterson, and, desirous + of finding our green pasture and still waters with the least possible + delay, we took a trolley running in the Newark direction, and were + presently dropped at a quaint, quiet little village called Little Falls, + the last we were to see of the modern work-a-day world for several + miles. A hundred yards or so beyond, and it is as though you had entered + some secret green door into a pastoral dream-land. Great trees, like + rustling walls of verdure, enclose an apparently endless roadway of + gleaming water, a narrow strip of tow-path keeping it company, + buttressed in from the surrounding fields with thickets of every species + of bush and luxurious undergrowth, and starred with every summer flower. +</p> +<p> + Presently, by the side of the path, one comes to an object which seems + romantically in keeping with the general character of the scene—a long + block of stone, lying among the grasses and the wild geraniums, on + which, as one nears it, one descries carved scroll-work and quaint, + deep-cut lettering. Is it the tomb of dead lovers, the memorial of some + great deed, or an altar to the <i>genius loci</i>? The willows whisper about + it, and the great elms and maples sway and murmur no less impressively + than if the inscription were in Latin of two thousand years ago. Nor is + it in me to regret that the stone and its inscription, instead of + celebrating the rural Pan, commemorate the men to whom I owe this lane + of dreaming water and all its marginal green solitude: to wit—the + "MORRIS CANAL AND BANKING CO., A.D. 1829," represented by its + president, its cashier, its canal commissioner, and a score of other + names of directors, engineers, and builders. Peace, therefore, to the + souls of those dead directors, who, having only in mind their banking + and engineering project, yet unconsciously wrought, nearly a century + ago, so poetic a thing, and may their rest be lulled by such leafy + murmurs and swaying of tendrilled shadows as all the day through stir + and sway along the old canal! +</p> +<p> + A few yards beyond this monumental stone, there comes a great opening in + the sky, a sense of depth and height and spacious freshness in the air, + such as we feel on approaching the gorge of a great river; and in fact + the canal has arrived at the Passaic and is about to be carried across + it in a sort of long, wooden trough, supported by a noble bridge that + might well pass for a genuine antique, owing to that collaborating hand + of Nature which has filled the interstices of its massive masonry with + fern, and so loosened it here and there that some of the canal escapes + in long, ribbon-like cascades into the rocky bed of the river below. An + aqueduct has always seemed to me, though it would be hard to say why, a + most romantic thing. The idea of carrying running water across a bridge + in this way—water which it is so hard to think of as imprisoned or + controlled, and which, too, however shallow, one always associates with + mysterious depth—the idea of thus carrying it across a valley high up + in the air, so that one may look underneath it, underneath the bed in + which it runs, and think of the fishes and the water-weeds and the + waterbugs all being carried across with it, too—this, I confess, has + always seemed to me engagingly marvellous. And I like, too, to think + that the canal, whose daily business is to be a "common carrier" of + others, thus occasionally tastes the luxury of being carried itself; as + sometimes one sees on a freight car a new buggy, or automobile, or + sometimes a locomotive, being luxuriously ridden along—as though out + for a holiday—instead of riding others. +</p> +<p> + And talking of freight-cars, it came to me with a sense of illumination + how different the word "Passaic" looks printed in white letters on the + grey sides of grim produce-vans in begrimed procession, from the way it + looks as it writes its name in wonderful white waterfalls, or murmurs it + through corridors of that strange pillared and cake-shaped rock, amid + the golden pomp of a perfect summer day. For a short distance the + Passaic and the canal run side by side, but presently they part company, + and mile after mile the canal seems to have the world to itself, once in + a great while finding human companionship in a shingled cottage half + hidden among willows, a sleepy brick-field run on principles as ancient + as itself, shy little girls picking flowers on its banks, or saucy boys + disporting themselves in the old swimming-hole; and +</p> +<pre class="si"> + Sometimes an angler comes and drops his hook + Within its hidden depths, and 'gainst a tree + Leaning his rod, reads in some pleasant book, + Forgetting soon his pride of fishery; + And dreams or falls asleep, + While curious fishes peep + About his nibbled bait or scornfully + Dart off and rise and leap. +</pre> +<p> + Once a year, indeed, every one goes a-fishing along the old canal—men, + women, boys, and girls. That is in spring, when the canal is emptied for + repairs, the patching up of leaks, and so forth. Then the fish lie + glittering in the shallow pools, as good as caught, and happy children + go home with strings of sunfish,—"pumpkin-seeds" they call + them,—cat-fish, and the like picturesque unprofitable spoils, while + graver fisher-folk take count of pickerel and bream. This merry festival + was over and gone, and the canal was all brimming with the lustral + renewal of its waters, its depths flashing now and again with the + passage of wary survivors of that spring <i>battue</i>. +</p> +<p> + It is essential to the appreciation of an old canal that one should not + expect it to provide excitement, that it be understood between it and + its fellow-pilgrim that there is very little to say and nothing to + record. Along the old tow-path you must be content with a few simple, + elemental, mysterious things. To enter into its spirit you must be + somewhat of a monastic turn of mind, and have spiritual affiliations, + above all, with La Trappe. For the presiding muse of an old canal is + Silence; yet, as at La Trappe, a silence far indeed from being a dumb + silence, but a silence that contains all speech. My friend and I spoke + hardly at all as we walked along, easily obedient to the spirit of the + hour and the place. For there were so few of those little gossipy + accidents and occurrences by the way that make those interruptions we + call conversation, and such overwhelming golden-handed presences of + sunlit woodlands, flashing water-meadows, shining, singing air, and + distant purple hills—all the blowing, rippling, leafy glory and mighty + laughter of a summer day—that we were glad enough to let the birds do + such talking as Nature deemed necessary; and I seem never to have heard + or seen so many birds, of so many varieties, as haunt that old canal. +</p> +<p> + As we chose our momentary camping-place under a buttonwood-tree, from + out an exuberant swamp of yellow water-lilies and the rearing + sword-blades of the coming cat-tail, a swamp blackbird, on his glossy + black orange-tipped wings, flung us defiance with his long, keen, full, + saucy note; and as we sat down under our buttonwood and spread upon the + sward our pastoral meal, the veery-thrush—sadder and stranger than any + nightingale—played for us, unseen, on an instrument like those old + water-organs played on by the flow and ebb of the tide, a flute of + silver in which some strange magician has somewhere hidden tears. I + wondered, as he sang, if the veery was the thrush that, to Walt + Whitman's fancy, "in the swamp in secluded recesses" mourned the death + of Lincoln: +</p> +<pre class="si"> + Solitary the thrush, + The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements, + Sings to himself a song. +</pre> +<p> + But when the veery had flown with his heart-break to some distant copse, + two song-sparrows came to persuade us with their blithe melody that life + was worth living, after all; and cheerful little domestic birds, like + the jenny-wren and the chipping-sparrow, pecked about and put in between + whiles their little chit-chat across the boughs, while the bobolink + called to us like a comrade, and the phoebe-bird gave us a series of + imitations, and the scarlet tanager and the wild canary put in a vivid + appearance, to show what can be done with colour, though they have no + song. +</p> +<p> + Yet, while one was grateful for such long, green silence as we found + along that old canal, one could not help feeling how hard it would be + to put into words an experience so infinite and yet so undramatic. Birds + and birds, and trees and trees, and the long, silent water! Prose has + seldom been adequate for such moments. So, as my friend and I took up + our walk again, I sang him this little song of the Silence of the Way: +</p> +<pre class="si"> + Silence, whose drowsy eyelids are soft leaves, + And whose half-sleeping eyes are the blue flowers, + On whose still breast the water-lily heaves, + And all her speech the whisper of the showers. + + Made of all things that in the water sway, + The quiet reed kissing the arrowhead, + The willows murmuring, all a summer day, + "Silence"—sweet word, and ne'er so softly said + + As here along this path of brooding peace, + Where all things dream, and nothing else is done + But all such gentle businesses as these + Of leaves and rippling wind, and setting sun + + Turning the stream to a long lane of gold, + Where the young moon shall walk with feet of pearl, + And, framed in sleeping lilies, fold on fold. + Gaze at herself like any mortal girl. +</pre> +<p> + But, after all, trees are perhaps the best expression of silence, massed + as they are with the merest hint of movement, and breathing the merest + suggestion of a sigh; and seldom have I seen such abundance and variety + of trees as along our old canal—cedars and hemlocks and hickory + dominating green slopes of rocky pasture, with here and there a clump of + silver birches bent over with the strain of last year's snow; and all + along, near by the water, beech and basswood, blue-gum and pin-oak, ash, + and even chestnut flourishing still, in defiance of blight. Nor have I + ever seen such sheets of water-lilies as starred the swampy thickets, in + which elder and hazels and every conceivable bush and shrub and giant + grass and cane make wildernesses pathless indeed save to the mink and + the water-snake, and the imagination that would fain explore their + glimmering recesses. +</p> +<p> + No, nothing except birds and trees, water-lilies and such like + happenings, ever happens along the old canal; and our nearest to a human + event was our meeting with a lonely, melancholy man, sitting near a + moss-grown water-wheel, smoking a corn-cob pipe, and gazing wistfully + across at the Ramapo Hills, over which great sunlit clouds were + billowing and casting slow-moving shadows. Stopping, we passed him the + time of day and inquired when the next barge was due. For answer he took + a long draw at his corn-cob, and, taking his eyes for a moment from the + landscape, said in a far-away manner that it might be due any time now, + as the spring had come and gone, and implying, with a sort of sad humour + in his eyes, that spring makes all things possible, brings all things + back, even an old slow-moving barge along the old canal. +</p> +<p> + "What do they carry on the canal?" I asked the melancholy man, the + romantic green hush and the gleaming water not irrelevantly flashing on + my fancy that far-away immortal picture of the lily-maid of Astolat on + her strange journey, with a letter in her hand for Lancelot. +</p> +<p> + "Coal," was his answer; and, again drawing at his corn-cob, he added, + with a sad and understanding smile, "once in a great while." Like most + melancholy men, he seemed to have brains, in his way, and to have no + particular work on hand, except, like ourselves, to dream. +</p> +<p> + "Suppose," said I, "that a barge should come along, and need to be drawn + up this 'plane'—would the old machinery work?" and I pointed to six + hundred feet of sloping grass, down which a tramway stretches and a + cable runs on little wheels—technically known, it appeared, as a + "plane." +</p> +<p> + Then the honour of the ancient company for which he had once worked + seemed to stir his blood, and he awakened to something like enthusiasm + as he explained the antique, picturesque device by which it is still + really possible for a barge to climb six hundred feet of grass and + fern—drawn up in a long "cradle," instead of being raised by locks in + the customary way. +</p> +<p> + Then he took us into the old building where, in the mossed and dripping + darkness, we could discern the great water-wheels that work this + fascinating piece of ancient engineering; and added that there would + probably be a barge coming along in three or four days, if we should + happen to be in the neighbourhood. He might have added that the old + canal is one of the few places where "time and tide" wait for any one + and everybody—but alas! on this occasion we could not wait for them. +</p> +<p> + Our walk was nearing its end when we came upon a pathetic reminder that, + though the old canal is so far from being a stormy sea, there have been + wrecks even in those quiet waters. In a backwater whispered over by + willows and sung over by birds, a sort of water-side graveyard, eleven + old barges were ingloriously rotting, unwept and unhonoured. The hulks + of old men-of-war, forgotten as they may seem, have still their annual + days of bunting and the salutes of cannon; but to these old servitors of + peace come no such memorial recognitions. +</p> +<p> + "Unwept and unhonoured, may be," said I to my friend, "but they shall + not go all unsung, though humble be the rhyme"; so here is the rhyme I + affixed to an old nail on the mouldering side of the <i>Janita C. + Williams</i>: +</p> +<pre class="si"> + You who have done your work and asked no praise, + Mouldering in these unhonoured waterways, + Carrying but simple peace and quiet fire, + Doing a small day's work for a small hire— + You need not praise, nor guns, nor flags unfurled, + Nor all such cloudy glories of the world; + The laurel of a simple duty done + Is the best laurel underneath the sun, + Yet would two strangers passing by this spot + Whisper, "Old boat—you are not all forgot!" +</pre> +<a name="2H_4_18"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<h2> + XIV +</h2> +<h3> + A MODERN SAINT FRANCIS +</h3> +<p> </p> + +<p> + We were neither of us fox-hunting ourselves, but chanced both to be out + on our morning walk and to be crossing a breezy Surrey common at the + same moment, when the huntsmen and huntresses of the Slumberfold Hunt + were blithely congregating for a day's run. A meet is always an + attractive sight, and we had both come to a halt within a yard or two of + each other, and stood watching the gallant company of fine ladies and + gentlemen on their beautiful, impatient mounts, keeping up a prancing + conversation, till the exciting moment should arrive when the cry would + go up that the fox had been started, and the whole field would sweep + away, a cataract of hounds, red-coats, riding habits, and dog-carts. +</p> +<p> + The moment came. The fox had been found in a spinney running down to + Withy Brook, and his race for life had begun. With a happy shout, the + hunt was up and off in a twinkling, and the stranger and I were left + alone on the broad common. +</p> +<p> + I had scanned him furtively as he stood near me; a tall, slightly build + man of about fifty, with perfectly white hair, and strangely gentle + blue eyes. There was a curious, sad distinction over him, and he had + watched the scene with a smile of blended humour and pity. +</p> +<p> + Turning to me, as we were left alone, and speaking almost as though to + himself: "It is a strange sight," he said with a sigh. "I wonder if it + seems as strange to you? Think of all those grown-up, so-called + civilized people being so ferociously intent on chasing one poor little + animal for its life—and feeling, when at last the huntsman holds up his + poor brush, with absurd pride (if indeed the fox is not too sly for + them), that they have really done something clever, in that with so many + horses and dogs and so much noise, they have actually contrived to catch + and kill one fox!" +</p> +<p> + "It is strange!" I said, for I had been thinking just that very thing. +</p> +<p> + "Of course, they always tell you," he continued, as we took the road + together, "that the fox really enjoys being hunted, and that he feels + his occupation gone if there are no hounds to track him, and finally to + tear him to pieces. What wonderful stories human nature will tell itself + in its own justification! Can one imagine any created thing <i>enjoying</i> + being pursued for its life, with all that loud terror of men and horses + and savage dogs at its heels? No doubt—if we can imagine even a fox so + self-conscious—it would take a certain pride in its own cunning and + skill, if the whole thing were a game; but a race with death is too + deadly in earnest for a fox even to relish his own stratagems. Happily + for the fox, it is probable that he does not feel so much for himself as + some of us feel for him; but any one who knows the wild things knows too + what terror they are capable of feeling, and how the fear of death is + always with them. No! you may be sure that a fox prefers a cosy + hen-roost to the finest run with the hounds ever made." +</p> +<p> + "But even if he should enjoy being hunted," I added, "the even stranger + thing to me is that civilized men and women should enjoy hunting him." +</p> +<p> + "Isn't it strange?" answered my companion eagerly, his face lighting up + at finding a sympathizer. "When will people realize that there is so + much more fun in studying wild things than in killing them!..." +</p> +<p> + He stopped suddenly in his walk, to gather a small weed which had + caught his quick eye by the roadside, and which he examined for a + moment through a little pocket microscope which I noticed, hanging + like an eyeglass round his neck, and which I learned afterward quite + affectionately to associate with him. Then, as we walked on, he + remarked: +</p> +<p> + "But, of course, we are yet very imperfectly civilized. Humanity is a + lesson learned very slowly by the human race. Yet we are learning it by + degrees, yes! we are learning it," and he threw out his long stride more + emphatically—the stride of one accustomed to long daily tramps on the + hills. +</p> +<p> + "Strange, that principle of cruelty in the universe!" he resumed, after + a pause in which he had walked on in silence. "Very strange. To me it is + the most mysterious of all things—though, I suppose, after all, it is + no more mysterious than pity. When, I wonder, did pity begin? Who was + the first human being to pity another? How strange he must have seemed + to the others, how incomprehensible and ridiculous—not to say + dangerous! There can be little doubt that he was promptly dispatched + with stone axes as an enemy of a respectable murderous society." +</p> +<p> + "I expect," said I "that our friends the fox-hunters would take a + similar view of our remarks on their sport." +</p> +<p> + "No doubt—and perhaps turn their hounds on us! A man hunt! 'Give me the + hunting of man!' as a brutal young poet we know of recently sang." +</p> +<p> + "How different was the spirit of Emerson's old verse," I said: +</p> +<pre class="si"> + "Hast thou named all the birds without a gun? + Loved the wood-rose, and left it on its stalk?... + O be my friend, and teach me to be thine!" +</pre> +<p> + "That is one of my mottoes!" cried my companion with evident pleasure. + "Let us go and quote it to our fox-hunters!" +</p> +<p> + "I wonder how the fox is getting on," I said. +</p> +<p> + "If he is any sort of fox, he is safe enough as yet, we may be sure. + They are wonderful creatures. It is not surprising that mankind has + always looked upon Reynard as almost a human being—if not more—for + there is something quite uncanny in his instincts, and the cool, + calculating way in which he uses them. He is come and gone like a ghost. + One moment you were sure you saw him clearly close by and the next he is + gone—who knows where? He can run almost as swiftly as light, and as + softly as a shadow; and in his wildest dash, what a sure judgment he has + for the lie of the ground, how unerringly—and at a moment when a + mistake is death—he selects his cover! How learned, too, he is in + his knowledge of the countryside! There is not a dry ditch, or a + water-course, or an old drain, or a hole in a bank for miles around that + is not mysteriously set down in the map he carries in his graceful, + clever head; and one need hardly say that all the suitable hiding-places + in and around farm-yards are equally well known to him. Then withal he + is so brave. How splendidly, when wearied out, and hopelessly tracked + down, with the game quite up, he will turn on his pursuers, and die with + his teeth fast in his enemy's throat!" +</p> +<p> + "I believe you are a fox-hunter in disguise," I laughed. +</p> +<p> + "Well, I have hunted as a boy," he said, "and I know something of what + those red-coated gentlemen are feeling. But soon I got more interested + in studying nature than killing it, and when I became a naturalist I + ceased to be a hunter. You get to love the things so that it seems like + killing little children. They come so close to you, are so beautiful and + so clever; and sometimes there seems such a curious pathos about them. + How any one can kill a deer with that woman's look in its eyes, I don't + know. I should always expect the deer to change into a fairy princess, + and die in my arms with the red blood running from her white breast. And + pigeons, too, with their soft sunny coo all the summer afternoon, or the + sudden lapping of sleepy wings round the chimneys—how can any one trap + or shoot them with blood-curdling rapidity, and not expect to see + ghosts!" +</p> +<p> + "Of course, there is this difference about the fox," I said, "that it is + really in a sense born to be hunted. For not only is it a fierce hunter + itself, but it would not be allowed to exist at all, so to say, unless + it consented to being hunted. Like a gladiator it accepts a comfortable + living for a certain time, on condition of its providing at last a + spirited exhibition of dying. In other words, it is preserved entirely + for the purpose of being hunted. It must accept life on that condition + or be extirpated as destructive vermin by the plundered farmer. Life is + sweet, after all, and to be a kind of protected highwayman of the + poultry-yard, for a few sweet toothsome years, taking one's chances of + being surely brought to book at last, may perhaps seem worth while." +</p> +<p> + "Yes! but how does your image of the protected gladiator reflect on + those who protect him? There, of course, is the point. The gladiator, as + you say, is willing to take his chances in exchange for fat living and + idleness, as long as he lives. You may even say that his profession is + good for him, develops fine qualities of mind even as well as body—but + what of the people who crowd with blood-thirsty eagerness to watch those + qualities exhibited in so tragic a fashion for their amusement? Do they + gain any of his qualities of skill and courage, and strength and + fearlessness in the face of death? No, they are merely brutalized by + cruel excitement—and while they applaud his skill and admire his + courage, they long most to watch him die. So—is it not?—with our + friend the fox. The huntsman invariably compliments him on his spirit + and his cunning, but what he wants is—the brush. He wants the + excitement of hunting the living thing to its death; and, let huntsmen + say what they will about the exhilaration of the horse exercise across + country as being the main thing, they know better—and, if it be true, + why don't they take it without the fox?" +</p> +<p> + "They do in America, as, of course, you know. There a man walks across + country trailing a stick, at the end of which is a piece of cloth + impregnated with some pungent scent which hounds love and mistake for + the real thing." +</p> +<p> + "Hard on the poor hounds!" smiled my friend. "Even worse than a red + herring. You could hardly blame the dogs if they mistook the man for + Actaeon and tore him to pieces." +</p> +<p> + "And I suspect that the huntsmen are no better satisfied." +</p> +<p> + "Yet, as we were saying, if the secret spring of their sport is not the + cruel delight of pursuing a living thing to its death, that American + plan should serve all the purposes, and give all the satisfaction for + which they claim to follow the hounds: the keen pleasure of a gallop + across country, the excitement of its danger, the pluck and pride of + taking a bad fence, and equally, too, the pleasure of watching the + hounds cleverly at work with their mysterious gift of scent. All the + same, I suspect there are few sportsmen who would not vote it a tame + substitute. Without something being killed, the zest, the 'snap,' is + gone. It is as depressing as a sham fight." +</p> +<p> + "Yes, that mysterious shedding of blood! what a part it has played in + human history! Even religion countenances it, and war glorifies it. Men + are never in higher spirits than when they are going to kill, or be + killed themselves, or see something else killed. Tennyson's 'ape and + tiger' die very hard in the tamest of us." +</p> +<p> + "Alas, indeed they do!" said my friend with a sigh. "But I do believe + that they are dying none the less. Just of late there has been a + reaction in favour of brute force, and people like you and me have been + ridiculed as old-fashioned sentimentalists. But reaction is one of the + laws of advance. Human progress always takes a step backwards after it + has taken two forward. And so it must be here too. In the end, it is the + highest type among men and nations that count, and the highest types + among both today are those which show most humanity, shrink most from + the infliction of pain. When one thinks of the horrible cruelties that + were the legal punishment of criminals, even within the last two hundred + years, and not merely brutal criminals, but also political offenders or + so-called heretics—how every one thought it the natural and proper + thing to break a man on the wheel for a difference of opinion, or + torture him with hideous ingenuity into a better frame of mind, and + how the pettiest larcenies were punished by death; it seems as if we + of today, even the least sensitive of us, cannot belong to the same + race—and it is impossible to deny that the heart of the world has grown + softer and that pity is becoming more and more a natural instinct in + human nature. I believe that some day it will have thrust out cruelty + altogether, and that the voluntary infliction of pain upon another will + be unknown. The idea of any one killing for pleasure will seem too + preposterous to be believed, and soldiers and fox-hunters and + pigeon-shooters will be spoken of as nowadays we speak of cannibals. + But, of course, I am a dreamer," he concluded, his face shining with his + gentle dream, as though he had been a veritable saint of the calendar. +</p> +<p> + "Yes, a dream," he added presently, "and yet—" In that "and yet" + there was a world of invincible faith that made it impossible not to + share his dream, even see it building before one's eyes—such is the + magnetic power of a passionate personal conviction. +</p> +<p> + "Of course," he went on again, "we all know that 'nature is one with + rapine, a harm no preacher can heal.' But because the fox runs off with + the goose, or the hawk swoops down on the chicken, and 'yon whole little + wood is a world of plunder and prey'—is that any reason why we should + be content to plunder and prey too? And after all, the cruelty of Nature + is only one-sided. There is lots of pity in Nature too. These strange + little wild lives around us are not entirely bent on killing and eating + each other. They know the tenderness of motherhood, the sweetness of + building a home together, and I believe there is far more comradeship + and mutual help amongst them than we know of. Yes, even in wild Nature + there is a principle of love working no less than a principle of hate. + Nature is not all-devouring and destroying. She is loving and building + too. Nature is more constructive than destructive, and she is ever at + work evolving and evolving a higher dream. Surely it is not for man, to + whom, so far as we know, Nature has entrusted the working out of her + finest impulses, and whom she has endowed with all the fairy apparatus + of the soul; it is not for him, whose eyes—of all her children—Nature + has opened, the one child she has taken into her confidence and to whom + she has whispered her secret hopes and purposes; surely it is not for + man voluntarily to deny his higher lot, and, because the wolf and he + have come from the same great mother, say: 'I am no better than the + wolf. Why should I not live the life of a wolf—and kill and devour like + my brother?' Surely it is not for the cruel things in Nature to teach + man cruelty—rather, if it were possible," and the saint smiled at his + fancy, "would it be the mission of man to teach them kindness: rather + should he preach pity to the hawk and peace between the panther and the + bear. It is not the bad lessons of Nature, but the good, that are meant + for man—though, as you must have noticed, man seldom appeals to the + precedents of Nature except to excuse that in him which is Nature at her + worst. When we say, 'it is only natural,' we almost invariably refer to + that in Nature of which Nature herself has entrusted the refinement or + the elimination to man. It is Nature's bad we copy, not Nature's good; + and always we forget that we ourselves are a part of Nature—Nature's + vicegerent, so to say, upon the earth—" +</p> +<p> + As we talked, we had been approaching a house built high among the + heather, with windows looking over all the surrounding country. + Presently, the saint stopped in front of it. +</p> +<p> + "This is my house," he said. "Won't you come in and see me some + time?—and, by the way, I am going to talk to some of the village + children about the wild things, bird's nesting, and so forth, up at the + schoolhouse on Thursday. I wish you'd come and help me. One's only hope + is with the children. The grown-up are too far gone. Mind you come." +</p> +<p> + So we parted, and, as I walked across the hill homeward, haunted by that + gentle face, I thought of Melampus, that old philosopher who loved the + wild things so and had made such friends with them, that they had taught + him their language and told him all their secrets: +</p> +<pre class="si"> + With love exceeding a simple love of the things + That glide in grasses and rubble of woody wreck; + Or change their perch on a beat of quivering wings + From branch to branch, only restful to pipe and peck; + Or, bridled, curl at a touch their snouts in a ball; + Or cast their web between bramble and thorny hook; + The good physician, Melampus, loving them all, + Among them walked, as a scholar who reads a book. +</pre> +<p> + As I dipped into the little thick-set wood that surrounds my house, + something stood for a second in one of the openings, then was gone like + a shadow. I was glad to think how full of bracken and hollows, and + mysterious holes and corners of mossed and lichened safety was our old + wood—for the shadow was a fox. I like to think it was the very fox we + had been talking about come to find shelter with me—and, if he stole a + meal out of our hen-roost, I gave it him before he asked it, with all + the will in the world. I hope he chose a good fat hen, and not one of + your tough old capons that sometimes come to table. +</p> +<a name="2H_4_19"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<h2> + XV +</h2> +<h3> + THE LITTLE GHOST IN THE GARDEN +</h3> +<p> </p> + +<p> + I don't know in what corner of the garden his busy little life now takes + its everlasting rest. None of us had the courage to stand by, that + summer morning, when Morris, our old negro man, buried him, and we felt + sympathetic for Morris that the sad job should fall upon him, for Morris + loved him just as we did. Perhaps if we had loved him less, more + sentimentally than deeply, we should have indulged in some sort of + appropriate ceremonial, and marked his grave with a little stone. But, + as I have said, his grave, like that of the great prophet, is a secret + to this day. None of us has ever asked Morris about it, and his grief + has been as reticent as our own. I wondered the other night, as I walked + the garden in a veiled moonlight, whether it was near the lotus-tanks he + was lying—for I remembered how he would stand there, almost by the + hour, watching the goldfish that we had engaged to protect us against + mosquitoes, moving mysteriously under the shadows of the great flat + leaves. In his short life he grew to understand much of this strange + world, but he never got used to those goldfish; and often I have seen + him, after a long wistful contemplation of them, turn away with a sort + of half-frightened, puzzled bark, as though to say that he gave it up. + Or, does he lie, I wonder, somewhere among the long grass of the + salt-marsh, that borders our garden, and in perigee tides widens out + into a lake. There indeed would be his appropriate country, for there + was the happy hunting-ground through which in life he was never tired of + roaming, in the inextinguishable hope of mink, and with the occasional + certainty of a water-rat. +</p> +<p> + He had come to us almost as mysteriously as he went away; a fox-terrier + puppy wandered out of the Infinite to the neighbourhood of our ice-box, + one November morning, and now wandered back again. Technically, he was + just graduating out of puppyhood, though, like the most charming human + beings, he never really grew up, and remained, in behaviour and + imagination, a puppy to the end. He was a dog of good breed and good + manners, evidently with gentlemanly antecedents canine and human. There + were those more learned in canine aristocracy than ourselves who said + that his large leaf-like, but very becoming, ears meant a bar sinister + somewhere in his pedigree, but to our eyes those only made him + better-looking; and, for the rest of him, he was race—race nervous, + sensitive, refined, and courageous—from the point of his all-searching + nose to the end of his stub of a tail, which the conventional docking + had seemed but to make the more expressive. We had already one dog in + the family when he arrived, and two Maltese cats. With the cats he was + never able to make friends, in spite of persistent well-intentioned + efforts. It was evident to us that his advances were all made in the + spirit of play, and from a desire of comradeship, the two crowning needs + of his blithe sociable spirit. But the cats received them in an attitude + of invincible distrust, of which his poor nose frequently bore the sorry + signature. Yet they had become friendly enough with the other dog, an + elderly setter, by name Teddy, whose calm, lordly, slow-moving ways were + due to a combination of natural dignity, vast experience of life, and + some rheumatism. As Teddy would sit philosophizing by the hearth of an + evening, immovable and plunged in memories, yet alert on the instant to + a footfall a quarter of a mile away, they would rub their sinuous + smoke-grey bodies to and fro beneath his jaws, just as though he were a + piece of furniture; and he would take as little notice of them as though + he were the leg of the piano; though sometimes he would wag his tail + gently to and fro, or rap it softly on the floor, as though appreciating + the delicate attention. +</p> +<p> </p> +<p> + Of Teddy's reception of the newcomer we had at first some slight + misgiving, for, amiable as we have just seen him with his Maltese + companions, and indeed as he is generally by nature, his is the + amiability that comes of conscious power, and is his, so to say, by + right of conquest; for of all neighbouring dogs he is the acknowledged + king. The reverse of quarrelsome, the peace of his declining years has + been won by much historical fighting, and his reputation among the dogs + of his acquaintance is such that it is seldom necessary for him to + assert his position. It is only some hapless stranger ignorant of his + standing that will occasionally provoke him to a display of those + fighting qualities he grows more and more reluctant to employ. Even with + such he is comparatively merciful; stern, but never brutal. Usually all + that is necessary is for him to look at them steadfastly for a few + moments in a peculiar way. This seems to convince them that, after all, + discretion is the better part, and slowly and sadly they turn around in + a curious cowed way, and walk off, apparently too scared to run, with + Teddy, like Fate, grimly at their heels, steadily "pointing" them off + the premises. We were a little anxious, therefore, as to how Teddy would + take our little terrier, with his fussy, youthful self-importance, and + eternal restless poking into other folks' affairs. But Teddy, as we + might have told ourselves, had had a long and varied experience of + terriers, and had nothing to learn from us. Yet I have no doubt that, + with his instinctive courtesy, he divined the wishes of the family in + regard to the newcomer, and was, therefore, predisposed in his favour. + This, however, did not save the evidently much overawed youngster from a + stern and searching examination, the most trying part of which seemed + to be that long, silent, hypnotizing contemplation of him, which is + Teddy's way of asserting his dignity. The little dog visibly trembled + beneath the great one's gaze, his tongue hanging out of his mouth, and + his eyes wandering helplessly from side to side; and he seemed to be + saying, in his dog way: "O yes! I know you are a very great and + important personage—and I am only a poor little puppy of no importance. + Only please let me go on living—and you will see how well I will + behave." Teddy seemed to be satisfied that some such recognition and + submission had been tendered him; so presently he wagged his tail, that + had up till then been rigid as a ramrod, and not only the little + terrier, but all of us, breathed again. Yet it was some time before + Teddy would admit him into anything like what one might call intimacy, + and premature attempts at gamesome familiarity were checked by the + gathering thunder of a lazy growl that unmistakably bade the youngster + keep his place. But real friendship eventually grew between them, + on Teddy's side a sort of big-brother affectionate tutelage and + guardianship, and on Puppy's—for, though we tried many, we never found + any other satisfactory name for him but "Puppy"—a reverent admiration + and watchful worshipping imitation. No great man was ever more anxiously + copied by some slavish flatterer than that old sleepy carelessly-great + setter by that eager, ambitious little terrier. The occasions when to + bark and when not to bark, for example. One could actually see Puppy + studying the old dog's face on doubtful occasions of the kind. Boiling + over, as he visibly was, with the desire to bark his soul out, yet he + could be seen unmistakably restraining himself, till Teddy, after some + preliminary soliloquizing in deep undertones, had made up his mind that + the suspicious shuffling-by of probably some inoffensive Italian workman + demanded investigation, and lumberingly risen to his feet and made for + the door. Then, like a bunch of firecrackers, Puppy was at the heels, + all officious assistance, and the two would disappear like an old and a + young thunderbolt into the resounding distance. +</p> +<p> </p> +<p> + Teddy's friendship had seemed to be definitely won on an occasion which + brought home to one the quaint resemblance between the codes and ways of + dogs and those of schoolboys. When the winter came on, a rather severe + one, it soon became evident that the little short-haired fellow suffered + considerably from the cold. Out on walks, he was visibly shivering, + though he made no fuss about it. So one of the angels in the house + knitted for him a sort of woollen sweater buttoned down his neck and + under his belly, and trimmed it with some white fur that gave it an + exceedingly smart appearance. Teddy did not happen to be there when it + was first tried on, and, for the moment, Puppy had to be content with + our admiration, and his own vast sense of importance. Certainly, a more + self-satisfied terrier never was than he who presently sped out, to air + his new finery before an astonished neighbourhood. But alas! you should + have seen him a few minutes afterwards. We had had the curiosity to + stroll out to see how he had got on, and presently, in a bit of rocky + woodland near by, we came upon a curious scene. In the midst of a clump + of red cedars, three great dogs, our Teddy, a wicked old black + retriever, and a bustling be-wigged and be-furred collie, stood in a + circle round Puppy, seated on his haunches, trembling with fear, tongue + lolling and eyes wandering, for all the world as though they were + holding a court-martial, or, at all events, a hazing-party. The offence + evidently lay with that dandified new sweater. One and another of the + dogs smelt at it, then tugged at it in evident disgust; and, as each + time Puppy made a move to get away, all girt him round with guttural + thunder of disapproval, as much as to say: "Do you call that a thing for + a manly dog to go around in? You ought to be ashamed of yourself, you + miserable dandy." +</p> +<p> + We couldn't help reflecting that it was all very well for those great + comfortable long-haired dogs to talk, naturally protected as they were + from the cold. Yet that evidently cut no figure with them, and they went + on sniffing and tugging and growling, till we thought our poor Puppy's + eyes and tongue would drop out with fear. Yet, all the time, they + seemed to be enjoying his plight, seemed to be smiling grimly together, + wicked old experienced brutes as they were. +</p> +<p> + Presently the idea of the thing seemed to occur to Puppy, or out of his + extremity a new soul was born within him, for suddenly an infinite + disgust of his new foppery seemed to take possession of him too, and, + regaining his courage, he turned savagely upon it, ripping it this way + and that, and struggling with might and main to rid himself of the + accursed thing. Presently he stood free, and barks of approval at once + went up from his judges. He had come through his ordeal, and was once + more a dog among dogs. Great was the rejoicing among his friends, and + the occasion having been duly celebrated by joint destruction and + contumely of the offending garment, Teddy and he returned home, friends + for life. +</p> +<p> </p> +<p> + It is to be feared that that friendship, deep and tender as it grew to + be on both sides, perhaps particularly on Teddy's, was the indirect + cause of Puppy's death. I have referred to Teddy's bark, and how he is + not wont to waste it on trivial occasions, or without due thought. On + the other hand, he is proud of it, and loves to practice it—just for + its own sake, particularly on early mornings, when, however fine a bark + it is, most of our neighbours would rather continue sleeping than wake + up to listen to it. There is no doubt at all, for those who understand + him, that it is a purely artistic bark. He means no harm to any one by + it. When the milkman, his private enemy, comes at seven, the bark is + quite different. This barking of Teddy's seems to be literally at + nothing. Around five o'clock on summer mornings, he plants himself on a + knob of rock overlooking the salt marsh and barks, possibly in honour of + the rising sun, but with no other perceptible purpose. So have I heard + men rise in the dawn to practice the cornet—but they were men, so they + ran no risk of their lives. Teddy's practicing, however, has now been + carried on for several years in the teeth of no little peril; and, had + it not been for much human influence employed on his behalf, he would + long since have antedated his little friend in Paradise. When that + little friend, however, came to assist and emulate him in those morning + recitals, adding to his bark an occasional—I am convinced purely + playful—bite, I am inclined to think that a sentiment grew in the + neighbourhood that one dog at a time was enough. At all events, Teddy + still barks at dawn as of old, but our little Puppy barks no more. +</p> +<p> + Before the final quietus came to him, there were several occasions on + which the Black dog, called Death, had almost caught him in his jaws. + One there was in especial. He had, I believe, no hatred for any living + thing save Italian workmen and automobiles. I have seen an Italian + workman throw his pick-axe at him, and then take to his heels in + grotesque flight. But the pick-axe missed him, as did many another + clumsily hurled missile. +</p> +<p> </p> +<p> + An automobile, however, on one occasion, came nearer its mark. Like + every other dog that ever barked, particularly terriers, Puppy delighted + to harass the feet of fast trotting horses, mockingly running ahead of + them, barking with affected savagery, and by a miracle evading their + on-coming hoofs—which to him, tiny thing as he was, must have seemed + like trip-hammers pounding down from the sky. But horses understand such + gaiety in terriers. They understand that it is only their foolish fun. + Automobiles are different. They have no souls. They see nothing engaging + in having their tires snapped at, as they whirl swiftly by; and, one + day, after Puppy had flung himself in a fine fury at the tires of one of + these soulless things, he gave a sharp yelp—"not cowardly!"—and lay a + moment on the roadside. But only a moment; then he went limping off on + his three sound legs, and hid himself away from all sympathy, in some + unknown spot. It was in vain we called and sought him, and only after + two days was he discovered, in the remotest corner of a great rocky + cellar, determined apparently to die alone in an almost inaccessible + privacy of wood and coal. Yet, when at last we persuaded him that life + was still sweet and carried him upstairs into the great living-room, and + the beautiful grandmother, who knows the sorrows of animals almost as + the old Roman seer knew the languages of beasts and birds, had taken + him in charge and made a cosy nest of comforters for him by the fire, + and tempted his languid appetite—to which the very thought of bones + was, of course, an offence—with warm, savory-smelling soup; then, he + who had certainly been no coward—for his thigh was a cruel lump of pain + which no human being would have kept so patiently to himself—became + suddenly, like many human invalids, a perfect glutton of self-pity; and + when we smoothed and patted him and told him how sorry we were, it was + laughable, and almost uncanny, how he suddenly set up a sort of moaning + talk to us, as much as to say that he certainly had had a pretty bad + time, was really something of a hero, and deserved all the sympathy we + would give him. So far as one can be sure about anything so mysterious + as animals, I am sure that from then on he luxuriated in his little + hospital by the fireside, and played upon the feelings of his beautiful + nurse, and of his various solicitous visitors, with all the histrionic + skill of the spoiled and petted convalescent. Suddenly, however, one + day, he forgot his part. He heard some inspiring barking going on + nearby—and, in a flash, his comforters were thrust aside, and he was + off and away to join the fun. Then, of course, we knew that he was well + again; though he still went briskly about his various business on three + legs for several days. +</p> +<p> + His manner was quite different, however, the afternoon he had so + evidently come home to die. There was no pose about the little forlorn + figure, which, after a mysterious absence of two days, suddenly + appeared, as we were taking tea on the veranda, already the very ghost + of himself. Wearily he sought the cave of the beautiful grandmother's + skirts, where, whenever he had had a scolding, he was wont always to + take refuge—barking, fiercely, as from an inaccessible fortress, at his + enemies. +</p> +<p> </p> +<p> + But, this afternoon, there was evidently no bark in him, poor little + fellow; everything about him said that he had just managed to crawl home + to die. His brisk white coat seemed dank with cold dews, and there was + something shadowy about him and strangely quiet. His eyes, always so + alert, were strangely heavy and indifferent, yet questioning and somehow + accusing. He seemed to be asking us why a little dog should suffer so, + and what was going to happen to him, and what did it all mean. Alas! We + could not tell him; and none of us dare say to each other that our + little comrade in the mystery of life was going to die. But a silence + fell over us all, and the beautiful grandmother took him into her care, + and so well did her great and wise heart nurse him through the night + that next morning it almost seemed as though we had been wrong; for a + flash of his old spirit was in him again, and, though his little legs + shook under him, it was plain that he wanted to try and be up at his + day's work on the veranda, warning off the passer-by, or in the garden + carrying on his eternal investigations, or farther afield in the + councils and expeditions of his fellows. So we let him have his way, and + for a while he seemed happier and stronger for the sunshine, and the old + familiar scents and sounds. But the one little tired husky bark he gave + at his old enemy, the Italian workman, passing by, would have broken + your heart; and the effort he made with a bone, as he visited the + well-remembered neighbourhood of the ice-box for the last time, was + piteous beyond telling. Those sharp, strong teeth that once could bite + and grind through anything could do nothing with it now. To lick it + sadly with tired lips, in a sort of hopeless way, was all that was left; + and there was really a look in his face as though he accepted this + mortal defeat, as he lay down, evidently exhausted with his exertions, + on a bank nearby. But once more his spirit seemed to revive, and he + scrambled to his legs again and wearily crawled to the back of the + house, where the beautiful grandmother loves to sit and look over the + glittering salt-marsh in the summer afternoons. +</p> +<p> </p> +<p> + Of course, he knew that she was there. She had been his best friend in + this strange world. His last effort was naturally to be near her again. + Almost he reached that kind cave of her skirts. Only another yard or two + and he had been there. But the energy that had seemed irrepressible and + everlasting had come to its end, and the little body had to give in at + last, and lie down wearily once more with no life left but the love in + its fading eyes. +</p> +<p> + There are some, I suppose, who may wonder how one can write about the + death of a mere dog like this; and cannot understand how the death of a + little terrier can make the world seem a lonelier place. But there are + others, I know, who will scarce need telling, men and women with little + ghosts of their own haunting their moonlit gardens; strange, appealing, + faithful companions, kind little friendly beings that journeyed with + them awhile the pilgrimage of the soul. +</p> +<p> + I often wonder if Teddy misses his little busy playfellow and disciple + as we do; if, perhaps, as he barks over the marsh of a morning, he is + sending him a message. He goes about the place with nonchalant greatness + as of old, and the Maltese cats still rub their sinuous smoke-grey + bodies to and fro beneath his jaws at evening. There is no sign of + sorrow upon him. But he is old and very wise, and keeps strange + knowledge to himself. So, who can say? +</p> +<a name="2H_4_20"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<h2> + XVI +</h2> +<h3> + THE ENGLISH COUNTRYSIDE +</h3> +<p> </p> + +<p> + For the genuine lover of nature, as distinct from the connoisseur of + dainty or spectacular "scenery," nature has always and everywhere some + charm or satisfaction. He will find it no less—some say more—in winter + than in summer, and I have little doubt that the great Alkali Desert is + not entirely without its enthusiasts. The nature among which we spent + our childhood is apt to have a lasting hold on us, in defiance of + showier competition, and I suppose there is no land with soul so dead + that it does not boast itself the fairest under heaven. +</p> +<p> + I am writing this surrounded by a natural scene which I would not + exchange for the Swiss lakes, yet I presume it is undeniable that + Switzerland has a more universal reputation for natural beauty than + Connecticut. It is, as we say, one of the show places of the earth. So + Niagara Falls, the Grand Cañon, the Rockies, and California generally + lord it over America. Italy has such a reputation for beauty that it is + almost unfair to expect her to live up to it. I once ventured to say + that the Alps must be greasy with being climbed, and it says much for + such stock pieces in nature's repertoire, that, in spite of all the wear + and tear of sentimental travellers, the mock-admiration of generations, + the batteries of amateur cameras, the Riviera, the English lakes, the + Welsh mountains, the Highlands of Scotland, and other tourist-trodden + classics of the picturesque, still remain haunts of beauty and joys + forever. God's masterpieces do not easily wear out. +</p> +<p> + Every country does something supremely well, and England may be said to + have a patent for a certain kind of scenery which Americans are the + first to admire. English scenery has no more passionate pilgrim than the + traveller from the United States, as the visitors' books of its various + show-places voluminously attest. Perhaps it is not difficult, when one + has lived in both countries, to understand why. +</p> +<p> + While America, apart from its impressive natural splendours, is rich + also in idyllic and pastoral landscape, it has, as yet, but little + "countryside." I say, as yet, because "the countryside," I think I am + right in feeling, is not entirely a thing of nature's making, but + rather a collaboration resulting from nature and man living so long in + partnership together. In England, with which the word is peculiarly, if + not exclusively, associated, God is not entirely to be credited with + making the country. Man has for generations also done his share. +</p> +<p> + It is perhaps not without significance that the word "countryside" + was not to be found in Webster's dictionary, till a recent edition. + Originally, doubtless, it was used with reference to those rural + districts in the vicinity of a town; as one might say the country side + of the town. Not wild or solitary nature was meant, but nature + humanized, made companionable by the presence and occupations of man; a + nature which had made the winding highway, the farm, and the pasture, + even the hamlet, with its church tower and its ancient inn, one with + herself. +</p> +<p> + The American, speeding up to London from his landing either at Liverpool + or Southampton, always exclaims on the gardenlike aspect, the deep, rich + greenness of the landscape. It is not so much the specific evidences of + cultivation, though those, of course, are plentifully present, but a + general air of ripeness and order. Even the land not visible under + cultivation suggests immemorial care and fertility. We feel that this + land has been fought over and ploughed over, nibbled over by sheep, sown + and reaped, planted and drained, walked over, hunted over, and very much + beloved, for centuries. It is not fanciful to see in it a land to + which its people have been stubbornly and tenderly devoted—still + "Shakespeare's England," still his favoured "isle set in the silver + sea." +</p> +<p> + As seen from the railway-carriage window, one is struck, too, by the + comparative tidiness of the English landscape. There are few loose ends, + and the outskirts of villages are not those distressing dump-heaps + which they too often are in America. Yet there is no excessive air of + trimness. The order and grooming seem a part of nature's processes. + There is, too, a casual charm about the villages themselves, the + graceful, accidental grouping of houses and gardens, which suggests + growth rather than premeditation. The general harmony does not preclude, + but rather comes of, the greatest variety of individual character. +</p> +<p> + Herein the English village strikingly differs from the typical New + England village, where the charm comes of a prim uniformity, and + individuality is made to give place to a general parking of lawns and + shade-trees in rectangular blocks and avenues. A New England village + suggests some large institution disposed in separate uniform buildings, + placed on one level carpet of green, each with a definite number of + trees, and the very sunlight portioned out into gleaming allotments. + The effect gained is for me one of great charm—the charm of a vivid, + exquisitely ordered, green silence, with a touch of monastic, or + Quakerish, decorum. I would not have it otherwise, and I speak of it + only to suggest by contrast the different, desultory charm of an old + English village, where beauty has not been so much planned, as has just + "occurred." +</p> +<p> + Of course, this is the natural result of the long occupation of the + land. Each century in succession has had a hand in shaping the + countryside to its present aspect, and English history is literally a + living visible part of English scenery. Here the thirteenth century has + left a church, here the fourteenth a castle, here the sixteenth, with + its suppression of the monasteries, a ruined abbey. Here is an inn where + Chaucer's pilgrims stopped on the way to Canterbury. Here, in a field + covered over by a cow-shed, is a piece of tessellated pavement which was + once the floor of an old country house occupied by one of Caesar's + generals. +</p> +<p> + Those strange grassy mounds breaking the soft sky-line of the rolling + South Downs are the tombs of Saxon chieftains, that rubble of stones at + the top of yonder hill was once a British camp, and those curious ridges + terracing yonder green slope mark the trenches of some prehistoric + battlefield. All these in the process of time have become part and + parcel of the English countryside, as necessary to its "English" + character as its trees and its wild flowers. +</p> +<p> + How much, too, the English countryside owes for its beauty to the many + old manor-houses, gabled and moated, with their quaint, mossy-walled + gardens and great forestlike parks. Whatever we may think of the English + territorial system as economics, its service to English scenery has been + incalculable. Without English traditionalism we should hardly have had + the English countryside. +</p> +<p> + The conservation of great estates, entailing a certain conservatism in + the treatment of farm lands from generation to generation, and the + upholding, too, of game-preserves, however obnoxious to the land + reformer, have been all to the good of the nature-lover. We owe no + little of the beauty of the English woodland to the English pheasant; + and with the coming of land nationalization we may expect to see + considerable changes in the English countryside. Meanwhile, in spite of, + or perhaps because of, the feudalistic character of English landlordism, + the Englishman enjoys a right of walking over his native land of which + no capitalist can rob him. Hence results another charming feature of the + English countryside—the footpaths you see everywhere winding over hill + and dale, through field and coppice. The ancient rights of these are + safeguarded to the people forever by statute no wealth can defy; and, + let any <i>nouveau riche</i> of a landlord try to close one of them, and + he has to reckon with one of the pluckiest and most persistent + organizations of English John Hampdens, the society that makes the + protection of these traditional pathways its particular care. So the + rich man cannot lock up his trees and his woodland glades all for + himself, but is compelled to share them to the extent of allowing the + poorest pedestrian to walk through them—which is about all the rich man + can do with them himself. +</p> +<p> + These footpaths, in conjunction with English lanes, have made the charm + of walking tours in England proverbial. Certain counties particularly + pride themselves on their lands. Surrey and Devonshire are the great + rivals in this respect. We say "Surrey lanes" or "Devonshire lanes," + as we speak of "Italian skies" or "Southern hospitality." Other + counties—Warwickshire, for example—doubtless have lanes no less + lovely, but Surrey and Devonshire have, so to say, got the decision; + and, if an American traveller wants to see a typical English lane, he + goes to Surrey or Devonshire, just as, if he wants a typical English + pork-pie, he sends to Melton Mowbray. +</p> +<p> + And the English lane has come honestly by its reputation. You may be + disappointed in Venice, but you will be hard to please if you are not + caught by the spell of an English lane. Of course, you must not expect + to feel that spell if you tear through it in a motor-car. It was made + for the loiterer, as its whimsical twists and turns plainly show. If you + are in a hurry, you had better keep to the king's highway, stretching + swift and white on the king's business. The English lane was made for + the leisurely meandering of cows to and from pasture, for the dreamy + snail-pace of time-forgetting lovers, for children gathering primroses + or wild strawberries, or for the knap-sacked wayfarer to whom time and + space are no objects, whose destination is anywhere and nowhere, whose + only clocks are the rising sun and the evening star, and to whom the way + means more than the goal. +</p> +<p> + I should not have spoken of it as "made," for, when it is most + characteristic, an English lane has no suggestion of ever having been + man-made like other roads. It seems as much a natural feature as the + woods or meadows through which it passes; and sometimes, as in Surrey, + when it runs between high banks, tunnelling its way under green boughs, + it seems more like an old river-bed than a road, whose sides nature has + tapestried with ferns and flowers. Of all roads in the world it is the + dreamer's road, luring on the wayfarer with perpetual romantic promise + and surprise, winding on and on, one can well believe, into the very + heart of fairy-land. Everything beautiful seems to be waiting for us + somewhere in the turnings of an English lane. +</p> +<p> + Had I sat down to write of the English countryside two years ago, I + should have done so with a certain amount of cautious skepticism. I + should have said to myself: "You have not visited England for over ten + years. Are you quite sure that your impressions of its natural beauties + are not the rose-coloured exaggerations of memory? Are not time and + distance lending their proverbial enchantment?" In fact, as I set sail + to revisit England, the spring before last, it was in some such mood of + anticipatory disillusion. +</p> +<p> + After all, I had said to myself, is not the English countryside the work + of the English poets—the English spring, the English wild flowers, the + English lark, the English nightingale, and so forth? That longing of + Browning expressed in the lines, +</p> +<pre> + O to be in England + Now that April's there! +</pre> +<p class="noindent"> + was, after all, the cry of a homesick versifier, thinking "Home + Thoughts, from Abroad"; and are Herrick and Wordsworth quite to be + trusted on the subject of daffodils? +</p> +<p> + Well, I am glad to have to own that my revisiting my native land + resulted in an agreeable disappointment. With a critical American eye, + jealously on my guard against sentimental superstition, I surveyed the + English landscape and examined its various vaunted beauties and + fascinations, as though making their acquaintance for the first time. + No, my youthful raptures had not been at fault, and the poets were once + more justified. The poets are seldom far wrong. If they see anything, it + is usually there. If we cannot see it, too, it is the fault of our eyes. +</p> +<p> + Take the English hawthorn, for instance. As its fragrance is wafted to + you from the bushes where it hangs like the fairest of white linen, you + will hardly, I think, quarrel with its praises. Yet, though it is, if I + am not mistaken, of rare occurrence in America, it is not absolutely + necessary to go to England for the hawthorn. Any one who cares to go + a-Maying along the banks of the Hudson, in the neighbourhood of + Peekskill, will find it there. But for the primrose and the cowslip you + must cross the sea; and, if you come upon such a wood as I strayed into, + my last visit, you will count it worth the trip. It was literally + carpeted with clumps of primroses and violets (violets that smell, too) + so thickly massed together in the mossy turf that there was scarcely + room to tread. There are no words rich or abundant enough to suggest the + sense of innocent luxury brought one by such a natural Persian carpet of + soft gold and dewy purple, at once so gorgeous and yet so gentle. In all + this lavish loveliness of English wild flowers there is, indeed, a + peculiar tenderness. The innocence of children seems to be in them, and + the tenderness of lovers. +</p> +<pre> + A lover would not tread + A cowslip on the head— +</pre> +<p> + How appropriately such lines come to mind as one carefully picks one's + way down a green hillside yellow with cowslips, and breathing perhaps + the most delicate of all flowery fragrances. Yet again, as we pass into + another stretch of woodland, another profusion and another fragrance + await us, the winey perfume and the spectral blue sheen of the wild + hyacinth. As one comes upon stretches of these hyacinths in the woods, + they seem at first glance like pools of blue water or fallen pieces of + the sky. Here, for once, the poets are left behind, and, of them all, + Shakespeare and Milton alone have come near to suggesting the + loveliness, at once so spiritual and so warmly and sweetly of the earth, + that belongs to English wild flowers. I know not if Sheffield steel + still keeps its position among the eternal verities, but in an age when + so many of one's cherished beliefs are threatened with the scrap-heap, + I count it of no small importance to be able to retain one's faith in + the English lark and English wild flowers. +</p> +<p> + But the English countryside is not all greenness and softness, blossomy + lanes, moated granges, and idyllic villages. It by no means always + suggests the gardener, the farmer, or the gamekeeper. It is rich, too, + in wildness and solitude, in melancholy fens and lonely moorlands. To + the American accustomed to the vast areas of his own enormous continent, + it would come as a surprise to realize that a land far smaller than many + of his States can in certain places give one so profound a sense of the + wilderness. Yet I doubt if a man could feel lonelier anywhere in the + world than on a Yorkshire moor or on Salisbury Plain. +</p> +<p> + After all, we are apt to forget that, even on the largest continent, we + can see only a limited portion of the earth at once. When one is in the + middle of Lake Erie we are as much out of sight of land, as impressed by + the illusion of boundless water, as if we were in the middle of the + Pacific Ocean. So, on Salisbury Plain, with nothing but rolling billows + of close-cropped turf, springy and noiseless to the tread, as far as the + eye can see, one feels as alone with the universe as in the middle of + some Asian desert. In addition to the actual loneliness of the scene, + and a silence broken only by the occasional tinkle of sheep-bells, as a + flock moves like a fleecy cloud across the grass, is an imaginative + loneliness induced by the overwhelming sense of boundless unrecorded + time, the "dim-grey-grown ages," of which the mysterious boulders of + Stonehenge are the voiceless witnesses. To experience this feeling to + the full one should come upon an old Roman road in the twilight, + grass-grown, choked with underbrush, but still running straight and + clearly defined as when it shook to the tread of Roman legions. It is + eery to follow one of these haunted roads, filled with the far-off + thoughts and fancies it naturally evokes, and then suddenly to come out + again into the world of today, as it joins the highway once more, and + the lights of a wayside inn welcome us back to humanity, with perhaps a + touring car standing at the door. +</p> +<p> + One need hardly say that the English wayside inn is as much a feature of + the English countryside as the English hawthorn. Its praises have been + the theme of essayists and poets for generations, and at its best there + is a cosiness and cheer about it which warm the heart, as its quaintness + and savour of past days keep alive the sense of romantic travel. There + the spirit of ancient hospitality still survives, and, though the + motor-car has replaced the stage-coach, that is, after all, but a + detail, and the old, low-ceilinged rooms, the bay windows with their + leaded panes, the tap-room with its shining vessels, the great kitchen, + the solid English fare, the brass candlesticks at bedtime, and the + lavendered sheets, still preserve the atmosphere of a novel by Fielding + or an essay by Addison. +</p> +<p> + There still, as in Shakespeare's day, one can take one's ease at one's + inn, as perhaps in the hostelries of no other land. It is the frequency + and excellence of these English inns that make it charmingly possible to + see England, as it is best seen, on foot or on a bicycle. It is not a + country of isolated wonders, with long stretches of mere road between. + Every mile counts for something. But, if the luxury of walking it with + stick and knapsack is denied us, and we must needs see it by motor-car, + we cannot fail to make one observation, that of the surprising variety + of natural scenery packed in so small a space. Between Land's End and + the Tweed the eye and the imagination have encountered every form of the + picturesque. In an area some three hundred and fifty miles long by three + hundred broad are contained the ruggedness of Cornwall, the idyllic + softness of Devon, the dreamy solitudes of the South Downs, with their + billowy, chalky contours, the agricultural fertility of Kent and + Middlesex, the romantic woodlands and hilly pastures of Surrey, the + melancholy fens of Lincolnshire, the broad, bosky levels of the + midlands, the sudden wildness of Wales, with her mountains and glens, + Yorkshire, with its grim, heather-clad moors, Westmoreland, with its + fells and Wordsworthian "Lakes"; every note in the gamut of natural + beauty has been struck, from honeysuckle prettiness to savage grandeur. +</p> +<p> + Yet, although all these contrasts are included in the English scene, it + is not of solitude or grandeur that we think when we speak of the + English countryside. They are the exceptions to the rule of a gentler, + more humanized natural beauty, in which the village church and the + ivy-clad ruin play their part. Perhaps some such formula as this would + represent the typical scene that springs to the mind's eye with the + phrase "the English countryside": a village green, with some geese + stringing out across it. A straggle of quaint thatched cottages, roses + climbing about the windows, and in front little, carefully kept gardens, + with hollyhocks standing in rows, stocks and sweet-williams and such + old-fashioned flowers. At one end of the village, rising out of a clump + of yews, the mouldering church-tower, with mossy gravestones on one side + and a trim rectory on the other. At the other end of the village a + gabled inn, with a great stable-yard, busy with horses and waggons. + Above the village, the slopes of gently rising pastures, intersected + with footpaths and shadowed with woodlands. A little way out of the + village, an old mill with a lilied mill-pond, a great, dripping + water-wheel, and the murmur of the escaping stream. And winding on + into the green, sun-steeped distance, the blossom-hung English lanes. +</p> +<a name="2H_4_21"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<h2> + XVII +</h2> +<h3> + LONDON—CHANGING AND UNCHANGING +</h3> +<p> </p> + +<p> + I find it an unexpectedly strange experience to be in London again + after ten years in New York. I had no idea it could be so strange. Of + course, there are men to whom one great city is as another—commercial + travellers, impresarios, globe-trotting millionaires. Being none of + these, I am not as much at home in St. Petersburg as in Buda-Pesth, in + Berlin as in Paris, and, while once I might have envied such plastic + cosmopolitanism, I am realizing, this last day or two in London, that, + were such an accomplishment mine, it had been impossible for me to feel + as deeply as I do my brief reincarnation into a city and a country with + which I was once so intimate, and which now seems so romantically + strange, while remaining so poignantly familiar. The man who is at home + everywhere has nowhere any home. My home was once this London—this + England—in which I am writing; but nothing so much as being in London + again could make me realize that my home now is New York, and how long + and how instinctively, without knowing it, I have been an American. It + is not indeed that I love New York and America more than I love London + and England. In fact, London has never seemed so wonderful to me in the + past as she has seemed during these days of my wistful momentary return + to her strange great heart. But this very freshness of her marvel to one + who once deemed that he knew her so well proves but the completeness of + my spiritual acclimatization into another land. I seem to be seeing her + face, hearing her voice, for the first time; while, all the while, my + heart is full with unforgotten memories, and my eyes have scarce the + hardihood to gaze with the decorum befitting the public streets on many + a landmark of vanished hours. To find London almost as new and strange + to me as New York once seemed when I first sighted her soaring morning + towers, and yet to know her for an enchanted Ghost-Land; to be able to + find my way through her streets—in spite of the new Kingsway and + Aldwych!—with closed eyes, and yet to see her, it almost seems, for the + first time: surely it is a curious, almost uncanny, experience. +</p> +<p> + Do I find London changed?—I am asked. I have been so busy in + rediscovering what I had half-forgotten, in finding engaging novelties + in things anciently familiar, that the question is one which I feel + hardly competent to answer. For instance, I had all but forgotten that + there was so noble a thing in the world as an old-fashioned English + pork-pie. Yesterday I saw one in a window, with a thrill of recognition, + that made a friend with whom I was walking think for a moment that I + had seen a ghost. He knows nothing of the human heart who cannot realize + how tremulous with ancient heart-break may seem an old-fashioned English + pork-pie—after ten years in America. +</p> +<p> + And, again, how curiously novel and charming seemed the soft and + courteous English voices—with or without aitches—all about one in + the streets and in the shops—I had almost said the "stores." I am + enamoured of the American accent, these many years, and—the calumny of + superficial observation to the contrary—I will maintain, so far as my + own experience goes, that there is as much courtesy broadcast in America + as in any land; more, I am inclined to think than in France. Yet, for + all that, that something or other in the English voice which I had heard + long since and lost awhile smote me with a peculiar pleasure, and, + though I like the comradely American "Cap" or "Professor," and am hoping + soon to hear it again—yet the novelty of being addressed once more as + "Sir" has had, I must own, a certain antiquarian charm. +</p> +<p> + Wandering in a quaint by-street near my hotel, and reading the names and + signs on one or two of the neat old-world "places of business," I came + on the word "sweep." I believe it was on a brass-plate. For a moment, I + wondered what it meant; and then I realized, with a great gratitude, + that London had not changed so much, after all, since the days of + Charles Lamb. As I emerged into a broader thoroughfare, my ears were + smitten with the sound of minstrelsy. It is true that the tune was + changed. It was unmistakably rag-time. Yet, there was the old + piano-organ, and in a broad circle of spectators, suspended awhile from + their various wayfaring, a young man in tennis flannels was performing a + spirited Apache dance with a quite comely short-skirted young woman, who + rightly enough felt that she had no need to be ashamed of her legs. + Across the extemporized stage, every now and then, taxicabs tooted + cautiously, longing in their hearts to stay; and once a motor + coal-waggon, like a sort of amateur freight-train, thundered across; but + not even these could break the spell that held that ring of enchanted + loiterers, from which presently the pennies fell like rain—the eternal + spell—still operating, I was glad to see, under the protection of the + only human police in the world—of the strolling player in London town. + Just before the players turned to seek fresh squares and alleys new, I + noticed on the edge of the crowd what seemed, in the gathering twilight, + to be a group of uplifted spears. Spears or halberds, were they? It was + a little company of the ancient brotherhood of lamp-lighters, seduced, + like the rest of us, from the strict pursuance of duty by the vagabond + music. +</p> +<p> + To me this thought is full of reassurance, whatever be the murmurs of + change: London has still her sweeps, her strolling minstrels, and her + lamp-lighters. +</p> +<p> + Of course, I missed at once the old busses, yet there are far more + horses left than I had dared to hope, and the hansom is far from + extinct. In fact, there seems to be some promise of its renaissance, and + even yet, in the words of the ancient bard, despite the competition of + taxis— +</p> +<pre> + Like dragon-flies, + The hansoms hover + With jewelled eyes, + To catch the lover. +</pre> +<p> + Further,—the quietude of the Temple remains undisturbed, the lawns of + Gray's Inn are green as of old, the Elizabethanism of Staple Inn is + unchanged, about the cornices of the British Museum the pigeons still + flutter and coo, and the old clocks chime sweetly as of old from their + mysterious stations aloft somewhere in the morning and the evening sky. +</p> +<p> + Changes, of course, there are. It is easier to telephone in London today + than it was ten years ago—almost as easy as in some little provincial + town in Connecticut. Various minor human conveniences have been + improved. The electric lighting is better. Some of the elevators—I + mean the "lifts"—almost remind one of New York. The problem of "rapid + transit" has been simplified. All which things, however, have nothing to + do with national characteristics, but are now the common property of the + civilized, or rather, I should say, the commercialized, world, and are + probably to be found no less in full swing in Timbuctoo. No one—save, + maybe, the citizens of some small imitative nation—confounds these + things with change, or calls them "progress." The soul of a great old + nation adopts all such contrivances as in the past it has adopted new + weapons, or new modes of conveyance. Only a Hottentot or a Cook's + Tourist can consider such superficial developments as evidences of + "change." +</p> +<p> + There are, of course, some new theatres—though I have heard of no new + great actor or actress. The old "favourites" still seem to dominate the + play-bills, as they did ten years ago. There is Mr. Hammerstein's Opera + House in the Kingsway. I looked upon it with pathos. Yet, surely, it is + a monument not so much of changing London as of that London which sees + no necessity of change. +</p> +<p> + In regard to the great new roadways, Kingsway, Aldwych, and the + broadening of the Strand, I have been grateful for the temper which + seems to have presided over their making—a temper combining the + necessary readjustment of past and present, with a spirit of sensitive + conservation for those buildings which more and more England will + realize as having a lasting value for her spirit. +</p> +<p> + So far as I have observed, London has been guilty of no such vandalism + as is responsible for the new Boulevard Raspail in Paris, and similar + heartless destructiveness, in a city which belongs less to France than + to the human soul. Such cities as London and Paris are among the eternal + spiritual possessions of mankind. If only those temporarily in charge of + them could be forced somehow to remember that, when their brief mayoral, + or otherwise official, lives are past, there will be found those who + will need to look upon what they have destroyed, and who will curse them + in their graves. +</p> +<p> + Putting aside such merely superficial "changes" as new streets, new + theatres, and new conveniences, there does seem to me one change of a + far higher importance for which I have no direct evidence, and which I + can only hint at, even to myself, as "something in the air." It is, of + course, nothing new either to London or to England. It is rather the + reawakening of an old temper to which England's history has so often and + so momentously given expression. I seem to find it in a new alertness in + the way men and women walk and talk in the streets, a braced-up + expectancy and readiness for some approaching development in England's + destiny, a new quickening of that old indomitable spirit that has faced + not merely external dangers, but grappled with and resolved her own + internal problems. London seems to me like a city that has heard a voice + crying "Arise, thou that sleepest!" and is answering to the cry with + girt loins and sloth-purged heart and blithe readiness for some new + unknown summons of a future that can but develop the glory of her past. +</p> +<p> + England seems to be no more sleepily resting on her laurels, as she was + some twenty years ago. Nor does she seem, on the other hand, to show the + least anxiety that she could ever lose them. She is merely realizing + that the time is at hand when she is to win others—that one more of + those many re-births of England, so to speak, out of her own womb, + approaches, and that once more she is about to prove herself eternally + young. +</p> +<p> + New countries are apt to speak of old countries as though they are + dying, merely because they have lived so long. Yet there is a longevity + which is one of the surest evidences of youth. Such I seem to feel once + more is England's—as from my window I watch the same old English May + weather: the falling rain and the rich gloom, within which moves always, + shouldering the darkest hour, an oceanic radiance, a deathless principle + of celestial fire. +</p> +<p> + LONDON, May, 1913. +</p> +<a name="2H_4_22"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<h2> + XVIII +</h2> +<h3> + THE HAUNTED RESTAURANT +</h3> +<p> </p> + +<p> + Were one to tell the proprietors of the very prosperous and flamboyant + restaurant of which I am thinking that it is haunted—yea, that ghosts + sit at its well appointed tables, and lost voices laugh and wail and + sing low to themselves through its halls—they would probably take one + for a lunatic—a servant of the moon. +</p> +<p> + Certainly, to all appearance, few places would seem less to suggest the + word "haunted" than that restaurant, as one comes upon it, in one of the + busiest of London thoroughfares, spreading as it does for blocks around, + like a conflagration, the festive glare of its electrically emblazoned + façade. Yet no ruined mansion, with the moon shining in through its + shattered roof, the owl nesting in its banqueting hall, and the snake + gliding through its bed chambers, was ever more peopled with phantoms + than this radiant palace of prandial gaiety, apparently filled with the + festive murmur of happy diners, the jocund strains of its vigorous + orchestra, the subdued clash of knives and forks and delicate dishes, + the rustle of women's gowns and the fairy music of women's voices. For + me its portico, flaming like a vortex of dizzy engulfing light, upon + which, as upon a swift current, gay men and women, alighting from motor + and hansom, are swept inward to glittering tables of snow-white napery, + fair with flowers—for me the mouth of the grave is not less dread, + and the walls of a sepulchre are not so painted with dead faces + or so inscribed with elegiac memories. I could spend a night in + Père-la-Chaise, and still be less aware of the presence of the dead + than I was a short time ago, when, greatly daring, I crossed with a + shudder that once so familiar threshold. +</p> +<p> + It was twelve years since I had been in London, so I felt no little of a + ghost myself, and I knew too well that it would be vain to look for the + old faces. Yes, gone was the huge good-natured commissionaire, who so + often in the past, on my arrival in company with some human flower, had + flung open the apron of our cab with such reverential alacrity, and on + our departure had so gently tucked in the petals of her skirts, smiling + the while a respectfully knowing benediction on the prospective + continuance of our evening's adventure. Another stood in his place, and + watched my lonely arrival with careless indifference. Glancing through + the window of the treasurer's office to the right of the hall, I could + see that an unfamiliar figure sat at the desk, where in the past so many + a cheque had been cashed for me with eager <i>bonhomie</i>. Now I reflected + that considerable identification would be necessary for that once + light-hearted transaction. It is true that I was welcomed with courtesy + by a bowing majordomo, but alas, my welcome was that of a stranger; and + when I mounted the ornate, marble-walled staircase leading to the + gallery where I had always preferred to sit, I realized that my hat and + cane must pass into alien keeping, and that no waiter's face would light + up as he saw me threading my way to the sacred table, withdrawn in a + nook of the balcony, where one could see and hear all, participate in + the general human stir and atmosphere, and yet remain apart. +</p> +<p> + Ah! no; for the friendly Cockney that once greeted me with an enfolding + paternal kindness was substituted broken English of a less companionable + accent. A polite young Greek it was who stood waiting respectfully for + my order, knowing nothing of all it meant for me—<i>me</i>—to be seated at + that table again—whereas, had he been one of half a dozen of the + waiters of yester-year, he would have known almost as much as I of the + "secret memoirs" of that historic table. +</p> +<p> + In ordering my meal I made no attempt at sentiment, for my mood went far + deeper than sentiment. Indeed, though, every second of the time, I was + living so vividly, so cruelly, in the past, I made one heartbroken + acknowledgment of the present by beginning with the anachronism of a + dry Martini cocktail, which, twelve years previous, was unknown and + unattainable in that haunted gallery. That cocktail was a sort of + desperate epitaph. It meant that I was alone—alone with my ghosts. Yet + it had a certain resurrecting influence, and as I sat there proceeding + dreamily with my meal, one face and another would flash before me, and + memory after memory re-enact itself in the theatre of my fancy. So + much in my actual surroundings brought back the past with an aching + distinctness—particularly the entrance of two charming young people, + making rainbows all about them, as, ushered by a smiling waiter, who was + evidently no stranger to their felicity, they seated themselves at a + neighbouring table with a happy sigh, and neglected the menu for a + moment or two while they gazed, rapt and lost, into each other's eyes. + How well I knew it all; how easily I could have taken the young man's + place, and played the part for which this evening he was so fortunately + cast! As I looked at them, I instinctively summoned to my side the + radiant shade of Aurea, for indeed she had seemed made of gold—gold and + water lilies. And, as of old, when I had called to her, she came swiftly + with a luxurious rustle of fragrant skirts, like the sound of the west + wind among the summer trees, or the swish and sway of the foam about the + feet of Aphrodite. There she sat facing me once more, "a feasting + presence made of light"—her hair like a golden wheat sheaf, her + eyes like blue flowers amid the wheat, and her bosom, by no means + parsimoniously concealed, literally suggesting that the loveliness of + all the water lilies in the world was amassed there within her corset + as in some precious casket. Ours was not one of the great tragic loves, + but I know I shall think of Aurea's bosom on my death-bed. At her coming + I had ordered champagne—we always drank champagne together, because, as + we said, it matched so well with her hair—champagne of a no longer + fashionable brand. The waiter seemed a little surprised to hear it asked + for, but it had been the only <i>chic</i> brand in 19—. +</p> +<p> + "Look at those two yonder," I said presently, after we had drunk to + each other, smiling long into each other's eyes over the brims of our + glasses. "You and I were once as they. It is their first wonderful + dinner together. Watch them—the poor darlings; it is enough to break + one's heart." +</p> +<p> + "Do you remember ours?" asked Aurea quite needlessly. +</p> +<p> + "I wonder what else I was thinking of—dear idiot!" said I, with tender + elegance, as in the old days. +</p> +<p> + As I said before, Aurea and I had not been tragic in our love. It was + more a matter of life—than death; warm, pagan, light-hearted life. Ours + was perhaps that most satisfactory of relationships between men and + women, which contrives to enjoy the happiness, the fun, even the + ecstasy, of loving, while evading its heartache. It was, I suppose, what + one would call a healthy physical enchantment, with lots of tenderness + and kindness in it, but no possibility of hurt to each other. There was + nothing Aurea would not have done for me, or I for Aurea, except—marry + each other; and, as a matter of fact, there were certain difficulties on + both sides in the way of our doing that, difficulties, however, which I + am sure neither of us regretted. +</p> +<p> + Yes, Aurea and I understood thoroughly what was going on in those young + hearts, as we watched them, our eyes starry with remembrance. Who better + than we should know that hush and wonder, that sense of enchanted + intimacy, which belongs of all moments perhaps in the progress of a + passion to that moment when two standing tiptoe on the brink of golden + surrender, sit down to their first ambrosial meal together—delicious + adventure!—with all the world to watch them, if it choose, and yet + aloof in a magic loneliness, as of youthful divinities wrapped in a + roseate cloud! Hours of divine expectancy, at once promise and + fulfilment. Happy were it for you, lovers, could you thus sit forever, + nor pass beyond this moment, touched by some immortalizing wand as those + lovers on the Grecian Urn: +</p> +<pre class="si"> + Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss. + Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve; + She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss. + Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair! +</pre> +<p> + "See," said Aurea presently, "they are getting ready to go. The waiter + has brought the bill, and is looking away, suddenly lost in profound + meditation. Let us see how he pays the bill. I am sure she is anxious." +</p> +<p> + "Your old test!" said I. "Do you remember?" +</p> +<p> + "Yes! And it's one that never fails," said Aurea with decision. "When a + woman goes out to dinner with a man for the first time, he little knows + how much is going to depend on his way of paying the bill. If, as with + some men one meets, he studies it through a microscope and adds it + up with anxious brow—meanwhile quite evidently forgetting your + presence—how your heart sinks, sinks and hardens—but you are glad all + the same, and next day you congratulate yourself on your narrow escape!" +</p> +<p> + "Was I like that?" said I. +</p> +<p> + "Did we escape?" asked Aurea. Then she added, touching my arm as with a + touch of honeyed fire: "O I'm so glad! He did it delightfully—quite <i>en + prince</i>. Just the right nonchalance—and perhaps, poor dear, he's as + poor—" +</p> +<p> + "As we often were," I added. +</p> +<p> + And then through the corners of our eyes we saw the young lovers rise + from the table, and the man enfold his treasure in her opera cloak, O so + reverently, O so tenderly, as though he were wrapping up some holy + flower. And O those deep eyes she gave him, half turning her head as he + did so! +</p> +<p> + "That look," whispered Aurea, quoting Tennyson, "'had been a clinging + kiss but for the street.'" +</p> +<p> + Then suddenly they were gone, caught up like Enoch, into heaven—some + little heaven, maybe, like one that Aurea and I remember, high up under + the ancient London roofs. +</p> +<p> + But, with their going, alas, Aurea had vanished too, and I was left + alone with my Greek waiter, who was asking me what cheese I would + prefer. +</p> +<p> + With the coming of coffee and cognac, I lit my cigar and settled down to + deliberate reverie, as an opium smoker gives himself up to his dream. I + savoured the bitter-sweetness of my memories; I took a strange pleasure + in stimulating the ache of my heart with vividly recalled pictures of + innumerable dead hours. I systematically passed from table to table all + around that spacious peristyle. There was scarcely one at which I + had not sat with some vanished companion in those years of ardent, + irresponsible living which could never come again. Not always a woman + had been the companion whose form I thus conjured out of the past, too + often out of the grave; for the noble friendship of youth haunted those + tables as well, with its generous starry-eyed enthusiasms and passionate + loyalties. Poets of whom but their songs remain, themselves by tragic + pathways descended into the hollow land, had read their verses to me + there, still glittering with the dawn dew of their creation, as we sat + together over the wine and talked of the only matters then—and perhaps + even yet—worth talking of: love and literature. Of these but one can + still be met in London streets, but all now wear crowns of varying + brightness— +</p> +<pre> + Where the oldest bard is as the young, + And the pipe is ever dropping honey, + And the lyre's strings are ever strung. +</pre> +<p> + Dear boon fellows of life as well as literature, how often have we risen + from those tables, to pursue together the not too swiftly flying + petticoat, through the terrestrial firmament of shining streets, aglow + with the midnight sun of pleasure, a-dazzle with eyes brighter far than + the city lamps—passionate pilgrims of the morning star! Ah! we go on + such quests no more—"another race hath been and other palms are won." +</p> +<p> + No, not always women—but naturally women nearly always, for it was the + time of rosebuds, and we were wisely gathering them while we might— +</p> +<pre> + Through the many to the one— + O so many! + Kissing all and missing none, + Loving any. +</pre> +<p> + Every man who has lived a life worthy the name of living has his own + private dream of fair women, the memory of whom is as a provision laid + up against the lean years that must come at last, however long they may + be postponed by some special grace of the gods, which is, it is good to + remember, granted to some—the years when one has reluctantly to + accept that the lovely game is almost, if not quite at an end, and to + watch the bloom and abundance of fragrant young creatures pass us, + unregarding, by. And, indeed, it may happen that a man who has won what + is for him the fairest of all fair faces, and has it still by his side, + may enter sometimes, without disloyalty, that secret gallery of those + other fair faces that were his before hers, in whom they are all summed + up and surpassed, had dawned upon his life. We shall hardly be loyal to + the present if we are coldly disloyal to the past. In the lover's + calendar, while there is but one Madonna, there must still be minor + saints, to whom it is meet, at certain times and seasons, to offer + retrospective candles—saints that, after the manner of many saints, + were once such charming sinners for our sakes, that utter forgetfulness + of them were an impious boorishness surely unacceptable to the most + jealous of Madonnas. Public worship of them is not, of course, + desirable, but occasional private celebrations are surely more than + permissible—such celebrations as that "night of memory and tears" which + Landor consecrated to Rose Aylmer, or that song which Thackeray + consecrated to certain loves of the long ago— +</p> +<pre> + Gillian's dead, God rest her bier, + How I loved her twenty years syne! + Marian's married, but I sit here, + Alone and merry at forty year, + Dipping my nose in the Gascon wine. +</pre> +<p> + So I, seated in my haunted restaurant, brought the burnt offerings of + several cigars, and poured out various libations to my own private + Gillians and Marians, and in fancy sat and looked into Angelica's eyes + at this table, and caressed Myrtle's opaled hand at that, and read + Sylvia a poem I had just written for her at still another. "Whose names + are five sweet symphonies," wrote Rossetti. Yes, symphonies, indeed, in + the ears of memory are the names of the lightest loves that flittered + butterfly-like across our path in the golden summer of our lives, + each name calling up its human counterpart, with her own endearing + personality distinguishing her from all other girls, her way of + smiling, her way of talking, her way of being serious, all the little + originalities on which she prided herself, her so solemnly held + differentia of tastes and manners—all, in a word, that made you realize + that you were dining with Corinna and not with Chloe. What a service of + contrast each—all unwittingly, need one say—did the other, just in the + same fashion as contrasting colours accentuate the special quality one + of the other. To have dined last night with Amaryllis, with her Titian + red hair and green eyes, her tropic languor and honey-drowsy ways, + was to feel all the keener zest in the presence of Callithoe on + the following evening, with her delicate soul-lit face, and eager + responsiveness of look and gesture—<i>blonde cendré</i>, and <i>fausse + maigre</i>—a being one of the hot noon, the other a creature of the + starlight. But I disclaim the sultanesque savour of thus writing of + these dear bearers of symphonic names. To talk of them as flowers and + fruit, as colour and perfume, as ivory and velvet, is to seem to forget + the best of them, and the best part of loving them and being loved + again; for that consisted in their comradeship, their enchanted + comradeship, the sense of shared adventure, the snatching of a fearful + joy together. For a little while we had escaped from the drab and + songless world, and, cost what it might, we were determined to take + possession, for a while at least, of that paradise which sprang into + existence at the moment when "male and female created He them." Such + divine foolishness, let discretion warn, or morality frown, or society + play the censorious hypocrite, "were wisdom in the scorn of + consequence." +</p> +<p> + "Ah, then," says every man to himself of such hours, as I said to myself + in my haunted restaurant—"ah, then came in the sweet o' the year." +</p> +<p> + But lovely and pleasant as were the memories over which I thus sat + musing, there was one face immeasurably beyond all others that I had + come there hoping and yet fearing to meet again, hers of whom for years + that seem past counting all the awe and wonder and loveliness of the + world have seemed but the metaphor. Endless years ago she and I had sat + at this table where I was now sitting and had risen from it with + breaking hearts, never to see each other's face, hear each other's voice + again. Voluntarily, for another's sake, we were breaking our hearts, + renouncing each other, putting from us all the rapture and religion + of our loving, dying then and there that another might live—vain + sacrifice! Once and again, long silences apart, a word or two would wing + its way across lands and seas and tell us both that we were still + under the same sky and were still what nature had made us from the + beginning—each other's. But long since that veil of darkness unpierced + of my star has fallen between us, and no longer do I hear the rustle of + her gown in the autumn woods, nor do the spring winds carry me the + sweetness of her faithful thoughts any more. So I dreamed maybe that, + after the manner of phantoms, we might meet again on the spot where we + had both died—but alas, though the wraiths of lighter loving came gaily + to my call, she of the starlit silence and the tragic eyes came not, + though I sat long awaiting her—sat on till the tables began to be + deserted, and the interregnum between dinner and after-theatre supper + had arrived. No, I began to understand that she could no longer come + to me: we must both wait till I could go to her. +</p> +<p> + And with this thought in my mind, I set about preparing to take my leave, + but at that moment I was startled—almost superstitiously—startled by + a touch on my shoulder. I was not to leave those once familiar halls + without one recognition, after all. It was our old waiter of all + those years ago, who, with an almost paternal gladness, was telling + me how good it was to see me again, and, with consolatory mendacity, + was assuring me that I had hardly changed a bit. God bless him—he + will never know what good it did me to have his honest recognition. + The whole world was not yet quite dead and buried, after all, nor + was I quite such an unremembered ghost as I had seemed. Dear old Jim + Lewis! So some of the old guard were still on deck, after all! And, + I was thinking as I looked at him: "He, too, has looked upon her + face. He it was who poured out our wine, that last time together." + Then I had a whim. My waiter had been used to them in the old days. +</p> +<p> + "Jim," I said, "I want you to give this half-sovereign to the bandmaster + and ask him to play Chopin's <i>Funeral March</i>. There are not many people + in the place, so perhaps he won't mind. Tell him it's for an old friend + of yours, and in memory of all the happy dinners he had here long ago." +</p> +<p> + So to the strains of that death music, which so strangely blends the + piercing pathos of lost things with a springlike sense of resurrection, + a spheral melody of immortal promise, I passed once more through the + radiant portals of my necropolitan restaurant into the resounding + thoroughfares of still living and still loving humanity. +</p> +<a name="2H_4_23"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<h2> + XIX +</h2> +<h3> + THE NEW PYRAMUS AND THISBE +</h3> +<p> </p> + +<p> + There never was a shallower or more short-sighted criticism than that + which has held that science is the enemy of romance. Ruskin, with + all the April showers of his rhetoric, discredited himself as an + authoritative thinker when he screamed his old-maidish diatribes against + that pioneer of modern romantic communication, the railroad. Just as + surely his idol Turner proved himself a romantic painter, not by his + rainbows, or his Italian sunsets, but by that picture of <i>Storm, Rain, + and Speed</i>—an old-fashioned express fighting its way through wind, + rain, and of course rainbows—in the English National Gallery. +</p> +<p> + With all his love of that light that never was on sea or land, Turner + was yet able to see the romance of that new thing of iron and steam so + affrighting to other men of his generation. A lover of light in all its + swift prismatic changes, he was naturally a lover of speed. He realized + that speed was one of the two most romantic things in the world. The + other is immobility. At present the two extremes of romantic expression + are the Sphinx and—the automobile. Unless you can realize that an + automobile is more romantic than a stage-coach, you know nothing + about romance. Soon the automobile will have its nose put out by the + air-ship, and we shall not need to be long-lived to see the day when + we shall hear old-timers lamenting the good old easy-going past of + the seventy-miles-an-hour automobile—just as we have heard our + grand-fathers talk of postilions and the Bath "flyer." +</p> +<p> + Romance is made of two opposites: Change, and That Which Changeth Not. + In spite of foolish sentimentalism, who needs be told that love is one + of those forces of the universe that is the same yesterday, today, and + forever—the same today as when Dido broke her heart, as when Leander + swam the Hellespont? Gravitation is not more inherent in the cosmic + scheme, nor fire nor water more unchangeable in their qualities. +</p> +<p> + But Love, contrary to the old notion that he is unpractical, is a + business-like god, and is ever on the lookout for the latest modern + appliances that can in anyway serve his purposes. True love is far from + being old-fashioned. On the contrary, true love is always up-to-date. + True love has its telephone, its phonograph, its automobile, and soon it + will have its air-ship. In the telephone alone what a debt love owes to + its supposed enemy, modern science! One wonders how lovers in the old + days managed to live at all without the telephone. +</p> +<p> + We often hear how our modern appliances wear upon our nerves. But think + how the lack of modern appliances must have worn upon the nerves of our + forefathers, and particularly our foremothers! Think what distance meant + in the Middle Ages, when the news of a battle took days to travel, + though carried by the swiftest horses. Horses! Think again of news being + carried by—horses! And once more think, with a prayer of gratitude to + two magicians named Edison and Bell, and with a due sense of your being + the spoiled and petted offspring of the painful ages, that should your + love be in Omaha this night and you in New York City, you can say + good-night to her through the wall of your apartment, and hear her sigh + back her good-night to you across two thousand miles of the American + flag. Or should your love be on the sea, you can interrupt her + flirtations all the way across with your persistent wireless + conversation. Contrast your luxurious communicativeness with the case of + the lovers of old-time. Say that you have just married a young woman, + and you are happy together in your castle in the heart of the forest. + Suddenly the courier of war is at your gates, and you must up and arm + and away with your men to the distant danger. You must follow the Cross + into the savage Kingdom of the Crescent. The husband must become the + crusader, and the Lord Christ alone knows when he shall look on the + child's face of his wife again. Through goblin-haunted wildernesses he + must go, through unmapped no-man's lands, and vacuum solitudes of the + world's end, and peril and pestilence meet in every form, the face of + his foe the friendliest thing in all his mysterious travel. Not a + pay-station as yet in all the wide world, and fully five hundred years + to the nearest telegraph office! +</p> +<p> + And think of the young wife meanwhile, alone with her maids and her + tapestry in the dank isolation of her lonely, listening castle. Not a + leaf falls in the wood, but she hears it. Not a footstep snaps the + silence, but her eyes are at the sleepless slit of light which is her + window in the armoured stone of her fortified bridal tower. The only + news of her husband she can hope for in a full year or more will be + the pleasing lies of some flattering minstrel, or broken soldier, or + imaginative pilgrim. On such rumours she must feed her famishing + heart—and all the time her husband's bones may be whitening unepitaphed + outside the walls of Ascalon or Joppa. +</p> +<p> + There is an old Danish ballad which quaintly tells the tale of such old + long-distance days, with that blending of humour and pathos that forever + goes to the heart of man. A certain Danish lord had but yesterday taken + unto himself a young wife, and on the morrow of his marriage there came + to him the summons to war. Then, as now, there was no arguing with the + trumpets of martial duty. The soldier's trumpet heeds not the soldier's + tears. The war was far away and likely to be long. Months, even years, + might go by before that Danish lord would look on the face of his bride + again. So much might happen meanwhile! A little boy, or a little girl, + might be born to the castle, and the father, fighting far away, know + nothing of the beautiful news. And there was no telephone in the castle, + and it was five hundred years to the nearest telegraph office. +</p> +<p> + So the husband and wife agreed upon a facetious signal of their own. The + castle stood upon a ridge of hills which could be seen fifty miles away, + and on the ridge the bride promised to build a church. If the child that + was to be born proved to be a boy, the church would be builded with a + tower; if a girl, with a steeple. So the husband went his way, and three + years passed, and at length he returned with his pennons and his + men-at-arms to his own country. Scanning the horizon line, he hurried + impatiently toward the heliographic ridge. And lo! when at last it came + in sight against the rising sun, there was a new church builded stately + there—with two towers. +</p> +<p> + So it was with the most important of all news in the Middle Ages; and + yet today, as I said, you in New York City have only to knock good-night + on your wall, to be heard by your true love in Omaha, and hear her knock + back three times the length of France; Pyramus and Thisbe—with this + difference: that the wall is no longer a barrier, but a sensitive + messenger. It has become, indeed, in the words of Demetrius in <i>A + Midsummer Night's Dream</i>, the wittiest of partitions, and the modern + Pyramus may apostrophize it in grateful earnest: +</p> +<pre class="si"> + "Thou wall, O wall, O sweet and lovely wall ... + Thanks, courteous wall. Jove shield thee well for this!" +</pre> +<p> + So at least I always feel toward the wall of my apartment every time I + call up her whom my soul loveth that dwelleth far away in Massachusetts. + She being a Capulet and I a Montague, it would go hard with us for + communication, were it not for this long-distance wall; and any one + who knows anything of love knows that the primal need of lovers is + communication. Lovers have so deep a distrust of each other's love that + they need to be assured of it from hour to hour. To the philosopher it + may well seem strange that this certitude should thus be in need of + progressive corroboration. But so it is, and the pampered modern lover + may well wonder how his great-grandfather and great-grandmother + supported the days, or even kept their love alive, on such famine + rations as a letter once a month. A letter once a month! They must have + had enormous faith in each other, those lovers of old-time, or they must + have suffered as we can hardly bear to think of—we, who write to each + other twice a day, telegraph three times, telephone six, and transmit a + phonographic record of our sighs to each other night and morn. The + telephone has made a toy of distance and made of absence, in many cases, + a sufficient presence. It is almost worth while to be apart on occasion + just for the sake of bringing each other so magically near. It is the + Arabian Nights come true. As in them, you have only to say a word, and + the jinn of the electric fire is waiting for your commands. The word + has changed. Once it was "Abracadabra." Now it is "Central." But the + miracle is just the same. +</p> +<p> + One might almost venture upon the generalization that most tragedies + have come about from lack of a telephone. Of course, there are + exceptions, but as a rule tragedies happen through delays in + communication. +</p> +<p> + If there had been a telephone in Mantua, Romeo would never have bought + poison of the apothecary. Instead, he would have asked leave to use his + long-distance telephone. Calling up Verona, he would first cautiously + disguise his voice. If, as usual, the old nurse answered, all well; but + if a bearded voice set all the wires a-trembling, he would, of course, + hastily ring off, and abuse "Central" for giving him the wrong number. + And "Central" would understand. Then Romeo would wait an hour or two + till he was sure that Lord Capulet had gone to the Council, and ring up + again. This time he would probably get the nurse and confide to her his + number in Mantua. Next morning Juliet and her nurse had only to drop in + at the nearest drug store, and confide to Romeo the whole plot which + Balthazar so sadly bungled. All that was needed was a telephone, and + Romeo would have understood that Juliet was only feigning death for the + sake of life with him. +</p> +<p> + But, as in the case of our Danish knight, there was not a pay-station + as yet in all the wide world, and it was fully five hundred years + to the nearest telegraph office. Another point in this tragedy is + worth considering by the modern mind: that not only would the final + catastrophe have been averted by the telephone, but that those beautiful + speeches to and from Juliet's balcony, made at such desperate risk to + both lovers, had the telephone only been in existence, could have + been made in complete security from the seclusion of their distant + apartments. +</p> +<p> + Seriously speaking, there are few love tragedies, few serious historic + crises of any kind, that might not have been averted by the telephone. + Strange indeed, when one considers a little, is that fallacy of + sentimentalism which calls science the enemy of love. +</p> +<p> + Far from being its enemy, science is easily seen to be its most romantic + servant; for all its strenuous and delicate learning it brings to the + feet of love for a plaything. Not only will it carry the voice of love + across space and time, but it will even bring it back to you from + eternity. It will not only carry to your ears the voices of the living, + but it will also keep safe for you the sweeter voices of the dead. In + fact, it would almost seem as though science had made all its + discoveries for the sake of love. +</p> +<a name="2H_4_24"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<h2> + XX +</h2> +<h3> + TWO WONDERFUL OLD LADIES +</h3> +<p> </p> + +<p> + It is a pity that our language has no other word to indicate that one + has lived seventy, eighty, or ninety years, than the word "old"; for the + word "old" carries with it implications of "senility" and decrepitude, + which many merely chronologically "old" people very properly resent. The + word "young," similarly, needs the assistance of another word, for we + all know individuals of thirty and forty, sometimes even only twenty, + whom it is as absurd to call "young" as it is to call those others of + seventy, eighty, or ninety, "old." +</p> +<p> + "Youth" is too large and rich a word to serve the limited purpose of + numbering the years of undeveloped boys and girls. It should stand + rather for the vital principle in men and women, ever expanding, and + rebuilding, and refreshing the human organism, partly a physical, but + perhaps in a greater degree a spiritual energy. +</p> +<p> + I am not writing this out of any compliment to two wonderful "old" + ladies of whom I am particularly thinking. They would consider me a + dunce were they to suspect me of any such commonplace intent. No! I am + not going to call them "eighty years young," or employ any of those + banal euphemisms with which would-be "tactful" but really club-footed + sentimentalists insult the intelligence of the so-called "old." Of + course, I know that they are both eighty or thereabouts, and they know + very well that I know. We make no secret of it. Why should we? Actually + though the number of my years falls short of eighty, I feel so much + older than either of them, that it never occurs to me to think of them + as "old," and often as I contemplate their really glowing energetic + youth, I grow melancholy for myself, and wonder what has become of my + own. +</p> +<p> + They were schoolgirls together. Luccia married Irene's brother—for they + allow me the privilege of calling them by their Christian names—and + they have been friends all their lives. Sometimes I see them together, + though oftener apart, for Luccia and her white-haired poet husband—no + "older" than herself,—are neighbours of mine in the country, and Irene + lives for the most part in New York—as much in love with its giant + developments as though she did not also cherish memories of that quaint, + almost vanished, New York of her girlhood days; for she is nothing if + not progressive. +</p> +<p> + But I will tell about Luccia first, and the first thing it is natural to + speak of—so every one else finds too—is her beauty. They say that she + was beautiful when she was young (I am compelled sometimes, under + protest, to use the words "young" and "old" thus chronologically) and, + of course, she must have been. I have, however, seen some of her early + portraits, before her hair was its present beautiful colour, and I must + confess that the Luccia of an earlier day does not compare with the + Luccia of today. I don't think I should have fallen in love with her + then, whereas now it is impossible to take one's eyes off her. She seems + to have grown more flower-like with the years, and while her lovely + indestructible profile has gathered distinction, and a lifelong habit of + thinking beautiful thoughts, and contemplating beautiful things, has + drawn honeyed lines as in silver point about her eyes and mouth, the + wild-roses of her cheeks still go on blooming—like wild-roses in + moonlight. And over all glow her great clear witty eyes, the eyes of a + <i>grand dame</i> who has still remained a girl. Her humour, no doubt, has + much to do with her youth, and I have seen strangers no little + surprised, even disconcerted, at finding so keen a humour in one so + beautiful; for beauty and humour are seldom found together in so + irresistible a combination. Is it to be wondered at that often on summer + days when I feel the need of a companion, I go in search of Luccia, and + take tea with her on the veranda? Sometimes I will find her in the + garden seated in front of her easel, making one of her delicate + water-colour sketches—for she was once a student in Paris and has + romantic Latin-quarter memories. Or I will find her with her magnifying + glass, trying to classify some weed she has come upon in the garden, + for she is a learned botanist; and sometimes we will turn over the pages + of books in which she hoards the pressed flowers gathered by her and her + husband in Italy and Switzerland up till but a year or two ago, + memorials of a life together that has been that flawless romance which + love sometimes grants to his faithful servants. +</p> +<p> + At other times we will talk politics, and I wish you could hear the + advanced views of this "old" lady of eighty. Indeed, generally speaking, + I find that nowadays the only real progressives are the "old" people. It + seems to be the fashion with the "young" to be reactionary. Luccia, + however, has been a radical and a rebel since her girlhood, and, years + before the word "feminist" was invented, was fighting the battle of + the freedom of woman. And what a splendid Democrat she is, and how + thoroughly she understands and fearlessly faces the problems and + developments of the moment! She is of the stuff the old Chartist women + and the women of the French Revolution were made of, and in her heart + the old faith in Liberty and the people burns as brightly as though she + were some young Russian student ready to give her life for the cause. + When the revolution comes to America, stern masculine authority will be + needed to keep her—her friend Irene too—from the barricades. +</p> +<p> + "Stern masculine authority"! As I write that phrase, how plainly I can + hear her mocking laughter; for she is never more delightful than when + pouring out her raillery on the magisterial pretensions of man. To hear + her talk! The idea of a mere man daring to assume any authority or + direction over a woman! Yet we who know her smile and whisper to + ourselves that, for all her witty tirades, she is perhaps of all women + the most feminine, and really the most "obedient" of wives—a rebel in + all else save to the mild tyranny of the poet she has loved, honoured, + and yes! obeyed, all these wonderful years. +</p> +<p> + Perhaps in nothing is the reality of her youthfulness so expressive as + in her adorable gaiety. Like a clear fresh spring, it is ever brimming + up from the heart into her mischief-loving eyes. By her side merely + technically young people seem heavy and serious. And nothing amuses her + more than gravely to mystify, or even bewilderingly shock, some proper + acquaintance, or some respectable strangers, with her carefully designed + mock improprieties of speech or action. To look at the loveliest of + grand-mothers, it is naturally somewhat perplexing to the uninitiated + visitor to hear her talk, with her rarely distinguished manner, of + frivolous matters with which they assume she has long since done. +</p> +<p> + A short while ago, when I was taking tea with her, she had for visitor a + staid old-maidish lady, little more than half her age, whom she had + known as a girl, but had not seen for some years. In the course of + conversation, she turned to her guest, with her grand air: +</p> +<p> + "Have you done much dancing this season?" she asked. +</p> +<p> + "O indeed no," answered the other unsuspiciously, "my dancing days are + over." +</p> +<p> + "At your age!" commented Luccia with surprise. "Nonsense! You must let + me teach you to dance the tango. I have enjoyed it immensely this + winter." +</p> +<p> + "Really?" gasped the other in astonishment, with that intonation in the + voice naturally so gratifying to the "old" suggesting that the person + talking with them really regards them as dead and buried. +</p> +<p> + "Of course, why not?" asks Luccia with perfect seriousness. "I dance it + with my grandsons. My husband doesn't care to dance it. He prefers the + polka." +</p> +<p> + Not knowing what to think, the poor old maid—actually "old" compared + with Luccia—looked from her to the beautiful venerable figure of her + polka-dancing husband seemingly meditating over his pipe, a little + withdrawn from them on the veranda, but inwardly shaken with mirth at + the darling nonsense of her who is still the same madcap girl he first + fell in love with so many years ago. +</p> +<p> + When the guest had departed, with a puzzled, questioning look still + lingering on her face, Luccia turned to me, her eyes bright pools of + merriment: +</p> +<p> + "It was quite true, wasn't it? Come, let us try it." +</p> +<p> + And, nimble as a girl, she was on her feet, and we executed quite a + passable tango up and down the veranda, to the accompaniment of her + husband's—"Luccia! Luccia! what a wild thing you are!" +</p> +<p> + A certain reputation for "wildness," a savour of innocent Bohemianism, + has clung to Luccia, and Irene too, all through their lives, as a legacy + from that far-off legendary time when, scarcely out of their girlhood, + they were fellow art-students together in Paris. Belonging both to + aristocratic, rather straitlaced New England families, I have often + wondered how they contrived to accomplish that adventure in a day when + such independent action on the part of two pretty young ladies was an + adventure indeed. But it was the time when the first vigorous spring of + feminine revolt was in the air. Rosa Bonheur, George Eliot, Elizabeth + Cady Stanton, and other leaders were setting the pace for the advanced + women, and George Sand was still a popular romancer. As a reminiscence + of George Sand, Luccia to this day pretends that she prefers to smoke + cigars to cigarettes, though, as a matter of fact, she has never smoked + either, and has, indeed, an ultra-feminine detestation of tobacco—even + in the form of her husband's pipe. She only says it, of course, for + the fun of seeming "naughty"; which recalls to my mind her shocking + behaviour one day when I went with her to call on some very prim + cousins in New York. It was a household of an excessively brown-stone + respectability, just the atmosphere to rouse the wickedness in Luccia. + As we sat together in an upright conversation that sounded like the + rustling of dried leaves in a cemetery, why! Luccia, for all her eighty + years, seemed like a young wild-rose bush filling the tomb-like room + with living light and fragrance. I could see the wickedness in her + surging for an outburst. She was well aware that those respectable + connections of hers had always looked upon her as a sort of "artistic" + black sheep in the family. Presently her opportunity came. As our visit + dragged mournfully towards its end, the butler entered, in pursuance of + the early Victorian ritual on such occasions, bearing a tray on which + was a decanter of sherry, some tiny wine-glasses, and some dry biscuits + of a truly early Victorian dryness. This ghostly hospitality was duly + dispensed, and Luccia, who seldom drinks anything but tea, instead of + sipping her sherry with a lady-like aloofness, drained her glass with a + sudden devil-may-care abandon, and, to the evident amazement even of the + furniture, held it out to be refilled. Such pagan behaviour had never + disgraced that scandalized drawing-room before. And when to her action + she added words, the room absolutely refused to believe its ears. "I + feel," she said, with a deep-down mirth in her eyes which only I could + suspect rather than see, "I feel today as if I should like to go on a + real spree. Do you ever feel that way?" +</p> +<p> + A palpable shudder passed through the room. +</p> +<p> + "Cousin Luccia!" cried out the three outraged mummies; the brother with + actual sternness, and the sisters in plain fear. Had their eccentric + cousin really gone out of her mind at last? +</p> +<p> + "Never feel that way?" she added, delighting in the havoc she was + making. "You should. It's a wonderful feeling." +</p> +<p> + Then she drained her second glass, and to the evident relief of all + three, rose to go. How we laughed together, as we sped away in our + taxicab. "It's as well to live up to one's reputation with such people," + she said, that dear, fantastic Luccia. +</p> +<p> + <i>À propos</i> that early Parisian adventure, Rosa Bonheur had been one of + Luccia's and Irene's great exemplars, and one might say, in one + particular connection,—heroes. I refer to the great painter's adoption + of masculine costume. Why two unusually pretty young women should burn + to discard the traditional flower-furniture of their sex, in exchange + for the uncouth envelopes of man, is hard to understand. But it was + the day of Mrs. Bloomer, as well as Rosa Bonheur; and earnest young + "intellectuals" among women had a notion, I fancy, that to shake off + their silks and laces was, symbolically, at all events, to shake off the + general disabilities of their sex, and was somehow an assertion of a + mental equality with man. At all events, it was a form of defiance + against their sex's immemorial tyrant, which seems to have appealed to + the imaginations of some young women of the period. Another woman's + weakness to be sternly discarded was that scriptural "glory" of her + hair. That must be ruthlessly lopped. So it is easy to imagine the + horror of such relatives as I have hinted at when our two beautiful + adventuresses returned from Paris, and appeared before their families in + great Spanish cloaks, picturesque, coquettish enough you may be sure, + veiling with some show of discretion those hideous compromises with + trousers invented and worn by the strong-minded Mrs. Bloomer, and + wearing their hair after the manner of Florentine boys. To face one's + family, and to walk New York streets so garbed, must have needed real + courage in those days; yet the two friends did both, and even for + a while accepted persecution for vagaries which for them had the + dead-seriousness of youth. +</p> +<p> + Passionate young propagandists as they were, they even preferred to + abandon their homes for a while—rather than their bloomers—and, taking + a studio together in New York, started out to earn their own living by + the teaching of art. Those were the days of the really brave women. +</p> +<p> + But to return to the less abstract topic of the bloomers, I often tease + Luccia and Irene about them, seeking for further information as to why + they ever came to retrograde from a position so heroically taken, one of + such serious import to human progress, and to condescend once more to + don the livery of feminine servitude, and appear, as they do today, in + delicate draperies which the eye searches in vain for any hint of + sanguinary revolution. Luccia always looks shamefaced at the question. + She still feels guilty, I can see, of a traitorous backsliding and + occasionally threatens to make up for it by a return to masculine + costume—looking the most exquisite piece of Dresden china as she says + it. I have seen that masculine tyrant of hers smiling knowingly to + himself on such occasions, and it has not been difficult to guess why + and when those historic bloomers disappeared into the limbo of lost + causes. There is little doubt that when Love came in by the door, the + bloomers went out, so to speak, by the window. +</p> +<p> + Irene seems to have held out longer, and, doubtless, scornful of her + more frivolous comrade's defection, steadfastly kept the faith awhile + unsupported, walking the world in bloomered loneliness—till a like + event overtook her. Such is the end of every maid's revolt! But Irene, + to this day, retains more of her student seriousness than her more + worldly-minded friend. Her face is of the round cherubic type, and her + large heavy-lidded eyes have a touch of demureness veiling humour no + less deep than Luccia's, but more reflective, chuckling quietly to + itself, though on occasion I know no one better to laugh with, even + giggle with, than Irene. But, whereas Luccia will talk gaily of + revolution and even anarchy for the fun of it, and in the next breath + talk hats with real seriousness, Irene still remains the purposeful + revolutionary student she was as a girl; while Luccia contents herself + with flashing generalizations, Irene seriously studies the latest + developments of thought and society, reads all the new books, sees all + the new plays and pictures, and has all the new movements of whatever + kind—art, philosophy, and sociology—at her finger ends; and I may add + that her favourite writer is Anatole France. Whenever I need light on + the latest artistic or philosophic nonsense calling itself a movement + (cubism, futurism, Bergsonism, syndicalism, or the like) I go to her, + certain that she will know all about it. Nothing is too "modern" for + this wonderful "old" lady of seventy-nine; and, whenever I am in town, + we always go together to the most "advanced" play in the newest of new + theatres. +</p> +<p> + <i>À propos</i> our theatre-going together, I must not forget a story about + her which goes back to that bloomer period. A little while ago, calling + to take tea with her, I found her seated with a fine soldierly + white-haired "old" man, and they were in such merry talk that I felt + that perhaps I was interrupting old memories. But they generously took + me into the circle of their reminiscence. They had been laughing as I + came in—"Shall I tell him, General?" she said, "what we were laughing + about?" Then she did. She and the General had been girl and boy + together, and as they came to eighteen and nineteen had been + semi-serious sweethearts. The embryo General—no doubt because of her + pretty face—had taken all her student vagaries with lover-like + seriousness, and had, on one occasion, assisted in a notable enterprise. + The bloomers had not been definitely donned at that time, but they were + on the way, glimmering ahead as a discussed ideal. Whether it was as a + preliminary experiment, or only in consequence of a "dare," I am not + quite sure. I think it was a little of both, and that the General had + dared Irene to go with him to the opera (in the gallery) dressed in + boy's clothes. She accepted the challenge, borrowing a suit of clothes + from her brother for the purpose. Her figure, according to the General's + account, had looked anything but masculine, and her hair, tucked up + under her boy's hat as best she could, was a peculiar peril. How her + heart had almost stopped beating as a policeman had turned upon the + youthful pair a suspicious scrutiny, how they had taken to their heels + at his glance, how she had crimsoned at the box-office, and hid her face + behind a fat man as they had scurried past the ticket-attendant, and how + during the whole performance a keen-faced woman had glanced at her with + a knowing persistency that seemed to threaten her with imminent exposure + and arrest, and how wonderful the whole thing had been—just to be in + boy's clothes and go in them to the theatre with one's sweetheart. O + youth! youth! youth! +</p> +<p> + As I looked at the General with his white hair, and Irene with her + quaint little old lady's cap over her girlish face, and visualized for + myself those two figures before me as they had appeared on the night of + that escapade, I realized that the real romance of life is made by + memory, and that for these two old friends to be able thus to recall + together across all those years that laughing freak of their young blood + was still more romantic than the original escapade. But as I went on + looking at Irene, with the bloom of her immortal youth upon her, I grew + jealous of the General's share in that historic night. Well, never mind, + it is I who take her to the theatre nowadays—and, after all, I think I + prefer her to go dressed just as she is. +</p> +<a name="2H_4_25"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<h2> + XXI +</h2> +<h3> + A CHRISTMAS MEDITATION +</h3> +<p> </p> + +<p> + Christmas already! However welcome its coming, Christmas always seems to + take us by surprise. Is the year really so soon at the end of its + journey? Why, it seems only yesterday that it needed a special effort of + remembrance to date our letters with the new "<i>anno domini</i>." And have + you noticed that one always does that reluctantly, with something almost + of misgiving? The figures of the old year have a warm human look, but + those of the new wear a chill, unfamiliar, almost menacing expression. + Nineteen hundred and—we know. It is nearly "all in." It has done its + best—and its worst. Between Christmas Day and New-Year it has hardly + time to change its character. Good or bad, as it may have been, we feel + at home with it, and we are fain to keep the old almanac a little longer + on the wall. But the last leaves are falling, the days are shortening. + There is a smell of coming snow in the air, and for weeks past it has + already been Christmas in the shops. +</p> +<p> + Yes, however it strikes us, we are a year older. On the first of January + last we had twelve brand-new months of a brand-new year to spend, and + now the last of them is all but spent. We had a new spring to look out + for, like the coming of one's sweetheart, a new summer bounteous in + prospect with inexhaustible wealth of royal sunshine, a new autumn, with + ruddy orchards and the glory of the tapestried woods; and now of the + four new seasons that were to be ours but one remains: +</p> +<pre class="si"> + And here is but December left and I, + To wonder if the hawthorn bloomed in May, + And if the wild rose with so fine a flush + Mantled the cheek of June, and if the way + The stream went singing foamed with meadow sweet, + And if the throstle sang in yonder bush, + And if the lark dizzied with song the sky. + I watched and listened—yet so sweet, so fleet, + The mad young year went by! +</pre> +<p> + Strange, that feeling at the end of the year that somehow we have missed + it, have failed to experience it all to the full, taken it too + carelessly, not dwelt sufficiently on its rich, expressive hours. Each + year we feel the same, and however intent we may have been, however we + have watched and listened, sensitively eager to hold and exhaust each + passing moment, when the year-end has come, we seem somehow to have been + cheated after all. Who, at the beginning of each year, has not promised + himself a stricter attentiveness to his experience? This year he will + "load every rift with ore." +</p> +<pre class="si"> + This year, I said, when first along the lane + With tiny nipples of the tender green + The winter-blackened hedge grew bright again, + This year I watch and listen; I have seen + So many springs steal profitless away, + This year I garner every sound and sweet. + And you, young year, make not such haste to bring + Hawthorn and rose; nor jumble, indiscreet, + Treasure on treasure of the precious spring; + But bring all softly forth upon the air, + Unhasting to be fair... +</pre> +<p> + Yet, for all our watchfulness, the year seems to have escaped us. We + know that the birds sang, that the flowers bloomed, that the grass was + green, but it seems to us that we did not take our joy of them with + sufficient keenness; our sweetheart came, but we did not look deep + enough into her eyes. If only we live to see the wild rose again! But + meanwhile here is the snow. +</p> +<p> + Unless we are still numbered among those happy people for whom + Christmas-trees are laden and lit, this annual prematurity of Christmas + cannot but make us a little meditative amid our mirth, and if, while + Santa Claus is dispensing his glittering treasures, our thoughts grow a + little wistful, they will not necessarily be mournful thoughts, or on + that account less seasonable in character; for Christmas is essentially + a retrospective feast, and we may, with fitness, with indeed a proper + piety of unforgetfulness, bring even our sad memories, as it were to + cheer themselves, within the glow of its festivity. Ghosts have always + been invited to Christmas parties, and whether they are seen or not, + they always come; nor is any form of story so popular by the Christmas + fire as the ghost-story—which, when one thinks of it, is rather odd, + considering the mirthful character of the time. Yet, after all, what are + our memories but ghost-stories? Ah! the beautiful ghosts that come to + the Christmas fire! +</p> +<p> + Christmas too is pre-eminently the Feast of the Absent, the Festival of + the Far-Away, for the most prosperous ingathering of beloved faces about + the Christmas fire can but include a small number of those we would fain + have there; and have you ever realized that the absent are ghosts? That + is, they live with us sheerly as spiritual presences, dependent upon our + faithful remembrance for their embodiment. We may not, with our physical + eyes, see them once a year; we may not even have so seen them for twenty + years; it may be decreed that we shall never see them again; we seldom, + perhaps never, write to each other; all we know of each other is that we + are alive and love each other across space and time. Alive—but how? + Scarce otherwise, surely, than the unforgotten dead are alive—alive in + unforgetting love. +</p> +<p> + It is rather strange, if you will give it a thought, how much of our + real life is thus literally a ghost-story. Probably it happens with the + majority of us that those who mean most to us, by the necessities of + existence, must be far away, met but now and then in brief flashes + of meeting that often seem to say so much less than absence; our + intercourse is an intercourse of the imagination—yet how real! They + belong to the unseen in our lives, and have all its power over us. The + intercourse of a mother and a son—is it not often like that in a world + which sends its men on the four winds, to build and fight, while the + mother must stay in the old nest? Seldom at Christmas can a mother + gather all her children beneath the wing of her smile. Her big boys are + seven seas away, and even her girls have Christmas-trees of their own. + But motherhood is in its very nature a ghostly, a spiritual, thing, and + the big boys and the old mother are not really divided. They meet + unseen by the Christmas fire, as they meet all the year round in that + mysterious ether of the soul, where space and time are not. +</p> +<p> + Yes, it is strange to think how small a proportion of our lives we spend + with those we love; even when we say that we spend all our time with + them. Husband and wife even—how much of the nearness of the closest of + human relations is, and must be, what Rossetti has called "parted + presence!" The man must go forth to his labour until the evening. How + few of the twenty-four hours can these two beings who have given their + whole lives to each other really give! Husband and wife even must be + content to be ghosts to each other for the greater part of each day. + As Rossetti says in his poem, eyes, hands, voice, lips, can meet so + strangely seldom in the happiest marriage; only in the invisible home of + the heart can the most fortunate husband and wife be always together: +</p> +<pre> + Your heart is never away, + But ever with mine, forever, + Forever without endeavour, + Tomorrow, love, as today; + Two blent hearts never astray, + Two souls no power may sever, + Together, O my love, forever! +</pre> +<p> + When I said that the absent were ghosts, I don't think you quite liked + the saying. It gave you a little shiver. It seemed rather grimly + fantastic. But do you not begin to see what I meant? Begin to see the + comfort in the thought? begin to see the inner connection between + Christmas and the ghost-story? Yes, the real lesson of Christmas is the + ever presence of the absent through love; the ghostly, that is to say + the spiritual, nature of all human intercourse. Our realities can exist + only in and through our imaginations, and the most important part of our + lives is lived in a dream with dream-faces, the faces of the absent and + the dead—who, in the consolation of this thought, are alike brought + near. +</p> +<p> + I have a friend who is dead—but I say to myself that he is in New + Zealand; for, if he were really in New Zealand, we should hardly seem + less distant, or be in more frequent communication. We should say that + we were both busy men, that the mails were infrequent, but that between + us there was no need of words, that we both "understood." That is what I + say now. It is just as appropriate. Perhaps he says it too. And—we + shall meet by the Christmas fire. +</p> +<p> + I have a friend who is alive. He is alive in England. We have not met + for twelve years. He never writes, and I never write. Perhaps we shall + never meet, never even write to each other, again. It is our way, the + way of many a friendship, none the less real for its silence—friendship + by faith, one might say, rather than by correspondence. My dead friend + is not more dumb, not more invisible. When these two friends meet me + by the Christmas fire, will they not both alike be ghosts—both, in a + sense, dead, but both, in a truer sense, alive? +</p> +<p> + It is so that, without our thinking of it, our simple human feelings one + for another at Christmas-time corroborate the mystical message which + it is the church's meaning to convey by this festival of "peace and + good-will to men"—the power of the Invisible Love; from the mystical + love of God for His world, to the no less, mystical love of mother and + child, of lover and lover, of friend and friend. +</p> +<p> + And, when you think of it, is not this festival founded upon what, + without irreverence, we may call the Divine Ghost-Story of Christmas? + Was there ever another ghost-story so strange, so full of marvels, a + story with so thrilling a message from the unseen? Taken just as a + story, is there anything in the <i>Arabian Nights</i> so marvellous as this + ghost-story of Christmas? The world was all marble and blood and bronze, + against a pitiless sky of pitiless gods. The world was Rome. No rule + ever stood builded so impregnably from earth to stars—a merciless wall + of power. Strength never planted upon the earth so stern a foot. Never + was tyranny so invincibly bastioned to the cowed and conquered eye. +</p> +<p> + And against all this marble and blood and bronze, what frail fantastic + attack is this? What quaint expedition from fairy-land that comes so + insignificantly against these battlements on which the Roman helmets + catch the setting sun? +</p> +<p> + A Star in the Sky. Some Shepherds from Judea. Three Wise Men from the + East. Some Frankincense and Myrrh. A Mother and Child. +</p> +<p> + Yes, a fairy-tale procession—but these are to conquer Rome, and that + child at his mother's breast has but to speak three words, for all that + marble and bronze to melt away: "Love One Another." +</p> +<p> + It may well have seemed an almost ludicrous weapon—three gentle words. + So one might attack a fortress with a flower. But Rome fell before them, + for all that, and cruel as the world still is, so cruel a world can + never be again. The history of Christianity from Christ to Tolstoi + is the history of a ghost-story; and as Rome fell before the men it + martyred, so Russia has been compelled at last to open its prison doors + by the passive imperative of the three gentle words. Stone and iron are + terribly strong to the eye and even to the arm of man, but they are as + vapour before the breath of the soul. Many enthroned and magisterial + authorities seem so much more important and powerful than the simple + human heart, but let the trial of strength come, and we see the might of + the delicate invisible energy that wells up out of the infinite mystery + to support the dreams of man. +</p> +<p> + Christmas is the friendly human announcement of this ghostly truth; its + holly and boar's-head are but a rough-and-tumble emblazonment of that + mystic gospel of—The Three Words; the Gospel of the Unseen Love. +</p> +<p> + And how well has the church chosen this particular season of the year + for this most subtly spiritual of all its festivals, so subtle because + its ghostly message is so ruddily disguised in human mirth, and thus the + more unconsciously operative in human hearts! +</p> +<p> + Winter, itself so ghostly a thing, so spiritual in its beauty, was + indeed the season to catch our ears with this ghost-story of the + Invisible and Invincible Love. The other seasons are full of sensuous + charm and seductiveness. With endless variety of form and colour and + fragrance, they weave "a flowery band to bind us to the earth." They are + running over with the pride of sap, the luxury of green leaves, and the + intoxicating fulness of life. The summer earth is like some voluptuous + enchantress, all ardour and perfume, and soft dazzle of moted sunshine. + But the beauty of winter seems a spiritual, almost a supernatural, + thing, austere and forbidding at first, but on a nearer approach found + to be rich in exquisite exhilaration, in rare and lofty discoveries and + satisfactions of the soul. Winter naturally has found less favour with + the poets than the other seasons. Praise of it has usually a strained + air, as though the poet were making the best of a barren theme, like a + portrait-painter reluctantly flattering some unattractive sitter. But + one poet has seen and seized the mysterious beauty of winter with + unforced sympathy—Coventry Patmore, whose "Odes," in particular, + containing as they do some of the most rarely spiritual meditation in + English poetry, are all too little known. In one of these he has these + beautiful lines, which I quote, I hope correctly, from memory: +</p> +<pre class="si"> + I, singularly moved + To love the lovely that are not beloved, + Of all the seasons, most love winter, and to trace + The sense of the Trophonian pallor of her face. + It is not death, but plenitude of peace; + And this dim cloud which doth the earth enfold + Hath less the characters of dark and cold + Than light and warmth asleep, + And intermittent breathing still doth keep + With the infant harvest heaving soft below + Its eider coverlet of snow. +</pre> +<p> + The beauty of winter is like the beauty of certain austere classics of + literature and art, and as with them, also, it demands a certain almost + moral strenuousness of application before it reveals itself. The + loftiest masterpieces have something aloof and cheerless about them at + our first approach, something of the cold breath of those starry spaces + into which they soar, and to which they uplift our spirits. When we + first open Dante or Milton, we miss the flowers and the birds and the + human glow of the more sensuous and earth-dwelling poets. But after + awhile, after our first rather bleak introduction to them, we grow aware + that these apparently undecorated and unmusical masterpieces are radiant + and resounding with a beauty and a music which "eye hath not seen nor + ear heard." For flowers we are given stars, for the song of birds the + music of the spheres, and for that human glow a spiritual ecstasy. +</p> +<p> + Similarly with winter. It has indeed a strange beauty peculiar to + itself, but it is a beauty we must be at some pains to enjoy. The beauty + of the other seasons comes to us, offers itself to us, without effort. + To study the beauty of summer, it is enough to lie under green boughs + with half-closed eyes, and listen to the running stream and the murmur + of a million wings. But winter's is no such idle lesson. In summer we + can hardly stay indoors, but in winter we can hardly be persuaded to + go out. We must gird ourselves to overcome that first disinclination, + else we shall know nothing of winter but its churlish wind and its + ice-in-the-pail. But, the effort made, and once out of doors on a + sunlit winter's morning, how soon are we finding out the mistake we + were making, coddling ourselves in the steam-heat! Indoors, indeed, + the prospect had its Christmas-card picturesqueness; snow-clad roofs, + snow-laden boughs, silhouetted tracery of leafless trees; but we said + that it was a soulless spectacular display, the beauty of death, and + the abhorred coldness thereof. We have hardly walked a hundred yards, + however, before impressions very different are crowding upon us, + among which the impression of cold is forgotten, or only retained as + pleasantly heightening the rest. +</p> +<p> + Far from the world's being dead, as it had seemed indoors, we are + presently, in some strange indefinable way, made intensely conscious of + a curious overwhelming sense of life in the air, as though the crystal + atmosphere was, so to say, ecstatically charged with the invisible + energy of spiritual forces. In the enchanted stillness of the snow, we + seem to hear the very breathing of the spirit of life. The cessation of + all the myriad little sounds that rise so merrily and so musically from + the summer surface of the earth seems to allow us to hear the solemn + beat of the very heart of earth itself. We seem very near to the sacred + mystery of being, nearer than at any other season of the year, for in + other seasons we are distracted by its pleasurable phenomena, but in + winter we seem close to the very mystery itself; for the world seems to + have put on robes of pure spirit and ascended into a diviner ether. +</p> +<p> + The very phenomena of winter have a spiritual air which those of summer + lack, a phantom-like strangeness. How mysterious this ice, how ghostly + this snow, and all the beautiful fantastic shapes taken by both; the + dream-like foliage, and feathers and furs of the snow, the Gothic + diablerie of icicled eaves, all the fairy fancies of the frost, the + fretted crystal shapes that hang the brook-side with rarer than Venetian + glass, the strange flowers that stealthily overlay the windows, even + while we watch in vain for the unseen hand! No flowers of summer seem so + strange as these, make us feel so weirdly conscious of the mystery of + life. As the ghostly artist covers the pane, is it not as though a + spirit passed? +</p> +<p> + As we walk on through the shining morning, we ourselves seem to grow + rarefied as the air. Our senses seem to grow finer, purged to a keener + sensitiveness. Our eyes and ears seem to become spiritual rather than + physical organs, and an exquisite elation, as though we were walking on + shining air, or winging through celestial space, fills all our being. + The material earth and our material selves seem to grow joyously + transparent, and while we are conscious of our earthly shoe-leather + ringing out on the iron-bound highway, we seem, nevertheless, to be + spirits moving without effort, in a world of spirit. Seldom, if ever, + in summer are we thus made conscious of, so to say, our own ghosts, + thus lifted up out of our material selves with a happy sense of + disembodiment. +</p> +<p> + There would, indeed, seem to be some relation between temperature and + the soul, and something literally purifying about cold. Certain it is + that we return from our winter's walk with something sacred in our + hearts and something shining in our faces, which we seldom, if ever, + bring back with us in summer. Without understanding the process, we seem + to have been brought nearer to the invisible mystery, and a solemn peace + of happy insight seems for a little while at least to possess our souls. + Our white walk in the snow-bright air has in some way quickened the + half-torpid immortal within us, revived awhile our sluggish sense of our + spiritual significance and destiny, made us once more, if only for a + little, attractively mysterious to ourselves. Yes! there is what one + might call a certain monastic discipline about winter which impels the + least spiritual minded to meditation on his mortal lot and its immortal + meanings; and thus, as I said, the Church has done wisely to choose + winter for its most Christian festival. The heart of man, thus prepared + by the very elements, is the more open to the message of the miraculous + love, and the more ready to translate it into terms of human goodness. + And thus, I hope, the ghostly significance of mince-pie is made clear. +</p> +<p> + But enough of ghostly, grown-up thoughts. Let us end with a song for + the children: +</p> +<pre> + O the big red sun, + And the wide white world, + And the nursery window + Mother-of-pearled; + + And the houses all + In hoods of snow, + And the mince-pies, + And the mistletoe; + + And Christmas pudding, + And berries red, + And stockings hung + At the foot of the bed; + + And carol-singers, + And nothing but play— + O baby, this is + Christmas Day! +</pre> +<a name="2H_4_26"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<h2> + XXII +</h2> +<h3> + ON RE-READING WALTER PATER +</h3> +<p> </p> + +<p> + It is with no small satisfaction, and with a sense of reassurance of + which one may, in moods of misgiving, have felt the need during + two decades of the Literature of Noise, that one sees a writer so + pre-eminently a master of the Literature of Meditation coming, for all + the captains and the shouting, so surely into his own. The acceptance + of Walter Pater is not merely widening all the time, but it is more + and more becoming an acceptance such as he himself would have most + valued, an acceptance in accordance with the full significance of his + work rather than a one-sided appreciation of some of its Corinthian + characteristics. The Doric qualities of his work are becoming recognized + also, and he is being read, as he has always been read by his true + disciples—so not inappropriately to name those who have come under his + graver spell—not merely as a <i>prosateur</i> of purple patches, or a + sophist of honeyed counsels tragically easy to misapply, but as an + artist of the interpretative imagination of rare insight and magic, a + writer of deep humanity as well as aesthetic beauty, and the teacher of + a way of life at once ennobling and exquisite. It is no longer possible + to parody him—after the fashion of Mr. Mallock's brilliancy in <i>The New + Republic</i>—as a writer of "all manner and no matter," nor is it possible + any longer to confuse his philosophy with those gospels of unrestrained + libertinism which have taken in vain the name of Epicurus. His highly + wrought, sensitively coloured, and musically expressive style is seen to + be what it is because of its truth to a matter profound and delicate and + intensely meditated, and such faults as it has come rather of too much + matter than too little; while his teaching, far from being that of + a facile "Epicureanism," is seen, properly understood, to involve + something like the austerity of a fastidious Puritanism, and to result + in a jealous asceticism of the senses rather than in their indulgence. + "Slight as was the burden of positive moral obligation with which he had + entered Rome," he writes of Marius, as on his first evening in Rome the + murmur comes to him of "the lively, reckless call to 'play,' from the + sons and daughters of foolishness," "it was to no wasteful and vagrant + affections, such as these, that his Epicureanism had committed him." + Such warnings against misunderstanding Pater is careful to place, at, so + to say, all the cross-roads in his books, so scrupulously concerned is + he lest any reader should take the wrong turning. Few writers, indeed, + manifest so constant a consideration for, and, in minor matters, + such a sensitive courtesy toward, their readers, while in matters + of conscience Pater seems to feel for them an actual pastoral + responsibility. His well-known withdrawal of the "Conclusion" to <i>The + Renaissance</i> from its second edition, from a fear that "it might + possibly mislead some of those young men into whose hands it might + fall," is but one of many examples of his solicitude; and surely such as + have gone astray after such painstaking guidance have but their own + natures to blame. As he justly says, again of Marius, "in the reception + of metaphysical <i>formula</i>, all depends, as regards their actual and + ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human + nature into which they fall—the company they find already present + there, on their admission into the house of thought." +</p> +<p> + That Pater's philosophy could ever have been misunderstood is not to be + entertained with patience by any one who has read him with even ordinary + attention; that it may have been misapplied, in spite of all his care, + is, of course, possible; but if a writer is to be called to account for + all the misapplications, or distortions, of his philosophy, writing may + as well come to an end. Yet, inconceivable as it may sound, a critic + very properly held in popular esteem recently gave it as his opinion + that the teaching of Walter Pater was responsible for the tragic career + of the author of <i>The Picture of Dorian Gray</i>. Certainly that remarkable + man was an "epicurean"—but one, to quote Meredith, "whom Epicurus would + have scourged out of his garden"; and the statement made by the critic + in question that <i>The Renaissance</i> is the book referred to in <i>The + Picture of Dorian Gray</i> as having had a sinister influence over its hero + is so easily disposed of by a reference to that romance itself that it + is hard to understand its ever having been made. Here is the passage + describing the demoralizing book in question: +</p> +<blockquote> + His eye fell on the yellow book that Lord Henry had sent him.... It + was the strangest book he had ever read. It seemed to him that in + exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of + the world were passing in dumb show before him. Things that he had + dimly dreamed of were suddenly made real to him. Things of which he + had never dreamed were gradually revealed.<br><br> + + It was a novel without a plot, and with only one character, being, + indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian who + spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the + passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except + his own, and to sum up, as it were, in himself the various moods + through which the world-spirit had ever passed, loving for their + mere artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called + virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call + sin. The style in which it was written was that curious jewelled + style, vivid and obscure at once, full of <i>argot</i> and of archaisms, + of technical expressions and of elaborate paraphrases, that + characterizes the work of some of the finest artists of the French + school of <i>Décandents.</i> There were in it metaphors as monstrous as + orchids, and as evil in colour. The life of the senses was described + in the terms of mystical philosophy. One hardly knew at times + whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some medieval + saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner. It was a + poisonous book. The heavy odour of incense seemed to cling about its + pages and to trouble the brain. The mere cadence of the sentences, + the subtle monotony of their music, so full as it was of complex + refrains and movements elaborately repeated, produced in the mind of + the lad, as he passed from chapter to chapter, a form of reverie, a + malady of dreaming, that made him unconscious of the falling day and + the creeping shadows....<br><br> + + For years Dorian Gray could not free himself from the memory of this + book. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he never + sought to free himself from it. He procured from Paris no less than + five large paper copies of the first edition, and had them bound in + different colours, so that they might suit his various moods and the + changing fancies of a nature over which he seemed, at times, to have + almost entirely lost control. +</blockquote> +<p> + The book thus characterized is obviously by a French writer—I have + good reason for thinking that it was <i>À Rebours</i> by Huysmans—and how + any responsible reader can have imagined that Walter Pater's <i>The + Renaissance</i> answers to this description passes all understanding. A + critic guilty of so patent a misstatement must either never have read + <i>The Picture of Dorian Gray</i>, or never have read <i>The Renaissance</i>. On + the other hand, if on other more reliable evidence it can be found that + Oscar Wilde was one of those "young men" misled by Pater's book, for + whose spiritual safety Pater, as we have seen, was so solicitous, one + can only remind oneself again of the phrase quoted above in regard to + "that soil of human nature" into which a writer casts his seed. If that + which was sown a lily comes up a toadstool, there is evidently something + wrong with the soil. +</p> +<p> + Let us briefly recall what this apparently so "dangerous" philosophy + of Pater's is, and we cannot do better than examine it in its most + concentrated and famous utterance, this oft-quoted passage from that + once-suppressed "Conclusion" to <i>The Renaissance</i>: +</p> +<blockquote> + Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A + counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated + dramatic life. How may we see in them all that there is to be seen + in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from + point to point, and be present always at the focus where the + greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? To + burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this + ecstasy, is success in life.... While all melts under our feet, we + may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to + knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for + a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange + colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the + face of one's friend. With this sense of the splendor of our + experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one + desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make + theories about the things we see and touch.... Well! we are all + <i>condamnés</i>, as Victor Hugo says; we are all under sentence of + death, but with a sort of indefinite reprieve—<i>les hommes sont tous + condamnés à mort avec des sursis indéfinis</i>: we have an interval, + and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in + listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among "the + children of this world," in art and song. For our one chance lies in + expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible + into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened + sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of + enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come + naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion—that it does + yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of + such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of + art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing + frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as + they pass, and simply for those moments' sake. +</blockquote> +<p> + Now, if it be true that the application, or rather the misapplication, + of this philosophy led Oscar Wilde to Reading Gaol, it is none the + less true that another application of it led Marius to something like + Christian martyrdom, and Walter Pater himself along an ever loftier and + serener path of spiritual vision. +</p> +<p> + Nothing short of wilful misconstruction can make of the counsel thus + offered, with so priestly a concern that the writer's exact meaning be + brought home to his reader, other than an inspiration toward a noble + employment of that mysterious opportunity we call life. For those of us, + perhaps more than a few, who have no assurance of the leisure of an + eternity for idleness or experiment, this expansion and elevation of the + doctrine of the moment, carrying a merely sensual and trivial moral in + the Horatian maxim of <i>carpe diem</i>, is one thrillingly charged with + exhilaration and sounding a solemn and yet seductive challenge to us to + make the most indeed, but also to make the best, of our little day. To + make the most, and to make the best of life! Those who misinterpret or + misapply Pater forget his constant insistence on the second half of that + precept. We are to get "as many pulsations as possible into the given + time," but we are to be very careful that our use of those pulsations + shall be the finest. Whether or not it is "simply for those moments' + sake," our attempt must be to give "<i>the highest quality</i>," remember, to + those "moments as they pass." And who can fail to remark the fastidious + care with which Pater selects various typical interests which he deems + most worthy of dignifying the moment? The senses are, indeed, of natural + right, to have their part; but those interests on which the accent of + Pater's pleading most persuasively falls are not so much the "strange + dyes, strange colours, and curious odours," but rather "the face of + one's friend," ending his subtly musical sentence with a characteristic + shock of simplicity, almost incongruity—or "some mood of passion or + insight or intellectual excitement," or "any contribution to knowledge + that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment." + There is surely a great gulf fixed between this lofty preoccupation with + great human emotions and high spiritual and intellectual excitements, + and a vulgar gospel of "eat, drink, for tomorrow we die," whether or not + both counsels start out from a realization of "the awful brevity" of our + mortal day. That realization may prompt certain natures to unbridled + sensuality. Doomed to perish as the beasts, they choose, it would seem + with no marked reluctance, to live the life of the beast, a life + apparently not without its satisfactions. But it is as stupid as it is + infamous to pretend that such natures as these find any warrant for + their tragic libertinism in Walter Pater. They may, indeed, have found + aesthetic pleasure in the reading of his prose, but the truth of which + that prose is but the beautiful garment has passed them by. For such + it can hardly be claimed that they have translated into action the + aspiration of this tenderly religious passage: +</p> +<blockquote> + Given the hardest terms, supposing our days are indeed but a shadow, + even so we may well adorn and beautify, in scrupulous self-respect, + our souls and whatever our souls touch upon—these wonderful bodies, + these material dwelling-places through which the shadows pass + together for a while, the very raiment we wear, our very pastimes, + and the intercourse of society. +</blockquote> +<p> + Here in this passage from <i>Marius</i> we find, to use Pater's own words + once more, "the spectacle of one of the happiest temperaments coming, + so to speak, to an understanding with the most depressing of theories." + That theory, of course, was the doctrine of the perpetual flux of things + as taught by Aristippus of Cyrene, making a man of the world's practical + application of the old Heraclitean formula, his influence depending on + this, "that in him an abstract doctrine, originally somewhat acrid, had + fallen upon a rich and genial nature well fitted to transform it into a + theory of practice of considerable stimulative power toward a fair + life." Such, too, was Pater's nature, and such his practical usefulness + as what one might call a philosophical artist. Meredith, Emerson, + Browning, and even Carlyle were artists so far related to him and each + other in that each of them wrought a certain optimism, or, at all + events, a courageous and even blithe working theory of life and conduct, + out of the unrelenting facts of existence unflinchingly faced, rather + than ecclesiastically smoothed over—the facts of death and pain and + struggle, and even the cruel mystery that surrounds with darkness and + terror our mortal lot. Each one of them deliberately faced the worst, + and with each, after his own nature, the worst returned to laughter. The + force of all these men was in their artistic or poetic embodiment of + philosophical conceptions, but, had they not been artists and poets, + their philosophical conceptions would have made but little way. And it + is time to recall, what critics preoccupied with his "message" leave + unduly in the background, that Pater was an artist of remarkable power + and fascination, a maker of beautiful things, which, whatever their + philosophical content, have for our spirits the refreshment and + edification which all beauty mysteriously brings us, merely because it + is beauty. <i>Marius the Epicurean</i> is a great and wonderful book, not + merely on account of its teaching, but because it is simply one of the + most <i>beautiful</i> books, perhaps the most beautiful book, written in + English. It is beautiful in many ways. It is beautiful, first of all, in + the uniquely personal quality of its prose, prose which is at once + austere and sensuous, simple at once and elaborate, scientifically exact + and yet mystically suggestive, cool and hushed as sanctuary marble, + sweet-smelling as sanctuary incense; prose that has at once the + qualities of painting and of music, rich in firmly visualized pictures, + yet moving to subtle, half-submerged rhythms, and expressive with every + delicate accent and cadence; prose highly wrought, and yet singularly + surprising one at times with, so to say, sudden innocencies, artless and + instinctive beneath all its sedulous art. It is no longer necessary, as + I hinted above, to fight the battle of this prose. Whether it appeal to + one not, no critic worth attention any longer disparages it as mere + ornate and perfumed verbiage, the elaborate mannerism of a writer hiding + the poverty of his thought beneath a pretentious raiment of decorated + expression. It is understood to be the organic utterance of one with a + vision of the world all his own striving through words, as he best can, + to make that vision visible to others as nearly as possible as he + himself sees it. Pater himself has expounded his theory and practice of + prose, doubtless with a side-thought of self-justification, in various + places up and down his writings, notably in his pregnant essay on + "Style," and perhaps even more persuasively in the chapter called + "Euphuism" in <i>Marius</i>. In this last he thus goes to the root of the + matter: +</p> +<blockquote> + That preoccupation of the <i>dilettante</i> with what might seem mere + details of form, after all, did but serve the purpose of bringing + to the surface, sincerely and in their integrity, certain strong + personal intuitions, a certain vision or apprehension of things + as really being, with important results, thus, rather than + thus—intuitions which the artistic or literary faculty was called + upon to follow, with the exactness of wax or clay, clothing the + model within. +</blockquote> +<p> + This striving to express the truth that is in him has resulted in a + beauty of prose which for individual quality must be ranked with the + prose of such masters as De Quincey and Lamb, and, to make a not + irrelevant comparison, above the very fine prose of his contemporary + Stevenson, by virtue of its greater personal sincerity. +</p> +<p> + There is neither space here, nor need, to illustrate this opinion by + quotation, though it may not be amiss, the musical and decorative + qualities of Pater's prose having been so generally dwelt upon, to + remind the reader of the magical simplicities by which it is no less + frequently characterized. Some of his quietest, simplest phrases have a + wonderful evocative power: "the long reign of these quiet Antonines," + for example; "the thunder which had sounded all day among the hills"; + "far into the night, when heavy rain-drops had driven the last lingerers + home"; "Flavian was no more. The little marble chest with its dust and + tears lay cold among the faded flowers." What could be simpler than + these brief sentences, yet how peculiarly suggestive they are; + what immediate pictures they make! And this magical simplicity is + particularly successful in his descriptive passages, notably of natural + effects, effects caught with an instinctively selected touch or two, + an expressive detail, a grey or coloured word. How lightly sketched, + and yet how clearly realized in the imagination, is the ancestral + country-house of Marius's boyhood, "White-Nights," "that exquisite + fragment of a once large and sumptuous villa"—"Two centuries of the + play of the sea-wind were in the velvet of the mosses which lay along + its inaccessible ledges and angles." Take again this picture: +</p> +<blockquote> + The cottagers still lingered at their doors for a few minutes as the + shadows grew larger, and went to rest early; though there was still + a glow along the road through the shorn corn-fields, and the birds + were still awake about the crumbling grey heights of an old temple. +</blockquote> +<p> + And again this picture of a wayside inn: +</p> +<blockquote> + The room in which he sat down to supper, unlike the ordinary + Roman inns at that day, was trim and sweet. The firelight danced + cheerfully upon the polished three-wicked <i>lucernae</i> burning cleanly + with the best oil, upon the whitewashed walls, and the bunches of + scarlet carnations set in glass goblets. The white wine of the place + put before him, of the true colour and flavour of the grape, and + with a ring of delicate foam as it mounted in the cup, had a + reviving edge or freshness he had found in no other wine. +</blockquote> +<p> + Those who judge of Pater's writing by a few purple passages such as the + famous rhapsody on the <i>Mona Lisa</i>, conceiving it as always thus heavy + with narcotic perfume, know but one side of him, and miss his gift + for conveying freshness, his constant happiness in light and air and + particularly running water, "green fields—or children's faces." His + lovely chapter on the temple of Aesculapius seems to be made entirely + of morning light, bubbling springs, and pure mountain air; and the + religious influence of these lustral elements is his constant theme. + For him they have a natural sacramental value, and it is through + them and such other influences that Pater seeks for his hero the + sanctification of the senses and the evolution of the spirit. In his + preoccupation with them, and all things lovely to the eye and to the + intelligence, it is that the secret lies of the singular purity of + atmosphere which pervades his <i>Marius</i>, an atmosphere which might be + termed the soul-beauty of the book, as distinct from its, so to say, + body-beauty as beautiful prose. +</p> +<p> + Considering <i>Marius</i> as a story, a work of imagination, one finds the + same evocative method used in the telling of it, and in the portrayal + of character, as Pater employs in its descriptive passages. Owing + to certain violent, cinematographic methods of story-telling and + character-drawing to which we have become accustomed, it is too often + assumed that stories cannot be told or characters drawn in any other + way. Actually, of course, as many an old masterpiece admonishes us, + there is no one canon in this matter, but, on the contrary, no limit to + the variety of method and manner a creative artist is at liberty to + employ in his imaginative treatment of human life. All one asks is that + the work should live, the characters and scenes appear real to us, and + the story be told. And Pater's <i>Marius</i> entirely satisfies this demand + for those to whom such a pilgrimage of the soul will alone appeal. It is + a real story, no mere German scholar's attempt to animate the dry bones + of his erudition; and the personages and the scenes do actually live + for us, as by some delicate magic of hint and suggestion; and, though at + first they may seem shadowy, they have a curious way of persisting, and, + as it were, growing more and more alive in our memories. The figure of + Marcus Aurelius, for example, though so delicately sketched, is a + masterpiece of historical portraiture, as the pictures of Roman life, + done with so little, seem to me far more convincing than the like + over-elaborated pictures of antiquity, so choked with learned detail, + of Flaubert and of Gautier. Swinburne's famous praise of Gautier's + <i>Mademoiselle de Maupin</i> applies with far greater fitness to Pater's + masterpiece; for, if ever a book deserved to be described as +</p> +<pre> + The golden book of spirit and sense, + The holy writ of beauty, +</pre> +<p class="noindent"> + it is <i>Marius the Epicurean</i>. +</p> +<p> + It has been natural to dwell so long on this "golden book," because + Pater's various gifts are concentrated in it, to make what is, of + course, his masterpiece; though some one or other of these gifts is to + be found employed with greater mastery in other of his writings, notably + that delicate dramatic gift of embodying in a symbolic story certain + subtle states of mind and refinements of temperament which reaches its + perfection in <i>Imaginary Portraits</i>, to which the later "Apollo in + Picardy" and "Hippolytus Veiled" properly belong. It is only necessary + to recall the exquisitely austere "Sebastian Van Storck" and the + strangely contrasting Dionysiac "Denys L'Auxerrois" to justify one's + claim for Pater as a creative artist of a rare kind, with a singular and + fascinating power of incarnating a philosophic formula, a formula no + less dry than Spinoza's, or a mood of the human spirit, in living, + breathing types and persuasive tragic fables. This genius for creative + interpretation is the soul and significance of all his criticism. It + gives their value to the studies of <i>The Renaissance</i>, but perhaps its + finest flower is to be found in the later <i>Greek Studies</i>. To Flavian, + Pater had said in <i>Marius</i>, "old mythology seemed as full of untried, + unexpressed motives and interest as human life itself," and with what + marvellous skill and evocative application of learning, he himself later + developed sundry of those "untried, unexpressed motives," as in his + studies of the myths of Dionysus—"The spirit of fire and dew, alive and + leaping in a thousand vines"—and Demeter and Persephone—"the peculiar + creation of country people of a high impressibility, dreaming over their + work in spring or autumn, half consciously touched by a sense of its + sacredness, and a sort of mystery about it"—no reader of Pater needs to + be told. This same creative interpretation gives a like value to his + studies of Plato; and so by virtue of this gift, active throughout the + ten volumes which constitute his collected work, Pater proved himself + to be of the company of the great humanists. +</p> +<p> + Along with all the other constituents of his work, its sacerdotalism, + its subtle reverie, its sensuous colour and perfume, its marmoreal + austerity, its honeyed music, its frequent preoccupation with the + haunted recesses of thought, there go an endearing homeliness and + simplicity, a deep human tenderness, a gentle friendliness, a something + childlike. He has written of her, "the presence that rose thus so + strangely beside the waters," to whom all experience had been "but as + the sound of lyres and flutes," and he has written of "The Child in the + House." Among all "the strange dyes, strange colours, and curious + odours, and work of the artist's hands," one never misses "the face of + one's friend"; and, in all its wanderings, the soul never strays far + from the white temples of the gods and the sound of running water. +</p> +<p> + It is by virtue of this combination of humanity, edification, and + aesthetic delight that Walter Pater is unique among the great teachers + and artists of our time. +</p> +<a name="2H_4_27"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<h2> + XXIII +</h2> +<h3> + THE MYSTERY OF "FIONA MACLEOD" <small><sup>1</sup></small> +</h3> + + +<p> </p> + + +<p class="note"> + <sup><b>1</b></sup><i>William Sharp (Fiona Macleod)</i>. A Memoir, compiled by + his wife, Elizabeth A. Sharp. (Duffield & Co.)<br> + <i>The Writings of Fiona Macleod</i>. Uniform edition. Arranged by Mrs. + William Sharp. (Duffield & Co.) +<p> + +<p> + In the fascinating memoir of her husband, which Mrs. William Sharp has + written with so much dignity and tact, and general biographic skill, she + dwells with particular fondness of recollection on the two years of + their life at Phenice Croft, a charming cottage they had taken in the + summer of 1892 at Rudgwick in Sussex, seven miles from Horsham, the + birthplace of Shelley. Still fresh in my memory is a delightful visit I + paid them there, and I was soon afterwards to recall with special + significance a conversation I had with Mrs. Sharp, as four of us walked + out one evening after dinner in a somewhat melancholy twilight, the + glow-worms here and there trimming their ghostly lamps by the wayside, + and the nightjar churring its hoarse lovesong somewhere in the + thickening dusk. +</p> +<p> + "Will," Mrs. Sharp confided to me, was soon to have a surprise for his + friends in a fuller and truer expression of himself than his work had + so far attained, but the nature of that expression Mrs. Sharp did not + confide—more than to hint that there were powers and qualities in her + husband's make-up that had hitherto lain dormant, or had, at all events, + been but little drawn upon. +</p> +<p> + Mrs. Sharp was thus vaguely hinting at the future "Fiona Macleod," + for it was at Rudgwick, we learn, that that so long mysterious + literary entity sprang into imaginative being with <i>Pharais</i>. <i>Pharais</i> + was published in 1894, and I remember that early copies of it came + simultaneously to myself and Grant Allen, with whom I was then staying, + and how we were both somewhat <i>intrigué</i> by a certain air of mystery + which seemed to attach to the little volume. We were both intimate + friends of William Sharp, but I was better acquainted with Sharp's + earlier poetry than Grant Allen, and it was my detection in <i>Pharais</i> + of one or two subtly observed natural images, the use of which had + previously struck me in one of his <i>Romantic Ballads and Poems of + Phantasy</i>, that brought to my mind in a flash of understanding that + Rudgwick conversation with Mrs. Sharp, and thus made me doubly certain + that "Fiona Macleod" and William Sharp were one, if not the same. + Conceiving no reason for secrecy, and only too happy to find that my + friend had fulfilled his wife's prophecy by such fuller and finer + expression of himself, I stated my belief as to its authorship in a + review I wrote for the London <i>Star</i>. My review brought me an urgent + telegram from Sharp, begging me, for God's sake, to shut my mouth—or + words to that effect. Needless to say, I did my best to atone for + having thus put my foot in it, by a subsequent severe silence till + now unbroken; though I was often hard driven by curious inquirers to + preserve the secret which my friend afterwards confided to me. +</p> +<p> + When I say "confided to me," I must add that in the many confidences + William Sharp made to me on the matter, I was always aware of a reserve + of fanciful mystification, and I am by no means sure, even now, that I, + or any of us—with the possible exception of Mrs. Sharp—know the whole + truth about "Fiona Macleod." Indeed it is clear from Mrs. Sharp's + interesting revelations of her husband's temperament that "the whole + truth" could hardly be known even to William Sharp himself; for, very + evidently in "Fiona Macleod" we have to deal not merely with a literary + mystification, but with a psychological mystery. Here it is pertinent to + quote the message written to be delivered to certain of his friends + after his death: "This will reach you," he says, "after my death. You + will think I have wholly deceived you about Fiona Macleod. But, in an + intimate sense this is not so, though (and inevitably) in certain + details I have misled you. Only, it is a mystery. I cannot explain. + Perhaps you will intuitively understand or may come to understand. 'The + rest is silence.' Farewell. WILLIAM SHARP." +</p> +<p> + "It is only right, however, to add that I, and I only, was the + author—in the literal and literary sense—of all written under the + name of 'Fiona Macleod.'" +</p> +<p> + "Only, it is a mystery. I cannot explain." Does "I cannot explain" mean + "I must not explain," or merely just what it says? I am inclined to + think it means both; but, if so, the "must not" would refer to the + purely personal mystification on which, of course, none would desire to + intrude, and the "cannot" would refer to that psychological mystery + which we are at liberty to investigate. +</p> +<p> + William Sharp's explanation to myself—as I believe to others of his + friends—was to the same tenor as this posthumous statement. He and he + only had actually <i>written</i> the "Fiona Macleod" fantasies and poems, + but—yes! there was a real "Fiona Macleod" as well. She was a beautiful + cousin of his, living much in solitude and dreams, and seldom visiting + cities. Between her and him there was a singular spiritual kinship, + which by some inexplicable process, so to say, of psychic collaboration, + had resulted in the writings to which he had given her name. They were + hers as well as his, his as well as hers. Several times he even went so + far as to say that Miss Macleod was contemplating a visit to London, but + that her visit was to be kept a profound secret, and that he intended + introducing her to three of his friends and no more—George Meredith, + W.B. Yeats, and myself. Probably he made the same mock-confidence to + other friends, as a part of his general scheme of mystification. On one + occasion, when I was sitting with him in his study, he pointed to the + framed portrait of a beautiful woman which stood on top of a revolving + book-case, and said "That is Fiona!" I affected belief, but, rightly or + wrongly, it was my strong impression that the portrait thus labelled was + that of a well-known Irish lady prominently identified with Home Rule + politics, and I smiled to myself at the audacious white lie. Mrs. Sharp, + whose remembrance of her husband goes back to "a merry, mischievous + little boy in his eighth year, with light-brown curly hair, blue-grey + eyes, and a laughing face, and dressed in a tweed kilt," tells us that + this "love not only of mystery for its own sake, but of mystification + also," was a marked characteristic of his nature—a characteristic + developed even in childhood by the necessity he always felt of hiding + away from his companions that visionary side of his life which was + almost painfully vivid with him, and the sacredness of which in late + years he felt compelled to screen under his pseudonym. +</p> +<p> + That William Sharp's affirmation of an actual living and breathing + "Fiona Macleod" was, however, virtually true is confided by this + significant and illuminating passage in Mrs. Sharp's biography. Mrs. + Sharp is speaking of a sojourn together in Rome during the spring of + 1891, in which her husband had experienced an unusual exaltation and + exuberance of vital and creative energy. +</p> +<blockquote> + There, at last [she says], he had found the desired incentive + towards a true expression of himself, in the stimulus and + sympathetic understanding of the friend to whom he dedicated the + first of the books published under his pseudonym. This friendship + began in Rome and lasted throughout the remainder of his life. And + though this new phase of his work was at no time the result of + collaboration, as certain of his critics have suggested, he was + deeply conscious of his indebtedness to this friend, for—as he + stated to me in a letter of instructions, written before he went to + America in 1896, concerning his wishes in the event of his death—he + realized that it was "to her I owe my development as 'Fiona + Macleod,' though in a sense of course that began long before I + knew her, and indeed while I was still a child," and that, as he + believed, "without her there would have been no 'Fiona Macleod.'" + Because of her beauty, her strong sense of life and of the joy of + life; because of her keen intuitions and mental alertness, her + personality stood for him as a symbol of the heroic women of Greek + and Celtic days, a symbol that, as he expressed it, unlocked new + doors in his mind and put him "in touch with ancestral memories" of + his race. So, for a time, he stilled the critical, intellectual mood + of William Sharp, to give play to the development of this new-found + expression of subtle emotions, towards which he had been moving with + all the ardour of his nature. +</blockquote> +<p> + From this statement of Mrs. Sharp one naturally turns to the dedication + of <i>Pharais</i> to which she refers, finding a dedicatory letter + to "E.W.R." dealing for the most part with "Celtic" matters, but + containing these more personal passages: +</p> +<blockquote> + Dear friend [the letter begins], while you gratify me by your + pleasure in this inscription, you modestly deprecate the dedication + to you of this study of alien life—of that unfamiliar island-life + so alien in all ways from the life of cities, and, let me add, from + that of the great mass of the nation to which, in the communal + sense, we both belong. But in the Domhan-Tòir of friendship there + are resting-places where all barriers of race, training, and + circumstances fall away in dust. At one of these places we met, a + long while ago, and found that we loved the same things, and in the + same way. +</blockquote> +<p> + The letter ends with this: "There is another Pàras (Paradise) than that + seen of Alastair of Innisròn—the Tir-Nan-Oigh of friendship. Therein we + both have seen beautiful visions and dreamed dreams. Take, then, out of + my heart, this book of vision and dream." +</p> +<p> + "Fiona Macleod," then, would appear to be the collective name given to + a sort of collaborative Three-in-One mysteriously working together: an + inspiring Muse with the initials E.W.R.; that psychical "other self" + of whose existence and struggle for expression William Sharp had been + conscious all his life; and William Sharp, general <i>littérateur</i>, as + known to his friends and reading public. "Fiona Macleod" would seem to + have always existed as a sort of spiritual prisoner within that comely + and magnetic earthly tenement of clay known as William Sharp, but + whom William Sharp had been powerless to free in words, till, at + the wand-like touch of E.W.R.—the creative stimulus of a profound + imaginative friendship—a new power of expression had been given to + him—a power of expression strangely missing from William Sharp's + previous acknowledged writings. +</p> +<p> + To speak faithfully, it was the comparative mediocrity, and occasional + even positive badness, of the work done over his own name that formed + one of the stumbling-blocks to the acceptance of the theory that William + Sharp <i>could</i> be "Fiona Macleod." Of course, his work had been that of + an accomplished widely-read man of letters, his life of Heine being + perhaps his most notable achievement in prose; and his verse had not + been without intermittent flashes and felicities, suggestive of + smouldering poetic fires, particularly in his <i>Sospiri di Roma</i>; but, + for the most part, it had lacked any personal force or savour, and was + entirely devoid of that magnetism with which William Sharp, the man, was + so generously endowed. In fact, its disappointing inadequacy was a + secret source of distress to the innumerable friends who loved him + with a deep attachment, to which the many letters making one of the + delightful features of Mrs. Sharp's biography bear witness. In himself + William Sharp was so prodigiously a personality, so conquering in the + romantic flamboyance of his sun-like vitality, so overflowing with the + charm of a finely sensitive, richly nurtured temperament, so essentially + a poet in all he felt and did and said, that it was impossible patiently + to accept his writings as any fair expression of himself. He was, as we + say, so much more than his books—so immeasurably and delightfully + more—that, compared with himself, his books practically amounted to + nothing; and one was inclined to say of him in one's heart, as one does + sometimes say of such imperfectly articulate artistic natures: "What + a pity he troubles to write at all! Why not be satisfied with being + William Sharp? Why spoil 'William Sharp' by this inadequate and + misleading translation?" +</p> +<p> + The curious thing, too, was that the work he did over his own name, + after "Fiona Macleod" had escaped into the freedom of her own beautiful + individual utterance, showed no improvement in quality, no marks of + having sprung from the same mental womb where it had lain side by side + with so fair a sister. But, of course, one can readily understand that + such work would naturally lack spontaneity of impulse, having to be + done, more or less, against the grain, from reasons of expediency: so + long as "Fiona Macleod" must remain a secret, William Sharp must produce + something to show for himself, in order to go on protecting that secret, + which would, also, be all the better kept by William Sharp continuing in + his original mediocrity. Of this dual activity, Mrs. Sharp thus writes + with much insight: +</p> +<blockquote> + From then till the end of his life [she says] there was a continual + play of the two forces in him, or of the two sides of his nature: of + the intellectually observant, reasoning mind—the actor, and of the + intuitively observant, spiritual mind—the dreamer, which + differentiated more and more one from the other, and required + different conditions, different environment, different stimuli, + until he seemed to be two personalities in one. It was a development + which, as it proceeded, produced a tremendous strain on his physical + and mental resources, and at one time between 1897-8 threatened him + with a complete nervous collapse. And there was for a time distinct + opposition between those two natures which made it extremely + difficult for him to adjust his life, for the two conditions were + equally imperative in their demands upon him.<br><br> + + His preference, naturally, was for the intimate creative work which + he knew grew out of his inner self; though the exigencies of life, + his dependence on his pen for his livelihood, and, moreover, the + keen active interest "William Sharp" took in all the movements of + the day, literary and political, at home and abroad, required of + him a great amount of applied study and work. +</blockquote> +<p> + The strain must indeed have been enormous, and one cannot but feel that + much of it was a needless, even trivial "expense of spirit," and regret + that, when "Fiona Macleod" had so manifestly come into her own, William + Sharp should have continued to keep up the mystification, entailing as + it did such an elaborate machinery of concealment, not the least taxing + of which must have been the necessity of keeping up "Fiona Macleod's" + correspondence as well as his own. Better, so to say, to have thrown + William Sharp overboard, and to have reserved the energies of a + temperament almost abnormally active, but physically delusive and + precarious, for the finer productiveness of "Fiona Macleod." But William + Sharp deemed otherwise. He was wont to say, "Should the secret be found + out, Fiona dies," and in a letter to Mrs. Thomas A. Janvier—she and her + husband being among the earliest confidants of his secret—he makes this + interesting statement: "I can write out of my heart in a way I could + not do as William Sharp, and indeed I could not do so if I were the + woman Fiona Macleod is supposed to be, unless veiled in scrupulous + anonymity.... This rapt sense of oneness with nature, this <i>cosmic + ecstasy</i> and elation, this wayfaring along the extreme verges of the + common world, all this is so wrought up with the romance of life that + I could not bring myself to expression by my outer self, insistent and + tyrannical as that need is.... My truest self, the self who is below + all other selves, and my most intimate life and joys and sufferings, + thoughts, emotions, and dreams, <i>must</i> find expression, yet I cannot + save in this hidden way...." +</p> +<p> + Later he wrote: "Sometimes I am tempted to believe I am half a woman, + and so far saved as I am by the hazard of chance from what a woman can + be made to suffer if one let the light of the common day illuminate the + avenues and vistas of her heart...." +</p> +<p> + At one time, I thought that William Sharp's assumption of a feminine + pseudonym was a quite legitimate device to steal a march on his critics, + and to win from them, thus disguised, that recognition which he must + have been aware he had failed to win in his own person. Indeed, it is + doubtful whether, if he had published the "Fiona Macleod" writings under + his own name, they would have received fair critical treatment. I am + very sure that they would not; for there is quite a considerable amount + of so-called "criticism" which is really foregone conclusion based on + personal prejudice, or biassed preconception, and the refusal to admit + (employing a homely image) that an old dog does occasionally learn new + tricks. Many well-known writers have resorted to this device, sometimes + with considerable success. Since reading Mrs. Sharp's biography, + however, I conclude that this motive had but little, if any, influence + on William Sharp, and that his statement to Mrs. Janvier must be taken + as virtually sincere. +</p> +<p> + A certain histrionism, which was one of his charms, and is perhaps + inseparable from imaginative temperaments, doubtless had its share in + his consciousness of that "dual nature" of which we hear so much, + and which it is difficult sometimes to take with Sharp's "Celtic" + seriousness. Take, for example, this letter to his wife, when, having + left London, precipitately, in response to the call of the Isles, he + wrote: "The following morning we (for a kinswoman was with me) stood on + the Greenock pier waiting for the Hebridean steamer, and before long + were landed on an island, almost the nearest we could reach, that I + loved so well." Mrs. Sharp dutifully comments: "The 'we' who stood on + the pier at Greenock is himself in his dual capacity; his 'kinswoman' is + his other self." Later he writes, on his arrival in the Isle of Arran: + "There is something of a strange excitement in the knowledge that two + people are here: so intimate and yet so far off. For it is with me as + though Fiona were asleep in another room. I catch myself listening + for her step sometimes, for the sudden opening of a door. It is + unawaredly that she whispers to me. I am eager to see what she will + do—particularly in <i>The Mountain Lovers</i>. It seems passing strange + to be here with her alone at last...." I confess that this strikes + me disagreeably. It is one thing to be conscious of a "dual + personality"—after all, consciousness of dual personality is by no + means uncommon, and it is a commonplace that, spiritually, men of genius + are largely feminine—but it is another to dramatize one's consciousness + in this rather childish fashion. There seems more than a suspicion of + pose in such writing: though one cannot but feel that William Sharp was + right in thinking that the real "Fiona Macleod" was asleep at the + moment. At the same time, William Sharp seems unmistakably to have been + endowed with what I suppose one has to call "psychic" powers—though the + word has been "soiled with all ignoble use"—and to be the possessor + in a considerable degree of that mysterious "sight" or sixth sense + attributed to men and women of Gaelic blood. Mrs. Sharp tells a curious + story of his mood immediately preceding that flight to the Isles of + which I have been writing. He had been haunted the night before by the + sound of the sea. It seemed to him that he heard it splashing in the + night against the walls of his London dwelling. So real it had seemed + that he had risen from his bed and looked out of the window, and even in + the following afternoon, in his study, he could still hear the waves + dashing against the house. "A telegram had come for him that morning," + writes Mrs. Sharp, "and I took it to his study. I could get no answer. + I knocked, louder, then louder,—at last he opened the door with a + curiously dazed look in his face. I explained. He answered: 'Ah, I + could not hear you for the sound of the waves!'" +</p> +<p> + His last spoken words have an eerie suggestiveness in this connection. + Writing of his death on the 12th of December, 1905, Mrs. Sharp says: + "About three o'clock, with his devoted friend Alec Hood by his side, he + suddenly leant forward with shining eyes and exclaimed in a tone of + joyous recognition, 'Oh, the beautiful "Green Life," again!' and the + next moment sank back in my arms with the contented sigh, 'Ah, all is + well!'" +</p> +<p> + "The green life" was a phrase often on Sharp's lips, and stood for him + for that mysterious life of elemental things to which he was almost + uncannily sensitive, and into which he seemed able strangely to merge + himself, of which too his writings as "Fiona Macleod" prove him to have + had "invisible keys." It is this, so to say, conscious pantheism, + this kinship with the secret forces and subtle moods of nature, this + responsiveness to her mystic spiritual "intimations," that give to those + writings their peculiar significance and value. In the external lore of + nature William Sharp was exceptionally learned. Probably no writer in + English, with the exceptions of George Meredith and Grant Allen, was his + equal here, and his knowledge had been gained, as such knowledge can + only be gained, in that receptive period of an adventurous boyhood of + which he has thus written: "From fifteen to eighteen I sailed up every + loch, fjord, and inlet in the Western Highlands and islands, from Arran + and Colonsay to Skye and the Northern Hebrides, from the Rhinns of + Galloway to the Ord of Sutherland. Wherever I went I eagerly associated + myself with fishermen, sailors, shepherds, gamekeepers, poachers, + gypsies, wandering pipers, and other musicians." For two months he had + "taken the heather" with, and had been "star-brother" and "sun-brother" + to, a tribe of gypsies, and in later years he had wandered variously in + many lands, absorbing the wonder and the beauty of the world. Well + might he write to Mrs. Janvier: "I have had a very varied, and, to use a + much abused word, a very romantic life in its internal as well as in its + external aspects." Few men have drunk so deep of the cup of life, and + from such pure sky-reflecting springs, and if it be true, in the words + of his friend Walter Pater, that "to burn ever with this hard gem-like + flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life," then indeed the + life of William Sharp was a nobly joyous success. +</p> +<p> + And to those who loved him it is a great happiness to know that he was + able to crown this ecstasy of living with that victory of expression for + which his soul had so long travailed, and to leave behind him not only a + lovely monument of star-lit words, but a spiritual legacy of perennial + refreshment, a fragrant treasure-house of recaptured dreams, and + hallowed secrets of the winds of time: for such are <i>The Writings of + "Fiona Macleod"</i>. +</p> +<a name="2H_4_28"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<h2> + XXIV +</h2> +<h3> + FORBES-ROBERTSON: AN APPRECIATION +</h3> +<p> </p> + + +<p> + The voluntary abdication of power in its zenith has always fascinated + and "intrigued" the imagination of mankind. We are so accustomed to + kings and other gifted persons holding on to their sceptres with a + desperate tenacity, even through those waning years when younger men, + beholding their present feebleness, wonder whether their previous might + was not a fancy of their fathers, whether, in fact, they were ever + really kings or gifted persons at all. In so many cases we have to rely + on a legend of past accomplishment to preserve our reverence. Therefore, + when a Sulla or a Charles V. or a Mary Anderson, leave their thrones at + the moment when their sway over us is most assured and brilliant, we + wonder—wonder at a phenomenon rare in humanity, and suggestive of + romantic reserves of power which seal not only our allegiance to them, + but that of posterity. The mystery which resides in all greatness, in + all charm, is not violated by the cynical explanations of decay. They + remain fortunate as those whom the gods loved, wearing the aureoles of + immortal promise. +</p> +<p> + Few artists have been wise in this respect; poets, for example, very + seldom. Thus we find the works of most of them encumbered with the + débris of their senility. Coventry Patmore was a rare example of a poet + who laid down his pen deliberately, not merely as an artist in words, + but as an artist in life, having, as he said in the memorable preface to + the collected edition of his poems, completed that work which in his + youth he had set before him. His readers, therefore, are not saddened by + any pathetic gleanings from a once-rich harvest-field, or the carefully + picked-up shakings of November boughs. +</p> +<p> + Forbes-Robertson is one of those artists who has chosen to bid farewell + to his art while he is still indisputably its master. One or two other + distinguished actors before him have thus chosen, and a greater number + have bade us, those professional "farewells" that remind one of that + dream of De Quincey in which he heard reverberated "Everlasting + farewells! and again and yet again reverberated—everlasting farewells!" + In Forbes-Robertson's case, however, apart from our courteous taking the + word of his management, we know that the news is sadly true. There is + a curious personal honour and sincerity breathing through all his + impersonations that make us feel, so to say, that not only would we take + the ghost's word for a thousand pounds, but that between him and his art + is such an austere compact that he would be incapable of humiliating it + by any mere advertising devices; and beyond that, those who have seen + him play this time (1914) in New York must have been aware that in the + very texture of all his performances was woven like a sigh the word + "farewell." His very art, as I shall have later to emphasize, is an art + of farewell; but, apart from that general quality, it seemed to me, + though, indeed, it may have been mere sympathetic fancy, that in these + last New York performances, as in the performances last spring in + London, I heard a personal valedictory note. Forbes-Robertson seemed to + be saying good-by at once to his audience and to his art. +</p> +<p> + In doing this, along with the inevitable sadness that must accompany + such a step, one cannot but think there will be a certain private + whimsical satisfaction for him in being able to go about the world in + after years with his great gift still his, hidden away, but still his to + use at any moment, and to know not only that he has been, but still is, + as it were, in secret, the supreme Hamlet of his time. Something + like that, one may imagine, must be the private fun of abdication. + Forbes-Robertson, as he himself has told us, lays down one art only to + take up another to which he has long been devoted, and of his early + affiliation to which the figure of Love Kissing Beatrice in Rossetti's + "Dante's Dream" bears illustrious and significant witness. As, one + recalls that he was the model for that figure one realizes that even + then he was the young lord Hamlet, born to be <i>par excellence</i> the actor + of sorrow and renunciation. +</p> +<p> + It is not my province to write here of Forbes-Robertson from the point + of view of the reminiscent playgoer or of the technical critic of + acting. Others, obviously, are far better qualified to undertake those + offices for his fame. I would merely offer him the tribute of one to + whom for many years his acting has been something more than acting, as + usually understood, something to class with great poetry, and all the + spiritual exaltation which "great poetry" implies. From first to last, + however associated with that whimsical comedy of which, too, he is + appropriately a master, he has struck for me that note of almost + heartbreaking spiritual intensity which, under all its superficial + materialism and cynicism, is the key-note of the modern world. +</p> +<p> + When I say "first," I am thinking of the first time I saw him, on the + first night of <i>The Profligate</i> by Pinero, in its day one of the plays + that blazed the trail for that social, or, rather, I should say, + sociological, drama since become even more deadly in earnest, though + perhaps less deadly in skill. Incidentally, I remember that Miss Olga + Nethersole, then quite unknown, made a striking impression of evil, + though playing only a small part. It was Forbes-Robertson, however, for + me, and I think for all the playgoing London of the time, that gave the + play its chief value by making us startlingly aware, through the + poignancy of his personality, of what one might call the voice of the + modern conscience. To associate that thrillingly beautiful and profound + voice of his with anything that sounds so prosaic as a "modern + conscience" may seem unkind, but actually our modern conscience is + anything but prosaic, and combines within it something at once poetic + and prophetic, of which that something ghostly in Forbes-Robertson's + acting is peculiarly expressive. That quality of other-worldliness which + at once scared and fascinated the lodgers in <i>The Passing of the Third + Floor Back</i> is present in all Forbes-Robertson's acting. It was that + which strangely stirred us, that first night of <i>The Profligate</i>. We + meet it again with the blind Dick Heldar in <i>The Light That Failed</i>, and + of course we meet it supremely in <i>Hamlet</i>. In fact, it is that quality + which, chief among others, makes Forbes-Robertson's Hamlet the classical + Hamlet of his time. +</p> +<p> + Forbes-Robertson has of course played innumerable parts. Years before + <i>The Profligate</i>, he had won distinction as the colleague of Irving and + Mary Anderson. He may be said to have played everything under the sun. + His merely theatric experience has thus enriched and equipped his + temperament with a superb technique. It would probably be impossible for + him to play any part badly, and of the various successes he has made, to + which his present repertoire bears insufficient witness, others, as I + have said, can point out the excellences. My concern here is with his + art in its fullest and finest expression, in its essence; and therefore + it is unnecessary for me to dwell upon any other of his impersonations + than that of Hamlet. When a man can play <i>Hamlet</i> so supremely, it may + be taken for granted, I presume, that he can play <i>Mice and Men</i>, or + even that masterpiece of all masterpieces, <i>Caesar and Cleopatra</i>. I + trust that it is no disrespect to the distinguished authors of these two + plays to say that such plays in a great actor's repertoire represent + less his versatility than his responsibilities, that pot-boiling + necessity which hampers every art, and that of the actor, perhaps, most + of all. +</p> +<p> + To my thinking, the chief interest of all Forbes-Robertson's other parts + is that they have "fed" his Hamlet; and, indeed, many of his best parts + may be said to be studies for various sides of Hamlet, his fine <i>Romeo</i>, + for example, which, unfortunately, he no longer plays. In <i>Hamlet</i> all + his qualities converge, and in him the tradition of the stage that all + an ambitious actor's experience is only to fit him to play Hamlet is for + once justified. But, of course, the chief reason of that success is that + nature meant Forbes-Robertson to play Hamlet. Temperament, personality, + experience, and training have so worked together that he does not merely + play, but <i>is</i>, Hamlet. Such, at all events, is the complete illusion he + is able to produce. +</p> +<p> + Of course, one has heard from them of old time that an actor's + personality must have nothing to do with the part he is playing; that he + only is an actor who can most successfully play the exact opposite of + himself. That is the academic theory of "character-acting," and of + course the half-truth of it is obvious. It represents the weariness + induced in audiences by handsome persons who merely, in the stage + phrase, "bring their bodies on"; yet it would go hard with some of our + most delightful comedians were it the whole truth about acting. As a + matter of fact, of course, a great actor includes a multiplicity of + selves, so that he may play many parts, yet always be playing himself. + Beyond himself no artist, whatever his art, has ever gone. +</p> +<p> + What reduplication of personality is necessary for the man who plays + Hamlet need hardly be said, what wide range of humanity and variety of + accomplishment; for, as Anatole France has finely said of Hamlet, "He is + a man, he is man, he is the whole of man." +</p> +<p> + Time was when <i>Hamlet</i> was little more than an opportunity for some + robustious periwig-pated fellow, or it gave the semi-learned actor the + chance to conceal his imaginative incapacity by a display of "new + readings." For example, instead of saying: +</p> +<pre> + The air bites shrewdly; it is very cold, +</pre> +<p class="noindent"> + you diverted attention from your acting by an appeal to the literary + antiquarianism of your audience, and, out of one or other of the + quartos, read the line: +</p> +<pre> + The air bites shrewdly; <i>is</i> it very cold? +</pre> +<p class="noindent"> + with the implication that there was a whole world of suggestion in the + difference. +</p> +<p> + One has known actors, far from unillustrious, who staked their whole + performance on some such learned triviality or some trifling novelty of + business, when, for example, in Hamlet's scene with his mother, the + prince comes to: +</p> +<pre> + Look here upon this picture, and on this. +</pre> +<p> + An actor who deserves better than he has yet received in the tradition + of the acted <i>Hamlet</i>—I mean Wilson Barrett—used to make much of + taking a miniature of his father from his bosom to point the contrast. +</p> +<p> + But all such things in the end are of no account. New readings, new + business, avail less and less. Nor does painstaking archaeology of + scenery or dresses any longer throw dust in our eyes. We are for the + play, the living soul of the play. Give us that, and your properties may + be no more elaborate than those of a <i>guignol</i> in the Champs-Elysées. +</p> +<p> + Forbes-Robertson's acting is so imaginative, creating the scene about + him as he plays, that one almost resents any stage-settings for him at + all, however learnedly accurate and beautifully painted. +</p> +<p> + His soul seems to do so much for us that we almost wish it could be + left to do it all, and he act for us as they acted in Elizabeth's day, + with only a curtain for scenery, and a placard at the side of the stage + saying, "This is Elsinore." +</p> +<p> + One could hardly say more for one's sense of the reality of + Forbes-Robertson's acting, as, naturally, one is not unaware that + distressing experiments have been made to reproduce the Elizabethan + theatre by actors who, on the other hand, were sadly in need of all + that scenery, archaeology, or orchestra could do for them. +</p> +<p> + With a world overcrowded with treatises on the theme, from, and before, + Gervinus, with the commentary of <i>Wilhelm Meister</i> in our minds, not to + speak of the starlit text ever there for our reading, there is surely no + need to traverse the character of Hamlet. He has meant so much to our + fathers—though he can never have meant so much to them as he does to us + of today—that he is, so to say, in our blood. He is strangely near to + our hearts by sheer inheritance. And perhaps the most beautiful thing + Forbes-Robertson's Hamlet does for us is that it commands our love for a + great gentleman doing his gentlest and bravest and noblest with a sad + smile and a gay humour, in not merely a complicated, wicked, absurd, and + tiresome, but, also, a ghostly world. +</p> +<p> + When we think of Hamlet, we think of him as two who knew him very well + thought of him,—Ophelia and Horatio,—and as one who saw him only as he + sat at last on his throne, dead, with the crown of Denmark on his + knees. +</p> +<p> + Ophelia's +</p> +<pre class="si"> + Courtier's, soldier's, scholar's eye, tongue, sword, + The expectancy and rose of the fair state; +</pre> +<p class="noindent"> + the "sweet prince" of Horatio's "good-night"—the soldier for whose + passage Fortinbras commanded +</p> +<pre class="si"> + The soldier's music and the rites of war. +</pre> +<p> + We think of him, too, as the haunted son of a dear father murdered, a + philosophic spectator of the grotesque brutality of life, suddenly by a + ghostly summons called on to take part in it; a prince, a philosopher, a + lover, a soldier, a sad humourist. +</p> +<p> + Were one asked what aspects of Hamlet does Forbes-Robertson specially + embody, I should say, in the first place, his princeliness, his + ghostliness, then his cynical and occasionally madcap humour, as where, + at the end of the play-scene, he capers behind the throne in a terrible + boyish glee. No actor that I have seen expresses so well that scholarly + irony of the Renaissance permeating the whole play. His scene with + Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and the recorders is masterly: the silken + sternness of it, the fine hauteur, the half-appeal as of lost ideals + still pleading with the vulgarity of life, the fierce humour of its + disillusion, and behind, as always, the heartbreak—that side of which + comes of the recognition of what it is to be a gentleman in such a + world. +</p> +<p> + In this scene, too, as in others, Forbes-Robertson makes it clear that + that final tribute of Fortinbras was fairly won. +</p> +<p> + The soldier—if necessary, the fighter—is there as supple and strong as + a Damascus blade. One is always aware of the "something dangerous," for + all his princely manners and scholarly ways. One is never left in doubt + as to how this Hamlet will play the man. It is all too easy for him to + draw his sword and make an end of the whole fantastic business. Because + this philosophic swordsman holds the sword, let no one think that he + knows not how to wield it. All this gentleness—have a care!—is that of + an unusually masculine restraint. +</p> +<p> + In the scene with Ophelia, Forbes-Robertson's tenderness was almost + terrible. It came from such a height of pity upon that little + uncomprehending flower! +</p> +<p> + "I never gave you aught," as Forbes-Robertson said it, seemed to mean: + "I gave you all—all that you could not understand." "Yet are not you + and I in the toils of that destiny there that moves the arras. <i>Is</i> it + your father?" +</p> +<p> + Along with Forbes-Robertson's spiritual interpretation of Shakespeare + goes pre-eminently, and doubtless as a contributive part of it, his + imaginative revitalization of the great old lines—lines worn like a + highway with the passage of the generations. As a friend of mine + graphically phrased it, "How he revives for us the splendour of the + text!" +</p> +<p> + The splendour of the text! It is a good phrase, and how splendid the + text is we, of course, all know—know so well that we take it for + granted, and so fall into forgetfulness of its significance; forgetting + what central fires of soul and intellect must have gone to the creation + of such a world of transcendent words. +</p> +<p> + Yet how living the lines still are, though the generations have almost + quoted the life out of them, no man who has spoken them on the stage in + our day, except Forbes-Robertson, has had the gift to show. +</p> +<p> + It is more than elocution, masterly elocution as it is, more than the + superbly modulated voice: the power comes of spiritual springs welling + up beneath the voice—springs fed from those infinite sources which "lie + beyond the reaches of our souls." +</p> +<p> + Merely to take the phrase I have just quoted, how few actors—or readers + of Shakespeare, or members of any Shakespearian audience, for that + matter—have any personal conception of what it means! They may make a + fine crescendo with it, but that is all. They have never stood, + shrinking and appalled, yet drawn with a divine temptation, upon the + brink of that vastness along the margin of which, it is evident, that + Hamlet often wandered. It is in vain they tell their audiences and + Horatio: +</p> +<pre class="si"> + There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, + Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. +</pre> +<p> + We are quite sure that they know nothing of what they are saying; and + that, as a matter of fact, there are few things for them in heaven or + earth except the theatre they are playing in, their actors' club, and, + generally, their genial mundane lives; and, of course, one rather + congratulates them on the simplicity of their lives, congratulates them + on their ignorance of such haunted regions of the mind. Yet, all the + same, that simplicity seems to disqualify them from playing <i>Hamlet</i>. +</p> +<p> + Few Shakespearian actors seem to remember what they are + playing—Shakespeare. One would think that to be held a worthy + interpreter of so great a dramatist, so mysterious a mind, and so + golden a poet, were enough distinction. Oscar Wilde, in a fine + sonnet, addressed Henry Irving as +</p> +<pre class="si"> + Thou trumpet set for Shakespeare's lips to blow, +</pre> +<p class="noindent"> + and we may be sure that Irving appreciated the honour thus paid him, he + who so wonderfully interpreted so many of Shakespeare's moods, so well + understood the irony of his intellect, even the breadth of his humanity, + yet in <i>Hamlet</i>, at all events, so strangely missed his soul. +</p> +<p> + Most of us have seen many Hamlets die. We have watched them squirming + through those scientific contortions of dissolution, to copy which they + had very evidently walked the hospitals in a businesslike quest of + death-agonies, as certain histrionic connoisseurs of madness in France + lovingly haunt the Saltpétrière. As I look back, I wonder how we + tolerated their wriggling absurdity. I suppose it was that the hand of + tradition was still upon us, as upon them. And, let us not forget, the + words were there, the immortal words, and an atmosphere of tragic death + and immortality that only such words could create: +</p> +<pre class="si"> + Absent thee from felicity awhile, + And in the harsh world draw thy breath in pain + To hear my story ... + The rest is silence.... +</pre> +<p> + How different it is when Forbes-Robertson's Hamlet dies! All my life I + seem to have been asking my friends, those I loved best, those who + valued the dearest, the kindest, the greatest, and the strongest in our + strange human life, to come with me and see Forbes-Robertson die in + <i>Hamlet</i>. I asked them because, as that strange young dead king sat + upon his throne, there was something, whatever it meant—death, life, + immortality, what you will—of a surpassing loveliness, something + transfiguring the poor passing moment of trivial, brutal murder into a + beauty to which it was quite natural that that stern Northern warrior, + with his winged helmet, should bend the knee. I would not exchange + anything I have ever read or seen for Forbes-Robertson as he sits there + so still and starlit upon the throne of Denmark. +</p> +<p> + Forbes-Robertson is not merely a great Shakespearian actor; he is a + great spiritual actor. The one doubtless implies the other, though the + implication has not always appeared to be obvious. +</p> +<p> + He is prophetic of what the stage will some day be, and what we can see + it here and there preparing to become. In all the welter of the dramatic + conditions of the moment there emerges one fact, that of the growing + importance of the stage as a vehicle for what one may term general + culture. The stage, with its half-sister, the cinema, is strangely, + by how long and circuitous a route, returning of course, with an + immeasurably developed equipment, to its starting-point, ending + curiously where it began as the handmaid of the church. As with the old + moralities or miracle-plays, it is becoming once more our teacher. The + lessons of truth and beauty, as those of plain gaiety and delight, are + relying more and more upon the actor for their expression, and less on + the accredited doctors of divinity or literature. Even the dancers are + doing much for our souls. Our duties as citizens are being taught us by + well-advertised plays, and if we wish to abolish Tammany or change our + police commissioner, we enforce our desire by the object-lesson of a + play. The great new plays may not yet be here, but the public once more + is going to the theatre, as it went long ago in Athens, to be delighted + and amused, of course, but also to be instructed in national and civic + affairs, and, most important of all, to be purified by pity and terror. +</p> +<a name="2H_4_29"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<h2> + XXV +</h2> +<h3> + A MEMORY OF FRÉDÉRIC MISTRAL +</h3> +<p> </p> + +<p> + There are many signs that poetry is coming into its own again—even + here in America, which, while actually one of the most romantic and + sentimental of countries, fondly imagines itself the most prosaic. +</p> +<p> + Kipling, to name but one instance, has, by his clarion-tongued + quickening of the British Empire, shown so convincingly what dynamic + force still belongs to the right kind of singing, and the poet in + general seems to be winning back some of that serious respect from his + fellow-citizens which, under a misapprehension of his effeminacy and + general uselessness, he had lost awhile. The poet is not so much a joke + to the multitude as he was a few years ago, and the term "minor poet" + seems to have fallen into desuetude. +</p> +<p> + Still for all this, I doubt if it is in the Anglo-Saxon blood, nowadays + at all events, to make a national hero of a poet, one might say a + veritable king, such as Frédéric Mistral is today in Provence. In our + time, Björnson in Norway was perhaps the only parallel figure, and he + held his position as actual "father of his people" for very much the + same reasons. At once a commanding and lovable personality, he and his + work were absolutely identified with his country and his countrymen. He + was simply Norway incarnate. +</p> +<p> + So, today in Provence, it is with Frédéric Mistral. He is not only a + poet of Provence. He is Provence incarnate, and, apart from the noble + quality of his work, his position as the foremost representative of his + compatriots is romantically unique. No other country today, pointing to + its greatest man, would point out—a poet; whereas Mistral, were he not + as unspoiled as he is laurelled, might, with literal truth, say: +</p> +<pre> + "<i>Provence—c'est moi!</i>" +</pre> +<p> + We had hardly set foot in Provence this last spring, my wife and I, + before we realized, with grateful wonder, that we had come to a country + that has a poet for a king. +</p> +<p> + On arriving at Marseilles almost the first word we heard was + "Mistral"—not the bitter wind of the same name, but the name of the + honey-tongued "Master." Our innkeeper—O the delightful innkeepers of + France!—on our consulting him as to our project of a walking trip + through the Midi—as Frenchmen usually speak of Provence—said, for his + first aid to the traveller: "Then, of course, you will see our great + poet, Mistral." And he promptly produced a copy of <i>Mirèio</i>, which he + begged me to use till I had bought a copy for myself. +</p> +<p> + "Ah! Mistral," he cried, with Gallic enthusiasm, using the words I have + borrowed from his lips, "Mistral is the King of Provence!" +</p> +<p> + Marseilles had not always been so enthusiastic over Mistral and his + fellows. And Mistral, in his memoirs, gives an amusing account of a + philological battle fought over the letter "s" in a room behind one of + the Marseilles bookshops between "the amateurs of trivialities, the + rhymers of the white beard, the jealous, the grumblers," and the young + innovators of the "félibrige." +</p> +<p> + But that was over fifty years ago, and the battle of those young + enthusiasts has long since been won. What that battle was and what an + extraordinary victory came of it must needs be told for the significance + of Mistral in Provence to be properly understood. +</p> +<p> + The story is one of the most romantic in the history of literature. + Briefly, it is this: +</p> +<p> + The Provençal language, the "langue d'oc," was, of course, once the + courtly and lettered language of Europe, the language of the great + troubadours, and through them the vehicle of the culture and refinement + of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. From it may be said to have + sprung the beginnings of Italian literature. +</p> +<p> + But, owing to various historical vicissitudes, the language of Northern + France, the "langue d'oil," gradually took its place, and when Mistral + was born, in 1830, Provençal had long been regarded as little more than + a <i>patois</i>. +</p> +<p> + Now it was the young Mistral's dream, as a school-boy in the old convent + school of Saint Michael de Frigolet, at Avignon, to restore his native + tongue to its former high estate, to make it once more a literary + language, and it chanced that one of his masters, Joseph Roumanille, was + secretly cherishing the same dream. +</p> +<p> + The master, looking over his pupil's shoulder one day, found that, + instead of working at his prescribed task, he was busily engaged in + translating the Penitential Psalms into Provençal. Instead of punishing + him, the master gratefully hailed a kindred spirit, and presently + confided Provençal verses of his own making. From that moment, though + there was a dozen years' difference between their ages, Mistral and + Roumanille began a friendship which was to last till Roumanille's death, + a friendship of half a century. +</p> +<p> + Soon their dream attracted other recruits, and presently seven friends, + whose names are all famous now, and most of whom have statues in Arles + or in Avignon—Roumanille, Mistral, Aubanel, Mathieu, Giéra, Brunet, and + Tavan—after the manner of Ronsard's "Pléiade," and Rossetti's + "P.R.B."—formed themselves into a brotherhood to carry on the great + work of regeneration. +</p> +<p> + They needed a name to call themselves by. They had all met together to + talk things over in the old castle of Font-Ségugne, or, as Mistral more + picturesquely puts it: "It was written in heaven that one blossoming + Sunday, the twenty-first of May, 1854, in the full springtide of life + and of the year, seven poets should come to meet together in the castle + of Font-Ségugne." Several suggestions were made for a name for this + brotherhood, but presently Mistral announced that in an old folk-story + he had collected at his birthplace, Maillane, he believed that he had + found the word they were in search of. In this folk-story the boy Christ + is represented as discoursing in the temple with "the seven félibres of + the Law." +</p> +<p> + "Why, that is us!" exclaimed the enthusiastic young men as Mistral + finished, and there on the spot "félibre" was adopted as the password of + their order, Mistral coining the word "félibrige" to represent the work + they aimed to do, and also their association. The name stuck, and has + now for many years been the banner-word for the vigorous school of + Provençal literature and the allied arts of painting and sculpture which + has responded with such eager vitality to Mistral's rallying cry. +</p> +<p> + But, excellent as are the other poets which the school has produced—and + one need only glance through a recent <i>Anthologie du Félibrige</i> to + realize what a wealth of true poetry the word "félibrige" now stands + for—there can be no question that its greatest asset still remains + Mistral's own work, as it was his first great poem, <i>Mirèio</i>, which + first drew the eyes of literary Paris, more than inclined to be + contemptuous, to the Provençal renaissance. +</p> +<p> + Adolphe Dumas had been sent to Provence in the year 1856 by the Minister + of Public Instruction to collect the folk-songs of the people, and + calling on Mistral (then twenty-six), living quietly with his widowed + mother at Maillane, he had found him at work on <i>Mirèio</i>. Mistral read + some passages to him, with the result that the generous Dumas returned + to Paris excitedly to proclaim the advent of a new poet. Presently, + Mistral accepted his invitation to visit Paris, was introduced to the + great Lamartine—who has left some charming pages descriptive of his + visit,—read some of <i>Mirèio</i> to him, and was hailed by him as "the + Homer of Provence." +</p> +<p> + The press, however, had its little fling at the new-comer. "The Mistral + it appears," said one pitiful punster, "has been incarnated in a poem. + We shall soon see whether it is anything else but wind." Such has been + the invariable welcome of great men in a small world. +</p> +<p> + But Mistral had no taste for Paris, either as a lion or a butt, and, + after a few days' stay, we find him once more quietly at home at + Maillane. Yet he had brought back with him one precious trophy—the + praise of Lamartine; and when, in the course of a year or two (1859), + <i>Mirèio</i> came to be published at Avignon, it bore, as it still bears, + this heart-felt dedication to Lamartine: +</p> +<p> + "To thee I dedicate <i>Mirèio</i>; it is my heart and my soul; it is the + flower of my years; it is a bunch of grapes from Crau with all its + leaves—a rustic's offering." +</p> +<p> + With the publication of <i>Mirèio</i> Mistral instantly "arrived," instantly + found himself on that throne which, as year has followed year, has + become more securely his own. Since then he has written much noble + poetry, all embodying and vitalizing the legendary lore of his native + land, a land richer in momentous history, perhaps, than any other + section of Europe. But in addition to his poetry he has, single-handed, + carried through the tremendous scholarly task of compiling a dictionary + of the Provençal language—a <i>Thesaurus of the Félibrige</i>, for which + work the Institute awarded him a prize of ten thousand francs. +</p> +<p> + In 1904, he was awarded the Nobel prize of 100,000 francs, but such is + his devotion to his fellow-countrymen that he did not keep that prize + for himself, but used it to found the Musée Arlésien at Arles, a museum + designed as a treasure house of anything and everything pertaining to + the history and life of Provence—antiquities, furniture, costumes, + paintings, and so forth. +</p> +<p> + It was in Arles in 1909, the fiftieth birthday of <i>Mirèio</i>, that + Mistral, then seventy-nine years old, may be said to have reached the + summit of his romantic fame. A great festival was held in his honour, in + which the most distinguished men of France took part. A dramatized + version of his <i>Mirèio</i> was played in the old Roman amphitheatre, and a + striking statue of him was unveiled in the antique public square, the + Place du Forum, with the shade of Constantine looking on, one might + feel, from his mouldering palace hard by. +</p> +<p> + In Arles Mistral is a well-known, beloved figure, for it is his custom, + every Saturday, to come there from Maillane, to cast his eye over the + progress of his museum, the pet scheme of his old age. One wonders how + it must seem to pass that figure of himself, pedestaled high in the old + square. To few men is it given to pass by their own statues in the + street. Sang a very different poet— +</p> +<pre class="si"> + They grind us to the dust with poverty, + And build us statues when we come to die. +</pre> +<p> + But poor Villon had the misfortune to be a poet of the "langue d'oil," + and the Montfaucon gibbet was the only monument of which he stood in + daily expectation. Could the lines of two poets offer a greater + contrast? Blessed indeed is he who serves the rural gods, Pan and Old + Sylvanus and the sister nymphs—as Virgil sang; and Virgilian indeed has + been the golden calm, and sunlit fortunes, as Virgilian, rather than + Homeric, is the gracious art, of the poet whom his first Parisian + admirer, Adolphe Dumas, called "the Homer of Provence"—as Virgilian, + too, seemed the landscape through which at length, one April afternoon, + we found ourselves on pilgrimage to the home of him whose name had been + on the lips of every innkeeper, shopkeeper, and peasant, all the way + from Marseilles to Tarascon. +</p> +<p> + Yes! the same golden peace that lies like a charm across every page + of his greatest poem lay across that sun-steeped, fertile plain, + with its walls of cypress trees, its lines of poplars, its delicate, + tapestry-like designs of almond trees in blossom, on a sombre background + of formal olive orchards, its green meadows, lit up with singing + water-courses, or gleaming irrigation canals, starred here and there + with the awakening kingcup, or sweet with the returning violet—here + and there a farmhouse ("mas," as they call them in Provence) snugly + sheltered from the mistral by their screens of foliage—and far aloft in + the distance, floating like a silver dream, the snow-white shoulder of + Mont Ventoux—the Fuji Yama of Provence. +</p> +<p> + At last the old, time-worn village came in sight—it lies about ten + miles north-east of Tartarin's Tarascon—and we entered it, as was + proper, with the "Master's" words on our lips: "Maillane is beautiful, + well-pleasing is Maillane; and it grows more and more beautiful every + day. Maillane is the honour of the countryside, and takes its name from + the month of May. +</p> +<p> + "Who would be in Paris or in Rome? Poor conscripts! There is nothing to + charm one there; but Maillane has its equal nowhere—and one would + rather eat an apple in Maillane than a partridge in Paris." +</p> +<p> + It was Sunday afternoon, and the streets were full of young people in + their Sunday finery, the girls wearing the pretty Arlésien caps. At + first sight of us, with our knapsacks, they were prepared to be amused, + and saucy lads called out things in mock English; but when it was + understood that we were seeking the house of the "Master" we inspired + immediate respect, and a dozen eager volunteers put themselves at our + service and accompanied us in a body to where, at the eastern edge of + the village, there stands an unpretentious square stone house of no + great antiquity, surrounded by a garden and half hidden with trees. +</p> +<p> + We stood silently looking at the house for a few minutes, trying to + realize that there a great poet had gone on living and working, in + single-minded devotion to his art and his people, for full fifty + years—there in that green, out-of-the-way corner of the world. The + idea of a life so rooted in contentment, so continuously happy in the + lifelong prosecution of a task set to itself in boyhood, and so + independent of change, is one not readily grasped by the hurrying + American mind. +</p> +<p> + Then we pushed open the iron gate and passed into the garden. A paved + walk led up to the front door, but that had an unused look, and, gaining + no response there, we walked through a shrubbery around the side of the + house, and as we turned the corner came on what was evidently the real + entrance, facing a sunny slope of garden where hyacinths and violets + told of the coming of spring. Here we were greeted by some half a dozen + friendly dogs, whose demonstrations brought to the door a neat little, + keen-eyed peasant woman, with an expression in her face that suggested + that she was the real watch dog, on behalf of her master, standing + between him and an intrusive world. As a matter of fact, as we afterward + learned, that is one of her many self-imposed offices, for, having been + in the Mistral household for many years, she has long since been as much + a family friend as a servant, and generally looks after the Master and + Mme. Mistral as if they were her children, nursing and "bossing" them by + turns. "Elise"—I think her name is—is a "character" almost as well + known in Provence as the Master himself. +</p> +<p> + So she looked sharply at us, while I produced a letter to M. Mistral + which had been given me by a humble associate of the "félibres," a + delightful <i>chansonnier</i> we had met at Les Baux. With this she went + indoors, presently to return with a face of still cautious welcome, and + invited us in to a little square hall hung with photographs of various + distinguished friends of the poet and two bronze medallions of himself, + one representing him with his favourite dog. +</p> +<p> + Then a door to the right opened, revealing a typical scholar's study, + lined with books from ceiling to floor, books and papers on tables and + chairs, and framed photographs again on the free wall space. The spring + sunshine poured in through long windows, and in this characteristic + setting stood a tall old man, astonishingly erect, his distinguished + head, with its sparse white locks, its keen eyes, and strong yet + delicate aquiline features, pointed white beard and mustache, + suggesting pictures of some military grand seigneur of old time. His + carriage had the same blending of soldier and nobleman, and the stately + kindliness with which he bade us welcome belonged, alas! to another day. +</p> +<p> + At his side stood a tall, handsome lady, with remarkable, dark, kind + eyes, evidently many years his junior. This was Mme. Mistral, in her day + one of those "queens of beauty" whom the "félibres" elect every seven + years at their floral fêtes. Mme. Mistral was no less gracious to us + than her husband, and joined in the talk that followed with much + animation and charm. +</p> +<p> + We had a little feared that M. Mistral, as he declines to write in + anything but Provençal, might carry his artistic creed into his + conversation too. To our relief, however, he spoke in the most polished + French—for you may know French very well, but be quite unable to + understand Provençal, either printed or spoken. This had sometimes made + our journeying difficult, as we inquired our way of peasants along the + road. +</p> +<p> + It was natural to talk first to Mistral of literature. We inquired + whether he read much English. He shook his head, smiling. No! outside of + one or two of the great classics, Shakespeare and Milton, for example, + he had read little. Yes! he had read one American author—Fenimore + Cooper. <i>Le Feu-Follet</i> had been a favourite book of his boyhood. This + we identified as <i>The Fire-Fly</i>. +</p> +<p> + He seemed to wish to talk about America rather than literature, and + seemed immensely interested in the fact that we were Americans, and he + raised his eyes, with an expression of French wonderment, at the fact + of our walking our way through the country—as also at the length of + the journey from America. Evidently it seemed to him a tremendous + undertaking. +</p> +<p> + "You Americans," he said, "are a wonderful people. You think nothing of + going around the world." +</p> +<p> + We were surprised to find that he took the keenest interest in American + politics. +</p> +<p> + "It must be a terribly difficult country to govern," he said. And then + he asked us eagerly for news of our "extraordinary President." We + suggested Mr. Wilson. +</p> +<p> + "Oh, no! no!" he explained. "The extraordinary man who was President + before him." +</p> +<p> + "Colonel Roosevelt?" +</p> +<p> + Yes, that was the man—a most remarkable man that! So Colonel Roosevelt + may be interested to hear that the poet-king of Provence is an + enthusiastic Bull Mooser. +</p> +<p> + Of course, we talked too of the "félibrige," and it was beautiful to see + how M. Mistral's face softened at the mention of his friend Joseph + Roumanille, and with what generosity he attributed the origin of the + great movement to his dead friend. +</p> +<p> + "But you must by all means call on Mme. Roumanille," said he, "when you + go to Avignon, and say that I sent you"—for Roumanille's widow still + lives, one of the most honoured muses of the "félibrige." +</p> +<p> + When it was time for us to go on our way, nothing would satisfy M. and + Mme. Mistral but that we drink a glass of a cordial which is made by + "Elise" from Mistral's own recipe; and as we raised the tiny glasses of + the innocent liqueur in our hands, Mistral drank "A l'Amérique!" +</p> +<p> + Then, taking a great slouch hat from a rack in the hall, and looking as + though it was his statue from Aries accompanying us, the stately old man + led us out into the road, and pointed us the way to Avignon. +</p> +<p> + On the 30th of this coming September that great old man—the memory of + whose noble presence and beautiful courtesy will remain with us + forever—will be eighty-three. +</p> +<p> + February, 1913. +</p> +<a name="2H_4_30"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<h2> + XXVI +</h2> +<h3> + IMPERISHABLE FICTION +</h3> +<p> </p> + +<p> + The longevity of trees is said to be in proportion to the slowness of + their growth. It has to do no little as well with the depth and area of + their roots and the richness of the soil in which they find themselves. + When the sower went forth to sow, it will be remembered, that which soon + sprang up as soon withered away. It was the seed that was content to + "bring forth fruit with patience" that finally won out and survived the + others. +</p> +<p> + These humble, old-fashioned illustrations occur to me as I apply myself + to the consideration of the question provoked by the lightning + over-production of modern fiction and modern literature generally: the + question of the flourishing longevity of the fiction of the past as + compared with the swift oblivion which seems almost invariably to + over-take the much-advertised "masterpieces" of the present. +</p> +<p> + I read somewhere a ballade asking—where are the "best sellers" of + yesteryear? The ballad-maker might well ask, and one might re-echo with + Villon: "Mother of God, ah! where are they?" During the last twenty + years they have been as the sands on the seashore for multitude, yet I + think one would be hard set to name a dozen of them whose titles even + are still on the lips of men—whereas several quieter books published + during that same period, unheralded by trumpet or fire-balloon, are seen + serenely to be ascending to a sure place in the literary firmament. +</p> +<p> + What can be the reason? Can the decay of these forgotten phenomena of + modern fiction, so lavishly crowned with laurels manufactured in the + offices of their own publishers, have anything to do with the hectic + rapidity of their growth, and may there be some truth in the supposition + that the novels, and books generally, that live longest are those that + took the longest to write, or, at all events underwent the longest + periods of gestation? +</p> +<p> + Some fifteen years or so ago one of the most successful manufacturers of + best sellers was Guy Boothby, whose <i>Dr. Nikola</i> is perhaps still + remembered. Unhappily he did not live long to enjoy the fruits of his + industrious dexterity. I bring his case to mind as typical of the modern + machine-made methods. +</p> +<p> + I had read in a newspaper that he did his "writing" by phonograph, and + chancing to meet him somewhere, asked him about it. His response was to + invite me to come down to his charming country house on the Thames and + see how he did it. Boothby was a fine, manly fellow, utterly without + "side" or any illusions as to the quality of his work. He loved good + literature too well—Walter Pater, incongruously enough, was one of his + idols—to dream that he could make it. Nor was the making of literature + by any means his first preoccupation, as he made clear, with winning + frankness, within a few moments of my arriving at his home. +</p> +<p> + Taking me out into his grounds, he brought me to some extensive kennels, + where he showed me with pride some fifty or so prize dogs; then he took + me to his stables, his face shining with pleasure in his thoroughbreds; + and again he led the way to a vast hennery, populated with innumerable + prize fowls. +</p> +<p> + "These are the things I care about," he said, "and I write the stuff for + which it appears I have a certain knack only because it enables me to + buy them!" +</p> +<p> + Would that all writers of best sellers were as engagingly honest. No few + of them, however, write no better and affect the airs of genius into the + bargain. +</p> +<p> + Then Boothby took me into his "study," the entire literary apparatus of + which consisted of three phonographs; and he explained that, when he had + dictated a certain amount of a novel into one of them, he handed it over + to his secretary in another room, who set it going and transcribed what + he had spoken into the machine; he, meanwhile, proceeding to fill up + another record. And he concluded airily by saying with a laugh that he + had a novel of 60,000 words to deliver in ten days, and was just on the + point of beginning it! +</p> +<p> + Boothby's method was, I believe, somewhat unusual in those days. Since + then it has become something like the rule. Not so much as regards + the phonograph, perhaps, but with respect to the breathless speed of + production. +</p> +<p> + I am informed by an editor, associated with magazines that use no less + than a million and a half words of fiction a month, that he has among + his contributors more than one writer on whom he can rely to turn off a + novel of 60,000 words in six days, and that he can put his finger on + twenty novelists who think nothing of writing a novel of a hundred + thousand words in anywhere from sixty to ninety days. He recalled to me, + too, the case of a well-known novelist who has recently contracted to + supply a publisher with four novels in one year, each novel to run to + not less than a hundred thousand words. One thinks of the Scotsman with + his "Where's your Willie Shakespeare now?" +</p> +<p> + Even Balzac's titanic industry must hide its diminished head before such + appalling fecundity; and what would Horace have to say to such frog-like + verbal spawning, with his famous "labour of the file" and his counsel to + writers "to take a subject equal to your powers, and consider long what + your shoulders refuse, what they are able to bear." It is to be feared + that "the monument more enduring than brass" is not erected with such + rapidity. The only brass associated with the modern best seller is to + be found in the advertisements; and, indeed, all that both purveyor and + consumer seem to care about may well be summed up in the publisher's + recommendation quoted by Professor Phelps: "This book goes with a rush + and ends with a smash." Such, one might add, is the beginning and ending + of all literary rockets. +</p> +<p> + Now let us recall some fiction that has been in the world anywhere from, + say, three hundred years to fifty years and is yet vigorously alive, + and, in many instances, to be classed still with the best sellers. +</p> +<p> + <i>Don Quixote</i>, for example, was published in 1605, but is still actively + selling. Why? May it perhaps be that it was some six years in the + writing, and that a great man, who was soldier as well as writer, + charged it with the vitality of all his blood and tears and laughter, + all the hard-won humanity of years of manful living, those five years as + a slave in Algiers (actually beginning it in prison once more at La + Mancha), and all the stern struggle of a storm-tossed life faced with + heroic steadfastness and gaiety of heart? +</p> +<p> + Take another book which, if it is not read as much as it used to be, and + still deserves to be, is certainly far from being forgotten—<i>Gil Blas</i>. + Published in 1715—that is, its first two parts—it has now two + centuries of popularity to its credit, and is still as racy with + humanity as ever; but, though Le Sage was a rapid and voluminous writer, + over this one book which alone the world remembers it is significant to + note that he expended unusual time and pains. He was forty-seven years + old when the first two parts were published. The third part was not + published till 1724, and eleven years more were to elapse before the + issue of the fourth and final part in 1735. +</p> +<p> + A still older book that is still one of the world's best sellers, <i>The + Pilgrim's Progress</i>, can hardly be conceived as being dashed off in + sixty or ninety days, and would hardly have endured so long had not + Bunyan put into it those twelve years of soul torment in Bedford gaol. + <i>Robinson Crusoe</i> still sells its annual thousands, whereas others of + its author's books no less skilfully written are practically forgotten, + doubtless because Defoe, fifty-eight years old at its publication, had + concentrated in it the ripe experience of a lifetime. Though a boy's + book to us, he clearly intended it for an allegory of his own arduous, + solitary life. +</p> +<p> + "I, Robinson Crusoe," we read, "do affirm that the story, though + allegorical, is also historical, and that it is the beautiful + representation of a life of unexampled misfortune, and of a variety + not to be met with in this world." +</p> +<p> + <i>The Vicar of Wakefield</i>, as we know, was no hurried piece of work. + Indeed, Goldsmith went about it in so leisurely a fashion as to leave it + neglected in a drawer of his desk, till Johnson rescued it, according to + the proverbial anecdote; and even then its publisher, Newbery, was in + no hurry, for he kept it by him another two years before giving it to + the printer and to immortality. It was certainly one of those fruits + "brought forth with patience" all round. +</p> +<p> + <i>Tom Jones</i> is another such slow-growing masterpiece. Written in the + sad years immediately following the death of his dearly loved wife, + Fielding, dedicating it to Lord Lyttelton, says: "I here present you + with the labours of some years of my life"; and it need scarcely + be added that the book, as in the case of all real masterpieces, + represented not merely the time expended on it, but all the accumulated + experience of Fielding's very human history. +</p> +<p> + Yes! Whistler's famous answer to Ruskin's counsel holds good of all + imperishable literature. Had he the assurance to ask two hundred guineas + for a picture that only took a day to paint? No, replied Whistler, he + asked it for "the training of a lifetime"; and it is this training of a + lifetime, in addition to the actual time expended on composition, that + constitutes the reserve force of all great works of fiction, and is + entirely lacking in most modern novels, however superficially brilliant + be their workmanship. +</p> +<p> + For this reason books like George Borrow's <i>Lavengro</i> and <i>Romany Rye</i>, + failures on their publication, grow greater rather than less with the + passage of time. Their writers, out of the sheer sincerity of their + natures, furnished them, as by magic, with an inexhaustible provision of + life-giving "ichor." To quote from Milton, "a good book is the precious + life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a + life beyond life." +</p> +<p> + Of this immortality principle in literature Milton himself, it need + hardly be said, is one of the great exemplars. He was but thirty-two + when he first projected <i>Paradise Lost</i>, and through all the intervening + years of hazardous political industry he had kept the seed warm in his + heart, its fruit only to be brought forth with tragic patience in those + seven years of blindness and imminent peril of the scaffold which + followed his fiftieth birthday. +</p> +<p> + The case of poets is not irrelevant to our theme, for the conditions of + all great literature, whatever its nature, are the same. Therefore, + we may recall Dante, whose <i>Divine Comedy</i> was with him from his + thirty-fifth year till the year of his death, the bitter-sweet companion + of twenty years of exile. Goethe, again, finished at eighty the <i>Faust</i> + he had conceived at twenty. +</p> +<p> + Spenser was at work on his <i>Faerie Queene</i>, alongside his preoccupation + with state business, for nearly twenty years. Pope was twelve years + translating Homer, and I think there is little doubt that Gray's <i>Elegy</i> + owes much of its staying power to the Horatian deliberation with which + Gray polished and repolished it through eight years. +</p> +<p> + If we are to believe Poe's <i>Philosophy of Composition</i>, and there is, I + think, more truth in it than is generally allowed, the vitality of <i>The + Raven</i>, as that, too, of his genuinely imperishable fictions, is less + due to inspiration than to the mathematical painstaking of their + composition. +</p> +<p> + But, perhaps, of all poets, the story of Virgil is most instructive for + an age of "get-rich-quick" <i>littérateurs</i>. On his <i>Georgics</i> alone he + worked seven years, and, after working eleven years on the <i>Aeneid</i>, he + was still so dissatisfied with it that on his death-bed he besought his + friends to burn it, and on their refusal, commanded his servants to + bring the manuscript that he might burn it himself. But, fortunately, + Augustus had heard portions of it, and the imperial veto overpowered the + poet's infanticidal desire. +</p> +<p> + But, to return to the novelists, it may at first sight seem that the + great writer who, with the Waverley Novels, inaugurated the modern era + of cyclonic booms and mammoth sales, was an exception to the classic + formula of creation which we are endeavouring to make good. Stevenson, + we have been told, used to despair as he thought of Scott's "immense + fecundity of invention" and "careless, masterly ease." +</p> +<p> + "I cannot compete with that," he says—"what makes me sick is to think + of Scott turning out <i>Guy Mannering</i> in three weeks." +</p> +<p> + Scott's speed is, indeed, one of the marvels of literary history, yet + in his case, perhaps more than in that of any other novelist, it must + be remembered that this speed had, in an unusual degree, that "training + of a lifetime" to rely upon; as from his earliest boyhood all Scott's + faculties had been consciously as well as unconsciously engaged in + absorbing and, by the aid of his astonishing memory, preserving the + vast materials on which he was able thus carelessly to draw. +</p> +<p> + Moreover, those who have read his manly autobiography know that this + speed was by no means all "ease," as witness the almost tragic + composition of <i>The Bride of Lammermoor</i>. If ever a writer scorned + delights and lived laborious days, it was Walter Scott. At the same time + the condition of his fame in the present day bears out the general truth + of my contention, for there is little doubt that he would be more widely + read than he is were it not for those too frequent <i>longueurs</i> and inert + paddings which resulted from his too hurried workmanship. +</p> +<p> + Jane Austen is another example of comparatively rapid creation, writing + three of her best-known novels, <i>Pride and Prejudice</i>, <i>Sense and + Sensibility</i>, and <i>Northanger Abbey</i> between the ages of twenty-one and + twenty-three. Yet <i>Pride and Prejudice</i>, which practically survives the + others, took her ten months to complete, and all her writings, it has + again to be said, had first been deeply and intimately "lived." +</p> +<p> + Charlotte Brontë was a year in writing <i>Jane Eyre</i>, spurred on to new + effort by the recent rejection of <i>The Professor</i>; but to write such a + book in a year cannot be called over-hasty production when one considers + how much of <i>Jane Eyre</i> was drawn from Charlotte Brontë's own life, and + also how she and her sisters had been experimenting with literature from + their earliest childhood. +</p> +<p> + Thackeray considered an allowance of two years sufficient for the + writing of a good novel, but that seems little enough when one takes + into account the length of his best-known books, not to mention the + perfection of their craftsmanship. Dickens, for all the prodigious bulk + of his output, was rather a steady than a rapid writer. "He considered," + says Forster, "three of his not very large manuscript pages a good, and + four an excellent, day's work." +</p> +<p> + <i>David Copperfield</i> was about a year and nine months in the writing, + having been begun in the opening of 1849 and completed in October, 1850. + <i>Bleak House</i> took a little longer, having been begun in November, 1851, + and completed in August, 1853. <i>Hard Times</i> was a hasty piece of work, + written between the winter of 1853, and the summer of 1854, and it + cannot be considered one of Dickens's notable successes. +</p> +<p> + George Meredith wrote four of his greatest novels in seven years, + <i>Richard Feverel</i>, <i>Evan Harrington</i>, <i>Sandra Belloni</i>, and <i>Rhoda + Fleming</i> being produced between 1859 and 1866. His poem, <i>Modern Love</i>, + was also written during that period. +</p> +<p> + George Eliot was a much-meditating, painstaking writer, though <i>Adam + Bede</i> cost her little more than a year's work. Her novels, however, as + a rule, did not come forth without prayer and fasting, and, in the + course of their creation, she used often to suffer from "hopelessness + and melancholy." <i>Romola</i>, to which she devoted long and studious + preparation, she was often on the point of giving up, and in regard to + it she gives expression to a literary ideal to which the gentleman with + the contract for four novels a year, referred to in the outset of this + paper, is probably a stranger. +</p> +<blockquote> + It may turn out [she says], that I can't work freely and fully + enough in the medium I have chosen, and in that case I must give + it up; for I will never write anything to which my whole heart, + mind, and conscience don't consent; so that I may feel it was + something—however small—which wanted to be done in this world, + and that I am just the organ for that small bit of work. +</blockquote> +<p> + Charles Kingsley who, if not a great novelist, has to his credit in + <i>Westward Ho!</i> one romance at least which, in the old phrase, "the world + will not willingly let die," was as conscientious in his work as he was + brilliant. +</p> +<p> + Says a friend who was with him while he was writing <i>Hypatia</i>: +</p> +<p> + "He took extraordinary pains to be accurate. We spent one whole day in + searching the four folio volumes of Synesius for a fact he thought was + there, and which was found there at last." +</p> +<p> + The writer of perhaps the greatest historical novel in the English + language, <i>The Cloister and the Hearth</i>, was what one might call a + glutton for thoroughness. Of himself Charles Reade has said: "I studied + the great art of fiction closely for fifteen years before I presumed + to write a line. I was a ripe critic before I became an artist." His + commonplace books, on the entries in which and the indexing he was + accustomed to spend one whole day out of each week, cataloguing the + notes of his multifarious reading and pasting in cuttings from + newspapers likely to be useful in novel-building, completely filled + one of the rooms in his house. In his will he left these open to the + inspection of literary students who cared to study the methods which + he had found so serviceable. +</p> +<p> + To name one or two more English novelists: Thomas Hardy's novels would + seem to have the slow growth of deep-rooted things. His greatest work, + <i>The Return of the Native</i>, was on the stocks for four years, though a + year seems to have sufficed for <i>Far from the Madding Crowd</i>. +</p> +<p> + The meticulous practice of Stevenson is proverbial, but this glimpse of + his method is worth catching again. +</p> +<blockquote> + The first draft of a story [records Mr. Charles D. Lanier], + Stevenson wrote out roughly, or dictated to Lloyd Osbourne. When all + the colours were in hand for the complete picture, he invariably + penned it himself, with exceeding care.... If the first copy did not + please him, he patiently made a second or a third draft. In his + stern, self-imposed apprenticeship of phrase-making he had prepared + himself for these workmanlike methods by the practice of rewriting + his trial stories into dramas and then reworking them into stories + again. +</blockquote> +<p> + Nathaniel Hawthorne brought the devoted, one might say, the devotional, + spirit of the true artist to all his work, but <i>The Scarlet Letter</i> was + written at a good pace when once started, though, as usual, the germ + had been in Hawthorne's mind for many years. The story of its beginning + is one of the many touching anecdotes in that history of authorship + which Carlyle compared to the Newgate Calendar. Incidentally, too, it + witnesses that an author occasionally meets with a good wife. +</p> +<p> + One wintry autumn day in Salem, Hawthorne returned home earlier than + usual from the custom-house. With pale lips, he said to his wife: "I am + turned out of office." To which she—God bless her!—cheerily replied: + "Very well! now you can write your book!" and immediately set about + lighting his study fire and generally making things comfortable for his + work. +</p> +<p> + The book was <i>The Scarlet Letter</i>, and was completed by the following + February, Hawthorne, as his wife said, writing "immensely" on it day + after day, nine hours a day. When finished, Hawthorne seems to have been + dispirited about the story, and put it away in a drawer; but the good + James T. Fields chanced soon to call on him, and asked him if he had + anything for him to publish. +</p> +<p> + "Who," asked Hawthorne gloomily, "would risk publishing a book from me, + the most unpopular writer in America?" +</p> +<p> + "I would," was Field's rejoinder, and after some further sparring, + Hawthorne owned up. +</p> +<p> + "As you have found me out," said he, "take what I have written and tell + me if it is good for anything"; and Fields went away with the manuscript + of what is, without any question, America's greatest novel. +</p> +<p> + Turning to the great novelists of France, with one or two exceptions, + they all bear out the theory of longevity in literature which I have + been endeavouring to support. It must reluctantly be confessed that one + of the most fascinatingly vital of them all, Alexandre Dumas, is one of + the exceptions, born improvisator as he was; yet immense research, it + needs hardly be said, went to the making of his enormous library of + romance—even though, it be allowed, that much of that work was done for + him by his "disciples." +</p> +<p> + George Sand was another facile, all too facile, writer. Here is a + description of her method: +</p> +<blockquote> + To write novels was to her only a process of nature. She seated + herself before her table at ten o'clock, with scarcely a plot and + only the slightest acquaintance with her characters, and until five + in the evening, while her hand guided a pen, the novel wrote itself. + Next day, and the next, it was the same. By and by the novel had + written itself in full and another was unfolding. +</blockquote> +<p> + Whether George Sand is still alive as a novelist, apart from her place + as an historic personality, I leave others to decide; but I am very sure + that she would be read a great deal more than she is if she had not so + confidently left her novels—to write themselves. Different, indeed, was + the method of Balzac, toiling year after year at his colossal task of + <i>The Human Comedy</i>, sometimes working eighteen hours a day, and never + less than twelve, and that "in the midst of protested bills, business + annoyances, the most cruel financial straits, in utter solitude and lack + of all consolation." But then Balzac was sustained by one of those great + dreams, without whose aid no lasting literature is produced, the dream, + "by infinite patience and courage, to compose for the France of the + nineteenth century, that history of morals which the old civilizations + of Rome, Athens, Memphis, and India have left untold." +</p> +<p> + To fulfil this he was able to live, for a long period, on a daily + expenditure of "three sous for bread, two for milk, and three for + firing." But doubtless it had been different if his dream had been + prize puppies, a garage full of motor-cars, or a translation into the + Four Hundred. +</p> +<p> + Victor Hugo, again, was one of the herculean artists, working, in + Emerson's phrase, "in a sad sincerity," with the patience of an ant and + the energy of a volcano. Of his <i>Les Misérables</i>—perhaps the greatest + novel ever written, as it is, I suppose, easily the longest—he said, + "it takes me nearly as long to publish a book as to write one"; and he + was at work on <i>Les Misérables</i>, off and on, for nearly fifteen years. + Of his writing <i>Notre Dame</i> (that other colossus of fiction) this quaint + picture has been preserved. He had made vast historical preparations for + it, but ever there seemed still more to make, till at length his + publisher grew impatient, and under his pressure Hugo at last made a + start—after this fashion: +</p> +<blockquote> + He purchased a great grey woollen wrapper that covered him from head + to foot, he locked up all his clothes lest he should be tempted to + go out, and, carrying off his ink-bottle to his study, applied + himself to his labour just as if he had been in prison. He never + left the table except for food and sleep, and the sole recreation + that he allowed himself was an hour's chat after dinner with M. + Pierre Leroux, or any other friend who might drop in, and to whom he + would occasionally read over his day's work. +</blockquote> +<p> + Daudet, whose <i>Tartarin</i> bids fair to remain one of the world's types, + like <i>Don Quixote</i> or <i>Mr. Micawber</i>, for all his natural Provençal + gift of improvisation and, indeed, from his self-recognized necessity + of keeping it in check, was another strenuous artist. He wrote each + manuscript three times over, he told his biographer, and would write it + as many more if he could; and his son, in writing of him, has this truth + to say of his, as of all living work: +</p> +<blockquote> + The fact is that labour does not begin at the moment when the + artist takes his pen. It begins in sustained reflection and in the + thought which accumulates images and sifts them, garners and winnows + them out, and compels life to keep control over imagination, and + imagination to expand and enlarge life. +</blockquote> +<p> + Zola is perhaps unduly depreciated nowadays, but certainly, if Carlyle's + "infinite capacity for taking pains" as a recipe for genius ever was put + to the test, it was by the author of the Rougon-Macquart series. Talking + of rewriting, Prosper Mérimée, best known for <i>Carmen</i>, is said to have + rewritten his <i>Colomba</i> no less than sixteen times; as our Anglo-Saxon + Kipling, it used to be told, wrote his short stories seven times over. +</p> +<p> + But, of course, the classical example of the artist-fanatic in modern + times was Gustave Flaubert. His agonies in quest of the <i>mot propre</i>, + the one and only word, are proverbial, and are said literally to have + broken down his nerves. Mr. Huneker has told of him that "he would + annotate three hundred volumes for a page of facts.... In twenty pages + he sometimes saved three or four from destruction," and, in the course + of twenty-six years' polishing and pruning of <i>The Temptation of Saint + Anthony</i>, he reduced his original manuscript of 540 pages down to 136, + even reducing it still further after its first publication. +</p> +<p> + On <i>Madame Bovary</i> he worked six years, and in writing <i>Salâmmbo</i>, + which, took him no less time, he studied the scenery on the spot and + exhausted the resources of the Imperial Library in his search for + documentary evidences. +</p> +<p> + Flaubert may be said to have carried his passion for perfection to the + point of mania, and it will be a question with some whether, with all + his pains, he can be called a great novelist, after all. But that he was + a great stylist and a master in the art of making terrible and beautiful + bas-reliefs admits of no doubt. +</p> +<p> + To be a great world-novelist you need an all-embracing humanity as well, + such as we find in Tolstoy's <i>War and Peace</i>—but that great book, need + one say, came of no slipshod speed of improvisation. On the contrary, + Tolstoy corrected and recorrected it so often that his wife, who acted + as his amanuensis, is said to have copied the whole enormous manuscript + no less than seven times! +</p> +<p> + Yes! though it be doubtless true, in Mr. Kipling's famous phrase, that +</p> +<pre> + There are nine and sixty ways + Of inditing tribal lays, + And every blessed one of them is right, +</pre> +<p class="noindent"> + I think that the whole nine and sixty of them include somewhere in their + method those sole preservative virtues of truth to life and passionate + artistic integrity. The longest-lived books, whatever their nature, have + usually been the longest growing; and even those lasting things of + literature that have seemed, as it were, to spring up in a night, have + been long in secret preparation in a soil mysteriously enriched and + refined by the hid processes of time. +</p> +<a name="2H_4_31"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<h2> + XXVII +</h2> +<h3> + THE MAN BEHIND THE PEN +</h3> +<p> </p> + +<p> + Bulwer's deservedly famous phrase, "The pen is mightier than the sword," + beneath its surface application, if you think it over, has this further + suggestion to make to the believer in literature—that, as the sword is + of no value as a weapon apart from the man that wields it, so, and no + less so, is it with the pen. A mere pen, a mere sword—of what use are + they, save as mural decorations, without a man behind them? +</p> +<p> + And that recalls a memory of mine, which, as both great men are now + drinking wine in Valhalla out of the skulls of their critics, there can + be no harm in recalling. +</p> +<p> + Some years ago I was on an unforgettable visit to Björnson, at his + country home of Aulestad, near Lillehammer. This is not the moment to + relive that beautiful memory as a whole. All that is pertinent to my + present purpose is a remark in regard to Ibsen that Björnson flashed out + one day, shaking his great white mane with earnestness, his noble face + alight with the spirit of battle. We had been talking of his possibly + too successful attempt to sever Norway from Sweden, and Ibsen came in + somehow incidentally. +</p> +<p> + "Ibsen," said he, "is not a man. He is only a pen." +</p> +<p> + There is no necessity to discuss the justice of the dictum. Probably, if + ever there was a man behind a pen, it was Ibsen; but Ibsen's manhood + concentrated itself entirely behind his pen, whereas Björnson's employed + other weapons also, such as his gift of oratory, and was generally more + dramatically in evidence. Björnson and Ibsen, as we know, did not agree + on a number of things. Thus Björnson, like a human being, was unjust. + But his phrase was a useful one, and I am using it. It was misapplied to + Ibsen; but, put in the form of a question, I know of no better single + test to apply to writers, dead or alive, than— +</p> +<p> + "Is this a man? Or is it only a pen?" +</p> +<p> + Said Walt Whitman, in his familiar "So Long" to <i>Leaves of Grass</i>: +</p> +<pre> + Camerado, this is no book; + Who touches this touches a man. +</pre> +<p> + And, of course, Walt was right about his own book, whether you like the + man behind <i>Leaves of Grass</i> or not; but also that assertion of his + might be chalked as a sort of customs "O.K." on all literary baggage + whatsoever that has passed free into immortality. There is positively no + writer that has withstood the searching examination of time, on whose + book that final stamp of literary reality may not be placed. On every + classic, Time has scrawled ineffaceably: +</p> +<pre> + This is no book; + Who touches this touches a man. +</pre> +<p> + I raise the question of reality in literature in no merely academic + spirit. For those who not only love books, but care for literature as a + living thing, the question is a particularly live issue at the present + time, when not only the quantity of writing is so enormous, but the + average quality of it is so astonishingly good, when technique that + would almost humble the masters, and would certainly dazzle them, is an + accomplishment all but commonplace. At any rate, it is so usual as to + create no special surprise. If people write at all, it is taken for + granted, nowadays, that they write well. And the number of people at the + present time writing not only well, but wonderfully well, is little + short of appalling. +</p> +<p> + In this, for those who ponder the phenomena of literature, there is less + matter for congratulation than would seem likely at first sight. There + is, indeed, no little bewilderment, and some disquietude. Confronted + with short stories—and novels also, for that matter—told with a skill + which makes the old masters of fiction look like clumsy amateurs; + confronted, too, with a thousand poets—the number is scarcely an + exaggeration—with accomplishments of metre and style that make some + famous singers seem like clodhoppers of the muse, one is obliged to ask + oneself: +</p> +<p> + "Are these brilliant writers really greater than those that went + before?" +</p> +<p> + If for some reason, felt at first rather than defined, we answer "no," + we are forced to the conclusion that, after all, literature must be + something more than a mere matter of writing. If so, we are constrained + to ask ourselves, what is it? +</p> +<p> + The men who deal with manuscripts—editors, publishers' readers, and + publishers, men not only expert witnesses in regard to the printed + literature of the day, but also curiously learned in the story of the + book unborn, the vast mass of writing that never arrives at print—are + even more impressed by what one might call the uncanny literary + brilliance of the time. They are also puzzled by the lack of a certain + something missing in work which otherwise possesses every nameable + quality of literary excellence. One of these, an editor with an eye as + sympathetic as it is keen, told me of an instance to the point, typical + of a hundred others. +</p> +<p> + He had been unusually struck by a story sent in to him by an unknown + writer. It was, he told me, amazing from every purely literary point of + view—plot, characterization, colour, and economy of language. It had so + much that it seemed strange that anything at all should be lacking. He + sent for the writer, and told him just what he thought. +</p> +<p> + "But," he ended, after praise such as an editor seldom risks, "there is + something the matter with it, after all. I wonder if you can tell me + what it is." +</p> +<p> + The writer was, for a writer so flattered, strangely modest. All he + could say, he answered, was that he had done his best. The editor, + agreeing that he certainly seemed to have done that, was all the more + curious to find out how it was that a man who could do so well had not + been able to add to his achievement the final "something" that was + missing. +</p> +<p> + "What puzzles me," said the editor finally, "is that, with all the + rest, you were not able to add—humanity. Your story seems to have + been written by a wonderful literary machine, instead of by a man." +</p> +<p> + And, no doubt, the young story-writer went away sorrowful, in spite of + the acceptance of his story—which, after all, was only lacking in that + quality which you will find lacking in all the writing of the day, save + in that by one or two exceptional writers, who, by their isolation, the + more forcibly point the moral. +</p> +<p> + A wonderful literary machine! The editor's phrase very nearly hits off + the situation. As we have the linotype to set up the written words with + a minimum of human agency, we really seem to be within measurable + distance of a similar automaton that will produce the literature to be + set up without the intrusion of any flesh-and-blood author. In this + connection I may perhaps be permitted to quote a sentence or two from + myself, written <i>à propos</i> a certain chameleonesque writer whose + deservedly popular works are among the contemporary books that I most + value: +</p> +<blockquote> + A peculiar skill seems to have been developed among writers during + the last twenty years—that of writing in the manner of some master, + not merely with mimetic cleverness, but with genuine creative power. + We have poets who write so like Wordsworth and Milton that one can + hardly differentiate them from their masters; and yet—for this is + my point—they are no mere imitators, but original poets, choosing, + it would seem, some old mask of immortality through which to express + themselves. In a different way from that of Guy de Maupassant they + have chosen to suppress themselves, or rather, I should say, that, + whereas De Maupassant strove to suppress, to eliminate, himself, + their method is that of disguise.<br><br> + + In some respects they remind one of the hermit-crab, who annexes + some beautiful ready-made house, instead of making one for himself. + But then they annex it so brilliantly, with such delightful + consequences for the reader, that not only is there no ground for + complaint, but the reader almost forgets that the house does not + really belong to them, and that they are merely entertaining tenants + on a short lease. +</blockquote> +<p> + It is not that one is not grateful to writers of this type. Indeed one + is. They not only provide us with genuine entertainment, but, by the + skill born of their fine culture, they make us re-taste of the old + masters in their brilliant variations. One has no complaint against + them. Far from it. Only one wonders why they trouble to attach their own + merely personal names to their volumes, for, so far as those volumes are + concerned, there is no one to be found in them answering to the name of + the ostensible author. +</p> +<p> + Suppose, for example, that the author's name on the title-page is + "Brown." Well, so far as we can find out by reading, "Brown" might just + as well be "Green." In fact, there is no "Brown" discoverable—no + individual man behind the pen that wrote, not out of the fulness of the + heart, or the originality of the brain, from any experience or knowledge + or temperament peculiar to "Brown," but out of the fulness of what one + might call a creatively assimilated education, and by the aid of a + special talent for the combination of literary influences. +</p> +<p> + We have had a great deal of pleasure in the reading, we have admired + this and that, we may even have been astonished, but I repeat—there is + no "Brown." In private life "Brown" may be a forceful and fascinating + personality, but, so far as literature is concerned, he is merely a + "wonderful literary machine." He has been able, by his remarkable skill, + to conjure every other writer into his book—except himself. The name + "Brown" on his title-page means nothing. He has not "made his name." +</p> +<p> + The phrase "to make a name" has become so dulled with long usage that it + is worth while to pause and consider what a reality it stands for. What + it really means, of course, is that certain men and women, by the + personal force or quality of their lives, have succeeded in charging + their names—names given them originally haphazard, as names are given + to all of us—with a permanent significance as unmistakable as that + belonging to the commonest noun. The name "Byron" has a meaning as clear + and unmistakable as the word "mutton." The words "dog" and "cat" have a + meaning hardly more clearly defined than the name "Burns" or "Voltaire." + An oak-tree can no more be mistaken for a willow than Shakespeare can be + confused with Spenser. If we say "Coleridge," there is no possibility of + any one thinking that perhaps we meant "Browning." +</p> +<p> + The reason, of course, is that these names are as unmistakably "made" + as a Krupp gun or a Sheffield razor. Sincere, intense life has passed + into them, life lived as the men who bore those names either chose, or + were forced, to live it; individual experience, stern or gentle, in + combination with an individual gift of expression. +</p> +<p> + All names that are really "made" are made in the same way. You may make + a name as Napoleon made his, through war, or you may make it as Keats + made his, by listening to the nightingale and worshipping the moon. Or + you may make it as Charles Lamb made his, merely by loving old folios, + whist, and roast pig. All that is necessary—granted, of course, the + gift of literary expression—is sincerity, an unshakable faithfulness to + yourself. +</p> +<p> + In really great writers—or, at all events, in those writings of theirs + by which they immortally exist—there is not one insincere word. The + perishable parts of great writers will, without exception, be found to + be those writings which they attempted either in insincere moments, or + at the instigation of some surface talent that had no real connection + with their deep-down selves. +</p> +<p> + All real writing has got to be lived before it is written—lived not + only once or twice, but lived over and over again. Mere reporting won't + do in literature, nor the records of easy voyaging through perilous + seas. Dante had to walk through hell before he could write of it, and + men today who would write either of hell or of heaven will never do it + by a study of fashionable drawing-rooms, or prolonged sojourns in the + country houses of the great. +</p> +<p> + On the other hand, if you wish to write convincingly about what we call + "society," those lords and ladies, for example, who are just as real in + their strange way as coal-heavers and mechanics, it is of no use your + trying, unless you were fortunate enough to be born among them, or have + been unfortunately associated with them all your life. To write with + reality about the most artificial condition necessitates an intimate + acquaintance with it that, at its best, is tragic. Those who would write + about the depths and the heights must have dared them, not merely as + visitors, but as awestricken inhabitants. Similarly, those who would + write about the plain, the long, low levels of commonplace human life, + must have dwelt in them, have possessed the dreary, unlaurelled courage + of the good bourgeois, have known what it is to live out the day just + for the day's sake, with the blessed hope of a reasonably respectable + and comfortable conclusion. +</p> +<p> + Probably it seldom occurs to us to think what a tremendously rooted life + is needed to make even one lasting lyric, though the strangeness of the + process is but the same strangeness that accompanies the antecedent + preparation of a flower. +</p> +<pre> + How many suns it takes + To make one speedwell blue— +</pre> +<p class="noindent"> + was no mere fancy of a poet. It is a fact of the long sifting and + kneading to which time subjects the material of its perfect things. +</p> +<p> + One could not get a better example of what I mean than Lovelace's song + <i>To Lucasta, Going to the Wars</i>, without which no anthology of English + verse could possibly be published. Why does generation after generation + say over and over, and hand on to its children: +</p> +<pre> + Yet this inconstancy is such + As you too shall adore; + I could not love thee, dear, so much + Loved I not honour more. +</pre> +<p> + Is it merely because it is so well written, or because it embodies a + highly moral sentiment suitable to the education of young men? No, it is + because the sword and the pen for once met together in the hand of a + man, because a soldier and a lover and a poet met together in a song. + One might almost say that Lovelace wrote his lyric first with his sword, + and merely copied it out with his pen. At all events, he was first a man + and incidentally a poet; and every real poet that ever sang, whether or + not he wielded the weapons of physical warfare, has been just the same. + Otherwise he could not have been a poet. +</p> +<p> + When one speaks of the man behind the pen, one does not necessarily mean + that the writer must be a man of dominant personality, suggestive in + every sentence of "the strenuous life," and muscle, and "punch." + Literature might be described as the world in words, and as it takes all + kinds of men to make a world, so with the world of literature. All we + ask is that we should be made aware of some kind of a man. Numerous + other qualities besides "the punch" go to the making of living + literature, though blood and brawn, not to say brutality, have of late + had it so much their own way in the fashionable literature of the + day—written by muscular literary gentlemen who seem to write rather + with their fists than their pens—that we are in danger of forgetting + the reassuring truth. +</p> +<p> + J.M. Barrie long ago made a criticism on Rudyard Kipling which has + always stayed by me as one of the most useful of critical touchstones. +</p> +<p> + "Mr. Kipling," said he, "has yet to learn that a man may know more of + life staying at home by his mother's knee than swaggering in bad company + over three continents." +</p> +<p> + Nor is successful literature necessarily the record of the successful + temperament. Some writers, not a few, owe their significance to the fact + that they have found humanly intimate expression for their own failure, + or set down their weakness in such a way as to make themselves the + consoling companions of human frailty and disappointment through the + generations. It is the paradox of such natures that they should express + themselves in the very record of their frustration. Amiel may be taken + as the type of such writers. In confiding to his <i>Journal</i> his hopeless + inability for expressing his high thought, he expressed what is + infinitely more valuable to us—himself. +</p> +<p> + Nor, again, does it follow that the man who thus gets himself + individualized in literature is the kind of man we care about or approve + of. Often it is quite the contrary, and we may think that it had been + just as well if some human types had not been able so forcibly to + project into literature their unworthy and undesirable selves. Yet this + is God's world, and nothing human must be foreign to the philosophical + student of it. +</p> +<p> + All the "specimens" in a natural history museum are not things of + beauty or joy. So it is in the world of books. François Villon cannot + be called an edifying specimen of the human family, yet he unmistakably + belongs there, and it was to that prince of scalawags that we owe not + merely that loveliest sigh in literature—"Where are the snows of + yester-year?"—but so striking a picture of the underworld of medieval + Paris that without it we should hardly be able to know the times as + they were. +</p> +<p> + The same applies to Benvenuto Cellini—bully, assassin, insufferable + egoist, and so forth, as well as artist. If he had not been sufficiently + in love with his own swashbuckler rascality to write his amazing + autobiography, how dim to our imaginations, comparatively, would have + been the world of the Italian Renaissance! +</p> +<p> + Again, in our own day, take Baudelaire, a personality even less + agreeable still—morbid, diseased, if you will, wasting, you may deem, + immense poetic powers on revealing the beauty of those "flowers of evil" + which had as well been left in their native shade. Yet, it is because he + saw them so vividly, cared to see little else, dwelt in his own strange + corner of the world with such an intensity of experience, that he + is—Baudelaire. Like him or not, his name is "made." A queer kind of + man, indeed, but not "only a pen." +</p> +<p> + Certain writers have made a cult of "impersonality" in literature. They + would do their utmost to keep themselves out of sight, to let their + subject-matter tell its own tale. But such a feat is an impossibility. + They might as well try to get out of their own skins. The mere effort + at suppression ends in a form of revelation. Their mere choice of + themes and manner of presentation, let them keep behind the scenes as + assiduously as they may, will in the end stamp them. However much a man + may hide behind his pen, so that indeed his personality, compared with + that of more subjective writers, remains always somewhat enigmatic, yet + when the pen is wielded by a man, whatever his reticence or his mask, we + know that a man is there—and that is all that concerns us. +</p> +<p> + On the other hand, of course, there are companionable, sympathetic + writers whose whole stock-in-trade is themselves, their personal charm, + their personal way of looking at things. Of these, Montaigne and Charles + Lamb are among the great examples. It matters to us little or nothing + what they are writing about; for their subjects, so far as they are + concerned, are only important in relation to themselves, as revealing + to us by reflection two uncommonly "human" human beings, whom it is + impossible to mistake for any one else; just as we enjoy the society of + some whimsical talker among our living friends, valuing him not so much + for what he says, but for the way he says it, and because it is he, and + no one else, that is talking. +</p> +<p> + Again, there are other men whose names, in addition to their personal + suggestion, have an impersonal significance as marking new eras of human + development, such as Erasmus or Rousseau or Darwin; men who embodied + the time-spirit at crucial moments of world change, men who announced + rather than created, the heralds of epochs, men who first took the new + roads along which the rest of mankind were presently to travel, men who + felt or saw something new for the first time, prophets of dawn while yet + their fellows slept. +</p> +<p> + Sometimes a man will come to stand for a whole nation, like Robert Burns + or Cervantes; or a great, half-legendary age of the world, like Homer; + or some permanent attitude of the human spirit, like Plato. +</p> +<p> + No fixed star, great or small, in the firmament of literature ever + got there without some vital reason, or merely by writing, however + remarkable. The idea that literature is a mere matter of writing is seen + to be the hollowest of misconceptions the moment you run over any list + of enduring names. Try any such that you can think of, and in every case + you will find that the name stands for something more than a writer. Of + course, the man had to have his own peculiar genius for writing, but the + peculiarity was but the result of his individual being, his own special + way of living his life or viewing the world. +</p> +<p> + Take Horace, for example. Does he live merely because of his unique + style, his masterly use of the Latin tongue? By means of that, of + course, but only secondarily. Primarily, he is as alive today as he + was when he sauntered through the streets of Rome, because he was so + absolutely the type of the well-bred man of the world in all countries + and times. He lived seriously in the social world as he found it, and + felt no idealistic craving to have it remoulded nearer to the heart's + desire. He was satisfied with its pleasures, and at one with its + philosophy. Thus he is as much at home in modern Paris or London or + New York as in ancient Rome, and his book is, therefore, forever + immortal as the man of the world's Bible. +</p> +<p> + Take a name so different as that of Shelley. We have but to speak it + to define all it now stands for. Though no one should read a line of + Shelley's any more, the dream he dreamed has passed into the very + life-blood of mankind. Wherever men strive for freedom, or seek to + attune their lives to the strange spiritual music that breathes through + all things—music that none ever heard more clearly than he—there is + Shelley like the morning star to guide them and inspire. +</p> +<p> + Think what Wordsworth means to the spiritual thought of the modern + world. In his own day he was one of the most lonely and laughed at of + poets, moping among his lakes and mountains and shepherds. Yet, as + Matthew Arnold said, "we are all Wordsworthians nowadays," and the + religion of nature that he found there for himself in his solitude bids + fair to be the final religion of the modern world. +</p> +<p> + It is the same with every other great name one can think of, be it + Bunyan or Heine, Schopenhauer or Izaak Walton. One has but to cast + one's eyes over one's shelves to realize, as we see the familiar + names, how literally the books that bear them are living men, merely + transmigrated from their fleshly forms into the printed word. + Shakespeare and Milton, yes, even Pope; Johnson, Fielding, Sterne, + Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Carlyle, Dumas, Balzac, Emerson, Thoreau, + Hawthorne, Poe—their very faces seem to look out at us from the + bindings, such vividly human beings were they, with a vision of the + world, or a definition of character, so much their own and no one + else's. One might almost call them patented human beings—patentees of + spiritual discoveries, or of aspects of humanity, whose patents can + never be infringed for all our cleverness. +</p> +<p> + Said Tennyson, in bitter answer to criticism that began to depreciate + him because of the glibness of his imitators: +</p> +<pre> + All can grow the flower now, + For all have got the seed. +</pre> +<p> + And certainly, as I have already said, the art of literary impersonation + is carried to a pitch today that almost amounts to genius. Yet you have + only to compare the real flower with the imitation, and you will soon + understand the difference. +</p> +<p> + Take Walter Scott. It is a commonplace to say how much better we do the + historical novel nowadays than he did. At first sight, we may seem to; + in certain particulars, no doubt we do; but read him again, read <i>Rob + Roy</i> or <i>Quentin Durward</i> again, and you will not be quite so sure. You + will realize what an immortal difference there is, after all, between + the pen with a man behind it, and the most brilliant literary machine. +</p> +<p> + Yes, "the mob of gentlemen that write with ease" is once more with us, + but no real book was ever yet written with ease, and no book has ever + survived, or ever can, in which we do not feel the presence of the + fighting, dreaming, or merely enjoying soul of a man. +</p> +<a name="2H_4_32"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<h2> + XXVIII +</h2> +<h3> + BULLS IN CHINA-SHOPS +</h3> +<p> </p> + +<p> + There are some people of great value and importance in their own + spheres, who, on the strength of the distinction gained there, are apt + to intrude on other spheres of which they have no knowledge, where in + fact they are irrelevant, and often indeed ridiculously out of place. + This, however, does not prevent their trying to assert an authority + gained in their own sphere in those other spheres where they simply do + not belong; and such is the power of a name that is won for any one + thing that the multitude, unaccustomed to make distinctions, accepts + them as authorities on the hundred other things of which they know + nothing. Thus, to take a crude example, the New York Police, which is, + without doubt, learned in its own world, and well-adapted and equipped + for asserting its authority there, sometimes intrudes, with its + well-known <i>bonhomie</i>, into the worlds of drama and sculpture, and, + because it is an acknowledged judge of crooks and grafters, presumes + to be a judge and censor also of new plays and nude statues. +</p> +<p> + Of course, the New York Police is absurd in such a character, absurd as + a bull in a china-shop is absurd; yet, as in the case of the bull with + the china, it is capable of doing quite a lot of damage. +</p> +<p> + I take the New York Police merely, as I said, as a crude example of, + doubtless, well-meant, but entirely misplaced energy. Actually, however, + it is scarcely more absurd than many similar, if more distinguished, + bulls gaily crashing about on higher planes. +</p> +<p> + Such are statesmen who, because they are Prime Ministers or Presidents, + deem themselves authorities on everything within the four winds, doctors + of divinity, and general <i>arbitri elegantiarum</i>. +</p> +<p> + Such a bull in a china-shop in regard to literature was the late Mr. + Gladstone. It is no disrespect towards his great and estimable character + to say, that while, of course, he was technically a scholar—"great + Homeric scholar" was the accepted phrase for him—there were probably + few men in England so devoid of the literary sense. Yet for an author to + receive a post-card of commendation from Mr. Gladstone meant at least + the sale of an edition or two, and a certain permanency in public + appreciation. Her late Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria was Mr. + Gladstone's only rival as the literary destiny of the time. To Mr. + Gladstone we owe Mrs. Humphry Ward, to Her Majesty we owe Miss Marie + Corelli. +</p> +<p> + John Ruskin, much as we may admire him for his moral influence, and + admire, or not admire, him for his prose, was a bull in a china-shop + when he made his famous criticism on Whistler, and thus inadvertantly + added to the gaiety of nations by provoking that delightful trial, + which, farcical as it seemed at the moment, not merely evoked from + Whistler himself some imperishable dicta on art and the relation of + critics to art, but really did something towards the long-drawn + awakening of that mysterious somnolence called the public consciousness + on the strange mission of beauty in this world, and, incidentally of the + status of those "eccentric" ministers of it called artists. +</p> +<p> + I do not mean to say that bulls in china-shops are without their uses. + John Ruskin is a shining example to the contrary. +</p> +<p> + One of his contemporaries, Thomas Carlyle, for all his genius, was on + one important subject—that of poetry—as much of a bull in a china-shop + as Ruskin was in art. Great friends as were he and Tennyson, the famous + anecdote <i>à propos</i> of Tennyson's publication of <i>The Idylls of the + King</i>—"all very fine, Alfred, but when are you going to do some + work"—and many other such written deliverances suffice to show how + absolutely out of court a great tragic humorist and rhetorician may + be on an art practised by writers at least as valuable to English + literature as himself, say Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge, and Keats. + Carlyle was a great writer, but the names of these four gentlemen who, + according to his standard, never did any "work" have a strangely + permanent look about them compared with that of the prophet-journalist + of Chelsea and Ecclefechan. +</p> +<p> + A similar "sage," another of the great conversational brow-beaters of + English literature, Samuel Johnson, though it was his chief business to + be a critic of poetry, was hardly more in court on the matter than + Carlyle. In fact, Dr. Johnson might with truth be described as the King + Bull of all the Bulls of all the China-shops. There was no subject, + however remote from his knowledge or experience on which he would + hesitate to pronounce, and if necessary bludgeon forth, his opinion. + But in his case, there is one important distinction to be made, a + distinction that has made him immortal. +</p> +<p> + He disported his huge bulk about the china-shop with such quaintness, + with such engaging sturdiness of character, strangely displaying all the + time so unique a wisdom of that world that lies outside and encloses all + china-shops, so unparalleled a genius of common sense, oddly linked + with that good old-time quality called "the fear of God," that in + his case we felt that the china, after all, didn't matter, but that + Dr. Samuel Johnson, "the great lexicographer," supremely did. His + opinions of Scotsmen or his opinions of poetry in themselves amount to + little—though they are far from being without their shrewd insight—and + much of the china—such as Milton's poetry—among which he gambolled, + after the manner of Behemoth, chanced to be indestructible. Any china + he broke was all to the ultimate good of the china-shop. Yet, if we + accept him so, is it not because he was such a wonderful bull in the + china-shop of the world? +</p> +<p> + There have been other such bulls but hardly another so great, and with + his name I will, for the moment at least, put personalities aside, and + refer to droves rather than to individual bulls. A familiar type of + the bull in the china-shop is the modern clergyman, who, apparently, + insecure in his status of saint-hood, dissatisfied with that spiritual + sphere which so many confiding human beings have given into his + keeping, will be forever pushing his way like an unwelcome, yet quite + unauthoritative, policeman, into that turmoil of human affairs—of which + politics is a sort of summary—where his opinion is not of the smallest + value, though, perforce, it is received with a certain momentary + respect—as though some beautiful old lady should stroll up to a battery + of artillery, engaged in some difficult and dangerous attack, and offer + her advice as to the sighting and management of the guns. The modern + clergyman's interference in the working out of the secular problems + of modern life has no such picturesque beauty—and it is even less + effective. +</p> +<p> + One would have thought that to have the care of men's souls would be + enough. What a world of suggestiveness there was in the old phrase "a + cure of souls"! Men's souls need saving as much today as ever. Perhaps + they were never in greater danger. Therefore, as the proverbial place + for the cobbler is his last, so more than ever the place for the + clergyman is his church, his pulpit, and those various spiritual offices + for which he is presumably "chosen." His vows do not call upon him + either to be a politician or a matinée idol, nor is it his business to + sow doubt where he is paid for preaching faith. If the Church is losing + its influence, it is largely because of its inefficient interference + in secular affairs, and because of the small percentage of real + spirituality amongst its clergy. +</p> +<p> + But there is a worse intrusion than that of clergymen into secular + affairs. There is the intrusion of the cheap atheist, the small + materialistic thinker, into a sphere of which certainly no clergyman or + priest has any monopoly, that sphere of what we call the spiritual life, + which, however undemonstrable by physical tests, has been real to so + many men and women whose intellects can hardly be called negligible, + from Plato to Newman. I have too much respect for their courageous + sincerity, their nobility of character, as well as for the necessary, if + superficial, destructive work they did, when to do such work meant no + little personal peril and obloquy to themselves, to class Robert + Ingersoll and Charles Bradlaugh with the small fry that resemble them + merely in their imitative negations; yet this is certainly true of both + of them that they were bulls in the china-shop to this extent—that they + confounded real religion with the defective historical evidences of one + religion, and the mythologic assertions and incongruities of its sacred + book. They did splendid work in their iconoclastic criticism of "the + letter" that "killeth," but of "the spirit" that "giveth life" they seem + to have had but little inkling. To make fun of Jonah and the whale, or + "the Mistakes of Moses," had no doubt a certain usefulness, but it was + no valid argument against the existence of God, nor did it explain away + the mysterious religious sense in man—however, or wherever expressed. + Neither Ingersoll nor Bradlaugh saw that the crudest Mumbo-Jumbo + idolatry of the savage does really stand for some point of rapport + between the seen and the unseen, and that, so long as the mysterious + sacredness of life is acknowledged and reverenced, it matters little by + what symbols we acknowledge it and do it reverence. +</p> +<p> + One may consider that the present age is an age of spiritual eclipse, + though that is not the writer's opinion, and question with Matthew + Arnold: +</p> +<pre> + What girl + Now reads in her bosom as clear + As Rebekah read, when she sate + At eve by the palm-shaded well? + Who guards in her breast + As deep, as pellucid a spring + Of feeling, as tranquil, as sure? + What bard, + At the height of his vision, can deem + Of God, of the world, of the soul, + With a plainness as near, + As flashing as Moses felt + When he lay in the night by his flock + On the starlit Arabian waste? + Can rise and obey + The beck of the Spirit like him. +</pre> +<p> + Yet the sight of one who sees is worth more than the blindness of a + hundred that cannot see. Some people are born with spiritual antennae + and some without. There is much delicate wonder in the universe that + needs special organizations for its apprehension. "One eye," you + remember, that of Browning's <i>Sordello</i>— +</p> +<pre> + one eye + In all Verona cared for the soft sky. +</pre> +<p> + In these imponderable and invisible matters, many are in a like case + with Hamlet's mother, when she was unable to see the ghost of his + father which he so plainly saw. "Yet all there is I see!" exclaimed the + queen—though she was quite wrong, as wrong as Mr. Ruskin when he could + see nothing in that painting of Whistler's but a cocks-comb throwing a + paint-pot at a canvas and calling it a picture! +</p> +<p> + Many people who have sharp enough eyes and ears for their own worlds are + absolutely blind and deaf when introduced into other worlds for which + nature has not equipped them. But this by no means prevents their + pronouncing authoritative opinions in those worlds, opinions which + would be amazing if they were not so impertinent. Many literary people + proclaim their indifference to and even contempt for music—as if their + announcement meant anything more than their music deafness, their + unfortunate exclusion from a great art. Mark Twain used to advertise his + preference for the pianola over the piano—as if that proved anything + against the playing of Paderewski. Similarly, he acted the bull in the + china-shop in regard to Christian Science, which cannot be the accepted + creed of millions of men and women of intelligence and social value + without deserving even in a critic the approach of some respect. +</p> +<p> + But humorists are privileged persons. That, no doubt, accounts for the + astonishing toleration of Bernard Shaw. Were it not that he is a + <i>farceur</i>, born to write knock-about comedies—his plays, by the way, + might be termed knock-about comedies of the middle-class mind—he would + never have got a hearing for his common-place blasphemies, and cheap + intellectual antics. He is undeniably "funny," so we cannot help + laughing, though we are often ashamed of ourselves for our laughter; for + to him there is nothing sacred—except his press-notices, and—his + royalties. +</p> +<p> + His so-called "philosophy" has an air of dangerous novelty only to those + innocent middle-classes born but yesterday, to whom any form of thought + is a novelty. Methusaleh himself was not older than Mr. Shaw's "original + ideas." In England, twenty years ago, we were long since weary of his + egotistic buffooneries. Of anything "fine" in literature or art he is + contemptuously ignorant, and from understanding of any of the finer + shades of human life, or of the meaning of such words as "honour," + "gentleman," "beauty," "religion," he is by nature utterly shut out. He + laughs and sneers to make up for his deficiencies, like that Pietro + Aretino who threw his perishable mud at Michael Angelo. So is it always + with the vulgarian out of his sphere. Once he dared to talk vulgarly of + God to a great man who believed in God—Count Tolstoi. +</p> +<p> + He had written to Tolstoi <i>à propos</i> his insignificant little play <i>The + Showing up of Blanco Posnet</i>, and in the course of his letter had said: + "Suppose the world were only one of God's jokes, would you work any less + to make it a good joke instead of a bad one?" Tolstoi had hitherto been + favourably inclined towards Shaw, owing to his friend and biographer Mr. + Aylmer Maude; but this cheap-jack sacrilege was too much for the great + old man, who seemed to know God with almost Matthew Arnold's +</p> +<pre> + plainness as near + As flashing as Moses felt, +</pre> +<p class="noindent"> + and he closed the correspondence with a rebuke which would have abashed + any one but the man to whom it was sent. +</p> +<p> + Tolstoi was like Walt Whitman—he "argued not concerning God." It is a + point of view which people like Mr. Shaw can never understand; any more + than he or his like can comprehend that there are areas of human feeling + over which for him and other such bulls in china-shops should be posted + the delicate Americanism—<small>KEEP OUT</small>. +</p> +<a name="2H_4_33"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<h2> + XXIX +</h2> +<h3> + THE BIBLE AND THE BUTTERFLY +</h3> +<p> </p> + +<p> + Once, in my old book-hunting days, I picked up, on the Quai Voltaire, a + copy of the <i>Proverbs of King Solomon</i>. Then it was more possible than + today to make finds in that quaint open-air library which, still more + than any library housed within governmental or diplomaed walls, is + haunted by the spirit of those passionate, dream-led scholars that + made the Renaissance, and crowded to those lectures filled with that + dangerous new charm which always belongs to the poetic presentation of + new knowledge—those lectures, "musical as is Apollo's lute," being + given up on the hill nearby, by a romantic young priest named Abelard. +</p> +<p> + My copy of the Great King's Wisdom was of no particular bibliographical + value, but it was one of those thick-set, old-calf duodecimos "black + with tarnished gold" which Austin Dobson has sung, books that, one + imagines, must have once made even the Latin Grammar attractive. The + text was the Vulgate, a rivulet of Latin text surrounded by meadows of + marginal comments of the Fathers translated into French,—the whole + presided over, for the edification of the young novice, to whom my copy + evidently belonged, by a distinguished Monseigneur who, in French of the + time of Bossuet, told exactly how these young minds should understand + the wisdom of Solomon, told it with a magisterial style which suggested + that Solomon lived long ago—and, yet, was one of the pillars of the + church. But what particularly interested me about the book, however, as + I turned over its yellow pages, was a tiny thing pressed between them, a + thing the Fathers and the Monseigneur would surely have regarded as + curiously alien to their wisdom, a thing once of a bright, but now of a + paler yellow, and of a frailer texture than it had once been in its + sunlit life—a flower, I thought at first, but, on looking closer, I saw + it was, or had once been, a yellow butterfly. +</p> +<p> + What young priest was it, I wondered, that had thus, with a breaking + heart, crushed the joy of life between these pages! On what spring + morning had this silent little messenger hovered a while over the high + garden-walls of St. Sulpice, flitting and fluttering, and at last darted + and alighted on the page of this old book, at that moment held in the + hands of a young priest walking to and fro amid the tall whispering + trees—delivering at last to him on the two small painted pages of its + wings a message he must not read.... +</p> +<p> + The temptation was severe, for spring was calling all over Paris, and + the words of another book of the Great King whose wisdom he held in his + hand said to him in the Latin that came easily to all manner of men in + those days: <i>Lo! the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the + flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, + and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.... Arise, my love, my + fair one, and come away.</i> +</p> +<p> + The little fluttering thing seemed to be saying that to him as it poised + on the page, and, as his eyes went into a dream, began to crawl softly, + like a rope-walker, up one of his fingers, with a frail, half-frightened + hold, while, high up, over the walls of the garden the poplars were + discreetly swaying to the southern wind, and the lilac-bushes were + carelessly tossing this way and that their fragrance, as altar-boys + swing their censers in the hushed chancel,—but ah! so different an + incense. +</p> +<p> + <i>The flowers appear on the earth</i>, he repeated to himself, beguiled for + a moment, <i>the flowers appear on the earth; and the time of the singing + of birds is come....</i> +</p> +<p> + But, suddenly, for his help against that tiny yellow butterfly there + came to him other stern everlasting words: +</p> +<p> + <i>The grass withereth, the flower fadeth, but the word of our Lord + endureth forever.</i> +</p> +<p> + Then it was, if I imagine aright from my old book, that my young novice + of St. Sulpice crushed the joy of life, in the frail form of its little + messenger, between the pages of the book he held in his hand just then, + the book I held in my hand for a while a hundred and fifty years or so + after—the book I bought that morning on the Quai Voltaire—guarding + that little dead butterfly even more than the wisdom of Solomon. I + wonder if, as he crushed that butterfly, he said to himself—in words + that have grown commonplace since his time—the words of that strange + emperor Hadrian—<i>Animula, vagula, blandula</i>! +</p> +<p> + Perhaps I should not have remembered that book-hunting morning in Old + Paris on the Quai Voltaire, when I bought that beautiful old copy of the + <i>Proverbs of Solomon</i>—with the butterfly so strangely crushed between + its pages—had it not been for a circumstance that happened to me, the + other day, in the subway, which seemed to me of the nature of a marvel. + Many weary men and women were travelling—in an enforced, yet in some + way humorously understanding, society—from Brooklyn Bridge to the + Bronx. I got in at Wall Street. The "crush-hour" was near, for it was + 4:25—still, as yet, there were time and space granted us to observe + our neighbours. In the particular car in which I was sitting, there + was room still left to look about and admire the courage of your + fellow-passengers. Weary men going home—many of them having used them + all day long—have little wish to use their eyes, so all the men in my + car sat silently and sadly, contemplating the future. As I looked at + them, it seemed to me that they were thinking over the day's work they + had done, and the innumerable days' work they had still to do. No one + smiled. No one observed the other. An automatic courtesy gave a seat + here and there, but no one gave any attention to any business but his + own thoughts and his own sad station. +</p> +<p> + It was a car, if I remember aright, occupied almost entirely by + men-passengers, and, so far as I could see, there were no evidences that + men knew women from men, or <i>vice versa</i>, yet, at last, there seemed to + dawn on four men sitting in a row that there was a wonderful creature + reading a book on the other side of the aisle—a lovely young woman, + with all the fabled beauty of the sea-shell, and the rainbow, that + enchantment in her calm pearl-like face, and in the woven stillness of + her hair, that has in all times and countries made men throw up sails + and dare the unknown sea, and the unknown Fates. The beauty, too, that + nature had given her was clothed in the subdued enchantments of the + rarest art. All unconscious of the admiration surrounding her, she sat + in that subway car, like a lonely butterfly, strangely there in her + incongruous surroundings, for a mysterious moment,—to vanish as swiftly + as she had come—and, as she stepped from the car, leaving it dark and + dazzled— +</p> +<pre> + bright with her past presence yet— +</pre> +<p class="noindent"> + I, who had fortunately, and fearfully, sat by her side was aware that + the book she had been reading was lying forgotten on the seat. It was + mine by right of accident,—treasure-trove. So I picked it up, braving + the glares of the four sad men facing me. +</p> +<p> + Naturally, I had wondered what book it was; but its being bound in + tooled and jewelled morocco, evidently by one of the great bookbinders + of Paris, made it unprofitable to hazard a guess. +</p> +<p> + I leave to the imagination of lovers of books what book one would + naturally expect to find in hands so fair. Perhaps <i>Ronsard</i>—or some + other poet from the Rose-Garden of old France. No! it was a charmingly + printed copy of The New Testament. +</p> +<p> + The paradox of the discovery hushed me for a few moments, and then I + began to turn over the pages, several of which I noticed were dog eared + after the manner of beautiful women in all ages. A pencil here and there + had marked certain passages. <i>Come unto me</i>, ran one of the underlined + passages, <i>all ye that are heavy laden, and I will give you rest</i>,—and + I thought how strange it was that she whose face was so calm and still + should have needed to mark that. And another marked passage I noted—<i>He + was in the world, and the world was made by Him, and the world knew Him + not</i>. Then I put down the book with a feeling of awe—such as the Bible + had never brought to me before, though I had been accustomed to it from + my boyhood, and I said to myself: "How very strange!" And I meant how + strange it was to find this wonderful old book in the hands of this + wonderful young beauty. +</p> +<p> + It had seemed strange to find that butterfly in that old copy of the + <i>Proverbs of King Solomon</i>, but how much stranger to find the New + Testament in the hands, or, so to speak, between the wings, of an + American butterfly. +</p> +<p> + I found something written in the book at least as wonderful to me as + the sacred text. It was the name of the butterfly—a name almost as + beautiful as herself. So I was enabled to return her book to her. There + is, of course, no need to mention a name as well-known for good works as + good looks. It will suffice to say that it was the name of the most + beautiful actress in the world. +</p> +<p> + There is a moral to this story. Morals—to stories—are once more + coming into fashion. The Bible, in my boyhood, came to us with no such + associations as I have recalled. There were no butterflies between its + pages, nor was it presented to us by fair or gracious hands. It was a + very grim and minatory book, wielded, as it seemed to one's childish + ignorance, for the purpose which that young priest of St. Sulpice had + used the pages of his copy of the <i>Proverbs of King Solomon</i>, that of + crushing out the joy of life. +</p> +<p> + My first acquaintance with it as I remember, was in a Methodist chapel + in Staffordshire, England, where three small boys, including myself, + prisoned in an old-fashioned high-back pew, were endeavouring to relieve + the apparently endless <i>ennui</i> of the service by eating surreptitious + apples. Suddenly upon our three young heads descended what seemed like a + heavy block of wood, wielded by an ancient deacon who did not approve + of boys. We were, each of us, no more than eight years old, and the book + which had thus descended upon our heads was nothing more to us than a + very weighty book—to be dodged if possible, for we were still in that + happy time of life when we hated all books. We knew nothing of its + contents—to us it was only a schoolmaster's cane, beating us into + silence and good behaviour. +</p> +<p> + So the Bible has been for many generations of boys a book even more + terrible than Caesar's <i>Commentaries</i> or the <i>Aeneid</i> of Virgil—the + dull thud of a mysterious cudgel upon the shoulders of youth which you + bore as courageously as you could. +</p> +<p> + So many of us grew up with what one might call a natural prejudice + against the Bible. +</p> +<p> + Then some of us who cared for literature took it up casually and found + its poetic beauty. We read the <i>Book of Job</i>—which, by the way, Mr. + Swinburne is said to have known by heart; and as we read it even the + stars themselves seemed less wonderful than this description of their + marvel and mystery: +</p> +<p> + <i>Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades or loose the hands of + Orion?</i> +</p> +<p> + <i>Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his season? or canst thou guide + Arcturus with his sons?</i> +</p> +<p> + Or we read in the 37th chapter of the <i>Book of Ezekiel</i> of that weird + valley that was full of bones—"<i>and as I prophesied, there was a noise, + and behold a shaking, and the bones came together bone to bone</i>," + surely one of the most wonderful visions of the imagination in all + literature. +</p> +<p> + Or we read the marvellous denunciatory rhetoric of Jeremiah and Isaiah, + or the music of the melodious heart-strings of King David; we read the + solemn adjuration of the "King Ecclesiast" to remember our Creator in + the days of our youth, with its haunting picture of old age: and the + loveliness of <i>The Song of Songs</i> passed into our lives forever. +</p> +<p> + To this purely literary love of the Bible there has been added within + the last few years a certain renewed regard for it as the profoundest + book of the soul, and for some minds not conventionally religious it has + regained even some of its old authority as a spiritual guide and stay. + And I will confess for myself that sometimes, as I fall asleep at + night, I wonder if even Bernard Shaw has written anything to equal the + Twenty-third Psalm. +</p> +<p> </p> + +<center> +<big>THE END</big> +</center> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> + + + + + + + +<pre> + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Vanishing Roads and Other Essays +by Richard Le Gallienne + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VANISHING ROADS AND OTHER ESSAYS *** + +***** This file should be named 11675-h.htm or 11675-h.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + https://www.gutenberg.org/1/1/6/7/11675/ + +Produced by Janet Kegg and PG Distributed Proofreaders + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: Vanishing Roads and Other Essays + +Author: Richard Le Gallienne + +Release Date: March 22, 2004 [EBook #11675] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ASCII + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VANISHING ROADS AND OTHER ESSAYS *** + + + + +Produced by Janet Kegg and PG Distributed Proofreaders + + + + + + + + +Vanishing Roads +And Other Essays + + +By + +Richard Le Gallienne + + +1915 + + + + + TO + + ROBERT HOBART DAVIS + +DEAR BOB: It is quite a long time now since you and I first caught +sight of each other and became fellow wayfarers on this Vanishing Road +of the world. O quite a lot of years now, Bob! Yet I control my tendency +to shiver at their number from the fact that we have travelled them, +always within hailing distance of each other, I with the comfortable +knowledge that near by I had so good a comrade, so true a friend. + +For this once, by your leave, we won't "can" the sentiment,--to use an +idiom in which you are the master-artist on this continent,--but I, at +least, will luxuriate in retrospect, as I write your name by way of +dedication to this volume of essays, for some of which your quick-firing +mind is somewhat more than editorially responsible. You were one of the +first to make me welcome to a country of which, even as a boy, I used +prophetically to dream as my "promised land," little knowing that it was +indeed to be my home, the home of my spirit, as well as the final +resting-place of my household gods; and, having you so early for my +friend, is it to be wondered at if I soon came to regard the American +humourist as the noblest work of God? + +There is yet, I trust, much left of the Vanishing Road for us to travel +together; and I hope that, when the time comes for us both to vanish +over the horizon line, we may exit still within hail of each other,--so +that we may have a reasonable chance of hitting the trail together on +the next route, whatever it is going to be. + +Always yours, + RICHARD LE GALLIENNE. + +Rowayton, December 25, 1914. + + + + +For their discernment in giving the following essays their first +opportunity with the reader the writer desires to thank the editors of +_The North American Review_, _Harper's Magazine_, _The Century_, _The +Smart Set_, _Munsey's_, _The Out-Door World_, and _The Forum_. + + + + +CONTENTS + + CHAPTER + I.--VANISHING ROADS + II.--WOMAN AS A SUPERNATURAL BEING + III.--THE LACK OF IMAGINATION AMONG MILLIONAIRES + IV.--THE PASSING OF MRS. GRUNDY + V.--MODERN AIDS TO ROMANCE + VI.--THE LAST CALL + VII.--THE PERSECUTIONS OF BEAUTY + VIII.--THE MANY FACES--THE ONE DREAM + IX.--THE SNOWS OF YESTER-YEAR + X.--THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GOSSIP + XI.--THE PASSING AWAY OF THE EDITOR + XII.--THE SPIRIT OF THE OPEN + XIII.--AN OLD AMERICAN TOW-PATH + XIV.--A MODERN SAINT FRANCIS + XV.--THE LITTLE GHOST IN THE GARDEN + XVI.--THE ENGLISH COUNTRYSIDE + XVII.--LONDON--CHANGING AND UNCHANGING + XVIII.--THE HAUNTED RESTAURANT + XIX.--THE NEW PYRAMUS AND THISBE + XX.--TWO WONDERFUL OLD LADIES + XXI.--A CHRISTMAS MEDITATION + XXII.--ON RE-READING WALTER PATER + XXIII.--THE MYSTERY OF "FIONA MACLEOD" + XXIV.--FORBES-ROBERTSON: AN APPRECIATION + XXV.--A MEMORY OF FREDERIC MISTRAL + XXVI.--IMPERISHABLE FICTION + XXVII.--THE MAN BEHIND THE PEN + XXVIII.--BULLS IN CHINA-SHOPS + XXIX.--THE BIBLE AND THE BUTTERFLY + + + +Vanishing Roads + + + + +I + +VANISHING ROADS + + +Though actually the work of man's hands--or, more properly speaking, the +work of his travelling feet,--roads have long since come to seem so much +a part of Nature that we have grown to think of them as a feature of the +landscape no less natural than rocks and trees. Nature has adopted them +among her own works, and the road that mounts the hill to meet the +sky-line, or winds away into mystery through the woodland, seems to be +veritably her own highway leading us to the stars, luring us to her +secret places. And just as her rocks and trees, we know not how or why, +have come to have for us a strange spiritual suggestiveness, so the +vanishing road has gained a meaning for us beyond its use as the avenue +of mortal wayfaring, the link of communication between village and +village and city and city; and some roads indeed seem so lonely, and so +beautiful in their loneliness, that one feels they were meant to be +travelled only by the soul. All roads indeed lead to Rome, but theirs +also is a more mystical destination, some bourne of which no traveller +knows the name, some city, they all seem to hint, even more eternal. + +Never more than when we tread some far-spreading solitude and mark the +road stretching on and on into infinite space, or the eye loses it in +some wistful curve behind the fateful foliage of lofty storm-stirred +trees, or as it merely loiters in sunny indolence through leafy copses +and ferny hollows, whatever its mood or its whim, by moonlight or at +morning; never more than thus, eagerly afoot or idly contemplative, are +we impressed by that something that Nature seems to have to tell us, +that something of solemn, lovely import behind her visible face. If we +could follow that vanishing road to its far mysterious end! Should we +find that meaning there? Should we know why it stops at no mere +market-town, nor comes to an end at any seaport? Should we come at last +to the radiant door, and know at last the purpose of all our travel? +Meanwhile the road beckons us on and on, and we walk we know not why or +whither. + +Vanishing roads do actually stir such thoughts, not merely by way of +similitude, but just in the same way that everything in Nature similarly +stirs thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls; as moonlit waters stir +them, or the rising of the sun. As I have said, they have come to seem +a part of natural phenomena, and, as such, may prove as suggestive a +starting-point as any other for those speculations which Nature is all +the time provoking in us as to why she affects us thus and thus. These +mighty hills of multitudinous rock, piled confusedly against the sky--so +much granite and iron and copper and crystal, says one. But to the soul, +strangely something besides, so much more. These rolling shapes of +cloud, so fantastically massed and moulded, moving in rhythmic change +like painted music in the heaven, radiant with ineffable glories or +monstrous with inconceivable doom. This sea of silver, "hushed and +halcyon," or this sea of wrath and ravin, wild as Judgment Day. So much +vapour and sunshine and wind and water, says one. + +Yet to the soul how much more! + +And why? Answer me that if you can. There, truly, we set our feet on the +vanishing road. + +Whatever reality, much or little, the personifications of Greek +Nature-worship had for the ancient world, there is no doubt that for a +certain modern temperament, more frequently met with every day, those +personifications are becoming increasingly significant, and one might +almost say veritably alive. Forgotten poets may, in the first instance, +have been responsible for the particular forms they took, their names +and stories, yet even so they but clothed with legend presences of wood +and water, of earth and sea and sky, which man dimly felt to have a +real existence; and these presences, forgotten or banished for a while +in prosaic periods, or under Puritanic repression, are once more being +felt as spiritual realities by a world coming more and more to evoke its +divinities by individual meditation on, and responsiveness to, the +mysterious so-called natural influences by which it feels itself +surrounded. Thus the first religion of the world seems likely to be its +last. In other words, the modern tendency, with spiritually sensitive +folk, is for us to go direct to the fountain-head of all theologies, +Nature herself, and, prostrating ourselves before her mystery, strive to +interpret it according to our individual "intimations," listening, +attent, for ourselves to her oracles, and making, to use the phrase of +one of the profoundest of modern Nature-seers, our own "reading of +earth." Such was Wordsworth's initiative, and, as some one has said, "we +are all Wordsworthians today." That pagan creed, in which Wordsworth +passionately wished himself suckled, is not "outworn." He himself, in +his own austere way, has, more than any one man, verified it for us, so +that indeed we do once more nowadays + + Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; + Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn. + +Nor have the dryads and the fauns been frighted away for good. All over +the world they are trooping back to the woods, and whoso has eyes may +catch sight, any summer day, of "the breast of the nymph in the brake." +Imagery, of course; but imagery that is coming to have a profounder +meaning, and a still greater expressive value, than it ever had for +Greece and Rome. All myths that are something more than fancies gain +rather than lose in value with time, by reason of the accretions of +human experience. The mysteries of Eleusis would mean more for a modern +man than for an ancient Greek, and in our modern groves of Dodona the +voice of the god has meanings for us stranger than ever reached his +ears. Maybe the meanings have a purport less definite, but they have at +least the suggestiveness of a nobler mystery. But surely the Greeks were +right, and we do but follow them as we listen to the murmur of the wind +in the lofty oaks, convinced as they of the near presence of the divine. + + The word by seers or sibyls told + In groves of oak or fanes of gold, + Still floats upon the morning wind, + Still whispers to the willing mind. + +Nor was it a vain thing to watch the flight of birds across the sky, and +augur this or that of their strange ways. We too still watch them in a +like mood, and, though we do not interpret them with a like exactitude, +we are very sure that they mean something important to our souls, as +they speed along their vanishing roads. + +This modern feeling of ours is quite different from the outworn +"pathetic fallacy," which was a purely sentimental attitude. We have, of +course, long since ceased to think of Nature as the sympathetic mirror +of our moods, or to imagine that she has any concern with the temporal +affairs of man. We no longer seek to appease her in her terrible moods +with prayer and sacrifice. We know that she is not thinking of us, but +we do know that for all her moods there is in us an answering thrill of +correspondence, which is not merely fanciful or imaginative, but of the +very essence of our beings. It is not that we are reading our thoughts +into her. Rather we feel that we are receiving her thoughts into +ourselves, and that, in certain receptive hours, we are, by some avenue +simpler and profounder than reason, made aware of certitudes we cannot +formulate, but which nevertheless siderealize into a faith beyond the +reach of common doubt--a faith, indeed, unelaborate, a faith, one might +say, of one tenet: belief in the spiritual sublimity of all Nature, and, +therefore, of our own being as a part thereof. + +In such hours we feel too, with a singular lucidity of conviction, that +those forces which thus give us that mystical assurance are all the time +moulding us accordingly as we give up ourselves to their influence, and +that we are literally and not fancifully what winds and waters make us; +that the poetry, for instance, of Wordsworth was literally first +somewhere in the universe, and thence transmitted to him by processes no +less natural than those which produced his bodily frame, gave him form +and feature, and coloured his eyes and hair. + +It is not man that has "poetized" the world, it is the world that has +made a poet out of man, by infinite processes of evolution, precisely in +the same way that it has shaped a rose and filled it with perfume, or +shaped a nightingale and filled it with song. One has often heard it +said that man has endowed Nature with his own feelings, that the pathos +or grandeur of the evening sky, for instance, are the illusions of his +humanizing fancy, and have no real existence. The exact contrary is +probably the truth--that man has no feelings of his own that were not +Nature's first, and that all that stirs in him at such spectacles is but +a translation into his own being of cosmic emotions which he shares in +varying degrees with all created things. Into man's strange heart Nature +has distilled her essences, as elsewhere she has distilled them in +colour and perfume. He is, so to say, one of the nerve-centres of cosmic +experience. In the process of the suns he has become a veritable +microcosm of the universe. It was not man that placed that tenderness in +the evening sky. It has been the evening skies of millions of years that +have at length placed tenderness in the heart of man. It has passed into +him as that "beauty born of murmuring sound" passed into the face of +Wordsworth's maiden. + +Perhaps we too seldom reflect how much the life of Nature is one with +the life of man, how unimportant or indeed merely seeming, the +difference between them. Who can set a seed in the ground, and watch it +put up a green shoot, and blossom and fructify and wither and pass, +without reflecting, not as imagery but as fact, that he has come into +existence, run his course, and is going out of existence again, by +precisely the same process? With so serious a correspondence between +their vital experience, the fact of one being a tree and the other a man +seems of comparatively small importance. The life process has but used +different material for its expression. And as man and Nature are so like +in such primal conditions, is it not to be supposed that they are alike +too in other and subtler ways, and that, at all events, as it thus +clearly appears that man is as much a natural growth as an apple-tree, +alike dependent on sun and rain, may not, or rather must not, the +thoughts that come to him strangely out of earth and sky, the sap-like +stirrings of his spirit, the sudden inner music that streams through him +before the beauty of the world, be no less authentically the working of +Nature within him than his more obviously physical processes, and, say, +a belief in God be as inevitable a blossom of the human tree as +apple-blossom of the apple? + +If this oracular office of Nature be indeed a truth, our contemplation +of her beauty and marvel is seen to be a method of illumination, and her +varied spectacle actually a sacred book in picture-writing, a revelation +through the eye of the soul of the stupendous purport of the universe. +The sun and the moon are the torches by which we study its splendid +pages, turning diurnally for our perusal, and in star and flower alike +dwells the lore which we cannot formulate into thought, but can only +come indescribably to know by loving the pictures. "The meaning of all +things that are" is there, if we can only find it. It flames in the +sunset, or flits by us in the twilight moth, thunders or moans or +whispers in the sea, unveils its bosom in the moonrise, affirms itself +in mountain-range and rooted oak, sings to itself in solitary places, +dreams in still waters, nods and beckons amid sunny foliage, and laughs +its great green laugh in the wide sincerity of the grass. + +As the pictures in this strange and lovely book are infinite, so +endlessly varied are the ways in which they impress us. In our highest +moments they seem to be definitely, almost consciously, sacerdotal, as +though the symbolic acts of a solemn cosmic ritual, in which the +universe is revealed visibly at worship. Were man to make a practice of +rising at dawn and contemplating in silence and alone the rising of the +sun, he would need no other religion. The rest of the day would be +hallowed for him by that morning memory and his actions would partake of +the largeness and chastity of that lustral hour. Moonlight, again, seems +to be the very holiness of Nature, welling out ecstatically from +fountains of ineffable purity and blessedness. Of some moonlight nights +we feel that if we did what our spirits prompt us, we should pass them +on our knees, as in some chapel of the Grail. To attempt to realize in +thought the rapture and purification of such a vigil is to wonder that +we so seldom pay heed to such inner promptings. So much we lose of the +best kind of joy by spiritual inertia, or plain physical sloth; and some +day it will be too late to get up and see the sunrise, or to follow the +white feet of the moon as she treads her vanishing road of silver across +the sea. This involuntary conscience that reproaches us with such laxity +in our Nature-worship witnesses how instinctive that worship is, and how +much we unconsciously depend on Nature for our impulses and our moods. + +Another definitely religious operation of Nature within us is expressed +in that immense gratitude which throws open the gates of the spirit as +we contemplate some example of her loveliness or grandeur. Who that +has stood by some still lake and watched a stretch of water-lilies +opening in the dawn but has sent out somewhere into space a profound +thankfulness to "whatever gods there be" that he has been allowed to +gaze on so fair a sight. Whatever the struggle or sorrow of our lives, +we feel in such moments our great good fortune at having been born into +a world that contains such marvels. It is sufficient success in life, +whatever our minor failures, to have beheld such beauty; and mankind at +large witnesses to this feeling by the value it everywhere attaches to +scenes in Nature exceptionally noble or exquisite. Though the American +traveller does not so express it, his sentiment toward such natural +spectacles as the Grand Canon or Niagara Falls is that of an intense +reverence. Such places are veritable holy places, and man's heart +instinctively acknowledges them as sacred. His repugnance to any +violation of them by materialistic interests is precisely the same +feeling as the horror with which Christendom regarded the Turkish +violation of the Holy Sepulchre. And this feeling will increase rather +than decrease in proportion as religion is recognized as having its +shrines and oracles not only in Jerusalem, or in St. Peter's, but +wherever Nature has erected her altars on the hills or wafted her +incense through the woodlands. + +After all, are not all religions but the theological symbolization of +natural phenomena; and the sacraments, the festivals, and fasts of all +the churches have their counterparts in the mysterious processes and +manifestations of Nature? and is the contemplation of the resurrection +of Adonis or Thammuz more edifying to the soul than to meditate the +strange return of the spring which their legends but ecclesiastically +celebrate? He who has watched and waited at the white grave of winter, +and hears at last the first faint singing among the boughs, or the first +strange "peeping" of frogs in the marshes; or watches the ghost-like +return of insects, stealing, still half asleep, from one knows not +where--the first butterfly suddenly fluttering helplessly on the +window-pane, or the first mud-wasp crawling out into the sun in a dazed, +bewildered way; or comes upon the violet in the woods, shining at the +door of its wintry sepulchre: he who meditates these marvels, and all +the magic processional of the months, as they march with pomp and pathos +along their vanishing roads, will come to the end of the year with a +lofty, illuminated sense of having assisted at a solemn religious +service, and a realization that, in no mere fancy of the poets, but in +very deed, "day unto day uttereth speech and night unto night sheweth +knowledge." + +Apart from this generally religious influence of Nature, she seems at +times in certain of her aspects and moods specifically to illustrate or +externalize states of the human soul. Sometimes in still, moonlit +nights, standing, as it were, on the brink of the universe, we seem to +be like one standing on the edge of a pool, who, gazing in, sees his own +soul gazing back at him. Tiny creatures though we be, the whole solemn +and majestic spectacle seems to be an extension of our own reverie, and +we to enfold it all in some strange way within our own infinitesimal +consciousness. So a self-conscious dewdrop might feel that it enfolded +the morning sky, and such probably is the meaning of the Buddhist seer +when he declares that "the universe grows I." + +Such are some of the more august impressions made upon us by the +pictures in the cosmic picture-book; but there are also times and +places when Nature seems to wear a look less mystic than dramatic in its +suggestiveness, as though she were a stage-setting for some portentous +human happening past or to come--the fall of kings or the tragic clash +of empires. As Whitman says, "Here a great personal deed has room." Some +landscapes seem to prophesy, some to commemorate. In some places not +marked by monuments, or otherwise definitely connected with history, we +have a curious haunted sense of prodigious far-off events once enacted +in this quiet grassy solitude--prehistoric battles or terrible +sacrifices. About others hangs a fateful atmosphere of impending +disaster, as though weighted with a gathering doom. Sometimes we seem +conscious of sinister presences, as though veritably in the abode of +evil spirits. The place seems somehow not quite friendly to humanity, +not quite good to linger in, lest its genius should cast its perilous +shadow over the heart. On the other hand, some places breathe an +ineffable sense of blessedness, of unearthly promise. We feel as though +some hushed and happy secret were about to be whispered to us out of the +air, some wonderful piece of good fortune on the edge of happening. Some +hand seems to beckon us, some voice to call, to mysterious paradises of +inconceivable green freshness and supernaturally beautiful flowers, +fairy fastnesses of fragrance and hidden castles of the dew. In such +hours the Well at the World's End seems no mere poet's dream. It awaits +us yonder in the forest glade, amid the brooding solitudes of silent +fern, and the gate of the Earthly Paradise is surely there in yonder +vale hidden among the violet hills. + +Various as are these impressions, it is strange and worth thinking on +that the dominant suggestion of Nature through all her changes, whether +her mood be stormy or sunny, melancholy or jubilant, is one of presage +and promise. She seems to be ever holding out to us an immortal +invitation to follow and endure, to endure and to enjoy. She seems to +say that what she brings us is but an earnest of what she holds for us +out there along the vanishing road. There is nothing, indeed, she will +not promise us, and no promise, we feel, she cannot keep. Even in her +tragic and bodeful seasons, in her elegiac autumns and stern winters, +there is an energy of sorrow and sacrifice that elevates and inspires, +and in the darkest hours hints at immortal mornings. She may terrify, +but she never deadens, the soul. In earthquake and eclipse she seems to +be less busy with destruction than with renewed creation. She is but +wrecking the old, that + + ... there shall be + Beautiful things made new, for the surprise + Of the sky-children. + +As I have thus mused along with the reader, a reader I hope not too +imaginary, the manner in which the phrase with which I began has +recurred to my pen has been no mere accident, nor yet has it been a +mere literary device. It seemed to wait for one at every turn of one's +theme, inevitably presenting itself. For wherever in Nature we set our +foot, she seems to be endlessly the centre of vanishing roads, radiating +in every direction into space and time. Nature is forever arriving and +forever departing, forever approaching, forever vanishing; but in her +vanishings there seems to be ever the waving of a hand, in all her +partings a promise of meetings farther along the road. She would seem to +say not so much _Ave atque vale_, as _Vale atque ave_. In all this +rhythmic drift of things, this perpetual flux of atoms flowing on and on +into Infinity, we feel less the sense of loss than of a musical +progression of which we too are notes. + +We are all treading the vanishing road of a song in the air, the +vanishing road of the spring flowers and the winter snows, the vanishing +roads of the winds and the streams, the vanishing road of beloved faces. +But in this great company of vanishing things there is a reassuring +comradeship. We feel that we are units in a vast ever-moving army, the +vanguard of which is in Eternity. The road still stretches ahead of us. +For a little while yet we shall experience all the zest and bustle of +marching feet. The swift-running seasons, like couriers bound for the +front, shall still find us on the road, and shower on us in passing +their blossoms and their snows. For a while the murmur of the running +stream of Time shall be our fellow-wayfarer--till, at last, up there +against the sky-line, we too turn and wave our hands, and know for +ourselves where the road wends as it goes to meet the stars. And others +will stand as we today and watch us reach the top of the ridge and +disappear, and wonder how it seemed to us to turn that radiant corner +and vanish with the rest along the vanishing road. + + + + +II + +WOMAN AS A SUPERNATURAL BEING + + +The boy's first hushed enchantment, blent with a sort of religious awe, +as in his earliest love affair he awakens to the delicious mystery we +call woman, a being half fairy and half flower, made out of moonlight +and water lilies, of elfin music and thrilling fragrance, of divine +whiteness and softness and rustle as of dewy rose gardens, a being of +unearthly eyes and terribly sweet marvel of hair; such, too, through +life, and through the ages, however confused or overlaid by use and +wont, is man's perpetual attitude of astonishment before the apparition +woman. + +Though she may work at his side, the comrade of his sublunary +occupations, he never, deep down, thinks of her as quite real. Though +his wife, she remains an apparition, a being of another element, an +Undine. She is never quite credible, never quite loses that first nimbus +of the supernatural. + +This is true not merely for poets; it is true for all men, though, of +course, all men may not be conscious of its truth, or realize the truth +in just this way. Poets, being endowed with exceptional sensitiveness of +feeling and expression, say the wonderful thing in the wonderful way, +bring to it words more nearly adequate than others can bring; but it is +an error to suppose that any beauty of expression can exaggerate, can +indeed more than suggest, the beauty of its truth. Woman is all that +poets have said of her, and all that poets can never say: + + Always incredible hath seemed the rose, + And inconceivable the nightingale-- + +and the poet's adoration of her is but the articulate voice of man's +love since the beginning, a love which is as mysterious as she herself +is a mystery. + +However some may try to analyse man's love for woman, to explain it, or +explain it away, belittle it, nay, even resent and befoul it, it remains +an unaccountable phenomenon, a "mystery we make darker with a name." +Biology, cynically pointing at certain of its processes, makes the +miracle rather more miraculous than otherwise. Musical instruments are +no explanation of music. "Is it not strange that sheep's guts should +hale souls out of men's bodies?" says Benedick, in _Much Ado About +Nothing_, commenting on Balthazar's music. But they do, for all that, +though no one considers sheep's gut the explanation. To cry "sex" and to +talk of nature's mad preoccupation with the species throws no light on +the matter, and robs it of no whit of its magic. The rainbow remains a +rainbow, for all the sciences. And woman, with or without the suffrage, +stenographer or princess, is of the rainbow. She is beauty made flesh +and dwelling amongst us, and whatever the meaning and message of beauty +may be, such is the meaning of woman on the earth--her meaning, at all +events, for men. That is, she is the embodiment, more than any other +creature, of that divine something, whatever it may be, behind matter, +that spiritual element out of which all proceeds, and which mysteriously +gives its solemn, lovely and tragic significance to our mortal day. + +If you tell some women this of themselves, they will smile at you. Men +are such children. They are so simple. Dear innocents, how easily they +are fooled! A little make-up, a touch of rouge, a dash of henna--and you +are an angel. Some women seem really to think this; for, naturally, they +know nothing of their own mystery, and imagine that it resides in a few +feminine tricks, the superficial cleverness with which some of them know +how to make the most of the strange something about them which they +understand even less than men understand it. + +Other women indeed resent man's religious attitude toward them as +sentimental, old-fashioned. They prefer to be regarded merely as +fellow-men. To show consciousness of their sex is to risk offence, and +to busy one's eyes with their magnificent hair, instead of the +magnificent brains beneath it, is to insult them. Yet when, in that old +court of law, Phryne bared her bosom as her complete case for the +defence, she proved herself a greater lawyer than will ever be made by +law examinations and bachelor's degrees; and even when women become +judges of the Supreme Court, a development easily within sight, they +will still retain the greater importance of being merely women. Yes, and +one can easily imagine some future woman President of the United States, +for all the acknowledged brilliancy of her administration, being +esteemed even more for her superb figure. + +It is no use. Woman, if she would, "cannot shake off the god." She must +make up her mind, whatever other distinctions she may achieve, to her +inalienable distinction of being woman; nothing she can do will change +man's eternal attitude toward her, as a being made to be worshipped and +to be loved, a being of beauty and mystery, as strange and as lovely as +the moon, the goddess and the mother of lunatics. What a wonderful +destiny is hers! In addition to being the first of human beings, all +that a man can be, to be so much else as well; to be, so to say, the +president of a railroad and yet a priestess of nature's mysteries; a +stenographer at so many dollars a week and yet a nymph of the forest +pools--woman, "and yet a spirit still." Not without meaning has myth +endowed woman with the power of metamorphosis, to change at will like +the maidens in the legend into wild white swans, or like Syrinx, fleeing +from the too ardent pursuit of Pan, into a flowering reed, or like +Lamia, into a jewelled serpent-- + + Eyed like a peacock, and all crimson barr'd; + And full of silver moons. + +Modern conditions are still more favourable than antique story for the +exhibition of this protean quality of woman, providing her with +opportunities of still more startling contrasts of transformation. Will +it not be a wonderful sight in that near future to watch that woman +judge of the Supreme Court, in the midst of some learned tangle of +inter-state argument, turn aside for a moment, in response to a +plaintive cry, and, unfastening her bodice, give the little clamourer +the silver solace it demands! What a hush will fall upon the assembled +court! To think of such a genius for jurisprudence, such a legal brain, +working in harmony--with such a bosom! So august a pillar of the law, +yet so divine a mother. + +As it is, how piquant the contrast between woman inside and outside her +office hours! As you take her out to dinner, and watch her there seated +before you, a perfumed radiance, a dewy dazzling vision, an evening star +swathed in gauzy convolutions of silk and lace--can it be the same +creature who an hour or two ago sat primly with notebook and pencil at +your desk side, and took down your specification for fireproofing that +new steel-constructed building on Broadway? You, except for your evening +clothes, are not changed; but she--well, your clients couldn't possibly +recognize her. As with Browning's lover, you are on the other side of +the moon, "side unseen" of office boy or of subway throng; you are in +the presence of those "silent silver lights and darks undreamed of" by +the gross members of your board of directors. By day--but ah! at evening +under the electric lights, to the delicate strains of the palm-shaded +orchestra! Man is incapable of these exquisite transformations. By day a +gruff and hurried machine--at evening, at best, a rapt and laconic poker +player. A change with no suggestion of the miraculous. + +Do not let us for a moment imagine that because man is ceasing to remove +his hat at her entrance into crowded elevators, or because he hustles +her or allows her to hang by the straps in crowded cars, that he is +tending to forget this supernaturalism of woman. Such change in his +manners merely means his respect for her disguise, her disguise as a +business woman. By day she desires to be regarded as just that, and she +resents as untimely the recognition of her sex, her mystery, and her +marvel during business hours. Man's apparent impoliteness, therefore, is +actually a delicate modern form of chivalry. But of course his real +feelings are only respectfully masked, and, let her be in any danger or +real discomfort, or let any language be uttered unseemly for her ears, +and we know what promptly happens. Barring such accidents, man tacitly +understands that her incognito is to be respected--till the charming +moment comes when she chooses to put it aside and take at his hands her +immemorial tribute. + +So, you see, she is able to go about the rough ways, taking part even in +the rough work of the world, literally bearing what the fairy tales call +a charmed life. And this, of course, gives her no small advantage in the +human conflict. So protected, she is enabled, when need arises, to take +the offensive, with a minimum of danger. Consider her recent campaign +for suffrage, for example. Does any one suppose that, had she been +anything but woman, a sacrosanct being, immune from clubs and bullets, +that she would have been allowed to carry matters with such high +victorious hand as in England--and more power to her!--she has of late +been doing. Let men attempt such tactics, and their shrift is +uncomplimentarily short. It may be said that woman enjoys this immunity +with children and curates, but, even so, it may be held that these +latter participate in a less degree in that divine nature with which +woman is so completely armoured. + + How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea, + Whose action is no stronger than a flower? + +exclaims Shakespeare. + +But there is indeed the mystery, for, though its "action is no stronger +than a flower," the power wielded by beauty in this world, and therefore +by woman as its most dynamic embodiment, is as undeniable as it is +irresistible. "Terrible as an army with banners" was no mere figure of +lovesick speech. It is as plain a truth as the properties of radium, +and belongs to the same order of marvel. Such scientific discoveries are +particularly welcome as demonstrating the power of the finer, as +contrasted with the more brutally obvious, manifestations of force; for +they thus illustrate the probable nature of those spiritual forces whose +operations we can plainly see, without being able to account for them. A +foolish phrase has it that "a woman's strength is in her helplessness." +"Helplessness" is a curious term to use for a mysteriously concentrated +or super-refined form of strength. "Whose action is no stronger than a +flower." But is the action of a flower any less strong because it is not +the action of a fist? As a motive force a flower may be, and indeed has +time and again been, stronger than a thousand fists. And what then shall +we say of the action of that flower of flowers that is woman--that +flower that not only once or twice in history has + + ... launched a thousand ships + And burned the topless towers of Ilium. + +Woman's helplessness, forsooth! On the contrary, woman is the best +equipped fighting machine that ever went to battle. And she is this, not +from any sufferance on the part of man, not from any consideration on +his part toward her "weakness," but merely because he cannot help +himself, because nature has so made her. + +No simple reasoning will account for her influence over man. It is not +an influence he allows. It is an influence he cannot resist, and it is +an influence which he cannot explain, though he may make believe to do +so. That "protection," for example, which he extends to her from the +common physical perils with which he is more muscularly constituted to +cope--why is it extended? Merely out of pity to a weaker being than +himself? Does other weakness always command his pity? We know that it +does not. No, this "protection" is but a part of an instinctive +reverence, for which he can give no reason, the same kind of reverence +which he has always given to divine beings, to any manifestation or +vessel of the mysteriously sacred something in human life. He respects +and protects woman from the same instinct which makes him shrink from +profaning an altar or robbing a church, or sends him on his knees before +any apparition supposedly divine. Priests and women are often classed +together, but not because the priests are regarded as effeminately +"helpless"; rather because both are recognized as ministers of sacred +mysteries, both belong to the spiritual sphere, and have commerce with +the occult holiness of things. Also be it remarked that this +"protection" is chiefly needed against the brutality and bestiality of +man's own heart, which woman and religion alike rather hold in +subjection by their mysterious influence than have to thank for any +favours of self-control. Man "protects" woman because he first worships +her, because, if she has for him not always the beauty of holiness, she +at least always suggests the holiness of beauty. + +Now when has man ever suggested holiness to the most adoring woman? I do +not refer to the professional holiness of saints and ecclesiastics, but +to that sense of hallowed strangeness, of mystic purity, of spiritual +exquisiteness, which breathes from a beautiful woman and makes the touch +of her hand a religious ecstasy, and her very garments a thrilling +mystery. How impossible it is to imagine a woman writing the _Vita +Nuova_, or a girl feeling toward a boy such feelings of awe and worship +as set the boy Dante a-tremble at his first sight of the girl Beatrice. + + At that moment [he writes], I say most truly that the spirit of + life, which hath its dwelling in the secretest chamber of the heart, + began to tremble so violently that the least pulse of my body shook + therewith; and in trembling it said these words: "_Ecce deus fortior + me, qui veniens dominabitur mihi_. (Here is a deity stronger than I, + who, coming, shall rule over me.)" + +And, loverlike, he records of "this youngest of the angels" that "her +dress on that day was of a most noble colour, a subdued and goodly +crimson, girdled and adorned in such sort as best suited with her very +tender age." Ah! that "little frock," that sacred little frock we first +saw her in! Don't we all know it? And the little handkerchief, scented +like the breath of heaven, we begged as a sacred relic! And-- + + Long after you are dead + I will kiss the shoes of your feet.... + +Yes! anything she has worn or touched; for, as a modern writer has said: + + Everything a woman wears or touches immediately incarnates something + of herself. A handkerchief, a glove, a flower--with a breath she + endows them with immortal souls. + +Waller with his girdle, Donne with "that subtle wreath of hair about his +arm," the mediaeval knight riding at tourney with his lady's sleeve at +his helm, and all relic-worshipping lovers through the ages bear witness +to that divine supernaturalism of woman. To touch the hem of that little +frock, to kiss the mere imprint of those little feet, is to be purified +and exalted. But when did man affect woman in that way? I am tolerably +well read in the poetry of woman's emotions, but I recall no parallel +expressions of feeling. No passionate apostrophes of his golf stockings +come to my mind, nor wistful recollections of the trousers he wore on +that never-to-be-forgotten afternoon. The immaculate collar that spanned +his muscular throat finds no Waller to sing it: + + A narrow compass--and yet there + Dwelt all that's good, and all that's fair, + +and probably the smartest negligee shirt that ever sported with the +summer winds on a clothes-line has never caused the smallest flutter in +feminine bosoms. The very suggestion is, of course, absurd--whereas with +women, in very deed, it is as with the temple in Keats's lines: + + ... even as the trees + That whisper round a temple become soon + Dear as the temple's self. + +Properly understood, therefore, the cult of the skirt-dancer has a +religious significance, and man's preoccupation with petticoats is but +the popular recognition of the divinity of woman. All that she is and +does and wears has a ritualistic character, and she herself commands our +reverence because we feel her to be the vessel of sacred mysteries, the +earthly representative of unearthly powers, with which she enjoys an +intimacy of communication denied to man. It is not a reasonable feeling, +or one to be reasoned about; and that is why we very properly exempt +woman from the necessity of being reasonable. She is not, we say, a +reasonable being, and in so saying we pay her a profound compliment. For +she transcends reason, and on that very account is mysteriously wise, +the wisest of created things--mother-wise. When we say "mother-wit," we +mean something deeper than we realize--for what in the universe is wiser +than a mother, fed as she is through the strange channels of her being +with that lore of the infinite which seems to enter her body by means of +organs subtler than the brain? + +A certain famous novelist meant well when recently he celebrated woman +as "the mother of the male," but such celebration, while ludicrously +masculine in its egotistic limitation, would have fallen short even if +he had stopped to mention that she was the mother of the female, too; +for not merely in the fact that she is the mother of the race resides +the essential mystery of her motherhood. We do not value woman merely, +if one may be permitted the expression, as a brood mare, an economic +factor controlling the census returns. Her gift of motherhood is +stranger than that, and includes spiritual affinities and significances +not entirely represented by visible babes. Her motherhood is mysterious +because it seems to be one with the universal motherhood of nature, one +with the motherhood that guards and warms to life the eggs in the nest +and the seeds in the hollows of the hills, the motherhood of the whole +strange vital process, wherever and howsoever it moves and dreams and +breaks into song and flower. And, as nature is something more than a +mother, so is woman. She is a vision, an outward and visible sign of an +inward and spiritual grace and goodness at the heart of life; and her +beauty is the sacred seal which the gods have set upon her in token of +her supernatural meaning and mission; for all beauty is the message of +the immortal to mortality. Always when man has been in doubt concerning +his gods, or in despair amid the darkness of his destiny, his heart has +been revived by some beatific vision; + + Some shape of beauty moves away the pall + From our dark spirits. + +Woman is our permanent Beatific Vision in the darkness of the world. + + + + +III + +THE LACK OF IMAGINATION AMONG MILLIONAIRES + + +Considering the truly magical power of money, it must often have struck +the meditative mind--particularly that class of meditative mind whose +wealth consists chiefly in meditation--to what thoroughly commonplace +uses the modern millionaire applies the power that is his: in brief, +with what little originality, with what a pitiful lack of imagination, +he spends his money. One seldom hears of his doing a novel or striking +thing with it. + +On the contrary, he buys precisely the same things as his +fellow-millionaires, the same stereotyped possessions--houses in Fifth +Avenue and Newport, racehorses, automobiles, boxes at the opera, +diamonds and dancing girls; and whether, as the phrase is, he makes good +use of his wealth, or squanders it on his pleasures, the so-called good +or bad uses are alike drearily devoid of individuality. Philanthropist +or profligate, the modern millionaire is one and the same in his lack of +initiative. Saint or sinner, he is one or the other in the same tame +imitative way. + +The rich men of the past, the splendid spendthrifts of antiquity, seem +usually to have combined a gift of fancy with their wealth, often even +something like poetry; and their extravagances, however extreme, had +usually a saving grace of personal whim to recommend them to lovers of +the picturesque. Sardanapalus and Heliogabalus may have been whatever +else you please, but they were assuredly not commonplace; and the mere +mention of their names vibrates with mankind's perennial gratitude for +splendour and colossal display, however perverse, and even absurd. The +princes of the Italian Renaissance were, of course, notable examples of +the rich man as fantast, probably because they had the good sense to +seek the skilled advice of poets and painters as to how best to make an +artistic display of their possessions. Alas, no millionaire today asks a +poet's or painter's assistance in spending his money; yet, were the +modern millionaire to do so, the world might once more be delighted with +such spectacles as Leonardo devised for the entertainments at the Villa +Medici--those fanciful banquets, where, instead of a mere vulgar display +of Medici money--"a hundred dollars a plate," so to say--whimsical wit +and beauty entered into the creation of the very dishes. Leicester's +famous welcoming of Elizabeth to Kenilworth was perhaps the last +spectacular "revel" of its kind to strike the imagination; though we +must not fail to remember with gratitude the magnificent Beckford, with +his glorious "rich man's folly" of Fonthill Abbey, a lordly pleasure +house which naturally sprang from the same Aladdin-like fancy which +produced "Vathek." + +I but mention one or two such typical examples at random to illustrate +the difference between past and present. At present the rich man's +paucity of originality is so painful that we even welcome a certain +millionaire's _penchant_ for collecting fleas--he, it is rumoured, +having paid as much as a thousand dollars for specimens of a +particularly rare species. It is a passion perhaps hard to understand, +but, at least, as we say, it is "different." Mr. Carnegie's more +comprehensible hobby for building libraries shows also no little +originality in a man of a class which is not as a rule devoted to +literature. Another millionaire I recently read of, who refused to pay +the smallest account till it had run for five years, and would then +gladly pay it, with compound interest at five per cent., has something +refreshing about him; while still another rich eccentric, who has lived +on his yacht anchored near the English coast for some fifteen years or +so in order to avoid payment of his American taxes, and who occasionally +amuses himself by having gold pieces heated white hot and thrown into +the sea for diving boys to pick them up, shows a quaint ingenuity which +deserves our gratitude. Another modern example of how to spend, or +waste, one's money picturesquely was provided by the late Marquis of +Anglesey, a young lord generally regarded as crazy by an ungrateful +England. Perhaps it was a little crazy in him to spend so much money in +the comparatively commonplace adventure of taking an amateur dramatic +company through the English provinces, he himself, I believe, playing +but minor roles; but lovers of Gautier's _Le Capitaine Fracasse_ will +see in that but a charmingly boyish desire to translate a beloved dream +into a reality--though his creditors probably did not take that view. +Neither, one can surmise, did those gentlemen sufficiently appreciate +his passion for amassing amazing waistcoats, of which some seven hundred +were found in his wardrobe at his lamented death; or strange and +beautiful walking sticks, a like prodigious collection of which were +among the fantastic assets which represented his originally large +personal fortune on the winding up of his earthly affairs. Among these +unimaginative creditors were, doubtless, many jewellers who found it +hard to sympathize with his lordship's genial after-dinner habit, +particularly when in the society of fair women, of plunging his hand +into his trousers pocket and bringing it forth again brimming over with +uncut precious stones of many colours, at the same time begging his +companion to take her choice of the moonlit rainbowed things. The +Marquis of Anglesey died at the early age of twenty-nine, much lamented, +as I have hinted--by his creditors, but no less sincerely lamented, too, +by those for whom his flamboyant personality and bizarre whims added to +that gaiety of nations sadly in need today of such figures. A friend of +mine owns two of the wonderful waistcoats. Sometimes he wears one as we +lunch together, and on such occasions we always drink in silence to the +memory of his fantastic lordship. + +These examples of rich men of our own time who have known how to spend +their money with whim and fancy and flourish are but exceptions to my +argument, lights shining, so to say, in a great darkness. As a general +rule, it is the poor or comparatively poor man, the man lacking the very +necessary material of the art, who is an artist of this kind. It is the +man with but little money who more often provides examples of the +delightful way of spending it. I trust that Mr. Richard Harding Davis +will not resent my recalling a charming feat of his in this connection. +Of course Mr. Davis is by no means a poor man, as all we who admire his +writings are glad to know. Still, successful writer as he is, he is not +yet, I presume, on a Carnegie or Rockefeller rating; and, at the time +which I am about to recall, while already famous and comparatively +prosperous, he had not attained that security of position which is +happily his today. Well, I suppose it was some twelve or fifteen years +ago--and of course I am only recalling a story well known to all the +world--that, chancing to be in London, and wishing to send a surprise +message to a lady in Chicago who afterward became his wife, he conceived +the idea of sending it by messenger boy from Charing Cross to Michigan +Avenue; and so the little lad, in the well-known uniform of hurry, sped +across the sea, as casually as though he were on an errand from Charing +Cross to Chancery Lane, raced across nearly half the continent, as +casually as though he were on an errand from Wall Street to Park Row, +and finding the proper number in Michigan Avenue, placed the far +travelled letter in the lady's hand, no doubt casually asking for a +receipt. This I consider one of the most romantic compliments ever paid +by a lover to his lady. What millionaire ever had a fancy like that? + +Or what millionaire ever had a fancy like this? There was living in New +York some ten years ago a charming actor, not unknown to the public and +much loved by his friends for, among his other qualities, his quaint +whims. Good actor as he was, like many other good actors he was usually +out of an engagement, and he was invariably poor. It was always his +poorest moment that he would choose for the indulgence of an odd, and +surely kindly, eccentricity. He would half starve himself, go without +drinks, forswear tobacco, deny himself car fares, till at last he had +saved up five dollars. This by no means easy feat accomplished, he would +have his five-dollar bill changed into five hundred pennies, filling his +pockets with which, he would sally forth from his lodging, and, seeking +neighbourhoods in which children most abound, he would scatter his +arduously accumulated largess among the scrambling boys and girls, +literally happy as a king to watch the glee on the young faces at the +miraculous windfall. We often wondered that he was not arrested for +creating a riot in the public streets, a disturber of the public +traffic. Had some millionaire passed by on one of those ecstatic +occasions, there is no question but that he would have been promptly +removed to Bellevue as a dangerous lunatic. + +Or what millionaire ever had a fancy like this? Passing along +Forty-second Street one afternoon, I came upon a little crowd, and +joining it I found that it was grouped in amused curiosity, and with a +certain kindness, round an old hatless Irishman, who was leaning against +a shop front, weeping bitterly, and, of course, grotesquely. The old man +was very evidently drunk, but there was something in his weeping deeply +pitiful for all that. He was drunk, for certain; but no less certainly +he was very unhappy--unhappy over some mysterious something that one or +two kindly questioners tried in vain to discover. As we all stood +helplessly looking on and wondering, a tall, brisk young man, of the +lean, rapid, few-worded American type, pushed in among us, took a swift +look at the old man, thrust a dollar bill into his hand, said "Forget +it"--no more--and was gone like a flash on his way. The old man fumbled +the note in a daze, but what chiefly interested me was the amazed look +on the faces of the little crowd. It was almost as if something +supernatural had happened. All eyes turned quickly to catch sight of +that strange young man; but he was already far off striding swiftly up +the street. I have often regretted that I checked my impulse to catch up +with him--for it seemed to me, too, that I had never seen a stranger +thing. Pity or whim or whatever it was, did ever a millionaire do the +like with a dollar, create such a sensation or have so much fun with so +small a sum? No; millionaires never have fancies like that. + +Another poor man's fancy is that of a friend of mine, a very poor young +lawyer, whose custom it is to walk uptown from his office at evening, +studying the faces of the passers-by. He is too poor to afford dollar +bills. He must work his miracles with twenty-five-cent pieces, or even +smaller coins; but it is with this art of spending money as with any +other art: the greatness of the artist is shown by his command over an +economy of material; and the amount of human happiness to be evoked by +the dispensation of a quarter into the carefully selected hand, at the +artistically chosen moment, almost passes belief. Suppose, for example, +you were a sandwich man on a bleak winter day, an old weary man, with +hope so long since faded out of your heart that you would hardly know +what the word meant if you chanced to read it in print. Thought, too, is +dead within you, and feeling even so numbed that you hardly suffer any +more. Practically you are a man who ought to be in your coffin--at peace +in Potter's field--who, by the mere mechanic habit of existence, +mournfully parades the public streets, holding up a banner with some +strange device, the scoff of the pitiless wayfarer--as like as not +supporting against an empty stomach the savoury advertisement of some +newly opened restaurant. Suppose you were that man, and suddenly through +the thick hopelessness, muffling you around as with a spiritual +deafness, there should penetrate a kind voice saying: "Try and keep up +your heart, friend; there are better days ahead"; and with the voice a +hand slipping into yours a coin, and with both a kind smile, a cheery +"Good-bye," and a tall, broad-shouldered figure, striding with long, so +to say, kindly legs up the street--gone almost before you knew he was +there. I think it would hardly matter to you whether the coin were a +quarter or a dime; but what would matter would be your amazement that +there still was any kindness left on the earth; and perhaps you might +almost be tempted to believe in God again. And then--well, what would it +matter to any one what you did with your miraculous coin? This is my +friend's favourite way of spending his money. To the extent of his poor +means he has constituted himself the Haroun Al Raschid of the sandwich +men. + +After all, I suppose that most of us, if put into the possession of +great wealth, would find our greatest satisfaction in the spending of it +much after the fashion of my poor lawyer friend--that is, in the +artistic distribution of human happiness. I do not, of course, for a +moment include in that phrase those soulless systems of philanthropy by +which a solid block of money on the one side is applied to the relief of +a solid block of human misery on the other, useful and much to be +appreciated as such mechanical charity of course is. It is not, indeed, +the pious use of money that is my theme, but rather how to get the most +fun, the most personal and original fun, out of it. + +The mention of the great caliph suggests a role which is open to any +rich man to play, the role of the Haroun Al Raschid of New York. What a +wonderful part to play! Instead of loitering away one's evenings at the +club, to doff one's magnificence and lose oneself in the great nightly +multitude of the great city, wandering hither and thither, watching and +listening, and, with one's cheque-book for a wand, play the magician of +human destinies--bringing unhoped-for justice to the oppressed, succour +as out of heaven to the outcast, and swift retribution, as of sudden +lightning, to the oppressor. To play Providence in some tragic crisis of +human lives; at the moment when all seemed lost to step out of the +darkness and set all right with a touch of that magic wand. To walk by +the side of lost and lonely men, an unexpected friend; to scribble a +word on a card and say, "Present this tomorrow morning at such a number +Broadway and see what will happen," and then to disappear once again +into the darkness. To talk with sad, wandering girls, and arrange that +wonderful new hats and other forms of feminine hope shall fall out of +the sky into their lonely rooms on the morrow. To be the friend of weary +workmen and all that toil by night while the world is asleep in soft +beds. To come upon the hobo as he lies asleep on the park bench and slip +a purse into his tattered coat, and perhaps be somewhere by to see him +wake up in the dawn, and watch the strange antics of his joy--all +unsuspected as its cause. To go up to the poor push-cart man, as he is +being hurried from street corner to street corner by the police, and +say: "Would you like to go back to Italy? Here is a steamer ticket. A +boat sails for Genoa tomorrow. And here is a thousand dollars. It will +buy you a vineyard in Sicily. Go home and bid the signora get ready." +And then to disappear once more, like Harlequin, to flash your wand in +some other corner of the human multitude. Oh, there would be fun for +one's money, something worth while having money for! + +I offer this suggestion to any rich man who may care to take it up, free +of charge. It is a fascinating opportunity, and its rewards would be +incalculable. At the end of the year how wise one would be in the human +story--how filled to overflowing his heart with the thought of the joy +he would thus have brought to so many lives--all, too, in pure fun, +himself having had such a good time all the while! + + + + +IV + +THE PASSING OF MRS. GRUNDY + + +"Death of Mrs. Grundy!" Imagine opening one's newspaper some morning and +finding in sensational headlines that welcome news. One recalls the +beautiful old legend of the death of Pan, and how--false report though +it happily was--there once ran echoing through the world a long +heartbroken sigh, and a mysterious voice was heard wailing three times +from land to land, "Great Pan is dead!" Similarly, on that happy morning +I have imagined, one can imagine, too, another sigh passing from land to +land, the sigh of a vast relief, of a great thankfulness for the lifting +of an ineffable burden, as though the earth stretched its limbs and drew +great draughts of a new freedom. How wildly the birds would sing that +morning! And I believe that even the church bells would ring of +themselves! + +Such definite news is not mine to proclaim, but if it cannot be +announced with certitude that Mrs. Grundy is no more, it may, at all +events, be affirmed without hesitation that she is on her deathbed, and +that surely, if slowly, she is breathing her last. Yes, that poisonous +breath, which has so long pervaded like numbing miasma the free air of +the world, will soon be out of her foolish, hypocritical old body; and +though it may still linger on here and there in provincial backwoods and +suburban fastnesses, from the great air centres of civilization it will +have passed away forever. + +The origin of Mrs. Grundy is shrouded in mystery. In fact, though one +thus speaks of her as so potent a personification, she has of course +never had any real existence. For that very reason she has been so hard +to kill. Nothing is so long-lived as a chimera, nothing so difficult to +lay as a ghost. From her first appearance, or rather mention, in +literature, Mrs. Grundy has been a mere hearsay, a bugaboo being +invented to frighten society, as "black men" and other goblins have been +wickedly invented by nurses to frighten children. In the old play itself +where we first find her mentioned by name, she herself never comes on +the stage. She is only referred to in frightened whispers. "_What will +Mrs. Grundy say?_" is the nervous catchword of one of the characters, +much in the same way as Mrs. Gamp was wont to defer to the censorious +standards of her invisible friend "Mrs. Harris." In the case of the last +named chimera, it will be recalled that the awful moment came when Mrs. +Gamp's boon companion, Batsey Prig, was sacrilegious enough to declare +her belief that no such person as "Mrs. Harris" was, or ever had been, +in existence. So the awful atheistic moment has come for Mrs. Grundy, +too, and an oppressed world at last takes courage to say that no such +being as Mrs. Grundy has ever really existed, or that, even if she has, +she shall exist no more. _What will Mrs. Grundy say?_ Who cares +nowadays--and so long as nobody cares, the good lady is as dead as need +be. + +Mrs. Grundy, of course, is man's embodied fear of his neighbour, the +creation of timid souls who are afraid of being themselves, and who, +instead of living their lives after their own fashion and desires, +choose to live them in hypocritical discomfort according to the +standards of others, standards which in their turn may be held +insincerely enough from fear of someone else, and so on without end--a +vicious circle of insincere living being thus created, in which no man +is or does anything real, or as he himself would naturally prefer to be +and to do. It is evident that such a state of mutual intimidation can +exist only in small communities, economically interdependent, and among +people with narrow boundaries and no horizons. If you live in a village, +for example, and are dependent on the good opinion of your neighbours +for your means of existence, your morals and your religious belief must +be those of the village, or you are liable to starve. It is only the +rich man in a village who can do as he pleases. The only thing for the +dependent individualist in a village to do is to go somewhere else, to +some place where a man may at the same time hold his job and his +opinions, a place too big to keep track of its units, too busy to ask +irrelevant questions, and so diverse in its constituents as to have +generated tolerance and free operation for all. + +Now, in spite of its bigness, the world was till quite recently little +more than a village, curiously held in subjection by village +superstitions and village ethics, narrow conceptions of life and +conduct; but the last twenty years have seen a remarkable enlargement of +the human spirit, a reassertion of the natural rights of man as against +the figments of prurient and emasculate conventions, to which there is +no parallel since the Renaissance. Voices have been heard and truths +told, and multitudes have listened gladly that aforetime must take +shelter either in overawed silence or in utterance so private that they +exerted no influence; and the literature of the day alone, literature of +wide and greedy acceptance, is sufficient warrant for the obituary +announcement which, if not yet, as I said, officially made, is already +writing in the hearts, and even in the actions, of society. The +popularity of such writers as Meredith and Hardy, Ibsen and Nietzsche, +Maeterlinck and Walt Whitman, constitutes a writing on the wall the +significance of which cannot be gainsaid. The vogue alone of Mr. Bernard +Shaw, apostle to the Philistines, is a portent sufficiently conclusive. +To regard Mr. Shaw either as a great dramatist or an original +philosopher is, of course, absurd. He, of all men, must surely be the +last to imagine such a vain thing about himself; but even should he be +so self-deluded, his immense coarse usefulness to his day and generation +remains, and the value of it can hardly be overestimated. What others +have said for years as in a glass darkly, with noble seriousness of +utterance, he proclaims again through his brazen megaphone, with all the +imperturbable _aplomb_ of an impudent showman, having as little +self-respect as he has respect for his public; and, as a consequence, +that vast herd of middle-class minds to whom finer spirits appeal in +vain hear for the first time truths as old as philosophy, and answer to +them with assenting instincts as old as humanity. Truth, like many +another excellent commodity, needs a vulgar advertisement, if it is +to become operative in the masses. Mr. Shaw is truth's vulgar +advertisement. He is a brilliant, carrying noise on behalf of freedom of +thought; and his special equipment for his peculiar revivalist mission +comes of his gift for revealing to the common mind not merely the +untruth of hypocrisy, but the laughableness of hypocrisy, first of all. +He takes some popular convention, that of medicine or marriage or what +you will, and shows you not merely how false it is but how ludicrously +false. He purges the soul, not with the terror and pity of tragedy, but +with the irresistible laughter of rough-and-tumble farce. To think +wrongly is, first of all, so absurd. He proves it by putting wrong +thinking on the stage, where you see it for yourself in action, and +laugh immoderately. Perhaps you had never thought how droll wrong +thinking or no thinking was before; and while you laugh with Shaw +at your side-splitting discovery, the serious message glides in +unostentatiously--wrong thinking is not merely laughable; it is also +dangerous, and very uncomfortable. And so the showman has done his work, +the advertiser has sold his goods, and there is so much more truth in +circulation in unfamiliar areas of society. + +That word "society" naturally claims some attention at the hands of one +who would speak of Mrs. Grundy, particularly as she has owed her long +existence to a general misconception as to what constitutes "society," +and to a superstitious terror as to its powers over the individual. +Society--using the word in its broad sense--has heretofore been regarded +as a vague tremendous entity imposing a uniformity of opinion and action +on the individual, under penalty of a like vague tremendous disapproval +for insubordination. Independent minds, however, have from time to time, +and in ever increasing numbers, ventured to do their own will and +pleasure in disregard of this vague tremendous disapproval, and have, +strange to say, found no sign of the terrible consequences threatened +them, with the result that they, and the onlookers, have come to the +conclusion that this fear of society is just one more bugaboo of +timorous minds, with no power over the courageous spirit. From a +multitude of such observations men and women have come more and more to +draw the conclusion that the solidarity of society is nothing but a +myth, and that so-called society is merely a loosely connected series of +independent societies, formed by natural selection among their members, +each with its own codes and satisfactions; and that a man not welcome in +one society may readily find a home for himself in another, or indeed, +if necessary, and if he be strong enough, rest content with his own +society of one. + +There was a time when a doubt as to the credibility of the book of +Genesis or a belief in the book of Darwin made the heretic a lonely man, +but nowadays he is hardly likely to go without friends. Besides, men and +women of strong personal character are not usually indiscriminately +gregarious. On the contrary, they are apt to welcome any disparity +between them and their neighbours which tends to safeguard their leisure +and protect them against the social inroads of irrelevant persons. I +recall the case of a famous novelist, who, himself jealous of his own +proper seclusion, permitted the amenities of his neighbours to pleasure +his wife who was more sociably inclined, and smilingly allowed himself +to be sacrificed once a week on the altar of a domestic "at home" day. +It was amusing to see him in his drawing-room on Fridays, surrounded by +every possible form of human irrelevancy--men and women well enough in +their way, of course, but absolutely unrelated, if not antipathetic to +him and all he stood for--heroically doing his best to seem really "at +home." But there came a time when he published a book of decidedly +"dangerous" tendencies, if not worse, and then it was a delight to see +how those various nobodies fled his contact as they would the plague. +His drawing-room suddenly became a desert, and when you dropped in on +Fridays you found there--only the people he wanted. "Is not this," he +would laughingly say, "a triumph of natural selection? See how simply, +by one honest action, I have cut off the bores!" + +To cut off the bores! Yes, that is the desperate attempt that any man or +woman who would live their own lives rather than the lives of others is +constantly engaged in making; and more and more all men and women are +realizing that there is only one society that really counts, the society +of people we want, rather than the people who want us or don't want us +or whom we don't want. And nowadays the man or woman must be +uncomfortable or undesirable, indeed, who cannot find all the society he +or she can profitably or conveniently handle, be their opinions and +actions never so anti-Grundy. Thus the one great fear that more than any +other has kept Mrs. Grundy alive, the fear of being alone in the world, +cut off from such intercourse with our fellows as most of us feel the +need of at times, has been put an end to by the ever increasing +subdivision of "society" into friendly seclusions and self-dependent +communities of men and women with like ways and points of view, however +disapproved in alien circles. What "shocks" one circle will seem +perfectly natural in another; and one great truth should always be held +firmly in mind--that the approval of one's neighbours has never yet paid +a man's bills. So long as he can go on paying those, and retain the +regard of the only society he values--that of himself and a few +friends--he can tell Mrs. Grundy to go--where she belongs. And this +happily is--almost--as true nowadays for woman as for man; which is the +main consideration, for, it need hardly be said, that it has been on her +own sex that the tyranny of Mrs. Grundy has weighed peculiarly hard. + +Had that tyranny been based on a genuine moral ideal, one would have +some respect for it, but, as the world has always known, it has been +nothing of the sort. On the contrary, it has all along been an organized +hypocrisy which condoned all it professed to censure on condition that +it was done in unhealthy secrecy, behind the closed doors of a lying +"respectability." All manner of uncleanness had been sanctioned so long +as it wore a mask of "propriety," whereas essentially clean and +wholesome expressions of human nature, undisguised manifestations of the +joy and romance of life, have been suppressed and confounded with their +base counterfeits merely because they have sought the sunlight of +sincerity rather than the shade where evil does well to hide. Man's +proper delight in the senses, the natural joy of men and women in each +other, the love of beauty, naked and unashamed, the romantic emotions, +and all that passionate vitality that dreams and builds and glorifies +the human story: all this, forsooth, it has been deemed wrong even to +speak of, save in colourless euphemisms, and their various drama has had +to be carried on by evasion and subterfuge pitiably silly indeed in this +robustly procreative world. Silly, but how preposterous, too, and no +longer to be endured. + +It was a gain indeed to drag these vital human interests into the arena +of undaunted discussion, but things are clearly seen to have already +passed beyond that stage. Discussion has already set free in the world +braver and truer ideals, ideals no longer afraid of life, but, in the +courage of their joyousness, feasibly close to all its breathing facts. +Men and women refuse any longer to allow their most vital instincts to +be branded with obloquy, and the fulness of their lives to be thwarted +at the bidding of an impure and irrational fiction of propriety. On +every hand we find the right to happiness asserted in deeds as well as +words. The essential purity of actions and relations to which a merely +technical or superstitious irregularity attaches is being more and more +acknowledged, and the fanciful barriers to human happiness are +everywhere giving way before the daylight of common sense. Love and +youth and pleasure are asserting their sacred natural rights, rights as +elemental as those forces of the universe by which the stars are +preserved from wrong, and the merely legal and ecclesiastical fictions +which have so long overawed them are fleeing like phantoms at cockcrow. +It is no longer sinful to be happy--even in one's own way; and the +extravagances of passion, the ebullitions of youth, and the vagaries of +pleasure are no longer frowned down by a sour-visaged public opinion, +but encouraged, or, if necessary, condoned, as the dramatic play of +natural forces, and as welcome additions to the gaiety of nations. The +true sins against humanity are, on the other hand, being exposed and +pilloried with a scientific eye for their essential qualities. + + ... The cold heart, and the murderous tongue, + The wintry soul that hates to hear a song, + The close-shut fist, the mean and measuring eye, + And all the little poisoned ways of wrong. + +Man's virtues and vices are being subjected to a re-classification, in +the course of which they are entertainingly seen, in no few instances, +to be changing places. The standards of punishment applied by Dante to +his inferno of lost souls is being, every year, more closely +approximated; warm-blooded sins of instinct and impulse, as having +usually some "relish of salvation" in them, are being judged lightly, +when they are accounted sins at all, and the cold-hearted sins of +essential selfishness, the sins of cruelty and calculation and +cowardice, are being nailed up as the real crimes against God and man. +The individual is being allowed more and more to be the judge of his own +actions, and all actions are being estimated more in regard to their +special relation and environment, as the relativity of right and wrong, +that most just of modern conceptions, is becoming understood. The hidden +sins of the pious and respectable are coming disastrously into the +light, and it no longer avails for a man to be a pillar of orthodoxy on +Sundays if he be a pillar of oppression all the rest of the week; while +the negative virtues of abstinence from the common human pleasures go +for less than nothing in a world that no longer regards the theatre, the +race course, and the card table, or even a beautiful woman, as under the +especial wrath of God. No, the Grundy "virtues" are fast disappearing, +and piano legs are once more being worn in their natural nudity. The +general trend is unmistakable and irresistible, and such apparent +contradictions of it as occasionally get into the newspapers are of no +general significance; as when, for example, some exquisitely refined +Irish police officer suppresses a play of genius, or blushingly covers +up the nakedness of a beautiful statue, or comes out strong on the +question of woman's bathing dress when some sensible girl has the +courage to go into the water with somewhat less than her entire walking +costume; or, again, when some crank invokes the blue laws against Sunday +golf or tennis; or some spinster association puts itself on record +against woman's smoking: all these are merely provincial or parochial +exceptions to the onward movement of morals and manners, mere spasmodic +twitchings, so to say, of the poor old lady on her deathbed. We know +well enough that she who would so sternly set her face against the +feminine cigarette would have no objection to one of her votaries +carrying on an affair with another woman's husband--not the least in the +world, so long as she was careful to keep it out of the courts. And such +is a sample of her morality in all her dealings. Humanity will lose no +real sanctity or safeguard by her demise; only false shame and false +morality will go--but true modesty, "the modesty of nature," true +propriety, true religion--and incidentally true love and true +marriage--will all be immeasurably the gainers by the death of this +hypocritical, nasty-minded old lady. + + + + +V + +MODERN AIDS TO ROMANCE + + +There have, of course, in all ages been those who made a business of +running down the times in which they lived--tiresome people for whom +everything had gone to the dogs--or was rapidly going--uncomfortable +critics who could never make themselves at home in their own century, +and whose weary shibboleth was that of some legendary perfect past. + +In Rome this particular kind of bore went by the name of _laudator +temporis acti_; and, if we have no such concise Anglo-Saxon phrase for +the type, we still have the type no less ubiquitously with us. The +bugbear of such is "modern science," or "modern thought," a monster +which, we are frequently assured, is fast devouring all the beautiful +and good in human life, a Moloch fed on the dreams and ideals and noble +faiths of man. Modernity! For such "modernity" has taken the place of +"Anti-Christ." These sad, nervous people have no eye for the beautiful +patterns and fantasies of change, none of that faith which rejoices to +watch "the roaring loom of time" weaving ever new garments for the +unchanging eternal gods. In new temples, strangely enough, they see +only atheism, instead of the vitality of spiritual evolution; in new +affirmations they scent only dangerous denials. With the more grave +misgivings of these folk of little faith this is not the place to deal, +though actually, if there were any ground for belief in a modern decay +of religion, we might seriously begin to believe in the alleged decay of +romance. + +Yes, romance, we not infrequently hear, is dead. Modern science has +killed it. It is essentially a "thing of the past"--an affair presumably +of stage-coaches, powdered wigs, and lace ruffles. It cannot breathe in +what is spoken of as "this materialistic age." + +The dullards who repeat these platitudes of the muddle-headed multitude +are surely the only people for whom they are true. It is they alone who +are the materialists, confusing as they do the spirit of romance with +its worn-out garments of bygone fashions. Such people are so clearly out +of court as not to be worth controverting, except for the opportunity +they give one of confidently making the joyous affirmation that, far +from romance being dead in our day, there never was a more romantic age +than ours, and that never since the world began has it offered so many +opportunities, so many facilities for romance as at the present time. + +In fact, a very little thinking will show that of all those benefited by +"the blessings of modern science," it is the lovers of the community +who as a body have most to be thankful for. Indeed, so true is this that +it might almost seem as though the modern laboratory has been run +primarily from romantic motives, to the end that the old reproach should +be removed and the course of true love run magically smooth. Valuable as +the telephone may be in business affairs, it is simply invaluable in the +affairs of love; and mechanicians the world over are absorbed in the +problem of aerial flight, whether they know it or not, chiefly to +provide Love with wings as swift as his desire. + +Distance may lend enchantment to those whom we prefer to appreciate from +afar, but nearness is the real enchantment to your true lover, and +distance is his natural enemy. Distance and the slow-footedness of Time +are his immemorial evils. Both of these modern science has all but +annihilated. Consider for a moment the conditions under which love was +carried on in those old days which some people find so romantic. Think +what a comparatively short distance meant then, with snail-paced +precarious mails, and the only means of communication horses by land, +and sailing ships by sea. How men and women had the courage to go on +long journeys at all away from each other in those days is hard to +realize, knowing what an impenetrable curtain of silence and mystery +immediately fell between them with the winding of the coach horn, or the +last wave of the plumed hat as it disappeared behind the last turning +of the road--leaving those at home with nothing for company but the +yearning horizon and the aching, uncommunicative hours. Days, weeks, +months, even years, must go by in waiting for a word--and when at last +it came, brought on lumbering wheels or at best by some courier on his +steaming mud-splashed mount, precious as it was, it was already grown +old and cold and perhaps long since untrue. + +Imagine perhaps being dependent for one's heart news on some chance +soldier limping back from the wars, or some pilgrim from the Holy Land +with scallop shell and staff! + +Distance was indeed a form of death under such conditions--no wonder men +made their wills as they set out on a journey--and when actual physical +death did not intervene, how much of that slow death-in-life, that +fading of the memory and that numbing of the affections which absence +too often brings, was even still more to be feared. The loved face might +indeed return, looking much the same as when it went away, but what of +the heart that went a-journeying, too? What even of the hearts that +remained at home? + +The chances of death and disaster not even modern science can forestall, +though even these it has considerably lessened; but that other death of +the heart, which comes of the slow starvation of silence and absence, it +may be held to have all but vanquished. Thanks to its weird magicians, +you may be seas or continents away from her whom your soul loveth, yet +"at her window bid good-morrow" as punctually as if you lived next door; +or serenade her by electricity--at all hours of the night. If you sigh +in New York, she can hear you and sigh back in San Francisco; and soon +her very face will be carried to you at any moment of the day along the +magic wires. Nor will you need to wait for the postman, but be able to +read her flowerlike words as they write themselves out on the luminous +slate before you, at the very moment as she leans her fragrant bosom +upon her electric desk three thousand miles away. If this isn't +romantic, one may well ask what is! + +To take the telephone alone, surely the romance of Pyramus and Thisbe, +with their primitive hole in the wall, was a tame affair compared with +the possibilities of this magic toy, by means of which you can talk with +your love not merely through a wall but through the Rocky Mountains. You +can whisper sweet nothings to her across the sounding sea, and bid her +"sleep well" over leagues of primeval forest, and through the +stoniest-hearted city her soft voice will find its way. Even in +mid-ocean the "wireless" will bring you news of her _mal-de-mer_. And +more than that; should you wish to carry her voice with you from place +to place, science is once more at your service with another magic +toy--the phonograph--by which indeed she can still go on speaking to +you, if you have the courage to listen, from beyond the grave. + +The telegraph, the telephone, the "wireless," the phonograph, the +electric letter writer--such are the modern "conveniences" of romance; +and, should an elopement be on foot, what are the fastest post-chaise or +the fleetest horses compared with a high-powered automobile? And when +the airship really comes, what romance that has ever been will compare +for excitement with an elopement through the sky? + +Apart from the practical conveniences of these various new devices, +there is a poetic quality about the mere devices themselves which is +full of fascination and charm. Whether we call up our sweetheart or our +stockbroker, what a thing of enchantment the telephone is merely in +itself! Such devices turn the veriest prose of life into poetry; and, +indeed, the more prosaic the uses to which we put them, the more +marvellous by contrast their marvel seems. Even our businesses are +carried on by agencies more mysterious and truly magical than anything +in the _Arabian Nights_, and all day long we are playing with mysterious +natural laws and exquisite natural forces as, in a small way, when boys +we used to delight in our experiments with oxygen and hydrogen and +Leyden jars. Science has thus brought an element of romantic "fun," so +to speak, even into our stores and our counting-houses. I wonder if +"Central" realizes what a truly romantic employment is hers? + +But, pressed into the high service of love, one sees at once what a +poetic fitness there is in their employ, and how our much-abused modern +science has found at last for that fastidious god an appropriately +dignified and beautiful ministrant. Coarse and vulgar indeed seem the +ancient servitors and the uncouth machinery by which the divine business +of the god was carried on of old. Today, through the skill of science, +the august lightning has become his messenger, and the hidden gnomes of +air and sea hasten to do his bidding. + +Modern science, then, so far from being an enemy of romance, is seen on +every hand to be its sympathetic and resourceful friend, its swift and +irresistible helper in its serious need, and an indulgent minister to +its lighter fancies. Be it whim or emergency, the modern laboratory is +equally at the service of romance, equally ready to gratify mankind with +a torpedo or a toy. + +Not only, however, has modern science thus put itself at the service of +romance, by supplying it with its various magic machinery of +communication, but modern thought--that much maligned bugbear of +timorous minds--has generated an atmosphere increasingly favourable to +and sympathetic with the romantic expression of human nature in all its +forms. + +The world has unmistakably grown younger again during the last twenty +years, as though--which, indeed, is the fact--it had thrown off an +accumulation of mopishness, shaken itself free from imaginary +middle-aged restrictions and preoccupations. All over the world there is +a wind of youth blowing such as has not freshened the air of time since +the days of Elizabeth. Once more the spring of a new Renaissance of +Human Nature is upon us. It is the fashion to be young, and the age of +romance both for men and women has been indefinitely extended. No one +gives up the game, or is expected to, till he is genuinely tired of +playing it. Mopish conventions are less and less allowed to restrict +that free and joyous play of vitality dear to the modern heart, which is +the essence of all romance. More and more the world is growing to love a +lover, and one has only to read the newspapers to see how sympathetic +are the times to any generous and adventurous display of the passions. + +This more humane temper is the result of many causes. The disintegration +of religious superstition, and the substitution in its stead of +spiritual ideals closer to the facts of life, is one of these. All that +was good in Puritanism has been retained by the modern spirit, while +its narrowing and numbing features, its anti-human, self-mortifying, +provincial side have passed or are passing in the regenerating sunlight +of what one might call a spiritual paganism, which conceives of natural +forces and natural laws as inherently pure and mysteriously sacred. Thus +the way of a man with a maid is no longer a shamefaced affair, but it +is more and more realized that in its romance and its multifarious +refinements of development are the "law and the prophets," the "eternal +meanings" of natural religion and social spirituality. + +Then, too, the spread of democracy, resulting in the breaking down of +caste barriers, is all to the good of romance. Swiftly and surely Guelph +and Ghibelline and break-neck orchard walls are passing away. If Romeo +and Juliet make a tragedy of it nowadays, they have only to blame their +own mismanagement, for the world is with them as it has never been +before, and all sensible fathers and mothers know it. + +Again, the freer intercourse between the sexes tends incalculably to +smooth that course of true love once so proverbially rough, but now +indeed in danger of being made too unexcitingly smooth. Yet if, as a +result, certain old combinations of romance are becoming obsolete, new +ones, no less picturesque, and even more vital in their drama, are being +evolved every day by the new conditions. Those very inroads being so +rapidly and successfully made by woman into the immemorial business of +man, which are superficially regarded by some as dangerous to the +tenderer sentiments between men and women, are, on the contrary, merely +widening the area of romance, and will eventually develop, as they can +be seen already developing, a new chivalry and a new poetry of the sexes +no less deep and far more many-sided than the old. The robuster +comradeship between the two already resulting from the more active +sharing of common interests cannot but tend to a deeper and more +exhilarating union of man and woman, a completer, intenser marriage +literally of true minds as well as bodies than was possible in the old +regime, when the masculine and feminine "spheres" were kept so jealously +distinct and only allowed to touch at the elementary points of +relationship. There has always been a thrill of adventure when either +has been admitted a little farther into the other's world than was +customary. How thrilling, therefore, will it be when men and women +entirely share in each other's lives, without fictitious reserves and +mysteries, and face the whole adventure of life squarely and completely +together, all the more husband and wife for being comrades as well--as +many men and women of the new era are already joyously doing. + +And, merely on the surface, what a new romantic element woman has +introduced into the daily drudgery of men's lives by her mere presence +in their offices! She cannot always be beautiful, poor dear, and she is +not invariably gracious, it is true; yet, on the whole, how much the +atmosphere of office life has gained in amenity by the coming of the +stenographer, the typewriter, and the telephone girl, not to speak of +her frequent decorative value in a world that has hitherto been +uncompromisingly harsh and unadorned! Men may affect to ignore this, and +cannot afford indeed to be too sensitive to these flowery presences that +have so considerably supplanted those misbegotten young miscreants known +as office-boys, a vanishing race of human terror; yet there she is, all +the same, in spite of her businesslike airs and her prosaic tasks, +silently diffusing about her that eternal mystery which she can never +lose, be her occupations never so masculine. + +There she is with her subtly wreathed hair and her absurd little lace +handkerchiefs and her furtive powder puff and her bits of immemorial +ornaments and the soft sound of her skirts and all the rest of it. Never +mind how grimly and even brusquely you may be dictating to her +specifications for steel rails or the like, little wafts of perfume +cannot help floating across to your rolltop desk, and you are a man and +she is a woman, for all that; and, instead of having her with you at fag +ends of your days, you have her with you all day long now--and your +sisters and your sweethearts are so much the nearer to you all day for +her presence, and, whether you know it or not, you are so much the less +a brute because she is there. + +Where the loss to romance comes in in these admirable new arrangements +of modern commerce it is hard to see. Of course a new element of danger +is thus introduced into the routine of our daily lives, but when was +danger an enemy to romance? The "bright face" of this particular +"danger" who would be without? The beloved essayist from whom that last +phrase is, of course, adapted, declared, as we all know, that to marry +is "to domesticate the recording angel." One might say that the modern +business man has officialized the ministering angel--perhaps some other +forms of angel as well. + +In their work, then, as in their play, men and women are more and more +coming to share with each other as comrades, and really the fun of life +seems in no wise diminished as a consequence. Rather the contrary, it +would seem, if one is to judge from the "Decameron" of the newspapers. +Yet it is not very long ago that man looked askance at woman's wistful +plea to take part even in his play. He had the old boyish fear that she +would spoil the game. However, it didn't take him long to find out his +mistake and to know woman for the true "sport" that she can be. And in +that discovery it was another invention of that wicked modern science +that was the chief, if humble seeming, factor, no less than that +eclipsed but inexpressibly useful instrument (of flirtation) in the +hands of a kind providence, the bicycle. + +The service of the bicycle to the "emancipation of woman" movements has +perhaps never been acknowledged by the philosopher; but a little thought +will make evident how far-reaching that service has been. When that near +day arrives on which woman shall call herself absolutely "free," should +she feel inclined to celebrate her freedom by some monument of her +gratitude, let the monument be neither to man nor woman, however valiant +in the fight, but simply let it take the form of an enthroned and +laurelled bicycle--for the moment woman mounted that apparently innocent +machine, it carried her on the high-road to freedom. On that she could +go not only where she pleased, but--what is even more to the point--with +whom she pleased. The free companionship of man and woman had begun. +Then and forever ended the old system of courtship, which seems so +laughable and even incredible today. One was no longer expected to pay +court to one's beloved, sitting stiffly on straight-backed chairs in a +chill drawing-room in the non-conducting, or non-conducive, presence of +still chillier maiden aunts. The doom of the _duenna_ was sounded; the +chill drawing-room was exchanged for "the open road" and the whispering +woodland; and soon it is to come about that a man shall propose to his +wife high up in the blue heavens, in an airship softly swaying at anchor +in the wake of the evening star. + + + + +VI + +THE LAST CALL + + +I don't know whether or not the cry "Last call for the dining-car" +affects others as it affects me, but for me it always has a stern, +fateful sound, suggestive of momentous opportunity fast slipping away, +opportunity that can never come again; and, on the occasions when I have +disregarded it, I have been haunted with a sense of the neglected +"might-have-been." + +Not, indeed, that the formless regret has been connected with any +illusions as to the mysterious quality of the dinner that I have thus +foregone. I have been well enough aware that the only actual opportunity +thus evaded has been most probably that of an unusually bad dinner, +exorbitantly paid for. The dinner itself has had nothing to do with my +feeling, which, indeed, has come of a suggestiveness in the cry beyond +the occasion, a sense conveyed by the words, in combination with the +swift speeding along of the train, of the inexorable swift passage and +gliding away of all things. Ah! so soon it will be the last call--for so +many pleasant things--that we would fain arrest and enjoy a little +longer in a world that with tragic velocity is flowing away from us, +each moment, "like the waters of the torrent." O yes, all too soon it +will be the "last call" in dead earnest--the last call for the joy of +life and the glory of the world. The grass is already withering, the +flower already fading; and that bird of time, with so short a way to +flutter, is relentlessly on the wing. + +Now some natures hear this call from the beginning of their lives. Even +their opulent spendthrift youth is "made the more mindful that the sweet +days die," by every strain of music, by every gathered flower. All their +joy is haunted, like the poetry of William Morris, with the wistful +burden of mortality. Even the summer woodlands, with all their pomp and +riot of exuberant green and gold, are anything but safe from this low +sweet singing, and in the white arms of beauty, pressed desperately +close as if to imprison the divine fugitive moment, the song seems to +come nearest. Who has not held some loved face in his hands, and gazed +into it with an almost agonizing effort to realize its reality, to make +eternally sure of it, somehow to wrest possession of it and the +transfiguring moment for ever, all the time pierced with the melancholy +knowledge that tomorrow all will be as if this had never been, and life +once more its dull disenchanted self? + + Too soon shall morning take the stars away, + And all the world be up and open-eyed, + This magic night be turned to common day-- + Under the willows on the riverside. + +Youth, however, can afford to enjoy even its melancholy; for the +ultimate fact of which that melancholy is a prophecy is a long way off. +If one enchanted moment runs to an end, it may be reasonably sure for a +long time yet of many more enchanted moments to come. It has as yet only +taken a bite or two into the wonderful cake. And, though its poets may +warn it that "youth's a stuff does not endure," it doesn't seriously +believe it. Others may have come to an end of their cake, but its cake +is going to last for ever. Alas, for the day when it is borne in upon us +with a tragic suddenness, like a miser who awakens to find that he has +been robbed of his hoard, that unaccountably the best part of the cake +has been eaten, that perhaps indeed only a few desperate crumbs remain. +A bleak laughter blends now with that once luxurious melancholy. There +is a song at our window, terribly like the mockery of Mephistopheles. +Our blood runs cold. We listen in sudden fear. It is life singing out +its last call. + +The time of this call, the occasion and the manner of it, mercifully +vary with individuals. Some fortunate ones, indeed, never hear it till +they lie on their deathbeds. Such have either been gifted with such a +generous-sized cake of youth that it has lasted all their lives, or +they have possessed a great art in the eating of it. Though I may add +here that a cautious husbanding of your cake is no good way. That way +you are liable to find it grown mouldy on your hands. No, oddly enough, +it is often seen that those who all their lives have eaten their cake +most eagerly have quite a little of it left at the end. There are no +hard and fast rules for the eating of your cake. One can only find out +by eating it; and, as I have said, it may be your luck to disprove the +proverb and both eat your cake and have it. + +For a dreary majority, however, the cake does come to an end, and for +them henceforth, as Stevenson grimly put it, the road lies long and +straight and dusty to the grave. For them that last call is apt to come +usually before sunset--and the great American question arises: What are +they going to do about it? That, of course, every one must decide for +himself, according to his inclinations and his opportunities. But a few +general considerations may be of comfort and even of greater value. + +There is one thing of importance to know about this last call, that we +are apt to imagine we hear it before we actually do, from a nervous +sense that it is about time for it to sound. Our hair perhaps is growing +grey, and our years beginning to accumulate. We hypnotize ourselves with +our chronology, and say with Emerson: + + It is time to grow old, + To take in sail. + +Well and good, if it is and we feel like it; but may be it isn't, and we +don't. Youth is largely a habit. So is romance. And, unless we allow +ourselves to be influenced by musty conventions and superstitions, both +habits may be prolonged far beyond the moping limits of custom, and need +never be abandoned unless we become sincerely and unregretfully tired of +them. I can well conceive of an old age like that of Sophocles, as +reported by Plato, who likened the fading of the passions with the +advance of age to "being set free from service to a band of madmen." + +When a man feels so, all is well and comfortable with him. He has +retired of his own free will from the banquet of life, having had his +fill, and is content. Our image of the last call does not apply to him, +but rather to those who, with appetites still keen, are sternly warned +that for them, willy-nilly, the banquet must soon end, and the prison +fare of prosaic middle age be henceforth their portion. No more ortolans +and transporting vintages for them. Nothing but Scotch oatmeal and +occasional sarsaparilla to the end of the chapter. No wonder that some, +hearing this dread sentence, go half crazy in a frenzied effort to +clutch at what remains, run amok, so to say, in their despairing +determination to have, if need be, a last "good time" and die. Their +efforts are apt to be either distasteful or pathetically comic, and the +world is apt to be cynically contemptuous of the "romantic" outbursts of +aging people. For myself, I always feel for them a deep and tender +sympathy. I know that they have heard that last fearful call to the +dining-car of life--and, poor souls, they have probably found it closed. +Their mistake has been in waiting so long for the call. From various +causes, they have mismanaged their lives. They have probably lived in a +numbing fear of their neighbours, who have told them that it is bad +manners to eat one's cake in public, and wicked to eat it in private; +and any one who is fool enough to allow his neighbours to live his life +for him instead of living it himself deserves what he gets, or rather +doesn't get. + +A wholesome oblivion of one's neighbours is the beginning of wisdom. +Neighbours, at the best, are an impertinent encroachment on one's +privacy, and, at the worst, an unnatural hindrance to our development. +Generally speaking, it is the man or woman who has lived with least fear +of his neighbours, who is least likely to hear that last call. Nothing +in retrospect is so barren as a life lived in accordance with the +hypocrisies of society. For those who have never lived, and are now fain +to begin living when it is too late, that last call comes indeed with a +ghastly irony. But for those who have fearlessly lived their lives, as +they came along, with Catullus singing their _vivamus atque amemus_, and +practising it, too; for those, if indeed the last call must come, they +will be able to support it by the thought that, often as in the past +life has called to them, it has never called to them in vain. We are apt +sometimes to belittle our memories, but actually they are worth a good +deal; and should the time come when we have little to look forward to, +it will be no small comfort to have something to look back on. And it +won't be the days when we _didn't_ that we shall recall with a sense of +possession, but the days and nights when we most emphatically _did_. +Thank God, we did for once hold that face in our hands in the woodland! +Thank God, we did get divinely drunk that wild night of nights in the +city! + + Wilt thou yet take all, Galilean? But these thou + shalt not take, + The laurel, the palms and the paean, the breast of the + nymphs in the brake. + +It is the fine excesses of life that make it worth living. The stalks of +the days are endurable only because they occasionally break into flower. +It is our sins of omission alone that we come in the end to regret. The +temptations we resisted in our youth make themselves rods to scourge our +middle age. I regret the paradoxical form these platitudes have +unconsciously taken, for that they are the simplest truth any honest +dying man would tell you. And that phrase recalls a beautiful poem by +"E. Nesbit" which has haunted me all my life, a poem I shall beg leave +to quote here, because, though it is to be found in that poet's volume, +it is not, I believe, as well known as it deserves to be by those who +need its lesson. I quote it, too, from memory, so I trust that the +length of time I have remembered it may be set to my credit against any +verbal mistakes I make. + + "If, on some balmy summer night, + You rowed across the moon path white, + And saw the shining sea grow fair + With silver scales and golden hair, + What would you do?" + + "I would be wise + And shut my ears and shut my eyes, + Lest I should leap into the tide + And clasp the seamaid as I died." + + "But if you thus were strong to flee + From sweet spells woven of moon and sea, + Are you quite sure that you would reach, + Without one backward look, the beach?" + + "I might look back, my dear, and then + Row straight into the snare again, + Or, if I safely got away-- + Regret it to my dying day." + +He who liveth his life shall live it. It is a grave error to give +ourselves grudgingly to our experiences. Only in a whole-hearted +surrender of ourselves to the heaven-sent moment do we receive back all +it has to give us, and by the active receptivity of our natures attract +toward us other such moments, as it were, out of the sky. An ever-ready +romantic attitude toward life is the best preservative against the +_ennui_ of the years. Adventures, as the proverb says, are to the +adventurous, and, as the old song goes: + + He either fears his fate too much + Or his deserts are small, + That dares not put it to the touch + To gain or lose it all. + +And the spirit of the times is happily growing more clement toward a +greater fulness and variety of life. The world is growing kinder toward +the fun and foolishness of existence, and the energetic pursuit of joy +is no longer frowned down by anaemic and hypocritical philosophies. The +old gods of energy and joy are coming to their own again, and the lives +of strong men and fair women are no longer ruled over by a hierarchy of +curates and maiden aunts; in fact, the maiden aunt has begun to find out +her mistake, and is out for her share of the fun and the foolishness +with the rest. Negative morality is fast becoming discredited, and many +an old "Thou shalt not" is coming to seem as absurd as the famous Blue +Laws of Connecticut. "Self-development, not self-sacrifice,"--a +favourite dictum of Grant Allen's,--is growing more and more to be the +formula of the modern world; and, if a certain amount of self-sacrifice +is of necessity included in a healthy self-development, the proportion +is being reduced to a rational limit. One form of self-sacrifice, at all +events, is no longer demanded of us--the wholesale sacrifice of our own +opinions. The possibility that there may be two opinions or a dozen or a +hundred on one matter, and that they may be all different, yet each one +of them right in its proper application, has dawned forcibly on the +world, with the conception of the relativity of experience and the +modification of conditions. Nowadays we recognize that there are as many +"rights" and as many "wrongs" as there are individuals; and to be happy +in our own way, instead of somebody else's, is one of the first laws of +nature, health, and virtue. Many an ancient restriction on personal +vitality is going the way of the old sumptuary laws. We have all of us +amusing memories of those severe old housekeepers who for no inclemency +of the weather would allow a fire in the grate before the first of +October, and who regarded a fire before that date as a positive breach +of the moral law. Such old wives are a type of certain old-fashioned +moralists whose icy clutch on our warm-blooded humanity we no longer +suffer. Nowadays we light our fires as we have a mind to, and if we +prefer to keep them going all the year round, it is no one's business +but our own. Happy is the man who, when the end comes, can say with +Landor: + + I warmed both hands before the fire of life; + It sinks and I am ready to depart. + +Such a one will have little need to fear that last call of which I have +been writing. In Kipling's phrase, he has taken his fun where he found +it, and his barns are well stocked with the various harvests of the +years. Not his the wild regret for having "safely got away." Rather he +laughs to remember how often he was taken captive by the enchantments of +the world, how whenever there was any piece of wildness afoot he was +always found in the thick of it. When the bacchantes were out on Mount +Cithaeron, and the mad _Evoe! Evoe!_ rang through the moonstruck woods, +be sure he was up and away, with ardent hands clutched in the flying +tresses. Ah! the vine leaves and the tiger skins and the ivory bodies, +the clash of the cymbals and the dithyramb shrilling up to the stars! +"If I forget thee, O golden Aphrodite!" He is no hypocrite, no weary +"king ecclesiast," shaking his head over the orgies of sap and song in +which he can no longer share. He frankly acknowledges that then came in +the sweet o' the year, and he is still as young as the youngest by +virtue of having drunk deep of the only elixir, the Dionysiac cup of +life. + +At the same time, while he may not ungratefully rejoice with Sophocles +at being "set free from service to a band of madmen," that ripening of +his nature which comes most fruitfully of a generous exercise of +its powers will have instinctively taught him that secret of the +transmutation of the passions which is one of the most precious rewards +of experience. It is quite possible for a lifelong passion for fair +women to become insensibly and unregretfully transmuted into a passion +for first editions, and you may become quite sincerely content that a +younger fellow catch the flying maiden, if only you can catch yon +flitting butterfly for your collection. And, strangest of all, your +grand passion for your own remarkable self may suffer a miraculous +transformation into a warm appreciation for other people. It is true +that you may smile a little sadly to find them even more interesting +than yourself. But such passing sadness has the relish of salvation in +it. Self is a weary throne, and the abdication of the ego is to be free +of one of the burdens rather than the pleasures of existence. + +But, to conclude, it is all too possible that you who read this may have +no such assets of a wilful well spent life to draw on as he whom I have +pictured. It may be that you have starved your emotions and fled your +opportunities, or you may simply have had bad luck. The golden moments +seldom came your way. The wilderness of life has seldom blossomed with a +rose. "The breast of the nymph in the brake" and "the chimes at +midnight" were not for you. And there is a menacing murmur of autumn in +the air. The days are shortening, and the twilight comes early, with a +chilly breath. The crickets have stopped singing, and the garden is sad +with elegiac blooms. The chrysanthemum is growing on the grave of the +rose. Perhaps already it is too late--too late for life and joy. You +must take to first editions and entomology and other people's interests +in good earnest. But no! Suddenly on the wind there comes a cry--a sound +of cymbals and flutes and dancing feet. It is life's last call. You have +one chance left. There is still Indian summer. It is better than +nothing. Hurry and join the music, ere it be too late. For this is the +last call! + + When time lets slip a little perfect hour, + Take it, for it will not come again. + + + + +VII + +THE PERSECUTIONS OF BEAUTY + + +All religions have periods in their history which are looked back to +with retrospective fear and trembling as eras of persecution, and each +religion has its own book of martyrs. The religion of beauty is no +exception. Far from it. For most other religions, however they may have +differed among themselves, have agreed in fearing beauty, and even in +Greece there were stern sanctuaries and ascetic academes where the white +bosom of Phryne would have pleaded in vain. Christianity has not been +beauty's only enemy, by any means; though, when the Book of Martyrs of +Beauty comes to be written, it will, doubtless, be the Christian +persecutions of beauty that will bulk largest in the record--for the +Beauty of Holiness and the Holiness of Beauty have been warring creeds +from the beginning. + +At the present moment, there is reason to fear, or to rejoice--according +to one's individual leanings--that the Religion of Beauty is gaining +upon its ancient rival; for perhaps never since the Renaissance has +there been such a widespread impulse to assert Beauty and Joy as the +ideals of human life. As evidence one has but to turn one's eyes on the +youth of both sexes, as they rainbow the city thoroughfares with their +laughing, heartless faces, evident children of beauty and joy, "pagan" +to the core of them, however ostensibly Christian their homes and their +country. In our time, at all events, Beauty has never walked the streets +with so frank a radiance, so confident an air of security, and in her +eyes and in her carriage, as in her subtly shaped and subtly scented +garments, so conspicuous a challenge to the musty, outworn, proprieties +to frown upon her all they please. From the humblest shop-girl to the +greatest lady, there is apparent an intention to be beautiful, sweet +maid, and let who will be hum-drum, at whatever cost, by whatever means. +This, of course, at all periods, has been woman's chief thought, but +till recently, in our times, she has more or less affected a certain +secrecy in her intention. She has hinted rather than fully expressed it, +as though fearing a certain flagrancy in too public an exhibition of her +enchantments. It has hardly seemed proper to her heretofore to be as +beautiful in the public gaze as in the sanctuary of her boudoir. But +now, bless you, she has no such misgivings, and the flower-like effect +upon the city streets is as dazzling as if, some fine morning in +Constantinople, all the ladies of the various harems should suddenly +appear abroad without their yashmaks, setting fire to the hearts and +turning the heads of the unaccustomed male. Or, to make comparison +nearer home, it is almost as startling as if the ladies of the various +musical comedies in town should suddenly be let loose upon our senses in +broad daylight, in all the adorable sorceries of "make-up" and +diaphanous draperies. I swear that it can be no more thrilling to +penetrate into that mysterious paradise "behind the scenes," than to +walk up Fifth Avenue one of these summer afternoons, in the present year +of grace,--humming to one's self that wistful old song, which goes +something like this: + + The girls that never can be mine! + In every lane and street + I hear the rustle of their gowns, + The whisper of their feet; + The sweetness of their passing by, + Their glances strong as wine, + Provoke the unpossessive sigh-- + Ah! girls that never can be mine. + +So audacious has Beauty become in these latter days, so proudly she +walks abroad, making so superb an appeal to the desire of the eye, +thighed like Artemis, and bosomed like Aphrodite, or at whiles a fairy +creature of ivory and gossamer and fragrance, with a look in her eyes of +secret gardens; and so much is the wide world at her feet, and one with +her in the vanity of her fairness--that I sometimes fear an impending +_dies irae_, when the dormant spirit of Puritanism will reassert itself, +and some stern priests thunder from the pulpit of worldly vanities and +the wrath to come. Indeed, I can well imagine in the near future some +modern Savonarola presiding over a new Bonfire of Vanities in Madison +Square, on which, to the droning of Moody and Sankey's hymns, shall be +cast all the fascinating Parisian creations, the puffs and rats, the +powder and the rouge, the darling stockings, and all such concomitant +bewitcheries that today make Manhattan a veritable Isle of Circe, all to +go up in savage sectarian flame, before the eyes of melancholy young +men, and filling all the city with the perfume of beauty's holocaust. At +street corners too will stand great books in which weeping maidens will +sign their names, swearing before high heaven, to wear nothing but +gingham and bed-ticking for the dreary remainder of their lives. Such a +day may well come, as it has often come before, and certainly will, if +women persist in being so deliberately beautiful as they are at present. + +It is curious how, from time immemorial, man seems to have associated +the idea of evil with beauty, shrunk from it with a sort of ghostly +fear, while, at the same time drawn to it by force of its hypnotic +attraction. Strangely enough, beauty has been regarded as the most +dangerous enemy of the soul, and the powers of darkness that are +supposed to lie in wait for that frail and fluttering psyche, so +precious and apparently so perishable, are usually represented as taking +shapes of beguiling loveliness--lamias, loreleis, wood nymphs, and +witches with blue flowers for their eyes. Lurking in its most innocent +forms, the grim ascetic has affected to find a leaven of concupiscence, +and whenever any reformation is afoot, it is always beauty that is made +the first victim, whether it take the form of a statue, a stained-glass +window, or a hair-ribbon. "Homeliness is next to Godliness," though not +officially stated as an article of the Christian creed, has been one of +the most active of all Christian tenets. It has always been easier far +for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than a gloriously +beautiful woman. Presumably such a one might be in danger of corrupting +the saints, somewhat unaccustomed to such apparitions. + +In this Christian fear and hatred of beauty the democratic origin of the +Christian religion is suggestively illustrated, for beauty, wherever +found, is always mysteriously aristocratic, and thus instinctively +excites the fear and jealousy of the common people. When, in the third +century, Christian mobs set about their vandalistic work of destroying +the "Pagan" temples, tearing down the beautiful calm gods and goddesses +from their pedestals, and breaking their exquisite marble limbs with +brutish mallets, it was not, we may be sure, of the danger to their +precious souls they were thinking, but of their patrician masters who +had worshipped these fair images, and paid great sums to famous +sculptors for such adornment of their sanctuaries. Perhaps it was human +enough, for to those mobs beauty had long been associated with +oppression. Yet how painful to picture those golden marbles, in all +their immortal fairness, confronted with the hideousness of those +fanatic ill-smelling multitudes. Wonderful religionists, forsooth, that +thus break with foolish hands and trample with swinish hoofs the sacred +vessels of divine dreams. Who would not + + rather be + A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn,-- + So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, + Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; + Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; + Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn. + +One can imagine the priest of such a violated sanctuary stealing back in +the quiet moonlight, when all the mob fury had passed away, seeking amid +all the wrack of fallen columns, and shattered carvings, for any poor +fragments of god or goddess at whose tranquil fair-ordered altar he had +ministered so long; and gathering such as he might find,--maybe a mighty +hand, still the hand of a god, albeit in overthrow, or some marble curls +of the sculptured ambrosial locks, or maybe the bruised breast of the +goddess, white as a water-lily in the moon. Then, seeking out some +secret corner of the sacred grove, how reverently he would bury the +precious fragments away from profane eyes, and go forth homeless into a +mysterious changing world, from which glory and loveliness were thus +surely passing away. Other priests, as we know, more fortunate than he, +had forewarnings of such impending sacrilege, and were able to +anticipate the mob, and bury their beautiful images in safe and secret +places, there to await, after the lapse of twelve centuries, the +glorious resurrection of the Renaissance. A resurrection, however, by no +means free from danger, even in that resplendent dawn of intelligence; +for Christianity was still the enemy of beauty, save in the Vatican, and +the ignorant priest of the remote village where the spade of the peasant +had revealed the sleeping marble was certain to declare the beautiful +image an evil spirit, and have it broken up forthwith and ground for +mortar, unless some influential scholar, or powerful lord touched with +"the new learning," chanced to be on hand to save it from destruction. +Yes! even at that time when beauty was being victoriously born again, +the mad fear of her raged with such panic in certain minds that, when +Savonarola lit his great bonfire so subtle a servant of beauty as +Botticelli, fallen into a sort of religious dotage, cast his own +paintings into the flames--to the lugubrious rejoicings of the +sanctimonious Piagnoni--as Savonarola's followers were called; +predecessors of those still gloomier zealots who, two centuries later, +were to turn England into a sort of whitewashed prison, with crop-headed +psalm-singing religious maniacs for gaolers. When Charles the First + + bow'd his comely head + Down, as upon a bed, + +at Whitehall, Beauty also laid her head upon the block at his side. +Ugliness, parading as piety, took her place, and once more the breaking +of images began, the banishment of music, the excommunication of grace, +and gentle manners, and personal adornments. Gaiety became penal, and a +happy heart or a beautiful smile was of the devil,--something like +hanging matters--but happy hearts and beautiful smiles must have been +rare things in England during the Puritan Commonwealth. Such as were +left had taken refuge in France, where men might worship God and Beauty +in the same church, and where it was not necessary, as at Oxford, to +bury your stained-glass windows out of the reach of the mob--those + + Storied windows richly dight + Casting a dim religious light, + +which even the Puritan Milton could thus celebrate. Doubtless, that +English Puritan persecution was the severest that Beauty has been called +upon to endure. She still suffers from it, need one say, to this day, +particularly in New England, where if the sculptured images of goddess +and nymph are not exactly broken to pieces by the populace, it is from +no goodwill towards them, but rather from an ingrained reverence for +any form of property, even though it be nude, and where, at all events, +they are under the strict surveillance of a highly proper and +respectable police, those distinguished guardians of American morals. + +It is worth while to try and get at the reason for this wide-spread, +deep-rooted, fear of beauty: for some reason there must surely be. Such +instinctive feelings, on so broad a scale, are not accidental. And so +soon as one begins to analyse the attitude of religion towards beauty, +the reason is not far to seek. + +All religions are made up of a spiritual element and a moral element, +the moral element being the temporary, practical, so to say, working +side of religion, concerned with this present world, and the limitations +and necessities of the various societies that compose it. The spiritual +element, the really important part of religion, has no concern with Time +and Space, temporary mundane laws, or conduct. It concerns itself only +with the eternal properties of things. Its business is the contemplation +and worship of the mystery of life, "the mystery we make darker with a +name." + +Now, great popular religions, designed as they are for the discipline +and control of the great brute masses of humanity, are almost entirely +occupied with morality, and what passes in them for spirituality is +merely mythology, an element of picturesque supernaturalism calculated +to enforce the morality with the multitude. Christianity is such a +religion. It is mostly a matter of conduct here and now upon the earth. +Its mystic side does not properly belong to it, and is foreign to, not +to speak of its being practically ignored by, the average "Christian." +It is a religion designed to work hand in hand with a given state of +society, making for the preservation of such laws and manners and +customs as are best fitted to make that society a success here and now, +a worldly success in the best sense of the term. Mohammedanism is a +similar religion calculated for the needs of a different society. +Whatever the words or intentions of the founders of such religions, +their kingdoms are essentially of this world. They are not mystic, or +spiritual, or in anyway concerned with infinite and eternal things. +Their business is the moral policing of humanity. Morality, as of course +its name implies, is a mere matter of custom, and therefore varies with +the variations of races and climates. It has nothing to do with +spirituality, and, in fact, the best morals are often the least +spiritual, and _vice versa_. It will be understood then that any force +which is apt to disturb this moral, or more exactly speaking social, +order will meet at once with the opposition of organized "religions" so +called, and the more spiritual it is, the greater will be the +opposition, for it will thus be the more dangerous. + +Now one begins to see why Beauty is necessarily the bugbear, more or +less, of all religions, or, as I prefer to regard them, "organized +moralities"; for Beauty is neither moral nor immoral, being as she is a +purely spiritual force, with no relations to man's little schemes of +being good and making money and being knighted and so forth. For those +who have eyes to see, she is the supreme spiritual vision vouchsafed to +us upon the earth--and, as that, she is necessarily the supreme danger +to that materialistic use and wont by which alone a materialistic +society remains possible. For this reason our young men and +maidens--particularly our young men--must be guarded against her, for +her beauty sets us adream, prevents our doing our day's work, makes us +forget the soulless occupations in which we wither away our lives. The +man who loves beauty will never be mayor of his city, or even sit on the +Board of Aldermen. Nor is he likely to own a railroad, or be a captain +of industry. Nor will he marry, for her money, a woman he does not love. +The face of beauty makes all such achievements seem small and absurd. +Such so-called successes seem to him the dreariest forms of failure. In +short, Beauty has made him divinely discontented with the limited human +world about him, divinely incapable of taking it seriously, or heeding +its standards or conditions. No wonder society should look upon Beauty +as dangerous, for she is constantly upsetting its equilibrium and +playing havoc with its smooth schemes and smug conventions. She outrages +the "proprieties" with "the innocence of nature," and disintegrates +"select" and "exclusive" circles with the wand of Romance. For earthly +possessions or rewards she has no heed. For her they are meaningless +things, mere idle dust and withered leaves. Her only real estate is in +the moon, and the one article of her simple creed--"Love is enough." + + Love is enough: though the world be a-waning + And the woods have no voice but the voice of complaining, + Though the sky be too dark for dim eyes to discover + The gold-cups and daisies fair blooming thereunder, + Though the hills beheld shadows, and the sea a dark wonder + And this day draw a veil over all deeds passed over, + Yet their hands shall not tremble, their feet shall not falter; + The void shall not weary, the fear shall not alter + These lips and these eyes of the loved and the lover. + +Those who have looked into her eyes see limitless horizons undreamed of +by those who know her not, horizons summoning the soul to radiant +adventures beyond the bounds of Space and Time. The world is so far +right in regarding beauty with a sort of superstitious dread, as a +presence almost uncanny among our mere mortal concerns, a daemonic +thing,--which is what the world has meant when it has, not unnaturally, +confused it with the spirits of evil; for surely it is a supernatural +stranger in our midst, a fairy element, and, like the lorelei and the +lamia, it does beckon its votaries to enchanted realms away and afar +from "all the uses of the world." Therefore, to them also it brings the +thrill of a different and nobler fear--the thrill of the mortal in +presence of the immortal. A strange feeling of destiny seems to come +over us as we first look into the beautiful face we were born to love. +It seems veritably an apparition from another and lovelier world, to +which it summons us to go with it. That is what we mean when we say that +Love and Death are one; for Death, to the thought of Love, is but one of +the gates to that other world, a gate to which we instinctively feel +Love has the key. That surely is the meaning of the old fairy-stories of +men who have come upon the white woman in the woodland, and followed +her, never to be seen again of their fellows, or of those who, like +Hylas, have met the water-nymph by the lilied spring, and sunk with her +down into the crystal deeps. The strange earth on which we live is just +such a place of enchantment, neither more nor less, and some of us have +met that fair face, with a strange suddenness of joy and fear, and +followed and followed it on till it vanished beyond the limits of the +world. But our failure was that we did not follow that last white +beckoning of the hand-- + + And I awoke and found me here + On the cold hill's side. + + + + +VIII + +THE MANY FACES--THE ONE DREAM + + +Among the many advantages of being very young is one's absolute +certainty that there is only one type of beautiful girl in the world. +That type we make a religion. We are its pugnacious champions, and the +idea of our falling in love with any other is too preposterous even for +discussion. If our tastes happen to be for blondness, brunettes simply +do not exist for us; and if we affect the slim and willowy in figure, +our contempt for the plump and rounded is too sincere for expression. +Usually the type we choose is one whose beauty is somewhat esoteric to +other eyes. We are well aware that photographs do it no justice, and +that the man in the street--who, strangely enough, we conceive as having +no eye for beauty--can see nothing in it. Thank Heaven, she is not the +type that any common eye can see. Heads are not turned in her wake as +she passes along. Her beauty is not "obvious." On the contrary, it is of +that rare and exquisite quality which only a few favoured ones can +apprehend--like the beauty of a Whistler or a Corot, and we have been +chosen to be its high-priest and evangelist. It is our secret, this +beautiful face that we love, and we wonder how any one can be found to +love the other faces. We even pity them, those rosy, rounded faces, with +their bright unmysterious eyes and straight noses and dimpled chins. How +fortunate for them that the secret of the beauty we love has been hidden +from their lovers. Sheer Bouguereau! Neither more nor less. + +In fact, the beauty we affect is aggressively spiritual, and in so far +as beauty is demonstrably physical we dismiss it with disdain. Our +ideal, indeed, might be said to consist in a beauty which is beautiful +in spite of the body rather than by means of it; a beauty defiantly +clothed, so to say, in the dowdiest of fleshly garments--radiantly +independent of such carnal conditions as features or complexion. Our +ideal of figure might be said to be negative rather than positive, and +that "little sister" mentioned in Solomon's Song would bring us no +disappointment. + +We are often heard to say that beauty consists chiefly, if not entirely, +in expression, that it is a transfiguration from within rather than a +gracious condition of the surface, that the shape of a nose is no +matter, and that a beautifully rounded chin or a fine throat has nothing +to do with it--indeed, is rather in the way than otherwise. We point +to the fact--which is true enough--that the most famous beauties +of antiquity were plain women--plain, that is, according to the +conventional standards. + +We also maintain--again with perfect truth--that mystery is more than +half of beauty, the element of strangeness that stirs the senses through +the imagination. These and other perfectly true truths about beauty we +discover through our devotion to the one face that we love--and we +should hardly have discovered them had we begun with the merely +cherry-ripe. It is with faces much as it is with books. There is no way +of attaining a vital catholic taste in literature so good as to begin by +mastering some difficult beautiful classic, by devoting ourselves in the +ardent receptive period of youth to one or two masterpieces which will +serve as touchstones for us in all our subsequent reading. Some books +engage all our faculties for their appreciation, and through the keen +attentiveness we are compelled to give them we make personal discovery +of those principles and qualities of all fine literature which otherwise +we might never have apprehended, or in which, at all events, we should +have been less securely grounded. + +So with faces: it is through the absorbed worship, the jealous study, of +one face that we best learn to see the beauty in all the other +faces--though the mere thought that our apprehension of its beauty could +ever lead us to so infidel a conclusion would seem heresy indeed during +the period of our dedication. The subtler the type, the more caviare it +is to the general, the more we learn from it. We become in a sense +discoverers, original thinkers, of beauty, taking nothing on authority, +but making trial and investigation always for ourselves. Such beauty +brings us nearer than the more explicit types to that mysterious +threshold over which beauty steps down to earth and dwells among us; +that well-spring of its wonder; the point where first its shining +essence pours its radiance into the earthly vessel. + +The perfect physical type hides no little of its own miracle through its +sheer perfection, as in the case of those masterpieces which, as we say, +conceal their art. It is often through the face externally less perfect, +faces, so to say, in process of becoming beautiful, that we get glimpses +of the interior light in its divine operation. We seem to look into the +very alembic of beauty, and see all the precious elements in the act of +combination. No wonder we should deem these faces the most beautiful of +all, for through them we see, not beauty made flesh, but beauty while it +is still spirit. In our eager fanaticism, indeed, we cannot conceive +that there can be beauty in any other types as well. Yet, because we +chance to have fallen under the spell of Botticelli, shall there be no +more Titian? Our taste is for a beauty of dim silver and faded stars, a +wistful twilight beauty made of sorrow and dreams, a beauty always half +in the shadow, a white flower in the moonlight. We cannot conceive how +beauty, for others, can be a thing of the hot sun, a thing of purple and +orange and the hot sun, a thing of firm outlines, superbly concrete, +marmoreal, sumptuous, magnificently animal. + +The beauty we love is very silent. It smiles softly to itself, but never +speaks. How should we understand a beauty that is vociferously gay, a +beauty of dash and dance, a beauty of swift and brilliant ways, +victoriously alive? + +Perhaps it were well for us that we should never understand, well for us +that we should preserve our singleness of taste through life. Some +contrive to do this, and never as long as they live are unfaithful to +the angel-blue eyes of their boyish love. Moralists have perhaps not +realized how much continence is due to a narrowness of aesthetic taste. +Obviously the man who sees beauty only in blue eyes is securer from +temptation than the man who can see beauty in brown or green eyes as +well; and how perilous is his state for whom danger lurks in all +beautiful eyes, irrespective of shape, size, or colour! And, alas! it is +to this state of eclecticism that most of us are led step by step by the +Mephistopheles of experience. + +As great politicians in their maturity are usually found in the exact +opposite party to that which they espoused in their youth, so men who +loved blondness in boyhood are almost certain to be found at the feet of +the raven-haired in their middle age, and _vice versa_. The change is +but a part of that general change which overtakes us with the years, +substituting in us a catholic appreciation of the world as it is for +idealist notions of the world as we see it, or desire it to be. It is a +part of that gradual abdication of the ego which comes of the slow +realization that other people are quite as interesting as ourselves--in +fact, a little more so,--and their tastes and ways of looking at things +may be worth pondering, after all. But, O when we have arrived at this +stage, what a bewildering world of seductive new impressions spreads for +us its multitudinous snares! No longer mere individuals, we have not +merely an individual's temptations to guard against, but the temptations +of all the world. Instead of being able to see only that one type of +beauty which first appealed to us, our eyes have become so instructed +that we now see the beauty of all the other types as well; and we no +longer scorn as Philistine the taste of the man in the street for the +beauty that is robustly vital and flamboyantly contoured. Once we called +it obvious. Now we say it is "barbaric," and call attention to its +perfection of type. + +The remembrance of our former injustice to it may even awaken a certain +tenderness towards it in our hearts, and soon we find ourselves making +love to it, partly from a vague desire to make reparation to a slighted +type, and partly from the experimental pleasure of loving a beauty the +attraction of which it was once impossible for us to imagine. So we feel +when the charm of some old master, hitherto unsympathetic, is suddenly +revealed to us. Ah! it was this they saw. How blind they must have +thought us! + +Brown eyes that I love, will you forgive me that I once looked into blue +eyes as I am looking now into yours? Hair black as Erebus, will you +forgive these hands that once loved to bathe in a brook of rippled gold? +Ah! they did not know. It was in ignorance they sinned. They did not +know. + +O my beautiful cypress, stately queen of the garden of the world, +forgive me that once I gave to the little shrub-like women the worship +that is rightly yours! + +Lady, whose loveliness is like white velvet, a vineyard heavy with +golden grapes, abundant as an orchard of apple blossoms, forgive that +once I loved the shadow women, the sad wreathing mists of beauty, the +silvery uncorseted phantoms of womanhood. It was in ignorance I sinned. +I did not know. + +Ah! That Mephistopheles of experience! How he has led us from one fair +face to another, teaching us, one by one, the beauty of all. No longer +lonely sectarians of beauty, pale prophets of one lovely face, there is +now no type whose secret is hidden from us. The world has become a +garden of beautiful faces. The flowers are different, but they are all +beautiful. How is it possible for us, now that we know the charm of each +one, to be indifferent to any, or to set the beauty of one above the +other? We have learned the beauty of the orchid, but surely we have not +unlearned the rose; and would you say that orchid or rose is more +beautiful than the lily? Surely not. They are differently beautiful, +that is all. + +Are blue eyes more beautiful than brown? I thought so once, but now I +see that they are differently beautiful, that is all. Nor is gold hair +more beautiful than black any more, or black than gold. They are +differently beautiful, that is all. Nor is thy white skin, O Saxon lady, +more beautiful than hers of tropic bronze. + +Come sad, or come with laughter, beautiful faces; come like stars in +dreams, or come vivid as fruit upon the bough; come softly like a timid +fawn, or terrible as an army with banners; come silent, come singing ... +you are all beautiful, and none is fairer than another--only differently +fair. + +And yet ... and yet ... Experience is indeed Mephistopheles in this: We +must pay him for all this wisdom. Is it the old price? Is it our souls? +I wonder. + +This at least is true: that, while indeed he has opened our eyes to all +this beauty that was hidden to us, shown us beauty, indeed, where we +could see but evil before, we miss something from our delight in these +faces. We can appreciate more beauty, but do we appreciate any quite as +much as in those old days when we were such passionate monotheists of +the beautiful? Alas! We are priests no more, are we even lovers? But we +are wonderful connoisseurs. + +It is our souls. + + + + +IX + +THE SNOWS OF YESTER-YEAR + + +_Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan?_ As I transcribe once more that +ancient sigh, perhaps the most real sigh in all literature, it is high +mid-summer, and the woodland surrounding the little cabin in which I am +writing lies in a trance of green and gold, hot and fragrant and dizzy +with the whirring of cicadas, under the might of the July sun. Bees buzz +in and out through my door, and sometimes a butterfly flits in, flutters +a while about my bookshelves, and presently is gone again, in search of +sweets more to his taste than those of the muses, though Catullus is +there, with + + Songs sweeter than wild honey dripping down, + Which once in Rome to Lesbia he sang. + +As I am caught by the dream-drowsy spell of the hot murmuring afternoon, +and my eyes rest on the thick vines clustering over the rocks, and the +lush grasses and innumerable underbrush, so spendthrift in their +crowding luxuriance, I try to imagine the ground as it was but four +months ago still in the grasp of winter, when the tiniest blade of +grass, or smallest speck of creeping green leaf, seemed like a miracle, +and it was impossible to realize that under the broad snowdrifts a +million seeds, like hidden treasure, were waiting to reveal their +painted jewels to the April winds. Snow was plentiful then, to be had by +the ton--but now, the thought suddenly strikes me, and brings home with +new illuminating force Villon's old refrain, that though I sought the +woodland from end to end, ransacked its most secret places, not one +vestige of that snow, so lately here in such plenty, would it be +possible to find. Though you were to offer me a million dollars for as +much as would fill the cup of a wild rose, say even a hundred million, I +should have to see all that money pass me by. I can think of hardly +anything that it couldn't buy--but such a simple thing as last year's +snow! + +Could there be a more poignant symbol of irreclaimable vanished things +than that so happily hit on by the old ballade-maker: + + Nay, never ask this week, fair lord, + Where they are gone, nor yet this year, + Save with thus much for an overword-- + But where are the snows of yester-year? + +Villon, as we know, has a melancholy fondness for asking these sad, +hopeless questions of snow and wind. He muses not only of the drift of +fair faces, but of the passing of mighty princes and all the arrogant +pride and pomp of the earth--"pursuivants, trumpeters, heralds, hey!" +"Ah! where is the doughty Charlemagne?" They, even as the humblest, "the +wind has carried them all away." They have vanished utterly as the snow, +gone--who knows where?--on the wind. "'Dead and gone'--a sorry burden of +the Ballad of Life," as Thomas Lowell Beddoes has it in his _Death's +Jest Book_. "Dead and gone!" as Andrew Lang re-echoes in a sweetly +mournful ballade: + + Through the mad world's scene + We are drifting on, + To this tune, I ween, + "They are dead and gone!" + +"Nought so sweet as melancholy," sings an old poet, and, while the +melancholy of the exercise is undoubted, there is at the same time an +undeniable charm attaching to those moods of imaginative retrospect in +which we summon up shapes and happenings of the vanished past, a tragic +charm indeed similar to that we experience in mournful music or elegiac +poetry. + +For, it is impossible to turn our eyes on any point of the starlit vista +of human history, without being overwhelmed with a heart-breaking sense +of the immense treasure of radiant human lives that has gone to its +making, the innumerable dramatic careers now shrunk to a mere mention, +the divinely passionate destinies, once all wild dream and dancing +blood, now nought but a name huddled with a thousand such in some dusty +index, seldom turned to even by the scholar, and as unknown to the world +at large as the moss-grown name on some sunken headstone in a country +churchyard. What an appallingly exuberant and spendthrift universe it +seems, pouring out its multitudinous generations of men and women with +the same wasteful hand as it has filled this woodland with millions of +exquisite lives, marvellously devised, patterned with inexhaustible +fancy, mysteriously furnished with subtle organs after their needs, +crowned with fairy blossoms, and ripening with magic seeds,--such a vast +treasure of fragrant sunlit leafage, all produced with such elaborate +care, and long travail, and all so soon to vanish utterly away! + +Along with this crushing sense of cosmic prodigality, and somewhat +lighting up its melancholy, comes the inspiring realization of the +splendid spectacle of human achievement, the bewildering array of all +the glorious lives that have been lived, of all the glorious happenings, +under the sun. Ah! what men this world has seen, and--what women! What +divine actors have trod this old stage, and in what tremendous dramas +have they taken part! And how strange it is, reading some great dramatic +career, of Caesar, say, or Luther, or Napoleon, or Byron, to realize +that there was a time when they were not, then a time when they were +beginning to be strange new names in men's ears, then all the romantic +excitement of their developing destinies, and the thunder and lightning +of the great resounding moments of their lives--moments made out of +real, actual, prosaic time, just as our own moments are made, yet once +so splendidly shining on the top of the world, as though to stay there +forever, moments so glorious that it would seem that Time must have +paused to watch and prolong them, jealous that they should ever pass and +give place to lesser moments! + +Think too of those other fateful moments of history, moments not +confined to a few godlike individuals, but participated in by whole +nations, such moments as that of the great Armada, the French +Revolution, or the Declaration of American Independence. How strangely +it comes upon one that these past happenings were once only just taking +place, just as at the moment of my writing other things are taking +place, and clocks were ticking and water flowing, just as they are doing +now! How wonderful, it seems to us, to have been alive then, as we are +alive now, to have shared in those vast national enthusiasms, "in those +great deeds to have had some little part"; and is it not a sort of poor +anti-climax for a world that has gone through such noble excitement to +have sunk back to this level of every day! Alas! all those lava-like +moments of human exaltation--what are they now, but, so to say, the +pumice-stone of history. They have passed as the summer flowers are +passing, they are gone with last year's snow. + +But the last year's snow of our personal lives--what a wistful business +it is, when we get thinking of that! To recall certain magic moments out +of the past is to run a risk of making the happiest present seem like a +desert; and for most men, I imagine, such retrospect is usually busied +with some fair face, or perhaps--being men--with several fair faces, +once so near and dear, and now so far. How poignantly and unprofitably +real memory can make them--all but bring them back--how vividly +reconstruct immortal occasions of happiness that we said could not, must +not, pass away; while all the time our hearts were aching with the sure +knowledge that they were even then, as we wildly clutched at them, +slipping from our grasp! + +That summer afternoon,--do you too still remember it, Miranda?--when, +under the whispering woodland, we ate our lunch together with such +prodigious appetite, and O! such happy laughter, yet never took our eyes +from each other; and, when the meal was ended, how we wandered along the +stream-side down the rocky glen, till we came to an enchanted pool among +the boulders, all hushed with moss and ferns and overhanging boughs--do +you remember what happened then, Miranda? Ah! nymphs of the forest +pools, it is no use asking me to forget. + +And, all the time, my heart was saying to my eyes:--"This fairy hour--so +real, so magical, now--some day will be in the far past; you will sit +right away on the lonely outside of it, and recall it only with the +anguish of beautiful vanished things." And here I am today surely +enough, years away from it, solitary on its lonely outside! + +I suppose that the river, this summer day, is making the same music +along its rocky bed, and the leafy boughs are rustling over that haunted +pool just the same as when--but where are the laughing ripples--ah! +Miranda--that broke with laughter over the divinely troubled water, and +the broken reflections, as of startled water-lilies, that rocked to and +fro in a panic of dazzling alabaster? + +They are with last year's snow. + +Meriel of the solemn eyes, with the heart and the laughter of a child, +and soul like the starlit sky, where should one look for the snows of +yester-year if not in your bosom, fairy girl my eyes shall never see +again. Wherever you are, lost to me somewhere among the winding paths of +this strange wood of the world, do you ever, as the moonlight falls over +the sea, give a thought to that night when we sat together by a window +overlooking the ocean, veiled in a haze of moonlit pearl, and, dimly +seen near shore, a boat was floating, like some mystic barge, as we +said, in our happy childishness, waiting to take us to the _Land East of +the Sun and West of the Moon_? Ah! how was it we lingered and lingered +till the boat was no more there, and it was too late? Perhaps it was +that we seemed to be already there, as you turned and placed your hand +in mine and said: "My life is in your hand." And we both believed it +true. Yes! wherever we went together in those days, we were always in +that enchanted land--whether we rode side by side through London streets +in a hansom--"a two-wheeled heaven" we called it--(for our dream +stretches as far back as that prehistoric day--How old one of us seems +to be growing! You, dear face, can never grow old)--or sat and laughed +at clowns in London music halls, or wandered in Surrey lanes, or gazed +at each other, as if our hearts would break for joy, over the snow-white +napery of some country inn, and maybe quoted Omar to each other, as we +drank his red wine to the immortality of our love. Perhaps we were +right, after all. Perhaps it could never die, and Time and Distance are +perhaps merely illusions, and you and I have never been apart. Who knows +but that you are looking over my shoulder as I write, though you seem so +far away, lost in that starlit silence that you loved. Ah! Meriel, is it +well with you, this summer day? A sigh seems to pass through the sunlit +grasses. They are waving and whispering as I have seen them waving and +whispering over graves. + +Such moments as these I have recalled all men have had in their lives, +moments when life seemed to have come to miraculous flower, attained +that perfect fulfilment of its promise which else we find only in +dreams. Beyond doubt there is something in the flawless blessedness of +such moments that links our mortality with super-terrestrial states of +being. We do, in very deed, gaze through invisible doors into the ether +of eternal existences, and, for the brief hour, live as they, drinking +deep of that music of the infinite which is the divine food of the +enfranchised soul. Thence comes our exaltation, and our wild longing to +hold the moment for ever; for, while it is with us, we have literally +escaped from the everyday earth, and have found the way into some other +dimension of being, and its passing means our sad return to the +prison-house of Time, the place of meetings and partings, of distance +and death. + +Part of the pang of recalling such moments is a remorseful sense that +perhaps we might have held them fast, after all. If only we might bring +them back, surely we would find some way to dwell in them for ever. They +came upon us so suddenly out of heaven, like some dazzling bird, and we +were so bewildered with the wonder of their coming that we stretched out +our hands to seize them, only when they were already spreading their +wings for flight. But O if the divine bird would but visit us again! +What golden nets we would spread for him! What a golden cage of worship +we would make ready! Our eyes would never leave his strange plumage, nor +would we miss one note of his strange song. But alas! now that we are +grown wise and watchful, that "moment eternal" comes to us no more. +Perhaps too that sad wisdom which has come to us with the years would +least of all avail us, should such moments by some magic chance suddenly +return. For it is one of the dangers of the retrospective habit that it +incapacitates us for the realization of the present hour. Much dwelling +on last year's snow will make us forget the summer flowers. Dreaming of +fair faces that are gone, we will look with unseeing eyes into the fair +faces that companion us still. To the Spring we say: "What of all your +blossom, and all your singing! Autumn is already at your heels, like a +shadow; and Winter waits for you like a marble tomb." To the hope that +still may beckon we say: "Well, what though you be fulfilled, you will +pass, like the rest. I shall see you come. We shall dwell together for a +while, and then you will go; and all will be as it was before, all as if +you had never come at all." For the retrospective mood, of necessity, +begets the anticipatory; we see everything finished before it is begun, +and welcome and valediction blend together on our lips. "That which hath +been is now; and that which is to be hath already been." + + In every kiss sealed fast + To feel the first kiss and forebode the last-- + +that is the shadow that haunts every joy, and sicklies o'er every action +of him whom life has thus taught to look before and after. + +Youth is not like that, and therein, for older eyes, lies its tragic +pathos. Superficial--or, if you prefer it, more normal--observers are +made happy by the spectacle of eager and confident young lives, all +abloom and adream, turning towards the future with plumed impatient +feet. But for some of us there is nothing quite so sad as young joy. The +playing of children is perhaps the most unbearably sad thing in the +world. Who can look on young lovers, without tears in their eyes? With +what innocent faith they are taking in all the radiant lies of life! But +perhaps a young mother with her new-born babe on her breast is the most +tragical of all pictures of unsuspecting joy, for none of all the +trusting sons and daughters of men is destined in the end to find +herself so tragically, one might say cynically, fooled. + +Cynically, I said; for indeed sometimes, as one ponders the lavish +heartless use life seems to make of all its divinely precious +material--were it but the flowers in one meadow, or the butterflies of a +single summer day--it does seem as though a cruel cynicism inhered +somewhere in the scheme of things, delighting to destroy and +disillusionize, to create loveliness in order to scatter it to the +winds, and inspire joy in order to mock it with desolation. Sometimes it +seems as though the mysterious spirit of life was hardly worthy of the +vessels it has called into being, hardly treats them fairly, uses them +with an ignoble disdain. For, how generously we give ourselves up to +life, how innocently we put our trust in it, do its bidding with such +fine ardours, striving after beauty and goodness, fain to be heroic and +clean of heart--yet "what hath man of all his labours, and of the +vexation of his heart, wherein he hath laboured under the sun." Yea, +dust, and fallen rose-leaves, and last year's snow. + +And yet and yet, for all this drift and dishonoured decay of things, +that retrospective mood of ours will sometimes take another turn, and, +so rare and precious in the memory seem the treasure that it has lost, +and yet in imagination still holds, that it will not resign itself to +mortal thoughts of such manifest immortalities. The snows of +yester-year! Who knows if, after all, they have so utterly vanished as +they seem. Who can say but that there may be somewhere in the universe +secret treasuries where all that has ever been precious is precious +still, safely garnered and guarded for us against some wonderful moment +which shall gather up for us in one transfiguring apocalypse all the +wonderful moments that have but preceded us into eternity. Perhaps, as +nothing is lost in the world, so-called, of matter, nothing is lost too +in the world of love and dream. + + O vanished loveliness of flowers and faces, + Treasure of hair, and great immortal eyes, + Are there for these no safe and secret places? + And is it true that beauty never dies? + Soldiers and saints, haughty and lovely names, + Women who set the whole wide world in flames, + Poets who sang their passion to the skies, + And lovers wild and wise: + Fought they and prayed for some poor flitting gleam + Was all they loved and worshipped but a dream? + Is Love a lie and fame indeed a breath? + And is there no sure thing in life--but death? + +Ah! perhaps we shall find all such lost and lovely things when we come +at length to the Land of Last Year's Snow. + + + + +X + +THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GOSSIP + + +According to the old Scandinavian fable of the cosmos, the whole world +is encircled in the coils of a vast serpent. The ancient name for it was +the Midgard serpent, and doubtless, for the old myth-maker, it had +another significance. Today, however, the symbol may still hold good of +a certain terrible and hideous reality. + +Still, as of old, the world is encircled in the coils of a vast serpent; +and the name of the serpent is Gossip. Wherever man is, there may you +hear its sibilant whisper, and its foul spawn squirm and sting and +poison in nests of hidden noisomeness, myriad as the spores of +corruption in a putrefying carcass, varying in size from some +hydra-headed infamy endangering whole nations and even races with its +deadly breath, to the microscopic wrigglers that multiply, a million a +minute, in the covered cesspools of private life. + +Printed history is so infested with this vermin, in the form of secret +memoirs, back-stairs diarists, and boudoir eavesdroppers, that it is +almost impossible to feel sure of the actual fact of any history +whatsoever. The fame of great personages may be literally compared to +the heroic figures in the well-known group of the Laocooen, battling in +vain with the strangling coils of the sea-serpent of Poseidon. We +scarcely know what to believe of the dead; and for the living, is it not +true, as Tennyson puts it, that "each man walks with his head in a cloud +of poisonous flies"? + +What is this evil leaven that seems to have been mixed in with man's +clay at the very beginning, making one almost ready to believe in the +old Manichean heresy of a principle of evil operating through nature, +everywhere doing battle with the good? Even from the courts of heaven, +as we learn from the Book of Job, the gossip was not excluded; and how +eternally true to the methods of the gossip in all ages was Satan's way +of going to work in that immortal allegory! Let us recall the familiar +scene with a quoted verse or two: + + Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves + before the Lord, and Satan [otherwise, the Adversary] came also + among them. + + And the Lord said unto Satan, "Whence comest thou?" Then Satan + answered the Lord, and said: "From going to and fro in the earth, + and from walking up and down in it." + + And the Lord said unto Satan: "Hast thou considered my servant Job, + that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright + man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil?" + + Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, "Doth Job fear God for + nought?" + +Here we have in a nutshell the whole _modus operandi_ of the gossip in +all ages, and as he may be observed at any hour of the day or night, +slimily engaged in his cowardly business. "Going to and fro in the +earth, walking up and down in it," everywhere peering and listening, +smiling and shrugging, here and there dropping a hint, sowing a seed, +leering an innuendo; seldom saying, only implying; leaving everywhere +trails of slime, yet trails too vague and broken to track him by, secure +in his very cowardice. + +"Doth Job fear God for nought?" He only asks, observe. Affirms nothing. +Only innocently wonders. Sows a doubt, that's all--and leaves it to +work. + +The victim may possibly be set right in the end, as was Job; but +meanwhile he has lost his flocks and his herds, his sons and his +daughters, and suffered no little inconvenience from a loathsome plague +of boils. Actually--life not being, like the Book of Job, an +allegory--he very seldom is set right, but must bear his losses and his +boils with what philosophy he can master till the end of the chapter. + +The race to which Job belonged presents perhaps the most conspicuous +example of a whole people burdened throughout its history with a +heritage of malignant gossip. In the town of Lincoln, in England, there +exists to this day, as one of its show places, the famous "Jew's House," +associated with the gruesome legend of "the boy of Lincoln"--a child, +it was whispered, sacrificed by the Jews at one of their pastoral +feasts. Such a wild belief in child-sacrifice by the Jews was widespread +in the Middle Ages, and is largely responsible, I understand, even at +the present day, for the Jewish massacres in Russia. + +Think of the wild liar who first put that fearful thought into the mind +of Europe! Think of the holocausts of human lives, and all the attendant +agony of which his diabolical invention has been the cause! What +criminal in history compares in infamy with that unknown--gossip? + +A similar madness of superstition, responsible for a like cruel +sacrifice of innocent lives, was the terrible belief in witchcraft. +Having its origin in ignorance and fear, it was chiefly the creation of +hearsay carried from lip to lip, beginning with the deliberate invention +of lying tongues, delighting in evil for its own sake, or taking +advantage of a ready weapon to pay off scores of personal enmity. At any +time to a period as near to our own day as the early eighteenth century, +nothing was easier than to rid oneself of an enemy by starting a whisper +going that he or she held secret commerce with evil spirits, was a +reader of magical books, and could at will cast spells of disease and +death upon the neighbours or their cattle. + +You had but to be recluse in your habits and eccentric in your +appearance, with perhaps a little more wisdom in your head and your +conversation than your fellows, to be at the mercy of the first fool or +knave who could gather a mob at his heels, and hale you to the nearest +horse-pond. Statement and proof were one, and how ready, and indeed +eager, human nature was to believe the wildest nonsense told by witless +fool or unscrupulous liar, the records of such manias as the famous +Salem trials appallingly evidence. Men high in the state, as well as +helpless old women in their dotage, disfigured with "witch-moles" or +incriminating beards on their withered faces, were equally vulnerable to +this most fearful of weapons ever placed by ignorance in the hands of +the malignant gossip. + +In such epidemics of tragic gossip we see plainly that, whatever +individuals are originally responsible, society at large is all too +culpably _particeps criminis_ in this phenomenon under consideration. If +the prosperity of a jest be in the ears that hear it, the like is +certainly true of any piece of gossip. Whoever it may be that sows the +evil seed of slander, the human soil is all too evilly ready to receive +it, to give it nurture, and to reproduce it in crops persistent as the +wild carrot and flamboyant as the wild mustard. + +There is something mean in human nature that prefers to think evil, that +gives a willing ear and a ready welcome to calumny, a sort of jealousy +of goodness and greatness and things of good report. + +Races and nations are thus ever ready to believe the worst of one +another. In all times it has been in this field of inter-racial and +international prejudice that the gossip has found the widest scope for +his gleeful activity, sowing broadcast dissensions and misunderstandings +which have persisted for centuries. They are the fruitful cause of wars, +insuperable barriers to progress, fabulous growths which the +enlightenment of the world painfully labours to weed out, but will +perhaps never entirely eradicate. + +Race-hatred is undoubtedly nine-tenths the heritage of ancient gossip. +Think of the generations of ill-feeling that kept England and France, +though divided but by a narrow strait, "natural enemies" and +misunderstood monsters to each other. In a less degree, the friendship +of England and America has been retarded by international gossips on +both sides. And as for races and nations more widely separated by +distance or customs, no lies have been bad enough for them to believe +about one another. + +It is only of late years that Europe has come to regard the peoples of +the Orient as human beings at all. And all this misunderstanding has +largely been the work of gossip acting upon ignorance. + +It is easy to see how in the days of difficult communication, before +nations were able to get about in really representative numbers to make +mutual acquaintance, they were completely at the mercy of a few +irresponsible travellers, who said or wrote what they pleased, and had +no compunction about lying in the interests of entertainment. The +proverbial "gaiety of nations" has always, in a great degree, consisted +in each nation believing that it was superior to all others, and that +the natives of other countries were invariably hopelessly dirty and +immoral, to say the least. Such reports the traveller was expected to +bring home with him, and such he seldom failed to bring. + +Even at the present time, when intercourse is so cosmopolitan, and some +approach to a sense of human brotherhood has been arrived at, the old +misconceptions die hard. Nations need still to be constantly on their +guard in believing all that the telegraph or the wireless is willing to +tell them about other countries. Electricity, many as are its advantages +for cosmopolitan _rapprochements_, is not invariably employed in the +interests of truth, and newspaper correspondents, if not watched, are +liable to be an even more dangerous form of international gossip than +the more leisurely fabulist of ancient time. + +When we come to consider the operation of gossip in the lives of +individuals, the disposition of human nature to relish discrediting +rumour is pitifully conspicuous. We know _Hamlet's_ opinion on the +matter: + + Let Hercules himself do what he may, + The cat will mew, and dog will have his day. + +And again: + + Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, + Thou shalt not escape calumny. + +This, it is to be feared, is merely the sad truth, for mankind, while it +admires both greatness and goodness, would seem to resent the one and +only half believe in the other. At all events, nothing is more to its +taste than the rumour that detracts from the great or sullies the good; +and so long as the rumour be entertaining, it has little concern for its +truth. + +Froude, in writing of Caesar, has this to say admirably to our purpose: + + In ages which we call heroic, the saint works miracles, the warrior + performs exploits beyond the strength of natural man. In ages less + visionary, which are given to ease and enjoyment, the tendency is to + bring a great man down to the common level, and to discover or + invent faults which shall show that he is or was but a little man + after all. Our vanity is soothed by evidence that those who have + eclipsed us in the race of life are no better than ourselves, or in + some respects worse than ourselves; and if to these general impulses + be added political or personal animosity, accusations of depravity + are circulated as surely about such men, and are credited as readily + as under other influences are the marvellous achievements of a Cid + or a St. Francis. + + The absurdity of a calumny may be as evident as the absurdity of a + miracle; the ground for belief may be no more than a lightness of + mind, and a less pardonable wish that it may be true. But the idle + tale floats in society, and by and by is written down in books and + passes into the region of established realities. + +The proportion of such idle tales seriously printed as history can +never, of course, be computed. Sometimes one is tempted to think that +history is mainly "whole cloth." Certainly the lives of such men as +Caesar are largely made up of what one might term illustrative fictions +rather than actual facts. The story of Caesar and Cleopatra is probably +such an "illustrative fiction," representing something that might very +well have happened to Caesar, whether it did so or not. At all events, +it does his fame no great harm, unlike another calumny, which, as it +does not seem "illustrative"--that is, not in keeping with his general +character--we are at liberty to reject. Both alike, however, were +the product of the gossip, the embodied littleness of human nature +endeavouring then, as always, to minimize and discredit the strong man, +who, whatever his actual faults, at least strenuously shoulders for his +fellows the hard work of the world. + +The great have usually been strong enough to smile contempt on their +traducers--Caesar's answer to an infamous epigram of the poet Catullus +was to ask him to dinner--but even so, at what extra cost, what "expense +of spirit in a waste of shame," have their achievements been bought, +because of these curs that bark forever at the heels of fame! + +And not always have they thus prevailed against the pack. Too often has +the sorry spectacle been seen of greatness and goodness going down +before the poisonous tongues and the licking jaws. Even Caesar himself +had to fall at last, his strong soul perhaps not sorry to escape through +his dagger-wounds from so pitiably small a world; and the poison in the +death-cup of Socrates was not so much the juice of the hemlock as the +venom of the gossips of Athens. + +In later times, no service to his country, no greatness of character, +can save the noble Raleigh from the tongues determined to bring him to +the block; and, when the haughty head of Marie Antoinette must bow at +last upon the scaffold, the true guillotine was the guillotine of +gossip. It was such lying tales as that of the diamond necklace that had +brought her there. All Queen Elizabeth's popularity could not save her +from the ribaldry of scandal, nor Shakespeare's genius protect his name +from the foulest of stains. + +In our own time, the mere mention of the name of Dreyfus suffices to +remind us of the terrible nets woven by this dark spinner. Within the +last year or two, have we not seen the loved king of a great nation +driven to seek protection from the spectre of innuendo in the courts of +law? But gossip laughs at such tribunals. It knows that where once it +has affixed its foul stain, the mark remains forever, indelible as that +imaginary stain which not all the multitudinous seas could wash from the +little hand of Lady Macbeth. The more the stain is washed, the more +persistently it reappears, like Rizzio's blood, as they say, in Holyrood +Palace. To deny a rumour is but to spread it. An action for libel, +however it may be decided, has at least the one inevitable result of +perpetuating it. + +Take the historical case of the Man with the Iron Mask. Out of pure +deviltry, it would appear, Voltaire started the story, as mere a fiction +as one of his written romances, that the mysterious prisoner was no less +than a half-brother of Louis XIV; and Dumas, seeing the dramatic +possibilities of the legend, picturesquely elaborates it in _Le Vicomte +de Bragelonne_. Never, probably, was so impudent an invention, and +surely never one so successful; for it is in vain that historians expose +it over and over again. Learned editors have proved with no shadow of a +doubt that the real man of the mask was an obscure Italian political +adventurer; but though scholars may be convinced, the world will have +nothing of your Count Matthioli, and will probably go on believing +Voltaire's story to the end of time. + +"At least there must have been something in it" is always the last word +on such debatable matters; and the curious thing is that, whenever a +doubt of the truth is expressed, it is never the victim, but always the +scandal, to which the benefit of the doubt is extended. Whatever the +proven fact, the world always prefers to hold fast by the disreputable +doubt. + +All that is necessary is to find the dog a bad name. The world will see +that he never loses it. In this regard the oft-reiterated confidence of +the dead in the justice of posterity is one of the most pathetic of +illusions. "Posterity will see me righted," cries some poor victim of +human wrong, as he goes down into the darkness; but of all appeals, the +appeal to posterity is the most hopeless. + +What posterity relishes is rather new scandals about its immortals than +tiresome belated justifications. It prefers its villains to grow blacker +with time, and welcomes proof of fallibility and frailty in its immortal +exemplars. For rehabilitation it has neither time nor inclination, +and it pursues certain luckless reputations beyond the grave with a +mysterious malignity. + +Such a reputation is that of Edgar Allan Poe. One would have thought +that posterity would be eager to make up to his shade for the criminal +animus of Rufus Griswold, his first biographer. On the contrary, it +prefers to perpetuate the lying portrait; and no consideration of the +bequests of Poe's genius, or of his tragic struggles with adverse +conditions, no editorial advocacy, or documentary evidence in his +favour, has persuaded posterity to reverse the unduly harsh judgment of +his fatuous contemporaries. + +Fortunately, it all matters nothing to Poe now. It is only to us that it +matters. + +Saddening, surely, it is, to say the least, to realize that the humanity +of which we are a part is tainted with so subtle a disease of lying, and +so depraved an appetite for lies. Under such conditions, it is +surprising that greatness and goodness are ever found willing to serve +humanity at all, and that any but scoundrels can be found to dare the +risks of the high places of the world. For this social disease of gossip +resembles that distemper which, at the present moment, threatens the +chestnut forests of America. It first attacks the noblest trees. Like +it, too, it would seem to baffle all remedies, and like it, it would +seem to be the work of indestructible microscopic worms. + +It is this vermicular insignificance of the gossip that makes his +detection so difficult, and gives him his security. A great reputation +may feel itself worm-eaten, and may suddenly go down with a crash, but +it will look around in vain for the social vermin that have brought +about its fall. It is the cowardice of gossip that its victims have +seldom an opportunity of coming face to face with their destroyers; for +the gossip is as small as he is ubiquitous-- + + Not half so big as a round little worm + Prick'd from the lazy finger of a maid. + +In all societies, there are men and women who are vaguely known as +gossips; but they are seldom caught red-handed. For one thing, they do +not often speak at first hand. They profess only to repeat something +that they have heard--something, they are careful to add, which is +probably quite untrue, and which they themselves do not believe for a +moment. + +Then the fact stated or hinted is probably no concern of ours. It is not +for us to sift its truth, or to bring it to the attention of the +individual it tarnishes. Obviously, society would become altogether +impossible if each one of us were to constitute ourselves a sort of +social police to arraign every accuser before the accused. We should +thus, it is to be feared, only make things worse, and involuntarily play +the gossip's own game. The best we can do is as far as possible to +banish the tattle from our minds, and, at all events, to keep our own +mouths shut. + +Even so, however, some harm will have been done. We shall never be quite +sure but that the rumour was true, and when we next meet the person +concerned, it will probably in some degree colour our attitude toward +him. + +And with others, less high-minded than ourselves, the gossip will have +had greater success. Not, of course, meaning any harm, they will inquire +of someone else if what So-and-so hinted of So-and-so can possibly be +true. And so it will go on _ad infinitum_. The formula is simple, and it +is only a matter of arithmetical progression for a private lie, once +started on its journey, to become a public scandal, with a reputation +gone, and no one visibly responsible. + +Of course, not all gossip is purposely harmful in its intention. The +deliberate, creative gossip is probably rare. In fact, gossip usually +represents the need of a bored world to be entertained at any price, the +restless _ennui_ that must be forever talking or listening to fill the +vacuity of its existence, to supply its lack of really vital interests. +This demand naturally creates a supply of idle talkers, whose social +existence depends on their ability to provide the entertainment desired; +and nothing would seem to be so well-pleasing to the idle human ear as +the whisper that discredits, or the story that ridicules, the +distinction it envies, and the goodness it cannot understand. + +The mystery of gossip is bound up with the mysterious human need of +talking. Talk we must, though we say nothing, or talk evil from sheer +lack of subject-matter. When we know why man talks so much, apparently +for the mere sake of talking, we shall probably be nearer to knowing why +he prefers to speak and hear evil rather than good of his fellows. + +Possibly the gossip would be just as ready to speak well of his victims, +to circulate stories to their credit rather than the reverse, but for +the melancholy fact that he would thus be left without an audience. For +the world has no anxiety to hear good of its neighbour, and there is no +piquancy in the disclosure of hidden virtues. + +'Tis true, 'tis pity; pity 'tis, 'tis true; and the only poor +consolation to be got out of it is that the victims of gossip may, if +they feel so inclined, feel flattered rather than angered by its +attentions; for, at all events, it argues their possession of gifts +and qualities transcending the common. At least it presupposes +individuality; and, all things considered, it may be held as true that +those most gossiped about are usually those who can best afford to pay +this tax levied by society on any form of distinction. + +After all, the great and good man has his greatness and goodness to +support him, though the world should unite in depreciating him. The +artist has his genius, the beautiful woman has her beauty. 'Tis in +ourselves that we are thus and thus; and if fame must have gossip for +its seamy side, there are some satisfactions that cannot be stolen away, +and some laurels that defy the worm. + + + + +XI + +THE PASSING AWAY OF THE EDITOR + + +The word "editor" as applied to the conductors of magazines and +newspapers is rapidly becoming a mere courtesy title; for the powers and +functions formerly exercised by editors, properly so called, are being +more and more usurped by the capitalist proprietor. There are not a few +magazines where the "editor" has hardly more say in the acceptance of a +manuscript than the contributor who sends it in. Few are the editors +left who uphold the magisterial dignity and awe with which the name of +editor was wont to be invested. These survive owing chiefly to the +prestige of long service, and even they are not always free from the +encroachments of the new method. The proprietor still feels the irksome +necessity of treating their editorial policies with respect, though +secretly chafing for the moment when they shall give place to more +manageable, modern tools. + +The "new" editor, in fact, is little more than a clerk doing the bidding +of his proprietor, and the proprietor's idea of editing is slavishly to +truckle to the public taste--or rather to his crude conception of the +public taste. The only real editors of today are the capitalist and the +public. The nominal editor is merely an office-boy of larger growth, and +slightly larger salary. + +Innocent souls still, of course, imagine him clothed with divine powers, +and letters of introduction to him are still sought after by the +superstitious beginner. Alas! the chances are that the better he thinks +of your MS. the less likely is it to be accepted by--the proprietor; for +Mr. Snooks, the proprietor, has decided tastes of his own, and a +peculiar distaste for anything remotely savouring of the "literary." His +broad editorial axiom is that a popular magazine should be everything +and anything but--"literature." For any signs of the literary taint he +keeps open a stern and ever-watchful eye, and the "editor" or "editorial +assistant"--to make a distinction without a difference--whom he should +suspect of literary leanings has but a short shrift. Mr. Snooks is +seldom much of a reader himself. His activities have been exclusively +financial, and he has drifted into the magazine business as he might +have drifted into pork or theatres--from purely financial reasons. His +literary needs are bounded on the north by a detective story, and on the +south by a scientific article. The old masters of literature are as much +foolishness to him as the old masters of painting. In short, he is just +a common, ignorant man with money invested in a magazine; and who shall +blame him if he goes on the principle that he who pays the piper calls +the tune. When he starts in he not infrequently begins by entrusting +his magazine to some young man with real editorial ability and ambition +to make a really good thing. This young man gathers about him a group of +kindred spirits, and the result is that after the publication of the +second number Mr. Snooks decides to edit the magazine himself, with the +aid of a secretary and a few typewriters. His bright young men hadn't +understood "what the public wants" at all. They were too high-toned, too +"literary." What the public wants is short stories and pictures of +actresses; and the short stories, like the actresses, must be no better +than they should be. Even short stories when they are masterpieces are +not "what the public wants." So the bright young men go into outer +darkness, sadly looking for new jobs, and with its third number +_Snooks's Monthly_ has fallen into line with the indistinguishable ruck +of monthly magazines, only indeed distinguishable one from the other by +the euphonious names of their proprietors. + +Now, a proprietor's right to have his property managed according to his +own ideas needs no emphasizing. The sad thing is that such proprietors +should get hold of such property. It all comes, of course, of the +modern vulgarization of wealth. Time was when even mere wealth was +aristocratic, and its possession, more or less implied in its possessors +the possession, too, of refinement and culture. The rich men of the past +knew enough to encourage and support the finer arts of life, and were +interested in maintaining high standards of public taste and feeling. +Thus they were capable of sparing some of their wealth for investment in +objects which brought them a finer kind of reward than the financial. +Among other things, they understood and respected the dignity of +literature, and would not have expected an editor to run a literary +venture in the interests of the illiterate. The further degradation of +the public taste was not then the avowed object of popular magazines. +Indeed--strange as it sounds nowadays--it was rather the education than +the degradation of the public taste at which the editor aimed, and in +that aim he found the support of intelligent proprietors. + +Today, however, all this is changed. Wealth has become democratic, and +it is only here and there, in its traditional possessors, that it +retains its traditional aristocracy of taste. As the commonest man can +be a multi-millionaire, so the commonest man can own a magazine, and +have it edited in the commonest fashion for the common good. + +As a result, the editor's occupation, in the true sense, will soon be +gone. There is, need one say, no lack today of men with real editorial +individuality--but editorial individuality is the last thing the +capitalist proprietors want. It is just that they are determined to +stamp out. Therefore, your real editor must either swallow his pride and +submit to ignorant dictation, or make way for the little band of +automatic sorters of manuscript, which, as nine tailors make a man, +nowadays constitute a sort of composite editor under the direction of +the proprietor. + +With the elimination of editorial individuality necessarily follows +elimination of individuality in the magazine. More and more, every day, +magazines are conforming to the same monotonous type; so that, except +for name and cover, it is impossible to tell one magazine from another. +Happily one or two--_rari nantes in gurgito vasto_--survive amid the +democratic welter; and all who have at heart not only the interests of +literature, but the true interests of the public taste, will pray that +they will have the courage to maintain their distinction, unseduced by +the moneyed voice of the mob--a distinction to which, after all, they +have owed, and will continue to owe, their success. The names of these +magazines will readily occur to the reader, and, as they occur, he +cannot but reflect that it was just editorial individuality and a high +standard of policy that made them what they are, and what, it is +ardently to be hoped, they will still continue to be. Plutus and Demos +are the worst possible editors for a magazine; and in the end, even, it +is the best magazine that always makes the most money. + + + + +XII + +THE SPIRIT OF THE OPEN + + +I often think, as I sit here in my green office in the woodland--too +often diverted from some serious literary business with the moon or the +morning stars, or a red squirrel who is the familiar spirit of my +wood-pile, or having my thoughts carried out to sea by the river which +runs so freshly and so truantly, with so strong a current of temptation, +a hundred yards away from my window--I often think that the strong +necessity that compelled me to do my work, to ply my pen and inkpot out +here in the leafy, blue-eyed wilderness, instead of doing it by +typewriter in some forty-two-storey building in the city, is one of +those encouraging signs of the times which links one with the great +brotherhood of men and women that have heard the call of the great god +Pan, as he sits by the river-- + + Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan! + Piercing sweet by the river! + Blinding sweet, O great god Pan! + +And I go on thinking to this effect: that this impulse that has come to +so many of us, and has, incidentally, wrought such a harmony in our +lives, is something more than duck-shooting, trout-fishing, +butterfly-collecting, or a sentimental passion for sunsets, but is +indeed something not so very far removed from religion, romantic +religion. At all events, it is something that makes us happy, and keeps +us straight. That combination of results can only come by the +satisfaction of the undeniable religious instinct in all of us: an +instinct that seeks goodness, but seeks happiness too. Now, there are +creeds by which you can be good without being happy; and creeds by which +you can be happy without being good. But, perhaps, there is only one +creed by which you can be both at once--the creed of the growing grass, +and the blue sky and the running river, the creed of the dog-wood and +the skunk-cabbage, the creed of the red-wing and the blue heron--the +creed of the great god Pan. + +Pan, being one of the oldest of the gods, might well, in an age eager +for novelty, expect to be the latest fashion; but the revival of his +worship is something far more than a mere vogue. It was rumoured, as, of +course, we all know, early in the Christian era, that he was dead. The +pilot Thomas, ran the legend, as told by Plutarch, sailing near Pascos, +with a boatful of merchants, heard in the twilight a mighty voice +calling from the land, bidding him proclaim to all the world that Pan +was dead. "Pan is dead!"--three times ran the strange shuddering cry +through the darkness, as though the very earth itself wailed the passing +of the god. + +But Pan, of course, could only die with the earth itself, and so long as +the lichen and the moss keep quietly at their work on the grey boulder, +and the lightning zigzags down through the hemlocks, and the arrowhead +guards its waxen blossom in the streams; so long as the earth shakes +with the thunder of hoofs, or pours out its heart in the song of the +veery-thrush, or bares its bosom in the wild rose, so long will there be +little chapels to Pan in the woodland--chapels on the lintels of which +you shall read, as Virgil wrote: _Happy is he who knows the rural gods, +Pan, and old Sylvanus, and the sister nymphs_. + +It is strange to see how in every country, but more particularly in +America and in England, the modern man is finding his religion as it was +found by those first worshippers of the beautiful mystery of the visible +universe, those who first caught glimpses of + + Nymphs in the coppice, Naiads in the fountain, + Gods on the craggy height and roaring sea. + +First thoughts are proverbially the best; at all events, they are the +bravest. And man's first thoughts of the world and the strangely +romantic life he is suddenly called up, out of nothingness, to live, +unconsulted, uninstructed, left to feel his way in the blinding +radiance up into which he has been mysteriously thrust; those first +thoughts of his are nowadays being corroborated in every direction by +the last thoughts of the latest thinker. Mr. Jack London, one of +Nature's own writers, one of those writers too, through whom the Future +speaks, has given a name to this stirring of the human soul--"The Call +of the Wild." Following his lead, others have written of "The Lure," of +this and that in nature, and all mean the same thing: that the salvation +of man is to be found on, and by means of, the green earth out of which +he was born, and that, as there is no ill of his body which may not be +healed by the magic juices of herb and flower, or the stern potency of +minerals, so there is no sickness of his soul that may not be cured by +the sound of the sea, the rustle of leaves, or the songs of birds. + +Thirty or forty years ago the soul of the world was very sick. It had +lost religion in a night of misunderstood "materialism," so-called. But +since then that mere "matter" which seemed to eclipse the soul has grown +strangely radiant to deep-seeing eyes, and, whereas then one had to +doubt everything, dupes of superficial disillusionment, now there is no +old dream that has not the look of coming true, no hope too wild and +strange and beautiful to be confidently entertained. Even, if you wish +to believe in fairies, science will hardly say you nay. Those dryads and +fauns, which Keats saw "frightened away" by the prosaic times in which +it was his misfortune to be alive and unrecognized, are trooping back in +every American woodland, and the god whose name I have invoked has +become more than ever + + the leaven + That spreading in this dull and clodded earth + Gives it a touch ethereal. + +His worship is all the more sincere because it is not self-conscious. +If you were to tell the trout-fisher, or the duck-shooter, or the +camper-out, that he is a worshipper of Pan, he would look at you in a +kindly bewilderment. He would seem a little anxious about you, but it +would be only a verbal misunderstanding. It would not take him long to +realize that you were only putting in terms of a creed the intuitive and +inarticulate faith of his heart. Perhaps the most convincing sign of +this new-old faith in nature is the unconsciousness of the believer. He +has no idea that he is believing or having faith in anything. He is +simply loving the green earth and the blue sea, and the ways of birds +and fish and animals; but he is so happy in his innocent, ignorant joy +that he seems almost to shine with his happiness. There is, literally, a +light about him--that light which edges with brightness all sincere +action. The trout, or the wild duck, or the sea bass is only an innocent +excuse to be alone with the Infinite. To be alone. To be afar. Men sail +precarious craft in perilous waters for no reason they could tell +of. They may think that trawling, or dredging, or whaling is the +explanation: the real reason is the mystery we call the Sea. + +Ostensibly, of course, the angler is a man who goes out to catch fish; +yet there is a great difference between an angler and a fishmonger. +Though the angler catches no fish, though his creel be empty as he +returns home at evening, there is a curious happiness and peace about +him which a mere fishmonger would be at a loss to explain. Fish, as I +said, were merely an excuse; and, as he vainly waited for fish, without +knowing it, he was learning the rhythm of the stream, and the silence of +ferns was entering into his soul, and the calm and patience of meadows +were dreamily becoming a part of him. Suddenly, too, in the silence, +maybe he caught sight of a strange, hairy, masterful presence, sitting +by the stream, whittling reeds, and blowing his breath into them here +and there, and finally binding them together with rushes, till he had +made out of the empty reeds and rushes an instrument that sang +everything that can be sung and told you everything that can be told. + + The sun on the hill forgot to die. + And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly + Came back to dream on the river. + +Do you really think that the huntsman hunts only the deer? He, himself, +doubtless thinks that the trophy of the antlers was all he went out +into the woods to win. But there came a day to him when he missed the +deer, and caught a glimpse instead of the divine huntress, Diana, +high-buskined, short-kirtled, speeding with her hounds through the +lonely woodland, and his thoughts ran no more on venison for that day. + +The same truth is true of all men who go out into the green, blue-eyed +wilderness, whether they go there in pursuit of game or butterflies. +They find something stranger and better than what they went out to seek, +and, if they come home disappointed in the day's bag or catch, there is +yet something in their eyes, and across their brows, a light of peace, +an enchanted calm, which tells those who understand that they, at all +events, have seen the great god Pan, and heard the music he can make out +of the pipy hemlocks or the lonely pines. + + + + +XIII + +AN OLD AMERICAN TOW-PATH + + +The charm of an old canal is one which every one seems to feel. Men who +care nothing about ruined castles or Gothic cathedrals light up with +romantic enthusiasm if you tell them of some old disused or seldom-used +canal, grass-grown and tree-shaded, along which, hardly oftener than +once a week, a leisurely barge--towed by an equally leisurely mule, with +its fellow there on deck taking his rest, preparatory to his next +eight-mile "shift"--sleepily dreams its way, presumably on some errand +and to some destination, yet indeed hinting of no purpose or object +other than its loitering passage through a summer afternoon. I have even +heard millionaires express envy of the life lived by the little family +hanging out its washing and smoking its pipe and cultivating its +floating garden of nasturtiums and geraniums, with children playing and +a house-dog to keep guard, all in that toy house of a dozen or so feet, +whose foundations are played about by fishes, and whose sides are +brushed by whispering reeds. But the charm of an old canal is perhaps +yet more its own when even so tranquil a happening as the passage of a +barge is no longer looked for, and the quiet water is called upon for no +more arduous usefulness than the reflection of the willows or the +ferrying across of summer clouds. Nature herself seems to wield a new +peculiar spell in such association--old quarries, the rusting tramways +choked with fern; forgotten mines with the wild vine twining tenderly +about the old iron of dismantled pit-tackle, grown as green as itself +with the summer rains; roads once dusty with haste over which only the +moss and the trailing arbutus now leisurely travel. Wherever Nature is +thus seen to be taking to herself, making her own, what man has first +made and grown tired of, she is twice an enchantress, strangely +combining in one charm the magic of a wistful, all but forgotten, past +with her own sibyl-line mystery. + +The symbol of that combined charm is that poppy of oblivion of which Sir +Thomas Browne so movingly wrote: but, though along that old canal of +which I am thinking and by which I walked a summer day, no poppies were +growing, the freshest grass, the bluest flowers, the new-born rustling +leafage of the innumerable trees, all alike seemed to whisper of +forgetfulness, to be brooding, even thus in the very heyday of the mad +young year, over time past. And this eloquently retrospective air of +Nature made me realize, with something of the sense of discovery, how +much of what we call antiquity is really a trick of Nature. She is as +clever at the manufacture of antiques as some expert of "old masters." +A little moss here and there, a network of ivy, a judicious use of ferns +and grass, a careless display of weeds and wild flowers, and in twenty +years Nature can make a modern building look as if it dated from the +Norman Conquest. I came upon this reflection because, actually, my canal +is not very old, though from the way it impressed me, and from the +manner in which I have introduced it, the reader might well imagine it +as old as Venice and no younger than Holland, and may find it as hard to +believe as I did that its age is but some eighty years, and that it has +its romantic being between Newark Bay and Phillipsburg, on the Delaware +River. + +One has always to be careful not to give too much importance to one's +own associative fancies in regard to the names of places. To me, for +instance, "Perth Amboy" has always had a romantic sound, and I believe +that a certain majesty in the collocation of the two noble words would +survive that visit to the place itself which I have been told is all +that is necessary for disillusionment. On the other hand, for reasons +less explainable, Hackensack, Paterson, Newark, and even Passaic are +names that had touched me with no such romantic thrill. Wrongfully, no +doubt, I had associated them with absurdity, anarchy, and railroads. +Never having visited them, it was perhaps not surprising that I should +not have associated them with such loveliness and luxury of Nature as I +now unforgettably recall; and I cannot help feeling that in the case of +places thus unfortunately named, Nature might well bring an action for +damages, robbed as she thus undoubtedly is of a flock of worshippers. + +At all events, I believe that my surprise and even incredulity will be +understood when an artist friend of mine told me that by taking the Fort +Lee ferry, and trolleying from the Palisades through Hackensack to +Paterson, I might find--a dream canal. It was as though he had said that +I had but to cross over to Hoboken to find the Well at the World's End. +But it was true, for all that--quite fairy-tale true. It was one of +those surprises of peace, deep, ancient peace, in America, of which +there are many, and of which more needs to be told. I can conceive of no +more suggestive and piquant contrast than that of the old canal gliding +through water-lilies and spreading pastures, in the bosom of hills +clothed with trees that scatter the sunshine or gather the darkness, the +haunt of every bird that sings or flashes strange plumage and is gone, +gliding past flowering rushes and blue dragon-flies, not + + Flowing down to Camelot, + +as one might well believe, but between Newark and Phillipsburg, touching +Paterson midway with its dreaming hand. + +Following my friend's directions, we had met at Paterson, and, desirous +of finding our green pasture and still waters with the least possible +delay, we took a trolley running in the Newark direction, and were +presently dropped at a quaint, quiet little village called Little Falls, +the last we were to see of the modern work-a-day world for several +miles. A hundred yards or so beyond, and it is as though you had entered +some secret green door into a pastoral dream-land. Great trees, like +rustling walls of verdure, enclose an apparently endless roadway of +gleaming water, a narrow strip of tow-path keeping it company, +buttressed in from the surrounding fields with thickets of every species +of bush and luxurious undergrowth, and starred with every summer flower. + +Presently, by the side of the path, one comes to an object which seems +romantically in keeping with the general character of the scene--a long +block of stone, lying among the grasses and the wild geraniums, on +which, as one nears it, one descries carved scroll-work and quaint, +deep-cut lettering. Is it the tomb of dead lovers, the memorial of some +great deed, or an altar to the _genius loci_? The willows whisper about +it, and the great elms and maples sway and murmur no less impressively +than if the inscription were in Latin of two thousand years ago. Nor is +it in me to regret that the stone and its inscription, instead of +celebrating the rural Pan, commemorate the men to whom I owe this lane +of dreaming water and all its marginal green solitude: to wit--the +"MORRIS CANAL AND BANKING CO., A.D. 1829," represented by its +president, its cashier, its canal commissioner, and a score of other +names of directors, engineers, and builders. Peace, therefore, to the +souls of those dead directors, who, having only in mind their banking +and engineering project, yet unconsciously wrought, nearly a century +ago, so poetic a thing, and may their rest be lulled by such leafy +murmurs and swaying of tendrilled shadows as all the day through stir +and sway along the old canal! + +A few yards beyond this monumental stone, there comes a great opening in +the sky, a sense of depth and height and spacious freshness in the air, +such as we feel on approaching the gorge of a great river; and in fact +the canal has arrived at the Passaic and is about to be carried across +it in a sort of long, wooden trough, supported by a noble bridge that +might well pass for a genuine antique, owing to that collaborating hand +of Nature which has filled the interstices of its massive masonry with +fern, and so loosened it here and there that some of the canal escapes +in long, ribbon-like cascades into the rocky bed of the river below. An +aqueduct has always seemed to me, though it would be hard to say why, a +most romantic thing. The idea of carrying running water across a bridge +in this way--water which it is so hard to think of as imprisoned or +controlled, and which, too, however shallow, one always associates with +mysterious depth--the idea of thus carrying it across a valley high up +in the air, so that one may look underneath it, underneath the bed in +which it runs, and think of the fishes and the water-weeds and the +waterbugs all being carried across with it, too--this, I confess, has +always seemed to me engagingly marvellous. And I like, too, to think +that the canal, whose daily business is to be a "common carrier" of +others, thus occasionally tastes the luxury of being carried itself; as +sometimes one sees on a freight car a new buggy, or automobile, or +sometimes a locomotive, being luxuriously ridden along--as though out +for a holiday--instead of riding others. + +And talking of freight-cars, it came to me with a sense of illumination +how different the word "Passaic" looks printed in white letters on the +grey sides of grim produce-vans in begrimed procession, from the way it +looks as it writes its name in wonderful white waterfalls, or murmurs it +through corridors of that strange pillared and cake-shaped rock, amid +the golden pomp of a perfect summer day. For a short distance the +Passaic and the canal run side by side, but presently they part company, +and mile after mile the canal seems to have the world to itself, once in +a great while finding human companionship in a shingled cottage half +hidden among willows, a sleepy brick-field run on principles as ancient +as itself, shy little girls picking flowers on its banks, or saucy boys +disporting themselves in the old swimming-hole; and + + Sometimes an angler comes and drops his hook + Within its hidden depths, and 'gainst a tree + Leaning his rod, reads in some pleasant book, + Forgetting soon his pride of fishery; + And dreams or falls asleep, + While curious fishes peep + About his nibbled bait or scornfully + Dart off and rise and leap. + +Once a year, indeed, every one goes a-fishing along the old canal--men, +women, boys, and girls. That is in spring, when the canal is emptied for +repairs, the patching up of leaks, and so forth. Then the fish lie +glittering in the shallow pools, as good as caught, and happy children +go home with strings of sunfish,--"pumpkin-seeds" they call +them,--cat-fish, and the like picturesque unprofitable spoils, while +graver fisher-folk take count of pickerel and bream. This merry festival +was over and gone, and the canal was all brimming with the lustral +renewal of its waters, its depths flashing now and again with the +passage of wary survivors of that spring _battue_. + +It is essential to the appreciation of an old canal that one should not +expect it to provide excitement, that it be understood between it and +its fellow-pilgrim that there is very little to say and nothing to +record. Along the old tow-path you must be content with a few simple, +elemental, mysterious things. To enter into its spirit you must be +somewhat of a monastic turn of mind, and have spiritual affiliations, +above all, with La Trappe. For the presiding muse of an old canal is +Silence; yet, as at La Trappe, a silence far indeed from being a dumb +silence, but a silence that contains all speech. My friend and I spoke +hardly at all as we walked along, easily obedient to the spirit of the +hour and the place. For there were so few of those little gossipy +accidents and occurrences by the way that make those interruptions we +call conversation, and such overwhelming golden-handed presences of +sunlit woodlands, flashing water-meadows, shining, singing air, and +distant purple hills--all the blowing, rippling, leafy glory and mighty +laughter of a summer day--that we were glad enough to let the birds do +such talking as Nature deemed necessary; and I seem never to have heard +or seen so many birds, of so many varieties, as haunt that old canal. + +As we chose our momentary camping-place under a buttonwood-tree, from +out an exuberant swamp of yellow water-lilies and the rearing +sword-blades of the coming cat-tail, a swamp blackbird, on his glossy +black orange-tipped wings, flung us defiance with his long, keen, full, +saucy note; and as we sat down under our buttonwood and spread upon the +sward our pastoral meal, the veery-thrush--sadder and stranger than any +nightingale--played for us, unseen, on an instrument like those old +water-organs played on by the flow and ebb of the tide, a flute of +silver in which some strange magician has somewhere hidden tears. I +wondered, as he sang, if the veery was the thrush that, to Walt +Whitman's fancy, "in the swamp in secluded recesses" mourned the death +of Lincoln: + + Solitary the thrush, + The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements, + Sings to himself a song. + +But when the veery had flown with his heart-break to some distant copse, +two song-sparrows came to persuade us with their blithe melody that life +was worth living, after all; and cheerful little domestic birds, like +the jenny-wren and the chipping-sparrow, pecked about and put in between +whiles their little chit-chat across the boughs, while the bobolink +called to us like a comrade, and the phoebe-bird gave us a series of +imitations, and the scarlet tanager and the wild canary put in a vivid +appearance, to show what can be done with colour, though they have no +song. + +Yet, while one was grateful for such long, green silence as we found +along that old canal, one could not help feeling how hard it would be +to put into words an experience so infinite and yet so undramatic. Birds +and birds, and trees and trees, and the long, silent water! Prose has +seldom been adequate for such moments. So, as my friend and I took up +our walk again, I sang him this little song of the Silence of the Way: + + Silence, whose drowsy eyelids are soft leaves, + And whose half-sleeping eyes are the blue flowers, + On whose still breast the water-lily heaves, + And all her speech the whisper of the showers. + + Made of all things that in the water sway, + The quiet reed kissing the arrowhead, + The willows murmuring, all a summer day, + "Silence"--sweet word, and ne'er so softly said + + As here along this path of brooding peace, + Where all things dream, and nothing else is done + But all such gentle businesses as these + Of leaves and rippling wind, and setting sun + + Turning the stream to a long lane of gold, + Where the young moon shall walk with feet of pearl, + And, framed in sleeping lilies, fold on fold. + Gaze at herself like any mortal girl. + +But, after all, trees are perhaps the best expression of silence, massed +as they are with the merest hint of movement, and breathing the merest +suggestion of a sigh; and seldom have I seen such abundance and variety +of trees as along our old canal--cedars and hemlocks and hickory +dominating green slopes of rocky pasture, with here and there a clump of +silver birches bent over with the strain of last year's snow; and all +along, near by the water, beech and basswood, blue-gum and pin-oak, ash, +and even chestnut flourishing still, in defiance of blight. Nor have I +ever seen such sheets of water-lilies as starred the swampy thickets, in +which elder and hazels and every conceivable bush and shrub and giant +grass and cane make wildernesses pathless indeed save to the mink and +the water-snake, and the imagination that would fain explore their +glimmering recesses. + +No, nothing except birds and trees, water-lilies and such like +happenings, ever happens along the old canal; and our nearest to a human +event was our meeting with a lonely, melancholy man, sitting near a +moss-grown water-wheel, smoking a corn-cob pipe, and gazing wistfully +across at the Ramapo Hills, over which great sunlit clouds were +billowing and casting slow-moving shadows. Stopping, we passed him the +time of day and inquired when the next barge was due. For answer he took +a long draw at his corn-cob, and, taking his eyes for a moment from the +landscape, said in a far-away manner that it might be due any time now, +as the spring had come and gone, and implying, with a sort of sad humour +in his eyes, that spring makes all things possible, brings all things +back, even an old slow-moving barge along the old canal. + +"What do they carry on the canal?" I asked the melancholy man, the +romantic green hush and the gleaming water not irrelevantly flashing on +my fancy that far-away immortal picture of the lily-maid of Astolat on +her strange journey, with a letter in her hand for Lancelot. + +"Coal," was his answer; and, again drawing at his corn-cob, he added, +with a sad and understanding smile, "once in a great while." Like most +melancholy men, he seemed to have brains, in his way, and to have no +particular work on hand, except, like ourselves, to dream. + +"Suppose," said I, "that a barge should come along, and need to be drawn +up this 'plane'--would the old machinery work?" and I pointed to six +hundred feet of sloping grass, down which a tramway stretches and a +cable runs on little wheels--technically known, it appeared, as a +"plane." + +Then the honour of the ancient company for which he had once worked +seemed to stir his blood, and he awakened to something like enthusiasm +as he explained the antique, picturesque device by which it is still +really possible for a barge to climb six hundred feet of grass and +fern--drawn up in a long "cradle," instead of being raised by locks in +the customary way. + +Then he took us into the old building where, in the mossed and dripping +darkness, we could discern the great water-wheels that work this +fascinating piece of ancient engineering; and added that there would +probably be a barge coming along in three or four days, if we should +happen to be in the neighbourhood. He might have added that the old +canal is one of the few places where "time and tide" wait for any one +and everybody--but alas! on this occasion we could not wait for them. + +Our walk was nearing its end when we came upon a pathetic reminder that, +though the old canal is so far from being a stormy sea, there have been +wrecks even in those quiet waters. In a backwater whispered over by +willows and sung over by birds, a sort of water-side graveyard, eleven +old barges were ingloriously rotting, unwept and unhonoured. The hulks +of old men-of-war, forgotten as they may seem, have still their annual +days of bunting and the salutes of cannon; but to these old servitors of +peace come no such memorial recognitions. + +"Unwept and unhonoured, may be," said I to my friend, "but they shall +not go all unsung, though humble be the rhyme"; so here is the rhyme I +affixed to an old nail on the mouldering side of the _Janita C. +Williams_: + + You who have done your work and asked no praise, + Mouldering in these unhonoured waterways, + Carrying but simple peace and quiet fire, + Doing a small day's work for a small hire-- + You need not praise, nor guns, nor flags unfurled, + Nor all such cloudy glories of the world; + The laurel of a simple duty done + Is the best laurel underneath the sun, + Yet would two strangers passing by this spot + Whisper, "Old boat--you are not all forgot!" + + + + +XIV + +A MODERN SAINT FRANCIS + + +We were neither of us fox-hunting ourselves, but chanced both to be out +on our morning walk and to be crossing a breezy Surrey common at the +same moment, when the huntsmen and huntresses of the Slumberfold Hunt +were blithely congregating for a day's run. A meet is always an +attractive sight, and we had both come to a halt within a yard or two of +each other, and stood watching the gallant company of fine ladies and +gentlemen on their beautiful, impatient mounts, keeping up a prancing +conversation, till the exciting moment should arrive when the cry would +go up that the fox had been started, and the whole field would sweep +away, a cataract of hounds, red-coats, riding habits, and dog-carts. + +The moment came. The fox had been found in a spinney running down to +Withy Brook, and his race for life had begun. With a happy shout, the +hunt was up and off in a twinkling, and the stranger and I were left +alone on the broad common. + +I had scanned him furtively as he stood near me; a tall, slightly build +man of about fifty, with perfectly white hair, and strangely gentle +blue eyes. There was a curious, sad distinction over him, and he had +watched the scene with a smile of blended humour and pity. + +Turning to me, as we were left alone, and speaking almost as though to +himself: "It is a strange sight," he said with a sigh. "I wonder if it +seems as strange to you? Think of all those grown-up, so-called +civilized people being so ferociously intent on chasing one poor little +animal for its life--and feeling, when at last the huntsman holds up his +poor brush, with absurd pride (if indeed the fox is not too sly for +them), that they have really done something clever, in that with so many +horses and dogs and so much noise, they have actually contrived to catch +and kill one fox!" + +"It is strange!" I said, for I had been thinking just that very thing. + +"Of course, they always tell you," he continued, as we took the road +together, "that the fox really enjoys being hunted, and that he feels +his occupation gone if there are no hounds to track him, and finally to +tear him to pieces. What wonderful stories human nature will tell itself +in its own justification! Can one imagine any created thing _enjoying_ +being pursued for its life, with all that loud terror of men and horses +and savage dogs at its heels? No doubt--if we can imagine even a fox so +self-conscious--it would take a certain pride in its own cunning and +skill, if the whole thing were a game; but a race with death is too +deadly in earnest for a fox even to relish his own stratagems. Happily +for the fox, it is probable that he does not feel so much for himself as +some of us feel for him; but any one who knows the wild things knows too +what terror they are capable of feeling, and how the fear of death is +always with them. No! you may be sure that a fox prefers a cosy +hen-roost to the finest run with the hounds ever made." + +"But even if he should enjoy being hunted," I added, "the even stranger +thing to me is that civilized men and women should enjoy hunting him." + +"Isn't it strange?" answered my companion eagerly, his face lighting up +at finding a sympathizer. "When will people realize that there is so +much more fun in studying wild things than in killing them!..." + +He stopped suddenly in his walk, to gather a small weed which had +caught his quick eye by the roadside, and which he examined for a +moment through a little pocket microscope which I noticed, hanging +like an eyeglass round his neck, and which I learned afterward quite +affectionately to associate with him. Then, as we walked on, he +remarked: + +"But, of course, we are yet very imperfectly civilized. Humanity is a +lesson learned very slowly by the human race. Yet we are learning it by +degrees, yes! we are learning it," and he threw out his long stride more +emphatically--the stride of one accustomed to long daily tramps on the +hills. + +"Strange, that principle of cruelty in the universe!" he resumed, after +a pause in which he had walked on in silence. "Very strange. To me it is +the most mysterious of all things--though, I suppose, after all, it is +no more mysterious than pity. When, I wonder, did pity begin? Who was +the first human being to pity another? How strange he must have seemed +to the others, how incomprehensible and ridiculous--not to say +dangerous! There can be little doubt that he was promptly dispatched +with stone axes as an enemy of a respectable murderous society." + +"I expect," said I "that our friends the fox-hunters would take a +similar view of our remarks on their sport." + +"No doubt--and perhaps turn their hounds on us! A man hunt! 'Give me the +hunting of man!' as a brutal young poet we know of recently sang." + +"How different was the spirit of Emerson's old verse," I said: + + "Hast thou named all the birds without a gun? + Loved the wood-rose, and left it on its stalk?... + O be my friend, and teach me to be thine!" + +"That is one of my mottoes!" cried my companion with evident pleasure. +"Let us go and quote it to our fox-hunters!" + +"I wonder how the fox is getting on," I said. + +"If he is any sort of fox, he is safe enough as yet, we may be sure. +They are wonderful creatures. It is not surprising that mankind has +always looked upon Reynard as almost a human being--if not more--for +there is something quite uncanny in his instincts, and the cool, +calculating way in which he uses them. He is come and gone like a ghost. +One moment you were sure you saw him clearly close by and the next he is +gone--who knows where? He can run almost as swiftly as light, and as +softly as a shadow; and in his wildest dash, what a sure judgment he has +for the lie of the ground, how unerringly--and at a moment when a +mistake is death--he selects his cover! How learned, too, he is in +his knowledge of the countryside! There is not a dry ditch, or a +water-course, or an old drain, or a hole in a bank for miles around that +is not mysteriously set down in the map he carries in his graceful, +clever head; and one need hardly say that all the suitable hiding-places +in and around farm-yards are equally well known to him. Then withal he +is so brave. How splendidly, when wearied out, and hopelessly tracked +down, with the game quite up, he will turn on his pursuers, and die with +his teeth fast in his enemy's throat!" + +"I believe you are a fox-hunter in disguise," I laughed. + +"Well, I have hunted as a boy," he said, "and I know something of what +those red-coated gentlemen are feeling. But soon I got more interested +in studying nature than killing it, and when I became a naturalist I +ceased to be a hunter. You get to love the things so that it seems like +killing little children. They come so close to you, are so beautiful and +so clever; and sometimes there seems such a curious pathos about them. +How any one can kill a deer with that woman's look in its eyes, I don't +know. I should always expect the deer to change into a fairy princess, +and die in my arms with the red blood running from her white breast. And +pigeons, too, with their soft sunny coo all the summer afternoon, or the +sudden lapping of sleepy wings round the chimneys--how can any one trap +or shoot them with blood-curdling rapidity, and not expect to see +ghosts!" + +"Of course, there is this difference about the fox," I said, "that it is +really in a sense born to be hunted. For not only is it a fierce hunter +itself, but it would not be allowed to exist at all, so to say, unless +it consented to being hunted. Like a gladiator it accepts a comfortable +living for a certain time, on condition of its providing at last a +spirited exhibition of dying. In other words, it is preserved entirely +for the purpose of being hunted. It must accept life on that condition +or be extirpated as destructive vermin by the plundered farmer. Life is +sweet, after all, and to be a kind of protected highwayman of the +poultry-yard, for a few sweet toothsome years, taking one's chances of +being surely brought to book at last, may perhaps seem worth while." + +"Yes! but how does your image of the protected gladiator reflect on +those who protect him? There, of course, is the point. The gladiator, as +you say, is willing to take his chances in exchange for fat living and +idleness, as long as he lives. You may even say that his profession is +good for him, develops fine qualities of mind even as well as body--but +what of the people who crowd with blood-thirsty eagerness to watch those +qualities exhibited in so tragic a fashion for their amusement? Do they +gain any of his qualities of skill and courage, and strength and +fearlessness in the face of death? No, they are merely brutalized by +cruel excitement--and while they applaud his skill and admire his +courage, they long most to watch him die. So--is it not?--with our +friend the fox. The huntsman invariably compliments him on his spirit +and his cunning, but what he wants is--the brush. He wants the +excitement of hunting the living thing to its death; and, let huntsmen +say what they will about the exhilaration of the horse exercise across +country as being the main thing, they know better--and, if it be true, +why don't they take it without the fox?" + +"They do in America, as, of course, you know. There a man walks across +country trailing a stick, at the end of which is a piece of cloth +impregnated with some pungent scent which hounds love and mistake for +the real thing." + +"Hard on the poor hounds!" smiled my friend. "Even worse than a red +herring. You could hardly blame the dogs if they mistook the man for +Actaeon and tore him to pieces." + +"And I suspect that the huntsmen are no better satisfied." + +"Yet, as we were saying, if the secret spring of their sport is not the +cruel delight of pursuing a living thing to its death, that American +plan should serve all the purposes, and give all the satisfaction for +which they claim to follow the hounds: the keen pleasure of a gallop +across country, the excitement of its danger, the pluck and pride of +taking a bad fence, and equally, too, the pleasure of watching the +hounds cleverly at work with their mysterious gift of scent. All the +same, I suspect there are few sportsmen who would not vote it a tame +substitute. Without something being killed, the zest, the 'snap,' is +gone. It is as depressing as a sham fight." + +"Yes, that mysterious shedding of blood! what a part it has played in +human history! Even religion countenances it, and war glorifies it. Men +are never in higher spirits than when they are going to kill, or be +killed themselves, or see something else killed. Tennyson's 'ape and +tiger' die very hard in the tamest of us." + +"Alas, indeed they do!" said my friend with a sigh. "But I do believe +that they are dying none the less. Just of late there has been a +reaction in favour of brute force, and people like you and me have been +ridiculed as old-fashioned sentimentalists. But reaction is one of the +laws of advance. Human progress always takes a step backwards after it +has taken two forward. And so it must be here too. In the end, it is the +highest type among men and nations that count, and the highest types +among both today are those which show most humanity, shrink most from +the infliction of pain. When one thinks of the horrible cruelties that +were the legal punishment of criminals, even within the last two hundred +years, and not merely brutal criminals, but also political offenders or +so-called heretics--how every one thought it the natural and proper +thing to break a man on the wheel for a difference of opinion, or +torture him with hideous ingenuity into a better frame of mind, and +how the pettiest larcenies were punished by death; it seems as if we +of today, even the least sensitive of us, cannot belong to the same +race--and it is impossible to deny that the heart of the world has grown +softer and that pity is becoming more and more a natural instinct in +human nature. I believe that some day it will have thrust out cruelty +altogether, and that the voluntary infliction of pain upon another will +be unknown. The idea of any one killing for pleasure will seem too +preposterous to be believed, and soldiers and fox-hunters and +pigeon-shooters will be spoken of as nowadays we speak of cannibals. +But, of course, I am a dreamer," he concluded, his face shining with his +gentle dream, as though he had been a veritable saint of the calendar. + +"Yes, a dream," he added presently, "and yet--" In that "and yet" +there was a world of invincible faith that made it impossible not to +share his dream, even see it building before one's eyes--such is the +magnetic power of a passionate personal conviction. + +"Of course," he went on again, "we all know that 'nature is one with +rapine, a harm no preacher can heal.' But because the fox runs off with +the goose, or the hawk swoops down on the chicken, and 'yon whole little +wood is a world of plunder and prey'--is that any reason why we should +be content to plunder and prey too? And after all, the cruelty of Nature +is only one-sided. There is lots of pity in Nature too. These strange +little wild lives around us are not entirely bent on killing and eating +each other. They know the tenderness of motherhood, the sweetness of +building a home together, and I believe there is far more comradeship +and mutual help amongst them than we know of. Yes, even in wild Nature +there is a principle of love working no less than a principle of hate. +Nature is not all-devouring and destroying. She is loving and building +too. Nature is more constructive than destructive, and she is ever at +work evolving and evolving a higher dream. Surely it is not for man, to +whom, so far as we know, Nature has entrusted the working out of her +finest impulses, and whom she has endowed with all the fairy apparatus +of the soul; it is not for him, whose eyes--of all her children--Nature +has opened, the one child she has taken into her confidence and to whom +she has whispered her secret hopes and purposes; surely it is not for +man voluntarily to deny his higher lot, and, because the wolf and he +have come from the same great mother, say: 'I am no better than the +wolf. Why should I not live the life of a wolf--and kill and devour like +my brother?' Surely it is not for the cruel things in Nature to teach +man cruelty--rather, if it were possible," and the saint smiled at his +fancy, "would it be the mission of man to teach them kindness: rather +should he preach pity to the hawk and peace between the panther and the +bear. It is not the bad lessons of Nature, but the good, that are meant +for man--though, as you must have noticed, man seldom appeals to the +precedents of Nature except to excuse that in him which is Nature at her +worst. When we say, 'it is only natural,' we almost invariably refer to +that in Nature of which Nature herself has entrusted the refinement or +the elimination to man. It is Nature's bad we copy, not Nature's good; +and always we forget that we ourselves are a part of Nature--Nature's +vicegerent, so to say, upon the earth--" + +As we talked, we had been approaching a house built high among the +heather, with windows looking over all the surrounding country. +Presently, the saint stopped in front of it. + +"This is my house," he said. "Won't you come in and see me some +time?--and, by the way, I am going to talk to some of the village +children about the wild things, bird's nesting, and so forth, up at the +schoolhouse on Thursday. I wish you'd come and help me. One's only hope +is with the children. The grown-up are too far gone. Mind you come." + +So we parted, and, as I walked across the hill homeward, haunted by that +gentle face, I thought of Melampus, that old philosopher who loved the +wild things so and had made such friends with them, that they had taught +him their language and told him all their secrets: + + With love exceeding a simple love of the things + That glide in grasses and rubble of woody wreck; + Or change their perch on a beat of quivering wings + From branch to branch, only restful to pipe and peck; + Or, bridled, curl at a touch their snouts in a ball; + Or cast their web between bramble and thorny hook; + The good physician, Melampus, loving them all, + Among them walked, as a scholar who reads a book. + +As I dipped into the little thick-set wood that surrounds my house, +something stood for a second in one of the openings, then was gone like +a shadow. I was glad to think how full of bracken and hollows, and +mysterious holes and corners of mossed and lichened safety was our old +wood--for the shadow was a fox. I like to think it was the very fox we +had been talking about come to find shelter with me--and, if he stole a +meal out of our hen-roost, I gave it him before he asked it, with all +the will in the world. I hope he chose a good fat hen, and not one of +your tough old capons that sometimes come to table. + + + + +XV + +THE LITTLE GHOST IN THE GARDEN + + +I don't know in what corner of the garden his busy little life now takes +its everlasting rest. None of us had the courage to stand by, that +summer morning, when Morris, our old negro man, buried him, and we felt +sympathetic for Morris that the sad job should fall upon him, for Morris +loved him just as we did. Perhaps if we had loved him less, more +sentimentally than deeply, we should have indulged in some sort of +appropriate ceremonial, and marked his grave with a little stone. But, +as I have said, his grave, like that of the great prophet, is a secret +to this day. None of us has ever asked Morris about it, and his grief +has been as reticent as our own. I wondered the other night, as I walked +the garden in a veiled moonlight, whether it was near the lotus-tanks he +was lying--for I remembered how he would stand there, almost by the +hour, watching the goldfish that we had engaged to protect us against +mosquitoes, moving mysteriously under the shadows of the great flat +leaves. In his short life he grew to understand much of this strange +world, but he never got used to those goldfish; and often I have seen +him, after a long wistful contemplation of them, turn away with a sort +of half-frightened, puzzled bark, as though to say that he gave it up. +Or, does he lie, I wonder, somewhere among the long grass of the +salt-marsh, that borders our garden, and in perigee tides widens out +into a lake. There indeed would be his appropriate country, for there +was the happy hunting-ground through which in life he was never tired of +roaming, in the inextinguishable hope of mink, and with the occasional +certainty of a water-rat. + +He had come to us almost as mysteriously as he went away; a fox-terrier +puppy wandered out of the Infinite to the neighbourhood of our ice-box, +one November morning, and now wandered back again. Technically, he was +just graduating out of puppyhood, though, like the most charming human +beings, he never really grew up, and remained, in behaviour and +imagination, a puppy to the end. He was a dog of good breed and good +manners, evidently with gentlemanly antecedents canine and human. There +were those more learned in canine aristocracy than ourselves who said +that his large leaf-like, but very becoming, ears meant a bar sinister +somewhere in his pedigree, but to our eyes those only made him +better-looking; and, for the rest of him, he was race--race nervous, +sensitive, refined, and courageous--from the point of his all-searching +nose to the end of his stub of a tail, which the conventional docking +had seemed but to make the more expressive. We had already one dog in +the family when he arrived, and two Maltese cats. With the cats he was +never able to make friends, in spite of persistent well-intentioned +efforts. It was evident to us that his advances were all made in the +spirit of play, and from a desire of comradeship, the two crowning needs +of his blithe sociable spirit. But the cats received them in an attitude +of invincible distrust, of which his poor nose frequently bore the sorry +signature. Yet they had become friendly enough with the other dog, an +elderly setter, by name Teddy, whose calm, lordly, slow-moving ways were +due to a combination of natural dignity, vast experience of life, and +some rheumatism. As Teddy would sit philosophizing by the hearth of an +evening, immovable and plunged in memories, yet alert on the instant to +a footfall a quarter of a mile away, they would rub their sinuous +smoke-grey bodies to and fro beneath his jaws, just as though he were a +piece of furniture; and he would take as little notice of them as though +he were the leg of the piano; though sometimes he would wag his tail +gently to and fro, or rap it softly on the floor, as though appreciating +the delicate attention. + + * * * * * + +Of Teddy's reception of the newcomer we had at first some slight +misgiving, for, amiable as we have just seen him with his Maltese +companions, and indeed as he is generally by nature, his is the +amiability that comes of conscious power, and is his, so to say, by +right of conquest; for of all neighbouring dogs he is the acknowledged +king. The reverse of quarrelsome, the peace of his declining years has +been won by much historical fighting, and his reputation among the dogs +of his acquaintance is such that it is seldom necessary for him to +assert his position. It is only some hapless stranger ignorant of his +standing that will occasionally provoke him to a display of those +fighting qualities he grows more and more reluctant to employ. Even with +such he is comparatively merciful; stern, but never brutal. Usually all +that is necessary is for him to look at them steadfastly for a few +moments in a peculiar way. This seems to convince them that, after all, +discretion is the better part, and slowly and sadly they turn around in +a curious cowed way, and walk off, apparently too scared to run, with +Teddy, like Fate, grimly at their heels, steadily "pointing" them off +the premises. We were a little anxious, therefore, as to how Teddy would +take our little terrier, with his fussy, youthful self-importance, and +eternal restless poking into other folks' affairs. But Teddy, as we +might have told ourselves, had had a long and varied experience of +terriers, and had nothing to learn from us. Yet I have no doubt that, +with his instinctive courtesy, he divined the wishes of the family in +regard to the newcomer, and was, therefore, predisposed in his favour. +This, however, did not save the evidently much overawed youngster from a +stern and searching examination, the most trying part of which seemed +to be that long, silent, hypnotizing contemplation of him, which is +Teddy's way of asserting his dignity. The little dog visibly trembled +beneath the great one's gaze, his tongue hanging out of his mouth, and +his eyes wandering helplessly from side to side; and he seemed to be +saying, in his dog way: "O yes! I know you are a very great and +important personage--and I am only a poor little puppy of no importance. +Only please let me go on living--and you will see how well I will +behave." Teddy seemed to be satisfied that some such recognition and +submission had been tendered him; so presently he wagged his tail, that +had up till then been rigid as a ramrod, and not only the little +terrier, but all of us, breathed again. Yet it was some time before +Teddy would admit him into anything like what one might call intimacy, +and premature attempts at gamesome familiarity were checked by the +gathering thunder of a lazy growl that unmistakably bade the youngster +keep his place. But real friendship eventually grew between them, +on Teddy's side a sort of big-brother affectionate tutelage and +guardianship, and on Puppy's--for, though we tried many, we never found +any other satisfactory name for him but "Puppy"--a reverent admiration +and watchful worshipping imitation. No great man was ever more anxiously +copied by some slavish flatterer than that old sleepy carelessly-great +setter by that eager, ambitious little terrier. The occasions when to +bark and when not to bark, for example. One could actually see Puppy +studying the old dog's face on doubtful occasions of the kind. Boiling +over, as he visibly was, with the desire to bark his soul out, yet he +could be seen unmistakably restraining himself, till Teddy, after some +preliminary soliloquizing in deep undertones, had made up his mind that +the suspicious shuffling-by of probably some inoffensive Italian workman +demanded investigation, and lumberingly risen to his feet and made for +the door. Then, like a bunch of firecrackers, Puppy was at the heels, +all officious assistance, and the two would disappear like an old and a +young thunderbolt into the resounding distance. + + * * * * * + +Teddy's friendship had seemed to be definitely won on an occasion which +brought home to one the quaint resemblance between the codes and ways of +dogs and those of schoolboys. When the winter came on, a rather severe +one, it soon became evident that the little short-haired fellow suffered +considerably from the cold. Out on walks, he was visibly shivering, +though he made no fuss about it. So one of the angels in the house +knitted for him a sort of woollen sweater buttoned down his neck and +under his belly, and trimmed it with some white fur that gave it an +exceedingly smart appearance. Teddy did not happen to be there when it +was first tried on, and, for the moment, Puppy had to be content with +our admiration, and his own vast sense of importance. Certainly, a more +self-satisfied terrier never was than he who presently sped out, to air +his new finery before an astonished neighbourhood. But alas! you should +have seen him a few minutes afterwards. We had had the curiosity to +stroll out to see how he had got on, and presently, in a bit of rocky +woodland near by, we came upon a curious scene. In the midst of a clump +of red cedars, three great dogs, our Teddy, a wicked old black +retriever, and a bustling be-wigged and be-furred collie, stood in a +circle round Puppy, seated on his haunches, trembling with fear, tongue +lolling and eyes wandering, for all the world as though they were +holding a court-martial, or, at all events, a hazing-party. The offence +evidently lay with that dandified new sweater. One and another of the +dogs smelt at it, then tugged at it in evident disgust; and, as each +time Puppy made a move to get away, all girt him round with guttural +thunder of disapproval, as much as to say: "Do you call that a thing for +a manly dog to go around in? You ought to be ashamed of yourself, you +miserable dandy." + +We couldn't help reflecting that it was all very well for those great +comfortable long-haired dogs to talk, naturally protected as they were +from the cold. Yet that evidently cut no figure with them, and they went +on sniffing and tugging and growling, till we thought our poor Puppy's +eyes and tongue would drop out with fear. Yet, all the time, they +seemed to be enjoying his plight, seemed to be smiling grimly together, +wicked old experienced brutes as they were. + +Presently the idea of the thing seemed to occur to Puppy, or out of his +extremity a new soul was born within him, for suddenly an infinite +disgust of his new foppery seemed to take possession of him too, and, +regaining his courage, he turned savagely upon it, ripping it this way +and that, and struggling with might and main to rid himself of the +accursed thing. Presently he stood free, and barks of approval at once +went up from his judges. He had come through his ordeal, and was once +more a dog among dogs. Great was the rejoicing among his friends, and +the occasion having been duly celebrated by joint destruction and +contumely of the offending garment, Teddy and he returned home, friends +for life. + + * * * * * + +It is to be feared that that friendship, deep and tender as it grew to +be on both sides, perhaps particularly on Teddy's, was the indirect +cause of Puppy's death. I have referred to Teddy's bark, and how he is +not wont to waste it on trivial occasions, or without due thought. On +the other hand, he is proud of it, and loves to practice it--just for +its own sake, particularly on early mornings, when, however fine a bark +it is, most of our neighbours would rather continue sleeping than wake +up to listen to it. There is no doubt at all, for those who understand +him, that it is a purely artistic bark. He means no harm to any one by +it. When the milkman, his private enemy, comes at seven, the bark is +quite different. This barking of Teddy's seems to be literally at +nothing. Around five o'clock on summer mornings, he plants himself on a +knob of rock overlooking the salt marsh and barks, possibly in honour of +the rising sun, but with no other perceptible purpose. So have I heard +men rise in the dawn to practice the cornet--but they were men, so they +ran no risk of their lives. Teddy's practicing, however, has now been +carried on for several years in the teeth of no little peril; and, had +it not been for much human influence employed on his behalf, he would +long since have antedated his little friend in Paradise. When that +little friend, however, came to assist and emulate him in those morning +recitals, adding to his bark an occasional--I am convinced purely +playful--bite, I am inclined to think that a sentiment grew in the +neighbourhood that one dog at a time was enough. At all events, Teddy +still barks at dawn as of old, but our little Puppy barks no more. + +Before the final quietus came to him, there were several occasions on +which the Black dog, called Death, had almost caught him in his jaws. +One there was in especial. He had, I believe, no hatred for any living +thing save Italian workmen and automobiles. I have seen an Italian +workman throw his pick-axe at him, and then take to his heels in +grotesque flight. But the pick-axe missed him, as did many another +clumsily hurled missile. + + * * * * * + +An automobile, however, on one occasion, came nearer its mark. Like +every other dog that ever barked, particularly terriers, Puppy delighted +to harass the feet of fast trotting horses, mockingly running ahead of +them, barking with affected savagery, and by a miracle evading their +on-coming hoofs--which to him, tiny thing as he was, must have seemed +like trip-hammers pounding down from the sky. But horses understand such +gaiety in terriers. They understand that it is only their foolish fun. +Automobiles are different. They have no souls. They see nothing engaging +in having their tires snapped at, as they whirl swiftly by; and, one +day, after Puppy had flung himself in a fine fury at the tires of one of +these soulless things, he gave a sharp yelp--"not cowardly!"--and lay a +moment on the roadside. But only a moment; then he went limping off on +his three sound legs, and hid himself away from all sympathy, in some +unknown spot. It was in vain we called and sought him, and only after +two days was he discovered, in the remotest corner of a great rocky +cellar, determined apparently to die alone in an almost inaccessible +privacy of wood and coal. Yet, when at last we persuaded him that life +was still sweet and carried him upstairs into the great living-room, and +the beautiful grandmother, who knows the sorrows of animals almost as +the old Roman seer knew the languages of beasts and birds, had taken +him in charge and made a cosy nest of comforters for him by the fire, +and tempted his languid appetite--to which the very thought of bones +was, of course, an offence--with warm, savory-smelling soup; then, he +who had certainly been no coward--for his thigh was a cruel lump of pain +which no human being would have kept so patiently to himself--became +suddenly, like many human invalids, a perfect glutton of self-pity; and +when we smoothed and patted him and told him how sorry we were, it was +laughable, and almost uncanny, how he suddenly set up a sort of moaning +talk to us, as much as to say that he certainly had had a pretty bad +time, was really something of a hero, and deserved all the sympathy we +would give him. So far as one can be sure about anything so mysterious +as animals, I am sure that from then on he luxuriated in his little +hospital by the fireside, and played upon the feelings of his beautiful +nurse, and of his various solicitous visitors, with all the histrionic +skill of the spoiled and petted convalescent. Suddenly, however, one +day, he forgot his part. He heard some inspiring barking going on +nearby--and, in a flash, his comforters were thrust aside, and he was +off and away to join the fun. Then, of course, we knew that he was well +again; though he still went briskly about his various business on three +legs for several days. + +His manner was quite different, however, the afternoon he had so +evidently come home to die. There was no pose about the little forlorn +figure, which, after a mysterious absence of two days, suddenly +appeared, as we were taking tea on the veranda, already the very ghost +of himself. Wearily he sought the cave of the beautiful grandmother's +skirts, where, whenever he had had a scolding, he was wont always to +take refuge--barking, fiercely, as from an inaccessible fortress, at his +enemies. + + * * * * * + +But, this afternoon, there was evidently no bark in him, poor little +fellow; everything about him said that he had just managed to crawl home +to die. His brisk white coat seemed dank with cold dews, and there was +something shadowy about him and strangely quiet. His eyes, always so +alert, were strangely heavy and indifferent, yet questioning and somehow +accusing. He seemed to be asking us why a little dog should suffer so, +and what was going to happen to him, and what did it all mean. Alas! We +could not tell him; and none of us dare say to each other that our +little comrade in the mystery of life was going to die. But a silence +fell over us all, and the beautiful grandmother took him into her care, +and so well did her great and wise heart nurse him through the night +that next morning it almost seemed as though we had been wrong; for a +flash of his old spirit was in him again, and, though his little legs +shook under him, it was plain that he wanted to try and be up at his +day's work on the veranda, warning off the passer-by, or in the garden +carrying on his eternal investigations, or farther afield in the +councils and expeditions of his fellows. So we let him have his way, and +for a while he seemed happier and stronger for the sunshine, and the old +familiar scents and sounds. But the one little tired husky bark he gave +at his old enemy, the Italian workman, passing by, would have broken +your heart; and the effort he made with a bone, as he visited the +well-remembered neighbourhood of the ice-box for the last time, was +piteous beyond telling. Those sharp, strong teeth that once could bite +and grind through anything could do nothing with it now. To lick it +sadly with tired lips, in a sort of hopeless way, was all that was left; +and there was really a look in his face as though he accepted this +mortal defeat, as he lay down, evidently exhausted with his exertions, +on a bank nearby. But once more his spirit seemed to revive, and he +scrambled to his legs again and wearily crawled to the back of the +house, where the beautiful grandmother loves to sit and look over the +glittering salt-marsh in the summer afternoons. + + * * * * * + +Of course, he knew that she was there. She had been his best friend in +this strange world. His last effort was naturally to be near her again. +Almost he reached that kind cave of her skirts. Only another yard or two +and he had been there. But the energy that had seemed irrepressible and +everlasting had come to its end, and the little body had to give in at +last, and lie down wearily once more with no life left but the love in +its fading eyes. + +There are some, I suppose, who may wonder how one can write about the +death of a mere dog like this; and cannot understand how the death of a +little terrier can make the world seem a lonelier place. But there are +others, I know, who will scarce need telling, men and women with little +ghosts of their own haunting their moonlit gardens; strange, appealing, +faithful companions, kind little friendly beings that journeyed with +them awhile the pilgrimage of the soul. + +I often wonder if Teddy misses his little busy playfellow and disciple +as we do; if, perhaps, as he barks over the marsh of a morning, he is +sending him a message. He goes about the place with nonchalant greatness +as of old, and the Maltese cats still rub their sinuous smoke-grey +bodies to and fro beneath his jaws at evening. There is no sign of +sorrow upon him. But he is old and very wise, and keeps strange +knowledge to himself. So, who can say? + + + + +XVI + +THE ENGLISH COUNTRYSIDE + + +For the genuine lover of nature, as distinct from the connoisseur of +dainty or spectacular "scenery," nature has always and everywhere some +charm or satisfaction. He will find it no less--some say more--in winter +than in summer, and I have little doubt that the great Alkali Desert is +not entirely without its enthusiasts. The nature among which we spent +our childhood is apt to have a lasting hold on us, in defiance of +showier competition, and I suppose there is no land with soul so dead +that it does not boast itself the fairest under heaven. + +I am writing this surrounded by a natural scene which I would not +exchange for the Swiss lakes, yet I presume it is undeniable that +Switzerland has a more universal reputation for natural beauty than +Connecticut. It is, as we say, one of the show places of the earth. So +Niagara Falls, the Grand Canon, the Rockies, and California generally +lord it over America. Italy has such a reputation for beauty that it is +almost unfair to expect her to live up to it. I once ventured to say +that the Alps must be greasy with being climbed, and it says much for +such stock pieces in nature's repertoire, that, in spite of all the wear +and tear of sentimental travellers, the mock-admiration of generations, +the batteries of amateur cameras, the Riviera, the English lakes, the +Welsh mountains, the Highlands of Scotland, and other tourist-trodden +classics of the picturesque, still remain haunts of beauty and joys +forever. God's masterpieces do not easily wear out. + +Every country does something supremely well, and England may be said to +have a patent for a certain kind of scenery which Americans are the +first to admire. English scenery has no more passionate pilgrim than the +traveller from the United States, as the visitors' books of its various +show-places voluminously attest. Perhaps it is not difficult, when one +has lived in both countries, to understand why. + +While America, apart from its impressive natural splendours, is rich +also in idyllic and pastoral landscape, it has, as yet, but little +"countryside." I say, as yet, because "the countryside," I think I am +right in feeling, is not entirely a thing of nature's making, but +rather a collaboration resulting from nature and man living so long in +partnership together. In England, with which the word is peculiarly, if +not exclusively, associated, God is not entirely to be credited with +making the country. Man has for generations also done his share. + +It is perhaps not without significance that the word "countryside" +was not to be found in Webster's dictionary, till a recent edition. +Originally, doubtless, it was used with reference to those rural +districts in the vicinity of a town; as one might say the country side +of the town. Not wild or solitary nature was meant, but nature +humanized, made companionable by the presence and occupations of man; a +nature which had made the winding highway, the farm, and the pasture, +even the hamlet, with its church tower and its ancient inn, one with +herself. + +The American, speeding up to London from his landing either at Liverpool +or Southampton, always exclaims on the gardenlike aspect, the deep, rich +greenness of the landscape. It is not so much the specific evidences of +cultivation, though those, of course, are plentifully present, but a +general air of ripeness and order. Even the land not visible under +cultivation suggests immemorial care and fertility. We feel that this +land has been fought over and ploughed over, nibbled over by sheep, sown +and reaped, planted and drained, walked over, hunted over, and very much +beloved, for centuries. It is not fanciful to see in it a land to +which its people have been stubbornly and tenderly devoted--still +"Shakespeare's England," still his favoured "isle set in the silver +sea." + +As seen from the railway-carriage window, one is struck, too, by the +comparative tidiness of the English landscape. There are few loose ends, +and the outskirts of villages are not those distressing dump-heaps +which they too often are in America. Yet there is no excessive air of +trimness. The order and grooming seem a part of nature's processes. +There is, too, a casual charm about the villages themselves, the +graceful, accidental grouping of houses and gardens, which suggests +growth rather than premeditation. The general harmony does not preclude, +but rather comes of, the greatest variety of individual character. + +Herein the English village strikingly differs from the typical New +England village, where the charm comes of a prim uniformity, and +individuality is made to give place to a general parking of lawns and +shade-trees in rectangular blocks and avenues. A New England village +suggests some large institution disposed in separate uniform buildings, +placed on one level carpet of green, each with a definite number of +trees, and the very sunlight portioned out into gleaming allotments. +The effect gained is for me one of great charm--the charm of a vivid, +exquisitely ordered, green silence, with a touch of monastic, or +Quakerish, decorum. I would not have it otherwise, and I speak of it +only to suggest by contrast the different, desultory charm of an old +English village, where beauty has not been so much planned, as has just +"occurred." + +Of course, this is the natural result of the long occupation of the +land. Each century in succession has had a hand in shaping the +countryside to its present aspect, and English history is literally a +living visible part of English scenery. Here the thirteenth century has +left a church, here the fourteenth a castle, here the sixteenth, with +its suppression of the monasteries, a ruined abbey. Here is an inn where +Chaucer's pilgrims stopped on the way to Canterbury. Here, in a field +covered over by a cow-shed, is a piece of tessellated pavement which was +once the floor of an old country house occupied by one of Caesar's +generals. + +Those strange grassy mounds breaking the soft sky-line of the rolling +South Downs are the tombs of Saxon chieftains, that rubble of stones at +the top of yonder hill was once a British camp, and those curious ridges +terracing yonder green slope mark the trenches of some prehistoric +battlefield. All these in the process of time have become part and +parcel of the English countryside, as necessary to its "English" +character as its trees and its wild flowers. + +How much, too, the English countryside owes for its beauty to the many +old manor-houses, gabled and moated, with their quaint, mossy-walled +gardens and great forestlike parks. Whatever we may think of the English +territorial system as economics, its service to English scenery has been +incalculable. Without English traditionalism we should hardly have had +the English countryside. + +The conservation of great estates, entailing a certain conservatism in +the treatment of farm lands from generation to generation, and the +upholding, too, of game-preserves, however obnoxious to the land +reformer, have been all to the good of the nature-lover. We owe no +little of the beauty of the English woodland to the English pheasant; +and with the coming of land nationalization we may expect to see +considerable changes in the English countryside. Meanwhile, in spite of, +or perhaps because of, the feudalistic character of English landlordism, +the Englishman enjoys a right of walking over his native land of which +no capitalist can rob him. Hence results another charming feature of the +English countryside--the footpaths you see everywhere winding over hill +and dale, through field and coppice. The ancient rights of these are +safeguarded to the people forever by statute no wealth can defy; and, +let any _nouveau riche_ of a landlord try to close one of them, and +he has to reckon with one of the pluckiest and most persistent +organizations of English John Hampdens, the society that makes the +protection of these traditional pathways its particular care. So the +rich man cannot lock up his trees and his woodland glades all for +himself, but is compelled to share them to the extent of allowing the +poorest pedestrian to walk through them--which is about all the rich man +can do with them himself. + +These footpaths, in conjunction with English lanes, have made the charm +of walking tours in England proverbial. Certain counties particularly +pride themselves on their lands. Surrey and Devonshire are the great +rivals in this respect. We say "Surrey lanes" or "Devonshire lanes," +as we speak of "Italian skies" or "Southern hospitality." Other +counties--Warwickshire, for example--doubtless have lanes no less +lovely, but Surrey and Devonshire have, so to say, got the decision; +and, if an American traveller wants to see a typical English lane, he +goes to Surrey or Devonshire, just as, if he wants a typical English +pork-pie, he sends to Melton Mowbray. + +And the English lane has come honestly by its reputation. You may be +disappointed in Venice, but you will be hard to please if you are not +caught by the spell of an English lane. Of course, you must not expect +to feel that spell if you tear through it in a motor-car. It was made +for the loiterer, as its whimsical twists and turns plainly show. If you +are in a hurry, you had better keep to the king's highway, stretching +swift and white on the king's business. The English lane was made for +the leisurely meandering of cows to and from pasture, for the dreamy +snail-pace of time-forgetting lovers, for children gathering primroses +or wild strawberries, or for the knap-sacked wayfarer to whom time and +space are no objects, whose destination is anywhere and nowhere, whose +only clocks are the rising sun and the evening star, and to whom the way +means more than the goal. + +I should not have spoken of it as "made," for, when it is most +characteristic, an English lane has no suggestion of ever having been +man-made like other roads. It seems as much a natural feature as the +woods or meadows through which it passes; and sometimes, as in Surrey, +when it runs between high banks, tunnelling its way under green boughs, +it seems more like an old river-bed than a road, whose sides nature has +tapestried with ferns and flowers. Of all roads in the world it is the +dreamer's road, luring on the wayfarer with perpetual romantic promise +and surprise, winding on and on, one can well believe, into the very +heart of fairy-land. Everything beautiful seems to be waiting for us +somewhere in the turnings of an English lane. + +Had I sat down to write of the English countryside two years ago, I +should have done so with a certain amount of cautious skepticism. I +should have said to myself: "You have not visited England for over ten +years. Are you quite sure that your impressions of its natural beauties +are not the rose-coloured exaggerations of memory? Are not time and +distance lending their proverbial enchantment?" In fact, as I set sail +to revisit England, the spring before last, it was in some such mood of +anticipatory disillusion. + +After all, I had said to myself, is not the English countryside the work +of the English poets--the English spring, the English wild flowers, the +English lark, the English nightingale, and so forth? That longing of +Browning expressed in the lines, + + O to be in England + Now that April's there! + +was, after all, the cry of a homesick versifier, thinking "Home +Thoughts, from Abroad"; and are Herrick and Wordsworth quite to be +trusted on the subject of daffodils? + +Well, I am glad to have to own that my revisiting my native land +resulted in an agreeable disappointment. With a critical American eye, +jealously on my guard against sentimental superstition, I surveyed the +English landscape and examined its various vaunted beauties and +fascinations, as though making their acquaintance for the first time. +No, my youthful raptures had not been at fault, and the poets were once +more justified. The poets are seldom far wrong. If they see anything, it +is usually there. If we cannot see it, too, it is the fault of our eyes. + +Take the English hawthorn, for instance. As its fragrance is wafted to +you from the bushes where it hangs like the fairest of white linen, you +will hardly, I think, quarrel with its praises. Yet, though it is, if I +am not mistaken, of rare occurrence in America, it is not absolutely +necessary to go to England for the hawthorn. Any one who cares to go +a-Maying along the banks of the Hudson, in the neighbourhood of +Peekskill, will find it there. But for the primrose and the cowslip you +must cross the sea; and, if you come upon such a wood as I strayed into, +my last visit, you will count it worth the trip. It was literally +carpeted with clumps of primroses and violets (violets that smell, too) +so thickly massed together in the mossy turf that there was scarcely +room to tread. There are no words rich or abundant enough to suggest the +sense of innocent luxury brought one by such a natural Persian carpet of +soft gold and dewy purple, at once so gorgeous and yet so gentle. In all +this lavish loveliness of English wild flowers there is, indeed, a +peculiar tenderness. The innocence of children seems to be in them, and +the tenderness of lovers. + + A lover would not tread + A cowslip on the head-- + +How appropriately such lines come to mind as one carefully picks one's +way down a green hillside yellow with cowslips, and breathing perhaps +the most delicate of all flowery fragrances. Yet again, as we pass into +another stretch of woodland, another profusion and another fragrance +await us, the winey perfume and the spectral blue sheen of the wild +hyacinth. As one comes upon stretches of these hyacinths in the woods, +they seem at first glance like pools of blue water or fallen pieces of +the sky. Here, for once, the poets are left behind, and, of them all, +Shakespeare and Milton alone have come near to suggesting the +loveliness, at once so spiritual and so warmly and sweetly of the earth, +that belongs to English wild flowers. I know not if Sheffield steel +still keeps its position among the eternal verities, but in an age when +so many of one's cherished beliefs are threatened with the scrap-heap, +I count it of no small importance to be able to retain one's faith in +the English lark and English wild flowers. + +But the English countryside is not all greenness and softness, blossomy +lanes, moated granges, and idyllic villages. It by no means always +suggests the gardener, the farmer, or the gamekeeper. It is rich, too, +in wildness and solitude, in melancholy fens and lonely moorlands. To +the American accustomed to the vast areas of his own enormous continent, +it would come as a surprise to realize that a land far smaller than many +of his States can in certain places give one so profound a sense of the +wilderness. Yet I doubt if a man could feel lonelier anywhere in the +world than on a Yorkshire moor or on Salisbury Plain. + +After all, we are apt to forget that, even on the largest continent, we +can see only a limited portion of the earth at once. When one is in the +middle of Lake Erie we are as much out of sight of land, as impressed by +the illusion of boundless water, as if we were in the middle of the +Pacific Ocean. So, on Salisbury Plain, with nothing but rolling billows +of close-cropped turf, springy and noiseless to the tread, as far as the +eye can see, one feels as alone with the universe as in the middle of +some Asian desert. In addition to the actual loneliness of the scene, +and a silence broken only by the occasional tinkle of sheep-bells, as a +flock moves like a fleecy cloud across the grass, is an imaginative +loneliness induced by the overwhelming sense of boundless unrecorded +time, the "dim-grey-grown ages," of which the mysterious boulders of +Stonehenge are the voiceless witnesses. To experience this feeling to +the full one should come upon an old Roman road in the twilight, +grass-grown, choked with underbrush, but still running straight and +clearly defined as when it shook to the tread of Roman legions. It is +eery to follow one of these haunted roads, filled with the far-off +thoughts and fancies it naturally evokes, and then suddenly to come out +again into the world of today, as it joins the highway once more, and +the lights of a wayside inn welcome us back to humanity, with perhaps a +touring car standing at the door. + +One need hardly say that the English wayside inn is as much a feature of +the English countryside as the English hawthorn. Its praises have been +the theme of essayists and poets for generations, and at its best there +is a cosiness and cheer about it which warm the heart, as its quaintness +and savour of past days keep alive the sense of romantic travel. There +the spirit of ancient hospitality still survives, and, though the +motor-car has replaced the stage-coach, that is, after all, but a +detail, and the old, low-ceilinged rooms, the bay windows with their +leaded panes, the tap-room with its shining vessels, the great kitchen, +the solid English fare, the brass candlesticks at bedtime, and the +lavendered sheets, still preserve the atmosphere of a novel by Fielding +or an essay by Addison. + +There still, as in Shakespeare's day, one can take one's ease at one's +inn, as perhaps in the hostelries of no other land. It is the frequency +and excellence of these English inns that make it charmingly possible to +see England, as it is best seen, on foot or on a bicycle. It is not a +country of isolated wonders, with long stretches of mere road between. +Every mile counts for something. But, if the luxury of walking it with +stick and knapsack is denied us, and we must needs see it by motor-car, +we cannot fail to make one observation, that of the surprising variety +of natural scenery packed in so small a space. Between Land's End and +the Tweed the eye and the imagination have encountered every form of the +picturesque. In an area some three hundred and fifty miles long by three +hundred broad are contained the ruggedness of Cornwall, the idyllic +softness of Devon, the dreamy solitudes of the South Downs, with their +billowy, chalky contours, the agricultural fertility of Kent and +Middlesex, the romantic woodlands and hilly pastures of Surrey, the +melancholy fens of Lincolnshire, the broad, bosky levels of the +midlands, the sudden wildness of Wales, with her mountains and glens, +Yorkshire, with its grim, heather-clad moors, Westmoreland, with its +fells and Wordsworthian "Lakes"; every note in the gamut of natural +beauty has been struck, from honeysuckle prettiness to savage grandeur. + +Yet, although all these contrasts are included in the English scene, it +is not of solitude or grandeur that we think when we speak of the +English countryside. They are the exceptions to the rule of a gentler, +more humanized natural beauty, in which the village church and the +ivy-clad ruin play their part. Perhaps some such formula as this would +represent the typical scene that springs to the mind's eye with the +phrase "the English countryside": a village green, with some geese +stringing out across it. A straggle of quaint thatched cottages, roses +climbing about the windows, and in front little, carefully kept gardens, +with hollyhocks standing in rows, stocks and sweet-williams and such +old-fashioned flowers. At one end of the village, rising out of a clump +of yews, the mouldering church-tower, with mossy gravestones on one side +and a trim rectory on the other. At the other end of the village a +gabled inn, with a great stable-yard, busy with horses and waggons. +Above the village, the slopes of gently rising pastures, intersected +with footpaths and shadowed with woodlands. A little way out of the +village, an old mill with a lilied mill-pond, a great, dripping +water-wheel, and the murmur of the escaping stream. And winding on +into the green, sun-steeped distance, the blossom-hung English lanes. + + + + +XVII + +LONDON--CHANGING AND UNCHANGING + + +I find it an unexpectedly strange experience to be in London again +after ten years in New York. I had no idea it could be so strange. Of +course, there are men to whom one great city is as another--commercial +travellers, impresarios, globe-trotting millionaires. Being none of +these, I am not as much at home in St. Petersburg as in Buda-Pesth, in +Berlin as in Paris, and, while once I might have envied such plastic +cosmopolitanism, I am realizing, this last day or two in London, that, +were such an accomplishment mine, it had been impossible for me to feel +as deeply as I do my brief reincarnation into a city and a country with +which I was once so intimate, and which now seems so romantically +strange, while remaining so poignantly familiar. The man who is at home +everywhere has nowhere any home. My home was once this London--this +England--in which I am writing; but nothing so much as being in London +again could make me realize that my home now is New York, and how long +and how instinctively, without knowing it, I have been an American. It +is not indeed that I love New York and America more than I love London +and England. In fact, London has never seemed so wonderful to me in the +past as she has seemed during these days of my wistful momentary return +to her strange great heart. But this very freshness of her marvel to one +who once deemed that he knew her so well proves but the completeness of +my spiritual acclimatization into another land. I seem to be seeing her +face, hearing her voice, for the first time; while, all the while, my +heart is full with unforgotten memories, and my eyes have scarce the +hardihood to gaze with the decorum befitting the public streets on many +a landmark of vanished hours. To find London almost as new and strange +to me as New York once seemed when I first sighted her soaring morning +towers, and yet to know her for an enchanted Ghost-Land; to be able to +find my way through her streets--in spite of the new Kingsway and +Aldwych!--with closed eyes, and yet to see her, it almost seems, for the +first time: surely it is a curious, almost uncanny, experience. + +Do I find London changed?--I am asked. I have been so busy in +rediscovering what I had half-forgotten, in finding engaging novelties +in things anciently familiar, that the question is one which I feel +hardly competent to answer. For instance, I had all but forgotten that +there was so noble a thing in the world as an old-fashioned English +pork-pie. Yesterday I saw one in a window, with a thrill of recognition, +that made a friend with whom I was walking think for a moment that I +had seen a ghost. He knows nothing of the human heart who cannot realize +how tremulous with ancient heart-break may seem an old-fashioned English +pork-pie--after ten years in America. + +And, again, how curiously novel and charming seemed the soft and +courteous English voices--with or without aitches--all about one in +the streets and in the shops--I had almost said the "stores." I am +enamoured of the American accent, these many years, and--the calumny of +superficial observation to the contrary--I will maintain, so far as my +own experience goes, that there is as much courtesy broadcast in America +as in any land; more, I am inclined to think than in France. Yet, for +all that, that something or other in the English voice which I had heard +long since and lost awhile smote me with a peculiar pleasure, and, +though I like the comradely American "Cap" or "Professor," and am hoping +soon to hear it again--yet the novelty of being addressed once more as +"Sir" has had, I must own, a certain antiquarian charm. + +Wandering in a quaint by-street near my hotel, and reading the names and +signs on one or two of the neat old-world "places of business," I came +on the word "sweep." I believe it was on a brass-plate. For a moment, I +wondered what it meant; and then I realized, with a great gratitude, +that London had not changed so much, after all, since the days of +Charles Lamb. As I emerged into a broader thoroughfare, my ears were +smitten with the sound of minstrelsy. It is true that the tune was +changed. It was unmistakably rag-time. Yet, there was the old +piano-organ, and in a broad circle of spectators, suspended awhile from +their various wayfaring, a young man in tennis flannels was performing a +spirited Apache dance with a quite comely short-skirted young woman, who +rightly enough felt that she had no need to be ashamed of her legs. +Across the extemporized stage, every now and then, taxicabs tooted +cautiously, longing in their hearts to stay; and once a motor +coal-waggon, like a sort of amateur freight-train, thundered across; but +not even these could break the spell that held that ring of enchanted +loiterers, from which presently the pennies fell like rain--the eternal +spell--still operating, I was glad to see, under the protection of the +only human police in the world--of the strolling player in London town. +Just before the players turned to seek fresh squares and alleys new, I +noticed on the edge of the crowd what seemed, in the gathering twilight, +to be a group of uplifted spears. Spears or halberds, were they? It was +a little company of the ancient brotherhood of lamp-lighters, seduced, +like the rest of us, from the strict pursuance of duty by the vagabond +music. + +To me this thought is full of reassurance, whatever be the murmurs of +change: London has still her sweeps, her strolling minstrels, and her +lamp-lighters. + +Of course, I missed at once the old busses, yet there are far more +horses left than I had dared to hope, and the hansom is far from +extinct. In fact, there seems to be some promise of its renaissance, and +even yet, in the words of the ancient bard, despite the competition of +taxis-- + + Like dragon-flies, + The hansoms hover + With jewelled eyes, + To catch the lover. + +Further,--the quietude of the Temple remains undisturbed, the lawns of +Gray's Inn are green as of old, the Elizabethanism of Staple Inn is +unchanged, about the cornices of the British Museum the pigeons still +flutter and coo, and the old clocks chime sweetly as of old from their +mysterious stations aloft somewhere in the morning and the evening sky. + +Changes, of course, there are. It is easier to telephone in London today +than it was ten years ago--almost as easy as in some little provincial +town in Connecticut. Various minor human conveniences have been +improved. The electric lighting is better. Some of the elevators--I +mean the "lifts"--almost remind one of New York. The problem of "rapid +transit" has been simplified. All which things, however, have nothing to +do with national characteristics, but are now the common property of the +civilized, or rather, I should say, the commercialized, world, and are +probably to be found no less in full swing in Timbuctoo. No one--save, +maybe, the citizens of some small imitative nation--confounds these +things with change, or calls them "progress." The soul of a great old +nation adopts all such contrivances as in the past it has adopted new +weapons, or new modes of conveyance. Only a Hottentot or a Cook's +Tourist can consider such superficial developments as evidences of +"change." + +There are, of course, some new theatres--though I have heard of no new +great actor or actress. The old "favourites" still seem to dominate the +play-bills, as they did ten years ago. There is Mr. Hammerstein's Opera +House in the Kingsway. I looked upon it with pathos. Yet, surely, it is +a monument not so much of changing London as of that London which sees +no necessity of change. + +In regard to the great new roadways, Kingsway, Aldwych, and the +broadening of the Strand, I have been grateful for the temper which +seems to have presided over their making--a temper combining the +necessary readjustment of past and present, with a spirit of sensitive +conservation for those buildings which more and more England will +realize as having a lasting value for her spirit. + +So far as I have observed, London has been guilty of no such vandalism +as is responsible for the new Boulevard Raspail in Paris, and similar +heartless destructiveness, in a city which belongs less to France than +to the human soul. Such cities as London and Paris are among the eternal +spiritual possessions of mankind. If only those temporarily in charge of +them could be forced somehow to remember that, when their brief mayoral, +or otherwise official, lives are past, there will be found those who +will need to look upon what they have destroyed, and who will curse them +in their graves. + +Putting aside such merely superficial "changes" as new streets, new +theatres, and new conveniences, there does seem to me one change of a +far higher importance for which I have no direct evidence, and which I +can only hint at, even to myself, as "something in the air." It is, of +course, nothing new either to London or to England. It is rather the +reawakening of an old temper to which England's history has so often and +so momentously given expression. I seem to find it in a new alertness in +the way men and women walk and talk in the streets, a braced-up +expectancy and readiness for some approaching development in England's +destiny, a new quickening of that old indomitable spirit that has faced +not merely external dangers, but grappled with and resolved her own +internal problems. London seems to me like a city that has heard a voice +crying "Arise, thou that sleepest!" and is answering to the cry with +girt loins and sloth-purged heart and blithe readiness for some new +unknown summons of a future that can but develop the glory of her past. + +England seems to be no more sleepily resting on her laurels, as she was +some twenty years ago. Nor does she seem, on the other hand, to show the +least anxiety that she could ever lose them. She is merely realizing +that the time is at hand when she is to win others--that one more of +those many re-births of England, so to speak, out of her own womb, +approaches, and that once more she is about to prove herself eternally +young. + +New countries are apt to speak of old countries as though they are +dying, merely because they have lived so long. Yet there is a longevity +which is one of the surest evidences of youth. Such I seem to feel once +more is England's--as from my window I watch the same old English May +weather: the falling rain and the rich gloom, within which moves always, +shouldering the darkest hour, an oceanic radiance, a deathless principle +of celestial fire. + +LONDON, May, 1913. + + + + +XVIII + +THE HAUNTED RESTAURANT + + +Were one to tell the proprietors of the very prosperous and flamboyant +restaurant of which I am thinking that it is haunted--yea, that ghosts +sit at its well appointed tables, and lost voices laugh and wail and +sing low to themselves through its halls--they would probably take one +for a lunatic--a servant of the moon. + +Certainly, to all appearance, few places would seem less to suggest the +word "haunted" than that restaurant, as one comes upon it, in one of the +busiest of London thoroughfares, spreading as it does for blocks around, +like a conflagration, the festive glare of its electrically emblazoned +facade. Yet no ruined mansion, with the moon shining in through its +shattered roof, the owl nesting in its banqueting hall, and the snake +gliding through its bed chambers, was ever more peopled with phantoms +than this radiant palace of prandial gaiety, apparently filled with the +festive murmur of happy diners, the jocund strains of its vigorous +orchestra, the subdued clash of knives and forks and delicate dishes, +the rustle of women's gowns and the fairy music of women's voices. For +me its portico, flaming like a vortex of dizzy engulfing light, upon +which, as upon a swift current, gay men and women, alighting from motor +and hansom, are swept inward to glittering tables of snow-white napery, +fair with flowers--for me the mouth of the grave is not less dread, +and the walls of a sepulchre are not so painted with dead faces +or so inscribed with elegiac memories. I could spend a night in +Pere-la-Chaise, and still be less aware of the presence of the dead +than I was a short time ago, when, greatly daring, I crossed with a +shudder that once so familiar threshold. + +It was twelve years since I had been in London, so I felt no little of a +ghost myself, and I knew too well that it would be vain to look for the +old faces. Yes, gone was the huge good-natured commissionaire, who so +often in the past, on my arrival in company with some human flower, had +flung open the apron of our cab with such reverential alacrity, and on +our departure had so gently tucked in the petals of her skirts, smiling +the while a respectfully knowing benediction on the prospective +continuance of our evening's adventure. Another stood in his place, and +watched my lonely arrival with careless indifference. Glancing through +the window of the treasurer's office to the right of the hall, I could +see that an unfamiliar figure sat at the desk, where in the past so many +a cheque had been cashed for me with eager _bonhomie_. Now I reflected +that considerable identification would be necessary for that once +light-hearted transaction. It is true that I was welcomed with courtesy +by a bowing majordomo, but alas, my welcome was that of a stranger; and +when I mounted the ornate, marble-walled staircase leading to the +gallery where I had always preferred to sit, I realized that my hat and +cane must pass into alien keeping, and that no waiter's face would light +up as he saw me threading my way to the sacred table, withdrawn in a +nook of the balcony, where one could see and hear all, participate in +the general human stir and atmosphere, and yet remain apart. + +Ah! no; for the friendly Cockney that once greeted me with an enfolding +paternal kindness was substituted broken English of a less companionable +accent. A polite young Greek it was who stood waiting respectfully for +my order, knowing nothing of all it meant for me--_me_--to be seated at +that table again--whereas, had he been one of half a dozen of the +waiters of yester-year, he would have known almost as much as I of the +"secret memoirs" of that historic table. + +In ordering my meal I made no attempt at sentiment, for my mood went far +deeper than sentiment. Indeed, though, every second of the time, I was +living so vividly, so cruelly, in the past, I made one heartbroken +acknowledgment of the present by beginning with the anachronism of a +dry Martini cocktail, which, twelve years previous, was unknown and +unattainable in that haunted gallery. That cocktail was a sort of +desperate epitaph. It meant that I was alone--alone with my ghosts. Yet +it had a certain resurrecting influence, and as I sat there proceeding +dreamily with my meal, one face and another would flash before me, and +memory after memory re-enact itself in the theatre of my fancy. So +much in my actual surroundings brought back the past with an aching +distinctness--particularly the entrance of two charming young people, +making rainbows all about them, as, ushered by a smiling waiter, who was +evidently no stranger to their felicity, they seated themselves at a +neighbouring table with a happy sigh, and neglected the menu for a +moment or two while they gazed, rapt and lost, into each other's eyes. +How well I knew it all; how easily I could have taken the young man's +place, and played the part for which this evening he was so fortunately +cast! As I looked at them, I instinctively summoned to my side the +radiant shade of Aurea, for indeed she had seemed made of gold--gold and +water lilies. And, as of old, when I had called to her, she came swiftly +with a luxurious rustle of fragrant skirts, like the sound of the west +wind among the summer trees, or the swish and sway of the foam about the +feet of Aphrodite. There she sat facing me once more, "a feasting +presence made of light"--her hair like a golden wheat sheaf, her +eyes like blue flowers amid the wheat, and her bosom, by no means +parsimoniously concealed, literally suggesting that the loveliness of +all the water lilies in the world was amassed there within her corset +as in some precious casket. Ours was not one of the great tragic loves, +but I know I shall think of Aurea's bosom on my death-bed. At her coming +I had ordered champagne--we always drank champagne together, because, as +we said, it matched so well with her hair--champagne of a no longer +fashionable brand. The waiter seemed a little surprised to hear it asked +for, but it had been the only _chic_ brand in 19--. + +"Look at those two yonder," I said presently, after we had drunk to +each other, smiling long into each other's eyes over the brims of our +glasses. "You and I were once as they. It is their first wonderful +dinner together. Watch them--the poor darlings; it is enough to break +one's heart." + +"Do you remember ours?" asked Aurea quite needlessly. + +"I wonder what else I was thinking of--dear idiot!" said I, with tender +elegance, as in the old days. + +As I said before, Aurea and I had not been tragic in our love. It was +more a matter of life--than death; warm, pagan, light-hearted life. Ours +was perhaps that most satisfactory of relationships between men and +women, which contrives to enjoy the happiness, the fun, even the +ecstasy, of loving, while evading its heartache. It was, I suppose, what +one would call a healthy physical enchantment, with lots of tenderness +and kindness in it, but no possibility of hurt to each other. There was +nothing Aurea would not have done for me, or I for Aurea, except--marry +each other; and, as a matter of fact, there were certain difficulties on +both sides in the way of our doing that, difficulties, however, which I +am sure neither of us regretted. + +Yes, Aurea and I understood thoroughly what was going on in those young +hearts, as we watched them, our eyes starry with remembrance. Who better +than we should know that hush and wonder, that sense of enchanted +intimacy, which belongs of all moments perhaps in the progress of a +passion to that moment when two standing tiptoe on the brink of golden +surrender, sit down to their first ambrosial meal together--delicious +adventure!--with all the world to watch them, if it choose, and yet +aloof in a magic loneliness, as of youthful divinities wrapped in a +roseate cloud! Hours of divine expectancy, at once promise and +fulfilment. Happy were it for you, lovers, could you thus sit forever, +nor pass beyond this moment, touched by some immortalizing wand as those +lovers on the Grecian Urn: + + Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss. + Though winning near the goal--yet, do not grieve; + She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss. + Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair! + +"See," said Aurea presently, "they are getting ready to go. The waiter +has brought the bill, and is looking away, suddenly lost in profound +meditation. Let us see how he pays the bill. I am sure she is anxious." + +"Your old test!" said I. "Do you remember?" + +"Yes! And it's one that never fails," said Aurea with decision. "When a +woman goes out to dinner with a man for the first time, he little knows +how much is going to depend on his way of paying the bill. If, as with +some men one meets, he studies it through a microscope and adds it +up with anxious brow--meanwhile quite evidently forgetting your +presence--how your heart sinks, sinks and hardens--but you are glad all +the same, and next day you congratulate yourself on your narrow escape!" + +"Was I like that?" said I. + +"Did we escape?" asked Aurea. Then she added, touching my arm as with a +touch of honeyed fire: "O I'm so glad! He did it delightfully--quite _en +prince_. Just the right nonchalance--and perhaps, poor dear, he's as +poor--" + +"As we often were," I added. + +And then through the corners of our eyes we saw the young lovers rise +from the table, and the man enfold his treasure in her opera cloak, O so +reverently, O so tenderly, as though he were wrapping up some holy +flower. And O those deep eyes she gave him, half turning her head as he +did so! + +"That look," whispered Aurea, quoting Tennyson, "'had been a clinging +kiss but for the street.'" + +Then suddenly they were gone, caught up like Enoch, into heaven--some +little heaven, maybe, like one that Aurea and I remember, high up under +the ancient London roofs. + +But, with their going, alas, Aurea had vanished too, and I was left +alone with my Greek waiter, who was asking me what cheese I would +prefer. + +With the coming of coffee and cognac, I lit my cigar and settled down to +deliberate reverie, as an opium smoker gives himself up to his dream. I +savoured the bitter-sweetness of my memories; I took a strange pleasure +in stimulating the ache of my heart with vividly recalled pictures of +innumerable dead hours. I systematically passed from table to table all +around that spacious peristyle. There was scarcely one at which I +had not sat with some vanished companion in those years of ardent, +irresponsible living which could never come again. Not always a woman +had been the companion whose form I thus conjured out of the past, too +often out of the grave; for the noble friendship of youth haunted those +tables as well, with its generous starry-eyed enthusiasms and passionate +loyalties. Poets of whom but their songs remain, themselves by tragic +pathways descended into the hollow land, had read their verses to me +there, still glittering with the dawn dew of their creation, as we sat +together over the wine and talked of the only matters then--and perhaps +even yet--worth talking of: love and literature. Of these but one can +still be met in London streets, but all now wear crowns of varying +brightness-- + + Where the oldest bard is as the young, + And the pipe is ever dropping honey, + And the lyre's strings are ever strung. + +Dear boon fellows of life as well as literature, how often have we risen +from those tables, to pursue together the not too swiftly flying +petticoat, through the terrestrial firmament of shining streets, aglow +with the midnight sun of pleasure, a-dazzle with eyes brighter far than +the city lamps--passionate pilgrims of the morning star! Ah! we go on +such quests no more--"another race hath been and other palms are won." + +No, not always women--but naturally women nearly always, for it was the +time of rosebuds, and we were wisely gathering them while we might-- + + Through the many to the one-- + O so many! + Kissing all and missing none, + Loving any. + +Every man who has lived a life worthy the name of living has his own +private dream of fair women, the memory of whom is as a provision laid +up against the lean years that must come at last, however long they may +be postponed by some special grace of the gods, which is, it is good to +remember, granted to some--the years when one has reluctantly to +accept that the lovely game is almost, if not quite at an end, and to +watch the bloom and abundance of fragrant young creatures pass us, +unregarding, by. And, indeed, it may happen that a man who has won what +is for him the fairest of all fair faces, and has it still by his side, +may enter sometimes, without disloyalty, that secret gallery of those +other fair faces that were his before hers, in whom they are all summed +up and surpassed, had dawned upon his life. We shall hardly be loyal to +the present if we are coldly disloyal to the past. In the lover's +calendar, while there is but one Madonna, there must still be minor +saints, to whom it is meet, at certain times and seasons, to offer +retrospective candles--saints that, after the manner of many saints, +were once such charming sinners for our sakes, that utter forgetfulness +of them were an impious boorishness surely unacceptable to the most +jealous of Madonnas. Public worship of them is not, of course, +desirable, but occasional private celebrations are surely more than +permissible--such celebrations as that "night of memory and tears" which +Landor consecrated to Rose Aylmer, or that song which Thackeray +consecrated to certain loves of the long ago-- + + Gillian's dead, God rest her bier, + How I loved her twenty years syne! + Marian's married, but I sit here, + Alone and merry at forty year, + Dipping my nose in the Gascon wine. + +So I, seated in my haunted restaurant, brought the burnt offerings of +several cigars, and poured out various libations to my own private +Gillians and Marians, and in fancy sat and looked into Angelica's eyes +at this table, and caressed Myrtle's opaled hand at that, and read +Sylvia a poem I had just written for her at still another. "Whose names +are five sweet symphonies," wrote Rossetti. Yes, symphonies, indeed, in +the ears of memory are the names of the lightest loves that flittered +butterfly-like across our path in the golden summer of our lives, +each name calling up its human counterpart, with her own endearing +personality distinguishing her from all other girls, her way of +smiling, her way of talking, her way of being serious, all the little +originalities on which she prided herself, her so solemnly held +differentia of tastes and manners--all, in a word, that made you realize +that you were dining with Corinna and not with Chloe. What a service of +contrast each--all unwittingly, need one say--did the other, just in the +same fashion as contrasting colours accentuate the special quality one +of the other. To have dined last night with Amaryllis, with her Titian +red hair and green eyes, her tropic languor and honey-drowsy ways, +was to feel all the keener zest in the presence of Callithoe on +the following evening, with her delicate soul-lit face, and eager +responsiveness of look and gesture--_blonde cendre_, and _fausse +maigre_--a being one of the hot noon, the other a creature of the +starlight. But I disclaim the sultanesque savour of thus writing of +these dear bearers of symphonic names. To talk of them as flowers and +fruit, as colour and perfume, as ivory and velvet, is to seem to forget +the best of them, and the best part of loving them and being loved +again; for that consisted in their comradeship, their enchanted +comradeship, the sense of shared adventure, the snatching of a fearful +joy together. For a little while we had escaped from the drab and +songless world, and, cost what it might, we were determined to take +possession, for a while at least, of that paradise which sprang into +existence at the moment when "male and female created He them." Such +divine foolishness, let discretion warn, or morality frown, or society +play the censorious hypocrite, "were wisdom in the scorn of +consequence." + +"Ah, then," says every man to himself of such hours, as I said to myself +in my haunted restaurant--"ah, then came in the sweet o' the year." + +But lovely and pleasant as were the memories over which I thus sat +musing, there was one face immeasurably beyond all others that I had +come there hoping and yet fearing to meet again, hers of whom for years +that seem past counting all the awe and wonder and loveliness of the +world have seemed but the metaphor. Endless years ago she and I had sat +at this table where I was now sitting and had risen from it with +breaking hearts, never to see each other's face, hear each other's voice +again. Voluntarily, for another's sake, we were breaking our hearts, +renouncing each other, putting from us all the rapture and religion +of our loving, dying then and there that another might live--vain +sacrifice! Once and again, long silences apart, a word or two would wing +its way across lands and seas and tell us both that we were still +under the same sky and were still what nature had made us from the +beginning--each other's. But long since that veil of darkness unpierced +of my star has fallen between us, and no longer do I hear the rustle of +her gown in the autumn woods, nor do the spring winds carry me the +sweetness of her faithful thoughts any more. So I dreamed maybe that, +after the manner of phantoms, we might meet again on the spot where we +had both died--but alas, though the wraiths of lighter loving came gaily +to my call, she of the starlit silence and the tragic eyes came not, +though I sat long awaiting her--sat on till the tables began to be +deserted, and the interregnum between dinner and after-theatre supper +had arrived. No, I began to understand that she could no longer come +to me: we must both wait till I could go to her. + +And with this thought in my mind, I set about preparing to take my leave, +but at that moment I was startled--almost superstitiously--startled by +a touch on my shoulder. I was not to leave those once familiar halls +without one recognition, after all. It was our old waiter of all +those years ago, who, with an almost paternal gladness, was telling +me how good it was to see me again, and, with consolatory mendacity, +was assuring me that I had hardly changed a bit. God bless him--he +will never know what good it did me to have his honest recognition. +The whole world was not yet quite dead and buried, after all, nor +was I quite such an unremembered ghost as I had seemed. Dear old Jim +Lewis! So some of the old guard were still on deck, after all! And, +I was thinking as I looked at him: "He, too, has looked upon her +face. He it was who poured out our wine, that last time together." +Then I had a whim. My waiter had been used to them in the old days. + +"Jim," I said, "I want you to give this half-sovereign to the bandmaster +and ask him to play Chopin's _Funeral March_. There are not many people +in the place, so perhaps he won't mind. Tell him it's for an old friend +of yours, and in memory of all the happy dinners he had here long ago." + +So to the strains of that death music, which so strangely blends the +piercing pathos of lost things with a springlike sense of resurrection, +a spheral melody of immortal promise, I passed once more through the +radiant portals of my necropolitan restaurant into the resounding +thoroughfares of still living and still loving humanity. + + + + +XIX + +THE NEW PYRAMUS AND THISBE + + +There never was a shallower or more short-sighted criticism than that +which has held that science is the enemy of romance. Ruskin, with +all the April showers of his rhetoric, discredited himself as an +authoritative thinker when he screamed his old-maidish diatribes against +that pioneer of modern romantic communication, the railroad. Just as +surely his idol Turner proved himself a romantic painter, not by his +rainbows, or his Italian sunsets, but by that picture of _Storm, Rain, +and Speed_--an old-fashioned express fighting its way through wind, +rain, and of course rainbows--in the English National Gallery. + +With all his love of that light that never was on sea or land, Turner +was yet able to see the romance of that new thing of iron and steam so +affrighting to other men of his generation. A lover of light in all its +swift prismatic changes, he was naturally a lover of speed. He realized +that speed was one of the two most romantic things in the world. The +other is immobility. At present the two extremes of romantic expression +are the Sphinx and--the automobile. Unless you can realize that an +automobile is more romantic than a stage-coach, you know nothing +about romance. Soon the automobile will have its nose put out by the +air-ship, and we shall not need to be long-lived to see the day when +we shall hear old-timers lamenting the good old easy-going past of +the seventy-miles-an-hour automobile--just as we have heard our +grand-fathers talk of postilions and the Bath "flyer." + +Romance is made of two opposites: Change, and That Which Changeth Not. +In spite of foolish sentimentalism, who needs be told that love is one +of those forces of the universe that is the same yesterday, today, and +forever--the same today as when Dido broke her heart, as when Leander +swam the Hellespont? Gravitation is not more inherent in the cosmic +scheme, nor fire nor water more unchangeable in their qualities. + +But Love, contrary to the old notion that he is unpractical, is a +business-like god, and is ever on the lookout for the latest modern +appliances that can in anyway serve his purposes. True love is far from +being old-fashioned. On the contrary, true love is always up-to-date. +True love has its telephone, its phonograph, its automobile, and soon it +will have its air-ship. In the telephone alone what a debt love owes to +its supposed enemy, modern science! One wonders how lovers in the old +days managed to live at all without the telephone. + +We often hear how our modern appliances wear upon our nerves. But think +how the lack of modern appliances must have worn upon the nerves of our +forefathers, and particularly our foremothers! Think what distance meant +in the Middle Ages, when the news of a battle took days to travel, +though carried by the swiftest horses. Horses! Think again of news being +carried by--horses! And once more think, with a prayer of gratitude to +two magicians named Edison and Bell, and with a due sense of your being +the spoiled and petted offspring of the painful ages, that should your +love be in Omaha this night and you in New York City, you can say +good-night to her through the wall of your apartment, and hear her sigh +back her good-night to you across two thousand miles of the American +flag. Or should your love be on the sea, you can interrupt her +flirtations all the way across with your persistent wireless +conversation. Contrast your luxurious communicativeness with the case of +the lovers of old-time. Say that you have just married a young woman, +and you are happy together in your castle in the heart of the forest. +Suddenly the courier of war is at your gates, and you must up and arm +and away with your men to the distant danger. You must follow the Cross +into the savage Kingdom of the Crescent. The husband must become the +crusader, and the Lord Christ alone knows when he shall look on the +child's face of his wife again. Through goblin-haunted wildernesses he +must go, through unmapped no-man's lands, and vacuum solitudes of the +world's end, and peril and pestilence meet in every form, the face of +his foe the friendliest thing in all his mysterious travel. Not a +pay-station as yet in all the wide world, and fully five hundred years +to the nearest telegraph office! + +And think of the young wife meanwhile, alone with her maids and her +tapestry in the dank isolation of her lonely, listening castle. Not a +leaf falls in the wood, but she hears it. Not a footstep snaps the +silence, but her eyes are at the sleepless slit of light which is her +window in the armoured stone of her fortified bridal tower. The only +news of her husband she can hope for in a full year or more will be +the pleasing lies of some flattering minstrel, or broken soldier, or +imaginative pilgrim. On such rumours she must feed her famishing +heart--and all the time her husband's bones may be whitening unepitaphed +outside the walls of Ascalon or Joppa. + +There is an old Danish ballad which quaintly tells the tale of such old +long-distance days, with that blending of humour and pathos that forever +goes to the heart of man. A certain Danish lord had but yesterday taken +unto himself a young wife, and on the morrow of his marriage there came +to him the summons to war. Then, as now, there was no arguing with the +trumpets of martial duty. The soldier's trumpet heeds not the soldier's +tears. The war was far away and likely to be long. Months, even years, +might go by before that Danish lord would look on the face of his bride +again. So much might happen meanwhile! A little boy, or a little girl, +might be born to the castle, and the father, fighting far away, know +nothing of the beautiful news. And there was no telephone in the castle, +and it was five hundred years to the nearest telegraph office. + +So the husband and wife agreed upon a facetious signal of their own. The +castle stood upon a ridge of hills which could be seen fifty miles away, +and on the ridge the bride promised to build a church. If the child that +was to be born proved to be a boy, the church would be builded with a +tower; if a girl, with a steeple. So the husband went his way, and three +years passed, and at length he returned with his pennons and his +men-at-arms to his own country. Scanning the horizon line, he hurried +impatiently toward the heliographic ridge. And lo! when at last it came +in sight against the rising sun, there was a new church builded stately +there--with two towers. + +So it was with the most important of all news in the Middle Ages; and +yet today, as I said, you in New York City have only to knock good-night +on your wall, to be heard by your true love in Omaha, and hear her knock +back three times the length of France; Pyramus and Thisbe--with this +difference: that the wall is no longer a barrier, but a sensitive +messenger. It has become, indeed, in the words of Demetrius in _A +Midsummer Night's Dream_, the wittiest of partitions, and the modern +Pyramus may apostrophize it in grateful earnest: + + "Thou wall, O wall, O sweet and lovely wall ... + Thanks, courteous wall. Jove shield thee well for this!" + +So at least I always feel toward the wall of my apartment every time I +call up her whom my soul loveth that dwelleth far away in Massachusetts. +She being a Capulet and I a Montague, it would go hard with us for +communication, were it not for this long-distance wall; and any one +who knows anything of love knows that the primal need of lovers is +communication. Lovers have so deep a distrust of each other's love that +they need to be assured of it from hour to hour. To the philosopher it +may well seem strange that this certitude should thus be in need of +progressive corroboration. But so it is, and the pampered modern lover +may well wonder how his great-grandfather and great-grandmother +supported the days, or even kept their love alive, on such famine +rations as a letter once a month. A letter once a month! They must have +had enormous faith in each other, those lovers of old-time, or they must +have suffered as we can hardly bear to think of--we, who write to each +other twice a day, telegraph three times, telephone six, and transmit a +phonographic record of our sighs to each other night and morn. The +telephone has made a toy of distance and made of absence, in many cases, +a sufficient presence. It is almost worth while to be apart on occasion +just for the sake of bringing each other so magically near. It is the +Arabian Nights come true. As in them, you have only to say a word, and +the jinn of the electric fire is waiting for your commands. The word +has changed. Once it was "Abracadabra." Now it is "Central." But the +miracle is just the same. + +One might almost venture upon the generalization that most tragedies +have come about from lack of a telephone. Of course, there are +exceptions, but as a rule tragedies happen through delays in +communication. + +If there had been a telephone in Mantua, Romeo would never have bought +poison of the apothecary. Instead, he would have asked leave to use his +long-distance telephone. Calling up Verona, he would first cautiously +disguise his voice. If, as usual, the old nurse answered, all well; but +if a bearded voice set all the wires a-trembling, he would, of course, +hastily ring off, and abuse "Central" for giving him the wrong number. +And "Central" would understand. Then Romeo would wait an hour or two +till he was sure that Lord Capulet had gone to the Council, and ring up +again. This time he would probably get the nurse and confide to her his +number in Mantua. Next morning Juliet and her nurse had only to drop in +at the nearest drug store, and confide to Romeo the whole plot which +Balthazar so sadly bungled. All that was needed was a telephone, and +Romeo would have understood that Juliet was only feigning death for the +sake of life with him. + +But, as in the case of our Danish knight, there was not a pay-station +as yet in all the wide world, and it was fully five hundred years +to the nearest telegraph office. Another point in this tragedy is +worth considering by the modern mind: that not only would the final +catastrophe have been averted by the telephone, but that those beautiful +speeches to and from Juliet's balcony, made at such desperate risk to +both lovers, had the telephone only been in existence, could have +been made in complete security from the seclusion of their distant +apartments. + +Seriously speaking, there are few love tragedies, few serious historic +crises of any kind, that might not have been averted by the telephone. +Strange indeed, when one considers a little, is that fallacy of +sentimentalism which calls science the enemy of love. + +Far from being its enemy, science is easily seen to be its most romantic +servant; for all its strenuous and delicate learning it brings to the +feet of love for a plaything. Not only will it carry the voice of love +across space and time, but it will even bring it back to you from +eternity. It will not only carry to your ears the voices of the living, +but it will also keep safe for you the sweeter voices of the dead. In +fact, it would almost seem as though science had made all its +discoveries for the sake of love. + + + + +XX + +TWO WONDERFUL OLD LADIES + + +It is a pity that our language has no other word to indicate that one +has lived seventy, eighty, or ninety years, than the word "old"; for the +word "old" carries with it implications of "senility" and decrepitude, +which many merely chronologically "old" people very properly resent. The +word "young," similarly, needs the assistance of another word, for we +all know individuals of thirty and forty, sometimes even only twenty, +whom it is as absurd to call "young" as it is to call those others of +seventy, eighty, or ninety, "old." + +"Youth" is too large and rich a word to serve the limited purpose of +numbering the years of undeveloped boys and girls. It should stand +rather for the vital principle in men and women, ever expanding, and +rebuilding, and refreshing the human organism, partly a physical, but +perhaps in a greater degree a spiritual energy. + +I am not writing this out of any compliment to two wonderful "old" +ladies of whom I am particularly thinking. They would consider me a +dunce were they to suspect me of any such commonplace intent. No! I am +not going to call them "eighty years young," or employ any of those +banal euphemisms with which would-be "tactful" but really club-footed +sentimentalists insult the intelligence of the so-called "old." Of +course, I know that they are both eighty or thereabouts, and they know +very well that I know. We make no secret of it. Why should we? Actually +though the number of my years falls short of eighty, I feel so much +older than either of them, that it never occurs to me to think of them +as "old," and often as I contemplate their really glowing energetic +youth, I grow melancholy for myself, and wonder what has become of my +own. + +They were schoolgirls together. Luccia married Irene's brother--for they +allow me the privilege of calling them by their Christian names--and +they have been friends all their lives. Sometimes I see them together, +though oftener apart, for Luccia and her white-haired poet husband--no +"older" than herself,--are neighbours of mine in the country, and Irene +lives for the most part in New York--as much in love with its giant +developments as though she did not also cherish memories of that quaint, +almost vanished, New York of her girlhood days; for she is nothing if +not progressive. + +But I will tell about Luccia first, and the first thing it is natural to +speak of--so every one else finds too--is her beauty. They say that she +was beautiful when she was young (I am compelled sometimes, under +protest, to use the words "young" and "old" thus chronologically) and, +of course, she must have been. I have, however, seen some of her early +portraits, before her hair was its present beautiful colour, and I must +confess that the Luccia of an earlier day does not compare with the +Luccia of today. I don't think I should have fallen in love with her +then, whereas now it is impossible to take one's eyes off her. She seems +to have grown more flower-like with the years, and while her lovely +indestructible profile has gathered distinction, and a lifelong habit of +thinking beautiful thoughts, and contemplating beautiful things, has +drawn honeyed lines as in silver point about her eyes and mouth, the +wild-roses of her cheeks still go on blooming--like wild-roses in +moonlight. And over all glow her great clear witty eyes, the eyes of a +_grand dame_ who has still remained a girl. Her humour, no doubt, has +much to do with her youth, and I have seen strangers no little +surprised, even disconcerted, at finding so keen a humour in one so +beautiful; for beauty and humour are seldom found together in so +irresistible a combination. Is it to be wondered at that often on summer +days when I feel the need of a companion, I go in search of Luccia, and +take tea with her on the veranda? Sometimes I will find her in the +garden seated in front of her easel, making one of her delicate +water-colour sketches--for she was once a student in Paris and has +romantic Latin-quarter memories. Or I will find her with her magnifying +glass, trying to classify some weed she has come upon in the garden, +for she is a learned botanist; and sometimes we will turn over the pages +of books in which she hoards the pressed flowers gathered by her and her +husband in Italy and Switzerland up till but a year or two ago, +memorials of a life together that has been that flawless romance which +love sometimes grants to his faithful servants. + +At other times we will talk politics, and I wish you could hear the +advanced views of this "old" lady of eighty. Indeed, generally speaking, +I find that nowadays the only real progressives are the "old" people. It +seems to be the fashion with the "young" to be reactionary. Luccia, +however, has been a radical and a rebel since her girlhood, and, years +before the word "feminist" was invented, was fighting the battle of +the freedom of woman. And what a splendid Democrat she is, and how +thoroughly she understands and fearlessly faces the problems and +developments of the moment! She is of the stuff the old Chartist women +and the women of the French Revolution were made of, and in her heart +the old faith in Liberty and the people burns as brightly as though she +were some young Russian student ready to give her life for the cause. +When the revolution comes to America, stern masculine authority will be +needed to keep her--her friend Irene too--from the barricades. + +"Stern masculine authority"! As I write that phrase, how plainly I can +hear her mocking laughter; for she is never more delightful than when +pouring out her raillery on the magisterial pretensions of man. To hear +her talk! The idea of a mere man daring to assume any authority or +direction over a woman! Yet we who know her smile and whisper to +ourselves that, for all her witty tirades, she is perhaps of all women +the most feminine, and really the most "obedient" of wives--a rebel in +all else save to the mild tyranny of the poet she has loved, honoured, +and yes! obeyed, all these wonderful years. + +Perhaps in nothing is the reality of her youthfulness so expressive as +in her adorable gaiety. Like a clear fresh spring, it is ever brimming +up from the heart into her mischief-loving eyes. By her side merely +technically young people seem heavy and serious. And nothing amuses her +more than gravely to mystify, or even bewilderingly shock, some proper +acquaintance, or some respectable strangers, with her carefully designed +mock improprieties of speech or action. To look at the loveliest of +grand-mothers, it is naturally somewhat perplexing to the uninitiated +visitor to hear her talk, with her rarely distinguished manner, of +frivolous matters with which they assume she has long since done. + +A short while ago, when I was taking tea with her, she had for visitor a +staid old-maidish lady, little more than half her age, whom she had +known as a girl, but had not seen for some years. In the course of +conversation, she turned to her guest, with her grand air: + +"Have you done much dancing this season?" she asked. + +"O indeed no," answered the other unsuspiciously, "my dancing days are +over." + +"At your age!" commented Luccia with surprise. "Nonsense! You must let +me teach you to dance the tango. I have enjoyed it immensely this +winter." + +"Really?" gasped the other in astonishment, with that intonation in the +voice naturally so gratifying to the "old" suggesting that the person +talking with them really regards them as dead and buried. + +"Of course, why not?" asks Luccia with perfect seriousness. "I dance it +with my grandsons. My husband doesn't care to dance it. He prefers the +polka." + +Not knowing what to think, the poor old maid--actually "old" compared +with Luccia--looked from her to the beautiful venerable figure of her +polka-dancing husband seemingly meditating over his pipe, a little +withdrawn from them on the veranda, but inwardly shaken with mirth at +the darling nonsense of her who is still the same madcap girl he first +fell in love with so many years ago. + +When the guest had departed, with a puzzled, questioning look still +lingering on her face, Luccia turned to me, her eyes bright pools of +merriment: + +"It was quite true, wasn't it? Come, let us try it." + +And, nimble as a girl, she was on her feet, and we executed quite a +passable tango up and down the veranda, to the accompaniment of her +husband's--"Luccia! Luccia! what a wild thing you are!" + +A certain reputation for "wildness," a savour of innocent Bohemianism, +has clung to Luccia, and Irene too, all through their lives, as a legacy +from that far-off legendary time when, scarcely out of their girlhood, +they were fellow art-students together in Paris. Belonging both to +aristocratic, rather straitlaced New England families, I have often +wondered how they contrived to accomplish that adventure in a day when +such independent action on the part of two pretty young ladies was an +adventure indeed. But it was the time when the first vigorous spring of +feminine revolt was in the air. Rosa Bonheur, George Eliot, Elizabeth +Cady Stanton, and other leaders were setting the pace for the advanced +women, and George Sand was still a popular romancer. As a reminiscence +of George Sand, Luccia to this day pretends that she prefers to smoke +cigars to cigarettes, though, as a matter of fact, she has never smoked +either, and has, indeed, an ultra-feminine detestation of tobacco--even +in the form of her husband's pipe. She only says it, of course, for +the fun of seeming "naughty"; which recalls to my mind her shocking +behaviour one day when I went with her to call on some very prim +cousins in New York. It was a household of an excessively brown-stone +respectability, just the atmosphere to rouse the wickedness in Luccia. +As we sat together in an upright conversation that sounded like the +rustling of dried leaves in a cemetery, why! Luccia, for all her eighty +years, seemed like a young wild-rose bush filling the tomb-like room +with living light and fragrance. I could see the wickedness in her +surging for an outburst. She was well aware that those respectable +connections of hers had always looked upon her as a sort of "artistic" +black sheep in the family. Presently her opportunity came. As our visit +dragged mournfully towards its end, the butler entered, in pursuance of +the early Victorian ritual on such occasions, bearing a tray on which +was a decanter of sherry, some tiny wine-glasses, and some dry biscuits +of a truly early Victorian dryness. This ghostly hospitality was duly +dispensed, and Luccia, who seldom drinks anything but tea, instead of +sipping her sherry with a lady-like aloofness, drained her glass with a +sudden devil-may-care abandon, and, to the evident amazement even of the +furniture, held it out to be refilled. Such pagan behaviour had never +disgraced that scandalized drawing-room before. And when to her action +she added words, the room absolutely refused to believe its ears. "I +feel," she said, with a deep-down mirth in her eyes which only I could +suspect rather than see, "I feel today as if I should like to go on a +real spree. Do you ever feel that way?" + +A palpable shudder passed through the room. + +"Cousin Luccia!" cried out the three outraged mummies; the brother with +actual sternness, and the sisters in plain fear. Had their eccentric +cousin really gone out of her mind at last? + +"Never feel that way?" she added, delighting in the havoc she was +making. "You should. It's a wonderful feeling." + +Then she drained her second glass, and to the evident relief of all +three, rose to go. How we laughed together, as we sped away in our +taxicab. "It's as well to live up to one's reputation with such people," +she said, that dear, fantastic Luccia. + +_A propos_ that early Parisian adventure, Rosa Bonheur had been one of +Luccia's and Irene's great exemplars, and one might say, in one +particular connection,--heroes. I refer to the great painter's adoption +of masculine costume. Why two unusually pretty young women should burn +to discard the traditional flower-furniture of their sex, in exchange +for the uncouth envelopes of man, is hard to understand. But it was +the day of Mrs. Bloomer, as well as Rosa Bonheur; and earnest young +"intellectuals" among women had a notion, I fancy, that to shake off +their silks and laces was, symbolically, at all events, to shake off the +general disabilities of their sex, and was somehow an assertion of a +mental equality with man. At all events, it was a form of defiance +against their sex's immemorial tyrant, which seems to have appealed to +the imaginations of some young women of the period. Another woman's +weakness to be sternly discarded was that scriptural "glory" of her +hair. That must be ruthlessly lopped. So it is easy to imagine the +horror of such relatives as I have hinted at when our two beautiful +adventuresses returned from Paris, and appeared before their families in +great Spanish cloaks, picturesque, coquettish enough you may be sure, +veiling with some show of discretion those hideous compromises with +trousers invented and worn by the strong-minded Mrs. Bloomer, and +wearing their hair after the manner of Florentine boys. To face one's +family, and to walk New York streets so garbed, must have needed real +courage in those days; yet the two friends did both, and even for +a while accepted persecution for vagaries which for them had the +dead-seriousness of youth. + +Passionate young propagandists as they were, they even preferred to +abandon their homes for a while--rather than their bloomers--and, taking +a studio together in New York, started out to earn their own living by +the teaching of art. Those were the days of the really brave women. + +But to return to the less abstract topic of the bloomers, I often tease +Luccia and Irene about them, seeking for further information as to why +they ever came to retrograde from a position so heroically taken, one of +such serious import to human progress, and to condescend once more to +don the livery of feminine servitude, and appear, as they do today, in +delicate draperies which the eye searches in vain for any hint of +sanguinary revolution. Luccia always looks shamefaced at the question. +She still feels guilty, I can see, of a traitorous backsliding and +occasionally threatens to make up for it by a return to masculine +costume--looking the most exquisite piece of Dresden china as she says +it. I have seen that masculine tyrant of hers smiling knowingly to +himself on such occasions, and it has not been difficult to guess why +and when those historic bloomers disappeared into the limbo of lost +causes. There is little doubt that when Love came in by the door, the +bloomers went out, so to speak, by the window. + +Irene seems to have held out longer, and, doubtless, scornful of her +more frivolous comrade's defection, steadfastly kept the faith awhile +unsupported, walking the world in bloomered loneliness--till a like +event overtook her. Such is the end of every maid's revolt! But Irene, +to this day, retains more of her student seriousness than her more +worldly-minded friend. Her face is of the round cherubic type, and her +large heavy-lidded eyes have a touch of demureness veiling humour no +less deep than Luccia's, but more reflective, chuckling quietly to +itself, though on occasion I know no one better to laugh with, even +giggle with, than Irene. But, whereas Luccia will talk gaily of +revolution and even anarchy for the fun of it, and in the next breath +talk hats with real seriousness, Irene still remains the purposeful +revolutionary student she was as a girl; while Luccia contents herself +with flashing generalizations, Irene seriously studies the latest +developments of thought and society, reads all the new books, sees all +the new plays and pictures, and has all the new movements of whatever +kind--art, philosophy, and sociology--at her finger ends; and I may add +that her favourite writer is Anatole France. Whenever I need light on +the latest artistic or philosophic nonsense calling itself a movement +(cubism, futurism, Bergsonism, syndicalism, or the like) I go to her, +certain that she will know all about it. Nothing is too "modern" for +this wonderful "old" lady of seventy-nine; and, whenever I am in town, +we always go together to the most "advanced" play in the newest of new +theatres. + +_A propos_ our theatre-going together, I must not forget a story about +her which goes back to that bloomer period. A little while ago, calling +to take tea with her, I found her seated with a fine soldierly +white-haired "old" man, and they were in such merry talk that I felt +that perhaps I was interrupting old memories. But they generously took +me into the circle of their reminiscence. They had been laughing as I +came in--"Shall I tell him, General?" she said, "what we were laughing +about?" Then she did. She and the General had been girl and boy +together, and as they came to eighteen and nineteen had been +semi-serious sweethearts. The embryo General--no doubt because of her +pretty face--had taken all her student vagaries with lover-like +seriousness, and had, on one occasion, assisted in a notable enterprise. +The bloomers had not been definitely donned at that time, but they were +on the way, glimmering ahead as a discussed ideal. Whether it was as a +preliminary experiment, or only in consequence of a "dare," I am not +quite sure. I think it was a little of both, and that the General had +dared Irene to go with him to the opera (in the gallery) dressed in +boy's clothes. She accepted the challenge, borrowing a suit of clothes +from her brother for the purpose. Her figure, according to the General's +account, had looked anything but masculine, and her hair, tucked up +under her boy's hat as best she could, was a peculiar peril. How her +heart had almost stopped beating as a policeman had turned upon the +youthful pair a suspicious scrutiny, how they had taken to their heels +at his glance, how she had crimsoned at the box-office, and hid her face +behind a fat man as they had scurried past the ticket-attendant, and how +during the whole performance a keen-faced woman had glanced at her with +a knowing persistency that seemed to threaten her with imminent exposure +and arrest, and how wonderful the whole thing had been--just to be in +boy's clothes and go in them to the theatre with one's sweetheart. O +youth! youth! youth! + +As I looked at the General with his white hair, and Irene with her +quaint little old lady's cap over her girlish face, and visualized for +myself those two figures before me as they had appeared on the night of +that escapade, I realized that the real romance of life is made by +memory, and that for these two old friends to be able thus to recall +together across all those years that laughing freak of their young blood +was still more romantic than the original escapade. But as I went on +looking at Irene, with the bloom of her immortal youth upon her, I grew +jealous of the General's share in that historic night. Well, never mind, +it is I who take her to the theatre nowadays--and, after all, I think I +prefer her to go dressed just as she is. + + + + +XXI + +A CHRISTMAS MEDITATION + + +Christmas already! However welcome its coming, Christmas always seems to +take us by surprise. Is the year really so soon at the end of its +journey? Why, it seems only yesterday that it needed a special effort of +remembrance to date our letters with the new "_anno domini_." And have +you noticed that one always does that reluctantly, with something almost +of misgiving? The figures of the old year have a warm human look, but +those of the new wear a chill, unfamiliar, almost menacing expression. +Nineteen hundred and--we know. It is nearly "all in." It has done its +best--and its worst. Between Christmas Day and New-Year it has hardly +time to change its character. Good or bad, as it may have been, we feel +at home with it, and we are fain to keep the old almanac a little longer +on the wall. But the last leaves are falling, the days are shortening. +There is a smell of coming snow in the air, and for weeks past it has +already been Christmas in the shops. + +Yes, however it strikes us, we are a year older. On the first of January +last we had twelve brand-new months of a brand-new year to spend, and +now the last of them is all but spent. We had a new spring to look out +for, like the coming of one's sweetheart, a new summer bounteous in +prospect with inexhaustible wealth of royal sunshine, a new autumn, with +ruddy orchards and the glory of the tapestried woods; and now of the +four new seasons that were to be ours but one remains: + + And here is but December left and I, + To wonder if the hawthorn bloomed in May, + And if the wild rose with so fine a flush + Mantled the cheek of June, and if the way + The stream went singing foamed with meadow sweet, + And if the throstle sang in yonder bush, + And if the lark dizzied with song the sky. + I watched and listened--yet so sweet, so fleet, + The mad young year went by! + +Strange, that feeling at the end of the year that somehow we have missed +it, have failed to experience it all to the full, taken it too +carelessly, not dwelt sufficiently on its rich, expressive hours. Each +year we feel the same, and however intent we may have been, however we +have watched and listened, sensitively eager to hold and exhaust each +passing moment, when the year-end has come, we seem somehow to have been +cheated after all. Who, at the beginning of each year, has not promised +himself a stricter attentiveness to his experience? This year he will +"load every rift with ore." + + This year, I said, when first along the lane + With tiny nipples of the tender green + The winter-blackened hedge grew bright again, + This year I watch and listen; I have seen + So many springs steal profitless away, + This year I garner every sound and sweet. + And you, young year, make not such haste to bring + Hawthorn and rose; nor jumble, indiscreet, + Treasure on treasure of the precious spring; + But bring all softly forth upon the air, + Unhasting to be fair... + +Yet, for all our watchfulness, the year seems to have escaped us. We +know that the birds sang, that the flowers bloomed, that the grass was +green, but it seems to us that we did not take our joy of them with +sufficient keenness; our sweetheart came, but we did not look deep +enough into her eyes. If only we live to see the wild rose again! But +meanwhile here is the snow. + +Unless we are still numbered among those happy people for whom +Christmas-trees are laden and lit, this annual prematurity of Christmas +cannot but make us a little meditative amid our mirth, and if, while +Santa Claus is dispensing his glittering treasures, our thoughts grow a +little wistful, they will not necessarily be mournful thoughts, or on +that account less seasonable in character; for Christmas is essentially +a retrospective feast, and we may, with fitness, with indeed a proper +piety of unforgetfulness, bring even our sad memories, as it were to +cheer themselves, within the glow of its festivity. Ghosts have always +been invited to Christmas parties, and whether they are seen or not, +they always come; nor is any form of story so popular by the Christmas +fire as the ghost-story--which, when one thinks of it, is rather odd, +considering the mirthful character of the time. Yet, after all, what are +our memories but ghost-stories? Ah! the beautiful ghosts that come to +the Christmas fire! + +Christmas too is pre-eminently the Feast of the Absent, the Festival of +the Far-Away, for the most prosperous ingathering of beloved faces about +the Christmas fire can but include a small number of those we would fain +have there; and have you ever realized that the absent are ghosts? That +is, they live with us sheerly as spiritual presences, dependent upon our +faithful remembrance for their embodiment. We may not, with our physical +eyes, see them once a year; we may not even have so seen them for twenty +years; it may be decreed that we shall never see them again; we seldom, +perhaps never, write to each other; all we know of each other is that we +are alive and love each other across space and time. Alive--but how? +Scarce otherwise, surely, than the unforgotten dead are alive--alive in +unforgetting love. + +It is rather strange, if you will give it a thought, how much of our +real life is thus literally a ghost-story. Probably it happens with the +majority of us that those who mean most to us, by the necessities of +existence, must be far away, met but now and then in brief flashes +of meeting that often seem to say so much less than absence; our +intercourse is an intercourse of the imagination--yet how real! They +belong to the unseen in our lives, and have all its power over us. The +intercourse of a mother and a son--is it not often like that in a world +which sends its men on the four winds, to build and fight, while the +mother must stay in the old nest? Seldom at Christmas can a mother +gather all her children beneath the wing of her smile. Her big boys are +seven seas away, and even her girls have Christmas-trees of their own. +But motherhood is in its very nature a ghostly, a spiritual, thing, and +the big boys and the old mother are not really divided. They meet +unseen by the Christmas fire, as they meet all the year round in that +mysterious ether of the soul, where space and time are not. + +Yes, it is strange to think how small a proportion of our lives we spend +with those we love; even when we say that we spend all our time with +them. Husband and wife even--how much of the nearness of the closest of +human relations is, and must be, what Rossetti has called "parted +presence!" The man must go forth to his labour until the evening. How +few of the twenty-four hours can these two beings who have given their +whole lives to each other really give! Husband and wife even must be +content to be ghosts to each other for the greater part of each day. +As Rossetti says in his poem, eyes, hands, voice, lips, can meet so +strangely seldom in the happiest marriage; only in the invisible home of +the heart can the most fortunate husband and wife be always together: + + Your heart is never away, + But ever with mine, forever, + Forever without endeavour, + Tomorrow, love, as today; + Two blent hearts never astray, + Two souls no power may sever, + Together, O my love, forever! + +When I said that the absent were ghosts, I don't think you quite liked +the saying. It gave you a little shiver. It seemed rather grimly +fantastic. But do you not begin to see what I meant? Begin to see the +comfort in the thought? begin to see the inner connection between +Christmas and the ghost-story? Yes, the real lesson of Christmas is the +ever presence of the absent through love; the ghostly, that is to say +the spiritual, nature of all human intercourse. Our realities can exist +only in and through our imaginations, and the most important part of our +lives is lived in a dream with dream-faces, the faces of the absent and +the dead--who, in the consolation of this thought, are alike brought +near. + +I have a friend who is dead--but I say to myself that he is in New +Zealand; for, if he were really in New Zealand, we should hardly seem +less distant, or be in more frequent communication. We should say that +we were both busy men, that the mails were infrequent, but that between +us there was no need of words, that we both "understood." That is what I +say now. It is just as appropriate. Perhaps he says it too. And--we +shall meet by the Christmas fire. + +I have a friend who is alive. He is alive in England. We have not met +for twelve years. He never writes, and I never write. Perhaps we shall +never meet, never even write to each other, again. It is our way, the +way of many a friendship, none the less real for its silence--friendship +by faith, one might say, rather than by correspondence. My dead friend +is not more dumb, not more invisible. When these two friends meet me +by the Christmas fire, will they not both alike be ghosts--both, in a +sense, dead, but both, in a truer sense, alive? + +It is so that, without our thinking of it, our simple human feelings one +for another at Christmas-time corroborate the mystical message which +it is the church's meaning to convey by this festival of "peace and +good-will to men"--the power of the Invisible Love; from the mystical +love of God for His world, to the no less, mystical love of mother and +child, of lover and lover, of friend and friend. + +And, when you think of it, is not this festival founded upon what, +without irreverence, we may call the Divine Ghost-Story of Christmas? +Was there ever another ghost-story so strange, so full of marvels, a +story with so thrilling a message from the unseen? Taken just as a +story, is there anything in the _Arabian Nights_ so marvellous as this +ghost-story of Christmas? The world was all marble and blood and bronze, +against a pitiless sky of pitiless gods. The world was Rome. No rule +ever stood builded so impregnably from earth to stars--a merciless wall +of power. Strength never planted upon the earth so stern a foot. Never +was tyranny so invincibly bastioned to the cowed and conquered eye. + +And against all this marble and blood and bronze, what frail fantastic +attack is this? What quaint expedition from fairy-land that comes so +insignificantly against these battlements on which the Roman helmets +catch the setting sun? + +A Star in the Sky. Some Shepherds from Judea. Three Wise Men from the +East. Some Frankincense and Myrrh. A Mother and Child. + +Yes, a fairy-tale procession--but these are to conquer Rome, and that +child at his mother's breast has but to speak three words, for all that +marble and bronze to melt away: "Love One Another." + +It may well have seemed an almost ludicrous weapon--three gentle words. +So one might attack a fortress with a flower. But Rome fell before them, +for all that, and cruel as the world still is, so cruel a world can +never be again. The history of Christianity from Christ to Tolstoi +is the history of a ghost-story; and as Rome fell before the men it +martyred, so Russia has been compelled at last to open its prison doors +by the passive imperative of the three gentle words. Stone and iron are +terribly strong to the eye and even to the arm of man, but they are as +vapour before the breath of the soul. Many enthroned and magisterial +authorities seem so much more important and powerful than the simple +human heart, but let the trial of strength come, and we see the might of +the delicate invisible energy that wells up out of the infinite mystery +to support the dreams of man. + +Christmas is the friendly human announcement of this ghostly truth; its +holly and boar's-head are but a rough-and-tumble emblazonment of that +mystic gospel of--The Three Words; the Gospel of the Unseen Love. + +And how well has the church chosen this particular season of the year +for this most subtly spiritual of all its festivals, so subtle because +its ghostly message is so ruddily disguised in human mirth, and thus the +more unconsciously operative in human hearts! + +Winter, itself so ghostly a thing, so spiritual in its beauty, was +indeed the season to catch our ears with this ghost-story of the +Invisible and Invincible Love. The other seasons are full of sensuous +charm and seductiveness. With endless variety of form and colour and +fragrance, they weave "a flowery band to bind us to the earth." They are +running over with the pride of sap, the luxury of green leaves, and the +intoxicating fulness of life. The summer earth is like some voluptuous +enchantress, all ardour and perfume, and soft dazzle of moted sunshine. +But the beauty of winter seems a spiritual, almost a supernatural, +thing, austere and forbidding at first, but on a nearer approach found +to be rich in exquisite exhilaration, in rare and lofty discoveries and +satisfactions of the soul. Winter naturally has found less favour with +the poets than the other seasons. Praise of it has usually a strained +air, as though the poet were making the best of a barren theme, like a +portrait-painter reluctantly flattering some unattractive sitter. But +one poet has seen and seized the mysterious beauty of winter with +unforced sympathy--Coventry Patmore, whose "Odes," in particular, +containing as they do some of the most rarely spiritual meditation in +English poetry, are all too little known. In one of these he has these +beautiful lines, which I quote, I hope correctly, from memory: + + I, singularly moved + To love the lovely that are not beloved, + Of all the seasons, most love winter, and to trace + The sense of the Trophonian pallor of her face. + It is not death, but plenitude of peace; + And this dim cloud which doth the earth enfold + Hath less the characters of dark and cold + Than light and warmth asleep, + And intermittent breathing still doth keep + With the infant harvest heaving soft below + Its eider coverlet of snow. + +The beauty of winter is like the beauty of certain austere classics of +literature and art, and as with them, also, it demands a certain almost +moral strenuousness of application before it reveals itself. The +loftiest masterpieces have something aloof and cheerless about them at +our first approach, something of the cold breath of those starry spaces +into which they soar, and to which they uplift our spirits. When we +first open Dante or Milton, we miss the flowers and the birds and the +human glow of the more sensuous and earth-dwelling poets. But after +awhile, after our first rather bleak introduction to them, we grow aware +that these apparently undecorated and unmusical masterpieces are radiant +and resounding with a beauty and a music which "eye hath not seen nor +ear heard." For flowers we are given stars, for the song of birds the +music of the spheres, and for that human glow a spiritual ecstasy. + +Similarly with winter. It has indeed a strange beauty peculiar to +itself, but it is a beauty we must be at some pains to enjoy. The beauty +of the other seasons comes to us, offers itself to us, without effort. +To study the beauty of summer, it is enough to lie under green boughs +with half-closed eyes, and listen to the running stream and the murmur +of a million wings. But winter's is no such idle lesson. In summer we +can hardly stay indoors, but in winter we can hardly be persuaded to +go out. We must gird ourselves to overcome that first disinclination, +else we shall know nothing of winter but its churlish wind and its +ice-in-the-pail. But, the effort made, and once out of doors on a +sunlit winter's morning, how soon are we finding out the mistake we +were making, coddling ourselves in the steam-heat! Indoors, indeed, +the prospect had its Christmas-card picturesqueness; snow-clad roofs, +snow-laden boughs, silhouetted tracery of leafless trees; but we said +that it was a soulless spectacular display, the beauty of death, and +the abhorred coldness thereof. We have hardly walked a hundred yards, +however, before impressions very different are crowding upon us, +among which the impression of cold is forgotten, or only retained as +pleasantly heightening the rest. + +Far from the world's being dead, as it had seemed indoors, we are +presently, in some strange indefinable way, made intensely conscious of +a curious overwhelming sense of life in the air, as though the crystal +atmosphere was, so to say, ecstatically charged with the invisible +energy of spiritual forces. In the enchanted stillness of the snow, we +seem to hear the very breathing of the spirit of life. The cessation of +all the myriad little sounds that rise so merrily and so musically from +the summer surface of the earth seems to allow us to hear the solemn +beat of the very heart of earth itself. We seem very near to the sacred +mystery of being, nearer than at any other season of the year, for in +other seasons we are distracted by its pleasurable phenomena, but in +winter we seem close to the very mystery itself; for the world seems to +have put on robes of pure spirit and ascended into a diviner ether. + +The very phenomena of winter have a spiritual air which those of summer +lack, a phantom-like strangeness. How mysterious this ice, how ghostly +this snow, and all the beautiful fantastic shapes taken by both; the +dream-like foliage, and feathers and furs of the snow, the Gothic +diablerie of icicled eaves, all the fairy fancies of the frost, the +fretted crystal shapes that hang the brook-side with rarer than Venetian +glass, the strange flowers that stealthily overlay the windows, even +while we watch in vain for the unseen hand! No flowers of summer seem so +strange as these, make us feel so weirdly conscious of the mystery of +life. As the ghostly artist covers the pane, is it not as though a +spirit passed? + +As we walk on through the shining morning, we ourselves seem to grow +rarefied as the air. Our senses seem to grow finer, purged to a keener +sensitiveness. Our eyes and ears seem to become spiritual rather than +physical organs, and an exquisite elation, as though we were walking on +shining air, or winging through celestial space, fills all our being. +The material earth and our material selves seem to grow joyously +transparent, and while we are conscious of our earthly shoe-leather +ringing out on the iron-bound highway, we seem, nevertheless, to be +spirits moving without effort, in a world of spirit. Seldom, if ever, +in summer are we thus made conscious of, so to say, our own ghosts, +thus lifted up out of our material selves with a happy sense of +disembodiment. + +There would, indeed, seem to be some relation between temperature and +the soul, and something literally purifying about cold. Certain it is +that we return from our winter's walk with something sacred in our +hearts and something shining in our faces, which we seldom, if ever, +bring back with us in summer. Without understanding the process, we seem +to have been brought nearer to the invisible mystery, and a solemn peace +of happy insight seems for a little while at least to possess our souls. +Our white walk in the snow-bright air has in some way quickened the +half-torpid immortal within us, revived awhile our sluggish sense of our +spiritual significance and destiny, made us once more, if only for a +little, attractively mysterious to ourselves. Yes! there is what one +might call a certain monastic discipline about winter which impels the +least spiritual minded to meditation on his mortal lot and its immortal +meanings; and thus, as I said, the Church has done wisely to choose +winter for its most Christian festival. The heart of man, thus prepared +by the very elements, is the more open to the message of the miraculous +love, and the more ready to translate it into terms of human goodness. +And thus, I hope, the ghostly significance of mince-pie is made clear. + +But enough of ghostly, grown-up thoughts. Let us end with a song for +the children: + + O the big red sun, + And the wide white world, + And the nursery window + Mother-of-pearled; + + And the houses all + In hoods of snow, + And the mince-pies, + And the mistletoe; + + And Christmas pudding, + And berries red, + And stockings hung + At the foot of the bed; + + And carol-singers, + And nothing but play-- + O baby, this is + Christmas Day! + + + + +XXII + +ON RE-READING WALTER PATER + + +It is with no small satisfaction, and with a sense of reassurance of +which one may, in moods of misgiving, have felt the need during +two decades of the Literature of Noise, that one sees a writer so +pre-eminently a master of the Literature of Meditation coming, for all +the captains and the shouting, so surely into his own. The acceptance +of Walter Pater is not merely widening all the time, but it is more +and more becoming an acceptance such as he himself would have most +valued, an acceptance in accordance with the full significance of his +work rather than a one-sided appreciation of some of its Corinthian +characteristics. The Doric qualities of his work are becoming recognized +also, and he is being read, as he has always been read by his true +disciples--so not inappropriately to name those who have come under his +graver spell--not merely as a _prosateur_ of purple patches, or a +sophist of honeyed counsels tragically easy to misapply, but as an +artist of the interpretative imagination of rare insight and magic, a +writer of deep humanity as well as aesthetic beauty, and the teacher of +a way of life at once ennobling and exquisite. It is no longer possible +to parody him--after the fashion of Mr. Mallock's brilliancy in _The New +Republic_--as a writer of "all manner and no matter," nor is it possible +any longer to confuse his philosophy with those gospels of unrestrained +libertinism which have taken in vain the name of Epicurus. His highly +wrought, sensitively coloured, and musically expressive style is seen to +be what it is because of its truth to a matter profound and delicate and +intensely meditated, and such faults as it has come rather of too much +matter than too little; while his teaching, far from being that of +a facile "Epicureanism," is seen, properly understood, to involve +something like the austerity of a fastidious Puritanism, and to result +in a jealous asceticism of the senses rather than in their indulgence. +"Slight as was the burden of positive moral obligation with which he had +entered Rome," he writes of Marius, as on his first evening in Rome the +murmur comes to him of "the lively, reckless call to 'play,' from the +sons and daughters of foolishness," "it was to no wasteful and vagrant +affections, such as these, that his Epicureanism had committed him." +Such warnings against misunderstanding Pater is careful to place, at, so +to say, all the cross-roads in his books, so scrupulously concerned is +he lest any reader should take the wrong turning. Few writers, indeed, +manifest so constant a consideration for, and, in minor matters, +such a sensitive courtesy toward, their readers, while in matters +of conscience Pater seems to feel for them an actual pastoral +responsibility. His well-known withdrawal of the "Conclusion" to _The +Renaissance_ from its second edition, from a fear that "it might +possibly mislead some of those young men into whose hands it might +fall," is but one of many examples of his solicitude; and surely such as +have gone astray after such painstaking guidance have but their own +natures to blame. As he justly says, again of Marius, "in the reception +of metaphysical _formula_, all depends, as regards their actual and +ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human +nature into which they fall--the company they find already present +there, on their admission into the house of thought." + +That Pater's philosophy could ever have been misunderstood is not to be +entertained with patience by any one who has read him with even ordinary +attention; that it may have been misapplied, in spite of all his care, +is, of course, possible; but if a writer is to be called to account for +all the misapplications, or distortions, of his philosophy, writing may +as well come to an end. Yet, inconceivable as it may sound, a critic +very properly held in popular esteem recently gave it as his opinion +that the teaching of Walter Pater was responsible for the tragic career +of the author of _The Picture of Dorian Gray_. Certainly that remarkable +man was an "epicurean"--but one, to quote Meredith, "whom Epicurus would +have scourged out of his garden"; and the statement made by the critic +in question that _The Renaissance_ is the book referred to in _The +Picture of Dorian Gray_ as having had a sinister influence over its hero +is so easily disposed of by a reference to that romance itself that it +is hard to understand its ever having been made. Here is the passage +describing the demoralizing book in question: + + His eye fell on the yellow book that Lord Henry had sent him.... It + was the strangest book he had ever read. It seemed to him that in + exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of + the world were passing in dumb show before him. Things that he had + dimly dreamed of were suddenly made real to him. Things of which he + had never dreamed were gradually revealed. + + It was a novel without a plot, and with only one character, being, + indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian who + spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the + passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except + his own, and to sum up, as it were, in himself the various moods + through which the world-spirit had ever passed, loving for their + mere artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called + virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call + sin. The style in which it was written was that curious jewelled + style, vivid and obscure at once, full of _argot_ and of archaisms, + of technical expressions and of elaborate paraphrases, that + characterizes the work of some of the finest artists of the French + school of _Decandents._ There were in it metaphors as monstrous as + orchids, and as evil in colour. The life of the senses was described + in the terms of mystical philosophy. One hardly knew at times + whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some medieval + saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner. It was a + poisonous book. The heavy odour of incense seemed to cling about its + pages and to trouble the brain. The mere cadence of the sentences, + the subtle monotony of their music, so full as it was of complex + refrains and movements elaborately repeated, produced in the mind of + the lad, as he passed from chapter to chapter, a form of reverie, a + malady of dreaming, that made him unconscious of the falling day and + the creeping shadows.... + + For years Dorian Gray could not free himself from the memory of this + book. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he never + sought to free himself from it. He procured from Paris no less than + five large paper copies of the first edition, and had them bound in + different colours, so that they might suit his various moods and the + changing fancies of a nature over which he seemed, at times, to have + almost entirely lost control. + +The book thus characterized is obviously by a French writer--I have +good reason for thinking that it was _A Rebours_ by Huysmans--and how +any responsible reader can have imagined that Walter Pater's _The +Renaissance_ answers to this description passes all understanding. A +critic guilty of so patent a misstatement must either never have read +_The Picture of Dorian Gray_, or never have read _The Renaissance_. On +the other hand, if on other more reliable evidence it can be found that +Oscar Wilde was one of those "young men" misled by Pater's book, for +whose spiritual safety Pater, as we have seen, was so solicitous, one +can only remind oneself again of the phrase quoted above in regard to +"that soil of human nature" into which a writer casts his seed. If that +which was sown a lily comes up a toadstool, there is evidently something +wrong with the soil. + +Let us briefly recall what this apparently so "dangerous" philosophy +of Pater's is, and we cannot do better than examine it in its most +concentrated and famous utterance, this oft-quoted passage from that +once-suppressed "Conclusion" to _The Renaissance_: + + Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A + counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated + dramatic life. How may we see in them all that there is to be seen + in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from + point to point, and be present always at the focus where the + greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? To + burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this + ecstasy, is success in life.... While all melts under our feet, we + may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to + knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for + a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange + colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the + face of one's friend. With this sense of the splendor of our + experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one + desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make + theories about the things we see and touch.... Well! we are all + _condamnes_, as Victor Hugo says; we are all under sentence of + death, but with a sort of indefinite reprieve--_les hommes sont tous + condamnes a mort avec des sursis indefinis_: we have an interval, + and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in + listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among "the + children of this world," in art and song. For our one chance lies in + expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible + into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened + sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of + enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come + naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion--that it does + yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of + such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of + art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing + frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as + they pass, and simply for those moments' sake. + +Now, if it be true that the application, or rather the misapplication, +of this philosophy led Oscar Wilde to Reading Gaol, it is none the +less true that another application of it led Marius to something like +Christian martyrdom, and Walter Pater himself along an ever loftier and +serener path of spiritual vision. + +Nothing short of wilful misconstruction can make of the counsel thus +offered, with so priestly a concern that the writer's exact meaning be +brought home to his reader, other than an inspiration toward a noble +employment of that mysterious opportunity we call life. For those of us, +perhaps more than a few, who have no assurance of the leisure of an +eternity for idleness or experiment, this expansion and elevation of the +doctrine of the moment, carrying a merely sensual and trivial moral in +the Horatian maxim of _carpe diem_, is one thrillingly charged with +exhilaration and sounding a solemn and yet seductive challenge to us to +make the most indeed, but also to make the best, of our little day. To +make the most, and to make the best of life! Those who misinterpret or +misapply Pater forget his constant insistence on the second half of that +precept. We are to get "as many pulsations as possible into the given +time," but we are to be very careful that our use of those pulsations +shall be the finest. Whether or not it is "simply for those moments' +sake," our attempt must be to give "_the highest quality_," remember, to +those "moments as they pass." And who can fail to remark the fastidious +care with which Pater selects various typical interests which he deems +most worthy of dignifying the moment? The senses are, indeed, of natural +right, to have their part; but those interests on which the accent of +Pater's pleading most persuasively falls are not so much the "strange +dyes, strange colours, and curious odours," but rather "the face of +one's friend," ending his subtly musical sentence with a characteristic +shock of simplicity, almost incongruity--or "some mood of passion or +insight or intellectual excitement," or "any contribution to knowledge +that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment." +There is surely a great gulf fixed between this lofty preoccupation with +great human emotions and high spiritual and intellectual excitements, +and a vulgar gospel of "eat, drink, for tomorrow we die," whether or not +both counsels start out from a realization of "the awful brevity" of our +mortal day. That realization may prompt certain natures to unbridled +sensuality. Doomed to perish as the beasts, they choose, it would seem +with no marked reluctance, to live the life of the beast, a life +apparently not without its satisfactions. But it is as stupid as it is +infamous to pretend that such natures as these find any warrant for +their tragic libertinism in Walter Pater. They may, indeed, have found +aesthetic pleasure in the reading of his prose, but the truth of which +that prose is but the beautiful garment has passed them by. For such +it can hardly be claimed that they have translated into action the +aspiration of this tenderly religious passage: + + Given the hardest terms, supposing our days are indeed but a shadow, + even so we may well adorn and beautify, in scrupulous self-respect, + our souls and whatever our souls touch upon--these wonderful bodies, + these material dwelling-places through which the shadows pass + together for a while, the very raiment we wear, our very pastimes, + and the intercourse of society. + +Here in this passage from _Marius_ we find, to use Pater's own words +once more, "the spectacle of one of the happiest temperaments coming, +so to speak, to an understanding with the most depressing of theories." +That theory, of course, was the doctrine of the perpetual flux of things +as taught by Aristippus of Cyrene, making a man of the world's practical +application of the old Heraclitean formula, his influence depending on +this, "that in him an abstract doctrine, originally somewhat acrid, had +fallen upon a rich and genial nature well fitted to transform it into a +theory of practice of considerable stimulative power toward a fair +life." Such, too, was Pater's nature, and such his practical usefulness +as what one might call a philosophical artist. Meredith, Emerson, +Browning, and even Carlyle were artists so far related to him and each +other in that each of them wrought a certain optimism, or, at all +events, a courageous and even blithe working theory of life and conduct, +out of the unrelenting facts of existence unflinchingly faced, rather +than ecclesiastically smoothed over--the facts of death and pain and +struggle, and even the cruel mystery that surrounds with darkness and +terror our mortal lot. Each one of them deliberately faced the worst, +and with each, after his own nature, the worst returned to laughter. The +force of all these men was in their artistic or poetic embodiment of +philosophical conceptions, but, had they not been artists and poets, +their philosophical conceptions would have made but little way. And it +is time to recall, what critics preoccupied with his "message" leave +unduly in the background, that Pater was an artist of remarkable power +and fascination, a maker of beautiful things, which, whatever their +philosophical content, have for our spirits the refreshment and +edification which all beauty mysteriously brings us, merely because it +is beauty. _Marius the Epicurean_ is a great and wonderful book, not +merely on account of its teaching, but because it is simply one of the +most _beautiful_ books, perhaps the most beautiful book, written in +English. It is beautiful in many ways. It is beautiful, first of all, in +the uniquely personal quality of its prose, prose which is at once +austere and sensuous, simple at once and elaborate, scientifically exact +and yet mystically suggestive, cool and hushed as sanctuary marble, +sweet-smelling as sanctuary incense; prose that has at once the +qualities of painting and of music, rich in firmly visualized pictures, +yet moving to subtle, half-submerged rhythms, and expressive with every +delicate accent and cadence; prose highly wrought, and yet singularly +surprising one at times with, so to say, sudden innocencies, artless and +instinctive beneath all its sedulous art. It is no longer necessary, as +I hinted above, to fight the battle of this prose. Whether it appeal to +one not, no critic worth attention any longer disparages it as mere +ornate and perfumed verbiage, the elaborate mannerism of a writer hiding +the poverty of his thought beneath a pretentious raiment of decorated +expression. It is understood to be the organic utterance of one with a +vision of the world all his own striving through words, as he best can, +to make that vision visible to others as nearly as possible as he +himself sees it. Pater himself has expounded his theory and practice of +prose, doubtless with a side-thought of self-justification, in various +places up and down his writings, notably in his pregnant essay on +"Style," and perhaps even more persuasively in the chapter called +"Euphuism" in _Marius_. In this last he thus goes to the root of the +matter: + + That preoccupation of the _dilettante_ with what might seem mere + details of form, after all, did but serve the purpose of bringing + to the surface, sincerely and in their integrity, certain strong + personal intuitions, a certain vision or apprehension of things + as really being, with important results, thus, rather than + thus--intuitions which the artistic or literary faculty was called + upon to follow, with the exactness of wax or clay, clothing the + model within. + +This striving to express the truth that is in him has resulted in a +beauty of prose which for individual quality must be ranked with the +prose of such masters as De Quincey and Lamb, and, to make a not +irrelevant comparison, above the very fine prose of his contemporary +Stevenson, by virtue of its greater personal sincerity. + +There is neither space here, nor need, to illustrate this opinion by +quotation, though it may not be amiss, the musical and decorative +qualities of Pater's prose having been so generally dwelt upon, to +remind the reader of the magical simplicities by which it is no less +frequently characterized. Some of his quietest, simplest phrases have a +wonderful evocative power: "the long reign of these quiet Antonines," +for example; "the thunder which had sounded all day among the hills"; +"far into the night, when heavy rain-drops had driven the last lingerers +home"; "Flavian was no more. The little marble chest with its dust and +tears lay cold among the faded flowers." What could be simpler than +these brief sentences, yet how peculiarly suggestive they are; +what immediate pictures they make! And this magical simplicity is +particularly successful in his descriptive passages, notably of natural +effects, effects caught with an instinctively selected touch or two, +an expressive detail, a grey or coloured word. How lightly sketched, +and yet how clearly realized in the imagination, is the ancestral +country-house of Marius's boyhood, "White-Nights," "that exquisite +fragment of a once large and sumptuous villa"--"Two centuries of the +play of the sea-wind were in the velvet of the mosses which lay along +its inaccessible ledges and angles." Take again this picture: + + The cottagers still lingered at their doors for a few minutes as the + shadows grew larger, and went to rest early; though there was still + a glow along the road through the shorn corn-fields, and the birds + were still awake about the crumbling grey heights of an old temple. + +And again this picture of a wayside inn: + + The room in which he sat down to supper, unlike the ordinary + Roman inns at that day, was trim and sweet. The firelight danced + cheerfully upon the polished three-wicked _lucernae_ burning cleanly + with the best oil, upon the whitewashed walls, and the bunches of + scarlet carnations set in glass goblets. The white wine of the place + put before him, of the true colour and flavour of the grape, and + with a ring of delicate foam as it mounted in the cup, had a + reviving edge or freshness he had found in no other wine. + +Those who judge of Pater's writing by a few purple passages such as the +famous rhapsody on the _Mona Lisa_, conceiving it as always thus heavy +with narcotic perfume, know but one side of him, and miss his gift +for conveying freshness, his constant happiness in light and air and +particularly running water, "green fields--or children's faces." His +lovely chapter on the temple of Aesculapius seems to be made entirely +of morning light, bubbling springs, and pure mountain air; and the +religious influence of these lustral elements is his constant theme. +For him they have a natural sacramental value, and it is through +them and such other influences that Pater seeks for his hero the +sanctification of the senses and the evolution of the spirit. In his +preoccupation with them, and all things lovely to the eye and to the +intelligence, it is that the secret lies of the singular purity of +atmosphere which pervades his _Marius_, an atmosphere which might be +termed the soul-beauty of the book, as distinct from its, so to say, +body-beauty as beautiful prose. + +Considering _Marius_ as a story, a work of imagination, one finds the +same evocative method used in the telling of it, and in the portrayal +of character, as Pater employs in its descriptive passages. Owing +to certain violent, cinematographic methods of story-telling and +character-drawing to which we have become accustomed, it is too often +assumed that stories cannot be told or characters drawn in any other +way. Actually, of course, as many an old masterpiece admonishes us, +there is no one canon in this matter, but, on the contrary, no limit to +the variety of method and manner a creative artist is at liberty to +employ in his imaginative treatment of human life. All one asks is that +the work should live, the characters and scenes appear real to us, and +the story be told. And Pater's _Marius_ entirely satisfies this demand +for those to whom such a pilgrimage of the soul will alone appeal. It is +a real story, no mere German scholar's attempt to animate the dry bones +of his erudition; and the personages and the scenes do actually live +for us, as by some delicate magic of hint and suggestion; and, though at +first they may seem shadowy, they have a curious way of persisting, and, +as it were, growing more and more alive in our memories. The figure of +Marcus Aurelius, for example, though so delicately sketched, is a +masterpiece of historical portraiture, as the pictures of Roman life, +done with so little, seem to me far more convincing than the like +over-elaborated pictures of antiquity, so choked with learned detail, +of Flaubert and of Gautier. Swinburne's famous praise of Gautier's +_Mademoiselle de Maupin_ applies with far greater fitness to Pater's +masterpiece; for, if ever a book deserved to be described as + + The golden book of spirit and sense, + The holy writ of beauty, + +it is _Marius the Epicurean_. + +It has been natural to dwell so long on this "golden book," because +Pater's various gifts are concentrated in it, to make what is, of +course, his masterpiece; though some one or other of these gifts is to +be found employed with greater mastery in other of his writings, notably +that delicate dramatic gift of embodying in a symbolic story certain +subtle states of mind and refinements of temperament which reaches its +perfection in _Imaginary Portraits_, to which the later "Apollo in +Picardy" and "Hippolytus Veiled" properly belong. It is only necessary +to recall the exquisitely austere "Sebastian Van Storck" and the +strangely contrasting Dionysiac "Denys L'Auxerrois" to justify one's +claim for Pater as a creative artist of a rare kind, with a singular and +fascinating power of incarnating a philosophic formula, a formula no +less dry than Spinoza's, or a mood of the human spirit, in living, +breathing types and persuasive tragic fables. This genius for creative +interpretation is the soul and significance of all his criticism. It +gives their value to the studies of _The Renaissance_, but perhaps its +finest flower is to be found in the later _Greek Studies_. To Flavian, +Pater had said in _Marius_, "old mythology seemed as full of untried, +unexpressed motives and interest as human life itself," and with what +marvellous skill and evocative application of learning, he himself later +developed sundry of those "untried, unexpressed motives," as in his +studies of the myths of Dionysus--"The spirit of fire and dew, alive and +leaping in a thousand vines"--and Demeter and Persephone--"the peculiar +creation of country people of a high impressibility, dreaming over their +work in spring or autumn, half consciously touched by a sense of its +sacredness, and a sort of mystery about it"--no reader of Pater needs to +be told. This same creative interpretation gives a like value to his +studies of Plato; and so by virtue of this gift, active throughout the +ten volumes which constitute his collected work, Pater proved himself +to be of the company of the great humanists. + +Along with all the other constituents of his work, its sacerdotalism, +its subtle reverie, its sensuous colour and perfume, its marmoreal +austerity, its honeyed music, its frequent preoccupation with the +haunted recesses of thought, there go an endearing homeliness and +simplicity, a deep human tenderness, a gentle friendliness, a something +childlike. He has written of her, "the presence that rose thus so +strangely beside the waters," to whom all experience had been "but as +the sound of lyres and flutes," and he has written of "The Child in the +House." Among all "the strange dyes, strange colours, and curious +odours, and work of the artist's hands," one never misses "the face of +one's friend"; and, in all its wanderings, the soul never strays far +from the white temples of the gods and the sound of running water. + +It is by virtue of this combination of humanity, edification, and +aesthetic delight that Walter Pater is unique among the great teachers +and artists of our time. + + + + +XXIII + +THE MYSTERY OF "FIONA MACLEOD" [1] + + + [1]_William Sharp (Fiona Macleod)_. A Memoir, compiled + by his wife, Elizabeth A. Sharp. (Duffield & Co.) + _The Writings of Fiona Macleod_. Uniform edition. Arranged + by Mrs. William Sharp. (Duffield & Co.) + +In the fascinating memoir of her husband, which Mrs. William Sharp has +written with so much dignity and tact, and general biographic skill, she +dwells with particular fondness of recollection on the two years of +their life at Phenice Croft, a charming cottage they had taken in the +summer of 1892 at Rudgwick in Sussex, seven miles from Horsham, the +birthplace of Shelley. Still fresh in my memory is a delightful visit I +paid them there, and I was soon afterwards to recall with special +significance a conversation I had with Mrs. Sharp, as four of us walked +out one evening after dinner in a somewhat melancholy twilight, the +glow-worms here and there trimming their ghostly lamps by the wayside, +and the nightjar churring its hoarse lovesong somewhere in the +thickening dusk. + +"Will," Mrs. Sharp confided to me, was soon to have a surprise for his +friends in a fuller and truer expression of himself than his work had +so far attained, but the nature of that expression Mrs. Sharp did not +confide--more than to hint that there were powers and qualities in her +husband's make-up that had hitherto lain dormant, or had, at all events, +been but little drawn upon. + +Mrs. Sharp was thus vaguely hinting at the future "Fiona Macleod," +for it was at Rudgwick, we learn, that that so long mysterious +literary entity sprang into imaginative being with _Pharais_. _Pharais_ +was published in 1894, and I remember that early copies of it came +simultaneously to myself and Grant Allen, with whom I was then staying, +and how we were both somewhat _intrigue_ by a certain air of mystery +which seemed to attach to the little volume. We were both intimate +friends of William Sharp, but I was better acquainted with Sharp's +earlier poetry than Grant Allen, and it was my detection in _Pharais_ +of one or two subtly observed natural images, the use of which had +previously struck me in one of his _Romantic Ballads and Poems of +Phantasy_, that brought to my mind in a flash of understanding that +Rudgwick conversation with Mrs. Sharp, and thus made me doubly certain +that "Fiona Macleod" and William Sharp were one, if not the same. +Conceiving no reason for secrecy, and only too happy to find that my +friend had fulfilled his wife's prophecy by such fuller and finer +expression of himself, I stated my belief as to its authorship in a +review I wrote for the London _Star_. My review brought me an urgent +telegram from Sharp, begging me, for God's sake, to shut my mouth--or +words to that effect. Needless to say, I did my best to atone for +having thus put my foot in it, by a subsequent severe silence till +now unbroken; though I was often hard driven by curious inquirers to +preserve the secret which my friend afterwards confided to me. + +When I say "confided to me," I must add that in the many confidences +William Sharp made to me on the matter, I was always aware of a reserve +of fanciful mystification, and I am by no means sure, even now, that I, +or any of us--with the possible exception of Mrs. Sharp--know the whole +truth about "Fiona Macleod." Indeed it is clear from Mrs. Sharp's +interesting revelations of her husband's temperament that "the whole +truth" could hardly be known even to William Sharp himself; for, very +evidently in "Fiona Macleod" we have to deal not merely with a literary +mystification, but with a psychological mystery. Here it is pertinent to +quote the message written to be delivered to certain of his friends +after his death: "This will reach you," he says, "after my death. You +will think I have wholly deceived you about Fiona Macleod. But, in an +intimate sense this is not so, though (and inevitably) in certain +details I have misled you. Only, it is a mystery. I cannot explain. +Perhaps you will intuitively understand or may come to understand. 'The +rest is silence.' Farewell. WILLIAM SHARP." + +"It is only right, however, to add that I, and I only, was the +author--in the literal and literary sense--of all written under the +name of 'Fiona Macleod.'" + +"Only, it is a mystery. I cannot explain." Does "I cannot explain" mean +"I must not explain," or merely just what it says? I am inclined to +think it means both; but, if so, the "must not" would refer to the +purely personal mystification on which, of course, none would desire to +intrude, and the "cannot" would refer to that psychological mystery +which we are at liberty to investigate. + +William Sharp's explanation to myself--as I believe to others of his +friends--was to the same tenor as this posthumous statement. He and he +only had actually _written_ the "Fiona Macleod" fantasies and poems, +but--yes! there was a real "Fiona Macleod" as well. She was a beautiful +cousin of his, living much in solitude and dreams, and seldom visiting +cities. Between her and him there was a singular spiritual kinship, +which by some inexplicable process, so to say, of psychic collaboration, +had resulted in the writings to which he had given her name. They were +hers as well as his, his as well as hers. Several times he even went so +far as to say that Miss Macleod was contemplating a visit to London, but +that her visit was to be kept a profound secret, and that he intended +introducing her to three of his friends and no more--George Meredith, +W.B. Yeats, and myself. Probably he made the same mock-confidence to +other friends, as a part of his general scheme of mystification. On one +occasion, when I was sitting with him in his study, he pointed to the +framed portrait of a beautiful woman which stood on top of a revolving +book-case, and said "That is Fiona!" I affected belief, but, rightly or +wrongly, it was my strong impression that the portrait thus labelled was +that of a well-known Irish lady prominently identified with Home Rule +politics, and I smiled to myself at the audacious white lie. Mrs. Sharp, +whose remembrance of her husband goes back to "a merry, mischievous +little boy in his eighth year, with light-brown curly hair, blue-grey +eyes, and a laughing face, and dressed in a tweed kilt," tells us that +this "love not only of mystery for its own sake, but of mystification +also," was a marked characteristic of his nature--a characteristic +developed even in childhood by the necessity he always felt of hiding +away from his companions that visionary side of his life which was +almost painfully vivid with him, and the sacredness of which in late +years he felt compelled to screen under his pseudonym. + +That William Sharp's affirmation of an actual living and breathing +"Fiona Macleod" was, however, virtually true is confided by this +significant and illuminating passage in Mrs. Sharp's biography. Mrs. +Sharp is speaking of a sojourn together in Rome during the spring of +1891, in which her husband had experienced an unusual exaltation and +exuberance of vital and creative energy. + + There, at last [she says], he had found the desired incentive + towards a true expression of himself, in the stimulus and + sympathetic understanding of the friend to whom he dedicated the + first of the books published under his pseudonym. This friendship + began in Rome and lasted throughout the remainder of his life. And + though this new phase of his work was at no time the result of + collaboration, as certain of his critics have suggested, he was + deeply conscious of his indebtedness to this friend, for--as he + stated to me in a letter of instructions, written before he went to + America in 1896, concerning his wishes in the event of his death--he + realized that it was "to her I owe my development as 'Fiona + Macleod,' though in a sense of course that began long before I + knew her, and indeed while I was still a child," and that, as he + believed, "without her there would have been no 'Fiona Macleod.'" + Because of her beauty, her strong sense of life and of the joy of + life; because of her keen intuitions and mental alertness, her + personality stood for him as a symbol of the heroic women of Greek + and Celtic days, a symbol that, as he expressed it, unlocked new + doors in his mind and put him "in touch with ancestral memories" of + his race. So, for a time, he stilled the critical, intellectual mood + of William Sharp, to give play to the development of this new-found + expression of subtle emotions, towards which he had been moving with + all the ardour of his nature. + +From this statement of Mrs. Sharp one naturally turns to the dedication +of _Pharais_ to which she refers, finding a dedicatory letter +to "E.W.R." dealing for the most part with "Celtic" matters, but +containing these more personal passages: + + Dear friend [the letter begins], while you gratify me by your + pleasure in this inscription, you modestly deprecate the dedication + to you of this study of alien life--of that unfamiliar island-life + so alien in all ways from the life of cities, and, let me add, from + that of the great mass of the nation to which, in the communal + sense, we both belong. But in the Domhan-Toir of friendship there + are resting-places where all barriers of race, training, and + circumstances fall away in dust. At one of these places we met, a + long while ago, and found that we loved the same things, and in the + same way. + +The letter ends with this: "There is another Paras (Paradise) than that +seen of Alastair of Innisron--the Tir-Nan-Oigh of friendship. Therein we +both have seen beautiful visions and dreamed dreams. Take, then, out of +my heart, this book of vision and dream." + +"Fiona Macleod," then, would appear to be the collective name given to +a sort of collaborative Three-in-One mysteriously working together: an +inspiring Muse with the initials E.W.R.; that psychical "other self" +of whose existence and struggle for expression William Sharp had been +conscious all his life; and William Sharp, general _litterateur_, as +known to his friends and reading public. "Fiona Macleod" would seem to +have always existed as a sort of spiritual prisoner within that comely +and magnetic earthly tenement of clay known as William Sharp, but +whom William Sharp had been powerless to free in words, till, at +the wand-like touch of E.W.R.--the creative stimulus of a profound +imaginative friendship--a new power of expression had been given to +him--a power of expression strangely missing from William Sharp's +previous acknowledged writings. + +To speak faithfully, it was the comparative mediocrity, and occasional +even positive badness, of the work done over his own name that formed +one of the stumbling-blocks to the acceptance of the theory that William +Sharp _could_ be "Fiona Macleod." Of course, his work had been that of +an accomplished widely-read man of letters, his life of Heine being +perhaps his most notable achievement in prose; and his verse had not +been without intermittent flashes and felicities, suggestive of +smouldering poetic fires, particularly in his _Sospiri di Roma_; but, +for the most part, it had lacked any personal force or savour, and was +entirely devoid of that magnetism with which William Sharp, the man, was +so generously endowed. In fact, its disappointing inadequacy was a +secret source of distress to the innumerable friends who loved him +with a deep attachment, to which the many letters making one of the +delightful features of Mrs. Sharp's biography bear witness. In himself +William Sharp was so prodigiously a personality, so conquering in the +romantic flamboyance of his sun-like vitality, so overflowing with the +charm of a finely sensitive, richly nurtured temperament, so essentially +a poet in all he felt and did and said, that it was impossible patiently +to accept his writings as any fair expression of himself. He was, as we +say, so much more than his books--so immeasurably and delightfully +more--that, compared with himself, his books practically amounted to +nothing; and one was inclined to say of him in one's heart, as one does +sometimes say of such imperfectly articulate artistic natures: "What +a pity he troubles to write at all! Why not be satisfied with being +William Sharp? Why spoil 'William Sharp' by this inadequate and +misleading translation?" + +The curious thing, too, was that the work he did over his own name, +after "Fiona Macleod" had escaped into the freedom of her own beautiful +individual utterance, showed no improvement in quality, no marks of +having sprung from the same mental womb where it had lain side by side +with so fair a sister. But, of course, one can readily understand that +such work would naturally lack spontaneity of impulse, having to be +done, more or less, against the grain, from reasons of expediency: so +long as "Fiona Macleod" must remain a secret, William Sharp must produce +something to show for himself, in order to go on protecting that secret, +which would, also, be all the better kept by William Sharp continuing in +his original mediocrity. Of this dual activity, Mrs. Sharp thus writes +with much insight: + + From then till the end of his life [she says] there was a continual + play of the two forces in him, or of the two sides of his nature: of + the intellectually observant, reasoning mind--the actor, and of the + intuitively observant, spiritual mind--the dreamer, which + differentiated more and more one from the other, and required + different conditions, different environment, different stimuli, + until he seemed to be two personalities in one. It was a development + which, as it proceeded, produced a tremendous strain on his physical + and mental resources, and at one time between 1897-8 threatened him + with a complete nervous collapse. And there was for a time distinct + opposition between those two natures which made it extremely + difficult for him to adjust his life, for the two conditions were + equally imperative in their demands upon him. + + His preference, naturally, was for the intimate creative work which + he knew grew out of his inner self; though the exigencies of life, + his dependence on his pen for his livelihood, and, moreover, the + keen active interest "William Sharp" took in all the movements of + the day, literary and political, at home and abroad, required of + him a great amount of applied study and work. + +The strain must indeed have been enormous, and one cannot but feel that +much of it was a needless, even trivial "expense of spirit," and regret +that, when "Fiona Macleod" had so manifestly come into her own, William +Sharp should have continued to keep up the mystification, entailing as +it did such an elaborate machinery of concealment, not the least taxing +of which must have been the necessity of keeping up "Fiona Macleod's" +correspondence as well as his own. Better, so to say, to have thrown +William Sharp overboard, and to have reserved the energies of a +temperament almost abnormally active, but physically delusive and +precarious, for the finer productiveness of "Fiona Macleod." But William +Sharp deemed otherwise. He was wont to say, "Should the secret be found +out, Fiona dies," and in a letter to Mrs. Thomas A. Janvier--she and her +husband being among the earliest confidants of his secret--he makes this +interesting statement: "I can write out of my heart in a way I could +not do as William Sharp, and indeed I could not do so if I were the +woman Fiona Macleod is supposed to be, unless veiled in scrupulous +anonymity.... This rapt sense of oneness with nature, this _cosmic +ecstasy_ and elation, this wayfaring along the extreme verges of the +common world, all this is so wrought up with the romance of life that +I could not bring myself to expression by my outer self, insistent and +tyrannical as that need is.... My truest self, the self who is below +all other selves, and my most intimate life and joys and sufferings, +thoughts, emotions, and dreams, _must_ find expression, yet I cannot +save in this hidden way...." + +Later he wrote: "Sometimes I am tempted to believe I am half a woman, +and so far saved as I am by the hazard of chance from what a woman can +be made to suffer if one let the light of the common day illuminate the +avenues and vistas of her heart...." + +At one time, I thought that William Sharp's assumption of a feminine +pseudonym was a quite legitimate device to steal a march on his critics, +and to win from them, thus disguised, that recognition which he must +have been aware he had failed to win in his own person. Indeed, it is +doubtful whether, if he had published the "Fiona Macleod" writings under +his own name, they would have received fair critical treatment. I am +very sure that they would not; for there is quite a considerable amount +of so-called "criticism" which is really foregone conclusion based on +personal prejudice, or biassed preconception, and the refusal to admit +(employing a homely image) that an old dog does occasionally learn new +tricks. Many well-known writers have resorted to this device, sometimes +with considerable success. Since reading Mrs. Sharp's biography, +however, I conclude that this motive had but little, if any, influence +on William Sharp, and that his statement to Mrs. Janvier must be taken +as virtually sincere. + +A certain histrionism, which was one of his charms, and is perhaps +inseparable from imaginative temperaments, doubtless had its share in +his consciousness of that "dual nature" of which we hear so much, +and which it is difficult sometimes to take with Sharp's "Celtic" +seriousness. Take, for example, this letter to his wife, when, having +left London, precipitately, in response to the call of the Isles, he +wrote: "The following morning we (for a kinswoman was with me) stood on +the Greenock pier waiting for the Hebridean steamer, and before long +were landed on an island, almost the nearest we could reach, that I +loved so well." Mrs. Sharp dutifully comments: "The 'we' who stood on +the pier at Greenock is himself in his dual capacity; his 'kinswoman' is +his other self." Later he writes, on his arrival in the Isle of Arran: +"There is something of a strange excitement in the knowledge that two +people are here: so intimate and yet so far off. For it is with me as +though Fiona were asleep in another room. I catch myself listening +for her step sometimes, for the sudden opening of a door. It is +unawaredly that she whispers to me. I am eager to see what she will +do--particularly in _The Mountain Lovers_. It seems passing strange +to be here with her alone at last...." I confess that this strikes +me disagreeably. It is one thing to be conscious of a "dual +personality"--after all, consciousness of dual personality is by no +means uncommon, and it is a commonplace that, spiritually, men of genius +are largely feminine--but it is another to dramatize one's consciousness +in this rather childish fashion. There seems more than a suspicion of +pose in such writing: though one cannot but feel that William Sharp was +right in thinking that the real "Fiona Macleod" was asleep at the +moment. At the same time, William Sharp seems unmistakably to have been +endowed with what I suppose one has to call "psychic" powers--though the +word has been "soiled with all ignoble use"--and to be the possessor +in a considerable degree of that mysterious "sight" or sixth sense +attributed to men and women of Gaelic blood. Mrs. Sharp tells a curious +story of his mood immediately preceding that flight to the Isles of +which I have been writing. He had been haunted the night before by the +sound of the sea. It seemed to him that he heard it splashing in the +night against the walls of his London dwelling. So real it had seemed +that he had risen from his bed and looked out of the window, and even in +the following afternoon, in his study, he could still hear the waves +dashing against the house. "A telegram had come for him that morning," +writes Mrs. Sharp, "and I took it to his study. I could get no answer. +I knocked, louder, then louder,--at last he opened the door with a +curiously dazed look in his face. I explained. He answered: 'Ah, I +could not hear you for the sound of the waves!'" + +His last spoken words have an eerie suggestiveness in this connection. +Writing of his death on the 12th of December, 1905, Mrs. Sharp says: +"About three o'clock, with his devoted friend Alec Hood by his side, he +suddenly leant forward with shining eyes and exclaimed in a tone of +joyous recognition, 'Oh, the beautiful "Green Life," again!' and the +next moment sank back in my arms with the contented sigh, 'Ah, all is +well!'" + +"The green life" was a phrase often on Sharp's lips, and stood for him +for that mysterious life of elemental things to which he was almost +uncannily sensitive, and into which he seemed able strangely to merge +himself, of which too his writings as "Fiona Macleod" prove him to have +had "invisible keys." It is this, so to say, conscious pantheism, +this kinship with the secret forces and subtle moods of nature, this +responsiveness to her mystic spiritual "intimations," that give to those +writings their peculiar significance and value. In the external lore of +nature William Sharp was exceptionally learned. Probably no writer in +English, with the exceptions of George Meredith and Grant Allen, was his +equal here, and his knowledge had been gained, as such knowledge can +only be gained, in that receptive period of an adventurous boyhood of +which he has thus written: "From fifteen to eighteen I sailed up every +loch, fjord, and inlet in the Western Highlands and islands, from Arran +and Colonsay to Skye and the Northern Hebrides, from the Rhinns of +Galloway to the Ord of Sutherland. Wherever I went I eagerly associated +myself with fishermen, sailors, shepherds, gamekeepers, poachers, +gypsies, wandering pipers, and other musicians." For two months he had +"taken the heather" with, and had been "star-brother" and "sun-brother" +to, a tribe of gypsies, and in later years he had wandered variously in +many lands, absorbing the wonder and the beauty of the world. Well +might he write to Mrs. Janvier: "I have had a very varied, and, to use a +much abused word, a very romantic life in its internal as well as in its +external aspects." Few men have drunk so deep of the cup of life, and +from such pure sky-reflecting springs, and if it be true, in the words +of his friend Walter Pater, that "to burn ever with this hard gem-like +flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life," then indeed the +life of William Sharp was a nobly joyous success. + +And to those who loved him it is a great happiness to know that he was +able to crown this ecstasy of living with that victory of expression for +which his soul had so long travailed, and to leave behind him not only a +lovely monument of star-lit words, but a spiritual legacy of perennial +refreshment, a fragrant treasure-house of recaptured dreams, and +hallowed secrets of the winds of time: for such are _The Writings of +"Fiona Macleod"_. + + + + +XXIV + +FORBES-ROBERTSON: AN APPRECIATION + + +The voluntary abdication of power in its zenith has always fascinated +and "intrigued" the imagination of mankind. We are so accustomed to +kings and other gifted persons holding on to their sceptres with a +desperate tenacity, even through those waning years when younger men, +beholding their present feebleness, wonder whether their previous might +was not a fancy of their fathers, whether, in fact, they were ever +really kings or gifted persons at all. In so many cases we have to rely +on a legend of past accomplishment to preserve our reverence. Therefore, +when a Sulla or a Charles V. or a Mary Anderson, leave their thrones at +the moment when their sway over us is most assured and brilliant, we +wonder--wonder at a phenomenon rare in humanity, and suggestive of +romantic reserves of power which seal not only our allegiance to them, +but that of posterity. The mystery which resides in all greatness, in +all charm, is not violated by the cynical explanations of decay. They +remain fortunate as those whom the gods loved, wearing the aureoles of +immortal promise. + +Few artists have been wise in this respect; poets, for example, very +seldom. Thus we find the works of most of them encumbered with the +debris of their senility. Coventry Patmore was a rare example of a poet +who laid down his pen deliberately, not merely as an artist in words, +but as an artist in life, having, as he said in the memorable preface to +the collected edition of his poems, completed that work which in his +youth he had set before him. His readers, therefore, are not saddened by +any pathetic gleanings from a once-rich harvest-field, or the carefully +picked-up shakings of November boughs. + +Forbes-Robertson is one of those artists who has chosen to bid farewell +to his art while he is still indisputably its master. One or two other +distinguished actors before him have thus chosen, and a greater number +have bade us, those professional "farewells" that remind one of that +dream of De Quincey in which he heard reverberated "Everlasting +farewells! and again and yet again reverberated--everlasting farewells!" +In Forbes-Robertson's case, however, apart from our courteous taking the +word of his management, we know that the news is sadly true. There is +a curious personal honour and sincerity breathing through all his +impersonations that make us feel, so to say, that not only would we take +the ghost's word for a thousand pounds, but that between him and his art +is such an austere compact that he would be incapable of humiliating it +by any mere advertising devices; and beyond that, those who have seen +him play this time (1914) in New York must have been aware that in the +very texture of all his performances was woven like a sigh the word +"farewell." His very art, as I shall have later to emphasize, is an art +of farewell; but, apart from that general quality, it seemed to me, +though, indeed, it may have been mere sympathetic fancy, that in these +last New York performances, as in the performances last spring in +London, I heard a personal valedictory note. Forbes-Robertson seemed to +be saying good-by at once to his audience and to his art. + +In doing this, along with the inevitable sadness that must accompany +such a step, one cannot but think there will be a certain private +whimsical satisfaction for him in being able to go about the world in +after years with his great gift still his, hidden away, but still his to +use at any moment, and to know not only that he has been, but still is, +as it were, in secret, the supreme Hamlet of his time. Something +like that, one may imagine, must be the private fun of abdication. +Forbes-Robertson, as he himself has told us, lays down one art only to +take up another to which he has long been devoted, and of his early +affiliation to which the figure of Love Kissing Beatrice in Rossetti's +"Dante's Dream" bears illustrious and significant witness. As, one +recalls that he was the model for that figure one realizes that even +then he was the young lord Hamlet, born to be _par excellence_ the actor +of sorrow and renunciation. + +It is not my province to write here of Forbes-Robertson from the point +of view of the reminiscent playgoer or of the technical critic of +acting. Others, obviously, are far better qualified to undertake those +offices for his fame. I would merely offer him the tribute of one to +whom for many years his acting has been something more than acting, as +usually understood, something to class with great poetry, and all the +spiritual exaltation which "great poetry" implies. From first to last, +however associated with that whimsical comedy of which, too, he is +appropriately a master, he has struck for me that note of almost +heartbreaking spiritual intensity which, under all its superficial +materialism and cynicism, is the key-note of the modern world. + +When I say "first," I am thinking of the first time I saw him, on the +first night of _The Profligate_ by Pinero, in its day one of the plays +that blazed the trail for that social, or, rather, I should say, +sociological, drama since become even more deadly in earnest, though +perhaps less deadly in skill. Incidentally, I remember that Miss Olga +Nethersole, then quite unknown, made a striking impression of evil, +though playing only a small part. It was Forbes-Robertson, however, for +me, and I think for all the playgoing London of the time, that gave the +play its chief value by making us startlingly aware, through the +poignancy of his personality, of what one might call the voice of the +modern conscience. To associate that thrillingly beautiful and profound +voice of his with anything that sounds so prosaic as a "modern +conscience" may seem unkind, but actually our modern conscience is +anything but prosaic, and combines within it something at once poetic +and prophetic, of which that something ghostly in Forbes-Robertson's +acting is peculiarly expressive. That quality of other-worldliness which +at once scared and fascinated the lodgers in _The Passing of the Third +Floor Back_ is present in all Forbes-Robertson's acting. It was that +which strangely stirred us, that first night of _The Profligate_. We +meet it again with the blind Dick Heldar in _The Light That Failed_, and +of course we meet it supremely in _Hamlet_. In fact, it is that quality +which, chief among others, makes Forbes-Robertson's Hamlet the classical +Hamlet of his time. + +Forbes-Robertson has of course played innumerable parts. Years before +_The Profligate_, he had won distinction as the colleague of Irving and +Mary Anderson. He may be said to have played everything under the sun. +His merely theatric experience has thus enriched and equipped his +temperament with a superb technique. It would probably be impossible for +him to play any part badly, and of the various successes he has made, to +which his present repertoire bears insufficient witness, others, as I +have said, can point out the excellences. My concern here is with his +art in its fullest and finest expression, in its essence; and therefore +it is unnecessary for me to dwell upon any other of his impersonations +than that of Hamlet. When a man can play _Hamlet_ so supremely, it may +be taken for granted, I presume, that he can play _Mice and Men_, or +even that masterpiece of all masterpieces, _Caesar and Cleopatra_. I +trust that it is no disrespect to the distinguished authors of these two +plays to say that such plays in a great actor's repertoire represent +less his versatility than his responsibilities, that pot-boiling +necessity which hampers every art, and that of the actor, perhaps, most +of all. + +To my thinking, the chief interest of all Forbes-Robertson's other parts +is that they have "fed" his Hamlet; and, indeed, many of his best parts +may be said to be studies for various sides of Hamlet, his fine _Romeo_, +for example, which, unfortunately, he no longer plays. In _Hamlet_ all +his qualities converge, and in him the tradition of the stage that all +an ambitious actor's experience is only to fit him to play Hamlet is for +once justified. But, of course, the chief reason of that success is that +nature meant Forbes-Robertson to play Hamlet. Temperament, personality, +experience, and training have so worked together that he does not merely +play, but _is_, Hamlet. Such, at all events, is the complete illusion he +is able to produce. + +Of course, one has heard from them of old time that an actor's +personality must have nothing to do with the part he is playing; that he +only is an actor who can most successfully play the exact opposite of +himself. That is the academic theory of "character-acting," and of +course the half-truth of it is obvious. It represents the weariness +induced in audiences by handsome persons who merely, in the stage +phrase, "bring their bodies on"; yet it would go hard with some of our +most delightful comedians were it the whole truth about acting. As a +matter of fact, of course, a great actor includes a multiplicity of +selves, so that he may play many parts, yet always be playing himself. +Beyond himself no artist, whatever his art, has ever gone. + +What reduplication of personality is necessary for the man who plays +Hamlet need hardly be said, what wide range of humanity and variety of +accomplishment; for, as Anatole France has finely said of Hamlet, "He is +a man, he is man, he is the whole of man." + +Time was when _Hamlet_ was little more than an opportunity for some +robustious periwig-pated fellow, or it gave the semi-learned actor the +chance to conceal his imaginative incapacity by a display of "new +readings." For example, instead of saying: + + The air bites shrewdly; it is very cold, + +you diverted attention from your acting by an appeal to the literary +antiquarianism of your audience, and, out of one or other of the +quartos, read the line: + + The air bites shrewdly; _is_ it very cold? + +with the implication that there was a whole world of suggestion in the +difference. + +One has known actors, far from unillustrious, who staked their whole +performance on some such learned triviality or some trifling novelty of +business, when, for example, in Hamlet's scene with his mother, the +prince comes to: + + Look here upon this picture, and on this. + +An actor who deserves better than he has yet received in the tradition +of the acted _Hamlet_--I mean Wilson Barrett--used to make much of +taking a miniature of his father from his bosom to point the contrast. + +But all such things in the end are of no account. New readings, new +business, avail less and less. Nor does painstaking archaeology of +scenery or dresses any longer throw dust in our eyes. We are for the +play, the living soul of the play. Give us that, and your properties may +be no more elaborate than those of a _guignol_ in the Champs-Elysees. + +Forbes-Robertson's acting is so imaginative, creating the scene about +him as he plays, that one almost resents any stage-settings for him at +all, however learnedly accurate and beautifully painted. + +His soul seems to do so much for us that we almost wish it could be +left to do it all, and he act for us as they acted in Elizabeth's day, +with only a curtain for scenery, and a placard at the side of the stage +saying, "This is Elsinore." + +One could hardly say more for one's sense of the reality of +Forbes-Robertson's acting, as, naturally, one is not unaware that +distressing experiments have been made to reproduce the Elizabethan +theatre by actors who, on the other hand, were sadly in need of all +that scenery, archaeology, or orchestra could do for them. + +With a world overcrowded with treatises on the theme, from, and before, +Gervinus, with the commentary of _Wilhelm Meister_ in our minds, not to +speak of the starlit text ever there for our reading, there is surely no +need to traverse the character of Hamlet. He has meant so much to our +fathers--though he can never have meant so much to them as he does to us +of today--that he is, so to say, in our blood. He is strangely near to +our hearts by sheer inheritance. And perhaps the most beautiful thing +Forbes-Robertson's Hamlet does for us is that it commands our love for a +great gentleman doing his gentlest and bravest and noblest with a sad +smile and a gay humour, in not merely a complicated, wicked, absurd, and +tiresome, but, also, a ghostly world. + +When we think of Hamlet, we think of him as two who knew him very well +thought of him,--Ophelia and Horatio,--and as one who saw him only as he +sat at last on his throne, dead, with the crown of Denmark on his +knees. + +Ophelia's + + Courtier's, soldier's, scholar's eye, tongue, sword, + The expectancy and rose of the fair state; + +the "sweet prince" of Horatio's "good-night"--the soldier for whose +passage Fortinbras commanded + + The soldier's music and the rites of war. + +We think of him, too, as the haunted son of a dear father murdered, a +philosophic spectator of the grotesque brutality of life, suddenly by a +ghostly summons called on to take part in it; a prince, a philosopher, a +lover, a soldier, a sad humourist. + +Were one asked what aspects of Hamlet does Forbes-Robertson specially +embody, I should say, in the first place, his princeliness, his +ghostliness, then his cynical and occasionally madcap humour, as where, +at the end of the play-scene, he capers behind the throne in a terrible +boyish glee. No actor that I have seen expresses so well that scholarly +irony of the Renaissance permeating the whole play. His scene with +Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and the recorders is masterly: the silken +sternness of it, the fine hauteur, the half-appeal as of lost ideals +still pleading with the vulgarity of life, the fierce humour of its +disillusion, and behind, as always, the heartbreak--that side of which +comes of the recognition of what it is to be a gentleman in such a +world. + +In this scene, too, as in others, Forbes-Robertson makes it clear that +that final tribute of Fortinbras was fairly won. + +The soldier--if necessary, the fighter--is there as supple and strong as +a Damascus blade. One is always aware of the "something dangerous," for +all his princely manners and scholarly ways. One is never left in doubt +as to how this Hamlet will play the man. It is all too easy for him to +draw his sword and make an end of the whole fantastic business. Because +this philosophic swordsman holds the sword, let no one think that he +knows not how to wield it. All this gentleness--have a care!--is that of +an unusually masculine restraint. + +In the scene with Ophelia, Forbes-Robertson's tenderness was almost +terrible. It came from such a height of pity upon that little +uncomprehending flower! + +"I never gave you aught," as Forbes-Robertson said it, seemed to mean: +"I gave you all--all that you could not understand." "Yet are not you +and I in the toils of that destiny there that moves the arras. _Is_ it +your father?" + +Along with Forbes-Robertson's spiritual interpretation of Shakespeare +goes pre-eminently, and doubtless as a contributive part of it, his +imaginative revitalization of the great old lines--lines worn like a +highway with the passage of the generations. As a friend of mine +graphically phrased it, "How he revives for us the splendour of the +text!" + +The splendour of the text! It is a good phrase, and how splendid the +text is we, of course, all know--know so well that we take it for +granted, and so fall into forgetfulness of its significance; forgetting +what central fires of soul and intellect must have gone to the creation +of such a world of transcendent words. + +Yet how living the lines still are, though the generations have almost +quoted the life out of them, no man who has spoken them on the stage in +our day, except Forbes-Robertson, has had the gift to show. + +It is more than elocution, masterly elocution as it is, more than the +superbly modulated voice: the power comes of spiritual springs welling +up beneath the voice--springs fed from those infinite sources which "lie +beyond the reaches of our souls." + +Merely to take the phrase I have just quoted, how few actors--or readers +of Shakespeare, or members of any Shakespearian audience, for that +matter--have any personal conception of what it means! They may make a +fine crescendo with it, but that is all. They have never stood, +shrinking and appalled, yet drawn with a divine temptation, upon the +brink of that vastness along the margin of which, it is evident, that +Hamlet often wandered. It is in vain they tell their audiences and +Horatio: + + There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, + Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. + +We are quite sure that they know nothing of what they are saying; and +that, as a matter of fact, there are few things for them in heaven or +earth except the theatre they are playing in, their actors' club, and, +generally, their genial mundane lives; and, of course, one rather +congratulates them on the simplicity of their lives, congratulates them +on their ignorance of such haunted regions of the mind. Yet, all the +same, that simplicity seems to disqualify them from playing _Hamlet_. + +Few Shakespearian actors seem to remember what they are +playing--Shakespeare. One would think that to be held a worthy +interpreter of so great a dramatist, so mysterious a mind, and so +golden a poet, were enough distinction. Oscar Wilde, in a fine +sonnet, addressed Henry Irving as + + Thou trumpet set for Shakespeare's lips to blow, + +and we may be sure that Irving appreciated the honour thus paid him, he +who so wonderfully interpreted so many of Shakespeare's moods, so well +understood the irony of his intellect, even the breadth of his humanity, +yet in _Hamlet_, at all events, so strangely missed his soul. + +Most of us have seen many Hamlets die. We have watched them squirming +through those scientific contortions of dissolution, to copy which they +had very evidently walked the hospitals in a businesslike quest of +death-agonies, as certain histrionic connoisseurs of madness in France +lovingly haunt the Saltpetriere. As I look back, I wonder how we +tolerated their wriggling absurdity. I suppose it was that the hand of +tradition was still upon us, as upon them. And, let us not forget, the +words were there, the immortal words, and an atmosphere of tragic death +and immortality that only such words could create: + + Absent thee from felicity awhile, + And in the harsh world draw thy breath in pain + To hear my story ... + The rest is silence.... + +How different it is when Forbes-Robertson's Hamlet dies! All my life I +seem to have been asking my friends, those I loved best, those who +valued the dearest, the kindest, the greatest, and the strongest in our +strange human life, to come with me and see Forbes-Robertson die in +_Hamlet_. I asked them because, as that strange young dead king sat +upon his throne, there was something, whatever it meant--death, life, +immortality, what you will--of a surpassing loveliness, something +transfiguring the poor passing moment of trivial, brutal murder into a +beauty to which it was quite natural that that stern Northern warrior, +with his winged helmet, should bend the knee. I would not exchange +anything I have ever read or seen for Forbes-Robertson as he sits there +so still and starlit upon the throne of Denmark. + +Forbes-Robertson is not merely a great Shakespearian actor; he is a +great spiritual actor. The one doubtless implies the other, though the +implication has not always appeared to be obvious. + +He is prophetic of what the stage will some day be, and what we can see +it here and there preparing to become. In all the welter of the dramatic +conditions of the moment there emerges one fact, that of the growing +importance of the stage as a vehicle for what one may term general +culture. The stage, with its half-sister, the cinema, is strangely, +by how long and circuitous a route, returning of course, with an +immeasurably developed equipment, to its starting-point, ending +curiously where it began as the handmaid of the church. As with the old +moralities or miracle-plays, it is becoming once more our teacher. The +lessons of truth and beauty, as those of plain gaiety and delight, are +relying more and more upon the actor for their expression, and less on +the accredited doctors of divinity or literature. Even the dancers are +doing much for our souls. Our duties as citizens are being taught us by +well-advertised plays, and if we wish to abolish Tammany or change our +police commissioner, we enforce our desire by the object-lesson of a +play. The great new plays may not yet be here, but the public once more +is going to the theatre, as it went long ago in Athens, to be delighted +and amused, of course, but also to be instructed in national and civic +affairs, and, most important of all, to be purified by pity and terror. + + + + +XXV + +A MEMORY OF FREDERIC MISTRAL + + +There are many signs that poetry is coming into its own again--even +here in America, which, while actually one of the most romantic and +sentimental of countries, fondly imagines itself the most prosaic. + +Kipling, to name but one instance, has, by his clarion-tongued +quickening of the British Empire, shown so convincingly what dynamic +force still belongs to the right kind of singing, and the poet in +general seems to be winning back some of that serious respect from his +fellow-citizens which, under a misapprehension of his effeminacy and +general uselessness, he had lost awhile. The poet is not so much a joke +to the multitude as he was a few years ago, and the term "minor poet" +seems to have fallen into desuetude. + +Still for all this, I doubt if it is in the Anglo-Saxon blood, nowadays +at all events, to make a national hero of a poet, one might say a +veritable king, such as Frederic Mistral is today in Provence. In our +time, Bjoernson in Norway was perhaps the only parallel figure, and he +held his position as actual "father of his people" for very much the +same reasons. At once a commanding and lovable personality, he and his +work were absolutely identified with his country and his countrymen. He +was simply Norway incarnate. + +So, today in Provence, it is with Frederic Mistral. He is not only a +poet of Provence. He is Provence incarnate, and, apart from the noble +quality of his work, his position as the foremost representative of his +compatriots is romantically unique. No other country today, pointing to +its greatest man, would point out--a poet; whereas Mistral, were he not +as unspoiled as he is laurelled, might, with literal truth, say: + + "_Provence--c'est moi!_" + +We had hardly set foot in Provence this last spring, my wife and I, +before we realized, with grateful wonder, that we had come to a country +that has a poet for a king. + +On arriving at Marseilles almost the first word we heard was +"Mistral"--not the bitter wind of the same name, but the name of the +honey-tongued "Master." Our innkeeper--O the delightful innkeepers of +France!--on our consulting him as to our project of a walking trip +through the Midi--as Frenchmen usually speak of Provence--said, for his +first aid to the traveller: "Then, of course, you will see our great +poet, Mistral." And he promptly produced a copy of _Mireio_, which he +begged me to use till I had bought a copy for myself. + +"Ah! Mistral," he cried, with Gallic enthusiasm, using the words I have +borrowed from his lips, "Mistral is the King of Provence!" + +Marseilles had not always been so enthusiastic over Mistral and his +fellows. And Mistral, in his memoirs, gives an amusing account of a +philological battle fought over the letter "s" in a room behind one of +the Marseilles bookshops between "the amateurs of trivialities, the +rhymers of the white beard, the jealous, the grumblers," and the young +innovators of the "felibrige." + +But that was over fifty years ago, and the battle of those young +enthusiasts has long since been won. What that battle was and what an +extraordinary victory came of it must needs be told for the significance +of Mistral in Provence to be properly understood. + +The story is one of the most romantic in the history of literature. +Briefly, it is this: + +The Provencal language, the "langue d'oc," was, of course, once the +courtly and lettered language of Europe, the language of the great +troubadours, and through them the vehicle of the culture and refinement +of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. From it may be said to have +sprung the beginnings of Italian literature. + +But, owing to various historical vicissitudes, the language of Northern +France, the "langue d'oil," gradually took its place, and when Mistral +was born, in 1830, Provencal had long been regarded as little more than +a _patois_. + +Now it was the young Mistral's dream, as a school-boy in the old convent +school of Saint Michael de Frigolet, at Avignon, to restore his native +tongue to its former high estate, to make it once more a literary +language, and it chanced that one of his masters, Joseph Roumanille, was +secretly cherishing the same dream. + +The master, looking over his pupil's shoulder one day, found that, +instead of working at his prescribed task, he was busily engaged in +translating the Penitential Psalms into Provencal. Instead of punishing +him, the master gratefully hailed a kindred spirit, and presently +confided Provencal verses of his own making. From that moment, though +there was a dozen years' difference between their ages, Mistral and +Roumanille began a friendship which was to last till Roumanille's death, +a friendship of half a century. + +Soon their dream attracted other recruits, and presently seven friends, +whose names are all famous now, and most of whom have statues in Arles +or in Avignon--Roumanille, Mistral, Aubanel, Mathieu, Giera, Brunet, and +Tavan--after the manner of Ronsard's "Pleiade," and Rossetti's +"P.R.B."--formed themselves into a brotherhood to carry on the great +work of regeneration. + +They needed a name to call themselves by. They had all met together to +talk things over in the old castle of Font-Segugne, or, as Mistral more +picturesquely puts it: "It was written in heaven that one blossoming +Sunday, the twenty-first of May, 1854, in the full springtide of life +and of the year, seven poets should come to meet together in the castle +of Font-Segugne." Several suggestions were made for a name for this +brotherhood, but presently Mistral announced that in an old folk-story +he had collected at his birthplace, Maillane, he believed that he had +found the word they were in search of. In this folk-story the boy Christ +is represented as discoursing in the temple with "the seven felibres of +the Law." + +"Why, that is us!" exclaimed the enthusiastic young men as Mistral +finished, and there on the spot "felibre" was adopted as the password of +their order, Mistral coining the word "felibrige" to represent the work +they aimed to do, and also their association. The name stuck, and has +now for many years been the banner-word for the vigorous school of +Provencal literature and the allied arts of painting and sculpture which +has responded with such eager vitality to Mistral's rallying cry. + +But, excellent as are the other poets which the school has produced--and +one need only glance through a recent _Anthologie du Felibrige_ to +realize what a wealth of true poetry the word "felibrige" now stands +for--there can be no question that its greatest asset still remains +Mistral's own work, as it was his first great poem, _Mireio_, which +first drew the eyes of literary Paris, more than inclined to be +contemptuous, to the Provencal renaissance. + +Adolphe Dumas had been sent to Provence in the year 1856 by the Minister +of Public Instruction to collect the folk-songs of the people, and +calling on Mistral (then twenty-six), living quietly with his widowed +mother at Maillane, he had found him at work on _Mireio_. Mistral read +some passages to him, with the result that the generous Dumas returned +to Paris excitedly to proclaim the advent of a new poet. Presently, +Mistral accepted his invitation to visit Paris, was introduced to the +great Lamartine--who has left some charming pages descriptive of his +visit,--read some of _Mireio_ to him, and was hailed by him as "the +Homer of Provence." + +The press, however, had its little fling at the new-comer. "The Mistral +it appears," said one pitiful punster, "has been incarnated in a poem. +We shall soon see whether it is anything else but wind." Such has been +the invariable welcome of great men in a small world. + +But Mistral had no taste for Paris, either as a lion or a butt, and, +after a few days' stay, we find him once more quietly at home at +Maillane. Yet he had brought back with him one precious trophy--the +praise of Lamartine; and when, in the course of a year or two (1859), +_Mireio_ came to be published at Avignon, it bore, as it still bears, +this heart-felt dedication to Lamartine: + +"To thee I dedicate _Mireio_; it is my heart and my soul; it is the +flower of my years; it is a bunch of grapes from Crau with all its +leaves--a rustic's offering." + +With the publication of _Mireio_ Mistral instantly "arrived," instantly +found himself on that throne which, as year has followed year, has +become more securely his own. Since then he has written much noble +poetry, all embodying and vitalizing the legendary lore of his native +land, a land richer in momentous history, perhaps, than any other +section of Europe. But in addition to his poetry he has, single-handed, +carried through the tremendous scholarly task of compiling a dictionary +of the Provencal language--a _Thesaurus of the Felibrige_, for which +work the Institute awarded him a prize of ten thousand francs. + +In 1904, he was awarded the Nobel prize of 100,000 francs, but such is +his devotion to his fellow-countrymen that he did not keep that prize +for himself, but used it to found the Musee Arlesien at Arles, a museum +designed as a treasure house of anything and everything pertaining to +the history and life of Provence--antiquities, furniture, costumes, +paintings, and so forth. + +It was in Arles in 1909, the fiftieth birthday of _Mireio_, that +Mistral, then seventy-nine years old, may be said to have reached the +summit of his romantic fame. A great festival was held in his honour, in +which the most distinguished men of France took part. A dramatized +version of his _Mireio_ was played in the old Roman amphitheatre, and a +striking statue of him was unveiled in the antique public square, the +Place du Forum, with the shade of Constantine looking on, one might +feel, from his mouldering palace hard by. + +In Arles Mistral is a well-known, beloved figure, for it is his custom, +every Saturday, to come there from Maillane, to cast his eye over the +progress of his museum, the pet scheme of his old age. One wonders how +it must seem to pass that figure of himself, pedestaled high in the old +square. To few men is it given to pass by their own statues in the +street. Sang a very different poet-- + + They grind us to the dust with poverty, + And build us statues when we come to die. + +But poor Villon had the misfortune to be a poet of the "langue d'oil," +and the Montfaucon gibbet was the only monument of which he stood in +daily expectation. Could the lines of two poets offer a greater +contrast? Blessed indeed is he who serves the rural gods, Pan and Old +Sylvanus and the sister nymphs--as Virgil sang; and Virgilian indeed has +been the golden calm, and sunlit fortunes, as Virgilian, rather than +Homeric, is the gracious art, of the poet whom his first Parisian +admirer, Adolphe Dumas, called "the Homer of Provence"--as Virgilian, +too, seemed the landscape through which at length, one April afternoon, +we found ourselves on pilgrimage to the home of him whose name had been +on the lips of every innkeeper, shopkeeper, and peasant, all the way +from Marseilles to Tarascon. + +Yes! the same golden peace that lies like a charm across every page +of his greatest poem lay across that sun-steeped, fertile plain, +with its walls of cypress trees, its lines of poplars, its delicate, +tapestry-like designs of almond trees in blossom, on a sombre background +of formal olive orchards, its green meadows, lit up with singing +water-courses, or gleaming irrigation canals, starred here and there +with the awakening kingcup, or sweet with the returning violet--here +and there a farmhouse ("mas," as they call them in Provence) snugly +sheltered from the mistral by their screens of foliage--and far aloft in +the distance, floating like a silver dream, the snow-white shoulder of +Mont Ventoux--the Fuji Yama of Provence. + +At last the old, time-worn village came in sight--it lies about ten +miles north-east of Tartarin's Tarascon--and we entered it, as was +proper, with the "Master's" words on our lips: "Maillane is beautiful, +well-pleasing is Maillane; and it grows more and more beautiful every +day. Maillane is the honour of the countryside, and takes its name from +the month of May. + +"Who would be in Paris or in Rome? Poor conscripts! There is nothing to +charm one there; but Maillane has its equal nowhere--and one would +rather eat an apple in Maillane than a partridge in Paris." + +It was Sunday afternoon, and the streets were full of young people in +their Sunday finery, the girls wearing the pretty Arlesien caps. At +first sight of us, with our knapsacks, they were prepared to be amused, +and saucy lads called out things in mock English; but when it was +understood that we were seeking the house of the "Master" we inspired +immediate respect, and a dozen eager volunteers put themselves at our +service and accompanied us in a body to where, at the eastern edge of +the village, there stands an unpretentious square stone house of no +great antiquity, surrounded by a garden and half hidden with trees. + +We stood silently looking at the house for a few minutes, trying to +realize that there a great poet had gone on living and working, in +single-minded devotion to his art and his people, for full fifty +years--there in that green, out-of-the-way corner of the world. The +idea of a life so rooted in contentment, so continuously happy in the +lifelong prosecution of a task set to itself in boyhood, and so +independent of change, is one not readily grasped by the hurrying +American mind. + +Then we pushed open the iron gate and passed into the garden. A paved +walk led up to the front door, but that had an unused look, and, gaining +no response there, we walked through a shrubbery around the side of the +house, and as we turned the corner came on what was evidently the real +entrance, facing a sunny slope of garden where hyacinths and violets +told of the coming of spring. Here we were greeted by some half a dozen +friendly dogs, whose demonstrations brought to the door a neat little, +keen-eyed peasant woman, with an expression in her face that suggested +that she was the real watch dog, on behalf of her master, standing +between him and an intrusive world. As a matter of fact, as we afterward +learned, that is one of her many self-imposed offices, for, having been +in the Mistral household for many years, she has long since been as much +a family friend as a servant, and generally looks after the Master and +Mme. Mistral as if they were her children, nursing and "bossing" them by +turns. "Elise"--I think her name is--is a "character" almost as well +known in Provence as the Master himself. + +So she looked sharply at us, while I produced a letter to M. Mistral +which had been given me by a humble associate of the "felibres," a +delightful _chansonnier_ we had met at Les Baux. With this she went +indoors, presently to return with a face of still cautious welcome, and +invited us in to a little square hall hung with photographs of various +distinguished friends of the poet and two bronze medallions of himself, +one representing him with his favourite dog. + +Then a door to the right opened, revealing a typical scholar's study, +lined with books from ceiling to floor, books and papers on tables and +chairs, and framed photographs again on the free wall space. The spring +sunshine poured in through long windows, and in this characteristic +setting stood a tall old man, astonishingly erect, his distinguished +head, with its sparse white locks, its keen eyes, and strong yet +delicate aquiline features, pointed white beard and mustache, +suggesting pictures of some military grand seigneur of old time. His +carriage had the same blending of soldier and nobleman, and the stately +kindliness with which he bade us welcome belonged, alas! to another day. + +At his side stood a tall, handsome lady, with remarkable, dark, kind +eyes, evidently many years his junior. This was Mme. Mistral, in her day +one of those "queens of beauty" whom the "felibres" elect every seven +years at their floral fetes. Mme. Mistral was no less gracious to us +than her husband, and joined in the talk that followed with much +animation and charm. + +We had a little feared that M. Mistral, as he declines to write in +anything but Provencal, might carry his artistic creed into his +conversation too. To our relief, however, he spoke in the most polished +French--for you may know French very well, but be quite unable to +understand Provencal, either printed or spoken. This had sometimes made +our journeying difficult, as we inquired our way of peasants along the +road. + +It was natural to talk first to Mistral of literature. We inquired +whether he read much English. He shook his head, smiling. No! outside of +one or two of the great classics, Shakespeare and Milton, for example, +he had read little. Yes! he had read one American author--Fenimore +Cooper. _Le Feu-Follet_ had been a favourite book of his boyhood. This +we identified as _The Fire-Fly_. + +He seemed to wish to talk about America rather than literature, and +seemed immensely interested in the fact that we were Americans, and he +raised his eyes, with an expression of French wonderment, at the fact +of our walking our way through the country--as also at the length of +the journey from America. Evidently it seemed to him a tremendous +undertaking. + +"You Americans," he said, "are a wonderful people. You think nothing of +going around the world." + +We were surprised to find that he took the keenest interest in American +politics. + +"It must be a terribly difficult country to govern," he said. And then +he asked us eagerly for news of our "extraordinary President." We +suggested Mr. Wilson. + +"Oh, no! no!" he explained. "The extraordinary man who was President +before him." + +"Colonel Roosevelt?" + +Yes, that was the man--a most remarkable man that! So Colonel Roosevelt +may be interested to hear that the poet-king of Provence is an +enthusiastic Bull Mooser. + +Of course, we talked too of the "felibrige," and it was beautiful to see +how M. Mistral's face softened at the mention of his friend Joseph +Roumanille, and with what generosity he attributed the origin of the +great movement to his dead friend. + +"But you must by all means call on Mme. Roumanille," said he, "when you +go to Avignon, and say that I sent you"--for Roumanille's widow still +lives, one of the most honoured muses of the "felibrige." + +When it was time for us to go on our way, nothing would satisfy M. and +Mme. Mistral but that we drink a glass of a cordial which is made by +"Elise" from Mistral's own recipe; and as we raised the tiny glasses of +the innocent liqueur in our hands, Mistral drank "A l'Amerique!" + +Then, taking a great slouch hat from a rack in the hall, and looking as +though it was his statue from Aries accompanying us, the stately old man +led us out into the road, and pointed us the way to Avignon. + +On the 30th of this coming September that great old man--the memory of +whose noble presence and beautiful courtesy will remain with us +forever--will be eighty-three. + +February, 1913. + + + + +XXVI + +IMPERISHABLE FICTION + + +The longevity of trees is said to be in proportion to the slowness of +their growth. It has to do no little as well with the depth and area of +their roots and the richness of the soil in which they find themselves. +When the sower went forth to sow, it will be remembered, that which soon +sprang up as soon withered away. It was the seed that was content to +"bring forth fruit with patience" that finally won out and survived the +others. + +These humble, old-fashioned illustrations occur to me as I apply myself +to the consideration of the question provoked by the lightning +over-production of modern fiction and modern literature generally: the +question of the flourishing longevity of the fiction of the past as +compared with the swift oblivion which seems almost invariably to +over-take the much-advertised "masterpieces" of the present. + +I read somewhere a ballade asking--where are the "best sellers" of +yesteryear? The ballad-maker might well ask, and one might re-echo with +Villon: "Mother of God, ah! where are they?" During the last twenty +years they have been as the sands on the seashore for multitude, yet I +think one would be hard set to name a dozen of them whose titles even +are still on the lips of men--whereas several quieter books published +during that same period, unheralded by trumpet or fire-balloon, are seen +serenely to be ascending to a sure place in the literary firmament. + +What can be the reason? Can the decay of these forgotten phenomena of +modern fiction, so lavishly crowned with laurels manufactured in the +offices of their own publishers, have anything to do with the hectic +rapidity of their growth, and may there be some truth in the supposition +that the novels, and books generally, that live longest are those that +took the longest to write, or, at all events underwent the longest +periods of gestation? + +Some fifteen years or so ago one of the most successful manufacturers of +best sellers was Guy Boothby, whose _Dr. Nikola_ is perhaps still +remembered. Unhappily he did not live long to enjoy the fruits of his +industrious dexterity. I bring his case to mind as typical of the modern +machine-made methods. + +I had read in a newspaper that he did his "writing" by phonograph, and +chancing to meet him somewhere, asked him about it. His response was to +invite me to come down to his charming country house on the Thames and +see how he did it. Boothby was a fine, manly fellow, utterly without +"side" or any illusions as to the quality of his work. He loved good +literature too well--Walter Pater, incongruously enough, was one of his +idols--to dream that he could make it. Nor was the making of literature +by any means his first preoccupation, as he made clear, with winning +frankness, within a few moments of my arriving at his home. + +Taking me out into his grounds, he brought me to some extensive kennels, +where he showed me with pride some fifty or so prize dogs; then he took +me to his stables, his face shining with pleasure in his thoroughbreds; +and again he led the way to a vast hennery, populated with innumerable +prize fowls. + +"These are the things I care about," he said, "and I write the stuff for +which it appears I have a certain knack only because it enables me to +buy them!" + +Would that all writers of best sellers were as engagingly honest. No few +of them, however, write no better and affect the airs of genius into the +bargain. + +Then Boothby took me into his "study," the entire literary apparatus of +which consisted of three phonographs; and he explained that, when he had +dictated a certain amount of a novel into one of them, he handed it over +to his secretary in another room, who set it going and transcribed what +he had spoken into the machine; he, meanwhile, proceeding to fill up +another record. And he concluded airily by saying with a laugh that he +had a novel of 60,000 words to deliver in ten days, and was just on the +point of beginning it! + +Boothby's method was, I believe, somewhat unusual in those days. Since +then it has become something like the rule. Not so much as regards +the phonograph, perhaps, but with respect to the breathless speed of +production. + +I am informed by an editor, associated with magazines that use no less +than a million and a half words of fiction a month, that he has among +his contributors more than one writer on whom he can rely to turn off a +novel of 60,000 words in six days, and that he can put his finger on +twenty novelists who think nothing of writing a novel of a hundred +thousand words in anywhere from sixty to ninety days. He recalled to me, +too, the case of a well-known novelist who has recently contracted to +supply a publisher with four novels in one year, each novel to run to +not less than a hundred thousand words. One thinks of the Scotsman with +his "Where's your Willie Shakespeare now?" + +Even Balzac's titanic industry must hide its diminished head before such +appalling fecundity; and what would Horace have to say to such frog-like +verbal spawning, with his famous "labour of the file" and his counsel to +writers "to take a subject equal to your powers, and consider long what +your shoulders refuse, what they are able to bear." It is to be feared +that "the monument more enduring than brass" is not erected with such +rapidity. The only brass associated with the modern best seller is to +be found in the advertisements; and, indeed, all that both purveyor and +consumer seem to care about may well be summed up in the publisher's +recommendation quoted by Professor Phelps: "This book goes with a rush +and ends with a smash." Such, one might add, is the beginning and ending +of all literary rockets. + +Now let us recall some fiction that has been in the world anywhere from, +say, three hundred years to fifty years and is yet vigorously alive, +and, in many instances, to be classed still with the best sellers. + +_Don Quixote_, for example, was published in 1605, but is still actively +selling. Why? May it perhaps be that it was some six years in the +writing, and that a great man, who was soldier as well as writer, +charged it with the vitality of all his blood and tears and laughter, +all the hard-won humanity of years of manful living, those five years as +a slave in Algiers (actually beginning it in prison once more at La +Mancha), and all the stern struggle of a storm-tossed life faced with +heroic steadfastness and gaiety of heart? + +Take another book which, if it is not read as much as it used to be, and +still deserves to be, is certainly far from being forgotten--_Gil Blas_. +Published in 1715--that is, its first two parts--it has now two +centuries of popularity to its credit, and is still as racy with +humanity as ever; but, though Le Sage was a rapid and voluminous writer, +over this one book which alone the world remembers it is significant to +note that he expended unusual time and pains. He was forty-seven years +old when the first two parts were published. The third part was not +published till 1724, and eleven years more were to elapse before the +issue of the fourth and final part in 1735. + +A still older book that is still one of the world's best sellers, _The +Pilgrim's Progress_, can hardly be conceived as being dashed off in +sixty or ninety days, and would hardly have endured so long had not +Bunyan put into it those twelve years of soul torment in Bedford gaol. +_Robinson Crusoe_ still sells its annual thousands, whereas others of +its author's books no less skilfully written are practically forgotten, +doubtless because Defoe, fifty-eight years old at its publication, had +concentrated in it the ripe experience of a lifetime. Though a boy's +book to us, he clearly intended it for an allegory of his own arduous, +solitary life. + +"I, Robinson Crusoe," we read, "do affirm that the story, though +allegorical, is also historical, and that it is the beautiful +representation of a life of unexampled misfortune, and of a variety +not to be met with in this world." + +_The Vicar of Wakefield_, as we know, was no hurried piece of work. +Indeed, Goldsmith went about it in so leisurely a fashion as to leave it +neglected in a drawer of his desk, till Johnson rescued it, according to +the proverbial anecdote; and even then its publisher, Newbery, was in +no hurry, for he kept it by him another two years before giving it to +the printer and to immortality. It was certainly one of those fruits +"brought forth with patience" all round. + +_Tom Jones_ is another such slow-growing masterpiece. Written in the +sad years immediately following the death of his dearly loved wife, +Fielding, dedicating it to Lord Lyttelton, says: "I here present you +with the labours of some years of my life"; and it need scarcely +be added that the book, as in the case of all real masterpieces, +represented not merely the time expended on it, but all the accumulated +experience of Fielding's very human history. + +Yes! Whistler's famous answer to Ruskin's counsel holds good of all +imperishable literature. Had he the assurance to ask two hundred guineas +for a picture that only took a day to paint? No, replied Whistler, he +asked it for "the training of a lifetime"; and it is this training of a +lifetime, in addition to the actual time expended on composition, that +constitutes the reserve force of all great works of fiction, and is +entirely lacking in most modern novels, however superficially brilliant +be their workmanship. + +For this reason books like George Borrow's _Lavengro_ and _Romany Rye_, +failures on their publication, grow greater rather than less with the +passage of time. Their writers, out of the sheer sincerity of their +natures, furnished them, as by magic, with an inexhaustible provision of +life-giving "ichor." To quote from Milton, "a good book is the precious +life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a +life beyond life." + +Of this immortality principle in literature Milton himself, it need +hardly be said, is one of the great exemplars. He was but thirty-two +when he first projected _Paradise Lost_, and through all the intervening +years of hazardous political industry he had kept the seed warm in his +heart, its fruit only to be brought forth with tragic patience in those +seven years of blindness and imminent peril of the scaffold which +followed his fiftieth birthday. + +The case of poets is not irrelevant to our theme, for the conditions of +all great literature, whatever its nature, are the same. Therefore, +we may recall Dante, whose _Divine Comedy_ was with him from his +thirty-fifth year till the year of his death, the bitter-sweet companion +of twenty years of exile. Goethe, again, finished at eighty the _Faust_ +he had conceived at twenty. + +Spenser was at work on his _Faerie Queene_, alongside his preoccupation +with state business, for nearly twenty years. Pope was twelve years +translating Homer, and I think there is little doubt that Gray's _Elegy_ +owes much of its staying power to the Horatian deliberation with which +Gray polished and repolished it through eight years. + +If we are to believe Poe's _Philosophy of Composition_, and there is, I +think, more truth in it than is generally allowed, the vitality of _The +Raven_, as that, too, of his genuinely imperishable fictions, is less +due to inspiration than to the mathematical painstaking of their +composition. + +But, perhaps, of all poets, the story of Virgil is most instructive for +an age of "get-rich-quick" _litterateurs_. On his _Georgics_ alone he +worked seven years, and, after working eleven years on the _Aeneid_, he +was still so dissatisfied with it that on his death-bed he besought his +friends to burn it, and on their refusal, commanded his servants to +bring the manuscript that he might burn it himself. But, fortunately, +Augustus had heard portions of it, and the imperial veto overpowered the +poet's infanticidal desire. + +But, to return to the novelists, it may at first sight seem that the +great writer who, with the Waverley Novels, inaugurated the modern era +of cyclonic booms and mammoth sales, was an exception to the classic +formula of creation which we are endeavouring to make good. Stevenson, +we have been told, used to despair as he thought of Scott's "immense +fecundity of invention" and "careless, masterly ease." + +"I cannot compete with that," he says--"what makes me sick is to think +of Scott turning out _Guy Mannering_ in three weeks." + +Scott's speed is, indeed, one of the marvels of literary history, yet +in his case, perhaps more than in that of any other novelist, it must +be remembered that this speed had, in an unusual degree, that "training +of a lifetime" to rely upon; as from his earliest boyhood all Scott's +faculties had been consciously as well as unconsciously engaged in +absorbing and, by the aid of his astonishing memory, preserving the +vast materials on which he was able thus carelessly to draw. + +Moreover, those who have read his manly autobiography know that this +speed was by no means all "ease," as witness the almost tragic +composition of _The Bride of Lammermoor_. If ever a writer scorned +delights and lived laborious days, it was Walter Scott. At the same time +the condition of his fame in the present day bears out the general truth +of my contention, for there is little doubt that he would be more widely +read than he is were it not for those too frequent _longueurs_ and inert +paddings which resulted from his too hurried workmanship. + +Jane Austen is another example of comparatively rapid creation, writing +three of her best-known novels, _Pride and Prejudice_, _Sense and +Sensibility_, and _Northanger Abbey_ between the ages of twenty-one and +twenty-three. Yet _Pride and Prejudice_, which practically survives the +others, took her ten months to complete, and all her writings, it has +again to be said, had first been deeply and intimately "lived." + +Charlotte Bronte was a year in writing _Jane Eyre_, spurred on to new +effort by the recent rejection of _The Professor_; but to write such a +book in a year cannot be called over-hasty production when one considers +how much of _Jane Eyre_ was drawn from Charlotte Bronte's own life, and +also how she and her sisters had been experimenting with literature from +their earliest childhood. + +Thackeray considered an allowance of two years sufficient for the +writing of a good novel, but that seems little enough when one takes +into account the length of his best-known books, not to mention the +perfection of their craftsmanship. Dickens, for all the prodigious bulk +of his output, was rather a steady than a rapid writer. "He considered," +says Forster, "three of his not very large manuscript pages a good, and +four an excellent, day's work." + +_David Copperfield_ was about a year and nine months in the writing, +having been begun in the opening of 1849 and completed in October, 1850. +_Bleak House_ took a little longer, having been begun in November, 1851, +and completed in August, 1853. _Hard Times_ was a hasty piece of work, +written between the winter of 1853, and the summer of 1854, and it +cannot be considered one of Dickens's notable successes. + +George Meredith wrote four of his greatest novels in seven years, +_Richard Feverel_, _Evan Harrington_, _Sandra Belloni_, and _Rhoda +Fleming_ being produced between 1859 and 1866. His poem, _Modern Love_, +was also written during that period. + +George Eliot was a much-meditating, painstaking writer, though _Adam +Bede_ cost her little more than a year's work. Her novels, however, as +a rule, did not come forth without prayer and fasting, and, in the +course of their creation, she used often to suffer from "hopelessness +and melancholy." _Romola_, to which she devoted long and studious +preparation, she was often on the point of giving up, and in regard to +it she gives expression to a literary ideal to which the gentleman with +the contract for four novels a year, referred to in the outset of this +paper, is probably a stranger. + + It may turn out [she says], that I can't work freely and fully + enough in the medium I have chosen, and in that case I must give + it up; for I will never write anything to which my whole heart, + mind, and conscience don't consent; so that I may feel it was + something--however small--which wanted to be done in this world, + and that I am just the organ for that small bit of work. + +Charles Kingsley who, if not a great novelist, has to his credit in +_Westward Ho!_ one romance at least which, in the old phrase, "the world +will not willingly let die," was as conscientious in his work as he was +brilliant. + +Says a friend who was with him while he was writing _Hypatia_: + +"He took extraordinary pains to be accurate. We spent one whole day in +searching the four folio volumes of Synesius for a fact he thought was +there, and which was found there at last." + +The writer of perhaps the greatest historical novel in the English +language, _The Cloister and the Hearth_, was what one might call a +glutton for thoroughness. Of himself Charles Reade has said: "I studied +the great art of fiction closely for fifteen years before I presumed +to write a line. I was a ripe critic before I became an artist." His +commonplace books, on the entries in which and the indexing he was +accustomed to spend one whole day out of each week, cataloguing the +notes of his multifarious reading and pasting in cuttings from +newspapers likely to be useful in novel-building, completely filled +one of the rooms in his house. In his will he left these open to the +inspection of literary students who cared to study the methods which +he had found so serviceable. + +To name one or two more English novelists: Thomas Hardy's novels would +seem to have the slow growth of deep-rooted things. His greatest work, +_The Return of the Native_, was on the stocks for four years, though a +year seems to have sufficed for _Far from the Madding Crowd_. + +The meticulous practice of Stevenson is proverbial, but this glimpse of +his method is worth catching again. + + The first draft of a story [records Mr. Charles D. Lanier], + Stevenson wrote out roughly, or dictated to Lloyd Osbourne. When all + the colours were in hand for the complete picture, he invariably + penned it himself, with exceeding care.... If the first copy did not + please him, he patiently made a second or a third draft. In his + stern, self-imposed apprenticeship of phrase-making he had prepared + himself for these workmanlike methods by the practice of rewriting + his trial stories into dramas and then reworking them into stories + again. + +Nathaniel Hawthorne brought the devoted, one might say, the devotional, +spirit of the true artist to all his work, but _The Scarlet Letter_ was +written at a good pace when once started, though, as usual, the germ +had been in Hawthorne's mind for many years. The story of its beginning +is one of the many touching anecdotes in that history of authorship +which Carlyle compared to the Newgate Calendar. Incidentally, too, it +witnesses that an author occasionally meets with a good wife. + +One wintry autumn day in Salem, Hawthorne returned home earlier than +usual from the custom-house. With pale lips, he said to his wife: "I am +turned out of office." To which she--God bless her!--cheerily replied: +"Very well! now you can write your book!" and immediately set about +lighting his study fire and generally making things comfortable for his +work. + +The book was _The Scarlet Letter_, and was completed by the following +February, Hawthorne, as his wife said, writing "immensely" on it day +after day, nine hours a day. When finished, Hawthorne seems to have been +dispirited about the story, and put it away in a drawer; but the good +James T. Fields chanced soon to call on him, and asked him if he had +anything for him to publish. + +"Who," asked Hawthorne gloomily, "would risk publishing a book from me, +the most unpopular writer in America?" + +"I would," was Field's rejoinder, and after some further sparring, +Hawthorne owned up. + +"As you have found me out," said he, "take what I have written and tell +me if it is good for anything"; and Fields went away with the manuscript +of what is, without any question, America's greatest novel. + +Turning to the great novelists of France, with one or two exceptions, +they all bear out the theory of longevity in literature which I have +been endeavouring to support. It must reluctantly be confessed that one +of the most fascinatingly vital of them all, Alexandre Dumas, is one of +the exceptions, born improvisator as he was; yet immense research, it +needs hardly be said, went to the making of his enormous library of +romance--even though, it be allowed, that much of that work was done for +him by his "disciples." + +George Sand was another facile, all too facile, writer. Here is a +description of her method: + + To write novels was to her only a process of nature. She seated + herself before her table at ten o'clock, with scarcely a plot and + only the slightest acquaintance with her characters, and until five + in the evening, while her hand guided a pen, the novel wrote itself. + Next day, and the next, it was the same. By and by the novel had + written itself in full and another was unfolding. + +Whether George Sand is still alive as a novelist, apart from her place +as an historic personality, I leave others to decide; but I am very sure +that she would be read a great deal more than she is if she had not so +confidently left her novels--to write themselves. Different, indeed, was +the method of Balzac, toiling year after year at his colossal task of +_The Human Comedy_, sometimes working eighteen hours a day, and never +less than twelve, and that "in the midst of protested bills, business +annoyances, the most cruel financial straits, in utter solitude and lack +of all consolation." But then Balzac was sustained by one of those great +dreams, without whose aid no lasting literature is produced, the dream, +"by infinite patience and courage, to compose for the France of the +nineteenth century, that history of morals which the old civilizations +of Rome, Athens, Memphis, and India have left untold." + +To fulfil this he was able to live, for a long period, on a daily +expenditure of "three sous for bread, two for milk, and three for +firing." But doubtless it had been different if his dream had been +prize puppies, a garage full of motor-cars, or a translation into the +Four Hundred. + +Victor Hugo, again, was one of the herculean artists, working, in +Emerson's phrase, "in a sad sincerity," with the patience of an ant and +the energy of a volcano. Of his _Les Miserables_--perhaps the greatest +novel ever written, as it is, I suppose, easily the longest--he said, +"it takes me nearly as long to publish a book as to write one"; and he +was at work on _Les Miserables_, off and on, for nearly fifteen years. +Of his writing _Notre Dame_ (that other colossus of fiction) this quaint +picture has been preserved. He had made vast historical preparations for +it, but ever there seemed still more to make, till at length his +publisher grew impatient, and under his pressure Hugo at last made a +start--after this fashion: + + He purchased a great grey woollen wrapper that covered him from head + to foot, he locked up all his clothes lest he should be tempted to + go out, and, carrying off his ink-bottle to his study, applied + himself to his labour just as if he had been in prison. He never + left the table except for food and sleep, and the sole recreation + that he allowed himself was an hour's chat after dinner with M. + Pierre Leroux, or any other friend who might drop in, and to whom he + would occasionally read over his day's work. + +Daudet, whose _Tartarin_ bids fair to remain one of the world's types, +like _Don Quixote_ or _Mr. Micawber_, for all his natural Provencal +gift of improvisation and, indeed, from his self-recognized necessity +of keeping it in check, was another strenuous artist. He wrote each +manuscript three times over, he told his biographer, and would write it +as many more if he could; and his son, in writing of him, has this truth +to say of his, as of all living work: + + The fact is that labour does not begin at the moment when the + artist takes his pen. It begins in sustained reflection and in the + thought which accumulates images and sifts them, garners and winnows + them out, and compels life to keep control over imagination, and + imagination to expand and enlarge life. + +Zola is perhaps unduly depreciated nowadays, but certainly, if Carlyle's +"infinite capacity for taking pains" as a recipe for genius ever was put +to the test, it was by the author of the Rougon-Macquart series. Talking +of rewriting, Prosper Merimee, best known for _Carmen_, is said to have +rewritten his _Colomba_ no less than sixteen times; as our Anglo-Saxon +Kipling, it used to be told, wrote his short stories seven times over. + +But, of course, the classical example of the artist-fanatic in modern +times was Gustave Flaubert. His agonies in quest of the _mot propre_, +the one and only word, are proverbial, and are said literally to have +broken down his nerves. Mr. Huneker has told of him that "he would +annotate three hundred volumes for a page of facts.... In twenty pages +he sometimes saved three or four from destruction," and, in the course +of twenty-six years' polishing and pruning of _The Temptation of Saint +Anthony_, he reduced his original manuscript of 540 pages down to 136, +even reducing it still further after its first publication. + +On _Madame Bovary_ he worked six years, and in writing _Salammbo_, +which, took him no less time, he studied the scenery on the spot and +exhausted the resources of the Imperial Library in his search for +documentary evidences. + +Flaubert may be said to have carried his passion for perfection to the +point of mania, and it will be a question with some whether, with all +his pains, he can be called a great novelist, after all. But that he was +a great stylist and a master in the art of making terrible and beautiful +bas-reliefs admits of no doubt. + +To be a great world-novelist you need an all-embracing humanity as well, +such as we find in Tolstoy's _War and Peace_--but that great book, need +one say, came of no slipshod speed of improvisation. On the contrary, +Tolstoy corrected and recorrected it so often that his wife, who acted +as his amanuensis, is said to have copied the whole enormous manuscript +no less than seven times! + +Yes! though it be doubtless true, in Mr. Kipling's famous phrase, that + + There are nine and sixty ways + Of inditing tribal lays, + And every blessed one of them is right, + +I think that the whole nine and sixty of them include somewhere in their +method those sole preservative virtues of truth to life and passionate +artistic integrity. The longest-lived books, whatever their nature, have +usually been the longest growing; and even those lasting things of +literature that have seemed, as it were, to spring up in a night, have +been long in secret preparation in a soil mysteriously enriched and +refined by the hid processes of time. + + + + +XXVII + +THE MAN BEHIND THE PEN + + +Bulwer's deservedly famous phrase, "The pen is mightier than the sword," +beneath its surface application, if you think it over, has this further +suggestion to make to the believer in literature--that, as the sword is +of no value as a weapon apart from the man that wields it, so, and no +less so, is it with the pen. A mere pen, a mere sword--of what use are +they, save as mural decorations, without a man behind them? + +And that recalls a memory of mine, which, as both great men are now +drinking wine in Valhalla out of the skulls of their critics, there can +be no harm in recalling. + +Some years ago I was on an unforgettable visit to Bjoernson, at his +country home of Aulestad, near Lillehammer. This is not the moment to +relive that beautiful memory as a whole. All that is pertinent to my +present purpose is a remark in regard to Ibsen that Bjoernson flashed out +one day, shaking his great white mane with earnestness, his noble face +alight with the spirit of battle. We had been talking of his possibly +too successful attempt to sever Norway from Sweden, and Ibsen came in +somehow incidentally. + +"Ibsen," said he, "is not a man. He is only a pen." + +There is no necessity to discuss the justice of the dictum. Probably, if +ever there was a man behind a pen, it was Ibsen; but Ibsen's manhood +concentrated itself entirely behind his pen, whereas Bjoernson's employed +other weapons also, such as his gift of oratory, and was generally more +dramatically in evidence. Bjoernson and Ibsen, as we know, did not agree +on a number of things. Thus Bjoernson, like a human being, was unjust. +But his phrase was a useful one, and I am using it. It was misapplied to +Ibsen; but, put in the form of a question, I know of no better single +test to apply to writers, dead or alive, than-- + +"Is this a man? Or is it only a pen?" + +Said Walt Whitman, in his familiar "So Long" to _Leaves of Grass_: + + Camerado, this is no book; + Who touches this touches a man. + +And, of course, Walt was right about his own book, whether you like the +man behind _Leaves of Grass_ or not; but also that assertion of his +might be chalked as a sort of customs "O.K." on all literary baggage +whatsoever that has passed free into immortality. There is positively no +writer that has withstood the searching examination of time, on whose +book that final stamp of literary reality may not be placed. On every +classic, Time has scrawled ineffaceably: + + This is no book; + Who touches this touches a man. + +I raise the question of reality in literature in no merely academic +spirit. For those who not only love books, but care for literature as a +living thing, the question is a particularly live issue at the present +time, when not only the quantity of writing is so enormous, but the +average quality of it is so astonishingly good, when technique that +would almost humble the masters, and would certainly dazzle them, is an +accomplishment all but commonplace. At any rate, it is so usual as to +create no special surprise. If people write at all, it is taken for +granted, nowadays, that they write well. And the number of people at the +present time writing not only well, but wonderfully well, is little +short of appalling. + +In this, for those who ponder the phenomena of literature, there is less +matter for congratulation than would seem likely at first sight. There +is, indeed, no little bewilderment, and some disquietude. Confronted +with short stories--and novels also, for that matter--told with a skill +which makes the old masters of fiction look like clumsy amateurs; +confronted, too, with a thousand poets--the number is scarcely an +exaggeration--with accomplishments of metre and style that make some +famous singers seem like clodhoppers of the muse, one is obliged to ask +oneself: + +"Are these brilliant writers really greater than those that went +before?" + +If for some reason, felt at first rather than defined, we answer "no," +we are forced to the conclusion that, after all, literature must be +something more than a mere matter of writing. If so, we are constrained +to ask ourselves, what is it? + +The men who deal with manuscripts--editors, publishers' readers, and +publishers, men not only expert witnesses in regard to the printed +literature of the day, but also curiously learned in the story of the +book unborn, the vast mass of writing that never arrives at print--are +even more impressed by what one might call the uncanny literary +brilliance of the time. They are also puzzled by the lack of a certain +something missing in work which otherwise possesses every nameable +quality of literary excellence. One of these, an editor with an eye as +sympathetic as it is keen, told me of an instance to the point, typical +of a hundred others. + +He had been unusually struck by a story sent in to him by an unknown +writer. It was, he told me, amazing from every purely literary point of +view--plot, characterization, colour, and economy of language. It had so +much that it seemed strange that anything at all should be lacking. He +sent for the writer, and told him just what he thought. + +"But," he ended, after praise such as an editor seldom risks, "there is +something the matter with it, after all. I wonder if you can tell me +what it is." + +The writer was, for a writer so flattered, strangely modest. All he +could say, he answered, was that he had done his best. The editor, +agreeing that he certainly seemed to have done that, was all the more +curious to find out how it was that a man who could do so well had not +been able to add to his achievement the final "something" that was +missing. + +"What puzzles me," said the editor finally, "is that, with all the +rest, you were not able to add--humanity. Your story seems to have +been written by a wonderful literary machine, instead of by a man." + +And, no doubt, the young story-writer went away sorrowful, in spite of +the acceptance of his story--which, after all, was only lacking in that +quality which you will find lacking in all the writing of the day, save +in that by one or two exceptional writers, who, by their isolation, the +more forcibly point the moral. + +A wonderful literary machine! The editor's phrase very nearly hits off +the situation. As we have the linotype to set up the written words with +a minimum of human agency, we really seem to be within measurable +distance of a similar automaton that will produce the literature to be +set up without the intrusion of any flesh-and-blood author. In this +connection I may perhaps be permitted to quote a sentence or two from +myself, written _a propos_ a certain chameleonesque writer whose +deservedly popular works are among the contemporary books that I most +value: + + A peculiar skill seems to have been developed among writers during + the last twenty years--that of writing in the manner of some master, + not merely with mimetic cleverness, but with genuine creative power. + We have poets who write so like Wordsworth and Milton that one can + hardly differentiate them from their masters; and yet--for this is + my point--they are no mere imitators, but original poets, choosing, + it would seem, some old mask of immortality through which to express + themselves. In a different way from that of Guy de Maupassant they + have chosen to suppress themselves, or rather, I should say, that, + whereas De Maupassant strove to suppress, to eliminate, himself, + their method is that of disguise. + + In some respects they remind one of the hermit-crab, who annexes + some beautiful ready-made house, instead of making one for himself. + But then they annex it so brilliantly, with such delightful + consequences for the reader, that not only is there no ground for + complaint, but the reader almost forgets that the house does not + really belong to them, and that they are merely entertaining tenants + on a short lease. + +It is not that one is not grateful to writers of this type. Indeed one +is. They not only provide us with genuine entertainment, but, by the +skill born of their fine culture, they make us re-taste of the old +masters in their brilliant variations. One has no complaint against +them. Far from it. Only one wonders why they trouble to attach their own +merely personal names to their volumes, for, so far as those volumes are +concerned, there is no one to be found in them answering to the name of +the ostensible author. + +Suppose, for example, that the author's name on the title-page is +"Brown." Well, so far as we can find out by reading, "Brown" might just +as well be "Green." In fact, there is no "Brown" discoverable--no +individual man behind the pen that wrote, not out of the fulness of the +heart, or the originality of the brain, from any experience or knowledge +or temperament peculiar to "Brown," but out of the fulness of what one +might call a creatively assimilated education, and by the aid of a +special talent for the combination of literary influences. + +We have had a great deal of pleasure in the reading, we have admired +this and that, we may even have been astonished, but I repeat--there is +no "Brown." In private life "Brown" may be a forceful and fascinating +personality, but, so far as literature is concerned, he is merely a +"wonderful literary machine." He has been able, by his remarkable skill, +to conjure every other writer into his book--except himself. The name +"Brown" on his title-page means nothing. He has not "made his name." + +The phrase "to make a name" has become so dulled with long usage that it +is worth while to pause and consider what a reality it stands for. What +it really means, of course, is that certain men and women, by the +personal force or quality of their lives, have succeeded in charging +their names--names given them originally haphazard, as names are given +to all of us--with a permanent significance as unmistakable as that +belonging to the commonest noun. The name "Byron" has a meaning as clear +and unmistakable as the word "mutton." The words "dog" and "cat" have a +meaning hardly more clearly defined than the name "Burns" or "Voltaire." +An oak-tree can no more be mistaken for a willow than Shakespeare can be +confused with Spenser. If we say "Coleridge," there is no possibility of +any one thinking that perhaps we meant "Browning." + +The reason, of course, is that these names are as unmistakably "made" +as a Krupp gun or a Sheffield razor. Sincere, intense life has passed +into them, life lived as the men who bore those names either chose, or +were forced, to live it; individual experience, stern or gentle, in +combination with an individual gift of expression. + +All names that are really "made" are made in the same way. You may make +a name as Napoleon made his, through war, or you may make it as Keats +made his, by listening to the nightingale and worshipping the moon. Or +you may make it as Charles Lamb made his, merely by loving old folios, +whist, and roast pig. All that is necessary--granted, of course, the +gift of literary expression--is sincerity, an unshakable faithfulness to +yourself. + +In really great writers--or, at all events, in those writings of theirs +by which they immortally exist--there is not one insincere word. The +perishable parts of great writers will, without exception, be found to +be those writings which they attempted either in insincere moments, or +at the instigation of some surface talent that had no real connection +with their deep-down selves. + +All real writing has got to be lived before it is written--lived not +only once or twice, but lived over and over again. Mere reporting won't +do in literature, nor the records of easy voyaging through perilous +seas. Dante had to walk through hell before he could write of it, and +men today who would write either of hell or of heaven will never do it +by a study of fashionable drawing-rooms, or prolonged sojourns in the +country houses of the great. + +On the other hand, if you wish to write convincingly about what we call +"society," those lords and ladies, for example, who are just as real in +their strange way as coal-heavers and mechanics, it is of no use your +trying, unless you were fortunate enough to be born among them, or have +been unfortunately associated with them all your life. To write with +reality about the most artificial condition necessitates an intimate +acquaintance with it that, at its best, is tragic. Those who would write +about the depths and the heights must have dared them, not merely as +visitors, but as awestricken inhabitants. Similarly, those who would +write about the plain, the long, low levels of commonplace human life, +must have dwelt in them, have possessed the dreary, unlaurelled courage +of the good bourgeois, have known what it is to live out the day just +for the day's sake, with the blessed hope of a reasonably respectable +and comfortable conclusion. + +Probably it seldom occurs to us to think what a tremendously rooted life +is needed to make even one lasting lyric, though the strangeness of the +process is but the same strangeness that accompanies the antecedent +preparation of a flower. + + How many suns it takes + To make one speedwell blue-- + +was no mere fancy of a poet. It is a fact of the long sifting and +kneading to which time subjects the material of its perfect things. + +One could not get a better example of what I mean than Lovelace's song +_To Lucasta, Going to the Wars_, without which no anthology of English +verse could possibly be published. Why does generation after generation +say over and over, and hand on to its children: + + Yet this inconstancy is such + As you too shall adore; + I could not love thee, dear, so much + Loved I not honour more. + +Is it merely because it is so well written, or because it embodies a +highly moral sentiment suitable to the education of young men? No, it is +because the sword and the pen for once met together in the hand of a +man, because a soldier and a lover and a poet met together in a song. +One might almost say that Lovelace wrote his lyric first with his sword, +and merely copied it out with his pen. At all events, he was first a man +and incidentally a poet; and every real poet that ever sang, whether or +not he wielded the weapons of physical warfare, has been just the same. +Otherwise he could not have been a poet. + +When one speaks of the man behind the pen, one does not necessarily mean +that the writer must be a man of dominant personality, suggestive in +every sentence of "the strenuous life," and muscle, and "punch." +Literature might be described as the world in words, and as it takes all +kinds of men to make a world, so with the world of literature. All we +ask is that we should be made aware of some kind of a man. Numerous +other qualities besides "the punch" go to the making of living +literature, though blood and brawn, not to say brutality, have of late +had it so much their own way in the fashionable literature of the +day--written by muscular literary gentlemen who seem to write rather +with their fists than their pens--that we are in danger of forgetting +the reassuring truth. + +J.M. Barrie long ago made a criticism on Rudyard Kipling which has +always stayed by me as one of the most useful of critical touchstones. + +"Mr. Kipling," said he, "has yet to learn that a man may know more of +life staying at home by his mother's knee than swaggering in bad company +over three continents." + +Nor is successful literature necessarily the record of the successful +temperament. Some writers, not a few, owe their significance to the fact +that they have found humanly intimate expression for their own failure, +or set down their weakness in such a way as to make themselves the +consoling companions of human frailty and disappointment through the +generations. It is the paradox of such natures that they should express +themselves in the very record of their frustration. Amiel may be taken +as the type of such writers. In confiding to his _Journal_ his hopeless +inability for expressing his high thought, he expressed what is +infinitely more valuable to us--himself. + +Nor, again, does it follow that the man who thus gets himself +individualized in literature is the kind of man we care about or approve +of. Often it is quite the contrary, and we may think that it had been +just as well if some human types had not been able so forcibly to +project into literature their unworthy and undesirable selves. Yet this +is God's world, and nothing human must be foreign to the philosophical +student of it. + +All the "specimens" in a natural history museum are not things of +beauty or joy. So it is in the world of books. Francois Villon cannot +be called an edifying specimen of the human family, yet he unmistakably +belongs there, and it was to that prince of scalawags that we owe not +merely that loveliest sigh in literature--"Where are the snows of +yester-year?"--but so striking a picture of the underworld of medieval +Paris that without it we should hardly be able to know the times as +they were. + +The same applies to Benvenuto Cellini--bully, assassin, insufferable +egoist, and so forth, as well as artist. If he had not been sufficiently +in love with his own swashbuckler rascality to write his amazing +autobiography, how dim to our imaginations, comparatively, would have +been the world of the Italian Renaissance! + +Again, in our own day, take Baudelaire, a personality even less +agreeable still--morbid, diseased, if you will, wasting, you may deem, +immense poetic powers on revealing the beauty of those "flowers of evil" +which had as well been left in their native shade. Yet, it is because he +saw them so vividly, cared to see little else, dwelt in his own strange +corner of the world with such an intensity of experience, that he +is--Baudelaire. Like him or not, his name is "made." A queer kind of +man, indeed, but not "only a pen." + +Certain writers have made a cult of "impersonality" in literature. They +would do their utmost to keep themselves out of sight, to let their +subject-matter tell its own tale. But such a feat is an impossibility. +They might as well try to get out of their own skins. The mere effort +at suppression ends in a form of revelation. Their mere choice of +themes and manner of presentation, let them keep behind the scenes as +assiduously as they may, will in the end stamp them. However much a man +may hide behind his pen, so that indeed his personality, compared with +that of more subjective writers, remains always somewhat enigmatic, yet +when the pen is wielded by a man, whatever his reticence or his mask, we +know that a man is there--and that is all that concerns us. + +On the other hand, of course, there are companionable, sympathetic +writers whose whole stock-in-trade is themselves, their personal charm, +their personal way of looking at things. Of these, Montaigne and Charles +Lamb are among the great examples. It matters to us little or nothing +what they are writing about; for their subjects, so far as they are +concerned, are only important in relation to themselves, as revealing +to us by reflection two uncommonly "human" human beings, whom it is +impossible to mistake for any one else; just as we enjoy the society of +some whimsical talker among our living friends, valuing him not so much +for what he says, but for the way he says it, and because it is he, and +no one else, that is talking. + +Again, there are other men whose names, in addition to their personal +suggestion, have an impersonal significance as marking new eras of human +development, such as Erasmus or Rousseau or Darwin; men who embodied +the time-spirit at crucial moments of world change, men who announced +rather than created, the heralds of epochs, men who first took the new +roads along which the rest of mankind were presently to travel, men who +felt or saw something new for the first time, prophets of dawn while yet +their fellows slept. + +Sometimes a man will come to stand for a whole nation, like Robert Burns +or Cervantes; or a great, half-legendary age of the world, like Homer; +or some permanent attitude of the human spirit, like Plato. + +No fixed star, great or small, in the firmament of literature ever +got there without some vital reason, or merely by writing, however +remarkable. The idea that literature is a mere matter of writing is seen +to be the hollowest of misconceptions the moment you run over any list +of enduring names. Try any such that you can think of, and in every case +you will find that the name stands for something more than a writer. Of +course, the man had to have his own peculiar genius for writing, but the +peculiarity was but the result of his individual being, his own special +way of living his life or viewing the world. + +Take Horace, for example. Does he live merely because of his unique +style, his masterly use of the Latin tongue? By means of that, of +course, but only secondarily. Primarily, he is as alive today as he +was when he sauntered through the streets of Rome, because he was so +absolutely the type of the well-bred man of the world in all countries +and times. He lived seriously in the social world as he found it, and +felt no idealistic craving to have it remoulded nearer to the heart's +desire. He was satisfied with its pleasures, and at one with its +philosophy. Thus he is as much at home in modern Paris or London or +New York as in ancient Rome, and his book is, therefore, forever +immortal as the man of the world's Bible. + +Take a name so different as that of Shelley. We have but to speak it +to define all it now stands for. Though no one should read a line of +Shelley's any more, the dream he dreamed has passed into the very +life-blood of mankind. Wherever men strive for freedom, or seek to +attune their lives to the strange spiritual music that breathes through +all things--music that none ever heard more clearly than he--there is +Shelley like the morning star to guide them and inspire. + +Think what Wordsworth means to the spiritual thought of the modern +world. In his own day he was one of the most lonely and laughed at of +poets, moping among his lakes and mountains and shepherds. Yet, as +Matthew Arnold said, "we are all Wordsworthians nowadays," and the +religion of nature that he found there for himself in his solitude bids +fair to be the final religion of the modern world. + +It is the same with every other great name one can think of, be it +Bunyan or Heine, Schopenhauer or Izaak Walton. One has but to cast +one's eyes over one's shelves to realize, as we see the familiar +names, how literally the books that bear them are living men, merely +transmigrated from their fleshly forms into the printed word. +Shakespeare and Milton, yes, even Pope; Johnson, Fielding, Sterne, +Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Carlyle, Dumas, Balzac, Emerson, Thoreau, +Hawthorne, Poe--their very faces seem to look out at us from the +bindings, such vividly human beings were they, with a vision of the +world, or a definition of character, so much their own and no one +else's. One might almost call them patented human beings--patentees of +spiritual discoveries, or of aspects of humanity, whose patents can +never be infringed for all our cleverness. + +Said Tennyson, in bitter answer to criticism that began to depreciate +him because of the glibness of his imitators: + + All can grow the flower now, + For all have got the seed. + +And certainly, as I have already said, the art of literary impersonation +is carried to a pitch today that almost amounts to genius. Yet you have +only to compare the real flower with the imitation, and you will soon +understand the difference. + +Take Walter Scott. It is a commonplace to say how much better we do the +historical novel nowadays than he did. At first sight, we may seem to; +in certain particulars, no doubt we do; but read him again, read _Rob +Roy_ or _Quentin Durward_ again, and you will not be quite so sure. You +will realize what an immortal difference there is, after all, between +the pen with a man behind it, and the most brilliant literary machine. + +Yes, "the mob of gentlemen that write with ease" is once more with us, +but no real book was ever yet written with ease, and no book has ever +survived, or ever can, in which we do not feel the presence of the +fighting, dreaming, or merely enjoying soul of a man. + + + + +XXVIII + +BULLS IN CHINA-SHOPS + + +There are some people of great value and importance in their own +spheres, who, on the strength of the distinction gained there, are apt +to intrude on other spheres of which they have no knowledge, where in +fact they are irrelevant, and often indeed ridiculously out of place. +This, however, does not prevent their trying to assert an authority +gained in their own sphere in those other spheres where they simply do +not belong; and such is the power of a name that is won for any one +thing that the multitude, unaccustomed to make distinctions, accepts +them as authorities on the hundred other things of which they know +nothing. Thus, to take a crude example, the New York Police, which is, +without doubt, learned in its own world, and well-adapted and equipped +for asserting its authority there, sometimes intrudes, with its +well-known _bonhomie_, into the worlds of drama and sculpture, and, +because it is an acknowledged judge of crooks and grafters, presumes +to be a judge and censor also of new plays and nude statues. + +Of course, the New York Police is absurd in such a character, absurd as +a bull in a china-shop is absurd; yet, as in the case of the bull with +the china, it is capable of doing quite a lot of damage. + +I take the New York Police merely, as I said, as a crude example of, +doubtless, well-meant, but entirely misplaced energy. Actually, however, +it is scarcely more absurd than many similar, if more distinguished, +bulls gaily crashing about on higher planes. + +Such are statesmen who, because they are Prime Ministers or Presidents, +deem themselves authorities on everything within the four winds, doctors +of divinity, and general _arbitri elegantiarum_. + +Such a bull in a china-shop in regard to literature was the late Mr. +Gladstone. It is no disrespect towards his great and estimable character +to say, that while, of course, he was technically a scholar--"great +Homeric scholar" was the accepted phrase for him--there were probably +few men in England so devoid of the literary sense. Yet for an author to +receive a post-card of commendation from Mr. Gladstone meant at least +the sale of an edition or two, and a certain permanency in public +appreciation. Her late Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria was Mr. +Gladstone's only rival as the literary destiny of the time. To Mr. +Gladstone we owe Mrs. Humphry Ward, to Her Majesty we owe Miss Marie +Corelli. + +John Ruskin, much as we may admire him for his moral influence, and +admire, or not admire, him for his prose, was a bull in a china-shop +when he made his famous criticism on Whistler, and thus inadvertantly +added to the gaiety of nations by provoking that delightful trial, +which, farcical as it seemed at the moment, not merely evoked from +Whistler himself some imperishable dicta on art and the relation of +critics to art, but really did something towards the long-drawn +awakening of that mysterious somnolence called the public consciousness +on the strange mission of beauty in this world, and, incidentally of the +status of those "eccentric" ministers of it called artists. + +I do not mean to say that bulls in china-shops are without their uses. +John Ruskin is a shining example to the contrary. + +One of his contemporaries, Thomas Carlyle, for all his genius, was on +one important subject--that of poetry--as much of a bull in a china-shop +as Ruskin was in art. Great friends as were he and Tennyson, the famous +anecdote _a propos_ of Tennyson's publication of _The Idylls of the +King_--"all very fine, Alfred, but when are you going to do some +work"--and many other such written deliverances suffice to show how +absolutely out of court a great tragic humorist and rhetorician may +be on an art practised by writers at least as valuable to English +literature as himself, say Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge, and Keats. +Carlyle was a great writer, but the names of these four gentlemen who, +according to his standard, never did any "work" have a strangely +permanent look about them compared with that of the prophet-journalist +of Chelsea and Ecclefechan. + +A similar "sage," another of the great conversational brow-beaters of +English literature, Samuel Johnson, though it was his chief business to +be a critic of poetry, was hardly more in court on the matter than +Carlyle. In fact, Dr. Johnson might with truth be described as the King +Bull of all the Bulls of all the China-shops. There was no subject, +however remote from his knowledge or experience on which he would +hesitate to pronounce, and if necessary bludgeon forth, his opinion. +But in his case, there is one important distinction to be made, a +distinction that has made him immortal. + +He disported his huge bulk about the china-shop with such quaintness, +with such engaging sturdiness of character, strangely displaying all the +time so unique a wisdom of that world that lies outside and encloses all +china-shops, so unparalleled a genius of common sense, oddly linked +with that good old-time quality called "the fear of God," that in +his case we felt that the china, after all, didn't matter, but that +Dr. Samuel Johnson, "the great lexicographer," supremely did. His +opinions of Scotsmen or his opinions of poetry in themselves amount to +little--though they are far from being without their shrewd insight--and +much of the china--such as Milton's poetry--among which he gambolled, +after the manner of Behemoth, chanced to be indestructible. Any china +he broke was all to the ultimate good of the china-shop. Yet, if we +accept him so, is it not because he was such a wonderful bull in the +china-shop of the world? + +There have been other such bulls but hardly another so great, and with +his name I will, for the moment at least, put personalities aside, and +refer to droves rather than to individual bulls. A familiar type of +the bull in the china-shop is the modern clergyman, who, apparently, +insecure in his status of saint-hood, dissatisfied with that spiritual +sphere which so many confiding human beings have given into his +keeping, will be forever pushing his way like an unwelcome, yet quite +unauthoritative, policeman, into that turmoil of human affairs--of which +politics is a sort of summary--where his opinion is not of the smallest +value, though, perforce, it is received with a certain momentary +respect--as though some beautiful old lady should stroll up to a battery +of artillery, engaged in some difficult and dangerous attack, and offer +her advice as to the sighting and management of the guns. The modern +clergyman's interference in the working out of the secular problems +of modern life has no such picturesque beauty--and it is even less +effective. + +One would have thought that to have the care of men's souls would be +enough. What a world of suggestiveness there was in the old phrase "a +cure of souls"! Men's souls need saving as much today as ever. Perhaps +they were never in greater danger. Therefore, as the proverbial place +for the cobbler is his last, so more than ever the place for the +clergyman is his church, his pulpit, and those various spiritual offices +for which he is presumably "chosen." His vows do not call upon him +either to be a politician or a matinee idol, nor is it his business to +sow doubt where he is paid for preaching faith. If the Church is losing +its influence, it is largely because of its inefficient interference +in secular affairs, and because of the small percentage of real +spirituality amongst its clergy. + +But there is a worse intrusion than that of clergymen into secular +affairs. There is the intrusion of the cheap atheist, the small +materialistic thinker, into a sphere of which certainly no clergyman or +priest has any monopoly, that sphere of what we call the spiritual life, +which, however undemonstrable by physical tests, has been real to so +many men and women whose intellects can hardly be called negligible, +from Plato to Newman. I have too much respect for their courageous +sincerity, their nobility of character, as well as for the necessary, if +superficial, destructive work they did, when to do such work meant no +little personal peril and obloquy to themselves, to class Robert +Ingersoll and Charles Bradlaugh with the small fry that resemble them +merely in their imitative negations; yet this is certainly true of both +of them that they were bulls in the china-shop to this extent--that they +confounded real religion with the defective historical evidences of one +religion, and the mythologic assertions and incongruities of its sacred +book. They did splendid work in their iconoclastic criticism of "the +letter" that "killeth," but of "the spirit" that "giveth life" they seem +to have had but little inkling. To make fun of Jonah and the whale, or +"the Mistakes of Moses," had no doubt a certain usefulness, but it was +no valid argument against the existence of God, nor did it explain away +the mysterious religious sense in man--however, or wherever expressed. +Neither Ingersoll nor Bradlaugh saw that the crudest Mumbo-Jumbo +idolatry of the savage does really stand for some point of rapport +between the seen and the unseen, and that, so long as the mysterious +sacredness of life is acknowledged and reverenced, it matters little by +what symbols we acknowledge it and do it reverence. + +One may consider that the present age is an age of spiritual eclipse, +though that is not the writer's opinion, and question with Matthew +Arnold: + + What girl + Now reads in her bosom as clear + As Rebekah read, when she sate + At eve by the palm-shaded well? + Who guards in her breast + As deep, as pellucid a spring + Of feeling, as tranquil, as sure? + What bard, + At the height of his vision, can deem + Of God, of the world, of the soul, + With a plainness as near, + As flashing as Moses felt + When he lay in the night by his flock + On the starlit Arabian waste? + Can rise and obey + The beck of the Spirit like him. + +Yet the sight of one who sees is worth more than the blindness of a +hundred that cannot see. Some people are born with spiritual antennae +and some without. There is much delicate wonder in the universe that +needs special organizations for its apprehension. "One eye," you +remember, that of Browning's _Sordello_-- + + one eye + In all Verona cared for the soft sky. + +In these imponderable and invisible matters, many are in a like case +with Hamlet's mother, when she was unable to see the ghost of his +father which he so plainly saw. "Yet all there is I see!" exclaimed the +queen--though she was quite wrong, as wrong as Mr. Ruskin when he could +see nothing in that painting of Whistler's but a cocks-comb throwing a +paint-pot at a canvas and calling it a picture! + +Many people who have sharp enough eyes and ears for their own worlds are +absolutely blind and deaf when introduced into other worlds for which +nature has not equipped them. But this by no means prevents their +pronouncing authoritative opinions in those worlds, opinions which +would be amazing if they were not so impertinent. Many literary people +proclaim their indifference to and even contempt for music--as if their +announcement meant anything more than their music deafness, their +unfortunate exclusion from a great art. Mark Twain used to advertise his +preference for the pianola over the piano--as if that proved anything +against the playing of Paderewski. Similarly, he acted the bull in the +china-shop in regard to Christian Science, which cannot be the accepted +creed of millions of men and women of intelligence and social value +without deserving even in a critic the approach of some respect. + +But humorists are privileged persons. That, no doubt, accounts for the +astonishing toleration of Bernard Shaw. Were it not that he is a +_farceur_, born to write knock-about comedies--his plays, by the way, +might be termed knock-about comedies of the middle-class mind--he would +never have got a hearing for his common-place blasphemies, and cheap +intellectual antics. He is undeniably "funny," so we cannot help +laughing, though we are often ashamed of ourselves for our laughter; for +to him there is nothing sacred--except his press-notices, and--his +royalties. + +His so-called "philosophy" has an air of dangerous novelty only to those +innocent middle-classes born but yesterday, to whom any form of thought +is a novelty. Methusaleh himself was not older than Mr. Shaw's "original +ideas." In England, twenty years ago, we were long since weary of his +egotistic buffooneries. Of anything "fine" in literature or art he is +contemptuously ignorant, and from understanding of any of the finer +shades of human life, or of the meaning of such words as "honour," +"gentleman," "beauty," "religion," he is by nature utterly shut out. He +laughs and sneers to make up for his deficiencies, like that Pietro +Aretino who threw his perishable mud at Michael Angelo. So is it always +with the vulgarian out of his sphere. Once he dared to talk vulgarly of +God to a great man who believed in God--Count Tolstoi. + +He had written to Tolstoi _a propos_ his insignificant little play _The +Showing up of Blanco Posnet_, and in the course of his letter had said: +"Suppose the world were only one of God's jokes, would you work any less +to make it a good joke instead of a bad one?" Tolstoi had hitherto been +favourably inclined towards Shaw, owing to his friend and biographer Mr. +Aylmer Maude; but this cheap-jack sacrilege was too much for the great +old man, who seemed to know God with almost Matthew Arnold's + + plainness as near + As flashing as Moses felt, + +and he closed the correspondence with a rebuke which would have abashed +any one but the man to whom it was sent. + +Tolstoi was like Walt Whitman--he "argued not concerning God." It is a +point of view which people like Mr. Shaw can never understand; any more +than he or his like can comprehend that there are areas of human feeling +over which for him and other such bulls in china-shops should be posted +the delicate Americanism--KEEP OUT. + + + + +XXIX + +THE BIBLE AND THE BUTTERFLY + + +Once, in my old book-hunting days, I picked up, on the Quai Voltaire, a +copy of the _Proverbs of King Solomon_. Then it was more possible than +today to make finds in that quaint open-air library which, still more +than any library housed within governmental or diplomaed walls, is +haunted by the spirit of those passionate, dream-led scholars that +made the Renaissance, and crowded to those lectures filled with that +dangerous new charm which always belongs to the poetic presentation of +new knowledge--those lectures, "musical as is Apollo's lute," being +given up on the hill nearby, by a romantic young priest named Abelard. + +My copy of the Great King's Wisdom was of no particular bibliographical +value, but it was one of those thick-set, old-calf duodecimos "black +with tarnished gold" which Austin Dobson has sung, books that, one +imagines, must have once made even the Latin Grammar attractive. The +text was the Vulgate, a rivulet of Latin text surrounded by meadows of +marginal comments of the Fathers translated into French,--the whole +presided over, for the edification of the young novice, to whom my copy +evidently belonged, by a distinguished Monseigneur who, in French of the +time of Bossuet, told exactly how these young minds should understand +the wisdom of Solomon, told it with a magisterial style which suggested +that Solomon lived long ago--and, yet, was one of the pillars of the +church. But what particularly interested me about the book, however, as +I turned over its yellow pages, was a tiny thing pressed between them, a +thing the Fathers and the Monseigneur would surely have regarded as +curiously alien to their wisdom, a thing once of a bright, but now of a +paler yellow, and of a frailer texture than it had once been in its +sunlit life--a flower, I thought at first, but, on looking closer, I saw +it was, or had once been, a yellow butterfly. + +What young priest was it, I wondered, that had thus, with a breaking +heart, crushed the joy of life between these pages! On what spring +morning had this silent little messenger hovered a while over the high +garden-walls of St. Sulpice, flitting and fluttering, and at last darted +and alighted on the page of this old book, at that moment held in the +hands of a young priest walking to and fro amid the tall whispering +trees--delivering at last to him on the two small painted pages of its +wings a message he must not read.... + +The temptation was severe, for spring was calling all over Paris, and +the words of another book of the Great King whose wisdom he held in his +hand said to him in the Latin that came easily to all manner of men in +those days: _Lo! the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the +flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, +and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.... Arise, my love, my +fair one, and come away._ + +The little fluttering thing seemed to be saying that to him as it poised +on the page, and, as his eyes went into a dream, began to crawl softly, +like a rope-walker, up one of his fingers, with a frail, half-frightened +hold, while, high up, over the walls of the garden the poplars were +discreetly swaying to the southern wind, and the lilac-bushes were +carelessly tossing this way and that their fragrance, as altar-boys +swing their censers in the hushed chancel,--but ah! so different an +incense. + +_The flowers appear on the earth_, he repeated to himself, beguiled for +a moment, _the flowers appear on the earth; and the time of the singing +of birds is come...._ + +But, suddenly, for his help against that tiny yellow butterfly there +came to him other stern everlasting words: + +_The grass withereth, the flower fadeth, but the word of our Lord +endureth forever._ + +Then it was, if I imagine aright from my old book, that my young novice +of St. Sulpice crushed the joy of life, in the frail form of its little +messenger, between the pages of the book he held in his hand just then, +the book I held in my hand for a while a hundred and fifty years or so +after--the book I bought that morning on the Quai Voltaire--guarding +that little dead butterfly even more than the wisdom of Solomon. I +wonder if, as he crushed that butterfly, he said to himself--in words +that have grown commonplace since his time--the words of that strange +emperor Hadrian--_Animula, vagula, blandula_! + +Perhaps I should not have remembered that book-hunting morning in Old +Paris on the Quai Voltaire, when I bought that beautiful old copy of the +_Proverbs of Solomon_--with the butterfly so strangely crushed between +its pages--had it not been for a circumstance that happened to me, the +other day, in the subway, which seemed to me of the nature of a marvel. +Many weary men and women were travelling--in an enforced, yet in some +way humorously understanding, society--from Brooklyn Bridge to the +Bronx. I got in at Wall Street. The "crush-hour" was near, for it was +4:25--still, as yet, there were time and space granted us to observe +our neighbours. In the particular car in which I was sitting, there +was room still left to look about and admire the courage of your +fellow-passengers. Weary men going home--many of them having used them +all day long--have little wish to use their eyes, so all the men in my +car sat silently and sadly, contemplating the future. As I looked at +them, it seemed to me that they were thinking over the day's work they +had done, and the innumerable days' work they had still to do. No one +smiled. No one observed the other. An automatic courtesy gave a seat +here and there, but no one gave any attention to any business but his +own thoughts and his own sad station. + +It was a car, if I remember aright, occupied almost entirely by +men-passengers, and, so far as I could see, there were no evidences that +men knew women from men, or _vice versa_, yet, at last, there seemed to +dawn on four men sitting in a row that there was a wonderful creature +reading a book on the other side of the aisle--a lovely young woman, +with all the fabled beauty of the sea-shell, and the rainbow, that +enchantment in her calm pearl-like face, and in the woven stillness of +her hair, that has in all times and countries made men throw up sails +and dare the unknown sea, and the unknown Fates. The beauty, too, that +nature had given her was clothed in the subdued enchantments of the +rarest art. All unconscious of the admiration surrounding her, she sat +in that subway car, like a lonely butterfly, strangely there in her +incongruous surroundings, for a mysterious moment,--to vanish as swiftly +as she had come--and, as she stepped from the car, leaving it dark and +dazzled-- + + bright with her past presence yet-- + +I, who had fortunately, and fearfully, sat by her side was aware that +the book she had been reading was lying forgotten on the seat. It was +mine by right of accident,--treasure-trove. So I picked it up, braving +the glares of the four sad men facing me. + +Naturally, I had wondered what book it was; but its being bound in +tooled and jewelled morocco, evidently by one of the great bookbinders +of Paris, made it unprofitable to hazard a guess. + +I leave to the imagination of lovers of books what book one would +naturally expect to find in hands so fair. Perhaps _Ronsard_--or some +other poet from the Rose-Garden of old France. No! it was a charmingly +printed copy of The New Testament. + +The paradox of the discovery hushed me for a few moments, and then I +began to turn over the pages, several of which I noticed were dog eared +after the manner of beautiful women in all ages. A pencil here and there +had marked certain passages. _Come unto me_, ran one of the underlined +passages, _all ye that are heavy laden, and I will give you rest_,--and +I thought how strange it was that she whose face was so calm and still +should have needed to mark that. And another marked passage I noted--_He +was in the world, and the world was made by Him, and the world knew Him +not_. Then I put down the book with a feeling of awe--such as the Bible +had never brought to me before, though I had been accustomed to it from +my boyhood, and I said to myself: "How very strange!" And I meant how +strange it was to find this wonderful old book in the hands of this +wonderful young beauty. + +It had seemed strange to find that butterfly in that old copy of the +_Proverbs of King Solomon_, but how much stranger to find the New +Testament in the hands, or, so to speak, between the wings, of an +American butterfly. + +I found something written in the book at least as wonderful to me as +the sacred text. It was the name of the butterfly--a name almost as +beautiful as herself. So I was enabled to return her book to her. There +is, of course, no need to mention a name as well-known for good works as +good looks. It will suffice to say that it was the name of the most +beautiful actress in the world. + +There is a moral to this story. Morals--to stories--are once more +coming into fashion. The Bible, in my boyhood, came to us with no such +associations as I have recalled. There were no butterflies between its +pages, nor was it presented to us by fair or gracious hands. It was a +very grim and minatory book, wielded, as it seemed to one's childish +ignorance, for the purpose which that young priest of St. Sulpice had +used the pages of his copy of the _Proverbs of King Solomon_, that of +crushing out the joy of life. + +My first acquaintance with it as I remember, was in a Methodist chapel +in Staffordshire, England, where three small boys, including myself, +prisoned in an old-fashioned high-back pew, were endeavouring to relieve +the apparently endless _ennui_ of the service by eating surreptitious +apples. Suddenly upon our three young heads descended what seemed like a +heavy block of wood, wielded by an ancient deacon who did not approve +of boys. We were, each of us, no more than eight years old, and the book +which had thus descended upon our heads was nothing more to us than a +very weighty book--to be dodged if possible, for we were still in that +happy time of life when we hated all books. We knew nothing of its +contents--to us it was only a schoolmaster's cane, beating us into +silence and good behaviour. + +So the Bible has been for many generations of boys a book even more +terrible than Caesar's _Commentaries_ or the _Aeneid_ of Virgil--the +dull thud of a mysterious cudgel upon the shoulders of youth which you +bore as courageously as you could. + +So many of us grew up with what one might call a natural prejudice +against the Bible. + +Then some of us who cared for literature took it up casually and found +its poetic beauty. We read the _Book of Job_--which, by the way, Mr. +Swinburne is said to have known by heart; and as we read it even the +stars themselves seemed less wonderful than this description of their +marvel and mystery: + +_Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades or loose the hands of +Orion?_ + +_Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his season? or canst thou guide +Arcturus with his sons?_ + +Or we read in the 37th chapter of the _Book of Ezekiel_ of that weird +valley that was full of bones--"_and as I prophesied, there was a noise, +and behold a shaking, and the bones came together bone to bone_," +surely one of the most wonderful visions of the imagination in all +literature. + +Or we read the marvellous denunciatory rhetoric of Jeremiah and Isaiah, +or the music of the melodious heart-strings of King David; we read the +solemn adjuration of the "King Ecclesiast" to remember our Creator in +the days of our youth, with its haunting picture of old age: and the +loveliness of _The Song of Songs_ passed into our lives forever. + +To this purely literary love of the Bible there has been added within +the last few years a certain renewed regard for it as the profoundest +book of the soul, and for some minds not conventionally religious it has +regained even some of its old authority as a spiritual guide and stay. +And I will confess for myself that sometimes, as I fall asleep at +night, I wonder if even Bernard Shaw has written anything to equal the +Twenty-third Psalm. + + +THE END + + + + + + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Vanishing Roads and Other Essays +by Richard Le Gallienne + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VANISHING ROADS AND OTHER ESSAYS *** + +***** This file should be named 11675.txt or 11675.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + https://www.gutenberg.org/1/1/6/7/11675/ + +Produced by Janet Kegg and PG Distributed Proofreaders + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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