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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Hortus Vitae, by Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
+
+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: Hortus Vitae
+       Essays on the Gardening of Life
+
+Author: Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
+
+Release Date: October 7, 2008 [EBook #26800]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HORTUS VITAE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Delphine Lettau & the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+HORTUS VITAE
+ESSAYS ON THE GARDENING OF LIFE
+
+
+
+
+BY
+VERNON LEE
+
+
+JOHN LANE: THE BODLEY HEAD
+LONDON & NEW YORK. MDCCCCIV
+
+SECOND EDITION.
+
+WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES.
+
+
+
+
+
+DEDICATION
+
+
+To MADAME TH: BLANC-BENTZON
+
+                                             MAIANO, NEAR FLORENCE,
+                                                     June 20, 1903.
+
+MY DEAR MADAME BLANC,
+
+The first copy of this little book was, of course, to have been for
+Gabrielle Delzant. I am fulfilling her wish, I think, in giving it,
+instead, to you, who were her oldest friend; as I, alas! had time to be
+only her latest.
+
+She had read nearly all these essays; and, during those weeks of her
+illness which I spent last autumn in Gascony, she had made me rewrite
+several among them. She wanted to learn to read English aloud, and it
+amused her and delighted me that she should do so on my writings. Her
+French pronunciation gave an odd grace to the sentences; the little
+hesitation spaced and accentuated their meaning; and I liked what I had
+written when she read it. The afternoons at Paraÿs which we spent
+together in this way! Prints of _Mère Angélique_ and _Ces Messieurs de
+Port Royal_ watching over us in her spacious bedroom, brown and yet
+light like the library it had become; and among those Jansenist
+worthies, the Turin Pallas Athena, with a sprig of green box as an
+offering from our friend. Yes; what I had written seemed good when read
+by her. And then there were the words which had to be looked out in the
+dictionary, bringing discussions on all manner of subjects, and
+wonderful romantic stories, like the "Golden Legend," about grandparents
+and servants and neighbours, giving me time to rearrange the cushions
+and to settle the fur over her feet. And the other words, hard to
+pronounce (she must always invert, from sheer anxiety, the English
+_th'_s and _s'_s); I had to say them first, and once more, and yet
+again. And we laughed, and I kissed her beloved patient face and her
+dear young white hair. I don't think it ever occurred to tell her my
+intention of putting her name on this volume--it went without saying.
+And besides, had not everything I could do or be of good belonged to her
+during the eighteen months we had been friends?
+
+There was another reason, however, why this book more particularly
+should have been hers; and having been hers, dear Madame Blanc, yours.
+Do you remember telling me how, years ago, and in a terrible moment of
+your experience, she had surprised you, herself still so young, by a
+remark which had sunk deep into your mind and had very greatly helped
+you? "We must," you told me she had said, "be prepared to begin life
+many times afresh." Now that is the thought, though never clearly
+expressed, which runs through these essays. And the essential goodness
+and fruitfulness of life, its worthiness to be lived over and over
+again, had come home to me more and more with the knowledge and the love
+of her who had made my own life so far happier and more significant. So
+that my endeavour to enumerate some of the unnoticed gifts and deepest
+consolations of life has come to be connected in my mind with this
+creature who consoled so many and gave herself, with such absolute gift
+of loving-kindness or gratitude, to all people and all things that
+deserved it.
+
+That life is worthy to be lived well, with fortitude, tenderness, and a
+certain reserved pride and humility, was indeed the essential, unspoken
+tenet of Gabrielle Delzant's religion, into which there entered, not
+merely the teachings of Stoics and Jansenists, but the traditional
+gaiety and gallant bearing of the little southern French nobles from
+whom she was descended. Her Huguenot blood, of which, with the dear
+self-contradictoriness of all true saints, she was inordinately proud;
+her Catholic doctrine, which by natural affinity was that of Port Royal
+and Pascal; this double strain of asceticism of both her faiths (for,
+like all deep believers, she had more than one) merely gave a solemn
+base, a zest, to her fine intuition of nature and joy. The refusal to
+possess (even her best-beloved books never bore her own name, and her
+beautiful bevelled wardrobes were found empty through sheer giving), the
+disdain for every form of property, only intensified her delight in all
+the beautiful things which could be shared with others. No one ever
+possessed, in the true sense of passionate enjoyment, as Gabrielle
+Delzant possessed, for instance, the fine passages of Corneille, or
+Maurice de Guérin, or Victor Hugo, which she asked her husband to read
+to us of an evening; as she possessed the refined lie of the land, the
+delicate autumn colouring of her modest and gracious southern country;
+and those old-fashioned Paris streets, through which we eagerly
+wandered, seeking obscure little churches and remote convents where
+Pascal had lived or André Chénier lay buried. Nay, no one, methinks,
+ever tasted so much of romance as this lady in her studious invalid's
+existence; for did she not extract wonderful and humorous adventures,
+not only out of the lives of her friends, but her own quiet comings and
+goings? Do you remember, dear Madame Blanc, that rainy day that she and
+I returned to you, brimful of marvellous adventures, when we had found a
+feather and shell shop built up against an old church in the Marais; or
+was it after wandering in the dripping Jardin des Plantes, peering at
+the white skeletons of animals of the already closed museum, and
+returning home in floods by many and devious trams and 'buses? Ah, no
+one could enjoy things, and make others enjoy them by sheer childlike
+lovingness, as she did!
+
+For her austerity, like that of the nobler pagans (and there are no
+nobler pagans, or more reverent to paganism, than true Christian
+saints, believe me) pruned all natural possibilities into fruitfulness
+of joy. And her reckless giving away of interest and of loving-kindness,
+enabled her, not merely to feed the multitude, but to carry home
+miraculous basketfuls, and more, methinks, than twelve.
+
+And thus, to return to my main theme, there was, transmuting all her
+orthodoxy (and making her accept some unorthodox among her
+fellow-worshippers) a deep and fervent adoration of life and
+fruitfulness, and an abhorrence of death.
+
+Her letters to me are full of it. Abhorrence of death. Death not of the
+body, for she held that but an incident, an accident almost, in a life
+eternal or universal; but death of the soul. And this she would have
+defined, though she was never fond of defining, as loss of the power of
+extracting joy and multiplying it through thankfulness.
+
+A matter less of belief than of temper. Of course. Gabrielle Delzant was
+one of the elect, and filled with grace. And she had as little sense of
+tragedy as St. Francis or his skylarks; sympathy meaning for her less
+the fact of feeling the sufferings of others, than that of healing, of
+consoling, and of compensating.
+
+With this went naturally that, in a very busy life, full--over-full,
+some of us thought--of the affairs of other folk, she never appeared
+worried or hurried. Of the numberless persons who carried their business
+to her, or whose secret troubles became manifest to her dear
+bluish-brown eyes, each must have felt as if she existed for him or her
+solely. And folk went to her as they go into a church of her religion,
+not merely for spiritual aid, but for the comfort of space and rest in
+this world of crowding and bustle; for the sense of a piece of heaven
+closed in for one's need and all one's very own. Dear Madame Blanc, how
+many shy shadows do we not seem to see around us since her death; or
+rather to guess at, roaming disconsolate, lacking they scarce know what,
+that ever-welcoming sanctuary of her soul!
+
+I have compared it with a church; but outwardly, and just because she
+was such a believer in life, it was more like a dwelling-place, like
+those brown corridors, full of books, at Paraÿs; or that bedroom of
+hers, with the high lights all over the polished floor, and its look of
+a library. To me Gabrielle Delzant revealed the reality of what I had
+long guessed and longed for aimlessly, the care and grace of art, the
+consecration of religion, applied to the matters of every day. It hung
+together with her worship of life, with her belief, as she expressed it
+to you, all those years ago, _that life must be begun many times anew_.
+And it is this which, for all the appalling unexpectedness, the dreadful
+cataclysm of her temporal ending, has made the death of Gabrielle
+Delzant so strangely difficult, for me, at least, to realise as death at
+all.
+
+Not death, but only absence; and that, how partial!
+
+It is eight months and more, dear Madame Blanc, since she and I bade
+each other adieu in the body. She had been some while ill, though none
+of us suspected how fatally. It was the eve of her departure for Paris;
+and I was returning to Italy. She was grieved at parting from me, at
+leaving her dear old Southern relatives; and secretly she perhaps half
+suspected that she might never come back to her Gascon home. It was a
+November day, dissolving fitfully into warm rain, and very melancholy.
+I was to take the late train to Agen with the two girls. And she and I,
+when all was ready, were to have the afternoon together. Of course we
+must have it serene, as if no parting were to close it. All traces of
+departure, of packing, were cleared away at her bidding, and when they
+had carried her on to her sofa, and placed by its side the little table
+with our books, and also my chair, she bade the dear Southern maids
+light a fine blaze of vine stumps, and fill all the jars with fresh
+roses--china roses, so vivid, surely none have ever smelt so sweet and
+poignant. We amused ourselves, a little sadly, burning some olive and
+myrtle branches I had brought for her from Corsica, and watching their
+frail silver twigs and leaves turn to embers and fall in fireworks of
+sparks and a smoke of incense. And we read together in one of my books
+(alas! that book has just come back this very same day, sent by her
+daughter), and looked up at the loose grey clouds suffused with rose and
+orange as the day drew to its end. Then the children shouted from below
+that the carriage was there, that I must go. We closed the books,
+marking the place, and I broke a rose from the nosegay on the
+fireplace. And we said farewell.
+
+Thus have we remained, she and I. With the mild autumn day drawing to an
+end outside; and within, the fresh roses, the bright fire she had asked
+for; remained reading our books, watching those dried leaves turn to
+showers of sparks and smoke of incense. She and I, united beyond all
+power of death to part, in the loving belief that, even like that
+afternoon of packing up and bidding adieu, and rain and early twilight,
+life also should be made serene and leisurely, and simple and sweet, and
+akin to eternity.
+
+And now I am going to put those volumes she and I had read together, on
+my own shelves, here in this house she never entered; and to correct the
+proofs of this new little book, which should have been hers, nay, rather
+_is_, and which is also, my dear Madame Blanc, for that reason, yours.
+
+I am, meanwhile, your grateful and affectionate friend,
+
+
+VERNON LEE.
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+
+
+DEDICATION
+
+THE GARDEN OF LIFE--INTRODUCTORY
+
+IN PRAISE OF GOVERNESSES
+
+ON GOING TO THE PLAY
+
+READING BOOKS
+
+HEARING MUSIC
+
+RECEIVING LETTERS
+
+NEW FRIENDS AND OLD
+
+OTHER FRIENDSHIPS
+
+A HOTEL SITTING-ROOM
+
+IN PRAISE OF COURTSHIP
+
+KNOWING ONE'S MIND
+
+AGAINST TALKING
+
+IN PRAISE OF SILENCE
+
+THE BLAME OF PORTRAITS
+
+SERE AND YELLOW--INTERLUDE
+
+A STAGE JEWEL
+
+MY BICYCLE AND I
+
+PUZZLES OF THE PAST
+
+MAKING PRESENTS
+
+GOING AWAY
+
+COMING BACK
+
+LOSING ONE'S TRAIN
+
+THE HANGING GARDENS--VALEDICTORY
+
+
+
+
+HORTUS VITAE
+
+THE GARDEN OF LIFE
+
+(INTRODUCTORY)
+
+
+"Cela est bien dit," répondit Candide; "mais il
+faut cultiver notre jardin."--ROMANS DE VOLTAIRE.
+
+
+
+
+THE GARDEN OF LIFE
+
+This by no means implies that the whole of life is a garden or could be
+made one. I am not sure even that we ought to try. Indeed, on second
+thoughts, I feel pretty certain that we ought not. Only such portion of
+life is our garden as lies, so to speak, close to our innermost
+individual dwelling, looked into by our soul's own windows, and
+surrounded by its walls. A portion of life which is ours exclusively,
+although we do occasionally lend its key to a few intimates; ours to
+cultivate just as we please, growing therein either pistachios and dwarf
+lemons for preserving, like Voltaire's immortal hero, or more spiritual
+flowers, "sweet basil and mignonette," such as the Lady of Epipsychidion
+sent to Shelley; kindly rosemary and balm; or, as may happen, a fine
+assortment of witch's herbs, infallible for turning us into cats and
+toads and poisoning our neighbours.
+
+But with whatever we may choose to plant the portion of our life and our
+thought which is our own, and whatsoever its natural fertility and
+aspect, this much is certain, that it needs digging, watering, planting,
+and perhaps most of all, weeding. "Cela est bien dit," répondit Candide,
+"mais il faut cultiver notre jardin." He was, as you will recollect,
+answering Dr. Pangloss. One evening, while they were resting from their
+many tribulations, and eating various kinds of fruit and sweetmeats in
+their arbour on the Bosphorus, the eminent optimistic philosopher had
+pointed out at considerable length that the delectable moment they were
+enjoying was connected by a Leibnitzian chain of cause and effect with
+sundry other moments of a less obviously desirable character in the
+earlier part of their several lives.
+
+"For, after all, my dear Candide," said Dr. Pangloss, "let us suppose
+you had not been kicked out of a remarkably fine castle, magnis ac
+cogentissimis cum argumentis a posteriori; suppose also that, etc., etc.
+had not happened, nor, furthermore, etc., etc., etc.; well, it is quite
+plain that you would not be in this particular place, _videlicet_ an
+arbour; and, moreover, in the act of eating preserved lemon-rind and
+pistachio nuts."
+
+"What you say is true," answered Candide, "but we have to cultivate our
+garden."
+
+And here I hasten to remark, that although I have quoted and translated
+these seven immortal words, I would on no account be answerable for
+their original and exact meaning, any more than for the meaning of more
+officially grave and reverend texts, albeit perhaps not wiser or nobler
+ones.
+
+Did the long-suffering hero of the Sage of Ferney accept the chain of
+cause and effect, and agree that without the kicks, the earthquake, the
+_auto-da-fè_, and all the other items of his uneasy career, it was
+impossible he should be eating pistachio nuts and preserved lemon-rind
+in that arbour? And, in consideration of the bitter sweet of these
+delicacies, was he prepared to welcome (retrospectively) the painful
+preliminaries as blessings in disguise? Did he even, rising to stoical
+or mystic heights, identify these superficially different phenomena and
+recognize that their apparent contradiction was real sameness?
+
+Or, should we take it that, refraining from such essential questions,
+and passing over his philosophical friend's satisfaction in the _causal
+nexus_, poor Candide was satisfied with pointing out the only practical
+lesson to be drawn from the whole matter, to wit, that in order to
+partake of such home-grown dainties, it had been necessary, and most
+likely would remain necessary, to put a deal of good work into whatever
+scrap of the soil of life had not been devastated by those Leibnitzian
+Powers who further Man's felicity in a fashion so energetic but so
+roundabout?
+
+All these points remain obscure. But even as a play is said to be only
+the better for the various interpretations which it affords to as many
+great actors; so methinks, the wisest sayings are often those which
+state some principle in general terms, leaving to individuals the
+practical working out, according to their nature and circumstances. So,
+whether we incline to optimism or to pessimism, we must do our best in
+the half-hours we can bestow upon our little garden.
+
+I speak advisedly of half-hours, and I would repeatedly insist upon the
+garden being little. For the garden, whatever its actual size, and were
+it as extensive as those of Eden and the Hesperides set on end, does not
+afford the exercise needful for spiritual health and vigour. And
+whatever we may succeed in growing there to please our taste or (like
+some virtuous dittany) to heal our bruises, this much is certain, that
+the power of enjoyment has to be brought from beyond its limits.
+
+Happiness, dear fellow-gardeners, is not a garden plant.
+
+In plain English: happiness is not the aim of life, although it is
+life's furtherance and in the long run life's _sine qua non_. And not
+being life's aim, life often disregards the people who pursue it for its
+own sake. I am not, like Dr. Pangloss, a professional philosopher, and
+what philosophy I have is of no particular school, and neither stoical
+nor mystic. I feel no sort of call to vindicate the Ways of Providence;
+and on the whole there seems something rather ill-bred in crabbing the
+unattainable, and pretending that what we can't have can't be good for
+us. Happiness _is_ good for us, excellent for us, necessary for us,
+indispensable to us. But ... how put such transcendental facts into
+common or garden (for it is _garden_) language? But _we_--that is to
+say, poor human beings--are one thing, and life is quite another. And as
+life has its own programme irrespective of ours, to wit, apparently its
+own duration and intensifying throughout all changes, it is quite
+natural that we, its little creatures of a second, receive what we
+happen to ask for--namely, happiness--as a reward for being thoroughly
+alive.
+
+Now, for some reason not of our choosing, we cannot be thoroughly alive
+except as a result of such exercises as come under the headings: Work
+and Duty. That seems to be the law of Life--of Life which does not care
+a button about being æsthetic or wisely epicurean. The truth of it is
+brought home to us occasionally in one of those fine symbolical
+intuitions which are the true stuff of poetry, because they reveal the
+organic unity and symmetry of all existence. I am alluding to the sense
+of cloying and restlessness which comes to most of us (save when tired
+or convalescent) after a very few days or even hours shut up in quite
+the finest real gardens; and to that instinct, impelling some of us to
+inquire about the lodges and the ways out, the very first thing on
+coming down into some private park. Of course they are quite exquisite,
+those flowery terraces cut in the green turf, and bowling greens set
+with pines or statues, and balustraded steps with jars and vases. And
+the great stretches of park land with their solemn furbelowed avenues
+and their great cedars stretching _moire_ skirts on to the grass, are
+marvellous fine things to look upon....
+
+But we want the ploughed fields beyond, the real woods with stacked-up
+timber, German fashion; the orchards and the kitchen gardens; the tracks
+across the high-lying sheep downs; the towing-paths where the barges
+come up the rivers; the deep lanes where the hay-carts have left long
+wisps on the overhanging elms; the high-roads running from village to
+village, with the hooded carts and bicycles and even the solemn
+Juggernaut traction-engines upon them. We want not only to rest from
+living, to take refreshment in life's kindly pauses and taste (like
+Candide in his arbour) the pleasantness of life's fruits. We want also
+to live.
+
+But there is living and living. There is, unfortunately, not merely such
+breezy work-a-dayness as we have been talking of, but something very
+different indeed beyond the walls of our private garden. There are
+black, oozy factory yards and mangy grass-plots heaped with brickbat and
+refuse; and miles of iron railing, and acres of gaunt and genteel
+streets not veiled enough in fog; a metaphorical _beyond the garden
+walls_, in which a certain number of us graduate for the ownership of
+sooty shrubberies and clammy orchid houses. And we poor latter-day
+mortals have become so deadly accustomed to the routine of useless work
+and wasteful play, that a writer must needs cross all the _t_'s and dot
+all the _i_'s of his conviction (held also by other sentimentalists and
+cranks called Carlyle, Ruskin, and Morris) that the bread and wine of
+life are not grown in the Black Country; no, nor life's flowers in the
+horticultural establishments (I will not call them gardens) of suburban
+villas.
+
+Fortunately, however, this casual-looking universe is not without its
+harmonies, as well as ironies. And one of these arrangements would seem
+to be that our play educates the aims and methods of our work. If we lay
+store by satisfactions which imply the envy and humiliation of other
+folk, why then we set about such work as humiliates our neighbours or
+fills them with enviousness, saving the case where others, sharing our
+tastes, do alike by us. Without going to such lengths (the mention of
+which has got me a reputation for lack of human sympathy) there remains
+the fact that if our soul happen to take delight in, let us say,
+futility--well, then, futility will litter existence with shreds of
+coloured paper and plaster comfits trodden into mud, as after a day of
+carnival at Nice. Nay, a still simpler case: if we cannot be happy
+without a garden as big as the grounds of an expensive lunatic asylum,
+why, then, all the little cottage gardens down the lane must be swept
+away to make it.
+
+Now, the cottage gardens, believe me, are the best. They are the only
+ones which, being small, may be allotted in some juster future to every
+man without dispossessing his neighbour. And they are also the only ones
+compatible with that fine arable or dairy country which we all long for.
+Stop and look over the hedges: their flowers leave no scrap of earth
+visible between them, like the bedded-out things of grander gardens; and
+their vivid crimsons, and tender rose and yellow, and ineffable blue,
+and the solemn white which comes out in the evening, are seen to most
+advantage against the silvery green of vegetables behind them, and the
+cornfield, the chalk-pit under the beech trees beyond. The cottage
+flowers come also into closer quarters with their owners, not merely
+because these breathe their fragrance and the soil's good freshness
+while stooping down to weed, and prune, and water; but also, and perhaps
+even more, because the flowers we tend with our own hands have a habit
+of blooming in our expectations and filling our hopes with a sweetness
+which not the most skilful hired gardeners have ever taught the most
+far-fetched hybrids that they raise for clients.
+
+Which, being interpreted, may be taken to mean that it is no use relying
+on artists, poets, philosophers, or saints to make something of the
+enclosed spaces or the waste portions of our soul: _Il faut cultiver
+notre jardin._
+
+
+
+
+IN PRAISE OF GOVERNESSES
+
+
+Even before discovering that there was an old, gabled, lower town at
+Cassel, I felt the special gladness of the touch of Germany. It was an
+autumn morning, bright yet tender. I sped along the wide, empty streets,
+across the sanded square, with hedges of sere lime trees, where a big,
+periwigged Roman Emperor of an Elector presides, making one think of the
+shouts of "Hurrah, lads, for America!" of the bought and sold Hessians
+of Schiller's "Cabal and Love." At the other end was a promenade,
+terraced above the yellow tree-tops of a park, above a gentle undulating
+country, with villages and steeples in the distance. "Schöneaussicht"
+the place called itself; and the view was looked at by the wide and many
+windows of pleasant old-fashioned houses, with cocked-hat roofs well
+pulled down over them, each in its little garden of standard roses, all
+quiet and smiling in the autumn sunshine.
+
+I felt the special gladness of being in Germany (for every country has
+its own way of making us happy), and glad that there should be in me
+something which answered to Germany's especial touch. We owe that, many
+of us, I mused, and with it a deep debt of gratitude, to our
+governesses. And I fell to thinking of certain things which an American
+friend had lately told me, sitting in the twilight with her head a
+little averted, about a certain governess of hers I can remember from my
+childhood. Pathetic things, heroic ones, nothings; all ending off in the
+story of a farewell letter, treasured many years, lost on a journey....
+"Do you remember Fräulein's bonnet? The one she brought from Hanover and
+wore that winter in Paris?" And there it was in a faded, crinolined
+photograph, so dear and funny. Dear and funny--that is the point of this
+relationship with creatures giving often the best of the substance and
+form of our soul, that it is without the sometimes rather empty majesty
+of the parental one. And surely it is no loss, but rather a gain, to
+have to smile, as my friend did at the thought of that Teutonic bonnet,
+just when we feel an awkward huskiness in our voice.
+
+There is, moreover, a particular possibility for good in the relation
+between a developing child (not, of course, a mere growing young brute)
+and a woman still young, childless, or separated from her children, a
+little solitary, most often alien, differently brought up, and whose
+affection and experience must therefore take a certain impersonality,
+and tend to subdued romance. We are loved, when we are, not as a matter
+of course and habit, not with any claim; but for ourselves and with the
+delicate warmth of a feeling necessarily one-sided. And whatever we
+learn of life in this relationship is of one very different from our
+own, and seen through the feelings, the imagination, often the repressed
+home-sickness, of a mature and foreign soul. And this is good for us,
+and useful in correcting family and national tradition, and the rubbing
+away of angles (and other portions of soul) by brothers and sisters, and
+general contemporaries, excellent educational items of which it is
+possible to have a little too much.
+
+Be this as it may, it is to our German governesses that we owe the
+power of understanding Germany, more than to German literature. For the
+literature itself requires some introduction of mood for its romantic,
+homely, sentimental, essentially German qualities; the mere Anglo-Saxon
+or Latin being, methinks, incapable of caring at once for Wilhelm
+Meister, or Siebennkäs, or Götz, or the manifold lyric of Forest and
+Millstream. To understand these, means to have somewhere in us a little
+sample, some fibres and corpuscles, of the German heart. And I maintain
+that we are all of us the better, of whatever nationality (and most,
+perhaps, we rather too-too solid Anglo-Saxons) for such transfusion of a
+foreign element, correcting our deficiencies and faults, and ripening
+(as the literature of Italy ripened our Elizabethans) our own intrinsic
+qualities. It means, apart from negative service against conceit and
+canting self-aggrandisement, an additional power of taking life
+intelligently and serenely; a power of adaptation to various climates
+and diets of the spirit, let alone the added wealth of such varied
+climates and diets themselves. Italy, somehow, attains this by her mere
+visible aspect and her history: a pure, high sky, a mountain city, or a
+row of cypresses can teach as much as Dante, and, indeed, teach us to
+understand Dante himself. While as to France, that most lucid of
+articulately-speaking lands, explains herself in her mere books; and we
+become in a manner French with every clear, delightful page we read, and
+almost every thought of our own we ever think with definiteness and
+grace. But the genius of Germany is, like her landscape, homely and
+sentimental, with the funny goodness and dearness of a good child; and
+we must learn to know it while we ourselves are children. And therefore
+it is from our governesses that we learn (with dimmer knowledge of
+mysterious persons or things "Ulfilas"--"Tacitus's Germania," supposed
+by me to have been a lady, his daughter perhaps, and the "seven stars"
+of German literature) a certain natural affinity with the Germany of
+humbler and greater days, when no one talked of Teuton superiority or of
+purity of Teuton idiom; the Germany which gave Kant, and Beethoven, and
+Goethe and Schiller, and was not ashamed to say "scharmant."
+
+I, too, was taught to say "scharmant" and "amüsiren". It was wrong, very
+wrong; and I feel my inferiority every time I come to Germany, and have
+to pause and think by what combination of words I can express the true
+Germanic functions and nature of booking offices and bicycle labels. For
+it was long ago: Count Bismarck was still looked on as a dangerous
+upstart, and we reckoned in kreutzers; blue and white Austrian bands
+played at Mainz and Frankfurt. It was long ago that I was, so to speak,
+a small German infant, fed on Teutonic romance and sentiment (and also
+funny Teutonic prosaicalness, bless it!) by a dim procession of
+Germania's daughters. There was Franziska, who could boast a Rhineland
+pastor for grandfather, a legendary pastor bearding Napoleon; Franziska,
+who read Schiller's "Maria Stuart" and "Joan of Arc," and even his
+"Child Murderess" (I remember every word of obloquy hurled at the
+hangman--"hangman, craven hangman, canst thou not break off a lily") to
+the housemaid and me whenever my father and mother went out of an
+evening; and described "Papagena," in Mozart's opera which she had seen,
+all dressed in feathers; and was tempted to strum furtive melancholy
+chords on my mother's zither.... Dear Franziska, whose comfortable
+blond good looks inspired the enamoured upholsterer in letters beginning
+"My dearest little goldfish"--Franziska, what has become of thee? And
+the Frau Professor, who averred with rhythmic iteration that teaching
+such a child was far, far worse than breaking stones on a high-road; in
+what stony regions may she have found an honoured stony grave? What has
+become of genial Mme. E., who played the Jupiter Symphonie with my
+mother, instead of hearing me through my scales, and lent me volumes of
+Tonkünstler-Lexikons to soothe her conscience, and gave us honey in the
+comb out of her garden of verbena and stocks? But best of all, dearest,
+far above all the others, and quite different, Marie S., charming
+enthusiastic young schoolmistress in that little town of pepper-pot
+towers and covered bridges, you I have found again; I shall soon see
+your eyes and hear your voice, quite unchanged, I am certain. And we
+shall sit and talk (your big daughter listening, perhaps not without an
+occasional smile) about those hours which you and I, a girl of twenty
+and a child of eleven, spent in the little room above the rushing Alpine
+river, eating apples and drinking _café au lait_; hours in which a
+whole world of legend and poetry, and scientific fact and theory more
+wonderful still, passed from your ardent young mind into the little
+eager puzzled one of your loving pupil. We shall meet very soon, a
+little awkwardly at first, perhaps, but after a moment talking as if no
+silence of thirty years had ever parted us; as if nothing had happened
+in between, as if all that might then have come true ... well, could
+come true still.
+
+These thoughts came into my head that morning in the promenade at
+Cassel, brought to the surface by the mellow autumn sun and the special
+pleasure of being again in Germany. There mingled with them also that
+recent conversation about the lady with the bonnet from Hanover, who had
+written that paper so precious to my American friend. And I determined
+to take my pen some day I should feel suitably happy, and offer up
+thanks for all of us to our governesses, to those dear women, dead,
+dispersed, faded into distance, but not forgotten; our spiritual
+foster-mothers who put a few drops of the milk of German kindness, of
+German simplicity and quaintness and romance, between our lips when we
+were children.
+
+
+
+
+ON GOING TO THE PLAY
+
+
+We were comparing notes the other day on plays and play-going. My friend
+was Irish; so, finding to our joy that we disliked this form of
+entertainment equally, we swore with fervour that we would go to the
+play together.
+
+Mankind may be divided into playgoers and not playgoers; and the first
+are far more numerous, and also far more illustrious. It evidently is a
+defect, and perhaps a sign of degeneracy, akin to deafness or to
+Daltonism, not to enjoy the theatre; not to enjoy it, at least in the
+reality, when there or just after coming away. For I can enjoy the
+thought of the play, and the thought of other folks liking it, so long
+as I am not taken there. There is something pleasant in thinking of
+those brilliant places, full of unrealities, with crowds engulfing
+themselves into this light from out of the dreary, foggy streets. Also,
+of young enthusiastic creatures, foregoing dinner, waiting for hours in
+cheap seats (like Charles and Mary Lamb before they had money to buy
+rare prints and blue china), with the delight of spending hoarded
+pennies; all under circumstances of the deepest bodily discomfort. I
+leave out of the question the thought of Greek theatres, of that
+semicircle of steps on the top of Fiesole, with, cypresses for side
+scenes, and, even now, lyric tragedies more than Æschylean enacted by
+clouds and winds in the amphitheatre of mountains beyond. I am thinking
+of the play as we moderns know it, with a sense of stuffiness as an
+integral part. Indeed, that stuffiness is by no means its worst feature.
+The most thrilling moment, I will confess, which theatres can still give
+me is that--but it is really _sui generis_ and ineffable--when, having
+got upstairs, you meet in the narrow lobbies of an old-fashioned
+playhouse the tuning of the fiddles and the smell--of gas, glue, heaven
+knows what glories of yester-year--which, ever since one's babyhood, has
+come to mean "the play." People have expended much genius and more money
+to make theatrical representation transcend imagination; but they can
+never transcend that moment in the corridor, _never transcend that
+smell_.
+
+Here is, most probably, one of my chief motives of dissatisfaction. I do
+not like the play--the play at the theatre--because it invariably falls
+short of that in my imagination. I make an exception for music; but not
+for the visible theatrical accompaniments thereof. Well given on the
+stage, _Don Giovanni_, for instance, remains but the rather bourgeois
+play of Molière; leave me and the music together, and I promise you that
+all the romance and terror and wonder of ten thousand Spains are
+distilled into my fancy!
+
+The fact is that, being an appeal to the imagination of others, every
+form of literature, every "deed of speech," as a friend of mine calls
+it, has a natural stage in the mind of the reader or the listener.
+Milton, let me point out, makes "gorgeous Tragedy in sceptred pall,"
+sweep across, not the planks of a theatre, but the scholar's thought as
+he sits alone with his book of nights. Neither is this an expression of
+conceit. I do not mean that _my_ conception of this, that, or the other
+is better, or as good as, what a great actor or a clever manager can
+set before me. Nothing of the sort; but my conception _is better suited
+to me_. Its very vagueness answers, nine times out of ten, to my
+repugnance and my preference; and the high lights, the vividly realized
+portions emerging from that vagueness, represent _what I like_. Hamlet
+or Portia or Viola and Olivia, exist for me under the evocation of the
+magician Shakespeare, but formed of recollections, impressions of
+places, people, and other poets, floating coloured atomies, which have a
+brooding charm, as being mine; why should they be scared off, replaced,
+by detailed real personalities who, even if charming, are most likely
+alien?
+
+I cannot very well conceive how people enjoy such substitutions. Perhaps
+they have more sensitive fancy and warmer sympathies than I; but as to
+mine, I had rather they were let alone. I can quite understand that it
+is different with children and with uneducated persons: their
+imagination is at once more erratic than ours (less tied by the logical
+necessities of details, less perceptive of these), and, at the same
+time, their imagination is not as thoroughly well stocked, and as ready
+to ignite almost spontaneously, as is ours. Much reading, travelling,
+much contemplation of human beings, apart from practical reasons, has
+given even the least creative of us lazy, grown-up folk a power, almost
+a habit, of imaginative creation; and but a very little, though a
+genial, pressure will make it act. But children and the people require
+stronger stimulus, and require also a field for their imagination to
+work upon. I can remember the amazing effect, entirely at variance with
+the intention, which portions of _Don Quixote_--seen at a circus, of all
+places--made on my mind when I was eight: it did not _realize_ ideas of
+chivalry which I had, but, on the contrary, it gave me, from outside,
+data (such data!) about chivalry on which my thoughts wove ideas the
+most amazing for many months. Something of the kind, I think, is
+happening to that Paris audience, rows and rows of eager heads and
+seeing eyes, which M. Carrière has painted, just enough visible, in his
+usual luminous haze, to give the mood. The stage is not shown: it really
+is in those eyes and faces. It is telling them that there are worlds
+different from their own; it is opening out perspectives (longer and
+deeper than those of wood and cardboard) down which those cabined
+thoughts and feelings may henceforth wander. The picture, like M.
+Carrière's "Morning" in the Luxembourg, is one of the greatest of poetic
+pictures; and it makes me, at least, understand what the value of the
+stage must be to hundreds and thousands of people; to _the people_, to
+children, and to those practical natures which, however learned and
+cultured, seem unable to get imaginative, emotional pleasure without a
+good deal of help from outward mechanism.
+
+These are all negative reasons why I dislike the play. But there are
+positive ones also. There is a story told by Lamb--or is it Hazlitt?--of
+a dear man who could not bear to read _Othello_, because of the dreadful
+fate of the Moor and his bride; "Such a noble gentleman! Such a sweet
+lady!" he would repeat, deeply distressed. The man was not
+artistic-souled; but I am like him. I know the healing anodyne in
+narrative, the classic consolation which that kind priest mentioned by
+Renan offered his congregation: "It took place so long ago that perhaps
+it never took place at all." But on the stage, when Salvini puts his
+terrible, suffused face out of Desdemona's curtains, it is not the past,
+but the present; there is no lurking hope that it may not be true. And I
+do not happen to wish to see such realities as that. Moreover, there are
+persons--my Irish friend and I, for instance--who feel abashed at what
+affects us as eavesdropping on our part. It is quite right we should be
+there to listen to some splendid piece of poetry, Romeo's duet with
+Juliet, the moonlight quartet of Lorenzo, Jessica, Olivia, and Nerissa,
+and parts of _Winter's Tale_; things which in musical quality transcend
+all music. But is it right that we be present at the unpacking of our
+neighbour's most private moral properties; at the dreadful laying bare
+of other folk's sores and nakedness? I wonder sometimes that any of the
+audience can look at the stage in company with the rest; the natural
+man, one would expect, would have the lights of the pit extinguished,
+and, if he needs must pry, pry at least unobserved.
+
+There is, however, an exception: when modern drama, instead of merely
+smuggling us, as by an ignominious King Candaules' ring called a theatre
+ticket, to witness what we shouldn't, gives us the spectacle of
+delightful personality, of individual power of soul, in its more
+intimate and perfect strength. I feel this sometimes in the case of Mme.
+Duse; and principally in her "Magda." This is good to see; as it is good
+to see naked muscles, to watch the efforts, the triumphant grace and
+strength of an athlete. For in this play of _Magda_ the Duse rivets
+interests, delights not by what she does, but by what she is. The plot,
+the turn of the action, is of no consequence; it might be all reversed,
+and most of it omitted. We care not what a creature like this happens to
+be doing or suffering; we care for her existence because it means energy
+and charm. Why not deliberately aim at such effects? Now that the stage
+is no longer the mere concert-room for magnificent poetry, lyric or
+epic, it might become what would be consonant with our modern
+psychologic tastes, the place where the genius of author or actor
+allowed us to come in sight, with the fulness and completeness of the
+intentional and artificial, of those finest spectacles of all, _great
+temperaments_. Not merely guess at them, see them by casual glimpses, as
+in real life; nor reconstruct them by their words and deeds, as in
+books; but actually see them revealed, homogeneous, consecutive, in
+their gestures and tones, the whole, the _very being_, of which words
+and acts are but the partial manifestation. Methinks that in this way
+the play might add enormously to the suggestiveness, the delight and
+dignity of life; play-acting might become a substantive art, not a mere
+spoiling of the work of poetry. Methinks that if this happened, or
+happened often, my friend and I, who also hates the play.... But it
+seems probable, on careful consideration, that my friend and I are
+conspicuously devoid of the dramatic faculty; which being the case we
+had better not discuss plays and play-going at all.
+
+
+
+
+READING BOOKS
+
+
+The chief point to be made in this matter is: that books, to fulfil
+their purpose, do not always require to be read. A book, for instance,
+which is a present, or an "hommage de l'auteur," has already served its
+purpose, like a visiting-card or a luggage label, at best like a
+ceremonial bouquet; and it is absurd to try and make it serve twice
+over, by reading it. The same applies, of course, to books lent without
+being asked for, and, in a still higher degree, to a book which has been
+discussed in society, and thus furnished out a due amount of
+conversation; to read such a book is an act of pedantry, showing
+slavishness to the names of things, and lack of insight into their real
+nature, which is revealed by the function they have been able to
+perform. Fancy, if public characters had to learn to snuff--a practice
+happily abandoned--because they occasionally received gifts of enamelled
+snuffboxes from foreign potentates!
+
+But there are subtler sides to this subject, and it is of these I fain
+would speak. We are apt to blunt our literary sense by reading far too
+much, and to lessen our capacity for getting the great delights from
+books by making reading into a routine and a drudgery. Of course I know
+that reading books has its utilitarian side, and that we have to
+consider printed matter (let me never call it literature!) as the raw
+material whence we extract some of the information necessary to life.
+But long familiarity with an illiterate peasantry like the Italian one,
+inclines me to think that we grossly exaggerate the need of such
+book-grown knowledge. Except as regards scientific facts and the various
+practices--as medicine, engineering, and the like, founded on them--such
+knowledge is really very little connected with life, either practical or
+spiritual, and it is possible to act, to feel, and even to think and to
+express one's self with propriety and grace, while having simply no
+literature at all behind one. That this is really no paradox is proved
+by pointing to the Greeks, who, even in the time of Plato--let alone the
+time, whenever that was, of Homer--had not much more knowledge of books
+than my Italian servant, who knows a few scraps of Tasso, possesses a
+"Book of Dreams; or Key to the Lottery," and uses the literature I have
+foolishly bestowed upon him as blotters in which to keep loose bills,
+and wherein occasionally to do addition sums. So that the fact seems to
+be that reading books is useful chiefly to enable us to wish to read
+more books!
+
+How many times does one not feel checked, when on the point of lending a
+book to what we call uneducated persons, by wondering what earthly
+texture of misapprehension and blanks they will weave out of its
+allusions and suggestions? And the same is the case of children. What
+fitter reading for a tall Greek goddess of ten than the tale of Cupid
+and Psyche, the most perfect of fairy stories with us; wicked sisters,
+subterranean adventures, ants helping to sort seeds, and terrible
+awaking drops of hot oil spilt over the bridegroom? But when I read to
+her this afternoon, shall I not see quite plainly over the edge of the
+book, that all the things which make it just what it is to me--the
+indescribable quality of the South, of antiquity and paganism--are
+utterly missed out; and that, to this divine young nymph, "Cupid and
+Psyche" is distinguishable from, say, "Beauty and the Beast" only by the
+unnecessary addition of a lot of heathenish names and the words which
+she does not even want to understand? Hence literature, alas! is, so to
+speak, for the literate; and one has to have read a great, great deal in
+order to taste the special exquisiteness of books, their marvellous
+essence of long-stored up, oddly mixed, subtly selected and hundredfold
+distilled suggestion.
+
+But once this state of things reached, there is no need to read much;
+and every reason for not _keeping up_, as vain and foolish persons
+boast, "with literature." Since, the time has come, after planting and
+grafting and dragging watering-pots, for flowering and fruition; for
+books to do their best, to exert their full magic. This is the time when
+a verse, imperfectly remembered, will haunt the memory; and one takes
+down the book, reads it and what follows, judiciously breaking off,
+one's mind full of the flavour and scent. Or, again, talking with a
+friend, a certain passage of prose--the account of the Lambs going to
+the play when young, or the beginning of "Urn Burial," or a chapter
+(with due improvised skippings) of "Candide"--comes up in conversation;
+and one reads it rejoicing with one's friends, feeling the special
+rapture of united comprehension, of mind touching mind, like the little
+thrill of voice touching voice on the resolving sevenths of the old
+duets in thirds. Or even when, remembering some graver page--say the
+dedication of "Faust" to Goethe's dead contemporaries--one fetches the
+book and reaches it silently to the other one, not daring to read it out
+loud.... It is when these things happen that one is really getting the
+good of books; and that one feels that there really is something
+astonishing and mysterious in words taken out of the dictionary and
+arranged with commas and semicolons and full stops between them.
+
+The greatest pleasures of reading consist in re-reading. Sometimes
+almost in not reading at all, but just thinking or feeling what there
+is inside the book, or what has come out of it, long ago, and passed
+into one's mind or heart, as the case may be. I wish to record in this
+reference a happy week once passed, at vintage time, in the Lower
+Apennines, with a beautiful copy of "Hippolytus," bound in white, which
+had been given me, regardless of my ignorance of Greek, by my dear
+Lombard friend who resembles a faun. I carried it about in my pocket;
+sometimes, at rare intervals, spelling out some word in _mai_ or in
+_totos_, and casting a glance on the interleaved crib; but more often
+letting the volume repose by me on the grass and crushed mint of the
+cool yard under the fig tree, while the last belated cicala sawed, and
+the wild bees hummed in the ivy flower of the old villa wall. For once
+you know the spirit of a book, there is a process (known to Petrarch
+with reference to Homer, whom he was unable to understand) of taking in
+its charm by merely turning over the pages, or even, as I say, in
+carrying it about. The literary essence, which is uncommonly subtle, has
+various modes of acting on us; and this particular manner of absorbing a
+book's spirit stands to the material operation called _reading_, much in
+the same way that _smell_, the act of breathing invisible volatile
+particles, stands to the more obvious wholesale process of _taste_.
+
+Nay, such is the virtuous power of books, that, to those who are
+initiated and reverent, it can act from the mere title, or more
+properly, the binding. Of this I had an instance quite lately in the
+library of an old Jacobite house on the North Tyne. This library
+contained, besides its properly embodied books, a small collection
+existing, so to speak, only in the spirit, or at least in effigy; a
+door, to wit, being covered with real book-backs, or, more properly,
+backs of real books of which the inside was missing. A quaint,
+delightful collection! "Female traits," two volumes; four volumes (what
+dinners and breakfasts, as well as suppers, of horrors!) of Webster's
+"Vittoria Corombona," etc., the "Siege of Mons," "Ancient Mysteries,"
+"The Epigrams of Martial," "A Journey through Italy," and Crébillon's
+novels. Contemplating these pseudo shelves of pageless tomes, I felt
+acutely how true it is that a book (for the truly lettered) can do its
+work without being read. I lingeringly relished (why did not Johnson
+give us a verb to _saporate_?) this mixed literature's flavour,
+humorous, romantic, and pedantic, beautifully welded. And I recognized
+that those gutted-away insides were quite superfluous: they had yielded
+their essence and their virtue.
+
+
+
+
+HEARING MUSIC
+
+
+"Heard melodies," said Keats, "are sweet; but those unheard are
+sweeter." The remark is not encouraging to performers, yet, saving their
+displeasure, there is some truth in it.
+
+We give too much importance, nowadays, being busy and idle and
+mercantile (compatible qualities, alas!) to the material presence of
+everything, its power of filling time or space, and particularly of
+becoming an item of our budget; forgetful that of the very best things
+the material presence is worthless save as first step to a spiritual
+existence within our soul. This is particularly the case with music.
+There is nothing in the realm of sound at all corresponding to the
+actual photographing of a visible object on the retina; our auditive
+apparatus, whatever its mysteries, gives no sign of being in any way of
+the nature of a phonograph. Moreover, one element of music is certainly
+due to the sense of locomotion, the _rhythm_; so that _sound_, to become
+music, requires the attention of something more than the mere ear. Nay,
+it would seem, despite the contrary assertion of the learned _Stumpf_,
+that the greater number of writers on the vexed science of sound incline
+to believe that the hearing of music is always attended with movements,
+however imperceptible, in the throat, which, being true, would prove
+that, in a fashion, we _perform_ the melodies which we think we only
+_hear_; living echoes, nerves vibrating beneath the composer's touch as
+literally as does the string of the fiddle, or its wooden fibres. A very
+delicate instrument this, called the _Hearer_, and, as we all know, more
+liable to being out of tune, to refusing to act altogether, than any
+instrument (fortunately for performers) hitherto made by the hand of
+man. Thus, in a way, one might paraphrase the answer which Mme.
+Gabbrielli is said to have made to the Empress Catherine, "Your
+Majesty's policemen can make me _scream_, not _sing_!" and say to some
+queen of piano keys or emperor of _ut de poitrine_ that there is no
+violence or blandishment which can secure the _inner ear_, however much
+the outer ear may be solicited or bullied.
+
+'Tis in this sense, methinks, that we should understand the saying of
+Keats--to wit, that in a great many cases the happiest conjunction of
+music and the soul occurs during what the profane call silence; the very
+fact of music haunting our mind, while every other sort of sound may be
+battering our ear, showing our highest receptivity. And, as a fact, we
+do not know that real musicians, _real_ Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha and
+Abt Voglers, not written ones, require organs neither of glass nor of
+metal; but build their palaces of sound on a plain deal table with a
+paper covered with little lines and dots before them? And was not
+Beethoven, in what some folk consider his mightiest era, as deaf as a
+post?
+
+I do not advocate deafness. Nay, privately, being quite incapable of
+deciphering a score, I confess that there is something dry and dreary in
+absolutely soundless music--music which from the silent composer passes
+to the silent performer, who is at the same time a silent listener,
+without the neighbours being even one bit the wiser? Besides, were this
+gift universal, it would deprive us of that delightful personality the
+mere performer, whose high-strung nervousness, or opulent joviality, is,
+after all, a pleasant item in art, a humorous dramatic interlude, in the
+excessive spirituality of music.
+
+I am not, therefore, in favour of absolute silence in the art of sounds.
+I am only asking people to remember that sound waves and the auditive
+apparatus put in connection, even if the connection costs a guinea, is
+not enough to secure the real _hearing_ of music; or, if this formula
+appear too vulgar, asking them to repeat to themselves those lines of
+Keats. I feel sure that so doing would save much of that dreadful
+bitterness and dryness of soul, a state of conscious non-receptivity
+corresponding in musical experience with what ascetic writers call
+"spiritual aridity"--which must occasionally depress even the most
+fortunate of listeners. For, look in thy conscience, O friendly
+fellow-concert-goer, and say truly, hast thou not, many times and oft,
+sat to no purpose upon narrow seats, blinded by gas, with no outlook
+save alien backs and bonnets, while divinest music flowed all around,
+yet somehow wetted not thy thirsty and irritated soul?
+
+The recognition of this fact would not only diminish such painful
+moments (or rather, alas! _hours_), but would teach us to endure them
+cheerfully as the preparation for future enjoyment, the garnering for
+private and silent enjoyment. "Heard melodies are sweet, but those
+unheard," etc., would act like Joseph's interpretation of the fat and
+lean kine of Pharaoh; we should consider concerts and musical festivals
+as fatiguing, even exhausting, employments, the strain of which was
+rendered pleasant by the anticipation of much ease and delight to come.
+
+Connected with this question is that of amateur performance. The amateur
+seems nowadays to waste infinite time in vying with the professional
+person instead of becoming acquainted, so to speak, with the composer.
+It is astonishing how very little music the best amateurs are acquainted
+with, because they must needs perform everything they know. This, in
+most cases, is sheer waste, for, in the way of performers, the present
+needs of mankind (as Auguste Comte remarked about philosophers) can be
+amply met by twenty thousand professionals. And many families would,
+from a spirit of moderation, forego the possession of an unpaid
+professional in the shape of a daughter or an aunt. One of the chief
+uses, indeed, of the professional performers should be to suppress
+amateurs by furnishing a standard of performance which lovers of music
+would silently apply to the music which formed the daily delight of
+their inner ear.
+
+For, if we care veraciously for music, we think of it, _or think it_, as
+it ought to be performed, not as we should ourselves perform it. Nay,
+more, I feel convinced that truly musical persons, such as can really
+understand a master's thoughts, are not distressed by the shortcomings
+of their own performance, the notes they play or sing merely serving to
+suggest those which they hear.
+
+This transcendental doctrine (fraught, I confess, like all transcendent
+truths, with gravest practical dangers) was matured in my mind by
+friendship with one of the most singular of musicians. This person
+(since deceased, and by profession a clerk) suffered from nervousness
+so excessive that, despite a fair knowledge of music, the fact of
+putting his hands upon the keys produced a maddening sort of stammer,
+let alone a notable tendency to strike wrong notes and miss his octaves;
+peculiarities of which he was so morbidly conscious that it was only an
+accident which revealed to me, after years of acquaintance, that he ever
+played the piano at all. Yet I know as a fact that this poor blundering
+player, who stopped convulsively if he heard steps in the passage, and
+actually _closed the lid of his instrument_ when the maid came in with
+the tea-things, was united more closely with the divine ones of music
+during his excruciating performance, than many a listener at a splendid
+concert. Mozart, for whom he had a special _cultus_, would surely have
+felt satisfied, if his clairvoyant spirit had been abroad, with my
+friend's marvellous bungling over that first finale of "Don Giovanni."
+The soul, the whole innermost nervous body (which felt of the shape of
+the music, fluid and infinitely sensitive) of the poor creature at the
+piano would draw itself up, parade grandly through that minuet, dance it
+in glory with the most glorious ghosts of glorious ladies--pshaw! not
+with anything so trifling! Dance it _with the notes themselves_, would
+sway with them, bow to them, rise to them, live with them, become in
+fact part and parcel of the music itself....
+
+So, to return whence I began, it is no use imagining that we necessarily
+hear music by going to concerts and festivals and operas, exposing our
+bodily ear to showers and floods of sound, unless we happen to be in the
+right humour, unless we dispose, at the moment, of that rare and
+capricious thing--the _inner ear_.
+
+
+
+
+RECEIVING LETTERS
+
+
+I think I shall not treat of writing them. That is a different matter,
+with pains and pleasures of its own, which do not correspond (the word
+fits nicely to this subject) with those of letters received. For 'tis a
+metaphysical mistake, or myth of language, like those victoriously
+exposed by the ingenious _M. Tarde_, to regard the reading of a letter
+as the symmetrical opposite (the right glove matching the left, or
+_inside of an outside_) of the writing thereof. Save in the case of
+lovers or moonstruck persons, like those in Emerson's essay on
+"Friendship," the reading of a letter is necessarily less potent, and,
+as the French say, _intimate_, in emotion, than the writing of it.
+Indeed, we catch ourselves repeatedly thrusting into our pocket for
+perusal at greater leisure those very letters which poured out like
+burning lava from their writers, or were conned over lovingly,
+lingeringly altered and rewritten; and we wonder sometimes at our lack
+of sympathy and wonder also (with cynicism or blushes) whether our
+letters also, say that one of Tuesday----But no; _our_ letters are not
+egoistical....
+
+The thought is not one to be dwelt on in an essay, which is nothing if
+it is not pleasing. So I proceed to note also that pleasure at the
+contents has nothing to do with the little excitement of the arrival
+of the post-bag, or of watching the clerk's slow evolutions at a
+_poste restante_ window. That satisfaction is due to the mere moment's
+hope for novelty, the flash past of the outer world, and the
+comfortable sense of having a following, friends, relatives, clients;
+and it is in proportion to the dulness of our surroundings. Great
+statesmen or fortunate lovers, methinks, must turn away from aunts'
+and cousins' epistles, and from the impression of so and so up the
+Nile, or on first seeing Rome. Indeed, I venture to suggest that only
+the monotony of our forbears' lives explains the existence of those
+endless volumes of dreary allusions and pointless anecdote handed
+down to us as the Correspondence of Sir Somebody This, or of the
+beautiful Countess of That, or even of Blank, that prince of
+coffee-house wits. The welcome they received in days when (as is
+recorded by Scott) the mail occasionally arrived at Edinburgh carrying
+only one single letter, has given such letters a reputation for
+delightfulness utterly disconnected with any intrinsic merit, but
+which we sycophantishly accept after a hundred or two hundred years,
+handing it on with hypocritical phrases about "quaintness," and "vivid
+picture of the past," and similar nonsense. But the Wizard Past casts
+wonderful spells. And then there is the tenderness and piety due to
+those poor dead people, once strutting majestically in power, beauty,
+wit, or genius; and now left shivering, poor, thin, transparent ghosts
+in those faded, thrice-crossed paper rags! I feel rebuked for my
+inhuman irreverence. Out upon it! I will speak only pious words about
+the letters of dead folk.
+
+But, to make up for such good feeling, let me say what I think about the
+letters of persons now living, in good health, my contemporaries and
+very liable to outlive me. For if I am to praise the letters which my
+soul loves, I must be plain also about those which my soul abhors.
+
+And to begin with the worst. The letter we all hate most, I feel quite
+sure, is the nice letter of a person whom we think horrid. Some beings
+have the disquieting peculiarity, which crowns their other bad
+qualities, of being able to write more pleasingly than they speak, look,
+or (we suppose) act; revealing, pen in hand, human characteristics,
+sometimes alas! human charms, high principle, pathetic sentiment, poetic
+insight, sensitiveness to nature, things we are bound to love, but
+particularly do not wish to love in _them_. This villainous faculty,
+which puts us in a rage and forces us to be amiable, is almost enough to
+make us like, or at all events condone, its contrary in our own dear
+friends. I mean that marvellous transformation to which so many of those
+we love are subject; creatures, supple, subtle and sympathetic in the
+flesh, in speech and glance and deed, becoming stiff, utterly impervious
+and heartless once they set to writing; lovely Melusinas turning, not
+into snakes, but into some creature like a dried cod. This is much
+worse with persons of our nation than with our foreign friends, owing to
+that fine contempt for composition, grammar, and punctuation which marks
+the well-bred Briton, and especially the well-bred Briton's wife and
+daughter. As a result, there is a positive satisfaction, a sense of
+voluminous well-being, derived from a letter which is merely explicit,
+consecutive, and garnished with occasional stops. This question of
+punctuation is a serious one. Speaking personally, I find I cannot enjoy
+the ineffable sense of resting in the affection and wisdom of my friend,
+if I am jerked breathless from noun to noun and from verb to verb, or
+set hunting desperately after predicates. Worse even is the lack of
+explicitness. The peace and trustfulness, the respite given by
+friendship from what Whitman calls "the terrible doubt of appearances"
+are incompatible with brief and casual utterance, ragbags of items,
+where you have to elucidate, weigh, and use your judgment whether more
+(or less) is meant than meets the eye; and after whose perusal you are
+left for hours, sometimes days, patching together suggestions and
+wondering what they suggest. Some persons' letters seem almost framed
+to afford a series of _alibis_ for their personality; not in this thing,
+oh no! not concerned in such a matter by any means; always elsewhere,
+never to be clutched.
+
+Yet there are bitterer things in letters from friends than even these,
+which merely puzzle and distress, but do not infuriate. For I feel
+cheated by casual glimpses of affairs which concern me not; I resent odd
+scraps of information, not chosen for my palate; I am indignant at news
+culled from the public prints, and frantic at thermometric and
+meteorological intelligence. But stay! There is a case when what seems
+to come under this heading is really intensely personal, and, therefore,
+most welcome to the letter receiver. I mean whenever, as happens with
+some persons, such talk about the weather reveals the real writing soul
+in its most intimate aspect; wrestling with hated fogs, or prone in the
+dampish heat, fretted by winds or jubilant in dry, sunny air. And now I
+find that with this item of weather reports, I am emerging from the
+region of letters I abhor into the region of letters which I love, or
+which I lovingly grieve over for some small minor cruelty.
+
+For I am grieved--nay, something more--by that extraordinary (and I
+hope exclusively feminine) fact an absence of superscripture. My soul
+claims some kind of vocative. I would accept a German note of
+exclamation; I would content myself with an Italian abbreviation, a
+Preg^mo, or Chiar^mo; I could be happy with a solemn and discreet
+French "Madame et chère amie," or (as may happen) "Monsieur et cher
+Maître," like the bow with tight-joined heels and _platbord_ hat
+pressed on to waistcoat, preluding delightful conversation. But not to
+be quite sure how one is thought of! Whether as _dear_, or _my dear_,
+or Tom, Dick, or Harry, or soldier, or sailor, or candlestick maker!
+Nay, at the first glance, not quite to know whether one is the
+destined reader, or whether even there is a destined reader at all; to
+be offered an entry out of a pocket-book, a page out of a diary, a
+selection of _Pensées_, were they Pascal's; a soliloquy, were it
+Hamlet's: surely lack of sympathy can go no further, nor incapacity of
+effort be more flagrant than with such writers, usually the very ones
+the reader most clings to, who put off, as it seems, until directing
+the envelope, the question of whom they are writing to.
+
+Yet the annoyance they give one is almost compensated when, once in a
+blue moon, in such a superscription-less epistle, one lights upon a
+sentence very exclusively directed to one's self; when suddenly out of
+the vague _tenebrae_ of such a letter, there comes, retreating as
+suddenly, a glance, a grasp, a clasp. It seems quite probable that young
+Endymion, in his noted love passages with the moon, may have had
+occasionally supreme felicity of this kind, in a relation otherwise of
+painfully impersonal and public nature; when, to wit, the goddess, after
+shining night after night over the seas and plains and hills,
+occasionally shot from behind a cloud one little gleam, one arrow of
+light, straight on to Latmos.
+
+But, alack! as Miss Howe wrote to the immortal Clarissa, my paper is at
+an end, my crowquill worn to the stump. So I can only add as postscript
+to such of my dear friends as write the letters which my soul abhors,
+that I hope, beg, entreat they will at least write them to me often.
+
+
+
+
+NEW FRIENDS AND OLD
+
+
+There is not unfrequently a spice of humiliation hidden in the rich
+cordial pleasure of a new friendship, and I think Emerson knew it.
+Without beating about the bush as he does, one might explain it,
+methinks, not merely as a vague sense of disloyalty towards the other
+friendships which are not new; but also as a shrewd suspicion (though we
+hide it from ourselves) that this one also will have to grow old in its
+turn. And we have not yet found out how to treat any of our possessions,
+including our own selves, in such a way that they shall, if anything,
+improve. Despite our complicated civilization, so called, or perhaps on
+account of it, we are all of us a mere set of barbarians, who find it
+less trouble to provide a new, cheap, and shoddy thing than to get the
+full use and full pleasure of a finely-made and carefully-chosen old
+one. Those ghastly paper toilettes of the ladies in "Looking Backward"
+are emblematic of our modes of proceeding. We are for ever dressing and
+undressing our souls, if not our bodies, in rags made out of rags.
+
+Heaven forbid that I should ever blaspheme new friendships! They are
+among the most necessary as well as the most delightful things we get a
+chance of. They do not merely exhilarate, but actually renew and add to
+us, more even than change of climate and season. We are (luckily for
+every one) such imitative creatures that every person we like much, adds
+a new possible form, a new pattern, to our understanding and our
+feeling; making us, through the pleasantness of novelty, see and feel a
+little as that person does. And when, instead of _liking_ (which is the
+verb belonging rather to good acquaintance, accidental relationship as
+distinguished from real friendship), it is a case of _loving_ (in the
+sense in which we really love a place, a piece of music, or even, very
+often, an animal), there is something more important and excellent even
+than this. For every creature we do really love seems to reveal a whole
+side of life, by the absorbing of our attention into that creature's
+ways; nay, more, the fact that what we call _loving_ is in most cases a
+complete creation, at least a thorough interpretation of them by our
+fancy and our shaken-up, refreshed feelings.
+
+A new friendship, by this unconscious imitation of the new friend's
+nature and habits, and by the excitement of the thing's pleasant
+novelty, causes us to discover new qualities in literature, art, our
+surroundings, ourselves. How different does the scenery look--still
+familiar but delightfully strange--as we drive along the valleys or
+scramble in the hills with the new friend! there is a distant peak one
+never noticed, or a scented herb which has always grown upon those
+rocks, but might as well never have done so, but for the other pair of
+eyes which drew ours to it, or the other hand which crushing made us
+know its fragrance. Pages of books, seemingly stale, revive into fresh
+meaning; new music is almost certain to be learned; and a harmony, a
+rational sequence, something very akin to music, perceived in what had
+been hitherto but a portion of life's noise and confusion. The changes
+of style which we note in the case of great geniuses--Goethe and
+Schiller, for instance, or Ruskin after his meeting with Carlyle--are
+often brought about, or prepared, by the accident of a new friendship;
+and, who knows? half of the disinterested progress of the world's
+thought and feeling might prove, under the moral microscope, to be but a
+moving web of invisible friendships, forgotten, but once upon a time
+new, and so vivid!
+
+The falling off from such pleasure and profit in older friendships (it
+is very sad, but not necessarily cynical to recognize the fact) is due
+in some measure to our being less frank, less ourselves, in them than in
+new ones. Our mutual ways of feeling and seeing are apt to produce a
+definite track of intellectual and affective intercourse; and as this
+track deepens we find ourselves confined, nay, imprisoned in it, with
+little possibility of seeing, and none of escaping, as in some sunken
+Devonshire lane; the very ups and downs of the friendship existing, so
+to speak, below the level of our real life; disagreements and
+reconciliations always on one pattern. With people we have known very
+long, we are apt to go thus continually over the same ground, reciting
+the same formulæ of thought and feeling, imitating the _ego_ of former
+years in its relations with a _thou_ quite equally obsolete; the real
+personality left waiting outside for the chance stranger. It is so easy!
+so safe! We have done it so long! There is an air of piety almost in the
+monotony and ceremonial; and then, there are the other's habits of
+thought which might be jarred, or feelings we might hurt.... Meanwhile
+our sincere, spontaneous reality is idling elsewhere, ready to vagabond
+irresponsibly at the beck and call of the passing stranger. And, who
+knows? while we are thus refusing to give our poor old friend the
+benefit of our genuine, living, changed and changing self, we may
+ourselves be losing the charm and profit of his or her renovated and
+more efficacious reality.
+
+The retribution sometimes comes in unexpected manner. We find ourselves
+neglected for some new-comer, thin of stuff, to-morrow threadbare; _we_,
+who are conscious all the time of a newness too well hidden, alas! a
+newness utterly unsuspected by our friend, and far surpassing the
+newness of the new one! Poetic justice too lamentable to dwell upon.
+But short of it, far short, our old friendships, with their safe
+traditions and lazy habits, are ever tending to become the intercourse
+of friendly ghosts.
+
+Yet even this is well worth having, and after bringing praise to younger
+friendships, let me for ever feel, rather than speak (for 'tis too deep
+and wide for words) befitting gratitude to old ones. For there is always
+something puzzling in the present; unrestful and disquieting in all
+novelty; and we require, poor harassed mortals, the past and lots of it;
+the safe, the done-for past, a heap of last year's leaves or of dry,
+scented hay (which is mere dead grass and dead meadow-flowers) to take
+our rest upon. There is a virtue ineffable in things known, tried,
+understood; a comfort and a peacefulness, often truly Elysian, in
+finding one's self again in this quiet, crepuscular, downy world of old
+friendships--a world, as I have remarked, largely peopled with ghosts,
+our own and other folks'; but ghosts whose footsteps never creak, whose
+touch can never startle, or whose voice stab us, and who smile a smile
+which has the wide, hazy warmth of setting suns or veiled October skies.
+Yes, whatever they may lack (through our own fault and folly), old
+friendships are made up of what, when all is said and done, we need
+above every other thing, poor faulty, uncertain creatures that we are--I
+mean kindness and certain indulgence. There is more understanding in new
+friendships, and a closer contact of soul with soul; but that contact
+may mean a jar, a bruise, or, worst of all, a sudden sense of icy chill;
+and the penetrating comprehension may entail, at any moment, pained
+surprise and disappointment. Making new friends is not merely
+exploration, but conquest; and what cruel checks to our wishes and
+ambitions!
+
+Instead of which, all vanity long since put to sleep, curiosity extinct
+for years, insidious pleasures of self-explanation quite forgotten,
+there remains this massive comfort of well-known faithful and trusting
+kindness; a feeling of absolute reassurance almost transcending the
+human, such as we get from, let us say, an excellent climate.
+
+There remain, also, joys quite especial to old friendship, or the
+possibility thereof, for the reality, alas! is rare enough. The sudden
+discovery, for instance, after a period of separation or a gap in
+intercourse, of qualities and ways not previously seen (perhaps not
+previously wanted) in the well-known soul: new notes, but with the added
+charm of likeness to already loved ones, deeper, more resonant, or
+perhaps of unsuspected high unearthly purity, in the dear voice. Absence
+may do it, or change of occupation; or sudden vicissitude of fortune; or
+merely the reading of a certain book (how many friends may not Tolstoi's
+"Resurrection" have thus revealed to one another!), or the passing of
+some public crisis like the Dreyfus business. What! after these years of
+familiarity, we did not know each other fully? You thought, you felt,
+like that on such or such a subject, dear old friend, and I never
+suspected it! Nay, never knew, perhaps, that _I_ must feel and think
+like that, and in no other way! To find more in what one already has;
+the truest adding to all wealth, the most fruitful act of
+production;--that is one of the privileges of old friendships.
+
+
+
+
+OTHER FRIENDSHIPS
+
+
+It came home to me, during that week of grim and sordid business in the
+old house, feeling so solitary among the ghosts of unkind passions which
+seemed, like the Wardour Street ancestors, to fill the place--it came
+home to me what consolation there can be in the friendship of one small
+corner of grace or beauty. During those dreary days in Scotland, the
+friendliness and consolation were given me by the old kitchen garden,
+with its autumn flower borders, half hiding apple trees and big cabbages
+and rhubarbs, and the sheep-dotted hill, and the beeches sloping above
+its red fruit walls. I slipped away morning and evening to it as to a
+friend. Not as to an old one; that would give a different aspect to the
+matter; nor yet exactly a new friend, conquering or being conquered; but
+rather as one turns one's thoughts, if not one's words, to some
+nameless stranger, casually met, in whom one recognizes, among the
+general wilderness of alien creatures, a quality, a character for which
+one cares.
+
+Travelling a good deal, and nearly always alone, one has occasion to
+gauge the deep dreariness of human beings pure and simple, when, so to
+speak, the small, learnt-by-rote lessons of civilization, of kindness,
+graciousness, or intelligence, are not being called into play by common
+business or acquaintanceship. There, in the train, they sit in the
+elemental, native dreariness of their more practical, ungracious demand
+on life; not bad in any way, oh no; nor actively repulsive, but trite,
+empty, _everyday_, in the sense of what _everyday_ often, alas! really
+is, but certainly no day or hour or minute, in a decent universe, should
+ever be. And suddenly a new traveller gets in; and, turning round, you
+realize that things are changed, that something from another planet, and
+yet something quite right and so familiar, has entered. A young man
+shabbily dressed in mourning, who got in at a junction in Northern
+France with a small girl, like him in mourning, and like him pale, a
+little washed-out ashy blond, and with the inexpressible moral grace
+which French folk sometimes have, will always remain in my memory; while
+all those fellow-travellers and all the others--hundreds of them since
+that day--have faded from my memory, their images collapsing into each
+other, a grey monotony as of the rows of little houses which unfurl and
+furl up, and vanish, thank the Lord, into nothingness, while the express
+swishes past some dreadful manufacturing town. Another time, some years
+ago, the unknown friend was a small boy, a baby almost, jumping and
+rolling (a practice intolerable in any child but him) on the seat of a
+second-class carriage. We did not speak; in fact my friend had barely
+acquired the necessary art. But I felt companioned, befriended,
+delivered of the world's crowded solitude.
+
+Apart from railway trains, a similar thing may sometimes happen. And
+there are few of us, surely, who do not possess, somewhere in their
+life, friends of the highest value whom they have barely known--met with
+once or twice perhaps, talked with, and for some reason not met again;
+but never lost sight of by heart and fancy--indeed, more often turned
+to, and perhaps more deeply trusted (as devout persons trust St. Joseph
+and St. Anthony of Padua, whom, after all, they scarcely know more than
+their own close kindred) than so many of, ostensibly, our nearest and
+dearest. Indeed, this is the meaning of that curious little poem of
+Whitman's--"Out of the rolling ocean, the crowd, came a drop gently to
+me"--with its Emersonian readiness to part, "now we have met, we are
+safe;" a very wise view of things, if our poor human weakness really
+wanted safety, and did not merely want "more"--indeed, like that human
+little boy, want "too much."
+
+But to return to the friendships, consoling, comforting intimacies,
+which we can have not merely with strangers never met again, or never,
+meeting, spoken with; but even more satisfactorily with those beloved
+ones whom, from our own lack of soul, of _anima_ drawing forth _anima_,
+we dully call inanimates. I am not speaking, of course, of the real
+passions with which exceptionally lovely or wonderful spots or
+monuments, views of distant Alps, or certain rocky southern coasts, or
+St. Mark's or Amiens Cathedral, great sirens among voiceless things,
+subjugate and draw our souls. The friendships in question are sober and
+deliberate, founded on reasonable recognition of some trait of dignity
+or grace; and matured by conscious courtship on our part, retracing of
+steps day by day, and watching the friend's varying moods at noon or
+under low lights. During that week in the grim Scottish ancestral house,
+it was the kitchen-garden, as I began by saying, which comforted me. In
+another place, where I was ill and sorely anxious, a group of slender,
+whispering poplars by a mill; and under different, but equally
+harassing, circumstances, the dear little Gothic church of a tiny town
+of Western France.
+
+The Gothic church on its rising ground above the high-pitched roofs,
+and, in a measure, the church's white tame goat, which I found there one
+morning under a lime tree. I had been overtaken by a sudden storm, the
+rain-floods dashing from the gargoyles on to the rough ground of the
+solitary, wooded mound. In the faint light the little church, with
+sparse oak leaves and dock delicately carved on the granite capitals,
+was wonderfully grave and gentle in its utter emptiness; and I did it
+all possible honour. There is a low granite bench or sill round the
+base of the beautiful sheaved columns; a broken, disused organ-loft of
+coloured mediæval thorn carving; and under two shapely little arches lie
+a knight, unknown, and lady in high coif.... I knew it all by heart,
+coming like that every day and sometimes twice a day; by heart, and, so
+to speak, _with_ my heart. The sound of the spouting gargoyles ceased;
+cocks began to crow; I went out, for the rain must have left off.... Not
+yet; the skies were still dripping, and the plain below full of vapours.
+And the tame white goat, the only living creature about the church, had
+taken refuge under a cart stranded by a large lime tree.
+
+I mention this particular visit to my friend the church of L----, in
+order to explain the precise nature of our friendship; and to show, as I
+think it does, that through that law of economy which should preside
+over our pleasures and interests, such intimacy with a single object,
+simple and unobtrusive, is worth the acquaintance with a hundred and one
+magnificent and perfect things, if superficially seen and without loving
+care.
+
+
+
+
+A HOTEL SITTING-ROOM
+
+
+I am calling this paper after a hotel sitting-room because some of one's
+most recurrent and definite trains of thought are most hopelessly
+obstinate about getting an intelligible name, so that I take advantage
+of this one having been brought to a head in a real room of the kind.
+The room was on a top floor in Florence; the Cupola and Campanile and
+other towers in front of it above the plum-coloured roofs; and beyond,
+the bluish mountains of Fiesole. Trams were puffing about in the square
+below, and the church bells ringing, and the crowd streaming to the
+promenade; but only the unchanging and significant life of the town
+seemed to matter up here. I was struck with the charm of such a hotel
+room--the very few ornaments, greatly cherished since they were carried
+about; the books for reading, not for furniture; the bought flowers in
+common glasses; and the consequent sense of selection, deliberateness,
+and personality. Good heavens, I reflected, are we mortals so
+cross-grained that we can thoroughly enjoy things only by contrast, and
+that a sort of mild starvation is needed to whet our æsthetic appetite?
+
+By no means. Contrast for contrast's sake is a very coarse stimulant,
+and required only by very joyless natures. The real explanation of the
+charm of the hotel room and its sparse properties and flowers must be
+sought, I believe, in the fact that the charm of things depends upon our
+power of extracting it; and that our power in this matter, as in every
+other, nay, our leisure to exert it, is necessarily limited. Things, as
+I before remarked, do not give themselves without some wooing; and
+courtship is the secret of true possession. The world outside us, as
+philosophers tell us, is not what our eyes, ears, and touch and taste
+make it appear; nay, for aught we know, 'tis a mere chaos; and if, out
+of the endless impressions with which outer objects keep pelting us, we
+manage to pick up and appropriate a few, setting them in a pattern of
+meaning and beauty, it is thanks to the activity of our own special
+little self. That is the gist of Kant's philosophy; and, apart from
+Kant, it is the vague practical knowledge which experience teaches us.
+Hence the disappointment of all such persons as think that the beautiful
+and significant things of the world ought to give them delight without
+any trouble on their part: they think that it is the fault of a Swiss
+mountain, or a Titian Madonna, or a poem by Browning if it does not at
+once ravish their inert souls into a seventh heaven. Yet these are
+people who occasionally ride, or play at golf or whist, and who never
+expect the cards and the golf clubs to play the game by themselves, nor
+the very best horse to carry them to some destination without riding.
+Now, beautiful and interesting things also require a deal of riding, of
+playing with; let us put it more courteously--of wooing.
+
+The hotel room I have spoken of reveals the fact that we usually have
+far too many pleasant things about us, to be able to extract much
+pleasure from any of them; while, of course, somebody else, at the other
+end of the world let us say, or merely in the mews to the back, has so
+very much too little as to have none at all, which is another way of
+diminishing possible enjoyment. There seems, moreover, to be a certain
+queer virtue in mere emptiness, in mere negation. We require a _margin_ of
+_nothing_ round everything that is to charm us; round our impressions as
+well as round the material objects which can supply them; for without it
+we lose all outline, and begin to feel vaguely choked.
+
+Compare the pleasure of a picture tucked away in a chapel or sacristy
+with the plethoric weariness of a whole Louvre or National Gallery. Nay,
+remember the vivid delight of some fine bit of tracery round a single
+door or window, as in the cathedral of Dol or the house of Tristan
+l'Hermite at Tours; or of one of those Ionic capitals which you
+sometimes find built into quite an uninteresting house in Rome (there is
+one almost opposite St. Angelo, and another near Tor dei Specchi, Tower
+of the Mirrors, delightful name!).
+
+That question of going to see the thing, instead of seeing it drearily
+among ten thousand other things equally lovely--O weariness
+unparalleled of South Kensington or Cluny!--that question of the
+agreeable little sense of deliberate pilgrimage (pilgrimage to a small
+shrine perhaps in one's memory), leads me to another explanation of
+what I must call the "hotel room phenomenon."
+
+I maintain that there is a zest added to one's pleasure in beautiful
+things by the effort and ingenuity (unless too exhausting) expended in
+eliminating the impressions which might detract from them. One likes the
+hotel room just because some of the furniture has been sent away into
+the passage or wheeled into corners; one enjoys pleasant things
+additionally for having arranged them to advantage in one's mind. It is
+just the reverse with the rooms in a certain palace I sometimes have the
+privilege of entering, where every detail is worked--furniture,
+tapestries, embroideries, majolica, and flowers--into an overwhelming
+Wagner symphony of loveliness. There is a genuine Leonardo in one of
+those rooms, and truly I almost wish it were in a whitewashed lobby. And
+in coming out of all that perfection I sometimes feel a kind of relief
+on getting into the empty, uninteresting street. My thoughts, somehow,
+fetch a long breath....
+
+These are not the sentiments of the superfine. But then I venture to
+think that the dose of fineness which is, so to speak, _super_ or _too
+much_, just turns these folks' refinement into something its reverse.
+People who cannot sleep because of the roseleaf in the sheets, or the
+pea (like the little precious princess) under the mattress, are bad
+sleepers, and had better do charing or climbing, or get pummelled by a
+masseur till they grow healthier. And if ever I had the advising of
+young folk with ambition to be æsthetic, I should conjure them to
+cultivate their sensitiveness only to good things, and atrophy it
+towards the inevitable bad; or rather I should teach them to push into
+corners (or altogether get rid of) the irrelevant and trivial
+impressions which so often are bound to accompany the most delightful
+ones; very much as those occupants of the hotel room had done with
+some of its furniture. What if an electric tram starts from the foot
+of Giotto's tower, or if four-and-twenty Cook's tourists invade the
+inn and streets of Verona? If you cannot extract some satisfaction
+from the thought that there may be intelligent people even in a Cook's
+party, and that the ugly tram takes hundreds of people up Fiesole
+hill without martyrizing cab-horses--if you cannot do this (which
+still is worth doing), overlook the Cook's tourists and the tram, blot
+them out of your thoughts and feelings.
+
+This question of _superfineness_ versus _refinement_ (which ought to
+mean the power of refining things through our feeling) has carried me
+away from the original theme of my discourse, which, under the symbol of
+the hotel room, was merely that we should _perhaps appreciate more if we
+were offered less to appreciate_. Apropos of this, I have long been
+struck by the case of a dear Italian friend of mine, whose keenness of
+perception and grip of judgment and unexpectedness of fancy is almost in
+inverse proportion to her knowledge of books or opportunity of travel.
+An invalid, cut off from much reading, and limited to monotonous
+to-and-fro between a town which is not a great town and a hillside
+village which is not a--not a great village; she is quite marvellously
+delightful by her power of assimilating the little she can read and
+observe, not merely of transmuting _it_ into something personal and
+racy, but (what is much more surprising) of being modified harmoniously
+by its assimilation; her rich and unexpected mind putting forth even
+richer and more unexpected details. Whereas think of Tom, Dick, or
+Harry, their natural good parts watered down with other folks' notions,
+their imagination worn threadbare by the friction of experience; men who
+ought to be so amusing, and alas!...
+
+And now, having fulfilled my programme, as was my duty, let me return to
+my pleasure, which, at this moment (and whenever the opportunity
+presents itself) consists in falling foul of the superfine. The
+superfine are those who deserve (and frequently attain) the condition of
+that Renaissance tyrant who lived exclusively on hard-boiled eggs
+(without salt) for fear of poison. The superfine are those who will not
+eat walnuts because of the shell, and are pained that Nature should have
+been so coarse as to propagate oranges through pips. The superfine
+are.... But no. Let us be true to our principle of not neglecting the
+delightful things of this world by fixing our too easily hypnotized gaze
+on the things which are not delightful--disagreeable things which
+should be examined only with a view to their removal; or if they prove
+obstinate fixtures in our reality, be all the more resolutely turned out
+of the sparsely-furnished, delectable chambers of our fancy.
+
+
+
+
+IN PRAISE OF COURTSHIP
+
+
+There is too little courtship in the world. I do not mean there is not
+enough marrying and giving in marriage, or that the preliminaries
+thereunto are otherwise than they should be. Quite the reverse. As long
+as there is love and youth, there is sure in the literal sense to be
+courtship. But what I ask is that there be courtship besides that
+literal courtship between the Perditas and Florizels; that there be
+"being in love" with a great many things, even stocks and stones,
+besides youth and maiden; which would result, on the whole, in all of us
+being young in feeling even when we had grown old in years.
+
+For courtship means a wish to stand well in the other person's eyes,
+and, what is more, a readiness to be pleased with the other's ways; a
+sense on each side of having had the better of the bargain; an
+undercurrent of surprise and thankfulness at one's good luck.
+
+There is not enough courtship in the world. This thought has been
+growing in my mind ever since the silver wedding of two dear friends:
+that quarter of a century has been but a prolonged courtship.
+
+Why is it not oftener so? One sees among married folk a good deal of
+affection, of kindliness, even of politeness; a great deal too much
+mutual dependence, degenerating, of course, into habitual boredom. But
+none of this can be called courtship. Perhaps this was the meaning, less
+cynical than supposed, but quite as sad, of La Rochefoucauld when he
+noted down, "Il y a de bons mariages, mais point de délicieux;" since,
+in the delicate French sense of the word, implying some analogy of
+subdued yet penetrating pleasantness, as of fresh, bright weather or
+fine light wine, courtship is essentially _délicieux_.
+
+This is, of course, initiating a question of manner. Modern psychology
+is discovering scientific reasons for the fact that if you wag a dog's
+tail he feels pleased; or, at all events, that the human being would
+feel pleased if it had a tail and could wag it. Confessors and nurses
+knew it long ago, curbing bad temper by restraining its outer
+manifestations; and are not dinners and plays, flags and illuminations,
+birthdays and jubilees--nay, art itself, devices for suggestions to
+mankind that it feels pleased?
+
+Married people, as a rule, wish not to be pleased, or at least not to
+show it. They may be heartbroken at each other's death, and unable to
+endure a temporary separation; but the outsider may wonder why, seeing
+how little they seem to care for being together. It is the same, after
+all, with other relations; and it is only because brothers and sisters,
+fathers and children have not taken visible steps to select one another
+that their bored indifference is less conspicuous. You will say it is a
+question of mere manner. But, as remarked, manner not merely results
+from feeling, but largely reacts on feeling, and makes it different.
+People who live together have the appearance, often, of taking each
+other, if not as a convenience, at all events as a _fait accompli_, and,
+so far as possible, as if not there at all. Near relations try to
+realize the paradox of companionable solitude; and intimacy seems to
+imply the right to behave as if the intimate other one were not there.
+Now, _being by one's self_ is a fine thing, convenient and salutary
+(indeed, like courtship, there is not enough of it); but being by one's
+self is not to be confounded with _not being in company_. I have
+selected that expression advisedly, in order to give a shock to the
+reader. _In company?_ Good heavens! is being with one's wife, one's
+brothers or sisters, one's children, one's bosom friends _being in
+company_? And why not? Should company necessarily mean the company of
+strangers? And is the presence of one's nearest and dearest to be
+accounted as nothing--as nothing demanding some change in ourselves, and
+worthy of being paid some price for?
+
+This goes against our notion of intimacy; but then our notion is wrong,
+as is shown daily by the quarrels and recriminations of intimate
+friends. One can be natural, _with a difference_, which difference means
+a thought for the other. There is a selection possible in one's words
+and actions before another--nay, there is a manner of doing and feeling
+which almost forestalls the necessity of a selection at all. I like the
+expression employed by a certain sister after nursing her small brother
+through a difficult illness, "We were always Castilian," she said. Why,
+as we all try to be honest, and hard-working, and clever, and more or
+less illustrious, should we not sometimes try to be a little Castilian?
+Similarly, my friend of the silver wedding once pointed out to me that
+marriage, with its enforced and often excessive intimacies, was a
+wonderful school of consideration, of mutual respect, of fine courtesy.
+This had been no paradox in her case; but then, as I said, her
+twenty-five years of wedlock had been years of courtship.
+
+Courtship, however, should not be confined to marriage, nor even to such
+relations as imply close quarters and worries in common; nay, it should
+exist towards all things, a constant attitude in life--at least, an
+attitude constantly tended towards.
+
+The line of least resistance seems against it; our laziness, and our
+wish to think well of ourselves merely because we _are_ ourselves,
+undoubtedly go against it, as they do against everything in the world
+worth having. In our own day certain ways of thinking, culminating in
+development of the _Moi_ and production of the _Uebermensch_, and
+general self-engrossment and currishness, are peculiarly hostile to
+courtship. Whereas the old religious training, where it did not
+degenerate into excessive asceticism, was a school of good manners
+towards the universe as well as towards one's neighbours. The "Fioretti
+di San Francisco" is a handbook of polite friendliness to men, women,
+birds, wolves, and, what must have been most difficult, fellow-monks;
+and St. Francis' Hymn to the Sun might be given as an example of the
+wise man's courtship of what we stupidly call inanimates.
+
+For courtship might be our attitude towards everything which is capable
+of giving pleasure; and would not many more things give us pleasure--let
+us say, the sun in the heavens, the water on the stones, even the fire
+in the grate, if, instead of thinking of them as existing merely to make
+our life bearable, we called them, like the saint of Assisi, My Lord the
+Sun, and Sister Water, and Brother Fire, and thought of them with joy
+and gratitude?
+
+Certain it is that everything in the world repays courtship; and that,
+quite outside all marrying and giving in marriage, in all our dealings
+with all possible things, the cessation of courtship marks the incipient
+necessity for divorce.
+
+
+
+
+KNOWING ONE'S MIND
+
+
+The only things which afforded me any pleasure in that great collection
+of Ingres drawings, let alone in that very dull, frowsy, stale, and
+unprofitable city of Montauban, whither I had travelled on purpose to
+see it, were an old printed copy of "Don Juan oder der Steinerne
+Gast"--in a glass case alongside of M. Ingres' century-long-uncleaned
+fiddle--and a half-page of Mozart's autograph, given to M. Ingres when a
+student by a Prix de Rome musician. I mentioned this fact to my friends,
+in a spirit of guileless truthfulness; when, what was my surprise at the
+story being received with smiling incredulity. "Your paradox," they
+said, with the benevolent courtesy of their nation, for they were
+French, "is delightful and most _réussi_. But, of course, we know you to
+be exquisitely sensitive to genius in all its manifestations."
+
+Now, I happened to know myself to be as insensible as a stone to genius
+as manifested in the late M. Ingres. However, I despaired of persuading
+them that I was speaking the truth; and, despite the knowledge of their
+language with which they graciously credited me, I hunted about in vain
+for the French equivalent of "I know my own mind." Whereupon, allowing
+the conversation to take another turn, I fell to musing on those
+untranslatable words, together with the whole episode of the Mozart
+manuscript and the drawings of M. Ingres, including that rainy, chilly
+day at Montauban; and also another day of travel, even wetter and
+colder, which returned to my memory.
+
+_Knowing one's own mind_ (in whatever way you might succeed in turning
+that into French) is a first step to filling one's own place instead of
+littering unprofitably over creation at large, and in so far also to
+doing one's own work. Life, I am willing to admit, is not all private
+garden, nor should we attempt to make it. 'Tis nine-tenths common acres,
+which we must till in company, and with mutual sacrifice of our whims.
+Nay, Life is largely public thoroughfares with a definite _rule of the
+road_ and a regulated pace of traffic; streets, at all events, however
+narrow, where each must shovel snow, sprinkle water, and sweep his
+threshold. But respect for such common property cannot be genuine where
+there is not a corresponding fidelity and fondness on the part of each
+for his own little enclosure, his garden, and, by analogy, his
+neighbour's garden also. There is little good to be got from your vague,
+gregarious natures, liking or disliking merely because others like or
+dislike. There cannot be much loving-kindness, let alone love (whether
+for persons or things or ideas), in souls which always require company,
+and prefer any to none at all. And as to good work, why, it means
+_tête-à-tête_ with what you are doing, and is incompatible with the
+spirit of picnics. I own to a growing suspicion of those often heroic
+and saintly persons who allow their neighbours--husband, father, mother,
+children--to saunter idly into the allotments which God has given them,
+trampling heedlessly the delicate seedlings, or, like holiday trippers,
+carving egoistic initials in growing trees not of their own planting.
+And one of the unnoticed, because continuous, tragedies of existence is
+surely such wanton or deliberate destruction of the individual
+qualities of the soul, such sacrifice of the necessary breathing and
+standing place which even the smallest requires; such grudging of the
+needful solitude and separateness, alas! often to those that we love the
+best. It seems highly probable that among all their absurd and
+melancholy recollections of this wasteful and slatternly earth, the
+denizens of the Kingdom of Heaven will look back with most astonishment
+and grief on the fact of having lived, before regeneration, without a
+room apiece.
+
+In the Kingdom of Heaven every one will have a separate room for rest
+and meditation; a cell perhaps, whitewashed, with a green shutter and a
+white dimity curtain in the sunshine. And the cells will, of course, be
+very much alike in all essentials, because most people agree about
+having some sort of bed, table, chair, and so forth. But some glorified
+souls will have the flowers (which Dante saw her plucking) of Leah; and
+others the looking-glass of the contemplative Rachel; and there will be
+ever so many other little differences, making it amusing and edifying to
+pay a call upon one's brother or sister soul.
+
+In such a state of spiritual community and privacy (so different from
+our present hugger-mugger and five-little-bears-in-a-bed mode of
+existence), my soul, for instance, if your soul should honour it with a
+visit, would be able, methinks, to talk quite freely and pleasantly
+about the Ingres Museum at Montauban, and the autograph of Mozart in the
+glass case alongside the fiddle.... The manuscript is only a half sheet
+full score, torn or cut through its height; and the voice part is broken
+off with one word only--insufficient to identify it among Mozart's
+Italian works, though, perhaps, most suggestive of "Don Giovanni"--the
+word "Guai." The manuscript is exquisitely neat, yet has none of the
+look of a copy, and we know that Mozart was never obliged to make any.
+The writing is so like the man's adorable personality, the little
+pattern of notes so like his music. The sight of it moved me, flooding
+my mind with divine things, that Concerto for Flute and Harp, for
+instance, which dear Mme. H---- had recently been playing for me. And
+during that dull, rainy day of waiting for trains at Montauban, it made
+me live over again another day of rainy travel, but with the
+"Zauberflöte" at the end of it, about which I will also tell you, since
+I am permitted to know my own mind and to speak it.
+
+But I find I have incidentally raised the question _de gustibus_, or, as
+our language puts it, the _accounting for tastes_. And I must settle and
+put myself right in the matter of M. Ingres before proceeding any
+further. The Latin saying, then, "De gustibus non est disputandum,"
+contains an excellent piece of advice, since disputing about tastes or
+anything else is but a sorry employment. But the English version is
+absolutely wide of the mark, since tastes can be accounted for just as
+much as climate, history, and bodily complexion. Indeed, we should know
+implicitly what people like and dislike if we knew what they were and
+how they had come to be so. The very diversity in taste proves its
+deep-down reality: preference and antipathy being consubstantial with
+the soul--nay, inherent in the very mechanism and chemistry of the body.
+And for this reason tastes are at once so universal and uniform, and so
+variously marked by minor differences. There are human beings all shank
+and thigh and wrist, with contemplative, deep-set eyes and compressed,
+silent lips; and others running to rounds and segments of circles, like
+M. Ingres' drawings, their eyes a trifle prominent for the better
+understanding of others, and mouth, like the typical French one, at a
+forward angle, as if for ready speech. But, different as these people
+are, they are alike in the main features of symmetry and balance; they
+haven't two sets of lungs and a duplicate stomach, like Centaurs, whom
+every one found so difficult to deal with; nor do any of them end off in
+a single forked tail, twisting about on which accounts for the
+proverbial untrustworthiness of mermaids. Being alike, all human
+creatures require free space and breathable air; and, being unlike, some
+of them hanker after the sea, and others cannot watch without longing
+the imitation mountains into which clouds pile themselves on dreary flat
+horizons. And similarly in the matter of art. We all delight in the
+ineffable presence of transcending power; we all require to renew our
+soul's strength and keenness in the union with souls stronger and keener
+than ours. But the power which appeals to some of us is struggling and
+brooding tragically, as in Michelangelo and Beethoven; while the power
+which straightway subdues certain others is easy, temperate, and
+radiant, as in Titian and Mozart. And thus it comes about that every
+soul--"where a soul can be discerned"--is the citizen, conscious or not,
+of a spiritual country, and obeys a hierarchy, bends before a sovereign
+genius, crowned or mitred by inscrutable right divine, never to be
+deposed. But there are many kingdoms and principalities, not necessarily
+overlapping; and the subjects of them are by no means the same.
+
+Take M. Ingres, for instance. He is, it seems, quite a tremendous
+potentate. I recognize his legitimate sway, like that of Prester John,
+or of the Great Mogul. Only I happen not to obey it, for I am a born
+subject of the King of Hearts. And who should that be but
+Apollo-Wolfgang-Amadeus, driving with easy wrist his teams, tandem or
+abreast, of winged, effulgent melodies?
+
+It was raining, as I told you, that morning which I spent in the Ingres
+Museum at Montauban. It was raining melted snow in hurricanes off the
+mountains that other day of travel, and I was on the top of a Tyrolese
+diligence. The roads were heavy; and we splashed slowly along the brink
+of roaring torrents and through the darkness of soaked and steaming fir
+woods. At the end of an hour's journey we had already lost four. "If you
+stop to dine," said successive jack-booted postilions, quickly fastening
+the traces at each relay, "you will never catch the Munich train at
+Garmisch. But the Herrschaften will please themselves in the matter of
+eating and drinking." So the Herrschaften did not please themselves at
+all, but splashed along through rain and sleet, through hospitable
+villages all painted over with scrollwork about beer, and coffee, and
+sugar-bakery, and all that "Restoration" which our poor drenched bodies
+and souls were lacking so woefully. For we had stalls at the Court
+Theatre of Munich, and it was the last, the very last, night of "The
+Magic Flute"! The Brocken journey on the diligence-top came to an end;
+the train at Garmisch was caught by just two seconds; we were safe at
+Munich. But I was prone on a sofa, with a despairing friend making
+hateful attempts to rouse me. Go to the play? Get up? Open my eyes to
+the light? My fingers must have fumbled some feeble "no," beyond all
+contradiction. "But your ticket--but 'The Magic Flute'--but you have
+come three days' journey on purpose!" I take it my lips achieved an
+inarticulate expression of abhorrence for such considerations. After
+that I do not exactly know what happened: my exhausted will gave way. I
+was combed and brushed, thrust into some manner of festive apparel,
+pushed into a vehicle, pulled out of it, and shoved along, by the
+staunch and (as it seemed) brutal arm of friendship, among crimson and
+gilding and blinding lights all seen at intervals through half-closed
+eyes. A little bell rang, and I felt it was my death knell. But through
+the darkness of my weltering soul (for I was presumably dead and
+undoubtedly damned) there marched, stood still, and curtsied
+majestically towards each other, the great grave opening chords of the
+overture. And when they had delivered, solemnly, their mysterious
+herald's message and subsided, off started the little nimble notes of
+the fugue, hastening from all sides, meeting, crossing, dispersing,
+returning, telling their wonderful news of improbable adventures;
+multitudinous, scurrying away in orderly haste to protect the hero and
+heroine, and be joined by other notes, all full of inexhaustible
+good-will; taking hands, dancing, laughing, and giving the assurance that
+all is for the best in the world of enchantment, in the world of
+bird-calls, and tinkling triangles and magic flutes, under the spells
+of the great Sun-priest and Sun-god Mozart. I opened my eyes and had no
+headache; and sat in that Court Theatre for three mortal hours, in
+flourishing health and absolute happiness, and would have given my soul
+for it to begin immediately all over again.
+
+Now, not all the drawings of M. Ingres could have done that. And the
+piece of torn music-paper in the glass case at Montauban had made me,
+for a few faint seconds, live it through again. And I know what I don't
+care for, and what I do.
+
+
+
+
+AGAINST TALKING
+
+
+As towards most other things of which we have but little personal
+experience (foreigners, or socialists, or aristocrats, as the case may
+be), there is a degree of vague ill-will towards what is called
+_Thinking_. It is reputed to impede action, to make hay of instincts
+and of standards, to fritter reality into doubt; and the career of
+Hamlet is frequently pointed out as a proof of its unhappy effects.
+But, as I hinted, one has not very often an opportunity of verifying
+these drawbacks of thinking, or its advantages either. And I am
+tempted to believe that much of the mischief thus laid at the door of
+that poor unknown quantity _Thinking_ is really due to its ubiquitous
+twin-brother _Talking_.
+
+I call them twins on the analogy of Death and Sleep, because there is
+something poetical and attractive in such references to family
+relations; and also because, as many people cannot think without
+talking, and talking, at all events, is the supposed indication that
+thinking is within, there has arisen about these two human activities a
+good deal of that confusion and amiable not-caring-which-is-which so
+characteristic of our dealings with twins. But _Talking_, take my word
+for it, is the true villain of the couple.
+
+Talking, however, should never be discouraged in the young. Not talking
+_with them_ (largely reiteration of the word "Why?"), but talking among
+themselves. Its beneficial effects are of the sort which ought to make
+us patient with the crying of infants. Talking helps growth. M. Renan,
+with his saintly ironical sympathy for the young and weak, knew it when
+he excused the symbolists and decadents of various kinds with that
+indulgent sentence, "Ce sont des enfants qui s'amusent." It matters
+little what litter they leave behind, what mud pies they make and little
+daily dug-up gardens of philosophy, ethics, literature, and general
+scandal; they will grow out of the need to make them--and meanwhile,
+making this sort of mess will help them grow.
+
+Besides, is it nothing that they should be amusing themselves once in
+their lives (we cannot be sure of the future)? And what amusement, what
+material revelry can be compared with the great carouses of words in
+which the young can still indulge? We were most of us young once, odd as
+it appears; and some of us can remember our youthful discussions, our
+salad-day talks, prolonged to hours, trespassing on to subjects, which
+added such a fine spice of the forbidden and therefore the free! The joy
+of asking reasons where you have hitherto answered school queries; of
+extemporizing replies, magnificent, irresponsible, instead of
+laboriously remembering mere solutions; of describing, analyzing, and
+generally laying bold mental eyes, irreverent intellectual hands, on
+personalities whose real presence would merely make you stumble over a
+chair or drop a tea-cup! For talking is the great equalizer of
+positions, turning the humble, the painfully immature, into judges with
+rope and torch; and in a kindlier way allowing the totally obscure to
+share the life of kings, and queens, and generals, and opera-singers;
+which is the reason that items of Court news or of "dramatic gossip"
+are so frequently exchanged in omnibuses and at small, decent
+dinner-tables.
+
+Moreover, talking has for the young the joys of personal exuberance; it
+is all honeycombed, or rather, filled (like champagne) with the generous
+gaseousness of self-analysis, self-accusation, self-pity,
+self-righteousness, and autobiography. The poor mortal, in that delusive
+sense of sympathy and perfect understanding which comes of perfect
+indifference to one's neighbour's presence, has quicker pulses, higher
+temperature, more vigorous movements than are compatible with the sober
+sense of human unimportance. In conversation, clever young people--vain,
+kindly, selfish, ridiculous, happy young people--actually take body and
+weight, expand. And are you quite sure, my own dear, mature, efficient,
+and thoroughly productive friends and contemporaries, that it is not
+this expansion of youthful rubbish which makes the true movement of the
+centuries?... Poor stuff enough, very likely, they talked, those
+long-haired, loose-collared Romanticists of the Hôtel Pimodan and the
+literary cafés recorded by Balzac, _Jeunes Frances_, or whatever their
+names; and priggery, as well as blood-and-thunder, those lads round the
+table d'hôte at Strasburg, where Jung-Stilling noticed the entrance of a
+certain tall, Apolline young man answering to the name of Goethe.
+Rubbish, of course; but rubbish necessary, yes, every empty bubble and
+scum and mess thereof, for the making of a great literary period--nay,
+of a great man of letters. And when, nine thousand nine hundred and
+ninety-nine times, there results neither one nor the other, why, there
+has been the talking itself--exciting and rapturous beyond everything
+that literary periods and literary personalities can ever match.
+
+'Tis with the talking of the mature and the responsible that I would
+pick a quarrel. Particularly if they are well read, unprejudiced, subtle
+of thought, and precise of language; and most particularly if they are
+scrupulously just and full of human charity. For when two or three
+persons of this sort meet together in converse, nothing escapes
+destruction. The character of third persons crumbles under that delicate
+and patient fingering: analysis, synthesis, rehabilitation, tender
+appreciation, enthusiastic definition, leave behind only a horrid
+quivering little heap of vain virtues and atrophied bad instincts. In
+such conversations I have heard loyal and loving friends make
+admissions and suggestions which would hang you in a court of justice; I
+can bear witness to having in all loyalty and loving-kindness done so
+myself a thousand times. Nor is this even the worst. For your living
+human being has luckily a wonderful knack of reasserting his reality;
+and the hero or victim of such conversational manipulation will take
+your breath away by suddenly entering the room or entering into your
+consciousness as hale and whole as old Æson stepping out of Medea's
+cooking-pot. But opinions, impressions, principles, standards, possess,
+alas! no such recuperative virtue; or, rather, they cannot interrupt the
+discussion of themselves by putting in an appearance.
+
+Now, silent thought, whenever it destroys, destroys only to reconstruct
+the universe or the atom in the thinker's image; and new realities arise
+whenever a real individual creature reveals his needs and ways of
+feeling. But in what is called _a good serious talk_ there is no such
+creating anew; nobody imposes his image, no whole human creature reveals
+a human organism: there is merely a jumble of superposed pictures which
+will not become a composite photograph; and the inherent optimism or
+pessimism, scepticism or dogmatism, of each interlocutor merely
+reiterates _No_ to the ways of seeing and feeling of the others. Every
+word, perpetually defined and redefined at random, is used by each
+speaker in a different sense and with quite different associations. The
+subject under discussion is in no one's keeping: it is banged from side
+to side, adjusted to the right and adjusted to the left, a fine screw
+put on it every now and then to send it sheer into the great void and
+chaos! And almost the saddest part of the business is that the
+defacements and tramplings which the poor subject (who knows, perhaps
+very sacred to some one of us?) is made to suffer, come not from our
+opponent's brutal thrusting forward of _his_ meaning, but rather from
+our own desperate methods to hold tight, to place _our_ meaning in
+safety, somewhere where, even if not recognized, it will at least not be
+mauled.... Such are the scuffles and scrimmages of the most temperate,
+intellectual conversations, leaving behind them for the moment not a
+twig, not a blade of the decent vegetation of the human soul. Cannot we
+get some great beneficent mechanic to invent some spiritual cement,
+some asphalt and gravel of nothingness, some thoroughly pneumatic
+intellectual balls, whereon, and also wherewith, we privileged creatures
+may harmlessly expend our waste dialectic energies?
+
+Then, would you never talk? Or would you confine talking to the weather
+or the contents of the public prints? Would you have our ideas get hard
+and sterile for want of being moved? Do you advise that, like some
+tactful persons we--you--yes, _you_--all know and detest--we
+systematically let every subject drop as soon as raised?
+
+There! the talking has begun. They are at it, contradicting what they
+agree with, and asking definitions of what they perfectly understand. Of
+course not! And here I am, unable to resist, rushing into the argument,
+excited--who can tell?--perhaps delighted. And by the time we take up
+our bedroom candles, and wish each other good night (with additional
+definitions over the banisters) every scrap of sensible meaning I ever
+had will be turned to nonsense; and I shall feel, next morning, oh, how
+miserably humiliated and depressed!...
+
+"Well--and to return to what we were saying last night...."
+
+
+
+
+IN PRAISE OF SILENCE
+
+
+One of the truths which come (if any do) with middle age, is the gradual
+recognition that in one's friendly intercourse the essential--the one
+thing needful--is not what people say, but what they think and feel.
+
+Words are not necessarily companionable, far from it; but moods truly
+meet, to part in violent dissonance; or to move parallel in happy
+harmonic intervals; or, more poignant and more satisfying still, to pass
+gradually along some great succession of alien chords--common
+contemplation, say, of a world grievous or pleasant to both--on towards
+the peace, the consummation, of a great major close. Once we have
+sufficient indication that another person cares for the same kind of
+things that we do--or, as important quite, cares in the same degree or
+in the same way--all further explanation becomes superfluous: detail,
+delightful occasionally to quicken and bring home the sense of
+companionship, but by no means needed.
+
+This is the secret of our intercourse with those persons of whom our
+friends will say (or think), What _can_ you have in common with
+So-and-so? What _can_ you find to talk about? Talk about? Why, nothing;
+the enigmatic person remains with us, as with all the rest of the world,
+silent, inarticulate; incapable, sometimes, of any inner making of
+formulæ. But we know that our companion is seeing, feeling, the same
+lines of the hills and washes of their colours, the same scudding or
+feathering out of clouds; is _living_, in the completest sense, in that
+particular scene and hour; and knowing this, it matters nothing how long
+we trudge along the road or saunter across the grass without uttering.
+The road of life, too, or the paths and thickets of speculation.
+
+And speaking of walks, I know no greater torment, among those minor ones
+which are the worst, than the intelligent conversation--full of
+suggestion and fine analysis, perhaps, and descriptions of _other_
+places--which reveals to us that the kindly speaker is indeed occupying
+the same geographical space or sitting behind the same horse as we are,
+but that his soul is miles and miles away. And the worst of it is that
+such false companionship can distract us from any real company with the
+moment and the place. We have to answer out of civility; then to think,
+to get interested, and then ... well, then it is all over. "We had such
+a delightful walk or drive, So-and-so and I," says our friend
+on returning home, "and I am so glad to find that we have such a lot of
+interests in common." Alas! alas!... Hazlitt was thinking of such
+experiences, knowing perhaps the stealthiness and duplicity which the
+fear of them develops in the honest but polite, when he recommended that
+one should take one's walks alone.
+
+But there is something more perfect even than one's own company: the
+companion met once, at most twice, in a lifetime (for he is by no means
+necessarily your dearest and nearest, nor the person who understands you
+best). He or she whose words are always about the place and moment, or
+seem to suit it; whose remarks, like certain music, feel restful,
+spacious, cool, airy--like silence. And here I have got back to the
+praise of such persons as talk little, or (what is even better) _seem_
+to talk little.
+
+There is a deal of truth, and, as befits the subject, rather implied
+than actually expressed, in Maeterlinck's essay on Silence. His fine
+temper, veined and shot with colour, rich in harmonics like a well-toned
+voice, enables him, even like the mystics whom he has edited, to guess
+at those diffuse and mellow states of soul which often defy words. He
+knows from experience how little we can really live, although we needs
+must speak, in definite formulæ, logical frameworks of verb and noun,
+subject and predicate. Let alone the fact that all consummate feeling
+(like the moment to which Faust cried _Stay_) abolishes the sense of
+sequence--revolves, if I may say so, on its own axis, a _now,
+forever_; baffling thereby all speech. And M. Maeterlinck perceives,
+therefore, that real communion between fellow-creatures is interchange
+of temperament, of rhythm of life; not exchange of remarks, views, and
+opinions, of which ninety-nine in a hundred are merely current coin. To
+what he has said I should like to add that if we are often silent with
+those whom we love best, it is because we are sensitive to their whole
+personality, face, gesture, texture of soul and body; that we are living
+with them not only in the present, but enriched, modified by all they
+have said before, by everything remaining in our memory as theirs. To
+talk would never express a state of feeling so rich and living; and it
+can serve, at most, only to give the heightening certainty of presence,
+like a handclasp or asking, "Are you there?" and getting the answer,
+"Yes; I am here, and so are you"--facts of no high logical importance!
+
+As regards silent people, this characteristic may, of course, be mere
+result of sloth and shyness, or lack of habit of the world, and they may
+be gabbling volubly in their hearts. Such as these are no kind of
+blessing, save perhaps negatively. Still less to be commended are those
+others, cutting a better figure (or thinking so), who measure their
+words from a dread of "giving themselves away"--of "making themselves
+cheap," or otherwise (always thinking in terms of money, lawsuits, and
+general overreaching) getting the worst of a bargain. Indeed, it is a
+sign how little we are truly civilized, that such silence or laconicism
+as this, can be met constantly outside the class (invariably cunning) of
+peasants; indeed, among men exercising what we are pleased to call
+_liberal professions_.
+
+The persons in whom silence is a mark of natural fine breeding are those
+who, being able to taste the real essence of things, are apt, perhaps
+wrongly, to despise the unessential. They are disdainful of all the old
+things inevitably repeated in saying half a new one. They cannot do with
+the lumber, wastepaper, shavings, sawdust, rubbish necessary for packing
+and conveying objects of value; now most of talk, and much of life, is
+exactly of that indispensable useful uselessness. They are silent for
+the same reason that they are frequently inactive, recognizing that
+words and actions are so often mere litter and encumbrance. One feels
+frozen occasionally by their unspoken criticism; one's small exuberances
+checked by lack of sympathy and indulgence; one would like, sometimes,
+to pick a quarrel with them, to offer a penny for their thoughts, to
+force them to be as unselective and vulgar as one's self. But one
+desists, feeling instinctively the refreshment (as of some solitary
+treeless down or rocky stream) and purification of their fine
+abstention in this world where industry means cinder-heaps, and
+statesmanship, philosophy, art, philanthropy, mean "secondary products"
+of analogous kind.
+
+Before concluding this over-garrulous tribute to silence, I would fain
+point out the contrast, ironical enough, between the pleasant sense of
+comradeship with some of those who "never utter," and the loneliness of
+spirit in which we steam and post and cab through every possible realm
+of fact and theory with certain other people. I am not alluding to the
+making hay of politics, exhibitions, theatres, current literature, etc.,
+which is so much the least interesting form of gossip. What I mean are
+those ample, apparently open talks between people who have found each
+other out; who know the cardboard and lath and plaster of the
+architectural arrangements or suspect the water-supply and drainage
+behind; talks where one knows that the other is shirking some practical
+conclusion, divagating into the abstract, and has to pick his way among
+hidden interests and vanities, or avert his eyes from moral vistas which
+he knows of.... "So-and-so is such a delightful talker--so witty and so
+wonderfully unprejudiced; I cannot understand why you don't cultivate
+him or her." Cultivate him or her! Cultivate garlic; those elegant white
+starry flowers you wonder at my weeding out of the beds.
+
+Compare with this the blessedness of knowing that the contents of the
+other person's mind are _nice_, pure of all worldliness, pretence, and
+meanness; that the creature's thoughts, if opened out to one, would
+diffuse the scent of sunshine and lavender even as does clean,
+well-folded linen.
+
+Hence the charm of a whole lot of persons not conspicuous for
+conversational powers: men who have lived much out-of-doors, with gun or
+rod; shy country neighbours, cross old scholars, simple motherly little
+housewives; and, if one get at their reality, peasants and even
+servants. For we have within ourselves memories and fancies; and it
+depends on our companion, on a word, a glance, a gesture, that only the
+sweet and profitable ones, thoughts of kindness and dignity, should be
+stirred up.
+
+
+
+
+THE BLAME OF PORTRAITS
+
+
+Feeling a little bit ashamed of myself, yet relieved at having done with
+that particular hypocrisy, I unpinned the two facsimiles of drawings
+from off my study screen and put them in a portfolio. A slight sense of
+profanation ensued; not so much of infidelity towards those two dear
+friends, nor certainly of irreverence towards Mr. Watts or the late Sir
+Edward Burne-Jones, but referable to the insistence with which I had
+clamoured for those portraits, the delight experienced at their arrival,
+and the solid satisfaction anticipated from their eternal possession.
+
+We have most of us--of the sentimental ones at least--gone through some
+similar small drama, and been a little harrowed by it. But though we
+feel as if there were some sort of naughtiness in us, we are quite
+blameless, and on the whole rather to be pitied. We are the dupes of a
+very human craving, and one which seems modest in its demands. What! a
+mere square of painted canvas, a few pencil scratchings, a bare
+mechanical photograph, something no rarer than a reflection in a mirror!
+That is all we ask for, to still the welling-up wistfulness, the
+clinging reluctance, to console for parting or the thought, almost, of
+death! We do not guess that this humble desire for a likeness is one of
+our most signal cravings after the impossible: an attempt to overcome
+space and baffle time; to imprison and use at pleasure the most
+fleeting, intangible, and uncommunicable of all mysterious essences, a
+human personality.
+
+"Often enough I think I have got the turn of her head and neck; but
+not the face--never the face that speaks," complains the poor bereaved
+husband in Mary Robinson's beautiful little poem. The case may not be
+tragic like that one, and yet thoroughly tantalizing; we feel the
+absent ones opposite to us in the room, we are in that distant room
+ourselves; there is a sense of their position, of the space they
+occupy, and thus we see, as through a ghost, the familiar outline,
+perhaps, of a chair. Or, again, there is the well-known movement,
+accompanied, perhaps, by the tone of voice, concentrated almost to the
+longed-for look, and, as the figure advances ... nothing! Like
+Virgil's Orpheus, our fancy embraces a shadow. "The face--never the
+face that speaks!" But we _will_ have it, people exclaimed, all those
+ages ago, and exclaim ever since. And thus they came by the notion of
+portraits.
+
+And when they got them they grumbled. The cavilling at every
+newly-painted likeness is notorious. The sitter, indeed, is sometimes
+easy enough to please, poor human creatures enjoying, as a rule, any
+notice (however professional) of their existence, let alone an answer to
+the attractive riddle of _what they look like_. And there are, of
+course, certain superfine persons who, in the case of a famous artist,
+think very like the sitter, and are satisfied so long as they get an
+ornamental picture, or one well up to date. But the truly human grumble,
+and are more than justified in doing so. Their cravings have been
+disappointed; they had expected the impossible, and have not got it.
+
+Since, in the very nature of things, a picture, and particularly a fine
+picture, is always an imperfect likeness. For the image of the sitter on
+the artist's retina is passed on its way to the canvas through a mind
+chock full of other images; and is transferred--heaven knows how changed
+already--by processes of line and curve, of blots of colour, and
+juxtaposition of light and shade, belonging not merely to the artist
+himself, but to the artist's whole school. Regarding merely the latter
+question, we all know that the old Venetians painted people ample,
+romantic, magnificent; and the old Tuscans painted them narrow, lucid,
+and commonplace; men of velvet and silk and armour on the one hand, and
+men of broadcloth and leather, on the other. The difference due to the
+individual artist is even greater; and, in truth, a portrait gives the
+sitter's temperament merged in the temperament of the painter.
+
+So, as a rule, portraiture does but defeat its own end. And, stoically
+speaking, does it much matter? Posterity has done just as well without
+the transmission of the real Cardinal Hippolytus; and we know that
+everything always comes right if only we look at it, Spinoza-like,
+"under the category of the eternal." But we, meanwhile, are not
+eternal, nor, alas! are our friends; and that is just one of the
+things which gall us. We cannot believe--how could we?--that the
+future can have its own witty men and gracious women, its own
+sufficient objects of love and reverence, even as we have. We feel we
+_must_ hand on our own great and beloved ones; we _must_ preserve the
+evanescent personal fragrance, press the flower. And hence, again,
+portraits and memoirs, Boswell's "Johnson," or Renan's "Ma Soeur
+Henriette"; grotesque or lovely things, as the case may be, and always
+pathetic, which tell us that men have always admired and always loved;
+leaving us to explain, by substituting the image of our own idols, why
+in that case more specially they did so. Poor people! We do so cling
+to our particular self and self's preferences; we are so confidently
+material and literal! And one dreads to think of the cruel
+self-defence of posterity, when we shall try to push into its notice
+with phonograph and cinematograph.
+
+Let us, in the presence of such hideous machinery, cease to be literal
+in matters of sentiment, even at the price of a little sadness and
+cynicism in recognizing the unreality of everything save our own moods
+and fancies. Perhaps I feel more strongly on this subject because I
+happen to have seen with my own eyes the _reductio ad absurdum_--to
+absurdity how lamentable and dreadful!--of this same human craving for
+literal preservation of that which should not, cannot, be preserved. It
+was in the lumber-room of an Italian palace; a life-size doll, with wig
+of real--perhaps personally real--hair, and dressed from head to foot in
+the garments of the real poor lady, dead some seventy years ago. I wrote
+a little tale about it; but the main facts were true, and far surpassed
+the power of invention. In this case the husband, who had ordered this
+simulacrum for his solace, taking his daily dose of sentiment in its
+presence, proceeded, after an interval, to woo and marry his own
+laundress; and I think, on the whole, this was the least harrowing
+possible solution. Fancy if he had not found that form of consolation,
+but had continued trying to be faithful to that dreadful material
+presence, more rigid, lifeless, meaningless, with every day and every
+year of familiarity!
+
+In a small way, we all of us commit that man's mistake of thinking that
+the life of our dear ones is in an image, instead of in the heartbeats
+which the image--like a name, a place, any associated thing--can
+produce in ourselves. And only changing things can answer to our
+changing self; only living creatures live with us. Once learned by
+heart, the portrait, be it never so speaking, ceases to speak, or we to
+listen to its selfsame message. What was once company to us, because it
+awakened a flickering feeling of wished-for presence, becomes, after a
+time, mere canvas or paper; disintegrates into mere colours or mere
+black and white. Even the faithfullest among us are utterly faithless to
+the best-beloved portraits. We have them on our walls or on our
+writing-tables, and pack and unpack some of them for every journey. But
+do we look at them? or, looking, do we see them, feel them?
+
+They are not, however, useless; very far from it. You might as well
+complain of the uselessness of the fire which is burned out, or the
+extinguished lamp. They have, though for a brief time, pleased, perhaps
+even consoled, us--warmed our heart with the sense of a loving nearness,
+shed a light on the visions in our mind. Hence we should cherish them as
+useful delusions, or rather realities, so long as they awaken a reality
+of feeling. And 'tis a decent instinct of gratitude, not mere
+inertness, which causes us to keep them, honoured pensioners of our
+affections, in honourable places.
+
+Only one thing we should guard against, and act firmly about, despite
+all sentimental scruples. During the _period of activity_ of a
+portrait--I mean while we still, more or less, look at it--we must
+beware lest it take, in our memory, the place of the original. Those
+unchanging features have the insistence of their definiteness and
+permanence, and may insidiously extrude, exclude, the fleeting,
+vacillating outlines of the remembered reality. And those alone concern
+our heart, and have a right to occupy our fancy. One feels aghast
+sometimes, on meeting some dear friend after an interval of absence, to
+find that those real features, that real expression, are not the
+familiar ones. It is the portrait, the envious counterfeit presentment,
+which (knowing its poor brief reign) has played us and our friend that
+mean trick. When this happens we must be merciless, like the fairy-story
+prince when the wicked creatures in the wood spoke to him in the voice
+of his mother; piety towards the original arms us with ruthlessness
+towards the portrait. It was for this same reason that, as I have said,
+I unpinned from my screen those two facsimiles of drawings, feeling
+rather a brute while I was doing so.
+
+
+
+
+
+SERE AND YELLOW
+
+INTERLUDE
+
+
+"Alors que je me croyais aux derniers jours de l'automne, dans un jardin
+dépouillé." The words are Madame de Hauterive's, one of the most
+charming among eighteenth-century letter-writers; but one of whom, for
+all the indiscretion of that age, we know little or nothing: a delicate,
+austere outline merely, a reserved and sensitive ghost shrinking into
+the dimness. She wrote those words when already an old woman, and long
+after death had taken her father and her daughter and most of her
+nearest and dearest, to the young Abbé de Carladès, who proved himself
+(one hopes) not utterly unworthy of that "unexpected late flowering of
+the soul." The phrase is eighteenth century, and it may be the feeling
+itself is of as bygone a fashion. Or does this seem the case because
+such delicate souls can become known to us only when they and their
+loves and friendships have ceased to be more than a handful of faded
+paper, fingered very piously, for heaven's sake?
+
+
+However this may be, that phrase of Madame de Hauterive's contains a
+truth which is undying, and which, though unobtrusive, can be observed
+by those who have a discreet eye for the soul's affairs. Nay, one might
+say that the knowledge of how many times life can begin afresh, the
+knowledge of the new modes of happiness which may succeed each other,
+even when the leaves float down yellow in the still air, and the dews on
+the renovated grass are white like frost, is one of the blessed secrets
+into which the passing seasons initiate those who have honourably
+cultivated the garden of life, and life's wide common acres.
+
+Indeed, such faith in the heart's renewed fruitfulness is itself among
+the autumn blossomings, the hidden compensations. Young folk, and those
+who never outgrow youth's headlong and blind self-seeking, cannot
+conceive such truths. For youth has no experience of change; and what it
+calls the Future is but the present longing or present dread projected
+forward. Hence youth lacks the resignation which comes of knowing that
+our aims, our loves, ourselves, will alter; and that we shall not
+eternally regret what we could not eternally covet. Hence, also, the
+fine despair and frequent suicide of youthful heroes and heroines. Poor
+young Werther, in his sky-blue _Frack_ and striped yellow waistcoat,
+cannot believe that the time will come when he will tune the spinet of
+some other Charlotte--nay, follow in the footsteps of the enlightened
+minister, his patron; bury himself in protocols and look forward to a
+diplomatic game of whist rather than to a country dance with meeting
+hands and eyes. And it is mere waste of breath to sermon him on the
+subject: lend him the pistols, and hope that (as in the humaner version
+of the opera) he will not use them. As to certain other forestallings of
+experience, they would be positively indecent and barbarous! You would
+die of shame if the young widow happened to overhear you saying (what is
+heaven's truth, and a most consoling one) that her baby, which now
+represents only so much time and love she might have given, all, all, to
+_him_ alone, is the only good thing which that worthless dead husband
+could ever have furnished her. And as to hinting in her presence that
+she will some day be much, much happier with dear Quixotic Dobbin than
+with that coxcomb of an Osborne, why the bare thought of such indecorum
+makes us feel like sinking into the ground! We must be sympathizing, and
+a little short of truthful, with poor distressed young people; above
+all, never seek to lighten their disappointments with visions of brisk
+octogenarians, one foot in the grave, enjoying a rubber!
+
+And this, no doubt, is a providential arrangement--I mean this youthful
+incapacity of grasping the consolations brought by Time. For, after all,
+life, being there, has to be lived; and maybe life would be lived in a
+half-hearted fashion did we suspect its many compensations, including
+what may, methinks, be the last, most solemn one. Should we jump hastily
+out of bed and bestir ourselves with the zest of the new day, if we
+thoroughly realized what is, however, matter of common experience, to
+wit: that at the day's close, sleep, rest without dreams or thought of
+awaking, may be as welcome as all this pleasant bustle of the morning?
+The knowledge of these mysteries, initiation into which comes late and
+silently, is, as I hinted, perhaps the final compensation; allowing us
+to face the order of things without superfine cavillings. But there are
+earlier, less awful and secret compensations, and these it is as well to
+know about, and to prepare our soul serenely to enjoy when the moment
+comes.
+
+Of this kind are, of course, those autumn flowerings of sentiment
+alluded to in Madame de Hauterive's letter. They are blossomings
+sometimes sweeter than those of summer, thanks to the very scorching of
+summer's suns; or else touched with an austere vividness by the first
+frosts, like the late china roses, which are streaked, where they open,
+with a vermillion unparalleled in their earlier sisters. Compare with
+this all that is implied in Swinburne's line, "the month of the long
+decline of roses." Think of those roses (I have before my eyes a
+Florentine terrace at the end of May) crowding each other out, blowing,
+withering, and dropping; roses white, red, pale lemon, and, alas! also
+brown and black with mildew, living and dying in such riotous excess
+that you have neither time nor inclination to pluck one of them, and
+keep it, piously in water, before you on your table.
+
+Mind, I do not say that such profusion is not all right and necessary
+in its season. The economy of Nature is often wasteful. There might be
+no roses at all next year if we depended for seed and slips upon those
+frost-bitten flowers with their fine austerity. And in the same way
+that, despite the pathetic tenderness of long-deferred father or
+motherhood, it is better for the race that infants be brought into the
+world plentiful, helter-skelter, and that only the toughest stay
+there; so, methinks, it may be needful that youth be full of false
+starts, mistaken vocations, lapsed engagements, fanciful friendships
+broken off in quarrel, glowing passions ending in ashes; nay, that
+this period, fertile in good and evil, be crowned by marriages such as
+are said to be made in heaven, no doubt because the great match-making
+spirit of life pursues ends unguessed by human wisdom, which would
+often remain in single blessedness, and found homes for sickly
+infants. Wedlock, in other words, and, for the matter of that, father
+and motherhood, and most of the serious business of the universe,
+should not be looked upon as a compensation or consolation, but rather
+as something for which poor human creatures require to be consoled and
+compensated.
+
+Having admitted which, and even suggested that marriages are fittest at
+the age of Daphnis and Chloe, or even of Amelia and George Osborne, let
+us, I pray you, glance with reverent eyes, and a smile not mocking but
+tender, at certain other weddings which furtively cross our path.
+Weddings between elderly persons, hitherto unable to make up their mind,
+or having, perchance, made it up all wrong on a first occasion;
+inveterate old maids and bachelors, or widowers who thought to mourn for
+ever; people who have found their heart perhaps a little late in the
+day; but, who knows? shrivelled as it is, perhaps, but the mellower, and
+of more enduring, more essential sweetness.
+
+Alongside of such tardy nuptials there is a corresponding class of
+_marriages of true minds_. Genuine ones are exceedingly rare during
+youth; and the impediments, despite the opinion of Shakespeare, are of
+the nature of nullity, ending most often in unseemly divorce between
+Hermia and Helena, or the Kings of Sicilia and Bohemia, one of whom, if
+you remember, tried to poison the other on very small provocation. The
+last-named is an instructive example of the hollowness of nursery or
+playground friendship, or rather of what passes for such. Genuine
+friendship is an addition to our real self, a revelation of new
+possibilities; and young people, busily absorbing the traditions of the
+past and the fashions of the day, have very rarely got a real self to
+reveal or to bestow. So that the feeling we experience in later life
+towards our playmates is, in fact, rather a wistful pleasure in the
+thought of our own past than any real satisfaction in their present
+selves.
+
+Be this as it may, there is among the compensations of life, a kind of
+friendship which, by its very nature, requires that one of the friends
+have passed the _middle of the way_. I am not referring to the joys of
+grandfather and grandmotherhood, and all that "_art d'être grandpère_"
+which have been written and sung until one turns a trifle sceptical
+about them. What I allude to has, on the contrary, escaped (almost
+entirely, I think) the desecrating pen of the analytical or moralizing
+novelist, and remains one of the half-veiled mysteries of human good
+fortune, before which the observer passes quickly in shy admiration.
+The case is this: one of the parents has been unwilling, or
+disappointed; marriage has meant emptiness, or worse; and a nursery full
+of children has been, very likely, a mere occasion for ill-will and
+painful struggle. The poor soul has been, perhaps for years, fretted and
+wearied; or else woefully lonely, cabined, confined, and cramped almost
+to numbness. When, behold! by the marvellous miracle of man or
+womanhood--a dull, tiresome child is suddenly transformed, takes on
+shapeliness and stature, opens the bolted doors of life, leads the
+father or mother into valleys of ease and on to hopeful hilltops; slays
+dragons, chains ogres, and smiles with the eyes and lips which have been
+vaguely dreamed of, longed for, who knows how long!
+
+So children do occasionally constitute compensations and blessings not
+merely in disguise. And this particularly where they have not been
+looked upon as investments for future happiness or arrangements for
+paying off parental debts to society, to glory, or the Supreme Being.
+For surely, if children are ever to renovate the flagging life of
+parents, it can only be by their leaving off their childhood and coming
+back as equals, brothers, sisters, sometimes as tenderest and most
+admiring of chivalrous lovers.
+
+'Tis, in fact, unexpected new life adding itself to ours which
+constitutes the supreme compensation in middle age; and our heart puts
+forth fresh blossoms of happiness (of genius sometimes, as in the case
+of Goethe) because younger shoots are rejoicing in the seasonable
+sunshine or dews. The interests and beliefs of the younger generation
+prevent our own from dying; nay, the friendships and loves of our
+children, whether according to the flesh or the spirit, may become our
+own. Daughters-in-law are not invariably made to dine off the poisoned
+half of a partridge, as in works of history. Some stepfathers and
+stepmothers feel towards those alien youths and maidens only as that
+dear Valentine Visconti did towards the little Dunois, whom she took in
+her arms, say the chronicles, and, with many kisses on eyes and cheeks,
+exclaimed, "Surely thou wast stolen from me!" And, in another
+relationship which is spoken ill of by those unworthy of it, we can
+sometimes watch a thing which is among reality's best poetry: where a
+mother, wisely and dutifully stepping aside from her married daughter's
+path, has been snatched back, borne in triumph, not by one loving pair
+of arms, but two; and where the happy young wife has smiled at
+recognizing that in her husband's love for her there was mixed up a
+head-over-ears devotion for her mother.
+
+Some folks have no sons or daughters, or husbands or wives, and hence no
+stepchildren or children-in-law. Yet even for them autumn may blossom.
+There are the children of friends, recalling their youth or compensating
+for their youth's failure; and for some there are the younger workers in
+the same field, giving us interest in books or pictures, or journeys or
+campaigns, when our own days for work and struggle are over; even as we,
+perhaps, have kept open the vistas of life, given Pisgah-sights to those
+beloved and venerated ones whose sympathy we value and understand better
+perhaps now than all those many, many years ago. Yes! even in our
+youthful egoism we gave them something, those dear long dead friends;
+and this knowledge is itself a tiny autumn bud in our soul.
+
+There are humbler compensations also. And among these the kind which,
+years after writing the immortal idyll of "Dr. Antonio," my dear
+venerated friend Ruffini set forth in a tiny story, perhaps partly his
+own, about the modest but very real happiness which the mere
+relationship of master and servant can bring into a solitary life; the
+story taking its name, by a coincidence by no means indifferent to me,
+from a faithful and pleasant person called Carlino.
+
+But an end to digressions, for it is time to cease writing,
+particularly of such intangible and shy matters. So, to return to
+Madame de Hauterive's sentence, which was our starting-point in this
+inventory of compensations and consolations. Paradoxical though it
+seem, the understanding and union brought by a glance, by words said
+in a given way, by any of the trifles bearing mysterious, unreasoned
+significance for the experienced soul--or, briefly, "_friendship at
+first sight_"--is as natural in the sere and yellow, as love at first
+sight in the salad, days. Only, to be sure, less manifest to
+indifferent bystanders, since one of the consoling habits which life
+brings with it is a respect for life's thoroughfares, a reluctance to
+stop the way, collect a crowd with our private interests, and a pious
+reserve about such good fortune as is good precisely because it suits
+us, not other people.
+
+Reserve of this sort, as I began with saying, is one of the charms of
+dear Madame de Hauterive; and the more so that eighteenth-century
+folk, particularly French, were not much given to it! And thus it
+happens that we know little or nothing about that friendship which
+consoled her later life; and must look round us in our own, if we
+would understand what were those new flowerings which had arisen,
+when, as she says, she had thought herself already in the last days of
+autumn and in a leafless garden.
+
+
+
+
+A STAGE JEWEL
+
+
+"It doesn't seem to be precisely what is meant by _old paste_," she
+answered, repeating the expression I had just made use of, while she
+handed me the diamond hoop across the table. "It's too like real stones,
+you know. I think it must be a stage jewel."
+
+As I fastened the brooch again in my dress, I was aware of a sudden
+little change in my feelings. I was no longer pleased. Not that I had
+hoped my diamonds might prove real; you cannot buy real diamonds, even
+in imagination, for four francs, which was the precise sum I had
+expended on these, and there were seven of them, all uncommonly large.
+Nor can I say that the words "old paste" had possessed, on my lips, any
+plain or positive meaning. But _stage jewel_, somehow ... My moral
+temperature had altered: I was dreadfully conscious that I was no longer
+pleased. Now, I had been, and to an absurd degree.
+
+Perhaps because it was Christmas Eve, when I suddenly found myself
+inside that curiosity shop, pricing the diamonds, and not without an
+emotion of guilty extravagance, and of the difficulty of not buying if
+the price proved too high.... As is always the case with me at that
+season, my soul was irradiated with a vague sense of festivity, perhaps
+with the lights of rows of long-extinguished Christmas trees in the fog
+of many years, like the lights of the shops caught up and diffused in
+the moist twilight. I had felt an inner call for a Christmas present;
+and, so far, nobody had given me one. So I had paid the money and driven
+back into the dark, soughing country with the diamond hoop loose in my
+pocket. I had felt so very pleased.... And now those two cursed words
+"stage jewel" had come and spoilt it all.
+
+For the first time I felt it was very, very hard that my box should have
+been broken open last autumn and all my valuables, my Real (the word
+became colossal), not _stage_, jewels stolen. It was brought home to me
+for the first time that the man who did it must have been very, very
+wicked; and that codes of law, police and even prisons could afford
+satisfaction to my feelings. Since, oddly enough, I had really not
+minded much at the time, nor let my pleasure in that wonderful old
+castle, where I had just arrived with the violated trunk, be in the
+least diminished by the circumstance. Indeed, such is the subtle,
+sophistic power of self-conceit, that the pleasure of finding, or
+thinking I found, that I did not mind the loss of those things had
+really, I believe, prevented me minding it. Though, of course, every now
+and then I had wished I might see again the little old-fashioned
+fleur-de-lysed star which had been my mother's (my heart smote me for
+not feeling sufficiently how much _she_ would have suffered at my losing
+it). And I remembered how much I had liked to play with those opals of
+the Queen of Hearts, which seemed the essence of pale-blue winter days
+with a little red flame of sunset in the midst; or, rather, like tiny
+lunar worlds, mysterious shining lakes and burning volcanoes in their
+heart. Of course, I had not been indifferent: that would have taken away
+all charm from the serenity with which I had enjoyed my loss. But I had
+been serene, delightfully serene. And now!...
+
+There was something vaguely vulgar, odious, unpardonable about false
+stones. I had always maintained there was not, but the stage jewel
+made me feel it. Mankind has sound instincts, rooting in untold depths
+of fitness; and superfine persons, setting themselves against them,
+reveal their superficiality, their lack of normal intuition and sound
+judgment, while fancying themselves superior. And mankind (save among
+barbarous Byzantine and Lombard kings, who encrusted their iron crowns
+impartially with balas rubies, antique cameos, and bottle
+glass)--mankind has always shown an instinct against sham jewels and
+their wearers. It is an unreasoned manifestation of the belief in
+truth as the supreme necessity for individuals and races, without
+which, as we know, there would be an end of commerce, the
+administration of justice, government, even family life (for birds,
+who have no such sense, are proverbially ignorant of their father),
+and everything which we call civilization. Real precious stones were
+perhaps created by Nature, and sham stones allowed to be created by
+man, as one of those moral symbols in which the universe abounds: a
+mysterious object-lesson of the difference between truth and
+falsehood.
+
+Real diamonds and rubies, I believe, require quite a different degree
+of heat to melt them than mere glass or paste; and you can amuse
+yourself, if you like, by throwing them in the fire. In the Middle
+Ages rubies, but only real ones, were sovereign remedies for various
+diseases, among others the one which carried off Lorenzo the
+Magnificent; and in the seventeenth century it was currently reported
+that the minions of the Duke of Orleans had required pounded diamonds
+to poison poor Madame Henriette in that glass of chicory water. And as
+to pearls, real ones go yellow if unworn for a few months, and have to
+be sunk fathoms deep in the sea, in safes with chains and anchors, and
+detectives sitting day and night upon the beach, and sentries in
+sentry-boxes; none of which occurs with imitations. Likewise you stamp
+on a real pearl, while you must be quite careful not to crush a sham
+one. All these are obvious differences revealing the nobility of the
+real thing, though not necessarily adding to its charm. But, then,
+there is the undoubted greater beauty, the wonderful _je ne sais
+quoi_, the depth of colour, purity of substance, effulgence of fire,
+of real gems, which we all recognize, although it is usual to have
+them tested by an expert before buying. And, when all is said and
+done, there is the difference in intrinsic value. And you need not
+imagine that value is a figment. Political economy affords us two
+different standards of value, the Marxian and the Orthodox. So you
+cannot escape from believing in it. A thing is valuable either (_a_)
+according to the amount of labour it embodies, or (_b_) according to
+the amount of goods or money you can obtain in exchange for it. Now,
+only let your mind dwell upon the value (_a_) embodied in a pearl or
+diamond. The pearl fisher, who doubtless frequently gets drowned; let
+alone the oyster, which has to have a horrid mortal illness, neither
+of which happens to the mean-spirited artificer of Roman pearls; or
+the diamond seeker, seeking through deserts for months; the fine
+diamond merchant, dying in caravans, of the past; and, finally, the
+diamond-cutter, grinding that adamant for weeks far, far more
+indefatigably than to make the optic lenses which reveal hidden
+planets and galaxies. All that labour, danger, that weary, weary time
+embodied in a thing so tiny that, like Queen Mab, it can sit on an
+alderman's forefinger! What could be more deeply satisfactory to think
+upon? And as to value (_b_) (the value in _Exchange_ of Mill, Fawcett,
+Marshall, Say, Bastiat, Gide), just think what you could buy by
+selling a largish diamond, supposing you had one! And what unlikely
+prices (fabulous, even monstrous) are said to have been given, before
+and after dubious Madame de la Motte priced that great typical one,
+for diamond necklaces by queens and heroines of every degree!
+
+Precious stones, therefore, are heaven-ordained symbols of what mankind
+values most highly--power over other folks' labour, time, life,
+happiness, and honour. And that, no doubt, is the reason that when the
+irreproachable turn-out and perfect manners of pickpockets allow them to
+mix freely in our select little gatherings, it is legitimate for a lady
+to deck herself with artificial pearls and diamonds only to the exact
+extent that she has real ones safely deposited at the bank. Let her look
+younger and sound honester than perhaps answers to the precise reality;
+there is no deception in all that. But think of the dishonourableness
+of misleading other folk about one's income....
+
+My soul was chastened by the seriousness of these reflections and by the
+recognition of the moral difference between real stones and sham ones,
+and I was in a very bad humour. Suddenly there came faint sounds of
+guitars and a mandolin, and I remembered that the servants were giving a
+ball at the other end of the house, and that it was Christmas Eve. I
+rose from my table and opened the window, letting in the music with the
+pure icy air. The night had become quite clear; and in its wintry blue
+the big stars sparkled in a cluster between the branches of my pine
+tree. They made me think of the circlet which Tintoret's Venus swoops
+down with over the head of the ruddy Bacchus and rose-white Ariadne.
+Those, also, I said to myself ill-humouredly, were probably stage
+jewels.... I cannot account for the sudden train of associations this
+word evoked: sweeping, magnificent gestures, star-like eyes, and a
+goddess' brows shining through innumerable years; a bar or two of
+melodious _ritornello_; an ineffable sense of poetry and grandeur,
+and--but I am not sure--a note or two of a distant, distant voice.
+Could it be Malibran--or Catalani ... and was my stage jewel bewitched,
+a kind of Solomon's ring, conjuring up great spirits? All I can say is
+that I have rarely spent a Christmas Eve like that one, while the
+servants' ball was going on at the other end of the house, furbishing my
+imitation diamonds with a silk handkerchief, alone, or perhaps not
+alone, in my study.
+
+
+
+
+MY BICYCLE AND I
+
+
+We two were sitting together on the wintry Campagna grass; the rest of
+the party, with their proud, tiresome horses, had disappeared beyond the
+pale green undulations; their carriage had stayed at that castellated
+bridge of the Anio. The great moist Roman sky, with its song of
+invisible larks, arched all round; above the rejuvenated turf rustled
+last year's silvery hemlocks. The world seemed very large, significant,
+and delightful; and we had it all to ourselves, as we sat there side by
+side, my bicycle and I.
+
+'Tis conceited, perhaps, to imagine myself an item in the musings of my
+silent companion, though I would fain be a pleasant one. But this much
+is certain, that, among general praising of life and of things, my own
+thoughts fell to framing the praises of bicycles. They were deeply felt,
+and as such not without appearance of paradox. What an excellent thing,
+I reflected, it is that a bicycle is satisfied to be quiet, and is not
+in the way when one is off it! Now, my friends out there, on their great
+horses, as Herbert of Cherbury calls them, are undoubtedly enjoying many
+and various pleasures; but they miss this pleasure of resting quietly on
+the grass with their steeds sitting calmly beside them. They are busy
+riding, moreover, and have to watch, to curb or humour the fancies of
+their beasts, instead of indulging their own fancy; let alone the
+necessity of keeping up a certain prestige. They are, in reality,
+domineered over by these horses, and these horses' standard of living,
+as fortunate people are dominated by their servants, their clothes, and
+their family connections; much as Merovingian kings, we were taught in
+our "Cours de Dictées," were dominated by the mayors of the palace.
+Instead of which, bar accidents (and the malignity of bottle-glass and
+shoe-nails), I am free, and am helped to ever greater freedom by my
+bicycle.
+
+These thoughts came to me while sitting there on the grass slopes,
+rather than while speeding along the solitary road which snakes across
+them to the mountains, because the great gift of the bicycle consists to
+my mind in something apart from mere rapid locomotion; so much so,
+indeed, that those persons forego it, who scorch along for mere
+exercise, or to get from place to place, or to read the record of miles
+on their cyclometer. There is an unlucky tendency--like the tendency to
+litter on the part of inanimates and to dulness on that of our
+fellow-creatures--to allow every new invention to add to life's
+complications, and every new power to increase life's hustling; so that,
+unless we can dominate the mischief, we are really the worse off instead
+of the better. It is so much easier, apparently, to repeat the spell
+(once the magician has spoken it) which causes the broomstick to fetch
+water from the well, as in Goethe's ballad, than to remember, or know,
+the potent word which will put a stop to his floodings; that, indeed,
+seems reserved to the master wizard; while the tiros of life's magic,
+puffed up with half-science, do not drink, but drown. In this way
+bicycling has added, methinks, an item to the hurry and breathlessness
+of existence, and to the difficulty of enjoying the passing hour--nay,
+the passing landscape. I have only once travelled on a bicycle, and,
+despite pleasant incidents and excellent company, I think it was a
+mistake; there was an inn to reach, a train to catch, a meal to secure,
+darkness to race against. And an order was issued, "Always make as much
+pace as you can at the beginning, because there may be some loss of time
+later on," which was insult and ingratitude to those mountain sides and
+valleys of Subiaco and Tivoli, and to the ghosts of St. Benedict, of
+Nero, and of the delightful beribboned Sibyl, who beckoned us to rest in
+their company.
+
+How different from this when one fares forth, companioned by one of the
+same mind; or, better still, with one's own honourable self, exploring
+the unknown, revisiting the already loved, with some sort of
+resting-place to return to, and the knowledge of time pleasantly
+effaced! One speeds along the straight road, flying into the beckoning
+horizon, conscious only of mountain lines or stacked cloud masses;
+living, for the instant, in air, space become fluid and breathable,
+earth a mere detail; and then, at the turn, slackening earth's power
+asserting itself with the road's windings. Curiosity keenly on edge, or
+memory awakened; and the past also casting its spells, with the isolated
+farms or the paved French villages by the river-bank, or the church
+spire, the towers, in the distance.... A wrong turn is no hardship; it
+merely gives additional knowledge of the country, a further detail of
+the characteristic lie of the land, a different view of some hill or
+some group of buildings. Indeed, I often deliberately deflect, try road
+and lane merely to return again, and have bicycled sometimes half an
+hour round a church to watch its transepts and choir fold and unfold,
+its towers change place, and its outline of high roof and gargoyles
+alter on the landscape. Then the joy, spiced with the sense of
+reluctance, of returning on one's steps, sometimes on the same day, or
+on successive days, to see the same house, to linger under the same
+poplars by the river. Those poplars I am thinking of are alongside a
+stately old French mill, built, towered, and gabled, of fine grey stone;
+and the image of them brings up in my mind, with the draught and foam of
+the weir and the glassiness of the backwater, and the whirr of the
+horse-ferry's ropes, that some of the most delightful moments which
+one's bicycle can give, are those when the bicycle is resting against a
+boat's side (once also in Exmouth harbour); or chained to an old
+lych-gate; or, as I remarked about my Campagna ride, taking its rest
+also and indulging its musings.
+
+I have alluded to the variety and alteration of pace which we can, and
+should, get while bicycling. Skimming rapidly over certain portions of
+the road--sordid suburbs, for instance--and precipitating our course to
+the points where we slacken and linger, the body keeps step with the
+spirit; and actuality forestalls, in a way, the selection by memory;
+significance, pleasantness, choice, not brute outer circumstance,
+determining the accentuation, the phrasing (in musical sense) of our
+life. For life must be _phrased_, lest it become mere jabber, without
+pleasure or lesson. Indeed, one may say that if games teach a man to
+stand a reverse or snatch an opportunity, so bicycling might afford an
+instructive analogy of what things to notice, to talk about and remember
+on life's high-roads and lanes; and what others, whizzing past on scarce
+skimming wheel, to reject from memory and feeling.
+
+The bicycle, in this particular, like the imagination it so well
+symbolizes, is a great liberator, freeing us from dwelling among
+ugliness and rubbish. It gives a foretaste of freedom of the spirit,
+reducing mankind to the only real and final inequality: inequality in
+the power of appreciating and enjoying. The poor clerk, or
+schoolmistress, or obscure individual from Grub Street can, with its
+help, get as much variety and pleasure out of a hundred miles' circuit
+as more fortunate persons from unlimited globetrotting. Nay, the
+fortunate person can on a bicycle get rid of the lumber and litter which
+constitutes so large a proportion of the gifts of Fortune. For the
+things _one has to have_, let alone the things _one has to do_ (in
+deference to butler and lady's-maid, high priests of fitness), are as
+well left behind, if only occasionally. And among such doubtful gifts of
+fortune is surely the thought of the many people employed in helping one
+to do nothing whatever. It spoils the Campagna, for instance, to have a
+brougham, with coachman and footman, and grooms to lead back the horses,
+all kicking their heels at the bridge of the Anio: worthy persons, no
+doubt, and conscientiously subserving our higher existence; but the
+bare fact of whom, their well-appointed silhouettes, seem somehow
+incongruous as we get further and more solitary among the pale grass
+billows, deeper into that immense space, that unlimited horizon of ages.
+
+These are some of the prestigious merits of the bicycle, though many
+more might be added. This grotesque iron courser, not without some of
+the grasshopper's absurd weirdness, is a creature of infinite capacities
+for the best kind of romance--the romance of the fancy. It may turn out
+to be (I always suspect it) the very mysterious steed which carried
+adventurous knights and damsels through forests of delightful
+enchantments, sprouting wings, proving a hippogriff and flying up,
+whenever fairies were lacking or whenever envious wizards were fussing
+about. And, as reward--or perhaps crown--for its many good services,
+reposed occasionally by Britomart's or Amadis' side, far from the
+world's din, even as my bicycle rested on the pale wintry grass
+hillocks, under the rolling cloud bales and the song of invisible larks,
+of the Campagna.
+
+
+
+
+PUZZLES OF THE PAST
+
+
+I am full of curiosity about the Past. This does not mean that I read
+the memoirs of Napoleon's marshals, or that I write queries to
+antiquarian papers, or that I enjoy being taken to see invisible Pictish
+barrows and Roman encampments; in fact, nothing could be further from my
+character and habits. But the Past puzzles me; and I like being puzzled
+by the Past.
+
+Not in its details, but in all manner of general questions, and such,
+moreover, as very rarely admit of an answer. What are the relations of
+the Past and Present? Where does the Past begin? And, to go further
+still, what _is_ the Past?
+
+All this sounds abstract, and even metaphysical; but it is really quite
+the reverse. These speculations are always connected with some concrete
+place or person, and they arise in my mind (and in the mind of the
+twenty thousand persons whom I don't know, but whom I resemble),
+together with some perspective of street or outline of face, and always
+with a faint puff of emotion. I will give you a typical instance of one
+of these puzzles. It formulated itself in my mind a few weeks ago at
+Verona, while going to see a certain little church on the slopes above
+the Adige. You go through the priest's house and vineyard; there is a
+fine carved lintel and a bit of fresco, all in the midst of a rag fair
+of squalid streets. What a place this must once have been! I felt the
+charm and splendour of piled-up palace and hanging gardens in former
+days. In former days! And a little doubt dropped into it, "If former
+days there ever were." For who can tell? This crumbling, ragged business
+which to us means that we stand before the Past; this gradual perishing
+of things in neglect and defilement, may very well have formed a
+necessary part of our ancestors' present. Our own standard and habit of
+tidiness, decorum, and uniformity may be quite recent developments;
+barbarism, in the sense of decay and pollution, may have existed
+together with prosperity. It is quite possible that dead donkeys were
+left in the streets of Haroun-al-Raschid's Bagdad, or Semiramis'
+Babylon, as well as in those of poor little modern Tangier. And the
+Verona of the Scaligers may have been just such a Verona as this which
+delights and depresses us, only with new beautiful things being built
+quite naturally alongside of decayed and defiled ones; things nowadays
+all equally levelled in ruin and squalor. The splendour of the Past may
+be a mere fiction of our own, like the romance of the Past which we say
+we no longer believe in. But history gives us, I think, no definite
+answer.
+
+With this question another is closely connected. I must explain it by a
+simile. A foreign friend of mine insists, with some show of reason, that
+much as any two countries of the Continent may differ, England contrives
+to differ a great deal more from all of them than they can differ from
+each other. Well, it sometimes strikes me that, in a similar way, our
+Present may be wholly detached from the mass, however heterogeneous, of
+the Past; an island divided from the mainland of history by seas of
+difference, or rather, like the great Arctic countries, a separate
+Continent, shrouded in mystery, of which we know only that its hitherto
+explored shores face, without ever touching, the other mapped-out
+Continent we call the Past. For just think, let us say, of the change
+implied in the multiplication through machinery of a stereotyped form,
+as against the production of an individual object by individual hands.
+Why, such a change means democracy far more than any other change in
+laws and franchises; and it means, among other things, that any art
+sprung really from the present will have to be of the nature, not of the
+painting or sculpture of old days, of the architecture which made each
+single cathedral an individual organism, but of the nature rather of
+process engraving, of lithography (are not our posters, Chéret's, for
+instance, the only thing which our masses see, as their distant forbears
+saw frescoes in churches and _campo santos_?), of book printing, in
+short; and will not literature and music become more and more the
+typical kinds of art, the creation of one brain projected over millions
+of acres and through mere wires and cylinders? And think also of the
+difference in locomotion. Say what you will, people who rode in coaches
+were bound to be more like people who rode in litters, for all the
+difference between Rome under Cæsar and England under George III., than
+like people who go by train. That is all on the surface, serious persons
+will answer: the pace at which people's body and goods are conveyed
+along may alter without their thoughts or feelings being changed the
+least bit. Perhaps. But are we so absolutely sure of that?
+
+For instance, are we sure we should have been able to get on for half an
+hour together with even our own great-grandparents of little more than a
+hundred years ago? There they hang, our great-grandfathers and mothers
+and uncles and aunts (or some one's else, more likely), painted by
+Reynolds or Raeburn, delightful persons whose ghosts we would give
+anything to meet. Their ghosts; aye, there's the rub. For their ghosts
+would have altered with posthumous experience, would have had glimpses
+of the world we live in, and somewhat conformed to its habits; but could
+we really get on with the living men and women of former days? It is
+true that we understand and enjoy the books which they read, or rather
+a small number of pages out of a smaller number of books. But did they
+read them in the same way? I should not wonder if the different sense in
+which we took their favourite authors, or rather the different sense in
+which we discovered that they were in the habit of taking them, created
+considerable coolness, not to say irritation, between the ghosts of the
+readers of "The Vicar of Wakefield," or "Werther," or the "Nouvelle
+Heloïse" and ourselves. Besides, they would be monstrously shocked at
+our ways. They would think us marvellously ill-bred. While we! I dare
+scarcely harbour the thought, much less express it. Anyway, it is
+certain that they occasionally allowed Sheridan and Miss Burney (I am
+not even thinking of the remote people of Fielding), and even, alas!
+Miss Austen, to paint pictures of them which we would scarcely own up to
+from novelists and playwrights of our day, and therefore I return to my
+puzzle: is time an unbroken continuity, all its subdivisions merely
+conventional, like those of postal districts; or, as I suggested above,
+are there real chains of mountains, chasms, nay, deep oceans, breaking
+up its surface; and do we not belong, we people of the nineteenth
+century, rather to the future which we are forming than to the Past
+which, much to its astonishment (I should think), produced us?
+
+There are other puzzles about the Past, far more intimate in nature and
+less grandiose, but, on the whole, far less easy to answer. One of these
+is difficult even to word, but every reader will identify it in
+connection with some of the most delightful experiences he has been
+admitted to. Roughly, it may be expressed as follows:--Were old people
+ever young? Was there a period in the world's history (and not so far
+back) when everybody was enchantingly mixed of primness and romance, had
+little graces of manner, nods and becks and wreathed smiles, with a
+tendency every now and then to employ language rather stronger than the
+occasion warranted? Did youths and maidens wander about with faint moral
+odours of pot-pourri and quaint creases of character, as of
+superannuated garments long folded in a drawer! Or are these qualities
+taken on by each generation in turn, in which case will the Hilda
+Wangels and Dodos of to-day delight the twentieth century as possible
+inmates of Cranford?
+
+Having worked my way to so marvellous a puzzle as this, I had better
+remove the strain by hastily suggesting another question, which will
+satisfactorily get rid of the others, to wit, whether the Past did
+really ever exist?
+
+On the whole, I am tempted to believe that it did not. I can even prove
+it by a logical stroke worthy of the very greatest philosophers. Granted
+that the Past is that which no longer has any existence, only the
+Present could ever be real now; as the Present and the Past cannot
+co-exist, the Past evidently never existed at all; unless, indeed, we
+call in the aid of the Hegelian philosophy, and set our minds at ease by
+a fine reduction of contraries, to the effect that since the Present and
+the Past exclude one another, they evidently must really be the same
+thing at bottom.
+
+This is cogent. And yet a doubt continues lurking in my mind. Is not
+what we think of as the Past--what we discuss, describe, and so often
+passionately love--a mere creation of our own? Not merely in its
+details, but in what is far more important, in its essential, emotional,
+and imaginative quality and value? Perhaps some day psychology may
+discover that we have a craving, like that which produces music or
+architecture, for a special state of nerves (or of something else, if
+people are bored with nerves by that time), obtainable by a special
+human product called the Past--the Past which has never been the
+Present.
+
+
+
+
+MAKING PRESENTS
+
+
+It was the dreadful perplexity of making a present to a rich woman. Like
+Heine's sweetheart, she was abundantly provided with diamonds and pearls
+and all things which mankind can wish. And so the lack of any mortal
+thing suggested that, so far from liking to be given it, she would far
+rather not have it at all.
+
+I do not choose to state whether that lady ever did get a present from
+me, for the statement would be an anti-climax. Suffice it that as a
+result of profound meditation I found myself in possession of a
+"Philosophy of Presents," which, copied fair on imaginary vellum, or
+bound in ideal morocco, I now lay at the feet of my friends, as a very
+appropriate gift, and entirely home-made.
+
+The whole subject of presents is bristling with fallacies, which have
+arisen like thistles out of the thinness of our life and the stoniness
+of our hearts. One of these mistaken views is perpetually being put
+forward by people who assert that _the pleasantness of a gift lies in
+the good-will of the giver_. The notion has a specious air of amiability
+and disinterestedness and general good-breeding; but the only truth it
+really contains is that, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, a present
+gives exactly no pleasure at all. For, if the pleasantness of a present
+depended solely on the expression of good-will, why not express
+good-will in any of the hundred excellent modes of doing so?--for we
+have all of us, more or less, voice, expressive features, words ready or
+(more expressive still) unready, and occasions enough, Heaven knows! of
+making small sacrifices for our neighbours. And it is entirely
+superfluous to waste our substance and cumber our friends' houses by
+adding to these convenient items, material tokens like, say, gold from
+Ophir and apes and peacocks. There are inconveniences attached to the
+private possession of bullion; many persons dislike the voices of
+peacocks, and I, at all events, am perfectly harrowed by the physiognomy
+of apes.
+
+This, of course, is metaphorical; but it leads me from the mere
+exposition of theory to the argument from experience. If presents are
+pleasant because of the good-will, etc., why are we all brought up (oh,
+the cruelty of suppressed disappointment when the doll arrives instead
+of the wooden horse, or the duplicate kitchen-set instead of the
+longed-for box of bricks!) to pretend that the gift we receive is the
+very thing we have been pining for for years? And here I would ask my
+friend and reader, the often-much-perplexed-giver-and-receiver of gifts,
+whether, quite apart even from those dreadful smothered tragedies of
+one's childhood, there are, among the trifling false positions of life,
+many false positions more painful than that of choosing a gift which one
+knows is not wanted, unless it be the more painful position still of
+receiving a gift which one would tip any one to take away?
+
+Some persons feel this so strongly, wondering why the preacher forgot
+this item in his list of vanities, that you may hear them loudly vowing
+that never again will they be caught in the act of making a present....
+
+So far about the mistaken view of the subject; now for the right one,
+which is mine: the result of great experience and of infinite
+meditation, all coming to a head in that recent perplexed business of
+choosing a present for the lady with the diamonds and pearls. And before
+proceeding further, let me say that my experience is really exceptional.
+Not that I have given many gifts, or that I am in the least certain that
+the few I have given were not the usual Dead Sea apples; but because I
+have been, what is much more to the point, a great receiver of presents,
+my room, my house containing nothing beautiful or pleasant that is not a
+present from some dear friend, or (the paradox will be explained later
+on) a present from myself. A great receiver of presents, also, because
+presents give me a very lively and special pleasure; have done so always
+ever since my days of Christmas-trees and birthday candles, leaving all
+through my life a particular permeating charm connected with certain
+dates and seasons, like the good, wonderful smell of old fir-needles
+slightly toasted, and of wax tapers recently extinguished, so that all
+very delightful places and moments are apt to affect me as a sort of
+gift-giving, what the Germans have a dear word for, beloved of children,
+_Bescheerung_. For if life, wisely lived, ought to be, as I firmly
+believe, nothing but a long act of courtship, then, surely, its
+exquisite things--summer nights with loose-hanging stars, pale sunny
+winter noons, first strolls through towered towns or upon herb-scented
+hills, the hearing again of music one has understood, not to speak of
+the gesture and voice of the people whom one holds dear--all these, and
+all other exquisite movements or exquisite items of life, should be felt
+with the added indescribable pleasure of being gifts.
+
+A present, then, may be defined as a _thing which one wants given by a
+person whom one likes_. But our English syntax falls short of my
+meaning, for what I would wish to say is rather, in Teutonic fashion, "a
+by a person one likes to one given object one wants." The stress of the
+sentence should be laid on the word _wants_. For much of the charm, and
+most of the dignity, of a gift depends on its being _a thing one would
+otherwise have done without_.
+
+This is true even with those dreadful useful objects which make us feel
+hot to distribute; they have become melancholy possible presents
+because, alas! however necessary, they would otherwise not have been
+forthcoming. And, apart from such cases, mankind has always decided that
+gifts should not be of the nature of blankets, or manuals of science, or
+cooking-pots, but rather flowers, fruit, books of poetry, and the wares
+of silken Samarkand and cedared Lebanon. It is admitted upon all hands
+that, to be perfect, presents must be superfluities; but I should like
+to add that the reverse also holds good, and that superfluities would be
+the better, nine times out of ten, for being presents.
+
+'Tis, methinks, a sign of the recent importation and comparative
+scarcity of honest livelihoods, that we should think so much how we come
+by our money, and so little how we part with it, as if we were free to
+waste, provided we do not steal. Now, _my manuals of political economy_
+(which were, of course, _not_ presents to me) make it quite plain that
+whatever we spend in mere self-indulgence is so much taken away from the
+profitable capital of the community; and sundry other sciences, which
+require no manuals to teach them, make it plainer still that the habit
+of indulging, upon legal payment, our whims and our greedinesses, fills
+our houses with lumber and our souls with worse than lumber where there
+might be light and breathable air. Extremes meet: and even as to
+paupers, the barest necessaries of life are superfluities--things
+dispensed with; so, at the other end of the vicious circle, to the
+spendthrift luxury ceases to be luxury, and superfluities are turned
+into things one cannot do without.
+
+The charm of a gift, its little moral flavour which makes us feel the
+better for it, resides, therefore, not merely in good-will, but in the
+little prelude of self-restraint on the one hand, of unselfishness on
+the other. Unless you gave it me, I should not have that pleasant thing;
+and you, knowing this much, give it to me, instead of to yourself. What
+a complicated lovers'-knot of good-feeling there is tied, as round
+flowers or sweetmeats, round every genuine present! This is a rich,
+varied impression, full of harmonies; compare with it the dry, dull,
+stifling impression one gets from looking round a rich man's house, or
+admiring the ornaments of a rich woman's person: all these things having
+merely been bought!
+
+Yet buying can be a fine thing. And among genuine presents (and in an
+honourable place) I certainly include--as I hinted some way back--the
+presents which people _sometimes make to themselves_. For 'tis a genuine
+present when a person who never allows himself a superfluity, at last
+buys one, as Charles and Mary Lamb did their first blue pots and prints,
+out of slowly saved up pennies. There is in that all the grace of long
+self-restraint, and the grace of finally triumphant love--love for that
+faithfully courted object, that Rachel among inanimates! The giving to
+one's self of such a present is a fit occasion for rejoicing; and 'tis a
+proper instinct (more proper than the one of displaying wedding
+presents) which causes the united giver and receiver of the gift to
+summon the neighbours, to see it and rejoice, not without feasting.
+
+But presents of this sort are even more difficult to compass than the
+other sort where people, like the lady sung by Heine, have pearls and
+diamonds in plenty, and all things which mankind can wish.
+
+
+
+
+GOING AWAY
+
+
+We stood on the steps of the old Scotch house as the carriage rolled her
+away. A last greeting from that delightful, unflagging voice; the misty
+flare of the lanterns round a corner; and then nothing but the darkness
+of the damp autumn night. There is to some foolish persons--myself
+especially--a strange and almost supernatural quality about the fact of
+departure, one's own or that of others, which constant repetition seems,
+if anything, merely to strengthen. I cannot become familiar with the
+fact that a moment, the time necessary for a carriage, as in this case,
+to turn a corner, or for those two steel muscles of the engine to play
+upon each other, can do so complete and wonderful a thing as to break
+the continuity of intercourse, to remove a living presence. The
+substitution of an image for a reality, the present broken off short and
+replaced by the past; enumerating this by no means gives the equivalent
+of that odd and unnatural word GONE. And the terror of death itself lies
+surely in its being the most sudden and utter act of _going away_.
+
+I suppose there must be people who do not feel like this, as there are
+people also who do not feel, apparently, the mystery of change of place,
+of watching the familiar lines of hill or valley transform themselves,
+and the very sense of one's bearings, what was in front or to the other
+side, east or west, getting lost or hopelessly altered. Such people's
+lives must be (save for misfortune) funnily undramatic; and, trying to
+realize them, I understand why such enormous crowds require to go and
+see plays.
+
+It is usually said that in such partings as these--partings with
+definite hope of meeting and with nothing humanly tragic about them, so
+that the last interchange of voice is expected to be a laugh or a
+joke--the sadder part is for those who stay. But I think this is
+mistaken. There is indeed a little sense of flatness--almost of
+something in one's chest--when the train is gone or the carriage rolled
+off; and one goes back into one's house or into the just-left room,
+throwing a glance all round as if to measure the emptiness. But the
+accustomed details--the book we left open, the order we had to give, the
+answer brought to the message, and breakfast and lunch and dinner and
+the postman, all the great eternities--gather round and close up the
+gap: close the gone one, and that piece of past, not merely _up_, but,
+alas! _out_.
+
+It is the sense of this, secret even in the most fatuous breast, which
+makes things sadder for the goer. He knows from experience, and, if he
+have imagination, he feels, this process of closing him out, this rapid
+adaptation to doing without him. And meanwhile he, in his carriage or
+train, is being hurled into the void; for even the richest man and he of
+the most numerous clients, is turned adrift without possessions or
+friends, a mere poor nameless orphan, when on a solitary journey. There
+is, moreover, a sadder feeling than this in the heart of the more
+sentimental traveller, who has engaged the hospitality of friends. _He
+knows it is extended equally to others_; that this room, which he may
+have made peculiarly his own, filling it, perhaps, in proportion to the
+briefness of sojourn, with his own most personal experience; the
+landscape made his own through this window, the crucial conversation,
+receiving unexpected sympathies, held or (more potent still) thought
+over afterwards in that chair; he knows that this room will become,
+perhaps, O horror, within a few hours, another's!
+
+The extraordinary hospitality of England, becoming, like all English
+things, rather too well done materially, rather systematic, and
+therefore heartless, inflicts, I have been told, some painful blows on
+sentimental aliens, particularly of Latin origin. There is a pang in
+finding on the hospitable door a label-holder with one's name in it: it
+saves losing one's way, but suggests that one is apt to lose it, is a
+stranger in the house; and it tells of other strangers, past and future,
+each with his name slipped in. Similarly the guest-book, imitated from
+nefarious foreign inns, so fearfully suggestive of human instability,
+with its close-packed signatures, and dates of arrival and departure.
+And then the cruelty of housekeepers, and the ruthlessness of
+housemaids! Take heed, O Thestylis, dear Latin guardian of my hearth,
+take heed and imprint my urgent wishes in thy faithful heart: never,
+never, never, in my small southern home (not unlike, I sometimes fondly
+fancy, the Poet's _parva domus_), never let me surprise thee depositing
+thy freshly-whitened linen in heaps outside the door of the departing
+guest; and never, I conjure thee, offend his eye or nostril with mops,
+or _frotteur's_ rollers, or resinous scent of furniture-polish near his
+small chamber! For that chamber, kindly Handmaiden, is _his_. He is the
+Prophet it was made for; and the only Prophet conceivable as long as
+present. And when he takes departure, why, the void must follow, a long
+hiatus, darkness, and stacked-up furniture, and the scent of varnish
+within tight-closed shutters....
+
+But, alas! alas! not all kind Thestylis's doing and refraining is able
+to dispel the natural sense of coming and going: one's bed re-made,
+one's self replaced, new boxes brought and unpacked, metaphorically as
+well as literally; fresh adjustments, new subjects of discourse, new
+sympathies: and the poor previous occupant meanwhile _rolling_, as the
+French put it. Rolling! how well the word expresses that sense of smooth
+and empty nowhere, with nothing to catch on or keep, which plays so
+large a part in all our earthly experience; as, for the rest, is
+natural, seeing that the earth is only a ball, at least the astronomers
+say so.
+
+But let us turn from this painful side of _going away_; and insist
+rather on certain charming impressions sometimes connected with it. For
+there is something charming and almost romantic, when, as in the case I
+mentioned, the friend leaves friends late in the evening. There is the
+whole pleasant day intact, with leisurely afternoon stroll when all is
+packed and ready: watching the sunset up the estuary, picking some
+flowers in the garden; sometimes even seeing the first stars prick
+themselves upon the sky, and mild sheet-lightnings, auguring good, play
+round the house, disclosing distant hills and villages. And the orderly
+dinner, seeming more swept and garnished for the anticipation of bustle,
+the light on the cloth, the sheen on the silver, the grace and fragrance
+of fruit and flowers, and the gracious faces above it, remains a wide
+and steady luminous vision on the black background of midnight travel,
+of the train rushing through nothingness. Most charming of all, when
+after the early evening on the balcony, the traveller leaves the south,
+to hurtle by night, conscious only of the last impression of supper with
+kind friends at Milan or the lakes, and the glimpse, in the station
+light, of heads covered with veils, and flowers in the hands, and
+southern evening dresses. These are the occasional gracious
+compensations for that bad thing called going away.
+
+
+
+
+COMING BACK
+
+
+Most people tell you that to return to places where one has been
+exceptionally happy is an unwise proceeding. But this, I venture to
+conceive, is what poor Alfred de Musset called "une insulte au bonheur."
+It shows, at all events, a lack of appreciation of the particular
+nature, permanent, and, in a manner, radiating, of happy experiences. Of
+course, I am not speaking of the cases where the happy past has been
+severed from indifferent present and future by some dreadful calamity;
+poetry alone is consolatory and also aloof enough to deal decorously
+with such tragic things, and they are no concern of the essayist. There
+is, besides, a very individual and variable character about great
+misfortunes, no two natures being affected by them quite alike, so that
+discussion and generalization are not merely intrusive, but also mostly
+fruitless. Therefore the question is not whether people are wise or
+unwise in avoiding places where they have been happy, after events which
+have shattered their happiness. And the only loss I have to deal with is
+the loss--if it really is one, as we shall examine--of the actual
+circumstances which accompanied a happy experience; the loss of the
+_then_ as opposed to the _now_, and, in a measure of the irrecoverable
+time, years or months, and of the small luggage of expectations and
+illusions which has got inevitably mislaid or scattered in the interval.
+And the question arises whether 'tis wiser, in a sense whether it is
+more delicately epicurean, to avoid the places which bring all that,
+together with the sense of the happy gone-by days, vividly home to one;
+or whether, as I contend, past happiness ought not to be used as an
+essential element in the happiness of the present.
+
+I have had, lately, the experience of returning to a part of the world
+which I had not seen for many, many years, and where I had spent the
+drowsy long days of a long illness, and the dreamy sweet days of a
+longer convalescence. It made a day's journey, without any especial
+resting-place for the soles of my feet, and undertaken, I can scarcely
+tell why, with a little shyness and fear. I did not go to the house
+where I had lived, but to one in the neighbourhood, whither I had often
+been taken all those years ago; and I did not even take the
+precaution--or perhaps took the contrary one--of securing the presence
+of the owners. The ladies were out; gone to one of the little fishing
+towns which are strung all around the Forth, and they would not be back
+till teatime. But the benevolent Scottish housemaid, noticing perhaps a
+shadow of disappointment, suggested my going in and waiting.
+
+The little old castle, which had got a little blurred in my
+recollection, seemed suddenly remembered and familiar, even as had been
+the case with the country I had driven along from the station; the
+undulating turnip-fields and fields of pale stooked corn, the
+reaping-machines and the women tying up the bean-straw, the white line
+of the Forth, and the whole pale, delicate country under the low,
+tender, _intimate_ northern sky. Even the smell, sweet and pungent, of
+the withered potatoes, bringing the sense of knowing it all, turnings
+of roads and of the land, so well. And similarly inside the castle,
+where I lingered on the pretext of writing a note to those ladies. It
+was all unchanged; the escutcheons in relief on the ceiling, the view of
+cornfield and thin beech belts, and distant sea from the windows, the
+lavender and _pot-pourri_ in the bowls, and almost the titles of the
+books, seemed quietly, at the touch of reality, to open out in
+remembrance. I did not stay till the return of the ladies, but went back
+to the station, and waited on the bridge for my train, which was a good
+half-hour late. I looked down from that bridge on the kind and gentle
+country in the veiled sunshine. The hill to the back of the house where
+I had lived, in the distance, the red roofs of the fishing villages, the
+little spire of the smallest of them barely projecting, as it always
+did, above the freshly reaped fields. And I felt, as I leaned against
+the parapet watching for my train's smoke coming towards me, not the
+loss, but rather the inestimable gain which a kindly past represents.
+Years gone by? Nay, rather years which make endurable, which furnish and
+warm the present, giving it sweetness and significance. How very poor
+we must be in our early youth, with no possessions like these; and how
+rich in our later life, with many years distilled into the essence of a
+single to-day!
+
+As I stood on the railway bridge thinking or feeling in this manner, I
+heard wheels, and saw a pony-cart, with an elderly lady, and a younger
+one driving her, coming towards me. It was the ladies who had been so
+kind to me all those years back, returning to the little castle. I
+turned my back, leaned on the parapet, and let them pass me, unnoticing.
+I wanted to keep them also in that dim and dear kind past.
+
+For we must be discreet as well as grateful-hearted if we would enjoy
+the Past's full gifts....
+
+The Past's gifts; and to these I would add, or among them rather I would
+include, an item which I find a difficulty in naming properly, and
+which, of course, I hesitate a little to speak about. I mean the gifts,
+odd as it sounds, of Death. For Death, while in his main function the
+cruel taker-away, the violent or stealthy robber, has also a less
+important side to his character, and is a giver of gifts, if only we
+know how to receive them. And he is this even apart from his power (for
+which one might imagine that the Greeks gave him, in certain terra
+cottas and reliefs, so very gentle and beautiful an aspect) of bringing
+light and loving-kindness into poor human creatures' judgments, and
+teaching them to understand and pardon; apart also from that mystic
+relationship, felt by Dante and all the poets, which he bears to the
+genius of imaginative love. What I allude to is a more humble, but quite
+as gracious function, of leading those he takes away (with the
+infinitely tender gesture of the antique funereal Hermes), not into
+vacuity and the horrid blackness of oblivion, but into a place of safe
+and serene memory. In this capacity Death can be, even like his master,
+Time, a giver of gifts to us. For those _are_ gifts to us, those friends
+he gathers together under hazier, tenderer skies into our thoughts which
+have the autumn warmth and stillness of late-reaped fields. Nay, the
+gift is greater, for there are added certain half-strangers, towards
+whom we lose all shyness, and who turn to real friends when introduced
+by death and worked into our past; dear such-an-one, whom we scarcely
+knew, barely more than face and name _then_, but know and have the right
+to care for now. So that I think that we might extract and take with
+happy interpretation those two last lines of the old, old Goethe's
+heartbreaking dedication to the generations whom he had outlived:--
+
+     "Was ich besitze, seh' ich wie im Weiten,
+      Und was verschwand, wird mir zu Wirklichkeiten."
+
+For all which reasons let us never be afraid of going back to places
+where we have been exceptionally happy; not even in the cases where we
+recognize that such former happiness was due, in part, to some dispelled
+illusion. For if we can but learn to be glad of the Past and receive its
+gift with gratitude, may not the remembrance of a dear illusion, brought
+home with the sight of the places which we filled with it, be merely
+another blessing; a possession which nothing can rob us of, and by which
+our spirit is the richer?
+
+
+
+
+LOSING ONE'S TRAIN
+
+
+The clocks up at the villa must have been all wrong, or else my watch
+did not go with them, or else I had not looked often enough at it while
+rambling about the town on my way to the station. Certain it is that
+when I got there, at the gallop of my cab-horse, the express was gone.
+There is something hatefully inexorable about expresses: it is useless
+to run after them, even in Italy. The next train took an hour and a
+quarter instead of forty minutes to cover the nineteen miles between
+Pistoia and Florence. Moreover, that next train was not till eight in
+the evening, and it was now half-past five.
+
+I felt all it was proper to feel on the occasion, and said, if anything,
+rather more. Missing a train is a terrible business, even if you miss
+nothing else in consequence; and the inner disarray, the blow and wrench
+to thoughts and feelings, is most often far worse than any mere
+upsetting of arrangements. A chasm suddenly gapes between present and
+future, and the river of life flows backwards, if but for a second. It
+is most fit and natural to lose one's temper; but the throwing out of so
+much moral ballast does not help one to overtake that train. I mention
+this, lest I should pass for heartless; and now proceed to say that,
+after a few minutes given to wrath and lamentation, I called the cab
+back and went in search of a certain very ancient church, containing a
+very ancient pulpit, which I had never succeeded in seeing before.
+Exactly as on previous occasions, when I got to the farm where the key
+of that church was kept, the key had gone to town in the pocket of the
+peasant. He would be back, no doubt, at nightfall. But I had not very
+much expected the church to be open, so I felt perfectly indifferent at
+not seeing the pulpit--nay, if anything, a little relieved, as one does
+sometimes when friends prove _not at home_.
+
+I walked up a long steep track to the little battered, black,
+fast-locked church, which stands all alone under some oak trees. The
+track was through thin hillside woods. Such divine woods! young oak and
+acacia, and an undergrowth of grass and ferns, of full-blown roses
+thrown across the grass; and here and there, dark in that pale young
+green, a cypress. The freshness of evening came all of a sudden, and
+with it a scent of every kind of leaf and herb and fern, and the
+sweetness of the ripening corn all round. And when I got to the ridge,
+slippery with dry cut grass, what should I see in front of me, over the
+olive-yards and the wooded slopes, but the walls and towers of
+Serravalle, which have beckoned to my fancy almost ever since my
+childhood. I sat there a long while in the June sunset and very nearly
+missed the second train, which it had seemed intolerable to wait for.
+
+This is an allegory, and I commend its application to the wise and
+gentle reader. There are more of such symbolical trains lost than real
+ones, even by the most travelled mortals, Odysseus or a bag-man. And
+such losing of trains is not inevitably a blessing. I have often written
+about life with optimistic heartlessness, because life, on the whole,
+has been uncommonly kind to me, and because one is nearer the truth
+when cheerful than when depressed. But this is the place for a brief
+interlude of pessimism. For it is all very well to make the best of
+losing trains when we have time, cabs, and a fine view at hand; and when
+in losing the train we lose nothing else, except our temper. But surely
+'tis no ingratitude towards life's great mercies and blessings to
+discriminate them from life's buffets and bruisings. And methinks that
+the teaching of courage or resignation might fitly begin by the
+recognition of the many cases where only courage or resignation avails,
+because they are thoroughly bad. There is something stupid and underbred
+at times in the attitude of saints and stoics--at least in their books.
+When Rachel weepeth for her children, we have no business to come round
+hawking our consolation; we should stand aside, unless we can cradle her
+to sleep in our arms. And if we refuse to weep, 'tis not because there
+is not matter enough for weeping, but because we require our strength
+and serenity to carry her through her trouble. Pain, dear cheerful
+friends, is pain; and grief, grief; and if our own complete human
+efficiency requires the acquaintance thereof, 'tis because the
+knowledge of their violence and of their wiles is needed for our own
+protection and the helping of other folk. Evil comes from the gods, no
+doubt; but so do all things; and to extract good from it--the great
+Prometheus-feat of man--is not to evil's credit, but to the credit of
+good. The contrary doctrine is a poison to the spirit, though a poison
+of medicinal use in moments of anguish, a bromide or an opiate.
+
+I am speaking, therefore, only of such contingencies as will bear
+comparison, without silly stoicism, to the missing of a train. Much of
+the good such disappointments may contain is of the nature of education,
+and most of it a matter of mere novelty. Without suspecting it, we are
+all suffering from lack of new departures; and life would no doubt be
+better if we tried a few more things, and gave the hidden, neglected
+possibilities a greater chance. Change as such is often fruitful of
+improvement, exposing to renovating air and rains the hard, exhausted
+soil of our souls, turning up new layers and helping on life's
+chemistry. The thwarting of our cherished plans is beneficial, because
+our plans are often mere routine, born not of wisdom, but of inertness.
+In our endless treadmill of activity, in our ceaseless rumination, we
+are, as a fact, neither acting nor thinking; and life, secretly at a
+standstill, ceases to produce any good. There was no reason for taking
+that express and getting back two or three hours sooner to my house: no
+one required me, nothing needed doing. Yet, unless I had lost that train
+I should not have dreamed of taking that walk, of making that little
+journey of discovery, in a delightful unknown place.
+
+There is another source of good hidden in disappointment. For it is
+disappointment rather than age (age getting the credit for what it
+merely witnesses) which teaches us to work into life's scheme certain
+facts, frequently difficult of acceptance; trying to make them, as all
+reality should be, causes of strength rather than of weakness. Painful
+facts? Or rather, perhaps, only painful contradictions to certain
+pleasant delusions, founded on nothing save their pleasantness, and
+taken for granted--who knows how long?--without proof and without
+questioning. Facts concerning not merely success, love, personal
+contact, but also one's own powers and possibilities for good, what the
+world is able to receive at one's hands, as much as of what the world
+can give to one.
+
+But the knowledge which disappointment gives, to those wishing to learn
+from it, has a higher usefulness than practical application. It
+constitutes a view of life, a certain contemplative attitude which, in
+its active resignation, in its domination of reality by intelligent
+acquiescence, gives continuity, peace, and dignity. And here my allegory
+finds its completion. For what compensated me after my lost train and
+all my worry and vexation of spirit? Nothing to put in my pocket or
+swell my luggage, not even a kingdom, such as made up for the loss of
+poor Saul's asses; but an impression of sunset freshness and sweetness
+among ripening corn and delicate leaves, and a view, unexpected, solemn,
+and charming, with those long-forgotten distant walls and towers which I
+shall never reach, and which have beckoned to me from my childhood.
+
+Such is the allegory, or morality, of the Lost Train.
+
+
+
+
+THE HANGING GARDENS
+
+VALEDICTORY
+
+
+I am not alluding to those of Semiramis. Though, now I come to think of
+it, this is the moment for protesting against one of those unnecessary
+deceptions from which the candid mind of children is allowed to suffer.
+For the verb _to hang_ invariably implies that the hanging object (or,
+according to our jurisprudence, person) is supported by a rope, nail, or
+other device, from above, while remaining unsupported from below. And it
+was in such relations to the forces of gravitation that my infancy
+conceived those gardens of the Babylonish Queen. So that I quite
+remember my bitter disappointment (the first germ, doubtless, of a
+general scepticism about Gods and Men) when a cut in an indiscreet
+_Handbook of Antiquities_ displayed these flowery places as resting
+flatly on a housetop, and no more hanging, in any intelligible sense,
+than I hung myself.
+
+Having lodged this complaint, I will, however, admit that this
+misleading adjective comes as a boon in the discourse I am now
+meditating. Since, returning to my old theme of the _Garden of Life_, I
+find that the misapplication of that word _Hanging_, and its original
+literal suggestion, lends added significance to this allegoric dictum:
+Of all the _Gardens of Life_ the best worth cultivating are often the
+Hanging Ones. Yes! Hanging between the town pavement, a hundred feet
+below, and the open sky, with gales ready to sweep down every flower-pot
+into smithereens, the kind or wicked sky, immediately above. Moreover,
+as regards legal claim to soil, leasehold, freehold, or copyhold, why,
+simply none, the earth having been carried up to that precarious place
+in arduous basketfuls.
+
+One of the wisest of women (I say it with pride, for she is my godchild)
+put this skyey allegory of mine into plain words, which I often repeat
+to myself, and never without profit. The circumstances and character of
+her husband had involved her in wanderings from her very wedding-day;
+and each of her six children had been born in a different place, and
+each in a more unlikely one. "It must have been very difficult to settle
+down at last like this," I said, looking in admiration from the dainty
+white walls and white carpets to the delicately laid table, with the
+flowers upon it and around it--I mean the garland of pink little faces
+and pink little pinafores. "I wonder you could do it after so long."
+"But I have always been what you call _settled_," she answered, and
+added very simply--"As soon as I took in that we should always be
+eternally uprooting, I made up my mind that the only way was to live as
+if we should never move at all. You see, everything would have gone to
+bits if I had let myself realise the contrary, and I think I should have
+gone crazy into the bargain."
+
+There has been a good deal of _going to bits_ and of craziness of sorts
+owing to the centuries and the universe not always having been as wise
+as this lady. And--with all deference to higher illuminations--I am
+tempted to ask myself whether all creeds, which have insisted on life's
+fleetingness and vanity, have not played considerable havoc with the
+fruitfulness, let alone the pleasantness, of existence. Certainly the
+holy persons who awaited the end of the world in caves, and on platforms
+fastened to columns, had not well-furbished knives and forks, nor
+carefully folded linen, nor, as a rule, nicely behaved nice little boys
+and girls, waiting with eager patience for a second helping of pudding.
+There is a distressing sneer at soap ("scented soap" it is always
+called), even in the great Tolstoi's writings, ever since he has allowed
+himself to be hag-ridden by the thought of death. And one speculates
+whether the care true saints have bestowed upon their souls, if not
+their bodies, the swept and garnished character of the best monasticism,
+has not been due to the fact that all this tidiness was in preparation
+for an eternity of beatitude?
+
+Fortunately for the world, the case of my dear goddaughter is an
+extreme one; and although our existence is quite as full of uprootings
+as hers, they come in such a stealthy or such a tragic manner as to
+beget no expectation of recurrence. Moreover, the very essence of life
+is to make us believe in itself; we fashion the future out of our
+feelings of the present, and go on living as if we should live for
+ever, simply because, by the nature of things, we have no experience
+of ceasing to live. Life is for ever murmuring to us the secret of its
+unendingness; and it is to our honour, and for our happiness, that we,
+poor flashes of a second, identify ourselves with the great unceasing,
+steady light which we and millions of myriads besides go to make up.
+Are we much surer of being alive to-morrow than of being dead in fifty
+years? "Is there any moment which can certify to its successor?" That
+is the answer to La Fontaine's octogenarian, planting his trees,
+despite the gibes of the little beardless boys whom, as is inevitable
+in such cases, he survived.
+
+                Défendez-vous au sage
+     De se donner des soins pour le plaisir d'autrui?
+     Cela même est un fruit qui je goûte aujourd'hui;
+     J'en puis jouir demain, et quelques jours encore.
+
+And all I would add is that, although it was very nice of the old man
+to enjoy his planting because of the unborn generations who would eat
+the fruits, he might have been less nice and quite as pleased if, as
+is probable, he liked gardening for its own sake.
+
+But people seem--on account of that horrid philosophical and
+moralising twist--to cast about for an excuse whenever they are doing
+what is, after all, neither wicked nor silly--to wit, making the best
+of such days and such powers as a merciful Providence or an
+indifferent trio of Fates has allowed them. But I should like to turn
+the tables on these persons, and suggest that all this worrying about
+whether life is or is not worth living, and hunting for answers for
+and against, may itself be an excuse, unconscious like all the most
+mischievous excuses, and hide not finer demands and highbred
+discontents, but rather a certain feebleness, lack of grip and
+adaptation, and an indolent acquiescence in what my godchild stoutly
+refused, a greater or lesser going to bits.
+
+This much is certain, that we all of us have to make a stand against
+such demoralisation whenever our plans are upset, or we are impatient to
+do something else, or we are feeling worried and ill. We most of us have
+to struggle against leaving our portmanteau gaping on a sofa or throwing
+our boot-trees into corners when we are in a place only for a few hours;
+and struggle against allowing the flowers on the table to wither, and
+the fire to go out, when we are setting out on a journey next day, or a
+dear one is about to say goodbye. "See to that fire being kept up, and
+bring fresh roses," said a certain friend of mine on a similar occasion.
+That was laying out a little hanging garden on the narrow ledge of two
+or three poor hours; and, behold! the garden has continued to be sweet
+and bright in the wide safe places of memory.
+
+In saying all these things, I am aware that many wise men, or men
+reputed wise, are against me; and that pretty hard words have been
+applied in the literature of all countries and ages to persons who are
+of my way of thinking, as, for instance, _gross, thoughtless, without
+soul_, and _Epicurean Swine_. And some of the people I like most to
+read about, the heroes of Tolstoi, André, Levine, Pierre, and, of
+course, Tolstoi himself, are for ever repeating that they can not
+live, let alone enjoy life, unless some one tell them why they should
+live at all.
+
+The demand, at first sight, does not seem unreasonable, and it is hard
+lines that just those who will ask about such matters should be the very
+ones for ever denied an answer. But so it is. The secret of _why we
+should live_ can be whispered only by a divinity; and, like the
+divinity who spoke to the Prophet, its small, still voice is heard only
+in ourselves. What it says there is neither couched in a logical form
+nor articulated in very definite language; and, I am bound to admit, is
+in no way of the nature of _pure reason_. Indeed, it is for the most
+part ejaculatory, and such that the veriest infant and simpleton, and I
+fear even animals (which is a dreadful admission), can follow its
+meaning. For to that unceasing question _Why_? the tiny voice within us
+answers with imperturbable irrelevance, "I want," "I do," "I think," and
+occasionally "I love." Very crass little statements, and not at all
+satisfactory to persons like Levine, André, and Tolstoi, who, for the
+most part, know them only second-hand; but wonderfully satisfying, thank
+goodness, to the great majority which hears them for ever humming and
+beating with the sound of its own lungs and heart. And one might even
+suspect that they are merely a personal paraphrase of the words which
+the spheres are singing and the heavens are telling.
+
+So, if we have no ampler places to cultivate with reverence and love,
+let us betake ourselves to the hanging gardens on our roof. The suns
+will cake the insufficient earth and parch the delicate roots; the
+storms will batter and tear the frail creepers. No doubt. But at this
+present moment all is fair and fragrant. And when the storms have done
+their wicked worst, and the sun and the frosts--nay, when that roof on
+which we perch is pulled to pieces, tiles and bricks, and the whole
+block goes--may there not be, for those caring enough, the chance of
+growing another garden, there or elsewhere?
+
+Be this as it may, one thing is certain, that no solid plot of earth
+between its walls or hedges allows us such intricate and unexpected
+bird's-eye views of streets and squares, of the bustling or resting
+city; none gives us such a vault of heaven, pure and sunny, or creeping
+with clouds, or serenely starlit, as do these hanging gardens of our
+life.
+
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+                           HORTUS VITAE;
+                     OR, THE HANGING GARDENS:
+
+                        MORALIZING ESSAYS.
+                               BY
+                           VERNON LEE.
+
+
+
+_Times._--"There are many charming flowers in it ... the swift
+to-and-fro of her vivid, capricious mind carries the reader hither
+and thither at her will, and she has such wise, suggestive things
+to say.... Whenever and wherever she speaks of Italy, the
+sun shines in this garden of hers, the south wind stirs among
+the roses."
+
+_Standard._--"There are imagination and fancy in the volume, a
+wise and independent outlook on society, an undercurrent of
+genial humour, and, what is perhaps still more rare, an invitation
+to think."
+
+
+_Westminster Gazette._--"They are of the family of Lamb, Hunt,
+and Hazlitt, just as those derive from the Augustans, Addison,
+and Steele.... Vernon Lee possesses the best gifts of the
+essayists--the engaging turn, the graceful touch, the subtle
+allusiveness."
+
+_Outlook._--"Vernon Lee possesses a mind richly imbued with the
+lore of the finest literature, and distinguished by just that touch
+of paradox, of the unexpected, which is the other indispensable
+requisite of the true essayist. Also her philosophy is never
+aggressively didactic, but always refreshing and helpful."
+
+_Speaker._--"This volume of essays gives us the work of Vernon Lee in
+her most eager and abundant mood.... Cordial pages that convey so much
+sincerity of heart, so much warmth, so much courage and love of life."
+
+_Pilot._--"All that Vernon Lee has written is strong and good ... and
+her shrewd observation has enabled her to see below the
+surface of life."
+
+JOHN LANE, PUBLISHER, LONDON & NEW YORK
+
+
+
+
+_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
+
+LIMBO; and Other Essays
+GENIUS LOCI. Notes on Places
+PENELOPE BRANDLING
+ARIADNE IN MANTUA
+      A Romance in Five Acts
+
+
+
+
+SOME NEW POETRY
+
+   A MASQUE OF MAY MORNING.
+   BY W. GRAHAM ROBERTSON.
+   With Twelve Full-page Illustrations
+   in Colour by the Author. Fcap. 4to. _7s. 6d._ net.
+
+
+   CORNISH BALLADS AND OTHER POEMS.
+   Being the Complete Poetical Works of ROBERT STEPHEN
+   HAWKER, sometime Vicar of Morwenstow, Cornwall. Edited
+   by C. E. BYLES. With numerous Illustrations by J. LEY
+   PETHYBRIDGE and others. Crown 8vo. _5s._ net.
+
+_Uniform with_
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+
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+   NEW POEMS.
+   By RONALD CAMPBELL MACFIE,
+   author of "Granite Dust." _5s._ net.
+
+
+_Daily News._--"The poetry ... is of a passionate intensity, and
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+with a note that is unfamiliar."
+
+_Academy._--"Mr. Macfie, as the reader of 'Granite Dust' well
+knows, is a veritable poet."
+
+_Star._--"Work ... far above the average."
+
+_Aberdeen Free Press._--"Strong, pure, and beautiful poetry."
+
+
+   POEMS.
+   By RACHEL ANNAND TAYLOR.
+   Crown 8vo. _5s._ net.
+
+
+   AN ELEGY TO F. W. A. DIED 1901.
+   By VIVIAN LOCKE ELLIS.
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+
+
+   LAND AND SEA PIECES: Poems.
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+
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+JOHN LANE, PUBLISHER, LONDON & NEW YORK
+
+
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+<title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of Hortus Vitae, by Vernon Lee</title>
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Hortus Vitae, by Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
+
+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: Hortus Vitae
+       Essays on the Gardening of Life
+
+Author: Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
+
+Release Date: October 7, 2008 [EBook #26800]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HORTUS VITAE ***
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+Produced by Delphine Lettau & the Online Distributed
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+</pre>
+
+
+
+<hr class="full" />
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h1>HORTUS VITAE.</h1>
+
+<h2> ESSAYS ON THE GARDENING OF LIFE</h2>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h4>by</h4>
+
+<h2>VERNON LEE</h2>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h4>JOHN LANE: THE BODLEY HEAD<br />
+LONDON &amp; NEW YORK. MDCCCCIV.</h4>
+
+<h6> SECOND EDITION.</h6>
+
+<h6>WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES.</h6>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
+<p><a name="c1-1" id="c1-1"></a>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>DEDICATION</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="jright">To MADAME TH: BLANC-BENTZON<br />
+<span class="smallcaps">Maiano, near Florence,</span><br />
+June 20, 1903.</p>
+
+
+<p>MY DEAR MADAME BLANC,</p>
+<p>The first copy of this little book was, of course, to have been for
+Gabrielle Delzant. I am fulfilling her wish, I think, in giving it,
+instead, to you, who were her oldest friend; as I, alas! had time to be
+only her latest.</p>
+
+<p>She had read nearly all these essays; and, during those weeks of her
+illness which I spent last autumn in Gascony, she had made me rewrite
+several among them. She wanted to learn to read English aloud, and it
+amused her and delighted me that she should do so on my writings. Her
+French pronunciation gave an odd grace to the sentences; the little
+hesitation spaced and accentuated their meaning; and I liked what I had
+written when she read it. The afternoons at Para&yuml;s which we spent
+together in this way! Prints of <i>M&egrave;re Ang&eacute;lique</i> and <i>Ces Messieurs de
+Port Royal</i> watching over us in her spacious bedroom, brown and yet
+light like the library it had become; and among those Jansenist
+worthies, the Turin Pallas Athena, with a sprig of green box as an
+offering from our friend. Yes; what I had written seemed good when read
+by her. And then there were the words which had to be looked out in the
+dictionary, bringing discussions on all manner of subjects, and
+wonderful romantic stories, like the "Golden Legend," about grandparents
+and servants and neighbours, giving me time to rearrange the cushions
+and to settle the fur over her feet. And the other words, hard to
+pronounce (she must always invert, from sheer anxiety, the English
+<i>th'</i>s and <i>s'</i>s); I had to say them first, and once more, and yet
+again. And we laughed, and I kissed her beloved patient face and her
+dear young white hair. I don't think it ever occurred to tell her my
+intention of putting her name on this volume&mdash;it went without saying.
+And besides, had not everything I could do or be of good belonged to her
+during the eighteen months we had been friends?</p>
+
+<p>There was another reason, however, why this book more particularly
+should have been hers; and having been hers, dear Madame Blanc, yours.
+Do you remember telling me how, years ago, and in a terrible moment of
+your experience, she had surprised you, herself still so young, by a
+remark which had sunk deep into your mind and had very greatly helped
+you? "We must," you told me she had said, "be prepared to begin life
+many times afresh." Now that is the thought, though never clearly
+expressed, which runs through these essays. And the essential goodness
+and fruitfulness of life, its worthiness to be lived over and over
+again, had come home to me more and more with the knowledge and the love
+of her who had made my own life so far happier and more significant. So
+that my endeavour to enumerate some of the unnoticed gifts and deepest
+consolations of life has come to be connected in my mind with this
+creature who consoled so many and gave herself, with such absolute gift
+of loving-kindness or gratitude, to all people and all things that
+deserved it.</p>
+
+<p>That life is worthy to be lived well, with fortitude, tenderness, and a
+certain reserved pride and humility, was indeed the essential, unspoken
+tenet of Gabrielle Delzant's religion, into which there entered, not
+merely the teachings of Stoics and Jansenists, but the traditional
+gaiety and gallant bearing of the little southern French nobles from
+whom she was descended. Her Huguenot blood, of which, with the dear
+self-contradictoriness of all true saints, she was inordinately proud;
+her Catholic doctrine, which by natural affinity was that of Port Royal
+and Pascal; this double strain of asceticism of both her faiths (for,
+like all deep believers, she had more than one) merely gave a solemn
+base, a zest, to her fine intuition of nature and joy. The refusal to
+possess (even her best-beloved books never bore her own name, and her
+beautiful bevelled wardrobes were found empty through sheer giving), the
+disdain for every form of property, only intensified her delight in all
+the beautiful things which could be shared with others. No one ever
+possessed, in the true sense of passionate enjoyment, as Gabrielle
+Delzant possessed, for instance, the fine passages of Corneille, or
+Maurice de Gu&eacute;rin, or Victor Hugo, which she asked her husband to read
+to us of an evening; as she possessed the refined lie of the land, the
+delicate autumn colouring of her modest and gracious southern country;
+and those old-fashioned Paris streets, through which we eagerly
+wandered, seeking obscure little churches and remote convents where
+Pascal had lived or Andr&eacute; Ch&eacute;nier lay buried. Nay, no one, methinks,
+ever tasted so much of romance as this lady in her studious invalid's
+existence; for did she not extract wonderful and humorous adventures,
+not only out of the lives of her friends, but her own quiet comings and
+goings? Do you remember, dear Madame Blanc, that rainy day that she and
+I returned to you, brimful of marvellous adventures, when we had found a
+feather and shell shop built up against an old church in the Marais; or
+was it after wandering in the dripping Jardin des Plantes, peering at
+the white skeletons of animals of the already closed museum, and
+returning home in floods by many and devious trams and 'buses? Ah, no
+one could enjoy things, and make others enjoy them by sheer childlike
+lovingness, as she did!</p>
+
+<p>For her austerity, like that of the nobler pagans (and there are no
+nobler pagans, or more reverent to paganism, than true Christian
+saints, believe me) pruned all natural possibilities into fruitfulness
+of joy. And her reckless giving away of interest and of loving-kindness,
+enabled her, not merely to feed the multitude, but to carry home
+miraculous basketfuls, and more, methinks, than twelve.</p>
+
+<p>And thus, to return to my main theme, there was, transmuting all her
+orthodoxy (and making her accept some unorthodox among her
+fellow-worshippers) a deep and fervent adoration of life and
+fruitfulness, and an abhorrence of death.</p>
+
+<p>Her letters to me are full of it. Abhorrence of death. Death not of the
+body, for she held that but an incident, an accident almost, in a life
+eternal or universal; but death of the soul. And this she would have
+defined, though she was never fond of defining, as loss of the power of
+extracting joy and multiplying it through thankfulness.</p>
+
+<p>A matter less of belief than of temper. Of course. Gabrielle Delzant was
+one of the elect, and filled with grace. And she had as little sense of
+tragedy as St. Francis or his skylarks; sympathy meaning for her less
+the fact of feeling the sufferings of others, than that of healing, of
+consoling, and of compensating.</p>
+
+<p>With this went naturally that, in a very busy life, full&mdash;over-full,
+some of us thought&mdash;of the affairs of other folk, she never appeared
+worried or hurried. Of the numberless persons who carried their business
+to her, or whose secret troubles became manifest to her dear
+bluish-brown eyes, each must have felt as if she existed for him or her
+solely. And folk went to her as they go into a church of her religion,
+not merely for spiritual aid, but for the comfort of space and rest in
+this world of crowding and bustle; for the sense of a piece of heaven
+closed in for one's need and all one's very own. Dear Madame Blanc, how
+many shy shadows do we not seem to see around us since her death; or
+rather to guess at, roaming disconsolate, lacking they scarce know what,
+that ever-welcoming sanctuary of her soul!</p>
+
+<p>I have compared it with a church; but outwardly, and just because she
+was such a believer in life, it was more like a dwelling-place, like
+those brown corridors, full of books, at Para&yuml;s; or that bedroom of
+hers, with the high lights all over the polished floor, and its look of
+a library. To me Gabrielle Delzant revealed the reality of what I had
+long guessed and longed for aimlessly, the care and grace of art, the
+consecration of religion, applied to the matters of every day. It hung
+together with her worship of life, with her belief, as she expressed it
+to you, all those years ago, <i>that life must be begun many times anew</i>.
+And it is this which, for all the appalling unexpectedness, the dreadful
+cataclysm of her temporal ending, has made the death of Gabrielle
+Delzant so strangely difficult, for me, at least, to realise as death at
+all.</p>
+
+<p>Not death, but only absence; and that, how partial!</p>
+
+<p>It is eight months and more, dear Madame Blanc, since she and I bade
+each other adieu in the body. She had been some while ill, though none
+of us suspected how fatally. It was the eve of her departure for Paris;
+and I was returning to Italy. She was grieved at parting from me, at
+leaving her dear old Southern relatives; and secretly she perhaps half
+suspected that she might never come back to her Gascon home. It was a
+November day, dissolving fitfully into warm rain, and very melancholy.
+I was to take the late train to Agen with the two girls. And she and I,
+when all was ready, were to have the afternoon together. Of course we
+must have it serene, as if no parting were to close it. All traces of
+departure, of packing, were cleared away at her bidding, and when they
+had carried her on to her sofa, and placed by its side the little table
+with our books, and also my chair, she bade the dear Southern maids
+light a fine blaze of vine stumps, and fill all the jars with fresh
+roses&mdash;china roses, so vivid, surely none have ever smelt so sweet and
+poignant. We amused ourselves, a little sadly, burning some olive and
+myrtle branches I had brought for her from Corsica, and watching their
+frail silver twigs and leaves turn to embers and fall in fireworks of
+sparks and a smoke of incense. And we read together in one of my books
+(alas! that book has just come back this very same day, sent by her
+daughter), and looked up at the loose grey clouds suffused with rose and
+orange as the day drew to its end. Then the children shouted from below
+that the carriage was there, that I must go. We closed the books,
+marking the place, and I broke a rose from the nosegay on the
+fireplace. And we said farewell.</p>
+
+<p>Thus have we remained, she and I. With the mild autumn day drawing to an
+end outside; and within, the fresh roses, the bright fire she had asked
+for; remained reading our books, watching those dried leaves turn to
+showers of sparks and smoke of incense. She and I, united beyond all
+power of death to part, in the loving belief that, even like that
+afternoon of packing up and bidding adieu, and rain and early twilight,
+life also should be made serene and leisurely, and simple and sweet, and
+akin to eternity.</p>
+
+<p>And now I am going to put those volumes she and I had read together, on
+my own shelves, here in this house she never entered; and to correct the
+proofs of this new little book, which should have been hers, nay, rather
+<i>is</i>, and which is also, my dear Madame Blanc, for that reason, yours.</p>
+<p>I am, meanwhile, your grateful and affectionate friend,</p>
+<p>VERNON LEE.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="narrow" />
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>CONTENTS<br />&nbsp;</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="center">
+<table cellpadding="1" summary="TOC">
+<tr><td align="right" valign="top">I.&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>    <td><a href="#c1-1" ><span class="smallcaps">DEDICATION</span></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right" valign="top">II.&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>   <td><a href="#c1-2" >THE GARDEN OF LIFE&mdash;INTRODUCTORY</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right" valign="top">III.&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>  <td><a href="#c1-3" >IN PRAISE OF GOVERNESSES</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right" valign="top">IV.&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>   <td><a href="#c1-4" >ON GOING TO THE PLAY.</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right" valign="top">V.&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>    <td><a href="#c1-5" >READING BOOKS.</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right" valign="top">VI.&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>   <td><a href="#c1-6" >HEARING MUSIC</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right" valign="top">VII.&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>  <td><a href="#c1-7" >RECEIVING LETTERS</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right" valign="top">VIII.&nbsp;&nbsp;</td> <td><a href="#c1-8" >NEW FRIENDS AND OLD.</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right" valign="top">IX.&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>   <td><a href="#c1-9" >OTHER FRIENDSHIPS.</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right" valign="top">X.&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>    <td><a href="#c1-10" >A HOTEL SITTING-ROOM</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right" valign="top">XI.&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>   <td><a href="#c1-11" >IN PRAISE OF COURTSHIP</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right" valign="top">XII.&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>  <td><a href="#c1-12" >KNOWING ONE'S MIND</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right" valign="top">XIII.&nbsp;&nbsp;</td> <td><a href="#c1-13" >AGAINST TALKING</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right" valign="top">XIV.&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>  <td><a href="#c1-14" >IN PRAISE OF SILENCE</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right" valign="top">XV.&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>   <td><a href="#c1-15" >THE BLAME OF PORTRAITS</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right" valign="top">XVI.&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>   <td><a href="#c1-16" >SERE AND YELLOW&mdash;INTERLUDE</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right" valign="top">XVII.&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>   <td><a href="#c1-17" >A STAGE JEWEL</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right" valign="top">XVIII.&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>   <td><a href="#c1-18" >MY BICYCLE AND I</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right" valign="top">XIX.&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>   <td><a href="#c1-19" >PUZZLES OF THE PAST</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right" valign="top">XX.&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>   <td><a href="#c1-20" >MAKING PRESENTS</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right" valign="top">XXI.&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>   <td><a href="#c1-21" >GOING AWAY</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right" valign="top">XXII.&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>   <td><a href="#c1-22" >COMING BACK</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right" valign="top">XXIII.&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>   <td><a href="#c1-23" >LOSING ONE'S TRAIN</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right" valign="top">XXIV.&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>   <td><a href="#c1-24" >THE HANGING GARDENS&mdash;VALEDICTORY</a></td></tr>
+</table>
+</div>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h2>HORTUS VITAE.</h2>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="narrow" />
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><a name="c1-2" id="c1-2"></a>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>THE GARDEN OF LIFE</h3>
+<h5>(INTRODUCTORY)<br />&nbsp;</h5>
+<p class="jright">"Cela est bien dit," r&eacute;pondit Candide;<br />
+"mais il faut cultiver notre jardin."<br />
+&mdash;<span class="smallcaps">Romans de Voltaire</span>.</p>
+
+<p>This by no means implies that the whole of life is a garden or could be
+made one. I am not sure even that we ought to try. Indeed, on second
+thoughts, I feel pretty certain that we ought not. Only such portion of
+life is our garden as lies, so to speak, close to our innermost
+individual dwelling, looked into by our soul's own windows, and
+surrounded by its walls. A portion of life which is ours exclusively,
+although we do occasionally lend its key to a few intimates; ours to
+cultivate just as we please, growing therein either pistachios and dwarf
+lemons for preserving, like Voltaire's immortal hero, or more spiritual
+flowers, "sweet basil and mignonette," such as the Lady of Epipsychidion
+sent to Shelley; kindly rosemary and balm; or, as may happen, a fine
+assortment of witch's herbs, infallible for turning us into cats and
+toads and poisoning our neighbours.</p>
+
+<p>But with whatever we may choose to plant the portion of our life and our
+thought which is our own, and whatsoever its natural fertility and
+aspect, this much is certain, that it needs digging, watering, planting,
+and perhaps most of all, weeding. "Cela est bien dit," r&eacute;pondit Candide,
+"mais il faut cultiver notre jardin." He was, as you will recollect,
+answering Dr. Pangloss. One evening, while they were resting from their
+many tribulations, and eating various kinds of fruit and sweetmeats in
+their arbour on the Bosphorus, the eminent optimistic philosopher had
+pointed out at considerable length that the delectable moment they were
+enjoying was connected by a Leibnitzian chain of cause and effect with
+sundry other moments of a less obviously desirable character in the
+earlier part of their several lives.</p>
+
+<p>"For, after all, my dear Candide," said Dr. Pangloss, "let us suppose
+you had not been kicked out of a remarkably fine castle, magnis ac
+cogentissimis cum argumentis a posteriori; suppose also that, etc., etc.
+had not happened, nor, furthermore, etc., etc., etc.; well, it is quite
+plain that you would not be in this particular place, <i>videlicet</i> an
+arbour; and, moreover, in the act of eating preserved lemon-rind and
+pistachio nuts."</p>
+
+<p>"What you say is true," answered Candide, "but we have to cultivate our
+garden."</p>
+
+<p>And here I hasten to remark, that although I have quoted and translated
+these seven immortal words, I would on no account be answerable for
+their original and exact meaning, any more than for the meaning of more
+officially grave and reverend texts, albeit perhaps not wiser or nobler
+ones.</p>
+
+<p>Did the long-suffering hero of the Sage of Ferney accept the chain of
+cause and effect, and agree that without the kicks, the earthquake, the
+<i>auto-da-f&egrave;</i>, and all the other items of his uneasy career, it was
+impossible he should be eating pistachio nuts and preserved lemon-rind
+in that arbour? And, in consideration of the bitter sweet of these
+delicacies, was he prepared to welcome (retrospectively) the painful
+preliminaries as blessings in disguise? Did he even, rising to stoical
+or mystic heights, identify these superficially different phenomena and
+recognize that their apparent contradiction was real sameness?</p>
+
+<p>Or, should we take it that, refraining from such essential questions,
+and passing over his philosophical friend's satisfaction in the <i>causal
+nexus</i>, poor Candide was satisfied with pointing out the only practical
+lesson to be drawn from the whole matter, to wit, that in order to
+partake of such home-grown dainties, it had been necessary, and most
+likely would remain necessary, to put a deal of good work into whatever
+scrap of the soil of life had not been devastated by those Leibnitzian
+Powers who further Man's felicity in a fashion so energetic but so
+roundabout?</p>
+
+<p>All these points remain obscure. But even as a play is said to be only
+the better for the various interpretations which it affords to as many
+great actors; so methinks, the wisest sayings are often those which
+state some principle in general terms, leaving to individuals the
+practical working out, according to their nature and circumstances. So,
+whether we incline to optimism or to pessimism, we must do our best in
+the half-hours we can bestow upon our little garden.</p>
+
+<p>I speak advisedly of half-hours, and I would repeatedly insist upon the
+garden being little. For the garden, whatever its actual size, and were
+it as extensive as those of Eden and the Hesperides set on end, does not
+afford the exercise needful for spiritual health and vigour. And
+whatever we may succeed in growing there to please our taste or (like
+some virtuous dittany) to heal our bruises, this much is certain, that
+the power of enjoyment has to be brought from beyond its limits.</p>
+
+<p>Happiness, dear fellow-gardeners, is not a garden plant.</p>
+
+<p>In plain English: happiness is not the aim of life, although it is
+life's furtherance and in the long run life's <i>sine qua non</i>. And not
+being life's aim, life often disregards the people who pursue it for its
+own sake. I am not, like Dr. Pangloss, a professional philosopher, and
+what philosophy I have is of no particular school, and neither stoical
+nor mystic. I feel no sort of call to vindicate the Ways of Providence;
+and on the whole there seems something rather ill-bred in crabbing the
+unattainable, and pretending that what we can't have can't be good for
+us. Happiness <i>is</i> good for us, excellent for us, necessary for us,
+indispensable to us. But &#8230; how put such transcendental facts into
+common or garden (for it is <i>garden</i>) language? But <i>we</i>&mdash;that is to
+say, poor human beings&mdash;are one thing, and life is quite another. And as
+life has its own programme irrespective of ours, to wit, apparently its
+own duration and intensifying throughout all changes, it is quite
+natural that we, its little creatures of a second, receive what we
+happen to ask for&mdash;namely, happiness&mdash;as a reward for being thoroughly
+alive.</p>
+
+<p>Now, for some reason not of our choosing, we cannot be thoroughly alive
+except as a result of such exercises as come under the headings: Work
+and Duty. That seems to be the law of Life&mdash;of Life which does not care
+a button about being &aelig;sthetic or wisely epicurean. The truth of it is
+brought home to us occasionally in one of those fine symbolical
+intuitions which are the true stuff of poetry, because they reveal the
+organic unity and symmetry of all existence. I am alluding to the sense
+of cloying and restlessness which comes to most of us (save when tired
+or convalescent) after a very few days or even hours shut up in quite
+the finest real gardens; and to that instinct, impelling some of us to
+inquire about the lodges and the ways out, the very first thing on
+coming down into some private park. Of course they are quite exquisite,
+those flowery terraces cut in the green turf, and bowling greens set
+with pines or statues, and balustraded steps with jars and vases. And
+the great stretches of park land with their solemn furbelowed avenues
+and their great cedars stretching <i>moire</i> skirts on to the grass, are
+marvellous fine things to look upon&#8230;.</p>
+
+<p>But we want the ploughed fields beyond, the real woods with stacked-up
+timber, German fashion; the orchards and the kitchen gardens; the tracks
+across the high-lying sheep downs; the towing-paths where the barges
+come up the rivers; the deep lanes where the hay-carts have left long
+wisps on the overhanging elms; the high-roads running from village to
+village, with the hooded carts and bicycles and even the solemn
+Juggernaut traction-engines upon them. We want not only to rest from
+living, to take refreshment in life's kindly pauses and taste (like
+Candide in his arbour) the pleasantness of life's fruits. We want also
+to live.</p>
+
+<p>But there is living and living. There is, unfortunately, not merely such
+breezy work-a-dayness as we have been talking of, but something very
+different indeed beyond the walls of our private garden. There are
+black, oozy factory yards and mangy grass-plots heaped with brickbat and
+refuse; and miles of iron railing, and acres of gaunt and genteel
+streets not veiled enough in fog; a metaphorical <i>beyond the garden
+walls</i>, in which a certain number of us graduate for the ownership of
+sooty shrubberies and clammy orchid houses. And we poor latter-day
+mortals have become so deadly accustomed to the routine of useless work
+and wasteful play, that a writer must needs cross all the <i>t</i>'s and dot
+all the <i>i</i>'s of his conviction (held also by other sentimentalists and
+cranks called Carlyle, Ruskin, and Morris) that the bread and wine of
+life are not grown in the Black Country; no, nor life's flowers in the
+horticultural establishments (I will not call them gardens) of suburban
+villas.</p>
+
+<p>Fortunately, however, this casual-looking universe is not without its
+harmonies, as well as ironies. And one of these arrangements would seem
+to be that our play educates the aims and methods of our work. If we lay
+store by satisfactions which imply the envy and humiliation of other
+folk, why then we set about such work as humiliates our neighbours or
+fills them with enviousness, saving the case where others, sharing our
+tastes, do alike by us. Without going to such lengths (the mention of
+which has got me a reputation for lack of human sympathy) there remains
+the fact that if our soul happen to take delight in, let us say,
+futility&mdash;well, then, futility will litter existence with shreds of
+coloured paper and plaster comfits trodden into mud, as after a day of
+carnival at Nice. Nay, a still simpler case: if we cannot be happy
+without a garden as big as the grounds of an expensive lunatic asylum,
+why, then, all the little cottage gardens down the lane must be swept
+away to make it.</p>
+
+<p>Now, the cottage gardens, believe me, are the best. They are the only
+ones which, being small, may be allotted in some juster future to every
+man without dispossessing his neighbour. And they are also the only ones
+compatible with that fine arable or dairy country which we all long for.
+Stop and look over the hedges: their flowers leave no scrap of earth
+visible between them, like the bedded-out things of grander gardens; and
+their vivid crimsons, and tender rose and yellow, and ineffable blue,
+and the solemn white which comes out in the evening, are seen to most
+advantage against the silvery green of vegetables behind them, and the
+cornfield, the chalk-pit under the beech trees beyond. The cottage
+flowers come also into closer quarters with their owners, not merely
+because these breathe their fragrance and the soil's good freshness
+while stooping down to weed, and prune, and water; but also, and perhaps
+even more, because the flowers we tend with our own hands have a habit
+of blooming in our expectations and filling our hopes with a sweetness
+which not the most skilful hired gardeners have ever taught the most
+far-fetched hybrids that they raise for clients.</p>
+
+<p>Which, being interpreted, may be taken to mean that it is no use relying
+on artists, poets, philosophers, or saints to make something of the
+enclosed spaces or the waste portions of our soul: <i>Il faut cultiver
+notre jardin</i>.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><a name="c1-3" id="c1-3"></a>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>IN PRAISE OF GOVERNESSES</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Even before discovering that there was an old, gabled, lower town at
+Cassel, I felt the special gladness of the touch of Germany. It was an
+autumn morning, bright yet tender. I sped along the wide, empty streets,
+across the sanded square, with hedges of sere lime trees, where a big,
+periwigged Roman Emperor of an Elector presides, making one think of the
+shouts of "Hurrah, lads, for America!" of the bought and sold Hessians
+of Schiller's "Cabal and Love." At the other end was a promenade,
+terraced above the yellow tree-tops of a park, above a gentle undulating
+country, with villages and steeples in the distance. "Sch&ouml;neaussicht"
+the place called itself; and the view was looked at by the wide and many
+windows of pleasant old-fashioned houses, with cocked-hat roofs well
+pulled down over them, each in its little garden of standard roses, all
+quiet and smiling in the autumn sunshine.</p>
+
+<p>I felt the special gladness of being in Germany (for every country has
+its own way of making us happy), and glad that there should be in me
+something which answered to Germany's especial touch. We owe that, many
+of us, I mused, and with it a deep debt of gratitude, to our
+governesses. And I fell to thinking of certain things which an American
+friend had lately told me, sitting in the twilight with her head a
+little averted, about a certain governess of hers I can remember from my
+childhood. Pathetic things, heroic ones, nothings; all ending off in the
+story of a farewell letter, treasured many years, lost on a journey&#8230;.
+"Do you remember Fr&auml;ulein's bonnet? The one she brought from Hanover and
+wore that winter in Paris?" And there it was in a faded, crinolined
+photograph, so dear and funny. Dear and funny&mdash;that is the point of this
+relationship with creatures giving often the best of the substance and
+form of our soul, that it is without the sometimes rather empty majesty
+of the parental one. And surely it is no loss, but rather a gain, to
+have to smile, as my friend did at the thought of that Teutonic bonnet,
+just when we feel an awkward huskiness in our voice.</p>
+
+<p>There is, moreover, a particular possibility for good in the relation
+between a developing child (not, of course, a mere growing young brute)
+and a woman still young, childless, or separated from her children, a
+little solitary, most often alien, differently brought up, and whose
+affection and experience must therefore take a certain impersonality,
+and tend to subdued romance. We are loved, when we are, not as a matter
+of course and habit, not with any claim; but for ourselves and with the
+delicate warmth of a feeling necessarily one-sided. And whatever we
+learn of life in this relationship is of one very different from our
+own, and seen through the feelings, the imagination, often the repressed
+home-sickness, of a mature and foreign soul. And this is good for us,
+and useful in correcting family and national tradition, and the rubbing
+away of angles (and other portions of soul) by brothers and sisters, and
+general contemporaries, excellent educational items of which it is
+possible to have a little too much.</p>
+
+<p>Be this as it may, it is to our German governesses that we owe the
+power of understanding Germany, more than to German literature. For the
+literature itself requires some introduction of mood for its romantic,
+homely, sentimental, essentially German qualities; the mere Anglo-Saxon
+or Latin being, methinks, incapable of caring at once for Wilhelm
+Meister, or Siebennk&auml;s, or G&ouml;tz, or the manifold lyric of Forest and
+Millstream. To understand these, means to have somewhere in us a little
+sample, some fibres and corpuscles, of the German heart. And I maintain
+that we are all of us the better, of whatever nationality (and most,
+perhaps, we rather too-too solid Anglo-Saxons) for such transfusion of a
+foreign element, correcting our deficiencies and faults, and ripening
+(as the literature of Italy ripened our Elizabethans) our own intrinsic
+qualities. It means, apart from negative service against conceit and
+canting self-aggrandisement, an additional power of taking life
+intelligently and serenely; a power of adaptation to various climates
+and diets of the spirit, let alone the added wealth of such varied
+climates and diets themselves. Italy, somehow, attains this by her mere
+visible aspect and her history: a pure, high sky, a mountain city, or a
+row of cypresses can teach as much as Dante, and, indeed, teach us to
+understand Dante himself. While as to France, that most lucid of
+articulately-speaking lands, explains herself in her mere books; and we
+become in a manner French with every clear, delightful page we read, and
+almost every thought of our own we ever think with definiteness and
+grace. But the genius of Germany is, like her landscape, homely and
+sentimental, with the funny goodness and dearness of a good child; and
+we must learn to know it while we ourselves are children. And therefore
+it is from our governesses that we learn (with dimmer knowledge of
+mysterious persons or things "Ulfilas"&mdash;"Tacitus's Germania," supposed
+by me to have been a lady, his daughter perhaps, and the "seven stars"
+of German literature) a certain natural affinity with the Germany of
+humbler and greater days, when no one talked of Teuton superiority or of
+purity of Teuton idiom; the Germany which gave Kant, and Beethoven, and
+Goethe and Schiller, and was not ashamed to say "scharmant."</p>
+
+<p>I, too, was taught to say "scharmant" and "am&uuml;siren". It was wrong, very
+wrong; and I feel my inferiority every time I come to Germany, and have
+to pause and think by what combination of words I can express the true
+Germanic functions and nature of booking offices and bicycle labels. For
+it was long ago: Count Bismarck was still looked on as a dangerous
+upstart, and we reckoned in kreutzers; blue and white Austrian bands
+played at Mainz and Frankfurt. It was long ago that I was, so to speak,
+a small German infant, fed on Teutonic romance and sentiment (and also
+funny Teutonic prosaicalness, bless it!) by a dim procession of
+Germania's daughters. There was Franziska, who could boast a Rhineland
+pastor for grandfather, a legendary pastor bearding Napoleon; Franziska,
+who read Schiller's "Maria Stuart" and "Joan of Arc," and even his
+"Child Murderess" (I remember every word of obloquy hurled at the
+hangman&mdash;"hangman, craven hangman, canst thou not break off a lily") to
+the housemaid and me whenever my father and mother went out of an
+evening; and described "Papagena," in Mozart's opera which she had seen,
+all dressed in feathers; and was tempted to strum furtive melancholy
+chords on my mother's zither&#8230;. Dear Franziska, whose comfortable
+blond good looks inspired the enamoured upholsterer in letters beginning
+"My dearest little goldfish"&mdash;Franziska, what has become of thee? And
+the Frau Professor, who averred with rhythmic iteration that teaching
+such a child was far, far worse than breaking stones on a high-road; in
+what stony regions may she have found an honoured stony grave? What has
+become of genial Mme. E., who played the Jupiter Symphonie with my
+mother, instead of hearing me through my scales, and lent me volumes of
+Tonkünstler-Lexikons to soothe her conscience, and gave us honey in the
+comb out of her garden of verbena and stocks? But best of all, dearest,
+far above all the others, and quite different, Marie S., charming
+enthusiastic young schoolmistress in that little town of pepper-pot
+towers and covered bridges, you I have found again; I shall soon see
+your eyes and hear your voice, quite unchanged, I am certain. And we
+shall sit and talk (your big daughter listening, perhaps not without an
+occasional smile) about those hours which you and I, a girl of twenty
+and a child of eleven, spent in the little room above the rushing Alpine
+river, eating apples and drinking <i>caf&eacute; au lait</i>; hours in which a
+whole world of legend and poetry, and scientific fact and theory more
+wonderful still, passed from your ardent young mind into the little
+eager puzzled one of your loving pupil. We shall meet very soon, a
+little awkwardly at first, perhaps, but after a moment talking as if no
+silence of thirty years had ever parted us; as if nothing had happened
+in between, as if all that might then have come true &#8230; well, could
+come true still.</p>
+
+<p>These thoughts came into my head that morning in the promenade at
+Cassel, brought to the surface by the mellow autumn sun and the special
+pleasure of being again in Germany. There mingled with them also that
+recent conversation about the lady with the bonnet from Hanover, who had
+written that paper so precious to my American friend. And I determined
+to take my pen some day I should feel suitably happy, and offer up
+thanks for all of us to our governesses, to those dear women, dead,
+dispersed, faded into distance, but not forgotten; our spiritual
+foster-mothers who put a few drops of the milk of German kindness, of
+German simplicity and quaintness and romance, between our lips when we
+were children.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><a name="c1-4" id="c1-4"></a>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>ON GOING TO THE PLAY</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>We were comparing notes the other day on plays and play-going. My friend
+was Irish; so, finding to our joy that we disliked this form of
+entertainment equally, we swore with fervour that we would go to the
+play together.</p>
+
+<p>Mankind may be divided into playgoers and not playgoers; and the first
+are far more numerous, and also far more illustrious. It evidently is a
+defect, and perhaps a sign of degeneracy, akin to deafness or to
+Daltonism, not to enjoy the theatre; not to enjoy it, at least in the
+reality, when there or just after coming away. For I can enjoy the
+thought of the play, and the thought of other folks liking it, so long
+as I am not taken there. There is something pleasant in thinking of
+those brilliant places, full of unrealities, with crowds engulfing
+themselves into this light from out of the dreary, foggy streets. Also,
+of young enthusiastic creatures, foregoing dinner, waiting for hours in
+cheap seats (like Charles and Mary Lamb before they had money to buy
+rare prints and blue china), with the delight of spending hoarded
+pennies; all under circumstances of the deepest bodily discomfort. I
+leave out of the question the thought of Greek theatres, of that
+semicircle of steps on the top of Fiesole, with, cypresses for side
+scenes, and, even now, lyric tragedies more than &AElig;schylean enacted by
+clouds and winds in the amphitheatre of mountains beyond. I am thinking
+of the play as we moderns know it, with a sense of stuffiness as an
+integral part. Indeed, that stuffiness is by no means its worst feature.
+The most thrilling moment, I will confess, which theatres can still give
+me is that&mdash;but it is really <i>sui generis</i> and ineffable&mdash;when, having
+got upstairs, you meet in the narrow lobbies of an old-fashioned
+playhouse the tuning of the fiddles and the smell&mdash;of gas, glue, heaven
+knows what glories of yester-year&mdash;which, ever since one's babyhood, has
+come to mean "the play." People have expended much genius and more money
+to make theatrical representation transcend imagination; but they can
+never transcend that moment in the corridor, <i>never transcend that
+smell</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Here is, most probably, one of my chief motives of dissatisfaction. I do
+not like the play&mdash;the play at the theatre&mdash;because it invariably falls
+short of that in my imagination. I make an exception for music; but not
+for the visible theatrical accompaniments thereof. Well given on the
+stage, <i>Don Giovanni</i>, for instance, remains but the rather bourgeois
+play of Moli&egrave;re; leave me and the music together, and I promise you that
+all the romance and terror and wonder of ten thousand Spains are
+distilled into my fancy!</p>
+
+<p>The fact is that, being an appeal to the imagination of others, every
+form of literature, every "deed of speech," as a friend of mine calls
+it, has a natural stage in the mind of the reader or the listener.
+Milton, let me point out, makes "gorgeous Tragedy in sceptred pall,"
+sweep across, not the planks of a theatre, but the scholar's thought as
+he sits alone with his book of nights. Neither is this an expression of
+conceit. I do not mean that <i>my</i> conception of this, that, or the other
+is better, or as good as, what a great actor or a clever manager can
+set before me. Nothing of the sort; but my conception <i>is better suited
+to me</i>. Its very vagueness answers, nine times out of ten, to my
+repugnance and my preference; and the high lights, the vividly realized
+portions emerging from that vagueness, represent <i>what I like</i>. Hamlet
+or Portia or Viola and Olivia, exist for me under the evocation of the
+magician Shakespeare, but formed of recollections, impressions of
+places, people, and other poets, floating coloured atomies, which have a
+brooding charm, as being mine; why should they be scared off, replaced,
+by detailed real personalities who, even if charming, are most likely
+alien?</p>
+
+<p>I cannot very well conceive how people enjoy such substitutions. Perhaps
+they have more sensitive fancy and warmer sympathies than I; but as to
+mine, I had rather they were let alone. I can quite understand that it
+is different with children and with uneducated persons: their
+imagination is at once more erratic than ours (less tied by the logical
+necessities of details, less perceptive of these), and, at the same
+time, their imagination is not as thoroughly well stocked, and as ready
+to ignite almost spontaneously, as is ours. Much reading, travelling,
+much contemplation of human beings, apart from practical reasons, has
+given even the least creative of us lazy, grown-up folk a power, almost
+a habit, of imaginative creation; and but a very little, though a
+genial, pressure will make it act. But children and the people require
+stronger stimulus, and require also a field for their imagination to
+work upon. I can remember the amazing effect, entirely at variance with
+the intention, which portions of <i>Don Quixote</i>&mdash;seen at a circus, of all
+places&mdash;made on my mind when I was eight: it did not <i>realize</i> ideas of
+chivalry which I had, but, on the contrary, it gave me, from outside,
+data (such data!) about chivalry on which my thoughts wove ideas the
+most amazing for many months. Something of the kind, I think, is
+happening to that Paris audience, rows and rows of eager heads and
+seeing eyes, which M. Carri&egrave;re has painted, just enough visible, in his
+usual luminous haze, to give the mood. The stage is not shown: it really
+is in those eyes and faces. It is telling them that there are worlds
+different from their own; it is opening out perspectives (longer and
+deeper than those of wood and cardboard) down which those cabined
+thoughts and feelings may henceforth wander. The picture, like M.
+Carri&egrave;re's "Morning" in the Luxembourg, is one of the greatest of poetic
+pictures; and it makes me, at least, understand what the value of the
+stage must be to hundreds and thousands of people; to <i>the people</i>, to
+children, and to those practical natures which, however learned and
+cultured, seem unable to get imaginative, emotional pleasure without a
+good deal of help from outward mechanism.</p>
+
+<p>These are all negative reasons why I dislike the play. But there are
+positive ones also. There is a story told by Lamb&mdash;or is it Hazlitt?&mdash;of
+a dear man who could not bear to read <i>Othello</i>, because of the dreadful
+fate of the Moor and his bride; "Such a noble gentleman! Such a sweet
+lady!" he would repeat, deeply distressed. The man was not
+artistic-souled; but I am like him. I know the healing anodyne in
+narrative, the classic consolation which that kind priest mentioned by
+Renan offered his congregation: "It took place so long ago that perhaps
+it never took place at all." But on the stage, when Salvini puts his
+terrible, suffused face out of Desdemona's curtains, it is not the past,
+but the present; there is no lurking hope that it may not be true. And I
+do not happen to wish to see such realities as that. Moreover, there are
+persons&mdash;my Irish friend and I, for instance&mdash;who feel abashed at what
+affects us as eavesdropping on our part. It is quite right we should be
+there to listen to some splendid piece of poetry, Romeo's duet with
+Juliet, the moonlight quartet of Lorenzo, Jessica, Olivia, and Nerissa,
+and parts of <i>Winter's Tale</i>; things which in musical quality transcend
+all music. But is it right that we be present at the unpacking of our
+neighbour's most private moral properties; at the dreadful laying bare
+of other folk's sores and nakedness? I wonder sometimes that any of the
+audience can look at the stage in company with the rest; the natural
+man, one would expect, would have the lights of the pit extinguished,
+and, if he needs must pry, pry at least unobserved.</p>
+
+<p>There is, however, an exception: when modern drama, instead of merely
+smuggling us, as by an ignominious King Candaules' ring called a theatre
+ticket, to witness what we shouldn't, gives us the spectacle of
+delightful personality, of individual power of soul, in its more
+intimate and perfect strength. I feel this sometimes in the case of Mme.
+Duse; and principally in her "Magda." This is good to see; as it is good
+to see naked muscles, to watch the efforts, the triumphant grace and
+strength of an athlete. For in this play of <i>Magda</i> the Duse rivets
+interests, delights not by what she does, but by what she is. The plot,
+the turn of the action, is of no consequence; it might be all reversed,
+and most of it omitted. We care not what a creature like this happens to
+be doing or suffering; we care for her existence because it means energy
+and charm. Why not deliberately aim at such effects? Now that the stage
+is no longer the mere concert-room for magnificent poetry, lyric or
+epic, it might become what would be consonant with our modern
+psychologic tastes, the place where the genius of author or actor
+allowed us to come in sight, with the fulness and completeness of the
+intentional and artificial, of those finest spectacles of all, <i>great
+temperaments</i>. Not merely guess at them, see them by casual glimpses, as
+in real life; nor reconstruct them by their words and deeds, as in
+books; but actually see them revealed, homogeneous, consecutive, in
+their gestures and tones, the whole, the <i>very being</i>, of which words
+and acts are but the partial manifestation. Methinks that in this way
+the play might add enormously to the suggestiveness, the delight and
+dignity of life; play-acting might become a substantive art, not a mere
+spoiling of the work of poetry. Methinks that if this happened, or
+happened often, my friend and I, who also hates the play&#8230;. But it
+seems probable, on careful consideration, that my friend and I are
+conspicuously devoid of the dramatic faculty; which being the case we
+had better not discuss plays and play-going at all.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><a name="c1-5" id="c1-5"></a>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>READING BOOKS</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>The chief point to be made in this matter is: that books, to fulfil
+their purpose, do not always require to be read. A book, for instance,
+which is a present, or an "hommage de l'auteur," has already served its
+purpose, like a visiting-card or a luggage label, at best like a
+ceremonial bouquet; and it is absurd to try and make it serve twice
+over, by reading it. The same applies, of course, to books lent without
+being asked for, and, in a still higher degree, to a book which has been
+discussed in society, and thus furnished out a due amount of
+conversation; to read such a book is an act of pedantry, showing
+slavishness to the names of things, and lack of insight into their real
+nature, which is revealed by the function they have been able to
+perform. Fancy, if public characters had to learn to snuff&mdash;a practice
+happily abandoned&mdash;because they occasionally received gifts of enamelled
+snuffboxes from foreign potentates!</p>
+
+<p>But there are subtler sides to this subject, and it is of these I fain
+would speak. We are apt to blunt our literary sense by reading far too
+much, and to lessen our capacity for getting the great delights from
+books by making reading into a routine and a drudgery. Of course I know
+that reading books has its utilitarian side, and that we have to
+consider printed matter (let me never call it literature!) as the raw
+material whence we extract some of the information necessary to life.
+But long familiarity with an illiterate peasantry like the Italian one,
+inclines me to think that we grossly exaggerate the need of such
+book-grown knowledge. Except as regards scientific facts and the various
+practices&mdash;as medicine, engineering, and the like, founded on them&mdash;such
+knowledge is really very little connected with life, either practical or
+spiritual, and it is possible to act, to feel, and even to think and to
+express one's self with propriety and grace, while having simply no
+literature at all behind one. That this is really no paradox is proved
+by pointing to the Greeks, who, even in the time of Plato&mdash;let alone the
+time, whenever that was, of Homer&mdash;had not much more knowledge of books
+than my Italian servant, who knows a few scraps of Tasso, possesses a
+"Book of Dreams; or Key to the Lottery," and uses the literature I have
+foolishly bestowed upon him as blotters in which to keep loose bills,
+and wherein occasionally to do addition sums. So that the fact seems to
+be that reading books is useful chiefly to enable us to wish to read
+more books!</p>
+
+<p>How many times does one not feel checked, when on the point of lending a
+book to what we call uneducated persons, by wondering what earthly
+texture of misapprehension and blanks they will weave out of its
+allusions and suggestions? And the same is the case of children. What
+fitter reading for a tall Greek goddess of ten than the tale of Cupid
+and Psyche, the most perfect of fairy stories with us; wicked sisters,
+subterranean adventures, ants helping to sort seeds, and terrible
+awaking drops of hot oil spilt over the bridegroom? But when I read to
+her this afternoon, shall I not see quite plainly over the edge of the
+book, that all the things which make it just what it is to me&mdash;the
+indescribable quality of the South, of antiquity and paganism&mdash;are
+utterly missed out; and that, to this divine young nymph, "Cupid and
+Psyche" is distinguishable from, say, "Beauty and the Beast" only by the
+unnecessary addition of a lot of heathenish names and the words which
+she does not even want to understand? Hence literature, alas! is, so to
+speak, for the literate; and one has to have read a great, great deal in
+order to taste the special exquisiteness of books, their marvellous
+essence of long-stored up, oddly mixed, subtly selected and hundredfold
+distilled suggestion.</p>
+
+<p>But once this state of things reached, there is no need to read much;
+and every reason for not <i>keeping up</i>, as vain and foolish persons
+boast, "with literature." Since, the time has come, after planting and
+grafting and dragging watering-pots, for flowering and fruition; for
+books to do their best, to exert their full magic. This is the time when
+a verse, imperfectly remembered, will haunt the memory; and one takes
+down the book, reads it and what follows, judiciously breaking off,
+one's mind full of the flavour and scent. Or, again, talking with a
+friend, a certain passage of prose&mdash;the account of the Lambs going to
+the play when young, or the beginning of "Urn Burial," or a chapter
+(with due improvised skippings) of "Candide"&mdash;comes up in conversation;
+and one reads it rejoicing with one's friends, feeling the special
+rapture of united comprehension, of mind touching mind, like the little
+thrill of voice touching voice on the resolving sevenths of the old
+duets in thirds. Or even when, remembering some graver page&mdash;say the
+dedication of "Faust" to Goethe's dead contemporaries&mdash;one fetches the
+book and reaches it silently to the other one, not daring to read it out
+loud&#8230;. It is when these things happen that one is really getting the
+good of books; and that one feels that there really is something
+astonishing and mysterious in words taken out of the dictionary and
+arranged with commas and semicolons and full stops between them.</p>
+
+<p>The greatest pleasures of reading consist in re-reading. Sometimes
+almost in not reading at all, but just thinking or feeling what there
+is inside the book, or what has come out of it, long ago, and passed
+into one's mind or heart, as the case may be. I wish to record in this
+reference a happy week once passed, at vintage time, in the Lower
+Apennines, with a beautiful copy of "Hippolytus," bound in white, which
+had been given me, regardless of my ignorance of Greek, by my dear
+Lombard friend who resembles a faun. I carried it about in my pocket;
+sometimes, at rare intervals, spelling out some word in <i>mai</i> or in
+<i>totos</i>, and casting a glance on the interleaved crib; but more often
+letting the volume repose by me on the grass and crushed mint of the
+cool yard under the fig tree, while the last belated cicala sawed, and
+the wild bees hummed in the ivy flower of the old villa wall. For once
+you know the spirit of a book, there is a process (known to Petrarch
+with reference to Homer, whom he was unable to understand) of taking in
+its charm by merely turning over the pages, or even, as I say, in
+carrying it about. The literary essence, which is uncommonly subtle, has
+various modes of acting on us; and this particular manner of absorbing a
+book's spirit stands to the material operation called <i>reading</i>, much in
+the same way that <i>smell</i>, the act of breathing invisible volatile
+particles, stands to the more obvious wholesale process of <i>taste</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Nay, such is the virtuous power of books, that, to those who are
+initiated and reverent, it can act from the mere title, or more
+properly, the binding. Of this I had an instance quite lately in the
+library of an old Jacobite house on the North Tyne. This library
+contained, besides its properly embodied books, a small collection
+existing, so to speak, only in the spirit, or at least in effigy; a
+door, to wit, being covered with real book-backs, or, more properly,
+backs of real books of which the inside was missing. A quaint,
+delightful collection! "Female traits," two volumes; four volumes (what
+dinners and breakfasts, as well as suppers, of horrors!) of Webster's
+"Vittoria Corombona," etc., the "Siege of Mons," "Ancient Mysteries,"
+"The Epigrams of Martial," "A Journey through Italy," and Cr&eacute;billon's
+novels. Contemplating these pseudo shelves of pageless tomes, I felt
+acutely how true it is that a book (for the truly lettered) can do its
+work without being read. I lingeringly relished (why did not Johnson
+give us a verb to <i>saporate</i>?) this mixed literature's flavour,
+humorous, romantic, and pedantic, beautifully welded. And I recognized
+that those gutted-away insides were quite superfluous: they had yielded
+their essence and their virtue.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><a name="c1-6" id="c1-6"></a>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>HEARING MUSIC</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>"Heard melodies," said Keats, "are sweet; but those unheard are
+sweeter." The remark is not encouraging to performers, yet, saving their
+displeasure, there is some truth in it.</p>
+
+<p>We give too much importance, nowadays, being busy and idle and
+mercantile (compatible qualities, alas!) to the material presence of
+everything, its power of filling time or space, and particularly of
+becoming an item of our budget; forgetful that of the very best things
+the material presence is worthless save as first step to a spiritual
+existence within our soul. This is particularly the case with music.
+There is nothing in the realm of sound at all corresponding to the
+actual photographing of a visible object on the retina; our auditive
+apparatus, whatever its mysteries, gives no sign of being in any way of
+the nature of a phonograph. Moreover, one element of music is certainly
+due to the sense of locomotion, the <i>rhythm</i>; so that <i>sound</i>, to become
+music, requires the attention of something more than the mere ear. Nay,
+it would seem, despite the contrary assertion of the learned <i>Stumpf</i>,
+that the greater number of writers on the vexed science of sound incline
+to believe that the hearing of music is always attended with movements,
+however imperceptible, in the throat, which, being true, would prove
+that, in a fashion, we <i>perform</i> the melodies which we think we only
+<i>hear</i>; living echoes, nerves vibrating beneath the composer's touch as
+literally as does the string of the fiddle, or its wooden fibres. A very
+delicate instrument this, called the <i>Hearer</i>, and, as we all know, more
+liable to being out of tune, to refusing to act altogether, than any
+instrument (fortunately for performers) hitherto made by the hand of
+man. Thus, in a way, one might paraphrase the answer which Mme.
+Gabbrielli is said to have made to the Empress Catherine, "Your
+Majesty's policemen can make me <i>scream</i>, not <i>sing</i>!" and say to some
+queen of piano keys or emperor of <i>ut de poitrine</i> that there is no
+violence or blandishment which can secure the <i>inner ear</i>, however much
+the outer ear may be solicited or bullied.</p>
+
+<p>'Tis in this sense, methinks, that we should understand the saying of
+Keats&mdash;to wit, that in a great many cases the happiest conjunction of
+music and the soul occurs during what the profane call silence; the very
+fact of music haunting our mind, while every other sort of sound may be
+battering our ear, showing our highest receptivity. And, as a fact, we
+do not know that real musicians, <i>real</i> Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha and
+Abt Voglers, not written ones, require organs neither of glass nor of
+metal; but build their palaces of sound on a plain deal table with a
+paper covered with little lines and dots before them? And was not
+Beethoven, in what some folk consider his mightiest era, as deaf as a
+post?</p>
+
+<p>I do not advocate deafness. Nay, privately, being quite incapable of
+deciphering a score, I confess that there is something dry and dreary in
+absolutely soundless music&mdash;music which from the silent composer passes
+to the silent performer, who is at the same time a silent listener,
+without the neighbours being even one bit the wiser? Besides, were this
+gift universal, it would deprive us of that delightful personality the
+mere performer, whose high-strung nervousness, or opulent joviality, is,
+after all, a pleasant item in art, a humorous dramatic interlude, in the
+excessive spirituality of music.</p>
+
+<p>I am not, therefore, in favour of absolute silence in the art of sounds.
+I am only asking people to remember that sound waves and the auditive
+apparatus put in connection, even if the connection costs a guinea, is
+not enough to secure the real <i>hearing</i> of music; or, if this formula
+appear too vulgar, asking them to repeat to themselves those lines of
+Keats. I feel sure that so doing would save much of that dreadful
+bitterness and dryness of soul, a state of conscious non-receptivity
+corresponding in musical experience with what ascetic writers call
+"spiritual aridity"&mdash;which must occasionally depress even the most
+fortunate of listeners. For, look in thy conscience, O friendly
+fellow-concert-goer, and say truly, hast thou not, many times and oft,
+sat to no purpose upon narrow seats, blinded by gas, with no outlook
+save alien backs and bonnets, while divinest music flowed all around,
+yet somehow wetted not thy thirsty and irritated soul?</p>
+
+<p>The recognition of this fact would not only diminish such painful
+moments (or rather, alas! <i>hours</i>), but would teach us to endure them
+cheerfully as the preparation for future enjoyment, the garnering for
+private and silent enjoyment. "Heard melodies are sweet, but those
+unheard," etc., would act like Joseph's interpretation of the fat and
+lean kine of Pharaoh; we should consider concerts and musical festivals
+as fatiguing, even exhausting, employments, the strain of which was
+rendered pleasant by the anticipation of much ease and delight to come.</p>
+
+<p>Connected with this question is that of amateur performance. The amateur
+seems nowadays to waste infinite time in vying with the professional
+person instead of becoming acquainted, so to speak, with the composer.
+It is astonishing how very little music the best amateurs are acquainted
+with, because they must needs perform everything they know. This, in
+most cases, is sheer waste, for, in the way of performers, the present
+needs of mankind (as Auguste Comte remarked about philosophers) can be
+amply met by twenty thousand professionals. And many families would,
+from a spirit of moderation, forego the possession of an unpaid
+professional in the shape of a daughter or an aunt. One of the chief
+uses, indeed, of the professional performers should be to suppress
+amateurs by furnishing a standard of performance which lovers of music
+would silently apply to the music which formed the daily delight of
+their inner ear.</p>
+
+<p>For, if we care veraciously for music, we think of it, <i>or think it</i>, as
+it ought to be performed, not as we should ourselves perform it. Nay,
+more, I feel convinced that truly musical persons, such as can really
+understand a master's thoughts, are not distressed by the shortcomings
+of their own performance, the notes they play or sing merely serving to
+suggest those which they hear.</p>
+
+<p>This transcendental doctrine (fraught, I confess, like all transcendent
+truths, with gravest practical dangers) was matured in my mind by
+friendship with one of the most singular of musicians. This person
+(since deceased, and by profession a clerk) suffered from nervousness
+so excessive that, despite a fair knowledge of music, the fact of
+putting his hands upon the keys produced a maddening sort of stammer,
+let alone a notable tendency to strike wrong notes and miss his octaves;
+peculiarities of which he was so morbidly conscious that it was only an
+accident which revealed to me, after years of acquaintance, that he ever
+played the piano at all. Yet I know as a fact that this poor blundering
+player, who stopped convulsively if he heard steps in the passage, and
+actually <i>closed the lid of his instrument</i> when the maid came in with
+the tea-things, was united more closely with the divine ones of music
+during his excruciating performance, than many a listener at a splendid
+concert. Mozart, for whom he had a special <i>cultus</i>, would surely have
+felt satisfied, if his clairvoyant spirit had been abroad, with my
+friend's marvellous bungling over that first finale of "Don Giovanni."
+The soul, the whole innermost nervous body (which felt of the shape of
+the music, fluid and infinitely sensitive) of the poor creature at the
+piano would draw itself up, parade grandly through that minuet, dance it
+in glory with the most glorious ghosts of glorious ladies&mdash;pshaw! not
+with anything so trifling! Dance it <i>with the notes themselves</i>, would
+sway with them, bow to them, rise to them, live with them, become in
+fact part and parcel of the music itself&#8230;.</p>
+
+<p>So, to return whence I began, it is no use imagining that we necessarily
+hear music by going to concerts and festivals and operas, exposing our
+bodily ear to showers and floods of sound, unless we happen to be in the
+right humour, unless we dispose, at the moment, of that rare and
+capricious thing&mdash;the <i>inner ear</i>.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><a name="c1-7" id="c1-7"></a>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>RECEIVING LETTERS</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>I think I shall not treat of writing them. That is a different matter,
+with pains and pleasures of its own, which do not correspond (the word
+fits nicely to this subject) with those of letters received. For 'tis a
+metaphysical mistake, or myth of language, like those victoriously
+exposed by the ingenious <i>M. Tarde</i>, to regard the reading of a letter
+as the symmetrical opposite (the right glove matching the left, or
+<i>inside of an outside</i>) of the writing thereof. Save in the case of
+lovers or moonstruck persons, like those in Emerson's essay on
+"Friendship," the reading of a letter is necessarily less potent, and,
+as the French say, <i>intimate</i>, in emotion, than the writing of it.
+Indeed, we catch ourselves repeatedly thrusting into our pocket for
+perusal at greater leisure those very letters which poured out like
+burning lava from their writers, or were conned over lovingly,
+lingeringly altered and rewritten; and we wonder sometimes at our lack
+of sympathy and wonder also (with cynicism or blushes) whether our
+letters also, say that one of <span class="nowrap">Tuesday&mdash;&mdash;</span>But no; <i>our</i> letters are not
+egoistical&#8230;.</p>
+
+<p>The thought is not one to be dwelt on in an essay, which is nothing if
+it is not pleasing. So I proceed to note also that pleasure at the
+contents has nothing to do with the little excitement of the arrival
+of the post-bag, or of watching the clerk's slow evolutions at a
+<i>poste restante</i> window. That satisfaction is due to the mere moment's
+hope for novelty, the flash past of the outer world, and the
+comfortable sense of having a following, friends, relatives, clients;
+and it is in proportion to the dulness of our surroundings. Great
+statesmen or fortunate lovers, methinks, must turn away from aunts'
+and cousins' epistles, and from the impression of so and so up the
+Nile, or on first seeing Rome. Indeed, I venture to suggest that only
+the monotony of our forbears' lives explains the existence of those
+endless volumes of dreary allusions and pointless anecdote handed
+down to us as the Correspondence of Sir Somebody This, or of the
+beautiful Countess of That, or even of Blank, that prince of
+coffee-house wits. The welcome they received in days when (as is
+recorded by Scott) the mail occasionally arrived at Edinburgh carrying
+only one single letter, has given such letters a reputation for
+delightfulness utterly disconnected with any intrinsic merit, but
+which we sycophantishly accept after a hundred or two hundred years,
+handing it on with hypocritical phrases about "quaintness," and "vivid
+picture of the past," and similar nonsense. But the Wizard Past casts
+wonderful spells. And then there is the tenderness and piety due to
+those poor dead people, once strutting majestically in power, beauty,
+wit, or genius; and now left shivering, poor, thin, transparent ghosts
+in those faded, thrice-crossed paper rags! I feel rebuked for my
+inhuman irreverence. Out upon it! I will speak only pious words about
+the letters of dead folk.</p>
+
+<p>But, to make up for such good feeling, let me say what I think about the
+letters of persons now living, in good health, my contemporaries and
+very liable to outlive me. For if I am to praise the letters which my
+soul loves, I must be plain also about those which my soul abhors.</p>
+
+<p>And to begin with the worst. The letter we all hate most, I feel quite
+sure, is the nice letter of a person whom we think horrid. Some beings
+have the disquieting peculiarity, which crowns their other bad
+qualities, of being able to write more pleasingly than they speak, look,
+or (we suppose) act; revealing, pen in hand, human characteristics,
+sometimes alas! human charms, high principle, pathetic sentiment, poetic
+insight, sensitiveness to nature, things we are bound to love, but
+particularly do not wish to love in <i>them</i>. This villainous faculty,
+which puts us in a rage and forces us to be amiable, is almost enough to
+make us like, or at all events condone, its contrary in our own dear
+friends. I mean that marvellous transformation to which so many of those
+we love are subject; creatures, supple, subtle and sympathetic in the
+flesh, in speech and glance and deed, becoming stiff, utterly impervious
+and heartless once they set to writing; lovely Melusinas turning, not
+into snakes, but into some creature like a dried cod. This is much
+worse with persons of our nation than with our foreign friends, owing to
+that fine contempt for composition, grammar, and punctuation which marks
+the well-bred Briton, and especially the well-bred Briton's wife and
+daughter. As a result, there is a positive satisfaction, a sense of
+voluminous well-being, derived from a letter which is merely explicit,
+consecutive, and garnished with occasional stops. This question of
+punctuation is a serious one. Speaking personally, I find I cannot enjoy
+the ineffable sense of resting in the affection and wisdom of my friend,
+if I am jerked breathless from noun to noun and from verb to verb, or
+set hunting desperately after predicates. Worse even is the lack of
+explicitness. The peace and trustfulness, the respite given by
+friendship from what Whitman calls "the terrible doubt of appearances"
+are incompatible with brief and casual utterance, ragbags of items,
+where you have to elucidate, weigh, and use your judgment whether more
+(or less) is meant than meets the eye; and after whose perusal you are
+left for hours, sometimes days, patching together suggestions and
+wondering what they suggest. Some persons' letters seem almost framed
+to afford a series of <i>alibis</i> for their personality; not in this thing,
+oh no! not concerned in such a matter by any means; always elsewhere,
+never to be clutched.</p>
+
+<p>Yet there are bitterer things in letters from friends than even these,
+which merely puzzle and distress, but do not infuriate. For I feel
+cheated by casual glimpses of affairs which concern me not; I resent odd
+scraps of information, not chosen for my palate; I am indignant at news
+culled from the public prints, and frantic at thermometric and
+meteorological intelligence. But stay! There is a case when what seems
+to come under this heading is really intensely personal, and, therefore,
+most welcome to the letter receiver. I mean whenever, as happens with
+some persons, such talk about the weather reveals the real writing soul
+in its most intimate aspect; wrestling with hated fogs, or prone in the
+dampish heat, fretted by winds or jubilant in dry, sunny air. And now I
+find that with this item of weather reports, I am emerging from the
+region of letters I abhor into the region of letters which I love, or
+which I lovingly grieve over for some small minor cruelty.</p>
+
+<p>For I am grieved&mdash;nay, something more&mdash;by that extraordinary (and I
+hope exclusively feminine) fact an absence of superscripture. My soul
+claims some kind of vocative. I would accept a German note of
+exclamation; I would content myself with an Italian abbreviation, a
+Preg<sup><small>mo</small></sup>, or Chiar<sup><small>mo</small></sup>; I could be happy with a solemn and discreet
+French "Madame et ch&egrave;re amie," or (as may happen) "Monsieur et cher
+Ma&icirc;re," like the bow with tight-joined heels and <i>platbord</i> hat
+pressed on to waistcoat, preluding delightful conversation. But not to
+be quite sure how one is thought of! Whether as <i>dear</i>, or <i>my dear</i>,
+or Tom, Dick, or Harry, or soldier, or sailor, or candlestick maker!
+Nay, at the first glance, not quite to know whether one is the
+destined reader, or whether even there is a destined reader at all; to
+be offered an entry out of a pocket-book, a page out of a diary, a
+selection of <i>Pens&eacute;s</i>, were they Pascal's; a soliloquy, were it
+Hamlet's: surely lack of sympathy can go no further, nor incapacity of
+effort be more flagrant than with such writers, usually the very ones
+the reader most clings to, who put off, as it seems, until directing
+the envelope, the question of whom they are writing to.</p>
+
+<p>Yet the annoyance they give one is almost compensated when, once in a
+blue moon, in such a superscription-less epistle, one lights upon a
+sentence very exclusively directed to one's self; when suddenly out of
+the vague <i>tenebrae</i> of such a letter, there comes, retreating as
+suddenly, a glance, a grasp, a clasp. It seems quite probable that young
+Endymion, in his noted love passages with the moon, may have had
+occasionally supreme felicity of this kind, in a relation otherwise of
+painfully impersonal and public nature; when, to wit, the goddess, after
+shining night after night over the seas and plains and hills,
+occasionally shot from behind a cloud one little gleam, one arrow of
+light, straight on to Latmos.</p>
+
+<p>But, alack! as Miss Howe wrote to the immortal Clarissa, my paper is at
+an end, my crowquill worn to the stump. So I can only add as postscript
+to such of my dear friends as write the letters which my soul abhors,
+that I hope, beg, entreat they will at least write them to me often.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><a name="c1-8" id="c1-8"></a>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>NEW FRIENDS AND OLD</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>There is not unfrequently a spice of humiliation hidden in the rich
+cordial pleasure of a new friendship, and I think Emerson knew it.
+Without beating about the bush as he does, one might explain it,
+methinks, not merely as a vague sense of disloyalty towards the other
+friendships which are not new; but also as a shrewd suspicion (though we
+hide it from ourselves) that this one also will have to grow old in its
+turn. And we have not yet found out how to treat any of our possessions,
+including our own selves, in such a way that they shall, if anything,
+improve. Despite our complicated civilization, so called, or perhaps on
+account of it, we are all of us a mere set of barbarians, who find it
+less trouble to provide a new, cheap, and shoddy thing than to get the
+full use and full pleasure of a finely-made and carefully-chosen old
+one. Those ghastly paper toilettes of the ladies in "Looking Backward"
+are emblematic of our modes of proceeding. We are for ever dressing and
+undressing our souls, if not our bodies, in rags made out of rags.</p>
+
+<p>Heaven forbid that I should ever blaspheme new friendships! They are
+among the most necessary as well as the most delightful things we get a
+chance of. They do not merely exhilarate, but actually renew and add to
+us, more even than change of climate and season. We are (luckily for
+every one) such imitative creatures that every person we like much, adds
+a new possible form, a new pattern, to our understanding and our
+feeling; making us, through the pleasantness of novelty, see and feel a
+little as that person does. And when, instead of <i>liking</i> (which is the
+verb belonging rather to good acquaintance, accidental relationship as
+distinguished from real friendship), it is a case of <i>loving</i> (in the
+sense in which we really love a place, a piece of music, or even, very
+often, an animal), there is something more important and excellent even
+than this. For every creature we do really love seems to reveal a whole
+side of life, by the absorbing of our attention into that creature's
+ways; nay, more, the fact that what we call <i>loving</i> is in most cases a
+complete creation, at least a thorough interpretation of them by our
+fancy and our shaken-up, refreshed feelings.</p>
+
+<p>A new friendship, by this unconscious imitation of the new friend's
+nature and habits, and by the excitement of the thing's pleasant
+novelty, causes us to discover new qualities in literature, art, our
+surroundings, ourselves. How different does the scenery look&mdash;still
+familiar but delightfully strange&mdash;as we drive along the valleys or
+scramble in the hills with the new friend! there is a distant peak one
+never noticed, or a scented herb which has always grown upon those
+rocks, but might as well never have done so, but for the other pair of
+eyes which drew ours to it, or the other hand which crushing made us
+know its fragrance. Pages of books, seemingly stale, revive into fresh
+meaning; new music is almost certain to be learned; and a harmony, a
+rational sequence, something very akin to music, perceived in what had
+been hitherto but a portion of life's noise and confusion. The changes
+of style which we note in the case of great geniuses&mdash;Goethe and
+Schiller, for instance, or Ruskin after his meeting with Carlyle&mdash;are
+often brought about, or prepared, by the accident of a new friendship;
+and, who knows? half of the disinterested progress of the world's
+thought and feeling might prove, under the moral microscope, to be but a
+moving web of invisible friendships, forgotten, but once upon a time
+new, and so vivid!</p>
+
+<p>The falling off from such pleasure and profit in older friendships (it
+is very sad, but not necessarily cynical to recognize the fact) is due
+in some measure to our being less frank, less ourselves, in them than in
+new ones. Our mutual ways of feeling and seeing are apt to produce a
+definite track of intellectual and affective intercourse; and as this
+track deepens we find ourselves confined, nay, imprisoned in it, with
+little possibility of seeing, and none of escaping, as in some sunken
+Devonshire lane; the very ups and downs of the friendship existing, so
+to speak, below the level of our real life; disagreements and
+reconciliations always on one pattern. With people we have known very
+long, we are apt to go thus continually over the same ground, reciting
+the same formul&aelig; of thought and feeling, imitating the <i>ego</i> of former
+years in its relations with a <i>thou</i> quite equally obsolete; the real
+personality left waiting outside for the chance stranger. It is so easy!
+so safe! We have done it so long! There is an air of piety almost in the
+monotony and ceremonial; and then, there are the other's habits of
+thought which might be jarred, or feelings we might hurt&#8230;. Meanwhile
+our sincere, spontaneous reality is idling elsewhere, ready to vagabond
+irresponsibly at the beck and call of the passing stranger. And, who
+knows? while we are thus refusing to give our poor old friend the
+benefit of our genuine, living, changed and changing self, we may
+ourselves be losing the charm and profit of his or her renovated and
+more efficacious reality.</p>
+
+<p>The retribution sometimes comes in unexpected manner. We find ourselves
+neglected for some new-comer, thin of stuff, to-morrow threadbare; <i>we</i>,
+who are conscious all the time of a newness too well hidden, alas! a
+newness utterly unsuspected by our friend, and far surpassing the
+newness of the new one! Poetic justice too lamentable to dwell upon.
+But short of it, far short, our old friendships, with their safe
+traditions and lazy habits, are ever tending to become the intercourse
+of friendly ghosts.</p>
+
+<p>Yet even this is well worth having, and after bringing praise to younger
+friendships, let me for ever feel, rather than speak (for 'tis too deep
+and wide for words) befitting gratitude to old ones. For there is always
+something puzzling in the present; unrestful and disquieting in all
+novelty; and we require, poor harassed mortals, the past and lots of it;
+the safe, the done-for past, a heap of last year's leaves or of dry,
+scented hay (which is mere dead grass and dead meadow-flowers) to take
+our rest upon. There is a virtue ineffable in things known, tried,
+understood; a comfort and a peacefulness, often truly Elysian, in
+finding one's self again in this quiet, crepuscular, downy world of old
+friendships&mdash;a world, as I have remarked, largely peopled with ghosts,
+our own and other folks'; but ghosts whose footsteps never creak, whose
+touch can never startle, or whose voice stab us, and who smile a smile
+which has the wide, hazy warmth of setting suns or veiled October skies.
+Yes, whatever they may lack (through our own fault and folly), old
+friendships are made up of what, when all is said and done, we need
+above every other thing, poor faulty, uncertain creatures that we are&mdash;I
+mean kindness and certain indulgence. There is more understanding in new
+friendships, and a closer contact of soul with soul; but that contact
+may mean a jar, a bruise, or, worst of all, a sudden sense of icy chill;
+and the penetrating comprehension may entail, at any moment, pained
+surprise and disappointment. Making new friends is not merely
+exploration, but conquest; and what cruel checks to our wishes and
+ambitions!</p>
+
+<p>Instead of which, all vanity long since put to sleep, curiosity extinct
+for years, insidious pleasures of self-explanation quite forgotten,
+there remains this massive comfort of well-known faithful and trusting
+kindness; a feeling of absolute reassurance almost transcending the
+human, such as we get from, let us say, an excellent climate.</p>
+
+<p>There remain, also, joys quite especial to old friendship, or the
+possibility thereof, for the reality, alas! is rare enough. The sudden
+discovery, for instance, after a period of separation or a gap in
+intercourse, of qualities and ways not previously seen (perhaps not
+previously wanted) in the well-known soul: new notes, but with the added
+charm of likeness to already loved ones, deeper, more resonant, or
+perhaps of unsuspected high unearthly purity, in the dear voice. Absence
+may do it, or change of occupation; or sudden vicissitude of fortune; or
+merely the reading of a certain book (how many friends may not Tolstoi's
+"Resurrection" have thus revealed to one another!), or the passing of
+some public crisis like the Dreyfus business. What! after these years of
+familiarity, we did not know each other fully? You thought, you felt,
+like that on such or such a subject, dear old friend, and I never
+suspected it! Nay, never knew, perhaps, that <i>I</i> must feel and think
+like that, and in no other way! To find more in what one already has;
+the truest adding to all wealth, the most fruitful act of
+production;&mdash;that is one of the privileges of old friendships.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><a name="c1-9" id="c1-9"></a>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>OTHER FRIENDSHIPS</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>It came home to me, during that week of grim and sordid business in the
+old house, feeling so solitary among the ghosts of unkind passions which
+seemed, like the Wardour Street ancestors, to fill the place&mdash;it came
+home to me what consolation there can be in the friendship of one small
+corner of grace or beauty. During those dreary days in Scotland, the
+friendliness and consolation were given me by the old kitchen garden,
+with its autumn flower borders, half hiding apple trees and big cabbages
+and rhubarbs, and the sheep-dotted hill, and the beeches sloping above
+its red fruit walls. I slipped away morning and evening to it as to a
+friend. Not as to an old one; that would give a different aspect to the
+matter; nor yet exactly a new friend, conquering or being conquered; but
+rather as one turns one's thoughts, if not one's words, to some
+nameless stranger, casually met, in whom one recognizes, among the
+general wilderness of alien creatures, a quality, a character for which
+one cares.</p>
+
+<p>Travelling a good deal, and nearly always alone, one has occasion to
+gauge the deep dreariness of human beings pure and simple, when, so to
+speak, the small, learnt-by-rote lessons of civilization, of kindness,
+graciousness, or intelligence, are not being called into play by common
+business or acquaintanceship. There, in the train, they sit in the
+elemental, native dreariness of their more practical, ungracious demand
+on life; not bad in any way, oh no; nor actively repulsive, but trite,
+empty, <i>everyday</i>, in the sense of what <i>everyday</i> often, alas! really
+is, but certainly no day or hour or minute, in a decent universe, should
+ever be. And suddenly a new traveller gets in; and, turning round, you
+realize that things are changed, that something from another planet, and
+yet something quite right and so familiar, has entered. A young man
+shabbily dressed in mourning, who got in at a junction in Northern
+France with a small girl, like him in mourning, and like him pale, a
+little washed-out ashy blond, and with the inexpressible moral grace
+which French folk sometimes have, will always remain in my memory; while
+all those fellow-travellers and all the others&mdash;hundreds of them since
+that day&mdash;have faded from my memory, their images collapsing into each
+other, a grey monotony as of the rows of little houses which unfurl and
+furl up, and vanish, thank the Lord, into nothingness, while the express
+swishes past some dreadful manufacturing town. Another time, some years
+ago, the unknown friend was a small boy, a baby almost, jumping and
+rolling (a practice intolerable in any child but him) on the seat of a
+second-class carriage. We did not speak; in fact my friend had barely
+acquired the necessary art. But I felt companioned, befriended,
+delivered of the world's crowded solitude.</p>
+
+<p>Apart from railway trains, a similar thing may sometimes happen. And
+there are few of us, surely, who do not possess, somewhere in their
+life, friends of the highest value whom they have barely known&mdash;met with
+once or twice perhaps, talked with, and for some reason not met again;
+but never lost sight of by heart and fancy&mdash;indeed, more often turned
+to, and perhaps more deeply trusted (as devout persons trust St. Joseph
+and St. Anthony of Padua, whom, after all, they scarcely know more than
+their own close kindred) than so many of, ostensibly, our nearest and
+dearest. Indeed, this is the meaning of that curious little poem of
+Whitman's&mdash;"Out of the rolling ocean, the crowd, came a drop gently to
+me"&mdash;with its Emersonian readiness to part, "now we have met, we are
+safe;" a very wise view of things, if our poor human weakness really
+wanted safety, and did not merely want "more"&mdash;indeed, like that human
+little boy, want "too much."</p>
+
+<p>But to return to the friendships, consoling, comforting intimacies,
+which we can have not merely with strangers never met again, or never,
+meeting, spoken with; but even more satisfactorily with those beloved
+ones whom, from our own lack of soul, of <i>anima</i> drawing forth <i>anima</i>,
+we dully call inanimates. I am not speaking, of course, of the real
+passions with which exceptionally lovely or wonderful spots or
+monuments, views of distant Alps, or certain rocky southern coasts, or
+St. Mark's or Amiens Cathedral, great sirens among voiceless things,
+subjugate and draw our souls. The friendships in question are sober and
+deliberate, founded on reasonable recognition of some trait of dignity
+or grace; and matured by conscious courtship on our part, retracing of
+steps day by day, and watching the friend's varying moods at noon or
+under low lights. During that week in the grim Scottish ancestral house,
+it was the kitchen-garden, as I began by saying, which comforted me. In
+another place, where I was ill and sorely anxious, a group of slender,
+whispering poplars by a mill; and under different, but equally
+harassing, circumstances, the dear little Gothic church of a tiny town
+of Western France.</p>
+
+<p>The Gothic church on its rising ground above the high-pitched roofs,
+and, in a measure, the church's white tame goat, which I found there one
+morning under a lime tree. I had been overtaken by a sudden storm, the
+rain-floods dashing from the gargoyles on to the rough ground of the
+solitary, wooded mound. In the faint light the little church, with
+sparse oak leaves and dock delicately carved on the granite capitals,
+was wonderfully grave and gentle in its utter emptiness; and I did it
+all possible honour. There is a low granite bench or sill round the
+base of the beautiful sheaved columns; a broken, disused organ-loft of
+coloured medi&aelig;val thorn carving; and under two shapely little arches lie
+a knight, unknown, and lady in high coif&#8230;. I knew it all by heart,
+coming like that every day and sometimes twice a day; by heart, and, so
+to speak, <i>with</i> my heart. The sound of the spouting gargoyles ceased;
+cocks began to crow; I went out, for the rain must have left off&#8230;. Not
+yet; the skies were still dripping, and the plain below full of vapours.
+And the tame white goat, the only living creature about the church, had
+taken refuge under a cart stranded by a large lime tree.</p>
+
+<p>I mention this particular visit to my friend the church of <span class="nowrap">L&mdash;&mdash;</span>, in
+order to explain the precise nature of our friendship; and to show, as I
+think it does, that through that law of economy which should preside
+over our pleasures and interests, such intimacy with a single object,
+simple and unobtrusive, is worth the acquaintance with a hundred and one
+magnificent and perfect things, if superficially seen and without loving
+care.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><a name="c1-10" id="c1-10"></a>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>A HOTEL SITTING-ROOM</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>I am calling this paper after a hotel sitting-room because some of one's
+most recurrent and definite trains of thought are most hopelessly
+obstinate about getting an intelligible name, so that I take advantage
+of this one having been brought to a head in a real room of the kind.
+The room was on a top floor in Florence; the Cupola and Campanile and
+other towers in front of it above the plum-coloured roofs; and beyond,
+the bluish mountains of Fiesole. Trams were puffing about in the square
+below, and the church bells ringing, and the crowd streaming to the
+promenade; but only the unchanging and significant life of the town
+seemed to matter up here. I was struck with the charm of such a hotel
+room&mdash;the very few ornaments, greatly cherished since they were carried
+about; the books for reading, not for furniture; the bought flowers in
+common glasses; and the consequent sense of selection, deliberateness,
+and personality. Good heavens, I reflected, are we mortals so
+cross-grained that we can thoroughly enjoy things only by contrast, and
+that a sort of mild starvation is needed to whet our &aelig;sthetic appetite?</p>
+
+<p>By no means. Contrast for contrast's sake is a very coarse stimulant,
+and required only by very joyless natures. The real explanation of the
+charm of the hotel room and its sparse properties and flowers must be
+sought, I believe, in the fact that the charm of things depends upon our
+power of extracting it; and that our power in this matter, as in every
+other, nay, our leisure to exert it, is necessarily limited. Things, as
+I before remarked, do not give themselves without some wooing; and
+courtship is the secret of true possession. The world outside us, as
+philosophers tell us, is not what our eyes, ears, and touch and taste
+make it appear; nay, for aught we know, 'tis a mere chaos; and if, out
+of the endless impressions with which outer objects keep pelting us, we
+manage to pick up and appropriate a few, setting them in a pattern of
+meaning and beauty, it is thanks to the activity of our own special
+little self. That is the gist of Kant's philosophy; and, apart from
+Kant, it is the vague practical knowledge which experience teaches us.
+Hence the disappointment of all such persons as think that the beautiful
+and significant things of the world ought to give them delight without
+any trouble on their part: they think that it is the fault of a Swiss
+mountain, or a Titian Madonna, or a poem by Browning if it does not at
+once ravish their inert souls into a seventh heaven. Yet these are
+people who occasionally ride, or play at golf or whist, and who never
+expect the cards and the golf clubs to play the game by themselves, nor
+the very best horse to carry them to some destination without riding.
+Now, beautiful and interesting things also require a deal of riding, of
+playing with; let us put it more courteously&mdash;of wooing.</p>
+
+<p>The hotel room I have spoken of reveals the fact that we usually have
+far too many pleasant things about us, to be able to extract much
+pleasure from any of them; while, of course, somebody else, at the other
+end of the world let us say, or merely in the mews to the back, has so
+very much too little as to have none at all, which is another way of
+diminishing possible enjoyment. There seems, moreover, to be a certain
+queer virtue in mere emptiness, in mere negation. We require a <i>margin</i> of
+<i>nothing</i> round everything that is to charm us; round our impressions as
+well as round the material objects which can supply them; for without it
+we lose all outline, and begin to feel vaguely choked.</p>
+
+<p>Compare the pleasure of a picture tucked away in a chapel or sacristy
+with the plethoric weariness of a whole Louvre or National Gallery. Nay,
+remember the vivid delight of some fine bit of tracery round a single
+door or window, as in the cathedral of Dol or the house of Tristan
+l'Hermite at Tours; or of one of those Ionic capitals which you
+sometimes find built into quite an uninteresting house in Rome (there is
+one almost opposite St. Angelo, and another near Tor dei Specchi, Tower
+of the Mirrors, delightful name!).</p>
+
+<p>That question of going to see the thing, instead of seeing it drearily
+among ten thousand other things equally lovely&mdash;O weariness
+unparalleled of South Kensington or Cluny!&mdash;that question of the
+agreeable little sense of deliberate pilgrimage (pilgrimage to a small
+shrine perhaps in one's memory), leads me to another explanation of
+what I must call the "hotel room phenomenon."</p>
+
+<p>I maintain that there is a zest added to one's pleasure in beautiful
+things by the effort and ingenuity (unless too exhausting) expended in
+eliminating the impressions which might detract from them. One likes the
+hotel room just because some of the furniture has been sent away into
+the passage or wheeled into corners; one enjoys pleasant things
+additionally for having arranged them to advantage in one's mind. It is
+just the reverse with the rooms in a certain palace I sometimes have the
+privilege of entering, where every detail is worked&mdash;furniture,
+tapestries, embroideries, majolica, and flowers&mdash;into an overwhelming
+Wagner symphony of loveliness. There is a genuine Leonardo in one of
+those rooms, and truly I almost wish it were in a whitewashed lobby. And
+in coming out of all that perfection I sometimes feel a kind of relief
+on getting into the empty, uninteresting street. My thoughts, somehow,
+fetch a long breath&#8230;.</p>
+
+<p>These are not the sentiments of the superfine. But then I venture to
+think that the dose of fineness which is, so to speak, <i>super</i> or <i>too
+much</i>, just turns these folks' refinement into something its reverse.
+People who cannot sleep because of the roseleaf in the sheets, or the
+pea (like the little precious princess) under the mattress, are bad
+sleepers, and had better do charing or climbing, or get pummelled by a
+masseur till they grow healthier. And if ever I had the advising of
+young folk with ambition to be &aelig;sthetic, I should conjure them to
+cultivate their sensitiveness only to good things, and atrophy it
+towards the inevitable bad; or rather I should teach them to push into
+corners (or altogether get rid of) the irrelevant and trivial
+impressions which so often are bound to accompany the most delightful
+ones; very much as those occupants of the hotel room had done with
+some of its furniture. What if an electric tram starts from the foot
+of Giotto's tower, or if four-and-twenty Cook's tourists invade the
+inn and streets of Verona? If you cannot extract some satisfaction
+from the thought that there may be intelligent people even in a Cook's
+party, and that the ugly tram takes hundreds of people up Fiesole
+hill without martyrizing cab-horses&mdash;if you cannot do this (which
+still is worth doing), overlook the Cook's tourists and the tram, blot
+them out of your thoughts and feelings.</p>
+
+<p>This question of <i>superfineness</i> versus <i>refinement</i> (which ought to
+mean the power of refining things through our feeling) has carried me
+away from the original theme of my discourse, which, under the symbol of
+the hotel room, was merely that we should <i>perhaps appreciate more if we
+were offered less to appreciate</i>. Apropos of this, I have long been
+struck by the case of a dear Italian friend of mine, whose keenness of
+perception and grip of judgment and unexpectedness of fancy is almost in
+inverse proportion to her knowledge of books or opportunity of travel.
+An invalid, cut off from much reading, and limited to monotonous
+to-and-fro between a town which is not a great town and a hillside
+village which is not a&mdash;not a great village; she is quite marvellously
+delightful by her power of assimilating the little she can read and
+observe, not merely of transmuting <i>it</i> into something personal and
+racy, but (what is much more surprising) of being modified harmoniously
+by its assimilation; her rich and unexpected mind putting forth even
+richer and more unexpected details. Whereas think of Tom, Dick, or
+Harry, their natural good parts watered down with other folks' notions,
+their imagination worn threadbare by the friction of experience; men who
+ought to be so amusing, and alas!&#8230;</p>
+
+<p>And now, having fulfilled my programme, as was my duty, let me return to
+my pleasure, which, at this moment (and whenever the opportunity
+presents itself) consists in falling foul of the superfine. The
+superfine are those who deserve (and frequently attain) the condition of
+that Renaissance tyrant who lived exclusively on hard-boiled eggs
+(without salt) for fear of poison. The superfine are those who will not
+eat walnuts because of the shell, and are pained that Nature should have
+been so coarse as to propagate oranges through pips. The superfine
+are&#8230;. But no. Let us be true to our principle of not neglecting the
+delightful things of this world by fixing our too easily hypnotized gaze
+on the things which are not delightful&mdash;disagreeable things which
+should be examined only with a view to their removal; or if they prove
+obstinate fixtures in our reality, be all the more resolutely turned out
+of the sparsely-furnished, delectable chambers of our fancy.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><a name="c1-11" id="c1-11"></a>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>IN PRAISE OF COURTSHIP</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>There is too little courtship in the world. I do not mean there is not
+enough marrying and giving in marriage, or that the preliminaries
+thereunto are otherwise than they should be. Quite the reverse. As long
+as there is love and youth, there is sure in the literal sense to be
+courtship. But what I ask is that there be courtship besides that
+literal courtship between the Perditas and Florizels; that there be
+"being in love" with a great many things, even stocks and stones,
+besides youth and maiden; which would result, on the whole, in all of us
+being young in feeling even when we had grown old in years.</p>
+
+<p>For courtship means a wish to stand well in the other person's eyes,
+and, what is more, a readiness to be pleased with the other's ways; a
+sense on each side of having had the better of the bargain; an
+undercurrent of surprise and thankfulness at one's good luck.</p>
+
+<p>There is not enough courtship in the world. This thought has been
+growing in my mind ever since the silver wedding of two dear friends:
+that quarter of a century has been but a prolonged courtship.</p>
+
+<p>Why is it not oftener so? One sees among married folk a good deal of
+affection, of kindliness, even of politeness; a great deal too much
+mutual dependence, degenerating, of course, into habitual boredom. But
+none of this can be called courtship. Perhaps this was the meaning, less
+cynical than supposed, but quite as sad, of La Rochefoucauld when he
+noted down, "Il y a de bons mariages, mais point de d&eacute;licieux;" since,
+in the delicate French sense of the word, implying some analogy of
+subdued yet penetrating pleasantness, as of fresh, bright weather or
+fine light wine, courtship is essentially <i>d&eacute;licieux</i>.</p>
+
+<p>This is, of course, initiating a question of manner. Modern psychology
+is discovering scientific reasons for the fact that if you wag a dog's
+tail he feels pleased; or, at all events, that the human being would
+feel pleased if it had a tail and could wag it. Confessors and nurses
+knew it long ago, curbing bad temper by restraining its outer
+manifestations; and are not dinners and plays, flags and illuminations,
+birthdays and jubilees&mdash;nay, art itself, devices for suggestions to
+mankind that it feels pleased?</p>
+
+<p>Married people, as a rule, wish not to be pleased, or at least not to
+show it. They may be heartbroken at each other's death, and unable to
+endure a temporary separation; but the outsider may wonder why, seeing
+how little they seem to care for being together. It is the same, after
+all, with other relations; and it is only because brothers and sisters,
+fathers and children have not taken visible steps to select one another
+that their bored indifference is less conspicuous. You will say it is a
+question of mere manner. But, as remarked, manner not merely results
+from feeling, but largely reacts on feeling, and makes it different.
+People who live together have the appearance, often, of taking each
+other, if not as a convenience, at all events as a <i>fait accompli</i>, and,
+so far as possible, as if not there at all. Near relations try to
+realize the paradox of companionable solitude; and intimacy seems to
+imply the right to behave as if the intimate other one were not there.
+Now, <i>being by one's self</i> is a fine thing, convenient and salutary
+(indeed, like courtship, there is not enough of it); but being by one's
+self is not to be confounded with <i>not being in company</i>. I have
+selected that expression advisedly, in order to give a shock to the
+reader. <i>In company?</i> Good heavens! is being with one's wife, one's
+brothers or sisters, one's children, one's bosom friends <i>being in
+company</i>? And why not? Should company necessarily mean the company of
+strangers? And is the presence of one's nearest and dearest to be
+accounted as nothing&mdash;as nothing demanding some change in ourselves, and
+worthy of being paid some price for?</p>
+
+<p>This goes against our notion of intimacy; but then our notion is wrong,
+as is shown daily by the quarrels and recriminations of intimate
+friends. One can be natural, <i>with a difference</i>, which difference means
+a thought for the other. There is a selection possible in one's words
+and actions before another&mdash;nay, there is a manner of doing and feeling
+which almost forestalls the necessity of a selection at all. I like the
+expression employed by a certain sister after nursing her small brother
+through a difficult illness, "We were always Castilian," she said. Why,
+as we all try to be honest, and hard-working, and clever, and more or
+less illustrious, should we not sometimes try to be a little Castilian?
+Similarly, my friend of the silver wedding once pointed out to me that
+marriage, with its enforced and often excessive intimacies, was a
+wonderful school of consideration, of mutual respect, of fine courtesy.
+This had been no paradox in her case; but then, as I said, her
+twenty-five years of wedlock had been years of courtship.</p>
+
+<p>Courtship, however, should not be confined to marriage, nor even to such
+relations as imply close quarters and worries in common; nay, it should
+exist towards all things, a constant attitude in life&mdash;at least, an
+attitude constantly tended towards.</p>
+
+<p>The line of least resistance seems against it; our laziness, and our
+wish to think well of ourselves merely because we <i>are</i> ourselves,
+undoubtedly go against it, as they do against everything in the world
+worth having. In our own day certain ways of thinking, culminating in
+development of the <i>Moi</i> and production of the <i>Uebermensch</i>, and
+general self-engrossment and currishness, are peculiarly hostile to
+courtship. Whereas the old religious training, where it did not
+degenerate into excessive asceticism, was a school of good manners
+towards the universe as well as towards one's neighbours. The "Fioretti
+di San Francisco" is a handbook of polite friendliness to men, women,
+birds, wolves, and, what must have been most difficult, fellow-monks;
+and St. Francis' Hymn to the Sun might be given as an example of the
+wise man's courtship of what we stupidly call inanimates.</p>
+
+<p>For courtship might be our attitude towards everything which is capable
+of giving pleasure; and would not many more things give us pleasure&mdash;let
+us say, the sun in the heavens, the water on the stones, even the fire
+in the grate, if, instead of thinking of them as existing merely to make
+our life bearable, we called them, like the saint of Assisi, My Lord the
+Sun, and Sister Water, and Brother Fire, and thought of them with joy
+and gratitude?</p>
+
+<p>Certain it is that everything in the world repays courtship; and that,
+quite outside all marrying and giving in marriage, in all our dealings
+with all possible things, the cessation of courtship marks the incipient
+necessity for divorce.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><a name="c1-12" id="c1-12"></a>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>KNOWING ONE'S MIND</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>The only things which afforded me any pleasure in that great collection
+of Ingres drawings, let alone in that very dull, frowsy, stale, and
+unprofitable city of Montauban, whither I had travelled on purpose to
+see it, were an old printed copy of "Don Juan oder der Steinerne
+Gast"&mdash;in a glass case alongside of M. Ingres' century-long-uncleaned
+fiddle&mdash;and a half-page of Mozart's autograph, given to M. Ingres when a
+student by a Prix de Rome musician. I mentioned this fact to my friends,
+in a spirit of guileless truthfulness; when, what was my surprise at the
+story being received with smiling incredulity. "Your paradox," they
+said, with the benevolent courtesy of their nation, for they were
+French, "is delightful and most <i>r&eacute;ussi</i>. But, of course, we know you to
+be exquisitely sensitive to genius in all its manifestations."</p>
+
+<p>Now, I happened to know myself to be as insensible as a stone to genius
+as manifested in the late M. Ingres. However, I despaired of persuading
+them that I was speaking the truth; and, despite the knowledge of their
+language with which they graciously credited me, I hunted about in vain
+for the French equivalent of "I know my own mind." Whereupon, allowing
+the conversation to take another turn, I fell to musing on those
+untranslatable words, together with the whole episode of the Mozart
+manuscript and the drawings of M. Ingres, including that rainy, chilly
+day at Montauban; and also another day of travel, even wetter and
+colder, which returned to my memory.</p>
+
+<p><i>Knowing one's own mind</i> (in whatever way you might succeed in turning
+that into French) is a first step to filling one's own place instead of
+littering unprofitably over creation at large, and in so far also to
+doing one's own work. Life, I am willing to admit, is not all private
+garden, nor should we attempt to make it. 'Tis nine-tenths common acres,
+which we must till in company, and with mutual sacrifice of our whims.
+Nay, Life is largely public thoroughfares with a definite <i>rule of the
+road</i> and a regulated pace of traffic; streets, at all events, however
+narrow, where each must shovel snow, sprinkle water, and sweep his
+threshold. But respect for such common property cannot be genuine where
+there is not a corresponding fidelity and fondness on the part of each
+for his own little enclosure, his garden, and, by analogy, his
+neighbour's garden also. There is little good to be got from your vague,
+gregarious natures, liking or disliking merely because others like or
+dislike. There cannot be much loving-kindness, let alone love (whether
+for persons or things or ideas), in souls which always require company,
+and prefer any to none at all. And as to good work, why, it means
+<i>t&ecirc;te-&agrave;-t&ecirc;te</i> with what you are doing, and is incompatible with the
+spirit of picnics. I own to a growing suspicion of those often heroic
+and saintly persons who allow their neighbours&mdash;husband, father, mother,
+children&mdash;to saunter idly into the allotments which God has given them,
+trampling heedlessly the delicate seedlings, or, like holiday trippers,
+carving egoistic initials in growing trees not of their own planting.
+And one of the unnoticed, because continuous, tragedies of existence is
+surely such wanton or deliberate destruction of the individual
+qualities of the soul, such sacrifice of the necessary breathing and
+standing place which even the smallest requires; such grudging of the
+needful solitude and separateness, alas! often to those that we love the
+best. It seems highly probable that among all their absurd and
+melancholy recollections of this wasteful and slatternly earth, the
+denizens of the Kingdom of Heaven will look back with most astonishment
+and grief on the fact of having lived, before regeneration, without a
+room apiece.</p>
+
+<p>In the Kingdom of Heaven every one will have a separate room for rest
+and meditation; a cell perhaps, whitewashed, with a green shutter and a
+white dimity curtain in the sunshine. And the cells will, of course, be
+very much alike in all essentials, because most people agree about
+having some sort of bed, table, chair, and so forth. But some glorified
+souls will have the flowers (which Dante saw her plucking) of Leah; and
+others the looking-glass of the contemplative Rachel; and there will be
+ever so many other little differences, making it amusing and edifying to
+pay a call upon one's brother or sister soul.
+</p>
+
+<p>In such a state of spiritual community and privacy (so different from
+our present hugger-mugger and five-little-bears-in-a-bed mode of
+existence), my soul, for instance, if your soul should honour it with a
+visit, would be able, methinks, to talk quite freely and pleasantly
+about the Ingres Museum at Montauban, and the autograph of Mozart in the
+glass case alongside the fiddle&#8230;. The manuscript is only a half sheet
+full score, torn or cut through its height; and the voice part is broken
+off with one word only&mdash;insufficient to identify it among Mozart's
+Italian works, though, perhaps, most suggestive of "Don Giovanni"&mdash;the
+word "Guai." The manuscript is exquisitely neat, yet has none of the
+look of a copy, and we know that Mozart was never obliged to make any.
+The writing is so like the man's adorable personality, the little
+pattern of notes so like his music. The sight of it moved me, flooding
+my mind with divine things, that Concerto for Flute and Harp, for
+instance, which dear Mme. <span class="nowrap">H&mdash;&mdash;</span> had recently been playing for me. And
+during that dull, rainy day of waiting for trains at Montauban, it made
+me live over again another day of rainy travel, but with the
+"Zauberfl&ouml;te" at the end of it, about which I will also tell you, since
+I am permitted to know my own mind and to speak it.</p>
+
+<p>But I find I have incidentally raised the question <i>de gustibus</i>, or, as
+our language puts it, the <i>accounting for tastes</i>. And I must settle and
+put myself right in the matter of M. Ingres before proceeding any
+further. The Latin saying, then, "De gustibus non est disputandum,"
+contains an excellent piece of advice, since disputing about tastes or
+anything else is but a sorry employment. But the English version is
+absolutely wide of the mark, since tastes can be accounted for just as
+much as climate, history, and bodily complexion. Indeed, we should know
+implicitly what people like and dislike if we knew what they were and
+how they had come to be so. The very diversity in taste proves its
+deep-down reality: preference and antipathy being consubstantial with
+the soul&mdash;nay, inherent in the very mechanism and chemistry of the body.
+And for this reason tastes are at once so universal and uniform, and so
+variously marked by minor differences. There are human beings all shank
+and thigh and wrist, with contemplative, deep-set eyes and compressed,
+silent lips; and others running to rounds and segments of circles, like
+M. Ingres' drawings, their eyes a trifle prominent for the better
+understanding of others, and mouth, like the typical French one, at a
+forward angle, as if for ready speech. But, different as these people
+are, they are alike in the main features of symmetry and balance; they
+haven't two sets of lungs and a duplicate stomach, like Centaurs, whom
+every one found so difficult to deal with; nor do any of them end off in
+a single forked tail, twisting about on which accounts for the
+proverbial untrustworthiness of mermaids. Being alike, all human
+creatures require free space and breathable air; and, being unlike, some
+of them hanker after the sea, and others cannot watch without longing
+the imitation mountains into which clouds pile themselves on dreary flat
+horizons. And similarly in the matter of art. We all delight in the
+ineffable presence of transcending power; we all require to renew our
+soul's strength and keenness in the union with souls stronger and keener
+than ours. But the power which appeals to some of us is struggling and
+brooding tragically, as in Michelangelo and Beethoven; while the power
+which straightway subdues certain others is easy, temperate, and
+radiant, as in Titian and Mozart. And thus it comes about that every
+soul&mdash;"where a soul can be discerned"&mdash;is the citizen, conscious or not,
+of a spiritual country, and obeys a hierarchy, bends before a sovereign
+genius, crowned or mitred by inscrutable right divine, never to be
+deposed. But there are many kingdoms and principalities, not necessarily
+overlapping; and the subjects of them are by no means the same.</p>
+
+<p>Take M. Ingres, for instance. He is, it seems, quite a tremendous
+potentate. I recognize his legitimate sway, like that of Prester John,
+or of the Great Mogul. Only I happen not to obey it, for I am a born
+subject of the King of Hearts. And who should that be but
+Apollo-Wolfgang-Amadeus, driving with easy wrist his teams, tandem or
+abreast, of winged, effulgent melodies?</p>
+
+<p>It was raining, as I told you, that morning which I spent in the Ingres
+Museum at Montauban. It was raining melted snow in hurricanes off the
+mountains that other day of travel, and I was on the top of a Tyrolese
+diligence. The roads were heavy; and we splashed slowly along the brink
+of roaring torrents and through the darkness of soaked and steaming fir
+woods. At the end of an hour's journey we had already lost four. "If you
+stop to dine," said successive jack-booted postilions, quickly fastening
+the traces at each relay, "you will never catch the Munich train at
+Garmisch. But the Herrschaften will please themselves in the matter of
+eating and drinking." So the Herrschaften did not please themselves at
+all, but splashed along through rain and sleet, through hospitable
+villages all painted over with scrollwork about beer, and coffee, and
+sugar-bakery, and all that "Restoration" which our poor drenched bodies
+and souls were lacking so woefully. For we had stalls at the Court
+Theatre of Munich, and it was the last, the very last, night of "The
+Magic Flute"! The Brocken journey on the diligence-top came to an end;
+the train at Garmisch was caught by just two seconds; we were safe at
+Munich. But I was prone on a sofa, with a despairing friend making
+hateful attempts to rouse me. Go to the play? Get up? Open my eyes to
+the light? My fingers must have fumbled some feeble "no," beyond all
+contradiction. "But your ticket&mdash;but 'The Magic Flute'&mdash;but you have
+come three days' journey on purpose!" I take it my lips achieved an
+inarticulate expression of abhorrence for such considerations. After
+that I do not exactly know what happened: my exhausted will gave way. I
+was combed and brushed, thrust into some manner of festive apparel,
+pushed into a vehicle, pulled out of it, and shoved along, by the
+staunch and (as it seemed) brutal arm of friendship, among crimson and
+gilding and blinding lights all seen at intervals through half-closed
+eyes. A little bell rang, and I felt it was my death knell. But through
+the darkness of my weltering soul (for I was presumably dead and
+undoubtedly damned) there marched, stood still, and curtsied
+majestically towards each other, the great grave opening chords of the
+overture. And when they had delivered, solemnly, their mysterious
+herald's message and subsided, off started the little nimble notes of
+the fugue, hastening from all sides, meeting, crossing, dispersing,
+returning, telling their wonderful news of improbable adventures;
+multitudinous, scurrying away in orderly haste to protect the hero and
+heroine, and be joined by other notes, all full of inexhaustible
+goodwill; taking hands, dancing, laughing, and giving the assurance that
+all is for the best in the world of enchantment, in the world of
+bird-calls, and tinkling triangles and magic flutes, under the spells
+of the great Sun-priest and Sun-god Mozart. I opened my eyes and had no
+headache; and sat in that Court Theatre for three mortal hours, in
+flourishing health and absolute happiness, and would have given my soul
+for it to begin immediately all over again.</p>
+
+<p>Now, not all the drawings of M. Ingres could have done that. And the
+piece of torn music-paper in the glass case at Montauban had made me,
+for a few faint seconds, live it through again. And I know what I don't
+care for, and what I do.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><a name="c1-13" id="c1-13"></a>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>AGAINST TALKING</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>As towards most other things of which we have but little personal
+experience (foreigners, or socialists, or aristocrats, as the case may
+be), there is a degree of vague ill-will towards what is called
+<i>Thinking</i>. It is reputed to impede action, to make hay of instincts
+and of standards, to fritter reality into doubt; and the career of
+Hamlet is frequently pointed out as a proof of its unhappy effects.
+But, as I hinted, one has not very often an opportunity of verifying
+these drawbacks of thinking, or its advantages either. And I am
+tempted to believe that much of the mischief thus laid at the door of
+that poor unknown quantity <i>Thinking</i> is really due to its ubiquitous
+twin-brother <i>Talking</i>.</p>
+
+<p>I call them twins on the analogy of Death and Sleep, because there is
+something poetical and attractive in such references to family
+relations; and also because, as many people cannot think without
+talking, and talking, at all events, is the supposed indication that
+thinking is within, there has arisen about these two human activities a
+good deal of that confusion and amiable not-caring-which-is-which so
+characteristic of our dealings with twins. But <i>Talking</i>, take my word
+for it, is the true villain of the couple.</p>
+
+<p>Talking, however, should never be discouraged in the young. Not talking
+<i>with them</i> (largely reiteration of the word "Why?"), but talking among
+themselves. Its beneficial effects are of the sort which ought to make
+us patient with the crying of infants. Talking helps growth. M. Renan,
+with his saintly ironical sympathy for the young and weak, knew it when
+he excused the symbolists and decadents of various kinds with that
+indulgent sentence, "Ce sont des enfants qui s'amusent." It matters
+little what litter they leave behind, what mud pies they make and little
+daily dug-up gardens of philosophy, ethics, literature, and general
+scandal; they will grow out of the need to make them&mdash;and meanwhile,
+making this sort of mess will help them grow.</p>
+
+<p>Besides, is it nothing that they should be amusing themselves once in
+their lives (we cannot be sure of the future)? And what amusement, what
+material revelry can be compared with the great carouses of words in
+which the young can still indulge? We were most of us young once, odd as
+it appears; and some of us can remember our youthful discussions, our
+salad-day talks, prolonged to hours, trespassing on to subjects, which
+added such a fine spice of the forbidden and therefore the free! The joy
+of asking reasons where you have hitherto answered school queries; of
+extemporizing replies, magnificent, irresponsible, instead of
+laboriously remembering mere solutions; of describing, analyzing, and
+generally laying bold mental eyes, irreverent intellectual hands, on
+personalities whose real presence would merely make you stumble over a
+chair or drop a tea-cup! For talking is the great equalizer of
+positions, turning the humble, the painfully immature, into judges with
+rope and torch; and in a kindlier way allowing the totally obscure to
+share the life of kings, and queens, and generals, and opera-singers;
+which is the reason that items of Court news or of "dramatic gossip"
+are so frequently exchanged in omnibuses and at small, decent
+dinner-tables.</p>
+
+<p>Moreover, talking has for the young the joys of personal exuberance; it
+is all honeycombed, or rather, filled (like champagne) with the generous
+gaseousness of self-analysis, self-accusation, self-pity,
+self-righteousness, and autobiography. The poor mortal, in that delusive
+sense of sympathy and perfect understanding which comes of perfect
+indifference to one's neighbour's presence, has quicker pulses, higher
+temperature, more vigorous movements than are compatible with the sober
+sense of human unimportance. In conversation, clever young people&mdash;vain,
+kindly, selfish, ridiculous, happy young people&mdash;actually take body and
+weight, expand. And are you quite sure, my own dear, mature, efficient,
+and thoroughly productive friends and contemporaries, that it is not
+this expansion of youthful rubbish which makes the true movement of the
+centuries?&#8230; Poor stuff enough, very likely, they talked, those
+long-haired, loose-collared Romanticists of the H&ocirc;tel Pimodan and the
+literary caf&eacute;s recorded by Balzac, <i>Jeunes Frances</i>, or whatever their
+names; and priggery, as well as blood-and-thunder, those lads round the
+table d'h&ocirc;te at Strasburg, where Jung-Stilling noticed the entrance of a
+certain tall, Apolline young man answering to the name of Goethe.
+Rubbish, of course; but rubbish necessary, yes, every empty bubble and
+scum and mess thereof, for the making of a great literary period&mdash;nay,
+of a great man of letters. And when, nine thousand nine hundred and
+ninety-nine times, there results neither one nor the other, why, there
+has been the talking itself&mdash;exciting and rapturous beyond everything
+that literary periods and literary personalities can ever match.</p>
+
+<p>'Tis with the talking of the mature and the responsible that I would
+pick a quarrel. Particularly if they are well read, unprejudiced, subtle
+of thought, and precise of language; and most particularly if they are
+scrupulously just and full of human charity. For when two or three
+persons of this sort meet together in converse, nothing escapes
+destruction. The character of third persons crumbles under that delicate
+and patient fingering: analysis, synthesis, rehabilitation, tender
+appreciation, enthusiastic definition, leave behind only a horrid
+quivering little heap of vain virtues and atrophied bad instincts. In
+such conversations I have heard loyal and loving friends make
+admissions and suggestions which would hang you in a court of justice; I
+can bear witness to having in all loyalty and loving-kindness done so
+myself a thousand times. Nor is this even the worst. For your living
+human being has luckily a wonderful knack of reasserting his reality;
+and the hero or victim of such conversational manipulation will take
+your breath away by suddenly entering the room or entering into your
+consciousness as hale and whole as old &AElig;son stepping out of Medea's
+cooking-pot. But opinions, impressions, principles, standards, possess,
+alas! no such recuperative virtue; or, rather, they cannot interrupt the
+discussion of themselves by putting in an appearance.</p>
+
+<p>Now, silent thought, whenever it destroys, destroys only to reconstruct
+the universe or the atom in the thinker's image; and new realities arise
+whenever a real individual creature reveals his needs and ways of
+feeling. But in what is called <i>a good serious talk</i> there is no such
+creating anew; nobody imposes his image, no whole human creature reveals
+a human organism: there is merely a jumble of superposed pictures which
+will not become a composite photograph; and the inherent optimism or
+pessimism, scepticism or dogmatism, of each interlocutor merely
+reiterates <i>No</i> to the ways of seeing and feeling of the others. Every
+word, perpetually defined and redefined at random, is used by each
+speaker in a different sense and with quite different associations. The
+subject under discussion is in no one's keeping: it is banged from side
+to side, adjusted to the right and adjusted to the left, a fine screw
+put on it every now and then to send it sheer into the great void and
+chaos! And almost the saddest part of the business is that the
+defacements and tramplings which the poor subject (who knows, perhaps
+very sacred to some one of us?) is made to suffer, come not from our
+opponent's brutal thrusting forward of <i>his</i> meaning, but rather from
+our own desperate methods to hold tight, to place <i>our</i> meaning in
+safety, somewhere where, even if not recognized, it will at least not be
+mauled&#8230;. Such are the scuffles and scrimmages of the most temperate,
+intellectual conversations, leaving behind them for the moment not a
+twig, not a blade of the decent vegetation of the human soul. Cannot we
+get some great beneficent mechanic to invent some spiritual cement,
+some asphalt and gravel of nothingness, some thoroughly pneumatic
+intellectual balls, whereon, and also wherewith, we privileged creatures
+may harmlessly expend our waste dialectic energies?</p>
+
+<p>Then, would you never talk? Or would you confine talking to the weather
+or the contents of the public prints? Would you have our ideas get hard
+and sterile for want of being moved? Do you advise that, like some
+tactful persons we&mdash;you&mdash;yes, <i>you</i>&mdash;all know and detest&mdash;we
+systematically let every subject drop as soon as raised?</p>
+
+<p>There! the talking has begun. They are at it, contradicting what they
+agree with, and asking definitions of what they perfectly understand. Of
+course not! And here I am, unable to resist, rushing into the argument,
+excited&mdash;who can tell?&mdash;perhaps delighted. And by the time we take up
+our bedroom candles, and wish each other good night (with additional
+definitions over the banisters) every scrap of sensible meaning I ever
+had will be turned to nonsense; and I shall feel, next morning, oh, how
+miserably humiliated and depressed!&#8230;</p>
+
+<p>"Well&mdash;and to return to what we were saying last night&#8230;."</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><a name="c1-14" id="c1-14"></a>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>IN PRAISE OF SILENCE</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>One of the truths which come (if any do) with middle age, is the gradual
+recognition that in one's friendly intercourse the essential&mdash;the one
+thing needful&mdash;is not what people say, but what they think and feel.</p>
+
+<p>Words are not necessarily companionable, far from it; but moods truly
+meet, to part in violent dissonance; or to move parallel in happy
+harmonic intervals; or, more poignant and more satisfying still, to pass
+gradually along some great succession of alien chords&mdash;common
+contemplation, say, of a world grievous or pleasant to both&mdash;on towards
+the peace, the consummation, of a great major close. Once we have
+sufficient indication that another person cares for the same kind of
+things that we do&mdash;or, as important quite, cares in the same degree or
+in the same way&mdash;all further explanation becomes superfluous: detail,
+delightful occasionally to quicken and bring home the sense of
+companionship, but by no means needed.</p>
+
+<p>This is the secret of our intercourse with those persons of whom our
+friends will say (or think), What <i>can</i> you have in common with
+So-and-so? What <i>can</i> you find to talk about? Talk about? Why, nothing;
+the enigmatic person remains with us, as with all the rest of the world,
+silent, inarticulate; incapable, sometimes, of any inner making of
+formul&aelig;. But we know that our companion is seeing, feeling, the same
+lines of the hills and washes of their colours, the same scudding or
+feathering out of clouds; is <i>living</i>, in the completest sense, in that
+particular scene and hour; and knowing this, it matters nothing how long
+we trudge along the road or saunter across the grass without uttering.
+The road of life, too, or the paths and thickets of speculation.
+And speaking of walks, I know no greater torment, among those minor ones
+which are the worst, than the intelligent conversation&mdash;full of
+suggestion and fine analysis, perhaps, and descriptions of <i>other</i>
+places&mdash;which reveals to us that the kindly speaker is indeed occupying
+the same geographical space or sitting behind the same horse as we are,
+but that his soul is miles and miles away. And the worst of it is that
+such false companionship can distract us from any real company with the
+moment and the place. We have to answer out of civility; then to think,
+to get interested, and then &#8230; well, then it is all over. "We had such
+a delightful walk or drive, So-and-so and I," says our friend
+on returning home, "and I am so glad to find that we have such a lot of
+interests in common." Alas! alas!&#8230; Hazlitt was thinking of such
+experiences, knowing perhaps the stealthiness and duplicity which the
+fear of them develops in the honest but polite, when he recommended that
+one should take one's walks alone.</p>
+
+<p>But there is something more perfect even than one's own company: the
+companion met once, at most twice, in a lifetime (for he is by no means
+necessarily your dearest and nearest, nor the person who understands you
+best). He or she whose words are always about the place and moment, or
+seem to suit it; whose remarks, like certain music, feel restful,
+spacious, cool, airy&mdash;like silence. And here I have got back to the
+praise of such persons as talk little, or (what is even better) <i>seem</i>
+to talk little.</p>
+
+<p>There is a deal of truth, and, as befits the subject, rather implied
+than actually expressed, in Maeterlinck's essay on Silence. His fine
+temper, veined and shot with colour, rich in harmonics like a well-toned
+voice, enables him, even like the mystics whom he has edited, to guess
+at those diffuse and mellow states of soul which often defy words. He
+knows from experience how little we can really live, although we needs
+must speak, in definite formul&aelig;, logical frameworks of verb and noun,
+subject and predicate. Let alone the fact that all consummate feeling
+(like the moment to which Faust cried <i>Stay</i>) abolishes the sense of
+sequence&mdash;revolves, if I may say so, on its own axis, a <i>now,
+forever</i>; baffling thereby all speech. And M. Maeterlinck perceives,
+therefore, that real communion between fellow-creatures is interchange
+of temperament, of rhythm of life; not exchange of remarks, views, and
+opinions, of which ninety-nine in a hundred are merely current coin. To
+what he has said I should like to add that if we are often silent with
+those whom we love best, it is because we are sensitive to their whole
+personality, face, gesture, texture of soul and body; that we are living
+with them not only in the present, but enriched, modified by all they
+have said before, by everything remaining in our memory as theirs. To
+talk would never express a state of feeling so rich and living; and it
+can serve, at most, only to give the heightening certainty of presence,
+like a handclasp or asking, "Are you there?" and getting the answer,
+"Yes; I am here, and so are you"&mdash;facts of no high logical importance!</p>
+
+<p>As regards silent people, this characteristic may, of course, be mere
+result of sloth and shyness, or lack of habit of the world, and they may
+be gabbling volubly in their hearts. Such as these are no kind of
+blessing, save perhaps negatively. Still less to be commended are those
+others, cutting a better figure (or thinking so), who measure their
+words from a dread of "giving themselves away" of "making themselves
+cheap," or otherwise (always thinking in terms of money, lawsuits, and
+general overreaching) getting the worst of a bargain. Indeed, it is a
+sign how little we are truly civilized, that such silence or laconicism
+as this, can be met constantly outside the class (invariably cunning) of
+peasants; indeed, among men exercising what we are pleased to call
+<i>liberal professions</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The persons in whom silence is a mark of natural fine breeding are those
+who, being able to taste the real essence of things, are apt, perhaps
+wrongly, to despise the unessential. They are disdainful of all the old
+things inevitably repeated in saying half a new one. They cannot do with
+the lumber, wastepaper, shavings, sawdust, rubbish necessary for packing
+and conveying objects of value; now most of talk, and much of life, is
+exactly of that indispensable useful uselessness. They are silent for
+the same reason that they are frequently inactive, recognizing that
+words and actions are so often mere litter and encumbrance. One feels
+frozen occasionally by their unspoken criticism; one's small exuberances
+checked by lack of sympathy and indulgence; one would like, sometimes,
+to pick a quarrel with them, to offer a penny for their thoughts, to
+force them to be as unselective and vulgar as one's self. But one
+desists, feeling instinctively the refreshment (as of some solitary
+treeless down or rocky stream) and purification of their fine
+abstention in this world where industry means cinder-heaps, and
+statesmanship, philosophy, art, philanthropy, mean "secondary products"
+of analogous kind.</p>
+
+<p>Before concluding this over-garrulous tribute to silence, I would fain
+point out the contrast, ironical enough, between the pleasant sense of
+comradeship with some of those who "never utter," and the loneliness of
+spirit in which we steam and post and cab through every possible realm
+of fact and theory with certain other people. I am not alluding to the
+making hay of politics, exhibitions, theatres, current literature, etc.,
+which is so much the least interesting form of gossip. What I mean are
+those ample, apparently open talks between people who have found each
+other out; who know the cardboard and lath and plaster of the
+architectural arrangements or suspect the water-supply and drainage
+behind; talks where one knows that the other is shirking some practical
+conclusion, divagating into the abstract, and has to pick his way among
+hidden interests and vanities, or avert his eyes from moral vistas which
+he knows of&#8230;. "So-and-so is such a delightful talker&mdash;so witty and so
+wonderfully unprejudiced; I cannot understand why you don't cultivate
+him or her." Cultivate him or her! Cultivate garlic; those elegant white
+starry flowers you wonder at my weeding out of the beds.</p>
+
+<p>Compare with this the blessedness of knowing that the contents of the
+other person's mind are <i>nice</i>, pure of all worldliness, pretence, and
+meanness; that the creature's thoughts, if opened out to one, would
+diffuse the scent of sunshine and lavender even as does clean,
+well-folded linen.</p>
+
+<p>Hence the charm of a whole lot of persons not conspicuous for
+conversational powers: men who have lived much out-of-doors, with gun or
+rod; shy country neighbours, cross old scholars, simple motherly little
+housewives; and, if one get at their reality, peasants and even
+servants. For we have within ourselves memories and fancies; and it
+depends on our companion, on a word, a glance, a gesture, that only the
+sweet and profitable ones, thoughts of kindness and dignity, should be
+stirred up.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><a name="c1-15" id="c1-15"></a>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>THE BLAME OF PORTRAITS</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Feeling a little bit ashamed of myself, yet relieved at having done with
+that particular hypocrisy, I unpinned the two facsimiles of drawings
+from off my study screen and put them in a portfolio. A slight sense of
+profanation ensued; not so much of infidelity towards those two dear
+friends, nor certainly of irreverence towards Mr. Watts or the late Sir
+Edward Burne-Jones, but referable to the insistence with which I had
+clamoured for those portraits, the delight experienced at their arrival,
+and the solid satisfaction anticipated from their eternal possession.</p>
+
+<p>We have most of us&mdash;of the sentimental ones at least&mdash;gone through some
+similar small drama, and been a little harrowed by it. But though we
+feel as if there were some sort of naughtiness in us, we are quite
+blameless, and on the whole rather to be pitied. We are the dupes of a
+very human craving, and one which seems modest in its demands. What! a
+mere square of painted canvas, a few pencil scratchings, a bare
+mechanical photograph, something no rarer than a reflection in a mirror!
+That is all we ask for, to still the welling-up wistfulness, the
+clinging reluctance, to console for parting or the thought, almost, of
+death! We do not guess that this humble desire for a likeness is one of
+our most signal cravings after the impossible: an attempt to overcome
+space and baffle time; to imprison and use at pleasure the most
+fleeting, intangible, and uncommunicable of all mysterious essences, a
+human personality.</p>
+
+<p>"Often enough I think I have got the turn of her head and neck; but
+not the face&mdash;never the face that speaks," complains the poor bereaved
+husband in Mary Robinson's beautiful little poem. The case may not be
+tragic like that one, and yet thoroughly tantalizing; we feel the
+absent ones opposite to us in the room, we are in that distant room
+ourselves; there is a sense of their position, of the space they
+occupy, and thus we see, as through a ghost, the familiar outline,
+perhaps, of a chair. Or, again, there is the well-known movement,
+accompanied, perhaps, by the tone of voice, concentrated almost to the
+longed-for look, and, as the figure advances &#8230; nothing! Like
+Virgil's Orpheus, our fancy embraces a shadow. "The face&mdash;never the
+face that speaks!" But we <i>will</i> have it, people exclaimed, all those
+ages ago, and exclaim ever since. And thus they came by the notion of
+portraits.</p>
+
+<p>And when they got them they grumbled. The cavilling at every
+newly-painted likeness is notorious. The sitter, indeed, is sometimes
+easy enough to please, poor human creatures enjoying, as a rule, any
+notice (however professional) of their existence, let alone an answer to
+the attractive riddle of <i>what they look like</i>. And there are, of
+course, certain superfine persons who, in the case of a famous artist,
+think very like the sitter, and are satisfied so long as they get an
+ornamental picture, or one well up to date. But the truly human grumble,
+and are more than justified in doing so. Their cravings have been
+disappointed; they had expected the impossible, and have not got it.</p>
+
+<p>Since, in the very nature of things, a picture, and particularly a fine
+picture, is always an imperfect likeness. For the image of the sitter on
+the artist's retina is passed on its way to the canvas through a mind
+chock full of other images; and is transferred&mdash;heaven knows how changed
+already&mdash;by processes of line and curve, of blots of colour, and
+juxtaposition of light and shade, belonging not merely to the artist
+himself, but to the artist's whole school. Regarding merely the latter
+question, we all know that the old Venetians painted people ample,
+romantic, magnificent; and the old Tuscans painted them narrow, lucid,
+and commonplace; men of velvet and silk and armour on the one hand, and
+men of broadcloth and leather, on the other. The difference due to the
+individual artist is even greater; and, in truth, a portrait gives the
+sitter's temperament merged in the temperament of the painter.</p>
+
+<p>So, as a rule, portraiture does but defeat its own end. And, stoically
+speaking, does it much matter? Posterity has done just as well without
+the transmission of the real Cardinal Hippolytus; and we know that
+everything always comes right if only we look at it, Spinoza-like,
+"under the category of the eternal." But we, meanwhile, are not
+eternal, nor, alas! are our friends; and that is just one of the
+things which gall us. We cannot believe&mdash;how could we?&mdash;that the
+future can have its own witty men and gracious women, its own
+sufficient objects of love and reverence, even as we have. We feel we
+<i>must</i> hand on our own great and beloved ones; we <i>must</i> preserve the
+evanescent personal fragrance, press the flower. And hence, again,
+portraits and memoirs, Boswell's "Johnson," or Renan's "Ma Soeur
+Henriette"; grotesque or lovely things, as the case may be, and always
+pathetic, which tell us that men have always admired and always loved;
+leaving us to explain, by substituting the image of our own idols, why
+in that case more specially they did so. Poor people! We do so cling
+to our particular self and self's preferences; we are so confidently
+material and literal! And one dreads to think of the cruel
+self-defence of posterity, when we shall try to push into its notice
+with phonograph and cinematograph.</p>
+
+<p>Let us, in the presence of such hideous machinery, cease to be literal
+in matters of sentiment, even at the price of a little sadness and
+cynicism in recognizing the unreality of everything save our own moods
+and fancies. Perhaps I feel more strongly on this subject because I
+happen to have seen with my own eyes the <i>reductio ad absurdum</i>&mdash;to
+absurdity how lamentable and dreadful!&mdash;of this same human craving for
+literal preservation of that which should not, cannot, be preserved. It
+was in the lumber-room of an Italian palace; a life-size doll, with wig
+of real&mdash;perhaps personally real&mdash;hair, and dressed from head to foot in
+the garments of the real poor lady, dead some seventy years ago. I wrote
+a little tale about it; but the main facts were true, and far surpassed
+the power of invention. In this case the husband, who had ordered this
+simulacrum for his solace, taking his daily dose of sentiment in its
+presence, proceeded, after an interval, to woo and marry his own
+laundress; and I think, on the whole, this was the least harrowing
+possible solution. Fancy if he had not found that form of consolation,
+but had continued trying to be faithful to that dreadful material
+presence, more rigid, lifeless, meaningless, with every day and every
+year of familiarity!</p>
+
+<p>In a small way, we all of us commit that man's mistake of thinking that
+the life of our dear ones is in an image, instead of in the heartbeats
+which the image&mdash;like a name, a place, any associated thing&mdash;can
+produce in ourselves. And only changing things can answer to our
+changing self; only living creatures live with us. Once learned by
+heart, the portrait, be it never so speaking, ceases to speak, or we to
+listen to its selfsame message. What was once company to us, because it
+awakened a flickering feeling of wished-for presence, becomes, after a
+time, mere canvas or paper; disintegrates into mere colours or mere
+black and white. Even the faithfullest among us are utterly faithless to
+the best-beloved portraits. We have them on our walls or on our
+writing-tables, and pack and unpack some of them for every journey. But
+do we look at them? or, looking, do we see them, feel them?</p>
+
+<p>They are not, however, useless; very far from it. You might as well
+complain of the uselessness of the fire which is burned out, or the
+extinguished lamp. They have, though for a brief time, pleased, perhaps
+even consoled, us&mdash;warmed our heart with the sense of a loving nearness,
+shed a light on the visions in our mind. Hence we should cherish them as
+useful delusions, or rather realities, so long as they awaken a reality
+of feeling. And 'tis a decent instinct of gratitude, not mere
+inertness, which causes us to keep them, honoured pensioners of our
+affections, in honourable places.</p>
+
+<p>Only one thing we should guard against, and act firmly about, despite
+all sentimental scruples. During the <i>period of activity</i> of a
+portrait&mdash;I mean while we still, more or less, look at it&mdash;we must
+beware lest it take, in our memory, the place of the original. Those
+unchanging features have the insistence of their definiteness and
+permanence, and may insidiously extrude, exclude, the fleeting,
+vacillating outlines of the remembered reality. And those alone concern
+our heart, and have a right to occupy our fancy. One feels aghast
+sometimes, on meeting some dear friend after an interval of absence, to
+find that those real features, that real expression, are not the
+familiar ones. It is the portrait, the envious counterfeit presentment,
+which (knowing its poor brief reign) has played us and our friend that
+mean trick. When this happens we must be merciless, like the fairy-story
+prince when the wicked creatures in the wood spoke to him in the voice
+of his mother; piety towards the original arms us with ruthlessness
+towards the portrait. It was for this same reason that, as I have said,
+I unpinned from my screen those two facsimiles of drawings, feeling
+rather a brute while I was doing so.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><a name="c1-16" id="c1-16"></a>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>SERE AND YELLOW</h3>
+<h5>INTERLUDE</h5>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>"Alors que je me croyais aux derniers jours de l'automne, dans un jardin
+d&eacute;pouill&eacute;." The words are Madame de Hauterive's, one of the most
+charming among eighteenth-century letter-writers; but one of whom, for
+all the indiscretion of that age, we know little or nothing: a delicate,
+austere outline merely, a reserved and sensitive ghost shrinking into
+the dimness. She wrote those words when already an old woman, and long
+after death had taken her father and her daughter and most of her
+nearest and dearest, to the young Abb&eacute; de Carlad&egrave;s, who proved himself
+(one hopes) not utterly unworthy of that "unexpected late flowering of
+the soul." The phrase is eighteenth century, and it may be the feeling
+itself is of as bygone a fashion. Or does this seem the case because
+such delicate souls can become known to us only when they and their
+loves and friendships have ceased to be more than a handful of faded
+paper, fingered very piously, for heaven's sake?</p>
+
+<p>However this may be, that phrase of Madame de Hauterive's contains a
+truth which is undying, and which, though unobtrusive, can be observed
+by those who have a discreet eye for the soul's affairs. Nay, one might
+say that the knowledge of how many times life can begin afresh, the
+knowledge of the new modes of happiness which may succeed each other,
+even when the leaves float down yellow in the still air, and the dews on
+the renovated grass are white like frost, is one of the blessed secrets
+into which the passing seasons initiate those who have honourably
+cultivated the garden of life, and life's wide common acres.</p>
+
+<p>Indeed, such faith in the heart's renewed fruitfulness is itself among
+the autumn blossomings, the hidden compensations. Young folk, and those
+who never outgrow youth's headlong and blind self-seeking, cannot
+conceive such truths. For youth has no experience of change; and what it
+calls the Future is but the present longing or present dread projected
+forward. Hence youth lacks the resignation which comes of knowing that
+our aims, our loves, ourselves, will alter; and that we shall not
+eternally regret what we could not eternally covet. Hence, also, the
+fine despair and frequent suicide of youthful heroes and heroines. Poor
+young Werther, in his sky-blue <i>Frack</i> and striped yellow waistcoat,
+cannot believe that the time will come when he will tune the spinet of
+some other Charlotte&mdash;nay, follow in the footsteps of the enlightened
+minister, his patron; bury himself in protocols and look forward to a
+diplomatic game of whist rather than to a country dance with meeting
+hands and eyes. And it is mere waste of breath to sermon him on the
+subject: lend him the pistols, and hope that (as in the humaner version
+of the opera) he will not use them. As to certain other forestallings of
+experience, they would be positively indecent and barbarous! You would
+die of shame if the young widow happened to overhear you saying (what is
+heaven's truth, and a most consoling one) that her baby, which now
+represents only so much time and love she might have given, all, all, to
+<i>him</i> alone, is the only good thing which that worthless dead husband
+could ever have furnished her. And as to hinting in her presence that
+she will some day be much, much happier with dear Quixotic Dobbin than
+with that coxcomb of an Osborne, why the bare thought of such indecorum
+makes us feel like sinking into the ground! We must be sympathizing, and
+a little short of truthful, with poor distressed young people; above
+all, never seek to lighten their disappointments with visions of brisk
+octogenarians, one foot in the grave, enjoying a rubber!</p>
+
+<p>And this, no doubt, is a providential arrangement&mdash;I mean this youthful
+incapacity of grasping the consolations brought by Time. For, after all,
+life, being there, has to be lived; and maybe life would be lived in a
+half-hearted fashion did we suspect its many compensations, including
+what may, methinks, be the last, most solemn one. Should we jump hastily
+out of bed and bestir ourselves with the zest of the new day, if we
+thoroughly realized what is, however, matter of common experience, to
+wit: that at the day's close, sleep, rest without dreams or thought of
+awaking, may be as welcome as all this pleasant bustle of the morning?
+The knowledge of these mysteries, initiation into which comes late and
+silently, is, as I hinted, perhaps the final compensation; allowing us
+to face the order of things without superfine cavillings. But there are
+earlier, less awful and secret compensations, and these it is as well to
+know about, and to prepare our soul serenely to enjoy when the moment
+comes.</p>
+
+<p>Of this kind are, of course, those autumn flowerings of sentiment
+alluded to in Madame de Hauterive's letter. They are blossomings
+sometimes sweeter than those of summer, thanks to the very scorching of
+summer's suns; or else touched with an austere vividness by the first
+frosts, like the late china roses, which are streaked, where they open,
+with a vermillion unparalleled in their earlier sisters. Compare with
+this all that is implied in Swinburne's line, "the month of the long
+decline of roses." Think of those roses (I have before my eyes a
+Florentine terrace at the end of May) crowding each other out, blowing,
+withering, and dropping; roses white, red, pale lemon, and, alas! also
+brown and black with mildew, living and dying in such riotous excess
+that you have neither time nor inclination to pluck one of them, and
+keep it, piously in water, before you on your table.</p>
+
+<p>Mind, I do not say that such profusion is not all right and necessary
+in its season. The economy of Nature is often wasteful. There might be
+no roses at all next year if we depended for seed and slips upon those
+frost-bitten flowers with their fine austerity. And in the same way
+that, despite the pathetic tenderness of long-deferred father or
+motherhood, it is better for the race that infants be brought into the
+world plentiful, helter-skelter, and that only the toughest stay
+there; so, methinks, it may be needful that youth be full of false
+starts, mistaken vocations, lapsed engagements, fanciful friendships
+broken off in quarrel, glowing passions ending in ashes; nay, that
+this period, fertile in good and evil, be crowned by marriages such as
+are said to be made in heaven, no doubt because the great match-making
+spirit of life pursues ends unguessed by human wisdom, which would
+often remain in single blessedness, and found homes for sickly
+infants. Wedlock, in other words, and, for the matter of that, father
+and motherhood, and most of the serious business of the universe,
+should not be looked upon as a compensation or consolation, but rather
+as something for which poor human creatures require to be consoled and
+compensated.</p>
+
+<p>Having admitted which, and even suggested that marriages are fittest at
+the age of Daphnis and Chloe, or even of Amelia and George Osborne, let
+us, I pray you, glance with reverent eyes, and a smile not mocking but
+tender, at certain other weddings which furtively cross our path.
+Weddings between elderly persons, hitherto unable to make up their mind,
+or having, perchance, made it up all wrong on a first occasion;
+inveterate old maids and bachelors, or widowers who thought to mourn for
+ever; people who have found their heart perhaps a little late in the
+day; but, who knows? shrivelled as it is, perhaps, but the mellower, and
+of more enduring, more essential sweetness.</p>
+
+<p>Alongside of such tardy nuptials there is a corresponding class of
+<i>marriages of true minds</i>. Genuine ones are exceedingly rare during
+youth; and the impediments, despite the opinion of Shakespeare, are of
+the nature of nullity, ending most often in unseemly divorce between
+Hermia and Helena, or the Kings of Sicilia and Bohemia, one of whom, if
+you remember, tried to poison the other on very small provocation. The
+last-named is an instructive example of the hollowness of nursery or
+playground friendship, or rather of what passes for such. Genuine
+friendship is an addition to our real self, a revelation of new
+possibilities; and young people, busily absorbing the traditions of the
+past and the fashions of the day, have very rarely got a real self to
+reveal or to bestow. So that the feeling we experience in later life
+towards our playmates is, in fact, rather a wistful pleasure in the
+thought of our own past than any real satisfaction in their present
+selves.</p>
+
+<p>Be this as it may, there is among the compensations of life, a kind of
+friendship which, by its very nature, requires that one of the friends
+have passed the <i>middle of the way</i>. I am not referring to the joys of
+grandfather and grandmotherhood, and all that "<i>art d'&ecirc;tre grandp&egrave;</i>"
+which have been written and sung until one turns a trifle sceptical
+about them. What I allude to has, on the contrary, escaped (almost
+entirely, I think) the desecrating pen of the analytical or moralizing
+novelist, and remains one of the half-veiled mysteries of human good
+fortune, before which the observer passes quickly in shy admiration.
+The case is this: one of the parents has been unwilling, or
+disappointed; marriage has meant emptiness, or worse; and a nursery full
+of children has been, very likely, a mere occasion for ill-will and
+painful struggle. The poor soul has been, perhaps for years, fretted and
+wearied; or else woefully lonely, cabined, confined, and cramped almost
+to numbness. When, behold! by the marvellous miracle of man or
+womanhood&mdash;a dull, tiresome child is suddenly transformed, takes on
+shapeliness and stature, opens the bolted doors of life, leads the
+father or mother into valleys of ease and on to hopeful hilltops; slays
+dragons, chains ogres, and smiles with the eyes and lips which have been
+vaguely dreamed of, longed for, who knows how long!</p>
+
+<p>So children do occasionally constitute compensations and blessings not
+merely in disguise. And this particularly where they have not been
+looked upon as investments for future happiness or arrangements for
+paying off parental debts to society, to glory, or the Supreme Being.
+For surely, if children are ever to renovate the flagging life of
+parents, it can only be by their leaving off their childhood and coming
+back as equals, brothers, sisters, sometimes as tenderest and most
+admiring of chivalrous lovers.</p>
+
+<p>'Tis, in fact, unexpected new life adding itself to ours which
+constitutes the supreme compensation in middle age; and our heart puts
+forth fresh blossoms of happiness (of genius sometimes, as in the case
+of Goethe) because younger shoots are rejoicing in the seasonable
+sunshine or dews. The interests and beliefs of the younger generation
+prevent our own from dying; nay, the friendships and loves of our
+children, whether according to the flesh or the spirit, may become our
+own. Daughters-in-law are not invariably made to dine off the poisoned
+half of a partridge, as in works of history. Some stepfathers and
+stepmothers feel towards those alien youths and maidens only as that
+dear Valentine Visconti did towards the little Dunois, whom she took in
+her arms, say the chronicles, and, with many kisses on eyes and cheeks,
+exclaimed, "Surely thou wast stolen from me!" And, in another
+relationship which is spoken ill of by those unworthy of it, we can
+sometimes watch a thing which is among reality's best poetry: where a
+mother, wisely and dutifully stepping aside from her married daughter's
+path, has been snatched back, borne in triumph, not by one loving pair
+of arms, but two; and where the happy young wife has smiled at
+recognizing that in her husband's love for her there was mixed up a
+head-over-ears devotion for her mother.</p>
+
+<p>Some folks have no sons or daughters, or husbands or wives, and hence no
+stepchildren or children-in-law. Yet even for them autumn may blossom.
+There are the children of friends, recalling their youth or compensating
+for their youth's failure; and for some there are the younger workers in
+the same field, giving us interest in books or pictures, or journeys or
+campaigns, when our own days for work and struggle are over; even as we,
+perhaps, have kept open the vistas of life, given Pisgah-sights to those
+beloved and venerated ones whose sympathy we value and understand better
+perhaps now than all those many, many years ago. Yes! even in our
+youthful egoism we gave them something, those dear long dead friends;
+and this knowledge is itself a tiny autumn bud in our soul.</p>
+
+<p>There are humbler compensations also. And among these the kind which,
+years after writing the immortal idyll of "Dr. Antonio," my dear
+venerated friend Ruffini set forth in a tiny story, perhaps partly his
+own, about the modest but very real happiness which the mere
+relationship of master and servant can bring into a solitary life; the
+story taking its name, by a coincidence by no means indifferent to me,
+from a faithful and pleasant person called Carlino.</p>
+
+<p>But an end to digressions, for it is time to cease writing,
+particularly of such intangible and shy matters. So, to return to
+Madame de Hauterive's sentence, which was our starting-point in this
+inventory of compensations and consolations. Paradoxical though it
+seem, the understanding and union brought by a glance, by words said
+in a given way, by any of the trifles bearing mysterious, unreasoned
+significance for the experienced soul&mdash;or, briefly, "<i>friendship at
+first sight</i>"&mdash;is as natural in the sere and yellow, as love at first
+sight in the salad, days. Only, to be sure, less manifest to
+indifferent bystanders, since one of the consoling habits which life
+brings with it is a respect for life's thoroughfares, a reluctance to
+stop the way, collect a crowd with our private interests, and a pious
+reserve about such good fortune as is good precisely because it suits
+us, not other people.</p>
+
+<p>Reserve of this sort, as I began with saying, is one of the charms of
+dear Madame de Hauterive; and the more so that eighteenth-century
+folk, particularly French, were not much given to it! And thus it
+happens that we know little or nothing about that friendship which
+consoled her later life; and must look round us in our own, if we
+would understand what were those new flowerings which had arisen,
+when, as she says, she had thought herself already in the last days of
+autumn and in a leafless garden.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><a name="c1-17" id="c1-17"></a>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>A STAGE JEWEL</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>"It doesn't seem to be precisely what is meant by <i>old paste</i>," she
+answered, repeating the expression I had just made use of, while she
+handed me the diamond hoop across the table. "It's too like real stones,
+you know. I think it must be a stage jewel."</p>
+
+<p>As I fastened the brooch again in my dress, I was aware of a sudden
+little change in my feelings. I was no longer pleased. Not that I had
+hoped my diamonds might prove real; you cannot buy real diamonds, even
+in imagination, for four francs, which was the precise sum I had
+expended on these, and there were seven of them, all uncommonly large.
+Nor can I say that the words "old paste" had possessed, on my lips, any
+plain or positive meaning. But <i>stage jewel</i>, somehow &#8230; My moral
+temperature had altered: I was dreadfully conscious that I was no longer
+pleased. Now, I had been, and to an absurd degree.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps because it was Christmas Eve, when I suddenly found myself
+inside that curiosity shop, pricing the diamonds, and not without an
+emotion of guilty extravagance, and of the difficulty of not buying if
+the price proved too high&#8230;. As is always the case with me at that
+season, my soul was irradiated with a vague sense of festivity, perhaps
+with the lights of rows of long-extinguished Christmas trees in the fog
+of many years, like the lights of the shops caught up and diffused in
+the moist twilight. I had felt an inner call for a Christmas present;
+and, so far, nobody had given me one. So I had paid the money and driven
+back into the dark, soughing country with the diamond hoop loose in my
+pocket. I had felt so very pleased&#8230;. And now those two cursed words
+"stage jewel" had come and spoilt it all.</p>
+
+<p>For the first time I felt it was very, very hard that my box should have
+been broken open last autumn and all my valuables, my Real (the word
+became colossal), not <i>stage</i>, jewels stolen. It was brought home to me
+for the first time that the man who did it must have been very, very
+wicked; and that codes of law, police and even prisons could afford
+satisfaction to my feelings. Since, oddly enough, I had really not
+minded much at the time, nor let my pleasure in that wonderful old
+castle, where I had just arrived with the violated trunk, be in the
+least diminished by the circumstance. Indeed, such is the subtle,
+sophistic power of self-conceit, that the pleasure of finding, or
+thinking I found, that I did not mind the loss of those things had
+really, I believe, prevented me minding it. Though, of course, every now
+and then I had wished I might see again the little old-fashioned
+fleur-de-lysed star which had been my mother's (my heart smote me for
+not feeling sufficiently how much <i>she</i> would have suffered at my losing
+it). And I remembered how much I had liked to play with those opals of
+the Queen of Hearts, which seemed the essence of pale-blue winter days
+with a little red flame of sunset in the midst; or, rather, like tiny
+lunar worlds, mysterious shining lakes and burning volcanoes in their
+heart. Of course, I had not been indifferent: that would have taken away
+all charm from the serenity with which I had enjoyed my loss. But I had
+been serene, delightfully serene. And now!&#8230;</p>
+
+<p>There was something vaguely vulgar, odious, unpardonable about false
+stones. I had always maintained there was not, but the stage jewel
+made me feel it. Mankind has sound instincts, rooting in untold depths
+of fitness; and superfine persons, setting themselves against them,
+reveal their superficiality, their lack of normal intuition and sound
+judgment, while fancying themselves superior. And mankind (save among
+barbarous Byzantine and Lombard kings, who encrusted their iron crowns
+impartially with balas rubies, antique cameos, and bottle
+glass)&mdash;mankind has always shown an instinct against sham jewels and
+their wearers. It is an unreasoned manifestation of the belief in
+truth as the supreme necessity for individuals and races, without
+which, as we know, there would be an end of commerce, the
+administration of justice, government, even family life (for birds,
+who have no such sense, are proverbially ignorant of their father),
+and everything which we call civilization. Real precious stones were
+perhaps created by Nature, and sham stones allowed to be created by
+man, as one of those moral symbols in which the universe abounds: a
+mysterious object-lesson of the difference between truth and
+falsehood.</p>
+
+<p>Real diamonds and rubies, I believe, require quite a different degree
+of heat to melt them than mere glass or paste; and you can amuse
+yourself, if you like, by throwing them in the fire. In the Middle
+Ages rubies, but only real ones, were sovereign remedies for various
+diseases, among others the one which carried off Lorenzo the
+Magnificent; and in the seventeenth century it was currently reported
+that the minions of the Duke of Orleans had required pounded diamonds
+to poison poor Madame Henriette in that glass of chicory water. And as
+to pearls, real ones go yellow if unworn for a few months, and have to
+be sunk fathoms deep in the sea, in safes with chains and anchors, and
+detectives sitting day and night upon the beach, and sentries in
+sentry-boxes; none of which occurs with imitations. Likewise you stamp
+on a real pearl, while you must be quite careful not to crush a sham
+one. All these are obvious differences revealing the nobility of the
+real thing, though not necessarily adding to its charm. But, then,
+there is the undoubted greater beauty, the wonderful <i>je ne sais
+quoi</i>, the depth of colour, purity of substance, effulgence of fire,
+of real gems, which we all recognize, although it is usual to have
+them tested by an expert before buying. And, when all is said and
+done, there is the difference in intrinsic value. And you need not
+imagine that value is a figment. Political economy affords us two
+different standards of value, the Marxian and the Orthodox. So you
+cannot escape from believing in it. A thing is valuable either (<i>a</i>)
+according to the amount of labour it embodies, or (<i>b</i>) according to
+the amount of goods or money you can obtain in exchange for it. Now,
+only let your mind dwell upon the value (<i>a</i>) embodied in a pearl or
+diamond. The pearl fisher, who doubtless frequently gets drowned; let
+alone the oyster, which has to have a horrid mortal illness, neither
+of which happens to the mean-spirited artificer of Roman pearls; or
+the diamond seeker, seeking through deserts for months; the fine
+diamond merchant, dying in caravans, of the past; and, finally, the
+diamond-cutter, grinding that adamant for weeks far, far more
+indefatigably than to make the optic lenses which reveal hidden
+planets and galaxies. All that labour, danger, that weary, weary time
+embodied in a thing so tiny that, like Queen Mab, it can sit on an
+alderman's forefinger! What could be more deeply satisfactory to think
+upon? And as to value (<i>b</i>) (the value in <i>Exchange</i> of Mill, Fawcett,
+Marshall, Say, Bastiat, Gide), just think what you could buy by
+selling a largish diamond, supposing you had one! And what unlikely
+prices (fabulous, even monstrous) are said to have been given, before
+and after dubious Madame de la Motte priced that great typical one,
+for diamond necklaces by queens and heroines of every degree!</p>
+
+<p>Precious stones, therefore, are heaven-ordained symbols of what mankind
+values most highly&mdash;power over other folks' labour, time, life,
+happiness, and honour. And that, no doubt, is the reason that when the
+irreproachable turn-out and perfect manners of pickpockets allow them to
+mix freely in our select little gatherings, it is legitimate for a lady
+to deck herself with artificial pearls and diamonds only to the exact
+extent that she has real ones safely deposited at the bank. Let her look
+younger and sound honester than perhaps answers to the precise reality;
+there is no deception in all that. But think of the dishonourableness
+of misleading other folk about one's income&#8230;.</p>
+
+<p>My soul was chastened by the seriousness of these reflections and by the
+recognition of the moral difference between real stones and sham ones,
+and I was in a very bad humour. Suddenly there came faint sounds of
+guitars and a mandolin, and I remembered that the servants were giving a
+ball at the other end of the house, and that it was Christmas Eve. I
+rose from my table and opened the window, letting in the music with the
+pure icy air. The night had become quite clear; and in its wintry blue
+the big stars sparkled in a cluster between the branches of my pine
+tree. They made me think of the circlet which Tintoret's Venus swoops
+down with over the head of the ruddy Bacchus and rose-white Ariadne.
+Those, also, I said to myself ill-humouredly, were probably stage
+jewels&#8230;. I cannot account for the sudden train of associations this
+word evoked: sweeping, magnificent gestures, star-like eyes, and a
+goddess' brows shining through innumerable years; a bar or two of
+melodious <i>ritornello</i>; an ineffable sense of poetry and grandeur,
+and&mdash;but I am not sure&mdash;a note or two of a distant, distant voice.
+Could it be Malibran&mdash;or Catalani &#8230; and was my stage jewel bewitched,
+a kind of Solomon's ring, conjuring up great spirits? All I can say is
+that I have rarely spent a Christmas Eve like that one, while the
+servants' ball was going on at the other end of the house, furbishing my
+imitation diamonds with a silk handkerchief, alone, or perhaps not
+alone, in my study.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><a name="c1-18" id="c1-18"></a>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>MY BICYCLE AND I</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>We two were sitting together on the wintry Campagna grass; the rest of
+the party, with their proud, tiresome horses, had disappeared beyond the
+pale green undulations; their carriage had stayed at that castellated
+bridge of the Anio. The great moist Roman sky, with its song of
+invisible larks, arched all round; above the rejuvenated turf rustled
+last year's silvery hemlocks. The world seemed very large, significant,
+and delightful; and we had it all to ourselves, as we sat there side by
+side, my bicycle and I.</p>
+
+<p>'Tis conceited, perhaps, to imagine myself an item in the musings of my
+silent companion, though I would fain be a pleasant one. But this much
+is certain, that, among general praising of life and of things, my own
+thoughts fell to framing the praises of bicycles. They were deeply felt,
+and as such not without appearance of paradox. What an excellent thing,
+I reflected, it is that a bicycle is satisfied to be quiet, and is not
+in the way when one is off it! Now, my friends out there, on their great
+horses, as Herbert of Cherbury calls them, are undoubtedly enjoying many
+and various pleasures; but they miss this pleasure of resting quietly on
+the grass with their steeds sitting calmly beside them. They are busy
+riding, moreover, and have to watch, to curb or humour the fancies of
+their beasts, instead of indulging their own fancy; let alone the
+necessity of keeping up a certain prestige. They are, in reality,
+domineered over by these horses, and these horses' standard of living,
+as fortunate people are dominated by their servants, their clothes, and
+their family connections; much as Merovingian kings, we were taught in
+our "Cours de Dict&eacute;es," were dominated by the mayors of the palace.
+Instead of which, bar accidents (and the malignity of bottle-glass and
+shoe-nails), I am free, and am helped to ever greater freedom by my
+bicycle.</p>
+
+<p>These thoughts came to me while sitting there on the grass slopes,
+rather than while speeding along the solitary road which snakes across
+them to the mountains, because the great gift of the bicycle consists to
+my mind in something apart from mere rapid locomotion; so much so,
+indeed, that those persons forego it, who scorch along for mere
+exercise, or to get from place to place, or to read the record of miles
+on their cyclometer. There is an unlucky tendency&mdash;like the tendency to
+litter on the part of inanimates and to dulness on that of our
+fellow-creatures&mdash;to allow every new invention to add to life's
+complications, and every new power to increase life's hustling; so that,
+unless we can dominate the mischief, we are really the worse off instead
+of the better. It is so much easier, apparently, to repeat the spell
+(once the magician has spoken it) which causes the broomstick to fetch
+water from the well, as in Goethe's ballad, than to remember, or know,
+the potent word which will put a stop to his floodings; that, indeed,
+seems reserved to the master wizard; while the tiros of life's magic,
+puffed up with half-science, do not drink, but drown. In this way
+bicycling has added, methinks, an item to the hurry and breathlessness
+of existence, and to the difficulty of enjoying the passing hour&mdash;nay,
+the passing landscape. I have only once travelled on a bicycle, and,
+despite pleasant incidents and excellent company, I think it was a
+mistake; there was an inn to reach, a train to catch, a meal to secure,
+darkness to race against. And an order was issued, "Always make as much
+pace as you can at the beginning, because there may be some loss of time
+later on," which was insult and ingratitude to those mountain sides and
+valleys of Subiaco and Tivoli, and to the ghosts of St. Benedict, of
+Nero, and of the delightful beribboned Sibyl, who beckoned us to rest in
+their company.</p>
+
+<p>How different from this when one fares forth, companioned by one of the
+same mind; or, better still, with one's own honourable self, exploring
+the unknown, revisiting the already loved, with some sort of
+resting-place to return to, and the knowledge of time pleasantly
+effaced! One speeds along the straight road, flying into the beckoning
+horizon, conscious only of mountain lines or stacked cloud masses;
+living, for the instant, in air, space become fluid and breathable,
+earth a mere detail; and then, at the turn, slackening earth's power
+asserting itself with the road's windings. Curiosity keenly on edge, or
+memory awakened; and the past also casting its spells, with the isolated
+farms or the paved French villages by the river-bank, or the church
+spire, the towers, in the distance&#8230;. A wrong turn is no hardship; it
+merely gives additional knowledge of the country, a further detail of
+the characteristic lie of the land, a different view of some hill or
+some group of buildings. Indeed, I often deliberately deflect, try road
+and lane merely to return again, and have bicycled sometimes half an
+hour round a church to watch its transepts and choir fold and unfold,
+its towers change place, and its outline of high roof and gargoyles
+alter on the landscape. Then the joy, spiced with the sense of
+reluctance, of returning on one's steps, sometimes on the same day, or
+on successive days, to see the same house, to linger under the same
+poplars by the river. Those poplars I am thinking of are alongside a
+stately old French mill, built, towered, and gabled, of fine grey stone;
+and the image of them brings up in my mind, with the draught and foam of
+the weir and the glassiness of the backwater, and the whirr of the
+horse-ferry's ropes, that some of the most delightful moments which
+one's bicycle can give, are those when the bicycle is resting against a
+boat's side (once also in Exmouth harbour); or chained to an old
+lych-gate; or, as I remarked about my Campagna ride, taking its rest
+also and indulging its musings.</p>
+
+<p>I have alluded to the variety and alteration of pace which we can, and
+should, get while bicycling. Skimming rapidly over certain portions of
+the road&mdash;sordid suburbs, for instance&mdash;and precipitating our course to
+the points where we slacken and linger, the body keeps step with the
+spirit; and actuality forestalls, in a way, the selection by memory;
+significance, pleasantness, choice, not brute outer circumstance,
+determining the accentuation, the phrasing (in musical sense) of our
+life. For life must be <i>phrased</i>, lest it become mere jabber, without
+pleasure or lesson. Indeed, one may say that if games teach a man to
+stand a reverse or snatch an opportunity, so bicycling might afford an
+instructive analogy of what things to notice, to talk about and remember
+on life's high-roads and lanes; and what others, whizzing past on scarce
+skimming wheel, to reject from memory and feeling.</p>
+
+<p>The bicycle, in this particular, like the imagination it so well
+symbolizes, is a great liberator, freeing us from dwelling among
+ugliness and rubbish. It gives a foretaste of freedom of the spirit,
+reducing mankind to the only real and final inequality: inequality in
+the power of appreciating and enjoying. The poor clerk, or
+schoolmistress, or obscure individual from Grub Street can, with its
+help, get as much variety and pleasure out of a hundred miles' circuit
+as more fortunate persons from unlimited globetrotting. Nay, the
+fortunate person can on a bicycle get rid of the lumber and litter which
+constitutes so large a proportion of the gifts of Fortune. For the
+things <i>one has to have</i>, let alone the things <i>one has to do</i> (in
+deference to butler and lady's-maid, high priests of fitness), are as
+well left behind, if only occasionally. And among such doubtful gifts of
+fortune is surely the thought of the many people employed in helping one
+to do nothing whatever. It spoils the Campagna, for instance, to have a
+brougham, with coachman and footman, and grooms to lead back the horses,
+all kicking their heels at the bridge of the Anio: worthy persons, no
+doubt, and conscientiously subserving our higher existence; but the
+bare fact of whom, their well-appointed silhouettes, seem somehow
+incongruous as we get further and more solitary among the pale grass
+billows, deeper into that immense space, that unlimited horizon of ages.</p>
+
+<p>These are some of the prestigious merits of the bicycle, though many
+more might be added. This grotesque iron courser, not without some of
+the grasshopper's absurd weirdness, is a creature of infinite capacities
+for the best kind of romance&mdash;the romance of the fancy. It may turn out
+to be (I always suspect it) the very mysterious steed which carried
+adventurous knights and damsels through forests of delightful
+enchantments, sprouting wings, proving a hippogriff and flying up,
+whenever fairies were lacking or whenever envious wizards were fussing
+about. And, as reward&mdash;or perhaps crown&mdash;for its many good services,
+reposed occasionally by Britomart's or Amadis' side, far from the
+world's din, even as my bicycle rested on the pale wintry grass
+hillocks, under the rolling cloud bales and the song of invisible larks,
+of the Campagna.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><a name="c1-19" id="c1-19"></a>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>PUZZLES OF THE PAST</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>I am full of curiosity about the Past. This does not mean that I read
+the memoirs of Napoleon's marshals, or that I write queries to
+antiquarian papers, or that I enjoy being taken to see invisible Pictish
+barrows and Roman encampments; in fact, nothing could be further from my
+character and habits. But the Past puzzles me; and I like being puzzled
+by the Past.</p>
+
+<p>Not in its details, but in all manner of general questions, and such,
+moreover, as very rarely admit of an answer. What are the relations of
+the Past and Present? Where does the Past begin? And, to go further
+still, what <i>is</i> the Past?</p>
+
+<p>All this sounds abstract, and even metaphysical; but it is really quite
+the reverse. These speculations are always connected with some concrete
+place or person, and they arise in my mind (and in the mind of the
+twenty thousand persons whom I don't know, but whom I resemble),
+together with some perspective of street or outline of face, and always
+with a faint puff of emotion. I will give you a typical instance of one
+of these puzzles. It formulated itself in my mind a few weeks ago at
+Verona, while going to see a certain little church on the slopes above
+the Adige. You go through the priest's house and vineyard; there is a
+fine carved lintel and a bit of fresco, all in the midst of a rag fair
+of squalid streets. What a place this must once have been! I felt the
+charm and splendour of piled-up palace and hanging gardens in former
+days. In former days! And a little doubt dropped into it, "If former
+days there ever were." For who can tell? This crumbling, ragged business
+which to us means that we stand before the Past; this gradual perishing
+of things in neglect and defilement, may very well have formed a
+necessary part of our ancestors' present. Our own standard and habit of
+tidiness, decorum, and uniformity may be quite recent developments;
+barbarism, in the sense of decay and pollution, may have existed
+together with prosperity. It is quite possible that dead donkeys were
+left in the streets of Haroun-al-Raschid's Bagdad, or Semiramis'
+Babylon, as well as in those of poor little modern Tangier. And the
+Verona of the Scaligers may have been just such a Verona as this which
+delights and depresses us, only with new beautiful things being built
+quite naturally alongside of decayed and defiled ones; things nowadays
+all equally levelled in ruin and squalor. The splendour of the Past may
+be a mere fiction of our own, like the romance of the Past which we say
+we no longer believe in. But history gives us, I think, no definite
+answer.</p>
+
+<p>With this question another is closely connected. I must explain it by a
+simile. A foreign friend of mine insists, with some show of reason, that
+much as any two countries of the Continent may differ, England contrives
+to differ a great deal more from all of them than they can differ from
+each other. Well, it sometimes strikes me that, in a similar way, our
+Present may be wholly detached from the mass, however heterogeneous, of
+the Past; an island divided from the mainland of history by seas of
+difference, or rather, like the great Arctic countries, a separate
+Continent, shrouded in mystery, of which we know only that its hitherto
+explored shores face, without ever touching, the other mapped-out
+Continent we call the Past. For just think, let us say, of the change
+implied in the multiplication through machinery of a stereotyped form,
+as against the production of an individual object by individual hands.
+Why, such a change means democracy far more than any other change in
+laws and franchises; and it means, among other things, that any art
+sprung really from the present will have to be of the nature, not of the
+painting or sculpture of old days, of the architecture which made each
+single cathedral an individual organism, but of the nature rather of
+process engraving, of lithography (are not our posters, Ch&eacute;eret's, for
+instance, the only thing which our masses see, as their distant forbears
+saw frescoes in churches and <i>campo santos</i>?), of book printing, in
+short; and will not literature and music become more and more the
+typical kinds of art, the creation of one brain projected over millions
+of acres and through mere wires and cylinders? And think also of the
+difference in locomotion. Say what you will, people who rode in coaches
+were bound to be more like people who rode in litters, for all the
+difference between Rome under C&aelig;sar and England under George III., than
+like people who go by train. That is all on the surface, serious persons
+will answer: the pace at which people's body and goods are conveyed
+along may alter without their thoughts or feelings being changed the
+least bit. Perhaps. But are we so absolutely sure of that?</p>
+
+<p>For instance, are we sure we should have been able to get on for half an
+hour together with even our own great-grandparents of little more than a
+hundred years ago? There they hang, our great-grandfathers and mothers
+and uncles and aunts (or some one's else, more likely), painted by
+Reynolds or Raeburn, delightful persons whose ghosts we would give
+anything to meet. Their ghosts; aye, there's the rub. For their ghosts
+would have altered with posthumous experience, would have had glimpses
+of the world we live in, and somewhat conformed to its habits; but could
+we really get on with the living men and women of former days? It is
+true that we understand and enjoy the books which they read, or rather
+a small number of pages out of a smaller number of books. But did they
+read them in the same way? I should not wonder if the different sense in
+which we took their favourite authors, or rather the different sense in
+which we discovered that they were in the habit of taking them, created
+considerable coolness, not to say irritation, between the ghosts of the
+readers of "The Vicar of Wakefield," or "Werther," or the "Nouvelle
+Helo&iuml;se" and ourselves. Besides, they would be monstrously shocked at
+our ways. They would think us marvellously ill-bred. While we! I dare
+scarcely harbour the thought, much less express it. Anyway, it is
+certain that they occasionally allowed Sheridan and Miss Burney (I am
+not even thinking of the remote people of Fielding), and even, alas!
+Miss Austen, to paint pictures of them which we would scarcely own up to
+from novelists and playwrights of our day, and therefore I return to my
+puzzle: is time an unbroken continuity, all its subdivisions merely
+conventional, like those of postal districts; or, as I suggested above,
+are there real chains of mountains, chasms, nay, deep oceans, breaking
+up its surface; and do we not belong, we people of the nineteenth
+century, rather to the future which we are forming than to the Past
+which, much to its astonishment (I should think), produced us?</p>
+
+<p>There are other puzzles about the Past, far more intimate in nature and
+less grandiose, but, on the whole, far less easy to answer. One of these
+is difficult even to word, but every reader will identify it in
+connection with some of the most delightful experiences he has been
+admitted to. Roughly, it may be expressed as follows:&mdash;Were old people
+ever young? Was there a period in the world's history (and not so far
+back) when everybody was enchantingly mixed of primness and romance, had
+little graces of manner, nods and becks and wreathed smiles, with a
+tendency every now and then to employ language rather stronger than the
+occasion warranted? Did youths and maidens wander about with faint moral
+odours of pot-pourri and quaint creases of character, as of
+superannuated garments long folded in a drawer! Or are these qualities
+taken on by each generation in turn, in which case will the Hilda
+Wangels and Dodos of to-day delight the twentieth century as possible
+inmates of Cranford?</p>
+
+<p>Having worked my way to so marvellous a puzzle as this, I had better
+remove the strain by hastily suggesting another question, which will
+satisfactorily get rid of the others, to wit, whether the Past did
+really ever exist?</p>
+
+<p>On the whole, I am tempted to believe that it did not. I can even prove
+it by a logical stroke worthy of the very greatest philosophers. Granted
+that the Past is that which no longer has any existence, only the
+Present could ever be real now; as the Present and the Past cannot
+co-exist, the Past evidently never existed at all; unless, indeed, we
+call in the aid of the Hegelian philosophy, and set our minds at ease by
+a fine reduction of contraries, to the effect that since the Present and
+the Past exclude one another, they evidently must really be the same
+thing at bottom.
+</p>
+
+<p>This is cogent. And yet a doubt continues lurking in my mind. Is not
+what we think of as the Past&mdash;what we discuss, describe, and so often
+passionately love&mdash;a mere creation of our own? Not merely in its
+details, but in what is far more important, in its essential, emotional,
+and imaginative quality and value? Perhaps some day psychology may
+discover that we have a craving, like that which produces music or
+architecture, for a special state of nerves (or of something else, if
+people are bored with nerves by that time), obtainable by a special
+human product called the Past&mdash;the Past which has never been the
+Present.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><a name="c1-20" id="c1-20"></a>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>MAKING PRESENTS</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>It was the dreadful perplexity of making a present to a rich woman. Like
+Heine's sweetheart, she was abundantly provided with diamonds and pearls
+and all things which mankind can wish. And so the lack of any mortal
+thing suggested that, so far from liking to be given it, she would far
+rather not have it at all.</p>
+
+<p>I do not choose to state whether that lady ever did get a present from
+me, for the statement would be an anti-climax. Suffice it that as a
+result of profound meditation I found myself in possession of a
+"Philosophy of Presents," which, copied fair on imaginary vellum, or
+bound in ideal morocco, I now lay at the feet of my friends, as a very
+appropriate gift, and entirely home-made.</p>
+
+<p>The whole subject of presents is bristling with fallacies, which have
+arisen like thistles out of the thinness of our life and the stoniness
+of our hearts. One of these mistaken views is perpetually being put
+forward by people who assert that <i>the pleasantness of a gift lies in
+the good-will of the giver</i>. The notion has a specious air of amiability
+and disinterestedness and general good-breeding; but the only truth it
+really contains is that, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, a present
+gives exactly no pleasure at all. For, if the pleasantness of a present
+depended solely on the expression of good-will, why not express
+good-will in any of the hundred excellent modes of doing so?&mdash;for we
+have all of us, more or less, voice, expressive features, words ready or
+(more expressive still) unready, and occasions enough, Heaven knows! of
+making small sacrifices for our neighbours. And it is entirely
+superfluous to waste our substance and cumber our friends' houses by
+adding to these convenient items, material tokens like, say, gold from
+Ophir and apes and peacocks. There are inconveniences attached to the
+private possession of bullion; many persons dislike the voices of
+peacocks, and I, at all events, am perfectly harrowed by the physiognomy
+of apes.</p>
+
+<p>This, of course, is metaphorical; but it leads me from the mere
+exposition of theory to the argument from experience. If presents are
+pleasant because of the good-will, etc., why are we all brought up (oh,
+the cruelty of suppressed disappointment when the doll arrives instead
+of the wooden horse, or the duplicate kitchen-set instead of the
+longed-for box of bricks!) to pretend that the gift we receive is the
+very thing we have been pining for for years? And here I would ask my
+friend and reader, the often-much-perplexed-giver-and-receiver of gifts,
+whether, quite apart even from those dreadful smothered tragedies of
+one's childhood, there are, among the trifling false positions of life,
+many false positions more painful than that of choosing a gift which one
+knows is not wanted, unless it be the more painful position still of
+receiving a gift which one would tip any one to take away?</p>
+
+<p>Some persons feel this so strongly, wondering why the preacher forgot
+this item in his list of vanities, that you may hear them loudly vowing
+that never again will they be caught in the act of making a present&#8230;.</p>
+
+<p>So far about the mistaken view of the subject; now for the right one,
+which is mine: the result of great experience and of infinite
+meditation, all coming to a head in that recent perplexed business of
+choosing a present for the lady with the diamonds and pearls. And before
+proceeding further, let me say that my experience is really exceptional.
+Not that I have given many gifts, or that I am in the least certain that
+the few I have given were not the usual Dead Sea apples; but because I
+have been, what is much more to the point, a great receiver of presents,
+my room, my house containing nothing beautiful or pleasant that is not a
+present from some dear friend, or (the paradox will be explained later
+on) a present from myself. A great receiver of presents, also, because
+presents give me a very lively and special pleasure; have done so always
+ever since my days of Christmas-trees and birthday candles, leaving all
+through my life a particular permeating charm connected with certain
+dates and seasons, like the good, wonderful smell of old fir-needles
+slightly toasted, and of wax tapers recently extinguished, so that all
+very delightful places and moments are apt to affect me as a sort of
+gift-giving, what the Germans have a dear word for, beloved of children,
+<i>Bescheerung</i>. For if life, wisely lived, ought to be, as I firmly
+believe, nothing but a long act of courtship, then, surely, its
+exquisite things&mdash;summer nights with loose-hanging stars, pale sunny
+winter noons, first strolls through towered towns or upon herb-scented
+hills, the hearing again of music one has understood, not to speak of
+the gesture and voice of the people whom one holds dear&mdash;all these, and
+all other exquisite movements or exquisite items of life, should be felt
+with the added indescribable pleasure of being gifts.</p>
+
+<p>A present, then, may be defined as a <i>thing which one wants given by a
+person whom one likes</i>. But our English syntax falls short of my
+meaning, for what I would wish to say is rather, in Teutonic fashion, "a
+by a person one likes to one given object one wants." The stress of the
+sentence should be laid on the word <i>wants</i>. For much of the charm, and
+most of the dignity, of a gift depends on its being <i>a thing one would
+otherwise have done without</i>.</p>
+
+<p>This is true even with those dreadful useful objects which make us feel
+hot to distribute; they have become melancholy possible presents
+because, alas! however necessary, they would otherwise not have been
+forthcoming. And, apart from such cases, mankind has always decided that
+gifts should not be of the nature of blankets, or manuals of science, or
+cooking-pots, but rather flowers, fruit, books of poetry, and the wares
+of silken Samarkand and cedared Lebanon. It is admitted upon all hands
+that, to be perfect, presents must be superfluities; but I should like
+to add that the reverse also holds good, and that superfluities would be
+the better, nine times out of ten, for being presents.</p>
+
+<p>'Tis, methinks, a sign of the recent importation and comparative
+scarcity of honest livelihoods, that we should think so much how we come
+by our money, and so little how we part with it, as if we were free to
+waste, provided we do not steal. Now, <i>my manuals of political economy</i>
+(which were, of course, <i>not</i> presents to me) make it quite plain that
+whatever we spend in mere self-indulgence is so much taken away from the
+profitable capital of the community; and sundry other sciences, which
+require no manuals to teach them, make it plainer still that the habit
+of indulging, upon legal payment, our whims and our greedinesses, fills
+our houses with lumber and our souls with worse than lumber where there
+might be light and breathable air. Extremes meet: and even as to
+paupers, the barest necessaries of life are superfluities&mdash;things
+dispensed with; so, at the other end of the vicious circle, to the
+spendthrift luxury ceases to be luxury, and superfluities are turned
+into things one cannot do without.</p>
+
+<p>The charm of a gift, its little moral flavour which makes us feel the
+better for it, resides, therefore, not merely in good-will, but in the
+little prelude of self-restraint on the one hand, of unselfishness on
+the other. Unless you gave it me, I should not have that pleasant thing;
+and you, knowing this much, give it to me, instead of to yourself. What
+a complicated lovers'-knot of good-feeling there is tied, as round
+flowers or sweetmeats, round every genuine present! This is a rich,
+varied impression, full of harmonies; compare with it the dry, dull,
+stifling impression one gets from looking round a rich man's house, or
+admiring the ornaments of a rich woman's person: all these things having
+merely been bought!</p>
+
+<p>Yet buying can be a fine thing. And among genuine presents (and in an
+honourable place) I certainly include&mdash;as I hinted some way back&mdash;the
+presents which people <i>sometimes make to themselves</i>. For 'tis a genuine
+present when a person who never allows himself a superfluity, at last
+buys one, as Charles and Mary Lamb did their first blue pots and prints,
+out of slowly saved up pennies. There is in that all the grace of long
+self-restraint, and the grace of finally triumphant love&mdash;love for that
+faithfully courted object, that Rachel among inanimates! The giving to
+one's self of such a present is a fit occasion for rejoicing; and 'tis a
+proper instinct (more proper than the one of displaying wedding
+presents) which causes the united giver and receiver of the gift to
+summon the neighbours, to see it and rejoice, not without feasting.</p>
+
+<p>But presents of this sort are even more difficult to compass than the
+other sort where people, like the lady sung by Heine, have pearls and
+diamonds in plenty, and all things which mankind can wish.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><a name="c1-21" id="c1-21"></a>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>GOING AWAY</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>We stood on the steps of the old Scotch house as the carriage rolled her
+away. A last greeting from that delightful, unflagging voice; the misty
+flare of the lanterns round a corner; and then nothing but the darkness
+of the damp autumn night. There is to some foolish persons&mdash;myself
+especially&mdash;a strange and almost supernatural quality about the fact of
+departure, one's own or that of others, which constant repetition seems,
+if anything, merely to strengthen. I cannot become familiar with the
+fact that a moment, the time necessary for a carriage, as in this case,
+to turn a corner, or for those two steel muscles of the engine to play
+upon each other, can do so complete and wonderful a thing as to break
+the continuity of intercourse, to remove a living presence. The
+substitution of an image for a reality, the present broken off short and
+replaced by the past; enumerating this by no means gives the equivalent
+of that odd and unnatural word GONE. And the terror of death itself lies
+surely in its being the most sudden and utter act of <i>going away</i>.</p>
+
+<p>I suppose there must be people who do not feel like this, as there are
+people also who do not feel, apparently, the mystery of change of place,
+of watching the familiar lines of hill or valley transform themselves,
+and the very sense of one's bearings, what was in front or to the other
+side, east or west, getting lost or hopelessly altered. Such people's
+lives must be (save for misfortune) funnily undramatic; and, trying to
+realize them, I understand why such enormous crowds require to go and
+see plays.</p>
+
+<p>It is usually said that in such partings as these&mdash;partings with
+definite hope of meeting and with nothing humanly tragic about them, so
+that the last interchange of voice is expected to be a laugh or a
+joke&mdash;the sadder part is for those who stay. But I think this is
+mistaken. There is indeed a little sense of flatness&mdash;almost of
+something in one's chest&mdash;when the train is gone or the carriage rolled
+off; and one goes back into one's house or into the just-left room,
+throwing a glance all round as if to measure the emptiness. But the
+accustomed details&mdash;the book we left open, the order we had to give, the
+answer brought to the message, and breakfast and lunch and dinner and
+the postman, all the great eternities&mdash;gather round and close up the
+gap: close the gone one, and that piece of past, not merely <i>up</i>, but,
+alas! <i>out</i>.</p>
+
+<p>It is the sense of this, secret even in the most fatuous breast, which
+makes things sadder for the goer. He knows from experience, and, if he
+have imagination, he feels, this process of closing him out, this rapid
+adaptation to doing without him. And meanwhile he, in his carriage or
+train, is being hurled into the void; for even the richest man and he of
+the most numerous clients, is turned adrift without possessions or
+friends, a mere poor nameless orphan, when on a solitary journey. There
+is, moreover, a sadder feeling than this in the heart of the more
+sentimental traveller, who has engaged the hospitality of friends. <i>He
+knows it is extended equally to others</i>; that this room, which he may
+have made peculiarly his own, filling it, perhaps, in proportion to the
+briefness of sojourn, with his own most personal experience; the
+landscape made his own through this window, the crucial conversation,
+receiving unexpected sympathies, held or (more potent still) thought
+over afterwards in that chair; he knows that this room will become,
+perhaps, O horror, within a few hours, another's!</p>
+
+<p>The extraordinary hospitality of England, becoming, like all English
+things, rather too well done materially, rather systematic, and
+therefore heartless, inflicts, I have been told, some painful blows on
+sentimental aliens, particularly of Latin origin. There is a pang in
+finding on the hospitable door a label-holder with one's name in it: it
+saves losing one's way, but suggests that one is apt to lose it, is a
+stranger in the house; and it tells of other strangers, past and future,
+each with his name slipped in. Similarly the guest-book, imitated from
+nefarious foreign inns, so fearfully suggestive of human instability,
+with its close-packed signatures, and dates of arrival and departure.
+And then the cruelty of housekeepers, and the ruthlessness of
+housemaids! Take heed, O Thestylis, dear Latin guardian of my hearth,
+take heed and imprint my urgent wishes in thy faithful heart: never,
+never, never, in my small southern home (not unlike, I sometimes fondly
+fancy, the Poet's <i>parva domus</i>), never let me surprise thee depositing
+thy freshly-whitened linen in heaps outside the door of the departing
+guest; and never, I conjure thee, offend his eye or nostril with mops,
+or <i>frotteur's</i> rollers, or resinous scent of furniture-polish near his
+small chamber! For that chamber, kindly Handmaiden, is <i>his</i>. He is the
+Prophet it was made for; and the only Prophet conceivable as long as
+present. And when he takes departure, why, the void must follow, a long
+hiatus, darkness, and stacked-up furniture, and the scent of varnish
+within tight-closed shutters&#8230;.</p>
+
+<p>But, alas! alas! not all kind Thestylis's doing and refraining is able
+to dispel the natural sense of coming and going: one's bed re-made,
+one's self replaced, new boxes brought and unpacked, metaphorically as
+well as literally; fresh adjustments, new subjects of discourse, new
+sympathies: and the poor previous occupant meanwhile <i>rolling</i>, as the
+French put it. Rolling! how well the word expresses that sense of smooth
+and empty nowhere, with nothing to catch on or keep, which plays so
+large a part in all our earthly experience; as, for the rest, is
+natural, seeing that the earth is only a ball, at least the astronomers
+say so.</p>
+
+<p>But let us turn from this painful side of <i>going away</i>; and insist
+rather on certain charming impressions sometimes connected with it. For
+there is something charming and almost romantic, when, as in the case I
+mentioned, the friend leaves friends late in the evening. There is the
+whole pleasant day intact, with leisurely afternoon stroll when all is
+packed and ready: watching the sunset up the estuary, picking some
+flowers in the garden; sometimes even seeing the first stars prick
+themselves upon the sky, and mild sheet-lightnings, auguring good, play
+round the house, disclosing distant hills and villages. And the orderly
+dinner, seeming more swept and garnished for the anticipation of bustle,
+the light on the cloth, the sheen on the silver, the grace and fragrance
+of fruit and flowers, and the gracious faces above it, remains a wide
+and steady luminous vision on the black background of midnight travel,
+of the train rushing through nothingness. Most charming of all, when
+after the early evening on the balcony, the traveller leaves the south,
+to hurtle by night, conscious only of the last impression of supper with
+kind friends at Milan or the lakes, and the glimpse, in the station
+light, of heads covered with veils, and flowers in the hands, and
+southern evening dresses. These are the occasional gracious
+compensations for that bad thing called going away.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><a name="c1-22" id="c1-22"></a>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>COMING BACK</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Most people tell you that to return to places where one has been
+exceptionally happy is an unwise proceeding. But this, I venture to
+conceive, is what poor Alfred de Musset called "une insulte au bonheur."
+It shows, at all events, a lack of appreciation of the particular
+nature, permanent, and, in a manner, radiating, of happy experiences. Of
+course, I am not speaking of the cases where the happy past has been
+severed from indifferent present and future by some dreadful calamity;
+poetry alone is consolatory and also aloof enough to deal decorously
+with such tragic things, and they are no concern of the essayist. There
+is, besides, a very individual and variable character about great
+misfortunes, no two natures being affected by them quite alike, so that
+discussion and generalization are not merely intrusive, but also mostly
+fruitless. Therefore the question is not whether people are wise or
+unwise in avoiding places where they have been happy, after events which
+have shattered their happiness. And the only loss I have to deal with is
+the loss&mdash;if it really is one, as we shall examine&mdash;of the actual
+circumstances which accompanied a happy experience; the loss of the
+<i>then</i> as opposed to the <i>now</i>, and, in a measure of the irrecoverable
+time, years or months, and of the small luggage of expectations and
+illusions which has got inevitably mislaid or scattered in the interval.
+And the question arises whether 'tis wiser, in a sense whether it is
+more delicately epicurean, to avoid the places which bring all that,
+together with the sense of the happy gone-by days, vividly home to one;
+or whether, as I contend, past happiness ought not to be used as an
+essential element in the happiness of the present.</p>
+
+<p>I have had, lately, the experience of returning to a part of the world
+which I had not seen for many, many years, and where I had spent the
+drowsy long days of a long illness, and the dreamy sweet days of a
+longer convalescence. It made a day's journey, without any especial
+resting-place for the soles of my feet, and undertaken, I can scarcely
+tell why, with a little shyness and fear. I did not go to the house
+where I had lived, but to one in the neighbourhood, whither I had often
+been taken all those years ago; and I did not even take the
+precaution&mdash;or perhaps took the contrary one&mdash;of securing the presence
+of the owners. The ladies were out; gone to one of the little fishing
+towns which are strung all around the Forth, and they would not be back
+till teatime. But the benevolent Scottish housemaid, noticing perhaps a
+shadow of disappointment, suggested my going in and waiting.</p>
+
+<p>The little old castle, which had got a little blurred in my
+recollection, seemed suddenly remembered and familiar, even as had been
+the case with the country I had driven along from the station; the
+undulating turnip-fields and fields of pale stooked corn, the
+reaping-machines and the women tying up the bean-straw, the white line
+of the Forth, and the whole pale, delicate country under the low,
+tender, <i>intimate</i> northern sky. Even the smell, sweet and pungent, of
+the withered potatoes, bringing the sense of knowing it all, turnings
+of roads and of the land, so well. And similarly inside the castle,
+where I lingered on the pretext of writing a note to those ladies. It
+was all unchanged; the escutcheons in relief on the ceiling, the view of
+cornfield and thin beech belts, and distant sea from the windows, the
+lavender and <i>pot-pourri</i> in the bowls, and almost the titles of the
+books, seemed quietly, at the touch of reality, to open out in
+remembrance. I did not stay till the return of the ladies, but went back
+to the station, and waited on the bridge for my train, which was a good
+half-hour late. I looked down from that bridge on the kind and gentle
+country in the veiled sunshine. The hill to the back of the house where
+I had lived, in the distance, the red roofs of the fishing villages, the
+little spire of the smallest of them barely projecting, as it always
+did, above the freshly reaped fields. And I felt, as I leaned against
+the parapet watching for my train's smoke coming towards me, not the
+loss, but rather the inestimable gain which a kindly past represents.
+Years gone by? Nay, rather years which make endurable, which furnish and
+warm the present, giving it sweetness and significance. How very poor
+we must be in our early youth, with no possessions like these; and how
+rich in our later life, with many years distilled into the essence of a
+single to-day!</p>
+
+<p>As I stood on the railway bridge thinking or feeling in this manner, I
+heard wheels, and saw a pony-cart, with an elderly lady, and a younger
+one driving her, coming towards me. It was the ladies who had been so
+kind to me all those years back, returning to the little castle. I
+turned my back, leaned on the parapet, and let them pass me, unnoticing.
+I wanted to keep them also in that dim and dear kind past.</p>
+
+<p>For we must be discreet as well as grateful-hearted if we would enjoy
+the Past's full gifts&#8230;.</p>
+
+<p>The Past's gifts; and to these I would add, or among them rather I would
+include, an item which I find a difficulty in naming properly, and
+which, of course, I hesitate a little to speak about. I mean the gifts,
+odd as it sounds, of Death. For Death, while in his main function the
+cruel taker-away, the violent or stealthy robber, has also a less
+important side to his character, and is a giver of gifts, if only we
+know how to receive them. And he is this even apart from his power (for
+which one might imagine that the Greeks gave him, in certain terra
+cottas and reliefs, so very gentle and beautiful an aspect) of bringing
+light and loving-kindness into poor human creatures' judgments, and
+teaching them to understand and pardon; apart also from that mystic
+relationship, felt by Dante and all the poets, which he bears to the
+genius of imaginative love. What I allude to is a more humble, but quite
+as gracious function, of leading those he takes away (with the
+infinitely tender gesture of the antique funereal Hermes), not into
+vacuity and the horrid blackness of oblivion, but into a place of safe
+and serene memory. In this capacity Death can be, even like his master,
+Time, a giver of gifts to us. For those <i>are</i> gifts to us, those friends
+he gathers together under hazier, tenderer skies into our thoughts which
+have the autumn warmth and stillness of late-reaped fields. Nay, the
+gift is greater, for there are added certain half-strangers, towards
+whom we lose all shyness, and who turn to real friends when introduced
+by death and worked into our past; dear such-an-one, whom we scarcely
+knew, barely more than face and name <i>then</i>, but know and have the right
+to care for now. So that I think that we might extract and take with
+happy interpretation those two last lines of the old, old Goethe's
+heartbreaking dedication to the generations whom he had outlived:&mdash;</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p class="noindent">"Was ich besitze, seh' ich wie im Weiten,<br />
+Und was verschwand, wird mir zu Wirklichkeiten."</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>For all which reasons let us never be afraid of going back to places
+where we have been exceptionally happy; not even in the cases where we
+recognize that such former happiness was due, in part, to some dispelled
+illusion. For if we can but learn to be glad of the Past and receive its
+gift with gratitude, may not the remembrance of a dear illusion, brought
+home with the sight of the places which we filled with it, be merely
+another blessing; a possession which nothing can rob us of, and by which
+our spirit is the richer?</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><a name="c1-23" id="c1-23"></a>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>LOSING ONE'S TRAIN</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>The clocks up at the villa must have been all wrong, or else my watch
+did not go with them, or else I had not looked often enough at it while
+rambling about the town on my way to the station. Certain it is that
+when I got there, at the gallop of my cab-horse, the express was gone.
+There is something hatefully inexorable about expresses: it is useless
+to run after them, even in Italy. The next train took an hour and a
+quarter instead of forty minutes to cover the nineteen miles between
+Pistoia and Florence. Moreover, that next train was not till eight in
+the evening, and it was now half-past five.</p>
+
+<p>I felt all it was proper to feel on the occasion, and said, if anything,
+rather more. Missing a train is a terrible business, even if you miss
+nothing else in consequence; and the inner disarray, the blow and wrench
+to thoughts and feelings, is most often far worse than any mere
+upsetting of arrangements. A chasm suddenly gapes between present and
+future, and the river of life flows backwards, if but for a second. It
+is most fit and natural to lose one's temper; but the throwing out of so
+much moral ballast does not help one to overtake that train. I mention
+this, lest I should pass for heartless; and now proceed to say that,
+after a few minutes given to wrath and lamentation, I called the cab
+back and went in search of a certain very ancient church, containing a
+very ancient pulpit, which I had never succeeded in seeing before.
+Exactly as on previous occasions, when I got to the farm where the key
+of that church was kept, the key had gone to town in the pocket of the
+peasant. He would be back, no doubt, at nightfall. But I had not very
+much expected the church to be open, so I felt perfectly indifferent at
+not seeing the pulpit&mdash;nay, if anything, a little relieved, as one does
+sometimes when friends prove <i>not at home</i>.</p>
+
+<p>I walked up a long steep track to the little battered, black,
+fast-locked church, which stands all alone under some oak trees. The
+track was through thin hillside woods. Such divine woods! young oak and
+acacia, and an undergrowth of grass and ferns, of full-blown roses
+thrown across the grass; and here and there, dark in that pale young
+green, a cypress. The freshness of evening came all of a sudden, and
+with it a scent of every kind of leaf and herb and fern, and the
+sweetness of the ripening corn all round. And when I got to the ridge,
+slippery with dry cut grass, what should I see in front of me, over the
+olive-yards and the wooded slopes, but the walls and towers of
+Serravalle, which have beckoned to my fancy almost ever since my
+childhood. I sat there a long while in the June sunset and very nearly
+missed the second train, which it had seemed intolerable to wait for.</p>
+
+<p>This is an allegory, and I commend its application to the wise and
+gentle reader. There are more of such symbolical trains lost than real
+ones, even by the most travelled mortals, Odysseus or a bag-man. And
+such losing of trains is not inevitably a blessing. I have often written
+about life with optimistic heartlessness, because life, on the whole,
+has been uncommonly kind to me, and because one is nearer the truth
+when cheerful than when depressed. But this is the place for a brief
+interlude of pessimism. For it is all very well to make the best of
+losing trains when we have time, cabs, and a fine view at hand; and when
+in losing the train we lose nothing else, except our temper. But surely
+'tis no ingratitude towards life's great mercies and blessings to
+discriminate them from life's buffets and bruisings. And methinks that
+the teaching of courage or resignation might fitly begin by the
+recognition of the many cases where only courage or resignation avails,
+because they are thoroughly bad. There is something stupid and underbred
+at times in the attitude of saints and stoics&mdash;at least in their books.
+When Rachel weepeth for her children, we have no business to come round
+hawking our consolation; we should stand aside, unless we can cradle her
+to sleep in our arms. And if we refuse to weep, 'tis not because there
+is not matter enough for weeping, but because we require our strength
+and serenity to carry her through her trouble. Pain, dear cheerful
+friends, is pain; and grief, grief; and if our own complete human
+efficiency requires the acquaintance thereof, 'tis because the
+knowledge of their violence and of their wiles is needed for our own
+protection and the helping of other folk. Evil comes from the gods, no
+doubt; but so do all things; and to extract good from it&mdash;the great
+Prometheus-feat of man&mdash;is not to evil's credit, but to the credit of
+good. The contrary doctrine is a poison to the spirit, though a poison
+of medicinal use in moments of anguish, a bromide or an opiate.</p>
+
+<p>I am speaking, therefore, only of such contingencies as will bear
+comparison, without silly stoicism, to the missing of a train. Much of
+the good such disappointments may contain is of the nature of education,
+and most of it a matter of mere novelty. Without suspecting it, we are
+all suffering from lack of new departures; and life would no doubt be
+better if we tried a few more things, and gave the hidden, neglected
+possibilities a greater chance. Change as such is often fruitful of
+improvement, exposing to renovating air and rains the hard, exhausted
+soil of our souls, turning up new layers and helping on life's
+chemistry. The thwarting of our cherished plans is beneficial, because
+our plans are often mere routine, born not of wisdom, but of inertness.
+In our endless treadmill of activity, in our ceaseless rumination, we
+are, as a fact, neither acting nor thinking; and life, secretly at a
+standstill, ceases to produce any good. There was no reason for taking
+that express and getting back two or three hours sooner to my house: no
+one required me, nothing needed doing. Yet, unless I had lost that train
+I should not have dreamed of taking that walk, of making that little
+journey of discovery, in a delightful unknown place.</p>
+
+<p>There is another source of good hidden in disappointment. For it is
+disappointment rather than age (age getting the credit for what it
+merely witnesses) which teaches us to work into life's scheme certain
+facts, frequently difficult of acceptance; trying to make them, as all
+reality should be, causes of strength rather than of weakness. Painful
+facts? Or rather, perhaps, only painful contradictions to certain
+pleasant delusions, founded on nothing save their pleasantness, and
+taken for granted&mdash;who knows how long?&mdash;without proof and without
+questioning. Facts concerning not merely success, love, personal
+contact, but also one's own powers and possibilities for good, what the
+world is able to receive at one's hands, as much as of what the world
+can give to one.</p>
+
+<p>But the knowledge which disappointment gives, to those wishing to learn
+from it, has a higher usefulness than practical application. It
+constitutes a view of life, a certain contemplative attitude which, in
+its active resignation, in its domination of reality by intelligent
+acquiescence, gives continuity, peace, and dignity. And here my allegory
+finds its completion. For what compensated me after my lost train and
+all my worry and vexation of spirit? Nothing to put in my pocket or
+swell my luggage, not even a kingdom, such as made up for the loss of
+poor Saul's asses; but an impression of sunset freshness and sweetness
+among ripening corn and delicate leaves, and a view, unexpected, solemn,
+and charming, with those long-forgotten distant walls and towers which I
+shall never reach, and which have beckoned to me from my childhood.</p>
+
+<p>Such is the allegory, or morality, of the Lost Train.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><a name="c1-24" id="c1-24"></a>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h3>THE HANGING GARDENS</h3>
+
+<h5>VALEDICTORY</h5>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>I am not alluding to those of Semiramis. Though, now I come to think of
+it, this is the moment for protesting against one of those unnecessary
+deceptions from which the candid mind of children is allowed to suffer.
+For the verb <i>to hang</i> invariably implies that the hanging object (or,
+according to our jurisprudence, person) is supported by a rope, nail, or
+other device, from above, while remaining unsupported from below. And it
+was in such relations to the forces of gravitation that my infancy
+conceived those gardens of the Babylonish Queen. So that I quite
+remember my bitter disappointment (the first germ, doubtless, of a
+general scepticism about Gods and Men) when a cut in an indiscreet
+<i>Handbook of Antiquities</i> displayed these flowery places as resting
+flatly on a housetop, and no more hanging, in any intelligible sense,
+than I hung myself.</p>
+
+<p>Having lodged this complaint, I will, however, admit that this
+misleading adjective comes as a boon in the discourse I am now
+meditating. Since, returning to my old theme of the <i>Garden of Life</i>, I
+find that the misapplication of that word <i>Hanging</i>, and its original
+literal suggestion, lends added significance to this allegoric dictum:
+Of all the <i>Gardens of Life</i> the best worth cultivating are often the
+Hanging Ones. Yes! Hanging between the town pavement, a hundred feet
+below, and the open sky, with gales ready to sweep down every flower-pot
+into smithereens, the kind or wicked sky, immediately above. Moreover,
+as regards legal claim to soil, leasehold, freehold, or copyhold, why,
+simply none, the earth having been carried up to that precarious place
+in arduous basketfuls.</p>
+
+<p>One of the wisest of women (I say it with pride, for she is my godchild)
+put this skyey allegory of mine into plain words, which I often repeat
+to myself, and never without profit. The circumstances and character of
+her husband had involved her in wanderings from her very wedding-day;
+and each of her six children had been born in a different place, and
+each in a more unlikely one. "It must have been very difficult to settle
+down at last like this," I said, looking in admiration from the dainty
+white walls and white carpets to the delicately laid table, with the
+flowers upon it and around it&mdash;I mean the garland of pink little faces
+and pink little pinafores. "I wonder you could do it after so long."
+"But I have always been what you call <i>settled</i>," she answered, and
+added very simply&mdash;"As soon as I took in that we should always be
+eternally uprooting, I made up my mind that the only way was to live as
+if we should never move at all. You see, everything would have gone to
+bits if I had let myself realise the contrary, and I think I should have
+gone crazy into the bargain."</p>
+
+<p>There has been a good deal of <i>going to bits</i> and of craziness of sorts
+owing to the centuries and the universe not always having been as wise
+as this lady. And&mdash;with all deference to higher illuminations&mdash;I am
+tempted to ask myself whether all creeds, which have insisted on life's
+fleetingness and vanity, have not played considerable havoc with the
+fruitfulness, let alone the pleasantness, of existence. Certainly the
+holy persons who awaited the end of the world in caves, and on platforms
+fastened to columns, had not well-furbished knives and forks, nor
+carefully folded linen, nor, as a rule, nicely behaved nice little boys
+and girls, waiting with eager patience for a second helping of pudding.
+There is a distressing sneer at soap ("scented soap" it is always
+called), even in the great Tolstoi's writings, ever since he has allowed
+himself to be hag-ridden by the thought of death. And one speculates
+whether the care true saints have bestowed upon their souls, if not
+their bodies, the swept and garnished character of the best monasticism,
+has not been due to the fact that all this tidiness was in preparation
+for an eternity of beatitude?</p>
+
+<p>Fortunately for the world, the case of my dear goddaughter is an
+extreme one; and although our existence is quite as full of uprootings
+as hers, they come in such a stealthy or such a tragic manner as to
+beget no expectation of recurrence. Moreover, the very essence of life
+is to make us believe in itself; we fashion the future out of our
+feelings of the present, and go on living as if we should live for
+ever, simply because, by the nature of things, we have no experience
+of ceasing to live. Life is for ever murmuring to us the secret of its
+unendingness; and it is to our honour, and for our happiness, that we,
+poor flashes of a second, identify ourselves with the great unceasing,
+steady light which we and millions of myriads besides go to make up.
+Are we much surer of being alive to-morrow than of being dead in fifty
+years? "Is there any moment which can certify to its successor?" That
+is the answer to La Fontaine's octogenarian, planting his trees,
+despite the gibes of the little beardless boys whom, as is inevitable
+in such cases, he survived.</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p class="noindent"><span class="ind8">D&eacute;fendez-vous au sage<br />
+De se donner des soins pour le plaisir d'autrui?<br />
+Cela m&ecirc;me est un fruit qui je go&ucirc;te aujourd'hui;<br />
+J'en puis jouir demain, et quelques jours encore.</span></p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>And all I would add is that, although it was very nice of the old man
+to enjoy his planting because of the unborn generations who would eat
+the fruits, he might have been less nice and quite as pleased if, as
+is probable, he liked gardening for its own sake.</p>
+
+<p>But people seem&mdash;on account of that horrid philosophical and
+moralising twist&mdash;to cast about for an excuse whenever they are doing
+what is, after all, neither wicked nor silly&mdash;to wit, making the best
+of such days and such powers as a merciful Providence or an
+indifferent trio of Fates has allowed them. But I should like to turn
+the tables on these persons, and suggest that all this worrying about
+whether life is or is not worth living, and hunting for answers for
+and against, may itself be an excuse, unconscious like all the most
+mischievous excuses, and hide not finer demands and highbred
+discontents, but rather a certain feebleness, lack of grip and
+adaptation, and an indolent acquiescence in what my godchild stoutly
+refused, a greater or lesser going to bits.</p>
+
+<p>This much is certain, that we all of us have to make a stand against
+such demoralisation whenever our plans are upset, or we are impatient to
+do something else, or we are feeling worried and ill. We most of us have
+to struggle against leaving our portmanteau gaping on a sofa or throwing
+our boot-trees into corners when we are in a place only for a few hours;
+and struggle against allowing the flowers on the table to wither, and
+the fire to go out, when we are setting out on a journey next day, or a
+dear one is about to say goodbye. "See to that fire being kept up, and
+bring fresh roses," said a certain friend of mine on a similar occasion.
+That was laying out a little hanging garden on the narrow ledge of two
+or three poor hours; and, behold! the garden has continued to be sweet
+and bright in the wide safe places of memory.</p>
+
+<p>In saying all these things, I am aware that many wise men, or men
+reputed wise, are against me; and that pretty hard words have been
+applied in the literature of all countries and ages to persons who are
+of my way of thinking, as, for instance, <i>gross, thoughtless, without
+soul</i>, and <i>Epicurean Swine</i>. And some of the people I like most to
+read about, the heroes of Tolstoi, Andr&eacute;, Levine, Pierre, and, of
+course, Tolstoi himself, are for ever repeating that they can not
+live, let alone enjoy life, unless some one tell them why they should
+live at all.</p>
+
+<p>The demand, at first sight, does not seem unreasonable, and it is hard
+lines that just those who will ask about such matters should be the very
+ones for ever denied an answer. But so it is. The secret of <i>why we
+should live</i> can be whispered only by a divinity; and, like the
+divinity who spoke to the Prophet, its small, still voice is heard only
+in ourselves. What it says there is neither couched in a logical form
+nor articulated in very definite language; and, I am bound to admit, is
+in no way of the nature of <i>pure reason</i>. Indeed, it is for the most
+part ejaculatory, and such that the veriest infant and simpleton, and I
+fear even animals (which is a dreadful admission), can follow its
+meaning. For to that unceasing question <i>Why</i>? the tiny voice within us
+answers with imperturbable irrelevance, "I want," "I do," "I think," and
+occasionally "I love." Very crass little statements, and not at all
+satisfactory to persons like Levine, Andr&eacute;, and Tolstoi, who, for the
+most part, know them only second-hand; but wonderfully satisfying, thank
+goodness, to the great majority which hears them for ever humming and
+beating with the sound of its own lungs and heart. And one might even
+suspect that they are merely a personal paraphrase of the words which
+the spheres are singing and the heavens are telling.</p>
+
+<p>So, if we have no ampler places to cultivate with reverence and love,
+let us betake ourselves to the hanging gardens on our roof. The suns
+will cake the insufficient earth and parch the delicate roots; the
+storms will batter and tear the frail creepers. No doubt. But at this
+present moment all is fair and fragrant. And when the storms have done
+their wicked worst, and the sun and the frosts&mdash;nay, when that roof on
+which we perch is pulled to pieces, tiles and bricks, and the whole
+block goes&mdash;may there not be, for those caring enough, the chance of
+growing another garden, there or elsewhere?</p>
+
+<p>Be this as it may, one thing is certain, that no solid plot of earth
+between its walls or hedges allows us such intricate and unexpected
+bird's-eye views of streets and squares, of the bustling or resting
+city; none gives us such a vault of heaven, pure and sunny, or creeping
+with clouds, or serenely starlit, as do these hanging gardens of our
+life.</p>
+
+<h4>THE END</h4>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h2>HORTUS VITAE;</h2>
+<h4>OR, THE HANGING GARDENS:</h4>
+<h4>MORALIZING ESSAYS.</h4>
+<h6>BY</h6>
+<h2>VERNON LEE.</h2>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<blockquote>
+<p class="noindent"><i>Times.</i>&mdash;"There are many charming flowers in it &#8230; the swift
+
+to-and-fro of her vivid, capricious mind carries the reader hither
+
+and thither at her will, and she has such wise, suggestive things
+
+to say&#8230;. Whenever and wherever she speaks of Italy, the
+
+sun shines in this garden of hers, the south wind stirs among
+
+the roses."</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+
+
+<blockquote>
+<p class="noindent"><i>Standard.</i>&mdash;"There are imagination and fancy in the volume, a
+
+wise and independent outlook on society, an undercurrent of
+
+genial humour, and, what is perhaps still more rare, an invitation
+
+to think."</p></blockquote>
+
+
+
+
+
+<blockquote>
+<p class="noindent"><i>Westminster Gazette.</i>&mdash;"They are of the family of Lamb, Hunt,
+
+and Hazlitt, just as those derive from the Augustans, Addison,
+
+and Steele&#8230;. Vernon Lee possesses the best gifts of the
+
+essayists&mdash;the engaging turn, the graceful touch, the subtle
+
+allusiveness."</p></blockquote>
+
+
+
+<blockquote>
+<p class="noindent"><i>Outlook.</i>&mdash;"Vernon Lee possesses a mind richly imbued with the
+
+lore of the finest literature, and distinguished by just that touch
+
+of paradox, of the unexpected, which is the other indispensable
+
+requisite of the true essayist. Also her philosophy is never
+
+aggressively didactic, but always refreshing and helpful."</p></blockquote>
+
+
+
+<blockquote>
+<p class="noindent"><i>Speaker.</i>&mdash;"This volume of essays gives us the work of Vernon Lee in
+
+her most eager and abundant mood&#8230;. Cordial pages that convey so much
+
+sincerity of heart, so much warmth, so much courage and love of life."</p></blockquote>
+
+
+
+<blockquote>
+<p class="noindent"><i>Pilot.</i>&mdash;"All that Vernon Lee has written is strong and good &#8230; and
+
+her shrewd observation has enabled her to see below the
+
+surface of life."</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+
+<div class="center">
+<p class="ind12">JOHN LANE, <span class="smallcaps">Publisher</span>,<br /> LONDON &amp; NEW YORK</p>
+</div>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h3><i>BY THE SAME AUTHOR</i></h3>
+
+
+
+<p class="ind10">LIMBO; and Other Essays</p>
+
+<p class="ind10">GENIUS LOCI. Notes on Places</p>
+
+<p class="ind10">PENELOPE BRANDLING</p>
+
+<p class="ind10">ARIADNE IN MANTUA<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;A Romance in Five Acts</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>SOME NEW POETRY</h3>
+
+<div class="center">
+<p class="noindent">A MASQUE OF MAY MORNING.<br />
+By <span class="smallcaps">W. Graham Robertson</span>.<br />
+With Twelve Full-page Illustrations in Colour by the Author.<br />
+Fcap. 4to. <i>7s. 6d.</i> net.</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">CORNISH BALLADS AND OTHER POEMS.<br />
+Being the Complete Poetical Works of <span class="smallcaps">Robert Stephen Hawker</span>,<br />
+sometime Vicar of Morwenstow, Cornwall. Edited by <span class="smallcaps">C. E. BYLES</span>.<br />
+With numerous Illustrations by <span class="smallcaps">J. Ley Pethybridge</span> and others.<br />
+Crown 8vo. <i>5s.</i> net.</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="center">
+<table summary="advertisements">
+  <tr>
+    <td>
+      <i>Uniform with</i>
+    </td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td align="center">
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;FOOTPRINTS OF FORMER MEN IN FAR CORNWALL.
+    </td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+</div>
+
+<div class="center">
+<p class="noindent">NEW POEMS.<br />
+By <span class="smallcaps">Ronald Campbell Macfie</span>,<br />
+author of "Granite Dust." <i>5s.</i> net.</p>
+</div>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p class="noindent"><i>Daily News.</i>&mdash;"The poetry &#8230; is of a passionate intensity, and
+sings itself, with a sort of clear anger, which is new&#8230;. He has a
+curious brightness and newness of phrase, his stanzas ringing down
+with a note that is unfamiliar."</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p class="noindent"><i>Academy.</i>&mdash;"Mr. Macfie, as the reader of 'Granite Dust' well
+knows, is a veritable poet."</p></blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p class="noindent"><i>Star.</i>&mdash;"Work &#8230; far above the average."</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p class="noindent"><i>Aberdeen Free Press.</i>&mdash;"Strong, pure, and beautiful poetry."</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<div class="center">
+<p class="noindent">POEMS.<br />
+By <span class="smallcaps">Rachel Annand Taylor</span>.<br />
+Crown 8vo. <i>5s.</i> net.</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="center">
+<p class="noindent">AN ELEGY TO F. W. A. DIED 1901.<br />
+By <span class="smallcaps">Vivian Locke Ellis</span>.<br />
+Crown 8vo. <i>3s. 6d.</i> net.</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">LAND AND SEA PIECES: Poems.<br />
+By <span class="smallcaps">A. E. J. Legge</span>.<br />
+Crown 8vo. <i>3s. 6d.</i> net.</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">JOHN LANE, <span class="smallcaps">Publisher</span>, LONDON &amp; NEW YORK</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>[The end of <i>Hortus Vitae</i> by Vernon Lee (Violet Paget)]</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Hortus Vitae, by Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
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+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Hortus Vitae, by Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
+
+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: Hortus Vitae
+       Essays on the Gardening of Life
+
+Author: Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
+
+Release Date: October 7, 2008 [EBook #26800]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HORTUS VITAE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Delphine Lettau & the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+HORTUS VITAE
+ESSAYS ON THE GARDENING OF LIFE
+
+
+
+
+BY
+VERNON LEE
+
+
+JOHN LANE: THE BODLEY HEAD
+LONDON & NEW YORK. MDCCCCIV
+
+SECOND EDITION.
+
+WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES.
+
+
+
+
+
+DEDICATION
+
+
+To MADAME TH: BLANC-BENTZON
+
+                                             MAIANO, NEAR FLORENCE,
+                                                     June 20, 1903.
+
+MY DEAR MADAME BLANC,
+
+The first copy of this little book was, of course, to have been for
+Gabrielle Delzant. I am fulfilling her wish, I think, in giving it,
+instead, to you, who were her oldest friend; as I, alas! had time to be
+only her latest.
+
+She had read nearly all these essays; and, during those weeks of her
+illness which I spent last autumn in Gascony, she had made me rewrite
+several among them. She wanted to learn to read English aloud, and it
+amused her and delighted me that she should do so on my writings. Her
+French pronunciation gave an odd grace to the sentences; the little
+hesitation spaced and accentuated their meaning; and I liked what I had
+written when she read it. The afternoons at Parays which we spent
+together in this way! Prints of _Mere Angelique_ and _Ces Messieurs de
+Port Royal_ watching over us in her spacious bedroom, brown and yet
+light like the library it had become; and among those Jansenist
+worthies, the Turin Pallas Athena, with a sprig of green box as an
+offering from our friend. Yes; what I had written seemed good when read
+by her. And then there were the words which had to be looked out in the
+dictionary, bringing discussions on all manner of subjects, and
+wonderful romantic stories, like the "Golden Legend," about grandparents
+and servants and neighbours, giving me time to rearrange the cushions
+and to settle the fur over her feet. And the other words, hard to
+pronounce (she must always invert, from sheer anxiety, the English
+_th'_s and _s'_s); I had to say them first, and once more, and yet
+again. And we laughed, and I kissed her beloved patient face and her
+dear young white hair. I don't think it ever occurred to tell her my
+intention of putting her name on this volume--it went without saying.
+And besides, had not everything I could do or be of good belonged to her
+during the eighteen months we had been friends?
+
+There was another reason, however, why this book more particularly
+should have been hers; and having been hers, dear Madame Blanc, yours.
+Do you remember telling me how, years ago, and in a terrible moment of
+your experience, she had surprised you, herself still so young, by a
+remark which had sunk deep into your mind and had very greatly helped
+you? "We must," you told me she had said, "be prepared to begin life
+many times afresh." Now that is the thought, though never clearly
+expressed, which runs through these essays. And the essential goodness
+and fruitfulness of life, its worthiness to be lived over and over
+again, had come home to me more and more with the knowledge and the love
+of her who had made my own life so far happier and more significant. So
+that my endeavour to enumerate some of the unnoticed gifts and deepest
+consolations of life has come to be connected in my mind with this
+creature who consoled so many and gave herself, with such absolute gift
+of loving-kindness or gratitude, to all people and all things that
+deserved it.
+
+That life is worthy to be lived well, with fortitude, tenderness, and a
+certain reserved pride and humility, was indeed the essential, unspoken
+tenet of Gabrielle Delzant's religion, into which there entered, not
+merely the teachings of Stoics and Jansenists, but the traditional
+gaiety and gallant bearing of the little southern French nobles from
+whom she was descended. Her Huguenot blood, of which, with the dear
+self-contradictoriness of all true saints, she was inordinately proud;
+her Catholic doctrine, which by natural affinity was that of Port Royal
+and Pascal; this double strain of asceticism of both her faiths (for,
+like all deep believers, she had more than one) merely gave a solemn
+base, a zest, to her fine intuition of nature and joy. The refusal to
+possess (even her best-beloved books never bore her own name, and her
+beautiful bevelled wardrobes were found empty through sheer giving), the
+disdain for every form of property, only intensified her delight in all
+the beautiful things which could be shared with others. No one ever
+possessed, in the true sense of passionate enjoyment, as Gabrielle
+Delzant possessed, for instance, the fine passages of Corneille, or
+Maurice de Guerin, or Victor Hugo, which she asked her husband to read
+to us of an evening; as she possessed the refined lie of the land, the
+delicate autumn colouring of her modest and gracious southern country;
+and those old-fashioned Paris streets, through which we eagerly
+wandered, seeking obscure little churches and remote convents where
+Pascal had lived or Andre Chenier lay buried. Nay, no one, methinks,
+ever tasted so much of romance as this lady in her studious invalid's
+existence; for did she not extract wonderful and humorous adventures,
+not only out of the lives of her friends, but her own quiet comings and
+goings? Do you remember, dear Madame Blanc, that rainy day that she and
+I returned to you, brimful of marvellous adventures, when we had found a
+feather and shell shop built up against an old church in the Marais; or
+was it after wandering in the dripping Jardin des Plantes, peering at
+the white skeletons of animals of the already closed museum, and
+returning home in floods by many and devious trams and 'buses? Ah, no
+one could enjoy things, and make others enjoy them by sheer childlike
+lovingness, as she did!
+
+For her austerity, like that of the nobler pagans (and there are no
+nobler pagans, or more reverent to paganism, than true Christian
+saints, believe me) pruned all natural possibilities into fruitfulness
+of joy. And her reckless giving away of interest and of loving-kindness,
+enabled her, not merely to feed the multitude, but to carry home
+miraculous basketfuls, and more, methinks, than twelve.
+
+And thus, to return to my main theme, there was, transmuting all her
+orthodoxy (and making her accept some unorthodox among her
+fellow-worshippers) a deep and fervent adoration of life and
+fruitfulness, and an abhorrence of death.
+
+Her letters to me are full of it. Abhorrence of death. Death not of the
+body, for she held that but an incident, an accident almost, in a life
+eternal or universal; but death of the soul. And this she would have
+defined, though she was never fond of defining, as loss of the power of
+extracting joy and multiplying it through thankfulness.
+
+A matter less of belief than of temper. Of course. Gabrielle Delzant was
+one of the elect, and filled with grace. And she had as little sense of
+tragedy as St. Francis or his skylarks; sympathy meaning for her less
+the fact of feeling the sufferings of others, than that of healing, of
+consoling, and of compensating.
+
+With this went naturally that, in a very busy life, full--over-full,
+some of us thought--of the affairs of other folk, she never appeared
+worried or hurried. Of the numberless persons who carried their business
+to her, or whose secret troubles became manifest to her dear
+bluish-brown eyes, each must have felt as if she existed for him or her
+solely. And folk went to her as they go into a church of her religion,
+not merely for spiritual aid, but for the comfort of space and rest in
+this world of crowding and bustle; for the sense of a piece of heaven
+closed in for one's need and all one's very own. Dear Madame Blanc, how
+many shy shadows do we not seem to see around us since her death; or
+rather to guess at, roaming disconsolate, lacking they scarce know what,
+that ever-welcoming sanctuary of her soul!
+
+I have compared it with a church; but outwardly, and just because she
+was such a believer in life, it was more like a dwelling-place, like
+those brown corridors, full of books, at Parays; or that bedroom of
+hers, with the high lights all over the polished floor, and its look of
+a library. To me Gabrielle Delzant revealed the reality of what I had
+long guessed and longed for aimlessly, the care and grace of art, the
+consecration of religion, applied to the matters of every day. It hung
+together with her worship of life, with her belief, as she expressed it
+to you, all those years ago, _that life must be begun many times anew_.
+And it is this which, for all the appalling unexpectedness, the dreadful
+cataclysm of her temporal ending, has made the death of Gabrielle
+Delzant so strangely difficult, for me, at least, to realise as death at
+all.
+
+Not death, but only absence; and that, how partial!
+
+It is eight months and more, dear Madame Blanc, since she and I bade
+each other adieu in the body. She had been some while ill, though none
+of us suspected how fatally. It was the eve of her departure for Paris;
+and I was returning to Italy. She was grieved at parting from me, at
+leaving her dear old Southern relatives; and secretly she perhaps half
+suspected that she might never come back to her Gascon home. It was a
+November day, dissolving fitfully into warm rain, and very melancholy.
+I was to take the late train to Agen with the two girls. And she and I,
+when all was ready, were to have the afternoon together. Of course we
+must have it serene, as if no parting were to close it. All traces of
+departure, of packing, were cleared away at her bidding, and when they
+had carried her on to her sofa, and placed by its side the little table
+with our books, and also my chair, she bade the dear Southern maids
+light a fine blaze of vine stumps, and fill all the jars with fresh
+roses--china roses, so vivid, surely none have ever smelt so sweet and
+poignant. We amused ourselves, a little sadly, burning some olive and
+myrtle branches I had brought for her from Corsica, and watching their
+frail silver twigs and leaves turn to embers and fall in fireworks of
+sparks and a smoke of incense. And we read together in one of my books
+(alas! that book has just come back this very same day, sent by her
+daughter), and looked up at the loose grey clouds suffused with rose and
+orange as the day drew to its end. Then the children shouted from below
+that the carriage was there, that I must go. We closed the books,
+marking the place, and I broke a rose from the nosegay on the
+fireplace. And we said farewell.
+
+Thus have we remained, she and I. With the mild autumn day drawing to an
+end outside; and within, the fresh roses, the bright fire she had asked
+for; remained reading our books, watching those dried leaves turn to
+showers of sparks and smoke of incense. She and I, united beyond all
+power of death to part, in the loving belief that, even like that
+afternoon of packing up and bidding adieu, and rain and early twilight,
+life also should be made serene and leisurely, and simple and sweet, and
+akin to eternity.
+
+And now I am going to put those volumes she and I had read together, on
+my own shelves, here in this house she never entered; and to correct the
+proofs of this new little book, which should have been hers, nay, rather
+_is_, and which is also, my dear Madame Blanc, for that reason, yours.
+
+I am, meanwhile, your grateful and affectionate friend,
+
+
+VERNON LEE.
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+
+
+DEDICATION
+
+THE GARDEN OF LIFE--INTRODUCTORY
+
+IN PRAISE OF GOVERNESSES
+
+ON GOING TO THE PLAY
+
+READING BOOKS
+
+HEARING MUSIC
+
+RECEIVING LETTERS
+
+NEW FRIENDS AND OLD
+
+OTHER FRIENDSHIPS
+
+A HOTEL SITTING-ROOM
+
+IN PRAISE OF COURTSHIP
+
+KNOWING ONE'S MIND
+
+AGAINST TALKING
+
+IN PRAISE OF SILENCE
+
+THE BLAME OF PORTRAITS
+
+SERE AND YELLOW--INTERLUDE
+
+A STAGE JEWEL
+
+MY BICYCLE AND I
+
+PUZZLES OF THE PAST
+
+MAKING PRESENTS
+
+GOING AWAY
+
+COMING BACK
+
+LOSING ONE'S TRAIN
+
+THE HANGING GARDENS--VALEDICTORY
+
+
+
+
+HORTUS VITAE
+
+THE GARDEN OF LIFE
+
+(INTRODUCTORY)
+
+
+"Cela est bien dit," repondit Candide; "mais il
+faut cultiver notre jardin."--ROMANS DE VOLTAIRE.
+
+
+
+
+THE GARDEN OF LIFE
+
+This by no means implies that the whole of life is a garden or could be
+made one. I am not sure even that we ought to try. Indeed, on second
+thoughts, I feel pretty certain that we ought not. Only such portion of
+life is our garden as lies, so to speak, close to our innermost
+individual dwelling, looked into by our soul's own windows, and
+surrounded by its walls. A portion of life which is ours exclusively,
+although we do occasionally lend its key to a few intimates; ours to
+cultivate just as we please, growing therein either pistachios and dwarf
+lemons for preserving, like Voltaire's immortal hero, or more spiritual
+flowers, "sweet basil and mignonette," such as the Lady of Epipsychidion
+sent to Shelley; kindly rosemary and balm; or, as may happen, a fine
+assortment of witch's herbs, infallible for turning us into cats and
+toads and poisoning our neighbours.
+
+But with whatever we may choose to plant the portion of our life and our
+thought which is our own, and whatsoever its natural fertility and
+aspect, this much is certain, that it needs digging, watering, planting,
+and perhaps most of all, weeding. "Cela est bien dit," repondit Candide,
+"mais il faut cultiver notre jardin." He was, as you will recollect,
+answering Dr. Pangloss. One evening, while they were resting from their
+many tribulations, and eating various kinds of fruit and sweetmeats in
+their arbour on the Bosphorus, the eminent optimistic philosopher had
+pointed out at considerable length that the delectable moment they were
+enjoying was connected by a Leibnitzian chain of cause and effect with
+sundry other moments of a less obviously desirable character in the
+earlier part of their several lives.
+
+"For, after all, my dear Candide," said Dr. Pangloss, "let us suppose
+you had not been kicked out of a remarkably fine castle, magnis ac
+cogentissimis cum argumentis a posteriori; suppose also that, etc., etc.
+had not happened, nor, furthermore, etc., etc., etc.; well, it is quite
+plain that you would not be in this particular place, _videlicet_ an
+arbour; and, moreover, in the act of eating preserved lemon-rind and
+pistachio nuts."
+
+"What you say is true," answered Candide, "but we have to cultivate our
+garden."
+
+And here I hasten to remark, that although I have quoted and translated
+these seven immortal words, I would on no account be answerable for
+their original and exact meaning, any more than for the meaning of more
+officially grave and reverend texts, albeit perhaps not wiser or nobler
+ones.
+
+Did the long-suffering hero of the Sage of Ferney accept the chain of
+cause and effect, and agree that without the kicks, the earthquake, the
+_auto-da-fe_, and all the other items of his uneasy career, it was
+impossible he should be eating pistachio nuts and preserved lemon-rind
+in that arbour? And, in consideration of the bitter sweet of these
+delicacies, was he prepared to welcome (retrospectively) the painful
+preliminaries as blessings in disguise? Did he even, rising to stoical
+or mystic heights, identify these superficially different phenomena and
+recognize that their apparent contradiction was real sameness?
+
+Or, should we take it that, refraining from such essential questions,
+and passing over his philosophical friend's satisfaction in the _causal
+nexus_, poor Candide was satisfied with pointing out the only practical
+lesson to be drawn from the whole matter, to wit, that in order to
+partake of such home-grown dainties, it had been necessary, and most
+likely would remain necessary, to put a deal of good work into whatever
+scrap of the soil of life had not been devastated by those Leibnitzian
+Powers who further Man's felicity in a fashion so energetic but so
+roundabout?
+
+All these points remain obscure. But even as a play is said to be only
+the better for the various interpretations which it affords to as many
+great actors; so methinks, the wisest sayings are often those which
+state some principle in general terms, leaving to individuals the
+practical working out, according to their nature and circumstances. So,
+whether we incline to optimism or to pessimism, we must do our best in
+the half-hours we can bestow upon our little garden.
+
+I speak advisedly of half-hours, and I would repeatedly insist upon the
+garden being little. For the garden, whatever its actual size, and were
+it as extensive as those of Eden and the Hesperides set on end, does not
+afford the exercise needful for spiritual health and vigour. And
+whatever we may succeed in growing there to please our taste or (like
+some virtuous dittany) to heal our bruises, this much is certain, that
+the power of enjoyment has to be brought from beyond its limits.
+
+Happiness, dear fellow-gardeners, is not a garden plant.
+
+In plain English: happiness is not the aim of life, although it is
+life's furtherance and in the long run life's _sine qua non_. And not
+being life's aim, life often disregards the people who pursue it for its
+own sake. I am not, like Dr. Pangloss, a professional philosopher, and
+what philosophy I have is of no particular school, and neither stoical
+nor mystic. I feel no sort of call to vindicate the Ways of Providence;
+and on the whole there seems something rather ill-bred in crabbing the
+unattainable, and pretending that what we can't have can't be good for
+us. Happiness _is_ good for us, excellent for us, necessary for us,
+indispensable to us. But ... how put such transcendental facts into
+common or garden (for it is _garden_) language? But _we_--that is to
+say, poor human beings--are one thing, and life is quite another. And as
+life has its own programme irrespective of ours, to wit, apparently its
+own duration and intensifying throughout all changes, it is quite
+natural that we, its little creatures of a second, receive what we
+happen to ask for--namely, happiness--as a reward for being thoroughly
+alive.
+
+Now, for some reason not of our choosing, we cannot be thoroughly alive
+except as a result of such exercises as come under the headings: Work
+and Duty. That seems to be the law of Life--of Life which does not care
+a button about being aesthetic or wisely epicurean. The truth of it is
+brought home to us occasionally in one of those fine symbolical
+intuitions which are the true stuff of poetry, because they reveal the
+organic unity and symmetry of all existence. I am alluding to the sense
+of cloying and restlessness which comes to most of us (save when tired
+or convalescent) after a very few days or even hours shut up in quite
+the finest real gardens; and to that instinct, impelling some of us to
+inquire about the lodges and the ways out, the very first thing on
+coming down into some private park. Of course they are quite exquisite,
+those flowery terraces cut in the green turf, and bowling greens set
+with pines or statues, and balustraded steps with jars and vases. And
+the great stretches of park land with their solemn furbelowed avenues
+and their great cedars stretching _moire_ skirts on to the grass, are
+marvellous fine things to look upon....
+
+But we want the ploughed fields beyond, the real woods with stacked-up
+timber, German fashion; the orchards and the kitchen gardens; the tracks
+across the high-lying sheep downs; the towing-paths where the barges
+come up the rivers; the deep lanes where the hay-carts have left long
+wisps on the overhanging elms; the high-roads running from village to
+village, with the hooded carts and bicycles and even the solemn
+Juggernaut traction-engines upon them. We want not only to rest from
+living, to take refreshment in life's kindly pauses and taste (like
+Candide in his arbour) the pleasantness of life's fruits. We want also
+to live.
+
+But there is living and living. There is, unfortunately, not merely such
+breezy work-a-dayness as we have been talking of, but something very
+different indeed beyond the walls of our private garden. There are
+black, oozy factory yards and mangy grass-plots heaped with brickbat and
+refuse; and miles of iron railing, and acres of gaunt and genteel
+streets not veiled enough in fog; a metaphorical _beyond the garden
+walls_, in which a certain number of us graduate for the ownership of
+sooty shrubberies and clammy orchid houses. And we poor latter-day
+mortals have become so deadly accustomed to the routine of useless work
+and wasteful play, that a writer must needs cross all the _t_'s and dot
+all the _i_'s of his conviction (held also by other sentimentalists and
+cranks called Carlyle, Ruskin, and Morris) that the bread and wine of
+life are not grown in the Black Country; no, nor life's flowers in the
+horticultural establishments (I will not call them gardens) of suburban
+villas.
+
+Fortunately, however, this casual-looking universe is not without its
+harmonies, as well as ironies. And one of these arrangements would seem
+to be that our play educates the aims and methods of our work. If we lay
+store by satisfactions which imply the envy and humiliation of other
+folk, why then we set about such work as humiliates our neighbours or
+fills them with enviousness, saving the case where others, sharing our
+tastes, do alike by us. Without going to such lengths (the mention of
+which has got me a reputation for lack of human sympathy) there remains
+the fact that if our soul happen to take delight in, let us say,
+futility--well, then, futility will litter existence with shreds of
+coloured paper and plaster comfits trodden into mud, as after a day of
+carnival at Nice. Nay, a still simpler case: if we cannot be happy
+without a garden as big as the grounds of an expensive lunatic asylum,
+why, then, all the little cottage gardens down the lane must be swept
+away to make it.
+
+Now, the cottage gardens, believe me, are the best. They are the only
+ones which, being small, may be allotted in some juster future to every
+man without dispossessing his neighbour. And they are also the only ones
+compatible with that fine arable or dairy country which we all long for.
+Stop and look over the hedges: their flowers leave no scrap of earth
+visible between them, like the bedded-out things of grander gardens; and
+their vivid crimsons, and tender rose and yellow, and ineffable blue,
+and the solemn white which comes out in the evening, are seen to most
+advantage against the silvery green of vegetables behind them, and the
+cornfield, the chalk-pit under the beech trees beyond. The cottage
+flowers come also into closer quarters with their owners, not merely
+because these breathe their fragrance and the soil's good freshness
+while stooping down to weed, and prune, and water; but also, and perhaps
+even more, because the flowers we tend with our own hands have a habit
+of blooming in our expectations and filling our hopes with a sweetness
+which not the most skilful hired gardeners have ever taught the most
+far-fetched hybrids that they raise for clients.
+
+Which, being interpreted, may be taken to mean that it is no use relying
+on artists, poets, philosophers, or saints to make something of the
+enclosed spaces or the waste portions of our soul: _Il faut cultiver
+notre jardin._
+
+
+
+
+IN PRAISE OF GOVERNESSES
+
+
+Even before discovering that there was an old, gabled, lower town at
+Cassel, I felt the special gladness of the touch of Germany. It was an
+autumn morning, bright yet tender. I sped along the wide, empty streets,
+across the sanded square, with hedges of sere lime trees, where a big,
+periwigged Roman Emperor of an Elector presides, making one think of the
+shouts of "Hurrah, lads, for America!" of the bought and sold Hessians
+of Schiller's "Cabal and Love." At the other end was a promenade,
+terraced above the yellow tree-tops of a park, above a gentle undulating
+country, with villages and steeples in the distance. "Schoeneaussicht"
+the place called itself; and the view was looked at by the wide and many
+windows of pleasant old-fashioned houses, with cocked-hat roofs well
+pulled down over them, each in its little garden of standard roses, all
+quiet and smiling in the autumn sunshine.
+
+I felt the special gladness of being in Germany (for every country has
+its own way of making us happy), and glad that there should be in me
+something which answered to Germany's especial touch. We owe that, many
+of us, I mused, and with it a deep debt of gratitude, to our
+governesses. And I fell to thinking of certain things which an American
+friend had lately told me, sitting in the twilight with her head a
+little averted, about a certain governess of hers I can remember from my
+childhood. Pathetic things, heroic ones, nothings; all ending off in the
+story of a farewell letter, treasured many years, lost on a journey....
+"Do you remember Fraeulein's bonnet? The one she brought from Hanover and
+wore that winter in Paris?" And there it was in a faded, crinolined
+photograph, so dear and funny. Dear and funny--that is the point of this
+relationship with creatures giving often the best of the substance and
+form of our soul, that it is without the sometimes rather empty majesty
+of the parental one. And surely it is no loss, but rather a gain, to
+have to smile, as my friend did at the thought of that Teutonic bonnet,
+just when we feel an awkward huskiness in our voice.
+
+There is, moreover, a particular possibility for good in the relation
+between a developing child (not, of course, a mere growing young brute)
+and a woman still young, childless, or separated from her children, a
+little solitary, most often alien, differently brought up, and whose
+affection and experience must therefore take a certain impersonality,
+and tend to subdued romance. We are loved, when we are, not as a matter
+of course and habit, not with any claim; but for ourselves and with the
+delicate warmth of a feeling necessarily one-sided. And whatever we
+learn of life in this relationship is of one very different from our
+own, and seen through the feelings, the imagination, often the repressed
+home-sickness, of a mature and foreign soul. And this is good for us,
+and useful in correcting family and national tradition, and the rubbing
+away of angles (and other portions of soul) by brothers and sisters, and
+general contemporaries, excellent educational items of which it is
+possible to have a little too much.
+
+Be this as it may, it is to our German governesses that we owe the
+power of understanding Germany, more than to German literature. For the
+literature itself requires some introduction of mood for its romantic,
+homely, sentimental, essentially German qualities; the mere Anglo-Saxon
+or Latin being, methinks, incapable of caring at once for Wilhelm
+Meister, or Siebennkaes, or Goetz, or the manifold lyric of Forest and
+Millstream. To understand these, means to have somewhere in us a little
+sample, some fibres and corpuscles, of the German heart. And I maintain
+that we are all of us the better, of whatever nationality (and most,
+perhaps, we rather too-too solid Anglo-Saxons) for such transfusion of a
+foreign element, correcting our deficiencies and faults, and ripening
+(as the literature of Italy ripened our Elizabethans) our own intrinsic
+qualities. It means, apart from negative service against conceit and
+canting self-aggrandisement, an additional power of taking life
+intelligently and serenely; a power of adaptation to various climates
+and diets of the spirit, let alone the added wealth of such varied
+climates and diets themselves. Italy, somehow, attains this by her mere
+visible aspect and her history: a pure, high sky, a mountain city, or a
+row of cypresses can teach as much as Dante, and, indeed, teach us to
+understand Dante himself. While as to France, that most lucid of
+articulately-speaking lands, explains herself in her mere books; and we
+become in a manner French with every clear, delightful page we read, and
+almost every thought of our own we ever think with definiteness and
+grace. But the genius of Germany is, like her landscape, homely and
+sentimental, with the funny goodness and dearness of a good child; and
+we must learn to know it while we ourselves are children. And therefore
+it is from our governesses that we learn (with dimmer knowledge of
+mysterious persons or things "Ulfilas"--"Tacitus's Germania," supposed
+by me to have been a lady, his daughter perhaps, and the "seven stars"
+of German literature) a certain natural affinity with the Germany of
+humbler and greater days, when no one talked of Teuton superiority or of
+purity of Teuton idiom; the Germany which gave Kant, and Beethoven, and
+Goethe and Schiller, and was not ashamed to say "scharmant."
+
+I, too, was taught to say "scharmant" and "amuesiren". It was wrong, very
+wrong; and I feel my inferiority every time I come to Germany, and have
+to pause and think by what combination of words I can express the true
+Germanic functions and nature of booking offices and bicycle labels. For
+it was long ago: Count Bismarck was still looked on as a dangerous
+upstart, and we reckoned in kreutzers; blue and white Austrian bands
+played at Mainz and Frankfurt. It was long ago that I was, so to speak,
+a small German infant, fed on Teutonic romance and sentiment (and also
+funny Teutonic prosaicalness, bless it!) by a dim procession of
+Germania's daughters. There was Franziska, who could boast a Rhineland
+pastor for grandfather, a legendary pastor bearding Napoleon; Franziska,
+who read Schiller's "Maria Stuart" and "Joan of Arc," and even his
+"Child Murderess" (I remember every word of obloquy hurled at the
+hangman--"hangman, craven hangman, canst thou not break off a lily") to
+the housemaid and me whenever my father and mother went out of an
+evening; and described "Papagena," in Mozart's opera which she had seen,
+all dressed in feathers; and was tempted to strum furtive melancholy
+chords on my mother's zither.... Dear Franziska, whose comfortable
+blond good looks inspired the enamoured upholsterer in letters beginning
+"My dearest little goldfish"--Franziska, what has become of thee? And
+the Frau Professor, who averred with rhythmic iteration that teaching
+such a child was far, far worse than breaking stones on a high-road; in
+what stony regions may she have found an honoured stony grave? What has
+become of genial Mme. E., who played the Jupiter Symphonie with my
+mother, instead of hearing me through my scales, and lent me volumes of
+Tonkuenstler-Lexikons to soothe her conscience, and gave us honey in the
+comb out of her garden of verbena and stocks? But best of all, dearest,
+far above all the others, and quite different, Marie S., charming
+enthusiastic young schoolmistress in that little town of pepper-pot
+towers and covered bridges, you I have found again; I shall soon see
+your eyes and hear your voice, quite unchanged, I am certain. And we
+shall sit and talk (your big daughter listening, perhaps not without an
+occasional smile) about those hours which you and I, a girl of twenty
+and a child of eleven, spent in the little room above the rushing Alpine
+river, eating apples and drinking _cafe au lait_; hours in which a
+whole world of legend and poetry, and scientific fact and theory more
+wonderful still, passed from your ardent young mind into the little
+eager puzzled one of your loving pupil. We shall meet very soon, a
+little awkwardly at first, perhaps, but after a moment talking as if no
+silence of thirty years had ever parted us; as if nothing had happened
+in between, as if all that might then have come true ... well, could
+come true still.
+
+These thoughts came into my head that morning in the promenade at
+Cassel, brought to the surface by the mellow autumn sun and the special
+pleasure of being again in Germany. There mingled with them also that
+recent conversation about the lady with the bonnet from Hanover, who had
+written that paper so precious to my American friend. And I determined
+to take my pen some day I should feel suitably happy, and offer up
+thanks for all of us to our governesses, to those dear women, dead,
+dispersed, faded into distance, but not forgotten; our spiritual
+foster-mothers who put a few drops of the milk of German kindness, of
+German simplicity and quaintness and romance, between our lips when we
+were children.
+
+
+
+
+ON GOING TO THE PLAY
+
+
+We were comparing notes the other day on plays and play-going. My friend
+was Irish; so, finding to our joy that we disliked this form of
+entertainment equally, we swore with fervour that we would go to the
+play together.
+
+Mankind may be divided into playgoers and not playgoers; and the first
+are far more numerous, and also far more illustrious. It evidently is a
+defect, and perhaps a sign of degeneracy, akin to deafness or to
+Daltonism, not to enjoy the theatre; not to enjoy it, at least in the
+reality, when there or just after coming away. For I can enjoy the
+thought of the play, and the thought of other folks liking it, so long
+as I am not taken there. There is something pleasant in thinking of
+those brilliant places, full of unrealities, with crowds engulfing
+themselves into this light from out of the dreary, foggy streets. Also,
+of young enthusiastic creatures, foregoing dinner, waiting for hours in
+cheap seats (like Charles and Mary Lamb before they had money to buy
+rare prints and blue china), with the delight of spending hoarded
+pennies; all under circumstances of the deepest bodily discomfort. I
+leave out of the question the thought of Greek theatres, of that
+semicircle of steps on the top of Fiesole, with, cypresses for side
+scenes, and, even now, lyric tragedies more than AEschylean enacted by
+clouds and winds in the amphitheatre of mountains beyond. I am thinking
+of the play as we moderns know it, with a sense of stuffiness as an
+integral part. Indeed, that stuffiness is by no means its worst feature.
+The most thrilling moment, I will confess, which theatres can still give
+me is that--but it is really _sui generis_ and ineffable--when, having
+got upstairs, you meet in the narrow lobbies of an old-fashioned
+playhouse the tuning of the fiddles and the smell--of gas, glue, heaven
+knows what glories of yester-year--which, ever since one's babyhood, has
+come to mean "the play." People have expended much genius and more money
+to make theatrical representation transcend imagination; but they can
+never transcend that moment in the corridor, _never transcend that
+smell_.
+
+Here is, most probably, one of my chief motives of dissatisfaction. I do
+not like the play--the play at the theatre--because it invariably falls
+short of that in my imagination. I make an exception for music; but not
+for the visible theatrical accompaniments thereof. Well given on the
+stage, _Don Giovanni_, for instance, remains but the rather bourgeois
+play of Moliere; leave me and the music together, and I promise you that
+all the romance and terror and wonder of ten thousand Spains are
+distilled into my fancy!
+
+The fact is that, being an appeal to the imagination of others, every
+form of literature, every "deed of speech," as a friend of mine calls
+it, has a natural stage in the mind of the reader or the listener.
+Milton, let me point out, makes "gorgeous Tragedy in sceptred pall,"
+sweep across, not the planks of a theatre, but the scholar's thought as
+he sits alone with his book of nights. Neither is this an expression of
+conceit. I do not mean that _my_ conception of this, that, or the other
+is better, or as good as, what a great actor or a clever manager can
+set before me. Nothing of the sort; but my conception _is better suited
+to me_. Its very vagueness answers, nine times out of ten, to my
+repugnance and my preference; and the high lights, the vividly realized
+portions emerging from that vagueness, represent _what I like_. Hamlet
+or Portia or Viola and Olivia, exist for me under the evocation of the
+magician Shakespeare, but formed of recollections, impressions of
+places, people, and other poets, floating coloured atomies, which have a
+brooding charm, as being mine; why should they be scared off, replaced,
+by detailed real personalities who, even if charming, are most likely
+alien?
+
+I cannot very well conceive how people enjoy such substitutions. Perhaps
+they have more sensitive fancy and warmer sympathies than I; but as to
+mine, I had rather they were let alone. I can quite understand that it
+is different with children and with uneducated persons: their
+imagination is at once more erratic than ours (less tied by the logical
+necessities of details, less perceptive of these), and, at the same
+time, their imagination is not as thoroughly well stocked, and as ready
+to ignite almost spontaneously, as is ours. Much reading, travelling,
+much contemplation of human beings, apart from practical reasons, has
+given even the least creative of us lazy, grown-up folk a power, almost
+a habit, of imaginative creation; and but a very little, though a
+genial, pressure will make it act. But children and the people require
+stronger stimulus, and require also a field for their imagination to
+work upon. I can remember the amazing effect, entirely at variance with
+the intention, which portions of _Don Quixote_--seen at a circus, of all
+places--made on my mind when I was eight: it did not _realize_ ideas of
+chivalry which I had, but, on the contrary, it gave me, from outside,
+data (such data!) about chivalry on which my thoughts wove ideas the
+most amazing for many months. Something of the kind, I think, is
+happening to that Paris audience, rows and rows of eager heads and
+seeing eyes, which M. Carriere has painted, just enough visible, in his
+usual luminous haze, to give the mood. The stage is not shown: it really
+is in those eyes and faces. It is telling them that there are worlds
+different from their own; it is opening out perspectives (longer and
+deeper than those of wood and cardboard) down which those cabined
+thoughts and feelings may henceforth wander. The picture, like M.
+Carriere's "Morning" in the Luxembourg, is one of the greatest of poetic
+pictures; and it makes me, at least, understand what the value of the
+stage must be to hundreds and thousands of people; to _the people_, to
+children, and to those practical natures which, however learned and
+cultured, seem unable to get imaginative, emotional pleasure without a
+good deal of help from outward mechanism.
+
+These are all negative reasons why I dislike the play. But there are
+positive ones also. There is a story told by Lamb--or is it Hazlitt?--of
+a dear man who could not bear to read _Othello_, because of the dreadful
+fate of the Moor and his bride; "Such a noble gentleman! Such a sweet
+lady!" he would repeat, deeply distressed. The man was not
+artistic-souled; but I am like him. I know the healing anodyne in
+narrative, the classic consolation which that kind priest mentioned by
+Renan offered his congregation: "It took place so long ago that perhaps
+it never took place at all." But on the stage, when Salvini puts his
+terrible, suffused face out of Desdemona's curtains, it is not the past,
+but the present; there is no lurking hope that it may not be true. And I
+do not happen to wish to see such realities as that. Moreover, there are
+persons--my Irish friend and I, for instance--who feel abashed at what
+affects us as eavesdropping on our part. It is quite right we should be
+there to listen to some splendid piece of poetry, Romeo's duet with
+Juliet, the moonlight quartet of Lorenzo, Jessica, Olivia, and Nerissa,
+and parts of _Winter's Tale_; things which in musical quality transcend
+all music. But is it right that we be present at the unpacking of our
+neighbour's most private moral properties; at the dreadful laying bare
+of other folk's sores and nakedness? I wonder sometimes that any of the
+audience can look at the stage in company with the rest; the natural
+man, one would expect, would have the lights of the pit extinguished,
+and, if he needs must pry, pry at least unobserved.
+
+There is, however, an exception: when modern drama, instead of merely
+smuggling us, as by an ignominious King Candaules' ring called a theatre
+ticket, to witness what we shouldn't, gives us the spectacle of
+delightful personality, of individual power of soul, in its more
+intimate and perfect strength. I feel this sometimes in the case of Mme.
+Duse; and principally in her "Magda." This is good to see; as it is good
+to see naked muscles, to watch the efforts, the triumphant grace and
+strength of an athlete. For in this play of _Magda_ the Duse rivets
+interests, delights not by what she does, but by what she is. The plot,
+the turn of the action, is of no consequence; it might be all reversed,
+and most of it omitted. We care not what a creature like this happens to
+be doing or suffering; we care for her existence because it means energy
+and charm. Why not deliberately aim at such effects? Now that the stage
+is no longer the mere concert-room for magnificent poetry, lyric or
+epic, it might become what would be consonant with our modern
+psychologic tastes, the place where the genius of author or actor
+allowed us to come in sight, with the fulness and completeness of the
+intentional and artificial, of those finest spectacles of all, _great
+temperaments_. Not merely guess at them, see them by casual glimpses, as
+in real life; nor reconstruct them by their words and deeds, as in
+books; but actually see them revealed, homogeneous, consecutive, in
+their gestures and tones, the whole, the _very being_, of which words
+and acts are but the partial manifestation. Methinks that in this way
+the play might add enormously to the suggestiveness, the delight and
+dignity of life; play-acting might become a substantive art, not a mere
+spoiling of the work of poetry. Methinks that if this happened, or
+happened often, my friend and I, who also hates the play.... But it
+seems probable, on careful consideration, that my friend and I are
+conspicuously devoid of the dramatic faculty; which being the case we
+had better not discuss plays and play-going at all.
+
+
+
+
+READING BOOKS
+
+
+The chief point to be made in this matter is: that books, to fulfil
+their purpose, do not always require to be read. A book, for instance,
+which is a present, or an "hommage de l'auteur," has already served its
+purpose, like a visiting-card or a luggage label, at best like a
+ceremonial bouquet; and it is absurd to try and make it serve twice
+over, by reading it. The same applies, of course, to books lent without
+being asked for, and, in a still higher degree, to a book which has been
+discussed in society, and thus furnished out a due amount of
+conversation; to read such a book is an act of pedantry, showing
+slavishness to the names of things, and lack of insight into their real
+nature, which is revealed by the function they have been able to
+perform. Fancy, if public characters had to learn to snuff--a practice
+happily abandoned--because they occasionally received gifts of enamelled
+snuffboxes from foreign potentates!
+
+But there are subtler sides to this subject, and it is of these I fain
+would speak. We are apt to blunt our literary sense by reading far too
+much, and to lessen our capacity for getting the great delights from
+books by making reading into a routine and a drudgery. Of course I know
+that reading books has its utilitarian side, and that we have to
+consider printed matter (let me never call it literature!) as the raw
+material whence we extract some of the information necessary to life.
+But long familiarity with an illiterate peasantry like the Italian one,
+inclines me to think that we grossly exaggerate the need of such
+book-grown knowledge. Except as regards scientific facts and the various
+practices--as medicine, engineering, and the like, founded on them--such
+knowledge is really very little connected with life, either practical or
+spiritual, and it is possible to act, to feel, and even to think and to
+express one's self with propriety and grace, while having simply no
+literature at all behind one. That this is really no paradox is proved
+by pointing to the Greeks, who, even in the time of Plato--let alone the
+time, whenever that was, of Homer--had not much more knowledge of books
+than my Italian servant, who knows a few scraps of Tasso, possesses a
+"Book of Dreams; or Key to the Lottery," and uses the literature I have
+foolishly bestowed upon him as blotters in which to keep loose bills,
+and wherein occasionally to do addition sums. So that the fact seems to
+be that reading books is useful chiefly to enable us to wish to read
+more books!
+
+How many times does one not feel checked, when on the point of lending a
+book to what we call uneducated persons, by wondering what earthly
+texture of misapprehension and blanks they will weave out of its
+allusions and suggestions? And the same is the case of children. What
+fitter reading for a tall Greek goddess of ten than the tale of Cupid
+and Psyche, the most perfect of fairy stories with us; wicked sisters,
+subterranean adventures, ants helping to sort seeds, and terrible
+awaking drops of hot oil spilt over the bridegroom? But when I read to
+her this afternoon, shall I not see quite plainly over the edge of the
+book, that all the things which make it just what it is to me--the
+indescribable quality of the South, of antiquity and paganism--are
+utterly missed out; and that, to this divine young nymph, "Cupid and
+Psyche" is distinguishable from, say, "Beauty and the Beast" only by the
+unnecessary addition of a lot of heathenish names and the words which
+she does not even want to understand? Hence literature, alas! is, so to
+speak, for the literate; and one has to have read a great, great deal in
+order to taste the special exquisiteness of books, their marvellous
+essence of long-stored up, oddly mixed, subtly selected and hundredfold
+distilled suggestion.
+
+But once this state of things reached, there is no need to read much;
+and every reason for not _keeping up_, as vain and foolish persons
+boast, "with literature." Since, the time has come, after planting and
+grafting and dragging watering-pots, for flowering and fruition; for
+books to do their best, to exert their full magic. This is the time when
+a verse, imperfectly remembered, will haunt the memory; and one takes
+down the book, reads it and what follows, judiciously breaking off,
+one's mind full of the flavour and scent. Or, again, talking with a
+friend, a certain passage of prose--the account of the Lambs going to
+the play when young, or the beginning of "Urn Burial," or a chapter
+(with due improvised skippings) of "Candide"--comes up in conversation;
+and one reads it rejoicing with one's friends, feeling the special
+rapture of united comprehension, of mind touching mind, like the little
+thrill of voice touching voice on the resolving sevenths of the old
+duets in thirds. Or even when, remembering some graver page--say the
+dedication of "Faust" to Goethe's dead contemporaries--one fetches the
+book and reaches it silently to the other one, not daring to read it out
+loud.... It is when these things happen that one is really getting the
+good of books; and that one feels that there really is something
+astonishing and mysterious in words taken out of the dictionary and
+arranged with commas and semicolons and full stops between them.
+
+The greatest pleasures of reading consist in re-reading. Sometimes
+almost in not reading at all, but just thinking or feeling what there
+is inside the book, or what has come out of it, long ago, and passed
+into one's mind or heart, as the case may be. I wish to record in this
+reference a happy week once passed, at vintage time, in the Lower
+Apennines, with a beautiful copy of "Hippolytus," bound in white, which
+had been given me, regardless of my ignorance of Greek, by my dear
+Lombard friend who resembles a faun. I carried it about in my pocket;
+sometimes, at rare intervals, spelling out some word in _mai_ or in
+_totos_, and casting a glance on the interleaved crib; but more often
+letting the volume repose by me on the grass and crushed mint of the
+cool yard under the fig tree, while the last belated cicala sawed, and
+the wild bees hummed in the ivy flower of the old villa wall. For once
+you know the spirit of a book, there is a process (known to Petrarch
+with reference to Homer, whom he was unable to understand) of taking in
+its charm by merely turning over the pages, or even, as I say, in
+carrying it about. The literary essence, which is uncommonly subtle, has
+various modes of acting on us; and this particular manner of absorbing a
+book's spirit stands to the material operation called _reading_, much in
+the same way that _smell_, the act of breathing invisible volatile
+particles, stands to the more obvious wholesale process of _taste_.
+
+Nay, such is the virtuous power of books, that, to those who are
+initiated and reverent, it can act from the mere title, or more
+properly, the binding. Of this I had an instance quite lately in the
+library of an old Jacobite house on the North Tyne. This library
+contained, besides its properly embodied books, a small collection
+existing, so to speak, only in the spirit, or at least in effigy; a
+door, to wit, being covered with real book-backs, or, more properly,
+backs of real books of which the inside was missing. A quaint,
+delightful collection! "Female traits," two volumes; four volumes (what
+dinners and breakfasts, as well as suppers, of horrors!) of Webster's
+"Vittoria Corombona," etc., the "Siege of Mons," "Ancient Mysteries,"
+"The Epigrams of Martial," "A Journey through Italy," and Crebillon's
+novels. Contemplating these pseudo shelves of pageless tomes, I felt
+acutely how true it is that a book (for the truly lettered) can do its
+work without being read. I lingeringly relished (why did not Johnson
+give us a verb to _saporate_?) this mixed literature's flavour,
+humorous, romantic, and pedantic, beautifully welded. And I recognized
+that those gutted-away insides were quite superfluous: they had yielded
+their essence and their virtue.
+
+
+
+
+HEARING MUSIC
+
+
+"Heard melodies," said Keats, "are sweet; but those unheard are
+sweeter." The remark is not encouraging to performers, yet, saving their
+displeasure, there is some truth in it.
+
+We give too much importance, nowadays, being busy and idle and
+mercantile (compatible qualities, alas!) to the material presence of
+everything, its power of filling time or space, and particularly of
+becoming an item of our budget; forgetful that of the very best things
+the material presence is worthless save as first step to a spiritual
+existence within our soul. This is particularly the case with music.
+There is nothing in the realm of sound at all corresponding to the
+actual photographing of a visible object on the retina; our auditive
+apparatus, whatever its mysteries, gives no sign of being in any way of
+the nature of a phonograph. Moreover, one element of music is certainly
+due to the sense of locomotion, the _rhythm_; so that _sound_, to become
+music, requires the attention of something more than the mere ear. Nay,
+it would seem, despite the contrary assertion of the learned _Stumpf_,
+that the greater number of writers on the vexed science of sound incline
+to believe that the hearing of music is always attended with movements,
+however imperceptible, in the throat, which, being true, would prove
+that, in a fashion, we _perform_ the melodies which we think we only
+_hear_; living echoes, nerves vibrating beneath the composer's touch as
+literally as does the string of the fiddle, or its wooden fibres. A very
+delicate instrument this, called the _Hearer_, and, as we all know, more
+liable to being out of tune, to refusing to act altogether, than any
+instrument (fortunately for performers) hitherto made by the hand of
+man. Thus, in a way, one might paraphrase the answer which Mme.
+Gabbrielli is said to have made to the Empress Catherine, "Your
+Majesty's policemen can make me _scream_, not _sing_!" and say to some
+queen of piano keys or emperor of _ut de poitrine_ that there is no
+violence or blandishment which can secure the _inner ear_, however much
+the outer ear may be solicited or bullied.
+
+'Tis in this sense, methinks, that we should understand the saying of
+Keats--to wit, that in a great many cases the happiest conjunction of
+music and the soul occurs during what the profane call silence; the very
+fact of music haunting our mind, while every other sort of sound may be
+battering our ear, showing our highest receptivity. And, as a fact, we
+do not know that real musicians, _real_ Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha and
+Abt Voglers, not written ones, require organs neither of glass nor of
+metal; but build their palaces of sound on a plain deal table with a
+paper covered with little lines and dots before them? And was not
+Beethoven, in what some folk consider his mightiest era, as deaf as a
+post?
+
+I do not advocate deafness. Nay, privately, being quite incapable of
+deciphering a score, I confess that there is something dry and dreary in
+absolutely soundless music--music which from the silent composer passes
+to the silent performer, who is at the same time a silent listener,
+without the neighbours being even one bit the wiser? Besides, were this
+gift universal, it would deprive us of that delightful personality the
+mere performer, whose high-strung nervousness, or opulent joviality, is,
+after all, a pleasant item in art, a humorous dramatic interlude, in the
+excessive spirituality of music.
+
+I am not, therefore, in favour of absolute silence in the art of sounds.
+I am only asking people to remember that sound waves and the auditive
+apparatus put in connection, even if the connection costs a guinea, is
+not enough to secure the real _hearing_ of music; or, if this formula
+appear too vulgar, asking them to repeat to themselves those lines of
+Keats. I feel sure that so doing would save much of that dreadful
+bitterness and dryness of soul, a state of conscious non-receptivity
+corresponding in musical experience with what ascetic writers call
+"spiritual aridity"--which must occasionally depress even the most
+fortunate of listeners. For, look in thy conscience, O friendly
+fellow-concert-goer, and say truly, hast thou not, many times and oft,
+sat to no purpose upon narrow seats, blinded by gas, with no outlook
+save alien backs and bonnets, while divinest music flowed all around,
+yet somehow wetted not thy thirsty and irritated soul?
+
+The recognition of this fact would not only diminish such painful
+moments (or rather, alas! _hours_), but would teach us to endure them
+cheerfully as the preparation for future enjoyment, the garnering for
+private and silent enjoyment. "Heard melodies are sweet, but those
+unheard," etc., would act like Joseph's interpretation of the fat and
+lean kine of Pharaoh; we should consider concerts and musical festivals
+as fatiguing, even exhausting, employments, the strain of which was
+rendered pleasant by the anticipation of much ease and delight to come.
+
+Connected with this question is that of amateur performance. The amateur
+seems nowadays to waste infinite time in vying with the professional
+person instead of becoming acquainted, so to speak, with the composer.
+It is astonishing how very little music the best amateurs are acquainted
+with, because they must needs perform everything they know. This, in
+most cases, is sheer waste, for, in the way of performers, the present
+needs of mankind (as Auguste Comte remarked about philosophers) can be
+amply met by twenty thousand professionals. And many families would,
+from a spirit of moderation, forego the possession of an unpaid
+professional in the shape of a daughter or an aunt. One of the chief
+uses, indeed, of the professional performers should be to suppress
+amateurs by furnishing a standard of performance which lovers of music
+would silently apply to the music which formed the daily delight of
+their inner ear.
+
+For, if we care veraciously for music, we think of it, _or think it_, as
+it ought to be performed, not as we should ourselves perform it. Nay,
+more, I feel convinced that truly musical persons, such as can really
+understand a master's thoughts, are not distressed by the shortcomings
+of their own performance, the notes they play or sing merely serving to
+suggest those which they hear.
+
+This transcendental doctrine (fraught, I confess, like all transcendent
+truths, with gravest practical dangers) was matured in my mind by
+friendship with one of the most singular of musicians. This person
+(since deceased, and by profession a clerk) suffered from nervousness
+so excessive that, despite a fair knowledge of music, the fact of
+putting his hands upon the keys produced a maddening sort of stammer,
+let alone a notable tendency to strike wrong notes and miss his octaves;
+peculiarities of which he was so morbidly conscious that it was only an
+accident which revealed to me, after years of acquaintance, that he ever
+played the piano at all. Yet I know as a fact that this poor blundering
+player, who stopped convulsively if he heard steps in the passage, and
+actually _closed the lid of his instrument_ when the maid came in with
+the tea-things, was united more closely with the divine ones of music
+during his excruciating performance, than many a listener at a splendid
+concert. Mozart, for whom he had a special _cultus_, would surely have
+felt satisfied, if his clairvoyant spirit had been abroad, with my
+friend's marvellous bungling over that first finale of "Don Giovanni."
+The soul, the whole innermost nervous body (which felt of the shape of
+the music, fluid and infinitely sensitive) of the poor creature at the
+piano would draw itself up, parade grandly through that minuet, dance it
+in glory with the most glorious ghosts of glorious ladies--pshaw! not
+with anything so trifling! Dance it _with the notes themselves_, would
+sway with them, bow to them, rise to them, live with them, become in
+fact part and parcel of the music itself....
+
+So, to return whence I began, it is no use imagining that we necessarily
+hear music by going to concerts and festivals and operas, exposing our
+bodily ear to showers and floods of sound, unless we happen to be in the
+right humour, unless we dispose, at the moment, of that rare and
+capricious thing--the _inner ear_.
+
+
+
+
+RECEIVING LETTERS
+
+
+I think I shall not treat of writing them. That is a different matter,
+with pains and pleasures of its own, which do not correspond (the word
+fits nicely to this subject) with those of letters received. For 'tis a
+metaphysical mistake, or myth of language, like those victoriously
+exposed by the ingenious _M. Tarde_, to regard the reading of a letter
+as the symmetrical opposite (the right glove matching the left, or
+_inside of an outside_) of the writing thereof. Save in the case of
+lovers or moonstruck persons, like those in Emerson's essay on
+"Friendship," the reading of a letter is necessarily less potent, and,
+as the French say, _intimate_, in emotion, than the writing of it.
+Indeed, we catch ourselves repeatedly thrusting into our pocket for
+perusal at greater leisure those very letters which poured out like
+burning lava from their writers, or were conned over lovingly,
+lingeringly altered and rewritten; and we wonder sometimes at our lack
+of sympathy and wonder also (with cynicism or blushes) whether our
+letters also, say that one of Tuesday----But no; _our_ letters are not
+egoistical....
+
+The thought is not one to be dwelt on in an essay, which is nothing if
+it is not pleasing. So I proceed to note also that pleasure at the
+contents has nothing to do with the little excitement of the arrival
+of the post-bag, or of watching the clerk's slow evolutions at a
+_poste restante_ window. That satisfaction is due to the mere moment's
+hope for novelty, the flash past of the outer world, and the
+comfortable sense of having a following, friends, relatives, clients;
+and it is in proportion to the dulness of our surroundings. Great
+statesmen or fortunate lovers, methinks, must turn away from aunts'
+and cousins' epistles, and from the impression of so and so up the
+Nile, or on first seeing Rome. Indeed, I venture to suggest that only
+the monotony of our forbears' lives explains the existence of those
+endless volumes of dreary allusions and pointless anecdote handed
+down to us as the Correspondence of Sir Somebody This, or of the
+beautiful Countess of That, or even of Blank, that prince of
+coffee-house wits. The welcome they received in days when (as is
+recorded by Scott) the mail occasionally arrived at Edinburgh carrying
+only one single letter, has given such letters a reputation for
+delightfulness utterly disconnected with any intrinsic merit, but
+which we sycophantishly accept after a hundred or two hundred years,
+handing it on with hypocritical phrases about "quaintness," and "vivid
+picture of the past," and similar nonsense. But the Wizard Past casts
+wonderful spells. And then there is the tenderness and piety due to
+those poor dead people, once strutting majestically in power, beauty,
+wit, or genius; and now left shivering, poor, thin, transparent ghosts
+in those faded, thrice-crossed paper rags! I feel rebuked for my
+inhuman irreverence. Out upon it! I will speak only pious words about
+the letters of dead folk.
+
+But, to make up for such good feeling, let me say what I think about the
+letters of persons now living, in good health, my contemporaries and
+very liable to outlive me. For if I am to praise the letters which my
+soul loves, I must be plain also about those which my soul abhors.
+
+And to begin with the worst. The letter we all hate most, I feel quite
+sure, is the nice letter of a person whom we think horrid. Some beings
+have the disquieting peculiarity, which crowns their other bad
+qualities, of being able to write more pleasingly than they speak, look,
+or (we suppose) act; revealing, pen in hand, human characteristics,
+sometimes alas! human charms, high principle, pathetic sentiment, poetic
+insight, sensitiveness to nature, things we are bound to love, but
+particularly do not wish to love in _them_. This villainous faculty,
+which puts us in a rage and forces us to be amiable, is almost enough to
+make us like, or at all events condone, its contrary in our own dear
+friends. I mean that marvellous transformation to which so many of those
+we love are subject; creatures, supple, subtle and sympathetic in the
+flesh, in speech and glance and deed, becoming stiff, utterly impervious
+and heartless once they set to writing; lovely Melusinas turning, not
+into snakes, but into some creature like a dried cod. This is much
+worse with persons of our nation than with our foreign friends, owing to
+that fine contempt for composition, grammar, and punctuation which marks
+the well-bred Briton, and especially the well-bred Briton's wife and
+daughter. As a result, there is a positive satisfaction, a sense of
+voluminous well-being, derived from a letter which is merely explicit,
+consecutive, and garnished with occasional stops. This question of
+punctuation is a serious one. Speaking personally, I find I cannot enjoy
+the ineffable sense of resting in the affection and wisdom of my friend,
+if I am jerked breathless from noun to noun and from verb to verb, or
+set hunting desperately after predicates. Worse even is the lack of
+explicitness. The peace and trustfulness, the respite given by
+friendship from what Whitman calls "the terrible doubt of appearances"
+are incompatible with brief and casual utterance, ragbags of items,
+where you have to elucidate, weigh, and use your judgment whether more
+(or less) is meant than meets the eye; and after whose perusal you are
+left for hours, sometimes days, patching together suggestions and
+wondering what they suggest. Some persons' letters seem almost framed
+to afford a series of _alibis_ for their personality; not in this thing,
+oh no! not concerned in such a matter by any means; always elsewhere,
+never to be clutched.
+
+Yet there are bitterer things in letters from friends than even these,
+which merely puzzle and distress, but do not infuriate. For I feel
+cheated by casual glimpses of affairs which concern me not; I resent odd
+scraps of information, not chosen for my palate; I am indignant at news
+culled from the public prints, and frantic at thermometric and
+meteorological intelligence. But stay! There is a case when what seems
+to come under this heading is really intensely personal, and, therefore,
+most welcome to the letter receiver. I mean whenever, as happens with
+some persons, such talk about the weather reveals the real writing soul
+in its most intimate aspect; wrestling with hated fogs, or prone in the
+dampish heat, fretted by winds or jubilant in dry, sunny air. And now I
+find that with this item of weather reports, I am emerging from the
+region of letters I abhor into the region of letters which I love, or
+which I lovingly grieve over for some small minor cruelty.
+
+For I am grieved--nay, something more--by that extraordinary (and I
+hope exclusively feminine) fact an absence of superscripture. My soul
+claims some kind of vocative. I would accept a German note of
+exclamation; I would content myself with an Italian abbreviation, a
+Preg^mo, or Chiar^mo; I could be happy with a solemn and discreet
+French "Madame et chere amie," or (as may happen) "Monsieur et cher
+Maitre," like the bow with tight-joined heels and _platbord_ hat
+pressed on to waistcoat, preluding delightful conversation. But not to
+be quite sure how one is thought of! Whether as _dear_, or _my dear_,
+or Tom, Dick, or Harry, or soldier, or sailor, or candlestick maker!
+Nay, at the first glance, not quite to know whether one is the
+destined reader, or whether even there is a destined reader at all; to
+be offered an entry out of a pocket-book, a page out of a diary, a
+selection of _Pensees_, were they Pascal's; a soliloquy, were it
+Hamlet's: surely lack of sympathy can go no further, nor incapacity of
+effort be more flagrant than with such writers, usually the very ones
+the reader most clings to, who put off, as it seems, until directing
+the envelope, the question of whom they are writing to.
+
+Yet the annoyance they give one is almost compensated when, once in a
+blue moon, in such a superscription-less epistle, one lights upon a
+sentence very exclusively directed to one's self; when suddenly out of
+the vague _tenebrae_ of such a letter, there comes, retreating as
+suddenly, a glance, a grasp, a clasp. It seems quite probable that young
+Endymion, in his noted love passages with the moon, may have had
+occasionally supreme felicity of this kind, in a relation otherwise of
+painfully impersonal and public nature; when, to wit, the goddess, after
+shining night after night over the seas and plains and hills,
+occasionally shot from behind a cloud one little gleam, one arrow of
+light, straight on to Latmos.
+
+But, alack! as Miss Howe wrote to the immortal Clarissa, my paper is at
+an end, my crowquill worn to the stump. So I can only add as postscript
+to such of my dear friends as write the letters which my soul abhors,
+that I hope, beg, entreat they will at least write them to me often.
+
+
+
+
+NEW FRIENDS AND OLD
+
+
+There is not unfrequently a spice of humiliation hidden in the rich
+cordial pleasure of a new friendship, and I think Emerson knew it.
+Without beating about the bush as he does, one might explain it,
+methinks, not merely as a vague sense of disloyalty towards the other
+friendships which are not new; but also as a shrewd suspicion (though we
+hide it from ourselves) that this one also will have to grow old in its
+turn. And we have not yet found out how to treat any of our possessions,
+including our own selves, in such a way that they shall, if anything,
+improve. Despite our complicated civilization, so called, or perhaps on
+account of it, we are all of us a mere set of barbarians, who find it
+less trouble to provide a new, cheap, and shoddy thing than to get the
+full use and full pleasure of a finely-made and carefully-chosen old
+one. Those ghastly paper toilettes of the ladies in "Looking Backward"
+are emblematic of our modes of proceeding. We are for ever dressing and
+undressing our souls, if not our bodies, in rags made out of rags.
+
+Heaven forbid that I should ever blaspheme new friendships! They are
+among the most necessary as well as the most delightful things we get a
+chance of. They do not merely exhilarate, but actually renew and add to
+us, more even than change of climate and season. We are (luckily for
+every one) such imitative creatures that every person we like much, adds
+a new possible form, a new pattern, to our understanding and our
+feeling; making us, through the pleasantness of novelty, see and feel a
+little as that person does. And when, instead of _liking_ (which is the
+verb belonging rather to good acquaintance, accidental relationship as
+distinguished from real friendship), it is a case of _loving_ (in the
+sense in which we really love a place, a piece of music, or even, very
+often, an animal), there is something more important and excellent even
+than this. For every creature we do really love seems to reveal a whole
+side of life, by the absorbing of our attention into that creature's
+ways; nay, more, the fact that what we call _loving_ is in most cases a
+complete creation, at least a thorough interpretation of them by our
+fancy and our shaken-up, refreshed feelings.
+
+A new friendship, by this unconscious imitation of the new friend's
+nature and habits, and by the excitement of the thing's pleasant
+novelty, causes us to discover new qualities in literature, art, our
+surroundings, ourselves. How different does the scenery look--still
+familiar but delightfully strange--as we drive along the valleys or
+scramble in the hills with the new friend! there is a distant peak one
+never noticed, or a scented herb which has always grown upon those
+rocks, but might as well never have done so, but for the other pair of
+eyes which drew ours to it, or the other hand which crushing made us
+know its fragrance. Pages of books, seemingly stale, revive into fresh
+meaning; new music is almost certain to be learned; and a harmony, a
+rational sequence, something very akin to music, perceived in what had
+been hitherto but a portion of life's noise and confusion. The changes
+of style which we note in the case of great geniuses--Goethe and
+Schiller, for instance, or Ruskin after his meeting with Carlyle--are
+often brought about, or prepared, by the accident of a new friendship;
+and, who knows? half of the disinterested progress of the world's
+thought and feeling might prove, under the moral microscope, to be but a
+moving web of invisible friendships, forgotten, but once upon a time
+new, and so vivid!
+
+The falling off from such pleasure and profit in older friendships (it
+is very sad, but not necessarily cynical to recognize the fact) is due
+in some measure to our being less frank, less ourselves, in them than in
+new ones. Our mutual ways of feeling and seeing are apt to produce a
+definite track of intellectual and affective intercourse; and as this
+track deepens we find ourselves confined, nay, imprisoned in it, with
+little possibility of seeing, and none of escaping, as in some sunken
+Devonshire lane; the very ups and downs of the friendship existing, so
+to speak, below the level of our real life; disagreements and
+reconciliations always on one pattern. With people we have known very
+long, we are apt to go thus continually over the same ground, reciting
+the same formulae of thought and feeling, imitating the _ego_ of former
+years in its relations with a _thou_ quite equally obsolete; the real
+personality left waiting outside for the chance stranger. It is so easy!
+so safe! We have done it so long! There is an air of piety almost in the
+monotony and ceremonial; and then, there are the other's habits of
+thought which might be jarred, or feelings we might hurt.... Meanwhile
+our sincere, spontaneous reality is idling elsewhere, ready to vagabond
+irresponsibly at the beck and call of the passing stranger. And, who
+knows? while we are thus refusing to give our poor old friend the
+benefit of our genuine, living, changed and changing self, we may
+ourselves be losing the charm and profit of his or her renovated and
+more efficacious reality.
+
+The retribution sometimes comes in unexpected manner. We find ourselves
+neglected for some new-comer, thin of stuff, to-morrow threadbare; _we_,
+who are conscious all the time of a newness too well hidden, alas! a
+newness utterly unsuspected by our friend, and far surpassing the
+newness of the new one! Poetic justice too lamentable to dwell upon.
+But short of it, far short, our old friendships, with their safe
+traditions and lazy habits, are ever tending to become the intercourse
+of friendly ghosts.
+
+Yet even this is well worth having, and after bringing praise to younger
+friendships, let me for ever feel, rather than speak (for 'tis too deep
+and wide for words) befitting gratitude to old ones. For there is always
+something puzzling in the present; unrestful and disquieting in all
+novelty; and we require, poor harassed mortals, the past and lots of it;
+the safe, the done-for past, a heap of last year's leaves or of dry,
+scented hay (which is mere dead grass and dead meadow-flowers) to take
+our rest upon. There is a virtue ineffable in things known, tried,
+understood; a comfort and a peacefulness, often truly Elysian, in
+finding one's self again in this quiet, crepuscular, downy world of old
+friendships--a world, as I have remarked, largely peopled with ghosts,
+our own and other folks'; but ghosts whose footsteps never creak, whose
+touch can never startle, or whose voice stab us, and who smile a smile
+which has the wide, hazy warmth of setting suns or veiled October skies.
+Yes, whatever they may lack (through our own fault and folly), old
+friendships are made up of what, when all is said and done, we need
+above every other thing, poor faulty, uncertain creatures that we are--I
+mean kindness and certain indulgence. There is more understanding in new
+friendships, and a closer contact of soul with soul; but that contact
+may mean a jar, a bruise, or, worst of all, a sudden sense of icy chill;
+and the penetrating comprehension may entail, at any moment, pained
+surprise and disappointment. Making new friends is not merely
+exploration, but conquest; and what cruel checks to our wishes and
+ambitions!
+
+Instead of which, all vanity long since put to sleep, curiosity extinct
+for years, insidious pleasures of self-explanation quite forgotten,
+there remains this massive comfort of well-known faithful and trusting
+kindness; a feeling of absolute reassurance almost transcending the
+human, such as we get from, let us say, an excellent climate.
+
+There remain, also, joys quite especial to old friendship, or the
+possibility thereof, for the reality, alas! is rare enough. The sudden
+discovery, for instance, after a period of separation or a gap in
+intercourse, of qualities and ways not previously seen (perhaps not
+previously wanted) in the well-known soul: new notes, but with the added
+charm of likeness to already loved ones, deeper, more resonant, or
+perhaps of unsuspected high unearthly purity, in the dear voice. Absence
+may do it, or change of occupation; or sudden vicissitude of fortune; or
+merely the reading of a certain book (how many friends may not Tolstoi's
+"Resurrection" have thus revealed to one another!), or the passing of
+some public crisis like the Dreyfus business. What! after these years of
+familiarity, we did not know each other fully? You thought, you felt,
+like that on such or such a subject, dear old friend, and I never
+suspected it! Nay, never knew, perhaps, that _I_ must feel and think
+like that, and in no other way! To find more in what one already has;
+the truest adding to all wealth, the most fruitful act of
+production;--that is one of the privileges of old friendships.
+
+
+
+
+OTHER FRIENDSHIPS
+
+
+It came home to me, during that week of grim and sordid business in the
+old house, feeling so solitary among the ghosts of unkind passions which
+seemed, like the Wardour Street ancestors, to fill the place--it came
+home to me what consolation there can be in the friendship of one small
+corner of grace or beauty. During those dreary days in Scotland, the
+friendliness and consolation were given me by the old kitchen garden,
+with its autumn flower borders, half hiding apple trees and big cabbages
+and rhubarbs, and the sheep-dotted hill, and the beeches sloping above
+its red fruit walls. I slipped away morning and evening to it as to a
+friend. Not as to an old one; that would give a different aspect to the
+matter; nor yet exactly a new friend, conquering or being conquered; but
+rather as one turns one's thoughts, if not one's words, to some
+nameless stranger, casually met, in whom one recognizes, among the
+general wilderness of alien creatures, a quality, a character for which
+one cares.
+
+Travelling a good deal, and nearly always alone, one has occasion to
+gauge the deep dreariness of human beings pure and simple, when, so to
+speak, the small, learnt-by-rote lessons of civilization, of kindness,
+graciousness, or intelligence, are not being called into play by common
+business or acquaintanceship. There, in the train, they sit in the
+elemental, native dreariness of their more practical, ungracious demand
+on life; not bad in any way, oh no; nor actively repulsive, but trite,
+empty, _everyday_, in the sense of what _everyday_ often, alas! really
+is, but certainly no day or hour or minute, in a decent universe, should
+ever be. And suddenly a new traveller gets in; and, turning round, you
+realize that things are changed, that something from another planet, and
+yet something quite right and so familiar, has entered. A young man
+shabbily dressed in mourning, who got in at a junction in Northern
+France with a small girl, like him in mourning, and like him pale, a
+little washed-out ashy blond, and with the inexpressible moral grace
+which French folk sometimes have, will always remain in my memory; while
+all those fellow-travellers and all the others--hundreds of them since
+that day--have faded from my memory, their images collapsing into each
+other, a grey monotony as of the rows of little houses which unfurl and
+furl up, and vanish, thank the Lord, into nothingness, while the express
+swishes past some dreadful manufacturing town. Another time, some years
+ago, the unknown friend was a small boy, a baby almost, jumping and
+rolling (a practice intolerable in any child but him) on the seat of a
+second-class carriage. We did not speak; in fact my friend had barely
+acquired the necessary art. But I felt companioned, befriended,
+delivered of the world's crowded solitude.
+
+Apart from railway trains, a similar thing may sometimes happen. And
+there are few of us, surely, who do not possess, somewhere in their
+life, friends of the highest value whom they have barely known--met with
+once or twice perhaps, talked with, and for some reason not met again;
+but never lost sight of by heart and fancy--indeed, more often turned
+to, and perhaps more deeply trusted (as devout persons trust St. Joseph
+and St. Anthony of Padua, whom, after all, they scarcely know more than
+their own close kindred) than so many of, ostensibly, our nearest and
+dearest. Indeed, this is the meaning of that curious little poem of
+Whitman's--"Out of the rolling ocean, the crowd, came a drop gently to
+me"--with its Emersonian readiness to part, "now we have met, we are
+safe;" a very wise view of things, if our poor human weakness really
+wanted safety, and did not merely want "more"--indeed, like that human
+little boy, want "too much."
+
+But to return to the friendships, consoling, comforting intimacies,
+which we can have not merely with strangers never met again, or never,
+meeting, spoken with; but even more satisfactorily with those beloved
+ones whom, from our own lack of soul, of _anima_ drawing forth _anima_,
+we dully call inanimates. I am not speaking, of course, of the real
+passions with which exceptionally lovely or wonderful spots or
+monuments, views of distant Alps, or certain rocky southern coasts, or
+St. Mark's or Amiens Cathedral, great sirens among voiceless things,
+subjugate and draw our souls. The friendships in question are sober and
+deliberate, founded on reasonable recognition of some trait of dignity
+or grace; and matured by conscious courtship on our part, retracing of
+steps day by day, and watching the friend's varying moods at noon or
+under low lights. During that week in the grim Scottish ancestral house,
+it was the kitchen-garden, as I began by saying, which comforted me. In
+another place, where I was ill and sorely anxious, a group of slender,
+whispering poplars by a mill; and under different, but equally
+harassing, circumstances, the dear little Gothic church of a tiny town
+of Western France.
+
+The Gothic church on its rising ground above the high-pitched roofs,
+and, in a measure, the church's white tame goat, which I found there one
+morning under a lime tree. I had been overtaken by a sudden storm, the
+rain-floods dashing from the gargoyles on to the rough ground of the
+solitary, wooded mound. In the faint light the little church, with
+sparse oak leaves and dock delicately carved on the granite capitals,
+was wonderfully grave and gentle in its utter emptiness; and I did it
+all possible honour. There is a low granite bench or sill round the
+base of the beautiful sheaved columns; a broken, disused organ-loft of
+coloured mediaeval thorn carving; and under two shapely little arches lie
+a knight, unknown, and lady in high coif.... I knew it all by heart,
+coming like that every day and sometimes twice a day; by heart, and, so
+to speak, _with_ my heart. The sound of the spouting gargoyles ceased;
+cocks began to crow; I went out, for the rain must have left off.... Not
+yet; the skies were still dripping, and the plain below full of vapours.
+And the tame white goat, the only living creature about the church, had
+taken refuge under a cart stranded by a large lime tree.
+
+I mention this particular visit to my friend the church of L----, in
+order to explain the precise nature of our friendship; and to show, as I
+think it does, that through that law of economy which should preside
+over our pleasures and interests, such intimacy with a single object,
+simple and unobtrusive, is worth the acquaintance with a hundred and one
+magnificent and perfect things, if superficially seen and without loving
+care.
+
+
+
+
+A HOTEL SITTING-ROOM
+
+
+I am calling this paper after a hotel sitting-room because some of one's
+most recurrent and definite trains of thought are most hopelessly
+obstinate about getting an intelligible name, so that I take advantage
+of this one having been brought to a head in a real room of the kind.
+The room was on a top floor in Florence; the Cupola and Campanile and
+other towers in front of it above the plum-coloured roofs; and beyond,
+the bluish mountains of Fiesole. Trams were puffing about in the square
+below, and the church bells ringing, and the crowd streaming to the
+promenade; but only the unchanging and significant life of the town
+seemed to matter up here. I was struck with the charm of such a hotel
+room--the very few ornaments, greatly cherished since they were carried
+about; the books for reading, not for furniture; the bought flowers in
+common glasses; and the consequent sense of selection, deliberateness,
+and personality. Good heavens, I reflected, are we mortals so
+cross-grained that we can thoroughly enjoy things only by contrast, and
+that a sort of mild starvation is needed to whet our aesthetic appetite?
+
+By no means. Contrast for contrast's sake is a very coarse stimulant,
+and required only by very joyless natures. The real explanation of the
+charm of the hotel room and its sparse properties and flowers must be
+sought, I believe, in the fact that the charm of things depends upon our
+power of extracting it; and that our power in this matter, as in every
+other, nay, our leisure to exert it, is necessarily limited. Things, as
+I before remarked, do not give themselves without some wooing; and
+courtship is the secret of true possession. The world outside us, as
+philosophers tell us, is not what our eyes, ears, and touch and taste
+make it appear; nay, for aught we know, 'tis a mere chaos; and if, out
+of the endless impressions with which outer objects keep pelting us, we
+manage to pick up and appropriate a few, setting them in a pattern of
+meaning and beauty, it is thanks to the activity of our own special
+little self. That is the gist of Kant's philosophy; and, apart from
+Kant, it is the vague practical knowledge which experience teaches us.
+Hence the disappointment of all such persons as think that the beautiful
+and significant things of the world ought to give them delight without
+any trouble on their part: they think that it is the fault of a Swiss
+mountain, or a Titian Madonna, or a poem by Browning if it does not at
+once ravish their inert souls into a seventh heaven. Yet these are
+people who occasionally ride, or play at golf or whist, and who never
+expect the cards and the golf clubs to play the game by themselves, nor
+the very best horse to carry them to some destination without riding.
+Now, beautiful and interesting things also require a deal of riding, of
+playing with; let us put it more courteously--of wooing.
+
+The hotel room I have spoken of reveals the fact that we usually have
+far too many pleasant things about us, to be able to extract much
+pleasure from any of them; while, of course, somebody else, at the other
+end of the world let us say, or merely in the mews to the back, has so
+very much too little as to have none at all, which is another way of
+diminishing possible enjoyment. There seems, moreover, to be a certain
+queer virtue in mere emptiness, in mere negation. We require a _margin_ of
+_nothing_ round everything that is to charm us; round our impressions as
+well as round the material objects which can supply them; for without it
+we lose all outline, and begin to feel vaguely choked.
+
+Compare the pleasure of a picture tucked away in a chapel or sacristy
+with the plethoric weariness of a whole Louvre or National Gallery. Nay,
+remember the vivid delight of some fine bit of tracery round a single
+door or window, as in the cathedral of Dol or the house of Tristan
+l'Hermite at Tours; or of one of those Ionic capitals which you
+sometimes find built into quite an uninteresting house in Rome (there is
+one almost opposite St. Angelo, and another near Tor dei Specchi, Tower
+of the Mirrors, delightful name!).
+
+That question of going to see the thing, instead of seeing it drearily
+among ten thousand other things equally lovely--O weariness
+unparalleled of South Kensington or Cluny!--that question of the
+agreeable little sense of deliberate pilgrimage (pilgrimage to a small
+shrine perhaps in one's memory), leads me to another explanation of
+what I must call the "hotel room phenomenon."
+
+I maintain that there is a zest added to one's pleasure in beautiful
+things by the effort and ingenuity (unless too exhausting) expended in
+eliminating the impressions which might detract from them. One likes the
+hotel room just because some of the furniture has been sent away into
+the passage or wheeled into corners; one enjoys pleasant things
+additionally for having arranged them to advantage in one's mind. It is
+just the reverse with the rooms in a certain palace I sometimes have the
+privilege of entering, where every detail is worked--furniture,
+tapestries, embroideries, majolica, and flowers--into an overwhelming
+Wagner symphony of loveliness. There is a genuine Leonardo in one of
+those rooms, and truly I almost wish it were in a whitewashed lobby. And
+in coming out of all that perfection I sometimes feel a kind of relief
+on getting into the empty, uninteresting street. My thoughts, somehow,
+fetch a long breath....
+
+These are not the sentiments of the superfine. But then I venture to
+think that the dose of fineness which is, so to speak, _super_ or _too
+much_, just turns these folks' refinement into something its reverse.
+People who cannot sleep because of the roseleaf in the sheets, or the
+pea (like the little precious princess) under the mattress, are bad
+sleepers, and had better do charing or climbing, or get pummelled by a
+masseur till they grow healthier. And if ever I had the advising of
+young folk with ambition to be aesthetic, I should conjure them to
+cultivate their sensitiveness only to good things, and atrophy it
+towards the inevitable bad; or rather I should teach them to push into
+corners (or altogether get rid of) the irrelevant and trivial
+impressions which so often are bound to accompany the most delightful
+ones; very much as those occupants of the hotel room had done with
+some of its furniture. What if an electric tram starts from the foot
+of Giotto's tower, or if four-and-twenty Cook's tourists invade the
+inn and streets of Verona? If you cannot extract some satisfaction
+from the thought that there may be intelligent people even in a Cook's
+party, and that the ugly tram takes hundreds of people up Fiesole
+hill without martyrizing cab-horses--if you cannot do this (which
+still is worth doing), overlook the Cook's tourists and the tram, blot
+them out of your thoughts and feelings.
+
+This question of _superfineness_ versus _refinement_ (which ought to
+mean the power of refining things through our feeling) has carried me
+away from the original theme of my discourse, which, under the symbol of
+the hotel room, was merely that we should _perhaps appreciate more if we
+were offered less to appreciate_. Apropos of this, I have long been
+struck by the case of a dear Italian friend of mine, whose keenness of
+perception and grip of judgment and unexpectedness of fancy is almost in
+inverse proportion to her knowledge of books or opportunity of travel.
+An invalid, cut off from much reading, and limited to monotonous
+to-and-fro between a town which is not a great town and a hillside
+village which is not a--not a great village; she is quite marvellously
+delightful by her power of assimilating the little she can read and
+observe, not merely of transmuting _it_ into something personal and
+racy, but (what is much more surprising) of being modified harmoniously
+by its assimilation; her rich and unexpected mind putting forth even
+richer and more unexpected details. Whereas think of Tom, Dick, or
+Harry, their natural good parts watered down with other folks' notions,
+their imagination worn threadbare by the friction of experience; men who
+ought to be so amusing, and alas!...
+
+And now, having fulfilled my programme, as was my duty, let me return to
+my pleasure, which, at this moment (and whenever the opportunity
+presents itself) consists in falling foul of the superfine. The
+superfine are those who deserve (and frequently attain) the condition of
+that Renaissance tyrant who lived exclusively on hard-boiled eggs
+(without salt) for fear of poison. The superfine are those who will not
+eat walnuts because of the shell, and are pained that Nature should have
+been so coarse as to propagate oranges through pips. The superfine
+are.... But no. Let us be true to our principle of not neglecting the
+delightful things of this world by fixing our too easily hypnotized gaze
+on the things which are not delightful--disagreeable things which
+should be examined only with a view to their removal; or if they prove
+obstinate fixtures in our reality, be all the more resolutely turned out
+of the sparsely-furnished, delectable chambers of our fancy.
+
+
+
+
+IN PRAISE OF COURTSHIP
+
+
+There is too little courtship in the world. I do not mean there is not
+enough marrying and giving in marriage, or that the preliminaries
+thereunto are otherwise than they should be. Quite the reverse. As long
+as there is love and youth, there is sure in the literal sense to be
+courtship. But what I ask is that there be courtship besides that
+literal courtship between the Perditas and Florizels; that there be
+"being in love" with a great many things, even stocks and stones,
+besides youth and maiden; which would result, on the whole, in all of us
+being young in feeling even when we had grown old in years.
+
+For courtship means a wish to stand well in the other person's eyes,
+and, what is more, a readiness to be pleased with the other's ways; a
+sense on each side of having had the better of the bargain; an
+undercurrent of surprise and thankfulness at one's good luck.
+
+There is not enough courtship in the world. This thought has been
+growing in my mind ever since the silver wedding of two dear friends:
+that quarter of a century has been but a prolonged courtship.
+
+Why is it not oftener so? One sees among married folk a good deal of
+affection, of kindliness, even of politeness; a great deal too much
+mutual dependence, degenerating, of course, into habitual boredom. But
+none of this can be called courtship. Perhaps this was the meaning, less
+cynical than supposed, but quite as sad, of La Rochefoucauld when he
+noted down, "Il y a de bons mariages, mais point de delicieux;" since,
+in the delicate French sense of the word, implying some analogy of
+subdued yet penetrating pleasantness, as of fresh, bright weather or
+fine light wine, courtship is essentially _delicieux_.
+
+This is, of course, initiating a question of manner. Modern psychology
+is discovering scientific reasons for the fact that if you wag a dog's
+tail he feels pleased; or, at all events, that the human being would
+feel pleased if it had a tail and could wag it. Confessors and nurses
+knew it long ago, curbing bad temper by restraining its outer
+manifestations; and are not dinners and plays, flags and illuminations,
+birthdays and jubilees--nay, art itself, devices for suggestions to
+mankind that it feels pleased?
+
+Married people, as a rule, wish not to be pleased, or at least not to
+show it. They may be heartbroken at each other's death, and unable to
+endure a temporary separation; but the outsider may wonder why, seeing
+how little they seem to care for being together. It is the same, after
+all, with other relations; and it is only because brothers and sisters,
+fathers and children have not taken visible steps to select one another
+that their bored indifference is less conspicuous. You will say it is a
+question of mere manner. But, as remarked, manner not merely results
+from feeling, but largely reacts on feeling, and makes it different.
+People who live together have the appearance, often, of taking each
+other, if not as a convenience, at all events as a _fait accompli_, and,
+so far as possible, as if not there at all. Near relations try to
+realize the paradox of companionable solitude; and intimacy seems to
+imply the right to behave as if the intimate other one were not there.
+Now, _being by one's self_ is a fine thing, convenient and salutary
+(indeed, like courtship, there is not enough of it); but being by one's
+self is not to be confounded with _not being in company_. I have
+selected that expression advisedly, in order to give a shock to the
+reader. _In company?_ Good heavens! is being with one's wife, one's
+brothers or sisters, one's children, one's bosom friends _being in
+company_? And why not? Should company necessarily mean the company of
+strangers? And is the presence of one's nearest and dearest to be
+accounted as nothing--as nothing demanding some change in ourselves, and
+worthy of being paid some price for?
+
+This goes against our notion of intimacy; but then our notion is wrong,
+as is shown daily by the quarrels and recriminations of intimate
+friends. One can be natural, _with a difference_, which difference means
+a thought for the other. There is a selection possible in one's words
+and actions before another--nay, there is a manner of doing and feeling
+which almost forestalls the necessity of a selection at all. I like the
+expression employed by a certain sister after nursing her small brother
+through a difficult illness, "We were always Castilian," she said. Why,
+as we all try to be honest, and hard-working, and clever, and more or
+less illustrious, should we not sometimes try to be a little Castilian?
+Similarly, my friend of the silver wedding once pointed out to me that
+marriage, with its enforced and often excessive intimacies, was a
+wonderful school of consideration, of mutual respect, of fine courtesy.
+This had been no paradox in her case; but then, as I said, her
+twenty-five years of wedlock had been years of courtship.
+
+Courtship, however, should not be confined to marriage, nor even to such
+relations as imply close quarters and worries in common; nay, it should
+exist towards all things, a constant attitude in life--at least, an
+attitude constantly tended towards.
+
+The line of least resistance seems against it; our laziness, and our
+wish to think well of ourselves merely because we _are_ ourselves,
+undoubtedly go against it, as they do against everything in the world
+worth having. In our own day certain ways of thinking, culminating in
+development of the _Moi_ and production of the _Uebermensch_, and
+general self-engrossment and currishness, are peculiarly hostile to
+courtship. Whereas the old religious training, where it did not
+degenerate into excessive asceticism, was a school of good manners
+towards the universe as well as towards one's neighbours. The "Fioretti
+di San Francisco" is a handbook of polite friendliness to men, women,
+birds, wolves, and, what must have been most difficult, fellow-monks;
+and St. Francis' Hymn to the Sun might be given as an example of the
+wise man's courtship of what we stupidly call inanimates.
+
+For courtship might be our attitude towards everything which is capable
+of giving pleasure; and would not many more things give us pleasure--let
+us say, the sun in the heavens, the water on the stones, even the fire
+in the grate, if, instead of thinking of them as existing merely to make
+our life bearable, we called them, like the saint of Assisi, My Lord the
+Sun, and Sister Water, and Brother Fire, and thought of them with joy
+and gratitude?
+
+Certain it is that everything in the world repays courtship; and that,
+quite outside all marrying and giving in marriage, in all our dealings
+with all possible things, the cessation of courtship marks the incipient
+necessity for divorce.
+
+
+
+
+KNOWING ONE'S MIND
+
+
+The only things which afforded me any pleasure in that great collection
+of Ingres drawings, let alone in that very dull, frowsy, stale, and
+unprofitable city of Montauban, whither I had travelled on purpose to
+see it, were an old printed copy of "Don Juan oder der Steinerne
+Gast"--in a glass case alongside of M. Ingres' century-long-uncleaned
+fiddle--and a half-page of Mozart's autograph, given to M. Ingres when a
+student by a Prix de Rome musician. I mentioned this fact to my friends,
+in a spirit of guileless truthfulness; when, what was my surprise at the
+story being received with smiling incredulity. "Your paradox," they
+said, with the benevolent courtesy of their nation, for they were
+French, "is delightful and most _reussi_. But, of course, we know you to
+be exquisitely sensitive to genius in all its manifestations."
+
+Now, I happened to know myself to be as insensible as a stone to genius
+as manifested in the late M. Ingres. However, I despaired of persuading
+them that I was speaking the truth; and, despite the knowledge of their
+language with which they graciously credited me, I hunted about in vain
+for the French equivalent of "I know my own mind." Whereupon, allowing
+the conversation to take another turn, I fell to musing on those
+untranslatable words, together with the whole episode of the Mozart
+manuscript and the drawings of M. Ingres, including that rainy, chilly
+day at Montauban; and also another day of travel, even wetter and
+colder, which returned to my memory.
+
+_Knowing one's own mind_ (in whatever way you might succeed in turning
+that into French) is a first step to filling one's own place instead of
+littering unprofitably over creation at large, and in so far also to
+doing one's own work. Life, I am willing to admit, is not all private
+garden, nor should we attempt to make it. 'Tis nine-tenths common acres,
+which we must till in company, and with mutual sacrifice of our whims.
+Nay, Life is largely public thoroughfares with a definite _rule of the
+road_ and a regulated pace of traffic; streets, at all events, however
+narrow, where each must shovel snow, sprinkle water, and sweep his
+threshold. But respect for such common property cannot be genuine where
+there is not a corresponding fidelity and fondness on the part of each
+for his own little enclosure, his garden, and, by analogy, his
+neighbour's garden also. There is little good to be got from your vague,
+gregarious natures, liking or disliking merely because others like or
+dislike. There cannot be much loving-kindness, let alone love (whether
+for persons or things or ideas), in souls which always require company,
+and prefer any to none at all. And as to good work, why, it means
+_tete-a-tete_ with what you are doing, and is incompatible with the
+spirit of picnics. I own to a growing suspicion of those often heroic
+and saintly persons who allow their neighbours--husband, father, mother,
+children--to saunter idly into the allotments which God has given them,
+trampling heedlessly the delicate seedlings, or, like holiday trippers,
+carving egoistic initials in growing trees not of their own planting.
+And one of the unnoticed, because continuous, tragedies of existence is
+surely such wanton or deliberate destruction of the individual
+qualities of the soul, such sacrifice of the necessary breathing and
+standing place which even the smallest requires; such grudging of the
+needful solitude and separateness, alas! often to those that we love the
+best. It seems highly probable that among all their absurd and
+melancholy recollections of this wasteful and slatternly earth, the
+denizens of the Kingdom of Heaven will look back with most astonishment
+and grief on the fact of having lived, before regeneration, without a
+room apiece.
+
+In the Kingdom of Heaven every one will have a separate room for rest
+and meditation; a cell perhaps, whitewashed, with a green shutter and a
+white dimity curtain in the sunshine. And the cells will, of course, be
+very much alike in all essentials, because most people agree about
+having some sort of bed, table, chair, and so forth. But some glorified
+souls will have the flowers (which Dante saw her plucking) of Leah; and
+others the looking-glass of the contemplative Rachel; and there will be
+ever so many other little differences, making it amusing and edifying to
+pay a call upon one's brother or sister soul.
+
+In such a state of spiritual community and privacy (so different from
+our present hugger-mugger and five-little-bears-in-a-bed mode of
+existence), my soul, for instance, if your soul should honour it with a
+visit, would be able, methinks, to talk quite freely and pleasantly
+about the Ingres Museum at Montauban, and the autograph of Mozart in the
+glass case alongside the fiddle.... The manuscript is only a half sheet
+full score, torn or cut through its height; and the voice part is broken
+off with one word only--insufficient to identify it among Mozart's
+Italian works, though, perhaps, most suggestive of "Don Giovanni"--the
+word "Guai." The manuscript is exquisitely neat, yet has none of the
+look of a copy, and we know that Mozart was never obliged to make any.
+The writing is so like the man's adorable personality, the little
+pattern of notes so like his music. The sight of it moved me, flooding
+my mind with divine things, that Concerto for Flute and Harp, for
+instance, which dear Mme. H---- had recently been playing for me. And
+during that dull, rainy day of waiting for trains at Montauban, it made
+me live over again another day of rainy travel, but with the
+"Zauberfloete" at the end of it, about which I will also tell you, since
+I am permitted to know my own mind and to speak it.
+
+But I find I have incidentally raised the question _de gustibus_, or, as
+our language puts it, the _accounting for tastes_. And I must settle and
+put myself right in the matter of M. Ingres before proceeding any
+further. The Latin saying, then, "De gustibus non est disputandum,"
+contains an excellent piece of advice, since disputing about tastes or
+anything else is but a sorry employment. But the English version is
+absolutely wide of the mark, since tastes can be accounted for just as
+much as climate, history, and bodily complexion. Indeed, we should know
+implicitly what people like and dislike if we knew what they were and
+how they had come to be so. The very diversity in taste proves its
+deep-down reality: preference and antipathy being consubstantial with
+the soul--nay, inherent in the very mechanism and chemistry of the body.
+And for this reason tastes are at once so universal and uniform, and so
+variously marked by minor differences. There are human beings all shank
+and thigh and wrist, with contemplative, deep-set eyes and compressed,
+silent lips; and others running to rounds and segments of circles, like
+M. Ingres' drawings, their eyes a trifle prominent for the better
+understanding of others, and mouth, like the typical French one, at a
+forward angle, as if for ready speech. But, different as these people
+are, they are alike in the main features of symmetry and balance; they
+haven't two sets of lungs and a duplicate stomach, like Centaurs, whom
+every one found so difficult to deal with; nor do any of them end off in
+a single forked tail, twisting about on which accounts for the
+proverbial untrustworthiness of mermaids. Being alike, all human
+creatures require free space and breathable air; and, being unlike, some
+of them hanker after the sea, and others cannot watch without longing
+the imitation mountains into which clouds pile themselves on dreary flat
+horizons. And similarly in the matter of art. We all delight in the
+ineffable presence of transcending power; we all require to renew our
+soul's strength and keenness in the union with souls stronger and keener
+than ours. But the power which appeals to some of us is struggling and
+brooding tragically, as in Michelangelo and Beethoven; while the power
+which straightway subdues certain others is easy, temperate, and
+radiant, as in Titian and Mozart. And thus it comes about that every
+soul--"where a soul can be discerned"--is the citizen, conscious or not,
+of a spiritual country, and obeys a hierarchy, bends before a sovereign
+genius, crowned or mitred by inscrutable right divine, never to be
+deposed. But there are many kingdoms and principalities, not necessarily
+overlapping; and the subjects of them are by no means the same.
+
+Take M. Ingres, for instance. He is, it seems, quite a tremendous
+potentate. I recognize his legitimate sway, like that of Prester John,
+or of the Great Mogul. Only I happen not to obey it, for I am a born
+subject of the King of Hearts. And who should that be but
+Apollo-Wolfgang-Amadeus, driving with easy wrist his teams, tandem or
+abreast, of winged, effulgent melodies?
+
+It was raining, as I told you, that morning which I spent in the Ingres
+Museum at Montauban. It was raining melted snow in hurricanes off the
+mountains that other day of travel, and I was on the top of a Tyrolese
+diligence. The roads were heavy; and we splashed slowly along the brink
+of roaring torrents and through the darkness of soaked and steaming fir
+woods. At the end of an hour's journey we had already lost four. "If you
+stop to dine," said successive jack-booted postilions, quickly fastening
+the traces at each relay, "you will never catch the Munich train at
+Garmisch. But the Herrschaften will please themselves in the matter of
+eating and drinking." So the Herrschaften did not please themselves at
+all, but splashed along through rain and sleet, through hospitable
+villages all painted over with scrollwork about beer, and coffee, and
+sugar-bakery, and all that "Restoration" which our poor drenched bodies
+and souls were lacking so woefully. For we had stalls at the Court
+Theatre of Munich, and it was the last, the very last, night of "The
+Magic Flute"! The Brocken journey on the diligence-top came to an end;
+the train at Garmisch was caught by just two seconds; we were safe at
+Munich. But I was prone on a sofa, with a despairing friend making
+hateful attempts to rouse me. Go to the play? Get up? Open my eyes to
+the light? My fingers must have fumbled some feeble "no," beyond all
+contradiction. "But your ticket--but 'The Magic Flute'--but you have
+come three days' journey on purpose!" I take it my lips achieved an
+inarticulate expression of abhorrence for such considerations. After
+that I do not exactly know what happened: my exhausted will gave way. I
+was combed and brushed, thrust into some manner of festive apparel,
+pushed into a vehicle, pulled out of it, and shoved along, by the
+staunch and (as it seemed) brutal arm of friendship, among crimson and
+gilding and blinding lights all seen at intervals through half-closed
+eyes. A little bell rang, and I felt it was my death knell. But through
+the darkness of my weltering soul (for I was presumably dead and
+undoubtedly damned) there marched, stood still, and curtsied
+majestically towards each other, the great grave opening chords of the
+overture. And when they had delivered, solemnly, their mysterious
+herald's message and subsided, off started the little nimble notes of
+the fugue, hastening from all sides, meeting, crossing, dispersing,
+returning, telling their wonderful news of improbable adventures;
+multitudinous, scurrying away in orderly haste to protect the hero and
+heroine, and be joined by other notes, all full of inexhaustible
+good-will; taking hands, dancing, laughing, and giving the assurance that
+all is for the best in the world of enchantment, in the world of
+bird-calls, and tinkling triangles and magic flutes, under the spells
+of the great Sun-priest and Sun-god Mozart. I opened my eyes and had no
+headache; and sat in that Court Theatre for three mortal hours, in
+flourishing health and absolute happiness, and would have given my soul
+for it to begin immediately all over again.
+
+Now, not all the drawings of M. Ingres could have done that. And the
+piece of torn music-paper in the glass case at Montauban had made me,
+for a few faint seconds, live it through again. And I know what I don't
+care for, and what I do.
+
+
+
+
+AGAINST TALKING
+
+
+As towards most other things of which we have but little personal
+experience (foreigners, or socialists, or aristocrats, as the case may
+be), there is a degree of vague ill-will towards what is called
+_Thinking_. It is reputed to impede action, to make hay of instincts
+and of standards, to fritter reality into doubt; and the career of
+Hamlet is frequently pointed out as a proof of its unhappy effects.
+But, as I hinted, one has not very often an opportunity of verifying
+these drawbacks of thinking, or its advantages either. And I am
+tempted to believe that much of the mischief thus laid at the door of
+that poor unknown quantity _Thinking_ is really due to its ubiquitous
+twin-brother _Talking_.
+
+I call them twins on the analogy of Death and Sleep, because there is
+something poetical and attractive in such references to family
+relations; and also because, as many people cannot think without
+talking, and talking, at all events, is the supposed indication that
+thinking is within, there has arisen about these two human activities a
+good deal of that confusion and amiable not-caring-which-is-which so
+characteristic of our dealings with twins. But _Talking_, take my word
+for it, is the true villain of the couple.
+
+Talking, however, should never be discouraged in the young. Not talking
+_with them_ (largely reiteration of the word "Why?"), but talking among
+themselves. Its beneficial effects are of the sort which ought to make
+us patient with the crying of infants. Talking helps growth. M. Renan,
+with his saintly ironical sympathy for the young and weak, knew it when
+he excused the symbolists and decadents of various kinds with that
+indulgent sentence, "Ce sont des enfants qui s'amusent." It matters
+little what litter they leave behind, what mud pies they make and little
+daily dug-up gardens of philosophy, ethics, literature, and general
+scandal; they will grow out of the need to make them--and meanwhile,
+making this sort of mess will help them grow.
+
+Besides, is it nothing that they should be amusing themselves once in
+their lives (we cannot be sure of the future)? And what amusement, what
+material revelry can be compared with the great carouses of words in
+which the young can still indulge? We were most of us young once, odd as
+it appears; and some of us can remember our youthful discussions, our
+salad-day talks, prolonged to hours, trespassing on to subjects, which
+added such a fine spice of the forbidden and therefore the free! The joy
+of asking reasons where you have hitherto answered school queries; of
+extemporizing replies, magnificent, irresponsible, instead of
+laboriously remembering mere solutions; of describing, analyzing, and
+generally laying bold mental eyes, irreverent intellectual hands, on
+personalities whose real presence would merely make you stumble over a
+chair or drop a tea-cup! For talking is the great equalizer of
+positions, turning the humble, the painfully immature, into judges with
+rope and torch; and in a kindlier way allowing the totally obscure to
+share the life of kings, and queens, and generals, and opera-singers;
+which is the reason that items of Court news or of "dramatic gossip"
+are so frequently exchanged in omnibuses and at small, decent
+dinner-tables.
+
+Moreover, talking has for the young the joys of personal exuberance; it
+is all honeycombed, or rather, filled (like champagne) with the generous
+gaseousness of self-analysis, self-accusation, self-pity,
+self-righteousness, and autobiography. The poor mortal, in that delusive
+sense of sympathy and perfect understanding which comes of perfect
+indifference to one's neighbour's presence, has quicker pulses, higher
+temperature, more vigorous movements than are compatible with the sober
+sense of human unimportance. In conversation, clever young people--vain,
+kindly, selfish, ridiculous, happy young people--actually take body and
+weight, expand. And are you quite sure, my own dear, mature, efficient,
+and thoroughly productive friends and contemporaries, that it is not
+this expansion of youthful rubbish which makes the true movement of the
+centuries?... Poor stuff enough, very likely, they talked, those
+long-haired, loose-collared Romanticists of the Hotel Pimodan and the
+literary cafes recorded by Balzac, _Jeunes Frances_, or whatever their
+names; and priggery, as well as blood-and-thunder, those lads round the
+table d'hote at Strasburg, where Jung-Stilling noticed the entrance of a
+certain tall, Apolline young man answering to the name of Goethe.
+Rubbish, of course; but rubbish necessary, yes, every empty bubble and
+scum and mess thereof, for the making of a great literary period--nay,
+of a great man of letters. And when, nine thousand nine hundred and
+ninety-nine times, there results neither one nor the other, why, there
+has been the talking itself--exciting and rapturous beyond everything
+that literary periods and literary personalities can ever match.
+
+'Tis with the talking of the mature and the responsible that I would
+pick a quarrel. Particularly if they are well read, unprejudiced, subtle
+of thought, and precise of language; and most particularly if they are
+scrupulously just and full of human charity. For when two or three
+persons of this sort meet together in converse, nothing escapes
+destruction. The character of third persons crumbles under that delicate
+and patient fingering: analysis, synthesis, rehabilitation, tender
+appreciation, enthusiastic definition, leave behind only a horrid
+quivering little heap of vain virtues and atrophied bad instincts. In
+such conversations I have heard loyal and loving friends make
+admissions and suggestions which would hang you in a court of justice; I
+can bear witness to having in all loyalty and loving-kindness done so
+myself a thousand times. Nor is this even the worst. For your living
+human being has luckily a wonderful knack of reasserting his reality;
+and the hero or victim of such conversational manipulation will take
+your breath away by suddenly entering the room or entering into your
+consciousness as hale and whole as old AEson stepping out of Medea's
+cooking-pot. But opinions, impressions, principles, standards, possess,
+alas! no such recuperative virtue; or, rather, they cannot interrupt the
+discussion of themselves by putting in an appearance.
+
+Now, silent thought, whenever it destroys, destroys only to reconstruct
+the universe or the atom in the thinker's image; and new realities arise
+whenever a real individual creature reveals his needs and ways of
+feeling. But in what is called _a good serious talk_ there is no such
+creating anew; nobody imposes his image, no whole human creature reveals
+a human organism: there is merely a jumble of superposed pictures which
+will not become a composite photograph; and the inherent optimism or
+pessimism, scepticism or dogmatism, of each interlocutor merely
+reiterates _No_ to the ways of seeing and feeling of the others. Every
+word, perpetually defined and redefined at random, is used by each
+speaker in a different sense and with quite different associations. The
+subject under discussion is in no one's keeping: it is banged from side
+to side, adjusted to the right and adjusted to the left, a fine screw
+put on it every now and then to send it sheer into the great void and
+chaos! And almost the saddest part of the business is that the
+defacements and tramplings which the poor subject (who knows, perhaps
+very sacred to some one of us?) is made to suffer, come not from our
+opponent's brutal thrusting forward of _his_ meaning, but rather from
+our own desperate methods to hold tight, to place _our_ meaning in
+safety, somewhere where, even if not recognized, it will at least not be
+mauled.... Such are the scuffles and scrimmages of the most temperate,
+intellectual conversations, leaving behind them for the moment not a
+twig, not a blade of the decent vegetation of the human soul. Cannot we
+get some great beneficent mechanic to invent some spiritual cement,
+some asphalt and gravel of nothingness, some thoroughly pneumatic
+intellectual balls, whereon, and also wherewith, we privileged creatures
+may harmlessly expend our waste dialectic energies?
+
+Then, would you never talk? Or would you confine talking to the weather
+or the contents of the public prints? Would you have our ideas get hard
+and sterile for want of being moved? Do you advise that, like some
+tactful persons we--you--yes, _you_--all know and detest--we
+systematically let every subject drop as soon as raised?
+
+There! the talking has begun. They are at it, contradicting what they
+agree with, and asking definitions of what they perfectly understand. Of
+course not! And here I am, unable to resist, rushing into the argument,
+excited--who can tell?--perhaps delighted. And by the time we take up
+our bedroom candles, and wish each other good night (with additional
+definitions over the banisters) every scrap of sensible meaning I ever
+had will be turned to nonsense; and I shall feel, next morning, oh, how
+miserably humiliated and depressed!...
+
+"Well--and to return to what we were saying last night...."
+
+
+
+
+IN PRAISE OF SILENCE
+
+
+One of the truths which come (if any do) with middle age, is the gradual
+recognition that in one's friendly intercourse the essential--the one
+thing needful--is not what people say, but what they think and feel.
+
+Words are not necessarily companionable, far from it; but moods truly
+meet, to part in violent dissonance; or to move parallel in happy
+harmonic intervals; or, more poignant and more satisfying still, to pass
+gradually along some great succession of alien chords--common
+contemplation, say, of a world grievous or pleasant to both--on towards
+the peace, the consummation, of a great major close. Once we have
+sufficient indication that another person cares for the same kind of
+things that we do--or, as important quite, cares in the same degree or
+in the same way--all further explanation becomes superfluous: detail,
+delightful occasionally to quicken and bring home the sense of
+companionship, but by no means needed.
+
+This is the secret of our intercourse with those persons of whom our
+friends will say (or think), What _can_ you have in common with
+So-and-so? What _can_ you find to talk about? Talk about? Why, nothing;
+the enigmatic person remains with us, as with all the rest of the world,
+silent, inarticulate; incapable, sometimes, of any inner making of
+formulae. But we know that our companion is seeing, feeling, the same
+lines of the hills and washes of their colours, the same scudding or
+feathering out of clouds; is _living_, in the completest sense, in that
+particular scene and hour; and knowing this, it matters nothing how long
+we trudge along the road or saunter across the grass without uttering.
+The road of life, too, or the paths and thickets of speculation.
+
+And speaking of walks, I know no greater torment, among those minor ones
+which are the worst, than the intelligent conversation--full of
+suggestion and fine analysis, perhaps, and descriptions of _other_
+places--which reveals to us that the kindly speaker is indeed occupying
+the same geographical space or sitting behind the same horse as we are,
+but that his soul is miles and miles away. And the worst of it is that
+such false companionship can distract us from any real company with the
+moment and the place. We have to answer out of civility; then to think,
+to get interested, and then ... well, then it is all over. "We had such
+a delightful walk or drive, So-and-so and I," says our friend
+on returning home, "and I am so glad to find that we have such a lot of
+interests in common." Alas! alas!... Hazlitt was thinking of such
+experiences, knowing perhaps the stealthiness and duplicity which the
+fear of them develops in the honest but polite, when he recommended that
+one should take one's walks alone.
+
+But there is something more perfect even than one's own company: the
+companion met once, at most twice, in a lifetime (for he is by no means
+necessarily your dearest and nearest, nor the person who understands you
+best). He or she whose words are always about the place and moment, or
+seem to suit it; whose remarks, like certain music, feel restful,
+spacious, cool, airy--like silence. And here I have got back to the
+praise of such persons as talk little, or (what is even better) _seem_
+to talk little.
+
+There is a deal of truth, and, as befits the subject, rather implied
+than actually expressed, in Maeterlinck's essay on Silence. His fine
+temper, veined and shot with colour, rich in harmonics like a well-toned
+voice, enables him, even like the mystics whom he has edited, to guess
+at those diffuse and mellow states of soul which often defy words. He
+knows from experience how little we can really live, although we needs
+must speak, in definite formulae, logical frameworks of verb and noun,
+subject and predicate. Let alone the fact that all consummate feeling
+(like the moment to which Faust cried _Stay_) abolishes the sense of
+sequence--revolves, if I may say so, on its own axis, a _now,
+forever_; baffling thereby all speech. And M. Maeterlinck perceives,
+therefore, that real communion between fellow-creatures is interchange
+of temperament, of rhythm of life; not exchange of remarks, views, and
+opinions, of which ninety-nine in a hundred are merely current coin. To
+what he has said I should like to add that if we are often silent with
+those whom we love best, it is because we are sensitive to their whole
+personality, face, gesture, texture of soul and body; that we are living
+with them not only in the present, but enriched, modified by all they
+have said before, by everything remaining in our memory as theirs. To
+talk would never express a state of feeling so rich and living; and it
+can serve, at most, only to give the heightening certainty of presence,
+like a handclasp or asking, "Are you there?" and getting the answer,
+"Yes; I am here, and so are you"--facts of no high logical importance!
+
+As regards silent people, this characteristic may, of course, be mere
+result of sloth and shyness, or lack of habit of the world, and they may
+be gabbling volubly in their hearts. Such as these are no kind of
+blessing, save perhaps negatively. Still less to be commended are those
+others, cutting a better figure (or thinking so), who measure their
+words from a dread of "giving themselves away"--of "making themselves
+cheap," or otherwise (always thinking in terms of money, lawsuits, and
+general overreaching) getting the worst of a bargain. Indeed, it is a
+sign how little we are truly civilized, that such silence or laconicism
+as this, can be met constantly outside the class (invariably cunning) of
+peasants; indeed, among men exercising what we are pleased to call
+_liberal professions_.
+
+The persons in whom silence is a mark of natural fine breeding are those
+who, being able to taste the real essence of things, are apt, perhaps
+wrongly, to despise the unessential. They are disdainful of all the old
+things inevitably repeated in saying half a new one. They cannot do with
+the lumber, wastepaper, shavings, sawdust, rubbish necessary for packing
+and conveying objects of value; now most of talk, and much of life, is
+exactly of that indispensable useful uselessness. They are silent for
+the same reason that they are frequently inactive, recognizing that
+words and actions are so often mere litter and encumbrance. One feels
+frozen occasionally by their unspoken criticism; one's small exuberances
+checked by lack of sympathy and indulgence; one would like, sometimes,
+to pick a quarrel with them, to offer a penny for their thoughts, to
+force them to be as unselective and vulgar as one's self. But one
+desists, feeling instinctively the refreshment (as of some solitary
+treeless down or rocky stream) and purification of their fine
+abstention in this world where industry means cinder-heaps, and
+statesmanship, philosophy, art, philanthropy, mean "secondary products"
+of analogous kind.
+
+Before concluding this over-garrulous tribute to silence, I would fain
+point out the contrast, ironical enough, between the pleasant sense of
+comradeship with some of those who "never utter," and the loneliness of
+spirit in which we steam and post and cab through every possible realm
+of fact and theory with certain other people. I am not alluding to the
+making hay of politics, exhibitions, theatres, current literature, etc.,
+which is so much the least interesting form of gossip. What I mean are
+those ample, apparently open talks between people who have found each
+other out; who know the cardboard and lath and plaster of the
+architectural arrangements or suspect the water-supply and drainage
+behind; talks where one knows that the other is shirking some practical
+conclusion, divagating into the abstract, and has to pick his way among
+hidden interests and vanities, or avert his eyes from moral vistas which
+he knows of.... "So-and-so is such a delightful talker--so witty and so
+wonderfully unprejudiced; I cannot understand why you don't cultivate
+him or her." Cultivate him or her! Cultivate garlic; those elegant white
+starry flowers you wonder at my weeding out of the beds.
+
+Compare with this the blessedness of knowing that the contents of the
+other person's mind are _nice_, pure of all worldliness, pretence, and
+meanness; that the creature's thoughts, if opened out to one, would
+diffuse the scent of sunshine and lavender even as does clean,
+well-folded linen.
+
+Hence the charm of a whole lot of persons not conspicuous for
+conversational powers: men who have lived much out-of-doors, with gun or
+rod; shy country neighbours, cross old scholars, simple motherly little
+housewives; and, if one get at their reality, peasants and even
+servants. For we have within ourselves memories and fancies; and it
+depends on our companion, on a word, a glance, a gesture, that only the
+sweet and profitable ones, thoughts of kindness and dignity, should be
+stirred up.
+
+
+
+
+THE BLAME OF PORTRAITS
+
+
+Feeling a little bit ashamed of myself, yet relieved at having done with
+that particular hypocrisy, I unpinned the two facsimiles of drawings
+from off my study screen and put them in a portfolio. A slight sense of
+profanation ensued; not so much of infidelity towards those two dear
+friends, nor certainly of irreverence towards Mr. Watts or the late Sir
+Edward Burne-Jones, but referable to the insistence with which I had
+clamoured for those portraits, the delight experienced at their arrival,
+and the solid satisfaction anticipated from their eternal possession.
+
+We have most of us--of the sentimental ones at least--gone through some
+similar small drama, and been a little harrowed by it. But though we
+feel as if there were some sort of naughtiness in us, we are quite
+blameless, and on the whole rather to be pitied. We are the dupes of a
+very human craving, and one which seems modest in its demands. What! a
+mere square of painted canvas, a few pencil scratchings, a bare
+mechanical photograph, something no rarer than a reflection in a mirror!
+That is all we ask for, to still the welling-up wistfulness, the
+clinging reluctance, to console for parting or the thought, almost, of
+death! We do not guess that this humble desire for a likeness is one of
+our most signal cravings after the impossible: an attempt to overcome
+space and baffle time; to imprison and use at pleasure the most
+fleeting, intangible, and uncommunicable of all mysterious essences, a
+human personality.
+
+"Often enough I think I have got the turn of her head and neck; but
+not the face--never the face that speaks," complains the poor bereaved
+husband in Mary Robinson's beautiful little poem. The case may not be
+tragic like that one, and yet thoroughly tantalizing; we feel the
+absent ones opposite to us in the room, we are in that distant room
+ourselves; there is a sense of their position, of the space they
+occupy, and thus we see, as through a ghost, the familiar outline,
+perhaps, of a chair. Or, again, there is the well-known movement,
+accompanied, perhaps, by the tone of voice, concentrated almost to the
+longed-for look, and, as the figure advances ... nothing! Like
+Virgil's Orpheus, our fancy embraces a shadow. "The face--never the
+face that speaks!" But we _will_ have it, people exclaimed, all those
+ages ago, and exclaim ever since. And thus they came by the notion of
+portraits.
+
+And when they got them they grumbled. The cavilling at every
+newly-painted likeness is notorious. The sitter, indeed, is sometimes
+easy enough to please, poor human creatures enjoying, as a rule, any
+notice (however professional) of their existence, let alone an answer to
+the attractive riddle of _what they look like_. And there are, of
+course, certain superfine persons who, in the case of a famous artist,
+think very like the sitter, and are satisfied so long as they get an
+ornamental picture, or one well up to date. But the truly human grumble,
+and are more than justified in doing so. Their cravings have been
+disappointed; they had expected the impossible, and have not got it.
+
+Since, in the very nature of things, a picture, and particularly a fine
+picture, is always an imperfect likeness. For the image of the sitter on
+the artist's retina is passed on its way to the canvas through a mind
+chock full of other images; and is transferred--heaven knows how changed
+already--by processes of line and curve, of blots of colour, and
+juxtaposition of light and shade, belonging not merely to the artist
+himself, but to the artist's whole school. Regarding merely the latter
+question, we all know that the old Venetians painted people ample,
+romantic, magnificent; and the old Tuscans painted them narrow, lucid,
+and commonplace; men of velvet and silk and armour on the one hand, and
+men of broadcloth and leather, on the other. The difference due to the
+individual artist is even greater; and, in truth, a portrait gives the
+sitter's temperament merged in the temperament of the painter.
+
+So, as a rule, portraiture does but defeat its own end. And, stoically
+speaking, does it much matter? Posterity has done just as well without
+the transmission of the real Cardinal Hippolytus; and we know that
+everything always comes right if only we look at it, Spinoza-like,
+"under the category of the eternal." But we, meanwhile, are not
+eternal, nor, alas! are our friends; and that is just one of the
+things which gall us. We cannot believe--how could we?--that the
+future can have its own witty men and gracious women, its own
+sufficient objects of love and reverence, even as we have. We feel we
+_must_ hand on our own great and beloved ones; we _must_ preserve the
+evanescent personal fragrance, press the flower. And hence, again,
+portraits and memoirs, Boswell's "Johnson," or Renan's "Ma Soeur
+Henriette"; grotesque or lovely things, as the case may be, and always
+pathetic, which tell us that men have always admired and always loved;
+leaving us to explain, by substituting the image of our own idols, why
+in that case more specially they did so. Poor people! We do so cling
+to our particular self and self's preferences; we are so confidently
+material and literal! And one dreads to think of the cruel
+self-defence of posterity, when we shall try to push into its notice
+with phonograph and cinematograph.
+
+Let us, in the presence of such hideous machinery, cease to be literal
+in matters of sentiment, even at the price of a little sadness and
+cynicism in recognizing the unreality of everything save our own moods
+and fancies. Perhaps I feel more strongly on this subject because I
+happen to have seen with my own eyes the _reductio ad absurdum_--to
+absurdity how lamentable and dreadful!--of this same human craving for
+literal preservation of that which should not, cannot, be preserved. It
+was in the lumber-room of an Italian palace; a life-size doll, with wig
+of real--perhaps personally real--hair, and dressed from head to foot in
+the garments of the real poor lady, dead some seventy years ago. I wrote
+a little tale about it; but the main facts were true, and far surpassed
+the power of invention. In this case the husband, who had ordered this
+simulacrum for his solace, taking his daily dose of sentiment in its
+presence, proceeded, after an interval, to woo and marry his own
+laundress; and I think, on the whole, this was the least harrowing
+possible solution. Fancy if he had not found that form of consolation,
+but had continued trying to be faithful to that dreadful material
+presence, more rigid, lifeless, meaningless, with every day and every
+year of familiarity!
+
+In a small way, we all of us commit that man's mistake of thinking that
+the life of our dear ones is in an image, instead of in the heartbeats
+which the image--like a name, a place, any associated thing--can
+produce in ourselves. And only changing things can answer to our
+changing self; only living creatures live with us. Once learned by
+heart, the portrait, be it never so speaking, ceases to speak, or we to
+listen to its selfsame message. What was once company to us, because it
+awakened a flickering feeling of wished-for presence, becomes, after a
+time, mere canvas or paper; disintegrates into mere colours or mere
+black and white. Even the faithfullest among us are utterly faithless to
+the best-beloved portraits. We have them on our walls or on our
+writing-tables, and pack and unpack some of them for every journey. But
+do we look at them? or, looking, do we see them, feel them?
+
+They are not, however, useless; very far from it. You might as well
+complain of the uselessness of the fire which is burned out, or the
+extinguished lamp. They have, though for a brief time, pleased, perhaps
+even consoled, us--warmed our heart with the sense of a loving nearness,
+shed a light on the visions in our mind. Hence we should cherish them as
+useful delusions, or rather realities, so long as they awaken a reality
+of feeling. And 'tis a decent instinct of gratitude, not mere
+inertness, which causes us to keep them, honoured pensioners of our
+affections, in honourable places.
+
+Only one thing we should guard against, and act firmly about, despite
+all sentimental scruples. During the _period of activity_ of a
+portrait--I mean while we still, more or less, look at it--we must
+beware lest it take, in our memory, the place of the original. Those
+unchanging features have the insistence of their definiteness and
+permanence, and may insidiously extrude, exclude, the fleeting,
+vacillating outlines of the remembered reality. And those alone concern
+our heart, and have a right to occupy our fancy. One feels aghast
+sometimes, on meeting some dear friend after an interval of absence, to
+find that those real features, that real expression, are not the
+familiar ones. It is the portrait, the envious counterfeit presentment,
+which (knowing its poor brief reign) has played us and our friend that
+mean trick. When this happens we must be merciless, like the fairy-story
+prince when the wicked creatures in the wood spoke to him in the voice
+of his mother; piety towards the original arms us with ruthlessness
+towards the portrait. It was for this same reason that, as I have said,
+I unpinned from my screen those two facsimiles of drawings, feeling
+rather a brute while I was doing so.
+
+
+
+
+
+SERE AND YELLOW
+
+INTERLUDE
+
+
+"Alors que je me croyais aux derniers jours de l'automne, dans un jardin
+depouille." The words are Madame de Hauterive's, one of the most
+charming among eighteenth-century letter-writers; but one of whom, for
+all the indiscretion of that age, we know little or nothing: a delicate,
+austere outline merely, a reserved and sensitive ghost shrinking into
+the dimness. She wrote those words when already an old woman, and long
+after death had taken her father and her daughter and most of her
+nearest and dearest, to the young Abbe de Carlades, who proved himself
+(one hopes) not utterly unworthy of that "unexpected late flowering of
+the soul." The phrase is eighteenth century, and it may be the feeling
+itself is of as bygone a fashion. Or does this seem the case because
+such delicate souls can become known to us only when they and their
+loves and friendships have ceased to be more than a handful of faded
+paper, fingered very piously, for heaven's sake?
+
+
+However this may be, that phrase of Madame de Hauterive's contains a
+truth which is undying, and which, though unobtrusive, can be observed
+by those who have a discreet eye for the soul's affairs. Nay, one might
+say that the knowledge of how many times life can begin afresh, the
+knowledge of the new modes of happiness which may succeed each other,
+even when the leaves float down yellow in the still air, and the dews on
+the renovated grass are white like frost, is one of the blessed secrets
+into which the passing seasons initiate those who have honourably
+cultivated the garden of life, and life's wide common acres.
+
+Indeed, such faith in the heart's renewed fruitfulness is itself among
+the autumn blossomings, the hidden compensations. Young folk, and those
+who never outgrow youth's headlong and blind self-seeking, cannot
+conceive such truths. For youth has no experience of change; and what it
+calls the Future is but the present longing or present dread projected
+forward. Hence youth lacks the resignation which comes of knowing that
+our aims, our loves, ourselves, will alter; and that we shall not
+eternally regret what we could not eternally covet. Hence, also, the
+fine despair and frequent suicide of youthful heroes and heroines. Poor
+young Werther, in his sky-blue _Frack_ and striped yellow waistcoat,
+cannot believe that the time will come when he will tune the spinet of
+some other Charlotte--nay, follow in the footsteps of the enlightened
+minister, his patron; bury himself in protocols and look forward to a
+diplomatic game of whist rather than to a country dance with meeting
+hands and eyes. And it is mere waste of breath to sermon him on the
+subject: lend him the pistols, and hope that (as in the humaner version
+of the opera) he will not use them. As to certain other forestallings of
+experience, they would be positively indecent and barbarous! You would
+die of shame if the young widow happened to overhear you saying (what is
+heaven's truth, and a most consoling one) that her baby, which now
+represents only so much time and love she might have given, all, all, to
+_him_ alone, is the only good thing which that worthless dead husband
+could ever have furnished her. And as to hinting in her presence that
+she will some day be much, much happier with dear Quixotic Dobbin than
+with that coxcomb of an Osborne, why the bare thought of such indecorum
+makes us feel like sinking into the ground! We must be sympathizing, and
+a little short of truthful, with poor distressed young people; above
+all, never seek to lighten their disappointments with visions of brisk
+octogenarians, one foot in the grave, enjoying a rubber!
+
+And this, no doubt, is a providential arrangement--I mean this youthful
+incapacity of grasping the consolations brought by Time. For, after all,
+life, being there, has to be lived; and maybe life would be lived in a
+half-hearted fashion did we suspect its many compensations, including
+what may, methinks, be the last, most solemn one. Should we jump hastily
+out of bed and bestir ourselves with the zest of the new day, if we
+thoroughly realized what is, however, matter of common experience, to
+wit: that at the day's close, sleep, rest without dreams or thought of
+awaking, may be as welcome as all this pleasant bustle of the morning?
+The knowledge of these mysteries, initiation into which comes late and
+silently, is, as I hinted, perhaps the final compensation; allowing us
+to face the order of things without superfine cavillings. But there are
+earlier, less awful and secret compensations, and these it is as well to
+know about, and to prepare our soul serenely to enjoy when the moment
+comes.
+
+Of this kind are, of course, those autumn flowerings of sentiment
+alluded to in Madame de Hauterive's letter. They are blossomings
+sometimes sweeter than those of summer, thanks to the very scorching of
+summer's suns; or else touched with an austere vividness by the first
+frosts, like the late china roses, which are streaked, where they open,
+with a vermillion unparalleled in their earlier sisters. Compare with
+this all that is implied in Swinburne's line, "the month of the long
+decline of roses." Think of those roses (I have before my eyes a
+Florentine terrace at the end of May) crowding each other out, blowing,
+withering, and dropping; roses white, red, pale lemon, and, alas! also
+brown and black with mildew, living and dying in such riotous excess
+that you have neither time nor inclination to pluck one of them, and
+keep it, piously in water, before you on your table.
+
+Mind, I do not say that such profusion is not all right and necessary
+in its season. The economy of Nature is often wasteful. There might be
+no roses at all next year if we depended for seed and slips upon those
+frost-bitten flowers with their fine austerity. And in the same way
+that, despite the pathetic tenderness of long-deferred father or
+motherhood, it is better for the race that infants be brought into the
+world plentiful, helter-skelter, and that only the toughest stay
+there; so, methinks, it may be needful that youth be full of false
+starts, mistaken vocations, lapsed engagements, fanciful friendships
+broken off in quarrel, glowing passions ending in ashes; nay, that
+this period, fertile in good and evil, be crowned by marriages such as
+are said to be made in heaven, no doubt because the great match-making
+spirit of life pursues ends unguessed by human wisdom, which would
+often remain in single blessedness, and found homes for sickly
+infants. Wedlock, in other words, and, for the matter of that, father
+and motherhood, and most of the serious business of the universe,
+should not be looked upon as a compensation or consolation, but rather
+as something for which poor human creatures require to be consoled and
+compensated.
+
+Having admitted which, and even suggested that marriages are fittest at
+the age of Daphnis and Chloe, or even of Amelia and George Osborne, let
+us, I pray you, glance with reverent eyes, and a smile not mocking but
+tender, at certain other weddings which furtively cross our path.
+Weddings between elderly persons, hitherto unable to make up their mind,
+or having, perchance, made it up all wrong on a first occasion;
+inveterate old maids and bachelors, or widowers who thought to mourn for
+ever; people who have found their heart perhaps a little late in the
+day; but, who knows? shrivelled as it is, perhaps, but the mellower, and
+of more enduring, more essential sweetness.
+
+Alongside of such tardy nuptials there is a corresponding class of
+_marriages of true minds_. Genuine ones are exceedingly rare during
+youth; and the impediments, despite the opinion of Shakespeare, are of
+the nature of nullity, ending most often in unseemly divorce between
+Hermia and Helena, or the Kings of Sicilia and Bohemia, one of whom, if
+you remember, tried to poison the other on very small provocation. The
+last-named is an instructive example of the hollowness of nursery or
+playground friendship, or rather of what passes for such. Genuine
+friendship is an addition to our real self, a revelation of new
+possibilities; and young people, busily absorbing the traditions of the
+past and the fashions of the day, have very rarely got a real self to
+reveal or to bestow. So that the feeling we experience in later life
+towards our playmates is, in fact, rather a wistful pleasure in the
+thought of our own past than any real satisfaction in their present
+selves.
+
+Be this as it may, there is among the compensations of life, a kind of
+friendship which, by its very nature, requires that one of the friends
+have passed the _middle of the way_. I am not referring to the joys of
+grandfather and grandmotherhood, and all that "_art d'etre grandpere_"
+which have been written and sung until one turns a trifle sceptical
+about them. What I allude to has, on the contrary, escaped (almost
+entirely, I think) the desecrating pen of the analytical or moralizing
+novelist, and remains one of the half-veiled mysteries of human good
+fortune, before which the observer passes quickly in shy admiration.
+The case is this: one of the parents has been unwilling, or
+disappointed; marriage has meant emptiness, or worse; and a nursery full
+of children has been, very likely, a mere occasion for ill-will and
+painful struggle. The poor soul has been, perhaps for years, fretted and
+wearied; or else woefully lonely, cabined, confined, and cramped almost
+to numbness. When, behold! by the marvellous miracle of man or
+womanhood--a dull, tiresome child is suddenly transformed, takes on
+shapeliness and stature, opens the bolted doors of life, leads the
+father or mother into valleys of ease and on to hopeful hilltops; slays
+dragons, chains ogres, and smiles with the eyes and lips which have been
+vaguely dreamed of, longed for, who knows how long!
+
+So children do occasionally constitute compensations and blessings not
+merely in disguise. And this particularly where they have not been
+looked upon as investments for future happiness or arrangements for
+paying off parental debts to society, to glory, or the Supreme Being.
+For surely, if children are ever to renovate the flagging life of
+parents, it can only be by their leaving off their childhood and coming
+back as equals, brothers, sisters, sometimes as tenderest and most
+admiring of chivalrous lovers.
+
+'Tis, in fact, unexpected new life adding itself to ours which
+constitutes the supreme compensation in middle age; and our heart puts
+forth fresh blossoms of happiness (of genius sometimes, as in the case
+of Goethe) because younger shoots are rejoicing in the seasonable
+sunshine or dews. The interests and beliefs of the younger generation
+prevent our own from dying; nay, the friendships and loves of our
+children, whether according to the flesh or the spirit, may become our
+own. Daughters-in-law are not invariably made to dine off the poisoned
+half of a partridge, as in works of history. Some stepfathers and
+stepmothers feel towards those alien youths and maidens only as that
+dear Valentine Visconti did towards the little Dunois, whom she took in
+her arms, say the chronicles, and, with many kisses on eyes and cheeks,
+exclaimed, "Surely thou wast stolen from me!" And, in another
+relationship which is spoken ill of by those unworthy of it, we can
+sometimes watch a thing which is among reality's best poetry: where a
+mother, wisely and dutifully stepping aside from her married daughter's
+path, has been snatched back, borne in triumph, not by one loving pair
+of arms, but two; and where the happy young wife has smiled at
+recognizing that in her husband's love for her there was mixed up a
+head-over-ears devotion for her mother.
+
+Some folks have no sons or daughters, or husbands or wives, and hence no
+stepchildren or children-in-law. Yet even for them autumn may blossom.
+There are the children of friends, recalling their youth or compensating
+for their youth's failure; and for some there are the younger workers in
+the same field, giving us interest in books or pictures, or journeys or
+campaigns, when our own days for work and struggle are over; even as we,
+perhaps, have kept open the vistas of life, given Pisgah-sights to those
+beloved and venerated ones whose sympathy we value and understand better
+perhaps now than all those many, many years ago. Yes! even in our
+youthful egoism we gave them something, those dear long dead friends;
+and this knowledge is itself a tiny autumn bud in our soul.
+
+There are humbler compensations also. And among these the kind which,
+years after writing the immortal idyll of "Dr. Antonio," my dear
+venerated friend Ruffini set forth in a tiny story, perhaps partly his
+own, about the modest but very real happiness which the mere
+relationship of master and servant can bring into a solitary life; the
+story taking its name, by a coincidence by no means indifferent to me,
+from a faithful and pleasant person called Carlino.
+
+But an end to digressions, for it is time to cease writing,
+particularly of such intangible and shy matters. So, to return to
+Madame de Hauterive's sentence, which was our starting-point in this
+inventory of compensations and consolations. Paradoxical though it
+seem, the understanding and union brought by a glance, by words said
+in a given way, by any of the trifles bearing mysterious, unreasoned
+significance for the experienced soul--or, briefly, "_friendship at
+first sight_"--is as natural in the sere and yellow, as love at first
+sight in the salad, days. Only, to be sure, less manifest to
+indifferent bystanders, since one of the consoling habits which life
+brings with it is a respect for life's thoroughfares, a reluctance to
+stop the way, collect a crowd with our private interests, and a pious
+reserve about such good fortune as is good precisely because it suits
+us, not other people.
+
+Reserve of this sort, as I began with saying, is one of the charms of
+dear Madame de Hauterive; and the more so that eighteenth-century
+folk, particularly French, were not much given to it! And thus it
+happens that we know little or nothing about that friendship which
+consoled her later life; and must look round us in our own, if we
+would understand what were those new flowerings which had arisen,
+when, as she says, she had thought herself already in the last days of
+autumn and in a leafless garden.
+
+
+
+
+A STAGE JEWEL
+
+
+"It doesn't seem to be precisely what is meant by _old paste_," she
+answered, repeating the expression I had just made use of, while she
+handed me the diamond hoop across the table. "It's too like real stones,
+you know. I think it must be a stage jewel."
+
+As I fastened the brooch again in my dress, I was aware of a sudden
+little change in my feelings. I was no longer pleased. Not that I had
+hoped my diamonds might prove real; you cannot buy real diamonds, even
+in imagination, for four francs, which was the precise sum I had
+expended on these, and there were seven of them, all uncommonly large.
+Nor can I say that the words "old paste" had possessed, on my lips, any
+plain or positive meaning. But _stage jewel_, somehow ... My moral
+temperature had altered: I was dreadfully conscious that I was no longer
+pleased. Now, I had been, and to an absurd degree.
+
+Perhaps because it was Christmas Eve, when I suddenly found myself
+inside that curiosity shop, pricing the diamonds, and not without an
+emotion of guilty extravagance, and of the difficulty of not buying if
+the price proved too high.... As is always the case with me at that
+season, my soul was irradiated with a vague sense of festivity, perhaps
+with the lights of rows of long-extinguished Christmas trees in the fog
+of many years, like the lights of the shops caught up and diffused in
+the moist twilight. I had felt an inner call for a Christmas present;
+and, so far, nobody had given me one. So I had paid the money and driven
+back into the dark, soughing country with the diamond hoop loose in my
+pocket. I had felt so very pleased.... And now those two cursed words
+"stage jewel" had come and spoilt it all.
+
+For the first time I felt it was very, very hard that my box should have
+been broken open last autumn and all my valuables, my Real (the word
+became colossal), not _stage_, jewels stolen. It was brought home to me
+for the first time that the man who did it must have been very, very
+wicked; and that codes of law, police and even prisons could afford
+satisfaction to my feelings. Since, oddly enough, I had really not
+minded much at the time, nor let my pleasure in that wonderful old
+castle, where I had just arrived with the violated trunk, be in the
+least diminished by the circumstance. Indeed, such is the subtle,
+sophistic power of self-conceit, that the pleasure of finding, or
+thinking I found, that I did not mind the loss of those things had
+really, I believe, prevented me minding it. Though, of course, every now
+and then I had wished I might see again the little old-fashioned
+fleur-de-lysed star which had been my mother's (my heart smote me for
+not feeling sufficiently how much _she_ would have suffered at my losing
+it). And I remembered how much I had liked to play with those opals of
+the Queen of Hearts, which seemed the essence of pale-blue winter days
+with a little red flame of sunset in the midst; or, rather, like tiny
+lunar worlds, mysterious shining lakes and burning volcanoes in their
+heart. Of course, I had not been indifferent: that would have taken away
+all charm from the serenity with which I had enjoyed my loss. But I had
+been serene, delightfully serene. And now!...
+
+There was something vaguely vulgar, odious, unpardonable about false
+stones. I had always maintained there was not, but the stage jewel
+made me feel it. Mankind has sound instincts, rooting in untold depths
+of fitness; and superfine persons, setting themselves against them,
+reveal their superficiality, their lack of normal intuition and sound
+judgment, while fancying themselves superior. And mankind (save among
+barbarous Byzantine and Lombard kings, who encrusted their iron crowns
+impartially with balas rubies, antique cameos, and bottle
+glass)--mankind has always shown an instinct against sham jewels and
+their wearers. It is an unreasoned manifestation of the belief in
+truth as the supreme necessity for individuals and races, without
+which, as we know, there would be an end of commerce, the
+administration of justice, government, even family life (for birds,
+who have no such sense, are proverbially ignorant of their father),
+and everything which we call civilization. Real precious stones were
+perhaps created by Nature, and sham stones allowed to be created by
+man, as one of those moral symbols in which the universe abounds: a
+mysterious object-lesson of the difference between truth and
+falsehood.
+
+Real diamonds and rubies, I believe, require quite a different degree
+of heat to melt them than mere glass or paste; and you can amuse
+yourself, if you like, by throwing them in the fire. In the Middle
+Ages rubies, but only real ones, were sovereign remedies for various
+diseases, among others the one which carried off Lorenzo the
+Magnificent; and in the seventeenth century it was currently reported
+that the minions of the Duke of Orleans had required pounded diamonds
+to poison poor Madame Henriette in that glass of chicory water. And as
+to pearls, real ones go yellow if unworn for a few months, and have to
+be sunk fathoms deep in the sea, in safes with chains and anchors, and
+detectives sitting day and night upon the beach, and sentries in
+sentry-boxes; none of which occurs with imitations. Likewise you stamp
+on a real pearl, while you must be quite careful not to crush a sham
+one. All these are obvious differences revealing the nobility of the
+real thing, though not necessarily adding to its charm. But, then,
+there is the undoubted greater beauty, the wonderful _je ne sais
+quoi_, the depth of colour, purity of substance, effulgence of fire,
+of real gems, which we all recognize, although it is usual to have
+them tested by an expert before buying. And, when all is said and
+done, there is the difference in intrinsic value. And you need not
+imagine that value is a figment. Political economy affords us two
+different standards of value, the Marxian and the Orthodox. So you
+cannot escape from believing in it. A thing is valuable either (_a_)
+according to the amount of labour it embodies, or (_b_) according to
+the amount of goods or money you can obtain in exchange for it. Now,
+only let your mind dwell upon the value (_a_) embodied in a pearl or
+diamond. The pearl fisher, who doubtless frequently gets drowned; let
+alone the oyster, which has to have a horrid mortal illness, neither
+of which happens to the mean-spirited artificer of Roman pearls; or
+the diamond seeker, seeking through deserts for months; the fine
+diamond merchant, dying in caravans, of the past; and, finally, the
+diamond-cutter, grinding that adamant for weeks far, far more
+indefatigably than to make the optic lenses which reveal hidden
+planets and galaxies. All that labour, danger, that weary, weary time
+embodied in a thing so tiny that, like Queen Mab, it can sit on an
+alderman's forefinger! What could be more deeply satisfactory to think
+upon? And as to value (_b_) (the value in _Exchange_ of Mill, Fawcett,
+Marshall, Say, Bastiat, Gide), just think what you could buy by
+selling a largish diamond, supposing you had one! And what unlikely
+prices (fabulous, even monstrous) are said to have been given, before
+and after dubious Madame de la Motte priced that great typical one,
+for diamond necklaces by queens and heroines of every degree!
+
+Precious stones, therefore, are heaven-ordained symbols of what mankind
+values most highly--power over other folks' labour, time, life,
+happiness, and honour. And that, no doubt, is the reason that when the
+irreproachable turn-out and perfect manners of pickpockets allow them to
+mix freely in our select little gatherings, it is legitimate for a lady
+to deck herself with artificial pearls and diamonds only to the exact
+extent that she has real ones safely deposited at the bank. Let her look
+younger and sound honester than perhaps answers to the precise reality;
+there is no deception in all that. But think of the dishonourableness
+of misleading other folk about one's income....
+
+My soul was chastened by the seriousness of these reflections and by the
+recognition of the moral difference between real stones and sham ones,
+and I was in a very bad humour. Suddenly there came faint sounds of
+guitars and a mandolin, and I remembered that the servants were giving a
+ball at the other end of the house, and that it was Christmas Eve. I
+rose from my table and opened the window, letting in the music with the
+pure icy air. The night had become quite clear; and in its wintry blue
+the big stars sparkled in a cluster between the branches of my pine
+tree. They made me think of the circlet which Tintoret's Venus swoops
+down with over the head of the ruddy Bacchus and rose-white Ariadne.
+Those, also, I said to myself ill-humouredly, were probably stage
+jewels.... I cannot account for the sudden train of associations this
+word evoked: sweeping, magnificent gestures, star-like eyes, and a
+goddess' brows shining through innumerable years; a bar or two of
+melodious _ritornello_; an ineffable sense of poetry and grandeur,
+and--but I am not sure--a note or two of a distant, distant voice.
+Could it be Malibran--or Catalani ... and was my stage jewel bewitched,
+a kind of Solomon's ring, conjuring up great spirits? All I can say is
+that I have rarely spent a Christmas Eve like that one, while the
+servants' ball was going on at the other end of the house, furbishing my
+imitation diamonds with a silk handkerchief, alone, or perhaps not
+alone, in my study.
+
+
+
+
+MY BICYCLE AND I
+
+
+We two were sitting together on the wintry Campagna grass; the rest of
+the party, with their proud, tiresome horses, had disappeared beyond the
+pale green undulations; their carriage had stayed at that castellated
+bridge of the Anio. The great moist Roman sky, with its song of
+invisible larks, arched all round; above the rejuvenated turf rustled
+last year's silvery hemlocks. The world seemed very large, significant,
+and delightful; and we had it all to ourselves, as we sat there side by
+side, my bicycle and I.
+
+'Tis conceited, perhaps, to imagine myself an item in the musings of my
+silent companion, though I would fain be a pleasant one. But this much
+is certain, that, among general praising of life and of things, my own
+thoughts fell to framing the praises of bicycles. They were deeply felt,
+and as such not without appearance of paradox. What an excellent thing,
+I reflected, it is that a bicycle is satisfied to be quiet, and is not
+in the way when one is off it! Now, my friends out there, on their great
+horses, as Herbert of Cherbury calls them, are undoubtedly enjoying many
+and various pleasures; but they miss this pleasure of resting quietly on
+the grass with their steeds sitting calmly beside them. They are busy
+riding, moreover, and have to watch, to curb or humour the fancies of
+their beasts, instead of indulging their own fancy; let alone the
+necessity of keeping up a certain prestige. They are, in reality,
+domineered over by these horses, and these horses' standard of living,
+as fortunate people are dominated by their servants, their clothes, and
+their family connections; much as Merovingian kings, we were taught in
+our "Cours de Dictees," were dominated by the mayors of the palace.
+Instead of which, bar accidents (and the malignity of bottle-glass and
+shoe-nails), I am free, and am helped to ever greater freedom by my
+bicycle.
+
+These thoughts came to me while sitting there on the grass slopes,
+rather than while speeding along the solitary road which snakes across
+them to the mountains, because the great gift of the bicycle consists to
+my mind in something apart from mere rapid locomotion; so much so,
+indeed, that those persons forego it, who scorch along for mere
+exercise, or to get from place to place, or to read the record of miles
+on their cyclometer. There is an unlucky tendency--like the tendency to
+litter on the part of inanimates and to dulness on that of our
+fellow-creatures--to allow every new invention to add to life's
+complications, and every new power to increase life's hustling; so that,
+unless we can dominate the mischief, we are really the worse off instead
+of the better. It is so much easier, apparently, to repeat the spell
+(once the magician has spoken it) which causes the broomstick to fetch
+water from the well, as in Goethe's ballad, than to remember, or know,
+the potent word which will put a stop to his floodings; that, indeed,
+seems reserved to the master wizard; while the tiros of life's magic,
+puffed up with half-science, do not drink, but drown. In this way
+bicycling has added, methinks, an item to the hurry and breathlessness
+of existence, and to the difficulty of enjoying the passing hour--nay,
+the passing landscape. I have only once travelled on a bicycle, and,
+despite pleasant incidents and excellent company, I think it was a
+mistake; there was an inn to reach, a train to catch, a meal to secure,
+darkness to race against. And an order was issued, "Always make as much
+pace as you can at the beginning, because there may be some loss of time
+later on," which was insult and ingratitude to those mountain sides and
+valleys of Subiaco and Tivoli, and to the ghosts of St. Benedict, of
+Nero, and of the delightful beribboned Sibyl, who beckoned us to rest in
+their company.
+
+How different from this when one fares forth, companioned by one of the
+same mind; or, better still, with one's own honourable self, exploring
+the unknown, revisiting the already loved, with some sort of
+resting-place to return to, and the knowledge of time pleasantly
+effaced! One speeds along the straight road, flying into the beckoning
+horizon, conscious only of mountain lines or stacked cloud masses;
+living, for the instant, in air, space become fluid and breathable,
+earth a mere detail; and then, at the turn, slackening earth's power
+asserting itself with the road's windings. Curiosity keenly on edge, or
+memory awakened; and the past also casting its spells, with the isolated
+farms or the paved French villages by the river-bank, or the church
+spire, the towers, in the distance.... A wrong turn is no hardship; it
+merely gives additional knowledge of the country, a further detail of
+the characteristic lie of the land, a different view of some hill or
+some group of buildings. Indeed, I often deliberately deflect, try road
+and lane merely to return again, and have bicycled sometimes half an
+hour round a church to watch its transepts and choir fold and unfold,
+its towers change place, and its outline of high roof and gargoyles
+alter on the landscape. Then the joy, spiced with the sense of
+reluctance, of returning on one's steps, sometimes on the same day, or
+on successive days, to see the same house, to linger under the same
+poplars by the river. Those poplars I am thinking of are alongside a
+stately old French mill, built, towered, and gabled, of fine grey stone;
+and the image of them brings up in my mind, with the draught and foam of
+the weir and the glassiness of the backwater, and the whirr of the
+horse-ferry's ropes, that some of the most delightful moments which
+one's bicycle can give, are those when the bicycle is resting against a
+boat's side (once also in Exmouth harbour); or chained to an old
+lych-gate; or, as I remarked about my Campagna ride, taking its rest
+also and indulging its musings.
+
+I have alluded to the variety and alteration of pace which we can, and
+should, get while bicycling. Skimming rapidly over certain portions of
+the road--sordid suburbs, for instance--and precipitating our course to
+the points where we slacken and linger, the body keeps step with the
+spirit; and actuality forestalls, in a way, the selection by memory;
+significance, pleasantness, choice, not brute outer circumstance,
+determining the accentuation, the phrasing (in musical sense) of our
+life. For life must be _phrased_, lest it become mere jabber, without
+pleasure or lesson. Indeed, one may say that if games teach a man to
+stand a reverse or snatch an opportunity, so bicycling might afford an
+instructive analogy of what things to notice, to talk about and remember
+on life's high-roads and lanes; and what others, whizzing past on scarce
+skimming wheel, to reject from memory and feeling.
+
+The bicycle, in this particular, like the imagination it so well
+symbolizes, is a great liberator, freeing us from dwelling among
+ugliness and rubbish. It gives a foretaste of freedom of the spirit,
+reducing mankind to the only real and final inequality: inequality in
+the power of appreciating and enjoying. The poor clerk, or
+schoolmistress, or obscure individual from Grub Street can, with its
+help, get as much variety and pleasure out of a hundred miles' circuit
+as more fortunate persons from unlimited globetrotting. Nay, the
+fortunate person can on a bicycle get rid of the lumber and litter which
+constitutes so large a proportion of the gifts of Fortune. For the
+things _one has to have_, let alone the things _one has to do_ (in
+deference to butler and lady's-maid, high priests of fitness), are as
+well left behind, if only occasionally. And among such doubtful gifts of
+fortune is surely the thought of the many people employed in helping one
+to do nothing whatever. It spoils the Campagna, for instance, to have a
+brougham, with coachman and footman, and grooms to lead back the horses,
+all kicking their heels at the bridge of the Anio: worthy persons, no
+doubt, and conscientiously subserving our higher existence; but the
+bare fact of whom, their well-appointed silhouettes, seem somehow
+incongruous as we get further and more solitary among the pale grass
+billows, deeper into that immense space, that unlimited horizon of ages.
+
+These are some of the prestigious merits of the bicycle, though many
+more might be added. This grotesque iron courser, not without some of
+the grasshopper's absurd weirdness, is a creature of infinite capacities
+for the best kind of romance--the romance of the fancy. It may turn out
+to be (I always suspect it) the very mysterious steed which carried
+adventurous knights and damsels through forests of delightful
+enchantments, sprouting wings, proving a hippogriff and flying up,
+whenever fairies were lacking or whenever envious wizards were fussing
+about. And, as reward--or perhaps crown--for its many good services,
+reposed occasionally by Britomart's or Amadis' side, far from the
+world's din, even as my bicycle rested on the pale wintry grass
+hillocks, under the rolling cloud bales and the song of invisible larks,
+of the Campagna.
+
+
+
+
+PUZZLES OF THE PAST
+
+
+I am full of curiosity about the Past. This does not mean that I read
+the memoirs of Napoleon's marshals, or that I write queries to
+antiquarian papers, or that I enjoy being taken to see invisible Pictish
+barrows and Roman encampments; in fact, nothing could be further from my
+character and habits. But the Past puzzles me; and I like being puzzled
+by the Past.
+
+Not in its details, but in all manner of general questions, and such,
+moreover, as very rarely admit of an answer. What are the relations of
+the Past and Present? Where does the Past begin? And, to go further
+still, what _is_ the Past?
+
+All this sounds abstract, and even metaphysical; but it is really quite
+the reverse. These speculations are always connected with some concrete
+place or person, and they arise in my mind (and in the mind of the
+twenty thousand persons whom I don't know, but whom I resemble),
+together with some perspective of street or outline of face, and always
+with a faint puff of emotion. I will give you a typical instance of one
+of these puzzles. It formulated itself in my mind a few weeks ago at
+Verona, while going to see a certain little church on the slopes above
+the Adige. You go through the priest's house and vineyard; there is a
+fine carved lintel and a bit of fresco, all in the midst of a rag fair
+of squalid streets. What a place this must once have been! I felt the
+charm and splendour of piled-up palace and hanging gardens in former
+days. In former days! And a little doubt dropped into it, "If former
+days there ever were." For who can tell? This crumbling, ragged business
+which to us means that we stand before the Past; this gradual perishing
+of things in neglect and defilement, may very well have formed a
+necessary part of our ancestors' present. Our own standard and habit of
+tidiness, decorum, and uniformity may be quite recent developments;
+barbarism, in the sense of decay and pollution, may have existed
+together with prosperity. It is quite possible that dead donkeys were
+left in the streets of Haroun-al-Raschid's Bagdad, or Semiramis'
+Babylon, as well as in those of poor little modern Tangier. And the
+Verona of the Scaligers may have been just such a Verona as this which
+delights and depresses us, only with new beautiful things being built
+quite naturally alongside of decayed and defiled ones; things nowadays
+all equally levelled in ruin and squalor. The splendour of the Past may
+be a mere fiction of our own, like the romance of the Past which we say
+we no longer believe in. But history gives us, I think, no definite
+answer.
+
+With this question another is closely connected. I must explain it by a
+simile. A foreign friend of mine insists, with some show of reason, that
+much as any two countries of the Continent may differ, England contrives
+to differ a great deal more from all of them than they can differ from
+each other. Well, it sometimes strikes me that, in a similar way, our
+Present may be wholly detached from the mass, however heterogeneous, of
+the Past; an island divided from the mainland of history by seas of
+difference, or rather, like the great Arctic countries, a separate
+Continent, shrouded in mystery, of which we know only that its hitherto
+explored shores face, without ever touching, the other mapped-out
+Continent we call the Past. For just think, let us say, of the change
+implied in the multiplication through machinery of a stereotyped form,
+as against the production of an individual object by individual hands.
+Why, such a change means democracy far more than any other change in
+laws and franchises; and it means, among other things, that any art
+sprung really from the present will have to be of the nature, not of the
+painting or sculpture of old days, of the architecture which made each
+single cathedral an individual organism, but of the nature rather of
+process engraving, of lithography (are not our posters, Cheret's, for
+instance, the only thing which our masses see, as their distant forbears
+saw frescoes in churches and _campo santos_?), of book printing, in
+short; and will not literature and music become more and more the
+typical kinds of art, the creation of one brain projected over millions
+of acres and through mere wires and cylinders? And think also of the
+difference in locomotion. Say what you will, people who rode in coaches
+were bound to be more like people who rode in litters, for all the
+difference between Rome under Caesar and England under George III., than
+like people who go by train. That is all on the surface, serious persons
+will answer: the pace at which people's body and goods are conveyed
+along may alter without their thoughts or feelings being changed the
+least bit. Perhaps. But are we so absolutely sure of that?
+
+For instance, are we sure we should have been able to get on for half an
+hour together with even our own great-grandparents of little more than a
+hundred years ago? There they hang, our great-grandfathers and mothers
+and uncles and aunts (or some one's else, more likely), painted by
+Reynolds or Raeburn, delightful persons whose ghosts we would give
+anything to meet. Their ghosts; aye, there's the rub. For their ghosts
+would have altered with posthumous experience, would have had glimpses
+of the world we live in, and somewhat conformed to its habits; but could
+we really get on with the living men and women of former days? It is
+true that we understand and enjoy the books which they read, or rather
+a small number of pages out of a smaller number of books. But did they
+read them in the same way? I should not wonder if the different sense in
+which we took their favourite authors, or rather the different sense in
+which we discovered that they were in the habit of taking them, created
+considerable coolness, not to say irritation, between the ghosts of the
+readers of "The Vicar of Wakefield," or "Werther," or the "Nouvelle
+Heloise" and ourselves. Besides, they would be monstrously shocked at
+our ways. They would think us marvellously ill-bred. While we! I dare
+scarcely harbour the thought, much less express it. Anyway, it is
+certain that they occasionally allowed Sheridan and Miss Burney (I am
+not even thinking of the remote people of Fielding), and even, alas!
+Miss Austen, to paint pictures of them which we would scarcely own up to
+from novelists and playwrights of our day, and therefore I return to my
+puzzle: is time an unbroken continuity, all its subdivisions merely
+conventional, like those of postal districts; or, as I suggested above,
+are there real chains of mountains, chasms, nay, deep oceans, breaking
+up its surface; and do we not belong, we people of the nineteenth
+century, rather to the future which we are forming than to the Past
+which, much to its astonishment (I should think), produced us?
+
+There are other puzzles about the Past, far more intimate in nature and
+less grandiose, but, on the whole, far less easy to answer. One of these
+is difficult even to word, but every reader will identify it in
+connection with some of the most delightful experiences he has been
+admitted to. Roughly, it may be expressed as follows:--Were old people
+ever young? Was there a period in the world's history (and not so far
+back) when everybody was enchantingly mixed of primness and romance, had
+little graces of manner, nods and becks and wreathed smiles, with a
+tendency every now and then to employ language rather stronger than the
+occasion warranted? Did youths and maidens wander about with faint moral
+odours of pot-pourri and quaint creases of character, as of
+superannuated garments long folded in a drawer! Or are these qualities
+taken on by each generation in turn, in which case will the Hilda
+Wangels and Dodos of to-day delight the twentieth century as possible
+inmates of Cranford?
+
+Having worked my way to so marvellous a puzzle as this, I had better
+remove the strain by hastily suggesting another question, which will
+satisfactorily get rid of the others, to wit, whether the Past did
+really ever exist?
+
+On the whole, I am tempted to believe that it did not. I can even prove
+it by a logical stroke worthy of the very greatest philosophers. Granted
+that the Past is that which no longer has any existence, only the
+Present could ever be real now; as the Present and the Past cannot
+co-exist, the Past evidently never existed at all; unless, indeed, we
+call in the aid of the Hegelian philosophy, and set our minds at ease by
+a fine reduction of contraries, to the effect that since the Present and
+the Past exclude one another, they evidently must really be the same
+thing at bottom.
+
+This is cogent. And yet a doubt continues lurking in my mind. Is not
+what we think of as the Past--what we discuss, describe, and so often
+passionately love--a mere creation of our own? Not merely in its
+details, but in what is far more important, in its essential, emotional,
+and imaginative quality and value? Perhaps some day psychology may
+discover that we have a craving, like that which produces music or
+architecture, for a special state of nerves (or of something else, if
+people are bored with nerves by that time), obtainable by a special
+human product called the Past--the Past which has never been the
+Present.
+
+
+
+
+MAKING PRESENTS
+
+
+It was the dreadful perplexity of making a present to a rich woman. Like
+Heine's sweetheart, she was abundantly provided with diamonds and pearls
+and all things which mankind can wish. And so the lack of any mortal
+thing suggested that, so far from liking to be given it, she would far
+rather not have it at all.
+
+I do not choose to state whether that lady ever did get a present from
+me, for the statement would be an anti-climax. Suffice it that as a
+result of profound meditation I found myself in possession of a
+"Philosophy of Presents," which, copied fair on imaginary vellum, or
+bound in ideal morocco, I now lay at the feet of my friends, as a very
+appropriate gift, and entirely home-made.
+
+The whole subject of presents is bristling with fallacies, which have
+arisen like thistles out of the thinness of our life and the stoniness
+of our hearts. One of these mistaken views is perpetually being put
+forward by people who assert that _the pleasantness of a gift lies in
+the good-will of the giver_. The notion has a specious air of amiability
+and disinterestedness and general good-breeding; but the only truth it
+really contains is that, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, a present
+gives exactly no pleasure at all. For, if the pleasantness of a present
+depended solely on the expression of good-will, why not express
+good-will in any of the hundred excellent modes of doing so?--for we
+have all of us, more or less, voice, expressive features, words ready or
+(more expressive still) unready, and occasions enough, Heaven knows! of
+making small sacrifices for our neighbours. And it is entirely
+superfluous to waste our substance and cumber our friends' houses by
+adding to these convenient items, material tokens like, say, gold from
+Ophir and apes and peacocks. There are inconveniences attached to the
+private possession of bullion; many persons dislike the voices of
+peacocks, and I, at all events, am perfectly harrowed by the physiognomy
+of apes.
+
+This, of course, is metaphorical; but it leads me from the mere
+exposition of theory to the argument from experience. If presents are
+pleasant because of the good-will, etc., why are we all brought up (oh,
+the cruelty of suppressed disappointment when the doll arrives instead
+of the wooden horse, or the duplicate kitchen-set instead of the
+longed-for box of bricks!) to pretend that the gift we receive is the
+very thing we have been pining for for years? And here I would ask my
+friend and reader, the often-much-perplexed-giver-and-receiver of gifts,
+whether, quite apart even from those dreadful smothered tragedies of
+one's childhood, there are, among the trifling false positions of life,
+many false positions more painful than that of choosing a gift which one
+knows is not wanted, unless it be the more painful position still of
+receiving a gift which one would tip any one to take away?
+
+Some persons feel this so strongly, wondering why the preacher forgot
+this item in his list of vanities, that you may hear them loudly vowing
+that never again will they be caught in the act of making a present....
+
+So far about the mistaken view of the subject; now for the right one,
+which is mine: the result of great experience and of infinite
+meditation, all coming to a head in that recent perplexed business of
+choosing a present for the lady with the diamonds and pearls. And before
+proceeding further, let me say that my experience is really exceptional.
+Not that I have given many gifts, or that I am in the least certain that
+the few I have given were not the usual Dead Sea apples; but because I
+have been, what is much more to the point, a great receiver of presents,
+my room, my house containing nothing beautiful or pleasant that is not a
+present from some dear friend, or (the paradox will be explained later
+on) a present from myself. A great receiver of presents, also, because
+presents give me a very lively and special pleasure; have done so always
+ever since my days of Christmas-trees and birthday candles, leaving all
+through my life a particular permeating charm connected with certain
+dates and seasons, like the good, wonderful smell of old fir-needles
+slightly toasted, and of wax tapers recently extinguished, so that all
+very delightful places and moments are apt to affect me as a sort of
+gift-giving, what the Germans have a dear word for, beloved of children,
+_Bescheerung_. For if life, wisely lived, ought to be, as I firmly
+believe, nothing but a long act of courtship, then, surely, its
+exquisite things--summer nights with loose-hanging stars, pale sunny
+winter noons, first strolls through towered towns or upon herb-scented
+hills, the hearing again of music one has understood, not to speak of
+the gesture and voice of the people whom one holds dear--all these, and
+all other exquisite movements or exquisite items of life, should be felt
+with the added indescribable pleasure of being gifts.
+
+A present, then, may be defined as a _thing which one wants given by a
+person whom one likes_. But our English syntax falls short of my
+meaning, for what I would wish to say is rather, in Teutonic fashion, "a
+by a person one likes to one given object one wants." The stress of the
+sentence should be laid on the word _wants_. For much of the charm, and
+most of the dignity, of a gift depends on its being _a thing one would
+otherwise have done without_.
+
+This is true even with those dreadful useful objects which make us feel
+hot to distribute; they have become melancholy possible presents
+because, alas! however necessary, they would otherwise not have been
+forthcoming. And, apart from such cases, mankind has always decided that
+gifts should not be of the nature of blankets, or manuals of science, or
+cooking-pots, but rather flowers, fruit, books of poetry, and the wares
+of silken Samarkand and cedared Lebanon. It is admitted upon all hands
+that, to be perfect, presents must be superfluities; but I should like
+to add that the reverse also holds good, and that superfluities would be
+the better, nine times out of ten, for being presents.
+
+'Tis, methinks, a sign of the recent importation and comparative
+scarcity of honest livelihoods, that we should think so much how we come
+by our money, and so little how we part with it, as if we were free to
+waste, provided we do not steal. Now, _my manuals of political economy_
+(which were, of course, _not_ presents to me) make it quite plain that
+whatever we spend in mere self-indulgence is so much taken away from the
+profitable capital of the community; and sundry other sciences, which
+require no manuals to teach them, make it plainer still that the habit
+of indulging, upon legal payment, our whims and our greedinesses, fills
+our houses with lumber and our souls with worse than lumber where there
+might be light and breathable air. Extremes meet: and even as to
+paupers, the barest necessaries of life are superfluities--things
+dispensed with; so, at the other end of the vicious circle, to the
+spendthrift luxury ceases to be luxury, and superfluities are turned
+into things one cannot do without.
+
+The charm of a gift, its little moral flavour which makes us feel the
+better for it, resides, therefore, not merely in good-will, but in the
+little prelude of self-restraint on the one hand, of unselfishness on
+the other. Unless you gave it me, I should not have that pleasant thing;
+and you, knowing this much, give it to me, instead of to yourself. What
+a complicated lovers'-knot of good-feeling there is tied, as round
+flowers or sweetmeats, round every genuine present! This is a rich,
+varied impression, full of harmonies; compare with it the dry, dull,
+stifling impression one gets from looking round a rich man's house, or
+admiring the ornaments of a rich woman's person: all these things having
+merely been bought!
+
+Yet buying can be a fine thing. And among genuine presents (and in an
+honourable place) I certainly include--as I hinted some way back--the
+presents which people _sometimes make to themselves_. For 'tis a genuine
+present when a person who never allows himself a superfluity, at last
+buys one, as Charles and Mary Lamb did their first blue pots and prints,
+out of slowly saved up pennies. There is in that all the grace of long
+self-restraint, and the grace of finally triumphant love--love for that
+faithfully courted object, that Rachel among inanimates! The giving to
+one's self of such a present is a fit occasion for rejoicing; and 'tis a
+proper instinct (more proper than the one of displaying wedding
+presents) which causes the united giver and receiver of the gift to
+summon the neighbours, to see it and rejoice, not without feasting.
+
+But presents of this sort are even more difficult to compass than the
+other sort where people, like the lady sung by Heine, have pearls and
+diamonds in plenty, and all things which mankind can wish.
+
+
+
+
+GOING AWAY
+
+
+We stood on the steps of the old Scotch house as the carriage rolled her
+away. A last greeting from that delightful, unflagging voice; the misty
+flare of the lanterns round a corner; and then nothing but the darkness
+of the damp autumn night. There is to some foolish persons--myself
+especially--a strange and almost supernatural quality about the fact of
+departure, one's own or that of others, which constant repetition seems,
+if anything, merely to strengthen. I cannot become familiar with the
+fact that a moment, the time necessary for a carriage, as in this case,
+to turn a corner, or for those two steel muscles of the engine to play
+upon each other, can do so complete and wonderful a thing as to break
+the continuity of intercourse, to remove a living presence. The
+substitution of an image for a reality, the present broken off short and
+replaced by the past; enumerating this by no means gives the equivalent
+of that odd and unnatural word GONE. And the terror of death itself lies
+surely in its being the most sudden and utter act of _going away_.
+
+I suppose there must be people who do not feel like this, as there are
+people also who do not feel, apparently, the mystery of change of place,
+of watching the familiar lines of hill or valley transform themselves,
+and the very sense of one's bearings, what was in front or to the other
+side, east or west, getting lost or hopelessly altered. Such people's
+lives must be (save for misfortune) funnily undramatic; and, trying to
+realize them, I understand why such enormous crowds require to go and
+see plays.
+
+It is usually said that in such partings as these--partings with
+definite hope of meeting and with nothing humanly tragic about them, so
+that the last interchange of voice is expected to be a laugh or a
+joke--the sadder part is for those who stay. But I think this is
+mistaken. There is indeed a little sense of flatness--almost of
+something in one's chest--when the train is gone or the carriage rolled
+off; and one goes back into one's house or into the just-left room,
+throwing a glance all round as if to measure the emptiness. But the
+accustomed details--the book we left open, the order we had to give, the
+answer brought to the message, and breakfast and lunch and dinner and
+the postman, all the great eternities--gather round and close up the
+gap: close the gone one, and that piece of past, not merely _up_, but,
+alas! _out_.
+
+It is the sense of this, secret even in the most fatuous breast, which
+makes things sadder for the goer. He knows from experience, and, if he
+have imagination, he feels, this process of closing him out, this rapid
+adaptation to doing without him. And meanwhile he, in his carriage or
+train, is being hurled into the void; for even the richest man and he of
+the most numerous clients, is turned adrift without possessions or
+friends, a mere poor nameless orphan, when on a solitary journey. There
+is, moreover, a sadder feeling than this in the heart of the more
+sentimental traveller, who has engaged the hospitality of friends. _He
+knows it is extended equally to others_; that this room, which he may
+have made peculiarly his own, filling it, perhaps, in proportion to the
+briefness of sojourn, with his own most personal experience; the
+landscape made his own through this window, the crucial conversation,
+receiving unexpected sympathies, held or (more potent still) thought
+over afterwards in that chair; he knows that this room will become,
+perhaps, O horror, within a few hours, another's!
+
+The extraordinary hospitality of England, becoming, like all English
+things, rather too well done materially, rather systematic, and
+therefore heartless, inflicts, I have been told, some painful blows on
+sentimental aliens, particularly of Latin origin. There is a pang in
+finding on the hospitable door a label-holder with one's name in it: it
+saves losing one's way, but suggests that one is apt to lose it, is a
+stranger in the house; and it tells of other strangers, past and future,
+each with his name slipped in. Similarly the guest-book, imitated from
+nefarious foreign inns, so fearfully suggestive of human instability,
+with its close-packed signatures, and dates of arrival and departure.
+And then the cruelty of housekeepers, and the ruthlessness of
+housemaids! Take heed, O Thestylis, dear Latin guardian of my hearth,
+take heed and imprint my urgent wishes in thy faithful heart: never,
+never, never, in my small southern home (not unlike, I sometimes fondly
+fancy, the Poet's _parva domus_), never let me surprise thee depositing
+thy freshly-whitened linen in heaps outside the door of the departing
+guest; and never, I conjure thee, offend his eye or nostril with mops,
+or _frotteur's_ rollers, or resinous scent of furniture-polish near his
+small chamber! For that chamber, kindly Handmaiden, is _his_. He is the
+Prophet it was made for; and the only Prophet conceivable as long as
+present. And when he takes departure, why, the void must follow, a long
+hiatus, darkness, and stacked-up furniture, and the scent of varnish
+within tight-closed shutters....
+
+But, alas! alas! not all kind Thestylis's doing and refraining is able
+to dispel the natural sense of coming and going: one's bed re-made,
+one's self replaced, new boxes brought and unpacked, metaphorically as
+well as literally; fresh adjustments, new subjects of discourse, new
+sympathies: and the poor previous occupant meanwhile _rolling_, as the
+French put it. Rolling! how well the word expresses that sense of smooth
+and empty nowhere, with nothing to catch on or keep, which plays so
+large a part in all our earthly experience; as, for the rest, is
+natural, seeing that the earth is only a ball, at least the astronomers
+say so.
+
+But let us turn from this painful side of _going away_; and insist
+rather on certain charming impressions sometimes connected with it. For
+there is something charming and almost romantic, when, as in the case I
+mentioned, the friend leaves friends late in the evening. There is the
+whole pleasant day intact, with leisurely afternoon stroll when all is
+packed and ready: watching the sunset up the estuary, picking some
+flowers in the garden; sometimes even seeing the first stars prick
+themselves upon the sky, and mild sheet-lightnings, auguring good, play
+round the house, disclosing distant hills and villages. And the orderly
+dinner, seeming more swept and garnished for the anticipation of bustle,
+the light on the cloth, the sheen on the silver, the grace and fragrance
+of fruit and flowers, and the gracious faces above it, remains a wide
+and steady luminous vision on the black background of midnight travel,
+of the train rushing through nothingness. Most charming of all, when
+after the early evening on the balcony, the traveller leaves the south,
+to hurtle by night, conscious only of the last impression of supper with
+kind friends at Milan or the lakes, and the glimpse, in the station
+light, of heads covered with veils, and flowers in the hands, and
+southern evening dresses. These are the occasional gracious
+compensations for that bad thing called going away.
+
+
+
+
+COMING BACK
+
+
+Most people tell you that to return to places where one has been
+exceptionally happy is an unwise proceeding. But this, I venture to
+conceive, is what poor Alfred de Musset called "une insulte au bonheur."
+It shows, at all events, a lack of appreciation of the particular
+nature, permanent, and, in a manner, radiating, of happy experiences. Of
+course, I am not speaking of the cases where the happy past has been
+severed from indifferent present and future by some dreadful calamity;
+poetry alone is consolatory and also aloof enough to deal decorously
+with such tragic things, and they are no concern of the essayist. There
+is, besides, a very individual and variable character about great
+misfortunes, no two natures being affected by them quite alike, so that
+discussion and generalization are not merely intrusive, but also mostly
+fruitless. Therefore the question is not whether people are wise or
+unwise in avoiding places where they have been happy, after events which
+have shattered their happiness. And the only loss I have to deal with is
+the loss--if it really is one, as we shall examine--of the actual
+circumstances which accompanied a happy experience; the loss of the
+_then_ as opposed to the _now_, and, in a measure of the irrecoverable
+time, years or months, and of the small luggage of expectations and
+illusions which has got inevitably mislaid or scattered in the interval.
+And the question arises whether 'tis wiser, in a sense whether it is
+more delicately epicurean, to avoid the places which bring all that,
+together with the sense of the happy gone-by days, vividly home to one;
+or whether, as I contend, past happiness ought not to be used as an
+essential element in the happiness of the present.
+
+I have had, lately, the experience of returning to a part of the world
+which I had not seen for many, many years, and where I had spent the
+drowsy long days of a long illness, and the dreamy sweet days of a
+longer convalescence. It made a day's journey, without any especial
+resting-place for the soles of my feet, and undertaken, I can scarcely
+tell why, with a little shyness and fear. I did not go to the house
+where I had lived, but to one in the neighbourhood, whither I had often
+been taken all those years ago; and I did not even take the
+precaution--or perhaps took the contrary one--of securing the presence
+of the owners. The ladies were out; gone to one of the little fishing
+towns which are strung all around the Forth, and they would not be back
+till teatime. But the benevolent Scottish housemaid, noticing perhaps a
+shadow of disappointment, suggested my going in and waiting.
+
+The little old castle, which had got a little blurred in my
+recollection, seemed suddenly remembered and familiar, even as had been
+the case with the country I had driven along from the station; the
+undulating turnip-fields and fields of pale stooked corn, the
+reaping-machines and the women tying up the bean-straw, the white line
+of the Forth, and the whole pale, delicate country under the low,
+tender, _intimate_ northern sky. Even the smell, sweet and pungent, of
+the withered potatoes, bringing the sense of knowing it all, turnings
+of roads and of the land, so well. And similarly inside the castle,
+where I lingered on the pretext of writing a note to those ladies. It
+was all unchanged; the escutcheons in relief on the ceiling, the view of
+cornfield and thin beech belts, and distant sea from the windows, the
+lavender and _pot-pourri_ in the bowls, and almost the titles of the
+books, seemed quietly, at the touch of reality, to open out in
+remembrance. I did not stay till the return of the ladies, but went back
+to the station, and waited on the bridge for my train, which was a good
+half-hour late. I looked down from that bridge on the kind and gentle
+country in the veiled sunshine. The hill to the back of the house where
+I had lived, in the distance, the red roofs of the fishing villages, the
+little spire of the smallest of them barely projecting, as it always
+did, above the freshly reaped fields. And I felt, as I leaned against
+the parapet watching for my train's smoke coming towards me, not the
+loss, but rather the inestimable gain which a kindly past represents.
+Years gone by? Nay, rather years which make endurable, which furnish and
+warm the present, giving it sweetness and significance. How very poor
+we must be in our early youth, with no possessions like these; and how
+rich in our later life, with many years distilled into the essence of a
+single to-day!
+
+As I stood on the railway bridge thinking or feeling in this manner, I
+heard wheels, and saw a pony-cart, with an elderly lady, and a younger
+one driving her, coming towards me. It was the ladies who had been so
+kind to me all those years back, returning to the little castle. I
+turned my back, leaned on the parapet, and let them pass me, unnoticing.
+I wanted to keep them also in that dim and dear kind past.
+
+For we must be discreet as well as grateful-hearted if we would enjoy
+the Past's full gifts....
+
+The Past's gifts; and to these I would add, or among them rather I would
+include, an item which I find a difficulty in naming properly, and
+which, of course, I hesitate a little to speak about. I mean the gifts,
+odd as it sounds, of Death. For Death, while in his main function the
+cruel taker-away, the violent or stealthy robber, has also a less
+important side to his character, and is a giver of gifts, if only we
+know how to receive them. And he is this even apart from his power (for
+which one might imagine that the Greeks gave him, in certain terra
+cottas and reliefs, so very gentle and beautiful an aspect) of bringing
+light and loving-kindness into poor human creatures' judgments, and
+teaching them to understand and pardon; apart also from that mystic
+relationship, felt by Dante and all the poets, which he bears to the
+genius of imaginative love. What I allude to is a more humble, but quite
+as gracious function, of leading those he takes away (with the
+infinitely tender gesture of the antique funereal Hermes), not into
+vacuity and the horrid blackness of oblivion, but into a place of safe
+and serene memory. In this capacity Death can be, even like his master,
+Time, a giver of gifts to us. For those _are_ gifts to us, those friends
+he gathers together under hazier, tenderer skies into our thoughts which
+have the autumn warmth and stillness of late-reaped fields. Nay, the
+gift is greater, for there are added certain half-strangers, towards
+whom we lose all shyness, and who turn to real friends when introduced
+by death and worked into our past; dear such-an-one, whom we scarcely
+knew, barely more than face and name _then_, but know and have the right
+to care for now. So that I think that we might extract and take with
+happy interpretation those two last lines of the old, old Goethe's
+heartbreaking dedication to the generations whom he had outlived:--
+
+     "Was ich besitze, seh' ich wie im Weiten,
+      Und was verschwand, wird mir zu Wirklichkeiten."
+
+For all which reasons let us never be afraid of going back to places
+where we have been exceptionally happy; not even in the cases where we
+recognize that such former happiness was due, in part, to some dispelled
+illusion. For if we can but learn to be glad of the Past and receive its
+gift with gratitude, may not the remembrance of a dear illusion, brought
+home with the sight of the places which we filled with it, be merely
+another blessing; a possession which nothing can rob us of, and by which
+our spirit is the richer?
+
+
+
+
+LOSING ONE'S TRAIN
+
+
+The clocks up at the villa must have been all wrong, or else my watch
+did not go with them, or else I had not looked often enough at it while
+rambling about the town on my way to the station. Certain it is that
+when I got there, at the gallop of my cab-horse, the express was gone.
+There is something hatefully inexorable about expresses: it is useless
+to run after them, even in Italy. The next train took an hour and a
+quarter instead of forty minutes to cover the nineteen miles between
+Pistoia and Florence. Moreover, that next train was not till eight in
+the evening, and it was now half-past five.
+
+I felt all it was proper to feel on the occasion, and said, if anything,
+rather more. Missing a train is a terrible business, even if you miss
+nothing else in consequence; and the inner disarray, the blow and wrench
+to thoughts and feelings, is most often far worse than any mere
+upsetting of arrangements. A chasm suddenly gapes between present and
+future, and the river of life flows backwards, if but for a second. It
+is most fit and natural to lose one's temper; but the throwing out of so
+much moral ballast does not help one to overtake that train. I mention
+this, lest I should pass for heartless; and now proceed to say that,
+after a few minutes given to wrath and lamentation, I called the cab
+back and went in search of a certain very ancient church, containing a
+very ancient pulpit, which I had never succeeded in seeing before.
+Exactly as on previous occasions, when I got to the farm where the key
+of that church was kept, the key had gone to town in the pocket of the
+peasant. He would be back, no doubt, at nightfall. But I had not very
+much expected the church to be open, so I felt perfectly indifferent at
+not seeing the pulpit--nay, if anything, a little relieved, as one does
+sometimes when friends prove _not at home_.
+
+I walked up a long steep track to the little battered, black,
+fast-locked church, which stands all alone under some oak trees. The
+track was through thin hillside woods. Such divine woods! young oak and
+acacia, and an undergrowth of grass and ferns, of full-blown roses
+thrown across the grass; and here and there, dark in that pale young
+green, a cypress. The freshness of evening came all of a sudden, and
+with it a scent of every kind of leaf and herb and fern, and the
+sweetness of the ripening corn all round. And when I got to the ridge,
+slippery with dry cut grass, what should I see in front of me, over the
+olive-yards and the wooded slopes, but the walls and towers of
+Serravalle, which have beckoned to my fancy almost ever since my
+childhood. I sat there a long while in the June sunset and very nearly
+missed the second train, which it had seemed intolerable to wait for.
+
+This is an allegory, and I commend its application to the wise and
+gentle reader. There are more of such symbolical trains lost than real
+ones, even by the most travelled mortals, Odysseus or a bag-man. And
+such losing of trains is not inevitably a blessing. I have often written
+about life with optimistic heartlessness, because life, on the whole,
+has been uncommonly kind to me, and because one is nearer the truth
+when cheerful than when depressed. But this is the place for a brief
+interlude of pessimism. For it is all very well to make the best of
+losing trains when we have time, cabs, and a fine view at hand; and when
+in losing the train we lose nothing else, except our temper. But surely
+'tis no ingratitude towards life's great mercies and blessings to
+discriminate them from life's buffets and bruisings. And methinks that
+the teaching of courage or resignation might fitly begin by the
+recognition of the many cases where only courage or resignation avails,
+because they are thoroughly bad. There is something stupid and underbred
+at times in the attitude of saints and stoics--at least in their books.
+When Rachel weepeth for her children, we have no business to come round
+hawking our consolation; we should stand aside, unless we can cradle her
+to sleep in our arms. And if we refuse to weep, 'tis not because there
+is not matter enough for weeping, but because we require our strength
+and serenity to carry her through her trouble. Pain, dear cheerful
+friends, is pain; and grief, grief; and if our own complete human
+efficiency requires the acquaintance thereof, 'tis because the
+knowledge of their violence and of their wiles is needed for our own
+protection and the helping of other folk. Evil comes from the gods, no
+doubt; but so do all things; and to extract good from it--the great
+Prometheus-feat of man--is not to evil's credit, but to the credit of
+good. The contrary doctrine is a poison to the spirit, though a poison
+of medicinal use in moments of anguish, a bromide or an opiate.
+
+I am speaking, therefore, only of such contingencies as will bear
+comparison, without silly stoicism, to the missing of a train. Much of
+the good such disappointments may contain is of the nature of education,
+and most of it a matter of mere novelty. Without suspecting it, we are
+all suffering from lack of new departures; and life would no doubt be
+better if we tried a few more things, and gave the hidden, neglected
+possibilities a greater chance. Change as such is often fruitful of
+improvement, exposing to renovating air and rains the hard, exhausted
+soil of our souls, turning up new layers and helping on life's
+chemistry. The thwarting of our cherished plans is beneficial, because
+our plans are often mere routine, born not of wisdom, but of inertness.
+In our endless treadmill of activity, in our ceaseless rumination, we
+are, as a fact, neither acting nor thinking; and life, secretly at a
+standstill, ceases to produce any good. There was no reason for taking
+that express and getting back two or three hours sooner to my house: no
+one required me, nothing needed doing. Yet, unless I had lost that train
+I should not have dreamed of taking that walk, of making that little
+journey of discovery, in a delightful unknown place.
+
+There is another source of good hidden in disappointment. For it is
+disappointment rather than age (age getting the credit for what it
+merely witnesses) which teaches us to work into life's scheme certain
+facts, frequently difficult of acceptance; trying to make them, as all
+reality should be, causes of strength rather than of weakness. Painful
+facts? Or rather, perhaps, only painful contradictions to certain
+pleasant delusions, founded on nothing save their pleasantness, and
+taken for granted--who knows how long?--without proof and without
+questioning. Facts concerning not merely success, love, personal
+contact, but also one's own powers and possibilities for good, what the
+world is able to receive at one's hands, as much as of what the world
+can give to one.
+
+But the knowledge which disappointment gives, to those wishing to learn
+from it, has a higher usefulness than practical application. It
+constitutes a view of life, a certain contemplative attitude which, in
+its active resignation, in its domination of reality by intelligent
+acquiescence, gives continuity, peace, and dignity. And here my allegory
+finds its completion. For what compensated me after my lost train and
+all my worry and vexation of spirit? Nothing to put in my pocket or
+swell my luggage, not even a kingdom, such as made up for the loss of
+poor Saul's asses; but an impression of sunset freshness and sweetness
+among ripening corn and delicate leaves, and a view, unexpected, solemn,
+and charming, with those long-forgotten distant walls and towers which I
+shall never reach, and which have beckoned to me from my childhood.
+
+Such is the allegory, or morality, of the Lost Train.
+
+
+
+
+THE HANGING GARDENS
+
+VALEDICTORY
+
+
+I am not alluding to those of Semiramis. Though, now I come to think of
+it, this is the moment for protesting against one of those unnecessary
+deceptions from which the candid mind of children is allowed to suffer.
+For the verb _to hang_ invariably implies that the hanging object (or,
+according to our jurisprudence, person) is supported by a rope, nail, or
+other device, from above, while remaining unsupported from below. And it
+was in such relations to the forces of gravitation that my infancy
+conceived those gardens of the Babylonish Queen. So that I quite
+remember my bitter disappointment (the first germ, doubtless, of a
+general scepticism about Gods and Men) when a cut in an indiscreet
+_Handbook of Antiquities_ displayed these flowery places as resting
+flatly on a housetop, and no more hanging, in any intelligible sense,
+than I hung myself.
+
+Having lodged this complaint, I will, however, admit that this
+misleading adjective comes as a boon in the discourse I am now
+meditating. Since, returning to my old theme of the _Garden of Life_, I
+find that the misapplication of that word _Hanging_, and its original
+literal suggestion, lends added significance to this allegoric dictum:
+Of all the _Gardens of Life_ the best worth cultivating are often the
+Hanging Ones. Yes! Hanging between the town pavement, a hundred feet
+below, and the open sky, with gales ready to sweep down every flower-pot
+into smithereens, the kind or wicked sky, immediately above. Moreover,
+as regards legal claim to soil, leasehold, freehold, or copyhold, why,
+simply none, the earth having been carried up to that precarious place
+in arduous basketfuls.
+
+One of the wisest of women (I say it with pride, for she is my godchild)
+put this skyey allegory of mine into plain words, which I often repeat
+to myself, and never without profit. The circumstances and character of
+her husband had involved her in wanderings from her very wedding-day;
+and each of her six children had been born in a different place, and
+each in a more unlikely one. "It must have been very difficult to settle
+down at last like this," I said, looking in admiration from the dainty
+white walls and white carpets to the delicately laid table, with the
+flowers upon it and around it--I mean the garland of pink little faces
+and pink little pinafores. "I wonder you could do it after so long."
+"But I have always been what you call _settled_," she answered, and
+added very simply--"As soon as I took in that we should always be
+eternally uprooting, I made up my mind that the only way was to live as
+if we should never move at all. You see, everything would have gone to
+bits if I had let myself realise the contrary, and I think I should have
+gone crazy into the bargain."
+
+There has been a good deal of _going to bits_ and of craziness of sorts
+owing to the centuries and the universe not always having been as wise
+as this lady. And--with all deference to higher illuminations--I am
+tempted to ask myself whether all creeds, which have insisted on life's
+fleetingness and vanity, have not played considerable havoc with the
+fruitfulness, let alone the pleasantness, of existence. Certainly the
+holy persons who awaited the end of the world in caves, and on platforms
+fastened to columns, had not well-furbished knives and forks, nor
+carefully folded linen, nor, as a rule, nicely behaved nice little boys
+and girls, waiting with eager patience for a second helping of pudding.
+There is a distressing sneer at soap ("scented soap" it is always
+called), even in the great Tolstoi's writings, ever since he has allowed
+himself to be hag-ridden by the thought of death. And one speculates
+whether the care true saints have bestowed upon their souls, if not
+their bodies, the swept and garnished character of the best monasticism,
+has not been due to the fact that all this tidiness was in preparation
+for an eternity of beatitude?
+
+Fortunately for the world, the case of my dear goddaughter is an
+extreme one; and although our existence is quite as full of uprootings
+as hers, they come in such a stealthy or such a tragic manner as to
+beget no expectation of recurrence. Moreover, the very essence of life
+is to make us believe in itself; we fashion the future out of our
+feelings of the present, and go on living as if we should live for
+ever, simply because, by the nature of things, we have no experience
+of ceasing to live. Life is for ever murmuring to us the secret of its
+unendingness; and it is to our honour, and for our happiness, that we,
+poor flashes of a second, identify ourselves with the great unceasing,
+steady light which we and millions of myriads besides go to make up.
+Are we much surer of being alive to-morrow than of being dead in fifty
+years? "Is there any moment which can certify to its successor?" That
+is the answer to La Fontaine's octogenarian, planting his trees,
+despite the gibes of the little beardless boys whom, as is inevitable
+in such cases, he survived.
+
+                Defendez-vous au sage
+     De se donner des soins pour le plaisir d'autrui?
+     Cela meme est un fruit qui je goute aujourd'hui;
+     J'en puis jouir demain, et quelques jours encore.
+
+And all I would add is that, although it was very nice of the old man
+to enjoy his planting because of the unborn generations who would eat
+the fruits, he might have been less nice and quite as pleased if, as
+is probable, he liked gardening for its own sake.
+
+But people seem--on account of that horrid philosophical and
+moralising twist--to cast about for an excuse whenever they are doing
+what is, after all, neither wicked nor silly--to wit, making the best
+of such days and such powers as a merciful Providence or an
+indifferent trio of Fates has allowed them. But I should like to turn
+the tables on these persons, and suggest that all this worrying about
+whether life is or is not worth living, and hunting for answers for
+and against, may itself be an excuse, unconscious like all the most
+mischievous excuses, and hide not finer demands and highbred
+discontents, but rather a certain feebleness, lack of grip and
+adaptation, and an indolent acquiescence in what my godchild stoutly
+refused, a greater or lesser going to bits.
+
+This much is certain, that we all of us have to make a stand against
+such demoralisation whenever our plans are upset, or we are impatient to
+do something else, or we are feeling worried and ill. We most of us have
+to struggle against leaving our portmanteau gaping on a sofa or throwing
+our boot-trees into corners when we are in a place only for a few hours;
+and struggle against allowing the flowers on the table to wither, and
+the fire to go out, when we are setting out on a journey next day, or a
+dear one is about to say goodbye. "See to that fire being kept up, and
+bring fresh roses," said a certain friend of mine on a similar occasion.
+That was laying out a little hanging garden on the narrow ledge of two
+or three poor hours; and, behold! the garden has continued to be sweet
+and bright in the wide safe places of memory.
+
+In saying all these things, I am aware that many wise men, or men
+reputed wise, are against me; and that pretty hard words have been
+applied in the literature of all countries and ages to persons who are
+of my way of thinking, as, for instance, _gross, thoughtless, without
+soul_, and _Epicurean Swine_. And some of the people I like most to
+read about, the heroes of Tolstoi, Andre, Levine, Pierre, and, of
+course, Tolstoi himself, are for ever repeating that they can not
+live, let alone enjoy life, unless some one tell them why they should
+live at all.
+
+The demand, at first sight, does not seem unreasonable, and it is hard
+lines that just those who will ask about such matters should be the very
+ones for ever denied an answer. But so it is. The secret of _why we
+should live_ can be whispered only by a divinity; and, like the
+divinity who spoke to the Prophet, its small, still voice is heard only
+in ourselves. What it says there is neither couched in a logical form
+nor articulated in very definite language; and, I am bound to admit, is
+in no way of the nature of _pure reason_. Indeed, it is for the most
+part ejaculatory, and such that the veriest infant and simpleton, and I
+fear even animals (which is a dreadful admission), can follow its
+meaning. For to that unceasing question _Why_? the tiny voice within us
+answers with imperturbable irrelevance, "I want," "I do," "I think," and
+occasionally "I love." Very crass little statements, and not at all
+satisfactory to persons like Levine, Andre, and Tolstoi, who, for the
+most part, know them only second-hand; but wonderfully satisfying, thank
+goodness, to the great majority which hears them for ever humming and
+beating with the sound of its own lungs and heart. And one might even
+suspect that they are merely a personal paraphrase of the words which
+the spheres are singing and the heavens are telling.
+
+So, if we have no ampler places to cultivate with reverence and love,
+let us betake ourselves to the hanging gardens on our roof. The suns
+will cake the insufficient earth and parch the delicate roots; the
+storms will batter and tear the frail creepers. No doubt. But at this
+present moment all is fair and fragrant. And when the storms have done
+their wicked worst, and the sun and the frosts--nay, when that roof on
+which we perch is pulled to pieces, tiles and bricks, and the whole
+block goes--may there not be, for those caring enough, the chance of
+growing another garden, there or elsewhere?
+
+Be this as it may, one thing is certain, that no solid plot of earth
+between its walls or hedges allows us such intricate and unexpected
+bird's-eye views of streets and squares, of the bustling or resting
+city; none gives us such a vault of heaven, pure and sunny, or creeping
+with clouds, or serenely starlit, as do these hanging gardens of our
+life.
+
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+                           HORTUS VITAE;
+                     OR, THE HANGING GARDENS:
+
+                        MORALIZING ESSAYS.
+                               BY
+                           VERNON LEE.
+
+
+
+_Times._--"There are many charming flowers in it ... the swift
+to-and-fro of her vivid, capricious mind carries the reader hither
+and thither at her will, and she has such wise, suggestive things
+to say.... Whenever and wherever she speaks of Italy, the
+sun shines in this garden of hers, the south wind stirs among
+the roses."
+
+_Standard._--"There are imagination and fancy in the volume, a
+wise and independent outlook on society, an undercurrent of
+genial humour, and, what is perhaps still more rare, an invitation
+to think."
+
+
+_Westminster Gazette._--"They are of the family of Lamb, Hunt,
+and Hazlitt, just as those derive from the Augustans, Addison,
+and Steele.... Vernon Lee possesses the best gifts of the
+essayists--the engaging turn, the graceful touch, the subtle
+allusiveness."
+
+_Outlook._--"Vernon Lee possesses a mind richly imbued with the
+lore of the finest literature, and distinguished by just that touch
+of paradox, of the unexpected, which is the other indispensable
+requisite of the true essayist. Also her philosophy is never
+aggressively didactic, but always refreshing and helpful."
+
+_Speaker._--"This volume of essays gives us the work of Vernon Lee in
+her most eager and abundant mood.... Cordial pages that convey so much
+sincerity of heart, so much warmth, so much courage and love of life."
+
+_Pilot._--"All that Vernon Lee has written is strong and good ... and
+her shrewd observation has enabled her to see below the
+surface of life."
+
+JOHN LANE, PUBLISHER, LONDON & NEW YORK
+
+
+
+
+_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
+
+LIMBO; and Other Essays
+GENIUS LOCI. Notes on Places
+PENELOPE BRANDLING
+ARIADNE IN MANTUA
+      A Romance in Five Acts
+
+
+
+
+SOME NEW POETRY
+
+   A MASQUE OF MAY MORNING.
+   BY W. GRAHAM ROBERTSON.
+   With Twelve Full-page Illustrations
+   in Colour by the Author. Fcap. 4to. _7s. 6d._ net.
+
+
+   CORNISH BALLADS AND OTHER POEMS.
+   Being the Complete Poetical Works of ROBERT STEPHEN
+   HAWKER, sometime Vicar of Morwenstow, Cornwall. Edited
+   by C. E. BYLES. With numerous Illustrations by J. LEY
+   PETHYBRIDGE and others. Crown 8vo. _5s._ net.
+
+_Uniform with_
+
+   FOOTPRINTS OF FORMER MEN IN FAR CORNWALL.
+
+
+   NEW POEMS.
+   By RONALD CAMPBELL MACFIE,
+   author of "Granite Dust." _5s._ net.
+
+
+_Daily News._--"The poetry ... is of a passionate intensity, and
+sings itself, with a sort of clear anger, which is new.... He has a
+curious brightness and newness of phrase, his stanzas ringing down
+with a note that is unfamiliar."
+
+_Academy._--"Mr. Macfie, as the reader of 'Granite Dust' well
+knows, is a veritable poet."
+
+_Star._--"Work ... far above the average."
+
+_Aberdeen Free Press._--"Strong, pure, and beautiful poetry."
+
+
+   POEMS.
+   By RACHEL ANNAND TAYLOR.
+   Crown 8vo. _5s._ net.
+
+
+   AN ELEGY TO F. W. A. DIED 1901.
+   By VIVIAN LOCKE ELLIS.
+   Crown 8vo. _3s. 6d._ net.
+
+
+   LAND AND SEA PIECES: Poems.
+   By A. E. J. LEGGE.
+   Crown 8vo. _3s. 6d._ net.
+
+
+
+JOHN LANE, PUBLISHER, LONDON & NEW YORK
+
+
+
+
+
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