Prose Fancies by Richard Le Gallienne

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[Illustration]

PROSE FANCIES

BY
RICHARD LE GALLIENNE

WITH A LITHOGRAPHED PORTRAIT
OF THE AUTHOR BY R. WILSON STEER

[Illustration]

LONDON
ELKIN MATHEWS & JOHN LANE
G.P. PUTNAM'S SONS
NEW YORK
1894

TO
MY DEAR WIFE
MY PROSE FOR HER POETRY
IN MEMORY OF TWO HAPPY YEARS
OCTOBER 22, 1891
DECEMBER 6
1893

CONTENTS

A SPRING MORNING
A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE
LIFE IN INVERTED COMMAS
FRACTIONAL HUMANITY
THE WOMAN'S HALF-PROFITS
GOOD BISHOP VALENTINE
IRRELEVANT PEOPLE
THE DEVILS ON THE NEEDLE
POETS AND PUBLISHERS
APOLLO'S MARKET
THE 'GENIUS' SUPERSTITION
A BORROWED SOVEREIGN
ANARCHY IN A LIBRARY
THE PHILOSOPHY OF 'LIMITED EDITIONS'
A PLEA FOR THE OLD PLAYGOER
THE MEASURE OF A MAN
THE BLESSEDNESS OF WOMAN
VIRAGOES OF THE BRAIN
THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER
TRANSFERABLE LIVES
THE APPARITION OF YOUTH
THE PATHETIC FLOURISH
A TAVERN NIGHT
SANDRA BELLONI'S PINEWOOD
WHITE SOUL

NOTE

The reader will, doubtless, feel the greater confidence
in the following essays, from the fact that they have
already passed their first and second readings
through the hands of the editors and subscribers
of _The Speaker_, _The Star_, _The Illustrated London
News_, and _The Sketch_. To the several editors of
these papers I am indebted for their kind permission
to reprint, and I take this opportunity of expressing
my thanks to Mr. CLEMENT SHORTER for many
other kindnesses. I venture also particularly to
thank my friend Mr. T.P. GILL--but for whose
kind incitement many of the following
'Fancies' had not been written at all.

PROSE FANCIES

A SPRING MORNING

I

Spring puts the old pipe to his lips and blows a note or two. At the
sound, little thrills pass across the wintry meadows. The bushes are
dotted with innumerable tiny sparks of green, that will soon set fire to
the whole hedgerow; here and there they have gone so far as those little
tufts which the children call 'bread and cheese.' A gentle change is
coming over the grim avenue of the elms yonder. They won't relent so far
as to admit buds, but there is an unmistakable bloom upon them, like the
promise of a smile. The rooks have known it for some weeks, and already
their Jews' market is in full caw. The more complaisant chestnut dandles
its sticky knobs. Soon they will be brussels-sprouts, and then they will
shake open their fairy umbrellas. So says a child of my acquaintance. The
water-lilies already poke their green scrolls above the surface of the
pond; a few buttercups venture into the meadows, but daisies are still
precious as asparagus. The air is warm as your love's cheek, golden as
canary. It is all a-clink and a-glitter, it trills and chirps on every
hand. Somewhere close by, but unseen, a young man is whistling at his
work; and, putting your ear to the ground, you shall hear how the earth
beneath is alive with a million little beating hearts. _C'est l'heure
exquise._

Presently along the road comes slowly, and at times erratically, a
charming procession. Following the fashion, or even setting it, three
weeks since yon old sow budded. From her side, recalling the Trojan horse,
sprang suddenly a little company of black-and-tan piglets, fully legged
and snouted for the battle of life. She is taking them with her to put
them to school at a farm two or three miles away. So I understand her.
They surround her in a compact body, ever moving and poking and
squeaking, yet all keeping together. As they advance slowly, she towering
above her tiny bodyguard, one thinks of Gulliver moving through Lilliput;
and there is a touch of solemnity in the procession which recalls a mighty
Indian idol being carried through the streets, with people thronging about
its feet. How delicately she steps, lest she hurt one of the little limbs!
And, meanwhile, mark the driver--for though the old pig pretends to ignore
any such coercion, as men believe in free-will, yet there is a fate, a
driver, to this idyllic domestic company. But how gentle is he too! He
never lets it be seen that he is driving them. He carries a little switch,
rather, it would appear, for form's sake; for he seldom does more with it
than tickle the gravely striding posteriors of the quaint little people.
He is wise as he is kind, for he knows that he is driving quicksilver. The
least undue coercion, the least sudden start, and they will be off like
spilled marbles, in eleven different directions. Sometimes occasion arises
for prompt action: when the poet of the family dreams he discerns the
promised land through the bottom of a gate, and is bent on squeezing his
way under, and the demoralisation of the whole eleven seems imminent.
Then, unconsciously applying the wisdom of Solomon, the driver deals a
smart flick to the old mother. Seeing her move on, and reflecting that she
carries all the provisions of the party, her children think better of
their romance, and gambol after her, taking a gamesome pull at her teats
from high spirits.

The man never seems to get angry with them. He is smiling gently to
himself all the time, as he softly and leisurely walks behind them.
Indeed, wherever this moving nursery of young life passes, it awakens
tenderness. The man who drove the gig so rapidly a little way off suddenly
slows down, and, with a sympathetic word, walks his horse gingerly by.
Every pedestrian stops and smiles, and on every face comes a transforming
tenderness, a touch of almost motherly sweetness. So dear is young life to
the eye and heart of man.

A few weeks hence these same pedestrians will pass these same pigs with
no emotion, beyond, possibly, that produced by the sweet savour of frying
ham. Their _naivete_, their charming baby quaintness, will have departed
for ever. Their features, as yet but roguishly indicated, will have become
set and hidebound; their soft little snouts will be ringed, and hard as a
fifth hoof; their dainty little ears--veritable silk purses--will have
grown long and bristly: in short, they will have lost that ineffable
tender bloom of young life which makes them quite a touching sight to-day.
Strange that loss of charm which comes with development in us all, pigs
included. A tendency to pigginess, as in these youngsters, a tendency to
manhood in the prattling and crowing babe, are both hailed as charming:
but the full-grown pig! the full-grown man! Alas! in each case the charm
seems to flee with the advent of bristles.

But let us return to the driver.

Under his arm he carries a basket, from which now and again proceed
suppressed squeaks and grunts. It is 'the rickling,' the weakling, of the
family. It will probably find an early death, and be embalmed in sage and
onions. The man has already had an offer for it--from 'Mr. Lamb.' Mr.
Lamb! Yes, Mr. Lamb at Six-Elm Farm. 'Oh! I see.' But was it not a
startling coincidence?

It has taken half an hour to come from the old bridge to the cross-roads,
barely half a mile. And now, good-bye, funny little silken-coated piglets;
good-bye, grave old mother. Ge-whoop! Good-bye, gentle driver. As you move
behind your charge with that tender smile, with that burden safely pressed
beneath your arm, I seem to have had a vision of the Good Shepherd.

II

Down by the river there is, as yet, little sign of spring. Its bed is all
choked with last year's reeds, trampled about like a manger. Yet its
running seems to have caught a happier note, and here and there along its
banks flash silvery wands of palm. Right down among the shabby burnt-out
underwood moves the sordid figure of a man. He seems the very _genius
loci_. His clothes are torn and soiled, as though he had slept on the
ground. The white lining of one arm gleams out like the slashing in a
doublet. His hat is battered, and he wears no collar. I don't like staring
at his face, for he has been unfortunate. Yet a glimpse tells me that he
is far down the hill of life, old and drink-corroded at fifty. He is
miserably gathering sticks--perhaps a little job for the farm close by. He
probably slept in the barn there last night, turned out drunk from the
public-house. He will probably do and be done by likewise to-night. How
many faggots to the dram? one wonders. What is he thinking as he rustles
about disconsolately among the bushes? Of what is he _dreaming_? What does
he make of the lark up there? But I notice he never looks at it. Perhaps
he cannot bear to. For who knows what is in the heart beneath that poor
soiled coat? If you have hopes, he may have memories. Some day your hopes
will be memories too--birds that have flown away, flowers long since
withered.

III

A short way further along I come across a boy gathering palm. He is a town
boy, and has come all the way from Whitechapel thus early. He has already
gathered a great bundle--worth five shillings to him, he says. This same
palm will to-morrow be distributed over London, and those who buy sprigs
of it by the Bank will know nothing of the blue-eyed boy who gathered it,
and the murmuring river by which it grew. And the lad, once more lost in
some squalid court, will be a sort of Sir John Mandeville to his
companions--a Sir John Mandeville of the fields, with their water-rats,
their birds' eggs, and many other wonders. And one can imagine him saying,
'And the sparrows there fly right up into the sun, and sing like angels!'
But he won't get his comrades to believe _that_.

IV

Spring has a wonderful way of bringing out hidden traits of character.
Through my window I look out upon a tiny farm. It is kept by a tall,
hard-looking, rough-bearded fellow, whom I have watched striding about his
fields all winter, with but little sympathy. Yet it would seem I have been
doing him wrong. For this morning, as he passed along the outside of the
railing wherein his two sheep were grazing, suddenly they came bounding
towards him with every manifestation of delight, literally recalling the
lambkins which Wordsworth saw bound 'as to the tabor's sound.' They
followed as far as the railing permitted, pushing their noses through at
him; nay, when at last he moved out of reach, they were evidently so much
in love that they leaped the fence and made after him. And he, instead of
turning brutally on them, as I had expected, smiled and played with them
awhile. Indeed, he had some difficulty in disengaging himself from their
persistent affection. So, evidently, they knew him better than I.

A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

Why do we go on talking? It is a serious question, one on which the
happiness of thousands depends. For there is no more wearing social demand
than that of compulsory conversation. All day long we must either talk,
or--dread alternative--listen. Now, that were very well if we had
something to say, or our fellow-sufferer something to tell, or, best of
all, if either of us possessed the gift of clothing the old commonplaces
with charm. But men with that great gift are not to be met with in every
railway-carriage, or at every dinner. The man we actually meet is one
whose joke, though we have signalled it a mile off, we are powerless to
stop, whose opinions come out with a whirr as of clockwork. Besides, it
always happens in life that the man--or woman--with whom we would like to
talk is at the next table. Those who really have something to say to each
other so seldom have a chance of saying it.

Why, oh why, do we go on talking? We ask the question in all seriousness,
not merely in the hope of making some cheap paradoxical fun out of the
answer. It is a cry from the deeps of ineffable boredom.

Is it to impart information? At the best it is a dreary ideal. But, at any
rate, it is a mistaken use of the tongue, for there is no information we
can impart which has not been far more accurately stated in book-form.
Even if it should happen to be a quite new fact, an accident happily rare
as the transit of Venus--a new fact about the North Pole, for
instance--well, a book, not a conversation, is the place for it. To talk
book, past, present, or to come, is not to converse.

To converse, as with every other art, is out of three platitudes to make
not a fourth platitude--'but a star.' Newness of information is no
necessity of conversation: else were the Central News Agency the best of
talkers. Indeed, the oldest information is perhaps the best material for
the artist as talker: though, truly, as with every other artist, material
matters little. There are just two or three men of letters left to us, who
provide us examples of that inspired soliloquy, those conversations of
one, which are our nearest approach to the talk of other days. How good it
is to listen to one of these!--for it is the great charm of their talk
that we remember nothing. There were no prickly bits of information to
stick on one's mind like burrs. Their talk had no regular features, but,
like a sunrise, was all music and glory.

The friend who talks the night through with his friend, till the dawn
climbs in like a pallid rose at the window; the lovers who, while the sun
is setting, sit in the greenwood and say, 'Is it thou? It is I!' in
awestruck antiphony, till the stars appear; and, holiest converse of all,
the mystic prattle of mother and babe: why are all these such wonderful
talk if not because we remember no word of them--only the glory? They
leave us nothing, in image worthy of the time, to 'pigeon-hole,' nothing
to store with our vouchers in the 'pigeon-holes' of memory.

Pigeon-holes of memory! Think of the degradation. And memory was once a
honeycomb, a hive of all the wonderful words of poets, of all the
marvellous moods of lovers. Once it was a shell that listened tremulously
upon Olympus, and caught the accents of the Gods; now it is a phonograph
catching every word that falleth from the mouths of the board of
guardians. Once a muse, now a servile drudge 'twixt man and man.

And this 'pigeon-hole' memory--once an impressionist of divine moments,
now the miser of all unimportant, trivial detail--is our tyrant, the muse
of modern talk. Men talk now not what they feel or think, but what they
remember, with their bad good memories. If they remembered the poets, or
their first love, or the spring, or the stars, it were well enough: but
no! they remember but what the poets ate and wore, the last divorce case,
the state of the crops, the last trivial detail about Mars. The man with
the muck-rake would have made a great reputation as a talker had he lived
to-day: for, as our modern speech has it, a Great Man simply means a Great
Memory, and a Great Memory is simply a prosperous marine-store.

What, in fact, do we talk about? Mainly about our business, our food, or
our diseases. All three themes more or less centre in that of food. How we
revel in the brutal digestive details, and call it gastronomy! How our
host plumes himself on his wine, as though it were a personal virtue, and
not the merely obvious accessory of a man with ten thousand a year!
Strange, is it not, how we pat and stroke our possessions as though they
belonged to us, instead of to our money--our grandfather's money?

There is, some hope and believe, an imminent Return to
Simplicity--Socialism the unwise it call. If it be really true, what good
news for the grave humorous man, who hates talking to anything but trees
and children! For, if that Return to Simplicity means anything, it must
mean the sweeping away of immemorial rookeries of talk--such crannied
hives of gossip as the professions, with all their garrulous heritage of
trivial witty _ana_: literary, dramatic, legal, aristocratic,
ecclesiastical, commercial. How good to dip them all deep in the great
ocean of oblivion, and watch the bookworms, diarists, 'raconteurs,' and
all the old-clothesmen of life, scurrying out of their holes, as when in
summer-time Mary Anne submerges the cockroach trap within the pail! And
oh, let there be no Noah to that flood! Let none survive to tell another
tale; for, only when the chronicler of small-beer is dead shall we be able
to know men as men, heroes as heroes, poets as poets--instead of mere
centres of gossip, an inch of text to a yard of footnote. Then only may we
begin to talk of something worth the talking: not merely of how the great
man creased his trousers, and call it 'the study of character,' but of how
he was great, and whether it is possible to climb after him.

Talk, too, is so definite, so limited. The people we meet might seem so
wonderful, might mean such quaint and charming meanings sometimes, if they
would not talk. Like some delightfully bound old volume in a foreign
tongue, that looks like one of the Sibylline books, till a friend
translates the title and explains that it is a sixteenth-century law
dictionary: so are the men and women we meet. How interesting they might
be if they would not persist in telling us what they are about!

That, indeed, is the abiding charm of Nature. No sensible man can envy
Asylas, to whom the language of birds was as familiar as French _argot_ to
our young _decadents_. Think how terrible it would be if Nature could all
of a sudden learn English! That exquisite mirror of all our shifting moods
would be broken for ever. No longer might we coin the woodland into
metaphors of our own joys and sorrows. The birds would no longer flute to
us of lost loves, but of found worms; we should realise how terribly
selfish they are; we could never more quote 'Hark, hark, the lark at
heaven's gate sings,' or poetise with Mr. Patmore of 'the heavenly-minded
thrush.' And what awful voices some of those great red roses would have!
Yes, Nature is so sympathetic because she is so silent; because, when she
does talk, she talks in a language which we cannot understand, but only
guess at; and her silence allows us to hear her eternal meanings, which
her gossiping would drown.

Happy monks of La Trappe! One has heard the foolish chattering world take
pity upon you. An hour of talk to a year of silence! O heavenly
proportion! And I can well imagine that when that hour has come, it seems
but a trivial toy you have forgotten how to play with. Were I a Trappist,
I would use my hour to evangelise converts to silence, would break the
long year's quiet but to whisper, 'How good is silence!' Let us inaugurate
a secular La Trappe, let us plot a conspiracy of silence, let us send the
world to Coventry. Or, if we must talk, let it be in Latin, or in the
'Volapuek' of myriad-meaning music; and let no man joke save in Greek--that
all may laugh. But, best of all, let us leave off talking altogether, and
listen to the morning stars.

LIFE IN INVERTED COMMAS

As I waited for an omnibus at the corner of Fleet Street the other day, I
was the spectator of a curious occurrence. Suddenly there was a scuffle
hard by me, and, turning round, I saw a powerful gentlemanly man wrestling
with two others in livery, who were evidently intent on arresting him.
These men, I at once perceived, belonged to the detective force of the
Incorporated Society of Authors, and were engaged in the capture of a
notorious plagiarist. I knew the prisoner well. He had, in fact, pillaged
from my own writings; but I was none the less sorry for his plight, to
which, I would assure the reader, I was no party. Yet he was, I admit, an
egregiously bad case, and my pity is doubtless misplaced sentiment. Like
many another, he had begun his career as a quotation and ended as a
plagiarism, daring even, in one instance, to imitate that shadow in the
fairy-tale which rose up on a sudden one day and declared himself to be
the substance and the substance his shadow. Indeed, he had so far
succeeded as to make many people question whether or not he was the
original and the other man the plagiarism. However, there was no longer to
be any doubt of it, for his captors had him fast this time; and,
presently, we saw him taken off in a hansom, well secured between strong
inverted commas.

This curious circumstance set me reflecting, and, as we trundled along
towards Charing Cross, my mind gave birth to sundry sententious
reflections.

After all, I thought, that unlucky plagiarist is no worse than most of us:
for is it not true that few of us live as conscientiously as we should
within our inverted commas? We are far more inclined to live in that
author, not ourselves, who makes for originality. It is, of course,
difficult, even with the best intentions, to make proper acknowledgment of
all our 'authorities'--to attach, so to say, the true _'del. et sculp.'_
to all our little bits of art. There is so much in our lives that we
honestly don't know how we came by.

As I reflected in this wise, I was drawn to notice my companions in the
omnibus, and lo! there was not an original person amongst us. Yet I looked
in vain to see if they wore their inverted commas. Not one of them,
believe me, had had the honesty to bring them. Each looked at me
unblushingly, as though he were really original, and not a cheap German
print of originals I had seen in books and pictures since I could read. I
really think that they must have been unaware of their imposture. They
could hardly have pretended so successfully.

There was the young dandy just let loose from his band-box, wearing
exactly the same face, the same smile, the same neck-tie, holding his
stick in exactly the same fashion, talking exactly the same words, with
precisely the same accent, as his neighbour, another dandy, and as all the
other dandies between the Bank and Hyde Park Corner. Yet he seemed
persuaded of his own originality. He evidently felt that there was
something individual about him, and apparently relied with confidence on
his friend not addressing a third dandy by mistake for him. I hope he had
his name safe in his hat.

Looking at these three examples of Nature's love of repeating herself, I
said to myself: Somewhere in heaven stands a great stencil, and at each
sweep of the cosmic brush a million dandies are born, each one alike as a
box of collars. Indeed, I felt that this stencil process had been employed
in the manufacture of every single person in that omnibus: two middle-aged
matrons, each of whom seemed to think that having given birth to six
children was an indisputable claim to originality; two elderly business
men to correspond; a young miss carrying music and wearing eye-glasses;
and a clergyman discussing stocks with one of the business men; I alone in
my corner being, of course, the one occupant for whom Nature had been at
the expense of casting a special mould, and at the extravagance of
breaking it.

Presently a matron and a business man alighted, and two dainty young
women, evidently of artistic tendencies, joined the Hammersmith pilgrims.
One saw at a glance that they were very sure of their originality. There
were no inverted commas around their pretty young heads, bless them! But
then Queen Anne houses are as much on a pattern as more commonplace
structures, and Bedford Parkians are already being manufactured by
celestial stencil. What I specially noticed about them was their
plagiarised voices--curious, yearning things, evidently intended to
suggest depths of infinite passion, controlled by many a wild and weary
past,

'Infinite passion, and the pain
Of finite souls that yearn'--

the kind of voice, you know, in which Socialist actresses yearn out
passages from 'The Cenci,' feeling that they do a fearful thing. The voice
began, I believe, with Miss Ellen Terry. With her, though, it is charming,
for it is, we feel, the voice of real emotion. There are real tears in it.
It is her own. But with these ladies, who were discussing the last
'Independent' play, it was so evidently a stop pulled out by
affectation--the _vox inhumana_, one might say, for it is a voice unlike
anything else to be found in the four elements. It has its counterpart in
the imitators of Mr. Beerbohm Tree--young actors who likewise endeavour to
make up for the lack of anything like dramatic passion by pretending to
control it: the control being feigned by a set jaw or a hard, throaty,
uncadenced voice of preternatural solemnity. These ladies, too, wore
plagiarised gowns of the most 'original' style, plagiarised hats,
glittering plagiarised smiles; and yet they so evidently looked down on
every one else in the omnibus, whom, perhaps, after all, it had been
kinder of me to describe as the hackneyed quotations of humanity, who had
probably thought it unnecessary to wear their inverted commas, as they
were so well known.

At last I grew impatient of them, and, leaving the omnibus, finished my
journey home by the Underground. What was my surprise when I reached it to
find our little house wearing inverted commas--two on the chimney, and two
on the gate! My wife, too! and the words of endearing salutation with
which I greeted her, why, they also to my diseased fancy seemed to leave
my lips between quotation marks. There is nothing in which we fancy
ourselves so original as in our terms of endearment, nothing in which we
are so like all the world; for, alas! there is no euphuism of affection
which lovers have not prattled together in springtides long before the
Christian era. If you call your wife 'a chuck,' so did Othello; and,
whatever dainty diminutive you may hit on, Catullus, with his warbling
Latin, 'makes mouths at our speech.'

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