Prose Fancies by Richard Le Gallienne
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Richard Le Gallienne >> Prose Fancies
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I grew so haunted with this oppressive thought, that my wife could not but
notice my trouble. But how could I tell her of the spectral inverted
commas that dodged every move of her dear head?--tell her that our own
original firstborn, just beginning to talk as never baby talked, was an
unblushing plagiarism of his great-great-great-grandfather, that our love
was nothing but the expansion of a line of Keats, and that our whole life
was one hideous mockery of originality? 'Woman,' I felt inclined to
shriek, 'be yourself, and not your great-grandmother. A man may not marry
his great-grandmother. For God's sake let us all be ourselves, and not
ghastly mimicries of our ancestors, or our neighbours. Let us shake
ourselves free from this evil dream of imitation. Merciful Heaven, it is
killing me!' But surely that was a quotation too, and, accidentally
catching sight of the back of my hand, suddenly the tears sprang to my
eyes, for it was just so the big soft veins used to be on the hands of my
father, when a little boy I prayed between his knees. He was gone, but
here was his hand--_his_ hand, not mine!
Then an idea possessed me. There was but one way. I could die. There was a
little phial of laudanum in the medicine-cupboard that always leered at me
from among the other bottles like a serpent's eye. Thrice happy thought!
Who would miss such a poor imitation? Even the mere soap-vending tradesmen
bid us 'beware of imitations.' Dark wine of forgetfulness.... No, that was
a quotation. However, here was the phial. I drew the cork, inhaled for a
moment the hard dry odour of poppies, and prepared to drink. But just at
that moment I seemed to hear a horrid little laugh coming out of the
bottle, and a voice chuckled at my ear: 'You ass, do you call that
original?' It was so absurd that I burst out into hysterical laughter.
Here had I been about to do the most 'banal' thing of all. Was there
anything in the world quite so commonplace as suicide?
And with the good spirits of laughter came peace. Nay, why worry to be
'original'? Why such haste to be unlike the rest of the world, when the
best things of life were manifestly those which all men had in common? Was
love less sweet because my next-door neighbour knew it as well? Would the
same reason make death less bitter? And were not those tender diminutives
all the more precious, because their vowels had been rounded for us by the
sweet lips of lovers dead and gone?--sainted jewels, still warm from the
beat of tragic bosoms, flowers which their kisses had freighted with
immortal meanings.
And then I bethought me how the meadow-daisies were one as the other, and
how, when the pearly shells of the dog rose settled on the hedge like a
flight of butterflies, one was as the other; how the birds sang alike, how
star was twin with star, and in peas is no distinction. My rhetoric
stopped as I was about to say 'as wife is to wife'--for I thought I would
first kiss her and see: and lo! I was once more perplexed, for as I looked
down into her eyes, simple and blue and deep, as the sky is simple and
blue and deep, I declared her to be the only woman in the world--which was
obviously not exact. But it was true, for all that.
FRACTIONAL HUMANITY
Mankind, in its heavy fashion, has chosen to mock the tailor with the
fact--the indubitable fact--that he is but the ninth part of a man. Yet,
after all, at this time of day, it seems more of a compliment than a gibe.
To be a whole ninth of a man! Few of _us_, when we ponder it, can boast so
much. Take, for instance, that other proverbial case of the
fractional-part-of-a-pin-maker. It takes nine persons to make a pin, we
were taught in our catechism. Actually that means that it takes nine
persons to make one whole pin-maker, which leaves the question still to be
solved as to how many whole pin-makers it takes to make a man. What is the
relation of one pin-maker to the whole social economy? That discovered, a
multiplication by nine will give us the exact fractional part of manhood
which belongs to the ninth-of-a-pin-maker. Obviously he is a much more
microscopic creature than the immemorially despised tailor, and, alas! his
case is nearest that of most of us. And it is curious to notice how we
rejoice in, rather than lament, this inevitable result of that great law
of differentiation, which one may figure as a terrible machine hour after
hour chopping up mankind into more and more infinitesimal fragments. We
feel a pride in being spoken of as 'specialists'--and yet what is a
specialist? The nine-hundred-and-ninety-ninth part of a man. Call me not
an entomologist, call me a lepidopterist, if you will--though, really,
that is too broad a term for a man who is not so much taken up with moths
generally as with the third ring of the antennae of the great oak-eggar.
If one is troubled with a gift for symbolism, it is hard to treat any man
one meets as though he were really a whole man: to treat a lawyer as
though he were anything but a deed of assignment, or a surgeon as if he
were anything more than an operation. As the metropolitan trains load and
unload in a morning, what does one see? Gross upon gross of steel pens, a
few quills, whole carriages full of bricklayers' trowels, and how strange
it seems to watch all the bank-books sorting themselves out from the
motley, and arranging themselves in the first classes, just as we see them
on the shelf in the bank! It is a curious sight. The little shop-girl
there, what is she but a roll of pink ribbon?--nay, she is but
half-a-yard. And the poor infinitesimal porters and guards, how
pathetically small seems their share in the great monosyllable Man,
animalcules in that great social system which, again, is but an animalcule
in the blood of Time. Still more infinitesimal seems the man who is a
subdivision, not of a form of work even, but merely of a form of taste;
the man who collects foreign stamps, say, or book-plates, or arrow-heads,
the connoisseur of a tiny section of one of the lesser schools of Italian
painting, the coral-insect who has devoted his life to a participle,
first-edition men, and all those various bookworms who, without
impropriety be it spoken, are the maggots that breed in the dung of the
great. A certain friend of mine always appears to me in the similitude of
a first edition of one of Mr. Hardy's novels. I have the greatest
difficulty at times to prevent myself forcibly setting him upon my shelf
to complete my set; for, oddly enough, he is the one bit of Hardyana I
lack. In which confession I let the reader into the secret of my own petty
limitations. To have one's horizon bounded by a book-plate, to have no
hope, no wish in life, beyond a first edition! The workers, however
sectional, have some place in the text of the great book of life, but such
mere testers and tasters of existence have hardly a place even in the
gloss, though it be printed in the most microscopic diamond.
And every moment, as we said, we are being turned out smaller and smaller
from the mill of Time. You ask your little boy what he would like to be
when he grows up. To your consternation he answers, 'A man!' You hide your
face: you cannot tell him how impossible it is now to be that. Poor little
chap! He is born centuries too late. You cannot promise even that he shall
be a tailor, for by the time he is old enough to be apprenticed, how do
you know how that ancient profession may be divided up? May you not have
sadly to tell him: 'My poor boy, it is impossible to make you that--for
there are no longer any whole-tailors. You may, if you like, be a
thread-waxer or a needle-threader; you may be one of the thirty men it
takes to make a buttonhole, but a complete tailor--alas! it is
impossible.'
Who will save us from this remorseless law of eternal subdivision? To make
one complete man out of all this vast collection of snips and snippets of
humanity. To piece all the trades, professions, and fads together, like a
puzzle, till one saw the honest face of a genuine man round and whole once
more. To take these dry bones of the Valley of Commerce, and powerfully
breathe into them the unifying breath of life, that once more they stand
up, not as fractional bones of the wrist or the ankle of manhood, but
mighty, full-blooded men as of old. Ah! we must wait for a new creation
for that.
The mystics have a suggestive fancy that all our vast complex life once
existed as a peaceful unit in the mind of God. But as God, brooding in
the abyss, meditated upon Himself, various thoughts separated themselves
and revolved within the atmosphere of His mind, at first unconscious of
themselves or each other. Presently, desire of separate existence awoke in
these shadowy things, a lust of corporeality grew upon them, and hence at
last the fall into physical life, the realisation in concrete form of
their diaphanous individualities. And that original cause of man's
separation from deity, this desire of subdivision, how it has gone on
operating, more and more! We call it differentiation, but the mystic would
describe it as dividing ourselves more and more from God, the primeval
unity in which alone is blessedness. Blake in one of his prophetic books
sings man's 'fall into Division and his resurrection into Unity.' And when
we look about us and consider but the common use of words, how do we find
the mystic's apparently wild fancy illustrated in every section of our
commonplace lives. What do we mean when we speak of 'division' of
interests, 'division' of families, when we say that 'union' is strength,
or how good it is to dwell together in 'unity,' or speak of lives 'made
one'? Are we not unwittingly expressing the unconscious yearning of the
fractions to merge once more in the sweet kinship of the unit, of the
ninths and the nine-hundred-and-ninety-ninths of humanity to merge their
differences in the mighty generalisation Man, of man to merge his finite
existence in the mysterious infinite, the undivided, indivisible One, to
'be made one,' as theology phrases it, 'with God'? How the complex life of
our time longs to return to its first happy state of simplicity, we feel
on every hand. What is Socialism but a vast throb of man's desire after
unity? We are overbred. The simple old type of manhood is lost long since
in endless orchidaceous variation. Oh to be simple shepherds, simple
sailors, simple delvers of the soil, to be something complete on our own
account, to be relative to nothing save God and His stars!
THE WOMAN'S HALF-PROFITS
_O ma pauvre Muse! est-ce toi?_
Fame in Athens and Florence took the form of laurel; in London it is
represented by 'Romeikes.' Hyacinth Rondel, the very latest new poet, sat
one evening not long ago in his elegant new chambers, with a cloud of
those pleasant witnesses about him, as charmed by 'the rustle' of their
'loved Apollian leaves' as though they had been veritable laurel or
veritable bank-notes. His rooms were provided with all those distinguished
comforts and elegancies proper to a success that may any moment be
interviewed. Needless to say, the walls had been decorated by Mr.
Whistler, and there was not a piece of furniture in the room that had not
belonged to this or that poet deceased. Priceless autograph portraits of
all the leading actors and actresses littered the mantelshelf with a
reckless prodigality; the two or three choice etchings were, of course, no
less conspicuously inscribed to their illustrious confrere by the
artists--naturally, the very latest hatched in Paris. There was hardly a
volume in the elegant Chippendale bookcases not similarly inscribed. Mr.
Rondel would as soon have thought of buying a book as of paying for a
stall. To the eye of imagination, therefore, there was not an article in
the room which did not carry a little trumpet to the distinguished poet's
honour and glory. Hidden from view in his buhl cabinet, but none the less
vivid to his sensitive egoism, were those tenderer trophies of his power,
spoils of the chase, which the adoring feminine had offered up at his
shrine: all his love-letters sorted in periods, neatly ribboned and snugly
ensconced in various sandalwood niches--much as urns are ranged at the
Crematorium, Woking--with locks of hair of many hues. He loved most to
think of those letters in which the women had gladly sought a spiritual
suttee, and begged him to cement the stones of his temple of fame with
the blood of their devoted hearts. To have had a share in building so
distinguished a life--that was enough for them! They asked no such
inconvenient reward as marriage: indeed, one or two of them had already
obtained that boon from others. To serve their purpose, and then, if it
must be, to be forgotten, or--wild hope--to be embalmed in a sonnet
sequence: that was reward enough.
In the midst of this silent and yet so eloquent orchestra, which from morn
to night was continually crying 'Glory, glory, glory' in the ear of the
self-enamoured poet, Hyacinth Rondel was sitting one evening. The last
post had brought him the above-mentioned leaves of the Romeike laurel, and
he sat in his easiest chair by the bright fire, adjusting them,
metaphorically, upon his high brow, a decanter at his right-hand and
cigarette smoke curling up from his left. At last he had drained all the
honey from the last paragraph, and, with rustling shining head, he turned
a sweeping triumphant gaze around his room. But, to his surprise, he found
himself no longer alone. Was it the Muse in dainty modern costume and
delicately tinted cheek? Yes! it was one of those discarded Muses who
sometimes remain upon the poet's hands as Fates.
When she raised her veil she certainly looked more of a Fate than a Muse.
Her expression was not agreeable. The poet, afterwards describing the
incident and remembering his Dante, spoke of her in an allegorical sonnet
as 'lady of terrible aspect,' and symbolised her as Nemesis.
He now addressed her as 'Annette,' and in his voice were four notes of
exclamation. She came closer to him, and very quietly, but with an accent
that was the very quintessence of Ibsenism, made the somewhat mercantile
statement: 'I have come for my half-profits!'
'Half-profits! What do you mean? Are you mad?'
'Not in the least! I want my share in the profits of all this pretty
poetry,' and she contemptuously ran her fingers over the several slim
volumes on the poet's shelves which represented his own contribution to
English literature.
Rondel began to comprehend, but he was as yet too surprised to answer.
'Don't you understand?' she went on. 'It takes two to make poetry like
yours--
"They steal their song the lips that sing
From lips that only kiss and cling."
Do you remember? Have I quoted correctly? Yes, here it is!' taking down a
volume entitled _Liber Amoris_, the passionate confession which had first
brought the poet his fame. As a matter of fact, several ladies had 'stood'
for this series, but the poet had artfully generalised them into one
supreme Madonna, whom Annette believed to be herself. Indeed, she had
furnished the warmest and the most tragic colouring. Rondel, however, had
for some time kept his address a secret from Annette. But the candle set
upon a hill cannot be hid: fame has its disadvantages. To a man with
creditors or any other form of 'a past,' it is no little dangerous to have
his portrait in the _Review of Reviews_. A well-known publisher is an
ever-present danger. By some such means Annette had found her poet. The
papers could not be decorated with reviews of his verse, and she not come
across some of them. Indeed, she had, with burning cheek and stormy bosom,
recognised herself in many an intimate confession. It was her hair, her
face, all her beauty, he sang, though the poems were dedicated to another.
She turned to another passage as she stood there--'How pretty it sounds
_in poetry!_' she said, and began to read:--
'"There in the odorous meadowsweet afternoon,
With the lark like the dream of a song in the dreamy blue,
All the air abeat with the wing and buzz of June,
We met--she and I, I and she," [You and I, I and you.]
"And there, while the wild rose and woodbine deliciousness blended,
We kissed and we kissed and we kissed, till the afternoon ended...."'
Here Rondel at last interrupted--
'Woman!' he said, 'are your cheeks so painted that you have lost all sense
of shame?' But she had her answer--
'Man! are you so _great_ that you have lost the sense of pity? And which
is the greater shame: to publish your sins in large paper and take
royalties for them, or to speak of them, just you and I together, you and
I, as "there in the odorous meadowsweet afternoon"?'
'Look you,' she continued, 'an artist pays his model at least a shilling
an hour, and it is only her body he paints: but you use body and soul, and
offer her nothing. Your blues and reds are the colours you have stolen
from her eyes and her heart--stolen, I say, for the painter pays so much a
tube for his colours, so much an hour for his model, but you--'
'I give you immortality. Poor fly, I give you amber,' modestly suggested
the poet.
But Annette repeated the word 'Immortality!' with a scorn that almost
shook the poet's conceit, and thereupon produced an account, which ran as
follows:--
'Mr. Hyacinth Rondel
Dr. to Miss Annette Jones,
For moiety of the following royalties:--
Moonshine and Meadowsweet, 500 copies.
Coral and Bells, 750 copies.
Liber Amoris, 3 editions, 3,000 copies.
Forbidden Fruit, 5 editions, 5,000 copies.
-------
9,250 copies at 1s.
= L462, 10s.
Moiety of same due to Miss Jones, L231, 5s.'
'I don't mind receipting it for two hundred and thirty,' she said, as she
handed it to him.
Hyacinth was completely awakened by this: the joke was growing serious. So
he at once roused up the bully in him, and ordered her out of his rooms.
But she smiled at his threats, and still held out her account. At last he
tried coaxing: he even had the insolence to beg her, by the memory of the
past they had shared together, to spare him. He assured her that she had
vastly overrated his profits, that fame meant far more cry than wool:
that, in short, he was up to the neck in difficulties as it was, and
really had nothing like that sum in his possession.
'Very well, then,' she replied at last, 'you must marry me instead. Either
the money or the marriage. Personally, I prefer the money'--Rondel's
egoism twinged like a hollow tooth--'and if you think you can escape me
and do neither, look at this!' and she drew a revolver from her pocket.
'They are all loaded,' she added. 'Now, which is it to be?'
Rondel made a movement as if to snatch the weapon from her, but she
sprang back and pointed it at his head.
'If you move, I fire.'
Now one would not need to be a minor poet to be a coward under such
circumstances. Rondel could see that Annette meant what she said. She was
clearly a desperate woman, with no great passion for life. To shoot him
and then herself would be a little thing in the present state of her
feelings. Like most poets, he was a prudent man--he hesitated, leaning
with closed fist upon the table. She stood firm.
'Come,' she said at length, 'which is it to be--the revolver, marriage, or
the money?' She ominously clicked the trigger, 'I give you five minutes.'
It was five minutes to eleven. The clock ticked on while the two still
stood in their absurdly tragic attitudes--he still hesitating, she with
her pistol in line with the brain that laid the golden verse. The clock
whirred before striking the hour. Annette made a determined movement.
Hyacinth looked up; he saw she meant it, all the more for the mocking
indifference of her expression.
'Once more--death, marriage, or the money?'
The clock struck.
'The money,' gasped the poet.
* * * * *
But Annette still kept her weapon in line.
'Your cheque-book!' she said. Rondel obeyed.
'Pay Miss Annette Jones, or order, the sum of two hundred and thirty
pounds. No, don't cross it!'
Rondel obeyed.
'Now, toss it over to me. You observe I still hold the pistol.'
Rondel once more obeyed. Then, still keeping him under cover of the
ugly-looking tube, she backed towards the door.
'Good-bye,' she said. 'Be sure I shall look out for your next volume.'
Rondel, bewildered as one who had lived through a fairy-tale, sank into
his chair. Did such ridiculous things happen? He turned to his
cheque-book. Yes, there was the counterfoil, fresh as a new wound, from
which indeed his bank account was profusely bleeding.
Then he turned to his laurels: but, behold, they were all withered.
So, after a while, he donned hat and coat, and went forth to seek a
flatterer as a pick-me-up.
GOOD BISHOP VALENTINE
The reader will remember how Lamb imagines him as a rubicund priest of
Hymen, and pictures him 'attended with thousands and ten thousands of
little loves, and the air is
"Brush'd with the hiss of rustling wings."
Singing Cupids are thy choristers and thy precentors; and instead of the
crozier, the mystical arrow is borne before thee.' Alas! who indeed would
have expected the bitter historical truth, and have dreamed that poor
Valentine, instead of being that rosy vision, was one of the Church's most
unhappy martyrs? Tradition has but two pieces of information about him:
that during the reign of Claudius II., probably in the year 270, he was
'first beaten with heavy clubs, and then beheaded'; and likewise that he
was a man of exceptional chastity of character--a fact that may be
considered no less paradoxical in regard to his genial reputation. He was
certainly the last man to have been the patron saint of young blood, and
if he has any cognisance of the frivolities done in his name, the
knowledge must be more painful to him than all the clubs of Claudius.
Unhappy saint! To have his good name murdered also! To be, through all
time, the high-priest of that very 'paganism' which he died to repudiate:
the one most potent survival throughout Christian times of the joyous old
order he would fain supplant! Could anything be more characteristic of the
whimsical humour of Time, which loves nothing better than to make a
laughing-stock of human symbolism? The savage putting a stray dress-coat
to solemn sacerdotal usage, or taking some blackguard of a Mulvaney for a
very god, is not more absurd than mankind thus ignorantly bringing to this
poor martyr throughout the years the very last offering he can have
desired. Surely it must have filled his shade with a strange bewilderment
to have watched us year by year bringing him garlands and the sweet
incense of young love, to have seen this gay company approach his shrine
with laughter and roses, a very bacchanal, where he had looked for
sympathetic sackcloth and ashes--surely it must have all seemed a silly
sacrilegious jest. However, he is long since slandered beyond all hope of
restitution. So long as the spring moves in the blood, lovers will
doubtless continue to take his name in vain, and feign his saintly
sanction for their charming indiscretions. Indeed, he is fabled by the
poets to be responsible for the billing and cooing of the whole creation.
Everybody knows that the birds, too, pair on St. Valentine's Day. We have
many a poet's word for it. Donne's charming lines, for instance--
'All the air is thy diocese,
And all the chirping choristers
And other birds are thy parishioners:
Thou marriest every year
The lyrique lark, and the grave whispering dove,
The sparrow, that neglects his life for love,
The household bird with the red stomacher;
Thou mak'st the blackbird speed as soon
As doth the goldfinch or the halcyon.'
In fact, it would appear that St. Valentine was, literally, a
hedge-priest.
But do lovers, one wonders, still observe his ancient, though mistaken,
rites? Do they still have a care whose pretty face they should first set
eyes upon on Valentine's morning, like Mistress Pepys, who kept her eyes
closed the whole forenoon lest they should portend a _mesalliance_ with
one of those tiresome 'paynters' at work on the gilding of the pictures
and the chimney-piece? Or do they with throbbing hearts 'draw' for the
fateful name, or, weighting little inscribed slips of paper with lead or
breadcrumbs, and dropping them into a basin of water, breathlessly await
the name that shall first float up to the surface? Do they still perform
that terrible feat of digestion, which consisted of eating a hard-boiled
egg, shell and all, to inspire the presaging dream, and pin five
bay-leaves upon their pillows to make it the surer?
We are told they do, these happy superstitious lovers, though probably the
practices obtain now mostly among a class of fair maids who have none of
Mrs. Pepys' fears of 'paynters,' and who are not averse even from a bright
young plumber. Indeed, it is to be feared that the one sturdy survival of
St. Valentine is to be sought in the 'ugly valentine.' This is another of
Time's jests: to degrade the beautiful and distinguished, and mock at
old-time sanctities with coarse burlesque. We see it constantly in the
fortunes of old streets and squares, once graced with the beau and the
sedan-chair, the very cynosure of the polite and elegant world, but now
vocal with the clamorous wrongs of the charwoman and the melancholy appeal
of the coster. We see it, too, in the ups and downs of words once
aristocratic or tender, words once the very signet of polite conversation,
now tossed about amid the very offal of language. We see it when some
noble house, an illustrious symbol of heroic honour, the ark of high
traditions, finds its _reductio ad absurdum_ in some hare-brained
turf-lord, who defiles its memories as he sells its pictures. But no lapse
could be more pitiful than the end of St. Valentine. Once the day on which
great gentlemen and great ladies exchanged stately and, as Pepys
frequently complained, costly compliments; when the ingenuity of love
tortured itself for the sweetest conceit wherein to express the very
sweetest thing; the May-day of the heart, when the very birds were Cupid's
messengers, and all the world wore ribbons and made pretty speeches. What
is it now? The festival of the servants' hall. It is the sacred day set
apart for the cook to tell the housemaid, in vividly illustrated verse,
that she need have no fear of the policeman thinking twice of _her_; for
the housemaid to make ungenerous reflections on 'cookey's' complexion and
weight, and to assure that 'queen of the larder' that it is not her, but
her puddings, that attract the constabulary heart. It is the day when
inoffensive little tailors receive anonymous letters beginning 'You silly
snip,' when the baker is unpleasantly reminded of his immemorial
_sobriquet_ of 'Daddy Dough,' and coarse insult breaks the bricklayer's
manly heart. Perhaps of all its symbols the most typical and popular are:
a nursemaid, a perambulator enclosing twins, and a gigantic dragoon. In
fact, we are faced by this curious development--that the day once sacred
to universal compliment is now mainly dedicated to low and foolish insult
Oh, that whirligig!
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