Prose Fancies by Richard Le Gallienne
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Richard Le Gallienne >> Prose Fancies
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Do true lovers still remember the day to keep it holy, one wonders? Does
Ophelia still sing beneath the window, and do the love-birds still carry
on their celestial postage? One fears that all have gone with the
sedan-chair, the stage-coach, and last year's snow. Will the true lovers
go next? But, indeed, a florist told us that he had sold many flowers for
'valentines' this year, and that the prettier practice of sending flowers
was, he thought, supplanting the tawdry and stereotyped offering of cards.
Which reminds one of an old verse:
'The violet made haste to appear,
To be her bosom guest,
With first primrose that grew this year
I purchas'd from her breast;
To me,
Gave she,
Her golden lock for mine;
My ring of jet
For her bracelet,
I gave my _Valentine_.
IRRELEVANT PEOPLE
There are numberless people who are, doubtless, of much interest and
charm--in their proper context. That context we feel, however, is not our
society. We have no objection to their carrying on the business of human
beings, so long as they allow us an uninterrupted trading of, say, a
hundred miles. Within that charmed and charming circle they should not set
foot, and we are quite willing in addition, for them, to gird themselves
about with the circumference of another thousand. It is not that they are
disagreeable or stupid, or in any way obviously objectionable. Bores are
more frequently clever than dull, and the only all-round definition of a
bore is--The Person We Don't Want. Few people are bores at all times and
places, and indeed one might venture on the charitable axiom: that when
people bore us we are pretty sure to be boring them at the same time. The
bore, to attempt a further definition, is simply a fellow human being out
of his element. It is said by travellers from distant lands that fishes
will not live out of water. It is a no less familiar fact that certain
dull metals need to be placed in oxygen to show off their brilliant parts.
So is it with the bore: set him in the oxygen of his native admiration,
and he will scintillate like a human St. Catherine wheel, though in your
society he was not even a Chinese cracker. Every man needs his own stage
and his own audience.
'Hath not love
Made for all these their sweet particular air
To shine in, their own beams and names to bear,
Their ways to wander and their wards to keep,
Till story and song and glory and all things sleep.'
Mr. Swinburne asked the question of lovers, but perhaps it is none the
less applicable to the bore or irrelevant person. Yet a third definition
of the latter here suggests itself. To be born for each other is,
obviously, to be lovers. Well, not to be born for each other is to be
bores. In future, let us not speak unkindly of the tame bore, let us
say--'We were not born for each other.'
Relations do not, perhaps, invariably suggest the first line of
'Endymion'; indeed, they are, one fears, but infrequently celebrated in
song. But the same word in the singular, how beautiful it is! Relation! In
that little word is the whole secret of life. To get oneself placed in
perfect harmony of relation with the world around us, to have nothing in
our lives that we wouldn't buy, to possess nothing that is not sensitive
to us, ready to ring a fairy chime of association at our slightest touch:
no irrelevant book, picture, acquaintance, or activity--ah me! you may
well say it is an ideal. Yes, it is what men have meant by El Dorado, The
Promised Land, and all such shy haunts of the Beatific Vision. Probably
the quest of the Philosopher's Stone is not more wild. Yet men still seek
that precious substitute for Midas. Brave spirits! Unconquerable
idealists! Salt of the earth!
But if it be admitted that the quest of the Perfect Relation (in two
senses) is hopeless, yet there is no reason why we should not approach as
near to it as we can.
We can at least begin by barring the irrelevant person--in other words,
choosing our own acquaintance. Of course, we have no entire free-will in
so important a matter. Free-will is like the proverbial policeman, never
there when most wanted. There are two classes of more or less irrelevant
persons that cannot be entirely avoided: our blood-relations, and our
business-relations--both often so pathetically distinct from our
heart-relations and our brain-relations. Well, our business-relations need
not trouble us over much. They are not, as the vermin-killer advertisement
has it, 'pests of the household.' They come out only during business
hours. The curse of the blood-relation, however, is that he infests your
leisure moments; and you must notice the pathos of that verbal
distinction: man measures his toil by 'hours' (office-hours), his leisure
by 'moments!'
But let not the reader mistake me for a Nero. The claims of a certain
degree of blood-relationship I not only admit, but welcome as a sacred
joy. Their experience is unhappy for whom the bonds of parentage, of
sisterhood and brotherhood, will not always have a sort of involuntary
religion. If a man should not exactly be tied to his mother's
apron-string, he should all his life remain tied to her by that other
mysterious cord which no knife can sever. Uncles and aunts may, under
certain circumstances, be regarded as sacred, and meet for occasional
burnt-offerings; but beyond them I hold that the knot of
blood-relationship may be regarded as Gordian, and ruthlessly cut. Cousins
have no claims. Indeed, the scale of the legacy duties, like few
legalities, follows the natural law. The further removed, the greater tax
should our blood-relations pay for our love, or our legacy; but the
heart-relation, the brain-relation ('the stranger in blood'), he alone
should go untaxed altogether! Alas, the Inland Revenue Commissioners would
charge him more than any, which shows that their above-mentioned touch of
nature was but a fluke, after all.
It is impossible to classify the multitude of remaining irrelevancies,
who, were one to permit them, would fall upon our leisure like locusts;
but possibly 'friends of the family,' 'friends from the country,' and
'casuals' would include the most able-bodied. Sentiment apart, old
schoolfellows should, if possible, be avoided; and no one who merely knew
us when we were babies (really a very limited elementary acquaintance) and
has mistaken us ever since should be admitted within the gates--though we
might introduce him to our own baby as the nearest match. The child is not
father to the man. It was a merely verbal paradox, which shows
Wordsworth's ignorance of humanity. Let me especially warn the reader,
particularly the newly-married reader, against the type of friend from the
country who, so soon as they learn you have set up house in London,
suddenly discovers an interest in your fortunes which, like certain
rivers, has run underground further than you can remember. They write and
tell you that they are thinking of coming to town, and would like to spend
a few days with you. They leave their London address vague. It has the
look of a blank which you are expected to fill up. You shrewdly surmise
that, so to say, they meditate paying a visit to Euston, and spending a
fortnight with you on the way. But if you are wise and subtle and strong,
you cut this acquaintance ruthlessly, as you lop a branch. Such are the
dead wood of your life. Cut it away and cast it into the oven of oblivion.
Don't fear to hurt it. These people care as little for you, as you for
them. All they want is board and lodging, and if you give in to them, you
may be an amateur hotel-keeper all your days.
Another 'word to the newly-married.' Be not over-solicitous of
wedding-presents. They carry a terrible rate of interest. A silver
toast-rack will never leave you a Bank Holiday secure, and a breakfast
service means at least a fortnight's 'change' to one or more irrelevant
persons twice a year. They have been known to stay a month on the strength
of an egg-boiler. So, be warned, I pray you. Wedding-presents are but a
form of loan, which you are expected to pay back, with compound interest
at 50 per cent., in 'hospitality,' 'entertainment,' and your still more
precious time. For the givers of wedding-presents there is no more
profitable form of investment. But you, be wise, and buy your own.
There is a peculiar joy in snubbing irrelevant would-be country visitors.
It is the sweetest exercise of the will. Especially, too, if they are
conceited persons who made sure of invitation. It adds a yet deeper thrill
to the pleasure if you are able to invite some other friends near at hand,
of humbler mind and greater interest, whose (maybe) shy charms are not
flauntingly revealed. 'Fancy So-and-So being invited! I shouldn't have
thought they had anything in common.' How sweet is the imagination of that
wounded whisper. It makes you feel like a (German) prince. You have the
power of making happy and (even better in some cases) unhappy, at least,
as Carlyle would say, 'to the extent of sixpence.'
You have tasted the sweets of choosing your own friends, and snubbing the
others. You have gone so far towards the attainment of the harmonious
environment, the Perfect Relation. Your friends shall be as carefully
selected, shall mean as much to you as your books and flowers and
pictures; and your leisure shall be a priest's garden, in which none but
the chosen may walk.
Yet, in spite of my little burst of Neroics, I am far from advising a
cruel treatment of the Irrelevant Person. Let us not forget what we said
at the beginning, that he is probably an interesting person in the wrong
place. He has taken the wrong turning--into your company. Do unto him as
you would he might do unto you. Direct him aright--that is to say, out of
it! Remember, we are all bores in certain uncongenial social climates: all
stars in our own particular milky way. So, remember, don't be cruel--as a
rule--to the Irrelevant Person; but just smile your best at him, and
whisper: 'We were not born for each other.'
THE DEVILS ON THE NEEDLE
'... these things are life:
And life, some say, is worthy of the muse.'
I
There is a famous query of the old schoolman at which we have all flung a
jest in our time: _How many angels can dance on the point of a needle?_ In
a world with so many real troubles it seems, perhaps, a little idle to
worry too long over the question. Yet in the mere question, putting any
answer outside possibility, there is a wonderful suggestiveness, if it has
happened to come to you illuminated by experience. It becomes a little
clearer, perhaps, if we substitute devils for angels. A friend of mine
used always to look at it thus inversely when he quarrelled with his wife.
Forgive so many enigmas to start with, but it was this way. They never
quarrelled more than three times a year, and it was always on the very
smallest trifle, one particular trifle too. On the great things of life
they were at one. It was but a tiny point, a needle's end of difference,
on which they disagreed, and it was on that needle's end that the devils
danced. All the devils of hell, you would have said. At any rate, you
would have no longer wondered why the old philosopher put so odd a
question, for you had only to see little Dora's face lit up with fury over
that ridiculous trifle to have exclaimed: 'Is it possible that so many
devils can dance on a point where there seems hardly footing for a frown?'
However, so it was, and when I tell you what the needle's end was, you
will probably not think me worth a serious person's attention. That I
shall, of course, regret, but it was simply this: Dora _would_ write with
a 'J' pen--for which it was William's idiosyncrasy to have an
unconquerable aversion. She might, you will think, have given way to her
husband on so absurd a point, a mere pen-point of disagreement. He was
the tenderest of husbands in every other point. There is nothing that love
can dream that he was not capable of doing for his wife's sake. But, on
the other hand, it was equally true that there can be no other wife in the
world more devoted than Dora; with her also there was nothing too hard for
love's sake. Could he not waive so ridiculous a blemish? It was little
enough for love to achieve, surely. Yes, strange as it seems, their love
was equal to impossible heroisms: to have died for each other had been
easy, but to surrender this pen-point was impossible. And, alas! as they
always do, the devils found out this needle's end--and danced. For their
purpose it was as good as a platform. It gave them joy indeed to think
what stupendous powers of devilry they could concentrate on so tiny a
stage.
It was a sad thing, too, that Dora and William were able to avoid the
subject three hundred and sixty-four days of the year, but on that odd day
it was sure to crop up. Perhaps they had been out late the night before,
and their nerves were against them. The merest accident would bring it
on. Dora would ask William to post a letter for her in town. Being out of
sorts, and susceptible to the silliest irritation, he would not be able to
resist criticising the addressing. If he didn't mention it, Dora would
notice his 'expression.' That would be 'quite enough,' you may be sure.
Half the tragedies of life depend on 'expression.'
'Well!' she would say.
'Well what?' he would answer, already beginning to tremble.
'You have one of your critical moods on again.'
'Not at all. What's the matter?'
'You have, I say.... Well, why do you look at the envelope in that way? I
know what it is, well enough.'
'If you know, dear, why do you ask?'
'Don't try to be sarcastic, dear. It is so vulgar.'
'I hadn't the least intention of being so.'
'Yes, you had.... Give me that letter.'
'All right.'
'Yes, you admire every woman's writing but your wife's.'
'Don't be silly, dear. See, I don't feel very well this morning. I don't
want to be angry.'
'Angry! Be angry; what does it matter to me? Be as angry as you like. I
wish I had never seen you.'
'Somewhat of a _non sequitur_, is it not, my love?'
'Don't "my love" me. With your nasty cool sarcasm!'
'Isn't it better to try and keep cool rather than to fly into a temper
about nothing? See, I know you are a little nervous this morning. Let us
be friends before I go.'
'I have no wish to be friends.'
'Dora!'
William would then lace his boots, and don his coat in silence, before
making a final effort at reconciliation.
'Well, dear, good-bye. Perhaps you will love me again by the time I get
home.'
'Perhaps I shan't be here when you come home.'
'For pity's sake, don't begin that silly nonsense, Dora.'
'It isn't silly nonsense. I say again--I mayn't be here when you come
home, and I mean it.'
'Oh, all right then. Suppose I were to say that I won't come home?'
'I should be quite indifferent.'
'O Dora!'
'I would. I am weary of our continual quarrels. I can bear this life no
longer.' (It was actually sunny as a summer sky.)
'Why, it was only last night you said how happy we were.'
'Yes, but I didn't mean it.'
'Didn't mean it! Don't talk like that, or I shall lose myself completely.'
'You will lose your train if you don't mind. Don't you think you had
better go?'
'Can you really talk to me like that?--me?--O Dora, it is not you that is
talking: it is some devil in you.'
Then suddenly irritated beyond all control by her silly little set face,
he would blurt out a sudden, 'Oh, very well, then!' and before she was
aware of it, the door would have banged. By the time William had reached
the gate he would be half-way through with a deed of assignment in favour
of his wife, who, now that he had really gone, would watch him covertly
from the window with slowly thawing heart.
So the devils would begin their dance: for it was by no means ended. Of
course, William would come home as usual; and yet, though the sound of his
footstep was the one sound she had listened for all day, Dora would
immediately begin to petrify again, and when he would approach her with
open arms, asking her to forgive and forget the morning, she would demur
just long enough to set him alight again. Heaven, how the devils would
dance then! And the night would usually end with them lying sleepless in
distant beds.
II
To attempt tragedy out of such absurd material is, you will say, merely
stupid. Well, I'm sorry. I know no other way to make it save life's own,
and I know that the tragedy of William's life hung upon a silly little
ink-stained 'J' pen. I would pretend that it was made of much more
grandiose material if I could. But the facts are as I shall tell you. And
surely if you fulfil that definition of man which describes him as a
reflective being, if you ever think on life at all, you must have noticed
how even the great tragedies that go in purple in the great poets all turn
on things no less trifling in themselves, all come of people pretending to
care for some bauble more than they really do.
And you must have wondered, too, as you stood awestruck before the regal
magnificence, the radiant power, the unearthly beauty, of those glorious
and terrible angels of passion--that splendid creature of wrath, that
sorrow wonderful as a starlit sky--you must have wondered that life has
not given these noble elementals material worthier of their fiery
operation than the paltry concerns of humanity; just as you may have
wondered too, that so god-like a thing as fire should find nothing
worthier of its divine fury than the ugly accumulations of man.
At any rate, I know that all the sorrow that saddens, sanctifies, and
sometimes terrifies my friend, centres round that silly little 'J' pen.
The difference is that the angels dance on its point now, instead of the
devils; but it is too late.
A night of unhappiness had ended once more as I described. The long
darkness had slowly passed, and morning, sunny with forgiveness, had come
at length. William's heart yearned for his wife in the singing of the
birds. He would first slip down into the garden and gather her some fresh
flowers, then steal with them into the room and kiss her little sulky
mouth till she awoke; and, before she remembered their sorrow, her eyes
would see the flowers.
It was a lover's simple thought, sweeter even than the flowers he had soon
gathered.
But then, reader, why tease you with transparent secrets? You know that
Dora could not smell the flowers.
You know that Death had come to dance with the devils that night, and that
Dora and William would quarrel about little 'J' pens no more for ever.
POETS AND PUBLISHERS
I
A serious theme demands serious treatment. Let us, therefore, begin with
definitions. What is a poet? and what is a publisher? Popularly speaking,
a poet is a fool, and a publisher is a knave. At least, I am hardly wrong
in saying that such is the literal assumption of the Incorporated Society
of Authors, a body well acquainted with both. Indeed, that may be said to
be its working hypothesis, the very postulate of its existence.
Of course, there are other definitions of both. It is not so the maiden of
seventeen defines a poet, as she looks up to him with brimming eyes in the
summer sunset and calls him 'her Byron.' It is not so the embryo
Chatterton defines him, chained to an office stool in some sooty
provincial town, dreaming of Fleet Street as of a shining thoroughfare in
the New Jerusalem, where move authors and poets, angelic beings, in
'solemn troops and sweet societies.' For, indeed, was that not the dream
of all of us? For my part, I remember my first, most beautiful, delusion
was that poets belonged only to the golden prime of the world, and that,
like miracles, they had long ceased before the present age. And I very
well recall my curious bewilderment when, one day in a bookseller's, a
friendly schoolmaster took up a new volume of Mr. Swinburne's and told me
that it was by the new great poet. How wonderful that little incident made
the world for me! Real poets actually existing in this unromantic to-day!
If you had told me of a mermaid, or a wood-nymph, or of the philosopher's
stone as apprehensible wonders, I should not have marvelled more. While a
single poet existed in the land, who could say that the kingdom of Romance
was all let out in building lots, or that the steam whistle had quite
'frighted away the Dryads and the Fauns'?
Since then I have taken up the reviewing of minor verse as a part of my
livelihood, and where I once saw the New Jerusalem I see now the New
Journalism.
There are, doubtless, many who still cherish that boyish dream of the
poet. He still stalks through the popular imagination with his Spanish hat
and cloak, his amaranthine locks, his finely-frenzied eyes, and his
Alastor-like forgetfulness of his meals. But only, it is to be feared, for
a little time. For the latter-day poet is doing his best to dissipate that
venerable tradition. Bitten by the modern passion for uniformity, he has
French-cropped those locks, in which, as truly as with Samson, lay his
strength, he has discarded his sombrero for a Lincoln and Bennett, he
cultivates a silky moustache, a glossy boot, and has generally given
himself into the hands of the West-End tailor. Stung beyond endurance by
taunts of his unpracticality, he enters Parliament, edits papers, keeps
accounts, and is in every way a better business man than his publisher.
This is all very well for a little time. The contrast amuses by its
piquancy. To write of wild and whirling things in your books, but in
public life to be associated with nothing more wild and whirling than a
shirt-fronted eye-glassed hansom; to be at heart an Alastor, but in
appearance a bank-clerk, delights an age of paradox.
But, though it may pay for a while, it will, I am sure, prove a disastrous
policy in the long run. The poet unborn shall, I am certain, rue it. The
next generation of poets (or, indeed, writers generally) will reap a
sorrowful harvest from the gratuitous disillusionment with which the
present generation is so eager to indulge the curiosity, and flatter the
mediocrity, of the public. The public, like the big baby it is, is
continually crying 'to see the wheels go round,' and for a time the
exhibition of, so to say, the 'works' of poet and novelist is profitable.
But a time will come when, with its curiosity sated, the public will turn
upon the poet, and throw into his face, on his own authority, that he is
but as they are, that his airs of inspiration and divine right are humbug.
And in that day the poet will block his silk hat, will shave away the
silken moustache, will get him a bottle of Mrs. Allen's Hair Restorer,
and betake himself to the sombrero of his ancestors--but it will be all
too late. The cat will have been irrecoverably let out of the bag, the
mystery of the poet as exploded as the mysteries of Eleusis.
Tennyson knew better. To use the word in its mediaevalsense, he respected
the 'mystery' of poetry. Instinctively, doubtless, but also, I should
imagine, deliberately, he all his life lived up to the traditional type of
the poet, and kept between him and his public a proper veil of Sinaitic
mist. You remember Browning's picture of the mysterious poet 'you saw go
up and down Valladolid,' and the awestruck rumours that were whispered
about him--how, for instance--
'If you tracked him to his home, down lanes
Beyond the Jewry, and as clean to pace,
You found he ate his supper in a room
Blazing with lights, four Titians on the wall,
And twenty naked girls to change his plate!'
That is the kind of thing the public likes to hear of its poets. That is
something like a poet. Inquisitive the public always will be, but it is a
mistake to indulge rather than to pique its curiosity. Tennyson respected
the wishes of his public in this matter, and, not only in his dress and
his dramatic seclusion, but surely in his obstinate avoidance of
prose-work of any kind we have a subtler expression of his carefulness for
fame. It is a mistake for a poet to write prose, however good, for it is a
charming illusion of the public that, comparatively speaking, any one can
write prose. It is an earthly accomplishment, it is as walking is to
flying--is it not stigmatised 'pedestrian'? Now, your true Bird of
Paradise, which is the poet, must, metaphorically speaking, have no
legs--as Adrian Harley said was the case with the women in Richard
Feverel's poems. He must never be seen to walk in prose, for his part is,
'pinnacled dim in the intense inane,' to hang aloft and warble the
unpremeditated lay, without erasure or blot. This is, I am sure, not
fanciful, for two or three modern instances, which I am far too
considerate to name, illustrate its truth. Unless you are a very great
person indeed, the surest way to lose a reputation as poet is to gain one
as critic. It is true that for a time one may help the other, and that if
you are very fecund, and let your poetical issues keep pace with your
critical, you may even avoid the catastrophe altogether; but it is an
unmistakable risk, and if in the end you are not catalogued as a great
critic, you will assuredly be set down as a minor poet: whereas if you had
stuck to your last, there is no telling what fame might not have been
yours. Limitation, not versatility, is the fashion to-day. The man with
the one talent, not the five, is the hero of the hour.
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