Prose Fancies by Richard Le Gallienne

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There is, too, especially about the latter, perhaps, a touch of comic
suggestiveness in the sublime preoccupation to which we owe their great
legacies, that look of Atlas which is always pathetic, when it is not
foolish, on the face of a mortal: the grand air of a Goethe, the colossal
absorption of a Balzac. Their attitude offends one's sense of the relation
of things, and we feel that, after all, we could have spared half their
works for a larger share of that delicate instinct for proportion, which
is one of the most precious attributes of what we call a gentleman. But
the demi-god has always much of the _nouveau riche_ about him, and a
gentleman is, after all, an exquisite product. Indeed, the world has, one
may think, quite enough genius to go on with. It could well do with a few
more gentlemen.

A BORROWED SOVEREIGN

(TO MR. AND MRS. WELCH)

Jim lent me a sovereign. He was working hard to make his home, and was
saving every penny. However, I took it, for I was really in sore straits.
If you have ever known what it is absolutely to need a sovereign, when you
have neither banking account nor employment, and your evening clothes are
no longer accessible for the last, you will be in a position to understand
the transfiguring properties of one small piece of gold. You leave your
friend's rooms a different man. Like the virtuous in the Buddhistic round,
you go in a beggar and come out a prince. To vary Carlyle's phrase, you
can pay for dinners, you can call hansoms, you can take stalls; in fact,
you are a prince--to the extent of a sovereign.

And oh! how wooingly does the world seem to nestle round you--the same
world that was so cold and haughty ten minutes ago. The world is a
courtesan, and has heard you have found a sovereign.

The gaslights seem beaming love at you. So near and bright are the
streets, you want to stay out in them all night; though you didn't relish
the prospect last evening. O sweet, sweet, siren London, with your golden
voice--I have a sovereign!

This, of course, was but the first rich impulse. The sovereign should
really be kept for the lodgings. But the snug little oyster-shops about
Booksellers' Row are so tempting, and there is nothing like oysters to
give one courage to open that giant oyster spoken of by Ancient Pistol.

I went in. I assured my conscience that it should only be
'Anglo-Portuguese,' and that I would forego the roll and butter. But
'Anglos' are not nice, Dutch are in every way to be preferred; and if you
are paying eighteenpence you might as well pay three shillings, and what's
the use of drawing the line at a roll and butter? No! we will repent after
the roll and butter. 'Roll and butter' shall be my Ebenezer. The 'r's'
have a notorious mnemonic quality. They will help me to remember.

So I sat down, and, fondling my sovereign in my pocket, fell into a dream.
When the oysters came I wished they had been 'Anglos' after all, because
my dream had grown beautiful and troublesome, and I had really forgotten
the oysters altogether. However, I ate them mechanically, and ordering
another half-dozen, so that the manager should not begrudge me my seat, I
turned again to my dream.

A young girl sat in a dainty room, writing at a quaint old escritoire, lit
by candles in shining brass sconces. She had a sweet blonde face, but more
character in it than usually falls to the lot of the English girl. There
was experience in the sensitive refinement of her features, a silver touch
of suffering: not wasting experience or bitter suffering, but just enough
to refine--she had waited. But she had been bravely happy all the time.

Pretty books filled a shelf above her escritoire, and between the
candlesticks was a photograph in a filigree silver frame. Towards this
she looked every now and then, in the pauses of her writing, with a happy,
trustful expression of quiet love. During one pause she noticed that her
little clock pointed to 8.30. 'Jim will just be going on,' she said to
herself. Yes, that photograph was 'Jim.'

A quaint little face it was, full of sweet wrinkles, and yet but a boy's
face. The wrinkles, you could see, were but so many threads of gold which
happy laughter had left there. Siss called him her Punchinello, likewise
her poet, for Jim is a poet who makes his poetry of his own bright face
and body, acts it night after night to an audience, and the people laugh
and cry as he plays, for his face is like a bubbling spring, full of
laughing eddies on the surface, but ever so deep with sweet freshness
beneath--and some catch sight of the deeps. The world knows him as a
comedian. Siss knows him as a poet, and because she knows what loving
tender tears are in him as well as laughter, she calls him her
Punchinello.

This is what she was writing: 'How near our home seems now, Jimmie boy!
Every night as you go on--and you are just going on now--I feel our home
draw nearer: and, do you know, all this week our star has seemed to grow
brighter and brighter. Can you see it in London? It comes out here about
six o'clock--first very pale, like a dream, and then fuller and fuller and
warmer and warmer. Sometimes I say that it is the sovereigns we are
putting into the bank that make it so much brighter; and I am sure it
_was_ brighter after that last ten pounds.... You are laughing at me,
aren't you? Never mind; you can be just as silly. Dear, dear, funny little
face!'

I had reached just so far in my dream when the oysters came, and that is
why I wished I had ordered 'Anglos' and no roll.

When I looked again, Siss had stopped writing, and was sitting with her
head in her hands dreaming. I looked into her eyes, felt ashamed for a
moment, and then stepped into her dream. I felt I was not worthy to walk
there, but I took off my hat and told myself that I was reverent.

It was a pretty flat, full of dainty rooms, and I followed her from one to
another, and one there was just like that in which I had seen her
writing, with the old escritoire, and the books, and the burning candles,
and the silver photograph shrine. She walked about very wistfully, and her
eyes were full. So were mine, and I wanted to sob, but feared lest she
should hear. Presently Jim joined her, and they walked together, and said
to each other, 'Think, this is our home at last'--'Think, this is our home
at last. O love, our home--together for evermore!'

This they said many times, and at length they came to a room that had a
door white as ivory, and I caught a breath of freshest flowers as they
opened and passed in.

Then I closed my eyes, and when I looked again I thought an angel stood on
the threshold, as I had seen it somewhere in Victor Hugo--a happy angel
with finger upon his lip.

And when the dream had gone, and I was once more alone, I said 'Jim is
working, Siss is waiting, and I--am eating borrowed oysters.'

Then I took out the sovereign and looked at it, for it was now symbolic.
Outside, above the street, a star was shining. I had filched a beam of
Siss's star. Was it less bright tonight? Had she missed this sovereign?

It had been symbolic before--a sovereign's-worth of the world, the flesh,
and the devil; now it was a sovereign's-worth of holy love and home. Every
penny I spent of it dimmed that star, delayed that home. In my pocket it
meant a sovereign's-worth more working and waiting. Pay it back again into
that star, and it was a sovereign nearer home. Yes, it was a
sovereign's-worth of that flat, of that escritoire, those books, those
burning candles, that photograph, that ivory-white door, those
sweet-smelling flowers, a sovereign's-worth of that angel, I was keeping
in my pocket.

Out on it! God forgive me. I had not thought it meant that to borrow a
sovereign from Jim, meant that to eat those borrowed oysters.
Nevertheless, they had not been all an immoral indulgence. Even oysters
may be the instruments of virtue in the hands of Providence.

The shopman knew me, so I 'confounded it' and told him I had come out
without my purse. It was all right. Pay next time, Jim's theatre was
close by, it was but a stone's-throw to the stage-door. Easy to leave him
a note. What will he think, I wonder, as he reads it, and the sovereign
rolls out: 'Dear old man, forgive me--I forgot it was a sovereign's-worth
of home.'

Yet, after all, it was the oysters that did this thing.

ANARCHY IN A LIBRARY

(A FABLE FOR SOCIALISTS)

Having occasion recently to re-arrange my books, they lay in bewildering
jumbled heaps upon my study floor; and, having in vain puzzled over this
plan and that which should give the little collection a continuity such as
it had never attained before, I at length gave it up in despair, and sat,
with my head in my hands, hopeless. Presently I seemed to hear small
voices talking in whispers, a curious papery tone, like the fluttering of
leaves, and listening I heard distinctly these words:--'The great era of
universal equality and redistribution has dawned at last. No one book
shall any longer claim more shelf than another, no book shall be taller or
thicker than another. The age of folios and quartos is past, and the Age
of the Universal Octavo has dawned.'

Looking up, I saw that the voice was that of a shabby, but perky, octavo,
which I had forgotten I ever possessed, since the day when some mistaken
charity had prompted me to rescue it from the threepenny box and give it a
good home in a respectable family of books. Certainly, it had so far
filled the humble position of a shelf-liner, and its accidental elevation
into daylight on the top of a prostrate folio had evidently turned its
head. It was now doing its best to disseminate socialistic principles
among the set of scurvy octavos and duodecimos in its neighbourhood.

'Why should we choke with dust in the dark there,' it continued, 'that
these splendid creatures should glitter all day in the sunshine, and get
all the firelight of an evening? We were born to be read as much as they,
born to enjoy our share of the good things of this world as much as my
Lord Folio, as much as any Honourable Quarto, or fashionable Large Paper.
My Brothers, the hour has come: will you strike now or never, exact your
rights as free-born books, or will you go back to be shelf-liners as
before?'

[Loud cries of 'No! no! we won't,' here encouraged the speaker.]

'Strike now, and the book unborn shall bless you. Miss this golden
opportunity, and the cause we serve will be delayed another hundred
editions.'

At this point a great folio that had for some time been leaning
threateningly, like a slab at Stonehenge, above the speaker, suddenly fell
and silenced him; but he had not spoken in vain, and from various sets of
books about the room I heard the voices of excited agitators taking up his
words. Then an idea struck me. I was, as I told you, heartily sick of my
task of arrangement. Here seemed an opportunity.

'Look here,' I said,'you shall have it all to yourselves. I resign, I
abdicate. You shall arrange yourselves as you please, but be quick about
it, and let there be as little bloodshed as possible'

With that there arose such a hubbub as was never before heard in a quiet
book-room, not even during that famous battle of the St. James's Library
in 1697; and conspicuous among the noises was a strange crowing sound as
of young cocks, which I was at a loss to understand, till I bethought me
how Mentzelius, long ago, sitting in the quiet of his library, had heard
the bookworm 'crow like a cock unto his mate.' On looking I saw that the
insurgents had indeed pressed into their service a certain politic body of
bookworms as joyous heralds, whom I had never suspected of inhabiting my
books at all--though, indeed, such hidden creatures do crawl out of their
corners in times of upheaval.

It was long before I could disentangle individual voices from the wild
chaos of strident theories that surrounded me. But at last there was
silence, as one bilious-looking vellum book, old enough to have known
better, had evidently caught the ear of the assembled multitudes; and then
I understood that the movement had already found its Robespierre. It was
clear from his words that the universal gospel of equality, so beautifully
expatiated upon before the revolution, had had reference only to those who
were already on an equality of that low estate which fears no fall. The
only equality now offered to books above the rank of octavo was that of
death, which, philosophers have long assured us, makes all men equal, by
a short and simple method. There was but one other way--that the quartos
should consent to be cut in two, and the folios quartered; but that, alas!
meant death no less, for that which alone is of worth in both books and
men, the soul, would be no more. So, as it seemed they must die either
way, all the condemned chose death before dishonour. Several distinguished
folios who, in a quixotism of heart, had flirted with the socialistic
leaders when their schemes were but propaganda, and equality had not yet
been so rigorously defined, now bitterly repented their folly, and did
their best in heading a rally against their foes. That, however, was soon
quelled, and but hastened their doom.

'To the guillotine with them!' cried the bilious little octavo, and then I
saw that my tobacco-cutter had been extemporised into the deadly engine.

But, hereupon, a voice of humour found hearing, that of a stout 32mo,
evidently a philosopher.

'Why shed blood?' he said, 'I have a better plan. Stature is no mark of
superiority, but usually the reverse. The mind's the standard of the man.
In the world of men the tallest and handsomest are made into servants, and
called flunkies, and these wait upon the small men, who have all the
money, which among men corresponds to brains among books. Why shouldn't we
take a hint from this custom, and turn these tall gaudy gentlemen into our
servants, for which all their gilt and fine clothes have already provided
them with livery? Ho! Sirrah Folio, come and turn my page!'

But this Lord Folio haughtily refused to do, and, consequently, being too
stout to turn his own pages, the little 32mo could say no more. His
proposal, though it tickled a few, found no great favour. It was generally
agreed that humour had no place in the discussion of a serious question.
Another speaker advocated the retention of the condemned as ornaments of
the state, but he was very speedily overruled. Was not that the shallow
excuse by which they had hung on for ever so long? No, that was quite
worn out.

The main question was further obstructed by many outbursts of
individualism. Certain self-contained books wished to be left to
themselves, and have no part in the social scheme, unless in the event of
a return to monarchy, when, they intimated, they might be eligible for
election. This, one could see, was the secret hope of all the speakers;
and you would have laughed could you have heard what inflated opinions
some of them had of their own importance--especially two or three of the
minor poets. Then, again, many sentimental demands, quite unforeseen,
added to the general anarchy. Collected editions, which had long groaned
in the bondage of an arbitrary relationship, saw an opportunity in the
general overturn to break away from their sets and join their natural
fellows. Sex was naturally the most unruly element of all. Volumes that
had waited edition after edition for each other, yearning across the
shelves, felt their time had come at last, and leapt into each other's
arms. It was with no avail that a distress minute was passed by The
Hundred Thousand Committee (a somewhat unworkable body) that henceforth
sex was to be a function exercised absolutely for the good of the state:
tattered poets were to be seen wildly proclaiming a different doctrine.

Such eccentric attachments as a volume of _The Essays of Elia_ for
Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, were especially troublesome; while the
explosion caused by the accidental contact of that same unruly Elia with a
modern reprint of _The Anatomy of Melancholy_, which (he said) he never
could tolerate, proved the last straw to the Committee of the Hundred
Thousand, who immediately resigned their offices in anger and despair.
Thereupon, tenfold chaos once more returning, I thought it time to
interfere. The Doctrine of Equality was evidently a failure--among books,
at any rate. So I savagely fell to, and threw the books back again into
their immemorial places, and the cause of freedom in 'The City of Books'
sleeps for another hundred editions.

Only I placed Elia next to the Duchess, because he was a human fellow, and
had no theories.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF 'LIMITED EDITIONS'

Why do the heathen so furiously rage against limited issues, large-papers,
first editions, and the rest? For there is certainly more to be said for
than against them. Broadly speaking, all such 'fads' are worthy of being
encouraged, because they maintain, in some measure, the expiring dignity
of letters, the mystery of books. Day by day the wonderfulness of life is
becoming lost to us. The sanctities of religion are defiled, the 'fairy
tales' of science have become commonplaces. Christian mysteries are
debased in the streets to the sound of drum and trumpet, and the sensitive
ear of the telephone is but a servile drudge 'twixt speculative bacon
merchants. And Books!--those miraculous memories of high thoughts and
golden moods; those magical shells tremulous with the secrets of the
ocean of life; those love-letters that pass from hand to hand of a
thousand lovers that never meet; those honeycombs of dreams; those
orchards of knowledge; those still-beating hearts of the noble dead; those
mysterious signals that beckon along the darksome pathways of the past;
voices through which the myriad lispings of the earth find perfect speech;
oracles through which its mysteries call like voices in moonlit woods;
prisms of beauty; urns stored with all the sweets of all the summers of
time; immortal nightingales that sing for ever to the rose of life: Books,
Bibles--ah me! what have ye become to-day!

What, indeed, has become of that mystery of the Printed Word, of which
Carlyle so movingly wrote? It has gone, it is to be feared, with those
Memnonian mornings we sleep through with so determined snore, those
ancient mysteries of night we forget beneath the mimic firmament of the
music-hall.

Only in the lamplit closet of the bookman, the fanatic of first and fine
editions, is it remembered and revered. To him alone of an Americanised,
'pirated-edition' reading world, the book remains the sacred thing it is.
Therefore, he would not have it degraded by, so to say, an indiscriminate
breeding, such as has also made the children of men cheap and vulgar to
each other. We pity the desert rose that is born to unappreciated beauty,
the unset gem that glitters on no woman's hand; but what of the book that
eats its heart out in the threepenny box, the remainders that are sold
ignominiously in job lots by ignorant auctioneers? Have we no feeling for
them?

Over-production, in both men and shirts, is the evil of the day. The world
has neither enough food, nor enough love, for the young that are born into
it. We have more mouths than we can fill, and more books than we can buy.
Well, the publisher and collector of limited editions aim, in their small
corner, to set a limit to this careless procreation. They are literary
Malthusians. The ideal world would be that in which there should be at
least one lover for each woman. In the higher life of books the ideal is
similar. No book should be brought into the world which is not sure of
love and lodging on some comfortable shelf. If writers and publishers
only gave a thought to what they are doing when they generate such large
families of books, careless as the salmon with its million young, we
should have no such sad alms-houses of learning as Booksellers' Row, no
such melancholy distress-sales of noble authors as remainder auctions. A
good book is beyond price; and it is far easier to under than over sell
it. The words of the modern minor poet are as rubies, and what if his sets
bring a hundred guineas?--it is more as it should be, than that any
sacrilegious hand should fumble them for threepence. It recalls that
golden age of which Mr. Dobson has sung, when--

'... a book was still a Book,
Where a wistful man might look,
Finding something through the whole
Beating--like a human soul';

days when for one small gilded manuscript men would willingly exchange
broad manors, with pasture--lands, chases, and blowing woodlands; days
when kings would send anxious embassies across the sea, burdened with
rich gifts to abbot and prior, if haply gold might purchase a single
poet's book.

But, says the scoffer, these limited editions and so forth foster the vile
passions of competition. Well, and if they do? Is it not meet that men
should strive together for such possessions? We compete for the allotments
of shares in American-meat companies, we outbid each other for tickets 'to
view the Royal procession,' we buffet at the gate of the football field,
and enter into many another of the ignoble rivalries of peace; and are not
books worth a scrimmage?--books that are all those wonderful things so
poetically set forth in a preceding paragraph! Lightly earned, lightly
spurned, is the sense, if not the exact phrasing, of an old proverb. There
is no telling how we should value many of our possessions if they were
more arduously come by: our relatives, our husbands and wives, our
presentation poetry from the unpoetical, our invitation-cards to one-man
shows in Bond Street, the auto-photographs of great actors, the flatteries
of the unimportant, the attentions of the embarrassing: how might we not
value all such treasures, if they were, so to say, restricted to a
limited issue, and guaranteed 'not to be reprinted'--'plates destroyed and
type distributed.'

Indeed, all nature is on the side of limited editions. Make a thing cheap,
she cries from every spring hedgerow, and no one values it. When do we
find the hawthorn, with its breath sweet as a milch-cow's; or the wild
rose, with its exquisite attar and its petals of hollowed pearl--when do
we find these decking the tables of the great? or the purple bilberry, or
the boot-bright blackberry in the entremets thereof? Think what that
'common dog-rose' would bring in a limited edition! And new milk from the
cow, or water from the well! Where would champagne be if those intoxicants
were restricted by expensive licence, and sold in gilded bottles? What
would you not pay for a ticket to see the moon rise, if nature had not
improvidently made it a free entertainment; and who could afford to buy a
seat at Covent Garden if Sir Augustus Harris should suddenly become sole
impresario of the nightingale?

Yes, 'from scarped cliff and quarried stone,' Nature cries, 'Limit the
Edition! Distribute the type!'--though in her capacity as the great
publisher she has been all too prodigal of her issues, and ruinously
guilty of innumerable remainders. In fact, it is by her warning rather
than by her example that we must be guided in this matter. Let us not
vulgarise our books, as she has done her stars and flowers. Let us, if
need be, make our editions smaller and smaller, our prices increasingly
'prohibitive,' rather than that we should forget the wonder and beauty of
printed dream and thought, and treat our books as somewhat less valuable
than wayside weeds.

A PLEA FOR THE OLD PLAYGOER

He's a nuisance, of course. But to see only that side of him is to think,
as the shepherd boy piped, 'as though' you will 'never grow old.' Does he
never appeal to you with any more human significance, a significance
tearful and uncomfortably symbolic? Or are you so entirely that tailor's
fraction of manhood, the _fin de siecle_ type, that your ninth part does
not include a heart and the lachrymal gland?

You suspect him at once as you squeeze past his legs to your stall, for he
cannot quite conceal the hissing twinge of gout; and you are hardly seated
ere you are quite sure that a long night of living for others is before
you.

'You hardly would think it, perhaps,' he begins, 'but I saw Charles Young
play the part--yes, in 1824.'

If you are young and innocent, you think--'What an interesting old
gentleman!' and you have vague ideas of pumping him for reminiscences to
turn into copy. Poor boy, you soon find that there is no need of pumping
on your part. He is entirely self-acting, and the wells of his
autobiography are as deep as the foundations of the world.

If you are more experienced, you make a quick frantic effort to escape;
you try to nip the bud of his talk with a frosty 'Indeed!' and edge away,
calling upon your programme to cover you. You never so much as turn the
sixteenth part of an eye in his direction, for even as the oyster-man,
should the poor mollusc heave the faintest sigh, is inside with his knife
in the twinkling of a star; even as a beetle has but to think of moving
its tiniest leg for the bird to swoop upon him,--even so will the least
muscular interest in your neighbour give you bound hand and foot into his
power.

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