Prose Fancies by Richard Le Gallienne

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But really and truly escape is hopeless. You are beyond the reach of any
salvage agency whatsoever. Better make up your mind to be absolutely rude
or absolutely kind: and the man who can find in his heart to be the former
must have meeting eyebrows, and will sooner or later be found canonised in
wax at Madame Tussaud's. To be the latter, however, is by no means easy.
It is one of the most poignant forms of self-sacrifice attained by the
race. In that, at least, you have some wintry consolation; and the
imaginative vignette of yourself wearing the martyr's crown is a pretty
piece of sacred art.

If you wished to make a bag of old playgoers, or meditated a sort of
Bartholomew's Eve, a revival of _Hamlet_ would, of course, be the occasion
you would select for your purpose: for the old playgoer, so to speak,
collects Hamlets. At a first night of _Hamlet_ every sixth stall-holder is
a Dr. Doran up to date, his mind a portfolio of old prints.

That is why a perambulation of the stalls is as perilous as to pick one's
way through hot ploughshares. You can hardly hope always to pass through
unscathed. You are as sure some night to find yourself seated beside him,
as you will some day be called to serve on the jury. And then--

'O limed soul, that, struggling to be free,
Art more engaged!'

However, 'sudden the worst turns best to the brave,' and 'there is much
music' in this old fellow if only you have the humanity to listen.

To begin with, he has probably a distinguished face, with a bunch of
vigorous curly hair, white as hawthorn. He has a manner, too. Suppose you
try and enter into his soul for a moment. It does us good to get outside
ourselves for a while, and this old man's soul is a palace of memory.
Those lines that, may be, have been familiar to you for sixteen years,
have been familiar to him for sixty. That is why he knows them off so
well, why he repeats them under his breath--Look at his face!--like a
Methodist praying, anticipating the actor in all the fine speeches. Do
look at his face! How it shines, as the golden passages come treading
along. How his head moves in an ecstasy of remembrance, in which there is
a whole world of tears. How he half turns to you with a wistful appeal to
feel what he is feeling: an appeal that might kindle a clod. It is the old
wine laughing to itself within the old bottle.

And, one thing you will notice, it is the poetry that moves him: the great
metaphor, the sonorous cadence, the honeysuckle fancy. He belongs to an
age that had an instinct for beauty, and loved style--an age that, in the
words of a modern wit, had not grown all nose with intellect, an age that
went to the theatre to dream, not to dissect.

For you there may be here and there a flower of remembrance stuck within
the leaves of the play, but for him it is stained through with the sweets
of sixty springs. His youth lies buried within it like a thousand violets.

Practically he is Death at the play. To you there is but one ghost in
_Hamlet_, to him there are fifty, and they all dance like shadows behind
'the new Hamlet,' and even sit about the stalls.

If your love be with you, forbear to press her hand in the love-scenes,
or, at least, don't let the old man see you: because he used to punctuate
those very passages he is muttering in just the same way--sixty years ago,
when she whose angel face he will kiss no more, unless it be in the
heavenly fields, sat like a flower at his side. Poor old fellow, can you
be selfish to him? Can you say, 'These tedious old fools!' Fool thyself,
this night shall thy youth be required of thee.

You might think of this next time you drop across the old playgoer. It was
natural in Hamlet to swear at Polonius--who, you will remember, was an old
playgoer himself--but, being a gentleman, it was natural in him, too, to
recall the first player with, 'Follow that lord; but look you mock him
not!'

THE MEASURE OF A MAN

I sometimes grow melancholy with the thought that, though I wear trousers
and shave once a day, I am not, properly speaking, a Man. Surely it is
from no failure of goodwill, no lack of prayerful striving towards that
noble estate: for if there is one spectacle in this moving phantasmagoria
of life that I love to carry within my eye, it is the figure of a true
man. The mere idea of a true man stirs one's heart like a trumpet.
Therefore, this doubt I am confiding is all the more dreary. Naturally, I
feel it most keenly in the company of my fellows, each one of whom seems
to carry the victorious badge of manhood, as though to cry shame upon me.
They make me shrink into myself, make me feel that I am but an impostor in
their midst. Indeed, in that sensitiveness of mine you have the
starting-point of my unmanliness. Look at that noble fellow there. He is
six-foot odd in his stockings, straight, stalwart, and confident. His face
is broad and strong, his close-cropped head is firm and proud on his
shoulders--firm and proud as a young bull's. It is a head made, indeed,
rather to butt than to think with; it is visited with no effeminacy of
thought or dream. It has another striking quality: it is hardly
distinguishable from any other head in the room--for I am in an assemblage
of true men all, a glorious herd of young John Bulls. All have the same
strong jaws, the same powerful low foreheads. Noble fellows! Any one of
them could send me to eternity with the wind of his fist.

And, most of all, is their manhood brought home to me, with a sickening
sense of inferiority, in their voices. What a leonine authority in the
roar of their opinions! Their words strike the air firm as the tread of
lions. They are not teased with fine distinctions, possibilities of
misconception, or the perils of afterthought. Their talk is of the
absolute, their opinions wear the primary colours, and dream not of 'art
shades.' Never have they been wrong in their lives, never shall they be
wrong in the time to come. Never have they been known to conjecture that
another may, after all, be wiser than they, handsomer, stronger, or more
fortunate. They would kill a man rather than admit a mistake. Noble
fellows! And I? Do you wonder that I blush in my corner as I gaze upon
them, strive to smooth my hair into the appearance of a manly flatness,
strive to set my face hard and feign it knowing, strive to elevate my
voice to the dogmatic note, strive to cast out from my mind all those evil
spirits of proportion?

Can it be possible that any one of my readers has ever been in a like
case? Is there hope for us, my brother? You have, I perceive, a fine,
expressive, sensitive countenance. That is, indeed, against you in this
race for manhood. It is true that Apollo passed for a man--but that was
long ago, and not in Britain. You have a pleasant, sympathetic voice. An
excellent thing in _woman_. But you, my friend,--break it, I beseech you.
Coarsen it with raw spirits and rawer opinions; and set that face of
thine with hog's bristles, plant a shoe-brush on thy upper lip, and send
thy head to the turner of billiard balls. Else come not nigh me, for,
'fore Heaven, I love a man!

Sometimes, however, I am inclined to a more comfortable consideration of
this great question--for it is one of my weaknesses to be positive on few
matters. But to-day I taunted my soul with its unmanliness till it rose in
rebellion against me. 'Poor-spirited creature,' I said, 'where is thy
valour? When a fool has struck thee I have seen thee pass on without a
word, not so much as a momentary knitting of thy fist When ignorance has
waxed proud, and put thee to the mock, thou hast sat meek, and uttered
never a word. It must needs be thou art pigeon-livered and lack gall!
There is not in thee the swagger, the rustle, the braggadocio of a true
swashbuckler manhood. Out on thee!'

And my soul took the blows in patience.

'Hast thou any courage hid in any crevice of thee?' I continued my taunt.
And suddenly my soul answered with a firm quiet voice: 'Try me!'

Then said I, 'Coward as thou art, fearful of thy precious skin, darest
thou strike a blow for the weak against his oppressor, darest thou meet
the strong tyrant in the way?'

And thereon I was startled, for my soul suddenly sprang up within me, and,
lo! it neighed like a war-horse for the battle.

'Ah!' I continued, 'but couldst thou fight against the enemy of thy land?
Surely thy valour would melt at the clash of swords and the voice of the
drum?'

And the answer of my soul was like the march of armed men.

Then said I softly, for I was touched by this unwonted valour of my soul,
'Soul! wouldst thou die for thy friend?'

And the voice of my soul came sweet as the sound of bells at evening. It
seemed, indeed, as though it could dream of naught sweeter than to die for
one's friend.

This colloquy of inner and outer set me further reflecting. Can it be that
this manhood is, after all, rather a quality of the spirit than of the
body; that it is to be sought rather in the stout heart than in the
strong arm; that big words and ready blows may, like a display of
bunting, betoken no true loyalty, and be but the gaudy sign to a sorry
inn? Dr. Watts, it may be remembered, declared the mind to be the standard
of the man. As he was the author of a book on 'The Human Mind,' envious
persons may meanly conceive that his statement was but a subtly-disguised
advertisement of his literary wares.

'Were I so tall to reach the Pole,
Or grasp the ocean in my span,
I must be measured by my soul:
The mind's the standard of the man.'

The fact of Dr. Watts being also a man of low stature does not affect the
truth or untruth of this fine verse, which may serve to comfort many. One
may assume that it was Jack, and not the giant, whom we would need to
describe as the true man of the two; and one seems to have heard of some
'fine,' 'manly' fellows, darlings of the football field and the American
bar, whose actions somehow have not altogether justified those epithets,
or, at any rate, certain readings of them. Theirs is a manhood, one
fancies, that is given to shine more at race-meetings and in hotel
parlours than at home--revealed to the barmaid, and strangely hidden from
the wife, who, indeed, has less opportunities for perceiving it.

This kind of manhood is, perhaps, rather a fashion than a personal
quality: a way of carrying the stick, of wearing, or not wearing, the
hair; it resides in the twirl of the moustache, or the cut of the trouser;
you must seek it in the quality of the boot and the shape of the hat
rather than in the actions of the wearer.

Take that matter of the hair. When next the street-boy sorrowfully
exclaims on your passing that 'it's no wonder the barbers all 'list for
soldiers,' or some puny idiot at your club--a lilliputian model of popular
'manhood'--sniggers to his friend behind his coffee as you come in: call
to mind pictures of certain brave 'tailed men' of old, at the winking of
whose eyelid your tiny club 'man' would have expired on the instant.
Threaten him with a Viking. Show him in a vision a band of blue-eyed
pirates, with their wild hair flying in the breeze, as they sternly
hasten across the Northern Sea. Summon Godiva's lord, 'his beard a yard
before him, and his hair a yard behind.' Call up the brave picture of
Rupert's love-locked Cavaliers, as their glittering column hurls like a
bolt of heaven to the charge, or Nelson's pig-tailed sailors in
Trafalgar's Bay. But, before you have gone half-way through your panorama,
that club-mannikin will have hastily departed, leaving his coffee
half-drunk, and you shall find him airing his manhood in the security of
the billiard-room.

Yes, for us who are denied the admiration of the billiard-marker; denied
the devotion of the barmaid (with charming paradox so-called); for us who
make poor braggarts, and often prefer to surrender rather than to elbow
for our rights; for us who deliver our opinions with mean-spirited
diffidence, and are men of quiet voices and ways: for us there is hope. It
may be that to love one's neighbour is also a part of manhood, to suffer
quietly for another as true a piece of bravery as to fell him for a
careless word; it may be that purity, constancy, and reverence are as
sure criteria of manhood as their opposites. It may be, I say; but be
certain that a strong beard, a harsh voice, and a bull-dog physiognomy are
surer still.

THE BLESSEDNESS OF WOMAN

Have you ever remarked as a curious thing that, whereas every day we hear
women sighing because they have not been born men, you never hear a sigh
blowing in the other direction? I only know one man who had the courage to
say that he would not mind exchanging into the female infantry, and it may
have been affectation on his part. At any rate, he blushed deeply at the
avowal, and his friends look askance at him ever since. Of course, the
obvious answer of the self-satisfied male is that he is the lord of
creation, that his is the better part which shall not be taken from him.
Yet this does not prevent his telling his wife sometimes, when oppressed
with the cares of this world and the deceitfulness of riches, that 'it is
nice to be her. Nothing to worry her all day long. No responsibility.'
For in his primitive vision of female existence, his wife languidly
presides for ever at an eternal five-o'clock tea. And it is not in the
province of this article to turn to him the seamy side of that charming
picture. Rather is it our mission to convince him of the substantial truth
of his intuition. He is quite right. It _is_ 'nice to be her.' And if men
had a little more common-sense in their consequential skulls, instead of
striving to resist the woman's invasion of their immemorial
responsibilities and worries, they would joyfully abdicate them--and skip
home to Nirvana and afternoon tea.

Foolish women! To want of your own free will to put yourselves in painful
harness; to take the bit of servitude between your rose-leaf lips; to
fight day-long in the reeking arena of bacon merchants; to settle accounts
instead of merely incurring them; to be confined in Stygian city-blocks
instead of silken bedchambers; to rise with the sparrow and leave by the
early morning train. What fatuity! Some day, when woman has had her way
and man has ceased to have his will, she will see of the travail of her
soul and be bitterly dissatisfied; for, unless man is a greater fool than
he looks, she shall demand back her petticoats in vain.

For what is the lot of woman? The first superficial fact about a woman is,
of course, her beauty. Secondly, as the leaves about a rose, comes her
dress. To be beautiful and to wear pretty things--these are two of the
obvious privileges of woman. To be a living rose, with bosom of gold and
petals of lace, a rose each passer-by longs to pluck from its
husband-stem, but dare not for fear of the husband-thorns. To be
privileged to play Narcissus all day long with your mirror, to love
yourself so much that you kiss the cold reflection, yet fear not to drown.
To reveal yourself to yourself in a thousand lovely poses, and bird-like
poises of the head. To kneel to yourself in adoration, to laugh and nod
and beckon to yourself with your own smiles and dimples, to yearn in
hopeless passion for your own loveliness. To finger silken garments,
linings to the casket of your beauty, never seen of men, to draw on stiff
embroidered gowns, to deck your hands with glittering jewels, and your
wrists with bands of gold--and then to sail forth from your boudoir like
the moon from a cloud, regally confident of public worship; to be at once
poet and poem, painter and painted: does not this belong to the lot of
woman?

But it was of nobler privileges than these that the candidate for
womanhood of whom I have spoken was thinking. It is fit that we skim the
surface before we dive into the deeps--especially so attractive a surface
as woman's. He was, doubtless, thinking less of woman as a home comfort or
a beauty, and much more of her as she once used to be among our far-off
sires, Sibyl and Priestess. Is it but an insular fancy to suppose that
Englishmen, beyond any other race, still retain the most living faith in
the sanctity of womanhood? and, if so, can it be doubted that it is an
inheritance from those wild child-hearted Vikings, who were first among
the peoples of Europe to conceive woman as the chosen vessel of the
divine? And how wittily true, by the way, how slily significant, was both
the Norse and the Greek conception of the ruling destinies of man, the
Norns and the Fates, as women!

To speak with authority, one should, doubtless, first sprout petticoats;
and, meanwhile, one must rest content with asking the intelligent women of
our acquaintance--whether man inspires them with anything like the
feelings of reverential adoration, the sense of a being holy and supernal,
with which woman undoubtedly inspires man. He is, of course, their god,
but a god of the Greek pattern, with no little of the familiarising alloy
of earth in his composition. He is strong, and swift, and splendid--but
seems he holy? Is he angel as well as god? Does the dream of him rise
silvery in the imagination of woman? Is he a star to lift her up to heaven
with pure importunate beam? I seem to hear the nightingale-laughter of
women for answer. Man neither is, nor would they have him, any of these
things.

But though some men, by a fortunate admixture of woman silver in their
masculine clay, may be even these, there is one sacred thing no man can
ever be, a privilege by which nature would seem to have put beyond doubt
the divinity of woman: a mother. It is true that it is within his reach
to be a father; but what is 'paternity' compared with motherhood? The very
word wears a droll face, as though accustomed to banter. Let us venture on
the bull: that, though it be possible for most men to be fathers, no man
can ever be a mother. Maybe a recondite intention of the dogma of the
Immaculate Conception was the accentuation of the fact that man's share in
the sacred mystery of birth is so small and woman's so great, that the
birth of a child is truly a mysterious traffic between divine powers of
nature and her miraculous womb--mystic visitations of radiant forces
hidden eternally from the knowledge of man.

We stand in wonder before the magical germinating properties of a clod of
earth. A grass-seed and a thimbleful of soil set all the sciences at
nought. But if such is the wonder of the mere spectator, how strange to be
the very vessel of the mystery, to know it moving through its mystic
stations within our very bodies, to feel the tender shoots of the young
life striking out blade after blade, already living and wonderful, though
as yet unsuspected of other eyes; to know the underground inarticulate
spring, sweeter far than spring of bird and blossom, while as yet all
seems barren winter in the upper air; to hear already the pathetic
pleadings of the young life, and to send back soothing answer along the
hidden channels of tender tremulous affinities; to lie still in the night
and see through the darkness the little white soul shining softly in its
birth-sleep, slowly filling with life as a moon with silver--it was a
woman and not a man that God chose for this blessedness.

VIRAGOES OF THE BRAIN

The strength of the old-fashioned virago was in her muscles. That of the
newfangled modern development is in her 'reason'--a very different thing
indeed from 'woman's reasons.' As the former knocked you down with her
fist, the latter fells you with her brain. In her has definitely commenced
that evolutionary process which, according to the enchanting dream of a
recent scientist, is to make the 'homo' a creature whose legs are of no
account, poor shrivelled vestiges of once noble calves and thighs; and
whose entire significance will be a noseless, hairless head, in shape and
size like an idiot's, which the scientist, gloating over the ugly duckling
of his distorted imagination, describes as a 'beautiful, glittering,
hairless dome!' A sad period one fears for Gaiety burlesque. In that day
a beautifully shaped leg and a fine head of hair will be rather a
disgrace than a distinction. They will be survivals of a barbarous age.
Indeed that they are already so regarded, there can be no doubt, by the
more 'advanced' representatives of the female sex.

There is one radical difference between the old and the new virago: the
old gloried in the fact that she was a woman, because thus her sex
triumphed over that male whom she despised, like her modern sister, in
proportion as she resembled him. The new virago, however, hates above all
things to be reminded of her womanhood, which she is constantly engaged in
repressing with Chinese ferocity. Not, as we have hinted, that she thinks
any better of man. Though she dresses as like him as possible, she is very
angry if you suggest that she at all envies him his birthright. And the
humour of the situation, the hopeless dilemma in which she thus places
herself--if it be right to apply the feminine gender!--never occurs to one
whose sense of humour has long been atrophied, perhaps at Girton, or by a
course of sterilising Extension lectures.

Obviously, there is but one course open for the advanced 'woman' in this
dilemma--to evolve a third sex, and this she is doing her best to
achieve, with, I am bound to admit, remarkably speedy success. The result
up to date is the Virago of the Brain, or the Female Frankenstein. The
patentees of this fearsome _tertium quid_ hope to present it to their
patrons, within a very few years, in a form entirely devoid of certain
physiological defects, with which the cussedness of human structure still
uselessly burdens the Virago. As it is, of course, it is by no means
uncommon for the virago to be born without that sentimental organ, the
heart; and it can, therefore, only be a matter of time before she is rid
of what the present writer has been criticised for calling 'her miraculous
womb.' Doubtless, the patentees will then turn their attention to Sir
Thomas Browne's suggested method for the propagation of the race after the
reasonable, civilised, and advanced manner of trees.

But I am warned that I commit impropriety even in naming such matters.
They are 'sacred,'--which means that we ought to be ashamed to mention
them, however reverent our intention. Motherhood, it would appear, is not,
as one had regarded it, a sanctifying privilege, but a shameful
disability, of which not the Immaculate Conception, but the ignoble
service for the 'purification' of women, is the significant symbol. It
behoves not only the unmarried, but the married mothers, so to speak, to
wear farthingales upon the subject, and pretend, with as grave a face as
possible, that babies are really found under cabbages, or sent parcel
post, on application, by her Majesty the Queen.

How long are we to retain the pernicious fallacy that sacredness is a
quality inhering not in the sacred object itself, but in the superstitious
'decencies' that swaddle it, or that we best reverence such sacred object
by a prurient prudish conspiracy of silence concerning it?

Then there is, it would also appear, a particular indignity, from the new
virago's point of view, in the assumption that a woman's beauty is one of
her great missions, or the supposition that she takes any such pride in it
herself as man has from time immemorial supposed. No sensible woman, we
have been indignantly assured, ever plays at Narcissus with her mirror.
That all women find such pleasure in their reflections no one would think
of saying. How could they, poor things? One is quite ready to admit that
probably our virago looks in her glass as seldom as possible. But all
sensible women that are beautiful as well should take joy in their own
charms, if they have any feelings of gratitude towards the supernal powers
which might have made them--well, more advanced than beautiful, and given
them a head full of cheap philosophy instead of a transfiguring head of
hair.

No one wants a woman to be silly and vain about her beauty. But vanity and
conceit are qualities that exist in people quite independently of their
gifts and graces. The ugly and stupid are perhaps more often conceited
than the beautiful or the clever,--vain, it would appear, of their very
ugliness and stupidity. Besides, is it any worse for a woman to be vain of
her looks than of her brains?--and the advanced woman is without doubt
most inordinately vain of those. Of the two, so far as they are at present
developed, is there any doubt that the woman with beauty is better off
than the woman with brains? In some few hundred years, maybe, the brain of
woman will be a joy to herself and the world: when she has got more used
to its possession, and familiar with the fruitful control of it. At
present, however, it is merely a discomfort, not to say a danger, to
herself and every one else--a tiresome engine for the pedantic
assimilation of German and the higher mathematics. And it may well
happen--horrid prophecy--that when that brain of woman has come to its
perfection, the flower of its meditation will be to realise the
significance, the sacredness, of the Simple Woman. It is in its
apprehension of the mystery of simplicity that the brain of man, at
present, is superior to that of woman.

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