Prose Fancies by Richard Le Gallienne
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Richard Le Gallienne >> Prose Fancies
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Young brain delights in the complex, old in the simple. Woman's love of
the complex has been illustrated abundantly during the last few years, in
her enthusiasm for certain great imperfect writers, who have been able to
stir up the mud in the fountain of life (doubtless, to medicinal ends) but
unable to bring it clear again. An eternal enigma herself, woman is
eternally in love with enigmas. Like a child, she loves any one who will
show her the 'works' of existence, and she is still in that inquisitive
stage when one imagines that the inside of a doll will afford explanation
of its fascinating exterior. It is no use telling her that analysis can
never explain the mystery of synthesis. Like an American humourist, she
still goes on wanting 't'know.'
Even more than man, she exaggerates the value of the articulate, the
organised. She has always been in love with 'accomplishments,' and she
loves natures that are minted into current coin of ready gifts and graces.
She cares more for the names of things than for the things themselves. Of
things without names she is impatient. Talkative as she is said to be, and
in so many modern languages, she knows not yet how to talk with
Silence--unless she be the inspired Simple Woman--for to talk with Silence
is to apprehend the mystic meanings of simplicity. For this reason,
mystics are more often found among men than women--a fact on which the
Pioneer Club is at liberty to congratulate itself. What advanced woman
understands that saying of Paracelsus: 'who tastes a crust of bread tastes
the heavens and all the stars.' Else would she understand also that the
'humblest' ministrations of life, those nearest to nature, are the
profoundest in their significance: that it means as much to bake a loaf as
to write a book, and that to watch over the sleep of a child is a liberal
education--nay, an initiation granted only to mothers and those meek to
whom mysteries are revealed. It has always been to the simple woman that
the angel has appeared--to Mary of Bethany, to Joan of Arc. Is it impious
to infer that the Angel Gabriel himself dreads a blue-stocking? What
chance indeed would he have with our modern viragoes of the brain, the
mighty daughters of the pen?
THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER
Other people's poetry--I don't mean their published verse, but their
absurdly romantic view of unromantic objects--is terribly hard to
translate. It seldom escapes being turned into prose. It must have
happened to you now and again to have had the photograph of your friend's
beloved produced for your inspection and opinion. It is a terrible moment.
If she does happen to be a really pretty girl--heavens! what a relief. You
praise her with almost hysterical gratitude. But if, as is far more
likely, her beauty proves to be of that kind which exists only in the eyes
of a single beholder, what a plight is yours! How you strive to look as if
she were a new Helen, and how hopelessly unconvincing is your weary
expression--as unconvincing as one's expression when, having weakly
pretended acquaintance with a strange author, we feign ecstatic
recognition of some passage or episode quoted by his ruthless admirer.
There is this hope in the case of the photograph: that its amorous
possessor will probably be incapable of imagining any one insensitive to
such a Golconda of charms, and you have always in your power the revenge
of showing him your own sacred graven image.
Is it not curious that the very follies we delight in for ourselves should
seem so stupid, so absolutely vulgar, when practised by others? The last
illusion to forsake a man is the absolute belief in his own refinement.
A test experience in other people's poetry is to sit in the pit of a
theatre and watch 'Arry and 'Arriet making love and eating oranges
simultaneously. 'Arry has a low forehead, close, black, oily hair, his
eyes and nose are small, and his face is freckled. His clothes are
painfully his best, he wears an irrelevant flower, and his tie has escaped
from the stud and got high into his neck, eclipsing his collar. 'Arriet
has thick unexpressive features, relying rather on the expressiveness of
her flaunting hat, she wears a straight fringe low down on her forehead,
and endeavours to disguise her heavy _ennui_ by an immovable simper. This
pair loll one upon each other. Whether lights be high or low they hold
each other's hands, hands hard and coarse with labour, with nails bitten
down close to the quick. But, for all that, they, in their strange uncouth
fashion, would seem to be loving each other. 'Not we alone have passions
hymeneal,' sings an aristocratic poet. They smile at each other, an
obvious animal smile, and you perhaps shudder. Or you study them for a
realistic novel, or you call up that touch of nature our great poet talks
of. But somehow you cannot forget how their lips will stick and smell of
oranges when they kiss each other on the way home. What is the truth about
this pair? Is it in the unlovely details on which, maybe, we have too much
insisted--or behind these are we to imagine their souls radiant in
celestial nuptials?
Mr. Chevalier may be said to answer the question in his pictures of
coster love-making. But are those pictures to be taken as documents, or
are they not the product of Mr. Chevalier's idealistic temperament? Does
the coster actually worship his 'dona' with so fine a chivalry? Is he so
sentimentally devoted to his 'old Dutch'? If you answer the question in
the negative, you are in this predicament: all the love and 'the fine
feelings' remain with the infinitesimal residuum of the cultured and
professionally 'refined.' Does that residuum actually incarnate all the
love, devotion, honour, and other noble qualities in man? One need hardly
trouble to answer the absurd question. Evidently behind the oranges, and
the uncouth animal manners, we should find souls much like our own refined
essences, had we the seeing sympathetic eye. All depends on the eye of the
beholder.
Among the majority of literary and artistic people of late that eye of the
beholder has been a very cynical supercilious eye. Never was such a bitter
cruel war waged against the poor _bourgeois_. The lack of humanity in
recent art and literature is infinitely depressing. Doubtless, it is the
outcome of a so-called 'realism,' which dares to pretend that the truth
about life is to be found on its grimy pock-marked surface. Over against
the many robust developments of democracy, and doubtless inspired by them,
is a marked spread of the aristocratic spirit--selfish, heartless, subtle,
of mere physical 'refinement'; a spirit, too, all the more inhuman because
it is for the most part not tempered by any intercourse with homely
dependants, as in the feudal aristocracy. It would seem to be the product
of 'the higher education,' a university priggishness, poor as proud. It is
the deadliest spirit abroad; but, of course, though it may poison life and
especially art for a while, the great laughing democracy will in good time
dispose of it as Hercules might crush a wasp.
This is the spirit that draws up its skirts and sneers to itself at poor
'old bodies' in omnibuses, because, forsooth, they are stout, and out of
the fulness of the heart the mouth speaketh. One thinks of Falstaff's
plaintive 'If to be fat is to be hated!' At displays of natural feelings
of any sort this comfortless evil spirit ever curls the lip. Inhabiting
modern young ladies, it is especially superior to the maternal instinct,
and cringes from a baby in a railway carriage as from an adder. At the
dropping of an 'h' it shrinks as though the weighty letter had fallen upon
its great toe, and it will forgive anything rather than a provincial
accent. It lives entirely in the surfaces of things, and, as the surface
of life is frequently rough and prickly, it is frequently uncomfortable.
At such times it peevishly darts out its little sting, like a young snake
angry with a farmer's boot. It is amusing to watch it venting its spleen
in papers the _bourgeois_ never read, in pictures they don't trouble to
understand. John Bull's indifference to the 'new' criticism is one of the
most pleasing features of the time. Probably he has not yet heard a
syllable of it, and, if he should hear, he would probably waive it aside
with, 'I have something more to think of than these megrims.' And so he
has. While these superior folk are wrangling about Degas and Mallarme,
about 'style' and 'distinction,' he is doing the work of the world. There
is nothing in life so much exaggerated as the importance of art. If it
were all wiped off the surface of the earth to-morrow, the world would
scarcely miss it. For what is art but a faint reflection of the beauty
already sown broadcast over the face of the world? And that would remain.
We should lose Leonardo and Titian, Velasquez and Rembrandt, and a great
host of modern precious persons, but the stars and the great trees, the
noble sculptured hills, the golden-dotted meadows, the airy sailing
clouds, and all the regal pageantry of the seasons, would still be ours;
and an almond-tree in flower would replace the National Gallery.
Yes, surely the true way of contemplating these undistinguished masses of
humanity, this 'h'-dropping, garlic-eating, child-begetting _bourgeois_,
is Shakespeare's, Dickens', Whitman's way--through the eye of a gentle
sympathetic beholder--one who understands Nature's trick of hiding her
most precious things beneath rough husks and in rank and bearded
envelopes--and not through the eye-glass of the new critic.
For these undistinguished people are, after all, alive as their critics
are not. They are, indeed, the only people who may properly be said to be
alive, dreaming and building while the superior person stands by
cogitating sarcasms on their swink'd and dusty appearances. More of the
true spirit of romantic existence goes to the opening of a little grocer's
shop in a back street in Whitechapel than to all the fine marriages at St.
George's, Hanover Square, in a year. But, of course, all depends on the
eye of the beholder.
TRANSFERABLE LIVES
I sometimes have a fancy to speculate how, supposing the matter still
undecided, I would like to spend my life. Often I feel how good it would
be to give it in service to one of my six dear friends: just to offer it
to them as so much capital, for whatever it may be worth. In pondering the
fancy, I need hardly say that I do not assess myself at any extravagant
value. I but venture to think that the devotion of one human creature,
however humble, throughout a lifetime, is not a despicable offering. To
use me as they would, to fetch and carry with me, to draw on me for
whatever force resides in me, as they would on a bank account, to the last
penny, to use my brains for their plans, my heart for their love, my blood
for added length of days: and thus be so much the more true in their love,
the more prosperous in their business, the more buoyant in their
health--by the addition of _me_.
But then embarrassment comes upon me. Which of my friends do I love the
most? To whose account of the six would I fain be credited? Then again I
think of the ten thousand virgins who go mateless about the world, sweet
women, with hearts like hidden treasure, awaiting the 'Prince's kiss' that
never comes; virgin mothers, whose bosoms shall never know the light warm
touch of baby-hands:
'Pale primroses
That die unmarried, ere they can behold
Bright Phoebus in his strength.'
How often one sees such a one in train or omnibus, her eyes, may be,
spilling the precious spikenard of their maternal love on some happier
woman's child. I noticed one of them withering on the stalk on my way to
town this morning. She was, I surmised, nearly twenty-eight, she carried a
roll of music, and I had a strong impression that she was the sole support
of an invalid mother. I could hardly resist suggesting to one of my men
companions what a good wife she was longing to make, what a Sleeping
Beauty she was, waiting for the marital kiss that would set all the sweet
bells of her nature a-chime. I had the greatest difficulty in preventing
myself from leaning over to her, and putting it to her in this way--
'Excuse me, madam, but I love you. Will you be my wife? I am just turning
thirty. I have so much a year, a comfortable little home, and probably
another thirty years of life to spend. Will you not go shares with me?'
And my imagination went on making pictures: how her eyes would suddenly
brighten up like the northern aurora, how a strange bloom would settle on
her somewhat weary face, and a dimple steal into her chin; how, when she
reached home and sat down to read Jane Austen to her mother, her mother
would suddenly imagine roses in the room, and she would blushingly answer,
'Nay, mother--it is my cheeks!'; and presently the mother would ask,
'Where is that smell of violets coming from?' and again she would answer,
'Nay, mother--it is my thoughts!'; and yet again the mother would say,
'Hush! listen to that wonderful bird singing yonder!' and she would
answer, 'Nay, mother dear--it is only my heart!'
But, alas! she alighted at Charing Cross, and not one of us in the
compartment had asked her to be his wife.
The weary clerk, the sweated shopman, the jaded engineer--how good it
would be to say to any of them, 'Here, let us change places awhile. Here
is my latch-key, my cheque-book, my joy and my leisure. Use them as long
as you will. Quick, let us change clothes, and let me take my share of the
world's dreariness and pain'!
Or to stop the old man of sixty, as he hobbles down the hill, with never a
thought of youth or spring in his heart, not a hope in his pocket, and his
faith long since run dry--to stop him and say: 'See, here are thirty
years; I have no use for them. Will you not take them? If you are quick,
you may yet catch up Phyllis by the stile. She has a wonderful rose in her
hand. She will sell it you for these thirty years; and she knows a field
where a lark is singing as though it were in heaven!'
To take the old lady from the bath-chair, and let her run with her
daughter to gather buttercups, or make eyes at the church gallants. Oh,
this were better far than living to one's-self, if we were only selfish
enough to see it!
But, best of all were it to go to the churchyard, where the dead have long
since given up all hopes of resurrection, and find some new grave, whose
inhabitant was not yet so fast asleep but that he might be awakened by a
kind word. To go to Alice's grave and call, 'Alice! Alice!' and then
whisper: 'The spring is here! Didn't you hear the birds calling you? I
have come to tell you it is time to get ready. In two hours the
church-bells will be ringing, and Edward will be waiting for you at the
altar. The organist is already trying over the 'Wedding March,' and the
bridesmaids have had their dresses on and off twice. They can talk of
nothing but orange-blossom and rice. Alice, dear, awaken. Ah, did you have
strange dreams, poor girl--dream that you were dead! Indeed, it was a
dream--an evil dream.'
And, then, as Alice stepped bewildered homewards, to steal down into her
place, and listen, and listen, till the sound of carriages rolled towards
the gate, listen till the low hush of the marriage service broke into the
wild happy laughter of the organ, and the babbling sound of sweet girls
stole through the church porch; then to lie back and to think that Alice
and Edward had been married after all--that your little useless life had
been so much use, at least: just to dream of that awhile, and then softly
fall asleep.
Ah, who would not give all his remaining days to ransom his beloved
dead?--to give them the joys they missed, the hopes they clutched at, the
dreams they dreamed? O river that runs so sweetly by their feet, when you
shall have stopped running will they rise? O sun that shines above their
heads, when you have ceased from shining will they come to us again? When
the lark shall have done with singing, and the hawthorn bud no more, shall
we then, indeed, hear the voices of our beloved, sweeter than song of
river or bird?
THE APPARITION OF YOUTH
Sententious people are fond of telling us that we change entirely every
seven years, that in that time every single atomy of body (and soul?)
finds a substitute. Personally, I am of opinion that we change oftener,
that rather we are triennial in our constitution. In fact, it is a change
we owe to our spiritual cleanliness. But there is a truth pertaining to
the change of which the sententious people are not, I think, aware. When
they speak of our sloughing our dead selves, they imagine the husk left
behind as a dead length of hollow scale or skin. Would it were so. These
sententious people, with all their information, have probably never gone
through the process of which they speak. They have never changed from the
beginning, but have been consistently their dull selves all through. To
those, however, who can look back on many a metamorphosis, the
quick-change artists of life, a fearful thing is known. The length of
discarded snake lies glistering in the greenwood, motionless, and slowly
perishes with the fallen leaves in autumn. But for the dead self is no
autumn. By some mysterious law of spiritual propagation, it breaks away
from us, a living thing, as the offspring of primitive organisms are, it
is said, broken off the tail of their sole and undivided parent. It goes
on living as we go on living; often, indeed, if we be poets or artists, it
survives us many years; it may be a friend, but it is oftener a foe; and
it is always a sad companion.
I sat one evening in my sumptuous library near Rutland Gate. I was deep in
my favourite author, my bank-book, when presently an entry--as a matter of
fact, a quarterly allowance to a friend (well, a woman friend) of my
youth--set me thinking. Just then my man entered. A youth wished to see
me. He would not give his name, but sent word that I knew him very well
for all that. Being in a good humour, I consented to see him. He was a
young man of about twenty, and his shabby clothes could not conceal that
he was comely. He entered the room with light step and chin in air, and to
my surprise he strode over to where I sat and seated himself without a
word. Then he looked at me with his blue eyes, and I recognised him with a
start 'What's the new book?' he asked eagerly, pointing to my open
bank-book.
Bending over he looked at it: 'Pshaw! Figures. You used not to care much
about them. When we were together it used to be Swinburne's _Poems and
Ballads_, or Shakespeare's _Sonnets_!'
As he spoke he tugged a faded copy of the _Sonnets_ from his pocket. It
slipped from his hand. As it fell it opened, and faded violets rained from
its leaves. The youth gathered them up carefully, as though they had been
valuable, and replaced them.
'How do you sell your violets?' I asked, ironically. 'I'll give you a
pound apiece for them!'
'A pound! Twenty pounds apiece wouldn't buy them,' he laughed, and I
remembered that they were the violets Alice Sunshine and I had gathered
one spring day when I was twenty. We had found them in a corner of the
dingle, where I had been reading the _Sonnets_ to her, till in our book
that day we read no more. As we parted she pressed them between the leaves
and kissed them. I remember, too, that I had been particular to write the
day and hour against them, and I remember further how it puzzled me a
couple of years after what the date could possibly mean.
Having secured his book, my visitor once more looked me straight in the
face, and as he did so he seemed to grow perplexed and disappointed. As I
gazed at him my contentment, too, seemed to be slowly melting away. Five
minutes before I had felt the most comfortable _bourgeois_ in the world.
There seemed nothing I was in need of, but there was something about this
youth that was dangerously disillusionising. Here was I already envying
him his paltry violets. I was even weak enough to offer him five pounds
apiece for them, but he still smilingly shook his head.
'Well!' he said presently, 'what have you been doing with yourself all
these years?'
I told him of my marriage and my partnership in a big city house.
'Phew!' he said. 'Monstrous dull, isn't it? As for me, I never intend to
marry. And if you don't marry, what do you want with money? You used to
despise it enough once. And do you remember our favourite line: "_Our
loves into corpses or wives_?"'
'Hush!' I said, for wives have ears.
'Is it Alice Sunshine?' he asked.
'No,' I said, 'not Alice Sunshine.'
'Maud Willow?'
'No, not Maud Willow.'
'Jenny Hopkins?'
'No, not Jenny Hopkins.'
'Lucy Rainbow?'
'No, not Lucy Rainbow.'
'Now who else was there? I cannot remember them all. Ah, I remember now.
It wasn't Lilian, after all?'
'No, poor Lilian died ten years ago. I am afraid you don't know my wife. I
don't think you ever met.'
'It isn't Edith Appleblossom, surely? Is it?'
'No, I ...' and then I stopped just in time! 'No, you don't know my wife,
I'm sure, and if you don't mind my saying so, I think I had better not
introduce you. Forgive me, but she wouldn't quite understand you, I
fear....'
'Wouldn't quite approve, eh?' said he, with a merry laugh. 'Poor old
chap!'
'Well, I'm better off than that,' he continued. 'Why, Doll and I love for
a week, and then forget each other's names in a twelvemonth, when Poll
comes along, and so on. And neither of us is any the worse, believe me.
We're one as fickle as the other, so where's the harm?'
'Ah, my dear fellow, you did make a mistake,' he ran on. 'I suppose you
forget Robert Louis' advice--_"Times are changed with him who marries,"_
etc.'
'He's married himself,' I replied.
'And I suppose you never drop in for a pipe at "The Three Tuns" now of an
evening?'
'No! I haven't been near the place these many years.'
'Poor old fellow! The Bass is superb at present.
I recollected. 'Won't you have some wine with me?' I said. 'I have some
fine old Chianti. And take a cigar?'
'No, thanks, old man. I'm too sad. Come with me to "The Three Tuns," and
let's have an honest pint and an honest pipe together. I don't care about
cigars. Come to-night. Let's make a night of it. We'll begin at "The Three
Tuns," then call at "The Blue Posts," look in at "The Dog and Fire-irons,"
and finish up at "The Shakespeare's Head." What was it we used to troll?--
'From tavern to tavern
Youth passes along,
With an armful of girl
And a heart-full of song.'
'Hush!' I cried in terror; 'it is impossible. I cannot. Come to my club
instead.' But he shook his head.
I persuaded him to have some Chianti at last, but he drank it without
spirit, and thus we sat far into the night talking of old days.
Before he went I made him a definite offer--he must have bewitched me, I
am sure--I offered him no less than L5000 and a share in the business for
the sprig of almond-blossom the ridiculous young pagan carried in his hat.
And will you believe me? He declined the offer.
THE PATHETIC FLOURISH
The dash under the signature, the unnecessary rat-tat of the visitor, the
extravagant angle of the hat in bowing, the extreme unction in the voice,
the business man's importance, the strut of the cock, the swagger of the
bad actor, the long hair of the poet, the Salvation bonnet, the blue shirt
of the Socialist: against all these, and a hundred examples of the swagger
of unreflecting life, did a little brass knocker in Gray's Inn warn me the
other evening. I had knocked as no one should who is not a postman, with
somewhat of a flourish. I had plainly said, in its metallic
reverberations, that I was somebody. As I left my friends, I felt the
knocker looking at me, and when I came out into the great square, framing
the heavens like an astronomical chart, the big stars repeated the lesson
with thousand-fold iteration. How they seemed to nudge each other and
twinkle among themselves at the poor ass down there, who actually took
himself and his doings so seriously as to flourish, even on a little brass
knocker.
Yes, I had once again forgotten Jupiter. How many hundred times was he
bigger than the earth? Never mind, there he was, bright as crystal, for me
to measure my importance against! The street-lamps did their best, I
observed, to brave it out, and the electric lights in Holborn seemed
certainly to have the best of it--as cheap jewellery is gaudiest in its
glitter. One could much more easily believe that all these hansoms with
their jewelled eyes, these pretty, saucily frocked women with theirs, this
busy glittering milky way of human life was the enduring, and those dimmed
uncertain points up yonder but the reflections of human gas-lights.
A city clerk, with shining evening hat, went by, his sweetheart on his
arm. They were wending gaily to the theatre, without a thought of all the
happy people who had done the same long ago--hasting down the self-same
street, to the self-same theatre, with the very same sweet talk--all long
since mouldering in their graves. I felt I ought to rush up and shake
them, take them into a bystreet, turn their eyes upon Jupiter, and tell
them they must die; but I thought it might spoil the play for them.
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