HORTUS VITAEESSAYS ON THE GARDENING OF LIFE

BYVERNON LEE

JOHN LANE: THE BODLEY HEADLONDON & NEW YORK. MDCCCCIV

SECOND EDITION. 

WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES. 

DEDICATION

To MADAME TH: BLANC-BENTZON

 MAIANO, NEAR FLORENCE, June 20, 1903. 

MY DEAR MADAME BLANC, The first copy of this little book was, of course, to have been forGabrielle Delzant. I am fulfilling her wish, I think, in giving it, instead, to you, who were her oldest friend; as I, alas! had time to beonly her latest. 

She had read nearly all these essays; and, during those weeks of herillness which I spent last autumn in Gascony, she had made me rewriteseveral among them. She wanted to learn to read English aloud, and itamused her and delighted me that she should do so on my writings. HerFrench pronunciation gave an odd grace to the sentences; the littlehesitation spaced and accentuated their meaning; and I liked what I hadwritten when she read it. The afternoons at Paraÿs which we spenttogether in this way! Prints of _Mère Angélique_ and _Ces Messieurs dePort Royal_ watching over us in her spacious bedroom, brown and yetlight like the library it had become; and among those Jansenistworthies, the Turin Pallas Athena, with a sprig of green box as anoffering from our friend. Yes; what I had written seemed good when readby her. And then there were the words which had to be looked out in thedictionary, bringing discussions on all manner of subjects, andwonderful romantic stories, like the "Golden Legend, " about grandparentsand servants and neighbours, giving me time to rearrange the cushionsand to settle the fur over her feet. And the other words, hard topronounce (she must always invert, from sheer anxiety, the English_th'_s and _s'_s); I had to say them first, and once more, and yetagain. And we laughed, and I kissed her beloved patient face and herdear young white hair. I don't think it ever occurred to tell her myintention of putting her name on this volume--it went without saying. And besides, had not everything I could do or be of good belonged to herduring the eighteen months we had been friends?

There was another reason, however, why this book more particularlyshould have been hers; and having been hers, dear Madame Blanc, yours. Do you remember telling me how, years ago, and in a terrible moment ofyour experience, she had surprised you, herself still so young, by aremark which had sunk deep into your mind and had very greatly helpedyou? "We must, " you told me she had said, "be prepared to begin lifemany times afresh. " Now that is the thought, though never clearlyexpressed, which runs through these essays. And the essential goodnessand fruitfulness of life, its worthiness to be lived over and overagain, had come home to me more and more with the knowledge and the loveof her who had made my own life so far happier and more significant. Sothat my endeavour to enumerate some of the unnoticed gifts and deepestconsolations of life has come to be connected in my mind with thiscreature who consoled so many and gave herself, with such absolute giftof loving-kindness or gratitude, to all people and all things thatdeserved it. 

That life is worthy to be lived well, with fortitude, tenderness, and acertain reserved pride and humility, was indeed the essential, unspokentenet of Gabrielle Delzant's religion, into which there entered, notmerely the teachings of Stoics and Jansenists, but the traditionalgaiety and gallant bearing of the little southern French nobles fromwhom she was descended. Her Huguenot blood, of which, with the dearself-contradictoriness of all true saints, she was inordinately proud;her Catholic doctrine, which by natural affinity was that of Port Royaland Pascal; this double strain of asceticism of both her faiths (for, like all deep believers, she had more than one) merely gave a solemnbase, a zest, to her fine intuition of nature and joy. The refusal topossess (even her best-beloved books never bore her own name, and herbeautiful bevelled wardrobes were found empty through sheer giving), thedisdain for every form of property, only intensified her delight in allthe beautiful things which could be shared with others. No one everpossessed, in the true sense of passionate enjoyment, as GabrielleDelzant possessed, for instance, the fine passages of Corneille, orMaurice de Guérin, or Victor Hugo, which she asked her husband to readto us of an evening; as she possessed the refined lie of the land, thedelicate autumn colouring of her modest and gracious southern country;and those old-fashioned Paris streets, through which we eagerlywandered, seeking obscure little churches and remote convents wherePascal had lived or André Chénier lay buried. Nay, no one, methinks, ever tasted so much of romance as this lady in her studious invalid'sexistence; for did she not extract wonderful and humorous adventures, not only out of the lives of her friends, but her own quiet comings andgoings? Do you remember, dear Madame Blanc, that rainy day that she andI returned to you, brimful of marvellous adventures, when we had found afeather and shell shop built up against an old church in the Marais; orwas it after wandering in the dripping Jardin des Plantes, peering atthe white skeletons of animals of the already closed museum, andreturning home in floods by many and devious trams and 'buses? Ah, noone could enjoy things, and make others enjoy them by sheer childlikelovingness, as she did!

For her austerity, like that of the nobler pagans (and there are nonobler pagans, or more reverent to paganism, than true Christiansaints, believe me) pruned all natural possibilities into fruitfulnessof joy. And her reckless giving away of interest and of loving-kindness, enabled her, not merely to feed the multitude, but to carry homemiraculous basketfuls, and more, methinks, than twelve. 

And thus, to return to my main theme, there was, transmuting all herorthodoxy (and making her accept some unorthodox among herfellow-worshippers) a deep and fervent adoration of life andfruitfulness, and an abhorrence of death. 

Her letters to me are full of it. Abhorrence of death. Death not of thebody, for she held that but an incident, an accident almost, in a lifeeternal or universal; but death of the soul. And this she would havedefined, though she was never fond of defining, as loss of the power ofextracting joy and multiplying it through thankfulness. 

A matter less of belief than of temper. Of course. Gabrielle Delzant wasone of the elect, and filled with grace. And she had as little sense oftragedy as St. Francis or his skylarks; sympathy meaning for her lessthe fact of feeling the sufferings of others, than that of healing, ofconsoling, and of compensating. 

With this went naturally that, in a very busy life, full--over-full, some of us thought--of the affairs of other folk, she never appearedworried or hurried. Of the numberless persons who carried their businessto her, or whose secret troubles became manifest to her dearbluish-brown eyes, each must have felt as if she existed for him or hersolely. And folk went to her as they go into a church of her religion, not merely for spiritual aid, but for the comfort of space and rest inthis world of crowding and bustle; for the sense of a piece of heavenclosed in for one's need and all one's very own. Dear Madame Blanc, howmany shy shadows do we not seem to see around us since her death; orrather to guess at, roaming disconsolate, lacking they scarce know what, that ever-welcoming sanctuary of her soul!

I have compared it with a church; but outwardly, and just because shewas such a believer in life, it was more like a dwelling-place, likethose brown corridors, full of books, at Paraÿs; or that bedroom ofhers, with the high lights all over the polished floor, and its look ofa library. To me Gabrielle Delzant revealed the reality of what I hadlong guessed and longed for aimlessly, the care and grace of art, theconsecration of religion, applied to the matters of every day. It hungtogether with her worship of life, with her belief, as she expressed itto you, all those years ago, _that life must be begun many times anew_. And it is this which, for all the appalling unexpectedness, the dreadfulcataclysm of her temporal ending, has made the death of GabrielleDelzant so strangely difficult, for me, at least, to realise as death atall. 

Not death, but only absence; and that, how partial!

It is eight months and more, dear Madame Blanc, since she and I badeeach other adieu in the body. She had been some while ill, though noneof us suspected how fatally. It was the eve of her departure for Paris;and I was returning to Italy. She was grieved at parting from me, atleaving her dear old Southern relatives; and secretly she perhaps halfsuspected that she might never come back to her Gascon home. It was aNovember day, dissolving fitfully into warm rain, and very melancholy. I was to take the late train to Agen with the two girls. And she and I, when all was ready, were to have the afternoon together. Of course wemust have it serene, as if no parting were to close it. All traces ofdeparture, of packing, were cleared away at her bidding, and when theyhad carried her on to her sofa, and placed by its side the little tablewith our books, and also my chair, she bade the dear Southern maidslight a fine blaze of vine stumps, and fill all the jars with freshroses--china roses, so vivid, surely none have ever smelt so sweet andpoignant. We amused ourselves, a little sadly, burning some olive andmyrtle branches I had brought for her from Corsica, and watching theirfrail silver twigs and leaves turn to embers and fall in fireworks ofsparks and a smoke of incense. And we read together in one of my books(alas! that book has just come back this very same day, sent by herdaughter), and looked up at the loose grey clouds suffused with rose andorange as the day drew to its end. Then the children shouted from belowthat the carriage was there, that I must go. We closed the books, marking the place, and I broke a rose from the nosegay on thefireplace. And we said farewell. 

Thus have we remained, she and I. With the mild autumn day drawing to anend outside; and within, the fresh roses, the bright fire she had askedfor; remained reading our books, watching those dried leaves turn toshowers of sparks and smoke of incense. She and I, united beyond allpower of death to part, in the loving belief that, even like thatafternoon of packing up and bidding adieu, and rain and early twilight, life also should be made serene and leisurely, and simple and sweet, andakin to eternity. 

And now I am going to put those volumes she and I had read together, onmy own shelves, here in this house she never entered; and to correct theproofs of this new little book, which should have been hers, nay, rather_is_, and which is also, my dear Madame Blanc, for that reason, yours. 

I am, meanwhile, your grateful and affectionate friend, VERNON LEE. 

CONTENTS

DEDICATION

THE GARDEN OF LIFE--INTRODUCTORY

IN PRAISE OF GOVERNESSES

ON GOING TO THE PLAY

READING BOOKS

HEARING MUSIC

RECEIVING LETTERS

NEW FRIENDS AND OLD

OTHER FRIENDSHIPS

A HOTEL SITTING-ROOM

IN PRAISE OF COURTSHIP

KNOWING ONE'S MIND

AGAINST TALKING

IN PRAISE OF SILENCE

THE BLAME OF PORTRAITS

SERE AND YELLOW--INTERLUDE

A STAGE JEWEL

MY BICYCLE AND I

PUZZLES OF THE PAST

MAKING PRESENTS

GOING AWAY

COMING BACK

LOSING ONE'S TRAIN

THE HANGING GARDENS--VALEDICTORY

HORTUS VITAE

THE GARDEN OF LIFE

(INTRODUCTORY)

"Cela est bien dit, " répondit Candide; "mais ilfaut cultiver notre jardin. "--ROMANS DE VOLTAIRE. 

THE GARDEN OF LIFE

This by no means implies that the whole of life is a garden or could bemade one. I am not sure even that we ought to try. Indeed, on secondthoughts, I feel pretty certain that we ought not. Only such portion oflife is our garden as lies, so to speak, close to our innermostindividual dwelling, looked into by our soul's own windows, andsurrounded by its walls. A portion of life which is ours exclusively, although we do occasionally lend its key to a few intimates; ours tocultivate just as we please, growing therein either pistachios and dwarflemons for preserving, like Voltaire's immortal hero, or more spiritualflowers, "sweet basil and mignonette, " such as the Lady of Epipsychidionsent to Shelley; kindly rosemary and balm; or, as may happen, a fineassortment of witch's herbs, infallible for turning us into cats andtoads and poisoning our neighbours. 

But with whatever we may choose to plant the portion of our life and ourthought which is our own, and whatsoever its natural fertility andaspect, this much is certain, that it needs digging, watering, planting, and perhaps most of all, weeding. "Cela est bien dit, " répondit Candide, "mais il faut cultiver notre jardin. " He was, as you will recollect, answering Dr. Pangloss. One evening, while they were resting from theirmany tribulations, and eating various kinds of fruit and sweetmeats intheir arbour on the Bosphorus, the eminent optimistic philosopher hadpointed out at considerable length that the delectable moment they wereenjoying was connected by a Leibnitzian chain of cause and effect withsundry other moments of a less obviously desirable character in theearlier part of their several lives. 

"For, after all, my dear Candide, " said Dr. Pangloss, "let us supposeyou had not been kicked out of a remarkably fine castle, magnis accogentissimis cum argumentis a posteriori; suppose also that, etc. , etc. Had not happened, nor, furthermore, etc. , etc. , etc. ; well, it is quiteplain that you would not be in this particular place, _videlicet_ anarbour; and, moreover, in the act of eating preserved lemon-rind andpistachio nuts. "

"What you say is true, " answered Candide, "but we have to cultivate ourgarden. "

And here I hasten to remark, that although I have quoted and translatedthese seven immortal words, I would on no account be answerable fortheir original and exact meaning, any more than for the meaning of moreofficially grave and reverend texts, albeit perhaps not wiser or noblerones. 

Did the long-suffering hero of the Sage of Ferney accept the chain ofcause and effect, and agree that without the kicks, the earthquake, the_auto-da-fè_, and all the other items of his uneasy career, it wasimpossible he should be eating pistachio nuts and preserved lemon-rindin that arbour? And, in consideration of the bitter sweet of thesedelicacies, was he prepared to welcome (retrospectively) the painfulpreliminaries as blessings in disguise? Did he even, rising to stoicalor mystic heights, identify these superficially different phenomena andrecognize that their apparent contradiction was real sameness?

Or, should we take it that, refraining from such essential questions, and passing over his philosophical friend's satisfaction in the _causalnexus_, poor Candide was satisfied with pointing out the only practicallesson to be drawn from the whole matter, to wit, that in order topartake of such home-grown dainties, it had been necessary, and mostlikely would remain necessary, to put a deal of good work into whateverscrap of the soil of life had not been devastated by those LeibnitzianPowers who further Man's felicity in a fashion so energetic but soroundabout?

All these points remain obscure. But even as a play is said to be onlythe better for the various interpretations which it affords to as manygreat actors; so methinks, the wisest sayings are often those whichstate some principle in general terms, leaving to individuals thepractical working out, according to their nature and circumstances. So, whether we incline to optimism or to pessimism, we must do our best inthe half-hours we can bestow upon our little garden. 

I speak advisedly of half-hours, and I would repeatedly insist upon thegarden being little. For the garden, whatever its actual size, and wereit as extensive as those of Eden and the Hesperides set on end, does notafford the exercise needful for spiritual health and vigour. Andwhatever we may succeed in growing there to please our taste or (likesome virtuous dittany) to heal our bruises, this much is certain, thatthe power of enjoyment has to be brought from beyond its limits. 

Happiness, dear fellow-gardeners, is not a garden plant. 

In plain English: happiness is not the aim of life, although it islife's furtherance and in the long run life's _sine qua non_. And notbeing life's aim, life often disregards the people who pursue it for itsown sake. I am not, like Dr. Pangloss, a professional philosopher, andwhat philosophy I have is of no particular school, and neither stoicalnor mystic. I feel no sort of call to vindicate the Ways of Providence;and on the whole there seems something rather ill-bred in crabbing theunattainable, and pretending that what we can't have can't be good forus. Happiness _is_ good for us, excellent for us, necessary for us, indispensable to us. But . .. How put such transcendental facts intocommon or garden (for it is _garden_) language? But _we_--that is tosay, poor human beings--are one thing, and life is quite another. And aslife has its own programme irrespective of ours, to wit, apparently itsown duration and intensifying throughout all changes, it is quitenatural that we, its little creatures of a second, receive what wehappen to ask for--namely, happiness--as a reward for being thoroughlyalive. 

Now, for some reason not of our choosing, we cannot be thoroughly aliveexcept as a result of such exercises as come under the headings: Workand Duty. That seems to be the law of Life--of Life which does not carea button about being æsthetic or wisely epicurean. The truth of it isbrought home to us occasionally in one of those fine symbolicalintuitions which are the true stuff of poetry, because they reveal theorganic unity and symmetry of all existence. I am alluding to the senseof cloying and restlessness which comes to most of us (save when tiredor convalescent) after a very few days or even hours shut up in quitethe finest real gardens; and to that instinct, impelling some of us toinquire about the lodges and the ways out, the very first thing oncoming down into some private park. Of course they are quite exquisite, those flowery terraces cut in the green turf, and bowling greens setwith pines or statues, and balustraded steps with jars and vases. Andthe great stretches of park land with their solemn furbelowed avenuesand their great cedars stretching _moire_ skirts on to the grass, aremarvellous fine things to look upon. .. . 

But we want the ploughed fields beyond, the real woods with stacked-uptimber, German fashion; the orchards and the kitchen gardens; the tracksacross the high-lying sheep downs; the towing-paths where the bargescome up the rivers; the deep lanes where the hay-carts have left longwisps on the overhanging elms; the high-roads running from village tovillage, with the hooded carts and bicycles and even the solemnJuggernaut traction-engines upon them. We want not only to rest fromliving, to take refreshment in life's kindly pauses and taste (likeCandide in his arbour) the pleasantness of life's fruits. We want alsoto live. 

But there is living and living. There is, unfortunately, not merely suchbreezy work-a-dayness as we have been talking of, but something verydifferent indeed beyond the walls of our private garden. There areblack, oozy factory yards and mangy grass-plots heaped with brickbat andrefuse; and miles of iron railing, and acres of gaunt and genteelstreets not veiled enough in fog; a metaphorical _beyond the gardenwalls_, in which a certain number of us graduate for the ownership ofsooty shrubberies and clammy orchid houses. And we poor latter-daymortals have become so deadly accustomed to the routine of useless workand wasteful play, that a writer must needs cross all the _t_'s and dotall the _i_'s of his conviction (held also by other sentimentalists andcranks called Carlyle, Ruskin, and Morris) that the bread and wine oflife are not grown in the Black Country; no, nor life's flowers in thehorticultural establishments (I will not call them gardens) of suburbanvillas. 

Fortunately, however, this casual-looking universe is not without itsharmonies, as well as ironies. And one of these arrangements would seemto be that our play educates the aims and methods of our work. If we laystore by satisfactions which imply the envy and humiliation of otherfolk, why then we set about such work as humiliates our neighbours orfills them with enviousness, saving the case where others, sharing ourtastes, do alike by us. Without going to such lengths (the mention ofwhich has got me a reputation for lack of human sympathy) there remainsthe fact that if our soul happen to take delight in, let us say, futility--well, then, futility will litter existence with shreds ofcoloured paper and plaster comfits trodden into mud, as after a day ofcarnival at Nice. Nay, a still simpler case: if we cannot be happywithout a garden as big as the grounds of an expensive lunatic asylum, why, then, all the little cottage gardens down the lane must be sweptaway to make it. 

Now, the cottage gardens, believe me, are the best. They are the onlyones which, being small, may be allotted in some juster future to everyman without dispossessing his neighbour. And they are also the only onescompatible with that fine arable or dairy country which we all long for. Stop and look over the hedges: their flowers leave no scrap of earthvisible between them, like the bedded-out things of grander gardens; andtheir vivid crimsons, and tender rose and yellow, and ineffable blue, and the solemn white which comes out in the evening, are seen to mostadvantage against the silvery green of vegetables behind them, and thecornfield, the chalk-pit under the beech trees beyond. The cottageflowers come also into closer quarters with their owners, not merelybecause these breathe their fragrance and the soil's good freshnesswhile stooping down to weed, and prune, and water; but also, and perhapseven more, because the flowers we tend with our own hands have a habitof blooming in our expectations and filling our hopes with a sweetnesswhich not the most skilful hired gardeners have ever taught the mostfar-fetched hybrids that they raise for clients. 

Which, being interpreted, may be taken to mean that it is no use relyingon artists, poets, philosophers, or saints to make something of theenclosed spaces or the waste portions of our soul: _Il faut cultivernotre jardin. _

IN PRAISE OF GOVERNESSES

Even before discovering that there was an old, gabled, lower town atCassel, I felt the special gladness of the touch of Germany. It was anautumn morning, bright yet tender. I sped along the wide, empty streets, across the sanded square, with hedges of sere lime trees, where a big, periwigged Roman Emperor of an Elector presides, making one think of theshouts of "Hurrah, lads, for America!" of the bought and sold Hessiansof Schiller's "Cabal and Love. " At the other end was a promenade, terraced above the yellow tree-tops of a park, above a gentle undulatingcountry, with villages and steeples in the distance. "Schöneaussicht"the place called itself; and the view was looked at by the wide and manywindows of pleasant old-fashioned houses, with cocked-hat roofs wellpulled down over them, each in its little garden of standard roses, allquiet and smiling in the autumn sunshine. 

I felt the special gladness of being in Germany (for every country hasits own way of making us happy), and glad that there should be in mesomething which answered to Germany's especial touch. We owe that, manyof us, I mused, and with it a deep debt of gratitude, to ourgovernesses. And I fell to thinking of certain things which an Americanfriend had lately told me, sitting in the twilight with her head alittle averted, about a certain governess of hers I can remember from mychildhood. Pathetic things, heroic ones, nothings; all ending off in thestory of a farewell letter, treasured many years, lost on a journey. .. . "Do you remember Fräulein's bonnet? The one she brought from Hanover andwore that winter in Paris?" And there it was in a faded, crinolinedphotograph, so dear and funny. Dear and funny--that is the point of thisrelationship with creatures giving often the best of the substance andform of our soul, that it is without the sometimes rather empty majestyof the parental one. And surely it is no loss, but rather a gain, tohave to smile, as my friend did at the thought of that Teutonic bonnet, just when we feel an awkward huskiness in our voice. 

There is, moreover, a particular possibility for good in the relationbetween a developing child (not, of course, a mere growing young brute)and a woman still young, childless, or separated from her children, alittle solitary, most often alien, differently brought up, and whoseaffection and experience must therefore take a certain impersonality, and tend to subdued romance. We are loved, when we are, not as a matterof course and habit, not with any claim; but for ourselves and with thedelicate warmth of a feeling necessarily one-sided. And whatever welearn of life in this relationship is of one very different from ourown, and seen through the feelings, the imagination, often the repressedhome-sickness, of a mature and foreign soul. And this is good for us, and useful in correcting family and national tradition, and the rubbingaway of angles (and other portions of soul) by brothers and sisters, andgeneral contemporaries, excellent educational items of which it ispossible to have a little too much. 

Be this as it may, it is to our German governesses that we owe thepower of understanding Germany, more than to German literature. For theliterature itself requires some introduction of mood for its romantic, homely, sentimental, essentially German qualities; the mere Anglo-Saxonor Latin being, methinks, incapable of caring at once for WilhelmMeister, or Siebennkäs, or Götz, or the manifold lyric of Forest andMillstream. To understand these, means to have somewhere in us a littlesample, some fibres and corpuscles, of the German heart. And I maintainthat we are all of us the better, of whatever nationality (and most, perhaps, we rather too-too solid Anglo-Saxons) for such transfusion of aforeign element, correcting our deficiencies and faults, and ripening(as the literature of Italy ripened our Elizabethans) our own intrinsicqualities. It means, apart from negative service against conceit andcanting self-aggrandisement, an additional power of taking lifeintelligently and serenely; a power of adaptation to various climatesand diets of the spirit, let alone the added wealth of such variedclimates and diets themselves. Italy, somehow, attains this by her merevisible aspect and her history: a pure, high sky, a mountain city, or arow of cypresses can teach as much as Dante, and, indeed, teach us tounderstand Dante himself. While as to France, that most lucid ofarticulately-speaking lands, explains herself in her mere books; and webecome in a manner French with every clear, delightful page we read, andalmost every thought of our own we ever think with definiteness andgrace. But the genius of Germany is, like her landscape, homely andsentimental, with the funny goodness and dearness of a good child; andwe must learn to know it while we ourselves are children. And thereforeit is from our governesses that we learn (with dimmer knowledge ofmysterious persons or things "Ulfilas"--"Tacitus's Germania, " supposedby me to have been a lady, his daughter perhaps, and the "seven stars"of German literature) a certain natural affinity with the Germany ofhumbler and greater days, when no one talked of Teuton superiority or ofpurity of Teuton idiom; the Germany which gave Kant, and Beethoven, andGoethe and Schiller, and was not ashamed to say "scharmant. "

I, too, was taught to say "scharmant" and "amüsiren". It was wrong, verywrong; and I feel my inferiority every time I come to Germany, and haveto pause and think by what combination of words I can express the trueGermanic functions and nature of booking offices and bicycle labels. Forit was long ago: Count Bismarck was still looked on as a dangerousupstart, and we reckoned in kreutzers; blue and white Austrian bandsplayed at Mainz and Frankfurt. It was long ago that I was, so to speak, a small German infant, fed on Teutonic romance and sentiment (and alsofunny Teutonic prosaicalness, bless it!) by a dim procession ofGermania's daughters. There was Franziska, who could boast a Rhinelandpastor for grandfather, a legendary pastor bearding Napoleon; Franziska, who read Schiller's "Maria Stuart" and "Joan of Arc, " and even his"Child Murderess" (I remember every word of obloquy hurled at thehangman--"hangman, craven hangman, canst thou not break off a lily") tothe housemaid and me whenever my father and mother went out of anevening; and described "Papagena, " in Mozart's opera which she had seen, all dressed in feathers; and was tempted to strum furtive melancholychords on my mother's zither. .. . Dear Franziska, whose comfortableblond good looks inspired the enamoured upholsterer in letters beginning"My dearest little goldfish"--Franziska, what has become of thee? Andthe Frau Professor, who averred with rhythmic iteration that teachingsuch a child was far, far worse than breaking stones on a high-road; inwhat stony regions may she have found an honoured stony grave? What hasbecome of genial Mme. E. , who played the Jupiter Symphonie with mymother, instead of hearing me through my scales, and lent me volumes ofTonkünstler-Lexikons to soothe her conscience, and gave us honey in thecomb out of her garden of verbena and stocks? But best of all, dearest, far above all the others, and quite different, Marie S. , charmingenthusiastic young schoolmistress in that little town of pepper-pottowers and covered bridges, you I have found again; I shall soon seeyour eyes and hear your voice, quite unchanged, I am certain. And weshall sit and talk (your big daughter listening, perhaps not without anoccasional smile) about those hours which you and I, a girl of twentyand a child of eleven, spent in the little room above the rushing Alpineriver, eating apples and drinking _café au lait_; hours in which awhole world of legend and poetry, and scientific fact and theory morewonderful still, passed from your ardent young mind into the littleeager puzzled one of your loving pupil. We shall meet very soon, alittle awkwardly at first, perhaps, but after a moment talking as if nosilence of thirty years had ever parted us; as if nothing had happenedin between, as if all that might then have come true . .. Well, couldcome true still. 

These thoughts came into my head that morning in the promenade atCassel, brought to the surface by the mellow autumn sun and the specialpleasure of being again in Germany. There mingled with them also thatrecent conversation about the lady with the bonnet from Hanover, who hadwritten that paper so precious to my American friend. And I determinedto take my pen some day I should feel suitably happy, and offer upthanks for all of us to our governesses, to those dear women, dead, dispersed, faded into distance, but not forgotten; our spiritualfoster-mothers who put a few drops of the milk of German kindness, ofGerman simplicity and quaintness and romance, between our lips when wewere children. 

ON GOING TO THE PLAY

We were comparing notes the other day on plays and play-going. My friendwas Irish; so, finding to our joy that we disliked this form ofentertainment equally, we swore with fervour that we would go to theplay together. 

Mankind may be divided into playgoers and not playgoers; and the firstare far more numerous, and also far more illustrious. It evidently is adefect, and perhaps a sign of degeneracy, akin to deafness or toDaltonism, not to enjoy the theatre; not to enjoy it, at least in thereality, when there or just after coming away. For I can enjoy thethought of the play, and the thought of other folks liking it, so longas I am not taken there. There is something pleasant in thinking ofthose brilliant places, full of unrealities, with crowds engulfingthemselves into this light from out of the dreary, foggy streets. Also, of young enthusiastic creatures, foregoing dinner, waiting for hours incheap seats (like Charles and Mary Lamb before they had money to buyrare prints and blue china), with the delight of spending hoardedpennies; all under circumstances of the deepest bodily discomfort. Ileave out of the question the thought of Greek theatres, of thatsemicircle of steps on the top of Fiesole, with, cypresses for sidescenes, and, even now, lyric tragedies more than Æschylean enacted byclouds and winds in the amphitheatre of mountains beyond. I am thinkingof the play as we moderns know it, with a sense of stuffiness as anintegral part. Indeed, that stuffiness is by no means its worst feature. The most thrilling moment, I will confess, which theatres can still giveme is that--but it is really _sui generis_ and ineffable--when, havinggot upstairs, you meet in the narrow lobbies of an old-fashionedplayhouse the tuning of the fiddles and the smell--of gas, glue, heavenknows what glories of yester-year--which, ever since one's babyhood, hascome to mean "the play. " People have expended much genius and more moneyto make theatrical representation transcend imagination; but they cannever transcend that moment in the corridor, _never transcend thatsmell_. 

Here is, most probably, one of my chief motives of dissatisfaction. I donot like the play--the play at the theatre--because it invariably fallsshort of that in my imagination. I make an exception for music; but notfor the visible theatrical accompaniments thereof. Well given on thestage, _Don Giovanni_, for instance, remains but the rather bourgeoisplay of Molière; leave me and the music together, and I promise you thatall the romance and terror and wonder of ten thousand Spains aredistilled into my fancy!

The fact is that, being an appeal to the imagination of others, everyform of literature, every "deed of speech, " as a friend of mine callsit, has a natural stage in the mind of the reader or the listener. Milton, let me point out, makes "gorgeous Tragedy in sceptred pall, "sweep across, not the planks of a theatre, but the scholar's thought ashe sits alone with his book of nights. Neither is this an expression ofconceit. I do not mean that _my_ conception of this, that, or the otheris better, or as good as, what a great actor or a clever manager canset before me. Nothing of the sort; but my conception _is better suitedto me_. Its very vagueness answers, nine times out of ten, to myrepugnance and my preference; and the high lights, the vividly realizedportions emerging from that vagueness, represent _what I like_. Hamletor Portia or Viola and Olivia, exist for me under the evocation of themagician Shakespeare, but formed of recollections, impressions ofplaces, people, and other poets, floating coloured atomies, which have abrooding charm, as being mine; why should they be scared off, replaced, by detailed real personalities who, even if charming, are most likelyalien?

I cannot very well conceive how people enjoy such substitutions. Perhapsthey have more sensitive fancy and warmer sympathies than I; but as tomine, I had rather they were let alone. I can quite understand that itis different with children and with uneducated persons: theirimagination is at once more erratic than ours (less tied by the logicalnecessities of details, less perceptive of these), and, at the sametime, their imagination is not as thoroughly well stocked, and as readyto ignite almost spontaneously, as is ours. Much reading, travelling, much contemplation of human beings, apart from practical reasons, hasgiven even the least creative of us lazy, grown-up folk a power, almosta habit, of imaginative creation; and but a very little, though agenial, pressure will make it act. But children and the people requirestronger stimulus, and require also a field for their imagination towork upon. I can remember the amazing effect, entirely at variance withthe intention, which portions of _Don Quixote_--seen at a circus, of allplaces--made on my mind when I was eight: it did not _realize_ ideas ofchivalry which I had, but, on the contrary, it gave me, from outside, data (such data!) about chivalry on which my thoughts wove ideas themost amazing for many months. Something of the kind, I think, ishappening to that Paris audience, rows and rows of eager heads andseeing eyes, which M. Carrière has painted, just enough visible, in hisusual luminous haze, to give the mood. The stage is not shown: it reallyis in those eyes and faces. It is telling them that there are worldsdifferent from their own; it is opening out perspectives (longer anddeeper than those of wood and cardboard) down which those cabinedthoughts and feelings may henceforth wander. The picture, like M. Carrière's "Morning" in the Luxembourg, is one of the greatest of poeticpictures; and it makes me, at least, understand what the value of thestage must be to hundreds and thousands of people; to _the people_, tochildren, and to those practical natures which, however learned andcultured, seem unable to get imaginative, emotional pleasure without agood deal of help from outward mechanism. 

These are all negative reasons why I dislike the play. But there arepositive ones also. There is a story told by Lamb--or is it Hazlitt?--ofa dear man who could not bear to read _Othello_, because of the dreadfulfate of the Moor and his bride; "Such a noble gentleman! Such a sweetlady!" he would repeat, deeply distressed. The man was notartistic-souled; but I am like him. I know the healing anodyne innarrative, the classic consolation which that kind priest mentioned byRenan offered his congregation: "It took place so long ago that perhapsit never took place at all. " But on the stage, when Salvini puts histerrible, suffused face out of Desdemona's curtains, it is not the past, but the present; there is no lurking hope that it may not be true. And Ido not happen to wish to see such realities as that. Moreover, there arepersons--my Irish friend and I, for instance--who feel abashed at whataffects us as eavesdropping on our part. It is quite right we should bethere to listen to some splendid piece of poetry, Romeo's duet withJuliet, the moonlight quartet of Lorenzo, Jessica, Olivia, and Nerissa, and parts of _Winter's Tale_; things which in musical quality transcendall music. But is it right that we be present at the unpacking of ourneighbour's most private moral properties; at the dreadful laying bareof other folk's sores and nakedness? I wonder sometimes that any of theaudience can look at the stage in company with the rest; the naturalman, one would expect, would have the lights of the pit extinguished, and, if he needs must pry, pry at least unobserved. 

There is, however, an exception: when modern drama, instead of merelysmuggling us, as by an ignominious King Candaules' ring called a theatreticket, to witness what we shouldn't, gives us the spectacle ofdelightful personality, of individual power of soul, in its moreintimate and perfect strength. I feel this sometimes in the case of Mme. Duse; and principally in her "Magda. " This is good to see; as it is goodto see naked muscles, to watch the efforts, the triumphant grace andstrength of an athlete. For in this play of _Magda_ the Duse rivetsinterests, delights not by what she does, but by what she is. The plot, the turn of the action, is of no consequence; it might be all reversed, and most of it omitted. We care not what a creature like this happens tobe doing or suffering; we care for her existence because it means energyand charm. Why not deliberately aim at such effects? Now that the stageis no longer the mere concert-room for magnificent poetry, lyric orepic, it might become what would be consonant with our modernpsychologic tastes, the place where the genius of author or actorallowed us to come in sight, with the fulness and completeness of theintentional and artificial, of those finest spectacles of all, _greattemperaments_. Not merely guess at them, see them by casual glimpses, asin real life; nor reconstruct them by their words and deeds, as inbooks; but actually see them revealed, homogeneous, consecutive, intheir gestures and tones, the whole, the _very being_, of which wordsand acts are but the partial manifestation. Methinks that in this waythe play might add enormously to the suggestiveness, the delight anddignity of life; play-acting might become a substantive art, not a merespoiling of the work of poetry. Methinks that if this happened, orhappened often, my friend and I, who also hates the play. .. . But itseems probable, on careful consideration, that my friend and I areconspicuously devoid of the dramatic faculty; which being the case wehad better not discuss plays and play-going at all. 

READING BOOKS

The chief point to be made in this matter is: that books, to fulfiltheir purpose, do not always require to be read. A book, for instance, which is a present, or an "hommage de l'auteur, " has already served itspurpose, like a visiting-card or a luggage label, at best like aceremonial bouquet; and it is absurd to try and make it serve twiceover, by reading it. The same applies, of course, to books lent withoutbeing asked for, and, in a still higher degree, to a book which has beendiscussed in society, and thus furnished out a due amount ofconversation; to read such a book is an act of pedantry, showingslavishness to the names of things, and lack of insight into their realnature, which is revealed by the function they have been able toperform. Fancy, if public characters had to learn to snuff--a practicehappily abandoned--because they occasionally received gifts of enamelledsnuffboxes from foreign potentates!

But there are subtler sides to this subject, and it is of these I fainwould speak. We are apt to blunt our literary sense by reading far toomuch, and to lessen our capacity for getting the great delights frombooks by making reading into a routine and a drudgery. Of course I knowthat reading books has its utilitarian side, and that we have toconsider printed matter (let me never call it literature!) as the rawmaterial whence we extract some of the information necessary to life. But long familiarity with an illiterate peasantry like the Italian one, inclines me to think that we grossly exaggerate the need of suchbook-grown knowledge. Except as regards scientific facts and the variouspractices--as medicine, engineering, and the like, founded on them--suchknowledge is really very little connected with life, either practical orspiritual, and it is possible to act, to feel, and even to think and toexpress one's self with propriety and grace, while having simply noliterature at all behind one. That this is really no paradox is provedby pointing to the Greeks, who, even in the time of Plato--let alone thetime, whenever that was, of Homer--had not much more knowledge of booksthan my Italian servant, who knows a few scraps of Tasso, possesses a"Book of Dreams; or Key to the Lottery, " and uses the literature I havefoolishly bestowed upon him as blotters in which to keep loose bills, and wherein occasionally to do addition sums. So that the fact seems tobe that reading books is useful chiefly to enable us to wish to readmore books!

How many times does one not feel checked, when on the point of lending abook to what we call uneducated persons, by wondering what earthlytexture of misapprehension and blanks they will weave out of itsallusions and suggestions? And the same is the case of children. Whatfitter reading for a tall Greek goddess of ten than the tale of Cupidand Psyche, the most perfect of fairy stories with us; wicked sisters, subterranean adventures, ants helping to sort seeds, and terribleawaking drops of hot oil spilt over the bridegroom? But when I read toher this afternoon, shall I not see quite plainly over the edge of thebook, that all the things which make it just what it is to me--theindescribable quality of the South, of antiquity and paganism--areutterly missed out; and that, to this divine young nymph, "Cupid andPsyche" is distinguishable from, say, "Beauty and the Beast" only by theunnecessary addition of a lot of heathenish names and the words whichshe does not even want to understand? Hence literature, alas! is, so tospeak, for the literate; and one has to have read a great, great deal inorder to taste the special exquisiteness of books, their marvellousessence of long-stored up, oddly mixed, subtly selected and hundredfolddistilled suggestion. 

But once this state of things reached, there is no need to read much;and every reason for not _keeping up_, as vain and foolish personsboast, "with literature. " Since, the time has come, after planting andgrafting and dragging watering-pots, for flowering and fruition; forbooks to do their best, to exert their full magic. This is the time whena verse, imperfectly remembered, will haunt the memory; and one takesdown the book, reads it and what follows, judiciously breaking off, one's mind full of the flavour and scent. Or, again, talking with afriend, a certain passage of prose--the account of the Lambs going tothe play when young, or the beginning of "Urn Burial, " or a chapter(with due improvised skippings) of "Candide"--comes up in conversation;and one reads it rejoicing with one's friends, feeling the specialrapture of united comprehension, of mind touching mind, like the littlethrill of voice touching voice on the resolving sevenths of the oldduets in thirds. Or even when, remembering some graver page--say thededication of "Faust" to Goethe's dead contemporaries--one fetches thebook and reaches it silently to the other one, not daring to read it outloud. .. . It is when these things happen that one is really getting thegood of books; and that one feels that there really is somethingastonishing and mysterious in words taken out of the dictionary andarranged with commas and semicolons and full stops between them. 

The greatest pleasures of reading consist in re-reading. Sometimesalmost in not reading at all, but just thinking or feeling what thereis inside the book, or what has come out of it, long ago, and passedinto one's mind or heart, as the case may be. I wish to record in thisreference a happy week once passed, at vintage time, in the LowerApennines, with a beautiful copy of "Hippolytus, " bound in white, whichhad been given me, regardless of my ignorance of Greek, by my dearLombard friend who resembles a faun. I carried it about in my pocket;sometimes, at rare intervals, spelling out some word in _mai_ or in_totos_, and casting a glance on the interleaved crib; but more oftenletting the volume repose by me on the grass and crushed mint of thecool yard under the fig tree, while the last belated cicala sawed, andthe wild bees hummed in the ivy flower of the old villa wall. For onceyou know the spirit of a book, there is a process (known to Petrarchwith reference to Homer, whom he was unable to understand) of taking inits charm by merely turning over the pages, or even, as I say, incarrying it about. The literary essence, which is uncommonly subtle, hasvarious modes of acting on us; and this particular manner of absorbing abook's spirit stands to the material operation called _reading_, much inthe same way that _smell_, the act of breathing invisible volatileparticles, stands to the more obvious wholesale process of _taste_. 

Nay, such is the virtuous power of books, that, to those who areinitiated and reverent, it can act from the mere title, or moreproperly, the binding. Of this I had an instance quite lately in thelibrary of an old Jacobite house on the North Tyne. This librarycontained, besides its properly embodied books, a small collectionexisting, so to speak, only in the spirit, or at least in effigy; adoor, to wit, being covered with real book-backs, or, more properly, backs of real books of which the inside was missing. A quaint, delightful collection! "Female traits, " two volumes; four volumes (whatdinners and breakfasts, as well as suppers, of horrors!) of Webster's"Vittoria Corombona, " etc. , the "Siege of Mons, " "Ancient Mysteries, ""The Epigrams of Martial, " "A Journey through Italy, " and Crébillon'snovels. Contemplating these pseudo shelves of pageless tomes, I feltacutely how true it is that a book (for the truly lettered) can do itswork without being read. I lingeringly relished (why did not Johnsongive us a verb to _saporate_?) this mixed literature's flavour, humorous, romantic, and pedantic, beautifully welded. And I recognizedthat those gutted-away insides were quite superfluous: they had yieldedtheir essence and their virtue. 

HEARING MUSIC

"Heard melodies, " said Keats, "are sweet; but those unheard aresweeter. " The remark is not encouraging to performers, yet, saving theirdispleasure, there is some truth in it. 

We give too much importance, nowadays, being busy and idle andmercantile (compatible qualities, alas!) to the material presence ofeverything, its power of filling time or space, and particularly ofbecoming an item of our budget; forgetful that of the very best thingsthe material presence is worthless save as first step to a spiritualexistence within our soul. This is particularly the case with music. There is nothing in the realm of sound at all corresponding to theactual photographing of a visible object on the retina; our auditiveapparatus, whatever its mysteries, gives no sign of being in any way ofthe nature of a phonograph. Moreover, one element of music is certainlydue to the sense of locomotion, the _rhythm_; so that _sound_, to becomemusic, requires the attention of something more than the mere ear. Nay, it would seem, despite the contrary assertion of the learned _Stumpf_, that the greater number of writers on the vexed science of sound inclineto believe that the hearing of music is always attended with movements, however imperceptible, in the throat, which, being true, would provethat, in a fashion, we _perform_ the melodies which we think we only_hear_; living echoes, nerves vibrating beneath the composer's touch asliterally as does the string of the fiddle, or its wooden fibres. A verydelicate instrument this, called the _Hearer_, and, as we all know, moreliable to being out of tune, to refusing to act altogether, than anyinstrument (fortunately for performers) hitherto made by the hand ofman. Thus, in a way, one might paraphrase the answer which Mme. Gabbrielli is said to have made to the Empress Catherine, "YourMajesty's policemen can make me _scream_, not _sing_!" and say to somequeen of piano keys or emperor of _ut de poitrine_ that there is noviolence or blandishment which can secure the _inner ear_, however muchthe outer ear may be solicited or bullied. 

'Tis in this sense, methinks, that we should understand the saying ofKeats--to wit, that in a great many cases the happiest conjunction ofmusic and the soul occurs during what the profane call silence; the veryfact of music haunting our mind, while every other sort of sound may bebattering our ear, showing our highest receptivity. And, as a fact, wedo not know that real musicians, _real_ Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha andAbt Voglers, not written ones, require organs neither of glass nor ofmetal; but build their palaces of sound on a plain deal table with apaper covered with little lines and dots before them? And was notBeethoven, in what some folk consider his mightiest era, as deaf as apost?

I do not advocate deafness. Nay, privately, being quite incapable ofdeciphering a score, I confess that there is something dry and dreary inabsolutely soundless music--music which from the silent composer passesto the silent performer, who is at the same time a silent listener, without the neighbours being even one bit the wiser? Besides, were thisgift universal, it would deprive us of that delightful personality themere performer, whose high-strung nervousness, or opulent joviality, is, after all, a pleasant item in art, a humorous dramatic interlude, in theexcessive spirituality of music. 

I am not, therefore, in favour of absolute silence in the art of sounds. I am only asking people to remember that sound waves and the auditiveapparatus put in connection, even if the connection costs a guinea, isnot enough to secure the real _hearing_ of music; or, if this formulaappear too vulgar, asking them to repeat to themselves those lines ofKeats. I feel sure that so doing would save much of that dreadfulbitterness and dryness of soul, a state of conscious non-receptivitycorresponding in musical experience with what ascetic writers call"spiritual aridity"--which must occasionally depress even the mostfortunate of listeners. For, look in thy conscience, O friendlyfellow-concert-goer, and say truly, hast thou not, many times and oft, sat to no purpose upon narrow seats, blinded by gas, with no outlooksave alien backs and bonnets, while divinest music flowed all around, yet somehow wetted not thy thirsty and irritated soul?

The recognition of this fact would not only diminish such painfulmoments (or rather, alas! _hours_), but would teach us to endure themcheerfully as the preparation for future enjoyment, the garnering forprivate and silent enjoyment. "Heard melodies are sweet, but thoseunheard, " etc. , would act like Joseph's interpretation of the fat andlean kine of Pharaoh; we should consider concerts and musical festivalsas fatiguing, even exhausting, employments, the strain of which wasrendered pleasant by the anticipation of much ease and delight to come. 

Connected with this question is that of amateur performance. The amateurseems nowadays to waste infinite time in vying with the professionalperson instead of becoming acquainted, so to speak, with the composer. It is astonishing how very little music the best amateurs are acquaintedwith, because they must needs perform everything they know. This, inmost cases, is sheer waste, for, in the way of performers, the presentneeds of mankind (as Auguste Comte remarked about philosophers) can beamply met by twenty thousand professionals. And many families would, from a spirit of moderation, forego the possession of an unpaidprofessional in the shape of a daughter or an aunt. One of the chiefuses, indeed, of the professional performers should be to suppressamateurs by furnishing a standard of performance which lovers of musicwould silently apply to the music which formed the daily delight oftheir inner ear. 

For, if we care veraciously for music, we think of it, _or think it_, asit ought to be performed, not as we should ourselves perform it. Nay, more, I feel convinced that truly musical persons, such as can reallyunderstand a master's thoughts, are not distressed by the shortcomingsof their own performance, the notes they play or sing merely serving tosuggest those which they hear. 

This transcendental doctrine (fraught, I confess, like all transcendenttruths, with gravest practical dangers) was matured in my mind byfriendship with one of the most singular of musicians. This person(since deceased, and by profession a clerk) suffered from nervousnessso excessive that, despite a fair knowledge of music, the fact ofputting his hands upon the keys produced a maddening sort of stammer, let alone a notable tendency to strike wrong notes and miss his octaves;peculiarities of which he was so morbidly conscious that it was only anaccident which revealed to me, after years of acquaintance, that he everplayed the piano at all. Yet I know as a fact that this poor blunderingplayer, who stopped convulsively if he heard steps in the passage, andactually _closed the lid of his instrument_ when the maid came in withthe tea-things, was united more closely with the divine ones of musicduring his excruciating performance, than many a listener at a splendidconcert. Mozart, for whom he had a special _cultus_, would surely havefelt satisfied, if his clairvoyant spirit had been abroad, with myfriend's marvellous bungling over that first finale of "Don Giovanni. "The soul, the whole innermost nervous body (which felt of the shape ofthe music, fluid and infinitely sensitive) of the poor creature at thepiano would draw itself up, parade grandly through that minuet, dance itin glory with the most glorious ghosts of glorious ladies--pshaw! notwith anything so trifling! Dance it _with the notes themselves_, wouldsway with them, bow to them, rise to them, live with them, become infact part and parcel of the music itself. .. . 

So, to return whence I began, it is no use imagining that we necessarilyhear music by going to concerts and festivals and operas, exposing ourbodily ear to showers and floods of sound, unless we happen to be in theright humour, unless we dispose, at the moment, of that rare andcapricious thing--the _inner ear_. 

RECEIVING LETTERS

I think I shall not treat of writing them. That is a different matter, with pains and pleasures of its own, which do not correspond (the wordfits nicely to this subject) with those of letters received. For 'tis ametaphysical mistake, or myth of language, like those victoriouslyexposed by the ingenious _M. Tarde_, to regard the reading of a letteras the symmetrical opposite (the right glove matching the left, or_inside of an outside_) of the writing thereof. Save in the case oflovers or moonstruck persons, like those in Emerson's essay on"Friendship, " the reading of a letter is necessarily less potent, and, as the French say, _intimate_, in emotion, than the writing of it. Indeed, we catch ourselves repeatedly thrusting into our pocket forperusal at greater leisure those very letters which poured out likeburning lava from their writers, or were conned over lovingly, lingeringly altered and rewritten; and we wonder sometimes at our lackof sympathy and wonder also (with cynicism or blushes) whether ourletters also, say that one of Tuesday----But no; _our_ letters are notegoistical. .. . 

The thought is not one to be dwelt on in an essay, which is nothing ifit is not pleasing. So I proceed to note also that pleasure at thecontents has nothing to do with the little excitement of the arrivalof the post-bag, or of watching the clerk's slow evolutions at a_poste restante_ window. That satisfaction is due to the mere moment'shope for novelty, the flash past of the outer world, and thecomfortable sense of having a following, friends, relatives, clients;and it is in proportion to the dulness of our surroundings. Greatstatesmen or fortunate lovers, methinks, must turn away from aunts'and cousins' epistles, and from the impression of so and so up theNile, or on first seeing Rome. Indeed, I venture to suggest that onlythe monotony of our forbears' lives explains the existence of thoseendless volumes of dreary allusions and pointless anecdote handeddown to us as the Correspondence of Sir Somebody This, or of thebeautiful Countess of That, or even of Blank, that prince ofcoffee-house wits. The welcome they received in days when (as isrecorded by Scott) the mail occasionally arrived at Edinburgh carryingonly one single letter, has given such letters a reputation fordelightfulness utterly disconnected with any intrinsic merit, butwhich we sycophantishly accept after a hundred or two hundred years, handing it on with hypocritical phrases about "quaintness, " and "vividpicture of the past, " and similar nonsense. But the Wizard Past castswonderful spells. And then there is the tenderness and piety due tothose poor dead people, once strutting majestically in power, beauty, wit, or genius; and now left shivering, poor, thin, transparent ghostsin those faded, thrice-crossed paper rags! I feel rebuked for myinhuman irreverence. Out upon it! I will speak only pious words aboutthe letters of dead folk. 

But, to make up for such good feeling, let me say what I think about theletters of persons now living, in good health, my contemporaries andvery liable to outlive me. For if I am to praise the letters which mysoul loves, I must be plain also about those which my soul abhors. 

And to begin with the worst. The letter we all hate most, I feel quitesure, is the nice letter of a person whom we think horrid. Some beingshave the disquieting peculiarity, which crowns their other badqualities, of being able to write more pleasingly than they speak, look, or (we suppose) act; revealing, pen in hand, human characteristics, sometimes alas! human charms, high principle, pathetic sentiment, poeticinsight, sensitiveness to nature, things we are bound to love, butparticularly do not wish to love in _them_. This villainous faculty, which puts us in a rage and forces us to be amiable, is almost enough tomake us like, or at all events condone, its contrary in our own dearfriends. I mean that marvellous transformation to which so many of thosewe love are subject; creatures, supple, subtle and sympathetic in theflesh, in speech and glance and deed, becoming stiff, utterly imperviousand heartless once they set to writing; lovely Melusinas turning, notinto snakes, but into some creature like a dried cod. This is muchworse with persons of our nation than with our foreign friends, owing tothat fine contempt for composition, grammar, and punctuation which marksthe well-bred Briton, and especially the well-bred Briton's wife anddaughter. As a result, there is a positive satisfaction, a sense ofvoluminous well-being, derived from a letter which is merely explicit, consecutive, and garnished with occasional stops. This question ofpunctuation is a serious one. Speaking personally, I find I cannot enjoythe ineffable sense of resting in the affection and wisdom of my friend, if I am jerked breathless from noun to noun and from verb to verb, orset hunting desperately after predicates. Worse even is the lack ofexplicitness. The peace and trustfulness, the respite given byfriendship from what Whitman calls "the terrible doubt of appearances"are incompatible with brief and casual utterance, ragbags of items, where you have to elucidate, weigh, and use your judgment whether more(or less) is meant than meets the eye; and after whose perusal you areleft for hours, sometimes days, patching together suggestions andwondering what they suggest. Some persons' letters seem almost framedto afford a series of _alibis_ for their personality; not in this thing, oh no! not concerned in such a matter by any means; always elsewhere, never to be clutched. 

Yet there are bitterer things in letters from friends than even these, which merely puzzle and distress, but do not infuriate. For I feelcheated by casual glimpses of affairs which concern me not; I resent oddscraps of information, not chosen for my palate; I am indignant at newsculled from the public prints, and frantic at thermometric andmeteorological intelligence. But stay! There is a case when what seemsto come under this heading is really intensely personal, and, therefore, most welcome to the letter receiver. I mean whenever, as happens withsome persons, such talk about the weather reveals the real writing soulin its most intimate aspect; wrestling with hated fogs, or prone in thedampish heat, fretted by winds or jubilant in dry, sunny air. And now Ifind that with this item of weather reports, I am emerging from theregion of letters I abhor into the region of letters which I love, orwhich I lovingly grieve over for some small minor cruelty. 

For I am grieved--nay, something more--by that extraordinary (and Ihope exclusively feminine) fact an absence of superscripture. My soulclaims some kind of vocative. I would accept a German note ofexclamation; I would content myself with an Italian abbreviation, aPreg^mo, or Chiar^mo; I could be happy with a solemn and discreetFrench "Madame et chère amie, " or (as may happen) "Monsieur et cherMaître, " like the bow with tight-joined heels and _platbord_ hatpressed on to waistcoat, preluding delightful conversation. But not tobe quite sure how one is thought of! Whether as _dear_, or _my dear_, or Tom, Dick, or Harry, or soldier, or sailor, or candlestick maker!Nay, at the first glance, not quite to know whether one is thedestined reader, or whether even there is a destined reader at all; tobe offered an entry out of a pocket-book, a page out of a diary, aselection of _Pensées_, were they Pascal's; a soliloquy, were itHamlet's: surely lack of sympathy can go no further, nor incapacity ofeffort be more flagrant than with such writers, usually the very onesthe reader most clings to, who put off, as it seems, until directingthe envelope, the question of whom they are writing to. 

Yet the annoyance they give one is almost compensated when, once in ablue moon, in such a superscription-less epistle, one lights upon asentence very exclusively directed to one's self; when suddenly out ofthe vague _tenebrae_ of such a letter, there comes, retreating assuddenly, a glance, a grasp, a clasp. It seems quite probable that youngEndymion, in his noted love passages with the moon, may have hadoccasionally supreme felicity of this kind, in a relation otherwise ofpainfully impersonal and public nature; when, to wit, the goddess, aftershining night after night over the seas and plains and hills, occasionally shot from behind a cloud one little gleam, one arrow oflight, straight on to Latmos. 

But, alack! as Miss Howe wrote to the immortal Clarissa, my paper is atan end, my crowquill worn to the stump. So I can only add as postscriptto such of my dear friends as write the letters which my soul abhors, that I hope, beg, entreat they will at least write them to me often. 

NEW FRIENDS AND OLD

There is not unfrequently a spice of humiliation hidden in the richcordial pleasure of a new friendship, and I think Emerson knew it. Without beating about the bush as he does, one might explain it, methinks, not merely as a vague sense of disloyalty towards the otherfriendships which are not new; but also as a shrewd suspicion (though wehide it from ourselves) that this one also will have to grow old in itsturn. And we have not yet found out how to treat any of our possessions, including our own selves, in such a way that they shall, if anything, improve. Despite our complicated civilization, so called, or perhaps onaccount of it, we are all of us a mere set of barbarians, who find itless trouble to provide a new, cheap, and shoddy thing than to get thefull use and full pleasure of a finely-made and carefully-chosen oldone. Those ghastly paper toilettes of the ladies in "Looking Backward"are emblematic of our modes of proceeding. We are for ever dressing andundressing our souls, if not our bodies, in rags made out of rags. 

Heaven forbid that I should ever blaspheme new friendships! They areamong the most necessary as well as the most delightful things we get achance of. They do not merely exhilarate, but actually renew and add tous, more even than change of climate and season. We are (luckily forevery one) such imitative creatures that every person we like much, addsa new possible form, a new pattern, to our understanding and ourfeeling; making us, through the pleasantness of novelty, see and feel alittle as that person does. And when, instead of _liking_ (which is theverb belonging rather to good acquaintance, accidental relationship asdistinguished from real friendship), it is a case of _loving_ (in thesense in which we really love a place, a piece of music, or even, veryoften, an animal), there is something more important and excellent eventhan this. For every creature we do really love seems to reveal a wholeside of life, by the absorbing of our attention into that creature'sways; nay, more, the fact that what we call _loving_ is in most cases acomplete creation, at least a thorough interpretation of them by ourfancy and our shaken-up, refreshed feelings. 

A new friendship, by this unconscious imitation of the new friend'snature and habits, and by the excitement of the thing's pleasantnovelty, causes us to discover new qualities in literature, art, oursurroundings, ourselves. How different does the scenery look--stillfamiliar but delightfully strange--as we drive along the valleys orscramble in the hills with the new friend! there is a distant peak onenever noticed, or a scented herb which has always grown upon thoserocks, but might as well never have done so, but for the other pair ofeyes which drew ours to it, or the other hand which crushing made usknow its fragrance. Pages of books, seemingly stale, revive into freshmeaning; new music is almost certain to be learned; and a harmony, arational sequence, something very akin to music, perceived in what hadbeen hitherto but a portion of life's noise and confusion. The changesof style which we note in the case of great geniuses--Goethe andSchiller, for instance, or Ruskin after his meeting with Carlyle--areoften brought about, or prepared, by the accident of a new friendship;and, who knows? half of the disinterested progress of the world'sthought and feeling might prove, under the moral microscope, to be but amoving web of invisible friendships, forgotten, but once upon a timenew, and so vivid!

The falling off from such pleasure and profit in older friendships (itis very sad, but not necessarily cynical to recognize the fact) is duein some measure to our being less frank, less ourselves, in them than innew ones. Our mutual ways of feeling and seeing are apt to produce adefinite track of intellectual and affective intercourse; and as thistrack deepens we find ourselves confined, nay, imprisoned in it, withlittle possibility of seeing, and none of escaping, as in some sunkenDevonshire lane; the very ups and downs of the friendship existing, soto speak, below the level of our real life; disagreements andreconciliations always on one pattern. With people we have known verylong, we are apt to go thus continually over the same ground, recitingthe same formulæ of thought and feeling, imitating the _ego_ of formeryears in its relations with a _thou_ quite equally obsolete; the realpersonality left waiting outside for the chance stranger. It is so easy!so safe! We have done it so long! There is an air of piety almost in themonotony and ceremonial; and then, there are the other's habits ofthought which might be jarred, or feelings we might hurt. .. . Meanwhileour sincere, spontaneous reality is idling elsewhere, ready to vagabondirresponsibly at the beck and call of the passing stranger. And, whoknows? while we are thus refusing to give our poor old friend thebenefit of our genuine, living, changed and changing self, we mayourselves be losing the charm and profit of his or her renovated andmore efficacious reality. 

The retribution sometimes comes in unexpected manner. We find ourselvesneglected for some new-comer, thin of stuff, to-morrow threadbare; _we_, who are conscious all the time of a newness too well hidden, alas! anewness utterly unsuspected by our friend, and far surpassing thenewness of the new one! Poetic justice too lamentable to dwell upon. But short of it, far short, our old friendships, with their safetraditions and lazy habits, are ever tending to become the intercourseof friendly ghosts. 

Yet even this is well worth having, and after bringing praise to youngerfriendships, let me for ever feel, rather than speak (for 'tis too deepand wide for words) befitting gratitude to old ones. For there is alwayssomething puzzling in the present; unrestful and disquieting in allnovelty; and we require, poor harassed mortals, the past and lots of it;the safe, the done-for past, a heap of last year's leaves or of dry, scented hay (which is mere dead grass and dead meadow-flowers) to takeour rest upon. There is a virtue ineffable in things known, tried, understood; a comfort and a peacefulness, often truly Elysian, infinding one's self again in this quiet, crepuscular, downy world of oldfriendships--a world, as I have remarked, largely peopled with ghosts, our own and other folks'; but ghosts whose footsteps never creak, whosetouch can never startle, or whose voice stab us, and who smile a smilewhich has the wide, hazy warmth of setting suns or veiled October skies. Yes, whatever they may lack (through our own fault and folly), oldfriendships are made up of what, when all is said and done, we needabove every other thing, poor faulty, uncertain creatures that we are--Imean kindness and certain indulgence. There is more understanding in newfriendships, and a closer contact of soul with soul; but that contactmay mean a jar, a bruise, or, worst of all, a sudden sense of icy chill;and the penetrating comprehension may entail, at any moment, painedsurprise and disappointment. Making new friends is not merelyexploration, but conquest; and what cruel checks to our wishes andambitions!

Instead of which, all vanity long since put to sleep, curiosity extinctfor years, insidious pleasures of self-explanation quite forgotten, there remains this massive comfort of well-known faithful and trustingkindness; a feeling of absolute reassurance almost transcending thehuman, such as we get from, let us say, an excellent climate. 

There remain, also, joys quite especial to old friendship, or thepossibility thereof, for the reality, alas! is rare enough. The suddendiscovery, for instance, after a period of separation or a gap inintercourse, of qualities and ways not previously seen (perhaps notpreviously wanted) in the well-known soul: new notes, but with the addedcharm of likeness to already loved ones, deeper, more resonant, orperhaps of unsuspected high unearthly purity, in the dear voice. Absencemay do it, or change of occupation; or sudden vicissitude of fortune; ormerely the reading of a certain book (how many friends may not Tolstoi's"Resurrection" have thus revealed to one another!), or the passing ofsome public crisis like the Dreyfus business. What! after these years offamiliarity, we did not know each other fully? You thought, you felt, like that on such or such a subject, dear old friend, and I neversuspected it! Nay, never knew, perhaps, that _I_ must feel and thinklike that, and in no other way! To find more in what one already has;the truest adding to all wealth, the most fruitful act ofproduction;--that is one of the privileges of old friendships. 

OTHER FRIENDSHIPS

It came home to me, during that week of grim and sordid business in theold house, feeling so solitary among the ghosts of unkind passions whichseemed, like the Wardour Street ancestors, to fill the place--it camehome to me what consolation there can be in the friendship of one smallcorner of grace or beauty. During those dreary days in Scotland, thefriendliness and consolation were given me by the old kitchen garden, with its autumn flower borders, half hiding apple trees and big cabbagesand rhubarbs, and the sheep-dotted hill, and the beeches sloping aboveits red fruit walls. I slipped away morning and evening to it as to afriend. Not as to an old one; that would give a different aspect to thematter; nor yet exactly a new friend, conquering or being conquered; butrather as one turns one's thoughts, if not one's words, to somenameless stranger, casually met, in whom one recognizes, among thegeneral wilderness of alien creatures, a quality, a character for whichone cares. 

Travelling a good deal, and nearly always alone, one has occasion togauge the deep dreariness of human beings pure and simple, when, so tospeak, the small, learnt-by-rote lessons of civilization, of kindness, graciousness, or intelligence, are not being called into play by commonbusiness or acquaintanceship. There, in the train, they sit in theelemental, native dreariness of their more practical, ungracious demandon life; not bad in any way, oh no; nor actively repulsive, but trite, empty, _everyday_, in the sense of what _everyday_ often, alas! reallyis, but certainly no day or hour or minute, in a decent universe, shouldever be. And suddenly a new traveller gets in; and, turning round, yourealize that things are changed, that something from another planet, andyet something quite right and so familiar, has entered. A young manshabbily dressed in mourning, who got in at a junction in NorthernFrance with a small girl, like him in mourning, and like him pale, alittle washed-out ashy blond, and with the inexpressible moral gracewhich French folk sometimes have, will always remain in my memory; whileall those fellow-travellers and all the others--hundreds of them sincethat day--have faded from my memory, their images collapsing into eachother, a grey monotony as of the rows of little houses which unfurl andfurl up, and vanish, thank the Lord, into nothingness, while the expressswishes past some dreadful manufacturing town. Another time, some yearsago, the unknown friend was a small boy, a baby almost, jumping androlling (a practice intolerable in any child but him) on the seat of asecond-class carriage. We did not speak; in fact my friend had barelyacquired the necessary art. But I felt companioned, befriended, delivered of the world's crowded solitude. 

Apart from railway trains, a similar thing may sometimes happen. Andthere are few of us, surely, who do not possess, somewhere in theirlife, friends of the highest value whom they have barely known--met withonce or twice perhaps, talked with, and for some reason not met again;but never lost sight of by heart and fancy--indeed, more often turnedto, and perhaps more deeply trusted (as devout persons trust St. Josephand St. Anthony of Padua, whom, after all, they scarcely know more thantheir own close kindred) than so many of, ostensibly, our nearest anddearest. Indeed, this is the meaning of that curious little poem ofWhitman's--"Out of the rolling ocean, the crowd, came a drop gently tome"--with its Emersonian readiness to part, "now we have met, we aresafe;" a very wise view of things, if our poor human weakness reallywanted safety, and did not merely want "more"--indeed, like that humanlittle boy, want "too much. "

But to return to the friendships, consoling, comforting intimacies, which we can have not merely with strangers never met again, or never, meeting, spoken with; but even more satisfactorily with those belovedones whom, from our own lack of soul, of _anima_ drawing forth _anima_, we dully call inanimates. I am not speaking, of course, of the realpassions with which exceptionally lovely or wonderful spots ormonuments, views of distant Alps, or certain rocky southern coasts, orSt. Mark's or Amiens Cathedral, great sirens among voiceless things, subjugate and draw our souls. The friendships in question are sober anddeliberate, founded on reasonable recognition of some trait of dignityor grace; and matured by conscious courtship on our part, retracing ofsteps day by day, and watching the friend's varying moods at noon orunder low lights. During that week in the grim Scottish ancestral house, it was the kitchen-garden, as I began by saying, which comforted me. Inanother place, where I was ill and sorely anxious, a group of slender, whispering poplars by a mill; and under different, but equallyharassing, circumstances, the dear little Gothic church of a tiny townof Western France. 

The Gothic church on its rising ground above the high-pitched roofs, and, in a measure, the church's white tame goat, which I found there onemorning under a lime tree. I had been overtaken by a sudden storm, therain-floods dashing from the gargoyles on to the rough ground of thesolitary, wooded mound. In the faint light the little church, withsparse oak leaves and dock delicately carved on the granite capitals, was wonderfully grave and gentle in its utter emptiness; and I did itall possible honour. There is a low granite bench or sill round thebase of the beautiful sheaved columns; a broken, disused organ-loft ofcoloured mediæval thorn carving; and under two shapely little arches liea knight, unknown, and lady in high coif. .. . I knew it all by heart, coming like that every day and sometimes twice a day; by heart, and, soto speak, _with_ my heart. The sound of the spouting gargoyles ceased;cocks began to crow; I went out, for the rain must have left off. .. . Notyet; the skies were still dripping, and the plain below full of vapours. And the tame white goat, the only living creature about the church, hadtaken refuge under a cart stranded by a large lime tree. 

I mention this particular visit to my friend the church of L----, inorder to explain the precise nature of our friendship; and to show, as Ithink it does, that through that law of economy which should presideover our pleasures and interests, such intimacy with a single object, simple and unobtrusive, is worth the acquaintance with a hundred and onemagnificent and perfect things, if superficially seen and without lovingcare. 

A HOTEL SITTING-ROOM

I am calling this paper after a hotel sitting-room because some of one'smost recurrent and definite trains of thought are most hopelesslyobstinate about getting an intelligible name, so that I take advantageof this one having been brought to a head in a real room of the kind. The room was on a top floor in Florence; the Cupola and Campanile andother towers in front of it above the plum-coloured roofs; and beyond, the bluish mountains of Fiesole. Trams were puffing about in the squarebelow, and the church bells ringing, and the crowd streaming to thepromenade; but only the unchanging and significant life of the townseemed to matter up here. I was struck with the charm of such a hotelroom--the very few ornaments, greatly cherished since they were carriedabout; the books for reading, not for furniture; the bought flowers incommon glasses; and the consequent sense of selection, deliberateness, and personality. Good heavens, I reflected, are we mortals socross-grained that we can thoroughly enjoy things only by contrast, andthat a sort of mild starvation is needed to whet our æsthetic appetite?

By no means. Contrast for contrast's sake is a very coarse stimulant, and required only by very joyless natures. The real explanation of thecharm of the hotel room and its sparse properties and flowers must besought, I believe, in the fact that the charm of things depends upon ourpower of extracting it; and that our power in this matter, as in everyother, nay, our leisure to exert it, is necessarily limited. Things, asI before remarked, do not give themselves without some wooing; andcourtship is the secret of true possession. The world outside us, asphilosophers tell us, is not what our eyes, ears, and touch and tastemake it appear; nay, for aught we know, 'tis a mere chaos; and if, outof the endless impressions with which outer objects keep pelting us, wemanage to pick up and appropriate a few, setting them in a pattern ofmeaning and beauty, it is thanks to the activity of our own speciallittle self. That is the gist of Kant's philosophy; and, apart fromKant, it is the vague practical knowledge which experience teaches us. Hence the disappointment of all such persons as think that the beautifuland significant things of the world ought to give them delight withoutany trouble on their part: they think that it is the fault of a Swissmountain, or a Titian Madonna, or a poem by Browning if it does not atonce ravish their inert souls into a seventh heaven. Yet these arepeople who occasionally ride, or play at golf or whist, and who neverexpect the cards and the golf clubs to play the game by themselves, northe very best horse to carry them to some destination without riding. Now, beautiful and interesting things also require a deal of riding, ofplaying with; let us put it more courteously--of wooing. 

The hotel room I have spoken of reveals the fact that we usually havefar too many pleasant things about us, to be able to extract muchpleasure from any of them; while, of course, somebody else, at the otherend of the world let us say, or merely in the mews to the back, has sovery much too little as to have none at all, which is another way ofdiminishing possible enjoyment. There seems, moreover, to be a certainqueer virtue in mere emptiness, in mere negation. We require a _margin_ of_nothing_ round everything that is to charm us; round our impressions aswell as round the material objects which can supply them; for without itwe lose all outline, and begin to feel vaguely choked. 

Compare the pleasure of a picture tucked away in a chapel or sacristywith the plethoric weariness of a whole Louvre or National Gallery. Nay, remember the vivid delight of some fine bit of tracery round a singledoor or window, as in the cathedral of Dol or the house of Tristanl'Hermite at Tours; or of one of those Ionic capitals which yousometimes find built into quite an uninteresting house in Rome (there isone almost opposite St. Angelo, and another near Tor dei Specchi, Towerof the Mirrors, delightful name!). 

That question of going to see the thing, instead of seeing it drearilyamong ten thousand other things equally lovely--O wearinessunparalleled of South Kensington or Cluny!--that question of theagreeable little sense of deliberate pilgrimage (pilgrimage to a smallshrine perhaps in one's memory), leads me to another explanation ofwhat I must call the "hotel room phenomenon. "

I maintain that there is a zest added to one's pleasure in beautifulthings by the effort and ingenuity (unless too exhausting) expended ineliminating the impressions which might detract from them. One likes thehotel room just because some of the furniture has been sent away intothe passage or wheeled into corners; one enjoys pleasant thingsadditionally for having arranged them to advantage in one's mind. It isjust the reverse with the rooms in a certain palace I sometimes have theprivilege of entering, where every detail is worked--furniture, tapestries, embroideries, majolica, and flowers--into an overwhelmingWagner symphony of loveliness. There is a genuine Leonardo in one ofthose rooms, and truly I almost wish it were in a whitewashed lobby. Andin coming out of all that perfection I sometimes feel a kind of reliefon getting into the empty, uninteresting street. My thoughts, somehow, fetch a long breath. .. . 

These are not the sentiments of the superfine. But then I venture tothink that the dose of fineness which is, so to speak, _super_ or _toomuch_, just turns these folks' refinement into something its reverse. People who cannot sleep because of the roseleaf in the sheets, or thepea (like the little precious princess) under the mattress, are badsleepers, and had better do charing or climbing, or get pummelled by amasseur till they grow healthier. And if ever I had the advising ofyoung folk with ambition to be æsthetic, I should conjure them tocultivate their sensitiveness only to good things, and atrophy ittowards the inevitable bad; or rather I should teach them to push intocorners (or altogether get rid of) the irrelevant and trivialimpressions which so often are bound to accompany the most delightfulones; very much as those occupants of the hotel room had done withsome of its furniture. What if an electric tram starts from the footof Giotto's tower, or if four-and-twenty Cook's tourists invade theinn and streets of Verona? If you cannot extract some satisfactionfrom the thought that there may be intelligent people even in a Cook'sparty, and that the ugly tram takes hundreds of people up Fiesolehill without martyrizing cab-horses--if you cannot do this (whichstill is worth doing), overlook the Cook's tourists and the tram, blotthem out of your thoughts and feelings. 

This question of _superfineness_ versus _refinement_ (which ought tomean the power of refining things through our feeling) has carried meaway from the original theme of my discourse, which, under the symbol ofthe hotel room, was merely that we should _perhaps appreciate more if wewere offered less to appreciate_. Apropos of this, I have long beenstruck by the case of a dear Italian friend of mine, whose keenness ofperception and grip of judgment and unexpectedness of fancy is almost ininverse proportion to her knowledge of books or opportunity of travel. An invalid, cut off from much reading, and limited to monotonousto-and-fro between a town which is not a great town and a hillsidevillage which is not a--not a great village; she is quite marvellouslydelightful by her power of assimilating the little she can read andobserve, not merely of transmuting _it_ into something personal andracy, but (what is much more surprising) of being modified harmoniouslyby its assimilation; her rich and unexpected mind putting forth evenricher and more unexpected details. Whereas think of Tom, Dick, orHarry, their natural good parts watered down with other folks' notions, their imagination worn threadbare by the friction of experience; men whoought to be so amusing, and alas!. .. 

And now, having fulfilled my programme, as was my duty, let me return tomy pleasure, which, at this moment (and whenever the opportunitypresents itself) consists in falling foul of the superfine. Thesuperfine are those who deserve (and frequently attain) the condition ofthat Renaissance tyrant who lived exclusively on hard-boiled eggs(without salt) for fear of poison. The superfine are those who will noteat walnuts because of the shell, and are pained that Nature should havebeen so coarse as to propagate oranges through pips. The superfineare. .. . But no. Let us be true to our principle of not neglecting thedelightful things of this world by fixing our too easily hypnotized gazeon the things which are not delightful--disagreeable things whichshould be examined only with a view to their removal; or if they proveobstinate fixtures in our reality, be all the more resolutely turned outof the sparsely-furnished, delectable chambers of our fancy. 

IN PRAISE OF COURTSHIP

There is too little courtship in the world. I do not mean there is notenough marrying and giving in marriage, or that the preliminariesthereunto are otherwise than they should be. Quite the reverse. As longas there is love and youth, there is sure in the literal sense to becourtship. But what I ask is that there be courtship besides thatliteral courtship between the Perditas and Florizels; that there be"being in love" with a great many things, even stocks and stones, besides youth and maiden; which would result, on the whole, in all of usbeing young in feeling even when we had grown old in years. 

For courtship means a wish to stand well in the other person's eyes, and, what is more, a readiness to be pleased with the other's ways; asense on each side of having had the better of the bargain; anundercurrent of surprise and thankfulness at one's good luck. 

There is not enough courtship in the world. This thought has beengrowing in my mind ever since the silver wedding of two dear friends:that quarter of a century has been but a prolonged courtship. 

Why is it not oftener so? One sees among married folk a good deal ofaffection, of kindliness, even of politeness; a great deal too muchmutual dependence, degenerating, of course, into habitual boredom. Butnone of this can be called courtship. Perhaps this was the meaning, lesscynical than supposed, but quite as sad, of La Rochefoucauld when henoted down, "Il y a de bons mariages, mais point de délicieux;" since, in the delicate French sense of the word, implying some analogy ofsubdued yet penetrating pleasantness, as of fresh, bright weather orfine light wine, courtship is essentially _délicieux_. 

This is, of course, initiating a question of manner. Modern psychologyis discovering scientific reasons for the fact that if you wag a dog'stail he feels pleased; or, at all events, that the human being wouldfeel pleased if it had a tail and could wag it. Confessors and nursesknew it long ago, curbing bad temper by restraining its outermanifestations; and are not dinners and plays, flags and illuminations, birthdays and jubilees--nay, art itself, devices for suggestions tomankind that it feels pleased?

Married people, as a rule, wish not to be pleased, or at least not toshow it. They may be heartbroken at each other's death, and unable toendure a temporary separation; but the outsider may wonder why, seeinghow little they seem to care for being together. It is the same, afterall, with other relations; and it is only because brothers and sisters, fathers and children have not taken visible steps to select one anotherthat their bored indifference is less conspicuous. You will say it is aquestion of mere manner. But, as remarked, manner not merely resultsfrom feeling, but largely reacts on feeling, and makes it different. People who live together have the appearance, often, of taking eachother, if not as a convenience, at all events as a _fait accompli_, and, so far as possible, as if not there at all. Near relations try torealize the paradox of companionable solitude; and intimacy seems toimply the right to behave as if the intimate other one were not there. Now, _being by one's self_ is a fine thing, convenient and salutary(indeed, like courtship, there is not enough of it); but being by one'sself is not to be confounded with _not being in company_. I haveselected that expression advisedly, in order to give a shock to thereader. _In company?_ Good heavens! is being with one's wife, one'sbrothers or sisters, one's children, one's bosom friends _being incompany_? And why not? Should company necessarily mean the company ofstrangers? And is the presence of one's nearest and dearest to beaccounted as nothing--as nothing demanding some change in ourselves, andworthy of being paid some price for?

This goes against our notion of intimacy; but then our notion is wrong, as is shown daily by the quarrels and recriminations of intimatefriends. One can be natural, _with a difference_, which difference meansa thought for the other. There is a selection possible in one's wordsand actions before another--nay, there is a manner of doing and feelingwhich almost forestalls the necessity of a selection at all. I like theexpression employed by a certain sister after nursing her small brotherthrough a difficult illness, "We were always Castilian, " she said. Why, as we all try to be honest, and hard-working, and clever, and more orless illustrious, should we not sometimes try to be a little Castilian?Similarly, my friend of the silver wedding once pointed out to me thatmarriage, with its enforced and often excessive intimacies, was awonderful school of consideration, of mutual respect, of fine courtesy. This had been no paradox in her case; but then, as I said, hertwenty-five years of wedlock had been years of courtship. 

Courtship, however, should not be confined to marriage, nor even to suchrelations as imply close quarters and worries in common; nay, it shouldexist towards all things, a constant attitude in life--at least, anattitude constantly tended towards. 

The line of least resistance seems against it; our laziness, and ourwish to think well of ourselves merely because we _are_ ourselves, undoubtedly go against it, as they do against everything in the worldworth having. In our own day certain ways of thinking, culminating indevelopment of the _Moi_ and production of the _Uebermensch_, andgeneral self-engrossment and currishness, are peculiarly hostile tocourtship. Whereas the old religious training, where it did notdegenerate into excessive asceticism, was a school of good mannerstowards the universe as well as towards one's neighbours. The "Fiorettidi San Francisco" is a handbook of polite friendliness to men, women, birds, wolves, and, what must have been most difficult, fellow-monks;and St. Francis' Hymn to the Sun might be given as an example of thewise man's courtship of what we stupidly call inanimates. 

For courtship might be our attitude towards everything which is capableof giving pleasure; and would not many more things give us pleasure--letus say, the sun in the heavens, the water on the stones, even the firein the grate, if, instead of thinking of them as existing merely to makeour life bearable, we called them, like the saint of Assisi, My Lord theSun, and Sister Water, and Brother Fire, and thought of them with joyand gratitude?

Certain it is that everything in the world repays courtship; and that, quite outside all marrying and giving in marriage, in all our dealingswith all possible things, the cessation of courtship marks the incipientnecessity for divorce. 

KNOWING ONE'S MIND

The only things which afforded me any pleasure in that great collectionof Ingres drawings, let alone in that very dull, frowsy, stale, andunprofitable city of Montauban, whither I had travelled on purpose tosee it, were an old printed copy of "Don Juan oder der SteinerneGast"--in a glass case alongside of M. Ingres' century-long-uncleanedfiddle--and a half-page of Mozart's autograph, given to M. Ingres when astudent by a Prix de Rome musician. I mentioned this fact to my friends, in a spirit of guileless truthfulness; when, what was my surprise at thestory being received with smiling incredulity. "Your paradox, " theysaid, with the benevolent courtesy of their nation, for they wereFrench, "is delightful and most _réussi_. But, of course, we know you tobe exquisitely sensitive to genius in all its manifestations. "

Now, I happened to know myself to be as insensible as a stone to geniusas manifested in the late M. Ingres. However, I despaired of persuadingthem that I was speaking the truth; and, despite the knowledge of theirlanguage with which they graciously credited me, I hunted about in vainfor the French equivalent of "I know my own mind. " Whereupon, allowingthe conversation to take another turn, I fell to musing on thoseuntranslatable words, together with the whole episode of the Mozartmanuscript and the drawings of M. Ingres, including that rainy, chillyday at Montauban; and also another day of travel, even wetter andcolder, which returned to my memory. 

_Knowing one's own mind_ (in whatever way you might succeed in turningthat into French) is a first step to filling one's own place instead oflittering unprofitably over creation at large, and in so far also todoing one's own work. Life, I am willing to admit, is not all privategarden, nor should we attempt to make it. 'Tis nine-tenths common acres, which we must till in company, and with mutual sacrifice of our whims. Nay, Life is largely public thoroughfares with a definite _rule of theroad_ and a regulated pace of traffic; streets, at all events, howevernarrow, where each must shovel snow, sprinkle water, and sweep histhreshold. But respect for such common property cannot be genuine wherethere is not a corresponding fidelity and fondness on the part of eachfor his own little enclosure, his garden, and, by analogy, hisneighbour's garden also. There is little good to be got from your vague, gregarious natures, liking or disliking merely because others like ordislike. There cannot be much loving-kindness, let alone love (whetherfor persons or things or ideas), in souls which always require company, and prefer any to none at all. And as to good work, why, it means_tête-à-tête_ with what you are doing, and is incompatible with thespirit of picnics. I own to a growing suspicion of those often heroicand saintly persons who allow their neighbours--husband, father, mother, children--to saunter idly into the allotments which God has given them, trampling heedlessly the delicate seedlings, or, like holiday trippers, carving egoistic initials in growing trees not of their own planting. And one of the unnoticed, because continuous, tragedies of existence issurely such wanton or deliberate destruction of the individualqualities of the soul, such sacrifice of the necessary breathing andstanding place which even the smallest requires; such grudging of theneedful solitude and separateness, alas! often to those that we love thebest. It seems highly probable that among all their absurd andmelancholy recollections of this wasteful and slatternly earth, thedenizens of the Kingdom of Heaven will look back with most astonishmentand grief on the fact of having lived, before regeneration, without aroom apiece. 

In the Kingdom of Heaven every one will have a separate room for restand meditation; a cell perhaps, whitewashed, with a green shutter and awhite dimity curtain in the sunshine. And the cells will, of course, bevery much alike in all essentials, because most people agree abouthaving some sort of bed, table, chair, and so forth. But some glorifiedsouls will have the flowers (which Dante saw her plucking) of Leah; andothers the looking-glass of the contemplative Rachel; and there will beever so many other little differences, making it amusing and edifying topay a call upon one's brother or sister soul. 

In such a state of spiritual community and privacy (so different fromour present hugger-mugger and five-little-bears-in-a-bed mode ofexistence), my soul, for instance, if your soul should honour it with avisit, would be able, methinks, to talk quite freely and pleasantlyabout the Ingres Museum at Montauban, and the autograph of Mozart in theglass case alongside the fiddle. .. . The manuscript is only a half sheetfull score, torn or cut through its height; and the voice part is brokenoff with one word only--insufficient to identify it among Mozart'sItalian works, though, perhaps, most suggestive of "Don Giovanni"--theword "Guai. " The manuscript is exquisitely neat, yet has none of thelook of a copy, and we know that Mozart was never obliged to make any. The writing is so like the man's adorable personality, the littlepattern of notes so like his music. The sight of it moved me, floodingmy mind with divine things, that Concerto for Flute and Harp, forinstance, which dear Mme. H---- had recently been playing for me. Andduring that dull, rainy day of waiting for trains at Montauban, it mademe live over again another day of rainy travel, but with the"Zauberflöte" at the end of it, about which I will also tell you, sinceI am permitted to know my own mind and to speak it. 

But I find I have incidentally raised the question _de gustibus_, or, asour language puts it, the _accounting for tastes_. And I must settle andput myself right in the matter of M. Ingres before proceeding anyfurther. The Latin saying, then, "De gustibus non est disputandum, "contains an excellent piece of advice, since disputing about tastes oranything else is but a sorry employment. But the English version isabsolutely wide of the mark, since tastes can be accounted for just asmuch as climate, history, and bodily complexion. Indeed, we should knowimplicitly what people like and dislike if we knew what they were andhow they had come to be so. The very diversity in taste proves itsdeep-down reality: preference and antipathy being consubstantial withthe soul--nay, inherent in the very mechanism and chemistry of the body. And for this reason tastes are at once so universal and uniform, and sovariously marked by minor differences. There are human beings all shankand thigh and wrist, with contemplative, deep-set eyes and compressed, silent lips; and others running to rounds and segments of circles, likeM. Ingres' drawings, their eyes a trifle prominent for the betterunderstanding of others, and mouth, like the typical French one, at aforward angle, as if for ready speech. But, different as these peopleare, they are alike in the main features of symmetry and balance; theyhaven't two sets of lungs and a duplicate stomach, like Centaurs, whomevery one found so difficult to deal with; nor do any of them end off ina single forked tail, twisting about on which accounts for theproverbial untrustworthiness of mermaids. Being alike, all humancreatures require free space and breathable air; and, being unlike, someof them hanker after the sea, and others cannot watch without longingthe imitation mountains into which clouds pile themselves on dreary flathorizons. And similarly in the matter of art. We all delight in theineffable presence of transcending power; we all require to renew oursoul's strength and keenness in the union with souls stronger and keenerthan ours. But the power which appeals to some of us is struggling andbrooding tragically, as in Michelangelo and Beethoven; while the powerwhich straightway subdues certain others is easy, temperate, andradiant, as in Titian and Mozart. And thus it comes about that everysoul--"where a soul can be discerned"--is the citizen, conscious or not, of a spiritual country, and obeys a hierarchy, bends before a sovereigngenius, crowned or mitred by inscrutable right divine, never to bedeposed. But there are many kingdoms and principalities, not necessarilyoverlapping; and the subjects of them are by no means the same. 

Take M. Ingres, for instance. He is, it seems, quite a tremendouspotentate. I recognize his legitimate sway, like that of Prester John, or of the Great Mogul. Only I happen not to obey it, for I am a bornsubject of the King of Hearts. And who should that be butApollo-Wolfgang-Amadeus, driving with easy wrist his teams, tandem orabreast, of winged, effulgent melodies?

It was raining, as I told you, that morning which I spent in the IngresMuseum at Montauban. It was raining melted snow in hurricanes off themountains that other day of travel, and I was on the top of a Tyrolesediligence. The roads were heavy; and we splashed slowly along the brinkof roaring torrents and through the darkness of soaked and steaming firwoods. At the end of an hour's journey we had already lost four. "If youstop to dine, " said successive jack-booted postilions, quickly fasteningthe traces at each relay, "you will never catch the Munich train atGarmisch. But the Herrschaften will please themselves in the matter ofeating and drinking. " So the Herrschaften did not please themselves atall, but splashed along through rain and sleet, through hospitablevillages all painted over with scrollwork about beer, and coffee, andsugar-bakery, and all that "Restoration" which our poor drenched bodiesand souls were lacking so woefully. For we had stalls at the CourtTheatre of Munich, and it was the last, the very last, night of "TheMagic Flute"! The Brocken journey on the diligence-top came to an end;the train at Garmisch was caught by just two seconds; we were safe atMunich. But I was prone on a sofa, with a despairing friend makinghateful attempts to rouse me. Go to the play? Get up? Open my eyes tothe light? My fingers must have fumbled some feeble "no, " beyond allcontradiction. "But your ticket--but 'The Magic Flute'--but you havecome three days' journey on purpose!" I take it my lips achieved aninarticulate expression of abhorrence for such considerations. Afterthat I do not exactly know what happened: my exhausted will gave way. Iwas combed and brushed, thrust into some manner of festive apparel, pushed into a vehicle, pulled out of it, and shoved along, by thestaunch and (as it seemed) brutal arm of friendship, among crimson andgilding and blinding lights all seen at intervals through half-closedeyes. A little bell rang, and I felt it was my death knell. But throughthe darkness of my weltering soul (for I was presumably dead andundoubtedly damned) there marched, stood still, and curtsiedmajestically towards each other, the great grave opening chords of theoverture. And when they had delivered, solemnly, their mysteriousherald's message and subsided, off started the little nimble notes ofthe fugue, hastening from all sides, meeting, crossing, dispersing, returning, telling their wonderful news of improbable adventures;multitudinous, scurrying away in orderly haste to protect the hero andheroine, and be joined by other notes, all full of inexhaustiblegood-will; taking hands, dancing, laughing, and giving the assurance thatall is for the best in the world of enchantment, in the world ofbird-calls, and tinkling triangles and magic flutes, under the spellsof the great Sun-priest and Sun-god Mozart. I opened my eyes and had noheadache; and sat in that Court Theatre for three mortal hours, inflourishing health and absolute happiness, and would have given my soulfor it to begin immediately all over again. 

Now, not all the drawings of M. Ingres could have done that. And thepiece of torn music-paper in the glass case at Montauban had made me, for a few faint seconds, live it through again. And I know what I don'tcare for, and what I do. 

AGAINST TALKING

As towards most other things of which we have but little personalexperience (foreigners, or socialists, or aristocrats, as the case maybe), there is a degree of vague ill-will towards what is called_Thinking_. It is reputed to impede action, to make hay of instinctsand of standards, to fritter reality into doubt; and the career ofHamlet is frequently pointed out as a proof of its unhappy effects. But, as I hinted, one has not very often an opportunity of verifyingthese drawbacks of thinking, or its advantages either. And I amtempted to believe that much of the mischief thus laid at the door ofthat poor unknown quantity _Thinking_ is really due to its ubiquitoustwin-brother _Talking_. 

I call them twins on the analogy of Death and Sleep, because there issomething poetical and attractive in such references to familyrelations; and also because, as many people cannot think withouttalking, and talking, at all events, is the supposed indication thatthinking is within, there has arisen about these two human activities agood deal of that confusion and amiable not-caring-which-is-which socharacteristic of our dealings with twins. But _Talking_, take my wordfor it, is the true villain of the couple. 

Talking, however, should never be discouraged in the young. Not talking_with them_ (largely reiteration of the word "Why?"), but talking amongthemselves. Its beneficial effects are of the sort which ought to makeus patient with the crying of infants. Talking helps growth. M. Renan, with his saintly ironical sympathy for the young and weak, knew it whenhe excused the symbolists and decadents of various kinds with thatindulgent sentence, "Ce sont des enfants qui s'amusent. " It matterslittle what litter they leave behind, what mud pies they make and littledaily dug-up gardens of philosophy, ethics, literature, and generalscandal; they will grow out of the need to make them--and meanwhile, making this sort of mess will help them grow. 

Besides, is it nothing that they should be amusing themselves once intheir lives (we cannot be sure of the future)? And what amusement, whatmaterial revelry can be compared with the great carouses of words inwhich the young can still indulge? We were most of us young once, odd asit appears; and some of us can remember our youthful discussions, oursalad-day talks, prolonged to hours, trespassing on to subjects, whichadded such a fine spice of the forbidden and therefore the free! The joyof asking reasons where you have hitherto answered school queries; ofextemporizing replies, magnificent, irresponsible, instead oflaboriously remembering mere solutions; of describing, analyzing, andgenerally laying bold mental eyes, irreverent intellectual hands, onpersonalities whose real presence would merely make you stumble over achair or drop a tea-cup! For talking is the great equalizer ofpositions, turning the humble, the painfully immature, into judges withrope and torch; and in a kindlier way allowing the totally obscure toshare the life of kings, and queens, and generals, and opera-singers;which is the reason that items of Court news or of "dramatic gossip"are so frequently exchanged in omnibuses and at small, decentdinner-tables. 

Moreover, talking has for the young the joys of personal exuberance; itis all honeycombed, or rather, filled (like champagne) with the generousgaseousness of self-analysis, self-accusation, self-pity, self-righteousness, and autobiography. The poor mortal, in that delusivesense of sympathy and perfect understanding which comes of perfectindifference to one's neighbour's presence, has quicker pulses, highertemperature, more vigorous movements than are compatible with the sobersense of human unimportance. In conversation, clever young people--vain, kindly, selfish, ridiculous, happy young people--actually take body andweight, expand. And are you quite sure, my own dear, mature, efficient, and thoroughly productive friends and contemporaries, that it is notthis expansion of youthful rubbish which makes the true movement of thecenturies?. .. Poor stuff enough, very likely, they talked, thoselong-haired, loose-collared Romanticists of the Hôtel Pimodan and theliterary cafés recorded by Balzac, _Jeunes Frances_, or whatever theirnames; and priggery, as well as blood-and-thunder, those lads round thetable d'hôte at Strasburg, where Jung-Stilling noticed the entrance of acertain tall, Apolline young man answering to the name of Goethe. Rubbish, of course; but rubbish necessary, yes, every empty bubble andscum and mess thereof, for the making of a great literary period--nay, of a great man of letters. And when, nine thousand nine hundred andninety-nine times, there results neither one nor the other, why, therehas been the talking itself--exciting and rapturous beyond everythingthat literary periods and literary personalities can ever match. 

'Tis with the talking of the mature and the responsible that I wouldpick a quarrel. Particularly if they are well read, unprejudiced, subtleof thought, and precise of language; and most particularly if they arescrupulously just and full of human charity. For when two or threepersons of this sort meet together in converse, nothing escapesdestruction. The character of third persons crumbles under that delicateand patient fingering: analysis, synthesis, rehabilitation, tenderappreciation, enthusiastic definition, leave behind only a horridquivering little heap of vain virtues and atrophied bad instincts. Insuch conversations I have heard loyal and loving friends makeadmissions and suggestions which would hang you in a court of justice; Ican bear witness to having in all loyalty and loving-kindness done somyself a thousand times. Nor is this even the worst. For your livinghuman being has luckily a wonderful knack of reasserting his reality;and the hero or victim of such conversational manipulation will takeyour breath away by suddenly entering the room or entering into yourconsciousness as hale and whole as old Æson stepping out of Medea'scooking-pot. But opinions, impressions, principles, standards, possess, alas! no such recuperative virtue; or, rather, they cannot interrupt thediscussion of themselves by putting in an appearance. 

Now, silent thought, whenever it destroys, destroys only to reconstructthe universe or the atom in the thinker's image; and new realities arisewhenever a real individual creature reveals his needs and ways offeeling. But in what is called _a good serious talk_ there is no suchcreating anew; nobody imposes his image, no whole human creature revealsa human organism: there is merely a jumble of superposed pictures whichwill not become a composite photograph; and the inherent optimism orpessimism, scepticism or dogmatism, of each interlocutor merelyreiterates _No_ to the ways of seeing and feeling of the others. Everyword, perpetually defined and redefined at random, is used by eachspeaker in a different sense and with quite different associations. Thesubject under discussion is in no one's keeping: it is banged from sideto side, adjusted to the right and adjusted to the left, a fine screwput on it every now and then to send it sheer into the great void andchaos! And almost the saddest part of the business is that thedefacements and tramplings which the poor subject (who knows, perhapsvery sacred to some one of us?) is made to suffer, come not from ouropponent's brutal thrusting forward of _his_ meaning, but rather fromour own desperate methods to hold tight, to place _our_ meaning insafety, somewhere where, even if not recognized, it will at least not bemauled. .. . Such are the scuffles and scrimmages of the most temperate, intellectual conversations, leaving behind them for the moment not atwig, not a blade of the decent vegetation of the human soul. Cannot weget some great beneficent mechanic to invent some spiritual cement, some asphalt and gravel of nothingness, some thoroughly pneumaticintellectual balls, whereon, and also wherewith, we privileged creaturesmay harmlessly expend our waste dialectic energies?

Then, would you never talk? Or would you confine talking to the weatheror the contents of the public prints? Would you have our ideas get hardand sterile for want of being moved? Do you advise that, like sometactful persons we--you--yes, _you_--all know and detest--wesystematically let every subject drop as soon as raised?

There! the talking has begun. They are at it, contradicting what theyagree with, and asking definitions of what they perfectly understand. Ofcourse not! And here I am, unable to resist, rushing into the argument, excited--who can tell?--perhaps delighted. And by the time we take upour bedroom candles, and wish each other good night (with additionaldefinitions over the banisters) every scrap of sensible meaning I everhad will be turned to nonsense; and I shall feel, next morning, oh, howmiserably humiliated and depressed!. .. 

"Well--and to return to what we were saying last night. .. . "

IN PRAISE OF SILENCE

One of the truths which come (if any do) with middle age, is the gradualrecognition that in one's friendly intercourse the essential--the onething needful--is not what people say, but what they think and feel. 

Words are not necessarily companionable, far from it; but moods trulymeet, to part in violent dissonance; or to move parallel in happyharmonic intervals; or, more poignant and more satisfying still, to passgradually along some great succession of alien chords--commoncontemplation, say, of a world grievous or pleasant to both--on towardsthe peace, the consummation, of a great major close. Once we havesufficient indication that another person cares for the same kind ofthings that we do--or, as important quite, cares in the same degree orin the same way--all further explanation becomes superfluous: detail, delightful occasionally to quicken and bring home the sense ofcompanionship, but by no means needed. 

This is the secret of our intercourse with those persons of whom ourfriends will say (or think), What _can_ you have in common withSo-and-so? What _can_ you find to talk about? Talk about? Why, nothing;the enigmatic person remains with us, as with all the rest of the world, silent, inarticulate; incapable, sometimes, of any inner making offormulæ. But we know that our companion is seeing, feeling, the samelines of the hills and washes of their colours, the same scudding orfeathering out of clouds; is _living_, in the completest sense, in thatparticular scene and hour; and knowing this, it matters nothing how longwe trudge along the road or saunter across the grass without uttering. The road of life, too, or the paths and thickets of speculation. 

And speaking of walks, I know no greater torment, among those minor oneswhich are the worst, than the intelligent conversation--full ofsuggestion and fine analysis, perhaps, and descriptions of _other_places--which reveals to us that the kindly speaker is indeed occupyingthe same geographical space or sitting behind the same horse as we are, but that his soul is miles and miles away. And the worst of it is thatsuch false companionship can distract us from any real company with themoment and the place. We have to answer out of civility; then to think, to get interested, and then . .. Well, then it is all over. "We had sucha delightful walk or drive, So-and-so and I, " says our friendon returning home, "and I am so glad to find that we have such a lot ofinterests in common. " Alas! alas!. .. Hazlitt was thinking of suchexperiences, knowing perhaps the stealthiness and duplicity which thefear of them develops in the honest but polite, when he recommended thatone should take one's walks alone. 

But there is something more perfect even than one's own company: thecompanion met once, at most twice, in a lifetime (for he is by no meansnecessarily your dearest and nearest, nor the person who understands youbest). He or she whose words are always about the place and moment, orseem to suit it; whose remarks, like certain music, feel restful, spacious, cool, airy--like silence. And here I have got back to thepraise of such persons as talk little, or (what is even better) _seem_to talk little. 

There is a deal of truth, and, as befits the subject, rather impliedthan actually expressed, in Maeterlinck's essay on Silence. His finetemper, veined and shot with colour, rich in harmonics like a well-tonedvoice, enables him, even like the mystics whom he has edited, to guessat those diffuse and mellow states of soul which often defy words. Heknows from experience how little we can really live, although we needsmust speak, in definite formulæ, logical frameworks of verb and noun, subject and predicate. Let alone the fact that all consummate feeling(like the moment to which Faust cried _Stay_) abolishes the sense ofsequence--revolves, if I may say so, on its own axis, a _now, forever_; baffling thereby all speech. And M. Maeterlinck perceives, therefore, that real communion between fellow-creatures is interchangeof temperament, of rhythm of life; not exchange of remarks, views, andopinions, of which ninety-nine in a hundred are merely current coin. Towhat he has said I should like to add that if we are often silent withthose whom we love best, it is because we are sensitive to their wholepersonality, face, gesture, texture of soul and body; that we are livingwith them not only in the present, but enriched, modified by all theyhave said before, by everything remaining in our memory as theirs. Totalk would never express a state of feeling so rich and living; and itcan serve, at most, only to give the heightening certainty of presence, like a handclasp or asking, "Are you there?" and getting the answer, "Yes; I am here, and so are you"--facts of no high logical importance!

As regards silent people, this characteristic may, of course, be mereresult of sloth and shyness, or lack of habit of the world, and they maybe gabbling volubly in their hearts. Such as these are no kind ofblessing, save perhaps negatively. Still less to be commended are thoseothers, cutting a better figure (or thinking so), who measure theirwords from a dread of "giving themselves away"--of "making themselvescheap, " or otherwise (always thinking in terms of money, lawsuits, andgeneral overreaching) getting the worst of a bargain. Indeed, it is asign how little we are truly civilized, that such silence or laconicismas this, can be met constantly outside the class (invariably cunning) ofpeasants; indeed, among men exercising what we are pleased to call_liberal professions_. 

The persons in whom silence is a mark of natural fine breeding are thosewho, being able to taste the real essence of things, are apt, perhapswrongly, to despise the unessential. They are disdainful of all the oldthings inevitably repeated in saying half a new one. They cannot do withthe lumber, wastepaper, shavings, sawdust, rubbish necessary for packingand conveying objects of value; now most of talk, and much of life, isexactly of that indispensable useful uselessness. They are silent forthe same reason that they are frequently inactive, recognizing thatwords and actions are so often mere litter and encumbrance. One feelsfrozen occasionally by their unspoken criticism; one's small exuberanceschecked by lack of sympathy and indulgence; one would like, sometimes, to pick a quarrel with them, to offer a penny for their thoughts, toforce them to be as unselective and vulgar as one's self. But onedesists, feeling instinctively the refreshment (as of some solitarytreeless down or rocky stream) and purification of their fineabstention in this world where industry means cinder-heaps, andstatesmanship, philosophy, art, philanthropy, mean "secondary products"of analogous kind. 

Before concluding this over-garrulous tribute to silence, I would fainpoint out the contrast, ironical enough, between the pleasant sense ofcomradeship with some of those who "never utter, " and the loneliness ofspirit in which we steam and post and cab through every possible realmof fact and theory with certain other people. I am not alluding to themaking hay of politics, exhibitions, theatres, current literature, etc. , which is so much the least interesting form of gossip. What I mean arethose ample, apparently open talks between people who have found eachother out; who know the cardboard and lath and plaster of thearchitectural arrangements or suspect the water-supply and drainagebehind; talks where one knows that the other is shirking some practicalconclusion, divagating into the abstract, and has to pick his way amonghidden interests and vanities, or avert his eyes from moral vistas whichhe knows of. .. . "So-and-so is such a delightful talker--so witty and sowonderfully unprejudiced; I cannot understand why you don't cultivatehim or her. " Cultivate him or her! Cultivate garlic; those elegant whitestarry flowers you wonder at my weeding out of the beds. 

Compare with this the blessedness of knowing that the contents of theother person's mind are _nice_, pure of all worldliness, pretence, andmeanness; that the creature's thoughts, if opened out to one, woulddiffuse the scent of sunshine and lavender even as does clean, well-folded linen. 

Hence the charm of a whole lot of persons not conspicuous forconversational powers: men who have lived much out-of-doors, with gun orrod; shy country neighbours, cross old scholars, simple motherly littlehousewives; and, if one get at their reality, peasants and evenservants. For we have within ourselves memories and fancies; and itdepends on our companion, on a word, a glance, a gesture, that only thesweet and profitable ones, thoughts of kindness and dignity, should bestirred up. 

THE BLAME OF PORTRAITS

Feeling a little bit ashamed of myself, yet relieved at having done withthat particular hypocrisy, I unpinned the two facsimiles of drawingsfrom off my study screen and put them in a portfolio. A slight sense ofprofanation ensued; not so much of infidelity towards those two dearfriends, nor certainly of irreverence towards Mr. Watts or the late SirEdward Burne-Jones, but referable to the insistence with which I hadclamoured for those portraits, the delight experienced at their arrival, and the solid satisfaction anticipated from their eternal possession. 

We have most of us--of the sentimental ones at least--gone through somesimilar small drama, and been a little harrowed by it. But though wefeel as if there were some sort of naughtiness in us, we are quiteblameless, and on the whole rather to be pitied. We are the dupes of avery human craving, and one which seems modest in its demands. What! amere square of painted canvas, a few pencil scratchings, a baremechanical photograph, something no rarer than a reflection in a mirror!That is all we ask for, to still the welling-up wistfulness, theclinging reluctance, to console for parting or the thought, almost, ofdeath! We do not guess that this humble desire for a likeness is one ofour most signal cravings after the impossible: an attempt to overcomespace and baffle time; to imprison and use at pleasure the mostfleeting, intangible, and uncommunicable of all mysterious essences, ahuman personality. 

"Often enough I think I have got the turn of her head and neck; butnot the face--never the face that speaks, " complains the poor bereavedhusband in Mary Robinson's beautiful little poem. The case may not betragic like that one, and yet thoroughly tantalizing; we feel theabsent ones opposite to us in the room, we are in that distant roomourselves; there is a sense of their position, of the space theyoccupy, and thus we see, as through a ghost, the familiar outline, perhaps, of a chair. Or, again, there is the well-known movement, accompanied, perhaps, by the tone of voice, concentrated almost to thelonged-for look, and, as the figure advances . .. Nothing! LikeVirgil's Orpheus, our fancy embraces a shadow. "The face--never theface that speaks!" But we _will_ have it, people exclaimed, all thoseages ago, and exclaim ever since. And thus they came by the notion ofportraits. 

And when they got them they grumbled. The cavilling at everynewly-painted likeness is notorious. The sitter, indeed, is sometimeseasy enough to please, poor human creatures enjoying, as a rule, anynotice (however professional) of their existence, let alone an answer tothe attractive riddle of _what they look like_. And there are, ofcourse, certain superfine persons who, in the case of a famous artist, think very like the sitter, and are satisfied so long as they get anornamental picture, or one well up to date. But the truly human grumble, and are more than justified in doing so. Their cravings have beendisappointed; they had expected the impossible, and have not got it. 

Since, in the very nature of things, a picture, and particularly a finepicture, is always an imperfect likeness. For the image of the sitter onthe artist's retina is passed on its way to the canvas through a mindchock full of other images; and is transferred--heaven knows how changedalready--by processes of line and curve, of blots of colour, andjuxtaposition of light and shade, belonging not merely to the artisthimself, but to the artist's whole school. Regarding merely the latterquestion, we all know that the old Venetians painted people ample, romantic, magnificent; and the old Tuscans painted them narrow, lucid, and commonplace; men of velvet and silk and armour on the one hand, andmen of broadcloth and leather, on the other. The difference due to theindividual artist is even greater; and, in truth, a portrait gives thesitter's temperament merged in the temperament of the painter. 

So, as a rule, portraiture does but defeat its own end. And, stoicallyspeaking, does it much matter? Posterity has done just as well withoutthe transmission of the real Cardinal Hippolytus; and we know thateverything always comes right if only we look at it, Spinoza-like, "under the category of the eternal. " But we, meanwhile, are noteternal, nor, alas! are our friends; and that is just one of thethings which gall us. We cannot believe--how could we?--that thefuture can have its own witty men and gracious women, its ownsufficient objects of love and reverence, even as we have. We feel we_must_ hand on our own great and beloved ones; we _must_ preserve theevanescent personal fragrance, press the flower. And hence, again, portraits and memoirs, Boswell's "Johnson, " or Renan's "Ma SoeurHenriette"; grotesque or lovely things, as the case may be, and alwayspathetic, which tell us that men have always admired and always loved;leaving us to explain, by substituting the image of our own idols, whyin that case more specially they did so. Poor people! We do so clingto our particular self and self's preferences; we are so confidentlymaterial and literal! And one dreads to think of the cruelself-defence of posterity, when we shall try to push into its noticewith phonograph and cinematograph. 

Let us, in the presence of such hideous machinery, cease to be literalin matters of sentiment, even at the price of a little sadness andcynicism in recognizing the unreality of everything save our own moodsand fancies. Perhaps I feel more strongly on this subject because Ihappen to have seen with my own eyes the _reductio ad absurdum_--toabsurdity how lamentable and dreadful!--of this same human craving forliteral preservation of that which should not, cannot, be preserved. Itwas in the lumber-room of an Italian palace; a life-size doll, with wigof real--perhaps personally real--hair, and dressed from head to foot inthe garments of the real poor lady, dead some seventy years ago. I wrotea little tale about it; but the main facts were true, and far surpassedthe power of invention. In this case the husband, who had ordered thissimulacrum for his solace, taking his daily dose of sentiment in itspresence, proceeded, after an interval, to woo and marry his ownlaundress; and I think, on the whole, this was the least harrowingpossible solution. Fancy if he had not found that form of consolation, but had continued trying to be faithful to that dreadful materialpresence, more rigid, lifeless, meaningless, with every day and everyyear of familiarity!

In a small way, we all of us commit that man's mistake of thinking thatthe life of our dear ones is in an image, instead of in the heartbeatswhich the image--like a name, a place, any associated thing--canproduce in ourselves. And only changing things can answer to ourchanging self; only living creatures live with us. Once learned byheart, the portrait, be it never so speaking, ceases to speak, or we tolisten to its selfsame message. What was once company to us, because itawakened a flickering feeling of wished-for presence, becomes, after atime, mere canvas or paper; disintegrates into mere colours or mereblack and white. Even the faithfullest among us are utterly faithless tothe best-beloved portraits. We have them on our walls or on ourwriting-tables, and pack and unpack some of them for every journey. Butdo we look at them? or, looking, do we see them, feel them?

They are not, however, useless; very far from it. You might as wellcomplain of the uselessness of the fire which is burned out, or theextinguished lamp. They have, though for a brief time, pleased, perhapseven consoled, us--warmed our heart with the sense of a loving nearness, shed a light on the visions in our mind. Hence we should cherish them asuseful delusions, or rather realities, so long as they awaken a realityof feeling. And 'tis a decent instinct of gratitude, not mereinertness, which causes us to keep them, honoured pensioners of ouraffections, in honourable places. 

Only one thing we should guard against, and act firmly about, despiteall sentimental scruples. During the _period of activity_ of aportrait--I mean while we still, more or less, look at it--we mustbeware lest it take, in our memory, the place of the original. Thoseunchanging features have the insistence of their definiteness andpermanence, and may insidiously extrude, exclude, the fleeting, vacillating outlines of the remembered reality. And those alone concernour heart, and have a right to occupy our fancy. One feels aghastsometimes, on meeting some dear friend after an interval of absence, tofind that those real features, that real expression, are not thefamiliar ones. It is the portrait, the envious counterfeit presentment, which (knowing its poor brief reign) has played us and our friend thatmean trick. When this happens we must be merciless, like the fairy-storyprince when the wicked creatures in the wood spoke to him in the voiceof his mother; piety towards the original arms us with ruthlessnesstowards the portrait. It was for this same reason that, as I have said, I unpinned from my screen those two facsimiles of drawings, feelingrather a brute while I was doing so. 

SERE AND YELLOW

INTERLUDE

"Alors que je me croyais aux derniers jours de l'automne, dans un jardindépouillé. " The words are Madame de Hauterive's, one of the mostcharming among eighteenth-century letter-writers; but one of whom, forall the indiscretion of that age, we know little or nothing: a delicate, austere outline merely, a reserved and sensitive ghost shrinking intothe dimness. She wrote those words when already an old woman, and longafter death had taken her father and her daughter and most of hernearest and dearest, to the young Abbé de Carladès, who proved himself(one hopes) not utterly unworthy of that "unexpected late flowering ofthe soul. " The phrase is eighteenth century, and it may be the feelingitself is of as bygone a fashion. Or does this seem the case becausesuch delicate souls can become known to us only when they and theirloves and friendships have ceased to be more than a handful of fadedpaper, fingered very piously, for heaven's sake?

However this may be, that phrase of Madame de Hauterive's contains atruth which is undying, and which, though unobtrusive, can be observedby those who have a discreet eye for the soul's affairs. Nay, one mightsay that the knowledge of how many times life can begin afresh, theknowledge of the new modes of happiness which may succeed each other, even when the leaves float down yellow in the still air, and the dews onthe renovated grass are white like frost, is one of the blessed secretsinto which the passing seasons initiate those who have honourablycultivated the garden of life, and life's wide common acres. 

Indeed, such faith in the heart's renewed fruitfulness is itself amongthe autumn blossomings, the hidden compensations. Young folk, and thosewho never outgrow youth's headlong and blind self-seeking, cannotconceive such truths. For youth has no experience of change; and what itcalls the Future is but the present longing or present dread projectedforward. Hence youth lacks the resignation which comes of knowing thatour aims, our loves, ourselves, will alter; and that we shall noteternally regret what we could not eternally covet. Hence, also, thefine despair and frequent suicide of youthful heroes and heroines. Pooryoung Werther, in his sky-blue _Frack_ and striped yellow waistcoat, cannot believe that the time will come when he will tune the spinet ofsome other Charlotte--nay, follow in the footsteps of the enlightenedminister, his patron; bury himself in protocols and look forward to adiplomatic game of whist rather than to a country dance with meetinghands and eyes. And it is mere waste of breath to sermon him on thesubject: lend him the pistols, and hope that (as in the humaner versionof the opera) he will not use them. As to certain other forestallings ofexperience, they would be positively indecent and barbarous! You woulddie of shame if the young widow happened to overhear you saying (what isheaven's truth, and a most consoling one) that her baby, which nowrepresents only so much time and love she might have given, all, all, to_him_ alone, is the only good thing which that worthless dead husbandcould ever have furnished her. And as to hinting in her presence thatshe will some day be much, much happier with dear Quixotic Dobbin thanwith that coxcomb of an Osborne, why the bare thought of such indecorummakes us feel like sinking into the ground! We must be sympathizing, anda little short of truthful, with poor distressed young people; aboveall, never seek to lighten their disappointments with visions of briskoctogenarians, one foot in the grave, enjoying a rubber!

And this, no doubt, is a providential arrangement--I mean this youthfulincapacity of grasping the consolations brought by Time. For, after all, life, being there, has to be lived; and maybe life would be lived in ahalf-hearted fashion did we suspect its many compensations, includingwhat may, methinks, be the last, most solemn one. Should we jump hastilyout of bed and bestir ourselves with the zest of the new day, if wethoroughly realized what is, however, matter of common experience, towit: that at the day's close, sleep, rest without dreams or thought ofawaking, may be as welcome as all this pleasant bustle of the morning?The knowledge of these mysteries, initiation into which comes late andsilently, is, as I hinted, perhaps the final compensation; allowing usto face the order of things without superfine cavillings. But there areearlier, less awful and secret compensations, and these it is as well toknow about, and to prepare our soul serenely to enjoy when the momentcomes. 

Of this kind are, of course, those autumn flowerings of sentimentalluded to in Madame de Hauterive's letter. They are blossomingssometimes sweeter than those of summer, thanks to the very scorching ofsummer's suns; or else touched with an austere vividness by the firstfrosts, like the late china roses, which are streaked, where they open, with a vermillion unparalleled in their earlier sisters. Compare withthis all that is implied in Swinburne's line, "the month of the longdecline of roses. " Think of those roses (I have before my eyes aFlorentine terrace at the end of May) crowding each other out, blowing, withering, and dropping; roses white, red, pale lemon, and, alas! alsobrown and black with mildew, living and dying in such riotous excessthat you have neither time nor inclination to pluck one of them, andkeep it, piously in water, before you on your table. 

Mind, I do not say that such profusion is not all right and necessaryin its season. The economy of Nature is often wasteful. There might beno roses at all next year if we depended for seed and slips upon thosefrost-bitten flowers with their fine austerity. And in the same waythat, despite the pathetic tenderness of long-deferred father ormotherhood, it is better for the race that infants be brought into theworld plentiful, helter-skelter, and that only the toughest staythere; so, methinks, it may be needful that youth be full of falsestarts, mistaken vocations, lapsed engagements, fanciful friendshipsbroken off in quarrel, glowing passions ending in ashes; nay, thatthis period, fertile in good and evil, be crowned by marriages such asare said to be made in heaven, no doubt because the great match-makingspirit of life pursues ends unguessed by human wisdom, which wouldoften remain in single blessedness, and found homes for sicklyinfants. Wedlock, in other words, and, for the matter of that, fatherand motherhood, and most of the serious business of the universe, should not be looked upon as a compensation or consolation, but ratheras something for which poor human creatures require to be consoled andcompensated. 

Having admitted which, and even suggested that marriages are fittest atthe age of Daphnis and Chloe, or even of Amelia and George Osborne, letus, I pray you, glance with reverent eyes, and a smile not mocking buttender, at certain other weddings which furtively cross our path. Weddings between elderly persons, hitherto unable to make up their mind, or having, perchance, made it up all wrong on a first occasion;inveterate old maids and bachelors, or widowers who thought to mourn forever; people who have found their heart perhaps a little late in theday; but, who knows? shrivelled as it is, perhaps, but the mellower, andof more enduring, more essential sweetness. 

Alongside of such tardy nuptials there is a corresponding class of_marriages of true minds_. Genuine ones are exceedingly rare duringyouth; and the impediments, despite the opinion of Shakespeare, are ofthe nature of nullity, ending most often in unseemly divorce betweenHermia and Helena, or the Kings of Sicilia and Bohemia, one of whom, ifyou remember, tried to poison the other on very small provocation. Thelast-named is an instructive example of the hollowness of nursery orplayground friendship, or rather of what passes for such. Genuinefriendship is an addition to our real self, a revelation of newpossibilities; and young people, busily absorbing the traditions of thepast and the fashions of the day, have very rarely got a real self toreveal or to bestow. So that the feeling we experience in later lifetowards our playmates is, in fact, rather a wistful pleasure in thethought of our own past than any real satisfaction in their presentselves. 

Be this as it may, there is among the compensations of life, a kind offriendship which, by its very nature, requires that one of the friendshave passed the _middle of the way_. I am not referring to the joys ofgrandfather and grandmotherhood, and all that "_art d'être grandpère_"which have been written and sung until one turns a trifle scepticalabout them. What I allude to has, on the contrary, escaped (almostentirely, I think) the desecrating pen of the analytical or moralizingnovelist, and remains one of the half-veiled mysteries of human goodfortune, before which the observer passes quickly in shy admiration. The case is this: one of the parents has been unwilling, ordisappointed; marriage has meant emptiness, or worse; and a nursery fullof children has been, very likely, a mere occasion for ill-will andpainful struggle. The poor soul has been, perhaps for years, fretted andwearied; or else woefully lonely, cabined, confined, and cramped almostto numbness. When, behold! by the marvellous miracle of man orwomanhood--a dull, tiresome child is suddenly transformed, takes onshapeliness and stature, opens the bolted doors of life, leads thefather or mother into valleys of ease and on to hopeful hilltops; slaysdragons, chains ogres, and smiles with the eyes and lips which have beenvaguely dreamed of, longed for, who knows how long!

So children do occasionally constitute compensations and blessings notmerely in disguise. And this particularly where they have not beenlooked upon as investments for future happiness or arrangements forpaying off parental debts to society, to glory, or the Supreme Being. For surely, if children are ever to renovate the flagging life ofparents, it can only be by their leaving off their childhood and comingback as equals, brothers, sisters, sometimes as tenderest and mostadmiring of chivalrous lovers. 

'Tis, in fact, unexpected new life adding itself to ours whichconstitutes the supreme compensation in middle age; and our heart putsforth fresh blossoms of happiness (of genius sometimes, as in the caseof Goethe) because younger shoots are rejoicing in the seasonablesunshine or dews. The interests and beliefs of the younger generationprevent our own from dying; nay, the friendships and loves of ourchildren, whether according to the flesh or the spirit, may become ourown. Daughters-in-law are not invariably made to dine off the poisonedhalf of a partridge, as in works of history. Some stepfathers andstepmothers feel towards those alien youths and maidens only as thatdear Valentine Visconti did towards the little Dunois, whom she took inher arms, say the chronicles, and, with many kisses on eyes and cheeks, exclaimed, "Surely thou wast stolen from me!" And, in anotherrelationship which is spoken ill of by those unworthy of it, we cansometimes watch a thing which is among reality's best poetry: where amother, wisely and dutifully stepping aside from her married daughter'spath, has been snatched back, borne in triumph, not by one loving pairof arms, but two; and where the happy young wife has smiled atrecognizing that in her husband's love for her there was mixed up ahead-over-ears devotion for her mother. 

Some folks have no sons or daughters, or husbands or wives, and hence nostepchildren or children-in-law. Yet even for them autumn may blossom. There are the children of friends, recalling their youth or compensatingfor their youth's failure; and for some there are the younger workers inthe same field, giving us interest in books or pictures, or journeys orcampaigns, when our own days for work and struggle are over; even as we, perhaps, have kept open the vistas of life, given Pisgah-sights to thosebeloved and venerated ones whose sympathy we value and understand betterperhaps now than all those many, many years ago. Yes! even in ouryouthful egoism we gave them something, those dear long dead friends;and this knowledge is itself a tiny autumn bud in our soul. 

There are humbler compensations also. And among these the kind which, years after writing the immortal idyll of "Dr. Antonio, " my dearvenerated friend Ruffini set forth in a tiny story, perhaps partly hisown, about the modest but very real happiness which the mererelationship of master and servant can bring into a solitary life; thestory taking its name, by a coincidence by no means indifferent to me, from a faithful and pleasant person called Carlino. 

But an end to digressions, for it is time to cease writing, particularly of such intangible and shy matters. So, to return toMadame de Hauterive's sentence, which was our starting-point in thisinventory of compensations and consolations. Paradoxical though itseem, the understanding and union brought by a glance, by words saidin a given way, by any of the trifles bearing mysterious, unreasonedsignificance for the experienced soul--or, briefly, "_friendship atfirst sight_"--is as natural in the sere and yellow, as love at firstsight in the salad, days. Only, to be sure, less manifest toindifferent bystanders, since one of the consoling habits which lifebrings with it is a respect for life's thoroughfares, a reluctance tostop the way, collect a crowd with our private interests, and a piousreserve about such good fortune as is good precisely because it suitsus, not other people. 

Reserve of this sort, as I began with saying, is one of the charms ofdear Madame de Hauterive; and the more so that eighteenth-centuryfolk, particularly French, were not much given to it! And thus ithappens that we know little or nothing about that friendship whichconsoled her later life; and must look round us in our own, if wewould understand what were those new flowerings which had arisen, when, as she says, she had thought herself already in the last days ofautumn and in a leafless garden. 

A STAGE JEWEL

"It doesn't seem to be precisely what is meant by _old paste_, " sheanswered, repeating the expression I had just made use of, while shehanded me the diamond hoop across the table. "It's too like real stones, you know. I think it must be a stage jewel. "

As I fastened the brooch again in my dress, I was aware of a suddenlittle change in my feelings. I was no longer pleased. Not that I hadhoped my diamonds might prove real; you cannot buy real diamonds, evenin imagination, for four francs, which was the precise sum I hadexpended on these, and there were seven of them, all uncommonly large. Nor can I say that the words "old paste" had possessed, on my lips, anyplain or positive meaning. But _stage jewel_, somehow . .. My moraltemperature had altered: I was dreadfully conscious that I was no longerpleased. Now, I had been, and to an absurd degree. 

Perhaps because it was Christmas Eve, when I suddenly found myselfinside that curiosity shop, pricing the diamonds, and not without anemotion of guilty extravagance, and of the difficulty of not buying ifthe price proved too high. .. . As is always the case with me at thatseason, my soul was irradiated with a vague sense of festivity, perhapswith the lights of rows of long-extinguished Christmas trees in the fogof many years, like the lights of the shops caught up and diffused inthe moist twilight. I had felt an inner call for a Christmas present;and, so far, nobody had given me one. So I had paid the money and drivenback into the dark, soughing country with the diamond hoop loose in mypocket. I had felt so very pleased. .. . And now those two cursed words"stage jewel" had come and spoilt it all. 

For the first time I felt it was very, very hard that my box should havebeen broken open last autumn and all my valuables, my Real (the wordbecame colossal), not _stage_, jewels stolen. It was brought home to mefor the first time that the man who did it must have been very, verywicked; and that codes of law, police and even prisons could affordsatisfaction to my feelings. Since, oddly enough, I had really notminded much at the time, nor let my pleasure in that wonderful oldcastle, where I had just arrived with the violated trunk, be in theleast diminished by the circumstance. Indeed, such is the subtle, sophistic power of self-conceit, that the pleasure of finding, orthinking I found, that I did not mind the loss of those things hadreally, I believe, prevented me minding it. Though, of course, every nowand then I had wished I might see again the little old-fashionedfleur-de-lysed star which had been my mother's (my heart smote me fornot feeling sufficiently how much _she_ would have suffered at my losingit). And I remembered how much I had liked to play with those opals ofthe Queen of Hearts, which seemed the essence of pale-blue winter dayswith a little red flame of sunset in the midst; or, rather, like tinylunar worlds, mysterious shining lakes and burning volcanoes in theirheart. Of course, I had not been indifferent: that would have taken awayall charm from the serenity with which I had enjoyed my loss. But I hadbeen serene, delightfully serene. And now!. .. 

There was something vaguely vulgar, odious, unpardonable about falsestones. I had always maintained there was not, but the stage jewelmade me feel it. Mankind has sound instincts, rooting in untold depthsof fitness; and superfine persons, setting themselves against them, reveal their superficiality, their lack of normal intuition and soundjudgment, while fancying themselves superior. And mankind (save amongbarbarous Byzantine and Lombard kings, who encrusted their iron crownsimpartially with balas rubies, antique cameos, and bottleglass)--mankind has always shown an instinct against sham jewels andtheir wearers. It is an unreasoned manifestation of the belief intruth as the supreme necessity for individuals and races, withoutwhich, as we know, there would be an end of commerce, theadministration of justice, government, even family life (for birds, who have no such sense, are proverbially ignorant of their father), and everything which we call civilization. Real precious stones wereperhaps created by Nature, and sham stones allowed to be created byman, as one of those moral symbols in which the universe abounds: amysterious object-lesson of the difference between truth andfalsehood. 

Real diamonds and rubies, I believe, require quite a different degreeof heat to melt them than mere glass or paste; and you can amuseyourself, if you like, by throwing them in the fire. In the MiddleAges rubies, but only real ones, were sovereign remedies for variousdiseases, among others the one which carried off Lorenzo theMagnificent; and in the seventeenth century it was currently reportedthat the minions of the Duke of Orleans had required pounded diamondsto poison poor Madame Henriette in that glass of chicory water. And asto pearls, real ones go yellow if unworn for a few months, and have tobe sunk fathoms deep in the sea, in safes with chains and anchors, anddetectives sitting day and night upon the beach, and sentries insentry-boxes; none of which occurs with imitations. Likewise you stampon a real pearl, while you must be quite careful not to crush a shamone. All these are obvious differences revealing the nobility of thereal thing, though not necessarily adding to its charm. But, then, there is the undoubted greater beauty, the wonderful _je ne saisquoi_, the depth of colour, purity of substance, effulgence of fire, of real gems, which we all recognize, although it is usual to havethem tested by an expert before buying. And, when all is said anddone, there is the difference in intrinsic value. And you need notimagine that value is a figment. Political economy affords us twodifferent standards of value, the Marxian and the Orthodox. So youcannot escape from believing in it. A thing is valuable either (_a_)according to the amount of labour it embodies, or (_b_) according tothe amount of goods or money you can obtain in exchange for it. Now, only let your mind dwell upon the value (_a_) embodied in a pearl ordiamond. The pearl fisher, who doubtless frequently gets drowned; letalone the oyster, which has to have a horrid mortal illness, neitherof which happens to the mean-spirited artificer of Roman pearls; orthe diamond seeker, seeking through deserts for months; the finediamond merchant, dying in caravans, of the past; and, finally, thediamond-cutter, grinding that adamant for weeks far, far moreindefatigably than to make the optic lenses which reveal hiddenplanets and galaxies. All that labour, danger, that weary, weary timeembodied in a thing so tiny that, like Queen Mab, it can sit on analderman's forefinger! What could be more deeply satisfactory to thinkupon? And as to value (_b_) (the value in _Exchange_ of Mill, Fawcett, Marshall, Say, Bastiat, Gide), just think what you could buy byselling a largish diamond, supposing you had one! And what unlikelyprices (fabulous, even monstrous) are said to have been given, beforeand after dubious Madame de la Motte priced that great typical one, for diamond necklaces by queens and heroines of every degree!

Precious stones, therefore, are heaven-ordained symbols of what mankindvalues most highly--power over other folks' labour, time, life, happiness, and honour. And that, no doubt, is the reason that when theirreproachable turn-out and perfect manners of pickpockets allow them tomix freely in our select little gatherings, it is legitimate for a ladyto deck herself with artificial pearls and diamonds only to the exactextent that she has real ones safely deposited at the bank. Let her lookyounger and sound honester than perhaps answers to the precise reality;there is no deception in all that. But think of the dishonourablenessof misleading other folk about one's income. .. . 

My soul was chastened by the seriousness of these reflections and by therecognition of the moral difference between real stones and sham ones, and I was in a very bad humour. Suddenly there came faint sounds ofguitars and a mandolin, and I remembered that the servants were giving aball at the other end of the house, and that it was Christmas Eve. Irose from my table and opened the window, letting in the music with thepure icy air. The night had become quite clear; and in its wintry bluethe big stars sparkled in a cluster between the branches of my pinetree. They made me think of the circlet which Tintoret's Venus swoopsdown with over the head of the ruddy Bacchus and rose-white Ariadne. Those, also, I said to myself ill-humouredly, were probably stagejewels. .. . I cannot account for the sudden train of associations thisword evoked: sweeping, magnificent gestures, star-like eyes, and agoddess' brows shining through innumerable years; a bar or two ofmelodious _ritornello_; an ineffable sense of poetry and grandeur, and--but I am not sure--a note or two of a distant, distant voice. Could it be Malibran--or Catalani . .. And was my stage jewel bewitched, a kind of Solomon's ring, conjuring up great spirits? All I can say isthat I have rarely spent a Christmas Eve like that one, while theservants' ball was going on at the other end of the house, furbishing myimitation diamonds with a silk handkerchief, alone, or perhaps notalone, in my study. 

MY BICYCLE AND I

We two were sitting together on the wintry Campagna grass; the rest ofthe party, with their proud, tiresome horses, had disappeared beyond thepale green undulations; their carriage had stayed at that castellatedbridge of the Anio. The great moist Roman sky, with its song ofinvisible larks, arched all round; above the rejuvenated turf rustledlast year's silvery hemlocks. The world seemed very large, significant, and delightful; and we had it all to ourselves, as we sat there side byside, my bicycle and I. 

'Tis conceited, perhaps, to imagine myself an item in the musings of mysilent companion, though I would fain be a pleasant one. But this muchis certain, that, among general praising of life and of things, my ownthoughts fell to framing the praises of bicycles. They were deeply felt, and as such not without appearance of paradox. What an excellent thing, I reflected, it is that a bicycle is satisfied to be quiet, and is notin the way when one is off it! Now, my friends out there, on their greathorses, as Herbert of Cherbury calls them, are undoubtedly enjoying manyand various pleasures; but they miss this pleasure of resting quietly onthe grass with their steeds sitting calmly beside them. They are busyriding, moreover, and have to watch, to curb or humour the fancies oftheir beasts, instead of indulging their own fancy; let alone thenecessity of keeping up a certain prestige. They are, in reality, domineered over by these horses, and these horses' standard of living, as fortunate people are dominated by their servants, their clothes, andtheir family connections; much as Merovingian kings, we were taught inour "Cours de Dictées, " were dominated by the mayors of the palace. Instead of which, bar accidents (and the malignity of bottle-glass andshoe-nails), I am free, and am helped to ever greater freedom by mybicycle. 

These thoughts came to me while sitting there on the grass slopes, rather than while speeding along the solitary road which snakes acrossthem to the mountains, because the great gift of the bicycle consists tomy mind in something apart from mere rapid locomotion; so much so, indeed, that those persons forego it, who scorch along for mereexercise, or to get from place to place, or to read the record of mileson their cyclometer. There is an unlucky tendency--like the tendency tolitter on the part of inanimates and to dulness on that of ourfellow-creatures--to allow every new invention to add to life'scomplications, and every new power to increase life's hustling; so that, unless we can dominate the mischief, we are really the worse off insteadof the better. It is so much easier, apparently, to repeat the spell(once the magician has spoken it) which causes the broomstick to fetchwater from the well, as in Goethe's ballad, than to remember, or know, the potent word which will put a stop to his floodings; that, indeed, seems reserved to the master wizard; while the tiros of life's magic, puffed up with half-science, do not drink, but drown. In this waybicycling has added, methinks, an item to the hurry and breathlessnessof existence, and to the difficulty of enjoying the passing hour--nay, the passing landscape. I have only once travelled on a bicycle, and, despite pleasant incidents and excellent company, I think it was amistake; there was an inn to reach, a train to catch, a meal to secure, darkness to race against. And an order was issued, "Always make as muchpace as you can at the beginning, because there may be some loss of timelater on, " which was insult and ingratitude to those mountain sides andvalleys of Subiaco and Tivoli, and to the ghosts of St. Benedict, ofNero, and of the delightful beribboned Sibyl, who beckoned us to rest intheir company. 

How different from this when one fares forth, companioned by one of thesame mind; or, better still, with one's own honourable self, exploringthe unknown, revisiting the already loved, with some sort ofresting-place to return to, and the knowledge of time pleasantlyeffaced! One speeds along the straight road, flying into the beckoninghorizon, conscious only of mountain lines or stacked cloud masses;living, for the instant, in air, space become fluid and breathable, earth a mere detail; and then, at the turn, slackening earth's powerasserting itself with the road's windings. Curiosity keenly on edge, ormemory awakened; and the past also casting its spells, with the isolatedfarms or the paved French villages by the river-bank, or the churchspire, the towers, in the distance. .. . A wrong turn is no hardship; itmerely gives additional knowledge of the country, a further detail ofthe characteristic lie of the land, a different view of some hill orsome group of buildings. Indeed, I often deliberately deflect, try roadand lane merely to return again, and have bicycled sometimes half anhour round a church to watch its transepts and choir fold and unfold, its towers change place, and its outline of high roof and gargoylesalter on the landscape. Then the joy, spiced with the sense ofreluctance, of returning on one's steps, sometimes on the same day, oron successive days, to see the same house, to linger under the samepoplars by the river. Those poplars I am thinking of are alongside astately old French mill, built, towered, and gabled, of fine grey stone;and the image of them brings up in my mind, with the draught and foam ofthe weir and the glassiness of the backwater, and the whirr of thehorse-ferry's ropes, that some of the most delightful moments whichone's bicycle can give, are those when the bicycle is resting against aboat's side (once also in Exmouth harbour); or chained to an oldlych-gate; or, as I remarked about my Campagna ride, taking its restalso and indulging its musings. 

I have alluded to the variety and alteration of pace which we can, andshould, get while bicycling. Skimming rapidly over certain portions ofthe road--sordid suburbs, for instance--and precipitating our course tothe points where we slacken and linger, the body keeps step with thespirit; and actuality forestalls, in a way, the selection by memory;significance, pleasantness, choice, not brute outer circumstance, determining the accentuation, the phrasing (in musical sense) of ourlife. For life must be _phrased_, lest it become mere jabber, withoutpleasure or lesson. Indeed, one may say that if games teach a man tostand a reverse or snatch an opportunity, so bicycling might afford aninstructive analogy of what things to notice, to talk about and rememberon life's high-roads and lanes; and what others, whizzing past on scarceskimming wheel, to reject from memory and feeling. 

The bicycle, in this particular, like the imagination it so wellsymbolizes, is a great liberator, freeing us from dwelling amongugliness and rubbish. It gives a foretaste of freedom of the spirit, reducing mankind to the only real and final inequality: inequality inthe power of appreciating and enjoying. The poor clerk, orschoolmistress, or obscure individual from Grub Street can, with itshelp, get as much variety and pleasure out of a hundred miles' circuitas more fortunate persons from unlimited globetrotting. Nay, thefortunate person can on a bicycle get rid of the lumber and litter whichconstitutes so large a proportion of the gifts of Fortune. For thethings _one has to have_, let alone the things _one has to do_ (indeference to butler and lady's-maid, high priests of fitness), are aswell left behind, if only occasionally. And among such doubtful gifts offortune is surely the thought of the many people employed in helping oneto do nothing whatever. It spoils the Campagna, for instance, to have abrougham, with coachman and footman, and grooms to lead back the horses, all kicking their heels at the bridge of the Anio: worthy persons, nodoubt, and conscientiously subserving our higher existence; but thebare fact of whom, their well-appointed silhouettes, seem somehowincongruous as we get further and more solitary among the pale grassbillows, deeper into that immense space, that unlimited horizon of ages. 

These are some of the prestigious merits of the bicycle, though manymore might be added. This grotesque iron courser, not without some ofthe grasshopper's absurd weirdness, is a creature of infinite capacitiesfor the best kind of romance--the romance of the fancy. It may turn outto be (I always suspect it) the very mysterious steed which carriedadventurous knights and damsels through forests of delightfulenchantments, sprouting wings, proving a hippogriff and flying up, whenever fairies were lacking or whenever envious wizards were fussingabout. And, as reward--or perhaps crown--for its many good services, reposed occasionally by Britomart's or Amadis' side, far from theworld's din, even as my bicycle rested on the pale wintry grasshillocks, under the rolling cloud bales and the song of invisible larks, of the Campagna. 

PUZZLES OF THE PAST

I am full of curiosity about the Past. This does not mean that I readthe memoirs of Napoleon's marshals, or that I write queries toantiquarian papers, or that I enjoy being taken to see invisible Pictishbarrows and Roman encampments; in fact, nothing could be further from mycharacter and habits. But the Past puzzles me; and I like being puzzledby the Past. 

Not in its details, but in all manner of general questions, and such, moreover, as very rarely admit of an answer. What are the relations ofthe Past and Present? Where does the Past begin? And, to go furtherstill, what _is_ the Past?

All this sounds abstract, and even metaphysical; but it is really quitethe reverse. These speculations are always connected with some concreteplace or person, and they arise in my mind (and in the mind of thetwenty thousand persons whom I don't know, but whom I resemble), together with some perspective of street or outline of face, and alwayswith a faint puff of emotion. I will give you a typical instance of oneof these puzzles. It formulated itself in my mind a few weeks ago atVerona, while going to see a certain little church on the slopes abovethe Adige. You go through the priest's house and vineyard; there is afine carved lintel and a bit of fresco, all in the midst of a rag fairof squalid streets. What a place this must once have been! I felt thecharm and splendour of piled-up palace and hanging gardens in formerdays. In former days! And a little doubt dropped into it, "If formerdays there ever were. " For who can tell? This crumbling, ragged businesswhich to us means that we stand before the Past; this gradual perishingof things in neglect and defilement, may very well have formed anecessary part of our ancestors' present. Our own standard and habit oftidiness, decorum, and uniformity may be quite recent developments;barbarism, in the sense of decay and pollution, may have existedtogether with prosperity. It is quite possible that dead donkeys wereleft in the streets of Haroun-al-Raschid's Bagdad, or Semiramis'Babylon, as well as in those of poor little modern Tangier. And theVerona of the Scaligers may have been just such a Verona as this whichdelights and depresses us, only with new beautiful things being builtquite naturally alongside of decayed and defiled ones; things nowadaysall equally levelled in ruin and squalor. The splendour of the Past maybe a mere fiction of our own, like the romance of the Past which we saywe no longer believe in. But history gives us, I think, no definiteanswer. 

With this question another is closely connected. I must explain it by asimile. A foreign friend of mine insists, with some show of reason, thatmuch as any two countries of the Continent may differ, England contrivesto differ a great deal more from all of them than they can differ fromeach other. Well, it sometimes strikes me that, in a similar way, ourPresent may be wholly detached from the mass, however heterogeneous, ofthe Past; an island divided from the mainland of history by seas ofdifference, or rather, like the great Arctic countries, a separateContinent, shrouded in mystery, of which we know only that its hithertoexplored shores face, without ever touching, the other mapped-outContinent we call the Past. For just think, let us say, of the changeimplied in the multiplication through machinery of a stereotyped form, as against the production of an individual object by individual hands. Why, such a change means democracy far more than any other change inlaws and franchises; and it means, among other things, that any artsprung really from the present will have to be of the nature, not of thepainting or sculpture of old days, of the architecture which made eachsingle cathedral an individual organism, but of the nature rather ofprocess engraving, of lithography (are not our posters, Chéret's, forinstance, the only thing which our masses see, as their distant forbearssaw frescoes in churches and _campo santos_?), of book printing, inshort; and will not literature and music become more and more thetypical kinds of art, the creation of one brain projected over millionsof acres and through mere wires and cylinders? And think also of thedifference in locomotion. Say what you will, people who rode in coacheswere bound to be more like people who rode in litters, for all thedifference between Rome under Cæsar and England under George III. , thanlike people who go by train. That is all on the surface, serious personswill answer: the pace at which people's body and goods are conveyedalong may alter without their thoughts or feelings being changed theleast bit. Perhaps. But are we so absolutely sure of that?

For instance, are we sure we should have been able to get on for half anhour together with even our own great-grandparents of little more than ahundred years ago? There they hang, our great-grandfathers and mothersand uncles and aunts (or some one's else, more likely), painted byReynolds or Raeburn, delightful persons whose ghosts we would giveanything to meet. Their ghosts; aye, there's the rub. For their ghostswould have altered with posthumous experience, would have had glimpsesof the world we live in, and somewhat conformed to its habits; but couldwe really get on with the living men and women of former days? It istrue that we understand and enjoy the books which they read, or rathera small number of pages out of a smaller number of books. But did theyread them in the same way? I should not wonder if the different sense inwhich we took their favourite authors, or rather the different sense inwhich we discovered that they were in the habit of taking them, createdconsiderable coolness, not to say irritation, between the ghosts of thereaders of "The Vicar of Wakefield, " or "Werther, " or the "NouvelleHeloïse" and ourselves. Besides, they would be monstrously shocked atour ways. They would think us marvellously ill-bred. While we! I darescarcely harbour the thought, much less express it. Anyway, it iscertain that they occasionally allowed Sheridan and Miss Burney (I amnot even thinking of the remote people of Fielding), and even, alas!Miss Austen, to paint pictures of them which we would scarcely own up tofrom novelists and playwrights of our day, and therefore I return to mypuzzle: is time an unbroken continuity, all its subdivisions merelyconventional, like those of postal districts; or, as I suggested above, are there real chains of mountains, chasms, nay, deep oceans, breakingup its surface; and do we not belong, we people of the nineteenthcentury, rather to the future which we are forming than to the Pastwhich, much to its astonishment (I should think), produced us?

There are other puzzles about the Past, far more intimate in nature andless grandiose, but, on the whole, far less easy to answer. One of theseis difficult even to word, but every reader will identify it inconnection with some of the most delightful experiences he has beenadmitted to. Roughly, it may be expressed as follows:--Were old peopleever young? Was there a period in the world's history (and not so farback) when everybody was enchantingly mixed of primness and romance, hadlittle graces of manner, nods and becks and wreathed smiles, with atendency every now and then to employ language rather stronger than theoccasion warranted? Did youths and maidens wander about with faint moralodours of pot-pourri and quaint creases of character, as ofsuperannuated garments long folded in a drawer! Or are these qualitiestaken on by each generation in turn, in which case will the HildaWangels and Dodos of to-day delight the twentieth century as possibleinmates of Cranford?

Having worked my way to so marvellous a puzzle as this, I had betterremove the strain by hastily suggesting another question, which willsatisfactorily get rid of the others, to wit, whether the Past didreally ever exist?

On the whole, I am tempted to believe that it did not. I can even proveit by a logical stroke worthy of the very greatest philosophers. Grantedthat the Past is that which no longer has any existence, only thePresent could ever be real now; as the Present and the Past cannotco-exist, the Past evidently never existed at all; unless, indeed, wecall in the aid of the Hegelian philosophy, and set our minds at ease bya fine reduction of contraries, to the effect that since the Present andthe Past exclude one another, they evidently must really be the samething at bottom. 

This is cogent. And yet a doubt continues lurking in my mind. Is notwhat we think of as the Past--what we discuss, describe, and so oftenpassionately love--a mere creation of our own? Not merely in itsdetails, but in what is far more important, in its essential, emotional, and imaginative quality and value? Perhaps some day psychology maydiscover that we have a craving, like that which produces music orarchitecture, for a special state of nerves (or of something else, ifpeople are bored with nerves by that time), obtainable by a specialhuman product called the Past--the Past which has never been thePresent. 

MAKING PRESENTS

It was the dreadful perplexity of making a present to a rich woman. LikeHeine's sweetheart, she was abundantly provided with diamonds and pearlsand all things which mankind can wish. And so the lack of any mortalthing suggested that, so far from liking to be given it, she would farrather not have it at all. 

I do not choose to state whether that lady ever did get a present fromme, for the statement would be an anti-climax. Suffice it that as aresult of profound meditation I found myself in possession of a"Philosophy of Presents, " which, copied fair on imaginary vellum, orbound in ideal morocco, I now lay at the feet of my friends, as a veryappropriate gift, and entirely home-made. 

The whole subject of presents is bristling with fallacies, which havearisen like thistles out of the thinness of our life and the stoninessof our hearts. One of these mistaken views is perpetually being putforward by people who assert that _the pleasantness of a gift lies inthe good-will of the giver_. The notion has a specious air of amiabilityand disinterestedness and general good-breeding; but the only truth itreally contains is that, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, a presentgives exactly no pleasure at all. For, if the pleasantness of a presentdepended solely on the expression of good-will, why not expressgood-will in any of the hundred excellent modes of doing so?--for wehave all of us, more or less, voice, expressive features, words ready or(more expressive still) unready, and occasions enough, Heaven knows! ofmaking small sacrifices for our neighbours. And it is entirelysuperfluous to waste our substance and cumber our friends' houses byadding to these convenient items, material tokens like, say, gold fromOphir and apes and peacocks. There are inconveniences attached to theprivate possession of bullion; many persons dislike the voices ofpeacocks, and I, at all events, am perfectly harrowed by the physiognomyof apes. 

This, of course, is metaphorical; but it leads me from the mereexposition of theory to the argument from experience. If presents arepleasant because of the good-will, etc. , why are we all brought up (oh, the cruelty of suppressed disappointment when the doll arrives insteadof the wooden horse, or the duplicate kitchen-set instead of thelonged-for box of bricks!) to pretend that the gift we receive is thevery thing we have been pining for for years? And here I would ask myfriend and reader, the often-much-perplexed-giver-and-receiver of gifts, whether, quite apart even from those dreadful smothered tragedies ofone's childhood, there are, among the trifling false positions of life, many false positions more painful than that of choosing a gift which oneknows is not wanted, unless it be the more painful position still ofreceiving a gift which one would tip any one to take away?

Some persons feel this so strongly, wondering why the preacher forgotthis item in his list of vanities, that you may hear them loudly vowingthat never again will they be caught in the act of making a present. .. . 

So far about the mistaken view of the subject; now for the right one, which is mine: the result of great experience and of infinitemeditation, all coming to a head in that recent perplexed business ofchoosing a present for the lady with the diamonds and pearls. And beforeproceeding further, let me say that my experience is really exceptional. Not that I have given many gifts, or that I am in the least certain thatthe few I have given were not the usual Dead Sea apples; but because Ihave been, what is much more to the point, a great receiver of presents, my room, my house containing nothing beautiful or pleasant that is not apresent from some dear friend, or (the paradox will be explained lateron) a present from myself. A great receiver of presents, also, becausepresents give me a very lively and special pleasure; have done so alwaysever since my days of Christmas-trees and birthday candles, leaving allthrough my life a particular permeating charm connected with certaindates and seasons, like the good, wonderful smell of old fir-needlesslightly toasted, and of wax tapers recently extinguished, so that allvery delightful places and moments are apt to affect me as a sort ofgift-giving, what the Germans have a dear word for, beloved of children, _Bescheerung_. For if life, wisely lived, ought to be, as I firmlybelieve, nothing but a long act of courtship, then, surely, itsexquisite things--summer nights with loose-hanging stars, pale sunnywinter noons, first strolls through towered towns or upon herb-scentedhills, the hearing again of music one has understood, not to speak ofthe gesture and voice of the people whom one holds dear--all these, andall other exquisite movements or exquisite items of life, should be feltwith the added indescribable pleasure of being gifts. 

A present, then, may be defined as a _thing which one wants given by aperson whom one likes_. But our English syntax falls short of mymeaning, for what I would wish to say is rather, in Teutonic fashion, "aby a person one likes to one given object one wants. " The stress of thesentence should be laid on the word _wants_. For much of the charm, andmost of the dignity, of a gift depends on its being _a thing one wouldotherwise have done without_. 

This is true even with those dreadful useful objects which make us feelhot to distribute; they have become melancholy possible presentsbecause, alas! however necessary, they would otherwise not have beenforthcoming. And, apart from such cases, mankind has always decided thatgifts should not be of the nature of blankets, or manuals of science, orcooking-pots, but rather flowers, fruit, books of poetry, and the waresof silken Samarkand and cedared Lebanon. It is admitted upon all handsthat, to be perfect, presents must be superfluities; but I should liketo add that the reverse also holds good, and that superfluities would bethe better, nine times out of ten, for being presents. 

'Tis, methinks, a sign of the recent importation and comparativescarcity of honest livelihoods, that we should think so much how we comeby our money, and so little how we part with it, as if we were free towaste, provided we do not steal. Now, _my manuals of political economy_(which were, of course, _not_ presents to me) make it quite plain thatwhatever we spend in mere self-indulgence is so much taken away from theprofitable capital of the community; and sundry other sciences, whichrequire no manuals to teach them, make it plainer still that the habitof indulging, upon legal payment, our whims and our greedinesses, fillsour houses with lumber and our souls with worse than lumber where theremight be light and breathable air. Extremes meet: and even as topaupers, the barest necessaries of life are superfluities--thingsdispensed with; so, at the other end of the vicious circle, to thespendthrift luxury ceases to be luxury, and superfluities are turnedinto things one cannot do without. 

The charm of a gift, its little moral flavour which makes us feel thebetter for it, resides, therefore, not merely in good-will, but in thelittle prelude of self-restraint on the one hand, of unselfishness onthe other. Unless you gave it me, I should not have that pleasant thing;and you, knowing this much, give it to me, instead of to yourself. Whata complicated lovers'-knot of good-feeling there is tied, as roundflowers or sweetmeats, round every genuine present! This is a rich, varied impression, full of harmonies; compare with it the dry, dull, stifling impression one gets from looking round a rich man's house, oradmiring the ornaments of a rich woman's person: all these things havingmerely been bought!

Yet buying can be a fine thing. And among genuine presents (and in anhonourable place) I certainly include--as I hinted some way back--thepresents which people _sometimes make to themselves_. For 'tis a genuinepresent when a person who never allows himself a superfluity, at lastbuys one, as Charles and Mary Lamb did their first blue pots and prints, out of slowly saved up pennies. There is in that all the grace of longself-restraint, and the grace of finally triumphant love--love for thatfaithfully courted object, that Rachel among inanimates! The giving toone's self of such a present is a fit occasion for rejoicing; and 'tis aproper instinct (more proper than the one of displaying weddingpresents) which causes the united giver and receiver of the gift tosummon the neighbours, to see it and rejoice, not without feasting. 

But presents of this sort are even more difficult to compass than theother sort where people, like the lady sung by Heine, have pearls anddiamonds in plenty, and all things which mankind can wish. 

GOING AWAY

We stood on the steps of the old Scotch house as the carriage rolled heraway. A last greeting from that delightful, unflagging voice; the mistyflare of the lanterns round a corner; and then nothing but the darknessof the damp autumn night. There is to some foolish persons--myselfespecially--a strange and almost supernatural quality about the fact ofdeparture, one's own or that of others, which constant repetition seems, if anything, merely to strengthen. I cannot become familiar with thefact that a moment, the time necessary for a carriage, as in this case, to turn a corner, or for those two steel muscles of the engine to playupon each other, can do so complete and wonderful a thing as to breakthe continuity of intercourse, to remove a living presence. Thesubstitution of an image for a reality, the present broken off short andreplaced by the past; enumerating this by no means gives the equivalentof that odd and unnatural word GONE. And the terror of death itself liessurely in its being the most sudden and utter act of _going away_. 

I suppose there must be people who do not feel like this, as there arepeople also who do not feel, apparently, the mystery of change of place, of watching the familiar lines of hill or valley transform themselves, and the very sense of one's bearings, what was in front or to the otherside, east or west, getting lost or hopelessly altered. Such people'slives must be (save for misfortune) funnily undramatic; and, trying torealize them, I understand why such enormous crowds require to go andsee plays. 

It is usually said that in such partings as these--partings withdefinite hope of meeting and with nothing humanly tragic about them, sothat the last interchange of voice is expected to be a laugh or ajoke--the sadder part is for those who stay. But I think this ismistaken. There is indeed a little sense of flatness--almost ofsomething in one's chest--when the train is gone or the carriage rolledoff; and one goes back into one's house or into the just-left room, throwing a glance all round as if to measure the emptiness. But theaccustomed details--the book we left open, the order we had to give, theanswer brought to the message, and breakfast and lunch and dinner andthe postman, all the great eternities--gather round and close up thegap: close the gone one, and that piece of past, not merely _up_, but, alas! _out_. 

It is the sense of this, secret even in the most fatuous breast, whichmakes things sadder for the goer. He knows from experience, and, if hehave imagination, he feels, this process of closing him out, this rapidadaptation to doing without him. And meanwhile he, in his carriage ortrain, is being hurled into the void; for even the richest man and he ofthe most numerous clients, is turned adrift without possessions orfriends, a mere poor nameless orphan, when on a solitary journey. Thereis, moreover, a sadder feeling than this in the heart of the moresentimental traveller, who has engaged the hospitality of friends. _Heknows it is extended equally to others_; that this room, which he mayhave made peculiarly his own, filling it, perhaps, in proportion to thebriefness of sojourn, with his own most personal experience; thelandscape made his own through this window, the crucial conversation, receiving unexpected sympathies, held or (more potent still) thoughtover afterwards in that chair; he knows that this room will become, perhaps, O horror, within a few hours, another's!

The extraordinary hospitality of England, becoming, like all Englishthings, rather too well done materially, rather systematic, andtherefore heartless, inflicts, I have been told, some painful blows onsentimental aliens, particularly of Latin origin. There is a pang infinding on the hospitable door a label-holder with one's name in it: itsaves losing one's way, but suggests that one is apt to lose it, is astranger in the house; and it tells of other strangers, past and future, each with his name slipped in. Similarly the guest-book, imitated fromnefarious foreign inns, so fearfully suggestive of human instability, with its close-packed signatures, and dates of arrival and departure. And then the cruelty of housekeepers, and the ruthlessness ofhousemaids! Take heed, O Thestylis, dear Latin guardian of my hearth, take heed and imprint my urgent wishes in thy faithful heart: never, never, never, in my small southern home (not unlike, I sometimes fondlyfancy, the Poet's _parva domus_), never let me surprise thee depositingthy freshly-whitened linen in heaps outside the door of the departingguest; and never, I conjure thee, offend his eye or nostril with mops, or _frotteur's_ rollers, or resinous scent of furniture-polish near hissmall chamber! For that chamber, kindly Handmaiden, is _his_. He is theProphet it was made for; and the only Prophet conceivable as long aspresent. And when he takes departure, why, the void must follow, a longhiatus, darkness, and stacked-up furniture, and the scent of varnishwithin tight-closed shutters. .. . 

But, alas! alas! not all kind Thestylis's doing and refraining is ableto dispel the natural sense of coming and going: one's bed re-made, one's self replaced, new boxes brought and unpacked, metaphorically aswell as literally; fresh adjustments, new subjects of discourse, newsympathies: and the poor previous occupant meanwhile _rolling_, as theFrench put it. Rolling! how well the word expresses that sense of smoothand empty nowhere, with nothing to catch on or keep, which plays solarge a part in all our earthly experience; as, for the rest, isnatural, seeing that the earth is only a ball, at least the astronomerssay so. 

But let us turn from this painful side of _going away_; and insistrather on certain charming impressions sometimes connected with it. Forthere is something charming and almost romantic, when, as in the case Imentioned, the friend leaves friends late in the evening. There is thewhole pleasant day intact, with leisurely afternoon stroll when all ispacked and ready: watching the sunset up the estuary, picking someflowers in the garden; sometimes even seeing the first stars prickthemselves upon the sky, and mild sheet-lightnings, auguring good, playround the house, disclosing distant hills and villages. And the orderlydinner, seeming more swept and garnished for the anticipation of bustle, the light on the cloth, the sheen on the silver, the grace and fragranceof fruit and flowers, and the gracious faces above it, remains a wideand steady luminous vision on the black background of midnight travel, of the train rushing through nothingness. Most charming of all, whenafter the early evening on the balcony, the traveller leaves the south, to hurtle by night, conscious only of the last impression of supper withkind friends at Milan or the lakes, and the glimpse, in the stationlight, of heads covered with veils, and flowers in the hands, andsouthern evening dresses. These are the occasional graciouscompensations for that bad thing called going away. 

COMING BACK

Most people tell you that to return to places where one has beenexceptionally happy is an unwise proceeding. But this, I venture toconceive, is what poor Alfred de Musset called "une insulte au bonheur. "It shows, at all events, a lack of appreciation of the particularnature, permanent, and, in a manner, radiating, of happy experiences. Ofcourse, I am not speaking of the cases where the happy past has beensevered from indifferent present and future by some dreadful calamity;poetry alone is consolatory and also aloof enough to deal decorouslywith such tragic things, and they are no concern of the essayist. Thereis, besides, a very individual and variable character about greatmisfortunes, no two natures being affected by them quite alike, so thatdiscussion and generalization are not merely intrusive, but also mostlyfruitless. Therefore the question is not whether people are wise orunwise in avoiding places where they have been happy, after events whichhave shattered their happiness. And the only loss I have to deal with isthe loss--if it really is one, as we shall examine--of the actualcircumstances which accompanied a happy experience; the loss of the_then_ as opposed to the _now_, and, in a measure of the irrecoverabletime, years or months, and of the small luggage of expectations andillusions which has got inevitably mislaid or scattered in the interval. And the question arises whether 'tis wiser, in a sense whether it ismore delicately epicurean, to avoid the places which bring all that, together with the sense of the happy gone-by days, vividly home to one;or whether, as I contend, past happiness ought not to be used as anessential element in the happiness of the present. 

I have had, lately, the experience of returning to a part of the worldwhich I had not seen for many, many years, and where I had spent thedrowsy long days of a long illness, and the dreamy sweet days of alonger convalescence. It made a day's journey, without any especialresting-place for the soles of my feet, and undertaken, I can scarcelytell why, with a little shyness and fear. I did not go to the housewhere I had lived, but to one in the neighbourhood, whither I had oftenbeen taken all those years ago; and I did not even take theprecaution--or perhaps took the contrary one--of securing the presenceof the owners. The ladies were out; gone to one of the little fishingtowns which are strung all around the Forth, and they would not be backtill teatime. But the benevolent Scottish housemaid, noticing perhaps ashadow of disappointment, suggested my going in and waiting. 

The little old castle, which had got a little blurred in myrecollection, seemed suddenly remembered and familiar, even as had beenthe case with the country I had driven along from the station; theundulating turnip-fields and fields of pale stooked corn, thereaping-machines and the women tying up the bean-straw, the white lineof the Forth, and the whole pale, delicate country under the low, tender, _intimate_ northern sky. Even the smell, sweet and pungent, ofthe withered potatoes, bringing the sense of knowing it all, turningsof roads and of the land, so well. And similarly inside the castle, where I lingered on the pretext of writing a note to those ladies. Itwas all unchanged; the escutcheons in relief on the ceiling, the view ofcornfield and thin beech belts, and distant sea from the windows, thelavender and _pot-pourri_ in the bowls, and almost the titles of thebooks, seemed quietly, at the touch of reality, to open out inremembrance. I did not stay till the return of the ladies, but went backto the station, and waited on the bridge for my train, which was a goodhalf-hour late. I looked down from that bridge on the kind and gentlecountry in the veiled sunshine. The hill to the back of the house whereI had lived, in the distance, the red roofs of the fishing villages, thelittle spire of the smallest of them barely projecting, as it alwaysdid, above the freshly reaped fields. And I felt, as I leaned againstthe parapet watching for my train's smoke coming towards me, not theloss, but rather the inestimable gain which a kindly past represents. Years gone by? Nay, rather years which make endurable, which furnish andwarm the present, giving it sweetness and significance. How very poorwe must be in our early youth, with no possessions like these; and howrich in our later life, with many years distilled into the essence of asingle to-day!

As I stood on the railway bridge thinking or feeling in this manner, Iheard wheels, and saw a pony-cart, with an elderly lady, and a youngerone driving her, coming towards me. It was the ladies who had been sokind to me all those years back, returning to the little castle. Iturned my back, leaned on the parapet, and let them pass me, unnoticing. I wanted to keep them also in that dim and dear kind past. 

For we must be discreet as well as grateful-hearted if we would enjoythe Past's full gifts. .. . 

The Past's gifts; and to these I would add, or among them rather I wouldinclude, an item which I find a difficulty in naming properly, andwhich, of course, I hesitate a little to speak about. I mean the gifts, odd as it sounds, of Death. For Death, while in his main function thecruel taker-away, the violent or stealthy robber, has also a lessimportant side to his character, and is a giver of gifts, if only weknow how to receive them. And he is this even apart from his power (forwhich one might imagine that the Greeks gave him, in certain terracottas and reliefs, so very gentle and beautiful an aspect) of bringinglight and loving-kindness into poor human creatures' judgments, andteaching them to understand and pardon; apart also from that mysticrelationship, felt by Dante and all the poets, which he bears to thegenius of imaginative love. What I allude to is a more humble, but quiteas gracious function, of leading those he takes away (with theinfinitely tender gesture of the antique funereal Hermes), not intovacuity and the horrid blackness of oblivion, but into a place of safeand serene memory. In this capacity Death can be, even like his master, Time, a giver of gifts to us. For those _are_ gifts to us, those friendshe gathers together under hazier, tenderer skies into our thoughts whichhave the autumn warmth and stillness of late-reaped fields. Nay, thegift is greater, for there are added certain half-strangers, towardswhom we lose all shyness, and who turn to real friends when introducedby death and worked into our past; dear such-an-one, whom we scarcelyknew, barely more than face and name _then_, but know and have the rightto care for now. So that I think that we might extract and take withhappy interpretation those two last lines of the old, old Goethe'sheartbreaking dedication to the generations whom he had outlived:--

 "Was ich besitze, seh' ich wie im Weiten, Und was verschwand, wird mir zu Wirklichkeiten. "

For all which reasons let us never be afraid of going back to placeswhere we have been exceptionally happy; not even in the cases where werecognize that such former happiness was due, in part, to some dispelledillusion. For if we can but learn to be glad of the Past and receive itsgift with gratitude, may not the remembrance of a dear illusion, broughthome with the sight of the places which we filled with it, be merelyanother blessing; a possession which nothing can rob us of, and by whichour spirit is the richer?

LOSING ONE'S TRAIN

The clocks up at the villa must have been all wrong, or else my watchdid not go with them, or else I had not looked often enough at it whilerambling about the town on my way to the station. Certain it is thatwhen I got there, at the gallop of my cab-horse, the express was gone. There is something hatefully inexorable about expresses: it is uselessto run after them, even in Italy. The next train took an hour and aquarter instead of forty minutes to cover the nineteen miles betweenPistoia and Florence. Moreover, that next train was not till eight inthe evening, and it was now half-past five. 

I felt all it was proper to feel on the occasion, and said, if anything, rather more. Missing a train is a terrible business, even if you missnothing else in consequence; and the inner disarray, the blow and wrenchto thoughts and feelings, is most often far worse than any mereupsetting of arrangements. A chasm suddenly gapes between present andfuture, and the river of life flows backwards, if but for a second. Itis most fit and natural to lose one's temper; but the throwing out of somuch moral ballast does not help one to overtake that train. I mentionthis, lest I should pass for heartless; and now proceed to say that, after a few minutes given to wrath and lamentation, I called the cabback and went in search of a certain very ancient church, containing avery ancient pulpit, which I had never succeeded in seeing before. Exactly as on previous occasions, when I got to the farm where the keyof that church was kept, the key had gone to town in the pocket of thepeasant. He would be back, no doubt, at nightfall. But I had not verymuch expected the church to be open, so I felt perfectly indifferent atnot seeing the pulpit--nay, if anything, a little relieved, as one doessometimes when friends prove _not at home_. 

I walked up a long steep track to the little battered, black, fast-locked church, which stands all alone under some oak trees. Thetrack was through thin hillside woods. Such divine woods! young oak andacacia, and an undergrowth of grass and ferns, of full-blown rosesthrown across the grass; and here and there, dark in that pale younggreen, a cypress. The freshness of evening came all of a sudden, andwith it a scent of every kind of leaf and herb and fern, and thesweetness of the ripening corn all round. And when I got to the ridge, slippery with dry cut grass, what should I see in front of me, over theolive-yards and the wooded slopes, but the walls and towers ofSerravalle, which have beckoned to my fancy almost ever since mychildhood. I sat there a long while in the June sunset and very nearlymissed the second train, which it had seemed intolerable to wait for. 

This is an allegory, and I commend its application to the wise andgentle reader. There are more of such symbolical trains lost than realones, even by the most travelled mortals, Odysseus or a bag-man. Andsuch losing of trains is not inevitably a blessing. I have often writtenabout life with optimistic heartlessness, because life, on the whole, has been uncommonly kind to me, and because one is nearer the truthwhen cheerful than when depressed. But this is the place for a briefinterlude of pessimism. For it is all very well to make the best oflosing trains when we have time, cabs, and a fine view at hand; and whenin losing the train we lose nothing else, except our temper. But surely'tis no ingratitude towards life's great mercies and blessings todiscriminate them from life's buffets and bruisings. And methinks thatthe teaching of courage or resignation might fitly begin by therecognition of the many cases where only courage or resignation avails, because they are thoroughly bad. There is something stupid and underbredat times in the attitude of saints and stoics--at least in their books. When Rachel weepeth for her children, we have no business to come roundhawking our consolation; we should stand aside, unless we can cradle herto sleep in our arms. And if we refuse to weep, 'tis not because thereis not matter enough for weeping, but because we require our strengthand serenity to carry her through her trouble. Pain, dear cheerfulfriends, is pain; and grief, grief; and if our own complete humanefficiency requires the acquaintance thereof, 'tis because theknowledge of their violence and of their wiles is needed for our ownprotection and the helping of other folk. Evil comes from the gods, nodoubt; but so do all things; and to extract good from it--the greatPrometheus-feat of man--is not to evil's credit, but to the credit ofgood. The contrary doctrine is a poison to the spirit, though a poisonof medicinal use in moments of anguish, a bromide or an opiate. 

I am speaking, therefore, only of such contingencies as will bearcomparison, without silly stoicism, to the missing of a train. Much ofthe good such disappointments may contain is of the nature of education, and most of it a matter of mere novelty. Without suspecting it, we areall suffering from lack of new departures; and life would no doubt bebetter if we tried a few more things, and gave the hidden, neglectedpossibilities a greater chance. Change as such is often fruitful ofimprovement, exposing to renovating air and rains the hard, exhaustedsoil of our souls, turning up new layers and helping on life'schemistry. The thwarting of our cherished plans is beneficial, becauseour plans are often mere routine, born not of wisdom, but of inertness. In our endless treadmill of activity, in our ceaseless rumination, weare, as a fact, neither acting nor thinking; and life, secretly at astandstill, ceases to produce any good. There was no reason for takingthat express and getting back two or three hours sooner to my house: noone required me, nothing needed doing. Yet, unless I had lost that trainI should not have dreamed of taking that walk, of making that littlejourney of discovery, in a delightful unknown place. 

There is another source of good hidden in disappointment. For it isdisappointment rather than age (age getting the credit for what itmerely witnesses) which teaches us to work into life's scheme certainfacts, frequently difficult of acceptance; trying to make them, as allreality should be, causes of strength rather than of weakness. Painfulfacts? Or rather, perhaps, only painful contradictions to certainpleasant delusions, founded on nothing save their pleasantness, andtaken for granted--who knows how long?--without proof and withoutquestioning. Facts concerning not merely success, love, personalcontact, but also one's own powers and possibilities for good, what theworld is able to receive at one's hands, as much as of what the worldcan give to one. 

But the knowledge which disappointment gives, to those wishing to learnfrom it, has a higher usefulness than practical application. Itconstitutes a view of life, a certain contemplative attitude which, inits active resignation, in its domination of reality by intelligentacquiescence, gives continuity, peace, and dignity. And here my allegoryfinds its completion. For what compensated me after my lost train andall my worry and vexation of spirit? Nothing to put in my pocket orswell my luggage, not even a kingdom, such as made up for the loss ofpoor Saul's asses; but an impression of sunset freshness and sweetnessamong ripening corn and delicate leaves, and a view, unexpected, solemn, and charming, with those long-forgotten distant walls and towers which Ishall never reach, and which have beckoned to me from my childhood. 

Such is the allegory, or morality, of the Lost Train. 

THE HANGING GARDENS

VALEDICTORY

I am not alluding to those of Semiramis. Though, now I come to think ofit, this is the moment for protesting against one of those unnecessarydeceptions from which the candid mind of children is allowed to suffer. For the verb _to hang_ invariably implies that the hanging object (or, according to our jurisprudence, person) is supported by a rope, nail, orother device, from above, while remaining unsupported from below. And itwas in such relations to the forces of gravitation that my infancyconceived those gardens of the Babylonish Queen. So that I quiteremember my bitter disappointment (the first germ, doubtless, of ageneral scepticism about Gods and Men) when a cut in an indiscreet_Handbook of Antiquities_ displayed these flowery places as restingflatly on a housetop, and no more hanging, in any intelligible sense, than I hung myself. 

Having lodged this complaint, I will, however, admit that thismisleading adjective comes as a boon in the discourse I am nowmeditating. Since, returning to my old theme of the _Garden of Life_, Ifind that the misapplication of that word _Hanging_, and its originalliteral suggestion, lends added significance to this allegoric dictum:Of all the _Gardens of Life_ the best worth cultivating are often theHanging Ones. Yes! Hanging between the town pavement, a hundred feetbelow, and the open sky, with gales ready to sweep down every flower-potinto smithereens, the kind or wicked sky, immediately above. Moreover, as regards legal claim to soil, leasehold, freehold, or copyhold, why, simply none, the earth having been carried up to that precarious placein arduous basketfuls. 

One of the wisest of women (I say it with pride, for she is my godchild)put this skyey allegory of mine into plain words, which I often repeatto myself, and never without profit. The circumstances and character ofher husband had involved her in wanderings from her very wedding-day;and each of her six children had been born in a different place, andeach in a more unlikely one. "It must have been very difficult to settledown at last like this, " I said, looking in admiration from the daintywhite walls and white carpets to the delicately laid table, with theflowers upon it and around it--I mean the garland of pink little facesand pink little pinafores. "I wonder you could do it after so long. ""But I have always been what you call _settled_, " she answered, andadded very simply--"As soon as I took in that we should always beeternally uprooting, I made up my mind that the only way was to live asif we should never move at all. You see, everything would have gone tobits if I had let myself realise the contrary, and I think I should havegone crazy into the bargain. "

There has been a good deal of _going to bits_ and of craziness of sortsowing to the centuries and the universe not always having been as wiseas this lady. And--with all deference to higher illuminations--I amtempted to ask myself whether all creeds, which have insisted on life'sfleetingness and vanity, have not played considerable havoc with thefruitfulness, let alone the pleasantness, of existence. Certainly theholy persons who awaited the end of the world in caves, and on platformsfastened to columns, had not well-furbished knives and forks, norcarefully folded linen, nor, as a rule, nicely behaved nice little boysand girls, waiting with eager patience for a second helping of pudding. There is a distressing sneer at soap ("scented soap" it is alwayscalled), even in the great Tolstoi's writings, ever since he has allowedhimself to be hag-ridden by the thought of death. And one speculateswhether the care true saints have bestowed upon their souls, if nottheir bodies, the swept and garnished character of the best monasticism, has not been due to the fact that all this tidiness was in preparationfor an eternity of beatitude?

Fortunately for the world, the case of my dear goddaughter is anextreme one; and although our existence is quite as full of uprootingsas hers, they come in such a stealthy or such a tragic manner as tobeget no expectation of recurrence. Moreover, the very essence of lifeis to make us believe in itself; we fashion the future out of ourfeelings of the present, and go on living as if we should live forever, simply because, by the nature of things, we have no experienceof ceasing to live. Life is for ever murmuring to us the secret of itsunendingness; and it is to our honour, and for our happiness, that we, poor flashes of a second, identify ourselves with the great unceasing, steady light which we and millions of myriads besides go to make up. Are we much surer of being alive to-morrow than of being dead in fiftyyears? "Is there any moment which can certify to its successor?" Thatis the answer to La Fontaine's octogenarian, planting his trees, despite the gibes of the little beardless boys whom, as is inevitablein such cases, he survived. 

 Défendez-vous au sage De se donner des soins pour le plaisir d'autrui? Cela même est un fruit qui je goûte aujourd'hui; J'en puis jouir demain, et quelques jours encore. 

And all I would add is that, although it was very nice of the old manto enjoy his planting because of the unborn generations who would eatthe fruits, he might have been less nice and quite as pleased if, asis probable, he liked gardening for its own sake. 

But people seem--on account of that horrid philosophical andmoralising twist--to cast about for an excuse whenever they are doingwhat is, after all, neither wicked nor silly--to wit, making the bestof such days and such powers as a merciful Providence or anindifferent trio of Fates has allowed them. But I should like to turnthe tables on these persons, and suggest that all this worrying aboutwhether life is or is not worth living, and hunting for answers forand against, may itself be an excuse, unconscious like all the mostmischievous excuses, and hide not finer demands and highbreddiscontents, but rather a certain feebleness, lack of grip andadaptation, and an indolent acquiescence in what my godchild stoutlyrefused, a greater or lesser going to bits. 

This much is certain, that we all of us have to make a stand againstsuch demoralisation whenever our plans are upset, or we are impatient todo something else, or we are feeling worried and ill. We most of us haveto struggle against leaving our portmanteau gaping on a sofa or throwingour boot-trees into corners when we are in a place only for a few hours;and struggle against allowing the flowers on the table to wither, andthe fire to go out, when we are setting out on a journey next day, or adear one is about to say goodbye. "See to that fire being kept up, andbring fresh roses, " said a certain friend of mine on a similar occasion. That was laying out a little hanging garden on the narrow ledge of twoor three poor hours; and, behold! the garden has continued to be sweetand bright in the wide safe places of memory. 

In saying all these things, I am aware that many wise men, or menreputed wise, are against me; and that pretty hard words have beenapplied in the literature of all countries and ages to persons who areof my way of thinking, as, for instance, _gross, thoughtless, withoutsoul_, and _Epicurean Swine_. And some of the people I like most toread about, the heroes of Tolstoi, André, Levine, Pierre, and, ofcourse, Tolstoi himself, are for ever repeating that they can notlive, let alone enjoy life, unless some one tell them why they shouldlive at all. 

The demand, at first sight, does not seem unreasonable, and it is hardlines that just those who will ask about such matters should be the veryones for ever denied an answer. But so it is. The secret of _why weshould live_ can be whispered only by a divinity; and, like thedivinity who spoke to the Prophet, its small, still voice is heard onlyin ourselves. What it says there is neither couched in a logical formnor articulated in very definite language; and, I am bound to admit, isin no way of the nature of _pure reason_. Indeed, it is for the mostpart ejaculatory, and such that the veriest infant and simpleton, and Ifear even animals (which is a dreadful admission), can follow itsmeaning. For to that unceasing question _Why_? the tiny voice within usanswers with imperturbable irrelevance, "I want, " "I do, " "I think, " andoccasionally "I love. " Very crass little statements, and not at allsatisfactory to persons like Levine, André, and Tolstoi, who, for themost part, know them only second-hand; but wonderfully satisfying, thankgoodness, to the great majority which hears them for ever humming andbeating with the sound of its own lungs and heart. And one might evensuspect that they are merely a personal paraphrase of the words whichthe spheres are singing and the heavens are telling. 

So, if we have no ampler places to cultivate with reverence and love, let us betake ourselves to the hanging gardens on our roof. The sunswill cake the insufficient earth and parch the delicate roots; thestorms will batter and tear the frail creepers. No doubt. But at thispresent moment all is fair and fragrant. And when the storms have donetheir wicked worst, and the sun and the frosts--nay, when that roof onwhich we perch is pulled to pieces, tiles and bricks, and the wholeblock goes--may there not be, for those caring enough, the chance ofgrowing another garden, there or elsewhere?

Be this as it may, one thing is certain, that no solid plot of earthbetween its walls or hedges allows us such intricate and unexpectedbird's-eye views of streets and squares, of the bustling or restingcity; none gives us such a vault of heaven, pure and sunny, or creepingwith clouds, or serenely starlit, as do these hanging gardens of ourlife. 

THE END

 HORTUS VITAE; OR, THE HANGING GARDENS:

 MORALIZING ESSAYS. BY VERNON LEE. 

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