The Savoy, no. 1, 2 and 3
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The Savoy, no. 1, 2 and 3[1] is a collection of the first three issues of The Savoy.
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THE SAVOY
All Contributions should be directed to The Editor of The Savoy, Effingham House, Arundel Street, Strand, W.C. MSS. should be type-written, and stamps enclosed for their return.
AN ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY
No. 1 Price 2/6 net
EDITORIAL NOTE
IT is hoped that "THE SAVOY" will be a periodical of an exclusively literary and artistic kind. To present Literature in the shape of its letter- press, Art in the form of its illustrations, will be its aim. For the attainment of that aim we can but rely on our best endeavours and on the logic of our belief that good writers and artists will care to see their work in company with the work of good writers and artists. Readers who look to a new periodical for only very well-known or only very obscure names must permit themselves to be disappointed. We have no objection to a celebrity who deserves to be celebrated, or to an unknown person who has not been seen often enough to be recognised in passing. All we ask from our contributors is good work, and good work is all we offer our readers. This we offer with some confidence. We have no formulas, and we desire no false unity of form or matter. We have not invented a new point of view. We are not Realists, or Romanticists, or Decadents. For us, all art is good which is good art. We hope to appeal to the tastes of the intelligent by not being original for originality's sake, or audacious for the sake of advertise- ment, or timid for the convenience of the elderly-minded. We intend to print no verse which has not some close relationship with poetry, no lirtion which has not a certain sense of what is finest in living tact, no criticism which has not some knowledge, discernment, and sincerity in its judgment. We could scarcely say more, and we are content to think we can scarcely say less.
LITERARY CONTENTS
PAGE
EDITORIAL .VOTE - - - - 5
ON GOING TO CHURCH. An Article by G. Bernard Sham 13
TO NANCY. A Story by Frederick Wedmore - - - 31 MANDOLINE. A Poem, translated by Arthur Symons from the Fifes
Galantes of Paul Verlaine (illustrated) - 42
.-/ GOOD PRINCE. An Article by Max Beerbohm 45
THE EYES OF PRIDE. A Story by Ernest Dowson 5.
THE THREE MUSICIANS. A Poem by Aubrey Beardsley (illustrated) 65 ZOLA: THE MAN AND HIS WORK. An Article by Havelock
Ellis -------- 67
TWO LOVE POEMS— The Shadowy Horses: The Travail of Passion.
By W. B. Yeats - 83
DIEPPE : iSqj. An Article by Arthur Symons ( illustrated) - - 84
ELLEN. A Story by Rudolf Dircks - - - - - - 103
SEA MUSIC. A Poem by Mathilde Blind m
A GOLDEN DECADE IN ENGLLSH ART. An Article by Joseph
Pennell (illustrated) - 112
A GLASS OE WHLSKEY. A Story by Humphrey James - 12?
IMPENITENTIA ULTLALA. A Poem by Ernest Dowson - - - 131
THE BLNDLNG OF THE HALE. A Story by W. B. Yeats - 135
ON CRITICISM AND THE CRITIC. An Essay by Selwyn Image 141
THE WANDERERS. A Poem by Arthur Symons - - - - 149 UNDER THE HILL. A Romantic Story by Aubrey Beardsley
(Chapters I, II and III, illustrated by the Author) - - • 151
ART CONTENTS
PAGE
COVER - \ /•--._
TITLE PAGE - - Designed by Aubrey Beardsley 3
CONTENTS PAGE) [ 7
./ LITHOGRAPH. By ('. H. Shannon .... _.,, MANDOLINE. A Wood- Engraving from a Water-Colour Drawing b)
Charles Conder "43
REGENT STREET LONDON. After a Pen-and-ink Drawing by Joseph
Pennell 49
THE THREE MUSICIANS } f - - - 64
By Aubrey Beardsley
TAILPLECE - ) ' t ... 66
LA PARISIENNE. By Louis Oury - - - - - - -81
THE BATHERS | [ - - 87
By Aubrey Beardsley
THE MOSKA -J 1 - • 91
CHLOE. By \Y. Rothenstein - - ... lo ^
THE OLD CHARTIST ] By F. Sandys. Reproduced 1 - 119
HAROLD from Once a Week I 120
A DRAWING by J. McNeill Whistler. Reproduced from Once a Week 121
CARICATURE OF MR. BEERBOHM TREE. A Wood - Engraving
after the Drawing by Max Beerboh.m - - - - 125 Til AC LOW: THE NORWEGIAN PAINTER AND HIS FAMILY.
After the Oil-Painting by Jacques L. Blanche - - - - 133
A HEAD. After a Crayon Drawing by J. Lemmen (printed in sanguine)- 139 lirr. FLYING ASS : a Scene from Voltaire's La Pucelle. Reproduced
in half-tone from an Etching by W. ROTHENSTEIN - 147
THE ABBE
'57
THE TOILET - \ -161
- By Aitrrf.y Beardsley -
THE FRULTBEARERS - - 167
A LARGE CHRISTMAS CARD ' - —
The whole of the Reproductions in this Volume, in line and half-tone blocks, and the two 7vood engravings, are by Mr. Paul NAUMANN.
2 — 2
ON GOING TO CHURCH
AS a modern man, concerned with matters of fine art and living in London by the sweat of my brain, I dwell in a world which, unable to live by bread alone, lives spiritually on alcohol and morphia. Young and excessively sentimental people live on love, and delight in poetry or fine writing which declares that love is Alpha and Omega ; but an attentive examination will generally establish the fact that this kind of love, ethereal as it seems, is merely a symptom of the drugs I have mentioned, and does not occur independently except in those persons whose normal state is similar to that induced in healthy persons by narcotic stimulants. If from the fine art of to-day we set aside feelingless or prosaic art, which is, properly, not tine art at all, we may safely refer most of the rest to feeling produced by the teapot, the bottle, or the hypodermic syringe. An exhibition of the cleverest men and women in London at five p.m., with their afternoon tea cut off, would shatter many illusions. Tea and coffee and cigarettes produce conversation ; lager beer and pipes produce routine journalism ; wine and gallantry produce brilliant journalism, essays and novels ; brandy and cigars produce violently devotional or erotic poetry : morphia produces tragic exaltation (useful on the stage) ; and sobriety produces an average curate's sermon. Again, strychnine and arsenic may be taken as pick-me-ups ; doctors quite understand that " tonics " mean drams of ether ; chlorodyne is a universal medicine ; chloral, sulphonal and the like call up Nature's great destroyer, artificial sleep ; bromide of potassium will reduce the over-sensitive man of genius to a con- dition in which the alighting of a wasp on his naked eyeball will not make him wink ; haschisch tempts the dreamer by the Oriental glamour of its reputation ; and gin is a cheap substitute for all these anodynes. Most of the activity ot the Press, the Pulpit, the Platform and the Theatre
, 4 THE SAVOY
is only a symptom of the activity of the drug trade, the tea trade, the tobacco trade and the liquor trade. The world is not going from bad to worse, it is true ; but the increased facilities which constitute the advance of civilisation include facilities for drugging oneself. These facilities wipe whole races of black men off the face of the earth ; and every extension and refinement of them picks a stratum out of white society and devotes it to destruction. Such traditions of the gross old habits as have reached me seem to be based on the idea of first doing your day's work and then enjoying yourself by getting drunk. Nowadays you get drunk to enable you to begin work. Shakespere's opportunities of meddling with his nerves were much more limited than Dante Rossetti's ; but it is not clear that the advantage of the change lay with Rossetti. Besides, though Shakespere may, as tradition asserts, have died of drink in a ditch, he at all events conceived alcohol as an enemy put by a man into his own mouth to steal away his brains ; whereas the modern man conceives it as an indispensable means of setting his brains going. We drink and drug, not for the pleasure of it, but for Dutch inspiration and by the advice of our doctors, as duellists drink for Dutch courage by the advice of their seconds. Obviously this systematic, utilitarian drugging and stimulating, though necessarily "moderate" (so as not to defeat its own object), is more dangerous than the old boozing if we are to regard the use of stimulants as an evil.
As for me, I do not clearly see where a scientific line can be drawn between food and stimulants. I cannot say, like Ninon de l'Enclos, that a bowl of soup intoxicates me ; but it stimulates me as much as I want to be stimulated, which is, perhaps, all that Ninon meant. Still, I have not failed to observe that all the drugs, from tea to morphia, and all the drams, from lager beer to brandy, dull the edge of self-criticism and make a man content with something less than the best work of which he is soberly capable. He thinks his work better, when he is really only more easily satisfied with him- self. Those whose daily task is only a routine, for the sufficient discharge of which a man need hardly be more than half alive, may seek this fool's paradise without detriment to their work ; but to those professional men whose
ON GOING TO CHURCH 15
art affords practically boundless scope for skill of execution and elevation of thought, to take drug or dram is to sacrifice the keenest, most precious part of life to a dollop of lazy and vulgar comfort for which no true man of genius should have any greater stomach than the lady of the manor has for her ploughman's lump of fat bacon. To the creative artist stimulants are especially dangerous, since they produce that terrible dream-glamour in which the ugly, the grotesque, the wicked, the morbific begin to fascinate and obsess instead of disgusting. This effect, however faint it may be, is always produced in some degree by drugs. The mark left on a novel in the Leisure Hour by a cup of tea may be imperceptible to a bishop's wife who has just had two cups ; but the effect is there as certainly as if De Quincey's eight thousand drops of laudanum had been substituted.
A very little experience of the world of art and letters will convince any open-minded person that abstinence, pure and simple, is not a practicable remedy for this state of things. There is a considerable commercial demand for maudlin or nightmarish art and literature which no sober person would produce, the manufacture of which must accordingly be frankly classed industrially with the unhealthy trades, and morally with the manufacture of unwholesome sweets for children or the distilling of gin. What the victims of this industry call imagination and artistic faculty is nothing but attenuated delirium tremens, like Pasteur's attenuated hydrophobia. It is useless to encumber an argument with these predestined children of perdition. The only profitable cases are those to consider of people engaged in the healthy pursuit of those arts which afford scope for the greatest mental and physical energy, the clearest and acutest reason and the most elevated perception. Work of this kind requires an intensity of energy of which no ordinary labourer or routine official can form any conception. If the dreams of Keeleyism could be so far realised as to transmute human brain energy into vulgar explosive force, the head of Shakespere, used as a bombshell, might conceivably blow England out of the sea. At all events, the succession of efforts by which a Shaksperean play, a Beethoven symphony, or a Wagner music-drama is produced, though it may not overtax Shakespere, Beethoven
1 6 THE SAVOY
or Wagner, must certainly tax even them to the utmost, and would be as prodigiously impossible to the average professional man as the writing of an ordinary leading article to a ploughman. What is called professional work is, in point of severity, just what you choose to make it, either commonplace, easy and requiring only extensive industry to be lucrative, or else dis- tinguished, difficult and exacting the fiercest intensive industry in return, after a probation of twenty years or so, for authority, reputation and an income only sufficient for simple habits and plain living. The whole professional world lies between these two extremes. At the one, you have the man to whom his profession is only a means of making himself and his family comfortable and prosperous : at the other, you have the man who sacrifices everything and everybody, himself included, to the perfection of his work — to the passion for efficiency which is the true master- passion of the artist. At the one, work is a necessary evil and moneymaking a pleasure : at the other, work is the objective realisation of life and moneymaking a nuisance. At the one, men drink and drug to make themselves comfortable : at the other, to stimulate their working faculty. Preach mere abstinence at the one, and you are preaching nothing but diminution of happiness. Preach it at the other, and you are proposing a reduction of efficiency. If you are to prevail, you must propose a sub- stitute. And the only one I have yet been able to hit on is — going to church.
It will not be disputed, I presume, that an unstimulated saint can work as hard, as long, as finely and, on occasion, as fiercely, as a stimulated sinner. Recuperation, recreation, inspiration seem to come to the saint far more surely than to the man who grows coarser and fatter with every additional hundred a year, and who calls the saint an ascetic. A comparison of the works of our carnivorous drunkard poets with those of Shelley, or of Dr. Johnson's dictionary with that of the vegetarian Littre, is sufficient to show that the secret of attaining the highest eminence either in poetry or in dictionary compiling (and all fine literature lies between the two), is to be found neither in alcohol nor in our monstrous habit of bringing
ON GOISG TO CHURCH 17
millions of useless and disagreeable animals into existence for the express purpose of barbarously slaughtering them, roasting their corpses and eating them. I have myself tried the experiment of not eating meat or drinking tea, coffee or spirits for more than a dozen years past, without, as far I can discover, placing myself at more than my natural disadvantages relatively to those colleagues of mine who patronise the slaughter-house and the distillery. But then I go to church. If you should chance to see, in a country church- yard, a bicycle leaning against a tombstone, you are not unlikely to find me inside the church if it is old enough or new enough to be fit for its purpose. There I find rest without languor and recreation without excitement, both of a quality unknown to the traveller who turns from the village church to the village inn and seeks to renew himself with shandygaff. Any place where men dwell, village or city, is a reflection of the consciousness of every single man. In my consciousness there is a market, a garden, a dwelling, a workshop, a lover's walk — above all, a cathedral. My appeal to the master- builder is : .Mirror this cathedral for me in enduring stone ; make it with hands ; let it direct its sure and clear appeal to my senses, so that when my spirit is vaguely groping after an elusive mood my eye shall be caught by the skyward tower, showing me where, within the cathedral, I may find my way to the cathedral within me. With a right knowledge of this great function of the cathedral builder, and craft enough to set an arch on a couple of pillars, make doors and windows in a good wall and put a roof over them, any modern man might, it seems to me, build churches as they built them in the middle ages, if only the pious founders and the parson would let him. For want of that knowledge, gentlemen of Mr. Pecksniff's profession make fashionable pencil-drawings, presenting what Mr. Pecksniff's creator elsewhere calls an architectooralooral appearance, with which, having delighted the darkened eyes of the committee and the clerics, they have them translated into bricks and masonry and take a shilling in the pound on the bill, with the result that the bishop may consecrate the finished building until he is black in the face without making a real church of it. Can it be doubted by the pious that babies baptised in such places go to limbo if they die before
i8 THE SAVOY
qualifying themselves for other regions ; that prayers said there do not count ; nay, that such purposeless, respectable-looking interiors are irreconcilable with the doctrine of Omnipresence, since the bishop's blessing is no spell of black magic to imprison Omnipotence in a place that must needs be intolerable to Omniscience ? At all events, the godhead in me, certified by the tenth chapter of St. John's Gospel to those who will admit no other authority, refuses to enter these barren places. This is perhaps fortunate, since they are generally kept locked ; and even when they are open, they are jealously- guarded in the spirit of that Westminster Abbey verger who, not long ago, had a stranger arrested for kneeling down, and explained, when remonstrated with, that if that sort of thing were tolerated, they would soon have people praying all over the place. Happily it is not so everywhere. You may now ride or tramp into a village with a fair chance of finding the church-door open and a manuscript placard in the porch, whereby the parson, speaking no less as a man and a brother than as the porter of the House Beautiful, gives you to understand that the church is open always for those who have any use for it. Inside such churches you will often find not only carefully-cherished work from the ages of faith, which you expect to find noble and lovely, but sometimes a quite modern furnishing of the interior and draping of the altar, evidently done, not by contract with a firm celebrated for its illustrated catalogues, but by someone who loved and understood the church, and who, when baffled in the search for beautiful things, had at least succeeded in avoiding indecently commercial and incongruous ones. And then the search for beauty is not always baffled. When the dean and chapter of a cathedral want not merely an ugly but a positively beastly pulpit to preach from — something like the Albert Memorial canopy, only much worse — they always get it, improbable and unnatural as the enterprise is. Similarly, when an enlightened country parson wants an unpretending tub to thump, with a few pretty panels in it and a pleasant shape generally, he will, with -a little perseverance, soon enough find a craftsman who has picked up the thread of the tradition of his craft from the time when that craft was a fine art — as may be done nowadays more easily than was possible before we had
ON GOING TO CHURCH i 9
cheap trips and cheap photographs* — and who is only too glad to be allowed to try his hand at something in the line of that tradition. Some months ago, bicycling in the west country, I came upon a little church, built long before the sense of beauty and devotion had been supplanted by the sense of respectability and talent, in which some neat panels left by a modern carver had been painted with a few saints on gold backgrounds, evidently by some woman who had tried to learn what she could from the early Florentine masters and had done the work in the true votive spirit, without any taint of the amateur exhibiting his irritating and futile imitations of the celebrated-artist business. From such humble but quite acceptable efforts, up to the master- piece in stained glass by William Morris and Burne-Jones which occasionally astonishes you in places far more remote and unlikely than Birmingham or Oxford, convincing evidence may be picked up here and there that the decay of religious art from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth was not caused by any atrophy of the artistic faculty, but was an eclipse of religion by science and com- merce. It is an odd period to look back on from the churchgoer's point of view — those eclipsed centuries calling their predecessors " the dark ages," and trying to prove their own piety by raising, at huge expense, gigantic monuments in enduring stone (not very enduring, though, sometimes) of their infidelity. Go to Milan, and join the rush of tourists to its petrified christening -cake of a cathedral. The projectors of that costly ornament spared no expense to prove that their devotion was ten times greater than that of the builders of San Ambrogio. But every pound they spent only recorded in marble that their devotion was a hundred times less. Go on to Florence and try San Lorenzo, a really noble church (which the Milan Cathedral is not),
- At the bookstall in the South Kensington Museum, any young craftsman, or other person,
can turn over hundreds of photographs taken by Alinari, of Florence, from the finest work in the churches and palaces of Italy. He will not be importuned to buy, or grudged access to the port- folios, which are, fortunately, in charge of a lady who is a first-rate public servant. He can, however, purchase as many of the photographs as he wants for sixpence each. This invaluable arrangement, having been made at the public expense, is carefully kept from the public knowledge, because, if it were properly advertised, complaints might be made by English shopkeepers who object to our buying Alinari's cheap photographs instead of their own dear photographs of the Great Wheel at Earl's Court.
20 THE SAVOY
Brunelleschi's masterpiece. You cannot but admire its intellectual command of form, its unaffected dignity, its power and accomplishment, its masterly combination of simplicity and homogeneity of plan with elegance and variety of detail : you are even touched by the retention of that part of the beauty of the older time which was perceptible to the Renascent intellect before its weaning from heavenly food had been followed by starvation. You under- stand the deep and serious respect which Michael Angelo had for Brunelleschi — why he said " I can do different work, but not better." But a few minutes' walk to Santa Maria Novella or Santa Croce, or a turn in the steam-tram to San Miniato, will bring you to churches built a century or two earlier ; and you have only to cross their thresholds to feel, almost before you have smelt the incense, the difference between a church built to the pride and glory of God (not to mention the Medici) and one built as a sanctuary shielded by God's presence from pride and glory and all the other burdens of life. In San Lorenzo up goes your head — every isolating advantage you have of talent, power or rank asserts itself with thrilling poignancy. In the older churches you forget yourself, and are the equal of the beggar at the door, standing on ground made holy by that labour in which we have discovered the reality of prayer. You may also hit on a church like the Santissima Annunziata, carefully and expensively brought up to date, quite in our modern church -restoring manner, by generations of princes chewing the cud of the Renascence ; and there you will see the worship of glory and the self-sufficiency of intellect giving way to the display of wealth and elegance as a guarantee of social importance — in another word, snobbery. In later edifices you see how intellect, finding its worshippers growing colder, had to abandon its dignity and cut capers to attract attention, giving the grotesque, the eccentric, the baroque, even the profane and blasphemous, until, finally, it is thoroughly snubbed out of its vulgar attempts at self-assertion, and mopes conventionally in our modern churches of St. Nicholas Without and St. Walker Within, locked up, except at service-time, from week's end to week's end without ever provoking the smallest protest from a public only too glad to have an
ON GOING TO CHURCH 21
excuse for not going into them. You may read the same history of the human soul in any art you like to select ; but he who runs may read it in the streets by looking at the churches.
Now, consider for a moment the prodigious increase of the population of Christendom since the church of San Zeno Maggiore was built at Verona, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Let a man go and renew himself for half an hour occasionally in San Zeno, and he need eat no corpses, nor drink any drugs or drams to sustain him. Yet not even all Verona, much less all Europe, could resort to San Zeno in the thirteenth century ; whereas, in the nineteenth, a thousand perfect churches would be but as a thousand drops of rain on Sahara. Yet in London, with four millions and a quarter of people in it, how many perfect or usable churches are there ? And of the few we have, how many are apparent to the wayfarer ? Who, for instance, would guess from the repulsive exterior of Westminster Abbey that there are beautiful chapels and a noble nave within, or cloisters without, on the hidden side ?
1 remember, a dozen years ago, Parson Shuttleworth, of St. Nicholas Cole Abbey in the city, tried to persuade the city man to spend his mid-day hour of rest in church ; guaranteeing him immunity from sermons, prayers and collections, and even making the organ discourse Bach and Wagner, instead of Goss and Jackson. This singular appeal to a people walking in darkness was quite successful : the mid-day hour is kept to this day ; but Parson Shuttleworth has to speak for five minutes — by general and insistent request — as Housekeeper, though he has placed a shelf of books in the church for those who would rather read than listen to him or the organ. This was a good thought ; for all inspired books should be read either in church or on the eternal hills. St. Nicholas Cole Abbey makes you feel, the moment you enter it, that you are in a rather dingy rococo banqueting-room, built for a city company. Corpulence and comfort are written on every stone of it. Considering that money is dirt cheap now in the city, it is strange that Mr. Shuttleworth cannot get twenty thousand pounds to build a real church. He would, soon enough, if the city knew what a church was. The twenty
22 THE SAVOY
thousand pounds need not be wasted, either, on an " architect." I was lately walking in a polite suburb of Newcastle, when I saw a church — a Hem church — with, of all things, a detached campanile; at sight of which I could not help exclaiming profanely : " How the deuce did you find your way to Newcastle ? " So I went in and, after examining the place with much astonishment, addressed myself to the sexton, who happened to be about. I asked him who built the church, and he gave me the name of Mr. Mitchell, who turned out, however, to be the pious founder — a ship- builder prince, with some just notion of his princely function. But this was not what I wanted to know ; so I asked who was the — the word stuck in my throat a little — the architect. He, it appeared, was one Spence. " Was that marble carving in the altar and that mosaic decoration round the chancel part of his design ? " said I. " Yes," said the sexton, with a certain surliness as if he suspected me of disapproving. " The ironwork is good," I remarked, to appease him ; " who did that ? " " Mr. Spence did." " Who carved that wooden figure of St. George ? " (the patron saint of the edifice). " Mr. Spence did." " Who painted those four panels in the dado with figures in oil?" "Mr. Spence did: he meant them to be at intervals round the church, but we put them all together by mistake." " Then, perhaps, he designed the stained windows, too ? " " Yes, most of em." I got so irritated at this — feeling that Spence was going too far — that I remarked sarcas- tically that no doubt Mr. Spence designed Mr. Mitchell's ships as well, which turned out to be the case as far as the cabins were concerned. Clearly, this Mr. Spence is an artist-craftsman with a vengeance. Many people, I learnt, came to see the church, especially in the first eighteen months ; but some of the congregation thought it too ornamental. (At St. Nicholas Cole Abbey, by the way, some of the parishioners objected at first to Mr. Shuttleworth as being too religious.) Now, as a matter of fact, this Newcastle church of St. George's is not ornamental enough. Under modern commercial conditions, it is impossible to get from the labour in the building - trade that artistic quality in the actual masonry which makes a good mediaeval building independent of
ON GOING TO CHURCH 23
applied ornament. Wherever Mr. Spence's artist's hand has passed over the interior surface, the church is beautiful. Why should his hand not pass over every inch of it ? It is true, the complete finishing of a large church of the right kind has hardly ever been carried through by one man. Some- times the man has died : more often the money has failed. But in this instance the man is not dead ; and surely money cannot fail in the most fashionable suburb of Newcastle. The chancel with its wonderful mosaics, the baptistry with its ornamented stones, the four painted panels of the dado, are only samples of what the whole interior should and might be. All that cold contract masonry must be redeemed, stone by stone, by the travail of the artist-churchmaker. Nobody, not even an average respectable Sabbath- keeper, will dare to say then that it is over-decorated, however out of place in it he may feel his ugly Sunday clothes and his wife's best bonnet. Howbeit, this church of St. George's in Newcastle proves my point, namely, that churches fit for their proper use can still be built by men who follow the craft of Orcagna instead of the profession of Mr. Pecksniff, and built cheaply, too ; for I took the pains to ascertain what this large church cost, and found that ^30,000 was well over the mark. For aught I know, there may be dozens of such churches rising in the country ; for Mr. Spence's talent, though evidently a rare and delicate one, cannot be unique, and what he has done in his own style other men can do in theirs, if they want to, and are given the means by those who can make money, and are capable of the same want.
There is still one serious obstacle to the use of churches on the very day when most people are best able and most disposed to visit them. I mean, of course, the services. When I was a little boy, I was compelled to go to church on Sunday ; and though I escaped from that intolerable bondage before I was ten, it prejudiced me so violently against churchgoing that twenty years elapsed before, in foreign lands and in pursuit of works of art, I became once more a churchgoer. To this day. my flesh creeps when I recall that genteel suburban Irish Protestant church, built by Roman Catholic workmen who would have considered themselves damned
24 THE SAVOY
had they crossed its threshold afterwards. Every separate stone, every pane of glass, every fillet of ornamental ironwork — half-dog-collar, half-coronet — in that building must have sowed a separate evil passion in my young heart. Yes : all the vulgaritv. savagery, and bad blood which has marred my literary work, was certainly laid upon me in that house of Satan ! The mere nullity of the building could make no positive impression on me : but what could, and did, were the unnaturally motionless figures of the congregation in their Sunday clothes and bonnets, and their set faces, pale with the malignant rigidity produced by the suppression of all expression. And yet these people were always moving and watching one another by stealth, as convicts com- municate with one another. So was I. I had been told to keep my restless little limbs still all through those interminable hours ; not to talk ; and, above all, to be happy and holy there and glad that I was not a wicked little boy pla34ng in the fields instead of worshipping God. I hypocritically acquiesced : but the state of my conscience may be imagined, especially as I implicitly believed that all the rest of the congregation were perfectly sincere and good. I remember at that time dreaming one night that I was dead and had gone to heaven. The picture of heaven which the efforts of the then Established Church of Ireland had conveyed to my childish imagination, was a waiting room with walls of pale sky-coloured tabbinet, and a pew-like bench running all round, except at one corner, where there was a door. I was, somehow, aware that God was in the next room, accessible through that door. I was seated on the bench with my ankles tightly interlaced to prevent my legs dangling, behaving myself with all my might before the grown-up people, who all belonged to the Sunday congregation, and were either sitting on the bench as if at church or else moving solemnly in and out as if there were a dead person in the house. A grimly-handsome lady who usually sat in a corner seat near me in church, and whom I believed to be thoroughly con- versant w'ith the arrangements of the Almighty, was to introduce me presently into the next room — a moment which I was supposed to await with joy and enthusiasm. Really, of course, my heart sank like lead within me at the thought : for I felt that my feeble affectation of piety could not impose on
ON GOING TO CHURCH 25
Omniscience, and that one glance of that all-searching eye would discover that I had been allowed to come to heaven by mistake. Unfortunately for the interest of this narrative, I awoke, or wandered off into another dream, before the critical moment arrived. But it goes far enough to show that I was by no means an insusceptible subject : indeed, I am sure, from other early experiences of mine, that if I had been turned loose in a real church, and allowed to wander and stare about, or hear noble music there instead of that most accursed Te Deum of Jackson's and a senseless droning of the Old Hundredth, I should never have seized the opportunity of a great evangelical revival, which occurred when I was still in my teens, to begin my literary career with a letter to the Press (which was duly printed), announcing with inflexible materialistic logic, and to the extreme horror of my respectable connections, that I was an atheist. When, later on, I was led to the study of the economic basis of the respectability of that and similar congregations, I was inexpressibly relieved to find that it represented a mere passing phase of industrial confusion, and could never have substantiated its claims to my respect if. as a child, I had been able to bring it to book. To this very day, whenever there is the slightest danger of my being mistaken for a votary of the blue tabbinet waiting-room or a supporter of that morality in which wrong and right, base and noble, evil and good, really mean nothing more than the kitchen and the drawing-room, I hasten to claim honourable exemption, as atheist and socialist, from any such complicity.
When I at last took to church-going again, a kindred difficulty beset me, especially in Roman Catholic countries. In Italy, for instance, churches are used in such a way that priceless pictures become smeared with filthy tallow- soot, and have sometimes to be rescued by the temporal power and placed in national galleries. But worse than this are the innumerable daily services which disturb the truly religious visitor. If these were decently and intelli- gently conducted by genuine mystics to whom the Mass was no mere rite or miracle, but a real communion, the celebrants might reasonably claim a place in the church as their share of the common human right to its use. «J3ut the average Italian priest, personally uncleanly, and with chronic
26 THE SAVOY
catarrh of the nose and throat, produced and maintained by sleeping and living in frowsy, ill-ventilated rooms, punctuating his gabbled Latin only by expectorative hawking, and making the decent guest sicken and shiver every time the horrible splash of spitten mucus echoes along the vaulting from the marble steps of the altar : this unseemly wretch should be seized and put out, bell, book, candle and all, until he learns to behave himself. The English tourist is often lectured for his inconsiderate behaviour in Italian churches, for walking about during service, talking loudly, thrusting himself rudely between a worshipper and an altar to examine a painting, even for stealing chips of stone and scrawling his name on statues. But as far as the mere disturbance of the services is concerned, and the often very evident disposition of the tourist — especially the experienced tourist — to regard the priest and his congregation as troublesome intruders, a week spent in Italy will convince any unprejudiced person that this is a perfectly reasonable attitude. I have seen inconsiderate British behaviour often enough both in church and out of it. The slow-witted Englishman who refuses to get out of the way of the Host, and looks at the bellringer going before it with " Where the devil are you shoving to ? " written in every pucker of his free-born British brow, is a familiar figure to me ; but I have never seen any stranger behave so insufferably as the officials of the church habitually do. It is the sacristan who teaches you, when once you are committed to tipping him, not to waste your good manners on the kneeling worshippers who are snatching a moment from their daily round of drudgery and starvation to be comforted by the Blessed Virgin or one of the saints : it is the officiating priest who makes you understand that the congregation are past shocking by any indecency that you would dream of committing, and that the black looks of the congregation are directed at the foreigner and the heretic only, and imply a denial of your right as a human being to your share of the use of the church. That right should be unflinchingly asserted on all proper occasions. I know no contrary right by which the great Catholic churches made for the world by the great church-builders should be monopolised by any sect as against any man who desires to use them. My own faith is clear: I am
ON GOING TO CHURCH 27
a resolute Protestant; 1 believe in the Holy Catholic Church; in the Holy Trinity of Father, Son (or Mother, Daughter) and Spirit ; in the Com- munion of Saints, the Life to Come, the Immaculate Conception, and the everyday reality of Godhead and the Kingdom of Heaven. Also, I believe that salvation depends on redemption from belief in miracles ; and I regard St. Athanasius as an irreligious fool — that is, in the only serious sense of the word, a damned fool. I pity the poor neurotic who can say, " Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery," as I pity a maudlin drunkard ; and I know that the real religion of to-day was made possible only by the materialist-physicists and atheist- critics who performed for us the indispensable preliminary operation of purging us thoroughly of the ignorant and vicious superstitions which were thrust down our throats as religion in our helpless childhood. How those who assume that our churches are the private property of their sect would think of this profession of faith of mine I need not describe. But am I, therefore, to be denied access to the place of spiritual recreation which is my inheritance as much as theirs ? If, for example, I desire to follow a good old custom by pledging my love to my wife in the church of our parish, why should I be denied due record in the registers unless she submits to have a moment of deep feeling made ridiculous by the reading aloud of the naive impertinences of St. Peter, who, on the subject of Woman, was neither Catholic nor Christian, but a boorish Syrian fisherman. If I want to name a child in the church, the prescribed service may be more touched with the religious spirit — once or twice beautifully touched — but, on the whole, it is time to dismiss our prayer- book as quite rotten with the pessimism of the age which produced it. In spite of the stolen jewels with which it is studded, an age of strength and faith and noble activity can have nothing to do with it : Caliban might have constructed such a ritual out of his own terror of the supernatural, and such fragments of the words of the saints as he could dimly feel some sort of glory in.
My demand will now be understood without any ceremonious" formulation of it. Xo nation, working at the strain we face, can live cleanly without
3—2
28 THE SAVOY
public-houses in which to seek refreshment and recreation. To supply that vital want we have the drinking-shop with its narcotic, stimulant poisons, the conventicle with its brimstone-flavoured hot gospel, and the church. In the church alone can our need be truly met, nor even there save when we leave outside the door the materialisations that help us to believe the in- credible, and the intellectualisations that help us to think the unthink- able, completing the refuse-heap of "isms" and creeds with our vain lust for truth and happiness, and going in without thought or belief or prayer or any other vanity, so that the soul, freed from all that crushing lumber, may open all its avenues of life to the holy air of the true Catholic Church.
G. Bernard Shaw.
TO NANCY
Weymouth, zgth September.
T T happens that I have seen much of you, Nancy, at an eventful
- ■ moment — eventful for yourself I mean, in your life and your career —
and here, because I like you, and like to think of and reflect on you, there is written down, straight and full, the record of my impression: concealing nothing, though written to yourself : a letter absolutely frank, looking all facts in the face ; for, young though you are, you are intelligent enough to bear them. My letter you may find tedious, perhaps, but at all events unusual ; for letters, even when detailed, generally omit much, hide some part of a thought — put the thing in a way that pleases the writer, or is intended to please the receiver. Here am I at the end of my first page, Nancy, and all preface ! Well, 1 shall recall, to begin with, how it w.is that I met you.
Acquit me, please, of any general love of your over-praised Music Hall. Neither it nor the Theatre counts for much in my life. I like you personally: I imagine a Future for you ; but I am not anxious for " the status of the profession." Life, it is just possible, has other goals than that of being received in smart drawing-rooms — whatever art you practice, its practice is your reward. Society, my dear, has bestowed of late upon the stage " lover " an attention that is misplaced. We are getting near the end of it : the cabotin, in a frock coat, no longer dominates the situation at afternoon teas. Youths from the green-room have, in the Past, over the luncheon-table, imparted to me, with patronage, their views about Painting; to me, Nancy, to your old friend, who has painted for thirty years — a full Academician one year since, with but few honours (as men call them) left to gain : few years, alas ! in which to live to gain them. Child as you are, your common sense — that neatly-balanced little mind of yours, so unusually clear — that neatly-balanced mind assures
32 THE SAVOY
you that it is not the profession you follow, but what you have been able to do in it, and what you really are, that gives you — I mean, of course, gives any one — legitimate claim to be in privileged places, to be motioned to the velvet of the social sward. " Artist," indeed ! As well expect to be received with welcome for having had sufficient capital to buy a camp stool and a few feet of German moulding with which to frame a canvas sent to the Dudley Gallery, as to be suffered to dictate and to dogmatise in virtue of a well-worn coat and an appearance at a London theatre !
You have read so far, and yet I have not reminded you how it was that you and I came to know each other. It was just two years ago, in this same town from which I write to you. I saw a photograph that struck me, at the door of your place of entertainment — at the door of the " People's Delight." The face was young — but I have known youth. Pretty, it was — but a fashionable portrait-painter lives with prettiness. It was so monstrously refined !
At three o'clock, they said, there would be an entertainment — Miss Nancy Nanson would certainly be seen. And in I went, with a companion — old Sir James Purchas, of Came Manor — my host more than once in these parts. Sir James, you know, is not a prey to the exactions of conventionality, and there was no reason why the humble entertainment your lounge and shelter offered to the tripper should not afford us half an hour's amusement.
The blazing September afternoon you recollect — September with the glare of the dog days. The "people," it seemed, were not profiting that day by the " People's Delight," for the place was all but empty — everyone out of doors — and we wandered, not aimlessly indeed, but not successfully, among those cavernous, half-darkened regions, among the stalls for fruits and sweets and cheap jewelry, in search of a show. A turn, and we came suddenly on rows of empty chairs placed in front of a small stage, with drawn curtain ; and, at a money-taker's box (for reserved seats, as I supposed) — leaning over the money-taker's counter, in talk with someone who came, it may be, from a selling-stall — there was a child, a little girl. Sir James touched my arm, directing my attention to her, and I took the initiative — said to the little girl :
TO NANCY 33
" We came to see Miss Nancy Nanson. You can tell us, perhaps, when is the show going to begin ? " " There won't be any entertainment this afternoon," the girl answered; "because, you see, there isn't any audience. I am Miss Nancy Nanson." The dignity of the child !
The fact was, you remember, that photograph at the entrance gave the impression of a girl of seventeen ; and I did not at all connect it with the figure of the well-spoken, silver-voiced, elegant child, who proved to be your- self — since then my model and my youthful friend. But the moment you spoke, and when my eyes, still not quite used to the obscurity, took in your real face and those refined expressions, the identity was established, though the photograph, with its dexterous concealment, showed more the Nancy Nanson you were going to be, than the Nancy Nanson you were. I was pleased, nevertheless ; and we talked about yourself for a few minutes ; and when you said (because I asked you) that there would be an entertainment next day, I told you we would come to see it, certainly. And Sir James was indulgent. And I am a man of my word.
And now there is a bit we can afford to hurry over ; for the next stage of our acquaintance does not advance, appreciably, the action of your story. We came; we saw your entertainment: your three turns: singing, dancing : and pretty enough it was; but yet, so-so. You were such a pleasant child, of course we applauded you — so refined, yet singing, tolerably, such nonsense. Even then, it was your charming little personality, you know — it was not your performance that had in it attractiveness. Next day, I left the neighbourhood.
For two years after that, I never saw Miss Nancy Nanson, " vocalist and dancer"; only once heard of and read of you — only once, perhaps, thought of you. The once was last Christmas — your name I saw was advertised in a pantomime played by "juveniles." I might, it is just possible, have gone to see it. But the average "juvenile!" — think! — and then, the influenza and the weather!
Well ! this present glowing September, Nancy — glowing and golden as it was two years ago- — brought me again, and very differently, into touch with you. The Past is over. Now I fix your attention — for you are still
34 THE SAVOY
patient with me — I fix your attention on the Present, and I point out to you, in detail — I realise to myself — how the time is critical, eventful ; how you stand, Nancy, upon a certain brink. I am not going to prophecy what you may be ; but I tell you what you are. The real You, you know : something better and deeper than that which those seven pastels, any or all of them together, show you — my delighted notes of your external beauty ; touched, I think, with some charm of grace that answers well to your own ; and mimicking, not badly, the colours and contours of your stage presence. Nothing more. Chance gleams — an artist's " snap-shots " at Miss Nancy Nanson, vocalist and dancer, at sixteen. (Sixteen yesterday.) But you — No !
This present September — a fortnight since — I came again to Weymouth ; this time alone ; putting up at the old " Gloucester " (it was George the Third's house) from which I write to you ; and not at Came Manor in the neighbour- hood. In the Weymouth of to-day one is obliged, in nearly every walk, to pass the " People's Delight " — your cheap vulgarity, my dear, that the great Georgian time would have resented. I passed it soon, and the two names biggest upon the bills were, "Achilles, the Strong Man" — there are things in which even a decayed watering place cannot afford to be behind the fashion — " Achilles, the Strong Man," then, and " Miss Nancy Nanson." Again did I go in ; took the seat, exactly, that I had taken two years since, in the third row- of chairs ; and while a band of three made casual, lifeless, introductory music, I waited for the show.
The curtain rose presently on a great, living, breathing, over-energetic statue — a late Renaissance bronze, by John of Bologna, he seemed — that muscular piece of colour and firm form, that nigger, posed effectively, and of prodigious force. "John of Bologna" — but you never heard of him! Then he began his operations — Achilles, the Strong Man — holding, and only by his teeth, enormous weights ; and rushing round with one, two, hundredweight, as if it were a feather ; lifting, with that jaw of his, masses of iron ; crashing them on the stage again, and standing afterwards with quivering muscles, heaving chest. Applause — I joined in it myself in common courtesy — and then the curtain fell.
TO NANCY 35
•
A wait. The band struck up again — it was your first turn. A slim and dainty figure, so very slight, so very young, in a lad's evening dress, advanced with swiftness towards the footlights, and bowed in a wide sweep that embraced everyone. Then you began to sing — and not too well, you know — a song of pretty-enough sentiment ; the song of a stripling whose sweetheart was his mother. His mother, she sufficed for him. It suited your young years. A tender touch or two, and with a boy's manliness. Applause! You vanished.
You vanished to return. In a girl's dress this time, with movements now more swift and now more graceful. Another song, and this time dancing with it. It was dancing you were born for. "She has grown another being — and yet with the old pleasantness — in these two years," I thought. " A child no longer." In colour and agility you were a brilliant show. I have told you since, in talking, what I thought of you. You were not a Sylvia Grey, my dear ; still less that other Sylvia Voltaire praised, contrasting her with the Camargo. The Graces danced like Sylvia, Voltaire said — like the Camargo, the wild nymphs. No ! you were not Voltaire's Sylvia, any more than you were Sylvia Grey. Sylvia Grey's dance is perfect, from the waist upwards — as an observant actress pointed out to me, with whom I saw it. Swan-like in the holding and slow movement of the head and neck ; exquisite in the undulations of the torso. Where Sylvia Grey ends — I mean where her remarkableness ends (for she has legs like another, I take it) — you, my dear, begin. But you want an Ingres to do you justice. The slimness of the girl, and what a fineness, as of race ; and then, the agility of infinite practice, and sixteen young years !
A third turn — then it was that you were agile most of all. The flying feet went skyward. Black shoes rushed, comet-like, so far above your head, and clattered on the floor again ; whilst against the sober crimson of the background curtain — a dull, thin stuff, stretched straightly — gleamed the white of moving skirts, and blazed the boss of brightest scarlet that nestled some- where in the brown gold of your head. Then, flushed and panting, it was over.
36 THE SAVOY
•
Next day, in a gaunt ante-room, or extra chamber, its wooden floor quite bare, and the place furnished only with a couple of benches and a half-voiceless semi-grand piano — the wreck of an Erard that was great once — in that big, bare room, Nancy, where my pastels since have caught your pose in lilac, rose and orange, but never your grave character, I came upon, and closely noted, and, for a quarter of an hour, talked to, a sedate young girl in black — a lady who, in all her bearing, ways, gesture, silver voice, was as refined as any, young or old, that I have been in contact with in my long life — and I have lived abundantly amongst great ladies, from stately, restful Quakeress to the descendant of the " hundred Earls. No one is more refined than you. This thing may not last with you. Whether it lasts depends, in great measure, upon the life you lead, in the strange world opening to you. Your little craft, Nancy, your slender skiff, will have some day to labour over voluminous seas.
You remember what you told me, in the great ante-room, standing by the wreck of the Erard, that your fingers touched. All your life to that time. You were frankness absolutely ; standing there in your dull, black frock that became you to perfection ; standing with hat of broad, black straw — the clear-cut nose, the faultless mouth, the bright-brown hair curled short about your head, and the limpid look of your serene eyes, steadily grey. It was interesting, and amusing too, your story. I told you, you remember, how much you had got on, how changed you were, what progress I had noticed. And you said a pretty " Thank you." It was clear that you meant it. We were friends. I asked who taught you — so far as anything can be taught in this world, where, at bottom, one's way is, after all, one's own. You said, your mother. And I told you I'd seen your name in some London Christmas play-bill. " I had a big success," you said. What a theatrical moment it was ! — the one occasion in all my little dealings with you in which I found the traditions of "the profession" stronger with you than your own personal character. Now, your own personal instinct is to be modest and natural ; the traditions of " the profession " are to boast. You did boast, Nancy ! You had a big success, had you ? Perhaps, for yourself;
TO NANCY 37
I do not say you failed. But the piece — my dear, you know it was a frost. Did it run three weeks ? Come now ! And someone, out of jealousy, paid four guineas — she or her friends did — to get you a had notice somewhere in back-stairs journalism. And they got it, and then repented of it. You were friends with them afterwards. But what a world, Nancy ! — a world iii which, for four guineas, a scoundrel contributes his part towards damning your career !
You remember, before I asked if I might make some sketches of you, you were turning over a song that had been sent you by " a gentleman at Birmingham." He had had it "ruled" for you, and wanted you to buy it for three pounds. It was " rather a silly song," you thought. I settled myself quietly to master the sense, or, as was more probable, the nonsense, of it. My dear, it was blank rubbish ! But you were not going to have it, you said. " Mamma would never buy a song I didn't like and take to." That was well, I thought. And then you slowly closed the ruined Erard, and were going away. But on the road down-stairs, remember, I persuaded you to ask your mother that you might give me sittings. I told you who I was. And in the gaunt ante-room, lit well from above, I had a sitting next day. It was the first of several. And your mother trusted me, and trusted you, as you deserve to be trusted. And we worked hard together, didn't we? — you posing, and I drawing. And there are seven pastels which record — taut bicn
•'., my dear — the delightful outside of you, the side the public might itself see, if it had eyes to really see — the flash of you in the dance, snow-white or carmine; and I got all that with alacrity—" swift means" I took, to "radiant ends" — the poise of the slim figure, the white frock slashed with gold, the lifted foot, and that gleam of vivid scarlet in your hair against the background of most sober crimson.
This tranquil Sunday I devote to writing to you, is the day after your last appearance at the " People's Delight." You and your mother, very soon, you tell me, leave Weymouth and your old associations — it is your home, you know — and you leave it for ever. The country, you admit, is beautiful, but you are tired of the place. I don't much wonder. And you
38 THE SAVOY
leave it — the great bay, the noble chalk downs, the peace of Dorset and its gleaming quiet — you leave it for lodgings in the Waterloo Road. For you must be among the agents for the Halls. Though you have been upon the Stage since you were very little, you have but lately, so you say, put your heart into it. Well ! it is not unnatural. But no more Sunday drives into the lovely country, recollect, with your brother, who is twenty-one and has his trade ; and your uncle, who is in a good way of business here, you said — your uncle, the plumber.
And so, last night being your last night, Nancy, it was almost like a Benefit. As for your dancing, you meant, I knew, to give us the cup filled — yes, filled and running over. I had noticed that, on some earlier evening, when Little Lily Somebody — a dumpling child, light of foot, but with not one " line " in all her meaningless, fat form — when Little Lily Somebody had capered her infantile foolishness, to the satisfaction of those who rejoice in mere babyhood, someone presented her with a bouquet. And you danced, excellently, just after her — you, height and grace, slimness and soul — and someone, with much effusion, handed you up a box of chocolates. And you smiled pleasantly. I saw there was a little conflict in your mind, however, between the gracious recognition of what was well-enough meant, and the resentment — well, the resentment we can hardly call it : the regret, at all events — at being treated so very visibly as a child — and yesterday you were to be sixteen ! So I myself — who, if this small indignity had not been offered you, might conceivably have given you, in private, at all events, a basket of fine fruit— I meant to offer you flowers. It might have been fruit, I say, if smuggled into the ante-room where I had done my pastels ; for I had seen you once there, crunching, quite happily, imperfect apples between perfect teeth — your perfect teeth, almost the only perfect things, Xancy, in an imperfect world.
But it had to be flowers. So I sent round to the dressing-room, just as you were getting ready, two button -holes merely — wired button -holes — of striped carnations, red or wine-coloured. They were not worn in your first turn. They were not worn in your second. In your third turn, I
/<> X.l.XCV
39
espied tliem at your neck's side, in the fury of your dance. Already there are people, I suppose, who would have thought those striped carnations happy — tossed, tossed to pieces, in the warmth of your throat.
Your second turn, last night, you know, was in flowing white, slashed with gold — old-gold velvet — with pale stockings. The third — when the Bowers died happy in your riot — in pure white alone, with stockings black. You remember the foot held in your hand, as you swing round upon the other toe— and one uplifted leg seen horizontal, in its straight and modelled slimness.
My dear — what were my little flowers? Who could have known — when you had finished — the great things still to come ? When the applause seemed over, and the enthusiasm of some lieutenant from Dorchester was, as I take it, abated and suppressed — when the applause was over, a certain elocutionist (Mr. Paris Brown, wasn't it?) brought you again upon the stage, and saying it was your last appearance, made you some presentation : a brooch from himself, "of no intrinsic value" he informed us — I willingly believed him — a bracelet from I don't know who — that had an "intrinsic value," I surmise — and a bouquet, exquisite. It was " From an admirer," Mr. Paris Brown, the elocutionist, read out, from an accompanying card. Then he congratulated you upon your Past ; prophesied as to your Future ; and, in regard to the presents to you, he said, in words that were quite happily chosen — because, Nancy, they were reticent while they were expressive — " She is but a — girl ; and she has done her duty by the management. Long may she be a credit to her father and mother!" Your mother I was well aware of — your mother I respect ; and you, you love her. But your father — he was invented, I think, for the occasion, as an additional protection, should the designs upon you of the admirer from Dorchester prove to be not altogether such as they ought to be. The precaution was unnecessary ; it was taking Time by the forelock. Our young friend looked ingenuous, and smitten grievously — you seem so big upon the stage, Nancy — so grown up. I mean. I could, I think, have toned down his emotions, had I told him you were a bare sixteen.
4°
THE SAVOY
Nancy, there is — for me — a certain pathos in this passage of yours from childhood into ripening girlhood ; a book closed, as it were ; a phase completed; an ending of the way. " What chapter is to open ? Nancy Nanson — what phase or facet of her life," I ask myself, " is now so soon to be presented ? What other way, what unfamiliar one, is to follow her blameless and dutiful childhood ? " I had a restless night, Nancy. Thinking of this, one saw — ridiculously perhaps — a presage in the first bouquet, a threat in the first bracelet — in the admirer's card. Would she be like the rest ? — at least, too many. Besmirched, too ?
Remember, Nancy, I am no Puritan at all. I recognise Humanity's instincts. There is little I do not tolerate. I recognise the gulf that separates the accidentally impolitic from the essentially wrong. But we owe things to other people — to the World's laws. We have responsi- bilities. Noblesse oblige ; and all superiority is Noblesse. " She must not be like the rest," I said, last night, in broken dreams ; " dining, winking, leering even, since sold at last and made common." In broken dreams, last night — or in wakeful hours — your feet tossed higher ; your gay blood passed into the place — electrical, overpowering. You can be so grave and sweet, you know ; and you can be so mad.
Have you ever lain awake, in the great, long darkness, and watched in the darkness a procession — the people of your Past and all your Future ? But you have no Past. For myself, I have watched them. My mother, who is long gone ; those who were good to me, and whom I slighted ; the relations who failed me ; the friend I lost. And the uncertain figures of the Future ! But the line of the Future is short enough for me — for you, it is all yours. Last night, it seemed to me, the dark was peopled with your enemies ; with your false friends, who were coming — always coming — the unavoidable crowd of the egotistic destroyers of youth. Their dark hearts, I thought, look upon her as a prey: some of them cruel, some of them cynical, yet some of them only careless. And I wished that last night had not come — your sixteenth birthday — with the applause and gifts and menacing triumph.
TO NANCY 41
There are women, perhaps, men cannot wrong — since they have wronged themselves too much. "This is a good girl," I said; and my over-anxious mind — in real affection for her — cries out to all the horrid forces of the world : " Leave Nancy ! "
Vini y, when you read this, you smile— and naturally— at your most sombre friend. You think, of course, with all the reckless trust, courageous confidence, of girlhood, "So superfluous! So unnecessary!"
Go the straight way ! . . . Whatever way you go, 1 shall always
be your friend.
Frederick Wedmore.
MANDOLINE
the "Fetes Galantes " of Paul Verlaine).
THE singers of serenades Whisper their faded vows Unto fair listening maids
Under the singing boughs.
Tircis, Aminte, are there, Clitandre is over-long, And Damis for many a fair
Tyrant makes many a song.
Their short vests, silken and bright, Their long, pale, silken trains,
Their elegance of delight,
Twine soft, blue, shadowy chains.
And the mandolines and they,
Faintlier breathing, swoon Into the rose and grey
Ecstasy of the moon.
Arthur Svmons.
A GOOD PRINCE
I FIRST saw him one morning of last summer, in the Green Park. Though short, even insignificant, in stature and with an obvious tendency to be obese, he had that unruffled, Olympian air, which is so sure a sign of the Blood Royal. In a suit of white linen he looked serenely cool, despite the heat. Perhaps I should have thought him, had I not been versed in the Almanack de Gotha, a trifle older than he is. He did not raise his hat in answer to my salute, but smiled most graciously and made as though he would extend his hand to me, mistaking me, I doubt not, for one of his friends. A member of his suite, however, said something to him in an undertone, whereat he smiled again and took no further notice of me.
I do not wonder the people idolise him. His almost blameless life has been passed among them, nothing in it hidden from their knowledge. When they look upon his dear presentment in the photographer's window — the shrewd, kindly eyes under the high forehead, the sparse locks so carefully distributed — words of loyalty only and of admiration rise to their lips. For of all princes in modern days he seems to fulfil, most perfectly, the obligation of princely rank. N^ios he might have been called in the heroic age, when princes were judged according to their mastery of the sword or of the bow, or have seemed, to those mediaeval eyes that loved to see a scholar's pate under the crown, an ignoramus. We are less exigent now. We do but ask of our princes that they should live among us, be often manifest to our eyes, set a perpetual example of a right life. We bid them be the ornaments of our State. Too often they do not attain to our ideal. They give, it may be, a half-hearted devotion to soldiering, or pursue pleasure merely — tales of their frivolity raising now and again the anger of a public swift to envy them their temptations. But against this
4
4 6 THE SAVOY
admirable Prince no such charges can be made. Never (as yet, at least) has he cared to "play at soldiers." By no means has he shocked the Puritans. Though it is no secret that he prefers the society of ladies, not one breath of scandal has ever touched his name. Of how many English princes could this be said, in days when Figaro, quill in hand, inclines his ear to every key-hole ?
Upon the one action that were well obliterated from his record I need not long insist. The wife of an aged ex-Premier came to have an audience and pay her respects. Hardly had she spoken, when His Royal Highness, in a fit of unreasoning displeasure, struck her a violent blow with his clenched fist. The incident is deplorable, but belongs, after all, to an earlier period of his life ; and, were it not that no appreciation must rest upon the suppression of any scandal, I should not have referred to it. For the rest, I find no stain, soever faint, upon his life. The simplicity of his tastes is the more admirable for that he is known to care not at all for what may be reported in the newspapers. He has never touched a card, never entered a play-house. In no stud of racers has he indulged, preferring to the finest blood - horse ever bred a certain white and woolly lamb with a blue riband at its neck. This he is never tired of fondling. It is with him, like the roebuck of Henri Ouatre, wherever he goes.
Suave and simple his life is ! Narrow in range, it may be, but with every royal appurtenance of delight ! Round the flower-garden at Sandringham runs an old wall of red brick, streaked with ivy and topped infrequently with balls of stone. By the iron gates, that open to a vista of flowers, stand two kind policemen, guarding the Prince's procedure along that bright vista. As his perambulator rolls out of the gate of St. James's Palace, he stretches out his tiny hands to the scarlet sentinels. An obsequious retinue follows him over the lawns of the White Lodge, cooing and laughing, blowing kisses and praising him. Yet his life has not been all happy. The afflictions that befall royal personages always touch very poignantly the heart of the people and it is not too much to say that all England watched by the
A GOOD PRINCE 47
cradle-side of Prince Edward in those hours of pain, when first the little battlements rose about the rose-red roof of his mouth. Irreiterate be the horror of that epoch!
As yet, when we know not even what his first words will be, it is too early to predict what verdict posterity will pass upon him. Already he has won the hearts of the people; but, in the years which, it is to be hoped, still await him, he may accomplish more. Attentions! He stands alone among European princes — but, as yet, only with the aid of a chair.
Max BEERBOHM.
REGEXT STREET, LOXDOX By JOSEPH PENNELL
IJ
-i i i -
THE EYES OF PRIDE
To A. F.
" Pluck out the eyes of pride; thy lips to mine ' Never, though 1 die thirsting! Go thy ways!"
i Meredith
1
11 | v O as you please — it's all one to me : yet I think you will live to regret
lie spoke sullenly, with well-affected indifference, standing on the hearth- rug, his hands in his pockets, looking down at her ; and yet there was a note of irresolution, of potential suffering in his voice, which was absent from her reply :
" If I do, I will tell you."
" That is just what you will never do."
" Perhaps not." She was actually indifferent, or her dissimulation was more profound than his, for the blank coldness of her speech lit a spark of irritation in him.
" And, all the same, I think you will regret it — every day of your life. . . . By God ! you are making a great mistake, Rosalind ! "
" Is it all coming over again ? " murmured the girl, wearily. " And, after all, it's your own choice."
He flushed angrily. He was in evening dress, and he fidgeted with his tie for a moment, before he held out his hand with stiff courtesy.
"Good-bye," he said; and "Good-bye, Mr. Seefang ! " the girl answered, listlessly. He dropped her impassive hand, and went slowly towards the door. Then he remembered he had brought his hat with him into the drawing-room, and he came back again, and placed it mechanically under his arm. " \\ ell, good-bye, Rosalind ! " he said again. This time she made no response, and he was really gone when she raised her eyes again. . . .
52 THE SAVOY
When he opened the hall door, emerged into the square, he paused to light a cigar before he plunged into the fog, rank and yellow and raw, which engulfed him. A clock struck eleven. li was actual ly so late; and he began to look round, vaguely, for a hansom, re: ting tl t their rapid talk — certainly, it had been fruitful in momentous consequences — had lasted for over an hour. He decided that all the cabs would have disappeared ; the square railings, ten yards in front of him. were invisible; he shrugged his shoulders — a gesture habitue! with him, in ", lassitude and a certain relief were
mingled — and, doggedly and resolutely, he set his face eastwards, to accom- plish on foe: his return journey to the Temple. ... As he went, his mind
coasting hi; specially the last six months of it, during
which he had been engaged to Rosalind Lingard. Well ! that was over at _nd he was unable to add that it had been pleasant while it lasted. Pleas. ik but it had been an intoxicating experience — a delirious
torture. Now he was a free man, and he tried to congratulate himself, reminding himself of all the phrase implied. Yes ; he was free again — free to his old pleasures and his old haunts, to his friends and his former wan- dering life, if he chose; above all, free to his art — his better passion. . . . And. suddenly, into his meditation there floated the face of the girl on the sofa, impassively beautiful and sullen, as it had been framed to his vision when he last held her hand, and he ground his teeth and cursed aloud.
He began to remember how, all along, he had forecasted this end of his wooing. What an ill-omened affair it had been from the first ! He was yet uncertain whether he loved or hated her most. That he had loved her at all was the rniracle. But, even now, he knew that he had loved her, with a love that was not child's-play — it had come for that — but, like his genius,
E was a great deal of Seefang : e\ en the critics of his pictures admitted
-v thjjig ah<-;i - him was on a large scale. So that when he had fallen
in love with Rosalind Lingard, a:;er three da\-s' acquaintance, he had done so
supremely, carried awav by i strange hurricane of sensual fascination and
spirir^a: rapture. Meeting her first a: ;. sparsely-attended b in a
THE EYES OF PRIDE 53
primitive Breton village where he was painting, he had promptly disliked her, thought her capricious and ill-tempered. Grudgingly, he had admitted that she was beautiful, but it was a beauty which repelled him in a girl of his own class, although he would have liked it well enough in women of less title to respect, with whom he was far too well acquainted.
If he had ever thought of marriage — and it must have been remotely — during his fifteen years of manhood, spent so pleasantly in the practice of an art in which his proficiency had met recognition and in the frank and unashamed satisfaction of his vigorous appetites, he had dreamed of a girl most unlike Rosalind Lingard ; a girl with the ambered paleness and the vaguely virginal air of an early Tuscan painting, who would cure him of his grossness and reform him. For he had, still, intervals of depression — generally when he had spoiled a canvas — in which he accused himself of living like a beast, and hankered, sentimentally, for the love of a good woman. And yet, Rosalind Lingard, with her ambiguous charm, her adorable imperfection, had been this woman — the first to dominate him by something more than the mere rose and white of her flesh. Masterful as he had been with the others, he was her slave, if it was still his masterfulness which bound her to him, for a pliant man would have repelled her, and she had dreamed of being loved tyrannically. A few days had sufficed, A juxtaposition somewhat out of the common — a slight illness of her aunt, Mrs. Sartorys, with whom she was travelling — having thrown them together, a discovery which he made suddenly, that if she was capricious she could yet be charming, and that her audacity was really the perfection of her innocence — these were the material agents of his subjection. To the lovers, as they became speedily, inevitable fate and the god who watches over little lovers were held alone responsible. The best of Seefang's character, in which the fine and the gross were so strangely mingled, leapt to meet the promise in her eyes. Their vows were exchanged.
He crossed Piccadilly Circus, debating w r hether he should go home at once or turn into his club and have an hour's poker ; finally, he decided to make for the Temple \nd he told himself again that it was over. In retro- spect, their love seemed like a long quarrel, with a few intervals of reconciliation.
54 THE SAVOY
But there had been a time, at the very beginning, when life was like Eden ; when he was so buoyant that he felt as if his head must touch the sky. He left his easel and wandered with them through Morbihan : his knowledge of the country, so sad and cold and poor, and yet so pictorial, made him their cicerone to nooks which elude the ordinary tourist. Actually, they were not betrothed, but they anticipated the official sanction ; and, indeed, no opposition was expected even by Mrs. Sartorys ; though, formally, Rosalinds guardian, -a learned lawyer — an abstract idea, even, to his ward — was to be consulted. Seefang had his fame, his kinship with the peerage, to set off against the girl's fortune, which was considerable. Had he been less eligible, Mrs. Sartorys, a weak, placid woman, professionally an invalid, would have been equally sub- missive. As it was, she allowed them the license of an engagement, stipulating merely for a postponement which was nominal. They rambled alone together over the ruddy moorland as it pleased them. Once he said to her :
" If your guardian damns me, will you make a curtsy and dismiss me, Rosalind ? "
The)' had come to a pause in their walk ; the sun was merciless, and they had wandered off the road to seek shade ; the girl had seated herself on a bank under a silver-birch tree, Seefang was standing over her. She shook her head.
" No ! if I've ever wanted anything since I was a child, I've cried and stormed till I got it."
" You give yourself a fine character."'
" I'm not a nice girl, I've told you so before.
"Nice!" he looked at her gravely. "I don't care about niceness."
" What do you care for ?
"You as you are," he said deliberately: "proud, capricious, not very sweet of temper, and — I suspect "
Her eyes challenged him, he completed his phrase: "A bit of a flirt!"
"And yet you "
"And yet I love you; good God! what am I myself?
She glanced at him with a sort of mocking tenderness.
THE E\ ES OF PRIDE 55
'• You are very proud," she said; "capricious, I don't know ; but stubborn and headstrong; I think you can be very cruel, and I am sure you have been very wicked."
"And yet?- -" be imitated her phrase softly. They were quite alone with the trees and the birds, and instinctively their lips met. Presently she resumed, a trifle sadly, her eyes contemplating vaguely the distant valley.
'• I'm only a girl — not twenty. You are thirty-eight, thirty-eight ! You must have kissed so many, many women before me."
He touched her hand very softly, held it while he went on : " Never mind the past, Rosalind. I've lived as other men. If I've been stupid, it was because I had never known you. When a man has been in heaven he is in no hurry to get back anywhere else. I'm yours, and you know it — body and soul — and they are a poor bargain, my child ! ever since — since Ploutnariel." She flushed and her head drooped towards him ; at Ploumariel they had crossed the great climacteric. YVhen she looked up, the sun, moving westwards, lit up the valley opposite them, illuminated the white stones of a village cemetery. Her eyes rested upon it. Presently she said :
" Oh, my dear, let us be kind to each other, bear and forbear .... That's the end of it all."
For a moment he was silent : then he leant over and kissed her hair.
" Rosalind, my darling, I wish we were dead together, you and I, lying there quietly, out of the worry of things."
It was a fantastic utterance, an odd and ominous mood to interrupt their foolish talk of plighted lovers ; it never recurred. But just now it came back to him like an intuition. It is so much easier to die for the woman you love than to live with her. They could talk of bearing and forbearing, but much tolerance was in the nature of neither. They were capable of generosity, but even to themselves they could not be just. Both had known speedily how it must end. He was impatient, tyrannical ; she, capricious and utterly a woman ; their pride was a great Juggernaut, beneath whose car they threw, one by one, their dearest hopes, their happiness and all that they cared most for in life. Was she a coquette ? At least she cared for
56 THE SAVOY
admiration, encouraged it, declined to live her life as he would have it. His conviction that small sacrifices which he asked of her she refused, not from any abiding joy the possession gave her, but in sheer perverseness, setting her will against his own, heightened his estimation of the offence. That his anger was out of all proportion to her wrongdoing he knew, and his know- ledge merely inflamed his passionate resentment. She, on her side, was exacting, jealous of his past life ; he was faithfully her lover, and he felt aggrieved, perhaps unjustly, that woman-like she took constancy too much for granted, was not more grateful that he did not lapse. And neither could make concessions : they hardened their hearts, were cold of eye and tongue when a seasonable softening would have flung them each in the other's arms. When they were most divided, each was secretly aware that life without the other would be but a savourless dish. For all that, they had ended it. She had flung him back his liberty, and he had accepted it with a bitter word of thanks. They had said, if they had not done, irrevocable things .... Seefang let himself into his chambers and slammed the oak behind him ; the room smelt of fog, the fire had gone out, and, just then, the lack of it seemed the most intolerable thing in life. But he sat down, still in his ulster, lighting the candle to dispel the gloom, and faced his freedom more deliberately than he had done before. He began to think of his work, and he was surprised at discovering how utterly he had neglected it during the last six months. There is nothing so disorganising as a great passion, nothing so enervating as a virtuous one. He went to bed, vowing that he would make amends. His art ! that he should ever have forgotten it ! None of the other women had interfered with that, the women who had amused him, satisfied the animal in him, but whom he had not loved. She alone had made him forget it. He had a sense of ingratitude towards his art, as to a person who has always stood by one, whom at times one has not valued, and whom one finds, after some calamity, steadfast and unchanged. His art should stand him in good stead now ; it should help him to endure his life, to forget her and be strong. Strength ! that was the great thing ; and he knew that it appertained to him. He fell asleep murmuring that he was glad he
THE EYES OF PRIDE 57
was strong .... strong .... Two months later Seefang went abroad ; he had made arrangements for a prolonged absence. He had not seen Miss Lingard ; if an acquaintance, who was ignorant of the rupture, asked after her, he looked vacant, seemed to search his memory to give the name a connotation. Then he remarked indifferently that he believed Mrs. Sartorys was out of town. fie was working hard, contemplated work more arduous still. Every now and then he drew himself up and reminded himself that he had forgotten her.
For two years he was hardly heard of : he was believed to be travelling in Spain, living in some secluded village. Then he was in London for a month : he exhibited, and critics were unanimous in their opinion that he had never done better work — at which he smiled. They declared he had not been in vain to the land of Velasquez and Goya. It was at this time that he heard of Miss Lingard's marriage with Lord Dagenham ; that nobleman had carried away his bride to an obscure Scandinavian capital, where he was diplomatically engaged. Seefang was curious enough to turn over the pages of Debrett, and discovered that the bridegroom was sixty ; it enabled him to credit the current rumour that he was dull. He went on smiling and was abroad for another three years.
II
He had known they would meet when he first heard that the Dagenhams were in town. Lord Dagenham had abandoned diplomacy with stays and any semblance of being young ; he was partly paralysed, and was constantly to be seen in a bath-chair in Kensington Gardens. But the lady went everywhere, and Seefang made much the same round ; their encounter was merely a question of time. He faced it with equanimity, or its tolerable imitation : he neither feared it nor hoped for it. And the season was but a few weeks old when it came about. At the dinner-table he faced her almost directly.
Five years ! Her beauty was richer, perhaps ; it had acquired sombre tones like an old picture ; but she was not perceptibly altered, hardly older. She was straight and tall, had retained something of her slim, girlish figure ;
5 8 THE SAVOY
and, as of old, her beauty had a sullen stain on it ; in the languid depths of her dark eyes their fate was written ; her full mouth in repose was scornful. He finished his soup, talked to his neighbour, mingled in the conversation ; one of his remarks sent a little ripple of well-bred laughter down the table, and he noticed that she joined in it. But her eyes avoided him, as they had done when she bowed to him formally in the drawing-room. They had not spoken. A vague feeling of irritation invaded him. Was there another woman in the world with hair like that, so dark and multitudinous ? He had promised himself to forget her, and it seemed to him that the promise had been kept. Life had been amusing, full of experience, lavish and expansive. If one supreme delight were impossible, that had not seemed to him a reason for denying himself any lesser joys which offered — -joys, distractions. How successful he had been ! And the tide of his irritation rose higher. His mind went back to the days when he had first known her. She had forgotten them, no doubt, but they were good while they lasted — yes, they were good. But what a life they would have led! — how thankful he should have been for his escape ! From time to time he fidgeted nervously with his tie. Like a great wave of anguish his old desire swept over him.
To Lady Dagenham, if she had not seemed to notice him, his presence there, facing her, was the one fact which possessed her mind during that interminable dinner-party. She had to perfection the gift of being rude urbanely, and she had begun by repressing any intentions of her neighbour on the right to be conversational. Her neighbour on the left talked for three ; she preserved appearances by throwing him smiles, and at mechanical intervals an icy monosyllable. " Yes," and " Yes," said her lips, and her eyes, which looked everywhere else — above, below, beside him — saw only Seefang. . . . He was changed ; older, coarser, bigger, she thought. Large he had always been ; but to-night he loomed stupendous. Every now and then his deep voice was borne across to her — that remained the same, his voice was always pleasant. And she missed no detail — his hair was thinner, it was streaked, like his moustache, with gray ; his eyes were clouded, a trifle blood-shot ; his laugh was cynical and easy. She noticed the one ring
THE EYES OF PRIDE 5 g
he wore, a curious, absinthe-coloured opal, when he moved his left hand, large, but well-shaped and white. She remembered the ring and his affection for opals. Had that been the secret of his luck — their luck? He was imi noticeably pitiable, but instinctively she fell to pitying him, and her com- passion included herself. Skeleton fingers groped out of the past and throttled her. At a familiar gesture, when his hand went up to his tie, a rush of memories made her giddy. Was the past never done with ? And why wish things undone or altered? He was a cross, brutal fellow; stupid and self-indulgent. Why had they ever met ? They were too much alike And she was sorry for him. sorry if he still cared, and sorrier if, as was more likely, he had forgotten ; for she was aware that the strength which puts away suffering is more costly than acquiescence in unhappiness. A sudden tenderness came over her for him ; it was not with the man she was angry, but with fate, the powers which had made them what they were, self- tormentors, the instruments of their own evil. As she rose from the table with the other women, she dropped one glance at him from her sombre, black eyes. And they met his in a flash which was electric.
When he came upstairs, rather tardily, it was with a certain relief that he failed to discover in either of the two large rooms, which opened into one another, the face which he sought. In the first of them, a young Hungarian musician of note was just taking his seat at the piano. The air was heavy with the smell of flowers, full of soft vibrations — the frou-frou of silken skirts, the rustle of posturing fans. He moved into the second room. It was a parched, hot night, and the windows had been left open ; the thin lace curtains protecting them were stirred imperceptibly. With a strange, nervous dread on him that was also an intuition, he pushed them aside and stepped on to the spacious balcony. Half-a-dozen people were sitting or standing there, and he distinguished her profile, marble white and strangely cold, in the subdued shine of the electric lights. An elderly -looking young man with a blonde moustache was talking with her. He took his station by them, joined mechanically in the conversation, looking not at her, but at the long, low line of the park in front of them with its background of mysterious trees.
60 THE SAVOY
Presently a crash of chords came from within — the Hungarian had begun his performance. People began to drift inside again ; Lady Dagenham and the blonde young man — a little anxious, for he was due in the House, concerned for a division — were the last loiterers. For the second time their eyes met, and there was a note of appeal in them.
" Please don't let me keep you, Mr. Rose . . . Mr. Seefang . . . We are old friends, and I haven't seen him for years . . . Mr. Seefang will look after me."
When they were alone together he came over to her side, and they stood so for a moment or two in silence : he was so close to her that he could smell the misty fragrance of her hair, hear the sighing of her bosom. The tense silence preyed on them ; to break it at any cost, he said, at last : " Rosalind ! " Her white face was turned towards him, and he read the passion in it as in a book. And, " Rosalind ! " he said again, with a new accent, more strenuously.
"So you have come back" — her rich voice was under control, but there was a vibration in it which spoke of effort — "come back to England? Your fame preceded you long ago. I have often heard of you, and wondered if we should ever meet."
" Did you ever wish it ? "
" It is always pleasant to meet old friends," she answered, mechanically. " Pleasant ! " He laughed harshly. " There is no pleasure in it, Lady Dagenham." She glanced at him uneasily, for, unconsciously, he had raised his voice. " And friends, are we friends — how can we be friends, you and I ? " " At least — not enemies," she murmured.
He was silent for a moment, looking out at the blurred mass of the park, but seeing only her face, the face of her youth, softened and idealised, so that five years seemed as yesterday, and the anger and bitterness, which had driven them apart, chimeras.
"At Ploumariel, up the hill to Sainte-Barbe " ; he spoke softly, as it were to himself, and the natural harshness of his voice was modulated. " Do you remember the wood, the smell of pines and wild thyme ? The
THE EYES OE PRIDE 61
pine-needles crackled under your little feet. 1 low warm il was ! You were tired at the end of the climb ; you sat on a boulder to rest, while I fetched you milk from the cottage by the chapel — fresh milk in a big, yellow bowl, too big for your little fingers to cling to. You laughed ; and I held it to your mouth, and you made me drink too, and I drank where the print of your lips had been, and your lips were sweet and fresh "
"Seefang!" she laid a white finger on his mouth, beseechingly, and he trembled ; then let her hand rest on his with something of a caress. "What is the use, Seefang? — what is the use? Do you think I have forgotten ? . . . That was over and done with years and years ago. It is no use maddening ourselves. We have so little, little time. Even now, someone may interrupt us at any moment ; we may not meet again — tell me about yourself, your life, all these years. I know you are a great artist ; have you been happy ? "
" I have made a name," he said, shortly, " in more than one sense. If I were to speak, my voice might lie to you. Look me in the face — that will answer you."
Almost childishly she obeyed him, scrutinised the dark, strong face, harsh and proud, with engrained lines of bitterness and ill-temper set upon it even in repose.
" You have answered me," she said, with a little moan.
" I have always longed for you, Rosalind, even when it seemed I had forgotten you most . . . And you ?"
She cut him short quickly.
" I have not been over happy," she said.
"Then your husband ?"
"My husband has been kind to me. I have done — tried to do my duty to him."
A fresh silence intervened, nervous and uneasy : each feared to dissipate it, for each was instinctively conscious of what gulfs of passion lay beneath it, irretrievable chasms into which one unstudied phrase, one word at random, might hurl them both. She was the first to make the venture.
5
62 THE SAVOY
" Can we not be friends, you and I ? " And, innocently as she had spoken, the words had not fallen before she was conscious of her error ; and his arms were round her, crushing the frail lace of her bodice, and their lips had joined, and the thrill in her blood had belied her protest.
" Oh, why did we do it, what was the good of it, why did we ever meet ? " she moaned, when the passionate moment had passed, and they were left face to face together, stupefied, yet with the mask of convention upon them once more, if set a little awry.
" Because, because " he faltered. " Oh, my darling, how can we
ever be friends ? Oh, my love, my one love, anything but that ! . . . There is only one end of it — or two — one of two, and you know that, Rosalind ! My clever, cross darling, you were always clever — always understood. That is why I liked you.'"
She stood free of him again ; her hands deftly, nervously restored one of her black, ruffled tresses.
"How little you liked me, after all! " she said at last.
And she saw, with a keen delight in her power to hurt him, with more pain at the hurt she did herself, the harsh and sneering lines round his mouth and nostrils darken into prominence, the latent brute in his face accentuate.
" There was little enough to like in you, was there, Rosalind ? But, by God ! I did — I loved you, yes, I love you . . . Look at the park, Rosalind ! It's a mist, and dark ; you can guess at the trees, believe in the grass ; perhaps it's soft — and new there, — it's vague and strange . . . would you plunge into it now with me, darling — into the darkness ? How this music and people tire me since I've seen you . . . would you ? Cool and vague and strange ! . . . No, you wouldn't — nor would I, even if it were possible. You need not answer. It would not do. There, or here, we should hurt each other as we always have — and shall, this side of the grave. That is why I said there was only one end of it, or two, and this is the one you choose."'
THE EYES OF I'RIDE 63
Once more, she laid her hand on his, and went on, her fingers caressing, absently, the opal of his ring.
" Don't be angry, Seefang, we have so little time — if it must be so. Life is so short. Besides, we've changed, grown older ; we might be kinder to each other now. What are you going to do?"
" I shall live as I have done — go abroad, perhaps, a little sooner — what else ? "
" Oh, why ? " she cried instinctively. "What is the good?"
" Would you have me come and see you ? When are you at home ? What is your day ? " he asked, with an inflection, the irony of which escaped her.
" If you are reasonable, why not ? " she queried.
He took up her hand and kissed it very gently, and, as it might have been a child's, retained it in his own.
"Because I am not that kind of man," he said; "because I know myself, and the world, and the world's view of me ; because of my other name, out of paint; because "
She pulled herself away, petulantly : withdrew from him with a sullen gesture.
" How little you must respect me ! You need not have told me that your reputation is infamous : I have heard of it : is it true, then ? "
" It is true that I love you. As for what they say " he broke off
with a little suppressed laugh. " You see we are beginning to quarrel, we are generating a misunderstanding — and, as you said, there is so little time. The music is quite over, and we may be invaded any moment."
" And I begin to feel chill," she said.
He helped to arrange her cloak around her, lifted aside the curtain to allow her passage.
" So this is the end ? " she said, lightly ; and her subtile voice had
grown expressionless.
"Yes," he replied, dully; "this is the very end."
Ernest Dowson.
THE THREE MUSICIANS
A'
LONG the path that skirts the wood, The three musicians wend their way, Pleased with their thoughts, each other's mood, Franz Himmel's latest roundelay, The morning's work, a new-found theme, their breakfast and the summer day.
One's a soprano, lightly frocked
In cool, white muslin that just shows
Her brown silk stockings gaily clocked,
Plump arms and elbows tipped with rose, And frills of petticoats and things, and outlines as the warm wind Mow-..
Beside her a slim, gracious boy
Hastens to mend her tresses' fall, And dies her favour to enjoy,
And dies for reclame and recall At Paris and St. Petersburg, Vienna and St. James's Hall.
The third's a Polish Pianist
With big engagements everywhere, A light heart and an iron wrist,
And shocks and shoals of yellow hair, And fingers that can trill on sixths and till beginners with despair.
The three musicians stroll along
And pluck the ears of ripened corn,
Break into odds and ends of song,
And mock the woods with Siegfried's horn, Ami till the air with Gluck, and till the tweeded tourist's soul with scorn.
The Polish genius lags behind,
And, with some poppies in his hand, Picks out the strings and wood and wind Of an imaginary band, Enchanted that for once his men obey his beat and understand.
,/;,
THE SAVOY
The charming cantatrice reclines
And rests a moment where she sees Her chateau's roof that hotly shines Amid the dusky summer trees, And fans herself, half shuts her eyes, and smoothes the frock about her knees.
The gracious boy is at her feet,
And weighs his courage with his chance ; His fears soon melt in noonday heat. The tourist gives a furious glance, Red as his guide-book grows, moves on, and offers up a prayer for France.
Aubrey Beardslev.
ZOLA: THE MAN AND HIS WORK
ZOLA'S name — a barbarous, explosive name, like an anarchist's bomb — has been tossed about amid hoots and yells for a quarter of a century. In every civilised country we have heard of the man who has dragged literature into the gutter, who has gone down to pick up the filth of the streets, and has put it into books for the filthy to read. And in every civilised country his books have been read by the hundred thousand, what- ever judgment must be passed on the millions who have drunk of this moral sewage. But popularity failed to silence the hooting ; in England, the classic land of self-righteousness, the decree went forth that this thing must be put an end to, and amid general acclamation the English publisher of such garbage was clapped into gaol. There was only a slight pause in the outcry, more a pause of stupefaction than of reconciliation, when it was known that many respected novelists in Europe and America looked up humbly to this scavenger as to a master ; or again, when a metaphysician stood up in the Concord School of Philosophy and boldly classed him with Jesus and the great masters of moral irony ; or once more, when the garbage- monger himself was welcomed as an honoured guest in the city which had imprisoned his publisher and prohibited his books, and when it was known that he was standing, with some hope, at the sacred portals of the French Academy.
To-day, Zola's great life-work is completed. At the same time, the uproar that it aroused has, to a large extent, fallen silent. Not that there is any general agreement as to the rank of the author of the Rougon- Macquart series ; but the storms that greeted it have worn themselves out, and it is recognised that there are at least two sides to this as to other questions. Such a time is favourable to the calm discussion of Zola's precise position.
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The fundamental assertion of those who, in their irreconcilable oppo- sition to Zola, have rightly felt that abuse is not argument, has always been that Zola is no artist. The matter has usually presented itself to them as a question of Idealism versus Realism. Idealism, as used by the literary critic, seems to mean a careful selection of the facts of life for artistic treatment, certain facts being suited for treatment in the novel, certain other facts being not so suited ; while the realist, from the literary critic's point of view, is one who flings all facts indiscriminately into his pages. I think- that is a fair statement of the matter, for the literary critic does not define very clearly ; still less does he ask himself how far the idealism he advocates is merely traditional, nor, usually, to what extent the manner of presentation should influence us. He does not ask himself these questions, nor need we ask him, for in the case of Zola (or, indeed, of any other so-called "realist'*) there is no such distinction. There is no absolute realism, merely various kinds of idealism : the only absolute realism would be a phonographic record, illustrated photographically, after the manner of Edison's kinetoscope. Zola is just as much an idealist as George Sand. It is true that he selects very largely from material things, and that he selects very profusely. But the selection remains, and where there is deliberate selection there must be art. We need not trouble ourselves here — and I doubt whether we are ever called upon to trouble ourselves — about "Realism" and "Idealism." The questions are : Has the artist selected his materials rightly ? Has he selected them with due restraint ?
The first question is a large one, and, in Zola's case at all events, it cannot, I think, be answered on purely aesthetic grounds ; the second may be answered without difficulty. Zola has himself answered it ; he admits that he has been carried away by his enthusiasm, and perhaps, also, by his extraordinary memory for recently -acquired facts (a memory like a sponge, as he has put it, quickly swollen and quickly emptied) ; he has sown details across his page with too profuse a hand. It is the same kind of error as Whitman made, impelled by the same kind of enthusiasm. Zola expends immense trouble to get his facts ; he has told how he
ZOLA .- I III MAX AND HIS WORK
ransacked the theologians to obtain body and colour for "La Faute de I'Abbg Mouret," perhaps the best of his earlier books. But he certainly spent no more preliminary labour on it than Flaubert spent on " Madame Bovary," very far less than Flaubert spent on the study of Carthage for " Sal a mm bo." liut the results are different; the one artist gets his effects by profusion and multiplicity of touches, the other by the deliberate self-restraint with which he selects and emphasises solely the salient and significant touches. The latter method seems to strike more swiftly and deeply the ends of art. Three strokes with the brush of Frans Hals are worth a thousand of Denner's. Rich and minute detail* may impress us, but it irritates and wearies in the end. II a man takes his two children on to his knees, it matters little whether he places Lenore on his right knee and Henri on his left, or the other way about : the man himself ma)' fail to know or to realise, and the more intense his feelings the less likely is he to know. When we are living deeply, the facts of our external life do not present themselves to us in elaborate detail : a very few points are focal in consciousness (to use Professor Lloyd Morgan's terminology), while the rest are marginal in subconsciousness. A few things stand out vividly at each moment of life; the rest are dim. The supreme artist is shown by the insight and boldness with which he seizes and illuminates these bright points at each stage, leaving the marginal elements in due subordination. Dramatists so unlike as Ford ami Ibsen, novelists so unlike as Flaubert and Tolstoi, yet alike impress us by the simple vividness of their artistic effects. The methods adopted by Zola render such effects extremely difficult of attainment. Perhaps the best proof of Zola's remarkable art is the skill with which he has neutralised the evil effects of his ponderous method. In using the dramatic form, as in '•Therese Raquin," the method, obviously, will not work, and Zola makes no attempt to get it to work, but is content to adopt fairly simple means to reach effects which, in their way, are certainly tremendous enough. But in his most characteristic novels, as " L'Assommoir," " Nana," " Germinal," his efforts to attain salient perspective in the mass of trivial or technical details — to build a single elaborate effect out of manifold details — are
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often admirably conducted. Take, for instance, the Yoreux, the coal-pit which may almost be said to be the hero of " Germinal " rather than any of the persons in the book. The details are not interesting, but they are carefully worked up, and the Voreux is finally symbolised as a stupendous idol, sated with human blood, crouching in its mysterious sanctuary. When- ever Zola wishes to bring the Voreux before us, this formula is repeated. And it is the same, in a slighter degree, with the other material personalities of the book. Sometimes, in the case of a crowd, this formula is simply a cry. It is so with the Parisian mob who yell " A Berlin ! " in the highly-wrought con- clusion to "Nana"; it is so with the- crowd of strikers in "Germinal" who shout for bread. It is more than the tricky repetition of a word or a gesture, overdone by Dickens and others ; it is the artful manipulation of a carefully- elaborated, significant phrase. Zola seems to have been the first who has, deliberately and systematically, introduced this sort of leit-motiv into literature as a method of summarising a complex mass of details, and bringing the impression of them before the reader. In this way he contrives to minimise the defects of his method, and to render his complex detail focal. He some- times attains poignantly simple effects by the mere repetition of a leit-motiv at the right moment. And he is able at times, also, to throw aside his detailed method altogether, and to reach effects of tragic intensity. The mutilation of Maigrat's corpse is a scene which can scarcely have been described in a novel before. Given the subject, Zola"s treatment of it has the strength, brevity, and certainty of touch which only belong to great masters of art. That Zola is a great master of his art, " L'Assommoir " and "Germinal" — which, so far as I have read Zola, seem his two finest works — are enough to prove. Such works are related to the ordinary novel much as Wagner's music- dramas are related to the ordinary Italian opera. Wagner reaches a loftier height of art than Zola ; he had a more complete grasp of all the elements he took in hand to unite. Zola has not seen with sufficient clearness the point of view of science, and its capacity for harmonising with fiction : nor has he, with perfect sureness of vision, always realised the ends of art. He has left far too much of the scaffolding standing amid his huge literary structures ; there is
ZOLA : THE MAN AND HIS WORK 71
too much mere brute fact which has not been wrought into art. But, if Zola is not among the world's greatest artists, I do not think we can finally deny that he is a great artist.
To look at Zola from the purely artistic standpoint, however, is scarcely to see him at all. His significance for the world generally, and even for literature, lies less in a certain method of using his material — as it may be said to lie, for example, in the case of the Goncourts — than in the material itself, and the impulses and ideas that prompted his selection of that material. These growing piles of large books are the volcanic ejecta of an original and exuberant temperament. To understand them we must investigate this temperament.
A considerable and confused amount of racial energy was stored up in Zola. At once French, Italian and Greek — with a mother from the central Beauce country of France, more fruitful in corn than in intellect, and a father of mixed foreign race, a mechanical genius in his way, with enthusiastic energies and large schemes — he presents a curious combination of potential forces, perhaps not altogether a very promising combination. One notes that the mechanical engineer in the father seems to have persisted in the son, not necessarily by heredity, but perhaps by early familiarity and association. Young Zola was by no means a brilliant schoolboy, though he once won a prize for memory ; such ability as he showed was in the direction of science ; he had no literary aptitudes. He seems to have adopted literature chierly because pen and ink come handiest to the eager energies of a poor clerk. It is scarcely fanciful to detect the mechanical aptitudes still. Just as all Huxley's natural instincts were towards mechanics, and in physiology he always sought for the "go" of the organism, so Zola, however imperfect his scientific equipment may be, has always sought for the " go " of the social organism. The history of the Rougon-Macquart family is a study in social mathematics : given certain family strains, what is the dynamic hereditary outcome of their contact ?
To the making of Zola there went, therefore, this curious racial blend, as a soil ready to be fertilised by any new seed, and a certain almost instinctive tendency to look at things from the mechanical and material point
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of view. To these, in very early life, a third factor was added of the first importance. During long years after his father's death, Zola, as a child and youth, suffered from poverty, poverty almost amounting to actual starvation, the terrible poverty of respectability. The whole temper of his work and his outlook on the world are clearly conditioned by this prolonged starvation of adolescence. The timid and reserved youth — for such, it is said, has been Zola's character both in youth and manhood — was shut up with his fresh energies in a garret while the panorama of the Paris world was unfolded below him. Forced by circumstances or by temperament to practise the strictest chastity and sobriety, there was but one indulgence left open to him, an orgy of vision. Of this, as we read his books, we cannot doubt that he fully availed himself, for each volume of the Rougon-Macquart series is an orgy of material vision.*
Zola is still said to be chaste, and he is still sober — though we are told that his melancholy morose face lights up like a gourmet's at dinner time — but this early eagerness to absorb the sights as well as the sounds, and one may add the smells, of the external world, has at length become moulded into a routine method. To take some corner of life, and to catalogue every detail of it, to place a living person in it, and to describe every sight and smell and sound around him, although he himself may be quite unconscious of them — that, in the simplest form, is the recipe for making a roman experimental . The method, I wish to insist, was rooted in the author's experience of the world. Life only came to him as the sights, sounds, smells, that reached his garret window. His soul seems to have been starved at the centre, and to have encamped at the sensory periphery. He never tasted deep of life, he
' " Mes souvenirs," he told a psychological interviewer, "ont une puissance, un relief extraordinaire; ma memoire est enonne, prodigieuse, elle me gene; quand j'evoque les objets que j'ai vus, je les revois tels qu'ils sont reellement avec leurs lignes, leurs formes, leurs couleurs, leurs odeurs, leurs sons ; e'est utu materialisation a entrance ; le soleil qui les eclairait m'eblouit presque ; l'odeur me suffoque, les details s'accrochent a moi et m'em- pechent de voir l'ensemble. Aussi pour le ressaisir me faut attendre un certain temps Cette possibility d'evocation ne dure pas tres longtemps ; le relief de 1 image est dune exactitude, dune intensite inouies, puis l'image s'efface, disparait, cela sen va ."' This descrip- tion suggests myopia, and it is a fact that Zola has been short-sighted from youth ; he first realised it at nineteen. His other senses, especially smell, are very keen
ZOLA : THE .1/ IN AND HIS WORK 73
Stored up none of those wells of purely personal emotion from which great artists have hoisted up the precious lluid which makes the bright, living blood of their creations. How different he is in this respect from the other great novelist of our day, who has also been a volcanic force of world-wide sig- nificance ! Tolstoi comes before us as a man who has himself lived deeply, a man who has had an intense thirst for life, and who has satisfied that thirst. He has craved to know life, to know women, the joy of wine, the fury of battle, the taste of the ploughman's sweat in the field. He has known all these things, not as material to make books, but as the slaking of instinctive personal passions. And in knowing them he has stored up a wealth of experience from which he drew as he came to make books, and which bear about them that peculiar haunting fragrance only yielded by the things which have been lived through, personally, in the far past. Zola's method has been quite otherwise : when he wished to describe a great house he sat outside the palatial residence of M. Menier, the chocolate manufacturer, and imagined for himself the luxurious fittings inside, discovering in after years that his description had come far short of the reality ; before writing " Nana," he obtained an introduction to a courtesan, with whom he was privileged to lunch ; his laborious preparation for the wonderful account of the war of 1870, in " La Debacle," was purely one of books, documents, and second-hand experiences; when he wished to write of labour he went to the mines and to the fields, but never appears to have done a day's manual work. Zola's literary methods are those of the parvenu who has tried to thrust himself in from outside, who has never been seated at the table of life, who has never really lived. That is their weakness. It is also their virtue. There is no sense of satiety in Zola's work as there is in Tolstoi's. One can understand how it is that, although their methods are so unlike, Tolstoi himself regards Zola as the one French novelist of the day who is really alive. The starved lad, whose eyes were concentrated with longing on the visible world, has reaped a certain reward from his intellectual chastity ; he has preserved his clearness of vision for material things, an eager, insatiable, impartial vision. He is a zealot in his devotion to life, to the smallest details of life. He has
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fought like the doughtiest knight of old-world romance for his lady's honour, and has suffered more contumely than they all. " On barde de fer nos urinoirs ! " he shouts in a fury of indignation in one of his essays ; it is a curious instance of the fanatic's austere determination that no barrier shall be set up to shut out the sights and smells of the external world. The virgin freshness of his thirst for life gives its swelling, youthful vigour to his work, its irrepressible energy.
It has, indeed, happened with this unsatisfied energy as it will happen with such energies ; it has retained its robustness at the sacrifice of the sweetness it might otherwise have gained. There is a certain bitterness in Zola's fury of vision, as there is also in his gospel of "Work! work! work! " One is conscious of a savage assault on a citadel which, the assailant now well knows, can never be scaled. Life cannot be reached by the senses alone ; there is always something that cannot be caught by the utmost tension of eyes and ears and nose ; a well-balanced soul is built up, not alone on sensory memories, but also on the harmonious satisfaction of the motor and emotional energies. That cardinal fact must be faced even when we are attempting to define the fruitful and positive element in Zola's activity.
The chief service which Zola has rendered to his fellow artists and successors, the reason of the immense stimulus he supplies, seems to lie in the proofs he has brought of the latent artistic uses of the rough, neglected details of life. The Rougon-Macquart series has been to his weaker brethren like that great sheet knit at the four corners, let down from Heaven full of four-footed beasts and creeping things and fowls of the air, and bearing in it the demonstration that to the artist as to the moralist nothing can be called common or unclean. It has henceforth become possible for other novelists to find inspiration where before they could never have turned, to touch life with a vigour and audacity of phrase which, without Zola's example, they would have trembled to use, while they still remain free to bring to their work the simplicity, precision, and inner experience which he has never possessed. Zola has enlarged the field of the novel. He has brought the modern material world into fiction in a more definite and thorough manner than it
ZOLA -. THE MAX AND HIS WORK 75
has ever been brought before, just as Richardson brought the modern emotional world into fiction ; such an achievement necessarily marks an epoch. In spite of all his blunders, Zola has given the novel new power and directness, a vigour of fibre which was hard indeed to attain, but which, once attained, we may chasten as we will. And in doing this he has put out of court, perhaps for ever, those unwholesome devotees of the novelist's art who, worked out of their vacuity, have neither inner nor outer world to tell of.
Zola's delight in exuberant detail, it is true, is open to severe criticism. When, however, we look at his work, not as a great art but as an important moment in the evolution of the novel, this exuberance is amply justified. Such furious energy in hammering home this demonstration of the artistic utility of the whole visible modern world may detract from the demonstrator's reputation for skill ; it has certainly added to the force of the demonstration. Zola's luxuriance of detail has extended impartially to every aspect of life he has investigated, to the working of a mine, to the vegetation of the Paradou, to the ritual of the Catholic Church. But it is not on the details of inanimate life, or the elaborate description of the industrial and religious functions of men, that the rage of Zola's adversaries has chiefly been spent. It is rather on his use of the language of the common people and on his descriptions of the sexual and digestive functions of humanity. Zola has used slang — the argot of the populace — copiously, chiefly indeed in " L'Assommoir " which is professedly a study of low life, but to a less extent in his other books. A considerable part of the power of " L'Assommoir," in many respects Zola's most perfect work, lies in the skill with which he uses the language of the people he is dealing with ; the reader is bathed throughout in an atmosphere of picturesque, vigorous, often coarse argot. There is, no doubt, a lack of critical sobriety in the profusion and reiteration of vulgarisms, of coarse oaths, of the varied common synonyms for common things. But they achieve the end that Zola sought, and so justify themselves.
They are of even greater interest as a protest against the exaggerated purism which has ruled the French language for nearly three centuries, and while rendering it a more delicate and precise instrument for scientific purposes, has caused it to become rather bloodless and colourless for the
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artist's purposes, as compared with the speech used by Rabelais, Montaigne, and even Moliere, the great classics who have chiefly influenced Zola. The romantic movement of the present century, it is true, added colour to the language, but scarcely blood ; it was an exotic, feverish colour which has not permanently enriched French speech. A language rendered anaemic by over- clarification cannot be fed by exotic luxuries but by an increase in the vigorous staples of speech, and Zola was on the right track when he went ' to the people's common speech, which is often classic in the true sense and always robust. Doubtless he has been indiscriminate and even inac- curate in his use of argot, sometimes giving undue place to what is of merely temporary growth. But the main thing was to give literary place and prestige to words and phrases which had fallen so low in general estimate, in spite of their admirable expressiveness, that only a writer of the first rank and of unequalled audacity could venture to lift them from the mire. This Zola has done ; and those who follow him may easily exercise the judgment and discretion in which he has been lacking.
Zola's treatment of the sexual and the digestive functions, as I pointed out, has chiefly aroused his critics. If you think of it, these two functions are precisely the central functions of life, the two poles of hunger and love around which the world revolves. It is natural that it should be precisely these fundamental aspects of life which in the superficial contact of ordinary social intercourse we are for ever trying more and more to refine away and ignore. They are subjected to an ever-encroaching process of attenuation and circumlocution, and as a social tendency this influence is possibly harmless or even beneficial. But it is constantly extending' to literature also, and here it is disastrous. It is true that a few great authors — classics of the first rank — have gone to extremes in their resistance to this tendency. These extremes are of two kinds : the first issuing in a sort of coprolalia, or inclination to dwell on excrement, which we find to a slight extent in Rabelais and to a marked extent in the half-mad Swift ; in its fully-developed shape this coprolalia is an uncontrollable instinct found in some forms of insanity. The other extreme is that of pruriency, or the perpetual itch to circle round sexual matters, accompanied by a timidity
ZOLA : THE MAN AND HIS WORK 77
which makes it impossible to come right up to them ; this sort of impotent fumbling in women's placket-holes finds its supreme literary exponent in Sterne. Like coprolalia, when uncontrolled, prurience is a well-recognised characteristic of the insane, leading them to find a vague eroticism every- where. But both these extreme tendencies have not been found incom- patible with the highest literary art. And, moreover, their most pronounced exponents have been clerics, the conventional representatives of the Almighty. However far Zola might go in these directions, he would still be in what is universally recognised as very good company. He has in these respects by no means come up with Father Rabelais and Dean Swift and the Rev. Laurence Sterne ; but there can be little doubt that, along both lines, he has gone farther than a perfectly well-balanced artist would go. On the one hand he over-emphasises what is repulsive in the nutritive side of life, and on the other hand, with the timid obsession of chastity, he over-emphasises the nakedness of flesh. In so doing, he has revealed a certain flabbiness in his art, although he has by no means diminished his service in widening the horizon of literary speech and subject. Bearing in mind that many crowned kings of literature have approached these subjects quite as closely as Zola, and far less seriously, it does not seem necessary to enter any severer judgment here.
To enlarge the sphere of language is an unthankful task, but in the long run literature owes an immense debt to the writers who courageously add to the stock of strong and simple words. Our own literature during the last two centuries has been terribly hampered by the social tendency of life to slur expression, and to paraphrase or suppress all forceful and poignant words. If we go back to Chaucer, or even to Shakespeare, we realise what power of expression we have lost. It is enough, indeed, to turn to our English Bible. The literary power of the English Bible is largely due to the unconscious instinct for style which happened to be in the air when it was chiefly moulded, to the simple, direct, unashamed vigour of its speech. If some of the stories of the Old Testament were presented to us under some trifling disguise on week-days we should declare that they were filthier than the filthiest things in Zola ; and, certainly, if the discovery
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of the Bible had been left for us to make, any English translation would have to be issued at a high price by some esoteric society for fear lest it should fall into the hands of the British matron. It is our British love of compromise, we say, that makes it possible for a spade to be called a spade on one day of the week, but on no other ; our neighbours, whose minds are more logically constituted, call it le cant Bvitannique. But our mental compartments remain very water-tight, and on the whole we are even worse off than the French who have no Bible. For instance, we have almost lost the indispensable words " belly " and " bowels," both used so often and with such admirable effect in the Psalms; we talk of the "stomach," a word which is not only an incorrect equivalent, but at best totally inapt for serious or poetic uses. Anyone who is acquainted with our old literature, or with the familiar speech of the common folk, will recall numberless similar instances of simple, powerful expressions which are lost or vanishing from literary language, leaving no available substitute behind. In modern literary language, indeed, man scarcely exists save in his extremities. For we take the pubes as a centre, and we thence describe a circle with a radius of some eighteen inches — in America the radius is rather longer — and we forbid any reference to any organ within that circle, save that maid - of - all -work the " stomach " ; in other words, we make it impossible to say anything to the point concerning the central functions of life. It is a question how far any real vital literature can be produced under such conditions.
In considering Zola, we are constantly brought back to the fact that most of the things that he has tried to do have been better done by more accomplished artists. The Goncourts have extended the sphere of language even in the direction of slang, and have faced many of the matters that Zola has faced, and with far more delicate, though usually more shadowy, art ; Balzac has created as large and vivid a world of people, though drawing more of it from his own imagination ; Huysmans has greater skill in stamping the vision of strange or sordid things on the brain ; Tolstoi gives a deeper realisation of life; Flaubert is as audaciously naturalistic, and has, as well, that perfect self-control which should always accompany audacity. And in Flaubert, too, we find something of the same irony as in Zola.
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This irony, however, is a personal and characteristic feature of Zola's work. It is irony alone which gives it distinction and poignant incisiveness. Irony may be called the soul of Zola's work, the embodiment of his moral attitude towards life. It has its source, doubtless, like so much else that is characteristic, in his early days of poverty and aloofness from the experiences of life. There is a fierce impartiality — the impartiality of one who is outside and shut oil -in this manner of presenting the brutalities and egoisms and pettinesses of men. The fury of his irony is here equalled by his self- restraint. He concentrates it into a word, a smile, a gesture. Zola believes, undoubtedly, in a reformed, even perhaps a revolutionised, future of society, but he has no illusions. He sets down things as he sees them. He has no tendernesses for the working - classes, no pictures of rough diamonds. YVe may see this very clearly in " Germinal." Here every side of the problem of modern capitalism is presented: the gentle-natured shareholding class unable to realise a state of society in which people should not live on dividends and give charity ; the official class with their correct authoritative views, very sure that they will always be needed to control labour and maintain social order ; and the workers, some brutalised, some suffering like dumb beasts, some cringing to the bosses, some rebelling madly, a few- striving blindly for justice.
There is no loophole in Zola's impartiality ; the gradual development of the seeming hero of " Germinal," Etienne Lantier, the agitator, honest in his revolt against oppression, but with an unconscious bourgeois ideal at his heart, seems unerringly right. All are the victims of an evil social system, as Zola sees the world, the enslaved workers as much as the overfed masters; the only logical outcome is a clean sweep — the burning up of the chaff and straw, the fresh furrowing of the earth, the new spring of a sweet and vigorous race. That is the logical outcome of Zola's attitude, the attitude of an optimist, or at all events a meliorist, who regards our present society as a thoroughly vicious circle. His pity for men and women is boundless ; his disdain is equally boundless. It is only towards animals that his tenderness is untouched by contempt ; some of his most memorable passages are con- cerned with the sufferings of animals. The New Jerusalem may be fitted
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up, but the Montsou miners will never reach it ; they will fight for the first small, stuffy, middle-class villa they meet on the way. And Zola pours out the stream of his pitiful, pitiless irony on the weak, helpless, erring children of men. It is this moral energy, combined with his volcanic exuberance, which lifts him to a position of influence above the greater artists with whom we may compare him.
It is by no means probable that the world will continue to read Zola much longer. His work is already done ; but when the nineteenth century is well past it may be that he will still have his interest. There will be plenty of material, especially in the newspapers, for the future historian to reconstruct the social life of the latter half of the nineteenth century. But the material is so vast that these historians will possibly be even more biassed and one- sided than our own. For a vivid, impartial picture — on the whole a faithful picture — of certain of the most characteristic aspects of this period, seen in- deed from the outside, but drawn by a contemporary in all its intimate and even repulsive details, the reader of a future age can best go to Zola. What would we not give for a thirteenth century Zola ! We should read with painful, absorbed interest a narrative of the Black Death as exact as that of nineteenth century alcoholism in " L'Assommoir." The story of how the serf lived, as fully told as in " La Terre," would be of incomparable value. The early merchant and usurer would be a less dim figure if " L' Argent " had been written about him. The abbeys and churches of those days have in part come down to us, but no "Germinal" remains to tell of the lives and thoughts of the men who hewed those stones, and piled them, and carved them. How precious such record would have been we may realise when we recall the incomparable charm of Chaucer's prologue to " The Canterbury Tales." But our children's children, with the same passions alive at their hearts under incalculably different circumstances, will in the pages of the Rougon-Macquart series find themselves back again among all the strange, remote details of a vanished world. What a fantastic and terrible page of old-world romance !
Havelock Ellis.
TWO LOVE POEMS THE SHADOWY HORSES
HEAR the shadowy horses, their long manes a-shake,
- Their hoofs heavy with tumult, their eyes glimmering white ;
rhe North unrolls above them clinging, creeping night, The Kast tells all her secret joy before daybreak, The West weeps in pale dew, and sighs, passing away, The South would cover them with roses of crimson fire : ( ) vanity of sleep, hope, dream, endless desire ; The horses of disaster plunge in the desolate clay. Beloved, let your eyes half close, and your heart beat Over my heart, and your hair fall about my breast Drowning Love's lonely hour in deep twilight of rest ; And hide their tossing manes and their tumultuous feet.
THE TRAVAIL OF PASSION
YVYHKN the flaming, lute-thronged angelic door is wide; ' ' When an immortal passion breathes in mortal clay, Out hearts endure the plaited thorn, the crowded way, The knotted scourge, the nail-pierced hands, the wounded suit-. The hissop-heavy sponge, the flowers by Kidron stream : We will bend down, and loosen our hair over you That it may drop faint perfume and be heavy with dew, I. Hits of death-pale hope, roses of passionate dream.
W. Li. Yeats.
DIEPPE: 1895
WENT to Dieppe this summer, with the intention of staying from .■*■ Saturday to Monday. Two months afterwards, I began to wonder, with a very mild kind of surprise, why I had not yet returned to London. And I was not the only one to fall under this inexplicable fascination. There is a fantastical quality in Dieppe air which somehow turns us all, at our moments, into amiable and enthusiastic lunatics. Relays of friends kept arriving, I as little as they knew why ; and some of them, like myself, never went back. Others, forced to live mostly in London, and for the most part content to live there, went backwards and forwards every week. What is it, in this little French watering-place, that appeals so to the not quite conventional Englishman, brings him to it, holds him in it, brings him back to it so inevitably ? Nothing, and everything ; an impalpable charm, the old-fashioned distinction of a little town which has still, in its faded lawns by the sea, in the line of white hotels beyond the lawns, something of that 1830 air which exhales for us from a picture of Bonington. And then Dieppe is so discreetly, and with such self-respect, hospitable to us English : so different from the vulgar friendliness of Boulogne, with its " English chop-houses " insulting one's taste at every step. Dieppe receives us with perfectly French manners, offers us politeness, and exacts it on our part, and pleases a sensitive and appreciative Englishman because it is so charming in such a French way. And then life, if you will but abandon yourself to the natural current of things, passes in a dream. I do not quite know why, but one cannot take things seriously at Dieppe. Only just on the other side of that blue streak is England : England means London. At the other end of a short railway-line is Paris. But all that is merely so man}' words : the mind refuses to grasp it as a fact. One's duties, probably,
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call one to London or Paris, one's realisable pleasures; everything hut the moment's vague, immense, I say again, inexplicable, satisfaction, which broods and dawdles about Dieppe.
At Dieppe the sea is liberal, and affords you a long sweep from the cliffs on the left to the pier on the right. A few villas nestle under the cliffs ; then comes the Casino, which takes its slice of the plage with excellent judgment. Built of peppermint-coloured brick, it sprawls its length insolently above the sea. It is quite nice, as casinos go ; it is roomy, and has some amusing chandeliers hung up by ribbons ; and the terrace is absolutely charming. If you are insular enough to wish it, you can sit and drink brandies and sodas all day ; if you would do in France as the French do, you can sit nearer the parapet, with an awning stretched above your head, and look out drowsily over the sea, which is worth looking at here, opalescent, full of soft changes ; and you can chat with as many of the beautes de plage, Polish princes, and distinguished artistic people as you happen to know. There is the Prince de Sagan, with his irreproachable button-hole ; the Comtesse de Greffulhe is standing on the estacade ; Massenet and Saint-Saens are sitting on the chairs yonder ; Cleo de Merode, the 1830 beauty of the Opera, whose photograph you have seen in every shop window in Paris, is taking her bath, wearing the prettiest little black socks, yellow gloves, and a thin, many-twisted gold chain about her neck. All around you, bright in the bright sun, there is a flow of soft dresses, mostly in sharp, clear colours, vivid yellows and blues and whites, the most wonderful blues, more dazzling than the sea. And there are delicious hats, floating over the hair like clouds ; great floating sleeves, adding wings to the butterfly. I adore beautiful summer dresses, and here at Dieppe you have all the fashions and felicities of a whole summer.
Ah ! but the plage, on a sunny morning in mid-season, what a feast of colour, of movement, of the most various curiosities ! The plage has its social laws, its social divisions, an etiquette almost as scrupulous as a drawing- room. All the space in front of the Casino is tacitly reserved for the people
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who subscribe to the Casino, and who are moving up and down the wooden stair- case from the terrace to the beach all day long. Beyond that limit the plage is plebeian, and belongs to everybody. Women sit about there with shawls and babies and paper parcels. At the bathing hours it is a little more select, for some people, with full liberty of choice, prefer to bathe there. Outside the Casino there are fewer people, but one is more or less smart, and the barons and beautes dc plage are alike here. In front of the double row of bathing machines there is a line of little private boxes. Smart women sit on exhibition in every compartment, wearing their best hats and smiles, sometimes pretending to read or sew : as if one did anything but sit on exhibition, and flirt, and chatter, and look at the bathers ! There is a constant promenade along the shifting and resounding pathway of boards laid over the great pebbles ; chairs are grouped closely all along the plage between this promenade and the sea ; there is another little crowd on the estacade, from which the bathers are diving. The bright dresses glitter in the sunlight, like a flower garden ; white peignoirs, bright and dark bathing costumes, the white and rose of bare and streaming flesh, passing to and fro, hurriedly, between the bathing machines and the sea. The men, if they have good figures, look well ; they have at least the chance of looking well. But the women ! Rare, indeed, is the woman who can look pretty, in her toilette or herself, as she comes out of the sea, wraps herself in a sort of white nightgown, and staggers up the beach, the water running down her legs. Even at the more elegant moment when she drops her peignoir at the sea's edge, before stepping in, it is hard for her, with the best intentions on her part and the best of wishes on ours, to look desirable. She is often wise enough to wear corsets ; without them, even an excellent figure may appear a little extreme, in one direction or another. It is with a finer taste, after all, that in England the women are not allowed to bathe with the men, are kept out of sight as much as possible. A sentimental sensualist should avoid the French seaside. He will be pained at seeing how ridiculous a beautiful woman may look when she has very few clothes on. The lines of the body are lost or deformed ; there is none of the suggestion of ordinary
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costume, only a grotesque and shapeless image, all in pits and protuberances,
for which Nature should be ashamed to accept responsibility. Complete
nudity, there is no doubt, has its charm, though of a somewhat primitive kind;
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but this state of being undressed and yet covered, in this makeshift, unmilliner- like way, it is too barbarous, Mesdames, for the tolerance of any gentleman of taste.
II
The Casino has many charms. You can dance there, listen to music, walk or sit on the terrace in the sun, write your letters in the reading- room on the very pictorial paper which is so carefully doled out to you ; but it is for none of these things that the Casino exists, it is in none of these things that there lies the unique fascination of the Casino, for those to whom the Casino has a unique fascination. The Casino, properly speaking, is only a gorgeous stable for the little horses which run away with all the money of the visitors, to heap up the golden hoards of Mr. Isidore Bloch, late of Monte Carlo. All the rooms in the Casino open into the room of the green tables ; all the alleys of the gardens lead there. In the intervals of the concert, if you wish to stroll for a few minutes on the terrace, you have to pass through the room ; you see the avid circle about the tables, the swish of the horses ; you hear the monotonous " Faites vos jeux, Messieurs .... Les jeux sont faits .... Rien ne va plus," and then, after the expectant pause, the number : " L'as, numero un." And in time, however strong, or however idle, or however indifferent you are, you will be drawn into that fascinated circle, you will be seized by the irresistible impulse, you will begin to play. The fascination of gambling, to the real amateur of the thing, is stronger than any other passion. Men forget that a beautiful woman is sitting opposite to them ; women do not so much as notice that a more beautiful toilette than their own has just come into the room. I have seen the most famous professional beauties of Paris sit at those green tables, and not a soul has looked at them except the croupiers and myself.
I said the impulse was irresistible. I have proved it on myself. Gambling in the abstract has no charms for me ; I can go to the races with- out the slightest inclination to take the odds ; it annoys me when little
DIEPPE : 1895
newspaper boys rush up to me as if expecting me to buy their papers because they are the first to shout "All the win-ner! " I lounged about the room of the Petits Chevaux for weeks without putting on more than two or three two- franc pieces, which I contentedly lost. I saw my friends winning and losing every afternoon and every evening ; I saw them leaving the tables with their pockets bulging with five-franc pieces ; I heard them discussing lucky numbers ; I saw the strength of the passion which held them by the urgency and the futility of their remorse when they had lost ; I heard them saying to me, " It will be your turn next," and I laughed, certain of myself. I put on a few francs to please a charming lady whom it had pleased to tempt me, and I found myself waiting with more interest for the turn of her head as she smiled up to me, from time to time, over her shoulder, than for the turn of the little horse past the winning post. I knew by that that the demon of play had not bitten me ; I felt absolutely safe.
Well, of course, I succumbed, and the sensation I experienced was worth the price I paid for it. While I played, nothing existed but the play ; the money slipped through my fingers, I gathered it in, flung it forth, with an absorption so complete that my actions were almost mechanical. My brain seemed to act with instantaneous energy : no sooner had I willed than my fingers were placing the coins here, and not there, I knew not why, on the table. I followed no system, and I never hesitated. I then knew for the first time the strength of convictions for which there is not even the pretence of a foundation. While my money lasted, and I saw it flowing to me and from me so capriciously, I felt what I think must have been the intoxication of abandoning oneself to Fate, with an astonishing sense of superiority over ordinary mortals, from whom I was almost more absolutely removed than if I had been moving in a haschisch dream. And in the exalta- tion, the absorption, of this dream, in which I was acting with such reckless and causeless certainty, there was no really disillusioning shock, either when I lost or when I won. My excitement was so great that I accepted these accidents as merely points in a progress. After a time I did not even play for the sake of winning. I played for the sake of playing.
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After all, Petits Chcvaux is the merest amateur gambling ; the serious people who play baccarat next door, in the club, would laugh at it, and rightly, from the gambler's point of view. The interest of the thing is in its revelation of the universal humanity of the gambling instinct, which comes out so certainly and so unexpectedly in the people who gamble once in the year, for a few scores or a few hundreds of francs. And those green tables are so admirable in the view they afford of the little superstitions which exist somewhere in the background of all minds. This table is lucky to such a person, that column to another. The women swear by the croupiers, and will take any amount of trouble to get a seat by the side of the one they prefer. And the croupiers, little miserable engines of Fate, sit with folded hands and intent eyes, impassive, supercilious, like little Eastern gods, raking in the money without satisfaction, and tossing you your winnings with an air of disdain. Yet they, too, in spite of their air of supremacy, are entirely at the mercy of a moment's caprice. A croupier at whose table too much is won is liable to instant dismissal ; at the best, they earn their five hundred francs a month only during the few months of the season, and the most imposing of all the croupiers at the tables now has just appealed to a lady who plays there, offering himself and his wife as servants.
Ill
On certain afternoons there is a Bal des Enfants at the Casino. You cannot imagine anything more delicious. All around the room sit children, in their white dresses, their little, thin, black and yellow legs set forth gravely. They are preoccupied with their fans, their sashes, their gloves ; their hair is beautifully done all over their heads, and falls down their backs. The little boys, in velvet and navy suits, march to and fro, very solemnly, a little awkwardly, bow, and choose partners. The bigger girls (some of them are thirteen or fourteen) jump up, cross the room hurriedly, with the nervous movement of young girls walking, tossing their hair back from their shoulders ; they form little groups, laugh and nod to the grown-up people who stand about the door ; and every now and then pounce on a tiny sister, and pull
DIEPPE
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about her dress until its set suits them. In the middle of the room stand two absurd persons : the blonde Jew with the immense pink nose, the golden beard and moustaches, who acts as master of the ceremonies : he tries to assume a paternal air, his swollen eyes dart about nervously ; and the middle- aged lady with eyeglasses, who is more immediately concerned with the
/\OSKA
V^_,A*^-"
children's conduct. She is frankly anxious, fussy and occupied. The orchestra
is about to begin, and in the middle of the room a little helpless ring of very
tiny children, infants, begins to walk gravely round and round ; the tiny people
hold one another's hands, wonderingly, and toddle along with their heads
looking over their shoulders, all in opposite directions. The dance has
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begun : it is the Moska, with its funny rhythm, its double stamp of the heels. Some of the children dance charmingly, with a pretty exactness in the trip and turn of the toes, the fling of the leg. There are adorable frocks, marvellous faces. They turn, turn, stop short, stamp their heels and turn again. The whole thing is so gay and simple and artificial, these little, got-up people who are playing at being their elders. It is so pretty altogether and so exciting, that I could watch it for hours. Nothing is more exciting than to see children masquerading. I am always disposed to take them, as they would be taken, very seriously, to think of them almost as of men and women. As if they were not so far more attractive than any possible men and women ! I hate to think of those long, thin legs getting stouter, and being covered up in skirts ; of all that floating hair being twisted up into coils and bundled together obscurely at the back of the head. I can see the elder sisters of these enchanting little absurdities standing beside me at the door. How uninteresting they are. how little they invite the wandering of even the vaguest emotion !
IV
But all Dieppe is not to be seen at the Casino, and, perhaps, not the most intimate part of Dieppe. I had the good fortune to live in the very heart of the town, just outside the principal doorway of the Eglise Saint- Jacques. I have never in my live had a more genuine, and, in its way, profound sensation than my daily and nightly view of that adorable old church, a somewhat flamboyant Gothic, certainly, which I grew to love and wonder at with an intimacy that was entirely new to me. To look out last thing at night, before getting into bed, and see the grey stone flowering there before me, rising up into the stars as if at home there, and so full of solid shadow about its base, broadly planted on the solid earth ; to rise in the morning and look out on the same grey mass, white in parts, and warm in the early sunlight ; there never was a decor which pleased me so much, which put so many dreams into my head. Every Gothic church is a nest of dreams, and the least religiously - minded of men has his moments of devotion, of spiritual exaltation, before so delicate and so enduring a work
DIEPPE : 189 > 93
of men's hands in praise of God. Sight and thought are lost in it ; one feels its immensity as one feels the immensity of the sea. And it was as dear to me as the sea itself, this church of the patron saint of fishermen, who leans upon his staff, a sensual Jewish person with fleshy lips and a smile which is somewhat sneering, in the arch of the doorway. During the first part of my stay, the fineness, the supremacy, the air of eternity of the church, were curiously accentuated by a horrid little fair which installed itself at the church's very base, in every corner of the many- cornered ground about it. All day long, into the late evening, the wooden horses went swaying round to the noise of two or three tunes which dinned themselves into one's brain ; a transformation show of Joan of Arc, just below my window, had a drum and a cornet at the door, an advertisement I could well have spared of the little, proud girl who stood outside, so seriously, in her pink tights, her tin helmet and breast-plate. A peep-show, a few steps further on, in which you saw the murder of M. Carnot and the degradation of M. Dreyfus, had a piano, which was played with diligence. Shots were fired all day long in the " Tir des Salons," which stood just this side of the " Theatre Moderne," which had a small band. Then, all around, clinging still closer to the skirts of the church, were caravans and tents, in which all these motley people lived and slept and did their cooking. They swarmed about it like a crowd of insects, throwing up their little mounds in the earth ; and the church rose calmly, undisturbed, almost unconscious of the very existence of the swarm, as the Eternal Church rises out of the agitations and feverish coming -and -going of the world and the fashions of the world.
The fair was horrid, an oppression, a nightmare; it kept me from work, from sleep, from the decent charity we owe our fellow mortals ; I could not hear myself talk ; but as there is no experience in the world which has not its contribution, if we choose to take it, to our sense of the agreeable, I managed to snatch a few amusing sensations out of even this discomfort. I had my own little romance in the fair, the most trifling, the most absurd of little romances that ever was. Still ! One evening I chanced to go into
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one of the shooting-galleries, the " Tir des Salons" it was ceremoniously called, in company with one or two idle friends, and as I fired, fruitlessly enough, at the dancing bubbles on the fountain, I noticed that the girl who loaded my musket for me was a little, blonde person with dancing blue eyes, frizzly golden hair, a cheeky little nose, which was cheeky and yet exquisite, and a perfectly golden complexion. She was about fifteen years of age : I like youth. We chatted and laughed together a good deal, and I stayed longer in the "Tir" than I had intended. From that time I could never pass the door (which I was obliged to do several times a day) without my little friend rushing forward, all smiles, clapping her hands to me, or dancing up and down on both feet : I spent no more money there, so her liking for me was scarcely interested. Occasionally I would stop and chat, if she were alone in the place ; but a mother would generally appear somewhere in the dark at the back, call to her in a harsh voice, and she would have to leave me, with a little piteous grimace. She liked to look at my books and papers, and would not shake hands if her hands seemed to her too dirty. One day, as I was looking out of my window, I saw her little face at the tiny window of one of the caravans down below ; it was the living - waggon of the family : and sometimes she used to sit on the doorstep mending her stockings, and she would wave the stockings gaily to me in the air as I sat at my window writing. I liked to look out and see her there ; it was a sort of company.
One morning I woke up to find that the peep-show was taking down its boards : the fair, at last, was really going away. I can never see the preparations for even the most welcome moving without a certain sadness ; but never had any moving been so welcome to me. I was no longer to hear those three tunes, the waltz, the " Gardes Municipaux," and " Daisy Bell." I should be able to sleep, to write, to hear myself talk. And I heaved a sigh of relief.
And then, with a smile, I almost sighed as I saw the little hand of the girl at the "Tir" waving to me from the door of her caravan. I was really sincerely sorry that my little friend was going away. I thought of going
DIEPPE : 1895 95
downstairs to say good-bye to her, to tell her I was sorry she was going ; but I was sure she would know that, and, besides, was it worth the trouble? So I nodded, and went on with my dressing.
When I came back to my room that afternoon her little show was still standing; it was the last one left. All the afternoon I sat at my window writing, and whenever I glanced down below the little yellow person was smiling up at me, with some pretty little gesture, in the midst of her work. She worked very hard, carrying about heavy beams and mattresses and all kinds of domestic and professional objects. When all the packing was finished, the old grandfather came and sat down in his chair in the middle of the road, put on his spectacles, and began to read his newspaper. The whole family grouped itself elegantly about the caravan, and my little person perched herself on the doorstep in the old way, and once more began to mend her stockings. She was very tired, very glad to have finished her heavy work ; and when I looked down she would wave her stockings to me (if no one was looking) with that gay little air which pleased me so much. I held up the sheet on which I had been writing verses. She danced up and down, and beckoned to me to give it to her. I shook my head and went on writing.
That was the last I saw of her. The next morning I awoke suddenly with a start and, without quite knowing why, sprang out of bed and rushed to the window. The noise of heavy wheels had awakened me, and I was just in time to see the hindward half of my little friend's caravan heave slowly round the corner. I fancied her looking up at my empty window, waving her hand for the last time, wishing I would wake up and look out and say good-bye to her. I would have given so much to have been there at the window just five minutes earlier. It would have pleased her, the gay little person whose name I never knew, my little friend, whom I liked because she liked me.
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VI
Very characteristic of Dieppe, I thought, and certainly quite unlike anything you can see in England, is the aspect of the Place Nationale on a market-day, with its statue of Duquesne, so brilliant and vivid in his great, flapping hat, standing there in the middle ; it reminded me somewhat of the Good-Friday fair at Venice, which is held round the Goldoni statue .near the Rialto. But the colours, despite the strong sunlight, are far from Venetian. At the cathedral end of the square are the butchers ; then come the vegetables, splashes of somewhat tawdry green, all over the ground, and up and down the stalls. The vegetables reach nearly as far as the statue ; just this side of it begin the clothes and commodities, which give its fair-like air to the market. Stalls alternate with ground-plots, all alike covered with cheap trousers, flannel shirts, heavy boots and carpet shoes, braces, foulards, handkerchiefs, stays, bright ribbons, veils, balls of worsted, shoe-laces, and, above all, dress-pieces of every sort of common and trumpery pattern. The women stop, handle them, draw them out, and the saleswoman waits with a long pair of scissors in her hand to cut off a slice here, a slice there. One dainty little covered stall has nothing but white Norman caps, laid in rows and hung in rows, one after another. White-capped old peasant-women stop in front of it, compare the frilling with their own, and try to make a bargain out of a sou. Not far off is an open and upturned umbrella full of white babies' caps and stomachers. A dazzling collection of tin spoons and gilt studs lies on the ground beside it, and the proprietors squat on their heels close by. After the clothes comes a little assemblage of baskets, brushes, and tin-pails and saucepans, dazzlingly white in the sun. Then come the poultry, crates and baskets of dead and living fowls and ducks and geese, with a few outside specimens ; and then, as we reach the street, where the market flows all the way up and down, from the quay to the Cafe des Tribunaux, we have the fruit and flowers ; the fruit all in pale yellows, with the vivid red of tomatoes ; the flowers mainly white and red, with a row of small palms along the pavement. And as one follows the crowded alleys between the stalls one elbows against slow, staring country-people,
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the blither natives of the town, the well-dressed visitors, and now and again a little lounging line of sailors or fishermen in their sea - stained dral> or brown.
The second-hand section of the market is strewn all around the cathedral, mainly about its front, and along the Rue de l'Oranger. Looking down from my window facing the portal, the whole ground seems carpeted with old clothes, so old, so dirty, so discoloured, that one wonders equally how they could have got there, and how those who have brought them i .m possibly imagine that they will ever iind purchasers. There are coats and trousers, petticoats and bodices, stockings, bed-covers, and even mattresses (once a whole four-poster was placed on the pavement, which it completely rilled, just outside my door); everything that can be folded is folded neatly, with a great economy of space ; and at intervals are collections of boots laid .lion',' side by side, eccentricities of rusty iron, which always look so amusing and so useless ; old books, prints, frames, vases, tall hats, lamps, clocks under glass cases, crockery and concertinas. There is a collection of earthen- ware, which is new ; some tea-pots, ribbons and tin pans are also new. Keyond, where the Rue Ste. Catherine narrows back to the arcade at the side of the church, the market-carts are laid in rows, resting on their shafts. Few- people pass. I have never actually seen anything bought, though I would not take upon myself to say that it never happens.
VII
The most absolutely romantic spot in Dieppe, a spot more absolutely romantic to its square inch than anything I ever saw, is the little curiosity- shop in the Rue de la Barre. You look in through a long sort of covered alley, lined on both sides with old tables, and mirrors, and bookshelves, and huge wooden effigies of saints, and plaster casts, and scraps of modern car- pentry, and you see at the farther end what looks like a garden of antiquities, in which all the oddities of the earth seem to be growing up out of trees and clinging on to vines, tier above tier. You go in a little way, and you see, fust, an uppei iIihii facing you, all the front covered with glass, in which arc
7—2
98 THE SAVOY
laid out the most precious items, the inlaid tables, the Empire clocks, the Louis XV. chairs. You go in a little further still, and you find yourself in the garden of antiquities, which is even more fantastic and impossible than its first aspect had intimated. It fills the square of a little court, round which curls a very old house trailed over with vines and creepers : a house all windows and doors, one of the doors opening on a spiral stone staircase like the staircase of a tower. At the further end there is a glass covering, like an unfinished conservatory ; creepers stretch across underneath the glass, and, in a huge mound, piled quite up to the creepers so that they are covered with its dust, I know not what astonishing brie - a - brae, a mound which fills the whole centre of the court. There are chairs and tables, beds, bundles, chests, pictures in frames, all sorts of iron things, and, very conspicuously, two battered wooden representations of the flames of hell (as I imagine), the red paint much worn from their artichoke - like shoots. All around the walls, wherever there is room for a nail between a window and a vine-branch, something is hung, plaster bas-reliefs and masks, Louis XVI. mirrors, lanterns, Japanese prints, arm-chairs without seats ; frankly, an incredible rigmarole. I saw few desirable objects, but the charm of the whole place, its unaccountability, its absurd and delightful romanticism, made up in themselves a picture which hardly needed to be painted, it was so obviously a picture already.
VIII
One of the most characteristic corners of Dieppe lies in the unfashion- able end of the town, the fisher quarter by the harbour, where the boats come in from Newhaven. Where the basin narrows to a close passage, just before you are past the pier, and in the open sea, there are two crucifixes, one on either side, guarding Dieppe. The boats lie all along the quay, their masts motionless above the water, and it is along the quay that the train from Paris comes crawling in its odd passage through the town ; a curious spectacle, as one sits at the cafe under the arcade. Arcades, reminding one of Padua, run along the townward side of the quay ; they are stocked with cheap restaurants, most with tiny balconies on the first floor, just under the
DIEPPE: 1895
roof of the arcades, and all with spread tables in the passage-way itself; waiters and women stroll up and down continually, touting for customers. From one of the little balconies you can look across the fish-market, beyond the masts, across the water, to the green hill opposite, with its votive church on the summit. The picture is framed in the oval of one of the arches, and it looks curiously theatrical, and charmingly so, over the heads of the fisher- people and townsfolk who throng below. The crier passes, beating his drum ; sometimes, about dinner-time, a company of strolling musicians, a harpist, his wife and daughter who play violins — the little one with an air of professional distinction — linger outside one of the cafes. Along the quay, which stretches out towards the pier, is a broken line of old, many-coloured houses ; there are endless little restaurants, hotels, and cafes, meant mainly for the sailors, and two cafes concerts of the seaside sort, with a piano (the pianist in one of them has been an organist in Paris ; drinks, of course, and reproaches destiny), the usual platform, and the usual enormous women, hoarse, strident, and dccolletces, who collect your pennies in a shell after every song. There is a night cafe, too, on the quay, which you can enter at any hour ; you tap on the glass door, a curtain is drawn back, and, if you are not an agent, you will have no difficulty in entering. An agent, when he makes his tour of inspection, has sometimes to wait a little, while a pack of drinkers is hurriedly bundled out at the back door. M. Jean's licence appears to be somewhat vague ; the report that an agent is at the door causes a charming little thrill of excitement among his customers. Some of his customers, who are fisher- men, I do not altogether like ; their friendliness was a little boisterous ; and, sometimes, when they lost their temper, M. Jean would knock them down, and roll them, quite roughly, out of the door. On the other side of the water, on the Pollet, as it is called, you find the real home of the fisher- men, in those little battered houses, twisting around all sorts of odd corners, climbing up all sorts of odd heights, some of them with wooden beams along the front, all dirty with age, all open to the street, all with swarms of draggled, blue-eyed, gold-haired children playing around their doors. In a few corners one sees -women making nets, once quite an industry, now
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fallen into some disuse. The whole place is thick with dust, faded with
years, shrivelled with poverty ; it is a part of Dieppe which is among the
most curious, among the most picturesque, but scarcely among the most charming.
IX
The charm of Dieppe! No, I can never give the real sense of that charm to anyone who has never experienced it ; for myself, it is not even easy to realise all the elements which have gone to make up the happiness of these two summer months here. It always rests me, in body and mind, to be near the sea ; and then Dieppe is so placid and indulgent, lets you have your way with it, is full of relief for you, in old corners and cool streets, warm and cool at once, if you take but five steps from the Rue Aguado, modern and fashionable along the sea front, dazzling with sunlight, into any one of the little streets that branch off from it townwards. And if the sun beats on you again as you come out into the square about the Eglise Saint-Jacques you have but to go inside — better still, if you seek the finer interior of Saint-Remy — and, suddenly, you have the liquid coldness of stone arches that have never felt the sun. And then the sea, at night, from the jetty ; the vast space of water, fading mistily into the unseen limits of the horizon, a boat, a sail, just distinguishable in its midst, the lights along the shore, the glow of the Casino, with all its windows golden, an infinite softness in the air. I have spent all night wandering about the beach, I have traced every change in sea and sky from twilight to sunrise, inconceivable delicacies of colour, rarities of tone. And what dreams have floated up in the smoke of my cigarette, mere smoke that will never reach the stars ! What memories I have evoked, what inspiring conversations I have had, in the cool of the evening, on that jetty ! And the country round Dieppe, rarely as I went into it, that, too, means something for me : Puys, where I went to see Alexandre Dumas, in the house in which his father died, the house where so many of his own plays have been written ; Pourville, the road along the cliffs, Varengeville, with its deep, enchanting
THEFRAm
DIEPPE : 1895 101
country lanes, its little sunken ways through the woods, its strange, stiff little pine woods on the heights; the Manoir d'Ango, now degraded into a farm, but still with its memories of Francis I. and Diane de Poitiers, whose faces one sees, cheek by cheek, on a double medallion ; the Manoir d'Ango, with its delicate approach through soft alleys of trees, and past a little shadowed pool; Arques, with its Italian landscape, so cunningly composed about the ruined castle on the hill. There is nothing in or near Dieppe which does not, in one way or another, appeal to me ; nowhere that I do not feel at home. And the friends I have made, or found, or fancied, at Dieppe, men and women of such varying charm and interest! The most amiable soul in all the world resides, I think, in the Anglo- maniac French painter in whose chalet I spent, so agreeably, so much of my time, in the studio where he paints the passing beauties as they fly. Was there not, too, the hospitable Norwegian painter, with the heart of a child in the body of a giant, who lives with his frank and friendly wife in the villa on the hill, where I spent so many good-tempered evenings ? And the young English painter, who was my chief companion, a temperament of 1830, nc romaniique, in whose conversation I found the subtle super- ficialities of a profoundly sensitive individuality, it was an education in the fine shades to be with him. The other younger Englishman, an artist of so different a kind, came into our little society with a refreshing and troubling bizarrerie ; all that feverish brilliance, the boyish defiance of things, the frail and intense vitality, how amusing and uncommon it was ! And there were the two French poets, again so different from one another ; elegant and enthusiastic youth, and the insistent reflectiveness of a mind which was above all reasoning. And then the charming women one met as they flitted to and fro between Dieppe and Paris and London and Monte Carlo; in especial, that flashing vision, to whom I here once more render my homage : the little French lady whose mother had been one of the Court beauties of the Second Empire ; the adorable profile dc moitton, with the hysterical piquancy of a mouth, perfect in repose, which would never rest, and which could be so exquisitely fluent with naughty words
102 THE SAVOY
and the malice of a truly feminine soul. Heartless, exquisite, posing little person^ I found you more sympathetic than you thought ; and if you see these lines, they are to tell you that I was really sorry when you went away so suddenly with your Russian grande dame, for whose talents I had so great an admiration. And there was Jane Hading, whom I went to see in the little, stifling dressing-room, scarcely more than a cupboard, of the tiny theatre, where she was playing Dumas' somewhat sentimental argument in drama, " La Princesse de Bagdad." Never had I seen the grave and yet Parisian beauty of the woman at so amusing an advantage, as there, in that absurd little dressing-room, where I had to squeeze myself into a corner, while the actress stood, hot and impatient, in front of the long glass, in which from time to time I caught the charm of a somewhat pre-occupied smile, as the dresser stitched and pinned the separate fragments of a bodice which was to be so magnificently torn off, with so considerable a view of such superb shoulders, in the fine, exciting scene of the second act. And there was the divine De Merode, with her slim, natural, and yet artificial elegance, her little, straight face, so virginal and yet so aware, under the Madonna-like placidity of those smooth coils of hair, drawn over the ears and curved along the forehead ; De Merode, who, more than anyone else, sums up Dieppe for me. How many other beautiful faces there were, people one never knew, and yet, meeting them at every hour, at dinner, on the terrace of the Casino, at the tables, in the sea, one seemed to know them almost better than one's friends, and to be known by them just as well. Much of the charm of life exists for me in the unspoken interest which forms a sort of electric current between oneself and strangers. It is a real emotion to me, satisfying, in a sense, for the very reason that it leaves one unsatisfied. And of this kind of emotion, Dieppe, in the season, is bewilderingly abundant. Is it, after all, surprising that I should have come to Dieppe with the intention of staying from Saturday to Monday, and that I should have stayed for two months ?
Arthur Symons.
ELLEN
SHE had now been a waitress at the little cafe off Cheapside for some- thing over two years; her circumstances had not changed during that time; she herself had scarcely changed; her features had, perhaps, developed a little and become more defined, her manner less hesitating — and that was all. That was all, at least, that was noticeable. A great change, however, had occurred in her between then and now that was not noticeable ; that silent, miraculous change, so imperceptible, so profound, which works in a woman between the ages of eighteen and twenty.
She had come during those two years to have an exaggerated, almost a morbid idea of her own want of good looks ; she had observed that regular frequenters of the cafe — young city-clerks, journalists and the rest — avoided the series of marble-topped tables at which she served for those which were attended by other girls smarter and prettier ; she rarely received the little attentions which the other girls among themselves proclaimed. It was the stray customer, the bird of passage, who kept her busy. But, as a matter of fact, it was not her want of good looks that kept the younger men aloof; it was something in her manner, an absence, perhaps, of that fictitious spirit of gaiety, of that alert responsiveness, which men find so arresting in women. Really, she was not at all bad-looking.
Still, this neglect ate into her heart a little. She regretted her want of adaptability, of the faculty of being able to assume all those charming (as they seemed to her) little airs and graces, partly natural, partly cultivated, which so became the other girls ; she, it is true, rather despised these coquetries of her companions, but her own deficiencies of the sort made her feel at times particularly dull and stupid and angry with herself. One or two of the girls at the cafe had, during her time, married one or two of the
104 THE SAVOY
young men who came there, and would afterwards pay an occasional visit to the place, certainly in pretty frocks, and, to all appearance, radiant and happy. But these girls were fortunate. Others, again, had suddenly dis- appeared, and none knew whither ; but as their disappearance happened to be simultaneous with a break in the regular attendance of certain customers, dark stories were whispered to which the non-appearance of the missing ones seemed to lend colour.
After a while, Ellen did not mind so much being neglected ; the smart of the sting became less and less painful, till finally, she rather, if anything, preferred escaping the attentions which fell to the share of the other girls. This may have been partly owing to the view which she came to take of men ; her position had provided her with opportunities for arriving at a generalisation, and she came to think of men as either silly or wicked — silly, when they were attracted by the trivial insincerities of the girls in the cafe; wicked, when they took advantage of their rarer simplicity. She did not conceive, now, that she would ever fall in love, that anyone would ever fall in love with her.
All the same, as the two years advanced, Ellen began to feel a curious isolation of the heart, an emptiness which she never attributed to the absence of a lover. Besides, she had an intuitive suspicion that she possessed qualities which would be fatal to her retaining the affections of a husband, that there would be little joy for her in the companionship which would place her in the position of a wife. Not that she thought anything very clearly about these things ; the vague emotions and sensations which moved her, the detached things which floated in her mind had not yet found the relief which comes with realisation ; her impulses were not remotely guided by self-consciousness. A sense of loneliness oppressed her, which was not diminished by the com- panionship of her fellow servants at the cafe, and she wanted companionship of some sort. It was dreadful for her at times to feel so much alone, to feel that there was nothing in the world, in this great London, which she really cared for ; that there was no one, since the death of her father and mother, who really cared for her.
ELLEN 105
She had this sense of loneliness even in the busiest time of the day, when an enormous wave of traffic swept by outside the cafe, and, inside, all was stir and movement. Even amid all this stir and din, when she was occupied in flitting from one tabic to another, in taking orders and attending to them, even at such moments her thoughts would be playing to another tune, her soul would be filled with unrest and impatience. Life, indeed, became a great struggle for her. Sometimes she said to herself that she would run away — from she knew not what, where she knew not to ; and sometimes she wished very sincerely that she were dead.
She had seen many strange faces during those two years ; at last it began to dawn upon her that one of these faces which had been strange was becoming familiar : a face with a fair, pointed beard and blue eyes. Beyond, however, merely ordering what he wanted, he had not spoken to her ; it was improbable that he had noticed her ; but his regular attendance at the tables at which she served began to attract the attention of the other girls, who derived some entertainment from hinting to Ellen that she was carrying on a flirtation, a suggestion which happened to be sufficiently inappropriate to appeal to their sense of humour. It was in keeping with Ellen's temperament that no romantic ideas entered her head at this point, where, possibly, the least susceptible of her companions would — as women will — have woven a complete fabric of foolish sentiment. Still, as he continued to come regularly, she began involuntarily to feel a certain liking for him ; the fact of his never attempting to enter into any sort of conversation with her had its not unpleasant side for her. So, by-and-by, they both seemed to begin to know each other in this silent way. And yet there came moments when Ellen felt somehow that she would like to talk to him, like to tell him all about herself, and what she felt. His presence accentuated a dimly-realised need for self-expression, of pouring into some ear the flood of vague sentiments which possessed her. She could not talk to the other girls ; they would not understand, or they would laugh at her ; but she could, she felt, talk to this fair-bearded man with the blue eyes. But not at the cafe ; she would rather remain silent for ever than do that. Then, how ?
THE SAVOY
This idea of speaking to him, of sharing with him her whole confidence, seized upon her, and developed with an intensity which caused her ceaseless perturbation and pain.
After a little time, indeed, they drifted, naturally enough, into a con- ventional intercourse, almost monosyllabic, uninteresting, which seemed to her hopelessly trivial — but how to advance beyond it ! Once or twice she thought she observed a look of interrogation in the blue eyes, a look which invited her confidence, and, at the same time, occasioned her a poignant feeling of self - consciousness — there, at the cafe, while meeting the significant glances, the partly ironical, partly suggestive, glances of her companions. No! she could not speak to him there; she had nothing to say to him there. Yet it was hard to resist the appeal of his eyes.
"You are looking pale. Do you go out much? " he said to her one day.
" Xo ; only home and back.'"
" Ah ! you should."'
" \\ e don"t close till seven,"' she said. Then, their eyes meeting, she continued irresistibly : " Will you meet me to-night ? "
It was not till an hour or so later that she realised that she was to meet him that evening at the principal entrance to St. Paul's ; that she realised that she herself had made the appointment. She had leapt the barrier, and was shocked at the extent of her daring, a little humiliated even ; yet, above everything, singularly elated and careless. She had never breathed so freely.
But when they met, the need for self-expression was no longer apparent ; she only felt stupid and shy. He suggested that they should go to a theatre or to an exhibition at Earl's Court, but she would not go to either place. Then they walked along the Embankment, between Blackfriars' Bridge and Charing Cross. He talked a good deal, but she hardly caught or understood what he said, and was quietly irresponsive. There was in his manner an air of familiarity which slightly repelled her ; she began to wish that she had not, after all, asked him to meet her ; to think of abruptly leaving him. Once he put his arm through hers, and was surprised at the startled expression
ELLEN
107
which sprang to her face as she quickly drew apart from him. After this his manner changed, and she felt more at ease. The incident had defined her attitude.
Reaching the gardens on t he Embankment, near Charing Cross, they entered a gate and sat on one of the seats. There were some children playing about "ii the path whose antics amused her, and led her to talk about her own childhood, to tell him of those dear, half-forgotten things which everyone remembers so well, of that dim world of curious fancies which all of us at one time inhabited. He was sympathetic, and they talked on so in the fading light until it was time for the gates of the garden to be closed. As they passed through them, their intimacy had become as natural and easy as she could have dared to hope.
They crossed the Strand and penetrated the maze of streets which lead in the direction of King's Cross, where she had her lodging. And now all the things that had lain in her mind, all the incoherent emotions that had possessed her, became coherent and simple, derived shape and form in the attempt to express them. She told him all about her present life, about the other girls in the cafe and their sentimental episodes. She told him of the feeling of loneliness, of abstraction, of the vague itching at her heart which never ceased.
At last they reached a house in one of the outlying streets of Regent Square.
" I don't know why I asked you to meet me to-night," she said, stopping at the door of this house ; " I don't know what is the matter with me. But 1 wanted to speak to someone. And I couldn't speak to the other girls ; they would only have made fun of me, I think. I feel happier now that I have had a nice long talk with someone — still — there
is something — something " She paused a moment, and then proceeded,
rather abruptly : " I don't want to be married, the same as most girls do ; I don't like men, as a rule — at least, not in that way . . . besides, I think I should always be happier remaining as I am at present, working for myself, independent."
io8 THE SAVOY
She gave a little shriek of delight at a thought which suddenly occurred to her, a flash of mental illumination, which enabled her to divine the source of all her perplexities, which instantly enabled her to solve the problem of her happiness; a thought which filled her poor, empty heart. " I think," she said, softly, " if I had a baby, my very own, I should want nothing — nothing in this world more than that ! " Her lips quivered and tears came into her eyes, exquisitely tender tears.
She then turned to the door and opened it with a latch-key.
" Are you living alone ? " he asked.
" Yes, quite alone," she said, retreating into the passage without turning.
He followed her a couple of paces, and then stood with one foot on
the doorstep. He looked into the passage, but could not make out whether
she were standing there in the dark or not. He wondered if she were
standing there. Then taking the handle of the door he drew it gently to,
and went down the street.
Rudolf Dircks.
Y i
— v *r
S E A - M U S I C
' I ' HP2 voices of the whispering woods are still;
-*■ No truant brook runs chattering to the stream ; Like heaven's own likeness, mirrored in a dream, The sea coils round each jutting rock and hill. Nay, hark ! what faint aerial harpings thrill The lonely bay ; what choral voices seem To float around and melt like rolling steam On air as quiet as a windless mill.
No holy chant in hushed cathedral naves Had ever such unearthly harmony, As these mysterious chords ineffable That peal from organ-pipes of fluted caves, Reverberate in hollow mountain shell, The music of the everlasting sea.
Mathildk Blind.
[This sonnet is founded on a singular experience I had at Wooda Bay in North Devon. While leaning over the cliff I was startled by hearing sounds as of harps and violins blending with muffled organ notes, and human voices soaring above the music. The effect was magical, and must have been due to an echo produced by the wave-hollowed rocks ]
A -GOLDEN DECADE IN ENGLISH ART
r T"'HE most perfect English art in black and white was done between the
- ■ years i860 and 1870. What an absurdity ! of course ; for Blake was
absurd, Alfred Stevens ridiculous, Keene ignored, Whistler a joke. And yet, when the amateur tires of his postage-stamp and the young lady with no books wearies of her book-plate, when all the sham Bartolozzis have been shipped to America and the Japanese print outweighs the bank-note, then the English illustration of i860 may possibly be invented, and Art may be once again upon the town. I use the date i860, but I ask for as much latitude as one is granted in speaking of the Romanticists and 1830, with whom the men of i860 are worthy to be ranked.
No matter how little we like to acknowledge it, many of our luxuries and necessities come from Germany ; and it is to Germany that one turns for the inspiration of modern illustration, and to Adolph Menzel as its prophet. When, in the late thirties, Menzel was working on his various versions of " Frederick the Great," seeing the results obtained in Curmer's " Paul et Virginie," he confided some of the designs he had drawn upon the wood-block to an Anglo-French firm of wood engravers, Andrew Best Leloir; but he was not satisfied with the results, which may be seen in the earlier part of Kuglers "Frederick the Great"; so he trained his own engravers — Kreutzchmar, Bentworth, Unzelmann, the Vogels — and between them they produced those triumphs of German art which gave the direct inspiration to modern English illustration. They are: "The Life of Frederick," 1840: "The Uniforms of the Army of Frederick," 1852, a supplement; "The Works of Frederick," 1850; "The Heroes of War and Peace," 1856. These books, I have been informed — and I have been told the facts by the artists and engravers and publishers themselves — did have their effect in the following ten years, if they did not produce a sensation in England
.-I GOLDEN DECADE IN ENGLISH ART 113
immediately on their appearance in Germany, or even on their re-publication here, for "The Life of Frederick the Great," Kugler's " Geschichte Fried- richs des Grossen," 1840, was issued here by Bohn in 1845 as "A Pictorial History of Germany," though the others have never appeared in English dress. The first book which shows this influence is William Allingham's "The Musii Master," 1855; and 1 maintain that Rossetti in his drawings — that is, in his method of drawing for engraving as shown in this book —must ha\ e been inspired by Menzel, for no book like it had been illustrated in England, nor had similar illustrations been made previously in this country. Rossetti. Millais and Arthur Hughes did the drawings. Rossetti furnished the frontispiece: "A youth listening in rapt mood to the chaunt of three mystic women — the maids of Elfm Mere." Burne -Jones then thought it the most beautiful drawing, for an illustration, that he had ever seen. Yet Mr. W. M. Rossetti says his brother was highly dissatisfied, and regarded the woodcut (of course it was a wood engraving) by Messrs. Dalziel as a decided travesty of his work. What would he have thought had it been done a little earlier ?
Next year, 1856, Samuel Palmer — who had been following the tradition of Blake and that lovely decorator, Calvert — illustrated one chapter : " The Distant Hills," for Adams's "Sacred Allegories," with nine drawings. Three or four of these must rank with Turner. Palmer has given the effect of the setting sun over great landscape as no one ever did before, as no one has attempted since.
The year 1857 is a memorable one — the year of Moxon's "Tennyson"; the herald of Millais' genius as an illustrator. The book contains the famous Rossetti drawings and Holman Hunt's best design, " The Lady of Shallot " : but the rest of the illustrations are weak, poor, commonplace. The engravings, of which one hears little that is good, are by Dalziel and Linton. It is most interesting to compare the engraving of "Sir Galahad" — from the Rossetti drawing done by Linton, which is quite characterless so far as the work of Rossetti goes (or, rather, Lintonesque, save in the small heads, which are very good) — with the first drawing in the " Palace of
n 4 THE SAVOY
Art," by Dalziel, also after Rossetti, which is brilliant and individual by comparison. Yet Rossetti himself, so his brother says, preferred the Linton to the Dalziel.
Mr. Ruskin backs Rossetti, too, in his denunciation of the engravers ; but this is not of much importance, as in a few years, just after the very best work had been done, he attacked artists and engravers both, saying : " Cheap popular art cannot draw for you beauty, sense, honesty ; but every species of distorted vice — the idiot, the blackguard, the coxcomb, the paltry fool, the degraded woman — are pictured for your honourable pleasure on every page. These are favourably representative of the entire art industry of the modern Press." This is a criticism of these men and these books.
In the same year, a book, the illustrated edition of which is quite un- heard of— Willmot's "Sacred Poetry" — was published. In this was maintained an all-round standard of greater merit in design and engraving even than in the " Tennyson," for among the contributors were Madox Brown, Tenniel, Harvey, Foster, Arthur Hughes, Harding, Millais and Gilbert, engraved by Dalziel : there were fewer Academicians, and the men knew better how to draw on wood.
In 1858, John Gilbert, even then the Nestor of English illustration, obtained his chance, and the magnificent " Shakespeare," also engraved by Dalziel, was commenced, and continued during the two following years. This is Gilbert's masterpiece, and still remains the finest complete illustrated edition of Shakespeare. It came out in parts, and is probably the first example, among these books, of the present popular fashion of issuing books in parts.
If 1857 was notable, 1859 is destined to become historic, for it marks the starting of Once a Week, soon to become synonymous with good illus- tration. The first volume is more an array of names than a distinguished accomplishment. Millais did eight drawings for it, not one of which can be compared with his designs for the "Tennyson"; though he was beginning that series of studies of the costume and furniture of the period, the crinoline. the chignon and the what-not, that we now find so amusing. Harvey did one drawing, and there are a number by Phiz, Leech, Tenniel, and many
A GOLDEN DECADE IN ENGLISH \R1 n 5
crude things signed " Keene " which are commonplace. They were all engraved by Swain, or, as Keene himself put it, they fell before the graver of Swain. After this, Keene appears continuously, always more and more interesting; but, save for his " Caudle Lectures," 1865, he is scarcely a book illustrator. Yet> his fame is secure, his position as an illustrator is acknowledged.
I have said already that it is to these books and magazines that we must turn for all that is left of the English illustration of the sixties ; for this reason, the final finished drawings were made on the wood-block, and, consequently, engraved all to pieces; and, save those wood-blocks, most of which have vanished, and, possibly, some engravers' proofs and the prints in the magazines and books themselves, there is absolutely nothing else left. Therefore the world, which always wants what it cannot have, may some day understand how important are these early volumes.
To the first number of the Cornhill, i860, Thackeray, more or less worked over by ghosts and engravers, contributed the illustrations for " Lovel the Widower." But, in the second or third number, Millais was called in, and then G. A. Sala, to complete the work. Frederick Sandys illustrated the " Legend of the Portent " ; this is, so far as I know, his first appearance as a book illustrator ; the lithographed burlesque of " Sir Isumbras" is earlier. And the volume ends with Millais' splendid " Was it not a Lie?" an illustration to " Framley Parsonage." From that time forward Millais gives character and distinction to its pages. The grace of the crinoline, the beauty of the frock- coat and the top hat, the daintiness of the pantalette, are shown in every number, while the pre-aesthetic houses are full of interest. It is curious to note that either Thackeray or the publisher refused to mention the names of the artists in any way. Millais and Sala alone signed their designs with their monograms. Sir Frederick Leighton, 1 imagine, contributed the Great God Pan" (signed " L.") in the second volume; while his drawings for* " Romola " were also among the special attractions in 1863. Richard Doyle began his " Birdseye Views of Society " in the third ; but it was not until more than half-way through this volume that the initials " F. W." appeared on what were supposed to be Thackeray's drawings — or, rather, it was
«— 2
n6 THE SAVOY
not until then that the great author acknowledged his failure as an illus- trator. But in one of his " Roundabout Papers," eventually, he admitted his indebtedness to Walker with the best grace in the world. The first drawing in the Cornhill signed by Walker — a fact interesting enough to be recorded — faces page 556, in the volume for 1861 : it is the " Nurse and Doctor," an illustration to Thackeray's " Philip."
Good Words also was started in i860, and attracted certain young Scotsmen — Orchardson, Pettie, Graham, MacWhirter. Even Punch was brilliant then, and its excellence was due to Du Maurier and Keene ; a Du Maurier, however, that one would not recognise to-day.
I do not know of any notable books in 1861, though G. H. Bennett's magnum opus, Quarles' " Emblems," appeared in that year, and, I believe, was popular. But in 1862, Miss Rossetti's " Poems," illustrated by her brother with two drawings, came out ; Rossetti also designed the cover. The illustra- tions can hardly be called satisfactory as illustrations, for the two Lizzies are quite different — the first, a country girl; the second, a stately Rossetti woman. The second edition contains two more drawings, which were added in 1866. William Morris engraved the frontispiece to this book, signed " M MF & Co." The illustrations for these magazines and books were done in a curious but very interesting way ; the entire work was undertaken by two firms, Messrs. Dalziel and Swain. They commissioned the drawings from the artists, and then engraved them ; the method seems to have been so successful, that the engravers, notably the Dalziels, not only employed artists to make drawings and then engraved the blocks themselves, but became their own printers as well. It was in this manner that they produced the books which are bound to become the admiration and despair of the intelligent and artistic collector. When the books were printed they were sold to a publisher, who merely put his imprint on them ; but to this day they are known as " Dalziel's Illustrated Editions," that is, when they are known at all. The first important book of the series which I have seen is Birket Foster's " Pictures of English Landscape," 1863 (Routledge), printed by Dalziel, with " Pictures in Words," by Tom Taylor. The binding is atrocious ; the paper is spotting
I GOLDEN DECADE IN ENGLISH ART 117
and losing colour ; but the drawings must have been exquisite, and here and there the ink is spreading and giving a lovely tone, like that of an etching, to the prints on the pages. This autumn it was revived, by Nimmo, with literary selections by Mr. John Davidson ; of course there is no mention of the fact that the engravings were made thirty-two years ago. In the same year, F. Shields did a shilling edition of Defoe's "Plague," containing six drawings, engraved by Swain and Moreton ; this must be one of the earliest of illus- trated shilling publications ; it contains Mr. Shield's best designs. The dead-pit, into w'hich, by the flaring light of torches, the bodies are being shot from a cart, is like Rembrandt in its power.
In 1S64, Messrs. Dalziel, who had already in the previous year engraved the designs for Good Words, published in a volume Millais' " Parables of Our Lord," through Routledge. This book, issued in an atrocious binding described as elaborate (and it truly is), bound up so badly that it has broken all to pieces, and printed with a text in red and black, contains much of the strongest work Millais ever did. Nothing could excel in dramatic power, or in effect of light, " The Enemy Sowing Tares," and the " Lost Piece of Silver," or in beauty of line or realistic treatment of the foreground, " The Sower," — to mention but three blocks where so many are so good. The whole book is excellent, and is now excessively rare in its first edition. In this year also, W. J. Linton illustrated Mrs. Lynn Linton's "Lake Country" (Smith, Elder & Co.), drawing and engraving the pictures ; it is a curious book, and exemplifies, I suppose, Mr. Linton's methods ; of which I may say, I had rather he engraved his own designs than mine.
But 1865 is the most notable year of all. To it belongs Dalziel's illustrated " Arabian Nights' Entertainments," originally published in parts, and, later, in two volumes, with text and pictures enclosed in horrid borders (Ward & Lock). In this book, A. Boyd Houghton first showed what a really great man he was. He clearly proved himself a master in technique as well as in imagination, and, although he had as fellow illus- trators Sir J. E. Millais, J. D. Watson, Sir John Tenniel, G. J. Pinwell and Thomas Dalziel, Houghton towers above them all. Mr. Lawrence
1 18 THE SAVOY
Housman, in an able article on him in Bibliographica, well says : " Among artists and those who care at all deeply for the great things of Art, he cannot be forgotten ; for them, his work is too much an influence and a problem ; and though, officially, the Academy shuts its mouth at him .... certain of its leading lights have been heard unofficially to declare ' that he was the greatest artist who has appeared in England in black and white.' Technically, his work, always in line, with a brush or pencil, is most simple and powerful ; the values of white asserted by the yard. Broad white upon black, black upon broad white ; yet there is searching draughtsmanship, marvels of subtle modelling, and always the strange realism that gives rags their squalor, limbs the hairiness of life."
In 1865, also, Houghton's "Home Thoughts and Home Scenes" was published by Routledge. It is much less imaginative than his later work, but contains, perhaps, more that is beautiful, studies of child-life, charm- ingly seen, beautifully drawn. After this, he worked prodigiously, and yet excellently. His edition of " Don Quixote " (Warne), as a whole rather over rated, yet fine in parts, must be sought for now in the most out-of-the- way places. Very Spanish in character is the frontispiece ; and his rendering of local colour in his books is all the more remarkable since I have heard he never was in Spain or the East. Easier to find are his " Kriloff's Fables," slight sketches . published by Strahan in 1869. Best known of all are his drawings in the early numbers of the Graphic — the American series — which were not all published, 1 think, before he died. If some of them are grotesque, almost even to caricature, they are amazingly powerful ; and, being the largest engraved works left, show him, fortunately, at his best. His original drawings scarcely exist at all ; they were nearly all done on the wood ; and though, at times, he made several versions of each, he seems to have destroyed all except the one that pleased him, and this disappeared in the engraving.
Another event was the publication of Ward & Lock's edition of Gold- smith, in which G. J. Pinwell revealed his marvellous powers ; but Pinwell's most important work is for a late date.
.-1 GOLDEN DECADE IS ENGLISH AR1
119
In 1S65, there must have been almost as many good illustrated magazines published in England alone as there are to-day in the whole world. Besides Good Words, the Cornhill, and Once a Week, there were London Society, the Shilling Magazine, the Argosy, and the Quiver. The uniform edition of Dickens was also being issued ; illustrated by C. Green, Luke Fildes, Marcus Stone, J. Mahoney and F. Barnard.
F. Sandys is, in imaginative power, the greatest of all these artists ;
in technique he is the legitimate successor of Durer, in popularity he is a
hopeless failure. He has never illustrated a book : so far as I know, ho
made but few drawings specially for books : these few are contained in
Willmot's "Sacred Poetry," 1863, "Life's Journey. the "Little Mourner."
and Dalziel's " Bible Gallerv."
A GOLDEN DECADE IN ENGLISH ART
In 1 86 1, a number of his drawings were printed in Once a Week— "Yet once more let the Organ play," "Three Statues of JEgina," and others. In every one is seen the hand of the man able to carry on the tradition of Durer, and yet bring it into line with modern methods. So far as I am
aware, Ruskin never mentions him ; how far this was owing to the famous
Sir Isumbras caricature, " The Nightmare," I do not know. All the spirit
of early German art breathes through his drawings. But it is during the
next year, 1862, that Sandys, becoming accustomed to the wood-block, did
122 THE SAVOY
some of his most powerful work — "The Old Chartist," "Harold," and "King Warwulf," in Once a Week. In "The Old Chartist" there is the real Durer feeling in the distant landscape, but the trees are better than Durer's trees, and the figure is one that Sandys has seen for himself. But in all his work there is this evidence of things seen and studied. 1862 was his most productive year; in 1863 there are but four drawings; none in 1864; in 1865, a magnificent "Amor Mundi," for Miss Rossetti's poem, printed in the April number of the Shilling Magazine. After that there are only one or two, and then he disappears. There are many drawings by him on paper, but it is safe to say no man who did so few drawings on wood ever made such a reputation. True, Whistler only did four in Once a Week (1861-2), among them the charming design printed in this article, but he was known as an etcher and painter at the time. Whistler also contributed to a "Catalogue of Blue and White," published by Ellis & Elvey, in 1878, illustrated by auto- types, which will one day rank with Jacquemart's books ; but this was only issued in a very limited edition.
After 1865, we find that the books contain better illustrations than the magazines, attracting the better men by the greater care with which they were printed and the larger size of the pages. However, Du Maurier, Keene, Lawless, Millais and Small still contributed regularly to the magazines.
Expensive gift-books by Houghton, Pinwell, North and Walker were then commenced, perfectly new drawings being used for their illustration. In 1866, "A Round of Days" was issued by Routledge ; Walker, North, Pinwell, and E. Dalziel come off best in this gorgeous morocco -covered volume, especially Dalziel, who contributes a striking nocturne ; the beauty of night, discovered by Whistler, being duly appreciated by these illustrators. Houghton's edition of "Don Quixote" is another of the books of 1866.
In 1867, "Wayside Posies" and Jean Ingelow's "Poems" were published by Routledge and Longmans respectively. These two books reach the high- water mark of English illustration ; in them, North and Pinwell surpass themselves — the one in landscape, the other in figure — and Edward Dalziel is quite amazing in studies of mist and rain, which I imagine were, at the
A GOLDEN DECADE IS ENGLISH A HI 123
time, absolutely unnoticed by the critics. The drawings of the school, however, must have been popular, for Smith, Elder Cv: Co. reprinted the Walkers from the Comhill in a "Gallery," in 1864; Strahan, in 1866, collected the Millais drawings in a portfolio; and in 1807, "Touches ot Nature, also from the magazines, printed, it is said, from the original blocks. Possibly this was meant as an atonement for the shabby way in which the artists had been treated in the magazines.
In 1868, "The North Coast," by Buchanan, was issued by Routledge ; much good work by Houghton is hidden away in its pages. The next year the Graphic was started, and these books virtually ceased to appear. There were some spasmodic efforts to produce new ones, most notable of which were Whymper's magnificent " Scrambles amongst the Alps," containing J. Mahoney's best drawings and Whymper's best engravings, Tenniel's editions of "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass," Miss Rossetti's "Sing-Song," illustrated by Arthur Hughes, 1872, and "His- torical and Legendary Ballads " (Chatto & YVindus), 1876, made up from the early numbers of the magazines, and specially interesting because of the rare drawings by Whistler and Sandys which are included. It is almost the only book in which one can find the work of these two men, although their drawings were not done originally for it, as the editor would like one to believe.
The Graphic printed a Portfolio in 1877, made up from early numbers. In 1878, "Nature Pictures," drawn by J. H. Dell and engraved by Patterson, was issued ; as an example of what facsimile wood-engraving is capable of, it is amazing, the most elaborate penwork being wonderfully facsimiled in wood.
Dalziels produced at least two books later on, magnificent India proofs of " English Rustic Pictures," printed from the original blocks by Pinwell and Walker, done for the books I have mentioned (this volume is undated) ; and the "Bible Gallery" (1881), the drawings for which had been made long before and kept back till they could be photographed on wood. Many of these drawings, which a few years ago they vainly tried to sell, are now among the treasures of South Kensington. All the best-known artists contributed
i2 4 THE SAVOY
to the " Bible Gallery," yet the result was not altogether a success. The
most conspicuously good drawings are by Ford Madox Brown, Leighton,
Burne-Jones, Sandys, Poynter, Houghton and Dalziel. It is the last great
English book illustrated by a band of artists and engravers working together.
Whether the results are satisfactory or not, the fact remains that the
engravers were most enthusiastic, and encouraged the artists as no one has
done since in the making of books ; and the artists were the most distinguished
draughtsmen who have ever appeared in England. In the early numbers of
the Graphic there are also many marvellous designs by these men, and
by Green, Fildes, Linton, Macbeth and Herkomer. In fact, in not a few
cases the most distinguished work of the present R.A.'s is to be found, in
black and white, in the Graphic.
I am perfectly aware that this is by no means a complete list of the
books of what I have called the i860 period. It is but an attempt to
point out the great value and importance of the illustrations contained in
these books, many of which, so far as their pictures go, are as important as
those of the fifteenth century. Yet no record of them has been made; they
are almost unknown, save to artists. Among artists, however, there is a
rapidly-growing admiration for English art of this period, and in ten years'
time these books will be rightly considered the treasure-houses of the golden
decade of English art.
Joseph Pennell.
^•cwW™ "Zu.'-
A GLASS OF WHISKEY
' T mind the man that gave me my first glass of whiskey," said Johnny ■1 Mullen, the tailor. " I hadn't a red nose then, or eleven half-starved children. I was a cub down at Omagh, doing my first tailoring ; and it was my own uncle, God forgive him ! I wish I was a cub again. I'd never get married. I'm not a man to have a houseful of children. I'm too much of a scoundrel."
" Hold up off the counter, Johnny, dear," said Mrs. Mulvany, " if you don't want to break every tumbler I have in the house."
" Come over here, Johnny, and sit down on the form between me and Williamson," said pensioner Higgins against the wall, " and tell us about the night you and Peter Hogan drank the half-gallon." •
" I'm a bad villain of a man," said Johnny, sitting down. " I might have come to something, and I turned out bad. There was a good man lost in me, and I turned out bad."
" Ah, no, you did not, Johnny," said Mrs. Williamson's husband. " You're a brave enough man as it is."
" I tell you I'm not, Williamson, and I ought to know better than you. I tell you I'm not."
" 1 tell you you are, Johnny. There's worse people than you."
" Williamson, Williamson, you know nothing about it. Damn all you know about it. I turned out a bad man."
" That'll do now, Johnny, that'll do. I was always your friend, and there wasn't often high words between us, and you can afford to talk me down. But it is not everyone would do it. It is not everyone would venture. All right now, Johnny, all right."
" Ay, but it's me has been the bad scoundrel of a man entirely. This uncle of mine wasn't a drop's blood to me. He was my uncle by marriage, and he didn't know anything better. ' Here, Johnny, my son,' says he,
128 THE SAVOY
' you're a smart, cliver cub, and the makings of a good tailor. Drink it up,' says he, ' for it'll make a man of you.' Ay, boys dear, and so it did. It did make the quare man of me, the quare bad baste of a man."
Williamson was holding his tongue, but he was listening, and this provocation was nearly too much fur him.
" I seen the time, Johnny," he said, " people wouldn't crow me down. I seen the time " — and he went on with his eyes shut, and as if talking to himself — " Ay, that was the fist could break noses " ; and he held it up. " That was once upon a time. There was the fist could break noses. Even yet, maybe, Johnny, even yet. Ay, there's the fist could break noses. There's the fist could break noses."
" It made the quare man of me," says Johnny ; " the quare bad baste of a man."
" Whist, Johnny, whist ! " put in Higgins, who was always for peace. " Don't go on like ^jthat, man. Don't provocate him, for you're not his match, anyway."
" I never seen the day I was afeard of a boy like Williamson," said Johnny.
" Was I ever threacherous to you yet, Johnny ? " said Williamson. " No, Johnny, never. Never, Johnny, never. But I never was afeard of you, either, and I amn't now. But was I ever threacherous to you yet ? "
" Oh ! look at this for rascality ! " said Mrs. Mulvany. " They'll murder one another yet, the villains, that could not have the decency to go and fight outside. They'll ruin my house. Archy Higgins, put up them tumblers at once, unless you want every vessel in my house to be broken into bits and the place disgraced for ever with such blackguardly conduct, for you're worse than them. It's a shame for you, a man of your time of life."
" Oh ! Mrs. Mulvany, dear, sure it's not my fault. Sure I'm doing
nothing but trying to sinder them, and they won't let go one another's necks."
- " Come here, child, and run for the police," said Mrs. Mulvany, " to
get this drunken crew out of my house. However they managed to crowd
in, all three of them, at once. It's bad enough, goodness knows, to have
A GLASS OF WHISKEY 129
one or two of them in the same house at the same time, but three rascals of the drunkenest feather in all the country, to think they'd come in and walk on a body like this. A party, besides, that has hardly ever a penny in their own pocket, and is always wanting to have credit or to drink on other people. Poor Mrs. Williamson ! indeed I pity her, but I don't blame her. A nice thing, indeed, if she had to give away her substance; though the man is not the undecentest of them if he had it, and is quiet enough if he wasn't provoked."
Higgins had got them to let each other go.
'■ Did ever I act threacherous to you, Johnny ?
•■ No matter now, Williamson ; no matter," says Johnny.
" Och ! Johnny, dear, whist, will you," says Higgins, " and go no further with it. Sure. Williamson's able-bodied, and you're only a light man, anyway, and always was."
Johnny reached for Williamson again.
" You ought to have been a Catholic, Williamson," he said ; " you ought to have been a Catholic. The grandfather before you was a papish, and a good one too, and a decent man."
" I was born and reared a Protestant, Johnny, and a decent one. Your uncle, Johnny Mullen, was in jail."
" He was in jail decently, Williamson. If my uncle was in jail he was in it decently. He was in it for poteen-making."
" They're clawing one another again ! " cried Mrs. Mulvany. " Lord have mercy on us ! or what is the world coming to. I'll go away and shut the door and leave you to yourselves, you good-for-nothing pack. Higgins, you'll pay for this blackguard work some day or other. Couldn't you go and call some of the Mullen's ones to come and take home their father ? Mrs. Williamson, but I pity you ! for you have a bad pill to deal with — though he's a quiet enough man in drink if he was let alone."
" I never was threacherous with you, Johnny, yet ; and I never yet saw them Id listen to saying a bad word against you," said Williamson.
1 3 o THE SAVOY
" Williamson, it was me that stood up for you at the election times, the evening that they wanted your blood for breaking in and spoiling the meeting. And they'd have had it, too, only your woman came and fetched you away. But I stood up for you, Williamson, and I'd stand up for you the morrow."
"Now they're going to hug one another," said Mrs. Mulvany ; "and they'll be crying in a minute, and it'll go on like this all evening. And there's nothing on earth I hate so much to see in two men. I'd far easier stand them fighting and killing one another. Archy Higgins, if you don't take them pair away out of that, you'll never enter my door again. Here, Johnny Mullen, your Jennie is on the street looking for you. Go on out home with her like a good man. You and Williamson may stay there, Higgins, as long as you like, for you're peaceable enough if let alone, and poor Mrs. Williamson has other things to think of than keeping a good-for-nothing man out of her way. But that Johnny Mullen ! — I don't like the sight of him. He'd sit in your house from morning to night to provoke you looking at him, and him never has a halfpenny to spend after Monday morning is over."
" Ay, I wish I was a cub again," Johnny said, going home, " I'd never get married, anyway." The little daughter Jennie was accustomed to the fool talk of him. " I wish I was a cub again, I'd never have got — ay, maybe I would ; ay, likely I would ; but things wouldn't, maybe, be like this."
Humphrey James.
IMPENITENTIA ULTIMA
¥") EFORE my light goes out for ever, if God should give me a choice
- ^ of graces,
I would not reck of length of days, nor crave for things to be ; But cry : " One day of the great lost days, one face of all the faces,
Grant me to see and touch once more, and nothing more to see."
For, Lord, I was free of all Thy flowers, and I chose the world's sad roses, And that is why I must eat my bread in bitterness and sweat ;
But at Thy terrible Judgment Seat, when this my tired life closes, I am ready to reap whereof I sowed, and pay my righteous debt.
But once before the sand is run and the silver thread is broken, Give me a grace and cast aside the veil of dolorous years ;
Grant me one hour of all mine hours, and let me see for a token Her pure and pitiful eyes shine out, and bathe her feet with tears.
Her pitiful hands should calm, and her hair stream down and blind me Out of the sight of night and out of the reach of fear,
And her eyes should be my light, while the sun went out behind me; And the viols in her voice be the last sound in mine ear.
Before the ruining waters fall, and my soul be carried under,
And Thine anger cleave me through, as a child cuts down a liower,
1 will praise Thee, Lord ! in Hell, while my limbs are racked asunder, For the last sad sight of her face and the little grace of an hour.
Kkkkst Dowson.
9—2
"Thaulow: The Norwegian Painter and his Family"
By
Jacques L. Blanche.
THE BINDING OF THE HAIR
I ' III*, men-at-arms of the young queen Dectira, and of the old and foolish king Lua, had lighted a line of fires from Bulben to the sea and set watchmen by every lire ; and built a long house with skin-covered wattles for the assembly, and smaller houses to sleep in, and dug round them a deep ditch, < lose to the place where the Lis of the Blindman was built in later times ; and now they sat in the long house waiting the attack of the clans coming down from the plain of Ith, and listened to the bard Aodh, who recited a battle-tale of the wars of Heber and Heremon. The tale w;b written upon thin slips of wood, which the bard held before him like a fan, grasping them above the brazen pivot, and only laid down when he would take up the five-stringed cruit from the ground at his feet and chaunt hastily, and with vehement gesture, one of the many lyrics woven into the more massive measure of the tale. Though the bard was famous, the old and foolish king did not listen, but leaned his head upon the central pillar and snored fitfully in a wine-heavy sleep; but the young queen sat among her women, straight and still like a white candle, and listened as though there was no tale in the world but this one, for the enchantment of his dreamy voice was in her ears ; the enchantment of his changing history in her memory : how he would live now in the Raths of kings, now alone in the great forest ; how rumour held him of the race of the bard for whom the tribes of Heber and Heremon cast lots at the making of the world ; how, despite the grey hairs mingling before their time with the dark of his beard, he was blown hither and thither by love and anger ; how, according to his mood, he would fly now from one man and with blanched face, and now prove himself of a preternatural bravery alone against many; and, above all, how he had sat continually by her great chair telling of forays and battles to hearten her war-beaten men-at-arms, or chaunting histories and songs laden with gentler destinies for her ears alone, or, more often still, listening in silence to the rustling of her dress.
136 THE SAVOY
He sang now of anger and not of love, for it was needful to fill the hearts of her men-at-arms with thirst of battle that her days might have peace ; yet over all the tale hovered a mournful beauty not of battle, and from time to time he would compare the gleam of a sword to the bright- ness of her eyes ; or the dawn breaking on a morning of victory to the glimmering of her breast. As the tale, and its lyrics, which were like the foam upon a wave, flowed on, it wrapped the men-at-arms as in a tide of fire, and its vehement passages made them clash their swords upon their shields and shout an ever-more clamorous approval. At last it died out in a chaunt of triumph over battle-cars full of saffron robes and ornaments of gold and silver, and over long lines of youths and maidens with brazen chains about their ankles ; and the men shouted and clashed their swords upon their shields for a long time. The queen sat motionless for a while, and then leaned back in her chair so that its carved back made one dark tress fall over her cheek. Sighing a long, inexplicable sigh, she bound the tress about her head and fastened it with a golden pin. Aodh gazed at her, the fierce light fading in his eyes, and began to murmur something over to himself, and presently taking the five-stringed cruit from the ground, half knelt before her, and softly touched the strings. The shouters fell silent, for they saw that he would praise the queen, as his way was when the tales were at an end ; and in the silence he struck three notes, as soft and sad as though they were the cooing of doves over the Gates of Death.
Before he could begin his song, the door which led from the long room into the open air burst open and a man rushed in, his face red with running, and cried out :
" The races with ignobly bodies and ragged beards, from beyond the Red Cataract, have driven us from the fires and have killed many !
The words were scarcely from his mouth before another man struck against him, making him reel from the door, only to be thrust aside by another and another and another, until all that remained of the watchmen stood in the centre of the hall, muddy and breathless, some pouring wine into horns from the great stone flagon that stood there, and some unhooking their bronze helmets and shields and swords from the pillars. The men about the
THE BINDING OF THE HAIR 137
queen had already taken their helmets and shields and swords from pillars and walls, and were now armed; but the queen sat on straight and still, and Aodh half knelt before her, with bowed head, and touched the five-stringed cruit slowly and dreamily.
At last he rose with a sigh, and was about to mix among the men-at- arms when the queen leaned forward, and, taking him by the hand, said, in a low voice :
" O Aodh, promise me to sing the song before the morning, whether we be victors or weary fugitives ! "
He turned, with a pale face, and answered :
" There are two little verses in my heart, two little drops in my flagon, and I swear by the Red Swineherd that I will pour them out before the morning for the Rose of my Desire, the Lily of my Peace, whether I have living lips or fade among the imponderable multitudes!"
Then he took down his wicker shield covered with hide, and his helmet and sword, from a pillar, and mixed among the crowd that poured, shouting, through the great door.
Nobody remained in the long room except the queen and her women and the foolish king, who slept on, with his head against a pillar.
After a little, they heard a far-off ringing of bronze upon bronze, and the dull thud of bronze upon hide, and the cries of men, and these continued for a long time, and then sank into the silence. When all was still, the queen took the five-stringed cruit upon her knees and began touching the strings fitfully and murmuring stray lines and phrases out of the love songs of Aodh ; and so sat until about two hours before dawn, when the tramp of feet told the return of the men-at-arms. They came in slowly and wearily, and threw themselves down, clotted with blood as they were, some on the floor, some on the benches.
•■ We have slain the most, and the rest fled beyond the mountains," said the leader ; " but there is no part of the way where there was not fighting, and we have left many behind us."
"Where is Aodh?" said one of the women.
" I saw his head taken oil with a sword," said the man.
138 THE SAVOY
The queen rose and passed silently out of the room, and, half crossing the space within the ditch, came where her horses were tethered, and bade the old man, who had charge of their harness and chariot, tell none, but come with her and seek for a dead man. They drove along the narrow track in the forest that had been trod by marauders, or by those sent to give them battle, for centuries ; and saw the starlight glimmer upon the helmets and swords of dead men troubling a darkness which seemed heavy with a sleep older than the world. At last they came out upon the treeless place where the servile tribes had fought their last desperate battle before they broke. The old man tied the reins to a tree and lit a torch, and the two began to search among the dead. The crows, which had been tearing the bodies, rushed up into the air before them with loud cawing, and here and there the starlight glimmered on helmet or sword, or in pools of blood, or in the eyes of the dead.
Of a sudden, a sweet, tremulous song came from a bush near them. They hurried towards the spot, and saw a head hanging from the bush by its dark- hair ; and the head was singing, and this was the song it sung —
" Fasten your hair with a golden pin, And bind up every wandering tress ;
I bade my heart build these poor rhymes : It worked at them day out, day in, Building a sorrowful loveliness Out of the battles of old times.
" You need but lift a pearl-pale hand,
And bind up your long hair and sigh ;
And all men's hearts must burn and beat ; And candle-like foam on the dim sand, And stars climbing the dew-dropping sky, Live but to light your passing feet.
And then a troop of crows, heavy like fragments of that sleep older than the world, swept out of the darkness, and, as they passed, smote those ecstatic lips with the points of their wings, and the head fell from the bush and rolled over at the feet of the queen.
W. B. Yeats.
$f*%' ^r ■
,y*»~.
JHii, ' idaS*^"'- 1
OF CRITICISM AND THE CRITIC
UNDER my window in the foggy, dripping street, those little imps, the newspaper-boys, are making the hour horrisonant with their yells. What voices the urchins develop, at what tender years! You and 1, Mr. Editor, we could not advertise our wares so penetratingly, though we strove till our throats cracked over it. I hear there is a movement on foot for the suppression, or at least the discipline, of these too-raucous vendors of our news ; and with all one's jealousy of the law's interference, it would be difficult reasonably, perhaps, to oppose this exercise of it. Yet, after all, how much are these iude and hideous cries of a piece with the thoroughfares they resound in, or, for the matter of that, with how much of our manners at large ! You will remember a charming series of seventeenth- century engravings, by Hollar, portraying for us the street-cries of that day. Such picturesque gentlemen and ladies, they assuredly must have advertised and insinuated their goods with choice words and musical falls, daintily appropriate. Nay, I am, alas ! old enough to recall out of the memory of childhood a lingering tradition of such things — the " Buy-a-broom," the " Buy my sweet, blooming lavender," girls. The latter cry may, indeed, yet be heard, now and again, actually here off Holborn, on an August morning ; but its sweet strangeness has something almost too pathetic in it, so that its delicate melody seems to jar on one, as a Corot might on the hoarding of an underground station. 1 recollect running incontinent out into the street the first time it fell on my ears three years since. From a poor lad, painfully making way with his one leg and a crutch, came those musical tenor notes ; and his apparently slight hold on life went far from amiss with that old-world fragrance, that old-world melody. Here, surely, was the last of a generation, a feeble relic, like a flame flickering
142 THE SAVOY
yet a moment or two, of vanished tastes and habits, an echo at its dying. Away, my poor fellow, out of this boisterousness and hurry ; leave us, and flit away to the leisurely and quiet shades !
Not, indeed, that I would lend myself to the vulgarity of a mere shrewish scolding and belittling of our own da) 7 . That is a cheap indigna- tion which leads a man to defame recklessly his age and country ; nay, it is a scurvy trick, anyhow, to befoul one's own nest. When the tale of the centuries comes to be made up, I have little misgiving but that we nine- teenth-century folk shall cut a decent-enough figure. But certainly it would be fanaticism, the drunkenness of a sheer conceit, to proclaim our time altogether, or indeed in some ways comparatively, as in se ipso totus, teres, atquc rotundus. Those very providences which have been vouchsafed to give us our distinction, our scientific and mechanical advances, I mean, are, as yet, themselves the provocatives of certain blemishes in us, directly and indirectly. \Ye have fed on strong and strange meat somewhat gluttonously, and suffer by consequence from an indigestion, as one might say. It is no sound appreciativeness, therefore, of our real condition, of our unquestionable virtues, which induces in some of us so determined a self-satisfaction, that either we deny the deficiencies detected in us, or treat them airily as of no moment. You shall have your friend Practicus hold you by the button in Shaftesbury Avenue, while he descants with enthusiasm on the improvements there of these past dozen years, and is moved even to some aesthetic fervour (for, somewhere in him, he, too, has a dormant sense of beauty) by that magical London atmosphere, which is for ever transmuting our world for us from mysterious glory to glory. Nor is it necessary, nor is it consonant with truth, to gainsay him ; the most one can say is, that there seems to be another side to things. In some matters, Nature is the most indulgent mother imaginable ; and however we deform our surroundings, she comes with her tender cunning and transfigures them into loveliness. To her effective resourcefulness there is, indeed, no end ; she plays over our mean buildings, our reckless contrivances to secure convenience, or to trumpet our way in the world, and, as though she were saying to us, " You foolish little
OF CRITICISM AND THE CRITIC t 43
creatures! you fancy beauty doesn't matter for you, and so it is in despite of you that I must work my miracles of grace," out of chaos she brings a charm unspeakable. Let us go down on our knees and thank her but, also, let us have an eye to our own souls. The true citizen would fain sec the thoroughfares of his town line and fair of themselves, needing no trickery of light or mist to commend them. To-day it is pathetic to observe with what a makeshift we have come to be content. As we hurry to and fro 'twixt our paltry buildings, the last device we can hit upon to relieve their mean stupidity, to amuse ourselves amid their depression, to refresh ourselves amid the prevailing dirt and din, is to paper them with placards, staring, grotesque, salacious. How excellently with it all goes the ragamuffin yonder, shouting " Ixtree Speshall ! " Dirty, ragged, cracked-voiced, impudent young scamp, how significant a product you are of our aims and methods ! My poor, belated lavender-seller of the soft notes and the dulcet melody, your modesty is an anachronism, your tunefulness a discord, the ears that had leisure to listen to you have been dust this many a day.
But you remind me, Mr. Editor, that my title has something about '•Criticism and the Critic. Ah! pardon me, I have been wandering afield; though not quite so far, perhaps, as you take it to be. However, I started on this communication with the thought of a newspaper in my head, a somewhat fresh variety of literary and artistic journal, the idea of which a friend suggests to me, and which it may be worth someone's while to consider. The characteristics of his adventure may be explained briefly. As the terms are ordinarily understood, this paper would have no principles and no policy. He proposes that the Editor should have no further care than to see that his writers possess individuality and can express it, and that they run him not into a libel-action. The writers shall have no further care than to say precisely what each of them thinks and feels on the matter in hand, unhampered by the least concern of supporting any tradition, or by a dread of contradicting, even flatly, what someone else, or their own selves, may have written in the same paper. Each of them, there- fore, would have a free hand entirely, with that one proviso of blanching the
i44 THE SAVOY
libel-court. He would write in the first person, and in the style his humour smiled upon at the moment. He would sign his article always, but sign it, as the whim took him, either with his name, or with a nom-de-giterre, or with an initial ; and he would be free to change his signature as the occasion prompted him. Such, briefly, is my friend's proposal.
I conceive that the ideas working in his brain, and leading him to the above suggestions, are somewhat as follows ; and though even to contem- plate adding to the burden of our current journals is dangerously near to criminality, I confess to feeling some force in what I believe he would authorise me to set forth as the grounds of his position.
Somebody has somewhere said, that in criticism the great thing is for the critic to get himself out of the way. There is much pertinence in the remark ; yet here, as so often, one may state precisely its opposite with a pertinence by no means less. Individuality is the one interesting, real thing in the universe. If a man is worth listening to at all (and, when one can get at him, I expect there breathes not a soul but is), let us hear what he thinks and feels, what he likes and hates, and let us hear it his own way. For the attainment of this end the tyranny of the editorial " we " is fatal ; but fatal, too, is the antithesis, that on every occasion a man should write over his own signature, or over a signature known to be his. The ideal function of criticism is indeed to discern the true character of the thing criticised ; but when we get off mere facts, as in the arts, such criticism is to mortals for the most part impossible ; when we assume to deliver it we are ludicrously, irritatingly impertinent. To learn, however, how a man is affected by this or that specimen of the arts at the moment before him, entertains and stimulates me; and the entertainment, the stimula- tion, are heightened if he has time and opportunity to express himself to a nicety. In some ways, therefore, his written impression of such matters is of finer value and delight than even his conversation on them, for it is hardly less personal, while it is more considered, more clear and precise. My friend's insistence that in his proposed paper everybody shall write in the first person, but still over what signature or signatures he chooses,
OF CRITICISM AND THE Chi lie , 4j
seems to secure at once an individuality of utterance, and to allow a man thai freedom in expressing himself which, on occasion, is in danger, if his real name must serve for finale. I do not deny that it is foolish in us to be so under the spell of a mere pronoun, and of the magnificent, magisterial air accompanying it, as to let them appal us by their authority, hi fret us into a petulant rebellion. We are aware that it is but a Mr. Jones or a Mr. Briggs swaggering under that pretentious mask; and if these gentlemen gave themselves such airs when we sat together, they would impose upon lis no more than any other coxcomb. But human nature is weak', and much at the mercy of appearances. When Mr. Jones and Mr. Briggs stand, stripped of their mystery, face to face with us, we meet them on equal terms ; and their credit, their limits of attraction, or of irritation, are proportioned fairly enough to their naked worth.
n Image.
A Scene from Voltaire's "La Pucelle"
Etched by
Will Rothenstein.
_z_
THE WANDERERS
V\7TA N I >E R I N G, ever wandering,
- Their eyelids freshened with the wind of the sea
I Mown up the cliffs at sunset, their cheeks cooled With meditative shadows of hushed leaves That have been drowsing in the woods all day, And certain fires of sunrise in their eyes.
They wander, and the white roads under them Crumble into fine dust behind their feet, For they return not ; life, a long white road, Winds ever from the dark into the dark, And they, as days, return not ; they go on For ever, with the travelling stars ; the night Curtains them, being wearied, and the dawn Vwakens them unwearied; they go on. They know the winds of all the earth, they know The dust of many highways, and the stones ( )f cities set for landmarks on the road. Theirs is the world, and all the glory of it, Theirs, because they forego it, passing on Into the freedom of the elements; Wandering, ever wandering, Because life holds not anything so good As to be free of yesterday, and bound Towards a new to-morrow ; and they wend Into a world of unknown faces, where
THE SAVOY
It may be there are faces waiting them, Faces of friendly strangers, not the long Intolerable monotony of friends.
The joy of earth is yours, O wanderers,
The only joy of the old earth, to wake,
As each new dawn is patiently renewed,
With foreheads fresh against a fresh young sky.
To be a little further on the road,
A little nearer somewhere, some few steps
Advanced into the future, and removed
By some few counted milestones from the past;
God gives you this good gift, the only gift
That God, being repentant, has to give.
Wanderers, you have the sunrise and the stars ; And we, beneath our comfortable roofs, Lamplight, and daily fire upon the hearth, And four walls of a prison, and sure food. But God has given you freedom, wanderers!
Arthur Symons.
UNDER THE HILL
A ROMANTIC NOVEL
AUBREY BEARDSLEY
WITH HIS ILLUSTRATION'S
CHAPTERS ONE, TWO AND THREE
LA CHALEUR PU BRANDON VENTS
Le Roman til la Rose, v. 22051
UND Eh' THE HILL 153
TO THE MOST EMINENT AND REVEREND PRINCE
GIULIO POLDO PEZZOLI
CARDINAL OF THE HOLY ROMAN CHURCH
TITULAR BISHOP OF S. MARIA IN TRASTAVERE
ARCHBISHOP OF OSTIA AND VELLETRI
NUNCIO TO THE HOLY SEE
IN
NICARAGUA AND PATAGONIA
A FATHER TO THE POOR
A REFORMER OF ECCLESIASTICAL DISCIPLINE
A PATTERN OF LEARNING
WISDOM AND HOLINESS OF LIFE
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED WITH DUE REVERENCE
BY HIS HUMBLE SERVITOR
A SCRIVENER AND LIMNER OF WORLDLY THINGS
WHO MADE THIS BOOK
AUBREY BEARDSLEY
Most Eminent Prince,
I know not by what mischance the writing of epistles dedicatory has fallen into disuse, whether through the vanity of authors or the humility ot patrons. But the practice seems to me so very beautiful and becoming that I have ventured to make an essay in the modest art, and lay with formalities my first book at your feet. I have it must be confessed many fears lest I shall be arraigned of presumption in choosing so exalted a name as your own to place at the beginning of this history ; but I hope that such a censure will not be too lightly passed upon me, for if I am guilty it is but of a most natural pride that the accidents of my life should allow me to sail the little pinnace of my wit under your protection.
10 — 2
154
THE SAVOY
But though I can clear myself of such a charge, I am still minded to use the tongue of apology, for with what face can I offer you a book treating of so vain and fantastical a thing as love ? I know that in the judgment of many the amorous passion is accounted a shameful thing and ridiculous ; indeed it must be confessed that more blushes have risen for love's sake than for any other cause and that lovers are an eternal laughing-stock. Still, as the book will be found to contain matter of deeper import than mere venery, inasmuch as it treats of the great contrition of its chiefest character, and of canonical things in certain pages, I am not without hopes that your Eminence will pardon my writing of a loving Abbe, for which extravagance let my youth excuse me.
Then I must crave your forgiveness for addressing you in a language other than the Roman, but my small freedom in Latinity forbids me to wander beyond the idiom of my vernacular. I would not for the world that your delicate Southern ear should be offended by a barbarous assault of rude and Gothic words ; but methinks no language is rude that can boast polite writers, and not a few such have flourished in this country in times past, bringing our common speech to very great perfection. In the present age, alas ! our pens are ravished by unlettered authors and unmannered critics, that make a havoc rather than a building, a wilderness rather than a garden. But, alack ! what boots it to drop tears upon the preterit ?
It is not of our own shortcomings though, but of your own great merits that I should speak, else I should be forgetful of the duties I have drawn upon myself in electing to address you in a dedication. It is of your noble virtues (though all the world know of 'em), your taste and wit, your care for letters, and very real regard for the arts that I must be the proclaimer.
Though it be true that all men have sufficient wit to pass a judgment on this or that, and not a few sufficient impudence to print the same (these last being commonly accounted critics), I have ever held that the critical faculty is more rare than the inventive. It is a faculty your
UNDER THE HILL i 55
Eminence possesses in so great a degree that your praise or blame is something oracular, your utterance infallible as great genius or as a beautiful woman. Your mind, I know, rejoicing in fine distinctions and subtle procedures of thought, beautifully discursive rather than hastily conclusive, has found in criticism its happiest exercise. It is a pity that so perfect a Mecsenas should have no Horace to befriend, no Georgics to accept ; for the offices and function of patron or critic must of necessity be lessened in an age of little men and little work. In times past it was nothing derogatory for great princes and men of State to extend their loves and favour to poets, for thereby they received as much honour as they conferred. Did not Prince Festus with pride take the masterwork of Julian into his protection, and was not the /Eneis a pretty thing to offer Caesar ?
Learning without appreciation is a thing of naught, but I know- not which is greatest in you — your love of the arts, or your knowledge of 'em. What wonder then that I am studious to please you, and desirous of your protection. How deeply thankful I am for your past affections you know well, your great kindness and liberality having far outgone my slight merits and small accomplishment that seemed scarce to warrant any favour. Alas ! 'tis a slight offering I make you now, but if after glancing into its pages (say of an evening upon your terrace) you should deem it worthy of the remotest place in your princely library, the knowledge that it rested there would be reward sufficient for my labours, and a crowning happiness to my pleasure in the writing of this slender book.
The humble and obedient servant of your Eminence,
AUBREY BEARDSLEY.
UNDER THE HILL
CHAPTER I
THE Abbe Fanfreluche, having lighted off his horse, stood doubtfully for a moment beneath the ombre gateway of the mysterious Hill, troubled with an exquisite fear lest a day's travel should have too cruelly undone the laboured niceness of his dress. His hand, slim and gracious as La Marquise du Deffand's in the drawing by Carmontelle, played nervously about the gold hair that fell upon his shoulders like a finely-curled peruke, and from point to point of a precise toilet the fingers wandered, quelling the little mutinies of cravat and ruffle.
It was taper-time ; when the tired earth puts on its cloak of mists and shadows, when the enchanted woods are stirred with light footfalls and slender voices of the fairies, when all the air is full of delicate influences, and even the beaux, seated at their dressing-tables, dream a little.
A delicious moment, thought Fanfreluche, to slip into exile.
The place where he stood waved drowsily with strange flowers, heavy with perfume, dripping with odours. Gloomy and nameless weeds not to be found in Mentzelius. Huge moths, so richly winged they must have banqueted upon tapestries and royal stuffs, slept on the pillars that flanked either side of the gateway, and the eyes of all the moths remained open and were burning and bursting with a mesh of veins. The pillars were fashioned in some pale stone and rose up like hymns in the praise of pleasure, for from cap to base, each one was carved with loving sculptures, showing such a cunning invention and such a curious knowledge, that Fanfreluche lingered not a little in reviewing them. They surpassed all that Japan has ever pictured from her maisons vertes, all that was ever painted in the cool bath-rooms of Cardinal La Motte, and even outdid the astonishing illustrations to Jones's " Nursery Numbers."
UNDER THE HILL i yi
" A pretty portal," murmured the Abbe, correcting his sash.
As he spoke, a faint sound of singing was breathed out from the mountain, faint music as strange and distant as sea-legends that are heard in shells.
" The Vespers of Helen, I take it," said Fanfreluche, and struck a few chords of accompaniment, ever so lightly, upon his little lute. Softly across the spell-bound threshold the song floated and wreathed itself about the subtle columns, till the moths were touched with passion and moved quaintly in their sleep. One of them was awakened by the intenser notes of the Abbe's lute-strings, and fluttered into the cave. Fanfreluche felt it was his cue for entry.
"Adieu," he exclaimed with an inclusive gesture, and "good-bye, Madonna," as the cold circle of the moon began to show, beautiful and full of enchantments. There was a shadow of sentiment in his voice as he spoke the words.
" Would to heaven," he sighed, " I might receive the assurance of a looking-glass before I make my debut ! However, as she is a Goddess, I doubt not her eyes are a little sated with perfection, and may not be displeased to see it crowned with a tiny fault."
A wild rose had caught upon the trimmings of his ruff, and in the tirst flush of displeasure he would have struck it brusquely away, and most severely punished the offending flower. But the ruffled mood lasted only a moment, for there was something so deliciously incongruous in the hardy petal's invasion of so delicate a thing, that Fanfreluche withheld the finger of resentment and vowed that the wild rose should stay where it had clung — a passport, as it were, from the upper to the under world.
" The very excess and violence of the fault," he said, " will be its excuse"; and, undoing a tangle in the tassel of his stick, stepped into the shadowy corridor that ran into the bosom of the wan hill — stepped with the admirable aplomb and unwrinkled suavity of Don John.
i6o THE SAVOY
CHAPTER II
Before a toilet that shone like the altar of Notre Dame des Victoires, Helen was seated in a little dressing-gown of black and heliotrope. The coiffeur Cosme was caring for her scented chevelure, and with tiny silver tongs, warm from the caresses of the flame, made delicious intelligent curls that fell as lightly as a breath about her forehead and over her eyebrows, and clustered like tendrils round her neck. Her three favourite girls, Pappelarde, Blanchemains and Loreyne, waited immediately upon her with perfume and powder in delicate flacons and frail cassolettes, and held in porcelain jars the ravishing paints prepared by Chateline for those cheeks and lips that had grown a little pale with anguish of exile. Her three favourite boys, Claud, Clair and Sarrasine, stood amorously about with salver, fan and napkin. Millamant held a slight tray of slippers, Minette some tender gloves, La Popeliniere — mistress of the robes — was ready with a frock of yellow and yellow, La Zambinella bore the jewels, Florizel some flowers, Amadour a box of various pins, and Yadius a box of sweets. Her doves, ever in attendance, walked about the room that was panelled with the gallant paintings of Jean Baptiste Dorat, and some dwarfs and doubtful creatures sat here and there lolling out their tongues, pinching each other, and behaving oddly enough. Sometimes Helen gave them little smiles.
As the toilet was in progress, Mrs. Marsuple, the fat manicure and fardeuse, strode in and seated herself by the side of the dressing-table, greeting Helen with an intimate nod. She wore a gown of white watered silk with gold lace trimmings, and a velvet necklet of false vermilion. Her hair hung in bandeaux over her ears, passing into a huge chignon at the back of her head, and the hat, wide-brimmed and hung with a vallance of pink muslin, was floral with red roses.
Mrs. Marsuple"s voice was full of salacious unction ; she had terrible little gestures with the hands, strange movements with the shoulders, a short respiration that made surprising wrinkles in her bodice, a corrupt skin, large horny eyes, a parrot's nose, a small loose mouth, great flaccid cheeks, and chin alter chin. She was a wise person, and Helen loved her more than any
UNDER THE HILL 163
other of her servants, and had a hundred pat names for her, such as Dear Toad, Pretty Poll, Cock Robin, Dearest Lip, Touchstone, Little Cough Drop, Bijou, Buttons, Dear Heart, Dick-dock, Mrs. Manly, Little Nipper, Cochon- de-lait, Naughty-naughty, Blessed Thing, and Trump. The talk that passed between Mrs. Marsuple and her mistress was of that excellent kind that passes between old friends, a perfect understanding giving to scraps of phrases their full meaning, and to the merest reference a point. Naturally Fanfreluche the newcomer was discussed a little. Helen had not seen him yet, and asked a score of questions on his account that were delightfully to the point.
The report and the coiffing were completed at the same moment.
" Cosme," said Helen, " you have been quite sweet and quite brilliant, you have surpassed yourself to-night."
" Madam flatters me," replied the antique old thing, with a girlish giggle under his black satin mask. " Gad, Madam ; sometimes I believe I have no talent in the world, but to-night 1 must confess to a touch of the vain mood."
It would pain me horribly to tell you about the painting of her face ; suffice it that the sorrowful work was accomplished ; frankly, magnificently, and without a shadow of deception.
Helen slipped away the dressing-gown, and rose before the mirror in a flutter of frilled things. She was adorably tall and slender. Her neck and shoulders were wonderfully drawn, and the little malicious breasts were full of the irritation of loveliness that can never- be entirely compre- hended, or ever enjoyed to the utmost. Her arms and hands were loosely, but delicately articulated, and her legs were divinely long. From the hip to the knee, twenty-two inches ; from the knee to the heel, twenty-two inches, as befitted a Goddess. Those who have seen Helen only in the Vatican, in the Louvre, in the Uffizi, or in the British Museum, can have no idea how very beautiful and sweet she looked. Not at all like the lady in " Lempriere."
Mrs. Marsuple grew quite lyric over the dear little person, and pecked at her arms with kisses.
1 64 THE SAVOY
" Dear Tongue, you must really behave yourself, said Helen, and called Millamant to bring her the slippers.
The tray was freighted with the most exquisite and shapely pantoufles, sufficient to make Cluny a place of naught. There were shoes of grey and black and brown suede, of white silk and rose satin, and velvet and sarcenet; there were some of sea-green sewn with cherry blossoms, some of red with willow branches, and some of grey with bright -winged birds. There were heels of silver, of ivory, and of gilt ; there were buckles of very precious stones set in most strange and esoteric devices ; there were ribbons tied and twisted into cunning forms; there were buttons so beautiful that the button- holes might have no pleasure till they closed upon them ; there were soles of delicate leathers scented with marechale, and linings of soft stuffs scented with the juice of July flowers. But Helen, finding none of them to her mind, called for a discarded pair of blood-red maroquin, diapered with pearls. These looked very distinguished over her white silk stockings.
Meantime, La Popeliniere stepped forward with the frock.
" I shan't wear one to-night," said Helen. Then she slipped on her gloves.
\\ hen the toilet was at an end all her doves clustered round her feet loving to froler her ankles with their plumes, and the dwarfs clapped their hands, and put their fingers between their lips and whistled. Never before had Helen been so radiant and compelling. Spiridion, in the corner, looked up from his game of Spellicans and trembled.
Just then, Pranzmungel announced that supper was ready upon the fifth terrace. "Ah!" cried Helen, "I'm famished!"
CHAPTER III
She was quite delighted with Fanfreluche, and, of course, he sat next her at supper.
The terrace, made beautiful with a thousand vain and fantastical things, and set with a hundred tables and four hundred couches, presented a truly
UNDER THE HILL [65
splendid appearance. In the middle was a huge bronze fountain with three basins. From the first rose a many -breasted dragon and four little loves mounted upon swans, and each love was furnished with a bow and arrow. Two of them that faced the monster seemed to recoil in fear, two that were behind made bold enough to aim their shafts at him. From the verge of the second sprang a circle of slim golden columns that supported silver doves with tails and wings spread out. The third, held by a group of grotesquely attenuated satyrs, was centered with a thin pipe hung with masks and roses and capped with children's heads.
From the mouths of the dragon and the loves, from the swans' eyes, from the breasts of the doves, from the satyrs' horns and lips, from the masks at many points, and from the childrens' curls, the water played profusely, cutting strange arabesques and subtle figures.
The terrace was lit entirely by candles. There were four thousand of them, not numbering those upon the tables. The candlesticks were of a countless variety, and smiled with moulded cochonneries. Some were twenty feet high, and bore single candles that flared like fragrant torches over the feast, and guttered till the wax stood round the tops in tall lances. Some, hung with dainty petticoats of shining lustres, had a whole bevy of tapers upon them devised in circles, in pyramids, in squares, in cuneiforms, in single lines regimentally and in crescents.
Then on quaint pedestals and Terminal Gods and gracious pilasters of every sort, were shell-like vases of excessive fruits and flowers that hung about and burst over the edges and could never be restrained. The orange- trees and myrtles, looped with vermilion sashes, stood in frail porcelain pots, and the rose-trees were wound and twisted with superb invention over trellis and standard. Upon one side of the terrace a long gilded stage for the comedians was curtained off with Pagonian tapestries, and in front of it the music-stands were placed.
The tables arranged between the fountain and the flight of steps to the sixth terrace were all circular, covered with white damask, and strewn with irises, roses, kingcups, colombines, daffodils, carnations and lilies ; and the
1 66 THE SAVOY
couches, high with soft cushions and spread with more stuffs than could be named, had fans thrown upon them.
Beyond the escalier stretched the gardens, which were designed so elabo- rately and with so much splendour that the architect of the Fetes d'Armailhacq could have found in them no matter for cavil, and the still lakes strewn with profuse barges full of gay flowers and wax marionettes, the alleys of tall trees, the arcades and cascades, the pavilions, the grottoes and the garden- gods — all took a strange tinge of revelry from the glare of the light that fell upon them from the feast.
The frockless Helen and Fanfreluche, with Mrs. Marsuple and Claude and Clair, and Farcy, the chief comedian, sat at the same table. Fanfreluche, who had doffed his travelling suit, wore long black silk stockings, a pair of pretty garters, a very elegant ruffled shirt, slippers and a wonderful dressing- gown ; and Farcy was in ordinary evening clothes. As for the rest of the company, it boasted some very noticeable dresses, and whole tables of quite delightful coiffures. There were spotted veils that seemed to stain the skin, fans with eye-slits in them, through which the bearers peeped and peered ; fans painted with figures and covered with the sonnets of Sporion and the short stories of Scaramouch ; and fans of big, hving moths stuck upon mounts of silver sticks. There were masks of green velvet that make the face look trebly powdered : masks of the heads of birds, of apes, of serpents, of dolphins, of men and women, of little embryons and of cats ; masks like the faces of gods ; masks of coloured glass, and masks of thin talc and of india-rubber. There were wigs of black and scarlet wools, of peacocks' feathers, of gold and silver threads, of swansdown, of the tendrils of the vine, and of human hair : huge collars of stiff muslin rising high above the head ; whole dresses of ostrich feathers curling inwards ; tunics of panthers' skins that looked beautiful over pink tights ; capotes of crimson satin trimmed with the wings of owls ; sleeves cut into the shapes of apocryphal animals : drawers flounced down to the ankles, and necked with tiny, red roses ; stockings clocked with fetes galantes, and curious designs ; and petticoats cut like artificial flowers. Some of the women had put on delightful little moustaches dyed in purples and bright
UNDER THE HILL o„,
greens, twisted and waxed with absolute skill ; and some wore great white beards, after the manner of Saint Wilgeforte. Then Dorat had painted extra- ordinary grotesques and vignettes over their bodies, here and there. Upon a cheek, an old man scratching his horned head ; upon a forehead, an old woman teased by an impudent amor ; upon a shoulder, an amorous singerie ; round a breast, a circlet of satyrs ; about a wrist, a wreath of pale, unconscious babes; upon an elbow, a bouquet of spring flowers; across a back, some sur- prising scenes of adventure ; at the corners of a mouth, tiny red spots ; anil upon a neck, a flight of birds, a caged parrot, a branch of fruit, a butterfly, a spider, a drunken dwarf, or, simply, some initials.
The supper provided by the ingenious Rambouillet was quite beyond parallel. Never had he created a more exquisite menu. The consomme im- promptu alone would have been sufficient to establish the immortal reputation of any chef. What, then, can I say of the Doradc bouillic sauce marcchale, the ragout aux tongues de carpes, the ratnereaux a la charniere, the ciboulrttc dc gibicr a Vespagnole, the pate dc cuisses d'oie aux pots dc Monsalvie, the queues d'agneau au clair dc lime, the artichauts a la grecque, the charlotte dc pommes a la Lucy Waters, the bomlies a la marie, and the glaces aux rayons d'or ? A veritable tour de cuisine that surpassed even the famous little suppers given by the Marquis de Rechale at Passy, and which the Abbe Mirliton pronounced " impeccable, and too good to be eaten."
Ah ! Pierre Antoine Berquin de Rambouillet ; you are worthy of your divine mistress !
Mere hunger quickly gave place to those finer instincts of the pure gourmet, and the strange wines, cooled in buckets of snow, unloosed all the decollete spirits of astonishing conversation and atrocious laughter.
As the courses advanced, the conversation grew bustling and more personal. Pulex and Cyril, and Marisca and Cathelin, opened a fire of raillery, and a thousand amatory follies of the day were discussed.
From harsh and shrill and clamant, the voices grew blurred and inarticulate. Bad sentences were helped out by worse gestures, and at one table Scabius expressed himself like the famous old knight in the first part
170 THE SAVOY
of the " Soldier's Fortune " of Otway. Bassalissa and Lysistrata tried to pronounce each other's names, and became very affectionate in the attempt ; and Tala, the tragedian, robed in roomy purple, and wearing plume and buskin, rose to his feet, and, with swaying gestures, began to recite one of his favourite parts. He got no further than the first line, but repeated it again and again, with fresh accents and intonations each time, and was only silenced by the approach of the asparagus that was being served by satyrs dressed in white.
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LEONARD
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THE SAVOY— N° II
THE SAVOY
No. 2
AN ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY
April 1896
Price
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No. 2
April 1896
0j
ARTHUR
SYMONS
K^
LEONARD SMITHERS
ARUNDEL STREET, STRAND LONDON W.C.
CHISWICK PRESS: — CHARLES WHITT1NGHAM AND CO.. TOOKS CODRT. CHANCERY LANE, LONDON
Rrj^r
EDITORIAL NOTE
N presenting to the public the second number of " The Savoy," I wish to thank the critics of the press for the flattering reception which they have given to No. i. That reception has been none the less flattering because it has been for the most part unfavourable. Any new endeavour lends itself, alike by its merits and by its defects, to the disapproval of the larger number of people. And it is always possible to learn from any vigorously expressed denunciation, not, perhaps, what the utterer of that denunciation intended should be learnt. I confess cheerfully that I have learnt much from the newspaper criticisms of the first number of " The Savoy." It is with confidence that I anticipate no less instruction from the criticisms which I shall have the pleasure of reading on the number now issued.
Arthur Symons.
April, 1896.
All communications should be directed to THE EDITOR OF The Savoy, Effingham House, Arundel Street, Strand, London, W.C. MSS. should be type-written, and stamps inclosed for their return.
LITERARY CONTENTS
PAGE
EDITORIAL NOTE 5
A MAD SAINT. An Article by Cesare Lombroso (translated by Havelock
Ellis) 13
NEW YEAR'S EVE. A Poem by Arthur Symons 25
A MERE MAN. By a New Writer 26
SAINT-GERMAINEN-LA YE. A Poem by Ernest Dowson . . .55
ROSA ALCHEMICA. A Story by W. B. Yeats 56
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE— I. An Article by Havelock Elli.s . 79
THE FORGE. A Poem by John Gray 97
THE DETERIORATION OF NANCY. A Story by Frederick
WEDMORE ............ go
TWO POEMS CONCERNING PEASANT VISIONARIES— A Cradle
Song : " The Valley of the Black Pig." By W. B. Yeats . . . .109
PAUL VERLAINE.
I. — A First Sight of Verlaine. By Edmund Gosse . . . -113 II. — Verlaine in 1894. By W. B.Yeats . . . . . -117
III. — My Visit to London. By Paul Verlaine (translated by Arthur
Symons . . . . . . . . . . .119
THE LOVE OF THE POOR. A Poem by Leila Macdonald (illustrated) 139 PAGES FROM THE LIFE OF LUCY NEWCOME. A Story by
Arthur Symons 147
THE TRUANT'S HOLIDAY. A Poem by Selwyn Image . . .163 ON THE KIND OF FICTION CALLED MORBID. An Essay by
Vincent O'Sullivan 167
COUNTESS MARIE OF THE ANGELS. A Story by Ernest Dowson 173 UNDER THE HILL. A Romantic Story by Aubrey Beardsley
(Chapter IV., illustrated by the Author) 187
PUBLISHER'S NOTE i 97
ART CONTENTS
COVER ■ -\ |
TITLE PAGE f Desi S° ed b >' AuBREY Beardslev j
SALTWATER. A Lithograph by Charles H. Shannon . CLASSIC LONDON. After a Pen-and-ink Drawing by Joseph Pennell PORTRAIT OF MRS. STERNER. After a Pencil Drawing by Albert
E. Sterner ...........
THREE VISIONS. After Pen-and-ink Drawings by William T. Horton THE BACCHANTES. After a VVater-Colour Drawing by Ph. Caresme THE RAPE OF THE LOCK. After a Pen-and-ink Drawing by Aubrey
Beardsley .......
THE DIVE. A Lithograph by Charles H. Shannon
A VIGNETTE .\ ( .
. „ rrr „„ r M ,„„„ \ By Wm. T. Horton \ A CUL-DE-LAMPE \ ' I .
THE RIALTO, VENICE. After a Pen-and-ink Drawing by Walter
SlCKERT ......
CA RICA TURE OF A UBRE Y BEARDSLE Y. A Wood-Engraving after the Drawing by Max Beerbohm .....
TWO LADIES. After an Oil-Painting by Will Rothenstein
THE MERMAID'S CAVE. By J. Lemmen
A FOOTNOTE
THE ASCENSION OF SAINT ROSE OF LIMA
FOR THE THIRD TAB LEA U OF " DAS RHEINGOLD"
COVER OF NO. i OF " THE SAVOY" .
CO VER OF NO. 2 OF " THE SA VO Y" .
After Pen-and-ink Drawings by -l Aubrey Beardsley
2 3
53
7' 95
1 1 i •37 139
144
'45
161 >65 '7i 185
[89
■93 199
The Whole of the Reproductions in this Volume, in line and half-tone blocks, and the Wood Engraving, are by Mr. Paul Xaumann.
\>
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' j£
A MAD SAINT
FEW months since a certain Maria G. appeared at my clinique. She was forty years of age, her voice was mascu- line in character, her forehead was high and remarkably broad, her jaw and cheek-bones more massive than we usually find in women. Her head also was somewhat above the average in size. Touch was rather obtuse, but sensitive- ness to pain almost normal. It was observed, however, that she blushed only on one side of her face and forehead, and on this side also there was abundant perspiration, while the other side was quite dry and pale. Her father had died in an asylum ; her mother was healthy, and so were four brothers and a sister. This last, however, was subject to fits. She herself suffered from various neuralgic pains, and from hysterical convulsions.
As a girl she wished to become a nun ; but, instead, she married, at eighteen, a man whom she respected, but for whom she had no love. She married him, against the wishes of her friends, solely to obey the will of God. She has had eight children, of whom five are living.
Ever since she was a child she has heard voices, and seen wonderful visions of the Madonna and the saints ; also of evil spirits in the likeness of beasts, monsters which inspired her with great terror, and she was thus regarded as mad. This recalls what Calmeil tells us concerning various nuns, especially Maddalena, whose hallucinations began at five. But it was not until the age of fourteen, after being unwell for three days, that she had an apparition, in a great flash of light that filled the room, of God Himself, clothed in garments so dazzling that she could not fix her eyes upon Him, and bearing in His hand a sword which He placed across the bed. She still has such visual and auditory hallucinations very frequently ; at these times she ceases speaking, bends her head very low, and weeps. She tells also that she has seen the eyes in a little picture of Jesus fixed upon her full of love, and following her all over the house, and she says that one day she saw them closed, as a reproof to an offence on her part.
To the commands she has thus received from the Volere Supremo, she refers the greater number of her acts, and frequently offers no further justifica-
i 4 THE SAVOY
tion of them ; thus she asserts that she was commanded by God to feign madness in order to enter an asylum, and there fulfil to the utmost her mission of fighting Satan, because there, she said, they whip people like beasts. Her acts were, in fact, so strange, that she was shut up in an asylum, where for some days she was the victim of further delirium, and she remained there for three years.
Now she lives at home, fairly tranquil, attending well to her domestic affairs, and to her occupation of straw-plaiting chairs. She dresses neatly, is devoted to her children, and weeps when she speaks of those who are dead. She weeps also when she tells of her mother's recent death, though latterly there had been no intercourse between them ; so that her affection towards her family appears to be normal. With her husband also she gets on fairly well, although he reproves her for the strange ideas she has in her head, and once turned her out of the house. On the other hand she hates her mother-in-law, who interferes with the pleasure she takes in writing ; thus she is not able to devote time to the laborious preparations of her very numerous manuscripts in verse and prose, except for a few hours after dawn, when she is alone. The verse, however, she composes in her head, not when she wishes to, but as it comes to her.
Her instincts appear to be chaste. She tells how, when she was a girl, she repelled the advances of a priest, and again, after she was married, of a canon, a monk, and an abbot. The education which she received as a child from her mother does not seem to have been very religious, at all events not sufficiently so to have determined her precocious inclinations. She only attended an elementary school, and cared little for reading afterwards ; but she read over and over again a book of religious devotion entitled, " L'Anima Desolata Confortata a patire cristianamente," to which title she has added in her own handwriting, " Per Amor di Dio," and also the following remark : — "This book is the greatest treasure I have had in this world." Certainly her own writings, however strange and incomprehensible they may be, always manifest an intelligence above her condition and the instruction she has received.
She believes that, although wholly unworthy, she has been charged by the Gran Sovran del Cielo with an illuminative and redemptive mission among men ; and regarding this mission she writes — in large and clear characters, with enormous capital letters and long strokes, in a fairly correct style — large pages of verse or long letters to alienists, to priests, to the King and Queen. The contents are uniformly the same ; she announces her mission to each,
A MAD SAINT 15
always saying that she is writing by command of God, and promising honour and profit to those who follow her. Yet from all her very numerous writings and oral declarations it is impossible to ascertain the ideas that lie at the basis of this mission ; perhaps her mind is not able to form such ideas ; perhaps she possesses that unconscious consciousness of absurdity which Amadei has acutely noted in mattoids. Once only she refers in her writings to the con- stitution of a Compagnia dei Fedeli Cristiani beneath the protection of the Gran Madre Maria Addolorata ; and in conversation she alludes to certain (imaginary ?) followers.
For the rest, she declares that she is inspired by the Virgin, although she is working for the Saviour ; she hates those who are outside the truth, and wishes to correct them and spiritualize them ; she would cut off the heads of the unfaithful with the tremendous sword of God, though this is only a spiritual weapon. She uses such ferocious metaphors frequently. She justi- fied herself by saying that if any of the students who heard her declarations should go and repeat what they had heard to priests, it would be to these latter like the blow of a dagger.
She accepts Christian dogma, but with modifications. Thus when the Gran Dio del Cielo had driven Adam and Eve out of Paradise, He told them that He would send a woman to purify and " mend " the world. " And with all my demerits I am that woman, the servant of the great God, the queen of the whole world ; for in myself I am nothing, but in the name of the great God I am everything ; and if I accomplish any good thing here, the merit will be His." And in connection with this she calls herself, and often signs herself, " Regina Salviati," that is to say, " Queen of the Saved."
Repeatedly and insistently asked to expound to us her doctrines, she formu- lated them thus : If you want to be happy you have to learn how to thoroughly concentrate yourself in the great God of heaven and earth, and then to re- cognize in her the saviour, not as the supreme judge but as His representative, and she only recognizes those disciples who believe in Christ who died on the cross and in St. Joseph.
She respects the Christian Church, but wishes to pull up the evil weeds, that is to say, bad priests, whom she considers responsible for the wickedness of the world, but with strange want of logic she carries out all religious practices.
The Madonna cannot be the mother of God who is uncreated, because otherwise she would be the supreme principle ; only as the handmaid of His
16 THE SAVOY
spirit has God permitted her to be worshipped. The spirit of Christ will reappear in the world in the person of a certain priest, a brother of hers, and then there will be a general day of judgment, which she announces as near, and the justice of God having assured the triumph of the just on earth, the world will live a better life, and will not end in a shower of fire, as the priests say. This idea of the reform of the world is certainly the same as that of Christ, who, as Renan says in his "Vie de J^sus," when seated as judge of the world in the midst of His apostles, is the exact representation of that conception of the Son of man, the first lines of which are already to be seen so strongly drawn in the Book of Daniel. But she lessens and abuses the conception by, for instance, apportioning the duties we are each to have in the reformed world. She naturally promises a different future to the good and those who respect her sayings from that ordained for the bad, " because God has not made Heaven for traitors, and Hell to be kept empty ; " she will pardon if God will pardon ; if not, she is ready to put a dagger (probably always a spiritual weapon) into the hearts of those traitors.
Of all this she speaks confusedly, as if she did not wish to be interrupted in her discourse, but she converses much and willingly. She distributes her numerous manuscripts, nearly all in verse, to the students. She frequently sings the Psalms in Latin with passionate animation and large movements of the arms, explaining the significance of what she sings. There is a notable tendency to musical intonation in her replies to the questions put to her, which she sometimes sings, always adapting the same air to her various poems. The metre of these is, however, nearly always the same, very sonorous, in rhymed quatrains of ten syllables ; but the rhymes are often only assonances, and the last line of each stanza is cut short. Sometimes while singing she falls into a condition of true ecstasy ; the eyeballs are turned upwards, the eyelids become fixed, the arms extended, and she is able to support a much stronger electric current than that which gives her pain under normal conditions.
This persistent use of melody and rhythm certainly represents an atavistic return to primitive musical methods of expression which commonly accom- panied emotional states among our ancestors. It is a kind of mental palaeontology, as Letourneau also has noted ; ' and it corresponds exactly to the vague, uniform, undifferentiated condition of her ideas.
1 " Revue de l'Ecole d' Anthropologic," Nov. 15th, 1892.
A MAD SAINT 17
The whole of this attitude, the convinced and absolute fashion in which she enunciates her dogmas, the security with which in every great con- tingency of life she trusts to the voice of the Volere Supremo, not only recall and in part repeat what all the saints of religious history have done, but they explain the force of attraction, and the suggestive power, which such phenomena exerted on popular masses under other conditions of culture and feeling.
It is also instructive to note her method of action, which is described as by divine impulse, working through an automaton. " Under spiritual influence," she says, " a person is not free, and I am even compelled to act for my own temporal disadvantage, without any reserve, ready to undergo martyrdom, even if the gibbet were standing ready ; and if the least act on my part, even the slightest word, would save me from martyrdom, I would not try to save myself, not for the whole world." " Pushed on," she writes, " by a supreme spiritual power, I set down these things, writing all that the supreme spirit suggests to me to write." She declared, also, that she " was driven " by God to come to the dinique, although she doubted if she would find anyone there.
Thus her own personality occupies nearly the whole of her mind, her conversation, her writings ; and, as if to accentuate this characteristic, she always writes the personal pronouns referring to herself with an initial capital. And yet amid the chaos and simplicity of her ideas, the uniformity and commonplace of their manifestation, a stroke of genius here and there flashes across the insanity. One day she improvised a logical and excellent discourse to the university students who were late in their attendance, lamenting the recent disorders among them as not only evil in themselves, but as bringing grief and shame to the professors, etc. Among her very numerous writings in verse, slovenly and full of errors as they often are, some are really beautiful, and contain phrases and passages marked by fine feeling and insight. "The justice of the great God of Heaven," she writes, " is not paid by gold or silver." " My mind," she writes again (in words that, in the original, tend to run into rhyme), "will only ally itself with reverence and justice; and my heart is not caught save by reverence and gentleness." And in verse : " But the sorrow- ing servant — Of our Lord — Possesses new hopes. — Already his heart opens. — O you who live — In a deceitful world, — Open your eyes — To the true light." And again : " I am no woman of proud ways — I am the handmaid of our Lord ; — On my head there is a crown— All adorned with laurel and honour. — I am faithful to the everlasting Lord— And no deceit can make
18 THE SAVOY
me waver : — And though I am but a lowly flower — I am queen of the great deep sea.' "
Yet these fugitive gleams of mental brilliancy not only heighten the general vacuity, but accentuate strange references and hints, sudden falls into the commonplace, and often the comic, which, with their painful contrasts, characterize the psychic contents of such unbalanced brains. For example : " I will take him up into the train and conduct him to eternal life ; " "I will give myself up to the Gran Voler Supremo and leave to his lordship to con- sider with the telescope of the Just and Supreme Divine Justice this my deposition."
Nor are there also lacking in her writings and her discourse those frequent and insistent repetitions of words, the strange metaphorical appellations, the emphatic air, which give a special imprint of solemnity to the religious style of every epoch. Here also these characters are due to analogous conditions, that is to say, that all effort is applied to the task of impressing the imagina- tion of the hearers by vaporous and solemn phrases, rather than to that of con- vincing them by the force of reason ; it is as though the evidence of the proclaimed truths disdained — and with good reason — all human arguments. " Tell me, my children," she writes, " what have you done for me to acquire the strongest affection of my heart ? Nothing : then it is God who deigns to bind my heart to a lofty and supernatural affection towards you." " To write of my Lord I have detached myself from all the things of the world, and they who would follow me must also detach themselves from the things of the world . . . with the sole thought of serving God faithfully in order to win the great prize of honour for eternal life." " Oh, this miserable and unworthy creature that I am, Thy miserable and unworthy servant, Thy miserable and unworthy daughter . . . and I will say it again and again."
To the same unfailing elements of every religious movement belong the prophecies which M. makes concerning the coming of God on earth, the approaching universal judgment, and the glorious and fruitful future which awaits the good cause, as well as certain miracles which she has already accom-
1 " Non son donna di vani costumi, Son 1' ancella del nostro Signor ;
Sul mio capo ci sta una corona Tutta guarnita di lauro e d' onor.
Io son costante all' eterno Signore, E niun inganno puo farmi tremar :
E bench' Io sia un misero fiore . . . Son Regina dell' alto gran mar."
A MAD SAINT 19
plished, professing that she has prevented an outbreak of war between Africa and Italy.
To this now well-defined form of religious insanity are associated, as often happens, though usually in a more accentuated degree, erotic insanity and the insanity of persecution. This last, however, is very slight and is directed in part against the priests, in part against the attendants and sisters at the asylum, and especially the doctor under whose care she was placed, and against whom, with much abusive language, she brings the usual vague accusations of offences against her spirit and body.
The erotic clement is more distinctly marked ; in her writings and discourses M. frequently recalls the name of a young gentleman who " because of his religious wanderings " had to suffer grave danger in Africa, from which danger she and no other could deliver him, or, as she says, " repair him in body and mind from that terrible exile, offering her life to the Great God of Heaven to expiate the faults accounted for guilt to Christians." In the same way, but more explicitly, she expresses herself in her verses, which reflect her thoughts more faithfully and unconsciously. In these are many expressions of affection and praise concerning this youth, whom she invokes as the imaginary head of armies, a dear companion and man of pure faith ; as well as in the replies, strangely veiled in spiritual mysticism, which she makes to questions on this subject. She confesses also that she recalls seeing some of her visions of God under the aspect of this gentleman. Yet she only appears to have seen him occasionally, and it is not possible to guess the circumstances which may have caused, if they have not justified, the direction which M.'s erotic affections have taken.
Altruism, which is the highest and noblest human note in the doctrines and works of nearly all great religious reformers — as though from the mystic contemplation of the superhuman, and man's annihilation before it, grew a more vivid feeling of the equality and fraternity of all human creatures — shows itself, though only by brief hints, in the writings of M. In several places she affirms that she would do nothing to avoid martyrdom, not fearing prisons, nor kings, nor anything else, but only the Virgin. And in alluding to the poor she exclaims : " O you miserable of the earth, oppressed by pain," offering them guidance and help ; and again, when she asserts she had feigned madness, so that she had almost voluntarily entered an asylum because the Volere Supremo had laid on her the burden of a mission to men. In this way she often declares herself mad, and signs her name as the poor Maria of the mad people — " povere Maria dei pazzi " — as a title that the Lord had given
B
20 THE SAVOY
her. All this, however, contrasts with her rebellion against the doctors and attendants on entering the asylum ; this was indeed so violent that it rendered necessary the application of the strait-jacket.
Apart from this, it is certain that her mind is not able to appreciate, and still less to conceive, the whole sublimity of the idea of altruism. Such incapacity is revealed in the poverty and individualism of all her conceptions, as well as by the strangeness and inco-ordination into which any informing idea, any trace of system, rapidly falls. Yet the neuropathic foundation, certain analogies of expression, certain other psychic affinities, render her a crude and rudimental example of a saint, a religious reformer.
I have presented this case in all its details, excluding the more technical, because it really constitutes a valuable document which shows us, in the first place, how genius often arises from a matrix of insanity. Here is an ordinary uneducated woman who suddenly becomes a poet, in a rude fashion, and an inventor of musical rhythms. But perhaps the phenomenon is more interesting from the point of view of hagiology, because of the light it throws on sanctity. This workwoman who thought more of others than of herself, who troubled herself all day long over public morality, who justly reproves the university students, who robs herself of her due nightly rest, after fulfilling all her family duties, in order to devote herself to her religious writings, presents a manifesta- tion of sanctity, also breaking forth from the matrix of paranoia, in evidence of the effect of hereditary insanity.
It is true that such cases are very rare : among thousands of mad people I have only met with this case : whether it is that in such persons the accompanying delusions of persecution, ambition, etc., too greatly preoccupy the mind to leave any care for the hagiological form, or that it here assumes a more prominent form by virtue of greater intelligence and greater energy.
But perhaps the cause of this rarity may be of a very different order. It is probable that the prevalence of saints in past ages, as compared with our own days, may be first of all due to the fact that religious preoccupations being to-day less intense, men are driven mad in quite other pursuits, their diseases arising from other pretexts and taking on a different veneer. And, again, the public among us being indifferent to such ideas, even when they do arise, these mad saints find none to listen to them ; and if they insist, like this woman, they are at last secluded in an asylum. Three or four centuries ago she would have attracted followers, founded monasteries, carried away crowds ; she would have become a historical event. It is sad to reflect on the
A MAD SAINT 21
fate of so many men of genius, born before their time, or in lands incapable of understanding them, and dying sterilized, when they were not killed as rebels or heretics. Even among ourselves to-day, indeed, it is only after death that such men are admired and honoured.
The germ of holiness, as well as that of genius, must be sought among the insane.
C. LOMBROSO. (Translated by Havelock Ellis.)
Classic London
by
Joseph Pennell
v-
4r
1 Ik '< < k i V V
NEW YEARS EVE
E heard the bells of midnight burying the year.
Then the night poured its silent waters over us. And then, in the vague darkness, faint and tremulous, Time paused ; then the night filled with sound ; morning
was here. Time paused ; our hearts were silent ; only your eyes burned Out of the night as though lit to consume my heart. The insane anger of love seized and became a part Of your incarnate spirit ; and your spirit yearned In such an agonizing ecstasy of desire
Unto my spirit waiting to be lost in you, Spirit to spirit was fused in living flame ; and neither knew, In that transfiguring ardency of perfect fire, Body from body, spirit from spirit, life from death. Only we knew, as flaming silence wrapt the past, We had escaped the shadowy labyrinth at last ; Only we knew, as brooding silence, like the breath Of the overshadowing wings of the creating Dove,
Descended on our hearts, and filled our hearts with peace. Love, born to be immortal, until all time cease, Was born of us anew, to be immortal love.
Arthur Svmons.
A MERE MAN
i
j]HE Clubs were full, and busy with gossip. The new beauty ^an American) had been presented to a royal prince, and the old beauty of three seasons ago was engaged to be married, engaged to an eligible man too, a certain Leonard Standish, whose father came of a good old stock, and had left him a pretty place in Yorkshire, and a decent amount of money. A young man of twenty-eight, a favourite on the race-course and in London drawing-rooms, with a handsome face, and a simple, unaffected manner, a reputation not too bad, and a record cleaner than most men's ; a man his own sex liked, and dubbed a " damned good fellow," and the other sex considered straight and honourable, he was up to date in all but his immorality, and the little there had been of that was decidedly behind the times.
The girl was a tall slim creature, with an aristocratic face, thin, delicate, pink lips, large, brilliant gray eyes, a thin nose, a well-shaped chin, and pretty, well-groomed hair. Her father, a Major in the Guards, was dead. Her mother was a well-known woman about town. Her brothers were equally divided between the Stock Exchange and the Army, and their friends were nice young men with squeaky voices. ■
She knew London well, had wearied of balls after her first season, had taken an interest in racing the second, and in Leonard Standish the third. During the ball-room epidemic she had been engaged to young Charlton, in the Guards, and had thrown him over at the last minute because he bored her. During the racing epidemic she had been engaged to Bernard Chitty, who had suddenly disappeared to Africa, and society talked with little result. Her third year was crowned with success. The royal prince had wearied of her, it is true, but she was engaged elsewhere, and her mother, her relations, and her friends were pouring congratulations from every quarter.
She was to be married in April, and was busy discussing a proposed visit to Paris in search of chiffons on a cold dreary February afternoon, as her
A MERE MAN 27
carriage drove down Park Lane, while her mother waxed fretful because a hand-glass reflected a somewhat reddened nose.
" My dear Aimee," Mrs. Bentley Cardross was saying, as she dabbed a minute powder-puff all over her face, " it's so very tiresome. You haven't noticed, I'm sure. The tip of my nose has been quite frost-bitten, and is reviving in a peculiarly painful manner. Do sympathize, dear."
Her daughter did not reply.
"So annoying that man never sending my new cloak home. I'm frozen, dear, frozen, I assure you."
The girl glanced at her quickly, and looked away again.
" You seem covered with fur," she remarked.
" Have you seen Leonard to-day, dear ? " inquired Mrs. Bentley Cardross, with a nervous smile.
" No."
" He was going "
" I don't know where he was going. He is coming to dinner to-night."
" Of course, dear, of course."
" I've asked Mrs. Sharpe."
" My dear girl, do you think you are quite wise ? She is not quite all I could wish ; and Leonard is so dreadfully particular."
" She is my friend."
" I know, of course, I know ; but her husband is so very racy, and always smells of the stables ; and she will smoke before dinner is half over, and I know Leonard will look at her with that tiresomely grave face which always makes me wish to shake him. After you are married "
" That odious phrase ! Let us leave that time to the future, mamma."
" Very well, dear, if you like. I am sure I am quite busy enough to find plenty to say about the present. But Mrs. Sharpe wants to flirt with every man she meets. She will look up at Leonard, with those pathetic eyes of hers, until she drives me mad."
" Of course she looks pathetic. Her husband is a perfect brute to her."
" Oh, no doubt ! "
" And unless she nags on at him for about an hour, he won't even allow her to dine with us."
" How unjust."
" And if she is just a little late in coming home, he goes and gets drunk."
" My dear, you shock me."
The daughter smiled.
28 THE SAVOY
" Do I, mamma ? " she inquired ; and then she leaned forward, and waved her hand to a man in a passing hansom.
" Who was it, dear ? " cried her mother. " Do tell me."
" Only Leonard. Who can he be going to see in Park Lane ? That horrid stiff Lady Jane Graham, I suppose. Perhaps she was a friend of his mother's."
" My dear ! She's only thirty-seven."
" And looks more."
" Well, Aimee, as a well-preserved woman myself, I never scoff at those who are stupid enough to show their years. They are usually religious people, and go often to the holy communion, and that's so tiring, — the kneeling I mean ; if you once get down it's so difficult to get up again, at my age. Don't you think so ? "
" I didn't hear what you were saying. Is it worth repeating again ? "
Her mother flushed crimson, and took up the hand-glass with a shaking hand.
" No, dear, no," she said, timidly. " Of course not."
Lady Jane Graham was at home, and would see Mr. Leonard Standish.
She was a tall woman, with a graceful face, a graceful figure, and a manner that was her chief charm. As she rose, with a smile, to welcome him, her deep voice had a peaceful sound, and her eyes a look which reminded him somehow of a church, and there was a faint scent somewhere, suggestive of incense.
" How are you ? " she began. " I am very glad to see you. Come and sit near the fire and tell me all your news. Harold has gone down to Langham, and I had that pretty little May Egerton staying with me for a few days. They are repairing the village church, and Harold bought a new horse, which he wants you to see. That is all my news in one breath. Aren't you relieved ? "
He took a tea-cup from her hand, and smiled. A few seconds were devoted to his questions about her husband, her friends, and to her answers. She was a woman whose whole household is always of interest to her acquaint- ances, and Leonard Standish had a closer claim than that. He had been a staunch friend to her brother, a handsome young scapegrace, who slept in a foreign grave.
She read people cleverly, and described them aptly. She was a woman who clung to old-fashioned ideas, and conventional thought. She had a kind
A MERE MAN 29
heart, and a sensitive nature, under a masked dignity which seemed like pride.
" You arc to be married in April," she said.
" Yes, in April — the seventeenth."
" Have you settled where you will go afterwards ? "
" Lord Arthur said he would lend us his place in Suffolk. Aimee knows him very well. He seems a nice kind of chap. I was at Eton with him."
" And your house — have you settled on it ? "
" Yes, it's in Cadogan Square." There was a pause, Leonard Standish put his hand up to his dark hair, and smoothed it.
Lady Jane feigned not to watch him, and touched some lilies of the valley in a vase near with long, shapely fingers. She knew well that he had some- thing to say to her, and she knew also that she would prefer him not to say it. There was only one course open to her, however, to be patient and sympathetic, and to listen to him when he chose to speak.
" I met that young Captain Cardross the other night. He is a handsome boy."
" Yes," his future brother-in-law admitted. " But I wish he didn't try so hard to be smart."
" Isn't that the fault of the age ? And youth reflects the age."
" I think I like Jack Cardross best."
" He's on the Stock Exchange, isn't he ? "
" Yes. He's an awfully sharp fellow. Gets on very well. Is rather too full of scandal, though. That sort of promiscuous soiling of characters makes me sick."
" I only met him once," Lady Jane said gravely ; " and I fancy that his words are bigger than his deeds. He is probably more harmless than he likes to be thought. I should distrust the captain more."
" Would you. How funny ! But then you always have queer ideas about people, and you are always right."
Lady Jane smiled.
" Have some more tea," she said ; " and tell me what you know of a Mrs. Sharpe."
" Oh ! she's a friend of AimeVs. A pretty little woman. I met her at Sandown."
" I saw her once at a theatre. Harold knew her husband slightly ; he is a racing man I fancy."
There was a pause.
30 THE SAVOY
" You didn't like Mrs. Sharpe," Standish blurted out.
"No, not much."
" I say, Lady Jane," he began, " I am in an awful fix, and I want to ask you something. You won't mind, will you ? "
" Do you think I am the right person to ask ? "
" I'm sure of it. The fact is, I couldn't question anyone else. It would seem so disloyal."
" My dear Leonard, it is so foolish to ask a friend anything. The only things worth knowing we all find out for ourselves."
" I don't think I understand," the man answered. " I'm awfully worried and bothered, and I thought you'd help me."
" Well, tell me what it is."
" People are saying beastly things "
" People ? "
" Well, one woman."
" Oh ! Go on."
" About some one I love very much — a great friend of mine — a woman I respect. I say, Lady Jane, you must guess, you know. It was about Aimee."
" Was the authority good ? "
" Good ! How do you mean ? "
" Was the woman who said the things reliable ? "
" No, not very, I should think. It didn't strike me before."
" Had she any motive for wishing to destroy your belief in Miss Cardross ? "
" Motive ? Women always think there must be a motive at the root of everything."
Lady Jane laughed. " Because there usually is. But you haven't answered my question."
" Oh, well, I don't know. She used rather to like me, perhaps. A man feels such a cad when he says a thing like that."
" Not to me," said his friend, not from vanity, but to reassure him. " Well, then, if she spoke from jealousy, I think we may dismiss the matter."
" You don't think it's true."
" If she was the only maligner "
"Oh, there it is! I've heard other people long ago hint — about — about all sorts of things."
" That is rather vague if you want me to dispute them."
" I do. That's just it. I want you to tell me that Aimee is all right. A
A MERE MAN 31
nice, good girl, as nice as she is beautiful. I'm really awfully fond of her. I can't tell you how fond. I never felt so strongly about anything before. She is so lovely, and so sweet, and I like to hear her talk : she's awfully clever too. I don't know what I should do if I believed all those horrid things."
Lady Jane blushed. She had a trick of flushing pink when anything distressed her. Her glance fell on the picture of a grave on a distant table, and she remembered her brother as he had looked years before the end. If he had been alive, he could have spoken where her mouth was sealed. She could not take the responsibility of settling Leonard's whole future for him in that way. And she could not ruin a young girl's chances of happiness by a word or sign.
" What do you want me to say ? " she asked.
" Tell me if you know anything."
" I know" — she slightly and conscientiously emphasized the word " know" — " I know nothing against Miss Cardross. Rumour has dealt with her as it deals with every woman celebrated for her beauty — that is, unjustly, always. It overpraises her outward appearance, and depreciates her soul. It claims the right to attack her character, as it cannot attack her face. Had I a child," — her voice altered — "had I been lucky enough to have a child, and she a girl, I should have wished her any curse but beauty, and any misery but brains. If a beautiful woman is attacked and smiles, a clever one is ten times more abused, and she doesn't smile — she is usually wretchedly alive to all that is said, and miserably sensitive about it. Why, Leonard, you cannot possess a pearl without the world deigning to envy you. It is the fate of all lucky men."
" Yes, of course, I am awfully lucky."
" Don't let spiteful women frighten you, or reckless men startle you. They mean only half of what they hint, and a quarter of what they say. A man's gossip is usually the most harmless thing in the world. He tells a scandalous story because it is naughtily amusing, not to ruin a woman's reputation, and he speaks lightly of a good name, because he has lost his own so long ago that he has forgotten the value of it."
Leonard Standish turned a puzzled face towards his hostess.
" I suppose I've bored you terribly," he said.
" Certainly not."
" You — you don't think me a cad for coming to ask you such questions."
" I have never known you do anything that could possibly earn you that obnoxious title."
32 THE SAVOY
" But, Lady Jane, will you let me tell you exactly what I did hear, so that you won't think I was worried over a mere nothing, a mere breath of scandal."
" My dear Leonard, I don't want to know. I can trust you not to have mentioned those rumours without reason, and such mud has a nasty trick of sticking to one's mind, and I want never to be reminded of anything but good of your wife. Take care that none of the mud clings on to you."
" You are quite right. Quite right. I can't thank you enough."
" Where are you dining to-night — not with Lady Ralston, I fear."
" No, are you going there ? I am dining with Mrs. Cardross. I haven't seen Aimee to-day — at least not to speak to. I passed her, as I was driving here, looking awfully pretty. Her mother was there too."
" Her mother." Lady Jane flushed pink. " I don't know Mrs. Cardross."
" She's — she's awfully good-natured."
" Yes, I heard she was."
" Rather careless, you know, but devoted to her children. The boys really do know an awful set of men. I met Dottie Leighton, and Freddie Williams with them at the Empire the other night. You don't know them, of course."
" Only by sight. You mean some pretty boys who are always in the Park on Sunday. They look harmless enough, as if all their time were spent in choosing a necktie to match their eyes."
Leonard Standish rose to go. He seized Lady Jane's long fingers impulsively. You've been awfully good to me," he said, " I can't thank you half enough. I'm not a bit worried now."
She smiled a little sadly.
" Come and see me again soon, Leonard," she said, " and bring Miss Cardross with you."
" Of course I will, she will love to come, I know. Good-bye."
Lady Jane stood and listened to his hansom wheels as he drove away. A dark, foggy evening was closing in, and she went to the window and looked out. His cab was a mere speck in the mist, the street lights twinkled uneasily through the smoke, and the roar of London was muffled to her ears.
" I wonder," she thought, " if I have done wrong that good may come." And the smoke, and the fog, and the darkness closed round the lucky man.
II
One warm Sunday morning in May, when the park was bright with lilac and laburnum and the pink blossom of the chestnut trees, a small group of people
A MERE MAN 33
were congregated near the Achilles statue. A slight breeze toyed with the lace veil of one of the women, and the large black feathers in the other's hat. The men were mostly young, and unmistakably smart. One of them was biting the end of a prayer book, absently, forgetting that he carried it for Mrs. Lionel Boyne, whose large rebellious veil claimed all her attention for the moment.
" Yes, the Standish menage has returned," Mrs. Sharpe was saying, " I saw her yesterday, she says they had a splendid time in Paris. I asked no questions about Lord Arthur's place, it must have been deadly dull. Fancy my being buried in the country with Bob. I should commit suicide after one day. And I'm sure Bob's the most good-natured creature in the world."
" Dear lady," cried Dottie Leighton, quickly," don't mention suicide, it's so nasty."
" Besides we couldn't spare you," said a heavy Colonel, with a smile. He liked the pathetic eyes to be raised slowly and pleadingly towards his own, and Mrs. Sharpe's gentle affected manner pleased him.
Mrs. Boyne overheard and turned round. " I never can remember how I spent the honeymoon with Lionel, I suppose I bored him to death. I know he bored me. Isn't that Dolly Marker over there, the new burlesque dancer, that people are so mad about, and it's Bernard Chitty with her? What a joke ! "
The ladies both laughed, Dottie laughed, the powdered and red-lipped Freddie Williams became convulsed with merriment. Colonel Ashby alone failed to see the joke, and wondered what the devil they all meant.
" Aimee doesn't know he is in England," said Mrs. Sharpe.
" Does anyone know the truth of that story ? " asked Mrs. Boyne.
" I suppose Bernard found out something," suggested Mrs. Sharpe.
" What do you mean ? " a fourth man inquired, abruptly.
" Oh, I really don't know, Mr. Franklin," said the lady in a hurry. " I am devoted to Aimee myself, and think her husband is a dear — so fond of her, too — it is quite charming to see them together."
" Talk of an angel," said Franklin, going forward, " and here she is. We were just discussing your domestic bliss, Mrs. Standish."
The girl looked her best, she had a becoming pink colour, and wore a Paris costume. Leonard Standish had a face which smiled on all the world, and if ever a man expressed contentment, he did, with his clear fresh voice and his bright smile.
" It was so awfully nice in Paris," he explained to Mrs. Sharpe ; " we went
34 THE SAVOY
everywhere, and saw everything. We heard Guilbert sing, and did all the theatres, and gave some jolly little dinners at Voisin's, and chez Paillard. You ought to get Bob to take you over for a few days. Paris is lovely just now."
" Oh, Bob never will take me anywhere, the old idiot is far too mad on racing."
Mrs. Boyne rustled up to Aimee. " Dearest," she said, in a shrill voice, " have you seen Dolly Marker and the latest victim ? It is such a joke, as he is a newly married man."
" Who is ? and where are they ? "
" Over there under those hawthorn trees." Mrs. Standish put up a lorgnette. It dropped suddenly, and the glass and tortoise-shell broke in twenty pieces on the gravel.
" Dear lady ! How dreadful ! " cried Freddie Williams. " I must get you a new one."
" I'll send you one from Paris," said Dottie.
" What made you drop it ? " asked her husband.
Her cold face chilled him, as she said with an almost imperceptible sneer, " Carelessness, I suppose, but I really don't know."
Mrs. Sharpe looked pensive, Mrs. Boyne smiled.
Later, Aimee said suddenly, " When, and where did Bernard marry ? "
" Oh, in Australia," Franklin replied. " He picked up a piece of gold, rubbed the dust off, and has brought it home to be polished. She's a large woman with auburn hair. She's his only mistake."
" Where is your husband, Mrs. Boyne ? " asked the girl.
" He's lost just at present. He's awfully clever at losing himself, you know."
Mrs. Sharpe turned round with her pensive smile, and raised eyebrows.
" M' dear," she said, clipping her words, and looking reproachful, " don't speak of the poor man like that. Perhaps he wants to be found."
"If you would like to go and hunt for Bob," proposed her friend, " I daresay he's somewhere in the park."
" Dear Bob," sighed Mrs. Sharp, " I wonder if he is."
" I wish I were a woman, and newly married," cried Mr. Williams. " It must be so nice wearing all one's new frocks."
" Oh, you naughty thing," Mrs. Sharpe said, and then laughed.
" Did Standish take you to the Moulin Rouge? " inquired Freddie.
Her husband turned round.
A MERE MAN 35
" Come home now, Aimee," he said. " We shall be late for lunch."
"All right, Leonard ;" she drew him a little aside. "You don't mind, do you — I've asked Dottie and Freddie to lunch ? "
" Not those brutes, have you ? "
" Yes, why not ? "
" Oh, very well, only it's the last time."
"The first, you mean. I shall invite whom I please."
" Not to my house, while I'm in it."
" Then you can go out, dear. I can't waste any more time now. Come on, Dottie, we're off now."
The rest of the party watched them crossing the row.
" She's a lovely woman ! " Colonel Ashby exclaimed.
" She's thoroughly smart," agreed the two women.
" Her husband," Franklin said slowly, " is the best chap I know. I only hope she'll treat him decently. He will cut up rough if she plays any of her old games, poor fellow."
" You didn't let me talk like that about Aimee, and now you've done it yourself."
" My dear Mrs. Bob, you hinted at something before those two boys, which means that all London will know who said it to-morrow, that is all. The Standish husband and wife have quite enough before them, without our adding to their troubles. No good ever came out of the Cardross family yet, and I don't believe it ever will. Come and dine at the Savoy with me to- night and I'll tell you some naughty stories. We won't ask Bob."
One warm June day, a month later, Leonard Standish went into his wife's room directly after breakfast. The window was wide open, and above the geraniums and mignonette in the flower-box he saw a perfect blue sky, and brilliant sunshine.
" What a jolly day ! " he exclaimed, " I say, Aimee, are you ill ? "
His glance fell on some brandy and seltzer in a tumbler on the dressing- table.
" Yes," she admitted fretfully. " Dreadfully seedy, dear. Don't worry."
" Then why on earth do you go out ? "
" How absurd you are. I've promised to go shopping with Ada Sharpe and there is Hurlingham this afternoon."
" Oh, yes, I forgot. Shall I come back and take you there ? "
C
36 THE SAVOY
His wife shook the powder-puff all over his coat-sleeve, and then drew a dark line under each eye.
" No need, dear," she remarked, and then seeing his face reflected behind her own in the mirror, she added quickly, " I am going with the Chittys."
" You are always with those people," Leonard said.
" I thought you liked her," his wife retorted.
" Well, I do like her — why not ? I like that sort of fresh woman, with her big honest face, and auburn hair. There is something straight about her which is very rare."
" She's a damned good fellow, in fact," laughed Aimee.
" What beastly language you use. I say, don't drink all that B. and S. It's an awfully stiff one."
Her eyes danced with fun over the rim of the glass.
" You silly boy," she said, " it won't hurt me. Do you think I've got a head like mamma ? "
" Your mother can stand a good deal," said Leonard, stiffly.
" I sent Mary down for ten minutes, and she's been an hour. Ring for her, will you ? "
" No, not for a second. I want to talk to you. I say, Aimee, really I wish you wouldn't go about with the Chittys so much. He's one of a horrid set of men, and although she's an awfully nice woman, she isn't quite a lady. It does you such harm with decent people."
" You are always grumbling at my friends. Pass me that rouge, dear, will you ? "
" Oh, don't, you've got an awfully pretty colour of your own. Let the nasty stuff alone." Leonard Standish touched his wife's hair timidly, and added very gently, " I like you as you are, Aimee, darling, not messed up with all that stuff."
She shook his hand off. " Don't be silly," she remarked, " you know you don't mind it really."
He look puzzled. " I don't in other women," he admitted, " but somehow I hate it in my wife."
" I must get on with my dressing, and you hinder me. If you haven't anything else to say, you'd better go."
Her husband went half across the room, and then returned.
" Can you come and call on Lady Jane, to-morrow ? " he asked, " we've never been near her since our marriage, and she came here three weeks ago, when we were out."
A MERE MAN 37
" I can't bother, she bores me to death. You can go, and say I'm ill. I say, Leonard, come back, and don't look so cross. I'll look in on you in the smoking-room before I go out. I have something to tell you — no, not now — later on. Ring the bell, there's a dear, and leave me alone."
He heard her rustling down the staircase half an hour later, he heard her greeting to Mrs. Sharpe in the hall, and her quick " wait for me in the morning- room one minute, dear," and then she turned the handle of his own den and entered.
She looked pretty and distinguished, and a little flushed. With a shyness new to them both she came and kissed him, and holding on to the lappels of his coat, she said, faintly, with nervous lips :
"Dr. Bell came in yesterday, Leonard, and he said that I — that I — I mean I thought you would like to know — that you would be glad, dear."
Leonard Standish sprang to his feet. " Why, darling," he cried, " do you mean ? "
She broke from him, crimson, and breathless.
" Oh don't, Leonard, don't, you know quite well what I mean. Now I shall be late if I don't go — and you've knocked my hat crooked." She laughed nervously, and rushed from the room.
The man sat down before his writing-table, and his lips twitched. Her few shy words had changed the whole world, and the little annoyances of the last month vanished. He thought that he would go and see Lady Jane, and as his wife did not intend returning till dinner time, he telegraphed to Lady Jane to know if he might lunch with her, and received an answer in the affirmative.
The day wore on, and a hot sun streamed into her cosy drawing-room and shone on her serene features, and on his happy careless face. It shone on Mrs. Standish during her drive down to Hurlingham, and watched her relentlessly when once there. The timid Australian wife tried to hide her large figure behind the slim girl. Bernard Chitty bent his ironical face close to Mrs. Standish, and whispered comments on their mutual friends, which made her laugh. Freddie, and Dottie, and Mr. Boyne gathered round her, and took her to have some champagne, and made her feel her costume was a success. Her laughter grew noisy, her speech more careless. They suggested a dinner at Hurlingham, and a music hall to follow, which necessitated no change of dress, and then supper in a private room at the Berkeley as a finish to the day. Mrs. Standish assented to it all, and rather late in the afternoon remembered her husband and sent him a wire.
38 THE SAVOY
He was in the dining-room when it came, fuming inwardly, and eating an over-cooked dinner. He read that she was staying at Hurlingham to dine, and was somewhat appeased. But it somehow seemed a bad ending to the day, which had been a happy one for him.
He drove down to one of the theatres after dinner, and met Franklin in the lobby.
" What have you been doing ? " he asked carelessly, as they both turned towards the stalls.
" Oh ! I went to Hurlingham. Rather good match on. I saw your wife there."
" Yes, she has stayed to dine."
" Oh ! " Franklin looked at him curiously.
They separated with a careless " see you later," and Leonard sat through the play.
In coming out into the Strand he saw a woman in rags, emerging from the door of a public house, and he stopped in the act of getting into his hansom to throw her half-a-crown. The baby she clutched to her breast had attracted his notice, but he felt half ashamed of the deed.
When he returned, he learnt to his surprise that his wife had not yet come home. He changed his coat for a smoking-jacket and lit a cigar.
Twelve o'clock struck, and he hummed an air from the piece he had seen, and opened some letters on the writing-table. His wife's tobacco bill was nearly as large as his own ; he flung it down with an oath, and settled himself in an armchair.
One o'clock struck, and he felt uneasy, and wandered in an aimless manner all over the house. Then he returned, and flinging himself into the chair again, fell asleep.
He woke with a start ; some one fell over something in the hall and roused him. He went quickly from the room. The clock faced him, it was three o'clock.
" Why, Aimee ! " he said, " how late you are."
She didn't answer. She stood leaning against the hall table, with her eyes on the ground.
" Aimee," he repeated, " what's the matter ? "
She raised her face.
" Noth — in," she replied.
He recoiled and turned sick with horror.
" Charming evening — so tired — go sh — sleep — all right."
A MERE MAX 39
His face had turned to the colour of chalk. He went up to her and took her arm.
" Come along to bed," he said, almost roughly.
She shook his hand off and laughed.
The man felt afraid of his own disgust.
She seemed to pull herself together suddenly.
" Come 'long, Leonard, bed-time," she said, and made a lurch towards the stairs.
He offered her his arm, she clutched it, and together they ascended, slowly. He helped her to undress, and put her to bed. He woke later from a troubled sleep, with the sun streaming into the room, to find her crying weakly. He took her into his arms, and she laid her cheek against his. The misery of that bright morning remained with him to the end of his days. Neither put the horror into words, they only clung to each other like two shipwrecked people, and through such misery and degradation their marriage tie seemed sanctified.
After that, in a furtive manner, he tried to stop her taking spirits, and she, in a furtive manner also, resented the fact, and defied him.
He never went near Lady Jane again ; the misery he bore was all his own, and had to be suffered alone.
Almost imperceptibly his wife changed ; she lost her sense of what was refined and pure, and her coarse jokes went the round of the clubs. She started card-parties, aud resumed her interest in racing. She took no care of her health, and was recklessly defiant of his wishes. This state of things lasted till the end of July, when they had settled to go north.
Mrs. Bentley Cardross, Mrs. Sharpeand her husband, Mr. and Mrs. Boyne, Colonel Ashby, Franklin, and the Chittys, were to be of the party. The house in Yorkshire was put in readiness for the twelfth, and Captain Cardross asked leave to bring two men friends to join them for the shooting. Leonard Standish looked forward to the moors and the out-of-doors existence with relief. His wife admitted that she felt dreadfully tired and ill, and would be glad of the rest. He felt more hopeful once away from London, and the familiar house and park seemed to welcome him home.
The Australian woman went out shooting, and became a general favourite. Her freckled face, brown eyes, and short auburn curls, were con- sidered almost attractive. She had a brusque manner, a large heart, and the dignity of a savage queen. Her husband neglected her shamefully, but she did not appear to notice it, and most of the women were a little
40 THE SAVOY
afraid of her purity of thought. They could not speak so openly in her presence.
Colonel Ashby was making a pitiable figure of himself while dancing attendance on Mrs. Sharpe. Mrs. Boyne flirted with Captain Cardross, and, as Aimee said, " She had found a nice old man for dear Mamma." Mrs. Bentley Cardross was, as usual, frivolous and undignified, and always smelt of sherry. She was terrified of her daughter, who bullied her ; she managed to be a great nuisance to her son-in-law.
Meanwhile Leonard's affection for his wife had in no wise abated. Her weakness needed all the more pitying protection, and all that was best in the man seemed to come out during those few months. Where he had been care- less and selfish, as men are trained to be from mere babyhood, he grew con- siderate and kind. He shielded her, as if she had been a rebellious child, from the consequences of her own misdeeds. Franklin swore under his breath, and marvelled ; the other men thought him a fool.
Then things went from bad to worse suddenly, and he determined to speak to her, as he had never spoken to any woman in his life.
She was lying on a sofa in her boudoir, resting, and smoking one of his cigars. He went in, feeling all that he had to face, and his voice would not sound clear and natural.
" Oh, it's you, is it, Leonard ? " she said. " Do shut that door. Damn the draught, it's blown this ash all over my teagown. What do you want ? "
" I want to speak to you, darling. It's awfully hard, and I feel a brute — you can't tell what a brute I feel — but I know I shall be to blame if I don't get it over. I say, Aimee, I wish you would be more careful than you are."
She flushed crimson, and she trembled so much that she dropped the cigar ; he knelt to pick it up, and remained on the ground beside her couch.
" You won't mind, darling, will you ? " he pleaded. " I know it isn't your fault. There are some things your mother didn't teach you — perhaps she couldn't. I'm not a bit angry ; I'm only sorry, and I want to help you. Won't you let me, dear ? "
Her face went white under the rouge, and her eyelids dropped.
" Make it easy for me, darling, because you know what I mean. Let us aid each other. I don't blame you one bit — I only want you to trust me to help you — let us fight this thing together, and conquer it. Do let's try, darling for both our sakes."
She raised herself on one elbow.
A MERE MAN 41
" I don't know what yon mean," she said, defiantly.
He gave a cry which might have touched her, for it wrung his own heart, and he answered hurriedly,
" I don't want you to take so much champagne. Oh, why did you force me to say it — why did you ? "
She burst into tears, and fell back, and wound her arm round his neck, and every word of her defence made him wince as if with shame.
" I know," she cried, "don't speak of it, pet. It is wrong and stupid of me, of course. I get so tired — and overstrung — and so faint. I won't do it again, I promise you. I will let you help me — I will be very good. Only you know, Leonard, it isn't my fault — I am really ill and — I need something."
He gathered her in his arms, and, in an agony which she never understood, he said, tenderly,
" Don't let us talk of it again. I know you don't mean it — I believe in you, dear. And we — we will fight it together. Oh, my darling, for the sake of the little child God is going to give us, try — let us both try — to be brave, and conquer it."
She held his head against her breast, as if it gave her strength, and she cried in short gasps, terrible to hear.
The afternoon sun waned, and shed a dim light over them both, as they clasped each other close, and whispered in soft abrupt murmurs, with hearts full of tender anguish, of the child which was to come.
Ill
Leonard Standish sat alone in his room. The snow lay thick on the ground, and the trees were white with frost. There was an awning over the steps of a house at the other side of the square, where the occupants were preparing to give a dance, and a barrel-organ started a well-known music-hall air somewhere at the end of the street. Upstairs a child cried faintly, and was hushed again. In his own room the fire burned brightly, and the scent of cigar-smoke was heavy in the warm curtains. He sat brooding alone, and not even the thought of his little son had power to console him.
Aimee was out, she had gone out against his wishes, she disregarded them in everything now, and the house felt lonely.
It was nearly a year since his wedding day, nearly a year since he had gone to ask Lady Jane those questions. He had shirked seeing her of late ; her gray eyes had a trick of reading the truth, and he had now something to hide.
42 THE SAVOY
His boyish face was changing ; his very manner had become troubled and restless ; he had lost control somehow in his own house, and the fact continually fretted him and worried him.
He thought perhaps it would be best if he went away for a little time ; and then the child above began to cry again. He rose impatiently and flung away his cigar ; then he went upstairs and knocked at the nursery door.
" I may come in, nurse, mayn't I ?" he said.
" Why, of course, sir."
He stepped into the room, and the woman stopped in her walk, and held up his child.
" There 's Papa, duckie," she cried. " Look at Papa."
He would have felt a fool if his wife or anyone else had been there ; as it was, the tiny red face, and the minute fingers clutching his own, made his throat feel dry, and his voice shake.
" I say, you're an awfully rum little thing," he remarked.
The baby, dimpled and blue-eyed, began to laugh ; the nurse made it dance till its father's head felt giddy, and ashamed, but comforted in a strange inexplicable way, he crept out of the nursery and drove away to his club.
When he returned from the club half an hour before dinner, he found his wife in her room, with the child on the bed.
" Well, Aimee," he cried briskly, " did you have a nice afternoon ? "
" Yes — all right. I say, Leonard." She turned a radiant face from the glass. " Isn't he a darling? "
The child somehow always drew them nearer. She went to the pillow and bent over it, with a face that was softened and beautiful. Her husband drew near, too.
" He is a nice little chap," he admitted.
" I adore him," she cried, burying her lips in the baby's soft cheek. " There never was such a baby in all the world. I think I should die if we lost him."
" He's not ill, is he ?"
" No, you idiot, quite well and healthy. Aren't you, my angel ? Leonard, you have got to kiss him, too."
He put his arm round his wife and drew her near him, first. She pushed him laughingly away. His face flushed.
She had been kissing her baby with a breath that was perfumed with brandy. The discovery turned him sick.
" Embrace your son," she cried.
A MERE MAN 43
" I — I think I'll take him back to the nursery," he stammered. " I shan't drop him, you know. And if you don't get on with your dressing, you'll be late for dinner. You — you don't mind, do you, darling?"
" Oh, no. I can't bother with him any more. Take him to nurse, and then go and get dressed yourself. The Chittys are coming, and I wired to ask Mr. Franklin, so do be ready in good time."
" I didn't know you had asked anyone," Leonard said, slightly annoyed, and then, with a quick suspicion of more to follow, he added, " That 's all, I hope ? "
" No, Mrs. Sharpe and Freddie may look in after dinner. Freddie was going to dine with her to-night."
" But I thought I told you, Aimee," — he tried his hardest to keep calm, — " that I wouldn't have that man in the house. I am weary of him and his whole set, and I begin to believe Bernard is as bad as the rest — anyhow, I draw the line at Williams, do you hear ? "
" I have no time to waste now, Leonard, and the Chittys will be here in a quarter of an hour. Do go and dress. We can discuss these things afterwards."
"Aimee, " her husband began, and then he stopped and carried the child
from the room.
He dressed hurriedly, with a nervous sense of trouble to come. She, on the contrary, drew out her diamonds at her leisure, and aided her maid to arrange some stars in her hair.
The scent of the dinner reached Leonard, and the front-door bell rang. He seized a handkerchief and stuffed it up his cuff, while he ran downstairs, Franklin met him at the drawing-room door.
" Glad to see you, Franklin," he cried. " Come in. My wife will be down in a minute."
His face had a queer, drawn look, and his lips were curiously white.
"Cold knocked you up?" asked his friend.
" No. Beastly day, isn't it ? Boyne seemed in a nice fix. Blend wouldn't lend him any more. I never knew before that the wife had the money."
" Oh, he has quite a decent amount of his own."
There was a pause.
" What rotten cigars those were that Arthur gave us the other night. Did you try them ? "
" I never smoke Arthur's cigars."
Mrs. Standish came into the room, and Franklin rose.
" How are you ? " She looked her best, and her husband recognized her
44 THE SAVOY
beauty with a stab of pain. " So glad you could come, Mr. Franklin. I knew you wouldn't mind a wire in a hurry. I only discovered the Chittys were dis- engaged this morning. Leonard, just fasten this bracelet for me."
She peeped at her reflection in a mirror over the fireplace. " Do you like this frock, Mr. Franklin ? It 's new."
He smiled. " I'm not much of a judge," he answered. " You always look charming."
" Tiresome man, when I put it on just for you." She sat down near him, and the astute Franklin thought, " She wants to conciliate me for some reason ; must have had a row with her husband, that would account for his face — poor devil ! "
Just at that moment the Chittys arrived, and dinner being announced at the same time, they all went downstairs.
Leonard was unusually silent, the Australian unusually grave. In contrast with these two, Franklin was witty and amusing, Bernard malicious and ironical, Aimee recklessly gay.
Leonard, when he did speak, talked at random ; the coming inevitable contest with his wife occupied all his thoughts. Thus it was that, coming out of his abstraction, he caught himself studying Bernard Chitty as if he saw him for the first time, and noted the man's black hair, keen dark eyes, and cruel mouth, with a start of surprise. He had a curiously sleek personality, and a tongue whose utterances cut like a knife. Franklin's expression was that of a man of the world, and therefore boasted no taint of innocence, but it was fresh and honest beside his, and to this man Aimee bent her pretty head and listened and laughed, while she drank her champagne as if it had been water, and flashed a look of defiance at her husband.
The Australian lifted an olive in her large fingers, and held it up to the light.
" The right kind," she remarked carelessly, " the Italian curved stone. I dislike those large Spanish things saturated with oil. What is this," she drawled for a moment, " what is this about our going to the Covent Garden Ball ? Are you thinking of it, Mr. Standish ?"
" Certainly not," answered Leonard, promptly, when his wife interposed.
" Oh, yes, you are," she said ; " I forgot to tell you, Leonard. Ada wants me to make one of her party. Are you invited, Mr. Franklin ? "
There was an uncomfortable pause, then Franklin answered slowly :
" I have not that good fortune."
" Oh, but Aimee," her husband said, " I don't think you can go. I hate
A MERE MAN 45
that sort of thing. I know people do it now, but unless I took you myself, I shouldn't care about it for you."
She turned an expressionless face in his direction.
" Ask for some Benedictine, please, Leonard," she said ; " I can't eat this sweet without some liqueur. I forgot you prefer Creme de Menthe, don't you, Mrs. Chitty ? "
" No, thank you. Neither for me."
" We will stay down here and smoke," Aim£e, continued. " Bernard, I have some mild cigars which you must persuade your wife to try. Freddie was telling me to-day that Reggie Graham is Dolly Marker's latest edition, is it true ? "
Franklin smiled. " Graham is always being some one's latest edition," he said, " I should say there will be no impression left to print, soon."
" What relation is he — give me a light, Bernard — what relation to Lady Jane Graham ? "
" None at all," said Leonard sharply.
" Oh, really, I am surprised ! I always thought he was her cousin. Mrs. Chitty, my husband has been so dreadfully dull all dinner time, that I am sure you must have had a very stupid evening, I'm so sorry."
The Australian looked her straight in the face. " Mr. Standish never bores me," she said ; " I may have seemed uninteresting to him."
Leonard flushed crimson, and turned to answer her in a low, troubled voice. Franklin intended to say something and refrained. Mrs. Standish was pouring brandy into her coffee with an unsteady hand.
When the ladies had left them, the men lingered for a few minutes, and then followed upstairs. Mrs. Sharpe was standing near the fire, warming a shapely foot. Freddie Williams had taken his place at the piano, and was warbling a ditty of illicit love. Aimee lolled in an armchair, the Australian bolt upright on a distant sofa, with a white face, and the lamplight full on her pretty hair. Franklin took a seat beside her, and for a time it seemed as if they were merely spectators of a play.
The ballad finished, Freddie discoursed of a new French novel, called " M. le Mari," and Aimee laughed at his description, immoderately. Mrs. Sharpe took Leonard aside to tease him into consenting to the proposed party for the ball, and Bernard sat silently intent on Mrs. Standish and her laughter.
Franklin left early, pleading another engagement. Freddie found a footstool and placed it at Aimee's feet, where he sat for the whole of the evening. The rest gathered round, and the conversation grew sultry.
\
46 THE SA VOY
Leonard talked to Mrs. Chitty at random, and she answered composedly, with no pity for the tragedy she guessed at, and no interest, merely a forced smile, and impassive manner.
At length the evening came to an end, and the husband and wife were alone. She hurried up to him with an excited laugh, and said thickly :
" What the devil made you so damned glum all the evening ? Do you want all the world to know that you are in a beastly temper?"
" We will talk of this another time," he answered.
" No, we won't. I want to speak of it now. What do you mean ? "
" I mean that you are tired and excited. We will return to this in the morning."
She went to the spirit stand and poured out a glass of water from a jug near. She drank it slowly, and then returned to the fire. Her manner was suddenly more composed.
" We'll have it out now, please, Leonard," she said. " I mean to ask any- one I like here."
" And I forbid you to ask Williams into the house again ; nor do I intend that you shall see so much of Mrs. Sharpe. I dislike her and all her set."
" Her set ! " she mimicked him. " Does that include the Chittys? "
" Yes, it does."
There was a dangerous light in her eyes.
"You disapprove of Bernard, for that wife of his can't count."
" I disapprove, and refuse to give countenance to your flirtation with him — yes. I have been stupidly blind for a long time, but I'll be blind no more. Mrs. Sharpe has circulated her nasty stories for the last time here. Williams has sung his beastly songs for the last time in my house, and I won't have Chitty hanging about you. You will please give in to my wishes, for I can't stand it, and I won't, Aimee, any more."
The servants had gone to bed, and the house was so quiet that they could hear the tick of the hall clock downstairs. The brilliantly lighted room showed Leonard Standish pacing it with a white face and rigid lips, and the light shone on his wife's pink cheeks and brilliant eyes as she lay back in the armchair and clenched her little fists.
" It's not the first time I've spoken. I asked you to give up Ada long ago." He went as far as the door and back again, his troubled eyes in little keeping with the firmness of his mouth. " I suppose you'll say I've lost my temper," he continued. " I daresay I have. But it's the first time I've lost it with you, anyway."
./ MERE MAN 47
She was thinking deeply, and barely noticed that he spoke.
" I don't want to be horrid to you, Aimee, but you made me mad to-night, and I know that if I don't insist on being obeyed now, my weakness will be criminal. I want to help you, not to ruin you, as so many men do their wives, by foolish complaisance. You must get out of this beastly set, and get out of it at once."
He drew aside the window curtains and looked out at the night. The moon shone on the snow, and changed even the London square into some- thing almost poetical and beautiful. He turned back again.
" I ought to have been more careful of you," he said. "We should have begun better. I don't blame you wholly, it was my fault too. Aimee — Aimee, have you nothing to say ? "
She rose with a set face, and went towards the door. He sprang forward and caught her arm.
" Come back, child. Don't go away like this, surely you know that find- ing fault with you nearly breaks my heart. Aimee, darling, do listen to me. I'm stupid at explaining things, I know, but I'll try, if you'll be patient, and I'm sure you'll see it's right to do what I want, in the end."
" Look here, Leonard," she said, slowly, " you are a fool to waste your breath. Your suspicions of Bernard insult me, just as your suspicions of the rest insult my friends. I don't want to talk about it any more, I'm going to bed."
He drew back, as if he had been struck ; her face, hardened and white, looked at his own. She went back to the table, and poured out some brandy, which she carried upstairs in her hand.
He followed a few minutes later, and found she had locked the door.
The night seemed long, and the dawn came slowly. He lay on the smoking-room sofa and tried to think, but consecutive thought would not come. Directly the servants were astir, he changed his clothes, and went and had a Turkish bath. He felt half afraid to go home.
IV
Mrs. Standish was out, his man told him when he returned home, and he seemed wishful to add to the fact, or at least to be questioned on the subject, but Leonard passed him, and went upstairs. He met her maid coming down.
Mrs. Standish had gone to spend the evening with Mrs. Sharpe, and had given her leave to go out.
48 THE SAVOY
Leonard nodded, with no sign of surprise, and changed his clothes for a smoking suit.
Before going down to dinner, he peeped in at the nursery. The boy lay sleeping peacefully in his little crib, with one small fist buried in his cheek.
Mrs. Standish had come in and kissed him before she went out, the nurse said, and might have added, how she had cried, but did not dare.
He found some paper and scribbled a hasty note in pencil, begging her not to give people a chance to talk, and asking her to return for their child's sake. He sent it round to Mrs. Sharpe's by his own man, and told him to wait if needful till they returned home from the theatre (should they be out), and not to come back without an answer.
Then he took a cigar and strolled into the smoking-room, where he read for some time.
To do so needed some self-control, as he was miserably restless.
Eleven struck. He threw the paper away, and sat down at his writing table. He wrote half-a-dozen notes which had been neglected, and then idly began tracing patterns on the blotting pad. The phantoms had returned, the air of Freddie's latest song rang in his ears, and he remembered with a start another evening when he had waited for her, and she had come back from Hurlingham — as she had often done since.
Twelve, and his man at last.
" Mrs. Sharpe gave me this note, sir. She had been at the theatre. I waited till she came in, as you told me."
" And your mistress ? "
" I didn't see her, sir. Is that all, sir ? "
" Yes, you can go to bed."
He hurriedly tore open the envelope. His own, unopened, fell out. On an added piece of paper, in Ada Sharpe's bold handwriting, were the words.
" Dear Mr. Standish,
" Aimee isn't here. There must be some mistake. I haven't seen her since last night. I hope there is nothing wrong.
" Sincerely yours,
" Ada Sharpe."
He turned so sick at heart, that for a time he sat like a statue, with no movement, and no colour in his face ; he scarcely thought.
Then, very slowly, with a foreknowledge of what he was to find there, he went up to her room.
A MERE MAN 49
It lay on the dressing table, the white sheet of paper telling him that she had gone. With a cry of agony, he flung himself on the bed which they had shared, and buried his face in the pillows.
And the child started crying in the room above as if it knew that its little life was desolate indeed.
- # # # * * *
The next morning found Leonard standing outside the Chittys' door. He was told that Mrs. Chitty would see him, and he went upstairs. They were in curious contrast, he so pale and shaken, she so calm and un- moved.
" I suppose you — you've heard," he said.
" Yes." i " I came to ask you if I can be of any use ? "
" No thank you — none."
He looked at her brown eyes, with their womanly softness, and marvelled.
" I suppose you will institute proceedings for a divorce," he said.
The room was manly, like herself, and devoid of any useless luxury. She rose and went towards the fireplace, and her neat dress showed her superb figure to good advantage.
" The truth is, Mr. Standish," she said, " we are companions merely in misfortune, and I think we are better apart. You are powerless to aid me, and I — I regret it — am powerless to comfort you. You will probably get a divorce — it is the only thing for you to do — but I shall not."
" Not ! " he stammered.
She smiled, and he realized that there was something more powerful in that smile than in any other expression of her face.
" You may as well have the facts. Bernard has a hundred a year of his own. The rest of the money is mine. Had your wife any money?"
" None — but her settlements."
" I thought so. Well, in a short time I expect him home."
" But you can't mean that you will receive him ?"
The Australian laughed. " Not exactly with open arms, Mr. Standish, but I shall receive him all the same. I have no relations in Australia, and no real friends in England. I have no choice. But I don't appeal to your pity," she added quickly, " I appeal to no one's pity."
Leonard rose.
" I suppose you think my visit an intrusion, Mrs. Chitty?" he said.
So THE SAVOY
The light fell full on his boyish face, altered and drawn with misery. The Australian flushed crimson, and said in a voice that was full of a woman's caressing tenderness :
" You are one of those men who should never have had this to bear. I believe you would be good to a woman, and patient with her. I thought you weak, but I fancy you were only blind. Will you shake hands and say you forgive me ? "
He did not quite understand, but he knew there was something quaintly motherly in her action which amused him while it touched him.
" Of course, I'll shake hands," he said. "And if you ever happen to want aid in any little way, you'll send for me, won't you ? "
She hesitated, and then she said :
" Yes, if I ever do, I will. Good-bye."
Leonard found there was a lady waiting to see him when he got home. The day reminded him of the time after the funeral of his mother, years ago. It was crowded with events, and yet none of them mattered.
He went upstairs like a man who was very weary, and pushed open the drawing-room door.
Lady Jane came towards him with outstretched hands.
" Leonard, my poor boy ! " she said.
The words arrested him, and he felt a queer choking sensation in his throat.
" I say — don't — don't make me be a fool," he cried, " don't, please."
She drew back, and put a handkerchief to her lips.
" I can't forgive myself," she said. " Oh, if only I hadn't been such a coward. How you must hate me."
He stared at her, with a curious smile touching his lips.
" What on earth do you mean ? "
" That day when you came to me, oh, if only I had spoken out ! "
" Then you did know something," he said.
" I knew nothing for certain, but I had heard rumours, yes. Oh, Leonard, what must you think ? And I might have saved you all this."
The smile deepened.
" My dear Lady Jane, it really doesn't matter ; nothing matters now. How did you hear about — her ? "
" Mr. Franklin came round this morning. It seems Mr. Leighton met them at the station — he was seeing some friends off by the same train. I hardly know Mr. Franklin, but he seemed much worried over the whole thing.
A MERE MAN 5 i
and begged me to come and see you. He said, a man felt such a useless brute at such a time."
" That's so like Franklin," Leonard said. " He's one of the best chaps I know."
" We were going down to Folkestone to-morrow, I have taken a house there— — "
He interrupted : " I forgot you had been ill. Are you better ? "
" Oh, yes, thank you. But I want — and Harold wants — you to come to us. It will make me feel you forgive me, and we shall be quite quiet down there. It — it would be good for you to get away from London, and good for the child."
He started, and then laid his head down on his elbow on the mantelpiece.
" I will take great care of him, Leonard. Although I've never had a child, I know how to manage them well. You can trust him to my care."
He didn't answer.
" Any business you have to arrange can be done down there. We can talk it over together, we three."
He looked up suddenly.
" I — I am such a coward of the future," he said.
" Did you sleep last night ? "
" No- — nor the night before."
" I thought not. Now I'm going to take possession of you. Ring that bell near you, and give orders that the nurse is to be ready to go home with me in an hour — you must sleep in my house to-night."
" There is so much to do."
" Leave it to others. I insist on your giving in to me. Will you be with us by dinner-time ? "
" Yes, anything you like."
By-and-by he left her, and crept away upstairs, and shut himself into the bedroom.
The house was to be let, and he intended to leave his man behind to arrange everything. It seemed years since last night.
He pulled open the drawers, the masses of white under-linen, sweetly scented, met his view. He seized them in his arms, and bundled them into a large trunk. Then he went on to the gloves and handkerchiefs, the dainty silk petticoats, and the tiny boots and shoes. He came to the wardrobe in its turn, and fingered the soft dresses with a tender touch. In this, she had gone to the Paris races a year ago ; in this, she had driven beside him on the Yorkshire
D
52 THE SAVOY
moors ; and, lastly, he came upon a box full of sheeny satin, and his hands shook as he lifted it — her pretty wedding dress, with its trimming of old lace — and laid it among the others in the trunk.
He pulled a second box forward, and commenced filling that. The writing-table, a dainty Louis Quinze table, a wedding present, he came to in time. He broke it open, and carried the drawer full of papers to the fire he had caused to be lighted an hour before. In piling the letters on to the flames, he caught sight of one in Bernard's writing, and swore. He cursed himself for a fool, and rescued the rest. These might be useful in an action for divorce.
There were fourteen in all. He put them into a large envelope, and sealed it.
The day wore on. A few hours later he emerged, gave some orders, had his own portmanteau placed on a hansom, and drove away.
He entered Lady Jane's drawing-room, and greeted Harold, as he had entered and greeted them all his life.
There was no difference in him at dinner. He asked once after their young niece, May Egerton, and added, that she was the prettiest girl he had ever known ; and turned crimson when he had said it, remembering whom he had admired more. He affected not to notice that Lady Jane's eyes were miserably red, or that her manner, in her keen self-reproach, had changed towards himself. Left alone with her husband, the few short words on the subject they exchanged merely put discussion off till another time. He met the nurse in leaving the dining-room, and asked her carelessly if the child was all right.
" Yes, sir," she faltered, in her timid pity for him. " He's sleeping beau- tiful. I'm just going down to have my supper, sir."
" Thank you," he said, abruptly, and went upstairs.
" Where's Leonard ? " asked Lady Jane, as her husband entered the draw- ing-room alone.
" He's gone upstairs — I fancy, to see the boy. And I hope to God it will thoroughly upset him. The man's calm may be natural, but it's horrid to watch."
Lady Jane put her head down on her hands.
" Don't, don't," her husband pleaded, " he has the kid, you know, after all."
And he said it as only a childless man could have said it, as his weeping wife knew, -
A New Writer.
SAINT-GERMAIN-EN-LAYE
1887-1895
HROUGH the green boughs, I hardly saw thy face They twined so close ; the sun was in mine eyes ; And now the sullen trees in sombre lace, Stand bare beneath the sinister, sad skies.
O sun and summer ! Say, in what far night, The gold and green, the glory of thine head, Of bough and branch have fallen ? O, the white, Gaunt ghosts that flutter where thy feet have sped,
Across the terrace, that is desolate, But rang then with thy laughter : ghost of thee, That holds its shroud up with most delicate Dead fingers ; and, behind, the ghost of me,
Tripping fantastic with a mouth that jeers At roseal flowers of youth, the turbid streams Toss in derision down the barren years To Death, the Host of all our golden dreams.
Ernest Dovvson.
ROSA ALCHEMICA
i
FEW years ago an extraordinary religious frenzy took hold upon the peasantry of a remote Connemara headland ; and a number of eccentric men and women, who had turned an old custom-house into a kind of college, were surprised at prayer, as it was then believed, by a mob of fishermen, stone masons, and small farmers, and beaten to death with stones, which were heaped up close at hand to be ready for the next breach in the wave-battered pier. Vague rumours of pagan ceremonies and mysterious idolatries had for some time drifted among the cabins ; and the indignation of the ignorant had been further inflamed by a priest, unfrocked for drunkenness, who had preached at the road-side of the secret coming of the Antichrist. I first heard of these unfortunates, on whom the passion for universal ideas, which distinguishes the Celtic and Latin races, was to bring so dreadful a martyrdom, but a few weeks before the end ; and the change in my opinions which has made my writings so much less popular and intelligible, and driven me to the verge of taking the habit of St. Dominic, was brought about by the strange experiences I endured in their presence.
I had just published " Rosa Alchemica," a little work on the alchemists, somewhat in the manner of Sir Thomas Browne, and had received many letters from believers in the arcane sciences, upbraiding what they called my timidity, for they could not believe so evident sympathy but the sympathy of the artist, which is half pity, for everything which has moved men's hearts in any age. I had discovered, early in my researches, that their doctrine was no merely chemical phantasy but a philosophy they applied to the world, to the elements, and to man himself; and that they sought to fashion gold out of common metals merely as part of an universal transmutation of all things into some divine and imperishable substance ; and this enabled me to make my little book a fanciful reverie over the transmutation of life into art, and a cry of measureless desire for a world made wholly of essences.
I was sitting, dreaming of what I had written, in my house in one of the old parts of Dublin, a house my ancestors had made almost famous through
ROSA ALCHEMIC A 57
their part in the politics of the city, and their friendships with the famous men of their generations ; and was feeling an unwonted happiness at having at last accomplished a long cherished design, and made my rooms an expression of this favourite doctrine. The portraits, of more historical than artistic interest, had gone ; and old Flemish tapestry, full of the blue and bronze of peacocks, fell over the doors, and shut out all common history and all unbeautiful activity ; and now, I repeated to myself, when I looked at my Crivelli, and pondered on the rose in the hand of the Virgin, wherein the form was so delicate and precise that it seemed more like a thought than a flower, or at the gray dawn and rapturous faces of my Francesca, I knew all a Christian's ecstasy without his slavery to rule and custom ; when I pondered over the antique bronze gods and goddesses, which I had mortgaged my house to buy, I had all a pagan's delight in various beauty, and without his terror at sleepless destiny, and his labour with many sacrifices : and I had only to go to my book-shelf, where every book was bound in leather, stamped with intricate ornament, and of a carefully chosen colour ; Shakespeare in the orange of the glory of the world, Dante in the dull red of his anger, Milton in the blue-gray of his formal calm ; and I could experience what I would of human passions without their bitterness and with- out satiety. I had gathered about me all gods because I believed in none, and experienced every pleasure because I gave myself to none, but held myself apart, individual, indissoluble, a mirror of polished steel. I looked in the triumph of this imagination at the birds of Hera, glowing in the firelight as though they were wrought of jewels ; and to my mind, for which symbolism was a necessity, they seemed the door-keepers of my world, shutting out all that was not of as affluent a beauty as their own ; and for a moment I thought as I had thought in so many other moments, that it was possible to rob life of every bitterness except the bitterness of death ; and then a thought which had followed this thought, time after time, filled me with a passionate sorrow. All those forms ; that Madonna with her brooding purity, those rapturous faces singing in the morning light, those bronze divinities with their passionless dignity, those wild shapes rushing from despair to despair ; belonged to a divine world wherein I had no part ; and every experience, however profound, every perception, however exquisite, would bring me the bitter dream of a limitless energy I could never know ; and even in my most perfect moment I would be two selves, the one watching with heavy eyes the other's moment of content. I had heaped about me the gold born on the crucibles of others, but the supreme dream of the alchemists, the transmutation of the weary heart
58 THE SAVOY
into a weariless spirit, was as far from me as, I doubted not, it had been from them also. I turned to my last purchase, a set of alchemical apparatus, which, the dealer in the Rue le Peletier had assured me, once belonged to Raymond Lully, and, as I joined the alembic to the attianor, and laid the lavacrum marce at their side, I understood the alchemical doctrine, that all beings, divided from the great deep, where the spirits wander one and yet a multitude, are weary ; and sympathized, in the pride of my connoisseurship, with the consuming thirst for destruction which made the alchemists veil under his symbols of lions and dragons, of eagles and ravens, of dew and of nitre, a search for an essence which would dissolve all mortal things. I repeated to myself the ninth key of Basilius Valentinus, in which he compares the fire of the last day to the fire of an alchemist, and the world to an alchemist's furnace, and would have us know that all must be dissolved before the divine substance, material gold or immaterial ecstasy, awake. I had dissolved indeed the mortal world, and lived amid immortal essences, but had obtained no miraculous ecstasy. As I thought of these things, I drew aside the curtains and looked out into the darkness, and it seemed to my troubled fancy that all those little points of light filling the sky were the furnaces of innumerable divine alchemists, who labour continually, turning lead into gold, weariness into ecstasy, bodies into souls, the darkness into God ; and at their perfect labour, my mortality grew heavy, and I cried out, as so many dreamers and men of letters in our age have cried, for the birth of that elaborate spiritual beauty which could alone uplift souls weighted with so many dreams.
II
My reverie was broken by a loud knocking at the door, and I wondered the more at this because I had no visitors, and had bid my servants to do all things silently, lest they broke the dream of my inner life. Feeling a little curious, I resolved to go to the door myself, and, taking one of the silver candlesticks from the mantelpiece, began to descend the stairs. The servants appeared to be out, for though the sound poured through every corner and crevice of the house, there was no stir in the lower rooms. I remembered that my needs were so few, my part in life so little, that they had begun to come and go as they would, often leaving me alone for hours. The emptiness and silence of a world, from which I had driven everything but dreams, suddenly- overwhelmed me and I shuddered as I drew the bolt. I found before me Michael Robartes, whom I had not seen for years, and whose wild red hair,
ROSA ALCHEMJCA 59
fierce eyes, sensitive, tremulous lips and rough clothes, made him look now just as they used to do fifteen years before, something between a debauchee, a saint, and a peasant. He had recently come to Ireland, he said, and wished to see me on a matter of importance, indeed, the only matter of importance for him and me. His voice brought visibly before me our student years in Paris, and remembering a mesmeric power he had once possessed over me, a little fear mingled with much annoyance at this irrelevant intrusion, as I led the way up the wide staircase, where Swift had passed joking and railing, and Curran telling stories and quoting Greek in simpler days, before men's minds, subtilized and complicated by the romantic movement in art and literature, began to tremble on the verge of some unimagined revelation. I felt that my hand shook and saw that the light of the candle wavered and quivered more than it need have, upon the meanids on the old French panels, making them look like the first beings slowly shaping in the formless and void darkness. When the door had closed, and the peacock curtain, glimmering like many- coloured flame; fell between us and the world, I felt in a way I could not understand, that some singular and unexpected thing was about to happen. I went over to the mantelpiece and set the candlestick upon it, and finding that a little painted bowl from the workshop of Orazio Fontana, which I used for holding antique amulets, had fallen on its side, and poured out its contents, I lingered partly to collect my thoughts, and partly to gather the amulets into the bowl with that habitual reverence which seemed to me the due of things so long connected with secret hopes and terrors. When I turned I saw Robartes standing in the middle of the room and looking straight before him as though he saw some one or something I could not, and whispering to himself. He heard me move, and coming toward the fire, sat down and began gazing at the flame. I turned my chair towards him and sat down also and waited for him to speak. He watched the rising and falling of the flame for a moment and began.
" I have come to ask you that question which I asked you in the Cafe de la Paix, and which you left Paris rather than answer."
He had turned his eyes towards me and I saw them glitter in the firelight as I replied :
" You mean, will I become an initiate of your Order of the Alchemical Rose? I would not consent in Paris, when I was full of unsatisfied desire and now that I have at last fashioned my life according to my desire, am I likely to consent ? "
" You have changed greatly since then," he answered. " I have read your books, and now I see you among all these images, and I understand you
60 THE SAVOY
better than you do yourself, for I have been with many and many dreamers at the same cross ways. You have shut away the world and gathered the gods about you, and if you do not throw yourself at their feet, you will be always full of lassitude and of wavering purpose ; for a man must forget he is miserable in the bustle and noise of the multitude in this world and time, or seek a mystical union with the multitude who govern this world and time."
For a moment the room appeared to darken, as it used to do when he was about to perform some singular experiment, and in the darkness the peacocks upon the doors seemed to glow with a more intense colour. I cast off the illusion, which was, I believed, caused merely by memory, for I would not acknowledge that he could overcome my now mature intellect, and said :
" Even if I grant that I need a spiritual belief and some form of worship, why should I go to Eleusis, and not to Calvary ? " He leaned forward and began speaking with a slightly rhythmical intonation, and as he spoke I had to struggle again with the shadow ; as of some older night than the night of the sun ; which began to dim the light of the candles and to blot out the little gleams upon the corners of picture frames and on the bronze divinities, while it left the peacocks to glimmer and glow as though each separate colour were a living spirit. I had fallen into a profound dreamlike reverie, in which I heard him speaking as at a distance. " And yet there is no one who communes with only one god," he was saying, " and the more a man lives in imagination and in a refined understanding, the more gods does he meet with and talk with, and the more does he come under the power of Lear, and Hamlet, and Lancelot, and Faust, and Beatrice, and Quixote, divinities who took upon themselves spiritual bodies in the minds of the modern poets and romance-writers, and under the power of the old divinities, who, since the Renaissance, have won everything of their ancient worship except the sacrifice of birds and beasts and fishes, the fragrance of garlands and the -smoke of incense. The man}- think humanity made these divinities, and that it can unmake them again ; but we who have seen them pass in rattling harness, and in soft robes, and heard them speak with articulate voices while we lay in deathlike trance, know that they are always making and unmaking humanity, which is indeed but the trembling of their lips." He had stood up and begun to walk to and fro, and had become in my waking dream a shuttle weaving an immense web whose folds had begun to fill the room. The room seemed to have become inexplicably silent, as though all but the web and the weaving were at an end in the world. " They have come to us. They have come to us," the voice began, " all that have ever been in your reverie, all
ROSA ALCHEMICA 61
that you have met with in books. There is Lear, his beard still wet with the thunderstorm, and he laughs because you thought yourself an existence who are but a shadow, and him a shadow who is an eternal god ; and there is Beatrice, with her lips half-parted in a smile, as though all the stars were about to pass away in a sigh of love ; and there is the mother of that god of humility who cast so great a spell over men that they have tried to unpeople their hearts that he might reign alone, but she holds in her hand the rose whose every petal is a god ; and there, O ! swiftly she comes, is Aphrodite under a twilight falling from the wings of numberless sparrows, and about her feet are the gray and white doves." In the midst of my dream I saw him hold out his left arm and pass his right hand over it as though he stroked the wings of doves. I made a violent effort which seemed almost to tear me in two, and said with a forced determination, " Your philosophy is charming as a phantasy, but, carried to the point of belief, it is a supreme delusion, and, enforced by mesmeric glamour, a supreme crime. You would sweep me away into an indefinite world which fills me with terror ; and yet a man is great, just in so far as he can make his mind reflect everything with indifferent precision like a mirror." I seemed to be perfectly master of myself, and went on, but more rapidly, " I command you to leave me at once, for your ideas and your phantasies are but the illusions that eat the world like maggots ; they creep into civilizations when they decline, and into minds when they decay." I had grown suddenly angry, and, seizing the alembic from the table, was about to rise and fling it, when the peacocks on the door behind him appeared to grow immense ; and then the alembic fell from my fingers, and I was drowned in a tide of green and bronze feathers, and as I struggled hopelessly I heard his distant voice saying, " Our master, Avicenna, has written that all life proceeds out of corruption." The glittering feathers had now covered me completely, and I knew that I had struggled for hundreds of years and was conquered at last. I was sinking into the depth when the green and bronze that seemed to fill the world became a sea of flame and swept me away, and as I was swirled along I heard a voice over my head cry, " The mirror is broken in two pieces ; " and another voice answer, " The mirror is broken in four pieces," and a more distant voice cry with an exultant cry, " The mirror is broken into numberless pieces ; " and then a multitude of pale hands were reaching towards me and strange gentle faces bending above me, and half-wailing and half-caressing voices uttering words that were forgotten the moment they were spoken. I was being lifted out of the tide of flame, and felt my memories, my hopes, my thoughts, my will, everything I held to be myself, melting away ; then I seemed to rise through numberless companies of
62 THE SAVOY
beings who were, I understood, in some way more certain than thought ; each wrapped in his eternal moment, in the perfect lifting of an arm, in a little circlet of rhythmical words, in dreaming with dim eyes and half-closed eyelids : And then I passed beyond these forms, which were so beautiful they had almost ceased to be, and, having endured strange moods melancholy, as it seemed, with the weight of many worlds, I passed into that Death which is Beauty herself, and into this Loneliness which all the multitudes desire without ceasing. All things that had ever lived seemed to come and dwell in my heart and I in theirs ; and I had never again known mortality or tears, had I not suddenly fallen from the certainty of vision into the uncertainty of dream, and become a drop of molten gold falling with immense rapidity, through a night elaborate with stars, and all about me a melancholy exultant wailing. I fell and fell and fell, and then the wailing was but the wailing of the wind in the chimney, and I awoke to find myself leaning upon the table and supporting my head with my hands. I saw the alembic swaying from side to side in the dis- tant corner it had rolled to, and Robartes watching me and waiting. " I will go wherever you will," I said, " and do whatever you bid me, for I have been with eternal things." " I knew you could not help yourself," he replied, "but must need answer as you have answered, when I heard the storm begin. You must come to a great distance, for we were commanded to build our temple between the pure multitude of the waves and the impure multitude of men."
Ill I did not speak as we drove through the deserted streets, for my mind was curiously empty of familiar thoughts and experiences : it seemed to have been plucked out of the definite world and cast naked upon a shoreless sea. There were moments when the vision appeared on the point of returning, and I would half-remember with an ecstasy of joy or sorrow, crimes and heroisms, fortunes and misfortunes, or begin to contemplate with a sudden leaping of the heart, hopes and terrors, desires and ambitions, alien to my orderly and careful life ; and then I would awake shuddering at the thought that some great imponderable being had swept through my mind. It was, indeed, days before this feeling passed perfectly away, and even now when I have sought refuge in the only definite faith, I feel a great tolerance for those people with incoherent personalities, who gather in the chapels and meeting-places of certain obscure .sects, because I also have felt fixed habits and principles dissolving before a power, which was hysterica passio, or sheer madness, if you
ROSA ALCHEMIC A 63
will, but was so powerful in its melancholy exultation that I tremble lest it wake again and drive me from my new-found peace.
We were not long in the train before Michael Robartes was asleep, and, to my excited mind, his face, in which there was no sign of all that had so shaken me and that now kept me wakeful, was more like a mask than a face. The fancy possessed me that the man behind it had dissolved away like salt in water, and that it laughed and sighed, appealed and denounced, at the bidding of beings greater or less than man. " This is not Michael Robartes at all : Michael Robartes is dead ; dead for ten, for twenty years, perhaps," I kept repeating to myself. I fell at last into a feverish sleep, waking up from time to time when we rushed past some little town, its slated roofs shining with wet, or still lake gleaming in the cold morning light. I had been too preoccupied to ask where we were going, or to notice what tickets Michael Robartes had taken, but I knew now from the direction of the sun that we were going westward ; and presently 1 knew also, by the way in which the trees had grown into the semblance of tattered beggars flying with bent heads towards the east, that we were approaching the western coast. Then immediately I saw the sea between the low hills upon the right, its dull gray broken into white patches and lines.
When we left the train we had still, I found, some way to go, and set out buttoning our coats about us, for the wind was bitter and violent. Robartes was silent, seeming anxious to leave me to my thoughts ; and as we walked between the sea and the rocky side of a great promontory, I realized with a new perfection what a shock had been given to all my habits of thought and of feeling, if indeed some mysterious change had not taken place in the substance of my mind, for the gray waves, plumed with scudding foam, had grown part of a teeming, fantastic inner life, and when Robartes pointed to a square ancient-looking house, with a smaller and newer building under its lea, set out on the very end of a dilapidated and almost deserted pier, and said it was the temple of the alchemical rose, I was possessed with the phantasy that the sea, which kept covering it with showers of white foam, was claiming it as part of some indefinite and passionate life, which had begun to war upon our orderly and careful days, and was about to plunge the world into a night as obscure as that which followed the downfall of the classical world. One part of my mind mocked this phantastic terror, but the other ; the part that still lay half-plunged in vision ; listened to the clash of unknown armies, and shuddered at unimaginable fanaticisms, that hung in those gray, leaping waves.
Some half a mile to sea, and plunging its bowsprit under at every moment, and lifting it again dripping with foam, was a brown- sailed fishing yawl.
64 THE SAVOY
" A time will come for these people also," said Robartes, pointing towards the yawl, " and they will sacrifice a mullet to Artemis, or some other fish to some new divinity ; unless, indeed, their own divinities, the Dagda with his overflowing cauldron, Lu with his spear dipped in poppy juice, lest it rush forth hot for battle, Angus with the three birds on his shoulder, Bove Derg and his red swine-herd, and all the heroic children of Dana set up once more their temples of gray stone. Their reign has never ceased, but only waned in power a little, for the shee still pass in every wind, and dance and play at hurley, and fight their sudden battles in every hollow and on every hill ; but they cannot build their temples again till there have been martyrdoms and victories, and perhaps even that long-foretold battle in the Valley of the Black Pig."
Keeping close to the wall that went about the pier on the seaward side to escape the driving foam and the wind, which threatened every moment to lift us off our feet, we made our way in silence to the door of the square building. Robartes opened it with a key, on which I saw the rust of many salt winds, and led me along a bare passage and up an uncarpeted stair to a little room surrounded with bookshelves. A meal would be brought, but only of fruit, for I must submit to a tempered fast before the ceremony, he explained, and with it a book on the doctrine and method of the Order, over which I was to spend what remained of the winter daylight. He then left me, promising to return an hour before the ceremony. I began searching among the bookshelves, and found one of the most exhaustive alchemical libraries I have ever seen. There were the works of Morienus, who hid his immortal body under a shirt of hair- cloth ; of Avicenna, who was a drunkard, and yet controlled numberless legions of spirits; of Alfarabi, who put so many spirits into his lute that he could make men laugh, or weep, or fall in deathly trance, as he would ; of Lully, who transformed himself into the likeness of a red cock ; of Flamell, who with his wife Parnella achieved the elixir many hundreds of years ago, and is fabled to live still in Arabia among the dervishes ; and of many of a less fame. There were few mediaeval or modern mystics other than the alchemical ; and because, I had little doubt, of the devotion to one god of the greater number, and of the limited sense of beauty, which Robartes would hold its inevitable consequence ; but I did notice a complete set of facsimiles of the prophetical writings of William Blake, and probably because of the multitude that thronged his illumination, and were, as he delights to describe them, " like the gay fishes on the waves when the moon sucks up the dew." I noted also many poets and prose-writers of every age, but only those who
ROSA ALCHEMIC A 65
were a little weary of life, as indeed the greatest have been everywhere, and who have cast their imagination to us, as a something they needed no longer now that they were going up in their fiery chariots.
Presently I heard a tap at the door, and a woman came in and laid a little fruit upon the table. I judged that she had once been handsome, but her cheeks were hollowed by what I would have held, had I seen her anywhere else, an excitement of the flesh and a thirst for pleasure, but that was, I doubted not, an excitement of the imagination and a thirst for beauty. I asked her some question concerning the ceremony, but, getting no answer except a shake of the head, saw that I must await initiation in silence. When I had eaten she came again, and having laid a curious wrought bronze box on the table, lighted the candles, and took away the plates and the remnants. So soon as I was alone, I turned to the box, and found that the peacocks of Hera spread out their tails over the sides and lid, and against a background, on which were wrought great stars as though to affirm that the heavens were a part of their glory. In the box was a book bound in vellum, and having upon the vellum, and in very delicate colours and in gold, the alchemical rose, with many spears thrusting against it, but in vain, as was shown by the shattered golden points of those nearest. The book was written upon vellum, and in beautiful clear letters interspersed with symbolical pictures and illumi- nations, after the manner of the Splendor Solis. The first chapter described how six students, of whom all but one, who was of Cornish descent, were Western Irish, Western Scottish, or French, gave themselves separately to the study of alchemy, and solved, one the mystery of the Pelican, another the mystery of the green Dragon, another the mystery of the Eagle, another that of Salt and Mercury. What seemed a procession of accidents, but was, the book declared, a contrivance of preternatural powers, brought them together in the garden of an inn in the south of France, and while they talked together the thought came to them, that alchemy was the gradual distillation of the contents of the soul until they were ready to put off the mortal and put on the immortal. An owl passed rustling among the vine-leaves overhead, and then an old woman came, leaning upon a stick, and sitting close to them took up the thought where they had dropped it. Having expounded the whole principle of spiritual alchemy, and bid them found the Order of the Alchemical Rose, she passed from among them, and when they would have followed, was nowhere to be seen. They formed themselves into an order, holding their goods and making their researches in common, and, as they became perfect in the alchemical doctrine, apparitions came and went among them, and taught
66 THE SA VO Y
them more and more marvellous mysteries. The book then went on to expound so much of these as the neophyte was permitted to know, dealing at the outset and at considerable length with the independent reality of our thoughts, which was, it declared, the doctrine from which all true doctrines sprang. If you imagine, it said, the semblance of a living being, it is at once possessed by a wandering soul, and goes hither and thither working good or evil, until the moment of its death has come ; and gave many examples received, it said, from many gods : Eros had taught them how to fashion forms in which a divine soul could dwell, and whisper what they would into sleeping ears ; and Ate, forms from which demonic beings could pour madness, or unquiet dreams, into sleeping blood ; and Hermes, that if you powerfully imagined a hound at your bedside, it would keep watch there until you woke, and drive away all but the mightiest demons, but that if your imagina- tion was weakly, the hound would be weakly also, and the demons prevail, and the hound soon die ; and Aphrodite, that if you imagined a dove crowned with silver, and bade it flutter over your bed, its soft cooing would make sweet dreams of immortal love gather and brood over your mortal sleep. And all divinities alike had revealed with many warnings and lamentations that all minds are continually giving birth to such beings, and sending them forth to work health or disease, joy or madness. If you would give forms to the evil powers, it went on, you were to make them ugly, thrust- ing out a lip, with the thirsts of Life, or breaking the proportions of a body with the burdens of Life ; but the divine powers would only appear in beautiful shapes, which are but, as it were, shapes trembling out of existence, folding up into a timeless ecstasy, drifting, with half-shut eyes, into a sleepy stillness. The bodiless souls who descended into these forms were what men call the moods, and worked all great changes in the world ; for just as the magician or the artist could call them when he would, so they could call out of the mind of the magician or the artist, or if they were demons, out of the mind of the mad or the ignoble, what shape they would, and through its voice and its gesture pour themselves out upon the world. In this way all great events were accomplished : a mood, a divinity or a demon, first descending like a faint sigh into men's minds, and then changing their thoughts and their actions until hair that was yellow had grown black, or hair that was black had grown yellow, or cities crumbled away and new cities arisen in their places, and empires moved their border as though they were but drifts of leaves. I remembered, as I read, that mood which Edgar Poe found in a wine-cup, and how it passed into France and took possession of Baudelaire, and from Baudelaire passed to England and the
ROSA ALCHEMIC A 67
Pre-Raphaelites, and then again returned to France, and still wanders the world, enlarging its power as it goes, awaiting the time when it shall be, perhaps, alone, or, with other moods, master over a great new religion, and an awakener of the fanatical wars that hovered in the gray surges, and forget the wine-cup where it was born. The rest of the book contained symbols of form, and sound, and colour, and their attribution to divinities and demons, so that the initiate might fashion a shape for any divinity or any demon, and be as powerful as Avicenna among those who live among the roots of tears and laughter.
IV
A couple of hours after sunset Robartes returned and told me that I would have to learn the steps of an exceedingly antique pantomimic dance, because before my initiation could be perfected I had to join three times in a magical dance ; rhythm being the circle of Eternity, on which alone the transient and accidental could be broken, and the spirit set free. I found that the steps, which were simple enough, resembled certain antique Greek dances, and having been a good dancer in my youth and the master of many curious Gaelic steps, I soon had them in my memory. He then robed me and himself in a costume which suggested by its shape both Greece and Egypt, but by its crimson colour a more passionate life than theirs ; and having put into my hands a little chainless censer of bronze, wrought into the likeness of a rose, by some modern craftsman, he told me to open a small door opposite to the door by which I had entered. I put my hand to the handle, but the moment I did so the fumes of the incense, helped perhaps by his mysterious glamour, made me fall again into a dream, in which I seemed to be a mask, lying on the counter of a little Eastern shop. Many persons, with eyes so bright and still that I knew them for more than human, came in and tried me on their faces, but at last flung me into a corner with a little laughter ; but all this passed in a moment, for when I awoke my hand was still upon the handle. I opened the door, and found myself in a marvellous passage, along whose sides were many divinities wrought in a mosaic not less beautiful than the mosaic in the Baptistery at Ravenna, but of a less severe beauty ; the predominant colour of each, which was surely symbolic, being repeated in the lamps that hung from the ceiling, a curiously-scented lamp before each divinity. I passed on, marvelling exceed- ingly how these enthusiasts could have created all this beauty in so remote a place, and half persuaded to believe in a material alchemy, by the sight of so
68 THE SAVOY
much hidden mysterious wealth, the censer filling the air, as I passed, with smoke of ever-changing colour. I stopped before a door on whose bronze panels were wrought great waves in whose shadow were faint suggestions of terrible faces. Those beyond it seemed to have heard our steps, for a voice cried : " Is the work of the Incorruptible Fire at an end ? " and immediately Robartes answered : " The perfect gold has come from the Athanor." The door swung open and we were in a great circular room, and among men and women who were dancing slowly in crimson robes. Upon the ceiling was an immense rose wrought in mosaic, and about the walls, also in mosaic, a battle of gods and angels, the gods glimmering like rubies and sapphires, and the angels of the one grayness, because, as Robartes whispered, they had renounced their divinity, and turned from the unfolding of their separate hearts, out of love for a God of humility and sorrow. Pillars supported the roof and made a kind of circular cloister, each pillar being a column of confused shapes, divinities, it seemed, of the winds, who rose as in a whirling dance of more than human vehemence, and playing upon pipes and cymbals ; and from among these shapes were thrust out hands, and in these hands were censers. I was bid place my censer also in a hand and take my place and dance, and as I turned from the pillars towards the dancers, I saw that the floor was of a green stone, and that a pale Christ on a pale cross was wrought in the midst. I asked Robartes the meaning of this, and was told that they desired " To trouble His unity with their multitudinous feet." The dance wound in and out, tracing upon the floor the shapes of petals that copied the petals in the rose overhead, and to the sound of hidden instruments, which were perhaps of an antique pattern, for I have never heard the like ; and every moment the dance was more passionate, until all the winds of the world seemed to have awakened under our feet. After a little I had grown weary, and stood by a pillar watching the coming and going of those flame-like figures ; until gradually I sank into a half dream, from which I was awakened by seeing the petals of the great rose, which had no longer the look of mosaic, falling slowly through the incense heavy air, and as they fell shaping into the likeness of living beings of an extraordinary beauty. Still faint and cloud-like, they began to dance, and as they danced took a more and more definite shape, so that I was able to distinguish beautiful Grecian faces and august Egyptian faces, and now and again to name a divinity by the staff in his hand or by a bird fluttering over his head ; and soon every mortal foot danced by the white foot of an immortal ; and in the troubled eyes that looked into untroubled shadowy eyes, I saw the brightness of uttermost desire, as though they had found at length, after unreckonable wandering, the lost love
ROSA ALCHEMIC A 69
of their youth. Sometimes, but only for a moment, I saw a faint solitary figure with a veiled face, and carrying a faint torch, flit among the dancers, but like a dream within a dream, like a shadow of a shadow, and I knew, by an understanding born from a deeper fountain than thought, that it was Eros himself, and that his face was veiled because no man or woman from the beginning of the world has ever known what Love is or looked into his eyes ; for Eros alone of divinities is altogether a spirit ; and hides in passions not of his essence, if he would commune with a mortal heart. So that if a man love nobly he knows Love through infinite pity, unspeakable trust, unending sympathy ; and if ignobly, through vehement jealousy, sudden hatred, and unappeasable desire; but unveiled Love he never knows. While I thought these things, a voice cried to me from the crimson figures, " Into the dance, there is none that can be spared out of the dance ; into the dance, into the dance, that the gods may make them bodies out of the substance of our hearts ; " and before I could answer, a mysterious wave of passion, that seemed like the soul of the dance moving within our souls, took hold of me and I was swept, neither consenting nor refusing, into the midst. I was dancing with an immortal august woman, who had black lilies in her hair, and her dreamy gesture seemed laden with a wisdom more profound than the darkness that is between star and star, and with a love like the love that breathed upon the waters ; and as we danced on and on, the incense drifted over us and round us, covering us away as in the heart of the world, and ages seemed to pass, and tempests to awake and perish in the folds of our robes and in her heavy hair.
Suddenly I remembered that her eyelids had never quivered and that her lilies had not dropped a black petal, or shaken from their places, and under- stood with a great horror that I danced with one who was more or less than human, and who was drinking up my soul as an ox drinks up a wayside pool, and I fell, and darkness passed over me.
V When I awoke I was lying on a roughly painted floor, and on the ceiling, which was at no great distance, was a roughly painted rose, and about me on the wall a half-finished painting. The pillars and the censers had gone ; and about me, wrapped in disordered robes, lay a score of sleepers, their upturned faces looking to my imagination like hollow masks ; and a chill dawn was shining down upon them, from a long window I had not noticed before ; and outside the sea roared angrily. I saw Michael Robartes lying at
E
70 THE SAVOY
a little distance, and beside him an overset bowl of wrought bronze which looked as though it had once held incense.
I had no thought but to get away, and to forget all. The door of the room opened with a push, and hurrying along the passage, where the bare boards clattered under my feet, I found the front door by the light of a single oil lamp, that hung from the ceiling, mingling its yellow flame with the morning light. I hurried along the pier, between brown nets and old spars, the spray driving in my face ; but had not gone far before I met a group of stonemasons going to their morning work. They went a few yards past me and then one of them, an old man with iron-gray hair, turned and cried : " Idolater, idolater, go back to your she dhoules, go down to hell with your she dhoules ! " I scarcely heard them, for other voices were in my ears. Voices uttering reproaches that were forgotten the moment they were spoken, as a dream is forgotten on waking.
From that day I have never failed to carry the rosary about my neck, and whenever the indefinite world, which has but half lost its empire over my heart and my intellect, though my conscience and my soul are free, is about to claim a new mastery, I press the cross to my heart and say : " He whose name is legion is at our doors, deceiving our intellects with subtlety and flattering our hearts with beauty, so that we have no trust but in Thee." And then the war that wages within me at all other times is still and I am at peace.
W. B. Yeats.
Three Visions
by
William T. Horton
They have sharpened their tongues like a serpent ; adders' poison is under
their lips."— Psalm cxl. 3.
" Giving heed to seducing spirits." — I Timothy, iv. i.
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' Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto lite, and few there be that find it." — Matthew, vii. 14.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
i
OR some years the name of Friedrich Nietzsche has been the war-cry of opposing factions in Germany. It is not easy to take up a German periodical without finding some trace of the passionate admiration or denunciation which this man has called forth. If we turn to Scandinavia or to France, whither his fame and his work are now also penetrating, we find that the same results have followed. And we may expect a similar out- burst in England now that a complete translation of his works has begun to appear. At present, however, I know of no attempt to deal with Nietzsche from the British point of view, and that is my excuse for trying to define his personality and influence. I do not come forward as the champion either of Nietzschianism or Anti-Nietzschianism. It appears to me that any human individuality that has strongly aroused the love and hatred of men must be far too complex for absolute condemnation, or absolute approval. Apart from praise or blame, which seem here alike impertinent, Nietzsche is without doubt an extraordinarily interesting figure. He is the modern incar- nation of that image of intellectual pride which Marlowe created in Faustus. A man who has certainly stood at the finest summit of modern culture, who has thence made the most determined effort ever made to destroy modern morals, and who now leads a life as near to death as any life outside the grave can be, must needs be a tragic figure. It is a figure full of significance, for it represents, perhaps, the greatest spiritual force which has appeared since Goethe, full of interest also to the psychologist, and surely not without its pathos, perhaps its horror, for the man in the street.
It is only within the last year that it has become possible to study Nietzsche's life-history. For a considerable period his early home at Naumberg has been the receptacle of Nietzsche archives of all kinds, and now his sister, Elizabeth Forster- Nietzsche, has utilized this copious material in the production of an authoritative biography. This sister is herself a remarkable
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person ; for many years she lived in close association with her brother so that she was supposed, though without reason, to have exerted an influence over his thought ; then she married Dr. Forster, the founder of the Xew Germany colony in Paraguay ; on his death she returned home to write the history of the colony, and has since devoted herself to the care of her brother and his fame. Only the first volume of the Leben Nietzsclie's has yet appeared, but it enables us to trace his development to adult life and throws light on his whole career.
Nietzsche belonged to a noble Polish family called Nietzky, who on account of strong Protestant convictions abandoned their country and their title during the eighteenth century and settled in Germany. Notwithstanding the large amount of German blood in his veins, he always regarded himself as essentially a Pole. The Poles seemed to him the best endowed and most knightly of Slavonic peoples, and he once remarked that it was only by virtue of a strong mixture of Slavonic blood that the Germans entered the ranks of gifted nations. He termed the Polish Chopin the deliverer of music from German heaviness and stupidity, and when he speaks of another Pole, Copernicus, who reversed the judgment of the whole world, one may divine a reference to what in later years Nietzsche regarded as his own mission. In adult life Nietzsche's keen and strongly marked features were distinctly Polish, and when abroad he was frequently greeted by Poles as a fellow- countryman ; at Sorrento, where he once spent a winter, the country people called him II Polacco.
Like Emerson (to whose writings he was strongly attracted throughout life) and many another strenuous philosophic revolutionary, Nietzsche came of a long race of Christian ministers. On both sides his ancestors were preachers, and from first to last the preacher's fervour was in his own blood. The eldest of three children (of whom one died in infancy), Friedrich Nietzsche was born in 1844 at Rocken, near Liitzen, in Saxony. His father — who shortly after his son's birth fell down the parsonage steps, injuring his head so severely that he died within twelve months — is described as a man of noble and poetic nature, with a special talent for music, inherited by his son ; he belonged to a large and very healthy family who mostly lived to extreme old age, preserving their mental and physical vigour to the last The Nietzsches were a proud, sincere folk, very clannish, looking askance at all who were not Nietzsches. Nietzsche's mother, said to be a charming woman and possessed of much physical vigour, was again a clergy- man's daughter. The Oehler family, to which she belonged, was also very
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large, very health)-, and very long-lived ; she was only eighteen at her son's birth, and is still alive to care for him in his complete mental decay. I note these facts, which are given with much precision and detail in the biography, because they certainly help us to understand Nietzsche. It is evident that he is no frail hectic flame of a degenerating race. There seems to be no trace of insanity or nervous disorder at any point in the family history, as far back as it is possible to go. On the contrary, he belonged to extremely vigorous stocks, possessing unusual moral and physical force, people of " character." A similar condition of things is not seldom found in the history of genius. In such a case the machine is, as it were, too highly charged with inherited energy, and works at a pressure which ultimately brings it to perdition. All genius must work without rest, it cannot do otherwise ; only the most happily constituted genius works without haste.
The sister's account of the children's early life is a very charming part of this record, and one which in the nature of things rarely finds place in a biography. She describes her first memories of the boy's pretty face, his long fair hair, and large, dark, serious eyes. He could not speak until he was nearly three years old, but at four he began to read and write. He was a quiet, rather obstinate child, with fits of passion which he learnt to control at a very early age ; his self-control became so great that, as a boy, on more than one occasion he deliberately burnt his hand, to show that Mucius Scaevola's act was but a trifling matter.
The widowed mother went with her children to settle at Naumberg on the Saale with her husband's mother, a woman of fine character with views of her own, one of which was that children of all classes should first be brought up together. Little Fritz was therefore sent to the town school, but the experiment was not altogether successful. He was a serious child, fond of solitude, and was called " the little parson " by his comrades. " The funda- mental note of his disposition," writes a schoolfellow in after life, " was a certain melancholy which expressed itself in his whole being." He avoided his fellows and sought beautiful scenery, as he continued to do throughout life. At the same time he was a well-developed, vigorous boy, who loved games of various kinds, especially those of his own invention. But although the children lived to the full the fantastic life of childhood, the sister regretfully confesses that they remained models of propriety. Fritz was " a very pious child ; he thought much about religious matters and was always concerned to put his thoughts into practice." It is curious that, notwithstanding his instinctive sympathy with the Greek spirit and his philological aptitudes, he found Greek specially
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difficult to learn. At the age of ten appeared his taste for verse-making, and also for music, and he soon began to show that inherited gift for improvisation by which he was always able to hold his audience spell-bound, Even as a boy the future moralist made a deep impression on those who knew him, and he even reminded one person of the youthful Jesus in the Temple. " We Nietzsches hate lies," an aunt was accustomed to say ; in Friedrich sincerity was a very deep-rooted trait, and he exercised an involuntary educational influence on those who came near him.
In 1858 a place was found for him at Pforta, a remarkable school of almost military discipline. Here many of the lines of his future activity were definitely laid down. At an even earlier date, excited by the influence of Humboldt, he had been fascinated by the ideal of universal culture, and at Pforta his intel- lectual energies began to expand. Here also, in 1859, when a pianoforte edition of " Tristan " was first published, Nietzsche became an enthusiastic Wagnerian, and "Tristan" always remained for him music par excellence ; he was also attracted to Berlioz. Here, too, he began those philological studies which led some years later to a professorship. He turned to philology, how- ever, as he himself recognized, because of the need he felt to anchor himself to some cool logical study which would not grip his heart like the restless and exciting artistic instincts which had hitherto chiefly moved him. During the latter part of his stay at this very strenuous educational establishment young Nietzsche was a less brilliant pupil than during the earlier part His own individuality was silently growing beneath the disciplinary pressure which would have dwarfed a less vigorous individuality. His philosophic aptitudes began to develop and take form ; he wished also to devote himself to music ; and he pined at the confinement, longing for the forest and the woodman's axe. It was the beginning of a long struggle between the impulses of his own self-centred nature and the duties imposed from without, by the school, the university, and, later, his professorship ; he always strove to broaden and deepen these duties to the scope of his own nature, but the struggle remained. It was the immediate result of this double strain that, during 1862, strong and healthy as the youth appeared, he began to suffer from headaches and eye- troubles, cured by temporary removal from the school. He remained extremely short-sighted, and it was only by an absurd error in the routine examination that in later years he was passed for military service in the artillery.
In the following year, 1863, Nietzsche met, and was for a while attracted by, a schoolfellow's sister, an ethereal little Berlin girl, who appealed to " the large, broad-shouldered, shy, rather solemn and stiff youth." To this early
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experience, which never went beyond poetic schwdrmerei, his sister is inclined to trace the origin of Nietzsche's view of women as very fragile, tender little buds. The experience is also interesting because it appears to stand alone in his life. We strike here on an organic abnormality in this congenital philosopher. Nietzsche's attitude was not the crude misogyny of Schopenhauer, who knew women chiefly as women of the streets. Nietzsche knew many of the finest women of his time, and he sometimes speaks with insight and sympathy of the world as it appears to women ; but there was clearly nothing in him to answer to any appeal to passion, and his attitude is well summed up in an aphorism of his own " Zarathustra " : " It is better to fall into the hands of a murderer than into the dreams of an ardent woman." " All his life long," his sister writes, " my brother remained completely apart from either great passion or vulgar love. His whole passion lay in the world of knowledge ; only very temperate emotions remained over for anything else. In later life he was grieved that he had never attained to amour passion, and that every inclination to a feminine personality quickly changed to a tender friendship, however fascinatingly pretty the fair one might be." He would expend much sympathy on unhappy lovers, yet he would shake his head, saying to himself or others : " And all that over a little girl ! "
Young Nietzsche left Pforta, in 1863, with the most various and incompatible scientific tastes and interests (always excepting in mathematics, for which he never possessed any aptitude), but, as he himself remarked, none that would fit him for any career. One point in regard to the termination of his school- life is noteworthy : he chose Theognis as the subject of his valedictory dissertation. His meditations on this moralist and aristocrat, so contemptuous of popular rule, may have served as the foundation of some of his own later views on Greek culture. In 1864 he became a student at Bonn, and the year that followed was of special import in his inner development ; he finally threw off the beliefs of his early youth ; he discovered his keen critical faculty ; and his self-contained independence became a visible mark of his character, though always disguised by his amiable and courteous manners. At Bonn his life seems to have been fairly happy, though he was by no means a typical German student. He spent much money, but it was chiefly on his artistic tastes — music and the theatre — or on little tours. No one could spend less on eating and drinking ; like Goethe and like Heine, he had no love of smoking and drinking, and he was repelled by the thick, beery good-humour of the German student. People who drink beer and smoke pipes every evening, he always held, were incapable of understanding his philosophy ; for
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they could not possibly possess the clarity of mind needed to grasp any delicate or complex intellectual problem. He returned home from Bonn "a picture of health and strength, broad-shouldered, brown, with rather fair thick hair, and exactly the same height as Goethe ; " and then went to continue his studies at Leipzig.
Notwithstanding the youth's efforts to subdue his emotional and aesthetic restlessness by cool and hard work, he was clearly tortured by the effort to find a philosophic home for himself in the world. This effort absorbed him all day long, frequently nearly all the night. At this time he chanced to take up on a bookstall a totally unknown work, entitled " Der Welt als Wille und Vorstellung ; " in obedience to an unusual impulse he bought the book without consideration, and from that moment began an acquaintance with Schopen- hauer which for many years exerted a deep influence on his life. At that time, probably, he could have had no better guide into paths of peace ; but even as a student he was a keen critic of Schopenhauer's system, valuing him chiefly as, in opposition to Kant, " the philosopher of a re-awakened classical period, a Germanized Hellenism." Schumann's music and long solitary walks aided in the work of recuperation. A year or two later Nietzsche met the other great god who shared with Schopenhauer his early worship. " I cannot bring my heart to any degree of critical coolness before this music," he wrote, in 1868, after listening to the overture to the "Meistersingers" ; "every fibre and nerve in me thrills ; it is a long time since I have been so carried away." I quote these words, for we shall, I think, find later that they have their significance. A few weeks afterwards he was invited to meet the master, and thus began a relationship that for Nietzsche was fateful.
Meanwhile his philological studies were bringing him distinction. A lecture on Theognis was pronounced by Ritschl to be the best work by a student of Nietzsche's standing that he had ever met with. Then followed investigations into the sources of Suidas, a lengthy examination De fontibus Diogenis Laertii, and palaeographic studies in connection with Terence, Statius, and Orosius. He was now also consciously perfecting his German style, treating language, he remarks, as a musical instrument on which one must be able to improvise, as well as play what is merely learnt by heart. In 1869, when only in his twenty-sixth year, and before he had taken his doctor's degree, he accepted the chair of classical philology at Basel. He was certainly, as he himself said, not a born philologist. He had devoted himself to philology — I wish to insist on this significant point — as a sedative and tonic to his restless energy ; in this he was doubtless wise, though his sister
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seems to suggest that he thereby increased his mental strain. But he had no real vocation for philology, and it is curious that when the Basel chair was offered to him he was proposing to himself to throw aside philology for chemistry. Philologists, he declares again and again, are but factory hands in the service of science. At the best philology is a waste of acuteness, since it merely enables us to state facts which the study of the present would teach us much more swiftly and surely. Thus it was that he instinctively broadened and deepened ever}- philological question he took up, making it a channel for philosophy and morals. With his specifically philological work we are not further concerned.
I have been careful to present the main facts in Nietzsche's early develop- ment because they seem to me to throw light on the whole of his later development. So far he had published nothing except in philological journals. In 1872, after he had settled at Basel, 1 appeared his first work, an essay entitled " Die Geburt der Tragodie aus dem Geiste der Musik," dedicated to Wagner. The conception of this essay was academic, but in Nietzsche's hands the origin of tragedy became merely the text for an exposition of his own philosophy of art at this period. He traces two art impulses in ancient Greece : one, starting in the phenomena of dreaming, which he associates with Apollo ; the other, starting in the phenomena of intoxication, associated with Dionysos, and through singing, music and dithyramb leading up to the lyric. The union of these, which both imply a pessimistic view of life, produced folk- song and finally tragedy, which is thus the outcome of Dionysiac music fertilized by Apollonian imagery. Socrates the optimist, with his views concerning virtue as knowledge, vice as ignorance, and his identification of virtue with happiness, led to the decay of tragedy and the triumph of Alexandrian culture, in the net of which the whole modern world is still held. Now, however, German music is producing a new birth of tragedy through Wagner, who has again united music and myth, and inaugurated an era of German art culture. This remarkable essay produced considerable con- troversy. It is characteristic of Nietzsche's first period, as we may call all he wrote before 1876, in its insistence on the all-importance of aesthetic as opposed to intellectual culture ; and it is characteristic of his whole work in its grip of the connection between the problems and solutions of Hellenic times and the problems and solutions of the modern world. For Nietzsche the
With the migration to Basel the " Leben Nietzsche's" at present ends; and I am, therefore, forced to rely on more fragmentary data in outlining the following years of Nietzsche's life.
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Greek world was not the model of beautiful mediocrity imagined by Winckel- mann and Goethe, nor did it date from the era of rhetorical idealism in- augurated by Plato. The real Hellenic world came earlier, and the true Hellenes were sturdy realists enamoured of life, reverencing all its manifesta- tions and returns, and holding in highest honour that sexual symbol of life which Christianity, with its denial of life, despises. Plato Nietzsche hated ; he had wandered from all the fundamental instincts of the Hellene. His childish dialectics can only appeal, Nietzsche said, to those who are ignor- ant of the French masters like Fontenelle. The best cure for Plato, he held, is Thucydides,the last of the old Hellenes who were brave in the face of reality ; Plato fled from reality into the ideal and was a Christian before his time.
Between 1873 and 1876 Nietzsche wrote four essays — on David Strauss, the Use and Abuse of History in relation to Life, Schopenhauer as an Educator, and Richard Wagner — which were collectively published as " Unzeitgemasse Betrachtungen." If in his first essay Nietzsche may seem to appear as the champion of the modern Teuton, it was for the first and last time. He made ample amends in the essay on Strauss. That essay was written soon after the great war, amid the resulting outburst of flamboyant patriotism and the widely-expressed conviction that the war was a victory of " German culture." Fresh from the world of Greece, Nietzsche pours contempt on that assumption. Culture, he says, is, above all, unity of artistic style in every expression of a people's life. The exuberance of knowledge in which a German glories is neither a necessary means of culture nor a sign of it, being, indeed, more allied to the opposite of culture — to barbarism. It is in this barbarism that the modern German lives, that is to say, in a chaotic mixture of all styles. Look at his clothing, Nietzsche continues, his houses, his streets, all his manners and customs. They are a turmoil of all styles in which he peacefully lives and moves. Such culture is really a phlegmatic absence of all sense of culture. Largely, also, it is merely a bad imitation of the real and productive culture of France which it is supposed to have conquered in 1870. Let there be no chatter, he concludes, about the triumph of German culture, for at present no real German culture exists. The heroic figures of the German past were not " classics," as some imagine ; they were seekers after a genuine German culture, and so regarded themselves. The would-be children of culture in Germany to-day are Philistines without knowing it, and the only unity they have achieved is a methodical barbarism. Nietzsche attacks Strauss by no means as a theologian, but as a typical culture-Philistine. He was moved to this by the recent publication of " Der
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Alte und der Neue Glaubc." I can well understand the emotions with which that book filled him, for I, too, read it soon after its publication, and can well recall the painful impression made on me by its homely pedestrianism, the dull lack of imagination of the man who could only compare the world to a piece of machinery, an engine that creaks in the working, a sort of vast Lancashire mill in which we must spend every moment in feverish labour, and for our trouble perhaps be caught between the wheels and cogs. But I was young, and my youthful idealism, eager for some vital and passionate picture of the world, inevitably revolted against so tawdry and mechanical a conception. Nietzsche, then and ever, failed to perceive that there is room, after all, for the modest sturdy bourgeois labourer who, at the end of a hard life in the service of truth, sits down to enjoy his brown beer and Haydn's quartettes, and to repeat his homely confession of faith in the world as he sees it. Nietzsche failed to realize that Strauss's limitations were essential to the work he had to do, and that he remained a not unworthy follower of those German heroes who were not " classics," but honest seekers after the highest they knew. In this hypertrophied repulsion for the everyday bourgeois work of the intellectual world we touch on a defect in Nietzsche's temperament which we must regard as congenital, and which wrought in him at last to wildest issues.
In another of these essays, "Schopenhauer als Erzieher," Nietzsche sets forth his opinions concerning his early master in philosophy. It is a significant indication of the qualities that attracted him to Schopenhauer that he compares him to Montaigne, thus at once revealing his own fundamental optimism, and the admiration which he then and always felt for the great French masters of wisdom. He regards Schopenhauer as the leader from Kant's caves of critical scepticism to the open sky with its consoling stars. Schopenhauer saw the world as a whole, and was not befooled by the analysis of the colours and canvas wherewith the picture is painted. Kant, in spite of the impulse of his genius, never became a philosopher. " If anyone thinks I am thus doing Kant an injustice, he cannot know what a philosopher is, i&., not merely a great thinker but also a real man ; " and he goes on to explain that the mere scholar who is accustomed to let opinions, ideas, and things in books always intervene between him and facts, will never see facts, and will never be a fact to himself; whereas the philosopher must regard himself as the symbol and abbreviation of all the facts of the world. It remained always an axiom with Nietzsche that the philosopher must first of all be a "real nun."
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In this essay also Nietzsche first expressed his conception of the value of individuality. Shakespeare had asked :
" Which can say more Than this rich praise, that you alone are you?"
But Shakespeare was only addressing a single beloved friend. Nietzsche addresses the same thought to the common " you." " At bottom every man well knows that he can only live one single life in the world, and that never again will so strange a chance shake together into unity such singularly varied elements as he holds : he knows that, but he hides it like a bad conscience." This was a sane and democratic individualism ; in later years, as we shall see, it assumed stranger shapes.
The essay on Wagner starts from the standpoint reached in the previous essays. There is a deep analogy for those to whom distance is no obscuring cloud, he remarks, between Kant and the Eleatics, Schopenhauer and Empedocles, yEschylus and Wagner. " The world has been orientalised long enough, and men now seek to be hellenised." The Gordian knot has been cut and its strands are fluttering to the ends of the world ; we need a series of Anti-Alexanders mighty enough to bring together the scattered threads of life. Wagner is such an Anti-Alexander, a great astringent force in the world. For "it is not possible to present the highest and purest operations of dramatic art, and not therewith to renew morals and the state, education and affairs." Bayreuth is the sacred consecration on the morning of battle. " The battles which art brings before us are a simplification of the actual battles of life ; its problems are an abbreviation of the endlessly involved reckoning of human action and aspiration. But herein lies the greatness and value of art, that it calls forth the appearance of a simpler world, a shorter solution of the problems of life. No one who suffers in life can dispense with that appearance, just as no one can dispense with sleep." Wagner has simplified the world ; he has related music to life, the drama to music ; he has intensified the visible things of the world, and made the audible visible. Just as Goethe found in poetry an expression for the painter's vocation he had missed, so Wagner utilized in music his dramatic instinct. And Nietzsche further notes the democratic nature of Wagner's art, so strenuously warm and bright as to reach even the lowliest in spirit. Wagner takes off the stigma that clings to the word " common," and brings to all the means of attaining spiritual freedom. " For," says Nietzsche, " whosoever will be free, must make himself free ; freedom is no fairy's gift to fall into any man's lap." Such are
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the leading thoughts in an essay which remains an interesting philosophic appreciation of the place of Wagner's art in the modern world.
" Richard Wagner in Bayreuth " brings to an end Nietzsche's first period, and may itself be said to lead up to the crash which inaugurated his later period. Hitherto Nietzsche's work was unquestionably sane both in substance and form. No doubt it had aroused much criticism ; work so vigorous, sincere, and independent could not fail to arouse hostility. But as we look back to-day, these fine essays represent, with much youthful enthusiasm, the best that was known and thought in Germany a quarter of a century ago. Nietzsche's opinions on Wagner and Schopenhauer, on individualism and democracy, the significance of early Hellenism for moderns, the danger of an excessive historical sense, the conception of culture less as a striving after intellectual knowledge than as that which arouses within us the philosopher, the artist, and the saint — all these ideas, wild as some of them seemed to Nietzsche's German contemporaries, are the ideas which have now largely permeated European culture. The same cannot be said of his later ideas. •
It was at the first Bayreuth festival in 1876 that this chapter in Nietzsche's life was finally closed. Many strange theories have been put forward to account for the change that then came over him. They may be thrust aside. No mere disappointment with the festival, or with " Parsifal," or with Wagner's growing conservatism, no mere offence to Nietzsche's own amour-propre, suffice to explain so radical an upheaval. The change was more fundamental. The excitement of the festival merely precipitated an organic catastrophe towards which he had long been tending. I have already noted passages which indicate that he was himself aware of a consuming flame within, and that from time to time he made efforts to check its ravages. That it was this internal flame which really produced the breakdown is shown by the narrative of Nietzsche's friend, Dr. Kretzer, who was with him at Bayreuth. It was evident he was seriously ill, Kretzer tells us, utterly changed and broken down. His eye-troubles were associated, if not with actual brain disease, at all events with a high degree of neurasthenia, and the physical effect of the performance was so overwhelming that he was only able to be present at a few scenes of the " Nibelungen." At Bayreuth, Nietzsche was forced to realize the peril of his position as he had never realized it before. He could no longer disguise from himself that he must break with all the passionate interests of his past. It was an essential measure of hygiene, almost a surgical operation. This is indeed how he has himself put the matter. In the preface
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to " Der Fall Wagner," he said that it had been to him a necessary self- discipline to take part against all that was morbid within himself, against Wagner, against Schopenhauer, against all the impassioning interests of modern life, and to view the world, so far as possible, with the philosopher's eyes, from an immense height. And again he speaks of Wagner's art as a beaker of ecstasy so subtle and profound that it acts like poison and leaves no remedy at last but flight from the syren's cave. Nietzsche was henceforth in the position of a gouty subject who is forced to abandon port wine and straightway becomes an apostle of total abstinence. The remedy seems to have been fairly successful. But the disease was in his bones. Impassioning interests that were far more subtly poisonous slowly developed within him, and twelve years later flight had become impossible, even if he was still able to realize the need for flight.
Nietzsche broke very thoroughly with his past, yet the break has been exaggerated, and he himself often helped to exaggerate it. He was in the position of a beleaguered city which has been forced to abandon its outer walls and concentrate itself in the citadel ; and however it may have been in ancient warfare, in spiritual affairs such a state of things involves an offensive attitude towards the former line of defence. The positions we have abandoned constitute a danger to the positions we have taken up. Many of the world's fiercest persecutors have but persecuted their old selves, and there seems to be psychological necessity for such an attitude. Yet a careful study of Nietzsche's earlier activity reveals many germs of later developments. The critical atti- tude towards conventional morality, the individualism, the optimism, the ideal of heroism, which dominate his later thought, exist as germs in his earlier work. Even the flagrant contrast between " Richard Wagner in Bayreuth " and "Der Fall Wagner" was the outcome of a gradual development. In the earlier essay Nietzsche had justly pointed out that Wagner's instincts were fundamentally dramatic. As years went on he brooded over this idea ; the nimble and lambent wit of his later days played around it until Wagner became a mere actor in his work and in his life, a rhetorician, an in- carnate falsehood, the personification of latter-day decadence, the Victor Hugo of music, the Bernini of music, the modern Cagliostro. At the same time he admits that Wagner represents the modern spirit, and that it is reasonable for a musician to say that though he hates Wagner he can tolerate no other music. The fact is that Nietzsche was not Teuton enough to abide for ever with Wagner. He compares him contemptuously with Hegel, cloud-compellers both, masters of German mists and German mysticism, worshippers of Wotan,
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the god of bad weather, the god of the Germans. " How could they miss what we, we Halcyonians, miss in Wagner — la gaya scienza, the light feet, wit, fire, grace, strong logic, the dance of the stars, arrogant intellectuality, the quivering light of the south, the smooth sea — perfection ?" It is evident that Nietzsche had not gained complete mastery of his own personality in his earlier work. It is brilliant, full of fine perceptions and critical insight, but as a personal utterance incomplete. It renders the best ideas of the time, not the best ideas that Nietzsche could contribute to the time. The shock of 1876 may have been a step towards the disintegration of his intellect, but it was also a rally, a step towards self-realization. Nietzsche had no genuine affinity with Schopenhauer or with Wagner, though they were helpful to his develop- ment ; he was no pessimist, he was no democrat. As he himself said, " I understood the philosophic pessimism of the nineteenth century as the symptom of a finer strength of thought, a more victorious fullness of life. In the same way Wagner's music signified to me the expression of a Dionysiac mightiness of soul in which I seemed to hear, as in an earth- quake, the upheaval of the primitive powers of life, after age-long repres- sion." Now he only needed relief, "golden, tender, oily melodies" to soothe the leaden weight of life, and these he found in " Carmen."
Any discussion of the merits of the question as between Wagner and Bizet, the earlier and the later Nietzsche, seems to me out of place, though much has been made of it by those who delight to see a giant turn and rend himself. Nietzsche himself said he was writing for psychologists, and it is not unfair to add that it is less " Wagner's case " that he presents to us than " Nietzsche's case." For my own part — speaking as one who finds Wagner the greatest among modern musicians, and " Carmen " the most delightful modern opera outside Wagner — I can address both the early and the late Nietzsche in the words habitually used by the landlord of the " Rainbow : " " You're both wrong and you're both right, as I alius says." Most of the mighty quarrels that have sent men to battle and the stake might have been appeased had both sides recognized that both were right in their affirmations, both wrong in their denials.
Nietzsche occupied his chair at Basel for some years longer ; in 1880 his health forced him to resign and he was liberally pensioned. As a professor he treated the most difficult questions of Greek study, and devoted his chief attention to his best pupils, who in their turn adored him. Basel is an admir- able residence for a cosmopolitan thinker ; it was easy for Nietzsche to keep in touch with all that went on from Paris to St. Petersburg. He was also on
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terms of more or less intimate friendship with the finest spirits in Switzerland, with Keller the novelist, Bocklin the painter, Burckhardt the historian. We are told that he was a man of great personal charm in social intercourse. But his associates at Basel never suspected that in this courteous and amiable professor was stored up an explosive energy which would one day be felt in every civilized land. With pen in hand his criticism of life was unflinching, his sincerity arrogant ; when the pen was dropped he became modest, reserved, almost timorous.
The work he produced between 1877 and 1882 seems to me to represent the maturity of his genius. It includes " Menschliches, Allzumenschliches," " Morgenrothe," and " Die Frohliche Wissenschaft {la gay a scienza)." In form all these volumes belong Yopensee literature. They deal with art, with religion, with morals and philosophy, with the relation of all these to life. Nietzsche shows himself in these pensees above all a freethinker, emancipated from every law save that of sincerity, wide-ranging, serious, penetrative, often impassioned, as yet always able to follow his own ideal of self-restraint.
After leaving Basel he spent the following nine years chiefly at health resorts and in travelling. We find him at Sorrento, Venice, Genoa, Turin, Sils Maria, as well as at Leipzig. Doubtless his fresh and poignant pensees are largely the outcome of strenuous solitary walks in the Engadine or among the Italian lakes. We may assume that during most of these years he was fight- ing, on the whole successfully fighting, for mental health. Yet passages that occur throughout his books seem to suggest that his thoughts may have some- times turned to the goal towards which he was tending. It is a mistake, he points out, to suppose that insanity is always the symptom of a degenerating culture, although to nod towards the asylum is a convenient modern way of slaying spiritual tyrants ; it is in primitive and developing stages of culture that insanity has played its chief part ; it was only by virtue of what seemed to be the " Divine " turbulence of insanity and epilepsy that any new moral law could make progress among early cultures. Just as for us there seems a little madness in all genius, so for them there seemed a little genius in all mad- ness, so that sorcerers and saints agonized in solitude and abstinence for some gleam of madness which would bring them faith in themselves and openly justify their mission.
What may, perhaps, be called Nietzsche's third period began in 1883 with " Also sprach Zarathustra," the most extraordinary of all his works, mystical in form, and recalling the oracular aphoristic manner of the Hebrews, but not mystical in substance. It was followed by " Jenseits von Gut und Bose,"
FRIED RICH NIETZSCHE 93
" Zur Genealogic der Moral," " Der Fall Wagner," and " Gotzendammerung." It is during this period that we trace the growth of the magnification of his own personal mission, which finally became a sort of megalomania. In form the books of this period are somewhat less fragmentary than those of the second period ; in substance they are marked by their emphatic, often extravagant, almost reckless insistence on certain views of morality. If in the first period he was an apostle of culture, in the second a freethinker, pro- nouncing judgment on all things in heaven and earth, he was now exclusively a moralist, or, as he would prefer to say, an immoralist. It was during this period that he worked out his " master morality " — the duty to be strong — in opposition to the " slave morality " of Christianity, with its glorification of weakness and pity, and that he consistently sought to analyze and destroy the traditional conceptions of good and evil on which our current morality rests. The last work w-hich he planned, but never completed, was a re-valuation of all values, " Umwerthung aller Werthe," which would have been his final indictment of the modern world, and the full statement of his own immoralism and Dionysiac philosophy.
It is sometimes said that Nietzsche's mastery of his thought and style was increasing up to the last. This I can scarcely admit, even as regards style. No doubt there is a light and swift vigour of movement in these last writings which before he had never attained. He pours out a shim- mering stream of golden phrases with which he has intoxicated himself, and tries to intoxicate us. We may lend ourselves to the charm, but it has no enduring hold. This master of gay or bitter invective no longer possesses the keenly reasoned and piercing insight of the earlier Nietzsche. We feel that he has become the victim of obsessions which drive him like a leaf before the wind, and all his exuberant wit is unsubstantial and pathetic as that of Falstaff. The devouring flame has at length eaten the core out of the man and his style, leaving only this coruscating shell. And at a touch even this thin shell collapsed into smouldering embers.
From a child Nietzsche was subject to strangely prophetic dreams. In a dream which, when a boy, he put into literary form, he tells how he seemed to be travelling forward amid a glorious landscape, while carolling larks ascended to the clouds, and his whole life seemed to stretch before him in a vista of happy years ; " and suddenly a shrill cry reached our ears ; it came from the neighbouring lunatic asylum." Even in 1876 it became visible to his friends that Nietzsche attached extraordinary- importance to his own work. After he wrote " Zarathustra," this self-exaltation increased, and began to find expres-
94 THE SAVOY
sion in his work. Latterly, it is said, he came to regard himself as the incarnation of the genius of humanity. It has always been found a terrible matter to war with the moral system of one's age ; it will have its revenge, one way or another, from within or from without, whatever happens after. Nietzsche strove for nothing less than to remodel the moral world after his own heart's desire, and his brain was perishing of exhaustion in the immense effort. In 1889 — at the moment when his work at last began to attract attention — he became hopelessly insane. A period of severe hallucinatory delirium led on to complete dementia, and he passes beyond our sight.
Havelock Ellis.
THE FORGE
LONG and narrow shop, magenta black Mottled with rose ; ten fires along one wall. Faint day comes through the skylight overhead Smoke-grimed to orange, when it comes at all. The blast shut off for breakfast, fires are slack.
The buzzing neighbouring engine quieted, You hear the mates talking from berth to berth The silence is complete. The seldom noises Reverberate as, quaintly, under earth The graves repeat the sayings of the dead.
Contrasted with the metals, human voices Sound hoarse and soft, as out of hollowed wood. Their beverage made : of boiling water, stained With tea and sugar, they prepare their food : " Tiger," to envy, even where there choice is ;
Here and now, truly, not to be disdained. Hear in what manner it is perfected ; How old world 'tis. The anvil polished bright With leather skirt, two hearty chunks of bread, Protecting ivory bacon, purple veined,
Are set thereon with caution ; and the wight
Who owns the morsel, passes over it
A piece of red-hot iron till 'tis brown.
It cleans the tongue to hear it fizzle and spit,
If two hours' work vouchsafe no appetite.
This done, the smith has only to sit down To eat his greasy " tiger," and drink off
98 THE SAVOY
His sweet, strong tea. This, being yet too hot, Hangs in the rust-red water of the trough To cool. The smith is sleeping, with a frown
Upon his shapeless features. This is not The ballad wag they tell of: at his best Maimed in his poor hands, wry, with crooked back, Great-armed, bow-legged, and narrow in the chest. It bends a man to make no matter what.
A rumour stirs, a hum, the blast comes back ; Shadows on wall and roof start forth and die. Rattle of tongs, slosh, fume ; unlovely night Grown Chinese hell, to seeming, suddenly, Where strange gods heap the fire and trim the rack.
Half shapes of light leap higher than man's height
Out from the blackness and as soon subside,
Flame-flesh-shapes, sweat-swamped clinging cotton swathed,
In violent action, following the guide
Of the smith's gesture bidding where to smite.
The smitten steel complains, all bruised and scathed, From thud to bark, from bark to metal scream ; Through ordeal of the fire and scaling trough, To wake it from its long-embowelled dream, To uses brought, flame-licked and torture-bathed.
This the arena wherein stubborn stuff With man locks strength ; where elements dispute The mastery, where breath and fire bear blaze, Where sullen water aids, to quell the brute Earth into shape, to make it meek enough.
And this day is the type of many days.
John Gray
THE DETERIORATION OF
NANCY
[I have obtained access to the remaining portion of the Correspondence between a dis- tinguished member of the Royal Academy and Miss Nancy Nanson, of the Variety Stage. I see that the young lady's are the more numerous and the shorter letters ; and in them, as they proceed, I seem to discern some change of tone — a rather quick transition or develop- ment (call it what you will) which, if it is really there, is unlikely to have escaped the eye of her correspondent, and may perhaps even have prepared him in a certain measure for a denouement which, nevertheless, when it arrived, disturbed him seriously. That, at least, is my own reading of Miss Nanson's notes. But I am possibly wrong.]
Weymouth :
September 2$t/t.
Dear Mr. Ashton
j S I suppose you leave Weymouth to-day I will send this to London. It is only to thank you very much for your long letter and your kindness to me, in which Mother joins. I hope you are well.
I remain yours very sincerely
Nancy Nansox. Mr. Clement Ashton.
ioo York Road, Waterloo Road. Oct. 20. Dear Mr. Ashton
I thought I should like to let you know that I have come to London.
I have not an engagement yet, but I have a pantomime engagement in view.
With best wishes I remain yours sincerely
Nancy Nanson. Clement Ashton, Esq : R.A.
100 York Road, Waterloo Road. Nov. 5. Dear Mr. Ashton-
I was so sorry I was out when you called. If I had known you were coming I would have stayed at home. We are all right here. The landlady- is awfully nice. I would come and see you if you appointed a time.
ioo THE SAVOY
I think you will be glad to hear that I'm engaged for principal girl for the Pantomime at the Theatre Royal, Hoxton, by R. Solomon, Esq. In about a month we shall begin rehearsing. I am engaged for eight weeks.
We hope you are well.
Hoping to see you soon, with my best wishes, in which Mother unites, I am yours very sincerely,
Nancy Nanson.
ioo York Road, Waterloo Road, November 20.
Dear Mr. Ashton
It was so kind of you to take me to the theatre yesterday afternoon. I must write to tell you so. How nice Miss Annie Hughes was ! She makes you laugh and cry. I like her more than any actress I have ever seen. The man was funny, wasn't he !
Thanking you again, and with best regards from Mother, believe me yours very sincerely
Nancy Nanson.
P.S. I am to do an extra on Saturday nights at the Bedford Camden Town, and at Gatti's, Westminster Bridge Road. I am very pleased, as I am tired of ' resting.' When we go to Hoxton we shall take lodgings where there is a piano. I have been practising an acrobatic trick for the pantomime. The public likes them. The Theatre Royal, Hoxton, is more for the masses than the classes.
The Walk, Hoxton,
Christmas Day.
Dear Mr. Ashton
O ! thank you for remembering us on Christmas Day. I was so pleased. We hope you will come to see the Panto. It went very well last night. I go very well so far. My voice sounds splendid here. It is not lost in the glass roof, as at the ' People's Delight.'
I have been so very, very busy rehearsing, I have seen very little of Hoxton yet, so I do not know how I shall like it. I shall know better soon ; now that we have started the Panto.
With best wishes for a happy Christmas from Mother and from me, I am yours sincerely and gratefully, in haste,
Nancy Nanson.
THE DETERIORATION OF NANCY 101
The Walk, Hoxton,
6th January.
I am glad you came to see me yesterday afternoon. How did you like me? But it was so fiat. I am sorry you came to a matinee. Half the house are mere children, then. In the evening it is different. And they cut out part of my song yesterday. It made me cry — I was so cross. I generally jump about much more. I am much merrier. Mother and I shall be so pleased if you have time to come again.
Sincerely yours in haste,
N. Nanson.
P.S. Mr. Solomon wants to engage me for next year, I think. And for better money.
The Studios, Westminster, 7 th January.
Dear Nancy,
No, I did not think you were up to the mark yesterday. It was a >' a gg c d performance. I write, of course, frankly. First then, as to your singing, — I never very much believed in that. But you would sing much better if you knew that you sang badly. You would then understand that I was serious when I told you, what you really wanted was singing lessons. Voice production, my dear. And your speaking voice is excellent. You used it well upon the whole, yesterday. A little careless, I thought — a mistake sometimes, in the emphasis. But what is pantomime dialogue ! I will come again, if you like me to see you, and you will do all that better. For agility in dancing, for vivacity in action, you seemed as good as it is possible to be. And you take in every point — even yesterday I noticed, you believed in every bit of the story. To do so, and to live in it, is the foundation of an actress. Yes, with your intelligence, with your alertness, your quick life, actress just as much as dancer you may very well be.
You come to Westminster, next week, any morning except Wednesday. I must make one more drawing of you. Not a pastel this time. I have long since done with the pastels of you. They are good as far as they go. Your colour and your dress, your movement and your pose, they record not at all unhappily. But I want a careful drawing — a drawing in line — and shall make it perhaps in pencil ; perhaps even in silver-point. You are such a strange, variable child, you see — there is not one subject in you, but a hundred ; and I shall not be contented till I have, somewhere else than in my memory, the
102 THE SAVOY
eyebrow's line, the delicate low forehead, the fine nose, half Greek (and it gains so in character as you throw your mind into your work) — all that and the curve of the open nostril. This moment, they are at my fingers' ends. And your grave sweetness !
Frank, is it not ? Yet I am not a foolish person, making up to you. I am not a vulgar flatterer of the first prettiness in the street. You know how much I am an artist — heart and soul, my dear — by which I mean that unlike too many of my brethren, I am not only a painter.
Your ' notices ' are good, I see. Very good. I congratulate you. The
time is coming perhaps when you will patronise me — when you will even be so
very great that you will quite ' cut ' me. ' No, no,' I hear you say — indeed
you said it when I saw you last — ' No, no, Mr. Ashton, I should never do that.'
You say it with your voice — and with your steady eyes you say it even more.
Until next week, then !
I am sincerely yours,
Clement Ashton.
The Walk, Hoxton : loth February.
Dear Mr. Ashton.
Mother says, How long since we have seen you ! You said you would come again to our Panto. Since that, remember, I have been twice to West- minster, to sit to you. They are going to publish one of the drawings, are they ? You will put my name to it, won't you ?
Saturday is my last night. Mother says, Can you come then ? I shall have all my admirers. And the boys in the gallery — though you say I sing so badly — all the boys in the gallery taking up my song. After Saturday, I am booked for the Halls.
Yesterday I was taken a long drive to Hagley Wood. It is near Barnet. I have had a great deal of attention here.
I am yours very sincerely,
Nancy Nanson.
P.S. Mr. Ashton, I allow you to say anything. Be sure and tell me what you think, if you come Saturday.
The Studios, Westminster : Sunday, idth Feb :
My Dear Nancy :
Yes, you allow me to say any thing — for a lifetime divides us — and because I am a friend of yours I shall say the bare hard truth. I saw you
THE DETERIORATION OF NANCY 103
yesterday, as you know, for you espied me from the stage. From the point of view of a theatrical success, the thing was quite undoubted. You were a mass of nerves. You came across the house to us. The footlights ceased to be. Your effect was extraordinary. Shylock's ' How much more elder art thou than thy years ! ' — the thing he said to Portia — is a question which may be put, no doubt, with reasonableness, to many little ladies at the theatre. There is nothing like the theatre for ageing you. You, Nancy, are now, not five months, but two years older than you were last autumn. At first I was afraid of it, physically. That last time that you came to me, to the studio, your face was quite drawn : not only its expressions, its very lines, had aged. You were pale ; you were worn. And sixteen !
Hut yesterday that was all right, again ; and, Nancy, it was the deeper You that had altered. I — I was always an idealist, remember, and so you will forgive me. I go down to the grave, when my time comes, poet, after all, far more than craftsman. Those changes, more or less, that I notice in you — those changes not for the better, I mean — I was never blind to the possibility of them. Idealist though I am, I foresaw them — I foresaw them, with forebodings.
There was my first long letter to you. It will be well, perhaps, that I should not say anything more in detail. But read that again — the last part of it, I mean — and be warned.
But no — the detail shan't be spared you, though what it really comes to — I tell it you from my heart, and you will keep this letter to yourself — all that it really comes to is that you will be ' spoilt.' ' Spoilt ' or ' ruined.' You are so sensible in many things. Clever I don't know that you are, except in your profession. It all runs into that one channel with you. Quickness of ' study,' closeness of observation, immediate faultless power of mimicry, vivacity, agility in the dance — all that we know ; and then at home your sensitiveness, your quickness, and your helpful tact. But as to books, as to pictures, as to music beyond your showy music of the theatre, as to the things that happen in the world, and that interest people — these things are all nothing to you. Who can wonder ! Your whole little eager heart is in your work. Your work is your play too — and the whole of your play. But a thirst for admiration, my dear, and vanity, vanity ! Will you split, like the others, on that rock ?
Last night, your face had new expressions. There were things I never saw in it, before. In that palace-scene, the slim young thing — how queenly you were, in the white silk, spangled with silver : how queenly, and withal a little contemptuous, a little scornful ! I watched you, Nancy, with a keenness
G
104 THE SAVOY
horribly inconvenient for you — or the scornful look, the bored look, the blase look (I have said the worst that I can say) would have passed perhaps unperceived. They were there.
Again, you acted to the house too much. I am not finding fault with you technically for that, — though you did, I think, overdo it. I am talking to the girl, and not to the stage character. There was one look at the Boxes : at a private Box rather — but I spare you.
Who the dickens are the people who have had this influence upon you? — hour by hour ; drop by drop, I suppose : here a little and there a little — in the life I begin to hate for you. . . . But it is no use hating it. I suppose that I could take you from it, if I liked. I have the money to — no overwhelming claims on me. But you would leave all this unwillingly : and, in the end, ought you to leave it ?
My dear Nancy, I will spare you any more. But read much more than I have actually written. Imagine yourself talked to, very gravely : fancy your- self receiving a good long, serious talking to. Think ! Think ! I have finished.
My dear child, you are a good girl at heart, you know — and such an eager little fiery one — when you are not grave and sober. The stuff is in you out of which they make Sisters of Charity. The stuff is in you out of which — — But No! Why?
I am your old and fatherly, your g raW-fatherly friend, if you prefer it —
Clement Ashton.
Tuesday, Feb. iSth.
My dear Mr. Ashton.
I cried so much when I got your letter. For you have been very kind to me. I suppose I deserved it.
Nancy.
Great Coram Street,
Thursday, Feb. 7.0th.
Dear Mr. Ashton,
We have moved. Until I get into a burlesque at Easter, I am working two of the Halls. On Monday I have a new song at the Metro- politan — the ' Met ' — Edgware Road, nine o'clock. New dresses, and I do a new dance. Also at Gatti's, Westminster Bridge Road, at 10.15.
Sincerely yours and gratefully,
Nancy Nanson.
THE DETERIORATION OF NANCY rc.5
Great Coram Street,
Tuesday, Feb. 25.
The engagement only lasts a week, Mr. Ashton. Am I not going to be a favourite, then ? I have tried for that music-hall kept by that faddy lady, the philanthropist. She is very severe. Why, she won't let you take up your skirts, even. I say, and Motlier says, she ought to keep a chapel — not a music- hall.
In haste,
Nancy.
Great Coram Street.
You were always kind to me. Mother is wild. And you, you will never forgive me.
From ,
Nancy.
Westminster,
\Vh April.
My dear Nancy.
At least I hurried to make the matter smoother for you at home, though, sooner or later that would have been effected anyhow ; for you and your mother are at one, generally. She is really fond of you, and you of her. I have not done much for you.
And now what can I do ? My business— if I have any — is to wait. ' Did I,' I ask myself, ' lose any opportunity of action ? ' Could I have stepped in, to stop you ? Nancy, I talk brutally, though I would not know, with definite - ness, any detail — but the valuation set by me on mere physical chastity — were it that that was in question — might be perhaps three half-pence. One friend at all events you have, between whom and yourself no mad outrageous freak of yours, raises insuperable barriers. And you feel that. Then why was I concerned for your Future, months ago ? The deterioration, the slow change in you, that must be coming or have come ; the undermining and deterioration, it may be — I say, that is the deep injury — but the very words draw round you like a curse. I haven't the heart left to sketch in words a sure decline. And, if I had, why should I overdo it ?
Was it done by you for gain, for sudden greed, for ambition, for vanity?
106 THE SAVOY
Answer yourself — not me. If it had been done for love — well then at all events I might have thought of your Future differently. Nancy, I must make excuses for you — excuses in any case. Once in your short life at least, you have been near to want — that winter you and your Mother came out into the Strand, from the empty treasury of a bogus management, with sixpence in your pockets, instead of a salary. Yes, sixpence it was — that was your salary. You told me so yourself. And your voice ' went ' in that cruel winter weather, as the little figure, with its slender grace, slid through the fog and blackened rain and reeking river mists of December in London. After that, Money, which seems to some people a small thing in the distance — so sure, so unim- portant — must have loomed large and of immense importance, in the near foreground, to you. Again, of course, we have our moods. We may be taken unawares. Judgment goes — principle. All your life, Nancy — with only trivial exceptions, after all — your life is good to this hour. And in all our lives, every day has its own difficulties : every hour is a choice. Good and diligent, and sweet and bright, wise too and helpful — week after week, month after month, you answer to your helm : and then there comes one hour which leaves you rudderless. I should be hard on you indeed, if I remembered only that hour — if I forgot the ninety and nine. My dear Nancy, I am not hard on you !
It is late at night when I write this. And, in my thoughts, you have been with me the whole of the day. The story can't be an unusual story — and I am a man of the world, or ought to be. No, the story can't be an unusual story : but the girl is an unusual girl.
Well, you must live it down, my dear — must have done with it — must forget it. But then there is the deterioration — some deterioration at least — that made the thing possible. And what more may be possible — mend and patch and cobble as we will ?
All day you have been in my thoughts. When I was setting my palette in the morning : arranging the light : screwing up the easel, waiting for the sitter, who was late — they are always late — I thought ' She has made a mess of it — poor little Nancy — foolish minx ! ' I was very silent with my sitter. I was scarcely even polite. She noticed it ; and it affected her. The sitting was a failure. I bowed the lady out. Nancy Nanson in my thoughts. The luncheon table was all wrong : not a thing as it ought to have been. ' Nancy Nanson, at the Devil, poor girl ! ' A walk in the streets, afterwards. The omnibuses rattling past me in Victoria Street. ' Nancy Nanson — is it all up with her ? ' Nothing else. The bell of Christ Church, Westminster, a tinkle for Evensong. The day goes on, then ! ' Nancy Nanson ! ' Afterwards,
THE DETERIORATION OF NANCY 107
in the quiet of St. James's Park, near Birdcage Walk, the clear sound of the bugle — the recall to barracks. ' Nancy Nanson ! ' And then, the space of the Park water, calm, as I saw it from the foot-bridge, by the five poplars — and the April evening sky, clear and serene. ' Nancy Nanson at the Devil ! Poor girl ! The Devil perhaps. The dear and clever irresponsible child ! '
Nancy, I've no more blame for you. The vials of my anger are poured out. Months ago I said ' I shall always be your friend.' ' Go the straight way ! ' I said. And I believed you would. What a collapse if I must say to you, to-night, only this word — the very sound of it, connected with you, is vulgar and repulsive — -' If you should get into any scrape, you know, and I can help you, come to me. I will help you. Right and left I will help you. I will see you through.' . . .
But only to say — that !
Nancy ! — with deep regard and real affection,
Clement Ashton.
Post-script. But I can't end like this. Just when you want to be reproached the least, some of my sentences sound hard. Be hopeful ! For, as it seems to me, whatever happened, the quite irreparable has not happened. Surely, surely, you can forget, for ever, one mad hour ! And, from whatever point, you can begin ' the journey homeward ' — to yourself. You can be the real You again ; the real Nancy — your very characteristic, the perfection of the contrast between the wildness of the theatre and your happy quietude.
So at home I must think of you. With that golden wig, that adds — piquantly perhaps and yet abominably — to your years, the maddening dancer is put off. The brown-haired child, in the plain dress, is in her place — the short brown hair, the quiet eyes, the tender, sensitive mouth. Your lodging-house parlour is ornamented with a play-bill, and photographs are stuck about the mantelpiece — Miss Marie Dainton, is it? and your uncle, the plumber; and, again, a celebrity of the Halls ; and somebody else, who was nice to you, a year ago, at Weymouth ; some comrade you were fond of : ' She's a dear girl,' you said. In the lodging-house parlour your mother sits beside the fire- place, combing out the golden wig, after its last night's service. The kettle, in preparation for tea-time, not far off, is at the side of the fire. It begins to sing. You, Nancy, sit beyond the table, on a cane-bottomed chair ; with your knees crossed — as I saw you that first time I called on you in London — your hands, so young, so nervous, and so highly bred, smooth out upon your lap a bit of wool-work that you — whose instinct is to please and to be pleasant —
108 THE SAVOY
are doing for your landlady. And, in the glow of the fender, lies curled up, warm and sleeping, that gray kitten rescued from misery, four days before, by you : won to you by your magnetism, or your kindness — they are both the same. In the morning, when your mother leaves your bed — leaves the tired child, worn out by the theatre, to an hour's extra resting — the soft gray thing, that you bewitched and cared for, creeps to your side — is happy.
Did they ever teach you, at your school, I wonder, verses of Wordsworth on the stock-dove ? What did the stock-dove sing ?
He sang of love with quiet blending, Slow to begin, and never ending ; Of serious faith, and inward glee. That was the song — the song for me !
Nancy ! — the spirit of the stock-dove's song lies in the deepest heart of Nancy
Nanson.
C. A.
[There was reason to apprehend that the Correspondence closed with this letter. One other note, however — in the round hand of Miss Nanson — has been discovered, and is therefore appended.]
Great Coram Street. Thank you so very, very much — and for not asking any exact questions, too. I was a fool. Some one behaved badly to me. No doubt I ' compro- mised ' myself. I was on deep waters. But I did not go under. No, Mr. Ashton.
You have been rather cross with me — but I was very troublesome. You understand the curious mixture that signs herself — and is —
Your grateful
Nancy.
Frederick Wedmore.
TWO POEMS CONCERNING PEASANT VISIONARIES
A CRADLE SONG
HE faery children laugh in cradles of wrought gold,
And clap their hands together, and half close their eyes,
For winds will bear them gently when the eagle flies,
With heavy whitening wings, and a heart fallen cold :
I kiss my wailing child and press it to my breast,
And hear the narrow graves calling my child and me
Desolate winds that cry over the wandering sea ;
Desolate winds that hover in the flaming West ;
Desolate winds that beat the doors of Heaven, and beat
The doors of Hell, and blow there many a whimpering ghost ;
And heart the winds have shaken ; the unappeasable host
Is comelier than candles before Maurya's feet.
"THE VALLEY OF THE BLACK PIG"
The Irish peasantry have for generations comforted themselves, in their misfortunes, with visions of a great battle, to be fought in a mysterious valley called, "The Valley of the Black Pig," and to break at last the power of their enemies. A few years ago, in the barony of Lisadell, in county Sligo, an old man would fall entranced upon the ground from time to time, and rave out a description of the battle ; and I have myself heard said that the girths shall rot from the bellies of the horses, because of the few men that shall come alive out of the valley.
HE dew drops slowly ; the dreams gather : unknown spears Suddenly hurtle before my dream-awakened eyes ; And then the clash of fallen horsemen, and the cries Of unknown perishing armies beat about my ears. We, who are labouring by the cromlech on the shore, The gray cairn on the hill, when day sinks drowned in dew,
Being weary of the world's empires, bow down to you,
Master of the still stars, and of the flaming door.
W. B. Yeats.
The Rape of the Lock
by
Aubrey Beardsley
PAUL VERLAINE
i
A FIRST SIGHT OF VERLAINE
HREE years ago my thoughts were a good deal occupied by the theories and experiments which a section of the younger French poets were engaged upon. In this country, the Symbolists and Decadents of Paris had been laughed at and parodied, but, with the exception of Mr. Arthur Symons, no English critic had given their tentatives any serious attention. I became much interested — not wholly converted, certainly, but considerably impressed — as I studied, not what was said about them by their enemies, but what they wrote themselves. Among them all, there was but one, M. Mallarme, whom I knew personally ; him I had met, more than twenty years before, carrying the vast folio of his Manet-Poe through the length and breadth of London, disappointed but not discouraged. I learned that there were certain haunts where these later Decadents might be observed in large numbers, drawn together by the gregarious attraction of verse. I determined to haunt that neighbourhood with a butterfly-net, and see what delicate creatures with powdery wings I could catch. And, above all, was it not understood that that vaster lepidopter, that giant hawk-moth, Paul Verlaine, uncoiled his proboscis in the same absinthe-corollas ?
Timidity, doubtless, would have brought the scheme to naught, if, un- folding it to Mr. Henry Harland, who knows his Paris like the palm of his hand, he had not, with enthusiastic kindness, offered to become my cicerone. He was far from sharing my interest in the Symbolo-decadent movement, and the ideas of the " poetes abscons comme la lune " left him a little cold, yet he entered at once into the sport of the idea. To race up and down the Boulevard St. Michel, catching live poets in shoals, what a charming game ! So, with a beating heart and under this gallant guidance, I started on a beautiful April morning to try my luck as an entomologist. This is not the occasion to speak of the butterflies which we successfully captured during this and the following days and nights ; the expedition was a great success.
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But, all the time, the hope of capturing that really substantial moth, Verlaine, was uppermost, and this is how it was realized.
As everyone knows, the broad Boulevard St. Michel runs almost due south from the Palais de Justice to the Gardens of the Luxembourg. Through the greater part of its course, it is principally (so it strikes one) composed of restau- rants and brasseries, rather dull in the day-time, excessively blazing and gay at night. To the critical entomologist the eastern side of this street is known as the chief, indeed almost the only habitat of poeta symbolans, which, however, occurs here in vast numbers. Each of the leaders of a school has his particular cafe, where he is to be found at an hour and in a chair known to the habituis of the place. So Dryden sat at Will's and Addison at Button's, when chocolate and ratafia, I suppose, took the place of absinthe. M. Jean Moreas sits in great circumstance at the Restaurant d'Harcourt — or he did three years ago — and there I enjoyed much surprising and stimulating conversation. But Verlaine — where was he? At his cafe, the Francois-Premier, we were told that he had not been seen for four days. " There is a letter for him — he must be ill," said Madame ; and we felt what the tiger-hunter feels when the tiger has gone to visit a friend in another valley. But to persist is to succeed.
The last of three days devoted to this fascinating sport had arrived. I had seen Symbolists and Decadents to my heart's content. I had learned that Victor Hugo was not a poet at all, and that M. Viele-Griffin was a splendid bard ; I had discovered that neither Victor Hugo nor M. Viele-Griffin had a spark of talent, but that M. Charles Morice was the real Simon Pure. I had heard a great many conflicting opinions stated without hesitation and with a delightful violence ; I had heard a great many verses recited which I did not understand because I was a foreigner, and could not have understood if I had been a Frenchman. I had quaffed a number of highly indigestible drinks, and had enjoyed myself very much. But I had not seen Verlaine, and poor Mr. Harland was in despair. We invited some of the poets to dine with us that night (this is the etiquette of the " Boul' Mich' ") at the Restaurant d'Harcourt, and a very entertaining meal we had. M. Moreas was in the chair, and a poetess with a charming name decorated us all with sprays of the narcissus poeticus. I suppose that the company was what is called "a little mixed," but I am sure it was very lyrical. I had the honour of giving my arm to a most amiable lady, the Queen of Golconda, whose precise rank among the crowned heads of Europe is, I am afraid, but vaguely determined. The dinner was simple, but distinctly good ; the chairman was in magnificent form, un vrai chef d'ecole, and between each of the courses somebody intoned
PAUL VERLAINE 115
his own verses at the top of his voice. The windows were wide open on to the Boulevard, but there was no public expression of surprise.
It was all excessively amusing, but deep down in my consciousness, tolling like a little bell, there continued to sound the words, "We haven't seen Verlaine." I confessed as much at last to the sovereign of Golconda, and she was graciously pleased to say that she would make a great effort. She was kind enough, I believe, to send out a sort of search-party. Meanwhile, we adjourned to another cafe, to drink other things, and our company grew like a rolling snowball. I was losing all hope, and we were descending the Boulevard, our faces set for home ; the Queen of Golconda was hanging heavily on my arm, and having formed a flattering misconception as to my age, was warning me against the temptations of Paris, when two more poets, a male and a female, most amiably hurried to meet us with the intoxicating news that Verlaine had been seen to dart into a little place called the Cafe Soleil d'Or. Thither we accordingly hied, buoyed up by hope, and our party, now containing a dozen persons (all poets), rushed into an almost empty drinking-shop. But no Verlaine was to be seen. M. Moreas then collected us round a table, and fresh grenadines were ordered.
Where I sat, by the elbow of M. Moreas, I was opposite an open door, absolutely dark, leading down, by oblique stairs, to a cellar. As I idly watched this square of blackness I suddenly saw some ghostly shape fluttering at the bottom of it. It took the form of a strange bald head, bobbing close to the ground. Although it was so dim and vague, an idea crossed my mind. Not daring to speak, I touched M. Moreas, and so drew his attention to it. " Pas un mot, pas un geste, Monsieur ! " he whispered, and then, instructed in the guile of his race, insidias Danauni, the eminent author of " Les Cantilenes " rose, making a vague detour towards the street, and then plunged at the cellar door. There was a prolonged scuffle and a rolling down stairs ; then M. Moreas re-appeared, triumphant ; behind him something flopped up out of the darkness like an owl, — a timid shambling figure in a soft black hat, with jerking hands, and it peeped with intention to disappear again. But there were cries of " Venez done, Maitre," and by-and-by Verlaine was persuaded to emerge definitely and to sit by me.
I had been prepared for strange eccentricities of garb, but he was very decently dressed ; he referred at once to the fact, and explained that this was the suit which had been bought for him to lecture in, in Belgium. He was particularly proud of a real white shirt ; " C'est ma chemise de conference," he said, and shot out the cuffs of it with pardonable pride. He was full of his
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experiences of Belgium, and in particular he said some very pretty things about Bruges and its beguinages, and how much he should like to spend the rest of his life there. Yet it seemed less the mediaeval buildings which had attracted him than a museum of old lace. He spoke with a veiled utterance, difficult for me to follow. Not for an instant would he take off his hat, so that I could not see the Socratic dome of forehead which figures in all the caricatures. I thought his countenance very Chinese, and I may perhaps say here that when he was in London in 1894 I called him a Chinese philosopher. He replied : " Chinois — comme vous voulez, mais philosophe — non pas ! "
On this first occasion (April 2, 1893), recitations were called for, and Verlaine repeated his " Clair de Lune " :
" Votre ame est un paysage choisi
Que vont charmant masques et bergamasques Jouant du Iuth et dansant et quasi
Tristes sous leurs deguisements fantasques."
He recited in a low voice, without gesticulation, very delicately. Then M. Moreas, in exactly the opposite manner, with roarings of a bull and with modulated sawings of the air with his hand, intoned an eclogue addressed by himself to Verlaine as " Tityre." And so the exciting evening closed, the passionate shepherd in question presently disappearing again down those mysterious stairs. And we, out into the soft April night and the budding smell of the trees.
Edmund Gosse.
PAUL VERLAINE 117
II VERLAINE IN 1894
In the spring of 1894 I received a note in English, inviting me to "coffee and cigarettes plentifully," and signed " yours quite cheerfully, Paul Verlaine." I found him in a little room at the top of a tenement house in the Rue St. Jacques, sitting in an easy chair, with his bad leg swaddled in many bandages. He asked me, and in English, for I had explained the poverty of my French, if I knew Paris well, and added, pointing to his leg, that it had " scorched " his leg, for he knew it " well, too well," and lived in it like " a fly in a pot of marmalade ; " and taking up an English dictionary, one of the very few books in his room, began searching for the name of the disease, selecting, after much labour, and with, I understand, imperfect accuracy, "erysipelas." Meanwhile, his homely and middle-aged mistress, who had been busy when I came, in dusting, or in some other housewife fashion, had found the cigarettes, and made excellent coffee. She had obviously given the room most of its character : her canary birds, of which there were several cages, kept up an in- termittent tumult in the open window, and her sentimental chromolithographs scattered themselves among the nude drawings, and the caricatures of himself as a monkey, which M. Verlaine had torn out of the papers and pinned against the wall. She handed me a match to light my cigarette, with the remark, in English, " A bad match, a French match," and I saw by the way her face lighted up when my reply, " They have the best matches in England, but you have the best poets," was translated to her, that she was proud of her ungainly lover. While we were drinking our coffee she drew a box towards the fire for a singular visitor, a man, who was nicknamed Louis XL, M. Verlaine explained, because of a close resemblance, and who had not shaved for a week, and kept his trousers on with a belt of string or thin rope, and wore an opera hat, which he set upon his knee, and kept shoving up and down continually while M. Verlaine talked. M. Verlaine talked of Shakespeare, whom he admired, with the reservations of his article in the " Fortnightly " ; of Maeterlinck, who was " a dear good fellow," but in his work " a little bit of a mountebank " ; of Hugo, who was " a volcano of mud as well as of flame," but always, though " not good enough for the young messieurs," a supreme poet ; and of Villiers de l'lsle Adam, who was " exalte," but wrote " the most excellent French,," and whose " Axel " he inter- preted, and somewhat narrowly, as I could but think, as meaning that love
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was the only important thing in the world ; and of " In Memoriam," which he had tried to translate and could not, because " Tennyson was too noble, too Anglais, and when he should have been broken-hearted had many re- miniscences."
No matter what he talked of, there was in his voice, in his face, or in his words, something of the "voluminous tenderness " which Mr. Bain has called, I believe, " the basis of all immorality," and of the joyous serenity and un- troubled perception of those who commune with spiritual ideas. One felt always that he was a great temperament, the servant of a great daimon, and fancied, as one listened to his vehement sentences that his temperament, his daimon, had been made uncontrollable that he might live the life needful for its perfect expression in art, and yet escape the bonfire. To remember him is to understand the futility of writing and thinking, as we commonly do, as if the ideal world were the perfection of ours, a blossom rooted in our clay ; and of being content to measure those who announce its commandments and its beauty by their obedience to our laws ; and of missing the wisdom of the Hebrew saying, " He who sees Jehovah dies." The ideal world, when it opens its fountains, dissolves by its mysterious excitement in this man sanity, which is but the art of understanding the mechanical world, and in this man morality, which is but the art of living there with comfort ; and, seeing this, we grow angry and forget that the Incarnation has none the less need of our reverence because it has taken place in a manger of the dim passions, or bring perhaps our frankincense and myrrh in secret, lest a little truth madden our world.
W. B. Yeats.
PAUL VERLAINE 119
III MY VISIT TO LONDON
(November, 1893)
On the 19th of November last, at nine in the evening, I took the train at the Gare Saint-Lazare for Dieppe-Newhaven. On reaching Dieppe, I found the buffet crammed with travellers, who had been kept by the bad weather from taking the preceding boats. The boat corresponding with my train was equally unable to put out to sea, on account of a storm which had already lasted twenty-four hours, and was to last, with redoubled violence, till the next evening. So there was nothing for it but, in company with a good hundred people, to spend part of the night on a bench, till the worthy host (to whom thanks, and thanks again !) made me the offer, not indeed of a room, but of a sofa in the dining-room of his hotel opposite the station, and I was thus enabled, if not to sleep with much comfort, at all events to take a little rest, to the accompaniment of the boom of the sea, which reminded me of the too Parisian uproar and the cannonade of September, 1870, to January, 1871. All the next day a diluvian rain fell, and I consumed the time in dejeuners, lunches, and dinners, aperitifs, coffees, and cigars, at the said buffet. Of Dieppe I saw no more than the whitish cliffs against an iron-gray sky, across the lances as of a mass of armed men —
" les lances de l'averse " —
the terrible downpour, under which the sea, gradually calming, growled like a gorged beast, still terribly, with a ravenous delight, one might have said, for many fishing-boats, alas ! had gone down, and were still going down, with all hands on board, in the harbour and out at sea.
At last, on the 20th of November, at nine in the evening, there was some talk of setting out, and, hobbling along as fast as I could, I managed to secure half a berth in the second-class cabin. When the bell had sounded for the last time, and the great white chimney, like a vast phantom in the opaque night, had uttered its lugubrious shriek, I felt, after some minutes of uneasy motion in port, a prodigious pitching of the vessel, then a quite sufficient rolling, stupefying at first by their continuity and their almost rhythmical regularity, and becoming a literal rocking to sleep, at least as far as I was
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concerned, fatigued as I already was by a sleepless night, or all but, and a day of interminable boredom. And there was something, too, in the immensity of the " caress," not unpleasing to a poet, and I made a little poem about it not long afterwards, which is to appear some day in an English paper. 1 Any- way, I slept the sleep of the just during the whole passage, and never opened my eyes till within sight of Xewhaven, when, the sea being now quite calm, the boat glided along without needing to turn on steam, and the very lull and comparative silence awoke me as pleasantly as possible. When I reached London at two in the morning, and had a quarter of an hour's drive to the Temple, in the fine moonlight, the wind quite bracing, I felt already the good effect of what was really one of the best crossings I had ever had. London, so impressive as one passes its superb buildings from the formidable Thames towards Westminster, the rich, elegant London between Victoria Station and the Strand, seemed to me that night exquisite, delicate, almost dainty — luminous.
At the Temple awaited me the poet Arthur Symons, who (as, afterwards, Herbert Home, poet himself, and architect) was to give me a charming hos- pitality. He had been to look for me three or four times in vain at Victoria Station, and, imagining after these fruitless errands that I should not come till night, he had waited up for me, and came to welcome me at the very door of the house which he inhabits in that vast caravanserai of the Law — and of Silence. (For how exquisite a corner of London, in which there are so many exquisite and infamous corners, so few common or vulgar !) My host led me up into his charming little flat, from which, next day. I was to have one of the most ravishing and peaceful views, in the exceptionally fine weather, as if made on purpose for the traveller, which bathed the London sky and the whole aspect of the immense city of pale rose and pearl gray. Blithe birds, blackbirds even, on the infinitely twisted branches of those beautiful, immense English trees ; to the left, in a paved and grassy angle, regular to the point of being beautiful, in its way, the fountain, which gives its name to the spot 'Fountain Court), with its babbling jet of water. But for the moment I was hungry, fagged out by those hours of vehement sea ; and Symons, following my example, ate — while we talked, for two good hours, about everything under the sun, Paris, poetry, money too (poets think of nothing else . . . and with reason !), my future lectures — an entire box, one of those long, tall, tin boxes, of tea-biscuits, " muffins " in English, 2 washed down with plenty of " gin and
1 It appeared in the " New Review." — Ed. " Savoy."
2 They were Osborne biscuits. — Ed. " Savoy."
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soda," ' and perfumed with vague cigarettes. And it was, I assure you, one of the best and gayest meals I ever had in my life !
But I had not come to London merely as a tourist. The very date of my arrival is sufficient evidence to the contrary. I had to give two con- ferences, or rather two lectures, as they say, more justly, more simply, and more modestly, in English : one at London, the other, on the following day, at Oxford. The London one was to take place next day (or rather the very day of my archi-matutinal arrival) at 8.30 P.M., at a hall in Holborn, of which I shall have something to say in a few moments.
Our conversation, much against our will, finally came to an end, in spite of its twofold interest, intellectual and gastronomic, for "the. Sandman," as Hoffmann says, " Madame la Poussiere," as they say in my mother's country, Arras, to represent sleep, had passed, and a well-deserved repose parted us until eleven, when the very sympathetic journalist, Mr. Edmund Gosse, came to take us out to lunch in a sumptuous restaurant near by, where my forces were sufficiently recuperated to enable me to put the finishing touches to my causerie for the evening. I say nothing of many other visits, among which I remember those of William Heinemann, the great publisher, Home, Rothen- stein, whom I had met the summer before, and who had sketched, in the Hopital Broussais, a portrait of me which has since appeared in the " Pall Mall Budget," Lane, the publisher of " les Jeunes," and others whose names I forget.
The evening came, and our little band, after a dinner a la francaise, not less copious than the morning's lunch, set out, in a confusion of vehicles, towards the spot where I was to speak of " Contemporary French Poets." It was, as I have said, in Holborn, the long, immemorial street of the venerable capital. I knew London long since, and I remembered to have seen, in Holborn, almost at the intersection formed by the Viaduct, a row of some dozen houses, as picturesque as could be, and extremely old, dating from at least the time of Elizabeth. I was not so very much surprised, guided as I was by artists and poets, to find myself, after passing through indefinite corridors, in an extraordinary hall, very ancient, of a sort of rustic Gothic — there is a little too much Gothic among our neighbours (and yet even their modern Gothic is so charming !) as, among us, there is an outrageous deal too much Roman, and what not ! in architecture — but the Gothic of Barnard's Inn is sincere, natural, and marvellous in its simplicity. There is some talk of pulling down this intimate remnant of the end of the Middle Ages. (Barnard's 1 There was no soda. — -Ed. " Savoy."
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Inn formerly served for corporative meetings and ceremonies.) In our days the hall is used for private exhibitions, and the artists protest vigorously against this act of vandalism. If the voice of a humble stranger can be heard in this most reasonable hue and cry, here is mine, and loudly.
In front of me was a platform, where, behind a bare table of oak, lit by an old bronze lamp, rose an armchair of oak, also bare, and of colossal proportions, in which there was room enough for even the ventripotent syndics of old " merry England."
I, " chetif trouvere de Paris," intimidated by the imposing place, and the rude, majestic furniture, but encouraged by the numerous and very select audience, installed myself as best I could in the immense chair, at the immense table, and unfolding a roll of notes, expressed myself much as follows :
" Ladies and Gentlemen, I should be unworthy of the title of poet — of the glorious, and sorrowful, and thereby the more glorious, name of poet — if I were to forget that I speak here in the country which is par excellence that of poetry. Some acquaintance (alas ! but imperfect), with your language, and necessarily incomplete readings in that language, have taught me modesty, Frenchman as I am — and modesty is not specially the portion of us Frenchmen — in regard to this as to many other truths. Thus it is not without timidity that I ask for the indulgence of this picked audience.
" Nevertheless I shall venture, since I have been so graciously invited, to attempt here the most difficult of all endeavours, and, asking forgiveness for not doing it in English, the English which a great writer of ours, Barbey d'Aurevilly, declared was evidently the idiom spoken at the beginning of the world by our grandmother Eve, I begin.
" I am not wanting in experience of lectures. Last year I went to Holland and to Belgium, where I met with some success. Quite lately I visited Nancy and Luneville, and I was touched at receiving so warm a welcome from my compatriots, for I belong to that part of the country, I was born at Metz,.and it was here in London, in 1872, that I declared for the French nationality.
" But under the present circumstances, I cannot repeat too often, I expe- rience a quite special kind of emotion, and I would specially ask your kind attention.
" May I merit it !
" I shall speak, too, during these few moments, so flattering and so formidable for me, of things of which I have some knowledge, for I have
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taken part in them to the best of my ability. I allude to contemporary French poetry.
" I do not intend, be assured, to recapitulate the whole history of the poetic evolution of the present time : Romanticism, the Parnasse contemporain, itself an output of Romanticism, an advanced Romanticism in which thun- dered the formidable verse of Leconte de Lisle, flickered and tinkled that of Theodore de Banville, while that of Baudelaire sighed and shone like a corpse- candle — revered and venerated trinity, from whom, undoubtedly, proceeded the first works of a generation already ripe, very ripe, too ripe, think and say some impatient ones among us ; a generation to which I belong, to which Stephanc Mallarme belongs, and others also, whose talent has retained the impress of the past, not without some necessary modifications (doubtless for the better) which time brings with it in its passing.
" I give here only the name of Mallarme, who, along with myself, was most in sympathy with those younger men about whom I intend to speak. It was about the year 1881 that the various tendencies of the new 'batch' of poets began to make themselves felt, tendencies confirmed by a most often happy audacity, and a true love of letters. I do not always agree with them ; I should raise many objections to the vers litre, for example, and the rime litre, preached and practised by these latest friends of mine. But what merits, already, and rightly, noised abroad, are there not in Jean Moreas in particular, at once the courageous, the indefatigable critic, and the protagonist of his work, still constantly under discussion, so to speak. It was at first pure Romanticism, without a shadow of resemblance to the Parnasse contemporain, then it adopted Symbolism, in whose definition of itself he was not slow to recognize the insufficiency, and which he replaced by the Ecole Romane, gathering about him, with a well-merited pride, men of such fine talents, original within even the limits of the accepted poetic discipline, as Ernest Raynaud, Maurice du Plessys, and, more recently, Raymond de la Tailhede.
" In addition to the ' Romans,' for, in spite of all, the name has had to be recognized, there is an independent ph'iade of poets, powerful or charming, each seeking a way of his own, and the most having found it ; some fervent adepts, others sceptical partisans, it would seem, of that vers litre which, once and for all, I am by no means too fond of. Others, again, hold by verse pure and simple, verse as I have known and used it, with yet others who are legion.
" Undoubtedly the most remarkable among these is Laurent Tailhade, at once subtle and mystical, and so terribly and so stingingly mc'chant. It is
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certainly well to be among his friends ; as for his literary enemies, they can be but the foolish or the ignorant. I am infinitely fond of his books of pure beauty, but I confess I have a weakness for An Pays du Mufle, which might be rendered in English, imperfectly enough, by In the Country of the Snob : that formidable farrago of violence and of irony, in which the ferocity of the subject-matter corresponds, in some sort, with a certain ferocity of the form, a form at once learned and amusing, furiously yet quite intelligibly archaic. Next follow Paul Verola ; Henri de Regnier ; Viele-Griffin, Stuart Merrill, both of Anglo-Saxon origin, but brought up mainly in France ; Adolphe Rette ; Edouard Dubus ; George Suzanne ; Dauphin Meunier ; all remark- able in their different degrees, and of an assured future. I am not mentioning names at random, be sure, for, if I desired to be interminable, I easily could be, so many young poets are there in these days of surrounding materialism and rationalism, whose extent, however, is perhaps somewhat exaggerated. Many of these will renounce the fray, and honourably re-enter the ordinary intellec- tual life. As for those I have named, never ! and so much the better for all of us.
" These poets, I repeat, are independent of one another. The ' Romans,' of whom I have just spoken, form, on the contrary, a group to themselves, and, whatever may be the very real originality, on which I have but now insisted, of one and another among them, taken separately, they follow a common principle, which is, to go straight back to the origin of the French language, which, it is well known, comes of Gallo-Roman stock. But is ' Roman ' really the word ? I doubt it ; indeed, I deny it. The Roman is still Latin, liturgical Latin, in my opinion, of the time of the Roman basilicas ; and I do not quite understand, on the part of the poets in question, the leap from this time to that of Ronsard, whose idiom, whose rhythm, whose very tricks, are a good deal too much borrowed by these amiable, and, at their moments, admirable poets. They have science (a little at random, for they are young) ; they have music, or at least almost all the four who form the group ; they have faith, and, above all, good faith. They have all that, I admit willingly, gladly, indeed, on behalf of my art which they honour, my country which they adorn ; but, but, though that is enough to be or to become a perfect artist, is it enough to become an incontestable poet ? Perhaps not ; unkind as it may seem to suggest the doubt.
" But life is hard, as it is essentially uncertain, obscure; indecisive, complex ; and again charming, smiling, friendly, simple, when it wills. And in order to be a poet, it seems to me, one must live much, and remember much. Alfred
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de Musset has said that infinitely better than I could possibly say it, and he has left a living work, the typical living work, though, indeed, he has not put all of himself into it. He had his reasons, which were, in the main, that he chose to do as he did ; but he might, perhaps he should, have done more. In spite of all, he remains a great poet. An artist ? yes, a hundred times, yes. A perfect artist ? No ; for life, felt and rendered, even well, even admirably felt and rendered, is not all which that task requires. You must work, you must work like a labourer ; and that these ' Roman' poets undoubtedly do.
" So, it seems to me, the poet should be absolutely sincere, but absolutely conscientious as a writer ; hiding nothing of himself, but employing, in the expression of this frankness, all needful dignity, and a care of that dignity which should manifest itself in, if not the perfection of form, at all events an invisible, insensible, but effective endeavour after this lofty and severe quality ; I was about to say, this virtue.
" A poet (alas ! only myself) has essayed this undertaking ; very probably he has failed, but certainly he has done his best to acquit himself honourably.
" I began, in 1867, with ' Poemes Saturniens,' a youthful affair, marked by- imitations to right and left : Hugo, Gautier, Baudelaire, Banville. In addition, thanks to a mistaken taste for Leconte de Lisle, I was an impassible, ' im- pas-si-ble,' as the word was pronounced then in the Passage Choiseul and on the Boulevard des Batignolles.
" ' Pauvre gens ! l'Art n'est pas d'e'parpiller son ame : Est-elle en marbre ou non, la Ve'nus de .Milo ? ;
I exclaimed, in an epilogue that I considered for some time as the cream of aesthetics ; and I added, in a sonnet which was excluded from this first collec- tion through lack of space rather than lack of taste, that the only just and great man is he who
' S'e'ternise dans un e'goisme de marbre.'
This verse, I may remark in parentheses, is one of my first, if not the very first, in this form. I was to go to much greater lengths in these audacities. Others outstep me : why should I cry halt to them ? I shall never cease to say, and to say again and again : I applaud, but for my part I hold back, and I applaud, even, with reservation. Sometimes I am inclined to reproach myself with having let loose the storm, but it is too late for me to oppose it now. A Quos ego on my part would seem ridiculous, and I am now but the old sea- man, a little weary, but never tired of heroism (' Comme un buffle se cabre, aspirant la tempete,' Stephane Mallarme, my old comrade in dangers, has
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written superbly), who assists, just a little sceptical, but imperceptibly, imper- turbably, at the efforts of younger 'Jack Tars,' to whom I wish good luck and the happiness of seeing them return victorious from the fray.
" Paulo minora canamus. I return to myself and my debuts. At present the verses quoted above, and the theories attached to them, seem to me puerile ; decent enough as verse, and thereby the more puerile.
" However, the man who lived beneath the very young, the somewhat pedantical young man, whom I then was, sometimes, indeed often, lifted the mask, and expressed himself in various little poems, not without tender- ness, such as :
'MON REVE FAMILIER
' Je fais souvent ce reve etrange et penetrant D'une femme inconnue, et que j'aime, et qui nv'aime, Et qui n'est, chaque fois, ni tout a fait la meme Ni tout a fait une autre, et m'aime et me comprend.
' Car elle me comprend, et mon coeur, transparent Pour elle seule, helas ! cesse d'etre un probleme Pour elle seule, et les moiteurs de mon front bleme Elle seule les sait rafraichir, en pleurant.
'Est-elle brune, blonde ou rousse? — Je l'ignore. Son nom ? Je me souviens qu'il est doux et sonore Comme ceux des aimes que la Vie exila.
' Son regard est pareil au regard des statues,
Et, pour sa voix, lointaine, et calme, et grave, elle a
L'inflexion des voix cheres qui se sont tues.'
'CHANSON D'AUTOMNE
' Les sanglots longs Des violons
De l'automne Blessent mon cceur D'une langueur
Monotone.
'Tout suffocant Et bleme quand
Sonne l'heure, Je me souviens Des jours anciens
Et je pieure ;
PAUL VERLATNE 127
' Et je m'en vais Au vent mauvais
Qui m'emporte De ga, de la, Pareil a la
Feuille morte.'
" These verses, among many others, gave evidence of a certain inclination towards a half-sensual, half-dreamy melancholy, confirmed, a year later, more agreeably, perhaps, in any case with more mastery and more deliberate intention, by the verses (costumed after the personages of the Italian comedy and the fancy pieces of Watteau) contained in the little volume, not badly received from the first, the ' Fetes Galantes.' It is not difficult to find among these some piquant notes of velvety sharpness and of sly malice.
'CREPUSCULE DU SOIR
' Les hauts talons luttaient avec les longues jupes, En sorte que, selon le terrain et le vent, Parfois luisaient des bas de jambe, trop souvent Intercepte's ! — et nous aimions ce jeu de dupes.
' Parfois aussi le dard d : un insecle jaloux Inquietait le col des belles sous les branches, Et c'etaient des eclairs soudains de nuques blanches Et ce r^gal comblait nos jeunes yeux de fous.
' Le soir tombait, un soir Equivoque d'automne :
Les belles, se pendant reveuses a nos bras
Dirent alors des mots si spdcieux, tout bas,
Que notre ame depuis ce temps tremble et s'&onne.
'LE FAUNE
' Un vieux faune de terre cuite Rit au centre des boulingrins, Pre'sageant sans doute une fuite Mauvaise a ces instants sereins
' Qui m'ont conduit et t'ont conduite, Melancholiques pe"lerins, Jusqu'a cette heure dont la fuite Toumoie au son des tambourins. 1
" A quite other music is heard in ' La Bonne Chanson,' really a wedding- present, literally speaking, for the tiny volume appeared on the occasion of a marriage which was going to take place, and which took place in 1S70. The
128 THE SAVOY
author values it as perhaps the most natural of his works. Indeed, it was Art, violent or delicate, which had affected to reign, almost exclusively, in his former works, and it was only from then that it was possible to trace in him true and simple views concerning nature, physical and moral.
t 'SERENADE
' La lune blanche Luit dans les bois ; De chaque branche Part une voix Sous la ramee . . .
O bien-aimee.
' L'&ang reflete,
Profond miroir,
La silhouette
De saule noir
Ou le vent pleure . . .
R6vons, c'est l'heure.
' Un vaste et tendre Apaisement Semble descendre Du firmament Que l'astre irise . . .
C'est l'heure exquise.'
" Life had its way, and distress soon came, not without his own fault, to the household of the poet, who suddenly threw up everything, and went wandering in search of unsatisfying distractions. On the other hand, I will not say remorse (he did not experience it, for he repented of nothing), but vexation and regret, with certain consolations, compensations rather, inspired him in his third collection, ' Romances sans Paroles,' thus named in order to express the real vagueness and the want of precise meaning which were part of his intention.
'SPLEEN
' O triste, triste dtait mon ame A cause, a cause d'une femme.
'Je ne me suis pas console', Bien que mon cceur s'en soit alle,
' Bien que mon coeur, bien que mon ame Eussent fui loin de cette femme.
PAUL VERLAINE 129
'Je ne me suis pas console", Bien que mon cceur s'en soit alld
' Et mon cceur, mon coeur trop sensible Dit a mon ame : Est-il possible,
' Est-il possible, — le fut-il, — Ce fier exil, ce triste exil ?
' Mon ame dit a mon cceur : Sais-je Moi-meme que nous veut ce piege
' D'etre presents bien qu'exile's, Encore que loin en alles ? '
'GREEN
' Voici des fruits, des fleurs, des feuilles et des branches, Et puis voici mon cceur, qui ne bat que pour vous : Ne le dechirez pas avec vos deux mains blanches Et qu'a vos yeux si beaux l'humble present soit doux.
' J'arrive tout couvert encore de rosee Que le vent du matin vient glacer a mon front. Souffrez que ma fatigue, a vos pieds repose'e, Reve des chers instants qui la d^lasseront.
' Sur votre jeune sein laisser rouler ma tete Toute sonore encor de vos derniers baisers ; Laissez-la s'apaiser de la bonne tempete, Et que je dorme un peu puisque vous reposez.'
" A serious catastrophe interrupted these factitious pains and pleasures. He exaggerated it indeed to the point of writing these lines :
'Un grand sommeil noir Tombe sur ma vie : Dormez, tout espoir, Dormez, toute envie.
'Je ne sais plus rien, Je perds la memoire Du mal et du bien . . . O la triste histoire !
'Je suis un berceau Qu'une main balance Au creux dun caveau : Silence, silence ! '
i 3 o THE SAVOY
" Then a divine resignation (still, to his thinking, divine) came over him, and inspired in him many mystical poems of the purest Catholicism, such as this, which marks a new era in poetry, and may stand for the motto of his life during many years :
' Beaute des femmes, leur faiblesse, et ces mains pales
Qui font souvent le bien et peuvent tout le mal,
Et ces yeux, ou plus rien ne reste d'animal
Que juste assez pour dire : 'assez' aux fureurs males,
' Et toujours, maternelle endormeuses des rales, Meme quand elle ment, cette voix ! Matinal Appel, ou chant bien doux a vepre, ou frais signal, Ou beau sanglot qui va mourir au pli des chiles ! . . .
' Hommes durs ! Vie atroce et laide d'ici-bas ! Ah ! que du moins, loin des baisers et des combats, Quelque chose demeure un peu sur la montagne,
' Quelque chose du coeur enfantin et subtil,
Bonte, respect ! Car qu'est-ce qui nous accompagne,
Et vraiment, quand la mort viendra, que reste-t-il ? '
' Ecoutez la chanson bien douce Qui ne pleure que pour vous plaire. Elle est discrete, elle est legere : Un frisson d'eau sur de la mousse !
' La voix vous fut connue (et chere ?), Mais a present elle est voilee Comme une veuve desolee, Pourtant comme elle encore fiere ;
' Et, dans les longs plis de son voile Qui palpite au brises d'automne, Cache et montre au cceur qui s'etonne La verite' comme une etoile.
' Elle dit, la voix reconnue, Que la bonte' c'est notre vie, Que de la haine et de l'envie Rien ne reste, la mort venue.
' Elle parle aussi de la gloire D'etre simple sans plus attendre. Et de noces d'or et du tendre Bonheur d'une paix sans victoire.
PAUL VERLAINE 131
'Accueillez la voix qui persiste Dans son naif epithalanie. Allez, rien n'est meilleur a l'ame Que de faire une ame moins triste !
' Elle est en peine et de passage, L'ame qui souffre sans colere, Et comme sa morale est claire ! . . . . Ecoutez la chanson bien sage.'
"Then, weary of men and women, of their baseness and frailty, and weary of himself, the poet turned to God :
' O mon Dieu, vous m'avez blesse d'amour
Et la blessure est encor vibrante,
O mon Dieu, vous m'avez blesse d'amour.
'O mon Dieu, votre crainte m'a frappe, Et la brulure est encor la qui tonne, O mon Dieu, votre crainte m'a frappe.
'O mon Dieu, j'ai connu que tout est vil Et votre gloire en moi s'est installee, O mon Dieu, j'ai connu que tout est vil.
' Noyez mon arhe aux flots de votre Vin, Fondez ma vie au Pain de votre table, Noyez mon cceur aux flots de votre Vin.
' Voici mon sang que je n'ai pas verse, Voici ma chair indigne de souffrance, Voici mon sang que je n'ai pas verse.
'Voici mon front qui n'a pu que rougir, Pour l'escabeau de vos pieds adorables, Voici mon front qui n'a pu que rougir.
' Voici mes mains qui n'ont pas travaille, Pour les charbons ardents et l'encens rare l Voici mes mains qui n'ont pas travaille.
'Voici mon cceur qui n'a battu qu'en vain, Pour palpiter aux ronces du Calvaire, Voici mon cceur qui n'a battu qu'en vain.
' Voici mes pieds, frivoles voyageurs, Pour accourir au cri de votre grace, Voici mes pieds, frivoles voyageurs.
'Voici ma voix, bruit maussade et menteur, Pour les reproches de la Penitence, Voici ma voix, bruit maussade et menteur.
1 "Ascendit fumus aromatum in conspectu Domini de manu angeli."
1 32 THE SAVOY
'Voici mes yeux, luminaires d'erreur, Pour etre eteints aux pleurs de la priere, Voici mes yeux, luminaires d'erreur.
' Helas ! Yous, Dieu d'offrande et de pardon, Quel est le puits de mon ingratitude, Helas ! Vous, Dieu d'offrande et de pardon,
' Dieu de terreur et Dieu de saintete, Helas ! ce noir abime de mon crime, Dieu de terreur et Dieu de saintete,
'Vous, Dieu de paix, de joie et de bonheur, Toutes mes peurs, toutes mes ignorances, Vous Dieu de paix, de joie et de bonheur,
' Vous connaissez tout cela, tout cela, Et que je suis plus pauvre que personne, Vous connaissez tout cela, tout cela,
' Mais ce que j'ai, mon Dieu, je vous le donne.'
(Stickney, 1875.)
" Then, as it was bound to happen, overstrained humanity resumed, or seemed to resume, its rights, or its fancied rights ; whence a series of volumes, ' Chansons pour Elle,' ' Odes en son Honneur,' ' Elegies,' in which the new affections were celebrated in appropriate measures. Trouble returned under other forms : there are so many, and the sharpest of them all is sickness. It was under this dominion that the poet made a certain return upon himself, and, putting an end or a pause to his recent lucubrations, resumed at times the sadness and serenity of ' Sagesse,' ' Amour,' and ' Bonheur,' not without an echo, but a rigorously diminished echo, of the sinful chants of ' Parallelement,' the most sensual, the most reprehensible, if you will, of his books. Here is a last poem, which, at all events, will carry me somewhat further back towards the ' Fetes Galantes ' (and then I shall have the honour of thanking you for your gracious attention), though my next volume, ' Varia,' shortly to appear, will give evidence rather of the philosophic and serious side of what people are pleased to term my talent :
'IMPRESSION DE PRINTEMPS
' II est des jours, avez vous remarque 1 ? Oil Ton se sent plus leger qu'un oiseau, Plus jeune qu'un enfant, et vrai, plus gai Que la meme gaiete d'un damoiseau.
PAUL VERLAINE 1 33
' On se souvient sans bien se rappeler . . . Evidemment Ton reve et non pourtant. L'on semble nager et Ton croirait voler. L'on aime ardemment sans aimer cependant,
1 Tant est leger le cceur sous le ciel clair Et tant Ton va, sur de soi, plein de foi Dans les autres que l'on trompe avec l'air D'etre plutot trompe gentiment, soi.
' La vie est bonne et l'on voudrait mourir Bien que n'ayant pas peur du lendemain. Un desir indecis s'en vient fleurir, Dirait-on, au coeur plus et moins qu'humain.
' Helas 1 faut-il que meure ce bonheur? Meurent plutot la vie et son tourment ! O dieux elements, gardez-moi du malheur D'a jamais perdre un moment si charmant.'
{May, 1893.)
" Since the course of my causerie, and the tone of its development, have led me to end with these lines :
' O dieux elements, gardez-moi du malheur D'a jamais perdre un moment si charmant,'
I take the opportunity of making them the transition to my ' last word,' or rather of ending with them. Thanks, then, once more, ladies and gentlemen, for the delicious hour in which I have felt your sympathy about me, as I have spoken of my own country in a country I so greatly love and admire, of things and men dear and precious to me ; thanks for the attention you have given to the words of a guest, for whom this evening will remain memorable and honourable among all the hours of a life which has all been devoted to the cause of letters."
The English press, both London and provincial, was, on the whole, favourable to me, and I would here offer my best " shake-hand " to the staff of many papers, particularly the "Times," the " Pall Mall Gazette," the "Star" (which, I may add in parentheses, has published a portrait of me in which I trace more resemblance to my friend the excellent Breton poet, Le Goffic), the " St. James's Gazette," the " Liverpool Post," the " Manchester Guardian," the " Sketch," etc., to all of which my warmest gratitude is due. Certain articles, intended to give more precise information, require perhaps a few corrections. But what difference will any contradictions, any improbablities, on my account, puzzling to posterity as they are likely to be, what harm will they
134 THE SAVOY
do to my good or bad reputation a thousand years from now? What real harm ?
Next day I was off to Oxford, where I lunched with my friend Rothenstein, in company with the distinguished professor, York Powell, and a French poet, M. Bonnier, long since settled in England, an ideal com- panion, full of stories and recollections. Then, with the aid of hansoms, we were able to see some of the town, deliciously dainty, almost rustic, in its commercial quarters, tiny shops as it were illuminated with cheap confec- tionaries, and goods of popular sorts, sweets for little people and little purses ; sweet little houses, little gardens full of rest, trees showing their last red leaves above the red, comfortable, flat roofs, somewhat like the proper and modest little streets of Boston, of which I have spoken in another paper ; and unique in its mediaeval majesty, its buildings, colleges, churches, of the good period (I refer neither to our century, nor to the two centuries and a half before it).
My lecture took place in a hall, situated at the end of a labyrinth of rooms crammed with books, an ancient hall, with an arched roof of stone and wood, severely furnished, where, under the presidency of Professor Powell, I gave once more, with such change as the place demanded, the lecture which I had given the previous night, before an audience mainly of students, most of them in the historic dress of the university, a black robe, short or long, according to the " degree," and completed, out of doors, by the traditional flat square cap, which gives to them, as to their professors, a half clerical, half magisterial air, well in keeping with those faces, grave with the majesty of young or matured learning, and all friendly and welcoming with smile or greeting.
On my return to London, I spent a few days in seeing the city which I once knew so well, and which I found, at all events in its purely " con- tinental " quarter, much changed, and much to its advantage, from the point of view, somewhat narrow perhaps, of an old Parisian ; and all this did but increase my long and profoundly felt sympathy for a city which I have praised so often for its force, its splendour, its infinite charm, too, in fine weather and foul, and which I am forced, in all good faith, to praise now for its charm of the moment, and a limitless hospitality, the understanding of tastes, the forgiveness of shortcomings, the appreciation of merits, of defects even : I do but speak, be sure, of elegant, respectable defects.
Early in December I set out for Manchester, leaving by the admirable station of St. Pancras, all brick, marble, pointed arches and bell-towers, which
PAUL VEKLAINE 135
was in course of building at the time of my first visit to London in 1873 : 1873 to 1894, a good age for an "old dog ! "
This town, proverbially a business town, black and splendid, a larger Lyons, struck me as being all swathed in smoke, with open promenades by the side of a very low-lying river. I only saw Salford, which forms half of the rival of Liverpool, and my visit, as at Oxford, only lasted twenty-four hours. I was received by Mr. Theodore C. London, a young clergyman of the Congregational Church, and by his sister and brother, a lad of eighteen or nineteen, all more friendly one than another. A friend of Mr. London, a charming young man, professor at the Grammar School, M. Emile Bally, a Swiss from Geneva, who, naturally, spoke French as his mother tongue, and English with absolute perfection, came to see us during the day. Both were steeped in literature to the finger-tips, and ardent admirers of poetry, and it was they who looked after the lecture which I had been invited to give. I had a most sympathetic audience for my speechifying, which was similar to those I had already given. I was well aware that Manchester, apart from its immense industrial importance, formed an important intel- lectual and artistic centre. If I had had the time, I should have made some endeavour to get a sight of a large picture which had attracted deserved attention at the Salon of 1872. The picture was signed Fantin-Latour ; the title, "Coin de Table"; the persons, Leon Valade, Camille Pelletan, Ernest d'Hervilly, Jean Aicard, Arthur Rimbaud, — and your humble servant.
Then, all too soon, the time came for me to leave England, and, after some days of delightful dawdling through a London of theatres (a very fairy- land !), music-halls (a very paradise !), of good and excellent visits received and returned ; after having shaken so many really friendly hands, William Heinemann, William Rothenstein, A. Symons, H. Home, H. Harland, E. Gosse, Image, Lane, Frank Harris, the sympathetic editor of the " Fort- nightly," I embarked once more, this time on a sea as still as glass, happy, certainly, at the thought of seeing France again, but very happy, too, at the thought of so agreeable a visit and of such good and enduring memories!
Paul Verlaine.
(Translated by Arthur Symons.)
The Dive
A Lithograph by Charles H. Shannon
.
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-
THE LOVE OF THE POOR
PERSONAGES.
The Old Man.
The Old Woman.
The Soul of their Dead Child.
SCENE. — The interior of a small cottage, almost devoid of furniture. chairs drawn tip to a fireless grate. Time : twilight.
The Old Woman enters, walking feebly, carrying a few twigs. The Old Woman. AR, far have I wandered in my search for wood. My arms are stiff, my eyes are dim From cold and want of food. But soon dear God will give us help, I know that God is good.
The Soul of the Dead Child. Yes, God is good. Tltc Old Woman. My foolish brain seems all to reel,
Two
140 THE SAVOY
And voices murmur in my head ; I could have sworn to baby's voice, And yet I know our babe is dead.
The Soul. Yes, mother, she is dead.
The Old Woman. Tis strange how lately when my heart has failed, When life has seemed too hard for folks like me, A little voice has murmured in my ear, And whispered comfort for the days to be.
The Soul. Yes, comfort for the days to be ; Such joys as you have never known, The songs of all the angel choir, The sight of God upon His throne.
The Old Woman. I know we must not hope for joys in heaven, To whom on earth no room to live is given. If God will grant me but His leave to rest.
The Soul. God will bestow whatever He thinks best.
THE Old Man totters into the room.
The Old Alan. My dear, they mocked me in the village street, The little boys threw stones and dogged my feet, The baker laughed, and turned me from his door.
The Soid. So shall God turn Him from his cry for grace.
The Old Man. There was no soul would give me resting-place.
The Old Woman. Then we must die, dear heart, And hand in hand
Seek out the passage to the pleasant land. As we have lived and toiled, so let us die. I could not close my weary eyes, Unless I knew you by.
The Old Alan. [Sits down, and supporting his head with both hands, speaks in a shrill, weak voice, smiling.] I mind me, wife, when we were young And green and fresh as yonder hills, The fields and woods we strolled among Knew more of grief and human ills Than we poor children dreamed or knew, When you loved me and I loved you.
The Old Woman. [Sitting likewise, and smiling to herself.'] Do you mind, James, of one brave day you kissed me in the wheat?
THE LOVE OF THE POOR 141
I was afraid the folks would guess, as I walked up the street. I felt a trembling in my voice, a glistening in my eyes.
The Old Man. I never yet had kissed a maid who showed such sweet surprise. And do you mind this little house, when I brought you home that day They made us one within the church, and sent us on our way?
The Old Woman. The honeysuckle was in bloom about the cottage door. Ah ! it was fine to be in love, we cared not we were poor.
The Old Man. I bring to mind we knelt that night, and prayed dear God to bless ; And as we knelt and prayed to Him, we wept for happiness.
The Old Woman. Ah ! husband mine, we were so young, how could such children tell God has no time to save the rich and love the poor as well ? Such sinful, humble folk as we, and of such little store, It were but vain and proud to think God coilld recall us more.
The Soul. As lilies shining in the woods at night, As diamonds glittering in a crown, More radiant and more full of light, When God shall bring the mighty down, And set the humble in their place, The suffering poor shall know His grace.
The Old Man. [Passing his hands over his eyes, and staring doubtfully about the room.] I hear a voice that thrills with love, A voice like the voice of a child
The Old Woman. A voice like the voice of our child. But she is an angel singing above —
[Bursting into tears. My arms that ache with longing, My eyes that are lost in tears. Oh ! child, my child, come back to me, Give me the love you loved with me, Give back the happy years.
Tlie Old Man. Hush, hush, my wife, we must obey God's will. We know our little child is happier on His breast. Think, think, my dear, if she were with us still, She would be hungry, too. Yes, wife, God's ways are best. He knows that we can bear the hunger and the cold :
1 42 THE SAVOY
For patience comes with poverty, as comfort to the old.
The Old Woman. [Still weeping softly.'] The days were never long to me, when she played at my feet ; The food was never poor to me, while I could see her eat ; The pains seemed never hard to me that brought her from the womb ; But life is long and poor and hard since she is in the tomb.
TJie Soul. Courage, mother, courage, father, God is on your side : Seek for help, and seek it bravely, He shall be your guide.
TJie Old Man. A voice within me whispers, " Courage, try again." The world is cruel, but not so cruel as to delight in pain. I will tell of our hunger, our age, our empty grate, Wife, the world shall bring you help before it is too late.
[He gets up, lays his hand comfortingly on her shoulder, and goes out. The room slowly darkens. The old woman remains sitting motion- less, sometimes stretching out Jier hands towards ttie grate, as though to warm them. The Old Woman. My head swims, my heart pants, my hands are cramped with cold. Will one be warm and young in heaven, or always poor and old ? I am tired, tired of life, and the misery that remains ; Tired of the many struggles, tired of the many pains.
[Her Jiead falls forward on her breast, and she seems to sleep. The SOUL OF the Dead Child comes forward, a shadowy figure swathed in gray, and kisses her on theforeliead. Then there passes slowly through the room the vision of a woman holding to her breast a young child. The child claps its hands, and laughs. The Old Woman. [Holding out her arms.'] Baby, dear, I see you, baby, come to me. Baby, mother calls you, calls you to her knee.
[ The vision passes slowly towards her. The Old Woman laughs, and, claspitig her arms to fur breast, rocks backwards and forwards, and sings in a quavering voice.
Down a down, down a down, Sleep, sleepy head. White satin gown For baby's warm bed. Down a down, down a down,
THE LOVE OF THE POOR 143
Wake sleepy eyes, Red satin gown For baby's surprise. [The vision passes slowly away. Tlie SOUL OF THE DEAD CHILD once more appears, and kisses t/ie Old Woman on the foreliead. The Old Woman. [Raising her luad with a start.] Oh ! how happily I dreamed. Baby nestled to my breast ; All my pain and weakness seemed Turned to happiness and rest.
The OLD MAN comes in very slowly, and going up to the OLD WOMAN takes her Jiand in his.
The Old Man. My dear, I cast aside our pride, my pride and the pride of my wife, The pride of honest workers, honest workers all our life. I went to the workhouse master, and I stood before his door, I said to him, I am old and ill, my wife and I are poor, We have toiled and saved for many years, and saved and toiled again, But cruel times and want of work have made our toil in vain. We have no fire within our grate, no food within our door, And I have come to beg the last sad refuge of the poor.
[He pauses, and covers his face with his hands. But he said, I cannot take you both, together you cannot be, She must go to the women's ward, and you must remain with me.
[He throws his arms round tier, and breaks into weak, tremulous sobs. And I must leave you, oh, my wife ! Through all this weary, toiling life, By night and day, and day and night, You were my joy, my one delight. As children, hid among the wheat, We kissed, and whispered, love was sweet ; As bride and bridegroom in our bed, We thanked our God that we were wed : We heard our little girl's first cry, And in my arms you watched her die ;
144
THE SAVOY
We wept together by her tomb.
And turned to our childless home.
Our heads have whitened on our way,
Our joys are gone, our sorrows stay.
But now our time is nearly spent,
We may not sit in quiet content,
Breathe out in peace our feeble breath,
Beneath the kindly hand of Death,
And so, together, hand in hand,
Journey towards the happy land. [He sinks down feebly at her feet.
The Old Woman. Nay, do not grieve, my dear, we will not part : No stranger's hand shall close our tired eyes ; Together we will wait Death's hand upon our heart, Together we will wake to heaven's glad surprise.
TJie Old Man. [In a weak voice.] Kiss me, sweetheart, the blades of corn are high, And not a soul can see of all the passers by.
[He stretches otct his arms to her, and she, leaning forward, kisses him. A long silence. Their breathing gets shorter and shorter, and finally ceases. The SOUL OF THE DEAD CHILD, coming forward, closes their eyes gently, and kisses them on the forehead.
Leila Macdonald.
f
PAGES FROM THE LIFE OF
LUCY NEWCOME
i
S Lucy Newcome walked down the street, with the baby in her arms, her first sensation was one of thankfulness, to be out of the long, blank, monotonous hospital, where she had suffered obscurely ; to be once more free, and in the open air. How refreshing it is to be out of doors again ! she said to herself. But she had not walked many steps before the unfamiliar morning air made her feel quite light-headed ; for a moment she fancied she was going to faint ; and she leant against the wall, closing her eyes, until the feeling had passed. As she walked on again, things still seemed a little dizzy before her eyes, and she had to draw in long breaths, for fear that curious cloudy sensation should come into her brain once more. She held the baby carefully, drawing the edges of the cloak around its face, so that it should not feel cold and wake up. It was the first time she had carried the baby out of doors, and it seemed to her that everyone must be looking at her. She was not much afraid of being recognized, for she knew that she had altered so much since her confinement ; and for that reason she was glad to be looking so thin and white and ill. But she felt sure that people would wonder who she was, and why such a young girl was carrying a baby ; perhaps they would not think it was hers ; she might be only carrying it for some married woman. And she let her left hand, on which there was no wedding-ring, show from under the shawl in which it had been her first instinct to envelope it. Many thoughts came into her mind, but in a dull confused way, as she walked slowly along, feeling the weight of the baby dragging at her arms. At last they began to ache so much that she looked around for somewhere to sit down. She had not noticed where she had been going ; why should she ? where was there for her to go ? and she found herself in one of the side streets, at the end of which, she remembered, was the park. There, at all events, she could sit down ; and when she had found a seat, she took the baby on her knees, and lay back in the corner with a sense of relief.
1 48 THE SAVOY
At first she did not try to think of plans for the future. She merely resigned herself, unconsciously enough, to the vague, peaceful, autumn sadness of the place and the hour. The damp smell of the earth, sharp and comforting, came to her nostrils ; the leaves, smelling a little musty, dropped now and then past her face on to the shawl in which the baby was wrapt. There was only enough breeze to make a gentle sighing among the branches overhead ; and she looked up at the leafy roof above her, as she had looked up so often when a child, and felt better for being there. Gradually her mind began to con- centrate itself: what am I to do, she thought, what am I to do?
Just then the little creature lying on her knees stirred a little, and opened its blue eyes. She caught it to her breast with kiss after kiss, and began to rock it to and fro, with a passionate fondness. " Mammy's little one," she said ; " all Mammy's, Mammy's own ; " and began to croon over it, with a sort of fierce insistence. Yes, she must do something, and at once, for the child's sake.
But the more she tried to find some plan for the future, the more hopeless did the task seem to become. There was her aunt, whom she would never go back to, whom she would never see again ; never. There was her cousin, who had cast her off; and she said to herself that she hated her cousin. All her aunt's friends were so respectable : they would never look at her ; and she could never go to them. Her cousin's friends were like himself, only worse, much worse. No, there was nowhere for her to look for help ; and how was she to help herself? She knew nothing of any sort of business, she had no showy accomplishments to put to use ; and besides, with a baby, who would give her employment ? Oh, why had she ever listened to her cousin, why had she been such a fool as to have a baby ? she said to herself, furiously ; and then, feeling the bundle stir in her arms, she fell to hugging and kissing it again.
As she lifted up her face, a woman who was passing half paused, looking at her in a puzzled way, t and then, after walking on a little distance, turned and came back, hesitatingly. Lucy knew her well : it was Mrs. Graham, her aunt's laundress, with whom she had had to settle accounts every week. She had never liked the woman, but now she was overjoyed at meeting her ; and as Mrs. Graham said, questioningly, " Miss Lucy? Lord, now, it isn't you? " she answered, " Yes, it 's me ; don't you know me, Mrs. Graham ?"
" Well," the woman said, " I wasn't sure ; how you have changed, miss I asked Mrs. Newcome where you was, and she said you was gone abroad." The woman stopped and looked curiously at the baby. She had taken
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in the situation at a glance ; and though she was rather surprised, she was not nearly so much surprised as Lucy had expected, and she seemed more interested than shocked.
" Pretty baby, miss," she said, stooping down to have a closer look.
" Yes," said Lucy, in a matter of fact way, " it 's my baby. I've been very unhappy."
" Have you now, miss? " said Mrs. Graham, sitting down by her side, and looking at her more curiously than ever. "Well, you do look ill. But where have you been all this time, and where are you living now ? "
" I'm not living anywhere," said Lucy ; " I only came out of hospital to-day and I've nowhere to go."
" You don't mean to say that ! " said Mrs. Graham ; " but," she added, looking at the baby, " his father . . ."
" He has left me," said Lucy, as quietly as she could.
At this Mrs. Graham glanced at her in a somewhat less favourable way. She did not disapprove of people running away from home and getting children as irregularly as they liked ; but she very much disapproved of their being left.
" I haven't a penny in the world," Lucy went on ; " at least, I have only a little more than two shillings ; and I don't know what I am going to do."
" Oh dear now, oh dear ! " said Mrs. Graham, rather coldly, "that 's very sad, it is. I do say that's hard lines. And so you was left without anything. That's very hard lines."
" I'm so glad I met you, Mrs. Graham," said Lucy. " Perhaps you can help me. Oh, do try to help me if you can ! I haven't anybody, really, to look to, and I haven't a roof to shelter me. I can't stay in the streets all day. I'm so afraid the baby will take cold, or something. It isn't for myself I mind so much. What shall I do ?"
While Lucy spoke, Mrs. Graham was considering matters. Without being exactly hard-hearted, she was not naturally sympathetic, and, while she felt sorry for the poor girl, she was not at all carried away by her feelings. But she did not like to leave her there as she was, and an idea had occurred to her which made her all the more ready to act kindly towards a creature in distress. So she said, after a moment's pause, " Well, you'd better come along with me, miss, and have a rest, anyway. Shan't I carry the baby? "
" Oh, you are good ! " cried Lucy, seizing her hand, and almost crying as she tried to thank her. " No, no, I'll carry the baby ! And may I really come in with you ? You don't mind ? You don't mind being seen ? "
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" Oh, no, / don't mind ! " said Mrs. Graham, a little loftily. " It 's this way, miss."
And they began to walk across the park. Lucy felt so immensely relieved that she was almost gay. She gave up thinking of what was going to happen, and trudged along contentedly by the side of the older woman. After they had left the park and had reached the poorer quarter of the town, she suddenly stopped outside a sweet-shop. " It won't be very extravagant if I get a pennyworth of acid-drops, will it ? " she said, with almost her old smile; and Mrs. Graham had to wait while she went in and bought them. Then they went on together through street after street, till at last Mrs. Graham said, " It 's here, come in."
As the door opened Lucy heard the barking of a dog ; and next moment she found herself in a room such as she had never been in in her life, but which seemed to her, at that moment, the most delightful place in the world. It was a kitchen, horribly dirty, with a dog-kennel in one corner, and a rabbit- hutch on the top of the kennel ; there was a patchwork rug on the floor, and a deal table in the middle, with a piece of paper on one end of it as a table- cloth, and a loaf of bread, without a plate, standing in the middle of the table.
" Have something to eat, miss," said Mrs. Graham, and Lucy sank into an old stuffed armchair, which stood by the side of the fire-place, the springs broken and protruding, and the flock coming through the horse-hair in great gray handfuls.
The baby was still asleep, and lay quietly on her lap as she munched ravenously at the thick slice of bread and butter which Mrs. Graham cut for her. All at once she heard a little cry, and, looking round in the corner behind her, she saw a baby lying in a clothes-basket.
" You'll have to sleep with the children to-night," said Mrs. Graham. " We've only two rooms besides this, and the children has one of them. When you've had a bit of a meal, you'd better lie down and rest yourself."
When Lucy went into the room which was to be her bedroom for the night, she could not at first distinguish the bed. There were no bedclothes, but some old coats and petticoats had been heaped up over a mattress on a little iron bedstead in the corner.
" Now just lie down for a bit," said Mrs. Graham, " and you give me the baby. I know the ways of them."
Lucy threw herself on the bed. She could at least rest there ; and she put a couple of acid-drops into her mouth, and then, almost before she knew it, she was asleep, in her old baby-fashion, sucking her thumb.
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II Lucy slept at Mrs. Graham's two nights. She had been told that she would have to work ; and she would do anything, she said, anything. Mrs. Graham had a cousin, Mrs. Marsh, who had a large laundry ; and Mrs. Marsh happened to be just then in want of a shirt and collar hand. Lucy knew nothing about ironing, but she was sure she could learn it without the least difficulty. So the two women set out for Mrs. Marsh's. It was not very far off, and when they got there Mr. and Mrs. Marsh were standing at the big side- gate, where the things were brought in and out, watching one of their vans being unloaded. The shop-door was open, and inside, in the midst of the faint steam, rising from piles of white linen, smoking under the crisp hiss of the hot irons, Lucy saw four young women, wearing loose blouses, their sleeves rolled up above their elbows, their faces flushed with the heat, bending over their work. Mrs. Marsh looked at her amiably enough, and she led the way into the laundry. Besides the four girls, the two shirt and collar hands, the gauferer and the plain ironer, there was a man ramming clothes into a boiler with a long pole, and a youth, Mrs. Marsh's son, turning a queer, new- fangled instrument like a barrel, which dollied the clothes by means of some mechanical contrivance. Clothes were hanging all around on clothes-horses, and overhead, on lines ; the shirts were piled up in neat heaps at the end of the ironing-boards ; some of the things lay in baskets on the ground. As Lucy looked around, her eye suddenly caught a white embroidered dress which was hanging up to dry ; and for the moment she felt quite sick ; it was exactly like a dress of her mother's.
And the heat, too, was overpowering ; she scarcely knew what was being said, as the two women discussed her to her face, and bargained between themselves as to the price of her labour. She realized that she was to come there next day ; that she was to learn to iron cuffs and collars and shirt-fronts like the young woman nearest to her, whom they called Polly ; and, as a special favour, she was to be paid eight shillings a-week, the full price at once instead of only six shillings, which was generally given to beginners. That she realized, she realized it acutely ; for she was already beginning to find out that money means something very definite when you are poor, and that a shilling more or less may mean all the difference between everything and nothing.
That day it was arranged that she should rent a little attic in a house
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not far from Mrs. Graham's, a house where a carpenter and his wife lived : they had no children, and she could have a room to herself. She was to pay five shillings a-week for her room and what they called her keep, that is to say, breakfast and supper, which, she soon found out, meant bread and cheese one day, bread and dripping another, and bread and lard a third, always with some very weak tea, water just coloured. Then there was the baby ; she could not look after the baby while she was out at work, so the carpenter's wife, who was called Mrs. Marsh, like the laundress, though she was no relation, promised to take charge of the baby during the day for half-a- crown extra. Five shillings and half-a-crown made seven-and-six, and that left her only sixpence a week to live on : could one say to live on ? At all events, she had now a roof over her head ; she would scarcely starve, not quite starve ; and she sat in her attic, the first night she found herself there, and wondered what was going to happen : if she would have strength to do the work, strength to live on, day after day, strength to nurse her baby, whose little life depended on hers. She sat on the edge of the bed, looking out at the clear, starry sky, visible above the roofs, and she sent up a prayer, up into that placid, unresponsive sky, hanging over her like the peace that passeth understanding, and has no comfort in it for mere mortals, a prayer for strength, only for the strength of day by day, one day at a time.
Next morning she took up her place at the ironing-board, next to Polly, between her and the head ironer, whom she was told to watch. They were all Lancashire girls, not bad-hearted, but coarse and ignorant, always swearing and using foul language. Lucy had never heard people who talked like that ; it wounded her horribly, and her pale face went crimson at every one of their coarse jokes. They had no sort of ill-will to her, but they knew she had a child, and was not married, and they could not help reminding her of the fact, which indeed seemed to them no less scandalous than their language seemed to her. They really believed that a woman who had been seduced was exactly the same as a prostitute ; they talked of people who led a gay life : " Ah, my wench, it's a gay life, but a short one ; " and they were convinced that every- one who led a gay life came to a deplorable end before she was five-and- twenty. To have had a child, without having been married, was the first step, so they held, in an inevitably downward course ; indeed, they believed that all kinds of horrible things came of it, and they talked to one another of the ghastly stories they had " heerd tell." Lucy had never heard of such things, and she half believed them. " Can all this really be true ? " she said to herself sometimes, in a paroxysm of terror ; and she tried not to think of
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it, as of something that might possibly be true, but must certainly be kept out of sight and out of mind.
One of the girls, Polly, was always very nice to her, and would come round sometimes to her little room and hold the baby for her ; but the others called her " Miss Stuck-up," " Miss Fine-airs," and when she blushed, cried, even, at the ribaldries which seemed to them so natural and matter-of-course, they would taunt her with her bastard, and ask her if she didn't know how a baby was made, she who pretended to be such an innocent. She never tried to answer them ; she did her work (after three days she could do it almost as well as the most practised of them), and she got through day after day as best she could. " It was for baby's sake," she whispered to herself, " all for baby's sake."
In the middle of the day they had a dinner-hour, and the girls brought their dinner with them, which they generally ate out of doors, in the drying- ground at the back, glad to be out of the steam and heat for a few minutes. That hour was Lucy's terror. She had no dinner to bring with her : how could she, out of sixpence a week ? and every day she pretended to go out and get her meal at an eating-house, scared lest one of them should come round the corner, and see her walking up and down the road, filling up the time until she could venture to go back again. She knew that if any one of them had guessed the truth, had known that she could never afford even the cheapest price of a dinner, they would one and all have shared with her their sandwiches, and bread and cheese, and meat pies, and apple dumplings. But she would not have let them know for worlds ; and the aching suspense, lest she should be found out, was almost as bad to bear as the actual pang of hunger. She grew thinner and paler, and every day it seemed to her that the baby grew thinner and paler too. How could she nourish it, when she had no nourishment herself? She wept over it, and prayed God in agony not to visit her sin on the child. All this while the poor little thing lay and wailed, a feeble, fretful, continual wail, ceasing and going on, ceasing and going on again. It seemed to her that the sound would lodge itself in her brain, and drive her mad, quite mad. She heard it when she was in the laundry, bending over the steaming linen ; it pierced through the crisp hiss of the irons as they passed shiningly over the surface ; she heard it keeping time to her footsteps as she walked hungrily up and down that road in the dinner-hour ; she dreamt of it even, and woke up to hear the little wail break out in the stillness of the night, in her attic bed. And the wail was getting feebler and feebler ; the baby was dying, oh ! she knew that it was dying, and she could not save it ; there was no way, absolutely no way to save it.
K
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III
She had now been eight weeks at the laundry, and she seemed to get thinner every day. As she looked at her face in the glass, she was quite frightened at the long hollows she saw in her white cheeks, the dark lines under her eyes : her own face seemed to fade away from her as she looked at it, away into a mist ; and through the mist she heard the small persistent crying of the baby, as if from a great way off. " Am I going to be ill ? " she wondered, looking down at her fingers helplessly. Certainly both she and the child were in need of the doctor ; but who was to pay for a doctor ? It was impossible.
That day, for the first time since she had been at the laundry, she had a half-holiday, and she put on her hat and went out into the streets, merely to walk about, and so think the less. " I can at least look at the shops," she said to herself, and she made her way to the more fashionable part of the town, where the milliners' and jewellers' shops were, and as she looked at the rings and bracelets, the smart hats and stylish jackets, it seemed to her worse than ever, to see all these things, and to know that none of them would ever be hers. It was now three o'clock ; she had had nothing since her early breakfast, and the long walk, the loitering about, had tired her ; it seemed to her, once more, as if a mist came floating up about her, through which the sound of voices was deadened before it reached her ears, and the ground felt a little uncertain under her feet, as if it were slightly elastic as she trod upon it. She turned aside out of the main street, into the big arcade, where she thought it would be quieter, and she found herself staring at a row of photographs of actresses, quite blankly, hardly seeing them. As she put her hand to her forehead, to press down her eyelids for a moment, she heard some one speaking to her, and looking round she saw a middle-aged gentleman standing by her side, and saying in a very kind voice : " My child, are you ill ? " Was she then looking so ill ? she wondered, or was she really ill ? She did not think so, only hungry and faint. How hungry and faint she was ! And as she shook her head, and said " No, thank you," she felt certain that the old gentleman, who looked so kind, would not believe her. Evidently he did not believe her, for he continued to look at her, and to say . . . what was it ? she only, knew that he told her, quite decidedly, that she must come and have some tea. " Thank you," she said again : how was she to say no ? and she walked along beside the gentleman in silence. He did not say anything more, but before she
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quite knew it, they were sitting at a little table in a tea-shop, and she had a cup of tea before her, real tea (how well she remembered, from what a distance, the taste of real tea !), and she was buttering a huge scone that made her mouth water, only to look at it.
When she had eaten her scone and drunk her tea, she saw that the gentleman was looking at her more kindly than ever, but with a certain ex- pression which she could not help understanding. He was a man of about fifty, somewhat tall, with broad shoulders and a powerful head, on which the iron-gray hair was cut close. His face was bronzed, he had a thick, closely- cut beard, and his eyes were large, gray, luminous, curiously sympathetic eyes, very kind, but a little puzzling in their expression. And he began to talk to her, asking her questions, feeling his way. She blushed furiously : how he had misunderstood her ! She was not angry, only frightened and disturbed ; and of course such a thing could never be, never. He seemed quite grieved when she told him hurriedly that she must go ; and when they were outside the shop he insisted on walking a few steps with her ; if not then, would she not come and see him some other day ? He would be so glad to do anything he could to help her ; that is, if she would come and see him. But she blushed again, and shook her head, and told him how impossible it was ; but as he insisted on her taking his card, she took it. What was the harm ? He had been kind to her. And of course she would never use it.
That night, as she ate her supper of bread and dripping, washing it down with what Mrs. Marsh called tea, she thought of the tea-shop and the meal she had had there, the pleasantness of the place, the bright little tables, the waitresses gliding about, the well-dressed people who had been in there. And the life she was living seemed more unbearable than ever. At first she had been so glad to be anywhere, to find any sort of refuge, where there was a roof over her head, and some sort of bed to lie on, that the actual sordidness of her surroundings had seemed of little moment ; but now it seemed more and more impossible to go on living among such people, without an educated person to speak to, without a book to read, without any of the little pleasant- nesses of comfortable life. No, I cannot go on with this for ever, she said to herself; and she began to muse, thinking vague things, vaguely ; thinking of what the girls at the laundry said to her, what they thought of her, and how to them it would be no difference at all, no difference at all ; for was she not (they all said it) a fallen creature ? When she went upstairs, and heard the feeble wail of her child, she almost wondered that she could have refused to take the man's money, which would have paid for a doctor. Oh, yes, she was
1 56 THE SAVOY
a fallen creature, no doubt ; and when you are once fallen you go on falling. But of course, all the same, it was impossible : she could not ; and there was an end of it.
But such thoughts as these, once set wandering through her brain, came back, and brought others with them. They came especially when she was very hungry ; they seemed to float to her on the steam of that tea which she had drunk in the tea-shop ; they whispered to her from the small, prim letters of the card which she still kept, with its sober, respectable-looking name, " Mr. Reginald Barfoot," and the address of a huge, handsome building which she had often seen, mostly laid out in bachelor's flats, very expensive flats. But of course, all the same, it was impossible.
IV
On the Saturday of that week, while she was working at the laundry, she had a message from Mrs. Marsh to say that her child was very ill. She hurried back, and found the little thing in convulsions. The poor little wasted body shook as if every moment would be its last. She held it in her arms, and crooned over it, and cried over it, and with her lips and fingers seemed to soothe the pain out of it. Presently it dropped into a quiet slumber. Lucy sat on the chair by the bedside, and thought. She had never seen an attack like that : she was terribly frightened : would it not come on again ? and if so, what was to be done ? A doctor, certainly a doctor must be called. But she had no money, and doctors (she remembered her aunt's doctor) were so expensive. The money must be got, and at once. She looked at the card, at the address. Was it not a matter of life or death ? She would go.
Then she felt that it was impossible ; that she could never do it. Was it really a matter of life or death ? The baby slept quietly. She would wait till to-morrow.
Through that night, and half-way through Sunday, the child seemed much better ; but about three the convulsions came on again. Lucy was frantic with terror, and when the little thing, now growing feebler and feebler, had got over a worse paroxysm than ever, and had quieted down again, she called Mrs. Marsh, and begged her to look after the child while she went and fetched the doctor. " I may be a little while," she said ; " but baby is quiet now ; you'll
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be very careful, won't you ? " She gave the child one big kiss on both his little eyes ; then she put on her hat and went out.
She went straight to the address on the card, without hesitation now, rang at the door, and a man-servant showed her into a room which seemed to her filled with books and photographs and pretty things. There was a fire in the grate, which shed a warm, comfortable glow over everything. She held out her hands to it ; she was shivering a little. How nice it is here, she could not help thinking, or, rather, the sensation of its comfort flashed through her unconsciously, as she stood there looking at the photographs above the mantel- piece, as blankly as she had looked at those photographs, that other day, in the arcade. And then the door opened, and Mr. Barfoot came in, smiling, as he had smiled at her before. He did not say anything, only smiled ; and as he came quite close, and took her hand, a sudden terror came into her eyes, she drew back violently, and covering her face with her hands, sobbed out, " I can't, I can't ! "
For a moment the man looked at her wonderingly ; then the expression of his face changed, he took her hands very gently, saying, "My poor child ! " Something in the voice and touch reassured her ; she let him draw away her hands from before her eyes, in which the tears were beginning to creep over the lower eyelids. She looked straight into his face ; there was no smile there now, and she almost wondered why she had been so frightened a moment before. He led her to a chair. " Sit down, now," he said, " and let us have a talk." She sat down, already with a sense of relief, and he drew up a chair beside her, and took her hand again, soothingly, as one might take the hand of a timid child. " Now," he said, "tell me all about it. How ill you look, my poor girl. You are in trouble. Tell me all about it."
At first she was silent, looking into his face with a sort of hesitating con- fidence. Then, looking down again, she said, " May I ? "
" I want you to," he said. " I want you to let me help you."
" Oh, will you ? " she said impulsively, pressing the hand he held. " I haven't a friend in the world. I am all alone. I have been very unhappy. It was all my fault. Will you really help me? It isn't for myself, it ... it 's my baby. I am afraid he 's dying, he 's so very ill, and to-day he had convulsions, and I thought ... I thought he would really have died. And I haven't a penny to get a doctor. And that 's why I came."
She broke off, and the hesitation came into her eyes again. She let her hand rest quite still ; he felt the fingers turning cola as she waited for what he would say.
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" Why didn't you tell me before ? " was all he said, but the voice and the eyes were kinder than ever. She almost smiled, she was so grateful ; and he went on, " Now we must see about the doctor at once. There 's a doctor who lives only three doors from here. If he's in, you must take him back with you. Here, do you see, you'll give him this card ; or, no, I'll see him about that. Just get him to come with you. And now I'm going to give you a sovereign, for anything you want, and to-morrow . . . but first of all, the doctor. Would you like me to come with you ? "
" No, please," said Lucy.
" Well, you had better go there at once. And mind you get anything you want, and for yourself, too. Why, you don't know how ill you look yourself! And then to-morrow I shall come and see how you are getting on, and then you must tell me all about yourself. Not now. You go straight to the doctor. By the way, what is your address ? "
Lucy told him, hardly able to speak ; she could not quite understand how it was that things had turned out so differently from what she had expected, or how everything seemed to be coming right without any trouble at all. She was bewildered, grateful, quiescent ; and as she got up, and closed her hand mechanically over the sovereign he slipped into it, she was already thinking of the next thing to do, to find the doctor, to take the doctor back with her at once, to save her child.
" Now I shall come in to-morrow at eleven," she heard him saying, " and then I'll see if you want anything more. Now good-bye. Dr. Hedges, the third door from here, on the same side."
He opened the door for her himself, and as she went downstairs she felt the sovereign in her hand, pressing into her flesh, in a little round circle. She wrapped up the sovereign in her handkerchief, and thrust it into her bodice. She was repeating, " Dr. Hedges, the third door from here, on the same side," over and over again, without knowing it, so mechanically, that she would have passed the door had she not seen a brougham standing outside. It was the doctor's brougham, and as she went up the steps in front of the house, the door opened and the doctor himself came out. " I want you, please, to come with me at once," she said ; " my baby . . . I'm afraid he'll die if you don't. Can you come at once ? "
The doctor looked at her critically ; he liked pretty women, and this one was so young too. " Yes, my dear," he said, " I'll come at once, if you like. Where is it ? All right ; jump in ; we'll be there in a minute."
The doctor talked cheerfully, and without expecting any answer, all the
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way to the house. " It 's the mother," he thought to himself, " who wants the doctor." Lucy sat by his side white and motionless, putting up her hand sometimes to her bodice, to feel if the gold was there. " Heart wrong," thought the doctor.
When they reached the house, Lucy opened the door. " Come in," she said, and began to fly up the stairs ; then, suddenly checking herself, " No, come quietly, perhaps baby is sleeping." They went up quietly, and Lucy opened the attic door with infinite precaution. As she held open the door for the doctor to come in, she saw Mrs. Marsh move towards her, she saw the bed, and on the bed a little body lying motionless, its white face on the pillow ; she saw it all at a glance, and, as the doctor came cheerfully into the room, she realized that everything had been in vain, that (she said to herself) she had waited just too long.
She sat down by the side of the bed, and looked straight in front of her, not saying a word, nor crying ; she seemed to herself to have been stunned. The doctor examined the child, and then, taking Mrs. Marsh into a corner of the room, began to question her. " Poor little thing," said Mrs. Marsh, " he just went off like you might have snuffed out a candle. He was always weakly, like ; and she, you know, sir, she ain't by no means strong, not fit to have the charge of a baby, sir. I'm that thankful she takes it so quiet like. Did you say, sir, there'll have to be a crowner's quest ? Well, I do hope not ; it do look so bad."
At this moment they heard a wild cry behind them ; both turned, and saw Lucy fling herself full length upon the bed, clasping the little body in her arms, sobbing convulsively. The tears streamed down her cheeks, the sobs forced themselves out in great bursts, almost in shouts. " It will do her good to have a good cry," said the doctor. " I'll leave you now ; rely on me to see after things." And he went out quietly.
Lucy never remembered quite how she got through the rest of that day. It always seemed to her afterwards like a bad dream, through which she had found her way vaguely, in a thick darkness. Early in the evening she undressed and went to bed, and then, lying awake in the little room where the dead baby lay folded in white things and covered up for its long sleep, her mind seemed to soak in, unconsciously, all the discomfortable impressions that had made up her life since she had been living in that miserable little room. Through all the hopeless sordidness of that life she lived again, enduring the insults of the laundry, the labour of long days, starvation almost, and the loneliness of forced companionship with such people as Mrs. Marsh
160 THE SAVOY
and Polly the ironer. She had borne it for her child's sake, and now there was no longer any reason for bearing it. Her life had come to a full stop ; the past was irrevocably past, folded away like the little dead body ; her mind had not the courage to look a single step before her into the future ; she closed her eyes, and tried to shut down the darkness upon her brain.
When she awoke in the morning it was nearly nine o'clock. She got up and dressed slowly, carefully, and when she had had her breakfast she went out to an undertaker's, from whom she ordered a baby's coffin. Remembering that she had a sovereign, she asked him to make it very nicely, and chose the particular kind of wood. She stayed in the shop some time, looking at inscriptions on the coffin lids, and asking questions about the ages of the people who were going to be buried. When she got back it was nearly eleven. She had taken off her hat, and was tidying her hair, quite mechanically, in front of the glass, when she heard a clock strike. Then she remembered that Mr. Barfoot was coming to see her about eleven. She stood there, lifting the hair back from her forehead with her two thin hands, and her eyes met their reflection in the glass, very seriously and meditatively.
Arthur Svmons.
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<"A A X
THE TRUANTS' HOLIDAY
OME, let us forth, Sibylla ! The brave day, See, 's all a-quiver with its gold and blue ! Come, let us fly these paltry streets, and pay Our matin worship at some woodland shrine, Where yet the pearl 's on rose and eglantine Not vainly there to sue From Nature's absolution and grave peace Of town-bred weariness an hour or so 's release !
Oh ! what enchantment lures us ! The glad fields,
The dappled woodland, the chaste, whispering stream ;
Yea, every marvel which rare Nature yields Of colour, or perfume, or entangled sound, To those who awefully approach her ground ;— Dear, how each joy doth seem
This hour conspired t' entrance us in some spell
Of fairyland's delight, no mortal song may tell !
What are these days we spend in curious toil, In hectic pleasure, and misname them life ?
Ah ! what last gain shall London's heart assoil For skies beclouded, Nature's fragrant breath Made poisonous for us ; whilst, more grim than Death, Amid the lonely strife,
Goading us on from fatal hour to hour
The brooding eyes of Care on her cowed victims lower ?
Come, let us forth ! why heed pale Duty's frown, If from th' accustomed task our truant feet
Turn wantonly, stale prisoners of the Town ? Come, come, let 's haste, ere yet a jealous fate
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On steps that falter shall cry out " Too late ! " Nay, do not linger, Sweet ! Joy calls a-flying : whoso fears t' obey her, May grieve the live-long day in vain attempt to stay her !
Selwyn Image.
ON THE KIND OF FICTION CALLED MORBID
HIS is a poison-bad world for the romancer, this Anglo-
Saxon world," wrote Robert Louis Stevenson to Mr. Sidney
Colvin : and if a popular writer with an obvious style, after
his years of experience, came to this conclusion, we risk
little in asserting that the same conclusion has been reached
by many another writer whose' - style is not obvious, and
who is not so popular. Amongst these, the man who would be always intro-
ducing the thin presence of Death is, without doubt, the most reviled ; we will
have nothing of a fellow who comes to our feasts with a skull. And though
we all agree that Memento homo quia pulvis es is a fine and wise saying, yet,
i' faith ! we are content to leave it at that ; and we clap the rogue who recalls
it in the stocks. Nay ! Ash Wednesday would have been long ago rubbed
out of the calendar, save that we are careful not to understand the full
significance of it ; just as we are careful not to understand the full significance
of Good Friday.
The smiling gentleman who hails us in the street does not like to think that one day he must be dead ; archbishops are supposed not to like a dwell- ing on that ; and a certain parson of easy life, whose business it is to preach mortality, when invited by a plain writer to fall into a better acquaintance with the cold guide who shall lead him to the Eternal Hills, flies into a passion, calls my plain writer (of all things in the world !) immoral, and sits down, raging, to write insolent letters to the papers. But (you will ask), do not these people give a man the credit of his courage in facing what they dare not face ? Well, no. For when a man has done the day's appointed labour, he stirs the fire, sinks into his armchair, and lo ! in a trice he spurns the hearth and is off swinging the sword and aiding somewhat sulky damsels with De Marsac ; or, if he is of a cold habit of body, he wanders in lanes where the clover breathes, and John and Joan while away the white-winged hours a-wooing. Or again, he hies to the ball, and watches the tenderness with which my lord and the farmer's daughter take the floor. If, then, to this man
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a person of wry visage and hearse-like airs comes offering a sombre story — why, up he leaps, grasps the intrusive fellow by the shoulders, and lands him in the street. No ; it is certain that abnormal nerves are not understood or thought proper in the suburban villa : and they are not tolerated by the Press, which is almost the same thing. Even editors, those cocks that show how the popular wind blows, if they have no kicks, have few ha'pence for the writer of stories which are not sops to our pleasure. The thought of death is not pleasant ! (folk may be imagined to exclaim) ; to escape that we laugh at sorry farces and the works of Mr. Mark Twain ; and yet, here is a zany with a hatful of dun thoughts formed to make one meditate on one's tomb for a week !
Still, for him, poor devil ! life is not all (as they say) beer and skittles. With an impatience of facility, he sets to work sedulously on a branch of art which he is pleased to consider difficult ; it cannot be pleasant work, since it progresses with shudders and cold sweats ; it cannot be easy, since it is acknowledged to be no easy thing to turn the blood from men's faces. He is even charmed by the fancy that he is driving his pen to a very high measure. He may (by chance) be right ; he is possibly wrong ; but I am glad to say I have yet to hear that Banquo's ghost at the feast, and Caesar's ghost in the tent, are deemed infamous, or (as the cant goes) immoral. And, talking of Shakespeare, has it ever occurred to you how the critics would waggle their heads at " Romeo and Juliet," if it were presented to-day as a new piece by William Shakespeare, Esq. ?
"As in a vault, an ancient receptacle, Where, for these many hundred years, the bones Of all my buried ancestors are pack'd ; Where bloody Tybalt, yet but green in earth, Lies festering in his shroud ; where, as they say, At some hours in the night spirits resort ; — Alack ! alack ! is it not like, that I, So early waking, — what with loathsome smells, And shrieks like mandrakes' torn out of the earth, That living mortals, hearing them, run mad ; — O, if I wake, shall I not be distraught, Environed with all these hideous fears ? And madly play with my forefathers' joints ? And pluck the mangled Tybalt from his shroud ? And, in this rage, with some great kinsman's bone, As with a club, dash out my desperate brains ?"
Methinks I see the words : " exotic," " morbid," " unhealthy," ready- made for that ! Ah ! how, then, can my modern writer expect to be suffered,
ON THE KIND OF FICTION CALLED MORBID 169
any more than we suffer an undertaker to send out cards setting forth the excellence of his wares. When he takes to the road, he must know that he is in for a weary and footsore journey : comely persons, in beautiful garments, with eyes full of invitation look down from bordering windows and jeer at his sober parade ; he sees cool, shaded by-lanes which are never for him ; others pass him on the road singing blithe, gamesome songs, and he is left to loiter. And be sure he travels in glum company : the stiff-featured dead, with their thin hands and strange smile, fall into step with him and tell him their dream- like tales. The poor dead, whom we all forget so soon on this sunny earth ! I think they tell him that they have a kindness for those who perform the last offices for them : the dead villager for the barber and the crone, the dead peer for the undertakers who come by night to Belgrave Square. Perhaps it is from fear of the ghosts who attend the march, that the writers of aweful stories are few and far between, up and down the world. And when we meet with such a one, whose head is humming like a top from the gray talk of his fellow-passengers, should we not thank (rather than stone) him for his sense of the decency of things, which prevents him from going tearing mad and holding the highway with a gun ? I will wager that the recognition of this is all he asks of reward from the " poison-bad world for the romancer," for sticking with iron courage to the graveside, and refusing to engage in work less resolute, and more easy.
Yes, more easy ; for it is more easy — if more degrading — to write a certain kind of novel. To take a fanciful instance, it is more easy to write the history of Miss Perfect : how, upon the death of her parents, she comes to reside in the village, and lives there mildly and sedately ; and how one day, in the course of her walk abroad, she is noticed by the squire's lady, who straightway transports her to the Hall. And, of course, she soon becomes mighty well with the family, and the squire's son becomes enamoured of her. Then the clouds must gather : and a villain lord comes on the scene to bombard her virtue with clumsy artillery. Finding after months that her virtue dwells in an impregnable citadel, he turns to, and jibes and goads the young squire to the fighting point. And, presto ! there they are, hard at it with bare steel, on the Norman beach, of a drizzling morning ; and the squire is just pressing hot upon my lord, when — it's hey ! for the old love, and ho ! for the new — out rushes my Miss Perfect to our great amazement, and falls between the swords down on the stinging sands, in the sight of the toiling sea. Now I maintain, that a novel woven of these meagre threads, and set out in three volumes and a brave binding, would put up a good front at Mudie's ;
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would become, it too, after a while, morality packed in a box. For nowa- days we seem to nourish our morals with the thinnest milk and water, with a good dose of sugar added, and not a suspicion of lemon at all.
You will note that the letter- writer says, the "Anglo-Saxon world" — Great Britain, say ! and the United States ; and it is well to keep in mind this distinction. In France, for example, people appear eager to watch how art triumphs over any matter. " Charles Baudelaire," says Hamerton, " had the poetical organization with all its worst inconveniences ; " but one incon- venience he had not — the inconvenience of a timid public not interested in form, and with a profound hatred of the unusual : a public from which Edgar Poe, Beddoes, and Francis Saltus (to name but three) suffered — how poignantly ! Let us cling by all means to our George Meredith, our Henry James — our Miss Rhoda Broughton, if you will ; but then let us try, if we cannot be towards others, unlike these, if not encouraging, at the least not actively hostile and harassing, when they go out in the black night to follow their own sullen will-o'-the-wisps.
Vincent O'Sullivan.
COUNTESS MARIE OF THE ANGELS
A Jean de Tinan
I
S he turned out of his hotel in the Avenue de l'Opera, com- paratively obscure at that hour, and emerged into the grands boulevards, Paris flashed upon him, all at once, her brightest illumination : row upon row of lamps tapering away in a double file to meet in a single point of light far away in the direction of the Place de la Republique. If it was winter by the calendar, the languid mellowness of a fine autumn lingered in the air. The Boulevard des Italiens was massed with wayfarers, sauntering, lounging with aimless and amiable nonchalance, while a gay Sunday crowd monopolized all the little tables outside the small and large cafes.
Colonel Mallory searched for a vacant place at one of them, then aban- doned the search and moved slowly along, joining the rest of the throng with steps as aimless, but with sentiments somewhat remote from theirs.
Fifty, perhaps, of middle stature, his white moustache was in striking contrast with his short, crisp hair which had retained its original darkness. Obviously English, with his keen, blue eyes ; obviously a soldier too, in gait and bearing, and in a certain sternness which comes of command, of high responsibility in perilous places, even when that command is kindly. An Anglo-Indian, to judge by his complexion, and the lines, tell-tale of the tropics, which scored his long, lean face, the colour of parchment. Less obviously English, and hardly military, was a certain grace, almost exotic, in his manner. He had emerged into the Boulevard Montmartrc before a cafe, less frequented than the others, caught his eye, and with a certain relief he could possess him- self of a vacant chair on the terrasse. He ordered a drink, lit a cigar, and settled himself to watch with an interest which was not so much present as retrospective, the crowd of passers-by. And as he watched his eyes softened into sadness.
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He had arrived from England that morning — he had not so very long arrived from India — and this crowd, these lights, the hard, bright gaiety of the boulevards was at once fantastically strange to him and strangely familiar ; for, twenty, or was it nearer thirty years ago, Paris had been to him not merely the city of cities, but that one of them which most represented old associations, his adolescence, boyhood, childhood. True, there had been Les Rochers, the dilapidated chateau, half ruin to his recollection, and now wholly a ruin, or perhaps demolished — Les Rochers in the Vendee, where he had been born, where he had spent his summer holidays, where — how many years ago ? — being at home on leave, just after he had obtained his company, he had closed the eyes of his mother.
But Paris ! It was his best remembered boyhood ; the interrupted studies in the Quartier, the Lycee, the boyish friendships, long since obliterated, the days of congt spent in the little hotel in the Rue de Varennes, where, more often than at Les Rochers, his mother, on her perpetual couch, economized her delicate days — days even then so clearly defined — as it were in an half twilight. Yes, until death and estrangement and the stern hand of circumstance had cast away that old life into the limbo of the dear irrevocable, that old life had been — Paris ! Episodes the rest : the occasional visits to the relations of his English father ; and later, episodes too, London, murky London, the days at Wren's, the month or so with an army-coach at Bonn, the course at Woolwich ; almost episodical too the first year of his soldiering. Quartered at Dover, what leave fell to him, he had spent in Paris — at Les Rochers sometimes, but more often at Paris — in those strangely silent rooms in the Rue de Varennes.
Looking out now, the phantasmagoria of the boulevards was obliterated and those old days floated up before him. Long before Woolwich : that time when he was a Lyceen, in the winter holidays. A vision so distinct ! His mother's salon, the ancient, withered furniture, the faded silk of the Louis XV. chairs, the worn carpet : his mother's refined and suffering face, the quaint bird-like features of the two old Mesdemoiselles de la Touche — the near neighbours of his mother and the most intimate gossips round her couch — two ancient sisters, very noble and very withered, dating from Charles X., absorbed in good works, in the merits of their confessor, and in the exile of Frohsdorf. Very shadowy figures, more shadowy even than that of himself, in the trim uniform of his Lycee ; a grave and rather silent boy, saddened by the twilight of that house, the atmosphere of his invalid mother.
More distinct was the dainty figure of a little girl, a child of fifteen, but seeming younger, united to him by a certain cousinship, remote enough to be
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valued, who, on her days of exit from the Sacre Cceur (his mother's constant visitor), talked with him sedately, softly — for there was a sort of hush always in that house — in an alcove of the sombre room. This child with her fragility, her face of a youthful Madonna, the decorous plaits in which her silken hair was gathered, losing thereby some of its lustre — the child seemed incongruous with and somewhat crushed and awed beneath the weight of her sonorous names : Marie-Joseph-Angele de la Tour de Boiserie.
What did they converse of on those long and really isolated afternoons — isolated, for their elders, if they were present, and their presence overshadowed them, were really so remote, with their lives in the past, in lost things ; their so little hold on, or care of, the future ?
But these were young, and if some of the freshness of youth had been sacrificed a little to what was oppressive in their surroundings, yet they were young things, with certain common interests, and a future before them, if not of boundless possibilities, still a future.
Yet it was hardly of love which they could speak, though their kindness for each other, fostered by somewhat similar conditions, had ripened into that feeling. Of love there could be no question : for Sebastian Mallory, as for his little companion, their life, as it should be, had been already somewhat arranged. For Angele, had not the iron-featured old grandmother, in her stately but penurious retreat near Les Rochers, resolved long ago that the shattered fortunes of a great house, so poor in all but name, were to be retrieved by a rich marriage ? And for Sebastian, was not all hope of fortune centred in his adhesion to the plan which had so long been made for him : the course at Woolwich, the military career — with its prosperous probabilities beneath the protection of an influential relative — the exile, as it sometimes seemed to him then, in England ? . . .
Certainly, there was much affection between these two, an affection maintained on the strength of the ambiguous cousinship, in a correspondence, scanty, but on each side sincere, for at least a few years after their roads had diverged. And there were other memories, later and more poignant, and as distinct, which surged up before his eyes ; and the actual life of the boulevards grew vaguer. Had life been too much arranged for them ? Had it been happier, perhaps, for him, for her, if they had been less acquiescent to circumstance, had interpreted duty, necessity — words early familiar to them — more leniently ?
Colonel Mallory, at fifty, with his prosperous life behind him — and it had not been without its meed of glory — wondered to-night whether, after all, it
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had not been with prophetic foresight, that once, writing, in a sudden mood of despondency, more frankly than usual, to that charming friend of his boyhood, he had said, years ago :
" / feel all this is a mistake ; " and, lower down in the same letter : " Paris haunts me like a regret. I feel, as we say liere, ' out of it! And I fear I shall never make a good soldier. Not that I mean that I am lacking in physical courage, nor that I should disgrace myself under fire. But there is a difference between t/uzt and possession of the military vocation, and nature never designed me to be a man of action. . . . My motfwr, you, yourself, my dear, grave cousin and councillor, think much of duty, and I sliall always endeavour to do mine — as circumstances have set it down for me — but there is a duty one owes to oneself, to one's character, and in that, per liaps, I have failed!'
A letter, dated " Simla," the last he would ever write to Mademoiselle de la Tour de Boiserie, actually, at that time, though of this fact he was ignorant, betrothed to a certain Comte Raoul des Anges. The news of the marriage reached him months later, just fresh from the excitement and tumult of a little border war, from which he had returned with a name already associated with gallantry, and a somewhat ugly wound from a Pathan spear.
In hospital, in the long nights and days, in the grievous heats, he had leisure for thought, and it is to be presumed he exercised it in a more strict analysis of his feelings, and it was certainly from this date that a somewhat stern reticence and reserve, which had always characterized his manner, became ingrained and inveterate.
And it was reticently, incidentally, and with little obvious feeling that he touched on the news in a letter to his mother :
" Et ce M. des Anges, dont je ne connais que le nom, est-il digne de notre enfant ? His name at least is propitious. Tell la petite cousine — or tell lier not, as you think fit, tltat to me she will always be ' Marie of tfte Angels! "
11 That had seemed the end of it, of their vaguely tender and now so incongruous relation ; as it was inevitably the end of their correspondence. And he set himself, buoyed up by a certain vein of austerity in his nature, to conquer that instinctive distaste which, from time to time, still exercised him towards his profession, to throw himself into its practice and theory, if not with ardour, at least with an earnestness that was its creditable imitation. And in due time he reaped his reward. . . .
COUNTESS MARIE OF THE ANGELS 177
But there was another memory — for the past will so very rarely bury its dead — a memory intense and incandescent, and, for all its bitterness, one which he could ill have spared.
That was five years later : invalided home, on a long leave, with a fine aroma of distinction attaching to him, it was after the funeral of his mother, after all the sad and wearisome arrangements for the disposition of Les Rochers that Colonel — then Captain — Mallory heard in Paris the loud and scandalous rumours which were associated with the figure of the Comte Raoul des Anges. There was pity mingled with the contempt with which his name was more often mentioned, for the man was young — it was his redeeming feature — but an z'nseust? ! It was weakness of character (some whispered weakness of intellect) and not natural vice : so the world spoke most frequently. But his head had been turned, it had not been strong enough to support the sudden weight of his immense fortune. A great name and a colossal fortune, and {bon garqon though he was) the intelligence of a rabbit !
In Paris, to go no further, is there not a whole army of the shrewd, the needy, and the plausible, ready to exploit such a conjunction ? And to this army of well-dressed pimps and parasites, Raoul had been an easy victim. The great name had been dragged in the mire, the colossal fortune was rapidly evaporating in the same direction, what was left of the little intelligence was debased and ruined. A marriage too early, before the lad had time to collect himself, for old Madame des Anges had kept him very tight, perhaps that had been largely responsible for the collapse. And it was said the Comtesse des Anges was little congenial, a prude, at least a devote, who could hardly be expected to manage ce pauvre Raoul. She was little known in Paris. They were separated of course, had been for a year or more ; she was living with her baby, very quietly, in some old house, which belonged to her family, at Sceaux — or was it at Fontenay-aux-Roses ? — on the remnants of her own fortune.
All this, and much more, Mallory heard in club and in cafe during that memorable sojourn in Paris. He said nothing, but he raged inwardly ; and one day, moved by an immense impulse of pity and tenderness, he went down to Fontenay-aux-Roses, to visit Madame des Anges.
His visit was only for a week ; that was the memory which he could not spare, and which was yet so surpassingly bitter. He had stopped at Sceaux, at an unpretending inn, but each day he had walked over to Fontenay, and each day had spent many hours with her, chiefly in the old-fashioned garden which surrounded her house. She had changed, but she had always the same
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indefinable charm for him ; and the virginal purity of her noble beauty, marriage had not assailed, if it had saddened. And if, at first, she was a little strange, gradually the recollection of their old alliance, her consciousness of the profundity of his kindness for her, melted the ice of their estrangement.
At last she spoke to him freely, though it had needed no speech of hers for him to discern that she was a woman who had suffered ; and in the light of her great unhappiness, he only then saw all that she was to him, and how much he himself had suffered.
They were very much alone. It was late in the year ; the gay crowd of the endzmanc/i/s had long ceased to make their weekly pilgrimages to the enchanting suburbs which surround Paris with a veritable garden of delight ; and the smart villas on the hill-side, at Sceaux and Fontenay, were shut up and abandoned to caretakers. So that Captain Mallory could visit the Chalet des Rosiers without exciting undue remark, or remark that was to be accounted.
And one afternoon, as was inevitable, the flood-gates were broken down, and their two souls looked one another in the face. But if, for one moment, she abandoned herself, weeping pitiably on his shoulders, carried away, terrified almost by the vehemence of his passion ; for the volcanoes, which were hidden beneath the fine crust of his reticence, his self-restraint, she had but dimly suspected ; it was only for a moment. The reaction was swift and bitter ; her whole life, her education, her tradition, were stronger than his protestations, stronger than their love, their extreme sympathy, stronger than her misery. And before she had answered him — calm now, although the tears were in her voice — he knew instinctively that she was once more far away from him, that she was not heeding his arguments, that what he had proposed was impossible ; life was too strong for them. " Leave me, my friend, my good and old friend ! I was wrong — God forgive me — even to listen to you ! The one thing you can do to help me, the one thing I ask of you, for the sake of our old kindness, is — to leave me."
He had obeyed her, for the compassion, with which his love was mingled, had purged passion in him of its baser concomitants. And when the next day he had called, hardly knowing himself the object of his visit, but ready, if she still so willed it, that it should be a final one, she had not received him. . . . He was once more in India, when a packet of his old letters to her, some of them in a quite boyish handwriting, were returned to him. That she had kept them at all touched him strangely ; that she should have returned them now gave him a very clear and cruel vision of how ruthlessly she would
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expiate the most momentary deviation from her terrible sense of duty. And the tide of his tenderness rose higher ; and with his tenderness, from time to time, a certain hope, a hope which he tried to suppress, as being somewhat of a l&cheU, began to be mingled.
Ill
" Paris haunts me like a regret ! " That old phrase, in his last letter to Mademoiselle de la Tour de Boiserie, returned to him with irony, as he sat on the boulevard, and he smiled sadly, for the charm of Paris seemed to him now like a long disused habit. Yet, after all, had he given reminiscence a chance ? For it was hardly Paris of the grands boulevards, with its crude illumination, its hard brilliancy, its cosmopolitan life of strangers and sojourners, which his regret had implied. The Paris of his memories, the other more intimate Paris, from the Faubourg Saint Germain to the quarter of ancient, intricate streets behind the Pantheon : — there was time to visit that, to wander vaguely in the fine evening, and recall the old landmarks, if it was hardly the hour to call on Madame des Anges.
He dined at an adjacent restaurant, hastily, for time had slipped by him — then hailed a cab, which he dismissed at the Louvre, for, after the lassitude of his meditation, a feverish impulse to walk had seized him. He traversed the Place de Carrousel, that stateliest of all squares, now gaunt and cold and bare, in its white brilliance of electricity, crossed the bridge, and then striking along the Quai, found himself almost instinctively turning into the Rue du Bac. Before a certain number he came to a halt, and stood gazing up at the inexpressive windows. . . .
More than a year ago that which he had dimly hoped, and had hated himself for hoping, had befallen. The paralytic imbecile, who had dragged out an apology for a life, which at its very best would hardly have been missed, and which had been for fifteen years a burden to himself and others, the Comte Raoul des Anges, that gilded calf of a season, whose scandalous fame had long since been forgotten, was gathered to his forefathers. That news reached Colonel Mallory in India, and mechanically, and with no very definite object in his mind, yet with a distinct sense that this course was an inevitable corollary, he had handed in his papers. But some nine months later, when, relieved of his command, and gazetted as no longer of Her Majesty's service, he was once more in possession of his freedom, it was a very different man to that youthful one who had made such broken and
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impassioned utterances in the garden of the Chalet des Rosiers, who ultimately embarked in England.
The life, the service, for which he had retained, to the last, something of his old aversion, for which he had possessed, however well he had acquitted himself, perhaps little real capacity : all that had left its mark on him. He had looked on the face of Death, and affronted him so often, had missed him so narrowly, had seen him amid bloodshed and the clash of arms, and, with the same equanimity, in times of peace, when, yet more terribly, his angel, Cholera, devastated whole companies in a night, that life had come to have few terrors for him, and less importance.
Yet what was left of the old Sebastian Mallory was his abiding memory, a continual sense (as it were of a spiritual presence cheering and supporting him) of the one woman whom he had loved, whom he still loved, if not with his youth's original ardour, yet with a great tenderness and pity, partaking of the nature of the theological charity.
" Marie of the Angels," as he had once in whimsical sadness called her. Yes ! He could feel now, after all those years of separation, that she had been to him in some sort a genius actually angelic, affording him just that salutary ideal, which a man needs, to carry him honourably, or, at least, without too much self-disgust, through the miry ways of life. And that was why, past fifty, a grim, kindly, soldierly man, he had given up soldiering and returned to find her. That was why he stood now in the Rue du Bac — for it was from there, on hearing of his intention, she had addressed him — gazing up in a senti- mentality almost boyish, at those blank, unlit windows.
IV Those windows, so cold and irresponsive, he could explain, when, return- ing to his hotel, he found a note from ner. It was dated from the Chalet des Rosiers. She was so little in Paris, that she had thoughts of letting her house ; but, to meet an old and valued friend, she would gladly have awaited him there — only, her daughter (she was still at the Sacre Cceur, although it was her last term) had been ailing. Paris did not agree with the child, and, perforce, she had been obliged to go down to Fontenay to prepare for her reception. There, at any time, was it necessary to say it ? she would be glad, oh, so glad, to receive him ! There was sincerity in this letter, which spoke of other things, of his life, and his great success — had she not read of him in the papers ? There was affection, too, between the somewhat formal lines, reticent but real ;
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so much was plain to him. But the little note struck chill to him ; it caused him to spend a night more troubled and painful than was his wont — for he slept as a rule the sleep of the old campaigner, and his trouble was the greater because of his growing suspicion, that, after all, the note which Madame des Anges had struck was the true one, for both of them ; that a response to it in any other key would be factitious, and that his pilgrimage was a self-deception. And this impression was only heightened when, on the morrow, he made his way to the station of the Luxembourg, which had been erected long since his day, when the facilities of travel were less frequent, and took his ticket for Fontenay. So many thousand miles he had come to see her, and already a certain vague terror of his approaching interview was invading him. Ah ! if it had been Paris ! . . . But here, at Fontenay-aux- Roses there was no fortunate omen. It represented no common memories, but rather their separate lives and histories, except, indeed, for one brief and unhappy moment which could hardly be called propitious. . . .
Yet it was a really kind and friendly reception which she gave him ; and his heart went out to her, when, after dtjeuner, they talked of quite trivial things, and he sat watching her, her fine hands folded in her lap, in the little faded salon, which smelt of flowers. She had always her noble charm, and something of her old beauty, although that was but the pale ghost of what it had once been, and her soft hair, upon which she wore no insincere symbols of widowhood, was but little streaked with gray. She had proposed a stroll in the garden, where a few of its famed roses still lingered, but he made a quick gesture of refusal, and a slight flush, which suffused her pale face, told him that she comprehended his instinctive reluctance.
He fell into a brooding reverie, from which, presently, she softly inter- rupted him.
"You look remote and sad," she murmured; "that is wrong — the sad- ness ! It is a pleasant day, this, for me, and I had hoped it would be the same for you too."
" I was thinking, thinking," he said, — " that I have always missed my happiness."
Then abruptly, before she could interrupt him, rising and standing before her, his head a little bowed :
" It is late in the day, but, Angele, will you marry me ? "
She was silent for a few minutes, gazing steadily with her calm and melancholy gaze into his eyes, which presently avoided it. Then she said :
1 82 THE SAVOY
" I was afraid that some such notion was in your mind. Yet I am not sorry you have spoken, for it gives me an opportunity, — an occasion of being quite sincere with you, of reasoning."
" Oh, I am very reasonable," he said, sadly.
" Yes," she threw back, quickly. " And that is why I can speak. No," she went on, after a moment, "there is no need to "reason with you. My dear old friend, you see yourself as clearly as I do,— examine your heart honestly — you had no real faith in your project, you knew that it was impossible."
He made no attempt to contradict her.
" You may be right," he said ; " yes, very likely, you are right. There is a season for all things, for one's happiness as for the rest, and missing it once, one misses it for ever. . . . But if things had been different. Oh, Angele, I have loved you very well ! "
She rose in her turn, made a step towards him, and there were tears in her eyes.
" My good and kind old friend ! Believe me, I know it, I have always known it. How much it has helped me — through what dark and difficult days — I can say that now : the knowledge of how you felt, how loyal and staunch you were. You were never far away, even in India ; and only once it hurt me." She broke off abruptly, as with a sudden transition of thought ; she caught hold of both his hands, and, unresistingly, he followed her into the garden. " I will not have you take away any bitter memories of this place," she said, with a smile. " Here, where you once made a great mistake, I should like to have a recantation from your own lips, to hear that you are glad, grateful, to have escaped a great madness, a certain misery."
" There are some miseries which are like happiness."
" There are some renunciations which are better than happiness."
After a while he resumed, reluctantly :
" You are different to other women, you always knew best the needs of your own life. I see now that you would have been miserable."
" And you ? " she asked, quickly.
" I may think your ideal of conduct too high, too hard for poor human flesh. I dare not say you are wrong. . . . But, no, to have known always that I had been the cause of your failing in that ideal, of lowering yourself in your own eyes — that would not have been happiness."
"That was what I wanted," she said, quickly.
Later, as he was leaving her — and there had been only vague talk of any further meeting — he said, suddenly :
COUNTESS MARIE OF THE ANGELS 183
" I hate to think of your days here ; they stretch out with a sort of gray- ness. How will you live ? "
" You forget I have my child, Ursule," she said. " She must necessarily occupy me very much now that she is leaving the convent. And you — you have "
" I have given up my profession."
" Yes, so much I knew. But you have inherited an estate, have you not?"
" My uncle's place. Yes, I have Beauchamp. I suppose I shall live there. I believe it has been very much neglected."
" Yes, that is right. There is always something to do. I shall like to think of you as a model landlord."
" Think of me rather as a model friend," he said, bowing to kiss her hand as he said good-bye to her.
Ernest Dowson.
Paris — Pont-Aven, 1896.
A Footnote
by
Aubrey Beardsley
UNDER THE HILL
9 Eomantic ^torp
CHAPTER IV
T is always delightful to wake up in a new bedroom. The fresh wall-paper, the strange pictures, the positions of doors and windows, imperfectly grasped the night before, are revealed with all the charm of surprise when we open our eyes the next morning.
It was about eight o'clock when Fanfreluche awoke, stretched himself deliciously in his great plumed four-post bed, murmured " What a pretty room ! " and freshened the frilled silk pillows behind him. Through the slim parting of the long flowered window curtains, he caught a peep of the sun-lit lawns outside, the silver fountains, the bright flowers, the gardeners at work, and beneath the shady trees some early breakfasters, dressed for a day's hunting in the distant wooded valleys.
" How sweet it all is," exclaimed the Abbe, yawning with infinite content. Then he lay back in his bed, stared at the curious patterned canopy above him and nursed his waking thoughts.
He thought of the " Romaunt de la Rose," beautiful, but all too brief. Of the Claude in Lady Delaware's collection. 1
Of a wonderful pair of blonde trousers he would get Madame Belleville to make for him.
Of a mysterious park full of faint echoes and romantic sounds. Of a great stagnant lake that must have held the subtlest frogs that ever were, and was surrounded with dark unreflected trees, and sleeping fleurs de luce.
Of Saint Rose, the well-known Peruvian virgin ; how she vowed herself
' The chef d'ceuvre, it seems to mc, of an. adorable and impeccable master, who more than any other landscape-painter puts us out of conceit with our cities, and makes us forget the country can be graceless and dull and tiresome. That he should ever have been compared unfavourably with Turner — the Wiertz of landscape-painting — seems almost incredible. Corot is Claude's only worthy rival, but he does not eclipse or supplant the earlier master. A painting of Corel's is like an exquisite lyric poem, full of love and truth; whilst one of Claude's recalls some noble eclogue glowing with rich concentrated thought.
M
1 88 THE SAVOY
to perpetual virginity when she was four years old l ; how she was beloved by Mary, who from the pale fresco in the Church of Saint Dominic, would stretch out her arms to embrace her ; how she built a little oratory at the end of the garden and prayed and sang hymns in it till all the beetles, spiders, snails and creeping things came round to listen ; how she promised to marry Ferdinand de Flores, and on the bridal morning perfumed herself and painted her lips, and put on her wedding frock, and decked her hair with roses, and went up to a little hill not far without the walls of Lima ; how she knelt there some moments calling tenderly upon Our Lady's name, and how Saint Mary descended and kissed Rose upon the forehead and carried her up swiftly into heaven.
He thought of the splendid opening of Racine's " Britannicus." Of a strange pamphlet he had found in Helen's library, called " A Plea for the Domestication of the Unicorn." Of the " Bacchanals of Sporion. 2 "
1 "At an age" writes Dubonnet, "when girls are for the most part well confirmed in all the hateful practices of coquetry, and attend with gusto, rather than with distaste, the hideous desires and terrible satisfactions of men / "
All who would respire the perfumes of Saint Rose's sanctity, and enjoy the story of the adorable intimacy that subsisted between her and Our Lady, should read Mother Ursula's "Ineffable and Miraculous Life of the Floiuer of Lima," published shortly after the canoniza- tion of Rose by Pope Clement X. in 1671. " Truly," exclaims the famous nun, "to chronicle the girlhood of this holy virgin makes as delicate a task as to trace the forms of some slim, sensitive plant, whose lightness, sweetness, and simplicity defy and trouble the most cunning pencil." Mother Ursula certainly acquits herself of the task with wonderful delicacy and taste. A cheap reprint of the biography has lately been brought out by Chaillot and Son.
2 A comedy ballet in one act by Philippe Savaral and Titurel de Scluntefleur. The Marquis de Vande'sir, who was present at the first performance, has left us a short impression of it in his Mdmoires :
" The curtain rose upon a scene of rare beauty, a remote Arcadian valley, a delicious scrap of Tempe, gracious with cool woods and watered with a little river as fresh and pastoral as a perfect fifth. It was early morning and the re-arisen sun, like the prince in the Sleeping Beauty, woke all the earth with his lips.
" In that golden embrace the night dews were caught up and made splendid, the trees were awakened from their obscure dreams, the slumber of the birds was broken, and all the flowers of the valley rejoiced, forgetting their fear of the darkness.
" Suddenly to the music of pipe and horn a troop of satyrs stepped out from the recesses of the woods bearing in their hands nuts and green boughs and flowers and roots, and whatsoever the forest yielded, to heap upon the altar of the mysterious Pan that stood in the middle of the stage ; and from the hills came down the shepherds and shepherdesses leading their flocks and carrying garlands upon their crooks. Then a rustic priest, white robed and venerable, came slowly across the valley followed by a
UNDER THE HILL 191
Of Morales' Madonnas with their high egg-shaped creamy foreheads and well-crimped silken hair.
Of Rossini's " Stabat Mater" (that delightful demode" piece of decadence, with a quality in its music like the bloom upon wax fruit).
Of love, and of a hundred other things.
choir of radiant children. The scene was admirably stage-managed and nothing could have been more varied yet harmonious than this Arcadian group. The service was quaint and simple, but with sufficient ritual to give the corps de ballet an opportunity of showing its dainty skill. The dancing of the satyrs was received with huge favour, and when the priest raised his hand in final blessing, the whole troop of worshippers made such an intricate and elegant exit, that it was generally agreed that Titurel had never before shown so fine an invention.
" Scarcely had the stage been empty for a moment, when Sporion entered, followed by a brilliant rout of dandies and smart women. Sporion was a tall, slim, depraved young man with a slight stoop, a troubled walk, an oval impassable face with its olive skin drawn lightly over the bone, strong, scarlet lips, long Japanese eyes, and a great gilt toupet. Round his shoulders hung a high-collared satin cape of salmon pink with long black ribbands untied and floating about his body. His coat of sea green spotted muslin was caught in at the waist by a scarlet sash with scalloped edges and frilled out over the hips for about six inches. His trousers, loose and wrinkled, reached to the end of the calf, and were brocaded down the sides and niched magnificently at the ankles. The stockings were of white kid with stalls for the toes, and had delicate red sandals'strapped over them. But his little hands, peeping out from their frills, seemed quite the most insinuating things, such supple fingers tapering to the point with tiny- nails stained pink, such unquenchable palms lined and mounted like Lord Fanny's in ' Love at all Hazards,' and such blue-veined hairless backs ! In his left hand he carried a small lace handkerchief broidered with a coronet.
" As for his friends and followers, they made the most superb and insolent crowd imaginable, but to catalogue the clothes they had on would require a chapter as long as the famous tenth in Penilliere's 'History of Underlinen.' On the whole they looked a very distinguished choru s.
" Sporion stepped forward and explained with swift and various gesture that he and his friends were tired of the amusements, wearied with the poor pleasures offered by the civil world, and had invaded the Arcadian valley hoping to experience a new frisson in the destruction of some shepherd's or some satyr's naivete, and the infusion of their venom among the dwellers of the woods.
" The chorus assented with languid but expressive movements.
" Curious and not a little frightened at the arrival of the worldly company, the sylvans began to peep nervously at those subtle souls through the branches of the trees, and one or two fauns and a shepherd or so crept out warily. Sporion and all the ladies and gentlemen made enticing sounds and invited the rustic creatures with all the grace in the world to come and join them. By little batches they came, lured by the
192 THE SAVOY
Then his half-closed eyes wandered among the prints that hung upon the rose-striped walls. Within the delicate curved frames lived the corrupt and gracious creatures of Dorat and his school, slender children in masque and domino smiling horribly, exquisite letchers leaning over the shoulders of smooth doll-like girls and doing nothing in particular, terrible little Pierrots posing as lady lovers and pointing at something outside the picture, and unearthly fops and huge bird-like women mingling in some rococo room, lighted mysteriously by the flicker of a dying fire that throws great shadows upon wall and ceiling.
Fanfreluche had taken some books to bed with him. One was the witty, extravagant, " Tuesday and Josephine," another was the score of " The Rheingold." Making a pulpit of his knees he propped up the opera before him and turned over the pages with a loving hand, and found it delicious to attack Wagner's brilliant comedy with the cool head of the morning.' Once more he was ravished with the beauty and wit of the opening scene ; the mystery of its prelude that seems to come up from the very mud of the Rhine, and to be as ancient, the abominable primitive wantonness of the music that follows the talk and movements of the Rhine-maidens, the black, hateful sounds of Alberic's love-making, and the flowing melody of the river of legends.
But it was the third tableau that he applauded most that morning, the scene where Loge, like some flamboyant primeval Scapin, practises his
strange looks, by the scents and the drugs, and by the brilliant clothes, and some ventured quite near, timorously fingering the delicious textures of the stuffs. Then Sporion and each of his friends took a satyr or a shepherdess or something by the hand and made the preliminary steps of a courtly measure, for which the most admirable combinations had been invented and the most charming music written. The pastoral folk were entirely bewildered when they saw such restrained and graceful movements, and made the most grotesque and futile efforts to imitate them. Dio mio, a pretty sight ! A charming effect too, was obtained by the intermixture of stockinged calf and hairy leg, of rich brocaded bodice and plain blouse, of tortured head-dress and loose untutored locks.
" When the dance was ended the servants of Sporion brought on champagne, and with many pirouettes poured it magnificently into slender glasses, and tripped about plying those Arcadian mouths that had never before tasted such a royal drink.
" Then the curtain fell with a pudic rapidity."
1 // is a thousand pities that concerts should only be given either in the afternoon, when you are torpid, or in the evening, when you are nervous. Surely you should assist at fine music as you assist at the Mass — before noon — when your brain and heart are not too troubled and tired with the secular influences of the growing day.
UNDER THE HI LI. 195
cunning upon Alberic. The feverish insistent ringing of the hammers at the forge, the dry staccato restlessness of Mime, the ceaseless coming and going of the troup of Niblungs, drawn hither and thither like a flock of terror-stricken and infernal sheep, Alberic's savage activity and metamorphoses, and Loge's rapid, flaming tongue-like movements, make the tableau the least reposeful, most troubled and confusing thing in the whole range of opera. How the Abbe rejoiced in the extravagant monstrous poetry, the heated melodrama, and splendid agitation of it all !
At eleven o'clock Fanfreluche got up and slipped off his dainty night-dress.
His bathroom was the largest and perhaps the most beautiful apartment in his splendid suite. The well-known engraving by Lorette that forms the frontispiece to Millevoye's " Architecture du XVIII"" siecle " will give you a better idea than any words of mine of the construction and decoration of the room. Only in Lorette's engraving the bath sunk into the middle of the floor is a little too small.
Fanfreluche stood for a moment like Narcissus gazing at his reflection in the still scented water, and then just ruffling its smooth surface with one foot, stepped elegantly into the cool basin and swam round it twice very gracefully. However, it is not so much at the very bath itself as in the drying and delicious frictions that a bather finds his chiefest joys, and Helen had appointed her most tried attendants to wait upon Fanfreluche. He was more than satisfied with their attention, that aroused feelings within him almost amounting to gratitude, and when the rites were ended any touch of home-sickness he might have felt was utterly dispelled. After he had rested a little, and sipped his chocolate, he wandered into the dressing-room, where, under the direction of the superb Dancourt, his toilet was completed.
As pleased as Lord Foppington with his appearance, the Abbe tripped off to bid good-morning to Helen. He found her in a sweet white muslin frock, wandering upon the lawn, and plucking flowers to deck her breakfast table. He kissed her lightly upon the neck.
" I'm just going to feed Adolphe," she said, pointing to a little reticule of buns that hung from her arm. Adolphe was her pet unicorn. " He is such a dear," she continued ; " milk white all over, excepting his nose, mouth, and nostrils. This way." The unicorn had a very pretty palace of its own made of green foliage and golden bars, a fitting home for such a delicate and dainty beast. Ah, it was a splendid thing to watch the white creature roaming in its artful cage, proud and beautiful, knowing no mate, and coming to no hand except the queen's itself. As Fanfreluche and Helen approached, Adolphe
196 THE SAVOY
began prancing and curvetting, pawing the soft turf with his ivory hoofs and flaunting his tail like a gonfalon. Helen raised the latch and entered.
" You mustn't come in with me, Adolphe is so jealous," she said, turning to the Abbe, who was following her, " but you can stand outside and look on ; Adolphe likes an audience." Then in her delicious fingers she broke the spicy buns and with affectionate niceness breakfasted her snowy pet. When the last crumbs had been scattered, Helen brushed her hands together and pretended to leave the cage without taking any further notice of Adolphe. Adolphe snorted.
Aubrey Beardslev.
PUBLISHER'S NOTE
Monsieur J. E. BLANCHE desires to state that the reproduction of his picture, " The Painter Thaulow and his Family," in the first number of " The Savoy," was made from a reduced photograph, the cliche of which had to be re-touched without comparison with the original.
It is regretted that owing to Mr. Beardsley's illness he has been unable to finish one of his full-page drawings to Chapter IV. of " Under the Hill," i.e., " The Bacchanals of Sporion," and that its publication in consequence has had to be postponed to No. 3 of "The Savoy."
For the convenience of such subscribers as desire to bind up " The Savoy " into volumes, is appended a print of the covers of Nos. 1 and 2, pulled on white paper, which may be bound in, in substitution for the pink cardboard covers.
THE SAVOY— ADVERTISEMENTS 203
THE SAVOY.
A New Illustrated Quarterly. Edited by Arthur Sy.mons.
No. I. JANUARY, 1896.
170 pages, 18 full-page Illustrations, and 5 Illustrations in the Text.
Crtnvn quarto, bound in pictorial cover, 2S. 6d. net.
No. I. contains literary contributions by G. Bernard Shaw, Frederick Wedmore, Paul Yerlaine, Max Beerbohm, Ernest Dowson, Aubrey Beardsley, Havelock Ellis, \V. B. Yeats, Rudolf Dircks. Mathilde Blind, Joseph Pennell, Humphrey James, Selwyn Image, and the Editor. The illustra- tions include work by Charles H. Shannon, Charles Conder, Joseph Pennell, Louis Oury, W. Rothenstein, F. Sandys, J. McNeill Whistler, Max Beerbohm, Jacques E. Blanche, J. Lemmen, and Eleven Drawings by Aubrey Beardsley.
EXTRACTS FROM PRESS NOTICES ON No. I. OF "THE SAVOY."
" There is not an article in the volume that one can put down without feeling the better and the purer for it ... . should be on every schoolroom table ; every mother should present it to her daughter, for it is bound to have an en- nobling and purifying influence." — Punch.
" The first number of a new literary and artistic venture is before us. We should describe it briefly as a ' Yellow Book ' redeemed of its puerilities — as a ' Pageant ' in which the illustrations are mainly original. The audacious 'decadence 1 of Mr. Aubrey Beardsley cannot blind the critic to the splendid decorative effect of his composition, his pattern, his ' idea.' The caricature of Mr. Beerbohm Tree by his younger brother, Max Beerbohm, is very delightful, without transcending the bounds of good taste. The eighteenth century sketch by Charles Conder wears the very spirit of the time. Of the literary contents Mr. Bernard Shaw's witty diatribe on ' Going to Church ' is the most purely literary, while Mr. Arthur Symons' verses perhaps give us the most content. Articles of considerable note are contri- buted by Messrs. Havelock Ellis and Selwyn Image, while the inevitable ' story-teller ' of the modern periodical is perhaps best found in Mr. Ernest Dowson. Not that Messrs. Wedmore, James, and Dircks are below the average of these things. Quite the contrary. Only somehow after Guy de Maupassant and Catulle Mendes, one feels that the English short story is never quite a success. The short poems by Mathilde Blind, W. B. Yeats, and Aubrey Beardsley are ' of the quality,' and the entire production does great credit to the editors, artistic and literary. The price, 2s. 6</., is singularly low, as rival works of the same type are 5*. and 6s., without at any rate surpassing the attractiveness of ' The Savoy.' We wish our new contemporary good speed and — ' sempre avanti Savoya ! ' " — Sunday Times.
"The best thing by far is Mr. Bernard Shaw's article on 'Going to Church,' which, like everything written by this paradoxical author, is not only clever, but thoroughly sincere." — The Times.
" ' The Savoy ' declines to be considered an offshoot of the ' Yellow Book,' and although the contributors are the same, it is free from some of the offences of the older periodical. The colour of the cover is ugly, but the quarto page is handsome, and the volume is light. The chief feature is the first instalment of a story by Mr. Aubrey Beardsley, accompanied by some exceedingly clever illustrations by the writer. Mr. Yeats's lines are characteristic of that notable writer. Mr. Symons contributes a clever article on Dieppe and a pleasant translation from Verlaine." — The Alhetiuiim.
"Though Mr. Aubrey Beardsley contributes several clever illustrations, the new quarterly, called 'The Savoy,' is anything but a repetition of an old enterprise. In form and character the serial which issues from the house of Mr. Leonard Smithers is as novel as it can be. As to its ' get up,' it has a large page, yet is delightfully light in the hand. It is not thick ; very little of the writing in it has the fault of diffuseness, which belongs generally to bulk ; and while some of its contents are chiefly entertaining, others are of a not less worthy gravity. From a writer of the distinction ■ >f Mr. Arthur Symons we had good reason to expect refined and careful editing, nor are we disappointed of it. The commonplaces of literary pessimism and the easy ingenuities of an unsavoury subject (upon which reputations of a moment have been built, as upon sand), are alike absent from ' The Savoy.' There is here some vivid, highly-wrought prose and a good share of excellent verse, among which, at the present time, nothing will attract more attention than the editor's own charmingly flexible translation of a poem from the ' Fetes Galantes' of Paul Verlaine." — The Academy.
" I am glad to notice, in the first number of ' The Savoy ' magazine, that Mr. Aubrey Beardsley has discovered a new type of woman. Unlike her predecessors in his artistic affections, she is almost pretty, and docs not suggest that her nose is frequently in a trough." — Sketch.
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20 4 THE SAVOY— ADVERTISEMENTS
London Nights. Poems by Arthur Symons.
Edition consists of 500 Small Paper copies on Large Post 8vo deckle-edged paper, bound in dark green cloth, at Six Shillings net per copy ; and 50 Large Paper copies on Royal 8vo hand- made paper, bound in dark green buckram, at One Guinea net per copy. Printed at the Chiswick P: .
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" Those who have learned from his former volumes to know Mr. Symons as a careful maker of melodious verse, net without a gift of direct vision, and often distinguished by some felicity of expression, will open, as we did, his new book of poems with considerable expectations. Nor will any student of verse, simply as verse, be disappointed. Mr. Symons is no unskilled metricist. He has learned the secret of the melody of simple metres, and he uses his knowledge often with unquestionable success. He has learned, too, the value of simplicity of language, and in such verse as • White Magic," ' Memory,' and ' At the Ambassadeurs,' he hits the mark. " — Saturday Review.
'"London I g Arthur Symons, is a very dainty, very clever volume of verses, mainly descriptive of
various female characters — fickle, fleeting, beautiful, intensely human, and of course, not unsuspectable, and therefore tormenringly unsatisfactory." — Glasgow Herald.
" ' Nuits de Londres,' ainsi s'intitule le nouveau livre du delicat et vivant poete. Mais n'allez pas en conclure a des tenebres de 'fog' et de 'mist,' a des scenes lugubres ou brutales. Imaginez ou, comme dit l'Anglais, 'realisez,' an contraire, tout le tz.~ lat de la vie nocturne d'un fantaisiste elegant, epris du joli, du coquet — et du
Beau, panni les splendeurs d'un Londres intelligemment viveur, d'un Londres modeme a l'extreme et le plus parisien possible, avec la nuance anglaise, toutefois, distinction supreme, veux-je le dire, dans le style, joyeux parfois, leger, qui sait so-. ;: sans jamais 's'emballer' jusqu'a meme nn soupcon de gaiete quelque peu grasse." — Paul
Yebaaixe, in the Revue Eniychfidiaue.
Silhouettes. By Arthur Symons.
Second edition. Carefully revised and enlarged by the addition of Nineteen New Poems. Uniform with " London Nights."
Mr. Symoxs' new volume of Poems, printed at the Chiswick Press, is now ready for delivery. The edition consists of 400 Small Paper copies on Large Post 8vo deckle-edged paper, bound in dark green cloth, at Five Shillings net per copy; and 15 Large Paper copies on Royal 8vo hand- made paper, bound in dark green buckram, at One Guinea net per copy.
"There is enough new matter in the new edition of Mr. Arthur Symons' 'Silhouettes' to make the second edition of that collection of decadent lyrics a different book from what it was when it first came out." — Scotsman.
The Rape of the Lock. By Alexander Pope. Illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley.
Mr. Leonard Smithers begs to announce the publication of an Edition de Luxe of the above famous Poem, printed at the Chiswick Press, in Crown 4to size, on old style paper, illustrated with nine elaborate drawings by Mr. Aubrey Beardsley, and bound in a specially designed cloth cover. (For Specimen Drawing see page in in this volume). The edition is a limited one, and the price is Ten Shillings and Sixpence net per copy. Twenty-five copies are printed on Japanese Vellum, and are offered at Two Guineas net per copy. Only 5 copies on Japanese Vellum now remain unsubscribed for. Now 1 :
Orchids. Poems by Theodore Wratislaw.
Edition consists of 250 Small Paper copies on Foolscap 8vo deckle-edged paper, bound in cream-coloured art linen, at Five Shillings net per copy; and 10 copies printed on Japanese ... at One Guinea net ptr copy. Printed at the Chiswick Press. Now ready.
THE SAVOY— ADVERTISEMENTS 205
Caprices. Poems by Theodore Wratislaw.
Edition consists of 100 copies on Foolscap 8vo hand-made paper, bound in parchment, at Five Shillings net per copy ; and 20 copies on Japanese Vellum, in similar binding, at One Guinea net per copy.
The fciv remaining copies have been transferred to me, from their late Publishers, by the Author.
"Mr. Wratislaw uses the most difficult metres, the least manageable verse forms, with the rarest facility
However bizarre the subject matter, the manner is admirably sedate, admirably restrained His ear is curiously
sensitive, and if he rarely obtains absolute orchestration, he produces delicious melodies, as it were, on violin and
Bute It may well be thai Mr. Wratislaw's l««>k will lie found shocking to some, irritating to many. Some
emphatic impression, whether of pain or of pleasure, it will leave on all." — C. T. J. IIiatt, in Artist, January, 1894.
Nocturnes and Pastorals. Poems by A. Bernard
Mi all.
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IN PREPARATION
VERSES. By Ernest Dovvson.
THE PIERROT OF THE MINUTE. A Dramatic Phantasy by Ernest Dowson.
LA FILLE AUX YEUX D'OR. Translated from the French of Honort) de Balzac by Ernest Dowson, and illustrated with Six Designs by Charles Conder, finely engraved upon wood.
THE FOOL AND HIS HEART. A Novel by F. Norreys Connell.
CARICATURES OF TWENTY-FIVE GENTLEMEN. By Max Beerboh.m. Finely engraved upon wood. (For specimen, see p. 161 in this volume.)
THE SOUVENIRS OF LEONARD, COIFFEUR TO QUEEN MARIE ANTOINETTE. Translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos.
A BOOK OF BARGAINS. Stories by Vincent O'Suli.ivan.
A NEW VOLUME OF VERSE. By Arthur Symons.
Circulars of any of the above books will be sent on application to LEONARD SMITHERS, Effingham House, Arundel Street, Strand, London, W.C.
206
THE SA VO Y—AD VER Tl SEMEN TS
I
fiiiSi
