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HORTUS VITAE
ESSAYS ON THE GARDENING OF LIFE
BY
VERNON LEE
JOHN LANE: THE BODLEY HEAD
LONDON & NEW YORK. MDCCCCIV
SECOND EDITION.
WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES.
DEDICATION
To MADAME TH: BLANC-BENTZON
MAIANO, NEAR FLORENCE,
June 20, 1903.
MY DEAR MADAME BLANC,
The first copy of this little book was, of course, to have been for
Gabrielle Delzant. I am fulfilling her wish, I think, in giving it,
instead, to you, who were her oldest friend; as I, alas! had time to be
only her latest.
She had read nearly all these essays; and, during those weeks of her
illness which I spent last autumn in Gascony, she had made me rewrite
several among them. She wanted to learn to read English aloud, and it
amused her and delighted me that she should do so on my writings. Her
French pronunciation gave an odd grace to the sentences; the little
hesitation spaced and accentuated their meaning; and I liked what I had
written when she read it. The afternoons at Paraÿs which we spent
together in this way! Prints of _Mère Angélique_ and _Ces Messieurs de
Port Royal_ watching over us in her spacious bedroom, brown and yet
light like the library it had become; and among those Jansenist
worthies, the Turin Pallas Athena, with a sprig of green box as an
offering from our friend. Yes; what I had written seemed good when read
by her. And then there were the words which had to be looked out in the
dictionary, bringing discussions on all manner of subjects, and
wonderful romantic stories, like the "Golden Legend," about grandparents
and servants and neighbours, giving me time to rearrange the cushions
and to settle the fur over her feet. And the other words, hard to
pronounce (she must always invert, from sheer anxiety, the English
_th'_s and _s'_s); I had to say them first, and once more, and yet
again. And we laughed, and I kissed her beloved patient face and her
dear young white hair. I don't think it ever occurred to tell her my
intention of putting her name on this volume--it went without saying.
And besides, had not everything I could do or be of good belonged to her
during the eighteen months we had been friends?
There was another reason, however, why this book more particularly
should have been hers; and having been hers, dear Madame Blanc, yours.
Do you remember telling me how, years ago, and in a terrible moment of
your experience, she had surprised you, herself still so young, by a
remark which had sunk deep into your mind and had very greatly helped
you? "We must," you told me she had said, "be prepared to begin life
many times afresh." Now that is the thought, though never clearly
expressed, which runs through these essays. And the essential goodness
and fruitfulness of life, its worthiness to be lived over and over
again, had come home to me more and more with the knowledge and the love
of her who had made my own life so far happier and more significant. So
that my endeavour to enumerate some of the unnoticed gifts and deepest
consolations of life has come to be connected in my mind with this
creature who consoled so many and gave herself, with such absolute gift
of loving-kindness or gratitude, to all people and all things that
deserved it.
That life is worthy to be lived well, with fortitude, tenderness, and a
certain reserved pride and humility, was indeed the essential, unspoken
tenet of Gabrielle Delzant's religion, into which there entered, not
merely the teachings of Stoics and Jansenists, but the traditional
gaiety and gallant bearing of the little southern French nobles from
whom she was descended. Her Huguenot blood, of which, with the dear
self-contradictoriness of all true saints, she was inordinately proud;
her Catholic doctrine, which by natural affinity was that of Port Royal
and Pascal; this double strain of asceticism of both her faiths (for,
like all deep believers, she had more than one) merely gave a solemn
base, a zest, to her fine intuition of nature and joy. The refusal to
possess (even her best-beloved books never bore her own name, and her
beautiful bevelled wardrobes were found empty through sheer giving), the
disdain for every form of property, only intensified her delight in all
the beautiful things which could be shared with others. No one ever
possessed, in the true sense of passionate enjoyment, as Gabrielle
Delzant possessed, for instance, the fine passages of Corneille, or
Maurice de Guérin, or Victor Hugo, which she asked her husband to read
to us of an evening; as she possessed the refined lie of the land, the
delicate autumn colouring of her modest and gracious southern country;
and those old-fashioned Paris streets, through which we eagerly
wandered, seeking obscure little churches and remote convents where
Pascal had lived or André Chénier lay buried. Nay, no one, methinks,
ever tasted so much of romance as this lady in her studious invalid's
existence; for did she not extract wonderful and humorous adventures,
not only out of the lives of her friends, but her own quiet comings and
goings? Do you remember, dear Madame Blanc, that rainy day that she and
I returned to you, brimful of marvellous adventures, when we had found a
feather and shell shop built up against an old church in the Marais; or
was it after wandering in the dripping Jardin des Plantes, peering at
the white skeletons of animals of the already closed museum, and
returning home in floods by many and devious trams and 'buses? Ah, no
one could enjoy things, and make others enjoy them by sheer childlike
lovingness, as she did!
For her austerity, like that of the nobler pagans (and there are no
nobler pagans, or more reverent to paganism, than true Christian
saints, believe me) pruned all natural possibilities into fruitfulness
of joy. And her reckless giving away of interest and of loving-kindness,
enabled her, not merely to feed the multitude, but to carry home
miraculous basketfuls, and more, methinks, than twelve.
And thus, to return to my main theme, there was, transmuting all her
orthodoxy (and making her accept some unorthodox among her
fellow-worshippers) a deep and fervent adoration of life and
fruitfulness, and an abhorrence of death.
Her letters to me are full of it. Abhorrence of death. Death not of the
body, for she held that but an incident, an accident almost, in a life
eternal or universal; but death of the soul. And this she would have
defined, though she was never fond of defining, as loss of the power of
extracting joy and multiplying it through thankfulness.
A matter less of belief than of temper. Of course. Gabrielle Delzant was
one of the elect, and filled with grace. And she had as little sense of
tragedy as St. Francis or his skylarks; sympathy meaning for her less
the fact of feeling the sufferings of others, than that of healing, of
consoling, and of compensating.
With this went naturally that, in a very busy life, full--over-full,
some of us thought--of the affairs of other folk, she never appeared
worried or hurried. Of the numberless persons who carried their business
to her, or whose secret troubles became manifest to her dear
bluish-brown eyes, each must have felt as if she existed for him or her
solely. And folk went to her as they go into a church of her religion,
not merely for spiritual aid, but for the comfort of space and rest in
this world of crowding and bustle; for the sense of a piece of heaven
closed in for one's need and all one's very own. Dear Madame Blanc, how
many shy shadows do we not seem to see around us since her death; or
rather to guess at, roaming disconsolate, lacking they scarce know what,
that ever-welcoming sanctuary of her soul!
I have compared it with a church; but outwardly, and just because she
was such a believer in life, it was more like a dwelling-place, like
those brown corridors, full of books, at Paraÿs; or that bedroom of
hers, with the high lights all over the polished floor, and its look of
a library. To me Gabrielle Delzant revealed the reality of what I had
long guessed and longed for aimlessly, the care and grace of art, the
consecration of religion, applied to the matters of every day. It hung
together with her worship of life, with her belief, as she expressed it
to you, all those years ago, _that life must be begun many times anew_.
And it is this which, for all the appalling unexpectedness, the dreadful
cataclysm of her temporal ending, has made the death of Gabrielle
Delzant so strangely difficult, for me, at least, to realise as death at
all.
Not death, but only absence; and that, how partial!
It is eight months and more, dear Madame Blanc, since she and I bade
each other adieu in the body. She had been some while ill, though none
of us suspected how fatally. It was the eve of her departure for Paris;
and I was returning to Italy. She was grieved at parting from me, at
leaving her dear old Southern relatives; and secretly she perhaps half
suspected that she might never come back to her Gascon home. It was a
November day, dissolving fitfully into warm rain, and very melancholy.
I was to take the late train to Agen with the two girls. And she and I,
when all was ready, were to have the afternoon together. Of course we
must have it serene, as if no parting were to close it. All traces of
departure, of packing, were cleared away at her bidding, and when they
had carried her on to her sofa, and placed by its side the little table
with our books, and also my chair, she bade the dear Southern maids
light a fine blaze of vine stumps, and fill all the jars with fresh
roses--china roses, so vivid, surely none have ever smelt so sweet and
poignant. We amused ourselves, a little sadly, burning some olive and
myrtle branches I had brought for her from Corsica, and watching their
frail silver twigs and leaves turn to embers and fall in fireworks of
sparks and a smoke of incense. And we read together in one of my books
(alas! that book has just come back this very same day, sent by her
daughter), and looked up at the loose grey clouds suffused with rose and
orange as the day drew to its end. Then the children shouted from below
that the carriage was there, that I must go. We closed the books,
marking the place, and I broke a rose from the nosegay on the
fireplace. And we said farewell.
Thus have we remained, she and I. With the mild autumn day drawing to an
end outside; and within, the fresh roses, the bright fire she had asked
for; remained reading our books, watching those dried leaves turn to
showers of sparks and smoke of incense. She and I, united beyond all
power of death to part, in the loving belief that, even like that
afternoon of packing up and bidding adieu, and rain and early twilight,
life also should be made serene and leisurely, and simple and sweet, and
akin to eternity.
And now I am going to put those volumes she and I had read together, on
my own shelves, here in this house she never entered; and to correct the
proofs of this new little book, which should have been hers, nay, rather
_is_, and which is also, my dear Madame Blanc, for that reason, yours.
I am, meanwhile, your grateful and affectionate friend,
VERNON LEE.
CONTENTS
DEDICATION
THE GARDEN OF LIFE--INTRODUCTORY
IN PRAISE OF GOVERNESSES
ON GOING TO THE PLAY
READING BOOKS
HEARING MUSIC
RECEIVING LETTERS
NEW FRIENDS AND OLD
OTHER FRIENDSHIPS
A HOTEL SITTING-ROOM
IN PRAISE OF COURTSHIP
KNOWING ONE'S MIND
AGAINST TALKING
IN PRAISE OF SILENCE
THE BLAME OF PORTRAITS
SERE AND YELLOW--INTERLUDE
A STAGE JEWEL
MY BICYCLE AND I
PUZZLES OF THE PAST
MAKING PRESENTS
GOING AWAY
COMING BACK
LOSING ONE'S TRAIN
THE HANGING GARDENS--VALEDICTORY
HORTUS VITAE
THE GARDEN OF LIFE
(INTRODUCTORY)
"Cela est bien dit," répondit Candide; "mais il
faut cultiver notre jardin."--ROMANS DE VOLTAIRE.
THE GARDEN OF LIFE
This by no means implies that the whole of life is a garden or could be
made one. I am not sure even that we ought to try. Indeed, on second
thoughts, I feel pretty certain that we ought not. Only such portion of
life is our garden as lies, so to speak, close to our innermost
individual dwelling, looked into by our soul's own windows, and
surrounded by its walls. A portion of life which is ours exclusively,
although we do occasionally lend its key to a few intimates; ours to
cultivate just as we please, growing therein either pistachios and dwarf
lemons for preserving, like Voltaire's immortal hero, or more spiritual
flowers, "sweet basil and mignonette," such as the Lady of Epipsychidion
sent to Shelley; kindly rosemary and balm; or, as may happen, a fine
assortment of witch's herbs, infallible for turning us into cats and
toads and poisoning our neighbours.
But with whatever we may choose to plant the portion of our life and our
thought which is our own, and whatsoever its natural fertility and
aspect, this much is certain, that it needs digging, watering, planting,
and perhaps most of all, weeding. "Cela est bien dit," répondit Candide,
"mais il faut cultiver notre jardin." He was, as you will recollect,
answering Dr. Pangloss. One evening, while they were resting from their
many tribulations, and eating various kinds of fruit and sweetmeats in
their arbour on the Bosphorus, the eminent optimistic philosopher had
pointed out at considerable length that the delectable moment they were
enjoying was connected by a Leibnitzian chain of cause and effect with
sundry other moments of a less obviously desirable character in the
earlier part of their several lives.
"For, after all, my dear Candide," said Dr. Pangloss, "let us suppose
you had not been kicked out of a remarkably fine castle, magnis ac
cogentissimis cum argumentis a posteriori; suppose also that, etc., etc.
had not happened, nor, furthermore, etc., etc., etc.; well, it is quite
plain that you would not be in this particular place, _videlicet_ an
arbour; and, moreover, in the act of eating preserved lemon-rind and
pistachio nuts."
"What you say is true," answered Candide, "but we have to cultivate our
garden."
And here I hasten to remark, that although I have quoted and translated
these seven immortal words, I would on no account be answerable for
their original and exact meaning, any more than for the meaning of more
officially grave and reverend texts, albeit perhaps not wiser or nobler
ones.
Did the long-suffering hero of the Sage of Ferney accept the chain of
cause and effect, and agree that without the kicks, the earthquake, the
_auto-da-fè_, and all the other items of his uneasy career, it was
impossible he should be eating pistachio nuts and preserved lemon-rind
in that arbour? And, in consideration of the bitter sweet of these
delicacies, was he prepared to welcome (retrospectively) the painful
preliminaries as blessings in disguise? Did he even, rising to stoical
or mystic heights, identify these superficially different phenomena and
recognize that their apparent contradiction was real sameness?
Or, should we take it that, refraining from such essential questions,
and passing over his philosophical friend's satisfaction in the _causal
nexus_, poor Candide was satisfied with pointing out the only practical
lesson to be drawn from the whole matter, to wit, that in order to
partake of such home-grown dainties, it had been necessary, and most
likely would remain necessary, to put a deal of good work into whatever
scrap of the soil of life had not been devastated by those Leibnitzian
Powers who further Man's felicity in a fashion so energetic but so
roundabout?
All these points remain obscure. But even as a play is said to be only
the better for the various interpretations which it affords to as many
great actors; so methinks, the wisest sayings are often those which
state some principle in general terms, leaving to individuals the
practical working out, according to their nature and circumstances. So,
whether we incline to optimism or to pessimism, we must do our best in
the half-hours we can bestow upon our little garden.
I speak advisedly of half-hours, and I would repeatedly insist upon the
garden being little. For the garden, whatever its actual size, and were
it as extensive as those of Eden and the Hesperides set on end, does not
afford the exercise needful for spiritual health and vigour. And
whatever we may succeed in growing there to please our taste or (like
some virtuous dittany) to heal our bruises, this much is certain, that
the power of enjoyment has to be brought from beyond its limits.
Happiness, dear fellow-gardeners, is not a garden plant.
In plain English: happiness is not the aim of life, although it is
life's furtherance and in the long run life's _sine qua non_. And not
being life's aim, life often disregards the people who pursue it for its
own sake. I am not, like Dr. Pangloss, a professional philosopher, and
what philosophy I have is of no particular school, and neither stoical
nor mystic. I feel no sort of call to vindicate the Ways of Providence;
and on the whole there seems something rather ill-bred in crabbing the
unattainable, and pretending that what we can't have can't be good for
us. Happiness _is_ good for us, excellent for us, necessary for us,
indispensable to us. But ... how put such transcendental facts into
common or garden (for it is _garden_) language? But _we_--that is to
say, poor human beings--are one thing, and life is quite another. And as
life has its own programme irrespective of ours, to wit, apparently its
own duration and intensifying throughout all changes, it is quite
natural that we, its little creatures of a second, receive what we
happen to ask for--namely, happiness--as a reward for being thoroughly
alive.
Now, for some reason not of our choosing, we cannot be thoroughly alive
except as a result of such exercises as come under the headings: Work
and Duty. That seems to be the law of Life--of Life which does not care
a button about being æsthetic or wisely epicurean. The truth of it is
brought home to us occasionally in one of those fine symbolical
intuitions which are the true stuff of poetry, because they reveal the
organic unity and symmetry of all existence. I am alluding to the sense
of cloying and restlessness which comes to most of us (save when tired
or convalescent) after a very few days or even hours shut up in quite
the finest real gardens; and to that instinct, impelling some of us to
inquire about the lodges and the ways out, the very first thing on
coming down into some private park. Of course they are quite exquisite,
those flowery terraces cut in the green turf, and bowling greens set
with pines or statues, and balustraded steps with jars and vases. And
the great stretches of park land with their solemn furbelowed avenues
and their great cedars stretching _moire_ skirts on to the grass, are
marvellous fine things to look upon....
But we want the ploughed fields beyond, the real woods with stacked-up
timber, German fashion; the orchards and the kitchen gardens; the tracks
across the high-lying sheep downs; the towing-paths where the barges
come up the rivers; the deep lanes where the hay-carts have left long
wisps on the overhanging elms; the high-roads running from village to
village, with the hooded carts and bicycles and even the solemn
Juggernaut traction-engines upon them. We want not only to rest from
living, to take refreshment in life's kindly pauses and taste (like
Candide in his arbour) the pleasantness of life's fruits. We want also
to live.
But there is living and living. There is, unfortunately, not merely such
breezy work-a-dayness as we have been talking of, but something very
different indeed beyond the walls of our private garden. There are
black, oozy factory yards and mangy grass-plots heaped with brickbat and
refuse; and miles of iron railing, and acres of gaunt and genteel
streets not veiled enough in fog; a metaphorical _beyond the garden
walls_, in which a certain number of us graduate for the ownership of
sooty shrubberies and clammy orchid houses. And we poor latter-day
mortals have become so deadly accustomed to the routine of useless work
and wasteful play, that a writer must needs cross all the _t_'s and dot
all the _i_'s of his conviction (held also by other sentimentalists and
cranks called Carlyle, Ruskin, and Morris) that the bread and wine of
life are not grown in the Black Country; no, nor life's flowers in the
horticultural establishments (I will not call them gardens) of suburban
villas.
Fortunately, however, this casual-looking universe is not without its
harmonies, as well as ironies. And one of these arrangements would seem
to be that our play educates the aims and methods of our work. If we lay
store by satisfactions which imply the envy and humiliation of other
folk, why then we set about such work as humiliates our neighbours or
fills them with enviousness, saving the case where others, sharing our
tastes, do alike by us. Without going to such lengths (the mention of
which has got me a reputation for lack of human sympathy) there remains
the fact that if our soul happen to take delight in, let us say,
futility--well, then, futility will litter existence with shreds of
coloured paper and plaster comfits trodden into mud, as after a day of
carnival at Nice. Nay, a still simpler case: if we cannot be happy
without a garden as big as the grounds of an expensive lunatic asylum,
why, then, all the little cottage gardens down the lane must be swept
away to make it.
Now, the cottage gardens, believe me, are the best. They are the only
ones which, being small, may be allotted in some juster future to every
man without dispossessing his neighbour. And they are also the only ones
compatible with that fine arable or dairy country which we all long for.
Stop and look over the hedges: their flowers leave no scrap of earth
visible between them, like the bedded-out things of grander gardens; and
their vivid crimsons, and tender rose and yellow, and ineffable blue,
and the solemn white which comes out in the evening, are seen to most
advantage against the silvery green of vegetables behind them, and the
cornfield, the chalk-pit under the beech trees beyond. The cottage
flowers come also into closer quarters with their owners, not merely
because these breathe their fragrance and the soil's good freshness
while stooping down to weed, and prune, and water; but also, and perhaps
even more, because the flowers we tend with our own hands have a habit
of blooming in our expectations and filling our hopes with a sweetness
which not the most skilful hired gardeners have ever taught the most
far-fetched hybrids that they raise for clients.
Which, being interpreted, may be taken to mean that it is no use relying
on artists, poets, philosophers, or saints to make something of the
enclosed spaces or the waste portions of our soul: _Il faut cultiver
notre jardin._
IN PRAISE OF GOVERNESSES
Even before discovering that there was an old, gabled, lower town at
Cassel, I felt the special gladness of the touch of Germany. It was an
autumn morning, bright yet tender. I sped along the wide, empty streets,
across the sanded square, with hedges of sere lime trees, where a big,
periwigged Roman Emperor of an Elector presides, making one think of the
shouts of "Hurrah, lads, for America!" of the bought and sold Hessians
of Schiller's "Cabal and Love." At the other end was a promenade,
terraced above the yellow tree-tops of a park, above a gentle undulating
country, with villages and steeples in the distance. "Schöneaussicht"
the place called itself; and the view was looked at by the wide and many
windows of pleasant old-fashioned houses, with cocked-hat roofs well
pulled down over them, each in its little garden of standard roses, all
quiet and smiling in the autumn sunshine.
I felt the special gladness of being in Germany (for every country has
its own way of making us happy), and glad that there should be in me
something which answered to Germany's especial touch. We owe that, many
of us, I mused, and with it a deep debt of gratitude, to our
governesses. And I fell to thinking of certain things which an American
friend had lately told me, sitting in the twilight with her head a
little averted, about a certain governess of hers I can remember from my
childhood. Pathetic things, heroic ones, nothings; all ending off in the
story of a farewell letter, treasured many years, lost on a journey....
"Do you remember Fräulein's bonnet? The one she brought from Hanover and
wore that winter in Paris?" And there it was in a faded, crinolined
photograph, so dear and funny. Dear and funny--that is the point of this
relationship with creatures giving often the best of the substance and
form of our soul, that it is without the sometimes rather empty majesty
of the parental one. And surely it is no loss, but rather a gain, to
have to smile, as my friend did at the thought of that Teutonic bonnet,
just when we feel an awkward huskiness in our voice.
There is, moreover, a particular possibility for good in the relation
between a developing child (not, of course, a mere growing young brute)
and a woman still young, childless, or separated from her children, a
little solitary, most often alien, differently brought up, and whose
affection and experience must therefore take a certain impersonality,
and tend to subdued romance. We are loved, when we are, not as a matter
of course and habit, not with any claim; but for ourselves and with the
delicate warmth of a feeling necessarily one-sided. And whatever we
learn of life in this relationship is of one very different from our
own, and seen through the feelings, the imagination, often the repressed
home-sickness, of a mature and foreign soul. And this is good for us,
and useful in correcting family and national tradition, and the rubbing
away of angles (and other portions of soul) by brothers and sisters, and
general contemporaries, excellent educational items of which it is
possible to have a little too much.
Be this as it may, it is to our German governesses that we owe the
power of understanding Germany, more than to German literature. For the
literature itself requires some introduction of mood for its romantic,
homely, sentimental, essentially German qualities; the mere Anglo-Saxon
or Latin being, methinks, incapable of caring at once for Wilhelm
Meister, or Siebennkäs, or Götz, or the manifold lyric of Forest and
Millstream. To understand these, means to have somewhere in us a little
sample, some fibres and corpuscles, of the German heart. And I maintain
that we are all of us the better, of whatever nationality (and most,
perhaps, we rather too-too solid Anglo-Saxons) for such transfusion of a
foreign element, correcting our deficiencies and faults, and ripening
(as the literature of Italy ripened our Elizabethans) our own intrinsic
qualities. It means, apart from negative service against conceit and
canting self-aggrandisement, an additional power of taking life
intelligently and serenely; a power of adaptation to various climates
and diets of the spirit, let alone the added wealth of such varied
climates and diets themselves. Italy, somehow, attains this by her mere
visible aspect and her history: a pure, high sky, a mountain city, or a
row of cypresses can teach as much as Dante, and, indeed, teach us to
understand Dante himself. While as to France, that most lucid of
articulately-speaking lands, explains herself in her mere books; and we
become in a manner French with every clear, delightful page we read, and
almost every thought of our own we ever think with definiteness and
grace. But the genius of Germany is, like her landscape, homely and
sentimental, with the funny goodness and dearness of a good child; and
we must learn to know it while we ourselves are children. And therefore
it is from our governesses that we learn (with dimmer knowledge of
mysterious persons or things "Ulfilas"--"Tacitus's Germania," supposed
by me to have been a lady, his daughter perhaps, and the "seven stars"
of German literature) a certain natural affinity with the Germany of
humbler and greater days, when no one talked of Teuton superiority or of
purity of Teuton idiom; the Germany which gave Kant, and Beethoven, and
Goethe and Schiller, and was not ashamed to say "scharmant."
I, too, was taught to say "scharmant" and "amüsiren". It was wrong, very
wrong; and I feel my inferiority every time I come to Germany, and have
to pause and think by what combination of words I can express the true
Germanic functions and nature of booking offices and bicycle labels. For
it was long ago: Count Bismarck was still looked on as a dangerous
upstart, and we reckoned in kreutzers; blue and white Austrian bands
played at Mainz and Frankfurt. It was long ago that I was, so to speak,
a small German infant, fed on Teutonic romance and sentiment (and also
funny Teutonic prosaicalness, bless it!) by a dim procession of
Germania's daughters. There was Franziska, who could boast a Rhineland
pastor for grandfather, a legendary pastor bearding Napoleon; Franziska,
who read Schiller's "Maria Stuart" and "Joan of Arc," and even his
"Child Murderess" (I remember every word of obloquy hurled at the
hangman--"hangman, craven hangman, canst thou not break off a lily") to
the housemaid and me whenever my father and mother went out of an
evening; and described "Papagena," in Mozart's opera which she had seen,
all dressed in feathers; and was tempted to strum furtive melancholy
chords on my mother's zither.... Dear Franziska, whose comfortable
blond good looks inspired the enamoured upholsterer in letters beginning
"My dearest little goldfish"--Franziska, what has become of thee? And
the Frau Professor, who averred with rhythmic iteration that teaching
such a child was far, far worse than breaking stones on a high-road; in
what stony regions may she have found an honoured stony grave? What has
become of genial Mme. E., who played the Jupiter Symphonie with my
mother, instead of hearing me through my scales, and lent me volumes of
Tonkünstler-Lexikons to soothe her conscience, and gave us honey in the
comb out of her garden of verbena and stocks? But best of all, dearest,
far above all the others, and quite different, Marie S., charming
enthusiastic young schoolmistress in that little town of pepper-pot
towers and covered bridges, you I have found again; I shall soon see
your eyes and hear your voice, quite unchanged, I am certain. And we
shall sit and talk (your big daughter listening, perhaps not without an
occasional smile) about those hours which you and I, a girl of twenty
and a child of eleven, spent in the little room above the rushing Alpine
river, eating apples and drinking _café au lait_; hours in which a
whole world of legend and poetry, and scientific fact and theory more
wonderful still, passed from your ardent young mind into the little
eager puzzled one of your loving pupil. We shall meet very soon, a
little awkwardly at first, perhaps, but after a moment talking as if no
silence of thirty years had ever parted us; as if nothing had happened
in between, as if all that might then have come true ... well, could
come true still.
These thoughts came into my head that morning in the promenade at
Cassel, brought to the surface by the mellow autumn sun and the special
pleasure of being again in Germany. There mingled with them also that
recent conversation about the lady with the bonnet from Hanover, who had
written that paper so precious to my American friend. And I determined
to take my pen some day I should feel suitably happy, and offer up
thanks for all of us to our governesses, to those dear women, dead,
dispersed, faded into distance, but not forgotten; our spiritual
foster-mothers who put a few drops of the milk of German kindness, of
German simplicity and quaintness and romance, between our lips when we
were children.
ON GOING TO THE PLAY
We were comparing notes the other day on plays and play-going. My friend
was Irish; so, finding to our joy that we disliked this form of
entertainment equally, we swore with fervour that we would go to the
play together.
Mankind may be divided into playgoers and not playgoers; and the first
are far more numerous, and also far more illustrious. It evidently is a
defect, and perhaps a sign of degeneracy, akin to deafness or to
Daltonism, not to enjoy the theatre; not to enjoy it, at least in the
reality, when there or just after coming away. For I can enjoy the
thought of the play, and the thought of other folks liking it, so long
as I am not taken there. There is something pleasant in thinking of
those brilliant places, full of unrealities, with crowds engulfing
themselves into this light from out of the dreary, foggy streets. Also,
of young enthusiastic creatures, foregoing dinner, waiting for hours in
cheap seats (like Charles and Mary Lamb before they had money to buy
rare prints and blue china), with the delight of spending hoarded
pennies; all under circumstances of the deepest bodily discomfort. I
leave out of the question the thought of Greek theatres, of that
semicircle of steps on the top of Fiesole, with, cypresses for side
scenes, and, even now, lyric tragedies more than Æschylean enacted by
clouds and winds in the amphitheatre of mountains beyond. I am thinking
of the play as we moderns know it, with a sense of stuffiness as an
integral part. Indeed, that stuffiness is by no means its worst feature.
The most thrilling moment, I will confess, which theatres can still give
me is that--but it is really _sui generis_ and ineffable--when, having
got upstairs, you meet in the narrow lobbies of an old-fashioned
playhouse the tuning of the fiddles and the smell--of gas, glue, heaven
knows what glories of yester-year--which, ever since one's babyhood, has
come to mean "the play." People have expended much genius and more money
to make theatrical representation transcend imagination; but they can
never transcend that moment in the corridor, _never transcend that
smell_.
Here is, most probably, one of my chief motives of dissatisfaction. I do
not like the play--the play at the theatre--because it invariably falls
short of that in my imagination. I make an exception for music; but not
for the visible theatrical accompaniments thereof. Well given on the
stage, _Don Giovanni_, for instance, remains but the rather bourgeois
play of Molière; leave me and the music together, and I promise you that
all the romance and terror and wonder of ten thousand Spains are
distilled into my fancy!
The fact is that, being an appeal to the imagination of others, every
form of literature, every "deed of speech," as a friend of mine calls
it, has a natural stage in the mind of the reader or the listener.
Milton, let me point out, makes "gorgeous Tragedy in sceptred pall,"
sweep across, not the planks of a theatre, but the scholar's thought as
he sits alone with his book of nights. Neither is this an expression of
conceit. I do not mean that _my_ conception of this, that, or the other
is better, or as good as, what a great actor or a clever manager can
set before me. Nothing of the sort; but my conception _is better suited
to me_. Its very vagueness answers, nine times out of ten, to my
repugnance and my preference; and the high lights, the vividly realized
portions emerging from that vagueness, represent _what I like_. Hamlet
or Portia or Viola and Olivia, exist for me under the evocation of the
magician Shakespeare, but formed of recollections, impressions of
places, people, and other poets, floating coloured atomies, which have a
brooding charm, as being mine; why should they be scared off, replaced,
by detailed real personalities who, even if charming, are most likely
alien?
I cannot very well conceive how people enjoy such substitutions. Perhaps
they have more sensitive fancy and warmer sympathies than I; but as to
mine, I had rather they were let alone. I can quite understand that it
is different with children and with uneducated persons: their
imagination is at once more erratic than ours (less tied by the logical
necessities of details, less perceptive of these), and, at the same
time, their imagination is not as thoroughly well stocked, and as ready
to ignite almost spontaneously, as is ours. Much reading, travelling,
much contemplation of human beings, apart from practical reasons, has
given even the least creative of us lazy, grown-up folk a power, almost
a habit, of imaginative creation; and but a very little, though a
genial, pressure will make it act. But children and the people require
stronger stimulus, and require also a field for their imagination to
work upon. I can remember the amazing effect, entirely at variance with
the intention, which portions of _Don Quixote_--seen at a circus, of all
places--made on my mind when I was eight: it did not _realize_ ideas of
chivalry which I had, but, on the contrary, it gave me, from outside,
data (such data!) about chivalry on which my thoughts wove ideas the
most amazing for many months. Something of the kind, I think, is
happening to that Paris audience, rows and rows of eager heads and
seeing eyes, which M. Carrière has painted, just enough visible, in his
usual luminous haze, to give the mood. The stage is not shown: it really
is in those eyes and faces. It is telling them that there are worlds
different from their own; it is opening out perspectives (longer and
deeper than those of wood and cardboard) down which those cabined
thoughts and feelings may henceforth wander. The picture, like M.
Carrière's "Morning" in the Luxembourg, is one of the greatest of poetic
pictures; and it makes me, at least, understand what the value of the
stage must be to hundreds and thousands of people; to _the people_, to
children, and to those practical natures which, however learned and
cultured, seem unable to get imaginative, emotional pleasure without a
good deal of help from outward mechanism.
These are all negative reasons why I dislike the play. But there are
positive ones also. There is a story told by Lamb--or is it Hazlitt?--of
a dear man who could not bear to read _Othello_, because of the dreadful
fate of the Moor and his bride; "Such a noble gentleman! Such a sweet
lady!" he would repeat, deeply distressed. The man was not
artistic-souled; but I am like him. I know the healing anodyne in
narrative, the classic consolation which that kind priest mentioned by
Renan offered his congregation: "It took place so long ago that perhaps
it never took place at all." But on the stage, when Salvini puts his
terrible, suffused face out of Desdemona's curtains, it is not the past,
but the present; there is no lurking hope that it may not be true. And I
do not happen to wish to see such realities as that. Moreover, there are
persons--my Irish friend and I, for instance--who feel abashed at what
affects us as eavesdropping on our part. It is quite right we should be
there to listen to some splendid piece of poetry, Romeo's duet with
Juliet, the moonlight quartet of Lorenzo, Jessica, Olivia, and Nerissa,
and parts of _Winter's Tale_; things which in musical quality transcend
all music. But is it right that we be present at the unpacking of our
neighbour's most private moral properties; at the dreadful laying bare
of other folk's sores and nakedness? I wonder sometimes that any of the
audience can look at the stage in company with the rest; the natural
man, one would expect, would have the lights of the pit extinguished,
and, if he needs must pry, pry at least unobserved.
There is, however, an exception: when modern drama, instead of merely
smuggling us, as by an ignominious King Candaules' ring called a theatre
ticket, to witness what we shouldn't, gives us the spectacle of
delightful personality, of individual power of soul, in its more
intimate and perfect strength. I feel this sometimes in the case of Mme.
Duse; and principally in her "Magda." This is good to see; as it is good
to see naked muscles, to watch the efforts, the triumphant grace and
strength of an athlete. For in this play of _Magda_ the Duse rivets
interests, delights not by what she does, but by what she is. The plot,
the turn of the action, is of no consequence; it might be all reversed,
and most of it omitted. We care not what a creature like this happens to
be doing or suffering; we care for her existence because it means energy
and charm. Why not deliberately aim at such effects? Now that the stage
is no longer the mere concert-room for magnificent poetry, lyric or
epic, it might become what would be consonant with our modern
psychologic tastes, the place where the genius of author or actor
allowed us to come in sight, with the fulness and completeness of the
intentional and artificial, of those finest spectacles of all, _great
temperaments_. Not merely guess at them, see them by casual glimpses, as
in real life; nor reconstruct them by their words and deeds, as in
books; but actually see them revealed, homogeneous, consecutive, in
their gestures and tones, the whole, the _very being_, of which words
and acts are but the partial manifestation. Methinks that in this way
the play might add enormously to the suggestiveness, the delight and
dignity of life; play-acting might become a substantive art, not a mere
spoiling of the work of poetry. Methinks that if this happened, or
happened often, my friend and I, who also hates the play.... But it
seems probable, on careful consideration, that my friend and I are
conspicuously devoid of the dramatic faculty; which being the case we
had better not discuss plays and play-going at all.
READING BOOKS
The chief point to be made in this matter is: that books, to fulfil
their purpose, do not always require to be read. A book, for instance,
which is a present, or an "hommage de l'auteur," has already served its
purpose, like a visiting-card or a luggage label, at best like a
ceremonial bouquet; and it is absurd to try and make it serve twice
over, by reading it. The same applies, of course, to books lent without
being asked for, and, in a still higher degree, to a book which has been
discussed in society, and thus furnished out a due amount of
conversation; to read such a book is an act of pedantry, showing
slavishness to the names of things, and lack of insight into their real
nature, which is revealed by the function they have been able to
perform. Fancy, if public characters had to learn to snuff--a practice
happily abandoned--because they occasionally received gifts of enamelled
snuffboxes from foreign potentates!
But there are subtler sides to this subject, and it is of these I fain
would speak. We are apt to blunt our literary sense by reading far too
much, and to lessen our capacity for getting the great delights from
books by making reading into a routine and a drudgery. Of course I know
that reading books has its utilitarian side, and that we have to
consider printed matter (let me never call it literature!) as the raw
material whence we extract some of the information necessary to life.
But long familiarity with an illiterate peasantry like the Italian one,
inclines me to think that we grossly exaggerate the need of such
book-grown knowledge. Except as regards scientific facts and the various
practices--as medicine, engineering, and the like, founded on them--such
knowledge is really very little connected with life, either practical or
spiritual, and it is possible to act, to feel, and even to think and to
express one's self with propriety and grace, while having simply no
literature at all behind one. That this is really no paradox is proved
by pointing to the Greeks, who, even in the time of Plato--let alone the
time, whenever that was, of Homer--had not much more knowledge of books
than my Italian servant, who knows a few scraps of Tasso, possesses a
"Book of Dreams; or Key to the Lottery," and uses the literature I have
foolishly bestowed upon him as blotters in which to keep loose bills,
and wherein occasionally to do addition sums. So that the fact seems to
be that reading books is useful chiefly to enable us to wish to read
more books!
How many times does one not feel checked, when on the point of lending a
book to what we call uneducated persons, by wondering what earthly
texture of misapprehension and blanks they will weave out of its
allusions and suggestions? And the same is the case of children. What
fitter reading for a tall Greek goddess of ten than the tale of Cupid
and Psyche, the most perfect of fairy stories with us; wicked sisters,
subterranean adventures, ants helping to sort seeds, and terrible
awaking drops of hot oil spilt over the bridegroom? But when I read to
her this afternoon, shall I not see quite plainly over the edge of the
book, that all the things which make it just what it is to me--the
indescribable quality of the South, of antiquity and paganism--are
utterly missed out; and that, to this divine young nymph, "Cupid and
Psyche" is distinguishable from, say, "Beauty and the Beast" only by the
unnecessary addition of a lot of heathenish names and the words which
she does not even want to understand? Hence literature, alas! is, so to
speak, for the literate; and one has to have read a great, great deal in
order to taste the special exquisiteness of books, their marvellous
essence of long-stored up, oddly mixed, subtly selected and hundredfold
distilled suggestion.
But once this state of things reached, there is no need to read much;
and every reason for not _keeping up_, as vain and foolish persons
boast, "with literature." Since, the time has come, after planting and
grafting and dragging watering-pots, for flowering and fruition; for
books to do their best, to exert their full magic. This is the time when
a verse, imperfectly remembered, will haunt the memory; and one takes
down the book, reads it and what follows, judiciously breaking off,
one's mind full of the flavour and scent. Or, again, talking with a
friend, a certain passage of prose--the account of the Lambs going to
the play when young, or the beginning of "Urn Burial," or a chapter
(with due improvised skippings) of "Candide"--comes up in conversation;
and one reads it rejoicing with one's friends, feeling the special
rapture of united comprehension, of mind touching mind, like the little
thrill of voice touching voice on the resolving sevenths of the old
duets in thirds. Or even when, remembering some graver page--say the
dedication of "Faust" to Goethe's dead contemporaries--one fetches the
book and reaches it silently to the other one, not daring to read it out
loud.... It is when these things happen that one is really getting the
good of books; and that one feels that there really is something
astonishing and mysterious in words taken out of the dictionary and
arranged with commas and semicolons and full stops between them.
The greatest pleasures of reading consist in re-reading. Sometimes
almost in not reading at all, but just thinking or feeling what there
is inside the book, or what has come out of it, long ago, and passed
into one's mind or heart, as the case may be. I wish to record in this
reference a happy week once passed, at vintage time, in the Lower
Apennines, with a beautiful copy of "Hippolytus," bound in white, which
had been given me, regardless of my ignorance of Greek, by my dear
Lombard friend who resembles a faun. I carried it about in my pocket;
sometimes, at rare intervals, spelling out some word in _mai_ or in
_totos_, and casting a glance on the interleaved crib; but more often
letting the volume repose by me on the grass and crushed mint of the
cool yard under the fig tree, while the last belated cicala sawed, and
the wild bees hummed in the ivy flower of the old villa wall. For once
you know the spirit of a book, there is a process (known to Petrarch
with reference to Homer, whom he was unable to understand) of taking in
its charm by merely turning over the pages, or even, as I say, in
carrying it about. The literary essence, which is uncommonly subtle, has
various modes of acting on us; and this particular manner of absorbing a
book's spirit stands to the material operation called _reading_, much in
the same way that _smell_, the act of breathing invisible volatile
particles, stands to the more obvious wholesale process of _taste_.