wish to think well of ourselves merely because we _are_ ourselves,
undoubtedly go against it, as they do against everything in the world
worth having. In our own day certain ways of thinking, culminating in
development of the _Moi_ and production of the _Uebermensch_, and
general self-engrossment and currishness, are peculiarly hostile to
courtship. Whereas the old religious training, where it did not
degenerate into excessive asceticism, was a school of good manners
towards the universe as well as towards one's neighbours. The "Fioretti
di San Francisco" is a handbook of polite friendliness to men, women,
birds, wolves, and, what must have been most difficult, fellow-monks;
and St. Francis' Hymn to the Sun might be given as an example of the
wise man's courtship of what we stupidly call inanimates.
For courtship might be our attitude towards everything which is capable
of giving pleasure; and would not many more things give us pleasure--let
us say, the sun in the heavens, the water on the stones, even the fire
in the grate, if, instead of thinking of them as existing merely to make
our life bearable, we called them, like the saint of Assisi, My Lord the
Sun, and Sister Water, and Brother Fire, and thought of them with joy
and gratitude?
Certain it is that everything in the world repays courtship; and that,
quite outside all marrying and giving in marriage, in all our dealings
with all possible things, the cessation of courtship marks the incipient
necessity for divorce.
KNOWING ONE'S MIND
The only things which afforded me any pleasure in that great collection
of Ingres drawings, let alone in that very dull, frowsy, stale, and
unprofitable city of Montauban, whither I had travelled on purpose to
see it, were an old printed copy of "Don Juan oder der Steinerne
Gast"--in a glass case alongside of M. Ingres' century-long-uncleaned
fiddle--and a half-page of Mozart's autograph, given to M. Ingres when a
student by a Prix de Rome musician. I mentioned this fact to my friends,
in a spirit of guileless truthfulness; when, what was my surprise at the
story being received with smiling incredulity. "Your paradox," they
said, with the benevolent courtesy of their nation, for they were
French, "is delightful and most _réussi_. But, of course, we know you to
be exquisitely sensitive to genius in all its manifestations."
Now, I happened to know myself to be as insensible as a stone to genius
as manifested in the late M. Ingres. However, I despaired of persuading
them that I was speaking the truth; and, despite the knowledge of their
language with which they graciously credited me, I hunted about in vain
for the French equivalent of "I know my own mind." Whereupon, allowing
the conversation to take another turn, I fell to musing on those
untranslatable words, together with the whole episode of the Mozart
manuscript and the drawings of M. Ingres, including that rainy, chilly
day at Montauban; and also another day of travel, even wetter and
colder, which returned to my memory.
_Knowing one's own mind_ (in whatever way you might succeed in turning
that into French) is a first step to filling one's own place instead of
littering unprofitably over creation at large, and in so far also to
doing one's own work. Life, I am willing to admit, is not all private
garden, nor should we attempt to make it. 'Tis nine-tenths common acres,
which we must till in company, and with mutual sacrifice of our whims.
Nay, Life is largely public thoroughfares with a definite _rule of the
road_ and a regulated pace of traffic; streets, at all events, however
narrow, where each must shovel snow, sprinkle water, and sweep his
threshold. But respect for such common property cannot be genuine where
there is not a corresponding fidelity and fondness on the part of each
for his own little enclosure, his garden, and, by analogy, his
neighbour's garden also. There is little good to be got from your vague,
gregarious natures, liking or disliking merely because others like or
dislike. There cannot be much loving-kindness, let alone love (whether
for persons or things or ideas), in souls which always require company,
and prefer any to none at all. And as to good work, why, it means
_tête-à-tête_ with what you are doing, and is incompatible with the
spirit of picnics. I own to a growing suspicion of those often heroic
and saintly persons who allow their neighbours--husband, father, mother,
children--to saunter idly into the allotments which God has given them,
trampling heedlessly the delicate seedlings, or, like holiday trippers,
carving egoistic initials in growing trees not of their own planting.
And one of the unnoticed, because continuous, tragedies of existence is
surely such wanton or deliberate destruction of the individual
qualities of the soul, such sacrifice of the necessary breathing and
standing place which even the smallest requires; such grudging of the
needful solitude and separateness, alas! often to those that we love the
best. It seems highly probable that among all their absurd and
melancholy recollections of this wasteful and slatternly earth, the
denizens of the Kingdom of Heaven will look back with most astonishment
and grief on the fact of having lived, before regeneration, without a
room apiece.
In the Kingdom of Heaven every one will have a separate room for rest
and meditation; a cell perhaps, whitewashed, with a green shutter and a
white dimity curtain in the sunshine. And the cells will, of course, be
very much alike in all essentials, because most people agree about
having some sort of bed, table, chair, and so forth. But some glorified
souls will have the flowers (which Dante saw her plucking) of Leah; and
others the looking-glass of the contemplative Rachel; and there will be
ever so many other little differences, making it amusing and edifying to
pay a call upon one's brother or sister soul.
In such a state of spiritual community and privacy (so different from
our present hugger-mugger and five-little-bears-in-a-bed mode of
existence), my soul, for instance, if your soul should honour it with a
visit, would be able, methinks, to talk quite freely and pleasantly
about the Ingres Museum at Montauban, and the autograph of Mozart in the
glass case alongside the fiddle.... The manuscript is only a half sheet
full score, torn or cut through its height; and the voice part is broken
off with one word only--insufficient to identify it among Mozart's
Italian works, though, perhaps, most suggestive of "Don Giovanni"--the
word "Guai." The manuscript is exquisitely neat, yet has none of the
look of a copy, and we know that Mozart was never obliged to make any.
The writing is so like the man's adorable personality, the little
pattern of notes so like his music. The sight of it moved me, flooding
my mind with divine things, that Concerto for Flute and Harp, for
instance, which dear Mme. H---- had recently been playing for me. And
during that dull, rainy day of waiting for trains at Montauban, it made
me live over again another day of rainy travel, but with the
"Zauberflöte" at the end of it, about which I will also tell you, since
I am permitted to know my own mind and to speak it.
But I find I have incidentally raised the question _de gustibus_, or, as
our language puts it, the _accounting for tastes_. And I must settle and
put myself right in the matter of M. Ingres before proceeding any
further. The Latin saying, then, "De gustibus non est disputandum,"
contains an excellent piece of advice, since disputing about tastes or
anything else is but a sorry employment. But the English version is
absolutely wide of the mark, since tastes can be accounted for just as
much as climate, history, and bodily complexion. Indeed, we should know
implicitly what people like and dislike if we knew what they were and
how they had come to be so. The very diversity in taste proves its
deep-down reality: preference and antipathy being consubstantial with
the soul--nay, inherent in the very mechanism and chemistry of the body.
And for this reason tastes are at once so universal and uniform, and so
variously marked by minor differences. There are human beings all shank
and thigh and wrist, with contemplative, deep-set eyes and compressed,
silent lips; and others running to rounds and segments of circles, like
M. Ingres' drawings, their eyes a trifle prominent for the better
understanding of others, and mouth, like the typical French one, at a
forward angle, as if for ready speech. But, different as these people
are, they are alike in the main features of symmetry and balance; they
haven't two sets of lungs and a duplicate stomach, like Centaurs, whom
every one found so difficult to deal with; nor do any of them end off in
a single forked tail, twisting about on which accounts for the
proverbial untrustworthiness of mermaids. Being alike, all human
creatures require free space and breathable air; and, being unlike, some
of them hanker after the sea, and others cannot watch without longing
the imitation mountains into which clouds pile themselves on dreary flat
horizons. And similarly in the matter of art. We all delight in the
ineffable presence of transcending power; we all require to renew our
soul's strength and keenness in the union with souls stronger and keener
than ours. But the power which appeals to some of us is struggling and
brooding tragically, as in Michelangelo and Beethoven; while the power
which straightway subdues certain others is easy, temperate, and
radiant, as in Titian and Mozart. And thus it comes about that every
soul--"where a soul can be discerned"--is the citizen, conscious or not,
of a spiritual country, and obeys a hierarchy, bends before a sovereign
genius, crowned or mitred by inscrutable right divine, never to be
deposed. But there are many kingdoms and principalities, not necessarily
overlapping; and the subjects of them are by no means the same.
Take M. Ingres, for instance. He is, it seems, quite a tremendous
potentate. I recognize his legitimate sway, like that of Prester John,
or of the Great Mogul. Only I happen not to obey it, for I am a born
subject of the King of Hearts. And who should that be but
Apollo-Wolfgang-Amadeus, driving with easy wrist his teams, tandem or
abreast, of winged, effulgent melodies?
It was raining, as I told you, that morning which I spent in the Ingres
Museum at Montauban. It was raining melted snow in hurricanes off the
mountains that other day of travel, and I was on the top of a Tyrolese
diligence. The roads were heavy; and we splashed slowly along the brink
of roaring torrents and through the darkness of soaked and steaming fir
woods. At the end of an hour's journey we had already lost four. "If you
stop to dine," said successive jack-booted postilions, quickly fastening
the traces at each relay, "you will never catch the Munich train at
Garmisch. But the Herrschaften will please themselves in the matter of
eating and drinking." So the Herrschaften did not please themselves at
all, but splashed along through rain and sleet, through hospitable
villages all painted over with scrollwork about beer, and coffee, and
sugar-bakery, and all that "Restoration" which our poor drenched bodies
and souls were lacking so woefully. For we had stalls at the Court
Theatre of Munich, and it was the last, the very last, night of "The
Magic Flute"! The Brocken journey on the diligence-top came to an end;
the train at Garmisch was caught by just two seconds; we were safe at
Munich. But I was prone on a sofa, with a despairing friend making
hateful attempts to rouse me. Go to the play? Get up? Open my eyes to
the light? My fingers must have fumbled some feeble "no," beyond all
contradiction. "But your ticket--but 'The Magic Flute'--but you have
come three days' journey on purpose!" I take it my lips achieved an
inarticulate expression of abhorrence for such considerations. After
that I do not exactly know what happened: my exhausted will gave way. I
was combed and brushed, thrust into some manner of festive apparel,
pushed into a vehicle, pulled out of it, and shoved along, by the
staunch and (as it seemed) brutal arm of friendship, among crimson and
gilding and blinding lights all seen at intervals through half-closed
eyes. A little bell rang, and I felt it was my death knell. But through
the darkness of my weltering soul (for I was presumably dead and
undoubtedly damned) there marched, stood still, and curtsied
majestically towards each other, the great grave opening chords of the
overture. And when they had delivered, solemnly, their mysterious
herald's message and subsided, off started the little nimble notes of
the fugue, hastening from all sides, meeting, crossing, dispersing,
returning, telling their wonderful news of improbable adventures;
multitudinous, scurrying away in orderly haste to protect the hero and
heroine, and be joined by other notes, all full of inexhaustible
good-will; taking hands, dancing, laughing, and giving the assurance that
all is for the best in the world of enchantment, in the world of
bird-calls, and tinkling triangles and magic flutes, under the spells
of the great Sun-priest and Sun-god Mozart. I opened my eyes and had no
headache; and sat in that Court Theatre for three mortal hours, in
flourishing health and absolute happiness, and would have given my soul
for it to begin immediately all over again.
Now, not all the drawings of M. Ingres could have done that. And the
piece of torn music-paper in the glass case at Montauban had made me,
for a few faint seconds, live it through again. And I know what I don't
care for, and what I do.
AGAINST TALKING
As towards most other things of which we have but little personal
experience (foreigners, or socialists, or aristocrats, as the case may
be), there is a degree of vague ill-will towards what is called
_Thinking_. It is reputed to impede action, to make hay of instincts
and of standards, to fritter reality into doubt; and the career of
Hamlet is frequently pointed out as a proof of its unhappy effects.
But, as I hinted, one has not very often an opportunity of verifying
these drawbacks of thinking, or its advantages either. And I am
tempted to believe that much of the mischief thus laid at the door of
that poor unknown quantity _Thinking_ is really due to its ubiquitous
twin-brother _Talking_.
I call them twins on the analogy of Death and Sleep, because there is
something poetical and attractive in such references to family
relations; and also because, as many people cannot think without
talking, and talking, at all events, is the supposed indication that
thinking is within, there has arisen about these two human activities a
good deal of that confusion and amiable not-caring-which-is-which so
characteristic of our dealings with twins. But _Talking_, take my word
for it, is the true villain of the couple.
Talking, however, should never be discouraged in the young. Not talking
_with them_ (largely reiteration of the word "Why?"), but talking among
themselves. Its beneficial effects are of the sort which ought to make
us patient with the crying of infants. Talking helps growth. M. Renan,
with his saintly ironical sympathy for the young and weak, knew it when
he excused the symbolists and decadents of various kinds with that
indulgent sentence, "Ce sont des enfants qui s'amusent." It matters
little what litter they leave behind, what mud pies they make and little
daily dug-up gardens of philosophy, ethics, literature, and general
scandal; they will grow out of the need to make them--and meanwhile,
making this sort of mess will help them grow.
Besides, is it nothing that they should be amusing themselves once in
their lives (we cannot be sure of the future)? And what amusement, what
material revelry can be compared with the great carouses of words in
which the young can still indulge? We were most of us young once, odd as
it appears; and some of us can remember our youthful discussions, our
salad-day talks, prolonged to hours, trespassing on to subjects, which
added such a fine spice of the forbidden and therefore the free! The joy
of asking reasons where you have hitherto answered school queries; of
extemporizing replies, magnificent, irresponsible, instead of
laboriously remembering mere solutions; of describing, analyzing, and
generally laying bold mental eyes, irreverent intellectual hands, on
personalities whose real presence would merely make you stumble over a
chair or drop a tea-cup! For talking is the great equalizer of
positions, turning the humble, the painfully immature, into judges with
rope and torch; and in a kindlier way allowing the totally obscure to
share the life of kings, and queens, and generals, and opera-singers;
which is the reason that items of Court news or of "dramatic gossip"
are so frequently exchanged in omnibuses and at small, decent
dinner-tables.
Moreover, talking has for the young the joys of personal exuberance; it
is all honeycombed, or rather, filled (like champagne) with the generous
gaseousness of self-analysis, self-accusation, self-pity,
self-righteousness, and autobiography. The poor mortal, in that delusive
sense of sympathy and perfect understanding which comes of perfect
indifference to one's neighbour's presence, has quicker pulses, higher
temperature, more vigorous movements than are compatible with the sober
sense of human unimportance. In conversation, clever young people--vain,
kindly, selfish, ridiculous, happy young people--actually take body and
weight, expand. And are you quite sure, my own dear, mature, efficient,
and thoroughly productive friends and contemporaries, that it is not
this expansion of youthful rubbish which makes the true movement of the
centuries?... Poor stuff enough, very likely, they talked, those
long-haired, loose-collared Romanticists of the Hôtel Pimodan and the
literary cafés recorded by Balzac, _Jeunes Frances_, or whatever their
names; and priggery, as well as blood-and-thunder, those lads round the
table d'hôte at Strasburg, where Jung-Stilling noticed the entrance of a
certain tall, Apolline young man answering to the name of Goethe.
Rubbish, of course; but rubbish necessary, yes, every empty bubble and
scum and mess thereof, for the making of a great literary period--nay,
of a great man of letters. And when, nine thousand nine hundred and
ninety-nine times, there results neither one nor the other, why, there
has been the talking itself--exciting and rapturous beyond everything
that literary periods and literary personalities can ever match.
'Tis with the talking of the mature and the responsible that I would
pick a quarrel. Particularly if they are well read, unprejudiced, subtle
of thought, and precise of language; and most particularly if they are
scrupulously just and full of human charity. For when two or three
persons of this sort meet together in converse, nothing escapes
destruction. The character of third persons crumbles under that delicate
and patient fingering: analysis, synthesis, rehabilitation, tender
appreciation, enthusiastic definition, leave behind only a horrid
quivering little heap of vain virtues and atrophied bad instincts. In
such conversations I have heard loyal and loving friends make
admissions and suggestions which would hang you in a court of justice; I
can bear witness to having in all loyalty and loving-kindness done so
myself a thousand times. Nor is this even the worst. For your living
human being has luckily a wonderful knack of reasserting his reality;
and the hero or victim of such conversational manipulation will take
your breath away by suddenly entering the room or entering into your
consciousness as hale and whole as old Æson stepping out of Medea's
cooking-pot. But opinions, impressions, principles, standards, possess,
alas! no such recuperative virtue; or, rather, they cannot interrupt the
discussion of themselves by putting in an appearance.
Now, silent thought, whenever it destroys, destroys only to reconstruct
the universe or the atom in the thinker's image; and new realities arise
whenever a real individual creature reveals his needs and ways of
feeling. But in what is called _a good serious talk_ there is no such
creating anew; nobody imposes his image, no whole human creature reveals
a human organism: there is merely a jumble of superposed pictures which
will not become a composite photograph; and the inherent optimism or
pessimism, scepticism or dogmatism, of each interlocutor merely
reiterates _No_ to the ways of seeing and feeling of the others. Every
word, perpetually defined and redefined at random, is used by each
speaker in a different sense and with quite different associations. The
subject under discussion is in no one's keeping: it is banged from side
to side, adjusted to the right and adjusted to the left, a fine screw
put on it every now and then to send it sheer into the great void and
chaos! And almost the saddest part of the business is that the
defacements and tramplings which the poor subject (who knows, perhaps
very sacred to some one of us?) is made to suffer, come not from our
opponent's brutal thrusting forward of _his_ meaning, but rather from
our own desperate methods to hold tight, to place _our_ meaning in
safety, somewhere where, even if not recognized, it will at least not be
mauled.... Such are the scuffles and scrimmages of the most temperate,
intellectual conversations, leaving behind them for the moment not a
twig, not a blade of the decent vegetation of the human soul. Cannot we
get some great beneficent mechanic to invent some spiritual cement,
some asphalt and gravel of nothingness, some thoroughly pneumatic
intellectual balls, whereon, and also wherewith, we privileged creatures
may harmlessly expend our waste dialectic energies?
Then, would you never talk? Or would you confine talking to the weather
or the contents of the public prints? Would you have our ideas get hard
and sterile for want of being moved? Do you advise that, like some
tactful persons we--you--yes, _you_--all know and detest--we
systematically let every subject drop as soon as raised?
There! the talking has begun. They are at it, contradicting what they
agree with, and asking definitions of what they perfectly understand. Of
course not! And here I am, unable to resist, rushing into the argument,
excited--who can tell?--perhaps delighted. And by the time we take up
our bedroom candles, and wish each other good night (with additional
definitions over the banisters) every scrap of sensible meaning I ever
had will be turned to nonsense; and I shall feel, next morning, oh, how
miserably humiliated and depressed!...
"Well--and to return to what we were saying last night...."
IN PRAISE OF SILENCE
One of the truths which come (if any do) with middle age, is the gradual
recognition that in one's friendly intercourse the essential--the one
thing needful--is not what people say, but what they think and feel.
Words are not necessarily companionable, far from it; but moods truly
meet, to part in violent dissonance; or to move parallel in happy
harmonic intervals; or, more poignant and more satisfying still, to pass
gradually along some great succession of alien chords--common
contemplation, say, of a world grievous or pleasant to both--on towards
the peace, the consummation, of a great major close. Once we have
sufficient indication that another person cares for the same kind of
things that we do--or, as important quite, cares in the same degree or
in the same way--all further explanation becomes superfluous: detail,
delightful occasionally to quicken and bring home the sense of
companionship, but by no means needed.