friends will say (or think), What _can_ you have in common with
So-and-so? What _can_ you find to talk about? Talk about? Why, nothing;
the enigmatic person remains with us, as with all the rest of the world,
silent, inarticulate; incapable, sometimes, of any inner making of
formulæ. But we know that our companion is seeing, feeling, the same
lines of the hills and washes of their colours, the same scudding or
feathering out of clouds; is _living_, in the completest sense, in that
particular scene and hour; and knowing this, it matters nothing how long
we trudge along the road or saunter across the grass without uttering.
The road of life, too, or the paths and thickets of speculation.
And speaking of walks, I know no greater torment, among those minor ones
which are the worst, than the intelligent conversation--full of
suggestion and fine analysis, perhaps, and descriptions of _other_
places--which reveals to us that the kindly speaker is indeed occupying
the same geographical space or sitting behind the same horse as we are,
but that his soul is miles and miles away. And the worst of it is that
such false companionship can distract us from any real company with the
moment and the place. We have to answer out of civility; then to think,
to get interested, and then ... well, then it is all over. "We had such
a delightful walk or drive, So-and-so and I," says our friend
on returning home, "and I am so glad to find that we have such a lot of
interests in common." Alas! alas!... Hazlitt was thinking of such
experiences, knowing perhaps the stealthiness and duplicity which the
fear of them develops in the honest but polite, when he recommended that
one should take one's walks alone.
But there is something more perfect even than one's own company: the
companion met once, at most twice, in a lifetime (for he is by no means
necessarily your dearest and nearest, nor the person who understands you
best). He or she whose words are always about the place and moment, or
seem to suit it; whose remarks, like certain music, feel restful,
spacious, cool, airy--like silence. And here I have got back to the
praise of such persons as talk little, or (what is even better) _seem_
to talk little.
There is a deal of truth, and, as befits the subject, rather implied
than actually expressed, in Maeterlinck's essay on Silence. His fine
temper, veined and shot with colour, rich in harmonics like a well-toned
voice, enables him, even like the mystics whom he has edited, to guess
at those diffuse and mellow states of soul which often defy words. He
knows from experience how little we can really live, although we needs
must speak, in definite formulæ, logical frameworks of verb and noun,
subject and predicate. Let alone the fact that all consummate feeling
(like the moment to which Faust cried _Stay_) abolishes the sense of
sequence--revolves, if I may say so, on its own axis, a _now,
forever_; baffling thereby all speech. And M. Maeterlinck perceives,
therefore, that real communion between fellow-creatures is interchange
of temperament, of rhythm of life; not exchange of remarks, views, and
opinions, of which ninety-nine in a hundred are merely current coin. To
what he has said I should like to add that if we are often silent with
those whom we love best, it is because we are sensitive to their whole
personality, face, gesture, texture of soul and body; that we are living
with them not only in the present, but enriched, modified by all they
have said before, by everything remaining in our memory as theirs. To
talk would never express a state of feeling so rich and living; and it
can serve, at most, only to give the heightening certainty of presence,
like a handclasp or asking, "Are you there?" and getting the answer,
"Yes; I am here, and so are you"--facts of no high logical importance!
As regards silent people, this characteristic may, of course, be mere
result of sloth and shyness, or lack of habit of the world, and they may
be gabbling volubly in their hearts. Such as these are no kind of
blessing, save perhaps negatively. Still less to be commended are those
others, cutting a better figure (or thinking so), who measure their
words from a dread of "giving themselves away"--of "making themselves
cheap," or otherwise (always thinking in terms of money, lawsuits, and
general overreaching) getting the worst of a bargain. Indeed, it is a
sign how little we are truly civilized, that such silence or laconicism
as this, can be met constantly outside the class (invariably cunning) of
peasants; indeed, among men exercising what we are pleased to call
_liberal professions_.
The persons in whom silence is a mark of natural fine breeding are those
who, being able to taste the real essence of things, are apt, perhaps
wrongly, to despise the unessential. They are disdainful of all the old
things inevitably repeated in saying half a new one. They cannot do with
the lumber, wastepaper, shavings, sawdust, rubbish necessary for packing
and conveying objects of value; now most of talk, and much of life, is
exactly of that indispensable useful uselessness. They are silent for
the same reason that they are frequently inactive, recognizing that
words and actions are so often mere litter and encumbrance. One feels
frozen occasionally by their unspoken criticism; one's small exuberances
checked by lack of sympathy and indulgence; one would like, sometimes,
to pick a quarrel with them, to offer a penny for their thoughts, to
force them to be as unselective and vulgar as one's self. But one
desists, feeling instinctively the refreshment (as of some solitary
treeless down or rocky stream) and purification of their fine
abstention in this world where industry means cinder-heaps, and
statesmanship, philosophy, art, philanthropy, mean "secondary products"
of analogous kind.
Before concluding this over-garrulous tribute to silence, I would fain
point out the contrast, ironical enough, between the pleasant sense of
comradeship with some of those who "never utter," and the loneliness of
spirit in which we steam and post and cab through every possible realm
of fact and theory with certain other people. I am not alluding to the
making hay of politics, exhibitions, theatres, current literature, etc.,
which is so much the least interesting form of gossip. What I mean are
those ample, apparently open talks between people who have found each
other out; who know the cardboard and lath and plaster of the
architectural arrangements or suspect the water-supply and drainage
behind; talks where one knows that the other is shirking some practical
conclusion, divagating into the abstract, and has to pick his way among
hidden interests and vanities, or avert his eyes from moral vistas which
he knows of.... "So-and-so is such a delightful talker--so witty and so
wonderfully unprejudiced; I cannot understand why you don't cultivate
him or her." Cultivate him or her! Cultivate garlic; those elegant white
starry flowers you wonder at my weeding out of the beds.
Compare with this the blessedness of knowing that the contents of the
other person's mind are _nice_, pure of all worldliness, pretence, and
meanness; that the creature's thoughts, if opened out to one, would
diffuse the scent of sunshine and lavender even as does clean,
well-folded linen.
Hence the charm of a whole lot of persons not conspicuous for
conversational powers: men who have lived much out-of-doors, with gun or
rod; shy country neighbours, cross old scholars, simple motherly little
housewives; and, if one get at their reality, peasants and even
servants. For we have within ourselves memories and fancies; and it
depends on our companion, on a word, a glance, a gesture, that only the
sweet and profitable ones, thoughts of kindness and dignity, should be
stirred up.
THE BLAME OF PORTRAITS
Feeling a little bit ashamed of myself, yet relieved at having done with
that particular hypocrisy, I unpinned the two facsimiles of drawings
from off my study screen and put them in a portfolio. A slight sense of
profanation ensued; not so much of infidelity towards those two dear
friends, nor certainly of irreverence towards Mr. Watts or the late Sir
Edward Burne-Jones, but referable to the insistence with which I had
clamoured for those portraits, the delight experienced at their arrival,
and the solid satisfaction anticipated from their eternal possession.
We have most of us--of the sentimental ones at least--gone through some
similar small drama, and been a little harrowed by it. But though we
feel as if there were some sort of naughtiness in us, we are quite
blameless, and on the whole rather to be pitied. We are the dupes of a
very human craving, and one which seems modest in its demands. What! a
mere square of painted canvas, a few pencil scratchings, a bare
mechanical photograph, something no rarer than a reflection in a mirror!
That is all we ask for, to still the welling-up wistfulness, the
clinging reluctance, to console for parting or the thought, almost, of
death! We do not guess that this humble desire for a likeness is one of
our most signal cravings after the impossible: an attempt to overcome
space and baffle time; to imprison and use at pleasure the most
fleeting, intangible, and uncommunicable of all mysterious essences, a
human personality.
"Often enough I think I have got the turn of her head and neck; but
not the face--never the face that speaks," complains the poor bereaved
husband in Mary Robinson's beautiful little poem. The case may not be
tragic like that one, and yet thoroughly tantalizing; we feel the
absent ones opposite to us in the room, we are in that distant room
ourselves; there is a sense of their position, of the space they
occupy, and thus we see, as through a ghost, the familiar outline,
perhaps, of a chair. Or, again, there is the well-known movement,
accompanied, perhaps, by the tone of voice, concentrated almost to the
longed-for look, and, as the figure advances ... nothing! Like
Virgil's Orpheus, our fancy embraces a shadow. "The face--never the
face that speaks!" But we _will_ have it, people exclaimed, all those
ages ago, and exclaim ever since. And thus they came by the notion of
portraits.
And when they got them they grumbled. The cavilling at every
newly-painted likeness is notorious. The sitter, indeed, is sometimes
easy enough to please, poor human creatures enjoying, as a rule, any
notice (however professional) of their existence, let alone an answer to
the attractive riddle of _what they look like_. And there are, of
course, certain superfine persons who, in the case of a famous artist,
think very like the sitter, and are satisfied so long as they get an
ornamental picture, or one well up to date. But the truly human grumble,
and are more than justified in doing so. Their cravings have been
disappointed; they had expected the impossible, and have not got it.
Since, in the very nature of things, a picture, and particularly a fine
picture, is always an imperfect likeness. For the image of the sitter on
the artist's retina is passed on its way to the canvas through a mind
chock full of other images; and is transferred--heaven knows how changed
already--by processes of line and curve, of blots of colour, and
juxtaposition of light and shade, belonging not merely to the artist
himself, but to the artist's whole school. Regarding merely the latter
question, we all know that the old Venetians painted people ample,
romantic, magnificent; and the old Tuscans painted them narrow, lucid,
and commonplace; men of velvet and silk and armour on the one hand, and
men of broadcloth and leather, on the other. The difference due to the
individual artist is even greater; and, in truth, a portrait gives the
sitter's temperament merged in the temperament of the painter.
So, as a rule, portraiture does but defeat its own end. And, stoically
speaking, does it much matter? Posterity has done just as well without
the transmission of the real Cardinal Hippolytus; and we know that
everything always comes right if only we look at it, Spinoza-like,
"under the category of the eternal." But we, meanwhile, are not
eternal, nor, alas! are our friends; and that is just one of the
things which gall us. We cannot believe--how could we?--that the
future can have its own witty men and gracious women, its own
sufficient objects of love and reverence, even as we have. We feel we
_must_ hand on our own great and beloved ones; we _must_ preserve the
evanescent personal fragrance, press the flower. And hence, again,
portraits and memoirs, Boswell's "Johnson," or Renan's "Ma Soeur
Henriette"; grotesque or lovely things, as the case may be, and always
pathetic, which tell us that men have always admired and always loved;
leaving us to explain, by substituting the image of our own idols, why
in that case more specially they did so. Poor people! We do so cling
to our particular self and self's preferences; we are so confidently
material and literal! And one dreads to think of the cruel
self-defence of posterity, when we shall try to push into its notice
with phonograph and cinematograph.
Let us, in the presence of such hideous machinery, cease to be literal
in matters of sentiment, even at the price of a little sadness and
cynicism in recognizing the unreality of everything save our own moods
and fancies. Perhaps I feel more strongly on this subject because I
happen to have seen with my own eyes the _reductio ad absurdum_--to
absurdity how lamentable and dreadful!--of this same human craving for
literal preservation of that which should not, cannot, be preserved. It
was in the lumber-room of an Italian palace; a life-size doll, with wig
of real--perhaps personally real--hair, and dressed from head to foot in
the garments of the real poor lady, dead some seventy years ago. I wrote
a little tale about it; but the main facts were true, and far surpassed
the power of invention. In this case the husband, who had ordered this
simulacrum for his solace, taking his daily dose of sentiment in its
presence, proceeded, after an interval, to woo and marry his own
laundress; and I think, on the whole, this was the least harrowing
possible solution. Fancy if he had not found that form of consolation,
but had continued trying to be faithful to that dreadful material
presence, more rigid, lifeless, meaningless, with every day and every
year of familiarity!
In a small way, we all of us commit that man's mistake of thinking that
the life of our dear ones is in an image, instead of in the heartbeats
which the image--like a name, a place, any associated thing--can
produce in ourselves. And only changing things can answer to our
changing self; only living creatures live with us. Once learned by
heart, the portrait, be it never so speaking, ceases to speak, or we to
listen to its selfsame message. What was once company to us, because it
awakened a flickering feeling of wished-for presence, becomes, after a
time, mere canvas or paper; disintegrates into mere colours or mere
black and white. Even the faithfullest among us are utterly faithless to
the best-beloved portraits. We have them on our walls or on our
writing-tables, and pack and unpack some of them for every journey. But
do we look at them? or, looking, do we see them, feel them?
They are not, however, useless; very far from it. You might as well
complain of the uselessness of the fire which is burned out, or the
extinguished lamp. They have, though for a brief time, pleased, perhaps
even consoled, us--warmed our heart with the sense of a loving nearness,
shed a light on the visions in our mind. Hence we should cherish them as
useful delusions, or rather realities, so long as they awaken a reality
of feeling. And 'tis a decent instinct of gratitude, not mere
inertness, which causes us to keep them, honoured pensioners of our
affections, in honourable places.
Only one thing we should guard against, and act firmly about, despite
all sentimental scruples. During the _period of activity_ of a
portrait--I mean while we still, more or less, look at it--we must
beware lest it take, in our memory, the place of the original. Those
unchanging features have the insistence of their definiteness and
permanence, and may insidiously extrude, exclude, the fleeting,
vacillating outlines of the remembered reality. And those alone concern
our heart, and have a right to occupy our fancy. One feels aghast
sometimes, on meeting some dear friend after an interval of absence, to
find that those real features, that real expression, are not the
familiar ones. It is the portrait, the envious counterfeit presentment,
which (knowing its poor brief reign) has played us and our friend that
mean trick. When this happens we must be merciless, like the fairy-story
prince when the wicked creatures in the wood spoke to him in the voice
of his mother; piety towards the original arms us with ruthlessness
towards the portrait. It was for this same reason that, as I have said,
I unpinned from my screen those two facsimiles of drawings, feeling
rather a brute while I was doing so.
SERE AND YELLOW
INTERLUDE
"Alors que je me croyais aux derniers jours de l'automne, dans un jardin
dépouillé." The words are Madame de Hauterive's, one of the most
charming among eighteenth-century letter-writers; but one of whom, for
all the indiscretion of that age, we know little or nothing: a delicate,
austere outline merely, a reserved and sensitive ghost shrinking into
the dimness. She wrote those words when already an old woman, and long
after death had taken her father and her daughter and most of her
nearest and dearest, to the young Abbé de Carladès, who proved himself
(one hopes) not utterly unworthy of that "unexpected late flowering of
the soul." The phrase is eighteenth century, and it may be the feeling
itself is of as bygone a fashion. Or does this seem the case because
such delicate souls can become known to us only when they and their
loves and friendships have ceased to be more than a handful of faded
paper, fingered very piously, for heaven's sake?
However this may be, that phrase of Madame de Hauterive's contains a
truth which is undying, and which, though unobtrusive, can be observed
by those who have a discreet eye for the soul's affairs. Nay, one might
say that the knowledge of how many times life can begin afresh, the
knowledge of the new modes of happiness which may succeed each other,
even when the leaves float down yellow in the still air, and the dews on
the renovated grass are white like frost, is one of the blessed secrets
into which the passing seasons initiate those who have honourably
cultivated the garden of life, and life's wide common acres.
Indeed, such faith in the heart's renewed fruitfulness is itself among
the autumn blossomings, the hidden compensations. Young folk, and those
who never outgrow youth's headlong and blind self-seeking, cannot
conceive such truths. For youth has no experience of change; and what it
calls the Future is but the present longing or present dread projected
forward. Hence youth lacks the resignation which comes of knowing that
our aims, our loves, ourselves, will alter; and that we shall not
eternally regret what we could not eternally covet. Hence, also, the
fine despair and frequent suicide of youthful heroes and heroines. Poor
young Werther, in his sky-blue _Frack_ and striped yellow waistcoat,
cannot believe that the time will come when he will tune the spinet of
some other Charlotte--nay, follow in the footsteps of the enlightened
minister, his patron; bury himself in protocols and look forward to a
diplomatic game of whist rather than to a country dance with meeting
hands and eyes. And it is mere waste of breath to sermon him on the
subject: lend him the pistols, and hope that (as in the humaner version
of the opera) he will not use them. As to certain other forestallings of
experience, they would be positively indecent and barbarous! You would
die of shame if the young widow happened to overhear you saying (what is
heaven's truth, and a most consoling one) that her baby, which now
represents only so much time and love she might have given, all, all, to
_him_ alone, is the only good thing which that worthless dead husband
could ever have furnished her. And as to hinting in her presence that
she will some day be much, much happier with dear Quixotic Dobbin than
with that coxcomb of an Osborne, why the bare thought of such indecorum
makes us feel like sinking into the ground! We must be sympathizing, and
a little short of truthful, with poor distressed young people; above
all, never seek to lighten their disappointments with visions of brisk
octogenarians, one foot in the grave, enjoying a rubber!
And this, no doubt, is a providential arrangement--I mean this youthful
incapacity of grasping the consolations brought by Time. For, after all,
life, being there, has to be lived; and maybe life would be lived in a
half-hearted fashion did we suspect its many compensations, including
what may, methinks, be the last, most solemn one. Should we jump hastily
out of bed and bestir ourselves with the zest of the new day, if we
thoroughly realized what is, however, matter of common experience, to
wit: that at the day's close, sleep, rest without dreams or thought of
awaking, may be as welcome as all this pleasant bustle of the morning?
The knowledge of these mysteries, initiation into which comes late and
silently, is, as I hinted, perhaps the final compensation; allowing us
to face the order of things without superfine cavillings. But there are
earlier, less awful and secret compensations, and these it is as well to
know about, and to prepare our soul serenely to enjoy when the moment
comes.
Of this kind are, of course, those autumn flowerings of sentiment
alluded to in Madame de Hauterive's letter. They are blossomings
sometimes sweeter than those of summer, thanks to the very scorching of
summer's suns; or else touched with an austere vividness by the first
frosts, like the late china roses, which are streaked, where they open,
with a vermillion unparalleled in their earlier sisters. Compare with
this all that is implied in Swinburne's line, "the month of the long
decline of roses." Think of those roses (I have before my eyes a
Florentine terrace at the end of May) crowding each other out, blowing,
withering, and dropping; roses white, red, pale lemon, and, alas! also
brown and black with mildew, living and dying in such riotous excess
that you have neither time nor inclination to pluck one of them, and
keep it, piously in water, before you on your table.
Mind, I do not say that such profusion is not all right and necessary
in its season. The economy of Nature is often wasteful. There might be
no roses at all next year if we depended for seed and slips upon those
frost-bitten flowers with their fine austerity. And in the same way
that, despite the pathetic tenderness of long-deferred father or
motherhood, it is better for the race that infants be brought into the
world plentiful, helter-skelter, and that only the toughest stay
there; so, methinks, it may be needful that youth be full of false
starts, mistaken vocations, lapsed engagements, fanciful friendships
broken off in quarrel, glowing passions ending in ashes; nay, that
this period, fertile in good and evil, be crowned by marriages such as
are said to be made in heaven, no doubt because the great match-making
spirit of life pursues ends unguessed by human wisdom, which would
often remain in single blessedness, and found homes for sickly
infants. Wedlock, in other words, and, for the matter of that, father
and motherhood, and most of the serious business of the universe,
should not be looked upon as a compensation or consolation, but rather
as something for which poor human creatures require to be consoled and
compensated.
Having admitted which, and even suggested that marriages are fittest at
the age of Daphnis and Chloe, or even of Amelia and George Osborne, let
us, I pray you, glance with reverent eyes, and a smile not mocking but
tender, at certain other weddings which furtively cross our path.
Weddings between elderly persons, hitherto unable to make up their mind,
or having, perchance, made it up all wrong on a first occasion;
inveterate old maids and bachelors, or widowers who thought to mourn for
ever; people who have found their heart perhaps a little late in the
day; but, who knows? shrivelled as it is, perhaps, but the mellower, and
of more enduring, more essential sweetness.