_marriages of true minds_. Genuine ones are exceedingly rare during
youth; and the impediments, despite the opinion of Shakespeare, are of
the nature of nullity, ending most often in unseemly divorce between
Hermia and Helena, or the Kings of Sicilia and Bohemia, one of whom, if
you remember, tried to poison the other on very small provocation. The
last-named is an instructive example of the hollowness of nursery or
playground friendship, or rather of what passes for such. Genuine
friendship is an addition to our real self, a revelation of new
possibilities; and young people, busily absorbing the traditions of the
past and the fashions of the day, have very rarely got a real self to
reveal or to bestow. So that the feeling we experience in later life
towards our playmates is, in fact, rather a wistful pleasure in the
thought of our own past than any real satisfaction in their present
selves.
Be this as it may, there is among the compensations of life, a kind of
friendship which, by its very nature, requires that one of the friends
have passed the _middle of the way_. I am not referring to the joys of
grandfather and grandmotherhood, and all that "_art d'être grandpère_"
which have been written and sung until one turns a trifle sceptical
about them. What I allude to has, on the contrary, escaped (almost
entirely, I think) the desecrating pen of the analytical or moralizing
novelist, and remains one of the half-veiled mysteries of human good
fortune, before which the observer passes quickly in shy admiration.
The case is this: one of the parents has been unwilling, or
disappointed; marriage has meant emptiness, or worse; and a nursery full
of children has been, very likely, a mere occasion for ill-will and
painful struggle. The poor soul has been, perhaps for years, fretted and
wearied; or else woefully lonely, cabined, confined, and cramped almost
to numbness. When, behold! by the marvellous miracle of man or
womanhood--a dull, tiresome child is suddenly transformed, takes on
shapeliness and stature, opens the bolted doors of life, leads the
father or mother into valleys of ease and on to hopeful hilltops; slays
dragons, chains ogres, and smiles with the eyes and lips which have been
vaguely dreamed of, longed for, who knows how long!
So children do occasionally constitute compensations and blessings not
merely in disguise. And this particularly where they have not been
looked upon as investments for future happiness or arrangements for
paying off parental debts to society, to glory, or the Supreme Being.
For surely, if children are ever to renovate the flagging life of
parents, it can only be by their leaving off their childhood and coming
back as equals, brothers, sisters, sometimes as tenderest and most
admiring of chivalrous lovers.
'Tis, in fact, unexpected new life adding itself to ours which
constitutes the supreme compensation in middle age; and our heart puts
forth fresh blossoms of happiness (of genius sometimes, as in the case
of Goethe) because younger shoots are rejoicing in the seasonable
sunshine or dews. The interests and beliefs of the younger generation
prevent our own from dying; nay, the friendships and loves of our
children, whether according to the flesh or the spirit, may become our
own. Daughters-in-law are not invariably made to dine off the poisoned
half of a partridge, as in works of history. Some stepfathers and
stepmothers feel towards those alien youths and maidens only as that
dear Valentine Visconti did towards the little Dunois, whom she took in
her arms, say the chronicles, and, with many kisses on eyes and cheeks,
exclaimed, "Surely thou wast stolen from me!" And, in another
relationship which is spoken ill of by those unworthy of it, we can
sometimes watch a thing which is among reality's best poetry: where a
mother, wisely and dutifully stepping aside from her married daughter's
path, has been snatched back, borne in triumph, not by one loving pair
of arms, but two; and where the happy young wife has smiled at
recognizing that in her husband's love for her there was mixed up a
head-over-ears devotion for her mother.
Some folks have no sons or daughters, or husbands or wives, and hence no
stepchildren or children-in-law. Yet even for them autumn may blossom.
There are the children of friends, recalling their youth or compensating
for their youth's failure; and for some there are the younger workers in
the same field, giving us interest in books or pictures, or journeys or
campaigns, when our own days for work and struggle are over; even as we,
perhaps, have kept open the vistas of life, given Pisgah-sights to those
beloved and venerated ones whose sympathy we value and understand better
perhaps now than all those many, many years ago. Yes! even in our
youthful egoism we gave them something, those dear long dead friends;
and this knowledge is itself a tiny autumn bud in our soul.
There are humbler compensations also. And among these the kind which,
years after writing the immortal idyll of "Dr. Antonio," my dear
venerated friend Ruffini set forth in a tiny story, perhaps partly his
own, about the modest but very real happiness which the mere
relationship of master and servant can bring into a solitary life; the
story taking its name, by a coincidence by no means indifferent to me,
from a faithful and pleasant person called Carlino.
But an end to digressions, for it is time to cease writing,
particularly of such intangible and shy matters. So, to return to
Madame de Hauterive's sentence, which was our starting-point in this
inventory of compensations and consolations. Paradoxical though it
seem, the understanding and union brought by a glance, by words said
in a given way, by any of the trifles bearing mysterious, unreasoned
significance for the experienced soul--or, briefly, "_friendship at
first sight_"--is as natural in the sere and yellow, as love at first
sight in the salad, days. Only, to be sure, less manifest to
indifferent bystanders, since one of the consoling habits which life
brings with it is a respect for life's thoroughfares, a reluctance to
stop the way, collect a crowd with our private interests, and a pious
reserve about such good fortune as is good precisely because it suits
us, not other people.
Reserve of this sort, as I began with saying, is one of the charms of
dear Madame de Hauterive; and the more so that eighteenth-century
folk, particularly French, were not much given to it! And thus it
happens that we know little or nothing about that friendship which
consoled her later life; and must look round us in our own, if we
would understand what were those new flowerings which had arisen,
when, as she says, she had thought herself already in the last days of
autumn and in a leafless garden.
A STAGE JEWEL
"It doesn't seem to be precisely what is meant by _old paste_," she
answered, repeating the expression I had just made use of, while she
handed me the diamond hoop across the table. "It's too like real stones,
you know. I think it must be a stage jewel."
As I fastened the brooch again in my dress, I was aware of a sudden
little change in my feelings. I was no longer pleased. Not that I had
hoped my diamonds might prove real; you cannot buy real diamonds, even
in imagination, for four francs, which was the precise sum I had
expended on these, and there were seven of them, all uncommonly large.
Nor can I say that the words "old paste" had possessed, on my lips, any
plain or positive meaning. But _stage jewel_, somehow ... My moral
temperature had altered: I was dreadfully conscious that I was no longer
pleased. Now, I had been, and to an absurd degree.
Perhaps because it was Christmas Eve, when I suddenly found myself
inside that curiosity shop, pricing the diamonds, and not without an
emotion of guilty extravagance, and of the difficulty of not buying if
the price proved too high.... As is always the case with me at that
season, my soul was irradiated with a vague sense of festivity, perhaps
with the lights of rows of long-extinguished Christmas trees in the fog
of many years, like the lights of the shops caught up and diffused in
the moist twilight. I had felt an inner call for a Christmas present;
and, so far, nobody had given me one. So I had paid the money and driven
back into the dark, soughing country with the diamond hoop loose in my
pocket. I had felt so very pleased.... And now those two cursed words
"stage jewel" had come and spoilt it all.
For the first time I felt it was very, very hard that my box should have
been broken open last autumn and all my valuables, my Real (the word
became colossal), not _stage_, jewels stolen. It was brought home to me
for the first time that the man who did it must have been very, very
wicked; and that codes of law, police and even prisons could afford
satisfaction to my feelings. Since, oddly enough, I had really not
minded much at the time, nor let my pleasure in that wonderful old
castle, where I had just arrived with the violated trunk, be in the
least diminished by the circumstance. Indeed, such is the subtle,
sophistic power of self-conceit, that the pleasure of finding, or
thinking I found, that I did not mind the loss of those things had
really, I believe, prevented me minding it. Though, of course, every now
and then I had wished I might see again the little old-fashioned
fleur-de-lysed star which had been my mother's (my heart smote me for
not feeling sufficiently how much _she_ would have suffered at my losing
it). And I remembered how much I had liked to play with those opals of
the Queen of Hearts, which seemed the essence of pale-blue winter days
with a little red flame of sunset in the midst; or, rather, like tiny
lunar worlds, mysterious shining lakes and burning volcanoes in their
heart. Of course, I had not been indifferent: that would have taken away
all charm from the serenity with which I had enjoyed my loss. But I had
been serene, delightfully serene. And now!...
There was something vaguely vulgar, odious, unpardonable about false
stones. I had always maintained there was not, but the stage jewel
made me feel it. Mankind has sound instincts, rooting in untold depths
of fitness; and superfine persons, setting themselves against them,
reveal their superficiality, their lack of normal intuition and sound
judgment, while fancying themselves superior. And mankind (save among
barbarous Byzantine and Lombard kings, who encrusted their iron crowns
impartially with balas rubies, antique cameos, and bottle
glass)--mankind has always shown an instinct against sham jewels and
their wearers. It is an unreasoned manifestation of the belief in
truth as the supreme necessity for individuals and races, without
which, as we know, there would be an end of commerce, the
administration of justice, government, even family life (for birds,
who have no such sense, are proverbially ignorant of their father),
and everything which we call civilization. Real precious stones were
perhaps created by Nature, and sham stones allowed to be created by
man, as one of those moral symbols in which the universe abounds: a
mysterious object-lesson of the difference between truth and
falsehood.
Real diamonds and rubies, I believe, require quite a different degree
of heat to melt them than mere glass or paste; and you can amuse
yourself, if you like, by throwing them in the fire. In the Middle
Ages rubies, but only real ones, were sovereign remedies for various
diseases, among others the one which carried off Lorenzo the
Magnificent; and in the seventeenth century it was currently reported
that the minions of the Duke of Orleans had required pounded diamonds
to poison poor Madame Henriette in that glass of chicory water. And as
to pearls, real ones go yellow if unworn for a few months, and have to
be sunk fathoms deep in the sea, in safes with chains and anchors, and
detectives sitting day and night upon the beach, and sentries in
sentry-boxes; none of which occurs with imitations. Likewise you stamp
on a real pearl, while you must be quite careful not to crush a sham
one. All these are obvious differences revealing the nobility of the
real thing, though not necessarily adding to its charm. But, then,
there is the undoubted greater beauty, the wonderful _je ne sais
quoi_, the depth of colour, purity of substance, effulgence of fire,
of real gems, which we all recognize, although it is usual to have
them tested by an expert before buying. And, when all is said and
done, there is the difference in intrinsic value. And you need not
imagine that value is a figment. Political economy affords us two
different standards of value, the Marxian and the Orthodox. So you
cannot escape from believing in it. A thing is valuable either (_a_)
according to the amount of labour it embodies, or (_b_) according to
the amount of goods or money you can obtain in exchange for it. Now,
only let your mind dwell upon the value (_a_) embodied in a pearl or
diamond. The pearl fisher, who doubtless frequently gets drowned; let
alone the oyster, which has to have a horrid mortal illness, neither
of which happens to the mean-spirited artificer of Roman pearls; or
the diamond seeker, seeking through deserts for months; the fine
diamond merchant, dying in caravans, of the past; and, finally, the
diamond-cutter, grinding that adamant for weeks far, far more
indefatigably than to make the optic lenses which reveal hidden
planets and galaxies. All that labour, danger, that weary, weary time
embodied in a thing so tiny that, like Queen Mab, it can sit on an
alderman's forefinger! What could be more deeply satisfactory to think
upon? And as to value (_b_) (the value in _Exchange_ of Mill, Fawcett,
Marshall, Say, Bastiat, Gide), just think what you could buy by
selling a largish diamond, supposing you had one! And what unlikely
prices (fabulous, even monstrous) are said to have been given, before
and after dubious Madame de la Motte priced that great typical one,
for diamond necklaces by queens and heroines of every degree!
Precious stones, therefore, are heaven-ordained symbols of what mankind
values most highly--power over other folks' labour, time, life,
happiness, and honour. And that, no doubt, is the reason that when the
irreproachable turn-out and perfect manners of pickpockets allow them to
mix freely in our select little gatherings, it is legitimate for a lady
to deck herself with artificial pearls and diamonds only to the exact
extent that she has real ones safely deposited at the bank. Let her look
younger and sound honester than perhaps answers to the precise reality;
there is no deception in all that. But think of the dishonourableness
of misleading other folk about one's income....
My soul was chastened by the seriousness of these reflections and by the
recognition of the moral difference between real stones and sham ones,
and I was in a very bad humour. Suddenly there came faint sounds of
guitars and a mandolin, and I remembered that the servants were giving a
ball at the other end of the house, and that it was Christmas Eve. I
rose from my table and opened the window, letting in the music with the
pure icy air. The night had become quite clear; and in its wintry blue
the big stars sparkled in a cluster between the branches of my pine
tree. They made me think of the circlet which Tintoret's Venus swoops
down with over the head of the ruddy Bacchus and rose-white Ariadne.
Those, also, I said to myself ill-humouredly, were probably stage
jewels.... I cannot account for the sudden train of associations this
word evoked: sweeping, magnificent gestures, star-like eyes, and a
goddess' brows shining through innumerable years; a bar or two of
melodious _ritornello_; an ineffable sense of poetry and grandeur,
and--but I am not sure--a note or two of a distant, distant voice.
Could it be Malibran--or Catalani ... and was my stage jewel bewitched,
a kind of Solomon's ring, conjuring up great spirits? All I can say is
that I have rarely spent a Christmas Eve like that one, while the
servants' ball was going on at the other end of the house, furbishing my
imitation diamonds with a silk handkerchief, alone, or perhaps not
alone, in my study.
MY BICYCLE AND I
We two were sitting together on the wintry Campagna grass; the rest of
the party, with their proud, tiresome horses, had disappeared beyond the
pale green undulations; their carriage had stayed at that castellated
bridge of the Anio. The great moist Roman sky, with its song of
invisible larks, arched all round; above the rejuvenated turf rustled
last year's silvery hemlocks. The world seemed very large, significant,
and delightful; and we had it all to ourselves, as we sat there side by
side, my bicycle and I.
'Tis conceited, perhaps, to imagine myself an item in the musings of my
silent companion, though I would fain be a pleasant one. But this much
is certain, that, among general praising of life and of things, my own
thoughts fell to framing the praises of bicycles. They were deeply felt,
and as such not without appearance of paradox. What an excellent thing,
I reflected, it is that a bicycle is satisfied to be quiet, and is not
in the way when one is off it! Now, my friends out there, on their great
horses, as Herbert of Cherbury calls them, are undoubtedly enjoying many
and various pleasures; but they miss this pleasure of resting quietly on
the grass with their steeds sitting calmly beside them. They are busy
riding, moreover, and have to watch, to curb or humour the fancies of
their beasts, instead of indulging their own fancy; let alone the
necessity of keeping up a certain prestige. They are, in reality,
domineered over by these horses, and these horses' standard of living,
as fortunate people are dominated by their servants, their clothes, and
their family connections; much as Merovingian kings, we were taught in
our "Cours de Dictées," were dominated by the mayors of the palace.
Instead of which, bar accidents (and the malignity of bottle-glass and
shoe-nails), I am free, and am helped to ever greater freedom by my
bicycle.
These thoughts came to me while sitting there on the grass slopes,
rather than while speeding along the solitary road which snakes across
them to the mountains, because the great gift of the bicycle consists to
my mind in something apart from mere rapid locomotion; so much so,
indeed, that those persons forego it, who scorch along for mere
exercise, or to get from place to place, or to read the record of miles
on their cyclometer. There is an unlucky tendency--like the tendency to
litter on the part of inanimates and to dulness on that of our
fellow-creatures--to allow every new invention to add to life's
complications, and every new power to increase life's hustling; so that,
unless we can dominate the mischief, we are really the worse off instead
of the better. It is so much easier, apparently, to repeat the spell
(once the magician has spoken it) which causes the broomstick to fetch
water from the well, as in Goethe's ballad, than to remember, or know,
the potent word which will put a stop to his floodings; that, indeed,
seems reserved to the master wizard; while the tiros of life's magic,
puffed up with half-science, do not drink, but drown. In this way
bicycling has added, methinks, an item to the hurry and breathlessness
of existence, and to the difficulty of enjoying the passing hour--nay,
the passing landscape. I have only once travelled on a bicycle, and,
despite pleasant incidents and excellent company, I think it was a
mistake; there was an inn to reach, a train to catch, a meal to secure,
darkness to race against. And an order was issued, "Always make as much
pace as you can at the beginning, because there may be some loss of time
later on," which was insult and ingratitude to those mountain sides and
valleys of Subiaco and Tivoli, and to the ghosts of St. Benedict, of
Nero, and of the delightful beribboned Sibyl, who beckoned us to rest in
their company.
How different from this when one fares forth, companioned by one of the
same mind; or, better still, with one's own honourable self, exploring
the unknown, revisiting the already loved, with some sort of
resting-place to return to, and the knowledge of time pleasantly
effaced! One speeds along the straight road, flying into the beckoning
horizon, conscious only of mountain lines or stacked cloud masses;
living, for the instant, in air, space become fluid and breathable,
earth a mere detail; and then, at the turn, slackening earth's power
asserting itself with the road's windings. Curiosity keenly on edge, or
memory awakened; and the past also casting its spells, with the isolated
farms or the paved French villages by the river-bank, or the church
spire, the towers, in the distance.... A wrong turn is no hardship; it
merely gives additional knowledge of the country, a further detail of
the characteristic lie of the land, a different view of some hill or
some group of buildings. Indeed, I often deliberately deflect, try road
and lane merely to return again, and have bicycled sometimes half an
hour round a church to watch its transepts and choir fold and unfold,
its towers change place, and its outline of high roof and gargoyles
alter on the landscape. Then the joy, spiced with the sense of
reluctance, of returning on one's steps, sometimes on the same day, or
on successive days, to see the same house, to linger under the same
poplars by the river. Those poplars I am thinking of are alongside a
stately old French mill, built, towered, and gabled, of fine grey stone;
and the image of them brings up in my mind, with the draught and foam of
the weir and the glassiness of the backwater, and the whirr of the
horse-ferry's ropes, that some of the most delightful moments which
one's bicycle can give, are those when the bicycle is resting against a
boat's side (once also in Exmouth harbour); or chained to an old
lych-gate; or, as I remarked about my Campagna ride, taking its rest
also and indulging its musings.
I have alluded to the variety and alteration of pace which we can, and
should, get while bicycling. Skimming rapidly over certain portions of
the road--sordid suburbs, for instance--and precipitating our course to
the points where we slacken and linger, the body keeps step with the
spirit; and actuality forestalls, in a way, the selection by memory;
significance, pleasantness, choice, not brute outer circumstance,
determining the accentuation, the phrasing (in musical sense) of our
life. For life must be _phrased_, lest it become mere jabber, without
pleasure or lesson. Indeed, one may say that if games teach a man to
stand a reverse or snatch an opportunity, so bicycling might afford an
instructive analogy of what things to notice, to talk about and remember
on life's high-roads and lanes; and what others, whizzing past on scarce
skimming wheel, to reject from memory and feeling.