symbolizes, is a great liberator, freeing us from dwelling among
ugliness and rubbish. It gives a foretaste of freedom of the spirit,
reducing mankind to the only real and final inequality: inequality in
the power of appreciating and enjoying. The poor clerk, or
schoolmistress, or obscure individual from Grub Street can, with its
help, get as much variety and pleasure out of a hundred miles' circuit
as more fortunate persons from unlimited globetrotting. Nay, the
fortunate person can on a bicycle get rid of the lumber and litter which
constitutes so large a proportion of the gifts of Fortune. For the
things _one has to have_, let alone the things _one has to do_ (in
deference to butler and lady's-maid, high priests of fitness), are as
well left behind, if only occasionally. And among such doubtful gifts of
fortune is surely the thought of the many people employed in helping one
to do nothing whatever. It spoils the Campagna, for instance, to have a
brougham, with coachman and footman, and grooms to lead back the horses,
all kicking their heels at the bridge of the Anio: worthy persons, no
doubt, and conscientiously subserving our higher existence; but the
bare fact of whom, their well-appointed silhouettes, seem somehow
incongruous as we get further and more solitary among the pale grass
billows, deeper into that immense space, that unlimited horizon of ages.
These are some of the prestigious merits of the bicycle, though many
more might be added. This grotesque iron courser, not without some of
the grasshopper's absurd weirdness, is a creature of infinite capacities
for the best kind of romance--the romance of the fancy. It may turn out
to be (I always suspect it) the very mysterious steed which carried
adventurous knights and damsels through forests of delightful
enchantments, sprouting wings, proving a hippogriff and flying up,
whenever fairies were lacking or whenever envious wizards were fussing
about. And, as reward--or perhaps crown--for its many good services,
reposed occasionally by Britomart's or Amadis' side, far from the
world's din, even as my bicycle rested on the pale wintry grass
hillocks, under the rolling cloud bales and the song of invisible larks,
of the Campagna.
PUZZLES OF THE PAST
I am full of curiosity about the Past. This does not mean that I read
the memoirs of Napoleon's marshals, or that I write queries to
antiquarian papers, or that I enjoy being taken to see invisible Pictish
barrows and Roman encampments; in fact, nothing could be further from my
character and habits. But the Past puzzles me; and I like being puzzled
by the Past.
Not in its details, but in all manner of general questions, and such,
moreover, as very rarely admit of an answer. What are the relations of
the Past and Present? Where does the Past begin? And, to go further
still, what _is_ the Past?
All this sounds abstract, and even metaphysical; but it is really quite
the reverse. These speculations are always connected with some concrete
place or person, and they arise in my mind (and in the mind of the
twenty thousand persons whom I don't know, but whom I resemble),
together with some perspective of street or outline of face, and always
with a faint puff of emotion. I will give you a typical instance of one
of these puzzles. It formulated itself in my mind a few weeks ago at
Verona, while going to see a certain little church on the slopes above
the Adige. You go through the priest's house and vineyard; there is a
fine carved lintel and a bit of fresco, all in the midst of a rag fair
of squalid streets. What a place this must once have been! I felt the
charm and splendour of piled-up palace and hanging gardens in former
days. In former days! And a little doubt dropped into it, "If former
days there ever were." For who can tell? This crumbling, ragged business
which to us means that we stand before the Past; this gradual perishing
of things in neglect and defilement, may very well have formed a
necessary part of our ancestors' present. Our own standard and habit of
tidiness, decorum, and uniformity may be quite recent developments;
barbarism, in the sense of decay and pollution, may have existed
together with prosperity. It is quite possible that dead donkeys were
left in the streets of Haroun-al-Raschid's Bagdad, or Semiramis'
Babylon, as well as in those of poor little modern Tangier. And the
Verona of the Scaligers may have been just such a Verona as this which
delights and depresses us, only with new beautiful things being built
quite naturally alongside of decayed and defiled ones; things nowadays
all equally levelled in ruin and squalor. The splendour of the Past may
be a mere fiction of our own, like the romance of the Past which we say
we no longer believe in. But history gives us, I think, no definite
answer.
With this question another is closely connected. I must explain it by a
simile. A foreign friend of mine insists, with some show of reason, that
much as any two countries of the Continent may differ, England contrives
to differ a great deal more from all of them than they can differ from
each other. Well, it sometimes strikes me that, in a similar way, our
Present may be wholly detached from the mass, however heterogeneous, of
the Past; an island divided from the mainland of history by seas of
difference, or rather, like the great Arctic countries, a separate
Continent, shrouded in mystery, of which we know only that its hitherto
explored shores face, without ever touching, the other mapped-out
Continent we call the Past. For just think, let us say, of the change
implied in the multiplication through machinery of a stereotyped form,
as against the production of an individual object by individual hands.
Why, such a change means democracy far more than any other change in
laws and franchises; and it means, among other things, that any art
sprung really from the present will have to be of the nature, not of the
painting or sculpture of old days, of the architecture which made each
single cathedral an individual organism, but of the nature rather of
process engraving, of lithography (are not our posters, Chéret's, for
instance, the only thing which our masses see, as their distant forbears
saw frescoes in churches and _campo santos_?), of book printing, in
short; and will not literature and music become more and more the
typical kinds of art, the creation of one brain projected over millions
of acres and through mere wires and cylinders? And think also of the
difference in locomotion. Say what you will, people who rode in coaches
were bound to be more like people who rode in litters, for all the
difference between Rome under Cæsar and England under George III., than
like people who go by train. That is all on the surface, serious persons
will answer: the pace at which people's body and goods are conveyed
along may alter without their thoughts or feelings being changed the
least bit. Perhaps. But are we so absolutely sure of that?
For instance, are we sure we should have been able to get on for half an
hour together with even our own great-grandparents of little more than a
hundred years ago? There they hang, our great-grandfathers and mothers
and uncles and aunts (or some one's else, more likely), painted by
Reynolds or Raeburn, delightful persons whose ghosts we would give
anything to meet. Their ghosts; aye, there's the rub. For their ghosts
would have altered with posthumous experience, would have had glimpses
of the world we live in, and somewhat conformed to its habits; but could
we really get on with the living men and women of former days? It is
true that we understand and enjoy the books which they read, or rather
a small number of pages out of a smaller number of books. But did they
read them in the same way? I should not wonder if the different sense in
which we took their favourite authors, or rather the different sense in
which we discovered that they were in the habit of taking them, created
considerable coolness, not to say irritation, between the ghosts of the
readers of "The Vicar of Wakefield," or "Werther," or the "Nouvelle
Heloïse" and ourselves. Besides, they would be monstrously shocked at
our ways. They would think us marvellously ill-bred. While we! I dare
scarcely harbour the thought, much less express it. Anyway, it is
certain that they occasionally allowed Sheridan and Miss Burney (I am
not even thinking of the remote people of Fielding), and even, alas!
Miss Austen, to paint pictures of them which we would scarcely own up to
from novelists and playwrights of our day, and therefore I return to my
puzzle: is time an unbroken continuity, all its subdivisions merely
conventional, like those of postal districts; or, as I suggested above,
are there real chains of mountains, chasms, nay, deep oceans, breaking
up its surface; and do we not belong, we people of the nineteenth
century, rather to the future which we are forming than to the Past
which, much to its astonishment (I should think), produced us?
There are other puzzles about the Past, far more intimate in nature and
less grandiose, but, on the whole, far less easy to answer. One of these
is difficult even to word, but every reader will identify it in
connection with some of the most delightful experiences he has been
admitted to. Roughly, it may be expressed as follows:--Were old people
ever young? Was there a period in the world's history (and not so far
back) when everybody was enchantingly mixed of primness and romance, had
little graces of manner, nods and becks and wreathed smiles, with a
tendency every now and then to employ language rather stronger than the
occasion warranted? Did youths and maidens wander about with faint moral
odours of pot-pourri and quaint creases of character, as of
superannuated garments long folded in a drawer! Or are these qualities
taken on by each generation in turn, in which case will the Hilda
Wangels and Dodos of to-day delight the twentieth century as possible
inmates of Cranford?
Having worked my way to so marvellous a puzzle as this, I had better
remove the strain by hastily suggesting another question, which will
satisfactorily get rid of the others, to wit, whether the Past did
really ever exist?
On the whole, I am tempted to believe that it did not. I can even prove
it by a logical stroke worthy of the very greatest philosophers. Granted
that the Past is that which no longer has any existence, only the
Present could ever be real now; as the Present and the Past cannot
co-exist, the Past evidently never existed at all; unless, indeed, we
call in the aid of the Hegelian philosophy, and set our minds at ease by
a fine reduction of contraries, to the effect that since the Present and
the Past exclude one another, they evidently must really be the same
thing at bottom.
This is cogent. And yet a doubt continues lurking in my mind. Is not
what we think of as the Past--what we discuss, describe, and so often
passionately love--a mere creation of our own? Not merely in its
details, but in what is far more important, in its essential, emotional,
and imaginative quality and value? Perhaps some day psychology may
discover that we have a craving, like that which produces music or
architecture, for a special state of nerves (or of something else, if
people are bored with nerves by that time), obtainable by a special
human product called the Past--the Past which has never been the
Present.
MAKING PRESENTS
It was the dreadful perplexity of making a present to a rich woman. Like
Heine's sweetheart, she was abundantly provided with diamonds and pearls
and all things which mankind can wish. And so the lack of any mortal
thing suggested that, so far from liking to be given it, she would far
rather not have it at all.
I do not choose to state whether that lady ever did get a present from
me, for the statement would be an anti-climax. Suffice it that as a
result of profound meditation I found myself in possession of a
"Philosophy of Presents," which, copied fair on imaginary vellum, or
bound in ideal morocco, I now lay at the feet of my friends, as a very
appropriate gift, and entirely home-made.
The whole subject of presents is bristling with fallacies, which have
arisen like thistles out of the thinness of our life and the stoniness
of our hearts. One of these mistaken views is perpetually being put
forward by people who assert that _the pleasantness of a gift lies in
the good-will of the giver_. The notion has a specious air of amiability
and disinterestedness and general good-breeding; but the only truth it
really contains is that, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, a present
gives exactly no pleasure at all. For, if the pleasantness of a present
depended solely on the expression of good-will, why not express
good-will in any of the hundred excellent modes of doing so?--for we
have all of us, more or less, voice, expressive features, words ready or
(more expressive still) unready, and occasions enough, Heaven knows! of
making small sacrifices for our neighbours. And it is entirely
superfluous to waste our substance and cumber our friends' houses by
adding to these convenient items, material tokens like, say, gold from
Ophir and apes and peacocks. There are inconveniences attached to the
private possession of bullion; many persons dislike the voices of
peacocks, and I, at all events, am perfectly harrowed by the physiognomy
of apes.
This, of course, is metaphorical; but it leads me from the mere
exposition of theory to the argument from experience. If presents are
pleasant because of the good-will, etc., why are we all brought up (oh,
the cruelty of suppressed disappointment when the doll arrives instead
of the wooden horse, or the duplicate kitchen-set instead of the
longed-for box of bricks!) to pretend that the gift we receive is the
very thing we have been pining for for years? And here I would ask my
friend and reader, the often-much-perplexed-giver-and-receiver of gifts,
whether, quite apart even from those dreadful smothered tragedies of
one's childhood, there are, among the trifling false positions of life,
many false positions more painful than that of choosing a gift which one
knows is not wanted, unless it be the more painful position still of
receiving a gift which one would tip any one to take away?
Some persons feel this so strongly, wondering why the preacher forgot
this item in his list of vanities, that you may hear them loudly vowing
that never again will they be caught in the act of making a present....
So far about the mistaken view of the subject; now for the right one,
which is mine: the result of great experience and of infinite
meditation, all coming to a head in that recent perplexed business of
choosing a present for the lady with the diamonds and pearls. And before
proceeding further, let me say that my experience is really exceptional.
Not that I have given many gifts, or that I am in the least certain that
the few I have given were not the usual Dead Sea apples; but because I
have been, what is much more to the point, a great receiver of presents,
my room, my house containing nothing beautiful or pleasant that is not a
present from some dear friend, or (the paradox will be explained later
on) a present from myself. A great receiver of presents, also, because
presents give me a very lively and special pleasure; have done so always
ever since my days of Christmas-trees and birthday candles, leaving all
through my life a particular permeating charm connected with certain
dates and seasons, like the good, wonderful smell of old fir-needles
slightly toasted, and of wax tapers recently extinguished, so that all
very delightful places and moments are apt to affect me as a sort of
gift-giving, what the Germans have a dear word for, beloved of children,
_Bescheerung_. For if life, wisely lived, ought to be, as I firmly
believe, nothing but a long act of courtship, then, surely, its
exquisite things--summer nights with loose-hanging stars, pale sunny
winter noons, first strolls through towered towns or upon herb-scented
hills, the hearing again of music one has understood, not to speak of
the gesture and voice of the people whom one holds dear--all these, and
all other exquisite movements or exquisite items of life, should be felt
with the added indescribable pleasure of being gifts.
A present, then, may be defined as a _thing which one wants given by a
person whom one likes_. But our English syntax falls short of my
meaning, for what I would wish to say is rather, in Teutonic fashion, "a
by a person one likes to one given object one wants." The stress of the
sentence should be laid on the word _wants_. For much of the charm, and
most of the dignity, of a gift depends on its being _a thing one would
otherwise have done without_.
This is true even with those dreadful useful objects which make us feel
hot to distribute; they have become melancholy possible presents
because, alas! however necessary, they would otherwise not have been
forthcoming. And, apart from such cases, mankind has always decided that
gifts should not be of the nature of blankets, or manuals of science, or
cooking-pots, but rather flowers, fruit, books of poetry, and the wares
of silken Samarkand and cedared Lebanon. It is admitted upon all hands
that, to be perfect, presents must be superfluities; but I should like
to add that the reverse also holds good, and that superfluities would be
the better, nine times out of ten, for being presents.
'Tis, methinks, a sign of the recent importation and comparative
scarcity of honest livelihoods, that we should think so much how we come
by our money, and so little how we part with it, as if we were free to
waste, provided we do not steal. Now, _my manuals of political economy_
(which were, of course, _not_ presents to me) make it quite plain that
whatever we spend in mere self-indulgence is so much taken away from the
profitable capital of the community; and sundry other sciences, which
require no manuals to teach them, make it plainer still that the habit
of indulging, upon legal payment, our whims and our greedinesses, fills
our houses with lumber and our souls with worse than lumber where there
might be light and breathable air. Extremes meet: and even as to
paupers, the barest necessaries of life are superfluities--things
dispensed with; so, at the other end of the vicious circle, to the
spendthrift luxury ceases to be luxury, and superfluities are turned
into things one cannot do without.
The charm of a gift, its little moral flavour which makes us feel the
better for it, resides, therefore, not merely in good-will, but in the
little prelude of self-restraint on the one hand, of unselfishness on
the other. Unless you gave it me, I should not have that pleasant thing;
and you, knowing this much, give it to me, instead of to yourself. What
a complicated lovers'-knot of good-feeling there is tied, as round
flowers or sweetmeats, round every genuine present! This is a rich,
varied impression, full of harmonies; compare with it the dry, dull,
stifling impression one gets from looking round a rich man's house, or
admiring the ornaments of a rich woman's person: all these things having
merely been bought!
Yet buying can be a fine thing. And among genuine presents (and in an
honourable place) I certainly include--as I hinted some way back--the
presents which people _sometimes make to themselves_. For 'tis a genuine
present when a person who never allows himself a superfluity, at last
buys one, as Charles and Mary Lamb did their first blue pots and prints,
out of slowly saved up pennies. There is in that all the grace of long
self-restraint, and the grace of finally triumphant love--love for that
faithfully courted object, that Rachel among inanimates! The giving to
one's self of such a present is a fit occasion for rejoicing; and 'tis a
proper instinct (more proper than the one of displaying wedding
presents) which causes the united giver and receiver of the gift to
summon the neighbours, to see it and rejoice, not without feasting.
But presents of this sort are even more difficult to compass than the
other sort where people, like the lady sung by Heine, have pearls and
diamonds in plenty, and all things which mankind can wish.
GOING AWAY
We stood on the steps of the old Scotch house as the carriage rolled her
away. A last greeting from that delightful, unflagging voice; the misty
flare of the lanterns round a corner; and then nothing but the darkness
of the damp autumn night. There is to some foolish persons--myself
especially--a strange and almost supernatural quality about the fact of
departure, one's own or that of others, which constant repetition seems,
if anything, merely to strengthen. I cannot become familiar with the
fact that a moment, the time necessary for a carriage, as in this case,
to turn a corner, or for those two steel muscles of the engine to play
upon each other, can do so complete and wonderful a thing as to break
the continuity of intercourse, to remove a living presence. The
substitution of an image for a reality, the present broken off short and
replaced by the past; enumerating this by no means gives the equivalent
of that odd and unnatural word GONE. And the terror of death itself lies
surely in its being the most sudden and utter act of _going away_.
I suppose there must be people who do not feel like this, as there are
people also who do not feel, apparently, the mystery of change of place,
of watching the familiar lines of hill or valley transform themselves,
and the very sense of one's bearings, what was in front or to the other
side, east or west, getting lost or hopelessly altered. Such people's
lives must be (save for misfortune) funnily undramatic; and, trying to
realize them, I understand why such enormous crowds require to go and
see plays.
It is usually said that in such partings as these--partings with
definite hope of meeting and with nothing humanly tragic about them, so
that the last interchange of voice is expected to be a laugh or a
joke--the sadder part is for those who stay. But I think this is
mistaken. There is indeed a little sense of flatness--almost of
something in one's chest--when the train is gone or the carriage rolled
off; and one goes back into one's house or into the just-left room,
throwing a glance all round as if to measure the emptiness. But the
accustomed details--the book we left open, the order we had to give, the
answer brought to the message, and breakfast and lunch and dinner and
the postman, all the great eternities--gather round and close up the
gap: close the gone one, and that piece of past, not merely _up_, but,
alas! _out_.
It is the sense of this, secret even in the most fatuous breast, which
makes things sadder for the goer. He knows from experience, and, if he
have imagination, he feels, this process of closing him out, this rapid
adaptation to doing without him. And meanwhile he, in his carriage or
train, is being hurled into the void; for even the richest man and he of
the most numerous clients, is turned adrift without possessions or
friends, a mere poor nameless orphan, when on a solitary journey. There
is, moreover, a sadder feeling than this in the heart of the more
sentimental traveller, who has engaged the hospitality of friends. _He
knows it is extended equally to others_; that this room, which he may
have made peculiarly his own, filling it, perhaps, in proportion to the
briefness of sojourn, with his own most personal experience; the
landscape made his own through this window, the crucial conversation,
receiving unexpected sympathies, held or (more potent still) thought
over afterwards in that chair; he knows that this room will become,
perhaps, O horror, within a few hours, another's!
The extraordinary hospitality of England, becoming, like all English
things, rather too well done materially, rather systematic, and
therefore heartless, inflicts, I have been told, some painful blows on
sentimental aliens, particularly of Latin origin. There is a pang in
finding on the hospitable door a label-holder with one's name in it: it
saves losing one's way, but suggests that one is apt to lose it, is a
stranger in the house; and it tells of other strangers, past and future,
each with his name slipped in. Similarly the guest-book, imitated from
nefarious foreign inns, so fearfully suggestive of human instability,
with its close-packed signatures, and dates of arrival and departure.
And then the cruelty of housekeepers, and the ruthlessness of
housemaids! Take heed, O Thestylis, dear Latin guardian of my hearth,
take heed and imprint my urgent wishes in thy faithful heart: never,
never, never, in my small southern home (not unlike, I sometimes fondly
fancy, the Poet's _parva domus_), never let me surprise thee depositing
thy freshly-whitened linen in heaps outside the door of the departing
guest; and never, I conjure thee, offend his eye or nostril with mops,
or _frotteur's_ rollers, or resinous scent of furniture-polish near his
small chamber! For that chamber, kindly Handmaiden, is _his_. He is the
Prophet it was made for; and the only Prophet conceivable as long as
present. And when he takes departure, why, the void must follow, a long
hiatus, darkness, and stacked-up furniture, and the scent of varnish
within tight-closed shutters....