all our theories, and all our efforts, aren't futile?"
"No, dear. Sometimes I am not sure. But--there's a certain comfort in
not being sure. To die for what one knows to be true, as many saints
have done--that is well. But to live, as many of us do nowadays, in
service of what may, for aught we know, be only a half-truth or not
true at all--this seems to me nobler still."
"Because it takes more out of us?"
"Because it takes more out of us."
Standing between the live bird and the dead, they gazed across
the river, over the snow-covered wharves, over the dim, slender
chimneys from which no smoke came, into the grey-black veil of the
distance. And it seemed to them that the genius of infinity did not
know--perhaps did not even care--whether they were futile or not,
nor how much and to what purpose, if to any purpose, they must go
on striving.
CHRISTMAS
_By_
G.S. STR**T
One likes it or not. This said, there is plaguey little else to say of
Christmas, and I (though I doubt my sentiments touch you not at all)
would rather leave that little unsaid. Did I confess a distaste for
Christmas, I should incur your enmity. But if I find it, as I protest
I do, rather agreeable than otherwise, why should I spoil my pleasure
by stringing vain words about it? Swift and the broomstick--yes. But
that essay was done at the behest of a clever woman, and to annoy the
admirers of Robert Boyle. Besides, it was hardly--or do you think it
was?--worth the trouble of doing it. There was no trouble involved?
Possibly. But I am not the Dean. And anyhow the fact that he never did
anything of the kind again may be taken to imply that he would not be
bothered. So would not I, if I had a deanery.
That is an hypothesis I am tempted to pursue. I should like to fill
my allotted space before reaching the tiresome theme I have set
myself ... A deanery, the cawing of rooks, their effect on the nervous
system, Trollope's delineations of deans, the advantages of the
Mid-Victorian novel ... But your discursive essayist is a nuisance.
Best come to the point. The bore is in finding a point to come to.
Besides, the chances are that any such point will have long ago been
worn blunt by a score of more active seekers. Alas!
Since I wrote the foregoing words, I have been out for a long walk,
in search of inspiration, through the streets of what is called the
West End. Snobbishly so called. Why draw these crude distinctions? We
all know that Mayfair happens to lie a few miles further west than
Whitechapel. It argues a lack of breeding to go on calling attention
to the fact. If the people of Whitechapel were less beautiful or less
well-mannered or more ignorant than we, there might be some excuse.
But they are not so. True, themselves talk about the East End, but
this only makes the matter worse. To a sensitive ear their phrase
has a ring of ironic humility that jars not less than our own coarse
boastfulness. Heaven knows they have a right to be ironic, and who
shall blame them for exercising it? All the same, this sort of thing
worries me horribly.
I said that I found Christmas rather agreeable than otherwise. But I
was speaking as one accustomed to live mostly in the past. The walk I
have just taken, refreshing in itself, has painfully reminded me that
I cannot hit it off with the present. My life is in the later days of
the eighteenth and the earlier days of the nineteenth century. This
twentieth affair is as a vision, dimly foreseen at odd moments, and
put from me with a slight shudder. My actual Christmases are spent
(say) in Holland House, which has but recently been built. Little
Charles Fox is allowed by his father to join us for the earlier stages
of dessert. I am conscious of patting him on the head and predicting
for him a distinguished future. A very bright little fellow, with
his father's eyes! Or again, I am down at Newstead. Byron is in his
wildest spirits, a shade too uproarious. I am glad to escape into
the park and stroll a quiet hour on the arm of Mr. Hughes Ball. Years
pass. The approach of Christmas finds one loth to leave one's usual
haunts. One is on one's way to one's club to dine with Postumus and
dear old "Wigsby" Pendennis, quietly at one's consecrated table near
the fireplace. As one is crossing St. James's Street an ear-piercing
grunt causes one to reel back just in time to be not run over by
a motor-car. Inside is a woman who scowls down at one through the
window--"Serve you right if we'd gone over you." Yes, I often have
these awakenings to fact--or rather these provisions of what life
might be if I survived into the twentieth century. Alas!
I have mentioned that woman in the motor-car because she is germane
to my theme. She typifies the vices of the modern Christmas. For her,
by the absurd accident of her wealth, there is no distinction between
people who have not motor-cars and people who might as well be run
over. But I wrong her. If we others were all run over, there would be
no one before whom she could flaunt her loathsome air of superiority.
And what would she do then, poor thing? I doubt she would die of
boredom--painfully, one hopes. In the same way, if the shop-keepers
in Bond Street knew there was no one who could not afford to buy the
things in their windows, there would be an end to the display that
makes those windows intolerable (to you and me) during the month of
December. I had often suspected that the things there were not meant
to be bought by people who could buy them, but merely to irritate the
rest. This afternoon I was sure of it. Not in one window anything
a sane person would give to any one not an idiot, but everywhere a
general glossy grin out at people who are not plutocrats. This sort
of thing lashes me to ungovernable fury. The lion is roused, and I
recognise in myself a born leader of men. Be so good as to smash those
windows for me.
One does not like to think that Christmas has been snapped up, docked
of its old-world kindliness, and pressed into the service of an odious
ostentation. But so it has. Alas! The thought of Father Christmas
trudging through the snow to the homes of gentle and simple alike
(forgive that stupid, snobbish phrase) was agreeable. But Father
Christmas in red plush breeches, lounging on the doorstep of Sir
Gorgius Midas--one averts one's eyes.
I have--now I come to think of it--another objection to the modern
Christmas. It would be affectation to pretend not to know that
there are many Jews living in England, and in London especially. I
have always had a deep respect for that race, their distinction in
intellect and in character. Being not one of them, I may in their
behalf put a point which themselves would be the last to suggest. I
hope they will acquit me of impertinence in doing this. You, in your
turn, must acquit me of sentimentalism. The Jews are a minority, and
as such must take their chances. But may not a majority refrain from
pressing its rights to the utmost? It is well that we should celebrate
Christmas heartily, and all that. But we could do so without an
emphasis that seems to me, in the circumstances, 'tother side good
taste. "Good taste" is a hateful phrase. But it escaped me in the heat
of the moment. Alas!
THE FEAST
_By_
J*S*PH C*NR*D
The hut in which slept the white man was on a clearing between the
forest and the river. Silence, the silence murmurous and unquiet of a
tropical night, brooded over the hut that, baked through by the sun,
sweated a vapour beneath the cynical light of the stars. Mahamo lay
rigid and watchful at the hut's mouth. In his upturned eyes, and along
the polished surface of his lean body black and immobile, the stars
were reflected, creating an illusion of themselves who are illusions.
The roofs of the congested trees, writhing in some kind of agony
private and eternal, made tenebrous and shifty silhouettes against the
sky, like shapes cut out of black paper by a maniac who pushes them
with his thumb this way and that, irritably, on a concave surface of
blue steel. Resin oozed unseen from the upper branches to the trunks
swathed in creepers that clutched and interlocked with tendrils
venomous, frantic and faint. Down below, by force of habit, the
lush herbage went through the farce of growth--that farce old and
screaming, whose trite end is decomposition.
Within the hut the form of the white man, corpulent and pale, was
covered with a mosquito-net that was itself illusory like everything
else, only more so. Flying squadrons of mosquitoes inside its meshes
flickered and darted over him, working hard, but keeping silence so
as not to excite him from sleep. Cohorts of yellow ants disputed him
against cohorts of purple ants, the two kinds slaying one another
in thousands. The battle was undecided when suddenly, with no such
warning as it gives in some parts of the world, the sun blazed up over
the horizon, turning night into day, and the insects vanished back
into their camps.
The white man ground his knuckles into the corners of his eyes,
emitting that snore final and querulous of a middle-aged man awakened
rudely. With a gesture brusque but flaccid he plucked aside the net
and peered around. The bales of cotton cloth, the beads, the brass
wire, the bottles of rum, had not been spirited away in the night. So
far so good. The faithful servant of his employers was now at liberty
to care for his own interests. He regarded himself, passing his hands
over his skin.
"Hi! Mahamo!" he shouted. "I've been eaten up."
The islander, with one sinuous motion, sprang from the ground, through
the mouth of the hut. Then, after a glance, he threw high his hands in
thanks to such good and evil spirits as had charge of his concerns. In
a tone half of reproach, half of apology, he murmured--
"You white men sometimes say strange things that deceive the heart."
"Reach me that ammonia bottle, d'you hear?" answered the white man.
"This is a pretty place you've brought me to!" He took a draught.
"Christmas Day, too! Of all the ---- But I suppose it seems all right
to you, you funny blackamoor, to be here on Christmas Day?"
"We are here on the day appointed, Mr. Williams. It is a feast-day of
your people?"
Mr. Williams had lain back, with closed eyes, on his mat. Nostalgia
was doing duty to him for imagination. He was wafted to a bedroom in
Marylebone, where in honour of the Day he lay late dozing, with great
contentment; outside, a slush of snow in the street, the sound of
church-bells; from below a savour of especial cookery. "Yes," he said,
"it's a feast-day of my people."
"Of mine also," said the islander humbly.
"Is it though? But they'll do business first?"
"They must first do that."
"And they'll bring their ivory with them?"
"Every man will bring ivory," answered the islander, with a smile
gleaming and wide.
"How soon'll they be here?"
"Has not the sun risen? They are on their way."
"Well, I hope they'll hurry. The sooner we're off this cursed island
of yours the better. Take all those things out," Mr. Williams added,
pointing to the merchandise, "and arrange them--neatly, mind you!"
In certain circumstances it is right that a man be humoured in
trifles. Mahamo, having borne out the merchandise, arranged it very
neatly.
While Mr. Williams made his toilet, the sun and the forest, careless
of the doings of white and black men alike, waged their warfare
implacable and daily. The forest from its inmost depths sent forth
perpetually its legions of shadows that fell dead in the instant
of exposure to the enemy whose rays heroic and absurd its outposts
annihilated. There came from those inilluminable depths the equable
rumour of myriads of winged things and crawling things newly roused to
the task of killing and being killed. Thence detached itself, little
by little, an insidious sound of a drum beaten. This sound drew more
near.
Mr. Williams, issuing from the hut, heard it, and stood gaping towards
it.
"Is that them?" he asked.
"That is they," the islander murmured, moving away towards the edge of
the forest.
Sounds of chanting were a now audible accompaniment to the drum.
"What's that they're singing?" asked Mr. Williams.
"They sing of their business," said Mahamo.
"Oh!" Mr. Williams was slightly shocked. "I'd have thought they'd be
singing of their feast."
"It is of their feast they sing."
It has been stated that Mr. Williams was not imaginative. But a few
years of life in climates alien and intemperate had disordered his
nerves. There was that in the rhythms of the hymn which made bristle
his flesh.
Suddenly, when they were very near, the voices ceased, leaving a
legacy of silence more sinister than themselves. And now the black
spaces between the trees were relieved by bits of white that were the
eyeballs and teeth of Mahamo's brethren.
"It was of their feast, it was of you, they sang," said Mahamo.
"Look here," cried Mr. Williams in his voice of a man not to be
trifled with. "Look here, if you've--"
He was silenced by sight of what seemed to be a young sapling sprung
up from the ground within a yard of him--a young sapling tremulous,
with a root of steel. Then a thread-like shadow skimmed the air, and
another spear came impinging the ground within an inch of his feet.
As he turned in his flight he saw the goods so neatly arranged at
his orders, and there flashed through him, even in the thick of the
spears, the thought that he would be a grave loss to his employers.
This--for Mr. Williams was, not less than the goods, of a kind easily
replaced--was an illusion. It was the last of Mr. Williams illusions.
A RECOLLECTION
_By_
EDM*ND G*SSE
"And let us strew
Twain wreaths of holly and of yew."
WALLER.
One out of many Christmas Days abides with peculiar vividness in my
memory. In setting down, however clumsily, some slight record of
it, I feel that I shall be discharging a duty not only to the two
disparately illustrious men who made it so very memorable, but also to
all young students of English and Scandinavian literature. My use of
the first person singular, delightful though that pronoun is in the
works of the truly gifted, jars unspeakably on me; but reasons of
space baulk my sober desire to call myself merely the present writer,
or the infatuated go-between, or the cowed and imponderable young
person who was in attendance.
In the third week of December, 1878, taking the opportunity of a brief
and undeserved vacation, I went to Venice. On the morning after my
arrival, in answer to a most kind and cordial summons, I presented
myself at the Palazzo Rezzonico. Intense as was the impression he
always made even in London, I think that those of us who met Robert
Browning only in the stress and roar of that metropolis can hardly
have gauged the fullness of his potentialities for impressing. Venice,
"so weak, so quiet," as Mr. Ruskin had called her, was indeed the
ideal setting for one to whom neither of those epithets could by any
possibility have been deemed applicable. The steamboats that now wake
the echoes of the canals had not yet been imported; but the vitality
of the imported poet was in some measure a preparation for them. It
did not, however, find me quite prepared for itself, and I am afraid
that some minutes must have elapsed before I could, as it were, find
my feet in the torrent of his geniality and high spirits, and give him
news of his friends in London.
He was at that time engaged in revising the proof-sheets of "Dramatic
Idylls," and after luncheon, to which he very kindly bade me remain,
he read aloud certain selected passages. The yellow haze of a wintry
Venetian sunshine poured in through the vast windows of his _salone_,
making an aureole around his silvered head. I would give much to
live that hour over again. But it was vouchsafed in days before the
Browning Society came and made everything so simple for us all. I am
afraid that after a few minutes I sat enraptured by the sound rather
than by the sense of the lines. I find, in the notes I made of the
occasion, that I figured myself as plunging through some enchanted
thicket on the back of an inspired bull.
That evening, as I was strolling in Piazza San Marco, my thoughts
of Browning were all of a sudden scattered by the vision of a small,
thick-set man seated at one of the tables in the Café Florian. This
was--and my heart leapt like a young trout when I saw that it could be
none other than--Henrik Ibsen. Whether joy or fear was the predominant
emotion in me, I should be hard put to it to say. It had been my
privilege to correspond extensively with the great Scandinavian, and
to be frequently received by him, some years earlier than the date of
which I write, in Rome. In that city haunted by the shades of so many
Emperors and Popes I had felt comparatively at ease even in Ibsen's
presence. But seated here in the homelier decay of Venice, closely
buttoned in his black surcoat and crowned with his uncompromising
top-hat, with the lights of the Piazza flashing back wanly from his
gold-rimmed spectacles, and his lips tight-shut like some steel trap
into which our poor humanity had just fallen, he seemed to constitute
a menace under which the boldest might well quail. Nevertheless,
I took my courage in both hands, and laid it as a kind of votive
offering on the little table before him.
My reward was in the surprising amiability that he then and afterwards
displayed. My travelling had indeed been doubly blessed, for, whilst
my subsequent afternoons were spent in Browning's presence, my
evenings fell with regularity into the charge of Ibsen. One of these
evenings is for me "prouder, more laurel'd than the rest" as having
been the occasion when he read to me the MS. of a play which he had
just completed. He was staying at the Hôtel Danieli, an edifice famous
for having been, rather more than forty years previously, the socket
in which the flame of an historic _grande passion_ had finally sunk
and guttered out with no inconsiderable accompaniment of smoke and
odour. It was there, in an upper room, that I now made acquaintance
with a couple very different from George Sand and Alfred de Musset,
though destined to become hardly less famous than they. I refer to
Torvald and Nora Helmer. My host read to me with the utmost vivacity,
standing in the middle of the apartment; and I remember that in
the scene where Nora Helmer dances the tarantella her creator
instinctively executed a few illustrative steps.
During those days I felt very much as might a minnow swimming to and
fro between Leviathan on the one hand and Behemoth on the other--a
minnow tremulously pleased, but ever wistful for some means of
bringing his two enormous acquaintances together. On the afternoon of
December 24th I confided to Browning my aspiration. He had never heard
of this brother poet and dramatist, whose fame indeed was at that time
still mainly Boreal; but he cried out with the greatest heartiness,
"Capital! Bring him round with you at one o'clock to-morrow for turkey
and plum-pudding!"
I betook myself straight to the Hôtel Danieli, hoping against hope
that Ibsen's sole answer would not be a comminatory grunt and an
instant rupture of all future relations with myself. At first he was
indeed resolute not to go. He had never heard of this Herr Browning.
(It was one of the strengths of his strange, crustacean genius that
he never had heard of anybody.) I took it on myself to say that
Herr Browning would send his private gondola, propelled by his two
gondoliers, to conduct Herr Ibsen to the scene of the festivity. I
think it was this prospect that made him gradually unbend, for he had
already acquired that taste for pomp and circumstance which was so
notable a characteristic of his later years. I hastened back to the
Palazzo Rezzonico before he could change his mind. I need hardly say
that Browning instantly consented to send the gondola. So large
and lovable was his nature that, had he owned a thousand of those
conveyances, he would not have hesitated to send out the whole fleet
in honour of any friend of any friend of his.
Next day, as I followed Ibsen down the Danielian water-steps into the
expectant gondola, my emotion was such that I was tempted to snatch
from him his neatly-furled umbrella and spread it out over his head,
like the umbrella beneath which the Doges of days gone by had made
their appearances in public. It was perhaps a pity that I repressed
this impulse. Ibsen seemed to be already regretting that he had
unbent. I could not help thinking, as we floated along the Riva
Schiavoni, that he looked like some particularly ruthless member of
the Council of Ten. I did, however, try faintly to attune him in
some sort to the spirit of our host and of the day of the year. I
adumbrated Browning's outlook on life, translating into Norwegian, I
well remember, the words "God's in His heaven, all's right with the
world." In fact I cannot charge myself with not having done what I
could. I can only lament that it was not enough.
When we marched into the _salone_, Browning was seated at the piano,
playing (I think) a Toccata of Galuppi's. On seeing us, he brought
his hands down with a great crash on the keyboard, seemed to reach
us in one astonishing bound across the marble floor, and clapped
Ibsen loudly on either shoulder, wishing him "the Merriest of Merry
Christmases."
Ibsen, under this sudden impact, stood firm as a rock, and it flitted
through my brain that here at last was solved the old problem of what
would happen if an irresistible force met an immoveable mass. But it
was obvious that the rock was not rejoicing in the moment of victory.
I was tartly asked whether I had not explained to Herr Browning that
his guest did not understand English. I hastily rectified my omission,
and thenceforth our host spoke in Italian. Ibsen, though he understood
that language fairly well, was averse to speaking it. Such remarks as
he made in the course of the meal to which we presently sat down were
made in Norwegian and translated by myself.
Browning, while he was carving the turkey, asked Ibsen whether he had
visited any of the Venetian theatres. Ibsen's reply was that he never
visited theatres. Browning laughed his great laugh, and cried "That's
right! We poets who write plays must give the theatres as wide a berth
as possible. We aren't wanted there!" "How so?" asked Ibsen. Browning
looked a little puzzled, and I had to explain that in northern Europe
Herr Ibsen's plays were frequently performed. At this I seemed to see
on Browning's face a slight shadow--so swift and transient a shadow as
might be cast by a swallow flying across a sunlit garden. An instant,
and it was gone. I was glad, however, to be able to soften my
statement by adding that Herr Ibsen had in his recent plays abandoned
the use of verse.
The trouble was that in Browning's company he seemed practically to
have abandoned the use of prose too. When, moreover, he did speak, it
was always in a sense contrary to that of our host. The Risorgimento
was a theme always very near to the great heart of Browning, and on
this occasion he hymned it with more than his usual animation and
resource (if indeed that were possible). He descanted especially on
the vast increase that had accrued to the sum of human happiness
in Italy since the success of that remarkable movement. When Ibsen
rapped out the conviction that what Italy needed was to be invaded
and conquered once and for all by Austria, I feared that an explosion
was inevitable. But hardly had my translation of the inauspicious
sentiment been uttered when the plum-pudding was borne into the room,
flaming on its dish. I clapped my hands wildly at sight of it, in the
English fashion, and was intensely relieved when the yet more resonant
applause of Robert Browning followed mine. Disaster had been averted
by a crowning mercy. But I am afraid that Ibsen thought us both quite
mad.