We had a conversation once, walking on your terrace, with the
wind-rippled olives above and the quietly nodding cypress tufts
below--about such writings as you chose to compare with carved
cherry-stones. We disagreed, for it seemed to me that the world
needed cherry-stone necklaces as much as anything else; and that
the only pity was that most of its inhabitants could not afford
such toys, and the rest despised them because they were made of
such very cheap material. Still, lest you should wonder at my
sending such things to you, I write to declare that my three
little tales, whatever they be, are not carved cherry-stones.
For round these sketches of frivolous women, there have gathered
some of the least frivolous thoughts, heaven knows, that have ever
come into my head; or rather, such thoughts have condensed and
taken body in these stories. Indeed, how can one look from outside
on the great waste of precious things, delicate discernment,
quick feeling and sometimes stoical fortitude, involved in
frivolous life, without a sense of sadness and indignation? Or what
satisfaction could its portrayal afford, save for the chance that
such pictures might mirror some astonished and abashed creature;
or show to men and women who toil and think that idleness, and
callousness, and much that must seem to them sheer wickedness, is
less a fault than a misfortune. For surely it is a misfortune not
merely to waste the nobler qualities one has, but to have little
inkling of the sense of brotherhood and duty which changes one,
from a blind dweller in caves, to an inmate of the real world of
storms and sunshine and serene night and exhilarating morning.
And, if miracles were still wrought nowadays, as in those times
when great sinners (as in Calderon's play) were warned by plucking
the hood off their own dead face, there would have been no waste
of the supernatural in teaching my Madame Krasinska that poor
crazy paupers and herself were after all exchangeable quantities.
Of my three frivolous women, another performed the miracle
herself, and abandoned freely the service of the great Goddess
Vanitas. While the third ... and there is the utter pity of the
thing, that frivolous living means not merely waste, but in many
cases martyrdom.
That fact, though it had come more than once before my eyes, would
perhaps never have been clear to my mind, but for our long talks
together about what people are and might be. A certain indignation
verging on hatred might have made these stories of mine utterly
false and useless, but for the love of all creatures who may
suffer with which you lit up the subject. And for this reason the
proof sheets of my little book must go first to that old bishop's
villa on the lowest Apennine spur, where the chestnuts are
dropping, with a sound of rustling silk, on to the sere leaves
below, and the autumn rain storms are rushing by, veiling the
plain with inky crape, blotting out that distant white shimmer,
which, in the sunlight, was Florence a moment ago.
VERNON LEE.
CHELSEA, _October_, 1891.
CONTENTS.
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