We sat on chairs in the sun, and after we had been silent a long while,
she began to do what women will never cease doing, so wise men say, as
long as men say they love them, to define what the love of a man meant
to a woman, and to explain the love of a man. She said that that man was
wise who had said that love was like religion, and must be done well or
not at all, but that she had never yet found in any man sincere love and
delicacy, for there was always something coarse, some little note which
jarred, some movement of the mind and body maladroit, in a man who is
shown a woman's love. "When men love and are not loved," she said,
"often they kept their grace and pride, and women are proud to be loved
by such men--even faithfully for more than ten years; but when men are
loved and are confident, then they seem to lose delicacy, to think that
love breaks down all barriers between man and woman; that love is a vase
of iron, unbreakable, and not, as it is, a vase of the most delicate and
brittle pottery, to be broken to pieces by the least touch of a careless
hand. They seem to think that the state of love stands at the end of a
great striving; they do not realise that it is only the beginning, and
that the striving must never cease, for without striving there is no
love, but only content. But they do not see that; they insist on
spoiling love, breaking the vase with stupid, unconscious hands; and
when it breaks they are surprised, and they say that love is a fickle
thing and will stand no tests, and that women are the very devil. Always
they spoil love; it comes and finds them helpless, puzzling whether to
clothe themselves entirely in reserve or whether to be entirely naked in
brutality; and generally they compromise, and, physically and mentally,
walk about in their shirts."
"As you say that," I said, "you remind me of that woman, Mrs. Millamant,
in Congreve's play, 'The Way of the World.' Do you remember that scene
between her and Mirabell, when she attaches 'provisos' to her consent to
marry him? She says, 'We must be as strange as though we had been
married a long time, and as well bred as though we had never been
married at all.' And it seems to me that she was right, and that you are
right, Shelmerdene. Nowadays there is a reaction against convention, and
such people make life unclean. They talk about being 'natural,' and
succeed only in being boorish; they think that the opposite of 'natural'
is 'artificial,' but that is absurd, for why was the title 'gentleman'
invented if not for the man who could put a presentable gloss on his
primitive, 'natural' instincts in polite company? There must always be
etiquette in life and in love, and there is no friendship or passion
which can justify familiarity trying to break down the barriers which
hide every man and every woman from the outside world. Men grow mentally
limp with their careless way of living; and life is like walking on the
Embankment at three o'clock in the morning, when London is very silent:
and if you lounge along as your feet take you, your hands deep in your
pockets, being 'natural,' you will see very little but the general
darkness of the night and the patch of pavement on which your eyes are
glued: but if you walk upright, your mind taut and rigid as it always
must be except when asleep, then you will see many things, how the river
looks strange beneath the stars, the mystery of Battersea Park which
might, in the darkness, be an endless forest of distantly murmuring
trees, the figure of a policeman by the bridge, a light here and there
in the windows of the houses in Cheyne Walk, which might mean birth or
death or nothing, but is food for your mind because you are living and
interested in all living things. It was probably some wise philosopher,
an Epicurean, and not a buffoon, as is supposed, who first uttered that
saying which is now become farcical, that 'distance lends enchantment.'
For he did not mean the material distance of yards and furlongs and
miles, but the distance of necessary strangeness, of inevitable mystery,
and of a rigid mental etiquette, the good manners of the mind. And that
is why Henry James was a great man, and with a great propaganda. He was
subtle with his propaganda--an ugly word which can be used for other
things than the bawling of tiresome men in this Park on Sunday
afternoons--for he could do nothing without an almost obvious subtlety;
but it is there in all his work, a teaching for all who care to be
taught. In the world of Henry James, for he was more fastidious than
Meredith or Mr. Hardy and would have nothing to do with this world as it
was, but made one of his own, in this world the men and women are not
just men and women, with thoughts and doings bluntly and coarsely
expressed as in real life; but he showed them to be subtle creatures,
something higher than clever animals, with different shades of meaning
in every word--what fool was it who said that a word spoken must be a
word meant!--with barriers of reserve and strangeness between each
person; and their conversation is not just a string of words, but a
thing of different values, in which the mind of the speaker and the
listener is alive and rigid to every current of refined thought which is
often unexpressed but understood. I think 'thin' is the right epithet
for the minds of James' characters; and the difference between them and
ordinary people is that within us there is a sort of sieve between the
mind and the mouth, or in whatever way we choose to be articulate,
which, unlike ordinary sieves, allows only the coarse grains to drop
through and be given out, but keeps the subtleties and the refinement to
itself; but between the minds and the articulation of James' people
there are no sieves, and the inner subtleties and shades are given
expression. There is a strangeness, a kind of mental tautness, a
never-ceasing etiquette, about them all."
But then I laughed, and when she asked me why I did not go on, I said
that I had suddenly realised that I had strayed from the subject, and
that whereas she had begun to talk of love I had ended by talking of
Henry James. "It is all about the same thing," she said, "for we are
both grumbling at that mental limpness which makes people think that
they need make no effort, but that life will go on around them just the
same. And that is why I think one of the most dreadful sights is a man
asleep. No one should see another person asleep; it seems to me the most
private thing in the world, and if I were a man and a woman had watched
me as I lay asleep, I should want to kill her so that she should not go
about and tell people how I had looked as I lay stupidly unconscious of
everything around me. Only once I have seen a man asleep, and that was
the end of a perfect love affair. I had suddenly gone to see him in his
chambers, and when his man showed me into his room I found him lying
there on the sofa, with his head thrown back on a cushion, sleeping. His
man said that he must be very tired as he had been working all night,
and that it would be kind of me not to wake him. I waited in the room
for an hour, trying not to look at him but to read a book, but his
breathing filled the room and I could not take my eyes away from him;
and at the end of an hour I felt that my love had gone from me minute by
minute as I had looked at him, and that now I might just as well get up
and go away, for I did not care any longer if he was asleep or awake. So
I went away, but I do not know if he woke up as the door closed behind
me."
"And did you ever tell him why you had ceased to love him?" I asked.
"I couldn't do that," she said, "because if he had not understood me I
should have hated him, and I do not like hating people whom I have
loved. But now I dine with him from time to time, and I can see that he
is still wondering how it was that on Monday I loved him and on Tuesday
I didn't."
As we walked through the Park towards the Park Lane gates, it seemed to
me wonderful that this day, one among many days, should already be
passing, irrevocably, and that what we had said and what we had felt as
we sat on chairs in the sun would never be repeated, would never come
again except perhaps in a different way and with different surprises.
And when I asked her if she felt the happiness of the afternoon, she
laughed slightly and said that she liked the Park this spring afternoon.
"It is perfect now," she said, "but when we come here in a month's or
two months' time it will be too warm to sit in the sun and talk about
love and Henry James, and in the autumn we will sit down for a moment
and shiver a little and pity the brown leaves falling, and in the winter
we will walk quickly through because it will be too cold; and then in
Park Lane you will put me into a taxi and stand by the door with your
hat in your hand, and say good-bye. For the seasons will have gone
round, and we shall each have given what the other will take, and when I
look at you you will be different, and when you look at me you will not
see, as you see now, my eyes looking far away over your shoulder, and
you will not wonder what it is that I am looking at. For then, as you
stand by the door of the taxi and smile your good-bye at me, the end
will have come, and there will be nothing to look at in the distance
over your shoulders. And next year you will be an 'old friend,' and I
shall ring you up and say that I am very sorry I can't lunch and walk in
the Park with you that day because an Oxfordish young man has fallen in
love with me, and it will be amusing to see what sort of lunch he will
order when he is in love.
"But is a rose less beautiful because it is sure to die?" she said.
But the winter she spoke of was not of the seasons, for it rushed
incontinently in upon us between the summer and the autumn, and I, too,
was delicately added to the sedate statuary of Shelmerdene's "old
friends...."
And now I am in this strange library whose rows of books stare so
unfamiliarly at me. The table at which I write is by the big French
windows, and I must be careful to keep my elbows from sprawling as they
would, for everything is covered with dust, and if I were fussy and
wiped it away I should raise a great cloud of it around my head.... All
is quiet and leisurely this morning. Outside there is no sun or mildness
to make me restless and self-conscious about my laziness; it is one of
those days on which one need not think of doing anything which will be
"good for one," and until about tea-time the outside world will be
better to look at than to breathe. For the windows show me a very dark,
wet-laden garden, and the steady rain falling among the last leaves of
the trees and their myriad dead comrades on the grass and gravel makes
that "swish" which comes so coolly and pleasantly to ears which need not
be wet with it. But at about five o'clock, if the rain has stopped by
then, I shall go out and walk about the garden for an hour or so; I
shall walk to the top of the Divvil Mound, which lies above half the
county to the west and, on a fine day, gives your eyes a rugged length
of the distant Cheviots, and there I shall look up to the sky and draw
in long draughts of the fresh rain-scented air, and feel that I shall
never be ill again in all my life; and as I walk back under the trees
the wet will drip on to me and I shall splash myself here and there; but
I shall not swear, for my clothes are done for the day, and when I get
in I shall have a bath and change, and feel all new and clean for
whatever the evening may bring.
Beside me now is an envelope with an American stamp, and the vaguely
woebegone look which readdressed envelopes have; for it followed me here
some ten days ago from London, reaching me the same morning that I sat
down to write this (for it has taken me more than a week of long
mornings to write these few thousand words) which was at first to have
been an essay on London, but seems now to have fallen into the state of
a personal confession. Many times I have taken out this letter and
re-read it, for it is a strange letter, such a one as a man may receive
only once in his life. This letter needs no answer, for it is dead like
the person who sent it; and that the sender should not now care if I
read it or not gives me a queer feeling of triviality; for in her letter
she asks me to write back, not knowing then that a letter from a dead
person is the only sort one need not answer without blame or reproach.
The day has long passed when, if you felt inclined, you could moralise
on death and the frailty of human life to your heart's content and be
sure of a hearing. I am sorry that the commonplaces on death find now
only impatient readers, for they make pleasant reading in the pioneer
essayists from poor Overbury to Steele; for death, with all its
embroideries and trappings of destiny and Nemesis, is a pretty way of
exercising that philosophy which no one is without. I envy the courage
of the man who could now write an essay "On Death" as Bacon did once,
laying down the law of it with no hint of an apology for the monotony of
his subject; but there is now no essayist or philosopher with the calm
and aloof assurance and arrogance of a Bacon, that you might see, after
the last written words on the most trivial theme, this last seal, as
though he were God, "Thus thought Francis Bacon." But of death there is
nothing trivial and pleasant left to be said, and as a subject it has
grown monotonous, except for the inevitable slayer and the slain, and
that prevalent instinct for fair play ("the essential quality of the
looker-on") which interests itself in the manner of the slaying.
But this letter has seemed strange to me because, perhaps, I shall never
again receive a letter whose writer is dead, and who, when writing it,
dreamt of all material things but death. Were I Oscar Wilde I might
wonder now if English-women who die in America come back to London; for
there is much of London in the letter: "I should like to be in London
to-day--Bloomsbury London, Mayfair London, Chelsea London, London of the
small restaurants and large draughts of wine, London of the intellectual
half-lights, drone of flippant phrases and racy epigrams, with a thin
fog outside; London of a resigned good humour, of modulated debauch
moving like her traffic, strips of colour through dusk, and drab,
optimistic, noisy solitude, tranquillity of incessant sound: autumn
lamplight, busy park, sheep, men, women, prostitutes: doors slamming,
people coming in and sitting by the fire, more cigarettes, cakes, shops,
myriads of people...."
But I would not like to be in London this month of November.
_The London Venture_: IV
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