Walking the other day in Cheapside I saw some turtles in Mr. Sweeting's
window, and was tempted to stay and look at them. As I did so I was
struck not more by the defences with which they were hedged about, than
by the fatuousness of trying to hedge that in at all which, if hedged
thoroughly, must die of its own defencefulness. The holes for the head
and feet through which the turtle leaks out, as it were, on to the
exterior world, and through which it again absorbs the exterior world
into itself--"catching on" through them to things that are thus both
turtle and not turtle at one and the same time--these holes stultify the
armour, and show it to have been designed by a creature with more of
faithfulness to a fixed idea, and hence one-sidedness, than of that quick
sense of relative importances and their changes, which is the main factor
of good living.
The turtle obviously had no sense of proportion; it differed so widely
from myself that I could not comprehend it; and as this word occurred to
me, it occurred also that until my body comprehended its body in a
physical material sense, neither would my mind be able to comprehend its
mind with any thoroughness. For unity of mind can only be consummated by
unity of body; everything, therefore, must be in some respects both knave
and fool to all that which has not eaten it, or by which it has not been
eaten. As long as the turtle was in the window and I in the street
outside, there was no chance of our comprehending one another.
Nevertheless I knew that I could get it to agree with me if I could so
effectually button-hole and fasten on to it as to eat it. Most men have
an easy method with turtle soup, and I had no misgiving but that if I
could bring my first premise to bear I should prove the better reasoner.
My difficulty lay in this initial process, for I had not with me the
argument that would alone compel Mr. Sweeting think that I ought to be
allowed to convert the turtles--I mean I had no money in my pocket. No
missionary enterprise can be carried on without any money at all, but
even so small a sum as half-a-crown would, I suppose, have enabled me to
bring the turtle partly round, and with many half-crowns I could in time
no doubt convert the lot, for the turtle needs must go where the money
drives. If, as is alleged, the world stands on a turtle, the turtle
stands on money. No money no turtle. As for money, that stands on
opinion, credit, trust, faith--things that, though highly material in
connection with money, are still of immaterial essence.
The steps are perfectly plain. The men who caught the turtles brought a
fairly strong and definite opinion to bear upon them, that passed into
action, and later on into money. They thought the turtles would come
that way, and verified their opinion; on this, will and action were
generated, with the result that the men turned the turtles on their backs
and carried them off. Mr. Sweeting touched these men with money, which
is the outward and visible sign of verified opinion. The customer
touches Mr. Sweeting with money, Mr. Sweeting touches the waiter and the
cook with money. They touch the turtle with skill and verified opinion.
Finally, the customer applies the clinching argument that brushes all
sophisms aside, and bids the turtle stand protoplasm to protoplasm with
himself, to know even as it is known.
But it must be all touch, touch, touch; skill, opinion, power, and money,
passing in and out with one another in any order we like, but still link
to link and touch to touch. If there is failure anywhere in respect of
opinion, skill, power, or money, either as regards quantity or quality,
the chain can be no stronger than its weakest link, and the turtle and
the clinching argument will fly asunder. Of course, if there is an
initial failure in connection, through defect in any member of the chain,
or of connection between the links, it will no more be attempted to bring
the turtle and the clinching argument together, than it will to chain up
a dog with two pieces of broken chain that are disconnected. The contact
throughout must be conceived as absolute; and yet perfect contact is
inconceivable by us, for on becoming perfect it ceases to be contact, and
becomes essential, once for all inseverable, identity. The most absolute
contact short of this is still contact by courtesy only. So here, as
everywhere else, Eurydice glides off as we are about to grasp her. We
can see nothing face to face; our utmost seeing is but a fumbling of
blind finger-ends in an overcrowded pocket.
Presently my own blind finger-ends fished up the conclusion, that as I
had neither time nor money to spend on perfecting the chain that would
put me in full spiritual contact with Mr. Sweeting's turtles, I had
better leave them to complete their education at some one else's expense
rather than mine, so I walked on towards the Bank. As I did so it struck
me how continually we are met by this melting of one existence into
another. The limits of the body seem well defined enough as definitions
go, but definitions seldom go far. What, for example, can seem more
distinct from a man than his banker or his solicitor? Yet these are
commonly so much parts of him that he can no more cut them off and grow
new ones, than he can grow new legs or arms; neither must he wound his
solicitor; a wound in the solicitor is a very serious thing. As for his
bank--failure of his bank's action may be as fatal to a man as failure of
his heart. I have said nothing about the medical or spiritual adviser,
but most men grow into the society that surrounds them by the help of
these four main tap-roots, and not only into the world of humanity, but
into the universe at large. We can, indeed, grow butchers, bakers, and
greengrocers, almost _ad libitum_, but these are low developments, and
correspond to skin, hair, or finger-nails. Those of us again who are not
highly enough organised to have grown a solicitor or banker can generally
repair the loss of whatever social organisation they may possess as
freely as lizards are said to grow new tails; but this with the higher
social, as well as organic, developments is only possible to a very
limited extent.
The doctrine of metempsychosis, or transmigration of souls--a doctrine to
which the foregoing considerations are for the most part easy
corollaries--crops up no matter in what direction we allow our thoughts
to wander. And we meet instances of transmigration of body as well as of
soul. I do not mean that both body and soul have transmigrated together,
far from it; but that, as we can often recognise a transmigrated mind in
an alien body, so we not less often see a body that is clearly only a
transmigration, linked on to some one else's new and alien soul. We meet
people every day whose bodies are evidently those of men and women long
dead, but whose appearance we know through their portraits. We see them
going about in omnibuses, railway carriages, and in all public places.
The cards have been shuffled, and they have drawn fresh lots in life and
nationalities, but any one fairly well up in mediaeval and last century
portraiture knows them at a glance.
Going down once towards Italy I saw a young man in the train whom I
recognised, only he seemed to have got younger. He was with a friend,
and his face was in continual play, but for some little time I puzzled in
vain to recollect where it was that I had seen him before. All of a
sudden I remembered he was King Francis I. of France. I had hitherto
thought the face of this king impossible, but when I saw it in play I
understood it. His great contemporary Henry VIII. keeps a restaurant in
Oxford Street. Falstaff drove one of the St. Gothard diligences for many
years, and only retired when the railway was opened. Titian once made me
a pair of boots at Vicenza, and not very good ones. At Modena I had my
hair cut by a young man whom I perceived to be Raffaelle. The model who
sat to him for his celebrated Madonnas is first lady in a confectionery
establishment at Montreal. She has a little motherly pimple on the left
side of her nose that is misleading at first, but on examination she is
readily recognised; probably Raffaelle's model had the pimple too, but
Raffaelle left it out--as he would.
Handel, of course, is Madame Patey. Give Madame Patey Handel's wig and
clothes, and there would be no telling her from Handel. It is not only
that the features and the shape of the head are the same, but there is a
certain imperiousness of expression and attitude about Handel which he
hardly attempts to conceal in Madame Patey. It is a curious coincidence
that he should continue to be such an incomparable renderer of his own
music. Pope Julius II. was the late Mr. Darwin. Rameses II. is a blind
woman now, and stands in Holborn, holding a tin mug. I never could
understand why I always found myself humming "They oppressed them with
burthens" when I passed her, till one day I was looking in Mr. Spooner's
window in the Strand, and saw a photograph of Rameses II. Mary Queen of
Scots wears surgical boots and is subject to fits, near the Horse Shoe in
Tottenham Court Road.
Michael Angelo is a commissionaire; I saw him on board the _Glen Rosa_,
which used to run every day from London to Clacton-on-Sea and back. It
gave me quite a turn when I saw him coming down the stairs from the upper
deck, with his bronzed face, flattened nose, and with the familiar bar
upon his forehead. I never liked Michael Angelo, and never shall, but I
am afraid of him, and was near trying to hide when I saw him coming
towards me. He had not got his commissionaire's uniform on, and I did
not know he was one till I met him a month or so later in the Strand.
When we got to Blackwall the music struck up and people began to dance. I
never saw a man dance so much in my life. He did not miss a dance all
the way to Clacton, nor all the way back again, and when not dancing he
was flirting and cracking jokes. I could hardly believe my eyes when I
reflected that this man had painted the famous "Last Judgment," and had
made all those statues.
Dante is, or was a year or two ago, a waiter at Brissago on the Lago
Maggiore, only he is better-tempered-looking, and has a more intellectual
expression. He gave me his ideas upon beauty: "Tutto ch' e vero e
bello," he exclaimed, with all his old self-confidence. I am not afraid
of Dante. I know people by their friends, and he went about with Virgil,
so I said with some severity, "No, Dante, il naso della Signora Robinson
e vero, ma non e bello"; and he admitted I was right. Beatrice's name is
Towler; she is waitress at a small inn in German Switzerland. I used to
sit at my window and hear people call "Towler, Towler, Towler," fifty
times in a forenoon. She was the exact antithesis to Abra; Abra, if I
remember, used to come before they called her name, but no matter how
often they called Towler, every one came before she did. I suppose they
spelt her name Taula, but to me it sounded Towler; I never, however, met
any one else with this name. She was a sweet, artless little hussy, who
made me play the piano to her, and she said it was lovely. Of course I
only played my own compositions; so I believed her, and it all went off
very nicely. I thought it might save trouble if I did not tell her who
she really was, so I said nothing about it.
I met Socrates once. He was my muleteer on an excursion which I will not
name, for fear it should identify the man. The moment I saw my guide I
knew he was somebody, but for the life of me I could not remember who.
All of a sudden it flashed across me that he was Socrates. He talked
enough for six, but it was all in _dialetto_, so I could not understand
him, nor, when I had discovered who he was, did I much try to do so. He
was a good creature, a trifle given to stealing fruit and vegetables, but
an amiable man enough. He had had a long day with his mule and me, and
he only asked me five francs. I gave him ten, for I pitied his poor old
patched boots, and there was a meekness about him that touched me. "And
now, Socrates," said I at parting, "we go on our several ways, you to
steal tomatoes, I to filch ideas from other people; for the rest--which
of these two roads will be the better going, our father which is in
heaven knows, but we know not."
I have never seen Mendelssohn, but there is a fresco of him on the
terrace, or open-air dining-room, of an inn at Chiavenna. He is not
called Mendelssohn, but I knew him by his legs. He is in the costume of
a dandy of some five-and-forty years ago, is smoking a cigar, and appears
to be making an offer of marriage to his cook. Beethoven both my friend
Mr. H. Festing Jones and I have had the good fortune to meet; he is an
engineer now, and does not know one note from another; he has quite lost
his deafness, is married, and is, of course, a little squat man with the
same refractory hair that he always had. It was very interesting to
watch him, and Jones remarked that before the end of dinner he had become
positively posthumous. One morning I was told the Beethovens were going
away, and before long I met their two heavy boxes being carried down the
stairs. The boxes were so squab and like their owners, that I half
thought for a moment that they were inside, and should hardly have been
surprised to see them spring up like a couple of Jacks-in-the-box. "Sono
indentro?" said I, with a frown of wonder, pointing to the boxes. The
porters knew what I meant, and laughed. But there is no end to the list
of people whom I have been able to recognise, and before I had got
through it myself, I found I had walked some distance, and had
involuntarily paused in front of a second-hand bookstall.
I do not like books. I believe I have the smallest library of any
literary man in London, and I have no wish to increase it. I keep my
books at the British Museum and at Mudie's, and it makes me very angry if
any one gives me one for my private library. I once heard two ladies
disputing in a railway carriage as to whether one of them had or had not
been wasting money. "I spent it in books," said the accused, "and it's
not wasting money to buy books." "Indeed, my dear, I think it is," was
the rejoinder, and in practice I agree with it. Webster's Dictionary,
Whitaker's Almanack, and Bradshaw's Railway Guide should be sufficient
for any ordinary library; it will be time enough to go beyond these when
the mass of useful and entertaining matter which they provide has been
mastered. Nevertheless, I admit that sometimes, if not particularly
busy, I stop at a second-hand bookstall and turn over a book or two from
mere force of habit.
I know not what made me pick up a copy of AEschylus--of course in an
English version--or rather I know not what made AEschylus take up with
me, for he took me rather than I him; but no sooner had he got me than he
began puzzling me, as he has done any time this forty years, to know
wherein his transcendent merit can be supposed to lie. To me he is, like
the greater number of classics in all ages and countries, a literary
Struldbrug, rather than a true ambrosia-fed immortal. There are true
immortals, but they are few and far between; most classics are as great
impostors dead as they were when living, and while posing as gods are,
five-sevenths of them, only Struldbrugs. It comforts me to remember that
Aristophanes liked AEschylus no better than I do. True, he praises him
by comparison with Sophocles and Euripides, but he only does so that he
may run down these last more effectively. Aristophanes is a safe man to
follow, nor do I see why it should not be as correct to laugh with him as
to pull a long face with the Greek Professors; but this is neither here
nor there, for no one really cares about AEschylus; the more interesting
question is how he contrived to make so many people for so many years
pretend to care about him.
Perhaps he married somebody's daughter. If a man would get hold of the
public ear, he must pay, marry, or fight. I have never understood that
AEschylus was a man of means, and the fighters do not write poetry, so I
suppose he must have married a theatrical manager's daughter, and got his
plays brought out that way. The ear of any age or country is like its
land, air, and water; it seems limitless but is really limited, and is
already in the keeping of those who naturally enough will have no
squatting on such valuable property. It is written and talked up to as
closely as the means of subsistence are bred up to by a teeming
population. There is not a square inch of it but is in private hands,
and he who would freehold any part of it must do so by purchase,
marriage, or fighting, in the usual way--and fighting gives the longest,
safest tenure. The public itself has hardly more voice in the question
who shall have its ear, than the land has in choosing its owners. It is
farmed as those who own it think most profitable to themselves, and small
blame to them; nevertheless, it has a residuum of mulishness which the
land has not, and does sometimes dispossess its tenants. It is in this
residuum that those who fight place their hope and trust.
Or perhaps AEschylus squared the leading critics of his time. When one
comes to think of it, he must have done so, for how is it conceivable
that such plays should have had such runs if he had not? I met a lady
one year in Switzerland who had some parrots that always travelled with
her and were the idols of her life. These parrots would not let any one
read aloud in their presence, unless they heard their own names
introduced from time to time. If these were freely interpolated into the
text they would remain as still as stones, for they thought the reading
was about themselves. If it was not about them it could not be allowed.
The leaders of literature are like these parrots; they do not look at
what a man writes, nor if they did would they understand it much better
than the parrots do; but they like the sound of their own names, and if
these are freely interpolated in a tone they take as friendly, they may
even give ear to an outsider. Otherwise they will scream him off if they
can.
I should not advise any one with ordinary independence of mind to attempt
the public ear unless he is confident that he can out-lung and out-last
his own generation; for if he has any force, people will and ought to be
on their guard against him, inasmuch as there is no knowing where he may
not take them. Besides, they have staked their money on the wrong men so
often without suspecting it, that when there comes one whom they do
suspect it would be madness not to bet against him. True, he may die
before he has out-screamed his opponents, but that has nothing to do with
it. If his scream was well pitched it will sound clearer when he is
dead. We do not know what death is. If we know so little about life
which we have experienced, how shall we know about death which we have
not--and in the nature of things never can? Every one, as I said years
ago in "Alps and Sanctuaries," is an immortal to himself, for he cannot
know that he is dead until he is dead, and when dead how can he know
anything about anything? All we know is, that even the humblest dead may
live long after all trace of the body has disappeared; we see them doing
it in the bodies and memories of those that come after them; and not a
few live so much longer and more effectually than is desirable, that it
has been necessary to get rid of them by Act of Parliament. It is love
that alone gives life, and the truest life is that which we live not in
ourselves but vicariously in others, and with which we have no concern.
Our concern is so to order ourselves that we may be of the number of them
that enter into life--although we know it not.
AEschylus did so order himself; but his life is not of that inspiriting
kind that can be won through fighting the good fight only--or being
believed to have fought it. His voice is the echo of a drone,
drone-begotten and drone-sustained. It is not a tone that a man must
utter or die--nay, even though he die; and likely enough half the
allusions and hard passages in AEschylus of which we can make neither
head nor tail are in reality only puffs of some of the literary leaders
of his time.
The lady above referred to told me more about her parrots. She was like
a Nasmyth's hammer going slow--very gentle, but irresistible. She always
read the newspaper to them. What was the use of having a newspaper if
one did not read it to one's parrots?
"And have you divined," I asked, "to which side they incline in
politics?"
"They do not like Mr. Gladstone," was the somewhat freezing answer; "this
is the only point on which we disagree, for I adore him. Don't ask more
about this, it is a great grief to me. I tell them everything," she
continued, "and hide no secret from them."
"But can any parrot be trusted to keep a secret?"
"Mine can."
"And on Sundays do you give them the same course of reading as on a week-
day, or do you make a difference?"
"On Sundays I always read them a genealogical chapter from the Old or New
Testament, for I can thus introduce their names without profanity. I
always keep tea by me in case they should ask for it in the night, and I
have an Etna to warm it for them; they take milk and sugar. The old
white-headed clergyman came to see them last night; it was very painful,
for Jocko reminded him so strongly of his late . . . "
I thought she was going to say "wife," but it proved to have been only of
a parrot that he had once known and loved.
One evening she was in difficulties about the quarantine, which was
enforced that year on the Italian frontier. The local doctor had gone
down that morning to see the Italian doctor and arrange some details.
"Then, perhaps, my dear," she said to her husband, "he is the
quarantine." "No, my love," replied her husband. "The quarantine is not
a person, it is a place where they put people"; but she would not be
comforted, and suspected the quarantine as an enemy that might at any
moment pounce out upon her and her parrots. So a lady told me once that
she had been in like trouble about the anthem. She read in her prayer-
book that in choirs and places where they sing "here followeth the
anthem," yet the person with this most mysteriously sounding name never
did follow. They had a choir, and no one could say the church was not a
place where they sang, for they did sing--both chants and hymns. Why,
then, this persistent slackness on the part of the anthem, who at this
juncture should follow her papa, the rector, into the reading-desk? No
doubt he would come some day, and then what would he be like? Fair or
dark? Tall or short? Would he be bald and wear spectacles like papa, or
would he be young and good-looking? Anyhow, there was something wrong,
for it was announced that he would follow, and he never did follow;
therefore there was no knowing what he might not do next.
I heard of the parrots a year or two later as giving lessons in Italian
to an English maid. I do not know what their terms were. Alas! since
then both they and their mistress have joined the majority. When the
poor lady felt her end was near she desired (and the responsibility for
this must rest with her, not me) that the birds might be destroyed, as
fearing that they might come to be neglected, and knowing that they could
never be loved again as she had loved them. On being told that all was
over, she said, "Thank you," and immediately expired.
Reflecting in such random fashion, and strolling with no greater method,
I worked my way back through Cheapside and found myself once more in
front of Sweeting's window. Again the turtles attracted me. They were
alive, and so far at any rate they agreed with me. Nay, they had eyes,
mouths, legs, if not arms, and feet, so there was much in which we were
both of a mind, but surely they must be mistaken in arming themselves so
very heavily. Any creature on getting what the turtle aimed at would
overreach itself and be landed not in safety but annihilation. It should
have no communion with the outside world at all, for death could creep in
wherever the creature could creep out; and it must creep out somewhere if
it was to hook on to outside things. What death can be more absolute
than such absolute isolation? Perfect death, indeed, if it were
attainable (which it is not), is as near perfect security as we can
reach, but it is not the kind of security aimed at by any animal that is
at the pains of defending itself. For such want to have things both
ways, desiring the livingness of life without its perils, and the safety
of death without its deadness, and some of us do actually get this for a
considerable time, but we do not get it by plating ourselves with armour
as the turtle does. We tried this in the Middle Ages, and no longer mock
ourselves with the weight of armour that our forefathers carried in
battle. Indeed the more deadly the weapons of attack become the more we
go into the fight slug-wise.
Slugs have ridden their contempt for defensive armour as much to death as
the turtles their pursuit of it. They have hardly more than skin enough
to hold themselves together; they court death every time they cross the
road. Yet death comes not to them more than to the turtle, whose
defences are so great that there is little left inside to be defended.
Moreover, the slugs fare best in the long run, for turtles are dying out,
while slugs are not, and there must be millions of slugs all the world
over for every single turtle. Of the two vanities, therefore, that of
the slug seems most substantial.
In either case the creature thinks itself safe, but is sure to be found
out sooner or later; nor is it easy to explain this mockery save by
reflecting that everything must have its meat in due season, and that
meat can only be found for such a multitude of mouths by giving
everything as meat in due season to something else. This is like the
Kilkenny cats, or robbing Peter to pay Paul; but it is the way of the
world, and as every animal must contribute in kind to the picnic of the
universe, one does not see what better arrangement could be made than the
providing each race with a hereditary fallacy, which shall in the end get
it into a scrape, but which shall generally stand the wear and tear of
life for some time. "_Do ut des_" is the writing on all flesh to him
that eats it; and no creature is dearer to itself than it is to some
other that would devour it.
Nor is there any statement or proposition more invulnerable than living
forms are. Propositions prey upon and are grounded upon one another just
like living forms. They support one another as plants and animals do;
they are based ultimately on credit, or faith, rather than the cash of
irrefragable conviction. The whole universe is carried on on the credit
system, and if the mutual confidence on which it is based were to
collapse, it must itself collapse immediately. Just or unjust, it lives
by faith; it is based on vague and impalpable opinion that by some
inscrutable process passes into will and action, and is made manifest in
matter and in flesh: it is meteoric--suspended in midair; it is the
baseless fabric of a vision so vast, so vivid, and so gorgeous that no
base can seem more broad than such stupendous baselessness, and yet any
man can bring it about his ears by being over-curious; when faith fails a
system based on faith fails also.
Whether the universe is really a paying concern, or whether it is an
inflated bubble that must burst sooner or later, this is another matter.
If people were to demand cash payment in irrefragable certainty for
everything that they have taken hitherto as paper money on the credit of
the bank of public opinion, is there money enough behind it all to stand
so great a drain even on so great a reserve? Probably there is not, but
happily there can be no such panic, for even though the cultured classes
may do so, the uncultured are too dull to have brains enough to commit
such stupendous folly. It takes a long course of academic training to
educate a man up to the standard which he must reach before he can
entertain such questions seriously, and by a merciful dispensation of
Providence, university training is almost as costly as it is
unprofitable. The majority will thus be always unable to afford it, and
will base their opinions on mother wit and current opinion rather than on
demonstration.
So I turned my steps homewards; I saw a good many more things on my way
home, but I was told that I was not to see more this time than I could
get into twelve pages of the _Universal Review_; I must therefore reserve
any remark which I think might perhaps entertain the reader for another
occasion.