"She is not Cleopatra, but she is at least Charmian," wrote Keats,
conscious that his damsel was not in the vanward of the pageant of
ladies. One may divine that he counted the ways wherein she was not
Cleopatra, the touches whereby she fell short of and differed from, nay,
in which she mimicked, the Queen.
In like manner many of us have for some years past boasted of our
appreciation of the inferior beauty, the substitute, the waiting
gentlewoman of corrupt or corruptible heart; Keats confessed, but did not
boast. It is a vaunt now, an emulation, who shall discover her beauty,
who shall discern her.
She is most conspicuous in the atmosphere in smoke "effects," in the
"lurid," the "mystery"; such are the perfervid words. But let us take
the natural and authentic light as our symbol of Cleopatra, her sprightly
port, her infinite jest, her bluest vein, her variety, her laugh. "O
Eastern star!"
Men in cities look upward not much more than animals, and these--except
the dog when he bays the moon--look skyward not at all. The events of
the sky do not come and go for the citizens, do not visibly approach and
withdraw, threaten and pardon; they merely happen. And even when the sun
so condescends as to face them at the level of their own horizon (say
from the western end of the Bayswater Road), when he searches out the
eyes that have neglected him all day, finds a way between their narrowing
lids, looks straight into their unwelcoming pupils, explores the careful
wrinkles, singles and numbers the dull hairs, even, I say, to sudden
sunset in our dim climate, the Londoner makes no reply; he would rather
look into puddles than into the pools of light among clouds.
Yet the light is as characteristic of a country as is its landscape. So
that I would travel for the sake of a character of early morning, for a
quality of noonday, or a tone of afternoon, or an accident of moonrise,
or a colour of dusk, at least as far as for a mountain, a cathedral,
rivers, or men. The light is more important than what it illuminates.
When Mr. Tomkins--a person of Dickens's earliest invention--calls his
fellow-boarders from the breakfast-table to the window, and with emotion
shows them the effect of sunshine upon the left side of a neighbouring
chimney-pot, he is far from cutting the grotesque figure that the
humourist intended to point out to banter. I am not sure that the
chimney-pot with the pure light upon it was not more beautiful than a
whole black Greek or a whole black Gothic building in the adulterated
light of a customary London day. Nor is the pleasure that many writers,
and a certain number of painters, tell us they owe to such adulteration
anything other than a sign of derogation--in a word, a pleasure in the
secondary thing.
Are we the better artists for our preference of the waiting-woman? It is
a strange claim. The search for the beauty of the less-beautiful is a
modern enterprise, ingenious in its minor pranks, insolent in its
greater. And its chief ignobility is the love of marred, defiled,
disordered, dulled, and imperfect skies, the skies of cities.
Some will tell us that the unveiled light is too clear or sharp for art.
So much the worse for art; but even on that plea the limitations of art
are better respected by natural mist, cloudy gloom of natural rain,
natural twilight before night, or natural twilight--Corot's--before day,
than by the artificial dimness of our unlovely towns. Those, too, who
praise the "mystery" of smoke are praising rather a mystification than a
mystery; and must be unaware of the profounder mysteries of light. Light
is all mystery when you face the sun, and every particle of the
innumerable atmosphere carries its infinitesimal shadow.
Moreover, it is only in some parts of the world that we should ask for
even natural veils. In California we may, not because the light is too
luminous, but because it is not tender. Clear and not tender in
California, tender and not clear in England; light in Italy and in Greece
is both tender and clear.
When one complains of the ill-luck of modern utilities, the sympathetic
listener is apt to agree, but to agree wrongly by denouncing the electric
light as something modern to be deplored. But the electric light is the
one success of the last century. It is never out of harmony with natural
things--villages, ancient streets of cities, where it makes the most
beautiful of all street-lighting, swung from house to opposite house in
Genoa or Rome. With no shock, except a shock of pleasure, does the
judicious traveller, entering some small sub-alpine hamlet, find the
electric light, fairly, sparingly spaced, slung from tree to tree over
the little road, and note it again in the frugal wine-shop, and solitary
and clear over the church portal.
Yet, forsooth, if yielding to the suggestions of your restless hobby, you
denounce, in any company, the spoiling of your Italy, the hearer, calling
up a "mumping visnomy," thinks he echoes your complaint by his sigh, "Ah,
yes--the electric light; you meet it everywhere now; so modern, so
disenchanting." It is, on the contrary, enchanting. It is as natural as
lightning. By all means let all the waterfalls in all the Alps be
"harnessed," as the lamentation runs, if their servitude gives us
electric light. For thus the power of the waterfall kindles a lovely
lamp. All this to be done by the simple force of gravitation--the
powerful fall of water. "Wonderful, all that water coming down!" cried
the tourist at Niagara, and the Irishman said, "Why wouldn't it?" He
recognised the simplicity of that power. It is a second-rate
passion--that for the waterfall, and often exacting in regard to visitors
from town. "I trudged unwillingly," says Dr. Johnson, "and was not sorry
to find it dry." It was very, very second-rate of an American admirer of
scenery to name a waterfall in the Yosemite Valley (and it bears the name
to-day) the "Bridal Veil." His Indian predecessor had called it, because
it was most audible in menacing weather, "The Voice of the Evil Wind." In
fact, your cascade is dearer to every sentimentalist than the sky.
Standing near the folding-over place of Niagara, at the top of the fall,
I looked across the perpetual rainbow of the foam, and saw the whole
further sky deflowered by the formless, edgeless, languid, abhorrent murk
of smoke from the nearest town. Much rather would I see that water put
to use than the sky so outraged. As it is, only by picking one's way
between cities can one walk under, or as it were in, a pure sky. The
horizon in Venice is thick and ochreous, and no one cares; the sky of
Milan is defiled all round. In England I must choose a path alertly; and
so does now and then a wary, fortunate, fastidious wind that has so found
his exact, uncharted way, between this smoke and that, as to clear me a
clean moonrise, and heavenly heavens.
There was an ominous prophecy to Charmian. "You shall outlive the lady
whom you serve." She has outlived her in every city in Europe; but only
for the time of setting straight her crown--the last servility. She
could not live but by comparison with the Queen.