who laugh at fate, and look good-humouredly for them; life's only evil
to him who wears it awkwardly, and philosophic resignation works as many
miracles as Harlequin; grumble, and you go to the dogs in a wretched
style; make _mots_ on your own misery, and you've no idea how pleasant a
_trajet_ even drifting "to the bad" may become.
* * *
The statue that Strathmore at once moulded and marred was his life: the
statue which we all, as we sketch it, endow with the strength of the
Milo, the glory of the Belvedere, the winged brilliance of the Perseus!
which ever lies at its best; when the chisel has dropped from our hands,
as they grow powerless and paralysed with death; like the mutilated
torso; a fragment unfinished and broken, food for the ants and worms,
buried in the sands that will quickly suck it down from sight or memory,
with but touches of glory and of value left here and there, only faintly
serving to show what _might have been_, had we had time, had we had
wisdom!
* * *
With which satirical reflection on his times and his order drifting
through his mind, Strathmore's thoughts floated onward to a piece of
statecraft then numbered among the delicate diplomacies and intricate
embroglie of Europe, whose moves absorbed him as the finesses of a
problem absorb a skilful chess-player, and from thence stretched onwards
to his future, in which he lived, like all men of dominant ambition, far
more than he lived in his present. It was a future brilliant, secure,
brightening in its lustre, and strengthening in its power, with each
successive year; a future which was not to him as to most wrapped in a
chiaroscuro, with but points of luminance gleaming through the mist, but
in whose cold glimmering light he seemed to see clear and distinct, as
we see each object of the far-off landscape stand out in the air of a
winter's noon, every thread that he should gather up, every distant
point to which he should pass onward; a future singular and
characteristic, in which state-power was the single ambition marked out,
from which the love of women was banished, in which pleasure and wealth
were as little regarded as in Lacedæmon, in which age would be courted,
not dreaded, since with it alone would come added dominion over the
minds of men, and in which, as it stretched out before him, failure and
alteration were alike impossible. What, if he lived, could destroy a
future that would be solely dependent on, solely ruled by, himself? By
his own hand alone would his future be fashioned; would he hew out any
shape save the idol that pleased him? When we hold the chisel ourselves,
are we not secure to have no error in the work? Is it likely that our
hand will slip, that the marble we select will be dark-veined, and
brittle, and impure, that the blows of the mallet will shiver our
handiwork, and that when we plan a Milo--god of strength--we shall but
mould and sculpture out a Laocoön of torture? Scarcely; and Strathmore
held the chisel, and, certain of his own skill, was as sure of what he
should make of life as Benvenuto, when he bade the molten metal pour
into the shape that he, master-craftsman, had fashioned, and gave to the
sight of the world the Winged Perseus. But Strathmore did not remember
what Cellini did--that one flaw might mar the whole!
* * *
In the little _millefleurs_-scented billet lay, unknown to its writer as
to him, the turning-point of his life! God help us! what avail are
experience, prescience, prudence, wisdom, in this world, when at every
chance step the silliest trifle, the most commonplace meeting, an
invitation to dinner, a turn down the wrong street, the dropping of a
glove, the delay of a train, the introduction to an unnoticed stranger,
will fling down every precaution, and build a fate for us of which we
never dream? Of what avail for us to erect our sand-castle when every
chance blast of air may blow it into nothing, and drift another into
form that we have no power to move? Life hinges upon hazard, and at
every turn wisdom is mocked by it, and energy swept aside by it, as the
battled dykes are worn away, and the granite walls beaten down by the
fickle ocean waves, which, never two hours together alike, never two
instants without restless motion, are yet as changeless as they are
capricious, as omnipotent as they are fickle, as cruel as they are
countless! Men and mariners may build their bulwarks, but hazard and the
sea will overthrow and wear away both alike at their will--their wild
and unreined will, which no foresight can foresee, no strength can
bridle.
Was it not the mere choice between the saddle and the barouche that day
when Ferdinand d'Orléans flung down on second thoughts his riding-whip
upon the console at the Tuileries, and ordered his carriage instead of
his horse, that cost himself his life, his son a throne, the Bourbon
blood their royalty, and France for long years her progress and her
peace? Had he taken up his whip instead of laying it aside, he might be
living to-day with the sceptre in his hand, and the Bee, crushed beneath
his foot, powerless to sting to the core of the Lily! Of all strange
things in human life, there is none stranger than the dominance of
Chance.
* * *
He landed and went into Silver-rest in the morning light. Far as the eye
could reach stretched the deep still waters of the bay; the white sails
of his yacht and of the few fishing skiffs in the offing stood out
distinct and glancing in the sun; over the bluffs and in all the clefts
of rock the growing grass blew and flickered in the breeze; and as he
crossed the sands the air was fragrant with the scent of the wild
flowers that grew down to the water's edge. But to note these things a
man must be in unison with the world; and to love them he must be in
unison with himself. Strathmore scarce saw them as he went onward.
* * *
If a military man's friend dies who had the step above him, his first
thought is "Promotion! deucedly lucky for me!" His next, "Poor fellow,
what a pity!" always comes two seconds after. I understand Voltaire. If
your companion's existence at table makes you have a dish dressed as you
don't like it, you are naturally relieved if an apoplectic fit empties
his chair, and sets you free to say, "_Point de sauce blanche!_" All men
are egotists, they only persuade themselves they are not selfish by
swearing so often, that at last they believe what they say. No motive
under the sun will stand the microscope; human nature, like a faded
beauty, must only have a _demi-lumièr_; draw the blinds up, and the
blotches come out, the wrinkles show, and the paint peels off. The
beauty scolds the servants--men hiss the satirists--who dare to let in
daylight!
* * *
The Frenchwoman prides herself on being thought unfaithful to her
husband; the Englishwoman on being thought faithful to him; but though
their theories are different, their practice comes to much the same
thing.
_FRIENDSHIP._
When Zeus, half in sport and half in cruelty, made man, young Hermês,
who, as all Olympus knew, was for ever at some piece of mischief,
insisted on meddling with his father's work, and got leave to fashion
the human ear out of a shell that he chanced to have by him, across
which he stretched a fine cobweb that he stole from Arachne. But he
hollowed and twisted the shell in such a fashion that it would turn back
all sounds except very loud blasts that Falsehood should blow on a
brazen horn, whilst the impenetrable web would keep out all such
whispers as Truth could send up from the depths of her well.
Hermês chuckled as he rounded the curves of his ear, and fastened it on
to the newly-made human creature.
"So shall these mortals always hear and believe the thing that is not,"
he said to himself in glee--knowing that the box he would give to
Pandora would not bear more confused and complex woes to the hapless
earth than this gift of an ear to man.
But he forgot himself so far that, though two ears were wanted, he only
made one.
Apollo, passing that way, marked the blunder, and resolved to avenge the
theft of his milk-white herds which had led him such a weary chase
through Tempe.
Apollo took a pearl of the sea and hollowed it, and strung across it a
silver string from his own lyre, and with it gave to man one ear by
which the voice of Truth should reach the brain.
"You have spoilt all my sport," said the boy Hermes, angry and weeping.
"Nay," said the elder brother with a smile. "Be comforted. The brazen
trumpets will be sure to drown the whisper from the well, and ten
thousand mortals to one, be sure, will always turn by choice your ear
instead of mine."
* * *
Women never like one another, except now and then an old woman and a
young woman like you and me. They are good to one another amongst the
poor, you say! Oh, that I don't know anything about. They may be.
Barbarians always retain the savage virtues. In Society women hate one
another--all the more because in Society they have to smile in each
other's faces every night of their lives. Only think what that is, my
dear!--to grudge each other's conquests, to grudge each other's
diamonds, to study each other's dress, to watch each other's wrinkles,
to outshine each other always on every possible occasion, big or little,
and yet always to be obliged to give pet names to each other, and visit
each other with elaborate ceremonial--why, women _must_ hate each other!
Society makes them. Your poor folks, I daresay, in the midst of their
toiling and moiling, and scrubbing and scraping, and starving and
begging, do do each other kindly turns, and put bread in each other's
mouths now and then, because they can scratch each other's eyes out, and
call each other hussies in the streets, any minute they like, in the
most open manner. But in Society women's entire life is a struggle for
precedence, precedence in everything--beauty, money, rank, success,
dress, everything. We have to smother hate under smiles, and envy under
compliment, and while we are dying to say "You hussy," like the women
in the streets, we are obliged, instead of boxing her ears, to kiss her
on both cheeks, and cry, "Oh, my dearest--how charming of you--so kind!"
Only think what all that repression means. You laugh? Oh, you very
clever people always do laugh at these things. But you must study
Society, or suffer from it, sooner or later. If you don't always strive
to go out before everybody, life will end in everybody going out before
you, everybody--down to the shoeblack!
* * *
"Read!" echoed the old wise man with scorn. "O child, what use is that?
Read!--the inland dweller reads of the sea, and thinks he knows it, and
believes it to be as a magnified duck-pond, and no more. Can he tell
anything of the light and the shade; of the wave and the foam; of the
green that is near, of the blue that is far; of the opaline changes, now
pure as a dove's throat, now warm as a flame; of the great purple depths
and the fierce blinding storm; and the delight and the fear, and the
hurricane rising like a horse snorting for war, and all that is known to
man who goes down to the great deep in ships? Passion and the sea are
like one another. Words shall not tell them, nor colour portray them.
The kiss that burns, and the salt spray that stings--let the poet excel
and the painter endeavour, yet the best they can do shall say nothing to
the woman without a lover; and the landsman who knows not the sea. If
you would live--love. You will live in an hour a lifetime; and you will
wonder how you bore your life before. But as an artist all will be over
with you--that I think."
* * *
What is the use of railing against Society? Society, after all, is only
Humanity _en masse_, and the opinion of it must be the opinion of the
bulk of human minds. Complaints against Society are like the lions'
against the man's picture. No doubt the lions would have painted the
combat as going just the other way, but then, so long as it is the man
who has the knife or the gun, and the palette and the pencil, where is
the use of the lions howling about injustice? Society has the knife and
the pencil; that's the long and the short of it; and if people don't
behave themselves they feel 'em both, and have to knock under. They're
knifed first, and then caricatured--as the lions were.
* * *
"Excelling!--it is rather a Dead Sea apple, I fear. The effort is
happiness, but the fruit always seems poor."
Lady Cardiff could not patiently hear such nonsense.
"There you are again, my dear feminine Alceste," she said irritably,
"looking at things from your solitary standpoint on that rock of yours
in the middle of the sea. _You_ are thinking of the excelling of genius,
of the possessor of an ideal fame, of the 'Huntress mightier than the
moon' and _I_ am thinking of the woman who excels in Society--who has
the biggest diamonds, the best _chef_, the most lovers, the most _chic_
and _chien_, who leads the fashion, and condescends when she takes tea
with an empress. But even from your point of view on your rock, I can't
quite believe it. Accomplished ambition must be agreeable. To look back
and say, 'I have achieved!'--what leagues of sunlight sever that proud
boast from the weary sigh, 'I have failed!' Fame must console."
"Perhaps; but the world, at least, does its best that it should not. Its
glory discs are of thorns."
"You mean that superiority has its attendant shadow, which is calumny?
Always has had, since Apelles painted. What does it matter if everybody
looks after you when you pass down a street, what they say when you
pass?"
"A malefactor may obtain that sort of flattery. I do not see the charm
of it."
"You are very perverse. Of course I talk of an unsullied fame, not of an
infamous notoriety."
"Fame nowadays is little else but notoriety," said Etoile with a certain
scorn, "and it is dearly bought, perhaps too dearly, by the sacrifice of
the serenity of obscurity, the loss of the peace of private life. Art is
great and precious, but the pursuit of it is sadly embittered when we
have become so the plaything of the public, through it, that the
simplest actions of our lives are chronicled and misconstrued. You do
not believe it, perhaps, but I often envy the women sitting at their
cottage doors, with their little children on their knees; no one talks
of _them_!"
"J'ai tant de gloire, ô roi, que j'aspire au fumier!"
said Lady Cardiff. "You are very thankless to Fate, my dear, but I
suppose it is always so."
And Lady Cardiff took refuge in her cigar case, being a woman of too
much experience not to know that it is quite useless to try and make
converts to your opinions; and especially impossible to convince people
dissatisfied with their good fortune that they ought to be charmed with
it.
"It is very curious," she thought when she got into her own carriage,
"really it makes one believe in that odd doctrine of, what is it,
Compensations; but, certainly, people of great talent always are a
little mad. If they're not flightily mad with eccentricity and brandy,
they are morbidly mad with solitude and sentiment. Now she is a great
creature, really a great creature; might have the world at her feet if
she liked; and all she cares for is a big dog, a bunch of roses, and
some artist or poet dead and gone three hundred or three thousand years!
It is very queer. It is just like that extraordinary possession of
Victor Hugo's; with powers that might have sufficed to make ten men
brilliant and comfortable, he must vex and worry about politics that
didn't concern him in the least, and go and live under a skylight in the
middle of the sea. It is very odd. They are never happy; but when they
are unhappy, and if you tell them that Addison could be a great writer,
and yet live comfortably and enjoy the things of this world, they only
tell you contemptuously that Addison had no genius, he had only a Style.
I suppose he hadn't. I think if I were one of them and had to choose, I
would rather have only a Style too."
* * *
When passion and habit long lie in company it is only slowly and with
incredulity that habit awakens to find its companion fled, itself alone.
* * *
A new acquaintance is like a new novel; you open it with expectation,
but what you find there seldom makes you care to take it off the shelf
another time.
* * *
The pity which is not born from experience is always cold. It cannot
help being so. It does not understand.
* * *
The house she lived in was very old, and had those charming conceits,
those rich shadows and depth of shade, that play of light, that variety,
and that character which seem given to a dwelling-place in ages when
men asked nothing better of their God than to live where their fathers
had lived, and leave the old roof-tree to their children's children.
The thing built yesterday, is a caravanserai: I lodge in it to-day, and
you to-morrow; in an old house only can be made a home, where the
blessings of the dead have rested and the memories of perfect faiths and
lofty passions still abide.
* * *
There is so much mystery in this world, only people who lead humdrum
lives will not believe it.
It is a great misfortune to be born to a romantic history. The humdrum
always think that you are lying. In real truth romance is common in
life, commoner, perhaps, than the commonplace. But the commonplace
always looks more natural.
In Nature there are millions of gorgeous hues to a scarcity of neutral
tints; yet the pictures that are painted in sombre semi-tones and have
no one positive colour in them are always pronounced the nearest to
nature. When a painter sets his palette, he dares not approach the gold
of the sunset and dawn, or the flame of the pomegranate and poppy.
* * *
This age of Money, of Concessions, of Capitalists, and of Limited
Liabilities, has largely produced the female financier, who thinks with
M. de Camors, that "_l'humanité est composée des actionnaires_." Other
centuries have had their especial type of womanhood; the learned and
graceful _hetaira_, the saintly and ascetic recluse, the warrior of
Oriflamme or Red Rose, the _dame de beauté_, all loveliness and light,
like a dewdrop, the philosophic _précieuse_, with sesquipedalian phrase,
the revolutionist, half nude of body and wholly nude of mind, each in
their turn have given their sign and seal to their especial century, for
better or for worse. The nineteenth century has some touch of all, but
its own novelty of production is the female speculator.
The woman who, breathless, watches _la hausse_ and _la baisse_; whose
favour can only be won by some hint in advance of the newspapers; whose
heart is locked to all save golden keys; who starts banks, who concocts
companies, who keeps a broker, as in the eighteenth century a woman kept
a monkey, and in the twelfth a knight; whose especial art is to buy in
at the right moments, and to sell out in the nick of time; who is great
in railways and canals, and new bathing-places, and shares in
fashionable streets; who chooses her lovers, thinking of concessions,
and kisses her friends for sake of the secrets they may betray from
their husbands--what other centuries may say of her who can tell?
The Hôtel Rambouillet thought itself higher than heaven, and the
generation of Catherine of Sienna believed her deal planks the sole
highway to the throne of God.
* * *
Proud women, and sensitive women, take hints and resent rebuffs, and so
exile themselves from the world prematurely and haughtily. They abdicate
the moment they see that any desire their discrowning. Abdication is
grand, no doubt. But possession is more profitable. "A well-bred dog
does not wait to be kicked out," says the old see-saw. But the well-bred
dog thereby turns himself into the cold, and leaves the crumbs from
under the table to some other dog with less good-breeding and more
worldly wisdom. The sensible thing to do is to stay where you like best
to be; stay there with tooth and claw ready and a stout hide on which
cudgels break. People, after all, soon get tired of kicking a dog that
never will go.
High-breeding was admirable in days when the world itself was high-bred.
But those days are over. The world takes high-breeding now as only a
form of insolence.
* * *
"To your poetic temper life is a vast romance, beautiful and terrible,
like a tragedy of Æschylus. You stand amidst it entranced, like a child
by the beauty and awe of a tempest. And all the while the worldly-wise,
to whom the tempest is only a matter of the machineries of a theatre--of
painted clouds, electric lights, and sheets of copper--the world-wise
govern the storm as they choose and leave you in it defenceless and
lonely as old Lear. To put your heart into life is the most fatal of
errors; it is to give a hostage to your enemies whom you can only ransom
at the price of your ruin. But what is the use of talking? To you, life
will be always Alastor and Epipsychidion, and to us, it will always be a
Treatise on Whist. That's all!"
"A Treatise on Whist! No! It is something much worse. It is a Book of
the Bastile, with all entered as criminal in it, who cannot be bought
off by bribe or intrigue, by a rogue's stratagem or a courtesan's vice!"
"The world is only a big Harpagon, and you and such as you are Maître
Jacques. '_Puisque vous l'avez voulu!_' you say,--and call him frankly
to his face, '_Avare, ladre, vilain, fessemathieu!_' and Harpagon
answers you with a big stick and cries, '_Apprenez à parler!_' Poor
Maître Jacques! I never read of him without thinking what a type he is
of Genius. No offence to you, my dear. He'd the wit to see he would
never be pardoned for telling the truth, and yet he told it! The perfect
type of Genius."
* * *
The untruthfulness of women communicates itself to the man whose chief
society they form, and the perpetual necessities of intrigue end in
corrupting the temper whose chief pursuit is passion.
Women who environ a man's fidelity by ceaseless suspicion and exaction,
create the evil that they dread.
* * *
Society, after all, asks very little. Society only asks you to wash the
outside of your cup and platter: inside you may keep any kind of
nastiness that you like: only wash the outside. Do wash the outside,
says Society; and it would be a churl or an ass indeed who would refuse
so small a request.
* * *
A woman who is ice to his fire, is less pain to a man than the woman who
is fire to his ice. There is hope for him in the one, but only a dreary
despair in the other. The ardours that intoxicate him in the first
summer of his passion serve but to dull and chill him in the later time.
* * *
A frog that dwelt in a ditch spat at a worm that bore a lamp.
"Why do you do that?" said the glow-worm.
"Why do you shine?" said the frog.
* * *
When a name is in the public mouth the public nostril likes to smell a
foulness in it. It likes to think that Byron committed incest; that
Milton was a brute; that Raffaelle's vices killed him; that Pascal was
mad; that Lamartine lived and died a pauper; that Scipio took the
treasury moneys; that Thucydides and Phidias stole; that Heloise and
Hypatia were but loose women after all--so the gamut runs over twice a
thousand years; and Rousseau is at heart the favourite of the world
because he was such a beast, with all his talent.
When the world is driven to tears and prayers by Schiller, it hugs
itself to remember that he could not write a line without the smell of
rotten apples near, and that when he died there was not enough money in
his desk to pay his burial. They make him smaller, closer, less
divine--the apples and the pauper's coffin.
* * *
"Get a great cook; give three big balls a winter, and drive English
horses; you need never consider Society then, it will never find fault
with you, _ma très-chère_."
She did not quite understand, but she obeyed; and Society never did.
Society says to the members of it as the Spanish monk to the tree that
he pruned, and that cried out under his hook:
"It is not beauty that is wanted of you, nor shade, but olives."
Moral loveliness or mental depth, charm of feeling or nobleness of
instinct, beauty, or shade, it does not ask for, but it does ask for
olives--olives that shall round off its dessert, and flavour its dishes,
and tickle its sated palate; olives that it shall pick up without
trouble, and never be asked to pay for; these are what it likes.
Now it is precisely in olives that the woman who has one foot in Society
and one foot out of it will be profuse.
She must please, or perish.