The very perilousness of her position renders her solicitous to attract
and to appease.
Society follows a natural selfishness in its condonation of her; she is
afraid of it, therefore she must bend all her efforts to be agreeable to
it! it can reject her at any given moment, so that her court of it must
be continual and expansive. No woman will take so much pains, give so
much entertainment, be so willing to conciliate, be so lavish in
hospitality, be so elastic in willingness, as the woman who adores
Society, and knows that any black Saturday it may turn her out with a
bundle of rods, and a peremptory dismissal.
Between her and Society there is a tacit bond.
"Amuse me, and I will receive you."
"Receive me, and I will amuse you."
* * *
Of all lay figures there is none on earth so useful as a wooden husband.
You should get a wooden husband, my dear, if you want to be left in
peace. It is like a comfortable slipper or your dressing-gown after a
ball. It is like springs to your carriage. It is like a clever maid who
never makes mistakes with your notes or comes without coughing
discreetly through your dressing-room. It is like tea, cigarettes,
postage-stamps, foot-warmers, eiderdown counterpanes--anything that
smooths life, in fact. Young women do not think enough of this. An
easy-going husband is the one indispensable comfort of life. He is like
a set of sables to you. You may never want to put them on; still, if the
north wind do blow--and one can never tell--how handy they are! You pop
into them in a second, and no cold wind can find you out, my dear.
Couldn't find you out, if your shift were in rags underneath! Without
your husband's countenance, you have scenes. With scenes, you have
scandal. With scandal, you come to a suit. With a suit, you most likely
lose your settlements. And without your settlements, where are you in
Society? With a husband you are safe. You need never think about him in
any way. His mere existence suffices. He will always be at the bottom of
your table, and the head of your visiting-cards. That is enough. He will
represent Respectability for you, without your being at the trouble to
represent Respectability for yourself. Respectability is a thing of
which the shadow is more agreeable than the substance. Happily for us,
Society only requires the shadow.
* * *
Very well; if you dislike dancing, don't dance; though if a woman don't,
you know, they always think she has got a short leg, or a cork leg, or
something or other that's dreadful. But why not show yourself at them?
At least show yourself. One goes to balls as one goes to church. It's a
social muster.
* * *
The art of pleasing is more based on the art of seeming pleased than
people think of, and she disarmed the prejudices of her enemies by the
unaffected delight she appeared to take in themselves. You may think
very ill of a woman, but after all you cannot speak very ill of her if
she has assured you a hundred times that you are amongst her dearest
friends.
* * *
Society always had its fixed demands. It used to exact birth. It used to
exact manners. In a remote and golden age there is a tradition that it
was once contented with mind. Nowadays it exacts money, or rather
amusement, because if you don't let other folks have the benefit of your
money, Society will take no account of it. But have money and spend it
well (that is, let Society live on it, gorge with it, walk ankle-deep in
it), and you may be anything and do anything; you may have been an
omnibus conductor in the Strand, and you may marry a duke's daughter;
you may have been an oyster-girl in New York, and you may entertain
royalties. It is impossible to exaggerate an age of anomaly and
hyperbole. There never was an age when people were so voracious of
amusement, and so tired of it, both in one. It is a perpetual carnival
and a permanent yawn. If you can do anything to amuse us you are
safe--till we get used to you--and then you amuse no longer, and must go
to the wall. Every age has its price: what Walpole said of men must be
true of mankind. Anybody can buy the present age that will bid very high
and pay with tact as well as bullion. There is nothing it will not
pardon if it see its way to getting a new sensation out of its leniency.
Perhaps no one ought to complain. A Society with an india-rubber
conscience, no memory, and an absolute indifference to eating its own
words and making itself ridiculous, is, after all, a convenient one to
live in--if you can pay for its suffrages.
* * *
If you are only well beforehand with your falsehood all will go upon
velvet; nobody ever listens to a rectification. "Is it possible?"
everybody cries with eager zest; but when they have only to say "Oh,
wasn't it so?" nobody feels any particular interest. It is the first
statement that has the swing and the success; as for explanation or
retractation--pooh! who cares to be bored?
* * *
Those people with fine brains and with generous souls will never learn
that life is after all only a game--a game which will go to the
shrewdest player and the coolest. They never see this; not they; they
are caught on the edge of great passions, and swept away by them. They
cling to their affections like commanders to sinking ships, and go down
with them. They put their whole heart into the hands of others, who only
laugh and wring out their lifeblood. They take all things too vitally in
earnest. Life is to them a wonderful, passionate, pathetic, terrible
thing that the gods of love and of death shape for them. They do not see
that coolness and craft, and the tact to seize accident, and the
wariness to obtain advantage, do in reality far more in hewing out a
successful future than all the gods of Greek or Gentile. They are very
unwise. It is of no use to break their hearts for the world; they will
not change it. _La culte de l'humanité_ is the one of all others which
will leave despair as its harvest. Laugh like Rabelais, smile like
Montaigne; that is the way to take the world. It only puts to death its
Sebastians, and makes its Shelleys not sorrowful to see the boat is
filling.
* * *
Society always adheres to its principles; just as a Moslem subscribes
none the less to the Koran because he may just have been blowing the
froth off his bumper of Mumm's before he goes to his mosque.
* * *
Pleasantness is the soft note of this generation, just as scientific
assassination is the harsh note of it. The age is compounded of the two.
Half of it is chloroform; the other half is dynamite.
* * *
You make us think, and Society dislikes thinking. You call things by
their right names, and Society hates that, though Queen Bess didn't mind
it. You trumpet our own littleness in our ear, and we know it so well
that we do not care to hear much about it. You shudder at sin, and we
have all agreed that there is no such thing as sin, only mere
differences of opinion, which, provided they don't offend us, we have no
business with: adultery is a _liaison_, lying is gossip, debt is a
momentary embarrassment, immorality is a little slip, and so forth: and
when we have arranged this pretty little dictionary of convenient
pseudonyms, it is not agreeable to have it sent flying by fierce,
dreadful, old words, that are only fit for some book that nobody ever
reads, like Milton or the Family Bible. We do not want to think. We do
not want to hear. We do not care about anything. Only give us a good
dinner and plenty of money, and let us outshine our neighbours. There is
the Nineteenth Century Gospel. My dear, if Ecclesiasticus himself came
he would preach in vain. You cannot convince people that don't want to
be convinced. We call ourselves Christians--Heaven save the mark!--but
we are only the very lowest kind of pagans. We do not believe in
anything--except that nothing matters. Well, perhaps nothing does
matter. Only one wonders why ever so many of us were all created, only
just to find _that_ out.
* * *
Love to the looker-on may be blind, unwise, unworthily bestowed, a
waste, a sacrifice, a crime; yet none the less is love, alone, the one
thing that, come weal or woe, is worth the loss of every other thing;
the one supreme and perfect gift of earth, in which all common things of
daily life become transfigured and divine. And perhaps of all the many
woes that priesthoods have wrought upon humanity, none have been greater
than this false teaching, that love can ever be a sin. To the sorrow
and the harm of the world, the world's religions have all striven to
make men and women shun and deny their one angel as a peril or a shame;
but religions cannot strive against nature, and when the lovers see each
other's heaven in each other's eyes, they know the supreme truth that
one short day together is worth a lifetime's glory.
* * *
Genius is like the nautilus, all sufficient for itself in its pretty
shell, quite at home in the big ocean, with no fear from any storm. But
if a wanton stone from a boat passing by break the shell, where is the
nautilus then? Drowned; just like any common creature!
* * *
There are times when, even on the bravest temper, the ironical mockery,
the cruel despotism of trifling circumstances, that have made themselves
the masters of our lives, the hewers of our fate, must weigh with a
sense of involuntary bondage, against which to strive is useless.
The weird sisters were forms of awe and magnitude proportionate to the
woes they dealt out, to the destiny they wove. But the very littleness
of the daily chances that actually shape fate is, in its discordance and
its mockery, more truly terrible and most hideously solemn--it is the
little child's laugh at a frisking kitten which brings down the
avalanche, and lays waste the mountain side, or it is the cackle of the
startled geese that saves the Capitol.
To be the prey of Atropos was something at the least; and the grim _Deus
vult perdere_, uttered in the delirium of pain, at the least made the
maddened soul feel of some slender account in the sight of the gods and
in the will of Heaven. But we, who are the children of mere accident and
the sport of idlest opportunity, have no such consolation.
* * *
Of course they will stone you, as village bumpkins run out and stone an
odd stray bird that they have never seen before; and the more beautiful
the plumage looks, the harder rain the stones. If the bird were a
sparrow the bumpkins would let it be.
* * *
Love that remembers aught save the one beloved may be affection, but it
is not love.
* * *
Ariel could not combat a leopardess; Ithuriel's spear glances pointless
from a rhinoceros' hide. To match what is low and beat it, you must
stoop, and soil your hands to cut a cudgel rough and ready. She did not
see this; and seeing it, would not have lowered herself to do it.
* * *
Which is the truth, which is the madness?--when the artist, in the
sunlit ice of a cold dreamland, scorns love and adores but one art; or
when the artist, amidst the bruised roses of a garden of passion, finds
all heaven in one human heart?
* * *
There is a story in an old poet's forgotten writings of a woman who was
queen when the world was young, and reigned over many lands, and loved a
captive, and set him free, and thinking to hurt him less by seeming
lowly, came down from her throne and laid her sceptre in the dust, and
passed amongst the common maidens that drew water at the well, or begged
at the city gate, and seemed as one of them, giving him all and keeping
nought herself: "so will he love me more," she thought; but he, crowned
king, thought only of the sceptre and the throne, and having those,
looked not amongst the women at the gate, and knew her not, because what
he had loved had been a queen. Thus she, self-discrowned, lost both her
lover and her kingdom. A wise man amongst the throng said to her, "Nay,
you should have kept aloof upon your golden seat and made him feel your
power to deal life or death, and fretted him long, and long kept him in
durance and in doubt, you, meanwhile, far above. For men are light
creatures as the moths are."
* * *
They had lived in London and Paris all their lives, and had, before
this, heard patriotism used as a reason for a variety of things, from a
minister's keeping in office against the will of the country, to a
newspaper's writing a country into bloodshed and bankruptcy; they were
quite aware of the word's elasticity.
* * *
It was the true and perfect springtide of the year, when Love walks
amongst the flowers, and comes a step nearer what it seeks with every
dawn.
Without Love, spring is of all seasons cruel; more cruel than all frost
and frown of winter.
* * *
In the early days of an illicit passion concealment is charming; every
secret stairway of intrigue has a sweet surprise at its close; to be in
conspiracy with one alone against all the rest of humanity is the most
seductive of seductions. Love lives best in this soft twilight, where it
only hears its own heart and one other's beat in the solitude.
But when the reverse of the medal is turned; when every step on the
stairs has been traversed and tired of, when, instead of the heart's
beat, there is but an upbraiding voice, when it is no longer _with_ one
but _from_ one that concealment is needed, then the illicit passion is
its own Nemesis, then nothing were ever drearier, wearier, more anxious,
or more fatiguing than its devious paths become, and they seem to hold
the sated wanderer in a labyrinth of which he knows, and knowing hates,
every wind, and curve, and coil, yet out of which it seems to him he
will never make his way back again into the light of wholesome day.
* * *
My dear, the days of Fontenoy are gone out; everybody nowadays only
tries to get the first fire, by hook or by crook. Ours is an age of
cowardice and cuirassed cannon; chivalry is out of place in it.
* * *
With a woman, the vulgarity that lies in public adulation is apt to
nauseate; at least if she be so little of a woman that she is not vain,
and so much of one that she cares for privacy. For the fame of our age
is not glory but notoriety; and notoriety is to a woman like the bull to
Pasiphae--whilst it caresses it crushes.
* * *
Had she your talent the world would have heard of her. As it is, she
only enjoys herself. Perhaps the better part. Fame is a cone of smoke.
Enjoyment is a loaf of sugar.
* * *
There is no such coward as the woman who toadies Society because she has
outraged Society. The bully is never brave.
"Oignez vilain il vous poindra: poignez vilain il vous oindra," is as
true of the braggart's soul still, as it used to be in the old days of
Froissart, when the proverb was coined.
* * *
She was of opinion with Sganarelle, that "cinq ou six coups de bâton
entre gens qui s'aiment ne font que ragaillarder l'affection."
But, like Sganarelle also, she always premised that the right to give
the blows should be hers.
* * *
She was only like any other well-dressed woman after all, and humanity
considers that when genius comes forth in the flesh the touch of the
coal from the altar should have left some visible stigmata on the lips
it has burned, as, of course anybody knows, it invariably leaves some
smirch upon the character.
Humanity feels that genius ought to wear a livery, as Jews and loose
women wore yellow in the old golden days of distinction.
"They don't even paint!" said one lady, and felt herself aggrieved.
* * *
Calumny is the homage of our contemporaries, as some South Sea Islanders
spit on those they honour.
* * *
Popularity has been defined as the privilege of being cheered by the
kind of people you would never allow to bow to you.
Fame may be said to be the privilege of being slandered at once by the
people who do bow to you, as well as by the people who do not.
* * *
Nobody there knew at all. So everybody averred they knew for certain.
Nobody's story agreed with anybody else's, but that did not matter at
all. The world, like Joseph's father, gives the favourite coat of many
colours which the brethren rend.
* * *
"Be honey, and the flies will eat you," says the old saw, but, like most
other proverbs, it will not admit of universal application. There is a
way of being honey that is thoroughly successful and extremely popular,
and constitutes a kind of armour that is bomb-proof.
* * *
The longest absence is less perilous to love than the terrible trials of
incessant proximity.
* * *
She forgot that love likes to preserve its illusions, and that it will
bear better all the sharpest deprivations in the world than it will the
cruel tests of an unlovely and unveiled intercourse.
She had committed the greatest error of all: she had let him be
disenchanted by familiarity. Passion will pardon rage, will survive
absence, will forgive infidelity, will even thrive on outrage, and will
often condone a crime; but when it dies of familiarity it is dead for
ever and aye.
* * *
Society will believe anything rather than ever believe that Itself can
be duped.
If you have only assurance enough to rely implicitly on this, there is
hardly anything you cannot induce it to accept.
* * *
Here was the secret of her success. To her nothing was little.
This temper is always popular with Society. To enjoy yourself in the
world, is, to the world, the prettiest of indirect compliments.
The chief offence of the poet, as of the philosopher, is that the world
as it is fails to satisfy them.
Society, which is after all only a conglomerate of hosts, has the host's
weakness--all its guests must smile.
The poet sighs, the philosopher yawns. Society feels that they
depreciate it. Society feels more at ease without them.
To find every one acceptable to you is to make yourself acceptable to
every one.
Hived bees get sugar because they will give back honey. All existence is
a series of equivalents.
* * *
Even the discreetest friends will, like the closest-packed hold of a
ship, leak occasionally. Salt water and secrets are alike apt to ooze.
* * *
The simplicity of the artist is always the stumbling-block of the artist
with the world.
* * *
A woman need never dread the fiercest quarrel with her lover; the
tempest may bring sweeter weather than any it broke up, and after the
thunder the singing of birds will sound lovelier than before. Anger will
not extinguish love, nor will scorn trample it dead; jealousy will fan
its fires, and offences against it may but fasten closer the fetters
that it adores beyond all liberty. But when love dies of a worn-out
familiarity it perishes for ever and aye.
Jaded, disenchanted, wearied, indifferent, the tired passion expires of
sheer listlessness and contemptuous disillusion.
The death is slow and unperceived, but it is sure; and it is a death
that has no resurrection.
* * *
There is nothing that you may not get people to believe in if you will
only tell it them loud enough and often enough, till the welkin rings
with it.
* * *
What Raffaelle has left us must be to the glories he imagined as the
weaver's dye to the sunset's fire.
* * *
A woman's violence is a mighty power; before it reason recoils unnerved,
justice quails appalled, and peace perishes like a burnt-up scroll; it
is a sand-storm, before which courage can do but little: the bravest man
can but fall on his face and let it rage on above him.
* * *
A very trustful woman believes in her lover's fidelity with her heart; a
very vain woman believes in it with her head.
* * *
From the moment that another life has any empire on ours, peace is gone.
Art spreads around us a profound and noble repose, but passion enters
it, and then art grows restless and troubled as the deep sea at the call
of the whirlwind.
_WANDA._
A man cast forth from his home is like a ship cut loose from its anchor
and rudderless. Whatever may have been his weakness, his offences, they
cannot absolve you from your duty to watch over your husband's soul, to
be his first and most faithful friend, to stand between him and his
temptations and perils. That is the nobler side of marriage. When the
light of love is faded, and its joys are over, its duties and its
mercies remain. Because one of the twain has failed in these the other
is not acquitted of obligation.
* * *
"Choose some career; make yourself some aim in life; do not fold your
talents in a napkin; in a napkin that lies on the supper-table at
Bignon's. That idle, aimless life is very attractive, I daresay, in its
way, but it must grow wearisome and unsatisfactory as years roll on. The
men of my house have never been content with it; they have always been
soldiers, statesmen, something or other beside mere nobles."
"But they have had a great position."
"Men make their own position; they cannot make a name (at least, not to
my thinking). You have that good fortune; you have a great name; you
only need, pardon me, to make your manner of life worthy of it."
"Cannot make a name? Surely in these days the beggar rides on horseback
in all the ministries and half the nobilities;"
"You mean that Hans, Pierre, or Richard becomes a count, an excellency,
or an earl? What does that change? It alters the handle; it does not
alter the saucepan. No one can be ennobled. Blood is blood; nobility can
only be inherited; it cannot be conferred by all the heralds in the
world. The very meaning and essence of nobility are descent, inherited
traditions, instincts, habits, and memories--all that is meant by
_noblesse oblige_."
* * *
"Men are always like Horace," said the princess. "They admire rural
life, but they remain for all that with Augustus."
* * *
I read the other day of some actresses dining off a truffled pheasant
and a sack of bonbons. That is the sort of dinner we make all the year
round, morally--metaphorically--how do you say it? It makes us thirsty,
and perhaps--I am not sure--perhaps it leaves us half starved, though we
nibble the sweetmeats, and don't know it.
"Your dinner must lack two things--bread and water."
"Yes; we never see either. It is all truffles and caramels and _vins
frappés_."
"There is your bread."
She glanced at the little children, two pretty, graceful little maids of
six and seven years old.
"_Ouf!_" said the Countess Branka. "They are only little bits of puff
paste, a couple of _petits fours_ baked on the boulevards. If they be
_chic_, and marry well, I for one shall ask no more of them. If ever you
have children, I suppose you will rear them on science and the
Antonines?"
"Perhaps on the open air and Homer."
* * *
Cannot you make them understand that we are not public artists to need
_réclames_, nor yet sovereigns to be compelled to submit to the
microscope? Is this the meaning of civilisation--to make privacy
impossible, to oblige every one to live under a lens?
* * *
The world was much happier when distinctions and divisions were
impassable. There are no sumptuary laws now. What is the consequence?
That your _bourgeoise_ ruins her husband in wearing gowns fit only for a
duchess, and your prince imagines it makes him popular to look precisely
like a cabman or a bailiff.
* * *
A great love must be as exhaustless as the ocean in its mercy, and as
profound in its comprehension.
* * *
What was love if not one long forgiveness? What raised it higher than
the senses if not its infinite patience and endurance of all wrong? What
was its hope of eternal life if it had not gathered strength in it
enough to rise above human arrogance and human vengeance?
* * *
There is an infinite sense of peace in those cool, vast, unworn mountain
solitudes, with the rain-mists sweeping like spectral armies over the
level lands below, and the sun-rays slanting heavenward, like the spears
of an angelic host. There is such abundance of rushing water, of deep
grass, of endless shade, of forest trees, of heather and pine, of
torrent and tarn; and beyond these are the great peaks that loom through
breaking clouds, and the clear cold air, in which the vulture wheels and
the heron sails; and the shadows are so deep, and the stillness is so
sweet, and the earth seems so green, and fresh, and silent, and strong.
Nowhere else can one rest so well; nowhere else is there so fit a refuge
for all the faiths and fancies that can find a home no longer in the
harsh and hurrying world; there is room for them all in the Austrian
forests, from the Erl-King to Ariel and Oberon.
* * *
"You think any sin may be forgiven?" he said irrelevantly, with his face
averted.
"That is a very wide question. I do not think St. Augustine himself
could answer it in a word or in a moment. Forgiveness, I think, would
surely depend on repentance."
"Repentance in secret--would that avail?"