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CERTAIN PERSONAL MATTERS
BY
H.G. WELLS
LONDON
T. FISHER UNWIN
PATERNOSTER SQUARE, E.C.
1901
CONTENTS
PAGE
THOUGHTS ON CHEAPNESS AND MY AUNT CHARLOTTE 7
THE TROUBLE OF LIFE 12
ON THE CHOICE OF A WIFE 18
THE HOUSE OF DI SORNO 22
OF CONVERSATION 27
IN A LITERARY HOUSEHOLD 32
ON SCHOOLING AND THE PHASES OF MR. SANDSOME 36
THE POET AND THE EMPORIUM 40
THE LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS 45
THE LITERARY REGIMEN 49
HOUSE-HUNTING AS AN OUTDOOR AMUSEMENT 54
OF BLADES AND BLADERY 59
OF CLEVERNESS 63
THE POSE NOVEL 67
THE VETERAN CRICKETER 71
CONCERNING A CERTAIN LADY 76
THE SHOPMAN 80
THE BOOK OF CURSES 85
DUNSTONE'S DEAR LADY 90
EUPHEMIA'S NEW ENTERTAINMENT (_this is illustrated_) 94
FOR FREEDOM OF SPELLING 98
INCIDENTAL THOUGHTS ON A BALD HEAD 104
OF A BOOK UNWRITTEN 108
THE EXTINCTION OF MAN 115
THE WRITING OF ESSAYS 120
THE PARKES MUSEUM 124
BLEAK MARCH IN EPPING FOREST 128
THE THEORY OF QUOTATION 132
ON THE ART OF STAYING AT THE SEASIDE 135
CONCERNING CHESS 140
THE COAL-SCUTTLE 145
BAGARROW 150
THE BOOK OF ESSAYS DEDICATORY 155
THROUGH A MICROSCOPE 159
THE PLEASURE OF QUARRELLING 164
THE AMATEUR NATURE-LOVER 169
FROM AN OBSERVATORY 174
THE MODE IN MONUMENTS 177
HOW I DIED 182
CERTAIN PERSONAL MATTERS
THOUGHTS ON CHEAPNESS AND MY AUNT CHARLOTTE
The world mends. In my younger days people believed in mahogany; some of
my readers will remember it--a heavy, shining substance, having a
singularly close resemblance to raw liver, exceedingly heavy to move,
and esteemed on one or other count the noblest of all woods. Such of us
as were very poor and had no mahogany pretended to have mahogany; and
the proper hepatite tint was got by veneering. That makes one incline to
think it was the colour that pleased people. In those days there was a
word "trashy," now almost lost to the world. My dear Aunt Charlotte used
that epithet when, in her feminine way, she swore at people she did not
like. "Trashy" and "paltry" and "Brummagem" was the very worst she could
say of them. And she had, I remember, an intense aversion to plated
goods and bronze halfpence. The halfpence of her youth had been vast and
corpulent red-brown discs, which it was folly to speak of as small
change. They were fine handsome coins, and almost as inconvenient as
crown-pieces. I remember she corrected me once when I was very young.
"Don't call a penny a copper, dear," she said; "copper is a metal. The
pennies they have nowadays are bronze." It is odd how our childish
impressions cling to us. I still regard bronze as a kind of upstart
intruder, a mere trashy pretender among metals.
All my Aunt Charlotte's furniture was thoroughly good, and most of it
extremely uncomfortable; there was not a thing for a little boy to break
and escape damnation in the household. Her china was the only thing with
a touch of beauty in it--at least I remember nothing else--and each of
her blessed plates was worth the happiness of a mortal for days
together. And they dressed me in a Nessus suit of valuable garments. I
learned the value of thoroughly good things only too early. I knew the
equivalent of a teacup to the very last scowl, and I have hated good,
handsome property ever since. For my part I love cheap things, trashy
things, things made of the commonest rubbish that money can possibly
buy; things as vulgar as primroses, and as transitory as a morning's
frost.
Think of all the advantages of a cheap possession--cheap and nasty, if
you will--compared with some valuable substitute. Suppose you need this
or that. "Get a good one," advises Aunt Charlotte; "one that will last."
You do--and it does last. It lasts like a family curse. These great
plain valuable things, as plain as good women, as complacently assured
of their intrinsic worth--who does not know them? My Aunt Charlotte
scarcely had a new thing in her life. Her mahogany was avuncular; her
china remotely ancestral; her feather beds and her bedsteads!--they were
haunted; the births, marriages, and deaths associated with the best one
was the history of our race for three generations. There was more in her
house than the tombstone rectitude of the chair-backs to remind me of
the graveyard. I can still remember the sombre aisles of that house, the
vault-like shadows, the magnificent window curtains that blotted out the
windows. Life was too trivial for such things. She never knew she tired
of them, but she did. That was the secret of her temper, I think; they
engendered her sombre Calvinism, her perception of the trashy quality of
human life. The pretence that they were the accessories to human life
was too transparent. _We_ were the accessories; we minded them for a
little while, and then we passed away. They wore us out and cast us
aside. We were the changing scenery; they were the actors who played on
through the piece. It was even so with clothing. We buried my other
maternal aunt--Aunt Adelaide--and wept, and partly forgot her; but her
wonderful silk dresses--they would stand alone--still went rustling
cheerfully about an ephemeral world.
All that offended my sense of proportion, my feeling of what is due to
human life, even when I was a little boy. I want things of my own,
things I can break without breaking my heart; and, since one can live
but once, I want some change in my life--to have this kind of thing and
then that. I never valued Aunt Charlotte's good old things until I sold
them. They sold remarkably well: those chairs like nether millstones for
the grinding away of men; the fragile china--an incessant anxiety until
accident broke it, and the spell of it at the same time; those silver
spoons, by virtue of which Aunt Charlotte went in fear of burglary for
six-and-fifty years; the bed from which I alone of all my kindred had
escaped; the wonderful old, erect, high-shouldered, silver-faced clock.
But, as I say, our ideas are changing--mahogany has gone, and repp
curtains. Articles are made for man, nowadays, and not man, by careful
early training, for articles. I feel myself to be in many respects a
link with the past. Commodities come like the spring flowers, and vanish
again. "Who steals my watch steals trash," as some poet has remarked;
the thing is made of I know not what metal, and if I leave it on the
mantel for a day or so it goes a deep blackish purple that delights me
exceedingly. My grandfather's hat--I understood when I was a little boy
that I was to have that some day. But now I get a hat for ten shillings,
or less, two or three times a year. In the old days buying clothes was
well-nigh as irrevocable as marriage. Our flat is furnished with
glittering things--wanton arm-chairs just strong enough not to collapse
under you, books in gay covers, carpets you are free to drop lighted
fusees upon; you may scratch what you like, upset your coffee, cast your
cigar ash to the four quarters of heaven. Our guests, at anyrate, are
not snubbed by our furniture. It knows its place.
But it is in the case of art and adornment that cheapness is most
delightful. The only thing that betrayed a care for beauty on the part
of my aunt was her dear old flower garden, and even there she was not
above suspicion. Her favourite flowers were tulips, rigid tulips with
opulent crimson streaks. She despised wildings. Her ornaments were
simply displays of the precious metal. Had she known the price of
platinum she would have worn that by preference. Her chains and brooches
and rings were bought by weight. She would have turned her back on
Benvenuto Cellini if he was not 22 carats fine. She despised
water-colour art; her conception of a picture was a vast domain of oily
brown by an Old Master. The Babbages at the Hall had a display of gold
plate swaggering in the corner of the dining-room; and the visitor
(restrained by a plush rope from examining the workmanship) was told the
value, and so passed on. I like my art unadorned: thought and skill, and
the other strange quality that is added thereto, to make things
beautiful--and nothing more. A farthing's worth of paint and paper, and,
behold! a thing of beauty!--as they do in Japan. And if it should fall
into the fire--well, it has gone like yesterday's sunset, and to-morrow
there will be another.
These Japanese are indeed the apostles of cheapness. The Greeks lived to
teach the world beauty, the Hebrews to teach it morality, and now the
Japanese are hammering in the lesson that men may be honourable, daily
life delightful, and a nation great without either freestone houses,
marble mantelpieces, or mahogany sideboards. I have sometimes wished
that my Aunt Charlotte could have travelled among the Japanese nation.
She would, I know, have called it a "parcel of trash." Their use of
paper--paper suits, paper pocket-handkerchiefs--would have made her
rigid with contempt. I have tried, but I cannot imagine my Aunt
Charlotte in paper underclothing. Her aversion to paper was
extraordinary. Her Book of Beauty was printed on satin, and all her
books were bound in leather, the boards regulated rather than decorated
with a severe oblong. Her proper sphere was among the ancient
Babylonians, among which massive populace even the newspapers were
built of brick. She would have compared with the King's daughter whose
raiment was of wrought gold. When I was a little boy I used to think she
had a mahogany skeleton. However, she is gone, poor old lady, and at
least she left me her furniture. Her ghost was torn in pieces after the
sale--must have been. Even the old china went this way and that. I took
what was perhaps a mean revenge of her for the innumerable
black-holeings, bread-and-water dinners, summary chastisements, and
impossible tasks she inflicted upon me for offences against her too
solid possessions. You will see it at Woking. It is a light and graceful
cross. It is a mere speck of white between the monstrous granite
paperweights that oppress the dead on either side of her. Sometimes I am
half sorry for that. When the end comes I shall not care to look her in
the face--she will be so humiliated.
THE TROUBLE OF LIFE
I do not know whether this will awaken a sympathetic lassitude in, say,
fifty per cent. of its readers, or whether my experience is unique and
my testimony simply curious. At anyrate, it is as true as I can make it.
Whether this is a mere mood, and a certain flagrant exhilaration my true
attitude towards things, or this is my true attitude and the exuberant
phase a lapse from it, I cannot say. Probably it does not matter. The
thing is that I find life an extremely troublesome affair. I do not want
to make any railing accusations against life; it is--to my
taste--neither very sad nor very horrible. At times it is distinctly
amusing. Indeed, I know nothing in the same line that can quite compare
with it. But there is a difference between general appreciation and
uncritical acceptance. At times I find life a Bother.
The kind of thing that I object to is, as a good example, all the
troublesome things one has to do every morning in getting up. There is
washing. This is an age of unsolicited personal confidences, and I will
frankly confess that if it were not for Euphemia I do not think I should
wash at all. There is a vast amount of humbug about washing. Vulgar
people not only profess a passion for the practice, but a physical
horror of being unwashed. It is a sort of cant. I can understand a
sponge bath being a novelty the first time and exhilarating the second
and third. But day after day, week after week, month after month, and
nothing to show at the end of it all! Then there is shaving. I have to
get shaved because Euphemia hates me with a blue jowl, and I will admit
I hate myself. Yet, if I were left alone, I do not think my personal
taste would affect my decision; I will say that for myself. Either I
hack about with a blunt razor--my razors are always blunt--until I am a
kind of Whitechapel Horror, and with hair in tufts upon my chin like the
top of a Bosjesman's head, or else I have to spend all the morning being
dabbed about the face by a barber with damp hands. In either case it is
a repulsive thing to have, eating into one's time when one might be
living; and I have calculated that all the hair I have lost in this way,
put end to end, would reach to Berlin. All that vital energy thrown
away! However, "Thorns and bristles shall it bring forth to thee." I
suppose it is part of the primal curse, and I try and stand it like a
man. But the thing is a bother all the same.
Then after shaving comes the hunt for the collar-stud. Of all idiotic
inventions the modern collar is the worst. A man who has to write things
for such readers as mine cannot think over-night of where he puts his
collar-stud; he has to keep his mind at an altogether higher level.
Consequently he walks about the bedroom, thinking hard, and dropping
things about: here a vest and there a collar, and sowing a bitter
harvest against the morning. Or he sits on the edge of the bed jerking
his garments this way and that. "I shot a slipper in the air," as the
poet sings, and in the morning it turns up in the most impossible
quarters, and where you least expect it. And, talking of going to bed,
before Euphemia took the responsibility over, I was always forgetting to
wind my watch. But now that is one of the things she neglects.
Then, after getting up, there is breakfast. Autolycus of the _Pall Mall
Gazette_ may find heaven there, but I am differently constituted. There
is, to begin with the essence of the offence--the stuff that has to be
eaten somehow. Then there is the paper. Unless it is the face of a
fashionable beauty, I know of nothing more absolutely uninteresting than
a morning paper. You always expect to find something in it, and never
do. It wastes half my morning sometimes, going over and over the thing,
and trying to find out why they publish it. If I edited a daily I think
I should do like my father does when he writes to me. "Things much the
same," he writes; "the usual fussing about the curate's red socks"--a
long letter for him. The rest margin. And, by the bye, there are letters
every morning at breakfast, too!
Now I do not grumble at letters. You can read them instead of getting on
with your breakfast. They are entertaining in a way, and you can tear
them up at the end, and in that respect at least they are better than
people who come to see you. Usually, too, you need not make a reply. But
sometimes Euphemia gets hold of some still untorn, and says in her
dictatorial way that they _have_ to be answered--insists--says I _must_.
Yet she knows that nothing fills me with a livelier horror than having
to answer letters. It paralyses me. I waste whole days sometimes
mourning over the time that I shall have to throw away presently,
answering some needless impertinence--requests for me to return books
lent to me; reminders from the London Library that my subscription is
overdue; proposals for me to renew my ticket at the stores--Euphemia's
business really; invitations for me to go and be abashed before
impertinent distinguished people: all kinds of bothering things.
And speaking of letters and invitations brings me round to friends. I
dislike most people; in London they get in one's way in the street and
fill up railway carriages, and in the country they stare at you--but I
_hate_ my friends. Yet Euphemia says I _must_ "keep up" my friends. They
would be all very well if they were really true friends and respected my
feelings and left me alone, just to sit quiet. But they come wearing
shiny clothes, and mop and mow at me and expect me to answer their
gibberings. Polite conversation always appears to me to be a wicked
perversion of the blessed gift of speech, which, I take it, was given us
to season our lives rather than to make them insipid. New friends are
the worst in this respect. With old friends one is more at home; you
give them something to eat or drink, or look at, or something--whatever
they seem to want--and just turn round and go on smoking quietly. But
every now and then Euphemia or Destiny inflicts a new human being upon
me. I do not mean a baby, though the sentence has got that turn
somehow, but an introduction; and the wretched thing, all angles and
offence, keeps bobbing about me and discovering new ways of worrying me,
trying, I believe, to find out what topics interest me, though the fact
is no topics interest me. Once or twice, of course, I have met human
beings I think I could have got on with very well, after a time; but in
this mood, at least, I doubt if any human being is quite worth the
bother of a new acquaintance.
These are just sample bothers--shaving, washing, answering letters,
talking to people. I could specify hundreds more. Indeed, in my sadder
moments, it seems to me life is all compact of bothers. There are the
details of business--knowing the date approximately (an incessant
anxiety) and the time of day. Then, having to buy things. Euphemia does
most of this, it is true, but she draws the line at my boots and gloves
and hosiery and tailoring. Then, doing up parcels and finding pieces of
string or envelopes or stamps--which Euphemia might very well manage for
me. Then, finding your way back after a quiet, thoughtful walk. Then,
having to get matches for your pipe. I sometimes dream of a better
world, where pipe, pouch, and matches all keep together instead of being
mutually negatory. But Euphemia is always putting everything into some
hiding-hole or other, which she calls its "place." Trivial things in
their way, you may say, yet each levying so much toll on my brain and
nervous system, and demanding incessant vigilance and activity. I
calculated once that I wasted a masterpiece upon these mountainous
little things about every three months of my life. Can I help thinking
of them, then, and asking why I suffer thus? And can I avoid seeing at
last how it is they hang together?
For there is still one other bother, a kind of _bother botherum_, to
tell of, though I hesitate at the telling. It brings this rabble herd of
worries into line and makes them formidable; it is, so to speak, the
Bother Commander-in-Chief. Well! Euphemia. I simply worship the ground
she treads upon, mind, but at the same time the truth is the truth.
Euphemia is a bother. She is a brave little woman, and helps me in
every conceivable way. But I wish she would not. It is so obviously all
her doing. She makes me get up of a morning--I would not stand as much
from anybody else--and keeps a sharp eye on my chin and collar. If it
were not for her I could sit about always with no collar or tie on in
that old jacket she gave to the tramp, and just smoke and grow a beard
and let all the bothers slide. I would never wash, never shave, never
answer any letters, never go to see any friends, never do any
work--except, perhaps, an insulting postcard to a publisher now and
again. I would just sit about.
Sometimes I think this may be peculiar in me. At other times I fancy I
am giving voice to the secret feeling of every member of my sex. I
suspect, then, that we would all do as the noble savage does, take our
things off and lie about comfortable, if only someone had the courage to
begin. It is these women--all love and reverence to Euphemia
notwithstanding--who make us work and bother us with Things. They keep
us decent, and remind us we have a position to support. And really,
after all, this is not my original discovery! There is the third chapter
of Genesis, for instance. And then who has not read Carlyle's gloating
over a certain historical suit of leather? It gives me a queer thrill of
envy, that Quaker Fox and his suit of leather. Conceive it, if you can!
One would never have to quail under the scrutiny of a tailor any more.
Thoreau, too, come to think of it, was, by way of being a prophet, a
pioneer in this Emancipation of Man from Bothery.
Then the silent gentry who brew our Chartreuse; what are they in
retirement for? Looking back into history, with the glow of discovery in
my eyes, I find records of wise men--everyone acknowledged they were
wise men--who lived apart. In every age the same associate of solitude,
silence, and wisdom. The holy hermits!... I grant it, they professed to
flee wickedness and seek after righteousness, but now my impression is
that they fled bothers. We all know they had an intense aversion to any
savour of domesticity, and they never shaved, washed, dined, visited,
had new clothes. Holiness, indeed! They were _viveurs_.... We have
witnessed Religion without Theology, and why not an Unsectarian Thebaid?
I sometimes fancy it needs only one brave man to begin.... If it were
not for the fuss Euphemia would make I certainly should. But I know she
would come and worry me worse than St. Anthony was worried until I put
them all on again, and that keeps me from the attempt.
I am curious whether mine is the common experience. I fancy, after all,
I am only seeing in a clearer way, putting into modern phrase, so to
speak, an observation old as the Pentateuch. And looking up I read upon
a little almanac with which Euphemia has cheered my desk:--
"The world was sad" (sweet sadness!)
"The garden was a wild" (a picturesque wild)
"And man the hermit" (he made no complaint)
"Till the woman smiled."--CAMPBELL.
[And very shortly after he had, as you know, all that bother about the
millinery.]
ON THE CHOICE OF A WIFE
Wife-choosing is an unending business. This sounds immoral, but what I
mean will be clearer in the context. People have lived--innumerable
people--exhausted experience, and yet other people keep on coming to
hand, none the wiser, none the better. It is like a waterfall more than
anything else in the world. Every year one has to turn to and warn
another batch about these stale old things. Yet it is one's duty--the
last thing that remains to a man. And as a piece of worldly wisdom, that
has nothing to do with wives, always leave a few duties neglected for
the comfort of your age. There are such a lot of other things one can do
when one is young.
Now, the kind of wife a young fellow of eight- or nine-and-twenty
insists on selecting is something of one-and-twenty or less,
inexperienced, extremely pretty, graceful, and well dressed, not too
clever, accomplished; but I need not go on, for the youthful reader can
fill in the picture himself from his own ideal. Every young man has his
own ideal, as a matter of course, and they are all exactly alike. Now, I
do not intend to repeat all the stale old saws of out-of-date wiseacres.
Most of them are even more foolish than the follies they reprove. Take,
for instance, the statement that "beauty fades." Absurd; everyone knows
perfectly well that, as the years creep on, beauty simply gets more
highly coloured. And then, "beauty is only skin-deep." Fantastically
wrong! Some of it is not that; and, for the rest, is a woman like a toy
balloon?--just a surface? To hear that proverb from a man is to know him
at once for a phonographic kind of fool. The fundamental and enduring
grace of womanhood goes down to the skeleton; you cannot have a pretty
face without a pretty skull, just as you cannot have one without a good
temper.
Yet all the same there is an excellent reason why one should shun beauty
in a prospective wife, at anyrate obvious beauty--the kind of beauty
people talk about, and which gets into the photographers' windows. The
common beautiful woman has a style of her own, a favourite aspect. After
all, she cannot be perfect. She comes upon you, dazzles you, marries
you; there is a time of ecstasy. People envy you, continue to envy you.
After a time you envy yourself--yourself of the day before yesterday.
For the imperfection, the inevitable imperfection--in one case I
remember it was a smile--becomes visible to you, becomes your especial
privilege. That is the real reason. No beauty is a beauty to her
husband. But with the plain woman--the thoroughly plain woman--it is
different. At first--I will not mince matters--her ugliness is an
impenetrable repulse. Face it. After a time little things begin to
appear through the violent discords: little scraps of melody--a shy
tenderness in her smile that peeps out at you and vanishes, a something
that is winning, looking out of her eyes. You find a waviness of her
hair that you never saw at the beginning, a certain surprising,
pleasing, enduring want of clumsiness in part of her ear. And it is
yours. You can see she strikes the beholder with something of a shock;
and while the beauty of the beauty is common for all the world to
rejoice in, you will find in your dear, plain wife beauty enough and to
spare; exquisite--for it is all your own, your treasure-trove, your
safely-hidden treasure....
Then, in the matter of age; though young fellows do not imagine it, it
is very easy to marry a wife too young. Marriage has been defined as a
foolish bargain in which one man provides for another man's daughter,
but there is no reason why this should go so far as completing her
education. If your conception of happiness is having something pretty
and innocent and troublesome about you, something that you can cherish
and make happy, a pet rabbit is in every way preferable. At the worst
that will nibble your boots. I have known several cases of the
girl-wife, and it always began like an idyll, charmingly; the tenderest
care on one hand, winsome worship on the other--until some little thing,
a cut chin or a missing paper, startled the pure and natural man out of
his veneer, dancing and blaspheming, with the most amazing consequences.
Only a proven saint should marry a girl-wife, and his motives might be
misunderstood. The idyllic wife is a beautiful thing to read about, but
in practice idylls should be kept episodes; in practice the idyllic life
is a little too like a dinner that is all dessert. A common man, after a
time, tires of winsome worship; he craves after companionship, and a
sympathy based on experience. The ordinary young man, with the still
younger wife, I have noticed, continues to love her with all his
heart--and spends his leisure telling somebody else's wife all about it.
If in these days of blatant youth an experienced man's counsel is worth
anything, it would be to marry a woman considerably older than oneself,
if one must marry at all. And while upon this topic--and I have lived
long--the ideal wife, I am persuaded, from the close observation of many
years, is invariably, by some mishap, a widow....
Avoid social charm. It was the capacity for entertaining visitors that
ruined Paradise. It grows upon a woman. An indiscriminating personal
magnetism is perhaps the most dreadful vice a wife can have. You think
you have married the one woman in the world, and you find you have
married a host--that is to say, a hostess. Instead of making a home for
you she makes you something between an ethnographical museum and a
casual ward. You find your rooms littered with people and teacups and
things, strange creatures that no one could possibly care for, that seem
scarcely to care for themselves. You go about the house treading upon
chance geniuses, and get tipped by inexperienced guests. And even when
she does not entertain, she is continually going out. I do not deny that
charming people are charming, that their company should be sought, but
seeking it in marriage is an altogether different matter.
Then, I really must insist that young men do not understand the real
truth about accomplishments. There comes a day when the most variegated
wife comes to the end of her tunes, and another when she ends them for
the second time; _Vita longa, ars brevis_--at least, as regards the art
of the schoolgirl. It is only like marrying a slightly more complicated
barrel-organ. And, for another point, watch the young person you would
honour with your hand for the slightest inkling of economy or tidiness.
Young men are so full of poetry and emotion that it does not occur to
them how widely the sordid vices are distributed in the other sex. If
you are a hotel proprietor, or a school proprietor, or a day labourer,
such weaknesses become a strength, of course, but not otherwise. For a
literary person--if perchance you are a literary person--it is
altogether too dreadful. You are always getting swept and garnished,
straightened up and sent out to be shaved. And home--even your
study--becomes a glittering, spick-and-span mechanism. But you know the
parable of the seven devils?
To conclude, a summary. The woman you choose should be plain, as plain
as you can find, as old or older than yourself, devoid of social gifts
or accomplishments, poor--for your self-respect--and with a certain
amiable untidiness. Of course no young man will heed this, but at least
I have given my counsel, and very excellent reasons for that counsel.
And possibly I shall be able to remind him that I told him as much, in
the course of a few years' time. And, by the bye, I had almost
forgotten! Never by any chance marry a girl whose dresses do up at the
back, unless you can afford her a maid or so of her own.
THE HOUSE OF DI SORNO
A MANUSCRIPT FOUND IN A BOX
And the box, Euphemia's. Brutally raided it was by an insensate husband,
eager for a tie and too unreasonably impatient to wait an hour or so
until she could get home and find it for him. There was, of course, no
tie at all in that box, for all his stirring--as anyone might have
known; but, if there was no tie, there were certain papers that at least
suggested a possibility of whiling away the time until the Chooser and
Distributer of Ties should return. And, after all, there is no reading
like your accidental reading come upon unawares.
It was a discovery, indeed, that Euphemia _had_ papers. At the first
glance these close-written sheets suggested a treasonable Keynote, and
the husband gripped it with a certain apprehension mingling with his
relief at the opiate of reading. It was, so to speak, the privilege of
police he exercised, so he justified himself. He began to read. But what
is this? "She stood on the balcony outside the window, while the
noblest-born in the palace waited on her every capricious glance, and
watched for an unbending look to relieve her hauteur, but in vain." None
of your snippy-snappy Keynote there!
Then he turned over a page or so of the copy, doubting if the privilege
of police still held good. Standing out by virtue of a different ink,
and coming immediately after "bear her to her proud father," were the
words, "How many yards of carpet 3/4 yds. wide will cover room, width 16
ft., length 27-1/2 ft.?" Then he knew he was in the presence of the
great romance that Euphemia wrote when she was sixteen. He had heard
something of it before. He held it doubtfully in his hands, for the
question of conscience still troubled him. "Bah!" he said abruptly, "not
to find it irresistible was to slight the authoress and her skill." And
with that he sat plump down among the things in the box very comfortably
and began reading, and, indeed, read until Euphemia arrived. But she, at
the sight of his head and legs, made several fragmentary and presumably
offensive remarks about crushing some hat or other, and proceeded with
needless violence to get him out of the box again. However, that is my
own private trouble. We are concerned now with the merits of Euphemia's
romance.
The hero of the story is a Venetian, named (for some unknown reason)
Ivan di Sorno. So far as I ascertained, he is the entire house of Di
Sorno referred to in the title. No other Di Sornos transpired. Like
others in the story, he is possessed of untold wealth, tempered by a
profound sorrow, for some cause which remains unmentioned, but which is
possibly internal. He is first displayed "pacing a sombre avenue of ilex
and arbutus that reflected with singular truth the gloom of his
countenance," and "toying sadly with the jewelled hilt of his dagger."
He meditates upon his loveless life and the burthen of riches. Presently
he "paces the long and magnificent gallery," where a "hundred
generations of Di Sornos, each with the same flashing eye and the same
marble brow, look down with the same sad melancholy upon the
beholder"--a truly monotonous exhibition. It would be too much for
anyone, day after day. He decides that he will travel. Incognito.
The next chapter is headed "In Old Madrid," and Di Sorno, cloaked to
conceal his grandeur, "moves sad and observant among the giddy throng."
But "Gwendolen"--the majestic Gwendolen of the balcony--"marked his
pallid yet beautiful countenance." And the next day at the bull-fight
she "flung her bouquet into the arena, and turning to Di Sorno"--a
perfect stranger, mind you--"smiled commandingly." "In a moment he had
flung himself headlong down among the flashing blades of the toreadors
and the trampling confusion of bulls, and in another he stood before
her, bowing low with the recovered flowers in his hand. 'Fair sir,' she
said, 'methinks my poor flowers were scarce worth your trouble.'" A very
proper remark. And then suddenly I put the manuscript down.
My heart was full of pity for Euphemia. Thus had she gone a-dreaming. A
man of imposing physique and flashing eye, who would fling you oxen here
and there, and vault in and out of an arena without catching a breath,
for his lady's sake--and here I sat, the sad reality, a lean and
slippered literary pretender, and constitutionally afraid of cattle.
Poor little Euphemia! For after all is said and done, and the New Woman
gibed out of existence, I am afraid we do undeceive these poor wives of
ours a little after the marrying is over. It may be they have deceived
themselves, in the first place, but that scarcely affects their
disappointment. These dream-lovers of theirs, these monsters of
unselfishness and devotion, these tall fair Donovans and dark
worshipping Wanderers! And then comes the rabble rout of us poor human
men, damning at our breakfasts, wiping pens upon our coat sleeves,
smelling of pipes, fearing our editors, and turning Euphemia's private
boxes into public copy. And they take it so steadfastly--most of them.
They never let us see the romance we have robbed them of, but turn to
and make the best of it--and us--with such sweet grace. Only now and
then--as in the instance of a flattened hat--may a cry escape them. And
even then----
But a truce to reality! Let us return to Di Sorno.
This individual does not become enamoured of Gwendolen, as the crude
novel reader might anticipate. He answers her "coldly," and his eye
rests the while on her "tirewoman, the sweet Margot." Then come scenes
of jealousy and love, outside a castle with heavily mullioned windows.
The sweet Margot, though she turns out to be the daughter of a bankrupt
prince, has one characteristic of your servant all the world over--she
spends all her time looking out of the window. Di Sorno tells her of his
love on the evening of the bull-fight, and she cheerfully promises to
"learn to love him," and therafter he spends all his days and nights
"spurring his fiery steed down the road" that leads by the castle
containing the young scholar. It becomes a habit with him--in all, he
does it seventeen times in three chapters. Then, "ere it is too late,"
he implores Margot to fly.
Gwendolen, after a fiery scene with Margot, in which she calls her a
"petty minion,"--pretty language for a young gentlewoman,--"sweeps with
unutterable scorn from the room," never, to the reader's huge
astonishment, to appear in the story again, and Margot flies with Di
Sorno to Grenada, where the Inquisition, consisting apparently of a
single monk with a "blazing eye," becomes extremely machinatory. A
certain Countess di Morno, who intends to marry Di Sorno, and who has
been calling into the story in a casual kind of way since the romance
began, now comes prominently forward. She has denounced Margot for
heresy, and at a masked ball the Inquisition, disguised in a yellow
domino, succeeds in separating the young couple, and in carrying off
"the sweet Margot" to a convent.
"Di Sorno, half distraught, flung himself into a cab and drove to all
the hotels in Grenada" (he overlooked the police station), and, failing
to find Margot, becomes mad. He goes about ejaculating "Mad, mad!" than
which nothing could be more eloquent of his complete mental inversion.
In his paroxysms the Countess di Morno persuades him to "lead her to the
altar," but on the way (with a certain indelicacy they go to church in
the same conveyance) she lets slip a little secret. So Di Sorno jumps
out of the carriage, "hurling the crowd apart," and, "flourishing his
drawn sword," "clamoured at the gate of the Inquisition" for Margot. The
Inquisition, represented by the fiery-eyed monk, "looked over the gate
at him." No doubt it felt extremely uncomfortable.
Now it was just at this thrilling part that Euphemia came home, and the
trouble about the flattened hat began. I never flattened her hat. It was
in the box, and so was I; but as for deliberate flattening----It was
just a thing that happened. She should not write such interesting
stories if she expects me to go on tiptoe through the world looking
about for her hats. To have that story taken away just at that
particular moment was horrible. There was fully as much as I had read
still to come, so that a lot happened after this duel of Sword _v._
Fiery Eye. I know from a sheet that came out of place that Margot
stabbed herself with a dagger ("richly jewelled"), but of all that came
between I have not the faintest suspicion. That is the peculiar interest
of it. At this particular moment the one book I want to read in all the
world is the rest of this novel of Euphemia's. And simply, on the score
of a new hat needed, she keeps it back and haggles!
OF CONVERSATION
AN APOLOGY
I must admit that in conversation I am not a brilliant success. Partly,
indeed, that may be owing to the assiduity with which my aunt suppressed
my early essays in the art: "Children," she said, "should be seen but
not heard," and incontinently rapped my knuckles. To a larger degree,
however, I regard it as intrinsic. This tendency to silence, to go out
of the rattle and dazzle of the conversation into a quiet apart, is
largely, I hold, the consequence of a certain elevation and breadth and
tenderness of mind; I am no blowfly to buzz my way through the universe,
no rattle that I should be expected to delight my fellow-creatures by
the noises I produce. I go about to this social function and that,
deporting myself gravely and decently in silence, taking, if possible, a
back seat; and, in consequence of that, people who do not understand me
have been heard to describe me as a "stick," as "shy," and by an
abundance of the like unflattering terms. So that I am bound almost in
self-justification to set down my reasons for this temperance of mine in
conversation.
Speech, no doubt, is a valuable gift, but at the same time it is a gift
that may be abused. What is regarded as polite conversation is, I hold,
such an abuse. Alcohol, opium, tea, are all very excellent things in
their way; but imagine continuous alcohol, an incessant opium, or to
receive, ocean-like, a perennially flowing river of tea! That is my
objection to this conversation: its continuousness. You have to keep on.
You find three or four people gathered together, and instead of being
restful and recreative, sitting in comfortable attitudes and at peace
with themselves and each other, and now and again, perhaps three or four
times in an hour, making a worthy and memorable remark, they are all
haggard and intent upon keeping this fetish flow agoing. A fortuitous
score of cows in a field are a thousand times happier than a score of
people deliberately assembled for the purposes of happiness. These
conversationalists say the most shallow and needless of things, impart
aimless information, simulate interest they do not feel, and generally
impugn their claim to be considered reasonable creatures. Why, when
people assemble without hostile intentions, it should be so imperative
to keep the trickling rill of talk running, I find it impossible to
imagine. It is a vestige of the old barbaric times, when men murdered at
sight for a mere whim; when it was good form to take off your sword in
the antechamber, and give your friend your dagger-hand, to show him it
was no business visit. Similarly, you keep up this babblement to show
your mind has no sinister concentration, not necessarily because you
have anything to say, but as a guarantee of good faith. You have to make
a noise all the time, like the little boy who was left in the room with
the plums. It is the only possible explanation.
To a logical mind there is something very distressing in this social law
of gabble. Out of regard for Mrs. A, let us say, I attend some festival
she has inaugurated. There I meet for the first time a young person of
pleasant exterior, and I am placed in her company to deliver her at a
dinner-table, or dance her about, or keep her out of harm's way, in a
cosy nook. She has also never seen me before, and probably does not want
particularly to see me now. However, I find her nice to look at, and she
has taken great pains to make herself nice to look at, and why we cannot
pass the evening, I looking at her and she being looked at, I cannot
imagine. But no; we must talk. Now, possibly there are topics she knows
about and I do not--it is unlikely, but suppose so; on these topics she
requires no information. Again, I know about other topics things unknown
to her, and it seems a mean and priggish thing to broach these, since
they put her at a disadvantage. Thirdly, comes a last group of subjects
upon which we are equally informed, and upon which, therefore, neither
of us is justified in telling things to the other. This classification
of topics seems to me exhaustive.
These considerations, I think, apply to all conversations. In every
conversation, every departure must either be a presumption when you talk
into your antagonist's special things, a pedantry when you fall back
upon your own, or a platitude when you tell each other things you both
know. I don't see any other line a conversation can take. The reason why
one has to keep up the stream of talk is possibly, as I have already
suggested, to manifest goodwill. And in so many cases this could be
expressed so much better by a glance, a deferential carriage, possibly
in some cases a gentle pressure of the hand, or a quiet persistent
smile. And suppose there is some loophole in my reasoning--though I
cannot see it--and that possible topics exist, how superficial and
unexact is the best conversation to a second-rate book!
Even with two people you see the objection, but when three or four are
gathered together the case is infinitely worse to a man of delicate
perceptions. Let us suppose--I do not grant it--that there is a possible
sequence of things to say to the person A that really harmonise with A
and yourself. Grant also that there is a similar sequence between
yourself and B. Now, imagine yourself and A and B at the corners of an
equilateral triangle set down to talk to each other. The kind of talk
that A appreciates is a discord with B, and similarly B's sequence is
impossible in the hearing of A. As a matter of fact, a real conversation
of three people is the most impossible thing in the world. In real life
one of the three always drops out and becomes a mere audience, or a mere
partisan. In real life you and A talk, and B pretends to be taking a
share by interjecting interruptions, or one of the three talks a
monologue. And the more subtle your sympathy and the greater your
restraint from self-assertion, the more incredible triple and quadruple
conversation becomes.
I have observed that there is even nowadays a certain advance towards my
views in this matter. Men may not pick out antagonists, and argue to the
general audience as once they did: there is a tacit taboo of
controversy, neither may you talk your "shop," nor invite your
antagonist to talk his. There is also a growing feeling against
extensive quotations or paraphrases from the newspapers. Again,
personalities, scandal, are, at least in theory, excluded. This narrows
the scope down to the "last new book," "the last new play," "impressions
de voyage," and even here it is felt that any very ironical or satirical
remarks, anything unusual, in fact, may disconcert your adversary. You
ask: Have you read the _Wheels of Chance_? The answer is "Yes." "Do you
like it?" "A little vulgar, I thought." And so forth. Most of this is
stereo. It is akin to responses in church, a prescription, a formula.
And, following out this line of thought, I have had a vision of the
twentieth century dinner. At a distance it is very like the nineteenth
century type; the same bright light, the same pleasant deglutition, the
same hum of conversation; but, approaching, you discover each diner has
a little drum-shaped body under his chin--his phonograph. So he dines
and babbles at his ease. In the smoking-room he substitutes his anecdote
record. I imagine, too, the suburban hostess meeting the new maiden: "I
hope, dear, you have brought a lot of conversation," just as now she
asks for the music. For my own part, I must confess I find this dinner
conversation particularly a bother. If I could eat with my eye it would
be different.
I lose a lot of friends through this conversational difficulty. They
think it is my dulness or my temper, when really it is only my refined
mind, my subtlety of consideration. It seems to me that when I go to see
a man, I go to see him--to enjoy his presence. If he is my friend, the
sight of him healthy and happy is enough for me. I don't want him to
keep his vocal cords, and I don't want to keep my own vocal cords, in
incessant vibration all the time I am in his company. If I go to see a
man, it distracts me to have to talk and it distracts me to hear him
talking. I can't imagine why one should not go and sit about in people's
rooms, without bothering them and without their bothering you to say all
these stereotyped things. Quietly go in, sit down, look at your man
until you have seen him enough, and then go. Why not?
Let me once more insist that this keeping up a conversation is a sign of
insecurity, of want of confidence. All those who have had real friends
know that when the friendship is assured the gabble ceases. You are not
at the heart of your friend, if either of you cannot go off comfortably
to sleep in the other's presence. Speech was given us to make known our
needs, and for imprecation, expostulation, and entreaty. This pitiful
necessity we are under, upon social occasions, to say something--however
inconsequent--is, I am assured, the very degradation of speech.
IN A LITERARY HOUSEHOLD
In the literary household of fiction and the drama, things are usually
in a distressing enough condition. The husband, as you know, has a
hacking cough, and the wife a dying baby, and they write in the
intervals of these cares among the litter of the breakfast things.
Occasionally a comic, but sympathetic, servant brings in an
armful--"heaped up and brimming over"--of rejected MSS., for, in the
dramatic life, it never rains but it pours. Instead of talking about
editors in a bright and vigorous fashion, as the recipients of
rejections are wont, the husband groans and covers his face with his
hands, and the wife, leaving the touching little story she is
writing--she posts this about 9 p.m., and it brings in a publisher and
£100 or so before 10.30--comforts him by flopping suddenly over his
shoulder. "Courage," she says, stroking his hyacinthine locks (whereas
all real literary men are more or less grey or bald). Sometimes, as in
_Our Flat_, comic tradesmen interrupt the course of true literature with
their ignoble desire for cash payment, and sometimes, as in _Our Boys_,
uncles come and weep at the infinite pathos of a bad breakfast egg. But
it's always a very sordid, dusty, lump-in-your-throaty affair, and no
doubt it conduces to mortality by deterring the young and impressionable
from literary vices. As for its truth, that is another matter
altogether.