like any other. There is the brass paper-fastener, for instance. I have
sometimes thought that Euphemia married me with an eye to these
conveniences. She has two in her grey gloves, and one (with the head
inked) in her boot in the place of a button. Others I suspect her of.
Then she fastened the lamp shade together with them, and tried one day
to introduce them instead of pearl buttons as efficient anchorage for
cuffs and collars. And she made a new handle for the little drawer under
the inkstand with one. Indeed, the literary household is held together,
so to speak, by paper-fasteners, and how other people get along without
them we are at a loss to imagine.
And another point, almost equally important, is that the husband is
generally messing about at home. That is, indeed, to a superficial
observer, one of the most remarkable characteristics of the literary
household. Other husbands are cast out in the morning to raven for
income and return to a home that is swept and garnished towards the end
of the day; but the literary husband is ever in possession. His work
must not be disturbed even when he is merely thinking. The study is
consequently a kind of domestic cordite factory, and you are never
certain when it may explode. The concussion of a dust-pan and brush may
set it going, the sweeping of a carpet in the room upstairs. Then behold
a haggard, brain-weary man, fierce and dishevelled, and full of
shattered masterpiece--expostulating. Other houses have their day of
cleaning out this room, and their day for cleaning out that; but in the
literary household there is one uniform date for all such functions, and
that is "to-morrow." So that Mrs. Mergles makes her purifying raids with
her heart in her mouth, and has acquired a way of leaving the pail and
brush, or whatever artillery she has with her, in a manner that
unavoidably engages the infuriated brute's attention and so covers her
retreat.
It is a problem that has never been probably solved, this discord of
order and orderly literary work. Possibly it might be done by making the
literary person live elsewhere or preventing literary persons from
having households. However it might be done, it is not done. This is a
thing innocent girls exposed to the surreptitious proposals of literary
men do not understand. They think it will be very fine to have
photographs of themselves and their "cosy nooks" published in magazines,
to illustrate the man's interviews, and the full horror of having this
feral creature always about the house, and scarcely ever being able to
do any little thing without his knowing it, is not brought properly home
to them until escape is impossible.
And then there is the taint of "copy" everywhere. That is really the
fundamental distinction. It is the misfortune of literary people, that
they have to write about something. There is no reason, of course, why
they should, but the thing is so. Consequently, they are always looking
about them for something to write about. They cannot take a pure-minded
interest in anything in earth or heaven. Their servant is no servant,
but a character; their cat is a possible reservoir of humorous
observation; they look out of window and see men as columns walking.
Even the sanctity of their own hearts, their self-respect, their most
private emotions are disregarded. The wife is infected with the taint.
Her private opinion of her husband she makes into a short story--forgets
its origin and shows it him with pride--while the husband decants his
heart-beats into occasional verse and minor poetry. It is amazing what a
lot of latter-day literature consists of such breaches of confidence.
And not simply latter-day literature.
The visitor is fortunate who leaves no marketable impression behind. The
literary entertainers eye you over, as if they were dealers in a slave
mart, and speculate on your uses. They try to think how you would do as
a scoundrel, and mark your little turns of phrase and kinks of thought
to that end. The innocent visitor bites his cake and talks about
theatres, while the meditative person in the arm-chair may be in
imagination stabbing him, or starving him on a desert island, or
even--horrible to tell!--flinging him headlong into the arms of the
young lady to the right and "covering her face with a thousand
passionate kisses." A manuscript in the rough of Euphemia's, that I
recently suppressed, was an absolutely scandalous example of this method
of utilising one's acquaintances. Mrs. Harborough, who was indeed
Euphemia's most confidential friend for six weeks and more, she had
made to elope with Scrimgeour--as steady and honourable a man as we
know, though unpleasant to Euphemia on account of his manner of holding
his teacup. I believe there really was something--quite harmless, of
course--between Mrs. Harborough and Scrimgeour, and that, imparted in
confidence, had been touched up with vivid colour here and there and
utilised freely. Scrimgeour is represented as always holding teacups in
his peculiar way, so that anyone would recognise him at once. Euphemia
calls that character. Then Harborough, who is really on excellent terms
with his wife, and, in spite of his quiet manner, a very generous and
courageous fellow, is turned aside from his headlong pursuit of the
fugitives across Wimbledon Common--they elope, by the bye, on
Scrimgeour's tandem bicycle--by the fear of being hit by a golf ball. I
pointed out to Euphemia that these things were calculated to lose us
friends, and she promises to destroy the likeness; but I have no
confidence in her promise. She will probably clap a violent auburn wig
on Mrs. Harborough and make Scrimgeour squint and give Harborough a big
beard. The point that she won't grasp is, that with that fatal facility
for detail, which is one of the most indisputable proofs of woman's
intellectual inferiority, she has reproduced endless remarks and
mannerisms of these excellent people with more than photographic
fidelity. But this is really a private trouble, though it illustrates
very well the shameless way in which those who have the literary taint
will bring to market their most intimate affairs.
ON SCHOOLING AND THE PHASES OF MR. SANDSOME
I do not know if you remember your "dates." Indeed, I do not know if
anyone does. My own memory is of a bridge; like that bridge of
Goldsmith's, standing firm and clear on its hither piers and then
passing into a cloud. In the beginning of days was "William the
Conqueror, 1066," and the path lay safe and open to Henry the Second;
then came Titanic forms of kings, advancing and receding, elongating and
dwindling, exchanging dates, losing dates, stealing dates from battles
and murders and great enactments--even inventing dates, vacant years
that were really no dates at all. The things I have suffered--prisons,
scourgings, beating with rods, wild masters, in bounds often, a hundred
lines often, standing on forms and holding out books often--on account
of these dates! I knew, and knew well before I was fifteen, what these
"heredity" babblers are only beginning to discover--that the past is the
curse of the present. But I never knew my dates--never. And I marvel now
that all little boys do not grow up to be Republicans, seeing how much
they suffer for the mere memory of Kings.
Then there were pedigrees, and principal parts and conjugations, and
county towns. Every county had a county town, and it was always on a
river. Mr. Sandsome never allowed us a town without that colophon. I
remember in my early manhood going to Guildford on the Wey, and trying
to find that unobtrusive rivulet. I went over the downs for miles. It is
not only the Wey I have had a difficulty in finding. There are certain
verses--Heaven help me, but I have forgotten them!--about "_i_ vel _e_
dat" (_was_ it dat?) "utrum malis"--if I remember rightly--and all that
about _amo, amas, amat_. There was a multitude of such things I
acquired, and they lie now, in the remote box-rooms and lumber recesses
of my mind, a rusting armoury far gone in decay. I have never been able
to find a use for them. I wonder even now why Mr. Sandsome equipped me
with them. Yet he seemed to be in deadly earnest about this learning,
and I still go in doubt. In those early days he impressed me, chiefly in
horizontal strips, with the profoundest respect for his mental and
physical superiority. I credited him then, and still incline to believe
he deserved to be credited, with a sincere persuasion that unless I
learnt these things I should assuredly go--if I may be frank--to the
devil. It may be so. I may be living in a fool's paradise,
prospering--like that wicked man the Psalmist disliked. Some unsuspected
gulf may open, some undreamt-of danger thrust itself through the
phantasmagoria of the universe, and I may learn too late the folly of
forgetting my declensions.
I remember Mr. Sandsome chiefly as sitting at his desk, in a little room
full of boys, a humming hive whose air was thick with dust, as the
slanting sunbeams showed. When we were not doing sums or writing copies,
we were always learning or saying lessons. In the early morning Mr.
Sandsome sat erect and bright, his face animated, his ruddy eyes keen
and observant, the cane hanging but uncertainly upon its hook. There was
a standing up of classes, a babble of repetition, now and then a crisis.
How long the days were then! I have heard that scientific
people--Professor C. Darwin is their leader, unless I err--which
probably I do, for names and dates I have hated from my youth up--say
the days grow longer. Anyhow, whoever says it, it is quite wrong. But as
the lank hours of that vast schooltime drawled on, Mr. Sandsome lost
energy, drooped like a flower,--especially if the day was at all
hot,--his sandy hair became dishevelled, justice became nerveless,
hectic, and hasty. Finally came copybooks; and yawns and weird rumblings
from Mr. Sandsome. And so the world aged to the dinner-hour.
When I had been home--it was a day school, for my aunt, who had an
appetite for such things, knew that boarding-schools were sinks of
iniquity--and returned, I had Mr. Sandsome at another phase. He had
dined--for we were simple country folk. The figurative suggestions of
that "phase" are irresistible--the lunar quality. May I say that Mr.
Sandsome was at his full? We now stood up, thirty odd of us altogether,
to read, reading out of books in a soothing monotone, and he sat with
his reading-book before him, ruddy as the setting sun, and slowly,
slowly settling down. But now and then he would jerk back suddenly into
staring wakefulness as though he were fishing--with himself as bait--for
schoolboy crimes in the waters of oblivion--and fancied a nibble. That
was a dangerous time, full of anxiety. At last he went right under and
slept, and the reading grew cheerful, full of quaint glosses and
unexpected gaps, leaping playfully from boy to boy, instead of
travelling round with a proper decorum. But it never ceased, and little
Hurkley's silly little squeak of a voice never broke in upon its mellow
flow. (It took a year for Hurkley's voice to break.) Any such
interruption and Mr. Sandsome woke up and into his next phase
forthwith--a disagreeable phase always, and one we made it our business
to postpone as long as possible.
During that final period, the last quarter, Mr. Sandsome was distinctly
malignant. It was hard to do right; harder still to do wrong. A feverish
energy usually inspired our government. "Let us try to get some work
done," Mr. Sandsome would say--and I have even known him teach things
then. More frequently, with a needless bitterness, he set us upon
impossible tasks, demanding a colossal tale of sums perhaps, scattering
pens and paper and sowing the horrors of bookkeeping, or chastising us
with the scorpions of parsing and translation. And even in wintry
weather the little room grew hot and stuffy, and we terminated our
schoolday, much exhausted, with minds lax, lounging attitudes, and red
ears. What became of Mr. Sandsome after the giving-out of home-work, the
concluding prayer, and the aftermath of impositions, I do not know. I
stuffed my books, such as came to hand--very dirty they were inside, and
very neat out with my Aunt Charlotte's chintz covers--into my green
baize bag, and went forth from the mysteries of schooling into the great
world, up the broad white road that went slanting over the Down.
I say "the mysteries of schooling" deliberately. I wondered then, I
wonder still, what it was all for. Reading, almost my only art, I learnt
from Aunt Charlotte; a certain facility in drawing I acquired at home
and took to school, to my own undoing. "Undoing," again, is
deliberate--it was no mere swish on the hand, gentle reader. But the
things I learnt, more or less partially, at school, lie in my mind, like
the "Sarsen" stones of Wiltshire--great, disconnected, time-worn chunks
amidst the natural herbage of it. "The Rivers of the East Coast; the
Tweed, the Tyne, the Wear, the Tees, the Humber"--why is that, for
instance, sticking up among my ferns and wild flowers? It is not only
useless but misleading, for the Humber is not another Tweed. I sometimes
fancy the world may be mad--yet that seems egotistical. The fact remains
that for the greater part of my young life Mr. Sandsome got an appetite
upon us from nine till twelve, and digested his dinner, at first
placidly and then with petulance, from two until five--and we thirty odd
boys were sent by our twenty odd parents to act as a sort of chorus to
his physiology. And he was fed (as I judge) more than sufficiently,
clothed, sheltered, and esteemed on account of this relation. I think,
after all, there must have been something in that schooling. I can't
believe the world mad. And I have forgotten it--or as good as forgotten
it--all! At times I feel a wild impulse to hunt up all those
chintz-covered books, and brush up my dates and paradigms, before it is
too late.
THE POET AND THE EMPORIUM
"I am beginning life," he said, with a sigh. "Great Heavens! I have
spent a day--_a day!_--in a shop. Three bedroom suites and a sideboard
are among the unanticipated pledges of our affection. Have you lithia?
For a man of twelve limited editions this has been a terrible day."
I saw to his creature comforts. His tie was hanging outside his
waistcoat, and his complexion was like white pasteboard that has got
wet. "Courage," said I. "It will not occur again----"
"It will," said he. "We have to get there again tomorrow. We have--what
is it?--carpets, curtains----"
He produced his tablets. I was amazed. Those receptacles of choice
thoughts!
"The amber sunlight splashing through the leaky--leafy interlacing
green," he read. "No!--that's not it. Ah, here! Curtains!
Drawing-room--not to cost more than thirty shillings! And there's all
the Kitchen Hardware! (Thanks.) Dining-room chairs--query--rush bottoms?
What's this? G.L.I.S.--ah! "Glistering thro' deeps of
glaucophane"--that's nothing. Mem. to see can we afford Indian
needlework chairs--57s. 6d.? It's dreadful, Bellows!"
He helped himself to a cigarette.
"Find the salesman pleasant?" said I.
"Delightful. Assumed I was a spendthrift millionaire at first. Produced
in an off-hand way an eighty-guinea bedroom suite--we're trying to do
the entire business, you know, on about two hundred pounds. Well--that's
ten editions, you know. Came down, with evidently dwindling respect, to
things that were still ruinously expensive. I told him we wanted an
idyll--love in a cottage, and all that kind of thing. He brushed that on
one side, said idols were upstairs in the Japanese Department, and that
perhaps we might _do_ with a servant's set of bedroom furniture. Do with
a set! He was a gloomy man with (I should judge) some internal pain. I
tried to tell him that there was quite a lot of middle-class people like
myself in the country, people of limited or precarious means, whose
existence he seemed to ignore; assured him some of them led quite
beautiful lives. But he had no ideas beyond wardrobes. I quite forgot
the business of shopping in an attempt to kindle a little human
enthusiasm in his heart. We were in a great vast place full of
wardrobes, with a remote glittering vista of brass bedsteads--skeleton
beds, you know--and I tried to inspire him with some of the poetry of
his emporium; tried to make him imagine these beds and things going east
and west, north and south, to take sorrow, servitude, joy, worry,
failing strength, restless ambition in their impartial embraces. He only
turned round to Annie, and asked her if she thought she could _do_ with
'enamelled.' But I was quite taken with my idea----Where is it? I left
Annie to settle with this misanthrope, amidst his raw frameworks of the
Homes of the Future."
He fumbled with his tablets. "Mats for hall--not to exceed 3s. 9d....
Kerbs ... inquire tiled hearth ... Ah! Here we are: 'Ballade of the
Bedroom Suite':--
"'Noble the oak you are now displaying,
Subtly the hazel's grainings go,
Walnut's charm there is no gainsaying,
Red as red wine is your rosewood's glow;
Brave and brilliant the ash you show,
Rich your mahogany's hepatite shine,
Cool and sweet your enamel: But oh!
_Where are the wardrobes of Painted Pine?_'
"They have 'em in the catalogue at five guineas, with a picture--quite
as good they are as the more expensive ones. To judge by the picture."
"But that's scarcely the idea you started with," I began.
"Not; it went wrong--ballades often do. The preoccupation of the
'Painted Pine' was too much for me. What's this? 'N.B.--Sludge sells
music stools at--' No. Here we are (first half unwritten):--
"'White enamelled, like driven snow,
Picked with just one delicate line.
Price you were saying is? Fourteen!--No!
_Where are the wardrobes of Painted Pine?_'
"Comes round again, you see! Then _L'Envoy_:--
"'Salesman, sad is the truth I trow:
Winsome walnut can never be mine.
Poets are cheap. And their poetry. So
_Where are the wardrobes of Painted Pine?_'
"Prosaic! As all true poetry is, nowadays. But, how I tired as the
afternoon moved on! At first I was interested in the shopman's amazing
lack of imagination, and the glory of that fond dream of mine--love in a
cottage, you know--still hung about me. I had ideas come--like that
Ballade--and every now and then Annie told me to write notes. I think my
last gleam of pleasure was in choosing the drawing-room chairs. There is
scope for fantasy in chairs. Then----"
He took some more whisky.
"A kind of grey horror came upon me. I don't know if I can describe it.
We went through vast vistas of chairs, of hall-tables, of machine-made
pictures, of curtains, huge wildernesses of carpets, and ever this cold,
unsympathetic shopman led us on, and ever and again made us buy this or
that. He had a perfectly grey eye--the colour of an overcast sky in
January--and he seemed neither to hate us nor to detest us, but simply
to despise us, to feel such an overwhelming contempt for our petty means
and our petty lives, as an archangel might feel for an apple-maggot. It
made me think...."
He lit a fresh cigarette.
"I had a kind of vision. I do not know if you will understand. The
Warehouse of Life, with our Individual Fate hurrying each of us through.
Showing us with a covert sneer all the good things that we cannot
afford. A magnificent Rosewood love affair, for instance, deep and
rich, fitted complete, some hours of perfect life, some acts of perfect
self-sacrifice, perfect self-devotion.... You ask the price."
He shrugged his shoulders.
"Where are the wardrobes of Painted Pine?" I quoted.
"That's it. All the things one might do, if the purse of one's courage
were not so shallow. If it wasn't for the lack of that coinage, Bellows,
every man might be magnificent. There's heroism, there's such nobility
as no one has ever attained to, ready to hand. Anyone, if it were not
for this lack of means, might be a human god in twenty-four hours....
You see the article. You cannot buy it. No one buys it. It stands in the
emporium, I suppose, for show--on the chance of a millionaire. And the
shopman waves his hand to it on your way to the Painted Pine.
"Then you meet other couples and solitary people going about, each with
a gloomy salesman leading. The run of them look uncomfortable; some are
hot about the ears and in the spiteful phase of ill-temper; all look
sick of the business except the raw new-comers. It's the only time they
will ever select any furniture, their first chance and their last. Most
of their selections are hurried a little. The salesman must not be kept
all day.... Yet it goes hard with you if you buy your Object in Life and
find it just a 'special line' made to sell.... We're all amateurs at
living, just as we are all amateurs at furnishing--or dying. Some of the
poor devils one meets carry tattered little scraps of paper, and fumble
conscientiously with stumpy pencils. It's a comfort to see how you go,
even if you do have to buy rubbish. 'If we have _this_ so good, dear, I
don't know _how_ we shall manage in the kitchen,' says the careful
housewife.... So it is we do our shopping in the Great Emporium."
"You will have to rewrite your Ballade," said I, "and put all that in."
"I wish I could," said the poet.
"And while you were having these very fine moods?"
"Annie and the shopman settled most of the furniture between them.
Perhaps it's just as well. I was never very good at the practical
details of life.... Cigarette's out! Have you any more matches?"
"Horribly depressed you are!" I said.
"There's to-morrow. Well, well...."
And then he went off at a tangent to tell me what he expected to make by
his next volume of poems, and so came to the congenial business of
running down his contemporaries, and became again the cheerful little
Poet that I know.
THE LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS
During the early Victorian revival of chivalry the Language of Flowers
had some considerable vogue. The Romeo of the mutton-chop whiskers was
expected to keep this delicate symbolism in view, and even to display
his wit by some dainty conceits in it. An ignorance of the code was
fraught with innumerable dangers. A sprig of lilac was a suggestion, a
moss-rosebud pushed the matter, was indeed evidence to go to court upon;
and unless Charlotte parried with white poplar--a by no means accessible
flower--or apricot blossom, or failing these dabbed a cooling dock-leaf
at the fellow, he was at her with tulip, heliotrope, and honeysuckle,
peach-blossom, white jonquil, and pink, and a really overpowering and
suffocating host of attentions. I suppose he got at last to
three-cornered notes in the vernacular; and meanwhile what could a poor
girl do? There was no downright "No!" in the language of flowers,
nothing equivalent to "Go away, please," no flower for "Idiot!" The only
possible defence was something in this way: "Your cruelty causes me
sorrow," "Your absence is a pleasure." For this, according to the code
of Mr. Thomas Miller (third edition, 1841, with elegantly coloured
plates) you would have to get a sweet-pea blossom for Pleasure, wormwood
for Absence, and indicate Sorrow by the yew, and Cruelty by the
stinging-nettle. There is always a little risk of mixing your predicates
in this kind of communication, and he might, for instance, read that his
Absence caused you Sorrow, but he could scarcely miss the point of the
stinging-nettle. That and the gorse carefully concealed were about the
only gleams of humour possible in the language. But then it was the
appointed tongue of lovers, and while their sickness is upon them they
have neither humour nor wit.