and the plates were coloured by hand. By the bye, what a blessed thing
colour-printing is! These hand-tinted plates, to an imaginative person,
are about as distressing as any plates can very well be. Whenever I look
at these triumphs of art over the beauties of nature, with all their
weary dabs of crimson, green, blue, and yellow, I think of wretched,
anæmic girls fading their youth away in some dismal attic over a
publisher's, toiling through the whole edition tint by tint, and being
mocked the while by Mr. Miller's alliterative erotics. And they _are_
erotics! In one place he writes, "Beautiful art thou, O Broom! on the
breezy bosom of the bee-haunted heath"; and throughout he buds and
blossoms into similar delights. He wallows in doves and coy toyings and
modest blushes, and bowers and meads. He always adds, "Wonderful boy!"
to Chatterton's name as if it were a university degree (W.B.), and he
invariably refers to Moore as the Bard of Erin, and to Milton as the
Bard of Paradise--though Bard of the Bottomless Pit would be more
appropriate. However, we are not concerned with Mr. Miller's language so
much as with a very fruitful suggestion he throws out, that "it is
surely worth while to trace a resemblance between the flower and the
emblem it represents" (a turn like that is nothing to Mr. Miller) "which
shall at least have some show of reason in it."
Come to think of it, there is something singularly unreasonable about
almost all floral symbolism. There is your forget-me-not, pink in the
bud, and sapphire in the flower, with a fruit that breaks up into four,
the very picture of inconstancy and discursiveness. Yet your lover, with
a singular blindness, presents this to his lady when they part. Then the
white water-lily is supposed to represent purity of heart, and, mark
you, it is white without and its centre is all set about with
innumerable golden stamens, while in the middle lies, to quote the words
of that distinguished botanist, Mr. Oliver, "a fleshy disc." Could
there be a better type of sordid and mercenary deliberation maintaining
a fair appearance? The tender apple-blossom, rather than Pretence, is
surely a reminder of Eden and the fall of love's devotion into inflated
worldliness. The poppy which flaunts its violent colours athwart the
bearded corn, and which frets and withers like the Second Mrs. Tanqueray
so soon as you bring it to the shelter of a decent home, is made the
symbol of Repose. One might almost think Aimé Martin and the other great
authorities on this subject wrote in a mood of irony.
The daisy, too, presents you Innocence, "companion of the milk-white
lamb," Mr. Miller calls it. I am sorry for the milk-white lamb. It was
one of the earliest discoveries of systematic botany that the daisy is a
fraud, a complicated impostor. _The daisy is not a flower at all._ It is
a favourite trap in botanical examinations, a snare for artless young
men entering the medical profession. Each of the little yellow things in
the centre of the daisy is a flower in itself,--if you look at one with
a lens you will find it not unlike a cowslip flower,--and the white rays
outside are a great deal more than the petals they ought to be if the
Innocence theory is to hold good. There is no such thing as an innocent
flower; they are all so many deliberate advertisements to catch the eye
of the undecided bee, but any flower almost is simpler than this one. We
would make it the emblem of artistic deception, and the confidence trick
expert should wear it as his crest.
The violet, again, is a greatly overrated exemplar. It stimulates a
certain bashfulness, hangs its head, and passed as modest among our
simple grandparents. Its special merit is its perfume, and it pretends
to wish to hide that from every eye. But, withal, the fragrance is as
far-reaching as any I know. It droops ingenuously. "How _could_ you come
to me," it seems to say, "when all these really brilliant flowers invite
you?" Mere fishing for compliments. All the while it is being sweet, to
the very best of its undeniable ability. Then it comes, too, in early
spring, without a chaperon, and catches our hearts fresh before they
are jaded with the crowded beauties of May. A really modest flower would
wait for the other flowers to come first. A subtle affectation is surely
a different thing from modesty. The violet is simply artful, the young
widow among flowers, and to hold up such a flower as an example is not
doing one's duty by the young. For true modesty commend me to the agave,
which flowers once only in half a hundred years, as one may see for
oneself at the Royal Botanical Gardens.
Enough has been said to show what scope there is for revision of this
sentimental Volapuk. Mr. Martin himself scarcely goes so far as I have
done, though I have merely worked out his suggestion. His only
revolutionary proposal is to displace the wind star by the "rathe
primrose" for Forsaken, on the strength of a quotation familiar to every
reader of Mason's little text-book on the English language. For the rest
he followed his authorities, and has followed them now to the remote
recesses of the literary lumber-room and into the twopenny book-box.
From that receptacle one copy of him was disinterred only a day or so
ago; a hundred and seventy pages of prose, chiefly alliterative, several
coloured plates, enthusiastic pencil-marking of a vanished somebody,
and, besides, an early Victorian flavour of dust and a dim vision of a
silent conversation in a sunlit flower garden--altogether I think very
cheap at twopence. The fashion has changed altogether now. In these days
we season our love-making with talk about heredity, philanthropy, and
sanitation, and present one another with Fabian publications instead of
wild flowers. But in the end, I fancy, the business comes to very much
the same thing.
THE LITERARY REGIMEN
At the risk of offending the young beginner's illusions, he must be
reminded of one or two homely but important facts bearing upon literary
production. Homely as they are, they explain much that is at first
puzzling. This perplexing question of distinction; the quality of being
somehow _fresh_--individual. Really it is a perfectly simple matter. It
is common knowledge that, after a prolonged fast, the brain works in a
feeble manner, the current of one's thoughts is pallid and shallow, it
is difficult to fix the attention and impossible to mobilise the full
forces of the mind. On the other hand, immediately after a sound meal,
the brain feels massive, but static. Tea is conducive to a gentle flow
of pleasing thoughts, and anyone who has taken Easton's syrup of the
hypophosphites will recall at once the state of cerebral erethrism, of
general mental alacrity, that followed on a dose. Again, champagne
(followed perhaps by a soupçon of whisky) leads to a mood essentially
humorous and playful, while about three dozen oysters, taken fasting,
will in most cases produce a profound and even ominous melancholy. One
might enlarge further upon this topic, on the brutalising influence of
beer, the sedative quality of lettuce, the stimulating consequences of
curried chicken; but enough has been said to point our argument. It is,
that such facts as this can surely indicate only one conclusion, and
that is the entire dependence of literary qualities upon the diet of the
writer.
I may remind the reader, in confirmation of this suggestion, of what is
perhaps the most widely known fact about Carlyle, that on one memorable
occasion he threw his breakfast out of the window. Why did he throw his
breakfast out of the window? Surely his friends have cherished the story
out of no petty love of depreciatory detail? There are, however, those
who would have us believe it was mere childish petulance at a chilly
rasher or a hard-boiled egg. Such a supposition is absurd. On the other
hand, what is more natural than an outburst of righteous indignation at
the ruin of some carefully studied climax of feeding? The thoughtful
literary beginner who is not altogether submerged in foolish theories of
inspiration and natural genius will, we fancy, see pretty clearly that I
am developing what is perhaps after all the fundamental secret of
literary art.
To come now to more explicit instructions. It is imperative, if you wish
to write with any power and freshness at all, that you should utterly
ruin your digestion. Any literary person will confirm this statement. At
any cost the thing must be done, even if you have to live on German
sausage, onions, and cheese to do it. So long as you turn all your
dietary to flesh and blood you will get no literature out of it. "We
learn in suffering what we teach in song." This is why men who live at
home with their mothers, or have their elder sisters to see after them,
never, by any chance, however great their literary ambition may be,
write anything but minor poetry. They get their meals at regular hours,
and done to a turn, and that plays the very devil--if you will pardon
the phrase--with one's imagination.
A careful study of the records of literary men in the past, and a
considerable knowledge of living authors, suggests two chief ways of
losing one's digestion and engendering literary capacity. You go and
live in humble lodgings,--we could name dozens of prominent men who have
fed a great ambition in this way,--or you marry a nice girl who does not
understand housekeeping. The former is the more efficacious method,
because, as a rule, the nice girl wants to come and sit on your knee all
day, and that is a great impediment to literary composition. Belonging
to a club--even a literary club--where you can dine is absolute ruin to
the literary beginner. Many a bright young fellow, who has pushed his
way, or has been pushed by indiscreet friends, into the society of
successful literary men, has been spoilt by this fatal error, and he has
saved his stomach to lose his reputation.
Having got rid of your digestion, then, the common condition of all good
literature, the next thing is to arrange your dietary for the particular
literary effect you desire. And here we may point out the secrecy
observed in such matters by literary men. Stevenson fled to Samoa to
hide his extremely elaborate methods, and to keep his kitchen servants
out of the reach of bribery. Even Sir Walter Besant, though he is fairly
communicative to the young aspirant, has dropped no hints of the plain,
pure, and wholesome menu he follows. Sala professed to eat everything,
but that was probably his badinage. Possibly he had one staple, and took
the rest as condiment. Then what did Shakespeare live on? Bacon? And Mr.
Barrie, though he has written a delightful book about his pipe and
tobacco, full of suggestion to the young humorist, lets out nothing or
next to nothing of his meat and drink. His hints about pipes are very
extensively followed, and nowadays every ambitious young pressman smokes
in public at least one well-burnt briar with an eccentric stem--even at
some personal inconvenience. But this jealous reticence on the part of
successful men--you notice they never let even the interviewer see their
kitchens or the débris of a meal--necessarily throws one back upon
rumour and hypothesis in this matter. Mr. Andrew Lang, for instance, is
popularly associated with salmon, but that is probably a wilful
delusion. Excessive salmon, far from engendering geniality, will be
found in practice a vague and melancholy diet, tending more towards the
magnificent despondency of Mr. Hall Caine.
Nor does Mr. Haggard feed entirely on raw meat. Indeed, for lurid and
somewhat pessimistic narrative, there is nothing like the ordinary
currant bun, eaten new and in quantity. A light humorous style is best
attained by soda-water and dry biscuits, following café-noir. The
soda-water may be either Scotch or Irish as the taste inclines. For a
florid, tawdry style the beginner must take nothing but boiled water,
stewed vegetables, and an interest in the movements against vivisection,
opium, alcohol, tobacco, sarcophagy, and the male sex.
For contributions to the leading reviews, boiled pork and cabbage may be
eaten, with bottled beer, followed by apple dumpling. This effectually
suppresses any tendency to facetiousness, or what respectable English
people call _double entendre_, and brings you _en rapport_ with the
serious people who read these publications. So soon as you begin to feel
wakeful and restless discontinue writing. For what is vulgarly known as
the _fin-de-siècle_ type of publication, on the other hand, one should
limit oneself to an aërated bread shop for a week or so, with the
exception of an occasional tea in a literary household. All people fed
mainly on scones become clever. And this regimen, with an occasional
debauch upon macaroons, chocolate, and cheap champagne, and brisk daily
walks from Oxford Circus, through Regent Street, Piccadilly, and the
Green Park, to Westminster and back, should result in an animated
society satire.
It is not known what Mr. Kipling takes to make him so peculiar. Many of
us would like to know. Possibly it is something he picked up in the
jungle--berries or something. A friend who made a few tentative
experiments to this end turned out nothing beyond a will, and that he
dictated and left incomplete. (It was scarcely on the lines of an
ordinary will, being blasphemous, and mentioning no property except his
inside.) For short stories of the detective type, strong cold tea and
hard biscuits are fruitful eating, while for a social science novel one
should take an abundance of boiled rice and toast and water.
However, these remarks are mainly by way of suggestion. Every writer in
the end, so soon as his digestion is destroyed, must ascertain for
himself the peculiar diet that suits him best--that is, which disagrees
with him the most. If everything else fails he might try some chemical
food. "Jabber's Food for Authors," by the bye, well advertised, and with
portraits of literary men, in their drawing-rooms, "Fed entirely on
Jabber's Food," with medical certificates of its unwholesomeness, and
favourable and expurgated reviews of works written on it, ought to be a
brilliant success among literary aspirants. A small but sufficient
quantity of arsenic might with advantage be mixed in.
HOUSE-HUNTING AS AN OUTDOOR AMUSEMENT
Since Adam and Eve went hand in hand out of the gates of Paradise, the
world has travailed under an infinite succession of house-hunts. To-day
in every eligible suburb you may see New Adams and New Eves by the
score, with rusty keys and pink order-forms in hand, wandering still, in
search of the ideal home. To them it is anything but an amusement. Most
of these poor pilgrims look simply tired, some are argumentative in
addition, but all are disappointed, anxious, and unhappy, their hands
dirty with prying among cisterns, and their garments soiled from cellar
walls. All, in the exaltation of the wooing days, saw at least the
indistinct reflection of the perfect house, but now the Quest is
irrevocably in hand they seek and do not find. And such a momentous
question it is to them. Are they not choosing the background, the air
and the colour, as it were, of the next three or four years, the
cardinal years, too! of their lives?
Perhaps the exquisite exasperation of the business for the man who hunts
among empty houses for a home is, that it is so entirely a choice of
second-hand, or at least ready-made goods. To me, at least, there is a
decided suggestion of the dead body in your empty house that has once
been occupied. Here, like pale ghosts upon the wall paper, are outlined
the pictures of the departed tenant; here are the nails of the invisible
curtains, this dent in the wall is all that is sensible of a vanished
piano. I could fancy all these things creeping back to visibility as the
light grew dim. Someone was irritable in the house, perhaps, and a
haunting fragrance of departed quarrels is to be found in the loose
door-handles, and the broken bell-pull. Then the blind in the bedroom
has a broken string. He was a beer-drinker, for the drip of the tap has
left its mark in the cellar; a careless man, for this wall is a record
of burst water-pipes; and rough in his methods, as his emendation of the
garden gate--a remedy rather worse than the disease--shows. The mark of
this prepotent previous man is left on the house from cellar to attic.
It is his house really, not mine. And against these haunting
individualities set the horrible wholesale flavour, the obvious
dexterous builder's economies of a new house. Yet, whatever your
repulsion may be, the end is always the same. After you have asked for
your ideal house a hundred times or so you begin to see you do not get
it. You go the way of your kind. All houses are taken in despair.
But such disgusts as this are for the man who really aims at taking a
house. The artist house-hunter knows better than that. He hunts for the
hunt's sake, and does not mar his work with a purpose. Then
house-hunting becomes a really delightful employment, and one strangely
neglected in this country. I have heard, indeed, of old ladies who
enlivened the intervals of their devotions in this manner, but to the
general run of people the thing is unknown. Yet a more entertaining way
of spending a half-holiday--having regard to current taste--it should be
difficult to imagine. An empty house is realistic literature in the
concrete, full of hints and allusions if a little wanting in tangible
humanity, and it outdoes the modern story in its own line, by beginning
as well as ending in a note of interrogation. That it is not more
extensively followed I can only explain by supposing that its merits are
generally unsuspected. In which case this book should set a fashion.
One singular thing the house-hunter very speedily discovers is, that the
greater portion of the houses in this country are owned by old gentlemen
or old ladies who live next door. After a certain age, and especially
upon retired tradespeople, house property, either alone or in common
with gardening, exercises an irresistible fascination. You always know
you are going to meet a landlord or landlady of this type when you read
on your order to view, "Key next door but one." Calling next door but
one, you are joined after the lapse of a few minutes by a bald, stout
gentleman, or a lady of immemorial years, who offers to go over "the
property" with you. Apparently the intervals between visits to view are
spent in slumber, and these old people come out refreshed and keen to
scrutinise their possible new neighbours. They will tell you all about
the last tenant, and about the present tenants on either side, and about
themselves, and how all the other houses in the neighbourhood are damp,
and how they remember when the site of the house was a cornfield, and
what they do for their rheumatism. As one hears them giving a most
delightful vent to their loquacity, the artistic house-hunter feels all
the righteous self-applause of a kindly deed. Sometimes they get
extremely friendly. One old gentleman--to whom anyone under forty must
have seemed puerile--presented the gentle writer with three fine large
green apples as a kind of earnest of his treatment: apples, no doubt, of
some little value, since they excited the audible envy of several little
boys before they were disposed of.
Sometimes the landlord has even superintended the building of the house
himself, and then it often has peculiar distinctions--no coal cellar, or
a tower with turrets, or pillars of ornamental marble investing the
portico with disproportionate dignity. One old gentleman, young as old
gentlemen go, short of stature, of an agreeable red colour, and with
short iron-grey hair, had a niche over the front door containing a piece
of statuary. It gave one the impression of the Venus of Milo in
chocolate pyjamas. "It was nood at first," said the landlord, "but the
neighbourhood is hardly educated up to art, and objected. So I gave it
that brown paint."
On one expedition the artistic house-hunter was accompanied by Euphemia.
Then it was he found Hill Crest, a vast edifice at the incredible rent
of £40 a year, with which a Megatherial key was identified. It took the
two of them, not to mention an umbrella, to turn this key. The rent was
a mystery, and while they were in the house--a thunderstorm kept them
there some time--they tried to imagine the murder. From the top windows
they could see the roofs of the opposite houses in plan.
"I wonder how long it would take to get to the top of the house from the
bottom?" said Euphemia.
"Certainly longer than we could manage every day," said the artistic
house-hunter. "Fancy looking for my pipe in all these rooms. Starting
from the top bedroom at the usual time, I suppose one would arrive
downstairs to breakfast about eleven, and then we should have to be
getting upstairs again by eight o'clock if we wanted any night's rest
worth having. Or we might double or treble existence, live a Gargantuan
life to match the house, make our day of forty-eight hours instead of
twenty-four. By doubling everything we should not notice the hole it
made in our time getting about the place. Perhaps by making dinner last
twice as long, eating twice as much, and doing everything on the scale
of two to one, we might adapt ourselves to our environment in time, grow
twice as big."
"_Then_ we might be very comfortable here," said Euphemia.
They went downstairs again. By that time it was thundering and raining
heavily. The rooms were dark and gloomy. The big side door, which would
not shut unless locked from the outside, swayed and banged as the gusts
of wind swept round the house. But they had a good time in the front
kitchen, playing cricket with an umbrella and the agent's order crumpled
into a ball. Presently the artistic house-hunter lifted Euphemia on to
the tall dresser, and they sat there swinging their feet patiently until
the storm should leave off and release them.
"I should feel in this kitchen," said Euphemia, "like one of my little
dolls must have felt in the dolls'-house kitchen I had once. The top of
her head just reached the level of the table. There were only four
plates on the dresser, but each was about half her height across----"
"Your reminiscences are always entertaining," said the artistic
house-hunter; "still they fail to explain the absorbing mystery of this
house being to let at £40 a year." The problem raised his curiosity, but
though he made inquiries he found no reason for the remarkably low rent
or the continued emptiness of the house. It was a specimen puzzle for
the house-hunter. A large house with a garden of about half an acre, and
with accommodation for about six families, going begging for £40 a year.
Would it let at eighty? Some such problem, however, turns up in every
house-hunt, and it is these surprises that give the sport its particular
interest and delight. Always provided the mind is not unsettled by any
ulterior notion of settling down.
OF BLADES AND BLADERY
The Blade is not so much a culture as a temperament, and Bladery--if the
thing may have the name--a code of sentiments rather than a ritual. It
is the rococo school of behaviour, the flamboyant gentleman, the
gargoyle life. The Blade is the tribute innocence pays to vice. He may
look like a devil and belong to a church. And the clothing of the Blade,
being symbolical, is a very important part of him. It must show not only
a certain tastiness, but also decision in the accent, courage in the
pattern, and a Dudley Hardihood of outline. A Blade must needs take the
colour of his social standing, but all Blades have the same essential
qualities. And all Blades have this quality, that they despise and
contemn other Blades from the top downward. (But where the bottommost
Blade comes no man can tell.)
A well-bred Blade--though he be a duke--tends to wear his hat tilted a
little over the right eyebrow, and a piece of hair is pulled
coquettishly down just below the brim. His collar is high, and a very
large bow is worn slightly askew. This may be either cream-coloured or
deep blue, with spots of white, or it may be red, or buff, but not
green, because of badinage. The Blade of the middle class displays a
fine gold watch-chain, and his jacket and vest may be of a rough black
cloth or blue serge. The trousering may be of a suit with the jacket, or
tasteful, and the shoes must be long. The betting man, adorned, is a
perfect Blade. There is often a large and ornamental stick, which is
invariably carried head downwards. And note, that the born Blade
instinctively avoids any narrowness of pose. In walking he thrusts out
his shoulders, elbows, and knees, and it is rather the thing to
dominate a sphere of influence beyond this by swinging his stick. At
first the beginner will find this weapon a little apt to slip from the
hand and cause inconvenience to the general public; but he must not mind
that. After a few such misadventures he will acquire dexterity.