In an age curious of new pleasures, the merry-go-round seems still to
maintain its ancient popularity. I was the other day the delighted,
indeed the fascinated, spectator of one in full swing in an old
Thames-side town. It was a very superior example, with a central musical
engine of extraordinary splendour, and horses that actually curveted, as
they swirled maddeningly round to the strains of 'The Man that Broke the
Bank at Monte Carlo.' How I longed to join the wild riders! But though I
am a brave man, I confess that to ride a merry-go-round in front of a
laughter-loving Cockney public is more than I can dare. I had to content
myself with watching the faces of the riders. I noticed particularly one
bright-eyed little girl, whose whole passionate young soul seemed to be
on fire with ecstasy, and for whom it was not difficult to prophesy
trouble when time should bring her within reach of more dangerous
excitements. Then there was a stolid little boy, dull and unmoved in
expression, as though he were in church. Life, one felt sure, would be
safe enough, and stupid enough, for him; the world would have no music
to stir or draw him. The fifes would go down the street with a sweet
sound of marching feet, and the eyes of other men would brighten and
their blood be all glancing spears and streaming banners, but he would
remain behind his counter; from the strange hill beyond the town the
dear, unholy music, so lovely in the ears of other men and maids, would
call to him in vain, and morning and evening the stars would sing above
his draper's shop, but he never hear a word.
What particularly struck me was the number of quite grown-up, even
elderly, people who came and had their pennyworth of horse-exercise. Now
it was a grave young workman quietly smoking his pipe as he revolved;
now it was a stout middle-aged woman returning from marketing, on whom
the Zulu music and the whirling horses laid their irresistible spells.
Unless ye become as little children!
Is the Kingdom of Heaven really at hand? For, indeed, men and women, and
perhaps particularly literary men and women, are once more becoming as
little children in their pleasures.
Seriously, one of the most curious and significant of recent literary
phenomena is the sudden return of the literary man to physical, and
so-called 'Philistine,' pleasures and modes of recreation. Perhaps
Stevenson set the fashion with his canoe and his donkey. But at the
moment that he was valiantly daring any one to tell him whether there
was anything better worth doing 'than fooling among boats,' Edward
Fitzgerald, all unconscious and careless of literary fashions, was
giving still more practical expression to the physical faith that was in
him, by going shares in a Lowestoft herring-lugger, and throwing his
heart as well as his money into the fortunes of its noble skipper
'Posh.' A literary man _par excellence_, Mr. Lang reproaches his sires
for his present way of life--
'Why lay your gipsy freedom down
And doom your child to pen and ink?'
and by steady and persistent golfing, and writing about angling and
cricket, comes as near to the noble savage as is possible to so
incorrigibly civilised a man. Mr. Henley--that Berserker of the
pen--sings the sword with a vigour that makes one curious to see him
using it, and we all know Mr. Kipling's views on the matter. Then Mr.
Bernard Shaw rides a bicycle!
Those men of letters whose inclinations or opportunities do not lead
them to these out-of-door, and more or less ferocious, pleasures seek to
forget themselves at the music-hall, the Aquarium, or the numerous
Earl's Court exhibitions. They become amateurs of foreign dancing,
connoisseurs of the trapeze, or they leave their great minds at home and
go up the Great Wheel. Earl's Court, particularly, is becoming quite a
modern Vauxhall--Tan-ta-ra-ra! Earl's Court! Earl's Court!--and Mr. Imre
Kiralfy, with his conceptions and designs, is to our generation what
Albert Smith was to the age of Dickens and Edmund Yates.
It takes some experience of life to realise how right this is; to
realise that, after all our fine philosophies and cocksure sciences,
there is no better answer to the riddle of things than a good game of
cricket or an exciting spin on one's 'bike.' The real inner significance
of Earl's Court--Mr. Kiralfy will no doubt be prepared to hear--is the
failure of science as an answer to life. We give up the riddle, and
enjoy ourselves with our wiser children. Simple pleasures, no doubt, for
the profound! But what is simple, and what is profound?
The simple joy we get from 'fooling among boats' on a summer day, the
thrill of a well-hit ball, the rapture of a skilful dive, are no more
easy to explain than the more complicated pleasures of literature, or
art, or religion. And why is it--to come closer to our theme--that the
round or the whirling have such attraction for us? What is the secret of
the fascination of the circle? Why is it that the turning of anything,
be it but a barrel-organ or a phrase, holds one as with an hypnotic
power? I confess that I can never genuinely pity a knife-grinder,
however needy. Think of the pleasure of driving that wheel all day, the
merry chirp of the knife on the stone, and the crisp, bright spray of
the flying sparks! Why, he does 'what some men dream of all their
lives'! Wheels of all kinds have the same strange charm; mill-wheels,
colliery-wheels, spinning-wheels, water-wheels, and wheeling waters:
there may--who knows?--have been a certain pleasure in being broken on
the wheel, and, at all events, that hideous punishment is another
curious example of the fascination of the circle. It would take a whole
volume to illustrate the prevalence of the circle in external nature, in
history, and, even more significant, in language. We all know, or think
we know, that the world is round--
'This orb--this round
Of sight and sound,'
as Mr. Quiller Couch sings--though I remember a porter at school who was
sure that it was flat, and who used to say that Hamlet's
'How weary, stale, _flat_, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this _world_!'
was a cryptic reference to Shakespeare's secret belief in his theory.
Many of the things we love most are round. Is not money, according to
the proverb, made round that it may go round, and are not the men most
in demand described as 'all-round men'? Nor are all-round women without
their admirers. Events, we know, move in a circle, as time moves in
cycles--though, alas! not on them. The ballet and the bicycle are
popular forms of the circle, and it is the charm of the essay to be
'roundabout.'
Again, how is it that that which on a small scale does not impress us at
all, when on a large scale impresses us so much? What is the secret of
the impressiveness of size, bulk, height, depth, speed, and mileage?
Philosophically, a mountain is no more wonderful than a molehill, yet no
man is knighted for climbing a molehill. One little drop of water and
one little grain of sand are essentially as wonderful as 'the mighty
ocean' or 'the beauteous land' to which they contribute. A balloon is
no more wonderful than an air-bubble, and were you to build an Atlantic
liner as big as the Isle of Wight it would really be no more remarkable
than an average steam-launch. Nobody marvels at the speed of a snail,
yet, given a snail's pace to start with, an express train follows as a
matter of course. Movement, not the rate of movement, is the mystery.
Precisely the same materials, the same forces, the same methods, are
employed in the little as in the big of these examples. Why should mere
accumulation, reiteration, and magnification make the difference? We may
ask why? But it does, for all that. If we answer that these mammoth
multiplications impress us because they are so much bigger, taller,
fatter, faster, etc., than we are, the question arises--How many times
bigger than a man must a mountain be before it impresses us? Perhaps the
problem has already been tackled by the schoolman who pondered how many
angels could dance on the point of a needle.
However, these and similar first principles, it will readily be seen,
are far from being irrelevant for the visitor at the Earl's Court
Exhibition. No doubt they are continually discussed by the thousands who
daily and nightly throng that very charming dream-world which Mr.
Kiralfy has built 'midmost the beating' of our 'steely sea.'
To an age that is over-read and over-fed Mr. Kiralfy brings the message:
'Leave your great minds at home, and go up the Great Wheel!' and I heard
his voice and obeyed. The sensation is, I should say, something between
going up in a balloon and being upon shipboard--a sensation compounded,
maybe, of the creaking of the circular rigging, the pleasure of rising
in the air, the freshening of the air as you ascend, the strange feeling
of the earth receding and spreading out beneath you, the curious
diminution of the people below--to their proper size. You will hear
original minds all about you comparing them to ants, and it is curious
to notice the involuntary feeling of contempt that possesses you as you
watch them. I believe one has a half-defined illusion that we are
growing greater as they are growing smaller. Ants and flies! ants and
flies! with here and there a fiery centipede in the shape of a District
train dashing in and out amongst them. We lose the power of
understanding their motions, and their throngs and movements do indeed
seem as purposeless at this height as the hurry-scurrying about an
anthill. At this height, indeed, one seems to understand how small a
matter a bank smash may seem to the Almighty; though, as a lady said to
me--as we clung tightly together in terror 'a-top of the topmost
bough'--it must be gratifying to see so many churches.
Those who would keep their illusions about the beauty of London had
better stay below, at least in the daytime, for it makes one's heart
sink to look on those miles and miles of sordid grey roofs huddled in
meaningless rows and crescents, just for all the world like a huge
child's box of wooden bricks waiting to be arranged into some
intelligible pattern. Of course, this is not London proper. Were the
Great Wheel set up in Trafalgar Square, one is fain to hope that the
view from it would be less disheartening--though it might be better not
to try.
By night, except for the bright oases of the Indian Exhibition, the view
is little more than a black blank, a great inky plain with faint sparks
and rows of light here and there, as though the world had been made of
saltpetre paper, and had lately been set fire to. Were you a traveller
from Mars you would say that the world was very badly lighted. But, for
all that, night is the time for the Great Wheel, for the conflagration
of pleasure at our feet makes us forget the void dark beyond. Then the
Wheel seems like a great revolving spider's web, with fireflies
entangled in it at every turn, and the little engine-house at the
centre, with its two electric lights, seems like the great lord spider,
with monstrous pearls for his eyes. And, as in the daytime the height
robs the depth of its significance, strips poor humanity of any
semblance of impressive or attractive meaning, at night the effect is
just the reverse. What a fairy-world is this opening out beneath our
feet, with its golden glowing squares and circles and palaces, with its
lamplit gardens and pagodas! and who are these gay and beautiful beings
flitting hither and thither, and passing from one bright garden to
another on the stream of pleasure? If this many-coloured, passionate
dream be really human life, let us hasten to be down amongst it once
more! And, after all, is not this flattering night aspect of the world
more true than that disheartening countenance of it in the daylight?
Those golden squares and glowing gardens and flashing waters are, of
course, an illusion of the magician Kiralfy's, yet what power could the
illusion have upon us without the realities of beauty and love and
pleasure it attracts there?