[46]
IV
LINOLEUM
True love is never utilitarian. I am well aware that, in novels and in plays, the fair heroine considerately falls in love with the brave man who, at a critical moment, saves her from a watery grave or from the lurid horrors of a burning building. It is very good of the lady in the novel. I admire the gratitude which prompts her romantic affection, and, nine times out of ten, my judgement cordially approves her taste. I know, too, that, in fiction, the sick or wounded hero invariably falls desperately in love with the devoted nurse whose patient and untiring attention ensures his recovery. It is very good of the hero. Again I say, I admire his gratitude and almost invariably endorse his choice. But it must be distinctly understood that this sort of thing is strictly confined to novels and theatricals. In real life, men and women do not fall in love out of gratitude. As a matter of fact, I am much more likely to fall in love with somebody for whom I have done something than with somebody who has done something for me.
[47]
I was talking the other day with a nurse in a
children’s hospital. It is a heartbreaking business,
she told me. ‘You get into the way of nursing
them, and comforting them, and playing with them,
and mothering them, until you feel that they belong
to you. And then, just as you have come to love
the little thing as though he were your own, out he
goes. And he always goes out with his father or
his mother, clapping his hands for very joy at the
excitement of going home, and you are left with a
big lump in your throat, and perhaps a tear in
your eye, at the thought that you will never see
him again!’ Clearly, therefore, we do not fall in
love as a matter of gratitude. The people who
cling to us and depend upon us are much more
likely to win our hearts than the people who have
placed us under an obligation to them. If, instead
of telling us that the heroine fell in love with the
man who had saved her from drowning, the novelist
had told us that the man who risked his life by plunging
into the river fell in love with the white and
upturned face as he laid it gently on the bank;
or if, instead of telling us that the patient fell in
love with the nurse, he had told us that the nurse
fell in love with the patient upon whom she had
lavished such beautiful devotion, he would have
been much more true to nature and to real life.
It is indisputable, of course, that, the rescuer having
[48]
fallen in love with the rescued, she may soon discover
his secret, and, since love begets love, reciprocate
his affection. It is equally true that, the nurse
having conceived so tender a passion for her patient,
he may soon read the meaning of the light in her
eye and of the tone in her voice, and feel towards
her as she first felt towards him. But that is
quite another matter, and is beside our point at
present. Just now, I am only concerned with
challenging the novelist’s unwarrantable assumption
that we fall in love out of gratitude. We do nothing
of the kind. Love, I repeat, is never utilitarian.
We may fall hopelessly in love with a thing that is of
very little use to us; and we may feel no sentimental
attractions at all towards a thing that is almost
indispensable. If any man dares to dispute these
conclusions, I shall simply produce a roll of linoleum
in support of my arguments, and he will be promptly
crushed beneath the weight of argument that the
linoleum will furnish.
The linoleum is the most conspicuous feature of the domestic establishment. It is impertinent, self-assertive, and loud. If you visit a house in which there is a linoleum, the thing rushes at you, and you see it even before the front door has been opened. Every minister who spends his afternoons in knocking at people’s doors knows exactly what I mean. The very sound of the knock tells you a good deal. Such [49] sounds are of three kinds. There is the echoing and reverberating knock that tells you of bare boards; there is the dead and sombre thud that tells of linoleum on the floor; and there is the softened and muffled tap that tells of a hall well carpeted. And so I say that the linoleum—if there be one—rushes at you, and you seem to see it even before the door has been opened. Perhaps it is this immodesty on its part that prevents your liking it. It is always with the coy, shy, modest things that we fall in love most readily.
But however that may be, the fact remains. Since this queer old world of ours began, men and women have fallen in love with all sorts of strange things; but there is no record of any man or woman yet having really fallen in love with a roll of linoleum. Of everything else about the house you get very fond. I can understand a man shedding tears when his arm-chair has to go to the sale-room or the scrap-heap. Robert Louis Stevenson once told the story of his favourite chair until he moved his schoolboy audience to tears! And everybody knows how Dickens makes you laugh and cry at the drollery and pathos with which, in all his books, he invests chairs, tables, clocks, pictures, and every other article of furniture. I fancy I should feel life to be less worth living if I were deprived of some of the household odds and ends with which all my felicity [50] seems to be mysteriously associated. But I cannot conceive of myself as yielding to even a momentary sensation of tenderness over the sale, destruction, or exchange of any of the linoleums. I feel perfectly certain that neither Stevenson nor Dickens would ever have felt an atom of sentiment concerning linoleum. Yet why? Few things about the house are more serviceable. I could point offhand to a hundred things no one of which has earned its right to a place in the home one-hundredth part as nobly as has the linoleum. Yet I am very fond of each of those hundred things, whilst I am not at all fond of the linoleum. I appreciate it, but I do not love it. So there it is! Said I not truly that love is never utilitarian? We grow fond of things because we grow fond of things; we never grow fond of things simply because they are of use to us.
But we cannot in decency let the matter rest at that. There must be some reason for the failure of the linoleum to stir my affections. Why does it alone, among my household goods and chattels, kindle no warmth within my soul? The linoleum is both pretty and useful; what more can I want? Many things pretty, but not useful, have swept me off my feet. Many things useful, but not pretty, have captivated my heart. And more than once things neither pretty nor useful have completely enslaved me. Yet here is the linoleum, both pretty [51] and useful, and I feel for it no fondness whatsoever; I remain as cold as ice, and as hard as adamant. Why is it? To begin with, I fancy the pattern has something to do with it. I do not now refer to any particular pattern; but to all the linoleum patterns that were ever designed. Those endless squares and circles and diamonds and stars! Could anything be more repelling? Here, for instance, on the linoleum, I find a star. I know at once that if I look I shall see hundreds of similar stars. They will all be in perfectly straight lines, not one a quarter of an inch out of its place. They will all be mathematically equidistant; they will be of exactly the same size, of identically the same colour, and their angles will all point in precisely the same direction. If the stars in the firmament above us were arranged on the same principle, they would drive us mad. The beauty of it is that, there, one star differeth from another star in glory. But on the linoleum they do nothing of the sort.
Or perhaps the pattern is a floral one. It thinks to coax me into a feeling that I am in the garden among the roses, the rhododendrons, or the chrysanthemums. But it is a hopeless failure. Whoever saw roses, rhododendrons, or chrysanthemums, all of exactly the same size, of precisely the same colour, and hanging in rows at mathematically identical levels? The beauty of the garden is [52] that having looked at this rose, I am the more eager to see that one; having admired this chrysanthemum, I am the more curious to mark the variety presented by the next. No two are precisely the same. And because this infinite diversity is the essential charm both of the heavens above and of the earth beneath, I am shocked and repelled by the monotony of the pattern on the linoleum. In the old days it was customary to plaster the walls, even of sick-rooms, with papers of patterns equally pronounced, and many a poor patient was tortured almost to death by the glaring geometrical abominations. The doctor said that the sufferer was to be kept perfectly quiet; yet the pattern on the wall is allowed to scream at him and shout at him from night until morning, and from morning until night. He has counted those awful stars or roses, perpendicularly, horizontally, diagonally, from right to left, from left to right, from top to bottom, and from bottom to top, until the hideous monstrosities are reproduced in frightful duplicate upon the fevered tissues of his throbbing brain. He may close his eyes, but he sees them still. It was a form of torture worthy of an inquisitor-general. The pattern on the linoleum is happily not quite so bad. When we are ill we do not see it; and when we are well we may to some extent avoid it. Not altogether; for even if we do not look at it, we have an uncanny feeling [53] that it is there. Between the hearthrug and the table I catch sight of the bright flaunting head of a scarlet poppy, or of the tossing petals of a huge chrysanthemum, and my imagination instantly flashes to my mind the horrible impression of tantalizing rows of exactly similar blossoms running off with mathematical precision in every conceivable direction.
For some reason or other we instinctively recoil from these monotonous regularities. I once heard a friend observe that the average woman would rather marry a man whose life was painfully irregular than a man whose life was painfully regular. It may have been an over-statement of the case; but there is something in it. We fall in love with good people, and we fall in love with bad people; but with the man who is ‘too proper,’ and the woman who is ‘too straight-laced,’ we very, very rarely fall in love. It is the problem of Tennyson’s ‘Maud.’ As a girl Maud was irregular—and lovable.
[54] But later on Maud was regular—and as unattractive as linoleum.
Shall I be told that this is high doctrine, and hard to bear, this doctrine of the lovableness of irregularity? I think not. Towering above all our biographies, as snowclad heights tower above dusty little molehills, there stands the life-story of One who, alone among the sons of men, was altogether good. It is the most charming and the most varied life-story that has ever been written since this little world began. Its lovely deeds and graceful speech, its tender pathos and its awful tragedy, have won the hearts of men all over the world, and all down the ages. But find monotony there if you can! It is like a sky full of stars or a field of fairest flowers. The life that repels, as the linoleum repels, by the very severity of its regularity, has something wrong with it somewhere.
[55]
If I have outraged the sensibilities of any well-meaning
champion of a geometrical and mathematical
and linoleum-like regularity, let me hasten to conciliate
him! I know that even regularity—the regularity
of the linoleum pattern—may have its advantages.
Dr. George MacDonald, in Robert Falconer, says that
‘there is a well-authenticated story of a notorious
convict who was reformed by entering, in one of the
colonies, a church where the matting along the aisle
was of the same pattern as that in the church to
which he had gone with his mother as a boy.’ Bravo!
It is pleasant, extremely pleasant, to find that even
monotony has its compensations. Let me but get
to know my ‘too proper’ and ‘straight-laced’
friends a little better, and I shall doubtless discover
even there a few redeeming features.
But, for all that, the linoleum is cold; and we do not fall in love with cold things. A volcano is a much more dangerous affair than an iceberg; but it is much more easy to fall in love with the things that make you shudder than with the things that make you shiver. That was the trouble with Maud, she was so chilly and chilling; her ‘cold and clear-cut face, faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null!’ And that is precisely the trouble with every system of religion, morality, or philosophy—save one—that has ever been presented to the minds of men. Plato and Aristotle and Marcus [56] Aurelius were splendid, simply splendid; but they were frigid, frigid as Maud, and their counsels of perfection could never have enchained my heart. Buddha, Confucius, Mohammed—the stars of the East—were wonderful, but oh, so cold! I turn from these icy regularities to the lovely life I have already mentioned. And, to use Whittier’s expressive word, it is ‘warm.’
‘Warm’ ... ‘love’ ... here are words that touch my soul to tears. ‘We love Him because He first loved us.’ The monotony and frigidity of the linoleum have given way to the beauty and the brightness of flowery fields all bathed in summer sunshine.