And drunk the milk of Paradise.
Have you never felt a sort of absurdity in paying for a rose—especially if you paid in copper? To pay for a thing of beauty in coin of extreme ugliness! There is obviously no equality of exchange in the transaction. In fact, it is little short of an insult to the flower-girl to pretend that you thus satisfy the obligation. Far better let her give it you—for the love of beauty—as very likely, if you explained the incongruity, she would be glad to do: for flower-girls, no doubt, like every one else, can only have chosen their particular profession because of its being a joy for ever. There might be fitness in offering a kiss on account, though that, of course, would depend on the flower-girl. To buy other things with flowers were not so incongruous. I have often thought of trying my tobacconist with a tulip; and certainly an orchid—no very rare one either—should cover one's household expenses for a week, if not a fortnight.
Omar Khayyám used to wonder what the vintners buy 'one-half so precious as the stuff they sell.' It is surely natural to wonder in like manner of the poet. What have we to offer in exchange for his priceless manna? One feels that he should be paid on the mercantile principles of 'Goblin Market.' Said Laura:—
To take were to purloin;
I have no copper in my purse,
I have no silver either....'
Copper! silver even! The goblin-men were more artistic than that; they realised the absurdity of paying for immortal things in coin of mere mortality. So—
They answered all together:
'Buy from us with a golden curl.'
Yes, those are the ideal rates at which poetry should be paid. We should, of course, pay for fairy goods in fairy-gold.
One of the few such appropriate transactions I remember was Queen Elizabeth's buying a poem from Sir Philip Sidney, literally, with a lock of her 'gowden hair.' Poem and lock now lie together at Wilton, both untouched of time. Or was it that Sir Philip Sidney paid for the lock with his poem? However it was, the exchange was appropriate. The ratio between the thing sold and the price given was fairly equal. And, at all times, it is far less absurd for a poet to pay for the earthly thing with his poem (thus leaving us to keep the change), than that we should think to pay him for his incorruptible with our corruptible. There would, no doubt, be a subtle element of absurdity in a poet consenting to pay his tailor for a suit with a sonnet, while it would obviously be beyond all proportion monstrous for a tailor to think to buy a sonnet with a suit. Yet a poet might, perhaps, be brought to consider the transaction, if he chanced to be of a gentle disposition.
Yes, the true, the tasteful way to pay a poet is by the exchange of some other beautiful thing: by beautiful praise, by a beautiful smile, by a well-shaped tear, by a rose. It is thus that a poet—frequently, I am bound to confess—finds his highest reward.
At the same time, there is a subtle ironic pleasure in taking the world's money for poetry—even though one pays it over to a charity immediately—for one feels that the world, for some reason or another, has been persuaded to buy something which it didn't really want, and which it will throw away so soon as we are round the corner. If the reader has ever published a volume of verse, he must often have chuckled with an unnatural glee over the number of absolutely unpoetic good souls who, from various motives—the unhappy accident of relationship, perhaps—have 'subscribed.' Most of us have sound unpoetic uncles. Of course, you make them buy you—in large-paper too. Have you ever gloatingly pictured their absolute bewilderment as, with a stern sense of family pride, they sit down to cut your pages? Think of the poor souls thus 'moving about in worlds not realised.'
A perfect instance of this cruelty to the Philistine occurs to me. The poet in question is one whose forte is children's poetry. Very tender some of his poems are. You will find them now and again in St. Nicholas, and he is not unknown in this country. With a heart like a lamb for children, he is like a hawk upon the Philistine. I remember an occasion, before he published a volume, when we were together in a tavern in a country-town, a tavern thronged with farmers on market-days. The poet had some prospectuses in his pocket. Suddenly a great John Bull would come bumping in like a cockchafer, and call for his pint. 'Just you watch,' the poet would say, and away he crossed over to his victim. 'Good morning, Mr. Oats!' 'Why, good morning, sir. How-d'ye-do; I hardly know'd thee.' Then presently the voice of the charmer unto the farmer—'Mr. Oats, you care for children, don't you?' 'Ay, ay,' would answer the farmer, a little doubtfully, 'when they're little'uns.' 'Well, you know I'm what they call a poet.' To this Mr. Oats would respond with a good round laugh, as of a man enjoying a good thing. This was very subtle of the poet, for it put the farmer on good terms with himself. He wondered, as he had his laugh over again, how a man could choose to be a poet, when he might have been a farmer. 'Well, I'm bringing out a book of poems all about children—here is one of them!' and the poet would read some humorous thing, such as 'Breeching Tommy.' Then another—such simple pictures of humanity at the age of two, that the farmer could not but be moved to that primary artistic delight, the recognition of the familiar. Then the farmer would grow grave, as he always did at any approach to a purchase, however small, while the poet would rapidly speak of the fitness of the volume as a present to the old woman: 'Women cared for such things,' he would add pityingly. Then the farmer would cautiously ask the price, and blow his cheeks out in surprise on hearing that it was five shillings. He had never given so much for a book in his life. The poet would then insidiously suggest that by subscribing before publication he would save a discount. This would arouse the farmer's instinct for getting things cheap; and so, finally, with a little more 'playing,' Mr. Timothy Oats, of Clod Hall, Salop, was landed high and dry on the subscription list—a list, by the way, which already included all the poet's tradesmen! This is one example of 'how poets sell.'
Yet over and above what we may term these forced sales, the demand for verse, we are assured, is growing. The impression to the contrary on the part of the Philistine is a delusion, a false security. And the demand, a well-known publisher has told us, is an intelligent one, for poetry of the markedly idealistic, or markedly realistic, kind; but to writers of the merely sentimental he can offer no hope. Their golden age, a pretty long one while it lasted, has probably gone for ever.
This is good news for those engaged in growing dreams for the London market.
THE 'GENIUS' SUPERSTITION
It must be very painful to the sentimentalist to notice what common sense is beginning to prevail on one of his pet subjects: that of the ancient immunities of 'genius.' Of course, to a great many good people genius continues still to be accepted as payment in full for every species of obligation, and if a man were a great poet he might probably still ruin a woman's life, and some, in secret at least, would deem that he did God service. There are perhaps even more women than ever nowadays who would, as Keats put it, like to be married to an epic, and given away by a three-volume novel. Such an attitude, however, is more and more taking its place among the superstitions, and the divine right of genius to ride rough-shod over us is at a discount.
At the same time, our national capacity for reaching right conclusions by the wrong course is in this matter once more exemplified. In the main, as usual, our reasoning seems to have been quite astray. We have argued as though for ourselves, and that on those lines we should have reached the sane conclusion is somewhat surprising. Because, indeed, it does pay the world to allow genius to do its pleasure: its victims even have little to complain of; they wear the martyr's crown, and if a few tradesmen or a few women are the worse, it has been deemed just, time out of mind, that such should suffer for the people. But the one whom it does not pay, either in this world or the next, is emphatically the man of genius himself. It is really on his behalf that the protest against his ancient immunities should be made, for
Matters not much in the end to any one but Him.'
To take the threadbare instance, the world suffered nothing from the suicide of Harriet Westbrook: rather it gained by one more story of tragic pathos. Harriet herself was no loser, for she had lived her dream, and the stern joy of a great sorrow was granted her to die with: it was only the selfish heart that could leave her thus to suffer and die that was the loser. Not in its relations with the world, fair or ill—such, like all external things, are important only as we take them: but in its diminished capacity to feel greatly and tenderly, in its added numbness, in its less noble beat. It was thus that the cor cordium lost what no lyric passion, no triumphant exultation of success, could give to it again.
However, Shelley and his story belong more or less to the tragic muse, and this subject is, perhaps, rather more the property of the comic: for great poets are rare, and really it is the smaller genius we have always with us that is likely to suffer most from those 'immunities'; still more the talent that would fain bear the greater name, and most of all the misguided industry which is neither the one nor the other.
In this lower sphere, it is not murder and sudden death, and other such volcanic aberrations, that call for condonation; but those offences against that code of daily intercourse which some faulty observer of human life has characterised as 'the minor morals.'
The type of 'genius' I am thinking of probably began life by a misapplication, to himself, of Emerson's essay on Self-Reliance: a great and beautiful essay, but Oh! how much has it to answer for in the survival of the unfittest. Alas! that the wheat and tares must grow together till the harvest. It is the syrup of phosphorus by which weakly mediocrity develops into sturdiness, a sturdy coarseness that else might have died down and been spared us. But, thanks to that or some other artificial fertiliser, it grows up with the idea that the duty which lies nearest to it is to write weary books, paint monotonous pictures, persevere in 'd——d bad acting'; and it fulfils that duty with an energy known only to mediocrity. The literary variety, probably, has the characteristics of the type most fully developed. No one takes himself with more touching seriousness. Day by day he grows in conceit, neglects his temper, especially at home, with a wife who is worth ten of him and all his 'works,' and generally behaves, as the phrase goes, 'as if anything becomes him.' If you visit him en famille, you will find him especially characteristic at meals, during which he is wont to sit absorbed, with an air of 'I cannot shake off the god'; and when they are over he goes off, moodily chewing a toothpick, to his den, where, maybe, the genius finds vent in a dissertation on 'Peg-Tops,' for The Boy's Own, or 'The Noses of Great Men,' for Chambers' Journal.
But if such genius as this be chiefly comic, its work cannot but awaken in one a deep sense of the pathetic. To stand before the poor little picture that has been so much to its painter, and yet holds no spark of vitality or touch of distinction; to take up the poor little book into which all the toil of so many wasted days could breathe no breath of life, formless, uninspired, unnecessary. Think of the pathos of the illusion that has waved 'its purple wings' around these lifeless products, endowing with sensitive expression the wooden lineaments that have really been dead and unexpressive all the time, never glowed at all save to the wistful yearning eye of their befooled creator. Yet if nature be thus cruel to afflict, she is no less kind to console: for the victim of this species of hallucination seldom wakens from the dream. That essay on Self-Reliance is with him to the end.
Yet no less pathetic is it to reflect how his whole development has suffered for this mistake, all his life-blood gone to feed this abortive thing. The gentler charities of life have been neglected, fine qualities atrophied, the man has grown narrow and selfish, all the real things have been lost for this shadow: that he might become, what nature never meant him to be—an artist. All along, when he has made any excuse, it has been 'art.' But, more likely, he has not been asked for excuse, he has lived under the shelter of the 'genius' superstition. He has worn the air of making great sacrifices for the goddess, and in these his intimates have felt a proud sense of awful participation, as of a family whom the gods love. They have never understood that art is a particular form of self-indulgence, by no means confined to artists; that it often becomes no less a vice than opium-eating, and that the same question has to be asked of both—whether the dreams are worth the cost. This might occasionally be asked of the world's famous: not only of those whose art has been the evilly exquisite outcome of spiritual disease, but even of the great sane successful reputations.
There is, too, especially about the latter, perhaps, a touch of comic suggestiveness in the sublime preoccupation to which we owe their great legacies, that look of Atlas which is always pathetic, when it is not foolish, on the face of a mortal: the grand air of a Goethe, the colossal absorption of a Balzac. Their attitude offends one's sense of the relation of things, and we feel that, after all, we could have spared half their works for a larger share of that delicate instinct for proportion, which is one of the most precious attributes of what we call a gentleman. But the demi-god has always much of the nouveau riche about him, and a gentleman is, after all, an exquisite product. Indeed, the world has, one may think, quite enough genius to go on with. It could well do with a few more gentlemen.
A BORROWED SOVEREIGN
(TO MR. AND MRS. WELCH)
Jim lent me a sovereign. He was working hard to make his home, and was saving every penny. However, I took it, for I was really in sore straits. If you have ever known what it is absolutely to need a sovereign, when you have neither banking account nor employment, and your evening clothes are no longer accessible for the last, you will be in a position to understand the transfiguring properties of one small piece of gold. You leave your friend's rooms a different man. Like the virtuous in the Buddhistic round, you go in a beggar and come out a prince. To vary Carlyle's phrase, you can pay for dinners, you can call hansoms, you can take stalls; in fact, you are a prince—to the extent of a sovereign.
And oh! how wooingly does the world seem to nestle round you—the same world that was so cold and haughty ten minutes ago. The world is a courtesan, and has heard you have found a sovereign.
The gaslights seem beaming love at you. So near and bright are the streets, you want to stay out in them all night; though you didn't relish the prospect last evening. O sweet, sweet, siren London, with your golden voice—I have a sovereign!
This, of course, was but the first rich impulse. The sovereign should really be kept for the lodgings. But the snug little oyster-shops about Booksellers' Row are so tempting, and there is nothing like oysters to give one courage to open that giant oyster spoken of by Ancient Pistol.
I went in. I assured my conscience that it should only be 'Anglo-Portuguese,' and that I would forego the roll and butter. But 'Anglos' are not nice, Dutch are in every way to be preferred; and if you are paying eighteenpence you might as well pay three shillings, and what's the use of drawing the line at a roll and butter? No! we will repent after the roll and butter. 'Roll and butter' shall be my Ebenezer. The 'r's' have a notorious mnemonic quality. They will help me to remember.
So I sat down, and, fondling my sovereign in my pocket, fell into a dream. When the oysters came I wished they had been 'Anglos' after all, because my dream had grown beautiful and troublesome, and I had really forgotten the oysters altogether. However, I ate them mechanically, and ordering another half-dozen, so that the manager should not begrudge me my seat, I turned again to my dream.
A young girl sat in a dainty room, writing at a quaint old escritoire, lit by candles in shining brass sconces. She had a sweet blonde face, but more character in it than usually falls to the lot of the English girl. There was experience in the sensitive refinement of her features, a silver touch of suffering: not wasting experience or bitter suffering, but just enough to refine—she had waited. But she had been bravely happy all the time.
Pretty books filled a shelf above her escritoire, and between the candlesticks was a photograph in a filigree silver frame. Towards this she looked every now and then, in the pauses of her writing, with a happy, trustful expression of quiet love. During one pause she noticed that her little clock pointed to 8.30. 'Jim will just be going on,' she said to herself. Yes, that photograph was 'Jim.'
A quaint little face it was, full of sweet wrinkles, and yet but a boy's face. The wrinkles, you could see, were but so many threads of gold which happy laughter had left there. Siss called him her Punchinello, likewise her poet, for Jim is a poet who makes his poetry of his own bright face and body, acts it night after night to an audience, and the people laugh and cry as he plays, for his face is like a bubbling spring, full of laughing eddies on the surface, but ever so deep with sweet freshness beneath—and some catch sight of the deeps. The world knows him as a comedian. Siss knows him as a poet, and because she knows what loving tender tears are in him as well as laughter, she calls him her Punchinello.
This is what she was writing: 'How near our home seems now, Jimmie boy! Every night as you go on—and you are just going on now—I feel our home draw nearer: and, do you know, all this week our star has seemed to grow brighter and brighter. Can you see it in London? It comes out here about six o'clock—first very pale, like a dream, and then fuller and fuller and warmer and warmer. Sometimes I say that it is the sovereigns we are putting into the bank that make it so much brighter; and I am sure it was brighter after that last ten pounds.... You are laughing at me, aren't you? Never mind; you can be just as silly. Dear, dear, funny little face!'
I had reached just so far in my dream when the oysters came, and that is why I wished I had ordered 'Anglos' and no roll.
When I looked again, Siss had stopped writing, and was sitting with her head in her hands dreaming. I looked into her eyes, felt ashamed for a moment, and then stepped into her dream. I felt I was not worthy to walk there, but I took off my hat and told myself that I was reverent.
It was a pretty flat, full of dainty rooms, and I followed her from one to another, and one there was just like that in which I had seen her writing, with the old escritoire, and the books, and the burning candles, and the silver photograph shrine. She walked about very wistfully, and her eyes were full. So were mine, and I wanted to sob, but feared lest she should hear. Presently Jim joined her, and they walked together, and said to each other, 'Think, this is our home at last'—'Think, this is our home at last. O love, our home—together for evermore!'
This they said many times, and at length they came to a room that had a door white as ivory, and I caught a breath of freshest flowers as they opened and passed in.
Then I closed my eyes, and when I looked again I thought an angel stood on the threshold, as I had seen it somewhere in Victor Hugo—a happy angel with finger upon his lip.
And when the dream had gone, and I was once more alone, I said 'Jim is working, Siss is waiting, and I—am eating borrowed oysters.'
Then I took out the sovereign and looked at it, for it was now symbolic. Outside, above the street, a star was shining. I had filched a beam of Siss's star. Was it less bright tonight? Had she missed this sovereign?
It had been symbolic before—a sovereign's-worth of the world, the flesh, and the devil; now it was a sovereign's-worth of holy love and home. Every penny I spent of it dimmed that star, delayed that home. In my pocket it meant a sovereign's-worth more working and waiting. Pay it back again into that star, and it was a sovereign nearer home. Yes, it was a sovereign's-worth of that flat, of that escritoire, those books, those burning candles, that photograph, that ivory-white door, those sweet-smelling flowers, a sovereign's-worth of that angel, I was keeping in my pocket.
Out on it! God forgive me. I had not thought it meant that to borrow a sovereign from Jim, meant that to eat those borrowed oysters. Nevertheless, they had not been all an immoral indulgence. Even oysters may be the instruments of virtue in the hands of Providence.
The shopman knew me, so I 'confounded it' and told him I had come out without my purse. It was all right. Pay next time, Jim's theatre was close by, it was but a stone's-throw to the stage-door. Easy to leave him a note. What will he think, I wonder, as he reads it, and the sovereign rolls out: 'Dear old man, forgive me—I forgot it was a sovereign's-worth of home.'
Yet, after all, it was the oysters that did this thing.
ANARCHY IN A LIBRARY
(A FABLE FOR SOCIALISTS)
Having occasion recently to re-arrange my books, they lay in bewildering jumbled heaps upon my study floor; and, having in vain puzzled over this plan and that which should give the little collection a continuity such as it had never attained before, I at length gave it up in despair, and sat, with my head in my hands, hopeless. Presently I seemed to hear small voices talking in whispers, a curious papery tone, like the fluttering of leaves, and listening I heard distinctly these words:—'The great era of universal equality and redistribution has dawned at last. No one book shall any longer claim more shelf than another, no book shall be taller or thicker than another. The age of folios and quartos is past, and the Age of the Universal Octavo has dawned.'
Looking up, I saw that the voice was that of a shabby, but perky, octavo, which I had forgotten I ever possessed, since the day when some mistaken charity had prompted me to rescue it from the threepenny box and give it a good home in a respectable family of books. Certainly, it had so far filled the humble position of a shelf-liner, and its accidental elevation into daylight on the top of a prostrate folio had evidently turned its head. It was now doing its best to disseminate socialistic principles among the set of scurvy octavos and duodecimos in its neighbourhood.
'Why should we choke with dust in the dark there,' it continued, 'that these splendid creatures should glitter all day in the sunshine, and get all the firelight of an evening? We were born to be read as much as they, born to enjoy our share of the good things of this world as much as my Lord Folio, as much as any Honourable Quarto, or fashionable Large Paper. My Brothers, the hour has come: will you strike now or never, exact your rights as free-born books, or will you go back to be shelf-liners as before?'
[Loud cries of 'No! no! we won't,' here encouraged the speaker.]
'Strike now, and the book unborn shall bless you. Miss this golden opportunity, and the cause we serve will be delayed another hundred editions.'
At this point a great folio that had for some time been leaning threateningly, like a slab at Stonehenge, above the speaker, suddenly fell and silenced him; but he had not spoken in vain, and from various sets of books about the room I heard the voices of excited agitators taking up his words. Then an idea struck me. I was, as I told you, heartily sick of my task of arrangement. Here seemed an opportunity.
'Look here,' I said,'you shall have it all to yourselves. I resign, I abdicate. You shall arrange yourselves as you please, but be quick about it, and let there be as little bloodshed as possible'
With that there arose such a hubbub as was never before heard in a quiet book-room, not even during that famous battle of the St. James's Library in 1697; and conspicuous among the noises was a strange crowing sound as of young cocks, which I was at a loss to understand, till I bethought me how Mentzelius, long ago, sitting in the quiet of his library, had heard the bookworm 'crow like a cock unto his mate.' On looking I saw that the insurgents had indeed pressed into their service a certain politic body of bookworms as joyous heralds, whom I had never suspected of inhabiting my books at all—though, indeed, such hidden creatures do crawl out of their corners in times of upheaval.
It was long before I could disentangle individual voices from the wild chaos of strident theories that surrounded me. But at last there was silence, as one bilious-looking vellum book, old enough to have known better, had evidently caught the ear of the assembled multitudes; and then I understood that the movement had already found its Robespierre. It was clear from his words that the universal gospel of equality, so beautifully expatiated upon before the revolution, had had reference only to those who were already on an equality of that low estate which fears no fall. The only equality now offered to books above the rank of octavo was that of death, which, philosophers have long assured us, makes all men equal, by a short and simple method. There was but one other way—that the quartos should consent to be cut in two, and the folios quartered; but that, alas! meant death no less, for that which alone is of worth in both books and men, the soul, would be no more. So, as it seemed they must die either way, all the condemned chose death before dishonour. Several distinguished folios who, in a quixotism of heart, had flirted with the socialistic leaders when their schemes were but propaganda, and equality had not yet been so rigorously defined, now bitterly repented their folly, and did their best in heading a rally against their foes. That, however, was soon quelled, and but hastened their doom.
'To the guillotine with them!' cried the bilious little octavo, and then I saw that my tobacco-cutter had been extemporised into the deadly engine.
But, hereupon, a voice of humour found hearing, that of a stout 32mo, evidently a philosopher.
'Why shed blood?' he said, 'I have a better plan. Stature is no mark of superiority, but usually the reverse. The mind's the standard of the man. In the world of men the tallest and handsomest are made into servants, and called flunkies, and these wait upon the small men, who have all the money, which among men corresponds to brains among books. Why shouldn't we take a hint from this custom, and turn these tall gaudy gentlemen into our servants, for which all their gilt and fine clothes have already provided them with livery? Ho! Sirrah Folio, come and turn my page!'
But this Lord Folio haughtily refused to do, and, consequently, being too stout to turn his own pages, the little 32mo could say no more. His proposal, though it tickled a few, found no great favour. It was generally agreed that humour had no place in the discussion of a serious question. Another speaker advocated the retention of the condemned as ornaments of the state, but he was very speedily overruled. Was not that the shallow excuse by which they had hung on for ever so long? No, that was quite worn out.
The main question was further obstructed by many outbursts of individualism. Certain self-contained books wished to be left to themselves, and have no part in the social scheme, unless in the event of a return to monarchy, when, they intimated, they might be eligible for election. This, one could see, was the secret hope of all the speakers; and you would have laughed could you have heard what inflated opinions some of them had of their own importance—especially two or three of the minor poets. Then, again, many sentimental demands, quite unforeseen, added to the general anarchy. Collected editions, which had long groaned in the bondage of an arbitrary relationship, saw an opportunity in the general overturn to break away from their sets and join their natural fellows. Sex was naturally the most unruly element of all. Volumes that had waited edition after edition for each other, yearning across the shelves, felt their time had come at last, and leapt into each other's arms. It was with no avail that a distress minute was passed by The Hundred Thousand Committee (a somewhat unworkable body) that henceforth sex was to be a function exercised absolutely for the good of the state: tattered poets were to be seen wildly proclaiming a different doctrine.
Such eccentric attachments as a volume of The Essays of Elia for Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, were especially troublesome; while the explosion caused by the accidental contact of that same unruly Elia with a modern reprint of The Anatomy of Melancholy, which (he said) he never could tolerate, proved the last straw to the Committee of the Hundred Thousand, who immediately resigned their offices in anger and despair. Thereupon, tenfold chaos once more returning, I thought it time to interfere. The Doctrine of Equality was evidently a failure—among books, at any rate. So I savagely fell to, and threw the books back again into their immemorial places, and the cause of freedom in 'The City of Books' sleeps for another hundred editions.
Only I placed Elia next to the Duchess, because he was a human fellow, and had no theories.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF 'LIMITED EDITIONS'
Why do the heathen so furiously rage against limited issues, large-papers, first editions, and the rest? For there is certainly more to be said for than against them. Broadly speaking, all such 'fads' are worthy of being encouraged, because they maintain, in some measure, the expiring dignity of letters, the mystery of books. Day by day the wonderfulness of life is becoming lost to us. The sanctities of religion are defiled, the 'fairy tales' of science have become commonplaces. Christian mysteries are debased in the streets to the sound of drum and trumpet, and the sensitive ear of the telephone is but a servile drudge 'twixt speculative bacon merchants. And Books!—those miraculous memories of high thoughts and golden moods; those magical shells tremulous with the secrets of the ocean of life; those love-letters that pass from hand to hand of a thousand lovers that never meet; those honeycombs of dreams; those orchards of knowledge; those still-beating hearts of the noble dead; those mysterious signals that beckon along the darksome pathways of the past; voices through which the myriad lispings of the earth find perfect speech; oracles through which its mysteries call like voices in moonlit woods; prisms of beauty; urns stored with all the sweets of all the summers of time; immortal nightingales that sing for ever to the rose of life: Books, Bibles—ah me! what have ye become to-day!
What, indeed, has become of that mystery of the Printed Word, of which Carlyle so movingly wrote? It has gone, it is to be feared, with those Memnonian mornings we sleep through with so determined snore, those ancient mysteries of night we forget beneath the mimic firmament of the music-hall.
Only in the lamplit closet of the bookman, the fanatic of first and fine editions, is it remembered and revered. To him alone of an Americanised, 'pirated-edition' reading world, the book remains the sacred thing it is. Therefore, he would not have it degraded by, so to say, an indiscriminate breeding, such as has also made the children of men cheap and vulgar to each other. We pity the desert rose that is born to unappreciated beauty, the unset gem that glitters on no woman's hand; but what of the book that eats its heart out in the threepenny box, the remainders that are sold ignominiously in job lots by ignorant auctioneers? Have we no feeling for them?
Over-production, in both men and shirts, is the evil of the day. The world has neither enough food, nor enough love, for the young that are born into it. We have more mouths than we can fill, and more books than we can buy. Well, the publisher and collector of limited editions aim, in their small corner, to set a limit to this careless procreation. They are literary Malthusians. The ideal world would be that in which there should be at least one lover for each woman. In the higher life of books the ideal is similar. No book should be brought into the world which is not sure of love and lodging on some comfortable shelf. If writers and publishers only gave a thought to what they are doing when they generate such large families of books, careless as the salmon with its million young, we should have no such sad alms-houses of learning as Booksellers' Row, no such melancholy distress-sales of noble authors as remainder auctions. A good book is beyond price; and it is far easier to under than over sell it. The words of the modern minor poet are as rubies, and what if his sets bring a hundred guineas?—it is more as it should be, than that any sacrilegious hand should fumble them for threepence. It recalls that golden age of which Mr. Dobson has sung, when—
Where a wistful man might look,
Finding something through the whole
Beating—like a human soul';
days when for one small gilded manuscript men would willingly exchange broad manors, with pasture—lands, chases, and blowing woodlands; days when kings would send anxious embassies across the sea, burdened with rich gifts to abbot and prior, if haply gold might purchase a single poet's book.
But, says the scoffer, these limited editions and so forth foster the vile passions of competition. Well, and if they do? Is it not meet that men should strive together for such possessions? We compete for the allotments of shares in American-meat companies, we outbid each other for tickets 'to view the Royal procession,' we buffet at the gate of the football field, and enter into many another of the ignoble rivalries of peace; and are not books worth a scrimmage?—books that are all those wonderful things so poetically set forth in a preceding paragraph! Lightly earned, lightly spurned, is the sense, if not the exact phrasing, of an old proverb. There is no telling how we should value many of our possessions if they were more arduously come by: our relatives, our husbands and wives, our presentation poetry from the unpoetical, our invitation-cards to one-man shows in Bond Street, the auto-photographs of great actors, the flatteries of the unimportant, the attentions of the embarrassing: how might we not value all such treasures, if they were, so to say, restricted to a limited issue, and guaranteed 'not to be reprinted'—'plates destroyed and type distributed.'
Indeed, all nature is on the side of limited editions. Make a thing cheap, she cries from every spring hedgerow, and no one values it. When do we find the hawthorn, with its breath sweet as a milch-cow's; or the wild rose, with its exquisite attar and its petals of hollowed pearl—when do we find these decking the tables of the great? or the purple bilberry, or the boot-bright blackberry in the entremets thereof? Think what that 'common dog-rose' would bring in a limited edition! And new milk from the cow, or water from the well! Where would champagne be if those intoxicants were restricted by expensive licence, and sold in gilded bottles? What would you not pay for a ticket to see the moon rise, if nature had not improvidently made it a free entertainment; and who could afford to buy a seat at Covent Garden if Sir Augustus Harris should suddenly become sole impresario of the nightingale?
Yes, 'from scarped cliff and quarried stone,' Nature cries, 'Limit the Edition! Distribute the type!'—though in her capacity as the great publisher she has been all too prodigal of her issues, and ruinously guilty of innumerable remainders. In fact, it is by her warning rather than by her example that we must be guided in this matter. Let us not vulgarise our books, as she has done her stars and flowers. Let us, if need be, make our editions smaller and smaller, our prices increasingly 'prohibitive,' rather than that we should forget the wonder and beauty of printed dream and thought, and treat our books as somewhat less valuable than wayside weeds.
A PLEA FOR THE OLD PLAYGOER
He's a nuisance, of course. But to see only that side of him is to think, as the shepherd boy piped, 'as though' you will 'never grow old.' Does he never appeal to you with any more human significance, a significance tearful and uncomfortably symbolic? Or are you so entirely that tailor's fraction of manhood, the fin de siècle type, that your ninth part does not include a heart and the lachrymal gland?
You suspect him at once as you squeeze past his legs to your stall, for he cannot quite conceal the hissing twinge of gout; and you are hardly seated ere you are quite sure that a long night of living for others is before you.
'You hardly would think it, perhaps,' he begins, 'but I saw Charles Young play the part—yes, in 1824.'
If you are young and innocent, you think—'What an interesting old gentleman!' and you have vague ideas of pumping him for reminiscences to turn into copy. Poor boy, you soon find that there is no need of pumping on your part. He is entirely self-acting, and the wells of his autobiography are as deep as the foundations of the world.
If you are more experienced, you make a quick frantic effort to escape; you try to nip the bud of his talk with a frosty 'Indeed!' and edge away, calling upon your programme to cover you. You never so much as turn the sixteenth part of an eye in his direction, for even as the oyster-man, should the poor mollusc heave the faintest sigh, is inside with his knife in the twinkling of a star; even as a beetle has but to think of moving its tiniest leg for the bird to swoop upon him,—even so will the least muscular interest in your neighbour give you bound hand and foot into his power.
But really and truly escape is hopeless. You are beyond the reach of any salvage agency whatsoever. Better make up your mind to be absolutely rude or absolutely kind: and the man who can find in his heart to be the former must have meeting eyebrows, and will sooner or later be found canonised in wax at Madame Tussaud's. To be the latter, however, is by no means easy. It is one of the most poignant forms of self-sacrifice attained by the race. In that, at least, you have some wintry consolation; and the imaginative vignette of yourself wearing the martyr's crown is a pretty piece of sacred art.
If you wished to make a bag of old playgoers, or meditated a sort of Bartholomew's Eve, a revival of Hamlet would, of course, be the occasion you would select for your purpose: for the old playgoer, so to speak, collects Hamlets. At a first night of Hamlet every sixth stall-holder is a Dr. Doran up to date, his mind a portfolio of old prints.
That is why a perambulation of the stalls is as perilous as to pick one's way through hot ploughshares. You can hardly hope always to pass through unscathed. You are as sure some night to find yourself seated beside him, as you will some day be called to serve on the jury. And then—
Art more engaged!'
However, 'sudden the worst turns best to the brave,' and 'there is much music' in this old fellow if only you have the humanity to listen.
To begin with, he has probably a distinguished face, with a bunch of vigorous curly hair, white as hawthorn. He has a manner, too. Suppose you try and enter into his soul for a moment. It does us good to get outside ourselves for a while, and this old man's soul is a palace of memory. Those lines that, may be, have been familiar to you for sixteen years, have been familiar to him for sixty. That is why he knows them off so well, why he repeats them under his breath—Look at his face!—like a Methodist praying, anticipating the actor in all the fine speeches. Do look at his face! How it shines, as the golden passages come treading along. How his head moves in an ecstasy of remembrance, in which there is a whole world of tears. How he half turns to you with a wistful appeal to feel what he is feeling: an appeal that might kindle a clod. It is the old wine laughing to itself within the old bottle.
And, one thing you will notice, it is the poetry that moves him: the great metaphor, the sonorous cadence, the honeysuckle fancy. He belongs to an age that had an instinct for beauty, and loved style—an age that, in the words of a modern wit, had not grown all nose with intellect, an age that went to the theatre to dream, not to dissect.
For you there may be here and there a flower of remembrance stuck within the leaves of the play, but for him it is stained through with the sweets of sixty springs. His youth lies buried within it like a thousand violets.
Practically he is Death at the play. To you there is but one ghost in Hamlet, to him there are fifty, and they all dance like shadows behind 'the new Hamlet,' and even sit about the stalls.
If your love be with you, forbear to press her hand in the love-scenes, or, at least, don't let the old man see you: because he used to punctuate those very passages he is muttering in just the same way—sixty years ago, when she whose angel face he will kiss no more, unless it be in the heavenly fields, sat like a flower at his side. Poor old fellow, can you be selfish to him? Can you say, 'These tedious old fools!' Fool thyself, this night shall thy youth be required of thee.
You might think of this next time you drop across the old playgoer. It was natural in Hamlet to swear at Polonius—who, you will remember, was an old playgoer himself—but, being a gentleman, it was natural in him, too, to recall the first player with, 'Follow that lord; but look you mock him not!'
THE MEASURE OF A MAN
I sometimes grow melancholy with the thought that, though I wear trousers and shave once a day, I am not, properly speaking, a Man. Surely it is from no failure of goodwill, no lack of prayerful striving towards that noble estate: for if there is one spectacle in this moving phantasmagoria of life that I love to carry within my eye, it is the figure of a true man. The mere idea of a true man stirs one's heart like a trumpet. Therefore, this doubt I am confiding is all the more dreary. Naturally, I feel it most keenly in the company of my fellows, each one of whom seems to carry the victorious badge of manhood, as though to cry shame upon me. They make me shrink into myself, make me feel that I am but an impostor in their midst. Indeed, in that sensitiveness of mine you have the starting-point of my unmanliness. Look at that noble fellow there. He is six-foot odd in his stockings, straight, stalwart, and confident. His face is broad and strong, his close-cropped head is firm and proud on his shoulders—firm and proud as a young bull's. It is a head made, indeed, rather to butt than to think with; it is visited with no effeminacy of thought or dream. It has another striking quality: it is hardly distinguishable from any other head in the room—for I am in an assemblage of true men all, a glorious herd of young John Bulls. All have the same strong jaws, the same powerful low foreheads. Noble fellows! Any one of them could send me to eternity with the wind of his fist.
And, most of all, is their manhood brought home to me, with a sickening sense of inferiority, in their voices. What a leonine authority in the roar of their opinions! Their words strike the air firm as the tread of lions. They are not teased with fine distinctions, possibilities of misconception, or the perils of afterthought. Their talk is of the absolute, their opinions wear the primary colours, and dream not of 'art shades.' Never have they been wrong in their lives, never shall they be wrong in the time to come. Never have they been known to conjecture that another may, after all, be wiser than they, handsomer, stronger, or more fortunate. They would kill a man rather than admit a mistake. Noble fellows! And I? Do you wonder that I blush in my corner as I gaze upon them, strive to smooth my hair into the appearance of a manly flatness, strive to set my face hard and feign it knowing, strive to elevate my voice to the dogmatic note, strive to cast out from my mind all those evil spirits of proportion?
Can it be possible that any one of my readers has ever been in a like case? Is there hope for us, my brother? You have, I perceive, a fine, expressive, sensitive countenance. That is, indeed, against you in this race for manhood. It is true that Apollo passed for a man—but that was long ago, and not in Britain. You have a pleasant, sympathetic voice. An excellent thing in woman. But you, my friend,—break it, I beseech you. Coarsen it with raw spirits and rawer opinions; and set that face of thine with hog's bristles, plant a shoe-brush on thy upper lip, and send thy head to the turner of billiard balls. Else come not nigh me, for, 'fore Heaven, I love a man!
Sometimes, however, I am inclined to a more comfortable consideration of this great question—for it is one of my weaknesses to be positive on few matters. But to-day I taunted my soul with its unmanliness till it rose in rebellion against me. 'Poor-spirited creature,' I said, 'where is thy valour? When a fool has struck thee I have seen thee pass on without a word, not so much as a momentary knitting of thy fist When ignorance has waxed proud, and put thee to the mock, thou hast sat meek, and uttered never a word. It must needs be thou art pigeon-livered and lack gall! There is not in thee the swagger, the rustle, the braggadocio of a true swashbuckler manhood. Out on thee!'
And my soul took the blows in patience.
'Hast thou any courage hid in any crevice of thee?' I continued my taunt. And suddenly my soul answered with a firm quiet voice: 'Try me!'
Then said I, 'Coward as thou art, fearful of thy precious skin, darest thou strike a blow for the weak against his oppressor, darest thou meet the strong tyrant in the way?'
And thereon I was startled, for my soul suddenly sprang up within me, and, lo! it neighed like a war-horse for the battle.
'Ah!' I continued, 'but couldst thou fight against the enemy of thy land? Surely thy valour would melt at the clash of swords and the voice of the drum?'
And the answer of my soul was like the march of armed men.
Then said I softly, for I was touched by this unwonted valour of my soul, 'Soul! wouldst thou die for thy friend?'
And the voice of my soul came sweet as the sound of bells at evening. It seemed, indeed, as though it could dream of naught sweeter than to die for one's friend.
This colloquy of inner and outer set me further reflecting. Can it be that this manhood is, after all, rather a quality of the spirit than of the body; that it is to be sought rather in the stout heart than in the strong arm; that big words and ready blows may, like a display of bunting, betoken no true loyalty, and be but the gaudy sign to a sorry inn? Dr. Watts, it may be remembered, declared the mind to be the standard of the man. As he was the author of a book on 'The Human Mind,' envious persons may meanly conceive that his statement was but a subtly-disguised advertisement of his literary wares.