Hortus Vitae Part 3

IN PRAISE OF COURTSHIP

There is too little courtship in the world. I do not mean there is not enough marrying and giving in marriage, or that the preliminaries thereunto are otherwise than they should be. Quite the reverse. As long as there is love and youth, there is sure in the literal sense to be courtship. But what I ask is that there be courtship besides that literal courtship between the Perditas and Florizels; that there be "being in love" with a great many things, even stocks and stones, besides youth and maiden; which would result, on the whole, in all of us being young in feeling even when we had grown old in years.

For courtship means a wish to stand well in the other person's eyes, and, what is more, a readiness to be pleased with the other's ways; a sense on each side of having had the better of the bargain; an undercurrent of surprise and thankfulness at one's good luck.

There is not enough courtship in the world. This thought has been growing in my mind ever since the silver wedding of two dear friends: that quarter of a century has been but a prolonged courtship.

Why is it not oftener so? One sees among married folk a good deal of affection, of kindliness, even of politeness; a great deal too much mutual dependence, degenerating, of course, into habitual boredom. But none of this can be called courtship. Perhaps this was the meaning, less cynical than supposed, but quite as sad, of La Rochefoucauld when he noted down, "Il y a de bons mariages, mais point de delicieux;" since, in the delicate French sense of the word, implying some a.n.a.logy of subdued yet penetrating pleasantness, as of fresh, bright weather or fine light wine, courtship is essentially _delicieux_.

This is, of course, initiating a question of manner. Modern psychology is discovering scientific reasons for the fact that if you wag a dog's tail he feels pleased; or, at all events, that the human being would feel pleased if it had a tail and could wag it. Confessors and nurses knew it long ago, curbing bad temper by restraining its outer manifestations; and are not dinners and plays, flags and illuminations, birthdays and jubilees--nay, art itself, devices for suggestions to mankind that it feels pleased?

Married people, as a rule, wish not to be pleased, or at least not to show it. They may be heartbroken at each other's death, and unable to endure a temporary separation; but the outsider may wonder why, seeing how little they seem to care for being together. It is the same, after all, with other relations; and it is only because brothers and sisters, fathers and children have not taken visible steps to select one another that their bored indifference is less conspicuous. You will say it is a question of mere manner. But, as remarked, manner not merely results from feeling, but largely reacts on feeling, and makes it different.

People who live together have the appearance, often, of taking each other, if not as a convenience, at all events as a _fait accompli_, and, so far as possible, as if not there at all. Near relations try to realize the paradox of companionable solitude; and intimacy seems to imply the right to behave as if the intimate other one were not there.

Now, _being by one's self_ is a fine thing, convenient and salutary (indeed, like courtship, there is not enough of it); but being by one's self is not to be confounded with _not being in company_. I have selected that expression advisedly, in order to give a shock to the reader. _In company?_ Good heavens! is being with one's wife, one's brothers or sisters, one's children, one's bosom friends _being in company_? And why not? Should company necessarily mean the company of strangers? And is the presence of one's nearest and dearest to be accounted as nothing--as nothing demanding some change in ourselves, and worthy of being paid some price for?

This goes against our notion of intimacy; but then our notion is wrong, as is shown daily by the quarrels and recriminations of intimate friends. One can be natural, _with a difference_, which difference means a thought for the other. There is a selection possible in one's words and actions before another--nay, there is a manner of doing and feeling which almost forestalls the necessity of a selection at all. I like the expression employed by a certain sister after nursing her small brother through a difficult illness, "We were always Castilian," she said. Why, as we all try to be honest, and hard-working, and clever, and more or less ill.u.s.trious, should we not sometimes try to be a little Castilian?

Similarly, my friend of the silver wedding once pointed out to me that marriage, with its enforced and often excessive intimacies, was a wonderful school of consideration, of mutual respect, of fine courtesy.

This had been no paradox in her case; but then, as I said, her twenty-five years of wedlock had been years of courtship.

Courtship, however, should not be confined to marriage, nor even to such relations as imply close quarters and worries in common; nay, it should exist towards all things, a constant att.i.tude in life--at least, an att.i.tude constantly tended towards.

The line of least resistance seems against it; our laziness, and our wish to think well of ourselves merely because we _are_ ourselves, undoubtedly go against it, as they do against everything in the world worth having. In our own day certain ways of thinking, culminating in development of the _Moi_ and production of the _Uebermensch_, and general self-engrossment and currishness, are peculiarly hostile to courtship. Whereas the old religious training, where it did not degenerate into excessive asceticism, was a school of good manners towards the universe as well as towards one's neighbours. The "Fioretti di San Francisco" is a handbook of polite friendliness to men, women, birds, wolves, and, what must have been most difficult, fellow-monks; and St. Francis' Hymn to the Sun might be given as an example of the wise man's courtship of what we stupidly call inanimates.

For courtship might be our att.i.tude towards everything which is capable of giving pleasure; and would not many more things give us pleasure--let us say, the sun in the heavens, the water on the stones, even the fire in the grate, if, instead of thinking of them as existing merely to make our life bearable, we called them, like the saint of a.s.sisi, My Lord the Sun, and Sister Water, and Brother Fire, and thought of them with joy and grat.i.tude?

Certain it is that everything in the world repays courtship; and that, quite outside all marrying and giving in marriage, in all our dealings with all possible things, the cessation of courtship marks the incipient necessity for divorce.

KNOWING ONE'S MIND

The only things which afforded me any pleasure in that great collection of Ingres drawings, let alone in that very dull, frowsy, stale, and unprofitable city of Montauban, whither I had travelled on purpose to see it, were an old printed copy of "Don Juan oder der Steinerne Gast"--in a gla.s.s case alongside of M. Ingres' century-long-uncleaned fiddle--and a half-page of Mozart's autograph, given to M. Ingres when a student by a Prix de Rome musician. I mentioned this fact to my friends, in a spirit of guileless truthfulness; when, what was my surprise at the story being received with smiling incredulity. "Your paradox," they said, with the benevolent courtesy of their nation, for they were French, "is delightful and most _reussi_. But, of course, we know you to be exquisitely sensitive to genius in all its manifestations."

Now, I happened to know myself to be as insensible as a stone to genius as manifested in the late M. Ingres. However, I despaired of persuading them that I was speaking the truth; and, despite the knowledge of their language with which they graciously credited me, I hunted about in vain for the French equivalent of "I know my own mind." Whereupon, allowing the conversation to take another turn, I fell to musing on those untranslatable words, together with the whole episode of the Mozart ma.n.u.script and the drawings of M. Ingres, including that rainy, chilly day at Montauban; and also another day of travel, even wetter and colder, which returned to my memory.

_Knowing one's own mind_ (in whatever way you might succeed in turning that into French) is a first step to filling one's own place instead of littering unprofitably over creation at large, and in so far also to doing one's own work. Life, I am willing to admit, is not all private garden, nor should we attempt to make it. 'Tis nine-tenths common acres, which we must till in company, and with mutual sacrifice of our whims.

Nay, Life is largely public thoroughfares with a definite _rule of the road_ and a regulated pace of traffic; streets, at all events, however narrow, where each must shovel snow, sprinkle water, and sweep his threshold. But respect for such common property cannot be genuine where there is not a corresponding fidelity and fondness on the part of each for his own little enclosure, his garden, and, by a.n.a.logy, his neighbour's garden also. There is little good to be got from your vague, gregarious natures, liking or disliking merely because others like or dislike. There cannot be much loving-kindness, let alone love (whether for persons or things or ideas), in souls which always require company, and prefer any to none at all. And as to good work, why, it means _tete-a-tete_ with what you are doing, and is incompatible with the spirit of picnics. I own to a growing suspicion of those often heroic and saintly persons who allow their neighbours--husband, father, mother, children--to saunter idly into the allotments which G.o.d has given them, trampling heedlessly the delicate seedlings, or, like holiday trippers, carving egoistic initials in growing trees not of their own planting.

And one of the unnoticed, because continuous, tragedies of existence is surely such wanton or deliberate destruction of the individual qualities of the soul, such sacrifice of the necessary breathing and standing place which even the smallest requires; such grudging of the needful solitude and separateness, alas! often to those that we love the best. It seems highly probable that among all their absurd and melancholy recollections of this wasteful and slatternly earth, the denizens of the Kingdom of Heaven will look back with most astonishment and grief on the fact of having lived, before regeneration, without a room apiece.

In the Kingdom of Heaven every one will have a separate room for rest and meditation; a cell perhaps, whitewashed, with a green shutter and a white dimity curtain in the sunshine. And the cells will, of course, be very much alike in all essentials, because most people agree about having some sort of bed, table, chair, and so forth. But some glorified souls will have the flowers (which Dante saw her plucking) of Leah; and others the looking-gla.s.s of the contemplative Rachel; and there will be ever so many other little differences, making it amusing and edifying to pay a call upon one's brother or sister soul.

In such a state of spiritual community and privacy (so different from our present hugger-mugger and five-little-bears-in-a-bed mode of existence), my soul, for instance, if your soul should honour it with a visit, would be able, methinks, to talk quite freely and pleasantly about the Ingres Museum at Montauban, and the autograph of Mozart in the gla.s.s case alongside the fiddle.... The ma.n.u.script is only a half sheet full score, torn or cut through its height; and the voice part is broken off with one word only--insufficient to identify it among Mozart's Italian works, though, perhaps, most suggestive of "Don Giovanni"--the word "Guai." The ma.n.u.script is exquisitely neat, yet has none of the look of a copy, and we know that Mozart was never obliged to make any.

The writing is so like the man's adorable personality, the little pattern of notes so like his music. The sight of it moved me, flooding my mind with divine things, that Concerto for Flute and Harp, for instance, which dear Mme. H---- had recently been playing for me. And during that dull, rainy day of waiting for trains at Montauban, it made me live over again another day of rainy travel, but with the "Zauberflote" at the end of it, about which I will also tell you, since I am permitted to know my own mind and to speak it.

But I find I have incidentally raised the question _de gustibus_, or, as our language puts it, the _accounting for tastes_. And I must settle and put myself right in the matter of M. Ingres before proceeding any further. The Latin saying, then, "De gustibus non est disputandum,"

contains an excellent piece of advice, since disputing about tastes or anything else is but a sorry employment. But the English version is absolutely wide of the mark, since tastes can be accounted for just as much as climate, history, and bodily complexion. Indeed, we should know implicitly what people like and dislike if we knew what they were and how they had come to be so. The very diversity in taste proves its deep-down reality: preference and antipathy being consubstantial with the soul--nay, inherent in the very mechanism and chemistry of the body.

And for this reason tastes are at once so universal and uniform, and so variously marked by minor differences. There are human beings all shank and thigh and wrist, with contemplative, deep-set eyes and compressed, silent lips; and others running to rounds and segments of circles, like M. Ingres' drawings, their eyes a trifle prominent for the better understanding of others, and mouth, like the typical French one, at a forward angle, as if for ready speech. But, different as these people are, they are alike in the main features of symmetry and balance; they haven't two sets of lungs and a duplicate stomach, like Centaurs, whom every one found so difficult to deal with; nor do any of them end off in a single forked tail, twisting about on which accounts for the proverbial untrustworthiness of mermaids. Being alike, all human creatures require free s.p.a.ce and breathable air; and, being unlike, some of them hanker after the sea, and others cannot watch without longing the imitation mountains into which clouds pile themselves on dreary flat horizons. And similarly in the matter of art. We all delight in the ineffable presence of transcending power; we all require to renew our soul's strength and keenness in the union with souls stronger and keener than ours. But the power which appeals to some of us is struggling and brooding tragically, as in Michelangelo and Beethoven; while the power which straightway subdues certain others is easy, temperate, and radiant, as in t.i.tian and Mozart. And thus it comes about that every soul--"where a soul can be discerned"--is the citizen, conscious or not, of a spiritual country, and obeys a hierarchy, bends before a sovereign genius, crowned or mitred by inscrutable right divine, never to be deposed. But there are many kingdoms and princ.i.p.alities, not necessarily overlapping; and the subjects of them are by no means the same.

Take M. Ingres, for instance. He is, it seems, quite a tremendous potentate. I recognize his legitimate sway, like that of Prester John, or of the Great Mogul. Only I happen not to obey it, for I am a born subject of the King of Hearts. And who should that be but Apollo-Wolfgang-Amadeus, driving with easy wrist his teams, tandem or abreast, of winged, effulgent melodies?

It was raining, as I told you, that morning which I spent in the Ingres Museum at Montauban. It was raining melted snow in hurricanes off the mountains that other day of travel, and I was on the top of a Tyrolese diligence. The roads were heavy; and we splashed slowly along the brink of roaring torrents and through the darkness of soaked and steaming fir woods. At the end of an hour's journey we had already lost four. "If you stop to dine," said successive jack-booted postilions, quickly fastening the traces at each relay, "you will never catch the Munich train at Garmisch. But the Herrschaften will please themselves in the matter of eating and drinking." So the Herrschaften did not please themselves at all, but splashed along through rain and sleet, through hospitable villages all painted over with scrollwork about beer, and coffee, and sugar-bakery, and all that "Restoration" which our poor drenched bodies and souls were lacking so woefully. For we had stalls at the Court Theatre of Munich, and it was the last, the very last, night of "The Magic Flute"! The Brocken journey on the diligence-top came to an end; the train at Garmisch was caught by just two seconds; we were safe at Munich. But I was p.r.o.ne on a sofa, with a despairing friend making hateful attempts to rouse me. Go to the play? Get up? Open my eyes to the light? My fingers must have fumbled some feeble "no," beyond all contradiction. "But your ticket--but 'The Magic Flute'--but you have come three days' journey on purpose!" I take it my lips achieved an inarticulate expression of abhorrence for such considerations. After that I do not exactly know what happened: my exhausted will gave way. I was combed and brushed, thrust into some manner of festive apparel, pushed into a vehicle, pulled out of it, and shoved along, by the staunch and (as it seemed) brutal arm of friendship, among crimson and gilding and blinding lights all seen at intervals through half-closed eyes. A little bell rang, and I felt it was my death knell. But through the darkness of my weltering soul (for I was presumably dead and undoubtedly d.a.m.ned) there marched, stood still, and curtsied majestically towards each other, the great grave opening chords of the overture. And when they had delivered, solemnly, their mysterious herald's message and subsided, off started the little nimble notes of the fugue, hastening from all sides, meeting, crossing, dispersing, returning, telling their wonderful news of improbable adventures; mult.i.tudinous, scurrying away in orderly haste to protect the hero and heroine, and be joined by other notes, all full of inexhaustible good-will; taking hands, dancing, laughing, and giving the a.s.surance that all is for the best in the world of enchantment, in the world of bird-calls, and tinkling triangles and magic flutes, under the spells of the great Sun-priest and Sun-G.o.d Mozart. I opened my eyes and had no headache; and sat in that Court Theatre for three mortal hours, in flourishing health and absolute happiness, and would have given my soul for it to begin immediately all over again.

Now, not all the drawings of M. Ingres could have done that. And the piece of torn music-paper in the gla.s.s case at Montauban had made me, for a few faint seconds, live it through again. And I know what I don't care for, and what I do.

AGAINST TALKING

As towards most other things of which we have but little personal experience (foreigners, or socialists, or aristocrats, as the case may be), there is a degree of vague ill-will towards what is called _Thinking_. It is reputed to impede action, to make hay of instincts and of standards, to fritter reality into doubt; and the career of Hamlet is frequently pointed out as a proof of its unhappy effects.

But, as I hinted, one has not very often an opportunity of verifying these drawbacks of thinking, or its advantages either. And I am tempted to believe that much of the mischief thus laid at the door of that poor unknown quant.i.ty _Thinking_ is really due to its ubiquitous twin-brother _Talking_.

I call them twins on the a.n.a.logy of Death and Sleep, because there is something poetical and attractive in such references to family relations; and also because, as many people cannot think without talking, and talking, at all events, is the supposed indication that thinking is within, there has arisen about these two human activities a good deal of that confusion and amiable not-caring-which-is-which so characteristic of our dealings with twins. But _Talking_, take my word for it, is the true villain of the couple.

Talking, however, should never be discouraged in the young. Not talking _with them_ (largely reiteration of the word "Why?"), but talking among themselves. Its beneficial effects are of the sort which ought to make us patient with the crying of infants. Talking helps growth. M. Renan, with his saintly ironical sympathy for the young and weak, knew it when he excused the symbolists and decadents of various kinds with that indulgent sentence, "Ce sont des enfants qui s'amusent." It matters little what litter they leave behind, what mud pies they make and little daily dug-up gardens of philosophy, ethics, literature, and general scandal; they will grow out of the need to make them--and meanwhile, making this sort of mess will help them grow.

Besides, is it nothing that they should be amusing themselves once in their lives (we cannot be sure of the future)? And what amus.e.m.e.nt, what material revelry can be compared with the great carouses of words in which the young can still indulge? We were most of us young once, odd as it appears; and some of us can remember our youthful discussions, our salad-day talks, prolonged to hours, trespa.s.sing on to subjects, which added such a fine spice of the forbidden and therefore the free! The joy of asking reasons where you have hitherto answered school queries; of extemporizing replies, magnificent, irresponsible, instead of laboriously remembering mere solutions; of describing, a.n.a.lyzing, and generally laying bold mental eyes, irreverent intellectual hands, on personalities whose real presence would merely make you stumble over a chair or drop a tea-cup! For talking is the great equalizer of positions, turning the humble, the painfully immature, into judges with rope and torch; and in a kindlier way allowing the totally obscure to share the life of kings, and queens, and generals, and opera-singers; which is the reason that items of Court news or of "dramatic gossip"

are so frequently exchanged in omnibuses and at small, decent dinner-tables.

Moreover, talking has for the young the joys of personal exuberance; it is all honeycombed, or rather, filled (like champagne) with the generous gaseousness of self-a.n.a.lysis, self-accusation, self-pity, self-righteousness, and autobiography. The poor mortal, in that delusive sense of sympathy and perfect understanding which comes of perfect indifference to one's neighbour's presence, has quicker pulses, higher temperature, more vigorous movements than are compatible with the sober sense of human unimportance. In conversation, clever young people--vain, kindly, selfish, ridiculous, happy young people--actually take body and weight, expand. And are you quite sure, my own dear, mature, efficient, and thoroughly productive friends and contemporaries, that it is not this expansion of youthful rubbish which makes the true movement of the centuries?... Poor stuff enough, very likely, they talked, those long-haired, loose-collared Romanticists of the Hotel Pimodan and the literary cafes recorded by Balzac, _Jeunes Frances_, or whatever their names; and priggery, as well as blood-and-thunder, those lads round the table d'hote at Strasburg, where Jung-Stilling noticed the entrance of a certain tall, Apolline young man answering to the name of Goethe.

Rubbish, of course; but rubbish necessary, yes, every empty bubble and sc.u.m and mess thereof, for the making of a great literary period--nay, of a great man of letters. And when, nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine times, there results neither one nor the other, why, there has been the talking itself--exciting and rapturous beyond everything that literary periods and literary personalities can ever match.

'Tis with the talking of the mature and the responsible that I would pick a quarrel. Particularly if they are well read, unprejudiced, subtle of thought, and precise of language; and most particularly if they are scrupulously just and full of human charity. For when two or three persons of this sort meet together in converse, nothing escapes destruction. The character of third persons crumbles under that delicate and patient fingering: a.n.a.lysis, synthesis, rehabilitation, tender appreciation, enthusiastic definition, leave behind only a horrid quivering little heap of vain virtues and atrophied bad instincts. In such conversations I have heard loyal and loving friends make admissions and suggestions which would hang you in a court of justice; I can bear witness to having in all loyalty and loving-kindness done so myself a thousand times. Nor is this even the worst. For your living human being has luckily a wonderful knack of rea.s.serting his reality; and the hero or victim of such conversational manipulation will take your breath away by suddenly entering the room or entering into your consciousness as hale and whole as old aeson stepping out of Medea's cooking-pot. But opinions, impressions, principles, standards, possess, alas! no such recuperative virtue; or, rather, they cannot interrupt the discussion of themselves by putting in an appearance.

Now, silent thought, whenever it destroys, destroys only to reconstruct the universe or the atom in the thinker's image; and new realities arise whenever a real individual creature reveals his needs and ways of feeling. But in what is called _a good serious talk_ there is no such creating anew; n.o.body imposes his image, no whole human creature reveals a human organism: there is merely a jumble of superposed pictures which will not become a composite photograph; and the inherent optimism or pessimism, scepticism or dogmatism, of each interlocutor merely reiterates _No_ to the ways of seeing and feeling of the others. Every word, perpetually defined and redefined at random, is used by each speaker in a different sense and with quite different a.s.sociations. The subject under discussion is in no one's keeping: it is banged from side to side, adjusted to the right and adjusted to the left, a fine screw put on it every now and then to send it sheer into the great void and chaos! And almost the saddest part of the business is that the defacements and tramplings which the poor subject (who knows, perhaps very sacred to some one of us?) is made to suffer, come not from our opponent's brutal thrusting forward of _his_ meaning, but rather from our own desperate methods to hold tight, to place _our_ meaning in safety, somewhere where, even if not recognized, it will at least not be mauled.... Such are the scuffles and scrimmages of the most temperate, intellectual conversations, leaving behind them for the moment not a twig, not a blade of the decent vegetation of the human soul. Cannot we get some great beneficent mechanic to invent some spiritual cement, some asphalt and gravel of nothingness, some thoroughly pneumatic intellectual b.a.l.l.s, whereon, and also wherewith, we privileged creatures may harmlessly expend our waste dialectic energies?

Then, would you never talk? Or would you confine talking to the weather or the contents of the public prints? Would you have our ideas get hard and sterile for want of being moved? Do you advise that, like some tactful persons we--you--yes, _you_--all know and detest--we systematically let every subject drop as soon as raised?

There! the talking has begun. They are at it, contradicting what they agree with, and asking definitions of what they perfectly understand. Of course not! And here I am, unable to resist, rushing into the argument, excited--who can tell?--perhaps delighted. And by the time we take up our bedroom candles, and wish each other good night (with additional definitions over the banisters) every sc.r.a.p of sensible meaning I ever had will be turned to nonsense; and I shall feel, next morning, oh, how miserably humiliated and depressed!...

"Well--and to return to what we were saying last night...."

IN PRAISE OF SILENCE

One of the truths which come (if any do) with middle age, is the gradual recognition that in one's friendly intercourse the essential--the one thing needful--is not what people say, but what they think and feel.

Words are not necessarily companionable, far from it; but moods truly meet, to part in violent dissonance; or to move parallel in happy harmonic intervals; or, more poignant and more satisfying still, to pa.s.s gradually along some great succession of alien chords--common contemplation, say, of a world grievous or pleasant to both--on towards the peace, the consummation, of a great major close. Once we have sufficient indication that another person cares for the same kind of things that we do--or, as important quite, cares in the same degree or in the same way--all further explanation becomes superfluous: detail, delightful occasionally to quicken and bring home the sense of companionship, but by no means needed.