The Yellow Book Volume I Part 4

[Ill.u.s.tration: L'Education Sentimentale]

Tree-Worship

By Richard Le Gallienne

Vast and mysterious brother, ere was yet of me So much as men may poise upon a needle's end, Still shook with laughter all this monstrous might of thee, And still with haughty crest it called the morning friend.

Thy latticed column jetted up the bright blue air, Tall as a mast it was, and stronger than a tower; Three hundred winters had beheld thee mighty there, Before my little life had lived one little hour.

With rocky foot stern-set like iron in the land, With leafy rustling crest the morning sows with pearls, Huge as a minster, half in heaven men saw thee stand, Thy rugged girth the waists of fifty Eastern girls.

Knotted and warted, slabbed and armoured like the hide Of tropic elephant; unstormable and steep As some grim fortress with a princess-pearl inside, Where savage guardian faces beard the bastioned keep:

So hard a rind, old tree, shielding so soft a heart, A woman's heart of tender little nestling leaves; Nor rind so hard but that a touch so soft can part, And spring's first baby-bud an easy pa.s.sage cleaves.

I picture thee within with dainty satin sides, Where all the long day through the sleeping dryad dreams, But when the moon bends low and taps thee thrice she glides, Knowing the fairy knock, to bask within her beams.

And all the long night through, for him with eyes and ears, She sways within thine arms and sings a fairy tune, Till, startled with the dawn, she softly disappears, And sleeps and dreams again until the rising moon.

But with the peep of day great bands of heavenly birds Fill all thy branchy chambers with a thousand flutes, And with the torrid noon stroll up the weary herds, To seek thy friendly shade and doze about thy roots;

Till with the setting sun they turn them once more home: And, ere the moon dawns, for a brief enchanted s.p.a.ce, Weary with million miles, the sore-spent star-beams come, And moths and bats hold witches' sabbath in the place.

And then I picture thee some bloodstained Holyrood, Dread haunted palace of the bat and owl, whence steal, Shrouded all day, lost murdered spirits of the wood, And fright young happy nests with homeless hoot and squeal.

Some Rizzio nightingale that plained adulterous love Beneath the boudoir-bough of some fast-married bird, Some dove that cooed to some one else's lawful dove, And felt the dagger-beak pierce while his lady heard.

Then, maybe, dangling from thy gloomy gallows boughs, A human corpse swings, mournful, rattling bones and chains-- His eighteenth century flesh hath fattened nineteenth century cows-- Ghastly aeolian harp fingered of winds and rains.

Poor Rizpah comes to reap each newly-fallen bone That once thrilled soft, a little limb, within her womb; And mark yon alchemist, with zodiac-spangled zone, Wrenching the mandrake root that fattens in the gloom.

So rounds thy day, from maiden morn to haunted night, From larks and sunlit dreams to owl and gibbering ghost; A catacomb of dark, a sponge of living light, To the wide sea of air a green and welcome coast.

I seek a G.o.d, old tree: accept my worship, thou!

All other G.o.ds have failed me always in my need.

I hang my votive song beneath thy temple bough, Unto thy strength I cry--Old monster, be my creed!

Give me to clasp this earth with feeding roots like thine, To mount yon heaven with such star-aspiring head, Fill full with sap and buds this shrunken life of mine, And from my boughs O might such stalwart sons be shed!

With loving cheek pressed close against thy h.o.r.n.y breast, I hear the roar of sap mounting within thy veins; Tingling with buds, thy great hands open towards the west, To catch the sweetheart wind that brings the sister rains.

O winds that blow from out the fruitful mouth of G.o.d, O rains that softly fall from his all-loving eyes, You that bring buds to trees and daisies to the sod, O G.o.d's best Angel of the Spring, in me arise.

Le Puy en Velay

By Joseph Pennell

_Reproduced by the Swan Electric Engraving Company_

[Ill.u.s.tration: Le Puy en Velay]

A Defence of Cosmetics

By Max Beerbohm

Nay, but it is useless to protest. Artifice must queen it once more in the town, and so, if there be any whose hearts chafe at her return, let them not say, "We have come into evil times," and be all for resistance, reformation or angry cavilling. For did the king's sceptre send the sea retrograde, or the wand of the sorcerer avail to turn the sun from its old course? And what man or what number of men ever stayed that reiterated process by which the cities of this world grow, are very strong, fail and grow again? Indeed, indeed, there is charm in every period, and only fools and flutterpates do not seek reverently for what is charming in their own day. No martyrdom, however fine, nor satire, however splendidly bitter, has changed by a little t.i.ttle the known tendency of things. It is the times that can perfect us, not we the times, and so let all of us wisely acquiesce. Like the little wired marionettes, let us acquiesce in the dance.

For behold! The Victorian era comes to its end and the day of sancta simplicitas is quite ended. The old signs are here and the portents to warn the seer of life that we are ripe for a new epoch of artifice. Are not men rattling the dice-box and ladies dipping their fingers in the rouge-pots? At Rome, in the keenest time of her degringolade, when there was gambling even in the holy temples, great ladies (does not Lucian tell us?) did not scruple to squander all they had upon unguents from Arabia. Nero's mistress and unhappy wife, Poppaea, of shameful memory, had in her travelling retinue fifteen--or, as some say, fifty--she-a.s.ses, for the sake of their milk, that was thought an incomparable guard against cosmetics with poison in them. Last century, too, when life was lived by candle-light, and ethics was but etiquette, and even art a question of punctilio, women, we know, gave the best hours of the day to the crafty farding of their faces and the towering of their coiffures. And men, throwing pa.s.sion into the wine-bowl to sink or swim, turned out thought to browse upon the green cloth. Cannot we even now in our fancy see them, those silent exquisites round the long table at Brooks', masked, all of them, "lest the countenance should betray feeling," in quinze masks, through whose eyelets they sat peeping, peeping, while macao brought them riches or ruin? We can see them, those silent rascals, sitting there with their cards and their rouleaux and their wooden money-bowls, long after the dawn had crept up St. James' and pressed its haggard face against the window of the little club. Yes, we can raise their ghosts--and, more, we can see manywhere a devotion to hazard fully as meek as theirs. In England there has been a wonderful revival of cards. Roulette may rival dead faro in the tale of her devotees. Her wheel is spinning busily in every house and ere long it may be that tender parents will be writing to complain of the compulsory baccarat in our public schools.

In fact, we are all gamblers once more, but our gambling is on a finer scale than ever it was. We fly from the card-room to the heath, and from the heath to the City, and from the City to the coast of the Mediterranean. And just as no one seriously encourages the clergy in its frantic efforts to lay the spirit of chance, that has thus resurged among us, so no longer are many faces set against that other great sign of a more complicated life, the love for cosmetics. No longer is a lady of fashion blamed if, to escape the outrageous persecution of time, she fly for sanctuary to the toilet-table; and if a damosel, prying in her mirror, be sure that with brush and pigment she can trick herself into more charm, we are not angry. Indeed, why should we ever have been?

Surely it is laudable, this wish to make fair the ugly and overtop fairness, and no wonder that within the last five years the trade of the makers of cosmetics has increased immoderately--twentyfold, so one of these makers has said to me. We need but walk down any modish street and peer into the little broughams that flit past, or (in Thackeray's phrase) under the bonnet of any woman we meet, to see over how wide a kingdom rouge reigns. We men, who, from Juvenal down to that discourteous painter of whom Lord Chesterfield tells us, have especially shown a dislike of cosmetics, are quite yielding; and there are, I fancy, many such husbands as he who, suddenly realising that his wife was painted, bad her sternly, "Go up and take it all off," and, on her reappearance, bad her with increasing sternness, "Go up and put it all on again."

But now that the use of pigments is becoming general, and most women are not so young as they are painted, it may be asked curiously how the prejudice ever came into being. Indeed, it is hard to trace folly, for that it is inconsequent, to its start; and perhaps it savours too much of reason to suggest that the prejudice was due to the tristful confusion man has made of soul and surface. Through trusting so keenly to the detection of the one by keeping watch upon the other, and by force of the thousand errors following, he has come to think of surface even as the reverse of soul. He supposes that every clown beneath his paint and lip-salve is moribund and knows it, (though in verity, I am told, clowns are as cheerful a cla.s.s of men as any other), that the fairer the fruit's rind and the more delectable its bloom, the closer are packed the ashes within it. The very jargon of the hunting-field connects cunning with a mask. And so perhaps came man's anger at the embellishment of women--that lovely mask of enamel with its shadows of pink and tiny pencilled veins, what must lurk behind it? Of what treacherous mysteries may it not be the screen? Does not the heathen lacquer her dark face, and the harlot paint her cheeks, because sorrow has made them pale?

After all, the old prejudice is a-dying. We need not pry into the secret of its birth. Rather is this a time of jolliness and glad indulgence.

For the era of rouge is upon us, and as only in an elaborate era can man by the tangled accrescency of his own pleasures and emotions reach that refinement which is his highest excellence, and by making himself, so to say, independent of Nature, come nearest to G.o.d, so only in an elaborate era is woman perfect. Artifice is the strength of the world, and in that same mask of paint and powder, shadowed with vermeil tinct and most trimly pencilled, is woman's strength.

For see! We need not look so far back to see woman under the direct influence of Nature. Early in this century, our grandmothers, sickening of the odour of faded exotics and spilt wine, came out into the daylight once more and let the breezes blow around their faces and enter, sharp and welcome, into their lungs. Artifice they drove forth, and they set Martin Tupper upon a throne of mahogany to rule over them. A very reign of terror set in. All things were sacrificed to the fetish Nature. Old ladies may still be heard to tell how, when they were girls, affectation was not; and, if we verify their a.s.sertion in the light of such literary authorities as d.i.c.kens, we find that it is absolutely true. Women appear to have been in those days utterly natural in their conduct--flighty, gushing, blushing, fainting, giggling and shaking their curls. They knew no reserve in the first days of the Victorian era. No thought was held too trivial, no emotion too silly, to express. To Nature everything was sacrificed. Great heavens! And in those barren days what influence was exerted by women? By men they seem not to have been feared nor loved, but regarded rather as "dear little creatures" or "wonderful little beings," and in their relation to life as foolish and ineffectual as the landscapes they did in water-colour. Yet, if the women of those years were of no great account, they had a certain charm and they at least had not begun to trespa.s.s upon men's ground; if they touched not thought, which is theirs by right, at any rate they refrained from action, which is ours. Far more serious was it when, in the natural trend of time, they became enamoured of rinking and archery and galloping along the Brighton Parade. Swiftly they have sped on since then from horror to horror. The invasion of the tennis-courts and of the golf-links, the seizure of the tricycle and of the type-writer, were but steps preliminary in that campaign which is to end with the final victorious occupation of St. Stephen's. But stay! The horrific pioneers of womanhood who gad hither and thither and, confounding wisdom with the device on her shield, shriek for the unbecoming, are doomed. Though they spin their tricycle-treadles so amazingly fast, they are too late.

Though they scream victory, none follow them. Artifice, that fair exile, has returned.

Yes, though the pioneers know it not, they are doomed already. For of the curiosities of history not the least strange is the manner in which two social movements may be seen to overlap, long after the second has, in truth, given its deathblow to the first. And, in like manner as one has seen the limbs of a murdered thing in lively movement, so we need not doubt that, though the voices of those who cry out for reform be very terribly shrill, they will soon be hushed. Dear Artifice is with us. It needed but that we should wait.

Surely, without any of my pleading, women will welcome their great and amiable protectrix, as by instinct. For (have I not said?) it is upon her that all their strength, their life almost, depends. Artifice's first command to them is that they should repose. With bodily activity their powder will fly, their enamel crack. They are b.u.t.terflies who must not flit, if they love their bloom. Now, setting aside the point of view of pa.s.sion, from which very many obvious things might be said, (and probably have been by the minor poets), it is, from the intellectual point of view, quite necessary that a woman should repose. Hers is the resupinate s.e.x. On her couch she is a G.o.ddess, but so soon as ever she put her foot to the ground--lo, she is the veriest little sillypop and quite done for. She cannot rival us in action, but she is our mistress in the things of the mind. Let her not by second-rate athletics, nor indeed by any exercise soever of the limbs, spoil the pretty procedure of her reason. Let her be content to remain the guide, the subtle suggester of what _we_ must do, the strategist whose soldiers we are, the little architect whose workmen.

"After all," as a pretty girl once said to me, "women are a s.e.x by themselves, so to speak," and the sharper the line between their worldly functions and ours, the better. This greater swiftness and less erring subtlety of mind, their forte and privilege, justifies the painted mask that Artifice bids them wear. Behind it their minds can play without let. They gain the strength of reserve. They become important, as in the days of the Roman Empire were the Emperor's mistresses, as was the Pompadour at Versailles, as was our Elizabeth. Yet do not their faces become lined with thought; beautiful and without meaning are their faces.

And, truly, of all the good things that will happen with the full renascence of cosmetics, one of the best is that surface will finally be severed from soul. That d.a.m.nable confusion will be solved by the extinguishing of a prejudice which, as I suggest, itself created. Too long has the face been degraded from its rank as a thing of beauty to a mere vulgar index of character or emotion. We had come to troubling ourselves, not with its charm of colour and line, but with such questions as whether the lips were sensuous, the eyes full of sadness, the nose indicative of determination. I have no quarrel with physiognomy. For my own part, I believe in it. But it has tended to degrade the face aesthetically, in such wise as the study of cheirosophy has tended to degrade the hand. And the use of cosmetics, the masking of the face, will change this. We shall gaze at a woman merely because she is beautiful, not stare into her face anxiously, as into the face of a barometer.

How fatal it has been, in how many ways, this confusion of soul and surface! Wise were the Greeks in making plain masks for their mummers to play in, and dunces we not to have done the same! Only the other day, an actress was saying that what she was most proud of in her art--next, of course, to having appeared in some provincial pantomime at the age of three--was the deftness with which she contrived, in parts demanding a rapid succession of emotions, to dab her cheeks quite quickly with rouge from the palm of her right hand, or powder from the palm of her left.

Gracious goodness! why do not we have masks upon the stage? Drama is the presentment of the soul in action. The mirror of the soul is the voice.

Let the young critics, who seek a cheap reputation for austerity, by cavilling at "incidental music," set their faces rather against the attempt to justify inferior dramatic art by the subvention of a quite alien art like painting, of any art, indeed, whose sphere is only surface. Let those, again, who sneer, so rightly, at the "painted anecdotes of the Academy," censure equally the writers who trespa.s.s on painter's ground. It is a proclaimed sin that a painter should concern himself with a good little girl's affection for a Scotch greyhound, or the keen enjoyment of their port by elderly gentlemen of the early 'forties. Yet, for a painter to prod the soul with his paint-brush is no worse than for a novelist to refuse to dip under the surface, and the fashion of avoiding a psychological study of grief by stating that the owner's hair turned white in a single night, or of shame by mentioning a sudden rush of scarlet to the cheeks, is as lamentable as may be. But!

But with the universal use of cosmetics and the consequent secernment of soul and surface, which, at the risk of irritating a reader, I must again insist upon, all those old properties that went to bolster up the ordinary novel--the trembling lips, the flashing eyes, the determined curve of the chin, the nervous trick of biting the moustache--aye and the hectic spot of red on either cheek--will be made spiflicate, as the puppets were spiflicated by Don Quixote. Yes, even now Demos begins to discern. The same spirit that has revived rouge, smote his mouth as it grinned at the wondrous painter of mist and river, and now sends him sprawling for the pearls that Meredith dived for in the deep waters of romance.

Indeed the revival of cosmetics must needs be so splendid an influence, conjuring boons innumerable, that one inclines almost to mutter against that inexorable law by which Artifice must perish from time to time.

That such branches of painting as the staining of gla.s.s or the illuminating of ma.n.u.scripts should fall into disuse seems in comparison, so likely; these were esoteric arts; they died with the monastic spirit. But personal appearance is art's very basis. The painting of the face is the first kind of painting man can have known. To make beautiful things--is it not an impulse laid upon few? But to make oneself beautiful is an universal instinct. Strange that the resultant art could ever perish! So fascinating an art too! So various in its materials from stimmis, psimythium and fuligo to bis.m.u.th and a.r.s.enic, so simple in that its ground and its subject-matter are one, so marvellous in that its very subject-matter becomes lovely when an artist has selected it! For surely this is no idle nor fantastic saying. To deny that "making-up" is an art, on the pretext that the finished work of its exponents depends for beauty and excellence upon the ground chosen for the work, is absurd. At the touch of a true artist, the plainest face turns comely.

As subject-matter the face is no more than suggestive, as ground, merely a loom round which the beatus artifex may spin the threads of any golden fabric:

"Quae nunc nomen habent operosi signa Maronis Pondus iners quondam duraque ma.s.sa fuit.