Trivia Part 5

London seemed last winter like an underground city; as if its low sky were the roof of a cave, and its murky day a light such as one reads of in countries beneath the earth.

And yet the natural sunlight sometimes shone there; white clouds voyaged in the blue sky; the interminable mult.i.tudes of roofs were washed with silver by the Moon, or cloaked with a mantle of new-fallen snow. And the coming of Spring to London was to me not unlike the descent of the maiden-G.o.ddess into Death's Kingdoms, when pink almond blossoms blew about her in the gloom, and those shadowy people were stirred with faint longings for meadows and the shepherd's life. Nor was there anything more virginal and fresh in wood or orchard than the s.h.i.+mmer of young foliage, which, in May, dimmed with delicate green all the smoke-blackened London trees.

_Fas.h.i.+on Plates_

I like loitering at the bookstalls, looking in at the windows of printshops, and romancing over the pictures I see of shepherdesses and old-fas.h.i.+oned Beauties. Tall and slim and crowned with plumes in one period, in another these Ladies become as wide-winged as b.u.t.terflies, or float, large, balloon-like visions, down summer streets. And yet in all shapes they have always (I tell myself) created thrilling effects of beauty, and waked in the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of modish young men ever the same charming Emotion.

But then I have questioned this. Is the emotion always precisely the same? Is it true to say that the human heart remains quite unchanged beneath all the changing fas.h.i.+ons of frills and ruffles? In this elegant and cruel Sentiment, I rather fancy that colour and shape do make a difference. I have a notion that about 1840 was the Zenith, the Meridian Hour, the Golden Age of the Pa.s.sion. Those tight-waisted, whiskered Beaux, those crinolined Beauties, adored one another, I believe, with a leisure, a refinement, and dismay not quite attainable at other dates.

_Mental Vice_

There are certain hackneyed Thoughts that will force them-selves on me; I find my mind, especially in hot weather, infested and buzzed about by moral Plat.i.tudes. "That shows--" I say to myself, or, "How true it is--" or, "I really ought to have known!" The sight of a large clock sets me off into musings on the flight of Time; a steamer on the Thames or lines of telegraph inevitably suggest the benefits of Civilization, man's triumph over Nature, the heroism of Inventors, the courage, amid ridicule and poverty, of Stephenson and Watt. Like faint, rather unpleasant smells, these thoughts lurk about railway stations. I can hardly post a letter without marvelling at the excellence and accuracy of the Postal System.

Then the pride in the British Const.i.tution and British Freedom, which comes over me when I see, even in the distance, the Towers of Westminster Palace--that Mother of Parliaments--it is not much comfort that this should be chastened, as I walk down the Embankment, by the sight of Cleopatra's Needle, and the Thought that it will no doubt witness the Fall of the British, as it has that of other Empires, remaining to point its Moral, as old as Egypt, to Antipodeans musing on the dilapidated bridges.

I am sometimes afraid of finding that there is a moral for everything; that the whole great frame of the Universe has a key, like a box; has been contrived and set going by a well-meaning but humdrum Eighteenth-century Creator. It would be a kind of h.e.l.l, surely, a world in which everything could be at once explained, shown to be obvious and useful. I am sated with Lesson and Allegory, weary of monitory ants, industrious bees, and preaching animals. The benefits of Civilization cloy me. I have seen enough s.h.i.+ning of the didactic Sun.

So gazing up on hot summer nights at the London stars, I cool my thoughts with a vision of the giddy, infinite, meaningless waste of Creation, the blazing Suns, the Planets and frozen Moons, all cras.h.i.+ng blindly forever across the void of s.p.a.ce.

_The Organ of Life_

Almost always In London--in the congregated uproar of streets, or in the noise that drifts through wails and windows--you can hear the hackneyed melancholy of street music; a music which sounds like the actual voice of the human Heart, singing the lost joys, the regrets, the loveless lives of the people who blacken the pavements, or jolt along on the busses.

"Speak to me kindly," the hand-organ implores; "I'm all alone!"

it screams amid the throng; "thy Vows are all broken," it laments in dingy courtyards, "And light is thy Fame." And of hot summer afternoons, the Cry for Courage to Remember, or Calmness to Forget, floats in with the smell of paint and asphalt--faint and sad--through open office windows.

_Humiliation_

"My own view is," I began, but no one listened. At the next pause, "I always say," I remarked, but again the loud talk went on. Someone told a story. When the laughter had ended, "I often think--"; but looking round the table I could catch no friendly or attentive eye. It was humiliating, but more humiliating the thought that Sophocles and Goethe would have always commanded attention, while the lack of it would not have troubled Spinoza or Abraham Lincoln.

_Green Ivory_

What a bore it is, waking up in the morning always the same person. I wish I were unflinching and emphatic, and had big, bushy eyebrows and a Message for the Age. I wish I were a deep Thinker, or a great Ventriloquist.

I should like to be refined and melancholy, the victim of a hopeless pa.s.sion; to love in the old, stilted way, with impossible Adoration and Despair under the pale-faced Moon.

I wish I could get up; I wish I were the world's greatest Violinist. I wish I had lots of silver, and first Editions, and green ivory.

_In The Park_

"Yes," I said one afternoon in the Park, as I looked rather contemptuously at the people of Fas.h.i.+on, moving slow and well-dressed in the suns.h.i.+ne, "but how about the others, the Courtiers and Beauties and Dandies of the past? They wore fine costumes, and glittered for their hour in the summer air. What has become of them?" I somewhat rhetorically asked.

They were all dead now. Their day was over. They were cold in their graves.

And I thought of those severe spirits who, in garrets far from the Park and Fas.h.i.+on, had scorned the fumes and tinsel of the noisy World.

But, good Heavens! these severe spirits were, it occurred to me, all, as a matter of fact, quite as dead as the others.

_The Correct_

I am sometimes visited by a suspicion that everything isn't quite all right with the Righteous; that the Moral Law speaks in m.u.f.fled and dubious tones to those who listen most scrupulously for its dictates. I feel sure I have detected a look of doubt and misgiving in the eyes of its earnest upholders.

But there is no such shadow or cloud on the faces in Club windows, or in the eyes of drivers of four-in-hands, or of fas.h.i.+onable young men walking down Piccadilly. For these live by a Rule which has not been drawn down from far-off and questionable skies, and needs no sanction; what they do is Correct, and that is all. Correctly dressed from head to foot, they pa.s.s, with correct speech and thoughts and gestures, correctly across the roundness of the Earth.

_"Where Do I Come In?"_

When I read in the _Times_ about India and all its problems and populations; when I look at the letters in large type of important personages, and find myself face to face with the Questions, Movements, and great Activities of the Age, "Where do I come in?" I ask myself uneasily.

Then in the great _Times_-reflected world I find the corner where I play my humble but necessary part. For I am one of the unpraised, unrewarded millions without whom Statistics would be a bankrupt science. It is we who are born, who marry, who die, in constant ratios; who regularly lose so many umbrellas, post just so many unaddressed letters every year. And there are enthusiasts among us who, without the least thought of their own convenience, allow omnibuses to run over them; or throw themselves month by month, in fixed numbers, from the London bridges.

_Microbes_

But how Is one to keep free from those mental microbes that worm-eat people's brains--those Theories and Diets and Enthusiasms and infectious Doctrines that we are always liable to catch from what seem the most innocuous contacts? People go about laden with germs; they breathe creeds and convictions on you whenever they open their mouths. Books and newspapers are simply creeping with them--the monthly Reviews seem to have room for nothing else.