The Colour Of Life And Other Stories Part 3

But for the vigilance of Vestries, gra.s.s would reconcile everything. When the first heat of the summer was over, a few nights of rain altered all the colour of the world. It had been the brown and russet of drought--very beautiful in landscape, but lifeless; it became a translucent, profound, and eager green. The citizen does not spend attention on it.

Why, then, is his vestry so alert, so apprehensive, so swift; in perception so instant, in execution so prompt, so silent in action, so punctual in destruction? The vestry keeps, as it were, a tryst with the gra.s.s. The "sunny spots of greenery" are given just time enough to grow and be conspicuous, and the barrow is there, true to time, and the spade.

(To call that spade a spade hardly seems enough.)

For the gracious gra.s.s of the summer has not been content within enclosures. It has--or would have--cheered up and sweetened everything.

Over asphalte it could not prevail, and it has prettily yielded to asphalte, taking leave to live and let live. It has taken the little strip of ground next to the asphalte, between this and the kerb, and again the refuse of ground between the kerb and the roadway. The man of business walking to the station with a bag could have his asphalte all unbroken, and the butcher's boy in his cart was not annoyed. The gra.s.s seemed to respect everybody's views, and to take only what n.o.body wanted.

But these gay and lowly ways will not escape a vestry.

There is no wall so impregnable or so vulgar, but a summer's gra.s.s will attempt it. It will try to persuade the yellow brick, to win the purple slate, to reconcile stucco. Outside the authority of the suburbs it has put a luminous touch everywhere. The thatch of cottages has given it an opportunity. It has perched and alighted in showers and flocks. It has crept and crawled, and stolen its hour. It has made haste between the ruts of cart wheels, so they were not too frequent. It has been stealthy in a good cause, and bold out of reach. It has been the most defiant runaway, and the meekest lingerer. It has been universal, ready and potential in every place, so that the happy country--village and field alike--has been all gra.s.s, with mere exceptions.

And all this the gra.s.s does in spite of the ill-treatment it suffers at the hands, and mowing-machines, and vestries of man. His ideal of gra.s.s is growth that shall never be allowed to come to its flower and completion. He proves this in his lawns. Not only does he cut the coming gra.s.s-flower off by the stalk, but he does not allow the mere leaf--the blade--to perfect itself. He will not have it a "blade" at all; he cuts its top away as never sword or sabre was shaped. All the beauty of a blade of gra.s.s is that the organic shape has the intention of ending in a point. Surely no one at all aware of the beauty of lines ought to be ignorant of the significance and grace of manifest intention, which rules a living line from its beginning, even though the intention be towards a point while the first spring of the line is towards an opening curve. But man does not care for intention; he mows it. Nor does he care for att.i.tude; he rolls it. In a word, he proves to the gra.s.s, as plainly as deeds can do so, that it is not to his mind. The rolling, especially, seems to be a violent way of showing that the universal gra.s.s interrupted by the life of the Englishman is not as he would have it. Besides, when he wishes to deride a city, he calls it gra.s.s-grown.

But his suburbs shall not, if he can help it, be gra.s.s-grown. They shall not be like a mere Pisa. Highgate shall not so, nor Peckham.

A WOMAN IN GREY

The mothers of Professors were indulged in the practice of jumping at conclusions, and were praised for their impatience of the slow process of reason.

Professors have written of the mental habits of women as though they acc.u.mulated generation by generation upon women, and pa.s.sed over their sons. Professors take it for granted, obviously by some process other than the slow process of reason, that women derive from their mothers and grandmothers, and men from their fathers and grandfathers. This, for instance, was written lately: "This power [it matters not what] would be about equal in the two s.e.xes but for the influence of heredity, which turns the scale in favour of the woman, as for long generations the surroundings and conditions of life of the female s.e.x have developed in her a greater degree of the power in question than circ.u.mstances have required from men." "Long generations" of subjection are, strangely enough, held to excuse the timorousness and the s.h.i.+fts of women to-day.

But the world, unknowing, tampers with the courage of its sons by such a slovenly indulgence. It tampers with their intelligence by fostering the ignorance of women.

And yet Shakespeare confessed the partic.i.p.ation of man and woman in their common heritage. It is Ca.s.sius who speaks:

"Have you not love enough to bear with me When that rash humour which my mother gave me Makes me forgetful?"

And Brutus who replies:

"Yes, Ca.s.sius, and from henceforth When you are over-earnest with your Brutus He'll think your mother chides, and leave you so."

Dryden confessed it also in his praises of Anne Killigrew:

"If by traduction came thy mind, Our wonder is the less to find A soul so charming from a stock so good.

Thy father was transfused into thy blood."

The winning of Waterloo upon the Eton playgrounds is very well; but there have been some other, and happily minor, fields that were not won--that were more or less lost. Where did this loss take place, if the gains were secured at football? This inquiry is not quite so cheerful as the other. But while the victories were once going forward in the playground, the defeats or disasters were once going forward in some other place, presumably. And this was surely the place that was not a playground, the place where the future wives of the football players were sitting still while their future husbands were playing football.

This is the train of thought that followed the grey figure of a woman on a bicycle in Oxford Street. She had an enormous and top-heavy omnibus at her back. All the things on the near side of the street--the things going her way--were going at different paces, in two streams, overtaking and being overtaken. The tributary streets shot omnibuses and carriages, cabs and carts--some to go her own way, some with an impetus that carried them curving into the other current, and other some making a straight line right across Oxford Street into the street opposite. Besides all the unequal movement, there were the stoppings. It was a delicate tangle to keep from knotting. The nerves of the mouths of horses bore the whole charge and answered it, as they do every day.

The woman in grey, quite alone, was immediately dependent on no nerves but her own, which almost made her machine sensitive. But this alertness was joined to such perfect composure as no flutter of a moment disturbed.

There was the steadiness of sleep, and a vigilance more than that of an ordinary waking.

At the same time, the woman was doing what nothing in her youth could well have prepared her for. She must have pa.s.sed a childhood unlike the ordinary girl's childhood, if her steadiness or her alertness had ever been educated, if she had been rebuked for cowardice, for the egoistic distrust of general rules, or for claims of exceptional chances. Yet here she was, trusting not only herself but a mult.i.tude of other people; taking her equal risk; giving a watchful confidence to averages--that last, perhaps, her strangest and greatest success.

No exceptions were hers, no appeals, and no forewarnings. She evidently had not in her mind a single phrase, familiar to women, made to express no confidence except in accidents, and to proclaim a prudent foresight of the less probable event. No woman could ride a bicycle along Oxford Street with any such baggage as that about her.

The woman in grey had a watchful confidence not only in a mult.i.tude of men but in a mult.i.tude of things. And it is very hard for any untrained human being to practise confidence in things in motion--things full of force, and, what is worse, of forces. Moreover, there is a supreme difficulty for a mind accustomed to search timorously for some little place of insignificant rest on any accessible point of stable equilibrium; and that is the difficulty of holding itself nimbly secure in an equilibrium that is unstable. Who can deny that women are generally used to look about for the little stationary repose just described? Whether in intellectual or in spiritual things, they do not often live without it.

She, none the less, fled upon unstable equilibrium, escaped upon it, depended upon it, trusted it, was 'ware of it, was on guard against it, as she sped amid her crowd her own unstable equilibrium, her machine's, that of the judgment, the temper, the skill, the perception, the strength of men and horses.

She had learnt the difficult peace of suspense. She had learnt also the lowly and self-denying faith in common chances. She had learnt to be content with her share--no more--in common security, and to be pleased with her part in common hope. For all this, it may be repeated, she could have had but small preparation. Yet no anxiety was hers, no uneasy distrust and disbelief of that human thing--an average of life and death.

To this courage the woman in grey had attained with a spring, and she had seated herself suddenly upon a place of detachment between earth and air, freed from the princ.i.p.al detentions, weights, and embarra.s.sments of the usual life of fear. She had made herself, as it were, light, so as not to dwell either in security or danger, but to pa.s.s between them. She confessed difficulty and peril by her delicate evasions, and consented to rest in neither. She would not owe safety to the mere motionlessness of a seat on the solid earth, but she used gravitation to balance the slight burdens of her wariness and her confidence. She put aside all the pride and vanity of terror, and leapt into an unsure condition of liberty and content.

She leapt, too, into a life of moments. No pause was possible to her as she went, except the vibrating pause of a perpetual change and of an unflagging flight. A woman, long educated to sit still, does not suddenly learn to live a momentary life without strong momentary resolution. She has no light achievement in limiting not only her foresight, which must become brief, but her memory, which must do more; for it must rather cease than become brief. Idle memory wastes time and other things. The moments of the woman in grey as they dropped by must needs disappear, and be simply forgotten, as a child forgets. Idle memory, by the way, shortens life, or shortens the sense of time, by linking the immediate past clingingly to the present. Here may possibly be found one of the reasons for the length of a child's time, and for the brevity of the time that succeeds. The child lets his moments pa.s.s by and quickly become remote through a thousand little successive oblivions.

He has not yet the languid habit of recall.

"Thou art my warrior," said Volumnia. "I holp to frame thee."

Shall a man inherit his mother's trick of speaking, or her habit and att.i.tude, and not suffer something, against his will, from her bequest of weakness, and something, against his heart, from her bequest of folly?

From the legacies of an unlessoned mind, a woman's heirs-male are not cut off in the Common Law of the generations of mankind. Brutus knew that the valour of Portia was settled upon his sons.

SYMMETRY AND INCIDENT

The art of j.a.pan has none but an exterior part in the history of the art of nations. Being in its own methods and att.i.tude the art of accident, it has, appropriately, an accidental value. It is of accidental value, and not of integral necessity. The virtual discovery of j.a.panese art, during the later years of the second French Empire, caused Europe to relearn how expedient, how delicate, and how lovely Incident may look when Symmetry has grown vulgar. The lesson was most welcome. j.a.pan has had her full influence. European art has learnt the value of position and the tact of the unique. But j.a.pan is unlessoned, and (in all her characteristic art) content with her own conventions; she is local, provincial, alien, remote, incapable of equal companions.h.i.+p with a world that has Greek art in its own history--Pericles "to its father."

Nor is it pictorial art, or decorative art only, that has been touched by j.a.panese example of Incident and the Unique. Music had attained the n.o.blest form of symmetry in the eighteenth century, but in music, too, symmetry had since grown dull; and momentary music, the music of phase and of fragment, succeeded. The sense of symmetry is strong in a complete melody--of symmetry in its most delicate and lively and least stationary form--balance; whereas the _leit_-_motif_ is isolated. In domestic architecture Symmetry and Incident make a familiar ant.i.thesis--the very commonplace of rival methods of art. But the same ant.i.thesis exists in less obvious forms. The poets have sought "irregular" metres. Incident hovers, in the very act of choosing its right place, in the most modern of modern portraits. In these we have, if not the j.a.panese suppression of minor emphasis, certainly the j.a.panese exaggeration of major emphasis; and with this a quickness and buoyancy.

The smile, the figure, the drapery--not yet settled from the arranging touch of a hand, and showing its mark--the restless and unstationary foot, and the unity of impulse that has pa.s.sed everywhere like a single breeze, all these have a life that greatly transcends the life of j.a.panese art, yet has the nimble touch of j.a.panese incident. In pa.s.sing, a charming comparison may be made between such portraiture and the aspect of an aspen or other tree of light and liberal leaf; whether still or in motion the aspen and the free-leafed poplar have the alertness and expectancy of flight in all their flocks of leaves, while the oaks and elms are gathered in their station. All this is not j.a.panese, but from such accident is j.a.panese art inspired, with its good luck of perceptiveness.

What symmetry is to form, that is repet.i.tion in the art of ornament.

Greek art and Gothic alike have series, with repet.i.tion or counter-change for their ruling motive. It is hardly necessary to draw the distinction between this motive and that of the j.a.panese. The j.a.panese motives may be defined as uniqueness and position. And these were not known as motives of decoration before the study of j.a.panese decoration. Repet.i.tion and counter-change, of course, have their place in j.a.panese ornament, as in the diaper patterns for which these people have so singular an invention, but here, too, uniqueness and position are the princ.i.p.al inspiration. And it is quite worth while, and much to the present purpose, to call attention to the chief peculiarity of the j.a.panese diaper patterns, which is _interruption_. Repet.i.tion there must necessarily be in these, but symmetry is avoided by an interruption which is, to the Western eye, at least, perpetually and freshly unexpected. The place of the interruptions of lines, the variation of the place, and the avoidance of correspondence, are precisely what makes j.a.panese design of this cla.s.s inimitable. Thus, even in a repeating pattern, you have a curiously successful effect of impulse. It is as though a separate intention had been formed by the designer at every angle. Such renewed consciousness does not make for greatness. Greatness in design has more peace than is found in the gentle abruptness of j.a.panese lines, in their curious brevity. It is scarcely necessary to say that a line, in all other schools of art, is long or short according to its place and purpose; but only the j.a.panese designer so contrives his patterns that the line is always short; and many repeating designs are entirely composed of this various and variously-occurring brevity, this prankish avoidance of the goal. Moreover, the j.a.panese evade symmetry, in the unit of their repeating patterns, by another simple device--that of numbers. They make a small difference in the number of curves and of lines. A great difference would not make the same effect of variety; it would look too much like a contrast. For example, three rods on one side and six on another would be something else than a mere variation, and variety would be lost by the use of them. The j.a.panese decorator will vary three in this place by two in that, and a sense of the defeat of symmetry is immediately produced. With more violent means the idea of symmetry would have been neither suggested nor refuted.

Leaving mere repeating patterns and diaper designs, you find, in j.a.panese compositions, complete designs in which there is no point of symmetry. It is a balance of suspension and of ant.i.thesis. There is no sense of lack of equilibrium, because place is, most subtly, made to have the effect of giving or of subtracting value. A small thing is arranged to reply to a large one, for the small thing is placed at the precise distance that makes it a (j.a.panese) equivalent. In Italy (and perhaps in other countries) the scales commonly in use are furnished with only a single weight that increases or diminishes in value according as you slide it nearer or farther upon a horizontal arm. It is equivalent to so many ounces when it is close to the upright, and to so many pounds when it hangs from the farther end of the horizontal rod. Distance plays some such part with the twig or the bird in the upper corner of a j.a.panese composition. Its place is its significance and its value. Such an art of position implies a great art of intervals. The j.a.panese chooses a few things and leaves the s.p.a.ce between them free, as free as the pauses or silences in music. But as time, not silence, is the subject, or material, of contrast in musical pauses, so it is the measurement of s.p.a.ce--that is, collocation--that makes the value of empty intervals. The s.p.a.ce between this form and that, in a j.a.panese composition, is valuable because it is just so wide and no more. And this, again, is only another way of saying that position is the principle of this apparently wilful art.

Moreover, the alien art of j.a.pan, in its pictorial form, has helped to justify the more stenographic school of etching. Greatly transcending j.a.panese expression, the modern etcher has undoubtedly accepted moral support from the islands of the j.a.panese. He too etches a kind of shorthand, even though his notes appeal much to the spectator's knowledge, while the Oriental shorthand appeals to nothing but the spectator's simple vision. Thus the two artists work in ways dissimilar.

Nevertheless, the French etcher would never have written his signs so freely had not the j.a.panese so freely drawn his own. Furthermore still, the transitory and destructible material of j.a.panese art has done as much as the multiplication of newspapers, and the discovery of processes, to reconcile the European designer--the black and white artist--to working for the day, the day of publication. j.a.pan lives much of its daily life by means of paper, painted; so does Europe by means of paper, printed.

But as we, unlike those Orientals, are a destructive people, paper with us means short life, quick abolition, transformation, re-appearance, a very circulation of life. This is our present way of surviving ourselves--the new version of that feat of life. Time was when to survive yourself meant to secure, for a time indefinitely longer than the life of man, such dull form as you had given to your work; to intrude upon posterity. To survive yourself, to-day, is to let your work go into daily oblivion.

Now, though the j.a.panese are not a destructive people, their paper does not last for ever, and that material has clearly suggested to them a different condition of ornament from that with which they adorned old lacquer, fine ivory, or other perdurable things. For the transitory material they keep the more purely pictorial art of landscape. What of j.a.panese landscape? a.s.suredly it is too far reduced to a monotonous convention to merit the serious study of races that have produced Cotman and Corot. j.a.panese landscape-drawing reduces things seen to such fewness as must have made the art insuperably tedious to any people less fresh-spirited and more inclined to take themselves seriously than these Orientals. A preoccupied people would never endure it. But a little closer attention from the Occidental student might find for their evasive att.i.tude towards landscape--it is an att.i.tude almost traitorously evasive--a more significant reason. It is that the distances, the greatness, the winds and the waves of the world, coloured plains, and the flight of a sky, are all certainly alien to the perceptions of a people intent upon little deformities. Does it seem harsh to define by that phrase the curious j.a.panese search for accidents? Upon such search these people are avowedly intent, even though they show themselves capable of exquisite appreciation of the form of a normal bird and of the habit of growth of a normal flower. They are not in search of the perpetual slight novelty which was Aristotle's ideal of the language poetic ("a little wildly, or with the flower of the mind," says Emerson of the way of a poet's speech)--and such novelty it is, like the frequent pulse of the pinion, that keeps verse upon the wing; no, what the j.a.panese are intent upon is perpetual slight disorder. In j.a.pan the man in the fields has eyes less for the sky and the crescent moon than for some stone in the path, of which the asymmetry strikes his curious sense of pleasure in fortunate accident of form. For love of a little grotesque strangeness he will load himself with the stone and carry it home to his garden. The art of such a people is not liberal art, not the art of peace, and not the art of humanity. Look at the curls and curves whereby this people conventionally signify wave or cloud. All these curls have an att.i.tude which is like that of a figure slightly malformed, and not like that of a human body that is perfect, dominant, and if bent, bent at no lowly or niggling labour. Why these curves should be so charming it would be hard to say; they have an exquisite prankishness of variety, the place where the upward or downward scrolls curl off from the main wave is delicately unexpected every time, and--especially in gold embroideries--is sensitively fit for the material, catching and losing the light, while the lengths of waving line are such as the long gold threads take by nature.

A moment ago this art was declared not human. And, in fact, in no other art has the figure suffered such crooked handling. The j.a.panese have generally evaded even the local beauty of their own race for the sake of perpetual slight deformity. Their beauty is remote from our sympathy and admiration; and it is quite possible that we might miss it in pictorial presentation, and that the j.a.panese artist may have intended human beauty where we do not recognise it. But if it is not easy to recognise, it is certainly not difficult to guess at. And, accordingly, you are generally aware that the separate beauty of the race, and its separate dignity, even--to be very generous--has been admired by the j.a.panese artist, and is represented here and there occasionally, in the figure of warrior or mousme. But even with this exception the habit of j.a.panese figure-drawing is evidently grotesque, derisive, and crooked. It is curious to observe that the search for slight deformity is so constant as to make use, for its purposes, not of action only, but of perspective foreshortening. With us it is to the youngest child only that there would appear to be mirth in the drawing of a man who, stooping violently forward, would seem to have his head "beneath his shoulders." The European child would not see fun in the living man so presented, but--unused to the same effect "in the flat"--he thinks it prodigiously humorous in a drawing. But so only when he is quite young. The j.a.panese keeps, apparently, his sense of this kind of humour. It amuses him, but not perhaps altogether as it amuses the child, that the foreshortened figure should, in drawing and to the unpractised eye, seem distorted and dislocated; the simple Oriental appears to find more derision in it than the simple child. The distortion is not without a suggestion of ignominy. And, moreover, the j.a.panese shows derision, but not precisely scorn. He does not hold himself superior to his hideous models. He makes free with them on equal terms. He is familiar with them.

And if this is the conviction gathered from ordinary drawings, no need to insist upon the ign.o.ble character of those that are intentional caricatures.

Perhaps the time has hardly come for writing anew the praises of symmetry. The world knows too much of the abuse of Greek decoration, and would be glad to forget it, with the intention of learning that art afresh in a future age and of seeing it then anew. But whatever may be the phases of the arts, there is the abiding principle of symmetry in the body of man, that goes erect, like an upright soul. Its balance is equal. Exterior human symmetry is surely a curious physiological fact where there is no symmetry interiorly. For the centres of life and movement within the body are placed with Oriental inequality. Man is Greek without and j.a.panese within. But the absolute symmetry of the skeleton and of the beauty and life that cover it is accurately a principle. It controls, but not tyrannously, all the life of human action. Att.i.tude and motion disturb perpetually, with infinite incidents--inequalities of work, war, and pastime, inequalities of sleep--the symmetry of man. Only in death and "at attention" is that symmetry complete in att.i.tude. Nevertheless, it rules the dance and the battle, and its rhythm is not to be destroyed. All the more because this hand holds the goad and that the harrow, this the s.h.i.+eld and that the sword, because this hand rocks the cradle and that caresses the unequal heads of children, is this rhythm the law; and grace and strength are inflections thereof. All human movement is a variation upon symmetry, and without symmetry it would not be variation; it would be lawless, fortuitous, and as dull and broadcast as lawless art. The order of inflection that is not infraction has been explained in a most authoritative sentence of criticism of literature, a sentence that should save the world the trouble of some of its futile, violent, and weak experiments: "Law, the rect.i.tude of humanity," says Mr Coventry Patmore, "should be the poet's only subject, as, from time immemorial, it has been the subject of true art, though many a true artist has done the Muse's will and knew it not. As all the music of verse arises, not from infraction but from inflection of the law of the set metre; so the greatest poets have been those the _modulus_ of whose verse has been most variously and delicately inflected, in correspondence with feelings and pa.s.sions which are the inflections of moral law in their theme. Law puts a strain upon feeling, and feeling responds with a strain upon law.

Furthermore, Aristotle says that the quality of poetic language is a continual _slight_ novelty. In the highest poetry, like that of Milton, these three modes of inflection, metrical, linguistical, and moral, all chime together in praise of the truer order of life."

And like that order is the order of the figure of man, an order most beautiful and most secure when it is put to the proof. That perpetual proof by perpetual inflection is the very condition of life. Symmetry is a profound, if disregarded because perpetually inflected, condition of human life.

The nimble art of j.a.pan is unessential; it may come and go, may settle or be fanned away. It has life and it is not without law; it has an obvious life, and a less obvious law. But with Greece abides the obvious law and the less obvious life: symmetry as apparent as the symmetry of the form of man, and life occult like his unequal heart. And this seems to be the n.o.bler and the more perdurable relation.