Prose Fancies Part 5

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 relations.h.i.+p, 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 b.u.mping in like a c.o.c.kchafer, 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 s.h.i.+llings. 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 a.s.sured, 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' SUPERSt.i.tION

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 G.o.d 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 att.i.tude, however, is more and more taking its place among the superst.i.tions, 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

'Whether a man serve G.o.d or his own whim 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 n.o.ble beat. It was thus that the _cor cordium_ lost what no lyric pa.s.sion, no triumphant exultation of success, could give to it again.

However, Sh.e.l.ley 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 st.u.r.diness, a st.u.r.dy coa.r.s.eness 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 G.o.d'; 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' superst.i.tion. He has worn the air of making great sacrifices for the G.o.ddess, and in these his intimates have felt a proud sense of awful partic.i.p.ation, as of a family whom the G.o.ds 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 att.i.tude 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-G.o.d 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 a.s.sured my conscience that it should only be 'Anglo-Portuguese,' and that I would forego the roll and b.u.t.ter. 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 s.h.i.+llings, and what's the use of drawing the line at a roll and b.u.t.ter? No! we will repent after the roll and b.u.t.ter. 'Roll and b.u.t.ter' 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 s.h.i.+ning bra.s.s 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 pa.s.sed 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 s.h.i.+ning. 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! G.o.d 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