"My dear lady, if you read him you will find that he is the reverse of Beerbohm Tree as Hamlet. Tree"s Hamlet was funny without being vulgar.
Jerome"s writings are vulgar without being funny. His books are like Academy pictures. They are all deserving of a place on the line."
"I think he means well," said Mrs. Windsor, taking some strawberries.
"I am afraid so," Amarinth answered. "People who mean well always do badly. They are like the ladies who wear clothes that don"t fit them in order to show their piety. Good intentions are invariably ungrammatical."
"Good intentions have been the ruin of the world," said Reggie fervently. "The only people who have achieved anything have been those who have had no intentions at all. I have no intentions."
"You will at least never be involved in an action for breach of promise if you always state that fact," said Lady Locke, laughing.
"To be intentional is to be middle cla.s.s," remarked Amarinth. "Herkomer has become intentional, and so he has taken to painting the directors of railway companies. The great picture of this year"s exhibition is intentional. The great picture of the year always is. It presents to us a pretty milkmaid milking her cow. A gallant, riding by, has dismounted, and is kissing the milkmaid."
Madame Valtesi blinked at him for a moment in silence. Then she said with an air of indescribable virtue--
"What a bad example for the cow!"
"Ah! I never thought of that!" cried Mrs. Windsor.
"One seldom does think how easily proper cows--and people--are put to confusion. That is why they so often flee from the plays of London to those of Paris. They can be confused there without their relations knowing it."
"Why are old men who have seen the world always so proper?" asked Lord Reggie. "The other day I was staying with an old general at Malta, and he took Catulle Mendez" charming and delicate romance, "Mephistophela,"
out of my bedroom and burnt it. Yet his language on parade was really quite artistically blasphemous. I think it is fatal to one"s personality to see the world at all."
"Then I must be quite hopeless," said Lady Locke, "for I have spent eight years in the Straits Settlements."
"Dear me!" murmured Madame Valtesi. "Where is that? It sounds like one of the places where that geographical little Henry Arthur Jones sends the heroes of his plays to expiate their virtues."
"It is quite a mistake to imagine that the author or the artist should stuff his beautiful, empty mind with knowledge, with impressions, with facts of any kind," said Amarinth. "I have written a great novel upon Iceland, full of colour, of pa.s.sion, of the most subtle impurity, yet I could not point you out Iceland upon the map. I do not know where it is, or what it is. I only know that it has a beautiful name, and that I have written a beautiful thing about it. This age is an age of identification, in which our G.o.d is the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and our devil the fairy tale that teaches nothing. We go to the British Museum for culture, and to Archdeacon Farrar for guidance. And then we think that we are advancing. We might as well return to the myths of Darwin, or to the delicious fantasies of John Stuart Mill. They at least were entertaining, and no one attempted to believe in them."
"We always return to our first hates," said Lord Reggie, rather languidly.
"Do have some more tea, Madame Valtesi," pleaded Mrs. Windsor.
"No, thank you. I never take more than one cup on principle--the principle being that the first cup is the best, like the last word. I want to take a stroll round the rose garden, if I may. Mr. Amarinth, will you come with me?"
She added in an undertone to him, as they walked slowly away together--
"I always hate to see people drinking when I have finished. It makes me feel like a barmaid."
VI.
Lady Locke and Lord Reggie were left alone together for the time. Mrs.
Windsor had gone into the cottage to write a note, asking the curate of Chenecote to dine the next day. She always asked the curate to dine during the Surrey week. She thought it made things so deliciously rustic. Lord Reggie was still looking very tired, and eating a great many strawberries. He did both mechanically, and as if he didn"t know he was doing them. As Lady Locke glanced at him, she felt that he certainly fulfilled her expectations, so far as being cool and young went. His round baby collar seemed to take off quite five years from his age, and his straw hat, with its black riband, suited him very well. Only the glaring green carnation offended her sight. She longed to ask him why he wore it. But she felt she had no right to. So she watched him looking tired and eating strawberries, until he glanced up at her with his pretty blue eyes.
"These strawberries are very good," he said. "I should finish them, only I hate finishing anything. There is something so commonplace about it. Don"t you think so? Commonplace people are always finishing off things, and getting through things. They map out their days, and have special hours for everything. I should like to have special hours for nothing. That would be much more original."
"You are very fond of originality?"
"Are not you?"
"I don"t quite know. Perhaps I have not met many original people in my life. You see I have been out of England a great deal, and out of cities. I have lived almost entirely among soldiers."
"Soldiers are never original. They think it is unmanly. I once spent a week with the commander of one of our armies of occupation, and I never heard the same remarks so often in all my life. They thought everything was an affectation. Once, when I mentioned Matthew Arnold at the mess, they thought he was an affectation."
"Oh, surely not."
"They did, really. I explained that he had been a school-inspector. I thought that might rea.s.sure them. But they evidently did not believe me.
They knew nothing about anything or anybody. That would have been rather charming, only they thought they knew everything."
"I think you must have been unfortunate in your experience."
"Perhaps I was. I know I tried to be manly. I talked about Wilson Barrett. What more could I do? To talk about Wilson Barrett is generally supposed to show your appreciation of the heroic age. Of course n.o.body thinks about him now. But I was quite a failure. I went to five dinner-parties, I remember, during that week, and we all conversed about machine-guns at each of them. I felt as if the whole of life was a machine-gun, and men and women were all quick-firing parties."
"I suppose we are most of us a little inclined to talk shop, as it is called."
"But we ought to talk general shop, the shop in which everything is sold from Bibles to cheap cheese. Only we might leave out the Bibles. Mrs.
Humphrey Ward has created a corner in them."
"You have finished the strawberries after all."
Reggie burst into an almost boyish laugh.
"So I have. We none of us live up to our ideals, I suppose. But really I have none. I agree with Esme that nothing is so limited as to have an ideal."
"And yet you look sometimes as if you might have many," she said, as if half to herself. The curious motherly feeling had come upon her again, a kind of tenderness that often leads to preaching.
Reggie glanced up at her quickly, and with a pleased expression. A veiled tribute to his good looks delighted him, whether it came from man or woman. Only an unveiled one surpa.s.sed it in his estimation.
"Ah! but that means nothing," he said. "It is quite a mistake to believe, as many people do, that the mind shows itself in the face. Vice may sometimes write itself in lines and changes of contour, but that is all. Our faces are really masks given to us to conceal our minds with.
Of course occasionally the mask slips partly off, generally when we are stupid and emotional. But that is an inartistic accident. Outward revelations of what is going on inside of us take place far more seldom than silly people suppose. No more preposterous theory has ever been put forward than that of the artist revealing himself in his art. The writer, for instance, has at least three minds--his Society mind, his writing mind, and his real mind. They are all quite separate and distinct, or they ought to be. When his writing mind and his real mind get mixed up together, he ceases to be an artist. That is why Swinburne has gone off so much. If you want to write really fine erotic poetry, you must live an absolutely rigid and entirely respectable life. The "Laus Veneris" could only have been produced by a man who had a Nonconformist conscience. I am certain that Mrs. Humphrey Ward is the most strictly orthodox Christian whom we have. Otherwise, her books against the accepted Christianity could never have brought her in so many thousands of pounds. I never read her, of course. Life is far too long and lovely for that sort of thing; but a bishop once told me that she was a great artist, and that if she had a sense of gravity, she would rival George Eliot. d.i.c.kens had probably no sense of humour. That is why he makes second-rate people die of laughing. Oscar Wilde was utterly mistaken when he wrote the "Picture of Dorian Gray." After Dorian"s act of cruelty, the picture ought to have grown more sweet, more saintly, more angelic in expression."
"I never read that book."
"Then you have gained a great deal. Poor Oscar! He is terribly truthful.
He reminds me so much of George Washington."
"Shall we walk round the garden if you have really finished tea?" said Lady Locke, rising. "What a delicious afternoon it is, so quiet, so detached from the rest of the year, as Mr. Amarinth might say. I am glad to be away from London. It is only habit that makes London endurable."
"But surely habit makes nothing endurable. Otherwise we should like politics, and get accustomed to the presence of solicitors in Society."
"I do like politics," Lady Locke said, laughing. "How beautiful these roses are! Ah, there is Tommy. You don"t know my little boy, do you?"
Tommy, in fact, now came bounding towards them along a rose alley. His cheeks were flushed with excitement, and, as he drew nearer, they saw that his brown eyes were sparkling with a dimmed l.u.s.tre behind a large pair of spectacles, that were set rakishly upon his straight little nose.
"My dear boy," exclaimed his mother, "what on earth are you doing? How hideous you are!"