SLAPTON SANDS
After all the world is a large place. At the moment of writing I have never heard of Home Rule, nor do I care two straws whether the House of Lords is to be blown up on the fifth of November. What moves my interest, what stirs my soul, what arouses the politician that lurks in the best of us, is this question of the crab-pots. Shall the trawlers of Brixham be allowed to slash at our cords and to send our wicker baskets adrift, spoiling our marine harvests and making our larders barren against the winter? They hover about our beautiful bay--these fiends in human shape, with brown wings outspread--and wantonly lay waste our fishing-pots in their reckless course, so that our crabs walk backwards into the sea. We have had gentlefolks down from London about it, men who argue and palaver, and wear high hats and are said to have long bills, and there is talk of a Government cutter to protect us, towed by red tape, and the trawlers are to cast their nets farther asea. But beware of believing what you read in the Brixham papers,--we have no voice to represent us in the press, and so these Brixham organs spread falsehoods about us in every corner of the globe. A pretty pretence, forsooth, that it is the steamers who plough up our crab-pots. Why, from Michaelmas to Christmas, when the trawlers are away, not a single pot is disturbed from its station, though the funnels smoke as usual in the eye of heaven. No, no, ye hirelings of the press. Turn your mercenary quills elsewhere, beslaver Mr. Gladstone or belabour him, arbitrate on the affairs of nations, and throw your weighty influence into the scale of European politics. But do not confuse the mind of the country on the question of crab-pots.
We do not get the Brixham papers here, but friends in London tell us that is what they say. It is the same with the crabs--we have to order them from London. All local products come _via_ London nowadays: London is like a central ganglion, through which all sensations must travel before being felt at the outside points where they were really incurred. This is the case even with Irish patriots: they are made in Ireland, but if you want them you have to go to London clubs for them. We have only had one funeral here since I came, and then we got our material from London. He had gone up to a London hospital--poor fellow!--and that was the end of him. The village butcher it was, who thus went the way of all flesh, and all of us went to his funeral and wept, for want of something else to do.
One cannot always be flippant, even on a holiday. Fortunately the butcher left an aged father, who announced his intention of carrying on the business, so we dried our eyes and dined, sure of the future. We thought of the many creatures the deceased had killed--the Juno-eyed oxen, the tender lambs, the peaceful pigs--and we did not see why we should be so sentimental over the human species. We are all murderers, and yet we are ready to gush over the first corpse that comes along. How I envy the death-bed of a vegetarian!
We are not vegetarians here, but at least we eschew the six-course dinner which so few travellers ever succeed in shaking off, even in _Ultima Thule_. The most of modern travelling is a sort of Cook"s Tour.
Everywhere the _menu_ is before you, everywhere waves the napkin, like the flag of civilisation. Nowhere do we eat ourselves into the real life of the people; everywhere the same monotonous variety of fare in kitchen-French. In the remotest Orkneys, in the caves of Iona, in the fjords of Norway, amid the creva.s.ses of the Alps,--"t is the same tale of _entrees_ and _entremets_. When Dr. Johnson made his tour in the Highlands, he was allowed to forget he was not taking a walk down Fleet Street. He interviewed the chiefs in their fastnesses, the cottagers in their crofts. He broke rye-bread with the shepherd, ate haggis and porridge with the peasant, and drank a gill of whisky to see "what makes a Scotchman happy." Behind him he left his dish of tea, and the pet pork that made the veins of his forehead swell with ecstasy. But to-day the dinner-gong resounds where Rob Boy"s bugle blared, and you may sit behind your serviette
Where the sun his beacon red Kindles on Ben Voirlich"s head,
or where the monument of a Gaelic poet broods above the heather. The tyranny of the _table-d"hote_ ceases not even at sea. Every ship bears these monster meals in its belly--from salami to pineapple--whether it walk the Boreal waters, or touch the Happy Isles of Mid-Pacific, or swelter in the Red Sea. Not all the majesties and terrors of naked nature can dock one _hors d"oeuvre_ from the _menu_. Our stomachs we have always with us--the traveller"s only real _vade mec.u.m_. We change our sky but not our stomach. When Nansen reaches the North Pole, he will, I am sure, be able to put up at the local hotel, and have every luxury of the cosmopolitan cuisine except the ices, which will probably have been all sent up to the London market. It is this sort of thing that makes foreign travel merely an expensive delusion. Your common traveller never gets away from England, fare he never so far. His church, his kitchen and his company are those he left behind him. To get away from England one must go to Devonshire or Cornwall. But even here, amid the combes and the leys, the crags and the quarries, the modern hotel, with its perfect sanitation and imperfect French, is springing up with the rapidity of Badraoulbadour"s palace. It spoils the primitiveness of the people, and gives them ideas below their station. They lose their simple manliness and take tips. They corrupt their autochthonic customs, and drink champagne cider. The modern hotel is a upas-tree, under whose boughs poetry withers. One looks to see the ancient ballads lose their blood and brawn. In time we may expect to find Cornwall producing _vers de societe_. As thus:--
And shall Trelawney dine?
And shall Trelawney dine?
Then thrice ten thousand Cornish men Will order in the wine.
In the absence of six-course dinners and newspapers about Home Rule, we have had to fall back upon literature. We borrowed Zola"s latest--from the rector,--and read it simultaneously, stealing it from one another.
Even the dogs have devoured bits of it. The poodle has taken in most, being French. She is an elegant, tricksy creature, Miss Plachecki by name, but called--for short--"Wopsy." Wopsy"s back is arranged in beds like a Dutch garden; she has rosettes of black hair symmetrically disposed about her hind quarters, and her tail is exactly like a mutton cutlet in its frill. She belongs to the Woman of the party. Chum belongs to the Girl. He is a bull-pup, with a frightfully ferocious face, but he never bites unless he wants to hurt you. Girl says she took him to a fashionable photographer"s, but the artist refused to pose him. In vain she pointed out that Chum was more paralysed than he; that Chum was trembling all over (I opine "t was at the sight of the actresses"
portraits--the young dog!). The photographer steadfastly kept the apparatus between him and the animal, telling Girl a story about a man who owned a bull-dog with a bad memory. The man, coming home late, and entering his sitting-room, was met by an ominous growl in the darkness.
Bull-dogs have little smell, and so the man was not recognized. He made a movement towards the mantelpiece, where the matches were, to strike a light and convince the dog of its mistake. But unfortunately the dog guarded the mantelpiece, and every move was answered by a ghastly growl.
More unfortunately still, the man"s bedroom was only approached through the sitting-room, and its door was only approached through the dog. So, for want of a match, the man pa.s.sed the night like a Peri at the gates of Paradise. At last Girl posed Chum, herself, her draperies const.i.tuting a nebulous background; and the artist, walking warily, adjusted his instrument, and the sun which shines alike on saints and bull-pups, painted the squatter"s portrait. But, alas! a woeful disappointment was in store. When the proofs arrived, it was found that all that delightful uncouthness of visage which is Chum"s chief charm, all that fascinating ferocity which makes him a thing of ugliness and a joy for ever, had vanished--refined away, idealised into a demureness as of domestic tabby, a plat.i.tudinarian peacefulness--nay, a sort of beauty! The camera had been so accustomed to actresses that it could no longer work naturally.
VENICE
I am reading Nietzsche and Tolsto. Each tells me that the morality of the day is all wrong, and that he has discovered the one true way of salvation. Life, cries Nietzsche, strength, sunshine, beauty. Death, cries Tolsto, abnegation, pity, holiness. "T is all as old as the hills, and withal so simple that one wonders why Nietzsche should have needed eleven volumes to say it in and Tolsto endless pamphlets. I never can understand the lengths to which some authors go in self-repet.i.tion. Half the books are written to prove that water is dry, and the other half that it"s wet. If you would only stop and think just for one moment, cries Tolsto, you would at once see what a ridiculous life you are leading and you would refuse to lead it any longer. Stop and think! Ay, but "t is difficult thinking to-day.
It will be all over and done with so long--by the time you read this--that the Triple Alliance may be in three pieces; but for the moment the complications of European politics alternately startle and depress my day with furious cannonades of honour from an Italian gunboat and brazen dronings of national anthems from a German band. For the young man whom Tolsto has described as the most comic figure in Europe, coming to meet Umberto I. in Venice, inconsiderately stationed his yacht just outside my window; and though he is gone at last, _Gott sei Dank_, the echoes of him still linger in irrelevant cannon-shots that send the pigeons scurrying in mad swoops; while, as if removed from the oppression of his presence, the band of the _Hohenzollern_ plays London music-hall tunes all day long, commencing, significantly enough, with "Oh, Mr. Porter, what a funny man you are!" I never realised how international is our music-hall till I heard Italians staggering home at midnight, singing "Two lovely black eyes" in choice Venetian. A beautiful yacht this _Hohenzollern_, as large as an Atlantic liner: I suppose an Imperial yacht is like an Imperial pint. "T was a great moment when it sailed in round a bend, slow and serene--a glorious white vessel, radiant with flags, stately and majestic in its movement as a sonnet of Milton, and about it a black swarm of gondolas, those of the n.o.ble families equipped with half a dozen gondoliers in green, yellow, or blue liveries, and at the stern of each boat a trail of silk. And the dense crowds huzzahed, and the band played "G.o.d Save the Queen," only in German, so that it meant, _Heil dir im Siegeskranz_. And after that came the Italian national air, which isn"t an anthem, but a quick march, and so lacks dignity. The "Wacht am Rhein"
made a half-hearted effort to be present, but in the night we had the Emperor"s own "Sang an Aegir," stuck in the middle of a Wagner programme.
Beyond this, compliment could scarcely go.
This brazen air was the one jar on the poetry of a spectacle possible only in Venice. Imagine it! Wagner played on a floating fairy-paG.o.da, built as of gold flame, and shot with green and red, on the broad bosom of St. Mark"s basin, in the divine night, the stars seen hanging diversely in free s.p.a.ce, not stuck like gold-headed nails in a dark ceiling; and in the mystery of the darkness, the domes and spires and palaces of Venice, and the dim creeping boats, and the quivering reflections of the illuminated Imperial vessel; and across the narrow track of luminous water made by the PaG.o.da--that glittered with a fantastic splendour as of Aladdin and Arabian nights--sudden gondolas gliding from darkness to darkness, the beautiful curve of the prow sharply revealed, the gondolier growing semi-transparent and quivering with light, a strange half-demoniac figure bestriding his black bark.
And, mingled with the music, the hum of mult.i.tudes and the tramp of feet and the silence of the vast night. All as Nietzsche"s poem on Venice hath it--"Gondeln, Lichter, Musik." Yes, they play politics prettily on the Grand Ca.n.a.l--the finest street in Europe. Does it matter much what is the game? Cannons and colour, bands and decorations, bread and circuses, emperors uncovering to us, beautiful queens waving dainty handkerchiefs--this is what lies behind the dry Treaties of the history books. A few short weeks back we had been very angry with our King, and had talked of Republics and what not. But the dead men in Abyssinia are dead, and we are alive, and the Bengal fire on the palaces is really very picturesque. If we would only stop and think--just for one moment! But there"s the rub.
It"s no use stopping and thinking, unless everybody else will stop and think at the same time. For you cannot refuse to lead a life that everybody is leading, unless you are willing to be crushed by the revolutions of the social machinery. Socialists, for instance, are often twitted with not "behaving as sich." But socialists say that socialism should be the law of the land: they do not say that it is practicable for an odd man here and there to be a socialist in a world of individualists.
Tolsto, to be of effect, would have to move all mankind at once to renounce its ways, to abjure the l.u.s.t of the eye and the pride of life.
And he would have to keep on moving it, or back it would roll. Mazzini and the unification of Italy--what words to conjure with! But Mazzini is dead, and how much of Italy is alive! "T is more like a great show-place, supported by its visitors, than a real, live country. Stop and think! "T is perhaps better not to think, for fear we should stop. William II., at any rate--he is not likely to stop and think. This young man--from all I have observed since he became my neighbour--lives a highly coloured dramatic existence, in which there are sixty minutes to every hour and sixty seconds to every minute, the sort of life that should have pleased Walter Pater. He must be a disciple of Nietzsche, a lover of the strong and the splendid, this German gentleman who is just off to Vienna to prance at the head of fifteen hundred hors.e.m.e.n. While he lived opposite me, it was all excursions and alarums. As a neighbour an emperor is distinctly noisy. The local comic papers suggested that, as a universal genius, Guglielmo II. would at once set about rowing a two-oared sandolo.
But this difficult feat Guglielmo did not essay, being convoyed more comfortably in a long-boat by a brawny crew. Curious, by the way, that transformation of William! They announce plays here by G. Shakespeare, the divine Guglielmo.
"T is all very well for Guglielmo, the gondola of Avon, to invite us to sit on the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings; and in a city of departed Doges and lost glories"t is easy to moralise over earthly greatness. But kings are not always dead, and I daresay as William II. in his c.o.c.ked hat gazed from the quarter-deck of the _Hohenzollern_ at the marvellous but untenanted Palace of the ancient Bridegrooms of the Sea, he felt that a living lion is better than a dead Doge. And yet it is a strange life, a king"s. What an unreal universe of flags and cannons and phrases must monarchs inhabit! Do they think that the streets are always gay with streamers and bunting and triumphal arches, always thunderous with throats of men or guns, always impa.s.sable?
Do they imagine their subjects spend their whole lives in packed black ma.s.ses, waving hats? Poor kings! I always cla.s.s them with novelists for ignorance of real life. And to think that they can only get to know life from novels! If they would only stop, and think! But even when they do stop, they never seem to think. Napoleon on St. Helena never faced realities, aggressively pompous to the end. Then there is Don Carlos, whom I miss in my afternoon stroll. He who might have dazzled us with divinity is visibly a feather-less biped. The poor, mock king had to leave Venice because his brother-sovereigns would not have called upon him. For Don Carlos still keeps up the form and style of a crowned head, and remains the last of the Bourbons, a picturesque ruin, reproach to a blasphemous generation, heedless of the divine right of kings.
And the "divinity that doth hedge a king" can be kept up nowhere so cheaply as in Venice. Venice is the dress-coat of cities, making all men equal. Well might Wordsworth dub her "the eldest child of liberty"! For in the streets of Venice you cannot drive or ride--walk you must. No gleaming broughams, no spanking steeds: nothing--be you monarch or mendicant--but your two legs. "T is strange, in a land of no horses, to find Venetians styled "Cavalier" for t.i.tle of honour. They should surely be called "Gondoliers." For the gondola is your only chance of display.
Rich Americans may flaunt it with four gondoliers and print "Palazzo" on their visiting-cards. But doctors and lawyers live in Palaces, and even a moderate purse can keep a horseless carriage. And your St. Mark"s Square, which is the largest drawing-room in the world, is also the most democratic. Ladies of quality jostle shawled street-walkers, a German sailor galls the kibe of a beautiful Browning d.u.c.h.ess, officers with showy epaulettes glitter among respectable shopkeepers; helmeted cuira.s.siers, Austrian admirals, policemen with coloured tufts like lamp-cleaners, German baronesses, bouncing bonnes with babies, garlic-scented workingmen, American schoolgirls, and kings in exile, are mixed pell-mell, all in perfect freedom and equality, and, though in the shadow of St. Mark"s Church, quite Christian. And an Italian crowd is also Christian in its freedom from crush. It does not turn a fete into a fight and a concourse into a compet.i.tion. Thus, as the Prince Consort was amused to find we English said of our pleasure-parties, all "pa.s.ses off well." Except when there is rain. And the heavens threw unmistakable cold water on the Triple Alliance. The day of the Emperor"s stay was the one wet day Venice had known for months--so dank and chill, with so sooty a sky, that my friend the artist, who had just been reading in the London paper that his work had not caught the glamour and the colour of Venice, that the South had not yet revealed its pa.s.sionate secrets to him, chuckled grimly. What is all this nonsense about an Italian hothouse? At Florence I was afraid of being snow-bound in the sunny South. For, long and heavily, though the London meteorologists registered sunshine,
Cadeva dal cielo la neve Con tutta la sua quiete.
(Down from heaven fell the snow With all its quietness.)
This perfect description of snowfall--which I found rudely chalked on the wall of a Venetian alley--could never have been conceived in the Italy of popular imagination. The superst.i.tion about Italian sunshine is like that about Italian beauty. If the country about Florence is the loveliest in Europe, surely the plain of Lombardy around Padua is the ugliest--a land of symmetrical tree-stumps and stony villas flaunting themselves on the roadway in pompous publicity.
In Venice the Emperor seemed specially to irritate the elements. The illuminations were extinguished by a terrific torrent that sent the people pattering away into the black, starless night, gleaming with rain and fire; and to-night when the imperial band attempted to play "Sang an Aegir" again, the heavens fell, and audience and orchestra vanished in the twinkling of a gas-lamp, while the pavement of the Piazza glittered golden as the facade of St. Mark"s with dancing reflections, and the lights burnt blue in the wind. Yes, though the papers next day said the Emperor"s Song was applauded enthusiastically, Jupiter Pluvius at least never plays the courtier, and Boreas must be a rude reminder to monarchs of their essential humanity. Come, let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the colds of kings. In the daylight I chanced upon a rough wooden platform, bordered with plush and surrounded by tawdry terraces of coloured, gla.s.s cups. This was the fairy, Aladdin-like PaG.o.da. And such, methinks, are kings, on closer acquaintance. How majestic seemed William II., and Humbert, the Kaiserin and Queen Margherita, when, ma.s.sed in our thousands on the Piazza, we clamoured for a glimpse of them: how inaccessible and star-like when, after much exciting but irrelevant shadow pantomime, they actually appeared on the balcony of the Palace, as if to feed us like the pigeons we had displaced! With what tumultuous rapture did we behold their faces! Stop and think! You cannot stop and think. Enthusiasm is a microbe, and is independent of its object: even so we could yawn over Punch and Judy, if the crowd a.s.sembled to yawn.
Republicans who came to sneer remained to cheer.
"T is comic this, And comic that, And clown on royal pay, But "t is "Long live _unser Kaiser!_"
When the band begins to play.
And humanity has need of leaders, heroes--"t is a primal instinct. The Jews had Jehovah himself for sovereign, but nothing would content them but a real man-king, who should rule them and judge them and go out before them in war. Kings were leaders once, but in modern days they are only symbols, just as flags are: the whole force of the nation is behind them, and they stand for home and country. This it is that gives them majesty and divinity. "T is a case of transformation of function, an old inst.i.tution adapted to new uses, and valuable partly as giving colour to life, partly for preventing the evils which Gibbon so pregnantly showed to be inseparable from any system of primacy not based on an immutable heredity. The trouble is when the flag wishes to order the march.
An unbroken tradition has kept up the old phrases of loyalty, and so what wonder if a king sometimes takes them seriously! "_Le roi le veult_" not unnaturally leads sometimes to a king willing. And also we are not quite conscious of the transformation; it has come about so gradually that no one knows when kings ceased to be leaders, and when they became flags, and so with the new feeling blend confusedly strands of the old. We English have abolished the sovereign, but we are too loyal to say so. In Germany the sovereign has refused to be a symbol, and in a country over-civilised in thought and under-civilised in action, he has had a pretty good innings. I must confess I do not find this att.i.tude of his merely ridiculous. It forces clearly upon the modern world the question of kingship, whether it is to be a sham or a reality. Unpopular as William II. has made himself by his martinet methods--ridiculous, if you will--yet there is only one step from the ridiculous to the sublime. In a flippant age he takes himself seriously, has a sense of a responsible relation to his people. Have you seen the cartoon he designed to inspire the nations of the West to league together for the protection of their ideals against the races of the East? The thought may be trite, the philosophy leagues behind the doctrines of the Berlin _Aufgeklarter_, but it shows a soul above card-playing or court-gossip. What a n.o.ble chance there would be for a modern sovereign who should really be the head of his people, on a par with the culture of his age, in harmony with its highest ideals, fostering all that is finest in life and character, in art and thought! Sn.o.bbishness would be converted to useful ends, and courtiers would become philosophers out of sheer flattery. But such a Platonic king is scarcely to be looked for: the training is so bad.
The presence of kings makes places abnormal and out of character, but in Venice it rather gives one a sense of the true Venice, she that once held the gorgeous East in fee. For the Venice of every day only escapes vulgarity by force of beauty: she lives up to the English and German tripper, borders her great Piazza with photograph shops, and counts on the sentimental traveller to feed her pigeons. Oh, that trail of the tourist over Europe, falsifying the very things he went out for to see!
"Coelum non animum mutant," said the Roman poet long ago of travellers, but the modern traveller carries his sky with him. Instead of "Venice in London" "t is London in Venice. Carefully fenced off from the local life by his _table d"hote_, it is rarely that the Briton comes to understand that he and not the native is the foreigner, the _forestiere_. Cities on show are never real; they are like people posturing before a camera, instead of being taken _au naturel_. And "the season" is the time in which they are least real. Too many Cooks" tourists spoil the broth.
Cities _en fete_ are masked and prankt, and the spring in Italy is like one long _Forestieri_ day. At the church of Eremitani in Padua I was taken to see some Mantegnas at a side-altar while a very devout congregation was celebrating Eastertide, and the verger unlocked a gate and pocketed his tip with undiminished piety. How apt an image of life, these Italian churches--some of us praying and some of us sightseeing! It must be confusing to the celestial bookkeepers to distinguish the Bibles from the Baedekers. And while the real Venice is as unreal as the real Florence or the real Rome, Venice welcoming her king gives one a truer impression of the Venice of our dreams, the Queen of the seas in the brave days of old. Let us forget the steamboats and the iron bridges, let us make believe that the _Hohenzollern_ is the great Bucentaur, in which the Doge went out to wed the Adriatic and which that arch-Philistine Napoleon broke up. For the Venice of every day is a dead city, with nothing left of its ancient glories but wealth. Though the millions be reckoned in lire, there are over a hundred millionaires in Venice. But of that mighty artistic and religious impulse which produced countless churches and palaces, pictures and frescoes, which strewed the very street walls with spirited sculpture, and warmed even parochial offices with priceless paintings, there is as little trace as of the indomitable energy that founded a great Republic on wooden piles and guarded it from the sea by d.y.k.es and from its enemies by the sea. The escutcheons of its great families are fast becoming archaeological, and Americans and Jews inhabit their palaces. How great a power Venice was I never realised till I was permitted to see the Archives. It takes three-quarters of an hour to walk through these galleries of town records. Miles of memorandums, wildernesses of reports, acres of amba.s.sadors" letters from every court in Europe, written in cipher with inter-bound Italian translations. I tried to find the report of the amba.s.sador at the Court of St. James anent the execution of Charles I., but gave up hopeless, oppressed by the musty myriads of volumes, and found comfort in the signature of Queen Elizabeth, surely the most regal autograph in the world, like some ship going out against the Armada with swelling canvas and pennants streaming.
There"s a woman after Nietzsche"s heart--strong, splendid, and unscrupulous. If Nietzsche had married her, he might have changed his philosophy. What a diplomatist, this Englishwoman! To this day the Direttore of the Archives of Venice swears by her. Those awesome Archives! The reports of the Council of Ten alone stretch away through vasty halls of death. And then people talk of writing history! How fortunate that the exact details of royal, political and military events are as unessential as they are unattainable! Real history consists mainly of the things that haven"t happened--the millions of everyday lives, sunrise and sunset, ships and harvests, the winds and the rain, and the bargains in the market-place. The reading of Clio"s blood-stained scroll would be unbearable, were it not for the reflection that all the important things have been left out--the myriads of sunny mornings that dawned on the "Dark Ages," and filled creation with the joy of life; the hopes and loves throbbing in the great obscure ma.s.s of humanity; the individual virtues and victories that co-existed with the decadence of great empires; the vast ocean of consciousness of which History just skims the surface. And now all that great Venetian life is over, the dreaded Council of Ten is as the dust that covers its reports, and the Doge"s Palace is a spectacle for tourists at a franc a head. Great Caesar dead and turned to show. And those who pay the franc scarcely seem to reflect that princes and artists did not live and die in Italy to help young British or German couples over their honeymoon; that Dandolo and Foscari, Sansovino and Tintoretto, pa.s.sed away with no suspicion of that latter-day trinity--Bride, Bridegroom, and Baedeker. Strange that that which was so real to themselves is so romantic to us! Such is the trans.m.u.tation of time, which can colour with poetry things much more prosaic than life in ancient Venice. Nothing of us that doth fade
But doth, suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange.
Poets and seers feel the richness and strangeness of the life that is pa.s.sing under their very eyes. With Maeterlinck it is the mystery, with Stevenson the colour, with Wordsworth the divinity. To see the glamour of the contemporary is the note of your modern. Whitman spent his life trying to see it in the most unpromising materials. The wondering perception of steamships and electric-cables has already grown dulled to us: it requires a Kipling to revivify it. The new photographic process which enables one to carry out Sydney Smith"s desire on a hot day, to take off one"s flesh and sit in one"s bones, alone seems wonderful to us; though to see through a window is just as marvellous as to see through a brick wall. For if _nil admirari_ be the motto of the sage, _omne admirari_ is that of the poet, and the poetry which wafts from the past to the soul of the most commonplace person is seen in the present by him who hath eyes. The pathos of that which _must_ pa.s.s away is no less great than the pathos of that which _has_ pa.s.sed away. And what produces the art-feeling in both cases is the same--the fresh, intense perception of things for themselves alone: only the ordinary man finds it easier to detach his own interests from the past than from the present of which he is part. Romance is not in things, but in the souls that observe. Every place, however enchanted, is inhabited by prosaic persons who earn their living there. My chambermaid was born in Padua--Padua, outside which Donatello could not achieve perfection; Padua, ever dear to us because Portia feigned to have studied law at its University. Alas! alas! the two gentlemen of Verona go down to business in tram-cars, and the
Magic cas.e.m.e.nts opening on the foam Of faery lands in perilous seas forlorn
are cleaned and repaired by some one who sends in the bill. Yet, since believing is seeing, let us behold, not the chambermaid and the window-cleaner, but the magic cas.e.m.e.nt and the moonrise. And if to the commonplace our own age is commonplace, yet our age, like youth, is a fault that will mend with time. Our politics, and philosophies too, will crumble and decay, the dust will gather on our books and newspapers, archaeologists will prize our coins, the fashion of our ugly garments will grow picturesque, and samples of our streets will be rebuilt in exhibitions. What is then left to console us for the eternal flux? Only that posterity shall grow old-fashioned too, while we, like antiquity, shall have enjoyed that which never grows old--the sunshine and the stars, love and friendship, the smiles of little children, and the freshness of flowers, aspiration and achievement, thought and worship, struggle and self-sacrifice.
These, these are the eternal things--that persist in every age, in every environment, in old Etruscan villages as in the Paris of to-day: these are the realities to which "the latest scientific conveniences" are but padding, and in which we have had no superiority over our ancestors, even as we shall have no inferiority to our successors, though they riot in "Vril" and balloons, and go on Cooks" Tours to the constellations. The network of nerves in which we live and move and have our being is only capable of a certain quota of sensations, and no invention will really enlarge our enjoyments except it be of a new set of nerves. Persons whose lives have known strange vicissitudes have been astonished to find pleasure and pain about equally distributed in all; and I am optimist enough to think that no age will be really less unhappy than the present.
Reformers who imagine they improve on the past age do but alter old inst.i.tutions to fit new feelings. Reformers are necessary because otherwise the new feelings would be cramped by the old inst.i.tutions. But there is no addition to the sum of pleasure. Progress really means not lagging behind; and however far we march, the same sunshine will throw the same shadow of pain across our path. The notion of progress, said Spinoza, is a futility, because G.o.d, of whom the universe is a manifestation, is always perfect. Later philosophers have found this doctrine a barren blind-alley, and craved for the notion of a more energising G.o.d. But both notions seem perfectly compatible. Progress may be just the way perfection manifests itself. The universe moves--and at each point is perfect. It is as good as it could be--at the moment: it could not be any better. For if it could have been, it would have been: it has no interest in being otherwise. That it is not perfect in our sense of the word matters little to the metaphysician. We have such limited experiences of universes that we cannot judge what a really good one should be like; and to say that ours is bad is to foul our own nest.
He had no doubt of the perfection of the universe, that gentle old Franciscan who lives with his twenty-nine brethren on the islet of St.
Francesco del Deserto, a rarely visited spot off Venice, that somehow reminded me of the island in Mr. H. A. Jones" "Michael and his Lost Angel." He had never been to a.s.sisi, where his tutelary saint was born.
"Have you no wish to see it?" I asked. "My only wish is to obey." Dear old man! He had stopped all his life; but thinking--ah! that is another matter. It was in this island that St. Francis preached to the birds. He was saying the Office when all the birds stopped to listen, and St.
Francis took advantage of the opportunity. It was his disciple St. Antony who preached to the fishes, and there is a delicious picture in Padua showing all the fishes perking their heads out of the water and listening in devout dumbness, the very oysters open to conviction. Poor dear fishes! What a delightful change to receive from the upper world something else than hooks! What a sweet simple cloister hath this lonely monastery--a plain stone walk under a red-tiled arcade supported by rough brick pillars, the walls lined by quaint black-and-white engravings of saints engaged in miracles. There is a well in the centre which used to be of sea-water, but St. Bernard of Siena blessed it and it turned sweet.
I have drunk of the water, so I can vouch the story is true. And there is a beautiful cypress walk. What a tranquil retreat!
O Beata Solitudo!
O Sola Beat.i.tudo!
as the inscription over the lintel hath it. I do not wonder that St.
Francis came here when he was greatly fatigued, "after converting the Sultan of Egypt," as the old Franciscan navely explained. "T is the sort of sanatorium Tolsto would need, after converting the German Emperor!
And despite St. Francis, and his doctrine of brotherhood with birds and fishes, we go on with our cannibal cookery, and even his own Church still teaches that animals have no souls, though that is perhaps because they have no _soldi_. And despite Tolsto and his tracts, the people who stop will not think and the people who think will not stop. For to convert the world is the one miracle that the saints have never compa.s.sed. Yet is the sunshine of these sweet souls never lost, and the gentle mien of the old Franciscan made me feel at peace even with my sandolier when I found him sound asleep in his boat, wrapped up in my cloak.
And these are the types of character Nietzsche would destroy. They are degenerative, forsooth! They make against life and the joy thereof. Ah, but the joy of life is not only the joy of self-a.s.sertion: there is the joy of self-effacement, which is only another form of self-expression, the a.s.sertion of a higher self. That was the secret of Jesus, of Buddha.
Whereas the doctrine of Nietzsche--_c"est le secret de Polichinelle_. The man in the street needs no encouragement to enjoyment. It is only by the travail of the centuries that he has been taught to prefer to his own pleasure somebody else"s absence of pain. Human nature is like Venice or Holland--a province slowly wrested from the sea, and secured by dams and d.y.k.es. Woe to him who makes a breach in the sea-walls! And yet Nietzsche is to be read, though "t is a pity he is to be translated into English for the seduction of unripe minds. The desuetude of Latin as a common language for scholars is to be regretted; it kept the thinkers of Europe in touch, and kept out the _profanum vulgus_. As I have often pointed out, a truth grows so stale that it is almost a lie, and to invert any conventionality is to produce what is almost a truth. Truth is convex as well as concave.
This method of inversion is Nietzsche"s main weapon: as earnest as any of our pulpiteering Puritans, he wears his morality inside out. He denies the copy-book, as Luther denied the infallibility of the Pope. He transposes all moral values, finds virtue often weakness and vice often strength, girds at all the cloud-spinning philosophers, and is one of the most brilliant and suggestive of modern writers, full of epigram and whimsy, and wielding the clumsy German tongue with rare grace and dexterity. But, as might be expected of the son of a parson, he pursues his reaction against conventional cant beyond the bounds of legitimate paradox, replacing the narrow by the narrower. Nietzsche was necessary; some one had to call a spade a spade. The great forces of modern thought, which have been gathering for centuries, had to find shameless expression; and Nietzsche"s scorn for those who have tried to patch up hollow truces with bygone beliefs, and dress up new heresies in old Sunday clothes, is amply justified. But what is not justified is his admiration of himself--an admiration so p.r.o.nounced that it has landed him in a lunatic asylum. Our systems of chronology ought to be recast, cries he; and even as men have dated from A.D., so are they to date from A.N., the year of Nietzsche. Not that he expects immediate recognition: "Erst das Uebermorgen gehort mir. Einige werden posthum geboren." But the bulk of what he tells us is really involved in all modern conceptions of the cosmus--it could have been found long ago in Herbert Spencer.