No not to-night, dear child;
I cannot go;
I'm busy, tired; they knew I should not come; you do not need me there.
Dear, be content, and take your pleasure; you shall tell me of it.
There, go to don your miracles of gauze, and come and show yourself a great pink cloud.
So, she has gone with half a discontent; but it will die before her curls are shaped, and she'll go forth intent on being pleased, and take her ponderous pastime like the rest— patient delightedly, prepared to talk in the right voice for the right length of time on any thing that anybody names, prepared to listen with the proper calm to any song that anybody sings; wedged in their chairs, all soberness and smiles, one steady sunshine like an August day: a band of very placid revellers, glad to be there but gladder still to go.
She like the rest: it seems so strange to me, my simple peasant girl, my nature's grace, one with the others; my wood violet stuck in a formal rose box at a show.
Well, since it makes her happier.
True I thought the artless girl, come from her cottage home knowing no world beyond her village streets, come stranger into our elaborate life with such a blithe and wondering ignorance as a young child's who sees new things all day, would learn it my way and would turn to me out of the solemn follies "What are these? why must we live by drill and laugh by drill; may we not be ourselves then, you and I?" I thought she would have nestled here by me "I cannot feign, and let me stay with you." I thought she would have shed about my life the unalloyed sweet freshness of the fields pure from your cloying fashionable musks: but she "will do what other ladies do"— my sunburnt Madge I saw, with skirts pinned up, carrying her father's dinner where he sat to take his noon-day rest beneath the hedge, and followed slowly for her clear loud song.
And she did then, she says, as others did who were her like. 'Tis logical enough: as every woman lives, (tush! as we all, following such granted patterns for our souls as for our hats and coats), she lived by rules how to be as her neighbours, though I, trained to my own different code, discerned it not (mistaking other laws for lawlessness, like raw and hasty travellers): and now why should she, in a new world, all unapt to judge its judgments, take so much on her she did not in her old world, pick and choose her pleasures and her tastes, her aims, her faiths, breaking her smooth path with the thorny points of upstart questions?
She is just a bird born in a wicker cage and brought away into a gilded one: she does not pine to make her nest in uncontrolled far woods, but, unconceiving freedom, chirrups on, content to see her prison bars so bright.
Yes, best for her; and, if not best for me,
I've my fault in it too: she's logical, but what am I, who, having chosen her for being all unlike the tutored type, next try and mould her to it—chose indeed my violet for being not a rose, then bade it hold itself as roses do, that passers by may note no difference?
The peasant ways must go, the homely burr, the quaint strong English—ancient classic turns mixed up with rustic blunders and misuse, old grammar shot with daring grammarlessness; the village belle's quick pertness, toss of head, and shriek of saucy laughter—graces there, and which a certain reckless gracefulness, half hoydenish, half fawnlike, made in her graces in even my eyes… there; the ease of quick companionship; the unsoftened "no's;" the ready quarrels, ready makings up; all these must go,
I would not have her mocked among the other women who have learned sweet level speech and quiet courtesies— and then they jarred upon me like the noise of music out of rule, which, heard at first, took the fresh ear with novel melody, but makes you restless, listened to too long, with missing looked for rhythms.
So I teach, or let her learn, the way to speak, to look, to walk, to sit, to dance, to sing, to laugh, and then…… the prized dissimilarity was outer husk and not essential core: my wife is just the wife my any friend selects among my any friend's good girls, (a duplicate except that here and there the rendering's faulty or touched in too strong); my little rugged bit of gold I mined, cleared from its quartz and dross and pieced for use with recognized alloy, is minted down one of a million stamped and current coins.
My poor dear Madge, it half seems treasonous to let regret touch any thought of you, loyal and loving to me as you are; and you are very very dear to me,
I could not spare you, would not change your love to have the rich ideal of my hope in any other woman; as you are I love you, being you.
And for the rest, if I, my theory's too eager fool, mistook the freedom of blunt ignorance for one with freedom of the instructed will, and took yours for a nature made to keep its hardiness in culture, gaining strength to be itself more fully; if I looked for some rare perfectness of natural gifts, developing not changed, pruned and not dwarfed; if I believed you would be that to me so many men have sung by women's names and known no woman for, where is your fault, who did but give yourself as you were then, and with so true a giving?
Violet, whose is the blame if, rooted from your place, where you grew truly to your natural law, set by my hand in artificial soil, bound to unwonted props, whose blame if you are not quite violet and not quite rose?
She's happy though,
I think: she does not bear the pain of my mistake, and shall not bear; and she'll not ever guess of a mistake.
Mistake—'tis a hard word.
Well let it pass: it shall not wrong her: for was it in her or in myself I was mistaken most?
What,
I, who have been bold to hurl revolt at great Queen Bugaboo Society, did I not teach her suit and service first, wincing when she infringed some useless law? do I not wince to-day beside the fire at every word or gesture she shall use not scheduled in the warrant what to do? do I not bid her have the table thus, assort such viands, use such furniture, wear such a stuff at morning, such at night, all to the warrant of Queen Bugaboo, and feel a something missing when she fails, a discord setting all my teeth on edge?
Why, what a score of small observances; mere fashionable tricks, are to my life the butter on the bread, without which salve the bit's too coarse to swallow; what a score of other small observances and tricks, worn out of fashion or not yet come in, reek worse than garlic to my pampered taste, making the wholesomest food too difficult!
And that which in an ancient yesterday was but some great man's humour is to me duty by rote to-day.
I had not felt my own life that punctilious copy-book, writ to stock patterns set to all a school,
I have called usual lives, but my poor Madge has unawares informed me of myself.
We can no other; 'tis as natural to men to take this artificial kind as to the flowers, which, grown in neighbour ranks, taste the same winds and feed on the same soil, to take inoculation by the bees of one another's dyes and be alike in new unlikeness to their primal types.
Our gift is imitation and to share the subtle current of all sympathies; we breathe each other's thoughts, as in a crowd we breathe each other's breaths, unconsciously; and if there could be a mere human man to singly be creator, make the thing which none has hoped for near him, say the things which none has thought beside him, were there one to be the god we claim in our rash word original, needs were he such a one as we call savage, one apart in woods and friendless deserts, planning by himself some first instinctive art, or questioning blank ignorance and wonder into thoughts.
And as for us, the men who live in days when what the West has whispered finds the East across an ocean in a breath of time; when the old era's painful manuscripts, too choice and rare for less than sage's needs, reach the new era changed to daily showers of schoolboys' text-books raining from the press; when we shake hands with our antipodes for being neighbour to us; when, like streets of the city where we are burghers, half the world is our admitted home, the other half our summer pleasure-grounds outside our walls; we, who are scholars of all times and lands, must be content, each several man, to feel we are no sovereign units each to rule the small world of himself, but knitted links, one drawing on the other in a chain— A bondage say, but have we not its worth, help, movement, and the chain grows lengthening on to span the universe?
A braggart whim, were it a possible, if any link, breaking away from hundreds side by side, would be a separate spangle. Yet, alack, sometimes we links get drawn we know not where, but think there's mud about us.
Still the chain lies in God's hands, though the sly devil comes and gives a crooked tug or so at times.
Links in a chain—my metaphor goes well, convinces me where first I was convinced— links in a chain, drawing each other on: but never yet material metaphor would fit a mind's whole thought, and the hitch comes where I bid mine good-bye.
Links in a chain, but what of hearts and wills that are in us, hopes, aims, beliefs? must we go measuring them Ay "the world says," "so other people think," dock our near tastes and natures to the shapes in common wear, make lay figures of our lives, as women of their bodies, to be decked and draped or trimmed and swathed or let go bare by strict indefinite despots out of sight?
Why, let us have that freedom we accord inanimate things, to grow each to his kind and to his best, cattle and servile beasts, to grow each to his kind and to his best; but we—oh, monstrous folly—we, designed each man so much unlike to all men else as one whole kind of beasts to other kinds, must train and pattern our reluctant souls into one liveried sameness! Oh,
I am tired! tired, tired, of this bland smiling slavery, monotonous waste of life.
And, while we fools are making curtsies and brave compliments to our rare century, and, courtierly, swaddling our strength in trammels of soft silk, the rotten depths grow rottener.
Every day more crime, more pain, more horror.
We are good no doubt, we "better classes"—oh, we boast our modern virtues in the dead men's teeth that were our fathers—we are earnest now, and charitable, and we wash ourselves, and have a very fair morality; most well brought up, in fine, of any men that any age has nurtured, and besides so equal in our manners and our coats: and then the classes which, though bettering, are not quite better yet, are the most shrewd, most apt, most honest, most intelligent, that ever the world saw yet.
True all of it for aught I know, some of it as I think, but underneath—great God, how many souls are born an hour as provender for hell!
Oh horrible days! our goodness growing ripe, a spreading scent of sweets, but with no power to disinfect the spreading foulnesses; and by mere birth-rate vice made multiplex!
From the murk lanes, and from the fetid courts, and from the shameful dens where poverty hobnobs with wolfish crime, out of the reek of lust and filth, out of the festering homes of pestilence and famine, the hoarse cry grows multitudinous, the cavernous cry of shame and ignorance hunger and greed become despair and devilishness…..
And we gravely thank God for culture and new lights!
Most horrible days: and we who know the worst, (or dream it, sitting in our easy chairs, sorry that all men have not easy chairs,) and would do somewhat, do it all amiss.
We pelt our broad-cast gold into the mire, then comes a scramble, foul grows fouler yet; with a Samaritan hand we feed and feed the daughters of the horseleech, drunkenness and dissolute idleness, that cry "give, give," sucking the lifeblood from our people's heart; we pension beggars, buy the burglar tools and the sot gin, and pay the harlot's rent: societies, committees, vestry rooms, with fingers in our purses, lavish wealth, past common counting, to keep up the tale of pauper legions and bribe new recruits, sow coin that, like the pestilent dragon's teeth, bear us a poisonous crop of human harm: all all endeavours go, like witches' prayers, backwards against the meaning, and bring down the counter-curse of blessings that were asked.
What should we do?
I know not; but I think there's moral in a hackneyed classic tale: when the great gulf still yawned, after the gold and treasures had been thrown, there came a man and gave himself, and then the great gulf closed.
But how? how?
And I know not; but I think if the strong pith and freshness of our lives were not so sucked and dried away, our span not maimed and dwarfed, our sight not warped untrue, by eating custom, petty disciplines, footlight perspectives cramped to suit our stage, if we were men, not types and portraitures and imitative shadows, some of us might learn— Learn, learn, and if we learned, saw by what boldness, or what sacrifice, or what endurance, or what vehemence, the goal of our beginning might be reached, the padded skeleton we call the world, that mumming glib Duessa who usurps the true world's rule and rights, would trip us up with half a league of silken barriers too soft for us to break and breaking us.
Oh, but I know it,
I, who time by time, fierce with the turbulent goodness of my youth, rushed to the clamourous call of new crusades, and time by time dropped baffled and worn weak before a rampart as of dancing pumps, a wind as if it blew from ladies' fans, till now I sit a weary man growing old among the ruins of his purposes, hopeless of any good to be by him.
Oh, with how full a hope, when morning glowed,
I donned my armour, who at night ride back foolish and broken!
I have set myself to fight with shadows stronger than a man, being impalpable and everywhere, and striking done no hurt but to myself; and I have ridden at ranks in adamant and fallen, strained and useless, under foot; and I have sieged impenetrable walls and waited day by day till I grew faint; and never have I triumphed in my cause, whether it were a great one, or a dream, a pettish whim, or too divinely large: for if I strove against contagious ills cankering the core of us or but at spots that fleck the smooth gloss of our drawingrooms, and if I rose to claim some wide desire of general good or but my own escape from some small prickings of our social gyves, always I was against the multitude, against strong Custom's army plodding on, unconquerable, calm, like a great stream whose power is that its waters drift one way.
Tired, tired—grown sick of battle and defeat, lying in harbour, like a man worn out by storms, and yet not patient of my rest: how if I went to some kind southern clime where, as they say, lost in long summer dreams, the mind grows careless with sun-drunkenness and sleeps and wakens softly like a child?
Would Madge be over sorry to come out into free loneliness with me a while? clear tints and sunshine, glowing seas and skies, beauty of mountains and of girdled plains, the strangeness of new peoples, change and rest, would these atone to her for so much lost which she counts precious?
For she loves that round of treadmill ceremonies, mimic tasks, we make our women's lives—Good heavens what work to set the creatures to, whom we declare God purposed for companions to us men… companions to each other only now, their business but to waste each other's time.
So much to do among us, and we spend so many human souls on only this! in petty actress parts in the long game (grave foolery like children playing school, setting themselves hard tasks and punishments,) that lasts till death and is Society: the sunlight working hours all chopped and chipped in stray ten minutes by some score of friends who, grieved their friend's not out, come rustling in by ones and twos to say the weather's fine; or paid away, poor soul, on pilgrimage reciprocally due to tell them so: each woman owing tax of half her life as plaything for the others' careless hours, each woman setting down her foot to hold her sister tightly to the tethered round, will she or nill she: all with rights on each greater than hers… and I might say than God's, since He made work the natural food of minds, cheated of which they dwindle and go dead like palsied limbs, and gives to each that sense of beasts, who know their food, to know its work, choosing the great or little. But myself, have I befooled the instinct by warped use? for is not the fruit rotten I have found by all my labours; nothing to the world and to me bitterness?
And I forget the strong joy of endeavour, and the fire of hope is burned out in me; all grows dull, rest is not rest and I am sick of toil:
I count the cost, and— Ready, love, at last?
Why, what a rosy June!
A flush of bloom sparkling with crystal dews—Ah silly one, you love these muslin roses better far than those that wear the natural dew of heaven.
I thought you prettier when, the other day, the children crowned you with the meadow-sweets:
I like to hear you teach them wild flowers' names and make them love them; but yourself— What's that? "The wild flowers in a room's hot stifling glare would die in half a minute." True enough: your muslin roses are the wiser wear.
Well,
I must see you start.
Draw your hood close: and are you shawled against this east wind's chills?
