THE COLOUR OF LIFE

Contents:

The Colour of LifeA Point Of BiographyCloudWinds of the WorldThe Honours of MortalityAt Monastery GatesRushes and ReedsEleonora DuseDonkey RacesGrassA Woman in GreySymmetry and IncidentThe Illusion of Historic TimeEyes

THE COLOUR OF LIFE

Red has been praised for its nobility as the colour of life. But thetrue colour of life is not red. Red is the colour of violence, or oflife broken open, edited, and published. Or if red is indeed the colourof life, it is so only on condition that it is not seen. Once fullyvisible, red is the colour of life violated, and in the act of betrayaland of waste. Red is the secret of life, and not the manifestationthereof. It is one of the things the value of which is secrecy, one ofthe talents that are to be hidden in a napkin. The true colour of lifeis the colour of the body, the colour of the covered red, the implicitand not explicit red of the living heart and the pulses. It is themodest colour of the unpublished blood. 

So bright, so light, so soft, so mingled, the gentle colour of life isoutdone by all the colours of the world. Its very beauty is that it iswhite, but less white than milk; brown, but less brown than earth; red, but less red than sunset or dawn. It is lucid, but less lucid than thecolour of lilies. It has the hint of gold that is in all fine colour;but in our latitudes the hint is almost elusive. Under Sicilian skies, indeed, it is deeper than old ivory; but under the misty blue of theEnglish zenith, and the warm grey of the London horizon, it is asdelicately flushed as the paler wild roses, out to their utmost, flat asstars, in the hedges of the end of June. 

For months together London does not see the colour of life in any mass. The human face does not give much of it, what with features, and beards, and the shadow of the top-hat and _chapeau melon_ of man, and of theveils of woman. Besides, the colour of the face is subject to a thousandinjuries and accidents. The popular face of the Londoner has soon lostits gold, its white, and the delicacy of its red and brown. We misslittle beauty by the fact that it is never seen freely in great numbersout-of-doors. You get it in some quantity when all the heads of a greatindoor meeting are turned at once upon a speaker; but it is only in theopen air, needless to say, that the colour of life is in perfection, inthe open air, "clothed with the sun, " whether the sunshine be golden anddirect, or dazzlingly diffused in grey. 

The little figure of the London boy it is that has restored to thelandscape the human colour of life. He is allowed to come out of all hisignominies, and to take the late colour of the midsummer north-westevening, on the borders of the Serpentine. At the stroke of eight hesheds the slough of nameless colours--all allied to the hues of dust, soot, and fog, which are the colours the world has chosen for itsboys--and he makes, in his hundreds, a bright and delicate flush betweenthe grey-blue water and the grey-blue sky. Clothed now with the sun, heis crowned by-and-by with twelve stars as he goes to bathe, and thereflection of an early moon is under his feet. 

So little stands between a gamin and all the dignities of Nature. Theyare so quickly restored. There seems to be nothing to do, but only alittle thing to undo. It is like the art of Eleonora Duse. The last andmost finished action of her intellect, passion, and knowledge is, as itwere, the flicking away of some insignificant thing mistaken for art byother actors, some little obstacle to the way and liberty of Nature. 

All the squalor is gone in a moment, kicked off with the second boot, andthe child goes shouting to complete the landscape with the lacking colourof life. You are inclined to wonder that, even undressed, he stillshouts with a Cockney accent. You half expect pure vowels and elasticsyllables from his restoration, his spring, his slenderness, hisbrightness, and his glow. Old ivory and wild rose in the deepeningmidsummer sun, he gives his colours to his world again. 

It is easy to replace man, and it will take no great time, where Naturehas lapsed, to replace Nature. It is always to do, by the happily easyway of doing nothing. The grass is always ready to grow in thestreets--and no streets could ask for a more charming finish than yourgreen grass. The gasometer even must fall to pieces unless it isrenewed; but the grass renews itself. There is nothing so remediable asthe work of modern man--"a thought which is also, " as Mr Pecksniff said, "very soothing. " And by remediable I mean, of course, destructible. Asthe bathing child shuffles off his garments--they are few, and one bracesuffices him--so the land might always, in reasonable time, shuffle offits yellow brick and purple slate, and all the things that collect aboutrailway stations. A single night almost clears the air of London. 

But if the colour of life looks so well in the rather sham scenery ofHyde Park, it looks brilliant and grave indeed on a real sea-coast. Tohave once seen it there should be enough to make a colourist. Omemorable little picture! The sun was gaining colour as it nearedsetting, and it set not over the sea, but over the land. The sea had thedark and rather stern, but not cold, blue of that aspect--the dark andnot the opal tints. The sky was also deep. Everything was verydefinite, without mystery, and exceedingly simple. The most luminousthing was the shining white of an edge of foam, which did not cease to bewhite because it was a little golden and a little rosy in the sunshine. It was still the whitest thing imaginable. And the next most luminousthing was the little child, also invested with the sun and the colour oflife. 

In the case of women, it is of the living and unpublished blood that theviolent world has professed to be delicate and ashamed. See the curioushistory of the political rights of woman under the Revolution. On thescaffold she enjoyed an ungrudged share in the fortunes of party. Political life might be denied her, but that seems a trifle when youconsider how generously she was permitted political death. She was tospin and cook for her citizen in the obscurity of her living hours; butto the hour of her death was granted a part in the largest interests, social, national, international. The blood wherewith she should, according to Robespierre, have blushed to be seen or heard in thetribune, was exposed in the public sight unsheltered by her veins. 

Against this there was no modesty. Of all privacies, the last and theinnermost--the privacy of death--was never allowed to put obstacles inthe way of public action for a public cause. Women might be, and were, duly suppressed when, by the mouth of Olympe de Gouges, they claimed a"right to concur in the choice of representatives for the formation ofthe laws"; but in her person, too, they were liberally allowed to bearpolitical responsibility to the Republic. Olympe de Gouges wasguillotined. Robespierre thus made her public and complete amends. 

A POINT OF BIOGRAPHY

There is hardly a writer now--of the third class probably not one--whohas not something sharp and sad to say about the cruelty of Nature; notone who is able to attempt May in the woods without a modern reference tothe manifold death and destruction with which the air, the branches, themosses are said to be full. 

But no one has paused in the course of these phrases to take notice ofthe curious and conspicuous fact of the suppression of death and of thedead throughout this landscape of manifest life. Where are they--all thedying, all the dead, of the populous woods? Where do they hide theirlittle last hours, where are they buried? Where is the violenceconcealed? Under what gay custom and decent habit? You may see, it istrue, an earth-worm in a robin's beak, and may hear a thrush breaking asnail's shell; but these little things are, as it were, passed by with akind of twinkle for apology, as by a well-bred man who does openly somelittle solecism which is too slight for direct mention, and which ameaner man might hide or avoid. Unless you are very modern indeed, youtwinkle back at the bird. 

But otherwise there is nothing visible of the havoc and the prey andplunder. It is certain that much of the visible life passes violentlyinto other forms, flashes without pause into another flame; but not all. Amid all the killing there must be much dying. There are, for instance, few birds of prey left in our more accessible counties now, and manythousands of birds must die uncaught by a hawk and unpierced. But iftheir killing is done so modestly, so then is their dying also. Shortlives have all these wild things, but there are innumerable flocks ofthem always alive; they must die, then, in innumerable flocks. And yetthey keep the millions of the dead out of sight. 

Now and then, indeed, they may be betrayed. It happened in a coldwinter. The late frosts were so sudden, and the famine was so complete, that the birds were taken unawares. The sky and the earth conspired thatFebruary to make known all the secrets; everything was published. Deathwas manifest. Editors, when a great man dies, are not more resolute thanwas the frost of '95. 

The birds were obliged to die in public. They were surprised and forcedto do thus. They became like Shelley in the monument which the art andimagination of England combined to raise to his memory at Oxford. 

Frost was surely at work in both cases, and in both it wrought wrong. There is a similarity of unreason in betraying the death of a bird and inexhibiting the death of Shelley. The death of a soldier--_passe__encore_. But the death of Shelley was not his goal. And the death ofthe birds is so little characteristic of them that, as has just beensaid, no one in the world is aware of their dying, except only in thecase of birds in cages, who, again, are compelled to die withobservation. The woodland is guarded and kept by a rule. There is nodisplay of the battlefield in the fields. There is no tale of the game-bag, no boast. The hunting goes on, but with strange decorum. You maypass a fine season under the trees, and see nothing dead except here andthere where a boy has been by, or a man with a trap, or a man with a gun. There is nothing like a butcher's shop in the woods. 

But the biographers have always had other ways than those of the wildworld. They will not have a man to die out of sight. I have turned overscores of "Lives, " not to read them, but to see whether now and againthere might be a "Life" which was not more emphatically a death. Butthere never is a modern biography that has taken the hint of Nature. Oneand all, these books have the disproportionate illness, the death out ofall scale. 

Even more wanton than the disclosure of a death is that of a mortalillness. If the man had recovered, his illness would have been rightlyhis own secret. But because he did not recover, it is assumed to be newsfor the first comer. Which of us would suffer the details of anyphysical suffering, over and done in our own lives, to be displayed anddescribed? This is not a confidence we have a mind to make; and no oneis authorised to ask for attention or pity on our behalf. The story ofpain ought not to be told of us, seeing that by us it would assuredly notbe told. 

There is only one other thing that concerns a man still more exclusively, and that is his own mental illness, or the dreams and illusions of a longdelirium. When he is in common language not himself, amends should bemade for so bitter a paradox; he should be allowed such solitude as ispossible to the alienated spirit; he should be left to the "not himself, "and spared the intrusion against which he can so ill guard that he couldhardly have even resented it. 

The double helplessness of delusion and death should keep the door ofRossetti's house, for example, and refuse him to the reader. His mortalillness had nothing to do with his poetry. Some rather affectedobjection is taken every now and then to the publication of some facts(others being already well known) in the life of Shelley. Nevertheless, these are all, properly speaking, biography. What is not biography isthe detail of the accident of the manner of his death, the detail of hiscremation. Or if it was to be told--told briefly--it was certainly notfor marble. Shelley's death had no significance, except inasmuch as hedied young. It was a detachable and disconnected incident. Ah, that wasa frost of fancy and of the heart that used it so, dealing with aninsignificant fact, and conferring a futile immortality. Those are ill-named biographers who seem to think that a betrayal of the ways of deathis a part of their ordinary duty, and that if material enough for a lastchapter does not lie to their hand they are to search it out. They, ofall survivors, are called upon, in honour and reason, to look upon adeath with more composure. To those who loved the dead closely, this is, for a time, impossible. To them death becomes, for a year, disproportionate. Their dreams are fixed upon it night by night. Theyhave, in those dreams, to find the dead in some labyrinth; they have tomourn his dying and to welcome his recovery in such a mingling ofdistress and of always incredulous happiness as is not known even todreams save in that first year of separation. But they are notbiographers. 

If death is the privacy of the woods, it is the more conspicuously secretbecause it is their only privacy. You may watch or may surpriseeverything else. The nest is retired, not hidden. The chase goes oneverywhere. It is wonderful how the perpetual chase seems to cause noperpetual fear. The songs are all audible. Life is undefended, careless, nimble and noisy. 

It is a happy thing that minor artists have ceased, or almost ceased, topaint dead birds. Time was when they did it continually in that BritishSchool of water-colour art, stippled, of which surrounding nations, itwas agreed, were envious. They must have killed their bird to paint him, for he is not to be caught dead. A bird is more easily caught alive thandead. 

A poet, on the contrary, is easily--too easily--caught dead. Minorartists now seldom stipple the bird on its back, but a good sculptor anda University together modelled their Shelley on his back, unessentiallydrowned; and everybody may read about the sick mind of Dante Rossetti. 

CLOUD

During a part of the year London does not see the clouds. Not to see theclear sky might seem her chief loss, but that is shared by the rest ofEngland, and is, besides, but a slight privation. Not to see the clearsky is, elsewhere, to see the cloud. But not so in London. You may gofor a week or two at a time, even though you hold your head up as youwalk, and even though you have windows that really open, and yet youshall see no cloud, or but a single edge, the fragment of a form. 

Guillotine windows never wholly open, but are filled with a doubled glasstowards the sky when you open them towards the street. They are, therefore, a sure sign that for all the years when no other windows wereused in London, nobody there cared much for the sky, or even knew so muchas whether there were a sky. 

But the privation of cloud is indeed a graver loss than the world knows. Terrestrial scenery is much, but it is not all. Men go in search of it;but the celestial scenery journeys to them. It goes its way round theworld. It has no nation, it costs no weariness, it knows no bonds. Theterrestrial scenery--the tourist's--is a prisoner compared with this. Thetourist's scenery moves indeed, but only like Wordsworth's maiden, withearth's diurnal course; it is made as fast as its own graves. And forits changes it depends upon the mobility of the skies. The mere greenflushing of its own sap makes only the least of its varieties; for thegreater it must wait upon the visits of the light. Spring and autumn areinconsiderable events in a landscape compared with the shadows of acloud. 

The cloud controls the light, and the mountains on earth appear or fadeaccording to its passage; they wear so simply, from head to foot, theluminous grey or the emphatic purple, as the cloud permits, that theirown local colour and their own local season are lost and cease, effacedbefore the all-important mood of the cloud. 

The sea has no mood except that of the sky and of its winds. It is thecloud that, holding the sun's rays in a sheaf as a giant holds a handfulof spears, strikes the horizon, touches the extreme edge with a delicaterevelation of light, or suddenly puts it out and makes the foregroundshine. 

Every one knows the manifest work of the cloud when it descends andpartakes in the landscape obviously, lies half-way across the mountainslope, stoops to rain heavily upon the lake, and blots out part of theview by the rough method of standing in front of it. But its greatestthings are done from its own place, aloft. Thence does it distribute thesun. 

Thence does it lock away between the hills and valleys more mysteriesthan a poet conceals, but, like him, not by interception. Thence itwrites out and cancels all the tracery of Monte Rosa, or lets the pencilsof the sun renew them. Thence, hiding nothing, and yet making dark, itsheds deep colour upon the forest land of Sussex, so that, seen from thehills, all the country is divided between grave blue and graver sunlight. 

And all this is but its influence, its secondary work upon the world. Itsown beauty is unaltered when it has no earthly beauty to improve. It isalways great: above the street, above the suburbs, above the gas-worksand the stucco, above the faces of painted white houses--the paintedsurfaces that have been devised as the only things able to vulgariselight, as they catch it and reflect it grotesquely from their importunategloss. This is to be well seen on a sunny evening in Regent Street. 

Even here the cloud is not so victorious as when it towers above somelittle landscape of rather paltry interest--a conventional river heavywith water, gardens with their little evergreens, walks, and shrubberies;and thick trees impervious to the light, touched, as the novelists alwayshave it, with "autumn tints. " High over these rises, in the enormousscale of the scenery of clouds, what no man expected--an heroic sky. Fewof the things that were ever done upon earth are great enough to be doneunder such a heaven. It was surely designed for other days. It is foran epic world. Your eyes sweep a thousand miles of cloud. What are thedistances of earth to these, and what are the distances of the clear andcloudless sky? The very horizons of the landscape are near, for theround world dips so soon; and the distances of the mere clear sky areunmeasured--you rest upon nothing until you come to a star, and the staritself is immeasurable. 

But in the sky of "sunny Alps" of clouds the sight goes farther, withconscious flight, than it could ever have journeyed otherwise. Man wouldnot have known distance veritably without the clouds. There aremountains indeed, precipices and deeps, to which those of the earth arepigmy. Yet the sky-heights, being so far off, are not overpowering bydisproportion, like some futile building fatuously made too big for thehuman measure. The cloud in its majestic place composes with a littlePerugino tree. For you stand or stray in the futile building, while thecloud is no mansion for man, and out of reach of his limitations. 

The cloud, moreover, controls the sun, not merely by keeping the custodyof his rays, but by becoming the counsellor of his temper. The cloudveils an angry sun, or, more terribly, lets fly an angry ray, suddenlybright upon tree and tower, with iron-grey storm for a background. Orwhen anger had but threatened, the cloud reveals him, gentle beyond hope. It makes peace, constantly, just before sunset. 

It is in the confidence of the winds, and wears their colours. There isa heavenly game, on south-west wind days, when the clouds are bowled by abreeze from behind the evening. They are round and brilliant, and comeleaping up from the horizon for hours. This is a frolic and haphazardsky. 

All unlike this is the sky that has a centre, and stands composed aboutit. As the clouds marshalled the earthly mountains, so the clouds inturn are now ranged. The tops of all the celestial Andes aloft are sweptat once by a single ray, warmed with a single colour. Promontory afterleague-long promontory of a stiller Mediterranean in the sky is calledout of mist and grey by the same finger. The cloudland is very great, but a sunbeam makes all its nations and continents sudden with light. 

All this is for the untravelled. All the winds bring him this scenery. It is only in London, for part of the autumn and part of the winter, thatthe unnatural smoke-fog comes between. And for many and many a day noLondon eye can see the horizon, or the first threat of the cloud like aman's hand. There never was a great painter who had not exquisitehorizons, and if Corot and Crome were right, the Londoner loses a greatthing. 

He loses the coming of the cloud, and when it is high in air he loses itsshape. A cloud-lover is not content to see a snowy and rosy head pilinginto the top of the heavens; he wants to see the base and the altitude. The perspective of a cloud is a great part of its design--whether it liesso that you can look along the immense horizontal distances of its floor, or whether it rears so upright a pillar that you look up its mountainsteeps in the sky as you look at the rising heights of a mountain thatstands, with you, on the earth. 

The cloud has a name suggesting darkness; nevertheless, it is not merelythe guardian of the sun's rays and their director. It is the sun'streasurer; it holds the light that the world has lost. We talk ofsunshine and moonshine, but not of cloud-shine, which is yet one of theilluminations of our skies. A shining cloud is one of the most majesticof all secondary lights. If the reflecting moon is the bride, this isthe friend of the bridegroom. 

Needless to say, the cloud of a thunderous summer is the most beautifulof all. It has spaces of a grey for which there is no name, and no othercloud looks over at a vanishing sun from such heights of blue air. Theshower-cloud, too, with its thin edges, comes across the sky with soinfluential a flight that no ship going out to sea can be better worthwatching. The dullest thing perhaps in the London streets is that peopletake their rain there without knowing anything of the cloud that dropsit. It is merely rain, and means wetness. The shower-cloud there haslimits of time, but no limits of form, and no history whatever. It hasnot come from the clear edge of the plain to the south, and will notshoulder anon the hill to the north. The rain, for this city, hardlycomes or goes; it does but begin and stop. No one looks after it on thepath of its retreat. 

WINDS OF THE WORLD

Every wind is, or ought to be, a poet; but one is classic and convertseverything in his day co-unity; another is a modern man, whose wordsclothe his thoughts, as the modern critics used to say prettily in theearly sixties, and therefore are separable. This wind, again, has astyle, and that wind a mere manner. Nay, there are breezes from the east-south-east, for example, that have hardly even a manner. You can hardlyname them unless you look at the weather vane. So they do not convinceyou by voice or colour of breath; you place their origin and assign thema history according as the hesitating arrow points on the top of yonderill-designed London spire. 

The most certain and most conquering of all is the south-west wind. Youdo not look to the weather-vane to decide what shall be the style of yourgreeting to his morning. There is no arbitrary rule of courtesy betweenyou and him, and you need no arrow to point to his distinctions, and toindicate to you the right manner of treating such a visitant. 

He prepares the dawn. While it is still dark the air is warned of hispresence, and before the window was opened he was already in the room. His sun--for the sun is his--rises in a south-west mood, with a bloom onthe blue, the grey, or the gold. When the south-west is cold, the coldis his own cold--round, blunt, full, and gradual in its very strength. Itis a fresh cold, that comes with an approach, and does not challenge youin the manner of an unauthorised stranger, but instantly gets your leave, and even a welcome to your house of life. He follows your breath in atyour throat, and your eyes are open to let him in, even when he is cold. Your blood cools, but does not hide from him. 

He has a splendid way with his sky. In his flight, which is that, not ofa bird, but of a flock of birds, he flies high and low at once: high withhis higher clouds, that keep long in the sight of man, seeming to moveslowly; and low with the coloured clouds that breast the hills and arenear to the tree-tops. These the south-west wind tosses up from his softhorizon, round and successive. They are tinted somewhat like ripe clover-fields, or like hay-fields just before the cutting, when all the grass isin flower, and they are, oftener than all other clouds, in shadow. Theselow-lying flocks are swift and brief; the wind casts them before him, from the western verge to the eastern. 

Corot has painted so many south-west winds that one might questionwhether he ever painted, in his later manner at least, any others. Hisskies are thus in the act of flight, with lower clouds outrunning thehigher, the farther vapours moving like a fleet out at sea, and thenearer like dolphins. In his "Classical Landscape: Italy, " the masterhas indeed for once a sky that seems at anchor, or at least that moveswith "no pace perceived. " The vibrating wings are folded, and Corot'swind, that flew through so many springs, summers, and Septembers for him(he was seldom a painter of very late autumn), that was mingled with somany aspen-leaves, that strewed his forests with wood for the gatherer, and blew the broken lights into the glades, is charmed into stillness, and the sky into another kind of immortality. Nor are the trees in thisantique landscape the trees so long intimate with Corot's south-westwind, so often entangled with his uncertain twilights. They are as quietas the cloud, and such as the long and wild breezes of Romance have nevershaken or enlaced. 

Upon all our islands this south-west wind is the sea wind. But elsewherethere are sea winds that are not from the south-west. They, too, nonethe less, are conquerors. They, too, are always strong, compelling windsthat take possession of the light, the shadow, the sun, moon, and stars, and constrain them all alike to feel the sea. Not a field, not ahillside, on a sea-wind day, but shines with some soft sea-lights. Themoon's little boat tosses on a sea-wind night. 

The south-west wind takes the high Italian coasts. He gathers the ilexwoods together and throngs them close, as a sheep-dog gathers the sheep. They crowd for shelter, and a great wall, leaning inland also, with itsstrong base to the sea, receives them. It is blank and sunny, and thetrees within are sunny and dark, serried, and their tops swept andflattened by months of sea-storms. On the farther side there aregardens--gardens that have in their midst those quietest things in allthe world and most windless, box-hedges and ponds. The gardens takeshelter behind the scared and hurried ilex woods, and the sea-wind sparesthem and breaks upon the mountain. But the garden also is his, and hiswild warm days have filled it with orange-trees and roses, and have givenall the abundant charm to its gay neglect, to its grass-grown terraces, and to all its lapsed, forsaken, and forgotten dainties. 

Nothing of the nature in this seaward Italy would be so beautiful withoutthe touch of man and of the sea gales. 

When the south-west wind brings his rain he brings it with the majesticonset announced by his breath. And when the light follows, it comes fromhis own doorway in the verge. His are the opened evenings after a dayshut down with cloud. He fills the air with innumerable particles ofmoisture that scatter and bestow the sun. There are no other days likehis, of so universal a harmony, so generous. 

The north wind has his own landscape, too; but the east wind never. Theaspect which he gives to the day is not all his own. The sunshine issweet in spite of him. The clouds go under his whip, but they havekinder greys than should be the colours of his cold. Not on an east-windday are these races in heaven, for the clouds are all far off. His rainis angry, and it flies against the sunset. The world is not one in hisreign, but rather there is a perpetual revolt or difference. The lightsand shadows are not all his. The waxing and waning hours aredisaffected. He has not a great style, and does not convince the day. 

All the four winds are brave, and not the less brave because, on theirway through town, they are betrayed for a moment into taking part in anypaltriness that may be there. On their way from the Steppes to theAtlantic they play havoc with the nerves of very insignificant people. Apart, as it were, of every gale that starts in the far north-east findsits goal in the breath of a reluctant citizen. 

You will meet a wind of the world nimble and eager in a sorry street. Butthese are only accidents of the way--the winds go free again. Those thatdo not go free, but close their course, are those that are breathed bythe nostrils of living creatures. A great flock of those wild birds cometo a final pause in London, and fan the fires of life with those wings inthe act of folding. In the blood and breath of a child close theinfluences of continent and sea. 

THE HONOURS OF MORTALITY

The brilliant talent which has quite lately and quite suddenly arisen, todevote itself to the use of the day or of the week, in illustratedpapers--the enormous production of art in black and white--is assuredly aconfession that the Honours of Mortality are worth working for. Fiftyyears ago, men worked for the honours of immortality; these were thecommonplace of their ambition; they declined to attend to the beauty ofthings of use that were destined to be broken and worn out, and theylooked forward to surviving themselves by painting bad pictures; so thatwhat to do with their bad pictures in addition to our own has become theproblem of the nation and of the householder alike. To-day men havebegan to learn that their sons will be grateful to them for few bequests. Art consents at last to work upon the tissue and the china that aredoomed to the natural and necessary end--destruction; and art shows amost dignified alacrity to do her best, daily, for the "process, " and foroblivion. 

Doubtless this abandonment of hopes so large at once and so cheap coststhe artist something; nay, it implies an acceptance of the inevitablethat is not less than heroic. And the reward has been in the singularand manifest increase of vitality in this work which is done for so shorta life. Fittingly indeed does life reward the acceptance of death, inasmuch as to die is to have been alive. There is a real circulation ofblood-quick use, brief beauty, abolition, recreation. The honour of theday is for ever the honour of that day. It goes into the treasury ofthings that are honestly and--completely ended and done with. And whencan so happy a thing be said of a lifeless oil-painting? Who of the wisewould hesitate? To be honourable for one day--one named and dated day, separate from all other days of the ages--or to be for an unlimited timetedious?

AT MONASTERY GATES

No woman has ever crossed the inner threshold, or shall ever cross it, unless a queen, English or foreign, should claim her privilege. Therefore, if a woman records here the slighter things visible of themonastic life, it is only because she was not admitted to see more thanbeautiful courtesy and friendliness were able to show her in guest-houseand garden. 

The Monastery is of fresh-looking Gothic, by Pugin--the first of thedynasty: it is reached by the white roads of a limestone country, andbacked by a young plantation, and it gathers its group of buildings in acleft high up among the hills of Wales. The brown habit is this, andthese are the sandals, that come and go by hills of finer, sharper, andloftier line, edging the dusk and dawn of an Umbrian sky. Just such aVia Crucis climbs the height above Orta, and from the foot of its finalcrucifix you can see the sunrise touch the top of Monte Rosa, while theencircled lake below is cool with the last of the night. The same orderof friars keep that sub-Alpine Monte Sacro, and the same have set theKreuzberg beyond Bonn with the same steep path by the same fourteenchapels, facing the Seven Mountains and the Rhine. 

Here, in North Wales, remote as the country is, with the wheat green overthe blunt hill-tops, and the sky vibrating with larks, a long wing ofsmoke lies round the horizon. The country, rather thinly and languidlycultivated above, has a valuable sub-soil, and is burrowed with mines;the breath of pit and factory, out of sight, thickens the lower sky, andlies heavily over the sands of Dee. It leaves the upper blue clear andthe head of Orion, but dims the flicker of Sirius and shortens the steadyray of the evening star. The people scattered about are not miningpeople, but half-hearted agriculturists, and very poor. Their cottagesare rather cabins; not a tiled roof is in the country, but the slateshave taken some beauty with time, having dips and dimples, and grass upontheir edges. The walls are all thickly whitewashed, which is a pleasureto see. How willingly would one swish the harmless whitewash over morethan half the colour--over all the chocolate and all the blue--with whichthe buildings of the world are stained! You could not wish for a better, simpler, or fresher harmony than whitewash makes with the slight sunshineand the bright grey of an English sky. 

The grey-stone, grey-roofed monastery looks young in one sense--it ismodern; and the friars look young in another--they are like theirbrothers of an earlier time. No one, except the journalists ofyesterday, would spend upon them those tedious words, "quaint, " or "oldworld. " No such weary adjectives are spoken here, unless it be by theexcursionists. 

With large aprons tied over their brown habits, the Lay Brothers workupon their land, planting parsnips in rows, or tending a prosperous bee-farm. A young friar, who sang the High Mass yesterday, is gaily hangingthe washed linen in the sun. A printing press, and a machine whichslices turnips, are at work in an outhouse, and the yard thereby isguarded by a St Bernard, whose single evil deed was that under one of theobscure impulses of a dog's heart--atoned for by long and self-consciousremorse--he bit the poet; and tried, says one of the friars, to makedoggerel of him. The poet, too, lives at the monastery gates, and onmonastery ground, in a seclusion which the tidings of the sequence of hiseditions hardly reaches. There is no disturbing renown to be got amongthe cabins of the Flintshire hills. Homeward, over the verge, from othervalleys, his light figure flits at nightfall, like a moth. 

To the coming and going of the friars, too, the village people havebecome well used, and the infrequent excursionists, for lack ofintelligence and of any knowledge that would refer to history, look atthem without obtrusive curiosity. It was only from a Salvation Army girlthat you heard the brutal word of contempt. She had come to the placewith some companions, and with them was trespassing, as she was welcometo do, within the monastery grounds. She stood, a figure for Bournemouthpier, in her grotesque bonnet, and watched the son of the Umbriansaint--the friar who walks among the Giotto frescoes at Assisi andbetween the cypresses of Bello Sguardo, and has paced the centuriescontinually since the coming of the friars. One might have asked of herthe kindness of a fellow-feeling. She and he alike were so habited as toshow the world that their life was aloof from its "idle business. " Bysome such phrase, at least, the friar would assuredly have attempted toinclude her in any spiritual honours ascribed to him. Or one might haveasked of her the condescension of forbearance. "Only fancy, " said theSalvation Army girl, watching the friar out of sight, "only fancy makingsuch a fool of one's self!"

The great hood of the friars, which is drawn over the head in Zurbaran'secstatic picture, is turned to use when the friars are busy. As a pocketit relieves the over-burdened hands. A bottle of the local white winemade by the brotherhood at Genoa, and sent to this house by the West, iscarried in the cowl as a present to the stranger at the gates. Thefriars tell how a brother resolved, at Shrovetide, to make pancakes, andnot only to make, but also to toss them. Those who chanced to be in theroom stood prudently aside, and the brother tossed boldly. But that wasthe last that was seen of his handiwork. Victor Hugo sings in _La__Legende des Siecles_ of disappearance as the thing which no creatureis able to achieve: here the impossibility seemed to be accomplished byquite an ordinary and a simple pancake. It was clean gone, and there wasan end of it. Nor could any explanation of this ceasing of a pancakefrom the midst of the visible world be so much as divined by thespectators. It was only when the brother, in church, knelt down tomeditate and drew his cowl about his head that the accident wasexplained. 

Every midnight the sweet contralto bells call the community, who get upgaily to this difficult service. Of all duties this one never grows easyor familiar, and therefore never habitual. It is something to have foundbut one act aloof from habit. It is not merely that the friars overcomethe habit of sleep. The subtler point is that they can never acquire thehabit of sacrificing sleep. What art, what literature, or what life butwould gain a secret security by such a point of perpetual freshness andperpetual initiative? It is not possible to get up at midnight without awill that is new night by night. So should the writer's work be done, and, with an intention perpetually unique, the poet's. 

The contralto bells have taught these Western hills the "Angelus" of theFrench fields, and the hour of night--_l'ora di notte_--which ringswith so melancholy a note from the village belfries on the Adriaticlittoral, when the latest light is passing. It is the prayer for thedead: "Out of the depths have I cried unto Thee, O Lord. "

The little flocks of novices, on paschal evenings, are folded to thesound of that evening prayer. The care of them is the central work ofthe monastery, which is placed in so remote a country because it isprincipally a place of studies. So much elect intellect and strength ofheart withdrawn from the traffic of the world! True, the friars are notdoing the task which Carlyle set mankind as a refuge from despair. These"bearded counsellors of God" keep their cells, read, study, suffer, sing, hold silence; whereas they might be "operating"--beautiful word!--uponthe Stock Exchange, or painting Academy pictures, or making speeches, orreluctantly jostling other men for places. They might be among theinvoluntary busybodies who are living by futile tasks the need whereof isa discouraged fiction. There is absolutely no limit to the superfluousactivities, to the art, to the literature, implicitly renounced by thedwellers within such walls as these. The output--again a beautifulword--of the age is lessened by this abstention. None the less hopes thestranger and pilgrim to pause and knock once again upon those monasterygates. 

RUSHES AND REEDS

Taller than the grass and lower than the trees, there is another growththat feels the implicit spring. It had been more abandoned to winterthan even the short grass shuddering under a wave of east wind, more thanthe dumb trees. For the multitudes of sedges, rushes, canes, and reedswere the appropriate lyre of the cold. On them the nimble winds playedtheir dry music. They were part of the winter. It looked through themand spoke through them. They were spears and javelins in array to thesound of the drums of the north. 

The winter takes fuller possession of these things than of those thatstand solid. The sedges whistle his tune. They let the colour of hislight look through--low-flying arrows and bright bayonets of winter day. 

The multitudes of all reeds and rushes grow out of bounds. They belongto the margins of lands, the space between the farms and the river, beyond the pastures, and where the marsh in flower becomes perilousfooting for the cattle. They are the fringe of the low lands, the signof streams. They grow tall between you and the near horizon of flatlands. They etch their sharp lines upon the sky; and near them growflowers of stature, including the lofty yellow lily. 

Our green country is the better for the grey, soft, cloudy darkness ofthe sedge, and our full landscape is the better for the distinction ofits points, its needles, and its resolute right lines. 

Ours is a summer full of voices, and therefore it does not so need thesound of rushes; but they are most sensitive to the stealthy breezes, andbetray the passing of a wind that even the tree-tops knew not of. Sometimes it is a breeze unfelt, but the stiff sedges whisper it along amile of marsh. To the strong wind they bend, showing the silver of theirsombre little tassels as fish show the silver of their sides turning inthe pathless sea. They are unanimous. A field of tall flowers tossesmany ways in one warm gale, like the many lovers of a poet who have athousand reasons for their love; but the rushes, more strongly tethered, are swept into a single attitude, again and again, at every renewal ofthe storm. 

Between the pasture and the wave, the many miles of rushes and reeds inEngland seem to escape that insistent ownership which has so changed(except for a few forests and downs) the aspect of England, and has infact made the landscape. Cultivation makes the landscape elsewhere, rather than ownership, for the boundaries in the south are notconspicuous; but here it is ownership. But the rushes are a gipsypeople, amongst us, yet out of reach. The landowner, if he is rather agross man, believes these races of reeds are his. But if he is a man ofsensibility, depend upon it he has his interior doubts. His property, hesays, goes right down to the centre of the earth, in the shape of awedge; how high up it goes into the air it would be difficult to say, andobviously the shape of the wedge must be continued in the direction ofincrease. We may therefore proclaim his right to the clouds and theircargo. It is true that as his ground game is apt to go upon hisneighbour's land to be shot, so the clouds may now and then spend hisshowers elsewhere. But the great thing is the view. A well-appointedcountry-house sees nothing out of the windows that is not its own. Buthe who tells you so, and proves it to you by his own view, is certainlydisturbed by an unspoken doubt, if his otherwise contented eyes shouldhappen to be caught by a region of rushes. The water is his--he had thepond made; or the river, for a space, and the fish, for a time. But thebulrushes, the reeds! One wonders whether a very thorough landowner, buta sensitive one, ever resolved that he would endure this sort of thing nolonger, and went out armed and had a long acre of sedges scythed todeath. 

They are probably outlaws. They are dwellers upon thresholds and uponmargins, as the gipsies make a home upon the green edges of a road. Nowild flowers, however wild, are rebels. The copses and their primrosesare good subjects, the oaks are loyal. Now and then, though, one has akind of suspicion of some of the other kinds of trees--the Corot trees. Standing at a distance from the more ornamental trees, from those offuller foliage, and from all the indeciduous shrubs and the conifers(manifest property, every one), two or three translucent aspens, withwhich the very sun and the breath of earth are entangled, have sometimesseemed to wear a certain look--an extra-territorial look, let us call it. They are suspect. One is inclined to shake a doubtful head at them. 

And the landowner feels it. He knows quite well, though he may not sayso, that the Corot trees, though they do not dwell upon margins, are inspirit almost as extraterritorial as the rushes. In proof of this hevery often cuts them down, out of the view, once for all. The view isbetter, as a view, without them. Though their roots are in his groundright enough, there is a something about their heads--. But the reasonhe gives for wishing them away is merely that they are "thin. " A mandoes not always say everything. 

ELEONORA DUSE

The Italian woman is very near to Nature; so is true drama. 

Acting is not to be judged like some other of the arts, and praised for a"noble convention. " Painting, indeed, is not praised amiss with thatword; painting is obviously an art that exists by its convention--theconvention is the art. But far otherwise is it with the art of acting, where there is no representative material; where, that is, the man is hisown material, and there is nothing between. With the actor the style isthe man, in another, a more immediate, and a more obvious sense than wasever intended by that saying. Therefore we may allow the critic--and notaccuse him of reaction--to speak of the division between art and Naturein the painting of a landscape, but we cannot let him say the same thingsof acting. Acting has a technique, but no convention. 

Once for all, then, to say that acting reaches the point of Nature, andtouches it quick, is to say all. In other arts imitation is more or lessfatuous, illusion more or less vulgar. But acting is, at its less good, imitation; at its best, illusion; at its worst, and when it ceases to bean art, convention. 

But the idea that acting is conventional has inevitably come about inEngland. For it is, in fact, obliged, with us, to defeat and destroyitself by taking a very full, entire, tedious, and impotent convention; acomplete body of convention; a convention of demonstrativeness--of voiceand manners intended to be expressive, and, in particular, a whole weakand unimpulsive convention of gesture. The English manners of real lifeare so negative and still as to present no visible or audible drama; anddrama is for hearing and for vision. Therefore our acting (granting thatwe have any acting, which is granting much) has to create its littledifferent and complementary world, and to make the division of "art" fromNature--the division which, in this one art, is fatal. 

This is one simple and sufficient reason why we have no considerableacting; though we may have more or less interesting and energetic orgraceful conventions that pass for art. But any student of internationalcharacter knows well enough that there are also supplementary reasons ofweight. For example, it is bad to make a conventional world of thestage, but it is doubly bad to make it badly--which, it must be granted, we do. When we are anything of the kind, we are intellectual rather thanintelligent; whereas outward-streaming intelligence makes the actor. Weare pre-occupied, and therefore never single, never wholly possessed bythe one thing at a time; and so forth. 

On the other hand, Italians are expressive. They are so possessed by theone thing at a time as never to be habitual in any lifeless sense. Theyhave no habits to overcome by something arbitrary and intentional. Accordingly, you will find in the open-air theatre of many an Italianprovince, away from the high roads, an art of drama that our capitalcannot show, so high is it, so fine, so simple, so complete, so direct, so momentary and impassioned, so full of singleness and of multitudinousimpulses of passion. 

Signora Duse is not different in kind from these unrenowned. What theyare, she is in a greater degree. She goes yet further, and yet closer. She has an exceptionally large and liberal intelligence. If lesseractors give themselves entirely to the part, and to the large moment ofthe part, she, giving herself, has more to give. 

Add to this nature of hers that she stages herself and her acting withsingular knowledge and ease, and has her technique so thoroughly as to beable to forget it--for this is the one only thing that is the better forhabit, and ought to be habitual. There is but one passage of her meretechnique in which she fails so to slight it. It is in the long exchangeof stove-side talk between Nora and the other woman of "The Doll'sHouse. " Signora Duse may have felt some misgivings as to the effect of adialogue having so little symmetry, such half-hearted feeling, and, in aword, so little visible or audible drama as this. Needless to say, themisgiving is not apparent; what is too apparent is simply the technique. For instance, she shifts her position with evident system and notableskill. The whole conversation becomes a dance of change andcounterchange of place. 

Nowhere else does the perfect technical habit lapse, and nowhere at alldoes the habit of acting exist with her. 

I have spoken of this actress's nationality and of her womanhoodtogether. They are inseparable. Nature is the only authentic art of thestage, and the Italian woman is natural: none other so natural and sojustified by her nature as Eleonora Duse; but all, as far as their naturegoes, natural. Moreover, they are women freer than other Europeans fromthe minor vanities. Has any one yet fully understood how her liberty inthis respect gives to the art of Signora Duse room and action? Hercountrywomen have no anxious vanities, because, for one reason, they aregenerally "sculpturesque, " and are very little altered by mere accidentsof dress or arrangement. Such as they are, they are so once for all;whereas, the turn of a curl makes all the difference with women of lessgrave physique. Italians are not uneasy. 

Signora Duse has this immunity, but she has a far nobler deliverance fromvanities, in her own peculiar distance and dignity. She lets herbeautiful voice speak, unwatched and unchecked, from the very life of themoment. It runs up into the high notes of indifference, or, higherstill, into those of _ennui_, as in the earlier scenes of _Divorcons_; orit grows sweet as summer with joy, or cracks and breaks outright, out ofall music, and out of all control. Passion breaks it so for her. 

As for her inarticulate sounds, which are the more intimate and the truerwords of her meaning, they, too, are Italian and natural. English women, for instance, do not make them. They are sounds _a bouche fermee_, at once private and irrepressible. They are not demonstrations intendedfor the ears of others; they are her own. Other actresses, even English, and even American, know how to make inarticulate cries, with open mouth;Signora Duse's noise is not a cry; it is her very thought audible--thethought of the woman she is playing, who does not at every moment giveexact words to her thought, but does give it significant sound. 

When _la femme de Claude_ is trapped by the man who has come insearch of the husband's secret, and when she is obliged to sit and listento her own evil history as he tells it her, she does not interrupt thetelling with the outcries that might be imagined by a lesser actress, sheaccompanies it. Her lips are close, but her throat is vocal. None whoheard it can forget the speech-within-speech of one of thesecomprehensive noises. It was when the man spoke, for her furtherconfusion, of the slavery to which she had reduced her lovers; shefollowed him, aloof, with a twang of triumph. 

If Parisians say, as they do, that she makes a bad Parisienne, it isbecause she can be too nearly a woman untamed. They have accused her oflack of elegance--in that supper scene of _La Dame aux Camelias_, for instance; taking for ill-breeding, in her Marguerite, that which isItalian merely and simple. Whether, again, Cyprienne, in _Divorcons_, can at all be considered a lady may be a question; but this is quiteunquestionable--that she is rather more a lady, and not less, whenSignora Duse makes her a savage. But really the result is not at allParisian. 

It seems possible that the French sense does not well distinguish, andhas no fine perception of that affinity with the peasant which remainswith the great ladies of the old civilisation of Italy, and has so longdisappeared from those of the younger civilisations of France andEngland--a paradox. The peasant's gravity, directness, andcarelessness--a kind of uncouthness which is neither graceless nor, inany intolerable English sense, vulgar--are to be found in theunceremonious moments of every cisalpine woman, however elect her birthand select her conditions. In Italy the lady is not a creature describedby negatives, as an author who is always right has defined the lady to bein England. Even in France she is not that, and between the Frenchwomanand the Italian there are the Alps. In a word, the educated Italian_mondaine_ is, in the sense (also untranslatable) of singular, insular, and absolutely British usage, a Native. None the less would she besurprised to find herself accused of a lack of dignity. 

As to intelligence--a little intelligence is sufficiently dramatic, if itis single. A child doing one thing at a time and doing it completely, produces to the eye a better impression of mental life than one receivesfrom--well, from a lecturer. 

DONKEY RACES

English acting had for some time past still been making a feint ofrunning the race that wins. The retort, the interruption, the call, thereply, the surprise, had yet kept a spoilt tradition of suddenness andlife. You had, indeed, to wait for an interruption in dialogue--it istrue you had to wait for it; so had the interrupted speaker on the stage. But when the interruption came, it had still a false air of vivacity; andthe waiting of the interrupted one was so ill done, with so roving an eyeand such an arrest and failure of convention, such a confession of ablank, as to prove that there remained a kind of reluctant and inexpertsense of movement. It still seemed as though the actor and the actressacknowledged some forward tendency. 

Not so now. The serious stage is openly the scene of the race thatloses. The donkey race is candidly the model of the talk in everytragedy that has a chance of popular success. Who shall be last? Thehands of the public are for him, or for her. A certain actress who has"come to the front of her profession" holds, for a time, the record ofdelay. "Come to the front, " do they say? Surely the front of herprofession must have moved in retreat, to gain upon her tardiness. Itmust have become the back of her profession before ever it came up withher. 

It should rejoice those who enter for this kind of racing that the recordneed never finally be beaten. The possibilities of success areincalculable. The play has perforce to be finished in a night, it istrue, but the minor characters, the subordinate actors, can be made tobear the burden of that necessity. The principals, or those who havecome "to the front of their profession, " have an almost unlimitedopportunity and liberty of lagging. 

Besides, the competitor in a donkey race is not, let it be borne in mind, limited to the practice of his own tediousness. Part of his victory isto be ascribed to his influence upon others. It may be that a determinedactor--a man of more than common strength of will--may so cause hiscolleague to get on (let us say "get on, " for everything in this world isrelative); may so, then, compel the other actor, with whom he is inconversation, to get on, as to secure his own final triumph by indirectmeans as well as by direct. To be plain, for the sake of thoseunfamiliar with the sports of the village, the rider in a donkey racemay, and does, cudgel the mounts of his rivals. 

Consider, therefore, how encouraging the prospect really is. Theindividual actor may fail--in fact, he must. Where two people ridetogether on horseback, the married have ever been warned, one must ridebehind. And when two people are speaking slowly one must needs be theslowest. Comparative success implies the comparative failure. But wherethis actor or that actress fails, the great cause of slowness profits, obviously. The record is advanced. Pshaw! the word "advanced" comesunadvised to the pen. It is difficult to remember in what a fatuoustheatrical Royal Presence one is doing this criticism, and how one'swords should go backwards, without exception, in homage to this symbol ofa throne. 

It is not long since there took place upon the principal stage in Londonthe most important event in donkey-racing ever known until that firstnight. A tragedian and a secondary actor of renown had a duet together. It was in "The Dead Heart. " No one who heard it can possibly have yetforgotten it. The two men used echoes of one another's voice, thenoutpaused each other. It was a contest so determined, so unrelaxed, sodeadly, so inveterate that you might have slept between its encounters. You did sleep. These men were strong men, and knew what they wanted. Itis tremendous to watch the struggle of such resolves. They had theirpurpose in their grasp, their teeth were set, their will was iron. Theywere foot to foot. 

And next morning you saw by the papers that the secondary, but stillrenowned, actor, had succeeded in sharing the principal honours of thepiece. So uncommonly well had he done, even for him. Then youunderstood that, though you had not known it, the tragedian must havebeen beaten in that dialogue. He had suffered himself in an instant ofweakness, to be stimulated; he had for a moment--only a moment--got on. 

That night was influential. We may see its results everywhere, andespecially in Shakespeare. Our tragic stage was always--well, different, let us say--different from the tragic stage of Italy and France. It isnow quite unlike, and frankly so. The spoilt tradition of vitality hasbeen explicitly abandoned. The interrupted one waits, no longer with aroving eye, but with something almost of dignity, as though he werefulfilling ritual. 

Benvolio and Mercutio outlag one another in hunting after the leapingRomeo. They call without the slightest impetus. One can imagine how thetrue Mercutio called--certainly not by rote. There must have been pausesindeed, brief and short-breath'd pauses of listening for an answer, between every nickname. But the nicknames were quick work. At theLyceum they were quite an effort of memory: "Romeo! Humours! Madman!Passion! Lover!"

The actress of Juliet, speaking the words of haste, makes her audiencewait to hear them. Nothing more incongruous than Juliet's harry ofphrase and the actress's leisure of phrasing. None act, none speak, asthough there were such a thing as impulse in a play. To drop behind isthe only idea of arriving. The nurse ceases to be absurd, for there isno one readier with a reply than she. Or, rather, her delays are soaltered by exaggeration as to lose touch with Nature. If it is illenough to hear haste drawled out, it is ill, too, to hear slowness out-tarried. The true nurse of Shakespeare lags with her news because herignorant wits are easily astray, as lightly caught as though they werelight, which they are not; but the nurse of the stage is never simplyastray: she knows beforehand how long she means to be, and never, neverforgets what kind of race is the race she is riding. The Juliet of thestage seems to consider that there is plenty of time for her to discoverwhich is slain--Tybalt or her husband; she is sure to know some time; itcan wait. 

A London success, when you know where it lies, is not difficult toachieve. Of all things that can be gained by men or women about theirbusiness, there is one thing that can be gained without fear of failure. This is time. To gain time requires so little wit that, except forcompetition, every one could be first at the game. In fact, time gainsitself. The actor is really not called upon to do anything. There isnothing, accordingly, for which our actors and actresses do not rely upontime. For humour even, when the humour occurs in tragedy, they appeal totime. They give blanks to their audiences to be filled up. 

It might be possible to have tragedies written from beginning to end forthe service of the present kind of "art. " But the tragedies we have arenot so written. And being what they are, it is not vivacity that theylose by this length of pause, this length of phrasing, this illimitabletiresomeness; it is life itself. For the life of a scene conceiveddirectly is its directness; the life of a scene created simply is itssimplicity. And simplicity, directness, impetus, emotion, nature fallout of the trailing, loose, long dialogue, like fish from the loosemeshes of a net--they fall out, they drift off, they are lost. 

The universal slowness, moreover, is not good for metre. Even when anactress speaks her lines as lines, and does not drop into prose byslipping here and there a syllable, she spoils the _tempo_ by inordinatelength of pronunciation. Verse cannot keep upon the wing without acertain measure in the movement of the pinion. Verse is a flight. 

GRASS

Now and then, at regular intervals of the summer, the Suburb springs fora time from its mediocrity; but an inattentive eye might not see why, ormight not seize the cause of the bloom and of the new look of humilityand dignity that makes the Road, the Rise, and the Villas seem suddenlygentle, gay and rather shy. 

It is no change in the gardens. These are, as usual, full, abundant, fragrant, and quite uninteresting, keeping the traditional secret bywhich the suburban rose, magnolia, clematis, and all other flowers growdull--not in colour, but in spirit--between the yellow brick house-frontand the iron railings. Nor is there anything altered for the better inthe houses themselves. 

Nevertheless, the little, common, prosperous road, has bloomed, youcannot tell how. It is unexpectedly liberal, fresh, and innocent. Thesoft garden-winds that rustle its shrubs are, for the moment, genuine. 

Another day and all is undone. The Rise is its daily self again--a roadof flowers and foliage that is less pleasant than a fairly well-builtstreet. And if you happen to find the men at work on there-transformation, you become aware of the accident that made all thisdifference. It lay in the little border of wayside grass which a row ofpublic servants--men with spades and a cart--are in the act of tidyingup. Their way of tidying it up is to lay its little corpse all along thesuburban roadside, and then to carry it away to some parochial dust-heap. 

But for the vigilance of Vestries, grass would reconcile everything. Whenthe first heat of the summer was over, a few nights of rain altered allthe colour of the world. It had been the brown and russet ofdrought--very beautiful in landscape, but lifeless; it became atranslucent, profound, and eager green. The citizen does not spendattention on it. 

Why, then, is his vestry so alert, so apprehensive, so swift; inperception so instant, in execution so prompt, so silent in action, sopunctual in destruction? The vestry keeps, as it were, a tryst with thegrass. The "sunny spots of greenery" are given just time enough to growand 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 grass of the summer has not been content withinenclosures. It has--or would have--cheered up and sweetened everything. Over asphalte it could not prevail, and it has prettily yielded toasphalte, taking leave to live and let live. It has taken the littlestrip of ground next to the asphalte, between this and the kerb, andagain the refuse of ground between the kerb and the roadway. The man ofbusiness walking to the station with a bag could have his asphalte allunbroken, and the butcher's boy in his cart was not annoyed. The grassseemed to respect everybody's views, and to take only what nobody 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 grass willattempt it. It will try to persuade the yellow brick, to win the purpleslate, to reconcile stucco. Outside the authority of the suburbs it hasput a luminous touch everywhere. The thatch of cottages has given it anopportunity. It has perched and alighted in showers and flocks. It hascrept and crawled, and stolen its hour. It has made haste between theruts of cart wheels, so they were not too frequent. It has been stealthyin a good cause, and bold out of reach. It has been the most defiantrunaway, and the meekest lingerer. It has been universal, ready andpotential in every place, so that the happy country--village and fieldalike--has been all grass, with mere exceptions. 

And all this the grass does in spite of the ill-treatment it suffers atthe hands, and mowing-machines, and vestries of man. His ideal of grassis growth that shall never be allowed to come to its flower andcompletion. He proves this in his lawns. Not only does he cut thecoming grass-flower off by the stalk, but he does not allow the mereleaf--the blade--to perfect itself. He will not have it a "blade" atall; he cuts its top away as never sword or sabre was shaped. All thebeauty of a blade of grass is that the organic shape has the intention ofending in a point. Surely no one at all aware of the beauty of linesought to be ignorant of the significance and grace of manifest intention, which rules a living line from its beginning, even though the intentionbe towards a point while the first spring of the line is towards anopening curve. But man does not care for intention; he mows it. Nordoes he care for attitude; he rolls it. In a word, he proves to thegrass, as plainly as deeds can do so, that it is not to his mind. Therolling, especially, seems to be a violent way of showing that theuniversal grass interrupted by the life of the Englishman is not as hewould have it. Besides, when he wishes to deride a city, he calls itgrass-grown. 

But his suburbs shall not, if he can help it, be grass-grown. They shallnot 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 atconclusions, and were praised for their impatience of the slow process ofreason. 

Professors have written of the mental habits of women as though theyaccumulated generation by generation upon women, and passed over theirsons. Professors take it for granted, obviously by some process otherthan the slow process of reason, that women derive from their mothers andgrandmothers, and men from their fathers and grandfathers. This, forinstance, was written lately: "This power [it matters not what] would beabout equal in the two sexes but for the influence of heredity, whichturns the scale in favour of the woman, as for long generations thesurroundings and conditions of life of the female sex have developed inher a greater degree of the power in question than circumstances haverequired from men. " "Long generations" of subjection are, strangelyenough, held to excuse the timorousness and the shifts of women to-day. But the world, unknowing, tampers with the courage of its sons by such aslovenly indulgence. It tampers with their intelligence by fostering theignorance of women. 

And yet Shakespeare confessed the participation of man and woman in theircommon heritage. It is Cassius 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, Cassius, 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 therehave been some other, and happily minor, fields that were not won--thatwere more or less lost. Where did this loss take place, if the gainswere secured at football? This inquiry is not quite so cheerful as theother. But while the victories were once going forward in theplayground, the defeats or disasters were once going forward in someother place, presumably. And this was surely the place that was not aplayground, the place where the future wives of the football players weresitting still while their future husbands were playing football. 

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

The woman in grey, quite alone, was immediately dependent on no nervesbut her own, which almost made her machine sensitive. But this alertnesswas 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 anordinary waking. 

At the same time, the woman was doing what nothing in her youth couldwell have prepared her for. She must have passed a childhood unlike theordinary girl's childhood, if her steadiness or her alertness had everbeen educated, if she had been rebuked for cowardice, for the egoisticdistrust of general rules, or for claims of exceptional chances. Yethere she was, trusting not only herself but a multitude of other people;taking her equal risk; giving a watchful confidence to averages--thatlast, perhaps, her strangest and greatest success. 

No exceptions were hers, no appeals, and no forewarnings. She evidentlyhad not in her mind a single phrase, familiar to women, made to expressno confidence except in accidents, and to proclaim a prudent foresight ofthe less probable event. No woman could ride a bicycle along OxfordStreet with any such baggage as that about her. 

The woman in grey had a watchful confidence not only in a multitude ofmen but in a multitude of things. And it is very hard for any untrainedhuman being to practise confidence in things in motion--things full offorce, and, what is worse, of forces. Moreover, there is a supremedifficulty for a mind accustomed to search timorously for some littleplace of insignificant rest on any accessible point of stableequilibrium; and that is the difficulty of holding itself nimbly securein an equilibrium that is unstable. Who can deny that women aregenerally used to look about for the little stationary repose justdescribed? Whether in intellectual or in spiritual things, they do notoften 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 strengthof men and horses. 

She had learnt the difficult peace of suspense. She had learnt also thelowly and self-denying faith in common chances. She had learnt to becontent with her share--no more--in common security, and to be pleasedwith her part in common hope. For all this, it may be repeated, shecould have had but small preparation. Yet no anxiety was hers, no uneasydistrust 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 hadseated herself suddenly upon a place of detachment between earth and air, freed from the principal detentions, weights, and embarrassments of theusual life of fear. She had made herself, as it were, light, so as notto dwell either in security or danger, but to pass between them. Sheconfessed difficulty and peril by her delicate evasions, and consented torest in neither. She would not owe safety to the mere motionlessness ofa seat on the solid earth, but she used gravitation to balance the slightburdens of her wariness and her confidence. She put aside all the prideand vanity of terror, and leapt into an unsure condition of liberty andcontent. 

She leapt, too, into a life of moments. No pause was possible to her asshe went, except the vibrating pause of a perpetual change and of anunflagging flight. A woman, long educated to sit still, does notsuddenly learn to live a momentary life without strong momentaryresolution. She has no light achievement in limiting not only herforesight, which must become brief, but her memory, which must do more;for it must rather cease than become brief. Idle memory wastes time andother things. The moments of the woman in grey as they dropped by mustneeds disappear, and be simply forgotten, as a child forgets. Idlememory, by the way, shortens life, or shortens the sense of time, bylinking the immediate past clingingly to the present. Here may possiblybe found one of the reasons for the length of a child's time, and for thebrevity of the time that succeeds. The child lets his moments pass byand 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 andattitude, and not suffer something, against his will, from her bequest ofweakness, and something, against his heart, from her bequest of folly?From the legacies of an unlessoned mind, a woman's heirs-male are not cutoff in the Common Law of the generations of mankind. Brutus knew thatthe valour of Portia was settled upon his sons. 

SYMMETRY AND INCIDENT

The art of Japan has none but an exterior part in the history of the artof nations. Being in its own methods and attitude the art of accident, it has, appropriately, an accidental value. It is of accidental value, and not of integral necessity. The virtual discovery of Japanese art, during the later years of the second French Empire, caused Europe torelearn how expedient, how delicate, and how lovely Incident may lookwhen Symmetry has grown vulgar. The lesson was most welcome. Japan hashad her full influence. European art has learnt the value of positionand the tact of the unique. But Japan is unlessoned, and (in all hercharacteristic art) content with her own conventions; she is local, provincial, alien, remote, incapable of equal companionship with a worldthat has Greek art in its own history--Pericles "to its father. "

Nor is it pictorial art, or decorative art only, that has been touched byJapanese example of Incident and the Unique. Music had attained thenoblest form of symmetry in the eighteenth century, but in music, too, symmetry had since grown dull; and momentary music, the music of phaseand of fragment, succeeded. The sense of symmetry is strong in acomplete melody--of symmetry in its most delicate and lively and leaststationary form--balance; whereas the _leit_-_motif_ is isolated. Indomestic architecture Symmetry and Incident make a familiarantithesis--the very commonplace of rival methods of art. But the sameantithesis exists in less obvious forms. The poets have sought"irregular" metres. Incident hovers, in the very act of choosing itsright place, in the most modern of modern portraits. In these we have, if not the Japanese suppression of minor emphasis, certainly the Japaneseexaggeration of major emphasis; and with this a quickness and buoyancy. The smile, the figure, the drapery--not yet settled from the arrangingtouch of a hand, and showing its mark--the restless and unstationaryfoot, and the unity of impulse that has passed everywhere like a singlebreeze, all these have a life that greatly transcends the life ofJapanese art, yet has the nimble touch of Japanese incident. In passing, a charming comparison may be made between such portraiture and the aspectof an aspen or other tree of light and liberal leaf; whether still or inmotion the aspen and the free-leafed poplar have the alertness andexpectancy of flight in all their flocks of leaves, while the oaks andelms are gathered in their station. All this is not Japanese, but fromsuch accident is Japanese art inspired, with its good luck ofperceptiveness. 

What symmetry is to form, that is repetition in the art of ornament. Greek art and Gothic alike have series, with repetition or counter-changefor their ruling motive. It is hardly necessary to draw the distinctionbetween this motive and that of the Japanese. The Japanese motives maybe defined as uniqueness and position. And these were not known asmotives of decoration before the study of Japanese decoration. Repetitionand counter-change, of course, have their place in Japanese ornament, asin the diaper patterns for which these people have so singular aninvention, but here, too, uniqueness and position are the principalinspiration. And it is quite worth while, and much to the presentpurpose, to call attention to the chief peculiarity of the Japanesediaper patterns, which is _interruption_. Repetition there mustnecessarily be in these, but symmetry is avoided by an interruption whichis, to the Western eye, at least, perpetually and freshly unexpected. Theplace of the interruptions of lines, the variation of the place, and theavoidance of correspondence, are precisely what makes Japanese design ofthis class inimitable. Thus, even in a repeating pattern, you have acuriously successful effect of impulse. It is as though a separateintention had been formed by the designer at every angle. Such renewedconsciousness does not make for greatness. Greatness in design has morepeace than is found in the gentle abruptness of Japanese lines, in theircurious brevity. It is scarcely necessary to say that a line, in allother schools of art, is long or short according to its place andpurpose; but only the Japanese designer so contrives his patterns thatthe line is always short; and many repeating designs are entirelycomposed of this various and variously-occurring brevity, this prankishavoidance of the goal. Moreover, the Japanese evade symmetry, in theunit of their repeating patterns, by another simple device--that ofnumbers. They make a small difference in the number of curves and oflines. A great difference would not make the same effect of variety; itwould look too much like a contrast. For example, three rods on one sideand six on another would be something else than a mere variation, andvariety would be lost by the use of them. The Japanese decorator willvary three in this place by two in that, and a sense of the defeat ofsymmetry is immediately produced. With more violent means the idea ofsymmetry would have been neither suggested nor refuted. 

Leaving mere repeating patterns and diaper designs, you find, in Japanesecompositions, complete designs in which there is no point of symmetry. Itis a balance of suspension and of antithesis. There is no sense of lackof equilibrium, because place is, most subtly, made to have the effect ofgiving or of subtracting value. A small thing is arranged to reply to alarge one, for the small thing is placed at the precise distance thatmakes it a (Japanese) equivalent. In Italy (and perhaps in othercountries) the scales commonly in use are furnished with only a singleweight that increases or diminishes in value according as you slide itnearer or farther upon a horizontal arm. It is equivalent to so manyounces when it is close to the upright, and to so many pounds when ithangs from the farther end of the horizontal rod. Distance plays somesuch part with the twig or the bird in the upper corner of a Japanesecomposition. Its place is its significance and its value. Such an artof position implies a great art of intervals. The Japanese chooses a fewthings and leaves the space between them free, as free as the pauses orsilences in music. But as time, not silence, is the subject, ormaterial, of contrast in musical pauses, so it is the measurement ofspace--that is, collocation--that makes the value of empty intervals. Thespace between this form and that, in a Japanese composition, is valuablebecause it is just so wide and no more. And this, again, is only anotherway of saying that position is the principle of this apparently wilfulart. 

Moreover, the alien art of Japan, in its pictorial form, has helped tojustify the more stenographic school of etching. Greatly transcendingJapanese expression, the modern etcher has undoubtedly accepted moralsupport from the islands of the Japanese. He too etches a kind ofshorthand, even though his notes appeal much to the spectator'sknowledge, while the Oriental shorthand appeals to nothing but thespectator's simple vision. Thus the two artists work in ways dissimilar. Nevertheless, the French etcher would never have written his signs sofreely had not the Japanese so freely drawn his own. Furthermore still, the transitory and destructible material of Japanese art has done as muchas the multiplication of newspapers, and the discovery of processes, toreconcile the European designer--the black and white artist--to workingfor the day, the day of publication. Japan lives much of its daily lifeby means of paper, painted; so does Europe by means of paper, printed. But as we, unlike those Orientals, are a destructive people, paper withus means short life, quick abolition, transformation, re-appearance, avery circulation of life. This is our present way of survivingourselves--the new version of that feat of life. Time was when tosurvive yourself meant to secure, for a time indefinitely longer than thelife of man, such dull form as you had given to your work; to intrudeupon posterity. To survive yourself, to-day, is to let your work go intodaily oblivion. 

Now, though the Japanese are not a destructive people, their paper doesnot last for ever, and that material has clearly suggested to them adifferent condition of ornament from that with which they adorned oldlacquer, fine ivory, or other perdurable things. For the transitorymaterial they keep the more purely pictorial art of landscape. What ofJapanese landscape? Assuredly it is too far reduced to a monotonousconvention to merit the serious study of races that have produced Cotmanand Corot. Japanese landscape-drawing reduces things seen to suchfewness as must have made the art insuperably tedious to any people lessfresh-spirited and more inclined to take themselves seriously than theseOrientals. A preoccupied people would never endure it. But a littlecloser attention from the Occidental student might find for their evasiveattitude towards landscape--it is an attitude almost traitorouslyevasive--a more significant reason. It is that the distances, thegreatness, the winds and the waves of the world, coloured plains, and theflight of a sky, are all certainly alien to the perceptions of a peopleintent upon little deformities. Does it seem harsh to define by thatphrase the curious Japanese search for accidents? Upon such search thesepeople are avowedly intent, even though they show themselves capable ofexquisite appreciation of the form of a normal bird and of the habit ofgrowth of a normal flower. They are not in search of the perpetualslight novelty which was Aristotle's ideal of the language poetic ("alittle wildly, or with the flower of the mind, " says Emerson of the wayof a poet's speech)--and such novelty it is, like the frequent pulse ofthe pinion, that keeps verse upon the wing; no, what the Japanese areintent upon is perpetual slight disorder. In Japan the man in the fieldshas eyes less for the sky and the crescent moon than for some stone inthe path, of which the asymmetry strikes his curious sense of pleasure infortunate accident of form. For love of a little grotesque strangenesshe will load himself with the stone and carry it home to his garden. Theart of such a people is not liberal art, not the art of peace, and notthe art of humanity. Look at the curls and curves whereby this peopleconventionally signify wave or cloud. All these curls have an attitudewhich is like that of a figure slightly malformed, and not like that of ahuman body that is perfect, dominant, and if bent, bent at no lowly orniggling labour. Why these curves should be so charming it would be hardto say; they have an exquisite prankishness of variety, the place wherethe upward or downward scrolls curl off from the main wave is delicatelyunexpected every time, and--especially in gold embroideries--issensitively fit for the material, catching and losing the light, whilethe lengths of waving line are such as the long gold threads take bynature. 

A moment ago this art was declared not human. And, in fact, in no otherart has the figure suffered such crooked handling. The Japanese havegenerally evaded even the local beauty of their own race for the sake ofperpetual slight deformity. Their beauty is remote from our sympathy andadmiration; and it is quite possible that we might miss it in pictorialpresentation, and that the Japanese artist may have intended human beautywhere we do not recognise it. But if it is not easy to recognise, it iscertainly not difficult to guess at. And, accordingly, you are generallyaware that the separate beauty of the race, and its separate dignity, even--to be very generous--has been admired by the Japanese artist, andis represented here and there occasionally, in the figure of warrior ormousme. But even with this exception the habit of Japanesefigure-drawing is evidently grotesque, derisive, and crooked. It iscurious to observe that the search for slight deformity is so constant asto make use, for its purposes, not of action only, but of perspectiveforeshortening. With us it is to the youngest child only that therewould appear to be mirth in the drawing of a man who, stooping violentlyforward, would seem to have his head "beneath his shoulders. " TheEuropean child would not see fun in the living man so presented, but--unused to the same effect "in the flat"--he thinks it prodigiouslyhumorous in a drawing. But so only when he is quite young. The Japanesekeeps, apparently, his sense of this kind of humour. It amuses him, butnot perhaps altogether as it amuses the child, that the foreshortenedfigure should, in drawing and to the unpractised eye, seem distorted anddislocated; the simple Oriental appears to find more derision in it thanthe simple child. The distortion is not without a suggestion ofignominy. And, moreover, the Japanese shows derision, but not preciselyscorn. He does not hold himself superior to his hideous models. Hemakes free with them on equal terms. He is familiar with them. 

And if this is the conviction gathered from ordinary drawings, no need toinsist upon the ignoble character of those that are intentionalcaricatures. 

Perhaps the time has hardly come for writing anew the praises ofsymmetry. The world knows too much of the abuse of Greek decoration, andwould be glad to forget it, with the intention of learning that artafresh in a future age and of seeing it then anew. But whatever may bethe phases of the arts, there is the abiding principle of symmetry in thebody of man, that goes erect, like an upright soul. Its balance isequal. Exterior human symmetry is surely a curious physiological factwhere there is no symmetry interiorly. For the centres of life andmovement within the body are placed with Oriental inequality. Man isGreek without and Japanese within. But the absolute symmetry of theskeleton and of the beauty and life that cover it is accurately aprinciple. It controls, but not tyrannously, all the life of humanaction. Attitude and motion disturb perpetually, with infiniteincidents--inequalities of work, war, and pastime, inequalities ofsleep--the symmetry of man. Only in death and "at attention" is thatsymmetry complete in attitude. Nevertheless, it rules the dance and thebattle, and its rhythm is not to be destroyed. All the more because thishand holds the goad and that the harrow, this the shield and that thesword, because this hand rocks the cradle and that caresses the unequalheads of children, is this rhythm the law; and grace and strength areinflections 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 ofinflection that is not infraction has been explained in a mostauthoritative sentence of criticism of literature, a sentence that shouldsave the world the trouble of some of its futile, violent, and weakexperiments: "Law, the rectitude of humanity, " says Mr Coventry Patmore, "should be the poet's only subject, as, from time immemorial, it has beenthe subject of true art, though many a true artist has done the Muse'swill and knew it not. As all the music of verse arises, not frominfraction but from inflection of the law of the set metre; so thegreatest poets have been those the _modulus_ of whose verse has been mostvariously and delicately inflected, in correspondence with feelings andpassions which are the inflections of moral law in their theme. Law putsa strain upon feeling, and feeling responds with a strain upon law. Furthermore, Aristotle says that the quality of poetic language is acontinual _slight_ novelty. In the highest poetry, like that of Milton, these three modes of inflection, metrical, linguistical, and moral, allchime together in praise of the truer order of life. "

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

The nimble art of Japan is unessential; it may come and go, may settle orbe fanned away. It has life and it is not without law; it has an obviouslife, and a less obvious law. But with Greece abides the obvious law andthe less obvious life: symmetry as apparent as the symmetry of the formof man, and life occult like his unequal heart. And this seems to be thenobler and the more perdurable relation. 

THE ILLUSION OF HISTORIC TIME

He who has survived his childhood intelligently must become conscious ofsomething more than a change in his sense of the present and in hisapprehension of the future. He must be aware of no less a thing than thedestruction of the past. Its events and empires stand where they did, and the mere relation of time is as it was. But that which has fallentogether, has fallen in, has fallen close, and lies in a little heap, isthe past itself--time--the fact of antiquity. 

He has grown into a smaller world as he has grown older. There are nomore extremities. Recorded time has no more terrors. The unit ofmeasure which he holds in his hand has become in his eyes a thing ofpaltry length. The discovery draws in the annals of mankind. He hadthought them to be wide. 

For a man has nothing whereby to order and place the floods, the states, the conquests, and the temples of the past, except only the measure whichhe holds. Call that measure a space of ten years. His first ten yearshad given him the illusion of a most august scale and measure. It wasthen that he conceived Antiquity. But now! Is it to a decade of tensuch little years as these now in his hand--ten of his mature years--thatmen give the dignity of a century? They call it an age; but what if lifeshows now so small that the word age has lost its gravity?

In fact, when a child begins to know that there is a past, he has a mostnoble rod to measure it by--he has his own ten years. He attributes anoverwhelming majesty to all recorded time. He confers distance. He, andhe alone, bestows mystery. Remoteness is his. He creates more thanmortal centuries. He sends armies fighting into the extremities of thepast. He assigns the Parthenon to a hill of ages, and the temples ofUpper Egypt to sidereal time. 

If there were no child, there would be nothing old. He, having conceivedold time, communicates a remembrance at least of the mystery to the mindof the man. The man perceives at last all the illusion, but he cannotforget what was his conviction when he was a child. He had once apersuasion of Antiquity. And this is not for nothing. The enormousundeception that comes upon him still leaves spaces in his mind. 

But the undeception is rude work. The man receives successive shocks. Itis as though one strained level eyes towards the horizon, and then werebidden to shorten his sight and to close his search within a poor halfacre before his face. Now, it is that he suddenly perceives the hithertoremote, remote youth of his own parents to have been something familiarlynear, so measured by his new standard; again, it is the coming of Attilathat is displaced. Those ten last years of his have corrected the world. There needs no other rod than that ten years' rod to chastise all theimaginations of the spirit of man. It makes history skip. 

To have lived through any appreciable part of any century is to holdthenceforth a mere century cheap enough. But, it may be said, themystery of change remains. Nay, it does not. Change that trudgesthrough our own world--our contemporary world--is not very mysterious. Weperceive its pace; it is a jog-trot. Even so, we now consider, joltedthe changes of the past, with the same hurry. 

The man, therefore, who has intelligently ceased to be a child scansthrough a shortened avenue the reaches of the past. He marvels that hewas so deceived. For it was a very deception. If the Argonauts, forinstance, had been children, it would have been well enough for the childto measure their remoteness and their acts with his own magnificentmeasure. But they were only men and demi-gods. Thus they belong to himas he is now--a man; and not to him as he was once--a child. It wasquite wrong to lay the child's enormous ten years' rule along the pathfrom our time to theirs; that path must be skipped by the nimble yard inthe man's present possession. Decidedly the Argonauts are no subject forthe boy. 

What, then? Is the record of the race nothing but a bundle of suchlittle times? Nay, it seems that childhood, which created the illusionof ages, does actually prove it true. Childhood is itself Antiquity--toevery man his only Antiquity. The recollection of childhood cannot makeAbraham old again in the mind of a man of thirty-five; but the beginningof every life is older than Abraham. _There_ is the abyss of time. Leta man turn to his own childhood--no further--if he would renew his senseof remoteness, and of the mystery of change. 

For in childhood change does not go at that mere hasty amble; it rushes;but it has enormous space for its flight. The child has an apprehensionnot only of things far off, but of things far apart; an illusiveapprehension when he is learning "ancient" history--a real apprehensionwhen he is conning his own immeasurable infancy. If there is nohistorical Antiquity worth speaking of, this is the renewed andunnumbered Antiquity for all mankind. 

And it is of this--merely of this--that "ancient" history seems topartake. Rome was founded when we began Roman history, and that is whyit seems long ago. Suppose the man of thirty-five heard, at that presentage, for the first time of Romulus. Why, Romulus would be nowhere. Buthe built his wall, as a matter of fact, when every one was seven yearsold. It is by good fortune that "ancient" history is taught in the onlyancient days. So, for a time, the world is magical. 

Modern history does well enough for learning later. But by learningsomething of antiquity in the first ten years, the child enlarges thesense of time for all mankind. For even after the great illusion is overand history is re-measured, and all fancy and flight caught back andchastised, the enlarged sense remains enlarged. The man remains capableof great spaces of time. He will not find them in Egypt, it is true, buthe finds them within, he contains them, he is aware of them. History hasfallen together, but childhood surrounds and encompasses history, stretches beyond and passes on the road to eternity. 

He has not passed in vain through the long ten years, the ten years thatare the treasury of preceptions--the first. The great disillusion shallnever shorten those years, nor set nearer together the days that madethem. "Far apart, " I have said, and that "far apart" is wonderful. Thepast of childhood is not single, is not motionless, nor fixed in onepoint; it has summits a world away one from the other. Year from yeardiffers as the antiquity of Mexico from the antiquity of Chaldea. Andthe man of thirty-five knows for ever afterwards what is flight, eventhough he finds no great historic distances to prove his wings by. 

There is a long and mysterious moment in long and mysterious childhood, which is the extremest distance known to any human fancy. Many othermoments, many other hours, are long in the first ten years. Hours ofweariness are long--not with a mysterious length, but with a mere lengthof protraction, so that the things called minutes and half-hours by theelderly may be something else to their apparent contemporaries, thechildren. The ancient moment is not merely one of these--it is a spacenot of long, but of immeasurable, time. It is the moment of going tosleep. The man knows that borderland, and has a contempt for it: he haslong ceased to find antiquity there. It has become a common enoughmargin of dreams to him; and he does not attend to its phantasies. Heknows that he has a frolic spirit in his head which has its way at thosehours, but he is not interested in it. It is the inexperienced child whopasses with simplicity through the marginal country; and the thing hemeets there is principally the yet further conception of illimitabletime. 

His nurse's lullaby is translated into the mysteries of time. She singsabsolutely immemorial words. It matters little what they may mean towaking ears; to the ears of a child going to sleep they tell of thebeginning of the world. He has fallen asleep to the sound of them allhis life; and "all his life" means more than older speech can wellexpress. 

Ancient custom is formed in a single spacious year. A child is besetwith long traditions. And his infancy is so old, so old, that the mereadding of years in the life to follow will not seem to throw it furtherback--it is already so far. That is, it looks as remote to the memory ofa man of thirty as to that of a man of seventy. What are a mere fortyyears of added later life in the contemplation of such a distance? Pshaw!

EYES

There is nothing described with so little attention, with suchslovenliness, or so without verification--albeit with so much confidenceand word-painting--as the eyes of the men and women whose faces have beenmade memorable by their works. The describer generally takes the firstcolour that seems to him probable. The grey eyes of Coleridge arerecorded in a proverbial line, and Procter repeats the word, indescribing from the life. Then Carlyle, who shows more signs of actualattention, and who caught a trick of Coleridge's pronunciation instantly, proving that with his hearing at least he was not slovenly, says thatColeridge's eyes were brown--"strange, brown, timid, yet earnest-lookingeyes. " A Coleridge with brown eyes is one man, and a Coleridge with greyeyes another--and, as it were, more responsible. As to Rossetti's eyes, the various inattention of his friends has assigned to them, in all theready-made phrases, nearly all the colours. 

So with Charlotte Bronte. Matthew Arnold seems to have thought the mostprobable thing to be said of her eyes was that they were grey andexpressive. Thus, after seeing them, does he describe them in one of hisletters. Whereas Mrs Gaskell, who shows signs of attention, says thatCharlotte's eyes were a reddish hazel, made up of "a great variety oftints, " to be discovered by close looking. Almost all eves that are notbrown are, in fact, of some such mixed colour, generally spotted in, andthe effect is vivacious. All the more if the speckled iris has a darkring to enclose it. 

Nevertheless, the eye of mixed colour has always a definite character, and the mingling that looks green is quite unlike the mingling that looksgrey; and among the greys there is endless difference. Brown eyes aloneare apart, unlike all others, but having no variety except in the degreesof their darkness. 

The colour of eyes seems to be significant of temperament, but as regardsbeauty there is little or nothing to choose among colours. It is not theeye, but the eyelid, that is important, beautiful, eloquent, full ofsecrets. The eye has nothing but its colour, and all colours are finewithin fine eyelids. The eyelid has all the form, all the drawing, allthe breadth and length; the square of great eyes irregularly wide; thelong corners of narrow eyes; the pathetic outward droop; the delicatecontrary suggestion of an upward turn at the outer corner, which SirJoshua loved. 

It is the blood that is eloquent, and there is no sign of blood in theeye; but in the eyelid the blood hides itself and shows its signs. Allalong its edges are the little muscles, living, that speak not only theobvious and emphatic things, but what reluctances, what perceptions, whatambiguities, what half-apprehensions, what doubts, what interceptions!The eyelids confess, and reject, and refuse to reject. They haveexpressed all things ever since man was man. 

And they express so much by seeming to hide or to reveal that whichindeed expresses nothing. For there is no message from the eye. It hasdirection, it moves, in the service of the sense of sight; it receivesthe messages of the world. But expression is outward, and the eye has itnot. There are no windows of the soul, there are only curtains; andthese show all things by seeming to hide a little more, a little less. They hide nothing but their own secrets. 

But, some may say, the eyes have emotion inasmuch as they betray it bythe waxing and contracting of the pupils. It is, however, the rarestthing, this opening and narrowing under any influences except those ofdarkness and light. It does take place exceptionally; but I am doubtfulwhether those who talk of it have ever really been attentive enough toperceive it. A nervous woman, brown-eyed and young, who stood to tellthe news of her own betrothal, and kept her manners exceedingly composedas she spoke, had this waxing and closing of the pupils; it went on allthe time like a slow, slow pulse. But such a thing is not to be seenonce a year. 

Moreover, it is--though so significant--hardly to be called expression. It is not articulate. It implies emotion, but does not define, ordescribe, or divide it. It is touching, insomuch as we have knowledge ofthe perturbed tide of the spirit that must cause it, but it is nototherwise eloquent. It does not tell us the quality of the thought, itdoes not inform and surprise as with intricacies. It speaks no moreexplicit or delicate things than does the pulse in its quickening. Itspeaks with less division of meanings than does the taking of the breath, which has impulses and degrees. 

No, the eyes do their work, but do it blankly, without communication. Openings into the being they may be, but the closed cheek is morecommunicative. From them the blood of Perdita never did look out. Itebbed and flowed in her face, her dance, her talk. It was hiding in herpaleness, and cloistered in her reserve, but visible in prison. It leaptand looked, at a word. It was conscious in the fingers that reached outflowers. It ran with her. It was silenced when she hushed her answersto the king. Everywhere it was close behind the doors--everywhere but inher eyes. 

How near at hand was it, then, in the living eyelids that expressed herin their minute and instant and candid manner! All her withdrawals, every hesitation, fluttered there. A flock of meanings and intelligencesalighted on those mobile edges. 

Think, then, of all the famous eyes in the world, that said so much, andsaid it in no other way but only by the little exquisite muscles of theirlids. How were these ever strong enough to bear the burden of those eyesof Heathcliff's in "Wuthering Heights"? "The clouded windows of Hellflashed a moment towards me; the fiend which usually looked out, however, was so dimmed and drowned--" That mourning fiend, who had wept allnight, had no expression, no proof or sign of himself, except in theedges of the eyelids of the man. 

And the eyes of Garrick? Eyelids, again. And the eyes of CharlesDickens, that were said to contain the life of fifty men? On themechanism of the eyelids hung that fifty-fold vitality. "Bacon had adelicate, lively, hazel eye, " says Aubrey in his "Lives of EminentPersons. " But nothing of this belongs to the eye except the colour. Merebrightness the eyeball has or has not, but so have many glass beads: theliveliness is the eyelid's. "Dr Harvey told me it was like the eie of aviper. " So intent and narrowed must have been the attitude of Bacon'seyelids. 

"I never saw such another eye in a human, head, " says Scott in describingBurns, "though I have seen the most distinguished men in my time. It waslarge, and of a dark cast, and glowed (I say literally glowed) when hespoke with feeling or interest. The eye alone, I think, indicated thepoetical character and temperament. " No eye literally glows; but someeyes are polished a little more, and reflect. And this is the utmostthat can possibly have been true as to the eyes of Burns. But set withinthe meanings of impetuous eyelids the lucidity of the dark eyes seemedbroken, moved, directed into fiery shafts. 

See, too, the reproach of little, sharp, grey eyes addressed to Hazlitt. There are neither large nor small eyes, say physiologists, or thedifference is so small as to be negligeable. But in the eyelids thedifference is great between large and small, and also between thevarieties of largeness. Some have large openings, and some are inthemselves broad and long, serenely covering eyes called small. Somehave far more drawing than others, and interesting foreshortenings andsweeping curves. 

Where else is spirit so evident? And where else is it so spoilt? Thereis no vulgarity like the vulgarity of vulgar eyelids. They have a slangall their own, of an intolerable kind. And eyelids have looked all thecruel looks that have ever made wounds in innocent souls meeting themsurprised. 

But all love and all genius have winged their flight from those slightand unmeasurable movements, have flickered on the margins of lovelyeyelids quick with thought. Life, spirit, sweetness are there in a smallplace; using the finest and the slenderest machinery; expressing meaningsa whole world apart, by a difference of material action so fine that thesight which appreciates it cannot detect it; expressing intricacies ofintellect; so incarnate in slender and sensitive flesh that nowhere elsein the body of man is flesh so spiritual.