Chapter 572

ASTRAEA: For the sake of peace and silence I consent, You should be warned that you will cruelly Disturb them. But 'tis best. You should be warned Your pleading will be hopeless. But 'tis best. You have my full consent. Weigh well your acts, You cannot rest where you have cast this bolt Lay that to heart, and you are cherished, prized, Among them: they are estimable ladies, Warmest of friends; though you may think they soar Too loftily for your measure of strict sense (And as my uncle Homeware's pupil, sir, In worldliness, you do), just minds they have: Once know them, and your banishment will fret. I would not run such risks. You will offend, Go near to outrage them; and perturbate As they have not deserved of you. But I, Considering I am nothing in the scales You balance, quite and of necessity Consent. When you have weighed it, let me hear. My uncle Homeware steps this way in haste. We have been talking long, and in full view!

SCENE VII

ASTRAEA, ARDEN, HOMEWARE

HOMEWARE: Astraea, child! You, Arden, stand aside. Ay, if she were a maid you might speak first, But being a widow she must find her tongue. Astraea, they await you. State the fact As soon as you are questioned, fearlessly. Open the battle with artillery.

ASTRAEA: What is the matter, uncle Homeware?

HOMEWARE (playing fox): What? Why, we have watched your nice preliminaries From the windows half the evening. Now run in. Their patience has run out, and, as I said, Unlimber and deliver fire at once. Your aunts Virginia and Winifred, With Lady Oldlace, are the senators, The Dame for Dogs. They wear terrific brows, But be not you affrighted, my sweet chick, And tell them uncle Homeware backs your choice, By lawyer and by priests! by altar, fount, And testament!

ASTRAEA: My choice! what have I chosen?

HOMEWARE: She asks? You hear her, Arden?--what and whom!

ARDEN: Surely, sir! . . . heavens! have you . . .

HOMEWARE: Surely the old fox, In all I have read, is wiser than the young: And if there is a game for fox to play, Old fox plays cunningest.

ASTRAEA: Why fox? Oh! uncle, You make my heart beat with your mystery; I never did love riddles. Why sit they Awaiting me, and looking terrible?

HOMEWARE: It is reported of an ancient folk Which worshipped idols, that upon a day Their idol pitched before them on the floor

ASTRAEA: Was ever so ridiculous a tale!

HOMEWARE To call the attendant fires to account Their elders forthwith sat . . .

ASTRAEA: Is there no prayer Will move you, uncle Homeware?

HOMEWARE: God-daughter, This gentleman for you I have proposed As husband.

ASTRAEA: Arden! we are lost.

ARDEN: Astraea! Support him! Though I knew not his design, It plants me in mid-heaven. Would it were Not you, but I to bear the shock. My love! We lost, you cry; you join me with you lost! The truth leaps from your heart: and let it shine To light us on our brilliant battle day And victory

ASTRAEA: Who betrayed me!

HOMEWARE: Who betrayed? Your voice, your eyes, your veil, your knife and fork; Your tenfold worship of your widowhood; As he who sees he must yield up the flag, Hugs it oath-swearingly! straw-drowningly. To be reasonable: you sent this gentleman Referring him to me . . . .

ASTRAEA: And that is false. All's false. You have conspired. I am disgraced. But you will learn you have judged erroneously. I am not the frail creature you conceive. Between your vision of life's aim, and theirs Who presently will question me, I cling To theirs as light: and yours I deem a den Where souls can have no growth.

HOMEWARE: But when we touched The point of hand-pressings, 'twas rightly time To think of wedding ties?

ASTRAEA: Arden, adieu!

(She rushes into house.)

SCENE VIII

ARDEN, HOMEWARE

ARDEN: Adieu! she said. With her that word is final.

HOMEWARE: Strange! how young people blowing words like clouds On winds, now fair, now foul, and as they please Should still attach the Fates to them.

ARDEN: She's wounded Wounded to the quick!

HOMEWARE: The quicker our success: for short Of that, these dames, who feel for everything, Feel nothing.

ARDEN: Your intention has been kind, Dear sir, but you have ruined me.

HOMEWARE: Good-night. (Going.)

ARDEN: Yet she said, we are lost, in her surprise.

HOMEWARE: Good morning. (Returning.)

ARDEN: I suppose that I am bound (If I could see for what I should be glad!) To thank you, sir.

HOMEWARE: Look hard but give no thanks. I found my girl descending on the road Of breakneck coquetry, and barred her way. Either she leaps the bar, or she must back. That means she marries you, or says good-bye. (Going again.)

ARDEN: Now she's among them. (Looking at window.)

HOMEWARE: Now she sees her mind.

ARDEN: It is my destiny she now decides!

HOMEWARE: There's now suspense on earth and round the spheres.

ARDEN: She's mine now: mine! or I am doomed to go.

HOMEWARE: The marriage ring, or the portmanteau now!

ARDEN: Laugh as you like, air! I am not ashamed To love and own it.

HOMEWARE: So the symptoms show. Rightly, young man, and proving a good breed. To further it's a duty to mankind And I have lent my push, But recollect: Old Ilion was not conquered in a day. (He enters house.)

ARDEN: Ten years! If I may win her at the end!

CURTAIN

ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

A great oration may be a sedative A male devotee is within an inch of a miracle Above Nature, I tell him, or, we shall be very much below As in all great oratory! The key of it is the pathos Back from the altar to discover that she has chained herself Cupid clipped of wing is a destructive parasite Excess of a merit is a capital offence in morality His idea of marriage is, the taking of the woman into custody I am a discordant instrument I do not readily vibrate I like him, I like him, of course, but I want to breathe I who respect the state of marriage by refusing Love and war have been compared--Both require strategy Peace, I do pray, for the husband-haunted wife Period of his life a man becomes too voraciously constant Pitiful conceit in men Rejoicing they have in their common agreement Self-worship, which is often self-distrust Suspects all young men and most young women Their idol pitched before them on the floor Were I chained, For liberty I would sell liberty Woman descending from her ideal to the gross reality of man Your devotion craves an enormous exchange

MISCELLANEOUS PROSE

CONTENTS: INTRODUCTION TO W. M. THACKERAY'S "THE FOUR GEORGES" A PAUSE IN THE STRIFE. CONCESSION TO THE CELT. LESLIE STEPHEN. CORRESPONDENCE FROM THE SEAT OF WAR IN ITALY LETTERS WRITTEN TO THE 'MORNING POST' FROM THE SEAT OF WAR IN ITALY.

INTRODUCTION TO W. M. THACKERAY'S "THE FOUR GEORGES"

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY was born at Calcutta, July 18, 1811, the only child of Richmond and Anne Thackeray. He received the main part of his education at the Charterhouse, as we know to our profit. Thence he passed to Cambridge, remaining there from February 1829 to sometime in 1830. To judge by quotations and allusions, his favourite of the classics was Horace, the chosen of the eighteenth century, and generally the voice of its philosophy in a prosperous country. His voyage from India gave him sight of Napoleon on the rocky island. In his young manhood he made his bow reverentially to Goethe of Weimar; which did not check his hand from setting its mark on the sickliness of Werther.

He was built of an extremely impressionable nature and a commanding good sense. He was in addition a calm observer, having 'the harvest of a quiet eye.' Of this combination with the flood of subjects brought up to judgement in his mind, came the prevalent humour, the enforced disposition to satire, the singular critical drollery, notable in his works. His parodies, even those pushed to burlesque, are an expression of criticism and are more effective than the serious method, while they rarely overstep the line of justness. The Novels by Eminent Hands do not pervert the originals they exaggerate. 'Sieyes an abbe, now a ferocious lifeguardsman,' stretches the face of the rollicking Irish novelist without disfeaturing him; and the mysterious visitor to the palatial mansion in Holywell Street indicates possibilities in the Oriental imagination of the eminent statesman who stooped to conquer fact through fiction. Thackeray's attitude in his great novels is that of the composedly urbane lecturer, on a level with a select audience, assured of interesting, above requirements to excite. The slow movement of the narrative has a grace of style to charm like the dance of the Minuet de la Cour: it is the limpidity of Addison flavoured with salt of a racy vernacular; and such is the veri-similitude and the dialogue that they might seem to be heard from the mouths of living speakers. When in this way the characters of Vanity Fair had come to growth, their author was rightly appreciated as one of the creators in our literature, he took at once the place he will retain. With this great book and with Esmond and The Newcomes, he gave a name eminent, singular, and beloved to English fiction.

Charges of cynicism are common against all satirists, Thackeray had to bear with them. The social world he looked at did not show him heroes, only here and there a plain good soul to whom he was affectionate in the unhysterical way of an English father patting a son on the head. He described his world as an accurate observer saw it, he could not be dishonest. Not a page of his books reveals malevolence or a sneer at humanity. He was driven to the satirical task by the scenes about him. There must be the moralist in the satirist if satire is to strike. The stroke is weakened and art violated when he comes to the front. But he will always be pressing forward, and Thackeray restrained him as much as could be done, in the manner of a good-humoured constable. Thackeray may have appeared cynical to the devout by keeping him from a station in the pulpit among congregations of the many convicted sinners. That the moralist would have occupied it and thundered had he presented us with the Fourth of the Georges we see when we read of his rejecting the solicitations of so seductive a personage for the satiric rod.

Himself one of the manliest, the kindliest of human creatures, it was the love of his art that exposed him to misinterpretation. He did stout service in his day. If the bad manners he scourged are now lessened to some degree we pay a debt in remembering that we owe much to him, and if what appears incurable remains with us, a continued reading of his works will at least help to combat it.

A PAUSE IN THE STRIFE--1886

Our 'Eriniad,' or ballad epic of the enfranchisement of the sister island is closing its first fytte for the singer, and with such result as those Englishmen who have some knowledge of their fellows foresaw. There are sufficient reasons why the Tories should always be able to keep together, but let them have the credit of cohesiveness and subordination to control. Though working for their own ends, they won the esteem of their allies, which will count for them in the struggles to follow. Their leaders appear to have seen what has not been distinctly perceptible to the opposite party--that the break up of the Liberals means the defection of the old Whigs in permanence, heralding the establishment of a powerful force against Radicalism, with a capital cry to the country. They have tactical astuteness. If they seem rather too proud of their victory, it is merely because, as becomes them, they do not look ahead. To rejoice in the gaining of a day, without having clear views of the morrow, is puerile enough. Any Tory victory, it may be said, is little more than a pause in the strife, unless when the Radical game is played 'to dish the Whigs,' and the Tories are now fast bound down by their incorporation of the latter to abstain from the violent springs and right-about-facings of the Derby-Disraeli period. They are so heavily weighted by the new combination that their Jack-in-the-box, Lord Randolph, will have to stand like an ordinary sentinel on duty, and take the measurement of his natural size. They must, on the supposition of their entry into office, even to satisfy their own constituents, produce a scheme. Their majority in the House will command it.

To this extent, then, Mr. Gladstone has not been defeated. The question set on fire by him will never be extinguished until the combustible matter has gone to ashes. But personally he meets a sharp rebuff. The Tories may well raise hurrahs over that. Radicals have to admit it, and point to the grounds of it. Between a man's enemies and his friends there comes out a rough painting of his character, not without a resemblance to the final summary, albeit wanting in the justly delicate historical touch to particular features. On the one side he is abused as 'the one-man power'; lauded on the other for his marvellous intuition of the popular will. One can believe that he scarcely wishes to march dictatorially, and full surely his Egyptian policy was from step to step a misreading of the will of the English people. He went forth on this campaign, with the finger of Egypt not ineffectively levelled against him a second time. Nevertheless he does read his English; he has, too, the fatal tendency to the bringing forth of Bills in the manner of Jove big with Minerva. He perceived the necessity, and the issue of the necessity; clearly defined what must come, and, with a higher motive than the vanity with which his enemies charge him, though not with such high counsel as Wisdom at his ear, fell to work on it alone, produced the whole Bill alone, and then handed it to his Cabinet to digest, too much in love with the thing he had laid and incubated to permit of any serious dismemberment of its frame. Hence the disruption. He worked for the future, produced a Bill for the future, and is wrecked in the present. Probably he can work in no other way than from the impulse of his enthusiasm, solitarily. It is a way of making men overweeningly in love with their creations. The consequence is likely to be that Ireland will get her full measure of justice to appease her cravings earlier than she would have had as much from the United Liberal Cabinet, but at a cost both to her and to England. Meanwhile we are to have a House of Commons incapable of conducting public business; the tradesmen to whom the Times addressed pathetic condolences on the loss of their season will lose more than one; and we shall be made sensible that we have an enemy in our midst, until a people, slow to think, have taken counsel of their native generosity to put trust in the most generous race on earth.

CONCESSION TO THE CELT--1886