Chapter 4

The falling off from such pleasure and profit in older friendships (it is very sad, but not necessarily cynical to recognize the fact) is due in some measure to our being less frank, less ourselves, in them than in new ones. Our mutual ways of feeling and seeing are apt to produce a definite track of intellectual and affective intercourse; and as this track deepens we find ourselves confined, nay, imprisoned in it, with little possibility of seeing, and none of escaping, as in some sunken Devonshire lane; the very ups and downs of the friendship existing, so to speak, below the level of our real life; disagreements and reconciliations always on one pattern. With people we have known very long, we are apt to go thus continually over the same ground, reciting the same formulae of thought and feeling, imitating the _ego_ of former years in its relations with a _thou_ quite equally obsolete; the real personality left waiting outside for the chance stranger. It is so easy! so safe! We have done it so long! There is an air of piety almost in the monotony and ceremonial; and then, there are the other's habits of thought which might be jarred, or feelings we might hurt.... Meanwhile our sincere, spontaneous reality is idling elsewhere, ready to vagabond irresponsibly at the beck and call of the passing stranger. And, who knows? while we are thus refusing to give our poor old friend the benefit of our genuine, living, changed and changing self, we may ourselves be losing the charm and profit of his or her renovated and more efficacious reality.

The retribution sometimes comes in unexpected manner. We find ourselves neglected for some new-comer, thin of stuff, to-morrow threadbare; _we_, who are conscious all the time of a newness too well hidden, alas! a newness utterly unsuspected by our friend, and far surpassing the newness of the new one! Poetic justice too lamentable to dwell upon. But short of it, far short, our old friendships, with their safe traditions and lazy habits, are ever tending to become the intercourse of friendly ghosts.

Yet even this is well worth having, and after bringing praise to younger friendships, let me for ever feel, rather than speak (for 'tis too deep and wide for words) befitting gratitude to old ones. For there is always something puzzling in the present; unrestful and disquieting in all novelty; and we require, poor harassed mortals, the past and lots of it; the safe, the done-for past, a heap of last year's leaves or of dry, scented hay (which is mere dead grass and dead meadow-flowers) to take our rest upon. There is a virtue ineffable in things known, tried, understood; a comfort and a peacefulness, often truly Elysian, in finding one's self again in this quiet, crepuscular, downy world of old friendships--a world, as I have remarked, largely peopled with ghosts, our own and other folks'; but ghosts whose footsteps never creak, whose touch can never startle, or whose voice stab us, and who smile a smile which has the wide, hazy warmth of setting suns or veiled October skies. Yes, whatever they may lack (through our own fault and folly), old friendships are made up of what, when all is said and done, we need above every other thing, poor faulty, uncertain creatures that we are--I mean kindness and certain indulgence. There is more understanding in new friendships, and a closer contact of soul with soul; but that contact may mean a jar, a bruise, or, worst of all, a sudden sense of icy chill; and the penetrating comprehension may entail, at any moment, pained surprise and disappointment. Making new friends is not merely exploration, but conquest; and what cruel checks to our wishes and ambitions!

Instead of which, all vanity long since put to sleep, curiosity extinct for years, insidious pleasures of self-explanation quite forgotten, there remains this massive comfort of well-known faithful and trusting kindness; a feeling of absolute reassurance almost transcending the human, such as we get from, let us say, an excellent climate.

There remain, also, joys quite especial to old friendship, or the possibility thereof, for the reality, alas! is rare enough. The sudden discovery, for instance, after a period of separation or a gap in intercourse, of qualities and ways not previously seen (perhaps not previously wanted) in the well-known soul: new notes, but with the added charm of likeness to already loved ones, deeper, more resonant, or perhaps of unsuspected high unearthly purity, in the dear voice. Absence may do it, or change of occupation; or sudden vicissitude of fortune; or merely the reading of a certain book (how many friends may not Tolstoi's "Resurrection" have thus revealed to one another!), or the passing of some public crisis like the Dreyfus business. What! after these years of familiarity, we did not know each other fully? You thought, you felt, like that on such or such a subject, dear old friend, and I never suspected it! Nay, never knew, perhaps, that _I_ must feel and think like that, and in no other way! To find more in what one already has; the truest adding to all wealth, the most fruitful act of production;--that is one of the privileges of old friendships.

OTHER FRIENDSHIPS

It came home to me, during that week of grim and sordid business in the old house, feeling so solitary among the ghosts of unkind passions which seemed, like the Wardour Street ancestors, to fill the place--it came home to me what consolation there can be in the friendship of one small corner of grace or beauty. During those dreary days in Scotland, the friendliness and consolation were given me by the old kitchen garden, with its autumn flower borders, half hiding apple trees and big cabbages and rhubarbs, and the sheep-dotted hill, and the beeches sloping above its red fruit walls. I slipped away morning and evening to it as to a friend. Not as to an old one; that would give a different aspect to the matter; nor yet exactly a new friend, conquering or being conquered; but rather as one turns one's thoughts, if not one's words, to some nameless stranger, casually met, in whom one recognizes, among the general wilderness of alien creatures, a quality, a character for which one cares.

Travelling a good deal, and nearly always alone, one has occasion to gauge the deep dreariness of human beings pure and simple, when, so to speak, the small, learnt-by-rote lessons of civilization, of kindness, graciousness, or intelligence, are not being called into play by common business or acquaintanceship. There, in the train, they sit in the elemental, native dreariness of their more practical, ungracious demand on life; not bad in any way, oh no; nor actively repulsive, but trite, empty, _everyday_, in the sense of what _everyday_ often, alas! really is, but certainly no day or hour or minute, in a decent universe, should ever be. And suddenly a new traveller gets in; and, turning round, you realize that things are changed, that something from another planet, and yet something quite right and so familiar, has entered. A young man shabbily dressed in mourning, who got in at a junction in Northern France with a small girl, like him in mourning, and like him pale, a little washed-out ashy blond, and with the inexpressible moral grace which French folk sometimes have, will always remain in my memory; while all those fellow-travellers and all the others--hundreds of them since that day--have faded from my memory, their images collapsing into each other, a grey monotony as of the rows of little houses which unfurl and furl up, and vanish, thank the Lord, into nothingness, while the express swishes past some dreadful manufacturing town. Another time, some years ago, the unknown friend was a small boy, a baby almost, jumping and rolling (a practice intolerable in any child but him) on the seat of a second-class carriage. We did not speak; in fact my friend had barely acquired the necessary art. But I felt companioned, befriended, delivered of the world's crowded solitude.

Apart from railway trains, a similar thing may sometimes happen. And there are few of us, surely, who do not possess, somewhere in their life, friends of the highest value whom they have barely known--met with once or twice perhaps, talked with, and for some reason not met again; but never lost sight of by heart and fancy--indeed, more often turned to, and perhaps more deeply trusted (as devout persons trust St. Joseph and St. Anthony of Padua, whom, after all, they scarcely know more than their own close kindred) than so many of, ostensibly, our nearest and dearest. Indeed, this is the meaning of that curious little poem of Whitman's--"Out of the rolling ocean, the crowd, came a drop gently to me"--with its Emersonian readiness to part, "now we have met, we are safe;" a very wise view of things, if our poor human weakness really wanted safety, and did not merely want "more"--indeed, like that human little boy, want "too much."

But to return to the friendships, consoling, comforting intimacies, which we can have not merely with strangers never met again, or never, meeting, spoken with; but even more satisfactorily with those beloved ones whom, from our own lack of soul, of _anima_ drawing forth _anima_, we dully call inanimates. I am not speaking, of course, of the real passions with which exceptionally lovely or wonderful spots or monuments, views of distant Alps, or certain rocky southern coasts, or St. Mark's or Amiens Cathedral, great sirens among voiceless things, subjugate and draw our souls. The friendships in question are sober and deliberate, founded on reasonable recognition of some trait of dignity or grace; and matured by conscious courtship on our part, retracing of steps day by day, and watching the friend's varying moods at noon or under low lights. During that week in the grim Scottish ancestral house, it was the kitchen-garden, as I began by saying, which comforted me. In another place, where I was ill and sorely anxious, a group of slender, whispering poplars by a mill; and under different, but equally harassing, circumstances, the dear little Gothic church of a tiny town of Western France.

The Gothic church on its rising ground above the high-pitched roofs, and, in a measure, the church's white tame goat, which I found there one morning under a lime tree. I had been overtaken by a sudden storm, the rain-floods dashing from the gargoyles on to the rough ground of the solitary, wooded mound. In the faint light the little church, with sparse oak leaves and dock delicately carved on the granite capitals, was wonderfully grave and gentle in its utter emptiness; and I did it all possible honour. There is a low granite bench or sill round the base of the beautiful sheaved columns; a broken, disused organ-loft of coloured mediaeval thorn carving; and under two shapely little arches lie a knight, unknown, and lady in high coif.... I knew it all by heart, coming like that every day and sometimes twice a day; by heart, and, so to speak, _with_ my heart. The sound of the spouting gargoyles ceased; cocks began to crow; I went out, for the rain must have left off.... Not yet; the skies were still dripping, and the plain below full of vapours. And the tame white goat, the only living creature about the church, had taken refuge under a cart stranded by a large lime tree.

I mention this particular visit to my friend the church of L----, in order to explain the precise nature of our friendship; and to show, as I think it does, that through that law of economy which should preside over our pleasures and interests, such intimacy with a single object, simple and unobtrusive, is worth the acquaintance with a hundred and one magnificent and perfect things, if superficially seen and without loving care.

A HOTEL SITTING-ROOM

I am calling this paper after a hotel sitting-room because some of one's most recurrent and definite trains of thought are most hopelessly obstinate about getting an intelligible name, so that I take advantage of this one having been brought to a head in a real room of the kind. The room was on a top floor in Florence; the Cupola and Campanile and other towers in front of it above the plum-coloured roofs; and beyond, the bluish mountains of Fiesole. Trams were puffing about in the square below, and the church bells ringing, and the crowd streaming to the promenade; but only the unchanging and significant life of the town seemed to matter up here. I was struck with the charm of such a hotel room--the very few ornaments, greatly cherished since they were carried about; the books for reading, not for furniture; the bought flowers in common glasses; and the consequent sense of selection, deliberateness, and personality. Good heavens, I reflected, are we mortals so cross-grained that we can thoroughly enjoy things only by contrast, and that a sort of mild starvation is needed to whet our aesthetic appetite?

By no means. Contrast for contrast's sake is a very coarse stimulant, and required only by very joyless natures. The real explanation of the charm of the hotel room and its sparse properties and flowers must be sought, I believe, in the fact that the charm of things depends upon our power of extracting it; and that our power in this matter, as in every other, nay, our leisure to exert it, is necessarily limited. Things, as I before remarked, do not give themselves without some wooing; and courtship is the secret of true possession. The world outside us, as philosophers tell us, is not what our eyes, ears, and touch and taste make it appear; nay, for aught we know, 'tis a mere chaos; and if, out of the endless impressions with which outer objects keep pelting us, we manage to pick up and appropriate a few, setting them in a pattern of meaning and beauty, it is thanks to the activity of our own special little self. That is the gist of Kant's philosophy; and, apart from Kant, it is the vague practical knowledge which experience teaches us. Hence the disappointment of all such persons as think that the beautiful and significant things of the world ought to give them delight without any trouble on their part: they think that it is the fault of a Swiss mountain, or a Titian Madonna, or a poem by Browning if it does not at once ravish their inert souls into a seventh heaven. Yet these are people who occasionally ride, or play at golf or whist, and who never expect the cards and the golf clubs to play the game by themselves, nor the very best horse to carry them to some destination without riding. Now, beautiful and interesting things also require a deal of riding, of playing with; let us put it more courteously--of wooing.

The hotel room I have spoken of reveals the fact that we usually have far too many pleasant things about us, to be able to extract much pleasure from any of them; while, of course, somebody else, at the other end of the world let us say, or merely in the mews to the back, has so very much too little as to have none at all, which is another way of diminishing possible enjoyment. There seems, moreover, to be a certain queer virtue in mere emptiness, in mere negation. We require a _margin_ of _nothing_ round everything that is to charm us; round our impressions as well as round the material objects which can supply them; for without it we lose all outline, and begin to feel vaguely choked.

Compare the pleasure of a picture tucked away in a chapel or sacristy with the plethoric weariness of a whole Louvre or National Gallery. Nay, remember the vivid delight of some fine bit of tracery round a single door or window, as in the cathedral of Dol or the house of Tristan l'Hermite at Tours; or of one of those Ionic capitals which you sometimes find built into quite an uninteresting house in Rome (there is one almost opposite St. Angelo, and another near Tor dei Specchi, Tower of the Mirrors, delightful name!).

That question of going to see the thing, instead of seeing it drearily among ten thousand other things equally lovely--O weariness unparalleled of South Kensington or Cluny!--that question of the agreeable little sense of deliberate pilgrimage (pilgrimage to a small shrine perhaps in one's memory), leads me to another explanation of what I must call the "hotel room phenomenon."

I maintain that there is a zest added to one's pleasure in beautiful things by the effort and ingenuity (unless too exhausting) expended in eliminating the impressions which might detract from them. One likes the hotel room just because some of the furniture has been sent away into the passage or wheeled into corners; one enjoys pleasant things additionally for having arranged them to advantage in one's mind. It is just the reverse with the rooms in a certain palace I sometimes have the privilege of entering, where every detail is worked--furniture, tapestries, embroideries, majolica, and flowers--into an overwhelming Wagner symphony of loveliness. There is a genuine Leonardo in one of those rooms, and truly I almost wish it were in a whitewashed lobby. And in coming out of all that perfection I sometimes feel a kind of relief on getting into the empty, uninteresting street. My thoughts, somehow, fetch a long breath....

These are not the sentiments of the superfine. But then I venture to think that the dose of fineness which is, so to speak, _super_ or _too much_, just turns these folks' refinement into something its reverse. People who cannot sleep because of the roseleaf in the sheets, or the pea (like the little precious princess) under the mattress, are bad sleepers, and had better do charing or climbing, or get pummelled by a masseur till they grow healthier. And if ever I had the advising of young folk with ambition to be aesthetic, I should conjure them to cultivate their sensitiveness only to good things, and atrophy it towards the inevitable bad; or rather I should teach them to push into corners (or altogether get rid of) the irrelevant and trivial impressions which so often are bound to accompany the most delightful ones; very much as those occupants of the hotel room had done with some of its furniture. What if an electric tram starts from the foot of Giotto's tower, or if four-and-twenty Cook's tourists invade the inn and streets of Verona? If you cannot extract some satisfaction from the thought that there may be intelligent people even in a Cook's party, and that the ugly tram takes hundreds of people up Fiesole hill without martyrizing cab-horses--if you cannot do this (which still is worth doing), overlook the Cook's tourists and the tram, blot them out of your thoughts and feelings.

This question of _superfineness_ versus _refinement_ (which ought to mean the power of refining things through our feeling) has carried me away from the original theme of my discourse, which, under the symbol of the hotel room, was merely that we should _perhaps appreciate more if we were offered less to appreciate_. Apropos of this, I have long been struck by the case of a dear Italian friend of mine, whose keenness of perception and grip of judgment and unexpectedness of fancy is almost in inverse proportion to her knowledge of books or opportunity of travel. An invalid, cut off from much reading, and limited to monotonous to-and-fro between a town which is not a great town and a hillside village which is not a--not a great village; she is quite marvellously delightful by her power of assimilating the little she can read and observe, not merely of transmuting _it_ into something personal and racy, but (what is much more surprising) of being modified harmoniously by its assimilation; her rich and unexpected mind putting forth even richer and more unexpected details. Whereas think of Tom, Dick, or Harry, their natural good parts watered down with other folks' notions, their imagination worn threadbare by the friction of experience; men who ought to be so amusing, and alas!...

And now, having fulfilled my programme, as was my duty, let me return to my pleasure, which, at this moment (and whenever the opportunity presents itself) consists in falling foul of the superfine. The superfine are those who deserve (and frequently attain) the condition of that Renaissance tyrant who lived exclusively on hard-boiled eggs (without salt) for fear of poison. The superfine are those who will not eat walnuts because of the shell, and are pained that Nature should have been so coarse as to propagate oranges through pips. The superfine are.... But no. Let us be true to our principle of not neglecting the delightful things of this world by fixing our too easily hypnotized gaze on the things which are not delightful--disagreeable things which should be examined only with a view to their removal; or if they prove obstinate fixtures in our reality, be all the more resolutely turned out of the sparsely-furnished, delectable chambers of our fancy.

IN PRAISE OF COURTSHIP

There is too little courtship in the world. I do not mean there is not enough marrying and giving in marriage, or that the preliminaries thereunto are otherwise than they should be. Quite the reverse. As long as there is love and youth, there is sure in the literal sense to be courtship. But what I ask is that there be courtship besides that literal courtship between the Perditas and Florizels; that there be "being in love" with a great many things, even stocks and stones, besides youth and maiden; which would result, on the whole, in all of us being young in feeling even when we had grown old in years.

For courtship means a wish to stand well in the other person's eyes, and, what is more, a readiness to be pleased with the other's ways; a sense on each side of having had the better of the bargain; an undercurrent of surprise and thankfulness at one's good luck.

There is not enough courtship in the world. This thought has been growing in my mind ever since the silver wedding of two dear friends: that quarter of a century has been but a prolonged courtship.

Why is it not oftener so? One sees among married folk a good deal of affection, of kindliness, even of politeness; a great deal too much mutual dependence, degenerating, of course, into habitual boredom. But none of this can be called courtship. Perhaps this was the meaning, less cynical than supposed, but quite as sad, of La Rochefoucauld when he noted down, "Il y a de bons mariages, mais point de delicieux;" since, in the delicate French sense of the word, implying some analogy of subdued yet penetrating pleasantness, as of fresh, bright weather or fine light wine, courtship is essentially _delicieux_.

This is, of course, initiating a question of manner. Modern psychology is discovering scientific reasons for the fact that if you wag a dog's tail he feels pleased; or, at all events, that the human being would feel pleased if it had a tail and could wag it. Confessors and nurses knew it long ago, curbing bad temper by restraining its outer manifestations; and are not dinners and plays, flags and illuminations, birthdays and jubilees--nay, art itself, devices for suggestions to mankind that it feels pleased?