Part 7

“Who is going to turn his back for ever on that passage? No,” K. went on, “it won’t do. It is not possible to name one essay and one only. But I have an amendment to propose. Instead of being permitted to retain only one essay, why should we not be allowed a series of passages equal in length to the longest essay--say ‘The Old Actors’? Then we should not be quite so hopeless. That, for example, would enable one to keep the page on Bensley’s Malvolio, the description of Bridget Elia, a portion of the ‘Mrs. Battle,’ Ralph Bigod, a portion of ‘Captain Jackson,’ the passages I have read, and--what I personally should insist upon including, earlier almost than anything--the Fallacies on rising with the Lark and retiring with the Lamb.”

“Well,” said the suggester of the original problem, “it’s a compromise and therefore no fun. But you may play with it if you like. The sweepingness of the first question was of course its merit. James is the only one of you with the courage really to make a choice.”

“Oh, no,” said our host. “I chose one and one only instantly--‘Old China.’”

“Nonsense!” said James; “you chose ‘Mackery End.’”

“There you are,” said K. “That shows.”

“Well, I refuse to be deprived of ‘Old China’ anyway,” said our host, “even if I named ‘Mackery End.’ How could one live without ‘Old China’? Our discussion reminds me,” he added, “of a very pretty poem--a kind of poem that is no longer written. It is by an American who came nearer Lamb in humour and ‘the tact of humanity’ than perhaps any writer--the Autocrat. Let me read it to you.”

He reached for a volume and read as follows:--

Oh for one hour of youthful joy! Give back my twentieth spring! I’d rather laugh, a bright-haired boy, Than reign, a gray-beard king.

Off with the spoils of wrinkled age! Away with Learning’s crown! Tear out Life’s Wisdom-written page, And dash its trophies down!

One moment let my life-blood stream From boyhood’s fount of flame! Give me one giddy, reeling dream Of life all love and fame!

* * * * *

My listening angel heard the prayer, And, calmly smiling, said, “If I but touch thy silvered hair Thy hasty wish hath sped.

“But is there nothing in thy track, To bid thee fondly stay, While the swift seasons hurry back To find the wished-for day?”

“Ah, truest soul of womankind! Without thee what were life? One bliss I cannot leave behind: I’ll take--my--precious--wife!”

The angel took a sapphire pen And wrote in rainbow dew, _The man would be a boy again_, _And be a husband too!_

“And is there nothing yet unsaid, Before the change appears? Remember, all their gifts have fled With those dissolving years.”

“Why, yes;” for memory would recall My fond paternal joys; “I could not bear to leave them all-- I’ll take--my--girl--and--boys.”

The smiling angel dropped his pen,-- “Why, this will never do; The man would be a boy again, And be a father too!”

* * * * *

And so I laughed,--my laughter woke The household with its noise,-- And wrote my dream, when morning broke, To please the grey-haired boys.

--“We,” said our host, as he closed the book and laid it aside, “are like that: we would eliminate most of Elia and have our Elia too.”

“Yes,” said W. “Exactly. We want them all and we value them the more as we grow older and they grow truer and better. For that is Lamb’s way. He sat down--often in his employers’ time--to amuse the readers of a new magazine and earn a few of those extra guineas which made it possible to write ‘Old China,’ and behold he was shedding radiance on almost every fact of life, no matter how spiritually recondite or remote from his own practical experience. No one can rise from Elia without being deepened and enriched; and no one having read Elia can ever say either off-hand or after a year’s thought which one essay he would retain to the loss of all the others.”

B. hitherto had been a silent listener. Here he spoke, and, as so often, said the final thing. “Yes,” he said, “it is vain (but good sport) to take any one of the essays and argue that it is the best. Just as the best thing in a garden is not any particular flower but the scent of all the flowers that are there, so the best of Lamb is not any single essay but the fragrance of them all. It is for this that those gentle paths have been trodden by so much good company.

“Yes,” he added meditatively. “‘The scent of Elia’s garden’! That is the best essay, if you like, and ‘Charles (and Mary) Lamb’ its title.”

A Friend of the Town

Londoners know much, but not all. A few secrets are still to be learned only in the provinces, and one of them is the true value of the bookstall man. In London a bookstall man is a machine; you throw pennies at him and in return he throws papers at you. Now and then he asks you to buy something that you don’t want or recommends the new sevenpenny; but for the most part he treats you as a stranger, if not as a foe, and expects for himself treatment no better.

But in the country....

Make your home in a small country town and see how long you can manage without becoming friendly with the bookstall man. For in the country he is a power. There is no longer any casual flinging of pennies; there is the weather to discuss, and a remark to drop on the headlines in the contents bill. “Another all-night sitting,” you say, from the security given by eight good hours in bed: “ah well, if people like to be Members of Parliament, let them!” Then you both laugh. Or, “What’s this?--another new Peer? Well, it will be your turn soon,” you say, and then you both laugh again. But there is something more important than persiflage and gossip--there is the new novel to choose from the circulating library. For in the country the bookstall man is also the librarian and adviser; he not only sells papers but he controls the reading of the neighbourhood. His advice is sound. His instinct dictates wisely. “Jacobs’s latest,” he says, “is splendid. I read it on Sunday.” Not, of course, that he has any need to read a story to know that it is splendid; that would be too mechanical. He knows because he possesses the sixth sense with which successful handlers of books are gifted. “What’s new?” he replies, “well, here’s something good. Take that. You can’t go wrong.” Or, when in a dissuading mood (and nowadays librarians have to dissuade as much as recommend, poor doomed varmints), “That one? Oh! I don’t think she would like that. That’s a little bit--well, it’s strong, that’s what it is. I don’t recommend that. But here’s a charming story by the author of “Milk and Water....” And so forth.

What some simple country people would do without their bookstall man I can’t imagine. Take Peter, for instance. Peter was the friend of three old ladies who lived in a southern seaport--a sleepy forgotten town with quiet, narrow, Georgian streets and vast stretches of mud in its harbour which the evening sun turned to gold. These three old ladies--sisters and unmarried--lived together in a tiny red brick house where their several personalities dovetailed perfectly, different as they were. One was the practical managing sister, one was the humorous commentator, and one was the kindly dreamer. All were generous and philanthropic; indeed their benefactions of thought and deed were the principal business of their placid lives, while the principal recreation was reading. And herein lay the value of Peter, the bookstall man, for it was through his library that all their books came to them. He too divined the character of the books that he circulated by the mere process of touch; and he was rarely wrong. He knew to a grain exactly what was to be found in every book he recommended or did not recommend to these old ladies. In so far as his recommendations went, Peter was always right; and probably his dissuasions were rightly based too, although that of course we shall never know, since his advice was duly taken.

But it is no light matter, is it, to pick out suitable stories for three old-fashioned old ladies with very decided views as to what is fitting and nice, and what not, when the books (and here is the real difficulty) were to be read aloud? For this meant of course that the three personalities had to be taken into consideration. Each book had to please, or at any rate not offend, an old lady who was of a practical managing turn, and an old lady who was herself a bit of a quiz (as all good novelists must be), and an old lady who had Utopian dreams.

Peter, you see, must have been rather remarkable. “No,” he would say, “I don’t think Miss Dorcas would like that ... the gambling passages.... I’d recommend this if it weren’t for Miss Kate. But she’d never like the divorce proceedings....” And so on.

Reading aloud was to these old ladies a kind of ritual. They looked forward to it all day, and then as each chapter was finished they discussed it and approved or disapproved. When it comes to analyzing the pleasures of life, the privilege of approving and disapproving in conversation must be ranked very high, and reading aloud makes it so very harmless an amusement, since no tale-bearing is involved. This they did, and not only during the reading but at meals too, and often they would come down to breakfast after a rather wakeful night with new theories as to the conduct of hero or heroine. Happy Peter, to set so much gentle machinery in motion!

Of course, he was not able always to satisfy their programme. Sometimes for weeks and weeks together no new books (not only fiction, of course: memoirs and travels they were very fond of) would be published; but when he really struck gold how happy they all were. I remember that I found them once--it was thirteen years ago--in a state of joyful excitement over one of Peter’s most inspired suggestions--Miss Jewett’s “Country of the Pointed Firs.” Never could three old ladies of simple tastes and warm hearts have been more delighted with a printed page. I wished Peter could have seen them.

Is he still acting as friend to that little town, I wonder. He was so capable that probably he has been promoted to a wider sphere. For that is what happens to these friends of the small town: they are raised to positions of more importance and better salaries, and the chances are that the old personal intimacy goes altogether. They may, for example, be elevated to the place of manager at, say, London Bridge. Then is all their kindliness and thoughtfulness over: they become machines: very targets for pennies and half-pennies all day long, with no time for the humaner intercourse.

Well, the price of getting on has always been heavy; but here it is paid not only by the friend but by the small town too. It is hard when nice old ladies are also penalized.

Gypsy

It is a shocking thing, after ringing the bell to inquire after a friend, to be told that she is dead.

That recently happened to me. I rang the bell and waited on the step. The door was at last opened by a man in livery, or at any rate uniform, who knew me. I made to enter, remarking “How is Delia?” “Delia?” he said. “Delia is dead.”

Here was a blow! I had been thinking of Delia all the way to Regent’s Park, seeing again in anticipation her sad and yearning eyes, her pathetic, dumb face, her auburn locks, feeling her confiding hand in mine.

“Dead!” I said.

“Yes,” he replied, “pneumonia. But Annie’s here if you’d like to see her. And Jerry too.”

“Of course,” I said, and followed him to their abode; stopping in the kitchen on the way for some grapes and milk.

Delia was an ourang-outang; Annie is a chimpanzee. Delia was a red woman--“Sweet Auburn, loveliest sample of the Plain!” one murmured as one looked at her; Annie is a brunette. Annie sits all day in her little basement home, with Jerry, and now and then receives privileged visitors, such as His Majesty, whose hat--just as if it were mine--she seized and hurled to the other end of the room, and the young Princes and Princesses, and Fellows of the Society and their friends. Annie is “that mischievous,” but Jerry is thoughtful and low-pulsed. Annie will snatch whatever you have that pleases her and rush to the ceiling with it; Jerry sits quite still and looks at you with bright eyes filled with ten thousand sorrows.

Annie has some of Delia’s charm; but oh, how much more had Delia! Annie also spreads her arms for an embrace and is curious about clothes; but Delia--no, there will never be another Delia.

It was while wandering at random regretting Delia that I came upon Gypsy.

Now, Gypsy also is not Delia; but Gypsy’s companionableness and merriment and candour go far to soften the loss. A Zoo with both Delia and Gypsy in it would be almost too fortunate--shall I put it like that? I found her in the Small Cats’ House, that abode of bright eyes and stealthy quicknesses, and, surely, she is out of place. For her fellow-creatures in the surrounding cages are subtle and swift, predatory and untrustworthy, while she is the most transparently harmless, blundering, foolish, faithful thing you could conceive, without a movement that is not clumsy or a thought that is not obvious.

She was eating chocolate when I found her, seated firmly on the floor and picking the silver paper off with her teeth as skilfully as a child. Having finished the chocolate and satisfied herself (no rapid business) that there was no more, she turned to another visitor for entertainment and seized his walking-stick. Whether she recognized a compatriot--for it was a Malacca cane, and she is a Malayan bear from the same district--or whether all walking-sticks present equal attractions, I do not know; but she fondled this one with the utmost tenderness, shouldered it, hugged it, nursed it, bit it, and did her best to poke out her insignificant but very capable eyes with it.

Then she rose to her full but trumpery height and flung her arms round my leg.

Then she turned to her indulgent keeper--whose happiness at being entrusted with a straightforward baby-bear after the monotony of complex Small Cats is delightful to watch--and they set to at a sparring-match with tremendous spirit. Gypsy is not an in-fighter (like Welsh) nor an offensive assaulter (like Johnson); her method is to deliver two or three open-handed blows (which are not allowed in the Ring) and then to escape punishment, at any rate on the face or chest, by rolling herself into a ball and squirming and revolving on the ground. This exposes her unguarded rotundities to attack, it is true, but blows there she seems to enjoy, although affecting to avoid; and then rising to her feet she again advances to the fray and repeats the performance. She is very gentle, and in some mysterious way softens her claws when she hits.

The contest over, Gypsy turned to my “Pall-Mall Gazette” and proceeded very deliberately and scrupulously to demolish it. Whether a paper written by gentlemen for gentlemen has ever before been made a Malayan baby-bear’s plaything, I do not know; but it is a very satisfying one, and kept her busy and happy for ten minutes. And all the while as she walked up and down the floor among the visitors, tearing the pages into shreds, the Small Cats in their cages were following her with intense and glittering gaze, while the largest of them--a young puma--flung himself once or twice in her direction like a lovely grey missile, to be brought up sharp against his bars.

To any one in need of a new pet I can recommend a Malayan baby-bear. Gypsy stands about forty-two inches, and is entirely covered with short, strong, yet soft hair, nearer black than brown. Her neck is a rich tawny yellow. Her mouth is full of teeth which do not bite, and her paws have long and very hard horn-like nails which do not scratch. She is more like a magnified mole than anything in the world; absurdly so, in fact. Her obedience is instant. “Back to your cage, Gypsy,” says her keeper, and she returns to it; “Shut your door, Gypsy,” says her keeper, and she shuts it. She then climbs to a lofty perch and smiles the smile of the virtuous and uncomplaining--a lesson to the restless ocelot and unquiet lynx.

There are always a few babies at the Zoo for those that think to ask for them. After I had seen Gypsy I saw a lion of tender years and he allowed me to ruffle his head and tickle his cheeks; but no such liberties are possible with the infant jaguar, which was born in January, 1911, and is anything but the harmless pat of butter that it looks. And then I held between my finger and thumb a six-weeks’ old alligator while he squirmed and raged and did everything he could to close his fret-saw jaws over me.

But none of these privileges of course made up for Delia’s death, and nothing can.

A Sale

The sale of the late Sir John Day’s pictures was particularly interesting to me, since it happens that I have the satisfaction of sharing that good judge’s predilections. His gods are for the most part mine. I, too, would choose for my walls (if I had any) Corots and Daubignys, Marises and Mauves, Millets and Bosbooms, Rousseaus and De Wints. I, too, prefer the wistful crepuscule to the vivid noon. Hence I entered Christie’s at a quarter to one on 13 May, 1909, and took the place that a boy messenger was keeping for me, with feelings of peculiar excitement and enthusiasm.

The seated company at a big sale at Christie’s is as unchanging as an ordinary congregation. A few strangers may be there, looking in for the first time, but the rest, the regular attendants, the pew-owners, so to speak, know each other, and are known to the auctioneer, so that the bids of those who engage in the contest are, as at most sales where dealers congregate, often imperceptible to others, although to him clear as speech.

We opened modestly. Lot 1 was a seascape by De Bock, and the first bid was five guineas. It little thought, that bid, what a huge total would be built upon it. The De Bock reached 160 guineas, and then made room for a Bosboom. Bosboom is a modern Dutch painter, now dead (you may see his palette in the Museum at the Hague), whose ecclesiastical interiors have a grave and sombre beauty that I suppose has never been equalled. Among collectors he is becoming more and more desired.

After the Bosbooms we came to the Corots, of which there were a round dozen, and a little anticipatory flutter was perceptible in the room. There are better Corots in the world than Sir John Day possessed; but this procession of twelve of the tender, serene canvases from the Ville d’Avray studio was very wonderful, and one lost the bidding in the quietude of the paint. Among them were three early works, when the artist liked a more rarefied air than later in life. And these one has to know in order to realize fully not only how superb Corot was, but how bewilderingly blind were the connoisseurs of that day to let him languish as they did. Of course it is easy to recognize his greatness now, when the very name Corot carries magic with it; it is difficult to put one’s self back into those times when it meant nothing, and to see the pictures with eyes unassisted by tradition; and yet I find it hard to believe that if one of these early works had come to me suddenly out of a clear sky, I should have failed to be arrested by it.

Well, there we sat, packed together like excursionists, while the giant picture-dealers of Europe fought for these pacific landscapes--these sweet lark songs among the light clouds of the grey day, to quote Corot’s own description of his ideal--until the dozen had reached a total of nearly £12,000.

To Corot succeeded his friend Charles Daubigny, whose vast and luminous “Harvest Moon” produced the instant bid of 1000 guineas, to which, after a long interval of silence, it fell. His “Bords de l’Oise,” a great wet landscape, with Daubigny’s stern, sincere beauty drenching it, brought 1800 guineas. Others followed, and then five rich scenes by Diaz, also a citizen of the white village of Barbizon, whose home you may see to-day, with a tablet on the gate, almost opposite the rambling house of Jean François Millet. The first of these Diazes was an evening picture with cattle coming down to drink beneath a stormy sky; not unlike the superb moorland scene from the same brush which Mr. Salting left to the National Gallery. It began at fifty guineas and reached 850. (By the way, the starting of safe pictures at fifty and a hundred guineas would be a pleasant task for a reduced gentleman of the Captain Jackson type, who, able no longer to collect, wished still to sun himself in the illusion of prosperity and connoisseurship. To make in a loud voice a bid of 100 or 500 guineas, whether one has such a sum in the bank or not, must do something for the spirit. It cannot leave one quite where one was.)

After Diaz, Jules Dupré, another great and sincere painter of landscape, a direct disciple of Constable (who was a founder of the Barbizon school) and the friend of Corot, Rousseau, and their friends. It was Dupré who said beautifully of Corot that he might--it was within the bounds of possibility--be replaced as a painter, but never as a man. There were five Duprés, upon the first of which a sanguine friend of mine, unconscious of the growing value of this master, had placed the sum of £100, for which I was to try and get it for him. It was too little, I had suggested; but no, Dupré was not much considered, he fondly replied. His face fell when I told him how the first bid had been 200 guineas and the last 520.

It is one of the charms of Christie’s that you never can tell. Pictures fetch every day unexpected prices, both high and low. Good pictures slip through, taking the room unawares, and bad pictures occasionally reach absurd figures, for various reasons. This Dupré, however, was fine. I once bought at Christie’s for two guineas two water-colour drawings attributed to Clarkson Stanfield, and, behold, on stripping them to be framed again, one was revealed, by a minute history on its back, to be a David Cox worth many times what I gave for it. Let no one despair of a bargain, even when all the dealers from the Continent and all the dollars from America are present. The dealers’ idea, it must be remembered, is to sell again, and they buy accordingly. Many a good picture does not appeal to the commercial eye. At this sale, for instance, five examples of the, to me, impressive art of Georges Michel, the rich and sombre painter of windmills, a French Crome, brought together only a little more than 100 guineas, while on the second or water-colour day, there were many lots that went far too cheaply. In a sale where competition is concentrated upon the great works, the humble collector has often a chance.

After the Duprés came the Harpignies’, in which Sir John Day was peculiarly rich. This grand old man, who is still (1911) hale, at the age of 92, has been painting all his life in oil and water-colour, and has never put forth a meretricious or hurried thing. He is the link between Barbizon and the present day. Less charming, perhaps, than the greatest men of that school, he is more of a realist, and trees and foliage have no closer or more inspired student. His great lack, I suppose, is tenderness; everything else he has. It is good to know that in this fine, sure hand the blood still flows; that this artist, who has loved the world of beauty so long, is still able to enjoy it; and that he can watch himself becoming an Old Master, and the quarry of the collector, while he is still living.