Part 6

Slang, the illegitimate sister of Poetry, makes with her a common cause against the utilitarian economy of Prose. Both stand for lavish luxuriance in trope and involution, for floriation and adornment of thought. It is their boast to make two words grow where but one grew before. Both garb themselves in metaphor, and the only complaint of the captious can be that whereas Poetry follows the accepted style, Slang dresses her thought to suit herself in fantastic and bizarre caprices--that her whims are unstable and too often in bad taste.

But this odium given to slang by superficial minds is undeserved. In other days, before the language was crystallized into the verbiage and idiom of the doctrinaire, prose, too, was untrammelled. A cursory glance at the Elizabethan poets discloses a kinship with the rebellious fancies of our modern common colloquial talk. For gargarism, scarab, quodling, puckfist, scroyle, foist, pumpion, trindle-tale, comrogue, pigsbones, and ding-dong, we may now read chump, scab, chaw, yap, fake, bloke, pal, bad-actor, and so on. "She's a delicate dab-chick!" says Ben Jonson; "she had all the component parts of a peach," says George Ade.

It will be seen that slang has two characteristics--humour and force. Brevity is not always the soul of wit, for today we find amusement in the euphuisms that, in the sixteenth century were taken in all seriousness. The circumlocutions will drop speedily out of use, but the more apt and adequate neologisms tend to improve literary style. For every hundred times slang attributes a new meaning to an old word, it creates once or twice a new word for an old meaning. Many hybrids will grow, some flower and a few seed. So it is with slang.

There is a "gentleman's slang," as Thackeray said, and there is the impossible kind; but of the bulk of the American product, the worst to be said of it usually is that it is homely and extravagant. None the less is it a picturesque element that spices the language with enthusiasm. It is antiseptic and prevents the decay of virility. Literary style is but an individual, glorified slang. It is not impossible for the artist; it went to its extreme in the abandon of Ben Jonson, Webster, and Beaumont and Fletcher, but, as your Cockney would say, "It does take a bit of doin'" nowadays.

*The Charms of Imperfection*

For a long time I have held a stubborn belief that I should admire and aim at perfection. I admitted its impossibility, of course; I attributed my friends' failure to achieve it as a charming evidence of their humanity, but it seemed to me to be a thing most properly to be desired. And yet, upon thinking it over, I was often astonished by the discovery that most of my delights were caused by a divergence from this ideal. "A sweete disorder in the dress kindleth in cloathes a wantonness!"

Now, is this because I am naturally perverse, and enjoy the bizarre, the unique and the grotesque? Is it because of my frailty that I take a dear delight in signs of our common humanity, in the petty faults and foibles of the world? Or is it because I have misinterpreted this ideal of perfection, and have thought it necessary or proper to worship a conventional criterion? Celestine and I have been puckering our brows for a week over the problem!

We have learned, after a quarter of a century's experience with the turning lathe and fret saw, to turn back for lasting joy to handmade work. We delight in the minor irregularities of a carving, for instance, recognizing that behind that slip of the tool there was a man at work; a man with a soul, striving for expression. The dreary, methodical uniformity of machine-made decoration and furniture wearies our new enlightened taste. Mathematical accuracy and "spirit" seem to be mutually exclusive, and we have been taught by the modern AEsthetic almost to regard amateurishness as a sure proof of sincerity. We cannot associate the abandon and naive enthusiasm of the pre-Raphaelites with the technical proficiency of the later Renascence, and Botticelli stands, not only for the spirit dominating and shining through the substance but, in a way, for the incompatibility of perfect idealization with perfect execution. And yet this conflict troubles us. We feel that the two should be wedded, so that the legitimate offspring might be perfection; but when perfect technique is attained, as in a Japanese carving, the result is almost as devoid of human feeling and warmth as a machine-made product.

We feel this instinctive choice of irregularity wherever we turn--wherever, that is, we have to do with humanity or human achievement. We do not, it is true, delight in the flaw in the diamond, but elsewhere we are in perpetual conflict with nature, whose sole object seems to be the obliteration of extremes and the ultimate establishment of a happy medium of uniformity. We find perfection cold and lifeless in the human face. I doubt if a woman has ever been loved for an absolute regularity of feature; but how many, like little Celestine, who acknowledges herself that her nose is too crooked, her eyes too hazel, and her mouth too large, are bewilderingly charming on that very account! These features go to make up an expression, which, if it is not perfect, is certainly not to be accounted for by merely adding up the items. It is a case where the whole is greater than the sum of all its parts. We admire the anatomy and poise of the Greek statues, but they are not humanly interesting. Indeed, they were never meant to be, for they are divinities, and the symbols of an inaccessible perfection.

Still, while we speak of certain faults as being adorable (notably feminine weaknesses), while we make the trite remark anent a man's "one redeeming vice," while we shrink from natures too chaste, too aloof from human temptation, too uncompromising, yet we must feel a pang of conscience. We are not living up to our ideals. Is it the mere reaction from the impositions of conventional morality? I think not. It is a miscomprehension of the term perfection.

The Buddhist believes in a process of spiritual evolution that, tending ever toward perfection, finally reaches the state of Nirvana, where the individual soul is merged into the Infinite. How can it be differentiated from the universal spirit if it has attained all the attributes of divinity? And that idea seems to be the basis of our mistaken worship of perfection--a Nirvana where each thing, being absolutely perfect, loses every distinguishing mark of character. But is not our Christian, or even the Pagan, ideal higher than this? For even the Greek gods, cold and exquisite as they were, had each his individuality, his character, his separate function. Our conception of Heaven, if it is ever formulated nowadays, has this differentiation of individuality strongly accented; though the most orthodox may insist that the spirits of the blessed are sanctified with perfection, yet he does not hold it as a necessary dogma that they are therefore all alike, and recast in a common mould. He still dares believe in that infinite variety which Nature has taught us persists throughout the universe.

This is the fundamental difference between the Oriental and the Occidental point of view. We moderns stand for the supremacy of character, an ineradicable distinction between human beings which evolution and growth does not diminish, but develops. We believe, you and I, that in a million aeons we shall be as different one from the other as we are now; that faults may be eradicated, weaknesses lose their hold, but that our best parts will increase in virtue, not approaching some theoretical standard, but always and forever nearing that standard which is set for ourselves.

We have grown out of our admiration for the "copper-plate hand" in penmanship; we recognize the fact now, that we need not so much follow the specimens in the copy-book as to make the best of what is distinctive in our own style of writing. And this is a type of what our conception of perfection, perhaps, should be. Everything should be significant of character, should supplement it, translate it, explain it. In the Japanese prints you will find almost every face with the same meaningless expression, every feature calm, disguising every symptom of individuality. It is the Oriental pose, the Oriental ideal just mentioned. It is not considered proper to express either joy or sorrow, and the perfection of poise is a sublime indifference.

And I have a final idea that may, to a more subtile student of AEsthetic, seem suggestive. In the beautiful parabola described by the mounting and descending sky-rocket the upward and downward path are not quite parallel. The stick does not drop vertically, although it continually approaches that direction. In other words, the curve, constantly approaching a straight line, is beautiful despite, and, indeed, perhaps _because_ it never quite attains that rectilinear perfection and keeps its distinctive character to the end. It is beautiful in its whole progress, for that path defines the curve of the parabola.

*"The Play's the Thing"*

"Would you rather see a good play performed by poor actors, or a poor play done by good actors?" asked Celestine.

As a professor of the romantic view of life and a "ghost-seer," there is but one answer to the question. "The play's the thing!" Acting is at best a secondary art--an art, that is, of interpretation, though we as critics judge it of itself alone. But, to an idealist, no play ever is, or can be, perfectly performed. As we accept the conventions of stage carpentry, impossible cottages, flat trees, "property" rocks, misfit costumes and tinsel ornament, so we must gloss over the imperfections of the players, and accept their struttings and mouthings as the fantastic accessories of stage-land. No actor that ever lived ever acted throughout a whole drama as a sane human being would act. We are used to thinking the contrary, but the compression of time and space prevents verisimilitude. A play is not supposed to simulate life except by an established convention. Every art has its medium and its limitation. It is indeed a limitation that makes art possible. In the drama the limitation is the use of the time element.

The play's the thing--we may read it from the book or have it recited before the footlights, but the lasting delight is the charm of plot that, with the frail assistance of the actor, finds its way to our emotions. A good play done by poor actors, then, for me, if I must choose between the two evils.

Fancy creates; imagination constructs. The child, sporting ingenuously with both these powers, dwells in a world of his own, either induced by his mastering fiat, or remodelled nearer to his heart's desire from the rags and fragments at hand. In his toy theatre alone is the perfect play produced, for there imagination is stage manager, and has the hosts of Wonderland in his cast. The child is the only perfect romanticist. He has the keen, fresh eye upon nature; all is play, and the critical faculty is not yet aroused. So in a way, too, was all primitive drama. The audience at Shakespearean plays heard but noble poesies, saw but a virile dream made partly visible, like a ghost beckoning away their thoughts. So, even today, is the Chinese theatre, with its hundreds of arbitrary conventions, its lack of scenery, and its artificial eloquence. The veriest coolie knows that a painted face (a white nose, stripes and crosses on the cheeks) does but portray a masked intention, as if the actor bore a placard writ with the word "Villain." Forthwith, all the rest is faery. The player does but lightly guide the rein, and Pegasus soars free.

So no play can be perfectly performed. We have created an artificial standard of realism, and we say that Bernhardt, Duse and Coquelin portray emotion with consummate art. It has been agreed by authorities on AEsthetic that simulated passion surpasses in suggestive power real emotion. The actor must not "lose himself in his part"--he must maintain the objective relation. None the less, however, must we, as audience, supply imagination to extend the play from art to life. From a romantic point of view, such devotion to realism is unnecessary. We are swayed by the wildest absurdities of melodrama, alike false to life and false to art, and we accept the operas of Wagner, with all their pasteboard dragons and bull-necked heroes belching forth technique, as impressive stimuli to the imagination. Even through such crude means, uplifted either by passionate brotherhood or upon the wings of song, we are wafted far and fast. The play, oh! the play's the thing!

For see! If you prefer the bad play performed by the good actors, why not go to life itself? What else, indeed, _is_ life? It was the old Duke in Lewis Carroll's "Sylvie and Bruno" who first pointed this out. All the world's a stage where are performed the worst of badly constructed plays--plays with neither unity nor sequence nor climax, but performed with absolute perfection. Why waste your time cursing the Adelphi, when, like the Duke, you can see the perfect art of the street? The railway porter's dialect is still convincing. The fat woman with her screaming children may enter at any minute, with her touches of wonderful realism. If you go to the theatre for acting you go to the wrong place! Watch the Font Neuf for the despairing suicide, lurk in Whitechapel, visit in Mayfair, coquette with a Spaniard's sweetheart, or rob a Jew, strike an Englishman, love an American girl, flirt with a French countess, or watch a Samoan beauty at the salt pools catching fish; but try not to find perfect acting behind a row of footlights!

But if, after all, the play's the thing, it is as much a mistake to look for real drama upon the street. There everything is incomplete and, for the satisfaction of our aesthetic sense, we require the threads to be brought together, and the pattern developed, the knots tied. Our contemplation of life is usually analytic; we delight in discovering motives, elementary passions, traits of character and human nature. Our joy in art, on the other hand, arises from synthesis; we love to see effect follow cause, and events march logically, passions work themselves out, the triumph of virtue and justice. Life, as we see it, is a series of photographs. The drama presents these successively as in a biograph, with all the insignificant intermediary glimpses removed. We hunger for the finished story, the poem with the envoy. For this reason we have the drama and the novel.

And now Celestine asks me, "Would you rather read a good story poorly written than a poor story well written?"

The question is as fair as the other, though not quite in the same case. We may agree that acting is a secondary art, but literature has more dignified claims to considerations. Here we are contemplating a wedding of two arts, not the employment of one by another. One might as well say, then, "Would you rather see a good man married to a bad woman or the reverse?" It is the critic who attempts always to divorce the two.

Yet, as in almost all marriage, where two arts work together one is usually the more important. One may have one's preferences, but the selection of that art which embodies an idea, rather than the one which aims at an interpretation, marks the romanticist's point of view. One art must be masculine, creative, and the other feminine and adorning. The glory of the one is strength, of the other beauty. For me, then, the manly choice. Give me the good story badly told, the fine song poorly sung, the virile design clumsily carved, rather than the opposite cases. The necessity of such a choice is not a mere whim of Celestine's; it is a problem we are forced to confront every day. We must take sides. It is not often, even from the Philistine's point of view, that we have the good thing well done, while the poor thing badly done we have everywhere. Between these limits of perfection and hopelessness, then, lies our every-day world of art, and there continually we must make our choice.

If we could deal with abstractions, there would be no question at all, and undoubtedly we would all prefer to enjoy the disincarnate ideal rather than any incomplete embodiment, no matter how praiseworthy the presentment. But few of us are good enough musicians to hear the music in our mind's ear when we look over the score of an opera; few of us can dream whole romances like Dumas, without putting pen to paper; few, even, can long remember the blended glories of a sunset. We must have some tangible sign to lure back memory and imagination, and if we recognize the fact that such symbols are symbols merely, conventions without intrinsic value as art, then we have the eyes of the child and the romantic view of life.

And lastly, Celestine leaned to me in her green kimono and said, "Would you rather see a pretty girl in an ugly gown, or an ugly girl in a pretty gown?" Ah, one does not need to hold the romantic view of life to answer that question!

*Living Alone*

I have lived so long alone now, that it seems almost as if there were two of me--one who goes out to see friends, transacts business and buys things, and one who returns, dons more comfortable raiment, lights a pipe, and dreams. One the world knows, the other no one knows but the flies on the wall.

I keep no pets, since these would enforce my keeping regular hours; the only familiars I have, therefore, are my clock, my fire and my candles, and how companionable these may become one does not know who does not live alone. They owe me the debt of life, and repay it each in its own way, faithfully and apparently willingly. I have a lamp, too; but a lamp is a dull thing, especially when half-filled, and this one bores me. I might count my typewriter, also, but she is too strenuous, and she makes me too impatient by her inability to spell. Besides, the clock, fire and candles may, with no great stretch of the imagination, be readily conceived to have volition, and, once started, they contribute not a little to relieving the tedium of living alone.

My clock is always the same; it has no surprises. It may go a bit fast or slow, but it has a maddeningly accurate conscience, and its fidelity in ringing the eight-o'clock alarm proves it inhuman. Still, it lives and moves, beating a sober accompaniment to my thoughts. Altogether, it is not unlike a faithful, conscientious servant, never obtrusive, always punctual and obedient, but with an unremitting devotion to orders that is at times exasperating. Many a man has stood in fear and shame of his valet, and so I look askance furtively with a suppressed curse when the hands point to my bath, my luncheon, or my sortie into town. It would be a relief, sometimes, if my clock stopped, were I not sure that it would be my fault.

But my fire is more feminine, full of moods and whims, ardent, domestic and inspiring. Now, a fire, like a woman, should be something besides beautiful, though in many houses the hearth is a mere accessory. It should have other uses than to provide mere warmth, though this is often its sole reason for being. Nor should it be a mere culinary necessity, though I have known open fires to be kindled for that alone, and treated as domestic servants. In my house the fire has all these functions and more, for it is my friend and has consoled many lonely moments. It is a mistress, full of unexpected fancies and vagaries. It has, too, a more sacred quality, for it is an altar where I burn the incense of memory and sacrifice to the gods of the future. It is both human and divine, a tool and symbol at once.

No one, I think, can know how much of all this a fire can be, who has not himself laid, lighted and kindled and coaxed it, who has not utilized its services and accepted its consolations. My fire is, however, often a jealous mistress. She warms me and makes my heart glad, but I dare not leave her side on a wintry day. I must keep well within bounds, hold her hand or be chilled. I need but little urging! I pull up my couch, take pencil and paper, and she twinkles and purrs by my side, casting flickering glances at me as I work.

Not till the flames die down and the coals glow soberly red do I find the more practical pleasures of friendship and housewifely service. Now my fire plays the part of cook, and, in her proper sphere, outdoes every stove or range ever lighted. A little duck laid gently across the grate, the kettle whistling with steam, and the coffee-pot ready--what bachelor was ever attended by more charming handmaiden than I by my little open fire? She will heat an iron or shaving-water as gracefully, too, waiting upon me with a jocund willingness. No servant could be so companionable. Still, she must be humoured as one must always humour a woman. Try to drive her, or make her feel that she is but a slave, and you shall see how quickly she resents it. There is a psychological moment for broiling on an open fire, and postponement is fatal. It takes a world of petting and poking to sooth her caprice when she is in a blazing temper, but remember her sex, and she melts in a glow like a mollified child.

Kindling and lighting my fire is a ritual. I cannot go about it thoughtlessly or without excitement. The birth of the first curling flame inspires me, for the heart becomes an altar sacred to the household gods. If the day offers the least plausible pretext for a fire, I light one and sit down in worship. I resent a warm morning, when economy struggles with desire. Luckily my studio is at the north of the house, and, no matter if the sun is warm abroad, there is a cool corner waiting where a fire needs no apology. The sun creeps in toward noon and puts out the flames, but all the morning I enjoy the blaze.

In the evening the fire becomes absolutely necessary, and provides both heat and light, giving a new life of its own to the darkness of the room. Then I become a Parsee, put on my sacerdotal robes (for such lonely priestcraft requires costume), and fall into a reverie. For my sacrifices, old letters feed the flames. They say that coal, in burning, gives back the stored sunlight of past ages. What lost fires burn, then, when love-letters go up in smoke to illumine for one brief, last instant the shadows of memory!

My candles partake of the nature of both clock and fire. They are to be depended upon, when let alone, to burn just six hours, marking the time like the ticking pendulum, but they give light and warmth, too, in their own way, in gentle imitation of the fire. They also have moods--less petulant than the fire's--but they require as little attention as the clock. The fire seems immortal; though the coals fade into ashes, the morning's resurrection seems to continue the same personality, and the same flames seem to be incarnated--living again the same old life. But the life of a candle seems visibly limited to a definite space of time, and its end is clearly to be seen. In that aspect it seems more human and lovable than the fire--a candle is more like a petted animal, whose short life seems to lead to nothing beyond. We may put more coals on the fire, and continue its existence indefinitely, but the candle is doomed. Putting another one in the socket does not renew a previous existence. But, if it is a short life, it is a merry one, and its service is glad and generous. My little army of candles is constantly being replenished. Like brave and loyal soldiers, they lay down their lives gallantly in my cause, and new ones fill up the vacant ranks, fighting the powers of darkness.