Personal Pleasures (10 page)

This is how (I trust) they will speak to one another of me and of my new dress, when they see it. How I shall prank it among them, “loitering up and down, peacocking and courting of myself.” I shall feel as Adam felt when Eve made him (after, of course, their great and disastrous removal) a medley coat of feathers.

Eve,
walking forth about the Forrests, gathers

Speights, Parrots, Peacocks, Estrich
scatt'red feathers

And then with wax the smaller plumes she sears
,

And sows the greater with long white Horse hairs …

And therof makes a medly coat so rare

That it resembles
Nature's
Mantle faire
,

When in the Sun, in Pomp all glistering
,

She seems with smiles to woo the gawdy Spring …

Then on he puts his painted garments new
,

And Peacocke-like himselfe doth often view
,

Looks on his shadow, and in proud amaze

Admires the hand that had the Art to cause

So many severall parts to meet in one
,

To fashion thus the quainte Mandilion
.

I shall feel as the serpent must feel in her new skin, as the barrel-organ monkey in his new red jacket and cocked hat. Strange, what a singular effect the body's outer wrapping has on the mind, how it elevates or depresses the termless spirit of man, exalting it to preen its feathers among the plumy angels, abasing it to creep the earth with meanest worm.

Foolish questions have been asked about this matter by philosophers and moralists since human beings began to put foolish questions at all. Dr. Watts, for example, inquired.

Why should our garments, made to hide

Our parents' shame, provoke our pride?

The art of dress did ne'er begin

Till Eve our mother learn'd to sin
.

When first she put her covering on
,

Her robe of innocence was gone;

And yet her children vainly boast

In the sad marks of glory lost
.

How proud we are! how fond to shew

Our clothes, and call them rich and new!

When the poor sheep and silkworm wore

That very clothing long before
.

The tulip and the butterfly

Appear in gayer coats than I;

Let me be drest fine as I will
,

Flies, worms, and flowers, exceed me still
.

And, “Have you,” Crœsus, adorned in his pomp and glory, inquired of Solon, “ever seen a goodlier spectacle?” “Yes,” said Solon, “cocks, pheasants and peacocks.”

Why, in short, the philosophers and moralists desire to know, should we that are earth, ashes and dust prick up ourselves so peacockly? They are but seldom answered, since the earth, ashes and dust is too busy pricking up itself to pause to reply to foolish questions. But the answer is apparent. Why does the crow emplume itself with gaudy borrowed quills? We that are so mean and plain cannot face our fellows without
extraneous decking. Were we modelled out of crystal, jade and turquoise, of the lucent milky moonstone and the orient pearl, were we even fashioned like the small birds and pretty beasts, no adornment should we need or use. But nature has not thus privileged man. “If” (as Montaigne remarks) “we impartially enter into judgment with our selves, we shall find, that if there be any creature or beast less favoured in that than we, there are others (and that in greater numbers) to whom nature hath been more favourable than to us.
A multibus animalibus decore vincimur
. We are excelled in comeliness by many living creatures: yea, of terrestrial creatures, that live with us. For, concerning those of the sea, omitting their figure, which no proportion can contain, so much doth it differ, both in colour, in neatness, in smoothness, and in disposition, we must give place unto them: which in all qualities we must likewise do to the airy ones. … Such as most resemble man are the vilest and filthiest of all the rout: As for outward appearance, it is the Monkey or Ape:

Simia quam similis, turpissima bestia, nobis!

as for inward and vital parts, it is the Hog. Truly, when I consider man all naked (yea, be it in that sex, which seemeth to have and challenge the greatest share of eye-pleasing beauty) and view his defects and manifold imperfections, I find we have had much more reason to hide and cover our nakedness than any creature else. We may be excused for borrowing those
which nature had there-in favoured more than us, with their beauties to adorn us, and under their spoils of wool, of hair, of feathers and of silk, to shroud us.”

To shroud us … melancholy word. Remember,

Soon the grave must be your home
,

And your only suit, a shroud
.

Consider,

Green as the bay tree, ever green
,

With its new foliage on
,

The gay, the thoughtless, have I seen
,

I pass'd—and they were gone
.

Read, ye that run, the awful truth
,

With which I charge my page;

A worm is in the bud of youth
,

And at the root of age
.

Having thus remembered and thus considered, I will go out to my party in my new dress, gratulating myself that at least, if no handsomer than the ape, the hog, and the hippopotamus, and rather less so than the ant-eater, I have more wit than they, for I can, if not make, anyhow cause to be made, and assume, a flattering garment.

Seen close, you would appear to have every fault but one. You are preposterously bovine, you are cornigerous ruminants, you chew cud and let it dribble from your moving jaws, you stand in ruminating herds by stiles and gates, trampling the grass until it seems like the field of campaign at Passchendaal, fit for ducks, not men, to tread; you listlessly emit that pale, unencouraging fluid which we offer to sick persons and young children and cats, and from which strong men and women turn in disgust; you pursue, with lowered horns, my dog. You are not beautiful; you are far from clean; and the melancholy cries with which you rend the evening skies are like steamers that take the ocean, or sirens in a fog.

What then is this strange pleasure that I take in your uncouth forms? What makes, as I approach you across the next field, my heart leap up as who beholds a rainbow in the sky? Analysing it, I discern it to be a pleasure of sex. I have said that you have one virtue; my pleasure lies in perceiving it, in recognising that, whatever you may have looked like from far, you are but cows after all.

But, alas, some of you are mothers: little ones run
at your sides; and it is of mothers alone among she-creatures that there is any truth in the otherwise preposterously mendacious statement that the female of the species is far deadlier than the male.

An exquisite peace obtains: a drowsy, golden peace, flowing honey-sweet over my dwelling, soaking it, dripping like music from the walls, strowing the floors like trodden herbs. A peace for gods; a divine emptiness.

Fair Quiet, have I found thee here
,

And Innocence, thy Sister dear!

Mistaken long, I sought you then

In busy Companies of Men. …

Society is all but rude

To this delicious Solitude
.

The easy chair spreads wide arms of welcome; the sofa stretches, guest-free; the books gleam, brown and golden, buff and blue and maroon, from their shelves; they may strew the floor, the chairs, the couch, once more, lying ready to the hand. “I am afraid the room is rather littered. …” The echo of the foolish words lingers on the air, is brushed away, dies forgotten, the air closes behind it. A heavy volume is heaved from its shelf on to the sofa. Silence drops like falling blossoms over the recovered kingdom from which pretenders have taken their leave.

What to do with all this luscious peace? It is a gift, a miracle, a golden jewel, a fragment of some gracious heavenly order, dropped to earth like some incredible strayed star. One's life to oneself again. Dear visitors, what largesse have you given, not only in departing, but in coming, that we might learn to prize your absence, wallow the more exquisitely in the leisure of your not-being.

To-night we shall sleep deep. We need no more hope that you “have everything you want”; we know that you have, for you are safely home, and can get it from your kitchen if you haven't. We send you blessing and God speed, and sink into our idle peace as into floods of down.

But you have unfortunately left behind you, besides peace, a fountain pen, a toothbrush, and a bottle of eye lotion with eye bath.

I believe very little: you will have to tell me something excessively credible before I believe it. Do not come to me with your ghosts, crystals, palmistries, cards, creeds, miracles, scandals, rumours, gossips, and all the little news of the town; your new moons, black cats, and piebald horses I cannot away with. Is there an earthquake in the Barbadoes, an eruption in Sicily, a war in Abyssinia, a revolution in Spain? It is possible: but I do not see them, and have heard such tales before.

I have a friend who cannot believe in atrocities. All her life she has heard of atrocities, and earnestly sought them when travelling abroad (for it is abroad that atrocities occur), but she has been always disappointed, for she has never found one. She was once told (says she) of a Balkan atrocity exhibit, a woman of whom it was reported that Bulgarian atrocities seen and suffered by her had made her mad, so that she was kept in an asylum, a permanent exhibit. My friend, thinking, “Here is a veritable atrocity at last,” made a pilgrimage to the asylum and asked to see the woman, but found her quite sane, only annoyed by her confinement. So now, when she hears of atrocities, she always thinks of this woman whom atrocity had not
driven mad, and rejects them sadly. If you offer her past atrocities, such as those of Nero and Caligula, she rejects them too, feeling that Suetonius was unreliable. I do not go so far as this friend of mine; the atrociousness of human nature has not, I must conclude, been always without its vent. For my part, I decimate atrocities, which leaves me more than enough.

But, concerning most relations made to me, I consider, as Sir Thomas Browne held of the digesting of iron by the ostrich or sparrow-camel, that the negative seems most reasonably entertained. Or anyhow, whether reasonably or not, the most easily. Tell me what you will of earth or heaven; with Montaigne, I feel that we should say most times, there is no such matter.

It makes me feel agreeably aloof, not to be imposed on by all those strident, thundering events of which I hear, not to be taken in by rumour-mongers, magicians, gossips, quacks, moon's men, old wives' tales, “puerile hallucinations and anile delirations,” and, in fact, the whole rumour of the humming world.

But sometimes a thought troubles me, and I ask myself, should I, many centuries back, have been numbered with those who denied the Antipodes, and the rotundity of earth? Of these Bishop Wilkins complained, mentioning among them Chrysostom, Austin, Lactantius, the Venerable Bede, Lucretius, Procopius, and the voluminous Abulensis, together with many Fathers, and with Herodotus, who wrote, “I cannot choose but laugh, to see so many men venture to describe
the earth's compass, relating those things that are without all sense, as that the sea flows about the world, and that the Earth itself is round as an orb.” While Lactantius exclaims, “What are they that think there are Antipodes, such as walk with their feet against ours? Is there anyone so foolish as to believe that there are men whose heels are higher than their heads, that the plants and trees grow downward? What shall we think, that men do cling like worms, or hang by their claws as cats?” with much other pleasantry such as the ignorant and unbelieving use.

I must beware, then, of too wide and too deep an incredulity, and remember that there are many things yet hid from us, and that really everything is extremely peculiar.

The voice of the turtle is heard in my chimney. It is the prettiest soft low crooning in the world, like the soughing of wind in a pine wood, or the low moan of seas imprisoned between rocks. When first it stole into my room, as I sat reading there, I thought I had been Steele's pastoral lady friend, Mrs. Cornelia Lizard, “whose Head was so far turned … that she kept a Pair of Turtles cooing in her Chamber, and had a tame Lamb running after her up and down the House. I used all gentle Methods to bring her to her self. …”

But no: I am more fortunate that Mrs. Cornelia, not only in that I am lambless, but in that my pair of turtles, (if pair they are, and not a mourning widow turtling it after her mate) have not taken up their abode in my chamber, but have, it seems, made them a nest in my chimney. Yes, my chimney is a pigeon-cote, a culver-house, and in it the kind turtles sit and coo, and answer to each other's moan. I like to think that there are two turtles, that my turtle is not bereaved. And yet, to have so chaste, so musically mourning a widow at hand, would also be charming. “As a turtledove did I chatter, and as a dove did I mourn”; melancholy ordinance of nature, that this otherwise oblivious bird, so unlike the elephant that she forgets practically
everything immediately, including her young the moment they have been taken from the nest, and the peckings and unkindnesses of her husband, and all wrongs done her, should remember and mourn her mate until death. Even the widowed cock mourns, winging him to some withered bough, or to some friendly chimney. But who shall say why he mourns? Basil wrote that the eating of vipers, a favourite food of theirs, gives turtles a pain, until they can find some marjoram to heal it. They will find no marjoram in my chimney, and so they mourn there still.