Personal Pleasures (13 page)

Leisure spreads before my dazzled eyes, a halcyon sea, too soon to be cumbered with the flotsam and jetsam of purposes long neglected, which will, I know it, drift quickly into view again once I am embarked upon that treacherous, enticing ocean. Leisure now is but a brief business, and past return are the days when it seemed to stretch, blue and unencumbered, between one occupation and the next. There are always arrears, always things undone, doubtless never to be done, putting up teasing, reproachful heads, so that, although I slug, I slug among the wretched souls whom care doth seek to kill. But now, just emerged as I am from the tangled and laborious thicket which has so long embosked me, I will contemplate a sweet and unencumbered slugging, a leisure and a liberty as of lotus eaters or gods. As for books, never more will I write one;
nay, I have done, you get no more of me. Is there none other way by which I may sustain a life, own a roof tree, a bed, a board, a car, a few clothes? Must I depend on these accursed labours, these toils that never cease?

Forget them. This last bundle of them has taken to itself wings like a dove; it will flee away and leave me at rest.

But, alas, it is a homing pigeon; it will return to me, typed words turned into print, bristling with even more errors, even more solecisms and follies, than when it left my hands. I shall struggle laboriously to amend it, send it away once more, and it will again return to make a fool of me in the end.

How they dash by, car after car, brave in scarlet, imperious with clanging bells, fraught with an army of courageous brass-helmed men! What calm and placid-seeming beings! And yet they must be seething, beneath that tranquil exterior, beneath those bright helmets, with more than all the excitement of those who go to look at fires, for they are pyromachs, they will wage a fearful war with ravening flames, they will run up ladders and rescue human beings, furniture, and cats from incineration, they will turn on a hose and deluge rooms and buildings with cooling, quenching streams, watched from all sides by a gratified populace and a busily recording Press.

All this, at least, is what I suppose that they mean to do when they arrive at the destination towards which they are so rapidly and impetuously proceeding, admitting no obstacle, ignoring traffic signals, ringing an imperious peal which sends cars, omnibuses, pedestrians, cyclists, yes, even horse-vans, those stately, marching monarchs of the street, scuttling out of their way.

So, one imagines, did the chariots of Roman Consuls dash imperiously, clatteringly, through Roman streets, scattering Roman citizens as the white herds
on the mountains and in the chestnut-shadowed gorges scatter before wolves. Did the Roman citizens, thus scattered, gaze on the speeding chariots with applause and exultation in their hearts, with that joyful yet lachrymose emotion which is caused by the sight of rapidly speeding brass-helmed men with coiled lengths of hose, jangling bells as they hurry flame-ward in flame-hued cars? No; our emotion must be more pleasurable, for it is fiery in origin; paradoxically, it is pyrolatry which causes us to delight in these pyroletrous engines and men.

Not only pyroletrous but panolethrous, for their scarlet cars of Juggernaut mow down all that cannot expeditiously enough fly from their path, and one of them has grazed my car's newly painted wing. I make no protest; they would not heed me were I to do so. They are out on a practice run and no casualties shall give them pause.

How rare, how sweet they fall, these honeyed words, these golden bells that stroke the listening air! O Flattery, thou coaxing, heav'nly maid, thou com'st too seldom to seduce and soothe. How amiable are thy feet as thou drawest nigh, how bright and insincere thy smile!

Sometimes the post brings thee. Perhaps an American professor has written me a kind word; he is learned as well as good-natured; he seems to know what is good in literature. Perhaps it is, instead, a kindly unknown, living in the English provinces. What a clever, well-educated man! What a sympathetic, intelligent woman! How different from some others! Here is someone who admires my poetry; another who thinks my essays well expressed; even my novels well conceived, with passable plots. Their words are sweet as honey in the mouth. An author there are few to praise should save and keep these copious and elegant celebrations of her merit: keep them, and show them one day to those contemners, those heapers of gratuitous obloquy, who write tasteless and tactless books pointing out how deficient in literary merit and personal worth practically all authors are. Here, Mr. Blank (I shall say), is the real truth about me, which you, who have apparently omitted to read the majority of
my works before pronouncing on them and on me, have so blindly overlooked. What about this, pray, I shall boast to the reviewers of my next book, when they find it insubstantial and facetious, or pedantic and dull, or sadly trivial and unconvincing. I would like you to know (I shall say) what this learned professor thinks of me, and this excellent gentleman from (or perhaps still in) Yorkshire, and all these ardent young students who desire to write a thesis on me in German, Italian, French and Scandinavian universities. (This is not a form of flattery that pleases me, as these young innocents all request lengthy and informing answers, and, though from me they receive no answer, they remain, on account of their projected theses and their tender years, a little on my conscience. It is obvious that they write to all authors. Has any so far answered them, poor nit-wits?)

Flattery. That great call, to which every sentient being down the ages has responded. Gods, men, women, children, beasts and birds; how readily these have fallen into the snares spread for their feet, the while they spruce themselves and smirk and smug, tripping it along life's highway, toes barely touching the earth, as if they were indeed puffed up with these agreeable gases until they have acquired the levity of balloons. For a very little, they would leave the earth, and soar away into the skyey sphere, still smiling and smirking like cherubs among the buxom clouds. “Vix humum tetigit pede,” wrote Milton of his proud and dreaming youth; scarcely did he touch the earth with
his feet; and so these happy ones who live with flattery. The sweet inebriant only comes my way on occasion, and stays not long enough to obliviate that negligence which is man's normal earthly portion. I would that it were otherwise. I would wish to go companioned and beleaguered by flatterers telling their sugared lies, like those Italian gentlemen whom one meets in trains. “Come è bellina, simpatica, graziosa!” Charming voices murmur in one's memory, like honeybees among clover. How comely and how elegant you appear, how fitly garbed, how altogether worthy of esteem. Nor man nor woman did I ever see, at all parts equal to the parts in thee.…

“Think'st thou,” asked Silvia disagreeably of Protheus trying to please her, “think'st thou I am so shallow, so conceitless, to be seduced by thy flattery?” “Nay, Sir,” says Dr. Johnson, “flattery pleases very generally. In the first place, the flatterer may think what he says to be true: but in the second place, whether he thinks so or not, he certainly thinks those whom he flatters of consequence enough to be flattered.” In the third place, he has a kindly desire to please them, and they are churlish indeed if they be not pleased by his amiable intentions, his delightful cozenage. Look on the pleasant fellow's picture, sketched three centuries since by the observant but hard-to-please Dr. John Earle.

“He will commend to you first what he knows you like, and has always some absurd story or other
of your enemy.… He will ask your counsel sometimes as a man of deep judgment … and whatsoever you say, is persuaded.… A piece of wit bursts him with an overflowing laughter, and he remembers it for you to all companies, and laughs again in the telling. He is one never chides you but for your virtues, as,
you are too good, too honest, too religious
.… It is a happiness not to discover him, for as long as you are happy, you shall not.”

Certainly I shall not. By all means flatter me; be kind and courteous; hop in my walks and gambol in my eyes; feed me with apricocks and dewberries; nod to me and do me courtesies, fool me to the top of my bent, for I enjoy it.

Though, alas, it makes the unflattering world at large seem more hard, chilly and malicious than ever.

How it glows, golden lit, empty of people, mysterious and dumb, behind curved glass that is as space bending unseen, that melts into the still, thin air, guarding what seems to the deceived eye unguarded and free to the touch. Still and bright and strange, like a deserted fairyland, like Eden after its erred denizens had been outed, like a palace garden whence queens have fled, gleams that ordered and enchanted space, blossoming like a greenhouse in the dead of the night. Golden baskets are piled high with pink roses; crimson roses riot in curious jars; hydrangeas make massed rainbows beneath many-coloured lights; tall lilies form a frieze behind, like liveried, guarding angels. Among the flowers are piled exotic fruits, pears and pines and medlars, little round fruitlets from China; clusters of purple grapes, asparagus in close formation, pressed together like sardines reared on end.

It is all very lovely, this gleaming vision of the night, so still, remote and bright, entranced behind its unseen glass, as it were a water garden deep planted in green seas, lit by the phosphorent illumination of a thousand fish. And look, it has glass tanks of fish, coral, and sea horses, softly shining in each corner, sending faint light over the flower garden from below, while brighter lights illustrate it from the high walls.

It is a scene so exquisite and so strange that it might be a mirage, to melt away before the wondering gaze. We will leave it, while it is still clear and brilliant; turn away and walk down the cold, empty and echoing street, looking not back lest that bright garden be darkened and fled like a dream before dawn.

I am in the cockpit of the Klemm two-seater of my friend. I am helmeted, goggled, strapped in. There was recently a man not strapped in, says my cheerful friend, as he takes his place behind me, who got left in the air two thousand feet up when the plane dropped in a pocket. The man followed, quickly but inaccurately; he reached the earth first. So it is better to be strapped in.

We taxy (odd word for it) over green pastures and turn into the wind. The starting light shines in the tower, the throttle is opened full, the engine roars. Faster and faster we go, bounce once or twice, and suddenly are off the meadow, in the air, rising up, climbing th'aerial height with eager haste, winging it like the mounting lark, scaling the steep ascent of heaven like the saints, eager to be above the clouds. What height now, I shout through my telephone to the pilot behind. About a thousand, he calls back. To be above the clouds we must climb two thousand more.

Still we fly sunward, like Icarus the rash. We are in the clouds now, pushing through them, flying blind. I, in my intrepidity, am unmoved by this; the pilot does not share my nonchalance, as he believes
the heavens to be cluttered with hidden aeroplanes practising from the school. The clouds are cool and wet; when we emerge from them the wind-screens are seen to be soaked and dripping, as if we had been in a storm of rain.

We are above them now, winging through a heaven of sunshine, with cushiony billows floating below, a feather bed for the gods, a range of snowy mountains, a forest of giant white trees, a pride of fairy castles, a gibbering of gliding, shrouding ghosts, a field of ice. Through rifts and chasms we catch glimpses of a distant earth, laid out green and hedged, like a chequer-board.

How high now?

About four thousand.

We speed along through radiant space. Enormous bliss, as Milton would say.

How fast? I call.

About a hundred miles.

It does not feel that, with only thin air for resistance. A car travelling at forty seems faster. Until you put a hand outside the wind-screen; then the whole weight and force of the heavens rushes storming against you.

We are nosing downward now; we shall soon be below the clouds again; we fly earthward, as the Archangel Raphael flew from heaven.

Down thither prone in flight
He speeds, and through the vast ethereal sky

Sails between worlds and worlds, with steady wing

Now on the polar winds, then with quick fan

Winnows the buxom air; till, within soar

Of towering eagles, to all the fowls he seems

A Phœnix, gazed by all as that sole Bird.…

What does Raphael, what do all the archangels, angels, seraphim, cherubim, principalities, dominions and powers, what do all the gazing fowls, think of our Klemm two-seater, so bravely soaring the heavens with golden wings outspread? One supposes them used to it by now; it is not a phœnix, not a strayed archangel, but just one among a flight of those great noisy birds that now disturb heaven's peace.

But to us it is a dream come true; never a man, woman, or child down all the ages but has dreamed of thus soaring and winging it through space, has conceived and desired what Bishop Wilkins called such volant automata. Though, as he said, the common desire has always been for wings fastened immediately to the body. That was Dædalus his manner; indeed, says the Bishop, it has been frequently attempted, not without some success. There was the English monk, Elmerus, about the Confessor's time, who did by such wings fly from a tower about a furlong; and so another from St. Mark's steeple in Venice; and Busbequius speaks of a Turk in Constantinople who attempted something this way. Mr. Burton doth believe that some new-fangled wit ('tis his cynical phrase) will some time or other find out this art. Though the
truth is, most of these artists did unfortunately miscarry by falling down, and breaking their arms or legs, yet this may be imputed to their want of experience, and too much fear, which must needs possess men in such dangerous and strange attempts. Those things that seem very difficult and fearful at the first may grow very facile after frequent trial and exercise. And therefore he that would effect anything in this kind must be brought up to the constant practice of it from his youth, trying first only to use his wings in running on the ground, as an ostrich or tame geese will do, touching the earth with his toes; and so by degrees learn to rise higher, till he shall attain unto skill and confidence.…