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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Colour of Life, by Alice Meynell
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Colour of Life
+
+Author: Alice Meynell
+
+Release Date: March 14, 2005  [eBook #1205]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE COLOUR OF LIFE***
+
+
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1897 John Lane edition by David Price, email
+ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+
+
+
+
+
+THE COLOUR OF LIFE
+
+
+Contents:
+
+The Colour of Life
+A Point Of Biography
+Cloud
+Winds of the World
+The Honours of Mortality
+At Monastery Gates
+Rushes and Reeds
+Eleonora Duse
+Donkey Races
+Grass
+A Woman in Grey
+Symmetry and Incident
+The Illusion of Historic Time
+Eyes
+
+
+
+
+THE COLOUR OF LIFE
+
+
+Red has been praised for its nobility as the colour of life.  But the
+true colour of life is not red.  Red is the colour of violence, or of
+life broken open, edited, and published.  Or if red is indeed the colour
+of life, it is so only on condition that it is not seen.  Once fully
+visible, red is the colour of life violated, and in the act of betrayal
+and of waste.  Red is the secret of life, and not the manifestation
+thereof.  It is one of the things the value of which is secrecy, one of
+the talents that are to be hidden in a napkin.  The true colour of life
+is the colour of the body, the colour of the covered red, the implicit
+and not explicit red of the living heart and the pulses.  It is the
+modest colour of the unpublished blood.
+
+So bright, so light, so soft, so mingled, the gentle colour of life is
+outdone by all the colours of the world.  Its very beauty is that it is
+white, but less white than milk; brown, but less brown than earth; red,
+but less red than sunset or dawn.  It is lucid, but less lucid than the
+colour of lilies.  It has the hint of gold that is in all fine colour;
+but in our latitudes the hint is almost elusive.  Under Sicilian skies,
+indeed, it is deeper than old ivory; but under the misty blue of the
+English zenith, and the warm grey of the London horizon, it is as
+delicately flushed as the paler wild roses, out to their utmost, flat as
+stars, in the hedges of the end of June.
+
+For months together London does not see the colour of life in any mass.
+The human face does not give much of it, what with features, and beards,
+and the shadow of the top-hat and _chapeau melon_ of man, and of the
+veils of woman.  Besides, the colour of the face is subject to a thousand
+injuries and accidents.  The popular face of the Londoner has soon lost
+its gold, its white, and the delicacy of its red and brown.  We miss
+little beauty by the fact that it is never seen freely in great numbers
+out-of-doors.  You get it in some quantity when all the heads of a great
+indoor meeting are turned at once upon a speaker; but it is only in the
+open air, needless to say, that the colour of life is in perfection, in
+the open air, "clothed with the sun," whether the sunshine be golden and
+direct, or dazzlingly diffused in grey.
+
+The little figure of the London boy it is that has restored to the
+landscape the human colour of life.  He is allowed to come out of all his
+ignominies, and to take the late colour of the midsummer north-west
+evening, on the borders of the Serpentine.  At the stroke of eight he
+sheds the slough of nameless colours--all allied to the hues of dust,
+soot, and fog, which are the colours the world has chosen for its
+boys--and he makes, in his hundreds, a bright and delicate flush between
+the grey-blue water and the grey-blue sky.  Clothed now with the sun, he
+is crowned by-and-by with twelve stars as he goes to bathe, and the
+reflection of an early moon is under his feet.
+
+So little stands between a gamin and all the dignities of Nature.  They
+are so quickly restored.  There seems to be nothing to do, but only a
+little thing to undo.  It is like the art of Eleonora Duse.  The last and
+most finished action of her intellect, passion, and knowledge is, as it
+were, the flicking away of some insignificant thing mistaken for art by
+other actors, some little obstacle to the way and liberty of Nature.
+
+All the squalor is gone in a moment, kicked off with the second boot, and
+the child goes shouting to complete the landscape with the lacking colour
+of life.  You are inclined to wonder that, even undressed, he still
+shouts with a Cockney accent.  You half expect pure vowels and elastic
+syllables from his restoration, his spring, his slenderness, his
+brightness, and his glow.  Old ivory and wild rose in the deepening
+midsummer sun, he gives his colours to his world again.
+
+It is easy to replace man, and it will take no great time, where Nature
+has lapsed, to replace Nature.  It is always to do, by the happily easy
+way of doing nothing.  The grass is always ready to grow in the
+streets--and no streets could ask for a more charming finish than your
+green grass.  The gasometer even must fall to pieces unless it is
+renewed; but the grass renews itself.  There is nothing so remediable as
+the work of modern man--"a thought which is also," as Mr Pecksniff said,
+"very soothing."  And by remediable I mean, of course, destructible.  As
+the bathing child shuffles off his garments--they are few, and one brace
+suffices him--so the land might always, in reasonable time, shuffle off
+its yellow brick and purple slate, and all the things that collect about
+railway stations.  A single night almost clears the air of London.
+
+But if the colour of life looks so well in the rather sham scenery of
+Hyde Park, it looks brilliant and grave indeed on a real sea-coast.  To
+have once seen it there should be enough to make a colourist.  O
+memorable little picture!  The sun was gaining colour as it neared
+setting, and it set not over the sea, but over the land.  The sea had the
+dark and rather stern, but not cold, blue of that aspect--the dark and
+not the opal tints.  The sky was also deep.  Everything was very
+definite, without mystery, and exceedingly simple.  The most luminous
+thing was the shining white of an edge of foam, which did not cease to be
+white because it was a little golden and a little rosy in the sunshine.
+It was still the whitest thing imaginable.  And the next most luminous
+thing was the little child, also invested with the sun and the colour of
+life.
+
+In the case of women, it is of the living and unpublished blood that the
+violent world has professed to be delicate and ashamed.  See the curious
+history of the political rights of woman under the Revolution.  On the
+scaffold she enjoyed an ungrudged share in the fortunes of party.
+Political life might be denied her, but that seems a trifle when you
+consider how generously she was permitted political death.  She was to
+spin and cook for her citizen in the obscurity of her living hours; but
+to the hour of her death was granted a part in the largest interests,
+social, national, international.  The blood wherewith she should,
+according to Robespierre, have blushed to be seen or heard in the
+tribune, was exposed in the public sight unsheltered by her veins.
+
+Against this there was no modesty.  Of all privacies, the last and the
+innermost--the privacy of death--was never allowed to put obstacles in
+the way of public action for a public cause.  Women might be, and were,
+duly suppressed when, by the mouth of Olympe de Gouges, they claimed a
+"right to concur in the choice of representatives for the formation of
+the laws"; but in her person, too, they were liberally allowed to bear
+political responsibility to the Republic.  Olympe de Gouges was
+guillotined.  Robespierre thus made her public and complete amends.
+
+
+
+
+A POINT OF BIOGRAPHY
+
+
+There is hardly a writer now--of the third class probably not one--who
+has not something sharp and sad to say about the cruelty of Nature; not
+one who is able to attempt May in the woods without a modern reference to
+the manifold death and destruction with which the air, the branches, the
+mosses are said to be full.
+
+But no one has paused in the course of these phrases to take notice of
+the curious and conspicuous fact of the suppression of death and of the
+dead throughout this landscape of manifest life.  Where are they--all the
+dying, all the dead, of the populous woods?  Where do they hide their
+little last hours, where are they buried?  Where is the violence
+concealed?  Under what gay custom and decent habit?  You may see, it is
+true, an earth-worm in a robin's beak, and may hear a thrush breaking a
+snail's shell; but these little things are, as it were, passed by with a
+kind of twinkle for apology, as by a well-bred man who does openly some
+little solecism which is too slight for direct mention, and which a
+meaner man might hide or avoid.  Unless you are very modern indeed, you
+twinkle back at the bird.
+
+But otherwise there is nothing visible of the havoc and the prey and
+plunder.  It is certain that much of the visible life passes violently
+into other forms, flashes without pause into another flame; but not all.
+Amid all the killing there must be much dying.  There are, for instance,
+few birds of prey left in our more accessible counties now, and many
+thousands of birds must die uncaught by a hawk and unpierced.  But if
+their killing is done so modestly, so then is their dying also.  Short
+lives have all these wild things, but there are innumerable flocks of
+them always alive; they must die, then, in innumerable flocks.  And yet
+they keep the millions of the dead out of sight.
+
+Now and then, indeed, they may be betrayed.  It happened in a cold
+winter.  The late frosts were so sudden, and the famine was so complete,
+that the birds were taken unawares.  The sky and the earth conspired that
+February to make known all the secrets; everything was published.  Death
+was manifest.  Editors, when a great man dies, are not more resolute than
+was the frost of '95.
+
+The birds were obliged to die in public.  They were surprised and forced
+to do thus.  They became like Shelley in the monument which the art and
+imagination of England combined to raise to his memory at Oxford.
+
+Frost was surely at work in both cases, and in both it wrought wrong.
+There is a similarity of unreason in betraying the death of a bird and in
+exhibiting the death of Shelley.  The death of a soldier--_passe_
+_encore_.  But the death of Shelley was not his goal.  And the death of
+the birds is so little characteristic of them that, as has just been
+said, no one in the world is aware of their dying, except only in the
+case of birds in cages, who, again, are compelled to die with
+observation.  The woodland is guarded and kept by a rule.  There is no
+display of the battlefield in the fields.  There is no tale of the game-
+bag, no boast.  The hunting goes on, but with strange decorum.  You may
+pass a fine season under the trees, and see nothing dead except here and
+there where a boy has been by, or a man with a trap, or a man with a gun.
+There is nothing like a butcher's shop in the woods.
+
+But the biographers have always had other ways than those of the wild
+world.  They will not have a man to die out of sight.  I have turned over
+scores of "Lives," not to read them, but to see whether now and again
+there might be a "Life" which was not more emphatically a death.  But
+there never is a modern biography that has taken the hint of Nature.  One
+and all, these books have the disproportionate illness, the death out of
+all scale.
+
+Even more wanton than the disclosure of a death is that of a mortal
+illness.  If the man had recovered, his illness would have been rightly
+his own secret.  But because he did not recover, it is assumed to be news
+for the first comer.  Which of us would suffer the details of any
+physical suffering, over and done in our own lives, to be displayed and
+described?  This is not a confidence we have a mind to make; and no one
+is authorised to ask for attention or pity on our behalf.  The story of
+pain ought not to be told of us, seeing that by us it would assuredly not
+be told.
+
+There is only one other thing that concerns a man still more exclusively,
+and that is his own mental illness, or the dreams and illusions of a long
+delirium.  When he is in common language not himself, amends should be
+made for so bitter a paradox; he should be allowed such solitude as is
+possible to the alienated spirit; he should be left to the "not himself,"
+and spared the intrusion against which he can so ill guard that he could
+hardly have even resented it.
+
+The double helplessness of delusion and death should keep the door of
+Rossetti's house, for example, and refuse him to the reader.  His mortal
+illness had nothing to do with his poetry.  Some rather affected
+objection is taken every now and then to the publication of some facts
+(others being already well known) in the life of Shelley.  Nevertheless,
+these are all, properly speaking, biography.  What is not biography is
+the detail of the accident of the manner of his death, the detail of his
+cremation.  Or if it was to be told--told briefly--it was certainly not
+for marble.  Shelley's death had no significance, except inasmuch as he
+died young.  It was a detachable and disconnected incident.  Ah, that was
+a frost of fancy and of the heart that used it so, dealing with an
+insignificant fact, and conferring a futile immortality.  Those are ill-
+named biographers who seem to think that a betrayal of the ways of death
+is a part of their ordinary duty, and that if material enough for a last
+chapter does not lie to their hand they are to search it out.  They, of
+all survivors, are called upon, in honour and reason, to look upon a
+death with more composure.  To those who loved the dead closely, this is,
+for a time, impossible.  To them death becomes, for a year,
+disproportionate.  Their dreams are fixed upon it night by night.  They
+have, in those dreams, to find the dead in some labyrinth; they have to
+mourn his dying and to welcome his recovery in such a mingling of
+distress and of always incredulous happiness as is not known even to
+dreams save in that first year of separation.  But they are not
+biographers.
+
+If death is the privacy of the woods, it is the more conspicuously secret
+because it is their only privacy.  You may watch or may surprise
+everything else.  The nest is retired, not hidden.  The chase goes on
+everywhere.  It is wonderful how the perpetual chase seems to cause no
+perpetual fear.  The songs are all audible.  Life is undefended,
+careless, nimble and noisy.
+
+It is a happy thing that minor artists have ceased, or almost ceased, to
+paint dead birds.  Time was when they did it continually in that British
+School of water-colour art, stippled, of which surrounding nations, it
+was agreed, were envious.  They must have killed their bird to paint him,
+for he is not to be caught dead.  A bird is more easily caught alive than
+dead.
+
+A poet, on the contrary, is easily--too easily--caught dead.  Minor
+artists now seldom stipple the bird on its back, but a good sculptor and
+a University together modelled their Shelley on his back, unessentially
+drowned; and everybody may read about the sick mind of Dante Rossetti.
+
+
+
+
+CLOUD
+
+
+During a part of the year London does not see the clouds.  Not to see the
+clear sky might seem her chief loss, but that is shared by the rest of
+England, and is, besides, but a slight privation.  Not to see the clear
+sky is, elsewhere, to see the cloud.  But not so in London.  You may go
+for a week or two at a time, even though you hold your head up as you
+walk, and even though you have windows that really open, and yet you
+shall see no cloud, or but a single edge, the fragment of a form.
+
+Guillotine windows never wholly open, but are filled with a doubled glass
+towards the sky when you open them towards the street.  They are,
+therefore, a sure sign that for all the years when no other windows were
+used in London, nobody there cared much for the sky, or even knew so much
+as whether there were a sky.
+
+But the privation of cloud is indeed a graver loss than the world knows.
+Terrestrial scenery is much, but it is not all.  Men go in search of it;
+but the celestial scenery journeys to them.  It goes its way round the
+world.  It has no nation, it costs no weariness, it knows no bonds.  The
+terrestrial scenery--the tourist's--is a prisoner compared with this.  The
+tourist's scenery moves indeed, but only like Wordsworth's maiden, with
+earth's diurnal course; it is made as fast as its own graves.  And for
+its changes it depends upon the mobility of the skies.  The mere green
+flushing of its own sap makes only the least of its varieties; for the
+greater it must wait upon the visits of the light.  Spring and autumn are
+inconsiderable events in a landscape compared with the shadows of a
+cloud.
+
+The cloud controls the light, and the mountains on earth appear or fade
+according to its passage; they wear so simply, from head to foot, the
+luminous grey or the emphatic purple, as the cloud permits, that their
+own local colour and their own local season are lost and cease, effaced
+before the all-important mood of the cloud.
+
+The sea has no mood except that of the sky and of its winds.  It is the
+cloud that, holding the sun's rays in a sheaf as a giant holds a handful
+of spears, strikes the horizon, touches the extreme edge with a delicate
+revelation of light, or suddenly puts it out and makes the foreground
+shine.
+
+Every one knows the manifest work of the cloud when it descends and
+partakes in the landscape obviously, lies half-way across the mountain
+slope, stoops to rain heavily upon the lake, and blots out part of the
+view by the rough method of standing in front of it.  But its greatest
+things are done from its own place, aloft.  Thence does it distribute the
+sun.
+
+Thence does it lock away between the hills and valleys more mysteries
+than a poet conceals, but, like him, not by interception.  Thence it
+writes out and cancels all the tracery of Monte Rosa, or lets the pencils
+of the sun renew them.  Thence, hiding nothing, and yet making dark, it
+sheds deep colour upon the forest land of Sussex, so that, seen from the
+hills, all the country is divided between grave blue and graver sunlight.
+
+And all this is but its influence, its secondary work upon the world.  Its
+own beauty is unaltered when it has no earthly beauty to improve.  It is
+always great: above the street, above the suburbs, above the gas-works
+and the stucco, above the faces of painted white houses--the painted
+surfaces that have been devised as the only things able to vulgarise
+light, as they catch it and reflect it grotesquely from their importunate
+gloss.  This is to be well seen on a sunny evening in Regent Street.
+
+Even here the cloud is not so victorious as when it towers above some
+little landscape of rather paltry interest--a conventional river heavy
+with water, gardens with their little evergreens, walks, and shrubberies;
+and thick trees impervious to the light, touched, as the novelists always
+have it, with "autumn tints."  High over these rises, in the enormous
+scale of the scenery of clouds, what no man expected--an heroic sky.  Few
+of the things that were ever done upon earth are great enough to be done
+under such a heaven.  It was surely designed for other days.  It is for
+an epic world.  Your eyes sweep a thousand miles of cloud.  What are the
+distances of earth to these, and what are the distances of the clear and
+cloudless sky?  The very horizons of the landscape are near, for the
+round world dips so soon; and the distances of the mere clear sky are
+unmeasured--you rest upon nothing until you come to a star, and the star
+itself is immeasurable.
+
+But in the sky of "sunny Alps" of clouds the sight goes farther, with
+conscious flight, than it could ever have journeyed otherwise.  Man would
+not have known distance veritably without the clouds.  There are
+mountains indeed, precipices and deeps, to which those of the earth are
+pigmy.  Yet the sky-heights, being so far off, are not overpowering by
+disproportion, like some futile building fatuously made too big for the
+human measure.  The cloud in its majestic place composes with a little
+Perugino tree.  For you stand or stray in the futile building, while the
+cloud is no mansion for man, and out of reach of his limitations.
+
+The cloud, moreover, controls the sun, not merely by keeping the custody
+of his rays, but by becoming the counsellor of his temper.  The cloud
+veils an angry sun, or, more terribly, lets fly an angry ray, suddenly
+bright upon tree and tower, with iron-grey storm for a background.  Or
+when anger had but threatened, the cloud reveals him, gentle beyond hope.
+It makes peace, constantly, just before sunset.
+
+It is in the confidence of the winds, and wears their colours.  There is
+a heavenly game, on south-west wind days, when the clouds are bowled by a
+breeze from behind the evening.  They are round and brilliant, and come
+leaping up from the horizon for hours.  This is a frolic and haphazard
+sky.
+
+All unlike this is the sky that has a centre, and stands composed about
+it.  As the clouds marshalled the earthly mountains, so the clouds in
+turn are now ranged.  The tops of all the celestial Andes aloft are swept
+at once by a single ray, warmed with a single colour.  Promontory after
+league-long promontory of a stiller Mediterranean in the sky is called
+out of mist and grey by the same finger.  The cloudland is very great,
+but a sunbeam makes all its nations and continents sudden with light.
+
+All this is for the untravelled.  All the winds bring him this scenery.
+It is only in London, for part of the autumn and part of the winter, that
+the unnatural smoke-fog comes between.  And for many and many a day no
+London eye can see the horizon, or the first threat of the cloud like a
+man's hand.  There never was a great painter who had not exquisite
+horizons, and if Corot and Crome were right, the Londoner loses a great
+thing.
+
+He loses the coming of the cloud, and when it is high in air he loses its
+shape.  A cloud-lover is not content to see a snowy and rosy head piling
+into the top of the heavens; he wants to see the base and the altitude.
+The perspective of a cloud is a great part of its design--whether it lies
+so that you can look along the immense horizontal distances of its floor,
+or whether it rears so upright a pillar that you look up its mountain
+steeps in the sky as you look at the rising heights of a mountain that
+stands, with you, on the earth.
+
+The cloud has a name suggesting darkness; nevertheless, it is not merely
+the guardian of the sun's rays and their director.  It is the sun's
+treasurer; it holds the light that the world has lost.  We talk of
+sunshine and moonshine, but not of cloud-shine, which is yet one of the
+illuminations of our skies.  A shining cloud is one of the most majestic
+of all secondary lights.  If the reflecting moon is the bride, this is
+the friend of the bridegroom.
+
+Needless to say, the cloud of a thunderous summer is the most beautiful
+of all.  It has spaces of a grey for which there is no name, and no other
+cloud looks over at a vanishing sun from such heights of blue air.  The
+shower-cloud, too, with its thin edges, comes across the sky with so
+influential a flight that no ship going out to sea can be better worth
+watching.  The dullest thing perhaps in the London streets is that people
+take their rain there without knowing anything of the cloud that drops
+it.  It is merely rain, and means wetness.  The shower-cloud there has
+limits of time, but no limits of form, and no history whatever.  It has
+not come from the clear edge of the plain to the south, and will not
+shoulder anon the hill to the north.  The rain, for this city, hardly
+comes or goes; it does but begin and stop.  No one looks after it on the
+path of its retreat.
+
+
+
+
+WINDS OF THE WORLD
+
+
+Every wind is, or ought to be, a poet; but one is classic and converts
+everything in his day co-unity; another is a modern man, whose words
+clothe his thoughts, as the modern critics used to say prettily in the
+early sixties, and therefore are separable.  This wind, again, has a
+style, and that wind a mere manner.  Nay, there are breezes from the east-
+south-east, for example, that have hardly even a manner.  You can hardly
+name them unless you look at the weather vane.  So they do not convince
+you by voice or colour of breath; you place their origin and assign them
+a history according as the hesitating arrow points on the top of yonder
+ill-designed London spire.
+
+The most certain and most conquering of all is the south-west wind.  You
+do not look to the weather-vane to decide what shall be the style of your
+greeting to his morning.  There is no arbitrary rule of courtesy between
+you and him, and you need no arrow to point to his distinctions, and to
+indicate to you the right manner of treating such a visitant.
+
+He prepares the dawn.  While it is still dark the air is warned of his
+presence, and before the window was opened he was already in the room.
+His sun--for the sun is his--rises in a south-west mood, with a bloom on
+the blue, the grey, or the gold.  When the south-west is cold, the cold
+is his own cold--round, blunt, full, and gradual in its very strength.  It
+is a fresh cold, that comes with an approach, and does not challenge you
+in the manner of an unauthorised stranger, but instantly gets your leave,
+and even a welcome to your house of life.  He follows your breath in at
+your throat, and your eyes are open to let him in, even when he is cold.
+Your blood cools, but does not hide from him.
+
+He has a splendid way with his sky.  In his flight, which is that, not of
+a bird, but of a flock of birds, he flies high and low at once: high with
+his higher clouds, that keep long in the sight of man, seeming to move
+slowly; and low with the coloured clouds that breast the hills and are
+near to the tree-tops.  These the south-west wind tosses up from his soft
+horizon, round and successive.  They are tinted somewhat like ripe clover-
+fields, or like hay-fields just before the cutting, when all the grass is
+in flower, and they are, oftener than all other clouds, in shadow.  These
+low-lying flocks are swift and brief; the wind casts them before him,
+from the western verge to the eastern.
+
+Corot has painted so many south-west winds that one might question
+whether he ever painted, in his later manner at least, any others.  His
+skies are thus in the act of flight, with lower clouds outrunning the
+higher, the farther vapours moving like a fleet out at sea, and the
+nearer like dolphins.  In his "Classical Landscape: Italy," the master
+has indeed for once a sky that seems at anchor, or at least that moves
+with "no pace perceived."  The vibrating wings are folded, and Corot's
+wind, that flew through so many springs, summers, and Septembers for him
+(he was seldom a painter of very late autumn), that was mingled with so
+many aspen-leaves, that strewed his forests with wood for the gatherer,
+and blew the broken lights into the glades, is charmed into stillness,
+and the sky into another kind of immortality.  Nor are the trees in this
+antique landscape the trees so long intimate with Corot's south-west
+wind, so often entangled with his uncertain twilights.  They are as quiet
+as the cloud, and such as the long and wild breezes of Romance have never
+shaken or enlaced.
+
+Upon all our islands this south-west wind is the sea wind.  But elsewhere
+there are sea winds that are not from the south-west.  They, too, none
+the less, are conquerors.  They, too, are always strong, compelling winds
+that take possession of the light, the shadow, the sun, moon, and stars,
+and constrain them all alike to feel the sea.  Not a field, not a
+hillside, on a sea-wind day, but shines with some soft sea-lights.  The
+moon's little boat tosses on a sea-wind night.
+
+The south-west wind takes the high Italian coasts.  He gathers the ilex
+woods together and throngs them close, as a sheep-dog gathers the sheep.
+They crowd for shelter, and a great wall, leaning inland also, with its
+strong base to the sea, receives them.  It is blank and sunny, and the
+trees within are sunny and dark, serried, and their tops swept and
+flattened by months of sea-storms.  On the farther side there are
+gardens--gardens that have in their midst those quietest things in all
+the world and most windless, box-hedges and ponds.  The gardens take
+shelter behind the scared and hurried ilex woods, and the sea-wind spares
+them and breaks upon the mountain.  But the garden also is his, and his
+wild warm days have filled it with orange-trees and roses, and have given
+all the abundant charm to its gay neglect, to its grass-grown terraces,
+and to all its lapsed, forsaken, and forgotten dainties.
+
+Nothing of the nature in this seaward Italy would be so beautiful without
+the touch of man and of the sea gales.
+
+When the south-west wind brings his rain he brings it with the majestic
+onset announced by his breath.  And when the light follows, it comes from
+his own doorway in the verge.  His are the opened evenings after a day
+shut down with cloud.  He fills the air with innumerable particles of
+moisture that scatter and bestow the sun.  There are no other days like
+his, of so universal a harmony, so generous.
+
+The north wind has his own landscape, too; but the east wind never.  The
+aspect which he gives to the day is not all his own.  The sunshine is
+sweet in spite of him.  The clouds go under his whip, but they have
+kinder greys than should be the colours of his cold.  Not on an east-wind
+day are these races in heaven, for the clouds are all far off.  His rain
+is angry, and it flies against the sunset.  The world is not one in his
+reign, but rather there is a perpetual revolt or difference.  The lights
+and shadows are not all his.  The waxing and waning hours are
+disaffected.  He has not a great style, and does not convince the day.
+
+All the four winds are brave, and not the less brave because, on their
+way through town, they are betrayed for a moment into taking part in any
+paltriness that may be there.  On their way from the Steppes to the
+Atlantic they play havoc with the nerves of very insignificant people.  A
+part, as it were, of every gale that starts in the far north-east finds
+its goal in the breath of a reluctant citizen.
+
+You will meet a wind of the world nimble and eager in a sorry street.  But
+these are only accidents of the way--the winds go free again.  Those that
+do not go free, but close their course, are those that are breathed by
+the nostrils of living creatures.  A great flock of those wild birds come
+to a final pause in London, and fan the fires of life with those wings in
+the act of folding.  In the blood and breath of a child close the
+influences of continent and sea.
+
+
+
+
+THE HONOURS OF MORTALITY
+
+
+The brilliant talent which has quite lately and quite suddenly arisen, to
+devote itself to the use of the day or of the week, in illustrated
+papers--the enormous production of art in black and white--is assuredly a
+confession that the Honours of Mortality are worth working for.  Fifty
+years ago, men worked for the honours of immortality; these were the
+commonplace of their ambition; they declined to attend to the beauty of
+things of use that were destined to be broken and worn out, and they
+looked forward to surviving themselves by painting bad pictures; so that
+what to do with their bad pictures in addition to our own has become the
+problem of the nation and of the householder alike.  To-day men have
+began to learn that their sons will be grateful to them for few bequests.
+Art consents at last to work upon the tissue and the china that are
+doomed to the natural and necessary end--destruction; and art shows a
+most dignified alacrity to do her best, daily, for the "process," and for
+oblivion.
+
+Doubtless this abandonment of hopes so large at once and so cheap costs
+the artist something; nay, it implies an acceptance of the inevitable
+that is not less than heroic.  And the reward has been in the singular
+and manifest increase of vitality in this work which is done for so short
+a life.  Fittingly indeed does life reward the acceptance of death,
+inasmuch as to die is to have been alive.  There is a real circulation of
+blood-quick use, brief beauty, abolition, recreation.  The honour of the
+day is for ever the honour of that day.  It goes into the treasury of
+things that are honestly and--completely ended and done with.  And when
+can so happy a thing be said of a lifeless oil-painting?  Who of the wise
+would hesitate?  To be honourable for one day--one named and dated day,
+separate from all other days of the ages--or to be for an unlimited time
+tedious?
+
+
+
+
+AT MONASTERY GATES
+
+
+No woman has ever crossed the inner threshold, or shall ever cross it,
+unless a queen, English or foreign, should claim her privilege.
+Therefore, if a woman records here the slighter things visible of the
+monastic life, it is only because she was not admitted to see more than
+beautiful courtesy and friendliness were able to show her in guest-house
+and garden.
+
+The Monastery is of fresh-looking Gothic, by Pugin--the first of the
+dynasty: it is reached by the white roads of a limestone country, and
+backed by a young plantation, and it gathers its group of buildings in a
+cleft high up among the hills of Wales.  The brown habit is this, and
+these are the sandals, that come and go by hills of finer, sharper, and
+loftier line, edging the dusk and dawn of an Umbrian sky.  Just such a
+Via Crucis climbs the height above Orta, and from the foot of its final
+crucifix you can see the sunrise touch the top of Monte Rosa, while the
+encircled lake below is cool with the last of the night.  The same order
+of friars keep that sub-Alpine Monte Sacro, and the same have set the
+Kreuzberg beyond Bonn with the same steep path by the same fourteen
+chapels, facing the Seven Mountains and the Rhine.
+
+Here, in North Wales, remote as the country is, with the wheat green over
+the blunt hill-tops, and the sky vibrating with larks, a long wing of
+smoke lies round the horizon.  The country, rather thinly and languidly
+cultivated above, has a valuable sub-soil, and is burrowed with mines;
+the breath of pit and factory, out of sight, thickens the lower sky, and
+lies heavily over the sands of Dee.  It leaves the upper blue clear and
+the head of Orion, but dims the flicker of Sirius and shortens the steady
+ray of the evening star.  The people scattered about are not mining
+people, but half-hearted agriculturists, and very poor.  Their cottages
+are rather cabins; not a tiled roof is in the country, but the slates
+have taken some beauty with time, having dips and dimples, and grass upon
+their edges.  The walls are all thickly whitewashed, which is a pleasure
+to see.  How willingly would one swish the harmless whitewash over more
+than half the colour--over all the chocolate and all the blue--with which
+the buildings of the world are stained!  You could not wish for a better,
+simpler, or fresher harmony than whitewash makes with the slight sunshine
+and the bright grey of an English sky.
+
+The grey-stone, grey-roofed monastery looks young in one sense--it is
+modern; and the friars look young in another--they are like their
+brothers of an earlier time.  No one, except the journalists of
+yesterday, would spend upon them those tedious words, "quaint," or "old
+world."  No such weary adjectives are spoken here, unless it be by the
+excursionists.
+
+With large aprons tied over their brown habits, the Lay Brothers work
+upon their land, planting parsnips in rows, or tending a prosperous bee-
+farm.  A young friar, who sang the High Mass yesterday, is gaily hanging
+the washed linen in the sun.  A printing press, and a machine which
+slices turnips, are at work in an outhouse, and the yard thereby is
+guarded by a St Bernard, whose single evil deed was that under one of the
+obscure impulses of a dog's heart--atoned for by long and self-conscious
+remorse--he bit the poet; and tried, says one of the friars, to make
+doggerel of him.  The poet, too, lives at the monastery gates, and on
+monastery ground, in a seclusion which the tidings of the sequence of his
+editions hardly reaches.  There is no disturbing renown to be got among
+the cabins of the Flintshire hills.  Homeward, over the verge, from other
+valleys, his light figure flits at nightfall, like a moth.
+
+To the coming and going of the friars, too, the village people have
+become well used, and the infrequent excursionists, for lack of
+intelligence and of any knowledge that would refer to history, look at
+them without obtrusive curiosity.  It was only from a Salvation Army girl
+that you heard the brutal word of contempt.  She had come to the place
+with some companions, and with them was trespassing, as she was welcome
+to do, within the monastery grounds.  She stood, a figure for Bournemouth
+pier, in her grotesque bonnet, and watched the son of the Umbrian
+saint--the friar who walks among the Giotto frescoes at Assisi and
+between the cypresses of Bello Sguardo, and has paced the centuries
+continually since the coming of the friars.  One might have asked of her
+the kindness of a fellow-feeling.  She and he alike were so habited as to
+show the world that their life was aloof from its "idle business."  By
+some such phrase, at least, the friar would assuredly have attempted to
+include her in any spiritual honours ascribed to him.  Or one might have
+asked of her the condescension of forbearance.  "Only fancy," said the
+Salvation Army girl, watching the friar out of sight, "only fancy making
+such a fool of one's self!"
+
+The great hood of the friars, which is drawn over the head in Zurbaran's
+ecstatic picture, is turned to use when the friars are busy.  As a pocket
+it relieves the over-burdened hands.  A bottle of the local white wine
+made by the brotherhood at Genoa, and sent to this house by the West, is
+carried in the cowl as a present to the stranger at the gates.  The
+friars tell how a brother resolved, at Shrovetide, to make pancakes, and
+not only to make, but also to toss them.  Those who chanced to be in the
+room stood prudently aside, and the brother tossed boldly.  But that was
+the last that was seen of his handiwork.  Victor Hugo sings in _La_
+_Legende des Siecles_ of disappearance as the thing which no creature
+is able to achieve: here the impossibility seemed to be accomplished by
+quite an ordinary and a simple pancake.  It was clean gone, and there was
+an end of it.  Nor could any explanation of this ceasing of a pancake
+from the midst of the visible world be so much as divined by the
+spectators.  It was only when the brother, in church, knelt down to
+meditate and drew his cowl about his head that the accident was
+explained.
+
+Every midnight the sweet contralto bells call the community, who get up
+gaily to this difficult service.  Of all duties this one never grows easy
+or familiar, and therefore never habitual.  It is something to have found
+but one act aloof from habit.  It is not merely that the friars overcome
+the habit of sleep.  The subtler point is that they can never acquire the
+habit of sacrificing sleep.  What art, what literature, or what life but
+would gain a secret security by such a point of perpetual freshness and
+perpetual initiative?  It is not possible to get up at midnight without a
+will that is new night by night.  So should the writer's work be done,
+and, with an intention perpetually unique, the poet's.
+
+The contralto bells have taught these Western hills the "Angelus" of the
+French fields, and the hour of night--_l'ora di notte_--which rings
+with so melancholy a note from the village belfries on the Adriatic
+littoral, when the latest light is passing.  It is the prayer for the
+dead: "Out of the depths have I cried unto Thee, O Lord."
+
+The little flocks of novices, on paschal evenings, are folded to the
+sound of that evening prayer.  The care of them is the central work of
+the monastery, which is placed in so remote a country because it is
+principally a place of studies.  So much elect intellect and strength of
+heart withdrawn from the traffic of the world!  True, the friars are not
+doing the task which Carlyle set mankind as a refuge from despair.  These
+"bearded counsellors of God" keep their cells, read, study, suffer, sing,
+hold silence; whereas they might be "operating"--beautiful word!--upon
+the Stock Exchange, or painting Academy pictures, or making speeches, or
+reluctantly jostling other men for places.  They might be among the
+involuntary busybodies who are living by futile tasks the need whereof is
+a discouraged fiction.  There is absolutely no limit to the superfluous
+activities, to the art, to the literature, implicitly renounced by the
+dwellers within such walls as these.  The output--again a beautiful
+word--of the age is lessened by this abstention.  None the less hopes the
+stranger and pilgrim to pause and knock once again upon those monastery
+gates.
+
+
+
+
+RUSHES AND REEDS
+
+
+Taller than the grass and lower than the trees, there is another growth
+that feels the implicit spring.  It had been more abandoned to winter
+than even the short grass shuddering under a wave of east wind, more than
+the dumb trees.  For the multitudes of sedges, rushes, canes, and reeds
+were the appropriate lyre of the cold.  On them the nimble winds played
+their dry music.  They were part of the winter.  It looked through them
+and spoke through them.  They were spears and javelins in array to the
+sound of the drums of the north.
+
+The winter takes fuller possession of these things than of those that
+stand solid.  The sedges whistle his tune.  They let the colour of his
+light look through--low-flying arrows and bright bayonets of winter day.
+
+The multitudes of all reeds and rushes grow out of bounds.  They belong
+to the margins of lands, the space between the farms and the river,
+beyond the pastures, and where the marsh in flower becomes perilous
+footing for the cattle.  They are the fringe of the low lands, the sign
+of streams.  They grow tall between you and the near horizon of flat
+lands.  They etch their sharp lines upon the sky; and near them grow
+flowers of stature, including the lofty yellow lily.
+
+Our green country is the better for the grey, soft, cloudy darkness of
+the sedge, and our full landscape is the better for the distinction of
+its points, its needles, and its resolute right lines.
+
+Ours is a summer full of voices, and therefore it does not so need the
+sound of rushes; but they are most sensitive to the stealthy breezes, and
+betray the passing of a wind that even the tree-tops knew not of.
+Sometimes it is a breeze unfelt, but the stiff sedges whisper it along a
+mile of marsh.  To the strong wind they bend, showing the silver of their
+sombre little tassels as fish show the silver of their sides turning in
+the pathless sea.  They are unanimous.  A field of tall flowers tosses
+many ways in one warm gale, like the many lovers of a poet who have a
+thousand reasons for their love; but the rushes, more strongly tethered,
+are swept into a single attitude, again and again, at every renewal of
+the storm.
+
+Between the pasture and the wave, the many miles of rushes and reeds in
+England seem to escape that insistent ownership which has so changed
+(except for a few forests and downs) the aspect of England, and has in
+fact made the landscape.  Cultivation makes the landscape elsewhere,
+rather than ownership, for the boundaries in the south are not
+conspicuous; but here it is ownership.  But the rushes are a gipsy
+people, amongst us, yet out of reach.  The landowner, if he is rather a
+gross man, believes these races of reeds are his.  But if he is a man of
+sensibility, depend upon it he has his interior doubts.  His property, he
+says, goes right down to the centre of the earth, in the shape of a
+wedge; how high up it goes into the air it would be difficult to say, and
+obviously the shape of the wedge must be continued in the direction of
+increase.  We may therefore proclaim his right to the clouds and their
+cargo.  It is true that as his ground game is apt to go upon his
+neighbour's land to be shot, so the clouds may now and then spend his
+showers elsewhere.  But the great thing is the view.  A well-appointed
+country-house sees nothing out of the windows that is not its own.  But
+he who tells you so, and proves it to you by his own view, is certainly
+disturbed by an unspoken doubt, if his otherwise contented eyes should
+happen to be caught by a region of rushes.  The water is his--he had the
+pond made; or the river, for a space, and the fish, for a time.  But the
+bulrushes, the reeds!  One wonders whether a very thorough landowner, but
+a sensitive one, ever resolved that he would endure this sort of thing no
+longer, and went out armed and had a long acre of sedges scythed to
+death.
+
+They are probably outlaws.  They are dwellers upon thresholds and upon
+margins, as the gipsies make a home upon the green edges of a road.  No
+wild flowers, however wild, are rebels.  The copses and their primroses
+are good subjects, the oaks are loyal.  Now and then, though, one has a
+kind of suspicion of some of the other kinds of trees--the Corot trees.
+Standing at a distance from the more ornamental trees, from those of
+fuller foliage, and from all the indeciduous shrubs and the conifers
+(manifest property, every one), two or three translucent aspens, with
+which the very sun and the breath of earth are entangled, have sometimes
+seemed to wear a certain look--an extra-territorial look, let us call it.
+They are suspect.  One is inclined to shake a doubtful head at them.
+
+And the landowner feels it.  He knows quite well, though he may not say
+so, that the Corot trees, though they do not dwell upon margins, are in
+spirit almost as extraterritorial as the rushes.  In proof of this he
+very often cuts them down, out of the view, once for all.  The view is
+better, as a view, without them.  Though their roots are in his ground
+right enough, there is a something about their heads--.  But the reason
+he gives for wishing them away is merely that they are "thin."  A man
+does not always say everything.
+
+
+
+
+ELEONORA DUSE
+
+
+The Italian woman is very near to Nature; so is true drama.
+
+Acting is not to be judged like some other of the arts, and praised for a
+"noble convention."  Painting, indeed, is not praised amiss with that
+word; painting is obviously an art that exists by its convention--the
+convention is the art.  But far otherwise is it with the art of acting,
+where there is no representative material; where, that is, the man is his
+own material, and there is nothing between.  With the actor the style is
+the man, in another, a more immediate, and a more obvious sense than was
+ever intended by that saying.  Therefore we may allow the critic--and not
+accuse him of reaction--to speak of the division between art and Nature
+in the painting of a landscape, but we cannot let him say the same things
+of acting.  Acting has a technique, but no convention.
+
+Once for all, then, to say that acting reaches the point of Nature, and
+touches it quick, is to say all.  In other arts imitation is more or less
+fatuous, illusion more or less vulgar.  But acting is, at its less good,
+imitation; at its best, illusion; at its worst, and when it ceases to be
+an art, convention.
+
+But the idea that acting is conventional has inevitably come about in
+England.  For it is, in fact, obliged, with us, to defeat and destroy
+itself by taking a very full, entire, tedious, and impotent convention; a
+complete body of convention; a convention of demonstrativeness--of voice
+and manners intended to be expressive, and, in particular, a whole weak
+and unimpulsive convention of gesture.  The English manners of real life
+are so negative and still as to present no visible or audible drama; and
+drama is for hearing and for vision.  Therefore our acting (granting that
+we have any acting, which is granting much) has to create its little
+different and complementary world, and to make the division of "art" from
+Nature--the division which, in this one art, is fatal.
+
+This is one simple and sufficient reason why we have no considerable
+acting; though we may have more or less interesting and energetic or
+graceful conventions that pass for art.  But any student of international
+character knows well enough that there are also supplementary reasons of
+weight.  For example, it is bad to make a conventional world of the
+stage, but it is doubly bad to make it badly--which, it must be granted,
+we do.  When we are anything of the kind, we are intellectual rather than
+intelligent; whereas outward-streaming intelligence makes the actor.  We
+are pre-occupied, and therefore never single, never wholly possessed by
+the one thing at a time; and so forth.
+
+On the other hand, Italians are expressive.  They are so possessed by the
+one thing at a time as never to be habitual in any lifeless sense.  They
+have no habits to overcome by something arbitrary and intentional.
+Accordingly, you will find in the open-air theatre of many an Italian
+province, away from the high roads, an art of drama that our capital
+cannot show, so high is it, so fine, so simple, so complete, so direct,
+so momentary and impassioned, so full of singleness and of multitudinous
+impulses of passion.
+
+Signora Duse is not different in kind from these unrenowned.  What they
+are, she is in a greater degree.  She goes yet further, and yet closer.
+She has an exceptionally large and liberal intelligence.  If lesser
+actors give themselves entirely to the part, and to the large moment of
+the part, she, giving herself, has more to give.
+
+Add to this nature of hers that she stages herself and her acting with
+singular knowledge and ease, and has her technique so thoroughly as to be
+able to forget it--for this is the one only thing that is the better for
+habit, and ought to be habitual.  There is but one passage of her mere
+technique in which she fails so to slight it.  It is in the long exchange
+of stove-side talk between Nora and the other woman of "The Doll's
+House."  Signora Duse may have felt some misgivings as to the effect of a
+dialogue having so little symmetry, such half-hearted feeling, and, in a
+word, so little visible or audible drama as this.  Needless to say, the
+misgiving is not apparent; what is too apparent is simply the technique.
+For instance, she shifts her position with evident system and notable
+skill.  The whole conversation becomes a dance of change and
+counterchange of place.
+
+Nowhere else does the perfect technical habit lapse, and nowhere at all
+does the habit of acting exist with her.
+
+I have spoken of this actress's nationality and of her womanhood
+together.  They are inseparable.  Nature is the only authentic art of the
+stage, and the Italian woman is natural: none other so natural and so
+justified by her nature as Eleonora Duse; but all, as far as their nature
+goes, natural.  Moreover, they are women freer than other Europeans from
+the minor vanities.  Has any one yet fully understood how her liberty in
+this respect gives to the art of Signora Duse room and action?  Her
+countrywomen have no anxious vanities, because, for one reason, they are
+generally "sculpturesque," and are very little altered by mere accidents
+of dress or arrangement.  Such as they are, they are so once for all;
+whereas, the turn of a curl makes all the difference with women of less
+grave physique.  Italians are not uneasy.
+
+Signora Duse has this immunity, but she has a far nobler deliverance from
+vanities, in her own peculiar distance and dignity.  She lets her
+beautiful voice speak, unwatched and unchecked, from the very life of the
+moment.  It runs up into the high notes of indifference, or, higher
+still, into those of _ennui_, as in the earlier scenes of _Divorcons_; or
+it grows sweet as summer with joy, or cracks and breaks outright, out of
+all music, and out of all control.  Passion breaks it so for her.
+
+As for her inarticulate sounds, which are the more intimate and the truer
+words of her meaning, they, too, are Italian and natural.  English women,
+for instance, do not make them.  They are sounds _a bouche fermee_,
+at once private and irrepressible.  They are not demonstrations intended
+for the ears of others; they are her own.  Other actresses, even English,
+and even American, know how to make inarticulate cries, with open mouth;
+Signora Duse's noise is not a cry; it is her very thought audible--the
+thought of the woman she is playing, who does not at every moment give
+exact words to her thought, but does give it significant sound.
+
+When _la femme de Claude_ is trapped by the man who has come in
+search of the husband's secret, and when she is obliged to sit and listen
+to her own evil history as he tells it her, she does not interrupt the
+telling with the outcries that might be imagined by a lesser actress, she
+accompanies it.  Her lips are close, but her throat is vocal.  None who
+heard it can forget the speech-within-speech of one of these
+comprehensive noises.  It was when the man spoke, for her further
+confusion, of the slavery to which she had reduced her lovers; she
+followed him, aloof, with a twang of triumph.
+
+If Parisians say, as they do, that she makes a bad Parisienne, it is
+because she can be too nearly a woman untamed.  They have accused her of
+lack of elegance--in that supper scene of _La Dame aux Camelias_,
+for instance; taking for ill-breeding, in her Marguerite, that which is
+Italian merely and simple.  Whether, again, Cyprienne, in _Divorcons_,
+can at all be considered a lady may be a question; but this is quite
+unquestionable--that she is rather more a lady, and not less, when
+Signora Duse makes her a savage.  But really the result is not at all
+Parisian.
+
+It seems possible that the French sense does not well distinguish, and
+has no fine perception of that affinity with the peasant which remains
+with the great ladies of the old civilisation of Italy, and has so long
+disappeared from those of the younger civilisations of France and
+England--a paradox.  The peasant's gravity, directness, and
+carelessness--a kind of uncouthness which is neither graceless nor, in
+any intolerable English sense, vulgar--are to be found in the
+unceremonious moments of every cisalpine woman, however elect her birth
+and select her conditions.  In Italy the lady is not a creature described
+by negatives, as an author who is always right has defined the lady to be
+in England.  Even in France she is not that, and between the Frenchwoman
+and the Italian there are the Alps.  In a word, the educated Italian
+_mondaine_ is, in the sense (also untranslatable) of singular, insular,
+and absolutely British usage, a Native.  None the less would she be
+surprised to find herself accused of a lack of dignity.
+
+As to intelligence--a little intelligence is sufficiently dramatic, if it
+is single.  A child doing one thing at a time and doing it completely,
+produces to the eye a better impression of mental life than one receives
+from--well, from a lecturer.
+
+
+
+
+DONKEY RACES
+
+
+English acting had for some time past still been making a feint of
+running the race that wins.  The retort, the interruption, the call, the
+reply, the surprise, had yet kept a spoilt tradition of suddenness and
+life.  You had, indeed, to wait for an interruption in dialogue--it is
+true you had to wait for it; so had the interrupted speaker on the stage.
+But when the interruption came, it had still a false air of vivacity; and
+the waiting of the interrupted one was so ill done, with so roving an eye
+and such an arrest and failure of convention, such a confession of a
+blank, as to prove that there remained a kind of reluctant and inexpert
+sense of movement.  It still seemed as though the actor and the actress
+acknowledged some forward tendency.
+
+Not so now.  The serious stage is openly the scene of the race that
+loses.  The donkey race is candidly the model of the talk in every
+tragedy that has a chance of popular success.  Who shall be last?  The
+hands of the public are for him, or for her.  A certain actress who has
+"come to the front of her profession" holds, for a time, the record of
+delay.  "Come to the front," do they say?  Surely the front of her
+profession must have moved in retreat, to gain upon her tardiness.  It
+must have become the back of her profession before ever it came up with
+her.
+
+It should rejoice those who enter for this kind of racing that the record
+need never finally be beaten.  The possibilities of success are
+incalculable.  The play has perforce to be finished in a night, it is
+true, but the minor characters, the subordinate actors, can be made to
+bear the burden of that necessity.  The principals, or those who have
+come "to the front of their profession," have an almost unlimited
+opportunity and liberty of lagging.
+
+Besides, the competitor in a donkey race is not, let it be borne in mind,
+limited to the practice of his own tediousness.  Part of his victory is
+to be ascribed to his influence upon others.  It may be that a determined
+actor--a man of more than common strength of will--may so cause his
+colleague to get on (let us say "get on," for everything in this world is
+relative); may so, then, compel the other actor, with whom he is in
+conversation, to get on, as to secure his own final triumph by indirect
+means as well as by direct.  To be plain, for the sake of those
+unfamiliar with the sports of the village, the rider in a donkey race
+may, and does, cudgel the mounts of his rivals.
+
+Consider, therefore, how encouraging the prospect really is.  The
+individual actor may fail--in fact, he must.  Where two people ride
+together on horseback, the married have ever been warned, one must ride
+behind.  And when two people are speaking slowly one must needs be the
+slowest.  Comparative success implies the comparative failure.  But where
+this actor or that actress fails, the great cause of slowness profits,
+obviously.  The record is advanced.  Pshaw! the word "advanced" comes
+unadvised to the pen.  It is difficult to remember in what a fatuous
+theatrical Royal Presence one is doing this criticism, and how one's
+words should go backwards, without exception, in homage to this symbol of
+a throne.
+
+It is not long since there took place upon the principal stage in London
+the most important event in donkey-racing ever known until that first
+night.  A tragedian and a secondary actor of renown had a duet together.
+It was in "The Dead Heart."  No one who heard it can possibly have yet
+forgotten it.  The two men used echoes of one another's voice, then
+outpaused each other.  It was a contest so determined, so unrelaxed, so
+deadly, so inveterate that you might have slept between its encounters.
+You did sleep.  These men were strong men, and knew what they wanted.  It
+is tremendous to watch the struggle of such resolves.  They had their
+purpose in their grasp, their teeth were set, their will was iron.  They
+were foot to foot.
+
+And next morning you saw by the papers that the secondary, but still
+renowned, actor, had succeeded in sharing the principal honours of the
+piece.  So uncommonly well had he done, even for him.  Then you
+understood that, though you had not known it, the tragedian must have
+been beaten in that dialogue.  He had suffered himself in an instant of
+weakness, to be stimulated; he had for a moment--only a moment--got on.
+
+That night was influential.  We may see its results everywhere, and
+especially in Shakespeare.  Our tragic stage was always--well, different,
+let us say--different from the tragic stage of Italy and France.  It is
+now quite unlike, and frankly so.  The spoilt tradition of vitality has
+been explicitly abandoned.  The interrupted one waits, no longer with a
+roving eye, but with something almost of dignity, as though he were
+fulfilling ritual.
+
+Benvolio and Mercutio outlag one another in hunting after the leaping
+Romeo.  They call without the slightest impetus.  One can imagine how the
+true Mercutio called--certainly not by rote.  There must have been pauses
+indeed, brief and short-breath'd pauses of listening for an answer,
+between every nickname.  But the nicknames were quick work.  At the
+Lyceum they were quite an effort of memory: "Romeo!  Humours!  Madman!
+Passion!  Lover!"
+
+The actress of Juliet, speaking the words of haste, makes her audience
+wait to hear them.  Nothing more incongruous than Juliet's harry of
+phrase and the actress's leisure of phrasing.  None act, none speak, as
+though there were such a thing as impulse in a play.  To drop behind is
+the only idea of arriving.  The nurse ceases to be absurd, for there is
+no one readier with a reply than she.  Or, rather, her delays are so
+altered by exaggeration as to lose touch with Nature.  If it is ill
+enough to hear haste drawled out, it is ill, too, to hear slowness out-
+tarried.  The true nurse of Shakespeare lags with her news because her
+ignorant wits are easily astray, as lightly caught as though they were
+light, which they are not; but the nurse of the stage is never simply
+astray: she knows beforehand how long she means to be, and never, never
+forgets what kind of race is the race she is riding.  The Juliet of the
+stage seems to consider that there is plenty of time for her to discover
+which is slain--Tybalt or her husband; she is sure to know some time; it
+can wait.
+
+A London success, when you know where it lies, is not difficult to
+achieve.  Of all things that can be gained by men or women about their
+business, there is one thing that can be gained without fear of failure.
+This is time.  To gain time requires so little wit that, except for
+competition, every one could be first at the game.  In fact, time gains
+itself.  The actor is really not called upon to do anything.  There is
+nothing, accordingly, for which our actors and actresses do not rely upon
+time.  For humour even, when the humour occurs in tragedy, they appeal to
+time.  They give blanks to their audiences to be filled up.
+
+It might be possible to have tragedies written from beginning to end for
+the service of the present kind of "art."  But the tragedies we have are
+not so written.  And being what they are, it is not vivacity that they
+lose by this length of pause, this length of phrasing, this illimitable
+tiresomeness; it is life itself.  For the life of a scene conceived
+directly is its directness; the life of a scene created simply is its
+simplicity.  And simplicity, directness, impetus, emotion, nature fall
+out of the trailing, loose, long dialogue, like fish from the loose
+meshes of a net--they fall out, they drift off, they are lost.
+
+The universal slowness, moreover, is not good for metre.  Even when an
+actress speaks her lines as lines, and does not drop into prose by
+slipping here and there a syllable, she spoils the _tempo_ by inordinate
+length of pronunciation.  Verse cannot keep upon the wing without a
+certain measure in the movement of the pinion.  Verse is a flight.
+
+
+
+
+GRASS
+
+
+Now and then, at regular intervals of the summer, the Suburb springs for
+a time from its mediocrity; but an inattentive eye might not see why, or
+might not seize the cause of the bloom and of the new look of humility
+and dignity that makes the Road, the Rise, and the Villas seem suddenly
+gentle, gay and rather shy.
+
+It is no change in the gardens.  These are, as usual, full, abundant,
+fragrant, and quite uninteresting, keeping the traditional secret by
+which the suburban rose, magnolia, clematis, and all other flowers grow
+dull--not in colour, but in spirit--between the yellow brick house-front
+and the iron railings.  Nor is there anything altered for the better in
+the houses themselves.
+
+Nevertheless, the little, common, prosperous road, has bloomed, you
+cannot tell how.  It is unexpectedly liberal, fresh, and innocent.  The
+soft garden-winds that rustle its shrubs are, for the moment, genuine.
+
+Another day and all is undone.  The Rise is its daily self again--a road
+of flowers and foliage that is less pleasant than a fairly well-built
+street.  And if you happen to find the men at work on the
+re-transformation, you become aware of the accident that made all this
+difference.  It lay in the little border of wayside grass which a row of
+public servants--men with spades and a cart--are in the act of tidying
+up.  Their way of tidying it up is to lay its little corpse all along the
+suburban roadside, and then to carry it away to some parochial dust-heap.
+
+But for the vigilance of Vestries, grass would reconcile everything.  When
+the first heat of the summer was over, a few nights of rain altered all
+the colour of the world.  It had been the brown and russet of
+drought--very beautiful in landscape, but lifeless; it became a
+translucent, profound, and eager green.  The citizen does not spend
+attention on it.
+
+Why, then, is his vestry so alert, so apprehensive, so swift; in
+perception so instant, in execution so prompt, so silent in action, so
+punctual in destruction?  The vestry keeps, as it were, a tryst with the
+grass.  The "sunny spots of greenery" are given just time enough to grow
+and be conspicuous, and the barrow is there, true to time, and the spade.
+(To call that spade a spade hardly seems enough.)
+
+For the gracious grass of the summer has not been content within
+enclosures.  It has--or would have--cheered up and sweetened everything.
+Over asphalte it could not prevail, and it has prettily yielded to
+asphalte, taking leave to live and let live.  It has taken the little
+strip of ground next to the asphalte, between this and the kerb, and
+again the refuse of ground between the kerb and the roadway.  The man of
+business walking to the station with a bag could have his asphalte all
+unbroken, and the butcher's boy in his cart was not annoyed.  The grass
+seemed to respect everybody's views, and to take only what nobody wanted.
+But these gay and lowly ways will not escape a vestry.
+
+There is no wall so impregnable or so vulgar, but a summer's grass will
+attempt it.  It will try to persuade the yellow brick, to win the purple
+slate, to reconcile stucco.  Outside the authority of the suburbs it has
+put a luminous touch everywhere.  The thatch of cottages has given it an
+opportunity.  It has perched and alighted in showers and flocks.  It has
+crept and crawled, and stolen its hour.  It has made haste between the
+ruts of cart wheels, so they were not too frequent.  It has been stealthy
+in a good cause, and bold out of reach.  It has been the most defiant
+runaway, and the meekest lingerer.  It has been universal, ready and
+potential in every place, so that the happy country--village and field
+alike--has been all grass, with mere exceptions.
+
+And all this the grass does in spite of the ill-treatment it suffers at
+the hands, and mowing-machines, and vestries of man.  His ideal of grass
+is growth that shall never be allowed to come to its flower and
+completion.  He proves this in his lawns.  Not only does he cut the
+coming grass-flower off by the stalk, but he does not allow the mere
+leaf--the blade--to perfect itself.  He will not have it a "blade" at
+all; he cuts its top away as never sword or sabre was shaped.  All the
+beauty of a blade of grass is that the organic shape has the intention of
+ending in a point.  Surely no one at all aware of the beauty of lines
+ought to be ignorant of the significance and grace of manifest intention,
+which rules a living line from its beginning, even though the intention
+be towards a point while the first spring of the line is towards an
+opening curve.  But man does not care for intention; he mows it.  Nor
+does he care for attitude; he rolls it.  In a word, he proves to the
+grass, as plainly as deeds can do so, that it is not to his mind.  The
+rolling, especially, seems to be a violent way of showing that the
+universal grass interrupted by the life of the Englishman is not as he
+would have it.  Besides, when he wishes to deride a city, he calls it
+grass-grown.
+
+But his suburbs shall not, if he can help it, be grass-grown.  They shall
+not be like a mere Pisa.  Highgate shall not so, nor Peckham.
+
+
+
+
+A WOMAN IN GREY
+
+
+The mothers of Professors were indulged in the practice of jumping at
+conclusions, and were praised for their impatience of the slow process of
+reason.
+
+Professors have written of the mental habits of women as though they
+accumulated generation by generation upon women, and passed over their
+sons.  Professors take it for granted, obviously by some process other
+than the slow process of reason, that women derive from their mothers and
+grandmothers, and men from their fathers and grandfathers.  This, for
+instance, was written lately: "This power [it matters not what] would be
+about equal in the two sexes but for the influence of heredity, which
+turns the scale in favour of the woman, as for long generations the
+surroundings and conditions of life of the female sex have developed in
+her a greater degree of the power in question than circumstances have
+required from men."  "Long generations" of subjection are, strangely
+enough, held to excuse the timorousness and the shifts of women to-day.
+But the world, unknowing, tampers with the courage of its sons by such a
+slovenly indulgence.  It tampers with their intelligence by fostering the
+ignorance of women.
+
+And yet Shakespeare confessed the participation of man and woman in their
+common heritage.  It is Cassius who speaks:
+
+   "Have you not love enough to bear with me
+   When that rash humour which my mother gave me
+   Makes me forgetful?"
+
+And Brutus who replies:
+
+   "Yes, Cassius, and from henceforth
+   When you are over-earnest with your Brutus
+   He'll think your mother chides, and leave you so."
+
+Dryden confessed it also in his praises of Anne Killigrew:
+
+   "If by traduction came thy mind,
+   Our wonder is the less to find
+   A soul so charming from a stock so good.
+   Thy father was transfused into thy blood."
+
+The winning of Waterloo upon the Eton playgrounds is very well; but there
+have been some other, and happily minor, fields that were not won--that
+were more or less lost.  Where did this loss take place, if the gains
+were secured at football?  This inquiry is not quite so cheerful as the
+other.  But while the victories were once going forward in the
+playground, the defeats or disasters were once going forward in some
+other place, presumably.  And this was surely the place that was not a
+playground, the place where the future wives of the football players were
+sitting still while their future husbands were playing football.
+
+This is the train of thought that followed the grey figure of a woman on
+a bicycle in Oxford Street.  She had an enormous and top-heavy omnibus at
+her back.  All the things on the near side of the street--the things
+going her way--were going at different paces, in two streams, overtaking
+and being overtaken.  The tributary streets shot omnibuses and carriages,
+cabs and carts--some to go her own way, some with an impetus that carried
+them curving into the other current, and other some making a straight
+line right across Oxford Street into the street opposite.  Besides all
+the unequal movement, there were the stoppings.  It was a delicate tangle
+to keep from knotting.  The nerves of the mouths of horses bore the whole
+charge and answered it, as they do every day.
+
+The woman in grey, quite alone, was immediately dependent on no nerves
+but her own, which almost made her machine sensitive.  But this alertness
+was joined to such perfect composure as no flutter of a moment disturbed.
+There was the steadiness of sleep, and a vigilance more than that of an
+ordinary waking.
+
+At the same time, the woman was doing what nothing in her youth could
+well have prepared her for.  She must have passed a childhood unlike the
+ordinary girl's childhood, if her steadiness or her alertness had ever
+been educated, if she had been rebuked for cowardice, for the egoistic
+distrust of general rules, or for claims of exceptional chances.  Yet
+here she was, trusting not only herself but a multitude of other people;
+taking her equal risk; giving a watchful confidence to averages--that
+last, perhaps, her strangest and greatest success.
+
+No exceptions were hers, no appeals, and no forewarnings.  She evidently
+had not in her mind a single phrase, familiar to women, made to express
+no confidence except in accidents, and to proclaim a prudent foresight of
+the less probable event.  No woman could ride a bicycle along Oxford
+Street with any such baggage as that about her.
+
+The woman in grey had a watchful confidence not only in a multitude of
+men but in a multitude of things.  And it is very hard for any untrained
+human being to practise confidence in things in motion--things full of
+force, and, what is worse, of forces.  Moreover, there is a supreme
+difficulty for a mind accustomed to search timorously for some little
+place of insignificant rest on any accessible point of stable
+equilibrium; and that is the difficulty of holding itself nimbly secure
+in an equilibrium that is unstable.  Who can deny that women are
+generally used to look about for the little stationary repose just
+described?  Whether in intellectual or in spiritual things, they do not
+often live without it.
+
+She, none the less, fled upon unstable equilibrium, escaped upon it,
+depended upon it, trusted it, was 'ware of it, was on guard against it,
+as she sped amid her crowd her own unstable equilibrium, her machine's,
+that of the judgment, the temper, the skill, the perception, the strength
+of men and horses.
+
+She had learnt the difficult peace of suspense.  She had learnt also the
+lowly and self-denying faith in common chances.  She had learnt to be
+content with her share--no more--in common security, and to be pleased
+with her part in common hope.  For all this, it may be repeated, she
+could have had but small preparation.  Yet no anxiety was hers, no uneasy
+distrust and disbelief of that human thing--an average of life and death.
+
+To this courage the woman in grey had attained with a spring, and she had
+seated herself suddenly upon a place of detachment between earth and air,
+freed from the principal detentions, weights, and embarrassments of the
+usual life of fear.  She had made herself, as it were, light, so as not
+to dwell either in security or danger, but to pass between them.  She
+confessed difficulty and peril by her delicate evasions, and consented to
+rest in neither.  She would not owe safety to the mere motionlessness of
+a seat on the solid earth, but she used gravitation to balance the slight
+burdens of her wariness and her confidence.  She put aside all the pride
+and vanity of terror, and leapt into an unsure condition of liberty and
+content.
+
+She leapt, too, into a life of moments.  No pause was possible to her as
+she went, except the vibrating pause of a perpetual change and of an
+unflagging flight.  A woman, long educated to sit still, does not
+suddenly learn to live a momentary life without strong momentary
+resolution.  She has no light achievement in limiting not only her
+foresight, which must become brief, but her memory, which must do more;
+for it must rather cease than become brief.  Idle memory wastes time and
+other things.  The moments of the woman in grey as they dropped by must
+needs disappear, and be simply forgotten, as a child forgets.  Idle
+memory, by the way, shortens life, or shortens the sense of time, by
+linking the immediate past clingingly to the present.  Here may possibly
+be found one of the reasons for the length of a child's time, and for the
+brevity of the time that succeeds.  The child lets his moments pass by
+and quickly become remote through a thousand little successive oblivions.
+He has not yet the languid habit of recall.
+
+"Thou art my warrior," said Volumnia.  "I holp to frame thee."
+
+Shall a man inherit his mother's trick of speaking, or her habit and
+attitude, and not suffer something, against his will, from her bequest of
+weakness, and something, against his heart, from her bequest of folly?
+From the legacies of an unlessoned mind, a woman's heirs-male are not cut
+off in the Common Law of the generations of mankind.  Brutus knew that
+the valour of Portia was settled upon his sons.
+
+
+
+
+SYMMETRY AND INCIDENT
+
+
+The art of Japan has none but an exterior part in the history of the art
+of nations.  Being in its own methods and attitude the art of accident,
+it has, appropriately, an accidental value.  It is of accidental value,
+and not of integral necessity.  The virtual discovery of Japanese art,
+during the later years of the second French Empire, caused Europe to
+relearn how expedient, how delicate, and how lovely Incident may look
+when Symmetry has grown vulgar.  The lesson was most welcome.  Japan has
+had her full influence.  European art has learnt the value of position
+and the tact of the unique.  But Japan is unlessoned, and (in all her
+characteristic art) content with her own conventions; she is local,
+provincial, alien, remote, incapable of equal companionship with a world
+that has Greek art in its own history--Pericles "to its father."
+
+Nor is it pictorial art, or decorative art only, that has been touched by
+Japanese example of Incident and the Unique.  Music had attained the
+noblest form of symmetry in the eighteenth century, but in music, too,
+symmetry had since grown dull; and momentary music, the music of phase
+and of fragment, succeeded.  The sense of symmetry is strong in a
+complete melody--of symmetry in its most delicate and lively and least
+stationary form--balance; whereas the _leit_-_motif_ is isolated.  In
+domestic architecture Symmetry and Incident make a familiar
+antithesis--the very commonplace of rival methods of art.  But the same
+antithesis exists in less obvious forms.  The poets have sought
+"irregular" metres.  Incident hovers, in the very act of choosing its
+right place, in the most modern of modern portraits.  In these we have,
+if not the Japanese suppression of minor emphasis, certainly the Japanese
+exaggeration of major emphasis; and with this a quickness and buoyancy.
+The smile, the figure, the drapery--not yet settled from the arranging
+touch of a hand, and showing its mark--the restless and unstationary
+foot, and the unity of impulse that has passed everywhere like a single
+breeze, all these have a life that greatly transcends the life of
+Japanese art, yet has the nimble touch of Japanese incident.  In passing,
+a charming comparison may be made between such portraiture and the aspect
+of an aspen or other tree of light and liberal leaf; whether still or in
+motion the aspen and the free-leafed poplar have the alertness and
+expectancy of flight in all their flocks of leaves, while the oaks and
+elms are gathered in their station.  All this is not Japanese, but from
+such accident is Japanese art inspired, with its good luck of
+perceptiveness.
+
+What symmetry is to form, that is repetition in the art of ornament.
+Greek art and Gothic alike have series, with repetition or counter-change
+for their ruling motive.  It is hardly necessary to draw the distinction
+between this motive and that of the Japanese.  The Japanese motives may
+be defined as uniqueness and position.  And these were not known as
+motives of decoration before the study of Japanese decoration.  Repetition
+and counter-change, of course, have their place in Japanese ornament, as
+in the diaper patterns for which these people have so singular an
+invention, but here, too, uniqueness and position are the principal
+inspiration.  And it is quite worth while, and much to the present
+purpose, to call attention to the chief peculiarity of the Japanese
+diaper patterns, which is _interruption_.  Repetition there must
+necessarily be in these, but symmetry is avoided by an interruption which
+is, to the Western eye, at least, perpetually and freshly unexpected.  The
+place of the interruptions of lines, the variation of the place, and the
+avoidance of correspondence, are precisely what makes Japanese design of
+this class inimitable.  Thus, even in a repeating pattern, you have a
+curiously successful effect of impulse.  It is as though a separate
+intention had been formed by the designer at every angle.  Such renewed
+consciousness does not make for greatness.  Greatness in design has more
+peace than is found in the gentle abruptness of Japanese lines, in their
+curious brevity.  It is scarcely necessary to say that a line, in all
+other schools of art, is long or short according to its place and
+purpose; but only the Japanese designer so contrives his patterns that
+the line is always short; and many repeating designs are entirely
+composed of this various and variously-occurring brevity, this prankish
+avoidance of the goal.  Moreover, the Japanese evade symmetry, in the
+unit of their repeating patterns, by another simple device--that of
+numbers.  They make a small difference in the number of curves and of
+lines.  A great difference would not make the same effect of variety; it
+would look too much like a contrast.  For example, three rods on one side
+and six on another would be something else than a mere variation, and
+variety would be lost by the use of them.  The Japanese decorator will
+vary three in this place by two in that, and a sense of the defeat of
+symmetry is immediately produced.  With more violent means the idea of
+symmetry would have been neither suggested nor refuted.
+
+Leaving mere repeating patterns and diaper designs, you find, in Japanese
+compositions, complete designs in which there is no point of symmetry.  It
+is a balance of suspension and of antithesis.  There is no sense of lack
+of equilibrium, because place is, most subtly, made to have the effect of
+giving or of subtracting value.  A small thing is arranged to reply to a
+large one, for the small thing is placed at the precise distance that
+makes it a (Japanese) equivalent.  In Italy (and perhaps in other
+countries) the scales commonly in use are furnished with only a single
+weight that increases or diminishes in value according as you slide it
+nearer or farther upon a horizontal arm.  It is equivalent to so many
+ounces when it is close to the upright, and to so many pounds when it
+hangs from the farther end of the horizontal rod.  Distance plays some
+such part with the twig or the bird in the upper corner of a Japanese
+composition.  Its place is its significance and its value.  Such an art
+of position implies a great art of intervals.  The Japanese chooses a few
+things and leaves the space between them free, as free as the pauses or
+silences in music.  But as time, not silence, is the subject, or
+material, of contrast in musical pauses, so it is the measurement of
+space--that is, collocation--that makes the value of empty intervals.  The
+space between this form and that, in a Japanese composition, is valuable
+because it is just so wide and no more.  And this, again, is only another
+way of saying that position is the principle of this apparently wilful
+art.
+
+Moreover, the alien art of Japan, in its pictorial form, has helped to
+justify the more stenographic school of etching.  Greatly transcending
+Japanese expression, the modern etcher has undoubtedly accepted moral
+support from the islands of the Japanese.  He too etches a kind of
+shorthand, even though his notes appeal much to the spectator's
+knowledge, while the Oriental shorthand appeals to nothing but the
+spectator's simple vision.  Thus the two artists work in ways dissimilar.
+Nevertheless, the French etcher would never have written his signs so
+freely had not the Japanese so freely drawn his own.  Furthermore still,
+the transitory and destructible material of Japanese art has done as much
+as the multiplication of newspapers, and the discovery of processes, to
+reconcile the European designer--the black and white artist--to working
+for the day, the day of publication.  Japan lives much of its daily life
+by means of paper, painted; so does Europe by means of paper, printed.
+But as we, unlike those Orientals, are a destructive people, paper with
+us means short life, quick abolition, transformation, re-appearance, a
+very circulation of life.  This is our present way of surviving
+ourselves--the new version of that feat of life.  Time was when to
+survive yourself meant to secure, for a time indefinitely longer than the
+life of man, such dull form as you had given to your work; to intrude
+upon posterity.  To survive yourself, to-day, is to let your work go into
+daily oblivion.
+
+Now, though the Japanese are not a destructive people, their paper does
+not last for ever, and that material has clearly suggested to them a
+different condition of ornament from that with which they adorned old
+lacquer, fine ivory, or other perdurable things.  For the transitory
+material they keep the more purely pictorial art of landscape.  What of
+Japanese landscape?  Assuredly it is too far reduced to a monotonous
+convention to merit the serious study of races that have produced Cotman
+and Corot.  Japanese landscape-drawing reduces things seen to such
+fewness as must have made the art insuperably tedious to any people less
+fresh-spirited and more inclined to take themselves seriously than these
+Orientals.  A preoccupied people would never endure it.  But a little
+closer attention from the Occidental student might find for their evasive
+attitude towards landscape--it is an attitude almost traitorously
+evasive--a more significant reason.  It is that the distances, the
+greatness, the winds and the waves of the world, coloured plains, and the
+flight of a sky, are all certainly alien to the perceptions of a people
+intent upon little deformities.  Does it seem harsh to define by that
+phrase the curious Japanese search for accidents?  Upon such search these
+people are avowedly intent, even though they show themselves capable of
+exquisite appreciation of the form of a normal bird and of the habit of
+growth of a normal flower.  They are not in search of the perpetual
+slight novelty which was Aristotle's ideal of the language poetic ("a
+little wildly, or with the flower of the mind," says Emerson of the way
+of a poet's speech)--and such novelty it is, like the frequent pulse of
+the pinion, that keeps verse upon the wing; no, what the Japanese are
+intent upon is perpetual slight disorder.  In Japan the man in the fields
+has eyes less for the sky and the crescent moon than for some stone in
+the path, of which the asymmetry strikes his curious sense of pleasure in
+fortunate accident of form.  For love of a little grotesque strangeness
+he will load himself with the stone and carry it home to his garden.  The
+art of such a people is not liberal art, not the art of peace, and not
+the art of humanity.  Look at the curls and curves whereby this people
+conventionally signify wave or cloud.  All these curls have an attitude
+which is like that of a figure slightly malformed, and not like that of a
+human body that is perfect, dominant, and if bent, bent at no lowly or
+niggling labour.  Why these curves should be so charming it would be hard
+to say; they have an exquisite prankishness of variety, the place where
+the upward or downward scrolls curl off from the main wave is delicately
+unexpected every time, and--especially in gold embroideries--is
+sensitively fit for the material, catching and losing the light, while
+the lengths of waving line are such as the long gold threads take by
+nature.
+
+A moment ago this art was declared not human.  And, in fact, in no other
+art has the figure suffered such crooked handling.  The Japanese have
+generally evaded even the local beauty of their own race for the sake of
+perpetual slight deformity.  Their beauty is remote from our sympathy and
+admiration; and it is quite possible that we might miss it in pictorial
+presentation, and that the Japanese artist may have intended human beauty
+where we do not recognise it.  But if it is not easy to recognise, it is
+certainly not difficult to guess at.  And, accordingly, you are generally
+aware that the separate beauty of the race, and its separate dignity,
+even--to be very generous--has been admired by the Japanese artist, and
+is represented here and there occasionally, in the figure of warrior or
+mousme.  But even with this exception the habit of Japanese
+figure-drawing is evidently grotesque, derisive, and crooked.  It is
+curious to observe that the search for slight deformity is so constant as
+to make use, for its purposes, not of action only, but of perspective
+foreshortening.  With us it is to the youngest child only that there
+would appear to be mirth in the drawing of a man who, stooping violently
+forward, would seem to have his head "beneath his shoulders."  The
+European child would not see fun in the living man so presented,
+but--unused to the same effect "in the flat"--he thinks it prodigiously
+humorous in a drawing.  But so only when he is quite young.  The Japanese
+keeps, apparently, his sense of this kind of humour.  It amuses him, but
+not perhaps altogether as it amuses the child, that the foreshortened
+figure should, in drawing and to the unpractised eye, seem distorted and
+dislocated; the simple Oriental appears to find more derision in it than
+the simple child.  The distortion is not without a suggestion of
+ignominy.  And, moreover, the Japanese shows derision, but not precisely
+scorn.  He does not hold himself superior to his hideous models.  He
+makes free with them on equal terms.  He is familiar with them.
+
+And if this is the conviction gathered from ordinary drawings, no need to
+insist upon the ignoble character of those that are intentional
+caricatures.
+
+Perhaps the time has hardly come for writing anew the praises of
+symmetry.  The world knows too much of the abuse of Greek decoration, and
+would be glad to forget it, with the intention of learning that art
+afresh in a future age and of seeing it then anew.  But whatever may be
+the phases of the arts, there is the abiding principle of symmetry in the
+body of man, that goes erect, like an upright soul.  Its balance is
+equal.  Exterior human symmetry is surely a curious physiological fact
+where there is no symmetry interiorly.  For the centres of life and
+movement within the body are placed with Oriental inequality.  Man is
+Greek without and Japanese within.  But the absolute symmetry of the
+skeleton and of the beauty and life that cover it is accurately a
+principle.  It controls, but not tyrannously, all the life of human
+action.  Attitude and motion disturb perpetually, with infinite
+incidents--inequalities of work, war, and pastime, inequalities of
+sleep--the symmetry of man.  Only in death and "at attention" is that
+symmetry complete in attitude.  Nevertheless, it rules the dance and the
+battle, and its rhythm is not to be destroyed.  All the more because this
+hand holds the goad and that the harrow, this the shield and that the
+sword, because this hand rocks the cradle and that caresses the unequal
+heads of children, is this rhythm the law; and grace and strength are
+inflections thereof.  All human movement is a variation upon symmetry,
+and without symmetry it would not be variation; it would be lawless,
+fortuitous, and as dull and broadcast as lawless art.  The order of
+inflection that is not infraction has been explained in a most
+authoritative sentence of criticism of literature, a sentence that should
+save the world the trouble of some of its futile, violent, and weak
+experiments: "Law, the rectitude of humanity," says Mr Coventry Patmore,
+"should be the poet's only subject, as, from time immemorial, it has been
+the subject of true art, though many a true artist has done the Muse's
+will and knew it not.  As all the music of verse arises, not from
+infraction but from inflection of the law of the set metre; so the
+greatest poets have been those the _modulus_ of whose verse has been most
+variously and delicately inflected, in correspondence with feelings and
+passions which are the inflections of moral law in their theme.  Law puts
+a strain upon feeling, and feeling responds with a strain upon law.
+Furthermore, Aristotle says that the quality of poetic language is a
+continual _slight_ novelty.  In the highest poetry, like that of Milton,
+these three modes of inflection, metrical, linguistical, and moral, all
+chime together in praise of the truer order of life."
+
+And like that order is the order of the figure of man, an order most
+beautiful and most secure when it is put to the proof.  That perpetual
+proof by perpetual inflection is the very condition of life.  Symmetry is
+a profound, if disregarded because perpetually inflected, condition of
+human life.
+
+The nimble art of Japan is unessential; it may come and go, may settle or
+be fanned away.  It has life and it is not without law; it has an obvious
+life, and a less obvious law.  But with Greece abides the obvious law and
+the less obvious life: symmetry as apparent as the symmetry of the form
+of man, and life occult like his unequal heart.  And this seems to be the
+nobler and the more perdurable relation.
+
+
+
+
+THE ILLUSION OF HISTORIC TIME
+
+
+He who has survived his childhood intelligently must become conscious of
+something more than a change in his sense of the present and in his
+apprehension of the future.  He must be aware of no less a thing than the
+destruction of the past.  Its events and empires stand where they did,
+and the mere relation of time is as it was.  But that which has fallen
+together, has fallen in, has fallen close, and lies in a little heap, is
+the past itself--time--the fact of antiquity.
+
+He has grown into a smaller world as he has grown older.  There are no
+more extremities.  Recorded time has no more terrors.  The unit of
+measure which he holds in his hand has become in his eyes a thing of
+paltry length.  The discovery draws in the annals of mankind.  He had
+thought them to be wide.
+
+For a man has nothing whereby to order and place the floods, the states,
+the conquests, and the temples of the past, except only the measure which
+he holds.  Call that measure a space of ten years.  His first ten years
+had given him the illusion of a most august scale and measure.  It was
+then that he conceived Antiquity.  But now!  Is it to a decade of ten
+such little years as these now in his hand--ten of his mature years--that
+men give the dignity of a century?  They call it an age; but what if life
+shows now so small that the word age has lost its gravity?
+
+In fact, when a child begins to know that there is a past, he has a most
+noble rod to measure it by--he has his own ten years.  He attributes an
+overwhelming majesty to all recorded time.  He confers distance.  He, and
+he alone, bestows mystery.  Remoteness is his.  He creates more than
+mortal centuries.  He sends armies fighting into the extremities of the
+past.  He assigns the Parthenon to a hill of ages, and the temples of
+Upper Egypt to sidereal time.
+
+If there were no child, there would be nothing old.  He, having conceived
+old time, communicates a remembrance at least of the mystery to the mind
+of the man.  The man perceives at last all the illusion, but he cannot
+forget what was his conviction when he was a child.  He had once a
+persuasion of Antiquity.  And this is not for nothing.  The enormous
+undeception that comes upon him still leaves spaces in his mind.
+
+But the undeception is rude work.  The man receives successive shocks.  It
+is as though one strained level eyes towards the horizon, and then were
+bidden to shorten his sight and to close his search within a poor half
+acre before his face.  Now, it is that he suddenly perceives the hitherto
+remote, remote youth of his own parents to have been something familiarly
+near, so measured by his new standard; again, it is the coming of Attila
+that is displaced.  Those ten last years of his have corrected the world.
+There needs no other rod than that ten years' rod to chastise all the
+imaginations of the spirit of man.  It makes history skip.
+
+To have lived through any appreciable part of any century is to hold
+thenceforth a mere century cheap enough.  But, it may be said, the
+mystery of change remains.  Nay, it does not.  Change that trudges
+through our own world--our contemporary world--is not very mysterious.  We
+perceive its pace; it is a jog-trot.  Even so, we now consider, jolted
+the changes of the past, with the same hurry.
+
+The man, therefore, who has intelligently ceased to be a child scans
+through a shortened avenue the reaches of the past.  He marvels that he
+was so deceived.  For it was a very deception.  If the Argonauts, for
+instance, had been children, it would have been well enough for the child
+to measure their remoteness and their acts with his own magnificent
+measure.  But they were only men and demi-gods.  Thus they belong to him
+as he is now--a man; and not to him as he was once--a child.  It was
+quite wrong to lay the child's enormous ten years' rule along the path
+from our time to theirs; that path must be skipped by the nimble yard in
+the man's present possession.  Decidedly the Argonauts are no subject for
+the boy.
+
+What, then?  Is the record of the race nothing but a bundle of such
+little times?  Nay, it seems that childhood, which created the illusion
+of ages, does actually prove it true.  Childhood is itself Antiquity--to
+every man his only Antiquity.  The recollection of childhood cannot make
+Abraham old again in the mind of a man of thirty-five; but the beginning
+of every life is older than Abraham.  _There_ is the abyss of time.  Let
+a man turn to his own childhood--no further--if he would renew his sense
+of remoteness, and of the mystery of change.
+
+For in childhood change does not go at that mere hasty amble; it rushes;
+but it has enormous space for its flight.  The child has an apprehension
+not only of things far off, but of things far apart; an illusive
+apprehension when he is learning "ancient" history--a real apprehension
+when he is conning his own immeasurable infancy.  If there is no
+historical Antiquity worth speaking of, this is the renewed and
+unnumbered Antiquity for all mankind.
+
+And it is of this--merely of this--that "ancient" history seems to
+partake.  Rome was founded when we began Roman history, and that is why
+it seems long ago.  Suppose the man of thirty-five heard, at that present
+age, for the first time of Romulus.  Why, Romulus would be nowhere.  But
+he built his wall, as a matter of fact, when every one was seven years
+old.  It is by good fortune that "ancient" history is taught in the only
+ancient days.  So, for a time, the world is magical.
+
+Modern history does well enough for learning later.  But by learning
+something of antiquity in the first ten years, the child enlarges the
+sense of time for all mankind.  For even after the great illusion is over
+and history is re-measured, and all fancy and flight caught back and
+chastised, the enlarged sense remains enlarged.  The man remains capable
+of great spaces of time.  He will not find them in Egypt, it is true, but
+he finds them within, he contains them, he is aware of them.  History has
+fallen together, but childhood surrounds and encompasses history,
+stretches beyond and passes on the road to eternity.
+
+He has not passed in vain through the long ten years, the ten years that
+are the treasury of preceptions--the first.  The great disillusion shall
+never shorten those years, nor set nearer together the days that made
+them.  "Far apart," I have said, and that "far apart" is wonderful.  The
+past of childhood is not single, is not motionless, nor fixed in one
+point; it has summits a world away one from the other.  Year from year
+differs as the antiquity of Mexico from the antiquity of Chaldea.  And
+the man of thirty-five knows for ever afterwards what is flight, even
+though he finds no great historic distances to prove his wings by.
+
+There is a long and mysterious moment in long and mysterious childhood,
+which is the extremest distance known to any human fancy.  Many other
+moments, many other hours, are long in the first ten years.  Hours of
+weariness are long--not with a mysterious length, but with a mere length
+of protraction, so that the things called minutes and half-hours by the
+elderly may be something else to their apparent contemporaries, the
+children.  The ancient moment is not merely one of these--it is a space
+not of long, but of immeasurable, time.  It is the moment of going to
+sleep.  The man knows that borderland, and has a contempt for it: he has
+long ceased to find antiquity there.  It has become a common enough
+margin of dreams to him; and he does not attend to its phantasies.  He
+knows that he has a frolic spirit in his head which has its way at those
+hours, but he is not interested in it.  It is the inexperienced child who
+passes with simplicity through the marginal country; and the thing he
+meets there is principally the yet further conception of illimitable
+time.
+
+His nurse's lullaby is translated into the mysteries of time.  She sings
+absolutely immemorial words.  It matters little what they may mean to
+waking ears; to the ears of a child going to sleep they tell of the
+beginning of the world.  He has fallen asleep to the sound of them all
+his life; and "all his life" means more than older speech can well
+express.
+
+Ancient custom is formed in a single spacious year.  A child is beset
+with long traditions.  And his infancy is so old, so old, that the mere
+adding of years in the life to follow will not seem to throw it further
+back--it is already so far.  That is, it looks as remote to the memory of
+a man of thirty as to that of a man of seventy.  What are a mere forty
+years of added later life in the contemplation of such a distance?  Pshaw!
+
+
+
+
+EYES
+
+
+There is nothing described with so little attention, with such
+slovenliness, or so without verification--albeit with so much confidence
+and word-painting--as the eyes of the men and women whose faces have been
+made memorable by their works.  The describer generally takes the first
+colour that seems to him probable.  The grey eyes of Coleridge are
+recorded in a proverbial line, and Procter repeats the word, in
+describing from the life.  Then Carlyle, who shows more signs of actual
+attention, and who caught a trick of Coleridge's pronunciation instantly,
+proving that with his hearing at least he was not slovenly, says that
+Coleridge's eyes were brown--"strange, brown, timid, yet earnest-looking
+eyes."  A Coleridge with brown eyes is one man, and a Coleridge with grey
+eyes another--and, as it were, more responsible.  As to Rossetti's eyes,
+the various inattention of his friends has assigned to them, in all the
+ready-made phrases, nearly all the colours.
+
+So with Charlotte Bronte.  Matthew Arnold seems to have thought the most
+probable thing to be said of her eyes was that they were grey and
+expressive.  Thus, after seeing them, does he describe them in one of his
+letters.  Whereas Mrs Gaskell, who shows signs of attention, says that
+Charlotte's eyes were a reddish hazel, made up of "a great variety of
+tints," to be discovered by close looking.  Almost all eves that are not
+brown are, in fact, of some such mixed colour, generally spotted in, and
+the effect is vivacious.  All the more if the speckled iris has a dark
+ring to enclose it.
+
+Nevertheless, the eye of mixed colour has always a definite character,
+and the mingling that looks green is quite unlike the mingling that looks
+grey; and among the greys there is endless difference.  Brown eyes alone
+are apart, unlike all others, but having no variety except in the degrees
+of their darkness.
+
+The colour of eyes seems to be significant of temperament, but as regards
+beauty there is little or nothing to choose among colours.  It is not the
+eye, but the eyelid, that is important, beautiful, eloquent, full of
+secrets.  The eye has nothing but its colour, and all colours are fine
+within fine eyelids.  The eyelid has all the form, all the drawing, all
+the breadth and length; the square of great eyes irregularly wide; the
+long corners of narrow eyes; the pathetic outward droop; the delicate
+contrary suggestion of an upward turn at the outer corner, which Sir
+Joshua loved.
+
+It is the blood that is eloquent, and there is no sign of blood in the
+eye; but in the eyelid the blood hides itself and shows its signs.  All
+along its edges are the little muscles, living, that speak not only the
+obvious and emphatic things, but what reluctances, what perceptions, what
+ambiguities, what half-apprehensions, what doubts, what interceptions!
+The eyelids confess, and reject, and refuse to reject.  They have
+expressed all things ever since man was man.
+
+And they express so much by seeming to hide or to reveal that which
+indeed expresses nothing.  For there is no message from the eye.  It has
+direction, it moves, in the service of the sense of sight; it receives
+the messages of the world.  But expression is outward, and the eye has it
+not.  There are no windows of the soul, there are only curtains; and
+these show all things by seeming to hide a little more, a little less.
+They hide nothing but their own secrets.
+
+But, some may say, the eyes have emotion inasmuch as they betray it by
+the waxing and contracting of the pupils.  It is, however, the rarest
+thing, this opening and narrowing under any influences except those of
+darkness and light.  It does take place exceptionally; but I am doubtful
+whether those who talk of it have ever really been attentive enough to
+perceive it.  A nervous woman, brown-eyed and young, who stood to tell
+the news of her own betrothal, and kept her manners exceedingly composed
+as she spoke, had this waxing and closing of the pupils; it went on all
+the time like a slow, slow pulse.  But such a thing is not to be seen
+once a year.
+
+Moreover, it is--though so significant--hardly to be called expression.
+It is not articulate.  It implies emotion, but does not define, or
+describe, or divide it.  It is touching, insomuch as we have knowledge of
+the perturbed tide of the spirit that must cause it, but it is not
+otherwise eloquent.  It does not tell us the quality of the thought, it
+does not inform and surprise as with intricacies.  It speaks no more
+explicit or delicate things than does the pulse in its quickening.  It
+speaks with less division of meanings than does the taking of the breath,
+which has impulses and degrees.
+
+No, the eyes do their work, but do it blankly, without communication.
+Openings into the being they may be, but the closed cheek is more
+communicative.  From them the blood of Perdita never did look out.  It
+ebbed and flowed in her face, her dance, her talk.  It was hiding in her
+paleness, and cloistered in her reserve, but visible in prison.  It leapt
+and looked, at a word.  It was conscious in the fingers that reached out
+flowers.  It ran with her.  It was silenced when she hushed her answers
+to the king.  Everywhere it was close behind the doors--everywhere but in
+her eyes.
+
+How near at hand was it, then, in the living eyelids that expressed her
+in their minute and instant and candid manner!  All her withdrawals,
+every hesitation, fluttered there.  A flock of meanings and intelligences
+alighted on those mobile edges.
+
+Think, then, of all the famous eyes in the world, that said so much, and
+said it in no other way but only by the little exquisite muscles of their
+lids.  How were these ever strong enough to bear the burden of those eyes
+of Heathcliff's in "Wuthering Heights"?  "The clouded windows of Hell
+flashed a moment towards me; the fiend which usually looked out, however,
+was so dimmed and drowned--"  That mourning fiend, who had wept all
+night, had no expression, no proof or sign of himself, except in the
+edges of the eyelids of the man.
+
+And the eyes of Garrick?  Eyelids, again.  And the eyes of Charles
+Dickens, that were said to contain the life of fifty men?  On the
+mechanism of the eyelids hung that fifty-fold vitality.  "Bacon had a
+delicate, lively, hazel eye," says Aubrey in his "Lives of Eminent
+Persons."  But nothing of this belongs to the eye except the colour.  Mere
+brightness the eyeball has or has not, but so have many glass beads: the
+liveliness is the eyelid's.  "Dr Harvey told me it was like the eie of a
+viper."  So intent and narrowed must have been the attitude of Bacon's
+eyelids.
+
+"I never saw such another eye in a human, head," says Scott in describing
+Burns, "though I have seen the most distinguished men in my time.  It was
+large, and of a dark cast, and glowed (I say literally glowed) when he
+spoke with feeling or interest.  The eye alone, I think, indicated the
+poetical character and temperament."  No eye literally glows; but some
+eyes are polished a little more, and reflect.  And this is the utmost
+that can possibly have been true as to the eyes of Burns.  But set within
+the meanings of impetuous eyelids the lucidity of the dark eyes seemed
+broken, moved, directed into fiery shafts.
+
+See, too, the reproach of little, sharp, grey eyes addressed to Hazlitt.
+There are neither large nor small eyes, say physiologists, or the
+difference is so small as to be negligeable.  But in the eyelids the
+difference is great between large and small, and also between the
+varieties of largeness.  Some have large openings, and some are in
+themselves broad and long, serenely covering eyes called small.  Some
+have far more drawing than others, and interesting foreshortenings and
+sweeping curves.
+
+Where else is spirit so evident?  And where else is it so spoilt?  There
+is no vulgarity like the vulgarity of vulgar eyelids.  They have a slang
+all their own, of an intolerable kind.  And eyelids have looked all the
+cruel looks that have ever made wounds in innocent souls meeting them
+surprised.
+
+But all love and all genius have winged their flight from those slight
+and unmeasurable movements, have flickered on the margins of lovely
+eyelids quick with thought.  Life, spirit, sweetness are there in a small
+place; using the finest and the slenderest machinery; expressing meanings
+a whole world apart, by a difference of material action so fine that the
+sight which appreciates it cannot detect it; expressing intricacies of
+intellect; so incarnate in slender and sensitive flesh that nowhere else
+in the body of man is flesh so spiritual.
+
+
+
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