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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Colour of Life by Alice Meynell
+#2 in our series by Alice Meynell
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+The Colour of Life
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+by Alice Meynell
+
+February, 1998  [Etext #1205]
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Colour of Life by Alice Meynell
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+Prepared by:
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+
+
+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+unpublished blood.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 e
+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.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Colour of Life by Alice Meynell
+
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