Part 3 (1/2)

IN PRAISE OF COURTs.h.i.+P

There is too little courts.h.i.+p in the world. I do not mean there is not enough marrying and giving in marriage, or that the preliminaries thereunto are otherwise than they should be. Quite the reverse. As long as there is love and youth, there is sure in the literal sense to be courts.h.i.+p. But what I ask is that there be courts.h.i.+p besides that literal courts.h.i.+p between the Perditas and Florizels; that there be ”being in love” with a great many things, even stocks and stones, besides youth and maiden; which would result, on the whole, in all of us being young in feeling even when we had grown old in years.

For courts.h.i.+p means a wish to stand well in the other person's eyes, and, what is more, a readiness to be pleased with the other's ways; a sense on each side of having had the better of the bargain; an undercurrent of surprise and thankfulness at one's good luck.

There is not enough courts.h.i.+p in the world. This thought has been growing in my mind ever since the silver wedding of two dear friends: that quarter of a century has been but a prolonged courts.h.i.+p.

Why is it not oftener so? One sees among married folk a good deal of affection, of kindliness, even of politeness; a great deal too much mutual dependence, degenerating, of course, into habitual boredom. But none of this can be called courts.h.i.+p. Perhaps this was the meaning, less cynical than supposed, but quite as sad, of La Rochefoucauld when he noted down, ”Il y a de bons mariages, mais point de delicieux;” since, in the delicate French sense of the word, implying some a.n.a.logy of subdued yet penetrating pleasantness, as of fresh, bright weather or fine light wine, courts.h.i.+p is essentially _delicieux_.

This is, of course, initiating a question of manner. Modern psychology is discovering scientific reasons for the fact that if you wag a dog's tail he feels pleased; or, at all events, that the human being would feel pleased if it had a tail and could wag it. Confessors and nurses knew it long ago, curbing bad temper by restraining its outer manifestations; and are not dinners and plays, flags and illuminations, birthdays and jubilees--nay, art itself, devices for suggestions to mankind that it feels pleased?

Married people, as a rule, wish not to be pleased, or at least not to show it. They may be heartbroken at each other's death, and unable to endure a temporary separation; but the outsider may wonder why, seeing how little they seem to care for being together. It is the same, after all, with other relations; and it is only because brothers and sisters, fathers and children have not taken visible steps to select one another that their bored indifference is less conspicuous. You will say it is a question of mere manner. But, as remarked, manner not merely results from feeling, but largely reacts on feeling, and makes it different.

People who live together have the appearance, often, of taking each other, if not as a convenience, at all events as a _fait accompli_, and, so far as possible, as if not there at all. Near relations try to realize the paradox of companionable solitude; and intimacy seems to imply the right to behave as if the intimate other one were not there.

Now, _being by one's self_ is a fine thing, convenient and salutary (indeed, like courts.h.i.+p, there is not enough of it); but being by one's self is not to be confounded with _not being in company_. I have selected that expression advisedly, in order to give a shock to the reader. _In company?_ Good heavens! is being with one's wife, one's brothers or sisters, one's children, one's bosom friends _being in company_? And why not? Should company necessarily mean the company of strangers? And is the presence of one's nearest and dearest to be accounted as nothing--as nothing demanding some change in ourselves, and worthy of being paid some price for?

This goes against our notion of intimacy; but then our notion is wrong, as is shown daily by the quarrels and recriminations of intimate friends. One can be natural, _with a difference_, which difference means a thought for the other. There is a selection possible in one's words and actions before another--nay, there is a manner of doing and feeling which almost forestalls the necessity of a selection at all. I like the expression employed by a certain sister after nursing her small brother through a difficult illness, ”We were always Castilian,” she said. Why, as we all try to be honest, and hard-working, and clever, and more or less ill.u.s.trious, should we not sometimes try to be a little Castilian?

Similarly, my friend of the silver wedding once pointed out to me that marriage, with its enforced and often excessive intimacies, was a wonderful school of consideration, of mutual respect, of fine courtesy.

This had been no paradox in her case; but then, as I said, her twenty-five years of wedlock had been years of courts.h.i.+p.

Courts.h.i.+p, however, should not be confined to marriage, nor even to such relations as imply close quarters and worries in common; nay, it should exist towards all things, a constant att.i.tude in life--at least, an att.i.tude constantly tended towards.

The line of least resistance seems against it; our laziness, and our wish to think well of ourselves merely because we _are_ ourselves, undoubtedly go against it, as they do against everything in the world worth having. In our own day certain ways of thinking, culminating in development of the _Moi_ and production of the _Uebermensch_, and general self-engrossment and currishness, are peculiarly hostile to courts.h.i.+p. Whereas the old religious training, where it did not degenerate into excessive asceticism, was a school of good manners towards the universe as well as towards one's neighbours. The ”Fioretti di San Francisco” is a handbook of polite friendliness to men, women, birds, wolves, and, what must have been most difficult, fellow-monks; and St. Francis' Hymn to the Sun might be given as an example of the wise man's courts.h.i.+p of what we stupidly call inanimates.

For courts.h.i.+p might be our att.i.tude towards everything which is capable of giving pleasure; and would not many more things give us pleasure--let us say, the sun in the heavens, the water on the stones, even the fire in the grate, if, instead of thinking of them as existing merely to make our life bearable, we called them, like the saint of a.s.sisi, My Lord the Sun, and Sister Water, and Brother Fire, and thought of them with joy and grat.i.tude?

Certain it is that everything in the world repays courts.h.i.+p; and that, quite outside all marrying and giving in marriage, in all our dealings with all possible things, the cessation of courts.h.i.+p marks the incipient necessity for divorce.

KNOWING ONE'S MIND

The only things which afforded me any pleasure in that great collection of Ingres drawings, let alone in that very dull, frowsy, stale, and unprofitable city of Montauban, whither I had travelled on purpose to see it, were an old printed copy of ”Don Juan oder der Steinerne Gast”--in a gla.s.s case alongside of M. Ingres' century-long-uncleaned fiddle--and a half-page of Mozart's autograph, given to M. Ingres when a student by a Prix de Rome musician. I mentioned this fact to my friends, in a spirit of guileless truthfulness; when, what was my surprise at the story being received with smiling incredulity. ”Your paradox,” they said, with the benevolent courtesy of their nation, for they were French, ”is delightful and most _reussi_. But, of course, we know you to be exquisitely sensitive to genius in all its manifestations.”

Now, I happened to know myself to be as insensible as a stone to genius as manifested in the late M. Ingres. However, I despaired of persuading them that I was speaking the truth; and, despite the knowledge of their language with which they graciously credited me, I hunted about in vain for the French equivalent of ”I know my own mind.” Whereupon, allowing the conversation to take another turn, I fell to musing on those untranslatable words, together with the whole episode of the Mozart ma.n.u.script and the drawings of M. Ingres, including that rainy, chilly day at Montauban; and also another day of travel, even wetter and colder, which returned to my memory.

_Knowing one's own mind_ (in whatever way you might succeed in turning that into French) is a first step to filling one's own place instead of littering unprofitably over creation at large, and in so far also to doing one's own work. Life, I am willing to admit, is not all private garden, nor should we attempt to make it. 'Tis nine-tenths common acres, which we must till in company, and with mutual sacrifice of our whims.

Nay, Life is largely public thoroughfares with a definite _rule of the road_ and a regulated pace of traffic; streets, at all events, however narrow, where each must shovel snow, sprinkle water, and sweep his threshold. But respect for such common property cannot be genuine where there is not a corresponding fidelity and fondness on the part of each for his own little enclosure, his garden, and, by a.n.a.logy, his neighbour's garden also. There is little good to be got from your vague, gregarious natures, liking or disliking merely because others like or dislike. There cannot be much loving-kindness, let alone love (whether for persons or things or ideas), in souls which always require company, and prefer any to none at all. And as to good work, why, it means _tete-a-tete_ with what you are doing, and is incompatible with the spirit of picnics. I own to a growing suspicion of those often heroic and saintly persons who allow their neighbours--husband, father, mother, children--to saunter idly into the allotments which G.o.d has given them, trampling heedlessly the delicate seedlings, or, like holiday trippers, carving egoistic initials in growing trees not of their own planting.

And one of the unnoticed, because continuous, tragedies of existence is surely such wanton or deliberate destruction of the individual qualities of the soul, such sacrifice of the necessary breathing and standing place which even the smallest requires; such grudging of the needful solitude and separateness, alas! often to those that we love the best. It seems highly probable that among all their absurd and melancholy recollections of this wasteful and slatternly earth, the denizens of the Kingdom of Heaven will look back with most astonishment and grief on the fact of having lived, before regeneration, without a room apiece.

In the Kingdom of Heaven every one will have a separate room for rest and meditation; a cell perhaps, whitewashed, with a green shutter and a white dimity curtain in the suns.h.i.+ne. And the cells will, of course, be very much alike in all essentials, because most people agree about having some sort of bed, table, chair, and so forth. But some glorified souls will have the flowers (which Dante saw her plucking) of Leah; and others the looking-gla.s.s of the contemplative Rachel; and there will be ever so many other little differences, making it amusing and edifying to pay a call upon one's brother or sister soul.

In such a state of spiritual community and privacy (so different from our present hugger-mugger and five-little-bears-in-a-bed mode of existence), my soul, for instance, if your soul should honour it with a visit, would be able, methinks, to talk quite freely and pleasantly about the Ingres Museum at Montauban, and the autograph of Mozart in the gla.s.s case alongside the fiddle.... The ma.n.u.script is only a half sheet full score, torn or cut through its height; and the voice part is broken off with one word only--insufficient to identify it among Mozart's Italian works, though, perhaps, most suggestive of ”Don Giovanni”--the word ”Guai.” The ma.n.u.script is exquisitely neat, yet has none of the look of a copy, and we know that Mozart was never obliged to make any.

The writing is so like the man's adorable personality, the little pattern of notes so like his music. The sight of it moved me, flooding my mind with divine things, that Concerto for Flute and Harp, for instance, which dear Mme. H---- had recently been playing for me. And during that dull, rainy day of waiting for trains at Montauban, it made me live over again another day of rainy travel, but with the ”Zauberflote” at the end of it, about which I will also tell you, since I am permitted to know my own mind and to speak it.