Part 4 (2/2)
”Alors que je me croyais aux derniers jours de l'automne, dans un jardin depouille.” The words are Madame de Hauterive's, one of the most charming among eighteenth-century letter-writers; but one of whom, for all the indiscretion of that age, we know little or nothing: a delicate, austere outline merely, a reserved and sensitive ghost shrinking into the dimness. She wrote those words when already an old woman, and long after death had taken her father and her daughter and most of her nearest and dearest, to the young Abbe de Carlades, who proved himself (one hopes) not utterly unworthy of that ”unexpected late flowering of the soul.” The phrase is eighteenth century, and it may be the feeling itself is of as bygone a fas.h.i.+on. Or does this seem the case because such delicate souls can become known to us only when they and their loves and friends.h.i.+ps have ceased to be more than a handful of faded paper, fingered very piously, for heaven's sake?
However this may be, that phrase of Madame de Hauterive's contains a truth which is undying, and which, though un.o.btrusive, can be observed by those who have a discreet eye for the soul's affairs. Nay, one might say that the knowledge of how many times life can begin afresh, the knowledge of the new modes of happiness which may succeed each other, even when the leaves float down yellow in the still air, and the dews on the renovated gra.s.s are white like frost, is one of the blessed secrets into which the pa.s.sing seasons initiate those who have honourably cultivated the garden of life, and life's wide common acres.
Indeed, such faith in the heart's renewed fruitfulness is itself among the autumn blossomings, the hidden compensations. Young folk, and those who never outgrow youth's headlong and blind self-seeking, cannot conceive such truths. For youth has no experience of change; and what it calls the Future is but the present longing or present dread projected forward. Hence youth lacks the resignation which comes of knowing that our aims, our loves, ourselves, will alter; and that we shall not eternally regret what we could not eternally covet. Hence, also, the fine despair and frequent suicide of youthful heroes and heroines. Poor young Werther, in his sky-blue _Frack_ and striped yellow waistcoat, cannot believe that the time will come when he will tune the spinet of some other Charlotte--nay, follow in the footsteps of the enlightened minister, his patron; bury himself in protocols and look forward to a diplomatic game of whist rather than to a country dance with meeting hands and eyes. And it is mere waste of breath to sermon him on the subject: lend him the pistols, and hope that (as in the humaner version of the opera) he will not use them. As to certain other forestallings of experience, they would be positively indecent and barbarous! You would die of shame if the young widow happened to overhear you saying (what is heaven's truth, and a most consoling one) that her baby, which now represents only so much time and love she might have given, all, all, to _him_ alone, is the only good thing which that worthless dead husband could ever have furnished her. And as to hinting in her presence that she will some day be much, much happier with dear Quixotic Dobbin than with that c.o.xcomb of an Osborne, why the bare thought of such indecorum makes us feel like sinking into the ground! We must be sympathizing, and a little short of truthful, with poor distressed young people; above all, never seek to lighten their disappointments with visions of brisk octogenarians, one foot in the grave, enjoying a rubber!
And this, no doubt, is a providential arrangement--I mean this youthful incapacity of grasping the consolations brought by Time. For, after all, life, being there, has to be lived; and maybe life would be lived in a half-hearted fas.h.i.+on did we suspect its many compensations, including what may, methinks, be the last, most solemn one. Should we jump hastily out of bed and bestir ourselves with the zest of the new day, if we thoroughly realized what is, however, matter of common experience, to wit: that at the day's close, sleep, rest without dreams or thought of awaking, may be as welcome as all this pleasant bustle of the morning?
The knowledge of these mysteries, initiation into which comes late and silently, is, as I hinted, perhaps the final compensation; allowing us to face the order of things without superfine cavillings. But there are earlier, less awful and secret compensations, and these it is as well to know about, and to prepare our soul serenely to enjoy when the moment comes.
Of this kind are, of course, those autumn flowerings of sentiment alluded to in Madame de Hauterive's letter. They are blossomings sometimes sweeter than those of summer, thanks to the very scorching of summer's suns; or else touched with an austere vividness by the first frosts, like the late china roses, which are streaked, where they open, with a vermillion unparalleled in their earlier sisters. Compare with this all that is implied in Swinburne's line, ”the month of the long decline of roses.” Think of those roses (I have before my eyes a Florentine terrace at the end of May) crowding each other out, blowing, withering, and dropping; roses white, red, pale lemon, and, alas! also brown and black with mildew, living and dying in such riotous excess that you have neither time nor inclination to pluck one of them, and keep it, piously in water, before you on your table.
Mind, I do not say that such profusion is not all right and necessary in its season. The economy of Nature is often wasteful. There might be no roses at all next year if we depended for seed and slips upon those frost-bitten flowers with their fine austerity. And in the same way that, despite the pathetic tenderness of long-deferred father or motherhood, it is better for the race that infants be brought into the world plentiful, helter-skelter, and that only the toughest stay there; so, methinks, it may be needful that youth be full of false starts, mistaken vocations, lapsed engagements, fanciful friends.h.i.+ps broken off in quarrel, glowing pa.s.sions ending in ashes; nay, that this period, fertile in good and evil, be crowned by marriages such as are said to be made in heaven, no doubt because the great match-making spirit of life pursues ends unguessed by human wisdom, which would often remain in single blessedness, and found homes for sickly infants. Wedlock, in other words, and, for the matter of that, father and motherhood, and most of the serious business of the universe, should not be looked upon as a compensation or consolation, but rather as something for which poor human creatures require to be consoled and compensated.
Having admitted which, and even suggested that marriages are fittest at the age of Daphnis and Chloe, or even of Amelia and George Osborne, let us, I pray you, glance with reverent eyes, and a smile not mocking but tender, at certain other weddings which furtively cross our path.
Weddings between elderly persons, hitherto unable to make up their mind, or having, perchance, made it up all wrong on a first occasion; inveterate old maids and bachelors, or widowers who thought to mourn for ever; people who have found their heart perhaps a little late in the day; but, who knows? shrivelled as it is, perhaps, but the mellower, and of more enduring, more essential sweetness.
Alongside of such tardy nuptials there is a corresponding cla.s.s of _marriages of true minds_. Genuine ones are exceedingly rare during youth; and the impediments, despite the opinion of Shakespeare, are of the nature of nullity, ending most often in unseemly divorce between Hermia and Helena, or the Kings of Sicilia and Bohemia, one of whom, if you remember, tried to poison the other on very small provocation. The last-named is an instructive example of the hollowness of nursery or playground friends.h.i.+p, or rather of what pa.s.ses for such. Genuine friends.h.i.+p is an addition to our real self, a revelation of new possibilities; and young people, busily absorbing the traditions of the past and the fas.h.i.+ons of the day, have very rarely got a real self to reveal or to bestow. So that the feeling we experience in later life towards our playmates is, in fact, rather a wistful pleasure in the thought of our own past than any real satisfaction in their present selves.
Be this as it may, there is among the compensations of life, a kind of friends.h.i.+p which, by its very nature, requires that one of the friends have pa.s.sed the _middle of the way_. I am not referring to the joys of grandfather and grandmotherhood, and all that ”_art d'etre grandpere_”
which have been written and sung until one turns a trifle sceptical about them. What I allude to has, on the contrary, escaped (almost entirely, I think) the desecrating pen of the a.n.a.lytical or moralizing novelist, and remains one of the half-veiled mysteries of human good fortune, before which the observer pa.s.ses quickly in shy admiration.
The case is this: one of the parents has been unwilling, or disappointed; marriage has meant emptiness, or worse; and a nursery full of children has been, very likely, a mere occasion for ill-will and painful struggle. The poor soul has been, perhaps for years, fretted and wearied; or else woefully lonely, cabined, confined, and cramped almost to numbness. When, behold! by the marvellous miracle of man or womanhood--a dull, tiresome child is suddenly transformed, takes on shapeliness and stature, opens the bolted doors of life, leads the father or mother into valleys of ease and on to hopeful hilltops; slays dragons, chains ogres, and smiles with the eyes and lips which have been vaguely dreamed of, longed for, who knows how long!
So children do occasionally const.i.tute compensations and blessings not merely in disguise. And this particularly where they have not been looked upon as investments for future happiness or arrangements for paying off parental debts to society, to glory, or the Supreme Being.
For surely, if children are ever to renovate the flagging life of parents, it can only be by their leaving off their childhood and coming back as equals, brothers, sisters, sometimes as tenderest and most admiring of chivalrous lovers.
'Tis, in fact, unexpected new life adding itself to ours which const.i.tutes the supreme compensation in middle age; and our heart puts forth fresh blossoms of happiness (of genius sometimes, as in the case of Goethe) because younger shoots are rejoicing in the seasonable suns.h.i.+ne or dews. The interests and beliefs of the younger generation prevent our own from dying; nay, the friends.h.i.+ps and loves of our children, whether according to the flesh or the spirit, may become our own. Daughters-in-law are not invariably made to dine off the poisoned half of a partridge, as in works of history. Some stepfathers and stepmothers feel towards those alien youths and maidens only as that dear Valentine Visconti did towards the little Dunois, whom she took in her arms, say the chronicles, and, with many kisses on eyes and cheeks, exclaimed, ”Surely thou wast stolen from me!” And, in another relations.h.i.+p which is spoken ill of by those unworthy of it, we can sometimes watch a thing which is among reality's best poetry: where a mother, wisely and dutifully stepping aside from her married daughter's path, has been s.n.a.t.c.hed back, borne in triumph, not by one loving pair of arms, but two; and where the happy young wife has smiled at recognizing that in her husband's love for her there was mixed up a head-over-ears devotion for her mother.
Some folks have no sons or daughters, or husbands or wives, and hence no stepchildren or children-in-law. Yet even for them autumn may blossom.
There are the children of friends, recalling their youth or compensating for their youth's failure; and for some there are the younger workers in the same field, giving us interest in books or pictures, or journeys or campaigns, when our own days for work and struggle are over; even as we, perhaps, have kept open the vistas of life, given Pisgah-sights to those beloved and venerated ones whose sympathy we value and understand better perhaps now than all those many, many years ago. Yes! even in our youthful egoism we gave them something, those dear long dead friends; and this knowledge is itself a tiny autumn bud in our soul.
There are humbler compensations also. And among these the kind which, years after writing the immortal idyll of ”Dr. Antonio,” my dear venerated friend Ruffini set forth in a tiny story, perhaps partly his own, about the modest but very real happiness which the mere relations.h.i.+p of master and servant can bring into a solitary life; the story taking its name, by a coincidence by no means indifferent to me, from a faithful and pleasant person called Carlino.
But an end to digressions, for it is time to cease writing, particularly of such intangible and shy matters. So, to return to Madame de Hauterive's sentence, which was our starting-point in this inventory of compensations and consolations. Paradoxical though it seem, the understanding and union brought by a glance, by words said in a given way, by any of the trifles bearing mysterious, unreasoned significance for the experienced soul--or, briefly, ”_friends.h.i.+p at first sight_”--is as natural in the sere and yellow, as love at first sight in the salad, days. Only, to be sure, less manifest to indifferent bystanders, since one of the consoling habits which life brings with it is a respect for life's thoroughfares, a reluctance to stop the way, collect a crowd with our private interests, and a pious reserve about such good fortune as is good precisely because it suits us, not other people.
Reserve of this sort, as I began with saying, is one of the charms of dear Madame de Hauterive; and the more so that eighteenth-century folk, particularly French, were not much given to it! And thus it happens that we know little or nothing about that friends.h.i.+p which consoled her later life; and must look round us in our own, if we would understand what were those new flowerings which had arisen, when, as she says, she had thought herself already in the last days of autumn and in a leafless garden.
A STAGE JEWEL
”It doesn't seem to be precisely what is meant by _old paste_,” she answered, repeating the expression I had just made use of, while she handed me the diamond hoop across the table. ”It's too like real stones, you know. I think it must be a stage jewel.”
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