Part 5 (2/2)
With this question another is closely connected. I must explain it by a simile. A foreign friend of mine insists, with some show of reason, that much as any two countries of the Continent may differ, England contrives to differ a great deal more from all of them than they can differ from each other. Well, it sometimes strikes me that, in a similar way, our Present may be wholly detached from the ma.s.s, however heterogeneous, of the Past; an island divided from the mainland of history by seas of difference, or rather, like the great Arctic countries, a separate Continent, shrouded in mystery, of which we know only that its. .h.i.therto explored sh.o.r.es face, without ever touching, the other mapped-out Continent we call the Past. For just think, let us say, of the change implied in the multiplication through machinery of a stereotyped form, as against the production of an individual object by individual hands.
Why, such a change means democracy far more than any other change in laws and franchises; and it means, among other things, that any art sprung really from the present will have to be of the nature, not of the painting or sculpture of old days, of the architecture which made each single cathedral an individual organism, but of the nature rather of process engraving, of lithography (are not our posters, Cheret's, for instance, the only thing which our ma.s.ses see, as their distant forbears saw frescoes in churches and _campo santos_?), of book printing, in short; and will not literature and music become more and more the typical kinds of art, the creation of one brain projected over millions of acres and through mere wires and cylinders? And think also of the difference in locomotion. Say what you will, people who rode in coaches were bound to be more like people who rode in litters, for all the difference between Rome under Caesar and England under George III., than like people who go by train. That is all on the surface, serious persons will answer: the pace at which people's body and goods are conveyed along may alter without their thoughts or feelings being changed the least bit. Perhaps. But are we so absolutely sure of that?
For instance, are we sure we should have been able to get on for half an hour together with even our own great-grandparents of little more than a hundred years ago? There they hang, our great-grandfathers and mothers and uncles and aunts (or some one's else, more likely), painted by Reynolds or Raeburn, delightful persons whose ghosts we would give anything to meet. Their ghosts; aye, there's the rub. For their ghosts would have altered with posthumous experience, would have had glimpses of the world we live in, and somewhat conformed to its habits; but could we really get on with the living men and women of former days? It is true that we understand and enjoy the books which they read, or rather a small number of pages out of a smaller number of books. But did they read them in the same way? I should not wonder if the different sense in which we took their favourite authors, or rather the different sense in which we discovered that they were in the habit of taking them, created considerable coolness, not to say irritation, between the ghosts of the readers of ”The Vicar of Wakefield,” or ”Werther,” or the ”Nouvelle Helose” and ourselves. Besides, they would be monstrously shocked at our ways. They would think us marvellously ill-bred. While we! I dare scarcely harbour the thought, much less express it. Anyway, it is certain that they occasionally allowed Sheridan and Miss Burney (I am not even thinking of the remote people of Fielding), and even, alas!
Miss Austen, to paint pictures of them which we would scarcely own up to from novelists and playwrights of our day, and therefore I return to my puzzle: is time an unbroken continuity, all its subdivisions merely conventional, like those of postal districts; or, as I suggested above, are there real chains of mountains, chasms, nay, deep oceans, breaking up its surface; and do we not belong, we people of the nineteenth century, rather to the future which we are forming than to the Past which, much to its astonishment (I should think), produced us?
There are other puzzles about the Past, far more intimate in nature and less grandiose, but, on the whole, far less easy to answer. One of these is difficult even to word, but every reader will identify it in connection with some of the most delightful experiences he has been admitted to. Roughly, it may be expressed as follows:--Were old people ever young? Was there a period in the world's history (and not so far back) when everybody was enchantingly mixed of primness and romance, had little graces of manner, nods and becks and wreathed smiles, with a tendency every now and then to employ language rather stronger than the occasion warranted? Did youths and maidens wander about with faint moral odours of pot-pourri and quaint creases of character, as of superannuated garments long folded in a drawer! Or are these qualities taken on by each generation in turn, in which case will the Hilda w.a.n.gels and Dodos of to-day delight the twentieth century as possible inmates of Cranford?
Having worked my way to so marvellous a puzzle as this, I had better remove the strain by hastily suggesting another question, which will satisfactorily get rid of the others, to wit, whether the Past did really ever exist?
On the whole, I am tempted to believe that it did not. I can even prove it by a logical stroke worthy of the very greatest philosophers. Granted that the Past is that which no longer has any existence, only the Present could ever be real now; as the Present and the Past cannot co-exist, the Past evidently never existed at all; unless, indeed, we call in the aid of the Hegelian philosophy, and set our minds at ease by a fine reduction of contraries, to the effect that since the Present and the Past exclude one another, they evidently must really be the same thing at bottom.
This is cogent. And yet a doubt continues lurking in my mind. Is not what we think of as the Past--what we discuss, describe, and so often pa.s.sionately love--a mere creation of our own? Not merely in its details, but in what is far more important, in its essential, emotional, and imaginative quality and value? Perhaps some day psychology may discover that we have a craving, like that which produces music or architecture, for a special state of nerves (or of something else, if people are bored with nerves by that time), obtainable by a special human product called the Past--the Past which has never been the Present.
MAKING PRESENTS
It was the dreadful perplexity of making a present to a rich woman. Like Heine's sweetheart, she was abundantly provided with diamonds and pearls and all things which mankind can wish. And so the lack of any mortal thing suggested that, so far from liking to be given it, she would far rather not have it at all.
I do not choose to state whether that lady ever did get a present from me, for the statement would be an anti-climax. Suffice it that as a result of profound meditation I found myself in possession of a ”Philosophy of Presents,” which, copied fair on imaginary vellum, or bound in ideal morocco, I now lay at the feet of my friends, as a very appropriate gift, and entirely home-made.
The whole subject of presents is bristling with fallacies, which have arisen like thistles out of the thinness of our life and the stoniness of our hearts. One of these mistaken views is perpetually being put forward by people who a.s.sert that _the pleasantness of a gift lies in the good-will of the giver_. The notion has a specious air of amiability and disinterestedness and general good-breeding; but the only truth it really contains is that, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, a present gives exactly no pleasure at all. For, if the pleasantness of a present depended solely on the expression of good-will, why not express good-will in any of the hundred excellent modes of doing so?--for we have all of us, more or less, voice, expressive features, words ready or (more expressive still) unready, and occasions enough, Heaven knows! of making small sacrifices for our neighbours. And it is entirely superfluous to waste our substance and c.u.mber our friends' houses by adding to these convenient items, material tokens like, say, gold from Ophir and apes and peac.o.c.ks. There are inconveniences attached to the private possession of bullion; many persons dislike the voices of peac.o.c.ks, and I, at all events, am perfectly harrowed by the physiognomy of apes.
This, of course, is metaphorical; but it leads me from the mere exposition of theory to the argument from experience. If presents are pleasant because of the good-will, etc., why are we all brought up (oh, the cruelty of suppressed disappointment when the doll arrives instead of the wooden horse, or the duplicate kitchen-set instead of the longed-for box of bricks!) to pretend that the gift we receive is the very thing we have been pining for for years? And here I would ask my friend and reader, the often-much-perplexed-giver-and-receiver of gifts, whether, quite apart even from those dreadful smothered tragedies of one's childhood, there are, among the trifling false positions of life, many false positions more painful than that of choosing a gift which one knows is not wanted, unless it be the more painful position still of receiving a gift which one would tip any one to take away?
Some persons feel this so strongly, wondering why the preacher forgot this item in his list of vanities, that you may hear them loudly vowing that never again will they be caught in the act of making a present....
So far about the mistaken view of the subject; now for the right one, which is mine: the result of great experience and of infinite meditation, all coming to a head in that recent perplexed business of choosing a present for the lady with the diamonds and pearls. And before proceeding further, let me say that my experience is really exceptional.
Not that I have given many gifts, or that I am in the least certain that the few I have given were not the usual Dead Sea apples; but because I have been, what is much more to the point, a great receiver of presents, my room, my house containing nothing beautiful or pleasant that is not a present from some dear friend, or (the paradox will be explained later on) a present from myself. A great receiver of presents, also, because presents give me a very lively and special pleasure; have done so always ever since my days of Christmas-trees and birthday candles, leaving all through my life a particular permeating charm connected with certain dates and seasons, like the good, wonderful smell of old fir-needles slightly toasted, and of wax tapers recently extinguished, so that all very delightful places and moments are apt to affect me as a sort of gift-giving, what the Germans have a dear word for, beloved of children, _Bescheerung_. For if life, wisely lived, ought to be, as I firmly believe, nothing but a long act of courts.h.i.+p, then, surely, its exquisite things--summer nights with loose-hanging stars, pale sunny winter noons, first strolls through towered towns or upon herb-scented hills, the hearing again of music one has understood, not to speak of the gesture and voice of the people whom one holds dear--all these, and all other exquisite movements or exquisite items of life, should be felt with the added indescribable pleasure of being gifts.
A present, then, may be defined as a _thing which one wants given by a person whom one likes_. But our English syntax falls short of my meaning, for what I would wish to say is rather, in Teutonic fas.h.i.+on, ”a by a person one likes to one given object one wants.” The stress of the sentence should be laid on the word _wants_. For much of the charm, and most of the dignity, of a gift depends on its being _a thing one would otherwise have done without_.
This is true even with those dreadful useful objects which make us feel hot to distribute; they have become melancholy possible presents because, alas! however necessary, they would otherwise not have been forthcoming. And, apart from such cases, mankind has always decided that gifts should not be of the nature of blankets, or manuals of science, or cooking-pots, but rather flowers, fruit, books of poetry, and the wares of silken Samarkand and cedared Lebanon. It is admitted upon all hands that, to be perfect, presents must be superfluities; but I should like to add that the reverse also holds good, and that superfluities would be the better, nine times out of ten, for being presents.
'Tis, methinks, a sign of the recent importation and comparative scarcity of honest livelihoods, that we should think so much how we come by our money, and so little how we part with it, as if we were free to waste, provided we do not steal. Now, _my manuals of political economy_ (which were, of course, _not_ presents to me) make it quite plain that whatever we spend in mere self-indulgence is so much taken away from the profitable capital of the community; and sundry other sciences, which require no manuals to teach them, make it plainer still that the habit of indulging, upon legal payment, our whims and our greedinesses, fills our houses with lumber and our souls with worse than lumber where there might be light and breathable air. Extremes meet: and even as to paupers, the barest necessaries of life are superfluities--things dispensed with; so, at the other end of the vicious circle, to the spendthrift luxury ceases to be luxury, and superfluities are turned into things one cannot do without.
The charm of a gift, its little moral flavour which makes us feel the better for it, resides, therefore, not merely in good-will, but in the little prelude of self-restraint on the one hand, of unselfishness on the other. Unless you gave it me, I should not have that pleasant thing; and you, knowing this much, give it to me, instead of to yourself. What a complicated lovers'-knot of good-feeling there is tied, as round flowers or sweetmeats, round every genuine present! This is a rich, varied impression, full of harmonies; compare with it the dry, dull, stifling impression one gets from looking round a rich man's house, or admiring the ornaments of a rich woman's person: all these things having merely been bought!
Yet buying can be a fine thing. And among genuine presents (and in an honourable place) I certainly include--as I hinted some way back--the presents which people _sometimes make to themselves_. For 'tis a genuine present when a person who never allows himself a superfluity, at last buys one, as Charles and Mary Lamb did their first blue pots and prints, out of slowly saved up pennies. There is in that all the grace of long self-restraint, and the grace of finally triumphant love--love for that faithfully courted object, that Rachel among inanimates! The giving to one's self of such a present is a fit occasion for rejoicing; and 'tis a proper instinct (more proper than the one of displaying wedding presents) which causes the united giver and receiver of the gift to summon the neighbours, to see it and rejoice, not without feasting.
But presents of this sort are even more difficult to compa.s.s than the other sort where people, like the lady sung by Heine, have pearls and diamonds in plenty, and all things which mankind can wish.
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