Book: Yet Again

M >> Max Beerbohm >> Yet Again




Cavina plants the dagger methodically, and the Inquisitor himself is
evidently filled with that intense self-consciousness which sustains
all martyrs in their supreme hour and makes them, it may be,
insensible to actual pain. One feels that this martyr will write his
motto in the dust with a firm hand. His whole comportment is quite
exemplary. What irony that he should be unobserved! Even we,
posterity, think far less of St. Peter than of Bellini when we see
this picture; St. Peter is no more to us than the blue harmony of
those little hills beyond, or than that little sparrow perched on a
twig in the foreground. After all, there have been so many martyrs--
and so many martyrs named Peter--but so few great painters. The little
screed on the fence is no mere vain anachronism. It is a sly, rather
malicious symbol. PERIIT PETRUS: BILLINUS FECIT, as who should say.


`L'OISEAU BLEU'
A PAINTING ON SILK BY CHARLES CONDER

Over them, ever over them, floats the Blue Bird; and they, the
ennuye'es and the ennuyants, the ennuyantes and the ennuye's, these
Parisians of 1830, are lolling in a charmed, charming circle, whilst
two of their order, the young Duc de Belhabit et Profil-Perdu with the
girl to whom he has but recently been married, move hither or thither
vaguely, their faces upturned, making vain efforts to lure down the
elusive creature. The haze of very early morning pervades the garden
which is the scene of their faint aspiration. One cannot see very
clearly there. The ladies' furbelows are blurred against the foliage,
and the lilac-bushes loom through the air as though they were white
clouds full of rain. One cannot see the ladies' faces very clearly.
One guesses them, though, to be supercilious and smiling, all with the
curved lips and the raised eyebrows of Experience. For, in their time,
all these ladies, and all their lovers with them, have tried to catch
this same Blue Bird, and have been full of hope that it would come
fluttering down to them at last. Now they are tired of trying, knowing
that to try were foolish and of no avail. Yet it is pleasant for them
to see, as here, others intent on the old pastime. Perhaps--who
knows?--some day the bird will be trapped... Ah, look! Monsieur Le Duc
almost touched its wing! Well for him, after all, that he did not more
than that! Had he caught it and caged it, and hung the gilt cage in
the boudoir of Madame la Duchesse, doubtless the bird would have
turned out to be but a moping, drooping, moulting creature, with not a
song to its little throat; doubtless the blue colour is but dye, and
would soon have faded from wings and breast. And see! Madame la
Duchesse looks a shade fatigued. She must not exert herself too much.
Also, the magic hour is all but over. Soon there will be sunbeams to
dispel the dawn's vapour; and the Blue Bird, with the sun sparkling on
its wings, will have soared away out of sight. Allons! The little
rogue is still at large.


`MACBETH AND THE WITCHES'
A PAINTING BY COROT, IN THE HERTFORD HOUSE COLLECTION

Look! Across the plain yonder, those three figures, dark and gaunt
against the sky.... Who are they? What are they? One of them is
pointing with rigid arm towards the gnarled trees that from the
hillside stretch out their storm-broken boughs and ragged leaves
against the sky. Shifting thither, my eye discerns through the shadows
two horsemen, riding slowly down the incline. Hush! I hold up a
warning finger to my companion, lest he move. On what strange and
secret tryst have we stumbled? They must not know they are observed.
Could we creep closer up to them? Nay, the plain is so silent: they
would hear us; and so barren: they would surely see us. Here, under
cover of this rock, we can crouch and watch them.... We discern now
more clearly those three expectants. One of them has a cloak of faded
blue; it is fluttering in the wind. Women or men are they? Scarcely
human they seem: inauspicious beings from some world of shadows,
magically arisen through that platform of broken rock whereon they
stand. The air around, even the fair sky above, is fraught by them
with I know not what of subtle bale. One would say they had been
waiting here for many days, motionless, eager but not impatient,
knowing that at this hour the two horsemen would come. And we--it is
strange--have we not ere now beheld them waiting? In some waking
dream, surely, we have seen them, and now dimly recognise them. And
the two horsemen, forcing their steeds down the slope--them, too, we
have seen, even so. The light through a break in the trees faintly
reveals them to us. They are accoutred in black armour. They seem not
to be yet aware of the weird figures confronting them across the
plain. But the horses, with some sharper instinct, are aware and
afraid, straining, quivering. One of them throws back its head, but
dares not whinny. As though under some evil spell, all nature seems to
be holding its breath. Stealthily, noiselessly, I turn the leaves of
my catalogue... `Macbeth and the Witches.' Why, of course!

Of the two horsemen, which is Macbeth, which Banquo? Though we peer
intently, we cannot in those distant shadows distinguish which is he
that shall be king hereafter, which is he that shall merely beget
kings. It is mainly in virtue of this very vagueness and mystery of
manner that the picture is so impressive. An illustration should stir
our fancy, leaving it scope and freedom. Most illustrations, being
definite, do but affront us. Usually, Shakespeare is illustrated by
some Englishman overawed by the poet's repute, and incapable of
treating him, as did Corot, vaguely and offhand. Shakespeare expressed
himself through human and superhuman characters; therefore in England
none but a painter of figures would dare illustrate him. Had Corot
been an Englishman, this landscape would have had nothing to do with
Shakespeare. Luckily, as an alien, he was untrammelled by piety to the
poet. He could turn Shakespeare to his own account. In this picture,
obviously, he was creating, and only in a secondary sense
illustrating. For him the landscape was the thing. Indeed, the five
little figures may have been inserted by him as an afterthought, to
point and balance the composition. Vaguely he remembered hearing of
Macbeth, or reading it in some translation. Ce Sac-espe`re...un beau
talent...ne' romantique. Hugo he would not have attempted to
illustrate. But Sac-espe`re--why not? And so the little figures came
upon the canvas, dim sketches. Charles Lamb disliked theatrical
productions of Shakespeare's plays, because of the constraint thus
laid on his imagination. But in the theatre, at least, we are diverted
by movement, recompensed by the sound of the poet's words and (may be)
by human intelligence interpreting his thoughts; whereas from a
definite painting of Shakespearean figures we get nothing but an
equivalent for the mimes' appearance: nothing but the painter's bare
notion (probably quite incongruous with our notion) of what these
figures ought to look like. Take Macbeth as an instance. From a
definite painting of him what do we get? At worst, the impression of a
kilted man with a red beard and red knees, brandishing a claymore. At
best, a sombre barbarian doing nothing in particular. In either case,
all the atmosphere, all the character, all the poetry, all that makes
Macbeth live for us, is lost utterly. If these definite illustrations
of Shakespeare's human figures affront us, how much worse is it when
an artist tries his hand at the figures that are superhuman! Imagine
an English illustrator's projection of the weird sisters--with long
grey beards duly growing on their chins, and belike one of them duly
holding in her hand a pilot's thumb. It is because Corot had no
reverence for Shakespeare's text--because he was able to create in his
own way, with scarcely a thought of Shakespeare, an independent
masterpiece--that this picture is worthy of its theme. The largeness
of the landscape in proportion to the figures seems to show us the
tragedy in its essential relation to the universe. We see the heath
lying under infinity, under true sky and winds. No hint of the theatre
is there. All is as the poet may have conceived it in his soul. And
for us Corot's brush-work fills the place of Shakespeare's music. Time
has tessellated the surface of the canvas; but beauty, intangible and
immortal, dwells in its depths safely--dwells there even as it dwells
in the works of Shakespeare, though the folios be foxed and seared.

The longer we gaze, the more surely does the picture illude us and
enthral us, steeping us in that tragedy of `the fruitless crown and
barren sceptre.' We forget all else, watching the unkind witches as
they await him whom they shall undo, driving him to deeds he dreams
not of, and beguiling him, at length, to his doom. Against `the set of
sun' they stand forth, while he who shall be king hereafter, with the
comrade whom he shall murder, rides down to them, guileless of aught
that shall be. Privy to his fate, we experience a strange compassion.
Anon the fateful colloquy will begin. `All hail, Macbeth' the
unearthly voices will be crying across the heath. Can nothing be done?
Can we stand quietly here while... Nay, hush! We are powerless. These
witches, if we tried to thwart them, would swiftly blast us. There are
things with which no mortal must meddle. There are things which no
mortal must behold. Come away!

So, casting one last backward look across the heath, we, under cover
of the rock, steal fearfully away across the parquet floor of the
gallery.


`CARLOTTA GRISI'
A COLOURED PRINT

It is not among the cardboard glades of the King's Theatre, nor,
indeed, behind any footlights, but in a real and twilit garden that
Grisi, gimp-waisted sylphid, here skips for posterity. To her right,
the roses on the trellis are not paper roses--one guesses them quite
fragrant. And that is a real lake in the distance; and those delicate
pale trees around it, they too are quite real. Yes! surely this is the
garden of Grisi's villa at Uxbridge; and her guests, quoting Lord
Byron's `al fresco, nothing more delicious,' have tempted her to a
daring by-show of her genius. To her left there is a stone cross,
which has been draped by one of the guests with a scarf bearing the
legend GISELLE. It is Sunday evening, I fancy, after dinner. Cannot
one see the guests, a group entranced by its privilege--the ladies
with bandeaux and with little shawls to ward the dew from their
shoulders; the gentlemen, D'Orsayesque all, forgetting to puff the
cigars which the ladies, `this once,' have suffered them to light? One
sees them there; but they are only transparent phantoms between us and
Grisi, not interrupting our vision. As she dances--the peerless
Grisi!--one fancies that she is looking through them at us, looking
across the ages to us who stand looking back at her. Her smile is but
the formal Cupid's-bow of the ballerina; but I think there is a
clairvoyance of posterity in the large eyes, and, in the pose, a self-
consciousness subtler than merely that of one who, dancing, leads all
men by the heart-strings. A something is there which is almost
shyness. Clearly, she knows it to be thus that she will be remembered;
feels this to be the moment of her immortality. Her form is all but in
profile, swaying far forward, but her face is full-turned to us. Her
arms float upon the air. Below the stark ruff of muslin about her
waist, her legs are as a tilted pair of compasses; one point in the
air, the other impinging the ground. One tiptoe poised ever so lightly
upon the earth, as though the muslin wings at her shoulders were not
quite strong enough to bear her up into the sky! So she remains,
hovering betwixt two elements; a creature exquisitely ambiguous, being
neither aerial nor of the earth. She knows that she is mortal, yet is
conscious of apotheosis. She knows that she, though herself must
perish, is imperishable; for she sees us, her posterity, gazing fondly
back at her. She is touched. And we, a little envious of those who did
once see Grisi plain, always shall find solace in this pretty picture
of her; holding it to be, for all the artificiality of its convention,
as much more real as it is prettier than the stringent ballet-girls of
Degas.


`HO-TEI'
A COLOURED DRAWING BY HOKUSAI

What monster have we here? Who is he that sprawls thus, ventrirotund,
against the huge oozing wine-skin? Wide his nose, narrowly-slit his
eyes, and with little teeth he smiles at us through a beard of bright
russet--a beard soft as the russet coat of a squirrel, and sprouting
in several tiers according to the several chins that ascend behind it
from his chest. Nude he is but for a few dark twists of drapery. One
dimpled foot is tucked under him, the other cocked before him. With a
bifurcated fist (such is his hand) he pillows the bald dome of his
head. He seems to be very happy, sprawling here in the twilight. The
wine oozes from the wine-skin; but he, replete, takes no heed of it.
On the ground before him are a few almond-blossoms, blown there by the
wind. He is snuffing their fragrance, I think.

Who is he? `Ho-Tei,' you tell me; `god of increase, god of the corn-
fields and rice-fields, patron of all little children in Japan--a
blend of Dionysus and Santa Claus.' So? Then his look belies him. He
is far too fat to care for humanity, too gross to be divine. I suspect
he is but some self-centred sage, whom Hokusai beheld with his own
eyes in a devious corner of Yedo. A hermit he is, surely; one not more
affable than Diogenes, yet wiser than he, being at peace with himself
and finding (as it were) the honest man without emerging from his own
tub; a complacent Diogenes; a Diogenes who has put on flesh. Looking
at him, one is reminded of that over-swollen monster gourd which to
young Nevil Beauchamp and his Marquise, as they saw it from their
river-boat, `hanging heavily down the bank on one greenish yellow
cheek, in prolonged contemplation of its image in the mirror below,'
so sinisterly recalled Monsieur le Marquis. But to us this `self-
adored, gross bald Cupid' has no such symbolism, and we revel as
whole-heartedly as he in his monstrous contours. `I am very
beautiful,' he seems to murmur. And we endorse the boast. At the same
time, we transfer to Hokusai the credit which this glutton takes all
to himself. It is Hokusai who made him, delineating his paunch in that
one soft summary curve, and echoing it in the curve of the wine-skin
that swells around him. Himself, as a living man, were too loathsome
for words; but here, thanks to Hokusai, he is not less admirable than
Pheidias' Hermes, or the Discobolus himself. Yes! Swathed in his
abominable surplusage of bulk, he is as fair as any statue of
astricted god or athlete that would suffer not by incarnation...

Presently, we forget again that he is unreal. He seems alive to us,
and somehow he is still beautiful. `It is a beauty,' like that of Mona
Lisa, `wrought out from within upon the flesh, the' adipose `deposit,
little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and
exquisite passions.' It is the beauty of real fatness--that fatness
which comes from within, and reacts on the soul that made it, until
soul and body are one deep harmony of fat; that fatness which gave us
the geniality of Silenus, of the late Major O'Gorman; which soothes
all nerves in its owner, and creates the earthy, truistic wisdom of
Sancho Pauza, of Fran‡isque Sarcey; which makes a man selfish, because
there is so much of him, and venerable because he seems to be a knoll
of the very globe we live on, and lazy inasmuch as the form of
government under which he lives is an absolute gastrocracy--the belly
tyrannising over the members whom it used to serve, and wielding its
power as unscrupulously as none but a promoted slave could.

Such is the true fatness. It is not to be confounded with mere
stoutness. Contrast with this Japanese sage that orgulous hidalgo who,
in black velvet, defies modern Prussia from one of Velasquez's
canvases in Berlin. Huge is that other, and gross; and, so puffed his
cheeks are that the light, cast up from below, strives vainly to creep
over them to his eyes, like a tourist vainly striving to creep over a
boulder on a mountainside. Yet is he not of the hierarchy of true
fatness. He bears his bulk proudly, and would sit well any charger
that were strong enough to bear him, and, if such a steed were not in
stables, would walk the distance swingingly. He is a man of action, a
fighter, an insolent dominator of men and women. In fact, he is merely
a stout man--uniform with Porthos, and Arthur Orton, and Sir John
Falstaff; spiced, like them, with charlatanism and braggadocio, and
not the less a fine fellow for that. Indeed, such bulk as his and
theirs is in the same kind as that bulk which, lesser in degree, is
indispensable to greatness in practical affairs. No man, as Prince
Bismarck declared, is to be trusted in state-craft until he can show a
stomach. A lack of stomach betokens lack of mental solidity, of
humanity, of capacity for going through with things; and these three
qualities are essential to statesmanship. Poets and philosophers can
afford to be thin--cannot, indeed, afford to be otherwise; inasmuch as
poetry and philosophy thrive but in the clouds aloft, and a stomach
ballasts you to earth. Such ballast the statesman must have. Thin
statesmen may destroy, but construct they cannot; have achieved chaos,
but cosmos never.

But why prate history, why evoke phantoms of the past, when we can
gaze on this exquisitely concrete thing--this glad and simple creature
of Hokusai? Let us emulate his calm, enjoy his enjoyment as he sprawls
before us--pinguis, iners, placidus--in the pale twilight. Let us not
seek to identify him as god or mortal, nor guess his character from
his form. Rather, let us take him as he is; for all time the perfect
type of fatness.

Lovely and excessive monster! Monster immensurable! What belt could
inclip you? What blade were long enough to prick the heart of you?


`THE VISIT'
A PAINTING BY GEORGE MORLAND, IN THE HERTFORD HOUSE COLLECTION

Never, I suppose, was a painter less maladif in his work than Morland,
that lover of simple and sun-bright English scenes. Probably, this
picture of his is all cheerful in intention. Yet the effect of it is
saddening.

Superficially, the scene is cheerful enough. Our first impression is
of a happy English home, of childish high-spirits and pretty manners.
We note how genial a lady is the visitor, and how eager the children
are to please. One of them trips respectfully forward--a wave of
yellow curls fresh and crisp from the brush, a rustle of white muslin
fresh and crisp from the wash. She is supported on one side by her
grown-up sister, on the other by her little brother, who displays the
nectarine already given to him by the kind lady. Splendid in far-
reaching furbelows, that kind lady holds out both her hands, beaming
encouragement. On her ample lap is a little open basket with other
ripe nectarines in it--one for every child.

Modest, demure, the girl trips forward as though she were dancing a
quadrille. In the garden, just beyond the threshold, stand two smaller
sisters, shyly awaiting their turn. They, too, are in their Sunday-
best, and on the tiptoe of excitement--infant coryphe'es, in whom, as
they stand at the wings, stage-fright is overborne by the desire to be
seen and approved. I fancy they are rehearsing under their breath the
`Yes, ma' am,' and the `No, ma'am,' and the `I thank you, ma'am, very
much,' which their grown-up sister has been drilling into them during
the hurried toilet they have just been put through in honour of this
sudden call.

How anxious their mother is during the ceremony of introduction! How
keenly, as she sits there, she keeps her eyes fixed on the visitor's
face! Maternal anxiety, in that gaze, seems to be intensified by
social humility. For this is no ordinary visitor. It is some great
lady of the county, very rich, of high fashion, come from a great
mansion in a great park, bringing fruit from one of her own many hot-
houses. That she has come at all is an act of no slight condescension,
and the mother feels it. Even so did homely Mrs. Fairchild look up to
Lady Noble. Indeed, I suspect that this visitor is Lady Noble herself,
and that the Fairchilds themselves are neighbours of this family.
These children have been coached to say `Yes, my lady,' and `No, my
lady,' and `I thank you, my lady, very much'; and their mother has
already been hoping that Mrs. Fairchild will haply pass through the
lane and see the emblazoned yellow chariot at the wicket. But just now
she is all maternal--`These be my jewels.' See with what pride she
fingers the sampler embroidered by one of her girls, knowing well that
`spoilt' Miss Augusta Noble could not do such embroidery to save her
life--that life which, through her Promethean naughtiness in playing
with fire, she was so soon to lose.

Other exemplary samplers hang on the wall yonder. On the mantelshelf
stands a slate, with an ink-pot and a row of tattered books, and other
tokens of industry. The schoolroom, beyond a doubt. Lady Noble has
expressed a wish to see the children here, in their own haunt, and her
hostess has led the way hither, somewhat flustered, gasping many
apologies for the plainness of the apartment. A plain apartment it is:
dark, bare-boarded, dingy-walled. And not merely a material gloom
pervades it. There is a spiritual gloom, also--the subtly oppressive
atmosphere of a room where life has not been lived happily.

Though these children are cheerful now, it is borne in on us by the
atmosphere (as preserved for us by Morland's master-hand) that their
life is a life of appalling dismalness. Even if we had nothing else to
go on, this evidence of our senses were enough. But we have other
things to go on. We know well the way in which children of this period
were brought up. We remember the life of `The Fairchild Family,' those
putative neighbours of this family--in any case, its obvious
contemporaries; and we know that the life of those hapless little
prigs was typical of child-life in the dawn of the nineteenth century.
Depend on it, this family (whatever its name may be: the Thompsons, I
conjecture) is no exception to the dismal rule. In this schoolroom,
every day is a day of oppression, of forced endeavour to reach an
impossible standard of piety and good conduct--a day of tears and
texts, of texts quoted and tears shed, incessantly, from morning unto
evening prayers. After morning prayers (read by Papa), breakfast. The
bread-and-butter of which, for the children, this meal consists, must
be eaten (slowly) in a silence by them unbroken except with prompt
answers to such scriptural questions as their parents (who have ham-
and-eggs) may, now and again, address to them. After breakfast, the
Catechism (heard by Mamma). After the Catechism, a hymn to be learnt.
After the repetition of this hymn, arithmetic, caligraphy, the use of
the globes. At noon, a decorous walk with Papa, who for their benefit
discourses on the General Depravity of Mankind in all Countries after
the Fall, occasionally pausing by the way to point for them some moral
of Nature. After a silent dinner, the little girls sew, under the
supervision of Mamma, or of the grown-up sister, or of both these
authorities, till the hour in which (if they have sewn well) they reap
permission to play (quietly) with their doll. A silent supper, after
which they work samplers. Another hymn to be learnt and repeated.
Evening prayers. Bedtime: `Good-night, dear Papa; good-night, dear
Mamma.'

Such, depend on it, is the Thompsons' curriculum. What a painful
sequence of pictures a genre-painter might have made of it! Let us be
thankful that we see the Thompsons only in this brief interlude of
their life, tearless and unpinafored, in this hour of strange
excitement, glorying in that Sunday-best which on Sundays is to them
but a symbol of intenser gloom.

But their very joy is in itself tragic. It reveals to us, in a flash,
the tragedy of their whole existence. That so much joy should result
from mere suspension of the usual re'gime, the sight of Lady Noble,
the anticipation of a nectarine! For us there is no comfort in the
knowledge that their present degree of joy is proportionate to their
usual degree of gloom, that for them the Law of Compensation drops
into the scale of these few moments an exact counter-weight of joy to
the misery accumulated in the scale of all their other moments. We,
who do not live their life, who regard Lady Noble as a mere Hecuba,
and who would accept one of her nectarines only in sheer politeness,
cannot rejoice with them that do rejoice thus, can but pity them for
all that has led up to their joy. We may reflect that the harsh system
on which they are reared will enable them to enjoy life with infinite
gusto when they are grown up, and that it is, therefore, a better
system than the indulgent modern one. We may reflect, further, that it
produces a finer type of man or woman, less selfish, better-mannered,
more capable and useful. The pretty grown-up daughter here, leading
her little sister by the hand, so gracious and modest in her mien, so
sunny and affectionate, so obviously wholesome and high-principled--is
she not a walking testimonial to the system? Yet to us the system is
not the less repulsive in itself. Its results may be what you please,
but its practice were impossible. We are too tender, too sentimental.
We have not the nerve to do our duty to children, nor can we bear to
think of any one else doing it. To children we can do nothing but
`spoil' them, nothing but bless their hearts and coddle their souls,
taking no thought for their future welfare. And we are justified,
maybe, in our flight to this opposite extreme. Nobody can read one
line ahead in the book of fate. No child is guaranteed to become an
adult. Any child may die to-morrow. How much greater for us the sting
of its death if its life shall not have been made as pleasant as
possible! What if its short life shall have been made as unpleasant as
possible? Conceive the remorse of Mrs. Thompson here if one of her
children were to die untimely--if one of them were stricken down now,
before her eyes, by this surfeit of too sudden joy!

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