Personal Pleasures (18 page)

But I shall never know what I have missed. What enchanting encounters, what faces new or long unseen, or all too often met; what jests, quips, cranks, quiddities, tales! They are occurring even now, in those high, lit rooms from which I turned. I am very well where I am; I prefer to be where I am; but who was it who said, “God himself cannot give us back a lost party?”

Let me die (as Melantha would say), but this will be a good party. See how many people are flocking in at the door, gay butterflies, bright birds all silkily emplumed, or glossily black and white, with tails like tails of ravens hanging down behind. How fast they flock,

As thick and numberless

As the gay motes that people the sun beams!

What a noise already they make! Already they are gay, benign, inebriate, they drink and eat like to a harpy–Oh, Lord, walk this way–I see a couple, I'll give you their history. In that corner, close to the hock cup, poets stand grouped; tolerable poets, better poets, definitely poor poets, poeticules, poetitos, poetasters. (Poets have coined more derogatory names for other poets than any other professional men have done, is it not so? That is because they feel very strongly about poetry and about other poets.) They speak of poetry as they drink hock cup and eat olives. Spender, Barker, Day Lewis, Auden, Pudney, Isherwood, they mention these, they argue about the latest works of each; poetomachia rages. Near them is a Roman Catholic group; these do not go in for poetry but wit; they drink deep and sing
gay songs. Then there are novelists; I always think novelists rather noisy, do not you? Let us move out of earshot. There stand three publishers, telling jovial stories of the frolic Greeks. Or is it about some books they hope to publish? I cannot catch the words; all speak, none hearkens. On the sofa near me two women murmur mysteriously one to another; one looks informed, and as if she knew the secrets of every one in the room; she seems the wisest aunt telling the saddest tale. I am not near enough to hear it.

What will happen at this party? Anything may happen. A man has just come in who stands charmingly on his head at parties. Perhaps he will stand on his head to-night. I hope that he will stand on his head. That is what people should do at parties of pleasure; it gives parties of pleasure the right note. At least, so I think, though to Cleisthenes the despot of Sikyon it seemed in the highest degree unseemly that his daughter's suitor should dance on a table on his head at a banquet. This only shows how times have changed since the days of Cleisthenes; if I had a daughter, I would present her immediately to a suitor who did that, and gladly would she go to him.

Other parties of pleasure which have been held come into my mind. Agathon's party, into which Aristodemus gate-crashed, on the specious suggestion of Socrates that “to the feasts of the good the good unbidden go,” and at which they praised love and Alcibiades complained of Socrates. That was a good party; I have heard that there are such parties now, but they do not
come my way. Then I think of Trimalchio's party, where they began with dormice rolled in honey and poppy-seed, sausages, damsons, pomegranate seeds, and peahens' eggs containing each a fat becafico in spiced yolk of egg, and went on with a great dish of the signs of the Zodiac, and then really began to eat, every now and then washing their hands in wine. That was a vulgar party, a gluttonous, ill-bred Roman party; I should not like to be at that party. I would rather be at an English rout, assembly, or conversazione, nibbling dainty rout-cakes and sipping spiced wine, while the card tables are set out and the tea is brought in. Or at a party at the Royal Society's, where experiments in gravity and levity occur, bowls of goldfish are weighed before and after the goldfish are removed from them, fruits are frozen stiff, Æolian harps make music, and pyrophones their fiery moan. This is not a party such as that. Still, anything, or nearly anything, might happen at it.

There is a levity, a light and glittering quality, among the guests, as of revel routs on tiptoe for a feast. We quaff champagne, we gulp ices, we sit down with pencils and paper, we shall write a poem line by line. Some people leave the room, to return and perform for us; it is all most diverting. We eat again, we drink again; some are drunk, some sober. We all speak very loudly, but the time is past when I can hear much of what we say. It does not matter. It is a good party. Let me die but it is a good party.

So the brief night goes in babble and revel and wine.
It is bed-time, but we are still here. To go home would be so odd. They would say that one was not enjoying the party, to be leaving it so soon. One must stay, though the black bat night has flown, though no silence falls with the waking bird, no hush with the setting moon.

It is a good party, an admirable party: but can it be that parties of pleasure go on just the fraction of a second too long?

I am, on the whole, entertained by these agreeable cheats. At their best, they divert and please beyond measure; at their worst (which often occurs), they embarrass and fatigue. But to sit and watch the curtain rise on the mummers who will strut and mime for us for two hours of an evening to make us sport is an excitement never stale. They will perhaps display to us some lively tragedy: caught in a very torrent, tempest and whirlwind of passion, they will saw the air with their hands and tear a passion to tatters, to very rags. Hamlet would have had them whipped for this; but for my part, I like to see them at it; I consider that this is partly what they are put on that raised daïs to do. They are in a fiction, in a dream of passion, and so, indeed, am I. Like Sir Thomas Browne, “I can weep most seriously at a play, and receive with true passion the counterfeit grief of those known and professed impostures.” 'Tis true, they do often imitate humanity most abominably; but humanity we can see anywhere; it imitates itself; I would scarce cross the street to watch it. Yet here, set on this platform strutting above a row of lights, I will watch it for two hours (not, I think, for longer). On a stage meal I hang entranced, though I would not lift my eyes from my newspaper to see the
same meal off-stage. I will delight in a stage dog, a stage baby, a stage quarrel, though all three are ever with us in the world without, and I think nothing of any of them. I will think with admiration, how well he said that! how wittily she took it! when I hear words well and wittily spoken all about me, and scarcely pause to mark them.

But sometimes the words are good words, well and wittily, or gravely and beautifully, written, and then how my pleasure is doubled; no, trebled, for there is the pleasure of the words, the pleasure of the speaking, and the pleasure of the fitness of the two conjoined. Should I ever hear, as I never yet have heard, the right Oberon sitting on a promontory to hear a mermaid on a dolphin's back, the right Titania deploring the confusing of the seasons, the right Prospero rounding our little life with a sleep, the right Macbeth in the tomorrow and to-morrow lines, the right Cleopatra in “The crown o' the earth doth melt.… And there is nothing left remarkable beneath the visiting moon,” and in the asp speech (which I have heard said to break the heart, but not on the stage), the right Beatrice, Rosalind, and Millamant in look, voice, and wit all joined, the right Restoration sparks to body forth the Restoration comic spirit … but so one might go on for ever: should I ever hear these (as I have, once or twice, heard the right Hamlet), to be at the play would be to peer at heaven; such pleasure is more than one dare hope to purchase for the price of a plush seat. Normally, one must be content, or malcontent, with lovely
lines blurred or flattened or coarsened in the speaking, or with plain speeches well enough spoken, as they are, or so it sounds to me, in most modern plays that I see.

Well enough, anyhow, for a theatre full of people to sit absorbed, smiling, laughing, moved, throughout the spectacle they have bought. We are, I suppose, easily entertained, and it was never hard to split the ears of the groundlings; even Punch and Judy will do that in the streets. As I said, there is that in the raised platform, the set piece, the ordination of players, the purchase of seats, which confers on common speeches and actions some strange cachet of prestige.

Anyhow, for my part I am pleased with these guileless impostures, and would watch them more often had I but more time, did the seats cost less, and would the play but run straight on without those dreary intervals that now break its thread and waste our time. If playacting should ever cease among the human race, which, after so many thousand years of mumming, would seem improbable, it will be the intervals which will kill it. There is not enough time in a crowded human life to waste hours of it doing nothing in a theatre, removed from all other occupations, and unprovided with the spectacle we gave up an evening to see. Music should fill these spaces, or a puppet show, or what not, if the play must pause.

They strut and trip around us, all shapes, all sizes, all colours, all species (for even a pretty little black curlytailed pig is at times to be admired, and the infant rhinoceros has indubitable charms). We may enquire, with Montaigne, what this beauty is that so pleases, and whether it has existence outside the individual eye and taste; we know that it has not, and that this in no degree diminishes its power to ravish and entice. “The preeminence in beauty, which Plato ascribeth unto the spherical figure, the Epicureans refer the same unto the pyramidal or squat.” … All the better, since Plato and the Epicureans are thereby both pleased. I dote on that gazelle, that tall, light-stepping girl with her slant eyes, her smooth and high-held head, her broad and smiling mouth; you on that fluffy kitten, that small and dainty person, with eyes large and round, clustering curls, pink roses in her cheeks. As to that, I dote on her also, as on all pretty creatures, from the sailing golden eagle to the gilded fly, from the splendid muscled athlete to the chubby babe in bath.

We are excelled, as we know, by many living creatures, earthly, airy, and marine. Yet this awkward and lumbering human biped has also power to ravish, and that not only its fellow-humans, who may be prejudiced
in its favour, but those very creatures who, we think, so manifestly excel it. Fishes, notoriously amorous of the human race, have leaped from the water to the land if their angler be fair of face, have crowded round lovely bathers in embarrassing shoals, have carried beautiful boys across oceans. Unicorns have always loved young virgins to the point of rashness; lions, tigers and wolves have followed beautiful youths and maidens with no anthropophagous dreams, merely to dote on their faces and forms; birds have lost their heads altogether–

When he was by, the birds such pleasure took

That some would sing, some others in their bills

Would bring him mulberries, and ripe red cherries
,

He fed them with his sight, they him with berries.

While, as to dragons, they have frequently doted to distraction, forgetting their own kind in their attachment to some handsome human creature.

If our dumb friends, then, can so admire our curious form, perhaps ejaculating when they see it the thanksgiving of the Hebrew, “Blessed be the Lord, who has made his creatures in such strange diversity of shapes,” how much more should we. And do. For, if there is one thing for which we have ever admired one another, it is for our beauty. Whatever strange chance arrangement of features and colour it may be that pleases any given race, tribe, period, or personal taste, however little it may please any other race, tribe, or
person, still, there it is, triumphantly, absurdly, irrationally victorious, enchanting such beholders as are to it susceptible. Beauty, as the intoxicated but truthful Comus remarked, is nature's brag. This amazing, confounding, admirable, amiable Beauty, than which in all Nature's treasure there is nothing so majestical and sacred, nothing so divine, lovely, precious, 'tis nature's crown, gold and glory–see where it goes, tripping and pacing about the common streets, about shop floors, uttering through its curled vermilion lips genteel remarks concerning art silk camiknickers and hose, swaggering in old flannels about ancient college courts, singing, bronzed and limber, behind mules on Apennine paths, running and tumbling with hoop and ball in Kensington Gardens, speaking rich Californian to us in darkened palaces, lounging about raised platforms above footlights. Beauty can do with us what it wills; more effectual on a jury, as Phryne showed, is a prisoner's handsome appearance than any eloquence of counsel: not only was Phryne, “following” (as reporters would say) the exhibition of her person to the court, discharged without a stain on her character (or without further stains than it had previously borne), but “those intemperate young men of Greece” erected to her eternal memory, with infinite cost, a golden image.

And here our best Athenians seem owls indeed (as someone remarks somewhere about something else): for who would desire a golden image of a beautiful lady? I should not look twice at Phryne in that hard
and yellow metal. The very charm of beauty is its moving evanescence, its fleeting hue and swift-sliding shape, that turns this way and that like a leaf on the wind, like the running sea in shadow and sun. Beauty vanishes, beauty passes: living beauty fixed in metal, all chained up in alabaster, is a poor and chilly thing.

Lounge, trip, stride and run around me, then, oh lovely creatures of all sizes, ages, hues and shapes. You are a garden of bright flowers, a forest of saplings, like the young sapling shoot on Delos of which Nausicaa minded Odysseus; you are a very bestiary of such lithe and bright-eyed creatures as one may encounter leaping and slinking about jungle paths, or about ferny parks at Whipsnade, or prisoned in the small bright capitals of monkish missals. Speak not, oh beauteous idiots; move all in muted beauty like the moon; delight my eyes, and assault not my ears with your harsh or pretty jungle cries. I have no illusions about you; I know your limitations, and all I beg of you is that you will remain within them, and so continue to please.