The Goose Girl and Other Stories (32 page)

There is another notable contradiction—that somehow is quite happily resolved—in the national aptitude for engineering and the popular addiction to poetry. The foreign visitor, looking at pylons, dams, steel-works, bridges, acqueducts, roads, hydro-electric installations, and smoothly running railways, inevitably remarks, ‘What engineers they are!' But the sensitive native, bombarded by the lyrical composition of innumerable friends, encircled by poetry-readers in the cultural associations that on all sides abound, and melodiously deafened by epic dramas in every theatre, exclaims with a melancholy pride, ‘What poets we are!'

And both are right. Poetry luxuriates in the comfort that engineers have built, and the engineers continually recreate themselves for fresh tasks with lyrics written upon the streams which they have dammed. If many of the songs are sentimental, that is explained by the climate; for snow lies deeply upon Sweden for many months in the year, and because most of the population is still rural and scattered, every red-walled house is a lonely outpost—warm but precarious, a sweet and perilous achievement—against the enormous wild enmity of winter. Now the songs that are sung everywhere in the outer garrisons of the world, in lonely outposts, are sentimental songs; for cynicism and the shallow wit of irony flourish only in great crowded cities where everyone is a stranger and nobody can be trusted. Smother mankind in snow, divide house from house by a mile of woodland or undulating blanched fields, and everyone will sing sweetly, a little sadly, and with a prevailing sentiment. In such circumstances it is an achievement to survive, a triumph to be comfortable; and gratitude is proper, tears are not amiss.

It was, then, in this comfortable domestication of a long, wild, lovely land that the names of Trimander, Folander, and Torssander were so easily remembered, and confidence remained in their intrinsic virtue and persisting promise. Nor was their promise denied.

Twenty years went by, and each of them, each within a few months of the other, produced a new book. But what a change there was, in every case, between the first and second volumes!

Trimander had found a new king. As he grew older, and thought more deeply of the proud and purposeful monarchs, he became uneasy in their remembered company. Their power had been absolute, their most trivial motives had compelled fearful events, and under the canopy of their thrones triumph and catastrophe had balanced on a private whim. He no longer felt safe or comfortable with them, and their great nobles were no better, for though their power had been less, its quality was the same and its exercise had been unpredictable. So he who had gloried in it, grew afraid of the heroic past. Now in his mind it was full of inhuman harsh-spoken men in black armour, who broke each other's limbs like lobsters' claws, lived in a dark conspiracy with their fingers on the hilt of a dagger, and died stark mad with frogs and newts in the dungeon beneath a cousin's moat.—How glad he was, after a long day's reading, to go down to dinner with the civilised descendants of these grim Counts! In a world that does not all grow better, he often told himself, the nobility is vastly improved. Now that they have lost their power, their manners are delightful.

So Trimander, by a natural process of sympathy, found his thoughts
dwelling more and more fondly upon that king of Sweden who himself was frightened of his nobles, and to ensure a little honest friendly company on the throne married a Corporal's daughter. Trimander was living with an aristocratic patron in the south of Sweden when finally he transferred his allegiance to Eric the Fourteenth, and he made his decision immediately after a visit to the ancient castle of Kalmar.

With sombre dignity and walls of a prodigious thickness the castle stands by the sea-shore. It was near Christmas when Trimander went there, and the shallows of the sea were frozen, snow lay deep on the fields, and black-purple clouds to the east threatened a new storm. On that dark and melancholy day two rooms only in the castle were so intrinsically cheerful as to expel from his mind the shadows of outer gloom, and make him forget how cold were his hands and feet and nose. One was called the King's Room, the other the Queen's. Both were panelled with a light wood inlaid, so as to make charming pictures or patterns, with strips, cantles, and divers shapes of other wood stained in gentle colours. In the King's Room, so confected, were two rural landscapes, and in the Queen's some ingenious cubist designs.

Trimander was delighted, and quite enraptured when the Custodian of the castle told him that the pictures were certainly contemporary with King Eric, and more than possibly—even probably—his own work. But the King had lived in the middle of the sixteenth century, said Trimander, and landscape painting was unknown in northern Europe till very much later than that, while cubist theories of art had had to wait for Picasso.—He was before his time, he was a genius, said the Custodian calmly.

Then, seeing how warm was Trimander's appreciation of the Monarch's work, he pressed with his hands upon one of the inlaid panels, and opened a little door. Behind it—oh, impossible!

He was civilised, said Trimander, his voice trembling with emotion. He in himself was both parts of our dear country. He was engineer and artist too.

He was a great man, the Custodian agreed.

Trimander stepped into the little room disclosed by the opening of the secret door, and looked reverently at the water-closet which the King had designed for his comfort.

They called him mad, he said, his voice hollow with alternate scorn and reverence and the echo from the closet. Mad indeed! He alone, in that barbarous age, saw the possibility of beauty and convenience living together to the benefit of both. Mad, my God! It was
they
were mad, and he alone was sane.

Trimander's second book, therefore, was all in praise of the most gifted but unfortunate of kings, poor Eric the Fourteenth. It included a poem called
The Nobles,
in which he laid bare the Monarch's most reasonable fear of men in armour; and the second, entitled
Karin's Wooing,
was an idyllic conversation, an eclogue swift and dainty as anything Theocritus wrote, about the wedding night of King Eric and the Corporal's daughter. The third of the poems, which celebrated the more fruitful Swedish marriage of beauty and convenience, was
The King's Room.
The book, with seventy-eight pages between its covers, was rather smaller than his first, but its success was much larger. The critics praised it, the public bought it.

Folander, fat Folander, published his second volume two months later, and a few of the critics were scornful, while some, frankly puzzled, honestly withheld their opinion. But everybody else bought, borrowed, or stole a copy as quickly as possible, for Folander's lyrical pleasure in life had with the years matured, and in enchanting verses he now celebrated certain forms of still life. He had written a poem called
My Birthday Dinner.

The development of his mind was clear and logical to all his ordinary readers; only the more academic critics were angered by it, or doubtful of its propriety.—The turning edge of a young leaf, he had said in his youth, is beautiful. The flight of a bird in the pale bright air of spring, and the muscular balance of a trout in a quick green stream, are symptoms of the ecstasy that attended Creation, and that we have lost or forgotten as the heresy fastened upon the world that life was labour.—But youth's melancholy sweet perception had now become, with no loss of verbal dexterity or mellifluous phrase, the sapience of middle age, and instead of his exquisite appreciation of Nature in her May, there was a full-grown delight in
nature morte.

Look at the curled flesh of a fat eel upon my plate, he said, and drink from my glass this pale yet burly distillate of the Ostrogothic corn! Here is Nature in her ripeness, and we who loved Nature with our eyes and hands, now love her also upon the tongue and in the warm caverns of our body!

On the subject of herring he was truly profound, and touched deeper notes than any he had struck in his early poems. He was most nobly moved by smoked salmon, and in the verses in which he slipped a delicate sharp knife into the fat breast of a well-roasted blackcock, and saw the tenderness within, his voice cried like Queen Dido when Aeneas sailed away, for at that moment he beheld the transience of life that makes it so dear and dreadful. But fortunately in his glass there was a Burgundy of the most generous heart and soft perfection,
and the following stanzas became more cheerful. He taught many too thoughtful connoisseurs that reverence of a great wine need not inspire timidity.

For sheer brilliance, however, there was nothing to equal his pages that described the smörgåsbord. Here was such a felicity of word and phrase, of rhyme and arrangement, that his vision of the elegant and richly varied table—the bright armoury of fishes, the patina of reindeer meat—that his stanzas reminded many of his more widely travelled readers of the glittering mosaics of St Mark's in Venice. Nature-lovers, said one of his later and more enthusiastic critics, have hitherto pursued their study and chanted her praise in woods and meadows. But now, taught by Folander to know better, they come to the dining-room.

Hard upon the heels of
My Birthday Dinner
came Torssander's volume. He, like the others, had weathered a crisis. He had discovered that the human estate was more closely limited than at first he had supposed. He had learnt that minor situations have a habit of recurring, that love merely goes in and out like the tide, that to explain man too deeply is to explain him away—and he had come to the conclusion that if he should continue to be witty at man's expense, he would either become repetitious and a bore, or nihilistic and a nuisance. It is clearly better, he said to himself, to do nothing from the beginning than to work so laboriously that you come to nothing in the end; and in this belief he had for some years led a very easy life indeed.

He played chess with various friends some five or six evenings a week, and presently, as the fascination of the game more strongly held him, he took to playing in the afternoons as well. Then he must play in the morning too, but now he encountered difficulty, for not many of his friends lived so idly as he, and even the idlest, he found, had no inclination to play chess after breakfast. So Torssander learnt to play against himself.

This involved a mental discipline of the most stringent sort, and required unlimited leisure. He found that he could play this internecine game most conveniently by setting the board upon the floor and lying prone—first on the one side, then on the other—to study the position and make his moves. He was cared for, at this time, by a devoted housekeeper, a widow with a son of eight or nine years old, and Torssander trained the boy to bring him in, silently and without comment, a pint of beer every forty minutes. So reinforced, his games were often arduous and long, and he had better opportunity than most players to muse upon the accidents of play and the delicate relation
of the pieces. He perceived in time that the application of a set of unbreakable rules to pieces of various but predetermined functions—some straightforward and humble, some strong and capricious—produced many situations which, under the finest analysis, were
witty
expressions of the Whites' perplexity or the Reds' advantage. Here were contests that broke no bones, that deployed intelligence without emotion, that came to a decent conclusion and could be started again, and proved—as he had always suspected—that the art of action, perhaps of life in its entirety if it were not so obscured by gross humours, was
wit.
And so his second volume was entitled
A Game of Chess.

The public, to begin with, was dubious, but the critics were delighted. Swedish literary critics, having been soundly educated in twelve years' residence at Uppsala or Lund, are widely conversant with the literature of all Europe, know English, Russian, French, German, and Italian as well as their own, and so they had no difficulty in perceiving that Torssander's technical model had been Pope's
Rape of the Lock.
To state this, with authority, gave them their initial pleasure, and most of them by judicious example found Torssander's skill in the nicely engineered couplet no whit inferior to his example. But their second and greater joy came from their analysis and tracking-down of Torssander's metaphysics. Torssander's
Game of Chess
had been played against himself, and so exhibited the eternal dualism of man.

Here, then, was a fine quarry for the critics. Some, it is true, the more popular and superficial, perceived in this battle of the divided self no more than a struggle between Conservative and Modern, and a few Freudians went far astray with a laborious explication of the Ego and the Id. Half a dozen elderly gentlemen were so bold as to see in its microcosm the struggle between God and Mammon, and eighteen or twenty worthy but somewhat conventional reviewers hailed the poem as the latest demonstration of the never-ending battle between the Classical and the Romantic schools of thought. To their enduring fame, however, the two senior critics in Sweden concurred in a masterly interpretation of it as an amicable duel between the Confucian attitude to life and the antithetical laxity of Lao-Tze. One of these erudite gentlemen, moreover, proved to the satisfaction of his readers that Sweden itself exhibited the Celestial antithesis: Our engineers, he said, are the modern Confucians, our poets the Taoist followers of Lao-Tze—and Torssander's poem is therefore a work of analytical but devoted patriotism.

This huge dispute, sprawling over hundreds of columns in the daily
papers, made
A Game of Chess
not merely a poem, but news; and the general populace, though still perplexed, bought it by the thousand.

Now Trimander, Folander, and Torssander became national figures indeed, and for a year or so lived such a public life as only politicians and actresses are normally accustomed to. They lunched in public, they dined in public, and in the daily papers the public read with whom at night they lodged. For several months Trimander and Folander and Torssander enjoyed their fame, for it brought them together more often than the preceding years had done, and in despite of their altered philosophies they found in each other's company a source of gaiety like that of their youth at Lund, and their quips and epigrams, their puns and profundities, were widely quoted and swiftly spread from Trälleborg in the South to Haparanda in the arctic North. But fame brought satiety more quickly than leisure, and within eighteen months of the publication of their second volumes each had retired to the quietness of his earlier residence: Trimander to a nobleman's castle in Scania, Folander to his wife's property in Dalecarlia, and Torssander to his lodging near Stockholm.