Part 5

Our fathers had friction of another kind: hardship at home, winters and nights that were dark with a darkness we have abolished; springs that brought an infinite releasing, illumination, and recolouring. None of us has seen the sight, or breathed the air, or heard those emancipated voices. The bloom, the birds, the ifted sky! Bright nights and glowing houses have surely robbed us of that variety, and all these untimely fruits and flowers have suppressed even the small privations of a winter in disguise.

In those days Englishmen had to breast the times as they were. They had the privilege of their latitude--vigorous and rigorous seasons. They had a year full of change--their time was stretched whether with impatience or with patience, with conflict or with felicity. Their salt meats were not the worst of it; there was the siege of darkness, the captivity of cold, the threat of storm, and the labour to close with the closing enemy, to break ways and save animals alive, and keep the laws in force in the street in the long and secret nights. From such a season of winter at home, winter well known, men broke free to hail their daffodils. They found them, short, strong, and shivering, in the still open and undefended woods. In the springs before Chaucer, and earlier than the day of the first spring lyric, in the same places grew the keen wild flowers as now; but they assuredly were marked with another welcome; they made memories; this year's wild harvest was not confused with that of last year, or of half-a-score of years gone by. Distance of vital time set the springs far apart, and made the daffodils strangers.

They were greeted with the courtesy due to strangers, so fresh must have been the senses of the villager, and of the citizen of the village town. Suburbs divide a city from the fields as walls did never. He of old went from a little town, close and serried as a new box of toys, with one step into the unsmirched country, carrying an unsated heart. Refreshed with the animating compulsion of changeful life were man and woman, and much like their child in a constant capacity for unique experiences, unique days, years that are separate, known, and distinguishable, and not only separate but long.

Indeed, some of us who travel hardly know how to remedy our fugitive, resembling, hastening, and collapsing seasons, even by means of this sovereign remedy of travel. It is to be feared that a modern journey is not always to us so bracing a manner of living as was the untravelled journey of hard days at home to the ancient islander. To journey as he did, keeping his feet, with a moving heart against the moving seasons, to resist, to withstand, widened the hours; but his posterity are taking all means to narrow their own, even on the railway. To go the same way every year, for instance, is to lose, when a few such years are gone, nearly all the gain to life. To take no heed at all of the way, but merely to be by any means at the end of the travelling, to sleep or go by night, and to calculate Europe by hours, half-hours, junctions, and dining-cars, is but to close up the time as though you closed a telescope. A long railway journey and a long motor journey may be taken with the flight of time as well as against it, and the habit of summaries can use these too to its own end. Precipitate, unresisting, are the day in the train and the heedless night. We love to reproach ourselves with living at too great a speed, having, perhaps, no sense of the second meaning of the phrase. Medicine may, perhaps, fulfil her promise of giving us a few more years, but habit derides her by making each year a scanty gift.

Much, too, of the spirit of time is lost to us because we will not let the sun rule the day. He would see to it that our hours were various; but we have preferred to his various face the plain face of a clock, and the lights without vicissitudes of our nights without seasons.

ADDRESSES

Not free from some ignominious attendance upon the opinion of the world is he who too consciously withdraws his affairs from its judgements. He is indebted to "the public." He is at least indebted to it for the fact that there is, yonder, without, a public. Lacking this excluded multitude his fastidiousness would have no subject, and his singularity no contrast. He would, in his grosser moods, have nothing to refuse, and nothing, in his finer, to ignore.

He, at any rate, is one, and the rest are numerous. They minister to him popular errors. But if they are nothing else in regard to himself, they are many. If he must have distinction, it is there on easy terms--he is one.

Well for him if he does not contract the heavier debt shouldered by the man who owes to the unknown, un-named, and uncounted his pleasure in their conjectured or implicit envy; who conceives the jealousy they may have covertly to endure, enjoys it, and thus silently begins and ends within his own morosity the story of his base advantage.

Vanity has indignity as its underside. And how shall even the pleasure in beauty be altogether without it? For since beauty, like other human things, is comparative, how shall the praise, or the admiration, thereof be free from (at least) some reference to the unbeautiful? Or from some allusion to the less beautiful? Yet this, if inevitable, is little; it may be negligible. The triumph of beauty is all but innocent. It is where no beauty is in question that lurks the unconfessed appeal to envy. That appeal is not an appeal to admiration--it lacks what is the genial part of egoism. For who, except perhaps a recent writer of articles on society in America, really admires a man for living in the approved part of Boston?

The vanity of addresses is as frequent with us as on the western side of the Atlantic. It is a vanity without that single apology for vanity--gaiety of heart. The first things that are, in London, sacrificed to it are the beautiful day and the facing of the sky. There are some amongst us whose wives have constrained them to dwell underground for love of an address. Modern and foolish is that contempt for daylight. To the simple, day is beautiful; and "beautiful as day" a happy proverb.

Over all colour, flesh, aspect, surface, manifestation of vitality, dwells one certain dominance. And if One, vigilant for the dues of His vicegerent, should ask us whose is the image and superscription? We reply, The Sun's.

The London air shortens and clips those beams, and yet leaves daylight the finest thing we know. Beauty of artificial lights is in our streets at night, but their chief beauty is when, just before night, they adorn the day. The late daylight honours them when it so easily and sweetly subdues and overcomes them, giving to the electric lamp, to the taper, to the hearth fire, and to the spark, a loveliness not their own.

With the unpublished desire to be envied, whereto here and there amongst us is sacrificed the sky, abides the desire for an object of unconfessed contempt. Both are contrary to that more authentic, that essential solitariness wherein a few men have the grace to live, and wherein all men are compelled to die. Both are unpublished even now, even in our days, when it costs men so little to manifest the effrontery of their opinions.

The difference between our worldliness and the New-worldliness is chiefly that here we are apt to remove, by a little space, the distinction brought about by riches, to put it back, to interpose, between it and our actual life, a generation or two, an education or two. Obviously, it was riches that made the class differences, if not now, then a little time ago. Therefore the New England citizen should not be reproved by us for anything except his too great candour. A social guide-book to some city of the Republic is in my hands. I note how the very names of streets take a sound of veneration or of cheerful derision from the writer's pen. It is evident that the names are almost enough. They have an expression. He is like a naif teller of humorous anecdotes, who cannot keep his own smiles in order till he have done.

This social writer has scorn, as an author should, and he wreaks it upon parishes. He turns me a phrase with the northern end of a town and makes an epigram of the southern. He caps a sarcasm with an address.

In truth, we too might write social guide-books to the same effect, had we the same simplicity. It is to be thought that we too hold an address, be it a good one, so closely that if Fortune should see fit to snatch it from us, she must needs do so with violence. Such unseemly violence, in this as in other transactions, is ours in the clinging and not hers in the taking. For equal is the force of Fortune, and steady is her grasp, whether she despoil the great of their noble things or strip the mean of things ignoble, whether she take from the clutching or the yielding hand.

Strange are the little traps laid by the Londoner so as to capture an address by the hem if he may. You would think a good address to be of all blessings the most stationary, and one to be either gained or missed, and no two ways about it. But not so. You shall see it waylaid at the angles of squares, with no slight exercise of skill, delayed, entreated, detained, entangled, intricately caught, persuaded to round a corner, prolonged beyond all probability, pursued.

One address there will in the future be for us, and few will visit there. It will bear the number of a narrow house. May it avow its poverty and be poor; for the obscure inhabitant, in frigid humility, shall have no thought nor no eye askance upon the multitude.

THE AUDIENCE

The long laugh that sometimes keeps the business of the stage waiting is only a sign of the exchange of parts that in the theatre every night takes place. The audience are the players. Their audience on the stage are bound to watch them, to understand them, to anticipate them, and to divine them. But once known and their character established in relation to a particular play, the audience--what is called the audience--need give no further trouble. They themselves cannot alter; they are fixed and compelled by the tremendous force of averages. The most inexorable of laws, and the most irresistible of necessities are upon them; they cannot do otherwise; they are out of the reach of accidents; they are made fast in their own mediocrity. They are a thousand London people; and no genius, or no imbecility, amongst them has any effect upon that secure sovereignty of a number.

The long laugh generally means that the house--by its unalterable majority--has laughed at one joke three times. The stage waits upon the audience, and the audience rehearses its collective and inevitable laugh. It performs. It communicates itself, and art is a communication. A small and chosen party is made up, behind the footlights, to see a thousand people, given helpless into the hands of destiny and subject to averages, so express themselves.

The audience's audience (the people on the stage) are persuaded into applauding the laugh too long and too often. The author is, of course, one of them, and he applauds by making too many such translations. They are perhaps worth making, and even worth renewing in acknowledgement of a smile; but it is surely to encourage the house unduly to make them so important. The actors applaud their audience by repeating--and not once or only twice--a piece of comic business. Does the Average laugh so well as indeed to deserve all this?

The Average does little more than laugh. It knows that its own truest talents are indubitably comic. We have no real tragic audiences. This is no expression of regret over legitimate audiences, or audiences of the old school, or any audiences of that kind, whose day may or may not have had a date. It is a mere statement of the fact that audiences have lost, or never had, a distinguishing perception of emotion, whereas they have every kind of perception of humour, distinguishing and general. Their laugh never fails. If their friends behind would really care to improve them, it might be done by exacting from them a little more temperance in their sense of comedy. We shall never have a really good school of audience without the exercise of some such severity.

For obviously when we call an average unchangeable, we mean that it is unchangeable for its time merely. There might be a slow upraising of the level. It would still be a level, and there would still be a compelling law upon one thousand that it should do the same thing as another thousand; but that same thing might become somewhat more intelligent.

When a fine actor does a fine thing, have we such a school of audience as to merit this admirable supply to their demands?--this applause of their understanding? Is there not in the whole excellent piece of work, something all too independent of their part in the theatre?

If Caligula wished that mankind had but one neck for his knife, and Byron that all womankind had but one mouth for his kiss, so the audience has conceived that all arts should have but one mystery for its blundering, and thus thinks itself interested in acting when it does but admire the actor as in a drawing.

The time may come when a national school of dramatic audience shall not accept artifices that could not convince the fool amongst them; when one brilliant moment of simplicity on the one side of the footlights shall meet a brilliant simplicity on the other. Which troupe, which side, to begin?