2. Not getting out of it
Infinite and interminable rivers of eloquence have run, singing and murmuring on this inexhaustible theme. It is probable that all has been said or sung on it that can be sung or said. Yet one is bound to contribute one’s tributary, one’s little stream of eloquence, to the flood which has flowed down the ages in praise of this great joy. The point is, once in the bed of pleasure, why get out of it? Humanity sees this point clearly every morning, yet, nearly every morning, obfuscates it, deserts the sheltering couch (where so much of the business of life might be transacted if we so chose, and at so much less cost of labour and distraction), and steps into the cold embattled world without.
How long wilt thou sleep, O sluggard? when wilt thou arise out of thy sleep? Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep. … Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways and be wise.…
Yes, but the ant’s bed (even if the female ant does leave it as early in the morning as is here implied), is but a poor miserable resting-place compared with ours; the phrase “to seek repose on an ant-bed” has been used as a synonym of fantastic mischoice. We must not be surprised if ants rise betimes, instead of replying, as we do, to those who rouse them, “You have waked me too soon, I must slumber again.” Do not praise the ant’s ready exsuscitation, but pity rather that entomological barrenness of invention which has never furnished this hard-worked insect with a really comfortable bed. Not for the ant the drowsy exit from delicious dreams to a world of soft down, box springs, and sheets that gentlier lie than tired eyelids upon tired eyes. Not for her (or him) the lively cup that disperses the somniatory clouds from the brain, the clean newspaper hot from the press, discreetly waiting to unfold its strange matutinal tale, the pile of letters, each throbbing with its little human message, each shut behind its enveloping protecting veil, which need not be torn asunder until, or unless, we choose—not these for the ant, waking on her stinging heap to another busy, bustling, onerous, formicarian day. Unhappy insect, motion-obsessed, for ever dragging, fetching, carrying, from one site to another, objects which are very well where they are, like those porters in Paris stations who can let nothing lie … such labours she can scarcely begin too late in the day. Consider the ant’s ways and be wise indeed, for her labour is like unto ours; we too are for ever dragging, fetching, carrying, changing, objects which are very well as they are … such labours we too can scarcely begin too late in the day. The advantage we have over the ant is that we know it; we have reason, she only instinct.
Lie back, then, among pillows and, gently yet firmly encouched, await the onslaught of the bellicose day, whose buffets jar less rudely those who take them lying down. Yield to the storm; venture not out into it, and it will pass.
Thou shalt have thy Caudles
before thou dost arise:
For churlishnesse breeds sicknesse
and danger therin lies.
Thus spoke a better lover than all those who have shouted to wake their ladies at dawn, calling them slug-a-beds, pigs in straw, bidding them rise and dress and come a-maying, asking them why should they sleep when they have slept enough (what a question!), and, worst of all, telling them that their breakfast stays until they are up—water-gruel, sugar-sops, brown ale, and toast. A kind lover or husband would bring all these to the bedroom; an intelligent one would be consuming them there himself. After this meal (unless quite incapacitated by its various ingredients), you may lie and reflect on all the occupations and works which man has pursued in bed; how Milton therein composed much of Paradise Lost; how Dido and her court feasted Æneas and his warriors, and after supper listened to his mournful travelogue, all reclining on their couches; how emperors and dictators have lain on beds while damsels danced before them and made music; how Sir John Suckling practised and perfected in bed that card-playing by which he lived; how Hobbes did mathematics, drawing lines on his thigh and on the sheets; how generals have planned victories and ordered attacks; how the Kings of France received their ministers in bed and dispensed affairs of state; how Lady Mary Wortley Montague received poets, and Prime Ministers the news of victories; how men are born in bed, and frequently die there; how Samuel Pepys lay late with great pleasure, and Samuel Johnson lay all his life until noon or until two, purposing to rise at eight and telling young men that nobody who did not rise early would ever come to good. Indeed, so much of the world’s business has been performed in bed, that even to begin to consider it will be a morning’s work. Rise early and bed late, says a foolish old adage, but does not explain why you will be better out of bed than in. A thing too often forgotten is that, once you are out of it, you or someone else will have to make it. There was a certain man named Æneas who had kept his bed eight years, whom St. Peter bade arise, and added that he was to make his bed. Æneas arose, and, we suppose, made his bed; but, after eight years of lying in it, this daily rising and making it must have seemed very strange, and we are not told how long it lasted.
Indeed, more should be done in bed than is (even more). We spend too many of these precious clinic hours in blind stupor, tenebrizing it like polar bears in winter. Going to bed is a nocturnal pleasure; but not getting out of it is a journal one, to be enjoyed with all the innocent ardours and relish of the day. Slug then in sloth, and languish in delights, while the day breaks and shadows flee away.
But the luxury of pleasure is marred, as time creeps on, by a bitter foreknowledge born of experience. Sooner or later some one of those who are under your roof, unless you have your roof all day to yourself, will enquire if you are ill, and, if you are well, at what hour you are proposing to rise. Why, in the name of all the great bed-lovers, should I be ill because I prefer to remain in so charming a refuge as my bed? Did Milton’s daughters ask him if he was ill when he preferred to dictate from his bed? Was Dr. Johnson ill? Were the French Kings? No, I am not ill; I am merely philoclinic … that is my answer, if I can but make it to her who arrives to clean my flat.…
Believing
Yes, I believe everything; you cannot tell me anything that I cannot believe.
That the forbidden fruit of Paradise was an apple presents no difficulties to me; nor that mermaids sing when combing their hair and swans when dying, that ostriches eat keys and a whale ate Jonah, that a remora can stay a ship, and the cockatrice, who is hatched by a toad out of the egg of a cock, slay a man by a glance.
All the reputed strange habits of birds and beasts I believe, even that little birds tell tales, unicorns love virgins, dragons are the faithfullest of pets, wild horses the most inquisitive, and yet the most uninformed, of quadrupeds, who still stick at nothing to drag secrets from people, but always drag in vain.
I believe (can you?) that
Slow Boötes underneath him sees
In th’icy Isles, those Goslings hatcht of Trees;
Whose fruitfull leaves, falling into the Water,
Are turn’d (they say) to living Fowls soon after;
and that
Rotten sides of broken Ships do change
To Barnacles; O Transformation strange!
’Twas first a green Tree, then a gallant Hull,
Lately a Mushroom, now a flying Gull.
And I believe in dowsing, and that anyone can divine water anywhere, whether it is there or not.
I believe in the Athanasian Trinity, and in angels; angels in heaven, on earth, and in the midmost air; angels with flaming swords expelling our parents from Paradise and obstructing Balaam’s ass; French angels assisting the Allied armies at Mons and turning back General Von Kluck’s march on Paris; Ulster angels crowding about Derry; Thomist angels crowding on needles; weeping angels distressed at what they see; guardian or tutelary angels steering our wayward course.
I believe that most things move the underjaw when eating, the crocodile not; that sirloins were knighted by an English king; that Diogenes lived in a tub, St. Simon Stylites on a pillar, chameleons on air, salamanders in fire, mermen in the sea; that corpses
bleed when their murderer approaches; that what I read in the newspapers is true.
I can be every man’s gull, and am infinitely persuadable. For to believe greatly is to enlarge life’s oddity; to teratologize and credit strange relations, to run open-mouthed after aniles, or old wives’ tales, illustrates the world with coloured candles, whose queer and flickering flames quaver into dim hidden corners, suggesting the goblin tenebrios that lurk therein, defining little but denying nothing. The clear and garish lucence of the sceptical spirit I utterly reject: it is so dull.
And there is nothing left remarkable
Beneath the visiting moon. …
That is what it ends in.
Give me a loud lie. Give me “misse-stories, hisse stories, by the old Serpent hissed and buzzed among superstitious men”; give me “that babbling and fabling Abdias,” who can tell me Ethiopian fables, and entertain me “in a fools’ Paradise situate above the highest mountains, with such delicacies as shew that Adam’s children are still in love with the forbidden fruit.”
I promise you I will swallow all you give me, I will reject nothing, I will not strain at gnats, no, nor at camels neither. He over there, you say he is a werewolf, and prowls howling by night over Primrose Hill? I can well believe it; he has that air. That other, he is a spy for the Russian government, and that is where he gets all his money from. He instigates strikes; his pockets bulge with Russian gold. There are some Nazi spies here too; they track down and murder refugees. As for that group over there, they indulge in the wildest, the oddest debauches—you would scarcely believe if I should tell you. Yes, I can believe, but you could not. … I can even believe that traveller from Bavaria, who last week saw a beautiful young man transformed into a goat.
I should like to sit in a coffee-house; one used to hear, from all accounts, the most ridiculous tales there. Everything was largened out of all reason and likelihood, like a flea under a magnifying glass, becoming thereby worthy of credence. But coffee-houses have degenerated, they are used now for rapid meals, and there is less time for tales. I am told that they still tell fine tales in taverns, and that after a short time in a tavern, a man can believe anything. Yes, but I do not need taverns; I can believe anything on tomato-juice.
It is good to believe so much. The only drawback is that I never have that fine truculent moment when I say to my informant, “You lie.”
Bird in the Box
He Lives in elegant retirement in a house of dark tortoise-shell, behind an oval china door on which is painted a blue lake, a blue and pink sky, three transparent pink mountains, a rocky shore, three red-roofed houses, three slim bending trees, and two sailing-boats. A small lake paradise, you think, and wonder what it does there, so sweetly, gaily set in shining gold-flecked dark-umber shell. Then you lightly touch a spring, and lo, a miracle. The door of lake and mountains springs back, opening wide, revealing its inner side, on which winds a broad reach of blue water (lake or river?) with more pink mountains, more small red roofed houses on the shore. This tiny china land and waterscape springs up from over a golden floor, a broidered mesh of woven flowers and leaves, like one of those enflowered golden meads in Paradise where, it is said, the blessed saints walk in bliss; and simultaneously there rises from this shining bed a bird. You will not credit this most extravagant sight, and I myself, as Herodotus was wont to say, am slow to believe it, but it is, nevertheless, the truth. An iridescent bird, a bird of shining blue and green, peacock-hued, tiny, he springs up, he flaps blue wings, he opens a small beak, he sings, turning this way and that, like a prima donna, against the oval background of pink mountains and blue lake. A stream, a fountain, of sweet pure lovely shrillness cascades into the air, unearthly, celestial, like the songs of angels which the blessed saints, walking on the golden floor, doubtless hear. This (approximately) is the tune that he sings1:
And, having sung it, folds his wings and retires, lying suddenly, swiftly down on his side on the golden meadow, which opens to receive his small form, and the china door snaps shut on gold-broidered floor and vanished bird. The sweet echo of that piping cadence still lilts upon the silent air; I hold in my hand a mute shell box, dark umber, flecked with gold, inset with an oval door, the outside of a closed door, whereon blue lake and transparent pink mountains and slim trees delicately smile, lying firmly, reticently, over the strange secret within, over music fallen dumb and a blue bird sunk asleep beneath a flowery golden floor.
A bird of pleasure indeed. Like Walton’s nightingale, he breathes such sweet music out of his little instrumental throat, that it might make mankind to think miracles are not ceased. He that at midnight (when the very labourer sleeps securely) should hear (as I have very often) the clear airs, the sweet descant, the natural rising and falling, the doubling and redoubling of his voice, might well be lifted above earth, and say, Lord, what music hast thou provided for the Saints in Heaven, when thou affordest men such music on earth! And this makes me (as it made Walton) the less to wonder at the many aviaries in Italy.
So much for the bird of pleasure, of which very much more might be said. In brief, how infinitely am I taken with this agreeable cheat! Like the phoenix, like the sun, he sinks into his golden bed only to rise again. Call him, and he will return, singing his carol before his opened door, turning this way and that, with flirting wings, against china lake and hills—tirra lirra sweet sweet sweet!
But will there come a day when he does not come, when, though his door springs back, his gold bed holds him still asleep and stirless beneath its starry mesh? Or a day when he cannot get back, when, his song ended, he still stands poised as for flight, lacking power to fall sideways and sink into the floor, so that the little door shuts on him and crushes him as he stands? For at times he seems weaker, more tardy in his retreat, and you may glimpse him lying half sunk in gold, with the china lakescape resting lightly on his folded blue wing. Are he and the spell that bids him come and go immortal, or will the enchantment one day end, and leave only a box of dark and shining shell, with china door closed tightly over a golden mesh and a buried, songless bird?
Come, press the spring once more; make sure that he will come. Rustle, flutter, tirra lirra sweet!
Book Auctions
It is a singular scene. Around the room sit and stand inner and outer circles of impassive men; each holds a catalogue, each a pencil. Another and still more impassive man enters, every few minutes, into the middle of the circle, holding up, for their critical, sophisticated and supercilious stare, a book. None of them, it is apparent, think much of this book; it is, in each case, to judge from their expressions, a book that ought to go pretty cheap, a defective book, a book that, if they purchase it, will stand on their shelves unsold for ever. Sometimes it is several books; a lot: all poor.
Only one man in the room admires and likes these books; he is the presiding god, raised above the rest on a dais. He thinks very well of all the books; he likes books; he is a bibliophile, a bibliolater, even a bibliomaniac. He is, in brief, a bibliopole. He too, has an impassive face, but you can tell by his voice and his utterances that he likes books. He must feel lonely, presiding over this gathering of bored bibliophobes. Yet he conceals it; he addresses them in dulcet, persuasive accents, though not infrequently his tone gently conveys admonition and reproof, a kindly but shocked, “Come, come, my dear sirs! Only five pounds for this admirable work! Come now, we all know better than that!” But he does not say it; except by the inflexions of his admirably modulated voice. Ever so slightly turning towards some unresponsive gentleman in the circle, he says, “Guineas. Five guineas bid.” After that, with other slight glances round, “Five ten. I am bid five pounds ten. Fifteen. Six Pounds. Guineas. Six ten, I am bid. …”
As he speaks, his eyes turn to and fro, from one to another, as if he watched tennis. But none but he has spoken; none but he, one would say, has moved. By what silent telepathy has he divined from them their offers of these shillings of which he makes mention? Or does he invent them? Is he hypnotising the
se hard bibliophobes with his gentle, even tones, uttering his own hopes and counsels, like the still small voice of conscience in their ears, so that when at length he pauses, (why he ever stops, is not known; since he never gets any response, it cannot be that the moment arrives when he gets less response than before) when he at last breaks off, and murmurs that the book in question has been sold to such an one, for such a price, the individual mentioned accepts his destiny, half believing that he has indeed offered this preposterous sum for a book which he dislikes and despises. That little motion he made with his catalogue; the time he sucked his pencil; scratched his chin; blew his nose; twirled his moustache; jerked his head; crossed his legs; winked his eyes; performed any one of those thousand little actions by which humankind reacts to the encompassing universe; these must have committed him to this purchase, involved him in the payment of this sum so far in excess of the value of the book, or the lot of books, which seems to have passed into his possession.
Very well. Life is like that. He must accept his portion, and sell it, if he can, at a price a little more than that which he has given, if only he can meet a fool.
Thus (I imagine) these silent book merchants cogitate, as the books are, one after another, inexplicably knocked down to them.
Alternatively, have they actually intended, by the trifling nods and becks that have escaped them, to convey to him who can read their very thoughts the little advances which have mounted to such a sum? If so, it shows once more the perils of competition. The delirious excitement of rivalry which stimulates the horse to run ahead of the horse in front of him, stirs in the blood of these hard-bitten men, egging them on to offer, in emulous rage, sums which they never in cold blood would have paid over any counter. “Ten shillings,” says (or indicates) Mr. Robinson; “fifteen,” the prompt repartee is hurled back by the flirt of Mr. Smith’s catalogue; “twenty,” Mr. Robinson, now roused, tilts his chair to convey; and “guinea,” replies Mr. Smith’s tilted hat. And so on and higher, in dumb but heated emulation, until one or other of the agonists comes to himself shaking his head as one who emerges from some strange delirious dream, and the disappointed, though calm, agonarch awards the prize to his rival.
Personal Pleasures Page 4