Simia quam similis, turpissima bestia, nobis!
as for inward and vital parts, it is the Hog. Truly, when I consider man all naked (yea, be it in that sex, which seemeth to have and challenge the greatest share of eye-pleasing beauty) and view his defects and manifold imperfections, I find we have had much more reason to hide and cover our nakedness than any creature else. We may be excused for borrowing those which nature had there-in favoured more than us, with their beauties to adorn us, and under their spoils of wool, of hair, of feathers and of silk, to shroud us.”
To shroud us … melancholy word. Remember,
Soon the grave must be your home,
And your only suit, a shroud.
Consider,
Green as the bay tree, ever green,
With its new foliage on,
The gay, the thoughtless, have I seen,
I pass’d—and they were gone.
Read, ye that run, the awful truth,
With which I charge my page;
A worm is in the bud of youth,
And at the root of age.
Having thus remembered and thus considered, I will go out to my party in my new dress, gratulating myself that at least, if no handsomer than the ape, the hog, and the hippopotamus, and rather less so than the ant-eater, I have more wit than they, for I can, if not make, anyhow cause to be made, and assume, a flattering garment.
Cows
Seen close, you would appear to have every fault but one. You are preposterously bovine, you are cornigerous ruminants, you chew cud and let it dribble from your moving jaws, you stand in ruminating herds by stiles and gates, trampling the grass until it seems like the field of campaign at Passchendaal, fit for ducks, not men, to tread; you listlessly emit that pale, unencouraging fluid which we offer to sick persons and young children and cats, and from which strong men and women turn in disgust; you pursue, with lowered horns, my dog. You are not beautiful; you are far from clean; and the melancholy cries with which you rend the evening skies are like steamers that take the ocean, or sirens in a fog.
What then is this strange pleasure that I take in your uncouth forms? What makes, as I approach you across the next field, my heart leap up as who beholds a rainbow in the sky? Analysing it, I discern it to be a pleasure of sex. I have said that you have one virtue; my pleasure lies in perceiving it, in recognising that, whatever you may have looked like from far, you are but cows after all.
But, alas, some of you are mothers: little ones run at your sides; and it is of mothers alone among she-creatures that there is any truth in the otherwise preposterously mendacious statement that the female of the species is far deadlier than the male.
Departure of Visitors
An exquisite peace obtains: a drowsy, golden peace, flowing honey-sweet over my dwelling, soaking it, dripping like music from the walls, strowing the floors like trodden herbs. A peace for gods; a divine emptiness.
Fair Quiet, have I found thee here,
And Innocence, thy Sister dear!
Mistaken long, I sought you then
In busy Companies of Men. …
Society is all but rude
To this delicious Solitude.
The easy chair spreads wide arms of welcome; the sofa stretches, guest-free; the books gleam, brown and golden, buff and blue and maroon, from their shelves; they may strew the floor, the chairs, the couch, once more, lying ready to the hand. “I am afraid the room is rather littered. …” The echo of the foolish words lingers on the air, is brushed away, dies forgotten, the air closes behind it. A heavy volume is heaved from its shelf on to the sofa. Silence drops like falling blossoms over the recovered kingdom from which pretenders have taken their leave.
What to do with all this luscious peace? It is a gift, a miracle, a golden jewel, a fragment of some gracious heavenly order, dropped to earth like some incredible strayed star. One’s life to oneself again. Dear visitors, what largesse have you given, not only in departing, but in coming, that we might learn to prize your absence, wallow the more exquisitely in the leisure of your not-being.
To-night we shall sleep deep. We need no more hope that you “have everything you want”; we know that you have, for you are safely home, and can get it from your kitchen if you haven’t. We send you blessing and God speed, and sink into our idle peace as into floods of down.
But you have unfortunately left behind you, besides peace, a fountain pen, a toothbrush, and a bottle of eye lotion with eye bath.
Disbelieving
I believe very little: you will have to tell me something excessively credible before I believe it. Do not come to me with your ghosts, crystals, palmistries, cards, creeds, miracles, scandals, rumours, gossips, and all the little news of the town; your new moons, black cats, and piebald horses I cannot away with. Is there an earthquake in the Barbadoes, an eruption in Sicily, a war in Abyssinia, a revolution in Spain? It is possible: but I do not see them, and have heard such tales before.
I have a friend who cannot believe in atrocities. All her life she has heard of atrocities, and earnestly sought them when travelling abroad (for it is abroad that atrocities occur), but she has been always disappointed, for she has never found one. She was once told (says she) of a Balkan atrocity exhibit, a woman of whom it was reported that Bulgarian atrocities seen and suffered by her had made her mad, so that she was kept in an asylum, a permanent exhibit. My friend, thinking, “Here is a veritable atrocity at last,” made a pilgrimage to the asylum and asked to see the woman, but found her quite sane, only annoyed by her confinement. So now, when she hears of atrocities, she always thinks of this woman whom atrocity had not driven mad, and rejects them sadly. If you offer her past atrocities, such as those of Nero and Caligula, she rejects them too, feeling that Suetonius was unreliable. I do not go so far as this friend of mine; the atrociousness of human nature has not, I must conclude, been always without its vent. For my part, I decimate atrocities, which leaves me more than enough.
But, concerning most relations made to me, I consider, as Sir Thomas Browne held of the digesting of iron by the ostrich or sparrow-camel, that the negative seems most reasonably entertained. Or anyhow, whether reasonably or not, the most easily. Tell me what you will of earth or heaven; with Montaigne, I feel that we should say most times, there is no such matter.
It makes me feel agreeably aloof, not to be imposed on by all those strident, thundering events of which I hear, not to be taken in by rumour-mongers, magicians, gossips, quacks, moon’s men, old wives’ tales, “puerile hallucinations and anile delirations,” and, in fact, the whole rumour of the humming world.
But sometimes a thought troubles me, and I ask myself, should I, many centuries back, have been numbered with those who denied the Antipodes, and the rotundity of earth? Of these Bishop Wilkins complained, mentioning among them Chrysostom, Austin, Lactantius, the Venerable Bede, Lucretius, Procopius, and the voluminous Abulensis, together with many Fathers, and with Herodotus, who wrote, “I cannot choose but laugh, to see so many men venture to describe the earth’s compass, relating those things that are without all sense, as that the sea flows about the world, and that the Earth itself is round as an orb.” While Lactantius exclaims, “What are they that think there are Antipodes, such as walk with their feet against ours? Is there anyone so foolish as to believe that there are men whose heels are higher than their heads, that the plants and trees grow downward? What shall we think, that men do cling like worms, or hang by their claws as cats?” with much other pleasantry such as the ignorant and unbelieving use.
I must beware, then, of too wide and too deep an incredulity, and remember that there are many things yet hid from us, and that really everything is extremely peculiar.
Doves in the Chimney
The voice of the turtle is heard in my chimney. It is the prettiest soft low crooning in the world, like the soughing of wind in a pine wood, or the low moan of seas imprisoned between rocks. When first it stole into my room, as I sat reading there, I thought I had
been Steele’s pastoral lady friend, Mrs. Cornelia Lizard, “whose Head was so far turned … that she kept a Pair of Turtles cooing in her Chamber, and had a tame Lamb running after her up and down the House. I used all gentle Methods to bring her to her self. …”
But no: I am more fortunate that Mrs. Cornelia, not only in that I am lambless, but in that my pair of turtles, (if pair they are, and not a mourning widow turtling it after her mate) have not taken up their abode in my chamber, but have, it seems, made them a nest in my chimney. Yes, my chimney is a pigeon-cote, a culver-house, and in it the kind turtles sit and coo, and answer to each other’s moan. I like to think that there are two turtles, that my turtle is not bereaved. And yet, to have so chaste, so musically mourning a widow at hand, would also be charming. “As a turtledove did I chatter, and as a dove did I mourn”; melancholy ordinance of nature, that this otherwise oblivious bird, so unlike the elephant that she forgets practically everything immediately, including her young the moment they have been taken from the nest, and the peckings and unkindnesses of her husband, and all wrongs done her, should remember and mourn her mate until death. Even the widowed cock mourns, winging him to some withered bough, or to some friendly chimney. But who shall say why he mourns? Basil wrote that the eating of vipers, a favourite food of theirs, gives turtles a pain, until they can find some marjoram to heal it. They will find no marjoram in my chimney, and so they mourn there still.
But no; I believe that turtles have been misjudged, and that the gentle crooning which has been taken to indicate grief actually, even in the solitary bird, expresses a tranquil pleasure in existence. I like to think this, for I have (who can other?) a great esteem for this amiable bird, so kind, so passing chaste, a messenger of peace, an ensample of simpleness, clean, plenteous in children, follower of meekness, friend of company, forgetter of wrongs, nicely curious, carrier of letters, emblem of the Holy Ghost. I will not suppose that my chimney-cole culver is a sad widow; she is the most constant pretty cooing turtle, and doubtless a happy, if forgetful, mother, sitting upon an ill made nest up there and crooning to her unborn turtlets. Her voice is so sweet, so comforting, so heavenly, it would convert the sceptical jeune homme de Dijon himself, did he hear it as I hear it now, rising, murmuring, falling, dying, melting away to start again—croo, croo, croo.
My chimney is a hospitable lodging for turtles. But what is their fate when they make their home in chimneys which are funnels for fire and smoke? Do they flit away, forgetting their turtlets, at the first alarm, to build in the next chimney? Or do they remain, faithful birds, amid the choking fumes, until, like the Phoenix and the Turtle, they enclosed in cinders lie?
Driving a Car
To propel a car through space, to devour the flying miles, to triumph over roads, flinging them behind us like discarded snakes, to rush, like Mulciber, from morn to noon, from noon to dewy eve, a summer’s day, up hill and down, by singing fir woods and blue heath, annihilating counties and minifying kingdoms—here is a joy that Phaethon, that bad driver, never knew. Phaethon, like us, was inebriated with rushing (as he fondly thought) through the air, intoxicated with pride in the great and hazardous car he drove, deeming himself a speed king. He believed himself to be doing his circuit of 583 million miles in twenty-four hours, or about 25,000,000 m.p.h. That is to say, had the sun really been rushing daily round the earth, that is about what it would have had to do, though it is possible that neither Helios nor Phaethon actually knew the mileage. Anyhow, as we now know, Phaethon was not really moving at all; it was the earth that was moving, and Phaethon crashed simply from nerves.
The same might be said of all the charioteers before the present age; they thought they were speeding, but were really scarcely moving at all. Nero fancied himself as a driver: but what was Nero doing? At the most, about fifteen. Bishop Wilkins much praised for their swiftness certain chariots with wheels and sails that were, said he, driven over land by the wind at a rate far exceeding the swiftness of ships on the sea. Such chariots sailed, he said, over the great smooth plains of China; and there was one at Sceveling in Holland, which that eminent inquisitive man Peireskius travelled to see, and would ever after talk of it, saying that its passengers did not feel the motion of the wind that drove them, since they travelled with equal speed themselves; men running before it seemed to go backwards, and things which seemed at a great distance were presently overtaken and left behind. Grotius was very copious and elegant in the celebration of this invention, and Bishop Wilkins inquires, what could be more delightful than to make use of the wind, which costs nothing and eats nothing, instead of horses. In two hours’ space, says he, the Sceveling chariot would travel two and forty miles. So, after all this fuss and travelling to see it and excitement on the part of English bishops and the eminent inquisitive Peireskius and the copious elegant Grotius, the thing could only do twenty-one.
The fact that our grandchildren, nay, our children, will soon be talking with similar contempt of us, rather adds to than detracts from our pleasure. The cars that we send hurtling over the earth by the touch of a foot on a knob are but at the beginning of their race with time and space; we drive slow and clumsy embryos. But they are swift enough to delight us, as with open throttle and hands lightly on the wheel we scud the roads, watching the needle mount, slipping past those other cars which unfortunately also scud the roads and impede our view.
All is bliss; we hum songs of triumph, as all charioteers have, even when they have been ignobly dragged by the brute creation, instead of by a drop of volatile spirit and a rotating engine, which is so obviously far better. Our song is chorused by the little chirping squeak of the door handles, the faint rattling of the windows, the less faint humming of the engine, the running of the wind. The scenery is doubled in charm by being seen at this rate; it flashes by with the vividness of a string of jewels, glimpsed, admired, and gone. How tired we should get of it were we afoot, trudging along with pack on back! One should not give scenery the chance to fatigue one. Seen thus, it will glow in the memory like a fairy land scarce trodden, awaiting one’s return.
The serpent in this Eden, the canker in this lovely bloom of speed, is (need one say it?) the other vehicles in our road. And particularly in the middle of our road, which is where cars, horse-carts, and cyclists love to travel. But, did all travellers keep, as they should, to their near side, driving would be too like heaven for sinful man below. As it is, when our time comes to go, when we fall in turn to the juggernaut, we may hope to be translated to some paradise traversed by great fair roads, to each soul a road to herself, along which her car shall dash at some supramundane speed, hugging (for souls shall be made perfect) the near border of thymey Elysian grass.
Easter in the Woods
A Delicate shimmer of greenery flickers, a light veil, over purple and brown, and starry blackthorn and wild cherry-blossom riot, in flights gay and white like angels, over wood and hill. How the copses, all enverdured with larch and birch and thorn and springing beech, climb the steep brown hillsides, running down to cowslipped dells and banks, while at their feet the marshy bottoms, gold-starred with kingcups, lie! Standing here, my feet deep in brown beech leaves, on Wheatham Hill’s steep shoulder, I can see the high hangers, copses, valleys, commons and farms, for miles around. There is the long, circling hanger called, in its different curves, Oakshott, Juniper, and Happersnapper, lying coiled, like a great snake of beech and oak, holly and birch, and alder, on the heights above Higher, Middle, and Lower Oakshott Farms; there are Moore’s Copse, Cheesecombe, Cherrycombe, lying about Oakshott Stream to the north; in the nearer distance burgeon those three petty copses, Roundabout, Hazel Holt, and Naps. While to the south writhes the wild steep Shoulder-of-Mutton hill, all embeeched, and edged along the ridge, where the wood breaks into bare grass gnarled with wind-bent thorn-trees, by the little deep-set path of Cockshut Lane. Eastward, in the near distance between the meadowy valley below these woods where I stand, and the running line of high moor and forest beyond, Wheatham Farm
lies on its hill; its hens have laid Easter eggs, and their cries of content float to me through the soft still air, striking their own exotic galline note in the merry Easter concert that pours from the greenwood. What plumy people sing in every grove! What whistling, what warbling, what chiff chaffing, what lyric sopranos and coloraturas, what shrill sweet zest! Could humanity but sing like this. …
But I am waiting and listening for a voice overdue, a voice as yet unheard by me this year. Will it come to-day? The stage is all adorned and set for the entry of this monotonous but enchanting performer; here is blossom and greenwood, soft sunshine and blue shadow, light breezes and sweet air. But he tarries still. The stone-chat ejaculates, sharp and bright, from the furzy common; the wheat-ear nods and flirts and says “Chak chak”; the ring ouzel sings, wild and gay, doing, no doubt, his marriage dance in the patch of moory grass above the wood; the blackbird, already settled, a householder, mellowly and with prosperous dignity whistles a tune; the nightingale jugs, the robin warbles, the wren twees, the goldcrest (or is it a long-tailed tit?) zee-zee-zees, the Dartford Warbler pittews, the hedge-sparrow chirrups, the linnet trills. At least, this is what I believe that I am hearing; the sum of it, anyhow, is the finest merry melodious canticling you can hear in a Hampshire Easter week.
And then, from the brown heart of Roundabout Copse, breaks the cry, high, far and clear, of the roving bully who is just arrived for his season of pleasure and increase in these islands after his African tour, and carelessly brags the freedom of himself and spouse from household cares, from the tedium of domesticity, from the trouble of parenthood, from the monotony of monogamy. The cuckoo is a witty bird; hearing his gay, cool, exultant cry, one hails once more the eternal pleasurist. They know how to live, these cuckoos; they rove, they love (briefly, but effectively), they breed, they procreate, they lay their cheerful Easter eggs singly in homes of eggs like-hued, relying, with a confidence justified by the inherited experience of ages, on the frail intellects and kind hearts of non-cuculan birds; and so away to the greenwood they hie, having thus made ample and painless provision for a progeny they have no notion of ever seeing again. Family business thus brilliantly disposed of, all spring and summer stretches before them for song, riot and debauchery; and why in the world their name has been taken by humanity as a synonym for stupidity, passes conjecture. Wise birds; intelligent, unscrupulous, cynical, sensible birds, wearing their freedom like a panache, crying it like a witty brag. They seem to me to have a Renaissance touch, to be like Medici princes and popes, luxurious, clever, conscienceless, getting the better of simpler, better men and women, looting the world of its pleasures and giving in return only their own insolent enjoyment. Life is no trouble to cuckoos; solvitur cantando. Their gay boast rings over the April woods like bells, ringing in the merry summer. First far, then drifting nearer, from Roundabout to Hazel Holt, from Hazel Holt to Naps Copse, and so across the dell to Wheatham Hanger, and then all over and about the wood, cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo, so negligently, boldly gay, as if they mocked, as well as they may, the chorus of little warblers, the future foster-parents of their, as yet, unlaid young. Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo! the cry drifts westward, away and away towards Juniper Hanger. Follow it through the greening woods, up sweet dim twisting paths, among the alders and the great bare budding beeches and the young slim beeches springing green, rustling through the deep brown pile of the beech carpet (laid last autumn, and overlaid with the green running pattern of agrimony), by ancient chalk pits and blown bare ridges hawthorn-grown, across the deep grass track of Old Litten Lane, and so to the wild sweep of Juniper Hanger, where it climbs above the Oakshotts against a shifting, sea-hued sky. The cuckoo is away now, following his private ploys somewhere in Happersnapper woods, but he has left the spring behind him, its gay bravery and the eternal dip-and-come-up of the dauntless, resurrecting Easter world, with its cowslips, its singing, and its dancing sun.
Personal Pleasures Page 8