If there is a drawback to this pure pleasure of doing good to a dictionary, I have not yet found it. Except that, naturally, it takes time.
Listening In
Who would have thought it? I press a switch, and my room is full of the clamour of voices from strange worlds, a thousand fantasies of calling shapes and airy tongues, on sands and shores and desert wildernesses, that may startle well but not astound the virtuous mind.… The coconut harvest is gathered in Malaya; tobacco is planted in Nyasaland, tea in Ceylon, timber hauled in Oregon, ship-loads of daffodils languish on Scilly quays while high seas rage, herds of reindeer trek across Canadian snows, and hearty voices from America strive to greet us above the rushing noises of the severing Atlantic. Or small, flat, twanging voices sound, telling us about Art, about Architecture, about Currency, crossing the “t” in often, dotting the “i” in opposite, speaking of de fects, figyures, ideels, currencee, dwelling fondly on those shy syllables in English words which are meant to be seen and not heard, and are only put in to make spelling more difficult. Or Youth prophesies in sad tones that the future will be quite different from the past, Eskimos sit naked in their igloos and spear whales in Hudson’s Strait, and the sky parades before us its marching regiments of planets and of stars. Had I time, I should listen to all of it, and know, very soon, everything, even the prices of fat cattle.
Then the music. How delicious to sit at ease and hear, without visible orchestra, this harmony that rains upon the ear. It might be, it very possibly is, that heavenly symphony, that music of the spheres to which Pythagoras used to say that the celestial universe revolved in tune, unheard by practically every man but him, for none but he was pure enough. Plato added sirens to the orchestra, seating one of these on each celestial orb and causing her to sing, so that at the honey-sweet chorus gods and men marvelled. It must certainly be so, said Milton, endorsing this delightful celestial concert, for the spheres would have long since wearied of their rotatory labours, had they not had music to sustain and encourage them. Other poets support this.
The turning vault of heaven formèd was,
Whose starry wheeles he hath so made to passe,
As that their movings do a musicke frame,
And they themselves still daunce unto the same.
The lark can hear this music, the nightingale too, and so should we, but for our grossness. It is
the heavenly tune, which none can hear
Of human mould with grosse unpurged ear.
Milton blames Prometheus, who robbed us of our innocence; others have put it down more to the error of our first parents, who are said to have been, until they fell, so tele-visionary and tele-audient that they could both see and hear the farthest, faintest star. Anyhow, and for whatever cause, we are now too sunk in brutishness to hear these heavenly harmonies. If our souls were pure, chaste, and snow-white, as was formerly that of Pythagoras, then should we hear that lovely rumour of the circling stars; or so they all say.
But what? Do I not hear the very sound? Does it not steal in ravishment upon my ear? What other than the rotating spheres and their melodious sirens can make these unseen harmonies? Have I indeed won the reward of a blameless life and become, like Pythagoras before me (and a few birds), celestially audient, cœlo-tuned? So, indeed, it seems.
So dear to Heav’n is Saintly chastity
That when a soul is found sincerely so,
A thousand liveried Angels lacky her …
And in cleer dream and solemn vision
Tell her of things that no gross ear can hear.
This must be what is occurring to me. How gratifying; how delightful. How Plato’s Er would have envied me: he only speculated on the spheral music; he never heard a note of it. Perhaps one evening I shall hear a bat squeak. Meanwhile the celestial orchestra performs for me.
then listen I
To the celestial Sirens harmony,
That sit upon the nine enfolded Sphears.…
But what is this? What shriek tears the soft air to quivering shreds? Heaven, who has given me such signal favours, protect me now, for a soprano has broken loose upon the divine orchestra, and her savage cry rends the evening peace as if a cat shrieked upon a roof. This is no siren, but rather some Fury, busy about her barbarous and vengeful tasks. So shrieked the Erinnyes, pursuing Orestes for his unnatural crimes, so the Harpies, gobbling the food of poor Phineus as they flew down black winds.
A soprano! What terrific cataclysm of nature gave tongue in such sort, what shrill and squawking bird was slain long since by huntsman, so that the race of men were condemned to have among them for ever its voice in human female shape? Procne remetamorphosed, and returning from her chelidonian adventures with more than chelidonian voice wherewith to plague Tereus and all mankind for their sins. That singing sea-maid on a dolphin’s back to whom Oberon listened from his rocky promontory, and to hear whom certain stars shot madly from their spheres, sang, it is sure, in a sweet contralto, smooth and shadow-haunted and creaming as the long run of waves into a deep green gully, or the humming of summer winds in a pine wood. Not a star would have deserted its own rotatory and siren music for a soprano. It fills the air with barbarous dissonance: but only for a moment. A touch, and it abruptly falls on silence. I turn a knob, and am in France; a cascade of sharp and throaty Gallic patters in my ears.
Who would have thought it?
But far be it from me to close on a note of pure content. Sopranos are all very well, and so are trombones and xylites and all such barbarous noises, for I can quickly rid myself of them. But not so with all airy abominations, for some of these are inserted out of due place, in the midst of news which I desire to hear. Such is the case with cricket. Cricket is, I understand, palatable news to some; they hang on bat and ball, on test match, ashes, and wicket; and, reading on news-posters in the street such catastrophic and momentous head-lines as “ENGLAND FALLS,” their hearts fall too. Very good: I would not grudge them their news. There is, at the end of the News Bulletin, a section entitled Sport. It is in this section that the results of games played with balls are announced, and those who do not desire to hear these may switch off at the word “Sport.” But too often cricket rises surging out of its place like a river in flood, breaking its levees, rushing out of Sport into the main news, so that, having heard about the weather, and settling down all agog for the odd tale of European events, I hear instead the odious word Cricket complacently uttered, and followed by a drab tale of balls flung and hit, runs run, inningses declared, and players in or out. And how can I switch off this dreary stuff, when I know not at what moment it will end and give place to news that I might want to hear?
I submit that this is not fair play, not (to use its own foolish phraseology) cricket. What I mean is, you might as well put the Italian-Abyssinian crisis in the Sport section. Better.
This must be mended. It is rousing up and down England an ugly feeling of resentment. We are a patient people, but our patience has limits, as our monarchs and other rulers have from time to time found. This business of misplacing the news items may be the rock on which the British Broadcasting Corporation will founder.
Logomachy
Strange! The quiet and sunlit garden, in which, but a moment since, we lay enwrapt in post-prandial dominical peace, affably exchanging sugared and drowsy comments on delphiniums, Marxism, Hitlerism, religion, literature, landscape, and life, has suddenly become a Whipsnade, noisy with the howls, snarls, chatterings, gibberings, trumpetings, roarings, yappings, of creatures who differ concerning words. Someone spoke of pornography–what more natural, what more inevitable, a topic, since it connects with Marxism, Hitlerism, religion, literature, landscape, life, and probably delphiniums? In brief, it connects, they say, with everything; someone had been sent a boot and shoe catalogue between whose lines it lay, or so it seemed to her, like foie gras between bread in sandwiches. Be that as it may, we spoke, still drowsy and still sugared, still post-prandial and still dominical, of pornography. And a very amica
ble course the conversion would doubtless have pursued on this congenial topic, but that we discovered that we did not agree as to the meaning of the term. Two schools of thought arose: one held that the word, if correctly used, must imply pleasure given, or intended to be given, to the readers of the pornographic narrative or discourse or what not; the other that the intentions of the writer were irrelevant, and that pornography was, quite simply, what the Greek word means, always provided that sufficient wealth of detail was supplied. The battle raged; one school accused the other of putting a gloss on the word, the other retaliated with charges of having an etymological mind, of pedantic insensitiveness to accepted shades of meaning. Other words broke in; we spoke of phenomenal, of litotes and meiosis, of the derivation of ilk (someone erroneously conceived it to come from the Latin illic), of anthropophagi (someone erroneously maintained that these should properly be human), of erotic, of melodrama, of prelate, presbyter, and priest, of highbrow, of a dozen more such contentious points. The garden rang again with our logomachy, with our loud ergoting pro and con. All were conceited, scornful, happy, crying ha-ha like the war-horse charging in battle. There is poetomachy, bibliomachy, angelomachy, theologomachy, gastromachy, erotomachy, a hundred other strifes; of them all, logomachy is the most absorbing, the most calculated to fill with sound and fury a pleasant Sunday afternoon.
But, during a moment’s pause, I recollected how logomachs have been disapproved of, scornfully entreated, regarded as petty squabblers and unworthy quibblers, out of tune with the infinite, out of place on Parnassus. I recalled John Milton, how, in a Cambridge oration, he railed against logomachia. Has argutiolas, he coldly exclaimed, inanes quæstiunculas; these quibblings, these empty little questions. And, “It is abundantly clear how little these trifles lead to integrity of life and cultivated manners, which are the greatest good. This logomachia neither contributes to the general welfare, nor in any way to the honour and profit of our country. Two things most advance and ornament a country–fine speaking and brave action; but this litigious battling of discrepant opinion neither instructs in eloquence, inculcates prudence, nor incites to brave deeds.”
And that, to be sure, is the main thing, is it not?
“Away, then,” continued John Milton, “with these cunning chatterboxes.…”
He must have been right. Nevertheless, as the word battle swells up around me, I cannot help thinking that it does, after all, incite to some eloquence.
Meals out
1. On the roof
Shut the attic skylight door; that is right. Do not let us put our toes through such tiles as we can conveniently avoid; there was some trouble last time the Brave Alpine Climber Band was on the roof. We will encamp in the valley between the two smoking peaks of Etna and Vesuvius. Here is the rucksack; it has five oranges, seven rusks, three bottles of ginger pop, twopence worth of pear drops, and a mug. And a packet of Woodbines, in case we feel brave enough for a smoke. Only no one must be sick on the roof; it would be too disgusting. Anyone who means to be sick must get through the skylight first, or else swarm down the gutter pipe into the yard.
The B.A.C.B. is enjoying its well-earned meal. It has climbed far to-day, and got very dirty and rather scraped. Pass round the mug; bang in the glass stoppers of the pop bottles, and do not let too much run fizzing over the roof. Turn and turn about; Climber Nansen’s turn is lasting too long. Have we finished? All but the pear drops and the cigarettes. We will now sit astride on that gable, or rather that mountain ridge, and suck the former and smoke the latter.
A fine view indeed. The yard lies spread beneath us, and the stable and barn and outhouse roofs lift their peaks and gables around us. We see the kitchen door, and the kennel, and the wall that divides the yard from the fruit garden and the lawn. We can see right over this, and over the holly hedge into the lane and the great field that slopes down beyond it. We can see the fields even beyond that; the corn-field with the footpath running through it, and the reapers at work, the large elms that hide the lane to the village. The universe simmers before us in a hot August drone. We are drowsy in the sun. We have a pear-drop in one side of the mouth, a Woodbine in the other. We suck; we smoke. Climber Nansen pales, spews out his pear-drop, drops his Woodbine, reclines. You had better, Climber Nansen, get back through the skylight before it is too late. Crawl away quickly; quicker, can’t you; I am crawling behind you; with me it is nearly already too late. All things are with God, but He must not permit anything to occur on the roof. …
2. On the pavement
The Café-Restauran Garcia has an orange and blue striped awning outside it, shading the pavement from the sun and the moon. Beneath it we sit at our table; we sit on, long after we have ceased to dine, drinking coffee, sipping cognac, eating lumps of sugar, smoking, talking, looking at the plaza with its elegant ordinations of palms, oranges and lemons, listening to the band which plays there. Mexican gentlemen and ladies stroll about, sit and drink at tables, twang musical instruments. It is balmy, it is warm, the night smells of lemon trees. There is a yellow ochre cathedral at the other side of the plaza, built by Spanish missionaries four centuries ago. The houses round the plaza are the houses of old Spain. Beyond them rise against the violet sky the dim serrated peaks of Mexican mountains. I eat oblongs of cane sugar, dipped in the cognac of my companion. Brandy-sugar: it sweetens and burns the blood, sets the night to a merry tune. The band has stopped, but the Mexican gentlemen still twang strings, and there is singing.
Hey, mozo! Otro aguardiente! Y mas azucar.
New Year’s Eve
WALKING in the fields on the last of those brief, chill and gentle afternoons that run the old year out, I felt the cool damp air of Hampshire, sweet with fir and heather, stir about me like cold wings. The sky loomed greyly over the purple-brown line of the moor, but melted into blue squares and ovals over the western stubble-fields, and glinted above Farewell Hanger into a pool of gold. Crossing two stiles, I came to a foot-bridge; beneath it the full Rother gurgled with song. The earth squelched under foot; a thrush whistled in a dripping copse of holly and oak.
In the still, dreaming heart of the Hampshire winter, the year turned, and would be made new. So wild and deep a mystery as this stirred the naked woods, whispered in the cold brook, whistled flutily from the holly copse. Immemorial Christmas, the year’s turn, the sun’s birth, the earth’s cold saturnalia, whereat soft-footed elves patter and chuckle and gobble and trip, shaking silver drops from the holly, sucking their teeth as they squelch in the mud of the small deep lanes and cow trodden fields. There is small friendliness in the year’s end: it is secret, cold, a prehistoric act played each twelvemonth by the drowsy primeval gods who have scarcely yet, after these few thousands of brief years, observed the intrusion of the fussy little creature strutting on two legs through their ancient habitations.
There was a sighing, soft and cold, as if the year turned over in his sleep.
Or as if the sky slid earthwards in a sheet of rain, which in fact at that moment occurred.
Not Going to Parties
It is apparent which door the party is behind, for all down the street pours and swells its jocund rumour, as of Bacchus and his merry crew. It guides me to it, as the sweet church bells guide worshippers to prayer. Hark, hark, and yet again!
This way the noise was, if mine ear be true,
My best guide now; me thought it was the sound
Of Riot, and ill manag’d Merriment,
Such as the jocond Flute, or gamesom Pipe
Stirs up among the loose unletter’d Hinds,
When for their teeming Flocks, and granges full
In wanton dance they praise the bounteous Pan,
And thank the gods amiss. I should be loath
To meet the rudenesse and swill’d insolence
Of such late Wassailers; yet O where els
Shall I inform my unacquainted feet?
Besides, I am all smugged up, all adorned for the party, all ready for the rout.
Yet, how hot it will be in there, up that flight of stairs to where they wassail in swilled insolence! How loudly shall I have to shout, to hear myself above all the ill-managed merriment! None will hear what I shout: I shall hear what no other shouts; all will be jocund revelry, with perhaps now and then an olive, a cheese straw, a glass of sherry or tomato juice, or a little sausage on a little stick. That is all very well when one is in the mood, and an excellent manner of employing an evening. But am I not also very well where I am, sitting in my car?
Hence vain deluding joyes,
The brood of folly without father bred,
How little you bested,
Or fill the fixed mind with all your toyes!
I turn my back on you; I trundle down small dim streets to the embankment, and along the dark, lit river, the night air, so delightful, so unwholesome, fanning my face and blowing through my hair, the wedge of a yellow moon, like a slice of cheese, rippling in black water among a myriad city lights. Tomato juice, strong drink, sausages, friendly faces, shouting wassailing and wit, I have rejected for lethargy, solitude, encharioted ease. I glide furtively home through streets and parks and embed in my own easy chair, as if I had never planned another evening.
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?”
Personal Pleasures Page 13