Parties
Let me die (as Melantha would say), but this will be a good party. See how many people are flocking in at the door, gay butterflies, bright birds all silkily emplumed, or glossily black and white, with tails like tails of ravens hanging down behind. How fast they flock,
As thick and numberless
As the gay motes that people the sun beams!
What a noise already they make! Already they are gay, benign, inebriate, they drink and eat like to a harpy–Oh, Lord, walk this way–I see a couple, I’ll give you their history. In that corner, close to the hock cup, poets stand grouped; tolerable poets, better poets, definitely poor poets, poeticules, poetitos, poetasters. (Poets have coined more derogatory names for other poets than any other professional men have done, is it not so? That is because they feel very strongly about poetry and about other poets.) They speak of poetry as they drink hock cup and eat olives. Spender, Barker, Day Lewis, Auden, Pudney, Isherwood, they mention these, they argue about the latest works of each; poetomachia rages. Near them is a Roman Catholic group; these do not go in for poetry but wit; they drink deep and sing gay songs. Then there are novelists; I always think novelists rather noisy, do not you? Let us move out of earshot. There stand three publishers, telling jovial stories of the frolic Greeks. Or is it about some books they hope to publish? I cannot catch the words; all speak, none hearkens. On the sofa near me two women murmur mysteriously one to another; one looks informed, and as if she knew the secrets of every one in the room; she seems the wisest aunt telling the saddest tale. I am not near enough to hear it.
What will happen at this party? Anything may happen. A man has just come in who stands charmingly on his head at parties. Perhaps he will stand on his head to-night. I hope that he will stand on his head. That is what people should do at parties of pleasure; it gives parties of pleasure the right note. At least, so I think, though to Cleisthenes the despot of Sikyon it seemed in the highest degree unseemly that his daughter’s suitor should dance on a table on his head at a banquet. This only shows how times have changed since the days of Cleisthenes; if I had a daughter, I would present her immediately to a suitor who did that, and gladly would she go to him.
Other parties of pleasure which have been held come into my mind. Agathon’s party, into which Aristodemus gate-crashed, on the specious suggestion of Socrates that “to the feasts of the good the good unbidden go,” and at which they praised love and Alcibiades complained of Socrates. That was a good party; I have heard that there are such parties now, but they do not come my way. Then I think of Trimalchio’s party, where they began with dormice rolled in honey and poppy-seed, sausages, damsons, pomegranate seeds, and peahens’ eggs containing each a fat becafico in spiced yolk of egg, and went on with a great dish of the signs of the Zodiac, and then really began to eat, every now and then washing their hands in wine. That was a vulgar party, a gluttonous, ill-bred Roman party; I should not like to be at that party. I would rather be at an English rout, assembly, or conversazione, nibbling dainty rout-cakes and sipping spiced wine, while the card tables are set out and the tea is brought in. Or at a party at the Royal Society’s, where experiments in gravity and levity occur, bowls of goldfish are weighed before and after the goldfish are removed from them, fruits are frozen stiff, Æolian harps make music, and pyrophones their fiery moan. This is not a party such as that. Still, anything, or nearly anything, might happen at it.
There is a levity, a light and glittering quality, among the guests, as of revel routs on tiptoe for a feast. We quaff champagne, we gulp ices, we sit down with pencils and paper, we shall write a poem line by line. Some people leave the room, to return and perform for us; it is all most diverting. We eat again, we drink again; some are drunk, some sober. We all speak very loudly, but the time is past when I can hear much of what we say. It does not matter. It is a good party. Let me die but it is a good party.
So the brief night goes in babble and revel and wine. It is bed-time, but we are still here. To go home would be so odd. They would say that one was not enjoying the party, to be leaving it so soon. One must stay, though the black bat night has flown, though no silence falls with the waking bird, no hush with the setting moon.
It is a good party, an admirable party: but can it be that parties of pleasure go on just the fraction of a second too long?
Play-Going
I am, on the whole, entertained by these agreeable cheats. At their best, they divert and please beyond measure; at their worst (which often occurs), they embarrass and fatigue. But to sit and watch the curtain rise on the mummers who will strut and mime for us for two hours of an evening to make us sport is an excitement never stale. They will perhaps display to us some lively tragedy: caught in a very torrent, tempest and whirlwind of passion, they will saw the air with their hands and tear a passion to tatters, to very rags. Hamlet would have had them whipped for this; but for my part, I like to see them at it; I consider that this is partly what they are put on that raised daïs to do. They are in a fiction, in a dream of passion, and so, indeed, am I. Like Sir Thomas Browne, “I can weep most seriously at a play, and receive with true passion the counterfeit grief of those known and professed impostures.” ’Tis true, they do often imitate humanity most abominably; but humanity we can see anywhere; it imitates itself; I would scarce cross the street to watch it. Yet here, set on this platform strutting above a row of lights, I will watch it for two hours (not, I think, for longer). On a stage meal I hang entranced, though I would not lift my eyes from my newspaper to see the same meal off-stage. I will delight in a stage dog, a stage baby, a stage quarrel, though all three are ever with us in the world without, and I think nothing of any of them. I will think with admiration, how well he said that! how wittily she took it! when I hear words well and wittily spoken all about me, and scarcely pause to mark them.
But sometimes the words are good words, well and wittily, or gravely and beautifully, written, and then how my pleasure is doubled; no, trebled, for there is the pleasure of the words, the pleasure of the speaking, and the pleasure of the fitness of the two conjoined. Should I ever hear, as I never yet have heard, the right Oberon sitting on a promontory to hear a mermaid on a dolphin’s back, the right Titania deploring the confusing of the seasons, the right Prospero rounding our little life with a sleep, the right Macbeth in the tomorrow and to-morrow lines, the right Cleopatra in “The crown o’ the earth doth melt.… And there is nothing left remarkable beneath the visiting moon,” and in the asp speech (which I have heard said to break the heart, but not on the stage), the right Beatrice, Rosalind, and Millamant in look, voice, and wit all joined, the right Restoration sparks to body forth the Restoration comic spirit … but so one might go on for ever: should I ever hear these (as I have, once or twice, heard the right Hamlet), to be at the play would be to peer at heaven; such pleasure is more than one dare hope to purchase for the price of a plush seat. Normally, one must be content, or malcontent, with lovely lines blurred or flattened or coarsened in the speaking, or with plain speeches well enough spoken, as they are, or so it sounds to me, in most modern plays that I see.
Well enough, anyhow, for a theatre full of people to sit absorbed, smiling, laughing, moved, throughout the spectacle they have bought. We are, I suppose, easily entertained, and it was never hard to split the ears of the groundlings; even Punch and Judy will do that in the streets. As I said, there is that in the raised platform, the set piece, the ordination of players, the purchase of seats, which confers on common speeches and actions some strange cachet of prestige.
Anyhow, for my part I am pleased with these guileless impostures, and would watch them more often had I but more time, did the seats cost less, and would the play but run straight on without those dreary intervals that now break its thread and waste our time. If playacting should ever cease among the human race, which, after so many thousand years of mumming, would seem improbable, it will be the intervals which will kill it. There is not enough time in a crowded human life to
waste hours of it doing nothing in a theatre, removed from all other occupations, and unprovided with the spectacle we gave up an evening to see. Music should fill these spaces, or a puppet show, or what not, if the play must pause.
Pretty Creatures
They strut and trip around us, all shapes, all sizes, all colours, all species (for even a pretty little black curlytailed pig is at times to be admired, and the infant rhinoceros has indubitable charms). We may enquire, with Montaigne, what this beauty is that so pleases, and whether it has existence outside the individual eye and taste; we know that it has not, and that this in no degree diminishes its power to ravish and entice. “The preeminence in beauty, which Plato ascribeth unto the spherical figure, the Epicureans refer the same unto the pyramidal or squat.” … All the better, since Plato and the Epicureans are thereby both pleased. I dote on that gazelle, that tall, light-stepping girl with her slant eyes, her smooth and high-held head, her broad and smiling mouth; you on that fluffy kitten, that small and dainty person, with eyes large and round, clustering curls, pink roses in her cheeks. As to that, I dote on her also, as on all pretty creatures, from the sailing golden eagle to the gilded fly, from the splendid muscled athlete to the chubby babe in bath.
We are excelled, as we know, by many living creatures, earthly, airy, and marine. Yet this awkward and lumbering human biped has also power to ravish, and that not only its fellow-humans, who may be prejudiced in its favour, but those very creatures who, we think, so manifestly excel it. Fishes, notoriously amorous of the human race, have leaped from the water to the land if their angler be fair of face, have crowded round lovely bathers in embarrassing shoals, have carried beautiful boys across oceans. Unicorns have always loved young virgins to the point of rashness; lions, tigers and wolves have followed beautiful youths and maidens with no anthropophagous dreams, merely to dote on their faces and forms; birds have lost their heads altogether–
When he was by, the birds such pleasure took
That some would sing, some others in their bills
Would bring him mulberries, and ripe red cherries,
He fed them with his sight, they him with berries.
While, as to dragons, they have frequently doted to distraction, forgetting their own kind in their attachment to some handsome human creature.
If our dumb friends, then, can so admire our curious form, perhaps ejaculating when they see it the thanksgiving of the Hebrew, “Blessed be the Lord, who has made his creatures in such strange diversity of shapes,” how much more should we. And do. For, if there is one thing for which we have ever admired one another, it is for our beauty. Whatever strange chance arrangement of features and colour it may be that pleases any given race, tribe, period, or personal taste, however little it may please any other race, tribe, or person, still, there it is, triumphantly, absurdly, irrationally victorious, enchanting such beholders as are to it susceptible. Beauty, as the intoxicated but truthful Comus remarked, is nature’s brag. This amazing, confounding, admirable, amiable Beauty, than which in all Nature’s treasure there is nothing so majestical and sacred, nothing so divine, lovely, precious, ’tis nature’s crown, gold and glory–see where it goes, tripping and pacing about the common streets, about shop floors, uttering through its curled vermilion lips genteel remarks concerning art silk camiknickers and hose, swaggering in old flannels about ancient college courts, singing, bronzed and limber, behind mules on Apennine paths, running and tumbling with hoop and ball in Kensington Gardens, speaking rich Californian to us in darkened palaces, lounging about raised platforms above footlights. Beauty can do with us what it wills; more effectual on a jury, as Phryne showed, is a prisoner’s handsome appearance than any eloquence of counsel: not only was Phryne, “following” (as reporters would say) the exhibition of her person to the court, discharged without a stain on her character (or without further stains than it had previously borne), but “those intemperate young men of Greece” erected to her eternal memory, with infinite cost, a golden image.
And here our best Athenians seem owls indeed (as someone remarks somewhere about something else): for who would desire a golden image of a beautiful lady? I should not look twice at Phryne in that hard and yellow metal. The very charm of beauty is its moving evanescence, its fleeting hue and swift-sliding shape, that turns this way and that like a leaf on the wind, like the running sea in shadow and sun. Beauty vanishes, beauty passes: living beauty fixed in metal, all chained up in alabaster, is a poor and chilly thing.
Lounge, trip, stride and run around me, then, oh lovely creatures of all sizes, ages, hues and shapes. You are a garden of bright flowers, a forest of saplings, like the young sapling shoot on Delos of which Nausicaa minded Odysseus; you are a very bestiary of such lithe and bright-eyed creatures as one may encounter leaping and slinking about jungle paths, or about ferny parks at Whipsnade, or prisoned in the small bright capitals of monkish missals. Speak not, oh beauteous idiots; move all in muted beauty like the moon; delight my eyes, and assault not my ears with your harsh or pretty jungle cries. I have no illusions about you; I know your limitations, and all I beg of you is that you will remain within them, and so continue to please.
Reading
Here is one of the oddest of the odd inventions which man has sought out, this conveying to one another by marks scratched on paper thoughts privately conceived in the mind. It shows, as all the arts show, the infinite publicism of humankind, the sociability, the interdependence, which cannot endure to have a thought, to conceive a tale, a tune, a picture, an arrangement of words, or anything else, but all must forthwith be informed of it. And how avidly we run to be informed; we have already consumed many thousands of tales, poems, essays, and what not, but we are never satiate, we are greedy always for more. We begin the day by running our eyes over those multi-paged printed rags which furnish us with potted selections of events which have occurred during the last twenty-four hours. What excitement! Here are countries plunging into war, politicians making speeches, governments, aeroplanes and motor-cars crashing right and left, murders, thefts and revolutions, Britons flung into foreign goals, Etonians bowled by other Etonians in 1887 (they have remembered it ever since, amid all the uproar and confusion of life), outbreaks of healthy-Aryan-national-sentiment in Germany, of sacred egoism in Italy, of foot-and-mouth disease in Berkshire. It has all occurred many times before, it will all occur many times again, but still I devour the pages with eager appetite, stimulated and mildly stunned. My newspaper makes me realise, in the improbable event of my ever forgetting it, on to what an exciting, what a tumultuous world, the sun and I matutinally rise.
Having risen, I endeavour for a time to bound my reading by what I regard as my proper studies, that is, by the requirements of such labours as I am at the moment committed to. These requirements, generously interpreted, may take me almost anywhere. They may take me, for example, to my dictionary; and, having heaved one of the somewhat ponderous volumes of this mighty work from its shelf (this is one of the main ways in which I keep in good athletic training) I continue to read in it at random, since it would be waste to heave it back at once. I need not expatiate on the inexhaustible pleasure to be extracted from the perusal of this dictionary, from the tasting of this various feast of language, etymology, and elegant extracts from all the periods of English literature. In this enticing pastime a whole morning may fleet itself idly away.
Or, on some slight pretext, the other works that beckon from my shelves like sirens from enchanted seas may win me to them, and, soon oblivious of the reason for my plunge, I am swimming in those deep voluminous seas, among poetry, masques, plays, history, lives, diaries, letters, zoology, navigations and explorations. These, last, above the rest, have the siren’s power to drug and to detain. For they are, I suppose, what the psychologists call, in their uncouth tongue, wish-fulfilment, or dream-sublimation. They take you travelling over the globe, and with no further trouble than the lazy flick of a page. Why, as Samuel Purchas introducing his collection of t
ravellers’ tales, so plausibly asked, travel, when you can get all the benefits of doing so and suffer none of its damages, by reading of the travels of others? Why should gentlemen adventure themselves to see the fashions of other countries, where their souls and bodies find temptations to a twofold whoredom, and bring home a few smattering terms, flattering garbs, apish cringes, foppish fancies, foolish guises and disguises, the vanities of neighbour nations (I name not Naples) without furthering their knowledge of God, the world or themselves? For his part, for the benefit both of those who cannot travel far and those who cannot travel virtuously, he offers “a world of travellers to their domestic entertainment.”
In brief, he recommends to us his travelogue, in which “both elephants may swim in deep voluminous seas, and such as want either lust or leisure may single out what author or voyage shall best fit to his profit or his pleasure.” He would have us arm-chair travellers, and well he knew how to play on our indolence.
Here, then, we sit, as he suggests, at home and in peace under the shadow of our own vine and fig, and from the shore behold with safety and delight the dangerous navigations and expeditions of explorers, viewing their war-like fights in the watery plain as from a fortified tower, enjoying the sweet contemplation of their laborious actions. Most commodiously we peregrinate with Marco Polo over Persia, Thibet, Turkestan, and to the court of Khublai Khan; with Spanish Conquistadores and English pirate merchants to Mexico, the Indies, and the New World; with Portugal friars about Abyssinia; with the Hollanders to the Java seas; with King Solomon’s navy to Ophir; with Captain William Hawkins, hindered all the way by proud injurious Portugals and wily Jesuits, to the court of the Great Mogul; with Sir John Hawkins in the Jesus to take five hundred negroes on the New Guinea coast and make vent of them to Spaniards in the Indies; with the good ship Dog to the Mexique Bay; with Captain Knox to the wild Highlands of Ceylon; with Thomas Gage, the disgruntled Jesuit, over Guatemala; with John Chilton over all New Spain, among Indians who dared not eat him for fear he might have the pox; with Anthony Knivet plundering chests of silver from the cells of Portugal friars in Brazil, eating the bark of cinnamon-trees at Port Famine, encountering cannibals, a crocodile, and a great dead whale lying on the shore like a ship grown with moss. We may visit the island of Ferro and see that tree which rains continually; or chase after those flitting isles near Teneriffe which, when men approach them, they vanish; or behold the islands off Scotland swimming after the manner of the ancient Cyclades and flitting up and down in the water, the sport of tempests; on these same islands you may see (and still without moving a step nearer the Scotch express) trees from whose fruit falling into running water ducks and geese do grow. “Whoever took possession of the huge oceans, made procession round about the vast earth? Whoever discovered new constellations, saluted the frozen poles, subjected the burning zones?” Whoever may have done so, I am as good as they, and far more at ease, sitting in my arm-chair and following them about the world with my eyes, doped and lulled with their enchanting lies. Without putting out a hand but to turn a page, I break off a sugar cane and suck it, drop into my mouth pears dripping honey, pluck store of oysters from the boughs of trees (but these have a flash taste), gather barnacle geese from the barnacle-trees, smell the sweetness of great lemon woods, watch Sierra Leonians slithering up high palm-trees to fill gourds with palmito wine, eat wood fruits called beninganions and beguills, as big as apples and tasting like strawberries, taste cooked friar, but reject it as unwholesome, visit the Castle at Agra, where in a fair court every noon the Rajah sees elephants, lions and buffles fight, and so on to Lahore, the way set on both sides with mulberry-trees; watch a Christian ape at the court of King Jahanjar pick out the name of Christ from those of twelve prophets shuffled in a bag, tearing up the eleven others with distaste; sail up the river Quame for gold, elephants’ teeth, ambergris and slaves; find turtles’ eggs with Roger Barlow in the Indies, unicorns’ horns with Sir John Hawkins in Florida; watch from the Florida beach the sea-fowl chase the flying fish; sail among these huge icy mountains which make such a dashing and crashing one against another in green Arctic seas; voyage, in brief, all oceans, peregrinate all lands, taste all foods, meet all people, enjoy all pleasures.
Personal Pleasures Page 14