Without Prejudice Part 28

Rush to the roof, sudden rocket, and higher, Melt into stars for the land's desire!

"Sudden rocket." How good the adjective is! A poet I know spent hall a day in finding the correct epithet for rockets, and was equally pleased and annoyed to discover subsequently that he had chosen the same adjective as the Master.

[Sidenote: Time's Forelock.]

Nowadays we let off all our fireworks a day before the fair and tug Time by his forelock. A magazine coming out in January must be dated February at the very earliest. We "go ahead" in an Irish-American sense, and cannot endure not to be in advance of our age. We live entirely in the future, and are too busy to live just at present. Christmas falls late in October and extends to the end of November, the period being marked by heavy showers of Christmas numbers. The Jews begin all their festivals the day before, and Christmas is by far the most Jewish of our holidays.

Our evening papers come out in the morning, though this will right itself in time, for they are getting earlier and earlier, and will ultimately come out the evening before. Dr. Johnson's line about Shakespeare, "And panting Time toils after him in vain," is truer of the man of to-day.

What's that you say? All this has been said before? Naturally.

[Sidenote: Diaries.]

Who is the most marvellous man? He who keepeth a diary. And by keeping a diary I mean keeping it for the whole year, from January 1st to December 31st--keeping it, moreover, by daily entry. Only one year in my life did I succeed in filling up every department of the three hundred and sixty-five, and even then I was often in arrears. Diaries are for those who lead cloistral lives and pure, so that the task is trivial, and whatsoever record of their own leap to light they shall not be shamed.

Diaries are not for those whose existence is a whirlpool; for such the blank page is an added perturbation, a haunting whiteness beseeching the blackness of diurnal autobiography, an I O U that calls for instant satisfcation. To the spontaneous vexings of conscience has been added an artificial p.r.i.c.king at the neglect of a supererogatory duty. How have I blonched to see day adding itself to day, unrecorded, time flying without being "kodak'd" on the wing; and each new neglect r.e.t.a.r.ding the day of reckoning even while it aggravated it! Then have I felt myself sinking beneath the self-imposed

Yoke, intolerable, not to be borne Of the too vast orb of my fate,

yearning for a smaller circ.u.mference and a shorter biography. At the outset one begins a diary, as one practises a new virtue, or plays with a new toy--enthusiastically. For the first few days of January the entries are rich in psychological and episodical matter. Then gradually the interest trails off; to the fertile plains of narrative and a.n.a.lysis succeeds a barren desert, relieved only by a few dates of appointments.

With Mark Twain it will be remembered the entries were reduced to "Got up, washed, went to bed." The keeping of a diary is generally the first New Year resolution to be broken. How eloquent these old diaries filled up for a month or two--and the rest silence!

On second thoughts there is a more marvellous than the most marvellous man. It is he who keepeth a pecuniary diary. I know one such. He has kept a perfect and absolutely complete record of every farthing he has laid out since the days when farthings were his standard of currency. Which of us would dare do this, or, doing, would dare cast a backward glance on the financial past? There is a crude, relentless actuality about items of expenditure, not to be softened by euphemistic phrasing. Surely a truer proverb than any of its species would be: "Tell me what you buy, and I'll tell you what you be." And to think, in reviewing your pecuniary biography, that, though you owe no man a farthing, you have still to pay the bill; that many things you have bought have yet to be paid for "over and over again," as the Master Builder said, "over and over again."

[Sidenote: "Looking Backward"]

Looking backward is a luxury which should be indulged in only moderation--say once in fifty years. The preachers will tell you differently. But life is so restless and feverish nowadays that there is no time for obeying the preachers. It is as much as we can do to find time to listen to them. Goethe says, "He who looks forward sees only one way to pursue, but he who looks backward sees many." This is the last word on the subject. It speaks volumes. But as you cannot walk through any of those backways, what is the use of bothering to look for them?

True, your own experience enables you to give advice to others. But advice is a drug in the market. What am I saying? A drug! No, no! Even a drug is taken sometimes. Advice never is. We learn only from our own mistakes, and when it is too late to profit by them. No; there is not much profit in looking backwards. Often it tends to make you pessimistic, to sap your energy, to petrify you, as it did Lot's wife. At other times, contrariwise, it makes you expel such salt as is already in you, dissolved in tears--

So sweet, so sad, the days that are no more.

Yet what is this but another form of Buskin's "Pathetic fallacy"? Those divinely sweet, sad days were in reality just as commonplace as to-day.

Life is a chaos of comic confusion, Past things alone take a halo harmonious; So from illusion we wake to illusion, Each as the rest just as true and erroneous.

A familiar form of the new illusion we wake to is seen in the exclamation that so often follows retrospection: "Oh, what a fool I was!" As a rule, nothing can be more conceited than this use of the past tense. A few people, perhaps, can look back complacently upon "a well-spent life"

(wherein all the years have been laid out to advantage, and every hour has been made to go as far as seventy-five minutes, and every odd second has been worth a row of pins at least); but I should not care to meet them. For the bulk of us it is best to press on, doing what our hand findeth to do, and letting the dead past bury its dead. It is quite enough to know we cannot escape paying the funeral bills. One of my friends found himself let in for the discharge of a number of extra bills, owing to his retrospective proclivities. He was just beginning to overcome the adverse financial fates when, taking a complacent survey of his past, he was horrified to find it bristling with forgotten debts.

Looking backward nearly ruined that man. Another of my friends lost his life entirely through it. He was an old man and a celebrity, and a publisher offered him 2000 for his memoirs. Unfortunately my friend had a very bad memory and no diaries, and, like my other friend, he was conscientious. The publisher's offer tantalized him terribly. He did not know what to do. At last, in despair, he determined to drown himself. On the moment before his death all his past life would come back to him and pa.s.s before his mental vision. Of course I was to rescue him the instant he lost consciousness, have him rubbed with hot towels and the rest of it. We went out bathing together, and everything came off as arranged, all except his resurrection. He was too old for such experiments.

A cynical Frenchman has defined life as the collection of recollections for the time when you shall have no memory. It is, at any rate, true (and the preachers are welcome to the moral) that the keenest joys of the senses leave a scant deposit in the memory, and that if sensual pleasures are doubled in antic.i.p.ation, it is the spiritual that are doubled in looking backward.

[Sidenote: Long Lives]

Just as there are many persons of whose existence you are unaware till you read their obituaries, so there are many of whose celebrity you are ignorant till you see the advertis.e.m.e.nt of their biographies. On all sides we are flooded with big books about little people. What is this new disease that has come upon us? Life is short but a "Life" is long. Can there be any one man in this great procession of the suns who deserves the two royal octavo volumes, which is the least monument that the pious biographer builds? The perspective is all wrong. Bossuet got the history of the world into a fifth of the s.p.a.ce. How keen must be the struggle for life amid these shoals of "Lives." How futile and vain this aspiration for a "Life" beyond the grave! Vainer still the bid for immortality, when one's own hand raises the mendacious memorial. It is an open question whether even Marie Bashkirtseff's self-hewn shrine will stand--she, who sacrificed her life to her "Life." If it does, it will not be by virtue of its veracity. I would not trust George Was.h.i.+ngton himself to write a perfectly accurate record of a prior day. As for the average biography, it is but the "In Memoriam" of memory. A friend of mine has written some excellent fiction and some entertaining reminiscences; only he has mis-labelled his books, and called his fiction "reminiscences," and his reminiscences "fiction."

VIVE LA MORT!

Wherefore do the critics rage?

'T is the Biographic Age.

Every dolt who duly died In a book is glorified Uniformly with his betters; All his unimportant letters Edited by writers gifted, Every sc.r.a.p of MS. sifted, Cla.s.sified by dates and ages, Pages multiplied on pages, Till the man is--for their pains-- Buried 'neath his own Remains.

Every day the craze grows stronger, Art is long, but "lives" are longer.

Those who were the most in view Block the stage _post mortem_ too.

Hark the tongues of either s.e.x-- Reminiscences of X!

Of his juvenile affections Hundreds write their Recollections, (None will recollect their writings) Telling of his love for whitings Fried in b.u.t.ter, or his fancy For bananas, buns, and Nancy.

Thank the gracious G.o.ds on high, Every day some "Life" must die: Death alone is our salvation.

Though'tisdubious consolation That of all these countless "Lives"

Only the unfit survives.

[Sidenote: Men and Bookmen]

The literary market is inundated with people who have no right to a stall. Aristocrats are badgered for books merely because they have the t.i.tles; and to have achieved success in any other profession than literature is the surest recommendation to the favour of the publishers.

If I had to start my literary career over again, I should commence by hopping on one leg through the Pyrenees, or figuring in a big divorce case; anything short of a.s.sa.s.sination, which makes one's success too posthumous. It is most unfair, this doubling of the parts of doing and writing. Our modern heroes and heroines are quite too self-conscious; amid all their deeds of derring-do they have their eye on Mudie's. The old way was better. Even before the Pyramids were reared, when books were pictures and letters were cuneiform, heroes had their poets and kings their laureates. You can no more imagine Agamemnon, after the fall of Troy, rus.h.i.+ng off to write an account of it for "Bentley's," than you can imagine Helen certifying that she found Pears' soap matchless for the complexion. It was better for the heroes as well as for the writers.

Aeneas would never have dared to draw such constant attention to his "piety" as Virgil does; and even Louis Quatorze would have hesitated to describe the taking of Namur in the language of Boileau--

Et vous, vents, faites silence: Je vais parler de Louis.

The true hero nowadays is the man who conquers himself and does not write books.

[Sidenote: James I. on Tobacco]

But even ancient kings did write sometimes, as witness this of James I: I hold it aye to be a Kings part to the Body-Politicke of all euils & excesses, & would fain demonstrate afresh to my dear Countrey-men how abhorrent to Heauen is this stinking incense that ascendeth day & night; but amid the heat & burden of the day I cannot find an hour to examine into this matter _de nouo_, & must needs be content with commending to the readers of "Without Prejudice" my booklet, "A Counterblaste to Tobacco," imprinted _Anno_ 1604, wherein they will find the abuses of this foreign custome duly set forth at length. But, on second thoughts, perchance these moderns read nothing but what is under their noses, so I will shortly recapitulate my main positions, merely adding that my objections to Smoak are to-day even stronger than when I wrote. (1) It is a fallacie of the vulgar that _because_ the braines of men are colde & wet, therefore _Tobacco_ Smoak, being hote and dry, is good for them; a conclusion which no more followeth on the Premiss than the Ratiocination of one who should apply a cake of cold lead to his stomacke, because the Liver, being the fountaine of blood, is always hote. Moreover, the Smoak hath also a venomous qualitee. (2) It is a vulgar fallacie that the affection of mankind for the Practise is a proof that it is good for them; inasmuch as men are ledd astray by a mode, & furthermore, the affectation & conceit of the patient persuadeth him he is benefited; yet how shall one drug cure of all diseases men of all complexions? (3) Men are by this custom disabled in their goods, spending many pounds a year upon this precious stinke, and are no better than drunkards. (4) It is a great iniquitee & against all humanity that the husband shall not bee ashamed to reduce thereby his delicate, wholesome and cleane complexioned wife to that extremitee that either shee must also corrupt her sweete breath therewith, or else resolve to live in a perpetual stinking torment. In short, tis a custome lothsome to the eye, hateful to the Nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the Lungs, & in the blacke stinking fume thereof neerest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomeless.

[Sidenote: A Counterblaste to James I.]

So please your Majestie, I would beg leave in all loyaltie & service to cry you mercy on behalf of the foreign weed, _Tobacco_, which stands for all time condemned by the potent _Counterblaste_ of a monarch, the maruelle of _Christendom_, whose brow hath borne at once the bays of Apollo, the laurels of Mars, & the crownes of Scotia & Anglia. And _imprimis_ I would venture humbly to obserue that your Majesties arguments are to the last Degree asinine. Euen the t.i.tle--which, as is customarie with great personages, is the best part of your Majesties book--is marred by an unseemlie concession to paronomasia. That your Majesties manifold abuses of the Logicks may be better espied, I will take them _seriatim_. (1) The ground founded upon the Theoricke of a deceiuable apparence of Reason--your Majestie is mistaken in thinking that I hold it a sure aphorisme in the Physickes. For the braines are neuer colde & wet saue when there is water on them; & those who do not Smoak haue no braines for _Tobacco_ to benefit. (2) Your Majesties argumentation proueth how zealously your Majestie striueth to liue up to the nickname of the _British Solomon_. And, of a veritie, I could not myself run atilt more cunningly at this popular fallacie; though I might back up your Majestie with a most transparent ill.u.s.tration--to wit, that the affection of Mankind for monarchs is no proof that they are good for them. (3) I denie that _Tobacco_ wastes ones substance, & I would refer your Majestie to my demonstration of the Extrauagance of not smoaking.

(4) And is it not an advantage that it resembleth to the Stigian smoak of the pit? The more we accustom ourselves thereto, the lesse we shall suffer when we join your Majestie. Will your Majestie kindlie recommend a Brande? Nor can I conclude without a word as to the ill-taste of that supplement to your Majesties booklet--a tax of Six s.h.i.+llings & Eighte-Pence uppon euery Pounde-Waighte of _Tobacco_, ouer & aboue the Custome of Two Pence uppon the Pound-Waighte usuallye paide heretofore.

Did your Majestie hope to effect so little by Reason that your Majestie must needs fall back on Reuenue? Hauing challenged this habit by the Kings pen, how unmannerly to resort to the coastguards cutla.s.s & fight the custome at the Custome House. Was it, perhaps, that your Majestie was wishful to promote English Agriculture or was getting up a cornere in Cabbaiges?

Howsoever, Smoak hath suruiued the _Stuarts_. May I offer your Majestie a Cigarre?