Hortus Vitae Part 5

As I fastened the brooch again in my dress, I was aware of a sudden little change in my feelings. I was no longer pleased. Not that I had hoped my diamonds might prove real; you cannot buy real diamonds, even in imagination, for four francs, which was the precise sum I had expended on these, and there were seven of them, all uncommonly large.

Nor can I say that the words "old paste" had possessed, on my lips, any plain or positive meaning. But _stage jewel_, somehow ... My moral temperature had altered: I was dreadfully conscious that I was no longer pleased. Now, I had been, and to an absurd degree.

Perhaps because it was Christmas Eve, when I suddenly found myself inside that curiosity shop, pricing the diamonds, and not without an emotion of guilty extravagance, and of the difficulty of not buying if the price proved too high.... As is always the case with me at that season, my soul was irradiated with a vague sense of festivity, perhaps with the lights of rows of long-extinguished Christmas trees in the fog of many years, like the lights of the shops caught up and diffused in the moist twilight. I had felt an inner call for a Christmas present; and, so far, n.o.body had given me one. So I had paid the money and driven back into the dark, soughing country with the diamond hoop loose in my pocket. I had felt so very pleased.... And now those two cursed words "stage jewel" had come and spoilt it all.

For the first time I felt it was very, very hard that my box should have been broken open last autumn and all my valuables, my Real (the word became colossal), not _stage_, jewels stolen. It was brought home to me for the first time that the man who did it must have been very, very wicked; and that codes of law, police and even prisons could afford satisfaction to my feelings. Since, oddly enough, I had really not minded much at the time, nor let my pleasure in that wonderful old castle, where I had just arrived with the violated trunk, be in the least diminished by the circ.u.mstance. Indeed, such is the subtle, sophistic power of self-conceit, that the pleasure of finding, or thinking I found, that I did not mind the loss of those things had really, I believe, prevented me minding it. Though, of course, every now and then I had wished I might see again the little old-fas.h.i.+oned fleur-de-lysed star which had been my mother's (my heart smote me for not feeling sufficiently how much _she_ would have suffered at my losing it). And I remembered how much I had liked to play with those opals of the Queen of Hearts, which seemed the essence of pale-blue winter days with a little red flame of sunset in the midst; or, rather, like tiny lunar worlds, mysterious s.h.i.+ning lakes and burning volcanoes in their heart. Of course, I had not been indifferent: that would have taken away all charm from the serenity with which I had enjoyed my loss. But I had been serene, delightfully serene. And now!...

There was something vaguely vulgar, odious, unpardonable about false stones. I had always maintained there was not, but the stage jewel made me feel it. Mankind has sound instincts, rooting in untold depths of fitness; and superfine persons, setting themselves against them, reveal their superficiality, their lack of normal intuition and sound judgment, while fancying themselves superior. And mankind (save among barbarous Byzantine and Lombard kings, who encrusted their iron crowns impartially with balas rubies, antique cameos, and bottle gla.s.s)--mankind has always shown an instinct against sham jewels and their wearers. It is an unreasoned manifestation of the belief in truth as the supreme necessity for individuals and races, without which, as we know, there would be an end of commerce, the administration of justice, government, even family life (for birds, who have no such sense, are proverbially ignorant of their father), and everything which we call civilization. Real precious stones were perhaps created by Nature, and sham stones allowed to be created by man, as one of those moral symbols in which the universe abounds: a mysterious object-lesson of the difference between truth and falsehood.

Real diamonds and rubies, I believe, require quite a different degree of heat to melt them than mere gla.s.s or paste; and you can amuse yourself, if you like, by throwing them in the fire. In the Middle Ages rubies, but only real ones, were sovereign remedies for various diseases, among others the one which carried off Lorenzo the Magnificent; and in the seventeenth century it was currently reported that the minions of the Duke of Orleans had required pounded diamonds to poison poor Madame Henriette in that gla.s.s of chicory water. And as to pearls, real ones go yellow if unworn for a few months, and have to be sunk fathoms deep in the sea, in safes with chains and anchors, and detectives sitting day and night upon the beach, and sentries in sentry-boxes; none of which occurs with imitations. Likewise you stamp on a real pearl, while you must be quite careful not to crush a sham one. All these are obvious differences revealing the n.o.bility of the real thing, though not necessarily adding to its charm. But, then, there is the undoubted greater beauty, the wonderful _je ne sais quoi_, the depth of colour, purity of substance, effulgence of fire, of real gems, which we all recognize, although it is usual to have them tested by an expert before buying. And, when all is said and done, there is the difference in intrinsic value. And you need not imagine that value is a figment. Political economy affords us two different standards of value, the Marxian and the Orthodox. So you cannot escape from believing in it. A thing is valuable either (_a_) according to the amount of labour it embodies, or (_b_) according to the amount of goods or money you can obtain in exchange for it. Now, only let your mind dwell upon the value (_a_) embodied in a pearl or diamond. The pearl fisher, who doubtless frequently gets drowned; let alone the oyster, which has to have a horrid mortal illness, neither of which happens to the mean-spirited artificer of Roman pearls; or the diamond seeker, seeking through deserts for months; the fine diamond merchant, dying in caravans, of the past; and, finally, the diamond-cutter, grinding that adamant for weeks far, far more indefatigably than to make the optic lenses which reveal hidden planets and galaxies. All that labour, danger, that weary, weary time embodied in a thing so tiny that, like Queen Mab, it can sit on an alderman's forefinger! What could be more deeply satisfactory to think upon? And as to value (_b_) (the value in _Exchange_ of Mill, Fawcett, Marshall, Say, Bastiat, Gide), just think what you could buy by selling a largish diamond, supposing you had one! And what unlikely prices (fabulous, even monstrous) are said to have been given, before and after dubious Madame de la Motte priced that great typical one, for diamond necklaces by queens and heroines of every degree!

Precious stones, therefore, are heaven-ordained symbols of what mankind values most highly--power over other folks' labour, time, life, happiness, and honour. And that, no doubt, is the reason that when the irreproachable turn-out and perfect manners of pickpockets allow them to mix freely in our select little gatherings, it is legitimate for a lady to deck herself with artificial pearls and diamonds only to the exact extent that she has real ones safely deposited at the bank. Let her look younger and sound honester than perhaps answers to the precise reality; there is no deception in all that. But think of the dishonourableness of misleading other folk about one's income....

My soul was chastened by the seriousness of these reflections and by the recognition of the moral difference between real stones and sham ones, and I was in a very bad humour. Suddenly there came faint sounds of guitars and a mandolin, and I remembered that the servants were giving a ball at the other end of the house, and that it was Christmas Eve. I rose from my table and opened the window, letting in the music with the pure icy air. The night had become quite clear; and in its wintry blue the big stars sparkled in a cl.u.s.ter between the branches of my pine tree. They made me think of the circlet which Tintoret's Venus swoops down with over the head of the ruddy Bacchus and rose-white Ariadne.

Those, also, I said to myself ill-humouredly, were probably stage jewels.... I cannot account for the sudden train of a.s.sociations this word evoked: sweeping, magnificent gestures, star-like eyes, and a G.o.ddess' brows s.h.i.+ning through innumerable years; a bar or two of melodious _ritornello_; an ineffable sense of poetry and grandeur, and--but I am not sure--a note or two of a distant, distant voice.

Could it be Malibran--or Catalani ... and was my stage jewel bewitched, a kind of Solomon's ring, conjuring up great spirits? All I can say is that I have rarely spent a Christmas Eve like that one, while the servants' ball was going on at the other end of the house, furbis.h.i.+ng my imitation diamonds with a silk handkerchief, alone, or perhaps not alone, in my study.

MY BICYCLE AND I

We two were sitting together on the wintry Campagna gra.s.s; the rest of the party, with their proud, tiresome horses, had disappeared beyond the pale green undulations; their carriage had stayed at that castellated bridge of the Anio. The great moist Roman sky, with its song of invisible larks, arched all round; above the rejuvenated turf rustled last year's silvery hemlocks. The world seemed very large, significant, and delightful; and we had it all to ourselves, as we sat there side by side, my bicycle and I.

'Tis conceited, perhaps, to imagine myself an item in the musings of my silent companion, though I would fain be a pleasant one. But this much is certain, that, among general praising of life and of things, my own thoughts fell to framing the praises of bicycles. They were deeply felt, and as such not without appearance of paradox. What an excellent thing, I reflected, it is that a bicycle is satisfied to be quiet, and is not in the way when one is off it! Now, my friends out there, on their great horses, as Herbert of Cherbury calls them, are undoubtedly enjoying many and various pleasures; but they miss this pleasure of resting quietly on the gra.s.s with their steeds sitting calmly beside them. They are busy riding, moreover, and have to watch, to curb or humour the fancies of their beasts, instead of indulging their own fancy; let alone the necessity of keeping up a certain prestige. They are, in reality, domineered over by these horses, and these horses' standard of living, as fortunate people are dominated by their servants, their clothes, and their family connections; much as Merovingian kings, we were taught in our "Cours de Dictees," were dominated by the mayors of the palace.

Instead of which, bar accidents (and the malignity of bottle-gla.s.s and shoe-nails), I am free, and am helped to ever greater freedom by my bicycle.

These thoughts came to me while sitting there on the gra.s.s slopes, rather than while speeding along the solitary road which snakes across them to the mountains, because the great gift of the bicycle consists to my mind in something apart from mere rapid locomotion; so much so, indeed, that those persons forego it, who scorch along for mere exercise, or to get from place to place, or to read the record of miles on their cyclometer. There is an unlucky tendency--like the tendency to litter on the part of inanimates and to dulness on that of our fellow-creatures--to allow every new invention to add to life's complications, and every new power to increase life's hustling; so that, unless we can dominate the mischief, we are really the worse off instead of the better. It is so much easier, apparently, to repeat the spell (once the magician has spoken it) which causes the broomstick to fetch water from the well, as in Goethe's ballad, than to remember, or know, the potent word which will put a stop to his floodings; that, indeed, seems reserved to the master wizard; while the tiros of life's magic, puffed up with half-science, do not drink, but drown. In this way bicycling has added, methinks, an item to the hurry and breathlessness of existence, and to the difficulty of enjoying the pa.s.sing hour--nay, the pa.s.sing landscape. I have only once travelled on a bicycle, and, despite pleasant incidents and excellent company, I think it was a mistake; there was an inn to reach, a train to catch, a meal to secure, darkness to race against. And an order was issued, "Always make as much pace as you can at the beginning, because there may be some loss of time later on," which was insult and ingrat.i.tude to those mountain sides and valleys of Subiaco and Tivoli, and to the ghosts of St. Benedict, of Nero, and of the delightful beribboned Sibyl, who beckoned us to rest in their company.

How different from this when one fares forth, companioned by one of the same mind; or, better still, with one's own honourable self, exploring the unknown, revisiting the already loved, with some sort of resting-place to return to, and the knowledge of time pleasantly effaced! One speeds along the straight road, flying into the beckoning horizon, conscious only of mountain lines or stacked cloud ma.s.ses; living, for the instant, in air, s.p.a.ce become fluid and breathable, earth a mere detail; and then, at the turn, slackening earth's power a.s.serting itself with the road's windings. Curiosity keenly on edge, or memory awakened; and the past also casting its spells, with the isolated farms or the paved French villages by the river-bank, or the church spire, the towers, in the distance.... A wrong turn is no hards.h.i.+p; it merely gives additional knowledge of the country, a further detail of the characteristic lie of the land, a different view of some hill or some group of buildings. Indeed, I often deliberately deflect, try road and lane merely to return again, and have bicycled sometimes half an hour round a church to watch its transepts and choir fold and unfold, its towers change place, and its outline of high roof and gargoyles alter on the landscape. Then the joy, spiced with the sense of reluctance, of returning on one's steps, sometimes on the same day, or on successive days, to see the same house, to linger under the same poplars by the river. Those poplars I am thinking of are alongside a stately old French mill, built, towered, and gabled, of fine grey stone; and the image of them brings up in my mind, with the draught and foam of the weir and the gla.s.siness of the backwater, and the whirr of the horse-ferry's ropes, that some of the most delightful moments which one's bicycle can give, are those when the bicycle is resting against a boat's side (once also in Exmouth harbour); or chained to an old lych-gate; or, as I remarked about my Campagna ride, taking its rest also and indulging its musings.

I have alluded to the variety and alteration of pace which we can, and should, get while bicycling. Skimming rapidly over certain portions of the road--sordid suburbs, for instance--and precipitating our course to the points where we slacken and linger, the body keeps step with the spirit; and actuality forestalls, in a way, the selection by memory; significance, pleasantness, choice, not brute outer circ.u.mstance, determining the accentuation, the phrasing (in musical sense) of our life. For life must be _phrased_, lest it become mere jabber, without pleasure or lesson. Indeed, one may say that if games teach a man to stand a reverse or s.n.a.t.c.h an opportunity, so bicycling might afford an instructive a.n.a.logy of what things to notice, to talk about and remember on life's high-roads and lanes; and what others, whizzing past on scarce skimming wheel, to reject from memory and feeling.

The bicycle, in this particular, like the imagination it so well symbolizes, is a great liberator, freeing us from dwelling among ugliness and rubbish. It gives a foretaste of freedom of the spirit, reducing mankind to the only real and final inequality: inequality in the power of appreciating and enjoying. The poor clerk, or schoolmistress, or obscure individual from Grub Street can, with its help, get as much variety and pleasure out of a hundred miles' circuit as more fortunate persons from unlimited globetrotting. Nay, the fortunate person can on a bicycle get rid of the lumber and litter which const.i.tutes so large a proportion of the gifts of Fortune. For the things _one has to have_, let alone the things _one has to do_ (in deference to butler and lady's-maid, high priests of fitness), are as well left behind, if only occasionally. And among such doubtful gifts of fortune is surely the thought of the many people employed in helping one to do nothing whatever. It spoils the Campagna, for instance, to have a brougham, with coachman and footman, and grooms to lead back the horses, all kicking their heels at the bridge of the Anio: worthy persons, no doubt, and conscientiously subserving our higher existence; but the bare fact of whom, their well-appointed silhouettes, seem somehow incongruous as we get further and more solitary among the pale gra.s.s billows, deeper into that immense s.p.a.ce, that unlimited horizon of ages.

These are some of the prestigious merits of the bicycle, though many more might be added. This grotesque iron courser, not without some of the gra.s.shopper's absurd weirdness, is a creature of infinite capacities for the best kind of romance--the romance of the fancy. It may turn out to be (I always suspect it) the very mysterious steed which carried adventurous knights and damsels through forests of delightful enchantments, sprouting wings, proving a hippogriff and flying up, whenever fairies were lacking or whenever envious wizards were fussing about. And, as reward--or perhaps crown--for its many good services, reposed occasionally by Britomart's or Amadis' side, far from the world's din, even as my bicycle rested on the pale wintry gra.s.s hillocks, under the rolling cloud bales and the song of invisible larks, of the Campagna.

PUZZLES OF THE PAST

I am full of curiosity about the Past. This does not mean that I read the memoirs of Napoleon's marshals, or that I write queries to antiquarian papers, or that I enjoy being taken to see invisible Pictish barrows and Roman encampments; in fact, nothing could be further from my character and habits. But the Past puzzles me; and I like being puzzled by the Past.

Not in its details, but in all manner of general questions, and such, moreover, as very rarely admit of an answer. What are the relations of the Past and Present? Where does the Past begin? And, to go further still, what _is_ the Past?

All this sounds abstract, and even metaphysical; but it is really quite the reverse. These speculations are always connected with some concrete place or person, and they arise in my mind (and in the mind of the twenty thousand persons whom I don't know, but whom I resemble), together with some perspective of street or outline of face, and always with a faint puff of emotion. I will give you a typical instance of one of these puzzles. It formulated itself in my mind a few weeks ago at Verona, while going to see a certain little church on the slopes above the Adige. You go through the priest's house and vineyard; there is a fine carved lintel and a bit of fresco, all in the midst of a rag fair of squalid streets. What a place this must once have been! I felt the charm and splendour of piled-up palace and hanging gardens in former days. In former days! And a little doubt dropped into it, "If former days there ever were." For who can tell? This crumbling, ragged business which to us means that we stand before the Past; this gradual peris.h.i.+ng of things in neglect and defilement, may very well have formed a necessary part of our ancestors' present. Our own standard and habit of tidiness, decorum, and uniformity may be quite recent developments; barbarism, in the sense of decay and pollution, may have existed together with prosperity. It is quite possible that dead donkeys were left in the streets of Haroun-al-Raschid's Bagdad, or Semiramis'

Babylon, as well as in those of poor little modern Tangier. And the Verona of the Scaligers may have been just such a Verona as this which delights and depresses us, only with new beautiful things being built quite naturally alongside of decayed and defiled ones; things nowadays all equally levelled in ruin and squalor. The splendour of the Past may be a mere fiction of our own, like the romance of the Past which we say we no longer believe in. But history gives us, I think, no definite answer.

With this question another is closely connected. I must explain it by a simile. A foreign friend of mine insists, with some show of reason, that much as any two countries of the Continent may differ, England contrives to differ a great deal more from all of them than they can differ from each other. Well, it sometimes strikes me that, in a similar way, our Present may be wholly detached from the ma.s.s, however heterogeneous, of the Past; an island divided from the mainland of history by seas of difference, or rather, like the great Arctic countries, a separate Continent, shrouded in mystery, of which we know only that its. .h.i.therto explored sh.o.r.es face, without ever touching, the other mapped-out Continent we call the Past. For just think, let us say, of the change implied in the multiplication through machinery of a stereotyped form, as against the production of an individual object by individual hands.

Why, such a change means democracy far more than any other change in laws and franchises; and it means, among other things, that any art sprung really from the present will have to be of the nature, not of the painting or sculpture of old days, of the architecture which made each single cathedral an individual organism, but of the nature rather of process engraving, of lithography (are not our posters, Cheret's, for instance, the only thing which our ma.s.ses see, as their distant forbears saw frescoes in churches and _campo santos_?), of book printing, in short; and will not literature and music become more and more the typical kinds of art, the creation of one brain projected over millions of acres and through mere wires and cylinders? And think also of the difference in locomotion. Say what you will, people who rode in coaches were bound to be more like people who rode in litters, for all the difference between Rome under Caesar and England under George III., than like people who go by train. That is all on the surface, serious persons will answer: the pace at which people's body and goods are conveyed along may alter without their thoughts or feelings being changed the least bit. Perhaps. But are we so absolutely sure of that?

For instance, are we sure we should have been able to get on for half an hour together with even our own great-grandparents of little more than a hundred years ago? There they hang, our great-grandfathers and mothers and uncles and aunts (or some one's else, more likely), painted by Reynolds or Raeburn, delightful persons whose ghosts we would give anything to meet. Their ghosts; aye, there's the rub. For their ghosts would have altered with posthumous experience, would have had glimpses of the world we live in, and somewhat conformed to its habits; but could we really get on with the living men and women of former days? It is true that we understand and enjoy the books which they read, or rather a small number of pages out of a smaller number of books. But did they read them in the same way? I should not wonder if the different sense in which we took their favourite authors, or rather the different sense in which we discovered that they were in the habit of taking them, created considerable coolness, not to say irritation, between the ghosts of the readers of "The Vicar of Wakefield," or "Werther," or the "Nouvelle Helose" and ourselves. Besides, they would be monstrously shocked at our ways. They would think us marvellously ill-bred. While we! I dare scarcely harbour the thought, much less express it. Anyway, it is certain that they occasionally allowed Sheridan and Miss Burney (I am not even thinking of the remote people of Fielding), and even, alas!

Miss Austen, to paint pictures of them which we would scarcely own up to from novelists and playwrights of our day, and therefore I return to my puzzle: is time an unbroken continuity, all its subdivisions merely conventional, like those of postal districts; or, as I suggested above, are there real chains of mountains, chasms, nay, deep oceans, breaking up its surface; and do we not belong, we people of the nineteenth century, rather to the future which we are forming than to the Past which, much to its astonishment (I should think), produced us?

There are other puzzles about the Past, far more intimate in nature and less grandiose, but, on the whole, far less easy to answer. One of these is difficult even to word, but every reader will identify it in connection with some of the most delightful experiences he has been admitted to. Roughly, it may be expressed as follows:--Were old people ever young? Was there a period in the world's history (and not so far back) when everybody was enchantingly mixed of primness and romance, had little graces of manner, nods and becks and wreathed smiles, with a tendency every now and then to employ language rather stronger than the occasion warranted? Did youths and maidens wander about with faint moral odours of pot-pourri and quaint creases of character, as of superannuated garments long folded in a drawer! Or are these qualities taken on by each generation in turn, in which case will the Hilda w.a.n.gels and Dodos of to-day delight the twentieth century as possible inmates of Cranford?

Having worked my way to so marvellous a puzzle as this, I had better remove the strain by hastily suggesting another question, which will satisfactorily get rid of the others, to wit, whether the Past did really ever exist?

On the whole, I am tempted to believe that it did not. I can even prove it by a logical stroke worthy of the very greatest philosophers. Granted that the Past is that which no longer has any existence, only the Present could ever be real now; as the Present and the Past cannot co-exist, the Past evidently never existed at all; unless, indeed, we call in the aid of the Hegelian philosophy, and set our minds at ease by a fine reduction of contraries, to the effect that since the Present and the Past exclude one another, they evidently must really be the same thing at bottom.

This is cogent. And yet a doubt continues lurking in my mind. Is not what we think of as the Past--what we discuss, describe, and so often pa.s.sionately love--a mere creation of our own? Not merely in its details, but in what is far more important, in its essential, emotional, and imaginative quality and value? Perhaps some day psychology may discover that we have a craving, like that which produces music or architecture, for a special state of nerves (or of something else, if people are bored with nerves by that time), obtainable by a special human product called the Past--the Past which has never been the Present.

MAKING PRESENTS

It was the dreadful perplexity of making a present to a rich woman. Like Heine's sweetheart, she was abundantly provided with diamonds and pearls and all things which mankind can wish. And so the lack of any mortal thing suggested that, so far from liking to be given it, she would far rather not have it at all.

I do not choose to state whether that lady ever did get a present from me, for the statement would be an anti-climax. Suffice it that as a result of profound meditation I found myself in possession of a "Philosophy of Presents," which, copied fair on imaginary vellum, or bound in ideal morocco, I now lay at the feet of my friends, as a very appropriate gift, and entirely home-made.

The whole subject of presents is bristling with fallacies, which have arisen like thistles out of the thinness of our life and the stoniness of our hearts. One of these mistaken views is perpetually being put forward by people who a.s.sert that _the pleasantness of a gift lies in the good-will of the giver_. The notion has a specious air of amiability and disinterestedness and general good-breeding; but the only truth it really contains is that, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, a present gives exactly no pleasure at all. For, if the pleasantness of a present depended solely on the expression of good-will, why not express good-will in any of the hundred excellent modes of doing so?--for we have all of us, more or less, voice, expressive features, words ready or (more expressive still) unready, and occasions enough, Heaven knows! of making small sacrifices for our neighbours. And it is entirely superfluous to waste our substance and c.u.mber our friends' houses by adding to these convenient items, material tokens like, say, gold from Ophir and apes and peac.o.c.ks. There are inconveniences attached to the private possession of bullion; many persons dislike the voices of peac.o.c.ks, and I, at all events, am perfectly harrowed by the physiognomy of apes.

This, of course, is metaphorical; but it leads me from the mere exposition of theory to the argument from experience. If presents are pleasant because of the good-will, etc., why are we all brought up (oh, the cruelty of suppressed disappointment when the doll arrives instead of the wooden horse, or the duplicate kitchen-set instead of the longed-for box of bricks!) to pretend that the gift we receive is the very thing we have been pining for for years? And here I would ask my friend and reader, the often-much-perplexed-giver-and-receiver of gifts, whether, quite apart even from those dreadful smothered tragedies of one's childhood, there are, among the trifling false positions of life, many false positions more painful than that of choosing a gift which one knows is not wanted, unless it be the more painful position still of receiving a gift which one would tip any one to take away?

Some persons feel this so strongly, wondering why the preacher forgot this item in his list of vanities, that you may hear them loudly vowing that never again will they be caught in the act of making a present....

So far about the mistaken view of the subject; now for the right one, which is mine: the result of great experience and of infinite meditation, all coming to a head in that recent perplexed business of choosing a present for the lady with the diamonds and pearls. And before proceeding further, let me say that my experience is really exceptional.

Not that I have given many gifts, or that I am in the least certain that the few I have given were not the usual Dead Sea apples; but because I have been, what is much more to the point, a great receiver of presents, my room, my house containing nothing beautiful or pleasant that is not a present from some dear friend, or (the paradox will be explained later on) a present from myself. A great receiver of presents, also, because presents give me a very lively and special pleasure; have done so always ever since my days of Christmas-trees and birthday candles, leaving all through my life a particular permeating charm connected with certain dates and seasons, like the good, wonderful smell of old fir-needles slightly toasted, and of wax tapers recently extinguished, so that all very delightful places and moments are apt to affect me as a sort of gift-giving, what the Germans have a dear word for, beloved of children, _Bescheerung_. For if life, wisely lived, ought to be, as I firmly believe, nothing but a long act of courts.h.i.+p, then, surely, its exquisite things--summer nights with loose-hanging stars, pale sunny winter noons, first strolls through towered towns or upon herb-scented hills, the hearing again of music one has understood, not to speak of the gesture and voice of the people whom one holds dear--all these, and all other exquisite movements or exquisite items of life, should be felt with the added indescribable pleasure of being gifts.

A present, then, may be defined as a _thing which one wants given by a person whom one likes_. But our English syntax falls short of my meaning, for what I would wish to say is rather, in Teutonic fas.h.i.+on, "a by a person one likes to one given object one wants." The stress of the sentence should be laid on the word _wants_. For much of the charm, and most of the dignity, of a gift depends on its being _a thing one would otherwise have done without_.

This is true even with those dreadful useful objects which make us feel hot to distribute; they have become melancholy possible presents because, alas! however necessary, they would otherwise not have been forthcoming. And, apart from such cases, mankind has always decided that gifts should not be of the nature of blankets, or manuals of science, or cooking-pots, but rather flowers, fruit, books of poetry, and the wares of silken Samarkand and cedared Lebanon. It is admitted upon all hands that, to be perfect, presents must be superfluities; but I should like to add that the reverse also holds good, and that superfluities would be the better, nine times out of ten, for being presents.

'Tis, methinks, a sign of the recent importation and comparative scarcity of honest livelihoods, that we should think so much how we come by our money, and so little how we part with it, as if we were free to waste, provided we do not steal. Now, _my manuals of political economy_ (which were, of course, _not_ presents to me) make it quite plain that whatever we spend in mere self-indulgence is so much taken away from the profitable capital of the community; and sundry other sciences, which require no manuals to teach them, make it plainer still that the habit of indulging, upon legal payment, our whims and our greedinesses, fills our houses with lumber and our souls with worse than lumber where there might be light and breathable air. Extremes meet: and even as to paupers, the barest necessaries of life are superfluities--things dispensed with; so, at the other end of the vicious circle, to the spendthrift luxury ceases to be luxury, and superfluities are turned into things one cannot do without.

The charm of a gift, its little moral flavour which makes us feel the better for it, resides, therefore, not merely in good-will, but in the little prelude of self-restraint on the one hand, of unselfishness on the other. Unless you gave it me, I should not have that pleasant thing; and you, knowing this much, give it to me, instead of to yourself. What a complicated lovers'-knot of good-feeling there is tied, as round flowers or sweetmeats, round every genuine present! This is a rich, varied impression, full of harmonies; compare with it the dry, dull, stifling impression one gets from looking round a rich man's house, or admiring the ornaments of a rich woman's person: all these things having merely been bought!

Yet buying can be a fine thing. And among genuine presents (and in an honourable place) I certainly include--as I hinted some way back--the presents which people _sometimes make to themselves_. For 'tis a genuine present when a person who never allows himself a superfluity, at last buys one, as Charles and Mary Lamb did their first blue pots and prints, out of slowly saved up pennies. There is in that all the grace of long self-restraint, and the grace of finally triumphant love--love for that faithfully courted object, that Rachel among inanimates! The giving to one's self of such a present is a fit occasion for rejoicing; and 'tis a proper instinct (more proper than the one of displaying wedding presents) which causes the united giver and receiver of the gift to summon the neighbours, to see it and rejoice, not without feasting.

But presents of this sort are even more difficult to compa.s.s than the other sort where people, like the lady sung by Heine, have pearls and diamonds in plenty, and all things which mankind can wish.