Part 20 (1/2)
By the way, what exquisite irony lies in some of your kitchen nomenclature!
Once at a great house in the west I saw a gathering on the young lord's coming of age. There were half the highest people in England there; and a little while before the tenantry went to their banquet in the marquees, the boy-peer and his guests were all out on the terraces and the lawns. With him was a very n.o.ble deer-hound, whom he had owned for four years.
Suddenly the hound, Red Comyn, left his t.i.tled master, and plunged head-foremost through the patrician crowd, and threw himself in wild raptures on to a poor, miserable, tattered, travelling cobbler, who had dared to creep in through the open gates and the happy crowds, hoping for a broken crust. Red Comyn pounced on him, and caressed him, and laid ma.s.sive paws upon his shoulders, and gave him maddest welcome--this poor hungry man, in the midst of that aristocratic festival.
The cobbler could scarcely speak awhile; but when he got his breath, his arms were round the hound, and his eyes were wet with tears.
”Please pardon him, my lord,” he said, all in a quiver and a tremble.
”He was mine once from the time he was pupped for a whole two year; and he loved me, poor soul, and he ha'n't forgot. He don't know no better, my lord--he's only a dog.”
No; he didn't know any better than to remember, and be faithful, and to recognise a friend, no matter in what woe or want. Ah, indeed, dogs are far behind you!
For the credit of ”the order,” it may be added that Red Comyn and the cobbler have parted no more, but dwell together still upon that young lord's lands.
Appearances are so and so, hence facts must be so and so likewise, is Society's formula. This sounds mathematical and accurate; but as facts, nine times out of ten, belie appearances, the logic is very false. There is something, indeed, comically stupid in your satisfied belief in the surface of any parliamentary or public facts that may be presented to you, varnished out of all likeness to the truth by the suave periods of writer or speaker. But there is something tragically stupid about your dogged acceptation of any social construction of a private life, d.a.m.ned out of all possibility of redemption by the flippant deductions of chatter-box or of slanderer.
Now and then you poor humanities, who are always so dimly conscious that you are all lies to one another, get a glimpse of various truths from some cynical dead man's diary, or some statesman's secret papers. But you never are warned: you placidly continue greedily to gobble up, unexamined, the falsehoods of public men; and impudently to adjudicate on the unrevealed secrets of private lives.
You are given, very continually, to denouncing or lamenting the gradual encroachment of mob-rule. But, alas! whose fault, pray, is it that bill-discounters dwell as lords in ancient castles; that money-lenders reign over old, time-honoured lands; that low-born hirelings dare to address their master with a grin and sneer, strong in the knowledge of his shameful secrets; and that the vile daughters of the populace are throned in public places, made gorgeous with the jewels which, from the heirlooms of a great patriciate, have fallen to be the gew-gaws of a fas.h.i.+onable infamy?
Ah, believe me, an aristocracy is a feudal fortress which, though it has merciless beleaguers in the Jacquerie of plebeian Envy, has yet no foe so deadly as its own internal traitor of Lost Dignity!
”But ye dunna get good wage?” said the miner, with practical wisdom.
”We doan't,” confessed the East Anglian, ”we doan't. And that theer botherin' machinery as do the thres.h.i.+n', and the reapin', and the sawin', and the mowin', hev a ruined us. See!--in old time, when ground was frost-bit or water-soaked, the min threshed in-doors, in barns, and kep in work so. But now the machine, he dew all theer is to dew, and dew it up so quick. Theer's a many more min than theer be things to dew. In winter-time measter he doan't want half o' us; and we're just out o'
labour; and we fall sick, cos o' naethin' to eat; and goes tew parish--able-bodied min strong as steers.”
”Machine's o' use i' mill-work,” suggested one of the northerners.
”O' use! ay, o' coorse 'tis o' use--tew tha measters,” growled the East Anglian. ”But if ye warn't needed at yer mill cos the iron beast was a weavin' and a reelin' and a dewin' of it all, how'd yer feel? Wi' six children, mebbe, biggest ony seven or eight, a crazin' ye for bread. And ye mayn't send 'em out, cos o' labour-laws, to pick up a halfpenny for theerselves; and tha pa.s.son be all agin yer, cos ye warn't thrifty and didn't gev a penny for the forrin blacks out o' the six s.h.i.+llin' a week?
Would yer think iron beast wor o' use thin? or would yer d.a.m.n him hard?”
The poetic faculty--as you call the insight and the sympathy which feels a divinity in all created things and a joy unutterable in the natural beauty of the earth--is lacking in the generality of women, notwithstanding their claims to the monopoly of emotion. If it be not, how comes it that women have given you no great poet since the days of Sappho?
It is women's deficiency in intellect, you will observe. Not a whit: it is women's deficiency in sympathy.
The greatness of a poet lies in the universality of his sympathies. And women are not sympathetic, because they are intensely self-centred.