Читать книгу The Romance of the Commonplace - Gelett Burgess - Страница 5

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They were begun in the April of my life, and though it is now well into mid-June, some of the glamour of the Spring yet inspires me, and I am still a-wondering. I have tried every charm to preserve my youth, and a drop of wine and a girl or two into the bargain, but the game is near played out.

But what boots marbles and tops when one is initiated into the mysteries of billiards and chess? It has taken me all these years to find that there is sport for every season, and the rules vary. To make a bold play at life, then, without cheating (which is due only to a false conception of the reward), and with the progress, rather than the particular stage reached, in mind, is my aim. So I have tossed overboard all my fears and regrets, and gone in for the higher problems of maturity.

Still, a few of the maxims I drew from my joys and sorrows in the few calmer moments of reverie persist; and these all strengthen me in the romantic view of life. A man must take his work or his art seriously, and pursue it with a single intent; he must fix upon the realities first of all, but there is room for imagination as well, and with this I have savoured my duties, as one puts sauce to pudding. Enough has been written upon the earnestness of motive, of sobriety and all the catalogue of virtues usually dignified with capital initials. I own allegiance to an empire beside all that--another Forest of Arden--the tinkle of whose laughter is a permanent sustained accompaniment to the more significant notes of man's sober industries.

Must I be dubbed trifler then, because I make a game of life? Every man of spirit and imagination must, I think, be a true sportsman. It is in the blood of genius to love play for its own sake, and whether one uses one's skill on thrones or women, swords or pens, gold or fame, the game's the thing! Surely, it is not only the reward that makes it worth while, it is the problem--the study of each step on the way, the disentangling of the knotted cord of fate, the sequence and climax of move after move, the logical grasp of what is to come upon the chess-board. As it is in the great, then, may it not be in the small? To one of fancy and poetic vision, mere size is an accident, a personal element, a relative, not an absolute quality of things. The microscope reveals wonders to the scientist, as great and as important as does the telescope. To the poet, "a primrose by the river's brim" has the beauty of the Infinite. And so nothing is commonplace, or to be taken for granted. One needs only the fresh eye, the eagerness of interest, and this Universe of workaday things which, with the animals, we get "for a penny, plain," may be coloured with the twopence worth of mind by which we are richer than they.

We have all passed through that phase of art-appreciation in which familiar objects are endowed with an extrinsic æsthetic value. The realist discovers a new sensation in a heap of refuse, the impressionist in the purple shadows of the hills. In weaker intellects the craving for this dignifying of the obvious leads to the gilding of the rolling-pin or the decalcomanie decoration of the bean-pot. With something of each of these methods, I would practice upon every-day affairs, and make them picturesque.

This is, perhaps, a characteristically Oriental point of view of life. Undoubtedly it is the Japanese pose, and it is well illustrated in their art. What by Korin would be thought too insignificant for portrayal? He had but to separate an object, or a group of objects, from its environment and he beheld a design, with line, mass, colour and notan. Art was to him not a question of subject, but of composition. He held his frame before a tiny fragment of the visible world, any fragment, indeed, and, placing that in its true position, not in regard to its surroundings, but in regard to the frame, it became a pattern. May we not, for our diversion, do thus with Life? If we hold up our frame, disregarding the accidental shadows of tradition and establishment, we may see bits of a new world.

It is thus that the man from Mars would view our life and manners. Unsophisticated, he would hold his frame in front of a man, and, cutting him off from his family, his neighbours, his position in Society, he would see a personage as real and as individual as "the Man with the Glove," or "the Unknown Woman" is to us. He would bring an uncorrupted eye and see strange pictures in the facts of our jaded routine. He would see in accustomed meetings and actions hidden possibilities and secret charms. He would witness this drab life of ours as a bewilderingly endless romance. Nothing would be presupposed, nothing foreseen, and each turn of the kaleidoscope would exhibit another of the infinitely various permutations of human relationship.

Such is the philosophy of youth. It denies the conventional postulates of the Philistine. It will not accept the axioms of the unimaginative; two and two may prove to make five, upon due investigation, seemingly parallel cases may widely diverge, and the greater may not always include the less, in this non-Euclidean Geometry of Life. It transmutes the prose of living into the poetry of idealization, as love transmutes the physical fact of osculation into the beatitude of a kiss. It makes mysteries of well-known occurrences, and it turns accepted marvels into simple truths, comprehensible and self-evident.

Civilization refines and analyzes. It seeks the invisible rays of the spectrum and delights in overtones, subtle vibrations and delicate nuances of thought. So this neglected philosophy of enthusiasm also gleans the neglected and forgotten mysteries of humanity. Its virtue is in its economy; it wrings the last drop of sensation from experience. Like modern processes of manufacture it produces good from what was considered but waste and tailings. By a positive contribution to happiness it refutes the charge of trifling, for in the practice of this art one does but pick up what has been thrown away. All's fish that comes to its net.

But it is more than a science; it has more than an economic value for happiness--it is a religion. The creed of hope bids one wonder and hope and rejoice, it teaches us to listen for the whispered voice, to see the spirit instead of the body of the facts of life. But it does more; it is illuminating, and reveals a new conception of beauty. There is an apocryphal legend of the Christ that tells how He with His disciples were passing along a road, when they came upon the body of a dead dog. Those with Him shrank from the pitiful sight with loathing, and drew away. But Jesus went calmly up to the decaying flesh and leaning over it, said gently, "How beautifully white are his teeth!" The customary moral drawn from the story is one of gentleness and pity, the kindness and charity of looking at the good, rather than the evil that is present. But it has a more literal meaning, and teaches clearly the lesson of beauty.

For it has come to this: that even in our pleasures we are influenced by prejudice and tradition. Some things are as empirically branded beautiful or ugly, as others are declared right or wrong, and to this dogma we conform. Korin, when he held his frame before a clothes-line fluttering with damp garments, saw not only an interesting design, but a beautiful one; yet the Monday's wash might be taken as something typically vulgar and ugly to the common mind.

We Anglo-Saxons have debased many facts of life, once rightly thought of as exquisitely beautiful, into the category of the beast. Sexual passion is the great example, but there are myriads of lesser things which, viewed calmly, purely, as some strange god able to see clearly without passion or prejudice, might view them, would take on lovely aspects. When such situations approach the pathetic, as the sight of some forlorn half-naked mother nursing her child on a doorstep, or the housemaid, denied of the chance of seclusion, embracing her lover in the publicity of the park, this diviner phase of common human nature is patent to the casual observer. When they approach the comic, also, it is easier to believe that every scene may have its complimentary phase, and the most careless may read the joke between the lines. But much of the more subtle delight of life escapes us, like the tree-toad in the oak, because it is so much a part of its surroundings; its charm is of so intrinsic a value that we do not notice it. We are used to finding our beauty within gilt rectangles, set off from other things not so denominated as especially worthy of regard; we expect it to be labelled and highly coloured.

Two things alone remain safe from this bias of custom--Love and Youth. To the lover, the tying of a shoe-lace on his mistress's foot may be as sacred a rite and may contain as much sentiment as the most impassioned caress. To the child, the mud-pile has possibilities of infinite bliss. To the one comes eternal beauty, to the other eternal mystery. And so, to touch these forever, and to lose no intermediary sensation of charm, whether it be humour, romance, pathos or inspiration, to be bound by every link that connects Youth to Love, that was my April essay!