Alone

N >> Norman Douglas >> Alone

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It is always entertaining to see ourselves as others see us. I had the
presence of mind to interject some anti-British remark, which produced
the desired effect.

"Now they howl about the sufferings of Belgium, because their money-bags
are threatened. They fight for poor Belgium. They did not fight for
France in 1870, or for Denmark or Poland or Armenia. Trade was not
threatened. There was no profit in view. Profit! And they won't even
supply us with coal----"

Always that coal.

It is clear as daylight. England has failed in her duty--her duty being
to supply everybody with coal, ships, money, cannons and anything else,
at the purchaser's valuation.

He made a few more statements of this nature, and I think he enjoyed his
little fling at that, for him, relatively speaking, since the war began,
rara avis, a genuine Englishman (Teutonic construction); I certainly
relished it. Then I asked:

"Where did you learn this? About Armenia, I mean, and Poland?"

"From my father. He was University Professor and Deputy in Parliament.
One also picks up a little something at school. Don't you agree with
me?"

"Not altogether. You seem to forget that a nation cannot indulge in
those freaks of humanitarianism which may possibly befit an individual.
A certain heroic dreamer told men to give all they had to the poor. You,
if you like, may adopt this idealistic attitude. You may do generous
actions such as your country cannot afford to do, since a nation which
abandons the line of expediency is on the high road to suicide. If I
have a bilious attack, by all means come and console me; if Poland has a
bilious attack, there is no reason why England should step in as
dry-nurse; there may be every reason, indeed, why England should stand
aloof. Now in Belgium, as you say, money is involved. Money, in this
national sense, means well-being; and well-being, in this national
sense, is one of the few things worth fighting for. However, I am only
throwing out one or two suggestions. On some other day, I would like to
discuss the matter with you point by point--some other day, that is,
when you are not playing football and have just a few clothes on. I am
now at a disadvantage. You could never get me to impugn your statements
courageously--not in that costume. It would be like haggling with Apollo
Belvedere. Why do you wear those baby things?"

"We are all wearing them, this season."

"So I perceive. How do you get into them?"

"Very slowly."

"Are they elastic?"

"I wish they were."....

Four minutes' talk. It gave me an insight. He was an intellectualist. As
such, he admired brute force but refused to employ it. He was civilized.
Like many products of civilization, he was unaware of its blessings and
unconcerned in its fate. Is it not a feature peculiar to civilization
that it thinks of everything save war? That is why they are uprooted,
these flowerings, each in its turn.

My father told me; often one hears that remark, even from adults. As if
a father could not be a fool like anybody else! That a child should have
hard-and-fast opinions--it is engaging. Children are egocentric. A
fellow of this size ought to be less positive.

These refined youths are fastidious about their clothes. They would not
dream of buying a ready-made suit, however well-fitting. They are
content to take their opinions second-hand. Unlike ours, they are seldom
alone; they lack those stretches of solitude during which they might
wrestle with themselves and do a little thinking on their own account.
When not with their family, they are always among companions, being far
more sociable and fond of herding together than their English
representatives. They talk more; they think less; they seem to do each
other's thinking, which takes away all hesitation and gives them a
precocious air of maturity. If this decorative lad engages in some
profession like medicine or engineering there is hope for him, even as
others of his age rectify their perspective by contact with crude
facts--groceries and calicoes and carburettors and so forth. Otherwise,
his doom is sealed. He remains a doctrinaire. This country is full of
them.

And then--the sterilizing influence of pavements. Even when summer comes
round, they all flock in a mass to some rowdy place like this Viareggio
or Ancona where, however pleasant the bathing, spiritual life is yet
shallower than at home. What says Craufurd Tait Ramage, LL.D.? "Their
country life consists merely in breathing a different air, though in
nothing else does it differ from the life they live in town."

He notices things, does Ramage; and might, indeed, have elaborated this
argument. The average Italian townsman seems to have lost all sense for
the beauty of rural existence; he is incurious about it; dislodge him
from the pavement--no easy task--and he gasps like a fish out of water.
Squares and cafes--they stimulate his fancy; the doings and opinions of
fellow-creatures--thence alone he derives inspiration. What is the
result? A considerable surface polish, but also another quality which I
should call dewlessness. Often glittering like a diamond, he is every
bit as dewless. His materialistic and supercilious outlook results, I
think, from contempt or nescience of nature; you will notice the trait
still more at Venice, whose inhabitants seldom forsake their congested
mud-flat. Depth of character and ideality and humour--such things
require a rustic landscape for their nurture. These citizens are arid,
for lack of dew; unquestionably more so than their English
representatives.

POSTSCRIPT.--The pavements of Florence, by the way, have an
objectionable quality. Their stone is too soft. They wear down rapidly
and an army of masons is employed in levelling them straight again all
the year round. And yet they sometimes use this very sandstone, instead
of marble, for mural inscriptions. How long are these expected to remain
legible? They employ the same material for their buildings, and I
observe that the older monuments last, on the whole, better than the new
ones, which flake away rapidly--exfoliate or crack, according to the
direction from which the grain of the rock has been attacked by the
chisel. It may well be that Florentines of past centuries left the hewn
blocks in their shady caverns for a certain length of time, as do the
Parisians of to-day, in order to allow for the slow discharge and
evaporation of liquid; whereas now the material, saturated with
moisture, is torn from its damp and cool quarries and set in the blazing
sunshine. At the Bourse, for instance,--quite a modern structure--the
columns already begin to show fissures. [7]

Amply content with Viareggio, because the Siren dwells so near, I stroll
forth. The town is awake. Hotels are open. Bathing is beginning. Summer
has dawned upon the land.

I am not in the city mood, three months in Florence having abated my
interest in humanity. Past a line of booths and pensions I wander in the
direction of that pinery which year by year is creeping further into the
waves, and driving the sea back from its old shore. There is peace in
this green domain; all is hushed, and yet pervaded by the mysterious
melody of things that stir in May-time. Here are no sombre patches, as
under oak or beech; only a tremulous interlacing of light and shade. A
peculiarly attractive bole not far from the sea, gleaming rosy in the
sunshine, tempts me to recline at its foot.

This insomnia, this fiend of the darkness--the only way to counteract
his mischief is by guile; by snatching a brief oblivion in the hours of
day, when the demon is far afield, tormenting pious Aethiopians at the
Antipodes. How well one rests at such moments of self-created night,
merged into the warm earth! The extreme quietude of my present room,
after Florentine street-noises, may have contributed to this
restlessness. Also, perhaps, the excitement of Corsanico. But chiefly,
the dream--that recurrent dream.

Everybody, I suppose, is subject to recurrent dreams of some kind. My
present one is of a painful or at least sad nature; it returns
approximately every three months and never varies by a hair's breadth. I
am in a distant town where I lived many years back, and where each stone
is familiar to me. I have come to look for a friend--one who, as a
matter of fact, died long ago. My sleeping self refuses to admit this
fact; once embarked on the dream-voyage, I hold him to be still alive.
Glad at the prospect of meeting my friend again, I traverse cheerfully
those well-known squares in the direction of his home.... Where is it,
that house; where has it gone? I cannot find it. Ages seem to pass while
I trample up and down, in ever-increasing harassment of mind, along
interminable rows of buildings and canals; that door, that
well-remembered door--vanished! All search is vain. I shall never meet
him: him whom I came so far to see. The dismal truth, once established,
fills me with an intensity of suffering such as only night-visions can
inspire. There is no reason for feeling so strongly; it is the way of
dreams! At this point I wake up, thoroughly exhausted, and say to
myself: "Why seek his house? Is he not dead?"

This stupid nightmare leaves me unrefreshed next morning, and often
bears in its rear a trail of wistfulness which may endure a week. Only
within the last few years has it dared to invade my slumbers. Before
that period there was a series of other recurrent dreams. What will the
next be? For I mean to oust this particular incubus. The monster annoys
me, and even our mulish dream-consciousness can be taught to acquiesce
in a fact, after a sufficient lapse of time.

There are dreams peculiar to every age of man. That celebrated one of
flying, for instance--it fades away with manhood. I once indulged in a
correspondence about it with a well-known psychologist, [8] and would
like to think, even now, that this dream is a reminiscence of leaping
habits in our tree-haunting days; a ghost of the dim past, therefore,
which revisits us at night when recent adjustments are cast aside and
man takes on the credulity and savagery of his remotest forefathers; a
ghost which comes in youth when these ancient etchings are easier to
decypher, being not yet overscored by fresh personal experiences. What
is human life but a never-ending palimpsest?

So I pondered, when my musings under that pine tree were interrupted by
the arrival on the scene of a young snake. I cannot say with any degree
of truthfulness which of us two was more surprised at the encounter. I
picked him up, as I always do when they give me a chance, and began to
make myself agreeable to him. He had those pretty juvenile markings
which disappear with maturity. Snakes of this kind, when they become
full-sized, are nearly always of a uniform shade, generally black. And
when they are very, very old, they begin to grow ears and seek out
solitary places. What is the origin of this belief? I have come across
it all over the country. If you wish to go to any remote or inaccessible
spot, be sure some peasant will say: "Ah! There you find the serpent
with ears."

These snakes are not easy to catch with the hand, living as they do
among stones and brushwood, and gliding off rapidly once their
suspicions are aroused. This one, I should say, was bent on some
youthful voyage of discovery or amorous exploit; he walked into the trap
from inexperience. As a rule, your best chance for securing them is when
they bask on the top of some bush or hedge in relative unconcern,
knowing they are hard to detect in such places. They climb into these
aerial situations after the lizards, which go there after the insects,
which go there after the flowers, which go there after the sunshine,
struggling upwards through the thick undergrowth. You must have a quick
eye and ready hand to grasp them by the tail ere they have time to lash
themselves round some stem where, once anchored, they will allow
themselves to be pulled in pieces rather than yield to your efforts. If
you fail to seize them, they trickle earthward through the tangle like a
thread of running water.

He belonged to that common Italian kind which has no English
name--Germans call them Zornnatter, in allusion to their choleric
disposition. Most of them are quite ready to snap at the least
provocation; maybe they find it pays, as it does with other folks, to
assume the offensive and be first in the field, demanding your place in
the sun with an air of wrathful determination. Some of the big fellows
can draw blood with their teeth. Yet the jawbones are weak and one can
force them asunder without much difficulty; whereas the bite of a
full-grown emerald lizard, for instance, will provide quite a novel
sensation. The mouth closes on you like a steel trap, tightly
compressing the flesh and often refusing to relax its hold. In such
cases, try a puff of tobacco. It works! Two puffs will daze them; a
fragment of a cigar, laid in the mouth, stretches them out dead. And
this is the beast which, they say, will gulp down prussic acid as if it
were treacle.

But snakes vary in temperament as we do, and some of these Zamenis
serpents are as gentle and amiable as their cousin the Aesculap snake.
My friend of this afternoon could not be induced to bite. Perhaps he was
naturally mild, perhaps drowsy from his winter sleep or ignorant of the
ways of the world; perhaps he had not yet shed his milk teeth. I am
disposed to think that he forgot about biting because I made a
favourable impression on him from the first. He crawled up my arm. It
was pleasantly warm, but a little too dark; soon he emerged again and
glanced around, relieved to discover that the world was still in its old
place. He was not clever at learning tricks. I tried to make him stand
on his head, but he refused to stiffen out. Snakes have not much sense
of humour.

Lizards are far more companionable. During two consecutive summers I had
a close friendship with a wall-lizard who spent in my society certain of
his leisure moments--which were not many, for he always had an
astonishing number of other things on hand. He was a full-grown male,
bejewelled with blue spots. A fierce fighter was Alfonso (such was his
name), and conspicuous for a most impressive manner of stamping his
front foot when impatient. Concerning his other virtues I know little,
for I learnt no details of his private life save what I saw with my
eyes, and they were not always worthy of imitation. He was a polygamist,
or worse; obsessed, moreover, by a deplorable habit of biting off the
tails of his own or other people's children. He went even further. For
sometimes, without a word of warning, he would pounce upon some innocent
youngster and carry him in his powerful jaws far away, over the wall,
right out of my sight. What happened yonder I cannot guess. It was
probably a little old-fashioned cannibalism.

Though my meals in those days were all out of doors, his attendance at
dinner-time was rather uncertain; I suspect he retired early in order to
spend the night, like other polygamists, in prayer and fasting. At the
hours of breakfast and luncheon--he knew them as well as I did--he was
generally free, and then quite monopolized my company, climbing up my
leg on to the table, eating out of my hand, sipping sugar-water out of
his own private bowl and, in fact, doing everything I suggested. I did
not suggest impossibilities. A friendship should never be strained to
breaking-point. Had I cared to risk such a calamity, I might have taught
him to play skittles....

For the rest, it is not very amusing to be either a lizard or a snake in
Italy. Lizards are caught in nooses and then tied by one leg and made to
run on the remaining three; or secured by a cord round the neck and
swung about in the air--mighty good sport, this; or deprived of their
tails and given to the baby or cat to play with; or dragged along at the
end of a string, like a reluctant pig that is led to market. There are
quite a number of ways of making lizards feel at home.

With snakes the procedure is simple. They are killed; treated to that
self-same system to which they used to treat us in our arboreal days
when the glassy eye of the serpent, gleaming through the branches, will
have caused our fur to stand on end with horror. No beast provokes human
hatred like that old coiling serpent. Long and cruel must have been his
reign for the memory to have lingered--how many years? Let us say, in
order to be on the safe side, a million. Here, then, is another ghost of
the past, a daylight ghost.

And look around you; the world is full of them. We live amid a legion of
ancestral terrors which creep from their limbo and peer in upon our
weaker moments, ready to make us their prey. A man whose wits are not
firmly rooted in earth, in warm friends and warm food, might well live a
life of ceaseless trepidation. Many do. They brood over their immortal
soul--a ghost. Others there are, whose dreams have altogether devoured
their realities. These live, for the most part, in asylums.

There flits, along this very shore, a ghost of another kind--that of
Shelley. Maybe the spot where they burnt his body can still be pointed
out. I have forgotten all I ever read on that subject. An Italian
enthusiast, the librarian of the Laurentian Library in Florence,
garnered certain information from ancient fishermen of Viareggio in
regard to this occurrence and set it down in a little book, a book with
white covers which I possessed during my Shelley period. They have
erected a memorial to the English poet in one of the public squares
here. The features of the bust do not strike me as remarkably etherial,
but the inscription is a good specimen of Italian adapted to lapidary
uses--it avoids those insipid verbal terminations which weaken the
language and sometimes render it almost ridiculous.

Smollet lies yonder, at Livorno; and Ouida hard by, at Bagni di Lucca.
She died in one of these same featureless streets of Viareggio, alone,
half blind, and in poverty....

I know Suffolk, that ripe old county of hers, with its pink villages
nestling among drowsy elms and cornfields; I know their "Spread Eagles"
and "Angels" and "White Horses" and other taverns suggestive--sure sign
of antiquity--of zoological gardens; I know their goodly ale and old
brown sherries. Her birthplace, despite those venerable green mounds, is
comparatively dull--I would not care to live at Bury; give me Lavenham
or Melford or some place of that kind. While looking one day at the
house where she was born, I was sorely tempted to crave permission to
view the interior, but refrained; something of her own dislike of prying
and meddlesomeness came over me. Thence down to that commemorative
fountain among the drooping trees. The good animals for whose comfort it
was built would have had some difficulty in slaking their thirst just
then, its basin being chocked up with decayed leaves.

We corresponded for a good while and I still possess her letters
somewhere; I see in memory that large and bold handwriting, often only
two words to a line, on the high-class slate-coloured paper. The sums
she spent on writing materials! It was one of her many ladylike traits.

I tried to induce her to stay with me in South Italy. She made three
conditions: to be allowed to bring her dogs, to have a hot bath every
day, and two litres of cream. Everything could be managed except the
cream, which was unprocurable. Later on, while living in the Tyrolese
mountains, I renewed the invitation; that third condition could now be
fulfilled as easily as the other two. She was unwell, she replied, and
could not move out of the house, having been poisoned by a cook. So we
never met, though she wrote me much about herself and about
"Helianthus," which was printed after her death. In return, I dedicated
to her a book of short stories; they were published, thank God, under a
pseudonym, and eight copies were sold.

She is now out of date. Why, yes. Those guardsmen who drenched their
beards in scent and breakfasted off caviare and chocolate and sparkling
Moselle--they certainly seem fantastic. They really were fantastic. They
did drench their beards in scent. The language and habits of these
martial heroes are authenticated in the records of their day; glance,
for instance, into back numbers of Punch. The fact is, we were all
rather ludicrous formerly. The characters of Dickens, to say nothing of
Cruikshank's pictures of them: can such beings ever have walked the
earth?

If her novels are somewhat faded, the same cannot be said of her letters
and articles and critiques. To our rising generation of authors--the
youngsters, I mean; those who have not yet sold themselves to the
devil--I should say: read these things of Ouida's. Read them
attentively, not for their matter, which is always of interest, nor yet
for their vibrant and lucid style, which often rivals that of Huxley.
Read them for their tone, their temper; for that pervasive good
breeding, that shining honesty, that capacity of scorn. These are
qualities which our present age lacks, and needs; they are conspicuous
in Ouida. Abhorrence of meanness was her dominant trait. She was
intelligent, fearless; as ready to praise without stint as to voice the
warmest womanly indignation. She was courageous not only in matters of
literature; courageous, and how right! Is it not satisfactory to be
right, when others are wrong? How right about the Japanese, about
Feminism and Conscription and German brutalitarianism! How she puts her
finger on the spot when discussing Marion Crawford and D'Annunzio! Those
local politicians--how she hits them off! Hers was a sure touch. Do we
not all now agree with what she wrote at the time of Queen Victoria and
Joseph Chamberlain? When she remarks of Tolstoy, in an age which adored
him (I am quoting from memory), that "his morality and monogamy are
against nature and common sense," adding that he is dangerous, because
he is an "educated Christ"--out of date? When she says that the world is
ruled by two enemies of all beauty, commerce and militarism--out of
date? When she dismisses Oscar Wilde as a cabotin and yet thinks that
the law should not have meddled with him--is not that the man and the
situation in a nutshell?

No wonder straightforward sentiments like these do not appeal to our age
of neutral tints and compromise, to our vegetarian world-reformers who
are as incapable of enthusiasm as they are of contempt, because their
blood-temperature is invariably two degrees below the normal. Ouida's
critical and social opinions are infernally out of date--quite
inconveniently modern, in fact. There is the milk of humanity in them,
glowing conviction and sincerity; they are written from a standpoint
altogether too European, too womanly, too personally-poignant for
present-day needs; and in a language, moreover, whose picturesque and
vigorous independence comes as a positive shock after the colourless
Grub-street brand of to-day.

They come as a shock, these writings, because in the brief interval
since they were published our view of life and letters has shifted. A
swarm of mystics and pragmatists has replaced the lonely giants of
Ouida's era. It is an epoch of closed pores, of constriction. The novel
has changed. Pick up the average one and ask yourself whether this
crafty and malodorous sex-problem be not a deliberately commercial
speculation--a frenzied attempt to "sell" by scandalizing our
unscandalizable, because hermaphroditic, middle classes? Ouida was not
one of these professional hacks, but a personality of refined instincts
who wrote, when she cared to write at all, to please her equals; a
rationalistic anti-vulgarian; a woman of wide horizons who fought for
generous issues and despised all shams; the last, almost the last, of
lady-authors. What has such a genial creature in common with our anaemic
and woolly generation? "The Massarenes" may have faults, but how many of
our actual woman-scribes, for all their monkey-tricks of cleverness,
could have written it? The haunting charm of "In Maremma": why ask our
public to taste such stuff? You might as well invite a bilious
nut-fooder to a Lord Mayor's banquet.

The mention of banquets reminds me that she was blamed for preferring
the society of duchesses and diplomats to that of the Florentine
literati, as if there were something reprehensible in Ouida's fondness
for decent food and amusing talk when she could have revelled in Ceylon
tea and dough-nuts and listened to babble concerning Quattro-Cento
glazes in any of the fifty squabbling art-coteries of that City of
Misunderstandings. It was one of her several failings, chiefest among
them being this: that she had no reverence for money. She was unable to
hoard--an unpardonable sin. Envied in prosperity, she was smugly pitied
in her distress. Such is the fate of those who stand apart from the
crowd, among a nation of canting shopkeepers. To die penniless, after
being the friend of duchesses, is distinctly bad form--a slur on
society. True, she might have bettered her state by accepting a
lucrative proposal to write her autobiography, but she considered such
literature a "degrading form of vanity" and refused the offer. She
preferred to remain ladylike to the last, in this and other little
trifles--in her lack of humour, her redundancies, her love of expensive
clothes and genuinely humble people, of hot baths and latinisms and
flowers and pet dogs and sealing-wax. All through life she made no
attempt to hide her woman's nature, her preference for male over female
company; she was even guilty of saying that disease serves the world
better than war, because it kills more women than men. Out of date, with
a vengeance!

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