Prose Fancies | Page 4

It is I!' in awestruck
antiphony, till the stars appear; and, holiest converse of all, the mystic
prattle of mother and babe: why are all these such wonderful talk if not
because we remember no word of them--only the glory? They leave us
nothing, in image worthy of the time, to 'pigeon-hole,' nothing to store
with our vouchers in the 'pigeon-holes' of memory.
Pigeon-holes of memory! Think of the degradation. And memory was
once a honeycomb, a hive of all the wonderful words of poets, of all the
marvellous moods of lovers. Once it was a shell that listened
tremulously upon Olympus, and caught the accents of the Gods; now it
is a phonograph catching every word that falleth from the mouths of the
board of guardians. Once a muse, now a servile drudge 'twixt man and
man.
And this 'pigeon-hole' memory--once an impressionist of divine

moments, now the miser of all unimportant, trivial detail--is our tyrant,
the muse of modern talk. Men talk now not what they feel or think, but
what they remember, with their bad good memories. If they
remembered the poets, or their first love, or the spring, or the stars, it
were well enough: but no! they remember but what the poets ate and
wore, the last divorce case, the state of the crops, the last trivial detail
about Mars. The man with the muck-rake would have made a great
reputation as a talker had he lived to-day: for, as our modern speech has
it, a Great Man simply means a Great Memory, and a Great Memory is
simply a prosperous marine-store.
What, in fact, do we talk about? Mainly about our business, our food,
or our diseases. All three themes more or less centre in that of food.
How we revel in the brutal digestive details, and call it gastronomy!
How our host plumes himself on his wine, as though it were a personal
virtue, and not the merely obvious accessory of a man with ten
thousand a year! Strange, is it not, how we pat and stroke our
possessions as though they belonged to us, instead of to our
money--our grandfather's money?
There is, some hope and believe, an imminent Return to
Simplicity--Socialism the unwise it call. If it be really true, what good
news for the grave humorous man, who hates talking to anything but
trees and children! For, if that Return to Simplicity means anything, it
must mean the sweeping away of immemorial rookeries of talk--such
crannied hives of gossip as the professions, with all their garrulous
heritage of trivial witty ana: literary, dramatic, legal, aristocratic,
ecclesiastical, commercial. How good to dip them all deep in the great
ocean of oblivion, and watch the bookworms, diarists, 'raconteurs,' and
all the old-clothesmen of life, scurrying out of their holes, as when in
summer-time Mary Anne submerges the cockroach trap within the pail!
And oh, let there be no Noah to that flood! Let none survive to tell
another tale; for, only when the chronicler of small-beer is dead shall
we be able to know men as men, heroes as heroes, poets as
poets--instead of mere centres of gossip, an inch of text to a yard of
footnote. Then only may we begin to talk of something worth the
talking: not merely of how the great man creased his trousers, and call

it 'the study of character,' but of how he was great, and whether it is
possible to climb after him.
Talk, too, is so definite, so limited. The people we meet might seem so
wonderful, might mean such quaint and charming meanings sometimes,
if they would not talk. Like some delightfully bound old volume in a
foreign tongue, that looks like one of the Sibylline books, till a friend
translates the title and explains that it is a sixteenth-century law
dictionary: so are the men and women we meet. How interesting they
might be if they would not persist in telling us what they are about!
That, indeed, is the abiding charm of Nature. No sensible man can envy
Asylas, to whom the language of birds was as familiar as French argot
to our young décadents. Think how terrible it would be if Nature could
all of a sudden learn English! That exquisite mirror of all our shifting
moods would be broken for ever. No longer might we coin the
woodland into metaphors of our own joys and sorrows. The birds
would no longer flute to us of lost loves, but of found worms; we
should realise how terribly selfish they are; we could never more quote
'Hark, hark, the lark at heaven's gate sings,' or poetise with Mr. Patmore
of 'the heavenly-minded thrush.' And what awful voices some of those
great red roses would have! Yes, Nature is so sympathetic because she