Prose Fancies | Page 7

tradesmen bid us 'beware of imitations.' Dark wine of
forgetfulness.... No, that was a quotation. However, here was the phial.
I drew the cork, inhaled for a moment the hard dry odour of poppies,
and prepared to drink. But just at that moment I seemed to hear a horrid
little laugh coming out of the bottle, and a voice chuckled at my ear:
'You ass, do you call that original?' It was so absurd that I burst out into
hysterical laughter. Here had I been about to do the most 'banal' thing
of all. Was there anything in the world quite so commonplace as
suicide?
And with the good spirits of laughter came peace. Nay, why worry to
be 'original'? Why such haste to be unlike the rest of the world, when

the best things of life were manifestly those which all men had in
common? Was love less sweet because my next-door neighbour knew
it as well? Would the same reason make death less bitter? And were not
those tender diminutives all the more precious, because their vowels
had been rounded for us by the sweet lips of lovers dead and
gone?--sainted jewels, still warm from the beat of tragic bosoms,
flowers which their kisses had freighted with immortal meanings.
And then I bethought me how the meadow-daisies were one as the
other, and how, when the pearly shells of the dog rose settled on the
hedge like a flight of butterflies, one was as the other; how the birds
sang alike, how star was twin with star, and in peas is no distinction.
My rhetoric stopped as I was about to say 'as wife is to wife'--for I
thought I would first kiss her and see: and lo! I was once more
perplexed, for as I looked down into her eyes, simple and blue and deep,
as the sky is simple and blue and deep, I declared her to be the only
woman in the world--which was obviously not exact. But it was true,
for all that.

FRACTIONAL HUMANITY
Mankind, in its heavy fashion, has chosen to mock the tailor with the
fact--the indubitable fact--that he is but the ninth part of a man. Yet,
after all, at this time of day, it seems more of a compliment than a gibe.
To be a whole ninth of a man! Few of us, when we ponder it, can boast
so much. Take, for instance, that other proverbial case of the
fractional-part-of-a-pin-maker. It takes nine persons to make a pin, we
were taught in our catechism. Actually that means that it takes nine
persons to make one whole pin-maker, which leaves the question still
to be solved as to how many whole pin-makers it takes to make a man.
What is the relation of one pin-maker to the whole social economy?
That discovered, a multiplication by nine will give us the exact
fractional part of manhood which belongs to the ninth-of-a-pin-maker.
Obviously he is a much more microscopic creature than the
immemorially despised tailor, and, alas! his case is nearest that of most
of us. And it is curious to notice how we rejoice in, rather than lament,

this inevitable result of that great law of differentiation, which one may
figure as a terrible machine hour after hour chopping up mankind into
more and more infinitesimal fragments. We feel a pride in being
spoken of as 'specialists'--and yet what is a specialist? The
nine-hundred-and-ninety-ninth part of a man. Call me not an
entomologist, call me a lepidopterist, if you will--though, really, that is
too broad a term for a man who is not so much taken up with moths
generally as with the third ring of the antennæ of the great oak-eggar.
If one is troubled with a gift for symbolism, it is hard to treat any man
one meets as though he were really a whole man: to treat a lawyer as
though he were anything but a deed of assignment, or a surgeon as if he
were anything more than an operation. As the metropolitan trains load
and unload in a morning, what does one see? Gross upon gross of steel
pens, a few quills, whole carriages full of bricklayers' trowels, and how
strange it seems to watch all the bank-books sorting themselves out
from the motley, and arranging themselves in the first classes, just as
we see them on the shelf in the bank! It is a curious sight. The little
shop-girl there, what is she but a roll of pink ribbon?--nay, she is but
half-a-yard. And the poor infinitesimal porters and guards, how
pathetically small seems their share in the great monosyllable Man,
animalcules in that great social system which, again, is but an
animalcule in the blood of Time. Still more infinitesimal seems the man
who