The Delicious Vice | Page 3

upon even the smallest second of eternity?
Who can repeat a joy or duplicate a sweet sorrow? Who has ever had
more than one first sweetheart, or more than one first kiss under the
honeysuckle? Or has ever seen his name in print for the first time, ever
again? Is it any wonder that all these inexplicable longings, these
hopeless hopes, were summed up in the heart-cry of Faust--
"Stay, yet awhile, O moment of beauty."

* * * * *
Yet, I maintain, Dr. Faustus was a weak creature. He begged to be
given another and wholly different chance to linger with beauty. How
much nobler the magnificent courage of the veteran novel-reader, who
in the old age of his service, asks only that he may be permitted to do
again all that he has done, blindly, humbly, loyally, as before.
Don't I know? Have I not been there? It is no child's play, the life of a
man who--paraphrasing the language of Spartacus, the much neglected
hero of the ages--has met upon the printed page every shape of perilous
adventure and dangerous character that the broad empire of fiction
could furnish, and never yet lowered his arm. Believe me it is no carpet
duty to have served on the British privateers in Guiana, under
Commodore Kingsley, alongside of Salvation Yeo; to have been a loyal
member of Thuggee and cast the scarf for Bowanee; to have watched
the tortures of Beatrice Cenci (pronounced as written in honest English,
and I spit upon the weaklings of the service who imagine that any freak
of woman called Bee-ah-treech-y Chon-chy could have endured the
agonies related of that sainted lady)--to have watched those tortures, I
say, without breaking down; to have fought under the walls of Acre
with Richard Coeur de Lion; to have crawled, amid rats and noxious
vapors, with Jean Valjean through the sewers of Paris; to have dragged
weary miles through the snow with Uncas, Chief of the Mohicans; to
have lived among wild beasts with Morok the lion tamer; to have
charged with the impis of Umslopogaas; to have sailed before the mast
with Vanderdecken, spent fourteen gloomy years in the next cell to
Edmund Dantes, ferreted out the murders in the Rue Morgue, advised
Monsieur Le Cocq and given years of life's prime in tedious
professional assistance to that anointed idiot and pestiferous scoundrel,
Tittlebat Titmouse! Equally, of course, it has not been all horror and
despair. Life averages up fairly, as any novel-reader will admit, and
there has been much of delight--even luxury and idleness--between the
carnage hours of battle. Is it not so? Ask that boyish-hearted old scamp
whom you have seen scuttling away from the circulating library with M.
St. Pierre's memoirs of young Paul and his beloved Virginia under his
arm; or stepping briskly out of the book store hugging to his left side a
carefully wrapped biography of Lady Diana Vernon, Mlle. de la
Valliere, or Madame Margaret Woffington; or in fact any of a thousand

charming ladies whom it is certain he had met before. Ladies too, who,
born whensoever, are not one day older since he last saw them. Nearly
a hundred years of Parisian residence have not served to induce the
Princess Haydee of Yanina to forego her picturesque Greek gowns and
coiffures, or to alter the somewhat embarrassing status of her relations
with her striking but gloomy protector, the Count of Monte Cristo.
The old memories are crowded with pleasures. Those delicious
mornings in the allee of the park, where you were permitted to see
Cosette with her old grandfather, M. Fauchelevent; those hours of
sweet pain when it was impossible to determine whether it was
Rebecca or Rowena who seemed to give most light to the day; the
flirtations with Blanche Amory, and the notes placed in the hollow tree;
the idyllic devotion of Little Emily, dating from the morning when you
saw her dress fluttering on the beam as she ran along it, lightly, above
the flowing tide--(devotion that is yet tender, for, God forgive you
Steerforth as I do, you could not smirch that pure heart;) the
melancholy, yet sweet sorrow, with which you saw the loved and lost
Little Eva borne to her grave over which the mocking-bird now sings
his liquid requiem. Has it not been sweet good fortune to love Maggie
Tulliver, Margot of Savoy, Dora Spenlow (undeclared because she was
an honest wife--even though of a most conceited and commonplace
jackass, totally undeserving of her); Agnes Wicklow (a passion quickly
cured when she took Dora's pitiful leavings), and poor ill-fated Marie
Antoinette? You can name dozens if you have been brought up in good
literary society.
* * * * *
These love affairs may be owned freely, as being perfectly honorable,