The Quest of the Golden Girl | Page 8

laws laid down for it by the professors of
aesthetics. All the beauty that has ever been in the world has broken the
laws of all previous beauty, and unwillingly dictated laws to the beauty
that succeeded it,--laws which that beauty has no less spiritedly broken,
to prove in turn dictator to its successor.
The immortal sculptors, painters, and poets have always done exactly
what their critics forbade them to do. The obedient in art are always the
forgotten.
Likewise beautiful women have always been a law unto themselves.
Who could have prophesied in what way any of these inspired
law-breakers would break the law, what new type of perfect
imperfection they would create?
So we return to the Perfect Woman, having gained this much
knowledge of her,--that her perfection is nothing more or less than her
unique, individual, charming imperfection, and that she is simply the
woman we love and who is fool enough to love us.
CHAPTER VI

IN WHICH THE AUTHOR ANTICIPATES DISCONTENT ON THE
PART OF HIS READER
"But come," I imagine some reader complaining, "isn't it high time for
something to happen?" No doubt it is, but what am I to do? I am no less
discontented. Is it not even more to my interest than to the reader's for
something to happen? Here have I been tramping along since
breakfast-time, and now it is late in the afternoon, but never a feather of
her dove's wings, never a flutter of her angel's robes have I seen. It is
disheartening, for one naturally expects to find anything we seek a few
minutes after starting out to seek it, and I confess that I expected to find
my golden mistress within a very few hours of leaving home. However,
had that been the case, there would have been no story, as the novelists
say, and I trust, as he goes on, the reader may feel with me that that
would have been a pity. Besides, with that prevision given to an author,
I am strongly of opinion that something will happen before long. And if
the worst comes to the worst, there is always that story of my First
Love wherewith to fill the time. Meanwhile I am approaching a
decorative old Surrey town, little more than a cluster of ripe old inns, to
one of which I have much pleasure in inviting the reader to dinner.
CHAPTER VII
PRANDIAL
Dinner!
Is there a more beautiful word in the language?
Dinner!
Let the beautiful word come as a refrain to and fro this chapter.
Dinner!
Just eating and drinking, nothing more, but so much!
Drinking, indeed, has had its laureates. Yet would I offer my mite of

prose in its honour. And when I say "drinking," I speak not of
smuggled gin or of brandy bottles held fiercely by the neck till they are
empty.
Nay, but of that lonely glass in the social solitude of the tavern,--alone,
but not alone, for the glass is sure to bring a dream to bear it company,
and it is a poor dream that cannot raise a song. And what greater
felicity than to be alone in a tavern with your last new song, just born
and yet still a tingling part of you.
Drinking has indeed been sung, but why, I have heard it asked, have we
no "Eating Songs?"--for eating is, surely, a fine pleasure. Many practise
it already, and it is becoming more general every day.
I speak not of the finicking joy of the gourmet, but the joy of an honest
appetite in ecstasy, the elemental joy of absorbing quantities of fresh
simple food,--mere roast lamb, new potatoes, and peas of living green.
It is, indeed, an absorbing pleasure. It needs all our attention. You must
eat as you kiss, so exacting are the joys of the mouth,--talking, for
example. The quiet eye may be allowed to participate, and sometimes
the ear, where the music is played upon a violin, and that a Stradivarius.
A well-kept lawn, with six-hundred-years-old cedars and a twenty-feet
yew hedge, will add distinction to the meal. Nor should one ever eat
without a seventeenth-century poet in an old yellow-leaved edition
upon the table, not to be read, of course, any more than the flowers are
to be eaten, but just to make music of association very softly to our
thoughts.
Some diners have wine too upon the table, and in the pauses of thinking
what a divine mystery dinner is, they eat.
For dinner IS a mystery,--a mystery of which even the greatest chef
knows but little, as a poet knows not,
"with all his lore, Wherefore he sang, or whence the mandate sped."
"Even our digestion is governed by angels," said Blake; and if you will

resist the trivial inclination to substitute