“She is not Cleopatra, but she is at least Charmian,”
wrote Keats, conscious that his damsel was not in the vanward of the
pageant of ladies. One may divine that he counted the ways wherein
she was not Cleopatra, the touches whereby she fell short of and differed
from, nay, in which she mimicked, the Queen.
In like manner many of us have for some years past boasted of our
appreciation of the inferior beauty, the substitute, the waiting gentlewoman
of corrupt or corruptible heart; Keats confessed, but did not boast.
It is a vaunt now, an emulation, who shall discover her beauty, who
shall discern her.
She is most conspicuous in the atmosphere in smoke “effects,”
in the “lurid,” the “mystery”; such are the
perfervid words. But let us take the natural and authentic light
as our symbol of Cleopatra, her sprightly port, her infinite jest, her
bluest vein, her variety, her laugh. “O Eastern star!”
Men in cities look upward not much more than animals, and these—except
the dog when he bays the moon—look skyward not at all. The
events of the sky do not come and go for the citizens, do not visibly
approach and withdraw, threaten and pardon; they merely happen.
And even when the sun so condescends as to face them at the level of
their own horizon (say from the western end of the Bayswater Road),
when he searches out the eyes that have neglected him all day, finds
a way between their narrowing lids, looks straight into their unwelcoming
pupils, explores the careful wrinkles, singles and numbers the dull
hairs, even, I say, to sudden sunset in our dim climate, the Londoner
makes no reply; he would rather look into puddles than into the pools
of light among clouds.
Yet the light is as characteristic of a country as is its landscape.
So that I would travel for the sake of a character of early morning,
for a quality of noonday, or a tone of afternoon, or an accident of
moonrise, or a colour of dusk, at least as far as for a mountain, a
cathedral, rivers, or men. The light is more important than what
it illuminates. When Mr. Tomkins—a person of Dickens’s
earliest invention—calls his fellow-boarders from the breakfast-table
to the window, and with emotion shows them the effect of sunshine upon
the left side of a neighbouring chimney-pot, he is far from cutting
the grotesque figure that the humourist intended to point out to banter.
I am not sure that the chimney-pot with the pure light upon it was not
more beautiful than a whole black Greek or a whole black Gothic building
in the adulterated light of a customary London day. Nor is the
pleasure that many writers, and a certain number of painters, tell us
they owe to such adulteration anything other than a sign of derogation—in
a word, a pleasure in the secondary thing.
Are we the better artists for our preference of the waiting-woman?
It is a strange claim. The search for the beauty of the less-beautiful
is a modern enterprise, ingenious in its minor pranks, insolent in its
greater. And its chief ignobility is the love of marred, defiled,
disordered, dulled, and imperfect skies, the skies of cities.
Some will tell us that the unveiled light is too clear or sharp for
art. So much the worse for art; but even on that plea the limitations
of art are better respected by natural mist, cloudy gloom of natural
rain, natural twilight before night, or natural twilight—Corot’s—before
day, than by the artificial dimness of our unlovely towns. Those,
too, who praise the “mystery” of smoke are praising rather
a mystification than a mystery; and must be unaware of the profounder
mysteries of light. Light is all mystery when you face the sun,
and every particle of the innumerable atmosphere carries its infinitesimal
shadow.
Moreover, it is only in some parts of the world that we should ask
for even natural veils. In California we may, not because the
light is too luminous, but because it is not tender. Clear and
not tender in California, tender and not clear in England; light in
Italy and in Greece is both tender and clear.
When one complains of the ill-luck of modern utilities, the sympathetic
listener is apt to agree, but to agree wrongly by denouncing the electric
light as something modern to be deplored. But the electric light
is the one success of the last century. It is never out of harmony
with natural things—villages, ancient streets of cities, where
it makes the most beautiful of all street-lighting, swung from house
to opposite house in Genoa or Rome. With no shock, except a shock
of pleasure, does the judicious traveller, entering some small sub-alpine
hamlet, find the electric light, fairly, sparingly spaced, slung from
tree to tree over the little road, and note it again in the frugal wine-shop,
and solitary and clear over the church portal.
Yet, forsooth, if yielding to the suggestions of your restless hobby,
you denounce, in any company, the spoiling of your Italy, the hearer,
calling up a “mumping visnomy,” thinks he echoes your complaint
by his sigh, “Ah, yes—the electric light; you meet it everywhere
now; so modern, so disenchanting.” It is, on the contrary,
enchanting. It is as natural as lightning. By all means
let all the waterfalls in all the Alps be “harnessed,” as
the lamentation runs, if their servitude gives us electric light.
For thus the power of the waterfall kindles a lovely lamp. All
this to be done by the simple force of gravitation—the powerful
fall of water. “Wonderful, all that water coming down!”
cried the tourist at Niagara, and the Irishman said, “Why wouldn’t
it?” He recognised the simplicity of that power. It
is a second-rate passion—that for the waterfall, and often exacting
in regard to visitors from town. “I trudged unwillingly,”
says Dr. Johnson, “and was not sorry to find it dry.”
It was very, very second-rate of an American admirer of scenery to name
a waterfall in the Yosemite Valley (and it bears the name to-day) the
“Bridal Veil.” His Indian predecessor had called it,
because it was most audible in menacing weather, “The Voice of
the Evil Wind.” In fact, your cascade is dearer to every
sentimentalist than the sky. Standing near the folding-over place
of Niagara, at the top of the fall, I looked across the perpetual rainbow
of the foam, and saw the whole further sky deflowered by the formless,
edgeless, languid, abhorrent murk of smoke from the nearest town.
Much rather would I see that water put to use than the sky so outraged.
As it is, only by picking one’s way between cities can one walk
under, or as it were in, a pure sky. The horizon in Venice is
thick and ochreous, and no one cares; the sky of Milan is defiled all
round. In England I must choose a path alertly; and so does now
and then a wary, fortunate, fastidious wind that has so found his exact,
uncharted way, between this smoke and that, as to clear me a clean moonrise,
and heavenly heavens.
There was an ominous prophecy to Charmian. “You shall
outlive the lady whom you serve.” She has outlived her in
every city in Europe; but only for the time of setting straight her
crown—the last servility. She could not live but by comparison
with the Queen.
