 |
| Continued on page 156 |
Strangers' Houses
by Rebecca West
· When you visit Britain you will be able to indulge in one pleasure which is new to our generation and is a refreshment, a refuge, a return. You yourself may live in a most beautiful house, something ghost white and minutely stately in New England, something colonnaded in the South, or something ambling and untroubled in the nineteenth-century way on high ground looking over to the Welsh Hills in Pennsylvania. But however proud you are of it, you must admit that it does not offer quite the same perfection to your eyes as it did the first time you saw it. That pearly look has gone, that purity. What has happened has been explained fully, though not in architectural terms, by a French dramatist named Porto-Riche in a play which was a success soon after World War I, called The Print Seller. In this a crippled veteran, happily married to a woman who has tended his infirmities and made him a good home and helped him build up his business, suddenly falls in love with a stranger of whom he knows nothing, whom he simply sees in the street as she goes about her errands. Such is his infatuation that it destorys his marriage and his life; and as the pair crash down into the abyss, his heartbroken wife begs him to tell her the secret of the stranger's power over him. He stammers, "Well. . . she's never done anything for me." This is an excellent reason; and it applies to houses as well as to human beings.
Our houses have done too much for us, we have done too much for them. They minister to our creature comforts, but like so many of those who love us, they follow their own ideas of what is best for us, and not ours; and of course there follows an argument. Just now my house is giving me hot bath water only in the middle of the day as obstinately as if it hoped to improve my character that way, and I am trying to turn it to my way of thinking by giving it a new furnace. No doubt that will settle the dispute, but it must leave a scar on our relationship, such as might be left on a marriage by a long wrangle about the proper school for the children. A web of care lies all about our houses and covers the gardens too. There can be no doubt that the cedar of Lebanon is the most beautiful of the conifers, with its layers of dark-bright branches, like spread arms with open hands, palms held downwards, and stretched fingers feeling the wind. The only one of them that does not give me unmitigated pleasure is that one that pleases me most, because it grows on the slope beneath my windows. I know how many branches, it has cast during the last few winters, and my heart contracts with anxiety when I see it at its best, with the wind tugging hard at all the stretched fingers. Then I suffer that most disagreeable of feelings, I feel I ought to do something about it.
It would be better, too, if our houses contracted and expelled us when any painful incident was going to occur. But as it is we have often to live on the fields where we met our worst defeat. The most shocking example of this ordeal that I ever came across was in the Scottish town where I was brought up. One Sunday, in one of those high, gray Northern houses, a schoolfellow of mine was seated at the dinner table, having her midday meal with her father, her mother and her four brothers and sisters. The room was one of a thousand in that town; there would be thick red curtains at the tall narrow windows and late Georgian mahogany furniture polished to the brown brightness of a peat stream by a Highland maid. My school-fellow's father was laying the carving knife to the Sunday joint when he paused, looked up into vacancy, sighed and laid down the carving knife. He left the room and his family was fixed for some minutes in a daze. Then his wife stood up and bade one of her sons carve the joint while she went up to see what was the matter with his father. But before she could leave the room, they heard the front door bang and saw their father hurry down the street. Meanwhile another of my school-fellows was having her Sunday midday meal with her family, like in number, in a room that also had its thick red curtains and its late Georgian furniture. They had got a little further on with their meal, the Sunday joint had been carved and was being eaten when there was a knock at the front door. Presently there burst into the room, brushing aside a startled maidservant, the gentleman who had just abandoned his Sunday joint. Without saying one word he advanced toward the wife of the gentleman who had finished carving his Sunday joint, grasped her wrist, and drew her out of the room under the goggling eyes of her family, who were to see her no more. The guilty couple went to London, where, as it was acidly said by the Scottish world they had forsaken, people do not mind that sort of thing, and the man started a new business, and they lived happily ever after. But in those days respectable Scots never moved house, it was a habit confined to the lower orders. So the deserted families went on eating their meals in dining rooms which certainly no guest ever entered for many long years afterwards without recalling that sudden flight from the Sunday joint to love.
Few of us have homes as deeply scarred by catastrophe as that; but almost all of us sometimes look round a room and remember that it was here we first found ourselves in a battle which we fought or finessed or simply lost. All this means that you can love the house you live in, but you cannot be in love with it. You and it have struggled to establish certain values, and you will have had your successes together; but when you first saw it, you imagined that you had only to move into it for all struggles to cease. So if you want to enjoy a house as you enjoy a person with whom you are in love, you should make sure that it is not your home. It should not even belong to a close friend, for if the friendship is real you will soon begin to worry with them over whatever it is they love that casts its branches in a high wind, you will learn what they had instead of an elopement in the dining room. The house should not belong to any of the great, for they burn up their houses with their own light. In no memory of Virginia Woolf do I see her surroundings, except when I think of her in her garden under the Sussex Downs, among her strangely abundant and richly-colored flowers, standing on the edge of the small swift gray river she was to prefer to them. Colette's apartment in the Palais Royal is bound to be full of objects, because all French writers are in the matter of interior decoration either magpies or monks, and Colette would obviously not live in a stripped cell. But I can remember none of her possessions except some tarnished gilt laurel wreaths of the sort they offer to the illustrious in France, the equivalent of paper hats to wear on Parnassian gala nights, which hung on the walls of the antichamber to her bedroom. I would have seen more had I seen less distinctly the brilliant eyes, as of a young and witty she-wolf, which the septuagenarian to whom they belonged had emphatically outlined with ulramarine blue eye shadow, proud and amazed that a part of her was still running wild and free.
It might seem convenient to have a love affair with a house belonging to acquaintances to whom you are indifferent, but that is a relationship impossible to maintain. If you keep on visiting the house you will either get fond of its owners, and the colonnade and the staircase you admired so much will become invisible, or you will take a dislike to the owners, and the colonnade and the staircase will assume the dignified pathos of cats who belong to their inferiors. There is no help for it, you must have your love affair with a house which is the property of a total stranger; and that you can do without difficulty if only you come to Britain and seek the offices of the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty, which is at 42, Queen Anne's Gate, London. S.W., just five minutes' walk from Westminster Abbey, and accessible by more than one Iittle alley opening off Birdcage Walk in St. James's Park. It, as the phrase goes, will fix you up with everything you want.
The Trust is a body which deals with the inorganic equivalents of displaced persons: houses and landscapes which had their assured place in a society which has now collapsed and left them to fend for themselves. England has many a beautiful house which in the ordinary course of events would have to be sold when its owner dies, because high taxation makes it impossible for any estate to save up enough to pay its death duties; and there are many stretches of woodland and moor and riverbank which might on like occasions fall into the hands of conscienceless builders. If the owner dies leaving little or no money, that fate still befalls it; and as few private individuals can afford to live in them, some are turned into hotels and most are used as social welfare institutions. So many serve this latter purpose, it is possible that in the future there may be citizens who because they are so wretchedly unfortunate, being, say, the children of unmarried and destitute mothers, becoming juvenile delinquents and then developing epilepsy or insanity, that never in all their darkened lives will they succeed in sleeping a night in anything less splendid than a Palladian mansion. But if the owner has enough money to make an endowment sufficient for the upkeep of his house, the National Trust will take it from him and get the Treasury to keep its claws off the endowment, on condition that the public is allowed to visit it at certain times. The Trust has in this way reprieved from the ruin of the age a two-hundred-and-fiftieth part of Britain, all beautiful; and at its offices you will get a list of properties which will tell you on what days, for a fee usually well under seventy-five cents, you may visit them.
Your special meat among them is the string of great country houses with names like the English butlers in Lonsdale plays, Barrington, Blickling, Lyme, Montacute, Attingham, Gunby and the rest-all superb, all belonging to strangers, all with that pearly look, that purity, all ready to be fallen in love with. The situation is ideal. Some of them, and those the best, like Knole and West Wycombe Park and Ham House, are only an hour or less from London.
It is paradisal. In the long gallery the shafts of sunlight strike through the broad high Jacobean windows at each end and lie on the polished floor boards, which are the color of sherry, the best dry sherry. It is not because of any effort or exhortation of yours that they are so bright. The worn brocade hangings are a breath of crimson on the walls between the portraits of the men who are for the most part handsomer than men are today and the women who are for the most part plainer than women are today (or so it seems to a woman). That brocade would spread into fine unrelated threads under the lightest touch. The faces in the portraits show a secretive and resentful strain, thickening through the ages; it would be hard to keep friends with this family. But you do not need to handle either the brocade or the family. It is true that the owners of most National Trust houses are encouraged to go on living in them, because that prevents them from freezing into museums. But the family will be upstairs or out in the garden and will think of you simply as one of the faceless reasons which make them have lunch early on the days of admission. There need never be a rag of human relationship to veil from you the lovely aspect of the room, to distract you from wonder at the Jacobean trick of building a long gallery so proportioned, so set to east and west, that in the early morning and late afternoon it becomes an oblong box filled to the top with golden, grainy sunlight.
You will not appreciate your good luck, of course. You will find yourself wishing that even if you could not live in this house, you could have taken part in the life which was carried on there. But you will be wrong. You have no guarantee that it would give you any of the same pleasure you find in the room, for nothing is more certain than that people can be completely unaffected by the houses in which they live, particularly if they inherit them. You will find an example of that at one of the three places which every American visitor should aim at seeing in Britain because their like is to be found in no other country in the world: Hampton Court Palace, Knole and Stourhead. There is no building more deeply satisfying than Hampton Court Palace with its rose red bricks and its cobbled courtyards. Walk through it and you will experience the abundance of the Tudor age and will understand how it came to produce Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth and Shakespeare and Sir Thomas More and other characters of whom there was enough to go round. Knole is Tudor too; and it is characteristic of English history that because it belonged to a peer it is much more formal and impressive than the royal palace. Our royalty has never been as aristocratic as its own aristocrats. Stourhead (which you can visit in the course of a motor trip that takes in Salisbury and Wells and Glastonbury and Bath) has gardens, laid out in the eighteenth century, which are among the finest in England and are still in excellent order.
This is to say much. For no American can fully understand how horrible is the life of many persons who own large gardens in Britain today. It is as if a woman had to go about clad in a dress made for her by Poiret in, say, 1920. It was beautiful then, and it is in a way still beautiful, but the stuff is wearing out and she has had to patch it with any bit of cloth she can lay hold of, and the seams are giving way and have to be pinned together. A large garden must be just such a botched survival. The supply of efficient gardeners is drying up because gardening is a craft that must be learned in boyhood and cannot be mastered by men who were young soldiers during the war or are now conscripted for military training. The cost of the inefficient labor which is available is enormous; it takes just about four times the money to staff a garden that it did before 1939. The housing shortage means that cottages built for gardeners have often to be handed over to the more essential agricultural laborers. It might seem simple enough to grass the gardens over, but this is not easy if the gardens are valuable from a botanical point of view, and it is even less easy if they are so beautiful that they constitute a work of art, as many do. Stourhead may fairly be judged the equivalent of one of the major poems of Alexander Pope, who would perhaps have admitted that. for he greatly admired it and wrote a couplet for inscription on its grotto. But Stourhead mercifully did not have to be martyred, for its last owner was a childless banker who could leave it with a large endowment to the National Trust.
So there it waits for you, nearer nature than most gardens, for there are no parterres and avenues, only a lake with woods dropping down to it from hills, and flowers and bushes growing near the water's edge; yet infinitely artificial, with its temples and its bridges, a fantasy based on an eighteenth-century banker's memories of Claude Lorraine's memories of the ruins of the antique Roman world. You will enter an exquisite neoclassical fairy tale when you stand in the dim light of the grotto, where the lovely nymph lies sleeping, the rivulets gently sliding down the green-stained stone wall behind her, as nearly drowsy as water ever could be. The adults who made this were playing like children, yet were not childish. You may feel that you would have liked to play in their company. But the Henry Hoare who laid out this garden was a friend of Walpole and Pope, and I cannot believe that the scene would have been so clear before the eye if Walpole had been beside one, flashing the spyglass of his connoisseurship in every direction; and if Pope had been presenting one with the antithesis of his sweetness and his malice, the conflict between his straight mind and his crooked body. And as for the generous donor who left Stourhead to the Trust, there would have been difficulties there, too, though of another sort. He was the most delightful of men, married to an equally delightful wife; they lived in amity for fifty-three years and died on the same day. He loved and served Stourhead; but all the same he thought of himself as having added to Stourhead a possession worthy of it when he had himself painted sitting in an armchair, with a dreamy expression on his face, in his mouth a cigar, from which smoke was issuing and forming a shadowy portrait of his wife. This is one of the final masterpieces of bad taste; it can be compared to the famous statue of the Venus deMilo with a clock in her stomach; and it would have been hard to congratulate the charming old gentleman on it if one had just come up from the grotto.
Decidedly you lose nothing by being alone with these houses and gardens and parks; indeed, if you have a good imagination, you will gain enormously. The most brilliant conversation that ever came my way I did not hear. It was reflected on the face of a mannequin at a London show, no longer very young, who showed the more elaborate dresses with extraordinary success, because she created a portrait of the ideal society in which women would wear such clothes. When she went down the room, she seemed to be smiling at an amusing and intelligent remark which someone had just made to her; and when she turned and came back, it could be seen in her eyebrows and her lips and her wrists that she had carried the argument a stage further by her retort. All her poses suggested the tensity of a gathering in which talk was a game, yet so much more than a game that one, would not like to fail in playing it. The secret, I discovered, was that she had been deaf from childhood. She had never heard the things we really say, she had been misled by the only thing she knew about conversation, which was the abstract idea of it. That is what strangers' houses do for us, they present us afresh with the abstract idea of society; we can realize it in our imaginations with the happy freedom of children filling in outlines with color in a painting-book. >>>>>
Our houses have done too much for us, we have done too much for them. They minister to our creature comforts, but like so many of those who love us, they follow their own ideas of what is best for us, and not ours; and of course there follows an argument. Just now my house is giving me hot bath water only in the middle of the day as obstinately as if it hoped to improve my character that way, and I am trying to turn it to my way of thinking by giving it a new furnace. No doubt that will settle the dispute, but it must leave a scar on our relationship, such as might be left on a marriage by a long wrangle about the proper school for the children. A web of care lies all about our houses and covers the gardens too. There can be no doubt that the cedar of Lebanon is the most beautiful of the conifers, with its layers of dark-bright branches, like spread arms with open hands, palms held downwards, and stretched fingers feeling the wind. The only one of them that does not give me unmitigated pleasure is that one that pleases me most, because it grows on the slope beneath my windows. I know how many branches, it has cast during the last few winters, and my heart contracts with anxiety when I see it at its best, with the wind tugging hard at all the stretched fingers. Then I suffer that most disagreeable of feelings, I feel I ought to do something about it.
It would be better, too, if our houses contracted and expelled us when any painful incident was going to occur. But as it is we have often to live on the fields where we met our worst defeat. The most shocking example of this ordeal that I ever came across was in the Scottish town where I was brought up. One Sunday, in one of those high, gray Northern houses, a schoolfellow of mine was seated at the dinner table, having her midday meal with her father, her mother and her four brothers and sisters. The room was one of a thousand in that town; there would be thick red curtains at the tall narrow windows and late Georgian mahogany furniture polished to the brown brightness of a peat stream by a Highland maid. My school-fellow's father was laying the carving knife to the Sunday joint when he paused, looked up into vacancy, sighed and laid down the carving knife. He left the room and his family was fixed for some minutes in a daze. Then his wife stood up and bade one of her sons carve the joint while she went up to see what was the matter with his father. But before she could leave the room, they heard the front door bang and saw their father hurry down the street. Meanwhile another of my school-fellows was having her Sunday midday meal with her family, like in number, in a room that also had its thick red curtains and its late Georgian furniture. They had got a little further on with their meal, the Sunday joint had been carved and was being eaten when there was a knock at the front door. Presently there burst into the room, brushing aside a startled maidservant, the gentleman who had just abandoned his Sunday joint. Without saying one word he advanced toward the wife of the gentleman who had finished carving his Sunday joint, grasped her wrist, and drew her out of the room under the goggling eyes of her family, who were to see her no more. The guilty couple went to London, where, as it was acidly said by the Scottish world they had forsaken, people do not mind that sort of thing, and the man started a new business, and they lived happily ever after. But in those days respectable Scots never moved house, it was a habit confined to the lower orders. So the deserted families went on eating their meals in dining rooms which certainly no guest ever entered for many long years afterwards without recalling that sudden flight from the Sunday joint to love.
Few of us have homes as deeply scarred by catastrophe as that; but almost all of us sometimes look round a room and remember that it was here we first found ourselves in a battle which we fought or finessed or simply lost. All this means that you can love the house you live in, but you cannot be in love with it. You and it have struggled to establish certain values, and you will have had your successes together; but when you first saw it, you imagined that you had only to move into it for all struggles to cease. So if you want to enjoy a house as you enjoy a person with whom you are in love, you should make sure that it is not your home. It should not even belong to a close friend, for if the friendship is real you will soon begin to worry with them over whatever it is they love that casts its branches in a high wind, you will learn what they had instead of an elopement in the dining room. The house should not belong to any of the great, for they burn up their houses with their own light. In no memory of Virginia Woolf do I see her surroundings, except when I think of her in her garden under the Sussex Downs, among her strangely abundant and richly-colored flowers, standing on the edge of the small swift gray river she was to prefer to them. Colette's apartment in the Palais Royal is bound to be full of objects, because all French writers are in the matter of interior decoration either magpies or monks, and Colette would obviously not live in a stripped cell. But I can remember none of her possessions except some tarnished gilt laurel wreaths of the sort they offer to the illustrious in France, the equivalent of paper hats to wear on Parnassian gala nights, which hung on the walls of the antichamber to her bedroom. I would have seen more had I seen less distinctly the brilliant eyes, as of a young and witty she-wolf, which the septuagenarian to whom they belonged had emphatically outlined with ulramarine blue eye shadow, proud and amazed that a part of her was still running wild and free.
It might seem convenient to have a love affair with a house belonging to acquaintances to whom you are indifferent, but that is a relationship impossible to maintain. If you keep on visiting the house you will either get fond of its owners, and the colonnade and the staircase you admired so much will become invisible, or you will take a dislike to the owners, and the colonnade and the staircase will assume the dignified pathos of cats who belong to their inferiors. There is no help for it, you must have your love affair with a house which is the property of a total stranger; and that you can do without difficulty if only you come to Britain and seek the offices of the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty, which is at 42, Queen Anne's Gate, London. S.W., just five minutes' walk from Westminster Abbey, and accessible by more than one Iittle alley opening off Birdcage Walk in St. James's Park. It, as the phrase goes, will fix you up with everything you want.
The Trust is a body which deals with the inorganic equivalents of displaced persons: houses and landscapes which had their assured place in a society which has now collapsed and left them to fend for themselves. England has many a beautiful house which in the ordinary course of events would have to be sold when its owner dies, because high taxation makes it impossible for any estate to save up enough to pay its death duties; and there are many stretches of woodland and moor and riverbank which might on like occasions fall into the hands of conscienceless builders. If the owner dies leaving little or no money, that fate still befalls it; and as few private individuals can afford to live in them, some are turned into hotels and most are used as social welfare institutions. So many serve this latter purpose, it is possible that in the future there may be citizens who because they are so wretchedly unfortunate, being, say, the children of unmarried and destitute mothers, becoming juvenile delinquents and then developing epilepsy or insanity, that never in all their darkened lives will they succeed in sleeping a night in anything less splendid than a Palladian mansion. But if the owner has enough money to make an endowment sufficient for the upkeep of his house, the National Trust will take it from him and get the Treasury to keep its claws off the endowment, on condition that the public is allowed to visit it at certain times. The Trust has in this way reprieved from the ruin of the age a two-hundred-and-fiftieth part of Britain, all beautiful; and at its offices you will get a list of properties which will tell you on what days, for a fee usually well under seventy-five cents, you may visit them.
Your special meat among them is the string of great country houses with names like the English butlers in Lonsdale plays, Barrington, Blickling, Lyme, Montacute, Attingham, Gunby and the rest-all superb, all belonging to strangers, all with that pearly look, that purity, all ready to be fallen in love with. The situation is ideal. Some of them, and those the best, like Knole and West Wycombe Park and Ham House, are only an hour or less from London.
It is paradisal. In the long gallery the shafts of sunlight strike through the broad high Jacobean windows at each end and lie on the polished floor boards, which are the color of sherry, the best dry sherry. It is not because of any effort or exhortation of yours that they are so bright. The worn brocade hangings are a breath of crimson on the walls between the portraits of the men who are for the most part handsomer than men are today and the women who are for the most part plainer than women are today (or so it seems to a woman). That brocade would spread into fine unrelated threads under the lightest touch. The faces in the portraits show a secretive and resentful strain, thickening through the ages; it would be hard to keep friends with this family. But you do not need to handle either the brocade or the family. It is true that the owners of most National Trust houses are encouraged to go on living in them, because that prevents them from freezing into museums. But the family will be upstairs or out in the garden and will think of you simply as one of the faceless reasons which make them have lunch early on the days of admission. There need never be a rag of human relationship to veil from you the lovely aspect of the room, to distract you from wonder at the Jacobean trick of building a long gallery so proportioned, so set to east and west, that in the early morning and late afternoon it becomes an oblong box filled to the top with golden, grainy sunlight.
You will not appreciate your good luck, of course. You will find yourself wishing that even if you could not live in this house, you could have taken part in the life which was carried on there. But you will be wrong. You have no guarantee that it would give you any of the same pleasure you find in the room, for nothing is more certain than that people can be completely unaffected by the houses in which they live, particularly if they inherit them. You will find an example of that at one of the three places which every American visitor should aim at seeing in Britain because their like is to be found in no other country in the world: Hampton Court Palace, Knole and Stourhead. There is no building more deeply satisfying than Hampton Court Palace with its rose red bricks and its cobbled courtyards. Walk through it and you will experience the abundance of the Tudor age and will understand how it came to produce Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth and Shakespeare and Sir Thomas More and other characters of whom there was enough to go round. Knole is Tudor too; and it is characteristic of English history that because it belonged to a peer it is much more formal and impressive than the royal palace. Our royalty has never been as aristocratic as its own aristocrats. Stourhead (which you can visit in the course of a motor trip that takes in Salisbury and Wells and Glastonbury and Bath) has gardens, laid out in the eighteenth century, which are among the finest in England and are still in excellent order.
This is to say much. For no American can fully understand how horrible is the life of many persons who own large gardens in Britain today. It is as if a woman had to go about clad in a dress made for her by Poiret in, say, 1920. It was beautiful then, and it is in a way still beautiful, but the stuff is wearing out and she has had to patch it with any bit of cloth she can lay hold of, and the seams are giving way and have to be pinned together. A large garden must be just such a botched survival. The supply of efficient gardeners is drying up because gardening is a craft that must be learned in boyhood and cannot be mastered by men who were young soldiers during the war or are now conscripted for military training. The cost of the inefficient labor which is available is enormous; it takes just about four times the money to staff a garden that it did before 1939. The housing shortage means that cottages built for gardeners have often to be handed over to the more essential agricultural laborers. It might seem simple enough to grass the gardens over, but this is not easy if the gardens are valuable from a botanical point of view, and it is even less easy if they are so beautiful that they constitute a work of art, as many do. Stourhead may fairly be judged the equivalent of one of the major poems of Alexander Pope, who would perhaps have admitted that. for he greatly admired it and wrote a couplet for inscription on its grotto. But Stourhead mercifully did not have to be martyred, for its last owner was a childless banker who could leave it with a large endowment to the National Trust.
So there it waits for you, nearer nature than most gardens, for there are no parterres and avenues, only a lake with woods dropping down to it from hills, and flowers and bushes growing near the water's edge; yet infinitely artificial, with its temples and its bridges, a fantasy based on an eighteenth-century banker's memories of Claude Lorraine's memories of the ruins of the antique Roman world. You will enter an exquisite neoclassical fairy tale when you stand in the dim light of the grotto, where the lovely nymph lies sleeping, the rivulets gently sliding down the green-stained stone wall behind her, as nearly drowsy as water ever could be. The adults who made this were playing like children, yet were not childish. You may feel that you would have liked to play in their company. But the Henry Hoare who laid out this garden was a friend of Walpole and Pope, and I cannot believe that the scene would have been so clear before the eye if Walpole had been beside one, flashing the spyglass of his connoisseurship in every direction; and if Pope had been presenting one with the antithesis of his sweetness and his malice, the conflict between his straight mind and his crooked body. And as for the generous donor who left Stourhead to the Trust, there would have been difficulties there, too, though of another sort. He was the most delightful of men, married to an equally delightful wife; they lived in amity for fifty-three years and died on the same day. He loved and served Stourhead; but all the same he thought of himself as having added to Stourhead a possession worthy of it when he had himself painted sitting in an armchair, with a dreamy expression on his face, in his mouth a cigar, from which smoke was issuing and forming a shadowy portrait of his wife. This is one of the final masterpieces of bad taste; it can be compared to the famous statue of the Venus deMilo with a clock in her stomach; and it would have been hard to congratulate the charming old gentleman on it if one had just come up from the grotto.
Decidedly you lose nothing by being alone with these houses and gardens and parks; indeed, if you have a good imagination, you will gain enormously. The most brilliant conversation that ever came my way I did not hear. It was reflected on the face of a mannequin at a London show, no longer very young, who showed the more elaborate dresses with extraordinary success, because she created a portrait of the ideal society in which women would wear such clothes. When she went down the room, she seemed to be smiling at an amusing and intelligent remark which someone had just made to her; and when she turned and came back, it could be seen in her eyebrows and her lips and her wrists that she had carried the argument a stage further by her retort. All her poses suggested the tensity of a gathering in which talk was a game, yet so much more than a game that one, would not like to fail in playing it. The secret, I discovered, was that she had been deaf from childhood. She had never heard the things we really say, she had been misled by the only thing she knew about conversation, which was the abstract idea of it. That is what strangers' houses do for us, they present us afresh with the abstract idea of society; we can realize it in our imaginations with the happy freedom of children filling in outlines with color in a painting-book. >>>>>
----------------------------
No comments:
Post a Comment