it was said, had been a Prime Minister and every woman, it was whispered, had been the mistress of a king. Certain it is that all were brilliant, and all were famous. Orlando took her seat with a deep reverence in silence… After three hours, she curtseyed profoundly and left.
But what, the reader may ask with some exasperation, happened in between. In three hours, such a company must have said the wittiest, the profoundest, the most interesting things in the world. So it would seem indeed. But the fact appears to be that they said nothing. It is a curious characteristic which they share with all the most brilliant societies that the world has seen. Old Madame du Deffand and her friends talked for fifty years without stopping. And of it all, what remains?
Perhaps three witty sayings. So that we are at liberty to suppose either that nothing was said, or that nothing witty was said, or that the fraction of three witty sayings lasted eighteen thousand two hundred and fifty nights, which does not leave a liberal allowance of wit for any one of them.
The truth would seem to be — if we dare use such a word in such a connection — that all these groups of people lie under an enchantment. The hostess is our modern Sibyl. She is a witch who lays her guests under a spell. In this house they think themselves happy; in that witty; in a third profound. It is all an illusion (which is nothing against it, for illusions are the most valuable and necessary of all things, and she who can create one is among the world’s greatest benefactors), but as it is notorious that illusions are shattered by conflict with reality, so no real happiness, no real wit, no real profundity are tolerated where the illusion prevails. This serves to explain why Madame du Deffand said no more than three witty things in the course of fifty years. Had she said more, her circle would have been destroyed. The witticism, as it left her lips, bowled over the current conversation as a cannon ball lays low the violets and the daisies. When she made her famous ‘mot de Saint Denis’
the very grass was singed. Disillusionment and desolation followed. Not a word was uttered. ‘Spare us another such, for Heaven’s sake, Madame!’ her friends cried with one accord.
And she obeyed. For almost seventeen years she said nothing memorable and all went well. The beautiful counterpane of illusion lay unbroken on her circle as it lay unbroken on the circle 115
of Lady R. The guests thought that they were happy, thought that they were witty, thought that they were profound, and, as they thought this, other people thought it still more strongly; and so it got about that nothing was more delightful than one of Lady R.’s assemblies; everyone envied those who were admitted; those who were admitted envied themselves because other people envied them; and so there seemed no end to it —
except that which we have now to relate.
For about the third time Orlando went there a certain incident occurred. She was still under the illusion that she was listening to the most brilliant epigrams in the world, though, as a matter of fact, old General C. was only saying, at some length, how the gout had left his left leg and gone to his right, while Mr L. interrupted when any proper name was mentioned,
‘R.? Oh! I know Billy R. as well as I know myself. S.? My dearest friend. T.? Stayed with him a fortnight in Yorkshire’—
which, such is the force of illusion, sounded like the wittiest repartee, the most searching comment upon human life, and kept the company in a roar; when the door opened and a little gentleman entered whose name Orlando did not catch. Soon a curiously disagreeable sensation came over her. To judge from their faces, the rest began to feel it as well. One gentleman said there was a draught. The Marchioness of C. feared a cat must be under the sofa. It was as if their eyes were being slowly opened after a pleasant dream and nothing met them but a cheap wash-stand and a dirty counterpane. It was as if the fumes of some delicious wine were slowly leaving them.
Still the General talked and still Mr L. remembered. But it became more and more apparent how red the General’s neck was, how bald Mr L.’s head was. As for what they said — nothing more tedious and trivial could be imagined. Everybody fidgeted and those who had fans yawned behind them. At last Lady R. rapped with hers upon the arm of her great chair. Both gentlemen stopped talking.
Then the little gentleman said, He said next, He said finally (These sayings are too well known to require repetition, and besides, they are all to be found in his published works.), Here, it cannot be denied, was true wit, true wisdom, true profundity. The company was thrown into complete dismay.
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One such saying was bad enough; but three, one after another, on the same evening! No society could survive it.
‘Mr Pope,’ said old Lady R. in a voice trembling with sarcast-ic fury, ‘you are pleased to be witty.’ Mr Pope flushed red.
Nobody spoke a word. They sat in dead silence some twenty minutes. Then, one by one, they rose and slunk from the room.
That they would ever come back after such an experience was doubtful. Link-boys could be heard calling their coaches all down South Audley Street. Doors were slammed and carriages drove off. Orlando found herself near Mr Pope on the staircase.
His lean and misshapen frame was shaken by a variety of emotions. Darts of malice, rage, triumph, wit, and terror (he was shaking like a leaf) shot from his eyes. He looked like some squat reptile set with a burning topaz in its forehead. At the same time, the strangest tempest of emotion seized now upon the luckless Orlando. A disillusionment so complete as that inflicted not an hour ago leaves the mind rocking from side to side. Everything appears ten times more bare and stark than before. It is a moment fraught with the highest danger for the human spirit. Women turn nuns and men priests in such moments. In such moments, rich men sign away their wealth; and happy men cut their throats with carving knives. Orlando would have done all willingly, but there was a rasher thing still for her to do, and this she did. She invited Mr Pope to come home with her.
For if it is rash to walk into a lion’s den unarmed, rash to navigate the Atlantic in a rowing boat, rash to stand on one foot on the top of St Paul’s, it is still more rash to go home alone with a poet. A poet is Atlantic and lion in one. While one drowns us the other gnaws us. If we survive the teeth, we suc-cumb to the waves. A man who can destroy illusions is both beast and flood. Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth. Roll up that tender air and the plant dies, the colour fades. The earth we walk on is a parched cinder. It is marl we tread and fiery cobbles scorch our feet. By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. ‘Tis waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life —(and so on for six pages if you will, but the style is tedious and may well be dropped).
On this showing, however, Orlando should have been a heap of cinders by the time the chariot drew up at her house in 117
Blackfriars. That she was still flesh and blood, though certainly exhausted, is entirely due to a fact to which we drew attention earlier in the narrative. The less we see the more we believe.
Now the streets that lie between Mayfair and Blackfriars were at that time very imperfectly lit. True, the lighting was a great improvement upon that of the Elizabethan age. Then the be-nighted traveller had to trust to the stars or the red flame of some night watchman to save him from the gravel pits at Park Lane or the oak woods where swine rootled in the Tottenham Court Road. But even so it wanted much of our modern efficiency. Lamp-posts lit with oil-lamps occurred every two hundred yards or so, but between lay a considerable stretch of pitch darkness. Thus for ten minutes Orlando and Mr Pope would be in blackness; and then for about half a minute again in the light. A very strange state of mind was thus bred in Orlando. As the light faded, she began to feel steal over her the most delicious balm. ‘This is indeed a very great honour for a young woman to be driving with Mr Pope,’ she began to think, looking at the outline of his nose. ‘I am the most blessed of my sex. Half an inch from me — indeed, I feel the knot of his knee ribbons pressing against my thigh — is the greatest wit in Her Majesty’s dominions. Future ages will think of us with curiosity and envy me with fury.’ Here came the lamp-post again. ‘What a foolish wretch I am!’ she thought. ‘There is no such thing as fame and glory. Ages to come will never cast a thought on me or on Mr Pope either. What’s an “age”, indeed? What are
“we”?’ and their progress through Berkeley Square seemed the groping of two blind ants, momentarily thrown together without interest or concern in common, across a blackened desert. She shivered. But here again was darkness. Her illusion revived. ‘How noble his brow is,’ she thought (mistaking a hump on a cushion for Mr Pope’s forehead in the darkness).
‘What a weight of genius lives in it! What wit, wisdom, and truth — what a wealth of all those jewels, indeed, for which people are ready to barter their lives! Yours is the only light that burns for ever. But for you the human pilgrimage would be performed in utter darkness’; (here the coach gave a great lurch as it fell into a rut in Park Lane) ‘without genius we should be upset and undone. Most august, most lucid of beams,’— thus she was apostrophizing the hump on the 118
cushion when they drove beneath one of the street lamps in Berkeley Square and she realized her mistake. Mr Pope had a forehead no bigger than another man’s. ‘Wretched man,’ she thought, ‘how you have deceived me! I took that hump for your forehead. When one sees you plain, how ignoble, how despic-able you are! Deformed and weakly, there is nothing to vener-ate in you, much to pity, most to despise.’
Again they were in darkness and her anger became modified directly she could see nothing but the poet’s knees.
‘But it is I that am a wretch,’ she reflected, once they were in complete obscurity again, ‘for base as you may be, am I not still baser? It is you who nourish and protect me, you who scare the wild beast, frighten the savage, make me clothes of the silkworm’s wool, and carpets of the sheep’s. If I want to worship, have you not provided me with an image of yourself and set it in the sky? Are not evidences of your care everywhere? How humble, how grateful, how docile, should I not be, therefore? Let it be all my joy to serve, honour, and obey you.’
Here they reached the big lamp-post at the corner of what is now Piccadilly Circus. The light blazed in her eyes, and she saw, besides some degraded creatures of her own sex, two wretched pigmies on a stark desert land. Both were naked, solitary, and defenceless. The one was powerless to help the other. Each had enough to do to look after itself. Looking Mr Pope full in the face, ‘It is equally vain’, she thought; ‘for you to think you can protect me, or for me to think I can worship you.
The light of truth beats upon us without shadow, and the light of truth is damnably unbecoming to us both.’
All this time, of course, they went on talking agreeably, as people of birth and education use, about the Queen’s temper and the Prime Minister’s gout, while the coach went from light to darkness down the Haymarket, along the Strand, up Fleet Street, and reached, at length, her house in Blackfriars. For some time the dark spaces between the lamps had been becoming brighter and the lamps themselves less bright — that is to say, the sun was rising, and it was in the equable but confused light of a summer’s morning in which everything is seen but nothing is seen distinctly that they alighted, Mr Pope handing Orlando from her carriage and Orlando curtseying Mr Pope 119
to precede her into her mansion with the most scrupulous attention to the rites of the Graces.
From the foregoing passage, however, it must not be supposed that genius (but the disease is now stamped out in the British Isles, the late Lord Tennyson, it is said, being the last person to suffer from it) is constantly alight, for then we should see everything plain and perhaps should be scorched to death in the process. Rather it resembles the lighthouse in its working, which sends one ray and then no more for a time; save that genius is much more capricious in its manifestations and may flash six or seven beams in quick succession (as Mr Pope did that night) and then lapse into darkness for a year or for ever. To steer by its beams is therefore impossible, and when the dark spell is on them men of genius are, it is said, much like other people.
It was happy for Orlando, though at first disappointing, that this should be so, for she now began to live much in the company of men of genius. Nor were they so different from the rest of us as one might have supposed. Addison, Pope, Swift, proved, she found, to be fond of tea. They liked arbours. They collected little bits of coloured glass. They adored grottos.
Rank was not distasteful to them. Praise was delightful. They wore plum-coloured suits one day and grey another. Mr Swift had a fine malacca cane. Mr Addison scented his handkerchiefs. Mr Pope suffered with his head. A piece of gossip did not come amiss. Nor were they without their jealousies. (We are jotting down a few reflections that came to Orlando higgledy-piggledy.) At first, she was annoyed with herself for noticing such trifles, and kept a book in which to write down their memorable sayings, but the page remained empty. All the same, her spirits revived, and she took to tearing up her cards of invitation to great parties; kept her evenings free; began to look forward to Mr Pope’s visit, to Mr Addison’s, to Mr Swift’s
— and so on and so on. If the reader will here refer to the
“Rape of the Lock”, to the “Spectator”, to “Gulliver’s Travels”, he will understand precisely what these mysterious words may mean. Indeed, biographers and critics might save themselves all their labours if readers would only take this advice. For when we read:
Whether the Nymph shall break Diana’s Law, 120
Or some frail China Jar receive a Flaw, Or stain her Honour, or her new Brocade, Forget her Pray’rs or miss a Masquerade, Or lose her Heart, or Necklace, at a Ball.
— we know as if we heard him how Mr Pope’s tongue flickered like a lizard’s, how his eyes flashed, how his hand trembled, how he loved, how he lied, how he suffered. In short, every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life; every quality of his mind is written large in his works; yet we require critics to explain the one and biographers to expound the other. That time hangs heavy on people’s hands is the only explanation of the monstrous growth.
