By RICHARD LE GALLIENNE
“HOW is it,” said the Sphinx one evening, “that you never bring a poem with you to dinner nowadays? Have you quite given up writing them?”
“Almost,” I answered.
“But you shouldn’t. It is lazy of you.”
“I suppose,” said I, “it is a kind of laziness—but I hardly think it is voluntary, or much under my control. In many ways I grow more active and industrious as I grow older. I do more work and I work more regularly. The laziness is certainly neither mental nor physical. It is rather emotional—yes! a laziness of the emotional faculties.”
“You cannot mean that you have stopped falling in love?”
“I’m inclined to think I have,” I laughed; “but that, like the poetry, is only one expression of the laziness I mean. Generally, while, as I say, I am less lazy in doing than of old, and while, as doctors would say, my mental faculties are active and unimpaired, I grow more and more lazy in feeling.”
“Tell me some more….”
“Well, I mean that, while my brain grows year by year more catholic in its sympathies, and sees more clearly all the time opportunities of feeling old and new, my heart and senses seem less and less inclined to second it with any energy of enthusiasm or excitement. The beauty of the world, for example, never seemed more beautiful to me than it does now. I can see far more beauty in it than I could when I was a boy, appreciate far more its infinite variety; nor has it lost in wonder, or mystery or holiness. All this I see, and thankfully accept—but it is seldom that I am set in a fine glow, or that I fall into a dream about it. My appreciation of it is no longer rapture. Yes, I have lost rapture.”
“Poor old thing!” laughed the Sphinx derisively, “but go on.”
“Laugh,” said I, “but it’s all too true. Take another illustration: Some noble cause, some ghastly wrong, some agonising disaster. Never has my imagination been more alive to such appeals; never have they stirred me to greater aspiration, indignation or pity—mentally. But while my perceptive, imaginative side is thus more active than ever, it seems unable to set going the motive forces of feeling, as it used to do. It were as if I should say ‘Oh yes! indeed, I see it all—but I’ll feel about it to-morrow.’ Something underneath seems to say: ‘What is the use of being excited about it—of taking fire. It’s noble, it’s monstrous, it’s pitiful—but what’s the use!—feeling won’t help.’ To think how inspired, how savage, how wrought I should have been once—use or no use! But now….”
“Tell me about falling in love,” interrupted the Sphinx, quizzically. “How does this sad state of things affect that?”
“In just the same way. I see a beautiful face, or come in contact with some romantic personality. I say to myself: ‘How wonderful she is! I could spend my life looking into those strange eyes, and I am old enough to know that I should never want to look into any others.’ I say to myself: ‘I think I have but to set my heart on it, and that woman and I might make life a fairy tale for each other!’ But I raise no hand. I am content to see the possibility, content to admire the opportunity, content to see it pass. I am too lazy even for romance.”
“And so you write no more poems?”
“Yes—or very staid ones. As it happens I have brought you one to-night, which you will see is very evidently inspired by the muse of middle-age. It has an unexceptionable moral, and is entitled ‘New Loves for Old.’ Shall I read it?”
“Go on,” said the Sphinx, and I proceeded to read the following:
“‘New Loves for Old!’ I heard a pedler cry,
‘New Loves for Old!’ as down the street he passed,
And from each door I noted with a sigh
How all the people ran at once to buy—
Bringing in hand the dimmed old loves that last.
“‘New Loves for Old!’ O wondrous fair and bright
Seem the new loves against the loves grown old,
So flower-fresh and dewy with delight,
And burning as with supernatural light—
Ah yes! the rest were tinsel—this is gold!
“‘New Loves for Old!’ the pedler went his way—
Night fell, then in my window the bright spark
Of my old love gave out its constant ray,
‘How burn the new loves that they bought to-day?’
But all the other windows remained dark.”
“Do you mean it? Is it true?” asked the Sphinx when I had finished.
“Those are nice questions for a philosopher to ask!” I laughed. “Of course, it is true for some people, true of some lives, and for those I mean it.”
“But what is your own personal feeling in the matter?”
“I hardly know if I have any personal feeling about it.”
“But you wrote the poem. Why did you write it then?”
“One doesn’t write poems for oneself. One writes them for others. Poetry is addressed, like certain legal proclamations, to all whom it concerns. Do you remember those lines of Straton’s in the Greek Anthology:
“‘Love-songs I write for him and her,
Now this, now that, as Love dictates;
One birthday gift alone the Fates
Gave me, to be Love’s Scrivener.’
“Of course, this is not the whole truth about the artist, but it is a good deal of it. In a sense the artist is the most unselfish of human beings, for his whole life is living for, and feeling for, others. The more lives and the more various he can live, the greater the number and the diversity of his feelings, the greater his art. This many-mooded nature leads those who misunderstand his function frequently to cry out that he is insincere; the fact being that he is so sincere in so many different ways that to hasty observers his imaginative sympathy has the look of inconsistency.”
“But come now, you needn’t pretend to be so superior to our common human nature as all that! If you yourself had to choose between one of your dimmed old loves that last, and one of the peddler’s brilliant novelties, which would you choose?”
“It would depend who I was at the moment.”
“Oh, nonsense—be serious.”
“But I am. It would depend, at all events, on what kind of love I felt most in need of at the moment—one’s needs are so different from day to day. Old loves give us certain satisfactions, and new loves give us certain other satisfactions.”
“Well, tell me what those different satisfactions are.”
“Old Love brings you the sense of security, of shelter, of peace; it has the warm-home charm of kindly long-known things, the beauty of beautiful habit, the nimbus and the authority of religion. In fact, it has all that belongs to the word ‘old’ used in the laudatory sense. Its value is the value of the known—whereas the value of new love is largely the value of the unknown.”
“You mean that the value of new love lies largely in its newness.”
“Certainly. Mere novelty, as the world admits on every hand, has real value; the value of refreshment, at least. In fact, novelty is the truest friend of old feeling, as it makes us feel the old feelings over again—which might hardly happen without its assistance. Besides, love is even more an imaginative than an emotional need, and the new love speaks to the imagination. Love needs wonder to live on quite as much as secure affection. The new love appeals to one’s sense of strangeness, one’s spirit of adventure. As we stand silent upon that peak in Darien—who knows, we say to our hushed expectant hearts, who knows but that this is Eldorado at last….”
“We only say that when the old was not Eldorado,” put in the Sphinx.
“O of course!” I admitted hastily.