But to have ambitions and to live up to them is only possible to the extreme idealist--a man who, seeing God in everything, the world has not yet learnt or perhaps forgotten to cater for.
So far everything is utilitarian--supplying the needs of the body which can only see God in consecrated wine, and so it is that wise men build churches for fools to pray in--the wise man in this world being he who grows rich.
This, then, is the solution to the mystery of John Grey. He was an idealist--the very type of person to live in a City of Beautiful Nonsense, where the rarest things in the world cost nothing and the most sordid necessities are dear. For example, the rent of number thirty-nine was a gross exactment upon his purse. He could ill afford that thirty pounds a year. He could ill afford the meals which sometimes hunger compelled him to pay for. But when he bought a piece of brass--the little brass man, for example, an old seal, that was of no use to anybody in the world, and only stood passively inert upon his mantel-piece--the price of it was as nothing when compared with the cheap and vulgar necessities of existence.
But it must not be supposed that Fetter Lane and its environs constitute the spires, the roofs and domes of that City of Beautiful Nonsense. It is not so. Far away East, on the breast of the Adriatic, that wonderful City lies. And we shall come to it--we shall come to it all too soon.
CHAPTER V
THE BALLAD-MONGER--FETTER LANE
In Kensington Gardens, you will find romance. Many a real, many a legendary, person has found it there. It will always be found there so long as this great City of London remains a hive for the millions of human bees that pass in and out of its doors, swarming or working, idling or pursuing in silent and unconscious obedience to a law which not one of them will ever live to understand.
Why it should be Kensington Gardens, more than any other place of the kind, is not quite possible of explanation. Why not Regent's Park, or St. James's Park? Why not those little gardens on the Embankment where the band plays in the late mornings of summer and romances certainly do find a setting? Why not any of these? But no--Kensington Gardens rule par excellence, and there is no spot in this vast acreage of humanity to touch them.
You will see there the romances that begin from both ends of a perambulator and, from that onwards, Romance in all its countless periods, infinitely more numerous than the seven ages of man; for Romance is more wonderful than just life. It has a thousand more variations, it plays a thousand more tricks with the understanding. Life is real, they tell us--Life is earnest; but Romance is all that is unreal besides; it is everything that is and is not, everything that has been and will be, and you will find some of the strangest examples of it under the boughs of those huge elms, on those uncomfortable little penny seats in Kensington Gardens.
When those rooms of his in Fetter Lane became unbearable, John Grey would betake himself to the Gardens, sitting by the round Pond where the great ships make their perilous voyages, or he would find a seat under the trees near that little one-storyed house which always shows so brave a blaze of colour in the flower beds that circle it round.