February 18.
An Arabian Looking-glass.
There has been great recrudescence of the Essay of late—none of it very important, I take the liberty of thinking. We moderns have lost the trick of it. All of us, at least, but Stevenson, and he hardly seems a modern, so closely is he related to the great classics, with his inheritance of the Grand Style, like the bel canto, now a lost art. And yet the Essay is a great temptation. Doubtless not one of all those who go down into the ink-bottle with pens has quite escaped its seduction. Generally it is, I suspect, merely an outcropping of the somewhat too widely known need of the artistic nature for "self-expression" in more definite terms than ordinary work permits.
The young fellows, still walking in the light of the eternal pulchritudes, are touchingly anxious lest they "falsify themselves"—pathetically unaware of the supreme unconcern of the rest of humanity as to their personal veracity. The line between art and the other thing is drawn just across this zone of egotism. "The other thing" is a man's expression of himself; Art is the mirror in which each observer sees only his own face. The Arabian legend of the prosperous old beggar who, making a pilgrimage to Mecca, left to his son, as his sole means of support, a looking-glass, and returned to find the boy starving and gazing into the mirror himself, is supposed to cynically suggest the uses of judicious flattery, but has deeper application. Speak of yourself—the world yawns. Talk to it of itself—rudely, vaguely, profoundly, how you will—and it hangs upon your lips. Turn the mirror toward it and it says proudly, "Of just such exalted devotion and sacrifice am I capable," or mutters with a shudder, "There, but for the grace of God, goes Augustine."
The tenor sings "Sous ta Fenetre" and every face is lighted by the inner shining of romance. The strangest revelations are discerned upon the countenances of respectable matrons, of rangé men of affairs. They beat their hands together in a flooding wave of applause, and the greasy Italian in his uneasy evening dress swells with a strutting consciousness of his vocal chords, of his method, his upper C, of his own value.
O tempora! O mores! He is nothing whatever to them. It is only that in every human heart there is a chord that vibrates to C in alt. They are quite unaware of him, and of his greasy personality. Every man is singing with his own soul's voice under the lattice of his first beloved. Every woman is leaning to listen to a dream lover yearning up to her through the warm scented moonlight. As for the garlicky loves of the singer they care not one jot whether he loves or not. It is all a question of themselves, of a vibration.
March 4.
The Cry of the Women.
I have been clearing out a lot of old books, preparatory to moving, and have been amused to see how empty and dead many already are, which a few years since were raging through edition after edition, and were the subject of so much talk and interest. Already more than half have grown as desiccated and unimportant as last year's leaves, and their "timeliness" seems of a time as far past as the deluge. There was among these dead books a group on the Woman Question, which already, in so short a space, has lost all its interrogation point. Is it that there was really no Woman Question, or has the Question already received an answer?