The hand that formed them has other tasks to occupy it now; the heart from which they came is mute and cold. Hope withers, love dies—times are altered. What would you have? It is a world of change. Nevertheless this has been a disheartening job; it has put me in low spirits; I must call “Bones” out of his cupboard to come and sit with me.
“What is this charm,” I ask him, “that seems to belong so exclusively to the past?—this ‘tender grace of a day that is dead’? and must I look after it down the gulf into which it has dropped with such irrepressible longing only because it will never come back to me? Is a man the greater or wiser that he lived a hundred years ago or a thousand? Are reputations, like wine, the mellower and the more precious for mere age, even though they have been hid away in a cellar all the time? Is a thing actually fairer and better because I have almost forgotten how it looked when present, and shall never set eyes on it again? I entertain the greatest aversion to Horace’s laudator temporis acti, shall always set my face against the superstition that ‘there were giants in those days’; and yet wherever I went in the world previous to my retirement here that I might live with you, I found the strange maxim predominate, that everything was very much better before it had been improved!
“If I entered a club and expressed my intention of going to the Opera, for instance, whatever small spark of enthusiasm I could kindle was submitted to a wet blanket on the spot. ‘Good heavens!’ would exclaim some venerable philosopher of the Cynic and Epicurean schools, ‘there is no opera now, nor ballet neither. My good sir, the thing is done; it’s over. We haven’t an artist left. Ah! you should have seen Taglioni dance; you should have heard Grisi sing; you should have lived when Plancus was consul. In short, you should be as old as I am, and as disgusted, and as gouty, and as disagreeable!’
“Or I walked into the smoking-room of that same resort, full of some athletic gathering at Holland Park, some ’Varsity hurdle-race, some trial of strength or skill amongst those lively boys, the subalterns of the Household Brigade; and ere I could articulate ‘brandy and soda’ I had Captain Barclay thrown body and bones in my face. ‘Walk, sir! You talk of walking?’ (I didn’t, for there had been barely time to get a word in edgeways, or my parable would have exhausted itself concerning a running high leap.) ‘But there is nothing like a real pedestrian left; they don’t breed ’em, sir, in these days: can’t grow them, and don’t know how to train them if they could! Show me a fellow who would make a match with Barclay to-day. Barclay, sir, if he were alive, would walk all your best men down after he came in from shooting. Ask your young friends which of ’em would like to drive the mail from London to Edinburgh without a greatcoat! I don’t know what’s come to the present generation. It must be the smoking, or the light claret, perhaps. They’re done, they’re used up, they’re washed out. Why, they go to covert by railway, and have their grouse driven to them on a hill! What would old Sir Tatton or Osbaldeston say to such doings as these? I was at Newmarket, I tell you, when the Squire rode his famous match—two hundred miles in less than nine hours! I saw him get off old Tranby, and I give you my honour the man looked fresher than the horse! Don’t tell me. He was rubbed down by a couple of prize-fighters (there were real bruisers in those days, and the best man used to win), dressed, and came to dinner just as you would after a five-mile walk. Pocket Hercules, you call him—one in a thousand? There were hundreds of such men in my day. Why, I recollect in Tom Smith’s time that I myself——’
“But at this point I used to make my escape, because there are two subjects on which nobody is so brilliant as not to be prolix, so dull as not to be enthusiastic—his doings in the saddle and his adventures with the fair. To honour either of these triumphs he blows a trumpet-note loud and long in proportion to the antiquity of the annals it records. Why must you never again become possessed of such a hunter as Tally-Ho? Did that abnormal animal really carry you as well as you think, neither failing when the ground was deep nor wavering when the fences were strong? Is it strictly true that no day was ever too long for him? that he was always in the same field with the hounds? And have not the rails he rose at, the ditches he covered so gallantly, increased annually in height and depth and general impossibility ever since that fatal morning when he broke his back, under the Coplow in a two-foot drain?
“You can’t find such horses now? Perhaps you do not give them so liberal a chance of proving their courage, speed, and endurance.
“On the other topic it is natural enough, I dare say, for you to ‘yarn’ with all the more freedom that there is no one left to contradict. People used enormous coloured silk handkerchiefs in that remote period, when you threw yours with such Oriental complacency, and the odalisques who picked it up are probably to-day so old and stiff they could not bend their backs to save their lives. But were they really as fond, and fair, and faithful as they seem to you now? Had they no caprices to chill, no whims to worry, no rivals on hand, to drive you mad? Like the sea, those eyes that look so deep and blue at a distance, are green and turbid and full of specks when you come quite close. Was it all sunshine with Mary, all roses with Margaret, all summer with Jane? What figures the modern women make of themselves, you say. How they offend your eye, those bare cheek-bones, those clinging skirts, those hateful chignons! Ah! the cheeks no longer hang out a danger-signal when you approach; the skirts are no more lifted, ever such a little, to make room for you in the corner of the sofa next the fire; and though you might have had locks of hair enough once to have woven a parti-coloured chignon of your own, it would be hopeless now to beg as much as would make a finger-ring for Queen Mab. What is it, I say, that causes us to look with such deluded eyes on the past? Is it sorrow or malice, disappointment or regret? Are our teeth still on edge with the sour grapes we have eaten or forborne? Do we glower through the jaundiced eyes of malevolence, or is our sight failing with the shades of a coming night?”
Bones seldom delivers himself of his opinion in a hurry. “I think,” he says very deliberately, “that this, like many other absurdities of human nature, originates in that desire for the unattainable which is, after all, the mainspring of effort, improvement, and approach towards perfection. Man longs for the impossible, and what is so impossible as the past? That which hath vanished becomes therefore valuable, that which is hidden attractive, that which is distant desirable. There is a strange lay still existing by an old Provençal troubadour, no small favourite with iron-handed, lion-hearted King Richard, of which the refrain, ‘so far away,’ expresses very touchingly the longing for the absent, perhaps only because absent, that is so painful, so human, and so unwise. The whole story is wild and absurd to a degree, yet not without a saddened interest, owing to the mournful refrain quoted above. It is thus told in the notes to Warton’s History of English Poetry:—
“‘Jeffrey Rudell, a famous troubadour of Provence, who is also celebrated by Petrarch, had heard from the adventurers in the Crusades the beauty of a Countess of Tripoli highly extolled. He became enamoured from imagination, embarked for Tripoli, fell sick on the voyage through the fever of expectation, and was brought on shore at Tripoli, half-expiring. The countess, having received the news of the arrival of this gallant stranger, hastened to the shore and took him by the hand. He opened his eyes, and at once overpowered by his disease and her kindness, had just time to say inarticulately that having seen her he died satisfied. The countess made him a most splendid funeral, and erected to his memory a tomb of porphyry inscribed with an epitaph in Arabian verse. She commanded his sonnets to be richly copied and illuminated with letters of gold, was seized with a profound melancholy, and turned nun. I will endeavour to translate one of the sonnets he made on his voyage, “Yret et dolent m’en partray,” etc. It has some pathos and sentiment. “I should depart pensive but for this love of mine so far away, for I know not what difficulties I may have to encounter, my native land being so far away. Thou who hast made all things and who formed this love of mine so far away, give me strength of body, and then I may hope to see this love of mine so far away. Surely my love must be founded on true merit, as I love one so far away. If I am easy for a moment, yet I feel a thousand pains for her who is so far away. No other love ever touched my heart than this for her so far away. A fairer than she never touched any heart, either so near or so far away.’”
“It is utter nonsense, I grant you, and the doings of this love-sick idiot seem to have been in character with his stanzas, yet is there a mournful pathos about that wailing so far away which, well-worded, well-set, and well-performed, would make the success of a drawing-room song.