If I have lured you so far into the web of my vagary, pray come into my parlour, too, and be hung for the whole sheep that you are, that I may fleece you close with my sophistries before you go. I have but one toy here to amuse you. I juggle idioms and balance phrases upon my pen, and whether you laugh at me or with me, I care not, moi. But as seriously as is possible (seriousness is not my present pose, I assure you), I would I might wheedle some of your dogged, clogged, rugged, ragged, fagged, foggy wits out of you, and constrain you to accept my pinchbeck for true plate the while; for I have a little sense in my alloy, after all, and you might go further and fare the worse than by my chatter. If I dared I would jump boldly into my thesis, without apologies; but it so happens that it is one that should be itself its own illustration. I should convince you of its truth by its own garment of expression, instead of depending upon my logical introductory presentation. But this I fear to try. My pistols, I fear, are, as the Duchess of Malfi might say, loaded with nothing but perfumes and kissing-comfits.
Now that you are well a-muddled, and like to turn to a saner page, let me button-hole you with one clean statement while you stand, gasping. Indeed I fear that a dozen have fled already from my gibbering, and I speak to but one sullen survivor, determined to collect his promised interest. We know, then, the joy of colour, taste, sound and odour as mere sensual gratifications, undiluted with significance. But, since I seldom read, I have never seen the apology for the sensual pleasures of diction, pure and simple in its essence. Swinburne, I hear, has his lilts and harmonies in poesy, and perhaps that is the nearest like, except for the Purpose that drives his chariot; but I am for that runaway mood that gallops gayly forth into Nowhere, unguided and unrestrained. A twenty bookmen shall come up to me, no doubt, with their index fingers set upon examples, but I am happier in my ignorance, and I prefer to think it has not yet been done--or, at least, not exactly as I mean. Indeed, you may depend upon me to evade proof with some quibble.
Your didactic prose is a wain, pulled over the hard city street. Fiction is the jaunting-car that paddles down the by-side lane. Poetry wallops you along the bridle path with your mistress Muse on a pillion, and, but very rarely, dares across country, over a low hedge or two (but always after some fleeting hare of thought); but I--I am for the reckless run over the moor and downs--the riderless random enthusiasm of nonsense! So out of my way, gentlemen of the red coats, or I bowl you down! Mazeppa might do for a figure, but his steed was hampered with the load; his runaway had too savage an import, and it is my purpose to be only a little mad. Pegasus is a forbidden metaphor nowadays. He is hackneyed by the livery of vulgar stables. I prefer that Black Horse, vanned and terrible, who flicked out the eyes of the Second Calender, as my mount is like to serve me!
In the Sonata is an exemplification of my theory. There, now, is a vehicle that carries no passengers, save what one's fancy lades it with--it charges and soars with no visible rein to guide it, except when a thread of melody steers it into some little course of delight. So there is a secret rhythm in the best prose that is more subtile than the metres of verse, and which is to the essay what the expression of the face is to the talker. One may, indeed, use that same word, expression or gesture, instead of the common term, style. But a common or house observation shows us that there is some pleasure in the face whose lips are dumb, and I dare say there is joy for the coxcomb and female fop in the unworn gown, as it hangs on its lonely nail, or is draped on the lay figure of meaningless, meaningful form. So it is to such hair-brains and cockatoos I appeal. Come to my Masquerade and let us for a wild half-hour wear the spangles and tights of palestric impropriety, hid by a visor that shall not betray our thought. In this lesser pantomime one may be irrelevant, inconsequent and immature, and sport the flower of thought that has not yet fruited into purpose.
Can you find your way through this frivolity, mixed metaphor and tricksy phrase, and see what a wanton a paragraph may become when one sends it forth, free from the conventional moralities of licenced Literature? I have been to many such debauch, and have got so drunk on adjectives that I thought all my thoughts double. In this Harlequinade, too, there are more games than my promised Sonata. I will mock you the "Mill in the Forest," or any other descriptive piece, with coloured words, parodying your orchestra with graphic nonsense. I will paint the charms of the dance in seductive syllables; or no! better--the long forthright swing of the skater, this way, that way, fast and faster, the Ice King's master, the nibble of the cold, the brush of the rasping breeze, the little rascally hubbies where the wind has pimpled the surface, and the dark, blue-black slippery glare beyond, where--damn it! I shock you with a raucous expletive, and you plunk into a dash of ice-cold remonstrance up to your ears, and flounder, cold and dripping, tooth-loose, and grey with fright!
So, at the expense of good taste and to the grief of the judicious, I force my point upon you. En garde, messieurs, and answer me! I find few enough who can play the game with me or for me. The age of Chivalry is gone, in horsemanship as well as in feats of arms and sword-play. Who knows the demi-volt, the caracole, the curvet, the capriole or the rest of the Seven Movements? Who is elegant in the High Manege or Raised Airs? Who prances for the sheer delight of gallant rhetoric, on Litotes, Asteism or Onomatopoeia? Fain would I be bedevilled, but the Magi are passed away. I must fall back on Dr. Johnson's pious flim-flam, but the humours of his verbiage are in me, not in him.
Yet the New Century Carnival is proclaimed and, over the water, there are, I hear, a few who are to revel with King Rex in the Empire of Unreason. On this side the nearest we have got to it is a little machine-made nonsense, ground out for the supposititious amusement of babes. But what I mean is neither second childhood, nor bombast, nor buffoonery, nor silliness, nor even insanity--though that is nearest the mark--but a tipsy Hell-raising with this wine of our fine old English speech. It has been too long corked up and cobwebbed by tradition, sanctified to the Elect, and discreetly dispensed at decorous dinner tables by respectable authors, and ladies-with-three-names who also write. It has been too long sipped and tasted mincingly out of the cut-glass goblets of the literary table. Gentlemen-inebriates all, I wave you the red flag! A torch this way! What ho! Roysterers! Up younglings, quodlings, dabchicks, devil-may-cares and mad-mannered blades! To the devil with the tip-staves and tithing-men, constables, beadles, vergers, deputy sheriffs and long-lipped parsons! A raid on the wine-cellar to break flagons of good English, and drink, drink, drink, till your heads spin! There is still joy and intoxication in the jolly old bottles that Shakespeare and his giddy-phrased Buccaneering crew of poets filled! "By Gad--slid! I scorn it, to be a consort for every humdrum, hang them, scroyles!"
Sub Rosa
Perhaps I am as discreet, honourable and loyal as the ordinary man, but I confess that at times I have a frantic desire to escape to the moon and tell all I know, or to unburden myself of the weight of dynamic confidences, pouring my revelations into the ears of some responsive idiot. In the old days a corpse was fastened to the felon's back in punishment of certain crimes, and to me a secret seems almost as deadly a load. The temptation to vivify the tale and make it walk abroad on its own legs is hard to deny.
There are secrets so dangerous that to possess them is foolhardy. It is like storing dynamite in one's drawing-room; an explosion is always imminent, and publication would mean disaster. I have known secrets myself, so outrageous, so bulging with scandal, that, had I not promptly forgotten them, they would have undone society twenty times over! There is a titilating pleasure in the keeping of such terrific truths and it increases one's inward pride to think that one knows of another what, if told, would change the aspect of a life. The temptation to tell is like being in church and suddenly seized with an almost irresistible impulse to shriek aloud, or like standing at the verge of a cliff and being impelled to throw one's self over. To give way to the perfidious thought means moral death, and when one falls, one brings others down as well.