Philistia. Allen Grant

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СКАЧАТЬ waistcoat; ‘but he’s spoilt by two bad traits. In the first place, he’s so dreadfully conscious of the fact that he has risen from a lower position; and then, again, he’s so engrossingly and pervadingly mathematical. X square seems to have seized upon him bodily, and to have wormed its fatal way into his very marrow.’

      ‘Ah, you must remember, he’s true to his first love. Culture came to him first, while yet he abode in Philistia, under the playful disguise of a conic section. He scaled his way out of Gath by means of a treatise on elementary trigonometry, and evaded Askelon on the wings of an undulatory theory of light. It is different with us, you know, who have emerged from the land of darkness by the regular classical and literary highway. We feed upon Rabelais and Burton; he flits carelessly from flower to flower of the theory of Quantics. If he were an idealist painter, like Rossetti, he would paint great allegorical pictures for us, representing an asymptotic curve appearing to him in a dream, and introducing that blushing maiden, Hyperbola, to his affectionate consideration.’

      As Berkeley spoke, a rap sounded on the oak, and Ernest Le Breton entered the room.

      ‘What, you here, Herbert?’ he said with a shade of displeasure in his tone. ‘Are you, too, of the bidden?’

      ‘Berkeley has asked me to stop and lunch with him, if that’s what you mean.’

      ‘We shall be quite a party,’ said Ernest, seating himself, and looking abstractedly round the room. ‘Why, Berkeley,’ as his eye fell upon the Venetian vase, ‘you’ve positively got some more gew-gaws here. This one’s new, isn’t it? Eh!’

      ‘Yes. I picked it up for a song, this long, at a stranded village in the Apennines. Literally for a song, for it cost me just what I got from Fradelli for that last little piece of mine. It’s very pretty, isn’t it?’

      ‘Very; exquisite, really; the blending of the tones is so perfect. I wish I knew what to think about these things. I can’t make up my mind about them. Sometimes I think it’s all right to make them and buy them; sometimes I think it’s all wrong.’

      ‘Oh, if that’s your difficulty,’ said Berkeley, pulling his white tie straight at the tiny round looking-glass, ‘I can easily reassure you. Do you think a hundred and eighty pounds a year an excessive sum for one person to spend upon his own entire living?’

      ‘It doesn’t seem so, as expenses go amongst US,’ said Ernest, seriously, ‘though I dare say it would look like shocking extravagance to a working man with a wife and family.’

      ‘Very well, that’s the very outside I ever spend upon myself in any one year, for the excellent reason that it’s all I ever get to spend in any way. Now, why shouldn’t I spend it on the things that please me best and are joys for ever, instead of on the things that disappear at once and perish in the using?’

      ‘Ah, but that’s not the whole question,’ Ernest answered, looking at the curate fixedly. ‘What right have you and I to spend so much when others are wanting for bread? And what right have you or I to make other people work at producing these useless trinkets for our sole selfish gratification?’

      ‘Well now, Le Breton,’ said the parson, assuming a more serious tone, ‘you know you’re a reasonable creature, so I don’t mind discussing this question with you. You’ve got an ethical foundation to your nature, and you want to see things done on decent grounds of distributive justice. There I am one with you. But you’ve also got an aesthetic side to your nature, which makes you worth arguing with upon the matter. I won’t argue with your vulgar materialised socialist, who would break up the frieze of the Parthenon for road metal, or pull down Giotto’s frescoes because they represent scenes in the fabulous lives of saints and martyrs. You know what a work of art is when you see it; and therefore you’re worth arguing with, which your vulgar Continental socialist really isn’t. The one cogent argument for him is the whiff of grape-shot.’

      ‘I recognise,’ said Ernest, ‘that the works of art, of poetry, or of music, which we possess are a grand inheritance from the past; and I would do all I could to preserve them intact for those that come after us.’

      ‘I’m sure you would. No restoration or tinkering in you, I’m certain. Well, then, would you give anything for a world which hadn’t got this aesthetic side to its corporate existence? Would you give anything for a world which didn’t care at all for painting, sculpture, music, poetry? I wouldn’t. I don’t want such a world. I won’t countenance such a world. I’ll do nothing to further or advance such a world. It’s utterly repugnant to me, and I banish it, as Themistocles banished the Athenians.’

      ‘But consider,’ said Ernest, ‘we live in a world where men and women are actually starving. How can we reconcile to our consciences the spending of one penny on one useless thing when others are dying of sheer want, and cold, and nakedness? That’s the great question that’s always oppressing my poor dissatisfied conscience.’

      ‘So it does everybody’s—except Herbert’s: he explains it all on biological grounds as the beautiful discriminative action of natural selection. Simple, but not consolatory. Still, look at the other side of the question. Suppose you and everybody else were to give up all superfluities, and confine all your energies to the unlimited production of bare necessaries. Suppose you occupy every acre of land with your corn-fields, or your piggeries; and sweep away all the parks, and woods, and heaths, and moorlands in England. Suppose you keep on letting your population multiply as fast as it chooses—and it WILL multiply, you know, in that ugly, reckless, anti-Malthusian fashion of its own—till every rood of ground maintains its man, and only just maintains him; and what will you have got then?’

      ‘A dead level of abject pauperism,’ put in Herbert blandly; ‘a reductio ad absurdum of all your visionary Schurzian philosophy, my dear Ernest. Look at it another way, now, and just consider. Which really and truly matters most to you and me, a great work of art or a highly respectable horny-handed son of toil, whose acquaintance we have never had the pleasure of personally making? Suppose you read in the Times that the respectable horny-handed one has fallen off a scaffolding and broken his neck; and that the Dresden Madonna has been burnt by an unexpected accident; which of the two items of intelligence affects you the most acutely? My dear fellow, you may push your humanitarian enthusiasm as far as ever you like; but in your heart of hearts you know as well as I do that you’ll deeply regret the loss of the Madonna, and you’ll never think again about the fate of the respectable horny-handed, his wife or children.’

      Ernest’s answer, if he had any to make, was effectually nipped in the bud by the entrance of the scout, who came in to announce Mr. and Miss Oswald and Mrs. Martindale. Edie wore the grey dress, her brother’s present, and flitted into the room after her joyous fashion, full of her first fresh delight at the cloistered quad of Magdalen.

      ‘What a delicious college, Mr. Berkeley!’ she said, holding out her hand to him brightly. ‘Good-morning, Mr. Le Breton; this is your brother, I know by the likeness. I thought New College very beautiful, but nothing I’ve seen is quite as beautiful as Magdalen. What a privilege to live always in such a place! And what an exquisite view from your window here!’

      ‘Yes,’ said Berkeley, moving a few music-books from the seat in the window-sill; ‘come and sit by it, Miss Oswald. Mrs. Martindale, won’t you put your shawl down? How’s the Professor to-day? So sorry he couldn’t come.’

      ‘Ah, he had to go to sit on one of his Boards,’ said the old lady, seating herself. ‘But you know I’m quite accustomed to going out without him.’

      Arthur Berkeley knew as much; indeed, being a person of minute strategical intellect, he had purposely looked out a day on which the СКАЧАТЬ