ALL SUMMER IN A DAY

Preface

“Come, I will sing you some low, sleepy tune,

Not cheerful, nor yet sad; some dull old thing, Some outworn and unused monotony.

.. . Have I forgot the words?

Faith! They are sadder than I thought they were.

Listen to the passing bell!

It says thou and I must part, With a light and a heavy heart.”

“| ae words seem to me to epitomise all that I have tried to express in this book. I have called it an Autobiographical Fantasia, and such is the spirit in which it should be read.

Without undue flattery to my twenty years of conscious experience I may say that I am sure these have yielded tangible and personal memories enough for more than one volume, did I wish to write a conventional Autobiography replete with little anecdotes and every kind of malice that I could arrive at. Of possessing such ambition I hope I am acquitted in this book. I have chosen but one or two ghosts from my | cupboard, brightly glittering ones by preference, whom I have dangled in the light for a few moments before I put them back in their dark corner. Some day, perhaps, I may open both cupboard-doors, dusting and brushing at least a few of the ghosts, before it is time to put them away. Here, in these pages, it has been naturally the oldest and most ragged that have required attention, lest they came to pieces and were useless, and so I have stretched into distant corners to see what I could bring to light.

Vil

PREFACE

It is noticeable how very little most people can remember who have not had their memory specially trained, or, if you like, distorted, by drawing or writing. “Oh! your uncle remembered Lord Byron. What could he tell you about him?” “He had very curly hair and used to limp.” Or—So you often used to meet Oscar Wilde. What was he like?” “He was very fat, he was wearing one of those green carnations, and he spoke in a loud, affected tone.” And this is about all. Indeed, I do not suppose that even Trelawney, a man of considerable intelligence, could have filled his mind consecutively for more than five minutes with his authentic memories of Byron and Shelley. Such is oral, and visual, tradition.

To fortify such meagre material there comes the still more tenuous blood-inheritance, heredity. “I want to know what Napoleon III really looked like. Can’t I make enquiries as to whether he has any surviving illegitimate son, get into touch with him, and see what he’s like!” But it diminishes, does this physical inheritance, by fifty per cent., on the law of natural averages, at the first impact; and it goes quicker and quicker down the descending scale of probability with each successive generation. Yet Nature is sometimes kind to the historian, and may out of a family of twelve produce one child who is really like his grandfather.

Human beings have for so short a time possessed the patience to stand perfectly still, or the painters’ is such a novel and modern profession that it is scarcely possible to follow the physical appearance of any one family in its different digressions and modifications for more than a few generations at the most. I suppose the one exception to this, and the one family who possess an almost complete documentation, are the Haps-

Vill

PREFACE burgs, whose peculiar features can be traced down in every generation from the early fifteenth century to the present day. In fact, the ruler of a certain country who is now engaged in that apparently traditional and hereditary war against the Moors is almost the precise counterpart in appearance to Charles V or to the Emperor Leopold I, that rather casual and disinterested flail of the Turks. But of course with the Hapsburgs the task of the historian has been assisted by their continual intermarriages, and so many alliances between cousins, or between uncle and niece, have made that peculiar appearance ineradicable.

To revert to oral and visual memory, I suppose the reason for the apparent scantiness of material on the part of most people is due to their not having set their ideas in order and tried to recall details while the events in question were still comparatively of recent happening. It is surely, therefore, of more value to set forth your memories when you are twenty-five than after you have reached seventy-five. More especially is this so with regard to the older order of shades, the ghosts of a generation or two before our own, who will so soon go and leave but the merest spark of light behind them. They will be standing, that is to say, in a sunlit window, coming through the door into a room, or met and passed by on the stairs; and that may well be all that is left of them, in fact, it amounts to the verdict of posterity, for this fickle and indiscriminate goddess has only a very few worshippers, and when we say that William Blake or Luca Signorelli are safe in the verdict of posterity, we mean that a few people of discerning minds are continually shouting about them. That is all the noise there is; and, for the rest, the great masses of humanity are silent—not in tolerance, but in ignorance. ix

PREFACE

With regard, then, to one’s private mythology, for in this way one might describe the arsenal of memory, those who know anything of interest had better say it; for such little flashes and flickers of light are one’s own property and visible to no one else. They get further and further away, and will soon be beyond recall; and this explains why I have seized these short and intangible moments in preference to more durable and concrete meetings. The recording of a few moments has been some two years’ work, and it would never have been undertaken but for my brother’s encouragement and advice, and that of two friends whom I may apostrophise here as A. D. W. and BADSZ.

In the only other prose work that I have written I found myself from an excess of poetry driven towards Museum-research and guide-books, old and new; here I have thrown overboard that ballast and narcotic of the senses and am trying to live without it in a world with which the things that really interest me have no contact. In fact they are dead, as dead as the things I describe in these pages; but from these latter I part with a light and a heavy heart, which means that at one time they were of my flesh and blood, however cold they may be now.

Contents

PREFACE : : : : : : PART I: ALL SUMMER IN A DAY

Tue Porish Musicians .

Miss Morcan .