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 The Battle of the Books and other Short Pieces by Jonathan Swift.
First published in 1704.
This ebook edition was created and published by Global Grey in 2020,
and updated on the 17th June 2023.
The artwork used for the cover is ‘The Library’
painted by Wilhelm Löwith.
This book can be found on the site here:
globalgreyebooks.com/battle-of-the-books-and-other-short-pieces-ebook.html
©Global Grey 2023
globalgreyebooks.com
Contents
Introduction
The Bookseller To The Reader
The Preface Of The Author
A Full And True Account Of The Battle Fought Last Friday Between The Ancient And The
Modern Books In Saint James’s Library
The Episode Of Bentley And Wotton
A Meditation Upon A Broomstick
Predictions For The Year 1708
The Accomplishment Of The First Of Mr. Bickerstaff’s Predictions; Being An Account Of
The Death Of Mr. Partridge The Almanack-Maker, Upon The 29th Instant
Baucis And Philemon
The Logicians Refuted
The Puppet Show
Cadenus And Vanessa
Stella’s Birthday, 1718
Stella’s Birthday, 1720
Stella’s Birthday
Stella’s Birthday, 1724
Stella’s Birthday, March 13, 1726
To Stella
The First He Wrote Oct. 17, 1727
The Second Prayer Was Written Nov. 6, 1727
The Beasts’ Confession (1732)
An Argument To Prove That The Abolishing Of Christianity In England May, As Things
Now Stand, Be Attended With Some Inconveniences, And Perhaps Not Produce Those Many
Good Effects Proposed Thereby
Hints Towards An Essay On Conversation
Thoughts On Various Subjects
 1

Introduction
Jonathan Swift was born in 1667, on the 30th of November. His father was a Jonathan Swift,
sixth of the ten sons of the Rev. Thomas Swift, vicar of Goodrich, near Ross, in
Herefordshire, who had married Elizabeth Dryden, niece to the poet Dryden’s
grandfather. Jonathan Swift married, at Leicester, Abigail Erick, or Herrick, who was of the
family that had given to England Robert Herrick, the poet. As their eldest brother, Godwin,
was prospering in Ireland, four other Swifts, Dryden, William, Jonathan, and Adam, all in
turn found their way to Dublin. Jonathan was admitted an attorney of the King’s Inns,
Dublin, and was appointed by the Benchers to the office of Steward of the King’s Inns, in
January, 1666. He died in April, 1667, leaving his widow with an infant daughter, Jane, and
an unborn child.
Swift was born in Dublin seven months after his father’s death. His mother after a time
returned to her own family, in Leicester, and the child was added to the household of his
uncle, Godwin Swift, who, by his four wives, became father to ten sons of his own and four
daughters. Godwin Swift sent his nephew to Kilkenny School, where he had William
Congreve among his schoolfellows. In April, 1782, Swift was entered at Trinity College as
pensioner, together with his cousin Thomas, son of his uncle Thomas. That cousin Thomas
afterwards became rector of Puttenham, in Surrey. Jonathan Swift graduated as B.A. at
Dublin, in February, 1686, and remained in Trinity College for another three years. He was
ready to proceed to M.A. when his uncle Godwin became insane. The troubles of 1689 also
caused the closing of the University, and Jonathan Swift went to Leicester, where mother and
son took counsel together as to future possibilities of life.
The retired statesman, Sir William Temple, at Moor Park, near Farnham, in Surrey, was in
highest esteem with the new King and the leaders of the Revolution. His father, as Master of
the Irish Rolls, had been a friend of Godwin Swift’s, and with his wife Swift’s mother could
claim cousinship. After some months, therefore, at Leicester, Jonathan Swift, aged twenty-
two, went to Moor Park, and entered Sir William Temple’s household, doing service with the
expectation of advancement through his influence. The advancement he desired was in the
Church. When Swift went to Moor Park he found in its household a child six or seven years
old, daughter to Mrs. Johnson, who was trusted servant and companion to Lady Gifford, Sir
William Temple’s sister. With this little Esther, aged seven, Swift, aged twenty-two, became
a playfellow and helper in her studies. He broke his English for her into what he called their
“little language,” that was part of the same playful kindliness, and passed into their after-
life. In July, 1692, with Sir William Temple’s help, Jonathan Swift commenced M.A. in
Oxford, as of Hart Hall. In 1694, Swift’s ambition having been thwarted by an offer of a
clerkship, of £120 a year, in the Irish Rolls, he broke from Sir William Temple, took orders,
and obtained, through other influence, in January, 1695, the small prebendary of Kilroot, in
the north of Ireland. He was there for about a year. Close by, in Belfast, was an old college
friend, named Waring, who had a sister. Swift was captivated by Miss Waring, called her
Varina, and would have become engaged to marry her if she had not flinched from
engagement with a young clergyman whose income was but a hundred a year.
But Sir William Temple had missed Jonathan Swift from Moor Park. Differences were
forgotten, and Swift, at his wish, went back. This was in 1696, when his little pupil, Esther
Johnson, was fifteen. Swift said of her, “I knew her from six years old, and had some share
in her education, by directing what books she should read, and perpetually instructing her in
 2

the principles of honour and virtue, from which she never swerved in any one action or
moment of her life. She was sickly from her childhood until about the age of fifteen; but then
grew into perfect health, and was then looked upon as one of the most beautiful, graceful, and
agreeable young women in London, only a little too fat. Her hair was blacker than a raven,
and every feature of her face in perfection.” This was the Stella of Swift’s after-life, the one
woman to whom his whole love was given. But side by side with the slow growth of his
knowledge of all she was for him, was the slow growth of his conviction that attacks of
giddiness and deafness, which first came when he was twenty, and recurred at times
throughout his life, were signs to be associated with that which he regarded as the curse upon
his life. His end would be like his uncle Godwin’s. It was a curse transmissible to children,
but if he desired to keep the influence his genius gave him, he could not tell the world why he
refused to marry. Only to Stella, who remained unmarried for his sake, and gave her life to
him, could all be known.
Returned to Moor Park, Swift wrote, in 1697, the “Battle of the Books,” as well as the “Tale
of the Tub,” with which it was published seven years afterwards, in 1704. Perrault and others
had been battling in France over the relative merits of Ancient and Modern Writers. The
debate had spread to England. On behalf of the Ancients, stress was laid by Temple on the
letters of Phalaris, tyrant of Agrigentum. Wotton replied to Sir William for the Moderns.
The Hon. Charles Boyle, of Christ Church, published a new edition of the Epistles of
Phalaris, with translation of the Greek text into Latin. Dr. Bentley, the King’s Librarian,
published a “Dissertation on the Epistles of Phalaris,” denying their value, and arguing that
Phalaris did not write them. Christ Church replied through Charles Boyle, with “Dr.
Bentley’s Dissertation on the Epistles of Phalaris examined.” Swift entered into the war with
a light heart, and matched the Ancients in defending them for the amusement of his
patron. His incidental argument between the Spider and the Bee has provided a catch-phrase,
“Sweetness and Light,” to a combatant of later times.
Sir William Temple died on the 27th of January, 1699. Swift then became chaplain to Lord
Berkeley in Dublin Castle, and it was as a little surprise to Lady Berkeley, who liked him to
read to her Robert Boyle’s “Meditations,” that Swift wrote the “Meditation on a
Broomstick.” In February, 1700, he obtained from Lord Berkeley the vicarage of Laracor
with the living of Rathbeggan, also in the diocese of Meath.
In the beginning of 1701 Esther Johnson, to whom Sir William Temple had bequeathed a
leasehold farm in Wicklow, came with an elder friend, Miss Dingley, and settled in Laracor
to be near Swift. During one of the visits to London, made from Laracor, Swift attacked the
false pretensions of astrologers by that prediction of the death of Mr. Partridge, a prophetic
almanac maker, of which he described the Accomplishment so clearly that Partridge had
much ado to get credit for being alive.
The lines addressed to Stella speak for themselves. “Cadenus and Vanessa” was meant as
polite and courteous admonition to Miss Hester Van Homrigh, a young lady in whom green-
sickness seems to have produced devotion to Swift in forms that embarrassed him, and with
which he did not well know how to deal.
H. M.
 3

The Bookseller To The Reader

This discourse, as it is unquestionably of the same author, so it seems to have been written
about the same time, with “The Tale of a Tub;” I mean the year 1697, when the famous
dispute was on foot about ancient and modern learning. The controversy took its rise from an
essay of Sir William Temple’s upon that subject; which was answered by W. Wotton, B.D.,
with an appendix by Dr. Bentley, endeavouring to destroy the credit of Æsop and Phalaris for
authors, whom Sir William Temple had, in the essay before mentioned, highly
commended. In that appendix the doctor falls hard upon a new edition of Phalaris, put out by
the Honourable Charles Boyle, now Earl of Orrery, to which Mr. Boyle replied at large with
great learning and wit; and the Doctor voluminously rejoined. In this dispute the town highly
resented to see a person of Sir William Temple’s character and merits roughly used by the
two reverend gentlemen aforesaid, and without any manner of provocation. At length, there
appearing no end of the quarrel, our author tells us that the BOOKS in St. James’s Library,
looking upon themselves as parties principally concerned, took up the controversy, and came
to a decisive battle; but the manuscript, by the injury of fortune or weather, being in several
places imperfect, we cannot learn to which side the victory fell.
I must warn the reader to beware of applying to persons what is here meant only of books, in
the most literal sense. So, when Virgil is mentioned, we are not to understand the person of a
famous poet called by that name; but only certain sheets of paper bound up in leather,
containing in print the works of the said poet: and so of the rest.
 4

The Preface Of The Author

Satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their
own; which is the chief reason for that kind reception it meets with in the world, and that so
very few are offended with it. But, if it should happen otherwise, the danger is not great; and
I have learned from long experience never to apprehend mischief from those understandings I
have been able to provoke: for anger and fury, though they add strength to the sinews of the
body, yet are found to relax those of the mind, and to render all its efforts feeble and
impotent.
There is a brain that will endure but one scumming; let the owner gather it with discretion,
and manage his little stock with husbandry; but, of all things, let him beware of bringing it
under the lash of his betters, because that will make it all bubble up into impertinence, and he
will find no new supply. Wit without knowledge being a sort of cream, which gathers in a
night to the top, and by a skilful hand may be soon whipped into froth; but once scummed
away, what appears underneath will be fit for nothing but to be thrown to the hogs.
 5

A Full And True Account Of The Battle Fought

Last Friday Between The Ancient And The
Modern Books In Saint James’s Library
Whoever examines, with due circumspection, into the annual records of time, will find it
remarked that War is the child of Pride, and Pride the daughter of Riches:—the former of
which assertions may be soon granted, but one cannot so easily subscribe to the latter; for
Pride is nearly related to Beggary and Want, either by father or mother, and sometimes by
both: and, to speak naturally, it very seldom happens among men to fall out when all have
enough; invasions usually travelling from north to south, that is to say, from poverty to
plenty. The most ancient and natural grounds of quarrels are lust and avarice; which, though
we may allow to be brethren, or collateral branches of pride, are certainly the issues of
want. For, to speak in the phrase of writers upon politics, we may observe in the republic of
dogs, which in its original seems to be an institution of the many, that the whole state is ever
in the profoundest peace after a full meal; and that civil broils arise among them when it
happens for one great bone to be seized on by some leading dog, who either divides it among
the few, and then it falls to an oligarchy, or keeps it to himself, and then it runs up to a
tyranny. The same reasoning also holds place among them in those dissensions we behold
upon a turgescency in any of their females. For the right of possession lying in common (it
being impossible to establish a property in so delicate a case), jealousies and suspicions do so
abound, that the whole commonwealth of that street is reduced to a manifest state of war, of
every citizen against every citizen, till some one of more courage, conduct, or fortune than
the rest seizes and enjoys the prize: upon which naturally arises plenty of heart-burning, and
envy, and snarling against the happy dog. Again, if we look upon any of these republics
engaged in a foreign war, either of invasion or defence, we shall find the same reasoning will
serve as to the grounds and occasions of each; and that poverty or want, in some degree or
other (whether real or in opinion, which makes no alteration in the case), has a great share, as
well as pride, on the part of the aggressor.
Now whoever will please to take this scheme, and either reduce or adapt it to an intellectual
state or commonwealth of learning, will soon discover the first ground of disagreement
between the two great parties at this time in arms, and may form just conclusions upon the
merits of either cause. But the issue or events of this war are not so easy to conjecture at; for
the present quarrel is so inflamed by the warm heads of either faction, and the pretensions
somewhere or other so exorbitant, as not to admit the least overtures of accommodation. This
quarrel first began, as I have heard it affirmed by an old dweller in the neighbourhood, about
a small spot of ground, lying and being upon one of the two tops of the hill Parnassus; the
highest and largest of which had, it seems, been time out of mind in quiet possession of
certain tenants, called the Ancients; and the other was held by the Moderns. But these
disliking their present station, sent certain ambassadors to the Ancients, complaining of a
great nuisance; how the height of that part of Parnassus quite spoiled the prospect of theirs,
especially towards the east; and therefore, to avoid a war, offered them the choice of this
alternative, either that the Ancients would please to remove themselves and their effects
down to the lower summit, which the Moderns would graciously surrender to them, and
advance into their place; or else the said Ancients will give leave to the Moderns to come
with shovels and mattocks, and level the said hill as low as they shall think it convenient. To
which the Ancients made answer, how little they expected such a message as this from a
 6

colony whom they had admitted, out of their own free grace, to so near a
neighbourhood. That, as to their own seat, they were aborigines of it, and therefore to talk
with them of a removal or surrender was a language they did not understand. That if the
height of the hill on their side shortened the prospect of the Moderns, it was a disadvantage
they could not help; but desired them to consider whether that injury (if it be any) were not
largely recompensed by the shade and shelter it afforded them. That as to the levelling or
digging down, it was either folly or ignorance to propose it if they did or did not know how
that side of the hill was an entire rock, which would break their tools and hearts, without any
damage to itself. That they would therefore advise the Moderns rather to raise their own side
of the hill than dream of pulling down that of the Ancients; to the former of which they would
not only give licence, but also largely contribute. All this was rejected by the Moderns with
much indignation, who still insisted upon one of the two expedients; and so this difference
broke out into a long and obstinate war, maintained on the one part by resolution, and by the
courage of certain leaders and allies; but, on the other, by the greatness of their number, upon
all defeats affording continual recruits. In this quarrel whole rivulets of ink have been
exhausted, and the virulence of both parties enormously augmented. Now, it must be here
understood, that ink is the great missive weapon in all battles of the learned, which, conveyed
through a sort of engine called a quill, infinite numbers of these are darted at the enemy by
the valiant on each side, with equal skill and violence, as if it were an engagement of
porcupines. This malignant liquor was compounded, by the engineer who invented it, of two
ingredients, which are, gall and copperas; by its bitterness and venom to suit, in some degree,
as well as to foment, the genius of the combatants. And as the Grecians, after an
engagement, when they could not agree about the victory, were wont to set up trophies on
both sides, the beaten party being content to be at the same expense, to keep itself in
countenance (a laudable and ancient custom, happily revived of late in the art of war), so the
learned, after a sharp and bloody dispute, do, on both sides, hang out their trophies too,
whichever comes by the worst. These trophies have largely inscribed on them the merits of
the cause; a full impartial account of such a Battle, and how the victory fell clearly to the
party that set them up. They are known to the world under several names; as disputes,
arguments, rejoinders, brief considerations, answers, replies, remarks, reflections, objections,
confutations. For a very few days they are fixed up all in public places, either by themselves
or their representatives, for passengers to gaze at; whence the chiefest and largest are
removed to certain magazines they call libraries, there to remain in a quarter purposely
assigned them, and thenceforth begin to be called books of controversy.
In these books is wonderfully instilled and preserved the spirit of each warrior while he is
alive; and after his death his soul transmigrates thither to inform them. This, at least, is the
more common opinion; but I believe it is with libraries as with other cemeteries, where some
philosophers affirm that a certain spirit, which they call brutum hominis, hovers over the
monument, till the body is corrupted and turns to dust or to worms, but then vanishes or
dissolves; so, we may say, a restless spirit haunts over every book, till dust or worms have
seized upon it—which to some may happen in a few days, but to others later—and therefore,
books of controversy being, of all others, haunted by the most disorderly spirits, have always
been confined in a separate lodge from the rest, and for fear of a mutual violence against each
other, it was thought prudent by our ancestors to bind them to the peace with strong iron
chains. Of which invention the original occasion was this: When the works of Scotus first
came out, they were carried to a certain library, and had lodgings appointed them; but this
author was no sooner settled than he went to visit his master Aristotle, and there both
concerted together to seize Plato by main force, and turn him out from his ancient station
among the divines, where he had peaceably dwelt near eight hundred years. The attempt
succeeded, and the two usurpers have reigned ever since in his stead; but, to maintain quiet
 7

for the future, it was decreed that all polemics of the larger size should be hold fast with a
chain.
By this expedient, the public peace of libraries might certainly have been preserved if a new
species of controversial books had not arisen of late years, instinct with a more malignant
spirit, from the war above mentioned between the learned about the higher summit of
Parnassus.
When these books were first admitted into the public libraries, I remember to have said, upon
occasion, to several persons concerned, how I was sure they would create broils wherever
they came, unless a world of care were taken; and therefore I advised that the champions of
each side should be coupled together, or otherwise mixed, that, like the blending of contrary
poisons, their malignity might be employed among themselves. And it seems I was neither
an ill prophet nor an ill counsellor; for it was nothing else but the neglect of this caution
which gave occasion to the terrible fight that happened on Friday last between the Ancient
and Modern Books in the King’s library. Now, because the talk of this battle is so fresh in
everybody’s mouth, and the expectation of the town so great to be informed in the particulars,
I, being possessed of all qualifications requisite in an historian, and retained by neither party,
have resolved to comply with the urgent importunity of my friends, by writing down a full
impartial account thereof.
The guardian of the regal library, a person of great valour, but chiefly renowned for his
humanity, had been a fierce champion for the Moderns, and, in an engagement upon
Parnassus, had vowed with his own hands to knock down two of the ancient chiefs who
guarded a small pass on the superior rock, but, endeavouring to climb up, was cruelly
obstructed by his own unhappy weight and tendency towards his centre, a quality to which
those of the Modern party are extremely subject; for, being light-headed, they have, in
speculation, a wonderful agility, and conceive nothing too high for them to mount, but, in
reducing to practice, discover a mighty pressure about their posteriors and their
heels. Having thus failed in his design, the disappointed champion bore a cruel rancour to the
Ancients, which he resolved to gratify by showing all marks of his favour to the books of
their adversaries, and lodging them in the fairest apartments; when, at the same time,
whatever book had the boldness to own itself for an advocate of the Ancients was buried
alive in some obscure corner, and threatened, upon the least displeasure, to be turned out of
doors. Besides, it so happened that about this time there was a strange confusion of place
among all the books in the library, for which several reasons were assigned. Some imputed it
to a great heap of learned dust, which a perverse wind blew off from a shelf of Moderns into
the keeper’s eyes. Others affirmed he had a humour to pick the worms out of the schoolmen,
and swallow them fresh and fasting, whereof some fell upon his spleen, and some climbed up
into his head, to the great perturbation of both. And lastly, others maintained that, by walking
much in the dark about the library, he had quite lost the situation of it out of his head; and
therefore, in replacing his books, he was apt to mistake and clap Descartes next to Aristotle,
poor Plato had got between Hobbes and the Seven Wise Masters, and Virgil was hemmed in
with Dryden on one side and Wither on the other.
Meanwhile, those books that were advocates for the Moderns, chose out one from among
them to make a progress through the whole library, examine the number and strength of their
party, and concert their affairs. This messenger performed all things very industriously, and
brought back with him a list of their forces, in all, fifty thousand, consisting chiefly of light-
horse, heavy-armed foot, and mercenaries; whereof the foot were in general but sorrily armed
and worse clad; their horses large, but extremely out of case and heart; however, some few,
by trading among the Ancients, had furnished themselves tolerably enough.
 8

While things were in this ferment, discord grew extremely high; hot words passed on both
sides, and ill blood was plentifully bred. Here a solitary Ancient, squeezed up among a
whole shelf of Moderns, offered fairly to dispute the case, and to prove by manifest reason
that the priority was due to them from long possession, and in regard of their prudence,
antiquity, and, above all, their great merits toward the Moderns. But these denied the
premises, and seemed very much to wonder how the Ancients could pretend to insist upon
their antiquity, when it was so plain (if they went to that) that the Moderns were much the
more ancient of the two. As for any obligations they owed to the Ancients, they renounced
them all. “It is true,” said they, “we are informed some few of our party have been so mean
as to borrow their subsistence from you, but the rest, infinitely the greater number (and
especially we French and English), were so far from stooping to so base an example, that
there never passed, till this very hour, six words between us. For our horses were of our own
breeding, our arms of our own forging, and our clothes of our own cutting out and
sewing.” Plato was by chance up on the next shelf, and observing those that spoke to be in
the ragged plight mentioned a while ago, their jades lean and foundered, their weapons of
rotten wood, their armour rusty, and nothing but rags underneath, he laughed loud, and in his
pleasant way swore, by ---, he believed them.
Now, the Moderns had not proceeded in their late negotiation with secrecy enough to escape
the notice of the enemy. For those advocates who had begun the quarrel, by setting first on
foot the dispute of precedency, talked so loud of coming to a battle, that Sir William Temple
happened to overhear them, and gave immediate intelligence to the Ancients, who thereupon
drew up their scattered troops together, resolving to act upon the defensive; upon which,
several of the Moderns fled over to their party, and among the rest Temple himself. This
Temple, having been educated and long conversed among the Ancients, was, of all the
Moderns, their greatest favourite, and became their greatest champion.
Things were at this crisis when a material accident fell out. For upon the highest corner of a
large window, there dwelt a certain spider, swollen up to the first magnitude by the
destruction of infinite numbers of flies, whose spoils lay scattered before the gates of his
palace, like human bones before the cave of some giant. The avenues to his castle were
guarded with turnpikes and palisadoes, all after the modern way of fortification. After you
had passed several courts you came to the centre, wherein you might behold the constable
himself in his own lodgings, which had windows fronting to each avenue, and ports to sally
out upon all occasions of prey or defence. In this mansion he had for some time dwelt in
peace and plenty, without danger to his person by swallows from above, or to his palace by
brooms from below; when it was the pleasure of fortune to conduct thither a wandering bee,
to whose curiosity a broken pane in the glass had discovered itself, and in he went, where,
expatiating a while, he at last happened to alight upon one of the outward walls of the
spider’s citadel; which, yielding to the unequal weight, sunk down to the very
foundation. Thrice he endeavoured to force his passage, and thrice the centre shook. The
spider within, feeling the terrible convulsion, supposed at first that nature was approaching to
her final dissolution, or else that Beelzebub, with all his legions, was come to revenge the
death of many thousands of his subjects whom his enemy had slain and devoured. However,
he at length valiantly resolved to issue forth and meet his fate. Meanwhile the bee had
acquitted himself of his toils, and, posted securely at some distance, was employed in
cleansing his wings, and disengaging them from the ragged remnants of the cobweb. By this
time the spider was adventured out, when, beholding the chasms, the ruins, and dilapidations
of his fortress, he was very near at his wit’s end; he stormed and swore like a madman, and
swelled till he was ready to burst. At length, casting his eye upon the bee, and wisely
gathering causes from events (for they know each other by sight), “A plague split you,” said
 9

he; “is it you, with a vengeance, that have made this litter here; could not you look before
you, and be d---d? Do you think I have nothing else to do (in the devil’s name) but to mend
and repair after you?” “Good words, friend,” said the bee, having now pruned himself, and
being disposed to droll; “I’ll give you my hand and word to come near your kennel no more; I
was never in such a confounded pickle since I was born.” “Sirrah,” replied the spider, “if it
were not for breaking an old custom in our family, never to stir abroad against an enemy, I
should come and teach you better manners.” “I pray have patience,” said the bee, “or you’ll
spend your substance, and, for aught I see, you may stand in need of it all, towards the repair
of your house.” “Rogue, rogue,” replied the spider, “yet methinks you should have more
respect to a person whom all the world allows to be so much your betters.” “By my troth,”
said the bee, “the comparison will amount to a very good jest, and you will do me a favour to
let me know the reasons that all the world is pleased to use in so hopeful a dispute.” At this
the spider, having swelled himself into the size and posture of a disputant, began his
argument in the true spirit of controversy, with resolution to be heartily scurrilous and angry,
to urge on his own reasons without the least regard to the answers or objections of his
opposite, and fully predetermined in his mind against all conviction.
“Not to disparage myself,” said he, “by the comparison with such a rascal, what art thou but a
vagabond without house or home, without stock or inheritance? born to no possession of your
own, but a pair of wings and a drone-pipe. Your livelihood is a universal plunder upon
nature; a freebooter over fields and gardens; and, for the sake of stealing, will rob a nettle as
easily as a violet. Whereas I am a domestic animal, furnished with a native stock within
myself. This large castle (to show my improvements in the mathematics) is all built with my
own hands, and the materials extracted altogether out of my own person.”
“I am glad,” answered the bee, “to hear you grant at least that I am come honestly by my
wings and my voice; for then, it seems, I am obliged to Heaven alone for my flights and my
music; and Providence would never have bestowed on me two such gifts without designing
them for the noblest ends. I visit, indeed, all the flowers and blossoms of the field and
garden, but whatever I collect thence enriches myself without the least injury to their beauty,
their smell, or their taste. Now, for you and your skill in architecture and other mathematics,
I have little to say: in that building of yours there might, for aught I know, have been labour
and method enough; but, by woeful experience for us both, it is too plain the materials are
naught; and I hope you will henceforth take warning, and consider duration and matter, as
well as method and art. You boast, indeed, of being obliged to no other creature, but of
drawing and spinning out all from yourself; that is to say, if we may judge of the liquor in the
vessel by what issues out, you possess a good plentiful store of dirt and poison in your breast;
and, though I would by no means lesson or disparage your genuine stock of either, yet I doubt
you are somewhat obliged, for an increase of both, to a little foreign assistance. Your
inherent portion of dirt does not fall of acquisitions, by sweepings exhaled from below; and
one insect furnishes you with a share of poison to destroy another. So that, in short, the
question comes all to this: whether is the nobler being of the two, that which, by a lazy
contemplation of four inches round, by an overweening pride, feeding, and engendering on
itself, turns all into excrement and venom, producing nothing at all but flybane and a cobweb;
or that which, by a universal range, with long search, much study, true judgment, and
distinction of things, brings home honey and wax.”
This dispute was managed with such eagerness, clamour, and warmth, that the two parties of
books, in arms below, stood silent a while, waiting in suspense what would be the issue;
which was not long undetermined: for the bee, grown impatient at so much loss of time, fled
straight away to a bed of roses, without looking for a reply, and left the spider, like an orator,
collected in himself, and just prepared to burst out.
 10

It happened upon this emergency that Æsop broke silence first. He had been of late most
barbarously treated by a strange effect of the regent’s humanity, who had torn off his title-
page, sorely defaced one half of his leaves, and chained him fast among a shelf of
Moderns. Where, soon discovering how high the quarrel was likely to proceed, he tried all
his arts, and turned himself to a thousand forms. At length, in the borrowed shape of an ass,
the regent mistook him for a Modern; by which means he had time and opportunity to escape
to the Ancients, just when the spider and the bee were entering into their contest; to which he
gave his attention with a world of pleasure, and, when it was ended, swore in the loudest key
that in all his life he had never known two cases, so parallel and adapt to each other as that in
the window and this upon the shelves. “The disputants,” said he, “have admirably managed
the dispute between them, have taken in the full strength of all that is to be said on both sides,
and exhausted the substance of every argument pro and con. It is but to adjust the reasonings
of both to the present quarrel, then to compare and apply the labours and fruits of each, as the
bee has learnedly deduced them, and we shall find the conclusion fall plain and close upon
the Moderns and us. For pray, gentlemen, was ever anything so modern as the spider in his
air, his turns, and his paradoxes? he argues in the behalf of you, his brethren, and himself,
with many boastings of his native stock and great genius; that he spins and spits wholly from
himself, and scorns to own any obligation or assistance from without. Then he displays to
you his great skill in architecture and improvement in the mathematics. To all this the bee, as
an advocate retained by us, the Ancients, thinks fit to answer, that, if one may judge of the
great genius or inventions of the Moderns by what they have produced, you will hardly have
countenance to bear you out in boasting of either. Erect your schemes with as much method
and skill as you please; yet, if the materials be nothing but dirt, spun out of your own entrails
(the guts of modern brains), the edifice will conclude at last in a cobweb; the duration of
which, like that of other spiders’ webs, may be imputed to their being forgotten, or neglected,
or hid in a corner. For anything else of genuine that the Moderns may pretend to, I cannot
recollect; unless it be a large vein of wrangling and satire, much of a nature and substance
with the spiders’ poison; which, however they pretend to spit wholly out of themselves, is
improved by the same arts, by feeding upon the insects and vermin of the age. As for us, the
Ancients, we are content with the bee, to pretend to nothing of our own beyond our wings
and our voice: that is to say, our flights and our language. For the rest, whatever we have got
has been by infinite labour and search, and ranging through every corner of nature; the
difference is, that, instead of dirt and poison, we have rather chosen to till our hives with
honey and wax; thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest of things, which are sweetness
and light.”
It is wonderful to conceive the tumult arisen among the books upon the close of this long
descant of Æsop: both parties took the hint, and heightened their animosities so on a sudden,
that they resolved it should come to a battle. Immediately the two main bodies withdrew,
under their several ensigns, to the farther parts of the library, and there entered into cabals
and consults upon the present emergency. The Moderns were in very warm debates upon the
choice of their leaders; and nothing less than the fear impending from their enemies could
have kept them from mutinies upon this occasion. The difference was greatest among the
horse, where every private trooper pretended to the chief command, from Tasso and Milton to
Dryden and Wither. The light-horse were commanded by Cowley and Despreaux. There
came the bowmen under their valiant leaders, Descartes, Gassendi, and Hobbes; whose
strength was such that they could shoot their arrows beyond the atmosphere, never to fall
down again, but turn, like that of Evander, into meteors; or, like the cannon-ball, into
stars. Paracelsus brought a squadron of stinkpot-flingers from the snowy mountains of
Rhætia. There came a vast body of dragoons, of different nations, under the leading of
Harvey, their great aga: part armed with scythes, the weapons of death; part with lances and
 11

long knives, all steeped in poison; part shot bullets of a most malignant nature, and used
white powder, which infallibly killed without report. There came several bodies of heavy-
armed foot, all mercenaries, under the ensigns of Guicciardini, Davila, Polydore Vergil,
Buchanan, Mariana, Camden, and others. The engineers were commanded by
Regiomontanus and Wilkins. The rest was a confused multitude, led by Scotus, Aquinas, and
Bellarmine; of mighty bulk and stature, but without either arms, courage, or discipline. In the
last place came infinite swarms of calones, a disorderly rout led by L’Estrange; rogues and
ragamuffins, that follow the camp for nothing but the plunder, all without coats to cover
them.
The army of the Ancients was much fewer in number; Homer led the horse, and Pindar the
light-horse; Euclid was chief engineer; Plato and Aristotle commanded the bowmen;
Herodotus and Livy the foot; Hippocrates, the dragoons; the allies, led by Vossius and
Temple, brought up the rear.
All things violently tending to a decisive battle, Fame, who much frequented, and had a large
apartment formerly assigned her in the regal library, fled up straight to Jupiter, to whom she
delivered a faithful account of all that passed between the two parties below; for among the
gods she always tells truth. Jove, in great concern, convokes a council in the Milky
Way. The senate assembled, he declares the occasion of convening them; a bloody battle just
impendent between two mighty armies of ancient and modern creatures, called books,
wherein the celestial interest was but too deeply concerned. Momus, the patron of the
Moderns, made an excellent speech in their favour, which was answered by Pallas, the
protectress of the Ancients. The assembly was divided in their affections; when Jupiter
commanded the Book of Fate to be laid before him. Immediately were brought by Mercury
three large volumes in folio, containing memoirs of all things past, present, and to come. The
clasps were of silver double gilt, the covers of celestial turkey leather, and the paper such as
here on earth might pass almost for vellum. Jupiter, having silently read the decree, would
communicate the import to none, but presently shut up the book.
Without the doors of this assembly there attended a vast number of light, nimble gods, menial
servants to Jupiter: those are his ministering instruments in all affairs below. They travel in a
caravan, more or less together, and are fastened to each other like a link of galley-slaves, by a
light chain, which passes from them to Jupiter’s great toe: and yet, in receiving or delivering
a message, they may never approach above the lowest step of his throne, where he and they
whisper to each other through a large hollow trunk. These deities are called by mortal men
accidents or events; but the gods call them second causes. Jupiter having delivered his
message to a certain number of these divinities, they flew immediately down to the pinnacle
of the regal library, and consulting a few minutes, entered unseen, and disposed the parties
according to their orders.
Meanwhile Momus, fearing the worst, and calling to mind an ancient prophecy which bore no
very good face to his children the Moderns, bent his flight to the region of a malignant deity
called Criticism. She dwelt on the top of a snowy mountain in Nova Zembla; there Momus
found her extended in her den, upon the spoils of numberless volumes, half devoured. At her
right hand sat Ignorance, her father and husband, blind with age; at her left, Pride, her
mother, dressing her up in the scraps of paper herself had torn. There was Opinion, her sister,
light of foot, hood-winked, and head-strong, yet giddy and perpetually turning. About her
played her children, Noise and Impudence, Dulness and Vanity, Positiveness, Pedantry, and
Ill-manners. The goddess herself had claws like a cat; her head, and ears, and voice
resembled those of an ass; her teeth fallen out before, her eyes turned inward, as if she looked
only upon herself; her diet was the overflowing of her own gall; her spleen was so large as to
Another Random Scribd Document
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about whose vales and groves and gleaming temples no living
creature will ever wander. The dove-coloured water that lapped the
rock on which she sat, the colonnade of dark-domed pines along the
brow of the cliff, Ischia and Capri like distant castles of chalcedony,
Vesuvius in a swoon of limpid golden air—all without Bram was but a
vanity of form and colour. The thought of how easily he might have
been preserved from death afflicted her with a madness of rage.
Indifference to the beauty of her surroundings was succeeded by a
wild hatred of that beauty, so well composed, so clear, so bland, and
so serene. But for the folly of one incompetent and unimaginative
fellow man he might have been sitting beside her on this rock, sitting
here in this murmurous placidity of earth and sea and sky, gazing out
across this crystalline expanse, his hand in hers, their hearts beating
together where now only his watch ticked dryly. Nancy longed to
weep; but she could not weep in this brightness. Yet she must either
weep or fling herself from this rock and sink down into the water at
her feet, into that tender water with the hue and the voice and the
softness of a dove. She let a loose stone drop from her hand and
watched it sink to the enamelled floor of the bay. How shallow it was!
She should never drown here. She must seek another rock round
which the water swirled deep and indigo-dark, water in which a stone
would flicker for a few moments in pale blue fire and be lost to sight
long before it reached the bottom. Nancy left the rock where she had
been sitting and tried to climb upward along the cliff’s edge in search
of deep water at its base. And while she climbed her clothes became
scented by the thickets of rosemary. There appeared to her
distraught mind the image of Bram as Laertes and of the actress
who had played Ophelia saying to him, “There’s rosemary, that’s for
remembrance.” She herself had been understudying the Queen and
had been standing in the wings to watch how the mad-scene was
taken. She could see the expression of mingled horror and pity on
Bram’s face, as he took the sprig of rosemary from his sister’s hand.
Pray, love, remember.
“Bram,” she cried aloud in an agony of repentance. “I didn’t mean
it. I’m not really mad. I won’t drown myself. I won’t really.”
 Then she flung herself face downward among the bushes of
rosemary and wept. For an hour she lay hidden from the sun in that
bitter-sweet grey-green gloom of the cliff’s undergrowth until at last
her tears ceased to flow and she could stand up bravely to face
again the future. More lovely now was the long sweep of the
Parthenopean shore, more lucid the wash of golden air, richer and
more profound the warm wintry Southern peace; and she standing
there among the rosemary was transmuted by the timelessness of
her grief into a timeless figure that might haunt for ever that calm and
classic scene.
The last sunset stain had faded from the cloudy cap of Vesuvius,
and the street-lamps were already twinkling when Nancy got back to
Naples. She went into a church, and there in a dark corner prayed to
be forgiven for that brief madness when she had wished to take her
life. She sat for a long while, thinking of happy times with Bram,
soothed by the continuous coming and going of poor people to visit
the Crib, all lit up at the other end of the church. She knelt once more
to beg that all that was lost of Bram’s life might be found again in his
daughter’s; and her ultimate prayer was as always for strength to
devote herself entirely to Letizia’s happiness.
Thus passed the fourth anniversary of the Clown’s death.
 CHAPTER XXII
SORRENTO
Two days after her visit to Posilipo Nancy came back from her
singing-lesson to discover John Kenrick at the pensione.
“I found that I could get away from England for a few days,” he
announced. “And I thought I’d come and ascertain for myself how
you really were getting on.”
“Very badly,” Nancy told him.
“So your last letter implied. But Gambone always errs on the side
of discouragement. I’m going to have a chat with him on the way
back to Bertolini’s. Will you dine with me there to-night? Or, no, wait
a minute. I’ll come down and fetch you, and we’ll eat at a more
native restaurant and go to the opera, or are you tired of the opera?”
Nancy had to confess that she had not yet been to San Carlo.
Kenrick was astonished.
“I couldn’t very well go alone, and I haven’t had anybody I could
ask to go with me,” she explained.
“You’ve been feeling lonely,” he said quickly. “And you’re looking a
bit overstrained. Has Gambone been working you too hard?”
“I doubt if he thinks I’m worth working very hard,” said Nancy.
“Nonsense! I’m going to find out exactly what he does think about
your voice and your prospects. I wager you’ll be pleasantly surprised
to hear what a great opinion he has of you.”
Kenrick left her soon after this, and then Nancy realised how
terribly lonely she had been ever since she came to Naples. A few
weeks ago she would have been vexed by the arrival of her patron. It
would have embarrassed her. It might even have made her suspect
him of ulterior motives. But his arrival now was a genuine pleasure,
and if only he came away from Maestro Gambone with good news of
her progress, she should be happier than she had been for months.
Even an unfavourable report would be something definite, and in that
case she could return to England immediately. Loneliness in
beautiful surroundings was much harder to bear than fellowship in
ugliness. To go back to playing adventuresses in the black country
would have its compensations.
When Kenrick returned to take her out to dinner, there was a smile
on his sombre face. He put up his monocle and looked at Nancy
quizzically.
“You’re a nice one!”
“What’s the matter? What have I done?”
“I thought you told me you weren’t getting on?”
“I didn’t think I was.”
“Well, Gambone says you’re a splendid pupil, that you work very
hard, that you have a glorious natural voice, and that if he can keep
you another six months he’ll guarantee you an engagement at San
Carlo next autumn. What more do you want?”
Nancy caught her breath.
“You’re joking!”
“I’m not indeed. I was never more serious.”
“But why didn’t he say something to me?”
“Gambone is a Neapolitan. Gambone is a realist. About women he
has no illusions. He thinks that the more he beats them the better
they’ll be. He only told me all this after exacting a promise not to
repeat it to you for fear you would be spoilt and give up working as
well as you’re working at present. I reproached him with not having
looked after you socially, and he nearly jumped through the ceiling of
his apartment.”
“‘She is here to work,’ he shouted. ‘She is not here to amuse
herself.’ ‘But you might at least have managed to find her an escort
for the opera.’ And I told him that you had not yet visited San Carlo.
‘Meno male!’ he squealed. I presume your Italian has at least got as
far as knowing that meno male means the less harm done. ‘Meno
male that she has not filled her head with other people’s singing. She
has enough to do with her practising, enough to do to learn how to
speak and pronounce the only civilised tongue that exists for a
singer.’ I told him that you had been lonely, and what do you think he
replied? ‘If she’s lonely, let her cultivate carnations. Garofani!’ he
yelled at the top of his voice. ‘Believe me, my good sir, carnations
are a thousand times more worth while than men and ten thousand
times more worth while than women.’ ‘Even good contraltos?’ I
laughed. ‘Sicuro! Or sopranos, either,’ the old villain chuckled.”
“Well, in some moods I would agree with him,” Nancy said.
“Anyway, whatever the old cynic may say, he has a profound belief
in your future. When he was ushering me out of his apartment ...”
“Oh, he ushered you out?” Nancy laughed. “He always pushes me
out.”
“He would! But listen, he took my arm and said, with a twinkle in
his bright black eyes, ‘So you heard her sing and knew she had a
voice?’ I bowed. ‘Siete un conoscente, caro. Felicitazioni.’”
The opera played at San Carlo that night was La Traviata. Nancy,
not oppressed by the sound and sight of a contralto singing and
acting far better than she could ever hope to sing and act, thoroughly
enjoyed it. The Violetta was a delicate and lovely creature so that,
even if her coloratura did lack something of the finest quality and
ease, her death was almost intolerably moving. Alfredo was played
by an elderly tenor into whose voice the vibrato of age had already
insinuated itself. He was, however, such a master of all the graces
that neither his appearance nor the fading of his voice seemed to
matter a great deal. In compensation for an elderly tenor, the heavy
father was played by a very young barytone with a voice of glorious
roundness and sonority. Kenrick was much excited by this
performance and prophesied for this new singer a success all over
Europe as round and sonorous as his voice. He declared that he had
never heard Germont’s great aria “Di Provenza” given so well.
 After the performance they went to supper at one of the popular
restaurants near the opera house, where Kenrick discoursed upon
the æsthetic value of La Traviata.
“It’s the fashion to decry it as a piece of tawdry and melodramatic
sensationalism, but to my mind it fulfills perfectly Aristotle’s
catharsis.”
“That sounds reassuring,” Nancy laughed. “But I’m afraid I don’t in
the least understand what it means.”
“Aristotle found an æsthetic value in the purging of the emotions.
Well, at the end of Traviata we are left with the feeling that music
could not express more completely the particular set of emotions that
are stirred by the story of Alfredo, Violetta, and Germont. No critic
has ever done justice to the younger Dumas’s Dame aux Camélias
either as a novel or as a play. Yet both they and the opera founded
upon them have a perennial vitality so marked as almost to tempt me
to claim for them an eternal vitality. The actuality of Traviata is so
tremendous that on the first night of its production in Venice it was a
failure because the soprano playing Violetta was so fat as to revolt
the audience’s sense of fact. This seems to me highly significant.
You cannot imagine an operatic version of, let us say, Wuthering
Heights being hissed off the stage because the Heathcliff revolted
any audience’s sense of fact. Now Wuthering Heights much more
nearly approximates to melodrama than La Dame aux Camélias.
The pretentious spiritualism with which a sordid tale of cruelty,
revenge, and lust is decked out cannot hide from the sane observer
the foolish parody of human nature presented therein. It has been
acclaimed as a work of tragic grandeur and sublime imagination as if
forsooth grandeur of imagination were to be measured by the
remoteness of protagonists or plot from recognisable life. Let us
grant that Traviata exhibits a low form of life——”
“Or a form of low life,” Nancy interposed.
“No, no, don’t make a joke of it! I feel seriously and strongly on this
subject,” Kenrick averred. “But a live jelly-fish is a great deal more
marvellous and much more beautiful than a stuffed lion. Nothing
really matters in a work of art if it lacks vitality. I would not say that
Wuthering Heights lacked all vitality, but its vitality is slight, indeed it
is almost imperceptible except to the precious and microscopic taste
of the literary connoisseur. The vitality of La Dame aux Camélias is
startling, so startling indeed as to repel the fastidious and academic
mind just as a don would be embarrassed were his attentions
solicited by a gay lady outside the St. James’s Restaurant. The
trouble is that the standards of criticism are nearly always set up by
the middle-aged. La Dame aux Camélias is a book for youth. We
have most of us lived not wisely and not well in our youth, and
middle-age is not the time to judge that early behaviour. Let it be
remembered that the follies of our youth are usually repeated when
we are old—not always actually, but certainly in imagination. An old
man should be the best judge of La Dame aux Camélias. Well, if that
is a vital book, and just because of its amazing vitality, a great book,
Traviata is a great opera, because, unlike that much inferior opera
Aïda, it is impossible to imagine any other music for it. All that could
be expressed by that foolish dead love, all the sentimental dreams of
it, all the cruelty of it, and the sweetness and the remorse, all is
there. We may tire of its barrel-organ tunes, but we tire in middle-age
of all youth’s facile emotions. We can scarcely imagine ourselves, let
us say, waiting two hours in the rain for any woman. We should be
bored by having to find the chocolates that Cleopatra preferred, and
we would not escort even Helen of Troy to the nearest railway
station. But fatigue is not necessarily wisdom, and so much that we
reject in middle-age is due to loss of resiliency. We cannot react as
we once could to the demands of the obvious excitement. We are, in
a word, blasé.”
Nancy felt that she was rushing in like a fool, but she could not sit
here and watch Kenrick blow away all argument in the wreaths of his
cigarette smoke. She had to point out one flaw in his remarks.
“But when I said that I would never love again and implied that I
knew what I was talking about, because I was twenty-eight, you
warned me that a woman’s most susceptible age was thirty-three.”
“Thirty-three is hardly middle-age,” said Kenrick. “I was thinking of
the chilly forties. Besides, you can’t compare women with men in this
matter. The old saw about a woman being as old as she looks and a
man as old as he feels is always used by women as an illustration of
the advantage of being a man. As a matter of fact, the advantage
lies all the other way. It is so much easier to look young than to feel
young. A woman is never too old to be loved. You can hardly
maintain that a man is never to old to love. I doubt if a man over
thirty ever knows what love means.”
“Och, I never heard such a preposterous statement,” Nancy
declared. “Why, think of the men who cherish hopeless passions all
their lives.”
“For my part I can never understand a man’s cherishing a
hopeless passion,” he declared. “I should feel so utterly humiliated
by a woman’s refusal of her love that my own passion would be
killed by it instantly. And the humiliation would be deepened by my
knowledge of woman’s facility for falling in love, which is, of course,
much greater than a man’s, as much greater as her fastidiousness
and sensitiveness are less. To be refused by a woman, when one
sees on what monstrous objects she is prepared to lavish her
affection, seems to me terrible. Equally I do not understand why a
woman, who after her childhood so rarely cherishes a hopeless
passion that will never be returned, is always prepared to cherish the
much more hopeless passion of continuing to love a man after he
has ceased to love her. I suppose it’s because women are such
sensualists. They always regard love as a gratification of self too
long postponed, and they continue to want it as children want broken
toys and men fail to give up smoking. The famous women who have
held men have held them by their infinite variety. Yet the one quality
in a lover that a woman finds it hardest to forgive is his variety.”
“Och, I don’t agree at all,” Nancy declared breathlessly. “In fact I
don’t agree with anything you’ve said about love or men or women. I
think it’s a great pity that you have let yourself grow middle-aged.
You wouldn’t be able to have all these ideas if you were still capable
of feeling genuine emotion. I’m not clever enough to argue with you
properly. No woman ever can argue, because either she feels so
strongly about a subject that all her reasons fly to the wind, or, if she
doesn’t feel strongly, she doesn’t think it worth while to argue and, in
fact, finds it a boring waste of time. But I feel that you are utterly
wrong. I know you are. You’re just wrong. And that’s all there is to be
said. My husband had more variety than any man I ever knew, and I
loved his variety as much as I loved every other single one of his
qualities.”
There were tears in her big deep-blue eyes, the tears that always
came to them when she spoke of Bram, and flashing tears of
exasperation as well, at being unable to defeat her companion’s
cynicism, for all his observations seemed to her to be the fruit of a
detestable and worldly-wise cynicism, the observations of a man
who has never known what it was to suffer or to lose anything in the
battle of life.
“Forgive me if I spoke thoughtlessly,” said Kenrick. “I get carried
away by my tongue whenever I go to an opera. Operas stimulate
me. They are the reductio ad absurdum of art. I seem always to get
down to the bedrock of the æsthetic impulse at the opera. We are
deluded by a tragedy of Æschylus into supposing that art is
something greater than it is, something more than a sublimation of
childhood’s games, something comparable in its importance to
science. In opera we see what a joke art really is. We know that in
the scroll of eternity the bottle-washer of a great chemist is a more
conspicuous minuscule than the greatest artist who ever shall be.”
“I think I’m too tired to listen to you any longer,” Nancy said. “I
really don’t understand anything you’re talking about now, and even
if I did I feel sure I wouldn’t agree with you.”
Kenrick laughed.
“I plead guilty to being a chatterbox to-night. But it was partly your
fault. You shouldn’t have sat there looking as if you were listening
with such intelligence. But let’s leave generalisations and come to
particulars. Gambone says a little holiday will do you good.”
“I don’t believe you,” Nancy laughed. “Maestro Gambone never
indulged in theories about his pupils’ well-being. I simply don’t
believe you.”
“Yes, really he did. I asked him if he did not think that you would
be all the better for a short rest, and he agreed with me. Now, why
don’t you come to Sorrento with me and see in this New Year that is
going to be your annus mirabilis?”
Nancy looked at him quickly.
“You’re thinking of the proprieties? There are no proprieties at
Sorrento. You want a change of air. I promise not to talk about art.
We’ll just take some good walks. Now don’t be missish. Treat me as
a friend.”
Yet Nancy still hesitated to accept this invitation. She had no
reason that she could express to herself, still less put into words. It
was merely an irrational presentiment that she should regret going to
Sorrento.
“Why don’t you answer?” he pressed.
“I was only wondering if it was wise to interrupt my lessons,” she
told him lamely.
“But you wouldn’t lose more than a couple. We shan’t be away
more than five days. I’ve got to be back in London by the fifth of
January.”
“All right. I’d really love to come if Gambone won’t think I’m being
lazy.”
Kenrick drove her back to the Via Virgilio, and next morning they
took the boat for Sorrento.
They stayed in an old sun-crumbled albergo built on one of the
promontories, the sheer cliff of which had been reinforced by
immense brick arches raised one above another against its face, so
that the soft tufaceous rock, which rather resembled rotten cheese,
should not collapse and plunge albergo, tangled garden, and pine-
dark promontory into the inky blue water two hundred feet below.
Sorrento looks north, and the proprietor of the albergo, a toad-faced
little man with sandy hair and a food-stained frock coat much too
large for him, suggested that his new guests would be more
comfortable at this season in rooms with an aspect away from the
sea. The south aspect of the albergo formed three sides of an
oblong, and the doors of all the rooms opened on a balcony paved
with blue and green porcelain tiles and covered with the naked grey
stems of wistaria, the convolutions of which resembled the throes of
huge pythons. The view looked away over orange groves to the
Sorrentine hills, and particularly to one conical bosky peak on which
the wooden cross of a Camaldolese congregation was silhouetted
against the sky. In the garden below the balcony tazetta narcissus
and China roses were in bloom. There were not many other guests
in the albergo, and these were mostly elderly English and American
women, all suffering from the delusion that Italy was the cheapest
country on earth and from a delusion of the natives that all English
and Americans were extremely wealthy.
Kenrick apologised for bringing Nancy to the Albergo del Sole
rather than taking her to one of the two fashionable hotels.
“But we can always go and feed at the Tramontano or the
Victoria,” he pointed out. “And there’s a charm about this
tumbledown old place. I was here once ten years ago and always
promised myself a return visit. Of course, Winter is not the time to be
in Sorrento. It’s not till the oranges come into their glory, about
Easter, that one understands the raptures of the great men who have
visited this place. The fascination of Sorrento is a stock subject with
all the letter-writers of our century.”
“Och, but I would much rather be staying here,” Nancy assured
him. “I think this place is so attractive.”
“It would be more attractive in Spring when the creamy Banksia
roses are in blossom and hung with necklaces of wistaria. It is a little
melancholy now. Yet the sun strikes warm at midday. I’ve told them
to make up a roaring fire of chestnut logs in your room.”
“They’ve certainly done so, and it’s as cosy as it can be.”
“I only hope the weather stays fine for our holiday,” said Kenrick,
putting up his monocle and staring an appeal to the tender azure of
the December sky.
And the weather did stay fine, so that they were able to drive or
walk all day and escape from the narrow walled alleys of Sorrento,
alleys designed for summer heats, when their ferns and mosses
would refresh the sun-tired eye, but in Winter damp and depressing,
soggy with dead leaves.
On the last day of the old year they climbed up through the olives
until they reached an open grassy space starred thick with the
tigered buff and mauve blooms of a myriad crocuses, the saffron
stamens of which burned like little tongues of fire in the sunlight.
“Forgive the melancholy platitude,” said Kenrick, “but I am
oppressed by the thought of our transience here, and not only our
transience, but the transience of all the tourists who sojourn for a
while on this magic coast. The song of a poet here is already less
than the warble of a passing bird; the moonlight is more powerful
than all the vows of all who have ever loved in Sorrento; no music
can endure beside the murmur of the Tyrrhenian. ‘Here could I live,’
one protests, and in a day or two the railway-guide is pulled out, and
one is discussing with the hotel porter how to fit in Pompeii on the
way back to Naples. Ugh! What is it that forbids man to be happy?”
“Well, obviously most of the people who visit Sorrento couldn’t
afford to stay here indefinitely,” said Nancy, who always felt
extremely matter-of-fact when her companion began to talk in this
strain.
“Yes, but there must be many people like myself who could.”
“Some do.”
“Ah, but not in the right way. They dig out a house-agent and
inspect eligible villas and behave exactly as if they were moving from
Bayswater to Hampstead, which in fact they are. I don’t want to
adjust these surroundings to myself. I want to become an integral
part of them. I should like to stay on in the Albergo del Sole without
writing letters or getting letters. I should like to be sitting here when
these crocuses have faded, and the grass is wine-stained by
anemones or silvery with asphodels. I should like to watch the cistus
petals fluttering to the hot earth, and to lie for hours listening to the
cicali, lie and dream all through the Summer as still and hot as a
terra-cotta shard, lie and dream until the black sirocco whips the
orchards and spits into my face the first drops of autumn rain. But if I
had to make arrangements for my business and explain that my
nerves required a long rest, all the savour would be taken out of my
whim. Oh, dio, I am as full to-day of yearnings for the au delà as a
French symbolist, or a callow German who sees the end of his
Wanderjahre looming.”
All the way back to the town Kenrick walked along beside Nancy in
a moody silence. She felt that perhaps she had been too
discouraging, and just before they emerged from the last of the
olives she put a hand on his arm and said:
“Will it do anything to console you if I tell you how perfectly I have
enjoyed these days here? I’m not an eloquent person, Mr. Kenrick.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake call me John. Haven’t you noticed I’ve
been calling you Nancy all this time?”
“I’ll try to call you John,” she promised. “But it’s terribly hard for me
to call people by their Christian names. I’m not an eloquent person ...
John. In fact, I’m sort of tongue-tied. But surely you must realise
what you’ve done for me.”
He stopped abruptly and looked into her eyes.
“Have I really done much?”
“Why, you know you have. You know you have. I was a touring
actress without an idea of ever being anything else, and you’ve given
me the chance to be something much more than that.”
“That’s all I’ve managed to do?” Kenrick asked.
“Isn’t it enough?”
He seemed to be striving either to say something or not to say
something, Nancy did not know which. Then he shivered.
“Come along, it’s beginning to turn chilly as the sun gets behind
the hills. Let’s go and have a fashionable tea at the Victoria, and
book a table for to-night.”
After dinner they sat in the lounge and watched the sophisticated
tarantella that was splashed on the tourists three times a week as
from a paint-pot of gaudy local colour. Followed luscious songs and
mandolinades, and shortly before midnight the capo d’anno
procession arrived to sing the song of the New Year. It was
accompanied by a band of queer primitive instruments; but the most
important feature of the celebration was a bay-tree, which was
banged on the floor to mark the time of the rhythmical refrain
throughout the song’s many verses. Everybody drank everybody’s
else health; the elderly English and American women twinkled at the
inspiration of an extra glass of vermouth; all was music and jollity.
The moonlight was dazzling when Kenrick and Nancy left the
hotel, the air coldly spiced with the scent of mandarins. He proposed
a walk to shake off the fumes, and, though she was feeling sleepy
after a long day in the open air followed by the long evening’s
merrymaking, Nancy had not the heart to say that she would rather
go home to bed. They wandered through the alleys now in darkness,
now in a vaporous sheen of grey light, now full in the sharp and
glittering eye of the moon. The naked arms of the walnut-trees and
figs shimmered ashen-pale. Here and there a gust of perfume from
the orange-groves waylaid them to hang upon its sweetness like
greedy moths. After twenty minutes of meandering through these
austere blazonries of argent and sable they turned back toward the
albergo and followed their shadows away from the soaring moon,
their little shadows that hung round their feet like black velvet, so rich
seemed they and so substantial upon the dusty silver of the path.
All was still when they reached the albergo, and the porcelain tiles
of the balcony were sparkling in the moonshine like aquamarines.
“Good night,” said Nancy, pausing in the doorway of her room.
“And once more a happy New Year!”
Kenrick stood motionless for an instant. Then he stepped forward
quickly into the doorway and caught Nancy to him.
“You can’t say good night like this,” he gasped.
She struggled to free herself from the kiss he had forced upon her.
In her physical revolt against him the lips pressed to hers felt like the
dry hot hide of some animal.
 “Let me go! Let me go!” she choked. “Och, why are you doing this
and spoiling everything?”
In escaping from his arms Nancy had gone right into her room.
Kenrick followed her in and, shutting the door behind him, began to
plead with her.
“Let me come and sit in here for a while. I won’t try to kiss you
again. Let’s pull up a couple of chairs to the fire and talk.”
“Och, do go away,” Nancy begged. “There’s nothing to talk about
now, and it’s late, and I feel so unhappy about this.”
All the time she was talking she was searching everywhere for the
matches to light the lamp and illuminate with its common sense this
mad situation created by moonshine and shadows and flickering
logs.
“You’ve surely realised that I’ve been madly in love with you ever
since I saw you at Bristol?” he demanded.
Nancy found the matches and lit the lamp. Then she turned to face
Kenrick.
“Of course I didn’t realise it. Do you suppose I would have let you
pay for my singing-lessons and all this, if I’d thought you were in love
with me? I see it now, and I could kill myself for being so dense. And
me supposing it was all on account of my fine voice! Och, it’s too
humiliating. Just an arrangement between you and Gambone, and
me to be so mad as to believe in you.”
“Now don’t be too unjust, Nancy,” he said. “You have a fine voice,
and even if you turn me down as a lover I’m still willing to see you
through with your training.”
“I thought you knew so much about women,” she stabbed. “You
don’t really suppose that I’d accept another penny from you now?”
“Why not?”
“Why not? Well, I won’t ever be your mistress, and since it was the
hope of getting me for your mistress that made you send me out
here—you can’t deny that, now, can you?—well, since it was that
and I can’t oblige, you don’t suppose I’ll accept your charity?”
“But I tell you I do think you have a fine voice, and so does
Gambone. I swear to you he does. This hasn’t been a trick to get you
out to Italy, and nothing else; though it would be absurd to pretend
that I’d have done what I did for you for any woman with a fine
voice.”
“Why couldn’t you have told me there was a price attached? It
wasn’t fair of you to let me come out here without knowing that.”
Nancy was on the verge of breaking down; but she knew that if
she cried Kenrick would take the opportunity of such weakness to
attempt a reconciliation, and she was determined to finish with him
for ever to-night.
“I suppose it wasn’t,” he admitted. “But you must remember that I
didn’t know you then as I know you now, and perhaps I assumed that
you were like most women, for I swear most women would have
realised that I was in love.”
“But it’s such a damnable way of being in love!” Nancy exclaimed.
“If you loved me, how could you think that I’d pretend such
innocence? To make myself more interesting? Well, I suppose if you
go through life judging women by your own ideas about them, you
would have discovered by now that all of them were frauds.”
“Listen, Nancy,” Kenrick said. “Is it because you don’t love me that
you refuse me as a lover? Or is it because of the conventions?
Would you marry me, if I could marry you?”
“Do you mean if I weren’t an actress?” she said, blazing.
“No, no,” he replied impatiently. “For God’s sake don’t talk like that.
What on earth difference could that conceivably make? I can’t marry
you, because I’m married already, and because my wife would die
rather than divorce me. But would you marry me?”
“No, never in this world! I won’t be your mistress, because I don’t
love you, and even if I did love you a little, I wouldn’t be your
mistress, because I could never love you as much as I loved my
husband and I wouldn’t do anything to hurt his child and mine.”
“Are you sure you don’t love me? Are you sure the second and
more sentimental reason isn’t the true one?”
“I’m so far from loving you,” she declared, “that I couldn’t even
hate you. Now perhaps you’ll go away and leave me alone?
Remember what you said the other night in Naples about cherishing
hopeless passions? Or was that just all nothing but beautiful talk?”
“Why don’t you love me?” he asked.
“I told you once that I could never love anybody again. You had a
theory about that, I remember. Now do go away, and leave me
alone.”
“Forgive me, Nancy.”
“I’ll forgive you if you let me know to a farthing what you’ve paid for
me from the moment I left London.”
“That’s not forgiveness,” he said. “You needn’t be cruel. After all,
it’s not unforgivable to love a woman. I loved you from the beginning.
I haven’t just taken advantage of moonlight to indulge myself. At
least, let me continue paying for your lessons. I’m going back to
England at once; I’ll promise not to worry you any more. Do, Nancy,
please do let me see you through!”
She shook her head.
“I couldn’t.”
“You’re sacrificing yourself for pride.”
“It’s not entirely pride,” she said. “There’s pride in it, but it’s—oh, I
can’t explain things as you can. Please tell me what I’ve cost you. I
have enough, I think, to pay you back.”
“I won’t accept it,” he declared. “And for no reason whatever can
you prove to me that I ought to accept repayment. I persuaded you
to leave your engagement. You believed in my sincerity. And I was
sincere. I think it’s wrong of you to give up your singing. But I know
it’s useless to argue about that with you. What I have paid is quite
another matter, and I simply refuse to accept repayment. If you can’t
even succeed in hating me, you’ve no right to ask me to do
something for which I must hate myself.”
“Yes, but you only used my voice as an excuse for the rest,” Nancy
argued. “Your main thought in getting me out to Italy was to make me
your mistress. Apparently I must have given you the impression that
your trouble was worth while. Yet when you invited me to come with
you to Sorrento on this holiday, why did you ask me to treat you as a
friend? As a matter of fact, the idea that you wanted to make love to
me did pass through my mind, but you drove away the fancy by the
way you spoke, as if you knew that I suspected your reasons and
wanted to reproach me for my nasty mind. Did you or did you not
expect that I would give myself to you here?”
“It was here that I first thought that you were growing fond of me,”
Kenrick said evasively. “I can tell you the exact moment. It was
yesterday afternoon when you put your hand on my arm.”
“I was growing fond of you. But not in that kind of way,” she said.
“Naturally I was growing fond of you. You had, as I thought, done a
great deal for me. I was grateful; and when you seemed depressed I
wanted to comfort you.”
“Nancy, let’s cut out to-night and blame the moon.”
She shook her head.
“I can’t. I know myself too well. Just to give you pleasure because I
owe you a great deal, I would like beyond anything to cut out to-night
and go on with my singing. But the moment I was alone I’d begin to
fret. I haven’t enough confidence in my success as a singer. For one
thing, now that you’ve told me that you were attracted to me
personally at Bristol I feel that you’ve thought my voice better than it
is. Suppose at the end of another five or six months Gambone
shouldn’t consider me worthy of being pushed along? I’d have
nothing to fall back upon. I’d have failed myself and my daughter and
you, artistically, and I’d have failed you in the only way that might
compensate you for that failure.”
 “But if the risk is mine and I’m willing to accept it, why must you
worry?”
“It’s no good. I know myself. I know that I couldn’t endure taking
your money under those conditions.”
“But you aren’t seriously proposing to give up your lessons and
leave Naples simply because I’ve told you that I’m in love with you?”
“Yes, yes, I am. I’m going back to-morrow.”
“But how will you explain your sudden return to your friends?”
“I haven’t so very many friends to bother about. But I shall tell
those I have that my voice wasn’t good enough to make it worth
while going on.”
Kenrick flung himself into a chair and poked the logs savagely.
“You make me feel such a clumsy brute,” he groaned. “Can’t I find
any argument that will make you change your mind?”
“None.”
“But at any rate you aren’t serious about paying me back the
trifling sum I’ve spent on you?”
“I am indeed.”
“Nancy, I’ve taken my disappointment fairly well; you can’t deny
that. I beg you to be kind and not insist on this repayment. I promise
not to inflict myself or my hopes upon you. I’ll do anything you tell
me, if only you’ll be generous over this. Your only motive for repaying
me can be pride. Use your imagination and try to realise what it will
mean for me if you insist. I do love you. I might have pretended that
the magic of this night had turned my senses for a moment, but by
being sincere I’ve ruined any hope I had for the future. My dream is
shattered. Be generous.”
He looked so miserable, hunched up over the fire, that Nancy
fought down her pride and agreed to accept as a present what he
had already done. She was inclined to regret her weakness a
moment later, when she saw that her surrender went far to restore
Kenrick’s optimism about their future relations. He began to talk
about the beauty of Italy in the Spring, of the peach blossoms in
March and the orange-groves in April. The mistake was in having
sent her out in Winter. In Spring she must think over everything and
come out again. And so on, and so on until Nancy could have
screamed with exasperation at his inability to comprehend the finality
of her decision.
It was nearly two o’clock before Kenrick left Nancy’s room. The
stress of argument had chased away her fatigue; but in Kenrick’s
new mood she did not dare stand on the balcony and pore upon the
hills of Sorrento floating like islands in that sea of moonshine. He
was capable of supposing that she had changed her mind and of
expecting the fulfilment of his passion. The fire had died down to a
heap of glowing ashes. The room was heavy with the smoke of
Kenrick’s incessant Macedonian cigarettes. So this was the end of
Italy. Yet she did not feel more than a twinge or two of sentimental
regret for the loveliness of earth and sea and sky that she was
deliberately abandoning. She had the happiness of knowing that she
had been true to herself. A dull, a bourgeois virtue perhaps for a
rogue and a vagabond; but Nancy, knowing all that she now wanted
from life, did not feel sorry for that self to which she had been true.
Three days later Italy seemed as far away as paradise, when the
cliffs of England loomed through a driving mist of dirty southerly
weather.
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