It really was admirable, as soon as I began to enter into it from this point of view. Even a porter passing, with a barrow piled with luggage, seemed so realistic that one was tempted to applaud. He was followed by an angry mother, with hot red face, dragging along two screaming children, and calling, to someone behind, “John! Come on!” Enter John, very meek, very silent, and loaded with parcels. And he was followed, in his turn, by a frightened little nursemaid, carrying a fat baby, also screaming. All the children screamed.
“Capital byplay!” said the old man aside. “Did you notice the nursemaid’s look of terror? It was simply perfect!”
“You have struck quite a new vein,” I said. “To most of us Life and its pleasures seem like a mine that is nearly worked out.”
“Worked out!” exclaimed the Earl. “For anyone with true dramatic instincts, it is only the Overture that is ended! The real treat has yet to begin. You go to a theatre, and pay your ten shillings for a stall, and what do you get for your money? Perhaps it’s a dialogue between a couple of farmers—unnatural in their overdone caricature of farmers’ dress—more unnatural in their constrained attitudes and gestures—most unnatural in their attempts at ease and geniality in their talk. Go instead and take a seat in a third-class railway-carriage, and you’ll get the same dialogue done to the life! Front-seats—no orchestra to block the view—and nothing to pay!”
“Which reminds me,” said Eric. “There is nothing to pay on receiving a telegram! Shall we enquire for one?” And he and Lady Muriel strolled off in the direction of the Telegraph-Office.
“I wonder if Shakespeare had that thought in his mind,” I said, “when he wrote ‘All the world’s a stage’?”
The old man sighed. “And so it is,” he said, “look at it as you will. Life is indeed a drama; a drama with but few encores—and no bouquets!” he added dreamily. “We spend one half of it in regretting the things we did in the other half!”
“And the secret of enjoying it,” he continued, resuming his cheerful tone, “is intensity!”
“But not in the modern aesthetic sense, I presume? Like the young lady, in Punch, who begins a conversation with ‘Are you intense?’ ”
“By no means!” replied the Earl. “What I mean is intensity of thought—a concentrated attention. We lose half the pleasure we might have in Life, by not really attending. Take any instance you like: it doesn’t matter how trivial the pleasure may be—the principle is the same. Suppose A and B are reading the same second-rate circulating-library novel. A never troubles himself to master the relationships of the characters, on which perhaps all the interest of the story depends: he ‘skips’ over all the descriptions of scenery, and every passage that looks rather dull: he doesn’t half attend to the passages he does read: he goes on reading—merely from want of resolution to find another occupation—for hours after he ought to have put the book aside: and reaches the ‘finis’ in a state of utter weariness and depression! B puts his whole soul into the thing—on the principle that ‘whatever is worth doing is worth doing well’: he masters the genealogies: he calls up pictures before his ‘mind’s eye’ as he reads about the scenery: best of all, he resolutely shuts the book at the end of some chapter, while his interest is yet at its keenest, and turns to other subjects; so that, when next he allows himself an hour at it, it is like a hungry man sitting down to dinner: and, when the book is finished, he returns to the work of his daily life like ‘a giant refreshed’!”
“But suppose the book were really rubbish—nothing to repay attention?”
“Well, suppose it,” said the Earl. “My theory meets that case, I assure you! A never finds out that it is rubbish, but maunders on to the end, trying to believe he’s enjoying himself. B quietly shuts the book, when he’s read a dozen pages, walks off to the Library, and changes it for a better! I have yet another theory for adding to the enjoyment of Life—that is, if I have not exhausted your patience? I’m afraid you find me a very garrulous old man.”
“No indeed!” I exclaimed earnestly. And indeed I felt as if one could not easily tire of the sweet sadness of that gentle voice.
“It is, that we should learn to take our pleasures quickly, and our pains slowly.”
“But why? I should have put it the other way, myself.”
“By taking artificial pain—which can be as trivial as you please—slowly, the result is that, when real pain comes, however severe, all you need do is to let it go at its ordinary pace, and it’s over in a moment!”
“Very true,” I said, “but how about the pleasure?”
“Why, by taking it quick, you can get so much more into life. It takes you three hours and a half to hear and enjoy an opera. Suppose I can take it in, and enjoy it, in half-an-hour. Why, I can enjoy seven operas, while you are listening to one!”
“Always supposing you have an orchestra capable of playing them,” I said. “And that orchestra has yet to be found!”
The old man smiled. “I have heard an air played,” he said, “and by no means a short one—played right through, variations and all, in three seconds!”
“When? And how?” I asked eagerly, with a half-notion that I was dreaming again.
“It was done by a little musical-box,” he quietly replied. “After it had been wound up, the regulator, or something, broke, and it ran down, as I said, in about three seconds. But it must have played all the notes, you know!”
“Did
