“Oh, yes, it is all very well,” Ambrose has been heard to say on being offered this agreeable and aromatic liqueur, “it’s nice enough, I daresay. But you should have tasted the real stuff. I got it at a little café in Soho some years ago—the Château de Chinon. No, it’s no good going there now, it’s quite different. All the walls are plate-glass and gold; the head waiter is called Maître d’hôtel, and I am told it’s quite the thing, both in southern and northern suburbs, to make up dinner parties at the Château—everything most correct, evening dress, fans, opera cloaks, ‘Hide-seek’ champagne, and stalls afterwards. One gets a glimpse of Bohemian life that way, and everybody says it’s been such a queer evening, but quite amusing, too. But you can’t get the real Benedictine there now.
“Where can you get it? Ah! I wish I knew. I never come across it. The bottle looks just the same, but it’s quite a different flavour. The phylloxera may be responsible, of course, but I don’t think it is. Perhaps the bottle that went round the table that night was like the powder in Jekyll and Hyde—its properties were the result of some strange accident. At all events, they were quite magical.”
The two adventurers went forth into the maze of streets and lost themselves again. Heaven knows where they went, by what ways they wandered, as with wide-gleaming eyes, arm locked in arm, they gazed on an enchanted scene which they knew must be London and nothing else—what else could it be? Indeed, now and again, Ambrose thought he recognized certain features and monuments and public places of which he had read; but still! That wine of the Château was, by all mundane reckonings, of the smallest, and one little glass of Benedictine with coffee could not disturb the weakest head: yet was it London, after all?
What they saw was, doubtless, the common world of the streets and squares, the gay ways and the dull, the broad, ringing, lighted roads and the dark, echoing passages; yet they saw it all as one sees a mystery play, through a veil. But the veil before their eyes was a transmuting vision, and its substance was shot as if it were samite, with wonderful and admirable golden ornaments. In the Eastern Tales, people find themselves thus suddenly transported into an unknown magical territory, with cities that are altogether things of marvel and enchantment, whose walls are pure gold, lighted by the shining of incomparable jewels; and Ambrose declared later that never till that evening had he realised the extraordinary and absolute truth to nature of the Arabian Nights. Those who were present on a certain occasion will not soon forget his rejoinder to “a gentleman in the company” who said that for truth to nature he went to George Eliot.
“I was speaking of men and women, Sir,” was the answer, “not of lice.”
The gentleman in question, who was quite an influential man—some whisper that he was an editor—was naturally very much annoyed.
Still, Ambrose maintained his position. He would even affirm that for crude realism the Eastern Tales were absolutely unique.
“Of course,” he said, “I take realism to mean absolute and essential truthfulness of description, as opposed to merely conventional treatment. Zola is a realist, not—as the imbeciles suppose—because he described—well, rather minutely—many unpleasant sights and sounds and smells and emotions, but because he was a poet, a seer; because, in spite of his pseudo-philosophies, his cheap materialisms, he saw the true heart, the reality of things. Take La Terre; do you think it is ‘realistic’ because it describes minutely, and probably faithfully, the event of a cow calving? Not in the least; the local vet who was called in could probably do all that as well, or better. It is ‘realist’ because it goes behind all the brutalities, all the piggeries and inhumanities, of those frightful people, and shows us the strange, mad, transcendent passion that lay behind all those things—the wild desire for the land—a longing that burned, that devoured, that inflamed, that drove men to hell and death as would a passion for a goddess who might never be attained. Remember how ‘La Beauce’ is personified, how the earth swells and quickens before one, how every clod and morsel of the soil cries for its service and its sacrifice and its victims—I call that realism.
“The Arabian Nights is also profoundly realistic, though both the subject-matter and the method of treatment—the technique—are very different from the subject-matter and the technique of Zola. Of course, there may be people who think that if you describe a pigsty well you are a ‘realist,’ and if you describe an altar well you are ‘romantic.’ … I do not know that the mental processes of Crétins form a very interesting subject for discussion.”
One may surmise, if one will, that the sudden violence of the change was a sufficient cause of exaltation. That detestable Lupton left behind; no town, but a collection of stink and poison factories and slave quarters; that more detestable school, more ridiculous than the Academy of Lagado; that most detestable routine, games, lessons and the Doctor’s sermons—the transition was tremendous to the freedom of fabled London, of the unknown streets and unending multitudes.
Ambrose said he hesitated to talk of that walk, lest he should be thought an aimless liar. They strolled for hours seeing the most wonderful things, the most wonderful people; but he declared that the case was similar to that of the Benedictine—he could never discover again the regions that he had perambulated. Somewhere, he said, close to the Château de Chinon there must be a passage which had since been blocked up. By it was the entrance to Fairyland.
When at last they found Little Russell Row, the black cat was awaiting them with an expression which was pleased and pious, too; he had devoured the greater portion of that quarter-pound of
