Flamma’s opinion, information he could give, things he knew; abroad they thought much of him.
Presents came occasionally—a boar’s head from Germany; fine Havana cigars—Alere always had a supply of the best cigars and Turkish tobacco, a perennial stream of tobacco ran for him; English venison; once a curious dagger from Italy, the strangest present good-natured Alere could possibly have received!
Sometimes there came a pressing invitation from a noble connoisseur to his country seat; Flamma’s views were wanted about the rearrangement of the library, the rebinding of some treasure picked up in a cover all too poor for its value, the building of another wing, for the artist is the true architect, as the princes of Italy knew of old time. Till the artist is called in we shall never again see real architecture in the world. Did not Benvenuto design fortifications? Did not Michelangelo build St. Peter’s at Rome?
If my lord duke wants a palace he cannot have it till he calls in the artist, the Alere Flamma, to draw it for him; if my lord bishop needs a cathedral he cannot have it till he calls in the poet-draughtsman, till he goes to Alere Flamma.
Our so-called architects are mere surveyors, engineers, educated bricklayers, men of hard straight ruler and square, mathematically accurate, and utterly devoid of feeling.
The princes of Italy knew better—they called in the poet and the painter, the dreamers to dream for them.
You call in your “practical” architect, and he builds you a brick box; not for a hundred thousand pounds in fees could he build you a palace or a cathedral.
The most ignorant of men are the “practical” people. It is meet and fitting that they should be worshipped and set on high. The calf worshipped of old was at least golden, and these are of lead.
But Alere could not go; he would do anything he was asked in this way; he would take infinite pains to please, but he could not leave Fleet Street for any mansion.
When a man once gets into Fleet Street he cannot get out.
Conventionally, I suppose, it would be the right thing to represent Alere as a great genius neglected, or as a genius destroyed by intemperance. The conventional type is so easy—so accepted—so popular; it would pay better, perhaps, to make him out a victim in some way.
He was not neglected, neither was he the victim of intemperance in the usual sense.
The way to fame and fortune had always been wide open to him; there were long intervals when he did not drink, nor did drink enfeeble his touch; it was not half so much to struggle against as the chest diseases from which professional men so often suffer; I believe if he had really tried or wished he could have conquered his vice altogether. Neither of these causes kept him from the foremost rank.
There was no ambition, and there was no business-avarice. So many who have no ideal are kept hard at work by the sheer desire of money, and thus spurred onward, achieve something approaching greatness. Alere did not care for money.
He could not get out of Fleet Street. Ten pounds was a large sum in the company he frequented; he did not want any more.
XXIX
Something in Fleet Street holds tight those who once come within its influence. The cerebellum of the world, the “grey matter” of the world’s brain, lies somewhere thereabouts. The thoughts of our time issue thence, like the radiating spokes of a wheel, to all places of the earth. There you have touch of the throbbing pulse of the vast multitudes that live and breathe. Their ideas come from Fleet Street.
From the printing-press and the engraver’s wood-block, the lithographic-stone, the etcher’s plate, from book and magazine, periodical and pamphlet, from world-read newspaper.
From Fleet Street, the centre whence ideas flow outwards.
It is joyous to be in the flower-grown meads; it is sweet to be on the hilltop; delicious to feel the swell and the long roll of the hexameter of the seas; doubtless there is a wild rapture on the summit of the Himalayas; triumph in the heart of the African explorer at the river’s source. But if once the mind has been dipped in Fleet Street, let the meads be never so sweet, the mountain-top never so exalted, still to Fleet Street the mind will return, because there is that other Mind, without whose sympathy even success is nothing—the Mind of the world.
I am, of course, thinking not only of the thoroughfare, Fleet Street, but of all that the printing-press means.
Alere was no leader of thought, but it was necessary to him to live and breathe in the atmosphere of thought—to feel the throb and swell around him—to be near the “grey matter” of the world’s brain.
Once a man gets into Fleet Street he cannot get out. Flamma would not leave it for months of gilded idleness in any nobleman’s mansion.
The flame must be fed. His name had some connection with the design of the Roman lamp on the splendid bindings of the books tooled in the House of Flamma. Alere Flammam—feed the flame. The flame of the mind must be fed.
Sad things happen on the stones of Fleet Street; if I could but get at it all to write the inside life of it, it would, indeed, be a book. Stone-cold poverty hovers about. The rich, living in the fool’s paradise of money, think they know life, but they do not, for, as was said of the sea—
Only those who share its dangers
Comprehend its mystery.
Only those who have shared the struggle literally for bread—for
