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Page 34
Besides, we are all for liberty down here, individualists to a man.
Give us a loophole to avoid compulsion and we use it. One of the
most frequently exercised of my magisterial functions is to certify
conscientious objections to the Vaccination Act. I do it against the
grain. A doctor told me the other day that he believed smallpox had
reached the end of its tether, and was on the ebb. I am sure I hope
so, lest there should be one day a bad outbreak among these liberty
men. I must have signed away the chances of hundreds of children, who,
by the way, are not of an age to consent. I never fail to point out
the risk; but the Court awards it and the law allows it; so I sign.
There is much to be said for Anarchy in the abstract, nothing at all
in the concrete. Mr. Smillie, however, appears to favour it, raw,
rough and ready. In that he is precocious, and, like the rathe
primrose, will "forsaken die." He will rend the Labour party in twain
from the top to the bottom, and will see the agricultural vote drop
off his industrials just as it had begun to adhere to them. I know the
peasantry. They will never strike for political ends, for though they
are not quick to see the consequences of hypothetical actions, they
do see that if you make Parliamentary government impossible you make a
Labour majority not worth having.
And another thing: Mr. Smillie and his friends may want a revolution,
but Hodge and his most certainly do not. They want to earn their
livelihood, pay their way, and dig their plots of ground. No more
warfare for them. I dare say I shall be sorry for Mr. Smillie when
the time comes; but I may have to be still more sorry for my country
first. I can't help hoping, however, when it comes to the point that
his feet will be a little colder than his head seems to be just now.
_LA PETITE PERSONNE_
No letter-writer's stage can at any time be called empty, because upon
it you necessarily have at all times two persons at least: the mover
of the figures and the audience, the puppeteer and the puppetee, the
letter-writer and the letter-reader. The play presented is, therefore,
a play within a play: like the _Mousetrap_ in _Hamlet_, like _Pyramus
and Thisbe_ in _A Midsummer Night's Dream_, like the romantic drama
of _Gayferos and Melisandra_ which Don Quixote witnessed with a select
company of acquaintance at an inn. The temperament of this presented
spectator, himself or herself a person of the scene, is always
reflected in the entertainment when the letter-writer is a sensitive
artist. So Horace Walpole's comedy varies according as it goes before
Sir Horace Mann in Florence or Lady Upper-Ossory at Ampthill; so, more
delicately, does Madame de S�vign�'s. There are blacker strokes in
the dialogue when Bussy is to see the play; there is always idolatry
implied, and sometimes anxiety, if the spoilt child of Provence is the
audience. It is this _ch�re bonne_, this Madame de Grignan, nine times
out of ten, who is queen of the entertainment. You have to reckon with
her upon her throne of degrees, set up there like Hippolita, Duchess
of Athens, to be propitiated and, if possible, diverted. For her sake,
not for ours, her incomparable mother beckons from the wings character
after character, and gives each his cue, having set the scene with
her exquisite art. In a few cases her anxiety to please spoils the
effects. As we should say, she "laboured" the Cardinal de Retz. The
sour-faced beauty would have none of him. But that is a rare case, one
in which predilection betrayed her. Madame de S�vign� had a weakness
for the Cardinal. It is very seldom that the lightest hand in the
world fails her at a portrait. Her great successes are her thumb-nail
sketches: she will be remembered by Picard in the hayfield so long
as the world knows how to laugh. One of her best, because one of her
tenderest, is the _petite personne_.
The name is Charles de S�vign�'s, but his mother takes it up after
him, and makes better play with it. Charles writes from Les Rochers in
December, 1675--Madame being really ill for once in her life with "a
nice little rheumatism," and Charles her amanuensis--"in the room of
la Plessis," that striving lady, too, was ill, or thought she was--"we
have had lately a very pretty young party (_une petite personne fort
jolie_) whose good looks don't at all remind us of that divinity. At
her instigation we have started _Reversis_: now, instead of knaves,
we talk about jacks." He adds a stroke too good to be lost, though his
mother might have left it out. "To give you a notion of her age and
quality, she has just confided to us that the day after Easter Eve was
a Tuesday. She thought that over, then said, 'No--it was a Monday!'
Then, judging by the look of us that that wouldn't do either,
'Heavens, how stupid! Of course--it was a Friday!' That is the kind
of party we are. If you wouldn't mind sending us word what day of the
week you believe it to have been, you will save us a great deal of
discomfort." The stage is the brisker for the coming in of this pretty
_soubrette_.
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