Prose Fancies | Page 6

the manufacture of every single person in that omnibus:
two middle-aged matrons, each of whom seemed to think that having
given birth to six children was an indisputable claim to originality; two
elderly business men to correspond; a young miss carrying music and
wearing eye-glasses; and a clergyman discussing stocks with one of the
business men; I alone in my corner being, of course, the one occupant
for whom Nature had been at the expense of casting a special mould,
and at the extravagance of breaking it.
Presently a matron and a business man alighted, and two dainty young
women, evidently of artistic tendencies, joined the Hammersmith
pilgrims. One saw at a glance that they were very sure of their
originality. There were no inverted commas around their pretty young
heads, bless them! But then Queen Anne houses are as much on a
pattern as more commonplace structures, and Bedford Parkians are

already being manufactured by celestial stencil. What I specially
noticed about them was their plagiarised voices--curious, yearning
things, evidently intended to suggest depths of infinite passion,
controlled by many a wild and weary past,
'Infinite passion, and the pain Of finite souls that yearn'--
the kind of voice, you know, in which Socialist actresses yearn out
passages from 'The Cenci,' feeling that they do a fearful thing. The
voice began, I believe, with Miss Ellen Terry. With her, though, it is
charming, for it is, we feel, the voice of real emotion. There are real
tears in it. It is her own. But with these ladies, who were discussing the
last 'Independent' play, it was so evidently a stop pulled out by
affectation--the vox inhumana, one might say, for it is a voice unlike
anything else to be found in the four elements. It has its counterpart in
the imitators of Mr. Beerbohm Tree--young actors who likewise
endeavour to make up for the lack of anything like dramatic passion by
pretending to control it: the control being feigned by a set jaw or a hard,
throaty, uncadenced voice of preternatural solemnity. These ladies, too,
wore plagiarised gowns of the most 'original' style, plagiarised hats,
glittering plagiarised smiles; and yet they so evidently looked down on
every one else in the omnibus, whom, perhaps, after all, it had been
kinder of me to describe as the hackneyed quotations of humanity, who
had probably thought it unnecessary to wear their inverted commas, as
they were so well known.
At last I grew impatient of them, and, leaving the omnibus, finished my
journey home by the Underground. What was my surprise when I
reached it to find our little house wearing inverted commas--two on the
chimney, and two on the gate! My wife, too! and the words of
endearing salutation with which I greeted her, why, they also to my
diseased fancy seemed to leave my lips between quotation marks.
There is nothing in which we fancy ourselves so original as in our
terms of endearment, nothing in which we are so like all the world; for,
alas! there is no euphuism of affection which lovers have not prattled
together in springtides long before the Christian era. If you call your
wife 'a chuck,' so did Othello; and, whatever dainty diminutive you

may hit on, Catullus, with his warbling Latin, 'makes mouths at our
speech.'
I grew so haunted with this oppressive thought, that my wife could not
but notice my trouble. But how could I tell her of the spectral inverted
commas that dodged every move of her dear head?--tell her that our
own original firstborn, just beginning to talk as never baby talked, was
an unblushing plagiarism of his great-great-great-grandfather, that our
love was nothing but the expansion of a line of Keats, and that our
whole life was one hideous mockery of originality? 'Woman,' I felt
inclined to shriek, 'be yourself, and not your great-grandmother. A man
may not marry his great-grandmother. For God's sake let us all be
ourselves, and not ghastly mimicries of our ancestors, or our
neighbours. Let us shake ourselves free from this evil dream of
imitation. Merciful Heaven, it is killing me!' But surely that was a
quotation too, and, accidentally catching sight of the back of my hand,
suddenly the tears sprang to my eyes, for it was just so the big soft
veins used to be on the hands of my father, when a little boy I prayed
between his knees. He was gone, but here was his hand--his hand, not
mine!
Then an idea possessed me. There was but one way. I could die. There
was a little phial of laudanum in the medicine-cupboard that always
leered at me from among the other bottles like a serpent's eye. Thrice
happy thought! Who would miss such a poor imitation? Even the mere
soap-vending