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Colour of Life - Alice Meynell · Mrs. Dalloway

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  Speaker 1: Chapter one of the Color of Life. This is a
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  Speaker 1: LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.
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  Speaker 1: For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org.
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  Speaker 1: The Color of Life by Alice Mayow, Chapter one, The
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  Speaker 1: color of life. Red has been praised for its nobility
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  Speaker 1: as the color of life. But the true color of
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  Speaker 1: life is not red. Red is the color of violence,
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  Speaker 1: or of life broken, open, edited and published. Or if
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  Speaker 1: red is indeed the color of life, it is so
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  Speaker 1: only on condition that it is not seen once fully visible.
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  Speaker 1: Red is the color of life violated and in the
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  Speaker 1: act of betrayal and of waste. Red is the secret
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  Speaker 1: of life, and not the manifestation thereof. It is one
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  Speaker 1: of the things the value of which is secrecy, one
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  Speaker 1: of the talents that are to be hidden in a napkin.
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  Speaker 1: The true color of life is the color of the body,
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  Speaker 1: the color of the covered red, the implicit and not
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  Speaker 1: explicit red of the living heart and the pulses. It
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  Speaker 1: is the modest color of the unpublished blood. So bright,
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  Speaker 1: so light, so soft, so mingled. The gentle color of
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  Speaker 1: life is outdone by all the colors of the world.
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  Speaker 1: Its very beauty is that it is white, but less
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  Speaker 1: white than milk, brown but less brown than earth, red
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  Speaker 1: but less red than sunset or dawn. It is lucid,
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  Speaker 1: but less lucid than the color of lilies. It has
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  Speaker 1: the hint of gold that is in all fine color,
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  Speaker 1: but in our latitudes the hint is almost elusive. Under
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  Speaker 1: Sicilian skies, indeed it is deeper than old ivory. But
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  Speaker 1: under the misty blue of the English zenith and the
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  Speaker 1: warm gray of the London horizon, it is as delicately
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  Speaker 1: flushed as the pale a wild roses out to their
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  Speaker 1: utmost flat as stars in the hedges of the end
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  Speaker 1: of June. For months together, London does not see the
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  Speaker 1: color of life in any mass. The human face does
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  Speaker 1: not give much of it, what with features and beards,
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  Speaker 1: and the shadow of the top hat and chapaumelon of man,
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  Speaker 1: and of the veils of woman. Besides, the color of
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  Speaker 1: the face is subject to a thousand injuries and accidents.
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  Speaker 1: The popular face of the londoner has soon lost its gold,
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  Speaker 1: its white, and the delicacy of its red and brown.
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  Speaker 1: We miss little beauty by the fact that it is
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  Speaker 1: never seen freely in great numbers out of doors. You
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  Speaker 1: get it in some quantity when all the heads of
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  Speaker 1: a great indoor meeting are turned at once upon a speaker.
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  Speaker 1: But it is only in the open air. Needless to
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  Speaker 1: say that the color of life is in perfection in
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  Speaker 1: the open air, clothed with the sun, whether the sunshine
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  Speaker 1: be golden and direct or dazzlingly diffused in gray. The
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  Speaker 1: little figure of the London boyeties that has restored to
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  Speaker 1: the landscape the human color of life. He is allowed
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  Speaker 1: to come out of all his ignominies and to take
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  Speaker 1: the late color of the midsummer northwest evening on the
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  Speaker 1: borders of the Serpentine. At the stroke of eight, he
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  Speaker 1: sheds the slough of nameless colors, all allied to the
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  Speaker 1: hues of dust, soot, and fog, which are the colors
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  Speaker 1: the world has chosen for its boys. And he makes
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  Speaker 1: in his hundreds a bright and delicate flush between the
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  Speaker 1: gray blue water and the gray blue sky. Clothed now
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  Speaker 1: with the sun, he is crowned by and by with
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  Speaker 1: twelve stars as he goes to bathe, and the reflection
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  Speaker 1: of an early moon is under his feet. So little
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  Speaker 1: stands between a gamine and all the dignities of nature.
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  Speaker 1: They are so quickly restored, there seems to be nothing
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  Speaker 1: to do, but only a little thing to undo. It
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  Speaker 1: is like the art of Eleonora du say, the last
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  Speaker 1: and most finished action of her intellect, passion, and knowledge is,
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  Speaker 1: as it were, the flicking away of some insignificant thing,
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  Speaker 1: mistaken for art by other actors, some little obstacle to
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  Speaker 1: the weigh and liberty of nature. All the squalor is
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  Speaker 1: gone in a moment, kicked off with the second boot,
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  Speaker 1: and the child goes shouting to complete the landscape with
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  Speaker 1: the lacking color of life. You are inclined to wonder that,
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  Speaker 1: even undressed, he still shouts with a cockney accent. You
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  Speaker 1: half expect pure vowels and elastic syllables from his restoration,
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  Speaker 1: his spring, his slenderness, his brightness, and his glow old
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  Speaker 1: ivory and wild rose. In the deepening midsummer sun, he
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  Speaker 1: gives his colors to his world again. It is easy
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  Speaker 1: to replace man, and it will take no great time
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  Speaker 1: where nature has lapsed to replace nature, it is always
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  Speaker 1: to do by the happily easy way of doing nothing.
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  Speaker 1: The grass is always ready to grow in the streets,
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  Speaker 1: and no streets could ask for a more charming finish
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  Speaker 1: than your green grass. The casometer even must fall to
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  Speaker 1: pieces unless it is renewed, but the grass renews itself.
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  Speaker 1: There is nothing so remediable as the work of modern man,
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  Speaker 1: a thought which is also, as mister Pecksniff said, very soothing.
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  Speaker 1: And by remediable I mean, of course destructible. As the
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  Speaker 1: bathing child shuffles off his garments, they are few, and
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  Speaker 1: one brace suffices him. So the land might always, in
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  Speaker 1: reasonable time shuffle off its yellow brick and purple slate,
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  Speaker 1: and all the things that collect about railway stations. A
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  Speaker 1: single night almost clears the air of London. But if
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  Speaker 1: the color of life looks so well in the rather
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  Speaker 1: sham scenery of Hyde Park, it looks brilliant and grave.
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  Speaker 1: Indeed on a real sea coast, to have once seen
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  Speaker 1: it there should be enough to make a colorist, oh
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  Speaker 1: memorable little picture. The sun was gaining color as it
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  Speaker 1: neared setting, and it set not over the sea but
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  Speaker 1: over the land. The sea had the dark and rather stern,
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  Speaker 1: but not cold blue of that aspect, the dark and
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  Speaker 1: not the opal tints. The sky was also deep. Everything
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  Speaker 1: was very definite, without mystery, and exceedingly simple. The most
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  Speaker 1: luminous thing was the shining white of an edge of foam,
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  Speaker 1: which did not cease to be white, because it was
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  Speaker 1: a little golden and a little rosy in the sunshine.
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  Speaker 1: It was still the whitest thing imaginable. And the next
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  Speaker 1: most luminous thing was the little child, also invested with
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  Speaker 1: the sun and the color of life. In the case
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  Speaker 1: of women, it is of the living and unpublished blood
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  Speaker 1: that the violent world has professed to be delicate and ashamed.
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  Speaker 1: See the Curious history of the political rights of women
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  Speaker 1: under the Revolution. On the scaffold, she enjoyed an ungrudged
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  Speaker 1: share in the fortunes of party. Political life might be
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  Speaker 1: denied her, but that seems a trifle when you consider
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  Speaker 1: how generously she was permitted political death. She was to
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  Speaker 1: spin and cook for her citizen in the obscurity of
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  Speaker 1: her living hours, but to the hour of her death
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  Speaker 1: was granted a part in the largest interests social, national,
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  Speaker 1: and international. The blood wherewith she should, according to Robespierre,
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  Speaker 1: have blushed to be seen or heard in the tribune,
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  Speaker 1: was exposed in the public sight, unchartered by her veins.
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  Speaker 1: Against this, there was no modesty of all privacies. The
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  Speaker 1: last and the innermost. The privacy of death was never
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  Speaker 1: allowed to put obstacles in the way of public action
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  Speaker 1: for a public cause. Women might be and were duly
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  Speaker 1: suppressed when by the mouth of or lamp de Gouge
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  Speaker 1: they claimed a right to concur in the choice of
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  Speaker 1: representatives for the formation of the laws. But in her
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  Speaker 1: person too, they were liberally allowed to be a political
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  Speaker 1: responsibility to the republic. A lamp de Gouge was guillotined.
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  Speaker 1: Robespierre thus made her public and complete amends. End of
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  Speaker 1: chapter one, Chapter two of The Color of Life. This
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  Speaker 1: is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the
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  Speaker 1: public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit
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  Speaker 1: LibriVox dot org. The Color of Life by Alice Maynel.
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  Speaker 1: Chapter two a point of biography. There is hardly a
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  Speaker 1: writer now of the third class, probably not one who
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  Speaker 1: has not something sharp and sad to say about the
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  Speaker 1: cruelty of nature, not one who is able to attempt
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  Speaker 1: may in the woods without a modern reference to the
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  Speaker 1: manifold death and destruction with which the air, the branches,
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  Speaker 1: the mosses are said to befall. But no one has
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  Speaker 1: paused in the course of these phrases to take notice
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  Speaker 1: of the curious and conspicuous fact of the suppression of
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  Speaker 1: death and of the dead throughout this landscape of manifest life.
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  Speaker 1: Where are they, or the dying or the dead of
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  Speaker 1: the populace woods? Where do they hide their little last hours?
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  Speaker 1: Where are they buried? Where is the violence concealed? Under
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  Speaker 1: what gay custom and decent habit you may see? It
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  Speaker 1: is true an earthworm in a robin's beak, and may
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  Speaker 1: hear a thrush breaking a snail's shell. But these little
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  Speaker 1: things are, as it were, passed by with a kind
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  Speaker 1: of twinkle for apology, as by a well bred man
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  Speaker 1: who does openly some little solecism, which is too slight
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  Speaker 1: light for direct mention, and which a meaner man might
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  Speaker 1: hide or avoid. Unless you are very modern. Indeed you
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  Speaker 1: twinkle back at the bird. But otherwise there is nothing
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  Speaker 1: visible of the havoc and the prey and plunder. It
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  Speaker 1: is certain that much of the visible life passes violently
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  Speaker 1: into other forms, flashes without pause into another flame, but
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  Speaker 1: not all. Amid all the killing, there must be much dying.
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  Speaker 1: There are, for instance, few birds of prey left in
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  Speaker 1: our more accessible counties now, and many thousands of birds
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  Speaker 1: must die uncaught by a hawk and unpierced. But if
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  Speaker 1: their killing is done so modestly, so then is their
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  Speaker 1: dying also short lives have all these wild things, but
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  Speaker 1: there are innumerable flocks of them, always alive. They must die, then,
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  Speaker 1: in innumerable flocks. And yet they keep the millions of
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  Speaker 1: the dead out of sight. Now and then indeed they
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  Speaker 1: may be betrayed. It happened in a cold The late
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  Speaker 1: frosts were so sudden, and the famine was so complete,
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  Speaker 1: that the birds were taken unawares. The sky and the
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  Speaker 1: earth conspired that February to make known all the secrets.
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  Speaker 1: Everything was published. Death was manifest Editors, when a great
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  Speaker 1: man dies, are not more resolute than was the frost
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  Speaker 1: of ninety five. The birds were obliged to die in public.
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  Speaker 1: They were surprised and forced to do. Thus they became
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  Speaker 1: like Shelley in the monument which the art and imagination
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  Speaker 1: of England combined to raise to his memory at Oxford.
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  Speaker 1: Frost was surely at work in both cases, and in
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  Speaker 1: both it wrought wrong. There is a similarity of unreason
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  Speaker 1: in betraying the death of a bird and in exhibiting
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  Speaker 1: the death of Shelley the death of a soldier Passancourt.
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  Speaker 1: But the death of Shelley was not his goal. And
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  Speaker 1: the death of the bird is so little characteristic of
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  Speaker 1: them that, as has just been said, no one in
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  Speaker 1: the world is aware of their dying, except only in
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  Speaker 1: the case of birds and cages, who again are compelled
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  Speaker 1: to die with observation. The woodland is guarded and kept
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  Speaker 1: by a rule. There is no display of the battlefield
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  Speaker 1: in the fields. There is no tale of the game, bag,
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  Speaker 1: no boast. The hunting goes on, but with strange decorum.
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  Speaker 1: You may pass a fine season under the trees and
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  Speaker 1: see nothing dead except here and there where a boy
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  Speaker 1: has been by, or a man with a trap, or
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  Speaker 1: a man with a gun. There is nothing like a
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  Speaker 1: butcher's shop in the woods. But the biographers have always
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  Speaker 1: had other ways than those of the world world. They
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  Speaker 1: will not have a man to die out of sight.
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  Speaker 1: I have turned over scores of lives, not to read them,
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  Speaker 1: but to see whether now and again there might be
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  Speaker 1: a life which was not more emphatically a death. But
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  Speaker 1: there never is a modern biography that has taken the
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  Speaker 1: hint of nature. One and all these books have the
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  Speaker 1: day proportionate illness. The death out of all scale, even
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  Speaker 1: more wanton than the disclosure of a death, is that
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  Speaker 1: of a mortal illness. If the man had recovered, his
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  Speaker 1: illness would have been rightly his own secret. But because
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  Speaker 1: he did not recover, it is assumed to be news
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  Speaker 1: for the first comer. Which of us would suffer the
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  Speaker 1: details of any physical suffering over and done in our
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  Speaker 1: own lives to be displayed and described. This is not
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  Speaker 1: a confidence we have a mind to make, and no
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  Speaker 1: one is authorized to ask for attention or pity on
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  Speaker 1: our behalf. The story of pain ought not to be
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  Speaker 1: told of us, seeing that by us it would assuredly
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  Speaker 1: not be told. There is only one other thing that
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  Speaker 1: concerns a man still more exclusively, and that is his
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  Speaker 1: own mental illness, or the dreams and illusions of a
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  Speaker 1: long delirium, when he is in common language not himself.
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  Speaker 1: Amense should be made for so bitter a paradox. He
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  Speaker 1: should be allowed such solitude as is possible to the
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  Speaker 1: alienated spirit. He should be left to the not himself,
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  Speaker 1: and spared the intrusion against which he can so ill
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  Speaker 1: guard that he could hardly have even resented it. The
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  Speaker 1: double helplessness of delusion and death should keep the door
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  Speaker 1: of Rossetti's house, for example, and refuse him. To the reader,
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  Speaker 1: his mortal illness had nothing to do with his poetry.
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  Speaker 1: Some rather affected objection is taken every now and then
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  Speaker 1: to the publication of some facts, others being already well
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  Speaker 1: known in the life of Shelley. Nevertheless, these are all,
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  Speaker 1: properly speaking, biography. What is not biography is the detail
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  Speaker 1: of the accident, of the manner of his death, the
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  Speaker 1: detail of his cremation, or, if it was to be told,
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  Speaker 1: told briefly. It was certainly not for Marble. Shelley's death
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  Speaker 1: had no significance, except inasmuch as he died young. It
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  Speaker 1: was a detachable and disconnected incident that was a frost
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  Speaker 1: of fancy and of the heart that used it, So
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  Speaker 1: dealing with an insignificant fact and conferring a futile immortality.
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  Speaker 1: These are ill named biographers, who seem to think that
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  Speaker 1: a betrayal of the ways of death is a part
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  Speaker 1: of their ordinary duty, and that if material enough for
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  Speaker 1: a last chapter does not lie to their hand, they
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  Speaker 1: are to search it out. They, of all survivors, are
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  Speaker 1: called upon in honor and reason to look upon a
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  Speaker 1: death with more composure. To those who loved the dead closely,
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  Speaker 1: this is for a time impossible to them. Death becomes
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  Speaker 1: for a year disproportionate. Their dreams are fixed upon it,
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  Speaker 1: night by night. They have, in those dreams to find
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  Speaker 1: the dead in some labyrinth. They have to mourn his dying,
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  Speaker 1: and to welcome his recovery in such a mingling of
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  Speaker 1: distress and of always incredulous happiness, as is not known
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  Speaker 1: even to dreams, save in that first year of separation.
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  Speaker 1: But they are not biographers. If death is the privacy
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  Speaker 1: of the woods, it is the more conspicuously secret, because
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  Speaker 1: it is their only privacy. You may watch, or may
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  Speaker 1: surprise everything else. The nest is retired, not hidden. The
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  Speaker 1: chase goes on everywhere. It is wonderful how the perpetual
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  Speaker 1: chase seems to cause no perpetual fair. The songs are
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  Speaker 1: all audible. Life is undefended, careless, nimble, and noisy. It
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  Speaker 1: is a happy thing that minor artists have seized or
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  Speaker 1: almost seized, to paint dead birds. Time was when they
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  Speaker 1: did it continually in that British school of watercolor art,
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  Speaker 1: stippled of which surrounding nations it was agreed, were enpious,
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  Speaker 1: they must have killed their bird to paint him, for
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  Speaker 1: he is not to be caught dead. A bird is
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  Speaker 1: more easily caught alive than dead. A poet, on the contrary,
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  Speaker 1: is easily too easily caught dead. Minor artists now seldom
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  Speaker 1: stip on the bird on its back, but a good
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  Speaker 1: sculptor and a university together models there Shelley on his back,
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  Speaker 1: unessentially drowned. And everybody may read about the sick mind
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  Speaker 1: of Dante Rosetti. End of chapter two.
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  Speaker 2: Chapter three of The Color of Life. This is a
• 16:28
  Speaker 2: LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.
• 16:33
  Speaker 2: For more information or to volunteer, this is it LibriVox
• 16:37
  Speaker 2: dot org recording by Isabel Lynn. The Color of Life
• 16:42
  Speaker 2: by Alice Maynall, Chapter three. Cloud during a part of
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  Speaker 2: the year London does not see the clouds. Not to
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  Speaker 2: see the clear sky might seem her chief loss, but
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  Speaker 2: that is shared by the rest of England, and is
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  Speaker 2: besides but a slight privation. Not to see the clear
• 17:01
  Speaker 2: sky is elsewhere to see the cloud but not so
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  Speaker 2: in London. You may go for a week or two
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  Speaker 2: at a time, even though you hold your head up
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  Speaker 2: as you walk. And even though you have windows that
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  Speaker 2: really open, and yet you shall see no cloud, or
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  Speaker 2: but a single edge the fragment of a form. Guillotine.
• 17:22
  Speaker 2: Windows never wholly open, but are filled with a double
• 17:26
  Speaker 2: glass towards the sky when you open them towards the street.
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  Speaker 2: They are therefore a sure sign that for all the
• 17:32
  Speaker 2: years when no other windows were used in London, nobody
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  Speaker 2: there cared much for the sky, or even knew so
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  Speaker 2: much as whether there were a sky. But the privation
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  Speaker 2: of cloud is indeed a graver loss than the world news.
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  Speaker 2: Terrestrial scenery as much. But it is not all men
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  Speaker 2: go in search of it, but the celestial scenery journeys
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  Speaker 2: to them. It goes its way round the world. It
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  Speaker 2: has no nation, It costs no weariness, it knows no bonds.
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  Speaker 2: The terrestrial scenery the tourists is a prisoner compared with this.
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  Speaker 2: The tourist's scenery moves, indeed, but only like Wordsworth's maiden,
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  Speaker 2: with Earth's diurnal course. It is made as fast as
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  Speaker 2: its own graves, and for its chinges. It depends upon
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  Speaker 2: the mobility of the skise, the mere green flushing of
• 18:25
  Speaker 2: its own sap makes only the least of its varieties,
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  Speaker 2: for the greater it must wait upon. The visits of
• 18:32
  Speaker 2: the light, spring and autumn are inconsiderable events in the
• 18:36
  Speaker 2: landscape compared with the shadows of a cloud. The cloud
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  Speaker 2: controls the light, and the mountains on earth a peer
• 18:43
  Speaker 2: of fade according to its passage. They wear so simply
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  Speaker 2: from head to foot. The luminous gray are the emphatic purple,
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  Speaker 2: as the cloud permits that their own local color and
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  Speaker 2: their own local season are lost and cease effaced before
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  Speaker 2: the all importance in mood of the cloud. The sea
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  Speaker 2: has no mood except that of the sky and of
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  Speaker 2: its winds. It is the cloud that, holding the sun's
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  Speaker 2: rays in a sheaf, as a dryant holds a handful
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  Speaker 2: of spears, strikes the horizon, touches the extreme edge with
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  Speaker 2: a delicate revelation of light, or suddenly puts it out
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  Speaker 2: and makes the foreground shine. Everyone knows the manifest work
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  Speaker 2: of the cloud when it descends and partakes in the landscape.
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  Speaker 2: Obviously lies half way across the mountain slope, stoops to
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  Speaker 2: rain heavily upon the lake, and blocks out part of
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  Speaker 2: the view by the rough method of standing in front
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  Speaker 2: of it, But its greatest things are done from its
• 19:41
  Speaker 2: own place aloft. Thence does it distribute the sun? Thence
• 19:47
  Speaker 2: does it lock away between the hills and valleys, more
• 19:50
  Speaker 2: mysteries than a poet conceals, But like him not by interception.
• 19:56
  Speaker 2: Thence it writes out and cancels all the tracery of
• 20:00
  Speaker 2: monter Rosa, or lets the pencils of the sun renew them. Thence,
• 20:05
  Speaker 2: hiding nothing and yet making dark, it sheds deep color
• 20:09
  Speaker 2: upon the forest land of Sussex, so that seen from
• 20:13
  Speaker 2: the hills, all the country is divided between grave blue
• 20:16
  Speaker 2: and graver sunlight. And all this is but its influence,
• 20:21
  Speaker 2: its secondary work upon the world. Its own beauty is unaltered.
• 20:25
  Speaker 2: When it has no earthly beauty to improve, it is
• 20:29
  Speaker 2: always great above the street, above the suburbs, above the
• 20:33
  Speaker 2: gas works and the stucco, above the faces of painted
• 20:37
  Speaker 2: white houses, the painted surfaces that have been devised as
• 20:41
  Speaker 2: the only things able to vulgarize light as they catch
• 20:44
  Speaker 2: it and reflect it grotesquely from their importunate glass. This
• 20:48
  Speaker 2: is to be well seen on a sunny evening in
• 20:50
  Speaker 2: Regent Street. Even here the cloud is not so victorious
• 20:56
  Speaker 2: as when it towers above some little landscape of rather
• 20:59
  Speaker 2: paltry interest, a conventional river heavy with water, gardens with
• 21:03
  Speaker 2: their little evergreens, walks and shrubberies, and thick trees, impervious
• 21:08
  Speaker 2: to the light, touched as the novelists always have it,
• 21:12
  Speaker 2: with autumn tints high over these rises. In the enormous
• 21:17
  Speaker 2: scale of the scenery of clouds, what no man expected
• 21:21
  Speaker 2: and heroic sky. Few of the things that were ever
• 21:25
  Speaker 2: done upon Earth are great enough to be done under
• 21:28
  Speaker 2: such a heaven. It was surely designed for other days.
• 21:32
  Speaker 2: It is for an epic world. Your eyes sweep a
• 21:36
  Speaker 2: thousand miles of cloud What are the distances of Earth
• 21:40
  Speaker 2: to these? And what are the distances of the clear
• 21:43
  Speaker 2: and cloudless sky. The very horizons of the landscape are near,
• 21:48
  Speaker 2: for the round world dip so soon, and the distances
• 21:51
  Speaker 2: of the mere, clear sky are unmeasured. You rest upon
• 21:55
  Speaker 2: nothing until you come to a star, And the star
• 21:58
  Speaker 2: itself is in measure. But in the sky of sunny
• 22:04
  Speaker 2: alps of clouds, the sight goes farther with conscious flight
• 22:08
  Speaker 2: than it could ever have journeyed. Otherwise man would not
• 22:12
  Speaker 2: have known distance. Veritably, without the clouds, there are mountains
• 22:16
  Speaker 2: indeed precipices and deeps to which those of the earth
• 22:20
  Speaker 2: are pigmy. Yet the sky heights, being so far off,
• 22:25
  Speaker 2: are not overpowering by disproportion. Like some futile building fatuously
• 22:29
  Speaker 2: made too big for the human measure. The cloud, in
• 22:33
  Speaker 2: its majestic place composes with a little perugino tree for
• 22:37
  Speaker 2: you stand astray in the futile building. While the cloud
• 22:41
  Speaker 2: is now mentioned for man and out of reach of
• 22:43
  Speaker 2: his limitations. The cloud moreover controls the Sun, not merely
• 22:50
  Speaker 2: by keeping the custody of his rays, but by becoming
• 22:53
  Speaker 2: the counselor of his temper. The cloud veils an angry sun,
• 22:58
  Speaker 2: or more terribly, lets fly an angry ray suddenly bright
• 23:02
  Speaker 2: upon tree and tower, with iron gray storm for a background.
• 23:07
  Speaker 2: Or when anger has but threatened, the cloud reveals him
• 23:11
  Speaker 2: gentle beyond hope. It makes peace constantly. Just before sunset.
• 23:19
  Speaker 2: It is in the confidence of the winds and wears
• 23:22
  Speaker 2: their colors. There is a heavenly game on southwest wind days,
• 23:27
  Speaker 2: when the clouds are bowled by a breeze from behind
• 23:29
  Speaker 2: the evening, they are round and brilliant and come leaping
• 23:33
  Speaker 2: up from the horizon for hours. This is a frolic
• 23:36
  Speaker 2: and haphazard sky. All unlike this is the sky that
• 23:41
  Speaker 2: has a center and stands composed about it. As the
• 23:45
  Speaker 2: clouds marshal the earthly mountains, so the clouds, in turn
• 23:49
  Speaker 2: are now arranged. The tops of all the celestial endies
• 23:53
  Speaker 2: aloft are swept at once by a single ray, warmed
• 23:57
  Speaker 2: with a single color promontory after league long promontory of
• 24:01
  Speaker 2: a stiller Mediterranean in the sky is called out of
• 24:05
  Speaker 2: mist and gray by the same finger. The cloud land
• 24:08
  Speaker 2: is very great, but a sunbeam makes all its nations
• 24:13
  Speaker 2: and continents sudden with light. All this is for the untraveled.
• 24:19
  Speaker 2: All the winds bring him this scenery. It is only
• 24:22
  Speaker 2: in London, for part of the autumn and part of
• 24:25
  Speaker 2: the winter that the unnatural smoke fog comes between. And
• 24:29
  Speaker 2: for many and many a day, no London eye can
• 24:32
  Speaker 2: see the horizon or the fur threat of the cloud
• 24:34
  Speaker 2: like a man's hand. There never was a great painter
• 24:38
  Speaker 2: who had not exquisite horizons. And if Koho and Chrome
• 24:42
  Speaker 2: were right, the Londoner loses a great thing. He loses
• 24:47
  Speaker 2: the coming of the cloud, and when it is hinh
• 24:49
  Speaker 2: in air, he loses its shape. A cloud lover is
• 24:53
  Speaker 2: not content to see a snowy and rosy head piling
• 24:56
  Speaker 2: into the top of the heavens. He wants to see
• 24:59
  Speaker 2: the base and altitude. The perspective of a cloud is
• 25:03
  Speaker 2: a great part of its design, whether it lies so
• 25:06
  Speaker 2: that you can look along the immense horizontal distances of
• 25:09
  Speaker 2: its floor, or whether it wears so upright the pillar
• 25:12
  Speaker 2: that you look up its mountains deeds in the sky
• 25:15
  Speaker 2: as you look at the rising heights of a mountain
• 25:17
  Speaker 2: that stands with you on the earth. The cloud has
• 25:22
  Speaker 2: a name suggesting darkness. Nevertheless, it is not merely the
• 25:26
  Speaker 2: guardian of the Sun's rays and their director. It is
• 25:30
  Speaker 2: the Sun's treasurer. It holds the light that the world
• 25:33
  Speaker 2: has lost. We talk of sunshine and moonshine, but not
• 25:38
  Speaker 2: of cloud shine, which is yet one of the illuminations
• 25:41
  Speaker 2: of our skies. A shining cloud is one of the
• 25:45
  Speaker 2: most majestic of all secondary lights. If the reflecting moon
• 25:49
  Speaker 2: is the bright, this is the friend of the bridegroom.
• 25:53
  Speaker 2: Needless to say, the cloud of its underous summer is
• 25:56
  Speaker 2: the most beautiful of all. It has spaces of a
• 25:59
  Speaker 2: gray for which there is no name, and no other
• 26:02
  Speaker 2: cloud looks over at a vanishing sun. From such heights
• 26:05
  Speaker 2: of blue air. The shower cloud, too, with its thin edges,
• 26:10
  Speaker 2: comes across the sky with so influent shoal of flight,
• 26:12
  Speaker 2: that no ship going out to sea can be better
• 26:15
  Speaker 2: worth watching. The dullest thing, perhaps in the London streets,
• 26:20
  Speaker 2: is that people take their rain there without knowing anything
• 26:22
  Speaker 2: of the cloud that drops it. It is merely rain
• 26:26
  Speaker 2: and means wetness. The shower cloud there has limits of time,
• 26:30
  Speaker 2: but no limits of form, and no history whatever. It
• 26:35
  Speaker 2: has not come from the clear edge of the plain
• 26:37
  Speaker 2: to the south, and will not shoulder anon the hill
• 26:40
  Speaker 2: to the north. The rain for this city hardly comes
• 26:44
  Speaker 2: or goes. It does but begin and stop. No one
• 26:49
  Speaker 2: looks after it on the path of its retreat. End
• 26:53
  Speaker 2: of chapter three. Recording by Isabel Lynne. Chapter four of
• 27:03
  Speaker 2: The Color of Life. This is a LibriVox recording. All
• 27:07
  Speaker 2: LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information
• 27:11
  Speaker 2: or to volunteer, plea visit LibriVox dot org. Recording by
• 27:16
  Speaker 2: Isabel lynn The Color of Life by Alice Mayno, Chapter four,
• 27:22
  Speaker 2: Winds of the World. Every wind is or ought to
• 27:28
  Speaker 2: be a poet, but one is classic and converts everything
• 27:32
  Speaker 2: in his day co unity. Another is a modern man
• 27:36
  Speaker 2: whose words close his thoughts, as the modern critics used
• 27:39
  Speaker 2: to say prettily in the early sixties, and therefore are separable.
• 27:45
  Speaker 2: This wind again has a style, and that wind a
• 27:48
  Speaker 2: mere manner. Nay, there are breezes from the east southeast,
• 27:52
  Speaker 2: for example, that have hardly even a manner. You can
• 27:56
  Speaker 2: hardly name them unless you look at the weather vane.
• 28:00
  Speaker 2: So they do not convince you by voice or color
• 28:02
  Speaker 2: of breath. You place their origin and assign them a history.
• 28:06
  Speaker 2: According as the hesitating arrow points on the top of
• 28:10
  Speaker 2: yonder Ill designed London Spire, the most certain and most
• 28:15
  Speaker 2: conquering of all is the southwest wind. You do not
• 28:19
  Speaker 2: look to the weather vane to decide what shall be
• 28:22
  Speaker 2: the style of your greeting to his mourning. There is
• 28:25
  Speaker 2: no arbitrary rule of courtesy between you and him, and
• 28:28
  Speaker 2: you need no arrow to point to his distinctions and
• 28:32
  Speaker 2: to indicate to you the right manner of treating such
• 28:34
  Speaker 2: a visitant. He prepares the dawn while it is still dark.
• 28:40
  Speaker 2: The air is warned of his presence, and before the
• 28:44
  Speaker 2: window was opened, he was already in the room his sun,
• 28:48
  Speaker 2: for the sun is his rises in a south West
• 28:51
  Speaker 2: mood with a bloom on the blue, the gray, or
• 28:54
  Speaker 2: the gold. When the Southwest is cold. The cold is
• 28:58
  Speaker 2: his own cold, blunt, full, and gradual in its very strength.
• 29:04
  Speaker 2: It is a fresh cold that comes with an approach,
• 29:07
  Speaker 2: and does not challenge you in the manner of an
• 29:09
  Speaker 2: anothorized stranger, but instantly gets your leave and even a
• 29:13
  Speaker 2: welcome to your house of life. He follows your breath
• 29:16
  Speaker 2: in at your throat, and your eyes are open to
• 29:19
  Speaker 2: let him in. Even when he is cold. Your blood calls,
• 29:23
  Speaker 2: but does not hide from him. He has a splendid
• 29:27
  Speaker 2: way with his sky in his flight, which is that
• 29:31
  Speaker 2: not of a bird, but of a flock of birds.
• 29:34
  Speaker 2: He flies high and low at once high was his
• 29:37
  Speaker 2: higher clouds that keep long in the sight of man,
• 29:41
  Speaker 2: seeming to move slowly and low, with the colored clouds
• 29:45
  Speaker 2: that breast the hills and are near to the tree tops.
• 29:49
  Speaker 2: These the southwest wind tosses up from his soft horizon,
• 29:53
  Speaker 2: round and successive. They are tinted somewhat like ripe clover fields,
• 29:59
  Speaker 2: or like hay fields just before the cutting, when all
• 30:02
  Speaker 2: the grass is in flower, and they are oftener than
• 30:05
  Speaker 2: all other clouds in shadow. These low lying flocks are
• 30:10
  Speaker 2: swift and brief. The wind cast them before him from
• 30:15
  Speaker 2: the western verge to the eastern. Koro has painted so
• 30:19
  Speaker 2: many southwest winds that one might question whether he ever
• 30:23
  Speaker 2: painted in his later manner, at least any others. His
• 30:29
  Speaker 2: skies are thus in the act of flight, with lower
• 30:32
  Speaker 2: clouds out running the higher, the farther vapors moving like
• 30:36
  Speaker 2: a fleet out at sea, and the nearer like dolphins.
• 30:41
  Speaker 2: In his classical landscape Italy, the master has indeed, for
• 30:45
  Speaker 2: once a sky that seems at anchor, or at least
• 30:49
  Speaker 2: that moves with no pace perceived. The vibrating wings are folded,
• 30:54
  Speaker 2: and Ko's wind that flew through so many springs, summers
• 30:59
  Speaker 2: and septembers him. He was seldom a painter of very
• 31:02
  Speaker 2: late autumn. It was mingled with so many aspen leaves
• 31:07
  Speaker 2: that strewed his forests with wood for the gatherer, and
• 31:10
  Speaker 2: blew the broken lights into the glades is charmed into stillness,
• 31:15
  Speaker 2: and the sky into another kind of immortality. Nor are
• 31:19
  Speaker 2: the trees in this antique landscape, the trees so long
• 31:23
  Speaker 2: intimate with golos southwest wind so often entangled. Was his
• 31:27
  Speaker 2: uncertain twilights. They are as quiet as the cloud, and
• 31:32
  Speaker 2: such as the long and wild breezes of Romance have
• 31:35
  Speaker 2: never shaken or enlaced upon all our islands. The southwest
• 31:40
  Speaker 2: wind is the sea wind. But elsewhere there are sea
• 31:44
  Speaker 2: winds that are not from the southwest. They too, nonetheless
• 31:49
  Speaker 2: are conquerors. They too are always strong, compelling winds that
• 31:55
  Speaker 2: take possession of delight the shadow, the sun, moon and stars,
• 32:00
  Speaker 2: and constrain them all alike to feel the sea. Not
• 32:03
  Speaker 2: a field, not a hillside on the sea wind day,
• 32:07
  Speaker 2: but shines with some soft sea lights. The moon's little
• 32:11
  Speaker 2: boat tosses on a sea wind night. The southwest wind
• 32:17
  Speaker 2: takes the high Italian coasts. He gathers the aleks woods
• 32:21
  Speaker 2: together and throngs them close, as a sheep dog gathers
• 32:26
  Speaker 2: the sheep. They crowd for shelter, and a great wall
• 32:30
  Speaker 2: leaning inland, also with its strong base to the sea,
• 32:34
  Speaker 2: receives them. It is blank and sunny, and the trees
• 32:38
  Speaker 2: within are sunny and dark, serried, and their tops swept
• 32:43
  Speaker 2: and flattened by months of sea storms. On the farther
• 32:47
  Speaker 2: side there are gardens, gardens that have in their mists
• 32:51
  Speaker 2: those quietest things in all the world, and most windless
• 32:55
  Speaker 2: box hedges and ponds. The gardens take shelter behind the
• 33:00
  Speaker 2: scared and hurried Alec's woods, and the sea wind spares
• 33:04
  Speaker 2: them and breaks upon the mountain. But the garden also
• 33:08
  Speaker 2: is his, and his wild warm days have filled it
• 33:11
  Speaker 2: with orange trees and roses, and have given all the
• 33:14
  Speaker 2: abundant charm to its gay neglect, to its grass grown terraces,
• 33:19
  Speaker 2: and to all its lapsed, forsaken and forgotten dainties. Nothing
• 33:25
  Speaker 2: of the nature in the seaward Italy would be so
• 33:27
  Speaker 2: beautiful without the touch of man and of the sea gales.
• 33:32
  Speaker 2: When the southwest wind brings his rain, he brings it
• 33:35
  Speaker 2: with the majestic onset announced by his breath, And when
• 33:38
  Speaker 2: the light follows, it comes from his own doorway in
• 33:42
  Speaker 2: the verge. His are the opened evenings after a day
• 33:46
  Speaker 2: shut down with cloud. He fills the air with innumerable
• 33:50
  Speaker 2: particles of moisture that scatter and bestow the sun. There
• 33:55
  Speaker 2: are no other days like his, of so universal a harmony,
• 34:00
  Speaker 2: so generous. The north wind has his own landscape too,
• 34:05
  Speaker 2: but the East wind never. The aspect which he gives
• 34:08
  Speaker 2: to the day is not all his own. The sunshine
• 34:12
  Speaker 2: is sweet in spite of him. The clouds go under
• 34:16
  Speaker 2: his whip, but they have kinder grays than should be
• 34:19
  Speaker 2: the colors of his cold. Not on an east wind
• 34:23
  Speaker 2: day are these races in heaven, for the clouds are
• 34:26
  Speaker 2: all far off. His rain is angry, and it flies
• 34:30
  Speaker 2: against the sunset. The world is not one in his rain,
• 34:34
  Speaker 2: but rather there is a perpetual revolt or difference. The
• 34:39
  Speaker 2: lights and shadows are not all his. The waxing and
• 34:43
  Speaker 2: waning hours are disaffected. He has not a great style
• 34:48
  Speaker 2: and does not convince the day. All the four winds
• 34:51
  Speaker 2: are brave, and not the less brave, because on their
• 34:55
  Speaker 2: way through town they are betrayed for a moment into
• 34:58
  Speaker 2: taking part in any patroness that may be there. On
• 35:02
  Speaker 2: their way from the steps to the Atlantic, they play
• 35:05
  Speaker 2: havoc with the nerves of very insignificant people, a part,
• 35:10
  Speaker 2: as it were, of every gale that starts in the
• 35:13
  Speaker 2: far northeast finds its goal, and the breath of a
• 35:16
  Speaker 2: reluctant citizen. You will meet a wind of the world,
• 35:21
  Speaker 2: nimble and eager in a soy street. But these are
• 35:25
  Speaker 2: only accidents of the way. The winds go free again.
• 35:29
  Speaker 2: Those that do not go free, but close their course
• 35:32
  Speaker 2: are those that are breezed by the nostrils of living creatures.
• 35:36
  Speaker 2: A great flock of those wild birds come to a
• 35:39
  Speaker 2: final pause in London and find the fires of life
• 35:43
  Speaker 2: with those wings in the act of folding and the
• 35:46
  Speaker 2: blood and breath of a child closed. Influences of continent
• 35:50
  Speaker 2: and sy end of chapter four. Recording by Isabel Lynn.
• 36:02
  Speaker 1: Chapter five of The Color of Life. This is a
• 36:05
  Speaker 1: LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.
• 36:10
  Speaker 1: For more information, Auto Volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org.
• 36:15
  Speaker 1: The Color of Life by Alice Maynaw, Chapter five, The
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: Honors of Mortality. The brilliant talent which has quite lately
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: and quite suddenly arisen to devote itself to the use
• 36:27
  Speaker 1: of the day or of the week in illustrated papers.
• 36:30
  Speaker 1: The enormous production of art in black and white is
• 36:33
  Speaker 1: assuredly a confession that the honors of mortality are worth working.
• 36:38
  Speaker 1: For fifty years ago men worked for the honors of immortality.
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: These were the commonplace of their ambition. They declined to
• 36:46
  Speaker 1: attend to the beauty of things of use that were
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: destined to be broken and worn out. And they looked
• 36:52
  Speaker 1: forward to surviving themselves by painting bad pictures, So that
• 36:56
  Speaker 1: what to do with their bad pictures, in addition to
• 36:58
  Speaker 1: our own, has been the problem of the nation and
• 37:01
  Speaker 1: of the householder alike. Today men have began to learn
• 37:05
  Speaker 1: that their sons will be grateful to them for few bequests.
• 37:09
  Speaker 1: Art consents at last to work upon the tissue and
• 37:12
  Speaker 1: the china that are doomed to the natural and necessary
• 37:15
  Speaker 1: end destruction, and art shows a most dignified alacrity to
• 37:20
  Speaker 1: do her best daily for the process and for oblivion. Doubtless,
• 37:25
  Speaker 1: this abandonment of hopes, so large at once and so cheap,
• 37:28
  Speaker 1: costs the artists, somethink nay, it implies an acceptance of
• 37:32
  Speaker 1: the inevitable that is not less than heroic. And the
• 37:36
  Speaker 1: reward has been in the singular and manifest increase of
• 37:39
  Speaker 1: vitality in this work, which is done for so short
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: a life. Fittingly indeed, does life reward the acceptance of death,
• 37:47
  Speaker 1: inasmuch as to die is to have been alive. There
• 37:51
  Speaker 1: is a real circulation of blood, quick use, brief, beauty, abolition, recreation.
• 37:58
  Speaker 1: The honour of the day is forever the us honor
• 38:00
  Speaker 1: of that day, it goes into the treasury of things
• 38:03
  Speaker 1: that are honestly and completely ended and done with. And
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: when can so happy a thing be said of a
• 38:10
  Speaker 1: lifeless oil painting? Who of the wires would hesitate to
• 38:14
  Speaker 1: be honorable for one day, one named and dated day,
• 38:18
  Speaker 1: separate from all other days of the ages, or to
• 38:22
  Speaker 1: be for an unlimited time tedious? End of chapter two,
• 38:34
  Speaker 1: Chapter six, The Color of Life. This is a LibriVox recording.
• 38:39
  Speaker 1: All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org. The
• 38:48
  Speaker 1: Color of Life by Alice Maynel, Chapter six At Monastery Gates.
• 38:53
  Speaker 1: At Monastery Gates, no woman has ever crossed the inner threshold,
• 38:59
  Speaker 1: or shall ever cross it, unless a Queen, English or
• 39:02
  Speaker 1: foreign should claim her privilege. Therefore, if a woman records
• 39:06
  Speaker 1: here the slighter things visible of the monastic life, it
• 39:09
  Speaker 1: is only because she was not admitted to see more
• 39:12
  Speaker 1: than beautiful courtesy and friendliness were able to show her
• 39:15
  Speaker 1: in guest house and garden. The monastery is of fresh
• 39:19
  Speaker 1: looking Gothic by pugin the first of the Dynasty. It
• 39:23
  Speaker 1: is reached by the white roads of a limestone country
• 39:27
  Speaker 1: and backed by a young plantation, and it gathers its
• 39:30
  Speaker 1: group of buildings in a cleft high up among the
• 39:33
  Speaker 1: hills of Wales. The brown habit is this, and these
• 39:36
  Speaker 1: are the sandals that come and go by hills of finer,
• 39:40
  Speaker 1: sharper and loftier line, edging the dusk and dawn of
• 39:43
  Speaker 1: an Umbrian sky. Just such a via crusis climbs the
• 39:48
  Speaker 1: height above water, and from the foot of its final
• 39:50
  Speaker 1: crucifix you can see the sunrise touch the top of
• 39:54
  Speaker 1: Monte Rosa, while the encircled lake below is cool with
• 39:58
  Speaker 1: the last of the night. The same order of fryers
• 40:01
  Speaker 1: keep that sub alpine Monte Sacro, and the same have
• 40:05
  Speaker 1: set the Kreuzberg beyond Bonn with the same steep path
• 40:08
  Speaker 1: by the same fourteen chapels, facing the seven mountains and
• 40:12
  Speaker 1: the Rhine. Here in North Wales, remote as the country is,
• 40:17
  Speaker 1: with the wheat green over the blunt hilltops, and the
• 40:20
  Speaker 1: sky vibrating with larks, a long wing of smoke lies
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: round the horizon. The country, rather thinly and languidly cultivated above,
• 40:30
  Speaker 1: has a valuable sub soil and is burrowed with mines.
• 40:33
  Speaker 1: The breath of pit and factory out of sight, thickens
• 40:37
  Speaker 1: the lower sky and lies heavily over the sands of
• 40:40
  Speaker 1: d It leaves the upper blue clear and the head
• 40:43
  Speaker 1: of a rhine, but dims the flicker of Sirius and
• 40:46
  Speaker 1: shortens the steady ray of the evening star. The people
• 40:50
  Speaker 1: scattered about are not mining people, but half hearted agriculturists,
• 40:54
  Speaker 1: and very poor. The cottages are rather cabins. Not a
• 40:58
  Speaker 1: tiled roof is in the country. But the slates have
• 41:01
  Speaker 1: taken some beauty with time, having dips and dimples and
• 41:05
  Speaker 1: grass upon their edges. The walls are all thickly whitewashed,
• 41:09
  Speaker 1: which is a pleasure to see. How willingly would one
• 41:12
  Speaker 1: wish the harmless whitewash over more than half the color,
• 41:15
  Speaker 1: over all the chocolate, and all the blue with which
• 41:18
  Speaker 1: the buildings of the world are stained. You could not
• 41:21
  Speaker 1: wish for a better, simpler or fresher harmony than whitewash makes.
• 41:26
  Speaker 1: With the slight sunshine and the bright gray of an
• 41:28
  Speaker 1: English sky, the gray stone, gray roofed monastery looks young
• 41:34
  Speaker 1: in one sense. It is modern, and the friars look
• 41:37
  Speaker 1: young in another. They are like their brothers of an
• 41:39
  Speaker 1: earlier time. No one excepts the journalists of yesterday would
• 41:44
  Speaker 1: spend upon them those tedious words quaint or old world.
• 41:49
  Speaker 1: No such weary adjectives are spoken here, unless it be
• 41:53
  Speaker 1: by the excursionists, with large aprons tied over their brown habits.
• 41:58
  Speaker 1: The lay brothers work upon their lad planting parsnips in rows,
• 42:02
  Speaker 1: or tending a prosperous bee farm. A young friar who
• 42:06
  Speaker 1: sang the high Mass yesterday is gaily hanging the washed
• 42:10
  Speaker 1: linen in the sun. A printing press and a machine
• 42:13
  Speaker 1: which slices turnips are at work in an outhouse, and
• 42:17
  Speaker 1: the yard thereby is guarded by a Saint Bernard, whose
• 42:20
  Speaker 1: single evil deed was at under one of the obscure
• 42:23
  Speaker 1: impulses of a dog's heart. Atoned for by long and
• 42:26
  Speaker 1: self conscious remorse, he bit the poet and tried, says
• 42:31
  Speaker 1: one of the friars, to make doggerel of him. The poet, too,
• 42:35
  Speaker 1: lives at the monastery gates and on monastery ground, in
• 42:38
  Speaker 1: a seclusion which the tidings of the sequence of his
• 42:41
  Speaker 1: additions hardly reaches. There is no disturbing renown to be
• 42:46
  Speaker 1: got among the cabins of the Flintshire hills homeward over
• 42:50
  Speaker 1: the verge from other valleys. His light figure flits at
• 42:53
  Speaker 1: nightfall like a moth to the coming and going of
• 42:57
  Speaker 1: the Friars. Too. The village people have become well used, used,
• 43:00
  Speaker 1: and the infrequent excursionists, for lack of intelligence and of
• 43:04
  Speaker 1: any knowledge that would refer to history, look at them
• 43:07
  Speaker 1: without obtrusive curiosity. It was only from a Salvation army
• 43:11
  Speaker 1: girl that she heard the brutal word of contempt. She
• 43:15
  Speaker 1: had come to the place with some companions, and with
• 43:18
  Speaker 1: them was trespassing, as she was welcome to do, within
• 43:21
  Speaker 1: the monastery grounds. She stood a figure for Bournemouth Pier
• 43:26
  Speaker 1: in her grotesque bonnet, and watched the son of the
• 43:29
  Speaker 1: Umbrian saint, the Friar, who walks among the Giotto frescoes
• 43:33
  Speaker 1: at Assisi and between the cypresses of Bellow's Guado, and
• 43:37
  Speaker 1: has paced the centuries continually since the coming of the Friars.
• 43:42
  Speaker 1: One might have asked of her the kindness of a fellow,
• 43:45
  Speaker 1: feeling she and he alike were so habited as to
• 43:48
  Speaker 1: show the world that their life was aloof from its
• 43:51
  Speaker 1: idle business. By some such phrase, at least the Friar
• 43:55
  Speaker 1: would assuredly have attempted to include her in any spiritual
• 43:58
  Speaker 1: honors ascribed to him, or one might have asked of
• 44:01
  Speaker 1: her the condescension of forbearance. Only fancy, said the Salvation
• 44:06
  Speaker 1: army girls watching the friar out of sight, Only fancy
• 44:10
  Speaker 1: making such a fool of one's self. The Great Hood
• 44:14
  Speaker 1: of the Fryars, which is drawn over the head in
• 44:17
  Speaker 1: Zurbrain's ecstatic picture, is turned to use when the Friars
• 44:20
  Speaker 1: are busy as a pocket it relieves the overbirdened hands.
• 44:25
  Speaker 1: A bottle of the local white wine, made by the
• 44:27
  Speaker 1: brotherhood at Genoa and sent to this house by the west,
• 44:31
  Speaker 1: is carried in the cowl as a present to the
• 44:34
  Speaker 1: stranger at the gates. The Friars tell how a brother
• 44:37
  Speaker 1: resolved at Shrovetide to make pancakes, and not only to make,
• 44:42
  Speaker 1: but also to toss them. Those who chanced to be
• 44:45
  Speaker 1: in the room stood prudently aside, and the brother tossed boldly.
• 44:50
  Speaker 1: But that was the last that was seen of his handiwork.
• 44:53
  Speaker 1: Victor Hugo sings in La Lajante de Siecle of disappearance
• 44:58
  Speaker 1: as a thing which no creature is able to achieve.
• 45:01
  Speaker 1: Here the impossibility seemed to be accomplished by quite an
• 45:04
  Speaker 1: ordinary and a simple pancake. It was clean gone, and
• 45:08
  Speaker 1: there was an end of it. Nor could any explanation
• 45:12
  Speaker 1: of this ceasing of a pancake from the midst of
• 45:14
  Speaker 1: the visible world be so much as divined by the spectators.
• 45:19
  Speaker 1: It was only when the brother in church knelt down
• 45:21
  Speaker 1: to meditate and drew his cowl about his head that
• 45:24
  Speaker 1: the accident was explained. Every midnight, the sweet Contralto bells
• 45:29
  Speaker 1: call the community, who get up gaily to this difficult service.
• 45:34
  Speaker 1: Of all duties, this one never grows easy or familiar,
• 45:37
  Speaker 1: and therefore never habitual. It is something to have found
• 45:41
  Speaker 1: but one act aloof from habit. It is not merely
• 45:45
  Speaker 1: that the friars overcome the habit of sleep. The subtler
• 45:48
  Speaker 1: point is that they can never acquire the habit of
• 45:51
  Speaker 1: sacrificing sleep. What art, what literature, or what life, but
• 45:56
  Speaker 1: would gain a secret security by such a point of
• 45:59
  Speaker 1: perpetual face freshness and perpetual initiative. It is not possible
• 46:04
  Speaker 1: to get up at midnight without a will that is
• 46:06
  Speaker 1: new night by night. So should the writer's work be
• 46:10
  Speaker 1: done and with an intention perpetually unique. The poets the
• 46:15
  Speaker 1: Contralto bells have taught these western hills the Angelus of
• 46:19
  Speaker 1: the French fields and the hour of night Laura denote,
• 46:23
  Speaker 1: which rings with so melancholy. A note from the village
• 46:26
  Speaker 1: Belfries on the Adriatic Littoral, when the latest light is passing.
• 46:31
  Speaker 1: It is the prayer for the dead out of the depths,
• 46:34
  Speaker 1: have I cried unto thee O Lord. The little flocks
• 46:38
  Speaker 1: of novices on Pascal evenings are folded to the sound
• 46:42
  Speaker 1: of that evening prayer. The care of them is the
• 46:45
  Speaker 1: central work of the monastery, which is placed in so
• 46:47
  Speaker 1: remote a country, because it is principally a place of studies,
• 46:51
  Speaker 1: so much elect intellect and strength of heart withdrawn from
• 46:55
  Speaker 1: the traffic of the world. True, the friars are not
• 46:59
  Speaker 1: doing the time which Carlyle set mankind as a refuge
• 47:02
  Speaker 1: from despair. These bearded counselors of God keep theirselves read, study, suffer, sing,
• 47:10
  Speaker 1: hold silence. Whereas they might be operating beautiful word upon
• 47:15
  Speaker 1: the stock exchange, or painting academy pictures, or making speeches,
• 47:20
  Speaker 1: or reluctantly jostling other men for places, they might be
• 47:24
  Speaker 1: among the involuntary, busybodies who are living by futile tasks.
• 47:28
  Speaker 1: The need weereof is a discouraged fiction. There is absolutely
• 47:32
  Speaker 1: no limit to the superfluous activities to the art, to
• 47:36
  Speaker 1: the literature implicitly renounced by the dwellers. Within such walls
• 47:41
  Speaker 1: as these. The output, again a beautiful word of the age,
• 47:46
  Speaker 1: is lessened by this abstention. Nonetheless hopes the stranger and
• 47:51
  Speaker 1: pilgrim to pause and knock once again upon those monastery gates.
• 47:59
  Speaker 2: End of chapter six, Chapter seven of the Color of Life.
• 48:08
  Speaker 2: This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in
• 48:12
  Speaker 2: the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please
• 48:16
  Speaker 2: visit LibriVox with Org recording by Isabel Lynn. The Color
• 48:21
  Speaker 2: of Life by Alice Mayno Chapter seven. Rushes and reeds
• 48:27
  Speaker 2: taller than the grass and lower than the trees. There
• 48:30
  Speaker 2: is another growth that feels the implicit spring. It had
• 48:33
  Speaker 2: been more abundant to winter than even the short grass
• 48:36
  Speaker 2: shuddering under a wave of east wind, more than the
• 48:38
  Speaker 2: dumb trees. For the multitudes of sedges, rushes, canes, and
• 48:43
  Speaker 2: reeds were the appropriate lyre of the cold. On them,
• 48:47
  Speaker 2: the nimble winds played their dry music. They were part
• 48:51
  Speaker 2: of the winter. It looked through them and spoke through them.
• 48:55
  Speaker 2: They were spears and javelins in a ray to the
• 48:57
  Speaker 2: sound of the drums of the north. The winter takes
• 49:00
  Speaker 2: fuller possession of these things than of those that stand solid.
• 49:04
  Speaker 2: The sedges whistle his tune. They let the color of
• 49:07
  Speaker 2: his light look through low flying arrows and bright bayonets
• 49:11
  Speaker 2: of winter day. The multitudes of all weeds and rushes
• 49:15
  Speaker 2: grow out of bounds. They belong to the margins of lands,
• 49:19
  Speaker 2: the space between the farms and the river, beyond the pastures,
• 49:22
  Speaker 2: and where the martian flower becomes perilous footing for the cattle.
• 49:27
  Speaker 2: They are the fringe of the lowlands, the sign of streams.
• 49:31
  Speaker 2: They grow tall between you and the near horizon of
• 49:33
  Speaker 2: flat lands. They etche their sharp lines upon the sky,
• 49:37
  Speaker 2: and near them grow flowers of stature, including the lofty
• 49:40
  Speaker 2: yellow lily. Our green country is better for the gray, soft,
• 49:45
  Speaker 2: cloudy darkness of this sedge, and our full landscape is
• 49:49
  Speaker 2: the better for the distinction of its points, its needles,
• 49:52
  Speaker 2: and its resolute white lines. Ours is a summer full
• 49:56
  Speaker 2: of voices, and therefore does not so neat the sound
• 49:59
  Speaker 2: of rushes. But they are most sensitive to the stealthy
• 50:03
  Speaker 2: breezes and betray the passing of a wind that even
• 50:06
  Speaker 2: the tree tops knew not of. Sometimes it is a
• 50:09
  Speaker 2: breeze unfelt, But the stiff sedges whispered along a mile
• 50:13
  Speaker 2: of marsh to the strong wind. They bend, showing the
• 50:17
  Speaker 2: silver of their somber little tassels, as fish show the
• 50:20
  Speaker 2: silver of their sides. Turning in the pathless sea. They
• 50:24
  Speaker 2: are unanimous. A field of tall flowers tosses many ways
• 50:28
  Speaker 2: in one warm gale, like the many lovers of a poet,
• 50:31
  Speaker 2: who have a selven reasons for their love. But the rushes,
• 50:35
  Speaker 2: more strongly tethered, are swept into a single attitude, again
• 50:39
  Speaker 2: and again at every renewal of the storm, between the
• 50:44
  Speaker 2: pasture and the wave. The many miles of rushes and
• 50:46
  Speaker 2: reeds in England seem to escape that insistent ownership which
• 50:49
  Speaker 2: has so changed, except for a few forests and downs,
• 50:53
  Speaker 2: the aspect of England, and has in fact made the landscape.
• 50:57
  Speaker 2: Cultivation makes the landscape elsewhere rather than ownership. For the
• 51:01
  Speaker 2: boundaries in the south are not conspicuous, but here it
• 51:05
  Speaker 2: is ownership. But the rushes are a gipsy people amongst us,
• 51:10
  Speaker 2: yet out of reach the landowner, if he is a
• 51:13
  Speaker 2: rather gross man, believes these races of reeds are his.
• 51:17
  Speaker 2: But if he is a man of sensibility, depend upon
• 51:20
  Speaker 2: it he has his interior dobts his property. He says,
• 51:24
  Speaker 2: goes right down to the center of the earth in
• 51:26
  Speaker 2: the shape of a wedge. How high up it goes
• 51:29
  Speaker 2: into the air, It would be difficult to say, and
• 51:32
  Speaker 2: obviously the shape of the wedge must be continued in
• 51:34
  Speaker 2: the direction of increase. We may therefore proclaim his right
• 51:38
  Speaker 2: to the clouds and their cargo. It is true that
• 51:41
  Speaker 2: as his ground game is apt to go upon his
• 51:43
  Speaker 2: neighbor's land to be shot, so the clouds may now
• 51:46
  Speaker 2: and then spend his showers elsewhere. But the great saying
• 51:50
  Speaker 2: is the view a well appointed country house sees nothing
• 51:54
  Speaker 2: out of the windows that is not its own. But
• 51:57
  Speaker 2: he who tells you so, and proves it to you
• 51:59
  Speaker 2: by his own views, is certainly disturbed by an unspoken doubt.
• 52:03
  Speaker 2: If his otherwise contented eyes should happen to be caught
• 52:05
  Speaker 2: by a region of rushes. The water is his. He
• 52:09
  Speaker 2: had the pond made, or the river for a space,
• 52:12
  Speaker 2: and the fish for a time. But the bulrushes, the
• 52:16
  Speaker 2: reeds one wanders whether a very thorough land owner. But
• 52:20
  Speaker 2: the sensitive one ever resolved that he would endure this
• 52:23
  Speaker 2: sort of thing no longer, and went out armed, and
• 52:26
  Speaker 2: had long acre of sedges sized to death. There are
• 52:30
  Speaker 2: probably outlaws. There are dwellers upon thresholds and upon margins,
• 52:35
  Speaker 2: as the gypsies make a home upon the green edges
• 52:37
  Speaker 2: of a road. No wild flowers, however wild, are rebels.
• 52:43
  Speaker 2: The copses and their primroses are good subjects. The oaks
• 52:46
  Speaker 2: are loyal now and then, though one has a kind
• 52:49
  Speaker 2: of suspicion of some of the other kinds of trees.
• 52:53
  Speaker 2: The coral trees, standing at a distance from the more
• 52:56
  Speaker 2: ornamental trees, from those of fuller foliage, and from all
• 53:00
  Speaker 2: the indeciduous shrubs and the conifers, manifest property every one.
• 53:05
  Speaker 2: Two or three translucent aspens, with which the very sun
• 53:09
  Speaker 2: and the breath of earth are untangled, have sometimes seemed
• 53:12
  Speaker 2: to wear a certain look, an extra territorial look, let
• 53:16
  Speaker 2: us call it. They are suspect. One is inclined to
• 53:20
  Speaker 2: shake a doubtful head at them, and the landowner feels
• 53:24
  Speaker 2: it He knows quite well, though he may not say so,
• 53:28
  Speaker 2: that the Coho trees, though they do not dwell upon margins,
• 53:31
  Speaker 2: are in spirit almost as extra territorial as the rushes.
• 53:36
  Speaker 2: In proof of this, he very often cuts them down
• 53:39
  Speaker 2: out of the view once for all. The view is
• 53:42
  Speaker 2: better as a view without them, though their roots are
• 53:45
  Speaker 2: in his ground right enough. There is something about their heads,
• 53:49
  Speaker 2: but the reason he gets for wishing them away is
• 53:52
  Speaker 2: merely that they are thin. A man does not always
• 53:56
  Speaker 2: say everything. End of chapter seven. Recording by Isabel Lyn.
• 54:08
  Speaker 1: Chapter eight of the Color of Life. This is a
• 54:11
  Speaker 1: LibriVox recording or LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.
• 54:16
  Speaker 1: For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org.
• 54:21
  Speaker 1: The Color of Life by Alice may Now, Chapter eight.
• 54:25
  Speaker 1: Eleonora du say the Italian woman is very near to nature.
• 54:31
  Speaker 1: So is true drama. Acting is not to be judged
• 54:35
  Speaker 1: like some other of the arts and praised for a
• 54:37
  Speaker 1: noble convention. Painting, indeed, is not praised amiss with that word.
• 54:43
  Speaker 1: Painting is obviously an art that exists by its convention.
• 54:47
  Speaker 1: The convention is the art. But far otherwise is it
• 54:51
  Speaker 1: with the art of acting, where there is no representative material,
• 54:55
  Speaker 1: where that is, the man is his own material, and
• 54:59
  Speaker 1: there is nothing between with the actor. The style is
• 55:03
  Speaker 1: the man in another a more immediate and a more
• 55:06
  Speaker 1: obvious sense than was ever intended by that saying. Therefore,
• 55:11
  Speaker 1: we may allow the critic, and not accuse him of reaction,
• 55:14
  Speaker 1: to speak of the division between art and nature in
• 55:18
  Speaker 1: the painting of a landscape. But we cannot let him
• 55:20
  Speaker 1: say the same things of acting. Acting has a technique,
• 55:25
  Speaker 1: but no convention. Once for all. Then to say that
• 55:29
  Speaker 1: acting reaches the point of nature and touches it quick
• 55:33
  Speaker 1: is to say all in other arts, imitation is more
• 55:37
  Speaker 1: or less fatuous, illusion, more or less vulgar. But acting
• 55:41
  Speaker 1: is at its less good, imitation at its best, illusion
• 55:47
  Speaker 1: at its worst, and when it ceases to be an
• 55:49
  Speaker 1: art convention. But the idea that acting is conventional has
• 55:54
  Speaker 1: inevitably come about in England, for it is in fact
• 55:58
  Speaker 1: obliged with us to defeat and destroy itself by taking
• 56:03
  Speaker 1: a very full, entire, tedious and impotent convention, a complete
• 56:08
  Speaker 1: body of convention, a convention of demonstrativeness of voice and
• 56:13
  Speaker 1: manners intended to be expressive, and in particular a whole,
• 56:18
  Speaker 1: weak and unimpulsive convention of gesture. The English manners of
• 56:23
  Speaker 1: real life are so negative and still as to present
• 56:27
  Speaker 1: no visible or audible drama, And drama is for hearing
• 56:31
  Speaker 1: and for vision. Therefore, our acting, granting that we have
• 56:36
  Speaker 1: any acting, which is granting much, has to create its
• 56:39
  Speaker 1: little different and complimentary wort, and to make the division
• 56:43
  Speaker 1: of art from nature, the division which in this one
• 56:47
  Speaker 1: art is fatal. There is one simple and sufficient reason
• 56:51
  Speaker 1: why we have no considerable acting, though we may have
• 56:55
  Speaker 1: more or less interesting and energetic or graceful conventions that
• 56:58
  Speaker 1: pass for art. But any student of international character knows
• 57:03
  Speaker 1: well enough that there are also supplementary reasons of weight.
• 57:07
  Speaker 1: For example, it is bad to make a conventional world
• 57:10
  Speaker 1: of the stage, but it is doubly bad to make
• 57:13
  Speaker 1: it badly, which it must be granted, we do when
• 57:17
  Speaker 1: we are anything of the kind. We are intellectual rather
• 57:20
  Speaker 1: than intelligent, whereas outward streaming intelligence makes the actor. We
• 57:26
  Speaker 1: are preoccupied and therefore never single, never wholly possessed by
• 57:31
  Speaker 1: the one thing at a time, and so forth. On
• 57:34
  Speaker 1: the other hand, Italians are expressive. They are so possessed
• 57:38
  Speaker 1: by the one thing at a time as never to
• 57:41
  Speaker 1: be habitual in any lifeless sense. They have no habits
• 57:44
  Speaker 1: to overcome by something arbitrary and intentional. Accordingly, you will
• 57:49
  Speaker 1: find in the open air theater of many, an Italian province,
• 57:53
  Speaker 1: away from the high roads, an art of drama that
• 57:56
  Speaker 1: our capital cannot show. So high is it, so far,
• 58:00
  Speaker 1: so simple, so complete, so direct, so momentary and impassioned,
• 58:06
  Speaker 1: so full of singleness and of multitudinous impulses of passion.
• 58:11
  Speaker 1: Senora Dusay is not different in kind from these unrenowned
• 58:15
  Speaker 1: what they are. She is in a greater degree. She
• 58:18
  Speaker 1: goes yet further and yet closer. She has an exceptionally
• 58:23
  Speaker 1: large and liberal intelligence. If lesser actors give themselves entirely
• 58:28
  Speaker 1: to the part and to the large moment of the part,
• 58:31
  Speaker 1: she giving herself has more to give. Add to this
• 58:36
  Speaker 1: nature of hers that she stages herself and her acting
• 58:38
  Speaker 1: with singular knowledge and ease, and has her technique so
• 58:42
  Speaker 1: thoroughly as to be able to forget it, For this
• 58:44
  Speaker 1: is the one only thing that is better for habit
• 58:47
  Speaker 1: and ought to be habitual. There is but one passage
• 58:50
  Speaker 1: of her mere technique in which she fails so to
• 58:53
  Speaker 1: slight it. It is in the long exchange of stoveside
• 58:57
  Speaker 1: talk between Nora and the other woman of the dolls house.
• 59:01
  Speaker 1: Senora Dusa may have felt some misgivings as to the
• 59:04
  Speaker 1: effect of a dialog having so little symmetry, such half
• 59:08
  Speaker 1: hearted feeling, and in a word, so little visible or
• 59:12
  Speaker 1: raudable drama as this. Needless to say, the misgiving is
• 59:16
  Speaker 1: not apparent. What is too apparent is simply the technique.
• 59:21
  Speaker 1: For instance, she shifts her position with evident system and
• 59:24
  Speaker 1: notable skill. The whole conversation becomes a dance of change
• 59:28
  Speaker 1: and counter change of place. Nowhere else does the perfect
• 59:32
  Speaker 1: technical habit lapse, and nowhere at all does the habit
• 59:36
  Speaker 1: of acting exist with her. I have spoken of this
• 59:39
  Speaker 1: actress's nationality and of her womanhood. Together they are inseparable.
• 59:44
  Speaker 1: Nature is the only authentic art of the stage, and
• 59:47
  Speaker 1: the Italian woman is natural none other so natural and
• 59:51
  Speaker 1: so justified by her nature as Eleonora Dusa. But all
• 59:56
  Speaker 1: as far as their nature goes natural. Moreover, they are
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 1: women freer than other Europeans from the minor vanities. Has
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 1: anyone yet fully understood how her liberty in this respect
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 1: gives to the art of Signora dusay room and action.
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 1: Her country women have no anxious vanities, because for one
• 1:00:15
  Speaker 1: reason they are generally sculpturesque, and are very little altered
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 1: by mere accidents of dress or arrangement. Such as they are,
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 1: they are so once for all, whereas the turn of
• 1:00:28
  Speaker 1: a curl makes all the difference with women of less
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 1: grave physique, Italians are not uneasy. Senora Ducea has this immunity,
• 1:00:37
  Speaker 1: but she has a far nobler deliverance from vanities in
• 1:00:41
  Speaker 1: her own peculiar distance and dignity. She lets her beautiful
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 1: voice speak, unwatched and unchecked, from the very life of
• 1:00:48
  Speaker 1: the moment. It runs up into the high notes of indifference,
• 1:00:52
  Speaker 1: or higher still, into those of ennui, as in the
• 1:00:55
  Speaker 1: earlier scenes of Devoissance, or it grows sweet as summer
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 1: with joy, or cracks and breaks outright out of all
• 1:01:02
  Speaker 1: music and out of all control. Passion breaks it so
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 1: for her, as for her inarticulate sounds, which are the
• 1:01:10
  Speaker 1: more intimate and the truer words of her meaning, They
• 1:01:13
  Speaker 1: too are Italian and natural. English women, for instance, do
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 1: not make them. They are sounds, are bouche fermee, at
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 1: once private and irrepressible. They are not demonstrations intended for
• 1:01:26
  Speaker 1: the ears of others. They are her own. Other actresses
• 1:01:30
  Speaker 1: even English and even American know how to make inarticulate
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 1: cries with open mouth. Senora Ducis, noise is not a cry.
• 1:01:39
  Speaker 1: It is her very thought, audible, the thought of the
• 1:01:42
  Speaker 1: woman she is playing, who does not, at every moment
• 1:01:45
  Speaker 1: give exact words to her thought, but does give it
• 1:01:48
  Speaker 1: significant sound. When La Fete de Cloude is trapped by
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 1: the man who has come in search of the husband's secret,
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 1: and when she is obliged to sit and listen to
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 1: her own evil history as he tells it her, she
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 1: does not interrupt the telling with the outcries that might
• 1:02:05
  Speaker 1: be imagined by a lesser actress. She accompanies it. Her
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 1: lips are close, but her throat is vocal. None who
• 1:02:12
  Speaker 1: heard it can forget the speech within speech of one
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 1: of these comprehensive noises. It was when the man spoke
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 1: for her further confusion of the slavery to which she
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 1: had reduced her lovers, She followed him aloof with a
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 1: twang of triumph. If Parisians say, as they do, that
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 1: she makes a bad Parisian, it is because she can
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 1: be too nearly a woman untamed. They have accused her
• 1:02:39
  Speaker 1: of lack of elegance In that supper scene of La
• 1:02:42
  Speaker 1: damere Camellia, for instance, taking for ill breeding in her
• 1:02:46
  Speaker 1: marguerite that which is Italian, merely and simple. Whether again,
• 1:02:51
  Speaker 1: Cyprienne in Divoson can at all be considered a lady
• 1:02:55
  Speaker 1: maybe a question, But this is quite unquestionable that she
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 1: is rather more a lady and not less when Signora
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 1: Duce makes her own savage. But really the result is
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 1: not at all Parisian. It seems possible that the French
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 1: sense does not well distinguish and has no fine perception
• 1:03:13
  Speaker 1: of that affinity with the peasant, which remains with the
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 1: great ladies of the old civilization of Italy, and has
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 1: so long disappeared from those of the younger civilizations of
• 1:03:23
  Speaker 1: France and England. A paradox the peasant's gravity, directness, and carelessness,
• 1:03:30
  Speaker 1: a kind of uncouthness which is neither graceless nor in
• 1:03:34
  Speaker 1: any intolerable English sense vulgar, are to be found in
• 1:03:37
  Speaker 1: the unceremonious moments of every cesar Pine woman, however, elect
• 1:03:42
  Speaker 1: her birth and select her conditions. In Italy, the lady
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 1: is not a creature described by negatives as an author
• 1:03:49
  Speaker 1: who is always right has defined the lady to be
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 1: in England.
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 2: Even in France she is not that.
• 1:03:55
  Speaker 1: And between the frenchwoman and the Italian there are the Alps.
• 1:03:59
  Speaker 1: In a word, the educated Italian mundane is in the
• 1:04:03
  Speaker 1: sense also untranslatable of singular, insular, and absolutely British usage.
• 1:04:09
  Speaker 1: A native. Nonetheless, would she be surprised to find herself
• 1:04:13
  Speaker 1: accused of a lack of dignity. As to intelligence, a
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 1: little intelligence is sufficiently dramatic if it is single. A
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 1: child doing one thing at a time and doing it
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 1: completely produces to the eye a better impression of mental
• 1:04:28
  Speaker 1: life than one receives from well from a lecturer.
• 1:04:33
  Speaker 3: End of chapter two, Chapter nine of The Color of Life.
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 3: This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in
• 1:04:48
  Speaker 3: the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please
• 1:04:52
  Speaker 3: visit LibriVox dot org. Recording by Matthew Thatcher. The Color
• 1:04:57
  Speaker 3: of Life by Alice maynow nine Donkey races. English acting
• 1:05:04
  Speaker 3: had for some time past still been making a feint
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 3: of running the race that wins. The retort, the interruption,
• 1:05:12
  Speaker 3: the call, the reply, the surprise, had yet kept a
• 1:05:16
  Speaker 3: spoilt tradition of suddenness in life. You had, indeed to
• 1:05:21
  Speaker 3: wait for an interruption in dialogue. It is true you
• 1:05:24
  Speaker 3: had to wait for it, so had the interrupted speaker
• 1:05:27
  Speaker 3: on the stage. But when the interruption came, it had
• 1:05:31
  Speaker 3: still a false air of vivacity. And the waiting of
• 1:05:35
  Speaker 3: the interrupted one was so ill done with so roving
• 1:05:39
  Speaker 3: an eye. In such an arrest and failure of convention,
• 1:05:43
  Speaker 3: such a confession of a blank, as to prove that
• 1:05:47
  Speaker 3: there remained a kind of reluctant in anexpert sense of movement,
• 1:05:52
  Speaker 3: it still seemed as though the actor and the actress
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 3: acknowledged some forward tendency. So now the serious stage is
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 3: openly the scene of the race that loses. The donkey
• 1:06:06
  Speaker 3: race is candidly the model of the talk. In every
• 1:06:08
  Speaker 3: tragedy that has a chance of popular success, who shall
• 1:06:13
  Speaker 3: be last? The hands of the public are for him
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 3: or for her? A certain actress who has come to
• 1:06:21
  Speaker 3: the front of her profession, holds for a time the
• 1:06:24
  Speaker 3: record of delay. Come to the front, Do they say,
• 1:06:28
  Speaker 3: surely the front of her profession must have moved in
• 1:06:31
  Speaker 3: retreat to gain upon her tardiness. It must have become
• 1:06:36
  Speaker 3: the back of her profession before it ever came up
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 3: with her. It should rejoice those who enter for this
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 3: kind of racing, that the record need never finally be beaten.
• 1:06:48
  Speaker 3: The possibilities of success are incalculable. The play has per
• 1:06:53
  Speaker 3: force to be finished in a night, it is true,
• 1:06:57
  Speaker 3: but the minor characters, the subordinate actor, can be made
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 3: to bear the burden of that necessity. The principles, or
• 1:07:05
  Speaker 3: those who have come to the front of their profession,
• 1:07:08
  Speaker 3: have an almost unlimited opportunity and liberty of lagging. Besides,
• 1:07:15
  Speaker 3: the competitor in a donkey race is not, let it
• 1:07:18
  Speaker 3: be borne in mind limited to the practice of his
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 3: own tediousness. Part of his victory is to be ascribed
• 1:07:26
  Speaker 3: to his influence upon others. It may be that a
• 1:07:30
  Speaker 3: determined actor, a man of more than common strength of will,
• 1:07:34
  Speaker 3: may so cause his colleagues to get on. Let us say,
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 3: get on, for everything in this world is relative. May
• 1:07:42
  Speaker 3: so then compel the other actor with whom he is
• 1:07:46
  Speaker 3: in conversation to get on, as to secure his own
• 1:07:50
  Speaker 3: final triumph by indirect means as well as by direct
• 1:07:54
  Speaker 3: to be plain for the sake of those unfamiliar with
• 1:07:58
  Speaker 3: the sports of the village. The writer in a donkey
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 3: race may and does cudgel the mounts of his rivals consider, therefore,
• 1:08:07
  Speaker 3: how encouraging the prospect really is. The individual actor may fail,
• 1:08:12
  Speaker 3: in fact he must. Where two people ride together on horseback,
• 1:08:17
  Speaker 3: the marry have ever been warned, one must ride behind,
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 3: And when two people are speaking slowly, one must needs
• 1:08:26
  Speaker 3: be the slowest. Comparative success implies the comparative failure. But
• 1:08:32
  Speaker 3: where this actor or that actress fails, the great cause
• 1:08:36
  Speaker 3: of slowness profits. Obviously the record is advanced Peshaw. The
• 1:08:42
  Speaker 3: word advance comes unadvised to the pen. It is difficult
• 1:08:46
  Speaker 3: to remember in what a fatuous theatrical royal presence one
• 1:08:50
  Speaker 3: is doing this criticism, and how one's words should go
• 1:08:54
  Speaker 3: backwards without exception in homage to this symbol of a throne.
• 1:09:00
  Speaker 3: It is not long since there took place upon the
• 1:09:03
  Speaker 3: principal stage in London the most important event in donkey
• 1:09:07
  Speaker 3: racing ever known until that first night. A tragedian and
• 1:09:12
  Speaker 3: a secondary actor renown had a duet together. It was
• 1:09:16
  Speaker 3: in the dead heart. No one who heard it can
• 1:09:20
  Speaker 3: possibly have yet forgotten it. The two men used echoes
• 1:09:24
  Speaker 3: of one another's voice, then out paused each other. It
• 1:09:29
  Speaker 3: was a contest, so determined, so unrelaxed, so deadly, so
• 1:09:34
  Speaker 3: inverterate that you might have slept between its encounters. You
• 1:09:39
  Speaker 3: did sleep. These men were strong men, and they knew
• 1:09:44
  Speaker 3: what they wanted. It is tremendous to watch the struggle
• 1:09:48
  Speaker 3: of such resolves. They had their purpose in their grasp,
• 1:09:53
  Speaker 3: Their teeth were set, their will was iron, They were
• 1:09:57
  Speaker 3: foot to foot. And the next warning you saw by
• 1:10:01
  Speaker 3: the papers that the secondary, but still renowned actor had
• 1:10:05
  Speaker 3: succeeded in sharing the principal honors of the piece. So
• 1:10:10
  Speaker 3: uncommonly well had he done, even for him. Then you
• 1:10:15
  Speaker 3: understood that, though you had not known it, the tradedian
• 1:10:19
  Speaker 3: must have been beaten in that dialogue. He had suffered
• 1:10:23
  Speaker 3: himself in an instant of weakness to be stimulated. He
• 1:10:28
  Speaker 3: had for a moment, only a moment got on That
• 1:10:33
  Speaker 3: night was influential. We may see its results everywhere, and
• 1:10:37
  Speaker 3: especially in Shakespeare. Our tragic stage was always well different,
• 1:10:42
  Speaker 3: let us say, different from the stage of Italy and France.
• 1:10:47
  Speaker 3: It is now quite unlike, and frankly so, the spoiled
• 1:10:51
  Speaker 3: tradition of vitality has been explicitly abandoned. The interrupted one
• 1:10:57
  Speaker 3: waits no longer with a roving eye, but with something
• 1:11:00
  Speaker 3: almost of dignity, as though he were fulfilling ritual. Benvolio
• 1:11:07
  Speaker 3: and Mercutio outlag one another in hunting after the leaping Romeo,
• 1:11:12
  Speaker 3: they call without the slightest impetus. One could imagine how
• 1:11:16
  Speaker 3: the true Mercutio called. Certainly not by road. There must
• 1:11:21
  Speaker 3: have been pauses, indeed, brief and short breath pauses of
• 1:11:25
  Speaker 3: listening for an answer between every nickname. But the nicknames
• 1:11:30
  Speaker 3: were quick work at the lyceum. They were quite in
• 1:11:33
  Speaker 3: effort of memory. Romeo humors, Madman, passion lover. The actress
• 1:11:42
  Speaker 3: of Juliet speaking the words of Haste makes her audience
• 1:11:46
  Speaker 3: wait to hear them. Nothing more incongruous than Juliet's hairy
• 1:11:50
  Speaker 3: of phrase and the actress's leisure of phrasing. None act
• 1:11:55
  Speaker 3: None speak as though there were such a thing as inPulse.
• 1:12:00
  Speaker 3: In a play. To drop behind is the only idea
• 1:12:04
  Speaker 3: of arriving the nurse ceases to be absurd, for there
• 1:12:08
  Speaker 3: is no one readier with a reply than she, or rather,
• 1:12:13
  Speaker 3: her delays are so altered by exaggeration as to lose
• 1:12:18
  Speaker 3: touch with nature. If it is ill enough to hear
• 1:12:22
  Speaker 3: haste drawled out, it is ill too to hear slowness
• 1:12:26
  Speaker 3: out tarried. The true Nurse of Shakespeare lags with her
• 1:12:31
  Speaker 3: news because her ignorant wits are easily astray, as lightly caught,
• 1:12:36
  Speaker 3: as though they were light, which they are not. But
• 1:12:40
  Speaker 3: the Nurse of the Stage is never simply astray. She
• 1:12:44
  Speaker 3: knows beforehand how long she means to be, and never
• 1:12:48
  Speaker 3: never forgets what kind of race is the race she
• 1:12:51
  Speaker 3: is writing. The Juliet of the stage seems to consider
• 1:12:55
  Speaker 3: that there is plenty of time for her to discover
• 1:12:58
  Speaker 3: which is slain Tibolt or her husband. She is sure
• 1:13:02
  Speaker 3: to know some time. It can wait. A London's success
• 1:13:08
  Speaker 3: when you know where it lies is not difficult to achieve.
• 1:13:12
  Speaker 3: Of all things that can be gained by men or
• 1:13:15
  Speaker 3: women about their business, there is one thing that can
• 1:13:19
  Speaker 3: be gained without fear of failure. This is time. To gain.
• 1:13:24
  Speaker 3: Time requires so little wit that, except for competition, everyone
• 1:13:29
  Speaker 3: could be first at the game. In fact, time gains itself.
• 1:13:35
  Speaker 3: The actor is really not called upon to do anything.
• 1:13:38
  Speaker 3: There is nothing accordingly for which our actors and actresses
• 1:13:42
  Speaker 3: do not rely upon time. For humor, even when the
• 1:13:47
  Speaker 3: humor occurs in tragedy, they appeal to time. They give
• 1:13:51
  Speaker 3: blanks to their audiences to be filled up. It might
• 1:13:55
  Speaker 3: be possible to have tragedies written from the beginning to
• 1:13:58
  Speaker 3: end for the service of the present kind of art.
• 1:14:01
  Speaker 3: But the tragedies we have are not so written, and
• 1:14:05
  Speaker 3: being what they are, it is not vivacity that they
• 1:14:09
  Speaker 3: lose by this length of pause, this length of phrasing,
• 1:14:13
  Speaker 3: this illimitable tiresomeness. It is life itself. For the life
• 1:14:18
  Speaker 3: of a scene conceived directly is its directness. The life
• 1:14:21
  Speaker 3: of a scene created simply is its simplicity. And simplicity, directness, impetus, emotion,
• 1:14:29
  Speaker 3: Nature fall out of the trailing loose long dialogue, like
• 1:14:34
  Speaker 3: fish from the loose meshes of a net. They fall out,
• 1:14:38
  Speaker 3: They drift off, They are lost. The universal slowness, moreover,
• 1:14:43
  Speaker 3: is not good for meter. Even when an actress speaks
• 1:14:46
  Speaker 3: her lines as lines and does not drop into prose.
• 1:14:50
  Speaker 3: By slipping here and there syllable, she spoils the tempo
• 1:14:54
  Speaker 3: by inordinate length of pronunciation. Verse cannot keep upon the
• 1:14:59
  Speaker 3: wing without a certain measure in the movement of the pinion.
• 1:15:03
  Speaker 3: Verse is a flight. End of chapter nine.
• 1:15:14
  Speaker 4: Chapter ten of the Color of Life. This is a
• 1:15:17
  Speaker 4: LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.
• 1:15:22
  Speaker 4: For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org.
• 1:15:27
  Speaker 4: The Color of Life by Alice Mano, Chapter ten. Grass
• 1:15:32
  Speaker 4: Now and then, at regular intervals of the summer, the
• 1:15:36
  Speaker 4: suburb springs for a time from its mediocrity. But in
• 1:15:40
  Speaker 4: attentive eye might not see why, or might not seize
• 1:15:43
  Speaker 4: the cause of the bloom, and of the new look
• 1:15:46
  Speaker 4: of humility and dignity that makes the road the rise,
• 1:15:50
  Speaker 4: and the villas seem suddenly gentle, gay, and rather shy.
• 1:15:55
  Speaker 4: It is no change in the gardens. These are as usual, full,
• 1:15:59
  Speaker 4: abundant and fragmant, and quite uninteresting, keeping the traditional secret
• 1:16:04
  Speaker 4: by which the suburbian rose, Magnolia clematis and all other
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 4: flowers grow dull, not in color, but in a spirit
• 1:16:12
  Speaker 4: between the yellow brick house front and the iron railings.
• 1:16:16
  Speaker 4: Nor is there anything altered for the better in the
• 1:16:20
  Speaker 4: houses themselves. Nevertheless, the little common, prosperous road has bloomed.
• 1:16:26
  Speaker 4: You cannot tell how it is unexpectedly, liberal, fresh and innocent.
• 1:16:31
  Speaker 4: The soft garden winds that rustle its shrubs are for
• 1:16:35
  Speaker 4: the moment genuine another day, and all is undone their
• 1:16:39
  Speaker 4: eyes is its daily self again a road of flowers
• 1:16:43
  Speaker 4: and foliage. It is less pleasant than a fairly well
• 1:16:46
  Speaker 4: built street. And if you happen to find the men
• 1:16:49
  Speaker 4: at work on the retransformation, you become aware of the
• 1:16:53
  Speaker 4: accident that made all this difference. It lay in the
• 1:16:57
  Speaker 4: little border of a wayside, grass which a row of
• 1:17:01
  Speaker 4: public servants, men with spade and a cart, are in
• 1:17:04
  Speaker 4: the act of tiding up. Their way of tiding it
• 1:17:07
  Speaker 4: up is to lay its little corpus all along the
• 1:17:10
  Speaker 4: suburbian roadside, and then to carrate away to some parochial
• 1:17:14
  Speaker 4: dust heap. But for the vigilance of vestries, grass would
• 1:17:18
  Speaker 4: reconcile everything. When the first heat of the summer was over,
• 1:17:22
  Speaker 4: a few nights of rain altered all the color of
• 1:17:25
  Speaker 4: the world. It had been the brown and russet of
• 1:17:29
  Speaker 4: a drought, very beautiful in landscape, but lifeless. It became
• 1:17:33
  Speaker 4: a translucent, profound and eager green. The citizen does not
• 1:17:37
  Speaker 4: spend attention on it. Why then, is his vistry so alert,
• 1:17:42
  Speaker 4: so apprehensive, so swift in perception, so innocent in execution,
• 1:17:47
  Speaker 4: so prompt, so silent in action, so punctual in destruction.
• 1:17:52
  Speaker 4: The vistreet keeps, as it were, at ryst with the grass.
• 1:17:56
  Speaker 4: The sunny spots of greenery are given just time enough
• 1:18:00
  Speaker 4: to grow and be conspicuous, And the barrow is there
• 1:18:03
  Speaker 4: true to time, and the spade. To call that spade
• 1:18:07
  Speaker 4: a spade hardly seems enough. For the gracious grass of
• 1:18:10
  Speaker 4: the summer has not been content within enclosures. It has
• 1:18:15
  Speaker 4: or would have sheared up and sweetened everything over as
• 1:18:19
  Speaker 4: fault it could not prevail, and it has prettily yielded
• 1:18:22
  Speaker 4: to as falt, taking leave to live and let live.
• 1:18:26
  Speaker 4: It has taken the little stripe of ground next to
• 1:18:29
  Speaker 4: the asphalt between this and the curb, and again the
• 1:18:33
  Speaker 4: refuse of ground between the curb and the roadway. The
• 1:18:36
  Speaker 4: man of business walking to the station with a bag
• 1:18:39
  Speaker 4: could have his asphalt all unbroken, and the butcher's boy
• 1:18:43
  Speaker 4: in his cart was not annoyed. The gross seems to
• 1:18:47
  Speaker 4: respect everybody's views and to take only what nobody wanted.
• 1:18:51
  Speaker 4: But these gay and lowly waves will not escape a mystry.
• 1:18:56
  Speaker 4: There is no wall so impregnable or so vulgar, but
• 1:18:59
  Speaker 4: a summer's gross will attempt it. It will try to
• 1:19:03
  Speaker 4: persuade the yellow brick to win the purple slate, and
• 1:19:06
  Speaker 4: to reconcile stacco outside the authority of the suburbs. It
• 1:19:10
  Speaker 4: has put aluminus touch everywhere. The statue of cottage has
• 1:19:14
  Speaker 4: given it an opportunity. It has pierced and alighted in
• 1:19:18
  Speaker 4: showers and flocks. It has crept and cold and stolen
• 1:19:22
  Speaker 4: its hour. It has made haste between the ruts of
• 1:19:25
  Speaker 4: cart wheels so they were not too frequented. It has
• 1:19:29
  Speaker 4: been stealthly in a good cause and bawled out of reach.
• 1:19:33
  Speaker 4: It has been the most defined runaway and the meekest lingerer.
• 1:19:38
  Speaker 4: It has been universal, ready and potential in every place,
• 1:19:42
  Speaker 4: so that the happy country, village and field alike has
• 1:19:45
  Speaker 4: been all gross, with mere exceptions. And all this the
• 1:19:49
  Speaker 4: gross does in spite of the ill treatment it suffers
• 1:19:52
  Speaker 4: at the hands and mowing machines and vistrees of man.
• 1:19:57
  Speaker 4: His ideal of grass is gross, that shall never be
• 1:19:59
  Speaker 4: all to come to its flower and completion. He proves
• 1:20:03
  Speaker 4: this in his lawns. Not only does he cut the
• 1:20:06
  Speaker 4: coming grass flower off by the stoke, but he does
• 1:20:09
  Speaker 4: not allow the mere leaf the blade to perfect itself.
• 1:20:13
  Speaker 4: He will not have it a blade at all. He
• 1:20:16
  Speaker 4: cuts its stop away, as never sword or saber was shaped.
• 1:20:20
  Speaker 2: All.
• 1:20:20
  Speaker 4: The beauty of a blade of grass is that the
• 1:20:22
  Speaker 4: organic shape has the intention of ending in a point. Surely,
• 1:20:27
  Speaker 4: no one at all aware of the beauty of lines
• 1:20:29
  Speaker 4: ought to be ignorant of the significance and grace of
• 1:20:32
  Speaker 4: manifest intention, which rules a living line from its beginning,
• 1:20:37
  Speaker 4: even though the intention be towards a point, while the
• 1:20:40
  Speaker 4: first spring of the line is toward an opening curve.
• 1:20:43
  Speaker 4: But man does not care for intention. He mows it,
• 1:20:47
  Speaker 4: nor does he care for attitude. He rolls it. In
• 1:20:51
  Speaker 4: a word, he proves to the grass as plainly as
• 1:20:54
  Speaker 4: these can do, so that it is not to his mind.
• 1:20:57
  Speaker 4: The rolling especially seems to be a violent way of
• 1:21:00
  Speaker 4: showing that the universal gross interrupted by the life of
• 1:21:03
  Speaker 4: the Englishman is not as he would have it. Besides,
• 1:21:07
  Speaker 4: when he wishes to deride a city, he calls it
• 1:21:10
  Speaker 4: grass grown. But his suburbs shall not, if he can
• 1:21:14
  Speaker 4: help it be grass grown. They shall not be like
• 1:21:17
  Speaker 4: a mere pisa. Highgate, shall not sew nor Peckham. End
• 1:21:22
  Speaker 4: of chapter ten. Recording by Sarah Hale.
• 1:21:33
  Speaker 5: Chapter eleven of the Color of Life. This is a
• 1:21:37
  Speaker 5: LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.
• 1:21:41
  Speaker 5: For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org.
• 1:21:47
  Speaker 5: The Color of Life by Alice Mayneil, chapter eleven, A
• 1:21:51
  Speaker 5: Woman in Gray. The mothers of professors were indulged in
• 1:21:56
  Speaker 5: the practice of jumping at conclusions, and were praised for
• 1:21:59
  Speaker 5: their patients of the slow process of reason. Professors have
• 1:22:03
  Speaker 5: written of the mental habits of women as though they
• 1:22:06
  Speaker 5: accumulated generation by generation upon women and passed over their sons.
• 1:22:11
  Speaker 5: Professors take it for granted, obviously, by some process other
• 1:22:14
  Speaker 5: than the slow process of reason, that women derive from
• 1:22:17
  Speaker 5: their mothers and grandmothers, and men from their fathers and grandfathers. This,
• 1:22:22
  Speaker 5: for instance, was written lately. This power, it matters not
• 1:22:27
  Speaker 5: what would be about equal in the two sexes, but
• 1:22:30
  Speaker 5: for the influence of heredity, which turns the scale in
• 1:22:33
  Speaker 5: favor of the woman. As for long generations, the surroundings
• 1:22:37
  Speaker 5: and conditions of life of the female sex have developed
• 1:22:40
  Speaker 5: in her a greater degree of the power in question
• 1:22:43
  Speaker 5: than circumstances have required from men. Long generations of subjection
• 1:22:49
  Speaker 5: are strangely enough held to excuse this timorousness and the
• 1:22:54
  Speaker 5: shifts of women today. But the world unknowing tampers with
• 1:22:58
  Speaker 5: the courage of its sons by such slovenly indulgence. It
• 1:23:02
  Speaker 5: tampers with their intelligence by fostering the ignorance of women.
• 1:23:06
  Speaker 5: And yet Shakespeare confessed the participation of man and woman
• 1:23:10
  Speaker 5: in their common heritage. It is Cassius who speaks, have
• 1:23:14
  Speaker 5: you not love enough to bear with me? When that
• 1:23:17
  Speaker 5: rash humor which my mother gave me makes me forgetful?
• 1:23:21
  Speaker 5: And Brutus who replies, yes, Cassius. And from henceforth, when
• 1:23:26
  Speaker 5: you are over earnest with your brutus, he'll think your
• 1:23:28
  Speaker 5: mother chides and leave you so Dryden confessed it also
• 1:23:33
  Speaker 5: in his praises of Anne Killigrew, if by traduction came
• 1:23:36
  Speaker 5: thy mind, our wonder is less to find a soul
• 1:23:40
  Speaker 5: so charming from a stock so good. Thy father was
• 1:23:43
  Speaker 5: transfused into thy blood. The winning of Waterloo upon the
• 1:23:48
  Speaker 5: eaten playgrounds is very well, But there have been some
• 1:23:51
  Speaker 5: other and happily minor fields that were not one, that
• 1:23:55
  Speaker 5: were more or less lost. Where did this loss take place?
• 1:23:58
  Speaker 5: If the gains were secure cured at football? This inquiry
• 1:24:02
  Speaker 5: is not quite so cheerful as the other. But while
• 1:24:05
  Speaker 5: the victories were once going forward in the playground. The
• 1:24:09
  Speaker 5: defeats or disasters were once going forward in some other place, presumably,
• 1:24:14
  Speaker 5: and this was surely the place that was not a playground,
• 1:24:17
  Speaker 5: the place where the future wives of the football players
• 1:24:20
  Speaker 5: were sitting still while their future husbands were playing football.
• 1:24:24
  Speaker 5: This is the train of thought that followed the gray
• 1:24:26
  Speaker 5: figure of a woman on a bicycle in Oxford Street.
• 1:24:30
  Speaker 5: She had an enormous and top heavy omnibus on her back.
• 1:24:34
  Speaker 5: All the things on the near side of the street,
• 1:24:36
  Speaker 5: the things going her way were going at different paces
• 1:24:40
  Speaker 5: in two streams, overtaking and being overtaken. The tributary street
• 1:24:45
  Speaker 5: shot omnibuses and carriages, cabs and carts, some to go
• 1:24:50
  Speaker 5: her own way, some with the impetus that carried them
• 1:24:52
  Speaker 5: curving into their other current, and other some making a
• 1:24:55
  Speaker 5: straight line right across Oxford Street into the street opposite.
• 1:25:00
  Speaker 5: Besides all the unequal movement, there were stoppings. It was
• 1:25:03
  Speaker 5: a delicate tangle to keep from nodding. The nerves of
• 1:25:06
  Speaker 5: the mouths of horses bore the whole charge and answered
• 1:25:09
  Speaker 5: it as they do every day. The woman in gray,
• 1:25:13
  Speaker 5: quite alone, was immediately dependent on no nerves but her own,
• 1:25:17
  Speaker 5: which almost made her machine sensitive. But this alertness was
• 1:25:22
  Speaker 5: joined to such perfect composure as no flutter of a
• 1:25:25
  Speaker 5: moment disturbed. There was a steadiness of sleep, and a
• 1:25:28
  Speaker 5: vigilant more than that of an ordinary waking. At the
• 1:25:32
  Speaker 5: same time, the woman was doing what nothing in her
• 1:25:35
  Speaker 5: youth could well have prepared her for. She must have
• 1:25:38
  Speaker 5: passed a childhood unlike the ordinary girl's childhood if her
• 1:25:42
  Speaker 5: steadiness or her alertness had ever been educated, if she
• 1:25:45
  Speaker 5: had been rebuked for cowardice, for the egotist's distrust of
• 1:25:49
  Speaker 5: general rules, or for claims of exceptional chances. Yet here
• 1:25:53
  Speaker 5: she was trusting not only herself, but a multitude of
• 1:25:57
  Speaker 5: other people taking her equal risk, giving a watchful confidence
• 1:26:01
  Speaker 5: to averages that last perhaps her strangest and greatest success.
• 1:26:08
  Speaker 5: No exceptions were hers, no appeals, and no forewarnings. She
• 1:26:12
  Speaker 5: evidently had not in her mind a single phrase familiar
• 1:26:16
  Speaker 5: to women, made to express no confidence except in accidents,
• 1:26:20
  Speaker 5: and to proclaim a prudent foresight of the less probable event.
• 1:26:24
  Speaker 5: No woman could ride a bicycle along Oxford Street with
• 1:26:26
  Speaker 5: any such baggage as that about her. The woman in
• 1:26:30
  Speaker 5: gray had a watchful confidence not only in a multitude
• 1:26:33
  Speaker 5: of men, but in a multitude of things. And it
• 1:26:36
  Speaker 5: is very hard for any untrained human being to practice
• 1:26:39
  Speaker 5: confidence in things in motion, things full of force, and
• 1:26:43
  Speaker 5: what is worse of forces. Moreover, there is a supreme
• 1:26:48
  Speaker 5: difficulty for a mind accustomed to search timorously for some
• 1:26:52
  Speaker 5: little place of insignificant rest on any accessible point of
• 1:26:55
  Speaker 5: stable equilibrium. And that is the difficulty of holding it
• 1:27:00
  Speaker 5: self nimbly secure in an equilibrium that is unstable. Who
• 1:27:04
  Speaker 5: can deny that Women are generally used to look about
• 1:27:07
  Speaker 5: for the little stationary repose just described, whether in intellectual
• 1:27:11
  Speaker 5: or in spiritual things, They do not often live without it.
• 1:27:16
  Speaker 5: She none the less fled upon unstable equilibrium, escaped upon it,
• 1:27:21
  Speaker 5: depended upon it, trusted it was ware of it, was
• 1:27:25
  Speaker 5: on guard against it. As she sped amid her crowd,
• 1:27:28
  Speaker 5: her own unstable equilibrium, her machines that of the judgment,
• 1:27:33
  Speaker 5: the temper, the skill, the perception, the strength of men
• 1:27:37
  Speaker 5: and horses, She had learnt the difficult piece of suspense.
• 1:27:41
  Speaker 5: She had learnt also the lowly and self denying faith
• 1:27:45
  Speaker 5: in common chances. She had learnt to be content with
• 1:27:48
  Speaker 5: her share no more in common security, and to be
• 1:27:52
  Speaker 5: pleased with her part in common hope. For all this,
• 1:27:56
  Speaker 5: it may be repeated, She could have but small preparation.
• 1:28:00
  Speaker 5: Yet no anxiety was hers, no uneasy, distrust and disbelief
• 1:28:04
  Speaker 5: of that human thing, an average of life and death.
• 1:28:07
  Speaker 5: To this courage, the woman in gray had attained with
• 1:28:10
  Speaker 5: a spring, and she had seated herself suddenly upon a
• 1:28:13
  Speaker 5: place of detachment between earth and air, Freed from the
• 1:28:16
  Speaker 5: principal detentions, weights, and embarrassments of the usual life of fear.
• 1:28:22
  Speaker 5: She had made herself, as it were, light, so as
• 1:28:24
  Speaker 5: not to dwell either in security or danger, but to
• 1:28:27
  Speaker 5: pass between them. She confessed difficulty and peril by her
• 1:28:31
  Speaker 5: delicate evasions, and consented to rest in neither. She would
• 1:28:36
  Speaker 5: not owe safety to the mere motionlessness of a seat
• 1:28:39
  Speaker 5: on the solid earth, But she used gravitation to balance
• 1:28:42
  Speaker 5: the slight burdens of her weariness and her confidence. She
• 1:28:46
  Speaker 5: put aside all the pride and vanity of terror, and
• 1:28:48
  Speaker 5: leapt into an unsure condition of liberty and content. She leapt, too,
• 1:28:54
  Speaker 5: into a life of moments. No pause was possible to
• 1:28:57
  Speaker 5: her as she went, except the vibrating pass of a
• 1:29:00
  Speaker 5: perpetual change and an unflagging flight. A woman long educated
• 1:29:06
  Speaker 5: to sit still does not suddenly learn to live a
• 1:29:09
  Speaker 5: momentary life. Without strong momentary resolution, she has no light
• 1:29:13
  Speaker 5: achievement in limiting not only her foresight, which must become brief,
• 1:29:17
  Speaker 5: but her memory, which must do more for it must
• 1:29:21
  Speaker 5: rather cease than become brief. Idle memory waste time and
• 1:29:25
  Speaker 5: other things. The moments of the woman in gray, as
• 1:29:28
  Speaker 5: they drop by, must needs despair and be simply forgotten,
• 1:29:32
  Speaker 5: as a child forgets. Idle memory by the way shortens
• 1:29:36
  Speaker 5: life or shortens the sense of time, by linking the
• 1:29:40
  Speaker 5: immediate past clingingly to the present. Here may possibly be
• 1:29:44
  Speaker 5: found one of the reasons for the length of a
• 1:29:46
  Speaker 5: child's time. For the brevity of the time that succeeds
• 1:29:50
  Speaker 5: the child lets his moments pass by and quickly become remote.
• 1:29:53
  Speaker 5: Through a thousand little successive oblivions, he has not yet
• 1:29:57
  Speaker 5: the languid habit of recall. Thou art, my warrior, said Volumnia,
• 1:30:03
  Speaker 5: I hope to frame thee. Shall a man inherit his
• 1:30:07
  Speaker 5: mother's trick of speaking, or her habit and attitude, and
• 1:30:11
  Speaker 5: not suffer something against his will from her bequest of weakness,
• 1:30:16
  Speaker 5: and something against his heart for her bequest of folly,
• 1:30:20
  Speaker 5: from the legacies of an unlessened mind. A woman's heir
• 1:30:23
  Speaker 5: males are not cut off in the common law of
• 1:30:25
  Speaker 5: the generation of mankind. Brutus knew that the valor of
• 1:30:30
  Speaker 5: Portia was settled upon his son's end of chapter eleven.
• 1:30:41
  Speaker 4: Chapter twelve of The Color of Life. This is a
• 1:30:44
  Speaker 4: LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.
• 1:30:49
  Speaker 4: For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org.
• 1:30:55
  Speaker 4: The Color of Life by Alismino. Chapter twelve, Symmetry and Incident.
• 1:31:01
  Speaker 4: The art of Japan has not but an exterior part
• 1:31:05
  Speaker 4: in the history of the art of nations, being in
• 1:31:08
  Speaker 4: its own message and attitude the art of accident. It
• 1:31:12
  Speaker 4: has appropriately an accidental value. It is of accidental value,
• 1:31:17
  Speaker 4: a not of integral necessity. The virtual discovery of Japanese
• 1:31:22
  Speaker 4: art during the later years of the Second French Empire
• 1:31:26
  Speaker 4: caused Europe to relearn how expedient, how delicate, and how
• 1:31:31
  Speaker 4: lovely incident may look. When symmetry has grown vulgar, the
• 1:31:35
  Speaker 4: lesson was most welcome. Japan has had her full influence.
• 1:31:41
  Speaker 4: European art has learned the value of position and detact
• 1:31:44
  Speaker 4: of the unique. But Japan is unlessened and in all
• 1:31:48
  Speaker 4: her characteristic art content with her own conventions, she local, provincial, alien,
• 1:31:56
  Speaker 4: removed and incapable of equal Companionship was a word that
• 1:32:00
  Speaker 4: has Greek art in its own history, Hercules to its father.
• 1:32:05
  Speaker 4: Nor is it pictorial art or decreative art only that
• 1:32:09
  Speaker 4: has been touched by Japanese example of incident and the unique.
• 1:32:13
  Speaker 4: Music had attained the noblest form of symmetry in the
• 1:32:16
  Speaker 4: eighteenth century, but in music too, symmetry had since grown
• 1:32:21
  Speaker 4: dull and momentarily music, the music of fays and of
• 1:32:25
  Speaker 4: fragments succeeded. The sense of symmetry is strong in a
• 1:32:29
  Speaker 4: complete melody, of symmetry in its most delicate and lively
• 1:32:33
  Speaker 4: and least stationary form balance, whereas the light motif is
• 1:32:38
  Speaker 4: isolated in domestic architecture. Symmetry and incident make a familiar
• 1:32:43
  Speaker 4: antithesis the very commonplace of rival methods of art, But
• 1:32:48
  Speaker 4: the same antithesis exists in less obvious forms. The poets
• 1:32:53
  Speaker 4: have sought irregular meters, incident hoovers in the very act
• 1:32:57
  Speaker 4: of choosing its right place in the most modern of
• 1:33:01
  Speaker 4: modern portraits. In these we have, if not the Japanese
• 1:33:04
  Speaker 4: suppression of minor emphasis, certainly the Japanese exaggeration of major emphasis,
• 1:33:11
  Speaker 4: and with this a quickness and buoyancy, the smile, the figure,
• 1:33:16
  Speaker 4: the drapery not yet settled from the arranging touch of
• 1:33:19
  Speaker 4: a hand and showing its mark, the restless and unstationary foot,
• 1:33:24
  Speaker 4: and the unity of impulse that has passed everywhere like
• 1:33:28
  Speaker 4: a single breathe. All these have a life that greatly
• 1:33:31
  Speaker 4: transcends the life of Japanese art, yet has the nimble
• 1:33:35
  Speaker 4: touch of Japanese incidents in pausing. A charming comparison may
• 1:33:40
  Speaker 4: be made between such portraiture and the aspect of an
• 1:33:44
  Speaker 4: aspen or another tree of light and liberal leaf, whether
• 1:33:48
  Speaker 4: still or in motion. The aspen and the three leaved
• 1:33:51
  Speaker 4: poplar have the alerkness and the expectancy of flight in
• 1:33:55
  Speaker 4: all their flokes of leaves, while the oaks and alams
• 1:33:58
  Speaker 4: are gathered in their state. All this is not Japanese,
• 1:34:02
  Speaker 4: But from such an accident is Japanese art, and inspire
• 1:34:06
  Speaker 4: was its good luck of perceptiveness. What symmetry is to form,
• 1:34:10
  Speaker 4: that is repetition In the art of ornament, Greek art
• 1:34:14
  Speaker 4: and Gothic alike have series with repetition or counter change.
• 1:34:18
  Speaker 4: For their ruling motive. It is hardly necessary to draw
• 1:34:22
  Speaker 4: the distinction between this motive and that of the Japanese.
• 1:34:26
  Speaker 4: The Japanese motives may be defined as uniqueness and position,
• 1:34:30
  Speaker 4: and these were not known as motives of decoration before
• 1:34:34
  Speaker 4: the study of Japanese decoration. Repetition and counter change, of
• 1:34:39
  Speaker 4: course have their place in Japanese ornament, as in the
• 1:34:43
  Speaker 4: diaper patterns for which these people have so singular an invention.
• 1:34:47
  Speaker 4: But here too, uniqueness and position are the principal and inspiration.
• 1:34:52
  Speaker 4: And it is quite worsewhile, and much to the present purpose,
• 1:34:56
  Speaker 4: to call attention to the chief pecularity of the Japanese diapers,
• 1:35:01
  Speaker 4: which is interruption. Repetition there must necessarily be in these
• 1:35:06
  Speaker 4: But symmetry is avoided by an interruption, which is, to
• 1:35:09
  Speaker 4: the Western eye at least perpetually and freshly unexpected. The
• 1:35:14
  Speaker 4: place of the interruptions of lines, the variation of the place,
• 1:35:17
  Speaker 4: and the avoidance of correspondence are precisely what makes Japanese
• 1:35:22
  Speaker 4: design of this class inimitable. Just even in a repeating
• 1:35:27
  Speaker 4: pattern you have a curiously successful effect of impulse. It
• 1:35:31
  Speaker 4: is as though a separate intention had been formed by
• 1:35:34
  Speaker 4: the designer at every angle. Such renewed consciousness does not
• 1:35:39
  Speaker 4: make for greatness. Greatness in design has more peace than
• 1:35:43
  Speaker 4: is found in the gender eruptness of Japanese lines. In
• 1:35:47
  Speaker 4: their curious privacy. It is scarcely necessary to say that
• 1:35:51
  Speaker 4: a line in all other schools of art is long
• 1:35:54
  Speaker 4: or short according to its place and purpose. But only
• 1:35:57
  Speaker 4: the Japanese designer so converse his path patterns that the
• 1:36:00
  Speaker 4: line is always sure, and many repeating designs are entirely
• 1:36:04
  Speaker 4: composed of this various and variously occurring privity. This frankish
• 1:36:09
  Speaker 4: avoidance of the goal. Moreover, the Japanese evade symmetry in
• 1:36:14
  Speaker 4: the unit of their repeating patterns by another simple device,
• 1:36:18
  Speaker 4: that of numbers. They make a small difference in the
• 1:36:22
  Speaker 4: number of curves and of lines. A great difference would
• 1:36:25
  Speaker 4: not make the same effect of variety. It would look
• 1:36:28
  Speaker 4: too much like a contrast. For example, three routes on
• 1:36:33
  Speaker 4: one side and six on another would be something else
• 1:36:36
  Speaker 4: than a mere variation, and variety would be lost by
• 1:36:39
  Speaker 4: the use of them. The Japanese decorated would vary three
• 1:36:43
  Speaker 4: in this place by two in that, and a sense
• 1:36:46
  Speaker 4: of defeat of symmetry is immediately produced. With more violent
• 1:36:51
  Speaker 4: means the idea of symmetry would have been neither suggested
• 1:36:55
  Speaker 4: nor refuted, leaving mere repeating patterns and diver disse You
• 1:37:00
  Speaker 4: find in Japanese compositions complete designs in which there is
• 1:37:04
  Speaker 4: no point of symmetry. It is a balance of suspension
• 1:37:08
  Speaker 4: and of antithesis. There is no sense of lack of equilibrium,
• 1:37:12
  Speaker 4: because place is most subtly made to have the effect
• 1:37:15
  Speaker 4: of giving or of subtracting value. A small thing is
• 1:37:21
  Speaker 4: arranged to reply to a large one, for the small
• 1:37:24
  Speaker 4: thing is placed at the precise distance that makes it
• 1:37:27
  Speaker 4: a Japanese equivalent. In Italy and in perhaps in other countries,
• 1:37:32
  Speaker 4: the scales commonly in use are furnished with only a
• 1:37:35
  Speaker 4: single weight that increases or diminishes in value according as
• 1:37:40
  Speaker 4: you slide nearer or further upon a horizontal arm. It
• 1:37:44
  Speaker 4: is equivalent to so many ounces when it is close
• 1:37:47
  Speaker 4: to the upright and to so many pounds when it
• 1:37:50
  Speaker 4: hangs from the farther end of the horizontal rod. Distance
• 1:37:54
  Speaker 4: plays some such part with the twig or the bird
• 1:37:58
  Speaker 4: in the upper corner of a Japanese composition. Its place
• 1:38:02
  Speaker 4: is its significance and its value. Such an art of
• 1:38:06
  Speaker 4: position implies a great art of intervals. The Japanese chooses
• 1:38:10
  Speaker 4: a few things and leaves the space between them free,
• 1:38:14
  Speaker 4: as free as the poses or silences and music, but
• 1:38:17
  Speaker 4: as time, not silence, is the subject or material of
• 1:38:21
  Speaker 4: contrast in musical poses. So it is the measurements of space,
• 1:38:25
  Speaker 4: that is collocation, that makes the value of empty intervals.
• 1:38:30
  Speaker 4: The space between this form and that in a Japanese
• 1:38:33
  Speaker 4: composition is valuable because it is just so wide and
• 1:38:36
  Speaker 4: no more. And this again is only another way of
• 1:38:40
  Speaker 4: saying that position is the principle of this apparently wilful art. Moreover,
• 1:38:46
  Speaker 4: the alien art of Japan in its pictorial form has
• 1:38:50
  Speaker 4: helped to justify the more technographic school of etching, greatly
• 1:38:55
  Speaker 4: transcending Japanese expression. The modern nature has undoubtedly a accepted
• 1:39:00
  Speaker 4: moral support from the island of the Japanese. He too,
• 1:39:04
  Speaker 4: itches a kind of shorthand, even though his notes appeal
• 1:39:08
  Speaker 4: much to the expectator's knowledge, while the oriental shorthand appeals
• 1:39:13
  Speaker 4: to nothing but the expectator's simple vision. Just the two
• 1:39:18
  Speaker 4: artists work in ways dissimilar. Nevertheless, the French itcher would
• 1:39:23
  Speaker 4: never have written his signs so freely had not Japanese
• 1:39:27
  Speaker 4: so freely drown his own. Furthermore, still, the transitory and
• 1:39:32
  Speaker 4: the destructible material of Japanese art has done, as much
• 1:39:36
  Speaker 4: as the multiplication of newspapers and the discovery of processes,
• 1:39:40
  Speaker 4: to reconcile the European designer, the black and white artist
• 1:39:45
  Speaker 4: to working for the day, the day of publication. Japan
• 1:39:49
  Speaker 4: lives much of its daily life by means of paper painted,
• 1:39:53
  Speaker 4: so does Europe by means of paper printed. But as we,
• 1:39:57
  Speaker 4: unlike those Orientals, are a destructive peace, paper with us
• 1:40:02
  Speaker 4: means short life, quick abolition, transformation, reappearance, a very circulation
• 1:40:08
  Speaker 4: of life. It is our present way of surviving ourselves.
• 1:40:12
  Speaker 4: The new version of defeat of life time was one.
• 1:40:16
  Speaker 4: To survive yourself meant to secure for a time indefinitely
• 1:40:19
  Speaker 4: longer than the life of man such dull form as
• 1:40:23
  Speaker 4: you had given your work to intrude upon posterity. To
• 1:40:28
  Speaker 4: survive yourself today is to let your work go into
• 1:40:31
  Speaker 4: daily oblivion. Now, though the Japanese are not a destructive people,
• 1:40:36
  Speaker 4: their paper does not last forever, and that material has
• 1:40:40
  Speaker 4: clearly suggested to them a different condition of ornament from
• 1:40:45
  Speaker 4: that with which they adorned or lacquer fine, ivory or
• 1:40:49
  Speaker 4: other pre durable things for the transitory material they give
• 1:40:53
  Speaker 4: the more purely pictorial art of landscave. What of Japanese landscape?
• 1:40:59
  Speaker 4: Assuredly its is too far reduced to a monotonous convention
• 1:41:03
  Speaker 4: to merit the serious study of races that have produced
• 1:41:06
  Speaker 4: coatman and grow Japanese landscape drawing reduces things seen to
• 1:41:12
  Speaker 4: such fewness as must have made the art insuperably hidious
• 1:41:16
  Speaker 4: to any people less fresh spirited and more inclined to
• 1:41:20
  Speaker 4: take themselves seriously than these orientals. A preoccupied people would
• 1:41:25
  Speaker 4: never endure it, but a little closer attention from the
• 1:41:29
  Speaker 4: occidental student might find for their evasive attitude towards landscape
• 1:41:34
  Speaker 4: it is an attitude almost traitorously evasive. A more significant
• 1:41:39
  Speaker 4: reason it is that the distance, the greatness the winds
• 1:41:43
  Speaker 4: and the waves of the world, colored planes, and the
• 1:41:46
  Speaker 4: flight of a sky are all certainly alien to the
• 1:41:50
  Speaker 4: perceptions of the people intended upon little deformities. Does it
• 1:41:55
  Speaker 4: seem harsh to define by that phrase the curious Japanese
• 1:41:59
  Speaker 4: search for accident? Upon such search, these people are avidly intent,
• 1:42:04
  Speaker 4: even though they show themselves capable of acquisite appreciation of
• 1:42:08
  Speaker 4: the form of a normal bird, and the habit of
• 1:42:11
  Speaker 4: gross of a normal flower. They are not in search
• 1:42:14
  Speaker 4: of perpetual slight to nobility, which was Aristotle's ideal of
• 1:42:18
  Speaker 4: the language poetic a little widely, or with the flower
• 1:42:22
  Speaker 4: of the mine, says Emerson, of the way of a
• 1:42:25
  Speaker 4: poet's speech, and such nobility, it is like the frequent
• 1:42:29
  Speaker 4: pulse of the opinion that keeps verse upon the wing.
• 1:42:33
  Speaker 4: Know what the Japanese are intent upon is perpetual slight disorder.
• 1:42:38
  Speaker 4: In Japan, the man in the fields has eyes less
• 1:42:41
  Speaker 4: for the sky and the crescent moon than for some
• 1:42:44
  Speaker 4: stone in the past, of which the asymmetry strike his
• 1:42:47
  Speaker 4: curious sense of pleasure in fortunate accident of form, for
• 1:42:52
  Speaker 4: love of a little grotesque strangeness, he will load himself
• 1:42:56
  Speaker 4: with the stone and carry it home to his garden.
• 1:42:59
  Speaker 4: The art of such a people is not liberal art,
• 1:43:02
  Speaker 4: not the art of peace, and not the art of humanity.
• 1:43:06
  Speaker 4: Look at the curls and curves, whereby these people conventionally
• 1:43:10
  Speaker 4: signify wave or cloud. All these curls have an attitude
• 1:43:14
  Speaker 4: which is like that of a figure slightly malformed, and
• 1:43:18
  Speaker 4: not like that of a human body that is perfect dominant.
• 1:43:22
  Speaker 4: And if bent bent at no lowly or niggling labor.
• 1:43:26
  Speaker 4: Why this curl should be so charming, It would be
• 1:43:29
  Speaker 4: hard to say. They have an equisite frankishness of variety.
• 1:43:34
  Speaker 4: The place where the upward or downward scrolls curl off
• 1:43:37
  Speaker 4: from the main wave is delicately unexpected every time, and
• 1:43:42
  Speaker 4: especially in gold embroideris is sensitively fit for the material,
• 1:43:47
  Speaker 4: catching and losing the light. While the lengths of wave's
• 1:43:50
  Speaker 4: line are such as the long gold threads take by nature.
• 1:43:54
  Speaker 4: A moment ago this art was declared not human, and
• 1:43:59
  Speaker 4: in fact, in no other art has the figure suffered
• 1:44:02
  Speaker 4: such crouped handling. The Japanese have generally evaded even the
• 1:44:06
  Speaker 4: local beauty of their own race, for the sake of
• 1:44:09
  Speaker 4: perpetual slight deformity. Their beauty is removed from our sympathy
• 1:44:14
  Speaker 4: and admiration, and it is quite possible that we might
• 1:44:18
  Speaker 4: miss it in a pictorial presentation, and that the Japanese
• 1:44:21
  Speaker 4: artist may have intended human beauty where we do not
• 1:44:25
  Speaker 4: recognize it. But if it is not easy to recognize,
• 1:44:29
  Speaker 4: it is certainly not difficult to guess aid. And accordingly,
• 1:44:33
  Speaker 4: you are generally aware that the separate beauty of the
• 1:44:36
  Speaker 4: race and its separate dignity, even to be very generous,
• 1:44:40
  Speaker 4: has been admired by the Japanese artists, and it is
• 1:44:44
  Speaker 4: represented here and there, occasionally and the figure of warrior
• 1:44:48
  Speaker 4: or musmi. But even with this exception, the habit of
• 1:44:51
  Speaker 4: Japanese figure drawing is evidently grotesque, diversive, and crouped. It
• 1:44:57
  Speaker 4: is curious to observe that the search for slight of
• 1:45:00
  Speaker 4: deformity is so constant as to make use for its
• 1:45:03
  Speaker 4: purposes not of action only, but of perspective. Foreshortening was us.
• 1:45:09
  Speaker 4: It is to the youngest child only that there would
• 1:45:11
  Speaker 4: appear to be immersed in the drawing of a man who,
• 1:45:14
  Speaker 4: stooping violently forward, would seem to have his head beneath
• 1:45:18
  Speaker 4: his shoulder. The European child would not see fun in
• 1:45:22
  Speaker 4: the living man so presented by unused the same effect
• 1:45:26
  Speaker 4: in the flag. He thinks it previously humorous in a drawing,
• 1:45:30
  Speaker 4: but so only when he is quite young. The Japanese keeps,
• 1:45:34
  Speaker 4: apparently his sense of this kind of humor. It amuses him,
• 1:45:38
  Speaker 4: but not perhaps altogether at it amuses the child that
• 1:45:43
  Speaker 4: the foreshortened figures should in drawing, and to the unpracticed
• 1:45:46
  Speaker 4: eye seem desorted and dislocated. The simple Oriental appears to
• 1:45:52
  Speaker 4: find more derision in it than the simple child. The
• 1:45:55
  Speaker 4: distortion is not without a suggestion of ignominy. And more over,
• 1:46:00
  Speaker 4: the Japanese shows derision, but not precisely scorn. He does
• 1:46:04
  Speaker 4: not hold himself superior to his hideous models. He makes
• 1:46:08
  Speaker 4: free with them on equal turn. He is familiar with them.
• 1:46:13
  Speaker 4: And if this is the convention gathered from ornary drawings,
• 1:46:16
  Speaker 4: no need to insist upon ignoble character of those that
• 1:46:19
  Speaker 4: are intentional caricatures. Perhaps the time has hardly come for
• 1:46:24
  Speaker 4: writing and new the phrases of symmetry. The word knows
• 1:46:28
  Speaker 4: so much of the abuse of Greek decoration, and would
• 1:46:30
  Speaker 4: be glad to forget. It was the intention of learning
• 1:46:34
  Speaker 4: that art afresh in a future age, and of seeing
• 1:46:37
  Speaker 4: it then anew. But whatever may be the phases of
• 1:46:40
  Speaker 4: the arts, there is the abiding principle of symmetry in
• 1:46:44
  Speaker 4: the body of man that goes erect, like an upright soul,
• 1:46:48
  Speaker 4: its balance is equal. Exterior human symmetry is surely a
• 1:46:52
  Speaker 4: curious physological fact. Where there is no symmetry interiorly, for
• 1:46:57
  Speaker 4: the centers of life and movement within the body are
• 1:47:00
  Speaker 4: placed with oriental inequality. Man is Greek without and Japanese within.
• 1:47:06
  Speaker 4: But the absolute symmetry of the skeleton and of the
• 1:47:09
  Speaker 4: beauty and life that cover is accurately a principle. It controls,
• 1:47:13
  Speaker 4: but notreaneously, all the life of human action, attitude, and motion,
• 1:47:18
  Speaker 4: disturbed perpetually with infinite incidents, inequalities of work, war and
• 1:47:23
  Speaker 4: pulse time, inequalities of sleep. The symmetry of man only
• 1:47:28
  Speaker 4: in death, and add attention, is that symmetry complete in attitude. Nevertheless,
• 1:47:34
  Speaker 4: it rules the dance and the battle, and its rhythm
• 1:47:36
  Speaker 4: is not to be destroyed. All the more because this
• 1:47:39
  Speaker 4: hand holds the gold, and that the harrow, this the shield,
• 1:47:43
  Speaker 4: and that the sword, because this hand rocks the crate,
• 1:47:46
  Speaker 4: and that caresses the unequal heads of children. Is this
• 1:47:50
  Speaker 4: rhythm the law and the grace and strengths are in fictions.
• 1:47:54
  Speaker 4: Thereof all human movement is a variation upon symmetry, And
• 1:47:58
  Speaker 4: without symmetry it would be not be variation. It would
• 1:48:02
  Speaker 4: be lawless, fertigious, and as dull and broadcast as lawless art.
• 1:48:07
  Speaker 4: The order of infliction that is not infraction has been
• 1:48:10
  Speaker 4: explained in a most auscilitative sentence of criticism of literature,
• 1:48:15
  Speaker 4: a sentence that should save the word the trouble of
• 1:48:18
  Speaker 4: some its frutal, violent and weak experiments. Law directitude of humanity,
• 1:48:24
  Speaker 4: says mister Contrey fatmore, should be the poet's only subject,
• 1:48:29
  Speaker 4: as from the time immemorial it has been the subject
• 1:48:32
  Speaker 4: of true art. Though many a true artist has done
• 1:48:35
  Speaker 4: the muses will and know it not as all, the
• 1:48:38
  Speaker 4: music of verse arises not from infraction, but from infliction
• 1:48:42
  Speaker 4: of the law of the set meter. So the greatest
• 1:48:45
  Speaker 4: poets have been those that modelus of whose verse has
• 1:48:48
  Speaker 4: been most variously and delicately inflicted in correspondence with feelings
• 1:48:53
  Speaker 4: and passions, which are the inflictions of moral law. In
• 1:48:57
  Speaker 4: their scene. Put a strain upon feeling, and feeling responds
• 1:49:03
  Speaker 4: with a strain upon law. Furthermore, Aristotle says that the
• 1:49:07
  Speaker 4: quality of poetic language is a continuous slight nobility. In
• 1:49:11
  Speaker 4: the highest poetry, like that of Milton. These three modes
• 1:49:15
  Speaker 4: of infliction, metorical, linguistical, and moral, all chime together in
• 1:49:20
  Speaker 4: praise of the truer order of life, and like that
• 1:49:24
  Speaker 4: order is the order of the figure of man, an
• 1:49:26
  Speaker 4: order most beautiful and most secure when it is put
• 1:49:29
  Speaker 4: to the proof that perpetual proof, by perpetual infliction is
• 1:49:33
  Speaker 4: the very condition of life. Symmetry is a profound if disregarded,
• 1:49:38
  Speaker 4: because perpetually inflicted condition of human life. The nimble art
• 1:49:43
  Speaker 4: of Japan is unessential. It may come and go, may
• 1:49:46
  Speaker 4: settle or be fended away. It has life, and it
• 1:49:49
  Speaker 4: is not without law. It has an obvious life and
• 1:49:52
  Speaker 4: less obvious law. But with Greece abides the obvious law
• 1:49:56
  Speaker 4: and the less obvious life. Symmetry as apparent as the
• 1:49:59
  Speaker 4: symmetry form of men and life occult like his unequal heart.
• 1:50:04
  Speaker 4: And this seems to be the nobler and the more
• 1:50:06
  Speaker 4: pew durable relation. End of chapter twelve. Recording by Sarah.
• 1:50:12
  Speaker 5: Hale, Chapter thirteen of The Color of Life. This is
• 1:50:22
  Speaker 5: a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.
• 1:50:27
  Speaker 5: For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org.
• 1:50:34
  Speaker 5: The Color of Life by Alice Maynell, Chapter thirteen, The
• 1:50:42
  Speaker 5: Illusion of historic time. He who survived his childhood intelligently
• 1:50:49
  Speaker 5: must become conscious of something more than a change in
• 1:50:52
  Speaker 5: his sense of the present and in his apprehension of
• 1:50:55
  Speaker 5: the future. He must be aware of no less a
• 1:50:58
  Speaker 5: thing than the destruction of the past. Its events and
• 1:51:02
  Speaker 5: empires stand where they did, and the mere relation of
• 1:51:05
  Speaker 5: time is as it was. But that which has fallen together,
• 1:51:09
  Speaker 5: has fallen in, has fallen closed, and lies in a
• 1:51:13
  Speaker 5: little heap is the past itself, Time, the fact of antiquity.
• 1:51:21
  Speaker 5: He has grown into a smaller world as he has
• 1:51:23
  Speaker 5: grown older. There are no more extremities recorded, time has
• 1:51:29
  Speaker 5: no more terrors. The unit of measure which he holds
• 1:51:33
  Speaker 5: in his hands has become his eyes, a thing of
• 1:51:35
  Speaker 5: paltry length. The discovery draws in the annals of mankind.
• 1:51:40
  Speaker 5: He had thought them to be wide. For a man
• 1:51:43
  Speaker 5: has nothing whereby to order and place the floods, the states,
• 1:51:47
  Speaker 5: the conquest, and the temples of the past, except only
• 1:51:50
  Speaker 5: the measure which he holds. Call that measure a space
• 1:51:54
  Speaker 5: of ten years. His first ten years had given him
• 1:51:58
  Speaker 5: the illusion of a most august scale and measure. It
• 1:52:03
  Speaker 5: was then that he conceived antiquity. But now is it
• 1:52:07
  Speaker 5: to a decade of ten such little years as these
• 1:52:10
  Speaker 5: now in his hand, ten of his mature years, that
• 1:52:13
  Speaker 5: men give the dignity of a century. They call it
• 1:52:17
  Speaker 5: an age. But what if life shows now so small
• 1:52:21
  Speaker 5: that the word age has lost its gravity. In fact,
• 1:52:25
  Speaker 5: when a child begins to know that there is a past,
• 1:52:28
  Speaker 5: he has a most noble rod to measure it by.
• 1:52:31
  Speaker 5: He has his own ten years. He attributes an overwhelming
• 1:52:35
  Speaker 5: majesty to all recorded time. He confers distance, he and
• 1:52:40
  Speaker 5: he alone bestows mystery. Remoteness is his. He creates more
• 1:52:45
  Speaker 5: than mortal centuries. He sends armies fighting into the extremities
• 1:52:50
  Speaker 5: of the past. He assigns the Parthenon, a heel of ages,
• 1:52:54
  Speaker 5: and the temples of Upper Egypt to side real time.
• 1:52:57
  Speaker 5: If there were no child, there would be nothing old. He,
• 1:53:02
  Speaker 5: having conceived old time, communicates a remembrance, at least of
• 1:53:06
  Speaker 5: the mystery to the mind of the man. The man
• 1:53:09
  Speaker 5: perceives at last all the illusion, but he can forget
• 1:53:13
  Speaker 5: what was his conviction. When he was a child. He
• 1:53:16
  Speaker 5: had once a persuasion of antiquity. And this is not
• 1:53:19
  Speaker 5: for nothing. The enormous undeception that comes upon him still
• 1:53:23
  Speaker 5: leaves spaces in his mind. But the undeception is rude work.
• 1:53:29
  Speaker 5: The man receives successive shocks. It is as though one
• 1:53:32
  Speaker 5: strained level eyes towards the horizon, and then were bidden
• 1:53:36
  Speaker 5: to shorten his side, and to close his search in
• 1:53:39
  Speaker 5: a poor half acre before his face. Now it is
• 1:53:44
  Speaker 5: that he suddenly perceives a hitherto remote, remote youth of
• 1:53:47
  Speaker 5: his own parents to have been something familiarly near, so
• 1:53:52
  Speaker 5: measured by his new standard. Again, it is a coming
• 1:53:55
  Speaker 5: of Attila that is displaced. Those ten last years of
• 1:53:59
  Speaker 5: his have corrected the world. There needs no other rod
• 1:54:02
  Speaker 5: than the ten years rod. To chastise all the imaginations
• 1:54:05
  Speaker 5: of the spirit of man. It makes history skip. To
• 1:54:10
  Speaker 5: have lived through any appreciable part of any century is
• 1:54:13
  Speaker 5: to hold thenceforth a mere century cheap enough. But it
• 1:54:16
  Speaker 5: may be said, the mystery of change remains. Nay, it
• 1:54:21
  Speaker 5: does not change the judges through our own world. Our
• 1:54:24
  Speaker 5: contemporary world is not very mysterious. We perceive its pace.
• 1:54:29
  Speaker 5: It is a jog trot. Even so we now consider
• 1:54:32
  Speaker 5: jolted the changes of the past with the same hurry.
• 1:54:35
  Speaker 5: The man, therefore, who intelligently ceased to be a child,
• 1:54:40
  Speaker 5: scans through a shortened avenue the reaches of the past.
• 1:54:44
  Speaker 5: He marvels that he was so deceived, for it was
• 1:54:47
  Speaker 5: a very deception. If the agronauts, for instance, had been children,
• 1:54:52
  Speaker 5: it would have been well enough for the child to
• 1:54:54
  Speaker 5: measure their remoteness and their acts with his own magnificent measure.
• 1:54:58
  Speaker 5: But they were only men and demigods. Thus they belong
• 1:55:01
  Speaker 5: to him as he is now a man, and not
• 1:55:04
  Speaker 5: to him as he was once a child. It was
• 1:55:08
  Speaker 5: quite wrong to lay the child's enormous ten years rule
• 1:55:11
  Speaker 5: along the path from our time to theirs. That path
• 1:55:15
  Speaker 5: must be skipped by the nimble yard in the man's
• 1:55:17
  Speaker 5: present possession. Decidedly, the argonauts are no subject for the boy.
• 1:55:22
  Speaker 5: What then, is the record of the race nothing but
• 1:55:26
  Speaker 5: a bundle of such little times. Nay, it seems that
• 1:55:30
  Speaker 5: the childhood which created the illusion of ages does actually
• 1:55:34
  Speaker 5: prove it true. Childhood is itself antiquity, to every man
• 1:55:39
  Speaker 5: his own antiquity. The recollection of childhood cannot make Abraham
• 1:55:44
  Speaker 5: old again in the mind of a man of thirty five,
• 1:55:47
  Speaker 5: But the beginning of every life is older than Abraham.
• 1:55:51
  Speaker 5: There is the abyss of time. Let a man turn
• 1:55:55
  Speaker 5: to his own childhood no further if he would renew
• 1:55:58
  Speaker 5: his sense of remoteness and of the mystery of change.
• 1:56:02
  Speaker 5: For in childhood, change does not go at that mere
• 1:56:05
  Speaker 5: hastily amble, it rushes, but it has enormous space for
• 1:56:09
  Speaker 5: its flight. The child has an apprehension not only of
• 1:56:13
  Speaker 5: things far off, but of things far apart, an elusive
• 1:56:19
  Speaker 5: apprehension when he is learning ancient history, a real apprehension
• 1:56:24
  Speaker 5: when he is conning his own immeasurable infancy. If there
• 1:56:29
  Speaker 5: is no historical antiquity worth speaking of, this is the
• 1:56:33
  Speaker 5: renewed and unnumbered antiquity for all mankind. And it is
• 1:56:38
  Speaker 5: of this, merely of this that ancient history seems to partake.
• 1:56:45
  Speaker 5: Rome was founded when we began Roman history, and that
• 1:56:48
  Speaker 5: is why it seems long ago. Suppose the man of
• 1:56:51
  Speaker 5: thirty five heard at that present age for the first
• 1:56:54
  Speaker 5: time of Romulus, why Romulus would be nowhere? But he
• 1:57:00
  Speaker 5: he built his wall, as a matter of fact, when
• 1:57:02
  Speaker 5: every one was seven years old. It is by good
• 1:57:05
  Speaker 5: fortune that ancient history is taught in the only ancient days.
• 1:57:09
  Speaker 5: So for a time the world is magical. Modern history
• 1:57:14
  Speaker 5: does well enough for learning later, but by learning something
• 1:57:17
  Speaker 5: of antiquity in the first ten years, the child enlarges
• 1:57:21
  Speaker 5: the sense of time for all mankind. For even after
• 1:57:24
  Speaker 5: the great illusion is over and history is remeasured, and
• 1:57:28
  Speaker 5: all fancy and flight caught back and chastised, the enlarged.
• 1:57:32
  Speaker 5: Sense remains enlarged. The man remains capable of great spaces
• 1:57:36
  Speaker 5: of time. He will not find them in Egypt, it
• 1:57:40
  Speaker 5: is true, but he finds them within. He contains them,
• 1:57:44
  Speaker 5: He is aware of them. History has fallen together, but
• 1:57:49
  Speaker 5: childhood surrounds and encompasses History, stretches beyond and passes on
• 1:57:55
  Speaker 5: the road to eternity. He is not passed in vain
• 1:57:59
  Speaker 5: through the long tail years, the ten years that are
• 1:58:02
  Speaker 5: the treasury of perceptions. The first, the great disillusion, shall
• 1:58:07
  Speaker 5: never shorten those years, nor set nearer together the days
• 1:58:10
  Speaker 5: that made them far apart, I have said, And that
• 1:58:15
  Speaker 5: far apart is wonderful. The past of childhood is not single.
• 1:58:20
  Speaker 5: It is not motionless nor fixed in one point. It
• 1:58:24
  Speaker 5: has summits a world away, one from the other. Year
• 1:58:28
  Speaker 5: from year, differs as the antiquity of Mexico from the
• 1:58:31
  Speaker 5: antiquity of Chaldea. And the man of thirty five knows
• 1:58:35
  Speaker 5: forever afterwards what is flight, even though he finds no
• 1:58:39
  Speaker 5: great historic distance to prove his wings by. There is
• 1:58:42
  Speaker 5: a long and mysterious moment in long and mysterious childhood,
• 1:58:47
  Speaker 5: which is the extremest distance known to any human. Fancy
• 1:58:52
  Speaker 5: many other moments. Many other hours are long. In the
• 1:58:55
  Speaker 5: first ten years, hours of weariness are long, the mysterious length,
• 1:59:01
  Speaker 5: but with the mere length of protraction, so that the
• 1:59:04
  Speaker 5: things called minutes and half hours by the elderly may
• 1:59:08
  Speaker 5: be something else to their apparent contemporaries the children. The
• 1:59:13
  Speaker 5: ancient moment is not merely one of these. It is
• 1:59:16
  Speaker 5: a space not of long but of immeasurable time. It
• 1:59:21
  Speaker 5: is the moment of going to sleep. The man knows
• 1:59:24
  Speaker 5: that border land and has a contempt for it. He
• 1:59:28
  Speaker 5: has long ceased to find antiquity there. It has become
• 1:59:31
  Speaker 5: a common enough margin of dreams to him, and he
• 1:59:34
  Speaker 5: does not attend to its fantasies. He knows that he
• 1:59:37
  Speaker 5: has a frolic spirit in his head which has its
• 1:59:40
  Speaker 5: way at those hours, but he is not interested in it.
• 1:59:43
  Speaker 5: It is the inexperienced child who passes with simplicity through
• 1:59:47
  Speaker 5: the marginal country, and the thing he meets there is
• 1:59:51
  Speaker 5: principally the yet further conception of illimitable time. His nurse's
• 1:59:56
  Speaker 5: lullaby is translated into the mysteries of time. She sings
• 2:00:00
  Speaker 5: absolutely immemorial words. It matters little what they may mean
• 2:00:05
  Speaker 5: to waking ears. To the ears of a child going
• 2:00:07
  Speaker 5: to sleep, they tell of the beginning of the world.
• 2:00:10
  Speaker 5: He has fallen asleep to the sound of them all
• 2:00:12
  Speaker 5: his life, and all his life means more than older
• 2:00:17
  Speaker 5: speech can well express. Ancient custom is formed in a
• 2:00:21
  Speaker 5: single spacious year. A child is beset with long traditions,
• 2:00:26
  Speaker 5: and his infancy is so old, so old, that the
• 2:00:30
  Speaker 5: mere adding of years in the life to follow will
• 2:00:32
  Speaker 5: not seem to throw it further back. It is already
• 2:00:35
  Speaker 5: so far. That is, it looks as remote to the
• 2:00:39
  Speaker 5: memory of a man of thirty as to that of
• 2:00:42
  Speaker 5: a man of seventy. What are a mere forty years
• 2:00:47
  Speaker 5: of added life in the contemplation of such a distance? Shah,
• 2:00:54
  Speaker 5: end of chapter thirteen.
• 2:01:01
  Speaker 6: Chapter fourteen of The Color of Life. This is a
• 2:01:05
  Speaker 6: LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.
• 2:01:09
  Speaker 6: For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org.
• 2:01:14
  Speaker 6: Recording by Dion Jns, Salt Lake City, Utah. The Color
• 2:01:18
  Speaker 6: of Life by Alice Maynell, Chapter fourteen Eyes. There is
• 2:01:24
  Speaker 6: nothing described with so little attention, with such slovenliness, or
• 2:01:30
  Speaker 6: so without verification, albeit with so much confidence and word
• 2:01:34
  Speaker 6: painting as the eyes of the men and women whose
• 2:01:38
  Speaker 6: faces have been made memorable by their works, the describer
• 2:01:43
  Speaker 6: generally takes the first color that seems to him probable.
• 2:01:46
  Speaker 6: The gray eyes of Coleridge are recorded in a proverbial line,
• 2:01:51
  Speaker 6: and Procter repeats the word in describing from the life
• 2:01:55
  Speaker 6: than Carlyle, who shows more signs of actual attention, and
• 2:02:00
  Speaker 6: who caught a trick of Coleridge's pronunciation, instantly proving that
• 2:02:04
  Speaker 6: with his hearing at least he was not slovenly says
• 2:02:08
  Speaker 6: that Coleridge's eyes were brown, strange, brown, timid, yet earnest
• 2:02:14
  Speaker 6: looking eyes. A Coliridge with brown eyes is one man,
• 2:02:18
  Speaker 6: and a Coliridge with gray eyes another, And as it
• 2:02:22
  Speaker 6: were more responsible as to Rosetti's eyes, the various inattention
• 2:02:28
  Speaker 6: of his friends has assigned to them in all the
• 2:02:31
  Speaker 6: ready made phrases, nearly all of the colors. So with
• 2:02:35
  Speaker 6: Charlotte Bronte, Matthew Arnold seems to have thought the most
• 2:02:39
  Speaker 6: probable thing to be said of her eyes was that
• 2:02:42
  Speaker 6: they were gray and expressive. Thus, after seeing them does
• 2:02:47
  Speaker 6: he describe them in one of his letters. Whereas Missus Gasquell,
• 2:02:51
  Speaker 6: who shows signs of attention says that Charlotte's eyes were
• 2:02:55
  Speaker 6: a reddish hazel, made up of a great variety of
• 2:02:59
  Speaker 6: tints to be discovered by close looking. Almost all eyes
• 2:03:03
  Speaker 6: that are not brown are in fact of some such
• 2:03:07
  Speaker 6: mixed color, generally spotted in, and the effect is vivacious,
• 2:03:11
  Speaker 6: all the more if the speckled iris has a dark
• 2:03:14
  Speaker 6: ring to enclose it. Nevertheless, the eye of mixed color
• 2:03:19
  Speaker 6: has always a definite character, And the mingling that looks
• 2:03:22
  Speaker 6: green is quite unlike the mingling that looks gray, And
• 2:03:27
  Speaker 6: among the grays there is endless difference. Brown eyes alone
• 2:03:31
  Speaker 6: are apart, unlike all others, but having no variety except
• 2:03:35
  Speaker 6: in the degrees of their darkness. The color of eyes
• 2:03:39
  Speaker 6: seems to be significant of temperament, but as regards beauty,
• 2:03:44
  Speaker 6: there is little or nothing to choose among colors. It
• 2:03:47
  Speaker 6: is not the eye, but the eyelid that is important. Beautiful, eloquent,
• 2:03:51
  Speaker 6: full of secrets. The eye has nothing but its color,
• 2:03:55
  Speaker 6: and all colors are fine within fine eyelids. The eyelid
• 2:04:00
  Speaker 6: it has all the form, all the drying, all the
• 2:04:02
  Speaker 6: breadth and length, the square of great eyes irregularly wide,
• 2:04:07
  Speaker 6: the long corners of narrow eyes, the pathetic outward droop,
• 2:04:12
  Speaker 6: the delicate, contrary suggestion of an upward turn at the
• 2:04:15
  Speaker 6: outer corner, which Sir Joshua loved. It is the blood
• 2:04:19
  Speaker 6: that is eloquent, and there is no sign of blood
• 2:04:22
  Speaker 6: in the eye. But in the eyelid the blood hides
• 2:04:25
  Speaker 6: itself and shows its signs. All along its edges are
• 2:04:29
  Speaker 6: the little muscles living that speak not only the obvious
• 2:04:33
  Speaker 6: and emphatic things. But what reluctances, what perceptions, what ambiguities,
• 2:04:39
  Speaker 6: what half apprehensions, what doubts, what interceptions? The eyelids confess
• 2:04:46
  Speaker 6: and reject, and refuse to reject. They have expressed all
• 2:04:50
  Speaker 6: things ever since man was man, And they express so
• 2:04:54
  Speaker 6: much by seeming to hide or to reveal, that which
• 2:04:58
  Speaker 6: indeed expresses nothing. For there is no message from the eye.
• 2:05:03
  Speaker 6: It has direction, it moves in the service of the
• 2:05:06
  Speaker 6: sense of sight. It receives the messages of the world.
• 2:05:10
  Speaker 6: But expression is outward, and the eye has it not.
• 2:05:13
  Speaker 6: There are no windows of the soul. There are only curtains,
• 2:05:17
  Speaker 6: and these show all things by seeming to hide a
• 2:05:20
  Speaker 6: little more a little less. They hide nothing but their
• 2:05:24
  Speaker 6: own secrets. But some may say the eyes have emotion
• 2:05:28
  Speaker 6: inasmuch as they betray it by the waxing and contracting
• 2:05:32
  Speaker 6: of the pupils. It is, however, the rarest thing, this
• 2:05:36
  Speaker 6: opening and narrowing, under any influences except those of darkness
• 2:05:40
  Speaker 6: and light. It does take place exceptionally, but I am
• 2:05:44
  Speaker 6: doubtful whether those who talk of it have ever really
• 2:05:47
  Speaker 6: been attentive enough to perceive it. A nervous woman, brown
• 2:05:52
  Speaker 6: eyed and young, who stood to tell the news of
• 2:05:54
  Speaker 6: her own betrothal, and kept her manners exceedingly composed as
• 2:05:58
  Speaker 6: she spoke, this waxing and closing of the pupils. It
• 2:06:03
  Speaker 6: went on all the time, like a slow, slow pulse.
• 2:06:06
  Speaker 6: But such a thing is not to be seen once
• 2:06:09
  Speaker 6: a year. Moreover, it is, though so significant, hardly to
• 2:06:14
  Speaker 6: be called expression. It is not articulate. It implies emotion,
• 2:06:19
  Speaker 6: but does not define or describe or divide it. It
• 2:06:22
  Speaker 6: is touching insomuch as we have knowledge of the perturbed
• 2:06:26
  Speaker 6: side of the spirit that must cause it. But it
• 2:06:29
  Speaker 6: is not otherwise eloquent. It does not tell us the
• 2:06:32
  Speaker 6: quality of the thought. It does not inform and surprise
• 2:06:36
  Speaker 6: us with intricacies. It speaks no more explicit or delicate
• 2:06:41
  Speaker 6: things than does the pulse in its quickening, it speaks
• 2:06:45
  Speaker 6: with less division of meanings than does the taking of
• 2:06:48
  Speaker 6: the breath, which has impulses and degrees. No, the eyes
• 2:06:52
  Speaker 6: do their work, but do it blankly, without communication. Openings
• 2:06:57
  Speaker 6: into the being they may be, But the closed cheek
• 2:07:01
  Speaker 6: is more communicative from them. The blood of Perdita never
• 2:07:05
  Speaker 6: did look out. It ebbed and flowed in her face,
• 2:07:08
  Speaker 6: her dance, her talk. It was hiding in her paleness,
• 2:07:12
  Speaker 6: and cloistered in her reserve, but visible in prison. It
• 2:07:16
  Speaker 6: leapt and looked at a word. It was conscious in
• 2:07:19
  Speaker 6: the fingers that reached out flowers. It ran with her.
• 2:07:23
  Speaker 6: It was silenced when she hushed her answers to the king. Everywhere,
• 2:07:28
  Speaker 6: it was close behind the doors everywhere, but in her eyes.
• 2:07:32
  Speaker 6: How near at hand was it then, in the living
• 2:07:35
  Speaker 6: eyelids that expressed her in their minute and instant and
• 2:07:39
  Speaker 6: candid manner. All her withdrawals, every hesitation fluttered there a
• 2:07:45
  Speaker 6: flock of meanings and intelligences alighted on those mobile edges.
• 2:07:50
  Speaker 6: Think then, of all the famous eyes in the world
• 2:07:53
  Speaker 6: that said so much, and said it in no other way,
• 2:07:57
  Speaker 6: but only by the little exquisite muscles of their life. Lids.
• 2:08:01
  Speaker 6: How were these ever strong enough to bear the burden
• 2:08:04
  Speaker 6: of those eyes of heathcliffs In Wuthering Heights, the clouded
• 2:08:08
  Speaker 6: windows of hell flashed a moment towards me. The fiend,
• 2:08:12
  Speaker 6: which usually looked out, however, was so dimmed and drowned
• 2:08:18
  Speaker 6: that morning. Fiend who had wept all night had no expression,
• 2:08:22
  Speaker 6: no proof or sign of himself, except in the edges
• 2:08:25
  Speaker 6: of the eyelids of the man, and the eyes of
• 2:08:28
  Speaker 6: Garrick eyelids again, and the eyes of Charles Dickens that
• 2:08:33
  Speaker 6: were said to contain the life of fifty men. On
• 2:08:36
  Speaker 6: the mechanism of the eyelids hung that fiftyfold vitality. Bacon
• 2:08:42
  Speaker 6: had a delicate, lively hazel eye, says Aubrey in his
• 2:08:46
  Speaker 6: Lives of eminent persons. But nothing of this belongs to
• 2:08:49
  Speaker 6: the eye except the color mere brightness the eyeball has
• 2:08:53
  Speaker 6: or has not, But so have many glass beads. The
• 2:08:57
  Speaker 6: liveliness is the eyelids. Doctor Harvey told me it was
• 2:09:01
  Speaker 6: like the eye of a viper. So intent and narrowed
• 2:09:05
  Speaker 6: must have been the attitude of Bacon's eyelids. I never
• 2:09:08
  Speaker 6: saw such another eye in a human head, says Scott
• 2:09:12
  Speaker 6: in describing burns, though I have seen the most distinguished
• 2:09:16
  Speaker 6: men in my time, it was large and of a
• 2:09:19
  Speaker 6: dark cast, and glowed I see literally glowed when he
• 2:09:23
  Speaker 6: spoke with feeling or interest. The eye alone, I think,
• 2:09:27
  Speaker 6: indicated that poetical character and temperament. No eye literally glows.
• 2:09:33
  Speaker 6: But some eyes are polished a little more and reflect.
• 2:09:36
  Speaker 6: And this is the utmost that can possibly have been
• 2:09:39
  Speaker 6: true as to the eyes of burns. But set within
• 2:09:43
  Speaker 6: the meanings of impetuous eyelids. The lucidity of the dark
• 2:09:47
  Speaker 6: eyes seemed broken, moved directed into fiery shafts. See too
• 2:09:53
  Speaker 6: the reproach of little, sharp gray eyes addressed to haslet.
• 2:09:57
  Speaker 6: There are neither large nor small eye, say physiologists, or
• 2:10:02
  Speaker 6: the difference is so small as to be negligible. But
• 2:10:05
  Speaker 6: in the eyelids the difference is great between large and small,
• 2:10:09
  Speaker 6: and also between the varieties of largeness. Some have large openings,
• 2:10:14
  Speaker 6: and some are in themselves broad and long, serenely covering
• 2:10:18
  Speaker 6: eyes called small. Some have far more drying than others,
• 2:10:23
  Speaker 6: and interesting foreshortenings and sweeping curves. Where else is spirit
• 2:10:28
  Speaker 6: so evident, and where else is it so spoilt? There
• 2:10:32
  Speaker 6: is no vulgarity. Like the vulgarity of vulgar eyelids, they
• 2:10:36
  Speaker 6: have a slang all their own, of an intolerable kind.
• 2:10:40
  Speaker 6: And eyelids have looked all the cruel looks that have
• 2:10:43
  Speaker 6: ever made wounds in innocent souls, meeting them surprised. But
• 2:10:48
  Speaker 6: all love and all genius have winged their flight from
• 2:10:51
  Speaker 6: those Slight and unmeasurable movements have flickered on the margins
• 2:10:56
  Speaker 6: of lovely eyelids. Quick with thought, Life, spear sweetness. Are
• 2:11:01
  Speaker 6: there in a small place, using the finest and slenderest machinery,
• 2:11:06
  Speaker 6: expressing meanings a whole world apart by a difference of
• 2:11:10
  Speaker 6: material actions, so fine that the sight which appreciates it
• 2:11:15
  Speaker 6: cannot detect it, expressing intricacies of intellect so incarnate in
• 2:11:20
  Speaker 6: slender and sensitive flesh, that nowhere else in the body
• 2:11:24
  Speaker 6: of man is flesh so spiritual. End of Chapter fourteen.
• 2:11:30
  Speaker 6: End of the Color of Life by Alice Maynell