Life's Little Ruses
MENDELSSOHN went to call on a friend, the story runs, and learned that he was still abed. Going to the piano, he played one loud chord of the seventh and sat down to await events. In a moment a commotion was heard above, boots were thrown on the floor, and soon the sluggard rushed down the stairs to the piano and played the resolution of the chord.
The tale has always amused me and served as an unfailing point of depart - ture in my ruminative hours. Never the time and the place and the loved one! But given two sides of this coveted triangle and the third may often be found, as life’s little ruses for some three thousand years go to prove.
Something blithe hovers about the ruse, lifting it immeasurably above its synonyms. One scorns a trick, despises a cheat, loathes fraud and cunning, repudiates artifice and finesse, chicanery and subterfuge; but the Ruse, though she clap her hand hard over your eyes for one moment, looks squarely into them the next, — and you see her an honest lass, likable and droll and endlessly efficient.
A mere three thousand years of her history and philosophy spares me from any charge of exaggeration, and eliminates any consideration of the household of Zeus, whose progeny by their superlative rusiness stretch out halfhuman hands to our own. This limitation of survey enables me also to pass lightly over the ways of the serpent with Eve and of Isaac with his father, and, cutting short the Egyptians, who grew sophisticated through much association with the Sphinx and the mother of Moses, — cutting short, I say, we come down to the old Greeks.
Of one thing we may be sure: the ruse of the ancients was no extraneous thing, but twin sister of our own. Plutarch assures us that the Athenians under Solon made things pleasant that be hateful by calling them so, as taxes, contributions, and prisons, houses. One can almost see the dimple in old Plutarch’s cheek as he wrote that down, unless perchance his tongue by pressure from inside countervailed the dimple. The same delectable biographer goes on to recount how the Roman Numa gave banquets of coarse fare and told his guests they were eating fine and delicate meats, and they ‘thought it nothing incredible if he would have it so.’ This quotation I consider one of the most useful in my repertoire, having yet to encounter a difficult conversational mire over which it will not bridge me.
Pericles was well proportioned except that his head was too long, which explains why all his statues wear helmets. Was this a ruse of classic art or of masculine vanity? The ingenuous Nero had a portrait of himself painted which was a hundred and twenty feet high; and when Alexander the Great returned out of India he made armor larger than his own proportions and bits far heavier than the common sorts, and had them scattered abroad. These devices the natives found and saved.
Some critic wrote of Whistler’s portrait of Carlyle that it was not lifesize. ‘No,’ was his reply, ‘few men are.’ He cannily made the portrait of Sarasate smaller than life-size, to simulate the effect of seeing the violinist far off on the concert stage.
One ruse of the Greek artists the world will never have done admiring, namely, the calculation of their temples in relation to a fixed point far above them. The columns were all slanted inwards in such a manner, so slightly and so imperceptibly, that if they were prolonged they would meet in an apex a mile above the temple. That invisible point in the heavens, as some one has said, like a raised crucifix, drew all the members of the temple together in a single act of recognition. ‘Such is the æsthetic value of an adequate inspiration.’
I wish that one of the gemlike pillars of the Greek Anthology had been dedicated to the Ruse. That Meleager of the Garland, for instance, had carved one, he who said, ‘And if I am a Syrian, what wonder? We all dwell in one country, O Stranger, the world.’ Or that Antipater, of whom Cicero and Pliny both mention the curious fact that he had an attack of fever on his birthday every winter — recalling by some association of ideas the American who had been celebrating the twelfth anniversary of his wife’s thirtieth birthday.
I crave an epigram, too, from that poet who in a few felicitous lines shows us the bust of Dionysius standing against the wall in the schoolroom and yawning with weariness on hearing his own words repeated over and over by the pupils. Busts of Longfellow and Burns, are you not with him?
And for ‘the time, the place and the person,’ dropped so casually from my pen a few moments ago, the fun is to find the missing third. Consider Borrow’s shrewd old man who had learned the difficult Chinese language from inscriptions on the pottery, and from that the laws of hospitality, but could not tell time by the clock until by a little ruse he got it out of the Romany Rye. Consider Hæckel, who, urged by his father to study and practice medicine, set his office-hours between five and six in the morning, by which means any reader of his elaborate Riddle of the Universe will be satisfied that he found time.
The mechanical reader who was kept at the same book for a whole year by the unfeeling ruse of a flippant relative who shifted the bookmark each night, illustrates the successful search for place. The Chinese, too, solved that problem when they used their houses as time-ovens for roast pig; and the pious architects of the Middle Ages who engraved mazes on the floors of their cathedrals, as at Chartres, so that the faithful in tortuous ways might accomplish the semblance of a pilgrimage while their compatriots were on their way to the rescue of the Holy Sepulchre.
As to the detection of the person, Mendelssohn’s ruse would suffice for illustration; but it is impossible to resist instancing the felicitous sign in the Paris theatre: ‘All ladies over thirtyfive may retain their hats.’
Children’s ruses are as pleasant to dwell upon as other products of their unspoiled imaginations. When BurneJones’s nurse, puzzled by his silences, asked what he was thinking about, he used to answer‘Camels.’ Darwin, when a child, invented a whole fabric to show how fond he was of speaking the truth; and Peter Pan expresses the feeling of all childhood when, goaded past endurance, he breathes quick short breaths, five a second. He had heard that every time you breathe, a grownup dies.
Over certain adult children we linger as gratefully, geniuses who really applied imagination to life,—perhaps the rarest of applications. Balzac’s bare room at Les Jardins had stage directions charcoaled on the plastered walls: ‘Rosewood panels, Gobelin tapestries, Venetian mirror, an inlaid cabinet stands here; here hangs a Raphael.’ Dickens painted the walls of his library at Gads Hill to represent bookshelves in tiers around the entire room. The titles on the sham tomes were likewise of his own invention: A History of the Middling Ages, in many volumes; Has a Cat Nine Lives? Was Shakespeare’s Mother’s Hair Red? Paul Verlaine died in a golden house, the last, amusement of this big child of abject poverty having been to brush everything about him with liquid gold.
We not-geniuses wear our ruses as our rue, with a difference; but we take off our hats to those brave souls and try afar off to imitate their self-enchantments. No man possesses all that he wants or is quite happy; but by bluffing a bit, as Max Beerbohm says, a man can gain some of the advantages that he would possess by really having it. Those who have nothing on earth have a right to claim a portion of the heavens. In resolute hands much may be done with a star, as George Meredith demonstrated in his Countess of Selden. On a clear night of May, 1800, Garibaldi gazed at the unwonted brightness of Arcturus, and half in jest told his aides that Arcturus was his star, chosen by him when a sailor, and that its splendor foreboded victory. How it came!
Whoever craves the grand thrill has but to take down Balzac’s Country Doctor and read that marvelous chapter of the Napoleonic legend, with its pounding ‘He had a Star!’ Besides his star, Napoleon had a consummate mastery of the ruse. How he put it forth as a feeler, — watch him drop his handkerchief in front of Markof, the Russian ambassador, and then stand waiting to have it handed to him. But two can play at a ruse de guerre. Markof instantly dropped his own handkerchief beside the other, and stooped to pick it up, leaving Bonaparte’s where it lay. That settled that.
After Napoleon put the Due d’Enghien to death, Paris was so horrified that the tyrant’s throne tottered. A counter revolution would doubtless have taken place had not Napoleon ordered a new ballet to be brought out with the utmost splendor at the Opera. The subject he pitched on was Ossian, or the Bards. In Southey’s day it was still remembered as the greatest spectacle ever exhibited in Paris, and in consequence the duke’s murder was forgotten and nothing but the new ballet talked about. It is a familiar device of great tacticians, this of operating a diversion. The probable origin of half the ghost stories of old English houses is that the room which contained the secret stair and the trap-door was said to be haunted merely as a ruse to discourage prying investigators. In our occasional zeal à la ruse, however, we should not let the method overreach the result, as when Tolstoï recognized Demosthenes by the pebble hidden in his golden mouth.
Lubrication is not the engine, nor the power that drives its wheels, yet without it the machinery is motionless or tears itself in pieces. So one of the pleasantest phases of life’s little ruses is that which deals with our social selves. A friend of mine recalls seeing her grandparents adding up the same column of figures to discover if they corresponded, and when they differed the man said, ‘Dear, I must have made a mistake.’ I think the narrator herself had caught something of the charm, the joyousness, from the way those early family divergencies were adjusted.
De Craye in The Egoist made a man act Solomon by praising his wisdom. Palmerston used to greet all whom he did not know with ‘ How d’ye do, and how’s the old complaint?’ which fitted all sorts and conditions of men. Trivial illustrations, indeed, which we may dismiss with this single note of recognition, that they are every whit as socially sincere as ‘literal truths’ told often in such a way as to create an entirely false impression.
At times the ruse rises into a fine art. I recall the cunning artist who painted the beautiful Irish girl, twice a duchess, with a sunflower that turns from the sun to look at her; and Mrs. Gaskell’s heroine who, as amateur clerk, tries to make the old bookkeeper forget that she is a woman, by whistling. A millionaire peasant of Russia wished Engel to give piano lessons to his daughter, but in order to lessen the cost thought that she might do without learning the black keys. The master sat down at the piano and played Chopin’s Étude on the black keys so divinely that the father exclaimed, ‘The devil take the five roubles: she shall learn to play on the black keys too.’ Richard Bentley’s engagement is said to have been broken off because he expressed a doubt about the book of Daniel. Nebuchadnezzar’s golden image is described as sixty cubits high and six broad. ‘Now,’ said Bentley, ‘this is out of all proportion: it ought to have been ten cubits broad at least ’; which made the good lady weep. The lovers’ difference was arranged, however, on the basis that the sixty cubits included the pedestal. Aldrich, we know, wrote each set of ‘Margery Daw’ letters in a different room, with different ink and pen and on different paper. Turgenieff so identified himself with the nihilistic theories of his hero Bazaroff that he kept a diary in his name, appreciating the current events from both points of view. As an artist, too, admit Moses, of whom a well-known lecturer suggests, ‘When the lawgiver wanted to say, “It seems to me,” he put it, “And the Lord said unto Moses.”
Not infrequently, given the ruse we can reconstruct the man, the type, or the race-perpetrator. What body of legislators but the British would hold to the Chiltern Hundreds? Custom says that a man cannot resign his seat in Parliament; but he may apply for the stewardship of the Chiltern Hundreds, accept it, and immediately give it up. He cannot hold another office while in Parliament. Chiltern is not an office, but an exit. By another official fiction, the Island of Ascension is considered a vessel of war, and as such is commanded by the Admiralty— one joke which Gilbert omitted from Pinafore. ‘Gild the farthing if you will, it remains a farthing still,’
We are all familiar with the complacent, dogmatic delusions of our acquaintances, typified possibly by the woman who marked her penny before putting it in the collection-box and triumphantly received it back next morning from the grocer, having ‘knowed well that the heathen never got it ’; proof which it is not for a mere commentator to parry. If some one asked you who wrote ‘An Ode to Duty’ and then considered he had done with that subject, could you by any chance have named Lamb instead of Wordsworth? or if you were asked who turned away his head as he opened a letter from an office-seeker, so as not to see if any money fell from the envelope, and then ‘homed to dinner,’ could you have failed to mention old Pepys?
’T is a sonsy vista, twinkling with dancing leaves and beckoning flowers, this rusey lane, leading to the rainbow and the pot of gold. Never to lose the halo around life was Susan Ferricr’s ideal; while Nietzsche proclaimed loud and often that life needs fictions as a safety valve from the pressure of life. The most solemn of us has the power in some degree to transform the light of the common day and commonplace people into something rare and strange.
‘Never chop the hash too fine: it might poison the family!’ my mother used to say — all our mothers! The first time it caused a horrified stare and all chopping ceased; but ever afterward the order made the little hand work extra fast, to the accompaniment of a laugh.
Often just the gymnastics of a ruse, oblivious of the result sought, tone our mental and spiritual muscles. ‘A smile on your lips!’ was the command of Louis Philippe when he watched his children at their riding lessons and noticed a frightened look on some little face; ‘a smile on your lips!’ Cultivate the twinkle of social lures, a royal philosophy admonishes us; do things with a swing and a rhythm, as Japanese sailors do; trick yourself if need be, for the infusion of the play-interest ameliorates the tediousness of the task; mystify your suitors sometimes, by raveling out. by night the garment you wove by day ; make a lever of the ruse in your hand, for self-protection and self-encouragement and cheer; to enlighten and urge and inspire others; as a link with the past and a claim on the future; as a bluff and a pastime; as a fine art.
Come, strike that chord of the seventh, and if the sluggard does not rush down and play the resolution, resolve it yourself, and then go the more gayly back whence you came.