Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/207

181 BEAU BEERBOHM 181 Watteau minuet. For if the phrases move in a galliard it is because they do form part of a ballet : a ballet set in Oxford — Eights Week for its time — deans, dons, and bedders for its minor coryphees — a ceremonious suicide of every undergraduate for its central scene — and, for its Pavlova, Zuleika herself, owner of those lacquered lips, the Helen who invokes that holocaust of fair young lives, and a follower of that art which, more potently than any other, touches in mankind the sense of mystery and stirs the faculty of wonder, the most truly romantic of all the arts — the art of conjuring. That is the kind of book it is ! It bears the same rela- tion to realism that music does to noise or dancing to pedestrian exercise. It is as formal as Mozart and as irresponsible as a fairy-tale ; fine literature it is, and yet a lark. Loveliness glides in and out among the revellers, but only as a lure for wit, and the wit is there for wantonness ; and indeed it is just when the dance whirls into its most elfin extravagances that the music, keeping pace with it, mounts to its subtlest and purest. It is mockery without a touch of malice ; the work of a Puck pretending to be pierrot and only succeeding, like his happy hypocrite, in becoming more humane. It is full of an exquisite raillery, yet you suffer no cathartic pang ; not even that spectacle of young lives quenched untimely by love and Isis discomposing you more than the ghosts that glimmer through the hero's halls : — There are ftve ghosts permanently residing in the right wing of the house, two in the left, and eleven in the park. But all are quite noiseless and quite harmless. My servants, when they meet them in the corridors or on the stairs, stand aside to let them pass, thus paying them the respect due to guests of mine ; but not even the rawest housemaid ever screams or flees at sight