The New Pyramus And Thisbe

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Title:     The New Pyramus And Thisbe
Author: Richard Le Gallienne [More Titles by Le Gallienne]

There never was a shallower or more short-sighted criticism than that which has held that science is the enemy of romance. Ruskin, with all the April showers of his rhetoric, discredited himself as an authoritative thinker when he screamed his old-maidish diatribes against that pioneer of modern romantic communication, the railroad. Just as surely his idol Turner proved himself a romantic painter, not by his rainbows, or his Italian sunsets, but by that picture of _Storm, Rain, and Speed_--an old-fashioned express fighting its way through wind, rain, and of course rainbows--in the English National Gallery.

With all his love of that light that never was on sea or land, Turner was yet able to see the romance of that new thing of iron and steam so affrighting to other men of his generation. A lover of light in all its swift prismatic changes, he was naturally a lover of speed. He realized that speed was one of the two most romantic things in the world. The other is immobility. At present the two extremes of romantic expression are the Sphinx and--the automobile. Unless you can realize that an automobile is more romantic than a stage-coach, you know nothing about romance. Soon the automobile will have its nose put out by the air-ship, and we shall not need to be long-lived to see the day when we shall hear old-timers lamenting the good old easy-going past of the seventy-miles-an-hour automobile--just as we have heard our grand-fathers talk of postilions and the Bath "flyer."

Romance is made of two opposites: Change, and That Which Changeth Not. In spite of foolish sentimentalism, who needs be told that love is one of those forces of the universe that is the same yesterday, today, and forever--the same today as when Dido broke her heart, as when Leander swam the Hellespont? Gravitation is not more inherent in the cosmic scheme, nor fire nor water more unchangeable in their qualities.

But Love, contrary to the old notion that he is unpractical, is a business-like god, and is ever on the lookout for the latest modern appliances that can in anyway serve his purposes. True love is far from being old-fashioned. On the contrary, true love is always up-to-date. True love has its telephone, its phonograph, its automobile, and soon it will have its air-ship. In the telephone alone what a debt love owes to its supposed enemy, modern science! One wonders how lovers in the old days managed to live at all without the telephone.

We often hear how our modern appliances wear upon our nerves. But think how the lack of modern appliances must have worn upon the nerves of our forefathers, and particularly our foremothers! Think what distance meant in the Middle Ages, when the news of a battle took days to travel, though carried by the swiftest horses. Horses! Think again of news being carried by--horses! And once more think, with a prayer of gratitude to two magicians named Edison and Bell, and with a due sense of your being the spoiled and petted offspring of the painful ages, that should your love be in Omaha this night and you in New York City, you can say good-night to her through the wall of your apartment, and hear her sigh back her good-night to you across two thousand miles of the American flag. Or should your love be on the sea, you can interrupt her flirtations all the way across with your persistent wireless conversation. Contrast your luxurious communicativeness with the case of the lovers of old-time. Say that you have just married a young woman, and you are happy together in your castle in the heart of the forest. Suddenly the courier of war is at your gates, and you must up and arm and away with your men to the distant danger. You must follow the Cross into the savage Kingdom of the Crescent. The husband must become the crusader, and the Lord Christ alone knows when he shall look on the child's face of his wife again. Through goblin-haunted wildernesses he must go, through unmapped no-man's lands, and vacuum solitudes of the world's end, and peril and pestilence meet in every form, the face of his foe the friendliest thing in all his mysterious travel. Not a pay-station as yet in all the wide world, and fully five hundred years to the nearest telegraph office!

And think of the young wife meanwhile, alone with her maids and her tapestry in the dank isolation of her lonely, listening castle. Not a leaf falls in the wood, but she hears it. Not a footstep snaps the silence, but her eyes are at the sleepless slit of light which is her window in the armoured stone of her fortified bridal tower. The only news of her husband she can hope for in a full year or more will be the pleasing lies of some flattering minstrel, or broken soldier, or imaginative pilgrim. On such rumours she must feed her famishing heart--and all the time her husband's bones may be whitening unepitaphed outside the walls of Ascalon or Joppa.

There is an old Danish ballad which quaintly tells the tale of such old long-distance days, with that blending of humour and pathos that forever goes to the heart of man. A certain Danish lord had but yesterday taken unto himself a young wife, and on the morrow of his marriage there came to him the summons to war. Then, as now, there was no arguing with the trumpets of martial duty. The soldier's trumpet heeds not the soldier's tears. The war was far away and likely to be long. Months, even years, might go by before that Danish lord would look on the face of his bride again. So much might happen meanwhile! A little boy, or a little girl, might be born to the castle, and the father, fighting far away, know nothing of the beautiful news. And there was no telephone in the castle, and it was five hundred years to the nearest telegraph office.

So the husband and wife agreed upon a facetious signal of their own. The castle stood upon a ridge of hills which could be seen fifty miles away, and on the ridge the bride promised to build a church. If the child that was to be born proved to be a boy, the church would be builded with a tower; if a girl, with a steeple. So the husband went his way, and three years passed, and at length he returned with his pennons and his men-at-arms to his own country. Scanning the horizon line, he hurried impatiently toward the heliographic ridge. And lo! when at last it came in sight against the rising sun, there was a new church builded stately there--with two towers.

So it was with the most important of all news in the Middle Ages; and yet today, as I said, you in New York City have only to knock good-night on your wall, to be heard by your true love in Omaha, and hear her knock back three times the length of France; Pyramus and Thisbe--with this difference: that the wall is no longer a barrier, but a sensitive messenger. It has become, indeed, in the words of Demetrius in _A Midsummer Night's Dream_, the wittiest of partitions, and the modern Pyramus may apostrophize it in grateful earnest:

"Thou wall, O wall, O sweet and lovely wall ...
Thanks, courteous wall. Jove shield thee well for this!"

So at least I always feel toward the wall of my apartment every time I call up her whom my soul loveth that dwelleth far away in Massachusetts. She being a Capulet and I a Montague, it would go hard with us for communication, were it not for this long-distance wall; and any one who knows anything of love knows that the primal need of lovers is communication. Lovers have so deep a distrust of each other's love that they need to be assured of it from hour to hour. To the philosopher it may well seem strange that this certitude should thus be in need of progressive corroboration. But so it is, and the pampered modern lover may well wonder how his great-grandfather and great-grandmother supported the days, or even kept their love alive, on such famine rations as a letter once a month. A letter once a month! They must have had enormous faith in each other, those lovers of old-time, or they must have suffered as we can hardly bear to think of--we, who write to each other twice a day, telegraph three times, telephone six, and transmit a phonographic record of our sighs to each other night and morn. The telephone has made a toy of distance and made of absence, in many cases, a sufficient presence. It is almost worth while to be apart on occasion just for the sake of bringing each other so magically near. It is the Arabian Nights come true. As in them, you have only to say a word, and the jinn of the electric fire is waiting for your commands. The word has changed. Once it was "Abracadabra." Now it is "Central." But the miracle is just the same.

One might almost venture upon the generalization that most tragedies have come about from lack of a telephone. Of course, there are exceptions, but as a rule tragedies happen through delays in communication.

If there had been a telephone in Mantua, Romeo would never have bought poison of the apothecary. Instead, he would have asked leave to use his long-distance telephone. Calling up Verona, he would first cautiously disguise his voice. If, as usual, the old nurse answered, all well; but if a bearded voice set all the wires a-trembling, he would, of course, hastily ring off, and abuse "Central" for giving him the wrong number. And "Central" would understand. Then Romeo would wait an hour or two till he was sure that Lord Capulet had gone to the Council, and ring up again. This time he would probably get the nurse and confide to her his number in Mantua. Next morning Juliet and her nurse had only to drop in at the nearest drug store, and confide to Romeo the whole plot which Balthazar so sadly bungled. All that was needed was a telephone, and Romeo would have understood that Juliet was only feigning death for the sake of life with him.

But, as in the case of our Danish knight, there was not a pay-station as yet in all the wide world, and it was fully five hundred years to the nearest telegraph office. Another point in this tragedy is worth considering by the modern mind: that not only would the final catastrophe have been averted by the telephone, but that those beautiful speeches to and from Juliet's balcony, made at such desperate risk to both lovers, had the telephone only been in existence, could have been made in complete security from the seclusion of their distant apartments.

Seriously speaking, there are few love tragedies, few serious historic crises of any kind, that might not have been averted by the telephone. Strange indeed, when one considers a little, is that fallacy of sentimentalism which calls science the enemy of love.

Far from being its enemy, science is easily seen to be its most romantic servant; for all its strenuous and delicate learning it brings to the feet of love for a plaything. Not only will it carry the voice of love across space and time, but it will even bring it back to you from eternity. It will not only carry to your ears the voices of the living, but it will also keep safe for you the sweeter voices of the dead. In fact, it would almost seem as though science had made all its discoveries for the sake of love.

[The end]
Richard Le Gallienne's essay: New Pyramus And Thisbe

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