Great Splendid Natures

IN 1905 the Russians dress-rehearsed their re- volution; and in 1907 Elinor Glyn published Thre Weeks. It sold three million copies, and Presented the Russian Queen as 'a great splendid nature full of the passionate realisation of Prim live instincts, immensely cultivated. Polished, blase,' married to the Russian King, a drunken degenerate. During a singularly proto- c,44 ve trip through Europe, she fell for a young Logi shman, 'straight and true in manhood,' and three weeks love-feast resulted in a Baby king, 'a fair, rosy-checked, golden-haired Eng- lish child,' destined to reclaim the Russian mon welly for health and decency. What faith we had once in our national mission! Not the Most romantic of our lady novelists would have the , gall to reform, let's say the Congo, by such nigh-handed methods. Whereas Elinor never gave a thought to the Romanovs; she was oth

b

, !red that her fans, wallowing in all this love!

„ y stuff, might overlook her moral messages. r'er instance. 'And so, as ever, the woman Paid the price.' (Jolly good. we can never have too much of that one.) „ Where are all the tall, blue-eyed, manly young ishmcn of yesteryear, their golden curls rat-I

deliciously dancing. their souls ever-so-lightly slumbering and in wait for her? Once certainly theY were in good supply; for I remember a delirious holidays spent with a Baroness Orczy. which sang of a Hungarian Countess. llonka? I "ink so; but a great untamed nature (see above) 4Nnd enainoured of a tall, blue-eyed (see above) Laig ishman. It ended, as I recall, 'Ah yes, they ,,Whn did not know called him proud, silent, cold. ou

, t when the two were alone and he sank to his

Knee at her feet passionately kissing her fluids....' Then there were Haggard's young gentlemen, all golden and straight and true; and °Ile rated no less than She, Herself, who could ' all pick and choose along the centuries. Did clinar and Rider ever meet? Did they recognise eaeL

other as inhabitants of the same myth-

eon aryl And have the Jungians-got around to Weeks?—for The lady is She, and just as Itluch eist to those shadowy mills. As for us we have the anti-hero, who is of CO u se dark and preferably scruffy, but whose soul is well awake by abOut the age of four; and the

best we can do for Her is Alice Aisgill, whose

rfilial killing is no nobler than a drunken car- s ft

sirlimftth. even when she is transmogrified into 3ne Signoret. No pillars of eternal fire, rnan; ■ ac assassinations or tiger skins for us. Mind

U. it wouldn't do some of us any harm. at least in t le theatre, to look to our lions, tigers, bears, squirrel5. sweet birds and similar symbols. did! suggest a salutary exercise, to show the splen- wh common denominator of the purple patch

wrote He knew her what she was, this lady. In Seville, or in Venice, the spot was on her. Sail- ing the pathways of the moon it was not celestial light that illumined her beauty. Her sin was there; but in dreaming to save, he was soft to her sin—drowned it in deep mournful- ness.'

lier face was aflame with the lea sacH. The noble brow and line of her throat will ever re- main in Paul's memory as a thing apart in Womankind. Who could have small or unworthy thoughts who had known her—this splendid adY! And his worship grew and grew.=

It was bliss, it was the nucicolating of the lecund darkness. Once the vessel had vibrated till it was shattered, the light of consciousness gone, then the darkness reigned, and the un- utterable satisfaction.'

Around me all the faint blue angels of romance are flying with the polkadot spotlight, the music is heartbroken and yearns for young close hearts, lips of girls in their teens, lost impossible chorus girls of eternity dancing slowly in our minds to the mad ruined tam- bourine of love and hope-1 sec I want to hug my Grcatshadow Maggie to myself for all time.'

He sat still like an Egyptian Pharaoh, driving the car. He felt as if he were seated in im- memorial potency, like the great carven statues of real Egypt, as real and as fulfilled with subtle strength as these arc, with a vague inscrutable smile on the lips.'

Her voice became still more dreamy, there was a cadence in it now as if some soul within were forcing her to chant it all, with almost the lilt of blank verse. 'Ohl the strange drug of the glorious East, flooding ye r senses with beauty and life. 'Tis the spell of the Sphinx. . .

DORIS LESSING