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In the Munich Gallery is A Soldier, dated 1662, of admirable transparency and softness. Also A Lady in a yellow satin dress fainting in the presence of the doctor. In the Hague Gallery is A Boy Blowing Soap-bubbles, dated 1663. This is a charming little picture of great depth of the brownish tone.
The girls were as light as soap-bubbles; even stout Miss Trampel, the baker's daughter, and the stupid, snub-nosed Miss Musiëlak, the stationmaster's daughter, danced like feathers; still, they were not in very much request.
Lloyd was blowing soap-bubbles when she saw him come in and fall heavily across the couch. The ghastly pallor of his face and his closed eyes frightened her so that she dropped the little clay pipe she was using. As she stooped to pick up the broken pieces, her mother's cry startled her still more. "Lloyd, run call Becky, quick, quick! Oh, he's dying!"
And as he thought and wished, all the things he thought and wished for grew up like soap-bubbles from nothing at all. Then, when day began to break, he wished himself with his fine clothes to be in the palace that his own wits had made, and away he flew through the air until he had come there safe and sound.
"'For three hundred pounds, and legal interest for six months, said my unwelcome visiter, wi' a face that shewed as little concern for the calamity in which, through mere simplicity and goodness of heart, I was involved, as if he had ordered me to take a pipe, and blow three hundred soap-bubbles! "'Oh! lack-o'-me! cried I, 'is that possible? Is Mr Swanston sic a villain?
In such a theory liberty is identified with caprice, and the collective reason and age-long tradition of an old society are nothing more than soap-bubbles which the smallest urchin may shiver with a snap of the fingers. Does this mean that I am an opponent of democracy? Not at all. Fiction for fiction, it is the least harmful. But it is well not to confound its promises with realities.
There are some make sermons as other men make bricks; and some more like the way children blow soap-bubbles; all they care for is, how big they are, and how high they will fly, and how long they will last. And I have heard people preach," the old lady went on, "who seemed most like as if they were laying out a Chinese puzzle, and you had to look sharp to see where the pieces fitted.
He gathered that I desired to be a novelist. Well, novelists, with certain exceptions, were fantastic fellows who blew iridescent soap-bubbles and who had no morals. In the face of such a philosophy as his I was mute. The world appeared a dreary place of musty offices and smoky steel-works, of coal dust, of labour without a spark of inspiration.
By now, he was consistently identifying himself with the latter. He took to carrying one of the thick-barrelled stun-pistols always, now. Alone, he practiced constantly with it, drawing, breaking soap-bubbles with the concentrated sound-waves it projected. It was silly, perhaps, but it helped him in his dreams.
Cavallo made the first practical attempts with hydrogen gas six years later, but he only succeeded in causing soap-bubbles to ascend. At last the art of aerial navigation was discovered in France, and in 1782 the first ascent was made.
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