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The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Vol. 2
THE WORKS OF
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
SWANSTON EDITION
VOLUME II
_Of this SWANSTON EDITION in Twenty-five
Volumes of the Works of ROBERT LOUIS
STEVENSON Two Thousand and Sixty Copies
have been printed, of which only Two Thousand
Copies are for sale._
_This is No. ......_
[Illustration: THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
(_From a Drawing by Mr. J. D. Strong_)]
THE WORKS OF
ROBERT LOUIS
STEVENSON
VOLUME TWO
LONDON : PUBLISHED BY CHATTO AND
WINDUS : IN ASSOCIATION WITH CASSELL
AND COMPANY LIMITED : WILLIAM
HEINEMANN : AND LONGMANS GREEN
AND COMPANY MDCCCCXI
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
CONTENTS
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
PART I.--FROM THE CLYDE TO SANDY HOOK
PAGE
THE SECOND CABIN 7
EARLY IMPRESSIONS 15
STEERAGE SCENES 24
STEERAGE TYPES 32
THE SICK MAN 43
THE STOWAWAYS 53
PERSONAL EXPERIENCE AND REVIEW 66
NEW YORK 77
PART II.--ACROSS THE PLAINS
NOTES BY THE WAY TO COUNCIL BLUFFS 93
THE EMIGRANT TRAIN 107
THE PLAINS OF NEBRASKA 115
THE DESERT OF WYOMING 119
FELLOW PASSENGERS 124
DESPISED RACES 129
TO THE GOLDEN GATES 133
THE OLD AND NEW PACIFIC CAPITALS
I. MONTEREY 141
II. SAN FRANCISCO 159
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 173
IN THE VALLEY:
I. CALISTOGA 179
II. THE PETRIFIED FOREST 184
III. NAPA WINE 188
IV. THE SCOT ABROAD 194
WITH THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL:
I. TO INTRODUCE MR. KELMAR 201
II. FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF SILVERADO 205
III. THE RETURN 215
THE ACT OF SQUATTING 221
THE HUNTER'S FAMILY 230
THE SEA-FOGS 239
THE TOLL HOUSE 245
A STARRY DRIVE 250
EPISODES IN THE STORY OF A MINE 254
TOILS AND PLEASURES 264
"VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE" AND OTHER PAPERS
I. "VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE":
I. 281
II. 292
III. ON FALLING IN LOVE 302
IV. TRUTH OF INTERCOURSE 311
II. CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH 321
III. AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 334
IV. ORDERED SOUTH 345
V. ÆS TRIPLEX 358
VI. EL DORADO 368
VII. THE ENGLISH ADMIRALS 372
VIII. SOME PORTRAITS BY RAEBURN 385
IX. CHILD'S PLAY 394
X. WALKING TOURS 406
XI. PAN'S PIPES 415
XII. A PLEA FOR GAS LAMPS 420
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
_TO
ROBERT ALAN MOWBRAY STEVENSON_
_Our friendship was not only founded before we were born by a community
of blood, but is in itself near as old as my life. It began with our
early ages, and, like a history, has been continued to the present time.
Although we may not be old in the world, we are old to each other,
having so long been intimates. We are now widely separated, a great sea
and continent intervening; but memory, like care, mounts into iron ships
and rides post behind the horseman. Neither time nor space nor enmity
can conquer old affection; and as I dedicate these sketches, it is not
to you only, but to all in the old country, that I send the greeting of
my heart._
1879. _R. L. S._
PART I
FROM THE CLYDE TO SANDY HOOK
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
THE SECOND CABIN
I first encountered my fellow-passengers on the Broomielaw in Glasgow.
Thence we descended the Clyde in no familiar spirit, but looking askance
on each other as on possible enemies. A few Scandinavians, who had
already grown acquainted on the North Sea, were friendly and voluble
over their long pipes; but among English speakers distance and suspicion
reigned supreme. The sun was soon overclouded, the wind freshened and
grew sharp as we continued to descend the widening estuary; and with the
falling temperature the gloom among the passengers increased. Two of the
women wept. Any one who had come aboard might have supposed we were all
absconding from the law. There was scarce a word interchanged, and no
common sentiment but that of cold united us, until at length, having
touched at Greenock, a pointing arm and rush to the starboard bow
announced that our ocean steamer was in sight. There she lay in
mid-river, at the tail of the Bank, her sea-signal flying: a wall of
bulwark, a street of white deck-houses, an aspiring forest of spars,
larger than a church, and soon to be as populous as many an incorporated
town in the land to which she was to bear us.
I was not, in truth, a steerage passenger. Although anxious to see the
worst of emigrant life, I had some work to finish on the voyage, and was
advised to go by the second cabin, where at least I should have a table
at command. The advice was excellent; but to understand the choice, and
what I gained, some outline of the internal disposition of the ship will
first be necessary. In her very nose is Steerage No. 1, down two pair of
stairs. A little abaft, another companion, labelled Steerage No. 2 and
3, gives admission to three galleries, two running forward towards
steerage No. 1, and the third aft towards the engines. The starboard
forward gallery is the second cabin. Away abaft the engines and below
the officers' cabins, to complete our survey of the vessel, there is yet
a third nest of steerages, labelled 4 and 5. The second cabin, to
return, is thus a modified oasis in the very heart of the steerages.
Through the thin partition you can hear the steerage passengers being
sick, the rattle of tin dishes as they sit at meals, the varied accents
in which they converse, the crying of their children terrified by this
new experience, or the clean flat smack of the parental hand in
chastisement.
There are, however, many advantages for the inhabitant of this strip. He
does not require to bring his own bedding or dishes, but finds berths
and a table completely if somewhat roughly furnished. He enjoys a
distinct superiority in diet; but this, strange to say, differs not only
on different ships, but on the same ship according as her head is to the
east or west. In my own experience, the principal difference between our
table and that of the true steerage passenger was the table itself, and
the crockery plates from which we ate. But lest I should show myself
ungrateful, let me recapitulate every advantage. At breakfast we had a
choice between tea and coffee for beverage; a choice not easy to make,
the two were so surprisingly alike. I found that I could sleep after the
coffee and lay awake after the tea; which is proof conclusive of some
chemical disparity; and even by the palate I could distinguish a smack
of snuff in the former from a flavour of boiling and dish-cloths in the
second. As a matter of fact, I have seen passengers, after many sips,
still doubting which had been supplied them. In the way of eatables at
the same meal we were gloriously favoured; for in addition to porridge,
which was common to all, we had Irish stew, sometimes a bit of fish, and
sometimes rissoles. The dinner of soup, roast fresh beef, boiled salt
junk, and potatoes was, I believe, exactly common to the steerage and
the second cabin; only I have heard it rumoured that our potatoes were
of a superior brand; and twice a week, on pudding days, instead of duff,
we had a saddle-bag filled with currants under the name of a
plum-pudding. At tea we were served with some broken meat from the
saloon; sometimes in the comparatively elegant form of spare patties or
rissoles; but as a general thing mere chicken-bones and flakes of fish,
neither hot nor cold. If these were not the scrapings of plates their
looks belied them sorely; yet we were all too hungry to be proud, and
fell to these leavings greedily. These, the bread, which was excellent,
and the soup and porridge which were both good, formed my whole diet
throughout the voyage; so that except for the broken meat and the
convenience of a table I might as well have been in the steerage
outright. Had they given me porridge again in the evening I should have
been perfectly contented with the fare. As it was, with a few biscuits
and some whisky and water before turning in, I kept my body going and my
spirits up to the mark.
The last particular in which the second cabin passenger remarkably
stands ahead of his brother of the steerage is one altogether of
sentiment. In the steerage there are males and females; in the second
cabin ladies and gentlemen. For some time after I came aboard I thought
I was only a male; but in the course of a voyage of discovery between
decks, I came on a brass plate, and learned that I was still a
gentleman. Nobody knew it, of course. I was lost in the crowd of males
and females, and rigorously confined to the same quarter of the deck.
Who could tell whether I housed on the port or starboard side of
Steerage No. 2 and 3? And it was only there that my superiority became
practical; everywhere else I was incognito, moving among my inferiors
with simplicity, not so much as a swagger to indicate that I was a
gentleman after all, and had broken meat to tea. Still, I was like one
with a patent of nobility in a drawer at home; and when I felt out of
spirits I could go down and refresh myself with a look of that brass
plate.
For all these advantages I paid but two guineas. Six guineas is the
steerage fare; eight that by the second cabin; and when you remember
that the steerage passenger must supply bedding and dishes, and, in five
cases out of ten, either brings some dainties with him, or privately
pays the steward for extra rations, the difference in price becomes
almost nominal. Air comparatively fit to breathe, food comparatively
varied, and the satisfaction of being still privately a gentleman, may
thus be had almost for the asking. Two of my fellow-passengers in the
second cabin had already made the passage by the cheaper fare, and
declared it was an experiment not to be repeated. As I go on to tell
about my steerage friends, the reader will perceive that they were not
alone in their opinion. Out of ten with whom I was more or less
intimate, I am sure not fewer than five vowed, if they returned, to
travel second cabin; and all who had left their wives behind them
assured me they would go without the comfort of their presence until
they could afford to bring them by saloon.
Our party in the second cabin was not perhaps the most interesting on
board. Perhaps even in the saloon there was as much good-will and
character. Yet it had some elements of curiosity. There was a mixed
group of Swedes, Danes, and Norsemen, one of whom, generally known by
the name of "Johnny," in spite of his own protests, greatly diverted us
by his clever, cross-country efforts to speak English, and became on the
strength of that an universal favourite--it takes so little in this
world of shipboard to create a popularity. There was, besides, a Scots
mason known from his favourite dish as "Irish Stew," three or four
nondescript Scots, a fine young Irishman, O'Reilly, and a pair of young
men who deserve a special word of condemnation. One of them was Scots:
the other claimed to be American; admitted, after some fencing, that he
was born in England; and ultimately proved to be an Irishman born and
nurtured, but ashamed to own his country. He had a sister on board, whom
he faithfully neglected throughout the voyage, though she was not only
sick, but much his senior, and had nursed and cared for him in
childhood. In appearance he was like an imbecile Henry the Third of
France. The Scotsman, though perhaps as big an ass, was not so dead of
heart; and I have only bracketed them together because they were fast
friends, and disgraced themselves equally by their conduct at the table.
Next, to turn to topics more agreeable, we had a newly-married couple,
devoted to each other, with a pleasant story of how they had first seen
each other years ago at a preparatory school, and that very afternoon he
had carried her books home for her. I do not know if this story will be
plain to southern readers; but to me it recalls many a school idyll,
with wrathful swains of eight and nine confronting each other
stride-legs, flushed with jealousy; for to carry home a young lady's
books was both a delicate attention and privilege.
Then there was an old lady, or indeed I am not sure that she was as much
old as antiquated and strangely out of place, who had left her husband,
and was travelling all the way to Kansas by herself. We had to take her
own word that she was married; for it was sorely contradicted by the
testimony of her appearance. Nature seemed to have sanctified her for
the single state; even the colour of her hair was incompatible with
matrimony, and her husband, I thought, should be a man of saintly spirit
and phantasmal bodily presence. She was ill, poor thing; her soul
turned from the viands; the dirty tablecloth shocked her like an
impropriety; and the whole strength of her endeavour was bent upon
keeping her watch true to Glasgow time till she should reach New York.
They had heard reports, her husband and she, of some unwarrantable
disparity of hours between these two cities; and with a spirit
commendably scientific, had seized on this occasion to put them to the
proof. It was a good thing for the old lady; for she passed much leisure
time in studying the watch. Once, when prostrated by sickness, she let
it run down. It was inscribed on her harmless mind in letters of adamant
that the hands of a watch must never be turned backwards; and so it
behoved her to lie in wait for the exact moment ere she started it
again. When she imagined this was about due, she sought out one of the
young second-cabin Scotsmen, who was embarked on the same experiment as
herself and had hitherto been less neglectful. She was in quest of two
o'clock; and when she learned it was already seven on the shores of
Clyde, she lifted up her voice and cried "Gravy!" I had not heard this
innocent expletive since I was a young child; and I suppose it must have
been the same with the other Scotsmen present, for we all laughed our
fill.
Last but not least, I come to my excellent friend Mr. Jones. It would be
difficult to say whether I was his right-hand man, or he mine, during
the voyage. Thus at table I carved, while he only scooped gravy; but at
our concerts, of which more anon, he was the president who called up
performers to sing, and I but his messenger who ran his errands and
pleaded privately with the over-modest. I knew I liked Mr. Jones from
the moment I saw him. I thought him by his face to be Scottish; nor
could his accent undeceive me. For as there is a _lingua franca_ of many
tongues on the moles and in the feluccas of the Mediterranean, so there
is a free or common accent among English-speaking men who follow the
sea. They catch a twang in a New England Port; from a cockney skipper,
even a Scotsman sometimes learns to drop an _h_; a word of a dialect is
picked up from another hand in the forecastle; until often the result is
undecipherable, and you have to ask for the man's place of birth. So it
was with Mr. Jones. I thought him a Scotsman who had been long to sea;
and yet he was from Wales, and had been most of his life a blacksmith at
an inland forge; a few years in America and half a score of ocean
voyages having sufficed to modify his speech into the common pattern. By
his own account he was both strong and skilful in his trade. A few years
back, he had been married and after a fashion a rich man; now the wife
was dead and the money gone. But his was the nature that looks forward,
and goes on from one year to another and through all the extremities of
fortune undismayed; and if the sky were to fall to-morrow, I should look
to see Jones, the day following, perched on a step-ladder and getting
things to rights. He was always hovering round inventions like a bee
over a flower, and lived in a dream of patents. He had with him a patent
medicine, for instance, the composition of which he had bought years ago
for five dollars from an American pedlar, and sold the other day for a
hundred pounds (I think it was) to an English apothecary. It was called
Golden Oil; cured all maladies without exception; and I am bound to say
that I partook of it myself with good results. It is a character of the
man that he was not only perpetually dosing himself with Golden Oil, but
wherever there was a head aching or a finger cut, there would be Jones
with his bottle.
If he had one taste more strongly than another, it was to study
character. Many an hour have we two walked upon the deck dissecting our
neighbours in a spirit that was too purely scientific to be called
unkind; whenever a quaint or human trait slipped out in conversation,
you might have seen Jones and me exchanging glances; and we could hardly
go to bed in comfort till we had exchanged notes and discussed the
day's experience. We were then like a couple of anglers comparing a
day's kill. But the fish we angled for were of a metaphysical species,
and we angled as often as not in one another's baskets. Once, in the
midst of a serious talk, each found there was a scrutinising eye upon
himself; I own I paused in embarrassment at this double detection; but
Jones, with a better civility, broke into a peal of unaffected laughter,
and declared, what was the truth, that there was a pair of us indeed.
EARLY IMPRESSIONS
We steamed out of the Clyde on Thursday night, and early on the Friday
forenoon we took in our last batch of emigrants at Lough Foyle, in
Ireland, and said farewell to Europe. The company was now complete, and
began to draw together, by inscrutable magnetisms, upon the deck. There
were Scots and Irish in plenty, a few English, a few Americans, a good
handful of Scandinavians, a German or two, and one Russian; all now
belonging for ten days to one small iron country on the deep.
As I walked the deck and looked round upon my fellow-passengers, thus
curiously assorted from all northern Europe, I began for the first time
to understand the nature of emigration. Day by day throughout the
passage, and thenceforward across all the States, and on to the shores
of the Pacific, this knowledge grew more clear and melancholy.
Emigration, from a word of the most cheerful import, came to sound most
dismally in my ear. There is nothing more agreeable to picture and
nothing more pathetic to behold. The abstract idea, as conceived at
home, is hopeful and adventurous. A young man, you fancy, scorning
restraints and helpers, issues forth into life, that great battle, to
fight for his own hand. The most pleasant stories of ambition, of
difficulties overcome, and of ultimate success, are but as episodes to
this great epic of self-help. The epic is composed of individual
heroisms; it stands to them as the victorious war which subdued an
empire stands to the personal act of bravery which spiked a single
cannon and was adequately rewarded with a medal. For in emigration the
young men enter direct and by the ship-load on their heritage of work;
empty continents swarm, as at the bo's'un's whistle, with industrious
hands, and whole new empires are domesticated to the service of man.
This is the closet picture, and is found, on trial, to consist mostly of
embellishments. The more I saw of my fellow passengers, the less I was
tempted to the lyric note. Comparatively few of the men were below
thirty; many were married, and encumbered with families; not a few were
already up in years; and this itself was out of tune with my
imaginations, for the ideal emigrant should certainly be young. Again, I
thought he should offer to the eye some bold type of humanity, with
bluff or hawk-like features, and the stamp of an eager and pushing
disposition. Now those around me were for the most part quiet, orderly,
obedient citizens, family men broken by adversity, elderly youths who
had failed to place themselves in life, and people who had seen better
days. Mildness was the prevailing character; mild mirth and mild
endurance. In a word, I was not taking part in an impetuous and
conquering sally, such as swept over Mexico or Siberia, but found
myself, like Marmion, "in the lost battle, borne down by the flying."
Labouring mankind had in the last years, and throughout Great Britain,
sustained a prolonged and crushing series of defeats. I had heard
vaguely of these reverses; of whole streets of houses standing deserted
by the Tyne, the cellar-doors broken and removed for firewood; of
homeless men loitering at the street-corners of Glasgow with their
chests beside them; of closed factories, useless strikes, and starving
girls. But I had never taken them home to me or represented these
distresses livingly to my imagination. A turn of the market may be a
calamity as disastrous as the French retreat from Moscow; but it hardly
lends itself to lively treatment, and makes a trifling figure in the
morning papers. We may struggle as we please, we are not born
economists. The individual is more affecting than the mass. It is by
the scenic accidents, and the appeal to the carnal eye, that for the
most part we grasp the significance of tragedies. Thus it was only now,
when I found myself involved in the rout, that I began to appreciate how
sharp had been the battle. We were a company of the rejected; the
drunken, the incompetent, the weak, the prodigal, all who had been
unable to prevail against circumstances in the one land, were now
fleeing pitifully to another; and though one or two might still succeed,
all had already failed. We were a shipful of failures, the broken men of
England. Yet it must not be supposed that these people exhibited
depression. The scene, on the contrary, was cheerful. Not a tear was
shed on board the vessel. All were full of hope for the future, and
showed an inclination to innocent gaiety. Some were heard to sing, and
all began to scrape acquaintance with small jests and ready laughter.
The children found each other out like dogs, and ran about the decks
scraping acquaintance after their fashion also. "What do you call your
mither?" I heard one ask. "Mawmaw," was the reply, indicating, I fancy,
a shade of difference in the social scale. When people pass each other
on the high seas of life at so early an age, the contact is but slight,
and the relation more like what we may imagine to be the friendship of
flies than that of men; it is so quickly joined, so easily dissolved, so
open in its communications and so devoid of deeper human qualities. The
children, I observed, were all in a band, and as thick as thieves at a
fair, while their elders were still ceremoniously manoeuvring on the
outskirts of acquaintance. The sea, the ship, and the seamen were soon
as familiar as home to these half-conscious little ones. It was odd to
hear them, throughout the voyage, employ shore words to designate
portions of the vessel. "Co' 'way doon to yon dyke," I heard one say,
probably meaning the bulwark. I often had my heart in my mouth,
watching them climb into the shrouds or on the rails, while the ship
went swinging through the waves; and I admired and envied the courage of
their mothers, who sat by in the sun and looked on with composure at
these perilous feats. "He'll maybe be a sailor," I heard one remark;
"now's the time to learn." I had been on the point of running forward to
interfere, but stood back at that, reproved. Very few in the more
delicate classes have the nerve to look upon the peril of one dear to
them; but the life of poorer folk, where necessity is so much more
immediate and imperious, braces even a mother to this extreme of
endurance. And perhaps, after all, it is better that the lad should
break his neck than that you should break his spirit.
And since I am here on the chapter of the children, I must mention one
little fellow, whose family belonged to Steerage No. 4 and 5, and who,
wherever he went, was like a strain of music round the ship. He was an
ugly, merry, unbreeched child of three, his lint-white hair in a tangle,
his face smeared with suet and treacle; but he ran to and fro with so
natural a step, and fell and picked himself up again with such grace and
good-humour, that he might fairly be called beautiful when he was in
motion. To meet him, crowing with laughter and beating an accompaniment
to his own mirth with a tin spoon upon a tin cup, was to meet a little
triumph of the human species. Even when his mother and the rest of his
family lay sick and prostrate around him, he sat upright in their midst
and sang aloud in the pleasant heartlessness of infancy.
Throughout the Friday, intimacy among us men made but few advances. We
discussed the probable duration of the voyage, we exchanged pieces of
information, naming our trades, what we hoped to find in the new world,
or what we were fleeing from in the old; and, above all, we condoled
together over the food and the vileness of the steerage. One or two had
been so near famine, that you may say they had run into the ship with
the devil at their heels; and to these all seemed for the best in the
best of possible steamers. But the majority were hugely discontented.
Coming as they did from a country in so low a state as Great Britain,
many of them from Glasgow, which commercially speaking was as good as
dead, and many having long been out of work, I was surprised to find
them so dainty in their notions. I myself lived almost exclusively on
bread, porridge, and soup, precisely as it was supplied to them, and
found it, if not luxurious, at least sufficient. But these working men
were loud in their outcries. It was not "food for human beings," it was
"only fit for pigs," it was "a disgrace." Many of them lived almost
entirely upon biscuit, others on their own private supplies, and some
paid extra for better rations from the ship. This marvellously changed
my notion of the degree of luxury habitual to the artisan. I was
prepared to hear him grumble, for grumbling is the traveller's pastime;
but I was not prepared to find him turn away from a diet which was
palatable to myself. Words I should have disregarded, or taken with a
liberal allowance; but when a man prefers dry biscuit there can be no
question of the sincerity of his disgust.
With one of their complaints I could most heartily sympathise. A single
night of the steerage had filled them with horror. I had myself
suffered, even in my decent second-cabin berth, from the lack of air;
and as the night promised to be fine and quiet, I determined to sleep on
deck, and advised all who complained of their quarters to follow my
example. I dare say a dozen of others agreed to do so, and I thought we
should have been quite a party. Yet, when I brought up my rug about
seven bells, there was no one to be seen but the watch. That chimerical
terror of good night-air, which makes men close their windows, list
their doors, and seal themselves up with their own poisonous
exhalations, had sent all these healthy workmen down below. One would
think we had been brought up in a fever country; yet in England the
most malarious districts are in the bed-chambers.
I felt saddened at this defection, and yet half-pleased to have the
night so quietly to myself. The wind had hauled a little ahead on the
starboard bow, and was dry but chilly. I found a shelter near the
fire-hole, and made myself snug for the night. The ship moved over the
uneven sea with a gentle and cradling movement. The ponderous, organic
labours of the engine in her bowels occupied the mind, and prepared it
for slumber. From time to time a heavier lurch would disturb me as I
lay, and recall me to the obscure borders of consciousness; or I heard,
as it were through a veil, the clear note of the clapper on the brass
and the beautiful sea-cry, "All's well!" I know nothing, whether for
poetry or music, that can surpass the effect of these two syllables in
the darkness of a night at sea.
The day dawned fairly enough, and during the early part we had some
pleasant hours to improve acquaintance in the open air; but towards
nightfall the wind freshened, the rain began to fall, and the sea rose
so high that it was difficult to keep one's footing on the deck. I have
spoken of our concerts. We were indeed a musical ship's company, and
cheered our way into exile with the fiddle, the accordion, and the songs
of all nations. Good, bad, or indifferent--Scottish, English, Irish,
Russian, German or Norse,--the songs were received with generous
applause. Once or twice, a recitation, very spiritedly rendered in a
powerful Scottish accent, varied the proceedings; and once we sought in
vain to dance a quadrille, eight men of us together, to the music of the
violin. The performers were all humorous, frisky fellows, who loved to
cut capers in private life; but as soon as they were arranged for the
dance, they conducted themselves like so many mutes at a funeral. I have
never seen decorum pushed so far; and as this was not expected, the
quadrille was soon whistled down, and the dancers departed under a
cloud. Eight Frenchmen, even eight Englishmen from another rank of
society, would have dared to make some fun for themselves and the
spectators; but the working man, when sober, takes an extreme and even
melancholy view of personal deportment. A fifth-form schoolboy is not
more careful of dignity. He dares not be comical; his fun must escape
from him unprepared, and, above all, it must be unaccompanied by any
physical demonstration. I like his society under most circumstances, but
let me never again join with him in public gambols.
But the impulse to sing was strong, and triumphed over modesty and even
the inclemencies of sea and sky. On this rough Saturday night, we got
together by the main deck-house, in a place sheltered from the wind and
rain. Some clinging to a ladder which led to the hurricane deck, and the
rest knitting arms or taking hands, we made a ring to support the women
in the violent lurching of the ship; and when we were thus disposed,
sang to our hearts' content. Some of the songs were appropriate to the
scene; others strikingly the reverse. Bastard doggrel of the music-hall,
such as, "Around her splendid form, I weaved the magic circle," sounded
bald, bleak, and pitifully silly. "We don't want to fight, but, by
Jingo, if we do," was in some measure saved by the vigour and unanimity
with which the chorus was thrown forth into the night. I observed a
Platt-Deutsch mason, entirely innocent of English, adding heartily to
the general effect. And perhaps the German mason is but a fair example
of the sincerity with which the song was rendered; for nearly all with
whom I conversed upon the subject were bitterly opposed to war, and
attributed their own misfortunes, and frequently their own taste for
whisky, to the campaigns in Zululand and Afghanistan.
Every now and again, however, some song that touched the pathos of our
situation was given forth; and you could hear by the voices that took up
the burden how the sentiment came home to each. "The Anchor's Weighed,"
was true for us. We were indeed "Rocked on the Bosom of the Stormy
Deep." How many of us could say with the singer, "I'm Lonely To-night,
Love, Without You," or, "Go, Someone, and Tell them from me, to write me
a Letter from Home." And when was there a more appropriate moment for
"Auld Lang Syne" than now, when the land, the friends, and the
affections of that mingled but beloved time were fading and fleeing
behind us in the vessel's wake? It pointed forward to the hour when
these labours should be overpast, to the return voyage, and to many a
meeting in the sanded inn, when those who had parted in the spring of
youth should again drink a cup of kindness in their age. Had not Burns
contemplated emigration, I scarce believe he would have found that note.
All Sunday the weather remained wild and cloudy; many were prostrated by
sickness; only five sat down to tea in the second cabin, and two of
these departed abruptly ere the meal was at an end. The Sabbath was
observed strictly by the majority of the emigrants. I heard an old woman
express her surprise that, "The ship didna gae doon," as she saw some
one pass her with a chess-board on the holy day. Some sang Scottish
psalms. Many went to service, and in true Scottish fashion came back ill
pleased with their divine. "I didna think he was an experienced
preacher," said one girl to me.
It was a bleak, uncomfortable day; but at night, by six bells, although
the wind had not yet moderated, the clouds were all wrecked and blown
away behind the rim of the horizon, and the stars came out thickly
overhead. I saw Venus burning as steadily and sweetly across this
hurly-burly of the winds and waters as ever at home upon the summer
woods. The engine pounded, the screw tossed out of the water with a
roar, and shook the ship from end to end; the bows battled with loud
reports against the billows: and as I stood in the lee-scuppers and
looked up to where the funnel leaned out, over my head, vomiting smoke,
and the black and monstrous top-sails blotted, at each lurch, a
different crop of stars, it seemed as if all this trouble were a thing
of small account, and that just above the mast reigned peace unbroken
and eternal.
STEERAGE SCENES
Our companion (Steerage No. 2 and 3) was a favourite resort. Down one
flight of stairs there was a comparatively large open space, the centre
occupied by a hatchway, which made a convenient seat for about twenty
persons, while barrels, coils of rope, and the carpenter's bench
afforded perches for perhaps as many more. The canteen, or steerage bar,
was on one side of the stair; on the other a no less attractive spot,
the cabin of the indefatigable interpreter. I have seen people packed
into this space like herrings in a barrel, and many merry evenings
prolonged there until five bells, when the lights were ruthlessly
extinguished and all must go to roost.
It had been rumoured since Friday that there was a fiddler aboard, who
lay sick and unmelodious in Steerage No. 1; and on the Monday forenoon,
as I came down the companion, I was saluted by something in Strathspey
time. A white-faced Orpheus was cheerily playing to an audience of
white-faced women. It was as much as he could do to play, and some of
his hearers were scarce able to sit; yet they had crawled from their
bunks at the first experimental flourish, and found better than medicine
in the music. Some of the heaviest heads began to nod in time, and a
degree of animation looked from some of the palest eyes. Humanly
speaking, it is a more important matter to play the fiddle, even badly,
than to write huge works upon recondite subjects. What could Mr. Darwin
have done for these sick women? But this fellow scraped away; and the
world was positively a better place for all who heard him. We have yet
to understand the economical value of these mere accomplishments. I
told the fiddler he was a happy man, carrying happiness about with him
in his fiddle-case, and he seemed alive to the fact.
"It is a privilege," I said. He thought a while upon the word, turning
it over in his Scots head, and then answered with conviction, "Yes, a
privilege."
That night I was summoned by "Merrily danced the Quaker's Wife" into the
companion of Steerage No. 4 and 5. This was, properly speaking, but a
strip across a deck-house, lit by a sickly lantern which swung to and
fro with the motion of the ship. Through the open slide-door we had a
glimpse of the grey night sea, with patches of phosphorescent foam
flying, swift as birds, into the wake, and the horizon rising and
falling as the vessel rolled to the wind. In the centre the companion
ladder plunged down sheerly like an open pit. Below, on the first
landing, and lighted by another lamp, lads and lasses danced, not more
than three at a time for lack of space, in jigs and reels, and
hornpipes. Above, on either side, there was a recess railed with iron,
perhaps two feet wide and four long, which stood for orchestra and seats
of honour. In the one balcony, five slatternly Irish lasses sat woven in
a comely group. In the other was posted Orpheus, his body, which was
convulsively in motion, forming an odd contrast to his somnolent,
imperturbable Scots face. His brother, a dark man with a vehement,
interested countenance, who made a god of the fiddler, sat by with open
mouth, drinking in the general admiration and throwing out remarks to
kindle it.
"That's a bonny hornpipe now," he would say; "it's a great favourite
with performers; they dance the sand dance to it." And he expounded the
sand dance. Then suddenly, it would be a long "Hush!" with uplifted
finger and glowing, supplicating eyes; "he's going to play 'Auld Robin
Gray' on one string!" And throughout this excruciating movement,--"On
one string, that's on one string!" he kept crying. I would have given
something myself that it had been on none; but the hearers were much
awed. I called for a tune or two, and thus introduced myself to the
notice of the brother, who directed his talk to me for some little
while, keeping, I need hardly mention, true to his topic, like the
seamen to the star. "He's grand of it," he said confidentially. "His
master was a music-hall man." Indeed, the music-hall man had left his
mark, for our fiddler was ignorant of many of our best old airs; "Logie
o' Buchan," for instance, he only knew as a quick, jigging figure in a
set of quadrilles, and had never heard it called by name. Perhaps, after
all, the brother was the more interesting performer of the two. I have
spoken with him afterwards repeatedly, and found him always the same
quick, fiery bit of a man, not without brains; but he never showed to
such advantage as when he was thus squiring the fiddler into public
note. There is nothing more becoming than a genuine admiration; and it
shares this with love, that it does not become contemptible although
misplaced.
The dancing was but feebly carried on. The space was almost
impracticably small; and the Irish wenches combined the extreme of
bashfulness about this innocent display with a surprising impudence and
roughness of address. Most often, either the fiddle lifted up its voice
unheeded, or only a couple of lads would be footing it and snapping
fingers on the landing. And such was the eagerness of the brother to
display all the acquirements of his idol, and such the sleepy
indifference of the performer, that the tune would as often as not be
changed, and the hornpipe expire into a ballad before the dancers had
cut half a dozen shuffles.
In the meantime, however, the audience had been growing more and more
numerous every moment; there was hardly standing-room round the top of
the companion; and the strange instinct of the race moved some of the
new-comers to close both the doors, so that the atmosphere grew
insupportable. It was a good place, as the saying is, to leave.
The wind hauled ahead with a head sea. By ten at night heavy sprays were
flying and drumming over the forecastle; the companion of Steerage No. 1
had to be closed, and the door of communication through the second cabin
thrown open. Either from the convenience of the opportunity, or because
we had already a number of acquaintances in that part of the ship, Mr.
Jones and I paid it a late visit. Steerage No. 1 is shaped like an
isosceles triangle, the sides opposite the equal angles bulging outward
with the contour of the ship. It is lined with eight pens of sixteen
bunks apiece, four bunks below and four above on either side. At night
the place is lit with two lanterns, one to each table. As the steamer
beat on her way among the rough billows, the light passed through
violent phases of change, and was thrown to and fro and up and down with
startling swiftness. You were tempted to wonder, as you looked, how so
thin a glimmer could control and disperse such solid blackness. When
Jones and I entered we found a little company of our acquaintances
seated together at the triangular foremost table. A more forlorn party,
in more dismal circumstances, it would be hard to imagine. The motion
here in the ship's nose was very violent; the uproar of the sea often
overpoweringly loud. The yellow flicker of the lantern spun round and
round and tossed the shadows in masses. The air was hot, but it struck a
chill from its foetor. From all round in the dark bunks, the scarcely
human noises of the sick joined into a kind of farmyard chorus. In the
midst, these five friends of mine were keeping up what heart they could
in company. Singing was their refuge from discomfortable thoughts and
sensations. One piped, in feeble tones, "Oh why left I my hame?" which
seemed a pertinent question in the circumstances. Another, from the
invisible horrors of a pen where he lay dog-sick upon the upper shelf,
found courage, in a blink of his sufferings, to give us several verses
of the "Death of Nelson"; and it was odd and eerie to hear the chorus
breathe feebly from all sorts of dark corners, and "this day has done
his dooty" rise and fall and be taken up again in this dim _inferno_, to
an accompaniment of plunging, hollow-sounding bows and the rattling
spray-showers overhead.
All seemed unfit for conversation; a certain dizziness had interrupted
the activity of their minds; and except to sing they were tongue-tied.
There was present, however, one tall, powerful fellow of doubtful
nationality, being neither quite Scotsman nor altogether Irish, but of
surprising clearness of conviction on the highest problems. He had gone
nearly beside himself on the Sunday, because of a general backwardness
to indorse his definition of mind as "a living, thinking substance which
cannot be felt, heard, or seen"--nor, I presume, although he failed to
mention it, smelt. Now he came forward in a pause with another
contribution to our culture.
"Just by way of change," said he, "I'll ask you a Scripture riddle.
There's profit in them too," he added ungrammatically.
This was the riddle--
C and P
Did agree
To cut down C;
But C and P
Could not agree
Without the leave of G.
All the people cried to see
The crueltie
Of C and P.
Harsh are the words of Mercury after the songs of Apollo! We were a long
while over the problem, shaking our heads and gloomily wondering how a
man could be such a fool; but at length he put us out of suspense and
divulged the fact that C and P stood for Caiaphas and Pontius Pilate.
I think it must have been the riddle that settled us; but the motion and
the close air likewise hurried our departure. We had not been gone long,
we heard next morning, ere two or even three out of the five fell sick.
We thought it little wonder on the whole, for the sea kept contrary all
night. I now made my bed upon the second cabin floor, where, although I
ran the risk of being stepped upon, I had a free current of air, more or
less vitiated indeed, and running only from steerage to steerage, but at
least not stagnant; and from this couch, as well as the usual sounds of
a rough night at sea, the hateful coughing and retching of the sick and
the sobs of children, I heard a man run wild with terror beseeching his
friend for encouragement. "The ship's going down!" he cried with a
thrill of agony. "The ship's going down!" he repeated, now in a blank
whisper, now with his voice rising towards a sob; and his friend might
reassure him, reason with him, joke at him--all was in vain, and the old
cry came back, "The ship's going down!" There was something panic and
catching in the emotion of his tones; and I saw in a clear flash what an
involved and hideous tragedy was a disaster to an emigrant ship. If this
whole parishful of people came no more to land, into how many houses
would the newspaper carry woe, and what a great part of the web of our
corporate human life would be rent across for ever!
The next morning when I came on deck I found a new world indeed. The
wind was fair; the sun mounted into a cloudless heaven; through great
dark blue seas the ship cut a swathe of curded foam. The horizon was
dotted all day with companionable sails, and the sun shone pleasantly on
the long, heaving deck.
We had many fine-weather diversions to beguile the time. There was a
single chess-board and a single pack of cards. Sometimes as many as
twenty of us would be playing dominoes for love. Feats of dexterity,
puzzles for the intelligence, some arithmetical, some of the same order
as the old problem of the fox and goose and cabbage, were always
welcome; and the latter, I observed, more popular as well as more
conspicuously well done than the former. We had a regular daily
competition to guess the vessel's progress; and twelve o'clock, when the
result was published in the wheel-house, came to be a moment of
considerable interest. But the interest was unmixed. Not a bet was laid
upon our guesses. From the Clyde to Sandy Hook I never heard a wager
offered or taken. We had, besides, romps in plenty. Puss in the Corner,
which we had rebaptised, in more manly style, Devil and four Corners,
was my own favourite game; but there were many who preferred another,
the humour of which was to box a person's ears until he found out who
had cuffed him.
This Tuesday morning we were all delighted with the change of weather,
and in the highest possible spirits. We got in a cluster like bees,
sitting between each other's feet under lee of the deck-houses. Stories
and laughter went around. The children climbed about the shrouds. White
faces appeared for the first time, and began to take on colour from the
wind. I was kept hard at work making cigarettes for one amateur after
another, and my less than moderate skill was heartily admired. Lastly,
down sat the fiddler in our midst and began to discourse his reels, and
jigs, and ballads, with now and then a voice or two to take up the air
and throw in the interest of human speech.
Through this merry and good-hearted scene there came three cabin
passengers, a gentleman and two young ladies, picking their way with
little gracious titters of indulgence, and a Lady-Bountiful air about
nothing, which galled me to the quick. I have little of the radical in
social questions, and have always nourished an idea that one person was
as good as another. But I began to be troubled by this episode. It was
astonishing what insults these people managed to convey by their
presence. They seemed to throw their clothes in our faces. Their eyes
searched us all over for tatters and incongruities. A laugh was ready at
their lips; but they were too well-mannered to indulge it in our
hearing. Wait a bit, till they were all back in the saloon, and then
hear how wittily they would depict the manners of the steerage. We were
in truth very innocently, cheerfully, and sensibly engaged, and there
was no shadow of excuse for the swaying elegant superiority with which
these damsels passed among us, or for the stiff and waggish glances of
their squire. Not a word was said; only when they were gone Mackay
sullenly damned their impudence under his breath; but we were all
conscious of an icy influence and a dead break in the course of our
enjoyment.
STEERAGE TYPES
We had a fellow on board, an Irish-American, for all the world like a
beggar in a print by Callot; one-eyed, with great, splay crow's-feet
round the sockets; a knotty squab nose coming down over his moustache; a
miraculous hat; a shirt that had been white, ay, ages long ago; an
alpaca coat in its last sleeves; and, without hyperbole, no buttons to
his trousers. Even in these rags and tatters, the man twinkled all over
with impudence like a piece of sham jewellery; and I have heard him
offer a situation to one of his fellow-passengers with the air of a
lord. Nothing could overlie such a fellow; a kind of base success was
written on his brow. He was then in his ill days; but I can imagine him
in Congress with his mouth full of bombast and sawder. As we moved in
the same circle, I was brought necessarily into his society. I do not
think I ever heard him say anything that was true, kind, or interesting;
but there was entertainment in the man's demeanour. You might call him a
half-educated Irish Tigg.
Our Russian made a remarkable contrast to this impossible fellow.
Rumours and legends were current in the steerages about his antecedents.
Some said he was a Nihilist escaping; others set him down for a harmless
spendthrift, who had squandered fifty thousand roubles, and whose father
had now despatched him to America by way of penance. Either tale might
flourish in security; there was no contradiction to be feared, for the
hero spoke not one word of English. I got on with him lumberingly enough
in broken German, and learned from his own lips that he had been an
apothecary. He carried the photograph of his betrothed in a pocket-book,
and remarked that it did not do her justice. The cut of his head stood
out from among the passengers with an air of startling strangeness. The
first natural instinct was to take him for a desperado; but although the
features, to our Western eyes, had a barbaric and unhomely cast, the eye
both reassured and touched. It was large and very dark and soft, with an
expression of dumb endurance, as if it had often looked on desperate
circumstances and never looked on them without resolution.
He cried out when I used the word. "No, no," he said, "not resolution."
"The resolution to endure," I explained.
And then he shrugged his shoulders, and said, "_Ach, ja_," with gusto,
like a man who has been flattered in his favourite pretensions. Indeed,
he was always hinting at some secret sorrow; and his life, he said, had
been one of unusual trouble and anxiety; so the legends of the steerage
may have represented at least some shadow of the truth. Once, and once
only, he sang a song at our concerts, standing forth without
embarrassment, his great stature somewhat humped, his long arms
frequently extended, his Kalmuck head thrown backward. It was a suitable
piece of music, as deep as a cow's bellow and wild like the White Sea.
He was struck and charmed by the freedom and sociality of our manners.
At home, he said, no one on a journey would speak to him, but those with
whom he would not care to speak; thus unconsciously involving himself in
the condemnation of his countrymen. But Russia was soon to be changed;
the ice of the Neva was softening under the sun of civilisation; the new
ideas, "_wie eine feine Violine_," were audible among the big, empty
drum-notes of Imperial diplomacy; and he looked to see a great revival,
though with a somewhat indistinct and childish hope.
We had a father and son who made a pair of Jacks-of-all-trades. It was
the son who sang the "Death of Nelson" under such contrarious
circumstances. He was by trade a shearer of ship plates; but he could
touch the organ, and led two choirs, and played the flute and piccolo in
a professional string band. His repertory of songs was, besides,
inexhaustible, and ranged impartially from the very best to the very
worst within his reach. Nor did he seem to make the least distinction
between these extremes, but would cheerfully follow up "Tom Bowling"
with "Around her splendid form."
The father, an old, cheery, small piece of manhood, could do everything
connected with tinwork from one end of the process to the other, use
almost every carpenter's tool, and make picture frames to boot. "I sat
down with silver plate every Sunday," said he, "and pictures on the
wall. I have made enough money to be rolling in my carriage. But, sir,"
looking at me unsteadily with his bright rheumy eyes, "I was troubled
with a drunken wife." He took a hostile view of matrimony in
consequence. "It's an old saying," he remarked: "God made 'em, and the
devil he mixed 'em."
I think he was justified by his experience. It was a dreary story. He
would bring home three pounds on Saturday, and on Monday all the clothes
would be in pawn. Sick of the useless struggle, he gave up a paying
contract, and contented himself with small and ill-paid jobs. "A bad job
was as good as a good job for me," he said; "it all went the same way."
Once the wife showed signs of amendment; she kept steady for weeks on
end; it was again worth while to labour and to do one's best. The
husband found a good situation some distance from home, and, to make a
little upon every hand, started the wife in a cook-shop; the children
were here and there, busy as mice; savings began to grow together in the
bank, and the golden age of hope had returned again to that unhappy
family. But one week my old acquaintance, getting earlier through with
his work, came home on the Friday instead of the Saturday, and there was
his wife to receive him, reeling drunk. He "took and gave her a pair o'
black eyes," for which I pardon him, nailed up the cook-shop door, gave
up his situation, and resigned himself to a life of poverty, with the
workhouse at the end. As the children came to their full age they fled
the house, and established themselves in other countries; some did well,
some not so well; but the father remained at home alone with his drunken
wife, all his sound-hearted pluck and varied accomplishments depressed
and negatived.
Was she dead now? or, after all these years, had he broken the chain,
and run from home like a schoolboy? I could not discover which; but here
at least he was, out on the adventure, and still one of the bravest and
most youthful men on board.
"Now, I suppose, I must put my old bones to work again," said he; "but I
can do a turn yet."
And the son to whom he was going, I asked, was he not able to support
him?
"Oh, yes," he replied. "But I'm never happy without a job on hand. And
I'm stout; I can eat a'most anything. You see no craze about me."
This tale of a drunken wife was paralleled on board by another of a
drunken father. He was a capable man, with a good chance in life; but he
had drunk up two thriving businesses like a bottle of sherry, and
involved his sons along with him in ruin. Now they were on board with
us, fleeing his disastrous neighbourhood.
Total abstinence, like all ascetical conclusions, is unfriendly to the
most generous, cheerful, and human parts of man; but it could have
adduced many instances and arguments from among our ship's company. I
was one day conversing with a kind and happy Scotsman, running to fat
and perspiration in the physical, but with a taste for poetry and a
genial sense of fun. I had asked him his hopes in emigrating. They were
like those of so many others, vague and unfounded: times were bad at
home; they were said to have a turn for the better in the States; and a
man could get on anywhere, he thought. That was precisely the weak
point of his position; for if he could get on in America, why could he
not do the same in Scotland? But I never had the courage to use that
argument, though it was often on the tip of my tongue, and instead I
agreed with him heartily, adding, with reckless originality, "If the man
stuck to his work, and kept away from drink."
"Ah!" said he slowly, "the drink! You see, that's just my trouble."
He spoke with a simplicity that was touching, looking at me at the same
time with something strange and timid in his eye, half-ashamed,
half-sorry, like a good child who knows he should be beaten. You would
have said he recognised a destiny to which he was born, and accepted the
consequences mildly. Like the merchant Abudah, he was at the same time
fleeing from his destiny and carrying it along with him, the whole at an
expense of six guineas.
As far as I saw, drink, idleness, and incompetency were the three great
causes of emigration; and for all of them, and drink first and foremost,
this trick of getting transported overseas appears to me the silliest
means of cure. You cannot run away from a weakness; you must some time
fight it out or perish; and if that be so, why not now, and where you
stand? _Coelum non animam_. Change Glenlivet for Bourbon, and it is
still whisky, only not so good. A sea-voyage will not give a man the
nerve to put aside cheap pleasure; emigration has to be done before we
climb the vessel; an aim in life is the only fortune worth the finding;
and it is not to be found in foreign lands, but in the heart itself.
Speaking generally, there is no vice of this kind more contemptible than
another; for each is but a result and outward sign of a soul tragically
shipwrecked. In the majority of cases, cheap pleasure is resorted to by
way of anodyne. The pleasure-seeker sets forth upon life with high and
difficult ambitions; he meant to be nobly good and nobly happy, though
at as little pains as possible to himself; and it is because all has
failed in his celestial enterprise that you now behold him rolling in
the garbage. Hence the comparative success of the teetotal pledge;
because to a man who had nothing it sets at least a negative aim in
life. Somewhat as prisoners beguile their days by taming a spider, the
reformed drunkard makes an interest out of abstaining from intoxicating
drinks, and may live for that negation. There is something, at least,
_not to be done_ each day; and a cold triumph awaits him every evening.
We had one on board with us, whom I have already referred to under the
name of Mackay, who seemed to me not only a good instance of this
failure in life of which we have been speaking, but a good type of the
intelligence which here surrounded me. Physically he was a small
Scotsman, standing a little back as though he were already carrying the
elements of a corporation, and his looks somewhat marred by the
smallness of his eyes. Mentally, he was endowed above the average. There
were but few subjects on which he could not converse with understanding
and a dash of wit; delivering himself slowly and with gusto like a man
who enjoyed his own sententiousness. He was a dry, quick, pertinent
debater, speaking with a small voice, and swinging on his heels to
launch and emphasise an argument. When he began a discussion, he could
not bear to leave it off, but would pick the subject to the bone,
without once relinquishing a point. An engineer by trade, Mackay
believed in the unlimited perfectibility of all machines except the
human machine. The latter he gave up with ridicule for a compound of
carrion and perverse gases. He had an appetite for disconnected facts
which I can only compare to the savage taste for beads. What is called
information was indeed a passion with the man, and he not only delighted
to receive it, but could pay you back in kind.
With all these capabilities, here was Mackay, already no longer young,
on his way to a new country, with no prospects, no money, and but little
hope. He was almost tedious in the cynical disclosures of his despair.
"The ship may go down for me," he would say, "now or to-morrow. I have
nothing to lose and nothing to hope." And again: "I am sick of the whole
damned performance." He was, like the kind little man already quoted,
another so-called victim of the bottle. But Mackay was miles from
publishing his weakness to the world; laid the blame of his failure on
corrupt masters and a corrupt State policy; and after he had been one
night overtaken and had played the buffoon in his cups, sternly, though
not without tact, suppressed all reference to his escapade. It was a
treat to see him manage this: the various jesters withered under his
gaze, and you were forced to recognise in him a certain steely force,
and a gift of command which might have ruled a senate.
In truth it was not whisky that had ruined him; he was ruined long
before for all good human purposes but conversation. His eyes were
sealed by a cheap, school-book materialism. He could see nothing in the
world but money and steam-engines. He did not know what you meant by the
word happiness. He had forgotten the simple emotions of childhood, and
perhaps never encountered the delights of youth. He believed in
production, that useful figment of economy, as if it had been real like
laughter; and production, without prejudice to liquor, was his god and
guide. One day he took me to task--a novel cry to me--upon the
over-payment of literature. Literary men, he said, were more highly paid
than artisans; yet the artisan made threshing machines and
butter-churns, and the man of letters, except in the way of a few useful
handbooks, made nothing worth the while. He produced a mere fancy
article. Mackay's notion of a book was "Hoppus's Measurer." Now in my
time I have possessed and even studied that work; but if I were to be
left to-morrow on Juan Fernandez, Hoppus's is not the book that I
should choose for my companion volume.
I tried to fight the point with Mackay. I made him own that he had taken
pleasure in reading books otherwise, to his view, insignificant; but he
was too wary to advance a step beyond the admission. It was in vain for
me to argue that here was pleasure ready-made and running from the
spring, whereas his ploughs and butter-churns were but means and
mechanisms to give men the necessary food and leisure before they start
upon the search for pleasure; he jibbed and ran away from such
conclusions. The thing was different, he declared, and nothing was
serviceable but what had to do with food. "Eat, eat, eat!" he cried;
"that's the bottom and the top." By an odd irony of circumstance, he
grew so much interested in this discussion that he let the hour slip by
unnoticed and had to go without his tea. He had enough sense and humour,
indeed he had no lack of either, to have chuckled over this himself in
private; and even to me he referred to it with the shadow of a smile.
Mackay was a hot bigot. He would not hear of religion. I have seen him
waste hours of time in argument with all sorts of poor human creatures
who understood neither him nor themselves, and he had had the boyishness
to dissect and criticise even so small a matter as the riddler's
definition of mind. He snorted aloud with zealotry and the lust for
intellectual battle. Anything, whatever it was, that seemed to him
likely to discourage the continued passionate production of corn and
steam-engines he resented like a conspiracy against the people. Thus,
when I put in the plea for literature, that it was only in good books,
or in the society of the good, that a man could get help in his conduct,
he declared I was in a different world from him. "Damn my conduct!" said
he. "I have given it up for a bad job. My question is, 'Can I drive a
nail?'" And he plainly looked upon me as one who was insidiously
seeking to reduce the people's annual bellyful of corn and
steam-engines.
It may be argued that these opinions spring from the defect of culture;
that a narrow and pinching way of life not only exaggerates to a man the
importance of material conditions, but indirectly, by denying him the
necessary books and leisure, keeps his mind ignorant of larger thoughts;
and that hence springs this overwhelming concern about diet, and hence
the bald view of existence professed by Mackay. Had this been an English
peasant the conclusion would be tenable. But Mackay had most of the
elements of a liberal education. He had skirted metaphysical and
mathematical studies. He had a thoughtful hold of what he knew, which
would be exceptional among bankers. He had been brought up in the midst
of hot-house piety, and told, with incongruous pride, the story of his
own brother's deathbed ecstasies. Yet he had somehow failed to fulfil
himself, and was adrift like a dead thing among external circumstances,
without hope or lively preference or shaping aim. And further, there
seemed a tendency among many of his fellows to fall into the same blank
and unlovely opinions. One thing, indeed, is not to be learned in
Scotland, and that is, the way to be happy. Yet that is the whole of
culture, and perhaps two-thirds of morality. Can it be that the Puritan
school, by divorcing a man from nature, by thinning out his instincts,
and setting a stamp of its disapproval on whole fields of human activity
and interest, leads at last directly to material greed?
Nature is a good guide through life, and the love of simple pleasures
next, if not superior, to virtue; and we had on board an Irishman who
based his claim to the widest and most affectionate popularity precisely
upon these two qualities, that he was natural and happy. He boasted a
fresh colour, a tight little figure, unquenchable gaiety, and
indefatigable good-will. His clothes puzzled the diagnostic mind, until
you heard he had been once a private coachman, when they became
eloquent, and seemed a part of his biography. His face contained the
rest, and, I fear, a prophecy of the future; the hawk's nose above
accorded so ill with the pink baby's mouth below. His spirit and his
pride belonged, you might say, to the nose: while it was the general
shiftlessness expressed by the other that had thrown him from situation
to situation, and at length on board the emigrant ship. Barney ate, so
to speak, nothing from the galley; his own tea, butter, and eggs
supported him throughout the voyage; and about mealtime you might often
find him up to the elbows in amateur cookery. His was the first voice
heard singing among all the passengers; he was the first who fell to
dancing. From Loch Foyle to Sandy Hook, there was not a piece of fun
undertaken but there was Barney in the midst.
You ought to have seen him when he stood up to sing at our concerts--his
tight little figure stepping to and fro, and his feet shuffling to the
air, his eyes seeking and bestowing encouragement--and to have enjoyed
the bow, so nicely calculated between jest and earnest, between grace
and clumsiness, with which he brought each song to a conclusion. He was
not only a great favourite among ourselves, but his songs attracted the
lords of the saloon, who often leaned to hear him over the rails of the
hurricane-deck. He was somewhat pleased, but not at all abashed, by this
attention; and one night, in the midst of his famous performance of
"Billy Keogh," I saw him spin half round in a pirouette and throw an
audacious wink to an old gentleman above.
This was the more characteristic, as, for all his daffing, he was a
modest and very polite little fellow among ourselves.
He would not hurt the feelings of a fly, nor throughout the passage did
he give a shadow of offence; yet he was always, by his innocent freedoms
and love of fun, brought upon that narrow margin where politeness must
be natural to walk without a fall. He was once seriously angry, and that
in a grave, quiet manner, because they supplied no fish on Friday; for
Barney was a conscientious Catholic. He had likewise strict notions of
refinement; and when, late one evening, after the women had retired, a
young Scotsman struck up an indecent song, Barney's drab clothes were
immediately missing from the group. His taste was for the society of
gentlemen, of whom, with the reader's permission, there was no lack in
our five steerages and second cabin; and he avoided the rough and
positive with a girlish shrinking. Mackay, partly from his superior
powers of mind, which rendered him incomprehensible, partly from his
extreme opinions, was especially distasteful to the Irishman. I have
seen him slink off, with backward looks of terror and offended delicacy,
while the other, in his witty, ugly way, had been professing hostility
to God, and an extreme theatrical readiness to be shipwrecked on the
spot. These utterances hurt the little coachman's modesty like a bad
word.
THE SICK MAN
One night Jones, the young O'Reilly, and myself were walking arm-in-arm
and briskly up and down the deck. Six bells had rung; a head-wind blew
chill and fitful, the fog was closing in with a sprinkle of rain, and
the fog-whistle had been turned on, and now divided time with its
unwelcome outcries, loud like a bull, thrilling and intense like a
mosquito. Even the watch lay somewhere snugly out of sight.
For some time we observed something lying black and huddled in the
scuppers, which at last heaved a little and moaned aloud. We ran to the
rails. An elderly man, but whether passenger or seaman it was impossible
in the darkness to determine, lay grovelling on his belly in the wet
scuppers, and kicking feebly with his outspread toes. We asked him what
was amiss, and he replied incoherently, with a strange accent and in a
voice unmanned by terror, that he had cramp in the stomach, that he had
been ailing all day, had seen the doctor twice, and had walked the deck
against fatigue till he was overmastered and had fallen where we found
him.
Jones remained by his side, while O'Reilly and I hurried off to seek the
doctor. We knocked in vain at the doctor's cabin; there came no reply;
nor could we find anyone to guide us. It was no time for delicacy; so we
ran once more forward; and I, whipping up a ladder and touching my hat
to the officer of the watch, addressed him as politely as I could--
"I beg your pardon, sir; but there is a man lying bad with cramp in the
lee scuppers; and I can't find the doctor."
He looked at me peeringly in the darkness; and then, somewhat harshly,
"Well, _I_ can't leave the bridge, my man," said he.
"No, sir; but you can tell me what to do," I returned.
"Is it one of the crew?" he asked.
"I believe him to be a fireman," I replied.
I dare say officers are much annoyed by complaints and alarmist
information from their freight of human creatures; but certainly,
whether it was the idea that the sick man was one of the crew, or from
something conciliatory in my address, the officer in question was
immediately relieved and mollified; and speaking in a voice much freer
from constraint, advised me to find a steward and despatch him in quest
of the doctor, who would now be in the smoking-room over his pipe.
One of the stewards was often enough to be found about this hour down
our companion, Steerage No. 2 and 3; that was his smoking-room of a
night. Let me call him Blackwood. O'Reilly and I rattled down the
companion, breathing hurry; and in his short-sleeves and perched across
the carpenter's bench upon one thigh, found Blackwood; a neat, bright,
dapper, Glasgow-looking man, with a bead of an eye and a rank twang in
his speech. I forget who was with him, but the pair were enjoying a
deliberate talk over their pipes. I dare say he was tired with his day's
work, and eminently comfortable at that moment; and the truth is, I did
not stop to consider his feelings, but told my story in a breath.
"Steward," said I, "there's a man lying bad with cramp, and I can't find
the doctor."
He turned upon me as pert as a sparrow, but with a black look that is
the prerogative of man; and taking his pipe out of his mouth--
"That's none of my business," said he. "I don't care."
I could have strangled the little ruffian where he sat. The thought of
his cabin civility and cabin tips filled me with indignation. I glanced
at O'Reilly; he was pale and quivering, and looked like assault and
battery, every inch of him. But we had a better card than violence.
"You will have to make it your business," said I, "for I am sent to you
by the officer on the bridge."
Blackwood was fairly tripped. He made no answer, but put out his pipe,
gave me one murderous look, and set off upon his errand strolling. From
that day forward, I should say, he improved to me in courtesy, as though
he had repented his evil speech and were anxious to leave a better
impression.
When we got on deck again, Jones was still beside the sick man; and two
or three late stragglers had gathered round and were offering
suggestions. One proposed to give the patient water, which was promptly
negatived. Another bade us hold him up; he himself prayed to be let lie;
but as it was at least as well to keep him off the streaming decks,
O'Reilly and I supported him between us. It was only by main force that
we did so, and neither an easy nor an agreeable duty; for he fought in
his paroxysms like a frightened child, and moaned miserably when he
resigned himself to our control.
"O let me lie!" he pleaded. "I'll no' get better anyway." And then with
a moan that went to my heart, "O why did I come upon this miserable
journey?"
I was reminded of the song which I had heard a little while before in
the close, tossing steerage: "O why left I my hame?"
Meantime Jones, relieved of his immediate charge, had gone off to the
galley, where we could see a light. There he found a belated cook
scouring pans by the radiance of two lanterns, and one of these he
sought to borrow. The scullion was backward. "Was it one of the crew?"
he asked. And when Jones, smitten with my theory, had assured him that
it was a fireman, he reluctantly left his scouring and came towards us
at an easy pace, with one of the lanterns swinging from his finger. The
light, as it reached the spot, showed us an elderly man, thick-set, and
grizzled with years; but the shifting and coarse shadows concealed from
us the expression and even the design of his face.
So soon as the cook set eyes on him he gave a sort of whistle.
"_It's only a passenger!_" said he; and turning about, made, lantern and
all, for the galley.
"He's a man anyway," cried Jones in indignation.
"Nobody said he was a woman," said a gruff voice, which I recognised for
that of the bo's'un.
All this while there was no word of Blackwood or the doctor; and now the
officer came to our side of the ship and asked, over the hurricane-deck
rails, if the doctor were not yet come. We told him not.
"No?" he repeated with a breathing of anger; and we saw him hurry aft in
person.
Ten minutes after the doctor made his appearance deliberately enough and
examined our patient with the lantern. He made little of the case, had
the man brought aft to the dispensary, dosed him, and sent him forward
to his bunk. Two of his neighbours in the steerage had now come to our
assistance, expressing loud sorrow that such "a fine cheery body" should
be sick; and these, claiming a sort of possession, took him entirely
under their own care. The drug had probably relieved him, for he
struggled no more, and was led along plaintive and patient, but
protesting. His heart recoiled at the thought of the steerage. "O let me
lie down upon the bieldy side," he cried; "O dinna take me down!" And
again: "O why did ever I come upon this miserable voyage?" And yet once
more, with a gasp and a wailing prolongation of the fourth word: "I had
no _call_ to come." But there he was; and by the doctor's order and the
kind force of his two shipmates disappeared down the companion of
Steerage No. 1 into the den allotted him.
At the foot of our own companion, just where I had found Blackwood,
Jones and the bo's'un were now engaged in talk. This last was a gruff,
cruel-looking seaman, who must have passed near half a century upon the
seas; square-headed, goat-bearded, with heavy blonde eyebrows, and an
eye without radiance, but inflexibly steady and hard. I had not
forgotten his rough speech; but I remembered also that he had helped us
about the lantern; and now seeing him in conversation with Jones, and
being choked with indignation, I proceeded to blow off my steam.
"Well," said I, "I make you my compliments upon your steward," and
furiously narrated what had happened.
"I've nothing to do with him," replied the bo's'un. "They're all alike.
They wouldn't mind if they saw you all lying dead one upon the top of
another."
This was enough. A very little humanity went a long way with me after
the experience of the evening. A sympathy grew up at once between the
bo's'un and myself; and that night, and during the next few days, I
learned to appreciate him better. He was a remarkable type, and not at
all the kind of man you find in books. He had been at Sebastopol under
English colours; and again in a States ship, "after the _Alabama_, and
praying God we shouldn't find her." He was a high Tory and a high
Englishman. No manufacturer could have held opinions more hostile to the
working man and his strikes. "The workmen," he said, "think nothing of
their country. They think of nothing but themselves. They're damned
greedy, selfish fellows." He would not hear of the decadence of England.
"They say they send us beef from America," he argued: "but who pays for
it? All the money in the world's in England." The Royal Navy was the
best of possible services, according to him. "Anyway the officers are
gentlemen," said he; "and you can't get hazed to death by a damned
non-commissioned ---- as you can in the army." Among nations, England
was the first; then came France. He respected the French navy and liked
the French people; and if he were forced to make a new choice in life,
"by God, he would try Frenchmen!" For all his looks and rough, cold
manners, I observed that children were never frightened by him; they
divined him at once to be a friend; and one night when he had chalked
his hand and went about stealthily setting his mark on people's clothes,
it was incongruous to hear this formidable old salt chuckling over his
boyish monkey trick.
In the morning, my first thought was of the sick man. I was afraid I
should not recognise him, so baffling had been the light of the lantern;
and found myself unable to decide if he were Scots, English, or Irish.
He had certainly employed north-country words and elisions; but the
accent and the pronunciation seemed unfamiliar and incongruous in my
ear.
To descend on an empty stomach into Steerage No. 1 was an adventure that
required some nerve. The stench was atrocious; each respiration tasted
in the throat like some horrible kind of cheese; and the squalid aspect
of the place was aggravated by so many people worming themselves into
their clothes in the twilight of the bunks. You may guess if I was
pleased, not only for him, but for myself also, when I heard that the
sick man was better and had gone on deck.
The morning was raw and foggy, though the sun suffused the fog with pink
and amber; the fog-horn still blew, stertorous and intermittent; and to
add to the discomfort, the seamen were just beginning to wash down the
decks. But for a sick man this was heaven compared to the steerage. I
found him standing on the hot-water pipe, just forward of the saloon
deck-house. He was smaller than I had fancied, and plain-looking; but
his face was distinguished by strange and fascinating eyes, limpid grey
from a distance, but, when looked into, full of changing colours and
grains of gold. His manners were mild and uncompromisingly plain; and I
soon saw that, when once started, he delighted to talk. His accent and
language had been formed in the most natural way, since he was born in
Ireland, had lived a quarter of a century on the banks of the Tyne, and
was married to a Scots wife. A fisherman in the season, he had fished
the east coast from Fisherrow to Whitby. When the season was over, and
the great boats, which required extra hands, were once drawn up on shore
till the next spring, he worked as a labourer about chemical furnaces,
or along the wharves unloading vessels. In this comparatively humble way
of life he had gathered a competence, and could speak of his comfortable
house, his hayfield, and his garden. On this ship, where so many
accomplished artisans were fleeing from starvation, he was present on a
pleasure trip to visit a brother in New York.
Ere he started, he informed me, he had been warned against the steerage
and the steerage fare, and recommended to bring with him a ham and tea
and a spice loaf. But he laughed to scorn such counsels. "_I'm_ not
afraid," he had told his adviser, "_I'll_ get on for ten days. I've not
been a fisherman for nothing." For it is no light matter, as he reminded
me, to be in an open boat, perhaps waist-deep with herrings, day
breaking with a scowl, and for miles on every hand lee-shores, unbroken,
iron-bound, surf-beat, with only here and there an anchorage where you
dare not lie, or a harbour impossible to enter with the wind that blows.
The life of a North Sea fisher is one long chapter of exposure and hard
work and insufficient fare; and even if he makes land at some bleak
fisher port, perhaps the season is bad or his boat has been unlucky,
and after fifty hours' unsleeping vigilance and toil, not a shop will
give him credit for a loaf of bread. Yet the steerage of the emigrant
ship had been too vile for the endurance of a man thus rudely trained.
He had scarce eaten since he came on board, until the day before, when
his appetite was tempted by some excellent pea-soup. We were all much of
the same mind on board, and beginning with myself, had dined upon
pea-soup not wisely but too well; only with him the excess had been
punished, perhaps because he was weakened by former abstinence, and his
first meal had resulted in a cramp. He had determined to live henceforth
on biscuit; and when, two months later, he should return to England, to
make the passage by saloon. The second cabin, after due inquiry, he
scouted as another edition of the steerage.
He spoke apologetically of his emotion when ill. "Ye see, I had no call
to be here," said he; "and I thought it was by with me last night. I've
a good house at home, and plenty to nurse me, and I had no real call to
leave them." Speaking of the attentions he had received from his
shipmates generally, "They were all so kind," he said, "that there's
none to mention." And except in so far as I might share in this, he
troubled me with no reference to my services.
But what affected me in the most lively manner was the wealth of this
day-labourer, paying a two months' pleasure visit to the States, and
preparing to return in the saloon, and the new testimony rendered by his
story, not so much to the horrors of the steerage as to the habitual
comfort of the working classes. One foggy, frosty December evening, I
encountered on Liberton Hill, near Edinburgh, an Irish labourer trudging
homeward from the fields. Our roads lay together, and it was natural
that we should fall into talk. He was covered with mud; an inoffensive,
ignorant creature, who thought the Atlantic cable was a secret
contrivance of the masters the better to oppress labouring mankind; and
I confess I was astonished to learn that he had nearly three hundred
pounds in the bank. But this man had travelled over most of the world,
and enjoyed wonderful opportunities on some American railroad, with two
dollars a shift and double pay on Sunday and at night; whereas my
fellow-passenger had never quitted Tyneside, and had made all that he
possessed in that same accursed, down-falling England, whence skilled
mechanics, engineers, millwrights, and carpenters were fleeing as from
the native country of starvation.
Fitly enough, we slid off on the subject of strikes and wages and hard
times. Being from the Tyne, and a man who had gained and lost in his own
pocket by these fluctuations, he had much to say, and held strong
opinions on the subject. He spoke sharply of the masters, and, when I
led him on, of the men also. The masters had been selfish and
obstructive; the men selfish, silly, and light-headed. He rehearsed to
me the course of a meeting at which he had been present, and the
somewhat long discourse which he had there pronounced, calling into
question the wisdom and even the good faith of the Union delegates; and
although he had escaped himself through flush times and starvation times
with a handsomely provided purse, he had so little faith in either man
or master, and so profound a terror for the unerring Nemesis of
mercantile affairs, that he could think of no hope for our country
outside of a sudden and complete political subversion. Down must go
Lords and Church and Army; and capital, by some happy direction, must
change hands from worse to better, or England stood condemned. Such
principles, he said, were growing "like a seed."
From this mild, soft, domestic man, these words sounded unusually
ominous and grave. I had heard enough revolutionary talk among my
workmen fellow-passengers; but most of it was hot and turgid, and fell
discredited from the lips of unsuccessful men. This man was calm; he had
attained prosperity and ease; he disapproved the policy which had been
pursued by labour in the past; and yet this was his panacea,--to rend
the old country from end to end, and from top to bottom, and in clamour
and civil discord remodel it with the hand of violence.
THE STOWAWAYS
On the Sunday, among a party of men who were talking in our companion,
Steerage No. 2 and 3, we remarked a new figure. He wore tweed clothes,
well enough made if not very fresh, and a plain smoking-cap. His face
was pale, with pale eyes, and spiritedly enough designed; but though not
yet thirty, a sort of blackguardly degeneration had already overtaken
his features. The fine nose had grown fleshy towards the point, the pale
eyes were sunk in fat. His hands were strong and elegant; his experience
of life evidently varied; his speech full of pith and verve; his manners
forward, but perfectly presentable. The lad who helped in the second
cabin told me, in answer to a question, that he did not know who he was,
but thought, "by his way of speaking, and because he was so polite, that
he was some one from the saloon."
I was not so sure, for to me there was something equivocal in his air
and bearing. He might have been, I thought, the son of some good family
who had fallen early into dissipation and run from home. But, making
every allowance, how admirable was his talk! I wish you could have heard
him tell his own stories. They were so swingingly set forth, in such
dramatic language, and illustrated here and there by such luminous bits
of acting, that they could only lose in any reproduction. There were
tales of the P. and O. Company, where he had been an officer; of the
East Indies, where in former years he had lived lavishly; of the Royal
Engineers, where he had served for a period; and of a dozen other sides
of life, each introducing some vigorous thumb-nail portrait. He had the
talk to himself that night, we were all so glad to listen. The best
talkers usually address themselves to some particular society; there
they are kings, elsewhere camp-followers, as a man may know Russian and
yet be ignorant of Spanish; but this fellow had a frank, headlong power
of style, and a broad, human choice of subject, that would have turned
any circle in the world into a circle of hearers. He was a Homeric
talker, plain, strong, and cheerful; and the things and the people of
which he spoke became readily and clearly present to the minds of those
who heard him. This, with a certain added colouring of rhetoric and
rodomontade, must have been the style of Burns, who equally charmed the
ears of duchesses and hostlers.
Yet freely and personally as he spoke, many points remained obscure in
his narration. The Engineers, for instance, was a service which he
praised highly; it is true there would be trouble with the sergeants;
but then the officers were gentlemen, and his own, in particular, one
among ten thousand. It sounded so far exactly like an episode in the
rakish, topsy-turvy life of such an one as I had imagined. But then
there came incidents more doubtful, which showed an almost impudent
greed after gratuities, and a truly impudent disregard for truth. And
then there was the tale of his departure. He had wearied, it seems, of
Woolwich, and one fine day, with a companion, slipped up to London for a
spree. I have a suspicion that spree was meant to be a long one; but God
disposes all things; and one morning, near Westminster Bridge, whom
should he come across but the very sergeant who had recruited him at
first! What followed? He himself indicated cavalierly that he had then
resigned. Let us put it so. But these resignations are sometimes very
trying.
At length, after having delighted us for hours, he took himself away
from the companion; and I could ask Mackay who and what he was. "That?"
said Mackay. "Why, that's one of the stowaways."
"No man," said the same authority, "who has had anything to do with the
sea, would ever think of paying for a passage." I give the statement as
Mackay's, without endorsement; yet I am tempted to believe that it
contains a grain of truth; and if you add that the man shall be impudent
and thievish, or else dead-broke, it may even pass for a fair
representation of the facts. We gentlemen of England who live at home at
ease have, I suspect, very insufficient ideas on the subject. All the
world over, people are stowing away in coal-holes and dark corners, and
when ships are once out to sea, appearing again, begrimed and bashful,
upon deck. The career of these sea-tramps partakes largely of the
adventurous. They may be poisoned by coal-gas, or die by starvation in
their place of concealment; or when found they may be clapped at once
and ignominiously into irons, thus to be carried to their promised land,
the port of destination, and alas! brought back in the same way to that
from which they started, and there delivered over to the magistrates and
the seclusion of a county jail. Since I crossed the Atlantic, one
miserable stowaway was found in a dying state among the fuel, uttered
but a word or two, and departed for a farther country than America.
When the stowaway appears on deck, he has but one thing to pray for:
that he be set to work, which is the price and sign of his forgiveness.
After half an hour with a swab or a bucket, he feels himself as secure
as if he had paid for his passage. It is not altogether a bad thing for
the company, who get more or less efficient hands for nothing but a few
plates of junk and duff; and every now and again find themselves better
paid than by a whole family of cabin passengers. Not long ago, for
instance, a packet was saved from nearly certain loss by the skill and
courage of a stowaway engineer. As was no more than just, a handsome
subscription rewarded him for his success; but even without such
exceptional good fortune, as things stand in England and America, the
stowaway will often make a good profit out of his adventure. Four
engineers stowed away last summer on the same ship, the _Circassia_; and
before two days after their arrival each of the four had found a
comfortable berth. This was the most hopeful tale of emigration that I
heard from first to last; and as you see, the luck was for stowaways.
My curiosity was much inflamed by what I heard; and the next morning, as
I was making the round of the ship, I was delighted to find the ex-Royal
Engineer engaged in washing down the white paint of a deck house. There
was another fellow at work beside him, a lad not more than twenty, in
the most miraculous tatters, his handsome face sown with grains of
beauty and lighted up by expressive eyes. Four stowaways had been found
aboard our ship before she left the Clyde; but these two had alone
escaped the ignominy of being put ashore. Alick, my acquaintance of last
night, was Scots by birth, and by trade a practical engineer; the other
was from Devonshire, and had been to sea before the mast. Two people
more unlike by training, character, and habits it would be hard to
imagine; yet here they were together, scrubbing paint.
Alick had held all sorts of good situations, and wasted many
opportunities in life. I have heard him end a story with these words:
"That was in my golden days, when I used finger-glasses." Situation
after situation failed him; then followed the depression of trade, and
for months he had hung round with other idlers, playing marbles all day
in the West Park, and going home at night to tell his landlady how he
had been seeking for a job. I believe this kind of existence was not
unpleasant to Alick himself, and he might have long continued to enjoy
idleness and a life on tick; but he had a comrade, let us call him
Brown, who grew restive. This fellow was continually threatening to slip
his cable for the States, and at last, one Wednesday, Glasgow was left
widowed of her Brown. Some months afterwards, Alick met another old
chum in Sauchiehall Street.
"By the bye, Alick," said he, "I met a gentleman in New York who was
asking for you."
"Who was that?" asked Alick.
"The new second engineer on board the _So-and-So_," was the reply.
"Well, and who is he?"
"Brown, to be sure."
For Brown had been one of the fortunate quartette aboard the
_Circassia_. If that was the way of it in the States, Alick thought it
was high time to follow Brown's example. He spent his last day, as he
put it, "reviewing the yeomanry," and the next morning says he to his
landlady, "Mrs. X., I'll not take porridge to-day, please; I'll take
some eggs."
"Why, have you found a job?" she asked, delighted.
"Well, yes," returned the perfidious Alick; "I think I'll start to-day."
And so, well lined with eggs, start he did, but for America. I am afraid
that landlady has seen the last of him.
It was easy enough to get on board in the confusion that attends a
vessel's departure; and in one of the dark corners of Steerage No. 1,
flat in a bunk and with an empty stomach, Alick made the voyage from the
Broomielaw to Greenock. That night, the ship's yeoman pulled him out by
the heels and had him before the mate. Two other stowaways had already
been found and sent ashore; but by this time darkness had fallen, they
were out in the middle of the estuary, and the last steamer had left
them till the morning.
"Take him to the forecastle and give him a meal," said the mate, "and
see and pack him off the first thing to-morrow."
In the forecastle he had supper, a good night's rest and breakfast, and
was sitting placidly with a pipe, fancying all was over and the game up
for good with that ship, when one of the sailors grumbled out an oath at
him, with a "What are you doing there?" and "Do you call that hiding,
anyway?" There was need of no more: Alick was in another bunk before the
day was older. Shortly before the passengers arrived, the ship was
cursorily inspected. He heard the round come down the companion and look
into one pen after another, until they came within two of the one in
which he lay concealed. Into these last two they did not enter, but
merely glanced from without; and Alick had no doubt that he was
personally favoured in this escape. It was the character of the man to
attribute nothing to luck and but little to kindness; whatever happened
to him he had earned in his own right amply; favours came to him from
his singular attraction and adroitness, and misfortunes he had always
accepted with his eyes open. Half an hour after the searchers had
departed, the steerage began to fill with legitimate passengers, and the
worst of Alick's troubles was at an end. He was soon making himself
popular, smoking other people's tobacco, and politely sharing their
private stock of delicacies, and when night came, he retired to his bunk
beside the others with composure.
Next day by afternoon, Lough Foyle being already far behind, and only
the rough north-western hills of Ireland within view, Alick appeared on
deck to court inquiry and decide his fate. As a matter of fact, he was
known to several on board, and even intimate with one of the engineers;
but it was plainly not the etiquette of such occasions for the
authorities to avow their information. Every one professed surprise and
anger on his appearance, and he was led prisoner before the captain.
"What have you got to say for yourself?" inquired the captain.
"Not much," said Alick; "but when a man has been a long time out of a
job, he will do things he would not under other circumstances."
"Are you willing to work?"
Alick swore he was burning to be useful.
"And what can you do?" asked the captain.
He replied composedly that he was a brass-fitter by trade.
"I think you will be better at engineering?" suggested the officer, with
a shrewd look.
"No, sir," says Alick simply.--"There's few can beat me at a lie," was
his engaging commentary to me as he recounted the affair.
"Have you been to sea?" again asked the captain.
"I've had a trip on a Clyde steamboat, sir, but no more," replied the
unabashed Alick.
"Well, we must try and find some work for you," concluded the officer.
And hence we behold Alick, clear of the hot engine-room, lazily scraping
paint and now and then taking a pull upon a sheet. "You leave me alone,"
was his deduction. "When I get talking to a man, I can get round him."
The other stowaway, whom I will call the Devonian--it was noticeable
that neither of them told his name--had both been brought up and seen
the world in a much smaller way. His father, a confectioner, died and
was closely followed by his mother. His sisters had taken, I think, to
dressmaking. He himself had returned from sea about a year ago and gone
to live with his brother, who kept the "George Hotel"--"it was not quite
a real hotel," added the candid fellow--"and had a hired man to mind the
horses." At first the Devonian was very welcome; but as time went on his
brother not unnaturally grew cool towards him, and he began to find
himself one too many at the "George Hotel." "I don't think brothers care
much for you," he said, as a general reflection upon life. Hurt at this
change, nearly penniless, and too proud to ask for more, he set off on
foot and walked eighty miles to Weymouth, living on the journey as he
could. He would have enlisted, but he was too small for the army and too
old for the navy; and thought himself fortunate at last to find a berth
on board a trading dandy. Somewhere in the Bristol Channel the dandy
sprung a leak and went down; and though the crew were picked up and
brought ashore by fishermen, they found themselves with nothing but the
clothes upon their back. His next engagement was scarcely better
starred; for the ship proved so leaky, and frightened them all so
heartily during a short passage through the Irish Sea, that the entire
crew deserted and remained behind upon the quays of Belfast.
Evil days were now coming thick on the Devonian. He could find no berth
in Belfast, and had to work a passage to Glasgow on a steamer. She
reached the Broomielaw on a Wednesday: the Devonian had a bellyful that
morning, laying in breakfast manfully to provide against the future, and
set off along the quays to seek employment. But he was now not only
penniless, his clothes had begun to fall in tatters; he had begun to
have the look of a street Arab; and captains will have nothing to say to
a ragamuffin; for in that trade, as in all others, it is the coat that
depicts the man. You may hand, reef, and steer like an angel, but if you
have a hole in your trousers, it is like a millstone round your neck.
The Devonian lost heart at so many refusals. He had not the impudence to
beg; although, as he said, "when I had money of my own, I always gave
it." It was only on Saturday morning, after three whole days of
starvation, that he asked a scone from a milkwoman, who added of her own
accord a glass of milk. He had now made up his mind to stow away, not
from any desire to see America, but merely to obtain the comfort of a
place in the forecastle and a supply of familiar sea-fare. He lived by
begging, always from milkwomen, and always scones and milk, and was not
once refused. It was vile wet weather, and he could never have been
dry. By night he walked the streets, and by day slept upon Glasgow
Green, and heard, in the intervals of his dozing, the famous theologians
of the spot clear up intricate points of doctrine and appraise the
merits of the clergy. He had not much instruction; he could "read bills
on the street," but was "main bad at writing"; yet these theologians
seemed to have impressed him with a genuine sense of amusement. Why he
did not go to the Sailors' Home I know not; I presume there is in
Glasgow one of these institutions, which are by far the happiest and the
wisest effort of contemporaneous charity; but I must stand to my author,
as they say in old books, and relate the story as I heard it. In the
meantime, he had tried four times to stow away in different vessels, and
four times had been discovered and handed back to starvation. The fifth
time was lucky; and you may judge if he were pleased to be aboard ship
again, at his old work, and with duff twice a week. He was, said Alick,
"a devil for the duff." Or if devil was not the word, it was one if
anything stronger.
The difference in the conduct of the two was remarkable. The Devonian
was as willing as any paid hand, swarmed aloft among the first, pulled
his natural weight and firmly upon a rope, and found work for himself
when there was none to show him. Alick, on the other hand, was not only
a skulker in the grain, but took a humorous and fine gentlemanly view of
the transaction. He would speak to me by the hour in ostentatious
idleness; and only if the bo's'un or a mate came by, fell-to languidly
for just the necessary time till they were out of sight. "I'm not
breaking my heart with it," he remarked.
Once there was a hatch to be opened near where he was stationed; he
watched the preparations for a second or so suspiciously, and then,
"Hullo," said he, "here's some real work coming--I'm off," and he was
gone that moment. Again, calculating the six guinea passage-money, and
the probable duration of the passage, he remarked pleasantly that he was
getting six shillings a day for this job, "and it's pretty dear to the
company at that." "They are making nothing by me," was another of his
observations; "they're making something by that fellow." And he pointed
to the Devonian, who was just then busy to the eyes.
The more you saw of Alick, the more, it must be owned, you learned to
despise him. His natural talents were of no use either to himself or
others; for his character had degenerated like his face, and become
pulpy and pretentious. Even his power of persuasion, which was certainly
very surprising, stood in some danger of being lost or neutralised by
over-confidence. He lied in an aggressive, brazen manner, like a pert
criminal in the dock; and he was so vain of his own cleverness that he
could not refrain from boasting, ten minutes after, of the very trick by
which he had deceived you. "Why, now I have more money than when I came
on board," he said one night, exhibiting a sixpence, "and yet I stood
myself a bottle of beer before I went to bed yesterday. And as for
tobacco, I have fifteen sticks of it." That was fairly successful
indeed; yet a man of his superiority, and with a less obtrusive policy,
might, who knows? have got the length of half a crown. A man who prides
himself upon persuasion should learn the persuasive faculty of silence,
above all as to his own misdeeds. It is only in the farce and for
dramatic purposes that Scapin enlarges on his peculiar talents to the
world at large.
Scapin is perhaps a good name for this clever, unfortunate Alick; for at
the bottom of all his misconduct there was a guiding sense of humour
that moved you to forgive him. It was more than half as a jest that he
conducted his existence. "Oh, man," he said to me once with unusual
emotion, like a man thinking of his mistress, "I would give up anything
for a lark."
It was in relation to his fellow-stowaway that Alick showed the best,
or perhaps I should say the only good, points of his nature. "Mind you,"
he said suddenly, changing his tone, "mind you, that's a good boy. He
wouldn't tell you a lie. A lot of them think he is a scamp because his
clothes are ragged, but he isn't; he's as good as gold." To hear him,
you become aware that Alick himself had a taste for virtue. He thought
his own idleness and the other's industry equally becoming. He was no
more anxious to insure his own reputation as a liar than to uphold the
truthfulness of his companion; and he seemed unaware of what was
incongruous in his attitude, and was plainly sincere in both characters.
It was not surprising that he should take an interest in the Devonian,
for the lad worshipped and served him in love and wonder. Busy as he
was, he would find time to warn Alick of an approaching officer, or even
to tell him that the coast was clear, and he might slip off and smoke a
pipe in safety. "Tom," he once said to him, for that was the name which
Alick ordered him to use, "if you don't like going to the galley, I'll
go for you. You ain't used to this kind of thing, you ain't. But I'm a
sailor; and I can understand the feelings of any fellow, I can." Again,
he was hard up, and casting about for some tobacco, for he was not so
liberally used in this respect as others perhaps less worthy, when Alick
offered him the half of one of his fifteen sticks. I think, for my part,
he might have increased the offer to a whole one, or perhaps a pair of
them, and not lived to regret his liberality. But the Devonian refused.
"No," he said, "you're a stowaway like me; I won't take it from you,
I'll take it from some one who's not down on his luck."
It was notable in this generous lad that he was strongly under the
influence of sex. If a woman passed near where he was working, his eyes
lit up, his hand paused, and his mind wandered instantly to other
thoughts. It was natural that he should exercise a fascination
proportionally strong upon women. He begged, you will remember, from
women only, and was never refused. Without wishing to explain away the
charity of those who helped him, I cannot but fancy he may have owed a
little to his handsome face, and to that quick, responsive nature formed
for love, which speaks eloquently through all disguises, and can stamp
an impression in ten minutes' talk or an exchange of glances. He was the
more dangerous in that he was far from bold, but seemed to woo in spite
of himself, and with a soft and pleading eye. Ragged as he was, and many
a scarecrow is in that respect more comfortably furnished, even on board
he was not without some curious admirers.
There was a girl among the passengers, a tall, blonde, handsome,
strapping Irishwoman, with a wild, accommodating eye, whom Alick had
dubbed Tommy, with that transcendental appropriateness that defies
analysis. One day the Devonian was lying for warmth in the upper
stoke-hole, which stands open on the deck, when Irish Tommy came past,
very neatly attired, as was her custom.
"Poor fellow," she said, stopping, "you haven't a vest."
"No," he said; "I wish I 'ad."
Then she stood and gazed on him in silence, until, in his embarrassment,
for he knew not how to look under this scrutiny, he pulled out his pipe
and began to fill it with tobacco.
"Do you want a match?" she asked. And before he had time to reply, she
ran off and presently returned with more than one.
That was the beginning and the end, as far as our passage is concerned,
of what I will make bold to call this love-affair. There are many
relations which go on to marriage and last during a lifetime, in which
less human feeling is engaged than in this scene of five minutes at the
stoke-hole.
Rigidly speaking, this would end the chapter of the stowaways; but in a
larger sense of the word I have yet more to add. Jones had discovered
and pointed out to me a young woman who was remarkable among her fellows
for a pleasing and interesting air. She was poorly clad, to the verge,
if not over the line, of disrespectability, with a ragged old jacket and
a bit of a sealskin cap no bigger than your fist; but her eyes, her
whole expression, and her manner, even in ordinary moments, told of a
true womanly nature, capable of love, anger, and devotion. She had a
look, too, of refinement, like one who might have been a better lady
than most, had she been allowed the opportunity. When alone she seemed
preoccupied and sad; but she was not often alone; there was usually by
her side a heavy, dull, gross man in rough clothes, chary of speech and
gesture--not from caution, but poverty of disposition; a man like a
ditcher, unlovely and uninteresting; whom she petted and tended and
waited on with her eyes as if he had been Amadis of Gaul. It was strange
to see this hulking fellow dog-sick, and this delicate, sad woman caring
for him. He seemed, from first to last, insensible of her caresses and
attentions, and she seemed unconscious of his insensibility. The Irish
husband, who sang his wife to sleep, and this Scottish girl serving her
Orson, were the two bits of human nature that most appealed to me
throughout the voyage.
On the Thursday before we arrived, the tickets were collected; and soon
a rumour began to go round the vessel; and this girl, with her bit of
sealskin cap, became the centre of whispering and pointed fingers. She
also, it was said, was a stowaway of a sort; for she was on board with
neither ticket nor money; and the man with whom she travelled was the
father of a family, who had left wife and children to be hers. The
ship's officers discouraged the story, which may therefore have been a
story and no more; but it was believed in the steerage, and the poor
girl had to encounter many curious eyes from that day forth.
PERSONAL EXPERIENCE AND REVIEW
Travel is of two kinds; and this voyage of mine across the ocean
combined both. "Out of my country and myself I go," sings the old poet:
and I was not only travelling out of my country in latitude and
longitude, but out of myself in diet, associates, and consideration.
Part of the interest and a great deal of the amusement flowed, at least
to me, from this novel situation in the world.
I found that I had what they call fallen in life with absolute success
and verisimilitude. I was taken for a steerage passenger; no one seemed
surprised that I should be so; and there was nothing but the brass plate
between decks to remind me that I had once been a gentleman. In a former
book, describing a former journey, I expressed some wonder that I could
be readily and naturally taken for a pedlar, and explained the accident
by the difference of language and manners between England and France. I
must now take a humbler view; for here I was among my own countrymen,
somewhat roughly clad, to be sure, but with every advantage of speech
and manner; and I am bound to confess that I passed for nearly anything
you please except an educated gentleman. The sailors called me "mate,"
the officers addressed me as "my man," my comrades accepted me without
hesitation for a person of their own character and experience, but with
some curious information. One, a mason himself, believed I was a mason;
several, and among these at least one of the seamen, judged me to be a
petty officer in the American navy; and I was so often set down for a
practical engineer that at last I had not the heart to deny it. From all
these guesses I drew one conclusion, which told against the insight of
my companions. They might be close observers in their own way, and read
the manners in the face; but it was plain that they did not extend their
observation to the hands.
To the saloon passengers also I sustained my part without a hitch. It is
true I came little in their way; but when we did encounter, there was no
recognition in their eye, although I confess I sometimes courted it in
silence. All these, my inferiors and equals, took me, like the
transformed monarch in the story, for a mere common, human man. They
gave me a hard, dead look, with the flesh about the eye kept unrelaxed.
With the women this surprised me less, as I had already experimented on
the sex by going abroad through a suburban part of London simply attired
in a sleeve-waistcoat. The result was curious. I then learned for the
first time, and by the exhaustive process, how much attention ladies are
accustomed to bestow on all male creatures of their own station; for, in
my humble rig, each one who went by me caused me a certain shock of
surprise and a sense of something wanting. In my normal circumstances,
it appeared, every young lady must have paid me some passing tribute of
a glance; and though I had often been unconscious of it when given, I
was well aware of its absence when it was withheld. My height seemed to
decrease with every woman who passed me, for she passed me like a dog.
This is one of my grounds for supposing that what are called the upper
classes may sometimes produce a disagreeable impression in what are
called the lower; and I wish some one would continue my experiment, and
find out exactly at what stage of toilette a man becomes invisible to
the well-regulated female eye.
Here on shipboard the matter was put to a more complete test; for, even
with the addition of speech and manner, I passed among the ladies for
precisely the average man of the steerage. It was one afternoon that I
saw this demonstrated. A very plainly dressed woman was taken ill on
deck. I think I had the luck to be present at every sudden seizure
during all the passage; and on this occasion found myself in the place
of importance, supporting the sufferer. There was not only a large crowd
immediately around us, but a considerable knot of saloon passengers
leaning over our heads from the hurricane-deck. One of these, an elderly
managing woman, hailed me with counsels. Of course I had to reply; and
as the talk went on, I began to discover that the whole group took me
for the husband. I looked upon my new wife, poor creature, with mingled
feelings; and I must own she had not even the appearance of the poorest
class of city servant-maids, but looked more like a country wench who
should have been employed at a roadside inn. Now was the time for me to
go and study the brass plate.
To such of the officers as knew about me--the doctor, the purser, and
the stewards--I appeared in the light of a broad joke. The fact that I
spent the better part of my day in writing had gone abroad over the ship
and tickled them all prodigiously. Whenever they met me they referred to
my absurd occupation with familiarity and breadth of humorous intention.
Their manner was well calculated to remind me of my fallen fortunes. You
may be sincerely amused by the amateur literary efforts of a gentleman,
but you scarce publish the feeling to his face. "Well!" they would say;
"still writing?" And the smile would widen into a laugh. The purser came
one day into the cabin, and, touched to the heart by my misguided
industry, offered me some other kind of writing, "for which," he added
pointedly, "you will be paid." This was nothing else than to copy out
the list of passengers.
Another trick of mine which told against my reputation was my choice of
roosting-place in an active draught upon the cabin floor. I was openly
jeered and flouted for this eccentricity; and a considerable knot would
sometimes gather at the door to see my last dispositions for the night.
This was embarrassing, but I learned to support the trial with
equanimity.
Indeed I may say that, upon the whole, my new position sat lightly and
naturally upon my spirits. I accepted the consequences with readiness,
and found them far from difficult to bear. The steerage conquered me; I
conformed more and more to the type of the place, not only in manner but
at heart, growing hostile to the officers and cabin passengers who
looked down upon me, and day by day greedier for small delicacies. Such
was the result, as I fancy, of a diet of bread and butter, soup and
porridge. We think we have no sweet tooth as long as we are full to the
brim of molasses; but a man must have sojourned in the workhouse before
he boasts himself indifferent to dainties. Every evening, for instance,
I was more and more preoccupied about our doubtful fare at tea. If it
was delicate my heart was much lightened; if it was but broken fish I
was proportionally downcast. The offer of a little jelly from a
fellow-passenger more provident than myself caused a marked elevation in
my spirits. And I would have gone to the ship's end and back again for
an oyster or a chipped fruit.
In other ways I was content with my position. It seemed no disgrace to
be confounded with my company; for I may as well declare at once I found
their manners as gentle and becoming as those of any other class. I do
not mean that my friends could have sat down without embarrassment and
laughable disaster at the table of a duke. That does not imply an
inferiority of breeding, but a difference of usage. Thus I flatter
myself that I conducted myself well among my fellow-passengers; yet my
most ambitious hope is not to have avoided faults, but to have committed
as few as possible. I know too well that my tact is not the same as
their tact, and that my habit of a different society constituted, not
only no qualification, but a positive disability to move easily and
becomingly in this. When Jones complimented me--because I "managed to
behave very pleasantly" to my fellow-passengers, was how he put it--I
could follow the thought in his mind, and knew his compliment to be such
as we pay foreigners on their proficiency in English. I dare say this
praise was given me immediately on the back of some unpardonable
solecism, which had led him to review my conduct as a whole. We are all
ready to laugh at the ploughman among lords; we should consider also the
case of a lord among the ploughmen. I have seen a lawyer in the house of
a Hebridean fisherman; and I know, but nothing will induce me to
disclose, which of these two was the better gentleman. Some of our
finest behaviour, though it looks well enough from the boxes, may seem
even brutal to the gallery. We boast too often manners that are
parochial rather than universal; that, like a country wine, will not
bear transportation for a hundred miles, nor from the parlour to the
kitchen. To be a gentleman is to be one all the world over, and in every
relation and grade of society. It is a high calling, to which a man must
first be born, and then devote himself for life. And, unhappily, the
manners of a certain so-called upper grade have a kind of currency, and
meet with a certain external acceptation throughout all the others, and
this tends to keep us well satisfied with slight acquirements and the
amateurish accomplishments of a clique. But manners, like art, should be
human and central.
Some of my fellow-passengers, as I now moved among them in a relation of
equality, seemed to me excellent gentlemen. They were not rough, nor
hasty, nor disputatious; debated pleasantly, differed kindly; were
helpful, gentle, patient, and placid. The type of manners was plain, and
even heavy; there was little to please the eye, but nothing to shock;
and I thought gentleness lay more nearly at the spring of behaviour than
in many more ornate and delicate societies. I say delicate, where I
cannot say refined; a thing may be fine, like ironwork, without being
delicate, like lace. There was here less delicacy; the skin supported
more callously the natural surface of events, the mind received more
bravely the crude facts of human existence; but I do not think that
there was less effective refinement, less consideration for others, less
polite suppression of self. I speak of the best among my
fellow-passengers; for in the steerage, as well as in the saloon, there
is a mixture. Those, then, with whom I found myself in sympathy, and of
whom I may therefore hope to write with a greater measure of truth, were
not only as good in their manners, but endowed with very much the same
natural capacities, and about as wise in deduction, as the bankers and
barristers of what is called society. One and all were too much
interested in disconnected facts, and loved information for its own sake
with too rash a devotion; but people in all classes display the same
appetite as they gorge themselves daily with the miscellaneous gossip of
the newspaper. Newspaper-reading, as far as I can make out, is often
rather a sort of brown study than an act of culture. I have myself
palmed off yesterday's issue on a friend, and seen him re-peruse it for
a continuance of minutes with an air at once refreshed and solemn.
Workmen, perhaps, pay more attention; but though they may be eager
listeners, they have rarely seemed to me either willing or careful
thinkers. Culture is not measured by the greatness of the field which is
covered by our knowledge, but by the nicety with which we can perceive
relations in that field, whether great or small. Workmen, certainly
those who were on board with me, I found wanting in this quality or
habit of the mind. They did not perceive relations, but leaped to a
so-called cause, and thought the problem settled. Thus the cause of
everything in England was the form of government, and the cure for all
evils was, by consequence, a revolution. It is surprising how many of
them said this, and that none should have had a definite thought in his
head as he said it. Some hated the Church because they disagreed with
it; some hated Lord Beaconsfield because of war and taxes; all hated
the masters, possibly with reason. But these feelings were not at the
root of the matter; the true reasoning of their souls ran thus--I have
not got on; I ought to have got on; if there was a revolution I should
get on. How? They had no idea. Why? Because--because--well, look at
America!
To be politically blind is no distinction; we are all so, if you come to
that. At bottom, as it seems to me, there is but one question in modern
home politics, though it appears in many shapes, and that is the
question of money; and but one political remedy, that the people should
grow wiser and better. My workmen fellow-passengers were as impatient
and dull of hearing on the second of these points as any member of
Parliament; but they had some glimmerings of the first. They would not
hear of improvement on their part, but wished the world made over again
in a crack, so that they might remain improvident and idle and
debauched, and yet enjoy the comfort and respect that should accompany
the opposite Virtues; and it was in this expectation, as far as I could
see, that many of them were now on their way to America. But on the
point of money they saw clearly enough that inland politics, so far as
they were concerned, were reducible to the question of annual income; a
question which should long ago have been settled by a revolution, they
did not know how, and which they were now about to settle for
themselves, once more they knew not how, by crossing the Atlantic in a
steamship of considerable tonnage.
And yet it has been amply shown them that the second or income question
is in itself nothing, and may as well be left undecided, if there be no
wisdom and virtue to profit by the change. It is not by a man's purse,
but by his character, that he is rich or poor. Barney will be poor,
Alick will be poor, Mackay will be poor; let them go where they will,
and wreck all the governments under heaven; they will be poor until they
die.
Nothing is perhaps more notable in the average workman than his
surprising idleness, and the candour with which he confesses to the
failing. It has to me been always something of a relief to find the
poor, as a general rule, so little oppressed with work. I can in
consequence enjoy my own more fortunate beginning with a better grace.
The other day I was living with a farmer in America, an old
frontiersman, who had worked and fought, hunted and farmed, from his
childhood up. He excused himself for his defective education on the
ground that he had been overworked from first to last. Even now, he
said, anxious as he was, he had never the time to take up a book. In
consequence of this, I observed him closely; he was occupied for four
or, at the extreme outside, for five hours out of the twenty-four, and
then principally in walking; and the remainder of the day he passed in
sheer idleness, either eating fruit or standing with his back against
the door. I have known men do hard literary work all morning, and then
undergo quite as much physical fatigue by way of relief as satisfied
this powerful frontiersman for the day. He, at least, like all the
educated class, did so much homage to industry as to persuade himself he
was industrious. But the average mechanic recognises his idleness with
effrontery; he has even, as I am told, organised it.
I give the story as it was told me, and it was told me for a fact. A man
fell from a housetop in the city of Aberdeen, and was brought into
hospital with broken bones. He was asked what was his trade, and replied
that he was a _tapper_. No one had ever heard of such a thing before;
the officials were filled with curiosity; they besought an explanation.
It appeared that when a party of slaters were engaged upon a roof, they
would now and then be taken with a fancy for the public-house. Now a
seamstress, for example, might slip away from her work and no one be the
wiser; but if these fellows adjourned, the tapping of the mallets would
cease, and thus the neighbourhood be advertised of their defection.
Hence the career of the tapper. He has to do the tapping and keep up an
industrious bustle on the housetop during the absence of the slaters.
When he taps for only one or two the thing is child's-play, but when he
has to represent a whole troop, it is then that he earns his money in
the sweat of his brow. Then must he bound from spot to spot,
reduplicate, triplicate, sexduplicate his single personality, and swell
and hasten his blows, until he produce a perfect illusion for the ear,
and you would swear that a crowd of emulous masons were continuing
merrily to roof the house. It must be a strange sight from an upper
window.
I heard nothing on board of the tapper; but I was astonished at the
stories told by my companions. Skulking, shirking, malingering, were all
established tactics, it appeared. They could see no dishonesty when a
man who is paid for an hour's work gives half an hour's consistent
idling in its place. Thus the tapper would refuse to watch for the
police during a burglary, and call himself an honest man. It is not
sufficiently recognised that our race detests to work. If I thought that
I should have to work every day of my life as hard as I am working now,
I should be tempted to give up the struggle. And the workman early
begins on his career of toil. He has never had his fill of holidays in
the past, and his prospect of holidays in the future is both distant and
uncertain. In the circumstance it would require a high degree of virtue
not to snatch alleviations for the moment.
There were many good talkers on the ship; and I believe good talking of
a certain sort is a common accomplishment among working men. Where books
are comparatively scarce, a greater amount of information will be given
and received by word of mouth; and this tends to produce good talkers,
and, what is no less needful for conversation, good listeners. They
could all tell a story with effect. I am sometimes tempted to think that
the less literary class show always better in narration; they have so
much more patience with detail, are so much less hurried to reach the
points, and preserve so much juster a proportion among the facts. At the
same time their talk is dry; they pursue a topic ploddingly, have not an
agile fancy, do not throw sudden lights from unexpected quarters, and
when the talk is over they often leave the matter where it was. They
mark time instead of marching. They think only to argue, not to reach
new conclusions, and use their reason rather as a weapon of offence than
as a tool for self-improvement. Hence the talk of some of the cleverest
was unprofitable in result, because there was no give and take; they
would grant you as little as possible for premise, and begin to dispute
under an oath to conquer or to die.
But the talk of a workman is apt to be more interesting than that of a
wealthy merchant, because the thoughts, hopes, and fears of which the
workman's life is built lie nearer to necessity and nature. They are
more immediate to human life. An income calculated by the week is a far
more human thing than one calculated by the year, and a small income,
simply from its smallness, than a large one. I never wearied listening
to the details of a workman's economy, because every item stood for some
real pleasure. If he could afford pudding twice a week, you know that
twice a week the man ate with genuine gusto and was physically happy;
while if you learn that a rich man has seven courses a day, ten to one
the half of them remain untasted, and the whole is but misspent money
and a weariness to the flesh.
The difference between England and America to a working man was thus
most humanly put to me by a fellow-passenger: "In America," said he,
"you get pies and puddings." I do not hear enough, in economy books, of
pies and pudding. A man lives in and for the delicacies, adornments, and
accidental attributes of life, such as pudding to eat, and pleasant
books and theatres to occupy his leisure. The bare terms of existence
would be rejected with contempt by all. If a man feeds on bread and
butter, soup and porridge, his appetite grows wolfish after dainties.
And the workman dwells in a borderland, and is always within sight of
those cheerless regions where life is more difficult to sustain than
worth sustaining. Every detail of our existence, where it is worth while
to cross the ocean after pie and pudding, is made alive and enthralling
by the presence of genuine desire; but it is all one to me whether
Croesus has a hundred or a thousand thousands in the bank. There is more
adventure in the life of the working man who descends as a common
soldier into the battle of life, than in that of the millionaire who
sits apart in an office, like Von Moltke, and only directs the
manoeuvres by telegraph. Give me to hear about the career of him who is
in the thick of the business; to whom one change of market means an
empty belly, and another a copious and savoury meal. This is not the
philosophical, but the human side of economics; it interests like a
story; and the life of all who are thus situated partakes in a small way
of the charm of "Robinson Crusoe"; for every step is critical, and human
life is presented to you naked and verging to its lowest terms.
NEW YORK
As we drew near to New York I was at first amused and then somewhat
staggered, by the cautions and the grisly tales that went the round. You
would have thought we were to land upon a cannibal island. You must
speak to no one in the streets, as they would not leave you till you
were rooked and beaten. You must enter a hotel with military
precautions; for the least you had to apprehend was to awake next
morning without money or baggage, or necessary raiment, a lone forked
radish in a bed; and if the worst befell, you would instantly and
mysteriously disappear from the ranks of mankind.
I have usually found such stories correspond to the least modicum of
fact. Thus I was warned, I remember, against the roadside inns of the
Cévennes, and that by a learned professor; and when I reached Pradelles
the warning was explained; it was but the far-away rumour and
reduplication of a single terrifying story already half a century old,
and half forgotten in the theatre of the events. So I was tempted to
make light of these reports against America. But we had on board with us
a man whose evidence it would not do to put aside. He had come near
these perils in the body; he had visited a robber inn. The public has an
old and well-grounded favour for this class of incident, and shall be
gratified to the best of my power.
My fellow-passenger, whom we shall call M'Naughten, had come from New
York to Boston with a comrade, seeking work. They were a pair of
rattling blades; and, leaving their baggage at the station, passed the
day in beer saloons, and with congenial spirits, until midnight struck.
Then they applied themselves to find a lodging, and walked the streets
till two, knocking at houses of entertainment and being refused
admittance, or themselves declining the terms. By two the inspiration of
their liquor had begun to wear off; they were weary and humble, and
after a great circuit found themselves in the same street where they had
begun their search, and in front of a French hotel where they had
already sought accommodation. Seeing the house still open, they returned
to the charge. A man in a white cap sat in an office by the door. He
seemed to welcome them more warmly than when they had at first presented
themselves, and the charge for the night had somewhat unaccountably
fallen from a dollar to a quarter. They thought him ill-looking, but
paid their quarter apiece, and were shown upstairs to the top of the
house. There, in a small room, the man in the white cap wished them
pleasant slumbers.
The room was furnished with a bed, a chair, and some conveniences. The
door did not lock on the inside; and the only sign of adornment was a
couple of framed pictures, one close above the head of the bed, and the
other opposite the foot, and both curtained, as we may sometimes see
valuable water-colours, or the portraits of the dead, or works of art
more than usually skittish in the subject. It was perhaps in the hope of
finding something of this last description that M'Naughten's comrade
pulled aside the curtain of the first. He was startlingly disappointed.
There was no picture. The frame surrounded, and the curtain was designed
to hide, an oblong aperture in the partition, through which they looked
forth into the dark corridor. A person standing without could easily
take a purse from under the pillow, or even strangle a sleeper as he lay
abed. M'Naughten and his comrade stared at each other like Balboa and
his men, "with a wild surmise"; and then the latter, catching up the
lamp, ran to the other frame and roughly raised the curtain. There he
stood, petrified; and M'Naughten, who had followed, grasped him by the
wrist in terror. They could see into another room, larger in size than
that which they occupied, where three men sat crouching and silent in
the dark. For a second or so these five persons looked each other in the
eyes, then the curtain was dropped, and M'Naughten and his friend made
but one bolt of it out of the room and down the stairs. The man in the
white cap said nothing as they passed him; and they were so pleased to
be once more in the open night that they gave up all notion of a bed,
and walked the streets of Boston till the morning.
No one seemed much cast down by these stories, but all inquired after
the address of a respectable hotel; and I, for my part, put myself under
the conduct of Mr. Jones. Before noon of the second Sunday we sighted
the low shores outside of New York harbour; the steerage passengers must
remain on board to pass through Castle Garden on the following morning;
but we of the second cabin made our escape along with the lords of the
saloon; and by six o'clock Jones and I issued into West Street, sitting
on some straw in the bottom of an open baggage-waggon. It rained
miraculously; and from that moment till on the following night I left
New York, there was scarcely a lull, and no cessation of the downpour.
The roadways were flooded; a loud strident noise of falling water filled
the air; the restaurants smelt heavily of wet people and wet clothing.
It took us but a few minutes, though it cost us a good deal of money, to
be rattled along West Street to our destination: "Reunion House, No. 10,
West Street, one minute's walk from Castle Garden; convenient to Castle
Garden, the Steamboat Landings, California Steamers and Liverpool Ships;
Board and Lodging per day 1 dollar, single meals 25 cents, lodging per
night 25 cents; private rooms for families; no charge for storage or
baggage; satisfaction guaranteed to all persons; Michael Mitchell,
proprietor." Reunion House was, I may go the length of saying, a humble
hostelry. You entered through a long bar-room, thence passed into a
little dining-room, and thence into a still smaller kitchen. The
furniture was of the plainest; but the bar was hung in the American
taste, with encouraging and hospitable mottoes.
Jones was well known; we were received warmly; and two minutes
afterwards I had refused a drink from the proprietor, and was going on,
in my plain European fashion, to refuse a cigar, when Mr. Mitchell
sternly interposed, and explained the situation. He was offering to
treat me, it appeared; whenever an American bar-keeper proposes
anything, it must be borne in mind that he is offering to treat; and if
I did not want a drink, I must at least take the cigar. I took it
bashfully, feeling I had begun my American career on the wrong foot. I
did not enjoy that cigar; but this may have been from a variety of
reasons, even the best cigar often failing to please if you smoke
three-quarters of it in a drenching rain.
For many years America was to me a sort of promised land; "westward the
march of empire holds its way"; the race is for the moment to the young;
what has been and what is we imperfectly and obscurely know; what is to
be yet lies beyond the flight of our imaginations. Greece, Rome, and
Judæa are gone by for ever, leaving to generations the legacy of their
accomplished work; China still endures, an old-inhabited house in the
brand-new city of nations; England has already declined, since she has
lost the States; and to these States, therefore, yet undeveloped, full
of dark possibilities, and grown, like another Eve, from one rib out of
the side of their own old land, the minds of young men in England turn
naturally at a certain hopeful period of their age. It will be hard for
an American to understand the spirit. But let him imagine a young man,
who shall have grown up in an old and rigid circle, following bygone
fashions and taught to distrust his own fresh instincts, and who now
suddenly hears of a family of cousins, all about his own age, who keep
house together by themselves and live far from restraint and tradition;
let him imagine this, and he will have some imperfect notion of the
sentiment with which spirited English youths turn to the thought of the
American Republic. It seems to them as if, out west, the war of life was
still conducted in the open air, and on free barbaric terms; as if it
had not yet been narrowed into parlours, nor begun to be conducted, like
some unjust and dreary arbitration, by compromise, costume, forms of
procedure, and sad, senseless self-denial. Which of these two he
prefers, a man with any youth still left in him will decide rightly for
himself. He would rather be houseless than denied a pass-key; rather go
without food than partake of a stalled ox in stiff, respectable society;
rather be shot out of hand than direct his life according to the
dictates of the world.
He knows or thinks nothing of the Maine Laws, the Puritan sourness, the
fierce, sordid appetite for dollars, or the dreary existence of country
towns. A few wild story-books which delighted his childhood form the
imaginative basis of his picture of America. In course of time, there is
added to this a great crowd of stimulating details--vast cities that
grow up as by enchantment; the birds, that have gone south in autumn,
returning with the spring to find thousands camped upon their marshes,
and the lamps burning far and near along populous streets; forests that
disappear like snow; countries larger than Britain that are cleared and
settled, one man running forth with his household gods before another,
while the bear and the Indian are yet scarce aware of their approach;
oil that gushes from the earth; gold that is washed or quarried in the
brooks or glens of the Sierras; and all that bustle, courage, action,
and constant kaleidoscopic change that Walt Whitman has seized and set
forth in his vigorous, cheerful, and loquacious verses.
Here I was at last in America, and was soon out upon New York streets,
spying for things foreign. The place had to me an air of Liverpool; but
such was the rain that not Paradise itself would have looked inviting.
We were, a party of four, under two umbrellas; Jones and I and two
Scots lads, recent immigrants, and not indisposed to welcome a
compatriot. They had been six weeks in New York, and neither of them had
yet found a single job or earned a single halfpenny. Up to the present
they were exactly out of pocket by the amount of the fare.
The lads soon left us. Now I had sworn by all my gods to have such a
dinner as would rouse the dead; there was scarce any expense at which I
should have hesitated; the devil was in it but Jones and I should dine
like heathen emperors. I set to work, asking after a restaurant; and I
chose the wealthiest and most gastronomical-looking passers-by to ask
from. Yet, although I had told them I was willing to pay anything in
reason, one and all sent me off to cheap, fixed-price houses, where I
would not have eaten that night for the cost of twenty dinners. I do not
know if this were characteristic of New York, or whether it was only
Jones and I who looked un-dinerly and discouraged enterprising
suggestions. But at length, by our own sagacity, we found a French
restaurant, where there was a French waiter, some fair French cooking,
some so-called French wine, and French coffee to conclude the whole. I
never entered into the feelings of Jack on land so completely as when I
tasted that coffee.
I suppose we had one of the "private rooms for families" at Reunion
House. It was very small; furnished with a bed, a chair, and some
clothes-pegs; and it derived all that was necessary for the life of the
human animal through two borrowed lights; one, looking into the passage,
and the second opening, without sash, into another apartment, where
three men fitfully snored, or, in intervals of wakefulness, drearily
mumbled to each other all night long. It will be observed that this was
almost exactly the disposition of the room in M'Naughten's story. Jones
had the bed; I pitched my camp upon the floor; he did not sleep until
near morning, and I, for my part, never closed an eye.
At sunrise I heard a cannon fired; and shortly afterwards the men in the
next room gave over snoring for good, and began to rustle over their
toilettes. The sound of their voices as they talked was low and moaning,
like that of people watching by the sick. Jones, who had at last begun
to doze, tumbled and murmured, and every now and then opened unconscious
eyes upon me where I lay. I found myself growing eerier and eerier, for
I dare say I was a little fevered by my restless night, and hurried to
dress and get downstairs.
You had to pass through the rain, which still fell thick and resonant,
to reach a lavatory on the other side of the court. There were three
basin-stands, and a few crumpled towels and pieces of wet soap, white
and slippery like fish; nor should I forget a looking-glass and a pair
of questionable combs. Another Scots lad was here, scrubbing his face
with a good will. He had been three months in New York and had not yet
found a single job nor earned a single halfpenny. Up to the present, he
also was exactly out of pocket by the amount of the fare. I began to
grow sick at heart for my fellow-emigrants.
Of my nightmare wanderings in New York I spare to tell. I had a thousand
and one things to do; only the day to do them in, and a journey across
the continent before me in the evening. It rained with patient fury;
every now and then I had to get under cover for a while in order, so to
speak, to give my mackintosh a rest; for under this continued drenching
it began to grow damp on the inside. I went to banks, post-offices,
railway-offices, restaurants, publishers, booksellers, money-changers,
and wherever I went a pool would gather about my feet, and those who
were careful of their floors would look on with an unfriendly eye.
Wherever I went, too, the same traits struck me: the people were all
surprisingly rude and surprisingly kind. The money-changer
cross-questioned me like a French commissary, asking my age, my
business, my average income, and my destination, beating down my
attempts at evasion, and receiving my answer in silence; and yet when
all was over, he shook hands with me up to the elbows, and sent his lad
nearly a quarter of a mile in the rain to get me books at a reduction.
Again, in a very large publishing and bookselling establishment, a man,
who seemed to be the manager, received me as I had certainly never
before been received in any human shop, indicated squarely that he put
no faith in my honesty, and refused to look up the names of books or
give me the slightest help or information, on the ground, like the
steward, that it was none of his business. I lost my temper at last,
said I was a stranger in America and not learned in their etiquette; but
I would assure him, if he went to any bookseller in England, of more
handsome usage. The boast was perhaps exaggerated; but like many a long
shot, it struck the gold. The manager passed at once from one extreme to
the other; I may say that from that moment he loaded me with kindness;
he gave me all sorts of good advice, wrote me down addresses and came
bareheaded into the rain to point me out a restaurant, where I might
lunch, nor even then did he seem to think that he had done enough. These
are (it is as well to be bold in statement) the manners of America. It
is this same opposition that has most struck me in people of almost all
classes and from east to west. By the time a man had about strung me up
to be the death of him by his insulting behaviour, he himself would be
just upon the point of melting into confidence and serviceable
attentions. Yet I suspect, although I have met with the like in so many
parts, that this must be the character of some particular state or group
of states; for in America, and this again in all classes, you will find
some of the softest-mannered gentlemen in the world.
I was so wet when I got back to Mitchell's towards the evening, that I
had simply to divest myself of my shoes, socks, and trousers, and leave
them behind for the benefit of New York city. No fire could have dried
them ere I had to start; and to pack them in their present condition
was to spread ruin among my other possessions. With a heavy heart I said
farewell to them as they lay a pulp in the middle of a pool upon the
floor of Mitchell's kitchen. I wonder if they are dry by now. Mitchell
hired a man to carry my baggage to the station, which was hard by,
accompanied me thither himself, and recommended me to the particular
attention of the officials. No one could have been kinder. Those who are
out of pocket may go safely to Reunion House, where they will get decent
meal and find an honest and obliging landlord. I owed him this word of
thanks, before I enter fairly on the second chapter of my emigrant
experience.
PART II
ACROSS THE PLAINS
_TO PAUL BOURGET_
_Traveller and student and curious as you are, you will never have heard
the name of Vailima, most likely not even that of Upolu, and Samoa
itself may be strange to your ears. To these barbaric seats there came
the other day a yellow book with your name on the title, and filled in
every page with the exquisite gifts of your art. Let me take and change
your own words: "J'ai beau admirer les autres de toutes mes forces,
c'est avec vous que je me complais à vivre."_
_R. L. S_
_Vailima,_
_Upolu,_
_Samoa._
LETTER TO THE AUTHOR
MY DEAR STEVENSON,
You have trusted me with the choice and arrangement of these papers,
written before you departed to the South Seas, and have asked me to add
a preface to the volume. But it is your prose the public wish to read,
not mine; and I am sure they will willingly be spared the preface.
Acknowledgments are due in your name to the publishers of the several
magazines from which the papers are collected, viz. _Fraser's_,
_Longman's_, the _Magazine of Art_, and _Scribner's_. I will only add,
lest any reader should find the tone of the concluding pieces less
inspiriting than your wont, that they were written under circumstances
of especial gloom and sickness. "I agree with you the lights seem a
little turned down," so you write to me now: "the truth is I was far
through, and came none too soon to the South Seas, where I was to
recover peace of body and mind. And however low the lights, the stuff is
true...." Well, inasmuch as the South Sea sirens have breathed new life
into you, we are bound to be heartily grateful to them, though as they
keep you so far removed from us, it is difficult not to bear them a
grudge; and if they would reconcile us quite, they have but to do two
things more--to teach you new tales that shall charm us like your old,
and to spare you, at least once in a while in summer, to climates within
reach of us who are task-bound for ten months in the year beside the
Thames.
Yours ever,
SIDNEY COLVIN.
_February, 1892._
NOTES BY THE WAY TO COUNCIL BLUFFS
_Monday._--It was, if I remember rightly, five o'clock when we were all
signalled to be present at the Ferry Depôt of the railroad. An emigrant
ship had arrived at New York on the Saturday night, another on the
Sunday morning, our own on Sunday afternoon, a fourth early on Monday;
and as there is no emigrant train on Sunday, a great part of the
passengers from these four ships was concentrated on the train by which
I was to travel. There was a babel of bewildered men, women, and
children. The wretched little booking office, and the baggage-room,
which was not much larger, were crowded thick with emigrants, and were
heavy and rank with the atmosphere of dripping clothes. Open carts full
of bedding stood by the half-hour in the rain. The officials loaded each
other with recriminations. A bearded, mildewed little man, whom I take
to have been an emigrant agent, was all over the place, his mouth full
of brimstone, blustering and interfering. It was plain that the whole
system, if system there was, had utterly broken down under the strain of
so many passengers.
My own ticket was given me at once, and an oldish man, who preserved his
head in the midst of this turmoil, got my baggage registered, and
counselled me to stay quietly where I was till he should give me the
word to move. I had taken along with me a small valise, a knapsack,
which I carried on my shoulders, and in the bag of my railway rug the
whole of "Bancroft's History of the United States" in six fat volumes.
It was as much as I could carry with convenience even for short
distances, but it insured me plenty of clothing, and the valise was at
that moment, and often after, useful for a stool. I am sure I sat for an
hour in the baggage-room, and wretched enough it was; yet, when at last
the word was passed to me, and I picked up my bundles and got under way,
it was only to exchange discomfort for downright misery and danger.
I followed the porters into a long shed reaching downhill from West
Street to the river. It was dark, the wind blew clean through it from
end to end; and here I found a great block of passengers and baggage,
hundreds of one and tons of the other. I feel I shall have a difficulty
to make myself believed; and certainly the scene must have been
exceptional, for it was too dangerous for daily repetition. It was a
tight jam; there was no fairway through the mingled mass of brute and
living obstruction. Into the upper skirts of the crowd, porters,
infuriated by hurry and overwork, clove their way with shouts. I may say
that we stood like sheep, and that the porters charged among us like so
many maddened sheep-dogs; and I believe these men were no longer
answerable for their acts. It mattered not what they were carrying, they
drove straight into the press, and when they could get no farther,
blindly discharged their barrowful. With my own hand, for instance, I
saved the life of a child as it sat upon its mother's knee, she sitting
on a box; and since I heard of no accident, I must suppose that there
were many similar interpositions in the course of the evening. It will
give some idea of the state of mind to which we were reduced if I tell
you that neither the porter nor the mother of the child paid the least
attention to my act. It was not till some time after that I understood
what I had done myself, for to ward off heavy boxes seemed at the moment
a natural incident of human life. Cold, wet, clamour, dead opposition to
progress, such as one encounters in an evil dream, had utterly daunted
the spirits. We had accepted this purgatory as a child accepts the
conditions of the world. For my part I shivered a little, and my back
ached wearily; but I believe I had neither a hope nor a fear, and all
the activities of my nature had become tributary to one massive
sensation of discomfort.
At length, and after how long an interval I hesitate to guess, the crowd
began to move, heavily straining through itself. About the same time
some lamps were lighted, and threw a sudden flare over the shed. We were
being filtered out into the river boat for Jersey City. You may imagine
how slowly this filtering proceeded, through the dense, choking crush,
every one overladen with packages or children, and yet under the
necessity of fishing out his ticket by the way; but it ended at length
for me, and I found myself on deck, under a flimsy awning, and with a
trifle of elbow-room to stretch and breathe in. This was on the
starboard; for the bulk of the emigrants stuck hopelessly on the port
side, by which we had entered. In vain the seamen shouted to them to
move on, and threatened them with shipwreck. These poor people were
under a spell of stupor, and did not stir a foot. It rained as heavily
as ever, but the wind now came in sudden claps and capfuls, not without
danger to a boat so badly ballasted as ours; and we crept over the river
in the darkness, trailing one paddle in the water like a wounded duck,
and passed ever and again by huge, illuminated steamers running many
knots, and heralding their approach by strains of music. The contrast
between these pleasure embarkations and our own grim vessel, with her
list to port and her freight of wet and silent emigrants, was of that
glaring description which we count too obvious for the purposes of art.
The landing at Jersey City was done in a stampede. I had a fixed sense
of calamity, and, to judge by conduct, the same persuasion was common to
us all. A panic selfishness, like that produced by fear, presided over
the disorder of our landing. People pushed, and elbowed, and ran, their
families following how they could. Children fell, and were picked up, to
be rewarded by a blow. One child, who had lost her parents, screamed
steadily and with increasing shrillness, as though verging towards a
fit; an official kept her by him, but no one else seemed so much as to
remark her distress; and I am ashamed to say that I ran among the rest.
I was so weary that I had twice to make a halt and set down my bundles
in the hundred yards or so between the pier and the railway station, so
that I was quite wet by the time that I got under cover. There was no
waiting-room, no refreshment-room; the cars were locked; and for at
least another hour, or so it seemed, we had to camp upon the draughty,
gas-lit platform. I sat on my valise, too crushed to observe my
neighbours; but as they were all cold, and wet, and weary, and driven
stupidly crazy by the mismanagement to which we had been subjected, I
believe they can have been no happier than myself. I bought half a dozen
oranges from a boy, for oranges and nuts were the only refection to be
had. As only two of them had even a pretence of juice, I threw the other
four under the cars, and beheld, as in a dream, grown people and
children groping on the track after my leavings.
At last we were admitted into the cars, utterly dejected, and far from
dry. For my own part, I got out a clothes-brush, and brushed my trousers
as hard as I could, till I had dried them and warmed my blood into the
bargain; but no one else, except my next neighbour, to whom I lent the
brush, appeared to take the least precaution. As they were, they
composed themselves to sleep. I had seen the lights of Philadelphia, and
been twice ordered to change carriages and twice countermanded, before I
allowed myself to follow their example.
_Tuesday._--When I awoke, it was already day; the train was standing
idle; I was in the last carriage, and, seeing some others strolling to
and fro about the lines, I opened the door and stepped forth, as from a
caravan by the wayside. We were near no station, nor even, as far as I
could see, within reach of any signal. A green, open, undulating country
stretched away upon all sides. Locust trees and a single field of Indian
corn gave it a foreign grace and interest; but the contours of the land
were soft and English. It was not quite England, neither was it quite
France; yet like enough either to seem natural in my eyes. And it was in
the sky, and not upon the earth, that I was surprised to find a change.
Explain it how you may, and for my part I cannot explain it at all, the
sun rises with a different splendour in America and Europe. There is
more clear gold and scarlet in our old country mornings; more purple,
brown, and smoky orange in those of the new. It may be from habit, but
to me the coming of day is less fresh and inspiriting in the latter; it
has a duskier glory, and more nearly resembles sunset; it seems to fit
some subsequential, evening epoch of the world, as though America were
in fact, and not merely in fancy, farther from the orient of Aurora and
the springs of day. I thought so then, by the railroad-side in
Pennsylvania, and I have thought so a dozen times since in far distant
parts of the continent. If it be an illusion, it is one very deeply
rooted, and in which my eyesight is accomplice.
Soon after a train whisked by, announcing and accompanying its passage
by the swift beating of a sort of chapel-bell upon the engine; and as it
was for this we had been waiting, we were summoned by the cry of "All
aboard!" and went on again upon our way. The whole line, it appeared,
was topsy-turvy; an accident at midnight having thrown all the traffic
hours into arrear. We paid for this in the flesh, for we had no meals
all that day. Fruit we could buy upon the cars; and now and then we had
a few minutes at some station with a meagre show of rolls and sandwiches
for sale; but we were so many and so ravenous that, though I tried at
every opportunity, the coffee was always exhausted before I could elbow
my way to the counter.
Our American sunrise had ushered in a noble summer's day. There was not
a cloud; the sunshine was baking; yet in the woody river valleys among
which we wound our way, the atmosphere preserved a sparkling freshness
till late in the afternoon. It had an inland sweetness and variety to
one newly from the sea; it smelt of woods, rivers, and the delved earth.
These, though in so far a country, were airs from home. I stood on the
platform by the hour; and, as I saw, one after another, pleasant
villages, carts upon the highway and fishers by the stream, and heard
cockcrows and cheery voices in the distance, and beheld the sun no
longer shining blankly on the plains of ocean, but striking among
shapely hills and his light dispersed and coloured by a thousand
accidents of form and surface, I began to exult with myself upon this
rise in life like a man who had come into a rich estate. And when I had
asked the name of the river from the brakesman, and heard that it was
called the Susquehanna, the beauty of the name seemed to be part and
parcel of the beauty of the land. As when Adam with divine fitness named
the creatures, so this word Susquehanna was at once accepted by the
fancy. That was the name, as no other could be, for that shining river
and desirable valley.
None can care for literature in itself who do not take a special
pleasure in the sound of names; and there is no part of the world where
nomenclature is so rich, poetical, humorous, and picturesque as the
United States of America. All times, races, and languages have brought
their contribution. Pekin is in the same State with Euclid, with
Bellefontaine, and with Sansdusky. Chelsea, with its London associations
of red brick, Sloane Square, and the King's Road, is own suburb to
stately and primeval Memphis; there they have their seat, translated
names of cities, where the Mississippi runs by Tennessee and
Arkansas[1]; and both, while I was crossing the continent, lay, watched
by armed men, in the horror and isolation of a plague. Old, red
Manhattan lies, like an Indian arrowhead under a steam factory, below
anglified New York. The names of the States and Territories themselves
form a chorus of sweet and most romantic vocables: Delaware, Ohio,
Indiana, Florida, Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming, Minnesota, and the Carolinas;
there are few poems with a nobler music for the ear: a songful, tuneful
land; and if the new Homer shall arise from the Western continent, his
verse will be enriched, his pages sing spontaneously, with the names of
states and cities that would strike the fancy in a business circular.
Late in the evening we were landed in a waiting-room at Pittsburg. I had
now under my charge a young and sprightly Dutch widow with her children;
these I was to watch over providentially for a certain distance farther
on the way; but as I found she was furnished with a basket of eatables,
I left her in the waiting-room to seek a dinner for myself.
I mention this meal, not only because it was the first of which I had
partaken for about thirty hours, but because it was the means of my
first introduction to a coloured gentleman. He did me the honour to wait
upon me after a fashion, while I was eating; and with every word, look,
and gesture marched me farther into the country of surprise. He was
indeed strikingly unlike the negroes of Mrs. Beecher Stowe, or the
Christy Minstrels of my youth. Imagine a gentleman, certainly somewhat
dark, but of a pleasant warm hue, speaking English with a slight and
rather odd foreign accent, every inch a man of the world, and armed with
manners so patronisingly superior that I am at a loss to name their
parallel in England. A butler perhaps rides as high over the unbutlered,
but then he sets you right with a reserve and a sort of sighing patience
which one is often moved to admire. And again, the abstract butler
never stoops to familiarity. But the coloured gentleman will pass you a
wink at a time; he is familiar like an upper-form boy to a fag; he
unbends to you like Prince Hal with Poins and Falstaff. He makes himself
at home and welcome. Indeed, I may say, this waiter behaved himself to
me throughout that supper much as, with us, a young, free, and not very
self-respecting master might behave to a good-looking chambermaid. I had
come prepared to pity the poor negro, to put him at his ease, to prove
in a thousand condescensions that I was no sharer in the prejudice of
race; but I assure you I put my patronage away for another occasion, and
had the grace to be pleased with that result.
Seeing he was a very honest fellow, I consulted him upon a point of
etiquette: if one should offer to tip the American waiter? Certainly
not, he told me. Never. It would not do. They considered themselves too
highly to accept. They would even resent the offer. As for him and me,
we had enjoyed a very pleasant conversation; he, in particular, had
found much pleasure in my society; I was a stranger; this was exactly
one of those rare conjunctures.... Without being very clear-seeing, I
can still perceive the sun at noonday; and the coloured gentleman deftly
pocketed a quarter.
_Wednesday._--A little after midnight I convoyed my widow and orphans on
board the train; and morning found us far into Ohio. This had early been
a favourite home of my imagination; I have played at being in Ohio by
the week, and enjoyed some capital sport there with a dummy gun, my
person being still unbreeched. My preference was founded on a work which
appeared in _Cassell's Family Paper_, and was read aloud to me by my
nurse. It narrated the doings of one Custaloga, an Indian brave, who, in
the last chapter, very obligingly washed the paint off his face and
became Sir Reginald Somebody-or-other; a trick I never forgave him. The
idea of a man being an Indian brave, and then giving that up to be a
baronet, was one which my mind rejected. It offended verisimilitude,
like the pretended anxiety of Robinson Crusoe and others to escape from
uninhabited islands.
But Ohio was not at all as I had pictured it. We were now on those great
plains which stretch unbroken to the Rocky Mountains. The country was
flat like Holland, but far from being dull. All through Ohio, Indiana,
Illinois, and Iowa, or for as much as I saw of them from the train and
in my waking moments, it was rich and various, and breathed an elegance
peculiar to itself. The tall corn pleased the eye; the trees were
graceful in themselves, and framed the plain into long, aërial vistas;
and the clean, bright, gardened townships spoke of country fare and
pleasant summer evenings on the stoop. It was a sort of flat paradise;
but, I am afraid, not unfrequented by the devil. That morning dawned
with such a freezing chill as I have rarely felt; a chill that was not
perhaps so measurable by instrument, as it struck home upon the heart
and seemed to travel with the blood. Day came in with a shudder. White
mists lay thinly over the surface of the plain, as we see them more
often on a lake; and though the sun had soon dispersed and drunk them
up, leaving an atmosphere of fever heat and crystal pureness from
horizon to horizon, the mists had still been there, and we knew that
this paradise was haunted by killing damps and foul malaria. The fences
along the line bore but two descriptions of advertisement; one to
recommend tobaccos, and the other to vaunt remedies against the ague. At
the point of day, and while we were all in the grasp of that first
chill, a native of the State, who had got in at some way station,
pronounced it, with a doctoral air, "a fever and ague morning."
The Dutch widow was a person of some character. She had conceived at
first sight a great aversion for the present writer, which she was at
no pains to conceal. But, being a woman of a practical spirit, she made
no difficulty about accepting my attentions, and encouraged me to buy
her children fruits and candies, to carry all her parcels, and even to
sleep upon the floor that she might profit by my empty seat. Nay, she
was such a rattle by nature, and so powerfully moved to autobiographical
talk, that she was forced, for want of a better, to take me into
confidence and tell me the story of her life. I heard about her late
husband, who seemed to have made his chief impression by taking her out
pleasuring on Sundays. I could tell you her prospects, her hopes, the
amount of her fortune, the cost of her housekeeping by the week, and a
variety of particular matters that are not usually disclosed except to
friends. At one station, she shook up her children to look at a man on
the platform and say if he were not like Mr. Z.; while to me she
explained how she had been keeping company with this Mr. Z., how far
matters had proceeded, and how it was because of his desistance that she
was now travelling to the west. Then, when I was thus put in possession
of the facts, she asked my judgment on that type of manly beauty. I
admired it to her heart's content. She was not, I think, remarkably
veracious in talk, but broidered as fancy prompted, and built castles in
the air out of her past; yet she had that sort of candour, to keep me,
in spite of all these confidences, steadily aware of her aversion. Her
parting words were ingeniously honest. "I am sure," said she, "we all
_ought_ to be very much obliged to you." I cannot pretend that she put
me at my ease; but I had a certain respect for such a genuine dislike. A
poor nature would have slipped, in the course of these familiarities,
into a sort of worthless toleration for me.
We reached Chicago in the evening. I was turned out of the cars, bundled
into an omnibus, and driven off through the streets to the station of a
different railroad. Chicago seemed a great and gloomy city. I remember
having subscribed, let us say sixpence, towards its restoration at the
period of the fire; and now when I beheld street after street of
ponderous houses and crowds of comfortable burghers, I thought it would
be a graceful act for the corporation to refund that sixpence, or, at
the least, to entertain me to a cheerful dinner. But there was no word
of restitution. I was that city's benefactor, yet I was received in a
third-class waiting-room, and the best dinner I could get was a dish of
ham and eggs at my own expense.
I can safely say, I have never been so dog-tired as that night in
Chicago. When it was time to start, I descended the platform like a man
in a dream. It was a long train, lighted from end to end; and car after
car, as I came up with it, was not only filled, but overflowing. My
valise, my knapsack, my rug, with those six ponderous tomes of Bancroft,
weighed me double; I was hot, feverish, painfully athirst; and there was
a great darkness over me, an internal darkness, not to be dispelled by
gas. When at last I found an empty bench, I sank into it like a bundle
of rags, the world seemed to swim away into the distance, and my
consciousness dwindled within me to a mere pin's head, like a taper on a
foggy night.
When I came a little more to myself, I found that there had sat down
before me a very cheerful, rosy little German gentleman, somewhat gone
in drink, who was talking away to me, nineteen to the dozen, as they
say. I did my best to keep up the conversation; for it seemed to me
dimly as if something depended upon that. I heard him relate, among many
other things, that there were pickpockets on the train, who had already
robbed a man of forty dollars and a return ticket; but though I caught
the words, I do not think I properly understood the sense until next
morning; and I believe I replied at the time that I was very glad to
hear it. What else he talked about I have no guess; I remember a
gabbling sound of words, his profuse gesticulation, and his smile, which
was highly explanatory; but no more. And I suppose I must have shown my
confusion very plainly; for, first, I saw him knit his brows at me like
one who has conceived a doubt; next, he tried me in German, supposing
perhaps that I was unfamiliar with the English tongue; and finally, in
despair, he rose and left me. I felt chagrined; but my fatigue was too
crushing for delay, and, stretching myself as far as that was possible
upon the bench, I was received at once into a dreamless stupor.
The little German gentleman was only going a little way into the suburbs
after a _dîner fin_, and was bent on entertainment while the journey
lasted. Having failed with me, he pitched next upon another emigrant,
who had come through from Canada, and was not one jot less weary than
myself. Nay, even in a natural state, as I found next morning when we
scraped acquaintance, he was a heavy, uncommunicative man. After trying
him on different topics, it appears that the little German gentleman
flounced into a temper, swore an oath or two, and departed from that car
in quest of livelier society. Poor little gentleman! I suppose he
thought an emigrant should be a rollicking, free-hearted blade, with a
flask of foreign brandy and a long, comical story to beguile the moments
of digestion.
_Thursday._--I suppose there must be a cycle in the fatigue of
travelling, for when I awoke next morning, I was entirely renewed in
spirits and ate a hearty breakfast of porridge, with sweet milk, and
coffee and hot cakes, at Burlington upon the Mississippi. Another long
day's ride followed, with but one feature worthy of remark. At a place
called Creston, a drunken man got in. He was aggressively friendly, but,
according to English notions, not at all unpresentable upon a train. For
one stage he eluded the notice of the officials; but just as we were
beginning to move out of the next station, Cromwell by name, by came the
conductor. There was a word or two of talk; and then the official had
the man by the shoulders, twitched him from his seat, marched him
through the car, and sent him flying on to the track. It was done in
three motions, as exact as a piece of drill. The train was still moving
slowly, although beginning to mend her pace, and the drunkard got his
feet without a fall. He carried a red bundle, though not so red as his
cheeks; and he shook this menacingly in the air with one hand, while the
other stole behind him to the region of the kidneys. It was the first
indication that I had come among revolvers, and I observed it with some
emotion. The conductor stood on the steps with one hand on his hip,
looking back at him; and perhaps this attitude imposed upon the
creature, for he turned without further ado, and went off staggering
along the track towards Cromwell, followed by a peal of laughter from
the cars. They were speaking English all about me, but I knew I was in a
foreign land.
Twenty minutes before nine that night, we were deposited at the Pacific
Transfer Station near Council Bluffs, on the eastern bank of the
Missouri river. Here we were to stay the night at a kind of
caravanserai, set apart for emigrants. But I gave way to a thirst for
luxury, separated myself from my companions, and marched with my effects
into the Union Pacific Hotel. A white clerk and a coloured gentleman
whom, in my plain European way, I should call the boots, were installed
behind a counter like bank tellers. They took my name, assigned me a
number, and proceeded to deal with my packages. And here came the tug of
war. I wished to give up my packages into safe keeping; but I did not
wish to go to bed. And this, it appeared, was impossible in an American
hotel.
It was, of course, some inane misunderstanding, and sprang from my
unfamiliarity with the language. For although two nations use the same
words and read the same books, intercourse is not conducted by the
dictionary. The business of life is not carried on by words, but in set
phrases, each with a special and almost a slang signification. Some
international obscurity prevailed between me and the coloured gentleman
at Council Bluffs; so that what I was asking, which seemed very natural
to me, appeared to him a monstrous exigency. He refused, and that with
the plainness of the West. This American manner of conducting matters of
business is, at first, highly unpalatable to the European. When we
approach a man in the way of his calling, and for those services by
which he earns his bread, we consider him for the time being our hired
servant. But in the American opinion, two gentlemen meet and have a
friendly talk with a view to exchanging favours if they will agree to
please. I know not which is the more convenient, nor even which is the
more truly courteous. The English stiffness unfortunately tends to be
continued after the particular transaction is at an end, and thus
favours class separations. But on the other hand, these equalitarian
plainnesses leave an open field for the insolence of Jack-in-office.
I was nettled by the coloured gentleman's refusal, and unbuttoned my
wrath under the similitude of ironical submission. I knew nothing, I
said, of the ways of American hotels; but I had no desire to give
trouble. If there was nothing for it but to get to bed immediately, let
him say the word, and though it was not my habit, I should cheerfully
obey.
He burst into a shout of laughter. "Ah!" said he, "you do not know about
America. They are fine people in America. Oh! you will like them very
well. But you mustn't get mad. I know what you want. You come along with
me."
And issuing from behind the counter, and taking me by the arm like an
old acquaintance, he led me to the bar of the hotel.
"There," said he, pushing me from him by the shoulder, "go and have a
drink!"
FOOTNOTE:
[1] Please pronounce _Arkansaw_, with the accent on the first.
THE EMIGRANT TRAIN
All this while I had been travelling by mixed trains, where I might meet
with Dutch widows and little German gentry fresh from table. I had been
but a latent emigrant; now I was to be branded once more, and put apart
with my fellows. It was about two in the afternoon of Friday that I
found myself in front of Emigrant House, with more than a hundred
others, to be sorted and boxed for the journey. A white-haired official,
with a stick under one arm and a list in the other hand, stood apart in
front of us, and called name after name in the tone of a command. At
each name you would see a family gather up its brats and bundles and run
for the hindmost of the three cars that stood awaiting us, and I soon
concluded that this was to be set apart for the women and children. The
second, or central car, it turned out, was devoted to men travelling
alone, and the third to the Chinese. The official was easily moved to
anger at the least delay; but the emigrants were both quick at answering
their names, and speedy in getting themselves and their effects on
board.
The families once housed, we men carried the second car without ceremony
by simultaneous assault. I suppose the reader has some notion of an
American railroad car, that long, narrow wooden box, like a flat-roofed
Noah's ark, with a stove and a convenience, one at either end, a passage
down the middle, and transverse benches upon either hand. Those destined
for emigrants on the Union Pacific are only remarkable for their extreme
plainness, nothing but wood entering in any part into their
constitution, and for the usual inefficacy of the lamps, which often
went out and shed but a dying glimmer even while they burned. The
benches are too short for anything but a young child. Where there is
scarce elbow-room for two to sit, there will not be space enough for one
to lie. Hence the company, or rather, as it appears from certain bills
about the Transfer Station, the company's servants, have conceived a
plan for the better accommodation of travellers. They prevail on every
two to chum together. To each of the chums they sell a board and three
square cushions stuffed with straw, and covered with thin cotton. The
benches can be made to face each other in pairs, for the backs are
reversible. On the approach of night the boards are laid from bench to
bench, making a couch wide enough for two, and long enough for a man of
the middle height; and the chums lie down side by side upon the cushions
with the head to the conductor's van and the feet to the engine. When
the train is full, of course this plan is impossible, for there must not
be more than one to every bench, neither can it be carried out unless
the chums agree. It was to bring about this last condition that our
white-haired official now bestirred himself. He made a most active
master of ceremonies, introducing likely couples, and even guaranteeing
the amiability and honesty of each. The greater the number of happy
couples the better for his pocket, for it was he who sold the raw
material of the beds. His price for one board and three straw cushions
began with two dollars and a half; but before the train left, and, I am
sorry to say, long after I had purchased mine, it had fallen to one
dollar and a half.
The match-maker had a difficulty with me; perhaps, like some ladies, I
showed myself too eager for union at any price; but certainly the first
who was picked out to be my bedfellow declined the honour without
thanks. He was an old, heavy, slow-spoken man, I think from Yankeeland,
looked me all over with great timidity, and then began to excuse himself
in broken phrases. He didn't know the young man, he said. The young man
might be very honest, but how was he to know that? There was another
young man whom he had met already in the train; he guessed _he_ was
honest, and would prefer to chum with _him_ upon the whole. All this
without any sort of excuse, as though I had been inanimate or absent. I
began to tremble lest every one should refuse my company, and I be left
rejected. But the next in turn was a tall, strapping, long-limbed,
small-headed, curly-haired Pennsylvania Dutchman, with a soldierly
smartness in his manner. To be exact, he had acquired it in the navy.
But that was all one; he had at least been trained to desperate
resolves, so he accepted the match, and the white-haired swindler
pronounced the connubial benediction, and pocketed his fees.
The rest of the afternoon was spent in making up the train. I am afraid
to say how many baggage-waggons followed the engine--certainly a score;
then came the Chinese, then we, then the families, and the rear was
brought up by the conductor in what, if I have it rightly, is called his
caboose. The class to which I belonged was of course far the largest,
and we ran over, so to speak, to both sides; so that there were some
Caucasians among the Chinamen, and some bachelors among the families.
But our own car was pure from admixture, save for one little boy of
eight or nine, who had the whooping-cough. At last, about six, the long
train crawled out of the Transfer Station and across the wide Missouri
river to Omaha, westward bound.
It was a troubled uncomfortable evening in the cars. There was thunder
in the air, which helped to keep us restless. A man played many airs
upon the cornet, and none of them were much attended to, until he came
to "Home, sweet home." It was truly strange to note how the talk ceased
at that, and the faces began to lengthen. I have no idea whether
musically this air is to be considered good or bad; but it belongs to
that class of art which may be best described as a brutal assault upon
the feelings. Pathos must be relieved by dignity of treatment. If you
wallow naked in the pathetic, like the author of "Home, sweet home," you
make your hearers weep in an unmanly fashion; and even while yet they
are moved, they despise themselves and hate the occasion of their
weakness. It did not come to tears that night, for the experiment was
interrupted. An elderly, hard-looking man, with a goatee beard and about
as much appearance of sentiment as you would expect from a retired
slaver, turned with a start and bade the performer stop that "damned
thing." "I've heard about enough of that," he added; "give us something
about the good country we're going to." A murmur of adhesion ran round
the car; the performer took the instrument from his lips, laughed and
nodded, and then struck into a dancing measure; and, like a new
Timotheus, stilled immediately the emotion he had raised.
The day faded; the lamps were lit; a party of wild young men, who got
off next evening at North Platte, stood together on the stern platform,
singing "The Sweet By-and-bye" with very tuneful voices; the chums began
to put up their beds; and it seemed as if the business of the day were
at an end. But it was not so; for, the train stopping at some station,
the cars were instantly thronged with the natives, wives and fathers,
young men and maidens, some of them in little more than nightgear, some
with stable lanterns, and all offering beds for sale. Their charge began
with twenty-five cents a cushion, but fell, before the train went on
again, to fifteen, with the bed-board gratis, or less than one-fifth of
what I had paid for mine at the Transfer. This is my contribution to the
economy of future emigrants.
A great personage on an American train is the newsboy. He sells books
(such books!), papers, fruit, lollipops, and cigars; and on emigrant
journeys, soap, towels, tin washing-dishes, tin coffee-pitchers, coffee,
tea, sugar, and tinned eatables, mostly hash or beans and bacon. Early
next morning the newsboy went round the cars, and chumming on a more
extended principle became the order of the hour. It requires but a
copartnery of two to manage beds; but washing and eating can be carried
on most economically by a syndicate of three. I myself entered a little
after sunrise into articles of agreement, and became one of the firm of
Pennsylvania, Shakespeare, and Dubuque. Shakespeare was my own nickname
on the cars; Pennsylvania that of my bedfellow; and Dubuque, the name of
a place in the State of Iowa, that of an amiable young fellow going west
to cure an asthma, and retarding his recovery by incessantly chewing or
smoking, and sometimes chewing and smoking together. I have never seen
tobacco so sillily abused. Shakespeare bought a tin washing-dish,
Dubuque a towel, and Pennsylvania a brick of soap. The partners used
these instruments, one after another, according to the order of their
first awaking; and when the firm had finished there was no want of
borrowers. Each filled the tin dish at the water filter opposite the
stove, and retired with the whole stock in trade to the platform of the
car. There he knelt down, supporting himself by a shoulder against the
woodwork, or one elbow crooked about the railing, and made a shift to
wash his face and neck and hands,--a cold, an insufficient, and, if the
train is moving rapidly, a somewhat dangerous toilet.
On a similar division of expense, the firm of Pennsylvania, Shakespeare,
and Dubuque supplied themselves with coffee, sugar, and necessary
vessels; and their operations are a type of what went on through all the
cars. Before the sun was up the stove would be brightly burning; at the
first station the natives would come on board with milk and eggs and
coffee cakes; and soon from end to end the car would be filled with
little parties breakfasting upon the bed-boards. It was the pleasantest
hour of the day.
There were meals to be had, however, by the wayside; a breakfast in the
morning, a dinner somewhere between eleven and two, and supper from
five to eight or nine at night. We had rarely less than twenty minutes
for each; and if we had not spent many another twenty minutes waiting
for some express upon a side track among many miles of desert, we might
have taken an hour to each repast and arrived at San Francisco up to
time. For haste is not the foible of an emigrant train. It gets through
on sufferance, running the gauntlet among its more considerable
brethren; should there be a block, it is unhesitatingly sacrificed; and
they cannot, in consequence, predict the length of the passage within a
day or so. Civility is the main comfort that you miss. Equality, though
conceived very largely in America, does not extend so low down as to an
emigrant. Thus in all other trains, a warning cry of "All aboard!"
recalls the passengers to take their seats; but as soon as I was alone
with emigrants, and from the Transfer all the way to San Francisco, I
found this ceremony was pretermitted; the train stole from the station
without note of warning, and you had to keep an eye upon it even while
you ate. The annoyance is considerable, and the disrespect both wanton
and petty.
Many conductors, again, will hold no communication with an emigrant. I
asked a conductor one day at what time the train would stop for dinner;
as he made no answer I repeated the question, with a like result; a
third time I returned to the charge, and then Jack-in-office looked me
coolly in the face for several seconds and turned ostentatiously away. I
believe he was half ashamed of his brutality; for when another person
made the same inquiry, although he still refused the information, he
condescended to answer, and even to justify his reticence in a voice
loud enough for me to hear. It was, he said, his principle not to tell
people where they were to dine; for one answer led to many other
questions, as what o'clock it was? or, how soon should we be there? and
he could not afford to be eternally worried.
As you are thus cut off from the superior authorities, a great deal of
your comfort depends on the character of the newsboy. He has it in his
power indefinitely to better and brighten the emigrant's lot. The
newsboy with whom we started from the Transfer was a dark, bullying,
contemptuous, insolent scoundrel, who treated us like dogs. Indeed, in
his case, matters came nearly to a fight. It happened thus: he was going
his rounds through the cars with some commodities for sale, and coming
to a party who were at _Seven-up_ or _Cascino_ (our two games) upon a
bed-board, slung down a cigar-box in the middle of the cards, knocking
one man's hand to the floor. It was the last straw. In a moment the
whole party were upon their feet, the cigars were upset, and he was
ordered to "get out of that directly, or he would get more than he
reckoned for." The fellow grumbled and muttered, but ended by making
off, and was less openly insulting in the future. On the other hand, the
lad who rode with us in this capacity from Ogden to Sacramento made
himself the friend of all, and helped us with information, attention,
assistance, and a kind countenance. He told us where and when we should
have our meals, and how long the train would stop; kept seats at table
for those who were delayed, and watched that we should neither be left
behind nor yet unnecessarily hurried. You, who live at home at ease, can
hardly realise the greatness of this service, even had it stood alone.
When I think of that lad coming and going, train after train, with his
bright face and civil words, I see how easily a good man may become the
benefactor of his kind. Perhaps he is discontented with himself, perhaps
troubled with ambitions; why, if he but knew it, he is a hero of the old
Greek stamp; and while he thinks he is only earning a profit of a few
cents, and that perhaps exorbitant, he is doing a man's work, and
bettering the world.
I must tell here an experience of mine with another newsboy. I tell it
because it gives so good an example of that uncivil kindness of the
American, which is perhaps their most bewildering character to one
newly landed. It was immediately after I had left the emigrant train;
and I am told I looked like a man at death's door, so much had this long
journey shaken me. I sat at the end of a car, and the catch being
broken, and myself feverish and sick, I had to hold the door open with
my foot for the sake of air. In this attitude my leg debarred the
newsboy from his box of merchandise. I made haste to let him pass when I
observed that he was coming; but I was busy with a book, and so once or
twice he came upon me unawares. On these occasions he most rudely struck
my foot aside; and though I myself apologised, as if to show him the
way, he answered me never a word. I chafed furiously, and I fear the
next time it would have come to words. But suddenly I felt a touch upon
my shoulder, and a large juicy pear was put into my hand. It was the
newsboy, who had observed that I was looking ill, and so made this
present out of a tender heart. For the rest of the journey I was petted
like a sick child; he lent me newspapers, thus depriving himself of his
legitimate profit on their sale, and came repeatedly to sit by me and
cheer me up.
THE PLAINS OF NEBRASKA
It had thundered on the Friday night, but the sun rose on Saturday
without a cloud. We were at sea--there is no other adequate
expression--on the plains of Nebraska. I made my observatory on the top
of a fruit-waggon, and sat by the hour upon that perch to spy about me,
and to spy in vain for something new. It was a world almost without a
feature; an empty sky, an empty earth; front and back, the line of
railway stretched from horizon to horizon, like a cue across a
billiard-board; on either hand, the green plain ran till it touched the
skirts of heaven. Along the track innumerable wild sunflowers, no bigger
than a crown-piece, bloomed in a continuous flower-bed; grazing beasts
were seen upon the prairie at all degrees of distance and diminution;
and now and again we might perceive a few dots beside the railroad which
grew more and more distinct as we drew nearer, till they turned into
wooden cabins, and then dwindled and dwindled in our wake until they
melted into their surroundings, and we were once more alone upon the
billiard-board. The train toiled over this infinity like a snail; and
being the one thing moving, it was wonderful what huge proportions it
began to assume in our regard. It seemed miles in length, and either end
of it within but a step of the horizon. Even my own body or my own head
seemed a great thing in that emptiness. I note the feeling the more
readily as it is the contrary of what I have read of in the experience
of others. Day and night, above the roar of the train, our ears were
kept busy with the incessant chirp of grasshoppers--a noise like the
winding up of countless clocks and watches, which began after a while
to seem proper to that land.
To one hurrying through by steam there was a certain exhilaration in
this spacious vacancy, this greatness of the air, this discovery of the
whole arch of heaven, this straight, unbroken, prison-line of the
horizon. Yet one could not but reflect upon the weariness of those who
passed by there in old days, at the foot's pace of oxen, painfully
urging their teams, and with no landmark but that unattainable evening
sun for which they steered, and which daily fled them by an equal
stride. They had nothing, it would seem, to overtake; nothing by which
to reckon their advance; no sight for repose or for encouragement; but
stage after stage, only the dead green waste under foot, and the
mocking, fugitive horizon. But the eye, as I have been told, found
differences even here; and at the worst the emigrant came, by
perseverance, to the end of his toil. It is the settlers, after all, at
whom we have a right to marvel. Our consciousness, by which we live, is
itself but the creature of variety. Upon what food does it subsist in
such a land? What livelihood can repay a human creature for a life spent
in this huge sameness? He is cut off from books, from news, from
company, from all that can relieve existence but the prosecution of his
affairs. A sky full of stars is the most varied spectacle that he can
hope for. He may walk five miles and see nothing; ten, and it is as
though he had not moved; twenty, and still he is in the midst of the
same great level, and has approached no nearer to the one object within
view, the flat horizon which keeps pace with his advance. We are full at
home of the question of agreeable wall-papers, and wise people are of
opinion that the temper may be quieted by sedative surroundings. But
what is to be said of the Nebraskan settler? His is a wall-paper with a
vengeance--one quarter of the universe laid bare in all its gauntness.
His eye must embrace at every glance the whole seeming concave of the
visible world; it quails before so vast an outlook, it is tortured by
distance; yet there is no rest or shelter, till the man runs into his
cabin, and can repose his sight upon things near at hand. Hence, I am
told, a sickness of the vision peculiar to these empty plains.
Yet perhaps with sunflowers and cicadæ, summer and winter, cattle, wife
and family, the settler may create a full and various existence. One
person at least I saw upon the plains who seemed in every way superior
to her lot. This was a woman who boarded us at a way station, selling
milk. She was largely formed; her features were more than comely; she
had that great rarity--a fine complexion which became her; and her eyes
were kind, dark, and steady. She sold milk with patriarchal grace. There
was not a line in her countenance, not a note in her soft and sleepy
voice, but spoke of an entire contentment with her life. It would have
been fatuous arrogance to pity such a woman. Yet the place where she
lived was to me almost ghastly. Less than a dozen wooden houses, all of
a shape and all nearly of a size, stood planted along the railway lines.
Each stood apart in its own lot. Each opened direct off the
billiard-board, as if it were a billiard-board indeed, and these only
models that had been set down upon it ready made. Her own, into which I
looked, was clean but very empty, and showed nothing homelike but the
burning fire. This extreme newness, above all in so naked and flat a
country, gives a strong impression of artificiality. With none of the
litter and discoloration of human life; with the paths unworn, and the
houses still sweating from the axe, such a settlement as this seems
purely scenic. The mind is loth to accept it for a piece of reality; and
it seems incredible that life can go on with so few properties, or the
great child, man, find entertainment in so bare a playroom.
And truly it is as yet an incomplete society in some points; or at least
it contained, as I passed through, one person incompletely civilised. At
North Platte, where we supped that evening, one man asked another to
pass the milk-jug. This other was well dressed and of what we should
call a respectable appearance; a darkish man, high-spoken, eating as
though he had some usage of society; but he turned upon the first
speaker with extraordinary vehemence of tone--
"There's a waiter here!" he cried.
"I only asked you to pass the milk," explained the first.
Here is the retort verbatim--
"Pass! Hell! I'm not paid for that business; the waiter's paid for it.
You should use civility at table, and, by God, I'll show you how!"
The other man very wisely made no answer, and the bully went on with his
supper as though nothing had occurred. It pleases me to think that some
day soon he will meet one of his own kidney; and perhaps both may fall.
THE DESERT OF WYOMING
To cross such a plain is to grow homesick for the mountains. I longed
for the Black Hills of Wyoming, which I knew we were soon to enter, like
an ice-bound whaler for the spring. Alas! and it was a worse country
than the other. All Sunday and Monday we travelled through these sad
mountains, or over the main ridge of the Rockies, which is a fair match
to them for misery of aspect. Hour after hour it was the same unhomely
and unkindly world about our onward path; tumbled boulders, cliffs that
drearily imitate the shape of monuments and fortifications--how
drearily, how tamely, none can tell who has not seen them; not a tree,
not a patch of sward, not one shapely or commanding mountain form;
sage-brush, eternal sage-brush; over all the same weariful and gloomy
colouring, greys warming into brown, greys darkening towards black; and
for sole sign of life, here and there a few fleeing antelopes; here and
there, but at incredible intervals, a creek running in a cañon. The
plains have a grandeur of their own; but here there is nothing but a
contorted smallness. Except for the air, which was light and
stimulating, there was not one good circumstance in that God-forsaken
land.
I had been suffering in my health a good deal all the way; and at last,
whether I was exhausted by my complaint or poisoned in some wayside
eating-house, the evening we left Laramie I fell sick outright. That was
a night which I shall not readily forget. The lamps did not go out; each
made a faint shining in its own neighbourhood, and the shadows were
confounded together in the long, hollow box of the car. The sleepers lay
in uneasy attitudes; here two chums alongside, flat upon their backs
like dead folk; there a man sprawling on the floor, with his face upon
his arm; there another half seated with his head and shoulders on the
bench. The most passive were continually and roughly shaken by the
movement of the train; others stirred, turned, or stretched out their
arms like children; it was surprising how many groaned and murmured in
their sleep; and as I passed to and fro, stepping across the prostrate,
and caught now a snore, now a gasp, now a half-formed word, it gave me a
measure of the worthlessness of rest in that unresting vehicle. Although
it was chill, I was obliged to open my window, for the degradation of
the air soon became intolerable to one who was awake and using the full
supply of life. Outside, in a glimmering night, I saw the black,
amorphous hills shoot by unweariedly into our wake. They that long for
morning have never longed for it more earnestly than I.
And yet when day came, it was to shine upon the same broken and
unsightly quarter of the world. Mile upon mile, and not a tree, a bird,
or a river. Only down the long, sterile cañons, the train shot hooting,
and awoke the resting echo. That train was the one piece of life in all
the deadly land; it was the one actor, the one spectacle fit to be
observed in this paralysis of man and nature. And when I think how the
railroad has been pushed through this unwatered wilderness and haunt of
savage tribes, and now will bear an emigrant for some £12 from the
Atlantic to the Golden Gates; how at each stage of the construction,
roaring, impromptu cities, full of gold and lust and death, sprang up
and then died away again, and are now but wayside stations in the
desert; how in these uncouth places pig-tailed Chinese pirates worked
side by side with border ruffians and broken men from Europe, talking
together in a mixed dialect, mostly oaths, gambling, drinking,
quarrelling, and murdering like wolves; how the plumed hereditary lord
of all America heard, in this last fastness, the scream of the "bad
medicine waggon" charioting his foes; and then when I go on to remember
that all this epical turmoil was conducted by gentlemen in frock-coats,
and with a view to nothing more extraordinary than a fortune and a
subsequent visit to Paris, it seems to me, I own, as if this railway
were the one typical achievement of the age in which we live, as if it
brought together into one plot all the ends of the world and all the
degrees of social rank, and offered to some great writer the busiest,
the most extended, and the most varied subject for an enduring literary
work. If it be romance, if it be contrast, if it be heroism that we
require, what was Troy town to this? But, alas! it is not these things
that are necessary--it is only Homer.
Here also we are grateful to the train, as to some god who conducts us
swiftly through these shades and by so many hidden perils. Thirst,
hunger, the sleight and ferocity of Indians, are all no more feared, so
lightly do we skim these horrible lands; as the gull, who wings safely
through the hurricane and past the shark. Yet we should not be forgetful
of these hardships of the past; and to keep the balance true, since I
have complained of the trifling discomforts of my journey, perhaps more
than was enough, let me add an original document. It was not written by
Homer, but by a boy of eleven, long since dead, and is dated only twenty
years ago. I shall punctuate, to make things clearer, but not change the
spelling.
"_My dear Sister Mary,--I am afraid you will go nearly crazy when you
read my letter. If Jerry" (the writer's eldest brother) "has not written
to you before now, you will be surprised to heare that we are in
California, and that poor Thomas" (another brother, of fifteen) "is
dead. We started from -------- in July, with plenty of provisions and
too yoke oxen. We went along very well till we got within six or seven
hundred miles of California, when the Indians attacked us. We found
places where they had killed the emigrants. We had one passenger with
us, too guns, and one revolver; so we ran all the lead We had into
bullets (and) hung the guns up in the wagon so we could get at them in a
minit. It was about two o'clock in the afternoon; droave the cattel a
little way; when a prairie chicken alited a little way from the wagon._
_"Jerry took out one of the guns to shoot it, and told Tom drive the
oxen. Tom and I drove the oxen, and Jerry and the passenger went on.
Then, after a little, I left Tom and caught up with Jerry and the other
man. Jerry stopped for Tom to come up; me and the man went on and sit
down by a little stream. In a few minutes we heard some noise; then
three shots (they all struck poor Tom, I suppose); then they gave the
war hoop, and as many as twenty of the red skins came down upon us. The
three that shot Tom was hid by the side of the road in the bushes._
_"I thought the Tom and Jerry were shot; so I told the other man that
Tom and Jerry were dead, and that we had better try to escape, if
possible. I had no shoes on; having a sore foot, I thought I would not
put them on. The man and me run down the road, but We was soon stopt by
an Indian on a pony. We then turend the other way, and run up the side
of the Mountain, and hid behind some cedar trees, and stayed there till
dark. The Indians hunted all over after us, and verry close to us, so
close that we could here there tomyhawks Jingle. At dark the man and me
started on, I stubing my toes against sticks and stones. We traveld on
all night; and next morning, Just as it was getting gray, we saw
something in the shape of a man. It layed Down in the grass. We went up
to it, and it was Jerry. He thought we ware Indians. You can imagine how
glad he was to see me. He thought we was all dead but him, and we
thought him and Tom was dead. He had the gun that he took out of the
wagon to shoot the prairie Chicken; all he had was the load that was in
it._
_"We traveld on till about eight o'clock, We caught up with one wagon
with too men with it. We had traveld with them before one day; we stopt
and they Drove on; we knew that they was ahead of us, unless they had
been killed to. My feet was so sore when we caught up with them that I
had to ride; I could not step. We traveld on for too days, when the men
that owned the cattle said they would (could) not drive them another
inch. We unyoked the oxen; we had about seventy pounds of flour; we took
it out and divided it into four packs. Each of the men took about 18
pounds apiece and a blanket. I carried a little bacon, dried meat, and
little quilt; I had in all about twelve pounds. We had one pint of flour
a day for our alloyance. Sometimes we made soup of it; sometimes we
(made) pancakes; and sometimes mixed it up with cold water and eat it
that way. We traveld twelve or fourteen days. The time came at last when
we should have to reach some place or starve. We saw fresh horse and
cattle tracks. The morning come, we scraped all the flour out of the
sack, mixed it up and baked it into bread, and made some soup, and eat
everything we had. We traveld on all day without anything to eat, and
that evening we caught up with a sheep train of eight wagons. We traveld
with them till we arrived at the settlements; and know I am safe in
California, and got to good home, and going to school._
_"Jerry is working in -------- It is a good country. You can get from 50
to 60 and 75 Dollars for cooking. Tell me all about the affairs in the
States, and how all the folks get along."_
And so ends this artless narrative. The little man was at school again,
God bless him, while his brother lay scalped upon the desert.
FELLOW PASSENGERS
At Ogden we changed cars from the Union Pacific to the Central Pacific
line of railroad. The change was doubly welcome; for, first, we had
better cars on the new line; and, second, those in which we had been
cooped for more than ninety hours had begun to stink abominably. Several
yards away, as we returned, let us say from dinner, our nostrils were
assailed by rancid air. I have stood on a platform while the whole train
was shunting; and as the dwelling-cars drew near, there would come a
whiff of pure menagerie, only a little sourer, as from men instead of
monkeys. I think we are human only in virtue of open windows. Without
fresh air, you only require a bad heart, and a remarkable command of the
Queen's English, to become such another as Dean Swift; a kind of leering
human goat, leaping and wagging your scut on mountains of offence. I do
my best to keep my head the other way, and look for the human rather
than the bestial in this Yahoo-like business of the emigrant train. But
one thing I must say, the car of the Chinese was notably the least
offensive.
The cars on the Central Pacific were nearly twice as high, and so
proportionally airier; they were freshly varnished, which gave us all a
sense of cleanliness as though we had bathed; the seats drew out and
joined in the centre, so that there was no more need for bed-boards; and
there was an upper tier of berths which could be closed by day and
opened at night.
I had by this time some opportunity of seeing the people whom I was
among. They were in rather marked contrast to the emigrants I had met on
board ship while crossing the Atlantic. They were mostly lumpish
fellows, silent and noisy, a common combination; somewhat sad, I should
say, with an extraordinary poor taste in humour, and little interest in
their fellow-creatures beyond that of a cheap and merely external
curiosity. If they heard a man's name and business, they seemed to think
they had the heart of that mystery; but they were as eager to know that
much as they were indifferent to the rest. Some of them were on nettles
till they learned your name was Dickson and you a journeyman baker; but
beyond that, whether you were Catholic or Mormon, dull or clever, fierce
or friendly, was all one to them. Others who were not so stupid,
gossiped a little, and, I am bound to say, unkindly. A favourite
witticism was for some lout to raise the alarm of "All aboard!" while
the rest of us were dining, thus contributing his mite to the general
discomfort. Such a one was always much applauded for his high spirits.
When I was ill coming through Wyoming, I was astonished--fresh from the
eager humanity on board ship--to meet with little but laughter. One of
the young men even amused himself by incommoding me, as was then very
easy; and that not from ill-nature, but mere clodlike incapacity to
think, for he expected me to join the laugh. I did so, but it was
phantom merriment. Later on, a man from Kansas had three violent
epileptic fits, and though, of course, there were not wanting some to
help him, it was rather superstitious terror than sympathy that his case
evoked among his fellow-passengers. "Oh, I hope he's not going to die!"
cried a woman; "it would be terrible to have a dead body!" And there was
a very general movement to leave the man behind at the next station.
This, by good fortune, the conductor negatived.
There was a good deal of story-telling in some quarters; in others,
little but silence. In this society, more than any other that ever I was
in, it was the narrator alone who seemed to enjoy the narrative. It was
rarely that any one listened for the listening. If he lent an ear to
another man's story, it was because he was in immediate want of a
hearer for one of his own. Food and the progress of the train were the
subjects most generally treated; many joined to discuss these who
otherwise would hold their tongues. One small knot had no better
occupation than to worm out of me my name; and the more they tried, the
more obstinately fixed I grew to baffle them. They assailed me with
artful questions and insidious offers of correspondence in the future;
but I was perpetually on my guard, and parried their assaults with
inward laughter. I am sure Dubuque would have given me ten dollars for
the secret. He owed me far more, had he understood life, for thus
preserving him a lively interest throughout the journey. I met one of my
fellow-passengers months after, driving a street tramway car in San
Francisco; and, as the joke was now out of season, told him my name
without subterfuge. You never saw a man more chap-fallen. But had my
name been Demogorgon, after so prolonged a mystery he had still been
disappointed.
There were no emigrants direct from Europe--save one German family and a
knot of Cornish miners who kept grimly by themselves, one reading the
New Testament all day long through steel spectacles, the rest discussing
privately the secrets of their old-world, mysterious race. Lady Hester
Stanhope believed she could make something great of the Cornish; for my
part, I can make nothing of them at all. A division of races, older and
more original than that of Babel, keeps this close, esoteric family
apart from neighbouring Englishmen. Not even a Red Indian seems more
foreign in my eyes. This is one of the lessons of travel--that some of
the strangest races dwell next door to you at home.
The rest were all American born, but they came from almost every quarter
of that Continent. All the States of the North had sent out a fugitive
to cross the plains with me. From Virginia, from Pennsylvania, from New
York, from far western Iowa and Kansas, from Maine that borders on the
Canadas, and from the Canadas themselves--some one or two were fleeing
in quest of a better land and better wages. The talk in the train, like
the talk I heard on the steamer, ran upon hard times, short commons, and
hope that moves ever westward. I thought of my shipful from Great
Britain with a feeling of despair. They had come 3,000 miles, and yet
not far enough. Hard times bowed them out of the Clyde, and stood to
welcome them at Sandy Hook. Where were they to go? Pennsylvania, Maine,
Iowa, Kansas? These were not places for immigration, but for emigration,
it appeared; not one of them, but I knew a man who had lifted up his
heel and left it for an ungrateful country. And it was still westward
that they ran. Hunger, you would have thought, came out of the east like
the sun, and the evening was made of edible gold. And, meantime, in the
car in front of me, were there not half a hundred emigrants from the
opposite quarter? Hungry Europe and hungry China, each pouring from
their gates in search of provender, had here come face to face. The two
waves had met; east and west had alike failed; the whole round world had
been prospected and condemned; there was no El Dorado anywhere; and till
one could emigrate to the moon, it seemed as well to stay patiently at
home. Nor was there wanting another sign, at once more picturesque and
more disheartening; for, as we continued to steam westward towards the
land of gold, we were continually passing other emigrant trains upon the
journey east; and these were as crowded as our own. Had all these return
voyagers made a fortune in the mines? Were they all bound for Paris, and
to be in Rome by Easter? It would seem not, for, whenever we met them,
the passengers ran on the platform and cried to us through the windows,
in a kind of wailing chorus, to "come back." On the plains of Nebraska,
in the mountains of Wyoming, it was still the same cry, and dismal to my
heart, "Come back!" That was what we heard by the way "about the good
country we were going to." And at that very hour the Sand-lot of San
Francisco was crowded with the unemployed, and the echo from the other
side of Market Street was repeating the rant of demagogues.
If, in truth, it were only for the sake of wages that men emigrate, how
many thousands would regret the bargain! But wages, indeed, are only one
consideration out of many; for we are a race of gipsies, and love change
and travel for themselves.
DESPISED RACES
Of all stupid ill-feelings, the sentiment of my fellow-Caucasians
towards our companions in the Chinese car was the most stupid and the
worst. They seemed never to have looked at them, listened to them, or
thought of them, but hated them _a priori_. The Mongols were their
enemies in that cruel and treacherous battlefield of money. They could
work better and cheaper in half a hundred industries, and hence there
was no calumny too idle for the Caucasians to repeat and even to
believe. They declared them hideous vermin, and affected a kind of
choking in the throat when they beheld them. Now, as a matter of fact,
the young Chinese man is so like a large class of European women, that
on raising my head and suddenly catching sight of one at a considerable
distance, I have for an instant been deceived by the resemblance. I do
not say it is the most attractive class of our women, but for all that
many a man's wife is less pleasantly favoured. Again, my emigrants
declared that the Chinese were dirty. I cannot say they were clean, for
that was impossible upon the journey; but in their efforts after
cleanliness they put the rest of us to shame. We all pigged and stewed
in one infamy, wet our hands and faces for half a minute daily on the
platform, and were unashamed. But the Chinese never lost an opportunity,
and you would see them washing their feet--an act not dreamed of among
ourselves--and going as far as decency permitted to wash their whole
bodies. I may remark by the way that the dirtier people are in their
persons the more delicate is their sense of modesty. A clean man strips
in a crowded boathouse; but he who is unwashed slinks in and out of bed
without uncovering an inch of skin. Lastly, these very foul and
malodorous Caucasians entertained the surprising illusion that it was
the Chinese waggon, and that alone, which stank. I have said already
that it was the exception, and notably the freshest of the three.
These judgments are typical of the feeling in all Western America. The
Chinese are considered stupid because they are imperfectly acquainted
with English. They are held to be base because their dexterity and
frugality enable them to underbid the lazy, luxurious Caucasian. They
are said to be thieves; I am sure they have no monopoly of that. They
are called cruel; the Anglo-Saxon and the cheerful Irishman may each
reflect before he bears the accusation. I am told, again, that they are
of the race of river pirates, and belong to the most despised and
dangerous class in the Celestial Empire. But if this be so, what
remarkable pirates have we here! and what must be the virtues, the
industry, the education, and the intelligence of their superiors at
home!
Awhile ago it was the Irish, now it is the Chinese that must go. Such is
the cry. It seems, after all, that no country is bound to submit to
immigration any more than to invasion; each is war to the knife, and
resistance to either but legitimate defence. Yet we may regret the free
tradition of the republic, which loved to depict herself with open arms,
welcoming all unfortunates. And certainly, as a man who believes that he
loves freedom, I may be excused some bitterness when I find her sacred
name misused in the contention. It was but the other day that I heard a
vulgar fellow in the Sand-lot, the popular tribune of San Francisco,
roaring for arms and butchery. "At the call of Abreham Lincoln," said
the orator, "ye rose in the name of freedom to set free the negroes; can
ye not rise and liberate yourselves from a few dhirty Mongolians?"
For my own part, I could not look but with wonder and respect on the
Chinese. Their forefathers watched the stars before mine had begun to
keep pigs. Gunpowder and printing, which the other day we imitated, and
a school of manners which we never had the delicacy so much as to desire
to imitate, were theirs in a long-past antiquity. They walked the earth
with us, but it seems they must be of different clay. They hear the
clock strike the same hour, yet surely of a different epoch. They travel
by steam conveyance, yet with such a baggage of old Asiatic thoughts and
superstitions as might check the locomotive in its course. Whatever is
thought within the circuit of the Great Wall; what the wry-eyed,
spectacled schoolmaster teaches in the hamlets round Pekin; religions so
old that our language looks a halfling boy alongside; philosophy so wise
that our best philosophers find things therein to wonder at; all this
travelled alongside of me for thousands of miles over plain and
mountain. Heaven knows if we had one common thought or fancy all that
way, or whether our eyes, which yet were formed upon the same design,
beheld the same world out of the railway windows. And when either of us
turned his thoughts to home and childhood, what a strange dissimilarity
must there not have been in these pictures of the mind--when I beheld
that old, grey, castled city, high throned above the firth, with the
flag of Britain flying, and the red-coat sentry pacing over all; and the
man in the next car to me would conjure up some junks and a pagoda and a
fort of porcelain, and call it, with the same affection, home.
Another race shared among my fellow-passengers in the disfavour of the
Chinese; and that, it is hardly necessary to say, was the noble red man
of old story--he over whose own hereditary continent we had been
steaming all these days. I saw no wild or independent Indian; indeed, I
hear that such avoid the neighbourhood of the train; but now and again
at way stations, a husband and wife and a few children, disgracefully
dressed out with the sweepings of civilisation, came forth and stared
upon the emigrants. The silent stoicism of their conduct, and the
pathetic degradation of their appearance, would have touched any
thinking creature, but my fellow-passengers danced and jested round them
with a truly Cockney baseness. I was ashamed for the thing we call
civilisation. We shall carry upon our consciences so much, at least, of
our forefathers' misconduct as we continue to profit by ourselves.
If oppression drives a wise man mad, what should be raging in the hearts
of these poor tribes, who have been driven back and back, step after
step, their promised reservations torn from them one after another as
the States extended westward, until at length they are shut up into
these hideous mountain deserts of the centre--and even there find
themselves invaded, insulted, and hunted out by ruffianly diggers? The
eviction of the Cherokees (to name but an instance), the extortion of
Indian agents, the outrages of the wicked, the ill-faith of all, nay,
down to the ridicule of such poor beings as were here with me upon the
train, make up a chapter of injustice and indignity such as a man must
be in some ways base if his heart will suffer him to pardon or forget.
These old, well-founded, historical hatreds have a savour of nobility
for the independent. That the Jew should not love the Christian, nor the
Irishman love the English, nor the Indian brave tolerate the thought of
the American, is not disgraceful to the nature of man; rather, indeed,
honourable, since it depends on wrongs ancient like the race, and not
personal to him who cherishes the indignation.
TO THE GOLDEN GATES
A little corner of Utah is soon traversed, and leaves no particular
impressions on the mind. By an early hour on Wednesday morning we
stopped to breakfast at Toano, a little station on a bleak, high-lying
plateau in Nevada. The man who kept the station eating-house was a Scot,
and learning that I was the same, he grew very friendly, and gave me
some advice on the country I was now entering. "You see," said he, "I
tell you this, because I come from your country." Hail, brither Scots!
His most important hint was on the moneys of this part of the world.
There is something in the simplicity of a decimal coinage which is
revolting to the human mind; thus the French, in small affairs, reckon
strictly by halfpence; and you have to solve, by a spasm of mental
arithmetic, such posers as thirty-two, forty-five, or even a hundred
halfpence. In the Pacific States they have made a bolder push for
complexity, and settle their affairs by a coin that no longer
exists--the _bit_, or old Mexican real. The supposed value of the bit is
twelve and a half cents, eight to the dollar. When it comes to two bits,
the quarter-dollar stands for the required amount. But how about an odd
bit? The nearest coin to it is a dime, which is short by a fifth. That,
then, is called a _short bit_. If you have one, you lay it triumphantly
down, and save two and a half cents. But if you have not, and lay down a
quarter, the bar-keeper or shopman calmly tenders you a dime by way of
change; and thus you have paid what is called a _long bit_, and lost two
and a half cents, or even, by comparison with a short bit, five cents.
In country places all over the Pacific coast, nothing lower than a bit
is ever asked or taken, which vastly increases the cost of life; as even
for a glass of beer you must pay fivepence or sevenpence-halfpenny, as
the case may be. You will say that this system of mutual robbery was as
broad as it was long; but I have discovered a plan to make it broader,
with which I here endow the public. It is brief and simple--radiantly
simple. There is one place where five cents are recognised, and that is
the post-office. A quarter is only worth two bits, a short and a long.
Whenever you have a quarter, go to the post office and buy five cents'
worth of postage-stamps; you will receive in change two dimes, that is,
two short bits. The purchasing power of your money is undiminished. You
can go and have your two glasses of beer all the same; and you have made
yourself a present of five cents' worth of postage-stamps into the
bargain. Benjamin Franklin would have patted me on the head for this
discovery.
From Toano we travelled all day through deserts of alkali and sand,
horrible to man, and bare sage-brush country that seemed little
kindlier, and came by supper-time to Elko. As we were standing, after
our manner, outside the station, I saw two men whip suddenly from
underneath the cars, and take to their heels across country. They were
tramps, it appeared, who had been riding on the beams since eleven of
the night before; and several of my fellow-passengers had already seen
and conversed with them while we broke our fast at Toano. These land
stowaways play a great part over here in America, and I should have
liked dearly to become acquainted with them.
At Elko an odd circumstance befell me. I was coming out from supper,
when I was stopped by a small, stout, ruddy man, followed by two others
taller and ruddier than himself.
"Ex-cuse me, sir," he said, "but do you happen to be going on?"
I said I was, whereupon he said he hoped to persuade me to desist from
that intention. He had a situation to offer me, and if we could come to
terms, why, good and well. "You see," he continued, "I'm running a
theatre here, and we're a little short in the orchestra. You're a
musician, I guess?"
I assured him that, beyond a rudimentary acquaintance with "Auld Lang
Syne" and "The Wearing of the Green," I had no pretension whatever to
that style. He seemed much put out of countenance; and one of his taller
companions asked him, on the nail, for five dollars.
"You see, sir," added the latter to me, "he bet you were a musician; I
bet you weren't. No offence, I hope?"
"None whatever," I said, and the two withdrew to the bar, where I
presume the debt was liquidated.
This little adventure woke bright hopes in my fellow-travellers, who
thought they had now come to a country where situations went a-begging.
But I am not so sure that the offer was in good faith. Indeed, I am more
than half persuaded it was but a feeler to decide the bet.
Of all the next day I will tell you nothing, for the best of all
reasons, that I remember no more than that we continued through desolate
and desert scenes, fiery hot and deadly weary. But some time after I had
fallen asleep that night, I was awakened by one of my companions. It was
in vain that I resisted. A fire of enthusiasm and whisky burned in his
eyes; and he declared we were in a new country, and I must come forth
upon the platform and see with my own eyes. The train was then, in its
patient way, standing halted in a by-track. It was a clear, moonlit
night; but the valley was too narrow to admit the moonshine direct, and
only a diffused glimmer whitened the tall rocks and relieved the
blackness of the pines. A hoarse clamour filled the air; it was the
continuous plunge of a cascade somewhere near at hand among the
mountains. The air struck chill, but tasted good and vigorous in the
nostrils--a fine, dry, old mountain atmosphere. I was dead sleepy, but
I returned to roost with a grateful mountain feeling at my heart.
When I awoke next morning, I was puzzled for a while to know if it were
day or night, for the illumination was unusual. I sat up at last, and
found we were grading slowly downward through a long snowshed; and
suddenly we shot into an open; and before we were swallowed into the
next length of wooden tunnel, I had one glimpse of a huge pine-forested
ravine upon my left, a foaming river and a sky already coloured with the
fires of dawn. I am usually very calm over the displays of nature; but
you will scarce believe how my heart leaped at this. It was like meeting
one's wife. I had come home again--home from unsightly deserts to the
green and habitable corners of the earth. Every spire of pine along the
hilltop, every trouty pool along that mountain river, was more dear to
me than a blood relation. Few people have praised God more happily than
I did. And thenceforward, down by Blue Cañon, Alta, Dutch Flat, and all
the old mining camps, through a sea of mountain forests, dropping
thousands of feet toward the far sea-level as we went, not I only, but
all the passengers on board, threw off their sense of dirt and heat and
weariness, and bawled like schoolboys, and thronged with shining eyes
upon the platform, and became new creatures within and without. The sun
no longer oppressed us with heat, it only shone laughingly along the
mountain-side, until we were fain to laugh ourselves for glee. At every
turn we could see farther into the land and our own happy futures. At
every town the cocks were tossing their clear notes into the golden air,
and crowing for the new day and the new country. For this was indeed our
destination; this was "the good country" we had been going to so long.
By afternoon we were at Sacramento, the city of gardens in a plain of
corn; and the next day before the dawn we were lying-to upon the Oakland
side of San Francisco Bay. The day was breaking as we crossed the
ferry; the fog was rising over the citied hills of San Francisco; the
day was perfect--not a ripple, scarce a stain, upon its blue expanse;
everything was waiting, breathless, for the sun. A spot of cloudy gold
lit first upon the head of Tamalpais, and then widened downward on its
shapely shoulder; the air seemed to awaken and began to sparkle; and
suddenly
"The tall hills Titan discovered,"
and the city of San Francisco, and the bay of gold and corn, were lit
from end to end with summer daylight.
THE OLD AND NEW PACIFIC CAPITALS
THE OLD AND NEW PACIFIC CAPITALS
I
MONTEREY
The Bay of Monterey has been compared by no less a person than General
Sherman to a bent fishing-hook; and the comparison, if less important
than the march through Georgia, still shows the eye of a soldier for
topography. Santa Cruz sits exposed at the shank; the mouth of the
Salinas river is at the middle of the bend; and Monterey itself is
cosily ensconced beside the barb. Thus the ancient capital of California
faces across the bay, while the Pacific Ocean, though hidden by low
hills and forest, bombards her left flank and rear with never-dying
surf. In front of the town, the long line of sea-beach trends north and
north-west, and then westward to enclose the bay. The waves which lap so
quietly about the jetties of Monterey grew louder and larger in the
distance; you can see the breakers leaping high and white by day; at
night, the outline of the shore is traced in transparent silver by the
moonlight and the flying foam; and from all round, even in quiet
weather, the low, distant, thrilling roar of the Pacific hangs over the
coast and the adjacent country like smoke above a battle.
These long beaches are enticing to the idle man. It would be hard to
find a walk more solitary and at the same time more exciting to the
mind. Crowds of ducks and sea-gulls hover over the sea. Sandpipers trot
in and out by troops after the retiring waves, trilling together in a
chorus of infinitesimal song. Strange sea-tangles, new to the European
eye, the bones of whales, or sometimes a whole whale's carcase, white
with carrion-gulls and poisoning the wind, lie scattered here and there
along the sands. The waves come in slowly, vast and green, curve their
translucent necks, and burst with a surprising uproar, that runs, waxing
and waning, up and down the long key-board of the beach. The foam of
these great ruins mounts in an instant to the ridge of the sand glacis,
swiftly fleets back again, and is met and buried by the next breaker.
The interest is perpetually fresh. On no other coast that I know shall
you enjoy, in calm, sunny weather, such a spectacle of Ocean's
greatness, such beauty of changing colour, or such degrees of thunder in
the sound. The very air is more than usually salt by this Homeric deep.
Inshore, a tract of sand-hills borders on the beach. Here and there a
lagoon, more or less brackish, attracts the birds and hunters. A rough,
spotty undergrowth partially conceals the sand. The crouching, hardy,
live oaks flourish singly or in thickets--the kind of wood for murderers
to crawl among--and here and there the skirts of the forest extend
downward from the hills with a floor of turf and long aisles of
pine-trees hung with Spaniard's Beard. Through this quaint desert the
railway cars drew near to Monterey from the junction at Salinas
City--though that and so many other things are now for ever altered--and
it was from here that you had the first view of the old township lying
in the sands, its white windmills bickering in the chill, perpetual
wind, and the first fogs of the evening drawing drearily around it from
the sea.
The one common note of all this country is the haunting presence of the
ocean. A great faint sound of breakers follows you high up into the
inland cañons; the roar of water dwells in the clean, empty rooms of
Monterey as in a shell upon the chimney; go where you will, you have
but to pause and listen to hear the voice of the Pacific. You pass out
of the town to the south-west, and mount the hill among pine woods.
Glade, thicket, and grove surround you. You follow winding sandy tracks
that lead nowhither. You see a deer; a multitude of quail arises. But
the sound of the sea still follows you as you advance, like that of wind
among the trees, only harsher and stranger to the ear; and when at
length you gain the summit, out breaks on every hand and with freshened
vigour that same unending, distant, whispering rumble of the ocean; for
now you are on the top of Monterey peninsula, and the noise no longer
only mounts to you from behind along the beach towards Santa Cruz, but
from your right also, round by Chinatown and Pinos lighthouse, and from
down before you to the mouth of the Carmello river. The whole woodland
is begirt with thundering surges. The silence that immediately surrounds
you where you stand is not so much broken as it is haunted by this
distant, circling rumour. It sets your senses upon edge; you strain your
attention; you are clearly and unusually conscious of small sounds near
at hand; you walk listening like an Indian hunter; and that voice of the
Pacific is a sort of disquieting company to you in your walk.
When once I was in these woods I found it difficult to turn homeward.
All woods lure a rambler onward; but in those of Monterey it was the
surf that particularly invited me to prolong my walks. I would push
straight for the shore where I thought it to be nearest. Indeed, there
was scarce a direction that would not, sooner or later, have brought me
forth on the Pacific. The emptiness of the woods gave me a sense of
freedom and discovery in these excursions. I never in all my visits met
but one man. He was a Mexican, very dark of hue, but smiling and fat,
and he carried an axe, though his true business at that moment was to
seek for straying cattle. I asked him what o'clock it was, but he seemed
neither to know nor care; and when he in his turn asked me for news of
his cattle, I showed myself equally indifferent. We stood and smiled
upon each other for a few seconds, and then turned without a word and
took our several ways across the forest.
One day--I shall never forget it--I had taken a trail that was new to
me. After a while the woods began to open, the sea to sound nearer hand.
I came upon a road, and, to my surprise, a stile. A step or two farther,
and, without leaving the woods, I found myself among trim houses. I
walked through street after street, parallel and at right angles, paved
with sward and dotted with trees, but still undeniable streets, and each
with its name posted at the corner, as in a real town. Facing down the
main thoroughfare--"Central Avenue," as it was ticketed--I saw an
open-air temple, with benches and sounding-board, as though for an
orchestra. The houses were all tightly shuttered; there was no smoke, no
sound but of the waves, no moving thing. I have never been in any place
that seemed so dream-like. Pompeii is all in a bustle with visitors, and
its antiquity and strangeness deceive the imagination; but this town had
plainly not been built above a year or two, and perhaps had been
deserted overnight. Indeed it was not so much like a deserted town as
like a scene upon the stage by daylight, and with no one on the boards.
The barking of a dog led me at last to the only house still occupied,
where a Scots pastor and his wife pass the winter alone in this empty
theatre. The place was "The Pacific Camp Grounds, the Christian Seaside
Resort." Thither, in the warm season, crowds come to enjoy a life of
teetotalism, religion, and flirtation, which I am willing to think
blameless and agreeable. The neighbourhood at least is well selected.
The Pacific booms in front. Westward is Point Pinos, with the lighthouse
in a wilderness of sand, where you will find the lightkeeper playing the
piano, making models and bows and arrows, studying dawn and sunrise in
amateur oil-painting, and with a dozen other elegant pursuits and
interests to surprise his brave old-country rivals. To the east, and
still nearer, you will come upon a space of open down, a hamlet, a haven
among rocks, a world of surge and screaming sea-gulls. Such scenes are
very similar in different climates; they appear homely to the eyes of
all; to me this was like a dozen spots in Scotland. And yet the boats
that ride in the haven are of strange outlandish design; and, if you
walk into the hamlet you will behold costumes and faces, and hear a
tongue, that are unfamiliar to the memory. The joss-stick burns, the
opium-pipe is smoked, the floors are strewn with slips of coloured
paper--prayers, you would say, that had somehow missed their
destination--and a man guiding his upright pencil from right to left
across the sheet writes home the news of Monterey to the Celestial
Empire.
The woods and the Pacific rule between them the climate of this seaboard
region. On the streets of Monterey, when the air does not smell salt
from the one, it will be blowing perfumed from the resinous tree-tops of
the other. For days together, a hot, dry air will overhang the town,
close as from an oven, yet healthful and aromatic in the nostrils. The
cause is not far to seek, for the woods are afire, and the hot wind is
blowing from the hills. These fires are one of the great dangers of
California. I have seen from Monterey as many as three at the same time,
by day a cloud of smoke, by night a red coal of conflagration in the
distance. A little thing will start them, and, if the wind be
favourable, they gallop over miles of country faster than a horse. The
inhabitants must turn out and work like demons, for it is not only the
pleasant groves that are destroyed; the climate and the soil are equally
at stake, and these fires prevent the rains of the next winter and dry
up perennial fountains. California has been a land of promise in its
time, like Palestine; but if the woods continue so swiftly to perish, it
may become, like Palestine, a land of desolation.
To visit the woods while they are languidly burning is a strange piece
of experience. The fire passes through the underbrush at a run. Every
here and there a tree flares up instantaneously from root to summit,
scattering tufts of flame, and is quenched, it seems, as quickly. But
this last is only in semblance. For after this first squib-like
conflagration of the dry moss and twigs, there remains behind a
deep-rooted and consuming fire in the very entrails of the tree. The
resin of the pitch-pine is principally condensed at the base of the bole
and in the spreading roots. Thus, after the light, showy, skirmishing
flames, which are only as the match to the explosion, have already
scampered down the wind into the distance, the true harm is but
beginning for this giant of the woods. You may approach the tree from
one side, and see it, scorched indeed from top to bottom, but apparently
survivor of the peril. Make the circuit, and there, on the other side of
the column, is a clear mass of living coal, spreading like an ulcer;
while underground, to their most extended fibre, the roots are being
eaten out by fire, and the smoke is rising through the fissures to the
surface. A little while and, without a nod of warning, the huge
pine-tree snaps off short across the ground, and falls prostrate with a
crash. Meanwhile the fire continues its silent business; the roots are
reduced to a fine ash; and long afterwards, if you pass by, you will
find the earth pierced with radiating galleries, and preserving the
design of all these subterranean spurs, as though it were the mould for
a new tree instead of the print of an old one. These pitch-pines of
Monterey are, with the single exception of the Monterey cypress, the
most fantastic of forest trees. No words can give an idea of the
contortion of their growth; they might figure without change in a circle
of the nether hell as Dante pictured it; and at the rate at which trees
grow, and at which forest fires spring up and gallop through the hills
of California, we may look forward to a time when there will not be one
of them left standing in that land of their nativity. At least they
have not so much to fear from the axe, but perish by what may be called
a natural although a violent death; while it is man in his short-sighted
greed that robs the country of the nobler redwood. Yet a little while
and perhaps all the hills of seaboard California may be as bald as
Tamalpais.
I have an interest of my own in these forest fires, for I came so near
to lynching on one occasion, that a braver man might have retained a
thrill from the experience. I wished to be certain whether it was the
moss, that quaint funereal ornament of Californian forests, which blazed
up so rapidly when the flame first touched the tree. I suppose I must
have been under the influence of Satan, for instead of plucking off a
piece for my experiment, what should I do but walk up to a great pine
tree in a portion of the wood which had escaped so much as scorching,
strike a match, and apply the flame gingerly to one of the tassels. The
tree went off simply like a rocket; in three seconds it was a roaring
pillar of fire. Close by I could hear the shouts of those who were at
work combating the original conflagration. I could see the waggon that
had brought them tied to a live oak in a piece of open; I could even
catch the flash of an axe as it swung up through the underwood into the
sunlight. Had any one observed the result of my experiment my neck was
literally not worth a pinch of snuff; after a few minutes of passionate
expostulation I should have been run up to a convenient bough.
"To die for faction is a common evil;
But to be hanged for nonsense is the devil."
I have run repeatedly, but never as I ran that day. At night I went out
of town, and there was my own particular fire, quite distinct from the
other, and burning, as I thought, with even greater vigour.
But it is the Pacific that exercises the most direct and obvious power
upon the climate. At sunset, for months together, vast, wet, melancholy
fogs arise and come shoreward from the ocean. From the hill-top above
Monterey the scene is often noble, although it is always sad. The upper
air is still bright with sunlight; a glow still rests upon the Gabelano
Peak; but the fogs are in possession of the lower levels; they crawl in
scarves among the sandhills; they float, a little higher, in clouds of a
gigantic size and often of a wild configuration; to the south, where
they have struck the seaward shoulder of the mountains of Santa Lucia,
they double back and spire up skyward like smoke. Where their shadow
touches, colour dies out of the world. The air grows chill and deadly as
they advance. The trade-wind freshens, the trees begin to sigh, and all
the windmills in Monterey are whirling and creaking and filling their
cisterns with the brackish water of the sands. It takes but a little
while till the invasion is complete. The sea, in its lighter order, has
submerged the earth. Monterey is curtained in for the night in thick,
wet, salt, and frigid clouds, so to remain till day returns; and before
the sun's rays they slowly disperse and retreat in broken squadrons to
the bosom of the sea. And yet often when the fog is thickest and most
chill, a few steps out of the town and up the slope, the night will be
dry and warm and full of inland perfume.
MONTEREY
MEXICANS, AMERICANS, AND INDIANS
The history of Monterey has yet to be written. Founded by Catholic
missionaries, a place of wise beneficence to Indians, a place of arms, a
Mexican capital continually wrested by one faction from another, an
American capital when the first House of Representatives held its
deliberations, and then falling lower and lower from the capital of the
State to the capital of a county, and from that again, by the loss of
its charter and town lands, to a mere bankrupt village, its rise and
decline is typical of that of all Mexican institutions and even Mexican
families in California.
Nothing is stranger in that strange State than the rapidity with which
the soil has changed hands. The Mexicans, you may say, are all poor and
landless, like their former capital; and yet both it and they hold
themselves apart, and preserve their ancient customs and something of
their ancient air.
The town, when I was there, was a place of two or three streets,
economically paved with sea-sand, and two or three lanes, which were
water-courses in the rainy season, and at all times were rent up by
fissures four or five feet deep. There were no street lights. Short
sections of wooden sidewalk only added to the dangers of the night, for
they were often high above the level of the roadway, and no one could
tell where they would be likely to begin or end. The houses were for the
most part built of unbaked adobe brick, many of them old for so new a
country, some of very elegant proportions, with low, spacious, shapely
rooms, and walls so thick that the heat of summer never dried them to
the heart. At the approach of the rainy season a deathly chill and a
graveyard smell began to hang about the lower floors; and diseases of
the chest are common and fatal among house-keeping people of either sex.
There was no activity but in and around the saloons, where people sat
almost all day long playing cards. The smallest excursion was made on
horseback. You would scarcely ever see the main street without a horse
or two tied to posts, and making a fine figure with their Mexican
housings. It struck me oddly to come across some of the _Cornhill_
illustrations to Mr. Blackmore's "Erema," and see all the characters
astride on English saddles. As a matter of fact, an English saddle is a
rarity even in San Francisco, and you may say a thing unknown in all the
rest of California. In a place so exclusively Mexican as Monterey, you
saw not only Mexican saddles but true Vaquero riding--men always at the
hand-gallop up hill and down dale, and round the sharpest corner, urging
their horses with cries and gesticulations and cruel rotatory spurs,
checking them dead with a touch, or wheeling them right-about-face in a
square yard. The type of face and character of bearing are surprisingly
un-American. The first ranged from something like the pure Spanish, to
something, in its sad fixity, not unlike the pure Indian, although I do
not suppose there was one pure blood of either race in all the country.
As for the second, it was a matter of perpetual surprise to find, in
that world of absolutely mannerless Americans, a people full of
deportment, solemnly courteous, and doing all things with grace and
decorum. In dress they ran to colour and bright sashes. Not even the
most Americanised could always resist the temptation to stick a red rose
into his hatband. Not even the most Americanised would descend to wear
the vile dress-hat of civilisation. Spanish was the language of the
streets. It was difficult to get along without a word or two of that
language for an occasion. The only communications in which the
population joined were with a view to amusement. A weekly public ball
took place with great etiquette, in addition to the numerous fandangoes
in private houses. There was a really fair amateur brass band. Night
after night serenaders would be going about the street, sometimes in a
company and with several instruments and voices together, sometimes
severally, each guitar before a different window. It was a strange thing
to lie awake in nineteenth-century America, and hear the guitar
accompany, and one of these old, heart-breaking Spanish love-songs mount
into the night air, perhaps in a deep baritone, perhaps in that
high-pitched, pathetic, womanish alto which is so common among Mexican
men, and which strikes on the unaccustomed ear as something not entirely
human, but altogether sad.
The town, then, was essentially and wholly Mexican; and yet almost all
the land in the neighbourhood was held by Americans, and it was from the
same class, numerically so small, that the principal officials were
selected. This Mexican and that Mexican would describe to you his old
family estates, not one rood of which remained to him. You would ask him
how that came about, and elicit some tangled story back-foremost, from
which you gathered that the Americans had been greedy like designing
men, and the Mexicans greedy like children, but no other certain fact.
Their merits and their faults contributed alike to the ruin of the
former landholders. It is true they were improvident, and easily dazzled
with the sight of ready money; but they were gentle-folk besides, and
that in a way which curiously unfitted them to combat Yankee craft.
Suppose they have a paper to sign, they would think it a reflection on
the other party to examine the terms with any great minuteness; nay,
suppose them to observe some doubtful clause, it is ten to one they
would refuse from delicacy to object to it. I know I am speaking within
the mark, for I have seen such a case occur, and the Mexican, in spite
of the advice of his lawyer, has signed the imperfect paper like a lamb.
To have spoken in the matter, he said, above all to have let the other
party guess that he had seen a lawyer, would have "been like doubting
his word." The scruple sounds oddly to one of ourselves, who have been
brought up to understand all business as a competition in fraud, and
honesty itself to be a virtue which regards the carrying out, but not
the creation, of agreements. This single unworldly trait will account
for much of that revolution of which we are speaking. The Mexicans have
the name of being great swindlers, but certainly the accusation cuts
both ways. In a contest of this sort, the entire booty would scarcely
have passed into the hands of the more scrupulous race.
Physically the Americans have triumphed; but it is not entirely seen how
far they have themselves been morally conquered. This is, of course, but
a part of a part of an extraordinary problem now in the course of being
solved in the various States of the American Union. I am reminded of an
anecdote. Some years ago, at a great sale of wine, all the odd lots were
purchased by a grocer in a small way in the old town of Edinburgh. The
agent had the curiosity to visit him some time after and inquire what
possible use he could have for such material. He was shown, by way of
answer, a huge vat where all the liquors, from humble Gladstone to
imperial Tokay, were fermenting together. "And what," he asked, "do you
propose to call this?" "I'm no' very sure," replied the grocer, "but I
think it's going to turn out port." In the older Eastern States, I think
we may say that this hotch-potch of races is going to turn out English,
or thereabout. But the problem is the Territorial belt, and in the group
of States on the Pacific coast. Above all, in these last we may look to
see some singular hybrid--whether good or evil, who shall forecast? but
certainly original and all their own. In my little restaurant at
Monterey, we have sat down to table, day after day, a Frenchman, two
Portuguese, an Italian, a Mexican, and a Scotsman: we had for common
visitors an American from Illinois, a nearly pure-blood Indian woman,
and a naturalised Chinese; and from time to time a Switzer and a German
came down from country ranches for the night. No wonder that the Pacific
coast is a foreign land to visitors from the Eastern States, for each
race contributes something of its own. Even the despised Chinese have
taught the youth of California, none indeed of their virtues, but the
debasing use of opium. And chief among these influences is that of the
Mexicans.
The Mexicans, although in the State, are out of it. They still preserve
a sort of international independence, and keep their affairs snug to
themselves. Only four or five years ago, Vasquez the bandit, his troops
being dispersed and the hunt too hot for him in other parts of
California, returned to his native Monterey, and was seen publicly in
her streets and saloons, fearing no man. The year that I was there there
occurred two reputed murders. As the Montereyans are exceptionally vile
speakers of each other and of every one behind his back, it is not
possible for me to judge how much truth there may have been in these
reports; but in the one case every one believed, and in the other some
suspected, that there had been foul play; and nobody dreamed for an
instant of taking the authorities into their counsel. Now this is, of
course, characteristic enough of the Mexicans; but it is a noteworthy
feature that all the Americans in Monterey acquiesced without a word in
this inaction. Even when I spoke to them upon the subject, they seemed
not to understand my surprise; they had forgotten the traditions of
their own race and upbringing, and become, in a word, wholly
Mexicanised.
Again, the Mexicans, having no ready money to speak of, rely almost
entirely in their business transactions upon each other's worthless
paper. Pedro the penniless pays you with an I O U from the equally
penniless Miguel. It is a sort of local currency by courtesy. Credit in
these parts has passed into a superstition. I have seen a strong,
violent man struggling for months to recover a debt, and getting nothing
but an exchange of waste paper. The very storekeepers are averse to
asking for cash payments, and are more surprised than pleased when they
are offered. They fear there must be something under it, and that you
mean to withdraw your custom from them. I have seen the enterprising
chemist and stationer begging me with fervour to let my account run on,
although I had my purse open in my hand; and partly from the commonness
of the case, partly from some remains of that generous old Mexican
tradition which made all men welcome to their tables, a person may be
notoriously both unwilling and unable to pay, and still find credit for
the necessaries of life in the stores of Monterey. Now this villainous
habit of living upon "tick" has grown into Californian nature. I do not
mean that the American and European storekeepers of Monterey are as lax
as Mexicans; I mean that American farmers in many parts of the State
expect unlimited credit, and profit by it in the meanwhile without a
thought for consequences. Jew storekeepers have already learned the
advantage to be gained from this; they lead on the farmer into
irretrievable indebtedness, and keep him ever after as their bond-slave
hopelessly grinding in the mill. So the whirligig of time brings in its
revenges, and except that the Jew knows better than to foreclose, you
may see Americans bound in the same chains with which they themselves
had formerly bound the Mexican. It seems as if certain sorts of follies,
like certain sorts of grain, were natural to the soil rather than to the
race that holds and tills it for the moment.
In the meantime, however, the Americans rule in Monterey County. The new
county seat, Salinas City, in the bald, corn-bearing plain under the
Gabelano Peak, is a town of a purely American character. The land is
held, for the most part, in those enormous tracts which are another
legacy of Mexican days, and form the present chief danger and disgrace
of California; and the holders are mostly of American or British birth.
We have here in England no idea of the troubles and inconveniences which
flow from the existence of these large landholders--land-thieves,
land-sharks, or land-grabbers, they are more commonly and plainly
called. Thus the townlands of Monterey are all in the hands of a single
man. How they came there is an obscure, vexatious question, and rightly
or wrongly the man is hated with a great hatred. His life has been
repeatedly in danger. Not very long ago, I was told, the stage was
stopped and examined three evenings in succession by disguised horsemen
thirsting for his blood. A certain house on the Salinas road, they say,
he always passes in his buggy at full speed, for the squatter sent him
warning long ago. But a year since he was publicly pointed out for death
by no less a man than Mr. Dennis Kearney. Kearney is a man too well
known in California, but a word of explanation is required for English
readers. Originally an Irish drayman, he rose, by his command of bad
language, to almost dictatorial authority in the State; throned it there
for six months or so, his mouth full of oaths, gallowses, and
conflagrations; was first snuffed out last winter by Mr. Coleman, backed
by his San Francisco Vigilantes and three Gatling guns; completed his
own ruin by throwing in his lot with the grotesque Green-backer party;
and had at last to be rescued by his old enemies, the police, out of the
hands of his rebellious followers. It was while he was at the top of his
fortune that Kearney visited Monterey with his battle-cry against
Chinese labour, the railroad monopolists, and the land-thieves; and his
one articulate counsel to the Montereyans was to "hang David Jacks." Had
the town been American, in my private opinion, this would have been
done years ago. Land is a subject on which there is no jesting in the
West, and I have seen my friend the lawyer drive out of Monterey to
adjust a competition of titles with the face of a captain going into
battle and his Smith-and-Wesson convenient to his hand.
On the ranche of another of these landholders you may find our old
friend, the truck system, in full operation. Men live there, year in
year out, to cut timber for a nominal wage, which is all consumed in
supplies. The longer they remain in this desirable service the deeper
they will fall in debt--a burlesque injustice in a new country, where
labour should be precious, and one of those typical instances which
explains the prevailing discontent and the success of the demagogue
Kearney.
In a comparison between what was and what is in California, the praisers
of times past will fix upon the Indians of Carmel. The valley drained by
the river so named is a true Californian valley, bare, dotted with
chaparal, overlooked by quaint, unfinished hills. The Carmel runs by
many pleasant farms, a clear and shallow river, loved by wading kine;
and at last, as it is falling towards a quicksand and the great Pacific,
passes a ruined mission on a hill. From the mission church the eye
embraces a great field of ocean, and the ear is filled with a continuous
sound of distant breakers on the shore. But the day of the Jesuit has
gone by, the day of the Yankee has succeeded, and there is no one left
to care for the converted savage. The church is roofless and ruinous,
sea-breezes and sea-fogs, and the alternation of the rain and sunshine,
daily widening the breaches and casting the crockets from the wall. As
an antiquity in this new land, a quaint specimen of missionary
architecture, and a memorial of good deeds, it had a triple claim to
preservation from all thinking people; but neglect and abuse have been
its portion. There is no sign of American interference, save where a
headboard has been torn from a grave to be a mark for pistol bullets.
So it is with the Indians for whom it was erected. Their lands, I was
told, are being yearly encroached upon by the neighbouring American
proprietor, and with that exception no man troubles his head for the
Indians of Carmel. Only one day in the year, the day before our Guy
Fawkes, the _padre_ drives over the hill from Monterey; the little
sacristy, which is the only covered portion of the church, is filled
with seats and decorated for the service; the Indians troop together,
their bright dresses contrasting with their dark and melancholy faces;
and there, among a crowd of somewhat unsympathetic holiday-makers, you
may hear God served with perhaps more touching circumstances than in any
other temple under heaven. An Indian, stone-blind and about eighty years
of age, conducts the singing; other Indians compose the choir; yet they
have the Gregorian music at their finger ends, and pronounce the Latin
so correctly that I could follow the meaning as they sang. The
pronunciation was odd and nasal, the singing hurried and staccato. "In
sæcula sæculo-hohorum," they went, with a vigorous aspirate to every
additional syllable. I have never seen faces more vividly lit up with
joy than the faces of these Indian singers. It was to them not only the
worship of God, nor an act by which they recalled and commemorated
better days, but was besides an exercise of culture, where all they knew
of art and letters was united and expressed. And it made a man's heart
sorry for the good fathers of yore who had taught them to dig and to
reap, to read and to sing, who had given them European mass-books which
they still preserve and study in their cottages, and who had now passed
away from all authority and influence in that land--to be succeeded by
greedy land-thieves and sacrilegious pistol-shots. So ugly a thing may
our Anglo-Saxon Protestantism appear beside the doings of the Society of
Jesus.
But revolution in this world succeeds to revolution. All that I say in
this paper is in a paulo-past tense. The Monterey of last year[2]
exists no longer. A huge hotel has sprung up in the desert by the
railway. Three sets of diners sit down successively to table. Invaluable
toilettes figure along the beach and between the live oaks; and Monterey
is advertised in the newspapers, and posted in the waiting-rooms at
railway stations, as a resort for wealth and fashion. Alas for the
little town! it is not strong enough to resist the influence of the
flaunting caravanserai, and the poor, quaint, penniless native gentlemen
of Monterey must perish, like a lower race, before the millionaire
vulgarians of the Big Bonanza.
FOOTNOTE:
[2] 1879.
II
SAN FRANCISCO
The Pacific coast of the United States, as you may see by the map, and
still better in that admirable book, "Two Years before the Mast," by
Dana, is one of the most exposed and shelterless on earth. The
trade-wind blows fresh; the huge Pacific swell booms along degree after
degree of an unbroken line of coast. South of the joint firth of the
Columbia and Williamette, there flows in no considerable river; south of
Puget Sound there is no protected inlet of the ocean. Along the whole
seaboard of California there are but two unexceptionable
anchorages,--the bight of the Bay of Monterey, and the inland sea that
takes its name from San Francisco.
Whether or not it was here that Drake put in in 1597, we cannot tell.
There is no other place so suitable; and yet the narrative of Francis
Pretty scarcely seems to suit the features of the scene. Viewed from
seaward, the Golden Gates should give no very English impression to
justify the name of a new Albion. On the west, the deep lies open;
nothing near but the still vexed Farallones. The coast is rough and
barren. Tamalpais, a mountain of a memorable figure, springing direct
from the sea-level, over-plumbs the narrow entrance from the north. On
the south, the loud music of the Pacific sounds along beaches and
cliffs, and among broken reefs, the sporting-place of the sea-lion.
Dismal, shifting sandhills, wrinkled by the wind, appear behind.
Perhaps, too, in the days of Drake, Tamalpais would be clothed to its
peak with the majestic redwoods.
Within the memory of persons not yet old, a mariner might have steered
into these narrows--not yet the Golden Gates--opened out the surface of
the bay--here girt with hills, there lying broad to the horizon--and
beheld a scene as empty of the presence, as pure from the handiwork, of
man, as in the days of our old sea-commander. A Spanish mission, fort,
and church took the place of those "houses of the people of the country"
which were seen by Pretty, "close to the water-side." All else would be
unchanged. Now, a generation later, a great city covers the sandhills on
the west, a growing town lies along the muddy shallows of the east;
steamboats pant continually between them from before sunrise till the
small hours of the morning; lines of great sea-going ships lie ranged at
anchor; colours fly upon the islands; and from all around the hum of
corporate life, of beaten bells, and steam, and running carriages, goes
cheerily abroad in the sunshine. Choose a place on one of the huge
throbbing ferry-boats, and, when you are midway between the city and the
suburb, look around. The air is fresh and salt as if you were at sea. On
the one hand is Oakland, gleaming white among its gardens. On the other,
to seaward, hill after hill is crowded and crowned with the palaces of
San Francisco; its long streets lie in regular bars of darkness, east
and west, across the sparkling picture; a forest of masts bristles like
bulrushes about its feet; nothing remains of the days of Drake but the
faithful trade-wind scattering the smoke, the fogs that will begin to
muster about sundown, and the fine bulk of Tamalpais looking down on San
Francisco, like Arthur's seat on Edinburgh.
Thus, in the course of a generation only, this city and its suburb have
arisen. Men are alive by the score who have hunted all over the
foundations in a dreary waste. I have dined, near the "punctual centre"
of San Francisco, with a gentleman (then newly married), who told me of
his former pleasures, wading with his fowling-piece in sand and scrub,
on the site of the house where we were dining. In this busy, moving
generation, we have all known cities to cover our boyish playgrounds, we
have all started for a country walk and stumbled on a new suburb; but I
wonder what enchantment of the Arabian Nights can have equalled this
evocation of a roaring city, in a few years of a man's life, from the
marshes and the blowing sand. Such swiftness of increase, as with an
overgrown youth, suggests a corresponding swiftness of destruction. The
sandy peninsula of San Francisco, mirroring itself on one side in the
bay, beaten on the other by the surge of the Pacific, and shaken to the
heart by frequent earthquakes, seems in itself no very durable
foundation. According to Indian tales, perhaps older than the name of
California, it once rose out of the sea in a moment, and sometime or
other shall, in a moment, sink again. No Indian, they say, cares to
linger on that doubtful land. "The earth hath bubbles as the water has,
and this is of them." Here, indeed, all is new, nature as well as towns.
The very hills of California have an unfinished look; the rains and the
streams have not yet carved them to their perfect shape. The forests
spring like mushrooms from the unexhausted soil; and they are mown down
yearly by the forest fires. We are in early geological epochs, changeful
and insecure; and we feel, as with a sculptor's model, that the author
may yet grow weary of and shatter the rough sketch.
Fancy apart, San Francisco is a city beleaguered with alarms. The lower
parts, along the bay side, sit on piles; old wrecks decaying, fish
dwelling unsunned, beneath the populous houses; and a trifling
subsidence might drown the business quarters in an hour. Earthquakes are
not only common, they are sometimes threatening in their violence; the
fear of them grows yearly on a resident; he begins with indifference,
ends in sheer panic; and no one feels safe in any but a wooden house.
Hence it comes that, in that rainless clime, the whole city is built of
timber--a woodyard of unusual extent and complication; that fires spring
up readily, and served by the unwearying trade-wind, swiftly spread;
that all over the city there are fire-signal boxes; that the sound of
the bell, telling the number of the threatened ward, is soon familiar to
the ear; and that nowhere else in the world is the art of the fireman
carried to so nice a point.
Next, perhaps, in order of strangeness to the rapidity of its
appearance, is the mingling of the races that combine to people it. The
town is essentially not Anglo-Saxon; still more essentially not
American. The Yankee and the Englishman find themselves alike in a
strange country. There are none of these touches--not of nature, and I
dare scarcely say of art--by which the Anglo-Saxon feels himself at home
in so great a diversity of lands. Here, on the contrary, are airs of
Marseilles and of Pekin. The shops along the street are like the
consulates of different nations. The passers-by vary in feature like the
slides of a magic-lantern. For we are here in that city of gold to which
adventurers congregated out of all the winds of heaven; we are in a land
that till the other day was ruled and peopled by the countrymen of
Cortes; and the sea that laves the piers of San Francisco is the ocean
of the East and of the isles of summer. There goes the Mexican,
unmistakable; there the blue-clad Chinaman with his white slippers;
there the soft-spoken, brown Kanaka, or perhaps a waif from far-away
Malaya. You hear French, German, Italian, Spanish, and English
indifferently. You taste the food of all nations in the various
restaurants; passing from a French _prix-fixe_ where every one is
French, to a roaring German ordinary where every one is German; ending,
perhaps, in a cool and silent Chinese tea-house. For every man, for
every race and nation, that city is a foreign city; humming with foreign
tongues and customs; and yet each and all have made themselves at home.
The Germans have a German theatre and innumerable beer-gardens. The
French Fall of the Bastille is celebrated with squibs and banners, and
marching patriots, as noisily as the American Fourth of July. The
Italians have their dear domestic quarter, with Italian caricatures in
the windows, Chianti and polenta in the taverns. The Chinese are settled
as in China. The goods they offer for sale are as foreign as the
lettering on the signboard of the shop: dried fish from the China seas;
pale cakes and sweetmeats--the like, perhaps, once eaten by
Badroubadour; nuts of unfriendly shape; ambiguous, outlandish
vegetables, misshapen, lean, or bulbous--telling of a country where the
trees are not as our trees, and the very back-garden is a cabinet of
curiosities. The joss-house is hard by, heavy with incense, packed with
quaint carvings and the paraphernalia of a foreign ceremonial. All these
you behold, crowded together in the narrower arteries of the city, cool,
sunless, a little mouldy, with the unfamiliar faces at your elbow, and
the high, musical sing-song of that alien language in your ears. Yet the
houses are of Occidental build; the lines of a hundred telegraphs pass,
thick as a ship's rigging, overhead, a kite hanging among them, perhaps,
or perhaps two, one European, one Chinese, in shape and colour;
mercantile Jack, the Italian fisher, the Dutch merchant, the Mexican
vaquero, go hustling by; at the sunny end of the street, a thoroughfare
roars with European traffic; and meanwhile, high and clear, out breaks
perhaps the San Francisco fire-alarm, and people pause to count the
strokes, and in the stations of the double fire-service you know that
the electric bells are ringing, the traps opening, and clapping to, and
the engine, manned and harnessed, being whisked into the street, before
the sound of the alarm has ceased to vibrate on your ear. Of all
romantic places for a boy to loiter in, that Chinese quarter is the most
romantic. There, on a half-holiday, three doors from home, he may visit
an actual foreign land, foreign in people, language, things, and
customs. The very barber of the Arabian Nights shall be at work before
him, shaving heads; he shall see Aladdin playing on the streets; who
knows but among those nameless vegetables the fruit of the nose-tree
itself may be exposed for sale? And the interest is heightened with a
chill of horror. Below, you hear, the cellars are alive with mystery;
opium dens, where the smokers lie one above another, shelf above shelf,
close-packed and grovelling in deadly stupor; the seats of unknown vices
and cruelties, the prisons of unacknowledged slaves and the secret
lazarettos of disease.
With all this mass of nationalities, crime is common. There are rough
quarters where it is dangerous o' nights; cellars of public
entertainment which the wary pleasure-seeker chooses to avoid. Concealed
weapons are unlawful, but the law is continually broken. One editor was
shot dead while I was there; another walked the streets accompanied by a
bravo, his guardian angel. I have been quietly eating a dish of oysters
in a restaurant, where, not more than ten minutes after I had left,
shots were exchanged and took effect; and one night about ten o'clock, I
saw a man standing watchfully at a street-corner with a long
Smith-and-Wesson glittering in his hand behind his back. Somebody had
done something he should not, and was being looked for with a vengeance.
It is odd, too, that the seat of the last vigilance committee I know
of--a mediæval _Vehmgericht_--was none other than the Palace Hotel, the
world's greatest caravanserai, served by lifts and lit with electricity;
where, in the great glazed court, a band nightly discourses music from a
grove of palms. So do extremes meet in this city of contrasts: extremes
of wealth and poverty, apathy and excitement, the conveniences of
civilisation and the red justice of Judge Lynch.
The streets lie straight up and down the hills, and straight across at
right angles, these in sun, those in shadow, a trenchant pattern of
gloom and glare; and what with the crisp illumination, the sea-air
singing in your ears, the chill and glitter, the changing aspects both
of things and people, the fresh sights at every corner of your
walk--sights of the bay, of Tamalpais, of steep, descending streets, of
the outspread city--whiffs of alien speech, sailors singing on
shipboard, Chinese coolies toiling on the shore, crowds brawling all day
in the street before the Stock Exchange--one brief impression follows
and obliterates another, and the city leaves upon the mind no general
and stable picture, but a profusion of airy and incongruous images, of
the sea and shore, the east and west, the summer and the winter.
In the better parts of the most interesting city there is apt to be a
touch of the commonplace. It is in the slums and suburbs that the city
dilettante finds his game. And there is nothing more characteristic and
original than the outlying quarters of San Francisco. The Chinese
district is the most famous; but it is far from the only truffle in the
pie. There is many another dingy corner, many a young antiquity, many a
_terrain vague_ with that stamp of quaintness that the city lover seeks
and dwells on; and the indefinite prolongation of its streets, up hill
and down dale, makes San Francisco a place apart. The same street in its
career visits and unites so many different classes of society, here
echoing with drays, there lying decorously silent between the mansions
of Bonanza millionaires, to founder at last among the drifting sands
beside Lone Mountain cemetery, or die out among the sheds and lumber of
the north. Thus you may be struck with a spot, set it down for the most
romantic of the city, and, glancing at the name-plate, find it is in the
same street that you yourself inhabit in another quarter of the town.
The great net of straight thoroughfares lying at right angles, east and
west and north and south, over the shoulders of Nob Hill, the hill of
palaces, must certainly be counted the best part of San Francisco. It is
there that the millionaires are gathered together vying with each other
in display. From thence, looking down over the business wards of the
city, we can descry a building with a little belfry, and that is the
Stock Exchange, the heart of San Francisco: a great pump we might call
it, continually pumping up the savings of the lower quarters into the
pockets of the millionaires upon the hill. But these same thoroughfares
that enjoy for awhile so elegant a destiny have their lines prolonged
into more unpleasant places. Some meet their fate in the sands; some
must take a cruise in the ill-famed China quarters; some run into the
sea; some perish unwept among pig-sties and rubbish-heaps.
Nob Hill comes, of right, in the place of honour; but the two other
hills of San Francisco are more entertaining to explore. On both there
are a world of old wooden houses snoozing together all forgotten. Some
are of the quaintest design, others only romantic by neglect and age.
Some have been almost undermined by new thoroughfares, and sit high up
on the margin of the sandy cutting, only to be reached by stairs. Some
are curiously painted, and I have seen one at least with ancient
carvings panelled in its wall. Surely they are not of Californian
building, but far voyagers from round the stormy Horn, like those who
sent for them and dwelt in them at first. Brought to be the favourites
of the wealthy, they have sunk into these poor, forgotten districts,
where, like old town toasts, they keep each other silently in
countenance. Telegraph Hill and Rincon Hill, these are the two dozing
quarters that I recommend to the city dilettante. There stand these
forgotten houses, enjoying the unbroken sun and quiet. There, if there
were such an author, would the San Francisco Fortuné de Boisgobey pitch
the first chapter of his mystery. But the first is the quainter of the
two, and commands, moreover, a noble view. As it stands at the turn of
the bay, its skirts are all waterside, and round from North Reach to the
Bay Front you can follow doubtful paths from one quaint corner to
another. Everywhere the same tumble-down decay and sloppy progress, new
things yet unmade, old things tottering to their fall; everywhere the
same out-at-elbows, many-nationed loungers at dim, irregular grog-shops;
everywhere the same sea-air and isleted sea-prospect; and for a last and
more romantic note, you have on the one hand Tamalpais standing high in
the blue air, and on the other the tail of that long alignment of
three-masted, full-rigged, deep-sea ships that make a forest of spars
along the eastern front of San Francisco. In no other port is such a
navy congregated. For the coast trade is so trifling, and the ocean
trade from round the Horn so large, that the smaller ships are swallowed
up, and can do nothing to confuse the majestic order of these merchant
princes. In an age when the ship-of-the-line is already a thing of the
past, and we can never again hope to go coasting in a cock-boat between
the "wooden walls" of a squadron at anchor, there is perhaps no place on
earth where the power and beauty of sea architecture can be so perfectly
enjoyed as in this bay.
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
_Vixerunt nonnulli in agris, delectati re sua
familiari. His idem propositum fuit quod
regibus, ut ne qua re agerent, ne cui
parerent, libertate uterentur: cujus proprium
est sic vivere ut velis._
CIC. DE OFF. I. XX.
TO
VIRGIL WILLIAMS
AND
DORA NORTON WILLIAMS
THESE SKETCHES ARE AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED
BY THEIR FRIEND
THE AUTHOR
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
The scene of this little book is on a high mountain. There are, indeed,
many higher; there are many of a nobler outline. It is no place of
pilgrimage for the summary globe trotter; but to one who lives upon its
sides, Mount Saint Helena soon becomes a centre of interest. It is the
Mont Blanc of one section of the Californian Coast Range, none of its
near neighbours rising to one-half its altitude. It looks down on much
green, intricate country. It feeds in the spring-time many splashing
brooks. From its summit you must have an excellent lesson of geography:
seeing, to the south, San Francisco Bay, with Tamalpais on the one hand
and Monte Diablo on the other; to the west and thirty miles away, the
open ocean; eastward, across the cornlands and thick tule swamps of
Sacramento Valley, to where the Central Pacific Railroad begins to climb
the sides of the Sierras; and northward, for what I know, the white head
of Shasta looking down on Oregon. Three counties, Napa County, Lake
County, and Sonoma County, march across its cliffy shoulders. Its naked
peak stands nearly four thousand five hundred feet above the sea; its
sides are fringed with forest; and the soil, where it is bare, glows
warm with cinnabar.
Life in its shadow goes rustically forward. Bucks, and bears, and
rattlesnakes, and former mining operations, are the staple of men's
talk. Agriculture has only begun to mount above the valley. And though
in a few years from now the whole district may be smiling with farms,
passing trains shaking the mountain to the heart, many-windowed hotels
lighting up the night like factories, and a prosperous city occupying
the site of sleepy Calistoga; yet in the meantime, around the foot of
that mountain the silence of nature reigns in a great measure unbroken,
and the people of hill and valley go sauntering about their business as
in the days before the flood.
To reach Mount Saint Helena from San Francisco, the traveller has twice
to cross the bay: once by the busy Oakland Ferry, and again, after an
hour or so of the railway, from Vallejo Junction to Vallejo. Thence he
takes rail once more to mount the long green strath of Napa Valley.
In all the contractions and expansions of that inland sea, the Bay of
San Francisco, there can be few drearier scenes than the Vallejo Ferry.
Bald shores and a low, bald islet enclose the sea; through the narrows
the tide bubbles, muddy like a river. When we made the passage (bound,
although yet we knew it not, for Silverado) the steamer jumped, and the
black buoys were dancing in the jabble; the ocean breeze blew killing
chill; and, although the upper sky was still unflecked with vapour, the
sea-fogs were pouring in from seaward, over the hilltops of Marin
County, in one great, shapeless, silver cloud.
South Vallejo is typical of many Californian towns. It was a blunder;
the site has proved untenable; and although it is still such a young
place by the scale of Europe, it has already begun to be deserted for
its neighbour and namesake, North Vallejo. A long pier, a number of
drinking-saloons, a hotel of a great size, marshy pools where the frogs
keep up their croaking, and even at high noon the entire absence of any
human face or voice--these are the marks of South Vallejo. Yet there was
a tall building beside the pier, labelled the _Star Flour Mills_; and
sea-going, full-rigged ships lay close alongshore, waiting for their
cargo. Soon these would be plunging round the Horn, soon the flour from
the _Star Flour Mills_ would be landed on the wharves of Liverpool. For
that, too, is one of England's outposts; thither, to this gaunt mill,
across the Atlantic and Pacific deeps and round about the icy Horn,
this crowd of great, three-masted, deep-sea ships come, bringing
nothing, and return with bread.
The Frisby House, for that was the name of the hotel, was a place of
fallen fortunes, like the town. It was now given up to labourers, and
partly ruinous. At dinner there was the ordinary display of what is
called in the west a _two-bit house_: the tablecloth checked red and
white, the plague of flies, the wire hencoops over the dishes, the great
variety and invariable vileness of the food and the rough, coatless men
devouring it in silence. In our bedroom, the stove would not burn,
though it would smoke; and while one window would not open, the other
would not shut. There was a view on a bit of empty road, a few dark
houses, a donkey wandering with its shadow on a slope, and a blink of
sea, with a tall ship lying anchored in the moonlight. All about that
dreary inn frogs sang their ungainly chorus.
Early the next morning we mounted the hill along a wooden footway,
bridging one marish spot after another. Here and there, as we ascended,
we passed a house embowered in white roses. More of the bay became
apparent, and soon the blue peak of Tamalpais rose above the green level
of the island opposite. It told us we were still but a little way from
the city of the Golden Gates, already, at that hour, beginning to awake
among the sand-hills. It called to us over the waters as with the voice
of a bird. Its stately head, blue as a sapphire on the paler azure of
the sky, spoke to us of wider outlooks and the bright Pacific. For
Tamalpais stands sentry, like a lighthouse, over the Golden Gates,
between the bay and the open ocean, and looks down indifferently on
both. Even as we saw and hailed it from Vallejo, seamen, far out at sea,
were scanning it with shaded eyes; and, as if to answer to the thought,
one of the great ships below began silently to clothe herself with white
sails, homeward bound for England.
For some way beyond Vallejo the railway led us through bald green
pastures. On the west the rough highlands of Marin shut off the ocean;
in the midst, in long, straggling, gleaming arms, the bay died out among
the grass; there were few trees and few enclosures; the sun shone wide
over open uplands, the dis-plumed hills stood clear against the sky. But
by-and-by these hills began to draw nearer on either hand, and first
thicket and then wood began to clothe their sides; and soon we were away
from all signs of the sea's neighbourhood, mounting an inland, irrigated
valley. A great variety of oaks stood, now severally, now in a becoming
grove, among the fields and vineyards. The towns were compact, in about
equal proportions, of bright new wooden houses and great and growing
forest trees; and the chapel bell on the engine sounded most festally
that sunny Sunday, as we drew up at one green town after another, with
the townsfolk trooping in their Sunday's best to see the strangers, with
the sun sparkling on the clean houses, and great domes of foliage
humming overhead in the breeze.
This pleasant Napa Valley is, at its north end, blockaded by our
mountain. There, at Calistoga, the railroad ceases, and the traveller
who intends faring farther, to the Geysers or to the springs in Lake
County, must cross the spurs of the mountain by stage. Thus Mount Saint
Helena is not only a summit, but a frontier; and up to the time of
writing it has stayed the progress of the iron horse.
IN THE VALLEY
I
CALISTOGA
It is difficult for a European to imagine Calistoga, the whole place is
so new, and of such an Occidental pattern; the very name, I hear, was
invented at a supper-party by the man who found the springs.
The railroad and the highway come up the valley about parallel to one
another. The street of Calistoga joins them, perpendicular to both--a
wide street, with bright, clean, low houses, here and there a veranda
over the sidewalk, here and there a horse-post, here and there lounging
townsfolk. Other streets are marked out, and most likely named; for
these towns in the New World begin with a firm resolve to grow larger,
Washington and Broadway, and then First and Second, and so forth, being
boldly plotted out as soon as the community indulges in a plan. But, in
the meanwhile, all the life and most of the houses of Calistoga are
concentrated upon that street between the railway station and the road.
I never heard it called by any name, but I will hazard a guess that it
is either Washington or Broadway. Here are the blacksmith's, the
chemist's, the general merchant's, and Kong Sam Kee, the Chinese
laundryman's; here, probably, is the office of the local paper (for the
place has a paper--they all have papers); and here certainly is one of
the hotels, Cheeseborough's, whence the daring Foss, a man dear to
legend, starts his horses for the Geysers.
It must be remembered that we are here in a land of stage-drivers and
highwaymen; a land, in that sense, like England a hundred years ago. The
highway robber--road-agent, he is quaintly called--is still busy in
these parts. The fame of Vasquez is still young. Only a few years ago,
the Lakeport stage was robbed a mile or two from Calistoga. In 1879, the
dentist of Mendocino City, fifty miles away upon the coast, suddenly
threw off the garments of his trade, like Grindoff, in _The Miller and
his Men_, and flamed forth in his second dress as a captain of banditti.
A great robbery was followed by a long chase, a chase of days if not of
weeks, among the intricate hill-country; and the chase was followed by
much desultory fighting, in which several--and the dentist, I believe,
amongst the number--bit the dust. The grass was springing for the first
time, nourished upon their blood, when I arrived in Calistoga. I am
reminded of another highwayman of that same year. "He had been unwell,"
so ran his humorous defence, "and the doctor told him to take something,
so he took the express box."
The cultus of the stage-coachman always flourishes highest where there
are thieves on the road, and where the guard travels armed, and the
stage is not only a link between country and city, and the vehicle of
news, but has a faint warfaring aroma, like a man who should be brother
to a soldier. California boasts her famous stage-drivers, and among the
famous Foss is not forgotten. Along the unfenced, abominable mountain
roads, he launches his team with small regard to human life or the
doctrine of probabilities. Flinching travellers, who behold themselves
coasting eternity at every corner, look with natural admiration at their
driver's huge, impassive, fleshy countenance. He has the very face for
the driver in Sam Weller's anecdote, who upset the election party at the
required point. Wonderful tales are current of his readiness and skill.
One in particular, of how one of his horses fell at a ticklish passage
of the road, and how Foss let slip the reins, and, driving over the
fallen animal, arrived at the next stage with only three. This I relate
as I heard it, without guarantee.
I only saw Foss once, though, strange as it may sound, I have twice
talked with him. He lives out of Calistoga, at a ranche called
Fossville. One evening, after he was long gone home, I dropped into
Cheeseborough's, and was asked if I should like to speak with Mr. Foss.
Supposing that the interview was impossible, and that I was merely
called upon to subscribe the general sentiment, I boldly answered "Yes."
Next moment, I had one instrument at my ear, another at my mouth, and
found myself, with nothing in the world to say, conversing with a man
several miles off among desolate hills. Foss rapidly and somewhat
plaintively brought the conversation to an end; and he returned to his
night's grog at Fossville, while I strolled forth again on Calistoga
high street. But it was an odd thing that here, on what we are
accustomed to consider the very skirts of civilisation, I should have
used the telephone for the first time in my civilised career. So it goes
in these young countries; telephones, and telegraphs, and newspapers,
and advertisements running far ahead among the Indians and the grizzly
bears.
Alone, on the other side of the railway, stands the Springs Hotel, with
its attendant cottages. The floor of the valley is extremely level to
the very roots of the hills; only here and there a hillock, crowned with
pines, rises like the barrow of some chieftain famed in war; and right
against one of these hillocks is the Springs Hotel--is or was; for since
I was there the place has been destroyed by fire, and has risen again
from its ashes. A lawn runs about the house, and the lawn is in its turn
surrounded by a system of little five-roomed cottages, each with a
veranda and a weedy palm before the door. Some of the cottages are let
to residents, and these are wreathed in flowers. The rest are occupied
by ordinary visitors to the hotel; and a very pleasant way this is, by
which you have a little country cottage of your own, without domestic
burthens, and by the day or week.
The whole neighbourhood of Mount Saint Helena is full of sulphur and of
boiling springs. The Geysers are famous; they were the great health
resort of the Indians before the coming of the whites. Lake County is
dotted with spas; Hot Springs and White Sulphur Springs are the names of
two stations on the Napa Valley Railroad; and Calistoga itself seems to
repose on a mere film above a boiling, subterranean lake. At one end of
the hotel enclosure are the springs from which it takes its name, hot
enough to scald a child seriously while I was there. At the other end,
the tenant of a cottage sank a well, and there also the water came up
boiling. It keeps this end of the valley as warm as a toast. I have gone
across to the hotel a little after five in the morning, when a sea-fog
from the Pacific was hanging thick and grey, and dark and dirty
overhead, and found the thermometer had been up before me, and had
already climbed among the nineties; and in the stress of the day it was
sometimes too hot to move about.
But in spite of this heat from above and below, doing one on both sides,
Calistoga was a pleasant place to dwell in; beautifully green, for it
was then that favoured moment in the Californian year, when the rains
are over and the dusty summer has not yet set in; often visited by fresh
airs, now from the mountain, now across Sonoma from the sea; very quiet,
very idle, very silent but for the breezes and the cattle bells afield.
And there was something satisfactory in the sight of that great mountain
that enclosed us to the north; whether it stood, robed in sunshine,
quaking to its topmost pinnacle with the heat and brightness of the day;
or whether it set itself to weaving vapours, wisp after wisp growing,
trembling, fleeting, and fading in the blue.
The tangled, woody, and almost trackless foothills that enclose the
valley, shutting it off from Sonoma on the west, and from Yolo on the
east--rough as they were in outline, dug out by winter streams, crowned
by cliffy bluffs and nodding pine-trees--were dwarfed into satellites by
the bulk and bearing of Mount Saint Helena. She over-towered them by
two-thirds of her own stature. She excelled them by the boldness of her
profile. Her great bald summit, clear of trees and pasture, a cairn of
quartz and cinnabar, rejected kinship with the dark and shaggy
wilderness of lesser hilltops.
II
THE PETRIFIED FOREST
We drove off from the Springs Hotel about three in the afternoon. The
sun warmed me to the heart. A broad, cool wind streamed pauselessly down
the valley, laden with perfume. Up at the top stood Mount Saint Helena,
a bulk of mountain, bare atop, with tree-fringed spurs, and radiating
warmth. Once we saw it framed in a grove of tall and exquisitely
graceful white oaks, in line and colour a finished composition. We
passed a cow stretched by the roadside, her bell slowly beating time to
the movement of her ruminating jaws, her big red face crawled over by
half a dozen flies, a monument of content.
A little farther, and we struck to the left up a mountain road, and for
two hours threaded one valley after another, green, tangled, full of
noble timber, giving us every now and again a sight of Mount Saint
Helena and the blue hilly distance, and crossed by many streams, through
which we splashed to the carriage-step. To the right or the left, there
was scarce any trace of man but the road we followed; I think we passed
but one ranchero's house in the whole distance, and that was closed and
smokeless. But we had the society of these bright streams--dazzlingly
clear, as is their wont, splashing from the wheels in diamonds, and
striking a lively coolness through the sunshine. And what with the
innumerable variety of greens, the masses of foliage tossing in the
breeze, the glimpses of distance, the descents into seemingly
impenetrable thickets, the continual dodging of the road, which made
haste to plunge again into the covert, we had a fine sense of woods,
and spring-time, and the open air.
Our driver gave me a lecture by the way on Californian trees--a thing I
was much in need of, having fallen among painters who know the name of
nothing, and Mexicans who know the name of nothing in English. He taught
me the madrona, the manzanita, the buckeye, the maple; he showed me the
crested mountain quail; he showed me where some young redwoods were
already spiring heavenwards from the ruins of the old; for in this
district all had already perished: redwoods and redskins, the two
noblest indigenous living things, alike condemned.
At length, in a lonely dell, we came on a huge wooden gate with a sign
upon it like an inn. "The Petrified Forest. Proprietor: C. Evans," ran
the legend. Within, on a knoll of sward, was the house of the
proprietor, and another smaller house hard by to serve as a museum,
where photographs and petrifactions were retailed. It was a pure little
isle of touristry among these solitary hills.
The proprietor was a brave old white-faced Swede. He had wandered this
way, Heaven knows how, and taken up his acres--I forget how many years
ago--all alone, bent double with sciatica, and with six bits in his
pocket and an axe upon his shoulder. Long, useless years of seafaring
had thus discharged him at the end, penniless and sick. Without doubt he
had tried his luck at the diggings, and got no good from that; without
doubt he had loved the bottle, and lived the life of Jack ashore. But at
the end of these adventures, here he came; and, the place hitting his
fancy, down he sat to make a new life of it, far from crimps and the
salt sea. And the very sight of his ranche had done him good. It was
"the handsomest spot in the Californy mountains." "Isn't it handsome,
now?" he said. Every penny he makes goes into that ranche to make it
handsomer. Then the climate, with the sea-breeze every afternoon in the
hottest summer weather, had gradually cured the sciatica; and his sister
and niece were now domesticated with him for company--or, rather, the
niece came only once in the two days, teaching music the meanwhile in
the valley. And then, for a last piece of luck, "the handsomest spot in
the Californy mountains" had produced a petrified forest, which Mr.
Evans now shows at the modest figure of half a dollar a head, or
two-thirds of his capital when he first came there with an axe and a
sciatica.
This tardy favourite of fortune--hobbling a little, I think, as if in
memory of the sciatica, but with not a trace that I can remember of the
sea--thoroughly ruralised from head to foot, proceeded to escort us up
the hill behind his house.
"Who first found the forest?" asked my wife.
"The first? I was that man," said he. "I was cleaning up the pasture for
my beasts, when I found _this_"--kicking a great redwood, seven feet in
diameter, that lay there on its side, hollow heart, clinging lumps of
bark, all changed into grey stone, with veins of quartz between what had
been the layers of the wood.
"Were you surprised?"
"Surprised? No! What would I be surprised about? What did I know about
petrifactions--following the sea? Petrifaction! There was no such word
in my language! I knew about putrefaction, though! I thought it was a
stone; so would you, if you was cleaning up pasture."
And now he had a theory of his own, which I did not quite grasp, except
that the trees had not "grewed" there. But he mentioned, with evident
pride, that he differed from all the scientific people who had visited
the spot; and he flung about such words as "tufa" and "silica" with
careless freedom.
When I mentioned I was from Scotland, "My old country," he said; "my old
country"--with a smiling look and a tone of real affection in his voice.
I was mightily surprised, for he was obviously Scandinavian, and begged
him to explain. It seemed he had learned his English and done nearly
all his sailing in Scottish ships. "Out of Glasgow," said he, "or
Greenock; but that's all the same--they all hail from Glasgow." And he
was so pleased with me for being a Scotsman, and his adopted compatriot,
that he made me a present of a very beautiful piece of petrifaction--I
believe the most beautiful and portable he had.
Here was a man, at least, who was a Swede, a Scot, and an American,
acknowledging some kind allegiance to three lands. Mr. Wallace's
Scoto-Circassian will not fail to come before the reader. I have myself
met and spoken with a Fifeshire German, whose combination of abominable
accents struck me dumb. But, indeed, I think we all belong to many
countries. And perhaps this habit of much travel, and the engendering of
scattered friendships, may prepare the euthanasia of ancient nations.
And the forest itself? Well, on a tangled, briery hillside--for the
pasture would bear a little further cleaning up, to my eyes--there lie
scattered thickly various lengths of petrified trunk, such as the one
already mentioned. It is very curious, of course, and ancient enough, if
that were all. Doubtless, the heart of the geologist beats quicker at
the sight; but, for my part, I was mightily unmoved. Sight-seeing is the
art of disappointment.
"There's nothing under heaven so blue,
That's fairly worth the travelling to."
But, fortunately, Heaven rewards us with many agreeable prospects and
adventures by the way; and sometimes, when we go out to see a petrified
forest, prepares a far more delightful curiosity in the form of Mr.
Evans, whom may all prosperity attend throughout a long and green old
age.
III
NAPA WINE
I was interested in Californian wine. Indeed, I am interested in all
wines, and have been all my life, from the raisin wine that a
school-fellow kept secreted in his playbox up to my last discovery,
those notable Valtellines that once shone upon the board of Cæsar.
Some of us, kind old Pagans, watch with dread the shadows falling on the
age: how the unconquerable worm invades the sunny terraces of France,
and Bordeaux is no more, and the Rhone a mere Arabia Petræa. Château
Neuf is dead, and I have never tasted it; Hermitage--a hermitage indeed
from all life's sorrows--lies expiring by the river. And in the place of
these imperial elixirs, beautiful to every sense, gem-hued,
flower-scented, dream-compellers:--behold upon the quays at Cette the
chemicals arrayed; behold the analyst at Marseilles, raising hands in
obsecration, attesting god Lyæus, and the vats staved in, and the
dishonest wines poured forth among the sea. It is not Pan only; Bacchus,
too, is dead.
If wine is to withdraw its most poetic countenance, the sun of the white
dinner-cloth, a deity to be invoked by two or three, all fervent,
hushing their talk, degusting tenderly, and storing reminiscences--for a
bottle of good wine, like a good act, shines ever in the retrospect--if
wine is to desert us, go thy ways, old Jack! Now we begin to have
compunctions, and look back at the brave bottles squandered upon
dinner-parties, where the guests drank grossly, discussing politics the
while, and even the schoolboy "took his whack," like liquorice water.
And at the same time, we look timidly forward, with a spark of hope, to
where the new lands, already weary of producing gold, begin to green
with vineyards. A nice point in human history falls to be decided by
Californian and Australian wines.
Wine in California is still in the experimental stage; and when you
taste a vintage, grave economical questions are involved. The beginning
of vine-planting is like the beginning of mining for the precious
metals: the wine-grower also "prospects." One corner of land after
another is tried with one kind of grape after another. This is a
failure; that is better; a third best. So, bit by bit, they grope about
for their Clos Vougeot and Lafitte. Those lodes and pockets of earth,
more precious than the precious ores, that yield inimitable fragrance
and soft fire; those virtuous Bonanzas, where the soil has sublimated
under sun and stars to something finer, and the wine is bottled poetry:
these still lie undiscovered; chaparral conceals, thicket embowers them;
the miner chips the rock and wanders farther, and the grizzly muses
undisturbed. But there they bide their hour, awaiting their Columbus;
and nature nurses and prepares them. The smack of Californian earth
shall linger on the palate of your grandson.
Meanwhile the wine is merely a good wine; the best that I have
tasted--better than a Beaujolais, and not unlike. But the trade is poor;
it lives from hand to mouth, putting its all into experiments, and
forced to sell its vintages. To find one properly matured, and bearing
its own name, is to be fortune's favourite.
Bearing its own name, I say, and dwell upon the inuendo.
"You want to know why Californian wine is not drunk in the States?" a
San Francisco wine merchant said to me, after he had shown me through
his premises. "Well, here's the reason."
And opening a large cupboard, fitted with many little drawers, he
proceeded to shower me all over with a great variety of gorgeously
tinted labels, blue, red, or yellow, stamped with crown or coronet, and
hailing from such a profusion of _clos_ and _châteaux_, that a single
department could scarce have furnished forth the names. But it was
strange that all looked unfamiliar.
"Château X----?" said I. "I never heard of that."
"I dare say not," said he. "I had been reading one of X----'s novels."
They were all castles in Spain! But that sure enough is the reason why
California wine is not drunk in the States.
Napa Valley has been long a seat of the wine-growing industry. It did
not here begin, as it does too often, in the low valley lands along the
river, but took at once to the rough foot-hills, where alone it can
expect to prosper. A basking inclination, and stones, to be a reservoir
of the day's heat, seem necessary to the soil for wine; the grossness of
the earth must be evaporated, its marrow daily melted and refined for
ages; until at length these clods that break below our footing, and to
the eye appear but common earth, are truly and to the perceiving mind, a
masterpiece of nature. The dust of Richebourg, which the wind carries
away, what an apotheosis of the dust! Not man himself can seem a
stranger child of that brown, friable powder, than the blood and sun in
that old flask behind the fagots.
A Californian vineyard, one of man's outposts in the wilderness, has
features of its own. There is nothing here to remind you of the Rhine or
Rhone, of the low _côte d'or_, or the infamous and scabby deserts of
Champagne; but all is green, solitary, covert. We visited two of them,
Mr. Schram's and Mr. M'Eckron's, sharing the same glen.
Some way down the valley below Calistoga, we turned sharply to the south
and plunged into the thick of the wood. A rude trail rapidly mounting; a
little stream tinkling by on the one hand, big enough perhaps after the
rains, but already yielding up its life; overhead and on all sides, a
bower of green and tangled thicket, still fragrant and still
flower-bespangled by the early season, where thimble-berry played the
part of our English hawthorn, and the buck-eyes were putting forth their
twisted horns of blossom; through all this, we struggled toughly
upwards, canted to and fro by the roughness of the trail, and
continually switched across the face by sprays of leaf or blossom. The
last is no great inconvenience at home; but here in California it is a
matter of some moment. For in all woods and by every wayside there
prospers an abominable shrub or weed, called poison oak, whose very
neighbourhood is venomous to some, and whose actual touch is avoided by
the most impervious.
The two houses, with their vineyards, stood each in a green niche of its
own in this steep and narrow forest dell. Though they were so near,
there was already a good difference in level; and Mr. M'Eckron's head
must be a long way under the feet of Mr. Schram. No more had been
cleared than was necessary for cultivation; close around each oasis ran
the tangled wood; the glen enfolds them; there they lie basking in sun
and silence, concealed from all but the clouds and the mountain birds.
Mr. M'Eckron's is a bachelor establishment; a little bit of a wooden
house, a small cellar hard by in the hillside, and a patch of vines
planted and tended single-handed by himself. He had but recently begun;
his vines were young, his business young also; but I thought he had the
look of a man who succeeds. He hailed from Greenock: he remembered his
father putting him inside Mons Meg, and that touched me home; and we
exchanged a word or two of Scotch, which pleased me more than you would
fancy.
Mr. Schram's, on the other hand, is the oldest vineyard in the valley,
eighteen years old, I think; yet he began a penniless barber, and even
after he had broken ground up here with his black malvoisies, continued
for long to tramp the valley with his razor. Now, his place is the
picture of prosperity: stuffed birds in the veranda, cellars far dug
into the hillside, and resting on pillars like a bandit's cave:--all
trimness, varnish, flowers, and sunshine, among the tangled wildwood.
Stout, smiling Mrs. Schram, who has been to Europe and apparently all
about the States for pleasure, entertaining Fanny in the veranda, while
I was tasting wines in the cellar. To Mr. Schram this was a solemn
office; his serious gusto warmed my heart; prosperity had not yet wholly
banished a certain neophite and girlish trepidation, and he followed
every sip and read my face with proud anxiety. I tasted all. I tasted
every variety and shade of Schramberger, red and white Schramberger,
Burgundy Schramberger, Schramberger Hock, Schramberger Golden Chasselas,
the latter with a notable bouquet, and I fear to think how many more.
Much of it goes to London--most, I think; and Mr. Schram has a great
notion of the English taste.
In this wild spot, I did not feel the sacredness of ancient cultivation.
It was still raw, it was no Marathon, and no Johannisberg; yet the
stirring sunlight, and the growing vines, and the vats and bottles in
the cavern, made a pleasant music for the mind. Here, also, earth's
cream was being skimmed and garnered; and the London customers can
taste, such as it is, the tang of the earth in this green valley. So
local, so quintessential is a wine, that it seems the very birds in the
veranda might communicate a flavour, and that romantic cellar influence
the bottle next to be uncorked in Pimlico, and the smile of jolly Mr.
Schram might mantle in the glass.
But these are but experiments. All things in this new land are moving
farther on: the wine-vats and the miner's blasting tools but picket for
a night, like Bedouin pavilions; and to-morrow, to fresh woods! This
stir of change and these perpetual echoes of the moving footfall, haunt
the land. Men move eternally, still chasing Fortune; and, fortune found,
still wander. As we drove back to Calistoga, the road lay empty of mere
passengers, but its green side was dotted with the camps of travelling
families: one cumbered with a great waggonful of household stuff,
settlers going to occupy a ranche they had taken up in Mendocino, or
perhaps Tehama County; another, a party in dust-coats, men and women,
whom we found camped in a grove on the roadside, all on pleasure bent,
with a Chinaman to cook for them, and who waved their hands to us as we
drove by.
IV
THE SCOT ABROAD
A few pages back, I wrote that a man belonged in these days to a variety
of countries; but the old land is still the true love, the others are
but pleasant infidelities. Scotland is indefinable; it has no unity
except upon the map. Two languages, many dialects, innumerable forms of
piety, and countless local patriotisms and prejudices, part us among
ourselves more widely than the extreme east and west of that great
continent of America. When I am at home, I feel a man from Glasgow to be
something like a rival, a man from Barra to be more than half a
foreigner. Yet let us meet in some far country, and, whether we hail
from the braes of Manor or the braes of Mar, some ready-made affection
joins us on the instant. It is not race. Look at us. One is Norse, one
Celtic, and another Saxon. It is not community of tongue. We have it not
among ourselves; and we have it almost to perfection, with English, or
Irish, or American. It is no tie of faith, for we detest each other's
errors. And yet somewhere, deep down in the heart of each one of us,
something yearns for the old land, and the old kindly people.
Of all mysteries of the human heart, this is perhaps the most
inscrutable. There is no special loveliness in that grey country, with
its rainy, sea-beat archipelago; its fields of dark mountains; its
unsightly places, black with coal; its treeless, sour, unfriendly-looking
corn-lands; its quaint, grey, castled city, where the bells clash of a
Sunday, and the wind squalls, and the salt showers fly and beat. I do
not even know if I desire to live there; but let me hear, in some far
land, a kindred voice sing out, "Oh, why left I my hame?" and it seems at
once as if no beauty under the kind heavens, and no society of the wise
and good, can repay me for my absence from my country. And though I think
I would rather die elsewhere, yet in my heart of hearts I long to be
buried among good Scots clods. I will say it fairly, it grows on me with
every year: there are no stars so lovely as Edinburgh street-lamps. When
I forget thee, auld Reekie, may my right hand forget its cunning!
The happiest lot on earth is to be born a Scotchman. You must pay for it
in many ways, as for all other advantages on earth. You have to learn
the paraphrases and the shorter catechism; you generally take to drink;
your youth, as far as I can find out, is a time of louder war against
society, of more outcry and tears and turmoil, than if you had been
born, for instance, in England. But somehow life is warmer and closer;
the hearth burns more redly; the lights of home shine softer on the
rainy street; the very names, endeared in verse and music, cling nearer
round our hearts. An Englishman may meet an Englishman to-morrow, upon
Chimborazo, and neither of them care; but when the Scotch wine-grower
told me of Mons Meg, it was like magic.
"From the dim shieling on the misty island
Mountains divide us, and a world of seas;
Yet still our hearts are true, our hearts are Highland,
And we, in dreams, behold the Hebrides."
And, Highland and Lowland, all our hearts are Scottish.
Only a few days after I had seen M'Eckron, a message reached me in my
cottage. It was a Scotchman who had come down a long way from the hills
to market. He had heard there was a countryman in Calistoga, and came
round to the hotel to see him. We said a few words to each other; we had
not much to say--should never have seen each other had we stayed at
home, separated alike in space and in society; and then we shook hands,
and he went his way again to his ranche among the hills, and that was
all.
Another Scotchman there was, a resident, who for the mere love of the
common country, douce, serious, religious man, drove me all about the
valley, and took as much interest in me as if I had been his son: more,
perhaps; for the son has faults too keenly felt, while the abstract
countryman is perfect--like a whiff of peats.
And there was yet another. Upon him I came suddenly, as he was calmly
entering my cottage, his mind quite evidently bent on plunder: a man of
about fifty, filthy, ragged, roguish, with a chimney-pot hat and a tail
coat, and a pursing of his mouth that might have been envied by an elder
of the kirk. He had just such a face as I have seen a dozen times behind
the plate.
"Hullo, sir!" I cried. "Where are you going?"
He turned round without a quiver.
"You are a Scotchman, sir?" he said gravely. "So am I; I come from
Aberdeen. This is my card," presenting me with a piece of pasteboard
which he had raked out of some gutter in the period of the rains. "I was
just examining this palm," he continued, indicating the misbegotten
plant before our door, "which is the largest specimen I have yet
observed in Califoarnia."
There were four or five larger within sight. But where was the use of
argument? He produced a tape-line, made me help him to measure the tree
at the level of the ground, and entered the figures in a large and
filthy pocket-book, all with the gravity of Solomon. He then thanked me
profusely, remarking that such little services were due between
countrymen; shook hands with me, "for auld lang syne," as he said; and
took himself solemnly away, radiating dirt and humbug as he went.
A month or two after this encounter of mine, there came a Scot to
Sacramento--perhaps from Aberdeen. Anyway, there never was anyone more
Scottish in this wide world. He could sing and dance and drink, I
presume; and he played the pipes with vigour and success. All the Scotch
in Sacramento became infatuated with him, and spent their spare time and
money driving him about in an open cab, between drinks, while he blew
himself scarlet at the pipes. This is a very sad story. After he had
borrowed money from every one, he and his pipes suddenly disappeared
from Sacramento, and when I last heard, the police were looking for him.
I cannot say how this story amused me, when I felt myself so thoroughly
ripe on both sides to be duped in the same way.
It is at least a curious thing, to conclude, that the races which wander
widest, Jews and Scots, should be the most clannish in the world. But
perhaps these two are cause and effect: "For ye were strangers in the
land of Egypt."
WITH THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL
I
TO INTRODUCE MR. KELMAR
One thing in this new country very particularly strikes a stranger, and
that is the number of antiquities. Already there have been many cycles
of population succeeding each other, and passing away and leaving behind
them relics. These, standing on into changed times, strike the
imagination as forcibly as any pyramid or feudal tower. The towns, like
the vineyards, are experimentally founded: they grow great and prosper
by passing occasions; and when the lode comes to an end, and the miners
move elsewhere, the town remains behind them, like Palmyra in the
desert. I suppose there are, in no country in the world, so many
deserted towns as here in California.
The whole neighbourhood of Mount Saint Helena, now so quiet and sylvan,
was once alive with mining camps and villages. Here there would be two
thousand souls under canvas; there one thousand or fifteen hundred
ensconced, as if for ever, in a town of comfortable houses. But the luck
had failed, the mines petered out; and the army of miners had departed,
and left this quarter of the world to the rattlesnakes and deer and
grizzlies, and to the slower but steadier advance of husbandry.
It was with an eye on one of these deserted places, Pine Flat, on the
Geysers road, that we had come first to Calistoga. There is something
singularly enticing in the idea of going, rent free, into a ready-made
house. And to the British merchant, sitting at home at ease, it may
appear that, with such a roof over your head and a spring of clear water
hard by, the whole problem of the squatter's existence would be solved.
Food, however, has yet to be considered. I will go as far as most people
on tinned meats; some of the brightest moments of my life were passed
over tinned mulligatawny in the cabin of a sixteen-ton schooner,
storm-stayed in Portree Bay; but after suitable experiments, I pronounce
authoritatively that man cannot live by tins alone. Fresh meat must be
had on an occasion. It is true that the great Foss, driving by along the
Geysers road, wooden-faced, but glorified with legend, might have been
induced to bring us meat, but the great Foss could hardly bring us milk.
To take a cow would have involved taking a field of grass and a
milkmaid; after which it would have been hardly worth while to pause,
and we might have added to our colony a flock of sheep and an
experienced butcher.
It is really very disheartening how we depend on other people in this
life. _Mihi est propositum_, as you may see by the motto, _idem quod
regibus_; and behold it cannot be carried out, unless I find a neighbour
rolling in cattle.
Now, my principal adviser in this matter was one whom I will call
Kelmar. That was not what he called himself, but as soon as I set eyes
on him, I knew it was or ought to be his name; I am sure it will be his
name among the angels. Kelmar was the store-keeper, a Russian Jew,
good-natured, in a very thriving way of business, and, on equal terms,
one of the most serviceable of men. He also had something of the
expression of a Scottish country elder, who, by some peculiarity, should
chance to be a Hebrew. He had a projecting under lip, with which he
continually smiled, or rather smirked. Mrs. Kelmar was a singularly kind
woman; and the oldest son had quite a dark and romantic bearing, and
might be heard on summer evenings playing sentimental airs on the
violin.
I had no idea, at the time I made his acquaintance, what an important
person Kelmar was. But the Jew store-keepers of California, profiting at
once by the needs and habits of the people, have made themselves in too
many cases the tyrants of the rural population. Credit is offered, is
pressed on the new customer, and when once he is beyond his depth, the
tune changes, and he is from thenceforth a white slave. I believe, even
from the little I saw, that Kelmar, if he chose to put on the screw,
could send half the settlers packing in a radius of seven or eight miles
round Calistoga. These are continually paying him, but are never
suffered to get out of debt. He palms dull goods upon them, for they
dare not refuse to buy; he goes and dines with them when he is on an
outing, and no man is loudlier welcomed; he is their family friend, the
director of their business, and, to a degree elsewhere unknown in modern
days, their king.
For some reason, Kelmar always shook his head at the mention of Pine
Flat, and for some days I thought he disapproved of the whole scheme and
was proportionately sad. One fine morning, however, he met me, wreathed
in smiles. He had found the very place for me--Silverado, another old
mining town, right up the mountain. Rufe Hanson, the hunter, could take
care of us--fine people the Hansons; we should be close to the Toll
House, where the Lakeport stage called daily; it was the best place for
my health, besides. Rufe had been consumptive, and was now quite a
strong man, ain't it? In short, the place and all its accompaniments
seemed made for us on purpose.
He took me to his back door, whence, as from every point of Calistoga,
Mount Saint Helena could be seen towering in the air. There, in the
nick, just where the eastern foot-hills joined the mountain, and she
herself began to rise above the zone of forest--there was Silverado. The
name had already pleased me; the high station pleased me still more. I
began to inquire with some eagerness. It was but a little while ago that
Silverado was a great place. The mine--a silver mine, of course--had
promised great things. There was quite a lively population, with
several hotels and boarding-houses; and Kelmar himself had opened a
branch store, and done extremely well--"Ain't it?" he said, appealing to
his wife. And she said, "Yes; extremely well." Now there was no one
living in the town but Rufe the hunter; and once more I heard Rufe's
praises by the yard, and this time sung in chorus.
I could not help perceiving at the time that there was something
underneath; that no unmixed desire to have us comfortably settled had
inspired the Kelmars with this flow of words. But I was impatient to be
gone, to be about my kingly project; and when we were offered seats in
Kelmar's waggon, I accepted on the spot. The plan of their next Sunday's
outing took them, by good fortune, over the border into Lake County.
They would carry us so far, drop us at the Toll House, present us to the
Hansons, and call for us again on Monday morning early.
II
FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF SILVERADO
We were to leave by six precisely; that was solemnly pledged on both
sides; and a messenger came to us the last thing at night, to remind us
of the hour. But it was eight before we got clear of Calistoga: Kelmar,
Mrs. Kelmar, a friend of theirs whom we named Abramina, her little
daughter, my wife, myself, and, stowed away behind us, a cluster of
ship's coffee-kettles. These last were highly ornamental in the sheen of
their bright tin, but I could invent no reason for their presence. Our
carriageful reckoned up, as near as we could get at it, some three
hundred years to the six of us. Four of the six, besides, were Hebrews.
But I never, in all my life, was conscious of so strong an atmosphere of
holiday. No word was spoken but of pleasure; and even when we drove in
silence, nods and smiles went round the party like refreshments.
The sun shone out of a cloudless sky. Close at the zenith rode the
belated moon, still clearly visible, and, along one margin, even bright.
The wind blew a gale from the north; the trees roared; the corn and the
deep grass in the valley fled in whitening surges; the dust towered into
the air along the road and dispersed like the smoke of battle. It was
clear in our teeth from the first, and for all the windings of the road
it managed to keep clear in our teeth until the end.
For some two miles we rattled through the valley, skirting the eastern
foot-hills; then we struck off to the right, through haugh-land, and
presently, crossing a dry watercourse, entered the Toll road, or, to be
more local, entered on "the grade." The road mounts the near shoulder of
Mount Saint Helena, bound northward into Lake County. In one place it
skirts along the edge of a narrow and deep cañon, filled with trees, and
I was glad, indeed, not to be driven at this point by the dashing Foss.
Kelmar, with his unvarying smile, jogging to the motion of the trap,
drove for all the world like a good, plain, country clergyman at home;
and I profess I blessed him unawares for his timidity.
Vineyards and deep meadows, islanded and framed with thicket, gave place
more and more as we ascended to woods of oak and madrona, dotted with
enormous pines. It was these pines, as they shot above the lower wood,
that produced that pencilling of single trees I had so often remarked
from the valley. Thence, looking up and from however far, each fir
stands separate against the sky no bigger than an eyelash; and all
together lend a quaint, fringed aspect to the hills. The oak is no baby;
even the madrona, upon these spurs of Mount Saint Helena, comes to a
fine bulk and ranks with forest trees; but the pines look down upon the
rest for underwood. As Mount Saint Helena among her foot-hills, so these
dark giants out-top their fellow-vegetables. Alas! if they had left the
redwoods, the pines, in turn, would have been dwarfed. But the redwoods,
fallen from their high estate, are serving as family bedsteads, or yet
more humbly as field fences, along all Napa Valley.
A rough smack of resin was in the air, and a crystal mountain purity. It
came pouring over these green slopes by the oceanful. The woods sang
aloud, and gave largely of their healthful breath. Gladness seemed to
inhabit these upper zones, and we had left indifference behind us in the
valley. "I to the hills will lift mine eyes!" There are days in a life
when thus to climb out of the lowlands seems like scaling heaven.
As we continued to ascend, the wind fell upon us with increasing
strength. It was a wonder how the two stout horses managed to pull us up
that steep incline and still face the athletic opposition of the wind,
or how their great eyes were able to endure the dust. Ten minutes after
we went by, a tree fell, blocking the road; and even before us leaves
were thickly strewn, and boughs had fallen, large enough to make the
passage difficult. But now we were hard by the summit. The road crosses
the ridge, just in the nick that Kelmar showed me from below, and then,
without pause, plunges down a deep, thickly wooded glen on the farther
side. At the highest point a trail strikes up the main hill to the
leftward; and that leads to Silverado. A hundred yards beyond, and in a
kind of elbow of the glen, stands the Toll House Hotel. We came up the
one side, were caught upon the summit by the whole weight of the wind as
it poured over into Napa Valley, and a minute after had drawn up in
shelter, but all buffeted and breathless, at the Toll House door.
A water-tank, and stables, and a grey house of two stories, with gable
ends and a veranda, are jammed hard against the hillside, just where a
stream has cut for itself a narrow cañon, filled with pines. The pines
go right up overhead; a little more and the stream might have played,
like a fire-hose, on the Toll House roof. In front the ground drops as
sharply as it rises behind. There is just room for the road and a sort
of promontory of croquet ground, and then you can lean over the edge and
look deep below you through the wood. I said croquet _ground_, not
_green_; for the surface was of brown, beaten earth. The toll-bar itself
was the only other note of originality: a long beam, turning on a post,
and kept slightly horizontal by a counterweight of stones. Regularly
about sundown this rude barrier was swung, like a derrick, across the
road and made fast, I think, to a tree upon the farther side.
On our arrival there followed a gay scene in the bar. I was presented to
Mr. Corwin, the landlord; to Mr. Jennings, the engineer, who lives
there for his health; to Mr. Hoddy, a most pleasant little gentleman,
once a member of the Ohio legislature, again the editor of a local
paper, and now, with undiminished dignity, keeping the Toll House bar. I
had a number of drinks and cigars bestowed on me, and enjoyed a famous
opportunity of seeing Kelmar in his glory, friendly, radiant, smiling,
steadily edging one of the ship's kettles on the reluctant Corwin.
Corwin, plainly aghast, resisted gallantly, and for that bout victory
crowned his arms.
At last we set forward for Silverado on foot. Kelmar and his jolly Jew
girls were full of the sentiment of Sunday outings, breathed geniality
and vagueness, and suffered a little vile boy from the hotel to lead
them here and there about the woods. For three people all so old, so
bulky in body, and belonging to a race so venerable, they could not but
surprise us by their extreme and almost imbecile youthfulness of spirit.
They were only going to stay ten minutes at the Toll House; had they not
twenty long miles of road before them on the other side? Stay to dinner?
Not they! Put up the horses? Never. Let us attach them to the veranda by
a wisp of straw rope, such as would not have held a person's hat on that
blustering day. And with all these protestations of hurry, they proved
irresponsible like children. Kelmar himself, shrewd old Russian Jew,
with a smirk that seemed just to have concluded a bargain to its
satisfaction, intrusted himself and us devoutly to that boy. Yet the boy
was patently fallacious; and for that matter a most unsympathetic
urchin, raised apparently on gingerbread. He was bent on his own
pleasure, nothing else; and Kelmar followed him to his ruin, with the
same shrewd smirk. If the boy said there was "a hole there in the
hill"--a hole, pure and simple, neither more nor less--Kelmar and his
Jew girls would follow him a hundred yards to look complacently down
that hole. For two hours we looked for houses; and for two hours they
followed us, smelling trees, picking flowers, foisting false botany on
the unwary. Had we taken five, with that vile lad to head them off on
idle divagations, for five they would have smiled and stumbled through
the woods.
However, we came forth at length, and as by accident, upon a lawn,
sparse planted like an orchard, but with forest instead of fruit trees.
That was the site of Silverado mining town. A piece of ground was
levelled up, where Kelmar's store had been; and facing that we saw Rufe
Hanson's house, still bearing on its front the legend _Silverado Hotel_.
Not another sign of habitation. Silverado town had all been carted from
the scene; one of the houses was now the schoolhouse far down the road;
one was gone here, one there, but all were gone away. It was now a
sylvan solitude, and the silence was unbroken but by the great, vague
voice of the wind. Some days before our visit, a grizzly bear had been
sporting round the Hansons' chicken-house.
Mrs. Hanson was at home, alone, we found. Rufe had been out after a
"bar," had risen late, and was now gone, it did not clearly appear
whither. Perhaps he had had wind of Kelmar's coming, and was now
ensconced among the underwood, or watching us from the shoulder of the
mountain. We, hearing there were no houses to be had, were for
immediately giving up all hopes of Silverado. But this, somehow, was not
to Kelmar's fancy. He first proposed that we should "camp someveres
around, ain't it?" waving his hand cheerily as though to weave a spell;
and when that was firmly rejected, he decided that we must take up house
with the Hansons. Mrs. Hanson had been, from the first, flustered,
subdued, and a little pale; but from this proposition she recoiled with
haggard indignation. So did we, who would have preferred, in a manner of
speaking, death. But Kelmar was not to be put by. He edged Mrs. Hanson
into a corner, where for a long time he threatened her with his
forefinger, like a character in Dickens; and the poor woman, driven to
her entrenchments, at last remembered with a shriek that there were
still some houses at the tunnel.
Thither we went; the Jews, who should already have been miles into Lake
County, still cheerily accompanying us. For about a furlong we followed
a good road along the hillside through the forest, until suddenly that
road widened out and came abruptly to an end. A cañon, woody below, red,
rocky, and naked overhead, was here walled across by a dump of rolling
stones, dangerously steep, and from twenty to thirty feet in height. A
rusty iron chute on wooden legs came flying, like a monstrous gargoyle,
across the parapet. It was down this that they poured the precious ore;
and below here the carts stood to wait their lading, and carry it
millward down the mountain.
The whole cañon was so entirely blocked, as if by some rude guerilla
fortification, that we could only mount by lengths of wooden ladder,
fixed in the hillside. These led us round the farther corner of the
dump; and when they were at an end, we still persevered over loose
rubble and wading deep in poison oak, till we struck a triangular
platform, filling up the whole glen, and shut in on either hand by bold
projections of the mountain. Only in front the place was open like the
proscenium of a theatre, and we looked forth into a great realm of air,
and down upon treetops and hilltops, and far and near on wild and varied
country. The place still stood as on the day it was deserted: a line of
iron rails with a bifurcation; a truck in working order; a world of
lumber, old wood, old iron, a blacksmith's forge on one side, half
buried in the leaves of dwarf madronas; and on the other, an old brown
wooden house.
Fanny and I dashed at the house. It consisted of three rooms, and was so
plastered against the hill, that one room was right atop of another,
that the upper floor was more than twice as large as the lower, and that
all three apartments must be entered from a different side or level. Not
a window-sash remained. The door of the lower room was smashed, and one
panel hung in splinters. We entered that, and found a fair amount of
rubbish: sand and gravel that had been sifted in there by the mountain
winds; straws, sticks, and stones; a table, a barrel; a plate-rack on
the wall; two home-made boot-jacks, signs of miners and their boots; and
a pair of papers pinned on the boarding, headed respectively "Funnel No.
1," and "Funnel No. 2," but with the tails torn away. The window,
sashless of course, was choked with the green and sweetly smelling
foliage of a bay; and through a chink in the floor, a spray of poison
oak had shot up and was handsomely prospering in the interior. It was my
first care to cut away that poison oak, Fanny standing by at a
respectful distance. That was our first improvement by which we took
possession.
The room immediately above could only be entered by a plank propped
against the threshold, along which the intruder must foot it gingerly,
clutching for support to sprays of poison oak, the proper product of the
country. Herein was, on either hand, a triple tier of beds, where miners
had once lain; and the other gable was pierced by a sashless window and
a doorless doorway opening on the air of heaven, five feet above the
ground. As for the third room, which entered squarely from the ground
level, but higher up the hill and farther up the cañon, it contained
only rubbish and the uprights for another triple tier of beds.
The whole building was overhung by a bold, lion-like, red rock. Poison
oak, sweet bay trees, calycanthus, brush, and chaparral, grew freely but
sparsely all about it. In front, in the strong sunshine, the platform
lay overstrewn with busy litter, as though the labours of the mine might
begin again to-morrow in the morning.
Following back into the cañon, among the mass of rotting plant and
through the flowering bushes, we came to a great crazy staging, with a
wry windlass on the top; and clambering up, we could look into an open
shaft, leading edgeways down into the bowels of the mountain, trickling
with water, and lit by some stray sun-gleams, whence I know not. In that
quiet place the still, far-away tinkle of the water-drops was loudly
audible. Close by, another shaft led edgeways up into the superincumbent
shoulder of the hill. It lay partly open; and sixty or a hundred feet
above our head, we could see the strata propped apart by solid wooden
wedges, and a pine, half-undermined, precariously nodding on the verge.
Here also a rugged, horizontal tunnel ran straight into the unsunned
bowels of the rock. This secure angle in the mountain's flank was, even
on this wild day, as still as my lady's chamber. But in the tunnel a
cold, wet draught tempestuously blew. Nor have I ever known that place
otherwise than cold and windy.
Such was our first prospect of Juan Silverado. I own I had looked for
something different: a clique of neighbourly houses on a village green,
we shall say, all empty to be sure, but swept and varnished; a trout
stream brawling by; great elms or chestnuts, humming with bees and
nested in by song-birds; and the mountains standing round about, as at
Jerusalem. Here, mountain and house and the old tools of industry were
all alike, rusty and down-falling. The hill was here wedged up, and
there poured forth its bowels in a spout of broken mineral; man with his
picks and powder, and nature with her own great blasting tools of sun
and rain, labouring together at the ruin of that proud mountain. The
view up the cañon was a glimpse of devastation; dry red minerals sliding
together, here and there a crag, here and there dwarf thicket clinging
in the general glissade, and over all a broken outline trenching on the
blue of heaven. Downwards indeed, from our rock eyrie, we beheld the
greener side of nature; and the bearing of the pine and the sweet smell
of bays and nutmegs commended themselves gratefully to our senses. One
way and another, now the die was cast. Silverado be it!
After we had got back to the Toll House, the Jews were not long of
striking forward. But I observed that one of the Hanson lads came down,
before their departure, and returned with a ship's kettle. Happy
Hansons! Nor was it until after Kelmar was gone, if I remember rightly,
that Rufe put in an appearance to arrange the details of our
installation.
The latter part of the day, Fanny and I sat in the veranda of the Toll
House, utterly stunned by the uproar of the wind among the trees on the
other side of the valley. Sometimes, we would have it it was like a sea,
but it was not various enough for that; and again, we thought it like
the roar of a cataract, but it was too changeful for the cataract; and
then we would decide, speaking in sleepy voices, that it could be
compared with nothing but itself. My mind was entirely preoccupied by
the noise. I hearkened to it by the hour, gapingly hearkened, and let my
cigarette go out. Sometimes the wind would make a sally nearer hand, and
send a shrill, whistling crash among the foliage on our side of the
glen; and sometimes a back-draught would strike into the elbow where we
sat, and cast the gravel and torn leaves into our faces. But for the
most part, this great, streaming gale passed unweariedly by us into Napa
Valley, not two hundred yards away visible by the tossing boughs,
stunningly audible, and yet not moving a hair upon our heads. So it blew
all night long while I was writing up my journal, and after we were in
bed, under a cloudless, starset heaven; and so it was blowing still next
morning when we rose.
It was a laughable thought to us, what had become of our cheerful
wandering Hebrews. We could not suppose they had reached a destination.
The meanest boy could lead them miles out of their way to see a
gopher-hole. Boys we felt to be their special danger; none others were
of that exact pitch of cheerful irrelevancy to exercise a kindred sway
upon their minds: but before the attractions of a boy their most
settled resolutions would be wax. We thought we could follow in fancy
these three aged Hebrew truants wandering in and out on hilltop and in
thicket, a demon boy trotting far ahead, their will-o'-the-wisp
conductor; and at last about midnight, the wind still roaring in the
darkness, we had a vision of all three on their knees upon a
mountain-top around a glow-worm.
III
THE RETURN
Next morning we were up by half-past five, according to agreement, and
it was ten by the clock before our Jew boys returned to pick us up:
Kelmar, Mrs. Kelmar, and Abramina, all smiling from ear to ear, and full
of tales of the hospitality they had found on the other side. It had not
gone unrewarded; for I observed with interest that the ship's kettles,
all but one, had been "placed." Three Lake County families, at least,
endowed for life with a ship's kettle. Come, this was no misspent
Sunday. The absence of the kettles told its own story: our Jews said
nothing about them; but, on the other hand, they said many kind and
comely things about the people they had met. The two women, in
particular, had been charmed out of themselves by the sight of a young
girl surrounded by her admirers; all evening, it appeared, they had been
triumphing together in the girl's innocent successes, and to this
natural and unselfish joy they gave expression in language that was
beautiful by its simplicity and truth.
Take them for all in all, few people have done my heart more good; they
seem so thoroughly entitled to happiness, and to enjoy it in so large a
measure and so free from after-thought; almost they persuaded me to be a
Jew. There was, indeed, a chink of money in their talk. They
particularly commended people who were well to do. "_He_ don't
care--ain't it?" was their highest word of commendation to an individual
fate; and here I seem to grasp the root of their philosophy--it was to
be free from care, to be free to make these Sunday wanderings, that
they so eagerly pursued after wealth; and all this carefulness was to be
careless. The fine good-humour of all three seemed to declare they had
attained their end. Yet there was the other side to it; and the
recipients of kettles perhaps cared greatly.
No sooner had they returned, than the scene of yesterday began again.
The horses were not even tied with a straw rope this time--it was not
worth while; and Kelmar disappeared into the bar, leaving them under a
tree on the other side of the road. I had to devote myself. I stood
under the shadow of that tree for, I suppose, hard upon an hour, and had
not the heart to be angry. Once some one remembered me, and brought me
out a half a tumblerful of the playful, innocuous American cocktail. I
drank it, and lo! veins of living fire ran down my leg; and then a focus
of conflagration remained seated in my stomach, not unpleasantly, for a
quarter of an hour. I love these sweet, fiery pangs, but I will not
court them. The bulk of the time I spent in repeating as much French
poetry as I could remember to the horses, who seemed to enjoy it hugely.
And now it went--
"O ma vieille Font-georges
Où volent les rouges-gorges":
and again, to a more trampling measure:--
"Et tout tremble, Irun, Coïmbre,
Santander, Almodovar,
Sitôt qu'on entend le timbre
Des cymbales de Bivar."
The redbreasts and the brooks of Europe, in that dry and songless land;
brave old names and wars, strong cities, cymbals, and bright armour, in
that nook of the mountain, sacred only to the Indian and the bear! This
is still the strangest thing in all man's travelling, that he should
carry about with him incongruous memories. There is no foreign land; it
is the traveller only that is foreign, and now and again, by a flash of
recollection, lights up the contrasts of the earth.
But while I was thus wandering in my fancy, great feats had been
transacted in the bar. Corwin the bold had fallen, Kelmar was again
crowned with laurels, and the last of the ship's kettles had changed
hands. If I had ever doubted the purity of Kelmar's motives, if I had
ever suspected him of a single eye to business in his eternal dallyings,
now at least, when the last kettle was disposed of, my suspicions must
have been allayed. I dare not guess how much more time was wasted; nor
how often we drove off merely to drive back again and renew interrupted
conversations about nothing, before the Toll House was fairly left
behind. Alas! and not a mile down the grade there stands a ranche in a
sunny vineyard, and here we must all dismount again and enter.
Only the old lady was at home, Mrs. Guele, a brown old Swiss dame, the
picture of honesty; and with her we drank a bottle of wine and had an
age-long conversation, which would have been highly delightful if Fanny
and I had not been faint with hunger. The ladies each narrated the story
of her marriage, our two Hebrews with the prettiest combination of
sentiment and financial bathos. Abramina, specially, endeared herself
with every word. She was as simple, natural, and engaging as a kid that
should have been brought up to the business of a money-changer. One
touch was so resplendently Hebraic that I cannot pass it over. When her
"old man" wrote home for her from America, her old man's family would
not entrust her with the money for the passage, till she had bound
herself by an oath--on her knees, I think she said--not to employ it
otherwise. This had tickled Abramina hugely, but I think it tickled me
fully more.
Mrs. Guele told of her homesickness up here in the long winters; of her
honest, country-woman troubles and alarms upon the journey; how in the
bank at Frankfort she had feared lest the banker, after having taken her
cheque, should deny all knowledge of it--a fear I have myself every
time I go to a bank; and how crossing the Lüneburger Heath, an old lady
witnessing her trouble and finding whither she was bound, had given her
"the blessing of a person eighty years old, which would be sure to bring
her safely to the States. And the first thing I did," added Mrs. Guele,
"was to fall down-stairs."
At length we got out of the house, and some of us into the trap,
when--judgment of Heaven!--here came Mr. Guele from his vineyard. So
another quarter of an hour went by; till at length, at our earnest
pleading, we set forth again in earnest, Fanny and I white-faced and
silent but the Jews still smiling. The heart fails me. There was yet
another stoppage! And we drove at last into Calistoga past two in the
afternoon, Fanny and I having breakfasted at six in the morning, eight
mortal hours before. We were a pallid couple; but still the Jews were
smiling.
So ended our excursion with the village usurers, and, now that it was
done, we had no more idea of the nature of the business, nor of the part
we had been playing in it, than the child unborn. That all the people we
had met were the slaves of Kelmar, though in various degrees of
servitude; that we ourselves had been sent up the mountain in the
interests of none but Kelmar; that the money we laid out, dollar by
dollar, cent by cent, and through the hands of various intermediaries,
should all hop ultimately into Kelmar's till; these were facts that we
only grew to recognise in the course of time and by the accumulation of
evidence. At length all doubt was quieted, when one of the
kettle-holders confessed. Stopping his trap in the moonlight, a little
way out of Calistoga, he told me, in so many words, that he dare not
show face there with an empty pocket. "You see, I don't mind if it was
only five dollars, Mr. Stevens," he said, "but I must give Mr. Kelmar
_something_."
Even now, when the whole tyranny is plain to me, I cannot find it in my
heart to be as angry as perhaps I should be with the Hebrew tyrant. The
whole game of business is beggar my neighbour; and though perhaps that
game looks uglier when played at such close quarters and on so small a
scale, it is none the more intrinsically inhumane for that. The village
usurer is not so sad a feature of humanity and human progress as the
millionaire manufacturer, fattening on the toil and loss of thousands,
and yet declaiming from the platform against the greed and dishonesty of
landlords. If it were fair for Cobden to buy up land from owners whom he
thought unconscious of its proper, value, it was fair enough for my
Russian Jew to give credit to his farmers. Kelmar, if he was unconscious
of the beam in his own eye, was at least silent in the matter of his
brother's mote.
THE ACT OF SQUATTING
There were four of us squatters--myself and my wife, the King and Queen
of Silverado; Lloyd, the Crown Prince; and Chuchu, the Grand Duke.
Chuchu, a setter crossed with spaniel, was the most unsuited for a rough
life. He had been nurtured tenderly in the society of ladies; his heart
was large and soft; he regarded the sofa-cushion as a bed-rock necessary
of existence. Though about the size of a sheep, he loved to sit in
ladies' laps; he never said a bad word in all his blameless days; and if
he had seen a flute, I am sure he could have played upon it by nature.
It may seem hard to say it of a dog, but Chuchu was a tame cat.
The king and queen, the grand duke, and a basket of cold provender for
immediate use, set forth from Calistoga in a double buggy; the crown
prince, on horseback, led the way like an outrider. Bags and boxes and a
second-hand stove were to follow close upon our heels by Hanson's team.
It was a beautiful still day; the sky was one field of azure. Not a leaf
moved, not a speck appeared in heaven. Only from the summit of the
mountain one little snowy wisp of cloud after another kept detaching
itself, like smoke from a volcano, and blowing southward in some high
stream of air: Mount Saint Helena still at her interminable task, making
the weather, like a Lapland witch.
By noon we had come in sight of the mill: a great brown building,
half-way up the hill, big as a factory, two stories high, and with tanks
and ladders along the roof; which, as a pendicle of Silverado mine, we
held to be an outlying province of our own. Thither, then, we went,
crossing the valley by a grassy trail; and there lunched out of the
basket, sitting in a kind of portico, and wondering, while we ate, at
this great bulk of useless building. Through a chink we could look far
down into the interior, and see sunbeams floating in the dust and
striking on tier after tier of silent, rusty machinery. It cost six
thousand dollars, twelve hundred English sovereigns; and now, here it
stands deserted, like the temple of a forgotten religion, the busy
millers toiling somewhere else. All the time we were there, mill and
mill town showed no sign of life; that part of the mountain side, which
is very open and green, was tenanted by no living creature but ourselves
and the insects; and nothing stirred but the cloud manufactory upon the
mountain summit. It was odd to compare this with the former days, when
the engine was in full blast, the mill palpitating to its strokes, and
the carts came rattling down from Silverado, charged with ore.
By two we had been landed at the mine, the buggy was gone again, and we
were left to our own reflections and the basket of cold provender, until
Hanson should arrive. Hot as it was by the sun, there was something
chill in such a home-coming, in that world of wreck and rust, splinter
and rolling gravel, where for so many years no fire had smoked.
Silverado platform filled the whole width of the cañon. Above, as I have
said, this was a wild, red, stony gully in the mountains; but below it
was a wooded dingle. And through this, I was told, there had gone a path
between the mine and the Toll House--our natural north-west passage to
civilisation. I found and followed it, clearing my way as I went through
fallen branches and dead trees. It went straight down that steep cañon,
till it brought you out abruptly over the roofs of the hotel. There was
nowhere any break in the descent. It almost seemed as if, were you to
drop a stone down the old iron chute at our platform, it would never
rest until it hopped upon the Toll House shingles. Signs were not
wanting of the ancient greatness of Silverado. The footpath was well
marked, and had been well trodden in the old days by thirsty miners. And
far down, buried in foliage, deep out of sight of Silverado, I came on a
last outpost of the mine--a mound of gravel, some wreck of wooden
aqueduct, and the mouth of a tunnel, like a treasure grotto in a fairy
story. A stream of water, fed by the invisible leakage from our shaft,
and dyed red with cinnabar or iron, ran trippingly forth out of the
bowels of the cave; and, looking far under the arch, I could see
something like an iron lantern fastened on the rocky wall. It was a
promising spot for the imagination. No boy could have left it
unexplored.
The stream thenceforward stole along the bottom of the dingle, and made,
for that dry land, a pleasant warbling in the leaves. Once, I suppose,
it ran splashing down the whole length of the cañon, but now its head
waters had been tapped by the shaft at Silverado, and for a great part
of its course it wandered sunless among the joints of the mountain. No
wonder that it should better its pace when it sees, far before it,
daylight whitening in the arch, or that it should come trotting forth
into the sunlight with a song.
The two stages had gone by when I got down, and the Toll House stood,
dozing in sun and dust and silence, like a place enchanted. My mission
was after hay for bedding, and that I was readily promised. But when I
mentioned that we were waiting for Rufe, the people shook their heads.
Rufe was not a regular man anyway, it seemed; and if he got playing
poker----Well, poker was too many for Rufe. I had not yet heard them
bracketed together; but it seemed a natural conjunction, and commended
itself swiftly to my fears; and as soon as I returned to Silverado and
had told my story, we practically gave Hanson up, and set ourselves to
do what we could find do-able in our desert-island state.
The lower room had been the assayer's office. The floor was thick with
_débris_--part human, from the former occupants; part natural, sifted in
by mountain winds. In a sea of red dust there swam or floated sticks,
boards, hay, straw, stones, and paper; ancient newspapers, above
all--for the newspaper, especially when torn, soon becomes an
antiquity--and bills of the Silverado boarding-house, some dated
Silverado, some Calistoga Mine. Here is one, verbatim; and if any one
can calculate the scale of charges, he has my envious admiration.
Calistoga Mine, May 3rd, 1875.
John Stanley
To S. Chapman, Cr.
To board from April 1st, to April 30 $25 75
" " " May 1st, to 3rd 2 00
------
27 75
Where is John Stanley mining now? Where is S. Chapman, within whose
hospitable walls we were to lodge? The date was but five years old, but
in that time the world had changed for Silverado; like Palmyra in the
desert, it had outlived its people and its purpose; we camped, like
Layard, amid ruins, and these names spoke to us of prehistoric time. A
boot-jack, a pair of boots, a dog-hutch, and these bills of Mr.
Chapman's were the only speaking relics that we disinterred from all
that vast Silverado rubbish-heap; but what would I not have given to
unearth a letter, a pocket-book, a diary, only a ledger, or a roll of
names, to take me back, in a more personal manner, to the past? It
pleases me, besides, to fancy that Stanley or Chapman, or one of their
companions, may light upon this chronicle, and be struck by the name,
and read some news of their anterior home, coming, as it were, out of a
subsequent epoch of history in that quarter of the world.
As we were tumbling the mingled rubbish on the floor, kicking it with
our feet, and groping for these written evidences of the past, Lloyd,
with a somewhat whitened face, produced a paper bag. "What's this?" said
he. It contained a granulated powder, something the colour of Gregory's
Mixture, but rosier; and as there were several of the bags, and each
more or less broken, the powder was spread widely on the floor. Had any
of us ever seen giant powder? No, nobody had; and instantly there grew
up in my mind a shadowy belief, verging with every moment nearer to
certitude, that I had somewhere heard somebody describe it as just such
a powder as the one around us. I have learnt since that it is a
substance not unlike tallow, and is made up in rolls for all the world
like tallow candles.
Fanny, to add to our happiness, told us a story of a gentleman who had
camped one night, like ourselves, by a deserted mine. He was a handy,
thrifty fellow, and looked right and left for plunder, but all he could
lay his hands on was a can of oil. After dark he had to see to the
horses with a lantern; and not to miss an opportunity, filled up his
lamp from the oil can. Thus equipped, he set forth into the forest. A
little while after, his friends heard a loud explosion; the mountain
echoes bellowed, and then all was still. On examination, the can proved
to contain oil, with the trifling addition of nitro-glycerine; but no
research disclosed a trace of either man or lantern.
It was a pretty sight, after this anecdote, to see us sweeping out the
giant powder. It seemed never to be far enough away. And, after all, it
was only some rock pounded for assay.
So much for the lower room. We scraped some of the rougher dirt off the
floor, and left it. That was our sitting-room and kitchen, though there
was nothing to sit upon but the table, and no provision for a fire
except a hole in the roof of the room above, which had once contained
the chimney of a stove.
To that upper room we now proceeded. There were the eighteen bunks in a
double tier, nine on either hand, where from eighteen to thirty-six
miners had once snored together all night long, John Stanley, perhaps,
snoring loudest. There was the roof, with a hole in it through which the
sun now shot an arrow. There was the floor, in much the same state as
the one below, though, perhaps, there was more hay, and certainly there
was the added ingredient of broken glass, the man who stole the
window-frames having apparently made a miscarriage with this one.
Without a broom, without hay or bedding, we could but look about us with
a beginning of despair. The one bright arrow of day, in that gaunt and
shattered barrack, made the rest look dirtier and darker, and the sight
drove us at last into the open.
Here, also, the handiwork of man lay ruined: but the plants were all
alive and thriving; the view below was fresh with the colours of nature;
and we had exchanged a dim, human garret for a corner, even although it
were untidy, of the blue hall of heaven. Not a bird, not a beast, not a
reptile. There was no noise in that part of the world, save when we
passed beside the staging, and heard the water musically falling in the
shaft.
We wandered to and fro. We searched among that drift of lumber--wood and
iron, nails and rails, and sleepers and the wheels of trucks. We gazed
up the cleft into the bosom of the mountain. We sat by the margin of the
dump and saw, far below us, the green treetops standing still in the
clear air. Beautiful perfumes, breaths of bay, resin, and nutmeg, came
to us more often and grew sweeter and sharper as the afternoon declined.
But still there was no word of Hanson.
I set to with pick and shovel, and deepened the pool behind the shaft,
till we were sure of sufficient water for the morning; and by the time I
had finished, the sun had begun to go down behind the mountain shoulder,
the platform was plunged in quiet shadow, and a chill descended from the
sky. Night began early in our cleft. Before us, over the margin of the
dump, we could see the sun still striking aslant into the wooded nick
below, and on the battlemented, pine-bescattered ridges on the farther
side.
There was no stove, of course, and no hearth in our lodging, so we
betook ourselves to the blacksmith's forge across the platform. If the
platform be taken as a stage, and the out-curving margin of the dump to
represent the line of the footlights, then our house would be the first
wing on the actor's left, and this blacksmith's forge, although no match
for it in size, the foremost on the right. It was a low, brown cottage,
planted close against the hill, and overhung by the foliage and peeling
boughs of a madrona thicket. Within it was full of dead leaves and
mountain dust, and rubbish from the mine. But we soon had a good fire
brightly blazing, and sat close about it on impromptu seats. Chuchu, the
slave of sofa cushions, whimpered for a softer bed; but the rest of us
were greatly revived and comforted by that good creature--fire, which
gives us warmth and light and companionable sounds, and colours up the
emptiest building with better than frescoes. For awhile it was even
pleasant in the forge, with the blaze in the midst, and a look over our
shoulders on the woods and mountains where the day was dying like a
dolphin.
It was between seven and eight before Hanson arrived, with a waggonful
of our effects and two of his wife's relatives to lend him a hand. The
elder showed surprising strength. He would pick up a huge packing-case,
full of books, of all things, swing it on his shoulder, and away up the
two crazy ladders and the breakneck spout of rolling mineral, familiarly
termed a path, that led from the cart-track to our house. Even for a man
unburthened, the ascent was toilsome and precarious; but Irvine scaled
it with a light foot, carrying box after box, as the hero whisks the
stage child up the practicable footway beside the waterfall of the fifth
act. With so strong a helper, the business was speedily transacted. Soon
the assayer's office was thronged with our belongings, piled
higgledy-piggledy, and upside down, about the floor. There were our
boxes, indeed, but my wife had left her keys in Calistoga. There was the
stove, but, alas! our carriers had forgot the chimney, and lost one of
the plates along the road. The Silverado problem was scarce solved.
Rufe himself was grave and good-natured over his share of blame; he
even, if I remember right, expressed regret. But his crew, to my
astonishment and anger, grinned from ear to ear, and laughed aloud at
our distress. They thought it "real funny" about the stovepipe they had
forgotten; "real funny" that they should have lost a plate. As for hay,
the whole party refused to bring us any till they should have supped.
See how late they were! Never had there been such a job as coming up
that grade! Nor often, I suspect, such a game of poker as that before
they started. But about nine, as a particular favour, we should have
some hay.
So they took their departure, leaving me still staring, and we resigned
ourselves to wait for their return. The fire in the forge had been
suffered to go out, and we were one and all too weary to kindle another.
We dined, or not to take that word in vain, we ate after a fashion, in
the nightmare disorder of the assayer's office, perched among boxes. A
single candle lighted us. It could scarce be called a house-warming; for
there was, of course, no fire, and with the two open doors and the open
window gaping on the night, like breaches in a fortress, it began to
grow rapidly chill. Talk ceased; nobody moved but the unhappy Chuchu,
still in quest of sofa-cushions, who tumbled complainingly among the
trunks. It required a certain happiness of disposition to look forward
hopefully, from so dismal a beginning, across the brief hours of night,
to the warm shining of to-morrow's sun.
But the hay arrived at last, and we turned, with our last spark of
courage, to the bedroom. We had improved the entrance, but it was still
a kind of rope-walking; and it would have been droll to see us
mounting, one after another, by candle light, under the open stars.
The western door--that which looked up the cañon, and through which we
entered by our bridge of flying plank--was still entire, a handsome,
panelled door, the most finished piece of carpentry in Silverado. And
the two lowest bunks next to this we roughly filled with hay for that
night's use. Through the opposite, or eastern-looking gable, with its
open door and window, a faint, diffused starshine came into the room
like mist; and when we were once in bed, we lay, awaiting sleep, in a
haunted, incomplete obscurity. At first the silence of the night was
utter. Then a high wind began in the distance among the treetops, and
for hours continued to grow higher. It seemed to me much such a wind as
we had found on our visit; yet here in our open chamber we were fanned
only by gentle and refreshing draughts, so deep was the cañon, so close
our house was planted under the overhanging rock.
THE HUNTER'S FAMILY
There is quite a large race or class of people in America, for whom we
scarcely seem to have a parallel in England. Of pure white blood, they
are unknown or unrecognisable in towns; inhabit the fringe of
settlements and the deep, quiet places of the country; rebellious to all
labour, and pettily thievish, like the English gipsies; rustically
ignorant, but with a touch of woodlore and the dexterity of the savage.
Whence they came is a moot point. At the time of the war, they poured
north in thousands to escape the conscription; lived during summer on
fruits, wild animals, and petty theft; and at the approach of winter,
when these supplies failed, built great fires in the forest, and there
died stoically by starvation. They are widely scattered, however, and
easily recognised. Loutish, but not ill-looking, they will sit all day,
swinging their legs on a field fence, the mind seemingly as devoid of
all reflection as a Suffolk peasant's, careless of politics, for the
most part incapable of reading, but with a rebellious vanity and a
strong sense of independence. Hunting is their most congenial business,
or, if the occasion offers, a little amateur detection. In tracking a
criminal, following a particular horse along a beaten highway, and
drawing inductions from a hair or a footprint, one of these somnolent,
grinning Hodges will suddenly display activity of body and finesse of
mind. By their names ye may know them, the women figuring as Loveina,
Larsenia, Serena, Leanna, Orreana; the men answering to Alvin, Alva, or
Orion, pronounced Orrion, with the accent on the first. Whether they are
indeed a race, or whether this is the form of degeneracy common to all
backwoodsmen, they are at least known by a generic byword, as Poor
Whites or Low-downers.
I will not say that the Hanson family was Poor White, because the name
savours of offence; but I may go as far as this--they were, in many
points, not unsimilar to the people usually so called. Rufe himself
combined two of the qualifications, for he was both a hunter and an
amateur detective. It was he who pursued Russel and Dollar, the robbers
of the Lake Port stage, and captured them the very morning after the
exploit, while they were still sleeping in a hayfield. Russel, a drunken
Scotch carpenter, was even an acquaintance of his own, and he expressed
much grave commiseration for his fate. In all that he said and did, Rufe
was grave. I never saw him hurried. When he spoke, he took out his pipe
with ceremonial deliberation, looked east and west, and then, in quiet
tones and few words, stated his business or told his story. His gait was
to match; it would never have surprised you if, at any step, he had
turned round and walked away again, so warily and slowly, and with so
much seeming hesitation did he go about. He lay long in bed in the
morning--rarely, indeed, rose before noon; he loved all games, from
poker to clerical croquet; and in the Toll House croquet ground I have
seen him toiling at the latter with the devotion of a curate. He took an
interest in education, was an active member of the local school-board,
and when I was there, he had recently lost the schoolhouse key. His
waggon was broken, but it never seemed to occur to him to mend it. Like
all truly idle people, he had an artistic eye. He chose the print stuff
for his wife's dresses, and counselled her in the making of a patch-work
quilt, always, as she thought, wrongly, but to the more educated eye,
always with bizarre and admirable taste--the taste of an Indian. With
all this, he was a perfect, unoffending gentleman in word and act. Take
his clay pipe from him, and he was fit for any society but that of
fools. Quiet as he was, there burned a deep, permanent excitement in his
dark blue eyes; and when this grave man smiled, it was like sunshine in
a shady place.
Mrs. Hanson (_née_, if you please, Lovelands) was more commonplace than
her lord. She was a comely woman, too, plump, fair-coloured, with
wonderful white teeth; and in her print dresses (chosen by Rufe) and
with a large sunbonnet shading her valued complexion, made, I assure
you, a very agreeable figure. But she was on the surface, what there was
of her, out-spoken and loud-spoken. Her noisy laughter had none of the
charm of one of Hanson's rare, slow-spreading smiles; there was no
reticence, no mystery, no manner about the woman: she was a first-class
dairymaid, but her husband was an unknown quantity between the savage
and the nobleman. She was often in and out with us, merry, and healthy,
and fair; he came far seldomer--only, indeed, when there was business,
or now and again, to pay a visit of ceremony, brushed up for the
occasion, with his wife on his arm, and a clean clay pipe in his teeth.
These visits, in our forest state, had quite the air of an event, and
turned our red cañon into a salon.
Such was the pair who ruled in the old Silverado Hotel, among the windy
trees, on the mountain shoulder overlooking the whole length of Napa
Valley, as the man aloft looks down on the ship's deck. There they kept
house, with sundry horses and fowls, and a family of sons, Daniel
Webster, and I think George Washington, among the number. Nor did they
want visitors. An old gentleman, of singular stolidity, and called
Breedlove--I think he had crossed the plains in the same caravan with
Rufe--housed with them for awhile during our stay; and they had besides
a permanent lodger, in the form of Mrs. Hanson's brother, Irvine
Lovelands. I spell Irvine by guess; for I could get no information on
the subject, just as I could never find out, in spite of many inquiries,
whether or not Rufe was a contraction for Rufus. They were all
cheerfully at sea about their names in that generation. And this is
surely the more notable where the names are all so strange, and even
the family names appear to have been coined. At one time, at least, the
ancestors of all these Alvins and Alvas, Loveinas, Lovelands, and
Breedloves, must have taken serious council and found a certain poetry
in these denominations; that must have been, then, their form of
literature. But still times change; and their next descendants, the
George Washingtons and Daniel Websters, will at least be clear upon the
point. And anyway, and however his name should be spelt, this Irvine
Lovelands was the most unmitigated Caliban I ever knew.
Our very first morning at Silverado, when we were full of business,
patching up doors and windows, making beds and seats, and getting our
rough lodging into shape, Irvine and his sister made their appearance
together, she for neighbourliness and general curiosity; he, because he
was working for me, to my sorrow, cutting firewood at I forget how much
a day. The way that he set about cutting wood was characteristic. We
were at that moment patching up and unpacking in the kitchen. Down he
sat on one side, and down sat his sister on the other. Both were chewing
pine-tree gum, and he, to my annoyance, accompanied that simple pleasure
with profuse expectoration. She rattled away, talking up hill and down
dale, laughing, tossing her head, showing her brilliant teeth. He looked
on in silence, now spitting heavily on the floor, now putting his head
back and uttering a loud, discordant, joyless laugh. He had a tangle of
shock hair, the colour of wool; his mouth was a grin; although as strong
as a horse, he looked neither heavy nor yet adroit, only leggy, coltish,
and in the road. But it was plain he was in high spirits, thoroughly
enjoying his visit; and he laughed frankly whenever we failed to
accomplish what we were about. This was scarcely helpful; it was even,
to amateur carpenters, embarrassing; but it lasted until we knocked off
work and began to get dinner. Then Mrs. Hanson remembered she should
have been gone an hour ago; and the pair retired, and the lady's
laughter died away among the nutmegs down the path. That was Irvine's
first day's work in my employment--the devil take him!
The next morning he returned and, as he was this time alone, he bestowed
his conversation upon us with great liberality. He prided himself on his
intelligence; asked us if we knew the school-ma'am. _He_ didn't think
much of her, anyway. He had tried her, he had. He had put a question to
her. If a tree a hundred feet high were to fall a foot a day, how long
would it take to fall right down? She had not been able to solve the
problem. "She don't know nothing," he opined. He told us how a friend of
his kept a school with a revolver, and chuckled mightily over that; his
friend could teach school, he could. All the time he kept chewing gum
and spitting. He would stand awhile looking down; and then he would toss
back his shock of hair, and laugh hoarsely, and spit, and bring forward
a new subject. A man, he told us, who bore a grudge against him, had
poisoned his dog. "That was a low thing for a man to do now, wasn't it?
It wasn't like a man, that, nohow. But I got even with him: I pisoned
_his_ dog." His clumsy utterance, his rude embarrassed manner, set a
fresh value on the stupidity of his remarks. I do not think I ever
appreciated the meaning of two words until I knew Irvine--the verb,
loaf, and the noun, oaf; between them, they complete his portrait. He
could lounge, and wriggle, and rub himself against the wall, and grin,
and be more in everybody's way than any other two people that I ever set
my eyes on. Nothing that he did became him; and yet you were conscious
that he was one of your own race, that his mind was cumbrously at work,
revolving the problem of existence like a quid of gum, and in his own
cloudy manner enjoying life, and passing judgment on his fellows. Above
all things, he was delighted with himself. You would not have thought
it, from his uneasy manners and troubled, struggling utterance; but he
loved himself to the marrow, and was happy and proud like a peacock on
a rail.
His self-esteem was, indeed, the one joint in his harness. He could be
got to work, and even kept at work, by flattery. As long as my wife
stood over him, crying out how strong he was, so long exactly he would
stick to the matter in hand; and the moment she turned her back, or
ceased to praise him, he would stop. His physical strength was
wonderful; and to have a woman stand by and admire his achievements,
warmed his heart like sunshine. Yet he was as cowardly as he was
powerful, and felt no shame in owning to the weakness. Something was
once wanted from the crazy platform over the shaft, and he at once
refused to venture there--"did not like," as he said, "foolin' round
them kind o' places," and let my wife go instead of him, looking on with
a grin. Vanity, where it rules, is usually more heroic; but Irvine
steadily approved himself, and expected others to approve him; rather
looked down upon my wife, and decidedly expected her to look up to him,
on the strength of his superior prudence.
Yet the strangest part of the whole matter was perhaps this, that Irvine
was as beautiful as a statue. His features were, in themselves, perfect;
it was only his cloudy, uncouth, and coarse expression that disfigured
them. So much strength residing in so spare a frame was proof sufficient
of the accuracy of his shape. He must have been built somewhat after the
pattern of Jack Sheppard; but the famous housebreaker, we may be
certain, was no lout. It was by the extraordinary powers of his mind no
less than by the vigour of his body, that he broke his strong prison
with such imperfect implements, turning the very obstacles to surface.
Irvine, in the same case, would have sat down and spat, and grumbled
curses. He had the soul of a fat sheep; but, regarded as an artist's
model, the exterior of a Greek god. It was a cruel thought to persons
less favoured in their birth, that this creature, endowed--to use the
language of theatres--with extraordinary "means," should so manage to
misemploy them that he looked ugly and almost deformed. It was only by
an effort of abstraction, and after many days, that you discovered what
he was.
By playing on the oaf's conceit, and standing closely over him, we got a
path made round the corner of the dump to our door, so that we could
come and go with decent ease; and he even enjoyed the work, for in that
there were boulders to be plucked up bodily, bushes to be uprooted, and
other occasions for athletic display: but cutting wood was a different
matter. Anybody could cut wood; and, besides, my wife was tired of
supervising him, and had other things to attend to. And in short, days
went by, and Irvine came daily, and talked and lounged and spat; but the
firewood remained intact as sleepers on the platform or growing trees
upon the mountain-side. Irvine, as a woodcutter, we could tolerate; but
Irvine as a friend of the family, at so much a day, was too bald an
imposition, and at length, on the afternoon of the fourth or fifth day
of our connection, I explained to him, as clearly as I could, the light
in which I had grown to regard his presence. I pointed out to him that I
could not continue to give him a salary for spitting on the floor; and
this expression, which came after a good many others, at last penetrated
his obdurate wits. He rose at once, and said if that was the way he was
going to be spoke to, he reckoned he would quit. And, no one
interposing, he departed.
So far, so good. But we had no firewood. The next afternoon, I strolled
down to Rufe's and consulted him on the subject. It was a very droll
interview, in the large, bare north room of the Silverado Hotel, Mrs.
Hanson's patchwork on a frame, and Rufe, and his wife, and I, and the
oaf himself, all more or less embarrassed. Rufe announced there was
nobody in the neighbourhood but Irvine who could do a day's work for
anybody. Irvine, thereupon, refused to have any more to do with my
service; he "wouldn't work no more for a man as had spoke to him 's I
had done." I found myself on the point of the last humiliation--driven
to beseech the creature whom I had just dismissed with insult: but I
took the high hand in despair, said there must be no talk of Irvine
coming back unless matters were to be differently managed; that I would
rather chop firewood for myself than be fooled; and, in short, the
Hansons being eager for the lad's hire, I so imposed upon them with
merely affected resolution, that they ended by begging me to re-employ
him again, on a solemn promise that he should be more industrious. The
promise, I am bound to say, was kept. We soon had a fine pile of
firewood at our door; and if Caliban gave me the cold shoulder and
spared me his conversation, I thought none the worse of him for that,
nor did I find my days much longer for the deprivation.
The leading spirit of the family was, I am inclined to fancy, Mrs.
Hanson. Her social brilliancy somewhat dazzled the others, and she had
more of the small change of sense. It was she who faced Kelmar, for
instance; and perhaps if she had been alone, Kelmar would have had no
rule within her doors. Rufe, to be sure, had a fine, sober, open-air
attitude of mind, seeing the world without exaggeration--perhaps, we may
even say, without enough; for he lacked, along with the others, that
commercial idealism which puts so high a value on time and money. Sanity
itself is a kind of convention. Perhaps Rufe was wrong; but, looking on
life plainly, he was unable to see that croquet or poker were in any way
less important than, for instance, mending his waggon. Even his own
profession, hunting, was dear to him mainly as a sort of play; even that
he would have neglected, had it not appealed to his imagination. His
hunting suit, for instance, had cost I should be afraid to say how many
bucks--the currency in which he paid his way; it was all befringed,
after the Indian fashion, and it was dear to his heart. The pictorial
side of his daily business was never forgotten. He was even anxious to
stand for his picture in those buckskin, hunting clothes; and I remember
how he once warmed almost into enthusiasm, his dark blue eyes growing
perceptibly larger, as he planned the composition in which he should
appear, "with the horns of some real big bucks, and dogs, and a camp on
a crick" (creek, stream).
There was no trace in Irvine of this woodland poetry. He did not care
for hunting, nor yet for buckskin suits. He had never observed scenery.
The world, as it appeared to him, was almost obliterated by his own
great grinning figure in the foreground: Caliban-Malvolio. And it seems
to me as if, in the persons of these brothers-in-law, we had the two
sides of rusticity fairly well represented: the hunter living really in
nature; the clodhopper living merely out of society; the one bent up in
every corporal agent to capacity in one pursuit, doing at least one
thing keenly and thoughtfully, and thoroughly alive to all that touches
it; the other in the inert and bestial state, walking in a faint dream,
and taking so dim an impression of the myriad sides of life that he is
truly conscious of nothing but himself. It is only in the fastnesses of
nature, forests, mountains, and the back of man's beyond, that a
creature endowed with five senses can grow up into the perfection of
this crass and earthly vanity. In towns or the busier country sides, he
is roughly reminded of other men's existence; and if he learns no more,
he learns at least to fear contempt. But Irvine had come scathless
through life, conscious only of himself, of his great strength and
intelligence; and in the silence of the universe, to which he did not
listen, dwelling with delight on the sound of his own thoughts.
THE SEA-FOGS
A change in the colour of the light usually called me in the morning. By
a certain hour, the long, vertical chinks in our western gable, where
the boards had shrunk and separated, flashed suddenly into my eyes as
stripes of dazzling blue, at once so dark and splendid that I used to
marvel how the qualities could be combined. At an earlier hour, the
heavens in that quarter were still quietly coloured, but the shoulder of
the mountain which shuts in the cañon already glowed with sunlight in a
wonderful compound of gold and rose and green; and this too would
kindle, although more mildly and with rainbow tints, the fissures of our
crazy gable. If I were sleeping heavily, it was the bold blue that
struck me awake; if more lightly, then I would come to myself in that
earlier and fairer light.
One Sunday morning, about five, the first brightness called me. I rose
and turned to the east, not for my devotions, but for air. The night had
been very still. The little private gale that blew every evening in our
cañon, for ten minutes or perhaps a quarter of an hour, had swiftly
blown itself out; in the hours that followed not a sigh of wind had
shaken the treetops; and our barracks, for all its breaches, was less
fresh that morning than of wont. But I had no sooner reached the window
than I forgot all else in the sight that met my eyes, and I made but two
bounds into my clothes, and down the crazy plank to the platform.
The sun was still concealed below the opposite hilltops, though it was
shining already, not twenty feet above my head, on our own mountain
slope. But the scene, beyond a few near features, was entirely changed.
Napa Valley was gone; gone were all the lower slopes and woody
foot-hills of the range; and in their place, not a thousand feet below
me, rolled a great level ocean. It was as though I had gone to bed the
night before, safe in a nook of inland mountains, and had awakened in a
bay upon the coast. I had seen these inundations from below; at
Calistoga I had risen and gone abroad in the early morning, coughing and
sneezing, under fathoms on fathoms of grey sea-vapour, like a cloudy
sky--a dull sight for the artist, and a painful experience for the
invalid. But to sit aloft one's self in the pure air and under the
unclouded dome of heaven, and thus look down on the submergence of the
valley, was strangely different and even delightful to the eyes. Far
away were hilltops like little islands. Nearer, a smoky surf beat about
the foot of precipices and poured into all the coves of these rough
mountains. The colour of that fog ocean was a thing never to be
forgotten. For an instant, among the Hebrides and just about sundown, I
have seen something like it on the sea itself. But the white was not so
opaline; nor was there, what surprisingly increased the effect, that
breathless, crystal stillness over all. Even in its gentlest moods the
salt sea travails, moaning among the weeds or lisping on the sand; but
that vast fog ocean lay in a trance of silence, nor did the sweet air of
the morning tremble with a sound.
As I continued to sit upon the dump, I began to observe that this sea
was not so level as at first sight it appeared to be. Away in the
extreme south, a little hill of fog arose against the sky above the
general surface, and as it had already caught the sun, it shone on the
horizon like the topsails of some giant ship. There were huge waves,
stationary, as it seemed, like waves in a frozen sea; and yet, as I
looked again, I was not sure but they were moving after all, with a slow
and august advance. And while I was yet doubting, a promontory of the
hills some four or five miles away, conspicuous by a bouquet of tall
pines, was in a single instant overtaken and swallowed up. It appeared
in a little, with its pines, but this time as an islet, and only to be
swallowed up once more and then for good. This set me looking nearer,
and I saw that in every cove along the line of mountains the fog was
being piled in higher and higher, as though by some wind that was
inaudible to me. I could trace its progress, one pine-tree first growing
hazy and then disappearing after another; although sometimes there was
none of this fore-running haze, but the whole opaque white ocean gave a
start and swallowed a piece of mountain at a gulp. It was to flee these
poisonous fogs that I had left the seaboard, and climbed so high among
the mountains. And now, behold, here came the fog to besiege me in my
chosen altitudes, and yet came so beautifully that my first thought was
of welcome.
The sun had now gotten much higher, and through all the gaps of the
hills it cast long bars of gold across that white ocean. An eagle, or
some other very great bird of the mountain, came wheeling over the
nearer pine-tops, and hung, poised and something sideways, as if to look
abroad on that unwonted desolation, spying, perhaps with terror, for the
eyries of her comrades. Then, with a long cry, she disappeared again
towards Lake County and the clearer air. At length it seemed to me as if
the flood were beginning to subside. The old landmarks, by whose
disappearance I had measured its advance, here a crag, there a brave
pine-tree, now began, in the inverse order, to make their reappearance
into daylight. I judged all danger of the fog was over. This was not
Noah's flood; it was but a morning spring, and would now drift out
seaward whence it came. So, mightily relieved, and a good deal
exhilarated by the sight, I went into the house to light the fire.
I suppose it was nearly seven when I once more mounted the platform to
look abroad. The fog ocean had swelled up enormously since last I saw
it; and a few hundred feet below me, in the deep gap where the Toll
House stands and the road runs through into Lake County, it had already
topped the slope, and was pouring over and down the other side like
driving smoke. The wind had climbed along with it; and though I was
still in calm air, I could see the trees tossing below me, and their
long, strident sighing mounted to me where I stood.
Half an hour later, the fog had surmounted all the ridge on the opposite
side of the gap, though a shoulder of the mountain still warded it out
of our cañon. Napa Valley and its bounding hills were now utterly
blotted out. The fog, sunny white in the sunshine, was pouring over into
Lake County in a huge, ragged cataract, tossing tree-tops appearing and
disappearing in the spray. The air struck with a little chill, and set
me coughing. It smelt strong of the fog, like the smell of a
washing-house, but with a shrewd tang of the sea salt.
Had it not been for two things--the sheltering spur which answered as a
dyke, and the great valley on the other side which rapidly engulfed
whatever mounted--our own little platform in the cañon must have been
already buried a hundred feet in salt and poisonous air. As it was, the
interest of the scene entirely occupied our minds. We were set just out
of the wind, and but just above the fog; we could listen to the voice of
the one as to music on the stage; we could plunge our eyes down into the
other, as into some flowing stream from over the parapet of a bridge;
thus we looked on upon a strange, impetuous, silent, shifting exhibition
of the powers of nature, and saw the familiar landscape changing from
moment to moment like figures in a dream.
The imagination loves to trifle with what is not. Had this been indeed
the deluge, I should have felt more strongly, but the emotion would have
been similar in kind. I played with the idea, as the child flees in
delighted terror from the creations of his fancy. The look of the thing
helped me. And when at last I began to flee up the mountain, it was
indeed partly to escape from the raw air that kept me coughing, but it
was also part in play.
As I ascended the mountain-side, I came once more to overlook the upper
surface of the fog; but it wore a different appearance from what I had
beheld at daybreak. For, first, the sun now fell on it from high
overhead, and its surface shone and undulated like a great nor'land moor
country, sheeted with untrodden morning snow. And next the new level
must have been a thousand or fifteen hundred feet higher than the old,
so that only five or six points of all the broken country below me,
still stood out. Napa Valley was now one with Sonoma on the west. On the
hither side, only a thin scattered fringe of bluffs was unsubmerged; and
through all the gaps the fog was pouring over, like an ocean, into the
blue clear sunny country on the east. There it was soon lost; for it
fell instantly into the bottom of the valleys, following the water-shed;
and the hill-tops in that quarter were still clear cut upon the eastern
sky.
Through the Toll House gap and over the near ridges on the other side,
the deluge was immense. A spray of thin vapour was thrown high above it,
rising and falling, and blown into fantastic shapes. The speed of its
course was like a mountain torrent. Here and there a few treetops were
discovered and then whelmed again; and for one second, the bough of a
dead pine beckoned out of the spray like the arm of a drowning man. But
still the imagination was dissatisfied, still the ear waited for
something more. Had this indeed been water (as it seemed so, to the
eye), with what a plunge of reverberating thunder would it have rolled
upon its course, disembowelling mountains and deracinating pines! And
yet water it was, and sea-water at that--true Pacific billows, only
somewhat rarefied, rolling in mid-air among the hilltops.
I climbed still higher, among the red rattling gravel and dwarf
underwood of Mount Saint Helena, until I could look right down upon
Silverado, and admire the favoured nook in which it lay. The sunny plain
of fog was several hundred feet higher; behind the protecting spur a
gigantic accumulation of cottony vapour threatened, with every second,
to blow over and submerge our homestead; but the vortex setting past the
Toll House was too strong; and there lay our little platform, in the
arms of the deluge, but still enjoying its unbroken sunshine. About
eleven, however, thin spray came flying over the friendly buttress, and
I began to think the fog had hunted out its Jonah after all. But it was
the last effort. The wind veered while we were at dinner, and began to
blow squally from the mountain summit; and by half-past one, all that
world of sea-fogs was utterly routed and flying here and there into the
south in little rags of cloud. And instead of a lone sea-beach, we found
ourselves once more inhabiting a high mountain-side, with the clear
green country far below us, and the light smoke of Calistoga blowing in
the air.
This was the great Russian campaign for that season. Now and then, in
the early morning, a little white lakelet of fog would be seen far down
in Napa Valley; but the heights were not again assailed, nor was the
surrounding world again shut off from Silverado.
THE TOLL HOUSE
The Toll House, standing alone by the wayside under nodding pines, with
its streamlet and water-tank; its backwoods, toll-bar, and well-trodden
croquet ground; the ostler standing by the stable door, chewing a straw;
a glimpse of the Chinese cook in the back parts; and Mr. Hoddy in the
bar, gravely alert and serviceable, and equally anxious to lend or
borrow books;--dozed all day in the dusty sunshine, more than half
asleep. There were no neighbours, except the Hansons up the hill. The
traffic on the road was infinitesimal; only, at rare intervals, a couple
in a waggon, or a dusty farmer on a spring-board, toiling over "the
grade" to that metropolitan hamlet, Calistoga; and, at the fixed hours,
the passage of the stages.
The nearest building was the schoolhouse, down the road; and the
school-ma'am boarded at the Toll House, walking thence in the morning to
the little brown shanty, where she taught the young ones of the
district, and returning thither pretty weary in the afternoon. She had
chosen this outlying situation, I understood, for her health. Mr. Corwin
was consumptive; so was Rufe; so was Mr. Jennings, the engineer. In
short, the place was a kind of small Davos: consumptive folk consorting
on a hilltop in the most unbroken idleness. Jennings never did anything
that I could see, except now and then to fish, and generally to sit
about in the bar and the veranda, waiting for something to happen.
Corwin and Rufe did as little as possible; and if the school-ma'am, poor
lady, had to work pretty hard all morning, she subsided when it was over
into much the same dazed beatitude as all the rest.
Her special corner was the parlour--a very genteel room, with Bible
prints, a crayon portrait of Mrs. Corwin in the height of fashion, a few
years ago, another of her son (Mr. Corwin was not represented), a
mirror, and a selection of dried grasses. A large book was laid
religiously on the table--"From Palace to Hovel," I believe, its
name--full of the raciest experiences in England. The author had mingled
freely with all classes, the nobility particularly meeting him with open
arms; and I must say that traveller had ill requited his reception. His
book, in short, was a capital instance of the Penny Messalina school of
literature; and there arose from it, in that cool parlour, in that
silent, wayside, mountain inn, a rank atmosphere of gold and blood and
"Jenkins," and the "Mysteries of London," and sickening, inverted
snobbery, fit to knock you down. The mention of this book reminds me of
another and far racier picture of our island life. The latter parts of
_Rocambole_ are surely too sparingly consulted in the country which they
celebrate. No man's education can be said to be complete, nor can he
pronounce the world yet emptied of enjoyment, till he has made the
acquaintance of "The Reverend Patterson, director of the Evangelical
Society." To follow the evolutions of that reverend gentleman, who goes
through scenes in which even Mr. Duffield would hesitate to place a
bishop, is to rise to new ideas. But, alas! there was no Patterson about
the Toll House. Only, alongside of "From Palace to Hovel," a sixpenny
"Ouida" figured. So literature, you see, was not unrepresented.
The school-ma'am had friends to stay with her, other school-ma'ams
enjoying their holidays, quite a bevy of damsels. They seemed never to
go out, or not beyond the veranda, but sat close in the little parlour,
quietly talking or listening to the wind among the trees. Sleep dwelt in
the Toll House, like a fixture: summer sleep, shallow, soft, and
dreamless. A cuckoo clock, a great rarity in such a place, hooted at
intervals about the echoing house; and Mr. Jennings would open his eyes
for a moment in the bar, and turn the leaf of a newspaper, and the
resting school-ma'ams in the parlour would be recalled to the
consciousness of their inaction. Busy Mrs. Corwin and her busy Chinaman
might be heard indeed, in the penetralia, pounding dough or rattling
dishes; or perhaps Rufe had called up some of the sleepers for a game of
croquet, and the hollow strokes of the mallet sounded far away among the
woods; but with these exceptions, it was sleep and sunshine and dust,
and the wind in the pine-trees, all day long.
A little before stage time, that castle of indolence awoke. The ostler
threw his straw away and set to his preparations. Mr. Jennings rubbed
his eyes; happy Mr. Jennings, the something he had been waiting for all
day about to happen at last! The boarders gathered in the veranda,
silently giving ear, and gazing down the road with shaded eyes. And as
yet there was no sign for the senses, not a sound, not a tremor of the
mountain road. The birds, to whom the secret of the hooting cuckoo is
unknown, must have set down to instinct this premonitory bustle.
And then the first of the two stages swooped upon the Toll House with a
roar and in a cloud of dust; and the shock had not yet time to subside,
before the second was abreast of it. Huge concerns they were, well
horsed and loaded, the men in their shirt-sleeves, the women swathed in
veils, the long whip cracking like a pistol; and as they charged upon
that slumbering hostelry, each shepherding a dust storm, the dead place
blossomed into life and talk and clatter. This the Toll House?--with its
city throng, its jostling shoulders, its infinity of instant business in
the bar? The mind would not receive it! The heartfelt bustle of that
hour is hardly credible; the thrill of the great shower of letters from
the post-bag, the childish hope and interest with which one gazed in all
these strangers' eyes. They paused there but to pass: the blue-clad
China-boy, the San Francisco magnate, the mystery in the dust coat, the
secret memoirs in tweed, the ogling, well-shod lady with her troop of
girls; they did but flash and go; they were hull-down for us behind
life's ocean, and we but hailed their topsails on the line. Yet, out of
our great solitude of four and twenty mountain hours, we thrilled to
their momentary presence; gauged and divined them, loved and hated; and
stood light-headed in that storm of human electricity. Yes, like
Piccadilly Circus, this is also one of life's crossing-places. Here I
beheld one man, already famous or infamous, a centre of pistol-shots;
and another who, if not yet known to rumour, will fill a column of the
Sunday paper when he comes to hang--a burly, thick-set, powerful Chinese
desperado, six long bristles upon either lip; redolent of whisky,
playing-cards, and pistols; swaggering in the bar with the lowest
assumption of the lowest European manners; rapping out blackguard
English oaths in his canorous oriental voice; and combining in one
person the depravities of two races and two civilisations. For all his
lust and vigour, he seemed to look cold upon me from the valley of the
shadow of the gallows. He imagined a vain thing; and while he drained
his cocktail, Holbein's death was at his elbow. Once, too, I fell in
talk with another of these flitting strangers--like the rest, in his
shirt-sleeves and all begrimed with dust--and the next minute we were
discussing Paris and London, theatres and wines. To him, journeying from
one human place to another, this was a trifle; but to me! No, Mr.
Lillie, I have not forgotten it.
And presently the city-tide was at its flood and began to ebb. Life runs
in Piccadilly Circus, say, from nine to one, and then, there also, ebbs
into the small hours of the echoing policeman and the lamps and stars.
But the Toll House is far up stream, and near its rural springs; the
bubble of the tide but touches it. Before you had yet grasped your
pleasure, the horses were put to, the loud whips volleyed, and the tide
was gone. North and south had the two stages vanished, the towering dust
subsided in the woods; but there was still an interval before the flush
had fallen on your cheeks, before the ear became once more contented
with the silence, or the seven sleepers of the Toll House dozed back to
their accustomed corners. Yet a little, and the ostler would swing round
the great barrier across the road; and in the golden evening, that
dreamy inn begin to trim its lamps and spread the board for supper.
As I recall the place--the green dell below; the spires of pine; the
sun-warm, scented air; that grey, gabled inn, with its faint stirrings
of life amid the slumber of the mountains--I slowly awake to a sense of
admiration, gratitude, and almost love. A fine place, after all, for a
wasted life to doze away in--the cuckoo clock hooting of its far home
country; the croquet mallets, eloquent of English lawns; the stages
daily bringing news of the turbulent world away below there; and perhaps
once in the summer, a salt fog pouring overhead with its tale of the
Pacific.
A STARRY DRIVE
In our rule at Silverado, there was a melancholy interregnum. The queen
and the crown prince with one accord fell sick; and, as I was sick to
begin with, our lone position on Mount Saint Helena was no longer
tenable, and we had to hurry back to Calistoga and a cottage on the
green. By that time we had begun to realise the difficulties of our
position. We had found what an amount of labour it cost to support life
in our red cañon; and it was the dearest desire of our hearts to get a
China-boy to go along with us when we returned. We could have given him
a whole house to himself, self-contained, as they say in the
advertisements; and on the money question we were prepared to go far.
Kong Sam Kee, the Calistoga washerman, was entrusted with the affair;
and from day to day it languished on, with protestations on our part and
mellifluous excuses on the part of Kong Sam Kee.
At length, about half-past eight of our last evening, with the waggon
ready harnessed to convey us up the grade, the washerman, with a
somewhat sneering air, produced the boy. He was a handsome, gentlemanly
lad, attired in rich dark blue, and shod with snowy white; but, alas! he
had heard rumours of Silverado. He knew it for a lone place on the
mountain-side, with no friendly wash-house near by, where he might smoke
a pipe of opium o' nights with other China-boys, and lose his little
earnings at the game of tan; and he first backed out for more money; and
then, when that demand was satisfied, refused to come point blank. He
was wedded to his wash-houses; he had no taste for the rural life; and
we must go to our mountain servantless. It must have been near half an
hour before we reached that conclusion, standing in the midst of
Calistoga high street under the stars, and the China-boy and Kong Sam
Kee singing their pigeon English in the sweetest voices and with the
most musical inflections.
We were not, however, to return alone; we brought with us a painter
guest, who proved to be a most good-natured comrade and a capital hand
at an omelette. I do not know in which capacity he was most valued--as a
cook or a companion; and he did excellently well in both.
The Kong Sam Kee negotiation had delayed us unduly; it must have been
half-past nine before we left Calistoga, and night came fully ere we
struck the bottom of the grade. I have never seen such a night. It
seemed to throw calumny in the teeth of all the painters that ever
dabbled in starlight. The sky itself was of a ruddy, powerful, nameless,
changing colour, dark and glossy like a serpent's back. The stars by
innumerable millions, stuck boldly forth like lamps. The milky way was
bright, like a moonlit cloud; half heaven seemed milky way. The greater
luminaries shone each more clearly than a winter's moon. Their light was
dyed in every sort of colour--red, like fire; blue, like steel; green,
like the tracks of sunset; and so sharply did each stand forth in its
own lustre that there was no appearance of that flat, star-spangled arch
we know so well in pictures, but all the hollow of heaven was one chaos
of contesting luminaries--a hurly-burly of stars. Against this the hills
and rugged treetops stood out redly dark.
As we continued to advance, the lesser lights and milky ways first grew
pale, and then vanished; the countless hosts of heaven dwindled in
number by successive millions; those that still shone had tempered their
exceeding brightness and fallen back into their customary wistful
distance; and the sky declined from its first bewildering splendour into
the appearance of a common night. Slowly this change proceeded, and
still there was no sign of any cause. Then a whiteness like mist was
thrown over the spurs of the mountain. Yet awhile, and, as we turned a
corner, a great leap of silver light and net of forest shadows fell
across the road and upon our wondering waggonful and, swimming low among
the trees, we beheld a strange, misshapen, waning moon, half tilted on
her back.
"Where are ye when the moon appears?" so the old poet sang, half
taunting, to the stars, bent upon a courtly purpose.
"As the sunlight round the dim earth's midnight tower of
shadow pours,
Streaming past the dim, wide portals,
Viewless to the eyes of mortals,
Till it floods the moon's pale islet or the morning's
golden shores."
So sings Mr. Trowbridge, with a noble inspiration. And so had the
sunlight flooded that pale islet of the moon, and her lit face put out,
one after another, that galaxy of stars. The wonder of the drive was
over; but, by some nice conjunction of clearness in the air and fit
shadow in the valley where we travelled, we had seen for a little while
that brave display of the midnight heavens. It was gone, but it had
been; nor shall I ever again behold the stars with the same mind. He who
has seen the sea commoved with a great hurricane, thinks of it very
differently from him who has seen it only in a calm. And the difference
between a calm and a hurricane is not greatly more striking than that
between the ordinary face of night and the splendour that shone upon us
in that drive. Two in our waggon knew night as she shines upon the
tropics, but even that bore no comparison. The nameless colour of the
sky, the hues of the star fire, and the incredible projection of the
stars themselves, starting from their orbits, so that the eye seemed to
distinguish their positions in the hollow of space--these were things
that we had never seen before and shall never see again.
Meanwhile, in this altered night, we proceeded on our way among the
scents and silence of the forest, reached the top of the grade, wound up
by Hanson's, and came at last to a stand under the flying gargoyle of
the chute. Lloyd, who had been lying back, fast asleep, with the moon on
his face, got down, with the remark that it was pleasant "to be home."
The waggon turned and drove away, the noise gently dying in the woods,
and we clambered up the rough path, Caliban's great feat of engineering,
and came home to Silverado.
The moon shone in at the eastern doors and windows and over the lumber,
on the platform. The one tall pine beside the ledge was steeped in
silver. Away up the cañon, a wild cat welcomed us with three discordant
squalls. But once we had lit a candle, and began to review our
improvements, homely in either sense, and count our stores, it was
wonderful what a feeling of possession and permanence grew up in the
hearts of the lords of Silverado. A bed had still to be made up for our
guest, and the morning's water to be fetched, with clinking pail; and as
we set about these household duties, and showed off our wealth and
conveniences before the stranger, and had a glass of wine, I think, in
honour of our return, and trooped at length one after another up the
flying bridge of plank, and laid down to sleep in our shattered,
moon-pierced barrack, we were among the happiest sovereigns in the
world, and certainly ruled over the most contented people. Yet, in our
absence, the palace had been sacked. Wild cats, so the Hansons said, had
broken in and carried off a side of bacon, a hatchet, and two knives.
EPISODES IN THE STORY OF A MINE
No one could live at Silverado and not be curious about the story of the
mine. We were surrounded by so many evidences of expense and toil, we
lived so entirely in the wreck of that great enterprise, like mites in
the ruins of a cheese, that the idea of the old din and bustle haunted
our repose. Our own house, the forge, the dump, the chutes, the rails,
the windlass, the mass of broken plant; the two tunnels, one far below
in the green dell, the other on the platform where we kept our wine; the
deep shaft, with the sun-glints and the water-drops; above all, the
ledge, that great gaping slice out of the mountain shoulder, propped
apart by wooden wedges, on whose immediate margin, high above our heads,
the one tall pine precariously nodded,--these stood for its greatness;
while the dog-hutch, boot-jacks, old boots, old tavern bills, and the
very beds that we inherited from bygone miners, put in human touches and
realised for us the story of the past.
I have sat on an old sleeper, under the thick madronas near the forge,
with just a look over the dump on the green world below, and seen the
sun lying broad among the wreck, and heard the silence broken only by
the tinkling water in the shaft, or a stir of the royal family about the
battered palace, and my mind has gone back to the epoch of the Stanleys
and the Chapmans, with a grand _tutti_ of pick and drill, hammer and
anvil, echoing about the cañon; the assayer hard at it in our
dining-room; the carts below on the road, and their cargo of red mineral
bounding and thundering down the iron chute. And now all gone--all
fallen away into this sunny silence and desertion: a family of squatters
dining in the assayer's office, making their beds in the big sleeping
room erstwhile so crowded, keeping their wine in the tunnel that once
rang with picks.
But Silverado itself, although now fallen in its turn into decay, was
once but a mushroom, and had succeeded to other mines and other flitting
cities. Twenty years ago, away down the glen on the Lake County side
there was a place, Jonestown by name, with two thousand inhabitants
dwelling under canvas, and one roofed house for the sale of whisky.
Round on the western side of Mount Saint Helena, there was at the same
date a second large encampment, its name, if it ever had one, lost for
me. Both of these have perished, leaving not a stick and scarce a memory
behind them. Tide after tide of hopeful miners have thus flowed and
ebbed about the mountain, coming and going, now by lone prospectors, now
with a rush. Last in order of time came Silverado, reared the big mill,
in the valley, founded the town which is now represented, monumentally,
by Hanson's, pierced all these slaps and shafts and tunnels, and in turn
declined and died away.
"Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal silence."
As to the success of Silverado in its time of being, two reports were
current. According to the first, six hundred thousand dollars were taken
out of that great upright seam, that still hung open above us on crazy
wedges. Then the ledge pinched out, and there followed, in quest of the
remainder, a great drifting and tunnelling in all directions, and a
great consequent effusion of dollars, until, all parties being sick of
the expense, the mine was deserted, and the town decamped. According to
the second version, told me with much secrecy of manner, the whole
affair, mine, mill, and town, were parts of one majestic swindle. There
had never come any silver out of any portion of the mine; there was no
silver to come. At midnight trains of packhorses might have been
observed winding by devious tracks about the shoulder of the mountain.
They came from far away, from Amador or Placer, laden with silver in
"old cigar-boxes." They discharged their load at Silverado, in the hour
of sleep; and before the morning they were gone again with their
mysterious drivers to their unknown source. In this way, twenty thousand
pounds' worth of silver was smuggled in under cover of night, in these
old cigar-boxes; mixed with Silverado mineral; carted down to the mill;
crushed, amalgamated, and refined, and despatched to the city as the
proper product of the mine. Stock-jobbing, if it can cover such
expenses, must be a profitable business in San Francisco.
I give these two versions as I got them. But I place little reliance on
either, my belief in history having been greatly shaken. For it chanced
that I had come to dwell in Silverado at a critical hour; great events
in its history were about to happen--did happen, as I am led to believe;
nay, and it will be seen that I played a part in that revolution myself.
And yet from first to last I never had a glimmer of an idea what was
going on; and even now, after full reflection, profess myself at sea.
That there was some obscure intrigue of the cigar-box order, and that I,
in the character of a wooden puppet, set pen to paper in the interest of
somebody, so much, and no more, is certain.
Silverado, then under my immediate sway, belonged to one whom I will
call a Mr. Ronalds. I only knew him through the extraordinarily
distorting medium of local gossip, now as a momentous jobber; now as a
dupe to point an adage; and again, and much more probably, as an
ordinary Christian gentleman like you or me, who had opened a mine and
worked it for awhile with better and worse fortune. So, through a
defective window-pane, you may see the passer-by shoot up into a
hunch-backed giant, or dwindle into a pot-bellied dwarf.
To Ronalds, at least, the mine belonged; but the notice by which he
held it would run out upon the 30th of June--or rather, as I suppose, it
had run out already, and the month of grace would expire upon that day,
after which any American citizen might post a notice of his own, and
make Silverado his. This, with a sort of quiet slyness, Rufe told me at
an early period of our acquaintance. There was no silver, of course; the
mine "wasn't worth nothing, Mr. Stevens," but there was a deal of old
iron and wood around, and to gain possession of this old wood and iron,
and get a right to the water, Rufe proposed, if I had no objections, to
"jump the claim."
Of course, I had no objection. But I was filled with wonder. If all he
wanted was the wood and iron, what, in the name of fortune, was to
prevent him taking them? "His right there was none to dispute." He might
lay hands on all to-morrow, as the wild cats had laid hands upon our
knives and hatchet. Besides, was this mass of heavy mining plant worth
transportation? If it was, why had not the rightful owners carted it
away? If it was, would they not preserve their title to these movables,
even after they had lost their title to the mine? And if it were not,
what the better was Rufe? Nothing would grow at Silverado; there was
even no wood to cut; beyond a sense of property, there was nothing to be
gained. Lastly, was it at all credible that Ronalds would forget what
Rufe remembered? The days of grace were not yet over; any fine morning
he might appear, paper in hand, and enter for another year on his
inheritance. However, it was none of my business; all seemed legal; Rufe
or Ronalds, all was one to me.
On the morning of the 27th, Mrs. Hanson appeared with the milk as usual,
in her sun-bonnet. The time would be out on Tuesday, she reminded us,
and bade me be in readiness to play my part, though I had no idea what
it was to be. And suppose Ronalds came? we asked. She received the idea
with derision, laughing aloud with all her fine teeth. He could not find
the mine to save his life, it appeared, without Rufe to guide him. Last
year, when he came, they heard him "up and down the road a-hollerin' and
a-raisin' Cain." And at last he had to come to the Hansons in despair,
and bid Rufe, "Jump into your pants and shoes, and show me where this
old mine is, anyway!" Seeing that Ronalds had laid out so much money in
the spot, and that a beaten road led right up to the bottom of the dump,
I thought this a remarkable example. The sense of locality must be
singularly in abeyance in the case of Ronalds.
That same evening, supper comfortably over, our guest busy at work on a
drawing of the dump and the opposite hills, we were all out on the
platform together, sitting there, under the tented heavens, with the
same sense of privacy as if we had been cabined in a parlour, when the
sound of brisk footsteps came mounting up the path. We pricked our ears
at this, for the tread seemed lighter and firmer than was usual with our
country neighbours. And presently, sure enough, two town gentlemen, with
cigars and kid gloves, came debouching past the house. They looked in
that place like a blasphemy.
"Good-evening," they said. For none of us had stirred; we all sat stiff
with wonder.
"Good-evening," I returned; and then, to put them at their ease, "A
stiff climb," I added.
"Yes," replied the leader; "but we have to thank you for this path."
I did not like the man's tone. None of us liked it. He did not seem
embarrassed by the meeting, but threw us his remarks like favours, and
strode magisterially by us towards the shaft and tunnel.
Presently we heard his voice raised to his companion. "We drifted every
sort of way, but couldn't strike the ledge." Then again: "It pinched out
here." And once more: "Every miner that ever worked upon it says there's
bound to be a ledge somewhere."
These were the snatches of his talk that reached us, and they had a
damning significance. We, the lords of Silverado, had come face to face
with our superior. It is the worst of all quaint and of all cheap ways
of life that they bring us at last to the pinch of some humiliation. I
liked well enough to be a squatter when there was none but Hanson by;
before Ronalds, I will own, I somewhat quailed. I hastened to do him
fealty, said I gathered he was the Squattee, and apologised. He
threatened me with ejection, in a manner grimly pleasant--more pleasant
to him, I fancy, than to me; and then he passed off into praises of the
former state of Silverado. "It was the busiest little mining town you
ever saw": a population of between a thousand and fifteen hundred souls,
the engine in full blast, the mill newly erected; nothing going but
champagne, and hope the order of the day. Ninety thousand dollars came
out; a hundred and forty thousand were put in, making a net loss of
fifty thousand. The last days, I gathered, the days of John Stanley,
were not so bright; the champagne had ceased to flow, the population was
already moving elsewhere, and Silverado had begun to wither in the
branch before it was cut to the root. The last shot that was fired
knocked over the stove chimney, and made that hole in the roof of our
barrack, through which the sun was wont to visit slug-a-beds towards
afternoon. A noisy last shot, to inaugurate the days of silence.
Throughout this interview, my conscience was a good deal exercised; and
I was moved to throw myself on my knees and own the intended treachery.
But then I had Hanson to consider. I was in much the same position as
Old Rowley, that royal humourist, whom "the rogue had taken into his
confidence." And again, here was Ronalds on the spot. He must know the
day of the month as well as Hanson and I. If a broad hint were
necessary, he had the broadest in the world. For a large board had been
nailed by the crown prince on the very front of our house, between the
door and window, painted in cinnabar--the pigment of the country--with
doggrel rhymes and contumelious pictures, and announcing in terms
unnecessarily figurative, that the trick was already played, the claim
already jumped, and the author of the placard the legitimate successor
of Mr. Ronalds. But no, nothing could save that man; _quem deus vult
perdere, prius dementat_. As he came so he went, and left his rights
depending.
Late at night, by Silverado reckoning, and after we were all abed, Mrs.
Hanson returned to give us the newest of her news. It was like a scene
in a ship's steerage: all of us abed in our different tiers, the single
candle struggling with the darkness, and this plump handsome woman,
seated on an upturned valise beside the bunks, talking and showing her
fine teeth, and laughing till the rafters rang. Any ship, to be sure,
with a hundredth part as many holes in it as our barrack, must long ago
have gone to her last port. Up to that time I had always imagined Mrs.
Hanson's loquacity to be mere incontinence, that she said what was
uppermost for the pleasure of speaking, and laughed and laughed again as
a kind of musical accompaniment. But I now found there was an art in it.
I found it less communicative than silence itself. I wished to know why
Ronalds had come; how he had found his way without Rufe; and why, being
on the spot, he had not refreshed his title. She talked interminably on,
but her replies were never answers. She fled under a cloud of words; and
when I had made sure that she was purposely eluding me, I dropped the
subject in my turn, and let her rattle where she would.
She had come to tell us that, instead of waiting for Tuesday, the claim
was to be jumped on the morrow. How? If the time were not out, it was
impossible. Why? If Ronalds had come and gone and done nothing, there
was the less cause for hurry. But again I could reach no satisfaction.
The claim was to be jumped next morning, that was all that she would
condescend upon.
And yet it was not jumped the next morning, nor yet the next, and a
whole week had come and gone before we heard more of this exploit. That
day week, however, a day of great heat, Hanson, with a little roll of
paper in his hand, and the eternal pipe alight; Breedlove, his large,
dull friend, to act, I suppose, as witness; Mrs. Hanson in her Sunday
best; and all the children from the eldest to the youngest;--arrived in
a procession, tailing one behind another up the path. Caliban was
absent, but he had been chary of his friendly visits since the row; and
with that exception, the whole family was gathered together as for a
marriage or a christening. Strong was sitting at work, in the shade of
the dwarf madronas near the forge; and they planted themselves about him
in a circle, one on a stone, another on the waggon rails, a third on a
piece of plank. Gradually the children stole away up the cañon to where
there was another chute, somewhat smaller than the one across the dump;
and down this chute, for the rest of the afternoon, they poured one
avalanche of stones after another, waking the echoes of the glen.
Meanwhile we elders sat together on the platform, Hanson and his friend
smoking in silence like Indian sachems, Mrs. Hanson rattling on as usual
with an adroit volubility, saying nothing, but keeping the party at
their ease like a courtly hostess.
Not a word occurred about the business of the day. Once, twice, and
thrice I tried to slide the subject in, but was discouraged by the stoic
apathy of Rufe, and beaten down before the pouring verbiage of his wife.
There is nothing of the Indian brave about me, and I began to grill with
impatience. At last, like a highway robber, I cornered Hanson, and bade
him stand and deliver his business. Thereupon he gravely rose, as though
to hint that this was not a proper place, nor the subject one suitable
for squaws, and I, following his example, led him up the plank into our
barrack. There he bestowed himself on a box, and unrolled his papers
with fastidious deliberation. There were two sheets of note-paper, and
an old mining notice, dated May 30th, 1879, part print, part manuscript,
and the latter much obliterated by the rains. It was by this identical
piece of paper that the mine had been held last year. For thirteen
months it had endured the weather and the change of seasons on a cairn
behind the shoulder of the cañon; and it was now my business, spreading
it before me on the table, and sitting on a valise, to copy its terms
with some necessary changes, twice over on the two sheets of note-paper.
One was then to be placed on the same cairn--a "mound of rocks" the
notice put it; and the other to be lodged for registration.
Rufe watched me, silently smoking, till I came to the place for the
locator's name at the end of the first copy; and when I proposed that he
should sign, I thought I saw a scare in his eye. "I don't think that'll
be necessary," he said slowly; "just you write it down." Perhaps this
mighty hunter, who was the most active member of the local school board,
could not write. There would be nothing strange in that. The constable
of Calistoga is, and has been for years, a bed-ridden man, and, if I
remember rightly, blind. He had more need of the emoluments than
another, it was explained; and it was easy for him to "depytise," with a
strong accent on the last. So friendly and so free are popular
institutions.
When I had done my scrivening, Hanson strolled out, and addressed
Breedlove, "Will you step up here a bit?" and after they had disappeared
a little while into the chaparral and madrona thicket, they came back
again, minus a notice, and the deed was done. The claim was jumped; a
tract of mountain side, fifteen hundred feet long by six hundred wide,
with all the earth's precious bowels, had passed from Ronalds to Hanson,
and, in the passage, changed its name from the "Mammoth" to the
"Calistoga." I had tried to get Rufe to call it after his wife, after
himself, and after Garfield, the Republican Presidential candidate of
the hour--since then elected, and, alas! dead--but all was in vain. The
claim had once been called the Calistoga before, and he seemed to feel
safety in returning to that.
And so the history of that mine became once more plunged in darkness,
lit only by some monster pyrotechnical displays of gossip. And perhaps
the most curious feature of the whole matter is this: that we should
have dwelt in this quiet corner of the mountains, with not a dozen
neighbours, and yet struggled all the while, like desperate swimmers, in
this sea of falsities and contradictions. Wherever a man is, there will
be a lie.
TOILS AND PLEASURES
I must try to convey some notion of our life, of how the days passed and
what pleasure we took in them, of what there was to do and how we set
about doing it, in our mountain hermitage. The house, after we had
repaired the worst of the damages, and filled in some of the doors and
windows with white cotton cloth, became a healthy and a pleasant
dwelling-place, always airy and dry, and haunted by the outdoor perfumes
of the glen. Within, it had the look of habitation, the human look. You
had only to go into the third room, which we did not use, and see its
stones, its shifting earth, its tumbled litter; and then return to our
lodging, with the beds made, the plates on the rack, the pail of bright
water behind the door, the stove crackling in a corner, and perhaps the
table roughly laid against a meal,--and man's order, the little clean
spots that he creates to dwell in, were at once contrasted with the rich
passivity of nature. And yet our house was everywhere so wrecked and
shattered, the air came and went so freely, the sun found so many
portholes, the golden outdoor glow shone in so many open chinks, that we
enjoyed, at the same time, some of the comforts of a roof and much of
the gaiety and brightness of _al fresco_ life. A single shower of rain,
to be sure, and we should have been drowned out like mice. But ours was
a Californian summer, and an earthquake was a far likelier accident than
a shower of rain.
Trustful in this fine weather, we kept the house for kitchen and
bedroom, and used the platform as our summer parlour. The sense of
privacy, as I have said already, was complete. We could look over the
dump on miles of forest and rough hilltop; our eyes commanded some of
Napa Valley, where the train ran, and the little country townships sat
so close together along the line of the rail. But here there was no man
to intrude. None but the Hansons were our visitors. Even they came but
at long intervals, or twice daily, at a stated hour, with milk. So our
days, as they were never interrupted, drew out to the greater length;
hour melted insensibly into hour; the household duties, though they were
many, and some of them laborious, dwindled into mere islets of business
in a sea of sunny daytime; and it appears to me, looking back, as though
the far greater part of our life at Silverado had been passed, propped
upon an elbow, or seated on a plank, listening to the silence that there
is among the hills.
My work, it is true, was over early in the morning. I rose before any
one else, lit the stove, put on the water to boil, and strolled forth
upon the platform to wait till it was ready. Silverado would then be
still in shadow, the sun shining on the mountain higher up. A clean
smell of trees, a smell of the earth at morning, hung in the air.
Regularly, every day, there was a single bird, not singing, but
awkwardly chirruping among the green madronas, and the sound was
cheerful, natural, and stirring. It did not hold the attention, nor
interrupt the thread of meditation, like a blackbird or a nightingale;
it was mere woodland prattle, of which the mind was conscious like a
perfume. The freshness of these morning seasons remained with me far on
into the day.
As soon as the kettle boiled, I made porridge and coffee; and that,
beyond the literal drawing of water, and the preparation of kindling,
which it would be hyperbolical to call the hewing of wood, ended my
domestic duties for the day. Thenceforth my wife laboured single-handed
in the palace, and I lay or wandered on the platform at my own sweet
will. The little corner near the forge, where we found a refuge under
the madronas from the unsparing early sun, is indeed connected in my
mind with some nightmare encounters over Euclid, and the Latin Grammar.
These were known as Crown Prince's lessons. He was supposed to be the
victim and the sufferer; but here there must have been some
misconception, for whereas I generally retired to bed after one of these
engagements, he was no sooner set free than he dashed up to the
Chinaman's house, where he had installed a printing-press, that great
element of civilisation, and the sound of his labours would be faintly
audible about the cañon half the day.
To walk at all was a laborious business; the foot sank and slid, the
boots were cut to pieces, among sharp, uneven, rolling stones. When we
crossed the platform in any direction, it was usual to lay a course,
following as much as possible the line of waggon rails. Thus, if water
were to be drawn, the water-carrier left the house along some tilting
planks that we had laid down, and not laid down very well. These carried
him to that great highroad, the railway; and the railway served him as
far as to the head of the shaft. But from thence to the spring and back
again he made the best of his unaided way, staggering among the stones,
and wading in low growth of the calcanthus, where the rattlesnakes lay
hissing at his passage. Yet I liked to draw water. It was pleasant to
dip the grey metal pail into the clean, colourless, cool water; pleasant
to carry it back, with the water lipping at the edge, and a broken
sunbeam quivering in the midst.
But the extreme roughness of the walking confined us in common practice
to the platform, and indeed to those parts of it that were most easily
accessible along the line of rails. The rails came straight forward from
the shaft, here and there overgrown with little green bushes, but still
entire, and still carrying a truck, which it was Lloyd's delight to
trundle to and fro by the hour with various ladings. About midway down
the platform, the railroad trended to the right, leaving our house and
coasting along the far side within a few yards of the madronas and the
forge, and not far off the latter, ended in a sort of platform on the
edge of the dump. There, in old days, the trucks were tipped, and their
load sent thundering down the chute. There, besides, was the only spot
where we could approach the margin of the dump. Anywhere else, you took
your life in your right hand when you came within a yard and a half to
peer over. For at any moment the dump might begin to slide and carry you
down and bury you below its ruins. Indeed, the neighbourhood of an old
mine is a place beset with dangers. For as still as Silverado was, at
any moment the report of rotten wood might tell us that the platform had
fallen into the shaft; the dump might begin to pour into the road below;
or a wedge slip in the great upright seam, and hundreds of tons of
mountain bury the scene of our encampment.
I have already compared the dump to a rampart, built certainly by some
rude people, and for prehistoric wars. It was likewise a frontier. All
below was green and woodland, the tall pines soaring one above another,
each with a firm outline and full spread of bough. All above was arid,
rocky, and bald. The great spout of broken mineral, that had dammed the
cañon up, was a creature of man's handiwork, its material dug out with a
pick and powder, and spread by the service of the trucks. But nature
herself, in that upper district, seemed to have had an eye to nothing
besides mining; and even the natural hillside was all sliding gravel and
precarious boulder. Close at the margin of the well leaves would decay
to skeletons and mummies, which at length some stronger gust would carry
clear of the cañon and scatter in the subjacent woods. Even moisture and
decaying vegetable matter could not, with all nature's alchemy, concoct
enough soil to nourish a few poor grasses. It is the same, they say, in
the neighbourhood of all silver mines; the nature of that precious rock
being stubborn with quartz and poisonous with cinnabar. Both were plenty
in our Silverado. The stones sparkled white in the sunshine with
quartz; they were all stained red with cinnabar. Here, doubtless, came
the Indians of yore to paint their faces for the war-path; and cinnabar,
if I remember rightly, was one of the few articles of Indian commerce.
Now, the Crown Prince had it in his undisturbed possession, to pound
down and slake, and paint his rude designs with. But to me it had always
a fine flavour of poetry, compounded out of Indian story and
Hawthornden's allusion:
"Desire, alas! I desire a Zeuxis new,
From Indies borrowing gold, from Eastern skies
Most bright cinoper . . ."
Yet this is but half the picture; our Silverado platform has another
side to it. Though there was no soil, and scarce a blade of grass, yet
out of these tumbled gravel-heaps and broken boulders, a flower garden
bloomed as at home in a conservatory. Calcanthus crept, like a hardy
weed, all over our rough parlour, choking the railway, and pushing forth
its rusty, aromatic cones from between two blocks of shattered mineral.
Azaleas made a big snow-bed just above the well. The shoulder of the
hill waved white with Mediterranean heath. In the crannies of the ledge
and about the spurs of the tall pine, a red flowering stone-plant hung
in clusters. Even the low, thorny chaparral was thick with pea-like
blossom. Close at the foot of our path nutmegs prospered, delightful to
the sight and smell. At sunrise, and again late at night, the scent of
the sweet bay-trees filled the cañon, and the down-blowing night wind
must have borne it hundreds of feet into the outer air.
All this vegetation, to be sure, was stunted. The madrona was here no
bigger than the manzanita; the bay was but a stripling shrub; the very
pines, with four or five exceptions in all our upper cañon, were not so
tall as myself, or but a little taller, and the most of them came lower
than my waist. For a prosperous forest tree, we must look below, where
the glen was crowded with green spires. But for flowers and ravishing
perfume, we had none to envy: our heap of road-metal was thick with
bloom, like a hawthorn in the front of June; our red, baking angle in
the mountain, a laboratory of poignant scents. It was an endless wonder
to my mind, as I dreamed about the platform, following the progress of
the shadows, where the madrona with its leaves, the azalea and
calcanthus with their blossoms, could find moisture to support such
thick, wet, waxy growths, or the bay-tree collect the ingredients of its
perfume. But there they all grew together, healthy, happy, and
happy-making, as though rooted in a fathom of black soil.
Nor was it only vegetable life that prospered. We had, indeed, few
birds, and none that had much of a voice or anything worthy to be called
a song. My morning comrade had a thin chirp, unmusical and monotonous,
but friendly and pleasant to hear. He had but one rival: a fellow with
an ostentatious cry of near an octave descending, not one note of which
properly followed another. This is the only bird I ever knew with a
wrong ear; but there was something enthralling about his performance.
You listened and listened, thinking each time he must surely get it
right; but no, it was always wrong, and always wrong the same way. Yet
he seemed proud of his song, delivered it with execution and a manner of
his own, and was charming to his mate. A very incorrect, incessant human
whistler had thus a chance of knowing how his own music pleased the
world. Two great birds--eagles, we thought--dwelt at the top of the
cañon, among the crags that were printed on the sky. Now and again, but
very rarely, they wheeled high over our heads in silence, or with a
distant, dying scream; and then, with a fresh impulse, winged fleetly
forward, dipped over a hilltop, and were gone. They seemed solemn and
ancient things, sailing the blue air: perhaps coeval with the mountain
where they haunted, perhaps emigrants from Rome, where the glad legions
may have shouted to behold them on the morn of battle.
But if birds were rare, the place abounded with rattlesnakes--the
rattlesnakes' nest, it might have been named. Wherever we brushed among
the bushes, our passage woke their angry buzz. One dwelt habitually in
the wood-pile, and sometimes, when we came for firewood, thrust up his
small head between two logs, and hissed at the intrusion. The rattle has
a legendary credit; it is said to be awe-inspiring, and, once heard, to
stamp itself for ever in the memory. But the sound is not at all
alarming; the hum of many insects, and the buzz of the wasp convince the
ear of danger quite as readily. As a matter of fact, we lived for weeks
in Silverado, coming and going, with rattles sprung on every side, and
it never occurred to us to be afraid. I used to take sun-baths and do
calisthenics in a certain pleasant nook among azalea and calcanthus, the
rattles whizzing on every side like spinning-wheels, and the combined
hiss or buzz rising louder and angrier at any sudden movement; but I was
never in the least impressed, nor ever attacked. It was only towards the
end of our stay, that a man down at Calistoga, who was expatiating on
the terrifying nature of the sound, gave me at last a very good
imitation; and it burst on me at once that we dwelt in the very
metropolis of deadly snakes, and that the rattle was simply the
commonest noise in Silverado. Immediately on our return, we attacked the
Hansons on the subject. They had formerly assured us that our cañon was
favoured, like Ireland, with an entire immunity from poisonous reptiles;
but with the perfect inconsequence of the natural man, they were no
sooner found out than they went off at score in the contrary direction,
and we were told that in no part of the world did rattlesnakes attain to
such a monstrous bigness as among the warm, flower-dotted rocks of
Silverado. This is a contribution rather to the natural history of the
Hansons than to that of snakes.
One person, however, better served by his instinct, had known the
rattle from the first; and that was Chuchu, the dog. No rational
creature has ever led an existence more poisoned by terror than that
dog's at Silverado. Every whiz of the rattle made him bound. His eyes
rolled; he trembled; he would be often wet with sweat. One of our great
mysteries was his terror of the mountain. A little away above our nook,
the azaleas and almost all the vegetation ceased. Dwarf pines, not big
enough to be Christmas trees, grew thinly among loose stones and gravel
scaurs. Here and there a big boulder sat quiescent on a knoll, having
paused there till the next rain in his long slide down the mountain.
There was here no ambuscade for the snakes, you could see clearly where
you trod; and yet the higher I went, the more abject and appealing
became Chuchu's terror. He was an excellent master of that composite
language in which dogs communicate with men, and he would assure me, on
his honour, that there was some peril on the mountain; appeal to me, by
all that I held holy, to turn back; and at length, finding all was in
vain, and that I still persisted, ignorantly foolhardy, he would
suddenly whip round and make a bee-line down the slope for Silverado,
the gravel showering after him. What was he afraid of? There were
admittedly brown bears and Californian lions on the mountain; and a
grizzly visited Rufe's poultry yard not long before, to the unspeakable
alarm of Caliban, who dashed out to chastise the intruder, and found
himself, by moonlight, face to face with such a tartar. Something at
least there must have been; some hairy, dangerous brute lodged
permanently among the rocks a little to the north-west of Silverado,
spending his summer thereabout, with wife and family.
And there was, or there had been, another animal. Once, under the broad
daylight, on that open stony hillside, where the baby pines were
growing, scarcely tall enough to be a badge for a MacGregor's bonnet, I
came suddenly upon his innocent body, lying mummified by the dry air and
sun: a pigmy kangaroo. I am ingloriously ignorant of these subjects;
had never heard of such a beast; thought myself face to face with some
incomparable sport of nature; and began to cherish hopes of immortality
in science. Rarely have I been conscious of a stranger thrill than when
I raised that singular creature from the stones, dry as a board, his
innocent heart long quiet, and all warm with sunshine. His long hind
legs were stiff, his tiny forepaws clutched upon his breast, as if to
leap; his poor life cut short upon that mountain by some unknown
accident. But the Kangaroo rat, it proved, was no such unknown animal;
and my discovery was nothing.
Crickets were not wanting. I thought I could make out exactly four of
them, each with a corner of his own, who used to make night musical at
Silverado. In the matter of voice, they far excelled the birds, and
their ringing whistle sounded from rock to rock, calling and replying
the same thing, as in a meaningless opera. Thus, children in full health
and spirits shout together, to the dismay of neighbours; and their idle,
happy, deafening vociferations rise and fall, like the song of the
crickets. I used to sit at night on the platform, and wonder why these
creatures were so happy; and what was wrong with man that he also did
not wind up his days with an hour or two of shouting; but I suspect that
all long-lived animals are solemn. The dogs alone are hardly used by
nature; and it seems a manifest injustice for poor Chuchu to die in his
teens, after a life so shadowed and troubled, continually shaken with
alarm, and the tear of elegant sentiment permanently in his eye.
There was another neighbour of ours at Silverado, small but very active,
a destructive fellow. This was a black, ugly fly--a bore, the Hansons
called him--who lived by hundreds in the boarding of our house. He
entered by a round hole, more neatly pierced than a man could do it with
a gimlet, and he seems to have spent his life in cutting out the
interior of the plank, but whether as a dwelling or a store-house, I
could never find. When I used to lie in bed in the morning for a
rest--we had no easy-chairs in Silverado--I would hear, hour after hour,
the sharp cutting sound of his labours, and from time to time a dainty
shower of sawdust would fall upon the blankets. There lives no more
industrious creature than a bore.
And now that I have named to the reader all our animals and insects
without exception--only I find I have forgotten the flies--he will be
able to appreciate the singular privacy and silence of our days. It was
not only man who was excluded: animals, the song of birds, the lowing of
cattle, the bleating of sheep, clouds even, and the variations of the
weather, were here also wanting; and as, day after day, the sky was one
dome of blue, and the pines below us stood motionless in the still air,
so the hours themselves were marked out from each other only by the
series of our own affairs, and the sun's great period as he ranged
westward through the heavens. The two birds cackled awhile in the early
morning; all day the water tinkled in the shaft, the bores ground
sawdust in the planking of our crazy palace--infinitesimal sounds; and
it was only with the return of night that any change would fall on our
surroundings, or the four crickets begin to flute together in the dark.
Indeed, it would be hard to exaggerate the pleasure that we took in the
approach of evening. Our day was not very long, but it was very tiring.
To trip along unsteady planks or wade among shifting stones, to go to
and fro for water, to clamber down the glen to the Toll House after meat
and letters, to cook, to make fires and beds, were all exhausting to the
body. Life out of doors, besides, under the fierce eye of day, draws
largely on the animal spirits. There are certain hours in the afternoon
when a man, unless he is in strong health or enjoys a vacant mind, would
rather creep into a cool corner of a house and sit upon the chairs of
civilisation. About that time, the sharp stones, the planks, the
upturned boxes of Silverado, began to grow irksome to my body; I set out
on that hopeless, never-ending quest for a more comfortable posture; I
would be fevered and weary of the staring sun; and just then he would
begin courteously to withdraw his countenance, the shadows lengthened,
the aromatic airs awoke, and an indescribable but happy change announced
the coming of the night.
The hours of evening when we were once curtained in the friendly dark,
sped lightly. Even as with the crickets, night brought to us a certain
spirit of rejoicing. It was good to taste the air; good to mark the
dawning of the stars, as they increased their glittering company; good,
too, to gather stones, and send them crashing down the chute, a wave of
light. It seemed, in some way, the reward and the fulfilment of the day.
So it is when men dwell in the open air; it is one of the simple
pleasures that we lose by living cribbed and covered in a house, that,
though the coming of the day is still the most inspiriting, yet day's
departure, also, and the return of night refresh, renew, and quiet us;
and in the pastures of the dusk we stand, like cattle, exulting in the
absence of the load.
Our nights were never cold, and they were always still, but for one
remarkable exception. Regularly, about nine o'clock, a warm wind sprang
up, and blew for ten minutes, or maybe a quarter of an hour, right down
the cañon, fanning it well out, airing it as a mother airs the night
nursery before the children sleep. As far as I could judge, in the clear
darkness of the night, this wind was purely local: perhaps dependent on
the configuration of the glen. At least, it was very welcome to the hot
and weary squatters; and if we were not abed already, the springing up
of this lilliputian valley-wind would often be our signal to retire.
I was the last to go to bed, as I was still the first to rise. Many a
night I have strolled about the platform, taking a bath of darkness
before I slept. The rest would be in bed, and even from the forge I
could hear them talking together from bunk to bunk. A single candle in
the neck of a pint bottle was their only illumination; and yet the old
cracked house seemed literally bursting with the light. It shone keen as
a knife through all the vertical chinks; it struck upward through the
broken shingles; and through the eastern door and window, it fell in a
great splash upon the thicket and the overhanging rock. You would have
said a conflagration, or at the least a roaring forge; and behold, it
was but a candle. Or perhaps it was yet more strange to see the
procession moving bedwards round the corner of the house, and up the
plank that brought us to the bedroom door; under the immense spread of
the starry heavens, down in a crevice of the giant mountain, these few
human shapes, with their unshielded taper, made so disproportionate a
figure in the eye and mind. But the more he is alone with nature, the
greater man and his doings bulk in the consideration of his fellow-men.
Miles and miles away upon the opposite hilltops, if there were any
hunter belated or any traveller who had lost his way, he must have
stood, and watched and wondered, from the time the candle issued from
the door of the assayer's office till it had mounted the plank and
disappeared again into the miners' dormitory.
"VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE"
AND OTHER PAPERS
DEDICATION
MY DEAR WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY,
We are all busy in this world building Towers of Babel; and the child of
our imaginations is always a changeling when it comes from nurse. This
is not only true in the greatest, as of wars and folios, but in the
least also, like the trifling volume in your hand. Thus I began to write
these papers with a definite end: I was to be the _Advocatus_, not I
hope _Diaboli_, but _Juventutis_; I was to state temperately the beliefs
of youth as opposed to the contentions of age; to go over all the field
where the two differ, and produce at last a little volume of special
pleadings which I might call, without misnomer, "Life at Twenty-five."
But times kept changing, and I shared in the change. I clung hard to
that entrancing age; but, with the best will, no man can be twenty-five
for ever. The old, ruddy convictions deserted me, and, along with them,
the style that fits their presentation and defence. I saw, and indeed my
friends informed me, that the game was up. A good part of the volume
would answer to the long-projected title; but the shadows of the
prison-house are on the rest.
It is good to have been young in youth and, as years go on, to grow
older. Many are already old before they are through their teens; but to
travel deliberately through one's ages is to get the heart out of a
liberal education. Times change, opinions vary to their opposite, and
still this world appears a brave gymnasium, full of sea-bathing, and
horse-exercise, and bracing, manly virtues; and what can be more
encouraging than to find the friend who was welcome at one age, still
welcome at another? Our affections and beliefs are wiser than we; the
best that is in us is better than we can understand; for it is grounded
beyond experience, and guides us, blindfold but safe, from one age on to
another.
These papers are like milestones on the wayside of my life; and as I
look back in memory, there is hardly a stage of that distance but I see
you present with advice, reproof, or praise. Meanwhile, many things have
changed, you and I among the rest: but I hope that our sympathy, founded
on the love of our art, and nourished by mutual assistance, shall
survive these little revolutions undiminished, and, with God's help,
unite us to the end.
R. L. S.
DAVOS PLATZ, 1881.
I
"VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE"
I
With the single exception of Falstaff, all Shakespeare's characters are
what we call marrying men. Mercutio, as he was own cousin to Benedick
and Biron, would have come to the same end in the long run. Even Iago
had a wife, and, what is far stranger, he was jealous. People like
Jacques and the Fool in _Lear_, although we can hardly imagine they
would ever marry, keep single out of a cynical humour or for a broken
heart, and not, as we do nowadays, from a spirit of incredulity and
preference for the single state. For that matter, if you turn to George
Sand's French version of _As You Like It_ (and I think I can promise you
will like it but little), you will find Jacques marries Celia just as
Orlando marries Rosalind.
At least there seems to have been much less hesitation over marriage in
Shakespeare's days; and what hesitation there was was of a laughing
sort, and not much more serious, one way or the other, than that of
Panurge. In modern comedies the heroes are mostly of Benedick's way of
thinking, but twice as much in earnest, and not one quarter so
confident. And I take this diffidence as a proof of how sincere their
terror is. They know they are only human after all; they know what gins
and pitfalls lie about their feet; and how the shadow of matrimony
waits, resolute and awful, at the cross-roads. They would wish to keep
their liberty; but if that may not be, why, God's will be done! "What,
are you afraid of marriage?" asks Cécile, in _Maître Guerin_. "Oh, mon
Dieu, non!" replies Arthur; "I should take chloroform." They look
forward to marriage much in the same way as they prepare themselves for
death: each seems inevitable; each is a great Perhaps, and a leap into
the dark, for which, when a man is in the blue devils, he has specially
to harden his heart. That splendid scoundrel, Maxime de Trailles, took
the news of marriages much as an old man hears the deaths of his
contemporaries. "C'est désespérant," he cried, throwing himself down in
the arm-chair at Madame Schontz's; "c'est désespérant, nous nous marions
tous!" Every marriage was like another grey hair on his head; and the
jolly church-bells seemed to taunt him with his fifty years and fair
round belly.
The fact is, we are much more afraid of life than our ancestors, and
cannot find it in our hearts either to marry or not to marry. Marriage
is terrifying, but so is a cold and forlorn old age. The friendships of
men are vastly agreeable, but they are insecure. You know all the time
that one friend will marry and put you to the door; a second accept a
situation in China, and become no more to you than a name, a
reminiscence, and an occasional crossed letter, very laborious to read;
a third will take up with some religious crotchet and treat you to sour
looks thenceforward. So, in one way or another, life forces men apart
and breaks up the goodly fellowships for ever. The very flexibility and
ease which make men's friendships so agreeable while they endure, make
them the easier to destroy and forget. And a man who has a few friends,
or one who has a dozen (if there be any one so wealthy on this earth),
cannot forget on how precarious a base his happiness reposes; and how by
a stroke or two of fate--a death, a few light words, a piece of stamped
paper, a woman's bright eyes--he may be left, in a month, destitute of
all. Marriage is certainly a perilous remedy. Instead of on two or
three, you stake your happiness on one life only. But still, as the
bargain is more explicit and complete on your part, it is more so on the
other; and you have not to fear so many contingencies; it is not every
wind that can blow you from your anchorage; and so long as Death
withholds his sickle, you will always have a friend at home. People who
share a cell in the Bastile, or are thrown together on an uninhabited
isle, if they do not immediately fall to fisticuffs, will find some
possible ground of compromise. They will learn each other's ways and
humours, so as to know where they must go warily, and where they may
lean their whole weight. The discretion of the first years becomes the
settled habit of the last; and so, with wisdom and patience, two lives
may grow indissolubly into one.
But marriage, if comfortable, is not at all heroic. It certainly narrows
and damps the spirits of generous men. In marriage, a man becomes slack
and selfish, and under-goes a fatty degeneration of his moral being. It
is not only when Lydgate misallies himself with Rosamond Vincy, but when
Ladislaw marries above him with Dorothea, that this may be exemplified.
The air of the fireside withers out all the fine wildings of the
husband's heart. He is so comfortable and happy that he begins to prefer
comfort and happiness to everything else on earth, his wife included.
Yesterday he would have shared his last shilling; to-day "his first duty
is to his family," and is fulfilled in large measure by laying down
vintages and husbanding the health of an invaluable parent. Twenty years
ago this man was equally capable of crime or heroism; now he is fit for
neither. His soul is asleep, and you may speak without constraint; you
will not wake him. It is not for nothing that Don Quixote was a bachelor
and Marcus Aurelius married ill. For women there is less of this danger.
Marriage is of so much use to a woman, opens out to her so much more of
life, and puts her in the way of so much more freedom and usefulness,
that, whether she marry ill or well, she can hardly miss some benefit.
It is true, however, that some of the merriest and most genuine of women
are old maids; and that those old maids, and wives who are unhappily
married, have often most of the true motherly touch. And this would seem
to show, even for women, some narrowing influence in comfortable married
life. But the rule is none the less certain: if you wish the pick of men
and women, take a good bachelor and a good wife.
I am often filled with wonder that so many marriages are passably
successful, and so few come to open failure, the more so as I fail to
understand the principle on which people regulate their choice. I see
women marrying indiscriminately with staring burgesses and ferret-faced,
white-eyed boys, and men dwell in contentment with noisy scullions, or
taking into their lives acidulous vestals. It is a common answer to say
the good people marry because they fall in love; and of course you may
use and misuse a word as much as you please, if you have the world along
with you. But love is at least a somewhat hyperbolical expression for
such lukewarm preference. It is not here, anyway, that Love employs his
golden shafts; he cannot be said, with any fitness of language, to reign
here and revel. Indeed, if this be love at all, it is plain the poets
have been fooling with mankind since the foundation of the world. And
you have only to look these happy couples in the face, to see they have
never been in love, or in hate, or in any other high passion all their
days. When you see a dish of fruit at dessert, you sometimes set your
affections upon one particular peach or nectarine, watch it with some
anxiety as it comes round the table, and feel quite a sensible
disappointment when it is taken by some one else. I have used the phrase
"high passion." Well, I should say this was about as high a passion as
generally leads to marriage. One husband hears after marriage that some
poor fellow is dying of his wife's love. "What a pity!" he exclaims;
"you know I could so easily have got another!" And yet that is a very
happy union. Or again: A young man was telling me the sweet story of his
loves. "I like it well enough as long as her sisters are there," said
this amorous swain; "but I don't know what to do when we're alone." Once
more: A married lady was debating the subject with another lady. "You
know, dear," said the first, "after ten years of marriage, if he is
nothing else, your husband is always an old friend." "I have many old
friends," returned the other, "but I prefer them to be nothing more."
"Oh, perhaps I might _prefer_ that also!" There is a common note in
these three illustrations of the modern idyll; and it must be owned the
god goes among us with a limping gait and blear eyes. You wonder whether
it was so always; whether desire was always equally dull and spiritless,
and possession equally cold. I cannot help fancying most people make,
ere they marry, some such table of recommendations as Hannah Godwin
wrote to her brother William anent her friend, Miss Gay. It is so
charmingly comical, and so pat to the occasion, that I must quote a few
phrases. "The young lady is in every sense formed to make one of your
disposition really happy. She has a pleasing voice, with which she
accompanies her musical instrument with judgment. She has an easy
politeness in her manners, neither free nor reserved. She is a good
housekeeper and a good economist, and yet of a generous disposition. As
to her internal accomplishments, I have reason to speak still more
highly of them: good sense without vanity, a penetrating judgment
without a disposition to satire, with about as much religion as my
William likes, struck me with a wish that she was my William's wife."
That is about the tune: pleasing voice, moderate good looks,
unimpeachable internal accomplishments after the style of the copy-book,
with about as much religion as my William likes; and then, with all
speed, to church.
To deal plainly, if they only married when they fell in love, most
people would die unwed; and among the others, there would be not a few
tumultuous households. The Lion is the King of Beasts, but he is
scarcely suitable for a domestic pet. In the same way, I suspect love
is rather too violent a passion to make, in all cases, a good domestic
sentiment. Like other violent excitements, it throws up not only what is
best, but what is worst and smallest, in men's characters. Just as some
people are malicious in drink, or brawling and virulent under the
influence of religious feeling, some are moody, jealous, and exacting
when they are in love, who are honest, downright, good-hearted fellows
enough in the everyday affairs and humours of the world.
How then, seeing we are driven to the hypothesis that people choose in
comparatively cold blood, how is it they choose so well? One is almost
tempted to hint that it does not much matter whom you marry; that, in
fact, marriage is a subjective affection, and if you have made up your
mind to it, and once talked yourself fairly over, you could "pull it
through" with anybody. But even if we take matrimony at its lowest, even
if we regard it as no more than a sort of friendship recognised by the
police, there must be degrees in the freedom and sympathy realised, and
some principle to guide simple folk in their selection. Now what should
this principle be? Are there no more definite rules than are to be found
in the Prayer-book? Law and religion forbid the banns on the ground of
propinquity or consanguinity; society steps in to separate classes; and
in all this most critical matter, has common sense, has wisdom, never a
word to say? In the absence of more magisterial teaching, let us talk it
over between friends: even a few guesses may be of interest to youths
and maidens.
In all that concerns eating and drinking, company, climate, and ways of
life, community of taste is to be sought for. It would be trying, for
instance, to keep bed and board with an early riser or a vegetarian. In
matters of art and intellect, I believe it is of no consequence.
Certainly it is of none in the companionships of men, who will dine more
readily with one who has a good heart, a good cellar, and a humorous
tongue, than with another who shares all their favourite hobbies and is
melancholy withal. If your wife likes Tupper, that is no reason why you
should hang your head. She thinks with the majority, and has the courage
of her opinions. I have always suspected public taste to be a mongrel
product, out of affectation by dogmatism; and felt sure, if you could
only find an honest man of no special literary bent, he would tell you
he thought much of Shakespeare bombastic and most absurd, and all of him
written in very obscure English and wearisome to read. And not long ago
I was able to lay by my lantern in content, for I found the honest man.
He was a fellow of parts, quick, humorous, a clever painter, and with an
eye for certain poetical effects of sea and ships. I am not much of a
judge of that kind of thing, but a sketch of his comes before me
sometimes at night. How strong, supple, and living the ship seems upon
the billows! With what a dip and rake she shears the flying sea! I
cannot fancy the man who saw this effect, and took it on the wing with
so much force and spirit, was what you call commonplace in the last
recesses of the heart. And yet he thought, and was not ashamed to have
it known of him, that Ouida was better in every way than William
Shakespeare. If there were more people of his honesty, this would be
about the staple of lay criticism. It is not taste that is plentiful,
but courage that is rare. And what have we in place? How many, who think
no otherwise than the young painter, have we not heard disbursing
second-hand hyperboles? Have you never turned sick at heart, O best of
critics! when some of your own sweet adjectives were returned on you
before a gaping audience? Enthusiasm about art is become a function of
the average female being, which she performs with precision and a sort
of haunting sprightliness, like an ingenious and well-regulated machine.
Sometimes, alas! the calmest man is carried away in the torrent, bandies
adjectives with the best, and out-Herods Herod for some shameful
moments. When you remember that, you will be tempted to put things
strongly, and say you will marry no one who is not like George the
Second, and cannot state openly a distaste for poetry and painting.
The word "facts" is, in some ways, crucial. I have spoken with Jesuits
and Plymouth Brethren, mathematicians and poets, dogmatic republicans
and dear old gentlemen in bird's-eye neckcloths; and each understood the
word "facts" in an occult sense of his own. Try as I might, I could get
no nearer the principle of their division. What was essential to them
seemed to me trivial or untrue. We could come to no compromise as to
what was, or what was not, important in the life of man. Turn as we
pleased, we all stood back to back in a big ring, and saw another
quarter of the heavens, with different mountain-tops along the sky-line
and different constellations overhead. We had each of us some whimsy in
the brain, which we believed more than anything else, and which
discoloured all experience to its own shade. How would you have people
agree, when one is deaf and the other blind? Now this is where there
should be community between man and wife. They should be agreed on their
catchword in "_facts of religion_," or "_facts of science_," or
"_society, my dear_"; for without such an agreement all intercourse is a
painful strain upon the mind. "About as much religion as my William
likes," in short, that is what is necessary to make a happy couple of
any William and his spouse. For there are differences which no habit nor
affection can reconcile, and the Bohemian must not intermarry with the
Pharisee. Imagine Consuelo as Mrs. Samuel Budget, the wife of the
Successful Merchant! The best of men and the best of women may sometimes
live together all their lives, and for want of some consent on
fundamental questions, hold each other lost spirits to the end.
A certain sort of talent is almost indispensable for people who would
spend years together and not bore themselves to death. But the talent,
like the agreement, must be for and about life. To dwell happily
together they should be versed in the niceties of the heart, and born
with a faculty for willing compromise. The woman must be talented as a
woman, and it will not much matter although she is talented in nothing
else. She must know her _métier de femme_, and have a fine touch for the
affections. And it is more important that a person should be a good
gossip, and talk pleasantly and smartly of common friends and the
thousand and one nothings of the day and hour, than that she should
speak with the tongues of men and angels; for a while together by the
fire happens more frequently in marriage than the presence of a
distinguished foreigner to dinner. That people should laugh over the
same sort of jests, and have many a story of "grouse in the gun-room,"
many an old joke between them which time cannot wither nor custom stale,
is a better preparation for life, by your leave, than many other things
higher and better sounding in the world's ears. You could read Kant by
yourself, if you wanted; but you must share a joke with some one else.
You can forgive people who do not follow you through a philosophical
disquisition; but to find your wife laughing when you had tears in your
eyes or staring when you were in a fit of laughter, would go some way
towards a dissolution of the marriage.
I know a woman who, from some distaste or disability, could never so
much as understand the meaning of the word _politics_, and has given up
trying to distinguish Whigs from Tories; but take her on her own
politics, ask her about other men or women and the chicanery of everyday
existence--the rubs, the tricks, the vanities on which life turns--and
you will not find many more shrewd, trenchant, and humorous. Nay, to
make plainer what I have in mind, this same woman has a share of the
higher and more poetical understanding, frank interest in things for
their own sake, and enduring astonishment at the most common. She is
not to be deceived by custom, or made to think a mystery solved when it
is repeated. I have heard her say she could wonder herself crazy over
the human eyebrow. Now in a world where most of us walk very contentedly
in the little lit circle of their own reason, and have to be reminded of
what lies without by specious and clamant exceptions--earthquakes,
eruptions of Vesuvius, banjos floating in mid-air at a _séance_, and the
like--a mind so fresh and unsophisticated is no despicable gift. I will
own I think it a better sort of mind than goes necessarily with the
clearest views on public business. It will wash. It will find something
to say at an odd moment. It has in it the spring of pleasant and quaint
fancies. Whereas I can imagine myself yawning all night long until my
jaws ached and the tears came into my eyes, although my companion on the
other side of the hearth held the most enlightened opinions on the
franchise or the ballot.
The question of professions, in as far as they regard marriage, was only
interesting to women until of late days, but it touches all of us now.
Certainly, if I could help it, I would never marry a wife who wrote. The
practice of letters is miserably harassing to the mind; and after an
hour or two's work, all the more human portion of the author is extinct;
he will bully, backbite, and speak daggers. Music, I hear, is not much
better. But painting, on the contrary, is often highly sedative; because
so much of the labour, after your picture is once begun, is almost
entirely manual, and of that skilled sort of manual labour which offers
a continual series of successes, and so tickles a man, through his
vanity, into good humour. Alas! in letters there is nothing of this
sort. You may write as beautiful a hand as you will, you have always
something else to think of, and cannot pause to notice your loops and
flourishes; they are beside the mark, and the first law stationer could
put you to the blush. Rousseau, indeed, made some account of penmanship,
even made it a source of livelihood, when he copied out the "Héloïse"
for _dilettante_ ladies; and therein showed that strange eccentric
prudence which guided him among so many thousand follies and insanities.
It would be well for all of the _genus irritabile_ thus to add something
of skilled labour to intangible brain-work. To find the right word is so
doubtful a success and lies so near to failure, that there is no
satisfaction in a year of it; but we all know when we have formed a
letter perfectly; and a stupid artist, right or wrong, is almost equally
certain he has found a right tone or a right colour, or made a dexterous
stroke with his brush. And, again, painters may work out of doors; and
the fresh air, the deliberate seasons, and the "tranquillising
influence" of the green earth, counterbalance the fever of thought, and
keep them cool, placable, and prosaic.
A ship captain is a good man to marry if it is a marriage of love, for
absences are a good influence in love and keep it bright and delicate;
but he is just the worst man if the feeling is more pedestrian, as habit
is too frequently torn open and the solder has never time to set. Men
who fish, botanise, work with the turning-lathe, or gather sea-weeds,
will make admirable husbands; and a little amateur painting in
water-colour shows the innocent and quiet mind. Those who have a few
intimates are to be avoided; while those who swim loose, who have their
hat in their hand all along the street, who can number an infinity of
acquaintances and are not chargeable with any one friend, promise an
easy disposition and no rival to the wife's influence. I will not say
they are the best of men, but they are the stuff out of which adroit and
capable women manufacture the best of husbands. It is to be noticed that
those who have loved once or twice already are so much the better
educated to a woman's hand; the bright boy of fiction is an odd and most
uncomfortable mixture of shyness and coarseness, and needs a deal of
civilising. Lastly (and this is, perhaps, the golden rule) no woman
should marry a teetotaller, or a man who does not smoke. It is not for
nothing that this "ignoble tabagie," as Michelet calls it, spreads over
all the world. Michelet rails against it because it renders you happy
apart from thought or work; to provident women this will seem no evil
influence in married life. Whatever keeps a man in the front garden,
whatever checks wandering fancy and all inordinate ambition, whatever
makes for lounging and contentment, makes just so surely for domestic
happiness.
These notes, if they amuse the reader at all, will probably amuse him
more when he differs than when he agrees with them; at least they will
do no harm, for nobody will follow my advice. But the last word is of
more concern. Marriage is a step so grave and decisive that it attracts
light-headed, variable men by its very awfulness. They have been so
tried among the inconstant squalls and currents, so often sailed for
islands in the air or lain becalmed with burning heart, that they will
risk all for solid ground below their feet. Desperate pilots, they run
their sea-sick, weary barque upon the dashing rocks. It seems as if
marriage were the royal road through life, and realised, on the instant,
what we have all dreamed on summer Sundays when the bells ring, or at
night when we cannot sleep for the desire of living. They think it will
sober and change them. Like those who join a brotherhood, they fancy it
needs but an act to be out of the coil and clamour for ever. But this is
a wile of the devil's. To the end, spring winds will sow disquietude,
passing faces leave a regret behind them, and the whole world keep
calling and calling in their ears. For marriage is like life in
this--that it is a field of battle, and not a bed of roses.
II
Hope, they say, deserts us at no period of our existence. From first to
last, and in the face of smarting disillusions we continue to expect
good fortune, better health, and better conduct; and that so
confidently, that we judge it needless to deserve them. I think it
improbable that I shall ever write like Shakespeare, conduct an army
like Hannibal, or distinguish myself like Marcus Aurelius in the paths
of virtue; and yet I have my by-days, hope prompting, when I am very
ready to believe that I shall combine all these various excellences in
my own person, and go marching down to posterity with divine honours.
There is nothing so monstrous but we can believe it of ourselves. About
ourselves, about our aspirations and delinquencies, we have dwelt by
choice in a delicious vagueness from our boyhood up. No one will have
forgotten Tom Sawyer's aspiration: "Ah, if he could only die
_temporarily_!" Or, perhaps, better still, the inward resolution of the
two pirates, that "so long as they remained in that business, their
piracies should not again be sullied with the crime of stealing." Here
we recognise the thoughts of our boyhood; and our boyhood ceased,--well,
when?--not, I think, at twenty; nor, perhaps, altogether at twenty-five;
nor yet at thirty; and possibly, to be quite frank, we are still in the
thick of that arcadian period. For as the race of man, after centuries
of civilisation, still keeps some traits of their barbarian fathers, so
man the individual is not altogether quit of youth, when he is already
old and honoured, and Lord Chancellor of England. We advance in years
somewhat in the manner of an invading army in a barren land; the age
that we have reached, as the phrase goes, we but hold with an outpost,
and still keep open our communications with the extreme rear and first
beginnings of the march. There is our true base; that is not only the
beginning, but the perennial spring of our faculties; and grandfather
William can retire upon occasion into the green enchanted forest of his
boyhood.
The unfading boyishness of hope and its vigorous irrationality are
nowhere better displayed than in questions of conduct. There is a
character in the "Pilgrim's Progress," one Mr. "Linger-after-Lust," with
whom I fancy we are all on speaking terms; one famous among the famous
for ingenuity of hope up to and beyond the moment of defeat; one who,
after eighty years of contrary experience, will believe it possible to
continue in the business of piracy and yet avoid the guilt of theft.
Every sin is our last; every 1st of January a remarkable turning-point
in our career. Any overt act, above all, is felt to be alchemic in its
power to change. A drunkard takes the pledge; it will be strange if that
does not help him. For how many years did Mr. Pepys continue to make and
break his little vows? And yet I have not heard that he was discouraged
in the end. By such steps we think to fix a momentary resolution; as a
timid fellow hies him to the dentist's while the tooth is stinging.
But, alas, by planting a stake at the top of flood, you can neither
prevent nor delay the inevitable ebb. There is no hocus-pocus in
morality; and even the "sanctimonious ceremony" of marriage leaves the
man unchanged. This is a hard saying, and has an air of paradox. For
there is something in marriage so natural and inviting, that the step
has an air of great simplicity and ease; it offers to bury for ever many
aching preoccupations; it is to afford us unfailing and familiar company
through life; it opens up a smiling prospect of the blest and passive
kind of love, rather than the blessing and active; it is approached not
only through the delights of courtship, but by a public performance and
repeated legal signatures. A man naturally thinks it will go hard with
him if he cannot be good and fortunate and happy within such august
circumvallations.
And yet there is probably no other act in a man's life so hot-headed and
foolhardy as this one of marriage. For years, let us suppose, you have
been making the most indifferent business of your career. Your
experience has not, we may dare to say, been more encouraging than
Paul's or Horace's; like them, you have seen and desired the good that
you were not able to accomplish; like them, you have done the evil that
you loathed. You have walked at night in a hot or a cold sweat,
according to your habit of body, remembering, with dismal surprise, your
own unpardonable acts and sayings. You have been sometimes tempted to
withdraw entirely from this game of life; as a man who makes nothing but
misses withdraws from that less dangerous one of billiards. You have
fallen back upon the thought that you yourself most sharply smarted for
your misdemeanours, or, in the old, plaintive phrase, that you were
nobody's enemy but your own. And then you have been made aware of what
was beautiful and amiable, wise and kind, in the other part of your
behaviour; and it seemed as if nothing could reconcile the
contradiction, as indeed nothing can. If you are a man, you have shut
your mouth hard and said nothing; and if you are only a man in the
making, you have recognised that yours was quite a special case, and you
yourself not guilty of your own pestiferous career.
Granted, and with all my heart. Let us accept these apologies; let us
agree that you are nobody's enemy but your own; let us agree that you
are a sort of moral cripple, impotent for good; and let us regard you
with the unmingled pity due to such a fate. But there is one thing to
which, on these terms, we can never agree:--we can never agree to have
you marry. What! you have had one life to manage, and have failed so
strangely, and now can see nothing wiser than to conjoin with it the
management of some one else's? Because you have been unfaithful in a
very little, you propose yourself to be a ruler over ten cities. You
strip yourself by such a step of all remaining consolations and excuses.
You are no longer content to be your own enemy; you must be your wife's
also. You have been hitherto in a mere subaltern attitude; dealing cruel
blows about you in life, yet only half responsible, since you came there
by no choice or movement of your own. Now, it appears, you must take
things on your own authority: God made you, but you marry yourself; and
for all that your wife suffers, no one is responsible but you. A man
must be very certain of his knowledge ere he undertake to guide a
ticket-of-leave man through a dangerous pass; you have eternally missed
your way in life, with consequences that you still deplore, and yet you
masterfully seize your wife's hand, and, blindfold, drag her after you
to ruin. And it is your wife, you observe, whom you select. Her, whose
happiness you most desire, you choose to be your victim. You would
earnestly warn her from a tottering bridge or bad investment. If she
were to marry some one else, how you would tremble for her fate! If she
were only your sister, and you thought half as much of her, how
doubtfully would you entrust her future to a man no better than
yourself!
Times are changed with him who marries; there are no more by-path
meadows where you may innocently linger, but the road lies long and
straight and dusty to the grave. Idleness, which is often becoming and
even wise in the bachelor, begins to wear a different aspect when you
have a wife to support. Suppose, after you are married, one of those
little slips were to befall you. What happened last November might
surely happen February next. They may have annoyed you at the time,
because they were not what you had meant; but how will they annoy you in
the future, and how will they shake the fabric of your wife's confidence
and peace! A thousand things unpleasing went on in the _chiaroscuro_ of
a life that you shrank from too particularly realising; you did not
care, in those days, to make a fetish of your conscience; you would
recognise your failures with a nod, and so, good day. But the time for
these reserves is over. You have wilfully introduced a witness into your
life, the scene of these defeats, and can no longer close the mind's eye
upon uncomely passages, but must stand up straight and put a name upon
your actions. And your witness is not only the judge, but the victim of
your sins; not only can she condemn you to the sharpest penalties, but
she must herself share feelingly in their endurance. And observe, once
more, with what temerity you have chosen precisely _her_ to be your spy,
whose esteem you value highest, and whom you have already taught to
think you better than you are. You may think you had a conscience and
believed in God; but what is a conscience to a wife? Wise men of yore
erected statues of their deities, and consciously performed their part
in life before those marble eyes. A god watched them at the board, and
stood by their bedside in the morning when they woke; and all about
their ancient cities, where they bought and sold or where they piped and
wrestled, there would stand some symbol of the things that are outside
of man. These were lessons, delivered in the quiet dialect of art, which
told their story faithfully, but gently. It is the same lesson, if you
will--but how harrowingly taught!--when the woman you respect shall weep
from your unkindness or blush with shame at your misconduct. Poor girls
in Italy turn their painted Madonnas to the wall: you cannot set aside
your wife. To marry is to domesticate the Recording Angel. Once you are
married, there is nothing left for you, not even suicide, but to be
good.
And goodness in marriage is a more intricate problem than mere single
virtue; for in marriage there are two ideals to be realised. A girl, it
is true, has always lived in a glass house among reproving relatives,
whose word was law; she has been bred up to sacrifice her judgments and
take the key submissively from dear papa; and it is wonderful how
swiftly she can change her tune into the husband's. Her morality has
been, too often, an affair of precept and conformity. But in the case of
a bachelor who has enjoyed some measure both of privacy and freedom, his
moral judgments have been passed in some accordance with his nature. His
sins were always sins in his own sight; he could then only sin when he
did some act against his clear conviction; the light that he walked by
was obscure, but it was single. Now, when two people of any grit and
spirit put their fortunes into one, there succeeds to this comparative
certainty a huge welter of competing jurisdictions. It no longer matters
so much how life appears to one; one must consult another: one, who may
be strong, must not offend the other, who is weak. The only weak brother
I am willing to consider is (to make a bull for once) my wife. For her,
and for her only, I must waive my righteous judgments, and go crookedly
about my life. How, then, in such an atmosphere of compromise, to keep
honour bright and abstain from base capitulations? How are you to put
aside love's pleadings? How are you, the apostle of laxity, to turn
suddenly about into the rabbi of precision, and, after these years of
ragged practice, pose for a hero to the lackey who has found you out? In
this temptation to mutual indulgence lies the particular peril to
morality in married life. Daily they drop a little lower from the first
ideal, and for a while continue to accept these changelings with a gross
complacency. At last Love awakes and looks about him; find his hero sunk
into a stout old brute, intent on brandy pawnee; finds his heroine
divested of her angel brightness; and, in the flash of that first
disenchantment, flees for ever.
Again, the husband, in these unions, is usually a man, and the wife
commonly enough a woman; and when this is the case, although it makes
the firmer marriage, a thick additional veil of misconception hangs
above the doubtful business. Women, I believe, are somewhat rarer than
men; but then, if I were a woman, myself, I daresay I should hold the
reverse; and at least we all enter more or less wholly into one or other
of these camps. A man who delights women by his feminine perceptions
will often scatter his admirers by a chance explosion of the under side
of man; and the most masculine and direct of women will some day, to
your dire surprise, draw out like a telescope into successive lengths of
personation. Alas! for the man knowing her to be at heart more candid
than himself, who shall flounder, panting, through these mazes in the
quest for truth. The proper qualities of each sex are, indeed, eternally
surprising to the other. Between the Latin and the Teuton races there
are similar divergencies, not to be bridged by the most liberal
sympathy. And in the good, plain, cut-and-dry explanations of this life,
which pass current among us as the wisdom of the elders, this difficulty
has been turned with the aid of pious lies. Thus, when a young lady has
angelic features, eats nothing to speak of, plays all day long on the
piano, and sings ravishingly in church, it requires a rough infidelity
falsely called cynicism, to believe that she may be a little devil after
all. Yet so it is: she may be a talebearer, a liar, and a thief; she may
have a taste for brandy, and no heart. My compliments to George Eliot
for her Rosamond Vincy; the ugly work of satire she has transmuted to
the ends of art, by the companion figure of Lydgate; and the satire was
much wanted for the education of young men. That doctrine of the
excellence of women, however chivalrous, is cowardly as well as false.
It is better to face the fact, and know, when you marry that you take
into your life a creature of equal, if of unlike, frailties; whose weak
human heart beats no more tunefully than yours.
But it is the object of a liberal education not only to obscure the
knowledge of one sex by another, but to magnify the natural differences
between the two. Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but
principally by catchwords; and the little rift between the sexes is
astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the
girls and another to the boys. To the first, there is shown but a very
small field of experience, and taught a very trenchant principle for
judgment and action; to the other, the world of life is more largely
displayed, and their rule of conduct is proportionally widened. They
are taught to follow different virtues, to hate different vices, to
place their ideal, even for each other, in different achievements. What
should be the result of such a course? When a horse has run away, and
the two flustered people in the gig have each possessed themselves of a
rein, we know the end of that conveyance will be in the ditch. So, when
I see a raw youth and a green girl fluted and fiddled in a dancing
measure into that most serious contract, and setting out upon life's
journey with ideas so monstrously divergent, I am not surprised that
some make shipwreck, but that any come to port. What the boy does almost
proudly, as a manly peccadillo, the girl will shudder at as a debasing
vice; what is to her the mere common sense of tactics, he will spit out
of his mouth as shameful. Through such a sea of contrarieties must this
green couple steer their way; and contrive to love each other; and to
respect, forsooth; and be ready, when the time arrives, to educate the
little men and women who shall succeed to their places and perplexities.
And yet, when all has been said, the man who should hold back from
marriage is in the same case with him who runs away from battle. To
avoid an occasion for our virtues is a worse degree of failure than to
push forward pluckily and make a fall. It is lawful to pray God that we
be not led into temptation; but not lawful to skulk from those that come
to us. The noblest passage in one of the noblest books of this century,
is where the old pope glories in the trial, nay, in the partial fall and
but imperfect triumph, of the younger hero.[3] Without some such manly
note, it were perhaps better to have no conscience at all. But there is
a vast difference between teaching flight, and showing points of peril
that a man may march the more warily. And the true conclusion of this
paper is to turn our back on apprehensions, and embrace that shining and
courageous virtue, Faith. Hope is the boy, a blind, headlong, pleasant
fellow, good to chase swallows with the salt; Faith is the grave,
experienced, yet smiling man. Hope lives on ignorance; open-eyed Faith
is built upon a knowledge of our life, of the tyranny of circumstance
and the frailty of human resolution. Hope looks for unqualified success;
but Faith counts certainly on failure, and takes honourable defeat to be
a form of victory. Hope is a kind old pagan; but Faith grew up in
Christian days, and early learnt humility. In the one temper, a man is
indignant that he cannot spring up in a clap to heights of elegance and
virtue; in the other, out of a sense of his infirmities, he is filled
with confidence because a year has come and gone, and he has still
preserved some rags of honour. In the first, he expects an angel for a
wife; in the last, he knows that she is like himself--erring,
thoughtless, and untrue; but like himself also, filled with a struggling
radiancy of better things, and adorned with ineffective qualities. You
may safely go to school with hope; but ere you marry, should have
learned the mingled lesson of the world; that dolls are stuffed with
sawdust, and yet are excellent playthings; that hope and love address
themselves to a perfection never realised, and yet, firmly held, become
the salt and staff of life; that you yourself are compacted of
infirmities, perfect, you might say, in imperfection, and yet you have a
something in you lovable and worth preserving; and that, while the mass
of mankind lies under this scurvy condemnation, you will scarce find
one, but, by some generous reading, will become to you a lesson, a
model, and a noble spouse through life. So thinking, you will constantly
support your own unworthiness, and easily forgive the failings of your
friend. Nay, you will be wisely glad that you retain the sense of
blemishes; for the faults of married people continually spur up each of
them, hour by hour, to do better and to meet and love upon a higher
ground. And ever, between the failures, there will come glimpses of kind
virtues to encourage and console.
FOOTNOTE:
[3] Browning's "The Ring and the Book."
III
ON FALLING IN LOVE
"Lord, what fools these mortals be!"
There is only one event in life which really astonishes a man and
startles him out of his prepared opinions. Everything else befalls him
very much as he expected. Event succeeds to event, with an agreeable
variety indeed, but with little that is either startling or intense;
they form together no more than a sort of background, or running
accompaniment to the man's own reflections; and he falls naturally into
a cool, curious, and smiling habit of mind, and builds himself up in a
conception of life which expects to-morrow to be after the pattern of
to-day and yesterday. He may be accustomed to the vagaries of his
friends and acquaintances under the influence of love. He may sometimes
look forward to it for himself with an incomprehensible expectation. But
it is a subject which neither intuition nor the behaviour of others will
help the philosopher to the truth. There is probably nothing rightly
thought or rightly written on this matter of love that is not a piece of
the person's experience. I remember an anecdote of a well-known French
theorist, who was debating a point eagerly in his _cénacle_. It was
objected against him that he had never experienced love. Whereupon he
arose, left the society, and made it a point not to return to it until
he considered that he had supplied the defect. "Now," he remarked, on
entering, "now I am in a position to continue the discussion." Perhaps
he had not penetrated very deeply into the subject after all; but the
story indicates right thinking, and may serve as an apologue to readers
of this essay.
When at last the scales fall from his eyes, it is not without something
of the nature of dismay that the man finds himself in such changed
conditions. He has to deal with commanding emotions instead of the easy
dislikes and preferences in which he has hitherto passed his days; and
he recognises capabilities for pain and pleasure of which he had not yet
suspected the existence. Falling in love is the one illogical adventure,
the one thing of which we are tempted to think as supernatural, in our
trite and reasonable world. The effect is out of all proportion with the
cause. Two persons, neither of them it may be, very amiable or very
beautiful, meet, speak a little, and look a little into each other's
eyes. That has been done a dozen or so of times in the experience of
either with no great result. But on this occasion all is different. They
fall at once into that state in which another person becomes to us the
very gist and centre-point of God's creation, and demolishes our
laborious theories with a smile; in which our ideas are so bound up with
the one master-thought that even the trivial cares of our own person
become so many acts of devotion, and the love of life itself is
translated into a wish to remain in the same world with so precious and
desirable a fellow-creature. And all the while their acquaintances look
on in stupor, and ask each other, with almost passionate emphasis, what
so-and-so can see in that woman, or such-an-one in that man. I am sure,
gentlemen, I cannot tell you. For my part, I cannot think what the women
mean. It might be very well, if the Apollo Belvedere should suddenly
glow all over into life, and step forward from the pedestal with that
godlike air of his. But of the misbegotten changelings who call
themselves men, and prate intolerably over dinner-tables, I never saw
one who seemed worthy to inspire love--no, nor read of any, except
Leonardo da Vinci, and perhaps Goethe in his youth. About women I
entertain a somewhat different opinion; but there, I have the misfortune
to be a man.
There are many matters in which you may waylay Destiny, and bid him
stand and deliver. Hard work, high thinking, adventurous excitement, and
a great deal more that forms a part of this or the other person's
spiritual bill of fare, are within the reach of almost any one who can
dare a little and be patient. But it is by no means in the way of every
one to fall in love. You know the difficulty Shakespeare was put into
when Queen Elizabeth asked him to show Falstaff in love. I do not
believe that Henry Fielding was ever in love. Scott, if it were not for
a passage or two in "Rob Roy," would give me very much the same effect.
These are great names and (what is more to the purpose) strong, healthy,
high-strung, and generous natures, of whom the reverse might have been
expected. As for the innumerable army of anæmic and tailorish persons
who occupy the face of this planet with so much propriety, it is
palpably absurd to imagine them in any such situation as a love-affair.
A wet rag goes safely by the fire; and if a man is blind, he cannot
expect to be much impressed by romantic scenery. Apart from all this,
many lovable people miss each other in the world, or meet under some
unfavourable star. There is the nice and critical moment of declaration
to be got over. From timidity or lack of opportunity a good half of
possible love cases never get so far, and at least another quarter do
there cease and determine. A very adroit person, to be sure, manages to
prepare the way and out with his declaration in the nick of time. And
then there is a fine solid sort of man, who goes on from snub to snub;
and if he has to declare forty times, will continue imperturbably
declaring, amid the astonished consideration of men and angels, until he
has a favourable answer. I daresay, if one were a woman, one would like
to marry a man who was capable of doing this, but not quite one who had
done so. It is just a little bit abject, and somehow just a little bit
gross; and marriages in which one of the parties has been thus battered
into consent scarcely form agreeable subjects for meditation. Love
should run out to meet love with open arms. Indeed, the ideal story is
that of two people who go into love step for step, with a fluttered
consciousness, like a pair of children venturing together into a dark
room. From the first moment when they see each other, with a pang of
curiosity, through stage after stage of growing pleasure and
embarrassment, they can read the expression of their own trouble in each
other's eyes. There is here no declaration, properly so called; the
feeling is so plainly shared, that as soon as the man knows what it is
in his own heart, he is sure of what it is in the woman's.
This simple accident of falling in love is as beneficial as it is
astonishing. It arrests the petrifying influence of years, disproves
cold-blooded and cynical conclusions, and awakens dormant sensibilities.
Hitherto the man had found it a good policy to disbelieve the existence
of any enjoyment which was out of his reach; and thus he turned his back
upon the strong sunny parts of nature, and accustomed himself to look
exclusively on what was common and dull. He accepted a prose ideal, let
himself go blind of many sympathies by disuse; and if he were young and
witty, or beautiful, wilfully forwent these advantages. He joined
himself to the following of what, in the old mythology of love, was
prettily called _nonchaloir_; and in an odd mixture of feelings, a fling
of self-respect, a preference for selfish liberty, and a great dash of
that fear with which honest people regard serious interests, kept
himself back from the straightforward course of life among certain
selected activities. And now, all of a sudden, he is unhorsed, like St.
Paul, from his infidel affectation. His heart, which has been ticking
accurate seconds for the last year, gives a bound and begins to beat
high and irregularly in his breast. It seems as if he had never heard or
felt or seen until that moment; and by the report of his memory, he must
have lived his past life between sleep and waking, or with the
pre-occupied attention of a brown study. He is practically incommoded by
the generosity of his feelings, smiles much when he is alone, and
develops a habit of looking rather blankly upon the moon and stars. But
it is not at all within the province of a prose essayist to give a
picture of this hyperbolical frame of mind; and the thing has been done
already, and that to admiration. In "Adelaïde," in Tennyson's "Maud,"
and in some of Heine's songs, you get the absolute expression of this
midsummer spirit. Romeo and Juliet were very much in love; although they
tell me some German critics are of a different opinion, probably the
same who would have us think Mercutio a dull fellow. Poor Antony was in
love, and no mistake. That lay figure, Marius, in "Les Misérables," is
also a genuine case in his own way, and worth observation. A good many
of George Sand's people are thoroughly in love; and so are a good many
of George Meredith's. Altogether, there is plenty to read on the
subject. If the root of the matter be in him, and if he has the
requisite chords to set in vibration, a young man may occasionally
enter, with the key of art, into that land of Beulah which is upon the
borders of Heaven, and within sight of the City of Love. There let him
sit awhile to hatch delightful hopes and perilous illusions.
One thing that accompanies the passion in its first blush is certainly
difficult to explain. It comes (I do not quite see how) that from having
a very supreme sense of pleasure in all parts of life--in lying down to
sleep, in waking, in motion, in breathing, in continuing to be--the
lover begins to regard his happiness as beneficial for the rest of the
world and highly meritorious in himself. Our race has never been able
contentedly to suppose that the noise of its wars, conducted by a few
young gentlemen in a corner of an inconsiderable star, does not re-echo
among the courts of Heaven with quite a formidable effect. In much the
same taste, when people find a great to-do in their own breasts, they
imagine it must have some influence in their neighbourhood. The presence
of the two lovers is so enchanting to each other that it seems as if it
must be the best thing possible for everybody else. They are half
inclined to fancy it is because of them and their love that the sky is
blue and the sun shines. And certainly the weather is usually fine while
people are courting.... In point of fact, although the happy man feels
very kindly towards others of his own sex, there is apt to be something
too much of the magnifico in his demeanour. If people grow presuming and
self-important over such matters as a dukedom or the Holy See, they will
scarcely support the dizziest elevation in life without some suspicion
of a strut; and the dizziest elevation is to love and be loved in
return. Consequently, accepted lovers are a trifle condescending in
their address to other men. An overweening sense of the passion and
importance of life hardly conduces to simplicity of manner. To women
they feel very nobly, very purely, and very generously, as if they were
so many Joan-of-Arcs; but this does not come out in their behaviour; and
they treat them to Grandisonian airs marked with a suspicion of fatuity.
I am not quite certain that women do not like this sort of thing; but
really, after having bemused myself over "Daniel Deronda," I have given
up trying to understand what they like.
If it did nothing else, this sublime and ridiculous superstition, that
the pleasure of the pair is somehow blessed to others, and everybody is
made happier in their happiness, would serve at least to keep love
generous and greathearted. Nor is it quite a baseless superstition after
all. Other lovers are hugely interested. They strike the nicest balance
between pity and approval, when they see people aping the greatness of
their own sentiments. It is an understood thing in the play, that while
the young gentlefolk are courting on the terrace, a rough flirtation is
being carried on, and a light, trivial sort of love is growing up,
between the footman and the singing chambermaid. As people are generally
cast for the leading parts in their own imaginations, the reader can
apply the parallel to real life without much chance of going wrong. In
short, they are quite sure this other love-affair is not so deep-seated
as their own, but they like dearly to see it going forward. And love,
considered as a spectacle, must have attractions for many who are not of
the confraternity. The sentimental old maid is a commonplace of the
novelists; and he must be rather a poor sort of human being, to be sure,
who can look on at this pretty madness without indulgence and sympathy.
For nature commends itself to people with a most insinuating art; the
busiest is now and again arrested by a great sunset; and you may be as
pacific or as coldblooded as you will, but you cannot help some emotion
when you read of well-disputed battles, or meet a pair of lovers in the
lane.
Certainly, whatever it may be with regard to the world at large, this
idea of beneficent pleasure is true as between the sweethearts. To do
good and communicate is the lover's grand intention. It is the happiness
of the other that makes his own most intense gratification. It is not
possible to disentangle the different emotions, the pride, humility,
pity, and passion, which are excited by a look of happy love or an
unexpected caress. To make one's self beautiful, to dress the hair, to
excel in talk, to do anything and all things that puff out the character
and attributes and make them imposing in the eyes of others, is not only
to magnify oneself, but to offer the most delicate homage at the same
time. And it is in this latter intention that they are done by lovers;
for the essence of love is kindness: and indeed it may be best defined
as passionate kindness: kindness, so to speak, run mad and become
importunate and violent. Vanity in a merely personal sense exists no
longer. The lover takes a perilous pleasure in privately displaying his
weak points and having them, one after another, accepted and condoned.
He wishes to be assured that he is not loved for this or that good
quality, but for himself, or something as like himself as he can
contrive to set forward. For, although it may have been a very difficult
thing to paint the marriage of Cana, or write the fourth act of _Antony
and Cleopatra_, there is a more difficult piece of art before every one
in this world who cares to set about explaining his own character to
others. Words and acts are easily wrenched from their true significance;
and they are all the language we have to come and go upon. A pitiful job
we make of it, as a rule. For better or worse, people mistake our
meaning and take our emotions at a wrong valuation. And generally we
rest pretty content with our failures; we are content to be
misapprehended by crackling flirts; but when once a man is moonstruck
with this affection of love, he makes it a point of honour to clear such
dubieties away. He cannot have the Best of her Sex misled upon a point
of this importance; and his pride revolts at being loved in a mistake.
He discovers a great reluctance to return on former periods of his life.
To all that has not been shared with her, rights and duties, bygone
fortunes and dispositions, he can look back only by a difficult and
repugnant effort of the will. That he should have wasted some years in
ignorance of what alone was really important, that he may have
entertained the thought of other women with any show of complacency, is
a burthen almost too heavy for his self-respect. But it is the thought
of another past that rankles in his spirit like a poisoned wound. That
he himself made a fashion of being alive in the bald, beggarly days
before a certain meeting, is deplorable enough in all good conscience.
But that She should have permitted herself the same liberty seems
inconsistent with a Divine providence.
A great many people run down jealousy, on the score that it is an
artificial feeling, as well as practically inconvenient. This is
scarcely fair; for the feeling on which it merely attends, like an
ill-humoured courtier, is itself artificial in exactly the same sense
and to the same degree. I suppose what is meant by that objection is
that jealousy has not always been a character of man; formed no part of
that very modest kit of sentiments with which he is supposed to have
begun the world; but waited to make its appearance in better days and
among richer natures. And this is equally true of love, and friendship,
and love of country, and delight in what they call the beauties of
nature, and most other things worth having. Love, in particular, will
not endure any historical scrutiny: to all who have fallen across it, it
is one of the most incontestable facts in the world; but if you begin to
ask what it was in other periods and countries, in Greece, for instance,
the strangest doubts begin to spring up, and everything seems so vague
and changing that a dream is logical in comparison. Jealousy, at any
rate, is one of the consequences of love; you may like it or not, at
pleasure; but there it is.
It is not exactly jealousy, however, that we feel when we reflect on the
past of those we love. A bundle of letters found after years of happy
union creates no sense of insecurity in the present; and yet it will
pain a man sharply. The two people entertain no vulgar doubt of each
other: but this pre-existence of both occurs to the mind as something
indelicate. To be altogether right, they should have had twin birth
together, at the same moment with the feeling that unites them. Then
indeed it would be simple and perfect and without reserve or
afterthought. Then they would understand each other with a fulness
impossible otherwise. There would be no barrier between them of
associations that cannot be imparted. They would be led into none of
those comparisons that send the blood back to the heart. And they would
know that there had been no time lost, and they had been together as
much as was possible. For besides terror for the separation that must
follow some time or other in the future, men feel anger, and something
like remorse, when they think of that other separation which endured
until they met. Some one has written that love makes people believe in
immortality, because there seems not to be room enough in life for so
great a tenderness, and it is inconceivable that the most masterful of
our emotions should have no more than the spare moments of a few years.
Indeed, it seems strange; but if we call to mind analogies, we can
hardly regard it as impossible.
"The blind bow-boy," who smiles upon us from the end of terraces in old
Dutch gardens, laughingly hails his bird-bolts among a fleeting
generation. But for as fast as ever he shoots, the game dissolves and
disappears into eternity from under his falling arrows; this one is gone
ere he is struck; the other has but time to make one gesture and give
one passionate cry; and they are all the things of a moment. When the
generation is gone, when the play is over, when the thirty years'
panorama has been withdrawn in tatters from the stage of the world, we
may ask what has become of these great, weighty, and undying loves, and
the sweethearts who despised mortal conditions in a fine credulity; and
they can only show us a few songs in a bygone taste, a few actions worth
remembering, and a few children who have retained some happy stamp from
the disposition of their parents.
IV
TRUTH OF INTERCOURSE
Among sayings that have a currency in spite of being wholly false upon
the face of them for the sake of a half-truth upon another subject which
is accidentally combined with the error, one of the grossest and
broadest conveys the monstrous proposition that it is easy to tell the
truth and hard to tell a lie. I wish heartily it were. But the truth is
one; it has first to be discovered, then justly and exactly uttered.
Even with instruments specially contrived for such a purpose--with a
foot-rule, a level, or a theodolite--it is not easy to be exact; it is
easier, alas! to be inexact. From those who mark the divisions on a
scale to those who measure the boundaries of empires or the distance of
the heavenly stars, it is by careful method and minute, unwearying
attention that men rise even to material exactness or to sure knowledge
even of external and constant things. But it is easier to draw the
outline of a mountain than the changing appearance of a face; and truth
in human relations is of this more intangible and dubious order: hard to
seize, harder to communicate. Veracity to facts in a loose, colloquial
sense--not to say that I have been in Malabar when as a matter of fact I
was never out of England, not to say that I have read Cervantes in the
original when, as a matter of fact, I know not one syllable of
Spanish--this, indeed, is easy and to the same degree unimportant in
itself. Lies of this sort, according to circumstances, may or may not be
important; in a certain sense even they may or may not be false. The
habitual liar may be a very honest fellow, and live truly with his wife
and friends; while another man who never told a formal falsehood in his
life may yet be himself one lie--heart and face, from top to bottom.
This is the kind of lie which poisons intimacy. And, _vice versâ_,
veracity to sentiment, truth in a relation, truth to your own heart and
your friends, never to feign or falsify emotion--that is the truth which
makes love possible and mankind happy.
_L'art de bien dire_ is but a drawing-room accomplishment unless it be
pressed into the service of the truth. The difficulty of literature is
not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but
to affect him precisely as you wish. This is commonly understood in the
case of books or set orations; even in making your will, or writing an
explicit letter, some difficulty is admitted by the world. But one thing
you can never make Philistine natures understand; one thing, which yet
lies on the surface, remains as unseizable to their wits as a high
flight of metaphysics--namely, that the business of life is mainly
carried on by means of this difficult art of literature, and according
to a man's proficiency in that art shall be the freedom and the fulness
of his intercourse with other men. Anybody, it is supposed, can say what
he means; and in spite of their notorious experience to the contrary,
people so continue to suppose. Now, I simply open the last book I have
been reading--Mr. Leland's captivating "English Gipsies." "It is said,"
I find on p. 7, "that those who can converse with Irish peasants in
their native tongue form far higher opinions of their appreciation of
the beautiful, and of _the elements of humour and pathos in their
hearts_, than do those who know their thoughts only through the medium
of English. I know from my own observations that this is quite the case
with the Indians of North America and it is unquestionably so with the
gipsy." In short, where a man has not a full possession of the language,
the most important, because the most amiable, qualities of his nature
have to lie buried and fallow; for the pleasure of comradeship, and the
intellectual part of love, rest upon these very "elements of humour and
pathos." Here is a man opulent in both, and for lack of a medium he can
put none of it out to interest in the market of affection! But what is
thus made plain to our apprehensions in the case of a foreign language
is partially true even with the tongue we learned in childhood. Indeed,
we all speak different dialects; one shall be copious and exact, another
loose and meagre; but the speech of the ideal talker shall correspond
and fit upon the truth of fact--not clumsily, obscuring lineaments, like
a mantle, but cleanly adhering, like an athlete's skin. And what is the
result? That the one can open himself more clearly to his friends, and
can enjoy more of what makes life truly valuable--intimacy with those he
loves. An orator makes a false step; he employs some trivial, some
absurd, some vulgar phrase; in the turn of a sentence he insults, by a
side wind, those whom he is labouring to charm; in speaking to one
sentiment he unconsciously ruffles another in parenthesis; and you are
not surprised, for you know his task to be delicate and filled with
perils. "O frivolous mind of man, light ignorance!" As if yourself, when
you seek to explain some misunderstanding or excuse some apparent fault,
speaking swiftly and addressing a mind still recently incensed, were not
harnessing for a more perilous adventure; as if yourself required less
tact and eloquence; as if an angry friend or a suspicious lover were not
more easy to offend than a meeting of indifferent politicians! Nay, and
the orator treads in a beaten round; the matters he discusses have been
discussed a thousand times before; language is ready-shaped to his
purpose; he speaks out of a cut-and-dry vocabulary. But you--may it not
be that your defence reposes on some subtlety of feeling, not so much as
touched upon in Shakespeare, to express which, like a pioneer, you must
venture forth into zones of thought still unsurveyed, and become
yourself a literary innovator? For even in love there are unlovely
humours; ambiguous acts, unpardonable words, may yet have sprung from a
kind sentiment. If the injured one could read your heart, you may be
sure that he would understand and pardon; but, alas! the heart cannot be
shown--it has to be demonstrated in words. Do you think it is a hard
thing to write poetry? Why, that is to write poetry, and of a high, if
not the highest, order.
I should even more admire "the lifelong and heroic literary labours" of
my fellow-men, patiently clearing up in words their loves and their
contentions, and speaking their autobiography daily to their wives, were
it not for a circumstance which lessens their difficulty and my
admiration by equal parts. For life, though largely, is not entirely
carried on by literature. We are subject to physical passions and
contortions; the voice breaks and changes, and speaks by unconscious and
winning inflections; we have legible countenances, like an open book;
things that cannot be said look eloquently through the eyes; and the
soul, not locked into the body as a dungeon, dwells ever on the
threshold with appealing signals. Groans and tears, looks and gestures,
a flush or a paleness, are often the most clear reporters of the heart,
and speak more directly to the hearts of others. The message flies by
these interpreters in the least space of time, and the misunderstanding
is averted in the moment of its birth. To explain in words takes time
and a just and patient hearing; and in the critical epochs of a close
relation, patience and justice are not qualities on which we can rely.
But the look or the gesture explains things in a breath; they tell their
message without ambiguity; unlike speech, they cannot stumble, by the
way, on a reproach or an allusion that should steel your friend against
the truth; and then they have a higher authority, for they are the
direct expression of the heart, not yet transmitted through the
unfaithful and sophisticating brain. Not long ago I wrote a letter to a
friend which came near involving us in quarrel; but we met, and in
personal talk I repeated the worst of what I had written, and added
worse to that; and with the commentary of the body it seemed not
unfriendly either to hear or say. Indeed, letters are in vain for the
purposes of intimacy; an absence is a dead break in the relation; yet
two who know each other fully and are bent on perpetuity in love, may so
preserve the attitude of their affections that they may meet on the same
terms as they had parted.
Pitiful is the case of the blind, who cannot read the face; pitiful that
of the deaf, who cannot follow the changes of the voice. And there are
others also to be pitied; for there are some of an inert, uneloquent
nature, who have been denied all the symbols of communication, who have
neither a lively play of facial expression, nor speaking gestures, nor a
responsive voice, nor yet the gift of frank, explanatory speech: people
truly made of clay, people tied for life into a bag which no one can
undo. They are poorer than the gipsy, for their heart can speak no
language under heaven. Such people we must learn slowly by the tenor of
their acts, or through yea and nay communications; or we take them on
trust on the strength of a general air, and now and again, when we see
the spirit breaking through in a flash, correct or change our estimate.
But these will be uphill intimacies, without charm or freedom, to the
end; and freedom is the chief ingredient in confidence. Some minds,
romantically dull, despise physical endowments. That is a doctrine for a
misanthrope; to those who like their fellow creatures it must always be
meaningless; and, for my part, I can see few things more desirable,
after the possession of such radical qualities as honour and humour and
pathos, than to have a lively and not a stolid countenance; to have
looks to correspond with every feeling; to be elegant and delightful in
person, so that we shall please even in the intervals of active
pleasing, and may never discredit speech with uncouth manners or become
unconsciously our own burlesques. But of all unfortunates there is one
creature (for I will not call him man) conspicuous in misfortune. This
is he who has forfeited his birthright of expression, who has cultivated
artful intonations, who has taught his face tricks, like a pet monkey,
and on every side perverted or cut off his means of communication with
his fellow-men. The body is a house of many windows: there we all sit,
showing ourselves and crying on the passers-by to come and love us. But
this fellow has filled his windows with opaque glass, elegantly
coloured. His house may be admired for its design, the crowd may pause
before the stained windows, but meanwhile the poor proprietor must lie
languishing within, uncomforted, unchangeably alone.
Truth of intercourse is something more difficult than to refrain from
open lies. It is possible to avoid falsehood and yet not tell the
truth. It is not enough to answer formal questions. To reach the truth
by yea and nay communications implies a questioner with a share of
inspiration, such as is often found in mutual love. _Yea_ and _nay_ mean
nothing; the meaning must have been related in the question. Many words
are often necessary to convey a very simple statement; for in this sort
of exercise we never hit the gold; the most that we can hope, is by many
arrows, more or less far off on different sides, to indicate, in the
course of time, for what target we are aiming, and after an hour's talk,
back and forward to convey the purport of a single principle or a single
thought. And yet while the curt, pithy speaker misses the point
entirely, a wordy, prolegomenous babbler will often add three new
offences in the process of excusing one. It is really a most delicate
affair. The world was made before the English language, and seemingly
upon a different design. Suppose we held our converse not in words, but
in music; those who have a bad ear would find themselves cut off from
all near commerce, and no better than foreigners in this big world. But
we do not consider how many have "a bad ear" for words, nor how often
the most eloquent find nothing to reply. I hate questioners and
questions; there are so few that can be spoken to without a lie. "_Do
you forgive me?_" Madam and sweetheart, so far as I have gone in life I
have never yet been able to discover what forgiveness means. "_Is it
still the same between us?_" Why, how can it be? It is eternally
different; and yet you are still the friend of my heart. "_Do you
understand me?_" God knows; I should think it highly improbable.
The cruellest lies are often told in silence. A man may have sat in a
room for hours and not opened his teeth, and yet come out of that room a
disloyal friend or a vile calumniator. And how many loves have perished
because, from pride, or spite, or diffidence, or that unmanly shame
which withholds a man from daring to betray emotion, a lover, at the
critical point of the relation, has but hung his head and held his
tongue? And, again, a lie may be told by a truth, or a truth conveyed
through a lie. Truth to facts is not always truth to sentiment; and part
of the truth, as often happens in answer to a question, may be the
foulest calumny. A fact may be an exception; but the feeling is the law,
and it is that which you must neither garble nor belie. The whole tenor
of a conversation is a part of the meaning of each separate statement:
the beginning and the end define and travesty the intermediate
conversation. You never speak to God; you address a fellow-man, full of
his own tempers; and to tell truth, rightly understood; is not to state
the true facts, but to convey a true impression; truth in spirit, not
truth to letter, is the true veracity. To reconcile averted friends a
Jesuitical discretion is often needful, not so much to gain a kind
hearing as to communicate sober truth. Women have an ill name in this
connection; yet they live in as true relations; the lie of a good woman
is the true index of her heart.
"It takes," says Thoreau, in the noblest and most useful passage I
remember to have read in any modern author,[4] "two to speak truth--one
to speak and another to hear." He must be very little experienced, or
have no great zeal for truth, who does not recognise the fact. A grain
of anger or a grain of suspicion produces strange acoustical effects,
and makes the ear greedy to remark offence. Hence we find those who have
once quarrelled carry themselves distantly, and are ever ready to break
the truce. To speak truth there must be moral equality or else no
respect; and hence between parent and child intercourse is apt to
degenerate into a verbal fencing bout, and misapprehensions to become
ingrained. And there is another side to this, for the parent begins with
an imperfect notion of the child's character, formed in early years or
during the equinoctial gales of youth; to this he adheres, noting only
the facts which suit with his preconception; and wherever a person
fancies himself unjustly judged, he at once and finally gives up the
effort to speak truth. With our chosen friends, on the other hand, and
still more between lovers (for mutual understanding is love's essence),
the truth is easily indicated by the one and aptly comprehended by the
other. A hint taken, a look understood, conveys the gist of long and
delicate explanations; and where the life is known even _yea_ and _nay_
become luminous. In the closest of all relations--that of a love well
founded and equally shared--speech is half discarded, like a roundabout,
infantile process or a ceremony of formal etiquette; and the two
communicate directly by their presences, and with few looks and fewer
words contrive to share their good and evil and uphold each other's
hearts in joy. For love rests upon a physical basis; it is a familiarity
of nature's making and apart from voluntary choice. Understanding has in
some sort out-run knowledge, for the affection perhaps began with the
acquaintance; and as it was not made like other relations, so it is not,
like them, to be perturbed or clouded. Each knows more than can be
uttered; each lives by faith and believes by a natural compulsion; and
between man and wife the language of the body is largely developed and
grown strangely eloquent. The thought that prompted and was conveyed in
a caress would only lose to be set down in words--ay, although
Shakespeare himself should be the scribe.
Yet it is in these dear intimacies, beyond all others, that we must
strive and do battle for the truth. Let but a doubt arise, and alas! all
the previous intimacy and confidence is but another charge against the
person doubted. "_What a monstrous dishonesty is this if I have been
deceived so long and so completely!_" Let but that thought gain
entrance, and you plead before a deaf tribunal. Appeal to the past; why,
that is your crime! Make all clear, convince the reason; alas!
speciousness is but a proof against you. "_If you can abuse me now, the
more likely that you have abused me from the first._"
For a strong affection such moments are worth supporting, and they will
end well; for your advocate is in your lover's heart and speaks her own
language; it is not you but she herself who can defend and clear you of
the charge. But in slighter intimacies, and for a less stringent union?
Indeed, is it worth while? We are all _incompris_, only more or less
concerned for the mischance; all trying wrongly to do right; all fawning
at each other's feet like dumb, neglected lapdogs. Sometimes we catch an
eye--this is our opportunity in the ages--and we wag our tail with a
poor smile. "_Is that all?_" All? If you only knew! But how can they
know? They do not love us; the more fools we to squander life on the
indifferent.
But the morality of the thing, you will be glad to hear, is excellent;
for it is only by trying to understand others that we can get our own
hearts understood; and in matters of human feeling the clement judge is
the most successful pleader.
FOOTNOTE:
[4] "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers," Wednesday, p. 283.
II
CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH
"You know my mother now and then argues very notably; always very
warmly at least. I happen often to differ from her; and we both think
so well of our own arguments, that we very seldom are so happy as to
convince one another. A pretty common case, I believe, in all
_vehement_ debatings. She says, I am _too witty_; Anglicé, _too
pert_; I, that she is _too wise_; that is to say, being likewise put
into English, _not so young as she had been_."--MISS HOWE to MISS
HARLOWE, "Clarissa," vol. ii. Letter xiii.
There is a strong feeling in favour of cowardly and prudential proverbs.
The sentiments of a man while he is full of ardour and hope are to be
received, it is supposed, with some qualification. But when the same
person has ignominiously failed, and begins to eat up his words, he
should be listened to like an oracle. Most of our pocket wisdom is
conceived for the use of mediocre people, to discourage them from
ambitious attempts, and generally console them in their mediocrity. And
since mediocre people constitute the bulk of humanity, this is no doubt
very properly so. But it does not follow that the one sort of
proposition is any less true than the other, or that Icarus is not to be
more praised, and perhaps more envied, than Mr. Samuel Budgett, the
Successful Merchant. The one is dead, to be sure, while the other is
still in his counting-house counting out his money; and doubtless this
is a consideration. But we have, on the other hand, some bold and
magnanimous sayings common to high races and natures, which set forth
the advantage of the losing side, and proclaim it better to be a dead
lion than a living dog. It is difficult to fancy how the mediocrities
reconcile such sayings with their proverbs. According to the latter,
every lad who goes to sea is an egregious ass; never to forget your
umbrella through a long life would seem a higher and wiser flight of
achievement than to go smiling to the stake; and so long as you are a
bit of a coward and inflexible in money matters, you fulfil the whole
duty of man.
It is a still more difficult consideration for our average men, that
while all their teachers, from Solomon down to Benjamin Franklin and the
ungodly Binney, have inculcated the same ideal of manners, caution, and
respectability, those characters in history who have most notoriously
flown in the face of such precepts are spoken of in hyperbolical terms
of praise, and honoured with public monuments in the streets of our
commercial centres. This is very bewildering to the moral sense. You
have Joan of Arc, who left a humble but honest and reputable livelihood
under the eyes of her parents, to go a-colonelling, in the company of
rowdy soldiers, against the enemies of France; surely a melancholy
example for one's daughters! And then you have Columbus, who may have
pioneered America, but, when all is said, was a most imprudent
navigator. His Life is not the kind of thing one would like to put into
the hands of young people; rather, one would do one's utmost to keep it
from their knowledge, as a red flag of adventure and disintegrating
influence in life. The time would fail me if I were to recite all the
big names in history whose exploits are perfectly irrational and even
shocking, to the business mind. The incongruity is speaking; and I
imagine it must engender among the mediocrities a very peculiar attitude
towards the nobler and showier sides of national life. They will read of
the Charge of Balaclava in much the same spirit as they assist at a
performance of the _Lyons Mail_. Persons of substance take in the
_Times_ and sit composedly in pit or boxes according to the degree of
their prosperity in business. As for the generals who go galloping up
and down among bomb-shells in absurd cocked hats--as for the actors who
raddle their faces and demean themselves for hire upon the stage--they
must belong, thank God! to a different order of beings, whom we watch as
we watch the clouds careering in the windy, bottomless inane, or read
about like characters in ancient and rather fabulous annals. Our
offspring would no more think of copying their behaviour, let us hope,
than of doffing their clothes and painting themselves blue in
consequence of certain admissions in the first chapter of their school
history of England.
Discredited as they are in practice, the cowardly proverbs hold their
own in theory; and it is another instance of the same spirit, that the
opinions of old men about life have been accepted as final. All sorts of
allowances are made for the illusions of youth; and none, or almost
none, for the disenchantments of age. It is held to be a good taunt, and
somehow or other to clinch the question logically, when an old gentleman
waggles his head and says: "Ah, so I thought when I was your age." It is
not thought an answer at all, if the young man retorts: "My venerable
sir, so I shall most probably think when I am yours." And yet the one is
as good as the other: pass for pass, tit for tat, a Roland for an
Oliver.
"Opinion in good men," says Milton, "is but knowledge in the making."
All opinions, properly so called, are stages on the road to truth. It
does not follow that a man will travel any further; but if he has really
considered the world and drawn a conclusion, he has travelled as far.
This does not apply to formulæ got by rote, which are stages on the road
to nowhere but second childhood and the grave. To have a catchword in
your mouth is not the same thing as to hold an opinion; still less is it
the same thing as to have made one for yourself. There are too many of
these catchwords in the world for people to rap out upon you like an
oath and by way of an argument. They have a currency as intellectual
counters; and many respectable persons pay their way with nothing else.
They seem to stand for vague bodies of theory in the background. The
imputed virtue of folios full of knockdown arguments is supposed to
reside in them, just as some of the majesty of the British Empire dwells
in the constable's truncheon. They are used in pure superstition, as old
clodhoppers spoil Latin by way of an exorcism. And yet they are vastly
serviceable for checking unprofitable discussion and stopping the mouths
of babes and sucklings. And when a young man comes to a certain stage of
intellectual growth, the examination of these counters forms a gymnastic
at once amusing and fortifying to the mind.
Because I have reached Paris, I am not ashamed of having passed through
Newhaven and Dieppe. They were very good places to pass through, and I
am none the less at my destination. All my old opinions were only stages
on the way to the one I now hold, as itself is only a stage on the way
to something else. I am no more abashed at having been a red-hot
Socialist with a panacea of my own than at having been a sucking infant.
Doubtless the world is quite right in a million ways; but you have to be
kicked about a little to convince you of the fact. And in the meanwhile
you must do something, be something, believe something. It is not
possible to keep the mind in a state of accurate balance and blank; and
even if you could do so, instead of coming ultimately to the right
conclusion, you would be very apt to remain in a state of balance and
blank to perpetuity. Even in quite intermediate stages, a dash of
enthusiasm is not a thing to be ashamed of in the retrospect: if St.
Paul had not been a very zealous Pharisee, he would have been a colder
Christian. For my part, I look back to the time when I was a Socialist
with something like regret. I have convinced myself (for the moment)
that we had better leave these great changes to what we call great blind
forces; their blindness being so much more perspicacious than the
little, peering, partial eyesight of men. I seem to see that my own
scheme would not answer; and all the other schemes I ever heard
propounded would depress some elements of goodness just as much as they
encouraged others. Now I know that in thus turning Conservative with
years, I am going through the normal cycle of change and travelling in
the common orbit of men's opinions. I submit to this, as I would submit
to gout or grey hair, as a concomitant of growing age or else of failing
animal heat; but I do not acknowledge that it is necessarily a change
for the better--I daresay it is deplorably for the worse. I have no
choice in the business, and can no more resist this tendency of my mind
than I could prevent my body from beginning to totter and decay. If I am
spared (as the phrase runs) I shall doubtless outlive some troublesome
desires; but I am in no hurry about that; nor, when the time comes,
shall I plume myself on the immunity. Just in the same way, I do not
greatly pride myself on having outlived my belief in the fairy tales of
Socialism. Old people have faults of their own; they tend to become
cowardly, niggardly, and suspicious. Whether from the growth of
experience or the decline of animal heat, I see that age leads to these
and certain other faults; and it follows, of course, that while in one
sense I hope I am journeying towards the truth, in another I am
indubitably posting towards these forms and sources of error.
As we go catching and catching at this or that corner of knowledge, now
getting a foresight of generous possibilities, now chilled with a
glimpse of prudence, we may compare the headlong course of our years to
a swift torrent in which a man is carried away; now he is dashed against
a boulder, now he grapples for a moment to a trailing spray; at the end
he is hurled out and overwhelmed in a dark and bottomless ocean. We have
no more than glimpses and touches; we are torn away from our theories;
we are spun round and round and shown this or the other view of life,
until only fools or knaves can hold to their opinions. We take a sight
at a condition in life, and say we have studied it; our most elaborate
view is no more than an impression. If we had breathing space, we should
take the occasion to modify and adjust; but at this breakneck hurry, we
are no sooner boys than we are adult, no sooner in love than married or
jilted, no sooner one age than we begin to be another, and no sooner in
the fulness of our manhood than we begin to decline towards the grave.
It is in vain to seek for consistency or expect clear and stable views
in a medium so perturbed and fleeting. This is no cabinet science, in
which things are tested to a scruple; we theorise with a pistol to our
head; we are confronted with a new set of conditions on which we have
not only to pass a judgment, but to take action, before the hour is at
an end. And we cannot even regard ourselves as a constant; in this flux
of things, our identity itself seems in a perpetual variation; and not
infrequently we find our own disguise the strangest in the masquerade.
In the course of time we grow to love things we hated and hate things we
loved. Milton is not so dull as he once was, nor perhaps Ainsworth so
amusing. It is decidedly harder to climb trees, and not nearly so hard
to sit still. There is no use pretending; even the thrice royal game of
hide and seek has somehow lost in zest. All our attributes are modified
or changed; and it will be a poor account of us if our views do not
modify and change in a proportion. To hold the same views at forty as we
held at twenty is to have been stupefied for a score of years, and take
rank, not as a prophet, but as an unteachable brat, well birched, and
none the wiser. It is as if a ship captain should sail to India from the
Port of London; and having brought a chart of the Thames on deck at his
first setting out, should obstinately use no other for the whole voyage.
And mark you, it would be no less foolish to begin at Gravesend with a
chart of the Red Sea. _Si Jeunesse savait, si Vieillesse pouvait_, is a
very pretty sentiment, but not necessarily right. In five cases out of
ten, it is not so much that the young people do not know, as that they
do not choose. There is something irreverent in the speculation, but
perhaps the want of power has more to do with the wise resolutions of
age than we are always willing to admit. It would be an instructive
experiment to make an old man young again and leave him all his
_savoir_. I scarcely think he would put his money in the Savings Bank
after all; I doubt if he would be such an admirable son as we are led to
expect; and as for his conduct in love, I believe firmly he would
out-Herod Herod, and put the whole of his new compeers to the blush.
Prudence is a wooden Juggernaut, before whom Benjamin Franklin walks
with the portly air of a high-priest, and after whom dances many a
successful merchant in the character of Atys. But it is not a deity to
cultivate in youth. If a man lives to any considerable age, it cannot be
denied that he laments his imprudences, but I notice he often laments
his youth a deal more bitterly and with a more genuine intonation.
It is customary to say that age should be considered, because it comes
last. It seems just as much to the point that youth comes first. And the
scale fairly kicks the beam, if you go on to add that age, in a majority
of cases, never comes at all. Disease and accident make short work of
even the most prosperous persons; death costs nothing, and the expense
of a headstone is an inconsiderable trifle to the happy heir. To be
suddenly snuffed out in the middle of ambitious schemes is tragical
enough at best; but when a man has been grudging himself his own life in
the meanwhile, and saving up everything for the festival that was never
to be, it becomes that hysterically moving sort of tragedy which lies on
the confines of farce. The victim is dead--and he has cunningly
overreached himself: a combination of calamities none the less absurd
for being grim. To husband a favourite claret until the batch turns
sour, is not at all an artful stroke of policy; and how much more with a
whole cellar--a whole bodily existence! People may lay down their lives
with cheerfulness in the sure expectation of a blessed immortality; but
that is a different affair from giving up youth with all its admirable
pleasures, in the hope of a better quality of gruel in a more than
problematical, nay, more than improbable, old age. We should not
compliment a hungry man, who should refuse a whole dinner and reserve
all his appetite for the dessert, before he knew whether there was to be
any dessert or not. If there be such a thing as imprudence in the world,
we surely have it here. We sail in leaky bottoms and on great and
perilous waters; and to take a cue from the dolorous old naval ballad,
we have heard the mermaids singing, and know that we shall never see dry
land any more. Old and young, we are all on our last cruise. If there is
a fill of tobacco among the crew, for God's sake pass it round, and let
us have a pipe before we go!
Indeed, by the report of our elders, this nervous preparation for old
age is only trouble thrown away. We fall on guard, and after all it is a
friend who comes to meet us. After the sun is down and the west faded,
the heavens begin to fill with shining stars. So, as we grow old, a sort
of equable jog-trot of feeling is substituted for the violent ups and
downs of passion and disgust; the same influence that restrains our
hopes quiets our apprehensions; if the pleasures are less intense, the
troubles are milder and more tolerable; and in a word, this period for
which we are asked to hoard up everything as for a time of famine, is,
in its own right, the richest, easiest, and happiest of life. Nay, by
managing its own work and following its own happy inspiration, youth is
doing the best it can to endow the leisure of age. A full, busy youth is
your only prelude to a self-contained and independent age; and the muff
inevitably develops into the bore. There are not many Doctor Johnsons,
to set forth upon their first romantic voyage at sixty-four. If we wish
to scale Mont Blanc or visit a thieves' kitchen in the East End, to go
down in a diving-dress or up in a balloon, we must be about it while we
are still young. It will not do to delay until we are clogged with
prudence and limping with rheumatism, and people begin to ask us: "What
does Gravity out of bed?" Youth is the time to go flashing from one end
of the world to the other both in mind and body; to try the manners of
different nations; to hear the chimes at midnight; to see sunrise in
town and country; to be converted at a revival; to circumnavigate the
metaphysics, write halting verses, run a mile to see a fire, and wait
all day long in the theatre to applaud _Hernani_. There is some meaning
in the old theory about wild oats; and a man who has not had his
green-sickness and got done with it for good, is as little to be
depended on as an unvaccinated infant. "It is extraordinary," says Lord
Beaconsfield, one of the brightest and best preserved of youths up to
the date of his last novel,[5] "it is extraordinary how hourly and how
violently change the feelings of an unexperienced young man." And this
mobility is a special talent entrusted to his care; a sort of
indestructible virginity; a magic armour, with which he can pass unhurt
through great dangers and come unbedaubed out of the miriest passages.
Let him voyage, speculate, see all that he can, do all that he may; his
soul has as many lives as a cat; he will live in all weathers, and never
be a halfpenny the worse. Those who go to the devil in youth, with
anything like a fair chance, were probably little worth saving from the
first; they must have been feeble fellows--creatures made of putty and
pack-thread, without steel or fire, anger or true joyfulness, in their
composition we may sympathise with their parents, but there is not much
cause to go into mourning for themselves; for, to be quite honest, the
weak brother is the worst of mankind.
When the old man waggles his head and says, "Ah, so I thought when I was
your age," he has proved the youth's case. Doubtless, whether from
growth of experience or decline of animal heat, he thinks so no longer;
but he thought so while he was young; and all men have thought so while
they were young, since there was dew in the morning or hawthorn in May;
and here is another young man adding his vote to those of previous
generations and rivetting another link to the chain of testimony. It is
as natural and as right for a young man to be imprudent and exaggerated,
to live in swoops and circles, and beat about his cage like any other
wild thing newly captured, as it is for old men to turn grey, or mothers
to love their offspring, or heroes to die for something worthier than
their lives.
By way of an apologue for the aged, when they feel more than usually
tempted to offer their advice, let me recommend the following little
tale. A child who had been remarkably fond of toys (and in particular of
lead soldiers) found himself growing to the level of acknowledged
boyhood without any abatement of this childish taste. He was thirteen;
already he had been taunted for dallying over-long about the playbox; he
had to blush if he was found among his lead soldiers; the shades of the
prison-house were closing about him with a vengeance. There is nothing
more difficult than to put the thoughts of children into the language of
their elders; but this is the effect of his meditations at this
juncture: "Plainly," he said, "I must give up my playthings in the
meanwhile, since I am not in a position to secure myself against idle
jeers. At the same time, I am sure that playthings are the very pick of
life; all people give them up out of the same pusillanimous respect for
those who are a little older; and if they do not return to them as soon
as they can, it is only because they grow stupid and forget. I shall be
wiser; I shall conform for a little to the ways of their foolish world;
but so soon as I have made enough money, I shall retire and shut myself
up among my playthings until the day I die." Nay, as he was passing in
the train along the Esterel mountains between Cannes and Fréjus, he
remarked a pretty house in an orange garden at the angle of a bay, and
decided that this should be his Happy Valley. Astrea Redux; childhood
was to come again! The idea has an air of simple nobility to me, not
unworthy of Cincinnatus. And yet, as the reader has probably
anticipated, it is never likely to be carried into effect. There was a
worm i' the bud, a fatal error in the premises. Childhood must pass
away, and then youth, as surely as age approaches. The true wisdom is to
be always seasonable, and to change with a good grace in changing
circumstances. To love playthings well as a child, to lead an
adventurous and honourable youth, and to settle when the time arrives,
into a green and smiling age, is to be a good artist in life and deserve
well of yourself and your neighbour.
You need repent none of your youthful vagaries. They may have been over
the score on one side, just as those of age are probably over the score
on the other. But they had a point; they not only befitted your age and
expressed its attitude and passions, but they had a relation to what was
outside of you, and implied criticisms on the existing state of things,
which you need not allow to have been undeserved, because you now see
that they were partial. All error, not merely verbal, is a strong way of
stating that the current truth is incomplete. The follies of youth have
a basis in sound reason, just as much as the embarrassing questions put
by babes and sucklings. Their most anti-social acts indicate the defects
of our society. When the torrent sweeps the man against a boulder, you
must expect him to scream, and you need not be surprised if the scream
is sometimes a theory. Shelley, chafing at the Church of England,
discovered the cure of all evils in universal atheism. Generous lads
irritated at the injustices of society see nothing for it but the
abolishment of everything and Kingdom Come of anarchy. Shelley was a
young fool; so are these cock-sparrow revolutionaries. But it is better
to be a fool than to be dead. It is better to emit a scream in the
shape of a theory than to be entirely insensible to the jars and
incongruities of life, and take everything as it comes in a forlorn
stupidity. Some people swallow the universe like a pill; they travel on
through the world, like smiling images pushed from behind. For God's
sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of
himself! As for the others, the irony of facts shall take it out of
their hands, and make fools of them in downright earnest, ere the farce
be over. There shall be such a mopping and a mowing at the last day, and
such blushing and confusion of countenance for all those who have been
wise in their own esteem, and have not learnt the rough lessons that
youth hands on to age. If we are indeed here to perfect and complete our
own natures, and grow larger, stronger, and more sympathetic against
some nobler career in the future, we had all best bestir ourselves to
the utmost while we have the time. To equip a dull, respectable person
with wings would be but to make a parody of an angel.
In short, if youth is not quite right in its opinions, there is a strong
probability that age is not much more so. Undying hope is co-ruler of
the human bosom with infallible credulity. A man finds he has been wrong
at every preceding stage of his career, only to deduce the astonishing
conclusion that he is at last entirely right. Mankind, after centuries
of failure, are still upon the eve of a thoroughly constitutional
millennium. Since we have explored the maze so long without result, it
follows, for poor human reason, that we cannot have to explore much
longer; close by must be the centre, with a champagne luncheon and a
piece of ornamental water. How if there were no centre at all, but just
one alley after another, and the whole world a labyrinth without end or
issue?
I overheard the other day a scrap of conversation, which I take the
liberty to reproduce. "What I advance is true," said one. "But not the
whole truth," answered the other. "Sir," returned the first (and it
seemed to me there was a smack of Dr. Johnson in the speech), "Sir,
there is no such thing as the whole truth!" Indeed, there is nothing so
evident in life as that there are two sides to a question. History is
one long illustration. The forces of nature are engaged, day by day, in
cudgelling it into our backward intelligences. We never pause for a
moment's consideration, but we admit it as an axiom. An enthusiast sways
humanity exactly by disregarding this great truth, and dinning it into
our ears that this or that question has only one possible solution; and
your enthusiast is a fine florid fellow, dominates things for a while
and shakes the world out of a doze; but when once he is gone, an army of
quiet and uninfluential people set to work to remind us of the other
side and demolish the generous imposture. While Calvin is putting
everybody exactly right in his "Institutes," and hot-headed Knox is
thundering in the pulpit, Montaigne is already looking at the other side
in his library in Périgord, and predicting that they will find as much
to quarrel about in the Bible as they had found already in the Church.
Age may have one side, but assuredly Youth has the other. There is
nothing more certain than that both are right, except perhaps that both
are wrong. Let them agree to differ; for who knows but what agreeing to
differ may not be a form of agreement rather than a form of difference?
I suppose it is written that any one who sets up for a bit of a
philosopher must contradict himself to his very face. For here have I
fairly talked myself into thinking that we have the whole thing before
us at last; that there is no answer to the mystery, except that there
are as many as you please; that there is no centre to the maze because,
like the famous sphere, its centre is everywhere; and that agreeing to
differ with every ceremony of politeness, is the only "one undisturbed
song of pure concent" to which we are ever likely to lend our musical
voices.
FOOTNOTE:
[5] "Lothair."
III
AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS
"BOSWELL: We grow weary when idle."
"JOHNSON: That is, sir, because others being busy, we want company;
but if we were idle, there would be no growing weary; we should all
entertain one another."
Just now, when every one is bound, under pain of a decree in absence
convicting them of _lèse_-respectability, to enter on some lucrative
profession, and labour therein with something not far short of
enthusiasm, a cry from the opposite party who are content when they have
enough, and like to look on and enjoy in the meanwhile, savours a little
of bravado and gasconade. And yet this should not be. Idleness so
called, which does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great
deal not recognised in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class, has
as good a right to state its position as industry itself. It is admitted
that the presence of people who refuse to enter in the great handicap
race for sixpenny pieces, is at once an insult and a disenchantment for
those who do. A fine fellow (as we see so many) takes his determination,
votes for the sixpences, and in the emphatic Americanism, "goes for"
them. And while such an one is ploughing distressfully up the road, it
is not hard to understand his resentment when he perceives cool persons
in the meadows by the wayside, lying with a handkerchief over their ears
and a glass at their elbow. Alexander is touched in a very delicate
place by the disregard of Diogenes. Where was the glory of having taken
Rome for those tumultuous barbarians, who poured into the Senate house,
and found the Fathers sitting silent and unmoved by their success? It
is a sore thing to have laboured along and scaled the arduous hilltops,
and when all is done, find humanity indifferent to your achievement.
Hence physicists condemn the unphysical; financiers have only a
superficial toleration for those who know little of stocks; literary
persons despise the unlettered; and people of all pursuits combine to
disparage those who have none.
But though this is one difficulty of the subject, it is not the
greatest. You could not be put in prison for speaking against industry,
but you can be sent to Coventry for speaking like a fool. The greatest
difficulty with most subjects is to do them well; therefore, please to
remember this is an apology. It is certain that much may be judiciously
argued in favour of diligence; only there is something to be said
against it, and that is what, on the present occasion, I have to say. To
state one argument is not necessarily to be deaf to all others, and that
a man has written a book of travels in Montenegro is no reason why he
should never have been to Richmond.
It is surely beyond a doubt that people should be a good deal idle in
youth. For though here and there a Lord Macaulay may escape from school
honours with all his wits about him, most boys pay so dear for their
medals that they never afterwards have a shot in their locker, and begin
the world bankrupt. And the same holds true during all the time a lad is
educating himself, or suffering others to educate him. It must have been
a very foolish old gentleman who addressed Johnson at Oxford in these
words: "Young man, ply your book diligently now, and acquire a stock of
knowledge; for when years come upon you, you will find that poring upon
books will be but an irksome task." The old gentleman seems to have been
unaware that many other things besides reading grow irksome, and not a
few become impossible, by the time a man has to use spectacles and
cannot walk without a stick. Books are good enough in their own way, but
they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life. It seems a pity to
sit, like the Lady of Shalott, peering into a mirror, with your back
turned on all the bustle and glamour of reality. And if a man reads very
hard, as the old anecdote reminds us, he will have little time for
thought.
If you look back on your own education, I am sure it will not be the
full, vivid, instructive hours of truantry that you regret; you would
rather cancel some lack-lustre periods between sleep and waking in the
class. For my own part, I have attended a good many lectures in my time.
I still remember that the spinning of a top is a case of Kinetic
Stability. I still remember that Emphyteusis is not a disease, nor
Stillicide a crime. But though I would not willingly part with such
scraps of science, I do not set the same store by them as by certain
other odds and ends that I came by in the open street while I was
playing truant. This is not the moment to dilate on that mighty place of
education, which was the favourite school of Dickens and of Balzac, and
turns out yearly many inglorious masters in the Science of the Aspects
of Life. Suffice it to say this: if a lad does not learn in the streets,
it is because he has no faculty of learning. Nor is the truant always in
the streets, for, if he prefers, he may go out by the gardened suburbs
into the country. He may pitch on some tuft of lilacs over a burn, and
smoke innumerable pipes to the tune of the water on the stones. A bird
will sing in the thicket, and there he may fall into a vein of kindly
thought, and see things in a new perspective. Why, if this be not
education, what is? We may conceive Mr. Worldly Wiseman accosting such
an one, and the conversation that should thereupon ensue:--
"How now, young fellow, what dost thou here?"
"Truly, sir, I take mine ease."
"Is not this the hour of the class? and shouldst thou not be plying thy
Book with diligence, to the end thou mayest obtain knowledge?"
"Nay, but thus also I follow after Learning, by your leave."
"Learning, quotha! After what fashion, I pray thee? Is it mathematics?"
"No, to be sure."
"Is it metaphysics?"
"Nor that."
"Is it some language?"
"Nay, it is no language."
"Is it a trade?"
"Nor a trade neither."
"Why, then, what is't?"
"Indeed, sir, as a time may soon come for me to go upon Pilgrimage, I am
desirous to note what is commonly done by persons in my case, and where
are the ugliest Sloughs and Thickets on the Road; as also, what manner
of Staff is of the best service. Moreover, I lie here, by this water, to
learn, by root-of-heart, a lesson which my master teaches me to call
Peace, or Contentment."
Hereupon Mr. Worldly Wiseman was much commoved with passion, and shaking
his cane with a very threatful countenance, broke forth upon this wise:
"Learning, quotha!" said he; "I would have all such rogues scourged by
the Hangman!"
And so he would go on his way, ruffling out his cravat with a crackle of
starch, like a turkey when it spreads its feathers.
Now this, of Mr. Wiseman's, is the common opinion. A fact is not called
a fact, but a piece of gossip, if it does not fall into one of your
scholastic categories. An inquiry must be in some acknowledged
direction, with a name to go by; or else you are not inquiring at all,
only lounging; and the workhouse is too good for you. It is supposed
that all knowledge is at the bottom of a well, or the far end of a
telescope. Sainte-Beuve, as he grew older, came to regard all experience
as a single great book, in which to study for a few years ere we go
hence; and it seemed all one to him whether you should read in Chapter
xx., which is the differential calculus, or in Chapter xxxix., which is
hearing the band play in the gardens. As a matter of fact, an
intelligent person, looking out of his eyes and hearkening in his ears,
with a smile on his face all the time, will get more true education than
many another in a life of heroic vigils. There is certainly some chill
and arid knowledge to be found upon the summits of formal and laborious
science; but it is all round about you, and for the trouble of looking,
that you will acquire the warm and palpitating facts of life. While
others are filling their memory with a lumber of words, one-half of
which they will forget before the week be out, your truant may learn
some really useful art: to play the fiddle, to know a good cigar, or to
speak with ease and opportunity to all varieties of men. Many who have
"plied their book diligently," and know all about some one branch or
another of accepted lore, come out of the study with an ancient and
owl-like demeanour, and prove dry, stockish, and dyspeptic in all the
better and brighter parts of life. Many make a large fortune, who remain
under-bred and pathetically stupid to the last. And meantime there goes
the idler, who began life along with them--by your leave, a different
picture. He has had time to take care of his health and his spirits; he
has been a great deal in the open air, which is the most salutary of all
things for both body and mind; and if he has never read the great Book
in very recondite places, he has dipped into it and skimmed it over to
excellent purpose. Might not the student afford some Hebrew roots, and
the business man-some of his half-crowns, for a share of the idler's
knowledge of life at large, and Art of Living? Nay, and the idler has
another and more important quality than these. I mean his wisdom. He who
has much looked on at the childish satisfaction of other people in their
hobbles, will regard his own with only a very ironical indulgence. He
will not be heard among the dogmatists. He will have a great and cool
allowance for all sorts of people and opinions. If he finds no
out-of-the-way truths, he will identify himself with no very burning
falsehood. His way takes him along a by-road, not much frequented, but
very even and pleasant, which is called Commonplace Lane, and leads to
the Belvedere of Common-sense. Thence he shall command an agreeable, if
no very noble prospect; and while others behold the East and West, the
Devil and the Sunrise, he will be contentedly aware of a sort of morning
hour upon all sublunary things, with an army of shadows running speedily
and in many different directions into the great daylight of Eternity.
The shadows and the generations, the shrill doctors and the plangent
wars, go by into ultimate silence and emptiness; but underneath all
this, a man may see, out of the Belvedere windows, much green and
peaceful landscape; many fire-lit parlours; good people laughing,
drinking, and making love as they did before the Flood or the French
Revolution; and the old shepherd telling his tale under the hawthorn.
Extreme _busyness_, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a
symptom of deficient vitality; and a faculty for idleness implies a
catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity. There is a
sort of dead-alive, hackneyed people about, who are scarcely conscious
of living except in the exercise of some conventional occupation. Bring
these fellows into the country, or set them aboard ship, and you will
see how they pine for their desk or their study. They have no curiosity;
they cannot give themselves over to random provocations; they do not
take pleasure in the exercise of their faculties for its own sake; and
unless Necessity lays about them with a stick, they will even stand
still. It is no good speaking to such folk; they _cannot_ be idle, their
nature is not generous enough; and they pass those hours in a sort of
coma, which are not dedicated to furious moiling in the gold-mill. When
they do not require to go to the office, when they are not hungry and
have no mind to drink, the whole breathing world is a blank to them. If
they have to wait an hour or so for a train, they fall into a stupid
trance with their eyes open. To see them, you would suppose there was
nothing to look at and no one to speak with; you would imagine they were
paralysed or alienated; and yet very possibly they are hard workers in
their own way, and have good eyesight for a flaw in a deed or a turn of
the market. They have been to school and college, but all the time they
had their eye on the medal; they have gone about in the world and mixed
with clever people, but all the time they were thinking of their own
affairs. As if a man's soul were not too small to begin with, they have
dwarfed and narrowed theirs by a life of all work and no play; until
here they are at forty, with a listless attention, a mind vacant of all
material of amusement, and not one thought to rub against another, while
they wait for the train. Before he was breeched, he might have clambered
on the boxes; when he was twenty, he would have stared at the girls; but
now the pipe is smoked out, the snuff-box empty, and my gentleman sits
bolt upright upon a bench, with lamentable eyes. This does not appeal to
me as being Success in Life.
But it is not only the person himself who suffers from his busy habits,
but his wife and children, his friends and relations, and down to the
very people he sits with in a railway-carriage or an omnibus. Perpetual
devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by
perpetual neglect of many other things. And it is not by any means
certain that a man's business is the most important thing he has to do.
To an impartial estimate it will seem clear that many of the wisest,
most virtuous, and most beneficent parts that are to be played upon the
Theatre of Life are filled by gratuitous performers, and pass, among the
world at large, as phases of idleness. For in that Theatre, not only the
walking gentlemen, singing chambermaids, and diligent fiddlers in the
orchestra, but those who look on and clap their hands from the benches,
do really play a part and fulfil important offices towards the general
result. You are no doubt very dependent on the care of your lawyer and
stockbroker, of the guards and signalmen who convey you rapidly from
place to place, and the policemen who walk the streets for your
protection; but is there not a thought of gratitude in your heart for
certain other benefactors who set you smiling when they fall in your
way, or season your dinner with good company? Colonel Newcome helped to
lose his friend's money; Fred Bayham had an ugly trick of borrowing
shirts; and yet they were better people to fall among than Mr. Barnes.
And though Falstaff was neither sober nor very honest, I think I could
name one or two long-laced Barabbases whom the world could better have
done without. Hazlitt mentions that he was more sensible of obligation
to Northcote, who had never done him anything he could call a service,
than to his whole circle of ostentatious friends; for he thought a good
companion emphatically the greatest benefactor. I know there are people
in the world who cannot feel grateful unless the favour has been done
them at the cost of pain and difficulty. But this is a churlish
disposition. A man may send you six sheets of letter-paper covered with
the most entertaining gossip, or you may pass half-an-hour pleasantly,
perhaps profitably, over an article of his; do you think the service
would be greater, if he had made the manuscript in his heart's blood,
like a compact with the devil? Do you really fancy you should be more
beholden to your correspondent, if he had been damning you all the while
for your importunity? Pleasures are more beneficial than duties because,
like the quality of mercy, they are not strained, and they are twice
blest. There must always be two to a kiss, and there may be a score in a
jest; but wherever there is an element of sacrifice, the favour is
conferred with pain, and, among generous people, received with
confusion. There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being
happy. By being happy, we sow anonymous benefits upon the world, which
remain unknown even to ourselves, or, when they are disclosed, surprise
nobody so much as the benefactor. The other day, a ragged, barefoot boy
ran down the street after a marble, with so jolly an air that he set
every one he passed into a good humour; one of these persons, who had
been delivered from more than usually black thoughts, stopped the little
fellow and gave him some money with this remark: "You see what sometimes
comes of looking pleased." If he had looked pleased before, he had now
to look both pleased and mystified. For my part, I justify this
encouragement of smiling rather than tearful children; I do not wish to
pay for tears anywhere but upon the stage; but I am prepared to deal
largely in the opposite commodity. A happy man or woman is a better
thing to find than a five-pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of
goodwill; and their entrance into a room is as though another candle had
been lighted. We need not care whether they could prove the
forty-seventh proposition; they do a better thing than that, they
practically demonstrate the great Theorem of the Liveableness of Life.
Consequently, if a person cannot be happy without remaining idle, idle
he should remain. It is a revolutionary precept; but thanks to hunger
and the workhouse, one not easily to be abused; and, within practical
limits, it is one of the most incontestable truths in the whole Body of
Morality. Look at one of your industrious fellows for a moment, I
beseech you. He sows hurry and reaps indigestion; he puts a vast deal of
activity out to interest, and receives a large measure of nervous
derangement in return. Either he absents himself entirely from all
fellowship, and lives a recluse in a garret, with carpet slippers and a
leaden inkpot; or he comes among people swiftly and bitterly, in a
contraction of his whole nervous system, to discharge some temper
before he returns to work. I do not care how much or how well he works,
this fellow is an evil feature in other people's lives. They would be
happier if he were dead. They could easier do without his services in
the Circumlocution Office, than they can tolerate his fractious spirits.
He poisons life at the well-head. It is better to be beggared out of
hand by a scapegrace nephew, than daily hag-ridden by a peevish uncle.
And what, in God's name, is all this pother about? For what cause do
they embitter their own and other people's lives? That a man should
publish three or thirty articles a year, that he should finish or not
finish his great allegorical picture, are questions of little interest
to the world. The ranks of life are full; and although a thousand fall,
there are always some to go into the breach. When they told Joan of Arc
she should be at home minding women's work, she answered there were
plenty to spin and wash. And so, even with your own rare gifts! When
nature is "so careless of the single life," why should we coddle
ourselves into the fancy that our own is of exceptional importance?
Suppose Shakespeare had been knocked on the head some dark night in Sir
Thomas Lucy's preserves, the world would have wagged on better or worse,
the pitcher gone to the well, the scythe to the corn, and the student to
his book; and no one been any the wiser of the loss. There are not many
works extant, if you look the alternative all over, which are worth the
price of a pound of tobacco to a man of limited means. This is a
sobering reflection for the proudest of our earthly vanities. Even a
tobacconist may, upon consideration, find no great cause for personal
vainglory in the phrase; for although tobacco is an admirable sedative,
the qualities necessary for retailing it are neither rare nor precious
in themselves. Alas and alas! you may take it how you will, but the
services of no single individual are indispensable. Atlas was just a
gentleman with a protracted nightmare! And yet you see merchants who go
and labour themselves into a great fortune and thence into the
bankruptcy court; scribblers who keep scribbling at little articles
until their temper is a cross to all who come about them, as though
Pharaoh should set the Israelites to make a pin instead of a pyramid;
and fine young men who work themselves into a decline, and are driven
off in a hearse with white plumes upon it. Would you not suppose these
persons had been whispered, by the Master of the Ceremonies, the promise
of some momentous destiny? and that this lukewarm bullet on which they
play their farces was the bull's-eye and centre-point of all the
universe? And yet it is not so. The ends for which they give away their
priceless youth, for all they know, may be chimerical or hurtful; the
glory and riches they expect may never come, or may find them
indifferent; and they and the world they inhabit are so inconsiderable
that the mind freezes at the thought.
IV
ORDERED SOUTH
By a curious irony of fate, the places to which we are sent when health
deserts us are often singularly beautiful. Often, too, they are places
we have visited in former years, or seen briefly in passing by, and kept
ever afterwards in pious memory; and we please ourselves with the fancy
that we shall repeat many vivid and pleasurable sensations, and take up
again the thread of our enjoyment in the same spirit as we let it fall.
We shall now have an opportunity of finishing many pleasant excursions,
interrupted of yore before our curiosity was fully satisfied. It may be
that we have kept in mind, during all these years, the recollection of
some valley into which we have just looked down for a moment before we
lost sight of it in the disorder of the hills; it may be that we have
lain awake at night, and agreeably tantalised ourselves with the thought
of corners we had never turned, or summits we had all but climbed: we
shall now be able, as we tell ourselves, to complete all these
unfinished pleasures, and pass beyond the barriers that confined our
recollections.
The promise is so great, and we are all so easily led away when hope and
memory are both in one story, that I daresay the sick man is not very
inconsolable when he receives sentence of banishment, and is inclined to
regard his ill-health as not the least fortunate accident of his life.
Nor is he immediately undeceived. The stir and speed of the journey, and
the restlessness that goes to bed with him as he tries to sleep between
two days of noisy progress, fever him, and stimulate his dull nerves
into something of their old quickness and sensibility. And so he can
enjoy the faint autumnal splendour of the landscape, as he sees hill and
plain, vineyard and forest, clad in one wonderful glory of fairy gold,
which the first great winds of winter will transmute, as in the fable,
into withered leaves. And so too he can enjoy the admirable brevity and
simplicity of such little glimpses of country and country ways as flash
upon him through the windows of the train; little glimpses that have a
character all their own; sights seen as a travelling swallow might see
them from the wing, or Iris as she went abroad over the land on some
Olympian errand. Here and there, indeed, a few children huzzah and wave
their hands to the express; but for the most part, it is an interruption
too brief and isolated to attract much notice; the sheep do not cease
from browsing; a girl sits balanced on the projecting tiller of a canal
boat, so precariously that it seems as if a fly or the splash of a
leaping fish would be enough to overthrow the dainty equilibrium, and
yet all these hundreds of tons of coal and wood and iron have been
precipitated roaring past her very ear, and there is not a start, not a
tremor, not a turn of the averted head, to indicate that she has been
even conscious of its passage. Herein, I think, lies the chief
attraction of railway travel. The speed is so easy, and the train
disturbs so little the scenes through which it takes us, that our heart
becomes full of the placidity and stillness of the country; and while
the body is borne forward in the flying chain of carriages, the thoughts
alight, as the humour moves them, at unfrequented stations; they make
haste up the poplar alley that leads towards the town; they are left
behind with the signalman as, shading his eyes with his hand, he watches
the long train sweep away into the golden distance.
Moreover, there is still before the invalid the shock of wonder and
delight with which he will learn that he has passed the indefinable
line that separates South from North. And this is an uncertain moment;
for sometimes the consciousness is forced upon him early, on the
occasion of some slight association, a colour, a flower, or a scent; and
sometimes not until, one fine morning, he wakes up with the southern
sunshine peeping through the _persiennes_, and the southern patois
confusedly audible below the windows. Whether it come early or late,
however, this pleasure will not end with the anticipation, as do so many
others of the same family. It will leave him wider awake than it found
him, and give a new significance to all he may see for many days to
come. There is something in the mere name of the South that carries
enthusiasm along with it. At the sound of the word, he pricks up his
ears; he becomes as anxious to seek out beauties and to get by heart the
permanent lines and character of the landscape, as if he had been told
that it was all his own--an estate out of which he had been kept
unjustly, and which he was now to receive in free and full possession.
Even those who have never been there before feel as if they had been;
and everybody goes comparing, and seeking for the familiar, and finding
it with such ecstasies of recognition, that one would think they were
coming home after a weary absence, instead of travelling hourly farther
abroad.
It is only after he is fairly arrived and settled down in his chosen
corner, that the invalid begins to understand the change that has
befallen him. Everything about him is as he had remembered, or as he had
anticipated. Here, at his feet, under his eyes, are the olive gardens
and the blue sea. Nothing can change the eternal magnificence of form of
the naked Alps behind Mentone; nothing, not even the crude curves of the
railway, can utterly deform the suavity of contour of one bay after
another along the whole reach of the Riviera. And of all this, he has
only a cold head-knowledge that is divorced from enjoyment. He
recognises with his intelligence that this thing and that thing is
beautiful, while in his heart of hearts he has to confess that it is not
beautiful for him. It is in vain that he spurs his discouraged spirit;
in vain that he chooses out points of view, and stands there, looking
with all his eyes, and waiting for some return of the pleasure that he
remembers in other days, as the sick folk may have awaited the coming of
the angel at the pool of Bethesda. He is like an enthusiast leading
about with him a stolid, indifferent tourist. There is some one by who
is out of sympathy with the scene, and is not moved up to the measure of
the occasion; and that some one is himself. The world is disenchanted
for him. He seems to himself to touch things with muffled hands, and to
see them through a veil. His life becomes a palsied fumbling after notes
that are silent when he has found and struck them. He cannot recognise
that this phlegmatic and unimpressionable body with which he now goes
burthened, is the same that he knew heretofore so quick and delicate and
alive.
He is tempted to lay the blame on the very softness and amenity of the
climate, and to fancy that in the rigours of the winter at home, these
dead emotions would revive and flourish. A longing for the brightness
and silence of fallen snow seizes him at such times. He is homesick for
the hale rough weather; for the tracery of the frost upon his
window-panes at morning, the reluctant descent of the first flakes, and
the white roofs relieved against the sombre sky. And yet the stuff of
which these yearnings are made is one of the flimsiest: if but the
thermometer fall a little below its ordinary Mediterranean level, or a
wind come down from the snow-clad Alps behind, the spirit of his fancies
changes upon the instant, and many a doleful vignette of the grim wintry
streets at home returns to him, and begins to haunt his memory. The
hopeless, huddled attitude of tramps in doorways; the flinching gait of
barefoot children on the icy pavement; the sheen of the rainy streets
towards afternoon; the meagre anatomy of the poor defined by the
clinging of wet garments; the high canorous note of the North-easter on
days when the very houses seem to stiffen with cold: these, and such as
these, crowd back upon him, and mockingly substitute themselves for the
fanciful winter scenes with which he had pleased himself a while before.
He cannot be glad enough that he is where he is. If only the others
could be there also; if only those tramps could lie down for a little in
the sunshine, and those children warm their feet, this once, upon a
kindlier earth; if only there were no cold anywhere, and no nakedness
and no hunger; if only it were as well with all men as it is with him!
For it is not altogether ill with the invalid, after all. If it is only
rarely that anything penetrates, vividly into his numbed spirit, yet,
when anything does, it brings with it a joy that is all the more
poignant for its very rarity. There is something pathetic in these
occasional returns of a glad activity of heart. In his lowest hours he
will be stirred and awakened by many such; and they will spring perhaps
from very trivial sources; as a friend once said to me, the "spirit of
delight" comes often on small wings. For the pleasure that we take in
beautiful nature is essentially capricious. It comes sometimes when we
least look for it; and sometimes, when we expect it most certainly, it
leaves us to gape joyously for days together, in the very home-land of
the beautiful. We may have passed a place a thousand times and one; and
on the thousand and second it will be transfigured, and stand forth in a
certain splendour of reality from the dull circle of surroundings; so
that we see it "with a child's first pleasure," as Wordsworth saw the
daffodils by the lake-side. And if this falls out capriciously with the
healthy, how much more so with the invalid! Some day he will find his
first violet, and be lost in pleasant wonder, by what alchemy the cold
earth of the clods, and the vapid air and rain, can be transmuted into
colour so rich and odour so touchingly sweet. Or perhaps he may see a
group of washerwomen relieved, on a spit of shingle, against the blue
sea, or a meeting of flower-gatherers in the tempered daylight of an
olive-garden; and something significant or monumental in the grouping,
something in the harmony of faint colour that is always characteristic
of the dress of these southern women, will come home to him
unexpectedly, and awaken in him that satisfaction with which we tell
ourselves that we are the richer by one more beautiful experience. Or it
may be something even slighter: as when the opulence of the sunshine,
which somehow gets lost and fails to produce its effect on the large
scale, is suddenly revealed to him by the chance isolation--as he
changes the position of his sunshade--of a yard or two of roadway with
its stones and weeds. And then, there is no end to the infinite variety
of the olive-yards themselves. Even the colour is indeterminate and
continually shifting: now you would say it was green, now grey now blue;
now tree stands above tree, like "cloud on cloud," massed into filmy
indistinctness; and now, at the wind's will, the whole sea of foliage is
shaken and broken up with little momentary silverings and shadows. But
every one sees the world in his own way. To some the glad moment may
have arrived on other provocations; and their recollection may be most
vivid of the stately gait of women carrying burthens on their heads; of
tropical effects, with canes and naked rock and sunlight; of the relief
of cypresses; of the troubled, busy-looking groups of sea-pines, that
seem always as if they were being wielded and swept together by a
whirlwind; of the air coming, laden with virginal perfumes, over the
myrtles and the scented underwood; of the empurpled hills standing up,
solemn and sharp, out of the green-gold air of the east at evening.
There go many elements, without doubt, to the making of one such moment
of intense perception; and it is on the happy agreement of these many
elements, on the harmonious vibration of many nerves, that the whole
delight of the moment must depend. Who can forget how, when he has
chanced upon some attitude of complete restfulness, after long uneasy
rolling to and fro on grass or heather, the whole fashion of the
landscape has been changed for him, as though the sun had just broken
forth, or a great artist had only then completed, by some cunning touch,
the composition of the picture! And not only a change of posture--a
snatch of perfume, the sudden singing of a bird, the freshness of some
pulse of air from an invisible sea, the light shadow of a travelling
cloud, the merest nothing that sends a little shiver along the most
infinitesimal nerve of a man's body--not one of the least of these but
has a hand somehow in the general effect, and brings some refinement of
its own into the character of the pleasure we feel.
And if the external conditions are thus varied and subtle, even more so
are those within our own bodies. No man can find out the world, says
Solomon, from beginning to end, because the world is in his heart; and
so it is impossible for any of us to understand, from beginning to end,
that agreement of harmonious circumstances that creates in us the
highest pleasure of admiration, precisely because some of these
circumstances are hidden from us for ever in the constitution of our own
bodies. After we have reckoned up all that we can see or hear or feel,
there still remains to be taken into account some sensibility more
delicate than usual in the nerves affected, or some exquisite refinement
in the architecture of the brain, which is indeed to the sense of the
beautiful as the eye or the ear to the sense of hearing or sight. We
admire splendid views and great pictures; and yet, what is truly
admirable is rather the mind within us, that gathers together these
scattered details for its delight, and makes out of certain colours
certain distributions of graduated light and darkness, that intelligible
whole which alone we call a picture or a view. Hazlitt, relating in one
of his essays how he went on foot from one great man's house to
another's in search of works of art, begins suddenly to triumph over
these noble and wealthy owners, because he was more capable of enjoying
their costly possessions than they were; because they had paid the money
and he had received the pleasure. And the occasion is a fair one for
self-complacency. While the one man was working to be able to buy the
picture, the other was working to be able to enjoy the picture. An
inherited aptitude will have been diligently improved in either case;
only the one man has made for himself a fortune, and the other has made
for himself a living spirit. It is a fair occasion for self-complacency,
I repeat, when the event shows a man to have chosen the better part, and
laid out his life more wisely, in the long run, than those who have
credit for most wisdom. And yet even this is not a good unmixed; and,
like all other possessions, although in a less degree, the possession of
a brain that has been thus improved and cultivated, and made into the
prime organ of a man's enjoyment, brings with it certain inevitable
cares and disappointments. The happiness of such an one comes to depend
greatly upon those fine shades of sensation that heighten and harmonise
the coarser elements of beauty. And thus a degree of nervous
prostration, that to other men would be hardly disagreeable, is enough
to overthrow for him the whole fabric of his life, to take, except at
rare moments, the edge off his pleasures, and to meet him wherever he
goes with failure, and the sense of want, and disenchantment of the
world and life.
It is not in such numbness of spirit only that the life of the invalid
resembles a premature old age. Those excursions that he had promised
himself to finish prove too long or too arduous for his feeble body; and
the barrier-hills are as impassable as ever. Many a white town that sits
far out on the promontory, many a comely fold of wood on the
mountain-side, beckons and allures his imagination day after day, and is
yet as inaccessible to his feet as the clefts and gorges of the clouds.
The sense of distance grows upon him wonderfully; and after some
feverish efforts and the fretful uneasiness of the first few days, he
falls contentedly in with the restrictions of his weakness. His narrow
round becomes pleasant and familiar to him as the cell to a contented
prisoner. Just as he has fallen already out of the mid race of active
life, he now falls out of the little eddy that circulates in the shallow
waters of the sanatorium. He sees the country people come and go about
their everyday affairs, the foreigners stream out in goodly pleasure
parties; the stir of man's activity is all about him, as he suns himself
inertly in some sheltered corner; and he looks on with a patriarchal
impersonality of interest, such as a man may feel when he pictures to
himself the fortunes of his remote descendants, or the robust old age of
the oak he has planted over-night.
In this falling aside, in this quietude and desertion of other men,
there is no inharmonious prelude to the last quietude and desertion of
the grave; in this dulness of the senses there is a gentle preparation
for the final insensibility of death. And to him the idea of mortality
comes in a shape less violent and harsh than is its wont, less as an
abrupt catastrophe than as a thing of infinitesimal gradation, and the
last step on a long decline of way. As we turn to and fro in bed, and
every moment the movements grow feebler and smaller and the attitude
more restful and easy, until sleep overtakes us at a stride and we move
no more, so desire after desire leaves him; day by day his strength
decreases, and the circle of his activity grows ever narrower; and he
feels, if he is to be thus tenderly weaned from the passion of life,
thus gradually inducted into the slumber of death, that when at last the
end comes, it will come quietly and fitly. If anything is to reconcile
poor spirits to the coming of the last enemy, surely it should be such a
mild approach as this; not to hale us forth with violence, but to
persuade us from a place we have no further pleasure in. It is not so
much, indeed, death that approaches as life that withdraws and withers
up from round about him. He has outlived his own usefulness, and almost
his own enjoyment; and if there is to be no recovery; if never again
will he be young and strong and passionate, if the actual present shall
be to him always like a thing read in a book or remembered out of the
far-away past; if, in fact, this be veritably nightfall, he will not
wish greatly for the continuance of a twilight that only strains and
disappoints the eyes, but steadfastly await the perfect darkness. He
will pray for Medea: when she comes, let her either rejuvenate or slay.
And yet the ties that still attach him to the world are many and kindly.
The sight of children has a significance for him such as it may have for
the aged also, but not for others. If he has been used to feel humanely,
and to look upon life somewhat more widely than from the narrow loophole
of personal pleasure and advancement, it is strange how small a portion
of his thoughts will be changed or embittered by this proximity of
death. He knows that already, in English counties, the sower follows the
ploughman up the face of the field, and the rooks follow the sower; and
he knows also that he may not live to go home again and see the corn
spring and ripen, and be cut down at last, and brought home with
gladness. And yet the future of this harvest, the continuance of drought
or the coming of rain unseasonably, touch him as sensibly as ever. For
he has long been used to wait with interest the issue of events in which
his own concern was nothing; and to be joyful in a plenty, and sorrowful
for a famine, that did not increase or diminish, by one half loaf, the
equable sufficiency of his own supply. Thus there remain unaltered all
the disinterested hopes for mankind and a better future which have been
the solace and inspiration of his life. These he has set beyond the
reach of any fate that only menaces himself; and it makes small
difference whether he die five thousand years, or five thousand and
fifty years, before the good epoch for which he faithfully labours. He
has not deceived himself; he has known from the beginning that he
followed the pillar of fire and cloud, only to perish himself in the
wilderness, and that it was reserved for others to enter joyfully into
possession of the land. And so, as everything grows greyer and quieter
about him, and slopes towards extinction, these unfaded visions
accompany his sad decline and follow him, with friendly voices and
hopeful words, into the very vestibule of death. The desire of love or
of fame scarcely moved him, in his days of health, more strongly than
these generous aspirations move him now; and so life is carried forward
beyond life, and a vista kept open for the eyes of hope, even when his
hands grope already on the face of the impassable.
Lastly, he is bound tenderly to life by the thought of his friends; or
shall we not say rather, that by their thought for him, by their
unchangeable solicitude and love, he remains woven into the very stuff
of life, beyond the power of bodily dissolution to undo? In a thousand
ways will he survive and be perpetuated. Much of Etienne de la Boétie
survived during all the years in which Montaigne continued to converse
with him on the pages of the ever-delightful essays. Much of what was
truly Goethe was dead already when he revisited places that knew him no
more, and found no better consolation than the promise of his own
verses, that soon he too would be at rest. Indeed, when we think of what
it is that we most seek and cherish, and find most pride and pleasure in
calling ours, it will sometimes seem to us as if our friends, at our
decease, would suffer loss more truly than ourselves. As a monarch who
should care more for the outlying colonies he knows on the map or
through the report of his vicegerents, than for the trunk of his empire
under his eyes at home, are we not more concerned about the shadowy life
that we have in the hearts of others, and that portion in their
thoughts and fancies which, in a certain far-away sense, belongs to us,
than about the real knot of our identity--that central metropolis of
self, of which alone we are immediately aware--or the diligent service
of arteries and veins and infinitesimal activity of ganglia, which we
know (as we know a proposition in Euclid) to be the source and substance
of the whole? At the death of every one whom we love, some fair and
honourable portion of our existence falls away, and we are dislodged
from one of these dear provinces; and they are not, perhaps, the most
fortunate who survive a long series of such impoverishments, till their
life and influence narrow gradually into the meagre limit of their own
spirits, and death, when he comes at last, can destroy them at one blow.
NOTE.--To this essay I must in honesty append a word or two of
qualification; for this is one of the points on which a slightly
greater age teaches us a slightly different wisdom:
A youth delights in generalities, and keeps loose from particular
obligations; he jogs on the footpath way, himself pursuing
butterflies, but courteously lending his applause to the advance of
the human species and the coming of the kingdom of justice and love.
As he grows older, he begins to think more narrowly of man's action
in the general, and perhaps more arrogantly of his own in the
particular. He has not that same unspeakable trust in what he would
have done had he been spared, seeing finally that that would have
been little; but he has a far higher notion of the blank that he will
make by dying. A young man feels himself one too many in the world;
his is a painful situation: he has no calling; no obvious utility; no
ties but to his parents, and these he is sure to disregard. I do not
think that a proper allowance has been made for this true cause of
suffering in youth; but by the mere fact of a prolonged existence, we
outgrow either the fact or else the feeling. Either we become so
callously accustomed to our own useless figure in the world, or
else--and this, thank God, in the majority of cases--we so collect
about us the interest or the love of our fellows, so multiply our
effective part in the affairs of life, that we need to entertain no
longer the question of our right to be.
And so in the majority of cases, a man who fancies himself dying will
get cold comfort from the very youthful view expressed in this essay.
He, as a living man, has some to help, some to love, some to correct;
it may be, some to punish. These duties cling, not upon humanity, but
upon the man himself. It is he, not another, who is one woman's son
and a second woman's husband and a third woman's father. That life
which began so small, has now grown, with a myriad filaments, into
the lives of others. It is not indispensable; another will take the
place and shoulder the discharged responsibility; but the better the
man and the nobler his purposes, the more will he be tempted to
regret the extinction of his powers and the deletion of his
personality. To have lived a generation is not only to have grown at
home in that perplexing medium, but to have assumed innumerable
duties. To die at such an age, has, for all but the entirely base,
something of the air of a betrayal. A man does not only reflect upon
what he might have done in a future that is never to be his; but
beholding himself so early a deserter from the fight, he eats his
heart for the good he might have done already. To have been so
useless and now to lose all hope of being useful any more--there it
is that death and memory assail him. And even if mankind shall go on,
founding heroic cities, practising heroic virtues, rising steadily
from strength to strength; even if his work shall be fulfilled, his
friends consoled, his wife remarried by a better than he; how shall
this alter, in one jot, his estimation of a career which was his only
business in this world, which was so fitfully pursued, and which is
now so ineffectively to end?
V
ÆS TRIPLEX
The changes wrought by death are in themselves so sharp and final, and
so terrible and melancholy in their consequences, that the thing stands
alone in man's experience, and has no parallel upon earth. It outdoes
all other accidents because it is the last of them. Sometimes it leaps
suddenly upon its victims, like a Thug; sometimes it lays a regular
siege and creeps upon their citadel during a score of years. And when
the business is done, there is sore havoc made in other people's lives,
and a pin knocked out by which many subsidiary friendships hung
together. There are empty chairs, solitary walks, and single beds at
night. Again, in taking away our friends, death does not take them away
utterly, but leaves behind a mocking, tragical, and soon intolerable
residue, which must be hurriedly concealed. Hence a whole chapter of
sights and customs striking to the mind, from the pyramids of Egypt to
the gibbets and dule trees of mediæval Europe. The poorest persons have
a bit of pageant going towards the tomb; memorial stones are set up over
the least memorable; and, in order to preserve some show of respect for
what remains of our old loves and friendships, we must accompany it with
much grimly ludicrous ceremonial, and the hired undertaker parades
before the door. All this, and much more of the same sort, accompanied
by the eloquence of poets, has gone a great way to put humanity in
error; nay, in many philosophies the error has been embodied and laid
down with every circumstance of logic; although in real life the bustle
and swiftness, in leaving people little time to think, have not left
them time enough to go dangerously wrong in practice.
As a matter of fact, although few things are spoken of with more fearful
whisperings than this prospect of death, few have less influence on
conduct under healthy circumstances. We have all heard of cities in
South America built upon the side of fiery mountains, and how, even in
this tremendous neighbourhood, the inhabitants are not a jot more
impressed by the solemnity of mortal conditions than if they were
delving gardens in the greenest corner of England. There are serenades
and suppers and much gallantry among the myrtles overhead; and meanwhile
the foundation shudders under foot, the bowels of the mountain growl,
and at any moment living ruin may leap sky-high into the moonlight, and
tumble man and his merry-making in the dust. In the eyes of very young
people, and very dull old ones, there is something indescribably
reckless and desperate in such a picture. It seems not credible that
respectable married people, with umbrellas, should find appetite for a
bit of supper within quite a long distance of a fiery mountain; ordinary
life begins to smell of high-handed debauch when it is carried on so
close to a catastrophe; and even cheese and salad, it seems, could
hardly be relished in such circumstances without something like a
defiance of the Creator. It should be a place for nobody but hermits
dwelling in prayer and maceration, or mere born-devils drowning care in
a perpetual carouse.
And yet, when one comes to think upon it calmly, the situation of these
South American citizens forms only a very pale figure for the state of
ordinary mankind. This world itself, travelling blindly and swiftly in
overcrowded space, among a million other worlds travelling blindly and
swiftly in contrary directions, may very well come by a knock that would
set it into explosion like a penny squib. And what, pathologically
looked at, is the human body with all its organs, but a mere bagful of
petards? The least of these is as dangerous to the whole economy as the
ship's powder-magazine to the ship; and with every breath we breathe,
and every meal we eat, we are putting one or more of them in peril. If
we clung as devotedly as some philosophers pretend we do to the abstract
idea of life, or were half as frightened as they make out we are, for
the subversive accident that ends it all, the trumpets might sound by
the hour and no one would follow them into battle--the blue-peter might
fly at the truck, but who would climb into a sea-going ship? Think (if
these philosophers were right) with what a preparation of spirit we
should affront the daily peril of the dinner-table: a deadlier spot than
any battle-field in history, where the far greater proportion of our
ancestors have miserably left their bones! What woman would ever be
lured into marriage, so much more dangerous than the wildest sea? And
what would it be to grow old? For, after a certain distance, every step
we take in life we find the ice growing thinner below our feet, and all
around us and behind us we see our contemporaries going through. By the
time a man gets well into the seventies, his continued existence is a
mere miracle; and when he lays his old bones in bed for the night, there
is an overwhelming probability that he will never see the day. Do the
old men mind it, as a matter of fact? Why, no. They were never merrier;
they have their grog at night, and tell the raciest stories; they hear
of the death of people about their own age, or even younger, not as if
it was a grisly warning, but with a simple child-like pleasure at having
outlived some one else; and when a draught might puff them out like a
guttering candle, or a bit of a stumble shatter them like so much glass,
their old hearts keep sound and unaffrighted, and they go on, bubbling
with laughter, through years of man's age compared to which the valley
at Balaclava was as safe and peaceful as a village cricket-green on
Sunday. It may fairly be questioned (if we look to the peril only)
whether it was a much more daring feat for Curtius to plunge into the
gulf, than for any old gentleman of ninety to doff his clothes and
clamber into bed.
Indeed, it is a memorable subject for consideration, with what unconcern
and gaiety mankind pricks on along the Valley of the Shadow of Death.
The whole way is one wilderness of snares, and the end of it, for those
who fear the last pinch, is irrevocable ruin. And yet we go spinning
through it all, like a party for the Derby. Perhaps the reader remembers
one of the humorous devices of the deified Caligula: how he encouraged a
vast concourse of holiday-makers on to his bridge over Baiæ bay; and
when they were in the height of their enjoyment, turned loose the
Prætorian guards among the company, and had them tossed into the sea.
This is no bad miniature of the dealings of nature with the transitory
race of man. Only, what a chequered picnic we have of it, even while it
lasts! and into what great waters, not to be crossed by any swimmer,
God's pale Prætorian throws us over in the end!
We live the time that a match flickers; we pop the cork of a ginger-beer
bottle, and the earthquake swallows us on the instant. Is it not odd, is
it not incongruous, is it not, in the highest sense of human speech,
incredible, that we should think so highly of the ginger-beer, and
regard so little the devouring earthquake? The love of Life and the fear
of Death are two famous phrases that grow harder to understand the more
we think about them. It is a well-known fact that an immense proportion
of boat accidents would never happen if people held the sheet in their
hands instead of making it fast; and yet, unless it be some martinet of
a professional mariner or some landsman with shattered nerves, every one
of God's creatures makes it fast. A strange instance of man's unconcern
and brazen boldness in the face of death!
We confound ourselves with metaphysical phrases, which we import into
daily talk with noble inappropriateness. We have no idea of what death
is, apart from its circumstances and some of its consequences to others;
and although we have some experience of living, there is not a man on
earth who has flown so high into abstraction as to have any practical
guess at the meaning of the word _life_. All literature, from Job and
Omar Khayam to Thomas Carlyle or Walt Whitman, is but an attempt to look
upon the human state with such largeness of view as shall enable us to
rise from the consideration of living to the Definition of Life. And our
sages give us about the best satisfaction in their power when they say
that it is a vapour, or a show, or made out of the same stuff with
dreams. Philosophy, in its more rigid sense, has been at the same work
for ages; and after a myriad bald heads have wagged over the problem,
and piles of words have been heaped one upon another into dry and cloudy
volumes without end, philosophy has the honour of laying before us, with
modest pride, her contribution towards the subject: that life is a
Permanent Possibility of Sensation. Truly a fine result! A man may very
well love beef, or hunting, or a woman; but surely, surely, not a
Permanent Possibility of Sensation! He may be afraid of a precipice, or
a dentist, or a large enemy with a club, or even an undertaker's man;
but not certainly of abstract death. We may trick with the word life in
its dozen senses until we are weary of tricking; we may argue in terms
of all the philosophies on earth, but one fact remains true
throughout--that we do not love life, in the sense that we are greatly
preoccupied about its conservation; that we do not, properly speaking,
love life at all, but living. Into the views of the least careful there
will enter some degree of providence; no man's eyes are fixed entirely
on the passing hour; but although we have some anticipation of good
health, good weather, wine, active employment, love, and self-approval,
the sum of these anticipations does not amount to anything like a
general view of life's possibilities and issues; nor are those who
cherish them most vividly at all the most scrupulous of their personal
safety. To be deeply interested in the accidents of our existence, to
enjoy keenly the mixed tenure of human experience, rather leads a man to
disregard precautions, and risk his neck against a straw. For surely the
love of living is stronger in an Alpine climber roping over a peril, or
a hunter riding merrily at a stiff fence, than in a creature who lives
upon a diet and walks a measured distance in the interest of his
constitution.
There is a great deal of very vile nonsense talked upon both sides of
the matter: tearing divines reducing life to the dimensions of a mere
funeral procession, so short as to be hardly decent; and melancholy
unbelievers yearning for the tomb as if it were a world too far away.
Both sides must feel a little ashamed of their performances now and
again when they draw in their chairs to dinner. Indeed, a good meal and
a bottle of wine is an answer to most standard works upon the question.
When a man's heart warms to his viands, he forgets a great deal of
sophistry, and soars into a rosy zone of contemplation. Death may be
knocking at the door, like the Commander's statue; we have something
else in hand, thank God, and let him knock. Passing-bells are ringing
all the world over. All the world over, and every hour, some one is
parting company with all his aches and ecstasies. For us also the trap
is laid. But we are so fond of life that we have no leisure to entertain
the terror of death. It is a honeymoon with us all through, and none of
the longest. Small blame to us if we give our whole hearts to this
glowing bride of ours, to the appetites, to honour, to the hungry
curiosity of the mind, to the pleasure of the eyes in nature, and the
pride of our own nimble bodies.
We all of us appreciate the sensations; but as for caring about the
Permanence of the Possibility, a man's head is generally very bald, and
his senses very dull, before he comes to that. Whether we regard life as
a lane leading to a dead wall--a mere bag's end, as the French say--or
whether we think of it as a vestibule or gymnasium, where we wait our
turn and prepare our faculties for some more noble destiny; whether we
thunder in a pulpit, or pule in little atheistic poetry-books, about its
vanity and brevity; whether we look justly for years of health and
vigour, or are about to mount into a bath-chair, as a step towards the
hearse; in each and all of these views and situations there is but one
conclusion possible: that a man should stop his ears against paralysing
terror, and run the race that is set before him with a single mind. No
one surely could have recoiled with more heartache and terror from the
thought of death than our respected lexicographer; and yet we know how
little it affected his conduct, how wisely and boldly he walked, and in
what a fresh and lively vein he spoke of life. Already an old man, he
ventured on his Highland tour; and his heart, bound with triple brass,
did not recoil before twenty-seven individual cups of tea. As courage
and intelligence are the two qualities best worth a good man's
cultivation, so it is the first part of intelligence to recognise our
precarious estate in life, and the first part of courage to be not at
all abashed before the fact. A frank and somewhat headlong carriage, not
looking too anxiously before, not dallying in maudlin regret over the
past, stamps the man who is well armoured for this world.
And not only well armoured for himself, but a good friend and a good
citizen to boot. We do not go to cowards for tender dealing; there is
nothing so cruel as panic; the man who has least fear for his own
carcase has most time to consider others. That eminent chemist who took
his walks abroad in tin shoes, and subsisted wholly upon tepid milk, had
all his work cut out for him in considerate dealings with his own
digestion. So soon as prudence has begun to grow up in the brain, like a
dismal fungus, it finds its first expression in a paralysis of generous
acts. The victim begins to shrink spiritually; he develops a fancy for
parlours with a regulated temperature, and takes his morality on the
principle of tin shoes and tepid milk. The care of one important body or
soul becomes so engrossing, that all the noises of the outer world begin
to come thin and faint into the parlour with the regulated temperature;
and the tin shoes go equably forward over blood and rain. To be overwise
is to ossify; and the scruple-monger ends by standing stockstill. Now
the man who has his heart on his sleeve, and a good whirling weathercock
of a brain, who reckons his life as a thing to be dashingly used and
cheerfully hazarded, makes a very different acquaintance of the world,
keeps all his pulses going true and fast, and gathers impetus as he
runs, until, if he be running towards anything better than wildfire, he
may shoot up and become a constellation in the end. Lord look after his
health, Lord have a care of his soul, says he; and he has at the key of
the position, and swashes through incongruity and peril towards his aim.
Death is on all sides of him with pointed batteries, as he is on all
sides of all of us; unfortunate surprises gird him round; mim-mouthed
friends and relations hold up their hands in quite a little elegiacal
synod about his path: and what cares he for all this? Being a true lover
of living, a fellow with something pushing and spontaneous in his
inside, he must, like any other soldier, in any other stirring, deadly
warfare, push on at his best pace until he touch the goal. "A peerage or
Westminster Abbey!" cried Nelson in his bright, boyish, heroic manner.
These are great incentives; not for any of these, but for the plain
satisfaction of living, of being about their business in some sort or
other, do the brave, serviceable men of every nation tread down the
nettle danger, and pass flyingly over all the stumbling-blocks of
prudence. Think of the heroism of Johnson, think of that superb
indifference to mortal limitation that set him upon his dictionary, and
carried him through triumphantly until the end! Who, if he were wisely
considerate of things at large, would ever embark upon any work much
more considerable than a halfpenny post-card? Who would project a serial
novel, after Thackeray and Dickens had each fallen in midcourse? Who
would find heart enough to begin to live, if he dallied with the
consideration of death?
And, after all, what sorry and pitiful quibbling all this is! To forego
all the issues of living in a parlour with a regulated temperature--as
if that were not to die a hundred times over, and for ten years at a
stretch! As if it were not to die in one's own lifetime, and without
even the sad immunities of death! As if it were not to die, and yet be
the patient spectators of our own pitiable change! The Permanent
Possibility is preserved, but the sensations carefully held at arm's
length, as if one kept a photographic plate in a dark chamber. It is
better to lose health like a spendthrift than to waste it like a miser.
It is better to live and be done with it, than to die daily in the
sick-room. By all means begin your folio; even if the doctor does not
give you a year, even if he hesitates about a month, make one brave push
and see what can be accomplished in a week. It is not only in finished
undertakings that we ought to honour useful labour. A spirit goes out of
the man who means execution, which outlives the most untimely ending.
All who have meant good work with their whole hearts, have done good
work, although they may die before they have the time to sign it. Every
heart that has beat strong and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse
behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind. And even
if death catch people, like an open pitfall, and in mid-career, laying
out vast projects, and planning monstrous foundations, flushed with
hope, and their mouths full of boastful language, they should be at once
tripped up and silenced: is there not something brave and spirited in
such a termination? and does not life go down with a better grace,
foaming in full body over a precipice, than miserably straggling to an
end in sandy deltas? When the Greeks made their fine saying that those
whom the gods love die young, I cannot help believing they had this sort
of death also in their eye. For surely, at whatever age it overtake the
man, this is to die young. Death has not been suffered to take so much
as an illusion from his heart. In the hot-fit of life, a-tiptoe on the
highest point of being, he passes at a bound on to the other side. The
noise of the mallet and chisel is scarcely quenched, the trumpets are
hardly done blowing, when, trailing with him clouds of glory, this
happy-starred, full-blooded spirit shoots into the spiritual land.
VI
EL DORADO
It seems as if a great deal were attainable in a world where there are
so many marriages and decisive battles, and where we all, at certain
hours of the day, and with great gusto and despatch, stow a portion of
victuals finally and irretrievably into the bag which contains us. And
it would seem also, on a hasty view, that the attainment of as much as
possible was the one goal of man's contentious life. And yet, as regards
the spirit, this is but a semblance. We live in an ascending scale when
we live happily, one thing leading to another in an endless series.
There is always a new horizon for onward-looking men, and although we
dwell on a small planet, immersed in petty business and not enduring
beyond a brief period of years, we are so constituted that our hopes are
inaccessible, like stars, and the term of hoping is prolonged until the
term of life. To be truly happy is a question of how we begin and not of
how we end, of what we want and not of what we have. An aspiration is a
joy for ever, a possession as solid as a landed estate, a fortune which
we can never exhaust and which gives us year by year a revenue of
pleasurable activity. To have many of these is to be spiritually rich.
Life is only a very dull and ill-directed theatre unless we have some
interests in the piece; and to those who have neither art nor science,
the world is a mere arrangement of colours, or a rough footway where
they may very well break their shins. It is in virtue of his own desires
and curiosities that any man continues to exist with even patience, that
he is charmed by the look of things and people, and that he wakens
every morning with a renewed appetite for work and pleasure. Desire and
curiosity are the two eyes through which he sees the world in the most
enchanted colours: it is they that make women beautiful or fossils
interesting: and the man may squander his estate and come to beggary,
but if he keeps these two amulets he is still rich in the possibilities
of pleasure. Suppose he could take one meal so compact and comprehensive
that he should never hunger any more; suppose him at a glance, to take
in all the features of the world and allay the desire for knowledge;
suppose him to do the like in any province of experience--would not that
man be in a poor way for amusement ever after?
One who goes touring on foot with a single volume in his knapsack reads
with circumspection, pausing often to reflect, and often laying the book
down to contemplate the landscape or the prints in the inn parlour; for
he fears to come to an end of his entertainment, and be left
companionless on the last stages of his journey. A young fellow recently
finished the works of Thomas Carlyle, winding up, if we remember aright,
with the ten notebooks upon Frederick the Great. "What!" cried the young
fellow, in consternation, "is there no more Carlyle? Am I left to the
daily papers?" A more celebrated instance is that of Alexander, who wept
bitterly because he had no more worlds to subdue. And when Gibbon had
finished the "Decline and Fall," he had only a few moments of joy; and
it was with a "sober melancholy" that he parted from his labours.
Happily we all shoot at the moon with ineffectual arrows; our hopes are
set on inaccessible El Dorado; we come to an end of nothing here below.
Interests are only plucked up to sow themselves again, like mustard. You
would think, when the child was born, there would be an end to trouble;
and yet it is only the beginning of fresh anxieties; and when you have
seen it through its teething and its education, and at last its
marriage, alas! it is only to have new fears, new quivering
sensibilities, with every day; and the health of your children's
children grows as touching a concern as that of your own. Again, when
you have married your wife, you would think you were got upon a hilltop,
and might begin to go downward by an easy slope. But you have only ended
courting to begin marriage. Falling in love and winning love are often
difficult tasks to overbearing and rebellious spirits; but to keep in
love is also a business of some importance, to which both man and wife
must bring kindness and goodwill. The true love story commences at the
altar, when there lies before the married pair a most beautiful contest
of wisdom and generosity, and a life-long struggle towards an
unattainable ideal. Unattainable? Ay, surely unattainable, from the very
fact that they are two instead of one.
"Of making books there is no end," complained the Preacher; and did not
perceive how highly he was praising letters as an occupation. There is
no end, indeed, to making books or experiments, or to travel or to
gathering wealth. Problem gives rise to problem. We may study for ever,
and we are never as learned as we would. We have never made a statue
worthy of our dreams. And when we have discovered a continent, or
crossed a chain of mountains, it is only to find another ocean or
another plain upon the farther side. In the infinite universe there is
room for our swiftest diligence and to spare. It is not like the works
of Carlyle, which can be read to an end. Even in a corner of it, in a
private park, or in the neighbourhood of a single hamlet, the weather
and the seasons keep so deftly changing that although we walk there for
a lifetime there will be always something new to startle and delight us.
There is only one wish realisable on the earth; only one thing that can
be perfectly attained: Death. And from a variety of circumstances we
have no one to tell us whether it be worth attaining.
A strange picture we make on our way to our Chimæras, ceaselessly
marching, grudging ourselves the time for rest; indefatigable,
adventurous pioneers. It is true that we shall never reach the goal; it
is even more than probable that there is no such place; and if we live
for centuries and were endowed with the powers of a god, we should find
ourselves not much nearer what we wanted at the end. O toiling hands of
mortals! O unwearied feet, travelling ye know not whither! Soon, soon,
it seems to you, you must come forth on some conspicuous hilltop, and
but a little way farther, against the setting sun, descry the spires of
El Dorado. Little do ye know your own blessedness; for to travel
hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to
labour.
VII
THE ENGLISH ADMIRALS
"Whether it be wise in men to do such actions or no, I am sure it is
so in States to honour them."--SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE.
There is one story of the wars of Rome which I have always very much
envied for England. Germanicus was going down at the head of the legions
into a dangerous river--on the opposite bank the woods were full of
Germans--when there flew out seven great eagles which seemed to marshal
the Romans on their way; they did not pause or waver, but disappeared
into the forest where the enemy lay concealed. "Forward!" cried
Germanicus, with a fine rhetorical inspiration, "Forward! and follow the
Roman birds." It would be a very heavy spirit that did not give a leap
at such a signal, and a very timorous one that continued to have any
doubt of success. To appropriate the eagles as fellow-countrymen was to
make imaginary allies of the forces of nature; the Roman Empire and its
military fortunes, and along with these the prospects of those
individual Roman legionaries now fording a river in Germany, looked
altogether greater and more hopeful. It is a kind of illusion easy to
produce. A particular shape of cloud, the appearance of a particular
star, the holiday of some particular saint--anything, in short, to
remind the combatants of patriotic legends or old successes--may be
enough to change the issue of a pitched battle; for it gives to the one
party a feeling that Right and the larger interests are with them.
If an Englishman wishes to have such a feeling, it must be about the
sea. The lion is nothing to us; he has not been taken to the hearts of
the people, and naturalised as an English emblem. We know right well
that a lion would fall foul of us as grimly as he would of a Frenchman
or a Moldavian Jew, and we do not carry him before us in the smoke of
battle. But the sea is our approach and bulwark; it has been the scene
of our greatest triumphs and dangers; and we are accustomed in lyrical
strains to claim it as our own. The prostrating experiences of
foreigners between Calais and Dover have always an agreeable side to
English prepossessions. A man from Bedfordshire, who does not know one
end of the ship from the other until she begins to move, swaggers among
such persons with a sense of hereditary nautical experience. To suppose
yourself endowed with natural parts for the sea because you are the
countryman of Blake and mighty Nelson is perhaps just as unwarrantable
as to imagine Scotch extraction a sufficient guarantee that you will
look well in a kilt. But the feeling is there, and seated beyond the
reach of argument. We should consider ourselves unworthy of our descent
if we did not share the arrogance of our progenitors, and please
ourselves with the pretension that the sea is English. Even where it is
looked upon by the guns and battlements of another nation we regard it
as a kind of English cemetery, where the bones of our seafaring fathers
take their rest until the last trumpet; for I suppose no other nation
has lost as many ships or sent as many brave fellows to the bottom.
There is nowhere such a background for heroism as the noble, terrifying,
and picturesque conditions of some of our sea-fights. Hawke's battle in
the tempest, and Aboukir at the moment when the French Admiral blew up,
reach the limit of what is imposing to the imagination. And our naval
annals owe some of their interest to the fantastic and beautiful
appearance of old warships and the romance that invests the sea and
everything sea-going in the eyes of English lads on a half-holiday at
the coast. Nay, and what we know of the misery between-decks enhances
the bravery of what was done by giving it something for contrast. We
like to know that these bold and honest fellows contrived to live, and
to keep bold and honest, among absurd and vile surroundings. No reader
can forget the description of the _Thunder_ in "Roderick Random": the
disorderly tyranny; the cruelty and dirt of officers and men; deck after
deck, each with some new object of offence; the hospital, where the
hammocks were huddled together with but fourteen inches space for each;
the cockpit, far under water, where "in an intolerable stench" the
spectacled steward kept the accounts of the different messes; and the
canvas enclosure, six feet square, in which Morgan made flip and
salmagundi, smoked his pipe, sang his Welsh songs, and swore his queer
Welsh imprecations. There are portions of this business on board the
_Thunder_ over which the reader passes lightly and hurriedly, like a
traveller in a malarious country. It is easy enough to understand the
opinion of Dr. Johnson: "Why, sir," he said, "no man will be a sailor
who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail." You would fancy
anyone's spirit would die out under such an accumulation of darkness,
noisomeness, and injustice, above all when he had not come there of his
own free will, but under the cutlasses and bludgeons of the press-gang.
But perhaps a watch on deck in the sharp sea air put a man on his mettle
again; a battle must have been a capital relief; and prize-money,
bloodily earned and grossly squandered, opened the doors of the prison
for a twinkling. Somehow or other, at least, this worst of possible
lives could not overlie the spirit and gaiety of our sailors; they did
their duty as though they had some interest in the fortune of that
country which so cruelly oppressed them, they served their guns merrily
when it came to fighting, and they had the readiest ear for a bold,
honourable sentiment, of any class of men the world ever produced.
Most men of high destinies have high-sounding names. Pym and Habakkuk
may do pretty well, but they must not think to cope with the Cromwells
and Isaiahs. And you could not find a better case in point than that of
the English Admirals. Drake and Rooke and Hawke are picked names for men
of execution. Frobisher, Rodney, Boscawen, "Foul-Weather" Jack Byron are
all good to catch the eye in a page of a naval history. Cloudesley
Shovel is a mouthful of quaint and sounding syllables. Benbow has a
bull-dog quality that suits the man's character, and it takes us back to
those English archers who were his true comrades for plainness,
tenacity, and pluck. Raleigh is spirited and martial, and signifies an
act of bold conduct in the field. It is impossible to judge of Blake or
Nelson, no names current among men being worthy of such heroes. But
still it is odd enough, and very appropriate in this connection, that
the latter was greatly taken with his Sicilian title. "The
signification, perhaps, pleased him," says Southey; "Duke of Thunder was
what in Dahomey would have been called a _strong name_; it was to a
sailor's taste, and certainly to no man could it be more applicable."
Admiral in itself is one of the most satisfactory of distinctions; it
has a noble sound and a very proud history; and Columbus thought so
highly of it, that he enjoined his heirs to sign themselves by that
title as long as the house should last.
But it is the spirit of the men, and not their names, that I wish to
speak about in this paper. That spirit is truly English; they, and not
Tennyson's cotton-spinners or Mr. D'Arcy Thompson's Abstract Bagman, are
the true and typical Englishmen. There may be more _head_ of bagmen in
the country, but human beings are reckoned by number only in political
constitutions. And the Admirals are typical in the full force of the
word. They are splendid examples of virtue, indeed, but of a virtue in
which most Englishmen can claim a moderate share; and what we admire in
their lives is a sort of apotheosis of ourselves. Almost everybody in
our land, except humanitarians and a few persons whose youth has been
depressed by exceptionally æsthetic surroundings, can understand and
sympathise with an admiral or a prize-fighter. I do not wish to bracket
Benbow and Tom Cribb; but, depend upon it, they are practically
bracketed for admiration in the minds of many frequenters of ale-houses.
If you told them about Germanicus and the eagles, or Regulus going back
to Carthage, they would very likely fall asleep; but tell them about
Harry Pearce and Jem Belcher, or about Nelson and the Nile, and they put
down their pipes to listen. I have by me a copy of "Boxiana," on the
fly-leaves of which a youthful member of the fancy kept a chronicle of
remarkable events and an obituary of great men. Here we find piously
chronicled the demise of jockeys, watermen, and pugilists--Johnny Moore,
of the Liverpool Prize Ring; Tom Spring, aged fifty-six; "Pierce Egan,
senior, writer of 'Boxiana' and other sporting works"--and among all
these, the Duke of Wellington! If Benbow had lived in the time of this
annalist, do you suppose his name would not have been added to the
glorious roll? In short, we do not all feel warmly towards Wesley or
Laud, we cannot all take pleasure in "Paradise Lost"; but there are
certain common sentiments and touches of nature by which the whole
nation is made to feel kinship. A little while ago everybody, from
Hazlitt and John Wilson down to the imbecile creature who scribbled his
register on the fly-leaves of "Boxiana," felt a more or less shamefaced
satisfaction in the exploits of prize-fighters. And the exploits of the
Admirals are popular to the same degree and tell in all ranks of
society. Their sayings and doings stir English blood like the sound of a
trumpet; and if the Indian Empire, the trade of London, and all the
outward and visible ensigns of our greatness should pass away, we should
still leave behind us a durable monument of what we were in these
sayings and doings of the English Admirals.
Duncan, lying off the Texel with his own flagship, the _Venerable_, and
only one other vessel, heard that the whole Dutch fleet was putting to
sea. He told Captain Hotham to anchor alongside of him in the narrowest
part of the channel, and fight his vessel till she sank. "I have taken
the depth of the water," added he, "and when the _Venerable_ goes down
my flag will still fly." And you observe this is no naked Viking in a
pre-historic period; but a Scottish member of Parliament, with a
smattering of the classics, a telescope, a cocked hat of great size, and
flannel underclothing. In the same spirit, Nelson went into Aboukir with
six colours flying; so that even if five were shot away, it should not
be imagined he had struck. He too must needs wear his four stars outside
his Admiral's frock, to be a butt for sharpshooters. "In honour I gained
them," he said to objectors, adding with sublime illogicality, "in
honour I will die with them." Captain Douglas of the _Royal Oak_, when
the Dutch fired his vessel in the Thames, sent his men ashore, but was
burned along with her himself rather than desert his post without
orders. Just then, perhaps the Merry Monarch was chasing a moth round
the supper-table with the ladies of his court. When Raleigh sailed into
Cadiz, and all the forts and ships opened fire on him at once, he
scorned to shoot a gun, and made answer with a flourish of insulting
trumpets. I like this bravado better than the wisest dispositions to
ensure victory; it comes from the heart and goes to it. God has made
nobler heroes, but He never made a finer gentleman than Walter Raleigh.
And as our Admirals were full of heroic superstitions, and had a
strutting and vainglorious style of fight, so they discovered a
startling eagerness for battle, and courted war like a mistress. When
the news came to Essex before Cadiz that the attack had been decided, he
threw his hat into the sea. It is in this way that a schoolboy hears of
a half-holiday; but this was a bearded man of great possessions who had
just been allowed to risk his life. Benbow could not lie still in his
bunk after he had lost his leg; he must be on deck in a basket to
direct and animate the fight. I said they loved war like a mistress; yet
I think there are not many mistresses we should continue to woo under
similar circumstances. Trowbridge went ashore with the _Culloden_, and
was able to take no part in the battle of the Nile. "The merits of that
ship and her gallant captain," wrote Nelson to the Admiralty, "are too
well known to benefit by anything I could say. Her misfortune was great
in getting aground, _while her more fortunate companions were in the
full tide of happiness_." This is a notable expression, and depicts the
whole great-hearted, big-spoken stock of the English Admirals to a hair.
It was to be "in the full tide of happiness" for Nelson to destroy five
thousand five hundred and twenty-five of his fellow-creatures, and have
his own scalp torn open by a piece of langridge shot. Hear him again at
Copenhagen: "A shot through the mainmast knocked the splinters about;
and he observed to one of his officers with a smile, 'It is warm work,
and this may be the last to any of us at any moment'; and then, stopping
short at the gangway, added, with emotion, '_But, mark you--I would not
be elsewhere for thousands._'"
I must tell one more story, which has lately been made familiar to us
all, and that in one of the noblest ballads of the English language. I
had written my tame prose abstract, I shall beg the reader to believe,
when I had no notion that the sacred bard designed an immortality for
Greenville. Sir Richard Greenville was Vice-Admiral to Lord Thomas
Howard, and lay off the Azores with the English squadron in 1591. He was
a noted tyrant to his crew: a dark, bullying fellow apparently; and it
is related of him that he would chew and swallow wine-glasses, by way of
convivial levity, till the blood ran out of his mouth. When the Spanish
fleet of fifty sail came within sight of the English, his ship, the
_Revenge_, was the last to weigh anchor, and was so far circumvented by
the Spaniards, that there were but two courses open--either to turn her
back upon the enemy or sail through one of his squadrons. The first
alternative Greenville dismissed as dishonourable to himself, his
country, and her Majesty's ship. Accordingly, he chose the latter, and
steered into the Spanish armament. Several vessels he forced to luff and
fall under his lee; until, about three o'clock of the afternoon, a great
ship of three decks of ordnance took the wind out of his sails, and
immediately boarded. Thenceforward, and all night long, the _Revenge_
held her own single-handed against the Spaniards. As one ship was beaten
off, another took its place. She endured, according to Raleigh's
computation, "eight hundred shot of great artillery, besides many
assaults and entries." By morning the powder was spent, the pikes all
broken, not a stick was standing, "nothing left overhead either for
flight or defence"; six feet of water in the hold; almost all the men
hurt, and Greenville himself in a dying condition. To bring them to this
pass, a fleet of fifty sail had been mauling them for fifteen hours, the
_Admiral of the Hulks_ and the _Ascension_ of Seville had both gone down
alongside, and two other vessels had taken refuge on shore in a sinking
state. In Hawke's words, "they had taken a great deal of drubbing." The
captain and crew thought they had done about enough; but Greenville was
not of this opinion; he gave orders to the master-gunner, whom he knew
to be a fellow after his own stamp, to scuttle the _Revenge_ where she
lay. The others, who were not mortally wounded like the Admiral,
interfered with some decision, locked the master-gunner in his cabin,
after having deprived him of his sword, for he manifested an intention
to kill himself if he were not to sink the ship; and sent to the
Spaniards to demand terms. These were granted. The second or third day
after, Greenville died of his wounds aboard the Spanish flagship,
leaving his contempt upon the "traitors and dogs" who had not chosen to
do as he did and engage fifty vessels, well found and fully manned, with
six inferior craft ravaged by sickness and short of stores. He at
least, he said, had done his duty, as he was bound to do, and looked for
everlasting fame.
Some one said to me the other day that they considered this story to be
of a pestilent example. I am not inclined to imagine we shall ever be
put into any practical difficulty from a superfluity of Greenvilles. And
besides, I demur to the opinion. The worth of such actions is not a
thing to be decided in a quaver of sensibility or a flush of righteous
common-sense. The man who wished to make the ballads of his country
coveted a small matter compared to what Richard Greenville accomplished.
I wonder how many people have been inspired by this mad story, and how
many battles have been actually won for England in the spirit thus
engendered. It is only with a measure of habitual foolhardiness that you
can be sure, in the common run of men, of courage on a reasonable
occasion. An army or a fleet, if it is not led by quixotic fancies, will
not be led far by terror of the Provost-Marshal. Even German warfare, in
addition to maps and telegraphs, is not above employing the "Wacht am
Rhein." Nor is it only in the profession of arms that such stories may
do good to a man. In this desperate and gleeful fighting, whether it is
Greenville or Benbow, Hawke or Nelson, who flies his colours in the
ship, we see men brought to the test and giving proof of what we call
heroic feeling. Prosperous humanitarians tell me, in my club
smoking-room, that they are a prey to prodigious heroic feelings, and
that it costs them more nobility of soul to do nothing in particular,
than would carry on all the wars, by sea or land, of bellicose humanity.
It may very well be so, and yet not touch the point in question. For
what I desire is to see some of this nobility brought face to face with
me in an inspiriting achievement. A man may talk smoothly over a cigar
in my club smoking-room from now to the Day of Judgment, without adding
anything to mankind's treasury of illustrious and encouraging examples.
It is not over the virtues of a curate-and-tea-party novel that people
are abashed into high resolutions. It may be because their hearts are
crass, but to stir them properly they must have men entering into glory
with some pomp and circumstance. And that is why these stories of our
sea-captains, printed, so to speak, in capitals, and full of bracing
moral influence, are more valuable to England than any material benefit
in all the books of political economy between Westminster and
Birmingham. Greenville chewing wine-glasses at table makes no very
pleasant figure, any more than a thousand other artists when they are
viewed in the body, or met in private life; but his work of art, his
finished tragedy, is an eloquent performance; and I contend it ought not
only to enliven men of the sword as they go into battle, but send back
merchant-clerks with more heart and spirit to their book-keeping by
double entry.
There is another question which seems bound up in this; and that is
Temple's problem: whether it was wise of Douglas to burn with the _Royal
Oak_? and by implication, what it was that made him do so. Many will
tell you it was the desire of fame.
"To what do Cæsar and Alexander owe the infinite grandeur of their
renown, but to fortune? How many men has she extinguished in the
beginning of their progress, of whom we have no knowledge; who brought
as much courage to the work as they, if their adverse hap had not cut
them off in the first sally of their arms? Amongst so many and so great
dangers, I do not remember to have anywhere read that Cæsar was ever
wounded; a thousand have fallen in less dangers than the least of those
he went through. A great many brave actions must be expected to be
performed without witness, for one that comes to some notice. A man is
not always at the top of a breach, or at the head of an army in the
sight of his general, as upon a platform. He is often surprised between
the hedge and the ditch; he must run the hazard of his life against a
hen-roost; he must dislodge four rascally musketeers out of a barn; he
must pick out single from his party, as necessity arises, and meet
adventures alone."
Thus far Montaigne, in a characteristic essay on "Glory." Where death is
certain, as in the cases of Douglas or Greenville, it seems all one from
a personal point of view. The man who lost his life against a hen-roost
is in the same pickle with him who lost his life against a fortified
place of the first order. Whether he has missed a peerage or only the
corporal's stripes, it is all one if he has missed them and is quietly
in the grave. It was by a hazard that we learned the conduct of the four
marines of the _Wager_. There was no room for these brave fellows in the
boat, and they were left behind upon the island to a certain death. They
were soldiers, they said, and knew well enough it was their business to
die; and as their comrades pulled away, they stood upon the beach, gave
three cheers, and cried "God bless the king!" Now, one or two of those
who were in the boat escaped, against all likelihood, to tell the story.
That was a great thing for us; but surely it cannot, by any possible
twisting of human speech, be construed into anything great for the
marines. You may suppose, if you like, that they died hoping their
behaviour would not be forgotten; or you may suppose they thought
nothing on the subject, which is much more likely. What can be the
signification of the word "fame" to a private of marines, who cannot
read and knows nothing of past history beyond the reminiscences of his
grandmother? But whichever supposition you make, the fact is unchanged.
They died while the question still hung in the balance; and I suppose
their bones were already white, before the winds and the waves and the
humour of Indian chiefs and Spanish governors had decided whether they
were to be unknown and useless martyrs or honoured heroes. Indeed, I
believe this is the lesson: if it is for fame that men do brave actions,
they are only silly fellows after all.
It is at best but a pettifogging, pickthank business to decompose
actions into little personal motives, and explain heroism away. The
Abstract Bagman will grow like an Admiral at heart, not by ungrateful
carping, but in a heat of admiration. But there is another theory of the
personal motive in these fine sayings and doings, which I believe to be
true and wholesome. People usually do things, and suffer martyrdoms,
because they have an inclination that way. The best artist is not the
man who fixes his eye on posterity, but the one who loves the practice
of his art. And instead of having a taste for being successful merchants
and retiring at thirty, some people have a taste for high and what we
call heroic forms of excitement. If the Admirals courted war like a
mistress; if, as the drum beat to quarters, the sailors came gaily out
of the forecastle,--it is because a fight is a period of multiplied and
intense experiences, and, by Nelson's computation, worth "thousands" to
any one who has a heart under his jacket. If the marines of the _Wager_
gave three cheers and cried "God bless the king," it was because they
liked to do things nobly for their own satisfaction. They were giving
their lives, there was no help for that; and they made it a point of
self-respect to give them handsomely. And there were never four happier
marines in God's world than these four at that moment. If it was worth
thousands to be at the Baltic, I wish a Benthamite arithmetician would
calculate how much it was worth to be one of these four marines; or how
much their story is worth to each of us who read it. And mark you,
undemonstrative men would have spoiled the situation. The finest action
is the better for a piece of purple. If the soldiers of the _Birkenhead_
had not gone down in line, or these marines of the _Wager_ had walked
away simply into the island, like plenty of other brave fellows in the
like circumstances, my Benthamite arithmetician would assign a far lower
value to the two stories. We have to desire a grand air in our heroes;
and such a knowledge of the human stage as shall make them put the dots
on their own i's, and leave us in no suspense as to when they mean to be
heroic. And hence, we should congratulate ourselves upon the fact that
our Admirals were not only great-hearted but big-spoken.
The heroes themselves say, as often as not, that fame is their object;
but I do not think that is much to the purpose. People generally say
what they have been taught to say; that was the catchword they were
given in youth to express the aims of their way of life; and men who are
gaining great battles are not likely to take much trouble in reviewing
their sentiments and the words in which they were told to express them.
Almost every person, if you will believe himself, holds a quite
different theory of life from the one on which he is patently acting.
And the fact is, fame may be a forethought and an afterthought, but it
is too abstract an idea to move people greatly in moments of swift and
momentous decision. It is from something more immediate, some
determination of blood to the head, some trick of the fancy, that the
breach is stormed or the bold word spoken. I am sure a fellow shooting
an ugly weir in a canoe has exactly as much thought about fame as most
commanders going into battle; and yet the action, fall out how it will,
is not one of those the muse delights to celebrate. Indeed it is
difficult to see why the fellow does a thing so nameless and yet so
formidable to look at, unless on the theory that he likes it. I suspect
that is why; and I suspect it is at least ten per cent. of why Lord
Beaconsfield and Mr. Gladstone have debated so much in the House of
Commons, and why Burnaby rode to Khiva the other day, and why the
Admirals courted war like a mistress.
VIII
SOME PORTRAITS BY RAEBURN
Through the initiative of a prominent citizen, Edinburgh has been in
possession, for some autumn weeks, of a gallery of paintings of singular
merit and interest. They were exposed in the apartments of the Scottish
Academy; and filled those who are accustomed to visit the annual spring
exhibition with astonishment and a sense of incongruity. Instead of the
too common purple sunsets, and pea-green fields, and distances executed
in putty and hog's lard, he beheld, looking down upon him from the walls
of room after room, a whole army of wise, grave, humorous, capable, or
beautiful countenances, painted simply and strongly by a man of genuine
instinct. It was a complete act of the Human Drawing-Room Comedy. Lords
and ladies, soldiers and doctors, hanging judges and heretical divines,
a whole generation of good society was resuscitated; and the Scotsman of
to-day walked about among the Scotsman of two generations ago. The
moment was well chosen, neither too late nor too early. The people who
sat for these pictures are not yet ancestors, they are still relations.
They are not yet altogether a part of the dusty past, but occupy a
middle distance within cry of our affections. The little child who looks
wonderingly on his grandfather's watch in the picture is now the veteran
Sheriff _emeritus_ of Perth. And I hear a story of a lady who returned
the other day to Edinburgh, after an absence of sixty years: "I could
see none of my old friends," she said, "until I went into the Raeburn
Gallery, and found them all there."
It would be difficult to say whether the collection was more interesting
on the score of unity or diversity. Where the portraits were all of the
same period, almost all of the same race, and all from the same brush,
there could not fail to be many points of similarity. And yet the
similarity of the handling seems to throw into more vigorous relief
those personal distinctions which Raeburn was so quick to seize. He was
a born painter of portraits. He looked people shrewdly between the eyes,
surprised their manners in their face, and had possessed himself of what
was essential in their character before they had been many minutes in
his studio. What he was so swift to perceive, he conveyed to the canvas
almost in the moment of conception. He had never any difficulty, he
said, about either hands or faces. About draperies or light or
composition, he might see room for hesitation or afterthought. But a
face or a hand was something plain and legible. There were no two ways
about it, any more than about the person's name. And so each of his
portraits is not only (in Doctor Johnson's phrase, aptly quoted on the
catalogue) "a piece of history," but a piece of biography into the
bargain. It is devoutly to be wished that all biography were equally
amusing, and carried its own credentials equally upon its face. These
portraits are racier than many anecdotes, and more complete than many a
volume of sententious memoirs. You can see whether you get a stronger
and clearer idea of Robertson the historian from Raeburn's palette or
Dugald Stewart's woolly and evasive periods. And then the portraits are
both signed and countersigned. For you have, first, the authority of the
artist, whom you recognise as no mean critic of the looks and manners of
men; and next you have the tacit acquiescence of the subject, who sits
looking out upon you with inimitable innocence, and apparently under the
impression that he is in a room by himself. For Raeburn could plunge at
once through all the constraint and embarrassment of the sitter, and
present the face, clear, open, and intelligent as at the most
disengaged moments. This is best seen in portraits where the sitter is
represented in some appropriate action: Neil Gow with his fiddle, Doctor
Spens shooting an arrow, or Lord Bannatyne hearing a cause. Above all,
from this point of view, the portrait of Lieutenant-Colonel Lyon is
notable. A strange enough young man, pink, fat about the lower part of
the face, with a lean forehead, a narrow nose and a fine nostril, sits
with a drawing board upon his knees. He has just paused to render
himself account of some difficulty, to disentangle some complication of
line or compare neighbouring values. And there, without any perceptible
wrinkling, you have rendered for you exactly the fixed look in the eyes,
and the unconscious compression of the mouth, that befit and signify an
effort of the kind. The whole pose, the whole expression, is absolutely
direct and simple. You are ready to take your oath to it that Colonel
Lyon had no idea he was sitting for his picture, and thought of nothing
in the world besides his own occupation of the moment.
Although the collection did not embrace, I understand, nearly the whole
of Raeburn's works, it was too large not to contain some that were
indifferent, whether as works of art or as portraits. Certainly the
standard was remarkably high, and was wonderfully maintained, but there
were one or two pictures that might have been almost as well away--one
or two that seemed wanting in salt, and some that you can only hope were
not successful likenesses. Neither of the portraits of Sir Walter Scott,
for instance, was very agreeable to look upon. You do not care to think
that Scott looked quite so rustic and puffy. And where is that peaked
forehead which according to all written accounts and many portraits, was
the distinguishing characteristic of his face? Again, in spite of his
own satisfaction and in spite of Dr. John Brown, I cannot consider that
Raeburn was very happy in hands. Without doubt, he could paint one if he
had taken the trouble to study it; but it was by no means always that
he gave himself the trouble. Looking round one of these rooms hung about
with his portraits, you were struck with the array of expressive faces,
as compared with what you may have seen in looking round a room full of
living people. But it was not so with the hands. The portraits differed
from each other in face perhaps ten times as much as they differed by
the hand; whereas with living people the two go pretty much together;
and where one is remarkable, the other will almost certainly not be
commonplace.
One interesting portrait was that of Duncan of Camperdown. He stands in
uniform beside a table, his feet slightly straddled with the balance of
an old sailor, his hand poised upon a chart by the finger-tips. The
mouth is pursed, the nostril spread and drawn up, the eyebrows very
highly arched. The cheeks lie along the jaw in folds of iron, and have
the redness that comes from much exposure to salt sea winds. From the
whole figure, attitude and countenance, there breathes something precise
and decisive, something alert, wiry, and strong. You can understand,
from the look of him, that sense, not so much of humour, as of what is
grimmest and driest in pleasantry, which inspired his address before the
fight at Camperdown. He had just overtaken the Dutch fleet under Admiral
de Winter. "Gentlemen," says he, "you see a severe winter approaching; I
have only to advise you to keep up a good fire." Somewhat of this same
spirit of adamantine drollery must have supported him in the days of the
mutiny at the Nore, when he lay off the Texel with his own flagship, the
_Venerable_, and only one other vessel, and kept up active signals as
though he had a powerful fleet in the offing, to intimidate the Dutch.
Another portrait which irresistibly attracted the eye was the
half-length of Robert M'Queen, of Braxfield, Lord Justice-Clerk. If I
know gusto in painting when I see it, this canvas was painted with rare
enjoyment. The tart, rosy, humorous look of the man, his nose like a
cudgel, his face resting squarely on the jowl, has been caught and
perpetuated with something that looks like brotherly love. A peculiarly
subtle expression haunts the lower part, sensual and incredulous, like
that of a man tasting good Bordeaux with half a fancy it has been
somewhat too long uncorked. From under the pendulous eye-lids of old age
the eyes look out with a half-youthful half-frosty twinkle. Hands, with
no pretence to distinction, are folded on the judge's stomach. So
sympathetically is the character conceived by the portrait-painter, that
it is hardly possible to avoid some movement of sympathy on the part of
the spectator. And sympathy is a thing to be encouraged, apart from
humane considerations, because it supplies us with the materials for
wisdom. It is probably more instructive to entertain a sneaking kindness
for any unpopular person, and among the rest, for Lord Braxfield, than
to give way to perfect raptures of moral indignation against his
abstract vices. He was the last judge on the Scots bench to employ the
pure Scots idiom. His opinions, thus given in Doric, and conceived in a
lively, rugged, conversational style, were full of point and authority.
Out of the bar, or off the bench, he was a convivial man, a lover of
wine, and one who "shone perculiarly" at tavern meetings. He has left
behind him an unrivalled reputation for rough and cruel speech; and to
this day his name smacks of the gallows. It was he who presided at the
trials of Muir and Skirving in 1793 and 1794; and his appearance on
these occasions was scarcely cut to the pattern of to-day. His summing
up on Muir began thus--the reader must supply for himself "the growling
blacksmith's voice" and the broad Scots accent: "Now this is the
question for consideration--Is the panel guilty of sedition, or is he
not? Now, before this can be answered, two things must be attended to
that require no proof: _First_, that the British constitution is the
best that ever was since the creation of the world, and it is not
possible to make it better." It's a pretty fair start, is it not, for a
political trial? A little later, he has occasion to refer to the
relations of Muir with "those wretches," the French. "I never liked the
French all my days," said his Lordship, "but now I hate them." And yet a
little further on: "A government in any country should be like a
corporation; and in this country it is made up of the landed interest,
which alone has a right to be represented. As for the rabble who have
nothing but personal property, what hold has the nation of them? They
may pack up their property on their backs, and leave the country in the
twinkling of an eye." After having made profession of sentiments so
cynically anti-popular as these, when the trials were at an end, which
was generally about midnight, Braxfield would walk home to his house in
George Square with no better escort than an easy conscience. I think I
see him getting his cloak about his shoulders, and, with perhaps a
lantern in one hand, steering his way along the streets in the mirk
January night. It might have been that very day that Skirving had defied
him in these words: "It is altogether unavailing for your lordship to
menace me; for I have long learned to fear not the face of man"; and I
can fancy, as Braxfield reflected on the number of what he called
_Grumbletonians_ in Edinburgh, and of how many of them must bear special
malice against so upright and inflexible a judge, nay, and might at that
very moment be lurking in the mouth of a dark close with hostile
intent--I can fancy that he indulged in a sour smile, as he reflected
that he also was not especially afraid of men's faces or men's fists,
and had hitherto found no occasion to embody this insensibility in
heroic words. For if he was an inhumane old gentleman (and I am afraid
it is a fact that he was inhumane), he was also perfectly intrepid. You
may look into the queer face of that portrait for as long as you will,
but you will not see any hole or corner for timidity to enter in.
Indeed, there would be no end to this paper if I were even to name half
of the portraits that were remarkable for their execution or interesting
by association. There was one picture of Mr. Wardrop, of Torbane Hill,
which you might palm off upon most laymen as a Rembrandt; and close by,
you saw the white head of John Clerk, of Eldin, that country gentleman
who, playing with pieces of cork on his own dining-table, invented
modern naval warfare. There was that portrait of Neil Gow, to sit for
which the old fiddler walked daily through the streets of Edinburgh arm
in arm with the Duke of Athole. There was good Harry Erskine, with his
satirical nose and upper lip, and his mouth just open for a witticism to
pop out; Hutton the geologist, in quakerish raiment, and looking
altogether trim and narrow, and as if he cared more about fossils than
young ladies; full-blown John Robison, in hyperbolical red
dressing-gown, and every inch of him a fine old man of the world;
Constable the publisher, upright beside a table, and bearing a
corporation with commercial dignity; Lord Bannatyne hearing a cause, if
ever anybody heard a cause since the world began; Lord Newton just
awakened from clandestine slumber on the bench; and the second President
Dundas, with every feature so fat that he reminds you, in his wig, of
some droll old court officer in an illustrated nursery story-book, and
yet all these fat features instinct with meaning, the fat lips curved
and compressed, the nose combining somehow the dignity of a beak with
the good-nature of a bottle, and the very double chin with an air of
intelligence and insight. And all these portraits are so pat and
telling, and look at you so spiritedly from the walls, that, compared
with the sort of living people one sees about the streets, they are as
bright new sovereigns to fishy and obliterated sixpences. Some
disparaging thoughts upon our own generation could hardly fail to
present themselves; but it is perhaps only the _sacer vates_ who is
wanting; and we also, painted by such a man as Carolus Duran, may look
in holiday immortality upon our children and grandchildren.
Raeburn's young women, to be frank, are by no means of the same order of
merit. No one, of course, could be insensible to the presence of Miss
Janet Suttie or Mrs. Campbell of Possil. When things are as pretty as
that, criticism is out of season. But, on the whole, it is only with
women of a certain age that he can be said to have succeeded, in at all
the same sense as we say he succeeded with men. The younger women do not
seem to be made of good flesh and blood. They are not painted in rich
and unctuous touches. They are dry and diaphanous. And although young
ladies in Great Britain are all that can be desired of them, I would
fain hope they are not quite so much of that as Raeburn would have us
believe. In all these pretty faces you miss character, you miss fire,
you miss that spice of the devil which is worth all the prettiness in
the world; and, what is worst of all, you miss sex. His young ladies are
not womanly to nearly the same degree as his men are masculine; they are
so in a negative sense; in short, they are the typical young ladies of
the male novelist.
To say truth, either Raeburn was timid with young and pretty sitters; or
he had stupefied himself with sentimentalities; or else (and here is
about the truth of it) Raeburn and the rest of us labour under an
obstinate blindness in one direction, and know very little more about
women after all these centuries than Adam when he first saw Eve. This is
all the more likely, because we are by no means so unintelligent in the
matter of old women. There are some capital old women, it seems to me,
in books written by men. And Raeburn has some, such as Mrs. Colin
Campbell, of Park, or the anonymous "Old lady with a large cap," which
are done in the same frank, perspicacious spirit as the very best of his
men. He could look into their eyes without trouble; and he was not
withheld, by any bashful sentimentalism, from recognising what he saw
there and unsparingly putting it down upon the canvas. But where people
cannot meet without some confusion and a good deal of involuntary
humbug, and are occupied, for as long as they are together, with a very
different vein of thought, there cannot be much room for intelligent
study nor much result in the shape of genuine comprehension. Even women,
who understand men so well for practical purposes, do not know them well
enough for the purposes of art. Take even the very best of their male
creations, take Tito Melema, for instance, and you will find he has an
equivocal air, and every now and again remembers he has a comb at the
back of his head. Of course, no woman will believe this, and many men
will be so very polite as to humour their incredulity.
IX
CHILD'S PLAY
The regret we have for our childhood is not wholly justifiable: so much
a man may lay down without fear of public ribaldry; for although we
shake our heads over the change, we are not unconscious of the manifold
advantages of our new state. What we lose in generous impulse we more
than gain in the habit of generously watching others; and the capacity
to enjoy Shakespeare may balance a lost aptitude for playing at
soldiers. Terror is gone out of our lives, moreover; we no longer see
the devil in the bed-curtains nor lie awake to listen to the wind. We go
to school no more; and if we have only exchanged one drudgery for
another (which is by no means sure), we are set free for ever from the
daily fear of chastisement. And yet a great change has overtaken us; and
although we do not enjoy ourselves less, at least we take our pleasure
differently. We need pickles nowadays to make Wednesday's cold mutton
please our Friday's appetite; and I can remember the time when to call
it red venison, and tell myself a hunter's story, would have made it
more palatable than the best of sauces. To the grown person, cold mutton
is cold mutton all the world over; not all the mythology ever invented
by man will make it better or worse to him; the broad fact, the clamant
reality, of the mutton carries away before it such seductive figments.
But for the child it is still possible to weave an enchantment over
eatables; and if he has but read of a dish in a storybook, it will be
heavenly manna to him for a week.
If a grown man does not like eating and drinking and exercise, if he is
not something positive in his tastes, it means he has a feeble body and
should have some medicine; but children may be pure spirits, if they
will, and take their enjoyment in a world of moonshine. Sensation does
not count for so much in our first years as afterwards; something of the
swaddling numbness of infancy clings about us; we see and touch and hear
through a sort of golden mist. Children, for instance, are able enough
to see, but they have no great faculty for looking; they do not use
their eyes for the pleasure of using them, but for by-ends of their own;
and the things I call to mind seeing most vividly were not beautiful in
themselves, but merely interesting or enviable to me as I thought they
might be turned to practical account in play. Nor is the sense of touch
so clean and poignant in children as it is in a man. If you will turn
over your old memories, I think the sensations of this sort you remember
will be somewhat vague, and come to not much more than a blunt, general
sense of heat on summer days, or a blunt, general sense of well-being in
bed. And here, of course, you will understand pleasurable sensations;
for overmastering pain--the most deadly and tragical element in life,
and the true commander of man's soul and body--alas! pain has its own
way with all of us; it breaks in, a rude visitant, upon the fairy garden
where the child wanders in a dream, no less surely than it rules upon
the field of battle, or sends the immortal war-god whimpering to his
father; and innocence, no more than philosophy, can protect us from this
sting. As for taste, when we bear in mind the excesses of unmitigated
sugar which delight a youthful palate, "it is surely no very cynical
asperity" to think taste a character of the maturer growth. Smell and
hearing are perhaps more developed; I remember many scents, many voices,
and a great deal of spring singing in the woods. But hearing is capable
of vast improvement as a means of pleasure; and there is all the world
between gaping wonderment at the jargon of birds, and the emotion with
which a man listens to articulate music.
At the same time, and step by step with this increase in the definition
and intensity of what we feel which accompanies our growing age, another
change takes place in the sphere of intellect, by which all things are
transformed and seen through theories and associations as through
coloured windows. We make to ourselves day by day, out of history, and
gossip, and economical speculations, and God knows what, a medium in
which we walk and through which we look abroad. We study shop windows
with other eyes than in our childhood, never to wonder, not always to
admire, but to make and modify our little incongruous theories about
life. It is no longer the uniform of a soldier that arrests our
attention; but perhaps the flowing carriage of a woman, or perhaps a
countenance that has been vividly stamped with passion and carries an
adventurous story written in its lines. The pleasure of surprise is
passed away; sugar loaves and water-carts seem mighty tame to encounter;
and we walk the streets to make romances and to sociologise. Nor must we
deny that a good many of us walk them solely for the purposes of transit
or in the interest of a livelier digestion. These, indeed, may look back
with mingled thoughts upon their childhood, but the rest are in a better
case; they know more than when they were children, they understand
better, their desires and sympathies answer more nimbly to the
provocation of the senses, and their minds are brimming with interest as
they go about the world.
According to my contention, this is a flight to which children cannot
rise. They are wheeled in perambulators or dragged about by nurses in a
pleasing stupor. A vague, faint, abiding wonderment possesses them. Here
and there some specially remarkable circumstance, such as a water-cart
or a guardsman, fairly penetrates into the seat of thought, and calls
them, for half a moment, out of themselves; and you may see them, still
towed forward sideways by the inexorable nurse as by a sort of destiny,
but still staring at the bright object in their wake. It may be some
minutes before another such moving spectacle reawakens them to the world
in which they dwell. For other children, they almost invariably show
some intelligent sympathy. "There is a fine fellow making mud pies,"
they seem to say; "that I can understand, there is some sense in mud
pies." But the doings of their elders, unless where they are speakingly
picturesque or recommend themselves by the quality of being easily
imitable, they let them go over their heads (as we say) without the
least regard. If it were not for this perpetual imitation, we should be
tempted to fancy they despised us outright, or only considered us in the
light of creatures brutally strong and brutally silly; among whom they
condescended to dwell in obedience like a philosopher at a barbarous
court. At times, indeed, they display an arrogance of disregard that is
truly staggering. Once, when I was groaning aloud with physical pain, a
young gentleman came into the room and nonchalantly inquired if I had
seen his bow and arrow. He made no account of my groans, which he
accepted, as he had to accept so much else, as a piece of the
inexplicable conduct of his elders; and like a wise young gentleman, he
would waste no wonder on the subject. Those elders, who care so little
for rational enjoyment, and are even the enemies of rational enjoyment
for others, he had accepted without understanding and without complaint,
as the rest of us accept the scheme of the universe.
We grown people can tell ourselves a story, give and take strokes until
the bucklers ring, ride far and fast, marry, fall, and die; all the
while sitting quietly by the fire or lying prone in bed. This is exactly
what a child cannot do, or does not do, at least, when he can find
anything else. He works all with lay figures and stage properties. When
his story comes to the fighting, he must rise, get something by way of
a sword and have a set-to with a piece of furniture, until he is out of
breath. When he comes to ride with the king's pardon, he must bestride a
chair, which he will so hurry and belabour and on which he will so
furiously demean himself, that the messenger will arrive, if not bloody
with spurring, at least fiery red with haste. If his romance involves an
accident upon a cliff, he must clamber in person about the chest of
drawers and fall bodily upon the carpet, before his imagination is
satisfied. Lead soldiers, dolls, all toys, in short, are in the same
category and answer the same end. Nothing can stagger a child's faith;
he accepts the clumsiest substitutes and can swallow the most staring
incongruities. The chair he has just been besieging as a castle, or
valiantly cutting to the ground as a dragon, is taken away for the
accommodation of a morning visitor, and he is nothing abashed; he can
skirmish by the hour with a stationary coal-scuttle; in the midst of the
enchanted pleasance, he can see, without sensible shock, the gardener
soberly digging potatoes for the day's dinner. He can make abstraction
of whatever does not fit into his fable; and he puts his eyes into his
pocket, just as we hold our noses in an unsavoury lane. And so it is,
that although the ways of children cross with those of their elders in a
hundred places daily, they never go in the same direction nor so much as
lie in the same element. So may the telegraph wires intersect the line
of the highroad, or so might a landscape painter and a bagman visit the
same country, and yet move in different worlds.
People, struck with these spectacles, cry aloud about the power of
imagination in the young. Indeed, there may be two words to that. It is,
in some ways, but a pedestrian fancy that the child exhibits. It is the
grown people who make the nursery stories; all the children do is
jealously to preserve the text. One out of a dozen reasons why "Robinson
Crusoe" should be so popular with youth, is that it hits their level in
this matter to a nicety; Crusoe was always at makeshifts, and had, in so
many words, to _play_ at a great variety of professions; and then the
book is all about tools, and there is nothing that delights a child so
much. Hammers and saws belong to a province of life that positively
calls for imitation. The juvenile lyrical drama, surely of the most
ancient Thespian model, wherein the trades of mankind are successively
simulated to the running burthen "On a cold and frosty morning," gives a
good instance of the artistic taste in children. And this need for overt
action and lay figures testifies to a defect in the child's imagination
which prevents him from carrying out his novels in the privacy of his
own heart. He does not yet know enough of the world and men. His
experience is incomplete. That stage-wardrobe and scene-room that we
call the memory is so ill-provided, that he can overtake few
combinations and body out few stories, to his own content, without some
external aid. He is at the experimental stage; he is not sure how one
would feel in certain circumstances; to make sure, he must come as near
trying it as his means permit. And so here is young heroism with a
wooden sword, and mothers practise their kind vocation over a bit of
jointed stick. It may be laughable enough just now; but it is these same
people and these same thoughts, that not long hence, when they are on
the theatre of life, will make you weep and tremble. For children think
very much the same thoughts and dream the same dreams as bearded men and
marriageable women. No one is more romantic. Fame and honour, the love
of young men and the love of mothers, the business man's pleasure in
method, all these and others they anticipate and rehearse in their play
hours. Upon us, who are further advanced and fairly dealing with the
threads of destiny, they only glance from time to time to glean a hint
for their own mimetic reproduction. Two children playing at soldiers are
far more interesting to each other than one of the scarlet beings whom
both are busy imitating. This is perhaps the greatest oddity of all.
"Art for art" is their motto; and the doings of grown folk are only
interesting as the raw material for play. Not Théophile Gautier, not
Flaubert, can look more callously upon life, or rate the reproduction
more highly over the reality; and they will parody an execution, a
deathbed, or the funeral of the young man of Nain, with all the
cheerfulness in the world.
The true parallel for play is not to be found, of course, in conscious
art, which, though it be derived from play, is itself an abstract,
impersonal thing, and depends largely upon philosophical interests
beyond the scope of childhood. It is when we make castles in the air and
personate the leading character in our own romances, that we return to
the spirit of our first years. Only, there are several reasons why the
spirit is no longer so agreeable to indulge. Nowadays, when we admit
this personal element into our divagations we are apt to stir up
uncomfortable and sorrowful memories, and remind ourselves sharply of
old wounds. Our day-dreams can no longer lie all in the air like a story
in the "Arabian Nights"; they read to us rather like the history of a
period in which we ourselves had taken part, where we come across many
unfortunate passages and find our own conduct smartly reprimanded. And
then the child, mind you, acts his parts. He does not merely repeat them
to himself; he leaps, he runs, and sets the blood agog over all his
body. And so his play breathes him; and he no sooner assumes a passion
than he gives it vent. Alas! when we betake ourselves to our
intellectual form of play, sitting quietly by the fire or lying prone in
bed, we rouse many hot feelings for which we can find no outlet.
Substitutes are not acceptable to the mature mind, which desires the
thing itself; and even to rehearse a triumphant dialogue with one's
enemy, although it is perhaps the most satisfactory piece of play still
left within our reach, is not entirely satisfying, and is even apt to
lead to a visit and an interview which may be the reverse of triumphant
after all.
In the child's world of dim sensation, play is all in all. "Making
believe" is the gist of his whole life, and he cannot so much as take a
walk except in character. I could not learn my alphabet without some
suitable _mise-en-scène_, and had to act a business man in an office
before I could sit down to my book. Will you kindly question your
memory, and find out how much you did, work or pleasure, in good faith
and soberness, and for how much you had to cheat yourself with some
invention? I remember, as though it were yesterday, the expansion of
spirit, the dignity and self-reliance, that came with a pair of
mustachios in burnt cork, even when there was none to see. Children are
even content to forego what we call the realities, and prefer the shadow
to the substance. When they might be speaking intelligibly together,
they chatter senseless gibberish by the hour, and are quite happy
because they are making believe to speak French. I have said already how
even the imperious appetite of hunger suffers itself to be gulled and
led by the nose with the fag end of an old song. And it goes deeper than
this: when children are together even a meal is felt as an interruption
in the business of life; and they must find some imaginative sanction,
and tell themselves some sort of story, to account for, to colour, to
render entertaining, the simple processes of eating and drinking. What
wonderful fancies I have heard evolved out of the pattern upon
tea-cups!--from which there followed a code of rules and a whole world
of excitement, until tea-drinking began to take rank as a game. When my
cousin and I took our porridge of a morning, we had a device to enliven
the course of the meal. He ate his with sugar, and explained it to be a
country continually buried under snow. I took mine with milk, and
explained it to be a country suffering gradual inundation. You can
imagine us exchanging bulletins; how here was an island still
unsubmerged, here a valley not yet covered with snow; what inventions
were made; how his population lived in cabins on perches and travelled
on stilts, and how mine was always in boats; how the interest grew
furious, as the last corner of safe ground was cut off on all sides and
grew smaller every moment; and how, in fine, the food was of altogether
secondary importance, and might even have been nauseous, so long as we
seasoned it with these dreams. But perhaps the most exciting moments I
ever had over a meal were in the case of calves'-feet jelly. It was
hardly possible not to believe--and you may be sure, so far from trying,
I did all I could to favour the illusion--that some part of it was
hollow, and that sooner or later my spoon would lay open the secret
tabernacle of the golden rock. There, might some miniature _Red Beard_
await his hour; there, might one find the treasures of the _Forty
Thieves_, and bewildered Cassim beating about the walls. And so I
quarried on slowly, with bated breath, savouring the interest. Believe
me, I had little palate left for the jelly; and though I preferred the
taste when I took cream with it, I used often to go without, because the
cream dimmed the transparent fractures.
Even with games, this spirit is authoritative with right-minded
children. It is thus that hide-and-seek has so pre-eminent a
sovereignty, for it is the wellspring of romance, and the actions and
the excitement to which it gives rise lend themselves to almost any sort
of fable. And thus cricket, which is a mere matter of dexterity,
palpably about nothing and for no end, often fails to satisfy infantile
craving. It is a game, if you like, but not a game of play. You cannot
tell yourself a story about cricket; and the activity it calls forth can
be justified on no rational theory. Even football, although it admirably
simulates the tug and the ebb and flow of battle, has presented
difficulties to the mind of young sticklers after verisimilitude; and I
knew at least one little boy who was mightily exercised about the
presence of the ball, and had to spirit himself up, whenever he came to
play, with an elaborate story of enchantment, and take the missile as a
sort of talisman bandied about in conflict between two Arabian nations.
To think of such a frame of mind is to become disquieted about the
bringing up of children. Surely they dwell in a mythological epoch, and
are not the contemporaries of their parents. What can they think of
them? what can they make of these bearded or petticoated giants who look
down upon their games? who move upon a cloudy Olympus, following unknown
designs apart from rational enjoyment? who profess the tenderest
solicitude for children, and yet every now and again reach down out of
their altitude and terribly vindicate the prerogatives of age? Off goes
the child, corporally smarting, but morally rebellious. Were there ever
such unthinkable deities as parents? I would give a great deal to know
what, in nine cases out of ten, is the child's unvarnished feeling. A
sense of past cajolery; a sense of personal attraction, at best very
feeble; above all, I should imagine, a sense of terror for the untried
residue of mankind; go to make up the attraction that he feels. No
wonder, poor little heart, with such a weltering world in front of him,
if he clings to the hand he knows! The dread irrationality of the whole
affair, as it seems to children, is a thing we are all too ready to
forget. "Oh, why," I remember passionately wondering, "why can we not
all be happy and devote ourselves to play?" And when children do
philosophise, I believe it is usually to very much the same purpose.
One thing, at least, comes very clearly out of these considerations:
that whatever we are to expect at the hands of children, it should not
be any peddling exactitude about matters of fact. They walk in a vain
show, and among mists and rainbows; they are passionate after dreams and
unconcerned about realities; speech is a difficult art not wholly
learned; and there is nothing in their own tastes or purposes to teach
them what we mean by abstract truthfulness. When a bad writer is
inexact, even if he can look back on half a century of years, we charge
him with incompetence and not with dishonesty. And why not extend the
same allowance to imperfect speakers? Let a stockbroker be dead stupid
about poetry, or a poet inexact in the details of business, and we
excuse them heartily from blame. But show us a miserable, unbreeched,
human entity, whose whole profession it is to take a tub for a fortified
town and a shaving-brush for the deadly stiletto, and who passes
three-fourths of his time in a dream and the rest in open
self-deception, and we expect him to be as nice upon a matter of fact as
a scientific expert bearing evidence. Upon my heart, I think it less
than decent. You do not consider how little the child sees, or how swift
he is to weave what he has seen into bewildering fiction; and that he
cares no more for what you call truth, than you for a gingerbread
dragoon.
I am reminded, as I write, that the child is very inquiring as to the
precise truth of stories. But indeed this is a very different matter,
and one bound up with the subject of play, and the precise amount of
playfulness, or playability, to be looked for in the world. Many such
burning questions must arise in the course of nursery education. Among
the fauna of this planet, which already embraces the pretty soldier and
the terrifying Irish beggar-man, is, or is not, the child to expect a
Bluebeard or a Cormoran? Is he, or is he not, to look out for magicians,
kindly and potent? May he, or may he not, reasonably hope to be cast
away upon a desert island, or turned to such diminutive proportions that
he can live on equal terms with his lead soldiery, and go a cruise in
his own toy-schooner? Surely all these are practical questions to a
neophyte entering upon life with a view to play. Precision upon such a
point, the child can understand. But if you merely ask him of his past
behaviour, as to who threw such a stone, for instance, or struck such
and such a match; or whether he had looked into a parcel or gone by a
forbidden path,--why, he can see no moment in the inquiry, and it is ten
to one he has already half forgotten and half bemused himself with
subsequent imaginings.
It would be easy to leave them in their native cloudland, where they
figure so prettily--pretty like flowers and innocent like dogs. They
will come out of their gardens soon enough, and have to go into offices
and the witness-box. Spare them yet a while, O conscientious parent! Let
them doze among their playthings yet a little! for who knows what a
rough, warfaring existence lies before them in the future?
X
WALKING TOURS
It must not be imagined that a walking tour, as some would have us
fancy, is merely a better or worse way of seeing the country. There are
many ways of seeing landscape quite as good; and none more vivid, in
spite of canting dilettantes, than from a railway train. But landscape
on a walking tour is quite accessory. He who is indeed of the
brotherhood does not voyage in quest of the picturesque, but of certain
jolly humours--of the hope and spirit with which the march begins at
morning, and the peace and spiritual repletion of the evening's rest. He
cannot tell whether he puts his knapsack on, or takes it off, with more
delight. The excitement of the departure puts him in key for that of the
arrival. Whatever he does is not only a reward in itself, but will be
further rewarded in the sequel; and so pleasure leads on to pleasure in
an endless chain. It is this that so few can understand; they will
either be always lounging or always at five miles an hour; they do not
play off the one against the other, prepare all day for the evening, and
all evening for the next day. And, above all, it is here that your
over-walker fails of comprehension. His heart rises against those who
drink their curaçoa in liqueur-glasses, when he himself can swill it in
a brown John. He will not believe that the flavour is more delicate in
the smaller dose. He will not believe that to walk this unconscionable
distance is merely to stupefy and brutalise himself, and come to his
inn, at night, with a sort of frost on his five wits, and a starless
night of darkness in his spirit. Not for him the mild luminous evening
of the temperate walker! He has nothing left of man but a physical need
for bedtime and a double nightcap; and even his pipe, if he be a smoker,
will be savourless and disenchanted. It is the fate of such an one to
take twice as much trouble as is needed to obtain happiness, and miss
the happiness in the end; he is the man of the proverb, in short, who
goes farther and fares worse.
Now, to be properly enjoyed, a walking tour should be gone upon alone.
If you go in a company, or even in pairs, it is no longer a walking tour
in anything but name; it is something else, and more in the nature of a
picnic. A walking tour should be gone upon alone, because freedom is of
the essence; because you should be able to stop and go on, and follow
this way or that, as the freak takes you; and because you must have your
own pace, and neither trot alongside a champion walker, nor mince in
time with a girl. And then you must be open to all impressions, and let
your thoughts take colour from what you see. You should be as a pipe for
any wind to play upon. "I cannot see the wit," says Hazlitt, "of walking
and talking at the same time. When I am in the country I wish to
vegetate like the country,"--which is the gist of all that can be said
upon the matter. There should be no cackle of voices at your elbow, to
jar on the meditative silence of the morning. And so long as a man is
reasoning he cannot surrender himself to that fine intoxication that
comes of much motion in the open air, that begins in a sort of a dazzle
and sluggishness of the brain, and ends in a peace that passes
comprehension.
During the first day or so of any tour there are moments of bitterness,
when the traveller feels more than coldly towards his knapsack, when he
is half in a mind to throw it bodily over the hedge, and, like Christian
on a similar occasion, "give three leaps and go on singing." And yet it
soon acquires a property of easiness. It becomes magnetic; the spirit of
the journey enters into it. And no sooner have you passed the straps
over your shoulder than the lees of sleep are cleared from you, you pull
yourself together with a shake, and fall at once into your stride. And
surely, of all possible moods, this, in which a man takes the road, is
the best. Of course, if he _will_ keep thinking of his anxieties, if he
_will_ open the merchant Abudah's chest and walk arm-in-arm with the
hag--why, wherever he is, and whether he walk fast or slow, the chances
are that he will not be happy. And so much the more shame to himself!
There are perhaps thirty men setting forth at that same hour, and I
would lay a large wager there is not another dull face among the thirty.
It would be a fine thing to follow, in a coat of darkness, one after
another of these wayfarers, some summer morning, for the first few miles
upon the road. This one, who walks fast, with a keen look in his eyes,
is all concentrated in his own mind; he is up at his loom, weaving and
weaving, to set the landscape to words. This one peers about, as he
goes, among the grasses; he waits by the canal to watch the
dragon-flies; he leans on the gate of the pasture, and cannot look
enough upon the complacent kine. And here comes another, talking,
laughing, and gesticulating to himself. His face changes from time to
time, as indignation flashes from his eyes or anger clouds his forehead.
He is composing articles, delivering orations, and conducting the most
impassioned interviews, by the way. A little farther on, and it is as
like as not he will begin to sing. And well for him, supposing him to be
no great master in that art, if he stumble across no stolid peasant at a
corner; for on such an occasion, I scarcely know which is the more
troubled, or whether it is worse to suffer the confusion of your
troubadour, or the unfeigned alarm of your clown. A sedentary
population, accustomed, besides, to the strange mechanical bearing of
the common tramp, can in no wise explain to itself the gaiety of these
passers-by. I knew one man who was arrested as a runaway lunatic,
because, although a full-grown person with a red beard, he skipped as
he went like a child. And you would be astonished if I were to tell you
all the grave and learned heads who have confessed to me that, when on
walking tours, they sang--and sang very ill--and had a pair of red ears
when, as described above, the inauspicious peasant plumped into their
arms from round a corner. And here, lest you should think I am
exaggerating, is Hazlitt's own confession, from his essay "On Going a
Journey," which is so good that there should be a tax levied on all who
have not read it:--
"Give me the clear blue sky over my head," says he, "and the green turf
beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours' march to
dinner--and then to thinking! It is hard if I cannot start some game on
these lone heaths. I laugh, I run, I leap, I sing for joy."
BRAVO! After that adventure of my friend with the policeman, you would
not have cared, would you, to publish that in the first person? But we
have no bravery nowadays, and, even in books, must all pretend to be as
dull and foolish as our neighbours. It was not so with Hazlitt. And
notice how learned he is (as, indeed, throughout the essay) in the
theory of walking tours. He is none of your athletic men in purple
stockings, who walk their fifty miles a day: three hours' march is his
ideal. And then he must have a winding road, the epicure.
Yet there is one thing I object to in these words of his, one thing in
the great master's practice that seems to me not wholly wise. I do not
approve of that leaping and running. Both of these hurry the
respiration; they both shake up the brain out of its glorious open-air
confusion; and they both break the pace. Uneven walking is not so
agreeable to the body, and it distracts and irritates the mind. Whereas,
when once you have fallen into an equable stride, it requires no
conscious thought from you to keep it up, and yet it prevents you from
thinking earnestly of anything else. Like knitting, like the work of a
copying clerk, it gradually neutralises and sets to sleep the serious
activity of the mind. We can think of this or that, lightly and
laughingly, as a child thinks, or as we think in a morning doze; we can
make puns or puzzle out acrostics, and trifle in a thousand ways with
words and rhymes; but when it comes to honest work, when we come to
gather ourselves together for an effort, we may sound the trumpet as
loud and long as we please; the great barons of the mind will not rally
to the standard, but sit, each one, at home, warming his hands over his
own fire, and brooding on his own private thought!
In the course of a day's walk, you see, there is much variance in the
mood. From the exhilaration of the start, to the happy phlegm of the
arrival, the change is certainly great. As the day goes on, the
traveller moves from the one extreme end towards the other. He becomes
more and more incorporated with the material landscape, and the open-air
drunkenness grows upon him with great strides, until he posts along the
road, and sees everything about him, as in a cheerful dream. The first
is certainly brighter, but the second stage is the more peaceful. A man
does not make so many articles towards the end, nor does he laugh aloud;
but the purely animal pleasures, the sense of physical wellbeing, the
delight of every inhalation, of every time the muscles tighten down the
thigh, console him for the absence of the others, and bring him to his
destination still content.
Nor must I forget to say a word on bivouacs. You come to a milestone on
a hill, or some place where deep ways meet under trees; and off goes the
knapsack, and down you sit to smoke a pipe in the shade. You sink into
yourself, and the birds come round and look at you; and your smoke
dissipates upon the afternoon under the blue dome of heaven; and the sun
lies warm upon your feet, and the cool air visits your neck and turns
aside your open shirt. If you are not happy, you must have an evil
conscience. You may dally as long as you like by the roadside. It is
almost as if the millennium were arrived, when we shall throw our
clocks and watches over the housetop, and remember time and seasons no
more. Not to keep hours for a lifetime is, I was going to say, to live
for ever. You have no idea, unless you have tried it, how endlessly long
is a summer's day that you measure out only by hunger, and bring to an
end only when you are drowsy. I know a village where there are hardly
any clocks, where no one knows more of the days of the week than by a
sort of instinct for the fête on Sundays, and where only one person can
tell you the day of the month, and she is generally wrong; and if people
were aware how slow Time journeyed in that village, and what armfuls of
spare hours he gives, over and above the bargain, to its wise
inhabitants, I believe there would be a stampede out of London,
Liverpool, Paris, and a variety of large towns, where the clocks lose
their heads, and shake the hours out each one faster than the other, as
though they were all in a wager. And all these foolish pilgrims would
each bring his own misery along with him, in a watch-pocket! It is to be
noticed there were no clocks and watches in the much-vaunted days before
the flood. It follows, of course, there were no appointments, and
punctuality was not yet thought upon. "Though ye take from a covetous
man all his treasure," says Milton, "he has yet one jewel left; ye
cannot deprive him of his covetousness." And so I would say of a modern
man of business, you may do what you will for him, put him in Eden, give
him the elixir of life--he has still a flaw at heart, he still has his
business habits. Now, there is no time when business habits are more
mitigated than on a walking tour. And so during these halts, as I say,
you will feel almost free.
But it is at night, and after dinner, that the best hour comes. There
are no such pipes to be smoked as those that follow a good day's march;
the flavour of the tobacco is a thing to be remembered, it is so dry and
aromatic, so full and so fine. If you wind up the evening with grog, you
will own there was never such grog; at every sip a jocund tranquillity
spreads about your limbs, and sits easily in your heart. If you read a
book--and you will never do so save by fits and starts--you find the
language strangely racy and harmonious; words take a new meaning; single
sentences possess the ear for half-an-hour together; and the writer
endears himself to you, at every page, by the nicest coincidence of
sentiment. It seems as if it were a book you had written yourself in a
dream. To all we have read on such occasions we look back with special
favour. "It was on the 10th of April, 1798," says Hazlitt, with amorous
precision, "that I sat down to a volume of the new 'Héloïse,' at the Inn
at Llangollen, over a bottle of sherry and a cold chicken." I should
wish to quote more, for though we are mighty fine fellows nowadays, we
cannot write like Hazlitt. And, talking of that, a volume of Hazlitt's
essays would be a capital pocket-book on such a journey; so would a
volume of Heine's songs; and for "Tristram Shandy" I can pledge a fair
experience.
If the evening be fine and warm, there is nothing better in life than to
lounge before the inn door in the sunset, or lean over the parapet of
the bridge, to watch the weeds and the quick fishes. It is then, if
ever, that you taste Joviality to the full significance of that
audacious word. Your muscles are so agreeably slack, you feel so clean
and so strong and so idle, that whether you move or sit still, whatever
you do is done with pride and a kingly sort of pleasure. You fall in
talk with any one, wise or foolish, drunk or sober. And it seems as if a
hot walk purged you, more than of anything else, of all narrowness and
pride, and left curiosity to play its part freely, as in a child or a
man of science. You lay aside all your own hobbies, to watch provincial
humours develop themselves before you, now as a laughable farce, and now
grave and beautiful like an old tale.
Or perhaps you are left to your own company for the night, and surly
weather imprisons you by the fire. You may remember how Burns, numbering
past pleasures, dwells upon the hours when he has been "happy thinking."
It is a phrase that may well perplex a poor modern, girt about on every
side by clocks and chimes, and haunted, even at night, by flaming
dial-plates. For we are all so busy, and have so many far-off projects
to realise, and castles in the fire to turn into solid habitable
mansions on a gravel soil, that we can find no time for pleasure trips
into the Land of Thought and among the Hills of Vanity. Changed times,
indeed, when we must sit all night, beside the fire, with folded hands;
and a changed world for most of us, when we find we can pass the hours
without discontent, and be happy thinking. We are in such haste to be
doing, to be writing, to be gathering gear, to make our voice audible a
moment in the derisive silence of eternity, that we forget that one
thing, of which these are but the parts--namely, to live. We fall in
love, we drink hard, we run to and fro upon the earth like frightened
sheep. And now you are to ask yourself if, when all is done, you would
not have been better to sit by the fire at home, and be happy thinking.
To sit still and contemplate,--to remember the faces of women without
desire, to be pleased by the great deeds of men without envy, to be
everything and everywhere in sympathy, and yet content to remain where
and what you are--is not this to know both wisdom and virtue, and to
dwell with happiness? After all, it is not they who carry flags, but
they who look upon it from a private chamber, who have the fun of the
procession. And once you are at that, you are in the very humour of all
social heresy. It is no time for shuffling, or for big, empty words. If
you ask yourself what you mean by fame, riches, or learning, the answer
is far to seek; and you go back into that kingdom of light imaginations,
which seem so vain in the eyes of Philistines perspiring after wealth,
and so momentous to those who are stricken with the disproportions of
the world, and, in the face of the gigantic stars, cannot stop to split
differences between two degrees of the infinitesimally small, such as a
tobacco-pipe or the Roman Empire, a million of money or a fiddlestick's
end.
You lean from the window, your last pipe reeking whitely into the
darkness, your body full of delicious pains, your mind enthroned in the
seventh circle of content; when suddenly the mood changes, the
weather-cock goes about, and you ask yourself one question more:
whether, for the interval, you have been the wisest philosopher or the
most egregious of donkeys? Human experience is not yet able to reply;
but at least you have had a fine moment, and looked down upon all the
kingdoms of the earth. And whether it was wise or foolish, to-morrow's
travel will carry you, body and mind, into some different parish of the
infinite.
XI
PAN'S PIPES
The world in which we live has been variously said and sung by the most
ingenious poets and philosophers: these reducing it to formulæ and
chemical ingredients, those striking the lyre in high-sounding measures
for the handiwork of God. What experience supplies is of a mingled
tissue, and the choosing mind has much to regret before it can get
together the materials of a theory. Dew and thunder, destroying Attila
and the Spring lambkins, belong to an order of contrasts which no
repetition can assimilate. There is an uncouth, outlandish strain
throughout the web of the world, as from a vexatious planet in the house
of life. Things are not congruous and wear strange disguises: the
consummate flower is fostered out of dung, and after nourishing itself
awhile with heaven's delicate distillations, decays again into
indistinguishable soil; and with Cæsar's ashes, Hamlet tells us, the
urchins make dirt pies and filthily besmear their countenance. Nay, the
kindly shine of summer, when tracked home with the scientific spyglass,
is found to issue from the most portentous nightmare of the
universe--the great, conflagrant sun: a world of hell's squibs,
tumultuary, roaring aloud, inimical to life. The sun itself is enough to
disgust a human being of the scene which he inhabits; and you would not
fancy there was a green or habitable spot in a universe thus awfully
lighted up. And yet it is by the blaze of such a conflagration, to which
the fire of Rome was but a spark, that we do all our fiddling, and hold
domestic tea-parties at the arbour door.
The Greeks figured Pan, the god of Nature, now terribly stamping his
foot, so that armies were dispersed; now by the woodside on a summer
noon trolling on his pipe until he charmed the hearts of upland
ploughmen. And the Greeks, in so figuring, uttered the last word of
human experience. To certain smoke-dried spirits matter and motion and
elastic æthers, and the hypothesis of this or that other spectacled
professor, tell a speaking story; but for youth and all ductile and
congenial minds, Pan is not dead, but of all the classic hierarchy alone
survives in triumph; goat-footed, with a gleeful and an angry look, the
type of the shaggy world: and in every wood, if you go with a spirit
properly prepared, you shall hear the note of his pipe.
For it is a shaggy world, and yet studded with gardens; where the salt
and tumbling sea receives clear rivers running from among reeds and
lilies; fruitful and austere; a rustic world; sunshiny, lewd, and cruel.
What is it the birds sing among the trees in pairing time? What means
the sound of the rain falling far and wide upon the leafy forest? To
what tune does the fisherman whistle, as he hauls in his net at morning,
and the bright fish are heaped inside the boat? These are all airs upon
Pan's pipe; he it was who gave them breath in the exultation of his
heart, and gleefully modulated their outflow with his lips and fingers.
The coarse mirth of herdsmen, shaking the dells with laughter and
striking out high echoes from the rock; the tune of moving feet in the
lamplit city, or on the smooth ballroom floor; the hooves of many
horses, beating the wide pastures in alarm; the song of hurrying rivers;
the colour of clear skies; and smiles and the live touch of hands; and
the voice of things, and their significant look, and the renovating
influence they breathe forth--these are his joyful measures, to which
the whole earth treads in choral harmony. To this music the young lambs
bound as to a tabor, and the London shop-girl skips rudely in the
dance. For it puts a spirit of gladness in all hearts; and to look on
the happy side of nature is common, in their hours, to all created
things. Some are vocal under a good influence, are pleasing whenever
they are pleased, and hand on their happiness to others, as a child who,
looking upon lovely things, looks lovely. Some leap to the strains with
unapt foot, and make a halting figure in the universal dance. And some,
like sour spectators at the play, receive the music into their hearts
with an unmoved countenance, and walk like strangers through the general
rejoicing. But let him feign never so carefully, there is not a man but
has his pulses shaken when Pan trolls out a stave of ecstasy and sets
the world a-singing.
Alas if that were all! But oftentimes the air is changed; and in the
screech of the night wind, chasing navies, subverting the tall ships and
the rooted cedar of the hills; in the random deadly levin or the fury of
headlong floods, we recognise the "dread foundation" of life and the
anger in Pan's heart. Earth wages open war against her children, and
under her softest touch hides treacherous claws. The cool waters invite
us in to drown; the domestic hearth burns up in the hour of sleep, and
makes an end of all. Everything is good or bad, helpful or deadly not in
itself, but by its circumstances. For a few bright days in England the
hurricane must break forth and the North Sea pay a toll of populous
ships. And when the universal music has led lovers into the path of
dalliance, confident of Nature's sympathy, suddenly the air shifts into
a minor, and death makes a clutch from his ambuscade below the bed of
marriage. For death is given in a kiss; the dearest kindnesses are
fatal; and into this life, where one thing preys upon another, the child
too often makes its entrance from the mother's corpse. It is no wonder,
with so traitorous a scheme of things, if the wise people who created
for us the idea of Pan thought that of all fears the fear of him was the
most terrible, since it embraces all. And still we preserve the phrase:
a panic terror. To reckon dangers too curiously, to hearken too intently
for the threat that runs through all the winning music of the world, to
hold back the hand from the rose because of the thorn, and from life
because of death: this it is to be afraid of Pan. Highly respectable
citizens who flee life's pleasures and responsibilities and keep, with
upright hat, upon the midway of custom, avoiding the right hand and the
left, the ecstasies and the agonies, how surprised they would be if they
could hear their attitude mythologically expressed, and knew themselves
as tooth-chattering ones, who flee from Nature because they fear the
hand of Nature's God! Shrilly sound Pan's pipes; and behold the banker
instantly concealed in the bank parlour! For to distrust one's impulses
is to be recreant to Pan.
There are moments when the mind refuses to be satisfied with evolution,
and demands a ruddier presentation of the sum of man's experience.
Sometimes the mood is brought about by laughter at the humorous side of
life, as when, abstracting ourselves from earth, we imagine people
plodding on foot, or seated in ships and speedy trains, with the planet
all the while whirling in the opposite direction, so that, for all their
hurry, they travel back-foremost through the universe of space.
Sometimes it comes by the spirit of delight, and sometimes by the spirit
of terror. At least, there will always be hours when we refuse to be put
off by the feint of explanation, nicknamed science; and demand instead
some palpitating image of our estate, that shall represent the troubled
and uncertain element in which we dwell, and satisfy reason by the means
of art. Science writes of the world as if with the cold finger of a
starfish; it is all true; but what is it when compared to the reality of
which it discourses? where hearts beat high in April, and death strikes,
and hills totter in the earthquake, and there is a glamour over all the
objects of sight, and a thrill in all noises for the ear, and Romance
herself has made her dwelling among men? So we come back to the old
myth, and hear the goat-footed piper making the music which is itself
the charm and terror of things; and when a glen invites our visiting
footsteps, fancy that Pan leads us thither with a gracious tremolo; or,
when our hearts quail at the thunder of the cataract, tell ourselves
that he has stamped his hoof in the nigh thicket.
XII
A PLEA FOR GAS LAMPS
Cities given, the problem was to light them. How to conduct individual
citizens about the burgess-warren, when once heaven had withdrawn its
leading luminary? or--since we live in a scientific age--when once our
spinning planet has turned its back upon the sun? The moon, from time to
time, was doubtless very helpful; the stars had a cheery look among the
chimney-pots; and a cresset here and there, on church or citadel,
produced a fine pictorial effect, and, in places where the ground lay
unevenly, held out the right hand of conduct to the benighted. But, sun,
moon, and stars abstracted or concealed, the night-faring inhabitant had
to fall back--we speak on the authority of old prints--upon stable
lanthorns two storeys in height. Many holes, drilled in the conical
turret-roof of this vagabond Pharos, let up spouts of dazzlement into
the bearer's eyes; and as he paced forth in the ghostly darkness,
carrying his own sun by a ring about his finger, day and night swung to
and fro and up and down about his footsteps. Blackness haunted his path;
he was beleaguered by goblins as he went; and, curfew being struck, he
found no light but that he travelled in throughout the township.
Closely following on this epoch of migratory lanthorns in a world of
extinction, came the era of oil-lights, hard to kindle, easy to
extinguish, pale and wavering in the hour of their endurance. Rudely
puffed the winds of heaven; roguishly clomb up the all-destructive
urchin; and lo! in a moment night re-established her void empire, and
the cit groped along the wall, suppered but bedless, occult from
guidance, and sorrily wading in the kennels. As if gamesome winds and
gamesome youths were not sufficient, it was the habit to swing these
feeble luminaries from house to house above the fairway. There, on
invisible cordage, let them swing! And suppose some crane-necked general
to go speeding by on a tall charger, spurring the destiny of nations,
red-hot in expedition, there would indubitably be some effusion of
military blood, and oaths, and a certain crash of glass; and while the
chieftain rode forward with a purple coxcomb, the street would be left
to original darkness, unpiloted, unvoyageable, a province of the desert
night.
The conservative, looking before and after, draws from each
contemplation the matter for content. Out of the age of gas lamps he
glances back slightingly at the mirk and glimmer in which his ancestors
wandered; his heart waxes jocund at the contrast; nor do his lips
refrain from a stave, in the highest style of poetry, lauding progress
and the golden mean. When gas first spread along a city, mapping it
forth about evenfall for the eye of observant birds, a new age had begun
for sociality and corporate pleasure-seeking, and begun with proper
circumstance, becoming its own birthright. The work of Prometheus had
advanced by another stride. Mankind and its supper-parties were no
longer at the mercy of a few miles of sea-fog; sundown no longer emptied
the promenade; and the day was lengthened out to every man's fancy. The
city-folk had stars of their own; biddable, domesticated stars.
It is true that these were not so steady, nor yet so clear, as their
originals; nor indeed was their lustre so elegant as that of the best
wax candles. But then the gas stars, being nearer at hand, were more
practically efficacious than Jupiter himself. It is true, again, that
they did not unfold their rays with the appropriate spontaneity of the
planets, coming out along the firmament, one after another, as the need
arises. But the lamplighters took to their heels every evening, and ran
with a good heart. It was pretty to see man thus emulating the
punctuality of heaven's orbs; and though perfection was not absolutely
reached, and now and then an individual may have been knocked on the
head by the ladder of the flying functionary, yet people commended his
zeal in a proverb, and taught their children to say, "God bless the
lamplighter!" And since his passage was a piece of the day's programme,
the children were well pleased to repeat the benediction, not, of
course, in so many words, which would have been improper, but in some
chaste circumlocution, suitable for infant lips.
God bless him, indeed! For the term of his twilight diligence is near at
hand; and for not much longer shall we watch him speeding up the street
and, at measured intervals, knocking another luminous hole into the
dusk. The Greeks would have made a noble myth of such an one; how he
distributed starlight, and, as soon as the need was over, re-collected
it; and the little bull's eye, which was his instrument, and held enough
fire to kindle a whole parish, would have been fitly commemorated in the
legend. Now, like all heroic tasks, his labours draw towards apotheosis,
and in the light of victory he himself shall disappear. For another
advance has been effected. Our tame stars are to come out in future, not
one by one, but all in a body and at once. A sedate electrician
somewhere in a back office touches a spring--and behold! from one end to
another of the city, from east to west, from the Alexandra to the
Crystal Palace, there is light! _Fiat Lux_, says the sedate electrician.
What a spectacle, on some clear, dark nightfall, from the edge of
Hampstead Hill, when in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the design
of the monstrous city flashes into vision--a glittering hieroglyph many
square miles in extent; and when, to borrow and debase an image, all the
evening street-lamps burst together into song! Such is the spectacle of
the future, preluded the other day by the experiment in Pall Mall.
Star-rise by electricity, the most romantic flight of civilisation; the
compensatory benefit for an innumerable array of factories and bankers'
clerks. To the artistic spirit exercised about Thirlmere, here is a
crumb of consolation; consolatory, at least, to such of them as look out
upon the world through seeing eyes, and contentedly accept beauty where
it comes.
But the conservative, while lauding progress, is ever timid of
innovation; his is the hand upheld to counsel pause; his is the signal
advising slow advance. The word _electricity_ now sounds the note of
danger. In Paris, at the mouth of the Passage des Princes, in the place
before the Opera portico, and in the Rue Drouot at the _Figaro_ office,
a new sort of urban star now shines out nightly, horrible, unearthly,
obnoxious to the human eye; a lamp for a nightmare! Such a light as this
should shine only on murders and public crime, or along the corridors of
lunatic asylums, a horror to heighten horror. To look at it only once is
to fall in love with gas, which gives a warm domestic radiance fit to
eat by. Mankind, you would have thought, might have remained content
with what Prometheus stole for them and not gone fishing the profound
heaven with kites to catch and domesticate the wildfire of the storm.
Yet here we have the levin brand at our doors, and it is proposed that
we should henceforward take our walks abroad in the glare of permanent
lightning. A man need not be very superstitious if he scruple to follow
his pleasures by the light of the Terror that Flieth, nor very epicurean
if he prefer to see the face of beauty more becomingly displayed. That
ugly blinding glare may not improperly advertise the home of slanderous
_Figaro_, which is a back-shop to the infernal regions; but where soft
joys prevail, where people are convoked to pleasure and the philosopher
looks on smiling and silent, where love and laughter and deifying wine
abound, there, at least, let the old mild lustre shine upon the ways of
man.
END OF VOL. II
PRINTED BY
CASSELL AND COMPANY, LIMITED, LA BELLE SAUVAGE
LONDON, E.C.
