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The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Vol. 22
THE WORKS OF
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
SWANSTON EDITION
VOLUME XXII
_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: R. L. S. SPEARING FISH IN THE BOW OF THE SCHOONER
"EQUATOR"]
THE WORKS OF
ROBERT LOUIS
STEVENSON
VOLUME TWENTY-TWO
LONDON: PUBLISHED BY CHATTO AND
WINDUS: IN ASSOCIATION WITH CASSELL
AND COMPANY LIMITED: WILLIAM
HEINEMANN: AND LONGMANS GREEN
AND COMPANY MDCCCCXII
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
CONTENTS
JUVENILIA AND OTHER PAPERS
THE PENTLAND RISING
PAGE
I. THE CAUSES OF THE REVOLT 3
II. THE BEGINNING 6
III. THE MARCH OF THE REBELS 8
IV. RULLION GREEN 13
V. A RECORD OF BLOOD 17
SKETCHES
I. THE SATIRIST 25
II. NUITS BLANCHES 27
III. THE WREATH OF IMMORTELLES 30
IV. NURSES 34
V. A CHARACTER 37
COLLEGE PAPERS
I. EDINBURGH STUDENTS IN 1824 41
II. THE MODERN STUDENT CONSIDERED GENERALLY 45
III. DEBATING SOCIETIES 53
IV. THE PHILOSOPHY OF UMBRELLAS 58
V. THE PHILOSOPHY OF NOMENCLATURE 63
NOTES AND ESSAYS CHIEFLY OF THE ROAD
I. A RETROSPECT 71
II. COCKERMOUTH AND KESWICK 80
III. ROADS 90
IV. NOTES ON THE MOVEMENTS OF YOUNG CHILDREN 97
V. ON THE ENJOYMENT OF UNPLEASANT PLACES 103
VI. AN AUTUMN EFFECT 112
VII. A WINTER'S WALK IN CARRICK AND GALLOWAY 132
VIII. FOREST NOTES 142
CRITICISMS
I. LORD LYTTON'S "FABLES IN SONG" 171
II. SALVINI'S MACBETH 180
III. BAGSTER'S "PILGRIM'S PROGRESS" 186
AN APPEAL TO THE CLERGY OF THE CHURCH OF SCOTLAND 199
THE CHARITY BAZAAR 213
THE LIGHT-KEEPER 217
ON A NEW FORM OF INTERMITTENT LIGHT FOR LIGHTHOUSES 220
ON THE THERMAL INFLUENCE OF FORESTS 225
ESSAYS OF TRAVEL
I. DAVOS IN WINTER 241
II. HEALTH AND MOUNTAINS 244
III. ALPINE DIVERSIONS 248
IV. THE STIMULATION OF THE ALPS 252
STEVENSON AT PLAY
INTRODUCTION BY LLOYD OSBOURNE 259
WAR CORRESPONDENCE FROM STEVENSON'S NOTE-BOOK 263
THE DAVOS PRESS
MORAL EMBLEMS, ETC.: FACSIMILES
ADVERTISEMENT OF BLACK CANYON
BLACK CANYON, OR WILD ADVENTURES IN THE FAR WEST
NOT I, AND OTHER POEMS
MORAL EMBLEMS
ADVERTISEMENT OF MORAL EMBLEMS: EDITION DE LUXE
ADVERTISEMENT OF MORAL EMBLEMS: SECOND COLLECTION
MORAL EMBLEMS: SECOND COLLECTION
A MARTIAL ELEGY FOR SOME LEAD SOLDIERS
ADVERTISEMENT OF THE GRAVER AND THE PEN
THE GRAVER AND THE PEN
MORAL TALES
ROBIN AND BEN; OR, THE PIRATE AND THE APOTHECARY
THE BUILDER'S DOOM
JUVENILIA AND OTHER PAPERS
THE PENTLAND RISING
A PAGE OF HISTORY
1666
A cloud of witnesses ly here, Who for Christ's interest did appear.
_Inscription on Battle-field at Rullion Green._
EDINBURGH
ANDREW ELLIOT, 17 PRINCES STREET
1866
_Facsimile of original Title-page_
THE PENTLAND RISING
I
THE CAUSES OF THE REVOLT
"Halt, passenger; take heed what thou dost see,
This tomb doth show for what some men did die."
_Monument, Greyfriars' Churchyard, Edinburgh_, 1661-1668.[1]
Two hundred years ago a tragedy was enacted in Scotland, the memory
whereof has been in great measure lost or obscured by the deep tragedies
which followed it. It is, as it were, the evening of the night of
persecution--a sort of twilight, dark indeed to us, but light as the
noonday when compared with the midnight gloom which followed. This fact,
of its being the very threshold of persecution, lends it, however, an
additional interest.
The prejudices of the people against Episcopacy were "out of measure
increased," says Bishop Burnet, "by the new incumbents who were put in
the places of the ejected preachers, and were generally very mean and
despicable in all respects. They were the worst preachers I ever heard;
they were ignorant to a reproach; and many of them were openly vicious.
They ... were indeed the dreg and refuse of the northern parts. Those of
them who arose above contempt or scandal were men of such violent
tempers that they were as much hated as the others were despised."[2] It
was little to be wondered at, from this account, that the country-folk
refused to go to the parish church, and chose rather to listen to outed
ministers in the fields. But this was not to be allowed, and their
persecutors at last fell on the method of calling a roll of the
parishioners' names every Sabbath, and marking a fine of twenty
shillings Scots to the name of each absenter. In this way very large
debts were incurred by persons altogether unable to pay. Besides this,
landlords were fined for their tenants' absences, tenants for their
landlords', masters for their servants', servants for their masters',
even though they themselves were perfectly regular in their attendance.
And as the curates were allowed to fine with the sanction of any common
soldier, it may be imagined that often the pretexts were neither very
sufficient nor well proven.
When the fines could not be paid at once, Bibles, clothes, and household
utensils were seized upon, or a number of soldiers, proportionate to his
wealth, were quartered on the offender. The coarse and drunken privates
filled the houses with woe; snatched the bread from the children to feed
their dogs; shocked the principles, scorned the scruples, and blasphemed
the religion of their humble hosts; and when they had reduced them to
destitution, sold the furniture, and burned down the roof-tree which was
consecrated to the peasants by the name of Home. For all this attention
each of these soldiers received from his unwilling landlord a certain
sum of money per day--three shillings sterling, according to _Naphtali._
And frequently they were forced to pay quartering money for more men
than were in reality "cessed on them." At that time it was no strange
thing to behold a strong man begging for money to pay his fines, and
many others who were deep in arrears, or who had attracted attention in
some other way, were forced to flee from their homes, and take refuge
from arrest and imprisonment among the wild mosses of the uplands.[3]
One example in particular we may cite:
John Neilson, the Laird of Corsack, a worthy man, was, unfortunately for
himself, a Nonconformist. First he was fined in four hundred pounds
Scots, and then through cessing he lost nineteen hundred and
ninety-three pounds Scots. He was next obliged to leave his house and
flee from place to place, during which wanderings he lost his horse. His
wife and children were turned out of doors, and then his tenants were
fined till they too were almost ruined. As a final stroke, they drove
away all his cattle to Glasgow and sold them.[4] Surely it was time that
something were done to alleviate so much sorrow, to overthrow such
tyranny.
About this time too there arrived in Galloway a person calling himself
Captain Andrew Gray, and advising the people to revolt. He displayed
some documents purporting to be from the northern Covenanters, and
stating that they were prepared to join in any enterprise commenced by
their southern brethren. The leader of the persecutors was Sir James
Turner, an officer afterwards degraded for his share in the matter. "He
was naturally fierce, but was mad when he was drunk, and that was very
often," said Bishop Burnet. "He was a learned man, but had always been
in armies, and knew no other rule but to obey orders. He told me he had
no regard to any law, but acted, as he was commanded, in a military
way."[5]
This was the state of matters, when an outrage was committed which gave
spirit and determination to the oppressed countrymen, lit the flame of
insubordination, and for the time at least recoiled on those who
perpetrated it with redoubled force.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] "Theater of Mortality," p. 10; Edin. 1713.
[2] "History of My Own Times," beginning 1660, by Bishop Gilbert
Burnet, p. 158.
[3] Wodrow's "Church History," Book II. chap. i. sect. 1.
[4] Crookshank's "Church History," 1751, second ed. p. 202.
[5] Burnet, p. 348.
II
THE BEGINNING
I love no warres, If it must be
I love no jarres, Warre we must see
Nor strife's fire. (So fates conspire),
May discord cease, May we not feel
Let's live in peace: The force of steel:
This I desire. This I desire.
T. JACKSON, 1651.[6]
Upon Tuesday, November 13th, 1666, Corporal George Deanes and three
other soldiers set upon an old man in the clachan of Dairy and demanded
the payment of his fines. On the old man's refusing to pay, they forced
a large party of his neighbours to go with them and thresh his corn. The
field was a certain distance out of the clachan, and four persons,
disguised as countrymen, who had been out on the moors all night, met
this mournful drove of slaves, compelled by the four soldiers to work
for the ruin of their friend. However, chilled to the bone by their
night on the hills, and worn out by want of food, they proceeded to the
village inn to refresh themselves. Suddenly some people rushed into the
room where they were sitting, and told them that the soldiers were about
to roast the old man, naked, on his own girdle. This was too much for
them to stand, and they repaired immediately to the scene of this gross
outrage, and at first merely requested that the captive should be
released. On the refusal of the two soldiers who were in the front room,
high words were given and taken on both sides, and the other two rushed
forth from an adjoining chamber and made at the countrymen with drawn
swords. One of the latter, John M'Lellan of Barscob, drew a pistol and
shot the corporal in the body. The pieces of tobacco-pipe with which it
was loaded, to the number of ten at least, entered him, and he was so
much disturbed that he never appears to have recovered, for we find long
afterwards a petition to the Privy Council requesting a pension for him.
The other soldiers then laid down their arms, the old man was rescued,
and the rebellion was commenced.[7]
And now we must turn to Sir James Turner's memoirs of himself; for,
strange to say, this extraordinary man was remarkably fond of literary
composition, and wrote, besides the amusing account of his own
adventures just mentioned, a large number of essays and short
biographies, and a work on war, entitled "Pallas Armata." The following
are some of the shorter pieces: "Magick," "Friendship," "Imprisonment,"
"Anger," "Revenge," "Duells," "Cruelty," "A Defence of some of the
Ceremonies of the English Liturgie--to wit--Bowing at the Name of Jesus,
The frequent repetition of the Lord's Prayer and Good Lord deliver us,
Of the Doxologie, Of Surplesses, Rotchets, Cannonicall Coats," etc. From
what we know of his character we should expect "Anger" and "Cruelty" to
be very full and instructive. But what earthly right he had to meddle
with ecclesiastical subjects it is hard to see.
Upon the 12th of the month he had received some information concerning
Gray's proceedings, but as it was excessively indefinite in its
character, he paid no attention to it. On the evening of the 14th,
Corporal Deanes was brought into Dumfries, who affirmed stoutly that he
had been shot while refusing to sign the Covenant--a story rendered
singularly unlikely by the after conduct of the rebels. Sir James
instantly despatched orders to the cessed soldiers either to come to
Dumfries or meet him on the way to Dairy, and commanded the thirteen or
fourteen men in the town with him to come at nine next morning to his
lodging for supplies.
On the morning of Thursday the rebels arrived at Dumfries with 50 horse
and 150 foot. Neilson of Corsack, and Gray, who commanded, with a
considerable troop, entered the town, and surrounded Sir James Turner's
lodging. Though it was between eight and nine o'clock, that worthy,
being unwell, was still in bed, but rose at once and went to the window.
Neilson and some others cried, "You may have fair quarter."
"I need no quarter," replied Sir James; "nor can I be a prisoner, seeing
there is no war declared." On being told, however, that he must either
be a prisoner or die, he came down, and went into the street in his
night-shirt. Here Gray showed himself very desirous of killing him, but
he was overruled by Corsack. However, he was taken away a prisoner,
Captain Gray mounting him on his own horse, though, as Turner naïvely
remarks, "there was good reason for it, for he mounted himself on a
farre better one of mine." A large coffer containing his clothes and
money, together with all his papers, were taken away by the rebels. They
robbed Master Chalmers, the Episcopalian minister of Dumfries, of his
horse, drank the King's health at the market cross, and then left
Dumfries.[8]
FOOTNOTES:
[6] Fuller's "Historie of the Holy Warre," fourth ed. 1651.
[7] Wodrow, vol. ii. p. 17.
[8] Sir J. Turner's "Memoirs," pp. 148-50.
III
THE MARCH OF THE REBELS
"Stay, passenger, take notice what thou reads,
At Edinburgh lie our bodies, here our heads;
Our right hands stood at Lanark, these we want,
Because with them we signed the Covenant."
_Epitaph on a Tombstone at Hamilton._[9]
On Friday the 16th, Bailie Irvine of Dumfries came to the Council at
Edinburgh, and gave information concerning this "horrid rebellion." In
the absence of Rothes, Sharpe presided--much to the wrath of some
members; and as he imagined his own safety endangered, his measures were
most energetic. Dalzell was ordered away to the West, the guards round
the city were doubled, officers and soldiers were forced to take the
oath of allegiance, and all lodgers were commanded to give in their
names. Sharpe, surrounded with all these guards and precautions,
trembled--trembled as he trembled when the avengers of blood drew him
from his chariot on Magus Muir,--for he knew how he had sold his trust,
how he had betrayed his charge, and he felt that against him must their
chiefest hatred be directed, against him their direst thunderbolts be
forged. But even in his fear the apostate Presbyterian was unrelenting,
unpityingly harsh; he published in his manifesto no promise of pardon,
no inducement to submission. He said, "If you submit not you must die,"
but never added, "If you submit you may live!"[10]
Meantime the insurgents proceeded on their way. At Carsphairn they were
deserted by Captain Gray, who, doubtless in a fit of oblivion, neglected
to leave behind him the coffer containing Sir James's money. Who he was
is a mystery, unsolved by any historian; his papers were evidently
forgeries--that, and his final flight, appear to indicate that he was an
agent of the Royalists, for either the King or the Duke of York was
heard to say, "That, if he might have his wish, he would have them all
turn rebels and go to arms."[11]
Upon the 18th day of the month they left Carsphairn and marched onwards.
Turner was always lodged by his captors at a good inn, frequently at the
best of which their halting-place could boast. Here many visits were
paid to him by the ministers and officers of the insurgent force. In his
description of these interviews he displays a vein of satiric severity,
admitting any kindness that was done to him with some qualifying
souvenir of former harshness, and gloating over any injury, mistake, or
folly, which it was his chance to suffer or to hear. He appears,
notwithstanding all this, to have been on pretty good terms with his
cruel "phanaticks," as the following extract sufficiently proves:
"Most of the foot were lodged about the church or churchyard, and order
given to ring bells next morning for a sermon to be preached by Mr.
Welch. Maxwell of Morith, and Major M'Cullough invited me to heare 'that
phanatick sermon' (for soe they merrilie called it). They said that
preaching might prove an effectual meane to turne me, which they
heartilie wished. I answered to them that I was under guards, and that
if they intended to heare that sermon, it was probable I might likewise,
for it was not like my guards wold goe to church and leave me alone at
my lodgeings. Bot to what they said of my conversion, I said it wold be
hard to turne a Turner. Bot because I founde them in a merrie humour, I
said, if I did not come to heare Mr. Welch preach, then they might fine
me in fortie shillings Scots, which was double the suome of what I had
exacted from the phanatics."[12]
This took place at Ochiltree, on the 22nd day of the month. The
following is recounted by this personage with malicious glee, and
certainly, if authentic, it is a sad proof of how chaff is mixed with
wheat, and how ignorant, almost impious, persons were engaged in this
movement; nevertheless we give it, for we wish to present with
impartiality all the alleged facts to the reader:
"Towards the evening Mr. Robinsone and Mr. Crukshank gaue me a visite; I
called for some ale purposelie to heare one of them blesse it. It fell
Mr. Robinsone to seeke the blessing, who said one of the most bombastick
graces that ever I heard in my life. He summoned God Almightie very
imperiouslie to be their secondarie (for that was his language). 'And
if,' said he, 'thou wilt not be our Secondarie, we will not fight for
thee at all, for it is not our cause bot thy cause; and if thou wilt
not fight for our cause and thy oune cause, then we are not obliged to
fight for it. They say,' said he, 'that Dukes, Earles, and Lords are
coming with the King's General against us, bot they shall be nothing bot
a threshing to us.' This grace did more fullie satisfie me of the folly
and injustice of their cause, then the ale did quench my thirst."[13]
Frequently the rebels made a halt near some roadside alehouse, or in
some convenient park, where Colonel Wallace, who had now taken the
command, would review the horse and foot, during which time Turner was
sent either into the alehouse or round the shoulder of the hill, to
prevent him from seeing the disorders which were likely to arise. He
was, at last, on the 25th day of the month, between Douglas and Lanark,
permitted to behold their evolutions. "I found their horse did consist
of four hundreth and fortie, and the foot of five hundreth and
upwards.... The horsemen were armed for most part with suord and
pistoll, some onlie with suord. The foot with musket, pike, sith
(scythe), forke, and suord; and some with suords great and long." He
admired much the proficiency of their cavalry, and marvelled how they
had attained to it in so short a time.[14]
At Douglas, which they had just left on the morning of this great
wapinshaw, they were charged--awful picture of depravity!--with the
theft of a silver spoon and a nightgown. Could it be expected that while
the whole country swarmed with robbers of every description, such a rare
opportunity for plunder should be lost by rogues--that among a thousand
men, even though fighting for religion, there should not be one Achan in
the camp? At Lanark a declaration was drawn up and signed by the chief
rebels. In it occurs the following:
"The just sense whereof"--the sufferings of the country--"made us
choose, rather to betake ourselves to the fields for self-defence, than
to stay at home, burdened daily with the calamities of others, and
tortured with the fears of our own approaching misery."[15]
The whole body, too, swore the Covenant, to which ceremony the epitaph
at the head of this chapter seems to refer.
A report that Dalzell was approaching drove them from Lanark to
Bathgate, where, on the evening of Monday the 26th, the wearied army
stopped. But at twelve o'clock the cry, which served them for a trumpet,
of "Horse! horse!" and "Mount the prisoner!" resounded through the
night-shrouded town, and called the peasants from their well-earned rest
to toil onwards in their march. The wind howled fiercely over the
moorland; a close, thick, wetting rain descended. Chilled to the bone,
worn out with long fatigue, sinking to the knees in mire, onward they
marched to destruction. One by one the weary peasants fell off from
their ranks to sleep, and die in the rain-soaked moor, or to seek some
house by the wayside wherein to hide till daybreak. One by one at first,
then in gradually increasing numbers, at every shelter that was seen,
whole troops left the waning squadrons, and rushed to hide themselves
from the ferocity of the tempest. To right and left nought could be
descried but the broad expanse of the moor, and the figures of their
fellow-rebels seen dimly through the murky night, plodding onwards
through the sinking moss. Those who kept together--a miserable
few--often halted to rest themselves, and to allow their lagging
comrades to overtake them. Then onward they went again, still hoping for
assistance, reinforcement, and supplies; onward again, through the wind,
and the rain, and the darkness--onward to their defeat at Pentland, and
their scaffold at Edinburgh. It was calculated that they lost one half
of their army on that disastrous night-march.
Next night they reached the village of Colinton, four miles from
Edinburgh, where they halted for the last time.[16]
FOOTNOTES:
[9] "A Cloud of Witnesses," p. 376.
[10] Wodrow, pp. 19, 20.
[11] "A Hind Let Loose," p. 123.
[12] Turner, p. 163.
[13] Turner, p. 198.
[14] _Ibid._ p. 167.
[15] Wodrow, p. 29.
[16] Turner, Wodrow, and "Church History" by James Kirkton, an outed
minister of the period.
IV
RULLION GREEN
"From Covenanters with uplifted hands,
From Remonstrators with associate bands,
Good Lord, deliver us!"
_Royalist Rhyme_, KIRKTON, p. 127.
Late on the fourth night of November, exactly twenty-four days before
Rullion Green, Richard and George Chaplain, merchants in Haddington,
beheld four men, clad like West-country Whigamores, standing round some
object on the ground. It was at the two-mile cross, and within that
distance from their homes. At last, to their horror, they discovered
that the recumbent figure was a livid corpse, swathed in a blood-stained
winding-sheet.[17] Many thought that this apparition was a portent of
the deaths connected with the Pentland Rising.
On the morning of Wednesday, the 28th of November 1666, they left
Colinton and marched to Rullion Green. There they arrived about sunset.
The position was a strong one. On the summit of a bare, heathery spur of
the Pentlands are two hillocks, and between them lies a narrow band of
flat marshy ground. On the highest of the two mounds--that nearest the
Pentlands, and on the left hand of the main body--was the greater part
of the cavalry, under Major Learmont; on the other Barscob and the
Galloway gentlemen; and in the centre Colonel Wallace and the weak,
half-armed infantry. Their position was further strengthened by the
depth of the valley below, and the deep chasm-like course of the Rullion
Burn.
The sun, going down behind the Pentlands, cast golden lights and blue
shadows on their snow-clad summits, slanted obliquely into the rich
plain before them, bathing with rosy splendour the leafless,
snow-sprinkled trees, and fading gradually into shadow in the distance.
To the south, too, they beheld a deep-shaded amphitheatre of heather and
bracken; the course of the Esk, near Penicuik, winding about at the foot
of its gorge; the broad, brown expanse of Maw Moss; and, fading into
blue indistinctness in the south, the wild heath-clad Peeblesshire
hills. In sooth, that scene was fair, and many a yearning glance was
cast over that peaceful evening scene from the spot where the rebels
awaited their defeat; and when the fight was over, many a noble fellow
lifted his head from the blood-stained heather to strive with darkening
eyeballs to behold that landscape, over which, as over his life and his
cause, the shadows of night and of gloom were falling and thickening.
It was while waiting on this spot that the fear-inspiring cry was
raised: "The enemy! Here come the enemy!"
Unwilling to believe their own doom--for our insurgents still hoped for
success in some negotiations for peace which had been carried on at
Colinton--they called out, "They are some of our own."
"They are too blacke" (_i.e._ numerous), "fie! fie! for ground to draw
up on," cried Wallace, fully realising the want of space for his men,
and proving that it was not till after this time that his forces were
finally arranged.[18]
First of all the battle was commenced by fifty Royalist horse sent
obliquely across the hill to attack the left wing of the rebels. An
equal number of Learmont's men met them, and, after a struggle, drove
them back. The course of the Rullion Burn prevented almost all pursuit,
and Wallace, on perceiving it, despatched a body of foot to occupy both
the burn and some ruined sheep walls on the farther side.
Dalzell changed his position, and drew up his army at the foot of the
hill, on the top of which were his foes. He then despatched a mingled
body of infantry and cavalry to attack Wallace's outpost, but they also
were driven back. A third charge produced a still more disastrous
effect, for Dalzell had to check the pursuit of his men by a
reinforcement.
These repeated checks bred a panic in the Lieutenant-General's ranks,
for several of his men flung down their arms. Urged by such fatal
symptoms, and by the approaching night, he deployed his men, and closed
in overwhelming numbers on the centre and right flank of the insurgent
army. In the increasing twilight the burning matches of the firelocks,
shimmering on barrel, halbert, and cuirass, lent to the approaching army
a picturesque effect, like a huge, many-armed giant breathing flame into
the darkness.
Placed on an overhanging hill, Welch and Semple cried aloud, "The God of
Jacob! The God of Jacob!" and prayed with uplifted hands for
victory.[19]
But still the Royalist troops closed in.
Captain John Paton was observed by Dalzell, who determined to capture
him with his own hands. Accordingly he charged forward, presenting his
pistols. Paton fired, but the balls hopped off Dalzell's buff coat and
fell into his boot. With the superstition peculiar to his age, the
Nonconformist concluded that his adversary was rendered bullet-proof by
enchantment, and, pulling some small silver coins from his pocket,
charged his pistol therewith. Dalzell, seeing this, and supposing, it is
likely, that Paton was putting in larger balls, hid behind his servant,
who was killed.[20]
Meantime the outposts were forced, and the army of Wallace was enveloped
in the embrace of a hideous boa-constrictor--tightening, closing,
crushing every semblance of life from the victim enclosed in his toils.
The flanking parties of horse were forced in upon the centre, and
though, as even Turner grants, they fought with desperation, a general
flight was the result.
But when they fell there was none to sing their coronach or wail the
death-wail over them. Those who sacrificed themselves for the peace, the
liberty, and the religion of their fellow-countrymen, lay bleaching in
the field of death for long, and when at last they were buried by
charity, the peasants dug up their bodies, desecrated their graves, and
cast them once more upon the open heath for the sorry value of their
winding-sheets!
_Inscription on stone at Rullion Green_
HERE AND NEAR TO THIS PLACE LYES THE REVEREND M^R JOHN CROOKSHANK AND
M^R ANDREW M^CCORMICK MINISTERS OF THE GOSPEL AND ABOUT FIFTY OTHER
TRUE COVENANTED PRESBYTERIANS WHO WERE KILLED IN THIS PLACE IN THEIR
OWN INOCENT SELF DEFENCE AND DEFFENCE OF THE COVENANTED WORK OF
REFORMATION BY THOMAS DALZEEL OF BINS UPON THE 28 OF NOVEMBER 1666.
REV. 12. 11. ERECTED SEPT. 28 1738.
_Back of stone_:
A Cloud of Witnesses lyes here,
Who for Christ's Interest did appear,
For to restore true Liberty,
O'erturned then by tyranny.
And by proud Prelats who did Rage
Against the Lord's own heritage.
They sacrificed were for the laws
Of Christ their king, his noble cause.
These heroes fought with great renown
By falling got the Martyr's crown.[21]
FOOTNOTES:
[17] Kirkton, p. 244.
[18] Kirkton.
[19] Turner.
[20] Kirkton.
[21] Kirkton.
V
A RECORD OF BLOOD
"They cut his hands ere he was dead,
And after that struck off his head.
His blood under the altar cries
For vengeance on Christ's enemies."
_Epitaph on Tomb at Longcross of Clermont._[22]
Master Andrew Murray, an outed minister, residing in the Potterrow, on
the morning after the defeat, heard the sounds of cheering and the march
of many feet beneath his window. He gazed out. With colours flying, and
with music sounding, Dalzell, victorious, entered Edinburgh. But his
banners were dyed in blood, and a band of prisoners were marched within
his ranks. The old man knew it all. That martial and triumphant strain
was the death-knell of his friends and of their cause, the rust-hued
spots upon the flags were the tokens of their courage and their death,
and the prisoners were the miserable remnant spared from death in battle
to die upon the scaffold. Poor old man! he had outlived all joy. Had he
lived longer he would have seen increasing torment and increasing woe;
he would have seen the clouds, then but gathering in mist, cast a more
than midnight darkness over his native hills, and have fallen a victim
to those bloody persecutions which, later, sent their red memorials to
the sea by many a burn. By a merciful Providence all this was spared to
him--he fell beneath the first blow; and ere four days had passed since
Rullion Green, the aged minister of God was gathered to his fathers.[23]
When Sharpe first heard of the rebellion, he applied to Sir Alexander
Ramsay, the Provost, for soldiers to guard his house. Disliking their
occupation, the soldiers gave him an ugly time of it. All the night
through they kept up a continuous series of "alarms and incursions,"
"cries of 'Stand!' 'Give fire!'" etc., which forced the prelate to flee
to the Castle in the morning, hoping there to find the rest which was
denied him at home.[24] Now, however, when all danger to himself was
past, Sharpe came out in his true colours, and scant was the justice
likely to be shown to the foes of Scottish Episcopacy when the Primate
was by. The prisoners were lodged in Haddo's Hole, a part of St. Giles'
Cathedral, where, by the kindness of Bishop Wishart, to his credit be it
spoken, they were amply supplied with food.[25]
Some people urged, in the Council, that the promise of quarter which had
been given on the field of battle should protect the lives of the
miserable men. Sir John Gilmoure, the greatest lawyer, gave no
opinion--certainly a suggestive circumstance,--but Lord Lee declared
that this would not interfere with their legal trial; "so to bloody
executions they went."[26] To the number of thirty they were condemned
and executed; while two of them, Hugh M'Kail, a young minister, and
Neilson of Corsack, were tortured with the boots.
The goods of those who perished were confiscated, and their bodies were
dismembered and distributed to different parts of the country; "the
heads of Major M'Culloch and the two Gordons," it was resolved, says
Kirkton, "should be pitched on the gate of Kirkcudbright; the two
Hamiltons and Strong's head should be affixed at Hamilton, and Captain
Arnot's sett on the Watter Gate at Edinburgh. The armes of all the ten,
because they hade with uplifted hands renewed the Covenant at Lanark,
were sent to the people of that town to expiate that crime, by placing
these arms on the top of the prison."[27] Among these was John Neilson,
the Laird of Corsack, who saved Turner's life at Dumfries; in return
for which service Sir James attempted, though without success, to get
the poor man reprieved. One of the condemned died of his wounds between
the day of condemnation and the day of execution. "None of them," says
Kirkton, "would save their life by taking the declaration and renouncing
the Covenant, though it was offered to them.... But never men died in
Scotland so much lamented by the people, not only spectators, but those
in the country. When Knockbreck and his brother were turned over, they
clasped each other in their armes, and so endured the pangs of death.
When Humphrey Colquhoun died, he spoke not like an ordinary citizen, but
like a heavenly minister, relating his comfortable Christian
experiences, and called for his Bible, and laid it on his wounded arm,
and read John iii. 8, and spoke upon it to the admiration of all. But
most of all, when Mr. M'Kail died, there was such a lamentation as was
never known in Scotland before; not one dry cheek upon all the street,
or in all the numberless windows in the mercate place." [28]
The following passage from this speech speaks for itself and its author:
"Hereafter I will not talk with flesh and blood, nor think on the
world's consolations. Farewell to all my friends, whose company hath
been refreshful to me in my pilgrimage. I have done with the light of
the sun and the moon; welcome eternal light, eternal life, everlasting
love, everlasting praise, everlasting glory. Praise to Him that sits
upon the throne, and to the Lamb for ever! Bless the Lord, O my soul,
that hath pardoned all my iniquities in the blood of His Son, and healed
all my diseases. Bless Him, O all ye His angels that excel in strength,
ye ministers of His that do His pleasure. Bless the Lord, O my soul!"
[29]
After having ascended the gallows ladder he again broke forth in the
following words of touching eloquence:
"And now I leave off to speak any more to creatures, and begin my
intercourse with God, which shall never be broken off. Farewell father
and mother, friends and relations! Farewell the world and all delights!
Farewell meat and drink! Farewell sun, moon, and stars!--Welcome God and
Father! Welcome sweet Jesus Christ, the Mediator of the new covenant!
Welcome blessed Spirit of grace and God of all consolation! Welcome
glory! Welcome eternal life! Welcome Death!"[30]
At Glasgow too, where some were executed, they caused the soldiers to
beat the drums and blow the trumpets on their closing ears. Hideous
refinement of revenge! Even the last words which drop from the lips of a
dying man--words surely the most sincere and the most unbiassed which
mortal mouth can utter--even these were looked upon as poisoned and as
poisonous. "Drown their last accents," was the cry, "lest they should
lead the crowd to take their part, or at the least to mourn their
doom!"[31] But, after all, perhaps it was more merciful than one would
think--unintentionally so, of course; perhaps the storm of harsh and
fiercely jubilant noises, the clanging of trumpets, the rattling of
drums, and the hootings and jeerings of an unfeeling mob, which were the
last they heard on earth, might, when the mortal fight was over, when
the river of death was passed, add tenfold sweetness to the hymning of
the angels, tenfold peacefulness to the shores which they had reached.
Not content with the cruelty of these executions, some even of the
peasantry, though these were confined to the shire of Mid-Lothian,
pursued, captured, plundered, and murdered the miserable fugitives who
fell in their way. One strange story have we of these times of blood and
persecution: Kirkton the historian and popular tradition tell us alike
of a flame which often would arise from the grave, in a moss near
Carnwath, of some of those poor rebels: of how it crept along the
ground; of how it covered the house of their murderer; and of how it
scared him with its lurid glare.
Hear Daniel Defoe:[32]
"If the poor people were by these insupportable violences made
desperate, and driven to all the extremities of a wild despair, who can
justly reflect on them when they read in the Word of God 'That
oppression makes a wise man mad'? And therefore were there no other
original of the insurrection known by the name of the Rising of
Pentland, it was nothing but what the intolerable oppressions of those
times might have justified to all the world, nature having dictated to
all people a right of defence when illegally and arbitrarily attacked in
a manner not justifiable either by laws of nature, the laws of God, or
the laws of the country."
Bear this remonstrance of Defoe's in mind, and though it is the fashion
of the day to jeer and to mock, to execrate and to contemn, the noble
band of Covenanters,--though the bitter laugh at their old-world
religious views, the curl of the lip at their merits, and the chilling
silence on their bravery and their determination, are but too rife
through all society,--be charitable to what was evil and honest to what
was good about the Pentland insurgents, who fought for life and liberty,
for country and religion, on the 28th of November 1666, now just two
hundred years ago.
EDINBURGH, 28_th November_ 1866.
FOOTNOTES:
[22] "Cloud of Witnesses," p. 389; Edin. 1765.
[23] Kirkton, p. 247.
[24] Kirkton, p. 254.
[25] _Ibid._ p. 247.
[26] _Ibid._ pp. 247, 248.
[27] _Ibid._ p. 248.
[28] Kirkton, p. 249.
[29] "Naphtali," p. 205; Glasgow, 1721.
[30] Wodrow, p. 59.
[31] Kirkton, p. 246.
[32] Defoe's "History of the Church of Scotland."
SKETCHES
SKETCHES
I
THE SATIRIST
My companion enjoyed a cheap reputation for wit and insight. He was by
habit and repute a satirist. If he did occasionally condemn anything or
anybody who richly deserved it, and whose demerits had hitherto escaped,
it was simply because he condemned everything and everybody. While I was
with him he disposed of St. Paul with an epigram, shook my reverence for
Shakespeare in a neat antithesis, and fell foul of the Almighty Himself,
on the score of one or two out of the ten commandments. Nothing escaped
his blighting censure. At every sentence he overthrew an idol, or
lowered my estimation of a friend. I saw everything with new eyes, and
could only marvel at my former blindness. How was it possible that I had
not before observed A's false hair, B's selfishness, or C's boorish
manners? I and my companion, methought, walked the streets like a couple
of gods among a swarm of vermin; for every one we saw seemed to bear
openly upon his brow the mark of the apocalyptic beast. I half expected
that these miserable beings, like the people of Lystra, would recognise
their betters and force us to the altar; in which case, warned by the
fate of Paul and Barnabas, I do not know that my modesty would have
prevailed upon me to decline. But there was no need for such churlish
virtue. More blinded than the Lycaonians, the people saw no divinity in
our gait; and as our temporary godhead lay more in the way of observing
than healing their infirmities, we were content to pass them by in
scorn.
I could not leave my companion, not from regard or even from interest,
but from a very natural feeling, inseparable from the case. To
understand it, let us take a simile. Suppose yourself walking down the
street with a man who continues to sprinkle the crowd out of a flask of
vitriol. You would be much diverted with the grimaces and contortions of
his victims; and at the same time you would fear to leave his arm until
his bottle was empty, knowing that, when once among the crowd, you would
run a good chance yourself of baptism with his biting liquor. Now my
companion's vitriol was inexhaustible.
It was perhaps the consciousness of this, the knowledge that I was being
anointed already out of the vials of his wrath, that made me fall to
criticising the critic, whenever we had parted.
After all, I thought, our satirist has just gone far enough into his
neighbours to find that the outside is false, without caring to go
farther and discover what is really true. He is content to find that
things are not what they seem, and broadly generalises from it that they
do not exist at all. He sees our virtues are not what they pretend they
are; and, on the strength of that, he denies us the possession of virtue
altogether. He has learnt the first lesson, that no man is wholly good;
but he has not even suspected that there is another equally true, to
wit, that no man is wholly bad. Like the inmate of a coloured star, he
has eyes for one colour alone. He has a keen scent after evil, but his
nostrils are plugged against all good, as people plugged their nostrils
before going about the streets of the plague-struck city.
Why does he do this? It is most unreasonable to flee the knowledge of
good like the infection of a horrible disease, and batten and grow fat
in the real atmosphere of a lazar-house. This was my first thought; but
my second was not like unto it, and I saw that our satirist was wise,
wise in his generation, like the unjust steward. He does not want
light, because the darkness is more pleasant. He does not wish to see
the good, because he is happier without it. I recollect that when I
walked with him, I was in a state of divine exaltation, such as Adam and
Eve must have enjoyed when the savour of the fruit was still unfaded
between their lips; and I recognise that this must be the man's habitual
state. He has the forbidden fruit in his waistcoat pocket, and can make
himself a god as often and as long as he likes. He has raised himself
upon a glorious pedestal above his fellows; he has touched the summit of
ambition; and he envies neither King nor Kaiser, Prophet nor Priest,
content in an elevation as high as theirs, and much more easily
attained. Yes, certes, much more easily attained. He has not risen by
climbing himself, but by pushing others down. He has grown great in his
own estimation, not by blowing himself out, and risking the fate of
Æsop's frog, but simply by the habitual use of a diminishing glass on
everybody else. And I think altogether that his is a better, a safer,
and a surer recipe than most others.
After all, however, looking back on what I have written, I detect a
spirit suspiciously like his own. All through, I have been comparing
myself with our satirist, and all through, I have had the best of the
comparison. Well, well, contagion is as often mental as physical; and I
do not think my readers, who have all been under his lash, will blame me
very much for giving the headsman a mouthful of his own sawdust.
II
NUITS BLANCHES
If any one should know the pleasure and pain of a sleepless night, it
should be I. I remember, so long ago, the sickly child that woke from
his few hours' slumber with the sweat of a nightmare on his brow, to lie
awake and listen and long for the first signs of life among the silent
streets. These nights of pain and weariness are graven on my mind; and
so when the same thing happened to me again, everything that I heard or
saw was rather a recollection than a discovery.
Weighed upon by the opaque and almost sensible darkness, I listened
eagerly for anything to break the sepulchral quiet. But nothing came,
save, perhaps, an emphatic crack from the old cabinet that was made by
Deacon Brodie, or the dry rustle of the coals on the extinguished fire.
It was a calm; or I know that I should have heard in the roar and
clatter of the storm, as I have not heard it for so many years, the wild
career of a horseman, always scouring up from the distance and passing
swiftly below the window; yet always returning again from the place
whence first he came, as though, baffled by some higher power, he had
retraced his steps to gain impetus for another and another attempt.
As I lay there, there arose out of the utter stillness the rumbling of a
carriage a very great way off, that drew near, and passed within a few
streets of the house, and died away as gradually as it had arisen. This,
too, was as a reminiscence.
I rose and lifted a corner of the blind. Over the black belt of the
garden I saw the long line of Queen Street, with here and there a
lighted window. How often before had my nurse lifted me out of bed and
pointed them out to me, while we wondered together if, there also, there
were children that could not sleep, and if these lighted oblongs were
signs of those that waited like us for the morning.
I went out into the lobby, and looked down into the great deep well of
the staircase. For what cause I know not, just as it used to be in the
old days that the feverish child might be the better served, a peep of
gas illuminated a narrow circle far below me. But where I was, all was
darkness and silence, save the dry monotonous ticking of the clock that
came ceaselessly up to my ear.
The final crown of it all, however, the last touch of reproduction on
the pictures of my memory, was the arrival of that time for which, all
night through, I waited and longed of old. It was my custom, as the
hours dragged on, to repeat the question, "When will the carts come in?"
and repeat it again and again until at last those sounds arose in the
street that I have heard once more this morning. The road before our
house is a great thoroughfare for early carts. I know not, and I never
have known, what they carry, whence they come, or whither they go. But I
know that, long ere dawn, and for hours together, they stream
continuously past, with the same rolling and jerking of wheels and the
same clink of horses' feet. It was not for nothing that they made the
burthen of my wishes all night through. They are really the first
throbbings of life, the harbingers of day; and it pleases you as much to
hear them as it must please a shipwrecked seaman once again to grasp a
hand of flesh and blood after years of miserable solitude. They have the
freshness of the daylight life about them. You can hear the carters
cracking their whips and crying hoarsely to their horses or to one
another; and sometimes even a peal of healthy, harsh horse-laughter
comes up to you through the darkness. There is now an end of mystery and
fear. Like the knocking at the door in _Macbeth_,[33] or the cry of the
watchman in the _Tour de Nesle_, they show that the horrible cæsura is
over and the nightmares have fled away, because the day is breaking and
the ordinary life of men is beginning to bestir itself among the
streets.
In the middle of it all I fell asleep, to be wakened by the officious
knocking at my door, and I find myself twelve years older than I had
dreamed myself all night.
FOOTNOTE:
[33] See a short essay of De Quincey's.
III
THE WREATH OF IMMORTELLES
It is all very well to talk of death as "a pleasant potion of
immortality"; but the most of us, I suspect, are of "queasy stomachs,"
and find it none of the sweetest.[34] The graveyard may be cloak-room to
Heaven; but we must admit that it is a very ugly and offensive vestibule
in itself, however fair may be the life to which it leads. And though
Enoch and Elias went into the temple through a gate which certainly may
be called Beautiful, the rest of us have to find our way to it through
Ezekiel's low-bowed door and the vault full of creeping things and all
manner of abominable beasts. Nevertheless, there is a certain frame of
mind to which a cemetery is, if not an antidote, at least an
alleviation. If you are in a fit of the blues, go nowhere else. It was
in obedience to this wise regulation that the other morning found me
lighting my pipe at the entrance to Old Greyfriars', thoroughly sick of
the town, the country, and myself.
Two of the men were talking at the gate, one of them carrying a spade in
hands still crusted with the soil of graves. Their very aspect was
delightful to me; and I crept nearer to them, thinking to pick up some
snatch of sexton gossip, some "talk fit for a charnel,"[35] something,
in fine, worthy of that fastidious logician, that adept in coroner's
law, who has come down to us as the patron of Yaughan's liquor, and the
very prince of gravediggers. Scots people in general are so much wrapped
up in their profession that I had a good chance of overhearing such
conversation: the talk of fishmongers running usually on stockfish and
haddocks; while of the Scots sexton I could repeat stories and speeches
that positively smell of the graveyard. But on this occasion I was
doomed to disappointment. My two friends were far into the region of
generalities. Their profession was forgotten in their electorship.
Politics had engulfed the narrower economy of gravedigging. "Na, na,"
said the one, "ye're a' wrang." "The English and Irish Churches,"
answered the other, in a tone as if he had made the remark before, and
it had been called in question--"The English and Irish Churches have
_impoverished_ the country."
"Such are the results of education," thought I as I passed beside them
and came fairly among the tombs. Here, at least, there were no
commonplace politics, no diluted this-morning's leader, to distract or
offend me. The old shabby church showed, as usual, its quaint extent of
roofage and the relievo skeleton on one gable, still blackened with the
fire of thirty years ago. A chill dank mist lay over all. The Old
Greyfriars' churchyard was in perfection that morning, and one could go
round and reckon up the associations with no fear of vulgar
interruption. On this stone the Covenant was signed. In that vault, as
the story goes, John Knox took hiding in some Reformation broil. From
that window Burke the murderer looked out many a time across the tombs,
and perhaps o' nights let himself down over the sill to rob some
new-made grave. Certainly he would have a selection here. The very walks
have been carried over forgotten resting-places; and the whole ground is
uneven, because (as I was once quaintly told) "when the wood rots it
stands to reason the soil should fall in," which, from the law of
gravitation, is certainly beyond denial. But it is round the boundary
that there are the finest tombs. The whole irregular space is, as it
were, fringed with quaint old monuments, rich in death's-heads and
scythes and hour-glasses, and doubly rich in pious epitaphs and Latin
mottoes--rich in them to such an extent that their proper space has run
over, and they have crawled end-long up the shafts of columns and
ensconced themselves in all sorts of odd corners among the sculpture.
These tombs raise their backs against the rabble of squalid
dwelling-houses, and every here and there a clothes-pole projects
between two monuments its fluttering trophy of white and yellow and red.
With a grim irony they recall the banners in the Invalides, banners as
appropriate perhaps over the sepulchres of tailors and weavers as these
others above the dust of armies. Why they put things out to dry on that
particular morning it was hard to imagine. The grass was grey with drops
of rain, the headstones black with moisture. Yet, in despite of weather
and common-sense, there they hung between the tombs; and beyond them I
could see through open windows into miserable rooms where whole families
were born and fed, and slept and died. At one a girl sat singing merrily
with her back to the graveyard; and from another came the shrill tones
of a scolding woman. Every here and there was a town garden full of
sickly flowers, or a pile of crockery inside upon the window-seat. But
you do not grasp the full connection between these houses of the dead
and the living, the unnatural marriage of stately sepulchres and squalid
houses, till, lower down, where the road has sunk far below the surface
of the cemetery, and the very roofs are scarcely on a level with its
wall, you observe that a proprietor has taken advantage of a tall
monument and trained a chimney-stack against its back. It startles you
to see the red, modern pots peering over the shoulder of the tomb.
A man was at work on a grave, his spade clinking away the drift of bones
that permeates the thin brown soil; but my first disappointment had
taught me to expect little from Greyfriars' sextons, and I passed him by
in silence. A slater on the slope of a neighbouring roof eyed me
curiously. A lean black cat, looking as if it had battened on strange
meats, slipped past me. A little boy at a window put his finger to his
nose in so offensive a manner that I was put upon my dignity, and turned
grandly off to read old epitaphs and peer through the gratings into the
shadow of vaults.
Just then I saw two women coming down a path, one of them old, and the
other younger, with a child in her arms. Both had faces eaten with
famine and hardened with sin, and both had reached that stage of
degradation, much lower in a woman than a man, when all care for dress
is lost. As they came down they neared a grave, where some pious friend
or relative had laid a wreath of immortelles, and put a bell glass over
it, as is the custom. The effect of that ring of dull yellow among so
many blackened and dusty sculptures was more pleasant than it is in
modern cemeteries, where every second mound can boast a similar coronal;
and here, where it was the exception and not the rule, I could even
fancy the drops of moisture that dimmed the covering were the tears of
those who laid it where it was. As the two women came up to it, one of
them kneeled down on the wet grass and looked long and silently through
the clouded shade, while the second stood above her, gently oscillating
to and fro to lull the muling baby. I was struck a great way off with
something religious in the attitude of these two unkempt and haggard
women; and I drew near faster, but still cautiously, to hear what they
were saying. Surely on them the spirit of death and decay had descended;
I had no education to dread here: should I not have a chance of seeing
nature? Alas! a pawnbroker could not have been more practical and
commonplace, for this was what the kneeling woman said to the woman
upright--this and nothing more: "Eh, what extravagance!"
O nineteenth century, wonderful art thou indeed--wonderful, but
wearisome in thy stale and deadly uniformity. Thy men are more like
numerals than men. They must bear their idiosyncrasies or their
professions written on a placard about their neck, like the scenery in
Shakespeare's theatre. The precepts of economy have pierced into the
lowest ranks of life; and there is now a decorum in vice, a
respectability among the disreputable, a pure spirit of Philistinism
among the waifs and strays of thy Bohemia. For lo! thy very gravediggers
talk politics; and thy castaways kneel upon new graves, to discuss the
cost of the monument and grumble at the improvidence of love.
Such was the elegant apostrophe that I made as I went out of the gates
again, happily satisfied in myself, and feeling that I alone of all whom
I had seen was able to profit by the silent poem of these green mounds
and blackened headstones.
FOOTNOTES:
[34] "Religio Medici," Part ii.
[35] "Duchess of Malfi."
IV
NURSES
I knew one once, and the room where, lonely and old, she waited for
death. It was pleasant enough, high up above the lane, and looking forth
upon a hill-side, covered all day with sheets and yellow blankets, and
with long lines of underclothing fluttering between the battered posts.
There were any number of cheap prints, and a drawing by one of "her
children," and there were flowers in the window, and a sickly canary
withered into consumption in an ornamental cage. The bed, with its
checked coverlid, was in a closet. A great Bible lay on the table; and
her drawers were full of "scones," which it was her pleasure to give to
young visitors such as I was then.
You may not think this a melancholy picture; but the canary, and the
cat, and the white mouse that she had for a while, and that died, were
all indications of the want that ate into her heart. I think I know a
little of what that old woman felt; and I am as sure as if I had seen
her, that she sat many an hour in silent tears, with the big Bible open
before her clouded eyes.
If you could look back upon her life, and feel the great chain that had
linked her to one child after another, sometimes to be wrenched suddenly
through, and sometimes, which is infinitely worse, to be torn gradually
off through years of growing neglect, or perhaps growing dislike! She
had, like the mother, overcome that natural repugnance--repugnance which
no man can conquer--towards the infirm and helpless mass of putty of the
earlier stage. She had spent her best and happiest years in tending,
watching, and learning to love like a mother this child, with which she
has no connection and to which she has no tie. Perhaps she refused some
sweetheart (such things have been), or put him off and off, until he
lost heart and turned to some one else, all for fear of leaving this
creature that had wound itself about her heart. And the end of it
all,--her month's warning, and a present perhaps, and the rest of the
life to vain regret. Or, worse still, to see the child gradually
forgetting and forsaking her, fostered in disrespect and neglect on the
plea of growing manliness, and at last beginning to treat her as a
servant whom he had treated a few years before as a mother. She sees the
Bible or the Psalm-book, which with gladness and love unutterable in her
heart she had bought for him years ago out of her slender savings,
neglected for some newer gift of his father, lying in dust in the
lumber-room or given away to a poor child, and the act applauded for its
unfeeling charity. Little wonder if she becomes hurt and angry, and
attempts to tyrannise and to grasp her old power back again. We are not
all patient Grizzels, by good fortune, but the most of us human beings
with feelings and tempers of our own.
And so in the end, behold her in the room that I described. Very likely
and very naturally, in some fling of feverish misery or recoil of
thwarted love, she has quarrelled with her old employers and the
children are forbidden to see her or to speak to her; or at best she
gets her rent paid and a little to herself, and now and then her late
charges are sent up (with another nurse, perhaps) to pay her a short
visit. How bright these visits seem as she looks forward to them on her
lonely bed! How unsatisfactory their realisation, when the forgetful
child, half wondering, checks with every word and action the outpouring
of her maternal love! How bitter and restless the memories that they
leave behind! And for the rest, what else has she?--to watch them with
eager eyes as they go to school, to sit in church where she can see them
every Sunday, to be passed some day unnoticed in the street, or
deliberately cut because the great man or the great woman are with
friends before whom they are ashamed to recognise the old woman that
loved them.
When she goes home that night, how lonely will the room appear to her!
Perhaps the neighbours may hear her sobbing to herself in the dark, with
the fire burnt out for want of fuel, and the candle still unlit upon the
table.
And it is for this that they live, these quasi-mothers--mothers in
everything but the travail and the thanks. It is for this that they have
remained virtuous in youth, living the dull life of a household servant.
It is for this that they refused the old sweetheart, and have no
fireside or offspring of their own.
I believe in a better state of things, that there will be no more
nurses, and that every mother will nurse her own offspring; for what can
be more hardening and demoralising than to call forth the tenderest
feelings of a woman's heart and cherish them yourself as long as you
need them, as long as your children require a nurse to love them, and
then to blight and thwart and destroy them, whenever your own use for
them is at an end? This may be Utopian; but it is always a little thing
if one mother or two mothers can be brought to feel more tenderly to
those who share their toil and have no part in their reward.
V
A CHARACTER
The man has a red, bloated face, and his figure is short and squat. So
far there is nothing in him to notice, but when you see his eyes, you
can read in these hard and shallow orbs a depravity beyond measure
depraved, a thirst after wickedness, the pure, disinterested love of
Hell for its own sake. The other night, in the street, I was watching an
omnibus passing with lit-up windows, when I heard some one coughing at
my side as though he would cough his soul out; and turning round, I saw
him stopping under a lamp, with a brown greatcoat buttoned round him and
his whole face convulsed. It seemed as if he could not live long; and so
the sight set my mind upon a train of thought, as I finished my cigar up
and down the lighted streets.
He is old, but all these years have not yet quenched his thirst for
evil, and his eyes still delight themselves in wickedness. He is dumb;
but he will not let that hinder his foul trade, or perhaps I should say,
his yet fouler amusement, and he has pressed a slate into the service of
corruption. Look at him, and he will sign to you with his bloated head,
and when you go to him in answer to the sign, thinking perhaps that the
poor dumb man has lost his way, you will see what he writes upon his
slate. He haunts the doors of schools, and shows such inscriptions as
these to the innocent children that come out. He hangs about
picture-galleries, and makes the noblest pictures the text for some
silent homily of vice. His industry is a lesson to ourselves. Is it not
wonderful how he can triumph over his infirmities and do such an amount
of harm without a tongue? Wonderful industry--strange, fruitless,
pleasureless toil? Must not the very devil feel a soft emotion to see
his disinterested and laborious service? Ah, but the devil knows better
than this: he knows that this man is penetrated with the love of evil
and that all his pleasure is shut up in wickedness: he recognises him,
perhaps, as a fit type for mankind of his satanic self, and watches over
his effigy as we might watch over a favourite likeness. As the business
man comes to love the toil, which he only looked upon at first as a
ladder towards other desires and less unnatural gratifications, so the
dumb man has felt the charm of his trade and fallen captivated before
the eyes of sin. It is a mistake when preachers tell us that vice is
hideous and loathsome; for even vice has her Hörsel and her devotees,
who love her for her own sake.
COLLEGE PAPERS
COLLEGE PAPERS
I
EDINBURGH STUDENTS IN 1824
On the 2nd of January 1824 was issued the prospectus of the _Lapsus
Linguæ; or, the College Tatler_; and on the 7th the first number
appeared. On Friday the 2nd of April "_Mr. Tatler_ became speechless."
Its history was not all one success; for the editor (who applies to
himself the words of Iago, "I am nothing if I am not critical")
over-stepped the bounds of caution, and found himself seriously
embroiled with the powers that were. There appeared in No. XVI. a most
bitter satire upon Sir John Leslie, in which he was compared to
Falstaff, charged with puffing himself, and very prettily censured for
publishing only the first volume of a class-book, and making all
purchasers pay for both. Sir John Leslie took up the matter angrily,
visited Carfrae the publisher, and threatened him with an action, till
he was forced to turn the hapless _Lapsus_ out of doors. The maltreated
periodical found shelter in the shop of Huie, Infirmary Street; and NO.
XVII. was duly issued from the new office. NO. XVII. beheld _Mr.
Tatler's_ humiliation, in which, with fulsome apology and not very
credible assurances of respect and admiration, he disclaims the article
in question, and advertises a new issue of NO. XVI. with all
objectionable matter omitted. This, with pleasing euphemism, he terms in
a later advertisement, "a new and improved edition." This was the only
remarkable adventure of _Mr. Tatler's_ brief existence; unless we
consider as such a silly Chaldee manuscript in imitation of
_Blackwood_, and a letter of reproof from a divinity student on the
impiety of the same dull effusion. He laments the near approach of his
end in pathetic terms. "How shall we summon up sufficient courage," says
he, "to look for the last time on our beloved little devil and his
inestimable proof-sheet? How shall we be able to pass No. 14 Infirmary
Street and feel that all its attractions are over? How shall we bid
farewell for ever to that excellent man, with the long greatcoat, wooden
leg and wooden board, who acts as our representative at the gate of
_Alma Mater?_" But alas! he had no choice: _Mr. Tatler_, whose career,
he says himself, had been successful, passed peacefully away, and has
ever since dumbly implored "the bringing home of bell and burial."
_Alter et idem_. A very different affair was the _Lapsus Linguæ_ from
the _Edinburgh University Magazine_. The two prospectuses alone, laid
side by side, would indicate the march of luxury and the repeal of the
paper duty. The penny bi-weekly broadside of session 1823-4 was almost
wholly dedicated to Momus. Epigrams, pointless letters, amorous verses,
and University grievances are the continual burthen of the song. But
_Mr. Tatler_ was not without a vein of hearty humour; and his pages
afford what is much better: to wit, a good picture of student life as it
then was. The students of those polite days insisted on retaining their
hats in the class-room. There was a cab-stance in front of the College;
and "Carriage Entrance" was posted above the main arch, on what the
writer pleases to call "coarse, unclassic boards." The benches of the
"Speculative" then, as now, were red; but all other Societies (the
"Dialectic" is the only survivor) met downstairs, in some rooms of which
it is pointedly said that "nothing else could conveniently be made of
them." However horrible these dungeons may have been, it is certain that
they were paid for, and that far too heavily for the taste of session
1823-4, which found enough calls upon its purse for porter and toasted
cheese at Ambrose's, or cranberry tarts and ginger-wine at Doull's.
Duelling was still a possibility; so much so that when two medicals fell
to fisticuffs in Adam Square, it was seriously hinted that single combat
would be the result. Last and most wonderful of all, Gall and Spurzheim
were in every one's mouth; and the Law student, after having exhausted
Byron's poetry and Scott's novels, informed the ladies of his belief in
phrenology. In the present day he would dilate on "Red as a rose is
she," and then mention that he attends Old Greyfriars', as a tacit claim
to intellectual superiority. I do not know that the advance is much.
But _Mr. Tatler's_ best performances were three short papers in which he
hit off pretty smartly the idiosyncrasies of the "_Divinity_," the
"_Medical_," and the "_Law_" of session 1823-4. The fact that there was
no notice of the "_Arts_" seems to suggest that they stood in the same
intermediate position as they do now--the epitome of student-kind. _Mr.
Tatler's_ satire is, on the whole, good-humoured, and has not grown
superannuated in _all_ its limbs. His descriptions may limp at some
points, but there are certain broad traits that apply equally well to
session 1870-71. He shows us the _Divinity_ of the period--tall, pale,
and slender--his collar greasy, and his coat bare about the seams--"his
white neckcloth serving four days, and regularly turned the
third,"--"the rim of his hat deficient in wool,"--and "a weighty volume
of theology under his arm." He was the man to buy cheap "a snuff-box, or
a dozen of pencils, or a six-bladed knife, or a quarter of a hundred
quills," at any of the public sale-rooms. He was noted for cheap
purchases, and for exceeding the legal tender in halfpence. He haunted
"the darkest and remotest corner of the Theatre Gallery." He was to be
seen issuing from "aerial lodging-houses." Withal, says mine author,
"there were many good points about him: he paid his landlady's bill,
read his Bible, went twice to church on Sunday, seldom swore, was not
often tipsy, and bought the _Lapsus Linguæ_."
The _Medical_, again, "wore a white greatcoat, and consequently talked
loud"--(there is something very delicious in that _consequently_). He
wore his hat on one side. He was active, volatile, and went to the top
of Arthur's Seat on the Sunday forenoon. He was as quiet in a debating
society as he was loud in the streets. He was reckless and imprudent:
yesterday he insisted on your sharing a bottle of claret with him (and
claret was claret then, before the cheap-and-nasty treaty), and
to-morrow he asks you for the loan of a penny to buy the last number of
the _Lapsus_.
The student of _Law_, again, was a learned man. "He had turned over the
leaves of Justinian's 'Institutes,' and knew that they were written in
Latin. He was well acquainted with the title-page of 'Blackstone's
Commentaries,' and _argal_ (as the gravedigger in _Hamlet_ says) he was
not a person to be laughed at." He attended the Parliament House in the
character of a critic, and could give you stale sneers at all the
celebrated speakers. He was the terror of essayists at the Speculative
or the Forensic. In social qualities he seems to have stood unrivalled.
Even in the police-office we find him shining with undiminished lustre.
"If a _Charlie_ should find him rather noisy at an untimely hour, and
venture to take him into custody, he appears next morning like a Daniel
come to judgment. He opens his mouth to speak, and the divine precepts
of unchanging justice and Scots law flow from his tongue. The magistrate
listens in amazement, and fines him only a couple of guineas."
Such then were our predecessors and their College Magazine. Barclay,
Ambrose, Young Amos, and Fergusson were to them what the Café, the
Rainbow, and Rutherford's are to us. An hour's reading in these old
pages absolutely confuses us, there is so much that is similar and so
much that is different; the follies and amusements are so like our own,
and the manner of frolicking and enjoying are so changed, that one
pauses and looks about him in philosophic judgment. The muddy quadrangle
is thick with living students; but in our eyes it swarms also with the
phantasmal white greatcoats and tilted hats of 1824. Two races meet:
races alike and diverse. Two performances are played before our eyes;
but the change seems merely of impersonators, of scenery, of costume.
Plot and passion are the same. It is the fall of the spun shilling
whether seventy-one or twenty-four has the best of it.
In a future number we hope to give a glance at the individualities of
the present, and see whether the cast shall be head or tail--whether we
or the readers of the _Lapsus_ stand higher in the balance.
II
THE MODERN STUDENT CONSIDERED GENERALLY
We have now reached the difficult portion of our task. _Mr. Tatler_, for
all that we care, may have been as virulent as he liked about the
students of a former day; but for the iron to touch our sacred selves,
for a brother of the Guild to betray its most privy infirmities, let
such a Judas look to himself as he passes on his way to the Scots Law or
the Diagnostic, below the solitary lamp at the corner of the dark
quadrangle. We confess that this idea alarms us. We enter a protest. We
bind ourselves over verbally to keep the peace. We hope, moreover, that
having thus made you secret to our misgivings, you will excuse us if we
be dull, and set that down to caution which you might before have
charged to the account of stupidity.
The natural tendency of civilisation is to obliterate those distinctions
which are the best salt of life. All the fine old professional flavour
in language has evaporated. Your very gravedigger has forgotten his
avocation in his electorship, and would quibble on the Franchise over
Ophelia's grave, instead of more appropriately discussing the duration
of bodies under ground. From this tendency, from this gradual attrition
of life, in which everything pointed and characteristic is being rubbed
down, till the whole world begins to slip between our fingers in smooth
undistinguishable sands, from this, we say, it follows that we must not
attempt to join _Mr. Tatler_ in his simple division of students into
_Law_, _Divinity_, and _Medical_. Nowadays the Faculties may shake hands
over their follies; and, like Mrs. Frail and Mrs. Foresight (in _Love
for Love_) they may stand in the doors of opposite class-rooms, crying:
"Sister, Sister--Sister everyway!" A few restrictions, indeed, remain to
influence the followers of individual branches of study. The _Divinity_,
for example, must be an avowed believer; and as this, in the present
day, is unhappily considered by many as a confession of weakness, he is
fain to choose one of two ways of gilding the distasteful orthodox
bolus. Some swallow it in a thin jelly of metaphysics; for it is even a
credit to believe in God on the evidence of some crack-jaw philosopher,
although it is a decided slur to believe in Him on His own authority.
Others again (and this we think the worst method), finding German
grammar a somewhat dry morsel, run their own little heresy as a proof of
independence; and deny one of the cardinal doctrines that they may hold
the others without being laughed at.
Besides, however, such influences as these, there is little more
distinction between the faculties than the traditionary ideal, handed
down through a long sequence of students, and getting rounder and more
featureless at each successive session. The plague of uniformity has
descended on the College. Students (and indeed all sorts and conditions
of men) now require their faculty and character hung round their neck on
a placard, like the scenes in Shakespeare's theatre. And in the midst of
all this weary sameness, not the least common feature is the gravity of
every face. No more does the merry medical run eagerly in the clear
winter morning up the rugged sides of Arthur's Seat, and hear the church
bells begin and thicken and die away below him among the gathered smoke
of the city. He will not break Sunday to so little purpose. He no longer
finds pleasure in the mere output of his surplus energy. He husbands his
strength, and lays out walks, and reading, and amusement with deep
consideration, so that he may get as much work and pleasure out of his
body as he can, and waste none of his energy on mere impulse, or such
flat enjoyment as an excursion in the country.
See the quadrangle in the interregnum of classes, in those two or three
minutes when it is full of passing students, and we think you will admit
that, if we have not made it "an habitation of dragons," we have at
least transformed it into "a court for owls." Solemnity broods heavily
over the enclosure; and wherever you seek it, you will find a dearth of
merriment, an absence of real youthful enjoyment. You might as well try
"To move wild laughter in the throat of death"
as to excite any healthy stir among the bulk of this staid company.
The studious congregate about the doors of the different classes,
debating the matter of the lecture, or comparing note-books. A reserved
rivalry sunders them. Here are some deep in Greek particles: there,
others are already inhabitants of that land
"Where entity and quiddity,
Like ghosts of defunct bodies fly--
Where Truth in person does appear
Like words congealed in northern air."
But none of them seem to find any relish for their studies--no pedantic
love of this subject or that lights up their eyes--science and learning
are only means for a livelihood, which they have considerately embraced
and which they solemnly pursue. "Labour's pale priests," their lips seem
incapable of laughter, except in the way of polite recognition of
professorial wit. The stains of ink are chronic on their meagre fingers.
They walk like Saul among the asses.
The dandies are not less subdued. In 1824 there was a noisy dapper
dandyism abroad. Vulgar, as we should now think, but yet genial--a
matter of white greatcoats and loud voices--strangely different from the
stately frippery that is rife at present. These men are out of their
element in the quadrangle. Even the small remains of boisterous humour,
which still clings to any collection of young men, jars painfully on
their morbid sensibilities; and they beat a hasty retreat to resume
their perfunctory march along Princes Street. Flirtation is to them a
great social duty, a painful obligation, which they perform on every
occasion in the same chill official manner, and with the same
commonplace advances, the same dogged observance of traditional
behaviour. The shape of their raiment is a burden almost greater than
they can bear, and they halt in their walk to preserve the due
adjustment of their trouser-knees, till one would fancy he had mixed in
a procession of Jacobs. We speak, of course, for ourselves; but we would
as soon associate with a herd of sprightly apes as with these gloomy
modern beaux. Alas, that our Mirabels, our Valentines, even our
Brummels, should have left their mantles upon nothing more amusing!
Nor are the fast men less constrained. Solemnity, even in dissipation,
is the order of the day; and they go to the devil with a perverse
seriousness, a systematic rationalism of wickedness that would have
surprised the simpler sinners of old. Some of these men whom we see
gravely conversing on the steps have but a slender acquaintance with
each other. Their intercourse consists principally of mutual bulletins
of depravity; and, week after week, as they meet they reckon up their
items of transgression, and give an abstract of their downward progress
for approval and encouragement. These folk form a freemasonry of their
own. An oath is the shibboleth of their sinister fellowship. Once they
hear a man swear, it is wonderful how their tongues loosen and their
bashful spirits take enlargement under the consciousness of brotherhood.
There is no folly, no pardoning warmth of temper about them; they are as
steady-going and systematic in their own way as the studious in theirs.
Not that we are without merry men. No. We shall not be ungrateful to
those, whose grimaces, whose ironical laughter, whose active feet in the
"College Anthem" have beguiled so many weary hours and added a pleasant
variety to the strain of close attention. But even these are too
evidently professional in their antics. They go about cogitating puns
and inventing tricks. It is their vocation, Hal. They are the gratuitous
jesters of the class-room; and, like the clown when he leaves the stage,
their merriment too often sinks as the bell rings the hour of liberty,
and they pass forth by the Post-Office, grave and sedate, and meditating
fresh gambols for the morrow.
This is the impression left on the mind of any observing student by too
many of his fellows. They seem all frigid old men; and one pauses to
think how such an unnatural state of matters is produced. We feel
inclined to blame for it the unfortunate absence of _University feeling_
which is so marked a characteristic of our Edinburgh students.
Academical interests are so few and far between--students, as students,
have so little in common, except a peevish rivalry--there is such an
entire want of broad college sympathies and ordinary college
friendships, that we fancy that no University in the kingdom is in so
poor a plight. Our system is full of anomalies. A, who cut B whilst he
was a shabby student, curries sedulously up to him and cudgels his
memory for anecdotes about him when he becomes the great so-and-so. Let
there be an end of this shy, proud reserve on the one hand, and this
shuddering fine ladyism on the other; and we think we shall find both
ourselves and the College bettered. Let it be a sufficient reason for
intercourse that two men sit together on the same benches. Let the great
A be held excused for nodding to the shabby B in Princes Street, if he
can say, "That fellow is a student." Once this could be brought about,
we think you would find the whole heart of the University beat faster.
We think you would find a fusion among the students, a growth of common
feelings, an increasing sympathy between class and class, whose
influence (in such a heterogeneous company as ours) might be of
incalculable value in all branches of politics and social progress. It
would do more than this. If we could find some method of making the
University a real mother to her sons--something beyond a building of
class-rooms, a Senatus and a lottery of somewhat shabby prizes--we
should strike a death-blow at the constrained and unnatural attitude of
our Society. At present we are not a united body, but a loose gathering
of individuals, whose inherent attraction is allowed to condense them
into little knots and coteries. Our last snowball riot read us a plain
lesson on our condition. There was no party spirit--no unity of
interests. A few, who were mischievously inclined, marched off to the
College of Surgeons in a pretentious file; but even before they reached
their destination the feeble inspiration had died out in many, and their
numbers were sadly thinned. Some followed strange gods in the direction
of Drummond Street, and others slunk back to meek good-boyism at the
feet of the Professors. The same is visible in better things. As you
send a man to an English University that he may have his prejudices
rubbed off, you might send him to Edinburgh that he may have them
ingrained--rendered indelible--fostered by sympathy into living
principles of his spirit. And the reason of it is quite plain. From this
absence of University feeling it comes that a man's friendships are
always the direct and immediate results of these very prejudices. A
common weakness is the best master of ceremonies in our quadrangle: a
mutual vice is the readiest introduction. The studious associate with
the studious alone--the dandies with the dandies. There is nothing to
force them to rub shoulders with the others; and so they grow day by day
more wedded to their own original opinions and affections. They see
through the same spectacles continually. All broad sentiments, all real
catholic humanity expires; and the mind gets gradually stiffened into
one position--becomes so habituated to a contracted atmosphere, that it
shudders and withers under the least draught of the free air that
circulates in the general field of mankind.
Specialism in Society then, is, we think, one cause of our present
state. Specialism in study is another. We doubt whether this has ever
been a good thing since the world began; but we are sure it is much
worse now than it was. Formerly, when a man became a specialist, it was
out of affection for his subject. With a somewhat grand devotion he left
all the world of Science to follow his true love; and he contrived to
find that strange pedantic interest which inspired the man who
"Settled _Hoti's_ business--let it be--
Properly based _Oun_--
Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic _D_
Dead from the waist down."
Nowadays it is quite different. Our pedantry wants even the saving
clause of Enthusiasm. The election is now matter of necessity and not of
choice. Knowledge is now too broad a field for your Jack-of-all-Trades;
and, from beautifully utilitarian reasons, he makes his choice, draws
his pen through a dozen branches of study, and behold--John the
Specialist. That this is the way to be wealthy we shall not deny; but we
hold that it is _not_ the way to be healthy or wise. The whole mind
becomes narrowed and circumscribed to one "punctual spot" of knowledge.
A rank unhealthy soil breeds a harvest of prejudices. Feeling himself
above others in his one little branch--in the classification of
toadstools, or Carthaginian history--he waxes great in his own eyes and
looks down on others. Having all his sympathies educated in one way,
they die out in every other; and he is apt to remain a peevish, narrow,
and intolerant bigot. Dilettante is now a term of reproach; but there is
a certain form of dilettantism to which no one can object. It is this
that we want among our students. We wish them to abandon no subject
until they have seen and felt its merit--to act under a general interest
in all branches of knowledge, not a commercial eagerness to excel in
one.
In both these directions our sympathies are constipated. We are apostles
of our own caste and our own subject of study, instead of being, as we
should, true men and _loving_ students. Of course both of these could be
corrected by the students themselves; but this is nothing to the
purpose: it is more important to ask whether the Senatus or the body of
alumni could do nothing towards the growth of better feeling and wider
sentiments. Perhaps in another paper we may say something upon this
head.
One other word, however, before we have done. What shall we be when we
grow really old? Of yore, a man was thought to lay on restrictions and
acquire new deadweight of mournful experience with every year, till he
looked back on his youth as the very summer of impulse and freedom. We
please ourselves with thinking that it cannot be so with us. We would
fain hope that, as we have begun in one way, we may end in another; and
that when we _are_ in fact the octogenarians that we _seem_ at present,
there shall be no merrier men on earth. It is pleasant to picture us,
sunning ourselves in Princes Street of a morning, or chirping over our
evening cups, with all the merriment that we wanted in youth.
III
DEBATING SOCIETIES
A debating society is at first somewhat of a disappointment. You do not
often find the youthful Demosthenes chewing his pebbles in the same room
with you; or, even if you do, you will probably think the performance
little to be admired. As a general rule, the members speak shamefully
ill. The subjects of debate are heavy; and so are the fines. The Ballot
Question--oldest of dialectic nightmares--is often found astride of a
somnolent sederunt. The Greeks and Romans, too, are reserved as sort of
_general-utility_ men, to do all the dirty work of illustration; and
they fill as many functions as the famous waterfall scene at the
"Princess's," which I found doing duty on one evening as a gorge in
Peru, a haunt of German robbers, and a peaceful vale in the Scottish
borders. There is a sad absence of striking argument or real lively
discussion. Indeed, you feel a growing contempt for your fellow-members;
and it is not until you rise yourself to hawk and hesitate and sit
shamefully down again, amid eleemosynary applause, that you begin to
find your level and value others rightly. Even then, even when failure
has damped your critical ardour, you will see many things to be laughed
at in the deportment of your rivals.
Most laughable, perhaps, are your indefatigable strivers after
eloquence. They are of those who "pursue with eagerness the phantoms of
hope," and who, since they expect that "the deficiencies of last
sentence will be supplied by the next," have been recommended by Dr.
Samuel Johnson to "attend to the History of Rasselas, Prince of
Abyssinia." They are characterised by a hectic hopefulness. Nothing
damps them. They rise from the ruins of one abortive sentence, to launch
forth into another with unabated vigour. They have all the manner of an
orator. From the tone of their voice, you would expect a splendid
period--and lo! a string of broken-backed, disjointed clauses, eked out
with stammerings and throat-clearings. They possess the art (learned
from the pulpit) of rounding an uneuphonious sentence by dwelling on a
single syllable--of striking a balance in a top-heavy period by
lengthening out a word into a melancholy quaver. Withal, they never
cease to hope. Even at last, even when they have exhausted all their
ideas, even after the would-be peroration has finally refused to
perorate, they remain upon their feet with their mouths open, waiting
for some further inspiration, like Chaucer's widow's son in the
dung-hole, after
"His throat was kit unto the nekké bone,"
in vain expectation of that seed that was to be laid upon his tongue,
and give him renewed and clearer utterance.
These men may have something to say, if they could only say it--indeed
they generally have; but the next class are people who, having nothing
to say, are cursed with a facility and an unhappy command of words, that
makes them the prime nuisances of the society they affect. They try to
cover their absence of matter by an unwholesome vitality of delivery.
They look triumphantly round the room, as if courting applause, after a
torrent of diluted truism. They talk in a circle, harping on the same
dull round of argument, and returning again and again to the same remark
with the same sprightliness, the same irritating appearance of novelty.
After this set, any one is tolerable; so we shall merely hint at a few
other varieties. There is your man who is pre-eminently conscientious,
whose face beams with sincerity as he opens on the negative, and who
votes on the affirmative at the end, looking round the room with an air
of chastened pride. There is also the irrelevant speaker, who rises,
emits a joke or two, and then sits down again, without ever attempting
to tackle the subject of debate. Again, we have men who ride
pick-a-back on their family reputation, or, if their family have none,
identify themselves with some well-known statesman, use his opinions,
and lend him their patronage on all occasions. This is a dangerous plan,
and serves oftener, I am afraid, to point a difference than to adorn a
speech.
But alas! a striking failure may be reached without tempting Providence
by any of these ambitious tricks. Our own stature will be found high
enough for shame. The success of three simple sentences lures us into a
fatal parenthesis in the fourth, from whose shut brackets we may never
disentangle the thread of our discourse. A momentary flush tempts us
into a quotation; and we may be left helpless in the middle of one of
Pope's couplets, a white film gathering before our eyes, and our kind
friends charitably trying to cover our disgrace by a feeble round of
applause. _Amis lecteurs_, this is a painful topic. It is possible that
we too, we, the "potent, grave, and reverend" editor, may have suffered
these things, and drunk as deep as any of the cup of shameful failure.
Let us dwell no longer on so delicate a subject.
In spite, however, of these disagreeables, I should recommend any
student to suffer them with Spartan courage, as the benefits he receives
should repay him an hundredfold for them all. The life of the debating
society is a handy antidote to the life of the class-room and
quadrangle. Nothing could be conceived more excellent as a weapon
against many of those _peccant humours_ that we have been railing
against in the jeremiad of our last "College Paper"--particularly in the
field of intellect. It is a sad sight to see our heather-scented
students, our boys of seventeen, coming up to College with determined
views--_roués_ in speculation--having gauged the vanity of philosophy or
learned to shun it as the middle-man of heresy--a company of determined,
deliberate opinionists, not to be moved by all the sleights of logic.
What have such men to do with study? If their minds are made up
irrevocably, why burn the "studious lamp" in search of further
confirmation? Every set opinion I hear a student deliver I feel a
certain lowering of my regard. He who studies, he who is yet employed in
groping for his premises, should keep his mind fluent and sensitive,
keen to mark flaws, and willing to surrender untenable positions. He
should keep himself teachable, or cease the expensive farce of being
taught. It is to further this docile spirit that we desire to press the
claims of debating societies. It is as a means of melting down this
museum of premature petrifactions into living and impressionable soul
that we insist on their utility. If we could once prevail on our
students to feel no shame in avowing an uncertain attitude towards any
subject, if we could teach them that it was unnecessary for every lad to
have his _opinionette_ on every topic, we should have gone a far way
towards bracing the intellectual tone of the coming race of thinkers;
and this it is which debating societies are so well fitted to perform.
We there meet people of every shade of opinion, and make friends with
them. We are taught to rail against a man the whole session through, and
then hob-a-nob with him at the concluding entertainment. We find men of
talent far exceeding our own, whose conclusions are widely different
from ours; and we are thus taught to distrust ourselves. But the best
means of all towards catholicity is that wholesome rule which some folk
are most inclined to condemn,--I mean the law of _obliged speeches_.
Your senior member commands; and you must take the affirmative or the
negative, just as suits his best convenience. This tends to the most
perfect liberality. It is no good hearing the arguments of an opponent,
for in good verity you rarely follow them; and even if you do take the
trouble to listen, it is merely in a captious search for weaknesses.
This is proved, I fear, in every debate; when you hear each speaker
arguing out his own prepared _spécialité_ (he never intended speaking,
of course, until some remarks of, etc.), arguing out, I say, his own
_coached-up_ subject without the least attention to what has gone
before, as utterly at sea about the drift of his adversary's speech as
Panurge when he argued with Thaumaste, and merely linking his own
prelection to the last by a few flippant criticisms. Now, as the rule
stands, you are saddled with the side you disapprove, and so you are
forced, by regard for your own fame, to argue out, to feel with, to
elaborate completely, the case as it stands against yourself; and what a
fund of wisdom do you not turn up in this idle digging of the vineyard!
How many new difficulties take form before your eyes? how many
superannuated arguments cripple finally into limbo, under the glance of
your enforced eclecticism!
Nor is this the only merit of Debating Societies. They tend also to
foster taste, and to promote friendship between University men. This
last, as we have had occasion before to say, is the great requirement of
our student life; and it will therefore be no waste of time if we devote
a paragraph to this subject in its connection with Debating Societies.
At present they partake too much of the nature of a _clique._ Friends
propose friends, and mutual friends second them, until the society
degenerates into a sort of family party. You may confirm old
acquaintances, but you can rarely make new ones. You find yourself in
the atmosphere of your own daily intercourse. Now, this is an
unfortunate circumstance, which it seems to me might readily be
rectified. Our Principal has shown himself so friendly towards all
College improvements that I cherish the hope of seeing shortly realised
a certain suggestion, which is not a new one with me, and which must
often have been proposed and canvassed heretofore--I mean, a real
_University Debating Society_, patronised by the Senatus, presided over
by the Professors, to which every one might gain ready admittance on
sight of his matriculation ticket, where it would be a favour and not a
necessity to speak, and where the obscure student might have another
object for attendance besides the mere desire to save his fines: to wit,
the chance of drawing on himself the favourable consideration of his
teachers. This would be merely following in the good tendency, which
has been so noticeable during all this session, to increase and multiply
student societies and clubs of every sort. Nor would it be a matter of
much difficulty. The united societies would form a nucleus: one of the
class-rooms at first, and perhaps afterwards the great hall above the
library, might be the place of meeting. There would be no want of
attendance or enthusiasm, I am sure; for it is a very different thing to
speak under the bushel of a private club on the one hand, and, on the
other, in a public place, where a happy period or a subtle argument may
do the speaker permanent service in after life. Such a club might end,
perhaps, by rivalling the "Union" at Cambridge or the "Union" at Oxford.
IV
THE PHILOSOPHY OF UMBRELLAS[36]
It is wonderful to think what a turn has been given to our whole Society
by the fact that we live under the sign of Aquarius,--that our climate
is essentially wet. A mere arbitrary distinction, like the
walking-swords of yore, might have remained the symbol of foresight and
respectability, had not the raw mists and dropping showers of our island
pointed the inclination of Society to another exponent of those virtues.
A ribbon of the Legion of Honour or a string of medals may prove a
person's courage; a title may prove his birth; a professorial chair his
study and acquirement; but it is the habitual carriage of the umbrella
that is the stamp of Respectability. The umbrella has become the
acknowledged index of social position.
Robinson Crusoe presents us with a touching instance of the hankering
after them inherent in the civilised and educated mind. To the
superficial, the hot suns of Juan Fernandez may sufficiently account for
his quaint choice of a luxury; but surely one who had borne the hard
labour of a seaman under the tropics for all these years could have
supported an excursion after goats or a peaceful _constitutional_ arm in
arm with the nude Friday. No, it was not this: the memory of a vanished
respectability called for some outward manifestation, and the result
was--an umbrella. A pious castaway might have rigged up a belfry and
solaced his Sunday mornings with the mimicry of church-bells; but Crusoe
was rather a moralist than a pietist, and his leaf-umbrella is as fine
an example of the civilised mind striving to express itself under
adverse circumstances as we have ever met with.
It is not for nothing, either, that the umbrella has become the very
foremost badge of modern civilisation--the Urim and Thummim of
respectability. Its pregnant symbolism has taken its rise in the most
natural manner. Consider, for a moment, when umbrellas were first
introduced into this country, what manner of men would use them, and
what class would adhere to the useless but ornamental cane. The first,
without doubt, would be the hypochondriacal, out of solicitude for their
health, or the frugal, out of care for their raiment; the second, it is
equally plain, would include the fop, the fool, and the Bobadil. Any one
acquainted with the growth of Society, and knowing out of what small
seeds of cause are produced great revolutions, and wholly new conditions
of intercourse, sees from this simple thought how the carriage of an
umbrella came to indicate frugality, judicious regard for bodily
welfare, and scorn for mere outward adornment, and, in one word, all
those homely and solid virtues implied in the term RESPECTABILITY. Not
that the umbrella's costliness has nothing to do with its great
influence. Its possession, besides symbolising (as we have already
indicated) the change from wild Esau to plain Jacob dwelling in tents,
implies a certain comfortable provision of fortune. It is not every one
that can expose twenty-six shillings' worth of property to so many
chances of loss and theft. So strongly do we feel on this point, indeed,
that we are almost inclined to consider all who possess really
well-conditioned umbrellas as worthy of the Franchise. They have a
qualification standing in their lobbies; they carry a sufficient stake
in the common-weal below their arm. One who bears with him an
umbrella--such a complicated structure of whalebone, of silk, and of
cane, that it becomes a very microcosm of modern industry--is
necessarily a man of peace. A half-crown cane may be applied to an
offender's head on a very moderate provocation; but a six-and-twenty
shilling silk is a possession too precious to be adventured in the shock
of war.
These are but a few glances at how umbrellas (in the general) came to
their present high estate. But the true Umbrella-Philosopher meets with
far stranger applications as he goes about the streets.
Umbrellas, like faces, acquire a certain sympathy with the individual
who carries them: indeed, they are far more capable of betraying his
trust; for whereas a face is given to us so far ready made, and all our
power over it is in frowning, and laughing, and grimacing, during the
first three or four decades of life, each umbrella is selected from a
whole shopful, as being most consonant to the purchaser's disposition.
An undoubted power of diagnosis rests with the practised
Umbrella-Philosopher. O you who lisp, and amble, and change the fashion
of your countenances--you who conceal all these, how little do you think
that you left a proof of your weakness in our umbrella-stand--that even
now, as you shake out the folds to meet the thickening snow, we read in
its ivory handle the outward and visible sign of your snobbery, or from
the exposed gingham of its cover detect, through coat and waistcoat, the
hidden hypocrisy of the "_dickey_"! But alas! even the umbrella is no
certain criterion. The falsity and the folly of the human race have
degraded that graceful symbol to the ends of dishonesty; and while some
umbrellas, from carelessness in selection, are not strikingly
characteristic (for it is only in what a man loves that he displays his
real nature), others, from certain prudential motives, are chosen
directly opposite to the person's disposition. A mendacious umbrella is
a sign of great moral degradation. Hypocrisy naturally shelters itself
below a silk; while the fast youth goes to visit his religious friends
armed with the decent and reputable gingham. May it not be said of the
bearers of these inappropriate umbrellas that they go about the streets
"with a lie in their right hand"?
The kings of Siam, as we read, besides having a graduated social scale
of umbrellas (which was a good thing), prevented the great bulk of their
subjects from having any at all, which was certainly a bad thing. We
should be sorry to believe that this Eastern legislator was a fool--the
idea of an aristocracy of umbrellas is too philosophic to have
originated in a nobody,--and we have accordingly taken exceeding pains
to find out the reason of this harsh restriction. We think we have
succeeded; but, while admiring the principle at which he aimed, and
while cordially recognising in the Siamese potentate the only man before
ourselves who had taken a real grasp of the umbrella, we must be allowed
to point out how unphilosophically the great man acted in this
particular. His object, plainly, was to prevent any unworthy persons
from bearing the sacred symbol of domestic virtues. We cannot excuse his
limiting these virtues to the circle of his court. We must only remember
that such was the feeling of the age in which he lived. Liberalism had
not yet raised the war-cry of the working classes. But here was his
mistake: it was a needless regulation. Except in a very few cases of
hypocrisy joined to a powerful intellect, men, not by nature
_umbrellarians_, have tried again and again to become so by art, and yet
have failed--have expended their patrimony in the purchase of umbrella
after umbrella, and yet have systematically lost them, and have finally,
with contrite spirits and shrunken purses, given up their vain struggle,
and relied on theft and borrowing for the remainder of their lives. This
is the most remarkable fact that we have had occasion to notice; and yet
we challenge the candid reader to call it in question. Now, as there
cannot be any _moral selection_ in a mere dead piece of furniture--as
the umbrella cannot be supposed to have an affinity for individual men
equal and reciprocal to that which men certainly feel toward individual
umbrellas,--we took the trouble of consulting a scientific friend as to
whether there was any possible physical explanation of the phenomenon.
He was unable to supply a plausible theory, or even hypothesis; but we
extract from his letter the following interesting passage relative to
the physical peculiarities of umbrellas: "Not the least important, and
by far the most curious property of the umbrella, is the energy which it
displays in affecting the atmospheric strata. There is no fact in
meteorology better established--indeed, it is almost the only one on
which meteorologists are agreed--than that the carriage of an umbrella
produces desiccation of the air; while if it be left at home, aqueous
vapour is largely produced, and is soon deposited in the form of rain.
No theory," my friend continues, "competent to explain this hygrometric
law has been given (as far as I am aware) by Herschel, Dove, Glaisher,
Tait, Buchan, or any other writer; nor do I pretend to supply the
defect. I venture, however, to throw out the conjecture that it will be
ultimately found to belong to the same class of natural laws as that
agreeable to which a slice of toast always descends with the buttered
surface downwards."
But it is time to draw to a close. We could expatiate much longer upon
this topic, but want of space constrains us to leave unfinished these
few desultory remarks--slender contributions towards a subject which has
fallen sadly backward, and which, we grieve to say, was better
understood by the king of Siam in 1686 than by all the philosophers of
to-day. If, however, we have awakened in any rational mind an interest
in the symbolism of umbrellas--in any generous heart a more complete
sympathy with the dumb companion of his daily walk,--or in any grasping
spirit a pure notion of respectability strong enough to make him expend
his six-and-twenty shillings--we shall have deserved well of the world,
to say nothing of the many industrious persons employed in the
manufacture of the article.
FOOTNOTE:
[36] "This paper was written in collaboration with James Walter
Ferrier, and if reprinted this is to be stated, though his principal
collaboration was to lie back in an easy-chair and laugh."--[R. L. S.,
_Oct_. 25, 1894.]
V
THE PHILOSOPHY OF NOMENCLATURE
"How many Cæsars and Pompeys, by mere inspirations of the names, have
been rendered worthy of them? And how many are there, who might have
done exceeding well in the world, had not their characters and spirits
been totally depressed and Nicodemus'd into nothing?"--"Tristram
Shandy," vol. i. chap. xix.
Such were the views of the late Walter Shandy, Esq., Turkey merchant. To
the best of my belief, Mr. Shandy is the first who fairly pointed out
the incalculable influence of nomenclature upon the whole life--who
seems first to have recognised the one child, happy in an heroic
appellation, soaring upwards on the wings of fortune, and the other,
like the dead sailor in his shotted hammock, haled down by sheer weight
of name into the abysses of social failure. Solomon possibly had his eye
on some such theory when he said that "a good name is better than
precious ointment"; and perhaps we may trace a similar spirit in the
compilers of the English Catechism, and the affectionate interest with
which they linger round the catechumen's name at the very threshold of
their work. But, be these as they may, I think no one can censure me for
appending, in pursuance of the expressed wish of his son, the Turkey
merchant's name to his system, and pronouncing, without further
preface, a short epitome of the "Shandean Philosophy of Nomenclature."
To begin, then: the influence of our name makes itself felt from the
very cradle. As a schoolboy I remember the pride with which I hailed
Robin Hood, Robert Bruce, and Robert le Diable as my name-fellows; and
the feeling of sore disappointment that fell on my heart when I found a
freebooter or a general who did not share with me a single one of my
numerous _prænomina_. Look at the delight with which two children find
they have the same name. They are friends from that moment forth; they
have a bond of union stronger than exchange of nuts and sweetmeats. This
feeling, I own, wears off in later life. Our names lose their freshness
and interest, become trite and indifferent. But this, dear reader, is
merely one of the sad effects of those "shades of the prison-house"
which come gradually betwixt us and nature with advancing years; it
affords no weapon against the philosophy of names.
In after life, although we fail to trace its working, that name which
careless godfathers lightly applied to your unconscious infancy will
have been moulding your character, and influencing with irresistible
power the whole course of your earthly fortunes. But the last name,
overlooked by Mr. Shandy, is no whit less important as a condition of
success. Family names, we must recollect, are but inherited nicknames;
and if the _sobriquet_ were applicable to the ancestor, it is most
likely applicable to the descendant also. You would not expect to find
Mr. M'Phun acting as a mute, or Mr. M'Lumpha excelling as a professor of
dancing. Therefore, in what follows, we shall consider names,
independent of whether they are first or last. And to begin with, look
what a pull _Cromwell_ had over _Pym_--the one name full of a resonant
imperialism, the other, mean, pettifogging, and unheroic to a degree.
Who would expect eloquence from _Pym_--who would read poems by
_Pym_--who would bow to the opinion of _Pym_? He might have been a
dentist, but he should never have aspired to be a statesman. I can only
wonder that he succeeded as he did. Pym and Habakkuk stand first upon
the roll of men who have triumphed, by sheer force of genius, over the
most unfavourable appellations. But even these have suffered; and, had
they been more fitly named, the one might have been Lord Protector, and
the other have shared the laurels with Isaiah. In this matter we must
not forget that all our great poets have borne great names. Chaucer,
Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Shelley--what a
constellation of lordly words! Not a single common-place name among
them--not a Brown, not a Jones, not a Robinson; they are all names that
one would stop and look at on a door-plate. Now, imagine if _Pepys_ had
tried to clamber somehow into the enclosure of poetry, what a blot would
that word have made upon the list! The thing was impossible. In the
first place a certain natural consciousness that men would have held him
down to the level of his name, would have prevented him from rising
above the Pepsine standard, and so haply withheld him altogether from
attempting verse. Next, the book-sellers would refuse to publish, and
the world to read them, on the mere evidence of the fatal appellation.
And now, before I close this section, I must say one word as to
_punnable_ names, names that stand alone, that have a significance and
life apart from him that bears them. These are the bitterest of all. One
friend of mine goes bowed and humbled through life under the weight of
this misfortune; for it is an awful thing when a man's name is a joke,
when he cannot be mentioned without exciting merriment, and when even
the intimation of his death bids fair to carry laughter into many a
home.
So much for people who are badly named. Now for people who are _too_
well named, who go top-heavy from the font, who are baptized into a
false position, and find themselves beginning life eclipsed under the
fame of some of the great ones of the past. A man, for instance, called
William Shakespeare could never dare to write plays. He is thrown into
too humbling an apposition with the author of _Hamlet._ His own name
coming after is such an anti-climax. "The plays of William Shakespeare"?
says the reader--"O no! The plays of William Shakespeare Cockerill," and
he throws the book aside. In wise pursuance of such views, Mr. John
Milton Hengler, who not long since delighted us in this favoured town,
has never attempted to write an epic, but has chosen a new path, and has
excelled upon the tight-rope. A marked example of triumph over this is
the case of Mr. Dante Gabriel Rossetti. On the face of the matter, I
should have advised him to imitate the pleasing modesty of the
last-named gentleman, and confine his ambition to the sawdust. But Mr.
Rossetti has triumphed. He has even dared to translate from his mighty
name-father; and the voice of fame supports him in his boldness.
Dear readers, one might write a year upon this matter. A lifetime of
comparison and research could scarce suffice for its elucidation. So
here, if it please you, we shall let it rest. Slight as these notes have
been, I would that the great founder of the system had been alive to see
them. How he had warmed and brightened, how his persuasive eloquence
would have fallen on the ears of Toby; and what a letter of praise and
sympathy would not the editor have received before the month was out!
Alas, the thing was not to be. Walter Shandy died and was duly buried,
while yet his theory lay forgotten and neglected by his
fellow-countrymen. But, reader, the day will come, I hope, when a
paternal government will stamp out, as seeds of national weakness, all
depressing patronymics, and when godfathers and godmothers will soberly
and earnestly debate the interest of the nameless one, and not rush
blindfold to the christening. In these days there shall be written a
"Godfather's Assistant," in shape of a dictionary of names, with their
concomitant virtues and vices; and this book shall be scattered
broadcast through the land, and shall be on the table of every one
eligible for god-fathership, until such a thing as a vicious or untoward
appellation shall have ceased from off the face of the earth.
NOTES AND ESSAYS CHIEFLY OF THE ROAD
NOTES AND ESSAYS CHIEFLY OF THE ROAD
I
A RETROSPECT
(_A Fragment: written at Dunoon, 1870_)
If there is anything that delights me in Hazlitt, beyond the charm of
style and the unconscious portrait of a vain and powerful spirit, which
his works present, it is the loving and tender way in which he returns
again to the memory of the past. These little recollections of bygone
happiness were too much a part of the man to be carelessly or poorly
told. The imaginary landscapes and visions of the most ecstatic dreamer
can never rival such recollections, told simply perhaps, but still told
(as they could not fail to be) with precision, delicacy, and evident
delight. They are too much loved by the author not to be palated by the
reader. But beyond the mere felicity of pencil, the nature of the piece
could never fail to move my heart. When I read his essay "On the Past
and Future," every word seemed to be something I had said myself. I
could have thought he had been eavesdropping at the doors of my heart,
so entire was the coincidence between his writing and my thought. It is
a sign perhaps of a somewhat vain disposition. The future is nothing;
but the past is myself, my own history, the seed of my present thoughts,
the mould of my present disposition. It is not in vain that I return to
the nothings of my childhood; for every one of them has left some stamp
upon me or put some fetter on my boasted free-will. In the past is my
present fate; and in the past also is my real life. It is not the past
only, but the past that has been many years in that tense. The doings
and actions of last year are as uninteresting and vague to me as the
blank gulf of the future, the _tabula rasa_ that may never be anything
else. I remember a confused hotch-potch of unconnected events, a "chaos
without form, and void"; but nothing salient or striking rises from the
dead level of "flat, stale, and unprofitable" generality. When we are
looking at a landscape we think ourselves pleased; but it is only when
it comes back upon us by the fire o' nights that we can disentangle the
main charm from the thick of particulars. It is just so with what is
lately past. It is too much loaded with detail to be distinct; and the
canvas is too large for the eye to encompass. But this is no more the
case when our recollections have been strained long enough through the
hour-glass of time; when they have been the burthen of so much thought,
the charm and comfort of so many a vigil. All that is worthless has been
sieved and sifted out of them. Nothing remains but the brightest lights
and the darkest shadows. When we see a mountain country near at hand,
the spurs and haunches crowd up in eager rivalry, and the whole range
seems to have shrugged its shoulders to its ears, till we cannot tell
the higher from the lower: but when we are far off, these lesser
prominences are melted back into the bosom of the rest, or have set
behind the round horizon of the plain, and the highest peaks stand forth
in lone and sovereign dignity against the sky. It is just the same with
our recollections. We require to draw back and shade our eyes before the
picture dawns upon us in full breadth and outline. Late years are still
in limbo to us; but the more distant past is all that we possess in
life, the corn already harvested and stored for ever in the grange of
memory. The doings of to-day at some future time will gain the required
offing; I shall learn to love the things of my adolescence, as Hazlitt
loved them, and as I love already the recollections of my childhood.
They will gather interest with every year. They will ripen in forgotten
corners of my memory; and some day I shall waken and find them vested
with new glory and new pleasantness.
It is for stirring the chords of memory, then, that I love Hazlitt's
essays, and for the same reason (I remember) he himself threw in his
allegiance to Rousseau, saying of him, what was so true of his own
writings: "He seems to gather up the past moments of his being like
drops of honey-dew to distil some precious liquor from them; his
alternate pleasures and pains are the bead-roll that he tells over and
piously worships; he makes a rosary of the flowers of hope and fancy
that strewed his earliest years." How true are these words when applied
to himself! and how much I thank him that it was so! All my childhood is
a golden age to me. I have no recollection of bad weather. Except one or
two storms where grandeur had impressed itself on my mind, the whole
time seems steeped in sunshine. "_Et ego in Arcadia vixi_" would be no
empty boast upon my grave. If I desire to live long, it is that I may
have the more to look back upon. Even to one, like the unhappy Duchess,
"Acquainted with sad misery
As the tamed galley-slave is with his oar,"
and seeing over the night of troubles no "lily-wristed morn" of hope
appear, a retrospect of even chequered and doubtful happiness in the
past may sweeten the bitterness of present tears. And here I may be
excused if I quote a passage from an unpublished drama (the unpublished
is perennial, I fancy) which the author believed was not all devoid of
the flavour of our elder dramatists. However this may be, it expresses
better than I could some further thoughts on this same subject. The
heroine is taken by a minister to the grave, where already some have
been recently buried, and where her sister's lover is destined to
rejoin them on the following day.[37]
* * * * *
What led me to the consideration of this subject, and what has made me
take up my pen to-night, is the rather strange coincidence of two very
different accidents--a prophecy of my future and a return into my past.
No later than yesterday, seated in the coffee-room here, there came into
the tap of the hotel a poor mad Highland woman. The noise of her
strained, thin voice brought me out to see her. I could conceive that
she had been pretty once, but that was many years ago. She was now
withered and fallen-looking. Her hair was thin and straggling, her dress
poor and scanty. Her moods changed as rapidly as a weathercock before a
thunderstorm. One moment she said her "mutch" was the only thing that
gave her comfort, and the next she slackened the strings and let it back
upon her neck, in a passion at it for making her too hot. Her talk was a
wild, somewhat weird, farrago of utterly meaningless balderdash, mere
inarticulate gabble, snatches of old Jacobite ballads and exaggerated
phrases from the drama, to which she suited equally exaggerated action.
She "babbled of green fields" and Highland glens; she prophesied "the
drawing of the claymore," with a lofty disregard of cause or
common-sense; and she broke out suddenly, with uplifted hands and eyes,
into ecstatic "Heaven bless hims!" and "Heaven forgive hims!" She had
been a camp-follower in her younger days, and she was never tired of
expatiating on the gallantry, the fame, and the beauty of the 42nd
Highlanders. Her patriotism knew no bounds, and her prolixity was much
on the same scale. This Witch of Endor offered to tell my fortune, with
much dignity and proper oracular enunciation. But on my holding forth my
hand a somewhat ludicrous incident occurred. "Na, na," she said; "wait
till I have a draw of my pipe." Down she sat in the corner, puffing
vigorously and regaling the lady behind the counter with conversation
more remarkable for stinging satire than prophetic dignity. The person
in question had "mair weeg than hair on her head" (did not the chignon
plead guilty at these words?)--"wad be better if she had less
tongue"--and would come at last to the grave, a goal which, in a few
words, she invested with "warning circumstance" enough to make a Stoic
shudder. Suddenly, in the midst of this, she rose up and beckoned me to
approach. The oracles of my Highland sorceress had no claim to
consideration except in the matter of obscurity. In "question hard and
sentence intricate" she beat the priests of Delphi; in bold, unvarnished
falsity (as regards the past) even spirit-rapping was a child to her.
All that I could gather may be thus summed up shortly: that I was to
visit America, that I was to be very happy, and that I was to be much
upon the sea, predictions which, in consideration of an uneasy stomach,
I can scarcely think agreeable with one another. Two incidents alone
relieved the dead level of idiocy and incomprehensible gabble. The first
was the comical announcement that "when I drew fish to the Marquis of
Bute, I should take care of my sweetheart," from which I deduce the fact
that at some period of my life I shall drive a fishmonger's cart. The
second, in the middle of such nonsense, had a touch of the tragic. She
suddenly looked at me with an eager glance, and dropped my hand saying,
in what were tones of misery or a very good affectation of them, "Black
eyes!" A moment after she was at work again. It is as well to mention
that I have not black eyes.[38]
This incident, strangely blended of the pathetic and the ludicrous, set
my mind at work upon the future; but I could find little interest in the
study. Even the predictions of my sibyl failed to allure me, nor could
life's prospect charm and detain my attention like its retrospect.
Not far from Dunoon is Rosemore, a house in which I had spent a week or
so in my very distant childhood, how distant I have no idea; and one may
easily conceive how I looked forward to revisiting this place and so
renewing contact with my former self. I was under necessity to be early
up, and under necessity also, in the teeth of a bitter spring
north-easter, to clothe myself warmly on the morning of my long-promised
excursion. The day was as bright as it was cold. Vast irregular masses
of white and purple cumulus drifted rapidly over the sky. The great
hills, brown with the bloomless heather, were here and there buried in
blue shadows, and streaked here and there with sharp stripes of sun. The
new-fired larches were green in the glens; and "pale primroses" hid
themselves in mossy hollows and under hawthorn roots. All these things
were new to me; for I had noticed none of these beauties in my younger
days, neither the larch woods, nor the winding road edged in between
field and flood, nor the broad, ruffled bosom of the hill-surrounded
loch. It was, above all, the height of these hills that astonished me. I
remembered the existence of hills, certainly, but the picture in my
memory was low, featureless, and uninteresting. They seemed to have kept
pace with me in my growth, but to a gigantic scale; and the villas that
I remembered as half-way up the slope seemed to have been left behind
like myself, and now only ringed their mighty feet, white among the
newly kindled woods. As I felt myself on the road at last that I had
been dreaming for these many days before, a perfect intoxication of joy
took hold upon me; and I was so pleased at my own happiness that I could
let none past me till I had taken them into my confidence. I asked my
way from every one, and took good care to let them all know, before
they left me, what my object was, and how many years had elapsed since
my last visit. I wonder what the good folk thought of me and my
communications.
At last, however, after much inquiry, I arrive at the place, make my
peace with the gardener, and enter. My disillusion dates from the
opening of the garden door. I repine, I find a reluctation of spirit
against believing that this is the place. What, is this kailyard that
inexhaustible paradise of a garden in which M---- and I found
"elbow-room," and expatiated together without sensible constraint? Is
that little turfed slope the huge and perilous green bank down which I
counted it a feat, and the gardener a sin, to run? Are these two squares
of stone, some two feet high, the pedestals on which I walked with such
a penetrating sense of dizzy elevation, and which I had expected to find
on a level with my eyes? Ay, the place is no more like what I expected
than this bleak April day is like the glorious September with which it
is incorporated in my memory. I look at the gardener, disappointment in
my face, and tell him that the place seems sorrily shrunken from the
high estate that it had held in my remembrance, and he returns, with
quiet laughter, by asking me how long it is since I was there. I tell
him, and he remembers me. Ah! I say, I was a great nuisance, I believe.
But no, my good gardener will plead guilty to having kept no record of
my evil-doings, and I find myself much softened toward the place and
willing to take a kinder view and pardon its shortcomings for the sake
of the gardener and his pretended recollection of myself. And it is just
at this stage (to complete my re-establishment) that I see a little
boy--the gardener's grandchild--just about the same age and the same
height that I must have been in the days when I was here last. My first
feeling is one of almost anger, to see him playing on the gravel where I
had played before, as if he had usurped something of my identity; but
next moment I feel a softening and a sort of rising and qualm of the
throat, accompanied by a pricking heat in the eye balls. I hastily join
conversation with the child, and inwardly felicitate myself that the
gardener is opportunely gone for the key of the house. But the child is
a sort of homily to me. He is perfectly quiet and resigned, an
unconscious hermit. I ask him jocularly if he gets as much abused as I
used to do for running down the bank; but the child's perfect
seriousness of answer staggers me--"O no, grandpapa doesn't allow
it--why should he?" I feel caught: I stand abashed at the reproof; I
must not expose my childishness again to this youthful disciplinarian,
and so I ask him very stately what he is going to be--a good serious
practical question, out of delicacy for his parts. He answers that he is
going to be a missionary to China, and tells me how a missionary once
took him on his knee and told him about missionary work, and asked him
if he, too, would not like to become one, to which the child had simply
answered in the affirmative. The child is altogether so different from
what I have been, is so absolutely complementary to what I now am, that
I turn away not a little abashed from the conversation, for there is
always something painful in sudden contact with the good qualities that
we do not possess. Just then the grandfather returns; and I go with him
to the summer-house, where I used to learn my Catechism, to the wall on
which M----and I thought it no small exploit to walk upon, and all the
other places that I remembered.
In fine, the matter being ended, I turn and go my way home to the hotel,
where, in the cold afternoon, I write these notes with the table and
chair drawn as near the fire as the rug and the French polish will
permit.
One other thing I may as well make a note of, and that is how there
arises that strange contradiction of the hills being higher than I had
expected and everything near at hand being so ridiculously smaller. This
is a question I think easily answered: the very terms of the problem
suggest the solution. To everything near at hand I applied my own
stature, as a sort of natural unit of measurement, so that I had no
actual image of their dimensions but their ratio to myself; so, of
course, as one term of the proportion changed, the other changed
likewise, and as my own height increased my notion of things near at
hand became equally expanded. But the hills, mark you, were out of my
reach: I could not apply myself to them: I had an actual, instead of a
proportional eidolon of their magnitude; so that, of course (my eye
being larger and flatter nowadays, and so the image presented to me then
being in sober earnest smaller than the image presented to me now), I
found the hills nearly as much too great as I had found the other things
too small.
* * * * *
[_Added the next morning_.]--He who indulges habitually in the
intoxicating pleasures of imagination, for the very reason that he reaps
a greater pleasure than others, must resign himself to a keener pain, a
more intolerable and utter prostration. It is quite possible, and even
comparatively easy, so to enfold oneself in pleasant fancies that the
realities of life may seem but as the white snow-shower in the street,
that only gives a relish to the swept hearth and lively fire within. By
such means I have forgotten hunger, I have sometimes eased pain, and I
have invariably changed into the most pleasant hours of the day those
very vacant and idle seasons which would otherwise have hung most
heavily upon my hand. But all this is attained by the undue prominence
of purely imaginative joys, and consequently the weakening and almost
the destruction of reality. This is buying at too great a price. There
are seasons when the imagination becomes somehow tranced and surfeited,
as it is with me this morning; and then upon what can we fall back? The
very faculty that we have fostered and trusted has failed us in the hour
of trial; and we have so blunted and enfeebled our appetite for the
others that they are subjectively dead to us. It is just as though a
farmer should plant all his fields in potatoes, instead of varying them
with grain and pasture; and so, when the disease comes, lose all his
harvest, while his neighbours, perhaps, may balance the profit and the
loss. Do not suppose that I am exaggerating when I talk about all
pleasures seeming stale. To me, at least, the edge of almost everything
is put on by imagination; and even nature, in these days when the fancy
is drugged and useless, wants half the charm it has in better moments. I
can no longer see satyrs in the thicket, or picture a highwayman riding
down the lane. The fiat of indifference has gone forth: I am vacant,
unprofitable: a leaf on a river with no volition and no aim: a mental
drunkard the morning after an intellectual debauch. Yes, I have a more
subtle opium in my own mind than any apothecary's drug; but it has a
sting of its own, and leaves me as flat and helpless as does the other.
FOOTNOTES:
[37] The quotation here promised from one of the author's own early
dramatic efforts (a tragedy of Semiramis) is not supplied in the
MS.--[SIR SIDNEY COLVIN'S NOTE.]
[38] "The old pythoness was right," adds the author in a note appended
to his MS. in 1887; "I have been happy: I did go to America (am even
going again--unless----): and I have been twice and once upon the
deep." The seafaring part of the prophecy remained to be fulfilled
on a far more extended scale in his Pacific voyages of
1888-90.--[SIR SIDNEY COLVIN'S NOTE.]
II
COCKERMOUTH AND KESWICK
(_A Fragment_: 1871)
Very much as a painter half closes his eyes so that some salient unity
may disengage itself from among the crowd of details, and what he sees
may thus form itself into a whole; very much on the same principle, I
may say, I allow a considerable lapse of time to intervene between any
of my little journeyings and the attempt to chronicle them. I cannot
describe a thing that is before me at the moment, or that has been
before me only a very little while before; I must allow my recollections
to get thoroughly strained free from all chaff till nothing be except
the pure gold; allow my memory to choose out what is truly memorable by
a process of natural selection; and I piously believe that in this way
I ensure the Survival of the Fittest. If I make notes for future use, or
if I am obliged to write letters during the course of my little
excursion, I so interfere with the process that I can never again find
out what is worthy of being preserved, or what should be given in full
length, what in torso, or what merely in profile. This process of
incubation may be unreasonably prolonged; and I am somewhat afraid that
I have made this mistake with the present journey. Like a bad
daguerreotype, great part of it has been entirely lost; I can tell you
nothing about the beginning and nothing about the end; but the doings of
some fifty or sixty hours about the middle remain quite distinct and
definite, like a little patch of sunshine on a long, shadowy plain, or
the one spot on an old picture that has been restored by the dexterous
hand of the cleaner. I remember a tale of an old Scots minister, called
upon suddenly to preach, who had hastily snatched an old sermon out of
his study and found himself in the pulpit before he noticed that the
rats had been making free with his manuscript and eaten the first two or
three pages away; he gravely explained to the congregation how he found
himself situated; "And now," said he, "let us just begin where the rats
have left off." I must follow the divine's example, and take up the
thread of my discourse where it first distinctly issues from the limbo
of forgetfulness.
COCKERMOUTH
I was lighting my pipe as I stepped out of the inn at Cockermouth, and
did not raise my head until I was fairly in the street. When I did so,
it flashed upon me that I was in England; the evening sunlight lit up
English houses, English faces, an English conformation of street,--as it
were, an English atmosphere blew against my face. There is nothing
perhaps more puzzling (if one thing in sociology can ever really be more
unaccountable than another) than the great gulf that is set between
England and Scotland--a gulf so easy in appearance, in reality so
difficult to traverse. Here are two people almost identical in blood;
pent up together on one small island, so that their intercourse (one
would have thought) must be as close as that of prisoners who shared one
cell of the Bastille; the same in language and religion; and yet a few
years of quarrelsome isolation--a mere forenoon's tiff, as one may call
it, in comparison with the great historical cycles--has so separated
their thoughts and ways that not unions, not mutual dangers, nor
steamers, nor railways, nor all the king's horses and all the king's
men, seem able to obliterate the broad distinction. In the trituration
of another century or so the corners may disappear; but in the meantime,
in the year of grace 1871, I was as much in a new country as if I had
been walking out of the Hotel St. Antoine at Antwerp.
I felt a little thrill of pleasure at my heart as I realised the change,
and strolled away up the street with my hands behind my back, noting in
a dull, sensual way how foreign, and yet how friendly, were the slopes
of the gables and the colour of the tiles, and even the demeanour and
voices of the gossips round about me.
Wandering in this aimless humour, I turned up a lane and found myself
following the course of the bright little river. I passed first one and
then another, then a third, several couples out love-making in the
spring evening; and a consequent feeling of loneliness was beginning to
grow upon me, when I came to a dam across the river, and a mill--a
great, gaunt promontory of building,--half on dry ground and half arched
over the stream. The road here drew in its shoulders, and crept through
between the landward extremity of the mill and a little garden
enclosure, with a small house and a large signboard within its privet
hedge. I was pleased to fancy this an inn, and drew little etchings in
fancy of a sanded parlour, and three-cornered spittoons, and a society
of parochial gossips seated within over their churchwardens; but as I
drew near, the board displayed its superscription, and I could read the
name of Smethurst, and the designation of "Canadian Felt Hat
Manufacturers." There was no more hope of evening fellowship, and I
could only stroll on by the river-side, under the trees. The water was
dappled with slanting sunshine, and dusted all over with a little mist
of flying insects. There were some amorous ducks, also, whose
love-making reminded me of what I had seen a little farther down. But
the road grew sad, and I grew weary; and as I was perpetually haunted
with the terror of a return of the tic that had been playing such ruin
in my head a week ago, I turned and went back to the inn, and supper,
and my bed.
The next morning, at breakfast, I communicated to the smart waitress my
intention of continuing down the coast and through Whitehaven to
Furness, and, as I might have expected, I was instantly confronted by
that last and most worrying form of interference, that chooses to
introduce tradition and authority into the choice of a man's own
pleasures. I can excuse a person combating my religious or philosophical
heresies, because them I have deliberately accepted, and am ready to
justify by present argument. But I do not seek to justify my pleasures.
If I prefer tame scenery to grand, a little hot sunshine over lowland
parks and woodlands to the war of the elements round the summit of Mont
Blanc; or if I prefer a pipe of mild tobacco, and the company of one or
two chosen companions, to a ball where I feel myself very hot, awkward,
and weary, I merely state these preferences as facts, and do not seek to
establish them as principles. This is not the general rule, however, and
accordingly the waitress was shocked, as one might be at a heresy, to
hear the route that I had sketched out for myself. Everybody who came to
Cockermouth for pleasure, it appeared, went on to Keswick. It was in
vain that I put up a little plea for the liberty of the subject; it was
in vain that I said I should prefer to go to Whitehaven. I was told that
there was "nothing to see there"--that weary, hackneyed, old falsehood;
and at last, as the handmaiden began to look really concerned, I gave
way, as men always do in such circumstances, and agreed that I was to
leave for Keswick by a train in the early evening.
AN EVANGELIST
Cockermouth itself, on the same authority, was a place with "nothing to
see"; nevertheless I saw a good deal, and retain a pleasant, vague
picture of the town and all its surroundings. I might have dodged
happily enough all day about the main street and up to the castle and in
and out of byways, but the curious attraction that leads a person in a
strange place to follow, day after day, the same round, and to make set
habits for himself in a week or ten days, led me half unconsciously up
the same road that I had gone the evening before. When I came up to the
hat manufactory, Smethurst himself was standing in the garden gate. He
was brushing one Canadian felt hat, and several others had been put to
await their turn one above the other on his own head, so that he looked
something like the typical Jew old-clothesman. As I drew near, he came
sidling out of the doorway to accost me, with so curious an expression
on his face that I instinctively prepared myself to apologise for some
unwitting trespass. His first question rather confirmed me in this
belief, for it was whether or not he had seen me going up this way last
night; and after having answered in the affirmative, I waited in some
alarm for the rest of my indictment. But the good man's heart was full
of peace; and he stood there brushing his hats and prattling on about
fishing, and walking, and the pleasures of convalescence, in a bright
shallow stream that kept me pleased and interested, I could scarcely say
how. As he went on, he warmed to his subject, and laid his hats aside to
go along the water-side and show me where the large trout commonly lay,
underneath an overhanging bank; and he was much disappointed, for my
sake, that there were none visible just then. Then he wandered off on to
another tack, and stood a great while out in the middle of a meadow in
the hot sunshine, trying to make out that he had known me before, or, if
not me, some friend of mine--merely, I believe, out of a desire that we
should feel more friendly and at our ease with one another. At last he
made a little speech to me, of which I wish I could recollect the very
words, for they were so simple and unaffected that they put all the best
writing and speaking to the blush; as it is, I can recall only the
sense, and that perhaps imperfectly. He began by saying that he had
little things in his past life that it gave him especial pleasure to
recall; and that the faculty of receiving such sharp impressions had now
died out in himself, but must at my age be still quite lively and
active. Then he told me that he had a little raft afloat on the river
above the dam which he was going to lend me, in order that I might be
able to look back, in after years, upon having done so, and get great
pleasure from the recollection. Now, I have a friend of my own who will
forego present enjoyments and suffer much present inconvenience for the
sake of manufacturing "a reminiscence" for himself; but there was
something singularly refined in this pleasure that the hatmaker found in
making reminiscences for others; surely no more simple or unselfish
luxury can be imagined. After he had unmoored his little embarkation,
and seen me safely shoved off into mid-stream, he ran away back to his
hats with the air of a man who had only just recollected that he had
anything to do.
I did not stay very long on the raft. It ought to have been very nice
punting about there in the cool shade of the trees, or sitting moored to
an overhanging root; but perhaps the very notion that I was bound in
gratitude specially to enjoy my little cruise, and cherish its
recollection, turned the whole thing from a pleasure into a duty. Be
that as it may, there is no doubt that I soon wearied and came ashore
again, and that it gives me more pleasure to recall the man himself and
his simple, happy conversation, so full of gusto and sympathy, than
anything possibly connected with his crank, insecure embarkation. In
order to avoid seeing him, for I was not a little ashamed of myself for
having failed to enjoy this treat sufficiently, I determined to continue
up the river, and, at all prices, to find some other way back into the
town in time for dinner. As I went, I was thinking of Smethurst with
admiration; a look into that man's mind was like a retrospect over the
smiling champaign of his past life, and very different from the
Sinai-gorges up which one looks for a terrified moment into the dark
souls of many good, many wise, and many prudent men. I cannot be very
grateful to such men for their excellence, and wisdom, and prudence. I
find myself facing as stoutly as I can a hard, combative existence, full
of doubt, difficulties, defeats, disappointments, and dangers, quite a
hard enough life without their dark countenances at my elbow, so that
what I want is a happy-minded Smethurst placed here and there at ugly
corners of my life's wayside, preaching his gospel of quiet and
contentment.
ANOTHER
I was shortly to meet with an evangelist of another stamp. After I had
forced my way through a gentleman's grounds, I came out on the high
road, and sat down to rest myself on a heap of stones at the top of a
long hill, with Cockermouth lying snugly at the bottom. An Irish
beggar-woman, with a beautiful little girl by her side, came up to ask
for alms, and gradually fell to telling me the little tragedy of her
life. Her own sister, she told me, had seduced her husband from her
after many years of married life, and the pair had fled, leaving her
destitute, with the little girl upon her hands. She seemed quite hopeful
and cheery, and, though she was unaffectedly sorry for the loss of her
husband's earnings, she made no pretence of despair at the loss of his
affection; some day she would meet the fugitives, and the law would see
her duly righted, and in the meantime the smallest contribution was
gratefully received. While she was telling all this in the most
matter-of-fact way, I had been noticing the approach of a tall man, with
a high white hat and darkish clothes. He came up the hill at a rapid
pace, and joined our little group with a sort of half salutation.
Turning at once to the woman, he asked her in a business-like way
whether she had anything to do, whether she were a Catholic or a
Protestant, whether she could read, and so forth; and then, after a few
kind words and some sweeties to the child, he despatched the mother with
some tracts about Biddy and the Priest, and the Orangeman's Bible. I was
a little amused at his abrupt manner, for he was still a young man, and
had somewhat the air of a navy officer; but he tackled me with great
solemnity. I could make fun of what he said, for I do not think it was
very wise; but the subject does not appear to me just now in a jesting
light, so I shall only say that he related to me his own conversion,
which had been effected (as is very often the case) through the agency
of a gig accident, and that, after having examined me and diagnosed my
case, he selected some suitable tracts from his repertory, gave them to
me, and, bidding me God-speed, went on his way.
LAST OF SMETHURST
That evening I got into a third-class carriage on my way for Keswick,
and was followed almost immediately by a burly man in brown clothes.
This fellow-passenger was seemingly ill at ease, and kept continually
putting his head out of the window, and asking the bystanders if they
saw _him_ coming. At last, when the train was already in motion, there
was a commotion on the platform, and a way was left clear to our
carriage door. _He_ had arrived. In the hurry I could just see
Smethurst, red and panting, thrust a couple of clay pipes into my
companion's outstretched hand, and hear him crying his farewells after
us as we slipped out of the station at an ever accelerating pace. I said
something about its being a close run, and the broad man, already
engaged in filling one of the pipes, assented, and went on to tell me of
his own stupidity in forgetting a necessary, and of how his friend had
good-naturedly gone down town at the last moment to supply the omission.
I mentioned that I had seen Mr. Smethurst already, and that he had been
very polite to me; and we fell into a discussion of the hatter's merits
that lasted some time and left us quite good friends at its conclusion.
The topic was productive of goodwill. We exchanged tobacco and talked
about the season, and agreed at last that we should go to the same hotel
at Keswick and sup in company. As he had some business in the town which
would occupy him some hour or so, on our arrival I was to improve the
time and go down to the lake, that I might see a glimpse of the promised
wonders.
The night had fallen already when I reached the water-side, at a place
where many pleasure-boats are moored and ready for hire; and as I went
along a stony path, between wood and water, a strong wind blew in gusts
from the far end of the lake. The sky was covered with flying scud; and,
as this was ragged, there was quite a wild chase of shadow and
moon-glimpse over the surface of the shuddering water. I had to hold my
hat on, and was growing rather tired, and inclined to go back in
disgust, when a little incident occurred to break the tedium. A sudden
and violent squall of wind sundered the low underwood, and at the same
time there came one of those brief discharges of moonlight, which leaped
into the opening thus made, and showed me three girls in the prettiest
flutter and disorder. It was as though they had sprung out of the
ground. I accosted them very politely in my capacity of stranger, and
requested to be told the names of all manner of hills and woods and
places that I did not wish to know, and we stood together for a while
and had an amusing little talk. The wind, too, made himself of the
party, brought the colour into their faces, and gave them enough to do
to repress their drapery; and one of them, amid much giggling, had to
pirouette round and round upon her toes (as girls do) when some
specially strong gust had got the advantage over her. They were just
high enough up in the social order not to be afraid to speak to a
gentleman; and just low enough to feel a little tremor, a nervous
consciousness of wrong-doing--of stolen waters, that gave a considerable
zest to our most innocent interview. They were as much discomposed and
fluttered, indeed, as if I had been a wicked baron proposing to elope
with the whole trio; but they showed no inclination to go away, and I
had managed to get them off hills and waterfalls and on to more
promising subjects, when a young man was descried coming along the path
from the direction of Keswick. Now whether he was the young man of one
of my friends, or the brother of one of them, or indeed the brother of
all, I do not know; but they incontinently said that they must be going,
and went away up the path with friendly salutations. I need not say that
I found the lake and the moonlight rather dull after their departure and
speedily found my way back to potted herrings and whisky-and-water in
the commercial room with my late fellow-traveller. In the smoking-room
there was a tall dark man with a moustache, in an ulster coat, who had
got the best place and was monopolising most of the talk; and, as I came
in, a whisper came round to me from both sides, that this was the
manager of a London theatre. The presence of such a man was a great
event for Keswick, and I must own that the manager showed himself equal
to his position. He had a large fat pocket-book, from which he produced
poem after poem, written on the backs of letters or hotel-bills; and
nothing could be more humorous than his recitation of these elegant
extracts, except perhaps the anecdotes with which he varied the
entertainment. Seeing, I suppose, something less countrified in my
appearance than in most of the company, he singled me out to
corroborate some statements as to the depravity and vice of the
aristocracy, and when he went on to describe some gilded saloon
experiences, I am proud to say that he honoured my sagacity with one
little covert wink before a second time appealing to me for
confirmation. The wink was not thrown away; I went in up to the elbows
with the manager, until I think that some of the glory of that great man
settled by reflection upon me, and that I was as noticeably the second
person in the smoking-room as he was the first. For a young man, this
was a position of some distinction, I think you will admit....
III
ROADS
(1873)
No amateur will deny that he can find more pleasure in a single drawing,
over which he can sit a whole quiet forenoon, and so gradually study
himself into humour with the artist, than he can ever extract from the
dazzle and accumulation of incongruous impressions that send him, weary
and stupefied, out of some famous picture-gallery. But what is thus
admitted with regard to art is not extended to the (so-called) natural
beauties: no amount of excess in sublime mountain outline or the graces
of cultivated lowland can do anything, it is supposed, to weaken or
degrade the palate. We are not at all sure, however, that moderation,
and a regimen tolerably austere, even in scenery, are not healthful and
strengthening to the taste; and that the best school for a lover of
nature is not to be found in one of those countries where there is no
stage effect--nothing salient or sudden,--but a quiet spirit of orderly
and harmonious beauty pervades all the details, so that we can
patiently attend to each of the little touches that strike in us, all of
them together, the subdued note of the landscape. It is in scenery such
as this that we find ourselves in the right temper to seek out small
sequestered loveliness. The constant recurrence of similar combinations
of colour and outline gradually forces upon us a sense of how the
harmony has been built up, and we become familiar with something of
nature's mannerism. This is the true pleasure of your "rural
voluptuary,"--not to remain awe-stricken before a Mount Chimborazo; not
to sit deafened over the big drum in the orchestra, but day by day to
teach himself some new beauty--to experience some new vague and tranquil
sensation that has before evaded him. It is not the people who "have
pined and hungered after nature many a year, in the great city pent," as
Coleridge said in the poem that made Charles Lamb so much ashamed of
himself; it is not those who make the greatest progress in this intimacy
with her, or who are most quick to see and have the greatest gusto to
enjoy. In this, as in everything else, it is minute knowledge and
long-continued loving industry that make the true dilettante. A man must
have thought much over scenery before he begins fully to enjoy it. It is
no youngling enthusiasm on hill-tops that can possess itself of the last
essence of beauty. Probably most people's heads are growing bare before
they can see all in a landscape that they have the capability of seeing;
and, even then, it will be only for one little moment of consummation
before the faculties are again on the decline, and they that look out of
the windows begin to be darkened and restrained in sight. Thus the study
of nature should be carried forward thoroughly and with system. Every
gratification should be rolled long under the tongue, and we should be
always eager to analyse and compare, in order that we may be able to
give some plausible reason for our admirations. True, it is difficult to
put even approximately into words the kind of feelings thus called into
play. There is a dangerous vice inherent in any such intellectual
refining upon vague sensation. The analysis of such satisfactions lends
itself very readily to literary affectations; and we can all think of
instances where it has shown itself apt to exercise a morbid influence,
even upon an author's choice of language and the turn of his sentences.
And yet there is much that makes the attempt attractive; for any
expression, however imperfect, once given to a cherished feeling, seems
a sort of legitimation of the pleasure we take in it. A common sentiment
is one of those great goods that make life palatable and ever new. The
knowledge that another has felt as we have felt, and seen things, even
if they are little things, not much otherwise than we have seen them,
will continue to the end to be one of life's choicest pleasures.
Let the reader, then, betake himself in the spirit we have recommended
to some of the quieter kinds of English landscape. In those homely and
placid agricultural districts, familiarity will bring into relief many
things worthy of notice, and urge them pleasantly home to him by a sort
of loving repetition; such as the wonderful life-giving speed of
windmill sails above the stationary country; the occurrence and
recurrence of the same church tower at the end of one long vista after
another; and, conspicuous among these sources of quiet pleasure, the
character and variety of the road itself, along which he takes his way.
Not only near at hand, in the lithe contortions with which it adapts
itself to the interchanges of level and slope, but far away also, when
he sees a few hundred feet of it upheaved against a hill and shining in
the afternoon sun, he will find it an object so changeful and enlivening
that he can always pleasurably busy his mind about it. He may leave the
river-side, or fall out of the way of villages, but the road he has
always with him; and, in the true humour of observation, will find in
that sufficient company. From its subtle windings and changes of level
there arises a keen and continuous interest, that keeps the attention
ever alert and cheerful. Every sensitive adjustment to the contour of
the ground, every little dip and swerve, seems instinct with life and
an exquisite sense of balance and beauty. The road rolls upon the easy
slopes of the country, like a long ship in the hollows of the sea. The
very margins of waste ground, as they trench a little farther on the
beaten way, or recede again to the shelter of the hedge, have something
of the same free delicacy of line--of the same swing and wilfulness. You
might think for a whole summer's day (and not have thought it any nearer
an end by evening) what concourse and succession of circumstances has
produced the least of these deflections; and it is, perhaps, just in
this that we should look for the secret of their interest. A footpath
across a meadow--in all its human waywardness and unaccountability, in
all the _grata protervitas_ of its varying direction--will always be
more to us than a railroad well engineered through a difficult
country.[39] No reasoned sequence is thrust upon our attention: we seem
to have slipped for one lawless little moment out of the iron rule of
cause and effect; and so we revert at once to some of the pleasant old
heresies of personification, always poetically orthodox, and attribute a
sort of free will, an active and spontaneous life, to the white riband
of road that lengthens out, and bends, and cunningly adapts itself to
the inequalities of the land before our eyes. We remember, as we write,
some miles of fine wide highway laid out with conscious æsthetic
artifice through a broken and richly cultivated tract of country. It is
said that the engineer had Hogarth's line of beauty in his mind as he
laid them down. And the result is striking. One splendid satisfying
sweep passes with easy transition into another, and there is nothing to
trouble or dislocate the strong continuousness of the main line of the
road. And yet there is something wanting. There is here no saving
imperfection, none of these secondary curves and little trepidations of
direction that carry, in natural roads, our curiosity actively along
with them. One feels at once that this road has not grown like a natural
road, but has been laboriously made to pattern; and that, while a model
may be academically correct in outline, it will always be inanimate and
cold. The traveller is also aware of a sympathy of mood between himself
and the road he travels. We have all seen ways that have wandered into
heavy sand near the sea-coast, and trail wearily over the dunes like a
trodden serpent: here we too must plod forward at a dull, laborious
pace; and so a sympathy is preserved between our frame of mind and the
expression of the relaxed, heavy curves of the roadway. Such a
phenomenon, indeed, our reason might perhaps resolve with a little
trouble. We might reflect that the present road had been developed out
of a track spontaneously followed by generations of primitive wayfarers;
and might see in its expression a testimony that those generations had
been affected at the same ground, one after another, in the same manner
as we are affected to-day. Or we might carry the reflection further, and
remind ourselves that where the air is invigorating and the ground firm
under the traveller's foot, his eye is quick to take advantage of small
undulations, and he will turn carelessly aside from the direct way
wherever there is anything beautiful to examine or some promise of a
wider view; so that even a bush of wild roses may permanently bias and
deform the straight path over the meadow; whereas, where the soil is
heavy, one is preoccupied with the labour of mere progression, and goes
with a bowed head heavily and unobservantly forward. Reason, however,
will not carry us the whole way; for the sentiment often recurs in
situations where it is very hard to imagine any possible explanation;
and indeed, if we drive briskly along a good, well-made road in an open
vehicle, we shall experience this sympathy almost at its fullest. We
feel the sharp settle of the springs at some curiously twisted corner;
after a steep ascent, the fresh air dances in our faces as we rattle
precipitately down the other side, and we find It difficult to avoid
attributing something headlong, a sort of _abandon_, to the road itself.
The mere winding of the path is enough to enliven a long day's walk in
even a commonplace or dreary country-side. Something that we have seen
from miles back, upon an eminence, is so long hid from us, as we wander
through folded valleys or among woods, that our expectation of seeing it
again is sharpened into a violent appetite, and as we draw nearer we
impatiently quicken our steps and turn every corner with a beating
heart. It is through these prolongations of expectancy, this succession
of one hope to another, that we live out long seasons of pleasure in a
few hours' walk. It is in following these capricious sinuosities that we
learn, only bit by bit and through one coquettish reticence after
another, much as we learn the heart of a friend, the whole loveliness of
the country. This disposition always preserves something new to be seen,
and takes us, like a careful cicerone, to many different points of
distant view before it allows us finally to approach the hoped-for
destination.
In its connection with the traffic, and whole friendly intercourse with
the country, there is something very pleasant in that succession of
saunterers and brisk and business-like passers-by, that peoples our ways
and helps to build up what Walt Whitman calls "the cheerful voice of the
public road, the gay, fresh sentiment of the road." But out of the great
network of ways that binds all life together from the hill-farm to the
city, there is something individual to most, and, on the whole, nearly
as much choice on the score of company as on the score of beauty or easy
travel. On some we are never long without the sound of wheels, and folk
pass us by so thickly that we lose the sense of their number. But on
others, about little-frequented districts, a meeting is an affair of
moment; we have the sight far off of some one coming towards us, the
growing definiteness of the person, and then the brief passage and
salutation, and the road left empty in front of us for perhaps a great
while to come. Such encounters have a wistful interest that can hardly
be understood by the dweller in places more populous. We remember
standing beside a countryman once, in the mouth of a quiet by-street in
a city that was more than ordinarily crowded and bustling; he seemed
stunned and bewildered by the continual passage of different faces; and
after a long pause, during which he appeared to search for some suitable
expression, he said timidly that there seemed to be a _great deal of
meeting thereabouts_. The phrase is significant. It is the expression of
town-life in the language of the long, solitary country highways. A
meeting of one with one was what this man had been used to in the
pastoral uplands from which he came; and the concourse of the streets
was in his eyes only an extraordinary multiplication of such "meetings."
And now we come to that last and most subtle quality of all, to that
sense of prospect, of outlook, that is brought so powerfully to our
minds by a road. In real nature as well as in old landscapes, beneath
that impartial daylight in which a whole variegated plain is plunged and
saturated, the line of the road leads the eye forth with the vague sense
of desire up to the green limit of the horizon. Travel is brought home
to us, and we visit in spirit every grove and hamlet that tempts us in
the distance. _Sehnsucht_--the passion for what is ever beyond--is
livingly expressed in that white riband of possible travel that severs
the uneven country; not a ploughman following his plough up the shining
furrow, not the blue smoke of any cottage in a hollow, but is brought to
us with a sense of nearness and attainability by this wavering line of
junction. There is a passionate paragraph in Werther that strikes the
very key. "When I came hither," he writes, "how the beautiful valley
invited me on every side, as I gazed down into it from the hill-top!
There the wood--ah, that I might mingle in its shadows! there the
mountain summits--ah, that I might look down from them over the broad
country! the interlinked hills! the secret valleys! O, to lose myself
among their mysteries! I hurried into the midst, and came back without
finding aught I hoped for. Alas! the distance is like the future. A vast
whole lies in the twilight before our spirit; sight and feeling alike
plunge and lose themselves in the prospect, and we yearn to surrender
our whole being, and let it be filled full with all the rapture of one
single glorious sensation; and alas! when we hasten to the fruition,
when _there_ is changed to _here_, all is afterwards as it was before,
and we stand in our indigent and cramped estate, and our soul thirsts
after a still ebbing elixir." It is to this wandering and uneasy spirit
of anticipation that roads minister. Every little vista, every little
glimpse that we have of what lies before us, gives the impatient
imagination rein, so that it can outstrip the body and already plunge
into the shadow of the woods, and overlook from the hilltop the plain
beyond it, and wander in the windings of the valleys that are still far
in front. The road is already there--we shall not be long behind. It is
as if we were marching with the rear of a great army, and, from far
before, heard the acclamation of the people as the vanguard entered some
friendly and jubilant city. Would not every man, through all the long
miles of march, feel as if he also were within the gates?
FOOTNOTE:
[39] Compare Blake, in the "Marriage of Heaven and Hell": "Improvement
makes straight roads; but the crooked roads, without improvement,
are roads of Genius."
IV
NOTES ON THE MOVEMENTS OF YOUNG CHILDREN
(1874)
I wish to direct the reader's attention to a certain quality in the
movements of children when young, which is somehow lovable in them,
although it would be even unpleasant in any grown person. Their
movements are not graceful, but they fall short of grace by something so
sweetly humorous that we only admire them the more. The imperfection is
so pretty and pathetic, and it gives so great a promise of something
different in the future, that it attracts us more than many forms of
beauty. They have something of the merit of a rough sketch by a master,
in which we pardon what is wanting or excessive for the sake of the very
bluntness and directness of the thing. It gives us pleasure to see the
beginning of gracious impulses and the springs of harmonious movement
laid bare to us with innocent simplicity.
One night some ladies formed a sort of impromptu dancing-school in the
drawing-room of an hotel in France. One of the ladies led the ring, and
I can recall her as a model of accomplished, cultured movement. Two
little girls, about eight years old, were the pupils; that is an age of
great interest in girls, when natural grace comes to its consummation of
justice and purity, with little admixture of that other grace of
forethought and discipline that will shortly supersede it altogether. In
these two, particularly, the rhythm was sometimes broken by an excess of
energy, as though the pleasure of the music in their light bodies could
endure no longer the restraint of regulated dance. So that, between
these and the lady, there was not only some beginning of the very
contrast I wish to insist upon, but matter enough to set one thinking a
long while on the beauty of motion. I do not know that, here in England,
we have any good opportunity of seeing what that is; the generation of
British dancing men and women are certainly more remarkable for other
qualities than for grace: they are, many of them, very conscientious
artists, and give quite a serious regard to the technical parts of their
performance; but the spectacle, somehow, is not often beautiful, and
strikes no note of pleasure. If I had seen no more, therefore, this
evening might have remained in my memory as a rare experience. But the
best part of it was yet to come. For after the others had desisted, the
musician still continued to play, and a little button between two and
three years old came out into the cleared space and began to figure
before us as the music prompted. I had an opportunity of seeing her, not
on this night only, but on many subsequent nights; and the wonder and
comical admiration she inspired was only deepened as time went on. She
had an admirable musical ear; and each new melody, as it struck in her a
new humour, suggested wonderful combinations and variations of movement.
Now it would be a dance with which she would suit the music, now rather
an appropriate pantomime, and now a mere string of disconnected
attitudes. But whatever she did, she did it with the same verve and
gusto. The spirit of the air seemed to have entered into her, and to
possess her like a passion; and you could see her struggling to find
expression for the beauty that was in her against the inefficacy of the
dull, half-informed body. Though her footing was uneven, and her
gestures often ludicrously helpless, still the spectacle was not merely
amusing; and though subtle inspirations of movement miscarried in
tottering travesty, you could still see that they had been inspirations;
you could still see that she had set her heart on realising something
just and beautiful, and that, by the discipline of these abortive
efforts, she was making for herself in the future a quick, supple, and
obedient body. It was grace in the making. She was not to be daunted by
any merriment of people looking on critically; the music said something
to her, and her whole spirit was intent on what the music said: she must
carry out its suggestions, she must do her best to translate its
language into that other dialect of the modulated body into which it can
be translated most easily and fully.
Just the other day I was witness to a second scene, in which the motive
was something similar; only this time with quite common children, and in
the familiar neighbourhood of Hampstead. A little congregation had
formed itself in the lane underneath my window, and was busy over a
skipping-rope. There were two sisters, from seven to nine perhaps, with
dark faces and dark hair, and slim, lithe, little figures clad in lilac
frocks. The elder of these two was mistress of the art of skipping. She
was just and adroit in every movement; the rope passed over her black
head and under her scarlet-stockinged legs with a precision and
regularity that was like machinery; but there was nothing mechanical in
the infinite variety and sweetness of her inclinations, and the
spontaneous agile flexure of her lean waist and hips. There was one
variation favourite with her, in which she crossed her hands before her
with a motion not unlike that of weaving, which was admirably intricate
and complete. And when the two took the rope together and whirled in and
out with occasional interruptions, there was something Italian in the
type of both--in the length of nose, in the slimness and accuracy of the
shapes--and something gay and harmonious in the double movement, that
added to the whole scene a southern element, and took me over sea and
land into distant and beautiful places. Nor was this impression lessened
when the elder girl took in her arms a fair-headed baby, while the
others held the rope for her, turned and gyrated, and went in and out
over it lightly, with a quiet regularity that seemed as if it might go
on for ever. Somehow, incongruous as was the occupation, she reminded me
of Italian Madonnas. And now, as before in the hotel drawing-room, the
humorous element was to be introduced; only this time it was in broad
farce. The funniest little girl, with a mottled complexion and a big,
damaged nose, and looking for all the world like any dirty, broken-nosed
doll in a nursery lumber-room, came forward to take her turn. While the
others swung the rope for her as gently as it could be done--a mere
mockery of movement--and playfully taunted her timidity, she passaged
backwards and forwards in a pretty flutter of indecision, putting up her
shoulders and laughing with the embarrassed laughter of children by the
water's edge, eager to bathe and yet fearful. There never was anything
at once so droll and so pathetic. One did not know whether to laugh or
to cry. And when at last she had made an end of all her deprecations and
drawings back, and summoned up heart enough to straddle over the rope,
one leg at a time, it was a sight to see her ruffle herself up like a
peacock and go away down the lane with her damaged nose, seeming to
think discretion the better part of valour, and rather uneasy lest they
should ask her to repeat the exploit. Much as I had enjoyed the grace of
the older girls, it was now just as it had been before in France, and
the clumsiness of the child seemed to have a significance and a sort of
beauty of its own, quite above this grace of the others in power to
affect the heart. I had looked on with a certain sense of balance and
completion at the silent, rapid, masterly evolutions of the eldest; I
had been pleased by these in the way of satisfaction. But when little
broken-nose began her pantomime of indecision I grew excited. There was
something quite fresh and poignant in the delight I took in her
imperfect movements. I remember, for instance, that I moved my own
shoulders, as if to imitate her; really, I suppose, with an inarticulate
wish to help her out.
Now, there are many reasons why this gracelessness of young children
should be pretty and sympathetic to us. And, first, there is an interest
as of battle. It is in travail and laughable _fiasco_ that the young
school their bodies to beautiful expression, as they school their minds.
We seem, in watching them, to divine antagonists pitted one against the
other; and, as in other wars, so in this war of the intelligence against
the unwilling body, we do not wish to see even the cause of progress
triumph without some honourable toil; and we are so sure of the ultimate
result, that it pleases us to linger in pathetic sympathy over these
reverses of the early campaign, just as we do over the troubles that
environ the heroine of a novel on her way to the happy ending. Again,
people are very ready to disown the pleasure they take in a thing
merely because it is big, as an Alp, or merely because it is little, as
a little child; and yet this pleasure is surely as legitimate as
another. There is much of it here; we have an irrational indulgence for
small folk; we ask but little where there is so little to ask it of; we
cannot overcome our astonishment that they should be able to move at
all, and are interested in their movements somewhat as we are interested
in the movements of a puppet. And again, there is a prolongation of
expectancy when, as in these movements of children, we are kept
continually on the very point of attainment and ever turned away and
tantalised by some humorous imperfection. This is altogether absent in
the secure and accomplished movements of persons more fully grown. The
tight-rope walker does not walk so freely or so well as any one else can
walk upon a good road; and yet we like to watch him for the mere sake of
the difficulty; we like to see his vacillations; we like this last so
much even, that I am told a really artistic tight-rope walker must feign
to be troubled in his balance, even if he is not so really. And again,
we have in these baby efforts an assurance of spontaneity that we do not
have often. We know this at least certainly, that the child tries to
dance for its own pleasure, and not for any by-end of ostentation and
conformity. If we did not know it we should see it. There is a
sincerity, a directness, an impulsive truth, about their free gestures
that shows throughout all imperfection, and it is to us as a
reminiscence of primitive festivals and the Golden Age. Lastly, there is
in the sentiment much of a simple human compassion for creatures more
helpless than ourselves. One nearly ready to die is pathetic; and so is
one scarcely ready to live. In view of their future, our heart is
softened to these clumsy little ones. They will be more adroit when they
are not so happy.
Unfortunately, then, this character that so much delights us is not one
that can be preserved by any plastic art. It turns, as we have seen,
upon consideration not really æsthetic. Art may deal with the slim
freedom of a few years later; but with this fettered impulse, with these
stammering motions, she is powerless to do more than stereotype what is
ungraceful, and, in the doing of it, lose all pathos and humanity. So
these humorous little ones must go away into the limbo of beautiful
things that are not beautiful for art, there to wait a more perfect age
before they sit for their portraits.
V
ON THE ENJOYMENT OF UNPLEASANT PLACES
(1874)
It is a difficult matter to make the most of any given place, and we
have much in our own power. Things looked at patiently from one side
after another generally end by showing a side that is beautiful. A few
months ago some words were said in the _Portfolio_ as to an "austere
regimen in scenery"; and such a discipline was then recommended as
"healthful and strengthening to the taste." That is the test, so to
speak, of the present essay. This discipline in scenery, it must be
understood, is something more than a mere walk before breakfast to whet
the appetite. For when we are put down in some unsightly neighbourhood,
and especially if we have come to be more or less dependent on what we
see, we must set ourselves to hunt out beautiful things with all the
ardour and patience of a botanist after a rare plant. Day by day we
perfect ourselves in the art of seeing nature more favourably. We learn
to live with her, as people learn to live with fretful or violent
spouses: to dwell lovingly on what is good, and shut our eyes against
all that is bleak or inharmonious. We learn, also, to come to each
place in the right spirit. The traveller, as Brantôme quaintly tells us,
"_fait des discours en soi pour se soutenir en chemin_"; and into these
discourses he weaves something out of all that he sees and suffers by
the way; they take their tone greatly from the varying character of the
scene; a sharp ascent brings different thoughts from a level road; and
the man's fancies grow lighter as he comes out of the wood into a
clearing. Nor does the scenery any more affect the thoughts than the
thoughts affect the scenery. We see places through our humours as
through differently-coloured glasses. We are ourselves a term in the
equation, a note of the chord, and make discord or harmony almost at
will. There is no fear for the result, if we can but surrender ourselves
sufficiently to the country that surrounds and follows us, so that we
are ever thinking suitable thoughts or telling ourselves some suitable
sort of story as we go. We become thus, in some sense, a centre of
beauty; we are provocative of beauty, much as a gentle and sincere
character is provocative of sincerity and gentleness in others. And even
where there is no harmony to be elicited by the quickest and most
obedient of spirits, we may still embellish a place with some attraction
of romance. We may learn to go far afield for associations, and handle
them lightly when we have found them. Sometimes an old print comes to
our aid; I have seen many a spot lit up at once with picturesque
imaginations, by a reminiscence of Callot, or Sadeler, or Paul Brill.
Dick Turpin has been my lay figure for many an English lane. And I
suppose the Trossachs would hardly be the Trossachs for most tourists if
a man of admirable romantic instinct had not peopled it for them with
harmonious figures, and brought them thither with minds rightly prepared
for the impression. There is half the battle in this preparation. For
instance: I have rarely been able to visit, in the proper spirit, the
wild and inhospitable places of our own Highlands. I am happier where it
is tame and fertile, and not readily pleased without trees. I
understand that there are some phases of mental trouble that harmonise
well with such surroundings, and that some persons, by the dispensing
power of the imagination, can go back several centuries in spirit, and
put themselves into sympathy with the hunted, houseless, unsociable way
of life that was in its place upon these savage hills. Now, when I am
sad, I like nature to charm me out of my sadness, like David before
Saul; and the thought of these past ages strikes nothing in me but an
unpleasant pity; so that I can never hit on the right humour for this
sort of landscape, and lose much pleasure in consequence. Still, even
here, if I were only let alone, and time enough were given, I should
have all manner of pleasures, and take many clear and beautiful images
away with me when I left. When we cannot think ourselves into sympathy
with the great features of a country, we learn to ignore them, and put
our head among the grass for flowers, or pore, for long times together,
over the changeful current of a stream. We come down to the sermon in
stones, when we are shut out from any poem in the spread landscape. We
begin to peep and botanise, we take an interest in birds and insects, we
find many things beautiful in miniature. The reader will recollect the
little summer scene in "Wuthering Heights"--the one warm scene, perhaps,
in all that powerful, miserable novel--and the great feature that is
made therein by grasses and flowers and a little sunshine: this is in
the spirit of which I now speak. And, lastly, we can go indoors;
interiors are sometimes as beautiful, often more picturesque, than the
shows of the open air, and they have that quality of shelter of which I
shall presently have more to say.
With all this in mind, I have often been tempted to put forth the
paradox that any place is good enough to live a life in, while it is
only in a few, and those highly favoured, that we can pass a few hours
agreeably. For, if we only stay long enough, we become at home in the
neighbourhood. Reminiscences spring up, like flowers, about
uninteresting corners. We forget to some degree the superior loveliness
of other places, and fall into a tolerant and sympathetic spirit which
is its own reward and justification. Looking back the other day on some
recollections of my own, I was astonished to find how much I owed to
such a residence; six weeks in one unpleasant country-side had done
more, it seemed, to quicken and educate my sensibilities than many years
in places that jumped more nearly with my inclination.
The country to which I refer was a level and treeless plateau over which
the winds cut like a whip. For miles on miles it was the same. A river,
indeed, fell into the sea near the town where I resided; but the valley
of the river was shallow and bald, for as far up as ever I had the heart
to follow it. There were roads, certainly, but roads that had no beauty
or interest; for, as there was no timber, and but little irregularity of
surface, you saw your whole walk exposed to you from the beginning:
there was nothing left to fancy, nothing to expect, nothing to see by
the wayside, save here and there an unhomely-looking homestead, and here
and there a solitary, spectacled stone-breaker; and you were only
accompanied, as you went doggedly forward, by the gaunt telegraph-posts
and the hum of the resonant wires in the keen sea-wind. To one who had
learned to know their song in warm pleasant places by the Mediterranean,
it seemed to taunt the country, and make it still bleaker by suggested
contrast. Even the waste places by the side of the road were not, as
Hawthorne liked to put it, "taken back to Nature" by any decent covering
of vegetation. Wherever the land had the chance, it seemed to lie
fallow. There is a certain tawny nudity of the South, bare sun-burnt
plains, coloured like a lion, and hills clothed only in the blue
transparent air; but this was of another description--this was the
nakedness of the North; the earth seemed to know that it was naked, and
was ashamed and cold.
It seemed to be always blowing on that coast. Indeed, this had passed
into the speech of the inhabitants, and they saluted each other when
they met with "Breezy, breezy," instead of the customary "Fine day" of
farther south. These continual winds were not like the harvest breeze,
that just keeps an equable pressure against your face as you walk, and
serves to set all the trees talking over your head, or bring round you
the smell of the wet surface of the country after a shower. They were of
the bitter, hard, persistent sort, that interferes with sight and
respiration, and makes the eyes sore. Even such winds as these have
their own merit in proper time and place. It is pleasant to see them
brandish great masses of shadow. And what a power they have over the
colour of the world! How they ruffle the solid woodlands in their
passage, and make them shudder and whiten like a single willow! There is
nothing more vertiginous than a wind like this among the woods, with all
its sights and noises; and the effect gets between some painters and
their sober eyesight, so that, even when the rest of their picture is
calm, the foliage is coloured like foliage in a gale. There was nothing,
however, of this sort to be noticed in a country where there were no
trees and hardly any shadows, save the passive shadows of clouds or
those of rigid houses and walls. But the wind was nevertheless an
occasion of pleasure; for nowhere could you taste more fully the
pleasure of a sudden lull, or a place of opportune shelter. The reader
knows what I mean; he must remember how, when he has sat himself down
behind a dyke on a hill-side, he delighted to hear the wind hiss vainly
through the crannies at his back; how his body tingled all over with
warmth, and it began to dawn upon him, with a sort of slow surprise,
that the country was beautiful, the heather purple, and the far-away
hills all marbled with sun and shadow. Wordsworth, in a beautiful
passage of the "Prelude," has used this as a figure for the feeling
struck in us by the quiet by-streets of London after the uproar of the
great thoroughfares; and the comparison may be turned the other way with
as good effect:
"Meanwhile the roar continues, till at length,
Escaped as from an enemy, we turn
Abruptly into some sequester'd nook,
Still as a shelter'd place when winds blow loud!"
I remember meeting a man once, in a train, who told me of what must have
been quite the most perfect instance of this pleasure of escape. He had
gone up, one sunny, windy morning, to the top of a great cathedral
somewhere abroad; I think it was Cologne Cathedral, the great unfinished
marvel by the Rhine; and after a long while in dark stairways, he issued
at last into the sunshine, on a platform high above the town. At that
elevation it was quite still and warm; the gale was only in the lower
strata of the air, and he had forgotten it in the quiet interior of the
church and during his long ascent; and so you may judge of his surprise
when, resting his arms on the sunlit balustrade and looking over into
the "Place" far below him, he saw the good people holding on their hats
and leaning hard against the wind as they walked. There is something, to
my fancy, quite perfect in this little experience of my
fellow-traveller's. The ways of men seem always very trivial to us when
we find ourselves alone on a church top, with the blue sky and a few
tall pinnacles, and see far below us the steep roofs and foreshortened
buttresses, and the silent activity of the city streets; but how much
more must they not have seemed so to him as he stood, not only above
other men's business, but above other men's climate, in a golden zone
like Apollo's!
This was the sort of pleasure I found in the country of which I write.
The pleasure was to be out of the wind, and to keep it in memory all the
time, and hug oneself upon the shelter. And it was only by the sea that
any such sheltered places were to be found. Between the black worm-eaten
headlands there are little bights and havens, well screened from the
wind and the commotion of the external sea, where the sand and weeds
look up into the gazer's face from a depth of tranquil water, and the
sea-birds, screaming and flickering from the ruined crags, alone disturb
the silence and the sunshine. One such place has impressed itself on my
memory beyond all others. On a rock by the water's edge, old fighting
men of the Norse breed had planted a double castle; the two stood wall
to wall like semi-detached villas; and yet feud had run so high between
their owners, that one, from out of a window, shot the other as he stood
in his own doorway. There is something in the juxtaposition of these two
enemies full of tragic irony. It is grim to think of bearded men and
bitter women taking hateful counsel together about the two hall-fires at
night, when the sea boomed against the foundations and the wild winter
wind was loose over the battlements. And in the study we may reconstruct
for ourselves some pale figure of what life then was. Not so when we are
there; when we are there such thoughts come to us only to intensify a
contrary impression, and association is turned against itself. I
remember walking thither three afternoons in succession, my eyes weary
with being set against the wind, and how, dropping suddenly over the
edge of the down, I found myself in a new world of warmth and shelter.
The wind, from which I had escaped, "as from an enemy," was seemingly
quite local. It carried no clouds with it, and came from such a quarter
that it did not trouble the sea within view. The two castles, black and
ruinous as the rocks about them, were still distinguishable from these
by something more insecure and fantastic in the outline, something that
the last storm had left imminent and the next would demolish entirely.
It would be difficult to render in words the sense of peace that took
possession of me on these three afternoons. It was helped out, as I
have said, by the contrast. The shore was battered and bemauled by
previous tempests; I had the memory at heart of the insane strife of the
pigmies who had erected these two castles and lived in them in mutual
distrust and enmity, and knew I had only to put my head out of this
little cup of shelter to find the hard wind blowing in my eyes; and yet
there were the two great tracts of motionless blue air and peaceful sea
looking on, unconcerned and apart, at the turmoil of the present moment
and the memorials of the precarious past. There is ever something
transitory and fretful in the impression of a high wind under a
cloudless sky; it seems to have no root in the constitution of things;
it must speedily begin to faint and wither away like a cut flower. And
on those days the thought of the wind and the thought of human life came
very near together in my mind. Our noisy years did indeed seem moments
in the being of the eternal silence: and the wind, in the face of that
great field of stationary blue, was as the wind of a butterfly's wing.
The placidity of the sea was a thing likewise to be remembered. Shelley
speaks of the sea as "hungering for calm," and in this place one learned
to understand the phrase. Looking down into these green waters from the
broken edge of the rock, or swimming leisurely in the sunshine, it
seemed to me that they were enjoying their own tranquillity; and when
now and again it was disturbed by a wind ripple on the surface, or the
quick black passage of a fish far below, they settled back again (one
could fancy) with relief.
On shore too, in the little nook of shelter, everything was so subdued
and still that the least particular struck in me a pleasurable surprise.
The desultory crackling of the whin-pods in the afternoon sun usurped
the ear. The hot, sweet breath of the bank, that had been saturated all
day long with sunshine, and now exhaled it into my face, was like the
breath of a fellow-creature. I remember that I was haunted by two lines
of French verse; in some dumb way they seemed to fit my surroundings and
give expression to the contentment that was in me, and I kept repeating
to myself--
"Mon coeur est un luth suspendu;
Sitôt qu'on le touche, il résonne."
I can give no reason why these lines came to me at this time; and for
that very cause I repeat them here. For all I know, they may serve to
complete the impression in the mind of the reader, as they were
certainly a part of it for me.
And this happened to me in the place of all others where I liked least
to stay. When I think of it I grow ashamed of my own ingratitude. "Out
of the strong came forth sweetness." There, in the bleak and gusty
North, I received, perhaps, my strongest impression of peace. I saw the
sea to be great and calm; and the earth, in that little corner, was all
alive and friendly to me. So, wherever a man is, he will find something
to please and pacify him: in the town he will meet pleasant faces of men
and women, and see beautiful flowers at a window, or hear a cage-bird
singing at the corner of the gloomiest street; and for the country,
there is no country without some amenity--let him only look for it in
the right spirit, and he will surely find.
VI
AN AUTUMN EFFECT
(1875)
"Nous ne décrivons jamais mieux la nature que lorsque nous nous
efforçons d'exprimer sobrement et simplement l'impression que nous en
avons reçue."--M. ANDRÉ THEURIET, "L'Automne dans les Bois," _Revue
des Deux Mondes_, 1st Oct. 1874, p. 562.[40]
A country rapidly passed through under favourable auspices may leave
upon us a unity of impression that would only be disturbed and
dissipated if we stayed longer. Clear vision goes with the quick foot.
Things fall for us into a sort of natural perspective when we see them
for a moment in going by; we generalise boldly and simply, and are gone
before the sun is overcast, before the rain falls, before the season can
steal like a dial-hand from his figure, before the lights and shadows,
shifting round towards nightfall, can show us the other side of things,
and belie what they showed us in the morning. We expose our mind to the
landscape (as we would expose the prepared plate in the camera) for the
moment only during which the effect endures; and we are away before the
effect can change. Hence we shall have in our memories a long scroll of
continuous wayside pictures, all imbued already with the prevailing
sentiment of the season, the weather, and the landscape, and certain to
be unified more and more, as time goes on, by the unconscious processes
of thought. So that we who have only looked at a country over our
shoulder, so to speak, as we went by, will have a conception of it far
more memorable and articulate than a man who has lived there all his
life from a child upwards, and had his impression of to-day modified by
that of to-morrow, and belied by that of the day after, till at length
the stable characteristics of the country are all blotted out from him
behind the confusion of variable effect.
I began my little pilgrimage in the most enviable of all humours: that
in which a person, with a sufficiency of money and a knapsack, turns his
back on a town and walks forward into a country of which he knows only
by the vague report of others. Such an one has not surrendered his will
and contracted for the next hundred miles, like a man on a railway. He
may change his mind at every finger-post, and, where ways meet, follow
vague preferences freely and go the low road or the high, choose the
shadow or the sunshine, suffer himself to be tempted by the lane that
turns immediately into the woods, or the broad road that lies open
before him into the distance, and shows him the far-off spires of some
city, or a range of mountain-tops, or a rim of sea, perhaps, along a low
horizon. In short, he may gratify his every whim and fancy, without a
pang of reproving conscience, or the least jostle to his self-respect.
It is true, however, that most men do not possess the faculty of free
action, the priceless gift of being able to live for the moment only;
and as they begin to go forward on their journey, they will find that
they have made for themselves new fetters. Slight projects they may have
entertained for a moment, half in jest, become iron laws to them, they
know not why. They will be led by the nose by these vague reports of
which I spoke above; and the mere fact that their informant mentioned
one village and not another will compel their footsteps with
inexplicable power. And yet a little while, yet a few days of this
fictitious liberty, and they will begin to hear imperious voices calling
on them to return; and some passion, some duty, some worthy or unworthy
expectation, will set its hand upon their shoulder and lead them back
into the old paths. Once and again we have all made the experiment. We
know the end of it right well. And yet if we make it for the hundredth
time to-morrow, it will have the same charm as ever; our heart will beat
and our eyes will be bright, as we leave the town behind us, and we
shall feel once again (as we have felt so often before) that we are
cutting ourselves loose for ever from our whole past life, with all its
sins and follies and circumscriptions, and go forward as a new creature
into a new world.
It is well, perhaps, that I had this first enthusiasm to encourage me up
the long hill above High Wycombe; for the day was a bad day for walking
at best, and now began to draw towards afternoon, dull, heavy, and
lifeless. A pall of grey cloud covered the sky, and its colour reacted
on the colour of the landscape. Near at hand, indeed, the hedgerow trees
were still fairly green, shot through with bright autumnal yellows,
bright as sunshine. But a little way off, the solid bricks of woodland
that lay squarely on slope and hill-top were not green, but russet and
grey, and ever less russet and more grey as they drew off into the
distance. As they drew off into the distance, also, the woods seemed to
mass themselves together, and lay thin and straight, like clouds, upon
the limit of one's view. Not that this massing was complete, or gave the
idea of any extent of forest, for every here and there the trees would
break up and go down into a valley in open order, or stand in long
Indian file along the horizon, tree after tree relieved, foolishly
enough, against the sky. I say foolishly enough, although I have seen
the effect employed cleverly in art, and such long line of single trees
thrown out against the customary sunset of a Japanese picture with a
certain fantastic effect that was not to be despised; but this was over
water and level land, where it did not jar, as here, with the soft
contour of hills and valleys. The whole scene had an indefinable look of
being painted, the colour was so abstract and correct, and there was
something so sketchy and merely impressional about these distant single
trees on the horizon that one was forced to think of it all as of a
clever French landscape. For it is rather in nature that we see
resemblance to art, than in art to nature; and we say a hundred times,
"How like a picture!" for once that we say, "How like the truth!" The
forms in which we learn to think of landscape are forms that we have got
from painted canvas. Any man can see and understand a picture; it is
reserved for the few to separate anything out of the confusion of
nature, and see that distinctly and with intelligence.
The sun came out before I had been long on my way; and as I had got by
that time to the top of the ascent, and was now treading a labyrinth of
confined by-roads, my whole view brightened considerably in colour, for
it was the distance only that was grey and cold, and the distance I
could see no longer. Overhead there was a wonderful carolling of larks
which seemed to follow me as I went. Indeed, during all the time I was
in that country the larks did not desert me. The air was alive with them
from High Wycombe to Tring; and as, day after day, their "shrill
delight" fell upon me out of the vacant sky, they began to take such a
prominence over other conditions, and form so integral a part of my
conception of the country, that I could have baptised it "The Country of
Larks." This, of course, might just as well have been in early spring;
but everything else was deeply imbued with the sentiment of the later
year. There was no stir of insects in the grass. The sunshine was more
golden, and gave less heat than summer sunshine; and the shadows under
the hedge were somewhat blue and misty. It was only in autumn that you
could have seen the mingled green and yellow of the elm foliage, and the
fallen leaves that lay about the road, and covered the surface of
wayside pools so thickly that the sun was reflected only here and there
from little joints and pin-holes in that brown coat of proof; or that
your ear would have been troubled, as you went forward, by the
occasional report of fowling-pieces from all directions and all degrees
of distance.
For a long time this dropping fire was the one sign of human activity
that came to disturb me as I walked. The lanes were profoundly still.
They would have been sad but for the sunshine and the singing of the
larks. And as it was, there came over me at times a feeling of isolation
that was not disagreeable, and yet was enough to make me quicken my
steps eagerly when I saw some one before me on the road. This
fellow-voyager proved to be no less a person than the parish constable.
It had occurred to me that in a district which was so little populous
and so well wooded, a criminal of any intelligence might play
hide-and-seek with the authorities for months; and this idea was
strengthened by the aspect of the portly constable as he walked by my
side with deliberate dignity and turned-out toes. But a few minutes'
converse set my heart at rest. These rural criminals are very tame
birds, it appeared. If my informant did not immediately lay his hand on
an offender, he was content to wait; some evening after nightfall there
would come a tap at his door, and the outlaw, weary of outlawry, would
give himself quietly up to undergo sentence, and resume his position in
the life of the country-side. Married men caused him no disquietude
whatever; he had them fast by the foot. Sooner or later they would come
back to see their wives, a peeping neighbour would pass the word, and my
portly constable would walk quietly over and take the bird sitting. And
if there were a few who had no particular ties in the neighbourhood, and
preferred to shift into another county when they fell into trouble,
their departure moved the placid constable in no degree. He was of
Dogberry's opinion; and if a man would not stand in the Prince's name,
he took no note of him, but let him go, and thanked God he was rid of a
knave. And surely the crime and the law were in admirable keeping:
rustic constable was well met with rustic offender. The officer sitting
at home over a bit of fire until the criminal came to visit him, and the
criminal coming--it was a fair match. One felt as if this must have been
the order in that delightful seaboard Bohemia where Florizel and Perdita
courted in such sweet accents, and the Puritan sang psalms to hornpipes,
and the four-and-twenty shearers danced with nosegays in their bosoms,
and chanted their three songs apiece at the old shepherd's festival; and
one could not help picturing to oneself what havoc among good people's
purses, and tribulation for benignant constable, might be worked here by
the arrival, over stile and footpath, of a new Autolycus.
Bidding good-morning to my fellow-traveller, I left the road and struck
across country. It was rather a revelation to pass from between the
hedgerows and find quite a bustle on the other side, a great coming and
going of school-children upon by-paths, and, in every second field,
lusty horses and stout country-folk a-ploughing. The way I followed took
me through many fields thus occupied, and through many strips of
plantation, and then over a little space of smooth turf, very pleasant
to the feet, set with tall fir-trees and clamorous with rooks making
ready for the winter, and so back again into the quiet road. I was now
not far from the end of my day's journey. A few hundred yards farther,
and, passing through a gap in the hedge, I began to go down hill through
a pretty extensive tract of young beeches. I was soon in shadow myself,
but the afternoon sun still coloured the upmost boughs of the wood, and
made a fire over my head in the autumnal foliage. A little faint vapour
lay among the slim tree-stems in the bottom of the hollow; and from
farther up I heard from time to time an outburst of gross laughter, as
though clowns were making merry in the bush. There was something about
the atmosphere that brought all sights and sounds home to one with a
singular purity, so that I felt as if my senses had been washed with
water. After I had crossed the little zone of mist, the path began to
remount the hill; and just as I, mounting along with it, had got back
again, from the head downwards, into the thin golden sunshine, I saw in
front of me a donkey tied to a tree. Now, I have a certain liking for
donkeys, principally, I believe, because of the delightful things that
Sterne has written of them. But this was not after the pattern of the
ass at Lyons. He was of a white colour, that seemed to fit him rather
for rare festal occasions than for constant drudgery. Besides, he was
very small, and of the daintiest proportions you can imagine in a
donkey. And so, sure enough, you had only to look at him to see he had
never worked. There was something too roguish and wanton in his face, a
look too like that of a schoolboy or a street Arab, to have survived
much cudgelling. It was plain that these feet had kicked off sportive
children oftener than they had plodded with a freight through miry
lanes. He was altogether a fine-weather, holiday sort of donkey; and
though he was just then somewhat solemnised and rueful, he still gave
proof of the levity of his disposition by impudently wagging his ears at
me as I drew near. I say he was somewhat solemnised just then; for, with
the admirable instinct of all men and animals under restraint, he had so
wound and wound the halter about the tree that he could go neither back
nor forwards, nor so much as put down his head to browse. There he
stood, poor rogue, part puzzled, part angry, part, I believe, amused. He
had not given up hope, and dully revolved the problem in his head,
giving ever and again another jerk at the few inches of free rope that
still remained unwound. A humorous sort of sympathy for the creature
took hold upon me. I went up, and, not without some trouble on my part,
and much distrust and resistance on the part of Neddy, got him forced
backward until the whole length of the halter was set loose, and he was
once more as free a donkey as I dared to make him. I was pleased (as
people are) with this friendly action to a fellow-creature in
tribulation, and glanced back over my shoulder to see how he was
profiting by his freedom. The brute was looking after me; and no sooner
did he catch my eye than he put up his long white face into the air,
pulled an impudent mouth at me, and began to bray derisively. If ever
any one person made a grimace at another, that donkey made a grimace at
me. The hardened ingratitude of his behaviour, and the impertinence that
inspired his whole face as he curled up his lip, and showed his teeth,
and began to bray, so tickled me, and was so much in keeping with what I
had imagined to myself about his character, that I could not find it in
my heart to be angry, and burst into a peal of hearty laughter. This
seemed to strike the ass as a repartee, so he brayed at me again by way
of rejoinder; and we went on for a while, braying and laughing, until I
began to grow a-weary of it, and, shouting a derisive farewell, turned
to pursue my way. In so doing--it was like going suddenly into cold
water--I found myself face to face with a prim little old maid. She was
all in a flutter, the poor old dear! She had concluded beyond question
that this must be a lunatic who stood laughing aloud at a white donkey
in the placid beech-woods. I was sure, by her face, that she had already
recommended her spirit most religiously to Heaven, and prepared herself
for the worst. And so, to reassure her, I uncovered and besought her,
after a very staid fashion, to put me on my way to Great Missenden. Her
voice trembled a little, to be sure, but I think her mind was set at
rest; and she told me, very explicitly, to follow the path until I came
to the end of the wood, and then I should see the village below me in
the bottom of the valley. And, with mutual courtesies, the little old
maid and I went on our respective ways.
Nor had she misled me. Great Missenden was close at hand, as she had
said, in the trough of a gentle valley, with many great elms about it.
The smoke from its chimneys went up pleasantly in the afternoon
sunshine. The sleepy hum of a threshing-machine filled the neighbouring
fields and hung about the quaint street corners. A little above, the
church sits well back on its haunches against the hill-side--an attitude
for a church, you know, that makes it look as if it could be ever so
much higher if it liked; and the trees grew about it thickly, so as to
make a density of shade in the churchyard. A very quiet place it looks;
and yet I saw many boards and posters about threatening dire punishment
against those who broke the church windows or defaced the precinct, and
offering rewards for the apprehension of those who had done the like
already. It was fair-day in Great Missenden. There were three stalls set
up _sub jove_, for the sale of pastry and cheap toys; and a great number
of holiday children thronged about the stalls, and noisily invaded every
corner of the straggling village. They came round me by coveys, blowing
simultaneously upon penny trumpets as though they imagined I should fall
to pieces like the battlements of Jericho. I noticed one among them who
could make a wheel of himself like a London boy, and seemingly enjoyed a
grave pre-eminence upon the strength of the accomplishment. By and by,
however, the trumpets began to weary me, and I went indoors, leaving the
fair, I fancy at its height.
Night had fallen before I ventured forth again. It was pitch dark in the
village street, and the darkness seemed only the greater for a light
here and there in an uncurtained window or from an open door. Into one
such window I was rude enough to peep, and saw within a charming _genre_
picture. In a room, all white wainscot and crimson wall-paper, a perfect
gem of colour after the black, empty darkness in which I had been
groping, a pretty girl was telling a story, as well as I could make out,
to an attentive child upon her knee, while an old woman sat placidly
dozing over the fire. You may be sure I was not behindhand with a story
for myself--a good old story after the manner of G.P.R. James and the
village melodramas, with a wicked squire, and poachers, and an
attorney, and a virtuous young man with a genius for mechanics, who
should love, and protect, and ultimately marry the girl in the crimson
room. Baudelaire has a few dainty sentences on the fancies that we are
inspired with when we look through a window into other people's lives;
and I think Dickens has somewhat enlarged on the same text. The subject,
at least, is one that I am seldom weary of entertaining. I remember,
night after night, at Brussels, watching a good family sup together,
make merry, and retire to rest; and night after night I waited to see
the candles lit, and the salad made, and the last salutations dutifully
exchanged, without any abatement of interest. Night after night I found
the scene rivet my attention and keep me awake in bed with all manner of
quaint imaginations. Much of the pleasure of the "Arabian Nights" hinges
upon this Asmodean interest; and we are not weary of lifting other
people's roofs and going about behind the scenes of life with the Caliph
and the serviceable Giaffar. It is a salutary exercise, besides; it is
salutary to get out of ourselves and see people living together in
perfect unconsciousness of our existence, as they will live when we are
gone. If to-morrow the blow falls, and the worst of our ill fears is
realised, the girl will none the less tell stories to the child on her
lap in the cottage at Great Missenden, nor the good Belgians light their
candle, and mix their salad, and go orderly to bed.
The next morning was sunny overhead and damp underfoot, with a thrill in
the air like a reminiscence of frost. I went up into the sloping garden
behind the inn and smoked a pipe pleasantly enough, to the tune of my
landlady's lamentations over sundry cabbages and cauliflowers that had
been spoiled by caterpillars. She had been so much pleased in the
summer-time, she said, to see the garden all hovered over by white
butterflies. And now, look at the end of it! She could nowise reconcile
this with her moral sense. And, indeed, unless these butterflies are
created with a side-look to the composition of improving apologues, it
is not altogether easy, even for people who have read Hegel and Dr.
M'Cosh, to decide intelligibly upon the issue raised. Then I fell into a
long and abstruse calculation with my landlord; having for object to
compare the distance driven by him during eight years' service on the
box of the Wendover coach with the girth of the round world itself. We
tackled the question most conscientiously, made all necessary allowance
for Sundays and leap-years, and were just coming to a triumphant
conclusion of our labours when we were stayed by a small lacuna in my
information. I did not know the circumference of the earth. The landlord
knew it, to be sure--plainly he had made the same calculation twice and
once before,--but he wanted confidence in his own figures, and from the
moment I showed myself so poor a second seemed to lose all interest in
the result.
Wendover (which was my next stage) lies in the same valley with Great
Missenden, but at the foot of it, where the hills trend off on either
hand like a coast-line, and a great hemisphere of plain lies, like a
sea, before one. I went up a chalky road, until I had a good outlook
over the place. The vale, as it opened out into the plain, was shallow,
and a little bare, perhaps, but full of graceful convolutions. From the
level to which I have now attained the fields were exposed before me
like a map, and I could see all that bustle of autumn field-work which
had been hid from me yesterday behind the hedgerows, or shown to me only
for a moment as I followed the footpath. Wendover lay well down in the
midst, with mountains of foliage about it. The great plain stretched
away to the northward, variegated near at hand with the quaint pattern
of the fields, but growing ever more and more indistinct, until it
became a mere hurly-burly of trees and bright crescents of river, and
snatches of slanting road, and finally melted into the ambiguous
cloud-land over the horizon. The sky was an opal-grey, touched here and
there with blue, and with certain faint russets that looked as if they
were reflections of the colour of the autumnal woods below. I could hear
the ploughmen shouting to their horses, the uninterrupted carol of larks
innumerable overhead, and, from a field where the shepherd was
marshalling his flock, a sweet tumultuous tinkle of sheep-bells. All
these noises came to me very thin and distinct in the clear air. There
was a wonderful sentiment of distance and atmosphere about the day and
the place.
I mounted the hill yet farther by a rough staircase of chalky footholds
cut in the turf. The hills about Wendover, and, as far as I could see,
all the hills in Buckinghamshire, wear a sort of hood of beech
plantation; but in this particular case the hood had been suffered to
extend itself into something more like a cloak, and hung down about the
shoulders of the hill in wide folds, instead of lying flatly along the
summit. The trees grew so close, and their boughs were so matted
together, that the whole wood looked as dense as a bush of heather. The
prevailing colour was a dull, smouldering red, touched here and there
with vivid yellow. But the autumn had scarce advanced beyond the
outworks; it was still almost summer in the heart of the wood; and as
soon as I had scrambled through the hedge, I found myself in a dim green
forest atmosphere under eaves of virgin foliage. In places where the
wood had itself for a background and the trees were massed together
thickly, the colour became intensified and almost gem-like: a perfect
fire of green, that seemed none the less green for a few specks of
autumn gold. None of the trees were of any considerable age or stature;
but they grew well together, I have said; and as the road turned and
wound among them, they fell into pleasant groupings and broke the light
up pleasantly. Sometimes there would be a colonnade of slim, straight
tree-stems with the light running down them as down the shafts of
pillars, that looked as if it ought to lead to something, and led only
to a corner of sombre and intricate jungle. Sometimes a spray of
delicate foliage would be thrown out flat, the light lying flatly along
the top of it, so that against a dark background it seemed almost
luminous. There was a great hush over the thicket (for, indeed, it was
more of a thicket than a wood); and the vague rumours that went among
the tree-tops, and the occasional rustling of big birds or hares among
the undergrowth, had in them a note of almost treacherous stealthiness,
that put the imagination on its guard and made me walk warily on the
russet carpeting of last year's leaves. The spirit of the place seemed
to be all attention; the wood listened as I went, and held its breath to
number my footfalls. One could not help feeling that there ought to be
some reason for this stillness: whether, as the bright old legend goes,
Pan lay somewhere near in a siesta, or whether, perhaps, the heaven was
meditating rain, and the first drops would soon come pattering through
the leaves. It was not unpleasant, in such an humour, to catch sight,
ever and anon, of large spaces of the open plain. This happened only
where the path lay much upon the slope, and there was a flaw in the
solid leafy thatch of the wood at some distance below the level at which
I chanced myself to be walking; then, indeed, little scraps of
foreshortened distance, miniature fields, and Liliputian houses and
hedgerow trees would appear for a moment in the aperture, and grow
larger and smaller, and change and melt one into another, as I continued
to go forward, and so shift my point of view.
For ten minutes, perhaps, I had heard from somewhere before me in the
wood a strange, continuous noise, as of clucking, cooing, and gobbling,
now and again interrupted by a harsh scream. As I advanced towards this
noise, it began to grow lighter about me, and I caught sight, through
the trees, of sundry gables and enclosure walls, and something like the
tops of a rickyard. And sure enough, a rickyard it proved to be, and a
neat little farm-steading, with the beech-woods growing almost to the
door of it. Just before me, however, as I came up the path, the trees
drew back and let in a wide flood of daylight on to a circular lawn. It
was here that the noises had their origin. More than a score of peacocks
(there are altogether thirty at the farm), a proper contingent of
peahens, and a great multitude that I could not number of more ordinary
barn-door fowls, were all feeding together on this little open lawn
among the beeches. They fed in a dense crowd, which swayed to and fro,
and came hither and thither as by a sort of tide, and of which the
surface was agitated like the surface of a sea as each bird guzzled his
head along the ground after the scattered corn. The clucking, cooing
noise that had led me thither was formed by the blending together of
countless expressions of individual contentment into one collective
expression of contentment, or general grace during meat. Every now and
again a big peacock would separate himself from the mob and take a
stately turn or two about the lawn, or perhaps mount for a moment upon
the rail, and there shrilly publish to the world his satisfaction with
himself and what he had to eat. It happened, for my sins, that none of
these admirable birds had anything beyond the merest rudiment of a tail.
Tails, it seemed, were out of season just then. But they had their necks
for all that; and by their necks alone they do as much surpass all the
other birds of our grey climate as they fall in quality of song below
the blackbird or the lark. Surely the peacock, with its incomparable
parade of glorious colour and the scrannel voice of it issuing forth, as
in mockery, from its painted throat, must, like my landlady's
butterflies at Great Missenden, have been invented by some skilful
fabulist for the consolation and support of homely virtue: or rather,
perhaps, by a fabulist not quite so skilful, who made points for the
moment without having a studious enough eye to the complete effect; for
I thought these melting greens and blues so beautiful that afternoon,
that I would have given them my vote just then before the sweetest pipe
in all the spring woods. For indeed there is no piece of colour of the
same extent in nature, that will so flatter and satisfy the lust of a
man's eyes; and to come upon so many of them, after these acres of
stone-coloured heavens and russet woods, and grey-brown ploughlands and
white roads, was like going three whole days' journey to the southward,
or a month back into the summer.
I was sorry to leave "Peacock Farm"--for so the place is called, after
the name of its splendid pensioners--and go forward again in the quiet
woods. It began to grow both damp and dusk under the beeches: and as the
day declined the colour faded out of the foliage: and shadow, without
form and void, took the place of all the fine tracery of leaves and
delicate gradations of living green that had before accompanied my walk.
I had been sorry to leave "Peacock Farm," but I was not sorry to find
myself once more in the open road, under a pale and somewhat
troubled-looking evening sky, and put my best foot foremost for the inn
at Wendover.
Wendover, in itself, is a straggling, purposeless sort of place.
Everybody seems to have had his own opinion as to how the street should
go; or rather, every now and then a man seems to have arisen with a new
idea on the subject, and led away a little sect of neighbours to join in
his heresy. It would have somewhat the look of an abortive
watering-place, such as we may now see them here and there along the
coast, but for the age of the houses, the comely quiet design of some of
them, and the look of long habitation, of a life that is settled and
rooted, and makes it worth while to train flowers about the windows, and
otherwise shape the dwelling to the humour of the inhabitant. The
church, which might perhaps have served as rallying-point for these
loose houses, and pulled the township into something like intelligible
unity, stands some distance off among great trees; but the inn (to take
the public buildings in order of importance) is in what I understand to
be the principal street: a pleasant old house, with bay windows, and
three peaked gables, and many swallows' nests plastered about the eaves.
The interior of the inn was answerable to the outside: indeed, I never
saw any room much more to be admired than the low wainscoted parlour in
which I spent the remainder of the evening. It was a short oblong in
shape, save that the fireplace was built across one of the angles so as
to cut it partially off, and the opposite angle was similarly truncated
by a corner cupboard. The wainscot was white, and there was a Turkey
carpet on the floor, so old that it might have been imported by Walter
Shandy before he retired, worn almost through in some places, but in
others making a good show of blues and oranges, none the less harmonious
for being somewhat faded. The corner cupboard was agreeable in design;
and there were just the right things upon the shelves--decanters and
tumblers, and blue plates, and one red rose in a glass of water. The
furniture was old-fashioned and stiff. Everything was in keeping, down
to the ponderous leaden inkstand on the round table. And you may fancy
how pleasant it looked all flushed and flickered over by the light of a
brisk companionable fire, and seen, in a strange, tilted sort of
perspective, in the three compartments of the old mirror above the
chimney. As I sat reading in the great arm-chair, I kept looking round
with the tail of my eye at the quaint, bright picture that was about me,
and could not help some pleasure and a certain childish pride in forming
part of it. The book I read was about Italy in the early Renaissance,
the pageantries and the light loves of princes, the passion of men for
learning, and poetry, and art; but it was written, by good luck, after a
solid, prosaic fashion, that suited the room infinitely more nearly than
the matter; and the result was that I thought less, perhaps, of Lippo
Lippi, or Lorenzo, or Politian, than of the good Englishman who had
written in that volume what he knew of them, and taken so much pleasure
in his solemn polysyllables.
I was not left without society. My landlord had a very pretty little
daughter whom we shall call Lizzie. If I had made any notes at the time,
I might be able to tell you something definite of her appearance. But
faces have a trick of growing more and more spiritualised and abstract
in the memory, until nothing remains of them but a look, a haunting
expression; just that secret quality in a face that is apt to slip out
somehow under the cunningest painter's touch, and leave the portrait
dead for the lack of it. And if it is hard to catch with the finest of
camel's hair pencils, you may think how hopeless it must be to pursue
after it with clumsy words. If I say, for instance, that this look,
which I remember as Lizzie, was something wistful that seemed partly to
come of slyness and in part of simplicity, and that I am inclined to
imagine it had something to do with the daintiest suspicion of a cast in
one of her large eyes, I shall have said all that I can, and the reader
will not be much advanced towards comprehension. I had struck up an
acquaintance with this little damsel in the morning, and professed much
interest in her dolls, and an impatient desire to see the large one
which was kept locked away for great occasions. And so I had not been
very long in the parlour before the door opened, and in came Miss Lizzie
with two dolls tucked clumsily under her arm. She was followed by her
brother John, a year or so younger than herself, not simply to play
propriety at our interview, but to show his own two whips in emulation
of his sister's dolls. I did my best to make myself agreeable to my
visitors, showing much admiration for the dolls and dolls' dresses, and,
with a very serious demeanour, asking many questions about their age and
character. I did not think that Lizzie distrusted my sincerity, but it
was evident she was both bewildered and a little contemptuous. Although
she was ready herself to treat her dolls as if they were alive, she
seemed to think rather poorly of any grown person who could fall
heartily into the spirit of the fiction. Sometimes she would look at me
with gravity and a sort of disquietude, as though she really feared I
must be out of my wits. Sometimes, as when I inquired too particularly
into the question of their names, she laughed at me so long and heartily
that I began to feel almost embarrassed. But when, in an evil moment, I
asked to be allowed to kiss one of them, she could keep herself no
longer to herself. Clambering down from the chair on which she sat
perched to show me, Cornelia-like, her jewels, she ran straight out of
the room and into the bar--it was just across the passage,--and I could
hear her telling her mother in loud tones, but apparently more in sorrow
than in merriment, that _the gentleman in the parlour wanted to kiss
Dolly_. I fancy she was determined to save me from this humiliating
action, even in spite of myself, for she never gave me the desired
permission. She reminded me of an old dog I once knew, who would never
suffer the master of the house to dance, out of an exaggerated sense of
the dignity of that master's place and carriage.
After the young people were gone there was but one more incident ere I
went to bed. I heard a party of children go up and down the dark street
for a while, singing together sweetly. And the mystery of this little
incident was so pleasant to me that I purposely refrained from asking
who they were, and wherefore they went singing at so late an hour. One
can rarely be in a pleasant place without meeting with some pleasant
accident. I have a conviction that these children would not have gone
singing before the inn unless the inn-parlour had been the delightful
place it was. At least, if I had been in the customary public room of
the modern hotel, with all its disproportions and discomforts, my ears
would have been dull, and there would have been some ugly temper or
other uppermost in my spirit, and so they would have wasted their songs
upon an unworthy hearer.
Next morning I went along to visit the church. It is a long-backed
red-and-white building, very much restored, and stands in a pleasant
graveyard among those great trees of which I have spoken already. The
sky was drowned in a mist. Now and again pulses of cold wind went about
the enclosure, and set the branches busy overhead, and the dead leaves
scurrying in to the angles of the church buttresses. Now and again,
also, I could hear the dull sudden fall of a chestnut among the
grass--the dog would bark before the rectory door--or there would come a
clinking of pails from the stable-yard behind. But in spite of these
occasional interruptions--in spite, also, of the continuous autumn
twittering that filled the trees--the chief impression somehow was one
as of utter silence, inasmuch that the little greenish bell that peeped
out of a window in the tower disquieted me with a sense of some possible
and more inharmonious disturbance. The grass was wet, as if with a
hoar-frost that had just been melted. I do not know that ever I saw a
morning more autumnal. As I went to and fro among the graves, I saw some
flowers set reverently before a recently erected tomb, and drawing near
was almost startled to find they lay on the grave of a man seventy-two
years old when he died. We are accustomed to strew flowers only over the
young, where love has been cut short untimely, and great possibilities
have been restrained by death. We strew them there in token that these
possibilities, in some deeper sense, shall yet be realised, and the
touch of our dead loves remain with us and guide us to the end. And yet
there was more significance, perhaps, and perhaps a greater consolation,
in this little nosegay on the grave of one who had died old. We are apt
to make so much of the tragedy of death, and think so little of the
enduring tragedy of some men's lives, that we see more to lament for in
a life cut off in the midst of usefulness and love, than in one that
miserably survives all love and usefulness, and goes about the world the
phantom of itself, without hope, or joy, or any consolation. These
flowers seemed not so much the token of love that survived death, as of
something yet more beautiful--of love that had lived a man's life out to
an end with him, and been faithful and companionable, and not weary of
loving, throughout all these years.
The morning cleared a little, and the sky was once more the old
stone-coloured vault over the sallow meadows and the russet woods, as I
set forth on a dog-cart from Wendover to Tring. The road lay for a good
distance along the side of the hills, with the great plain below on one
hand, and the beech-woods above on the other. The fields were busy with
people ploughing and sowing; every here and there a jug of ale stood in
the angle of the hedge, and I could see many a team wait smoking in the
furrow as ploughman or sower stepped aside for a moment to take a
draught. Over all the brown ploughlands, and under all the leafless
hedgerows, there was a stout piece of labour abroad, and, as it were, a
spirit of picnic. The horses smoked and the men laboured and shouted and
drank in the sharp autumn morning; so that one had a strong effect of
large, open-air existence. The fellow who drove me was something of a
humorist; and his conversation was all in praise of an agricultural
labourer's way of life. It was he who called my attention to these jugs
of ale by the hedgerow; he could not sufficiently express the liberality
of these men's wages; he told me how sharp an appetite was given by
breaking up the earth in the morning air, whether with plough or spade,
and cordially admired this provision of nature. He sang _O fortunatos
agricolas_! indeed, in every possible key, and with many cunning
inflections, till I began to wonder what was the use of such people as
Mr. Arch, and to sing the same air myself in a more diffident manner.
Tring was reached, and then Tring railway station; for the two are not
very near, the good people of Tring having held the railway, of old
days, in extreme apprehension, lest some day it should break loose in
the town and work mischief. I had a last walk, among russet beeches as
usual, and the air filled, as usual, with the carolling of larks; I
heard shots fired in the distance, and saw, as a new sign of the
fulfilled autumn, two horsemen exercising a pack of fox-hounds. And then
the train came and carried me back to London.
FOOTNOTE:
[40] I had nearly finished the transcription of the following pages,
when I saw on a friend's table the number containing the piece from
which this sentence is extracted, and, struck with a similarity of
title, took it home with me and read it with indescribable
satisfaction. I do not know whether I more envy M. Theuriet the
pleasure of having written this delightful article, or the reader
the pleasure, which I hope he has still before him, of reading it
once and again, and lingering over the passages that please him
most.
VII
A WINTER'S WALK IN CARRICK AND GALLOWAY
(_A Fragment_: 1876)
At the famous bridge of Doon, Kyle, the central district of the shire of
Ayr, marches with Carrick, the most southerly. On the Carrick side of
the river rises a hill of somewhat gentle conformation, cleft with
shallow dells, and sown here and there with farms and tufts of wood.
Inland, it loses itself, joining, I suppose, the great herd of similar
hills that occupies the centre of the Lowlands. Towards the sea, it
swells out the coast-line into a protuberance, like a bay window in a
plan, and is fortified against the surf behind bold crags. This hill is
known as the Brown Hill of Carrick, or, more shortly, Brown Carrick.
It had snowed overnight. The fields were all sheeted up; they were
tucked in among the snow, and their shape was modelled through the
pliant counterpane, like children tucked in by a fond mother. The wind
had made ripples and folds upon the surface, like what the sea, in quiet
weather, leaves upon the sand. There was a frosty stifle in the air. An
effusion of coppery light on the summit of Brown Carrick showed where
the sun was trying to look through; but along the horizon clouds of cold
fog had settled down, so that there was no distinction of sky and sea.
Over the white shoulders of the headlands, or in the opening of bays,
there was nothing but a great vacancy and blackness; and the road as it
drew near the edge of the cliff seemed to skirt the shores of creation
and void space.
The snow crunched underfoot, and at farms all the dogs broke out barking
as they smelt a passer-by upon the road. I met a fine old fellow, who
might have sat as the father in "The Cottar's Saturday Night," and who
swore most heathenishly at a cow he was driving. And a little after I
scraped acquaintance with a poor body tramping out to gather cockles.
His face was wrinkled by exposure; it was broken up into flakes and
channels, like mud beginning to dry, and weathered in two colours, an
incongruous pink and grey. He had a faint air of being surprised--which,
God knows, he might well be--that life had gone so ill with him. The
shape of his trousers was in itself a jest, so strangely were they
bagged and ravelled about his knees; and his coat was all bedaubed with
clay as though he had lain in a rain-dub during the New Year's
festivity. I will own I was not sorry to think he had had a merry New
Year, and been young again for an evening; but I was sorry to see the
mark still there. One could not expect such an old gentleman to be much
of a dandy, or a great student of respectability in dress; but there
might have been a wife at home, who had brushed out similar stains after
fifty New Years, now become old, or a round-armed daughter, who would
wish to have him neat, were it only out of self-respect and for the
ploughman sweetheart when he looks round at night. Plainly, there was
nothing of this in his life, and years and loneliness hung heavily on
his old arms. He was seventy-six, he told me; and nobody would give a
day's work to a man that age: they would think he couldn't do it. "And,
'deed," he went on, with a sad little chuckle, "'deed, I doubt if I
could." He said good-bye to me at a foot-path, and crippled wearily off
to his work. It will make your heart ache if you think of his old
fingers groping in the snow.
He told me I was to turn down beside the school-house for Dunure. And
so, when I found a lone house among the snow, and heard a babble of
childish voices from within, I struck off into a steep road leading
downwards to the sea. Dunure lies close under the steep hill: a haven
among the rocks, a breakwater in consummate disrepair, much apparatus
for drying nets, and a score or so of fishers' houses. Hard by, a few
shards of ruined castle overhang the sea, a few vaults, and one tall
gable honeycombed with windows. The snow lay on the beach to the
tide-mark. It was daubed on to the sills of the ruin; it roosted in the
crannies of the rock like white sea-birds; even on outlying reefs there
would be a little cock of snow, like a toy lighthouse. Everything was
grey and white in a cold and dolorous sort of shepherd's plaid. In the
profound silence, broken only by the noise of oars at sea, a horn was
sounded twice; and I saw the postman, girt with two bags, pause a moment
at the end of the clachan for letters. It is, perhaps, characteristic of
Dunure that none were brought him.
The people at the public-house did not seem well pleased to see me, and
though I would fain have stayed by the kitchen fire, sent me "ben the
hoose" into the guest-room. This guest-room at Dunure was painted in
quite æsthetic fashion. There are rooms in the same taste not a hundred
miles from London, where persons of an extreme sensibility meet together
without embarrassment. It was all in a fine dull bottle-green and black;
a grave harmonious piece of colouring, with nothing, so far as coarser
folk can judge, to hurt the better feelings of the most exquisite
purist. A cherry-red half window-blind kept up an imaginary warmth in
the cold room, and threw quite a glow on the floor. Twelve cockle-shells
and a halfpenny china figure were ranged solemnly along the
mantel-shelf. Even the spittoon was an original note, and instead of
sawdust contained sea-shells. And as for the hearthrug, it would merit
an article to itself, and a coloured diagram to help the text. It was
patchwork, but the patchwork of the poor; no glowing shreds of old
brocade and Chinese silk, shaken together in the kaleidoscope of some
tasteful housewife's fancy; but a work of art in its own way, and
plainly a labour of love. The patches came exclusively from people's
raiment. There was no colour more brilliant than a heather mixture; "My
Johnnie's grey breeks," well polished over the oar on the boat's
thwart, entered largely into its composition. And the spoils of an old
black cloth coat, that had been many a Sunday to church, added something
(save the mark!) of preciousness to the material.
While I was at luncheon four carters came in--long-limbed, muscular
Ayrshire Scots, with lean, intelligent faces. Four quarts of stout were
ordered; they kept filling the tumbler with the other hand as they
drank; and in less time than it takes me to write these words the four
quarts were finished--another round was proposed, discussed, and
negatived--and they were creaking out of the village with their carts.
The ruins drew you towards them. You never saw any place more desolate
from a distance, nor one that less belied its promise near at hand. Some
crows and gulls flew away croaking as I scrambled in. The snow had
drifted into the vaults. The clachan dabbled with snow, the white hills,
the black sky, the sea marked in the coves with faint circular wrinkles,
the whole world, as it looked from a loop-hole in Dunure, was cold,
wretched, and out-at-elbows. If you had been a wicked baron and
compelled to stay there all the afternoon, you would have had a rare fit
of remorse. How you would have heaped up the fire and gnawed your
fingers! I think it would have come to homicide before the evening--if
it were only for the pleasure of seeing something red! And the masters
of Dunure, it is to be noticed, were remarkable of old for inhumanity.
One of these vaults where the snow had drifted was that "black voute"
where "Mr. Alane Stewart, Commendatour of Crossraguel," endured his
fiery trials. On the 1st and 7th of September 1570 (ill dates for Mr.
Alan!), Gilbert, Earl of Cassilis, his chaplain, his baker, his cook,
his pantryman, and another servant, bound the poor Commendator "betwix
an iron chimlay and a fire," and there cruelly roasted him until he
signed away his abbacy. It is one of the ugliest stories of an ugly
period, but not, somehow, without such a flavour of the ridiculous as
makes it hard to sympathise quite seriously with the victim. And it is
consoling to remember that he got away at last, and kept his abbacy,
and, over and above, had a pension from the Earl until he died.
Some way beyond Dunure a wide bay, of somewhat less unkindly aspect,
opened out. Colzean plantations lay all along the steep shore, and there
was a wooded hill towards the centre, where the trees made a sort of
shadowy etching over the snow. The road went down and up, and past a
blacksmith's cottage that made fine music in the valley. Three
compatriots of Burns drove up to me in a cart. They were all drunk, and
asked me jeeringly if this was the way to Dunure. I told them it was;
and my answer was received with unfeigned merriment. One gentleman was
so much tickled he nearly fell out of the cart; indeed, he was only
saved by a companion, who either had not so fine a sense of humour or
had drunken less.
"The toune of Mayboll," says the inimitable Abercrummie,[41] "stands
upon an ascending ground from east to west, and lyes open to the south.
It hath one principall street, with houses upon both sides, built of
freestone, and it is beautifyed with the situation of two castles, one
at each end of this street. That on the east belongs to the Erle of
Cassilis. On the west end is a castle, which belonged sometime to the
laird of Blairquan, which is now the tolbuith, and is adorned with a
pyremide [conical roof], and a row of ballesters round it raised from
the top of the staircase, into which they have mounted a fyne clock.
There be four lanes which pass from the principall street; one is called
the Back Vennel, which is steep, declining to the south-west, and leads
to a lower street, which is far larger than the high chiefe street, and
it runs from the Kirkland to the Well Trees, in which there have been
many pretty buildings, belonging to the severall gentry of the
countrey, who were wont to resort thither in winter, and divert
themselves in converse together at their owne houses. It was once the
principall street of the town; but many of these houses of the gentry
having been decayed and ruined, it has lost much of its ancient beautie.
Just opposite to this vennel, there is another that leads north-west,
from the chiefe street to the green, which is a pleasant plott of
ground, enclosed round with an earthen wall, wherein they were wont to
play football, but now at the Gowff and byasse-bowls. The houses of this
towne, on both sides of the street, have their several gardens belonging
to them; and in the lower street there be some pretty orchards, that
yield store of good fruit." As Patterson says, this description is near
enough even to-day, and is mighty nicely written to boot. I am bound to
add, of my own experience, that Maybole is tumble-down and dreary.
Prosperous enough in reality, it has an air of decay; and though the
population has increased, a roofless house every here and there seems to
protest the contrary. The women are more than well-favoured, and the men
fine tall fellows; but they look slipshod and dissipated. As they
slouched at street corners, or stood about gossiping in the snow, it
seemed they would have been more at home in the slums of a large city
than here in a country place betwixt a village and a town. I heard a
great deal about drinking, and a great deal about religious revivals:
two things in which the Scottish character is emphatic and most
unlovely. In particular, I heard of clergymen who were employing their
time in explaining to a delighted audience the physics of the Second
Coming. It is not very likely any of us will be asked to help. If we
were, it is likely we should receive instructions for the occasion, and
that on more reliable authority. And so I can only figure to myself a
congregation truly curious in such flights of theological fancy, as one
of veteran and accomplished saints, who have fought the good fight to an
end and outlived all worldly passion, and are to be regarded rather as
a part of the Church Triumphant than the poor, imperfect company on
earth. And yet I saw some young fellows about the smoking-room who
seemed, in the eyes of one who cannot count himself strait-laced, in
need of some more practical sort of teaching. They seemed only eager to
get drunk, and to do so speedily. It was not much more than a week after
the New Year; and to hear them return on their past bouts with a gusto
unspeakable was not altogether pleasing. Here is one snatch of talk, for
the accuracy of which I can vouch--
"Ye had a spree here last Tuesday?"
"We had that!"
"I wasna able to be oot o' my bed. Man, I was awful bad on Wednesday."
"Ay, ye were gey bad."
And you should have seen the bright eyes, and heard the sensual accents!
They recalled their doings with devout gusto and a sort of rational
pride. Schoolboys, after their first drunkenness, are not more boastful;
a cock does not plume himself with a more unmingled satisfaction as he
paces forth among his harem; and yet these were grown men, and by no
means short of wit. It was hard to suppose they were very eager about
the Second Coming: it seemed as if some elementary notions of temperance
for the men and seemliness for the women would have gone nearer the
mark. And yet, as it seemed to me typical of much that is evil in
Scotland, Maybole is also typical of much that is best. Some of the
factories, which have taken the place of weaving in the town's economy,
were originally founded and are still possessed by self-made men of the
sterling, stout old breed--fellows who made some little bit of an
invention, borrowed some little pocketful of capital, and then, step by
step, in courage, thrift, and industry, fought their way upward to an
assured position.
Abercrummie has told you enough of the Tolbooth; but, as a bit of
spelling, this inscription on the Tolbooth bell seems too delicious to
withhold: "This bell is founded at Maiboll Bi Danel Geli, a Frenchman,
the 6th November 1696, Bi appointment of the heritors of the parish of
Maiyboll." The Castle deserves more notice. It is a large and shapely
tower, plain from the ground upward, but with a zone of ornamentation
running about the top. In a general way this adornment is perched on the
very summit of the chimney-stacks; but there is one corner more
elaborate than the rest. A very heavy string-course runs round the upper
story, and just above this, facing up the street, the tower carries a
small oriel window, fluted and corbelled and carved about with stone
heads. It is so ornate it has somewhat the air of a shrine. And it was,
indeed, the casket of a very precious jewel, for in the room to which it
gives light lay, for long years, the heroine of the sweet old ballad of
"Johnnie Faa"--she who, at the call of the gipsies' songs, "came
tripping down the stair, and all her maids before her." Some people say
the ballad has no basis in fact, and have written, I believe,
unanswerable papers to the proof. But in the face of all that, the very
look of that high oriel window convinces the imagination, and we enter
into all the sorrows of the imprisoned dame. We conceive the burthen of
the long, lack-lustre days, when she leaned her sick head against the
mullions, and saw the burghers loafing in Maybole High Street, and the
children at play, and ruffling gallants riding by from hunt or foray. We
conceive the passion of odd moments, when the wind threw up to her some
snatch of song, and her heart grew hot within her, and her eyes
overflowed at the memory of the past. And even if the tale be not true
of this or that lady, or this or that old tower, it is true in the
essence of all men and women: for all of us, some time or other, hear
the gipsies singing; over all of us is the glamour cast. Some resist and
sit resolutely by the fire. Most go and are brought back again, like
Lady Cassilis. A few, of the tribe of Waring, go and are seen no more;
only now and again, at springtime, when the gipsies' song is afloat in
the amethyst evening, we can catch their voices in the glee.
By night it was clearer, and Maybole more visible than during the day.
Clouds coursed over the sky in great masses; the full moon battled the
other way, and lit up the snow with gleams of flying silver; the town
came down the hill in a cascade of brown gables, bestridden by smooth
white roofs, and spangled here and there with lighted windows. At either
end the snow stood high up in the darkness, on the peak of the Tolbooth
and among the chimneys of the Castle. As the moon flashed a bull's-eye
glitter across the town between the racing clouds, the white roofs
leaped into relief over the gables and the chimney-stacks, and their
shadows over the white roofs. In the town itself the lit face of the
clock peered down the street; an hour was hammered out on Mr. Geli's
bell, and from behind the red curtains of a public-house some one
trolled out--a compatriot of Burns, again!--"The saut tear blin's my
e'e."
Next morning there were sun and a flapping wind. From the street-corners
of Maybole I could catch breezy glimpses of green fields. The road
underfoot was wet and heavy--part ice, part snow, part water; and any
one I met greeted me, by way of salutation, with "A fine thowe" (thaw).
My way lay among rather bleak hills, and past bleak ponds and
dilapidated castles and monasteries, to the Highland-looking village of
Kirkoswald. It has little claim to notice save that Burns came there to
study surveying in the summer of 1777, and there also, in the kirkyard,
the original of Tam o' Shanter sleeps his last sleep. It is worth
noticing, however, that this was the first place I thought
"Highland-looking." Over the hill from Kirkoswald a farm-road leads to
the coast. As I came down above Turnberry, the sea view was indeed
strangely different from the day before. The cold fogs were all blown
away; and there was Ailsa Craig, like a refraction, magnified and
deformed, of the Bass Rock; and there were the chiselled mountain tops
of Arran, veined and tipped with snow; and behind, and fainter, the low,
blue land of Cantyre. Cottony clouds stood, in a great castle, over the
top of Arran, and blew out in long streamers to the south. The sea was
bitten all over with white; little ships, tacking up and down the Firth,
lay over at different angles in the wind. On Shanter they were ploughing
lea; a cart foal, all in a field by himself, capered and whinnied as if
the spring were in him.
The road from Turnberry to Girvan lies along the shore, among sandhills
and by wildernesses of tumbled bent. Every here and there a few cottages
stood together beside a bridge. They had one odd feature, not easy to
describe in words: a triangular porch projected from above the door,
supported at the apex by a single upright post; a secondary door was
hinged to the post, and could be hasped on either cheek of the real
entrance; so, whether the wind was north or south, the cotter could make
himself a triangular bight of shelter where to set his chair and finish
a pipe with comfort. There is one objection to this device: for, as the
post stands in the middle of the fairway, any one precipitately issuing
from the cottage must run his chance of a broken head. So far as I am
aware, it is peculiar to the little corner of country about Girvan. And
that corner is noticeable for more reasons: it is certainly one of the
most characteristic districts in Scotland. It has this movable porch by
way of architecture; it has, as we shall see, a sort of remnant of
provincial costume, and it has the handsomest population in the
Lowlands....
FOOTNOTE:
[41] William Abercrombie. See _Fasti Ecclesiæ Scoticanæ_, under
"Maybole" (Part iii.).
VIII
FOREST NOTES
(1875-6)
ON THE PLAIN
Perhaps the reader knows already the aspect of the great levels of the
Gâtinais, where they border with the wooded hills of Fontainebleau. Here
and there a few grey rocks creep out of the forest as if to sun
themselves. Here and there a few apple-trees stand together on a knoll.
The quaint, undignified tartan of a myriad small fields dies out into
the distance; the strips blend and disappear; and the dead flat lies
forth open and empty, with no accident save perhaps a thin line of trees
or faint church-spire against the sky. Solemn and vast at all times, in
spite of pettiness in the near details, the impression becomes more
solemn and vast towards evening. The sun goes down, a swollen orange, as
it were into the sea. A blue-clad peasant rides home, with a harrow
smoking behind him among the dry clods. Another still works with his
wife in their little strip. An immense shadow fills the plain; these
people stand in it up to their shoulders; and their heads, as they stoop
over their work and rise again, are relieved from time to time against
the golden sky.
These peasant farmers are well off nowadays, and not by any means
overworked; but somehow you always see in them the historical
representative of the serf of yore, and think not so much of present
times, which may be prosperous enough, as of the old days when the
peasant was taxed beyond possibility of payment, and lived, in
Michelet's image, like a hare between two furrows. These very people now
weeding their patch under the broad sunset, that very man and his wife,
it seems to us, have suffered all the wrongs of France. It is they who
have been their country's scape-goat for long ages; they who, generation
after generation, have sowed and not reaped, reaped and another has
garnered; and who have now entered into their reward, and enjoy their
good things in their turn. For the days are gone by when the Seigneur
ruled and profited. "Le Seigneur," says the old formula, "enferme ses
manants comme sous porte et gonds, du ciel à la terre. Tout est à lui,
forêt chenue, oiseau dans l'air, poisson dans l'eau, bête au buisson,
l'onde qui coule, la cloche dont le son au loin roule." Such was his old
state of sovereignty, a local god rather than a mere king. And now you
may ask yourself where he is, and look round for vestiges of my late
lord, and in all the country-side there is no trace of him but his
forlorn and fallen mansion. At the end of a long avenue, now sown with
grain, in the midst of a close full of cypresses and lilacs, ducks and
crowing chanticleers and droning bees, the old château lifts its red
chimneys and peaked roofs and turning vanes into the wind and sun. There
is a glad spring bustle in the air, perhaps, and the lilacs are all in
flower, and the creepers green about the broken balustrade; but no
spring shall revive the honour of the place. Old women of the people,
little children of the people, saunter and gambol in the walled court or
feed the ducks in the neglected moat. Plough-horses, mighty of limb,
browse in the long stables. The dial-hand on the clock waits for some
better hour. Out on the plain, where hot sweat trickles into men's eyes,
and the spade goes in deep and comes up slowly, perhaps the peasant may
feel a movement of joy at his heart when he thinks that these spacious
chimneys are now cold, which have so often blazed and flickered upon gay
folk at supper, while he and his hollow-eyed children watched through
the night with empty bellies and cold feet. And perhaps, as he raises
his head and sees the forest lying like a coast-line of low hills along
the sea-like level of the plain, perhaps forest and château hold no
unsimilar place in his affections.
If the château was my lord's the forest was my lord the king's; neither
of them for this poor Jacques. If he thought to eke out his meagre way
of life by some petty theft of wood for the fire, or for a new
roof-tree, he found himself face to face with a whole department, from
the Grand Master of the Woods and Waters, who was a high-born lord, down
to the common sergeant, who was a peasant like himself, and wore stripes
or bandolier by way of uniform. For the first offence, by the Salic law,
there was a fine of fifteen sols; and should a man be taken more than
once in fault, or circumstances aggravate the colour of his guilt, he
might be whipped, branded, or hanged. There was a hangman over at Melun,
and, I doubt not, a fine tall gibbet hard by the town gate, where
Jacques might see his fellows dangle against the sky as he went to
market.
And then, if he lived near to a cover, there would be the more hares and
rabbits to eat out his harvest, and the more hunters to trample it down.
My lord has a new horn from England. He has laid out seven francs in
decorating it with silver and gold, and fitting it with a silken leash
to hang about his shoulder. The hounds have been on a pilgrimage to the
shrine of Saint Mesmer, or Saint Hubert in the Ardennes, or some other
holy intercessor who has made a speciality of the health of
hunting-dogs. In the grey dawn the game was turned and the branch broken
by our best piqueur. A rare day's hunting lies before us. Wind a jolly
flourish, sound the _bien-aller_ with all your lungs. Jacques must stand
by, hat in hand, while the quarry and hound and huntsman sweep across
his field, and a year's sparing and labouring is as though it had not
been. If he can see the ruin with a good enough grace, who knows but he
may fall in favour with my lord; who knows but his son may become the
last and least among the servants at his lordship's kennel--one of the
two poor varlets who get no wages and sleep at night among the
hounds?[42]
For all that, the forest has been of use to Jacques, not only warming
him with fallen wood, but giving him shelter in days of sore trouble,
when my lord of the château, with all his troopers and trumpets, had
been beaten from field after field into some ultimate fastness, or lay
overseas in an English prison. In these dark days, when the watch on the
church steeple saw the smoke of burning villages on the sky-line, or a
clump of spears and fluttering pennon drawing nigh across the plain,
these good folk gat them up, with all their household gods, into the
wood, whence, from some high spur, their timid scouts might overlook the
coming and going of the marauders, and see the harvest ridden down, and
church and cottage go up to heaven all night in flame. It was but an
unhomely refuge that the woods afforded, where they must abide all
change of weather and keep house with wolves and vipers. Often there was
none left alive, when they returned, to show the old divisions of field
from field. And yet, as times went, when the wolves entered at night
into depopulated Paris, and perhaps De Retz was passing by with a
company of demons like himself, even in these caves and thickets there
were glad hearts and grateful prayers.
Once or twice, as I say, in the course of the ages, the forest may have
served the peasant well, but at heart it is a royal forest, and noble by
old association. These woods have rung to the horns of all the kings of
France, from Philip Augustus downwards. They have seen St. Louis
exercise the dogs he brought with him from Egypt; Francis I. go
a-hunting with ten thousand horses in his train; and Peter of Russia
following his first stag. And so they are still haunted for the
imagination by royal hunts and progresses, and peopled with the faces
of memorable men of yore. And this distinction is not only in virtue of
the pastime of dead monarchs. Great events, great revolutions, great
cycles in the affairs of men, have here left their note, here taken
shape in some significant and dramatic situation. It was hence that
Guise and his leaguers led Charles the Ninth a prisoner to Paris. Here,
booted and spurred, and with all his dogs about him, Napoleon met the
Pope beside a woodland cross. Here, on his way to Elba, not so long
after, he kissed the eagle of the Old Guard, and spoke words of
passionate farewell to his soldiers. And here, after Waterloo, rather
than yield its ensign to the new power, one of his faithful regiments
burned that memorial of so much toil and glory on the Grand Master's
table, and drank its dust in brandy, as a devout priest consumes the
remnants of the Host.
IN THE SEASON
Close into the edge of the forest, so close that the trees of the
_bornage_ stand pleasantly about the last houses, sits a certain small
and very quiet village. There is but one street, and that, not long ago,
was a green lane, where the cattle browsed between the doorsteps. As you
go up this street, drawing ever nearer the beginning of the wood, you
will arrive at last before an inn where artists lodge. To the door (for
I imagine it to be six o'clock on some fine summer's even), half a
dozen, or maybe half a score, of people have brought out chairs, and now
sit sunning themselves and waiting the omnibus from Melun. If you go on
into the court you will find as many more, some in the billiard-room
over absinthe and a match of corks, some without over a last cigar and a
vermouth. The doves coo and flutter from the dovecot; Hortense is
drawing water from the well; and as all the rooms open into the court,
you can see the white-capped cook over the furnace in the kitchen, and
some idle painter, who has stored his canvases and washed his brushes,
jangling a waltz on the crazy, tongue-tied piano in the salle-à-manger.
"_Edmond, encore un vermouth_," cries a man in velveteen, adding in a
tone of apologetic after-thought, "_un double, s'il vous plaît_." "Where
are you working?" asks one in pure white linen from top to toe. "At the
Garrefour de l'Épine," returns the other in corduroy (they are all
gaitered, by the way). "I couldn't do a thing to it. I ran out of white.
Where were you?" "I wasn't working. I was looking for motives." Here is
an outbreak of jubilation, and a lot of men clustering together about
some new-comer with outstretched hands; perhaps the "correspondence" has
come in and brought So-and-so from Paris, or perhaps it is only
So-and-so who has walked over from Chailly to dinner.
"_À table, Messieurs!_" cries M. Siron, bearing through the court the
first tureen of soup. And immediately the company begins to settle down
about the long tables in the dining-room, framed all round with sketches
of all degrees of merit and demerit. There's the big picture of the
huntsman winding a horn with a dead boar between his legs, and his
legs--well, his legs in stockings. And here is the little picture of a
raw mutton-chop, in which Such-a-one knocked a hole last summer with no
worse a missile than a plum from the dessert. And under all these works
of art so much eating goes forward, so much drinking, so much jabbering
in French and English, that it would do your heart good merely to peep
and listen at the door. One man is telling how they all went last year
to the fête at Fleury, and another how well So-and-so would sing of an
evening; and here are a third and fourth making plans for the whole
future of their lives; and there is a fifth imitating a conjuror making
faces on his clenched fist, surely of all arts the most difficult and
admirable! A sixth has eaten his fill, lights a cigarette, and resigns
himself to digestion. A seventh has just dropped in, and calls for
soup. Number eight, meanwhile, has left the table, and is once more
trampling the poor piano under powerful and uncertain fingers.
Dinner over, people drop outside to smoke and chat. Perhaps we go along
to visit our friends at the other end of the village, where there is
always a good welcome and a good talk, and perhaps some pickled oysters
and white wine to close the evening. Or a dance is organised in the
dining-room, and the piano exhibits all its paces under manful
jockeying, to the light of three or four candles and a lamp or two,
while the waltzers move to and fro upon the wooden floor, and sober men,
who are not given to such light pleasures, get up on the table or the
sideboard, and sit there looking on approvingly over a pipe and a
tumbler of wine. Or sometimes--suppose my lady moon looks forth, and the
court from out the half-lit dining-room seems nearly as bright as by
day, and the light picks out the window-panes, and makes a clear shadow
under every vine leaf on the wall--sometimes a picnic is proposed, and a
basket made ready, and a good procession formed in front of the hotel.
The two trumpeters in honour go before; and as we file down the long
alley, and up through devious footpaths among rocks and pine-trees, with
every here and there a dark passage of shadow, and every here and there
a spacious outlook over moonlit woods, these two precede us and sound
many a jolly flourish as they walk. We gather ferns and dry boughs into
the cavern, and soon a good blaze flutters the shadows of the old
bandits' haunt, and shows shapely beards and comely faces and toilettes
ranged about the wall. The bowl is lit, and the punch is burnt and sent
round in scalding thimblefuls. So a good hour or two may pass with song
and jest. And then we go home in the moonlight morning, straggling a
good deal among the birch tufts and the boulders, but ever called
together again, as one of our leaders winds his horn. Perhaps some one
of the party will not heed the summons, but chooses out some by-way of
his own. As he follows the winding sandy road, he hears the flourishes
grow fainter and fainter in the distance, and die finally out, and still
walks on in the strange coolness and silence and between the crisp
lights and shadows of the moonlit woods, until suddenly the bell rings
out the hour from far-away Chailly, and he starts to find himself alone.
No surf-bell on forlorn and perilous shores, no passing knell over the
busy market-place, can speak with a more heavy and disconsolate tongue
to human ears. Each stroke calls up a host of ghostly reverberations in
his mind. And as he stands rooted, it has grown once more so utterly
silent that it seems to him he might hear the church-bells ring the hour
out all the world over, not at Chailly only, but in Paris, and away in
outlandish cities, and in the village on the river, where his childhood
passed between the sun and flowers.
IDLE HOURS
The woods by night, in all their uncanny effect, are not rightly to be
understood until you can compare them with the woods by day. The
stillness of the medium, the floor of glittering sand, these trees that
go streaming up like monstrous sea-weeds and waver in the moving winds
like the weeds in submarine currents, all these set the mind working on
the thought of what you may have seen off a foreland or over the side of
a boat, and make you feel like a diver, down in the quiet water, fathoms
below the tumbling, transitory surface of the sea. And yet in itself, as
I say, the strangeness of these nocturnal solitudes is not to be felt
fully without the sense of contrast. You must have risen in the morning
and seen the woods as they are by day, kindled and coloured in the sun's
light; you must have felt the odour of innumerable trees at even, the
unsparing heat along the forest roads, and the coolness of the groves.
And on the first morning you will doubtless rise betimes. If you have
not been wakened before by the visit of some adventurous pigeon, you
will be wakened as soon as the sun can reach your window--for there are
no blinds or shutters to keep him out--and the room, with its bare wood
floor and bare whitewashed walls, shines all round you in a sort of
glory of reflected lights. You may doze a while longer by snatches, or
lie awake to study the charcoal men and dogs and horses with which
former occupants have defiled the partitions: Thiers, with wily profile;
local celebrities, pipe in hand; or, maybe, a romantic landscape
splashed in oil. Meanwhile artist after artist drops into the
salle-à-manger for coffee, and then shoulders easel, sunshade, stool,
and paint-box, bound into a fagot, and sets off for what he calls his
"motive." And artist after artist, as he goes out of the village,
carries with him a little following of dogs. For the dogs, who belong
only nominally to any special master, hang about the gate of the forest
all day long, and whenever any one goes by who hits their fancy, profit
by his escort, and go forth with him to play an hour or two at hunting.
They would like to be under the trees all day. But they cannot go alone.
They require a pretext. And so they take the passing artist as an excuse
to go into the woods, as they might take a walking-stick as an excuse to
bathe. With quick ears, long spines, and bandy legs, or perhaps as tall
as a greyhound and with a bulldog's head, this company of mongrels will
trot by your side all day and come home with you at night, still showing
white teeth and wagging stunted tail. Their good humour is not to be
exhausted. You may pelt them with stones if you please, all they will do
is to give you a wider berth. If once they come out with you, to you
they will remain faithful, and with you return; although if you meet
them next morning in the street, it is as like as not they will cut you
with a countenance of brass.
The forest--a strange thing for an Englishman--is very destitute of
birds. This is no country where every patch of wood among the meadows
gives up an incense of song, and every valley wandered through by a
streamlet rings and reverberates from side to side with a profusion of
clear notes. And this rarity of birds is not to be regretted on its own
account only. For the insects prosper in their absence, and become as
one of the plagues of Egypt. Ants swarm in the hot sand; mosquitoes
drone their nasal drone; wherever the sun finds a hole in the roof of
the forest, you see a myriad transparent creatures coming and going in
the shaft of light; and even between-whiles, even where there is no
incursion of sun-rays into the dark arcade of the wood, you are
conscious of a continual drift of insects, an ebb and flow of
infinitesimal living things between the trees. Nor are insects the only
evil creatures that haunt the forest. For you may plump into a cave
among the rocks, and find yourself face to face with a wild boar, or see
a crooked viper slither across the road.
Perhaps you may set yourself down in the bay between two spreading
beech-roots with a book on your lap, and be awakened all of a sudden by
a friend: "I say, just keep where you are, will you? You make the
jolliest motive." And you reply: "Well, I don't mind, if I may smoke."
And thereafter the hours go idly by. Your friend at the easel labours
doggedly a little way off, in the wide shadow of the tree; and yet
farther, across a strait of glaring sunshine, you see another painter,
encamped in the shadow of another tree, and up to his waist in the fern.
You cannot watch your own effigy growing out of the white trunk, and the
trunk beginning to stand forth from the rest of the wood, and the whole
picture getting dappled over with the flecks of sun that slip through
the leaves overhead, and, as a wind goes by and sets the trees
a-talking, flicker hither and thither like butterflies of light. But you
know it is going forward; and, out of emulation with the painter, get
ready your own palette, and lay out the colour for a woodland scene in
words.
Your tree stands in a hollow paved with fern and heather, set in a
basin of low hills, and scattered over with rocks and junipers. All the
open is steeped in pitiless sunlight. Everything stands out as though it
were cut in cardboard, every colour is strained into its highest key.
The boulders are some of them upright and dead like monolithic castles,
some of them prone like sleeping cattle. The junipers--looking, in their
soiled and ragged mourning, like some funeral procession that has gone
seeking the place of sepulchre three hundred years and more in wind and
rain--are daubed in forcibly against the glowing ferns and heather.
Every tassel of their rusty foliage is defined with pre-Raphaelite
minuteness. And a sorry figure they make out there in the sun, like
misbegotten yew-trees! The scene is all pitched in a key of colour so
peculiar, and lit up with such a discharge of violent sunlight, as a man
might live fifty years in England and not see.
Meanwhile at your elbow some one tunes up a song, words of Ronsard to a
pathetic tremulous air, of how the poet loved his mistress long ago, and
pressed on her the flight of time, and told her how white and quiet the
dead lay under the stones, and how the boat dipped and pitched as the
shades embarked for the passionless land. Yet a little while, sang the
poet, and there shall be no more love; only to sit and remember loves
that might have been. There is a falling flourish in the air that
remains in the memory and comes back in incongruous places, on the seat
of hansoms or in the warm bed at night, with something of a forest
savour.
"You can get up now," says the painter; "I'm at the background."
And so up you get, stretching yourself, and go your way into the wood,
the daylight becoming richer and more golden, and the shadows stretching
farther into the open. A cool air comes along the highways, and the
scents awaken. The fir-trees breathe abroad their ozone. Out of unknown
thickets comes forth the soft, secret, aromatic odour of the woods, not
like a smell of the free heaven, but as though court ladies, who had
known these paths in ages long gone by, still walked in the summer
evenings, and shed from their brocades a breath of musk or bergamot upon
the woodland winds. One side of the long avenues is still kindled with
the sun, the other is plunged in transparent shadow. Over the trees the
west begins to burn like a furnace; and the painters gather up their
chattels, and go down, by avenue or footpath, to the plain.
A PLEASURE-PARTY
As this excursion is a matter of some length, and, moreover, we go in
force, we have set aside our usual vehicle, the pony-cart, and ordered a
large wagonette from Lejosne's. It has been waiting for near an hour,
while one went to pack a knapsack, and t'other hurried over his toilette
and coffee; but now it is filled from end to end with merry folk in
summer attire, the coachman cracks his whip, and amid much applause from
round the inn-door off we rattle at a spanking trot. The way lies
through the forest, up hill and down dale, and by beech and pine wood,
in the cheerful morning sunshine. The English get down at all the
ascents and walk on ahead for exercise; the French are mightily
entertained at this, and keep coyly underneath the tilt. As we go we
carry with us a pleasant noise of laughter and light speech, and some
one will be always breaking out into a bar or two of opera bouffe.
Before we get to the Route Ronde here comes Desprez, the colourman from
Fontainebleau, trudging across on his weekly peddle with a case of
merchandise; and it is "Desprez, leave me some malachite green";
"Desprez, leave me so much canvas"; "Desprez, leave me this, or leave me
that"; M. Desprez standing the while in the sunlight with grave face and
many salutations. The next interruption is more important. For some time
back we have had the sound of cannon in our ears; and now, a little past
Franchard, we find a mounted trooper holding a led horse, who brings
the wagonette to a stand. The artillery is practising in the
Quadrilateral, it appears; passage along the Route Ronde formally
interdicted for the moment. There is nothing for it but to draw up at
the glaring cross-roads, and get down to make fun with the notorious
Cocardon, the most ungainly and ill-bred dog of all the ungainly and
ill-bred dogs of Barbizon, or clamber about the sandy banks. And
meanwhile the Doctor, with sun umbrella, wide Panama, and patriarchal
beard, is busy wheedling and (for aught the rest of us know) bribing the
too facile sentry. His speech is smooth and dulcet, his manner dignified
and insinuating. It is not for nothing that the Doctor has voyaged all
the world over, and speaks all languages from French to Patagonian. He
has not come home from perilous journeys to be thwarted by a corporal of
horse. And so we soon see the soldier's mouth relax, and his shoulders
imitate a relenting heart. "_En voiture, Messieurs, Mesdames_," sings
the Doctor; and on we go again at a good round pace, for black care
follows hard after us, and discretion prevails not a little over valour
in some timorous spirits of the party. At any moment we may meet the
sergeant, who will send us back. At any moment we may encounter a flying
shell, which will send us somewhere farther off than Grez.
Grez--for that is our destination--has been highly recommended for its
beauty. "_Il y a de l'eau_," people have said, with an emphasis, as if
that settled the question, which, for a French mind, I am rather led to
think it does. And Grez, when we get there, is indeed a place worthy of
some praise. It lies out of the forest, a cluster of houses, with an old
bridge, an old castle in ruin, and a quaint old church. The inn garden
descends in terraces to the river; stableyard, kailyard, orchard, and a
space of lawn, fringed with rushes and embellished with a green arbour.
On the opposite bank there is a reach of English-looking plain, set
thickly with willows and poplars. And between the two lies the river,
clear and deep, and full of reeds and floating lilies. Water-plants
cluster about the starlings of the long low bridge, and stand half-way
up upon the piers in green luxuriance. They catch the dipped oar with
long antennæ, and chequer the slimy bottom with the shadow of their
leaves. And the river wanders hither and thither among the islets, and
is smothered and broken up by the reeds, like an old building in the
lithe, hardy arms of the climbing ivy. You may watch the box where the
good man of the inn keeps fish alive for his kitchen, one oily ripple
following another over the top of the yellow deal. And you can hear a
splashing and a prattle of voices from the shed under the old kirk,
where the village women wash and wash all day among the fish and
water-lilies. It seems as if linen washed there should be specially cool
and sweet.
We have come here for the river. And no sooner have we all bathed than
we board the two shallops and push off gaily, and go gliding under the
trees and gathering a great treasure of water-lilies. Some one sings;
some trail their hands in the cool water; some lean over the gunwale to
see the image of the tall poplars far below, and the shadow of the boat,
with balanced oars and their own head protruded, glide smoothly over the
yellow floor of the stream. At last, the day declining--all silent and
happy, and up to the knees in the wet lilies--we punt slowly back again
to the landing-place beside the bridge. There is a wish for solitude on
all. One hides himself in the arbour with a cigarette; another goes a
walk in the country with Cocardon; a third inspects the church. And it
is not till dinner is on the table, and the inn's best wine goes round
from glass to glass, that we begin to throw off the restraint and fuse
once more into a jolly fellowship.
Half the party are to return to-night with the wagonette; and some of
the others, loath to break up good company, will go with them a bit of
the way and drink a stirrup-cup at Marlotte. It is dark in the
wagonette, and not so merry as it might have been. The coachman loses
the road. So-and-so tries to light fireworks with the most indifferent
success. Some sing, but the rest are too weary to applaud; and it seems
as if the festival were fairly at an end--
"Nous avons fait la noce,
Rentrons à nos foyers!"
And such is the burthen, even after we have come to Marlotte and taken
our places in the court at Mother Antonine's. There is punch on the long
table out in the open air, where the guests dine in summer weather. The
candles flare in the night wind, and the faces round the punch are lit
up, with shifting emphasis, against a background of complete and solid
darkness. It is all picturesque enough; but the fact is, we are aweary.
We yawn; we are out of the vein; we have made the wedding, as the song
says, and now, for pleasure's sake, let's make an end on't. When here
comes striding into the court, booted to mid-thigh, spurred and
splashed, in a jacket of green cord, the great, famous, and redoubtable
Blank; and in a moment the fire kindles again, and the night is witness
of our laughter as he imitates Spaniards, Germans, Englishmen,
picture-dealers, all eccentric ways of speaking and thinking, with a
possession, a fury, a strain of mind and voice, that would rather
suggest a nervous crisis than a desire to please. We are as merry as
ever when the trap sets forth again, and say farewell noisily to all the
good folk going farther. Then, as we are far enough from thoughts of
sleep, we visit Blank in his quaint house, and sit an hour or so in a
great tapestried chamber, laid with furs, littered with sleeping hounds,
and lit up, in fantastic shadow and shine, by a wood-fire in a mediæval
chimney. And then we plod back through the darkness to the inn beside
the river.
How quick bright things come to confusion! When we arise next morning,
the grey showers fall steadily, the trees hang limp, and the face of
the stream is spoiled with dimpling raindrops. Yesterday's lilies
encumber the garden walk, or begin, dismally enough, their voyage
towards the Seine and the salt sea. A sickly shimmer lies upon the
dripping house roofs, and all the colour is washed out of the green and
golden landscape of last night, as though an envious man had taken a
water-colour sketch and blotted it together with a sponge. We go out
a-walking in the wet roads. But the roads about Grez have a trick of
their own. They go on for a while among clumps of willows and patches of
vine, and then, suddenly and without any warning, cease and determine in
some miry hollow or upon some bald knowe; and you have a short period of
hope, then right-about face, and back the way you came! So we draw about
the kitchen fire and play a round game of cards for ha'pence, or go to
the billiard-room for a match at corks; and by one consent a messenger
is sent over for the wagonette--Grez shall be left to-morrow.
To-morrow dawns so fair that two of the party agree to walk back for
exercise, and let their knapsacks follow by the trap. I need hardly say
they are neither of them French; for, of all English phrases, the phrase
"for exercise" is the least comprehensible across the Straits of Dover.
All goes well for a while with the pedestrians. The wet woods are full
of scents in the noontide. At a certain cross, where there is a
guard-house, they make a halt, for the forester's wife is the daughter
of their good host at Barbizon. And so there they are hospitably
received by the comely woman, with one child in her arms and another
prattling and tottering at her gown, and drink some syrup of quince in
the back parlour, with a map of the forest on the wall, and some prints
of love-affairs and the great Napoleon hunting. As they draw near the
Quadrilateral, and hear once more the report of the big guns, they take
a by-road to avoid the sentries, and go on a while somewhat vaguely,
with the sound of the cannon in their ears and the rain beginning to
fall. The ways grow wider and sandier; here and there there are real
sand hills, as though by the seashore; the fir-wood is open and grows in
clumps upon the hillocks, and the race of sign-posts is no more. One
begins to look at the other doubtfully. "I am sure we should keep more
to the right," says one; and the other is just as certain they should
hold to the left. And now, suddenly, the heavens open, and the rain
falls "sheer and strong and loud," as out of a shower-bath. In a moment
they are as wet as shipwrecked sailors. They cannot see out of their
eyes for the drift, and the water churns and gurgles in their boots.
They leave the track and try across country with a gambler's
desperation, for it seems as if it were impossible to make the situation
worse; and, for the next hour, go scrambling from boulder to boulder, or
plod along paths that are now no more than rivulets, and across waste
clearings where the scattered shells and broken fir-trees tell all too
plainly of the cannon in the distance. And meantime the cannon grumble
out responses to the grumbling thunder. There is such a mixture of
melodrama and sheer discomfort about all this, it is at once so grey and
so lurid, that it is far more agreeable to read and write about by the
chimney-corner than to suffer in the person. At last they chance on the
right path, and make Franchard in the early evening, the sorriest pair
of wanderers that ever welcomed English ale. Thence, by the Bois
d'Hyver, the Ventes-Alexandre, and the Pins Brulés, to the clean
hostelry, dry clothes, and dinner.
THE WOODS IN SPRING
I think you will like the forest best in the sharp early spring-time,
when it is just beginning to re-awaken, and innumerable violets peep
from among the fallen leaves; when two or three people at most sit down
to dinner, and, at table, you will do well to keep a rug about your
knees, for the nights are chill, and the salle-à-manger opens on the
court. There is less to distract the attention, for one thing, and the
forest is more itself. It is not bedotted with artists' sunshades as
with unknown mushrooms, nor bestrewn with the remains of English
picnics. The hunting still goes on, and at any moment your heart may be
brought into your mouth as you hear far-away horns; or you may be told
by an agitated peasant that the Vicomte has gone up the avenue, not ten
minutes since, "_à fond de train, monsieur, et avec douze piqueurs._"
If you go up to some coign of vantage in the system of low hills that
permeates the forest, you will see many different tracts of country,
each of its own cold and melancholy neutral tint, and all mixed together
and mingled the one into the other at the seams. You will see tracts of
leafless beeches of a faint yellowish grey, and leafless oaks a little
ruddier in the hue. Then zones of pine of a solemn green; and, dotted
among the pines, or standing by themselves in rocky clearings, the
delicate, snow-white trunks of birches, spreading out into snow-white
branches yet more delicate, and crowned and canopied with a purple haze
of twigs. And then a long, bare ridge of tumbled boulders, with bright
sandbreaks between them, and wavering sandy roads among the bracken and
brown heather. It is all rather cold and unhomely. It has not the
perfect beauty, nor the gem-like colouring, of the wood in the later
year, when it is no more than one vast colonnade of verdant shadow,
tremulous with insects, intersected here and there by lanes of sunlight
set in purple heather. The loveliness of the woods in March is not,
assuredly, of this blowsy rustic type. It is made sharp with a grain of
salt, with a touch of ugliness. It has a sting like the sting of bitter
ale; you acquire the love of it as men acquire a taste for olives. And
the wonderful clear, pure air wells into your lungs the while by
voluptuous inhalations, and makes the eyes bright, and sets the heart
tinkling to a new tune--or, rather, to an old tune; for you remember in
your boyhood something akin to this spirit of adventure, this thirst for
exploration, that now takes you masterfully by the hand, plunges you
into many a deep grove, and drags you over many a stony crest. It is as
if the whole wood were full of friendly voices calling you farther in,
and you turn from one side to another, like Buridan's donkey, in a maze
of pleasure.
Comely beeches send up their white, straight, clustered branches, barred
with green moss, like so many fingers from a half-clenched hand. Mighty
oaks stand to the ankles in a fine tracery of underwood; thence the tall
shaft climbs upward, and the great forest of stalwart boughs spreads out
into the golden evening sky, where the rooks are flying and calling. On
the sward of the Bois d'Hyver the firs stand well asunder with outspread
arms, like fencers saluting; and the air smells of resin all around, and
the sound of the axe is rarely still. But strangest of all, and in
appearance oldest of all, are the dim and wizard upland districts of
young wood. The ground is carpeted with fir-tassel, and strewn with
fir-apples and flakes of fallen bark. Rocks lie crouching in the
thicket, guttered with rain, tufted with lichen, white with years and
the rigours of the changeful seasons. Brown and yellow butterflies are
sown and carried away again by the light air--like thistledown. The
loneliness of these coverts is so excessive, that there are moments when
pleasure draws to the verge of fear. You listen and listen for some
noise to break the silence, till you grow half mesmerised by the
intensity of the strain; your sense of your own identity is troubled;
your brain reels, like that of some gymnosophist poring on his own nose
in Asiatic jungles; and should you see your own outspread feet, you see
them, not as anything of yours, but as a feature of the scene around
you.
Still the forest is always, but the stillness is not always unbroken.
You can hear the wind pass in the distance over the tree-tops; sometimes
briefly, like the noise of a train; sometimes with a long steady rush,
like the breaking of waves. And sometimes, close at hand, the branches
move, a moan goes through the thicket, and the wood thrills to its
heart. Perhaps you may hear a carriage on the road to Fontainebleau, a
bird gives a dry continual chirp, the dead leaves rustle underfoot, or
you may time your steps to the steady recurrent strokes of the woodman's
axe. From time to time, over the low grounds, a flight of rooks goes by;
and from time to time the cooing of wild doves falls upon the ear, not
sweet and rich and near at hand as in England, but a sort of voice of
the woods, thin and far away, as fits these solemn places. Or you hear
suddenly the hollow, eager, violent barking of dogs; scared deer flit
past you through the fringes of the wood; then a man or two running, in
green blouse, with gun and game-bag on a bandolier; and then, out of the
thick of the trees, comes the jar of rifle-shots. Or perhaps the hounds
are out, and horns are blown, and scarlet-coated huntsmen flash through
the clearings, and the solid noise of horses galloping passes below you,
where you sit perched among the rocks and heather. The boar is afoot,
and all over the forest, and in all neighbouring villages, there is a
vague excitement and a vague hope; for who knows whither the chase may
lead? and even to have seen a single piqueur, or spoken to a single
sportsman, is to be a man of consequence for the night.
Besides men who shoot and men who ride with the hounds, there are few
people in the forest, in the early spring, save woodcutters plying their
axes steadily, and old women and children gathering wood for the fire.
You may meet such a party coming home in the twilight: the old woman
laden with a fagot of chips, and the little ones hauling a long branch
behind them in her wake. That is the worst of what there is to
encounter; and if I tell you of what once happened to a friend of mine,
it is by no means to tantalise you with false hopes; for the adventure
was unique. It was on a very cold, still, sunless morning, with a flat
grey sky and a frosty tingle in the air, that this friend (who shall
here be nameless) heard the notes of a key-bugle played with much
hesitation, and saw the smoke of a fire spread out along the green
pine-tops, in a remote uncanny glen, hard by a hill of naked boulders.
He drew near warily, and beheld a picnic party seated under a tree in an
open. The old father knitted a sock, the mother sat staring at the fire.
The eldest son, in the uniform of a private of dragoons, was choosing
out notes on a key-bugle. Two or three daughters lay in the
neighbourhood picking violets. And the whole party as grave and silent
as the woods around them! My friend watched for a long time, he says;
but all held their peace; not one spoke or smiled; only the dragoon kept
choosing out single notes upon the bugle, and the father knitted away at
his work and made strange movements the while with his flexible
eyebrows. They took no notice whatever of my friend's presence, which
was disquieting in itself, and increased the resemblance of the whole
party to mechanical wax-works. Certainly, he affirms, a wax figure might
have played the bugle with more spirit than that strange dragoon. And as
this hypothesis of his became more certain, the awful insolubility of
why they should be left out there in the woods with nobody to wind them
up again when they ran down, and a growing disquietude as to what might
happen next, became too much for his courage, and he turned tail, and
fairly took to his heels. It might have been a singing in his ears, but
he fancies he was followed as he ran by a peal of Titanic laughter.
Nothing has ever transpired to clear up the mystery; it may be they were
automata; or it may be (and this is the theory to which I lean myself)
that this is all another chapter of Heine's "Gods in Exile"; that the
upright old man with the eyebrows was no other than Father Jove, and the
young dragoon with the taste for music either Apollo or Mars.
MORALITY
Strange indeed is the attraction of the forest for the minds of men. Not
one or two only, but a great chorus of grateful voices have arisen to
spread abroad its fame. Half the famous writers of modern France have
had their word to say about Fontainebleau. Chateaubriand, Michelet,
Béranger, George Sand, de Senancour, Flaubert, Murger, the brothers
Goncourt, Théodore de Banville, each of these has done something to the
eternal praise and memory of these woods. Even at the very worst of
times, even when the picturesque was anathema in the eyes of all Persons
of Taste, the forest still preserved a certain reputation for beauty. It
was in 1730 that the Abbé Guilbert published his "Historical Description
of the Palace, Town, and Forest of Fontainebleau." And very droll it is
to see him, as he tries to set forth his admiration in terms of what was
then permissible. The monstrous rocks, etc., says the Abbé, "sont
admirées avec surprise des voyageurs qui s'écrient aussitôt avec Horace:
Ut mihi devio rupes et vacuum nemus mirari libet." The good man is not
exactly lyrical in his praise; and you see how he sets his back against
Horace as against a trusty oak. Horace, at any rate, was classical. For
the rest, however, the Abbé likes places where many alleys meet; or
which, like the Belle-Étoile, are kept up "by a special gardener," and
admires at the Table du Roi the labours of the Grand Master of Woods and
Waters, the Sieur de la Falure, "qui a fait faire ce magnifique
endroit."
But indeed, it is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a
claim upon men's hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of
the air, that emanation from the old trees, that so wonderfully changes
and renews a weary spirit. Disappointed men, sick Francis Firsts and
vanquished Grand Monarchs, time out of mind have come here for
consolation. Hither perplexed folk have retired out of the press of
life, as into a deep bay-window on some night of masquerade, and here
found quiet and silence, and rest, the mother of wisdom. It is the great
moral spa; this forest without a fountain is itself the great fountain
of Juventius. It is the best place in the world to bring an old sorrow
that has been a long while your friend and enemy; and if, like
Béranger's, your gaiety has run away from home and left open the door
for sorrow to come in, of all covers in Europe, it is here you may
expect to find the truant hid. With every hour you change. The air
penetrates through your clothes, and nestles to your living body. You
love exercise and slumber, long fasting and full meals. You forget all
your scruples and live a while in peace and freedom, and for the moment
only. For here, all is absent that can stimulate to moral feeling. Such
people as you see may be old, or toil-worn, or sorry; but you see them
framed in the forest, like figures on a painted canvas; and for you,
they are not people in any living and kindly sense. You forget the grim
contrariety of interests. You forget the narrow lane where all men
jostle together in unchivalrous contention, and the kennel, deep and
unclean, that gapes on either hand for the defeated. Life is simple
enough, it seems, and the very idea of sacrifice becomes like a mad
fancy out of a last night's dream.
Your ideal is not perhaps high, but it is plain and possible. You become
enamoured of a life of change and movement and the open air, where the
muscles shall be more exercised than the affections. When you have had
your will of the forest, you may visit the whole round world. You may
buckle on your knapsack and take the road on foot. You may bestride a
good nag, and ride forth, with a pair of saddle-bags, into the enchanted
East. You may cross the Black Forest, and see Germany widespread before
you, like a map, dotted with old cities, walled and spired, that dream
all day on their own reflections in the Rhine or Danube. You may pass
the spinal cord of Europe and go down from Alpine glaciers to where
Italy extends her marble moles and glasses her marble palaces in the
midland sea. You may sleep in flying trains or wayside taverns. You may
be awakened at dawn by the scream of the express or the small pipe of
the robin in the hedge. For you the rain should allay the dust of the
beaten road; the wind dry your clothes upon you as you walked. Autumn
should hang out russet pears and purple grapes along the lane; inn after
inn proffer you their cups of raw wine; river by river receive your body
in the sultry noon. Wherever you went warm valleys and high trees and
pleasant villages should compass you about; and light fellowships should
take you by the arm, and walk with you an hour upon your way. You may
see from afar off what it will come to in the end--the weather-beaten
red-nosed vagabond, consumed by a fever of the feet, cut off from all
near touch of human sympathy, a waif, an Ishmael, and an outcast. And
yet it will seem well--and yet, in the air of the forest, this will seem
the best--to break all the network bound about your feet by birth and
old companionship and loyal love, and bear your shovelful of phosphates
to and fro, in town and country, until the hour of the great dissolvent.
Or, perhaps, you will keep to the cover. For the forest is by itself,
and forest life owns small kinship with life in the dismal land of
labour. Men are so far sophisticated that they cannot take the world as
it is given to them by the sight of their eyes. Not only what they see
and hear, but what they know to be behind, enter into their notion of a
place. If the sea, for instance, lie just across the hills, sea-thoughts
will come to them at intervals, and the tenor of their dreams from time
to time will suffer a sea-change. And so here, in this forest, a
knowledge of its greatness is for much in the effect produced. You
reckon up the miles that lie between you and intrusion. You may walk
before you all day long, and not fear to touch the barrier of your Eden,
or stumble out of fairyland into the land of gin and steam-hammers. And
there is an old tale enhances for the imagination the grandeur of the
woods of France, and secures you in the thought of your seclusion. When
Charles VI. hunted in the time of his wild boyhood near Senlis, there
was captured an old stag, having a collar of bronze about his neck, and
these words engraved on the collar: "Cæsar mini hoc donavit." It is no
wonder if the minds of men were moved at this occurrence and they stood
aghast to find themselves thus touching hands with forgotten ages, and
following an antiquity with hound and horn. And even for you, it is
scarcely in an idle curiosity that you ponder how many centuries this
stag had carried its free antlers through the wood, and how many summers
and winters had shone and snowed on the imperial badge. If the extent of
solemn wood could thus safeguard a tall stag from the hunter's hounds
and horses, might not you also play hide-and-seek, in these groves, with
all the pangs and trepidations of man's life, and elude Death, the
mighty hunter, for more than the span of human years? Here, also, crash
his arrows; here, in the farthest glade, sounds the gallop of the pale
horse. But he does not hunt this cover with all his hounds, for the game
is thin and small: and if you were but alert and wary, if you lodged
ever in the deepest thickets, you too might live on into later
generations and astonish men by your stalwart age and the trophies of an
immemorial success.
For the forest takes away from you all excuse to die. There is nothing
here to cabin or thwart your free desires. Here all the impudences of
the brawling world reach you no more. You may count your hours, like
Endymion, by the strokes of the lone woodcutter, or by the progression
of the lights and shadows and the sun wheeling his wide circuit through
the naked heavens. Here shall you see no enemies but winter and rough
weather. And if a pang comes to you at all, it will be a pang of
healthful hunger. All the puling sorrows, all the carking repentance,
all this talk of duty that is no duty, in the great peace, in the pure
daylight of these woods, fall away from you like a garment. And if
perchance you come forth upon an eminence, where the wind blows upon you
large and fresh, and the pines knock their long stems together, like an
ungainly sort of puppets, and see far away over the plain a factory
chimney defined against the pale horizon--it is for you, as for the
staid and simple peasant when, with his plough, he upturns old arms and
harness from the furrow of the glebe. Ay, sure enough, there was a
battle there in the old times; and, sure enough, there is a world out
yonder where men strive together with a noise of oaths and weeping and
clamorous dispute. So much you apprehend by an athletic act of the
imagination. A faint far-off rumour as of Merovingian wars; a legend as
of some dead religion.
FOOTNOTE:
[42] "Deux poures varlez qui n'out nulz gages et qui gissoient la
nuit avec les chiens." See Champollion-Figeac's "Louis et Charles
d'Orléans," i. 63, and for my lord's English horn, _ibid._ 96.
CRITICISMS
CRITICISMS
I
LORD LYTTON'S "FABLES IN SONG"
It seems as if Lord Lytton, in this new book of his, had found the form
most natural to his talent. In some ways, indeed, it may be held
inferior to "Chronicles and Characters"; we look in vain for anything
like the terrible intensity of the night-scene in "Irene," or for any
such passages of massive and memorable writing as appeared, here and
there, in the earlier work, and made it not altogether unworthy of its
model, Hugo's "Legend of the Ages." But it becomes evident, on the most
hasty retrospect, that this earlier work was a step on the way towards
the later. It seems as if the author had been feeling about for his
definite medium, and was already, in the language of the child's game,
growing hot. There are many pieces in "Chronicles and Characters" that
might be detached from their original setting, and embodied, as they
stand, among the "Fables in Song."
For the term Fable is not very easy to define rigorously. In the most
typical form some moral precept is set forth by means of a conception
purely fantastic, and usually somewhat trivial into the bargain; there
is something playful about it, that will not support a very exacting
criticism, and the lesson must be apprehended by the fancy at half a
hint. Such is the great mass of the old stories of wise animals or
foolish men that have amused our childhood. But we should expect the
fable, in company with other and more important literary forms, to be
more and more loosely, or at least largely, comprehended as time went
on, and so to degenerate in conception from this original type. That
depended for much of its piquancy on the very fact that it was
fantastic: the point of the thing lay in a sort of humorous
inappropriateness; and it is natural enough that pleasantry of this
description should become less common, as men learn to suspect some
serious analogy underneath. Thus a comical story of an ape touches us
quite differently after the proposition of Mr. Darwin's theory.
Moreover, there lay, perhaps, at the bottom of this primitive sort of
fable, a humanity, a tenderness of rough truths; so that at the end of
some story, in which vice or folly had met with its destined punishment,
the fabulist might be able to assure his auditors, as we have often to
assure tearful children on the like occasions, that they may dry their
eyes, for none of it was true.
But this benefit of fiction becomes lost with more sophisticated hearers
and authors: a man is no longer the dupe of his own artifice, and cannot
deal playfully with truths that are a matter of bitter concern to him in
his life. And hence, in the progressive centralisation of modern
thought, we should expect the old form of fable to fall gradually into
desuetude, and be gradually succeeded by another, which is a fable in
all points except that it is not altogether fabulous. And this new form,
such as we should expect, and such as we do indeed find, still presents
the essential character of brevity; as in any other fable also, there
is, underlying and animating the brief action, a moral idea; and as in
any other fable, the object is to bring this home to the reader through
the intellect rather than through the feelings; so that, without being
very deeply moved or interested by the characters of the piece, we
should recognise vividly the hinges on which the little plot revolves.
But the fabulist now seeks analogies where before he merely sought
humorous situations. There will be now a logical nexus between the moral
expressed and the machinery employed to express it. The machinery, in
fact, as this change is developed, becomes less and less fabulous. We
find ourselves in presence of quite a serious, if quite a miniature
division of creative literature; and sometimes we have the lesson
embodied in a sober, everyday narration, as in the parables of the New
Testament, and sometimes merely the statement or, at most, the
collocation of significant facts in life, the reader being left to
resolve for himself the vague, troublesome, and not yet definitely moral
sentiment which has been thus created. And step by step with the
development of this change, yet another is developed: the moral tends to
become more indeterminate and large. It ceases to be possible to append
it, in a tag, to the bottom of the piece, as one might write the name
below a caricature; and the fable begins to take rank with all other
forms of creative literature, as something too ambitious, in spite of
its miniature dimensions, to be resumed in any succinct formula without
the loss of all that is deepest and most suggestive in it.
Now it is in this widest sense that Lord Lytton understands the term;
there are examples in his two pleasant volumes of all the forms already
mentioned, and even of another which can only be admitted among fables
by the utmost possible leniency of construction. "Composure," "Et
Cætera," and several more, are merely similes poetically elaborated. So,
too, is the pathetic story of the grandfather and grandchild: the child,
having treasured away an icicle and forgotten it for ten minutes, comes
back to find it already nearly melted, and no longer beautiful: at the
same time, the grandfather has just remembered and taken out a bundle of
love-letters, which he too had stored away in years gone by, and then
long neglected; and, behold! the letters are as faded and sorrowfully
disappointing as the icicle. This is merely a simile poetically worked
out; and yet it is in such as these, and some others, to be mentioned
further on, that the author seems at his best. Wherever he has really
written after the old model, there is something to be deprecated: in
spite of all the spirit and freshness, in spite of his happy assumption
of that cheerful acceptation of things as they are, which, rightly or
wrongly, we come to attribute to the ideal fabulist, there is ever a
sense as of something a little out of place. A form of literature so
very innocent and primitive looks a little over-written in Lord Lytton's
conscious and highly-coloured style. It may be bad taste, but sometimes
we should prefer a few sentences of plain prose narration, and a little
Bewick by way of tail-piece. So that it is not among those fables that
conform most nearly to the old model, but one had nearly said among
those that most widely differ from it, that we find the most
satisfactory examples of the author's manner.
In the mere matter of ingenuity, the metaphysical fables are the most
remarkable; such as that of the windmill who imagined that it was he who
raised the wind; or that of the grocer's balance ("Cogito ergo sum") who
considered himself endowed with free-will, reason, and an infallible
practical judgment; until, one fine day, the police made a descent upon
the shop, and find the weights false and the scales unequal; and the
whole thing is broken up for old iron. Capital fables, also, in the same
ironical spirit, are "Prometheus Unbound," the tale of the vainglorying
of a champagne-cork, and "Teleology," where a nettle justifies the ways
of God to nettles while all goes well with it, and, upon a change of
luck, promptly changes its divinity.
In all these there is still plenty of the fabulous if you will,
although, even here, there may be two opinions possible; but there is
another group, of an order of merit perhaps still higher, where we look
in vain for any such playful liberties with Nature. Thus we have
"Conservation of Force"; where a musician, thinking of a certain
picture, improvises in the twilight; a poet, hearing the music, goes
home inspired, and writes a poem; and then a painter, under the
influence of this poem, paints another picture, thus lineally descended
from the first. This is fiction, but not what we have been used to call
fable. We miss the incredible element, the point of audacity with which
the fabulist was wont to mock at his readers. And still more so is this
the case with others. "The Horse and the Fly" states one of the
unanswerable problems of life in quite a realistic and straightforward
way. A fly startles a cab-horse, the coach is overset; a newly-married
pair within and the driver, a man with a wife and family, are all
killed. The horse continues to gallop off in the loose traces, and ends
the tragedy by running over an only child; and there is some little
pathetic detail here introduced in the telling, that makes the reader's
indignation very white-hot against some one. It remains to be seen who
that some one is to be: the fly? Nay, but on closer inspection, it
appears that the fly, actuated by maternal instinct, was only seeking a
place for her eggs: is maternal instinct, then, "sole author of these
mischiefs all"? "Who's in the Right?" one of the best fables in the
book, is somewhat in the same vein. After a battle has been won, a group
of officers assemble inside a battery, and debate together who should
have the honour of the success; the Prince, the general staff, the
cavalry, the engineer who posted the battery in which they then stand
talking, are successively named: the sergeant, who pointed the guns,
sneers to himself at the mention of the engineer; and, close by, the
gunner, who had applied the match, passes away with a smile of triumph,
since it was through his hand that the victorious blow had been dealt.
Meanwhile, the cannon claims the honour over the gunner; the
cannon-ball, who actually goes forth on the dread mission, claims it
over the cannon, who remains idly behind; the powder reminds the
cannon-ball that, but for him, it would still be lying on the arsenal
floor; and the match caps the discussion; powder, cannon-ball, and
cannon would be all equally vain and ineffectual without fire. Just then
there comes on a shower of rain, which wets the powder and puts out the
match, and completes this lesson of dependence, by indicating the
negative conditions which are as necessary for any effect, in their
absence, as is the presence of this great fraternity of positive
conditions, not any one of which can claim priority over any other. But
the fable does not end here, as perhaps, in all logical strictness, it
should. It wanders off into a discussion as to which is the truer
greatness, that of the vanquished fire or that of the victorious rain.
And the speech of the rain is charming:
"Lo, with my little drops I bless again
And beautify the fields which thou didst blast!
Rend, wither, waste, and ruin, what thou wilt,
But call not Greatness what the Gods call Guilt.
Blossoms and grass from blood in battle spilt,
And poppied corn, I bring.
'Mid mouldering Babels, to oblivion built,
My violets spring.
Little by little my small drops have strength
To deck with green delights the grateful earth."
And so forth, not quite germane (it seems to me) to the matter in hand,
but welcome for its own sake.
Best of all are the fables that deal more immediately with the emotions.
There is, for instance, that of "The Two Travellers," which is
profoundly moving in conception, although by no means as well written as
some others. In this, one of the two, fearfully frost-bitten, saves his
life out of the snow at the cost of all that was comely in his body;
just as, long before, the other, who has now quietly resigned himself to
death, had violently freed himself from Love at the cost of all that was
finest and fairest in his character. Very graceful and sweet is the
fable (if so it should be called) in which the author sings the praises
of that "kindly perspective," which lets a wheat-stalk near the eye
cover twenty leagues of distant country, and makes the humble circle
about a man's hearth more to him than all the possibilities of the
external world. The companion fable to this is also excellent. It tells
us of a man who had, all his life through, entertained a passion for
certain blue hills on the far horizon, and had promised himself to
travel thither ere he died, and become familiar with these distant
friends. At last, in some political trouble, he is banished to the very
place of his dreams. He arrives there overnight, and, when he rises and
goes forth in the morning, there sure enough are the blue hills, only
now they have changed places with him, and smile across to him, distant
as ever, from the old home whence he has come. Such a story might have
been very cynically treated; but it is not so done, the whole tone is
kindly and consolatory, and the disenchanted man submissively takes the
lesson, and understands that things far away are to be loved for their
own sake, and that the unattainable is not truly unattainable, when we
can make the beauty of it our own. Indeed, throughout all these two
volumes, though there is much practical scepticism, and much irony on
abstract questions, this kindly and consolatory spirit is never absent.
There is much that is cheerful and, after a sedate, fireside fashion,
hopeful. No one will be discouraged by reading the book; but the ground
of all this hopefulness and cheerfulness remains to the end somewhat
vague. It does not seem to arise from any practical belief in the future
either of the individual or the race, but rather from the profound
personal contentment of the writer. This is, I suppose, all we must look
for in the case. It is as much as we can expect, if the fabulist shall
prove a shrewd and cheerful fellow-wayfarer, one with whom the world
does not seem to have gone much amiss, but who has yet laughingly
learned something of its evil. It will depend much, of course, upon our
own character and circumstances, whether the encounter will be agreeable
and bracing to the spirits, or offend us as an ill-timed mockery. But
where, as here, there is a little tincture of bitterness along with the
good-nature, where it is plainly not the humour of a man cheerfully
ignorant, but of one who looks on, tolerant and superior and smilingly
attentive, upon the good and bad of our existence, it will go hardly if
we do not catch some reflection of the same spirit to help us on our
way. There is here no impertinent and lying proclamation of peace--none
of the cheap optimism of the well-to-do; what we find here is a view of
life that would be even grievous, were it not enlivened with this
abiding cheerfulness, and ever and anon redeemed by a stroke of pathos.
It is natural enough, I suppose, that we should find wanting in this
book some of the intenser qualities of the author's work; and their
absence is made up for by much happy description after a quieter
fashion. The burst of jubilation over the departure of the snow, which
forms the prelude to "The Thistle," is full of spirit and of pleasant
images. The speech of the forest in "Sans Souci" is inspired by a
beautiful sentiment for nature of the modern sort, and pleases us more,
I think, as poetry should please us, than anything in "Chronicles and
Characters." There are some admirable felicities of expression here and
there; as that of the hill, whose summit
"Did print
The azure air with pines."
Moreover, I do not recollect in the author's former work any symptom of
that sympathetic treatment of still life, which is noticeable now and
again in the fables; and perhaps most noticeably, when he sketches the
burned letters as they hover along the gusty flue, "Thin, sable veils,
wherein a restless spark Yet trembled." But the description is at its
best when the subjects are unpleasant, or even grisly. There are a few
capital lines in this key on the last spasm of the battle before alluded
to. Surely nothing could be better, in its own way, than the fish in
"The Last Cruise of the Arrogant," "the shadowy, side-faced, silent
things," that come butting and staring with lidless eyes at the sunken
steam-engine. And although, in yet another, we are told, pleasantly
enough, how the water went down into the valleys, where it set itself
gaily to saw wood, and on into the plains, where it would soberly carry
grain to town; yet the real strength of the fable is when it deals with
the shut pool in which certain unfortunate raindrops are imprisoned
among slugs and snails, and in the company of an old toad. The sodden
contentment of the fallen acorn is strangely significant; and it is
astonishing how unpleasantly we are startled by the appearance of her
horrible lover, the maggot.
And now for a last word, about the style. This is not easy to criticise.
It is impossible to deny to it rapidity, spirit, and a full sound; the
lines are never lame, and the sense is carried forward with an
uninterrupted, impetuous rush. But it is not equal. After passages of
really admirable versification, the author falls back upon a sort of
loose, cavalry manner, not unlike the style of some of Mr. Browning's
minor pieces, and almost inseparable from wordiness, and an easy
acceptation of somewhat cheap finish. There is nothing here of that
compression which is the note of a really sovereign style. It is unfair,
perhaps, to set a not remarkable passage from Lord Lytton side by side
with one of the signal masterpieces of another, and a very perfect poet;
and yet it is interesting, when we see how the portraiture of a dog,
detailed through thirty odd lines, is frittered down and finally almost
lost in the mere laxity of the style, to compare it with the clear,
simple, vigorous delineation that Burns, in four couplets, has given us
of the ploughman's collie. It is interesting, at first, and then it
becomes a little irritating; for when we think of other passages so much
more finished and adroit, we cannot help feeling, that with a little
more ardour after perfection of form, criticism would have found nothing
left for her to censure. A similar mark of precipitate work is the
number of adjectives tumultuously heaped together, sometimes to help out
the sense, and sometimes (as one cannot but suspect) to help out the
sound of the verses. I do not believe, for instance, that Lord Lytton
himself would defend the lines in which we are told how Laocoön
"Revealed to _Roman_ crowds, now _Christian_ grown, That _Pagan_ anguish
which, in _Parian_ stone, the _Rhodian_ artist," and so on. It is not
only that this is bad in itself; but that it is unworthy of the company
in which it is found; that such verses should not have appeared with the
name of a good versifier like Lord Lytton. We must take exception, also,
in conclusion, to the excess of alliteration. Alliteration is so liable
to be abused that we can scarcely be too sparing of it; and yet it is a
trick that seems to grow upon the author with years. It is a pity to see
fine verses, such as some in "Demos," absolutely spoiled by the
recurrence of one wearisome consonant.
II
SALVINI'S MACBETH
Salvini closed his short visit to Edinburgh by a performance of
_Macbeth_. It was, perhaps, from a sentiment of local colour that he
chose to play the Scottish usurper for the first time before Scotsmen;
and the audience were not insensible of the privilege. Few things,
indeed, can move a stronger interest than to see a great creation taking
shape for the first time. If it is not purely artistic, the sentiment is
surely human. And the thought that you are before all the world, and
have the start of so many others as eager as yourself, at least keeps
you in a more unbearable suspense before the curtain rises, if it does
not enhance the delight with which you follow the performance and see
the actor "bend up each corporal agent" to realise a masterpiece of a
few hours' duration. With a player so variable as Salvini, who trusts
to the feelings of the moment for so much detail, and who, night after
night, does the same thing differently but always well, it can never be
safe to pass judgment after a single hearing. And this is more
particularly true of last week's _Macbeth_; for the whole third act was
marred by a grievously humorous misadventure. Several minutes too soon
the ghost of Banquo joined the party, and after having sat helpless a
while at a table, was ignominiously withdrawn. Twice was this ghostly
Jack-in-the-box obtruded on the stage before his time; twice removed
again; and yet he showed so little hurry when he was really wanted,
that, after an awkward pause, Macbeth had to begin his apostrophe to
empty air. The arrival of the belated spectre in the middle, with a jerk
that made him nod all over, was the last accident in the chapter, and
worthily topped the whole. It may be imagined how lamely matters went
throughout these cross purposes.
In spite of this, and some other hitches, Salvini's Macbeth had an
emphatic success. The creation is worthy of a place beside the same
artist's Othello and Hamlet. It is the simplest and most unsympathetic
of the three; but the absence of the finer lineaments of Hamlet is
redeemed by gusto, breadth, and a headlong unity. Salvini sees nothing
great in Macbeth beyond the royalty of muscle, and that courage which
comes of strong and copious circulation. The moral smallness of the man
is insisted on from the first, in the shudder of uncontrollable jealousy
with which he sees Duncan embracing Banquo. He may have some northern
poetry of speech, but he has not much logical understanding. In his
dealings with the supernatural powers he is like a savage with his
fetich, trusting them beyond bounds while all goes well, and whenever he
is crossed, casting his belief aside and calling "fate into the list."
For his wife, he is little more than an agent, a frame of bone and sinew
for her fiery spirit to command. The nature of his feeling towards her
is rendered with a most precise and delicate touch. He always yields to
the woman's fascination; and yet his caresses (and we know how much
meaning Salvini can give to a caress) are singularly hard and unloving.
Sometimes he lays his hand on her as he might take hold of any one who
happened to be nearest to him at a moment of excitement. Love has fallen
out of this marriage by the way, and left a curious friendship. Only
once--at the very moment when she is showing herself so little a woman
and so much a high-spirited man--only once is he very deeply stirred
towards her; and that finds expression in the strange and horrible
transport of admiration, doubly strange and horrible on Salvini's
lips--"Bring forth men-children only!"
The murder scene, as was to be expected, pleased the audience best.
Macbeth's voice, in the talk with his wife, was a thing not to be
forgotten; and when he spoke of his hangman's hands he seemed to have
blood in his utterance. Never for a moment, even in the very article of
the murder, does he possess his own soul. He is a man on wires. From
first to last it is an exhibition of hideous cowardice. For, after all,
it is not here, but in broad daylight, with the exhilaration of
conflict, where he can assure himself at every blow he has the longest
sword and the heaviest hand, that this man's physical bravery can keep
him up; he is an unwieldy ship, and needs plenty of way on before he
will steer.
In the banquet scene, while the first murderer gives account of what he
has done, there comes a flash of truculent joy at the "twenty trenchèd
gashes" on Banquo's head. Thus Macbeth makes welcome to his imagination
those very details of physical horror which are so soon to turn sour in
him. As he runs out to embrace these cruel circumstances, as he seeks to
realise to his mind's eye the reassuring spectacle of his dead enemy, he
is dressing out the phantom to terrify himself; and his imagination,
playing the part of justice, is to "commend to his own lips the
ingredients of his poisoned chalice." With the recollection of Hamlet
and his father's spirit still fresh upon him, and the holy awe with
which that good man encountered things not dreamt of in his philosophy,
it was not possible to avoid looking for resemblances between the two
apparitions and the two men haunted. But there are none to be found.
Macbeth has a purely physical dislike for Banquo's spirit and the
"twenty trenchèd gashes." He is afraid of he knows not what. He is
abject, and again blustering. In the end he so far forgets himself, his
terror, and the nature of what is before him, that he rushes upon it as
he would upon a man. When his wife tells him he needs repose, there is
something really childish in the way he looks about the room, and,
seeing nothing, with an expression of almost sensual relief, plucks up
heart enough to go to bed. And what is the upshot of the visitation? It
is written in Shakespeare, but should be read with the commentary of
Salvini's voice and expression:--"_O! siam nell' opra ancor
fanciulli_,"--"We are yet but young in deed." Circle below circle. He is
looking with horrible satisfaction into the mouth of hell. There may
still be a prick to-day; but to-morrow conscience will be dead, and he
may move untroubled in this element of blood.
In the fifth act we see this lowest circle reached; and it is Salvini's
finest moment throughout the play. From the first he was admirably made
up, and looked Macbeth to the full as perfectly as ever he looked
Othello. From the first moment he steps upon the stage you can see this
character is a creation to the fullest meaning of the phrase; for the
man before you is a type you know well already. He arrives with Banquo
on the heath, fair and red-bearded, sparing of gesture, full of pride
and the sense of animal wellbeing, and satisfied after the battle like a
beast who has eaten his fill. But in the fifth act there is a change.
This is still the big, burly, fleshly, handsome-looking Thane; here is
still the same face which in the earlier acts could be superficially
good-humoured and sometimes royally courteous. But now the atmosphere
of blood, which pervades the whole tragedy, has entered into the man and
subdued him to its own nature; and an indescribable degradation, a
slackness and puffiness, has overtaken his features. He has breathed the
air of carnage, and supped full of horrors. Lady Macbeth complains of
the smell of blood on her hand: Macbeth makes no complaint--he has
ceased to notice it now; but the same smell is in his nostrils. A
contained fury and disgust possesses him. He taunts the messenger and
the doctor as people would taunt their mortal enemies. And, indeed, as
he knows right well, every one is his enemy now, except his wife. About
her he questions the doctor with something like a last human anxiety;
and, in tones of grisly mystery, asks him if he can "minister to a mind
diseased." When the news of her death is brought him, he is staggered
and falls into a seat; but somehow it is not anything we can call grief
that he displays. There had been two of them against God and man; and
now, when there is only one, it makes perhaps less difference than he
had expected. And so her death is not only an affliction, but one more
disillusion; and he redoubles in bitterness. The speech that follows,
given with tragic cynicism in every word, is a dirge, not so much for
her as for himself. From that time forth there is nothing human left in
him, only "the fiend of Scotland," Macduff's "hell-hound," whom, with a
stern glee, we see baited like a bear and hunted down like a wolf. He is
inspired and set above fate by a demoniacal energy, a lust of wounds and
slaughter. Even after he meets Macduff his courage does not fail; but
when he hears the Thane was not born of woman, all virtue goes out of
him; and though he speaks sounding words of defiance, the last combat is
little better than a suicide.
The whole performance is, as I said, so full of gusto and a headlong
unity; the personality of Macbeth is so sharp and powerful; and within
these somewhat narrow limits there is so much play and saliency that, so
far as concerns Salvini himself, a third great success seems
indubitable. Unfortunately, however, a great actor cannot fill more than
a very small fraction of the boards; and though Banquo's ghost will
probably be more seasonable in his future apparitions, there are some
more inherent difficulties in the piece. The company at large did not
distinguish themselves. Macduff, to the huge delight of the gallery,
out-Macduff'd the average ranter. The lady who filled the principal
female part has done better on other occasions, but I fear she has not
metal for what she tried last week. Not to succeed in the sleep-walking
scene is to make a memorable failure. As it was given, it succeeded in
being wrong in art without being true to nature.
And there is yet another difficulty, happily easy to reform, which
somewhat interfered with the success of the performance. At the end of
the incantation scene the Italian translator has made Macbeth fall
insensible upon the stage. This is a change of questionable propriety
from a psychological point of view; while in point of view of effect it
leaves the stage for some moments empty of all business. To remedy this,
a bevy of green ballet-girls came forth and pointed their toes about the
prostrate king. A dance of High Church curates, or a hornpipe by Mr. T.
P. Cooke, would not be more out of the key; though the gravity of a
Scots audience was not to be overcome, and they merely expressed their
disapprobation by a round of moderate hisses, a similar irruption of
Christmas fairies would most likely convulse a London theatre from pit
to gallery with inextinguishable laughter. It is, I am told, the Italian
tradition; but it is one more honoured in the breach than the
observance. With the total disappearance of these damsels, with a
stronger Lady Macbeth, and, if possible, with some compression of those
scenes in which Salvini does not appear, and the spectator is left at
the mercy of Macduffs and Duncans, the play would go twice as well, and
we should be better able to follow and enjoy an admirable work of
dramatic art.
III
BAGSTER'S "PILGRIM'S PROGRESS"
I have here before me an edition of the "Pilgrim's Progress," bound in
green, without a date, and described as "illustrated by nearly three
hundred engravings, and memoir of Bunyan." On the outside it is lettered
"Bagster's Illustrated Edition," and after the author's apology, facing
the first page of the tale, a folding pictorial "Plan of the Road" is
marked as "drawn by the late Mr. T. Conder," and engraved by J. Basire.
No further information is anywhere vouchsafed; perhaps the publishers
had judged the work too unimportant; and we are still left ignorant
whether or not we owe the woodcuts in the body of the volume to the same
hand that drew the plan. It seems, however, more than probable. The
literal particularity of mind which, in the map, laid down the
flower-plots in the devil's garden, and carefully introduced the
court-house in the town of Vanity, is closely paralleled in many of the
cuts; and in both, the architecture of the buildings and the disposition
of the gardens have a kindred and entirely English air. Whoever he was,
the author of these wonderful little pictures may lay claim to be the
best illustrator of Bunyan.[43] They are not only good illustrations,
like so many others; but they are like so few, good illustrations of
Bunyan. Their spirit, in defect and quality, is still the same as his
own. The designer also has lain down and dreamed a dream, as literal, as
quaint, and almost as apposite as Bunyan's; and text and pictures
make but the two sides of the same homespun yet impassioned story. To
do justice to the designs, it will be necessary to say, for the
hundredth time, a word or two about the masterpiece which they adorn.
All allegories have a tendency to escape from the purpose of their
creators; and as the characters and incidents become more and more
interesting in themselves, the moral, which these were to show forth,
falls more and more into neglect. An architect may command a wreath of
vine-leaves round the cornice of a monument; but if, as each leaf came
from the chisel, it took proper life and fluttered freely on the wall,
and if the vine grew, and the building were hidden over with foliage and
fruit, the architect would stand in much the same situation as the writer
of allegories. The "Faëry Queen" was an allegory, I am willing to
believe; but it survives as an imaginative tale in incomparable verse.
The case of Bunyan is widely different; and yet in this also Allegory,
poor nymph, although never quite forgotten, is sometimes rudely thrust
against the wall. Bunyan was fervently in earnest; with "his fingers in
his ears, he ran on," straight for his mark. He tells us himself, in the
conclusion to the first part, that he did not fear to raise a laugh;
indeed, he feared nothing, and said anything; and he was greatly served
in this by a certain rustic privilege of his style, which, like the talk
of strong uneducated men, when it does not impress by its force, still
charms by its simplicity. The mere story and the allegorical design
enjoyed perhaps his equal favour. He believed in both with an energy of
faith that was capable of moving mountains. And we have to remark in him,
not the parts where inspiration fails and is supplied by cold and merely
decorative invention, but the parts where faith has grown to be
credulity, and his characters become so real to him that he forgets the
end of their creation. We can follow him step by step into the trap which
he lays for himself by his own entire good faith and triumphant
literality of vision, till the trap closes and shuts him in an
inconsistency. The allegories of the Interpreter and of the Shepherds of
the Delectable Mountains are all actually performed, like stage-plays,
before the pilgrims. The son of Mr. Great-grace visibly "tumbles hills
about with his words." Adam the First has his condemnation written
visibly on his forehead, so that Faithful reads it. At the very instant
the net closes round the pilgrims, "the white robe falls from the black
man's body." Despair "getteth him a grievous crab-tree cudgel"; it was in
"sunshiny weather" that he had his fits; and the birds in the grove about
the House Beautiful, "our country birds," only sing their little pious
verses "at the spring, when the flowers appear and the sun shines warm."
"I often," says Piety, "go out to hear them; we also ofttimes keep them
tame on our house." The post between Beulah and the Celestial City sounds
his horn, as you may yet hear in country places. Madam Bubble, that
"tall, comely dame, something of a swarthy complexion, in very pleasant
attire, but old," "gives you a smile at the end of each sentence"--a real
woman she; we all know her. Christiana dying "gave Mr. Stand-fast a
ring," for no possible reason in the allegory, merely because the touch
was human and affecting. Look at Great-heart, with his soldierly ways,
garrison ways, as I had almost called them; with his taste in weapons;
his delight in any that "he found to be a man of his hands"; his
chivalrous point of honour, letting Giant Maul get up again when he was
down, a thing fairly flying in the teeth of the moral; above all, with
his language in the inimitable tale of Mr. Fearing: "I thought I should
have lost my man"--"chicken-hearted"--"at last he came in, and I will say
that for my lord, he carried it wonderful lovingly to him." This is no
Independent minister; this is a stout, honest, big-busted ancient,
adjusting his shoulder-belts, twirling his long moustaches as he speaks.
Last and most remarkable, "My sword," says the dying Valiant-for-Truth,
he in whom Great-heart delighted, "my sword I give to him that shall
succeed me in my pilgrimage, _and my courage and skill to him that can
get it_." And after this boast, more arrogantly unorthodox than was ever
dreamed of by the rejected Ignorance, we are told that "all the trumpets
sounded for him on the other side."
In every page the book is stamped with the same energy of vision and the
same energy of belief. The quality is equally and indifferently
displayed in the spirit of the fighting, the tenderness of the pathos,
the startling vigour and strangeness of the incidents, the natural
strain of the conversations, and the humanity and charm of the
characters. Trivial talk over a meal, the dying words of heroes, the
delights of Beulah or the Celestial City, Apollyon and my Lord
Hate-good, Great-heart, and Mr. Worldly-Wiseman, all have been imagined
with the same clearness, all written of with equal gusto and precision,
all created in the same mixed element, of simplicity that is almost
comical, and art that, for its purpose, is faultless.
It was in much the same spirit that our artist sat down to his drawings.
He is by nature a Bunyan of the pencil. He, too, will draw anything,
from a butcher at work on a dead sheep, up to the courts of Heaven. "A
Lamb for Supper" is the name of one of his designs, "Their Glorious
Entry" of another. He has the same disregard for the ridiculous, and
enjoys somewhat of the same privilege of style, so that we are pleased
even when we laugh the most. He is literal to the verge of folly. If
dust is to be raised from the unswept parlour, you may be sure it will
"fly abundantly" in the picture. If Faithful is to lie "as dead" before
Moses, dead he shall lie with a warrant--dead and stiff like granite;
nay (and here the artist must enhance upon the symbolism of the author),
it is with the identical stone tables of the law that Moses fells the
sinner. Good and bad people, whom we at once distinguish in the text by
their names, Hopeful, Honest, and Valiant-for-Truth, on the one hand, as
against By-ends, Sir Having Greedy, and the Lord Old-man on the other,
are in these drawings as simply distinguished by their costume. Good
people, when not armed _cap-à-pie_, wear a speckled tunic girt about the
waist, and low hats, apparently of straw. Bad people swagger in
tail-coats and chimney-pots, a few with knee-breeches, but the large
majority in trousers, and for all the world like guests at a
garden-party. Worldly-Wiseman alone, by some inexplicable quirk, stands
before Christian in laced hat, embroidered waistcoat, and trunk-hose.
But above all examples of this artist's intrepidity, commend me to the
print entitled "Christian Finds it Deep." "A great darkness and horror,"
says the text, have fallen on the pilgrim; it is the comfortless
deathbed with which Bunyan so strikingly concludes the sorrows and
conflicts of his hero. How to represent this worthily the artist knew
not; and yet he was determined to represent it somehow. This was how he
did: Hopeful is still shown to his neck above the water of death; but
Christian has bodily disappeared, and a blot of solid blackness
indicates his place.
As you continue to look at these pictures, about an inch square for the
most part, sometimes printed three or more to the page, and each having
a printed legend of its own, however trivial the event recorded, you
will soon become aware of two things: first, that the man can draw, and,
second, that he possesses the gift of an imagination. "Obstinate
reviles," says the legend; and you should see Obstinate reviling. "He
warily retraces his steps"; and there is Christian, posting through the
plain, terror and speed in every muscle. "Mercy yearns to go" shows you
a plain interior with packing going forward, and, right in the middle,
Mercy yearning to go--every line of the girl's figure yearning. In "The
Chamber called Peace" we see a simple English room, bed with white
curtains, window valance and door, as may be found in many thousand
unpretentious houses; but far off, through the open window, we behold
the sun uprising out of a great plain, and Christian hails it with his
hand:
"Where am I now! is this the love and care
Of Jesus, for the men that pilgrims are!
Thus to provide! That I should be forgiven!
And dwell already the next door to heaven!"
A page or two further, from the top of the House Beautiful, the damsels
point his gaze toward the Delectable Mountains: "The Prospect," so the
cut is ticketed--and I shall be surprised, if on less than a square of
paper you can show me one so wide and fair. Down a cross road on an
English plain, a cathedral city outlined on the horizon, a hazel shaw
upon the left, comes Madam Wanton dancing with her fair enchanted cup,
and Faithful, book in hand, half pauses. The cut is perfect as a symbol;
the giddy movement of the sorceress, the uncertain poise of the man
struck to the heart by a temptation, the contrast of that even plain of
life whereon he journeys with the bold, ideal bearing of the wanton--the
artist who invented and portrayed this had not merely read Bunyan, he
had also thoughtfully lived. The Delectable Mountains--I continue
skimming the first part--are not on the whole happily rendered. Once,
and once only, the note is struck, when Christian and Hopeful are seen
coming, shoulder-high, through a thicket of green shrubs--box, perhaps,
or perfumed nutmeg; while behind them, domed or pointed, the hills stand
ranged against the sky. A little further, and we come to that
masterpiece of Bunyan's insight into life, the Enchanted Ground; where,
in a few traits, he has set down the latter end of such a number of the
would-be good; where his allegory goes so deep that, to people looking
seriously on life, it cuts like satire. The true significance of this
invention lies, of course, far out of the way of drawing; only one
feature, the great tedium of the land, the growing weariness in
welldoing, may be somewhat represented in a symbol. The pilgrims are
near the end: "Two Miles Yet," says the legend. The road goes ploughing
up and down over a rolling heath; the wayfarers, with outstretched arms,
are already sunk to the knees over the brow of the nearest hill; they
have just passed a milestone with the cipher two; from overhead a great,
piled, summer cumulus, as of a slumberous summer afternoon, beshadows
them: two miles! it might be hundreds. In dealing with the Land of
Beulah the artist lags, in both parts, miserably behind the text, but in
the distant prospect of the Celestial City more than regains his own.
You will remember when Christian and Hopeful "with desire fell sick."
"Effect of the Sunbeams" is the artist's title. Against the sky, upon a
cliffy mountain, the radiant temple beams upon them over deep, subjacent
woods; they, behind a mound, as if seeking shelter from the
splendour--one prostrate on his face, one kneeling, and with hands
ecstatically lifted--yearn with passion after that immortal city. Turn
the page, and we behold them walking by the very shores of death;
Heaven, from this nigher view, has risen half-way to the zenith, and
sheds a wider glory; and the two pilgrims, dark against that brightness,
walk and sing out of the fulness of their hearts. No cut more thoroughly
illustrates at once the merit and the weakness of the artist. Each
pilgrim sings with a book in his grasp--a family Bible at the least for
bigness; tomes so recklessly enormous that our second impulse is to
laughter. And yet that is not the first thought, nor perhaps the last.
Something in the attitude of the manikins--faces they have none, they
are too small for that--something in the way they swing these monstrous
volumes to their singing, something perhaps borrowed from the text, some
subtle differentiation from the cut that went before and the cut that
follows after--something, at least, speaks clearly of a fearful joy, of
Heaven seen from the deathbed, of the horror of the last passage no less
than of the glorious coming home. There is that in the action of one of
them which always reminds me, with a difference, of that haunting last
glimpse of Thomas Idle, travelling to Tyburn in the cart. Next come the
Shining Ones, wooden and trivial enough; the pilgrims pass into the
river; the blot already mentioned settles over and obliterates
Christian. In two more cuts we behold them drawing nearer to the other
shore; and then, between two radiant angels, one of whom points upward,
we see them mounting in new weeds, their former lendings left behind
them on the inky river. More angels meet them; Heaven is displayed, and
if no better, certainly no worse, than it has been shown by others--a
place, at least, infinitely populous and glorious with light--a place
that haunts solemnly the hearts of children. And then this symbolic
draughtsman once more strikes into his proper vein. Three cuts conclude
the first part. In the first the gates close, black against the glory
struggling from within. The second shows us Ignorance--alas! poor
Arminian!--hailing, in a sad twilight, the ferryman Vain-Hope; and in
the third we behold him, bound hand and foot, and black already with the
hue of his eternal fate, carried high over the mountain-tops of the
world by two angels of the anger of the Lord. "Carried to Another
Place," the artist enigmatically names his plate--a terrible design.
Wherever he touches on the black side of the supernatural his pencil
grows more daring and incisive. He has many true inventions in the
perilous and diabolic; he has many startling nightmares realised. It is
not easy to select the best; some may like one and some another; the
nude, depilated devil bounding and casting darts against the Wicket
Gate; the scroll of flying horrors that hang over Christian by the Mouth
of Hell; the horned shade that comes behind him whispering blasphemies;
the daylight breaking through that rent cave-mouth of the mountains and
falling chill adown the haunted tunnel; Christian's further progress
along the causeway, between the two black pools, where, at every yard or
two, a gin, a pitfall, or a snare awaits the passer-by--loathsome white
devilkins harbouring close under the bank to work the springes,
Christian himself pausing and pricking with his sword's point at the
nearest noose, and pale discomfortable mountains rising on the farther
side; or yet again, the two ill-favoured ones that beset the first of
Christian's journey, with the frog-like structure of the skull, the
frog-like limberness of limbs--crafty, slippery, lustful-looking devils,
drawn always in outline as though possessed of a dim, infernal
luminosity. Horrid fellows are they, one and all; horrid fellows and
horrific scenes. In another spirit that Good-Conscience "to whom Mr.
Honest had spoken in his lifetime," a cowled, grey, awful figure, one
hand pointing to the heavenly shore, realises, I will not say all, but
some at least of the strange impressiveness of Bunyan's words. It is no
easy nor pleasant thing to speak in one's lifetime with Good-Conscience;
he is an austere, unearthly friend, whom maybe Torquemada knew; and the
folds of his raiment are not merely claustral, but have something of the
horror of the pall. Be not afraid, however; with the hand of that
appearance Mr. Honest will get safe across.
[Illustration: Obstinate reviles]
[Illustration: Mr. Worldly-Wiseman]
[Illustration: He warily retraces his steps]
[Illustration: Christian at the gate]
[Illustration: The parlour unswept]
[Illustration: The chamber called Peace]
[Illustration: The prospect]
[Illustration: Is met by Apollyon]
[Illustration: The fiend in discourse]
[Illustration: The conflict]
[Illustration: Close combat]
[Illustration: The deadly thrust]
[Illustration: Thanksgiving for victory]
[Illustration: His last weapon--All-prayer]
[Illustration: Whispering blasphemies]
[Illustration: Snares, traps, gins, and pitfalls]
[Illustration: Madam Wanton]
[Illustration: Two miles yet]
[Illustration: Effect of the sunbeams]
[Illustration: Carried to another place]
Yet perhaps it is in sequences that this artist best displays himself.
He loves to look at either side of a thing: as, for instance, when he
shows us both sides of the wall--"Grace Inextinguishable" on the one
side, with the devil vainly pouring buckets on the flame, and "The Oil
of Grace" on the other, where the Holy Spirit, vessel in hand, still
secretly supplies the fire. He loves, also, to show us the same event
twice over, and to repeat his instantaneous photographs at the interval
of but a moment. So we have, first, the whole troop of pilgrims coming
up to Valiant, and Great-heart to the front, spear in hand and
parleying; and next, the same cross-roads, from a more distant view, the
convoy now scattered and looking safely and curiously on, and Valiant
handing over for inspection his "right Jerusalem blade." It is true that
this designer has no great care after consistency: Apollyon's spear is
laid by, his quiver of darts will disappear, whenever they might hinder
the designer's freedom; and the fiend's tail is blobbed or forked at his
good pleasure. But this is not unsuitable to the illustration of the
fervent Bunyan, breathing hurry and momentary inspiration. He, with
his hot purpose, hunting sinners with a lasso, shall himself forget the
things that he has written yesterday. He shall first slay Heedless in
the Valley of the Shadow, and then take leave of him talking in his
sleep, as if nothing had happened, in an arbour on the Enchanted Ground.
And again, in his rhymed prologue, he shall assign some of the glory of
the siege of Doubting Castle to his favourite Valiant-for-the-Truth, who
did not meet with the besiegers till long after, at that dangerous
corner by Deadman's Lane. And, with all inconsistencies and freedoms,
there is a power shown in these sequences of cuts: a power of joining on
one action or one humour to another; a power of following out the moods,
even of the dismal subterhuman fiends engendered by the artist's fancy;
a power of sustained continuous realisation, step by step, in nature's
order, that can tell a story, in all its ins and outs, its pauses and
surprises, fully and figuratively, like the art of words.
One such sequence is the fight of Christian and Apollyon--six cuts,
weird and fiery, like the text. The pilgrim is throughout a pale and
stockish figure; but the devil covers a multitude of defects. There is
no better devil of the conventional order than our artist's Apollyon,
with his mane, his wings, his bestial legs, his changing and terrifying
expression, his infernal energy to slay. In cut the first you see him
afar off, still obscure in form, but already formidable in suggestion.
Cut the second, "The Fiend in Discourse," represents him, not reasoning,
railing rather, shaking his spear at the pilgrim, his shoulder advanced,
his tail writhing in the air, his foot ready for a spring, while
Christian stands back a little, timidly defensive. The third illustrates
these magnificent words: "Then Apollyon straddled quite over the whole
breadth of the way, and said, I am void of fear in this matter: prepare
thyself to die; for I swear by my infernal den that thou shalt go no
farther: here will I spill thy soul! And with that he threw a flaming
dart at his breast." In the cut he throws a dart with either hand,
belching pointed flames out of his mouth, spreading his broad vans, and
straddling the while across the path, as only a fiend can straddle who
has just sworn by his infernal den. The defence will not be long against
such vice, such flames, such red-hot nether energy. And in the fourth
cut, to be sure, he has leaped bodily upon his victim, sped by foot and
pinion, and roaring as he leaps. The fifth shows the climacteric of the
battle; Christian has reached nimbly out and got his sword, and dealt
that deadly home-thrust, the fiend still stretched upon him, but "giving
back, as one that had received his mortal wound." The raised head, the
bellowing mouth, the paw clapped upon the sword, the one wing relaxed in
agony, all realise vividly these words of the text. In the sixth and
last, the trivial armed figure of the pilgrim is seen kneeling with
clasped hands on the betrodden scene of contest and among the shivers of
the darts; while just at the margin the hinder quarters and the tail of
Apollyon are whisking off, indignant and discomfited.
In one point only do these pictures seem to be unworthy of the text, and
that point is one rather of the difference of arts than the difference
of artists. Throughout his best and worst, in his highest and most
divine imaginations as in the narrowest sallies of his sectarianism, the
human-hearted piety of Bunyan touches and ennobles, convinces, accuses
the reader. Through no art beside the art of words can the kindness of a
man's affections be expressed. In the cuts you shall find faithfully
parodied the quaintness and the power, the triviality and the surprising
freshness of the author's fancy; there you shall find him outstripped in
ready symbolism and the art of bringing things essentially invisible
before the eyes: but to feel the contact of essential goodness, to be
made in love with piety, the book must be read and not the prints
examined.
Farewell should not be taken with a grudge; nor can I dismiss in any
other words than those of gratitude a series of pictures which have, to
one at least, been the visible embodiment of Bunyan from childhood up,
and shown him, through all his years, Great-heart lungeing at Giant
Maul, and Apollyon breathing fire at Christian, and every turn and town
along the road to the Celestial City, and that bright place itself, seen
as to a stave of music, shining afar off upon the hill-top, the candle
of the world.
FOOTNOTE:
[43] The illustrator was, in fact, a lady, Miss Eunice Bagster,
eldest daughter of the publisher, Samuel Bagster; except in the case
of the cuts depicting the fight with Apollyon, which were designed
by her brother, Mr. Jonathan Bagster. The edition was published in
1845. I am indebted for this information to the kindness of Mr.
Robert Bagster, the present managing director of the firm.--SIR
SIDNEY COLVIN'S NOTE.
AN APPEAL
TO THE
_Clergy of the Church of Scotland_
WITH A NOTE FOR THE LAITY
"_Had I a strong voice, as it is the weakest alive, yea, could I lift
it up as a trumpet, I would sound a retreat from our unnatural
contentions, and irreligious strivings for religion_"
ARCHBISHOP LEIGHTON, 1669
_William Blackwood & Sons_
_Edinburgh and London_
1875
Price 3d.]
(_Facsimile of original Title-page_)
AN APPEAL TO THE CLERGY OF THE CHURCH OF SCOTLAND
WITH A NOTE FOR THE LAITY
"Had I a strong voice, as it is the weakest alive, yea, could I lift
it up as a trumpet, I would sound a retreat from our unnatural
contentions, and irreligious strivings for religion."--ARCHBISHOP
LEIGHTON, 1669.
Gentlemen,--The position of the Church of Scotland is now one of
considerable difficulty; not only the credit of the Church, not only the
credit of Christianity, but to some extent also that of the national
character, is at stake. You have just gained a great victory, in spite
of an opposition neither very logical nor very generous; you have
succeeded in effecting, by quiet constitutional processes, a great
reform which brings your Church somewhat nearer in character to what is
required by your Dissenting brethren. It remains to be seen whether you
can prove yourselves as generous as you have been wise and patient. And
the position, as I say, is one of difficulty. Many, doubtless, left the
Church for a reason which is now removed; many have joined other sects
who would rather have joined themselves with you, had you been then as
you now are; and for these you are bound to render as easy as may be the
way of reconciliation, and show, by some notable action, the reality of
your own desire for Peace. But I am not unaware that there are others,
and those possibly a majority, who hold very different opinions--who
regard the old quarrel as still competent, or have found some new reason
for dissent; and from these the Church, if she makes such an advance as
she ought to make, in all loyalty and charity, may chance to meet that
most sensible of insults--ridicule, in return for an honest offer of
reconciliation. I am not unaware, also, that there is yet another ground
of difficulty; and that those even who would be most ready to hold the
cause of offence as now removed will find it hard to forget the
past--will continue to think themselves unjustly used--will not be
willing to come back, as though they were repentant offenders, among
those who delayed the reform and quietly enjoyed their benefices, while
they bore the heat and burthen of the day in a voluntary exile for the
Truth's sake.
In view of so many elements of difficulty, no intelligent person can be
free from apprehension for the result; and you, gentlemen, may be
perhaps more ready now to receive advice, to hear and weigh the opinion
of one who is free, because he writes without name, than you would be at
any juncture less critical. There is now a hope, at least, that some
term may be put to our more clamorous dissensions. Those who are at all
open to a feeling of national disgrace look eagerly forward to such a
possibility; they have been witnesses already too long to the strife
that has divided this small corner of Christendom; and they cannot
remember without shame that there has been as much noise, as much
recrimination, as much severance of friends, about mere logical
abstractions in our remote island, as would have sufficed for the great
dogmatic battles of the Continent. It would be difficult to exaggerate
the pity that fills the heart at such a reflection; at the thought of
how this neck of barren hills between two inclement seaways has echoed
for three centuries with the uproar of sectarian battle; of how the east
wind has carried out the sound of our shrill disputations into the
desolate Atlantic, and the west wind has borne it over the German Ocean,
as though it would make all Europe privy to how well we Scottish
brethren abide together in unity. It is not a bright page in the annals
of a small country: it is not a pleasant commentary on the Christianity
that we profess; there is something in it pitiful, as I have said, for
the pitiful man, but bitterly humorous for others. How much time we have
lost, how much of the precious energy and patience of good men we have
exhausted, on these trivial quarrels, it would be nauseous to consider;
we know too much already when we know the facts in block; we know enough
to make us hide our heads for shame, and grasp gladly at any present
humiliation, if it would ensure a little more quiet, a little more
charity, a little more brotherly love in the distant future.
And it is with this before your eyes that, as I feel certain, you are
now addressing yourselves to the consideration of this important crisis.
It is with a sense of the blackness of this discredit upon the national
character and national Christianity that not you alone but many of other
Churches are now setting themselves to square their future course with
the exigencies of the new position of sects; and it is with you that the
responsibility remains. The obligation lies ever on the victor; and just
so surely as you have succeeded in the face of captious opposition in
carrying forth the substance of a reform of which others had despaired,
just as surely does it lie upon you as a duty to take such steps as
shall make that reform available, not to you only, but to all your
brethren who will consent to profit by it; not only to all the clergy,
but to the cause of decency and peace, throughout your native land. It
is earnestly hoped that you may show yourselves worthy of a great
opportunity, and do more for the public minds by the example of one act
of generosity and humility than you could do by an infinite series of
sermons.
Without doubt, it is your intention, on the earliest public opportunity,
to make some advance. Without doubt, it is your purpose to improve the
advantage you have gained, and to press upon those who quitted your
communion some thirty years ago your great desire to be once more united
to them. This, at least, will find a place in the most unfriendly
programme you can entertain; and if there are any in the Free Church (as
I doubt not there are some) who seceded, not so much from any dislike to
the just supremacy of the law, as from a belief that the law in these
ecclesiastical matters was applied unjustly, I know well that you will
be most eager to receive them back again; I know well that you will not
let any petty vanity, any scruple of worldly dignity, stand between them
and their honourable return. If, therefore, there were no more to be
done than to display to these voluntary exiles the deep sense of your
respect for their position, this appeal would be unnecessary, and you
might be left to the guidance of your own good feeling.
But it seems to me that there is need of something more; it seems to me,
and I think that it will seem so to you also, that you must go even
further if you would be equal to the importance of the situation. If
there are any among the Dissenters whose consciences are so far
satisfied with the provisions of the recent Act that they could now
return to your communion, to such, it must not be forgotten, you stand
in a position of great delicacy. The conduct of these men you have so
far justified; you have tacitly admitted that there was some ground for
dissatisfaction with the former condition of the Church; and though you
may still judge those to have been over-scrupulous who were moved by
this imperfection to secede, instead of waiting patiently with you until
it could be remedied by peaceful means, you must not forget that it is
the strong stomach, according to St. Paul, that is to consider the weak,
and should come forward to meet these brethren with something better
than compliments upon your lips. Observe, I speak only of those who
would now see their way back to your communion with a clear conscience;
it is their conduct, and their conduct alone, that you have justified,
and therefore it is only for them that your special generosity is here
solicited. But towards them, if there are any such, your countrymen
would desire to see you behave with all consideration. I do not pretend
to lay before you any definite scheme of action; I wish only to let you
understand what thoughts are busy in the heads of some outside your
councils, so that you may take this also into consideration when you
come to decide. And this, roughly, is how it appears to these: These
good men have exposed themselves to the chance of hardship for the sake
of their scruples, whilst you being of a stronger stomach, continued to
enjoy the security of national endowments. Some of you occupy the very
livings which they resigned for conscience' sake. To others preferment
has fallen which would have fallen to them had they been still eligible.
If, then, any of them are now content to return, you are bound, if not
in justice, then in honour, to do all that you can to testify your
respect for brave conviction, and to repair to them such losses as they
may have suffered, whether for their first secession or their second.
You owe a special duty, not only to the courage that left the Church,
but to the wisdom and moderation that now returns to it. And your sense
of this duty will find a vent not only in word but in action. You will
facilitate their return not only by considerate and brotherly language
but by pecuniary aid; you will seek, by some new endowment scheme, to
preserve for them their ecclesiastical status. That they have no claim
will be their strongest claim on your consideration. Many of you, if not
all, will set apart some share out of your slender livings for their
assistance and support: you will give them what you can afford; and you
will say to them, as you do so, what I dare say to you, that what you
give is theirs--not only in honour but in justice.
For you know that the justice which should rule the dealings of
Christians, how much more of Christian ministers, is not as the justice
of courts of law or equity; and those who profess the morality of Jesus
Christ have abjured, in that profession, all that can be urged by policy
or worldly prudence. From them we can accept no half-hearted and
calculating generosity; they must make haste to be liberal; they must
catch with eagerness at all opportunities of service, and the mere
whisper of an obligation should be to them more potent than the decree
of a court to others who make profession of a less stringent code. And
remember that it lies with you to show to the world that Christianity is
something more than a verbal system. In the lapse of generations men
grow weary of unsupported precept. They may wait long, and keep long in
memory the bright doings of former days, but they will weary at the
last; they will begin to trouble you for your credentials; if you cannot
give them miracles, they will demand virtue; if you cannot heal the
sick, they will call upon you for some practice of the Christian ethics.
Thus people will knock often at a door if only it be opened to them now
and again; but if the door remains closed too long, they will judge the
house uninhabited and go elsewhere. And thus it is that a season of
persecution, constantly endured, revives the fainting confidence of the
people, and some centuries of prosperity may prepare a Church for ruin.
You have here at your hand an opportunity to do more for the credit of
your Christianity than ever you could do by visions, miracles, or
prophecies. A sacrifice such as this would be better worth, as I said
before, than many sermons; and there is a disposition in mankind that
would ennoble it beyond much that is more ostentatious; for men, whether
lay or clerical, suffer better the flame of the stake than a daily
inconvenience or a pointed sneer, and will not readily be martyred
without some external circumstance and a concourse looking on. And you
need not fear that your virtue will be thrown away; the people of
Scotland will be quick to understand, in default of visible fire and
halter, that you have done a brave action for Christianity and the
national weal; and if they are spared in the future any of the present
ignoble jealousy of sect against sect, they will not forget that to that
end you gave of your household comfort and stinted your children. Even
if you fail--ay, and even if there were not found one to profit by your
invitation--your virtue would still have its own reward. Your
predecessors gave their lives for ends not always the most Christian;
they were tempted, and slain with the sword; they wandered in deserts
and in mountains, in caves and in dens of the earth. But your action
will not be less illustrious; what you may have to suffer may be a small
thing if the world will, but it will have been suffered for the cause of
peace and brotherly love.
I have said that the people of Scotland will be quick to appreciate what
you do. You know well that they will be quick also to follow your
example. But the sign should come from you. It is more seemly that you
should lead than follow in this matter. Your predecessors gave the word
from their free pulpits which was to brace men for sectarian strife: it
would be a pleasant sequel if the word came from you that was to bid
them bury all jealousy, and forget the ugly and contentious past in a
good hope of peace to come.
What is said in these few pages may be objected to as vague; it is no
more vague than the position seemed to me to demand. Each man must judge
for himself what it behoves him to do at this juncture, and the whole
Church for herself. All that is intended in this appeal is to begin, in
a tone of dignity and disinterestedness, the consideration of the
question; for when such matters are much pulled about in public prints,
and have been often discussed from many different, and not always from
very high, points of view, there is ever a tendency that the decision of
the parties may contract some taint of meanness from the spirit of their
critics. All that is desired is to press upon you, as ministers of the
Church of Scotland, some sense of the high expectation with which your
country looks to you at this time; and how many reasons there are that
you should show an example of signal disinterestedness and zeal in the
encouragement that you give to returning brethren. For, first, it lies
with you to clear the Church from the discredit of our miserable
contentions; and surely you can never have a fairer opportunity to
improve her claim to the style of a peacemaker. Again, it lies with
you, as I have said, to take the first step, and prove your own true
ardour for an honourable union; and how else are you to prove it? It
lies with you, moreover, to justify in the eyes of the world the time
you have been enjoying your benefices, while these others have
voluntarily shut themselves out from all participation in their
convenience; and how else are you to convince the world that there was
not something of selfishness in your motives? It lies with you, lastly,
to keep your example unspotted before your congregations; and I do not
know how better you are to do that.
It is never a thankful office to offer advice; and advice is the more
unpalatable, not only from the difficulty of the service recommended,
but often from its very obviousness. We are fired with anger against
those who make themselves the spokesmen of plain obligations; for they
seem to insult us as they advise. In the present case I should have
feared to waken some such feeling, had it not been that I was addressing
myself to a body of special men on a very special occasion. I know too
much of the history of ideas to imagine that the sentiments advocated in
this appeal are peculiar to me and a few others. I am confident that
your own minds are already busy with similar reflections. But I know at
the same time how difficult it is for one man to speak to another in
such a matter; how he is withheld by all manner of personal
considerations, and dare not propose what he has nearest his heart,
because the other has a larger family or a smaller stipend, or is older,
more venerable, and more conscientious than himself; and it is in view
of this that I have determined to profit by the freedom of an anonymous
writer, and give utterance to what many of you would have uttered
already, had they been (as I am) apart from the battle. It is easy to be
virtuous when one's own convenience is not affected; and it is no shame
to any man to follow the advice of an outsider who owns that, while he
sees which is the better part, he might not have the courage to profit
himself by this opinion.
[_Note for the Laity_]
The foregoing pages have been in type since the beginning of last
September. I have been advised to give them to the public; and it is
only necessary to add that nothing of all that has taken place since
they were written has made me modify an opinion or so much as change a
word. The question is not one that can be altered by circumstances.
I need not tell the laity that with them this matter ultimately rests.
Whether we regard it as a question of mere expense or as a question of
good feeling against ill feeling, the solution must come from the Church
members. The lay purse is the long one; and if the lay opinion does not
speak from so high a place, it speaks all the week through and with
innumerable voices. Trumpets and captains are all very well in their
way; but if the trumpets were ever so clear, and the captains as bold as
lions, it is still the army that must take the fort.
The laymen of the Church have here a question before them, on the
answering of which, as I still think, many others attend. If the
Established Church could throw off its lethargy, and give the Dissenters
some speaking token of its zeal for union, I still think that union, to
some extent, would be the result. There is a motion tabled (as I suppose
all know) for the next meeting of the General Assembly; but something
more than motions must be tabled, and something more must be given than
votes. It lies practically with the laymen, by a new endowment scheme,
to put the Church right with the world in two ways, so that those who
left it more than thirty years ago, and who may now be willing to
return, shall lose neither in money nor in ecclesiastical status. At the
outside, what will they have to do? They will have to do for (say) ten
years what the laymen of the Free Church have done cheerfully ever since
1843.
_February 12th_ 1875.
THE CHARITY BAZAAR
THE LIGHT-KEEPER
ON A NEW FORM OF INTERMITTENT LIGHT FOR LIGHTHOUSES
ON THE THERMAL INFLUENCE OF FORESTS
THE CHARITY BAZAAR
AN ALLEGORICAL DIALOGUE
* * * * *
_PERSONS OF THE DIALOGUE_
THE INGENUOUS PUBLIC
HIS WIFE
THE TOUT
* * * * *
_The Tout, in an allegorical costume, holding a silver trumpet in his
right hand, is discovered on the steps in front of the Bazaar. He
sounds a preliminary flourish._
_The Tout_.--Ladies and Gentlemen, I have the honour to announce a sale
of many interesting, beautiful, rare, quaint, comical, and necessary
articles. Here you will find objects of taste, such as Babies' Shoes,
Children's Petticoats, and Shetland Wool Cravats; objects of general
usefulness, such as Tea-cosies, Bangles, Brahmin Beads, and Madras
Baskets; and objects of imperious necessity, such as Pen-wipers, Indian
Figures carefully repaired with glue, and Sealed Envelopes, containing a
surprise. And all this is not to be sold by your common Shopkeepers,
intent on small and legitimate profits, but by Ladies and Gentlemen, who
would as soon think of picking your pocket of a cotton handkerchief as
of selling a single one of these many interesting, beautiful, rare,
quaint, comical, and necessary articles at less than twice its market
value. (_He sounds another flourish_.)
_The Wife._--This seems a very fair-spoken young man.
_The Ingenuous Public_ (_addressing the Tout_).--Sir, I am a man of
simple and untutored mind; but I apprehend that this sale, of which you
give us so glowing a description, is neither more nor less than a
Charity Bazaar?
_The Tout._--Sir, your penetration has not deceived you.
_The Ingenuous Public._--Into which you seek to entice unwary
passengers?
_The Tout._--Such is my office.
_The Ingenuous Public._--But is not a Charity Bazaar, Sir, a place
where, for ulterior purposes, amateur goods are sold at a price above
their market value?
_The Tout._--I perceive you are no novice. Let us sit down, all three,
upon the doorsteps, and reason this matter at length. The position is a
little conspicuous, but airy and convenient.
(_The Tout seats himself on the second step, the Ingenuous Public and
his Wife to right and left of him, one step below._)
_The Tout._--Shopping is one of the dearest pleasures of the human
heart.
_The Wife._--Indeed, Sir, and that it is.
_The Tout._--The choice of articles, apart from their usefulness, is an
appetising occupation, and to exchange bald, uniform shillings for a
fine big, figurative knick-knack, such as a windmill, a gross of green
spectacles, or a cocked hat, gives us a direct and emphatic sense of
gain. We have had many shillings before, as good as these; but this is
the first time we have possessed a windmill. Upon these principles of
human nature, Sir, is based the theory of the Charity Bazaar. People
were doubtless charitably disposed. The problem was to make the exercise
of charity entertaining in itself--you follow me, Madam?--and in the
Charity Bazaar a satisfactory solution was attained. The act of giving
away money for charitable purposes is, by this admirable invention,
transformed into an amusement, and puts on the externals of profitable
commerce. You play at shopping a while; and in order to keep up the
illusion, sham goods do actually change hands. Thus, under the
similitude of a game, I have seen children confronted with the horrors
of arithmetic, and even taught to gargle.
_The Ingenuous Public._--You expound this subject very magisterially,
Sir. But tell me, would it not be possible to carry this element of play
still further? and after I had remained a proper time in the Bazaar, and
negotiated a sufficient number of sham bargains, would it not be
possible to return me my money in the hall?
_The Tout._--I question whether that would not impair the humour of the
situation. And besides, my dear Sir, the pith of the whole device is to
take that money from you.
_The Ingenuous Public._--True. But at least the Bazaar might take back
the tea-cosies and pen-wipers.
_The Tout._--I have no doubt, if you were to ask it handsomely, that you
would be so far accommodated. Still it is out of the theory. The sham
goods, for which, believe me, I readily understand your
disaffection--the sham goods are well adapted for their purpose. Your
lady wife will lay these tea-cosies and pen-wipers aside in a safe
place, until she is asked to contribute to another Charity Bazaar. There
the tea-cosies and pen-wipers will be once more charitably sold. The new
purchasers, in their turn, will accurately imitate the dispositions of
your lady wife. In short, Sir, the whole affair is a cycle of
operations. The tea-cosies and pen-wipers are merely counters; they come
off and on again like a stage army; and year after year people pretend
to buy and pretend to sell them, with a vivacity that seems to indicate
a talent for the stage. But in the course of these illusory
manoeuvres, a great deal of money is given in charity, and that in a
picturesque, bustling, and agreeable manner. If you have to travel
somewhere on business, you would choose the prettiest route, and desire
pleasant companions by the way. And why not show the same spirit in
giving alms?
_The Ingenuous Public._--Sir, I am profoundly indebted to you for all
you have said. I am, Sir, your absolute convert.
_The Wife._--Let us lose no time, but enter the Charity Bazaar.
_The Ingenuous Public._--Yes; let us enter the Charity Bazaar.
_Both_ (_singing_).--Let us enter, let us enter, let us enter, Let us
enter the Charity Bazaar!
(_An interval is supposed to elapse. The Ingenuous Public and his Wife
are discovered issuing from the Charity Bazaar._)
_The Wife._--How fortunate you should have brought your cheque-book!
_The Ingenuous Public._--Well, fortunate in a sense. (_Addressing the
Tout._)--Sir, I shall send a van in the course of the afternoon for the
little articles I have purchased. I shall not say good-bye; because I
shall probably take a lift in the front seat, not from any solicitude,
believe me, about the little articles, but as the last opportunity I may
have for some time of enjoying the costly entertainment of a drive.
THE SCENE CLOSES
THE LIGHT-KEEPER
I
The brilliant kernel of the night,
The flaming lightroom circles me:
I sit within a blaze of light
Held high above the dusky sea.
Far off the surf doth break and roar
Along bleak miles of moonlit shore,
Where through the tides the tumbling wave
Falls in an avalanche of foam
And drives its churnèd waters home
Up many an undercliff and cave.
The clear bell chimes: the clockworks strain:
The turning lenses flash and pass,
Frame turning within glittering frame
With frosty gleam of moving glass:
Unseen by me, each dusky hour
The sea-waves welter up the tower
Or in the ebb subside again;
And ever and anon all night,
Drawn from afar by charm of light,
A sea-bird beats against the pane.
And lastly when dawn ends the night
And belts the semi-orb of sea,
The tall, pale pharos in the light
Looks white and spectral as may be.
The early ebb is out: the green
Straight belt of sea-weed now is seen,
That round the basement of the tower
Marks out the interspace of tide;
And watching men are heavy-eyed,
And sleepless lips are dry and sour.
The night is over like a dream:
The sea-birds cry and dip themselves;
And in the early sunlight, steam
The newly-bared and dripping shelves,
Around whose verge the glassy wave
With lisping wash is heard to lave;
While, on the white tower lifted high,
With yellow light in faded glass
The circling lenses flash and pass,
And sickly shine against the sky.
1869.
II
As the steady lenses circle
With a frosty gleam of glass;
And the clear bell chimes,
And the oil brims over the lip of the burner,
Quiet and still at his desk,
The lonely light-keeper
Holds his vigil.
Lured from afar,
The bewildered sea-gull beats
Dully against the lantern;
Yet he stirs not, lifts not his head
From the desk where he reads,
Lifts not his eyes to see
The chill blind circle of night
Watching him through the panes.
This is his country's guardian,
The outmost sentry of peace.
This is the man,
Who gives up all that is lovely in living
For the means to live.
Poetry cunningly gilds
The life of the Light-Keeper,
Held on high in the blackness
In the burning kernel of night.
The seaman sees and blesses him;
The Poet, deep in a sonnet,
Numbers his inky fingers
Fitly to praise him:
Only we behold him,
Sitting, patient and stolid,
Martyr to a salary.
1870.
ON A NEW FORM OF INTERMITTENT LIGHT FOR LIGHTHOUSES[44]
The necessity for marked characteristics in coast illumination increases
with the number of lights. The late Mr. Robert Stevenson, my
grandfather, contributed two distinctions, which he called respectively
the _intermittent_ and the _flashing_ light. It is only to the former of
these that I have to refer in the present paper. The intermittent light
was first introduced at Tarbetness in 1830, and is already in use at
eight stations on the coasts of the United Kingdom. As constructed
originally, it was an arrangement by which a fixed light was alternately
eclipsed and revealed. These recurrent occultations and revelations
produce an effect totally different from that of the revolving light,
which comes gradually into its full strength, and as gradually fades
away. The changes in the intermittent, on the other hand, are immediate;
a certain duration of darkness is followed at once and without the least
gradation by a certain period of light. The arrangement employed by my
grandfather to effect this object consisted of two opaque cylindric
shades or extinguishers, one of which descended from the roof, while the
other ascended from below to meet it, at a fixed interval. The light was
thus entirely intercepted.
At a later period, at the harbour light of Troon, Mr. Wilson, C.E.,
produced an intermittent light by the use of gas, which leaves little to
be desired, and which is still in use at Troon harbour. By a simple
mechanical contrivance, the gas jet was suddenly lowered to the point of
extinction, and, after a set period, as suddenly raised again. The chief
superiority of this form of intermittent light is economy in the
consumption of the gas. In the original design, of course, the oil
continues uselessly to illuminate the interior of the screens during the
period of occultation.
Mr. Wilson's arrangement has been lately resuscitated by Mr. Wigham of
Dublin, in connection with his new gas-burner.
Gas, however, is inapplicable to many situations; and it has occurred to
me that the desired result might be effected with strict economy with
oil lights, in the following manner:--
[Illustration: Fig. 1.]
In Fig. 1, AAA represents in plan an ordinary Fresnel's dioptric fixed
light apparatus, and BB' a hemispherical mirror (either metallic or
dioptric on my father's principle) which is made to revolve with uniform
speed about the burner. This mirror, it is obvious, intercepts the rays
of one hemisphere, and, returning them through the flame (less loss by
absorption, etc.), spreads them equally over the other. In this way 180°
of light pass regularly the eye of the seaman; and are followed at once
by 180° of darkness. As the hemispherical mirror begins to open, the
observer receives the full light, since the whole lit hemisphere is
illuminated with strict equality; and as it closes again, he passes into
darkness.
Other characteristics can be produced by different modifications of the
above. In Fig. 2 the original hemispherical mirror is shown broken up
into three different sectors, BB', CC', and DD'; so that with the same
velocity of revolution the periods of light and darkness will be
produced in quicker succession. In this figure (Fig. 2) the three
sectors have been shown as subtending equal angles, but if one of them
were increased in size and the other two diminished (as in Fig. 3), we
should have one long steady illumination and two short flashes at each
revolution. Again, the number of sectors may be increased; and by
varying both their number and their relative size, a number of
additional characteristics are attainable.
[Illustration: Fig. 2.]
Colour may also be introduced as a means of distinction. Coloured glass
may be set in the alternate spaces; but it is necessary to remark that
these coloured sectors will be inferior in power to those which remain
white. This objection is, however, obviated to a large extent
(especially where the dioptric spherical mirror is used) by such an
arrangement as is shown in Fig. 4; where the two sectors, WW, are left
unassisted, while the two with the red screens are reinforced
respectively by the two sectors of mirror, MM.
[Illustration: Fig. 3.]
[Illustration: Fig. 4.]
Another mode of holophotally producing the intermittent light has been
suggested by my father, and is shown in Fig. 5. It consists of alternate
and opposite sectors of dioptric spherical mirror, MM, and of Fresnel's
fixed light apparatus, AA. By the revolution of this composite frame
about the burner, the same immediate alternation of light and darkness
is produced, the first when the front of the fixed panel, and the
second when the back of the mirror, is presented to the eye of the
sailor.
One advantage of the method that I propose is this, that while we are
able to produce a plain intermittent light; an intermittent light of
variable period, ranging from a brief flash to a steady illumination of
half the revolution; and finally, a light combining the immediate
occultation of the intermittent with combination and change of colour,
we can yet preserve comparative lightness in the revolving parts, and
consequent economy in the driving machinery. It must, however, be
noticed, that none of these last methods are applicable to cases where
more than one radiant is employed: for these cases, either my
grandfather's or Mr. Wilson's contrivance must be resorted to.
[Illustration: Fig. 5.]
FOOTNOTE:
[44] Read before the Royal Scottish Society of Arts on 27th March
1871, and awarded the Society's Silver Medal.
ON THE THERMAL INFLUENCE OF FORESTS[45]
The opportunity of an experiment on a comparatively large scale, and
under conditions of comparative isolation, can occur but rarely in such
a science as Meteorology. Hence Mr. Milne Home's proposal for the
plantation of Malta seemed to offer an exceptional opportunity for
progress. Many of the conditions are favourable to the simplicity of the
result; and it seemed natural that, if a searching and systematic series
of observations were to be immediately set afoot, and continued during
the course of the plantation and the growth of the wood, some light
would be thrown on the still doubtful question of the climatic influence
of forests.
Mr. Milne Home expects, as I gather, a threefold result:--1st, an
increased and better regulated supply of available water; 2nd, an
increased rainfall; and, 3rd, a more equable climate, with more
temperate summer heat and winter cold.[46] As to the first of these
expectations, I suppose there can be no doubt that it is justified by
facts; but it may not be unnecessary to guard against any confusion of
the first with the second. Not only does the presence of growing timber
increase and regulate the supply of running and spring water
independently of any change in the amount of rainfall, but as
Boussingault found at Marmato,[47] denudation of forest is sufficient to
decrease that supply, even when the rainfall has increased instead of
diminished in amount. The second and third effects stand apart,
therefore, from any question as to the utility of Mr. Milne Home's
important proposal; they are both, perhaps, worthy of discussion at the
present time, but I wish to confine myself in the present paper to the
examination of the third alone.
A wood, then, may be regarded either as a _superficies_ or as a _solid_;
that is, either as a part of the earth's surface slightly elevated above
the rest, or as a diffused and heterogeneous body displacing a certain
portion of free and mobile atmosphere. It is primarily in the first
character that it attracts our attention, as a radiating and absorbing
surface, exposed to the sun and the currents of the air; such that, if
we imagine a plateau of meadow-land or bare earth raised to the mean
level of the forest's exposed leaf-surface, we shall have an agent
entirely similar in kind, although perhaps widely differing in the
amount of action. Now, by comparing a tract of wood with such a plateau
as we have just supposed, we shall arrive at a clear idea of the
specialities of the former. In the first place, then, the mass of
foliage may be expected to increase the radiating power of each tree.
The upper leaves radiate freely towards the stars and the cold
inter-stellar spaces, while the lower ones radiate to those above and
receive less heat in return; consequently, during the absence of the
sun, each tree cools gradually downward from top to bottom. Hence we
must take into account not merely the area of leaf-surface actually
exposed to the sky, but, to a greater or less extent, the surface of
every leaf in the whole tree or the whole wood. This is evidently a
point in which the action of the forest may be expected to differ from
that of the meadow or naked earth; for though, of course, inferior
strata tend to a certain extent to follow somewhat the same course as
the mass of inferior leaves, they do so to a less degree--conduction,
and the conduction of a very slow conductor, being substituted for
radiation.
We come next, however, to a second point of difference. In the case of
the meadow, the chilled air continues to lie upon the surface, the
grass, as Humboldt says, remaining all night submerged in the stratum of
lowest temperature; while in the case of trees, the coldest air is
continually passing down to the space underneath the boughs, or what we
may perhaps term the crypt of the forest. Here it is that the
consideration of any piece of woodland conceived as a solid comes
naturally in; for this solid contains a portion of the atmosphere,
partially cut off from the rest, more or less excluded from the
influence of wind, and lying upon a soil that is screened all day from
isolation by the impending mass of foliage. In this way (and chiefly, I
think, from the exclusion of winds), we have underneath the radiating
leaf-surface a stratum of comparatively stagnant air, protected from
many sudden variations of temperature, and tending only slowly to bring
itself into equilibrium with the more general changes that take place in
the free atmosphere.
Over and above what has been mentioned, thermal effects have been
attributed to the vital activity of the leaves in the transudation of
water, and even to the respiration and circulation of living wood. The
whole actual amount of thermal influence, however, is so small that I
may rest satisfied with mere mention. If these actions have any effect
at all, it must be practically insensible; and the others that I have
already stated are not only sufficient validly to account for all the
observed differences, but would lead naturally to the expectation of
differences very much larger and better marked. To these observations I
proceed at once. Experience has been acquired upon the following three
points:--1, The relation between the temperature of the trunk of a tree
and the temperature of the surrounding atmosphere; 2, The relation
between the temperature of the air under a wood and the temperature of
the air outside; and, 3, The relation between the temperature of the air
above a wood and the temperature of the air above cleared land.
As to the first question, there are several independent series of
observations; and I may remark in passing, what applies to all, that
allowance must be made throughout for some factor of specific heat. The
results were as follows:--The seasonal and monthly means in the tree and
in the air were not sensibly different. The variations in the tree, in
M. Becquerel's own observations, appear as considerably less than a
fourth of those in the atmosphere, and he has calculated, from
observations made at Geneva between 1796 and 1798, that the variations
in the tree were less than a fifth of those in the air; but the tree in
this case, besides being of a different species, was seven or eight
inches thicker than the one experimented on by himself.[48] The
variations in the tree, therefore, are always less than those in the
air, the ratio between the two depending apparently on the thickness of
the tree in question and the rapidity with which the variations followed
upon one another. The times of the maxima, moreover, were widely
different: in the air, the maximum occurs at 2 P.M. in winter, and at 3
P.M. in summer; in the tree, it occurs in winter at 6 P.M., and in
summer between 10 and 11 P.M. At nine in the morning in the month of
June, the temperatures of the tree and of the air had come to an
equilibrium. A similar difference of progression is visible in the
means, which differ most in spring and autumn, and tend to equalise
themselves in winter and in summer. But it appears most strikingly in
the case of variations somewhat longer in period than the daily ranges.
The following temperatures occurred during M. Becquerel's observations
in the Jardin des Plantes:--
Date. Temperature of Temperature in
the Air. the Tree.
1859. Dec. 15, 26.78° 32°
" 16, 19.76° 32°
" 17, 17.78° 31.46°
" 18, 13.28° 30.56°
" 19, 12.02° 28.40°
" 20, 12.54° 25.34°
" 21, 38.30° 27.86°
" 22, 43.34° 30.92°
" 23, 44.06° 31.46°
A moment's comparison of the two columns will make the principle
apparent. The temperature of the air falls nearly fifteen degrees in
five days; the temperature of the tree, sluggishly following, falls in
the same time less than four degrees. Between the 19th and the 20th the
temperature of the air has changed its direction of motion, and risen
nearly a degree; but the temperature of the tree persists in its former
course, and continues to fall nearly three degrees farther. On the 21st
there comes a sudden increase of heat, a sudden thaw; the temperature of
the air rises twenty-five and a half degrees; the change at last reaches
the tree, but only raises its temperature by less than three degrees;
and even two days afterwards, when the air is already twelve degrees
above freezing point, the tree is still half a degree below it. Take,
again, the following case:--
Date Temperature of Temperature in
the Air. the Tree.
1859. July 13, 84.92° 76.28°
" 14, 82.58° 78.62°
" 15, 80.42° 77.72°
" 16, 79.88° 78.44°
" 17, 73.22° 75.92°
" 18, 68.54° 74.30°
" 19, 65.66° 70.70°
The same order reappears. From the 13th to the 19th the temperature of
the air steadily falls, while the temperature of the tree continues
apparently to follow the course of previous variations, and does not
really begin to fall, is not really affected by the ebb of heat, until
the 17th, three days at least after it had been operating in the
air.[49] Hence we may conclude that all variations of the temperature
of the air, whatever be their period, from twenty-four hours up to
twelve months, are followed in the same manner by variations in the
temperature of the tree; and that those in the tree are always less in
amount and considerably slower of occurrence than those in the air. This
_thermal sluggishness_, so to speak, seems capable of explaining all the
phenomena of the case without any hypothetical vital power of resisting
temperatures below the freezing point, such as is hinted at even by
Becquerel.
Réaumur, indeed, is said to have observed temperatures in slender trees
nearly thirty degrees higher than the temperature of the air in the sun;
but we are not informed as to the conditions under which this
observation was made, and it is therefore impossible to assign to it its
proper value. The sap of the ice-plant is said to be materially colder
than the surrounding atmosphere; and there are several other somewhat
incongruous facts, which tend, at first sight, to favour the view of
some inherent power of resistance in some plants to high temperatures,
and in others to low temperatures.[50] But such a supposition seems in
the meantime to be gratuitous. Keeping in view the thermal
redispositions, which must be greatly favoured by the ascent of the sap,
and the difference between the condition as to temperature of such parts
as the root, the heart of the trunk, and the extreme foliage, and never
forgetting the unknown factor of specific heat, we may still regard it
as possible to account for all anomalies without the aid of any such
hypothesis. We may, therefore, I think, disregard small exceptions, and
state the result as follows:--
If, after every rise or fall, the temperature of the air remained
stationary for a length of time proportional to the amount of the
change, it seems probable--setting aside all question of vital
heat--that the temperature of the tree would always finally equalise
itself with the new temperature of the air, and that the range in tree
and atmosphere would thus become the same. This pause, however, does not
occur: the variations follow each other without interval; and the
slow-conducting wood is never allowed enough time to overtake the rapid
changes of the more sensitive air. Hence, so far as we can see at
present, trees appear to be simply bad conductors, and to have no more
influence upon the temperature of their surroundings than is fully
accounted for by the consequent tardiness of their thermal variations.
Observations bearing on the second of the three points have been made by
Becquerel in France, by La Cour in Jutland and Iceland, and by Rivoli at
Posen. The results are perfectly congruous. Becquerel's observations[51]
were made under wood, and about a hundred yards outside in open ground,
at three stations in the district of Montargis, Loiret. There was a
difference of more than one degree Fahrenheit between the mean annual
temperatures in favour of the open ground. The mean summer temperature
in the wood was from two to three degrees lower than the mean summer
temperature outside. The mean maxima in the wood were also lower than
those without by a little more than two degrees. Herr La Cour[52] found
the daily range consistently smaller inside the wood than outside. As
far as regards the mean winter temperatures, there is an excess in
favour of the forest, but so trifling in amount as to be unworthy of
much consideration. Libri found that the minimum winter temperatures
were not sensibly lower at Florence, after the Apennines had been
denuded of forest, than they had been before.[53] The disheartening
contradictoriness of his observations on this subject led Herr Rivoli to
the following ingenious and satisfactory comparison.[54] Arranging his
results according to the wind that blew on the day of observation, he
set against each other the variation of the temperature under wood from
that without, and the variation of the temperature of the wind from the
local mean for the month:--
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
| Wind. | N. | N.E.| E. | S.E.| S. | S.W.| W. | N.W.|
| |-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----|
|Var. in Wood |+0.60|+0.26|+0.26|+0.04|-0.04|-0.20|+0.16|+0.07|
|Var. in Wind |-0.30|-2.60|-3.30|-1.20|+1.00|+1.30|+1.00|+1.00|
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
From this curious comparison, it becomes apparent that the variations of
the difference in question depend upon the amount of variations of
temperature which take place in the free air, and on the slowness with
which such changes are communicated to the stagnant atmosphere of woods;
in other words, as Herr Rivoli boldly formulates it, a forest is simply
a bad conductor. But this is precisely the same conclusion as we have
already arrived at with regard to individual trees; and in Herr Rivoli's
table, what we see is just another case of what we saw in M.
Becquerel's--the different progression of temperatures. It must be
obvious, however, that the thermal condition of a single tree must be
different in many ways from that of a combination of trees and more or
less stagnant air, such as we call a forest. And accordingly we find, in
the case of the latter, the following new feature: The mean yearly
temperature of woods is lower than the mean yearly temperature of free
air, while they are decidedly colder in summer, and very little, if at
all, warmer in winter. Hence, on the whole, forests are colder than
cleared lands. But this is just what might have been expected from the
amount of evaporation, the continued descent of cold air, and its
stagnation in the close and sunless crypt of a forest; and one can only
wonder here, as elsewhere, that the resultant difference is so
insignificant and doubtful.
We come now to the third point in question, the thermal influence of
woods upon the air above them. It will be remembered that we have seen
reason to believe their effect to be similar to that of certain other
surfaces, except in so far as it may be altered, in the case of the
forest, by the greater extent of effective radiating area, and by the
possibility of generating a descending cold current as well as an
ascending hot one. M. Becquerel is (so far as I can learn) the only
observer who has taken up the elucidation of this subject. He placed his
thermometers at three points:[55] A and B were both about seventy feet
above the surface of the ground; but A was at the summit of a chestnut
tree, while B was in the free air, fifty feet away from the other. C was
four or five feet above the ground, with a northern exposure; there was
also a fourth station to the south, at the same level as this last, but
its readings are very seldom referred to. After several years of
observation, the mean temperature at A was found to be between one and
two degrees higher than that at B. The order of progression of
differences is as instructive here as in the two former investigations.
The maximum difference in favour of station A occurred between three and
five in the afternoon, later or sooner according as there had been more
or less sunshine, and ranged sometimes as high as seven degrees. After
this the difference kept declining until sunrise, when there was often a
difference of a degree, or a degree and a half, upon the other side. On
cloudy days the difference tended to a minimum. During a rainy month of
April, for example, the difference in favour of station A was less than
half a degree; the first fifteen days of May following, however, were
sunny, and the difference rose to more than a degree and a half.[56] It
will be observed that I have omitted up to the present point all mention
of station C. I do so because M. Becquerel's language leaves it doubtful
whether the observations made at this station are logically comparable
with those made at the other two. If the end in view were to compare
the progression of temperatures above the earth, above a tree, and in
free air, removed from all such radiative and absorptive influences, it
is plain that all three should have been equally exposed to the sun or
kept equally in shadow. As the observations were made, they give us no
notion of the relative action of earth-surface and forest-surface upon
the temperature of the contiguous atmosphere; and this, as it seems to
me, was just the _crux_ of the problem. So far, however, as they go,
they seem to justify the view that all these actions are the same in
kind, however they may differ in degree. We find the forest heating the
air during the day, and heating it more or less according as there has
been more or less sunshine for it to absorb, and we find it also
chilling it during the night; both of which are actions common to any
radiating surface, and would be produced, if with differences of amount
and time, by any other such surface raised to the mean level of the
exposed foliage.
To recapitulate:
1st. We find that single trees appear to act simply as bad conductors.
2nd. We find that woods, regarded as solids, are, on the whole, slightly
lower in temperature than the free air which they have displaced, and
that they tend slowly to adapt themselves to the various thermal changes
that take place without them.
3rd. We find forests regarded as surfaces acting like any other part of
the earth's surface, probably with more or less difference in amount and
progression, which we still lack the information necessary to estimate.
All this done, I am afraid that there can be little doubt that the more
general climatic investigations will be long and vexatious. Even in
South America, with extremely favourable conditions, the result is far
from being definite. Glancing over the table published by M. Becquerel
in his book on climates, from the observations of Humboldt, Hall,
Boussingault, and others, it becomes evident, I think, that nothing can
be founded upon the comparisons therein instituted; that all reasoning,
in the present state of our information, is premature and unreliable.
Strong statements have certainly been made; and particular cases lend
themselves to the formation of hasty judgments. "From the Bay of Cupica
to the Gulf of Guayaquil," says M. Boussingault, "the country is covered
with immense forest and traversed by numerous rivers; it rains there
almost ceaselessly; and the mean temperature of this moist district
scarcely reaches 78.8° F.... At Payta commence the sandy deserts of
Priura and Sechura; to the constant humidity of Choco succeeds almost at
once an extreme of dryness; and the mean temperature of the coast
increases at the same time by 1.8° F."[57] Even in this selected
favourable instance it might be argued that the part performed in the
change by the presence or absence of forest was comparatively small;
there seems to have been, at the same time, an entire change of soil;
and, in our present ignorance, it would be difficult to say by how much
this of itself is able to affect the climate. Moreover, it is possible
that the humidity of the one district is due to other causes besides the
presence of wood, or even that the presence of wood is itself only an
effect of some more general difference or combination of differences. Be
that as it may, however, we have only to look a little longer at the
table before referred to, to see how little weight can be laid on such
special instances. Let us take five stations, all in this very district
of Choco. Hacquita is eight hundred and twenty feet above Novita, and
their mean temperatures are the same. Alto de Mombu, again, is five
hundred feet higher than Hacquita, and the mean temperature has here
fallen nearly two degrees. Go up another five hundred feet to Tambo de
la Orquita, and again we find no fall in the mean temperature. Go up
some five hundred further to Chami, and there is a fall in the mean
temperature of nearly six degrees. Such numbers are evidently quite
untrustworthy; and hence we may judge how much confidence can be placed
in any generalisation from these South American mean temperatures.
The question is probably considered too simply--too much to the neglect
of concurrent influences. Until we know, for example, somewhat more of
the comparative radiant powers of different soils, we cannot expect any
very definite result. A change of temperature would certainly be
effected by the plantation of such a marshy district as the Sologne,
because, if nothing else were done, the roots might pierce the
impenetrable subsoil, allow the surface-water to drain itself off, and
thus dry the country. But might not the change be quite different if the
soil planted were a shifting sand, which, _fixed_ by the roots of the
trees, would become gradually covered with a vegetable earth, and be
thus changed from dry to wet? Again, the complication and conflict of
effects arises, not only from the soil, vegetation, and geographical
position of the place of the experiment itself, but from the
distribution of similar or different conditions in its immediate
neighbourhood, and probably to great distances on every side. A forest,
for example, as we know from Herr Rivoli's comparison, would exercise a
perfectly different influence in a cold country subject to warm winds,
and in a warm country subject to cold winds; so that our question might
meet with different solutions even on the east and west coasts of Great
Britain.
The consideration of such a complexity points more and more to the
plantation of Malta as an occasion of special importance; its insular
position and the unity of its geological structure both tend to simplify
the question. There are certain points about the existing climate,
moreover, which seem specially calculated to throw the influence of
woods into a strong relief. Thus, during four summer months, there is
practically no rainfall. Thus, again, the northerly winds when stormy,
and especially in winter, tend to depress the temperature very suddenly;
and thus, too, the southerly and south-westerly winds, which raise the
temperature during their prevalence to from eighty-eight to ninety-eight
degrees, seldom last longer than a few hours; insomuch that "their
disagreeable heat and dryness may be escaped by carefully closing the
windows and doors of apartments at their onset."[58] Such sudden and
short variations seem just what is wanted to accentuate the differences
in question. Accordingly, the opportunity seems one not lightly to be
lost, and the British Association or this Society itself might take the
matter up and establish a series of observations, to be continued during
the next few years. Such a combination of favourable circumstances may
not occur again for years; and when the whole subject is at a standstill
for want of facts, the present occasion ought not to go past unimproved.
Such observations might include the following:--
The observation of maximum and minimum thermometers in three different
classes of situation--_videlicet_, in the areas selected for plantation
themselves, at places in the immediate neighbourhood of those areas
where the external influence might be expected to reach its maximum, and
at places distant from those areas where the influence might be expected
to be least.
The observation of rain-gauges and hygrometers at the same three
descriptions of locality.
In addition to the ordinary hours of observation, special readings of
the thermometers should be made as often as possible at a change of wind
and throughout the course of the short hot breezes alluded to already,
in order to admit of the recognition and extension of Herr Rivoli's
comparison.
Observation of the periods and forces of the land and sea breezes.
Gauging of the principal springs, both in the neighbourhood of the areas
of plantation and at places far removed from those areas.
1873.
FOOTNOTES:
[45] Read before the Royal Society, Edinburgh, 19th May 1873, and
reprinted from the _Proceedings_ R.S.E.
[46] _Jour. Scot. Met. Soc._, New Ser. xxvi. 35.
[47] Quoted by Mr. Milne Home.
[48] _Atlas Météorologique de l'Observatoire Impérial_, 1867.
[49] _Comptes Rendus de l'Académie_, 29th March 1869.
[50] Professor Balfour's "Class Book of Botany," Physiology, chap.
xii., p. 670.
[51] _Comptes Rendus_, 1867 and 1869.
[52] See his paper.
[53] _Annales de Chimie et de Physique_, xlv., 1830. A more detailed
comparison of the climates in question would be a most interesting
and important contribution to the subject.
[54] Reviewed in the _Austrian Meteorological Magazine_, vol. iv.;
p. 543.
[55] _Comptes Rendus_, 28th May 1860.
[56] _Ibid._, 20th May 1861.
[57] Becquerel, "Climats," p. 141.
[58] Scoresby-Jackson's "Medical Climatology."
ESSAYS OF TRAVEL
ESSAYS OF TRAVEL
I
DAVOS IN WINTER
A mountain valley has, at the best, a certain prison-like effect on the
imagination, but a mountain valley, an Alpine winter, and an invalid's
weakness make up among them a prison of the most effective kind. The
roads indeed are cleared, and at least one footpath dodging up the hill;
but to these the health-seeker is rigidly confined. There are for him no
cross-cuts over the field, no following of streams, no unguided rambles
in the wood. His walks are cut and dry. In five or six different
directions he can push as far, and no farther, than his strength
permits; never deviating from the line laid down for him and beholding
at each repetition the same field of wood and snow from the same corner
of the road. This, of itself, would be a little trying to the patience
in the course of months; but to this is added, by the heaped mantle of
the snow, an almost utter absence of detail and an almost unbroken
identity of colour. Snow, it is true, is not merely white. The sun
touches it with roseate and golden lights. Its own crushed infinity of
crystals, its own richness of tiny sculpture, fills it, when regarded
near at hand, with wonderful depths of coloured shadow, and, though
wintrily transformed, it is still water, and has watery tones of blue.
But, when all is said, these fields of white and blots of crude black
forest are but a trite and staring substitute for the infinite variety
and pleasantness of the earth's face. Even a boulder, whose front is too
precipitous to have retained the snow, seems, if you come upon it in
your walk, a perfect gem of colour, reminds you almost painfully of
other places, and brings into your head the delights of more Arcadian
days--the path across the meadow, the hazel dell, the lilies on the
stream, and the scents, the colours, and the whisper of the woods. And
scents here are as rare as colours. Unless you get a gust of kitchen in
passing some hotel, you shall smell nothing all day long but the faint
and choking odour of frost. Sounds, too, are absent: not a bird pipes,
not a bough waves, in the dead, windless atmosphere. If a sleigh goes
by, the sleigh-bells ring, and that is all; you work all winter through
to no other accompaniment but the crunching of your steps upon the
frozen snow.
It is the curse of the Alpine valleys to be each one village from one
end to the other. Go where you please, houses will still be in sight,
before and behind you, and to the right and left. Climb as high as an
invalid is able, and it is only to spy new habitations nested in the
wood. Nor is that all; for about the health resort the walks are
besieged by single people walking rapidly with plaids about their
shoulders, by sudden troops of German boys trying to learn to jödel, and
by German couples silently and, as you venture to fancy, not quite
happily, pursuing love's young dream. You may perhaps be an invalid who
likes to make bad verses as he walks about. Alas! no muse will suffer
this imminence of interruption--and at the second stampede of jödellers
you find your modest inspiration fled. Or you may only have a taste for
solitude; it may try your nerves to have some one always in front whom
you are visibly overtaking, and some one always behind who is audibly
overtaking you, to say nothing of a score or so who brush past you in an
opposite direction. It may annoy you to take your walks and seats in
public view. Alas! there is no help for it among the Alps. There are no
recesses, as in Gorbio Valley by the oil-mill; no sacred solitude of
olive gardens on the Roccabruna-road; no nook upon St. Martin's Cape,
haunted by the voice of breakers, and fragrant with the three-fold
sweetness of the rosemary and the sea-pines and the sea.
For this publicity there is no cure, and no alleviation; but the storms
of which you will complain so bitterly while they endure, chequer and by
their contrast brighten the sameness of the fair-weather scenes. When
sun and storm contend together--when the thick clouds are broken up and
pierced by arrows of golden daylight--there will be startling
rearrangements and transfigurations of the mountain summits. A
sun-dazzling spire of alp hangs suspended in mid-sky among awful glooms
and blackness; or perhaps the edge of some great mountain shoulder will
be designed in living gold, and appear for the duration of a glance
bright like a constellation, and alone "in the unapparent." You may
think you know the figure of these hills; but when they are thus
revealed, they belong no longer to the things of earth--meteors we
should rather call them, appearances of sun and air that endure but for
a moment and return no more. Other variations are more lasting, as when,
for instance, heavy and wet snow has fallen through some windless hours,
and the thin, spiry mountain pine-trees stand each stock-still and
loaded with a shining burthen. You may drive through a forest so
disguised, the tongue-tied torrent struggling silently in the cleft of
the ravine, and all still except the jingle of the sleigh bells, and you
shall fancy yourself in some untrodden northern territory--Lapland,
Labrador, or Alaska.
Or, possibly, you arise very early in the morning; totter down-stairs in
a state of somnambulism; take the simulacrum of a meal by the glimmer of
one lamp in the deserted coffee-room; and find yourself by seven o'clock
outside in a belated moonlight and a freezing chill. The mail sleigh
takes you up and carries you on, and you reach the top of the ascent in
the first hour of the day. To trace the fires of the sunrise as they
pass from peak to peak, to see the unlit tree-tops stand out soberly
against the lighted sky, to be for twenty minutes in a wonderland of
clear, fading shadows, disappearing vapours, solemn blooms of dawn,
hills half glorified already with the day and still half confounded with
the greyness of the western heaven--these will seem to repay you for the
discomforts of that early start; but as the hour proceeds, and these
enchantments vanish, you will find yourself upon the farther side in yet
another Alpine valley, snow white and coal black, with such another
long-drawn congeries of hamlets and such another senseless watercourse
bickering along the foot. You have had your moment; but you have not
changed the scene. The mountains are about you like a trap; you cannot
foot it up a hillside and behold the sea as a great plain, but live in
holes and corners, and can change only one for another.
II
HEALTH AND MOUNTAINS
There has come a change in medical opinion, and a change has followed in
the lives of sick folk. A year or two ago and the wounded soldiery of
mankind were all shut up together in some basking angle of the Riviera,
walking a dusty promenade or sitting in dusty olive-yards within earshot
of the interminable and unchanging surf--idle among spiritless idlers
not perhaps dying, yet hardly living either, and aspiring, sometimes
fiercely, after livelier weather and some vivifying change. These were
certainly beautiful places to live in, and the climate was wooing in its
softness. Yet there was a later shiver in the sunshine; you were not
certain whether you were being wooed; and these mild shores would
sometimes seem to you to be the shores of death. There was a lack of a
manly element; the air was not reactive; you might write bits of poetry
and practise resignation, but you did not feel that here was a good
spot to repair your tissue or regain your nerve. And it appears, after
all, that there was something just in these appreciations. The invalid
is now asked to lodge on wintry Alps; a ruder air shall medicine him;
the demon of cold is no longer to be fled from, but bearded in his den.
For even Winter has his "dear domestic cave," and in those places where
he may be said to dwell for ever tempers his austerities.
Any one who has travelled westward by the great transcontinental
railroad of America must remember the joy with which he perceived, after
the tedious prairies of Nebraska and across the vast and dismal
moorlands of Wyoming, a few snowy mountain summits along the southern
sky. It is among these mountains in the new State of Colorado that the
sick man may find, not merely an alleviation of his ailments, but the
possibility of an active life and an honest livelihood. There, no longer
as a lounger in a plaid, but as a working farmer, sweating at his work,
he may prolong and begin anew his life. Instead of the bath-chair, the
spade; instead of the regulated walk, rough journeys in the forest, and
the pure, rare air of the open mountains for the miasma of the
sick-room--these are the changes offered him, with what promise of
pleasure and of self-respect, with what a revolution in all his hopes
and terrors, none but an invalid can know. Resignation, the cowardice
that apes a kind of courage and that lives in the very air of health
resorts, is cast aside at a breath of such a prospect. The man can open
the door; he can be up and doing; he can be a kind of a man after all
and not merely an invalid.
But it is a far cry to the Rocky Mountains. We cannot all of us go
farming in Colorado; and there is yet a middle term, which combines the
medical benefits of the new system with the moral drawbacks of the old.
Again the invalid has to lie aside from life and its wholesome duties;
again he has to be an idler among idlers; but this time at a great
altitude, far among the mountains, with the snow piled before his door
and the frost flowers every morning on his window. The mere fact is
tonic to his nerves. His choice of a place of wintering has somehow to
his own eyes the air of an act of bold contract; and, since he has
wilfully sought low temperatures, he is not so apt to shudder at a touch
of chill. He came for that, he looked for it, and he throws it from him
with the thought.
A long straight reach of valley, wall-like mountains upon either hand
that rise higher and higher and shoot up new summits the higher you
climb; a few noble peaks seen even from the valley; a village of hotels;
a world of black and white--black pine-woods, clinging to the sides of
the valley, and white snow flouring it, and papering it between the
pine-woods, and covering all the mountains with a dazzling curd; add a
few score invalids marching to and fro upon the snowy road, or skating
on the ice-rinks, possibly to music, or sitting under sunshades by the
door of the hotel--and you have the larger features of a mountain
sanatorium. A certain furious river runs curving down the valley; its
pace never varies, it has not a pool for as far as you can follow it;
and its unchanging, senseless hurry is strangely tedious to witness. It
is a river that a man could grow to hate. Day after day breaks with the
rarest gold upon the mountain spires, and creeps, growing and glowing,
down into the valley. From end to end the snow reverberates the
sunshine; from end to end the air tingles with the light, clear and dry
like crystal. Only along the course of the river, but high above it,
there hangs far into the noon one waving scarf of vapour. It were hard
to fancy a more engaging feature in a landscape; perhaps it is harder to
believe that delicate, long-lasting phantom of the atmosphere, a
creature of the incontinent stream whose course it follows. By noon the
sky is arrayed in an unrivalled pomp of colour--mild and pale and
melting in the north, but towards the zenith, dark with an intensity of
purple blue. What with this darkness of heaven and the intolerable
lustre of the snow, space is reduced again to chaos. An English painter,
coming to France late in life, declared with natural anger that "the
values were all wrong." Had he got among the Alps on a bright day he
might have lost his reason. And even to any one who has looked at
landscape with any care, and in any way through the spectacles of
representative art, the scene has a character of insanity. The distant
shining mountain peak is here beside your eye; the neighbouring
dull-coloured house in comparison is miles away; the summit, which is
all of splendid snow, is close at hand; the nigh slopes, which are black
with pine-trees, bear it no relation, and might be in another sphere.
Here there are none of those delicate gradations, those intimate, misty
joinings-on and spreadings-out into the distance, nothing of that art of
air and light by which the face of nature explains and veils itself in
climes which we may be allowed to think more lovely. A glaring piece of
crudity, where everything that is not white is a solecism and defies the
judgment of the eyesight; a scene of blinding definition; a parade of
daylight, almost scenically vulgar, more than scenically trying, and yet
hearty and healthy, making the nerves to tighten and the mouth to smile:
such is the winter daytime in the Alps. With the approach of evening all
is changed. A mountain will suddenly intercept the sun; a shadow fall
upon the valley; in ten minutes the thermometer will drop as many
degrees; the peaks that are no longer shone upon dwindle into ghosts;
and meanwhile, overhead, if the weather be rightly characteristic of the
place, the sky fades towards night through a surprising key of colours.
The latest gold leaps from the last mountain. Soon, perhaps, the moon
shall rise, and in her gentler light the valley shall be mellowed and
misted, and here and there a wisp of silver cloud upon a hilltop, and
here and there a warmly glowing window in a house, between fire and
starlight, kind and homely in the fields of snow.
But the valley is not seated so high among the clouds to be eternally
exempt from changes. The clouds gather, black as ink; the wind bursts
rudely in; day after day the mists drive overhead, the snowflakes
flutter down in blinding disarray; daily the mail comes in later from
the top of the pass; people peer through their windows and foresee no
end but an entire seclusion from Europe, and death by gradual dry-rot,
each in his indifferent inn; and when at last the storm goes and the sun
comes again, behold a world of unpolluted snow, glossy like fur, bright
like daylight, a joy to wallowing dogs and cheerful to the souls of men.
Or perhaps from across storied and malarious Italy, a wind cunningly
winds about the mountains and breaks, warm and unclean, upon our
mountain valley. Every nerve is set ajar; the conscience recognises, at
a gust, a load of sins and negligences hitherto unknown; and the whole
invalid world huddles into its private chambers, and silently recognises
the empire of the Föhn.
III
ALPINE DIVERSIONS
There will be no lack of diversion in an Alpine sanatorium. The place is
half English, to be sure, the local sheet appearing in double column,
text and translation; but it still remains half German; and hence we
have a band which is able to play, and a company of actors able, as you
will be told, to act. This last you will take on trust, for the players,
unlike the local sheet, confine themselves to German; and though at the
beginning of winter they come with their wig-boxes to each hotel in
turn, long before Christmas they will have given up the English for a
bad job. There will follow, perhaps, a skirmish between the two races;
the German element seeking, in the interest of their actors, to raise a
mysterious item, the _Kur-taxe_, which figures heavily enough already
in the weekly bills, the English element stoutly resisting. Meantime in
the English hotels home-played farces, _tableaux-vivants_, and even
balls enliven the evenings; a charity bazaar sheds genial consternation;
Christmas and New Year are solemnised with Pantagruelian dinners, and
from time to time the young folks carol and revolve untunefully enough
through the figures of a singing quadrille. A magazine club supplies you
with everything, from the _Quarterly_ to the _Sunday at Home_. Grand
tournaments are organised at chess, draughts, billiards, and whist. Once
and again wandering artists drop into our mountain valley, coming you
know not whence, going you cannot imagine whither, and belonging to
every degree in the hierarchy of musical art, from the recognised
performer who announces a concert for the evening, to the comic German
family or solitary long-haired German baritone, who surprises the guests
at dinner-time with songs and a collection. They are all of them good to
see; they, at least, are moving; they bring with them the sentiment of
the open road; yesterday, perhaps, they were in Tyrol, and next week
they will be far in Lombardy, while all we sick folk still simmer in our
mountain prison. Some of them, too, are welcome as the flowers in May
for their own sake; some of them may have a human voice; some may have
that magic which transforms a wooden box into a song-bird, and what we
jeeringly call a fiddle into what we mention with respect as a violin.
From that grinding lilt, with which the blind man, seeking pence,
accompanies the beat of paddle wheels across the ferry, there is surely
a difference rather of kind than of degree to that unearthly voice of
singing that bewails and praises the destiny of man at the touch of the
true virtuoso. Even that you may perhaps enjoy; and if you do so you
will own it impossible to enjoy it more keenly than here, _im Schnee der
Alpen_. A hyacinth in a pot, a handful of primroses packed in moss, or a
piece of music by some one who knows the way to the heart of a violin,
are things that, in this invariable sameness of the snows and frosty
air, surprise you like an adventure. It is droll, moreover, to compare
the respect with which the invalids attend a concert, and the ready
contempt with which they greet the dinner-time performers. Singing which
they would hear with real enthusiasm--possibly with tears--from a corner
of a drawing-room, is listened to with laughter when it is offered by an
unknown professional and no money has been taken at the door.
Of skating little need be said; in so snowy a climate the rinks must be
intelligently managed; their mismanagement will lead to many days of
vexation and some petty quarrelling, but when all goes well, it is
certainly curious, and perhaps rather unsafe, for the invalid to skate
under a burning sun, and walk back to his hotel in a sweat, through long
tracts of glare and passages of freezing shadow. But the peculiar
outdoor sport of this district is tobogganing. A Scotsman may remember
the low flat board, with the front wheels on a pivot, which was called a
_hurlie_; he may remember this contrivance, laden with boys, as,
laboriously started, it ran rattling down the brae, and was, now
successfully, now unsuccessfully, steered round the corner at the foot;
he may remember scented summer evenings passed in this diversion, and
many a grazed skin, bloody cockscomb, and neglected lesson. The toboggan
is to the hurlie what the sled is to the carriage; it is a hurlie upon
runners; and if for a grating road you substitute a long declivity of
beaten snow, you can imagine the giddy career of the tobogganist. The
correct position is to sit; but the fantastic will sometimes sit
hindforemost, or dare the descent upon their belly or their back. A few
steer with a pair of pointed sticks, but it is more classical to use the
feet. If the weight be heavy and the track smooth, the toboggan takes
the bit between its teeth; and to steer a couple of full-sized friends
in safety requires not only judgment but desperate exertion. On a very
steep track, with a keen evening frost, you may have moments almost too
appalling to be called enjoyment; the head goes, the world vanishes;
your blind steed bounds below your weight; you reach the foot, with all
the breath knocked out of your body, jarred and bewildered as though you
had just been subjected to a railway accident. Another element of joyful
horror is added by the formation of a train; one toboggan being tied to
another, perhaps to the number of half a dozen, only the first rider
being allowed to steer, and all the rest pledged to put up their feet
and follow their leader, with heart in mouth, down the mad descent.
This, particularly if the track begins with a headlong plunge, is one of
the most exhilarating follies in the world, and the tobogganing invalid
is early reconciled to somersaults.
There is all manner of variety in the nature of the tracks, some miles
in length, others but a few yards, and yet like some short rivers,
furious in their brevity. All degrees of skill and courage and taste may
be suited in your neighbourhood. But perhaps the true way to toboggan is
alone and at night. First comes the tedious climb, dragging your
instrument behind you. Next a long breathing-space, alone with snow and
pine-woods, cold, silent, and solemn to the heart. Then you push off;
the toboggan fetches away; she begins to feel the hill, to glide, to
swim, to gallop. In a breath you are out from under the pine-trees, and
a whole heavenful of stars reels and flashes overhead. Then comes a
vicious effort; for by this time your wooden steed is speeding like the
wind, and you are spinning round a corner, and the whole glittering
valley and all the lights in all the great hotels lie for a moment at
your feet; and the next you are racing once more in the shadow of the
night with close-shut teeth and beating heart. Yet a little while and
you will be landed on the high-road by the door of your own hotel. This,
in an atmosphere tingling with forty degrees of frost, in a night made
luminous with stars and snow, and girt with strange white mountains,
teaches the pulse an unaccustomed tune and adds a new excitement to the
life of man upon his planet.
IV
THE STIMULATION OF THE ALPS
To any one who should come from a southern sanatorium to the Alps, the
row of sun-burned faces round the table would present the first
surprise. He would begin by looking for the invalids, and he would lose
his pains, for not one out of five of even the bad cases bears the mark
of sickness on his face. The plump sunshine from above and its strong
reverberation from below colour the skin like an Indian climate; the
treatment, which consists mainly of the open air, exposes even the
sickliest to tan, and a tableful of invalids comes, in a month or two,
to resemble a tableful of hunters. But although he may be thus surprised
at the first glance, his astonishment will grow greater, as he
experiences the effects of the climate on himself. In many ways it is a
trying business to reside upon the Alps: the stomach is exercised, the
appetite often languishes; the liver may at times rebel; and because you
have come so far from metropolitan advantages, it does not follow that
you shall recover. But one thing is undeniable--that in the rare air,
clear, cold, and blinding light of Alpine winters, a man takes a certain
troubled delight in his existence which can nowhere else be paralleled.
He is perhaps no happier, but he is stingingly alive. It does not,
perhaps, come out of him in work or exercise, yet he feels an enthusiasm
of the blood unknown in more temperate climates. It may not be health,
but it is fun.
There is nothing more difficult to communicate on paper than this
baseless ardour, this stimulation of the brain, this sterile joyousness
of spirits. You wake every morning, see the gold upon the snow-peaks,
become filled with courage, and bless God for your prolonged existence.
The valleys are but a stride to you; you cast your shoe over the
hilltops; your ears and your heart sing; in the words of an unverified
quotation from the Scots psalms, you feel yourself fit "on the wings of
all the winds" to "come flying all abroad." Europe and your mind are too
narrow for that flood of energy. Yet it is notable that you are hard to
root out of your bed; that you start forth, singing, indeed, on your
walk, yet are unusually ready to turn home again; that the best of you
is volatile; and that although the restlessness remains till night, the
strength is early at an end. With all these heady jollities, you are
half conscious of an underlying languor in the body; you prove not to be
so well as you had fancied; you weary before you have well begun; and
though you mount at morning with the lark, that is not precisely a
song-bird's heart that you bring back with you when you return with
aching limbs and peevish temper to your inn.
It is hard to say wherein it lies, but this joy of Alpine winters is its
own reward. Baseless, in a sense, it is more than worth more permanent
improvements. The dream of health is perfect while it lasts; and if, in
trying to realise it, you speedily wear out the dear hallucination,
still every day, and many times a day, you are conscious of a strength
you scarce possess, and a delight in living as merry as it proves to be
transient.
The brightness--heaven and earth conspiring to be bright--the levity and
quiet of the air; the odd stirring silence--more stirring than a tumult;
the snow, the frost, the enchanted landscape: all have their part in the
effect and on the memory, "_tous vous tapent sur la tête_"; and yet when
you have enumerated all, you have gone no nearer to explain or even to
qualify the delicate exhilaration that you feel--delicate, you may say,
and yet excessive, greater than can be said in prose, almost greater
than an invalid can bear. There is a certain wine of France known in
England in some gaseous disguise, but when drunk in the land of its
nativity still as a pool, clean as river water, and as heady as verse.
It is more than probable that in its noble natural condition this was
the very wine of Anjou so beloved by Athos in the "Musketeers." Now, if
the reader has ever washed down a liberal second breakfast with the wine
in question, and gone forth, on the back of these dilutions, into a
sultry, sparkling noontide, he will have felt an influence almost as
genial, although strangely grosser, than this fairy titillation of the
nerves among the snow and sunshine of the Alps. That also is a mode, we
need not say of intoxication, but of insobriety. Thus also a man walks
in a strong sunshine of the mind, and follows smiling, insubstantial
meditations. And whether he be really so clever or so strong as he
supposes, in either case he will enjoy his chimera while it lasts.
The influence of this giddy air displays itself in many secondary ways.
A certain sort of laboured pleasantry has already been recognised, and
may perhaps have been remarked in these papers, as a sort peculiar to
that climate. People utter their judgments with a cannonade of
syllables; a big word is as good as a meal to them; and the turn of a
phrase goes further than humour or wisdom. By the professional writer
many sad vicissitudes have to be undergone. At first he cannot write at
all. The heart, it appears, is unequal to the pressure of business, and
the brain, left without nourishment, goes into a mild decline. Next,
some power of work returns to him, accompanied by jumping headaches.
Last, the spring is opened, and there pours at once from his pen a world
of blatant, hustling polysyllables, and talk so high as, in the old
joke, to be positively offensive in hot weather. He writes it in good
faith and with a sense of inspiration; it is only when he comes to read
what he has written that surprise and disquiet seize upon his mind. What
is he to do, poor man? All his little fishes talk like whales. This
yeasty inflation, this stiff and strutting architecture of the sentence
has come upon him while he slept; and it is not he, it is the Alps, who
are to blame. He is not, perhaps, alone, which somewhat comforts him.
Nor is the ill without a remedy. Some day, when the spring returns, he
shall go down a little lower in this world, and remember quieter
inflections and more modest language. But here, in the meantime, there
seems to swim up some outline of a new cerebral hygiene and a good time
coming, when experienced advisers shall send a man to the proper
measured level for the ode, the biography, or the religious tract; and a
nook may be found between the sea and Chimborazo, where Mr. Swinburne
shall be able to write more continently, and Mr. Browning somewhat
slower.
Is it a return of youth, or is it a congestion of the brain? It is a
sort of congestion, perhaps, that leads the invalid, when all goes well,
to face the new day with such a bubbling cheerfulness. It is certainly
congestion that makes night hideous with visions, all the chambers of a
many-storied caravanserai, haunted with vociferous nightmares, and many
wakeful people come down late for breakfast in the morning. Upon that
theory the cynic may explain the whole affair--exhilaration, nightmares,
pomp of tongue and all. But, on the other hand, the peculiar blessedness
of boyhood may itself be but a symptom of the same complaint, for the
two effects are strangely similar; and the frame of mind of the invalid
upon the Alps is a sort of intermittent youth, with periods of
lassitude. The fountain of Juventus does not play steadily in these
parts; but there it plays, and possibly nowhere else.
STEVENSON AT PLAY
STEVENSON AT PLAY
INTRODUCTION BY MR. LLOYD OSBOURNE
In an old note-book, soiled and dog-eared by much travelling, yellow and
musty with the long years it had lain hid in a Samoan chest, the present
writer came across the mimic war correspondence here presented to the
public. The stirring story of these tin-soldier campaigns occupies the
greater share of the book, though interspersed with many pages of
scattered verse, not a little Gaelic idiom and verb, a half-made will
and the chaptering of a novel. This game of tin soldiers, an intricate
"Kriegspiel," involving rules innumerable, prolonged arithmetical
calculations, constant measuring with foot-rules, and the throwing of
dice, sprang from the humblest beginnings--a row of soldiers on either
side and a deadly marble. From such a start it grew in size and
complexity until it became mimic war indeed, modelled closely upon real
conditions and actual warfare, requiring, on Stevenson's part, the use
of text-books and long conversations with military invalids; on mine,
all the pocket-money derived from my publishing ventures as well as a
considerable part of my printing stock in trade.
The abiding spirit of the child in Stevenson was seldom shown in more
lively fashion than during those days of exile at Davos, where he
brought a boy's eagerness, a man's intellect, a novelist's imagination,
into the varied business of my holiday hours; the printing press, the
toy theatre, the tin soldiers, all engaged his attention. Of these,
however, the tin soldiers most took his fancy; and the war game was
constantly improved and elaborated, until from a few hours a "war" took
weeks to play, and the critical operations in the attic monopolised half
our thoughts. This attic was a most chilly and dismal spot, reached by a
crazy ladder, and unlit save for a single frosted window; so low at the
eaves and so dark that we could seldom stand upright, nor see without a
candle. Upon the attic floor a map was roughly drawn in chalks of
different colours, with mountains, rivers, towns, bridges, and roads of
two classes. Here we would play by the hour, with tingling fingers and
stiffening knees, and an intentness, zest, and excitement that I shall
never forget. The mimic battalions marched and counter-marched, changed
by measured evolutions from column formation into line, with cavalry
screens in front and massed supports behind, in the most approved
military fashion of to-day. It was war in miniature, even to the making
and destruction of bridges, the entrenching of camps, good and bad
weather, with corresponding influence on the roads, siege and horse
artillery proportionately slow, as compared to the speed of unimpeded
foot and proportionately expensive in the upkeep; and an exacting
commissariat added to the last touch of verisimilitude. Four men formed
the regiment or unit, and our shots were in proportion to our units and
amount of ammunition. The troops carried carts of printers'
"ems"--twenty "ems" to each cart--and for every shot taken an "em" had
to be paid into the base, from which fresh supplies could be slowly
drawn in empty carts returned for the purpose. As a large army often
contained thirty regiments, consuming a cart and a half of ammunition in
every engagement (not to speak of the heavy additional expense of
artillery), it will be seen what an important part the commissariat
played in the game, and how vital to success became the line of
communication to the rear. A single cavalry brigade, if bold and lucky
enough, could break the line at the weakest link, and by cutting off the
sustenance of a vast army could force it to fall back in the full tide
of success. A well-devised flank attack, the plucky destruction of a
bridge, or the stubborn defence of a town, might each become a factor in
changing the face of the war and materially alter the course of
campaigns.
It must not be supposed that the enemy ever knew your precise strength,
or that it could divine your intentions by the simple expedient of
looking at your side of the attic and counting your regiments. Numerous
numbered cards dotted the country wherever the eye might fall; one,
perhaps, representing a whole army with supports, another a solitary
horseman dragging some ammunition, another nothing but a dummy that
might paralyse the efforts of a corps, and overawe it into a ruinous
inactivity. To uncover these cards and unmask the forces for which they
stood was the duty of the cavalry vedettes, whose movements were
governed by an elaborate and most vexatious set of rules. It was
necessary to feel your way amongst these alarming pasteboards to obtain
an inkling of your opponent's plans, and the first dozen moves were
often spent in little less. But even if you were befriended by the dice,
and your cavalry broke the enemy's screen and uncovered his front, you
would learn nothing more than could reasonably be gleaned with a
field-glass. The only result of a daring and costly activity might be
such meagre news as "the road is blocked with artillery and infantry in
column" or "you can perceive light horse-artillery strongly supported."
It was only when the enemy began to take his shots that you would begin
to learn the number of his regiments, and even then he often fired less
than his entitled share in order to maintain the mystery of his
strength.
If the game possessed a weakness, it was the unshaken courage of our
troops, who faced the most terrific odds and endured defeat upon defeat
with an intrepidity rarely seen on the actual field. An attempt was made
to correct this with the dice, but the innovation was so heart-breaking
to the loser, and so perpetual a menace to the best-laid plans, that it
had perforce to be given up. After two or three dice-box panics our
heroes were permitted to resume their normal and unprecedented devotion
to their cause, and their generals breathed afresh. There was another
defect in our "Kriegspiel": I was so much the better shot that my
marksmanship often frustrated the most admirable strategy and the most
elaborate of military schemes. It was in vain that we--or rather my
opponent--wrestled with the difficulty and tried to find a substitute
for the deadly and discriminating pop-gun. It was all of no use.
Whatever the missile--sleeve-fink, marble, or button--I was invariably
the better shot, and that skill stood me in good stead on many an
ensanguined plain, and helped to counteract the inequality between a boy
of twelve and a man of mature years. A wise discretion ruled with regard
to the _personnel_ of the fighting line. Stevenson possessed a horde of
particularly chubby cavalrymen, who, when marshalled in close formation
at the head of the infantry, could bear unscathed the most accurate and
overwhelming fire, and thus shelter their weaker brethren in the rear.
This was offset by his "Old Guard," whose unfortunate peculiarity of
carrying their weapons at the charge often involved whole regiments in
a common ruin. On my side there was a multitude of flimsy Swiss, for
whom I trembled whenever they were called to action. These Swiss were so
weak upon their legs that the merest breath would mow them down in
columns, and so deficient in stamina that they would often fall before
they were hurt. Their ranks were burdened, too, with a number of
egregious puppets with musical instruments, who never fell without
entangling a few of their comrades.
Another improvement that was tried and soon again given up was an effort
to match the sickness of actual war. Certain zones were set apart as
unwholesome, especially those near great rivers and lakes, and troops
unfortunate enough to find themselves in these miasmic plains had to
undergo the ordeal of the dice-box. Swiss or Guards, musicians, Arabs,
chubby cavalrymen or thin, all had to pay Death's toll in a new and
frightful form. But we rather overdid the miasma, so it was abolished by
mutual consent.
The war which forms the subject of the present paper was unusual in no
respect save that its operations were chronicled from day to day in a
public press of Stevenson's imagination, and reported by daring
correspondents on the field. Nothing is more eloquent of the man than
the particularity and care with which this mimic war correspondence was
compiled; the author of the "Child's Garden" had never outgrown his love
for childish things, and it is typical of him that, though he mocks us
at every turn and loses no occasion to deride the puppets in the play,
he is everywhere faithful to the least detail of fact. It must not be
supposed that I was privileged to hear these records daily read and thus
draw my plans against the morrow; on the contrary, they were sometimes
held back until the military news was staled by time or were guardedly
communicated with blanks for names and the dead unnumbered. Potty,
Pipes, and Piffle were very real to me, and lived like actual people in
that dim garret. I can still see them through the mist of years; the
formidable General Stevenson, corpulent with solder, a detachable midget
who could be mounted upon a fresh steed whenever his last had been
trodden under foot, whose frame gave evidence of countless mendings; the
emaciated Delafield, with the folded arms, originally a simple
artilleryman, but destined to reach the highest honours; Napoleon, with
the flaming clothes, whom fate had bound to a very fragile horse;
Green, the simple patriot, who took his name from his coat; and the
redoubtable Lafayette in blue, alas! with no Washington to help him.
The names of that attic country fall pleasantly upon the ear and
brighten the dark and bloody page of war: Scarlet, Glendarule, Sandusky,
Mar, Tahema, and Savannah; how sweetly they run! I must except my own
(and solitary) contribution to the map, Samuel City, which sounds out of
key with these mouthfuls of melody, though none the less an important
point. Yallobally I shall always recall with bitterness, for it was
there I first felt the thorn of a vindictive press. The reader will see
what little cause I had to love the _Yallobally Record_, a scurrilous
sheet that often made my heart ache, for all I pretended to laugh and
see the humour of its attacks. It was indeed a relief when I learned I
might exert my authority and suppress its publication--and even hang the
editor--which I did, I fear, with unseemly haste. It will be noticed
that the story of the war begins on the tenth day, the earlier moves
being without interest save to the combatants themselves, passed as they
were in uncovering the cards on either side; and in learning, with more
or less success, the forces for which they stood. This was an essential
but scarcely stirring branch of tin-soldiering, and has been accordingly
unreported as too tedious even for the columns of the _Yallobally
Record_. When the veil had been somewhat lifted and the shadowy armies
discerned with some precision, the historian takes his pen and awaits
the clash of arms.
LLOYD OSBOURNE
WAR CORRESPONDENCE FROM STEVENSON'S NOTE-BOOK
GLENDARULE TIMES.--10th. _Scarlet_.--"The advance of the enemy continues
along three lines, a light column moving from Tahema on Grierson, and
the main body concentrating on Garrard from the Savannah and Yallobally
roads. Garrard and Grierson have both been evacuated. A small force,
without artillery, is alone in the neighbourhood of Cinnabar, and some
of that has fallen back on Glentower by the pass. The brave artillery
remains in front of Scarlet, and was reinforced this morning with some
ammunition. All day infantry has been moving eastward on Sandusky. The
greatest depression prevails."
_Editorial Comment_.--General Stevenson may, or may not, be a capable
commander. It would be unjust to pronounce in the meantime. Still, the
attempt to seize Mar was disastrously miscalculated, and, as we all
know, the column has fallen back on Sandusky with cruel loss. Nor is it
possible to deny that the attempt to hold Grierson, and keep an army in
the west, was idle. Our correspondent at Scarlet mentions the passage of
troops moving eastward through that place, and the retreat of another
column on Glentower. These are the last wrecks of that Army of the West,
from which great things were once expected. With the exception of the
Yolo column, which is without guns, all our forces are now concentrated
in the province of Sandusky; Blue Mountain Province is particularly
deserted, and nothing has been done to check, even for an hour, the
advance of our numerous and well-appointed foes.
11th. _Scarlet_.--The horse-artillery returned through Scarlet on the
Glendarule road; hideous confusion reigns; were the enemy to fall upon
us now, the best opinions regard our position as hopeless. Authentic
news has been received of the desertion of Cinnabar.
_Sandusky_.--The enemy has again appeared, threatening Mar, and the
column moving to the relief of the Yolo column has stopped in its
advance in consequence. General Stevenson moved out a column with
artillery, and crushed a flanking party of the enemy's great centre army
on Scarlet, Garrard, and Savannah road; no loss was sustained on our
side; the enemy's loss is officially calculated at four hundred killed
or wounded.
_Scarlet_.--At last the moment has arrived. The enemy, with a strong
column of horse and horse-artillery, occupied Grierson this morning.
This, with his Army of the Centre moving steadily forward upon Garrard,
places all the troops in and around this place in imminent danger of
being entirely cut off, or being forced to retreat before overwhelming
forces across the Blue Mountains, a course, according to all military
men, involving the total destruction of General Potty's force. Piffle's
whole corps, with the heavy artillery, continued its descent on the left
bank of the Sandusky river, while Potty, dashing through Scarlet at the
hand-gallop, and among the cheers of the populace, moved off along the
Grierson road, collecting infantry as he moved, and riding himself at
the head of the horse-artillery.
NOTE.--General Potty was an airy, amiable, affected creature, the very
soul of bravery and levity. He had risen rapidly by virtue of his
pleasing manners; but his application was small, and he lacked
self-reliance at the Council Board. Piffle called him a parrot; he
returned the compliment by calling Piffle "the hundred-weight of
bricks." They were scarce on speaking terms.
Half an hour after, he had driven the fore-guard of the enemy out of
Grierson without the loss of a trooper on our side; the enemy's loss is
reckoned at 1,600 men. I telegraph at this juncture before returning to
the field. So far the work is done; Potty has behaved nobly. But he
remains isolated by the retreat of Piffle, with a large force in front,
and another large force advancing on his unprotected flank.
_Editorial Comment_.--We have been successful in two skirmishes, but the
situation is felt to be critical, and is by some supposed to be
desperate. Stevenson's skirmish on the 11th did not check the advance of
the Army of the Centre; it is impossible to predict the result of
Potty's success before Grierson. The Yolo column appears to meet with no
resistance; but it is terribly committed, and is, it must be remembered,
quite helpless for offensive purposes, without the co-operation of
Stevenson from Sandusky. How that can be managed, while the enemy hold
the pass behind Mar, is more than we can see. Some shrewd, but perhaps
too hopeful, critics perceive a deep policy in the inactivity of our
troops about Sandusky, and believe that Stevenson is luring on the
cautious Osbourne to his ruin. We will hope so; but this does not
explain Piffle's senseless counter-marchings around Scarlet, nor the
horribly outflanked and unsupported position of Potty on the line of the
Cinnabar river. If General Osbourne were a child, we might hope for the
best; there is no doubt that he has been careless about Mar and Yolo,
and that he was yesterday only saved from a serious disaster by a fluke,
and the imperfection of our scout system; but the situation to the west
and centre wears a different complexion; there his steady, well-combined
advance, carrying all before him, contrasts most favourably with the
timid and divided counsels of our Stevensons, Piffles, and Pottys.
[Illustration: _From the original sketch in Stevenson's Note-book_]
YALLOBALLY RECORD.--"That incompetent shuffler, General Osbourne, has
again put his foot into it. Blundering into Grierson with a lot of
unsupported horse, he has got exactly what he deserved. The whole
command was crushed by that wide-awake fellow, Potty, and a lot of guns
and ammunition lie ignominiously deserted on our own side of the river.
All this through mere chuckle-headed incompetence and the neglect of the
most elementary precautions, within a day's march of two magnificent
armies, either of which, under any sane, soldierly man, is capable of
marching right through to Glendarule.
"This is the last scandal. Yesterday, it was a whole regiment cut off
between the Garrard road and the Sandusky river, and cut off without
firing or being able to fire a single shot in self-defence. It is an
open secret that the men behind Mar are starving, and that the whole
east and the city of Savannah were within a day of being deserted. How
long is this disorganisation to go on? How long is that bloated
bondholder to go prancing round on horseback, wall-eyed and
muddle-headed, while his men are starved and butchered, and the forces
of this great country are at the mercy of clever rogues like Potty, or
respectable mediocrities like Stevenson?"
General Piffle's force was, I learn, attacked this morning from across
the river by the whole weight of the enemy's centre. Supports were being
hurried forward. Ammunition was scarce. A feeling of anxiety, not
unmixed with hope, is the rule.
_Noon_.--I am now back in Scarlet, as being more central to both actions
now raging, one along the line of the Sandusky between General Piffle
and the Army of the Centre, the other toward Grierson between Potty and
the corps of Generals Green and Lafayette. News has come from both
quarters. Piffle, who was at one time thought to be overwhelmed, has
held his ground on the Sandusky highroad; and by last advices his whole
supports had come into line, and he hoped, by a last effort, to carry
the day. His losses have been severe; they are estimated at 2,600 killed
and wounded; but it appears from the reports of captives that the
enemy's losses must amount to 3,000 at least. The fate of the engagement
still trembles in the balance. From the battle at Grierson, the news is
both encouraging and melancholy. The enemy has once more been driven
across the rivers, and even some distance behind the town of Grierson
itself on the Tahema road; he has certainly lost 2,400 men, principally
horse; but he has succeeded in carrying off his guns and ammunition in
the face of our attack, and his immense reserves are close at hand. Both
Green and Lafayette are sent wounded to the rear; it is unknown who now
commands their column. These successes, necessary as they were felt to
be, were somewhat dearly purchased. Two thousand six hundred men are
_hors de combat_; and the chivalrous Potty is himself seriously hurt.
This has cast a shade of anxiety over our triumph; and though the light
column is still pushing its advantage under Lieutenant-General Pipes, it
is felt that nothing but a complete success of the main body under
Piffle can secure us from the danger of complete investment.
14th. _Scarlet_.--The engagement ended last night by the complete
evacuation of Grierson. Pipes cleared the whole country about that town
in splendid style, and the army encamped on the field of battle; sadly
reduced indeed, but victorious for the moment. The enemy, since their
first appearance at Grierson, have lost 4,400 men, and have been beaten
decisively back. There is now not a man on our side of the Sandusky; and
our loss of 2,600 is serious indeed, but, seeing how much has been
accomplished, not excessive. The enemy's horse was cut to pieces.
Piffle slept on the ground that he had held all day. In the afternoon he
had once more driven back the head of the enemy's columns, inflicting a
further loss of 3,200 killed and wounded at the lowest computation; but
the enemy's camp-fires can still be plainly made out with a field-glass,
in the same position as the night before. This is scarcely to be called
success, although it is certainly not failure.
_Sandusky_.--All quiet at Sandusky; the army has fallen back into the
city, and large reserves are still massed behind.
_Editorial Comment_.--The battle of Grierson is a distinct success; the
enemy, with a heavy loss, have been beaten back to their own side. As to
the vital engagement on the Sandusky and the heavy fighting before Yolo,
it is plain that we must wait for further news of both. In neither case
has any decided advantage crowned our arms, and if we are to judge by
the expressions of the commander-in-chief to our Sandusky correspondent,
the course of the former still leaves room for the most serious
apprehensions. General Potty, we are glad to assure our readers, will be
once more in the saddle before many days. It is an odd coincidence that
all the principal commanders in the battle of Grierson were at one
period or another of the day carried to the rear; and that none of the
three is seriously hurt. Green and Lafayette were shot down, it appears,
within a few moments of each other. It was reported that they had been
having high words as to the reckless advance over the Sandusky, each
charging the blame upon the other; but it seems certain that the fault
was Lafayette's, who was in chief command, and was present in Grierson
itself at the time of the fatal manoeuvre. The result would have been
crushing, had not General Potty been left for some hours utterly without
ammunition; Commissary Scuttlebutt is loudly blamed. To-morrow's news is
everywhere awaited with an eagerness approaching to agony.
15th. _Scarlet_.--Late last night, orders reached General Pipes to fall
back on this place, where his reserves were diverted to support Piffle,
hard-pressed on the Sandusky. This morning the manoeuvre was effected
in good order, the enemy following us through Grierson and capturing one
hundred prisoners. The battle was resumed on the Sandusky with the same
fury; and it is still raging as I write. The enemy's Army of the Centre
is commanded, as we learn from stragglers, by General Napoleon; they
boast of large supports arriving, both from Savannah and Tahema
directions. The slaughter is something appalling; the whole of Potty's
infantry corps has marched to support Piffle; and as we have now no more
men within a day's ride, it is feared the enemy may yet manage to carry
Garrard and command the line of the river.
_Sandusky_.--This morning, General Stevenson marched out of town to the
southward on the Savannah and Sandusky road. It was fully expected that
he would have mounted the Sandusky river to support Piffle and engage
the enemy's Army of the Centre on the flank; and the present manoeuvre
is loudly criticised. Not only is the integrity of the line of the
Sandusky ventured, but Stevenson's own force is now engaged in a most
awkward country, with a difficult bridge in front. To add, if possible,
to our anxiety, it is reported that General Delafield, in yesterday's
engagement, lost 3,200 men, killed and wounded. He held his ground,
however, and by the last advices had killed 800 and taken 1,400
prisoners, with which he had fallen back again on Yolo itself. This
retrogression, it seems, is in accordance with his original orders: he
was either to hold Yolo, or if possible advance on Savannah via Brierly.
This last he judged unwise, so that he was obliged to cling to Yolo
itself. This also is seriously criticised in the best-informed circles.
Osbourne himself is reported to be in Savannah.
YALLOBALLY RECORD.--"We have never concealed our opinion that Osbourne
was a bummer and a scallywag; but the entire collapse of his campaign
beats the worst that we imagined possible. We have received, at the same
moment, news of Green and Lafayette's column being beaten ignominiously
back again across the Sandusky river and out of Grierson, a place on our
own side; and next of the appearance of a large body of troops at Yolo,
in the very heart of this great land, where they seem to have played the
very devil, taking prisoners by the hundred and marching with arrogant
footsteps on the sacred soil of the province of Savannah. General
Napoleon, the only commander who has not yet disgraced himself, still
fights an uphill battle in the centre, inflicting terrific losses and
upholding the honour of his country single-handed. The infamous Osbourne
is shaking in his spectacles at Savannah. He was roundly taken to task
by a public-spirited reporter, and babbled meaningless excuses; he did
not know, he said, that the force now falling in on us at Yolo was so
large. It was his business to know. What is he paid for? That force has
been ten days at least turning the east of the Mar Mountains, a week at
least on our own side of the frontier. Where were Osbourne's wits? Will
it be believed, the column at Lone Bluff is again short of ammunition?
This old man of the sea, whom all the world knows to be an ass and whom
we can prove to be a coward, is apparently a peculator also. If we were
to die to-morrow, the word Osbourne would be found engraven backside
foremost on our hearts."
Note. _The Tergiversation of the Army of the West_.--The delay of the
Army of the West, and the timorous counsels of Green and Lafayette, were
the salvation of Potty, Pipes, and Piffle. This is the third time we
hear of this great army crossing the river. It never should have left
hold. Lafayette had an overwhelming force at his back; and with a little
firmness, a little obstinacy even, he might have swallowed up the thin
lines opposed to him. On this day, the 16th, when we hear of his leaving
Grierson for the third time, his headquarters should have been in
Scarlet, and his guns should have enfiladed the weak posts of Piffle.
_Sandusky. Noon_.--Great gloom here. As everyone predicted, Stevenson
has already lost 600 men in the marshes at the mouth of the Sandusky,
men simply sacrificed. His wilful conduct in not mounting the river,
following on his melancholy defeat before Mar, and his long and fatal
hesitation as to the Armies of the West and Centre, fill up the measure
of his incapacity. His uncontrolled temper and undisguised incivility,
not only to the Press, but to fellow-soldiers of the stamp of Piffle,
have alienated from him even the sympathy that sometimes improperly
consoles demerit.
_Editorial_.--We leave our correspondents to speak for themselves,
reserving our judgment with a heavy heart. Piffle has the sympathy of
the nation.
_Scarlet_. 9 P.M.--The attack has ceased. Napoleon is moving off
southward. Our fellows smartly pursued and cut off 1,600 men; in
spreading along the other side of the Sandusky they fell on a flanking
column of the enemy's Army of the West and sent it to the right-about
with a loss of 800 left upon the field. This shows how perilously near
to a junction these two formidable armies were, and should increase our
joy at Napoleon's retreat. That movement is variously explained, but
many suppose it is due to some advance from Sandusky.
_Sandusky_.8 P.M.--Stevenson this afternoon occupied the angle between
the Glendarule and the Sandusky; his guns command the Garrard and
Savannah highroad, the only line of retreat for General Napoleon's guns,
and he has already hopelessly defeated and scattered a strong body of
supports advancing from Savannah to the aid of that commander. The enemy
lost 1,600 men; it is thought that this success and Stevenson's present
position involve the complete destruction or the surrender of the
enemy's Army of the Centre. The enemy have retired from the passes
behind Mar; but it is thought they have moved too late to save Savannah.
Pleasant news from Colonel Delafield, who, with a loss of 600, has
destroyed thrice that number of the enemy before Yolo.
17th. _Scarlet_.--The enemy turned last night, inflicting losses on the
combined forces of Generals Pipes and Piffle, amounting together to
1,600 men. But his retreat still continues, harassed by our cavalry and
guns. The rest of the troops out of Cinnabar have arrived, via
Glentower, at the foot of the Blue Mountains. Everyone is in high
spirits. Potty has resumed command of his division; I met him half an
hour ago at lunch, when he expressed himself delighted with the
campaign.
_Sandusky_.--A great victory must be announced. Today Stevenson passed
the Sandusky, and occupied the right bank of the Glendarule and the
country in front of Savannah. General Napoleon, in full retreat upon
that place, found himself cut off, and, after a desperate struggle, in
which 2,600 fell, surrendered with 6,000 men. The wrecks of his army are
scattered far and wide, and his guns are lying deserted on the Garrard
road. At the very moment while Napoleon was surrendering his sword to
General Stevenson, the head of our colours cut off 1,400 men before
Savannah, which was under the fire of our guns, and destroyed a convoy
on the Mar and Savannah highroad. This completes the picture; the enemy
have now only one bridge over the Glendarule not swept by our artillery.
Delafield has had another partial success; with a loss of 1,000 he has
cut off 1,200 and made 400 prisoners, but a strong force ts reported on
the Yolo and Yallobally road, which, by placing him between two fires,
may soon render his hold on the Yolo untenable.
Note.--General Napoleon. His real name was Clamborough. The son of a
well-known linen-draper in Yolo, he was educated at the military college
of Savannah. His chief fault was an overwhelming vanity, which betrayed
itself in his unfortunate assumption of a pseudonym, and in the gorgeous
Oriental costumes by which he rendered himself conspicuous and absurd.
He received early warning of Stevenson's advance from Sandusky, but
refused to be advised, and did not begin to retreat until his army was
already circumvented. A characteristic anecdote is told of the
surrender. "General," said Napoleon to his captor, "you have to-day
immortalised your name." "Sir," returned Stevenson, whose brutality of
manner was already proverbial, "if you had taken as much trouble to
direct your army as your tailor to make your clothes, our positions
might have been reversed."
[Illustration: From the original sketch in Stevenson's Note-book]
_Editorial Comment_.--Unlike many others, we have never lost confidence
in General Stevenson; indeed, as our readers may remember, we have
always upheld him as a capable, even a great commander. Some little
ruffle at Scarlet did occur, but it was, no doubt, chargeable to the
hasty Potty; and now, by one of the finest manoeuvres on record, the
head general of our victorious armies has justified our most hopeful
prophecies and aspirations. There is not, perhaps, an officer in the
army who would not have chosen the obvious and indecisive move up the
Sandusky, which even our correspondent, able as he is, referred to with
apparent approval. Had Stevenson done that, the brave enemy who chooses
to call himself Napoleon might have been defeated twelve hours earlier,
and there would have been less sacrifice of life in the divisions of
Potty and the ignorant Piffle. But the enemy's retreat would not have
been cut off; his general would not now have been a prisoner in our
camp, nor should our cannon, advanced boldly into the country of our
foes, thunder against the gates of Savannah and cut off the supplies
from the army behind Mar. A glance at the map will show the authority of
our position; not a loaf of bread, not an ounce of powder can reach
Savannah or the enemy's Army of the East, but it must run the gauntlet
of our guns. And this is the result produced by the turning movement at
Yolo, General Stevenson's long inactivity in Sandusky, and his advance
at last, the one right movement and in the one possible direction.
YALLOBALLY RECORD.--"The humbug who had the folly and indecency to pick
up the name of Napoleon second-hand at a sale of old pledges, has been
thrashed and is a prisoner. Except the Army of the West, and the
division on the Mar road, which is commanded by an old woman, we have
nothing on foot but scattered, ragamuffin regiments. Savannah is under
fire; that will teach Osbourne to skulk in cities instead of going to
the front with the poor devils whom he butchers by his ignorance and
starves with his peculations. What we want to know is, when is Osbourne
to be shot?"
Note.--The _Record_ editor, a man of the name of McGuffog, was
subsequently hanged by order of General Osbourne. Public opinion
endorsed this act of severity. My great-uncle, Mr. Phelim Settle, was
present and saw him with the nightcap on and a file of his journals
around his neck; when he was turned off, the applause, according to Mr.
Settle, was deafening. He was a man, as the extracts prove, not without
a kind of vulgar talent.
YALLOBALLY EVENING HERALD.--"It would be idle to disguise the fact that
the retreat of our Army of the Centre, and the accidental capture of the
accomplished soldier whose modesty conceals itself under the pseudonym
of Napoleon, have created a slight though baseless feeling of alarm in
this city. Nearer the field the troops are quite steady, the inhabitants
enthusiastic, and the loyal and indefatigable Osbourne multiplies his
bodily presence. The events of yesterday were much exaggerated by some
papers, and the publication of one rowdy sheet, suspected of receiving
pay from the enemy, has been suspended by an order from headquarters.
Our Army of the West still advances triumphantly unresisted into the
heart of the enemy's country; the force at Yolo, which is a mere handful
and quite without artillery, will probably be rooted out to-morrow.
Addresses and congratulations pour in to General Osbourne; subscriptions
to the great testimonial Osbourne statue are received at the _Herald_
office every day between the hours of 10 and 4."
ABSTRACT OF SIX DAYS' FIGHTING, FROM THE 19TH TO THE 24TH, FROM THE
GLENDARULE TIMES SATURDAY SPECIAL.--"This week has been, on the whole,
unimportant; there are few changes in the aspect of the field of war,
and perhaps the most striking fact is the collapse of Colonel
Delafield's Yolo column. Fourteen hundred killed and eighteen hundred
prisoners is assuredly a serious consideration for our small army; yet
the good done by that expedition is not wiped away by the present
defeat; large reinforcements of troops and much ammunition have been
directed into the far east, and the city of Savannah and the enemy's
forces in the pass have thus been left without support. Delafield
himself has reached Mar, now in our hands, and the cavalry and stores of
the expedition, all safe, are close behind him. Yolo is a name that will
never be forgotten. Our forces are now thus disposed: Potty, with the
brave artillery, lies behind the south-east shoulder of the Blue
Mountains, on the Sandusky and Samuel City road; Piffle, with the Army
of the Centre, has fallen back into Sandusky itself; while Stevenson
still holds the same position across the Sandusky river, his advance to
which will constitute his chief claim to celebrity. Savannah was
bombarded from the 18th to the 20th, inclusive; 4,000 men fell in its
defence. Osbourne himself, directing operations, was seriously wounded
and sent to Yallobally; and on the evening of the 20th the city
surrendered, only 600 men being found within its walls. A heavy
contribution was raised: but the general himself, fearing to expose his
communications, remains in the same position and has not even occupied
the fallen city.
"In the meantime the army from the pass has been slowly drawing down to
the support of Savannah, suffering cruelly at every step. Yesterday
(24th) Mar was occupied by a corps of our infantry, who fell on the rear
of the retreating enemy, inflicting heavy loss."
NOTE.--Retreat of the Mar column. The army which so long and so usefully
held the passes behind Mar, over the neck of Long Bluff, did not begin
to retreat until the enemy had already occupied Mar and begun to engage
their outposts. Supplies had already been cut off by the advanced
position of Stevenson. The men were short of bread. The roads were
heavy; the horses starving. The rear of the column was continually and
disastrously engaged with the enemy pouring after. It is perhaps the
saddest chapter in the history of the war. My grandmother, Mrs. Hankey
(_née_ Pillworthy), then a young girl on a mountain farm on the line of
the retreat, distinctly remembers giving a soda biscuit, which was
greedily received, to Colonel Diggory Jacks, then in command of our
division, and lending him an umbrella, which was never returned. This
incident, trivial as it may be thought, emphatically depicts the
destitution of our brave soldiers.
In the meantime, in the west, the enemy are slowly passing the rivers
and advancing with their main body on Scarlet, and with a single corps
on Glentower. Cinnabar was occupied on the 21st in the morning, and a
heavy contribution raised. The situation may thus be stated: In the
centre we are the sole arbiters, commanding the roads and holding a
position which can only be described as authoritative. In the east,
Delafield's corps has been destroyed; but the enemy's army of the pass,
on the other hand, is in a critical position and may, in the course of a
few days or so, be forced to lay down its arms. In the west, nothing as
yet is decided, and the movement through the Glentower Pass somewhat
hampers General Potty's position.
The comparative losses during these days are very encouraging, and
compare pleasingly with the cost of the early part of the campaign. The
enemy have lost 12,800 men, killed, wounded, and prisoners, as against
4,800 on our side.
YALLOBALLY HERALD.--Interview from General Osbourne with a special
reporter.--"I met the wounded hero some miles out of Yallobally, still
working, even as he walked, and surrounded by messengers from every
quarter. After the usual salutations, he inquired what paper I
represented, and received the name of the _Herald_ with satisfaction.
'It is a decent paper,' he said. 'It does not seek to obstruct a general
in the exercise of his discretion.' He spoke hopefully of the west and
east, and explained that the collapse of our centre was not so serious
as might have been imagined. 'It is unfortunate,' he said, 'but if Green
succeeds in his double advance on Glendarule, and if our army can
continue to keep up even the show of resistance in the province of
Savannah, Stevenson dare not advance upon the capital; that would expose
his communications too seriously for such a cautious and often cowardly
commander. I call him cowardly,' he added, 'even in the face of the
desperate Yolo expedition, for you see he is withdrawing all along the
west, and Green, though now in the heart of his country, encounters no
resistance.' The General hopes soon to recover; his wound, though
annoying, presents no character of gravity."
NOTE.--General Osbourne's perfect sincerity is doubtful. He must have
known that Green was hopelessly short of ammunition. "Unfortunate," as
an epithet describing the collapse of the Army of the Centre, is perhaps
without parallel in military criticism. It was not unfortunate, it was
ruinous. Stevenson was a man of uneven character, whom his own successes
rendered timid; this timidity it was that delayed the end; but the war
was really over when General Napoleon surrendered his sword on the
afternoon of the 17th.
THE DAVOS PRESS
_In the Reproductions which follow of Moral Emblems, etc., by R. L.
Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne, the tint shows the actual size of the
paper on which the pamphlets were printed_
NOTICE.
Today is published by _S. L. Osbourne & Co._
ILLUSTRATED
BLACK CANYON,
_or_
Wild Adventures in the FAR WEST.
AN
Instructive and amusing TALE written by
_SAMUEL LLOYD OSBOURNE_
PRICE 6D.
OPINIONS OF THE PRESS.
Although _Black Canyon_ is rather shorter than ordinary for that kind of
story, it is an excellent work. We cordially recommend it to our
readers.
_Weekly Messenger._
S. L. Osbourne's new work (_Black Canyon_) is splendidly illustrated. In
the story, the characters are bold and striking. It reflects the highest
honor on its writer.
_Morning Call._
A very remarkable work. Every page produces an effect. The end is as
singular as the beginning. I never saw such a work before.
_R. L. Stevenson._
BLACK CANYON,
_or_
Wild Adventures in the FAR WEST
A
Tale of Instruction and Amusement
for the Young.
_BY_
_SAMUEL OSBOURNE_
ILLUSTRATED.
_Printed by the Author._
Davos-Platz.
_Chapter I._
In this forest we see, in a misty morning, a camp fire! Sitting lazily
around it are three men. The oldest is evidently a sailor. The sailor
turns to the fellow next to him and says, "blast my eyes if I know where
we is." "I's rather think we're in the vecenty of tho Rocky Mount'ins."
Remarked the young man.
Suddenly the bushes parted. 'WHAT!' they all exclaim, '_Not BLACK
EAGLE?_'
Who is Black Eagle? We shall see.
_Chapter II._
James P. Drake was a gambler! Not in cards, but _in lost luggage_! In
America, all baggage etc. lost on trains and not reclaimed is put up to
auction _unopened_.
James was one who always expected to find a fortune in some one of these
bags.
[Illustration]
One day he was at the auction house as usual, when a small and
exceedingly light trunk was put up for sale. He bought and opened it.
_It was empty! NO! A little bit of paper_ was in the bottom with this
written on it.
IDAHO
[Illustration: Black Canyon 570 fR0(1)m west 10 £ Beware Indian Black
Eagle]
Being an intelligent young man he knew that this was _a clue for finding
Hidden TREASURE_! Then after a while he made this: _In Black Canyon,
Idaho, 570 feet west of some mark, 10 feet below a tree Treasure will be
found. Beware of Black Eagle (Indian)._ But he forgot the (1).
_Chapter III._
James at once took two friends into his secret: an old sailor (Jack),
and a young frontiersman.
[Illustration]
They all agreed that they must start for Black Canyon at once. The
frontiersman said he had heard of Black Canyon in Idaho.
But who could Black Eagle be?
_Chapter IV._
Lost! Certainly lost! Lost in the Far West! The Frontiersman had lost
them in a large forest. They had travelled for about a month, first by
water (See page 4) then by stage, then by horse.
[Illustration]
This was their third day in it. Just after their morning meal the bushes
parted.
[Illustration]
_An Indian stood before them! (See 1st Chap.)_ He merely said '_COME_.'
They take up their arms and do so.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
Chapter V.
After following him for four hours, he stopped, turned around and said,
"Rest, eat you fellows." They did so. In about an hour they started
again. After walking ten miles they heard the roaring of an immense
cataract. Suddenly they find themselves face to face _with a long deep
gorge or canyon. 'Black Canyon,'_ they all cry. '_Stop_,' says the
Indian. He pushes a stone aside. It uncovers the mouth of a small cave.
The Indian struck a light with _two sticks_. They follow him into this
cave for about a mile when the cave opens into an immense Grotto. The
Indian whistled, _a bear and dog appeared_. "Bring meat, Nero," said the
Indian.
The bear at once brought a deer. Which they cooked and ate. Then the
Indian said, _"Show me the Treasure clue." His eyes flashed when he saw
it._
_Chapter VI._
[Illustration]
MIDNIGHT! _The Indian is about to light a fuse to a cask of gunpowder!
But James sees him and shoots him before he is able to light the fuse._
[Illustration]
He ran to the side of the dying Indian who made this confession. "I am
not an Indian. 10 years ago I met G. Gidean, a man who found a quantity
of gold here. Before be died, he sent that clue to a friend _who never
received it_. I knew the gold was here. I have hunted 10 years for it,
your clue showed me where IT was," _(here Black Eagle told it to James.)
Then Black Eagle DIED_.
_Chapter VII._
20 years have passed! James is the same as ever. Jack is owner of a
yacht.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
The Frontiersman owns a large cattle and hog ranch.
[Illustration]
Finis.
NOT I,
And Other POEMS,
_BY_
Robert Louis Stevenson,
Author of
_The Blue Scalper, Travels
with a Donkey etc._
PRICE 6d.
Dedicated to
_Messrs. R.& R. CLARKE_
by
_S.L.Osbourne_
Davos
1881
_Not I._
Some like drink
In a pint pot,
Some like to think;
Some not.
Strong Dutch Cheese,
Old Kentucky Rye,
Some like these;
Not I.
Some like Poe
And others like Scott,
Some like Mrs. Stowe;
Some not.
Some like to laugh,
Some like to cry.
Some like chaff;
Not I.
[Illustration]
Here, perfect to a wish,
We offer, not a dish,
But just the platter:
A book that's not a book,
A pamphlet in the look
But not the matter.
I own in disarray;
As to the flowers of May
The frosts of Winter,
To my poetic rage,
The smallness of the page
And of the printer.
As seamen on the seas
With song and dance descry
Adown the morning breeze
An islet in the sky:
In Araby the dry,
As o'er the sandy plain
The panting camels cry
To smell the coming rain.
So all things over earth
A common law obey
And rarity and worth
Pass, arm in arm, away;
And even so, today,
The printer and the bard,
In pressless Davos, pray
Their sixpenny reward.
[Illustration]
The pamphlet here presented
Was planned and printed by
A printer unindent-ed,
A bard whom all decry.
The author and the printer,
With various kinds of skill,
Concocted it in Winter
At Davos on the Hill.
They burned the nightly taper
But now the work is ripe
Observe the costly paper,
Remark the perfect type!
[Illustration]
Begun FEB ended OCT 1881
MORAL EMBLEMS
A
Collection of Cuts and Verses.
_By_
_ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON._
Author of
_The Blue Scalper, Travels with a Donkey,
Treasure Island, Not I etc._
Printers:
S. L. OSBOURNE & COMPANY.
Davos-Platz.
[Illustration]
See how the children in the print
Bound on the book to see what's in't!
O, like these pretty babes, may you
Seize and _apply_ this volume too!
And while your eye upon the cuts
With harmless ardour open and shuts,
Reader, may your immortal mind
To their sage lessons not be blind.
[Illustration]
Reader, your soul upraise to see,
In yon fair cut designed by me,
The pauper by the highwayside
Vainly soliciting from pride.
Mark how the Beau with easy air
Contemps the anxious rustic's prayer,
And casting a disdainful eye,
Goes gaily gallivanting by.
He from the poor averts his head....
He will regret it when he's dead.
[Illustration]
_A Peak in Darien_.
Broad gazing on untrodden lands,
See where adventurous Cortez stands;
While in the heavens above his head,
The Eagle seeks its daily bread.
How aptly fact to fact replies:
Heroes and Eagles, hills and skies.
Ye, who contemn the fatted slave,
Look on this emblem and be brave
[Illustration]
See in the print, how moved by whim
Trumpeting Jumbo, great and grim,
Adjusts his trunk, like a cravat,
To noose that individual's hat.
The sacred Ibis in the distance
Joys to observe his bold resistance.
[Illustration]
Mark, printed on the opposing page,
The unfortunate effects of rage.
A man (who might be you or me)
Hurls another into the sea.
Poor soul, his unreflecting act
His future joys will much contract,
And he will spoil his evening toddy
By dwelling on that mangled body.
Works recently issued by
SAMUEL OSBOURNE & CO. DAVOS.
NOT I and other poems, by Robert Louis Stevenson.
_A volume of enchanting poetry._
BLACK CANYON or wild adventures in the Far West, by S. Osbourne.
_A beautiful gift-book._
_To be obtained from the Publishers and all respectable BOOK-SELLERS._
[Illustration]
Stevenson's Moral Emblems.
_Edition de Luxe: 5 full-page Illustrations._
Price 9 PENCE.
The above speciman cut, illustrates a new departure in the business of
OSBOURNE & Co.
Wood engraving, designed and executed by Mr. & Mrs. Stevenson and
printed under the PERSONAL supervision of Mr. Osbourne, now form a
branch of their business.
Today is published by _S. L. Osbourne & Co._
A
Second Collection Of
MORAL
EMBLEMS.
By
_ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON._
_Edition de Luxe_, tall paper, (extra fine) first impression. Price 10
pence.
_Popular Edition_, for the Million, small paper, cuts slightly worn, a
great bargain, 8 pence.
NOTICE!!!
A literary curiosity: Part of the M. S. of '_Black Canyon_.' Price 1s.
6d.
Apply to
SAMUEL OSBOURNE & C^o
Buol Chalet (Villa Stein,) Davos.
MORAL EMBLEMS
A Second Collection of Cuts and Verses.
_By_
_ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON._
Author of
_Latter-day Arabian Nights, Travels
with a Donkey, Not I, &c._
Printers:
S. L. OSBOURNE & COMPANY.
Davos-Platz.
[Illustration]
With storms a-weather, rocks a-lee,
The dancing skiff puts forth to sea.
The lone dissenter in the blast
Recoils before the sight aghast.
But she, although the heavens be black,
Holds on upon the starboard tack.
For why? although today she sink
Still safe she sails in printers' ink,
And though today the seamen drown,
My cut shall hand their memory down.
[Illustration]
The careful angler chose his nook
At morning by the lilied brook,
And all the noon his rod he plied
By that romantic riverside.
Soon as the evening hours decline
Tranquilly he'll return to dine,
And breathing forth a pious wish,
Will cram his belly full of fish.
[Illustration]
The Abbot for a walk went out
A wealthy cleric, very stout,
And Robin has that Abbot stuck
As the red hunter spears the buck.
The djavel or the javelin
Has, you observe, gone bravely in,
And you may hear that weapon whack
Bang through the middle of his back.
_Hence we may learn that abbots should
Never go walking in a wood._
[Illustration]
The frozen peaks he once explored,
But now he's dead and by the board.
How better far at home to have stayed
Attended by the parlour maid,
And warmed his knees before the fire
Until the hour when folks retire!
_So, if you would be spared to friends.
Do nothing but for business ends_.
[Illustration]
Industrious pirate! see him sweep
The lonely bosom of the deep,
And daily the horizon scan
From Hatteras or Matapan.
Be sure, before that pirate's old,
He will have made a pot of gold,
And will retire from all his labours
And be respected by his neighbors.
_You also scan your life's horizon
For all that you can clap your eyes on._
Works recently issued by
SAMUEL OSBOURNE & C^o.
DAVOS.
NOT I and other poems, by Robert Louis Stevenson.
_A volume of enchanting poetry._
BLACK CANYON or wild adventures in the Far West, by S. L. Osbourne.
_A beautiful gift-book._
MORAL EMBLEMS, (first Series.) by Robert Louis Stevenson.
_Has only to be seen to be admired._
_To be obtained from the Publishers and all respectable Book-sellers._
A Martial Elegy for some lead Soldiers.
For certain soldiers lately dead
Our-reverent dirge shall here be said.
Them, when their martial leader called,
No dread preparative appalled;
But leaden hearted, leaden heeled,
I marked them steadfast in the field
Death grimly sided with the foe,
And smote each leaden hero low.
Proudly they perished one by one:
The dread Pea-cannon's work was done
O not for them the tears we shed,
Consigned to their congenial lead;
But while unmoved their sleep they take,
We mourn for their dear Captain's sake,
For their dear Captain, who shall smart
Both in his pocket and his heart,
Who saw his heros shed their gore
And lacked a shilling to buy more!
Price 1 penny. (1st Edition.)
Today is published by SAMUEL OSBOURNE & Co.
THE
GRAVER and the PEN
OR
Scenes from Nature with Appropriate Verses
by ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON author of the 'EMBLEMS.'
'The Graver and the Pen' is a most strikingly illustrated little work
and the poetry so pleasing that when it is taken up to be read is
finished before it is set down.
It contains 5 full-page illustrations (all of the first class) and 11
pages of poetry finely printed on superb paper (especially obtained from
C. G. Squintani & Co. London) with the title on the cover in red
letters.
Small 8vo. Granite paper cover with coloured title
_Price Ninepence per Copy_.
Splendid chance for an energetic publisher!!!
For Sale--Copyright of 'Black Canyon' price 1 / 3/4
Autograph of Mr. R. L. Stevenson price -/3, ditto of Mr. S. L. Osbourne
price 1/- each.
If copies of the 'Graver,' 'Emblems,' or 'Black Canyon' are wanted apply
to the publisher, 17 Harlot Row Edinburgh.
THE GRAVER & THE PEN.
THE
_GRAVER & THE PEN_,
or
Scenes from Nature with
Appropriate Verses
BY
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
author of
'The New Arabian Nights,' 'Moral Emblems,' 'Not I,' 'Treasure Island,'
etc.
_Illustrated._
EDINBURGH
_S. L. Osbourne & Company_
No. 17 HERIOT ROW.
[It was only by the kindness of Mr. CRERAR of Kingussie that we are able
to issue this little work--having allowed us to print with his own press
when ours was broken.]
PROEM.
Unlike the common run of men,
I wield a double power to please,
And use the GRAVER and the PEN
With equal aptitude and ease.
I move with that illustrious crew,
The ambidextrous Kings of Art;
And every mortal thing I do
Brings ringing money in the mart.
Hence, to the morning hour, the mead,
The forest and the stream perceive
Me wandering as the muses lead----
Or back returning in the eve.
Two muses like two maiden aunts,
The engraving and the singing muse,
Follow, through all my favorite haunts,
My devious traces in the dews.
To guide and cheer me, each attends;
Each speeds my rapid task along;
One to my cuts her ardour lends,
One breathes her magic in my song.
[Illustration]
_The Precarious Mill._
Alone above the stream it stands,
Above the iron hill,
The topsy-turvy, tumble-down,
Yet habitable mill.
Still as the ringing saws advance
To slice the humming deal,
All day the pallid miller hears
The thunder of the wheel.
He hears the river plunge and roar
As roars the angry mob;
He feels the solid building quake,
The trusty timbers throb.
All night beside the fire he cowers:
He hears the rafters jar:
O why is he not in a proper house
As decent people are!
The floors are all aslant, he sees,
The doors are all a-jam;
And from the hook above his head
All crooked swings the ham.
"Alas," he cries and shakes his head,
"I see by every sign,
There soon will be the deuce to pay,
With this estate of mine."
[Illustration]
The Disputatious Pines.
The first pine to the second said:
"My leaves are black, my branches red;
I stand upon this moor of mine,
A hoar, _unconquerable pine_."
The second sniffed and answered: "Pooh,
I am as good a pine as you."
"Discourteous tree" the first replied,
"The tempest in my boughs had cried,
The hunter slumbered in my shade,
A hundred years ere you were made."
The second smiled as he returned:
"I shall be here when you are burned."
So far dissension ruled the pair,
Each turned on each a frowning air,
When flickering from the bank anigh,
A flight of martens met their eye.
Sometime their course they watched; and then
They nodded off to sleep again.
[Illustration]
_The Tramps_.
Now long enough has day endured,
Or King Apollo Palinured,
Seaward be steers his panting team,
And casts on earth his latest gleam.
But see! the Tramps with jaded eye
Their destined provinces espy.
Long through the hills their way they took,
Long camped beside the mountain brook;
'Tis over; now with rising hope
They pause upon the downward slope,
And as their aching bones they rest,
Their anxious captain scans the west.
So paused Alaric on the Alps
And ciphered up the Roman scalps.
[Illustration]
_The Foolhardy Geographer._
The howling desert miles around,
The tinkling brook the only sound--
Wearied with all his toils and feats,
The traveller dines on potted meats;
On potted meats and princely wines,
Not wisely but too well he dines.
The brindled Tiger loud may roar,
High may the hovering Vulture soar,
Alas! regardless of them all,
Soon shall the empurpled glutton sprawl--
Soon, in the desert's hushed repose,
Shall trumpet tidings through his nose!
Alack, unwise! that nasal song
Shall be the Ounce's dinner-gong!
* * * * *
A blemish in the cut appears;
Alas! it cost both blood and tears.
The glancing graver swerved aside,
Fast flowed the artist's vital tide!
And now the apologetic bard
Demands indulgence for his pard!
[Illustration]
_The Angler & the Clown._
The echoing bridge you here may see,
The pouring lynn, the waving tree,
The eager angler fresh from town--
Above, the contumelious clown.
'The angler plies his line and rod,
The clodpole stands with many a nod,--
With many a nod and many a grin,
He sees him cast his engine in.
"What have you caught?" the peasant cries.
"Nothing as yet," the Fool replies.
MORAL TALES
[Illustration]
Rob and Ben
or
The PIRATE and the APOTHECARY.
Scene the First.
[Illustration]
Rob and Ben
or
The PIRATE and the APOTHECARY.
Scene the Second.
[Illustration]
Rob and Ben
or
The PIRATE and the APOTHECARY.
Scene the Third.
ROBIN AND BEN: OR, THE PIRATE AND THE APOTHECARY
Come lend me an attentive ear
A startling moral tale to hear,
Of Pirate Rob and Chemist Ben,
And different destinies of men.
Deep in the greenest of the vales
That nestle near the coast of Wales,
The heaving main but just in view,
Robin and Ben together grew,
Together worked and played the fool,
Together shunned the Sunday school,
And pulled each other's youthful noses
Around the cots, among the roses.
Together but unlike they grew;
Robin was rough, and through and through
Bold, inconsiderate, and manly,
Like some historic Bruce or Stanley.
Ben had a mean and servile soul,
He robbed not, though he often stole.
He sang on Sunday in the choir,
And tamely capped the passing Squire.
At length, intolerant of trammels--
Wild as the wild Bithynian camels,
Wild as the wild sea-eagles--Bob
His widowed dam contrives to rob,
And thus with great originality
Effectuates his personality.
Thenceforth his terror-haunted flight
He follows through the starry night;
And with the early morning breeze,
Behold him on the azure seas.
The master of a trading dandy
Hires Robin for a go of brandy;
And all the happy hills of home
Vanish beyond the fields of foam.
Ben, meanwhile, like a tin reflector,
Attended on the worthy rector;
Opened his eyes and held his breath,
And flattered to the point of death;
And was at last, by that good fairy,
Apprenticed to the Apothecary.
So Ben, while Robin chose to roam,
A rising chemist was at home,
Tended his shop with learnéd air,
Watered his drugs and oiled his hair,
And gave advice to the unwary,
Like any sleek apothecary.
Meanwhile upon the deep afar
Robin the brave was waging war,
With other tarry desperadoes
About the latitude of Barbadoes.
He knew no touch of craven fear;
His voice was thunder in the cheer;
First, from the main-to'-gallan' high,
The skulking merchantman to spy--
The first to bound upon the deck,
The last to leave the sinking wreck.
His hand was steel, his word was law,
His mates regarded him with awe.
No pirate in the whole profession
Held a more honourable position.
At length, from years of anxious toil,
Bold Robin seeks his native soil;
Wisely arranges his affairs,
And to his native dale repairs.
The Bristol _Swallow_ sets him down
Beside the well-remembered town.
He sighs, he spits, he marks the scene,
Proudly he treads the village green;
And free from pettiness and rancour,
Takes lodgings at the 'Crown and Anchor.'
Strange when a man so great and good,
Once more in his home-country stood,
Strange that the sordid clowns should show
A dull desire to have him go.
His clinging breeks, his tarry hat,
The way he swore, the way he spat,
A certain quality of manner,
Alarming like the pirate's banner--
Something that did not seem to suit all--
Something, O call it bluff, not brutal--
Something at least, howe'er it's called,
Made Robin generally black-balled.
His soul was wounded; proud and glum,
Alone he sat and swigged his rum,
And took a great distaste to men
Till he encountered Chemist Ben.
Bright was the hour and bright the day,
That threw them in each other's way;
Glad were their mutual salutations,
Long their respective revelations.
Before the inn in sultry weather
They talked of this and that together;
Ben told the tale of his indentures,
And Rob narrated his adventures.
Last, as the point of greatest weight,
The pair contrasted their estate,
And Robin, like a boastful sailor,
Despised the other for a tailor.
'See,' he remarked, 'with envy, see
A man with such a fist as me!
Bearded and ringed, and big, and brown,
I sit and toss the stingo down.
Hear the gold jingle in my bag--
All won beneath the Jolly Flag!'
Ben moralised and shook his head:
'You wanderers earn and eat your bread.
The foe is found, beats or is beaten,
And either how, the wage is eaten.
And after all your pully-hauly
Your proceeds look uncommon small-ly.
You had done better here to tarry
Apprentice to the Apothecary.
The silent pirates of the shore
Eat and sleep soft, and pocket more
Than any red, robustious ranger
Who picks his farthings hot from danger.
You clank your guineas on the board;
Mine are with several bankers stored.
You reckon riches on your digits,
You dash in chase of Sals and Bridgets,
You drink and risk delirium tremens,
Your whole estate a common seaman's!
Regard your friend and school companion,
Soon to be wed to Miss Trevanion
(Smooth, honourable, fat and flowery,
With Heaven knows how much land in dowry)
Look at me--am I in good case?
Look at my hands, look at my face;
Look at the cloth of my apparel;
Try me and test me, lock and barrel;
And own, to give the devil his due,
I have made more of life than you.
Yet I nor sought nor risked a life;
I shudder at an open knife;
The perilous seas I still avoided
And stuck to land whate'er betided.
I had no gold, no marble quarry,
I was a poor apothecary,
Yet here I stand, at thirty-eight,
A man of an assured estate.'
'Well,' answered Robin--'well, and how?'
The smiling chemist tapped his brow.
'Rob,' he replied,'this throbbing brain
Still worked and hankered after gain.
By day and night, to work my will,
It pounded like a powder mill;
And marking how the world went round
A theory of theft it found.
Here is the key to right and wrong:
_Steal little but steal all day long_;
And this invaluable plan
Marks what is called the Honest Man.
When first I served with Doctor Pill,
My hand was ever in the till.
Now that I am myself a master
My gains come softer still and faster.
As thus: on Wednesday, a maid
Came to me in the way of trade.
Her mother, an old farmer's wife,
Required a drug to save her life.
'At once, my dear, at once,' I said,
Patted the child upon the head,
Bade her be still a loving daughter,
And filled the bottle up with water.
'Well, and the mother?' Robin cried.
'O she!' said Ben, 'I think she died.'
'Battle and blood, death and disease,
Upon the tainted Tropic seas--
The attendant sharks that chew the cud--
The abhorred scuppers spouting blood--
The untended dead, the Tropic sun--
The thunder of the murderous gun--
The cut-throat crew--the Captain's curse--
The tempest blustering worse and worse--
These have I known and these can stand,
But you, I settle out of hand!'
Out flashed the cutlass, down went Ben
Dead and rotten, there and then.
THE BUILDER'S DOOM
In eighteen twenty Deacon Thin
Feu'd the land and fenced it in,
And laid his broad foundations down
About a furlong out of town.
Early and late the work went on.
The carts were toiling ere the dawn;
The mason whistled, the hodman sang;
Early and late the trowels rang;
And Thin himself came day by day
To push the work in every way.
An artful builder, patent king
Of all the local building ring,
Who was there like him in the quarter
For mortifying brick and mortar,
Or pocketing the odd piastre
By substituting lath and plaster?
With plan and two-foot rule in hand,
He by the foreman took his stand,
With boisterous voice, with eagle glance
To stamp upon extravagance.
Far thrift of bricks and greed of guilders,
He was the Buonaparte of Builders.
The foreman, a desponding creature,
Demurred to here and there a feature:
'For surely, sir--with your permeession--
Bricks here, sir, in the main parteetion...'
The builder goggled, gulped and stared,
The foreman's services were spared.
Thin would not count among his minions
A man of Wesleyan opinions.
'Money is money,' so he said.
'Crescents are crescents, trade is trade.
Pharaohs and emperors in their seasons
Built, I believe, for different reasons--
Charity, glory, piety, pride--
To pay the men, to please a bride,
To use their stone, to spite their neighbours,
Not for a profit on their labours.
They built to edify or bewilder;
I build because I am a builder.
Crescent and street and square I build,
Plaster and paint and carve and gild.
Around the city see them stand,
These triumphs of my shaping hand,
With bulging walls, with sinking floors,
With shut, impracticable doors,
Fickle and frail in every part,
And rotten to their inmost heart.
There shall the simple tenant find
Death in the falling window-blind,
Death in the pipe, death in the faucit,
Death in the deadly water-closet!
A day is set for all to die:
_Caveat emptor!_ what care I?'
As to Amphion's tuneful kit
Troy rose, with towers encircling it;
As to the Mage's brandished wand
A spiry palace clove the sand;
To Thin's indomitable financing,
That phantom crescent kept advancing.
When first the brazen bells of churches
Called clerk and parson to their perches,
The worshippers of every sect
Already viewed it with respect;
A second Sunday had not gone
Before the roof was rattled on:
And when the fourth was there, behold
The crescent finished, painted, sold!
The stars proceeded in their courses,
Nature with her subversive forces,
Time, too, the iron-toothed and sinewed;
And the edacious years continued.
Thrones rose and fell; and still the crescent,
Unsanative and now senescent,
A plastered skeleton of lath,
Looked forward to a day of wrath.
In the dead night, the groaning timber
Would jar upon the ear of slumber,
And, like Dodona's talking oak,
Of oracles and judgments spoke.
When to the music fingered well
The feet of children lightly fell,
The sire, who dozed by the decanters,
Started, and dreamed of misadventures.
The rotten brick decayed to dust;
The iron was consumed by rust;
Each tabid and perverted mansion
Hung in the article of declension.
So forty, fifty, sixty passed;
Until, when seventy came at last,
The occupant of number three
Called friends to hold a jubilee.
Wild was the night; the charging rack
Had forced the moon upon her back;
The wind piped up a naval ditty;
And the lamps winked through all the city.
Before that house, where lights were shining,
Corpulent feeders, grossly dining,
And jolly clamour, hum and rattle,
Fairly outvoiced the tempest's battle.
As still his moistened lip he fingered,
The envious policeman lingered;
While far the infernal tempest sped,
And shook the country folks in bed,
And tore the trees and tossed the ships,
He lingered and he licked his lips.
Lo, from within, a hush! the host
Briefly expressed the evening's toast;
And lo, before the lips were dry,
The Deacon rising to reply!
'Here in this house which once I built,
Papered and painted, carved and gilt,
And out of which, to my content,
I netted seventy-five per cent.;
Here at this board of jolly neighbours,
I reap the credit of my labours.
These were the days--I will say more--
These were the grand old days of yore!
The builder laboured day and night;
He watched that every brick was right;
The decent men their utmost did;
And the house rose--a pyramid!
These were the days, our provost knows,
When forty streets and crescents rose,
The fruits of my creative noddle,
All more or less upon a model,
Neat and commodious, cheap and dry,
A perfect pleasure to the eye!
I found this quite a country quarter;
I leave it solid lath and mortar.
In all, I was the single actor--
And am this city's benefactor!
Since then, alas! both thing and name,
Shoddy across the ocean came--
Shoddy that can the eye bewilder
And makes me blush to meet a builder!
Had this good house, in frame or fixture,
Been tempered by the least admixture
Of that discreditable shoddy,
Should we to-day compound our toddy,
Or gaily marry song and laughter
Below its sempiternal rafter?
Not so!' the Deacon cried.
The mansion
Had marked his fatuous expansion.
The years were full, the house was fated,
The rotten structure crepitated!
A moment, and the silent guests
Sat pallid as their dinner vests.
A moment more, and root and branch,
That mansion fell in avalanche,
Story on story, floor on floor,
Roof, wall and window, joist and door,
Dead weight of damnable disaster,
A cataclysm of lath and plaster.
_Siloam did not choose a sinner--
All were not builders at the dinner._
[Illustration: LORD NELSON AND HIS TAR.]
[Illustration]
[Illustration: (_Facsimile of Letter addressed by R. L. Stevenson, in
his Tenth Year, to his Aunt Miss Balfour._)]
PRINTED BY
CASSELL & CO., LIMITED, LA BELLE SAUVAGE,
LONDON, E.C.
* * * * *
Transcriber's note:
The following typographical errors were corrected:
Page 159: "The hunting still goes on, and at any moment", 'moment'
amended from 'monent'.
Footnote 46: "Jour. Scot. Met. Soc., New Ser. xxvi." 'Scot.'
amended from 'Sbot.'
***
