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The Wisdom of Robert Louis Stevenson
s
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The Wisdom
of
Robert Louis Stevenson
COLLECTED AND ARRANGED FROM HIS WRITINGS
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NEW |
YORK |
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Scott-Thaw Co. |
, 542 Fifth Ave. |
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MCMIV |
Copyright 1904 by Scott-Thaw Co.
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r/re Plimpton Press Norwood Mass.
Editor's Note, xv Stevenson, Robert Louis,
Himself, xvii Life and Death
Liv^e To-day the Day's Life, i Preserve the QuaHty of Youth, 2 Truth of Intercourse, 2 Between Friends, 3 Betw^een Parent and Child, 3 Between Lovers, 3 Between Man and Wife, 4 Deceit, 5
Falling in Love, 6-8 Love Brings with it the Flighest
A Portrait of
of
the Pleasure of Living,
The Happy Lover is the Condescending
Gentleman, 9 Sweethearts, 10
Love's Essence is Kindness, 10-12 Death, 13, 14 Our Lives are Bound Tenderly to Life
through Friendship, 14-16 Honesty in Business, 16 Busyness, a Symptom of Deficient Vitality,
16-19
Contents
Contents
Life and Death — Continued
Our Healthy Indifference to Death, 19-21 The Last Thing a Brave Man Thinks of
is Death, 21-23 To be Over-wise is to Ossify, 23 Prudence is Death to Generosity, 24 The True Lover of Living, 24-26 Better to Lose Health Hke a Spendthrift
than Waste it like a Miser, 26-27 Attempt the Leap even though Death
Catch you in Mid-air, 27-28 The Young Man and Death, 28-30 Fame, 30, 31
Great Deeds Breed their Kind, 31-33 Business and Pleasure, 33 How to Think of Death, 1,^, 34 Instability of Friendship, 34, t^^ General Occupation, 35 Declarations of Love, 35, 36 The Ideal Proposal is not Expressed in
Words, 36, 37 Love is not Blind, 37 A Friend is He who Knows you are No
Good, and is Willing to Forget It, 37 Marry in Faith and not in Hope, 38
Life and Death — Continued
He who Refrains from Marriage is a
Coward, 38 Hope and Faith, 38, 39 The Wife, 39, 40 Choice in Marriage, 40, 41 The *'High Passion" is not often the Cause
of Marriage, 42 The Modern Marriage Idyll is often Writ
in Common Prose, 42-44 The Lion of Love is hardly a fit Animal
for the Domestic Pet, 44 Marriage, 45 Marriage — its Advantages, 45
its Speculative Character, 46,47 its Beneficent Effects, 49 its Commonplaceness, 49, 50 to Women it is Enlarging, 50, 5 1 its Experience Chastening, 51 Our Presumption in Marry- ing, 47> 48 A Wife is the Witness of your Life and the Sharpest Critic of your Conduct and Character. She is the Domestic Recording Angel, 52, 53
Contents
Life and Death — Continued Respectability, 53 Our Boyhood, 54 Poverty and Morality, 54, 55 Letter from Home, 55, 56 The Dreams by the Fireside, 56 Happiness is Found in Social Life, 56, 57 We Value what we Pay for, 57 The Blind Bow-boy, 57, 58 The Price we Pay for what we Want is
what we Call Life — we Pay the Price
of Money in Liberty, 58, 59 Satisfy the Opportunities you Have before
Looking for New Opportunities, 59 "Making Believe" in Child's Play, 60-65 Realism in Children, 65-67 Apology for Idleness, 67-69 Invalidism, Premature Old Age, 69-72 The Invalid and His Joys, 72-75 The Pleasures of Convalescence, 75-77 Railway Travel, 77-79 Ever Walk in Hope even though there be
no Goal to Reach, 79 The True Love Story begins with Marriage,
Courtship is the Prologue, 80
Life and Death — Continued Lies and Lying, 8i, 82 Silence — a Method of Lying, 82, 83 The True Veracity is Truth in the Spirit,
not Truth to the Letter, 83 Talk, 84-86 Natural Talk a Festival of Ostentation,
86-92 The Mother and Child Must Part, 93 Silence in Speech, 94, 95 Courage in Life, 95 The Value of Time, 95 Rest after Death, 96 Telling the Truth, 96-98 Travel, 98
We are all Travellers, 99 Rest after a Tramp, 99-101 Pleasure Trips in the Land of Thought
and among the Hills of Vanity;
Dwelling with Happiness, 101-104 Bivouacs, the Halts of Life, 104-106 A Walking Tour, 106-1 10 The Place of Money in Life, no, in The Thief and the Soldier, in, 112 Putting Questions, 112
Contents
Contents I^iye AND DeatH — Continued
All Opinion Stages on the Road to Truth,
112, 113
Opinion is the Tavern by the Way in which we Dwell a little while on our Way to Truth, 114-116
Woman's Self-Sufficiency, 116, 117
Man's Dependence, 117, 118
Representative Men and their Works, 118, 119
Society's Laws Affect even Dogs, 119-121
A Wife is but a Woman; a Being of like Frailties as is the Man, 121-123
Aspiration, 123-125 Character
Success out of Failure, 129-134
The Selfishness of Youth, 134-136
The Old Adam, 136, 137
Indiscretions of Youth, 137, 138
It Requires Brains to make a Fool of Your- self, 138
Be not too Wise in your own Esteem, 139
Lack of Prudence in Great Men, 139-141
Hurry, 141
Jealousy, 142, 143
Character — Contitiued
Modesty in Deeds, 143
Human Endurance, 143, 144
Individuality, 144, 145
Tranquillity of Mind, 145
Good Traits in Character, 145
Gratitude, 146
The Self-made Man, 146
Saying *'No" and "Yes," 146 Religion
The Sabbath, 149
Change of Creed, 149, 150
Pan's Pipes, 150-158
Our Divine Unrest, 158, 159
Prayer, 159 Art
The Actor as Artist, 163, 164
Style, 164, 165
Cathedrals, 166, 167
Choice of Words in Writing, 167-169 Literature
Whitman's "Leaves of Grass," 173, 174
Meredith's "The Egoist," 174, 175
Wordsworth, 175, 176
Plays and Romances, 176
Contents
Literature — Continued The Play, 176-178 The Romance, 178-180 Marcus Aurelius, 180 The Poetry of Despair, 181, 182 Ignorance is better than that Knowledge
which Brings Sadness, 182, 183 Advice to the Young Writer, 183-185 Romance the Realization of the Ideal Laws
of the Day-Dream, 185-187 The Quality of Romance, 187-190 Books are Letters to the Author's Friends,
190 Dumas's D'Artagnan, 190-192 The Truth in Literature is Essential,
192-194 The Duties of the Writer as Story-Teller,
194-198 Nature
A River, 201
Woods and Forests, 201, 202
Forest and Ocean, 202, 203
Sleep in the Open Air at Night, 203-206
The Genius of Place and Time, 206-209
The Forest as Comforter, 209-211
Education
The Choice of Literature as a Profession,
215-219 Knowledge, 219-221 The Wisdom of the Idler, 221, 222 Books not Everything, 222, 223 Idleness, 223 Education in the School and in the Street,
224 Playing Truant, 224-226 The Gift of Reading, 226-228 Education of Boys and Girls, 228. Often
nothing but a System of Catchwords
and Formulae, 228, 229 The Gift of Speech, 229-231 The Art of Speaking Well, 231-234 The Art of the Orator, 234, 235 Logic, 235, 236 Men and Women
Grave-diggers, 239-242
The Talk of the Aged, 242-244
The Aged as Listeners, 244-246
Women as Talkers and Listeners, 246-
249 France and England, 249, 250
Contents
Contents
Men and Women — Continued
Woman's Value as a Teacher shows most
in Married Life, 250,251 French Independence, 251,252 The Aged as Teachers, 252-254 EngHshman's Pride and Ignorance,
254-256
THE charm and the beauty of Ste- venson's writings compel our hom- age at all times. In this small selection it is hoped that neither of these qualities has been lost, but, on the contrary, the fine grace of thought and the clear in- sight into men and things so stand re- vealed that they shall appeal to the reader and invite him to a fuller study of the works of one of the greatest prose writers of the last century. ^ ^
I AM a kind of farthing dip, Unfriendly to the nose and eye; A blue-behinded ape, I skip Upon the trees of Paradise.
At mankind's feet, I take my place In solemn, sanctimonious state,
And have the air of saying grace While I defile the dinner plate.
I am " the smiler with the knife," The battener upon garbage, I —
Dear Heaven, w^ith such a rancid life. Were it not better far to die .?
Yet still, about the human pale, I love to scamper, love to race,
To swing by my irreverent tail All over the most holy place.
And when at length, some golden day, The unfailing sportsman, aiming at, Shall bag, me — all the world shall say:
Thank God, and there's an end of that!
Underwoods.
LIFE AND DEATH
IT is customary to say that age should be considered, because it comes last. It seems just as much to the point, that youth comes first. And the scale fairly kicks the beam, if you go on to add that age, in a majority of cases, never comes at all. Disease and acci- dent make short work of even the most pros- perous persons; death costs nothing, and the expense of a headstone is an inconsiderable trifle to the happy heir. To be suddenly snuffed out in the middle of ambitious schemes is tragical enough at the best; but when a man has been grudging himself his own life in the meanwhile, and saving up everything for the festival that was never to be, it becomes that hysterically moving sort of tragedy which lies on the confines of farce. The victim is dead — and he has cunningly overreached himself; a combination of calam- ities none the less absurd for being grim. To husband a favourite claret until the batch turns sour is not at all an artful stroke of policy; and how much more with a whole cellar — a whole bodily existence! People may lay down their lives with cheerfulness
Preserve the Qual- ity of Youth
in the sure expectation of a blessed mortality; but that is a different affair from giving up youth with all its admirable pleasures, in the hope of a better quality of gruel in a more than problematic, nay, more than improbable, old age. We should not compliment a hungry man, who should refuse a whole dinner and reserve all his appetite for the dessert, before he knew whether there was to be any dessert or not. If there be such a thing as imprudence in the world, we surely have it here. We sail in leaky bottoms and on great and perilous waters; and to take a cue from the dolorous old naval ballad, we have heard the mermaids singing, and know that we shall never see dry land any more. Old and young, we are all on our last cruise. If there is a fill of tobacco among the crew, for God's sake pass it round, and let us have a pipe before we go! Virgini- bus Puerisque. Crabbed Age and Youth.
Truth of Inter- course
IT takes," says Thoreau, in the noblest and most useful passage I remember to have read in any modern author, "two to speak truth — one to speak and another to
hear." He must be very little experienced, or have no great zeal for truth, who does not recognise the fact. A grain of anger or a grain of suspicion produces strange acoustical ef- fects, and makes the ear greedy to remark offence. Hence we find those who have once quarrelled carry themselves distantly, and are ever ready to break the truce. To speak truth there must be moral equality or else no respect; and hence between parent and child intercourse is apt to degenerate into a verbal fencing bout, and misapprehensions to be- come ingrained. And there is another side to this, for the parent begins with an imperfect notion of the child's character, formed in early years or during the equinoctial gales of youth; to this he adheres, noting only the facts which suit with his preconception; and wherever a person fancies himself unjustly judged, he at once and finally gives up the effort to speak truth. With our chosen friends, on the other hand, and still more between lovers (for^_mutual understanding is love's essence), the truth is easily indicated by the one and aptly comprehended by the other.
Between Man and Wife
A hint taken, a look understood, conveys the gist of long and delicate explanations; and where the life is known, even yea and nay become luminous. In the closest of all rela- tions — that of a love well-founded and equally shared — speech is half discarded, like a roundabout infantile process or a cere- mony of formal etiquette; and the two com- municate directly by their presences, and with few looks and fewer words contrive to share their good and evil" and uphold each other's hearts in joy. For love rests upon a physical basis; it is a familiarity of nature's making and apart from voluntary choice. Understanding has in some sort outrun knowledge, for the affection perhaps began with the acquaintance; and as it was not made like other relations, so it is not, like them, to be perturbed or clouded. Each knows more than can be uttered; each lives by faith, and believes by a natural compulsion; and be- tween man and wife the language of the body is largely developed and grown strangely eloquent. The thought that prompted and was conveyed in a caress would only lose to
be set down in words — ay, although Shakes- peare himself should be the scribe. Yet it is in these dear intimacies, beyond all others, that we must strive and do battle for the truth. Let but a doubt arise, and alas! all the previous intimacy and confidence is but another charge against the person doubted. " What a monstrous dishonesty is this if I have been deceived so long and so completely ! '' Let but that thought gain entrance, and you plead before a deaf tribunal. Appeal to the past; why, that is your crime! Make all clear, convince the reason; alas! speciousness is but a proof against you. "If you can abuse me now, the more likely that you have abused me from the first.''
For a strong affection such moments are worth supporting, and they will end well; for your advocate is in your lover's heart and speaks her own language; it is not you, but she herself, who can defend and clear you of the charge. But in slighter intimacies, and for a less stringent union ? Indeed, is it worth while ? We are all incompris, only more or less concerned for the mischance; all trying
wrongly to do right; all fawning at each other's feet like dumb, neglected lap-dogs. Some- times we catch an eye — this is our oppor- tunity in the ages — and we wag our tail with a poor smile, "/j that all! " All ? If you only knew! But how can they know } They do not love us; the more fools we to squander like on the indifferent.
But the morality of the thing, you will be glad to hear, is excellent; for it is only by trying to understand others that we can get our own hearts understood; and in matters of human feeling the clement judge is the most success- ful pleader. Virginibus Puerisque. IV.
Falling in Love
THIS simple accident of falling in love is as beneficial as it is astonishing. It ar- rests the petrifying influence of years, dis- proves cold-blooded and cynical conclusions, and awakens dormant sensibilities. Hitherto the man had found it a good policy to dis- believe the existence of any enjoyment which was out of his reach; and thus he turned his back upon the strong, sunny parts of nature, and accustomed himself to look exclusively
on what was common and dull. He accepted a prose ideal, let himself go blind of many sympathies by disuse; and if he were young and witty, or beautiful, wilfully forewent these advantages. He joined himself to the follow- ing of what, in the old mythology of love, was prettily called nonchaloir; and in an odd mixture of feelings, a fling of self-respect, a preference of selfish liberty, and a great dash of that fear with which honest people regard serious interests, kept himself back from the straightforward course of life, among certain selected activities. And now, all of a sudden, he is unhorsed, like St. Paul, from his infidel affectation. His heart, which has been ticking accurate seconds for the last year, gives a bound and begins to beat high and irregu- larly in his breast. It seems as if he had never heard or felt or seen until that moment; and by the report of his memory, he must have lived his past life between sleep and waking, or with the preoccupied attention of a brown study. He is practically incommoded by the generosity of his feelings, smiles much when he is alone, and develops a habit of looking
Love
Brings
with it
the
Highest
Sense
of the
Pleasure
of
Living
rather blankly upon the moon and stars. ... If the root of the matter be in him. and if he has the requisite chords to set in vibration, a young man may occasionally enter, with the key of art, into that land of Beulah which is upon the borders of Heaven and within sight of the City of Love. There let him sit awhile to hatch delightful hopes and perilous illu- sions.
One thing that accompanies the passion in its first blush is certainly difficult to explain. It comes (I do not see how) that from having a very supreme sense of pleasure in all parts of life — in lying down to sleep, in waking, in motion, in breathing, in continuing to be — the lover begins to regard his happiness as beneficial for the rest of the world and highly meritorious in himself. Our race has never been able contentedly to suppose that the noise of its wars, conducted by a few young gentlemen in a corner of an incon- siderable star, does not reecho among the courts of Heaven with quite a formidable effect. In much the same taste, when people find a great to-do in their own breasts, they
imagine it must have some influence in their neighbourhood. The presence of the two lovers is so enchanting to each other that it seems as if it must be the best thing possible for everybody else. They are half inclined to fancy it is because of them and their love that the sky is blue and the sun shines. And cer- tainly the v^eather is usually fine v^hile people are courting. ... In point of fact, although the happy man feels very kindly tov^ards others of his own sex, there is apt to be something too much of the magnijico in his demeanour. If people grow presuming and self-impor- tant over such matters as a dukedom or the Holy See, they will scarcely support the diz- ziest elevation in life without some suspicion of a strut; and the dizziest elevation is to love and be loved in return. Consequently, ac- cepted lovers are a trifle condescending in their address to other men. An overweening sense of the passion and importance of life hardly conduces to simplicity of manner. To women, they feel very nobly, very purely, and very generously, as if they were so many Joan of Arcs; but this does not come out in
Love's Essence is
Kind- ness
their behaviour; and they treat them to Gran- disonian airs marked with a suspicion of fatuity. Virginibus Puerisque. III.
f^ ERTAINLY, whatever it may be v/ith ^^ regard to the world at large, this idea of beneficent pleasure is true as between the sweethearts. To do good and communicate is the lover's grand intention. It is the happi- ness of the other that makes his own most intense gratification. It is not possible to en- tangle the different emotions, the pride, humility, pity and passion, which are ex- cited by a look of happy love or an unex- pected caress. To make one's self beautiful, to dress the hair, to excel in talk, to do any- thing and all things that puff out the charac- ter and attributes and make them imposing in the eyes of others, is not only to magnify one's self, but to offer the most delicate hom- age at the same time. And it is in this latter intention that they are done by lovers; for the essence of love is kindness; and indeed it may be best defined as passionate kindness; kindness, so to speak, run mad and become
importunate and violent\yanity in a merely personal sense exists no longer. The lover takes a perilous pleasure in privately dis- playing his weak points and having them, one after another, accepted and condoned. He wishes to be assured that he is loved not for this or that good quality, but for himself, or something as like himself as he can con- trive to set forward. For, although it may have been a very difficult thing to paint the Marriage of Cana, or write the fourth act of Antony and Cleopatra, there is a more difficult piece of art before every one in this world who cares to set about explaining his own character to others. Words and acts are easily wrenched from their true significance; and they are all the language we have to come and go upon, A pitiful job we make of it, as a rule. For better or worse, people mis- take our meaning and take our emotions at a wrong valuation. And generally we rest pretty content with our failures; we are content to be misapprehended by cackling flirts; but when once a man is moonstruck with this affection of love, he makes it a point of honour
to clear such dubieties away. He cannot have the Best of her Sex misled upon a point of this importance; and his pride revolts at being loved in a mistake.
He discovers a great reluctance to return on former periods of his life. To all that has not been shared with her, rights and duties, by- gone fortunes and dispositions, he can look back only by a difficult and repugnant effort of the will. That he should have wasted some years in ignorance of what alone was really important, that he may have entertained the thought of other women with any show of complacency, is a burthen almost too heavy for his self-respect. But it is the thought of another past that rankles in his spirit like a poisoned wound. That he himself made a fashion of being alive in the bald, beggarly days before a certain meeting, is deplorable enough in all good conscience. But that She should have permitted herself the same liberty seems inconsistent with a Divine Providence. Virginibus Puerisque. III.
THE changes wrought by death are in themselves so sharp and final, and so terrible and melancholy in their consequences, that the thing stands alone in man's expe- rience, and has no parallel upon earth. It out- does all other accidents because it is the last of them. Sometimes it leaps suddenly upon its victims, like a Thug; sometimes it lays a reg- ular siege and creeps upon their citadel during a score of years. And when the business is done, there is sore havoc made in other peo- ple's lives, and a pin knocked out by which many subsidiary friendships hung together. There are empty chairs, solitary walks, and single beds at night. Again, in taking away our friends, death does not take them away utterly, but leaves behind a mocking, tragical, and soon intolerable residue, which must be hurriedly concealed. Hence a whole chapter of sights and customs striking to the mind, from the pyramids of Egypt to the gibbets and dule trees of mediaeval Europe. The poorest persons have a bit of pageant going towards the tomb; memorial stones are set up over the least memorable; and, in order to
13
preserve some show of respect for what re- mains of our old loves and friendships, we must accompany it with much grimly ludi- crous ceremonial, and the hired undertaker parades before the door. All this, and much more of the same sort, accompanied by the eloquence of poets, has gone a great way to put humanity in error; nay, in many philoso- phies the error has been embodied and laid down with every circumstance of logic; al- though in real life the bustle and swiftness, in leaving people little time to think, have not left them time enough to go dangerously wrong in practice.
Virginihus Piierisque. Aes Triplex.
Our
Lives are Bound Tenderly to Life through Friend- ship
LASTLY, he is bound tenderly to life by the thought of his friends; or, shall we not say rather, that by their thought for him, by their unchangeable solicitude and love, he remains woven into the very stuff of life, beyond the power of bodily dissolution to undo } In a thousand ways will he survive and be perpetuated. Much of Etienne de la Boetie survived during all the years in which
14
Montaigne continued to converse with him on the pages of the ever-dehghtful essays. Much of what was truly Goethe was dead already when he revisited places that knew him no more, and found no better consola- tion than the promise of his own verses, that soon he too would be at rest. Indeed, when we think of what it is that we most seek and cherish, and find most pride and pleasure in calling ours, it v/ill sometimes seem to us as if our friends, at our decease, w^ould suffer loss more truly than ourselves. As a monarch who should care more for the outlying colonies he knows on the map, or through the report of his vicegerents, than for the trunk of his em- pire under his eyes at home, are we not more concerned about the shadowy life that we have in the hearts of others, and that portion in their thought and fancies which, in a certain far-away sense, belongs to us, than about the real knot of our identity — that central m.e~ tropolis of self, of which alone we are imme- diately aware — or the diligent service of arteries and veins and infinitesimal activity of ganglia, which we know (as we know a
proposition in Euclid) to be the source and substance of the whole ? At the death of every one whom we love, some fair and honourable portion of our existence falls away, and we are dislodged from one of these dear provinces; and they are not, perhaps, the most fortunate who survive a long series of such impoverish- ments, till their life and influence narrow gradually into the meagre limit of their own spirits, and death, when he comes at last, can destroy them at one blow.
Virginibus Puerisque. Ordered South.
Honesty in Busi- ness
THE salary in any business under heaven is not the only, nor indeed the first, question. That you should continue to exist is a matter for your own consideration; but that your business should be first honest, and second useful, are points in which honour and morality are concerned. Profession of Letters.
Busy- ness a Symp- tom of Deficient Vitality
EXTREME busyness, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a symptom of deficient vitality; and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and strong sense
of personal identity. There is a sort of dead- alive, hackneyed people about, who are scarcely conscious of living except in the exer- cise of some conventional occupation. Bring these fellows into the country, or set them aboard ship, and you will see how they pine for their desk or their study. They have no curiosity; they cannot give themselves over to random provocations; they do not take pleasure in the exercise of their faculties for its own sake; and unless Necessity lays about them with a stick, they will even stand still. It is no good speaking to such folk; they can- not be idle, their nature is not generous I enough; and they pass those hours in a sort J of coma which are not dedicated to furious moiling in the gold-mill. When they do not require to go to the office, when they are not hungry and have no mind to drink, the whole breathing world is a blank to them. If they have to wait an hour or so for a train, they fall into a stupid trance with their eyes open. To see them, you would suppose there was nothing to look at and no one to speak with; you would imagine they were paralysed or
alienated; and yet very possibly they are hard workers in their way, and have good eyesight for a flaw in a deed or a turn of the market. They have been to school and college, but all the time they had their eye on the medal; they have gone about in the world and mixed with clever people, but all the time they were thinking of their own affairs. As if a man's soul were not too small to begin with, they have dwarfed and narrowed theirs by a life of all work and no play; until here they are at forty, with a listless attention, a mind vacant of all material of amusement, and not one thought to rub against another, while they wait for the train. Before he was breeched, he might have clambered on the boxes; when he was twenty, he would have stared at the girls; but now the pipe is smoked out, the snuft-box empty, and my gentleman sits bolt upright upon a bench, with lamentable eyes. This does not appear to me as being Success in Life. But it is not only the person himself who suffers from his busy habits, but his wife and children, his friends and relations, and down to the very people he sits with in a railway
carriage or an omnibus. Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things. And it is not by any means certain that a man's business is the most important thing he has to do. To an impartial estimate it will seem clear that many of the wisest, most virtuous, and most beneficent parts that are to be played upon the Theatre of Life are filled by gratuitous performers, and pass among the world at large as phases of idle- ness. For in that theatre, not only the walking gentlemen, singing chambermaids, and dili- gent fiddlers in the orchestra, but those who look on and clap their hands from the benches, do really play a part and fulfil important offices towards the general result.
Virginibus Puerisque. Apology for Idlers.
THIS world itself, travelling blindly and swiftly in over-crowded space, among a million other worlds travelling blindly and swiftly in contrary directions, may very well come by a knock that would set it into ex-
19
plosion like a penny squib. And what, patho- logically looked at, is the human body, with all its organs, but a mere bagful of petards ? The least of these is as dangerous to the whole economy as the ship's powder-magazine to the ship; and with every breath we breathe, and every meal we eat, we are putting one or more of them in peril. If we clung as devotedly as some philosophers pretend we do to the abstract idea of life, or were half as frightened as they make out we are, for the subversive accident that ends it all, the trumpets might sound by the hour and no one would follow them into battle — the blue-peter might fly at the truck, but who would climb into a sea-going ship ? Think (if these philosophers were right) with what a preparation of spirit we should affront the daily peril of the dinner- table; a deadlier spot than any battlefield in history, where the far greater proportion of our ancestors have miserably left their bones! What woman would ever be lured into mar- riage, so much more dangerous than the wild- est sea .? And what would it be to grow old .? For, after a certain distance, every step we
take in life we find the ice growing thinner under our feet, and all around us and behind us we see our contemporaries going through. By the time a man gets well into the seven- ties, his continued existence is a mere mir- acle; and when he lays his old bones in bed for the night, there is an overwhelming prob- ability that he will never see the day. Do the old men mind it, as a matter of fact ? Why, no. They were never merrier; they have their grog at night, and tell the raciest stories; they hear of the death of people about their own age, or even younger, not as if it was a grisly warning, but with a simple childlike pleasure at having outlived some one else; and when a draught might puff them out like a guttering candle, or a bit of a stumble shatter them like so much glass, their old hearts keep sound and unaffrighted, and they go on, bubbling with laughter, through years of man's age compared to which the valley at Balaklava was as safe and peaceful as a village cricket- green on Sunday. It may fairly be questioned (if we look to the peril only) whether it was a much more daring feat for Curtius to plunge
into the gulf, than for any old gentleman of ninety to doff his clothes and clamber into bed. .
Indeed, it is a memorable subject for con- sideration, with what unconcern and gaiety mankind pricks on along the Valley of the Shadow of Death. The whole way is one wil- derness of snares, and the end of it, for those who fear the last pinch, is irrevocable ruin. And yet we go spinning through it all, like a party for the Derby. Perhaps the reader re- members one of the humorous devices of the deified Caligula ; how he encouraged a vast con- course of holiday-makers on to his bridge over Balae Bay; and when they were in the height of their enjoyment, turned loose the Praetorian guards among the company, and had them tossed into the sea. This is no bad miniature of the dealings of nature Vv^ith the transitory race of man. Only, what a checquered picnic we have of it, even while it lasts! and into v^hat great waters, not to be crossed by any swimmer, God's pale Praetorian throws us over in the end! We live the time that a match flickers; we
pop the cork of a ginger-beer bottle, and the earthquake swallows us on the instant. Is it not odd, is it not incongruous, is it not, in the highest sense of human speech, incredible, that we should think so highly of the ginger- beer, and regard so little the devouring earth- quake ? The love of Life and the fear of Death are tv/o famous phrases that grow harder to understand the more we think about them. It is a well-known fact that an immense pro- portion of boat accidents would never happen if people held the sheet in their hands instead of making it fast; and yet, unless it be some martinet of a professional mariner or some landsman with shattered nerves, every one of God's creatures makes it fast. A strange instance of man's unconcern and brazen boldness in the face of death!
Virginibus Pucrisque. Aes Triplex.
WE do not go to cowards for tender deal- ing; there is nothing so cruel as panic; the man who has least fear for his own car- case, has most time to consider others. That eminent chemist who took his walks abroad
23
in tin shoes, and subsisted wholly upon tepid milk, had all his work cut out for him in con- siderate dealings with his own digestion. So soon as prudence has begun to grow up in the brain, like a dismal fungus, it finds its first expression in a paralysis of generous acts. The victim begins to shrink spiritually; he develops a fancy for parlours with a regu- lated temperature, and takes his morality on the principle of tin shoes and tepid milk. The care of one important body or soul becomes so engrossing, that all the noises of the outer world begin to come thin and faint into the parlour with the regulated temperature; and the tin shoes go equably forward over blood and rain. To be overwise is to ossify; and the scruple-monger ends by standing stock-still. Now the man who has his heart on his sleeve, and a good whirling weathercock of a brain, who reckons his life as a thing to be dashingly used and cheerfully hazarded, makes a very diff^erent acquaintance of the world, keeps all his pulses going true and fast, and gathers impetus as he runs, until, if he be running towards anything better than wildfire, he
24
may shoot up and become a constellation in the end. Lord look after his health, Lord have a care of his soul, says he; and he has the key of the position, and swashes through in- congruity and peril towards his aim. Death is on all sides of him with pointed batteries, as he is on all sides of all of us; unfortunate surprises gird him round; mimouthed friends and relations hold up their hands in quite a little elegiacal synod about his path; and what cares he for all this ? Being a true lover of living, a fellow with something pushing and spontaneous in his inside, he must, like any other soldier, in any other stirring, deadly warfare, push on at his best pace until he touch the goal. *'A peerage or Westminster Abbey!" cried Nelson, in his bright, boyish, heroic manner. These are great incentives; not for any of these, but for the plain satis- faction of living, of being about their business in some sort or other, do the brave, serviceable men of every nation tread down the nettle danger, and pass flyingly over all the stum- bling-blocks of prudence. Think of the hero- ism of Johnson, think of that superb indif-
25
Better to Lose Health Like a Spend- thrift than Waste it Like a Miser
ference to mortal limitation that set him upon his dictionary, and carried him through tri- umphantly to the end! Who, if he were wisely considerate of things at large, would ever embark upon any work much more consider- able than a half-penny post card ? Who would project a serial novel, after Thackeray and Dickens had each fallen in mid-course ? Who would find heart enough to begin to live, if he dallied with the consideration of death ? And, after all, what sorry and pitiful quib- bling all this is! To forego all the issues of living in a parlour with a regulated temper- ature — as if that were not to die a hundred times over, and for ten years at a stretch! As if it were not to die in one's own lifetime, and without even the sad immunities of death! As if it were not to die, and yet be the patient spectators of our own pitiable change! The Permanent Possibility is preserved, but the sensations carefully held at arm's length, as if one kept a photographic plate in a dark chamber. It is better to lose health like a spendthrift than to waste it like a miser. It is better to live and be done with it, than to
die daily in the sick-room. By all means begin your folio; even if the doctor does not give you a year, even if he hesitates about a month, make one brave push and see v^hat can be accomplished in a week. It is not only in finished undertakings that we ought to honour useful labour. A spirit goes out of the man who means execution, which outlives the most untimely ending. All who have meant good with their whole hearts, have done good work, although they may die before they have the time to sign it. Every heart that has beat strong and cheerfully has left a hopeful im- pulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind. And even if death catch people, like an open pitfall, and in mid- career, laying out vast projects, and planning monstrous foundations, flushed with hope, and their mouths full of boastful language, they should be at once tripped up and si- lenced: is there not something brave and spirited in such a termination .? and does not life go down with a better grace, foaming in full body over a precipice, than miserably straggling to an end in sandy deltas } When
The Young Man and Death
/
the Greeks made their fine saying that those whom the gods love die young, I cannot help believing they had this sort of death also in their eye. For surely, at whatever age it over- take the man, this is to die young. Death has not been suffered to take so much as an illusion from his heart. In the hot-fit of life, a-tiptoe on the highest point of being, he passes at a bound on to the other side. The noise of the mallet and chisel is scarcely quenched, the trumpets are hardly done blowing, when, trailing with him clouds of glory, this happy- starred, full-blooded spirit shoots into the spiritual land.
VirgiJiibus Puerisque. Aes Triplex.
THE interests of youth are rarely frank; his passions, like Noah's dove, come home to roost. The fire, sensibility, and volume of his own nature, that is all that he has learned to recognise. The tumultuary and gray tide of life, the empire of routine, the unrejoicing faces of his elders, fill him with contemptu- ous surprise; there also he seems to walk among the tombs of spirits; and it is only in — __
the course of years, and after much rubbing with his fellow-men, that he begins by ghmpses to see himself from without and his fellows from within; to know his own for one among the thousand undenoted countenances of the city street, and to divine in others the throb of human agony and hope. In the mean- time he will avoid the hospital doors, the pale faces, the cripple, the sweet whiff of chloro- form — for there, on the most thoughtless, the pains of others are burned home; but he will continue to walk, in a divine self-pity, the aisles of the forgotten graveyard. The length of man's life, which is endless to the brave and busy, is scorned by his ambitious thought. He cannot bear to have come for so little, and to go again so wholly. He cannot bear, above all, in that brief scene, to be still idle, and by way of cure, neglects the little that he has to do. The parable of the talent is the brief epitome of youth. To believe in immortality is one thing, but it is first needful to believe in life. Denunciatory preachers seem not to suspect that they may be taken gravely and in evil part; that young men may
29
Fame
come to think of time as of a moment, and with the pride of Satan wave back the in- adequate gift. Yet here is a true peril; this it is that sets them to pace the graveyard alleys and to read, with strange extremes of pity and derision, the memorials of the dead.
Old Mortality. Memories and Portraits.
/ I vHE heroes themselves say, as often as JL not, that fame is their object, but I do not think that is much to the purpose. People generally say what they have been taught to say; that was the catch-word they were given in youth to express the aims of their way of life; and men who are gaining great battles are not likely to take much trouble in review- ing their sentiments and the words in which they were told to express them. Almost every person, if you will believe himself, holds a quite different theory of life from the one on which he is patiently acting. And the fact is, fame may be a forethought and an after- thought, but it is too abstract an idea to move people greatly in moments of swift and mo- mentous decision. It is from something more
immediate, some determination of blood to the head, some trick of the fancy, that the breach is stormed or the bold word spoken. I am sure a fellow shooting an ugly weir in a canoe has exactly as much thought about fame as most com.manders going into battle; and yet the action, fall out how it will, is not one of those the muse delights to celebrate. Indeed it is difficult to see why the fellow does a thing so nameless and yet so formidable to look at, unless on the theory that he likes it. I suspect that is why; and I suspect it is at least ten per cent of why Lord Beaconsfield and Mr. Gladstone have debated so much in the House of Commons, and why Burnaby rode to Khiva the other day, and why the Admirals courted war like a mistress. Virginibus Puerisque. The English Admirals.
— f 4—
Prosperous humanitarians tell me, in my club smoking-room, that they are a prey to prodigious heroic feelings, and that it costs them more nobility of soul to do noth- ing in particular than would carry on all the wars, by sea or land, of bellicose humanity.
It may very well be so, and yet not touch the point in question. For what I desire is to see some of this nobility brought face to face with me in an inspiring achievement. A man may talk smoothly over a cigar in my club smok- ing-room from now to the Day of Judgment, without adding anything to mankind's treas- ury of illustrious and encouraging examples. It is not over the virtues of a curate-and-tea- party novel that people are abashed into high resolutions. It may be because their hearts are crass, but to stir them up properly they must have men entering into glory with some pomp and circumstance. And that is why these stories of our sea-captains, printed, so to speak, in capitals, and full of bracing moral influence, are more valuable to Eng- land than any material benefit in all the books of political economy between Westminster and Birmingham. Greenville chewing wine- glasses at table makes no very pleasant figure, ^ny more than a thousand other artists when they are viewed in the body, or met in private life; but his work of art, his finished tragedy, is an eloquent performance; and I contend it
32
ought not only to enliven men of the sword as they go into battle, but send back merchant clerks with more heart and spirit to their bookkeeping by double entry. Virginibus Puerisque. The English Admirals. — f -}—
THERE should be nothing so much a man's business as his amusements. Nothing but money-grubbing can be put for- ward to the contrary; no one but Mammon, the least erected spirit that fell from Heaven, durst risk a word in answer. It is but a lying cant that would but represent the merchant and the banker as people disinterestedly toil- ing for mankind, and then most useful when they are most absorbed in their transactions; for the man is more important than his ser- vices. An Inland Voyage.
FOR I think we may look upon our little private war with death somewhat in this light: If a man knows he will sooner or later be robbed upon a journey, he will have a bottle of the best in every inn, and look upon his extravagances as so much gained upon
33
Insta- bility of Friend- ships
the thieves. And above all, where instead of simply spending, he makes a profitable in- vestment for some of his money, where it will be out of risk of loss. So every bit of brisk living, and above all when it is healthful, is just so much gained upon the wholesale fil- cher, death. We shall have the less in our pockets, the more in our stomach, when he cries stand and deliver. A swift stream is a favorite artifice of his, and one that brings him in a comfortable thing per annum; but when he and I come to settle our accounts, I shall w^histle in his face for these hours upon the upper Oise. An Inland Voyage.
THE friendships of men are vastly agree- able, but they are insecure. You know all the time that one friend will marry and put you to the door; a second accept a situa- tion in China, and become no more to you than a name, a reminiscence, and an occa- sional crossed letter, very laborious to read; a third will take up with some religious crotchet and treat you to sour looks thenceforward.
So,
way
or another, life forces men
34
apart and breaks up the goodly fellowships forever. The very flexibility and ease which make men's friendships so agreeable while they endure, make them the easier to destroy and forget. And a man who has a few friends, or one who has a dozen (if there be anyone so wealthy on this earth), cannot forget on how precarious a basis his happiness reposes; and how by a stroke or two of fate — a death, a few light words, a piece of stamped paper, a woman's bright eyes — he may be left, in a month, destitute of all.
Virginibus Puerisque. I.
A ND perhaps there is no subject on which -^ ^ a man should speak so gravely as that industry, whatever it may be, which is the occupation or delight of his life; which is his tool to earn or serve with; and which, if it be unworthy, stamps himself as a mere incubus of dumb and greedy bowels on the shoulders of labouring humanity. Profession of Letters.
IV/TANY lovable people miss each other in ■^^ ^ the world, or meet under some un-
35
The Ideal Proposal is not Ex- pressed in Words
favourable star. There is the nice and critical moment of declaration to be got over. From timidity or lack of opportunity a good half of possible love cases never get so far, and at least another quarter do there cease and de- termine. A very adroit person, to be sure, manages to prepare the way and out w^ith his declaration in the nick of time. And then there is a fine, solid sort of man, who goes on from snub to snub; and if he has to declare forty times will continue imperturbably de- claring, amid the astonished consideration of men and angels, until he has a favorable answer. I daresay, if one were a woman, one would like to marry a man who was capable of doing this, but not quite one who had done so. It is just a little bit abject, and somehow just a little bit gross; and marriages in which one of the parties has been thus battered into consent scarcely form agreeable subjects for meditation. Love should run out to meet love with open arms. Indeed, the ideal story is that of two people who go into love step for step, with a fluttered consciousness, like a pair of children venturing together in a dark
36
room. From the first moment when they see each other, with a pang of curiosity, through stage after stage of growing pleasure and em- barrassment, they can read the expression of their own trouble in each other's eyes. There is here no declaration properly so called; the feeling is so plainly shared, that as soon as the man knows what is in his own heart, he is sure of what is in the woman's.
Virgmibus Puerisque. III.
LOVE is not blind, nor yet forgiving. "O, yes, believe me," as the song says, " Love has eyes!" The nearer the intimacy, the more cuttingly do we feel the unworthiness of those we love; and because you love one, and would die for that love to-morrow, you have not forgiven, and you never will forgive, that friend's misconduct. If you want a person's faults, go to those who love him. They will not tell you, but they know. And here lies the magnanimous courage of love, that it endures this knowledge without change. Familiar Studies of Men and Books. Henry David Thoreau.
37
Marry in Faith and not in Hope
He who Refrains from Mar- riage is a Coward
Hope
and
Faith
A ND yet, when all has been said, the man -^ ^ who should hold back from marriage is in the same case with him who runs away from battle. To avoid an occasion for our virtues is a worse degree of failure than to push forward pluckily and make a fall. It is lawful that we pray to God that we be not led into temptation; but not lav/ful to skulk from those that come to us. The noblest pas- sage in one of the noblest books of this cen- tury is where the old pope glories in the trial, nay, in the partial fall and but imperfect triumph, of the younger hero. [Browning's ''The Ring and the Book."] Without some such manly note, it were perhaps better to have no conscience at all. But there is a vast difference between teaching flight, and show- ing points of peril that a man may walk the more warily. And the true conclusion of this paper is to turn our back on apprehensions, and embrace that shining and courageous virtue, Faith. Hope is the boy, a blind, head- long, pleasant fellow, good to chase swal- lows with the salt; Faith is the grave, expe- rienced, yet smiling man. Hope lives on ig- ___ _ ^
norance; open-eyed Faith is built upon a knowledge of our life, of the tyranny of cir- cumstance and the frailty of human resolu- tion. Hope looks for unqualified success; but Faith counts certainly on failure, and takes honourable defeat to be a form of victory. Hope is a kind old pagan; but Faith grew up in Christian days, and early learnt humility. In the one temper, a man is indignant that he cannot spring up in a clap to heights of elegance and virtue; in the other, out of a sense of his infirmities, he is filled with con- fidence because a year has come and gone, and he has still preserved some rags of honour. In the first, he expects an angel for a wife; in the last, he knows that she is like himself — erring, thoughtless, and untrue; but like him- self, also, filled v/ith a struggling radiancy of better things, and adorned with ineffective qualities. You may safely go to school with hope; but ere you marry should have learned the mingled lesson of the world: that dolls are stuffed with sawdiist, and yet are excellent playthings; that hope and/love a^ress them- selves to a perfection never realised, and yet.
firmly held, become the salt and staff of life; that you yourself are compacted of infirm- ities, perfect, you might say, in imperfection, and yet you have a something in you lovable and worth preserving; and that while the mass of mankind lies under this scurvy con- demnation, you will scarce find one but, by some generous reading, will become to you a lesson, a model, and a noble spouse through life. So thinking, you will constantly support your own unworthiness, and easily forgive the failings of your friend. Nay, you will be wisely glad that you retain the sense of blem- ishes; for the faults of married people con- tinually spur up each of them, hour by hour, to do better and to meet and love upon a higher ground. And ever, between the fail- ures, there will come glimpses of kind vir- tues to encourage and console.
Virginibus Puerisque. II.
Choice in Mar- riage
T AM often filled with wonder that so many ^ marriages are passably successful, and so few come to open failure, the more so as I fail to understand the principle on which
people regulate their choice. I see women marrying indiscriminately with staring bur- gesses and ferret-faced, white-eyed bugs, and men dwelling in contentment with noisy scul- lions, or taking into their lives acidulous ves- tals. It is a common answer to say the good people marry because they fall in love; and of course you may use or misuse a word as much as you please, if you have the world along with you. But love is at least a some- what hyperbolical expression for such luke- warm preference. It is not here, anyway, that Love employs his golden shafts; he cannot be said, with any fitness of language, to reign here and revel. Indeed, if this be love at all, it is plain the poets have been fooling with mankind since the foundation of the world. And you have only to look these happy couples in the face, to see they have never been in love, or in hate, or in any other high passion, all their days. When you see a dish of fruit at dessert, you sometimes set your affections upon one particular peach or nec- tarine, watch it with some anxiety as it comes round the table, and feel quite a sensible dis-
The "High Pas- sion" is not often the Cause of Mar- riage
The Modern Mar- riage Idyll is often Writ in Common Prose
appointment when it is taken by someone else. I have used the phrase ''high passion." Well, I should say this was about as high a passion as generally leads to marriage. One husband hears after marriage that some poor fellow is dying of his wife's love. *'What a pity!" he exclaims; ''you know I could so easily have got another!" And yet that is a very happy union. Or again: A young man was telling me the sweet story of his love. "I like it well enough as long as her sisters are there," said this amorous swain; "but I don't know what to do when we're alone." Once more: A married lady was debating the sub- ject with another lady. '*You know, dear," said the first, "after ten years of marriage, if he is nothing else, your husband is always an old friend." "I have many old friends," re- turned the other, "but I prefer them to be nothing more." "Oh, perhaps I might pre- fer that also!" There is a common note in these three illustrations of the modern idyll; and it must be owned the god goes among us with a limping gait and blear eyes. You won- der whether it was so always; whether desire
was always equally dull and spiritless, and possession equally cold. I cannot help fancy- ing most people make, ere they marry, some such table of recommendations as Hannah Goodwin wrote to her brother William anent her friend Miss Gray. It is so charmingly comical, and so put to the occasion, that I must quote a few phrases. **The young lady is in every sense formed to make one of your disposition happy. She has a pleasing voice, with which she accompanies her musical in- strument with judgment. She has an easy politeness in her manners, neither free nor reserved. She is a good housekeeper and a good economist, and yet of a generous dis- position. As to her internal accomplishments, I have reason to speak still more highly of them; good sense without vanity, a penetrat- ing judgment without a disposition to satire, with about as much religion as my William likes, struck me with a wish that she was my William's wife." That is about the tune: Pleasing voice, moderate good looks, unim- peachable internal accomplishments, after the style of the copy-book, with about as
43
The Lion of Love is Hardly a Fit Animal for the Domes- tic Pet
much religion as my William likes; and then, with all speed, to church. To deal plainly, if they only married when they fell in love, most people would die unwed; and among the others there would be not a few tumultuous households. The Lion is the King of Beasts, but he is scarcely suitable for a domestic pet. In the same way, I suspect love is rather too violent a passion to make, in all cases, a good domestic sentiment. Like other violent ex- citements, it throws up not only what is best, but what is worst and smallest, in men's char- acters. Just as some people are malicious in drink, or brawling and virulent under the influence of religious feeling, some are moody, jealous, and exacting when they are in love, who are honest, downright, good-hearted fellows enough in the every-day aflfairs and humours of the world. How then, seeing we are driven to the hypothesis that people choose in comparatively cold blood, how is it that they choose so well ? One is about tempted to hint that it does not much matter whom you marry; that, in fact, marriage is a subjective affection, and if you have made up your mind
44
to it, and once talked yourself fairly over, you could *'pull it through" with anybody.
Virginibus Puerisque. I.
TJUT, alas, by planting a stake at the top -*^ of a flood, you can neither prevent nor delay the inevitable ebb. There is no hocus- pocus in morality; and even the "sanctimo- nious ceremony" of marriage leaves the man unchanged. This is a hard saying, and has an air of paradox. For there is something in mar- riage so natural and inviting, that the step has an air of great simplicity and ease; it offers to bury forever many aching preoccu- pations; it is to afford us unfailing and fa- miliar company through life; it opens up a smiling prospect of the blest and passive kind of love, rather than the blessing and the active; it is approached not only through the delights of courtship, but by a pub- lic performance and repeated legal sig- natures. A man naturally thinks it will go hard with him if he cannot be good and for- tunate and happy within such august circum- vallations.
45
Its
Specu- lative Charac- ter
And yet there is probably no other act in a man's Hfe so hot-headed and foolhardy as this one of marriage. For years, let us sup- pose, you have been making the most in- different business of your career. Your ex- perience has not, we may dare to say, been more encouraging than Paul's or Horace's; like them, you have seen and desired the good you have not been able to accomplish; like them, you have done the evil that you loathed. You have waked at night in a hot or cold sweat, according to your habit of body, re- membering with dismal surprise your own unpardonable acts and sayings. You have been sometimes tempted to withdraw en- tirely from this game of life; as a man who makes nothing but misses withdraws from that less dangerous one of billiards. You have fallen back upon the thought that you your- self most sharply smarted for your misde- meanors, or, in the old plaintive phrase, that you were nobody's enemy but your own. And then you have been made aware of what was beautiful and amiable, wise and kind, in the other part of your behaviour; and it
46
seemed as if nothing could reconcile the con- tradiction; as indeed nothing can. If you are a man, you have shut your mouth hard and said nothing; and if you are only a man in the making, you have recognised that yours v^as quite a special case, and you yourself not guilty of your ov^n pestiferous career. Granted, and with all my heart. Let us ac- cept these apologies; let us agree that you are nobody's enemy but your own; let us agree that you are a sort of moral cripple, impotent for good; and let us regard you with the un- mingled pity due to such a fate. But there is one thing to which, on these terms, we can never agree: we can never agree to have you marry. What! you have had one life to manage, and have failed so strangely, and now can see nothing wiser than to conjoin with it the management of some one else's ? Because you have been unfaithful in a very little, you propose yourself to be a ruler over ten cities. You strip yourself by such a step of all remaining consolations and excuses. You are no longer content to be your own enemy. You must be your wife's also. You
have been hitherto in a mere subaltern atti- tude; deaUng cruel blows about you in life, yet only half responsible, since you came there by no choice or movement of your own. Now, it appears, you must take things on your own authority. God made you, but you marry yourself; and for all that your wife suffers, no one is responsible but you. A man must be very certain of his knowledge ere he undertakes to guide a ticket-of-leave man through a dangerous pass; you have eternally missed your way in life, with consequences that you still deplore, and yet you masterfully seize your wife's hand, and, blindfold, drag her after you through ruin. And it is your wife, you observe, whom you select. She, whose happiness you most desire, you choose to be your victim. You would earnestly warn her from a tottering bridge or a bad invest- ment. If she were to marry someone else, how you would tremble for her fate! If she were only your sister, and you thought half as much of her, how doubtfully would you entrust her future to a man no better than yourself!
Virginibus Puertsque. II.
INSTEAD of on two or three, you stake your happiness on one Hfe only. But still, as the bargain is more explicit and complete on your part, it is more so on the other; and you have not to fear so many contingencies; it is not every wind that can blow you from your anchorage; and so long as death with- holds his sickle, you will always have a friend at home. People who share a cell in the Bas- tile, or are thrown together on an uninhab- ited isle, if they do not immediately fall to fisticuffs, will find some possible ground of compromise. They will learn each other's ways and humours, so as to know where they must go warily, and where they may lean their whole weight. The discretion of the first years becomes the settled habit of the last; and so, with wisdom and patience, two lives may grow indissolubly into one. But marriage, if comfortable, is not at all heroic. It certainly narrows and damps the spirit of generous men. In marriage, a man becomes slack and selfish, and undergoes a fatty degeneration of his moral being. . . . The air of the fireside withers out all the fire wild-
49
To
Women it is En- larging
ings of the husband's heart. He is so com- fortable and happy that he begins to prefer comfort and happiness to everything else on earth, his wife included. Yesterday he would have shared his last shilling; to-day **his first duty is to his family," and is fulfilled in large measure by laying down vintages and hus- banding the health of an invaluable parent. Twenty years ago this man was equally capa- ble of crime or heroism; now he is fit for neither. His soul is asleep, and you may speak without constraint; you will not wake him. It is not for nothing that Don Quixote was a bachelor and Marcus Aurelius maimed ill. For women there is less of this danger. Mar- riage is of so much use to a woman, opens out to her so much more of life, and puts her in the way of so much more freedom and use- fulness, that, whether she marry ill or well, she can hardly miss some benefit. It is true, however, that some of the merriest and most genuine of women are old maids; and that those old maids, and wives who are unhappily married, have often most of the true motherly touch. And this would seem to show, even
50
for women, some narrowing influence in com- fortable married life. But the rule is none the less certain: if you wish the pick of men and women, take a good bachelor and a good wife. Virginibus Puerisque. I.
TIMES are changed with him who mar- ries; there are no more by-path meadows where you may innocently linger, but the road lies long and straight and dusty to the grave. Idleness, which is often becoming and even wise in the bachelor, begins to wear a different aspect when you have a wife to sup- port. Suppose, after you are married, one of those little slips were to befall you. What happened last November might surely happen February next. They may have annoyed you at the time, because they were not what you meant; but how will they annoy you in the future, and how will they shake the fabric of your wife's confidence and peace! A thousand things unpleasing went on in the chiaroscuro of a life that you shrank from too particu- larly realising: you did not care, in those days, J to make a fetish of your conscience; you
51
A Wife is the Witness of your Life and the Sharpest Critic of your Conduct and
Charac- ter. She is the
Domes- tic
Record- ing Angel
would recognise your failures with a nod, and so, good-day. But the time for these re- serves is over. You have wilfully introduced a witness into your life, the scene of these de- feats, and can no longer close the mind's eye upon uncomely passages, but must stand up straight and put a name upon your actions. And your witness is not only the judge, but the victim of your sins; not only can she con- demn you to the sharpest penalties, but she must herself share feelingly in their endurance. And observe, once more, with what temerity you have chosen precisely her to be your spy, whose esteem you value highest, and whom you have already taught to think you better than you are. You may think you had a con- science, and believed in God; but what is a conscience to a wife ? Wise men of yore erected statues of their deities, and consciously per- formed their part in life before those marble eyes. A god watched them at the board, and stood by the bedside in the morning when they woke; and all about their ancient cities, where they bought or sold, or where they piped and wrestled, there would stand some
52
symbol of the things that are outside of man. These were lessons, delivered in the quiet dialect of art, which told their story faithfully, but gently. It is the same lesson, if you will — but how harrowingly taught! — when the woman you respect shall weep from your un- kindness or blush with shame at your mis- conduct. Poor girls in Italy turn their painted Madonnas to the wall; you cannot set aside your wife. To marry is to domesticate the Recording Angel. Once you are married, there is nothing left for you, not even suicide, but to be good. Virginibus Puerisque. II.
RESPECTABILITY is a very good thing in its way, but it does not rise superior to all considerations; I would not for a mo- ment venture to hint that it was a matter of taste; but I think I will go as far as this; that if a position is admittedly unkind, uncomfort- able, unnecessary, and superfluously useless, although it were as respectable as the Church of England, the sooner a man is out of it, the better for himself, and all concerned.
An Inland Voyage.
53
Our Boy- hood
OUR boyhood ceased — well, when ? — not, I think, at twenty; nor perhaps al- together at twenty-five; nor yet at thirty; and possibly, to be quite frank, we are still in the thick of that arcadian period. For as the race of man, after centuries of civilisation, still keeps some traits of their barbarian fathers, so man, the individual, is not altogether quit of youth, when he is already old and hon- oured, and Lord Chancellor of England. We advance in years somewhat in the manner of an invading army in a barren land; the age that we have reached, as the phrase goes, we but hold with an outpost, and still keep open our communications with the extreme rear and first beginnings of the march. There is our true base; that is not the only beginning, but the perennial spring of our faculties; and grandfather William can retire upon occa- sion into the green enchanted forest of his boyhood. Virginibus Puerisque. II.
Poverty and Mo- rality
IT is all very fine to talk about tramps and morality. Six hours of police surveillance (such as I have had), or one brutal rejection
54
from an inn door, change your views upon the subject like a course of lectures. As long as you keep in the upper regions, with all the world bowing to you as you go, social ar- rangements have a very handsome air; but once get under the wheels, and you wish Society were at the devil. I will give most re- spectable men a fortnight of such a life, and then I will offer them two pence for what re- mains of their morality. An Inland Voyage.
OUT of my country and myself I go." I wish to take a dive among new condi- tions for awhile, as into another element. I have nothing to do with my friends or affec- tions for the time; when I came av/ay, I left my heart at home in a desk, or sent it foi'ward with my portmanteau to await me at my des- tination. After my journey is over, I shall not fail to read your admirable letters with the attention they deserve. But I have paid all this money, look you, and paddled all these strokes, for no other purpose than to be abroad; and yet you keep me at home with your perpetual communications. You tug
55
The
Dreams by the Fireside
Happi- ness is Found in Social Life
the string, and I feel that I am a tethered bird. You pursue me all over Europe with the little vexations that I came away to avoid. There is no discharge in the war of life, I am well aware; but shall there not be so much as a week's furlough ? An hiland Voyage.
YOU may paddle all day long; but it is when you come back at nightfall, and look in at the familiar room, that you find Love or Death awaiting you beside the stove; and the most beautiful adventures are not those we go to seek. An Inland Voyage.
WE need have no respect for a state of artificial training. True health is to be able to do without it. Shakespeare, we can imagine, might begin the day upon a quart of ale, and yet enjoy the sunrise to the full as much as Thoreau, and commemorate his enjoyment in vastly better verses. A man who must separate himself from his neigh- bours' habits in order to be happy, is in much the same case with one who requires to take opium for the same purpose. V/hat we want
56
to see is one who can breast into the world, do a man's work, and still preserve his first and pure enjoyment of existence. Familiar Studies of Men and Books. Henry David Thoreau.
INDEED, so long as a thing is an exhibi- tion, and you to pay to see it, it is nearly certain to amuse. If we were charged so much a head for sunsets, or if God sent round a drum before the hawthorns came in flower, what a work should we not make about their beauty! But these things, like good companions, stupid people early cease to observe; and the Abstract Bagman tittups past in his spring gig, and is positively not aware of the flowers along the lane, or the scenery of the weather overhead. An Inland Voyage.
THE blind bow-boy," who smiles upon us from the end of terraces in old Dutch gardens, laughingly hails his bird-bolts among a fleeting generation. But for as fast as ever he shoots, the game dissolves and disappears into eternity from under his falling arrows;
57
The Price we
pay
for
what we "Want is what w^e call Life — we pay the Price of Money in Liberty
this one is gone ere he is struck; the other has but time to make one gesture and give one passionate cry; and they are all the things of a moment. When the generation is gone, when the play is over, v^hen the thirty years' pano- rama has been withdrawn in tatters from the stage of the world, we may ask what has be- come of. these great, weighty, and undying loves, and the sweethearts who despised mor- tal conditions in a fine credulity; and they can only show us a few songs in a bygone taste, a few actions worth remembering, and a few children who have retained some happy stamp from the disposition of their parents.
Ftrginibus Puerisque. III.
THE cost of a thing," says Thoreau, "is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run." I have been accustomed to put it to myself, perhaps more clearly, that the price we have to pay for money is paid in liberty. Between these two ways of it, at least, the reader will probably not fail to find a third definition of his own, and it follows, _
on one or other, that a man may pay too dearly for his livehhood, by giving, in Tho- reau's terms, his whole Hfe for it, or, in mine, bartering for it the whole of his available liberty, and becoming a slave till death. There are two questions to be considered — the quality of what we buy, and the price we have to pay for it. Do you want a thousand a year, a two thousand a year, or a ten thousand a year livelihood ? and can you afford the one you want ? It is a matter of taste; it is not in the least degree a question of duty, though commonly supposed so. But there is no author- ity for that view anywhere. It is nowhere in the Bible. It is true that we might do a vast amount of good if we were wealthy, but it is also highly improbable; not many do; and the art of growing rich is not only quite dis- tinct from that of doing good, but the prac- tice of the one does not at all train a man for practising the other. ''Money might be of great service to me," writes Thoreau, "but the difficulty now is that I do not improve my opportunities, and therefore I am not prepared to have my opportunities increased."
59
"Mak- ing Be- lieve " in Child's Play
It is a mere illusion that, above a certain in- come, the personal desires will be satisfied and leave a wider margin for the generous impulse. It is as difficult to be generous, or anything else, except perhaps a member of Parliament, on thirty thousand as on two thousand a year. Familiar Studies of Men and Books. Henry David Thoreau.
TN the child's world of dim sensation, play ^ is all in all. ''Making believe" is the gist of his whole life, and he cannot so much as take a walk except in character. I could not learn my alphabet without some suitable mise-en-scene, and had to act a business man in an office before I could sit down to my book. Will you kindly question your memory, and find out how much you did, work or pleasure, in good faith and soberness, and for how much you had to cheat yourself with some invention .? I remember, as though it were yesterday, the expansion of spirit, the dignity and self-reliance, that came with a pair of mustachios in burnt cork, even when there was none to see. Children are even con-
' 60
tent to forego what we call the realities, and prefer the shadow to the substance. When they might be speaking intelligibly together, they chatter senseless gibberish by the hour, and are quite happy because they are making believe to speak French. I have said already how even the imperious appetite of hunger suffers itself to be gulled and led by the nose with the fag end of an old song. And it goes deeper than this: when children are together even a meal is felt as an interruption in the business of life; and they must find some imaginative sanction, and tell themselves some sort of story, to account for, to colour, to render entertaining, the simple processes of eating and drinking. What wonderful fancies I have heard evolved out of the pattern upon teacups! — from which there followed a code of rules and a whole world of excitement, until tea-drinking began to take rank as a game. When my cousin and I took our por- ridge of a morning, we had a device to en- liven the course of the meal. He ate his with sugar, and explained it to be a country con- tinually buried under snow. I took mine with
milk, and explained it to be a country suffer- ing gradual inundation. You can imagine us exchanging bulletins; how here was an island still unsubmerged, here a valley not yet cov- ered with snow; what inventions were made; how this population lived in cabins on perches and travelled on stilts, and how mine was always in boats; how the interest grew furious, as the last corner of safe ground was cut off on all sides and grew smaller every moment; and how, in fine, the food was of altogether secondary importance, and might even have been nauseous, so long as we seasoned it with these dreams. But perhaps the most exciting moments I ever had over a meal were in the case of a calf's-foot jelly. It was hardly pos- sible not to believe — and you may be sure, so far from trying, I did all I could to favour the illusion — that some part of it was hol- low, and that sooner or later my spoon would lay open the secret tabernacle of the golden rock. There, might some miniature Red Beard await his hour; there, might one find the treasures of the Forty Thieves, and be- wildered Cassim beating about the walls. And
so I quarried on slowly, with bated breath, savouring the interest. Believe me, I had little palate left for the jelly; and though I preferred the taste when I took cream with it, I used often to go without, because the cream dimmed the transparent fractures. Even with games, this spirit is authoritative with right-minded children. It is thus that hide-and-seek has so preeminent a sover- eignty, for it is the well-spring of romance, and the actions and the excitement to which it gives rise lend themselves to almost any sort of fable. And thus cricket, which is a mere matter of dexterity, palpably about noth- ing and for no end, often fails to satisfy in- fantile craving. It is a game, if you like, but not a game of play. You cannot tell yourself a story about cricket; and the activity it calls forth can be justified on no rational theory. Even football, although it admirably stimu- lates the tug and the ebb and flow of battle, has presented difficulties to the mind of young sticklers after verisimilitude; and I knew at least one little boy who was mightily exer- cised about the presence of the ball, and had
6^
to spirit himself up, whenever he came to play, with an elaborate story of enchantment, and take the missile as a sort of talisman bandied about in conflict between two Ara- bian nations.
To think of such a frame of mind is to be- come disquieted about the bringing up of children. Surely they dwell in a mythological epoch, and are not the contemporaries of their parents. What can they think of them } What can they make of these bearded or pet- ticoated giants who look down upon their games .? who move upon a cloudy Olympus, following unknown designs apart from ra- tional enjoyment ? who profess the tenderest solicitude for children, and yet every now and again reach down out of their altitude and terribly vindicate the prerogatives of age .? Off goes the child, corporally smarting, but morally rebellious. Were there ever such un- thinkable deities as parents ? I would give a great deal to know what, in nine cases out of ten, is the child's unvarnished feeling. A sense of past cajolery; a sense of personal attraction, at best very feeble; above all, I C
64
should imagine, a sense of terror for the un- tried residue of mankind, go to make up the attraction that he feels. No wonder, poor little heart, with such a weltering world in front of him, if he clings to the hand he knows! The dread irrationality of the whole affair, as it seems to children, is a thing we are all too ready to forget. '*0, why," I remember pas- sionately wondering, "why cannot we all be happy and devote ourselves to play.?" And when children do philosophise, I believe it is usually to very much the same purpose.
Virginihus Puerisque. Child's Play.
WE grown people can tell ourselves a story, give and t^ke strokes until the bucklers ring, ride far and fast, marry, fall and die; all the while sitting quietly by the fire or lying prone in bed. This is exactly what a child cannot do, at least when he can find anything else. He works all with lay figures and stage properties. When his story comes to the fighting, he must rise, get something by way of a sword, and have a set-to with a piece of furniture, until he is out of breath. _
When he comes to ride with the king's par- don, he must bestride a chair, which he will so hurry and belabour, and on which he will so furiously demean himself, that the messen- ger will arrive, if not bloody with spurring, at least fiery red with haste. If his romance in- volves an accident upon a cliff, he must clam- ber in person about the chest of drawers and fall bodily upon the carpet, before his imag- ination is satisfied. Lead soldiers, dolls, all toys, in short, are in the same category and answer the same end. Nothing can stagger a child's faith; he accepts the clumsiest sub- stitutes and can swallow the most staring incongruities. The chair he has just been be- sieging as a castle, (5r valiantly been cutting to the ground as a dragon, is taken away for the accommodation of a morning visitor, and he is nothing abashed; he can skirmish by the hour wth a stationary coal-scuttle; in the midst of the enchanted pleasance, he can see, without sensible shock, the gardener soberly digging potatoes for the day's dinner. He can make abstraction of whatever does not fit into his fable, and he puts his eyes into
66
his pocket, just as we hold our noses in an unsavoury lane. And so it is, that although the ways of children cross with those of their elders in a hundred places daily, they never go in the same direction nor so much as lie in the same element. So may the telegraph wires intersect the line of the high-road, or so might a landscape painter and so may a bag- man visit the same country, and yet move in different worlds.
Virginibus Puerisque. Child's Play.
AND what, in God's name, is all this bother about ? For what cause do they embitter their own and other people's lives ? That a man should publish three or thirty articles a year, that he should finish or not finish his great allegorical picture, are questions of little interest to the world. The ranks of life are full; and although a thousand fall, there are always some to go into the breach. When they told Joan of Arc she should be at home doing women's work, she answered there were plenty to spin and wash. And so, even with your own rare gifts! When nature is
67
"so careless of the single life," why should we coddle ourselves into the fancy that our own is of exceptional importance ? Suppose Shakespeare had been knocked on the head some dark night in Sir Thomas Lucy's pre- serves, the world would have wagged on bet- ter or worse, the pitcher gone to the well, the scythe to the corn, and the student to his book; and no one been any the wiser of the loss. There are not many works extant, if you look the alternative all over, which are worth the price of a pound of tobacco to a man of limited means. This is a sobering reflection for the proudest of our earthly vanities. Even a tobacconist may, upon consideration, find no great cause for personal vainglory in the phrase; for although tobacco is an admirable sedative, the qualities necessary for retailing it are neither rare nor precious in themselves. Alas and alas! you may take it how you will, but the services of no single individual are indispensable. Atlas was just a gentleman with a protracted nightmare! And yet you see merchants who go and labour themselves into a great fortune and hence into the bankruptcy
68
court; scribblers who keep scribbling at little articles until their temper is a cross to all who come about them, as though Pharaoh should set the Israelites to make a pin instead of a pyramid; and fine young men who work themselves into a decline, and are driven off into a hearse with white plumes upon it. Would you not suppose that these persons had been whispered, by the Master of the Ceremonies, the promise of some momentous destiny ? and that this lukewarm bullet on which they play their farces was the bull's-eye and centre-point of all the universe ? And yet it is not so. The ends for which they give away their priceless youth, for all they know, may be chimerical or hurtful; the glory and riches they expect may never come, or may find them indifferent; and they and the world they inhabit are so inconsiderable that the mind freezes at the thought.
Virginibus Puerisque. Apology for Idlers.
T T is not in such numbness of spirit only that -■- the life of an invalid resembles a premature old age. Those excursions that he had prom-
69
ised himself to finish, prove too long or too arduous for his feeble body, and the barrier- hills are as impassable as ever. Many a white town that sits far out on the promontory, many a comely fold of wood on the mountain- side, beckons and allures his imagination day after day, and is yet as inaccessible to his feet as the clefts and gorges of the clouds. The sense of distance grows upon him won- derfully; and after some feverish efforts and the fretful uneasiness of the first few days, he falls contentedly in with the restrictions of his weakness. His narrow round becomes pleas- ant and familiar to him as the cell to a con- tented prisoner. Just as he has fallen already out of the mid-race of active life, he now falls out of the little eddy that circulates in the shallow waters of the sanatorium. He sees the country people come and go about their every-day affairs, the foreigners stream out in goodly pleasure parties; the stir of man's activity is all about him, as he suns himself inertly in some sheltered corner; and he looks on with a patriarchal impersonality of in- terest, such as a man may feel when he pic-
70
tures to himself the fortunes of his remote descendants, or the robust old age of the oak he has planted over-night. In this falling aside, in this quietude and de- sertion of other men, there is no inharmonious prelude to the last quietude and desertion of the grave; in this dullness of the senses there is a gentle preparation for the final insensibil- ity of death. And to him the idea of mortality comes in a shape less violent and harsh than is its v^ont, less as an abrupt catastrophe than as a thing of infinitesimal gradation, and the last step on a long decline of way. As we turn to and fro in bed, and every moment the movements grow feebler and smaller and the attitude more restful and easy, until sleep overtakes us at a stride and we move no more, so desire after desire leaves him; day by day his strength decreases, and the circle of his activity grows ever narrower; and he feels, if he is to be thus tenderly weaned from the passion of life, thus gradually inducted into the slumber of death, that when at last the end comes, it will come quietly and fitly. If anything is to reconcile poor spirits to the
71
The In- valid and hisjoys
coming of the last enemy, surely it should be such a mild approach as this; not to hale us forth with violence, but to persuade us from a place we have no further pleasure in. It is not so much, indeed, death that approaches as life that withdraws and withers up from round about him. He has outlived his own usefulness, and almost his own enjoyment; and if there is to be no recovery; if never again will he be young and strong and passionate; if the actual present shall be to him always like a thing read in a book or remembered out of the faraway past; if, in fact, this be veritably nightfall, he will not wish greatly for the continuance of a twilight that only strains and disappoints the eyes, but stead- fastly await the perfect darkness. He will pray for Medea; when she comes, let her either rejuvenate or slay.
Virginihus Puerisque. Ordered South.
FOR it is not altogether ill with the invalid, after all. If it is only rarely that anything penetrates vividly into his numbed spirit, yet, when anything does, it brings with it a joy
72
that is all the more poignant for its very rarity. There is something pathetic in these occasional returns of a glad activity of heart. In his lowest hours he will be stirred and awakened by many such; and they will spring perhaps from very trivial sources; as a friend once said to me, the "spirit of delight" comes often on small wings. For the pleasure that we take in beautiful nature is essentially capricious. It comes sometimes when we least look for it; and sometimes, when we expect it most certainly, it leaves us to gape joyously for days together, in the very home- land of the beautiful. We may have passed a place a thousand times and one; and on the thousand and second it will be transfigured, and stand forth in a certain splendour of reality from the dull circle of surroundings; so that we see it "with a child's first pleas- ure," as Wordsworth saw the daffodils by the lake side. And if this falls out capriciously with the healthy, how much more so with the invalid. Some day he will find his first violet and be lost in pleasant wonder, by what al- chemy the cold earth of the clods, and the
73
vapid air and rain, can be transmuted into colour so rich and odour so touchingly sweet. Or perhaps he may see a group of washer- women reheved, on a spit of shingle, against the blue sea, or a meeting of flower-gatherers in a tempered daylight of an olive-garden; and something significant and monumental in the grouping, something in the harmony of faint colour that is always characteristic of the dress of these Southern women, will come home to him unexpectedly, and awake in him that satisfaction with which we tell ourselves that we are the richer by one more beautiful experience. Or it may be something even slighter: as when the opulence of the sunshine, which somehow gets lost and fails to produce its effect on the large scale, is sud- denly revealed to him by the chance isola- tion — as he changes the position of his sun- shade — of a yard or two of roadway with its stones and weeds. And then, there is no end to the infinite variety of the olive-yards themselves. Even the colour is indeterminate and continually shifting: now you would say it was green, now gray, now blue; now tree
74 •
stands above tree, like '* cloud on cloud," massed into filmy indistinctness; and now, at the wind's will, the whole sea of foliage is shaken and broken up with little momentary silverings and shadows. But every one sees the world in his own way. To some the glad moment may have arrived on other provoca- tions; and their recollection may be most vivid of the stately gait of women carrying burthens on their heads; of tropical effects, with canes and naked rock and sunlight; of the relief of cypresses; of the troubled, busy- looking groups of sea-pines, that seem always as if they were being wielded and swept to- gether by a whirlwind; of the air coming, laden with virginal perfumes, over the myrtles and the scented underwood; of the empurpled hills standing up, solemn and sharp, out of the green-gold air of the east at evening.
Virginibus Puerisque. Ordered South.
THE promise is so great, and we are all so easily led away when hope and mem- ory are both in one story, that I dare say the sick man is not very inconsolable when he
75
receives sentence of banishment, and is in- clined to regard his ill health as not the least fortunate accident of his life. Nor is he im- mediately undeceived. The stir and speed of the journey, and the restlessness that goes to bed with him as he tries to sleep betw^een two days of noisy progress, fever him, and stimulate his dull nerves into something of their old quickness and sensibility. And so he can enjoy the faint autumnal splendour of the landscape, as he sees hill and plain, vine- yard and forest, clad in one wonderful glory of fairy gold, which the first great winds of winter will transmute, as in the fable, into withered leaves. And so too he can enjoy the admirable brevity and simplicity of such little glimpses of country and country ways as flash upon him through the windows of the train; little glimpses that have a character all their own; sights seen as a travelling swallow might see them from the wing, or Iris as she went abroad over the land on some Olympian errand. Here and there, indeed, a few chil- dren huzzah and wave their hands to the ex- press; but for the most part, it is an interrup-
tion too brief and isolated to attract much notice; the sheep do not cease from browsing; a girl sits balanced on the projecting tiller of a canal boat, so precariously that it seems as if a fly or the splash of a leaping fish would be enough to overthrow the dainty equilibrium, and yet all these hundreds of tons of coal and wood and iron have been precipitated roaring past her very ear, and there is not a start, nor a tremor, nor a turn of the averted head, to in- dicate that she has been even conscious of its passage. Herein, I think, lies the chief attrac- tion of railway travel. The speed is so easy, and the train disturbs so little the scenes through which it takes us, that our heart becomes full of the placidity and stillness of the country; and while the body is borne forward in the flying chain of carriages, the thoughts alight, as the humour moves them, at unfrequented stations; they make haste up the poplar alley that leads toward the town; they are left be- hind with the signalman as, shading his eyes with his hand, he watches the long train sweep away in the golden distance. Moreover, there is still before the invalid the
77
shock of wonder and delight with which he will learn that he has passed the indefinable line that separates South from North. And this is an uncertain moment; for sometimes the consciousness is forced upon him early, on the occasion of some slight association, a colour, a flower, or a scent; and sometimes not until, one fine morning, he wakes up with the Southern sunshine peeping through the persiennes, and the Southern patois con- fusedly audible below the windows. Whether it come early or late, however, this pleasure will not end with the anticipation, as do so many others of the same family. It will leave him wider awake than it found him, and give a new significance to all he may see for many days to come. There is something in the miere name of the South that carries enthusiasm along with it. At the sound of the word, he pricks up his ears; he becomes as anxious to seek out beauties and to get by heart the per- manent lines and character of the landscape, as if he had been told that it was all his own — an estate out of which he had been kept unjustly, and which he was now to receive in _
free and full possession. Even those who have never been there before feel as if they had been; and everybody goes comparing, and seeking for the familiar, and finding it with such ecstasies of recognition, that one would think they were coming home after a weary absence, instead of travelling hourly farther abroad. Virginibus Puerisque. Ordered South.
THERE is only one wish realisable on the earth; only one thing that can be per- fectly attained: Death. And from a variety of circumstances we have no one to tell us whether it be worth attaining. A strange picture we make on our way to our chimeras, ceaselessly marching, grudging ourselves the time for rest; indefatigable, adventurous pioneers. It is true that we shall never reach the goal; it is even more than probable that there is no such place; and if we lived for centuries, and were endowed with the powers of a god, we should find ourselves not much nearer what we wanted at the end. O toiHng hands of mortals! O unwearied feet, travelling ye know not whither! Soon,
The True Love Story I Begins with Mar- riage. Court- ship is the Pro- logue
soon, it seems to you, you must come forth on some conspicuous hilltop, and but a little way further, against the setting sun, descry the spires of El Dorado. Little do ye know your own blessedness; for to travel hopefully is a • better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour. Virginibus Puerisque. ElDorado.
AGAIN, when you have married your .wife, you would think you were got upon a hilltop, and might begin to go downward by an easy slope. But you have only ended courting to begin marriage. Falling in love and winning love are often difficult tasks to overbearing and rebellious spirits; but to keep in love is also a business of some importance, to which both man and wife must bring kind- ness and goodwill. The true love story com- mences at the altar, when there lies before the married pair a most beautiful contest of wisdom and generosity, and a life-long strug- gle towards an unattainable ideal. Unattain- able ? Ay, surely unattainable, from the very fact that they are two instead of one.
Virginibus Puerisque. El Dorado. _ __
TRUTH of intercourse is something more difficult than to refrain from open Hes. It is possible to avoid falsehood and yet not tell the truth. It is not enough to answer formal questions. To reach the truth by yea and nay communications implies a questioner with a share of inspiration, such as is often found in mutual love. Tea and nay mean nothing; the meaning must have been related in the question. Many words are often neces- sary to convey a very simple statement; for in this sort of exercise we never hit the gold; the most that we can hope is by many arrows, more or less far off on different sides, to in- dicate, in the course of time, for what target we are aiming, and after an hour's talk, back and forward, to convey the purport of a single principle or a single thought. And yet while the curt, pithy speaker misses the point en- tirely, a wordy prolegomenous babbler will often add three new offences in the process of excusing one. It is really a most delicate affair. The world was made before the Eng- lish language, and seemingly upon a different design. Suppose we held our converse not in
Silence a Method of Lying
words but in music; those who have a bad ear would find themselves cut off from all near commerce, and no better than foreigners in this big v/orld. But we do not consider how many have ''a bad ear" for words, nor how often the most eloquent find nothing to reply. I hate questioners and questions; there are so few that can be spoken to without a lie. ^' Do you forgive me? " Madam and sweet- heart, so far as I have gone in life I have never yet been able to discover what forgive- ness means. *' Is it still the same between usF" Why, how can it be .? It is eternally different; and yet you are still the friend of my heart. ''Do you understand meP" God knows; I should think it highly improbable. The cruellest lies are often told in silence. A man may have sat in a room for hours and not opened his teeth, and yet come out of that room a disloyal friend or a vile calumniator. And how many loves have perished because, from pride, or spite, or indifference, or that unmanly shame which withholds a man from daring to betray emotion, a lover, at the crit- ical point of the relation, has but hung his
82
head and held his tongue. And, again, a he may be told by a truth, or a truth conveyed through a he. Truth to facts is not always truth to sentiment; and part of the truth, as often happens in answer to a question, may be the foulest calumny. A fact may be an exception; but the feeling is the law, and it is that which you must neither garble nor belie. The whole tenor of a conversation is a part of the meaning of each separate statement; the beginning and the end define and trav- esty the intermediate conversation. You never speak to God; you address a fellow-man, full of his own tempers; and to tell truth, rightly understood, is not to state the true facts, but to convey a true expression; truth in spirit, not truth to letter, is the true veracity. To reconcile averted friends a Jesuitical dis- cretion is often needful, not so much to gain a kind hearing as to communicate sober truth. Women have an ill name in this connection, yet they live in as true relations; the lie of a good woman is the true index of her heart.
Virginibus Puerisque. IV.
83
Talk
THERE are always two to a talk, giving and talking, comparing experience and according conclusions. Talk is fluid, tenta- tive, continually "in further search and prog- ress"; while written words remain fixed, be- come idols even to the writer, found wooden dogmatisms, and preserve flies of obvious error in the amber of the truth. Last and chief, while literature, gagged with linsey- woolsey, can only deal with a fraction of the life of man, talk goes fancy free and may call a spade a spade. Talk has none of the freezing immunities of the pulpit. It cannot, even if it would, become merely aesthetic or merely classical like literature. A jest intervenes, the solemn humbug is dissolved in laughter, and speech runs forth out of the contemporary groove into the open fields of nature, cheery and cheering, like schoolboys out of school. And it is in talk alone that we can learn our period and ourselves. In short, the first duty of a man is to speak; that is his chief business in this world; and talk, which is the harmo- nious speech of two or more, is by far the most accessible of pleasures. It costs nothing
84
in money; it is all profit; it completes our edu- cation, founds and fosters our friendships, and can be enjoyed at any age and in almost any state of health. . . . Now, the relation that has the least root in matter is undoubtedly that airy one of friendship; and hence, I suppose, it is that good talk most commonly arises among friends. Talk is, indeed, both the scene and instrument of friendship. It is in talk alone that the friends can measure strength, and enjoy that amicable counter- assertion of personality which is the gauge of relations and the sport of life. A. good talk is not to be had for the asking. Humours must first be accorded in a kind of overture or prologue; hour, company and circumstance be suited; and then, at a fit juncture, the subject, the quarry of two heated minds, spring up like a deer out of the wood. Not that the talker has any of the hunter's pride, though he has all and more than all his ardour. The genuine artist fol- lows the stream of conversation as an angler follows the windings of a brook, not dallying where he fails to *'kill." He trusts implicitly
Natural Talk a Festival ofOsten- tation
to hazard; and he is rewarded by continual variety, continual pleasure, and those chang- ing prospects of the truth that are the best education. There is nothing in a subject, so called, that we should regard it as an idol, or follow it beyond the promptings of desire. Indeed, there are few subjects; and so far as they are truly talkable, more than the half of them may be reduced to three; that I am I, that you are you, and that there are other people dimly understood to be not quite the same as either. Wherever talk may range, it still runs half the time on these eternal lines. The theme being set, each plays on himself as on an instrument; asserts and justifies himself; ransacks his brain for instances and opinions, and brings them forth new-minted, to his own surprise and the admiration of his adversary. All natural talk is a festival of ostentation; and by the laws of the game each accepts and fans the vanity of the other. It is from that reason that we venture to lay our- selves so open, that we dare to be so warmly eloquent, and that Vv^e swell in each other's eyes to such a vast proportion. For talkers.
once launched, begin to overflow the hmits of their ordinary selves, tower up to the height of their secret pretensions, and give them- selves out for the heroes, brave, pious, mu- sical and wise, that in their most shining moments they aspire to be. So they weave for themselves with words and for a while in- habit a palace of delights, temple at once and theatre, where they fill the round of the world's dignitaries, and feast with the gods, exulting in Kudos. And when the talk is over, each goes his w^ay, still flushed with vanity and admiration, still trailing clouds of glory; each declines from the height of his ideal orgie, not in a moment, but by slow declension. I remember, in the entracte of an afternoon performance, coming forth into the sunshine, in a beautiful green, gardened corner of a romantic city; and as I sat and smoked, the music moving in my blood, I seemed to sit there and evaporate *'The Flying Dutch- man" (for it was that I had been hearing) with a wonderful sense of life, warmth, well- being and pride; and the noises of the city voices, bells and marching feet, fell together
in my ears like a symphonious orchestra. In the same way, the excitement of a good talk lives for a long while after in the blood, the heart still hot within you, the brain still sim- mering, and the physical earth swimming around you with the colours of the sunset. Natural talk, like ploughing, should turn up a large surface of life, rather than dig mines into geological strata. Masses of experience, anecdote, incident, cross-lights, quotation, historical instances, the whole flotsam and jetsam of two minds forced in and in upon the matter in hand from every point of the compass, and from every degree of mental elevation and abasement — these are the ma- terials with which talk is fortified, the food on which the talkers thrive. Such argument as is proper to the exercise should still be brief and seizing. Talk should proceed by instances; by the apposite, not the expository. It should keep close along the lines of humanity, near the bosoms and businesses of men, at the level where history, fiction and experience inter- sect and illuminate each other. I am I, and you are you, with all my heart; but conceive
how these lean propositions change and brighten when, instead of words, the actual you and I sit cheek by jowl, the spirit housed in the live body, and the very clothes uttering voices to corroborate the story in the face. Not less surprising is the change when we leave off to speak of generalities — the bad, the good, the miser, and all the characters of Theophrastus — and call up other men, by anecdote or instance, in their very trick or feature; or trading on a common knowledge, toss each other famous names, still glowing with the hues of life. Communication is no longer by w^ords, but by the instancing of whole biographies, epics, systems of philoso- phy, and epochs of history, in bulk. That which is understood excels that which is spoken in quantity and quality alike; ideas thus figured and personified change hands, as we may say, like coin; and the speakers imply without effort the most obscure and intricate thoughts. Strangers who have a large common ground of reading will, for this reason, come the sooner to the grapple of genuine converse. If they know Othello
8^
and Napoleon, Consuelo and Clarissa Har- lowe, Vautrin and Steenie Steenson, they can leave generalities and begin at once to speak by figures. . . . Conclusions, indeed, are not often reached by talk any more than by pri- vate thinking. That is not the profit. The profit is in the exercise, and above all in the experience; for when we reason at large on any subject, v/e review our state and history in life. From time to time, however, and espe- cially, I think, in talking art, talk becomes effective, conquering like war, widening the boundaries of knowledge like an exploration. A point arises; the question takes a problem- atical, a baffling, yet a likely air; the talkers begin to feel lively presentiments of some conclusions near at hand; towards this they strive with emulous ardour, each by his own path, and struggling for first utterance; and then one leaps upon the summit of that mat- ter with a shout, and almost at the same mo- ment the other is beside him; and behold they are agreed. Like enough, the progress is illusory, a mere cat's cradle having been wound and unwound out of words. But the
90
sense of joint discovery is none the less giddy and inspiriting. And in the life of the talker such triumphs, though imaginary, are neither new nor far apart; they are attained with speed and pleasure, in the hour of mirth; and by the nature of the process, they are always worthily shared. There is a certain attitude, combative at once and deferential, eager to fight yet most averse to quarrel, which marks out at once the talkable man. It is not eloquence, not fairness, not obstinacy, but a certain proportion of all of these that I love to encounter in my amicable adver- saries. They must not be pontiffs holding doctrine, but huntsmen questing after ele- ments of truth. Neither must they be toys to be instructed, but fellow-teachers v/ith whom I may wrangle and agree on equal terms. We must reach some solution, some shadow of consent: for without that, eager talk be- comes a torture. But we do not wish to reach it cheaply, or quickly, or without the tussle and effort wherein pleasure lies. ... It is the mark of genuine conversation that the say- ings can scarce be quoted with their full
91
effect beyond the circle of common friends. To have their proper weight they should ap- pear in a biography, and with the portrait of the speaker. Good talk is dramatic; it is like an impromptu piece of acting where each should represent himself to the greatest ad- vantage; and that is the best kind of talk where each speaker is most fully and candidly himself, and where, if you were to shift the speeches round from one to another, there would be the greatest loss in significance and perspicuity. It is for this reason that talk de- pends so wholly on our company. We should like to introduce Falstaff and Mercutio, or Falstaff and Sir Toby; but Falstaff in talk with Cordelia seems even painful. Most of us, by the Protean quality of man, can talk to some degree with all; but the true talk, that strikes out all the slum^bering best of us, comes only with the peculiar brethren of our spirits, is founded as deep as love in the con- stitution of our being, and is a thing to relish with all our energy, while yet we have it, and to be grateful for forever.
Memories and Portraits. Talk and Talkers.
92
I ^HE child, the seed, the grain of corn, -*- The acorn on the hill. Each for some separate end is born In season fit, and still
Each must in strength arise to work the al- mighty will.
So from the hearth the children flee, By that almighty hand Austerely led; so one by sea Goes forth, and one by land; Nor aught of all man's sons escapes from that command.
So from the sally each obeys The unseen almighty nod; So till the ending all their ways Blindfolded both have trod: Nor knew their task at all, but were the tools of God.
And as the fervent smith of love Beat out the glowing blade, Nor wielded in the front of war The weapons he had made, But in the tower at home still plied his ring- ing trade ;
The
Mother
and
Child
must
Part
93
So like a sword the son shall roam On nobler missions sent; And as the smith remained at home In peaceful turret pent,
So sits the while at home the mother well content. Underwoods.
Silence
in
Speech
AS for those who are restricted to silence, I can only wonder how they bear their solemn and cheerless isolation. And yet, apart from any view of mortification, I can see a certain policy, not only in the exclusion of women, but in this vow of silence. I have had some experience of lay phalansteries, of an artistic, not to say a bacchanalian, character; and seen more than one association easily formed and yet more easily dispersed. With a Cistercian rule, perhaps they might have lasted longer. In the neighbourhood of women it is but a touch-and-go association that can be formed among defenceless men; the stronger electricity is sure to trium.ph; the dreams of boyhood, the schemes of youth, are abandoned after an interview of ten min- utes, and the arts and sciences, and profes-
94
slonal male jollity, deserted at once for two sweet eyes and a caressing accent. And next after this, the tongue is the great divider.
Travels with a Donkey. — f-h-
OTO be up and doing, O Unfearing and unshamed to go In all the uproar and the press About my human business! My undissuaded heart I hear Whisper courage in my ear. With voiceless calls, the ancient earth Summons me to a daily birth. Thou, O my love, ye, O my friends — The gist of life, the end of ends — To laugh, to love, to live, to die, Ye call me by the ear and eye!
Our Lady of the Snows. UnderzvooJs.
CONTEND, my soul, for moments and for hours; Each is with service pregnant; each re- claimed Is as a kingdom conquered, where to reign.
Underwoods.
95
Rest after Death
UNDER the wide and starry sky, Dig the grave and let me lie. Gladly did I live and gladly die.
And I laid me dow^n v^ith a will.
This be the verse you grave for me: Here he lies where he longed to be; Home IS the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
Requiem. Underwoods.
Telling
the
Truth
AMONG sayings that have a currency in spite of being wholly false upon the face of them for the sake of a half-truth upon an- other subject which is accidentally combined with the error, one of the grossest and broad- est conveys the monstrous proposition that it is easy to tell the truth and hard to tell a lie. I wish heartily that it were. But the truth is one; it has first to be discovered, then justly and exactly uttered. Even with instruments specially contrived for such a purpose — with a foot rule, a level, or a theodolite — it is not easy to be exact; it is easier, alas! to be inexact. From those who mark the divi-
96
sions on a scale to those who measure the boundaries of empires or the distance of the heavenly stars, it is by careful method and minute, unwearying attention that men rise even to material exactness or to sure knowl- edge even of external and constant things. But it is easier to draw the outline of a moun- tain than the changing appearance of a face; and truth in human relations is of this more intangible and dubious order; hard to seize, harder to communicate. Veracity to facts in a loose, colloquial sense — not to say that I have been in Malabar, when as a matter of fact I was never out of England, not to say that I have read Cervantes in the original, when as a matter of fact I know not one syl- lable of Spanish, — this, indeed, is easy, and to the same degree unimportant in itself. Lies of this sort, according to circumstances, may or may not be important; in a certain sense even they may or may not be false. The habitual liar may be a very honest fellow, and live truly with his wife and friends; while another man who never told a formal false- hood in his life may yet be himself one lie —
97
heart and face, from top to bottom. This Is the kind of lie which poisons intimacy. And, vice versa, veracity to sentiment, truth in a relation, truth to your own heart and your friends, never to feign or falsify emotion — that is the truth which makes love possible and mankind happy.
Virginihus Puerisque. IV.
Travel
FOR my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilization, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints. Alas, as we get up in life, and are more preoccupied with our affairs, even a holiday is a thing that must be worked for. To hold a pack upon a pack-saddle against a gale out of the freezing north is no high in- dustry, but it is one that serves to occupy and compose the mind. And when the present Is so exacting, who can annoy himself about the future ? Travels with a Donkey.
98
BUT we are all travellers in what John Bunyan calls the wilderness of the world, — all, too, travellers with a donkey; and the best that we find in our travels is an honest friend. He is a fortunate voyager who finds many. We travel, indeed, to find them. They are the end and the reward of life. They keep us worthy ourselves; and when we are alone, we are only nearer to the absent.
Travels with a Donkey.
BUT it is at night, and after dinner, that the best hour comes. There are no such pipes to be smoked as those that follow a good day's march; the flavour of the tobacco is a thing to be remembered, it is so dry and aromatic, so full and so fine. If you wind up the evening with grog, you will own there was never such grog; at every sip a jocund tranquillity spreads about your limbs, and sits easily in your heart. If you read a book — and you will never do so save by fits and starts — you find the lan- guage strangely racy and harmonious; words take a new meaning; single sentences possess the ear for half an hour together; and the
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writer endears himself to you, at every page, by the nicest coincidence of sentiment. It seems as if it were a book you had written yourself in a dream. To all we have read on such occasions we look back with special fa- vour. *'It was on the loth of April, 1798," says Hazlitt, with amorous precision, ''that I sat down to a volume of the new Heloise, at the Inn at Llangollen, over a bottle of sherry and a cold chicken." I should wish to quote more, for though we are mighty fine fellows nowadays, we cannot write like Hazlitt. And, talking of that, a volume of Hazlitt's essays would be a capital pocketbook on such a journey; so would a volume of Heine's songs, and for Tristram Shandy I can pledge a fair experience.
If the evening be fine and warm, there is noth- ing better in life than to lounge before the inn door in the sunset, or lean over the parapet of the bridge, to watch the weeds and the quick fishes. It is then, if ever, that you taste Joviality to the full significance of that auda- cious word. Your muscles are so agreeably slack, you feel so clean and so strong and so
idle, that whether you move or sit still, what- ever you do is done with pride and with a kingly sort of pleasure. You fall in talk with any one, wise or foolish, drunk or sober. And it seems as if a hot walk purged you, more than of anything else, of all narrowness and pride, and left curiosity to play its part freely, as in a child or a man of science. You lay aside all your own hobbies, to watch provincial humours develop themselves before you, now as a laughable farce, and now grave and beau- tiful like an old tale.
Or, perhaps you are left to your own company for the night, and surly weather imprisons you by the fire. You may remember how Burns, numbering past pleasures, dwells upon the hours when he has been "happy thinking." It is a phrase that may well per- plex a poor modern, girt about on every side by clocks and chimes, and haunted, even at night, by flaming dial-plates. For we are all so busy, and have so many far-oflF projects to realize, and castles in the fire to turn into solid habitable mansions on a gravel soil, ^ that we can find no time for pleasure trips in-
to the Land of Thought and among the Hills of Vanity. Changed times, indeed, when we must sit all night, beside the fire, with folded hands; and a changed world for most of us, when we find we can pass the hours without discontent, and be happy thinking. We are in such haste to be doing, to be writing, to be gathering gear, to make our voice audible a moment in the derisive silence of eternity, that we forget that one thing, of which these are but the parts — namely, to live. We fall in love, we drink hard, we run to and fro upon the earth like frightened sheep. And now you are to ask yourself if, when all is done, you would not have been better to sit by the fire at home, and be happy thinking. To sit still and contemplate, — to remember the faces of women without desire, to be pleased by the great deeds of men without envy, to be everything and everywhere in sympathy, and yet content to remain where and what you are — is not this to know both wisdom and virtue, and to dwell with happi- ness ? After all, it is not they w^ho carry flags, but they who look upon it from a private
chamber, who have the fun of the procession. And once you are at that, you are in the very humour of all social heresy. It is no time for shuffling, or for big, empty words. If you ask yourself what you mean by fame, riches, or learning, the answer is far to seek; and you go back to that kingdom of light imagina- tions, which seem so vain in the eyes of Phil- istines perspiring after wealth, and so mo- mentous to those who are stricken with the disproportions of the world, and, in the face of the gigantic stars, cannot stop to split dif- ferences between two degrees of the infini- tesimally small, such as a tobacco pipe or the Roman Empire, a million of money or a fiddlestick's end.
You lean from the window, your last pipe reeking whitely into the darkness, your body full of delicious pains, your mind enthroned in the seventh circle of content; when sud- denly the mood changes, the weathercock goes about, and you ask yourself one ques- tion more: whether, for the interval, you have been the wisest philosopher or the most egregious of donkeys ^ Human experience is
103
Biv- ouacs. The Halts in Life
not yet able to reply; but at least you have had a fine moment, and looked down upon all the kingdoms of the earth.
Virginihus Puerisque, Walking Tours.
^^J OR must I forget to say a word on -^ ^ bivouacs. You come to a milestone on a hill, or some place where deep ways meet under trees; and off goes the knapsack, and down you sit to smoke a pipe in the shade. You sink into yourself, and the birds come round and look at you; and your smoke dis- sipates upon the afternoon under the blue dome of heaven; and the sun lies warm upon your feet, and the cool air visits your neck and turns aside your open shirt. If you are not happy, you must have an evil conscience. You may dally as long as you like by the roadside. It is almost as if the millennium were arrived, when we shall throw our clocks and watches over the housetop, and remem- ber time and seasons no more. Not to keep hours for a lifetime is, I was going to say, to live forever. You have no idea, unless you have tried it, how endlessly long is a summer's '-j
day, that you measure out only by hunger, and bring to an end only when you are drowsy. I know a village where there are hardly any clocks, where no one knows more of the days of the week than by a sort of instinct for the fete on Sundays, and where only one person can tell you the day of the month, and she is generally wrong; and if people were aware how slow Time journeyed in that village, and what armfuls of spare hours he gives, over and above the bargain, to its wise in- habitants, I believe there would be a stam- pede out of London, Liverpool, Paris, and a variety of large towns, where the clocks lose their heads, and shake the hours out each one faster than the other, as though they were all in a wager. And all these foolish pilgrims would each bring his own misery along with him, in a watch-pocket! It is to be noticed, there were no clocks or watches in the much- vaunted days before the flood. It follows, of course, there were no appointments, and punctuality was not yet thought upon. "Though ye take from a covetous man all his treasure," says Milton, "he has yet one
105
A Walk- ing Tour
jewel left; men cannot deprive him of his covetousness." And so I would say of a mod- ern man of business, you may do what you will for him, put him in Eden, give him the elixir of life — he has still a flaw at heart, he still has his business habits. Now, there is no time when business habits are more mitigated than on a walking tour. And so, during these halts, as I say, you will feel almost free.
Virginihus Puerisque. Walking Tours.
NOW, to be properly enjoyed, a walking tour should be gone upon alone. If you go in a company, or even in pairs, it is no longer a walking tour in anything but name; it is something else and more in the nature of a picnic. A walking tour should be gone upon alone, because freedom is of the essence; be- cause you should be able to stop and go on, and follow this way or that, as the freak takes you; and because you must have your own pace, and neither trot along a champion walker, nor mince in time with a girl. And then you must be open to all impressions and let your thoughts take colour from what
io6
you see. You should be as a pipe for any wind to play upon. *'I cannot see the wit," says Hazlitt, "of walking and talking at the same time. When I am in the country I wish to vegetate like the country," — which is the gist of all that can be said upon the matter. There should be no cackle of voices at your elbow, to jar on the meditative silence of the morning. And so long as a man is reasoning he cannot surrender himself to that fine in- toxication that comes of such motion in the open air, that begins in a sort of dazzle and sluggishness of the brain, and ends in a peace that passes comprehension. During the first day or so of any tour there are moments of bitterness, when the traveller feels more than coldly towards his knapsack, when he is half in a mind to throw it bodily over the hedge, and, like Christian on a sim- ilar occasion, "give three leaps and go on singing." And yet it soon acquires a property of easiness. It becomes magnetic; the spirit of the journey enters into it. And no sooner have you passed the straps over your shoulder than the lees of sleep are cleared from you,
107
you pull yourself together with a shake, and fall at once into your stride. And surely, of all possible moods, this, in which a man takes the road, is the best. Of course, if he will keep thinking of his anxieties, if he will open the merchant Abudah's chest and walk arm-in- arm with the hag — why, wherever he is, and whether he walk fast or slow, the chances are that he will not be happy. And so much the more shame to himself! There are per- haps thirty men setting forth at that same hour, and I would lay a large wager there is not another dull face among the thirty. It would be a fine thing to follow, in a coat of darkness, one after another of these way- farers, some summer morning, for the first few miles upon the road. This one, who walks fast, with a keen look in his eyes, is all con- centrated in his own mind; he is up at his loom, weaving and weaving, to set the land- scape to words. This one peers about, as he goes, among the grasses: he waits by the canal to watch the dragon-flies; he leans on the gate of the pasture, and cannot look enough upon the complacent kine. And here comes
io8
another, talking, laughing, and gesticulating to himself. His face changes from time to time, as indignation flashes from his eyes or anger clouds his forehead. He is composing articles, delivering orations, and conducting the most impassioned interviews, by the way. A little farther on, and it is as like as not he will begin to sing. And well for him, suppos- ing him to be no great master in that art, if he stumble across no stolid peasant at a cor- ner; for on such an occasion, I scarcely know which is the more troubled, or whether it is worse to suffer the confusion of your trou- badour, or the unfeigned alarm of your clown. A sedentary population, accustomed, besides, to the strange mechanical bearing of the com- mon tramp, can in no wise explain to itself the gaiety of these passers-by. I knew one man who was arrested as a runaway lunatic, be- cause, although a full-grown person with a red beard, he skipped as he went, like a child. And you would be astonished if I were to tell you all the grave and learned heads who have confessed to me that, when on walking tours, ^they sang — and sang very ill — and had a
109
The
Place of Money in Life
pair of red ears when, as described above, the' inauspicious peasant plumped into their arms from round a corner. And here, lest you should think I am exaggerating, is Hazlitt's own confession, from his essay "On Going a Journey," which is so good that there should be a tax levied on all who have not read it: "Give me the clear blue sky over my head," says he, "and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours' march to dinner — and then to thinking! It is hard if I cannot start some game on these lone heaths. I laugh, I run, I leap, I sing for
Virgtnibus Puerisque. A Walking Tour.
FOR money enters in two different char- acters into the scheme of life. A certain amount, varying with the number and empire of our desires, is a true necessary for each one of us in the present order of society; but beyond that amount, money is a commodity to be bought or not to be bought, a luxury in which we may either indulge or stint our- selves, like any other. And there are many ^ J
luxuries that we may legitimately prefer to it, such as a grateful conscience, a country life, or the woman of our inclination. Trite, flat, and obvious as this conclusion may ap- pear, we have only to look round us in society to see how scantily it has been recognised; and perhaps even ourselves, after a little re- flection, may decide to spend a trifle less for money, and indulge ourselves a trifle more in the article of freedom. Familiar Studies of Men and Books. Henry David Thoreau.
YOU see you cannot separate the soldier from the brigand; and what is a thief but an isolated brigand with circumspect manners ? I steal a couple of mutton chops, without so much as disturbing people's sleep; the farmer grumbles a bit, but sups none the less wholesomely on what remains. You come up blowing gloriously on a trumpet, take away the whole sheep, and beat the farmer pitifully into the bargain. I have no trumpet; I am only Tom, Dick or Harry; I am a rogue and a dog, and hanging's too good for me — with all my heart; but just ask the farmer which
Putting Ques- tions
of US he prefers, just find out which of us he Hes awake to curse on cold nights. Frangois Villon, in *' A Lodging for the Night."
IFEEL very strongly about putting ques- tions; it partakes too much of the style of the day of judgment. You start a question, and it's like starting a stone. You sit quietly on the top of a hill; and away the stone goes, starting others; and presently some bland old bird (the last you would have thought of) is knocked on the head in his own back garden and the family have to change their name. Mr. Enfield in ''Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde."
All
Opinion Stages on the Road to Truth
OPINION in good men," says Milton, "is but knowledge in the making." All opinions, properly so called, are stages on the road to truth. It does not follow that a man will travel any further; but if he has really considered the world and drawn a con- clusion, he has travelled as far. This does not apply to formulae got by rote, which are on the road to nowhere but second
a catch-
stages
childhood and the grave. To have
nC \ ] ]
word in your mouth is not the same thing as
to hold an opinion; still less is it the same thing as to have made one for yourself. There are too many of these catchwords in the world for people to rap out upon you like an oath and by the way of an argument. They have a currency as intellectual counters; and many respectable persons pay their way with noth- ing else. They seem to stand for vague bodies of theory in the background. The imputed virtue of folios full of knockdown arguments is supposed to reside in them, just as some of the majesty of the British Empire dwells in the constable's truncheon. They are used in pure superstition, as old clodhoppers spoil Latin by way of an exorcism. And yet they are vastly serviceable for checking unprofit- able discussion and stopping the mouths of babes and sucklings. And when the young man comes to a certain stage of intellectual growth, the examination of these counters forms a gymnastic at once amusing and forti- fying to the mind.
Because I have reached Paris, I am not ashamed of having passed through New-
"3
Opinion is the Tavern by the Way in which we
Dwell a Little While on our Way to Truth
haven and Dieppe. They were very good places to pass through, and I am none the less at my destination. All my old opinions were only stages on the way to the one I now hold, as itself is only a stage on the way to some- thing else. I am no more abashed at having been a red-hot Socialist with a panacea of my own than at having been a sucking infant. Doubtless the world is quite right in a million ways; but you have to be kicked about a little to convince you of the fact. And in the mican- while you must do something, be something, believe something. It is not possible to keep the mind in a state of accurate balance and blank; and even if you could do so, instead of coming ultimately to the right conclusion, you would be very apt to remain in a state of balance and blank to perpetuity. Even in quite intermediate stages, a dash of enthu- siasm is not a thing to be ashamed of, in the retrospect: if St. Paul had not been a very zealous Pharisee, he would have been a colder Christian. For my part, I look back to the time when I was a Socialist with something like regret. I have convinced myself (for the
114
i''^^
moment) that we had better leave these great changes to what we call great blind forces; their blindness being so much more perspicacious than the little, peering, partial eyesight of men. I seem to see that my ow^n scheme would not answer; and all the other schemes I ever heard propounded would de- press some elements of goodness just as much as they encouraged others. Now I know that in this turning Conservative with years, I am going through the normal cycle of change and travelling in the common orbit of men's opinions. I submit to this, as I would submit to gout or gray hair, as a concomitant of grow- ing age or else of failing animal heat; but I do not acknowledge that it is necessarily a change for the better — I daresay it is de- plorably for the worse. I have no choice in the business, and can no more resist this ten- dency of my mind than I could prevent my body from beginning to totter and decay. If I am spared (as the phrase runs) I shall doubtless outlive some troublesome desires; but I am in no hurry about that; nor, when the time comes, shall I plume myself on the
"5
Wom- an's Self- suffi- ciency
immunity. Just in the same way, I do not greatly pride myself on having outlived my belief in the fairy tales of Socialism. Old people have faults of their own; they tend to become cowardly, niggardly, and suspicious. Whether from the growth of experience or the decline of animal heat, I see that age leads to these and certain other faults; and it follows, of course, that while in one sense I hope I am journeying towards the truth, in another I am indubitably posting towards these forms and sources of error. Virginibus Puerisque. Crab- bed A (re and Touth.
o
THE sex likes to pick up knowledge, and yet preserves its superiority. It is a good policy, and almost necessary in the circum- stances. If a man finds a woman admires him, were it only for his acquaintance with geog- raphy, he will begin at once to build upon the admiration. It is only by unintermittent snubbing that the pretty ones can keep us in our place. Men, as Miss Hozve, or Miss /i/^r- /oiu^, would have said, "are suchencroachers." For my part, I am body and soul with the p
ii6
women; and after a well-married couple, there is nothing so beautiful in the world as the myth of the divine huntress. It is no use for a man to take to the woods; we know him; Anthony tried the same thing long ago, and had a pitiful time of it by all accounts. But there is this about some women, which over- tops the best gymnosophist among men, that they suffice to themselves, and can walk in a high and cold zone without the countenance of any trousered being. I declare, although the reverse of a professed ascetic, I am more obliged to women for this ideal than I should be to the majority of them, or indeed to any but one, for a spontaneous kiss. There is nothing so encouraging as the spectacle of self-sufficiency. And when I think of the slim and lovely maidens, running the woods all night to the note of Diana's horn; moving among the old oaks as fancy-free as they; things of the forest and the starlight, not touched by the commotion of man's hot and turbid life — although there are plenty other ideals that I should prefer — I find my heart beat at the thought of this one. 'Tis to fail in
117
Repre- senta- tive Men and Their Works
life, but to fail with what a grace! That is not lost which is not regretted. And where — here slips out the male — where would be much of the glory of inspiring love, if there were no contempt to overcome ?
An Inland Voyage.
EN who are in any way typical of a stage
M^i
progress may be compared more justly to the hand upon the dial of a clock, which continues to advance as it indicates, than to the stationary milestone, which is only the measure of what is past. The move- ment is not arrested. That significant some- thing by which the work of such a man differs from that of his predecessors goes on dis- engaging itself and becoming more and more articulate and cognisable. The same principle of growth that carried his first book beyond the books of previous writers carries his last book beyond his first. And just as the most imbecile production of any literary age gives us sometimes the very clue to comprehension we have sought long and vainly in contem- porary masterpieces, so it may be the very —
weakest of an author's books that, coming in the sequel of many others, enables us at last to get hold of what underlies the whole of them — of that spinal marrow of significance that unites the work of his life into something organic and rational. Familiar Studies of Men and Books. Victor Hugo's Romances.
THE person, man or dog, who has a con- science is eternally condemned to some degree of humbug; the sense of the law in their members fatally precipitates either towards a frozen and affected bearing. And the converse is true; and in the elaborate and con- scious manners of the dog, moral opinions and the love of the ideal stand confessed. To follow for ten minutes in the street some swaggering, canine cavalier, is to receive a lesson in dramatic art and the cultured con- duct of the body; in every act or gesture you see him true to a refined conception; and the dullest cur, beholding him, pricks up his ear and proceeds to imitate and parody that charming ease. For to be a high-mannered and high-minded gentleman, careless, affable,
119
and gay, is the inborn pretension of the dog.' The large dog, so much lazier, so much more weighed upon with matter, so majestic with repose, so beautiful in effort, is born with the dramatic means to wholly represent the part. And it is more pathetic and perhaps more in- structive to consider the small dog in his conscientious and imperfect efforts to outdo Sir Philip Sidney. For the ideal of the dog is feudal and religious; the ever-present polythe- ism, the whip-bearing Olympus of mankind, rules them on the one hand; on the other, their singular difference of size and strength among themselves effectually prevents the appearance of the democratic notion. Or we might more exactly compare their society to the curious spectacle presented by a school — ushers, monitors, and big and little boys — qualified by one circumstance, the introduc- tion of the other sex. In each, we should observe a somewhat similar tension of man- ner, and somewhat similar points of honour. In each the larger animal keeps a contemptu- ous good humour; in each the smaller annoys himwithwasp-like impudence, certain of prac-
tical immunity; in each we shall find a double life producing double characters, and an ex- cursive and noisy heroism combined with a fair amount of practical timidity. I have known dogs, and I have known school heroes that, set aside the fur, could hardly have been told apart; and if we desire to understand the chivalry of old, we must turn to the school playfields of the dungheap where the dogs are trooping. Memories and Portraits. The Char- acter of Dogs.
AGAIN, the husband in these [marriage] unions, is usually a man, and the wife commonly enough a woman; and when this is the case, although it makes the firmer mar- riage, a thick additional veil of misconception hangs about the doubtful business. Women, I believe, are somewhat rarer than men; but then, if I were a woman myself, I daresay I should hold the reverse, and at least we all enter more or less wholly into one or other of these camps. A man who delights women by his feminine perceptions will often scatter his admirers by a chance explosion of the under
side of man; and the most masculine and direct of women will some day, to your dire surprise, draw out like a telescope into suc- cessive lengths of personation. Alas! for the man, knowing her to be at heart more candid than himself, who shall flounder, panting, through these mazes in the quest forthwith. The proper qualities of each sex are, indeed, eternally surprising to the other. Between the Latin and the Teuton races, there are similar divergencies, not to be bridged by the most liberal sympathy. And in the good, plain, cut-and-dry explanations of life, which pass current among us as the Wisdom of the elders, this difficulty has been turned with the aid of pious lies. Thus, when a young lady has angelic features, eats nothing to speak of, plays all day long on the piano, and sings ravishingly in church, it requires a rough in- fidelity, falsely called cynicism, to believe that she may be a little devil after all. Yet so it is; she may be a tale-bearer, a liar, and a thief; she may have a taste for brandy, and no heart. My compliments to George Eliot for her Rosamund Vincy; the ugly work of'
satire she has transmuted to the ends of art, by the companion figure of Lydgate; and the satire was much wanted for the education of men. That doctrine of the excellence of women, however chivalrous, is cowardly as well as false. It is better to face the fact, and know, w^hen you marry, that you take into your life a creature of equal, if of unlike, frail- ties; whose weak human heart beats no more tunefully than yours.
Virginihus Puerisque. II. ■I !■
THERE is always a new horizon for on- ward-looking men, and although we dwell on a small planet, immersed in petty business and not enduring beyond a brief period of years, we are so constituted that our hopes are inaccessible, like stars, and the term of hoping is prolonged until the term of life. To be truly happy is a question of how we begin and not of how we end, of what we want and not of what we have. An aspiration is a joy forever, a possession as solid as a landed estate, a fortune which we can never exhaust and which gives us year by year a
123
revenue of pleasurable activity. To have many of these is to be spiritually rich. Life is only a very dull and ill-directed theatre unless we have some interest in the piece; and to those who have neither art nor science, the world is a mere arrangement of colours, or a rough footway where they may very well break their shins. It is in virtue of his own desires and curiosities that any man con- tinues to exist with even patience, that he is charmed with the look of things and people, and that he awakens every morning with a renewed appetite for work and pleasure. Desire and curiosity are the two eyes through which he sees the world in the most enchanted colours; it is they that make women beautiful or fossils interesting; and the man may squan- der his estate and come to beggary, but if he keeps these two amulets he is still rich in the possibilities of pleasure. Suppose he could take one meal so compact and comprehensive that he should never hunger any more; sup- pose him, at a glance, to take in all the fea- tures of the world and allay the desire for knowledge; suppose him to do the like in any
124
province of experience — would not that man be in a poor way for amusement ever after ?
Virginibus Puerisque. El Dorado.
125
CHARACTER
I I NE such face I now remember; one such ^^ blank some half-dozen of us labour to dissemble. In his youth he was most beautiful in person, most serene and genial by disposi- tion; full of racy words and quaint thoughts. Laughter attended on his coming. He had the air of a great gentleman, jovial and royal with his equals, and to the poorest student gentle and attentive. Power seemed to reside in him exhaustless; we saw him stoop to play with us, but held him marked for higher des- tinies; we loved his notice; and I have rarely had my pride more gratified than when he sat at my father's table, my acknowledged friend. So he walked among us, both hands full of gifts, carrying with nonchalance the seeds of a most influential life. The powers and the ground of friendship is a mystery; but, looking back, I can discern that, in part, we loved the J:hing he was, for some shadow of what he was to be. For with all his beauty, breeding, urbanity and mirth, there was in those days something soulless in our friend. He would astonish us by sallies, witty, innocent and inhumane; and by a mis-
I2g
applied Johnsonian pleasantry, demolish hon- est sentiment. I can still see and hear him, as he went his way along the lamplit streets. La ci darem la mano on his lips, a noble figure of youth, but following vanity and incredulous of good; and sure enough, somewhere on the high seas of life, with his health, his hopes, his patrimony and his self-respect, miserably went down.
From this disaster, like a spent swimmer, he came desperately ashore, bankrupt of money and consideration; creeping to the family he had deserted; with broken wing, never more to rise. But in his face there was a light of knowledge that was new to it. Of the wounds of his body he was never healed; died of them gradually, with clear-eyed resignation; of his wounded pride, we knew only from his si- lence. He returned to that city where he had lorded it in his ambitious youth; lived there alone, seeing few; striving to retrieve the ir- retrievable; at times still grappling with that mortal frailty that had brought him down; still joying in his friends' successes; his laugh still ready but with a kindlier music; and over
130
'1%
all his thoughts the shadow of that unalter- able law which he had disavowed and which had brought him low. Lastly, when his bodily evils had quite disabled him, he lay a great while dying, still without complaint, still finding interests; to his last step gentle, ur- bane and with the will to smile. The tale of this great failure is, to those who remained true to him, the tale of a success. In his youth he took thought for no one but himself; when he came ashore again, his whole armada lost, he seemed to think of none but others. Such was his tenderness for others, such his instinct of fine courtesy and pride, that of that impure passion of remorse he never breathed a syllable; even regret was rare with him, and pointed with a jest. You would not have dreamed, if you had known him then, that this was that great failure, that beacon to young men, over whose fall a whole society had hissed and pointed fingers. Often have we gone to him, red-hot with our own hopeful sorrows, railing on the rose-leaves in our princely bed of life, and he would pa- tiently give ear and wisely counsel; and it was
131
only upon some return of our own thoughts that we were reminded what manner of man this was to whom we disembosomed; a man, by his own fault, ruined; shut out of the garden of his gifts; his whole city of hope both ploughed and salted; silently awaiting the deliverer. Then something took us by the throat; and to see him there, so gentle, pa- tient, brave and pious, oppressed but not cast down, sorrow was so swallowed up in admira- tion that we could not dare to pity him. Even if the old fault flashed out again, it but awoke our wonder that, in that lost battle, he should have still the energy to fight. He had gone to ruin with a kind of kingly abandon, like one who condescended; but once ruined, with the lights all out, he fought as for a kingdom. Most men, finding themselves the authors of their own disgrace, rail the louder against God or destiny. Most men, when they repent, oblige their friends to share the bitterness of that repentance. But he had held an inquest and passed sentence: mene, mene; and con- demned himself to smiling silence. He had given trouble enough; had earned misfortune
132
amply, and foregone the right to murmur. Thus was our old comrade, like Samson, care- less in his days of strength; but on the coming of adversity, and when that strength was gone that had betrayed him — *'for our strength is weakness" — he began to blossom and bring forth. Well, now, he is out of the fight: the burden that he bore thrown down before the great deliverer. We
"in the vast cathedral leave him; God accept him, Christ receive him!"
If we go now and look on these innumerable epitaphs, the pathos and the irony are strangely fled. They do not stand merely to the dead, these foolish monuments; they are pillars and legends set up to glorify the diffi- cult but not desperate life of man. This ground is hallowed by the heroes of defeat. I see the indifferent pass before my friend's resting-place; pause, with a shrug of pity, marvelling that so rich an argosy had sunk. A pity, now that he is done with suffering, a pity most uncalled for, and an ignorant won-
133
The
Selfish- ness of Youth
der. Before those who loved him, his memory shines Hke a reproach; they honour him for silent lessons; they cherish his example; and in what remains before them of their toil, fear to be unworthy of the dead. For this proud man was one of those who prospered in the valley of humiliation; — of whom Bunyan wrote that, ''Though Christian had the hard hap to meet in the valley with Apollyon, yet I must tell you, that in former times men have met with angels here; have found pearls here; and have in this place found the words of life." Old Mortality. Memories and Portraits.
I WOULD fain strike a note that should be more heroical; but the ground of all youth's suffering, solitude, hysteria, and haunting of the grave, is nothing else than naked, ignorant selfishness. It is himself that he sees dead; those are his virtues that are forgotten; his is the vague epitaph. Pity him but the more, if pity be your cue; for where a man is all pride, vanity, and per- sonal aspiration, he goes through life un- shielded. In every part and corner of our life,
134
to lose oneself is to be gainer; to forget one- self is to be happy; and this poor, laughable and tragic fool has not yet learned the rudi- ments; himself, giant Prometheus, is still ironed on the peaks of Caucasus. But by and by his truant interests will leave that tortured body, slip abroad and gather flowers. Then shall death appear before him in an altered guise; no longer as a doom peculiar to him- self, whether fate's crowning injustice or his own last vengeance upon those who fail to value him; but now as a power that wounds him far more tenderly, not without solemn compensations, taking and giving, bereaving and yet storing up.
The first step for all is to learn to the dregs our own ignoble fallibility. When w^e have fallen through storey after storey of our vanity and aspiration, and sit rueful among the ruins, then it is that we begin to measure the stature of our friends: how they stand be- tween us and our own contempt, believing in our best; how, linking us with others, and still spreading wide the influential circle, they weave us in and in with the fabric of
135
The Old Adam
contemporary life; and to what pretty size they dwarf the virtues and the vices that ap- peared gigantic in our youth. So that at the last, when such a pin falls out — when there vanished in the least breath of time one of those rich magazines of life on which we drew our supply — when he who had first dawned upon us as a face among the faces of the city, and, still growing, came to bulk on our re- gard with those clear features of the loved and living man, falls in a breath to memory and shadow, there falls along with him a whole wing of the palace of our life.
Old Mortality. Memories and Portraits.
T"^ HERE is a certain critic, not indeed of -*- execution, but of matter, whom I dare be known to set before the best: a certain low- browed, hairy gentleman, at first a percher in the fork of trees, next (as they relate) a dweller in caves, and whom I think I see squatting in cave-mouths, of a pleasant afternoon, to munch his berries — his wife, that accom- plished lady, squatting by his side: his name I never heard, but he is often described as Prob-
136
ably Arboreal, which may serve for recogni- tion. Each has his own tree of ancestors, but at the top of all sits Probably Arboreal; in all our veins there run some minims of his old, wild, treetop blood; our civilized nerves still tingle with his rude terrors and pleasures; and to that which would have moved our common ancestor all must obediently thrill. Memories and Portraits. Pastoral.
YOU need repent none of your youthful vagaries. They may have been over the score on one side, just as those of age are probably over the score on the other. But they had a point; they not only befitted your age and expressed its attitude and passions, but they had a relation to what was outside of you, and implied criticism.s on the existing state of things, which you need not allow to have been undeserved, because you now see that they were partial. All error, not merely verbal, is a strong way of stating that the cur- rent truth is incomplete. The follies of youth have a basis in sound reason, just as much as the embarrassing questions put by babes and
137
It re- quires Brains to make a Fool of Yourself
sucklings. Their most anti-social acts indicate the defects of our society. When the torrent sweeps the man against a boulder, you must expect him to scream, and you need not be surprised if the scream is sometimes a theory. Shelley, chafing at the Church of England, discovered the cure of all evils in universal atheism. Generous lads, irritated at the in- justices of society, see nothing for it but the abolishment of everything and King- dom Come of anarchy. Shelley was a young fool; so are these cock-sparrow revolutiona- aries. But it is better to be a fool than to be dead. It is better to emit a scream in the shape of a theory than to be entirely insensible to the jars and incongruities of life and take everything as it comes in a forlorn stupidity. Some people swallov^ the universe like a pill; they travel on through the world, like smiling images pushed from behind. For God's sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself! As for the others, the irony of facts shall take it out of their hands, and make fools of them in down- right earnest, ere the farce be over. There -^
^ 138
shall be such a mopping and a mov/ing at the last day, and such blushing and confusion of countenance for all those who have been wise in their own esteem, and have not learnt the rough lessons that youth hands on to age. If we are indeed here to complete and perfect our own natures, and grow larger, stronger, and more sympathetic against some nobler career in the future, we had all best bestir ourselves to the utmost while we have the time. To equip a dull, respectable person with wings would be but to make a parody of an angel. Vtrginibus Puerisque. Crabbed Age and Touth.
I
T is a still more difficult consideration for our average men, that while all their teachers, from Solomon down to Benjamin Franklin and the ungodly Binney, have in- culcated the same ideal of manners, caution, and respectability, those characters in history who have most notoriously flown in the face of such precepts are spoken of in hyperbolical terms of praise, and honoured with public monuments in the streets of our commercial
139
centres. This is very bewildering to the moral sense. You have Joan of Arc, who left a humble but honest and reputable livelihood under the eyes of her parents, to go a-colonel- ling, in the company of rowdy soldiers, against the enemies of France; surely a melancholy example for one's daughters! And then you have Columbus, who may have pioneered America, but, when all is said, was a most imprudent navigator. His life is not the kind of thing one would like to put into the hands of young people; rather, one would do one's utmost to keep it from their knowledge, as a red flag of adventure and disintegrating in- fluence in life. The time would fail me if I were to recite all the names in history whose exploits are perfectly irrational and even shocking to the business mind. The incon- gruity is speaking; and I imagine it must en- gender among the mediocrities a very peculiar attitude towards the nobler and showier sides of national life. They will read of the Charge of Balaklava in much the same spirit as they assist at a performance of the Lyons Mail. Persons of substance take in the Times and sit .
j^
140
composedly in the pit or boxes according to the degree of their prosperity in business. As for the generals who go galloping up and down among bombshells in absurd cocked hats — as for the actors who raddle their faces and demean themselves for hire upon the stage — they must belong, thank God! to a different order of beings, whom we watch as we watch the clouds careering in the windy, bottomless inane, or read about like charac- ters in ancient and rather fabulous annals. Our offspring would no more think of copy- ing their behaviour, let us hope, than of doff- ing their clothes and painting themselves blue in consequence of certain admissions in the first chapter of their school history of England. Virginibus Puerisque. Crabbed Age and Touth.
HURRY is the resource of the faithless. Where a man can trust his own heart, and those of his friends, to-morrow is as good as to-day. And if he die in the meanwhile, why then, there he dies, and the question is solved. An Inland Voyage.
141
A GREAT many people run down jeal- ousy on the score that it is an artificial feeling, as well as practically inconvenient. This is scarcely fair; for the feeling on which it merely attends, like an ill-humoured cour- tier, is itself artificial in exactly the same sense and to the same degree. I suppose what is meant by that objection is that jealousy has not always been a character of man; formed no part of that very modest kit of sentiments with which he is supposed to have begun the world; but waited to make its ap- pearance in better days and among richer natures. And this is equally true of love, and friendship, and love of country, and delight in what they call the beauties of nature, and most other things worth having. Love, in particular, will not endure any historical scrutiny: to all who have fallen across it, it is one of the most incontestable facts in the world; but if you begin to ask what it was in other periods and countries, in Greece for instance, the strangest doubts begin to spring up, and everything seems so vague and changing that a dream is logical in compari-
142
son. Jealousy, at any rate, is one of the con- sequences of love; you may like it or not, at pleasure; but there it is.
Virginibus Pucrisque. III.
WHEN people take the trouble to do dig- nified acts, it is worth while to take a little more, and allow the dignity to be com- mon to all concerned. But in our brave Saxon countries, where we plod threescore years and ten in the mud, and the wind keeps sing- ing in our ears from birth to burial, we do our good and bad with a high hand and almost offensively; and make even our alms a wit- ness-bearing and an act of war against the wrong. An Inland Voyage.
IT is a commonplace, that we cannot answer for ourselves before we have been tried. But it is not so common a reflection, and surely more consoling, that we usually find ourselves a great deal braver and better than we thought. I believe this is every one's ex- perience; but an apprehension that they m^ay belie themselves in the future prevents
143
mankind from trumpeting this cheerful sen- timent abroad. I wish sincerely, for it would have saved me much trouble, that there had been some one to put me in a good heart about life when I was younger; to tell me how dan- gers are most portentous on a distant sight; and how the good in a man's spirit will not sufier itself to be overlaid, and rarely or never deserts him in the hour of need. But we are all for tootling on the sentimental flute in literature; and not a man among us will go to the head of the march to sound the heavy drums. An Inland Voyage.
Individ- uality
TO know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive. Such a man may be generous; he may be honest in something more than the commercial sense; he may love his friends with an elective personal sympathy, and not accept them as an adjunct of the station to which he has been called. He may be a m.an, in short, acting on his own instincts, keeping in his own shape that God made him in; and
144
not a mere crank in the social engine house, welded on principles that he does not under- stand, and for purposes that he does not care for. An Inland Voyage.
ALL the world may be an aristocrat, and play the duke among marquises, and the reigning monarch among the dukes. If he will only outvie them In tranquIlHty. An Imper- turbable demeanour comes from perfect pa- tience. Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened, but go on In fortune or misfor- tune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm. An Inland Voyage.
IN this mixed world. If you can find one or two sensible places In a man, above all, If you should find a whole family living together on such pleasant terms, you may surely be satisfied, and take the rest for granted; or, what Is a great deal better, boldly make up your mind that you can do perfectly without the rest; and that ten thousand bad traits cannot make a single good one any the less
An Inland Voyage.
^ good
145
Grati- tude.
The Self- made Man
WHETHER people's gratitude for the good gifts that come to them be wisely conceived or dutifully expressed is a second- ary matter, after all, so long as they feel grat- itude. The true ignorance is when a man does not well know that he has received a good gift, or begins to imagine that he has got it for himself. The self-made man is the fun- niest wind-bag after all! There is a marked difference between decreeing light in chaos, and lighting the gas in a metropolitan back parlour with a box of patent matches; and do what we will, there is always something made to our hand, if it were only our fingers.
An Inland Voyage.
Saying "No," and "Yes"
IT is a useful accomplishment to be able to say no, but surely it is the essence of amia- bility to prefer to say yes where it is possible. There is something wanting in the man who does not hate himself whenever he is con- strained to say no. Familiar Studies of Men and Books. Henry David Thoreau.
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RELIGION
IT was Sabbath; the mountain-fields were all vacant in the sunshine; and as we came down through St. Martin de Frugeres, the church was crowded to the door, there were people kneeling without upon the steps, and the sound of the priest's chanting came forth out of the dim interior. It gave me a home feeling on the spot; for I am a countryman of the Sabbath, so to speak, and all Sabbath observances, like a Scotch accent, strike in me mixed feelings, grateful and the reverse. It is only a traveller, hurrying by like a per- son from another planet, who can rightly enjoy the peace and beauty of the great as- cetic feast. The sight of the resting country does his spirit good. There is something better than music in the wide, unusual silence; and it disposes him to amiable thoughts, like the sound of a little river or the warmth of sun- light. Travels with a Donkey.
I
T is a bad idea for a man to change," said one. It may have been accidental, but you see how this phrase pursued me; and for myself, I believe it is the current philosophy
149
in these parts. I have some difficulty in imag- ining a better. It's not only a great flight of confidence for a man to change his creed and go out of his family for heaven's sake; but the odds are — nay, and the hope is — that, with all this great transition in the eyes of man, he has not changed himself a hairsbreadth to the eyes of God. Honour to those w^ho do so, for the wrench is sore. But it argues something narrow, whether of strength or weakness, whether of the prophet or the fool, in those who can take a sufficient interest in such in- finitesimal and human operations, or who can quit a friendship for a doubtful process of the mind. And I think I should not leave my old creed for another, changing only words for other words; but by some brave reading, embrace it in spirit and truth, and find wrong as wrong for me as for the best of other com- munions. Travels with a Donkey.
THE world in which we live has been va- riously said and sung by the most in- genious poets and philosophers: these reduc- ing it to formulae and chemical ingredients.
150
those striking the lyre in high-sounding meas- ures for the handiwork of God. What expe- rience supplies is of a mingled tissue, and the choosing mind has much to reject before it can get together the materials of a theory. Dew and thunder, destroying Atilla and the Spring lambkins, belong to an order of con- trast which no repetition can assimilate. There is an uncouth, outlandish strain throughout the web of the world, as from a vexatious planet in the house of life. Things are not congruous and wear strange disguises: the consummate flower is fostered out of dung, and after nourishing itself awhile with heav- en's delicate distillations, decays again into indistinguishable soil; and with Caesar's ashes, Hamlet tells us, the urchins make dirt pies and filthily besmear their countenance. Nay, the kindly shine of summer, when tracked home with the scientific spyglass, is found to issue from the most portentous nightmare of the universe — the great, con- flagrant sun: a world of hell's squibs, tumul- tuary, roaring aloud, inimical to life. The sun litself is enough to disgust a human being of
151
the scene which he inhabits; and you would not fancy there was a green or habitable spot in a universe thus awfully lighted up. And yet it is by the blaze of such a conflagration, to which the fire of Rome was but a spark, that we do all our fiddling, and hold domestic tea-parties at the arbour door. The Greeks figured Pan, the god of Nature, now terribly stamping his foot, so that armies were dispersed; now by the woodside on a summer noon trolling on his pipe until he charmed the hearts of upland ploughmen. And the Greeks, in so figuring, uttered the last word of human experience. To certain smoke-dried spirits matter and motion and elastic aethers, and the hypothesis of this or that other spectacled professor, tell a speaking story; but for youth and all ductile and con- genial minds. Pan is not dead, but of all the classic hierarchy alone survives in triumph; goat-footed, with a gleeful and an angry look, the type of the shaggy world: and in every wood, if you go with a spirit properly pre- pared, you shall hear the note of his pipe. For it is a shaggy world, and yet studded with
152
gardens; where the salt and tumbling sea re- ceives clear rivers running from among reeds and lilies; fruitful and austere; a rustic w^orld; sunshiny, lewd, and cruel. What is it the birds sing among the trees in pairing-time ? What means the sound of the rain falling far and wide upon the leafy forest ? To what tune does the fisherman whistle, as he hauls in his net at morning, and the bright fish are heaped inside the boat ? These are all airs upon Pan's pipe; he it was who gave them breath in the exultation of his heart, and gleefully modu- lated their outflow with his lips and fingers. The coarse mirth of herdsmen, shaking the dells with laughter and striking out high echoes from the rock; the tune of moving feet in the lamplit city, or on the smooth ballroom floor; the hooves of many horses, beating the wide pastures in alarm; the song of hurrying rivers; the colour of clear skies; and smiles and the live touch of hands; and the voice of things, and their significant look, and the renovating influence they breathed forth — these are his joyful measures, to which the whole earth treads in choral harmony. To
this music the young lambs bound as to a tabor, and the London shop-girl skips rudely in the dance. For it puts a spirit of gladness in all hearts; and to look on the happy side of nature is common, in their hours, to all created things. Some are vocal under a good influence, are pleasing whenever they are pleased, and hand on their happiness to others, as a child who, looking upon lovely things, looks lovely. Some leap to the strains with unapt foot, and make a halting figure in the universal dance. And some, like sour spectators at the play, re- ceive the music into their hearts with an un- moved countenance, and walk like strangers through the general rejoicing. But let him feign never so carefully, there is not a man but has his pulses shaken when Pan trolls out a stave of ecstasy and sets the world a-singing. Alas, if that were all! But oftentimes the air is changed: and in the screech of the night wind, chasing navies, subverting the tall ships and the rooted cedar of the hills; in the random deadly levin or the fury of headlong floods, we recognize the "dread foundation" of life and the anger in Pan's heart. Earth wages
154
open war against her children, and under her softest touch hides treacherous claws. The cool waters invite us in to drown; the domestic hearth burns us in the hour of sleep, and makes an end of all. Everything is good or bad, helpful or deadly, not in itself, but by its circumstances. For a few bright days in Eng- land the hurricane must break forth and the North Sea pay a toll of populous ships. And when the universal music has led lovers into the paths of dalliance, confident of Nature's sympathy, suddenly the air shifts into a minor, and death makes a clutch from his ambus- cade below the bed of marriage. For death is given in a kiss; the dearest kindnesses are fatal; and into this life, where one life preys into another, the child too often makes its entrance from the mother's corpse. It is no wonder, with so traitorous a scheme of things, if the wise people who created for us the idea of Pan thought that of all fears the fear of him was the most terrible, since it embraces all. And still we preserve the phrase: a panic ter- ror. To reckon dangers too curiously, to hearken too intently for the threat that runs
155
through all the winning music of the world, to hold back the hand from the rose because of the thorn, and from life because of death: this is to be afraid of Pan. Highly respectable citizens who flee life's pleasures and respon- sibilities and keep, with upright hat, upon the midway of custom, avoiding the right hand and the left, the ecstasies and the agonies, how surprised they would be if they could hear their attitude mythologically expressed, and knew themselves as tooth-chattering ones, who flee from Nature because they fear the hand of Nature's God! Shrilly sound Pan's pipes; and behold the banker instantly concealed in the bank parlour! For to dis- trust one's impulses is to be recreant to Pan. There are moments when the mind refuses to be satisfied with evolution, and demands a ruddier presentation of the sum of man's experience. Sometimes the mood is brought about by laughter at the humorous side of life, as when, abstracting ourselves from earth, we imagine people plodding on foot, or seated in ships and speedy trains, with the planet all the while whirling in the opposite _
direction, so that, for all their hurry, they travel back-foremost through the universe of space. Sometimes it comes by the spirit of de- light, and sometimes by the spirit of terror. At least, there will always be hours when we refuse to be put off by the feint of explana- tion, nicknamed science; and demand instead some palpitating image of our estate, that shall represent the troubled and uncertain element in which we dwell, and satisfy reason by the means of art. Science writes of the world as if with the cold finger of a starfish; it is all true; but what is it when compared with the reality of which it discourses .? where hearts beat high in April, and death strikes, and hills totter in the earthquake, and there is a glamour over all the objects of sight, and a thrill in all noises of the ear, and Romance herself has made her dwelling among men .? So we come back to the old myth, and hear the goat-footed piper making the music which is itself the charm and terror of things; and when a glen invites our visiting footsteps, fancy that Pan leads us thither with a gra- cious tremolo; or when our hearts quail at the
157
Our
Divine Unrest
thunder of the cataract, tell ourselves that he has stamped his hoof in the night thicket.
Virginibus Puerisque. Pan s Pipes.
WE are told by men of science that all the ventures of mariners on the sea, all that counter-marching of tribes and races that confounds old history v^ith its dust and rumour, sprung from nothing more abstruse than the laws of supply and demand, and a certain natural instinct for cheap rations. To any one thinking deeply, this will seem a dull and pitiful explanation. The tribes that came swarming out of the North and East, if they were indeed pressed onward from behind by others, were drawn at the same time by the magnetic influence of the South and West. The fame of other lands had reached them; the name of the eternal city rang in their ears; they were not colonists, but pilgrims; they travelled toward wine and gold and sunshine, but their hearts were set on something higher. That divine unrest, that old stinging trouble of humanity that makes all high achievements and all miserable failure, the same that
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spread wings with Icarus, the same that sent Columbus into the desolate Atlantic, in- spired and supported these barbarians on their perilous march. There is one legend which profoundly represents their spirit, of how a flying party of these wanderers en- countered a very old man shod with iron. The old man asked them whither they were going; and they answered, with one voice: "To the Eternal City!" He looked at them gravely. "I have sought it," he said, "over the most part of the world. Three such pairs as I now carry on my feet have I worn out upon this pilgrimage, and now the fourth is growing slender underneath my steps. And all this while I have not found the city." And he turned and went his own way alone, leav- ing them astonished. The Merry Men.
A GENEROUS prayer is never presented in vain; the petitioner is always, I be- lieve, rewarded by some gracious visitation.
The Merry Men.
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ART
BUT the gymnast is not my favourite; he has little or no tincture of the artist in his composition; his soul is small and pedestrian, for the most part, since his profession makes no call upon it, and does not accustom him to high ideas. But if a man is only so much of an actor that he can stumble through a farce, he is made free of a new order of thoughts. He has something else to think about besides the money box. He has a pride of his own, and, what is of far more impor- tance, he has an aim before him that he can never quite attain. He has gone upon a pil- grimage that will last him his life long, be- cause there is no end to it short of perfection. He will better upon himself a little day by day; or even if he has given up the attempt, he will always remember that once upon a time he had conceived this high ideal, that once upon a time he had fallen in love with a star. "'Tis better to have loved and lost." Although the moon should have nothing to say to Endymion, although he should settle down with Audrey and feed pigs, do you not think he would move with a better grace, and
163
cherish hifrher thouo-hts to the end ? The louts he meets at church never had a fancy above Audrey's snood; but there is a reminis- cence in Endymion's heart that, Hke a spice, keeps it fresh and haughty. To be even one of the outskirters of art leaves a fine stamp on a man's countenance. I remember once dining with a party in the inn Chateau Lan- don. Most of them were unmistakable bag- men; others well-to-do peasantry; but there was one young fellow in a blouse, whose face stood out from among the rest surprisingly. It looked more finished; more of the spirit looked out through it; it had a living, ex- pressive air, and you could see that his eyes took things in. My companion and I won- dered greatly who and what he could be. It was fair time in Chateau Landon, and when we went to the booths, we had our question answered; for there was our friend busily fiddling for the peasants to caper to. He was a wandering violinist. An Inland Voyage.
style in Art
TYLE is the invariable mark of any mas- ter; and for the student who does not aspire
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so high as to be numbered with the giants, it is still the one quaHty in which he may im- prove himself at will. Passion, wisdom, crea- tive force, the power of mystery or colour, are allotted in the hour of birth, and can be nei- ther learned nor stimulated. But the just and dexterous use of what qualities we have, the proportion of one part to another and to the whole, the elision of the useless, the accentua- tion of the important, and the preservation of a uniform character from end to end — these, which taken together constitute technical perfection, are to some degree within the reach of industry and intellectual courage. What to put in and what to leave out; whether some particular fact be organically necessary or purely ornamental; whether, if it be purely ornamental, it may not weaken or obscure the general design; and finally, whether, if we decide to use it, we should do so grossly and notably, or in some conventional disguise: are questions of plastic style continually re- arising. And the sphinx that patrols the high- ways of executive art has no more unanswer- able riddle to propound. A Note on Realism. _
Cathe- drals
I FIND I never weary of great churches. It is my favourite kind of mountain scenery. Mankind W2.s never so happily inspired as v^hen it made a cathedral; a thing as single and specious as a statue to the first glance, and yet, on examination, as lively and inter- esting as a forest in detail. The height of spires cannot be taken by trigonometry; they measure absurdly short, but how^ tall they are to the admiring eye! And where we have so many elegant proportions, growing one out of the other, and all together into one, it seems as if proportion transcended itself and became something different and more im- posing. I could never fathom how a man dares to lift up his voice to preach in a cathedral. What is he to say that will not be an anti- climax .f* For though I have heard a consider- able variety of sermons, I never yet heard one that was so expressive as a cathedral. 'Tis the best preacher itself, and preaches day and night; not only telling you of man's arts and aspirations in the past, but convinc- ing your own soul of ardent sympathies; or rather, like all good preachers, it sets you
preaching to yourself; — and every man is his own doctor of divinity in the last resort.
An Inland Voyage.
THE art of literature stands apart from among its sisters, because the material in which the literary artist works is the dialect of life: hence, on the one hand, a strange fresh- ness and immediacy of address to the public mind which is ready prepared to understand it; but hence, on the other, a singular limita- tion. The sister arts enjoy the use of a plastic and ductile material, like the modeller's clay; literature alone is condemned to work in mosaic with infinite and quite rigid words. You have seen those blocks, dear to the nur- sery: this one a pillar, that a pediment, a third a window or a vase. It is with blocks of just such arbitrary size and figure that the literary architect is condemned to design the palace of his art. Nor is this all; for since these blocks, or words, are the acknowledged currency of our daily affairs, there are here possible none of those suppressions by which other arts obtain relief, continuity, and vigor:
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no hieroglyphic touch, no smoothed impasto, no inscrutable shadow, as in painting; no blank wall, as in architecture: but every word, phrase, sentence, and paragraph must move in a logical progression, and convey a definite conventional import. Now the first merit which attracts in the pages of a good writer, or the talk of a bril- liant conversationalist, is the apt choice and contrast of the words employed. It is, indeed, a strange art to take these blocks, rudely con- ceived for the purpose of the market or the bar, and by tact of application touch them to the finest meanings and distinctions, restore to them their primal energy, wittily shift them to another issue, or make of them a drum to rouse the passions. But though this form of merit is without doubt the most sen- sible and seizing, it is far from being equally present in all writers. The effect of words in Shakespeare, their singular justice, signifi- cance, and poetic charm, is different, indeed, from the effect of words in Addison or Field- ing. Or, to take an example nearer home, the words in Carlyle seem electrified into an
i68
energy of lineament, like the faces of men furiously moved; whilst the words in Ma- caulay, apt enough to convey his meaning, harmonious enough in sound, yet glide from the memory like undistinguishable elements in a general effect. But the first class of writ- ers have no monopoly of literary merit. There is a sense in which Addison is superior to Carlyle; a sense in which Cicero is better than Tacitus, in which Voltaire excels Montaigne: it certainly lies not in the choice of words; it lies not in the interest or value of the matter; it lies not in force of intellect, of poetry or of humour. The first three are but infants to the three second; and yet each, in a particular point of literary art, excels his superior in the whole. What is that point ?
Style tn Literature.
i6g
LITERATURE
I COME next to Whitman's ** Leaves of Grass," a book of singular service, a book which tumbled the world upside down for me, blew into space a thousand cobwebs of genteel and ethical illusion, and, having thus shaken my tabernacle of lies, set me back again upon a strong foundation of all the original and manly virtues. But it is, once more, only a book for those who have the gift of reading. I will be very frank — I believe it is so with all good books, except, perhaps, fiction. The average man lives, and must live, so wholly in convention, that gun-pow- der charges of the truth are more apt to dis- compose than to invigorate his creed. Either he cries out upon blasphemy and indecency, and crouches the closer round that little idol of part truths and part conveniences which is the contemporary deity, or he is convinced by what is new, forgets what is old, and be- comes truly blasphemous and indecent him- self. New truth is only useful to supplement the old; rough truth is only wanted to expand, not to destroy, our civil and often elegant conventions. He who cannot judge had better
X73
stick to fiction and the daily papers. There he will get little harm, and, in the first at least, some good. The Influence of Books.
Mere- dith's "The Egoist '
I SHOULD never forgive myself if I forgot "The Egoist." It is art, if you like, but it belongs purely to didactic art, and from all the novels I have read (and I have read thou- sands) stands in a place by itself. Here is a Nathan for the modern David; here is a book to send the blood into men's faces. Satire, the angry picture of men's faults, is not great art; v^e can all be angry with our neighbour; what we want is to be shown, not his defects, of which we are too conscious, but his merits, to which we are too blind. And "The Egoist" is a satire; so much must be allowed; but it is a satire of singular quality, which tells you nothing of that obvious mote, which is en- gaged from first to last with that invisible beam. It is yourself that is hunted down; these are your own faults that are dragged into the day and numbered, with lingering relish, with cruel cunning and precision. A young friend of Mr. Meredith's (as I have the
174
story) came to him in an agony. "That is too bad of you," he cried. "Willoughby is me!" "No, my dear fellow," said the author; "he is all of us." I have read "The Egoist" five or six times myself, and I mean to read it again; for I am like the young friend of. the anecdote — I think Willoughby an unmanly but a very serviceable exposure of myself.
The Influence of Books.
WORDSWORTH should perhaps come next. Everyone has been influenced by Wordsworth, and it is hard to tell precisely how. A certain innocence, a rugged austerity of joy, a sight of the stars, "the silence that is in the lonely hills," something of the cold thrill of dawn, cling to his work and give it a particular address to what is best in us. I do not know that you learn a lesson; you need not — Mill did not — agree with any one of his beliefs; and yet the spell is cast. Such are the best teachers: a dogma learned is only a new error — the old one was perhaps as good; but a spirit communicated is a perpetual pos- session. These best teachers climb beyond
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Plays and Ro- mances
The Play
teaching to the plane of art; it is themselves, and what is best in themselves, that they com- municate. The Influence of Books.
THE purposes of these two arts are so much alike, and they deal so much with the same passions and interests, that we are apt to forget the fundamental opposition of their methods. And yet such a fundamental oppo- sition exists. In the drama the action is de- veloped in great measure by means of things that remain outside of the art; by means of real things, that is, and not artistic conven- tions for things. This is a sort of realism that is not to be confounded with that realism in painting of which we hear so much. The realism in painting is a thing of purposes; this that we have to indicate in the drama is an affair of method. We have heard a story, indeed, of a painter in France who, when he wanted to paint a sea-beach, carried realism from his ends to his means, and plastered real sand upon his canvas; and that is pre- cisely what is done in the drama. The dra- matic author has to paint his beaches with
176
real sand; real live men and women move about the stage; we hear real voices; what is feigned merely puts a sense upon what is; we do actually see a woman go behind a screen as Lady Teazle, and, after a certain interval, we do actually see her very shame- fully produced again. Now all these things, that remain as they were in life, and are not transmuted into any artistic convention, are terribly stubborn and difficult to deal with; and hence there are for the dramatist many resultant limitations in time and space. These limitations in some sort approximate towards those of painting; the dramatic author is tied down, not indeed to a moment, but to the duration of each scene or act; he is confined to the stage, almost as the painter is confined within his frame. But the great restriction is this, that a dramatic author must deal with his actors, and with his actors alone. Certain moments of suspense, certain significant dis- positions of personages, a certain logical growth of emotion, these are the only means at the disposal of the playwright. It is true that, with the assistance of the scene-painter.
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The Ro- mance
the costumier and the conductor of the or- chestra, he may add to this something of pageant, something of sound and fury; but these are, for the dramatic writer, beside the mark, and do not come under the vivifying touch of his genius. When we turn to romance we find this no longer. Here nothing is re- produced to our senses directly. Not only the main conception of the work, but the scenery, the appliances, the mechanism by which this conception is brought home to us, have been put through the crucible of another man's mind, and come out again, one and all, in the form of written words. With the loss of every degree of such realism as we have described, there is for art a clear gain of liberty and largeness of competence. Thus, painting, in which the round outlines of things are thrown on to a flat board, is far more free than sculpture, in which their solidity is preserved. It is by giving up these identities that art gains true strength. And so in the case of novels as compared with the stage. Continuous narration is the flat board on which the novelist throws everything.
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And from this there results for him a great loss of vividness, but a great compensating gain in his pov^er over the subject; so that he can nov^ subordinate one thing to another in im- portance, and introduce all manner of very subtle detail, to a degree that was before im- possible. He can render just as easily the flourish of trumpets before a victorious em- peror and the gossip of country market women; the gradual decay of forty years of a man's life and the gesture of a passionate moment. He finds himself equally unable, if he looks at it from one point of view — equally able, if he looks at it from another point of view — to reproduce a colour, a sound, an outline, a logical argument, a physical action. He can show his readers, behind and around the personages that for the moment occupy the foreground of his story, the continual suggestion of the land- scape; the turn of the weather, that will turn with it men's lives and fortunes, dimly fore- shadowed on the horizon; the fatality of dis- tant events, the stream of national tendency, the salient framework of causation. And all
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Marcus Aurelius
this thrown upon the flat board — all this entering, naturally and smoothly, into the texture of continuous intelligent narration.
Familiar Studies of Men and Books, Victor Hugo's Romance.
THIS brings us by a natural transition to a very noble book — the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. The dispassionate gravity, the noble forgetfulness of self, the tenderness of others, that are there expressed and were practised on so great a scale in the life of its writer, make this book a book quite by itself. No one can read it and not be moved. Yet it scarcely or rarely appeals to the feelings — those very mobile, those not very trusty parts of man. Its address lies further back: its lesson comes more deeply home; when you have read, you carry away with you a mem- ory of the man himself; it is as though you had touched a loyal hand, looked into brave eyes, and made a noble friend; there is another bond on you thenceforward, binding you to life and to the love of virtue.
The Influence of Books.
i8o
WE are accustomed nowadays to a great deal of puling over the circumstances in which we are placed. The great refinement of many poetical gentlemen has here rendered them practically unfit for the jostling and ugliness of life, and they record their unfit- ness at considerable length. The bold and awful poetry of Job's complaint produces too many flimsy imitators; for there is always something consolatory in grandeur; but the symphony transposed for the piano becomes hysterically sad. The literature of woe, as Whitman calls it, this Maladie de Rene, as we like to call it in Europe, is in many ways a most humiliating and sickly phenomenon. Young gentlemen with three or four hundred a year of private means look down from a pinnacle of doleful experience on all the grown and hearty men who have dared to say a good word for life since the beginning of the world. There is no prophet but the melan- choly Jacques, and the blue devils dance on all our literary wives.
It would be a poor service to spread culture, if this be its result, among the comparatively
Igno- rance is Better
than that Knowl- edge which brings Sadness.
innocent and cheerful ranks of men. When our Httle poets have to be sent to look at the ploughmen and learn wisdom, we must be careful how we tamper with our ploughmen. Where a man in not the best of circumstances preserves composure of mind, and relishes ale and tobacco, and his wife and children, in the intervals of dull and unremunerative labour; where a man in this predicament can afford a lesson by the way to what are called his intellectual superiors, there is plainly something to be lost, as well as something to be gained, by teaching him to think differ- ently. It is better to leave him as he is than to teach him whining. It is better that he should go without the cheerful lights of culture, if cheerless doubt and paralysing sentimental- ism are to be the consequence. Let us, by all means, fight against the hide-bound stolidity of sensation and sluggishness of mind which blurs and decolourises for poor natures the wonderful pageant of consciousness; let us teach people, as much as we can, to enjoy, and they will learn for themselves to sym- pathise; but let us see to it, above all, that t
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we give these lessons in a brave, vivacious note, and build the man up in courage, w^hile we demolish its substitute, indifference. Fa- miliar Studies of Men and Books. Walt Whit- man.
AND the young writer will not so much be helped by genial pictures of what an art may aspire to at its highest, as by a true idea of what it must be on the lowest terms. The best that we can say to him is this: Let him choose a motive, whether of character or passion; carefully construct his plot so that every incident is an illustration of the motive, and every property employed shall bear to it a near relation of congruity or contrast; avoid a sub-plot, unless, as sometimes in Shakes- peare, the sub-plot be a reversion or comple- ment of the main intrigue; 'suffer not his style to flag below the level of the argument; pitch the key of conversation, not with any thought of how men talk in parlours, but with a single eye to the degree of passion he may be called on to express; and allow neither himself in the narrative, nor any character in the course
i8^
of the dialogue, to utter one sentence that is not part and parcel ot the business of the story or the discussion of the problem involved. Let him not regret it this shortens his books; it will be better so; for to add irrelevant matter is not to lengthen but to bury. Let him not mind if he miss a thousand qualities, so that he keeps unflaggingly in pursuit of the one he has chosen. Let him not care particularly if he miss the tone of conversation, the pungent material detail of the day's manners, the re- production of the atmosphere and the en- vironment. These elements are not essential: a novel may be excellent, and yet have none of them; a passion or a character is so much the better depicted as it rises clearer from material circumstances. In this age of the par- ticular, let him remember the ages of the ab- stract, the great books of the past, the great men that lived before Shakespeare and before Balzac. And as the root of the whole matter, let him bear in mind that his novel is not a transcript of life, to be judged by its exacti- tude; but a simplification of some side or point of life, to stand or fall by its significant^
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simplicity. For although, in great men, work- ing upon great motives, what we observe and admire is often their complexity, yet under- neath appearances the truth remains un- changed : that simplification was their method, and that simplicity is their excellence. Memo- ries and Portraits. A Humhle Remonstrance.
NOW, this is one of the natural appetites with which any lively literature has to count. The desire for knowledge, I had al- most added the desire for meat, is not more deeply seated that this demand for fit and striking incident. The dullest of clowns tells, or tries to tell, himself a story, as the feeblest of children uses invention in his play; and even as the imaginative grown person, join- ing in the game, at once enriches it with many delightful circumstances, the great creative writer shows us the realisation and the apoth- eosis of the day-dreams of common men. His stories may be nourished with the realities of life, but their true mark is to satisfy the name- less longings of the reader, and to obey the /deal laws of the day-dream. The right kind
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of thing should fall out in the right kind of place; the right kind of thing should follow; and not only the characters talk aptly and think naturally, but all the circumstances in a tale answer one to another like notes in music. The threads of a story come from time to time together and make a picture in the web; the characters fall from time to time into some attitude to each other or to nature, which stamps the story home like an illustra- tion. Crusoe recoiling from the footprint, Achilles shouting over against the Trojans, Ulysses bending the great bow. Christian running with his fingers in his ears, these are each culminating moments in the legend, and each has been printed on the mind's eye for ever. Other things we may forget; we may forget the words, although they are beautiful; we may forget the author's comment, al- though perhaps it was ingenious and true; but these epoch-making scenes, which put the last mark of truth upon a story and fill up, at one blow, our capacity for sympathetic pleas- ures, we so adopt into the very bosom of our mind that neither time nor tide can efface o^ _
\-
weaken the impression. This, then, is the plastic part of Hterature: to embody charac- ter, thought, or emotion in some act or atti- tude that shall be remarkably striking to the mind's eye. This is the highest and hardest thing to do in words; the thing which, once accomplished, equally delights the schoolboy and the sage, and makes, in its own right, the quality of epics. Compared with this, all other purposes in literature, except the purely lyrical or the purely philosophic, are bastard in nature, facile of execution, and feeble in result. It is one thing to write about the inn at Burford, or to describe scenery with the word-painters; it is quite another to seize on the heart of the suggestion and make a coun- try famous with a legend. It is one thing to remark and to dissect, with the most cutting logic, the complications of life, and of the human spirit; it is quite another to give them body and blood in the story of Ajax or of Hamlet. The first is literature, but the second is something besides, for it is likewise art. Memories and Portraits. A Gossip on Ro-
mance.
The Quality of Ro- mance
TO come at all at the nature of this quality of romance, we must bear in mind the peculiarity of our attitude to any art. No art produces illusion; in the theatre we never forget that we are in the theatre; and while we read a story, we sit wavering between two minds, now merely clapping our hands at the merit of the performance, now condescending to take an active part in fancy with the char- acters. This last is the triumph of romantic story-telling; when the reader consciously plays at being the hero, the scene is a good scene. Now in character-studies the pleasure that we take is critical; we watch, we approve, we smile at incongruities, we are moved to sudden heats of sympathy with courage, suffering or virtue. But the characters are still themselves, they are not us; the more clearly they are depicted, the more widely do they stand away from us, the more imperi- ously do they thrust us back into our place as a spectator. I cannot identify myself with Rawdon Crawley or with Eugene de Ras- tignac, for I have scarce a hope or fear in common with them. It is not character bus _
incident that woos us out of reserve. Some- thing happens as we desire to have it happen to ourselves: some situation, that v^e have long dallied w^ith in fancy, is realised in the story v^ith enticing and appropriate details. Then we forget the characters; then we push the hero aside; then we plunge into the tale in our own person and bathe in fresh expe- rience; — and then, and then only, do we say we have been reading a romance. It is not only pleasurable things that we imagine in our day-dreams; there are lights in which we are willing to contemplate even the idea of our own death; ways in which it seems as if it would amuse us to be cheated, wounded, or calumniated. It is thus possible to con- struct a story, even of tragic import, in which every incident, detail and trick of circum- stance shall be welcome to the reader's thoughts. Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child; it is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life; and when the game so chimes with his fancy that he can join in it with all his heart, when it pleases him with every turn, when he loves
to recall it and dwells upon its recollections with entire delight, fiction is called romance. Memories and Portraits. A Gossip on Ro- mance.
Books
are
Letters
to the
Author's
Friends
EVERY book is, in an intimate sense, a circular letter to the friends of him who writes it. They alone take his meaning; they find private messages, assurances of love, and expressions of gratitude, dropped for them in every corner. The public is but a generous patron who defrays the postage. Yet though the letter is directed to all, we have an old and kindly custom of addressing it on the outside to one. Of what shall a man be proud, if he is not proud of his friends ?
Travels with a Donkey.
Dumas's
D'Ar-
tagnan
TO cling to what is left of any damaged quality is virtue in the man; but per- haps to sing its praises is scarcely to be called morality in the writer. And it is elsewhere, it is in the character of d'Artagnan, that we must look for that spirit of morality which is one of the chief merits of the book, makes one
190
of the main joys of its perusal, and sets it high above more popular rivals. Athos, with the coming of years, has declined too much into the preacher, and the preacher of a sap- less creed; but d'Artagnan has mellowed in- to a man so witty, rough, kind, and upright, that he takes the heart by storm. There is nothing of the copy-book about his virtues, nothing of the drawing-room in his fine, natural civility; he will sail near the wind; he is no district visitor — no Wesley or Robes- pierre; his conscience is void of all refinement whether for good or evil; but the whole man rings true like a good sovereign. Readers who have approached the Vicomte, not across the country, but by the legitimate, five-volumed avenue of the Mousquetaires and Vingt Ans Apres, will not have forgotten d'Artagnan's ungentlemanly and perfectly improbable trick upon Milady. What a pleasure it is, then, what a reward, how agreeable a lesson, to see the old captain humble himself to the son of the man whom he has personated! Here, and throughout, if I am to choose vir- tues for myself and my friends, let me choose
191
The
Truth in Litera- ture is Essen- tial
the virtues of d'Artagnan. I do not say there is no character as well drawn in Shakespeare; I do say there is none that I love so wholly. There are many spiritual eyes that seem to spy upon our actions — eyes of the dead and the absent, whom we imagine to behold us in our most private hours, and whom we fear and scruple to offend: our witnesses and judges. And among these, even if you should think me childish, I must count my d'Artagn- an — not d'Artagnan of the memoirs whom Thackeray pretended to prefer — a prefer- ence, I take the freedom of saying, in which he stands alone; not the d'Artagnan of flesh and blood, but him of the ink and paper; not Nature's but Dumas's. And this is the par- ticular crown and triumph of the artist — not to be true merely, but to be lovable; not sim- ply to convince, but to enchant. Memories and Portraits. A Novel of Dumas's.
j\/l AN is imperfect; yet, in his literature,
he must express himself and his own
views and preferences; for to do anything
else is to do a far more perilous thing than to
ig2
risk being immoral: it is to be sure of being untrue. To ape a sentiment, even a good one, is to travesty a sentiment; that w^ill not be helpful. To conceal a sentiment, if you are sure you hold it, is to take a liberty with truth. There is probably no point of view possible to a sane man but contains some truth and, in the true connection, might be profitable to the race. I am not afraid of the truth, if any one could tell it to me, but I am afraid of parts of it impertinently uttered. There is a time to dance and a time to mourn; to be harsh as well as to be sentimental; to be ascetic as well as to glorify the appetites; and if a man were to combine all these extremes into his work, each in its place and proportion, that work would be the world's masterpiece of morality as well as of art. Partiality is immorality; for any book is wrong that gives a misleading picture of the world and life. The trouble is that the weakling must be partial; the work of one proving dank and depressing; of an- other, cheap and vulgar; of a third, epilepti- cally sensual ; of a fourth, sourly ascetic. In literature as in conduct, you can never hope
193
The Duties of the Writer as Story- teller
to do exactly right. All you can do is to make as sure as possible; and for that there is but one rule. Nothing should be done in a hurry that can be done slowly. It is no use to write a book and put it by for nine or even ninety years; for in the writing you will have partly convinced yourself; the delay must precede any beginning; and if you meditate any work of art, you should first long roll the subject under the tongue to make sure you like the flavour, before you brew a volume that shall taste of it from end to end: or if you propose to enter on the field of controversy, you should first have thought upon the question under all conditions, in health as well as in sickness, in sorrow as well as in joy. It is this nearness of examination necessary for any true and kind writing, that makes the practice of art a prolonged and noble education for the writer. Profession of Letters.
SO far as the writer merely narrates, he should principally tell of these. He should tell of the kind and wholesome and beautiful elements of our life; he should tell unsparingly 4
194
of the evil and sorrow of the present, to move us w^ith instances; he should tell of wise and good people in the past, to excite us by ex- ample; and of these he should tell soberly and truthfully, not glossing faults, that we may neither grow discouraged with ourselves nor exacting to our neighbours. So the body of contemporary literature, ephemeral and feeble in itself, touches in the minds of men the springs of thought and kindness, and supports them (for those who will go at all are easily supported) on their way to what is true and right. And if, in any degree, it does so now, how much more might it do so if the writers chose! There is not a life in all the records of the past but, properly studied, might lend a hint and a help to some con- temporary. There is not a juncture in to-day's affairs but some useful word may yet be said of it. Even the reporter has an office, and, with clear eyes and honest language, may unveil injustices and point the way to progress. And for a last word: in all narration there is only one way to be clever, and that is to be exact. To be vivid is a secondary quality
195
which must presuppose the first; for vividly to convey a w^rong impression is only to make failure conspicuous.
But a fact may be viewed on many sides: it may be chronicled with rage, tears, laughter, indifference, or admiration, and by each of these the story will be transformed to some- thing else. The newspapers that told of the return of our representatives from Berlin, even if they had not differed as to the facts, would have sufficiently differed by their spirits; so that the one description would have been a second ovation, and the other a pro- longed insult. The subject makes but a trifling part of any piece of literature, and the view of the writer is itself a fact more important because less disputable than the others. Now this spirit in which a subject is regarded, im- portant in all kinds of literary work, becomes all-important in works of fiction, meditation, or rhapsody; for there it not only colours but itself chooses the facts; not only modifies but shapes the work. And thence, over the far larger proportion of the field of literature, the health or disease of the writer's mind or
ig6
momentary humour forms not only the lead- ing feature of his work, but is, at bottom, the only thing he can communicate to others. In all works of art, widely speaking, it is first of all the author's attitude that is narrated, though in the attitude there be implied a whole experience and a theory of life. An author who has begged the question and re- poses in some narrow faith cannot, if he would; express the whole or even many of the sides of this various existence; for, his own life being maim, some of them are not admitted in his theory, and were only dimly and unwillingly recognised in his experience. Hence the smallness, the triteness, and the inhumanity in works of merely sectarian re- ligion; and hence we find equal although un- similar limitation in works inspired by the spirit of the flesh or the despicable taste for high society. So that the first duty of any man who is to write is intellectual. Designedly or not, he has so far set himself up for a leader of the minds of men; and he must see that his own mind is kept supple, charitable, and bright. Everything but prejudice should find
197
a voice through him; he should see the good in all things; where he has even a fear that he does not v^holly understand, there he should be wholly silent; and he should recog- nise from the first that he has only one tool in his workshop, that tool is sympathy.
Profession of Letters.
198
NATURE
/\ FTER a good woman, and a good book,
and tobacco, there is nothing so agreeable
on earth as a river. An Inland Voyage.
I WISH our way had always lain among woods. Trees are the most civil society. An old oak that has been growing where he stands since before the Reformation, taller than many spires, more stately than the greater part of mountains, and yet a living thing, liable to sickness and death, like you and me: is not that in itself a speaking lesson in history ? But acres on acres of such pa- triarchs contiguously rooted, their green tops billowing in the wind, their stalwart young- lings pushing up about their knees; a whole forest, healthy and beautiful, giving colour to the light, giving perfume to the air: what is this but the most imposing field of nature's repertory t Heine wished to lie like Merlin under the oaks of Broceliande. I should not be satisfied with one tree; but if the wood grew together like a banyan grove, I would be buried under the tap-root of the whole; my parts should circulate from oak to oak;
201
and my consciousness should be diffused abroad in all the forest, and give a common heart to that assembly of green spires, so that it also might rejoice in its own loveliness and dignity. I think I feel a thousand squirrels leaping from bough to bough in my vast mausoleum; and the birds and the winds merrily coursing over its uneven, leafy sur- face. An Inland Voyage.
Forest
and
Ocean
WHAT is a forest but a city of nature's own, full of hardy and innocuous living things, where there is nothing dead and noth- ing made with the hands, but the citizens themselves are the houses and public monu- ments ? . . . And surely of all smells in the world, the smell of many trees is the sweetest and most fortifying. The sea has a rude, pis- tolling sort of odour, that takes you in the nostrils like snuff, and carries with it a fine sentiment of open water and tall ships; but the smell of a forest, which comes nearest to this in tonic quality, surpasses it by many degrees in the quality of softness. Again, the smell of the sea has little variety, but the'
'smell of a forest is infinitely changeful; it varies with the hour of the day, not in strength merely, but in character; and the different sorts of trees, as you go from one zone of the wood to another, seem to live among different kinds of atmosphere. Usually the resin of the fir predominates. But some woods are more coquettish in their habits; and the breath of the forest of Mormal, as it came aboard upon us that showery afternoon, was perfumed with nothing less delicate than sweet-brier.
An Inland Voyage.
NIGHT is a dead, monotonous period under a roof; but in the open world it passes lightly, with its stars and dews and perfumes, and the hours are marked by changes in the face of Nature. What seems a kind of temporal death to people choked be- tween walls and curtains is only a light and living slumber to the man who sleeps a-field. All night long he can hear Nature breathing deeply and freely; even as she takes her rest, she turns and smiles; and there is one stirring hour unknown to those who dwell in houses.
203
when a wakeful influence goes abroad over ^ the sleeping hemisphere, and all the out-door world are on their feet. It is then that the cock crows first, not this time to announce the dawn, but like a cheerful watchman speeding the course of night. Cattle awake on the meadows; sheep break their fast on dewy hillsides, and change to a new lair among the ferns; and houseless men, who have lain down with the fowls, open their dim eyes and behold the beauty of the night. At what inaudible summons, at what gentle touch of Nature, are all these sleepers thus recalled in the same hour to life ? Do the stars rain down an influence, or do we share some thrill of mother earth below our resting bodies \ Even shepherds and old country- folk, who are the deepest read in these arcana, have not a guess as to the means or purposes of this nightly resurrection. Towards two in the morning they declare the thing takes place; and neither* know nor inquire further. And at least it is a pleasant incident. We are disturbed in our slumber only, like the luxu- rious Montaigne, **that we may the better JJ
204
,and more sensibly relish it." We have a mo- ment to look upon the stars, and there is a special pleasure for some minds in the reflec- tion that we share the impulse with all out- door creatures in our neighborhood, that we have escaped out of the Bastile of civiliza- tion, and are become, for the time being, a mere kindly animal and a sheep of Nature's flock. ... A faint wind, more like a moving coolness than a stream of air, passed down the glade from time to time; so that even in my great chamber the air was being renewed all night long. I thought with horror of the Inn at Chasserades and the congregated nightcaps; with horror of the nocturnal prow- esses of clerks and students, of hot theatres and pass-keys and close rooms. I have not often enjoyed a more serene possession of myself, nor felt more independent of material aids. The outer world, from which we cower into our houses, seemed after all a gentle, habitable place; and night after night a man's bed, it seemed, was laid and waiting for him, in the fields, where God keeps an open house. I thou2;ht I had rediscovered one of those
205
The Ge- nius of Place and Time
truths which are revealed to savages and hid, from pohtical economists: at the least, I had discovered a new pleasure for myself. And yet even while I was exulting in my solitude I became aware of a strange lack. I wished a companion to lie near me in the starlight, silent and not moving, but ever within touch. For there is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect. And to live out of doors with the woman a man loves is of all lives the most complete and free.
Travels with a Donkey.
/^NE thing in life calls for another; there ^^ is a fitness in events and places. The sight of a pleasant arbour puts it in our mind to sit there. One place suggests work, another idleness, a third early rising and long ram- bles in the dew. The effect of night, of any flowing water, of lighted cities, of the peep of day, of ships, of the open ocean, calls up in the mind an army of anonymous desires and pleasures. Something, we feel, should hap- pen; we know not Vv^hat, yet we proceed in
206
'quest of it. And many of the happiest hours in life fleet by us in this vain attendance on the genius of the place and moment. It is thus that tracts of young fir, and low rocks that reach into deep soundings, particularly tor- ture and delight me. Something must have happened in such places, and perhaps ages back, to members of my race; and when I was a child I tried in vain to invent appropriate games for them, as I still try, just as vainly, to fit them with the proper story. Some places speak distinctly. Certain dank gardens cry aloud for a murder; certain old houses de- mand to be haunted; certain coasts are set apart for shipwreck. Other spots again seem to abide their destiny, suggestive and im- penetrable, "miching mallecho." The inn at Burford Bridge, with its arbours and green garden and silent, eddying river — though it is known already as the place where Keats wrote some of his Endymion and Nelson parted from his Emma — still seems to wait the coming of the appropriate legend. With- in these ivied walls, behind these old green shutters, some further business smoulders.
207
waitino- for its hour. The old Hawes Inn at the Queen's Ferry makes a similar call upon my fancy. There it stands, apart from the town, beside the pier, in a climate of its own, half inland, half marine — in front, the ferry bubbling with the tide and the guardship swinging to her anchor; behind, the old gar- den with the trees. Americans seek it already for the sake of Lovel and Oldbuck, who dined there at the beginning of the Antiquary. But you need not tell me — that is not all, there is some story, unrecorded or not yet complete, which must express the meaning of that inn more fully. So it is with names and faces; so it is with incidents that are idle and inconclusive in themselves, and yet seem like the beginning of some quaint romance, which the all-careless author leaves untold. How many of these romances have we not seen determine at their birth; how many people have met us with a look of meaning in their eye, and sunk at once into trivial acquain- tances; to how many places have we not drawn near, with express intimations — *'here my destiny awaits me" — and we have
208
but dined there and passed on! I have lived both at the Hawes and Burford in a perpetual flutter, on the heels, as it seemed, of some adventure that should justify the place; but though the feeling had me to bed at night and called me again at morning in one un- broken round of pleasure and suspense, noth- ino; befell me in either worth remark. The man or the hour had not yet come; but some day, I think, a boat shall put off from the Queen's Ferry, fraught with a dear cargo, and some frosty night a horseman, on a tragic errand, rattle with his whip upon the green shutters of the inn at Burford. Memories and Portraits. A Gossip on Romance.
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 qual- ity of the air, that emanation from the old trees, that so wonderfully changes and re- news a weary spirit. Disappointed men, sick Francis Firsts and vanquished Grand Mon- archs, time out of mind have come here for consolation. Hither perplexed folks have re-
2og
tired 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 Beranger'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 pene- trates 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 people 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 sacri- fice becomes like a mad fancy out of a last night's dream. Forest Notes.
EDUCATION
T ITERATURE, like any other art, is -*-^ singularly interesting to the artist; and, in a degree peculiar to itself among the arts, it is useful to mankind. These are the suffi- cient justifications for any young man or woman who adopts it as the business of his life. I shall not say much about the wages. A writer can live by his writing. If not so luxu- riously as by other trades, then less luxuriously. The nature of the work he does all day will more affect his happiness than the quality of his dinner at night. Whatever be your call- ing, and however much it brings you in the year, you could still, you know, get more by cheating. We all suffer ourselves to be too much concerned about a little poverty; but such considerations should not move us in the choice of that which is to be the business and justification of so great a portion of our lives ; and like the missionary, the patriot, or the philosopher, we should all choose that poor and brave career in which we can do the most and best for mankind. Now nature, faithfully followed, proves herself a careful mother. A lad, for some liking to the jingle
215
of words, betakes himself to letters for his life; by-and-by, when he learns more gravity, he finds that he has chosen better than he knew; that if he earns little, he is earning it amply; that if he receives a small wage, he is in a position to do considerable services; that it is in his power, in some small measure, to protect the oppressed and to defend the truth. So kindly is the world arranged, such great profit may arise from a small degree of human reliance on oneself, and such, in particular, is the happy star of this trade of writing, that it should combine pleasure and profit to both parties, and be at once agreeable, like fiddling, and useful, like good preaching. This is to speak of literature at its highest; and with the four great elders who are still spared to our respect and admiration, with Carlyle, Ruskin, Browning and Tennyson before us, it would be cowardly to consider it at first in any lesser aspect. But while we can- not follow these athletes, while we may none of us, perhaps, be very vigorous, very original, or very wise, I still contend that, in the hum- blest sort of literary work, we have it in our
2l5
power either to do great harm or great good. We may seek merely to please; we may seek, having no higher gift, merely to gratify the idle nine days' curiosity of our contempo- raries; or we may essay, however feebly, to instruct. In each of these we shall have to deal with that remarkable art of words which, because it is the dialect of life, comes home so easily and powerfully to the minds of men; and since that is so, w^e contribute, in each of these branches, to build up the sum of sen- timents and appreciations which goes by the name of Public Opinion or Public Feeling. The total of a nation's reading, in these days of daily papers, greatly modifies the total of the nation's speech; and the speech and read- ing, taken together, form the efficient educa- tional medium of youth. A good man or woman may keep a youth some little while in clearer air; but the contemporary atmosphere is all-powerful in the end on the average of mediocre characters. The copious Corinthian baseness of the American reporter or the Parisian chroniqueur, both so lightly readable, must exercise an incalculable influence for
217
ill; they touch upon all subjects, and on all with the same ungenerous hand; they begin the consideration of all, in young and unpre- pared minds, in an unworthy spirit; on all, they supply some pungency for dull people to quote. The mere body of this ugly matter overwhelms the rare utterances of good men; the sneering, selfish, and the cowardly are scattered in broad sheets on every table, while the antidote, in small volumes, lies un- read upon the shelf. I have spoken of the American and the French, not because they are so much baser, but so much more readable than the English; their evil is done more ef- fectively, in America for the masses, in French for the few that care to read; but with us as with them, the duties of literature are daily neglected, truth daily perverted and sup- pressed, and grave subjects daily degraded in the treatment. The journalist is not reck- oned as an important officer; yet judge of the good he might do, the harm he does; judge of it by one instance only: that when we find two journals on the reverse sides of politics each, on the same day, openly garbling a _
piece of news for the interest of its own party, we smile at the discovery (no discovery now!) as over a good joke and pardonable stratagem. Lying so open is scarce lying, it is true; but one of the things that we profess to teach our young is a respect for truth; and I cannot think this piece of education will be crowned with any great success, as long as some of us practice, and the rest openly approve of public falsehood. Profession of Letters.
NOW this, of Mr. Wiseman's, is the com- mon opinion. A fact is not called a fact, but a piece of gossip, if it does not fall into one of your scholastic categories. An inquiry must be in some acknowledged direction, with a name to go by; or else you are not inquiring at all, only lounging; and the workhouse is too good for you. It is supposed that all knowl- edge is at the bottom of a well, or the far end of a telescope. Sainte-Beuve, as he grew older, came to regard all experience as a single great book, in which to study for a few years ere we go hence; and it seemied all one to him whether you should read in Chapter XX., f "_
2ig
which is the differential calculus, or in Chap- ter XXXIX., which is hearing the band play in the gardens. As a matter of fact, an intel- ligent person, looking out of his eyes and hearkening in his ears, wath a smile on his face all the time, will get more true education than many another in a life of heroic vigils. There is certainly some chill and arid knowl- edge to be found upon the summits of formal and laborious science; but it is all round about you, and for the trouble of looking, that you will acquire the warm and palpitating facts of life. While others are filling their memory with a lumber of words, one-half of which they will forget before the week be out, your truant may learn some really useful art: to play the fiddle, to know a good cigar, or to speak with ease and opportunity to all va- rieties of men. Many who have ** plied their book diligently," and know all about some one branch or another of accepted lore, come out of the study with an ancient and owl-like demeanour, and prove dry, stockish, and dyspeptic in all the better and brighter parts of life. Many make a large fortune, who re-
main underbred and pathetically stupid to the last. And meantime there goes the idler, who began life along with them — by your leave, a different picture. He has had time to take care of his health and his spirits; he has been a great deal in the open air, which is the most salutary of all things for both body and mind; and if he has never read the great Book in very recondite places, he has dipped into it and skimmed it over to excellent purpose. Might not the student afford some Hebrew roots, and the business man some of his half- crowns, for a share of the idler's knowledge of life, and Art of Living .? Nay, and the idler has another and more important quality than these. I mean his wisdom. He who has much looked on at the childish satisfaction of other people in their hobbies, will regard his own with only a very ironical indulgence. He will not be heard among the dogmatists. He will have a great and cool allowance for all sorts of people and opinions. If he finds no out-of- the-way truths, he will identify himself with no very burning falsehood. His way takes him along a by-road, not much frequented, but
very even and pleasant, which is called Com- monplace Lane, and leads to the Belvedere of Commonsense. Thence he shall command an agreeable,, if no very noble prospect; and while others behold the East and the West, the Devil and the Sunrise, he will be con- tentedly aware of a sort of morning hour upon all sublunary things, with an army of shad- ows running speedily and in many different directions into the great daylight of Eternity. The shadows and the generations, the shrill doctors and the plangent wars, go by into ultimate silence and emptiness; but under- neath all this, a man may see, out of the Bel- vedere windows, much green and peaceful landscape; many firelit parlours; good people laughing, drinking, and making love as they did before the Flood or the French Revolu- tion; and the old shepherd telling his tale under the hawthorn. Virginibus Puerisque. An Apology for Idlers.
Books not
Every- thing
BOOKS are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life. It seems a pity to sit, like the Lady
of Shalott, peering into a mirror, with your back turned on all the bustle and glamour of reality. And if a man reads very hard, as the old anecdote reminds us, he will have little time for thought. Virginibus Puerisque. An Apology for Idlers.
T DLENESS, so called, which does not con- ^ sist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognised in the dogmatic formu- laries of the ruling class, has as good a right to state its position as industry itself. It is admitted that the presence of people who re- fuse to enter in the great handicap race for sixpenny pieces is at once an insult and a dis- enchantment for those who do. A fine fellow (as we see so many) takes his determination, votes for the sixpences, and in the emphatic Americanism," goes for " them. And while such an one is ploughing distressfully up the road, it is not hard to understand his resentment, when he perceives cool persons in the meadow by the wayside, lying with a handkerchief over their ears and a glass at their elbow. Virginibus Puerisque. An Apology for Idlers.
223
Educa- tion in School and in the Street
Playing Truant
IF you look back on your own education, I am sure it will not be the full, vivid, in- structive hours of truantry that you regret; you would rather cancel some lack-lustre periods between sleep and waking in the class. For my own part I have attended a good many lectures in my time. I still remember that the spinning of a top is a case of Kinetic Stability. I still remember that Emphyteusis is not a disease, nor Stillicide a crime. But though I willingly would not part with such scraps of science, I do not set the same store by them as by certain other odds and ends that I cam.e by in the open streets while I was playing truant. This is not the moment to dilate on that mighty place of education, which was the favourite school of Dickens and of Balzac, and turns out yearly many inglorious masters in the Science of the Aspects of Life. Suffice it to say this: if a lad does not learn in the streets, it is because he has no faculty of learning. Nor is the truant always in the streets, for if he prefers, he may go out by the gardened suburbs into the country. He may pitch on some tuft of lilacs over a burn, and
smoke innumerable pipes to the tune of the water on the stones. A bird will sing in the thicket. And there he may fall into a vein of kindly thought, and see things in a new per- spective. Why, if this be not education, what is ? We may conceivie Mr. Worldly Wiseman accosting such an one, and the conversation that should thereupon ensue: *'How now, young fellow, what dost thou here ?"
*' Truly, sir, I take mine ease." " Is not this the hour of the class .? and shouldst thou not be plying thy Book with diligence, to the end thou mayest obtain knowledge V "Nay, but thus also I follow after Learning, by your leave."
** Learning, quotha! After what fashion, I pray thee .r* Is it mathematics?" **No, to be sure." ''Is it metaphysics V "Nor that." "Is it some language ?" "Nay, it is no language." "Is it a trade .?" "Nor a trade neither."
225
The Gift of Reading
"Why, then, what is't?" "Indeed, sir, as a time may come soon for me to go upon Pilgrimage, I am desirous to note what is commonly done by persons in my case, and where are the ugliest Sloughs and Thickets on the Road; as also, what manner of Staff is of the best service. Moreover, I lie here, by this water, to learn by root-of-heart a lesson which my master teaches me to call Peace, or Contentment." Hereupon Mr. Worldly Wiseman was much commoved with passion, and shaking his cane with a very threatful countenance broke forth upon this wise: "Learning, quotha!" said he; "I w^ould have all such rogues scourged by the Hangman! " And so he would go his way, ruffling out his cravat with a crackle of starch, like a turkey when it spreads its feathers. Virginibus Puerisque. An Apology for Idlers.
THE gift of reading, as I have called it, is not very common, nor very generally understood. It consists, first of all, in a vast intellectual endowment — a free erace, I
226
find I must call it — by which a man rises to understand that he is not punctually right, nor those from whom he differs absolutely wrong. He may hold dogmas; he may hold them passionately; and he may know that others hold them but coldly, or hold them differently, or hold them not at all. Well, if he has the gift of reading, these others will be full of feet for him. They will see the other side of propositions and the other side of vir- tues. He need not change his dogma for that but he may change his reading of that dogma, and he must supplement and correct his de- ductions from it. A human truth, which is always very much a lie, hides as much of life as it displays. It is men who hold another truth, or, as it seems to us, perhaps a danger- ous He, who can extend our restricted field of knowledge, and rouse our drowsy consciences. Something that seems quite new, or that seems insolently false or very dangerous, is the test of a reader. If he tries to see what it means, what truth excuses it, he has the gift, and let him read. If he is merely hurt, or offended, or exclaims upon his author's folly, he had better
227
Educa- tion of Boys and Girls
Often Nothing but a System of
Catch- words and Formu-
take to the daily papers; he will never be a reader. The Infuence of Books.
BUT it is the object of a liberal education not only to obscure the knowledge of one sex by another, but to magnify the natural differences between the two. Man is a crea- ture who lives not upon bread alone, but principally by catchwords; and the little rift between the sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys. To the first there is shown a very small field of experience, and taught a very trenchant principle for judgment and action; to the other, the world of life is more largely displayed, and their rule of conduct is proportionally widened. They are taught to follow different virtues, to hate different vices, to place their ideal, even for each other, in different achievements. What should be the result of such a course ? When a horse has run away, and the two flustered people in the gig have each pos- sessed themselves of a rein, we know the end of that conveyance will be in the ditch. So,
when I see a raw youth and a green girl, fluted and fiddled in a dancing measure into that most serious contract, and setting out upon life's journey with ideas so monstrously divergent, I am not surprised that some make shipwreck, but that any come to port. What the boy does almost proudly, as a manly peccadillo, the girl will shudder at as a debas- ing vice; what is to her the mere common- sense of tactics, he will spit out of his mouth as shameful. Through such a sea of contrarie- ties must this green couple steer their way; and contrive to love each other; and to re- spect, forsooth; and be ready, when the time arrives, to educate the little men and women who shall succeed to their places and per- plexities. Virginibus Puerisque. II.
PITIFUL is the case of the blind, who can- not read the face; pitiful that of the deaf, who cannot follow the changes of the voice. And there are others also to be pitied; for there are some of an inert, uneloquent nature, who have been denied all the symbols of communication, who have neither a lively
229
play of facial expression, nor speaking ges- tures, nor a responsive voice, nor yet the gift of frank, explanatory speech; people truly made of clay, people tied for life into a bag which no one can undo. They are poorer than the gipsy, for their heart can speak no lan- guage under heaven. Such people vs^e must learn slowly by the tenor of their acts, or through yea and nay communications; or we take them on trust on the strength of a gen- eral air, and now and again, when we see the spirit breaking through in a flash, correct or change our estimate. But these will be uphill intimacies, without charm or freedom, to the end; and freedom is the chief ingredient in confidence. Some minds, romantically dull, despise physical endowments. That is a doc- trine for a misanthrope; to those who like their fellow-creatures it must always be mean- ingless; and, for my part, I can see few things more desirable, after the possession of such radical qualities as honour and humour and pathos, than to have a lively and not a stolid countenance; to have looks to correspond with every feeling; to be elegant and delight-
230
ful in person, so that we shall please even In the intervals of active pleasing, and may never discredit speech v^ith uncouth manners or become unconsciously our ov^n burlesques. But of all unfortunates, there is one creature (for I v^ill not call him man) conspicuous in misfortune. This is he v^ho has forfeited his birthright of expression, vv^ho has cultivated artful intonations, who has taught his face tricks, like a pet monkey, and on every side perverted or cut off his means of communica- tion with his fellowmen. The body is a house of many windows; there we all sit, shov/ing ourselves and crying on the passers-by to come and love us. But this fellow has filled his windows with opaque glass, elegantly col- oured. His house may be admired for its design, the crowd may pause before the stained win- dows, but meanwhile the door proprietor must lie languishing within, uncomforted, un- changeably alone. Virginibus Puerisque. IV.
L'ART de bien dire is but a drawing-room accomplishment unless it be pressed into the service of the truth. The difficulty of lit-
231
^
erature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish. This is commonly understood in the case of books or set ora- tions; even in making your will, or writing an explicit letter, some difficulty is admitted by the world. But one thing you can never make Philistine natures understand; one thing, which yet lies on the surface, remains as unseizable to their wits as a high flight of metaphysics — namely, that the business of life is mainly carried on by means of this difficult art of literature, and according to a man's proficiency in that art shall be the free- dom and the fulness of his intercourse with other men. Anybody, it is supposed, can say what he means; and, in spite of their notori- ous experience to the contrary, people so con- tinue to suppose. Now, I simply open the last book I have been reading — Mr. Leland's captivating English Gipsies. "It is said," I find on page 7, "that those who can converse with Irish peasants in their own native tongue form far higher opinions of their apprecia- tion of the beautiful, and of the elements of
232
humour and pathos in their hearts, than do those who know their thoughts only through the medium of English. I know from my own observations that this is quite the case with the Indians of North America, and it is un- questionably so with the gipsy." In short, where a man has not a full possession of the language, the most important, because the most amiable, qualities of his nature have to lie buried and fallow; for the pleasure of comradeship, and the intellectual part of love, rest upon these very ''elements of humour and pathos." Here is a man opulent in both, and for lack of a medium he can put none of it out to interest in the market of affection! But what is thus made plain to our apprehen- sions in the case of a foreign language is par- tially true even with the tongue we learned in childhood. Indeed, we all speak different dialects; one shall be copious and exact, an- other loose and meagre; but the speech of the ideal talker shall correspond and fit upon the truth of fact — not clumsily, obscuring lineaments, like a mantle, but cleanly ad- » hering, like an athlete's skin. And what is the
233
The Art of the Orator
result ? That the one can open himself more clearly to his friends, and can enjoy more of what makes life truly valuable — intimacy with those he loves. An orator makes a false step; he employs some trivial, some absurd, some vulgar phrase; in the turn of a sentence he insults, by a side wind, those whom he is labouring to charm; in speaking to one sen- timent he unconsciously ruffles another in parenthesis; and you are not surprised, for you know his task to be delicate and filled with perils. "O frivolous mind of man, light ignorance!" As if yourself, when you seek to explain some misunderstanding or excuse some apparent fault, speaking swiftly and addressing a mind still recently incensed, were not harnessing for a more perilous ad- venture; as if yourself required less tact and eloquence; as if an angry friend or a suspi- cious lover w^ere not more easy to offend than a meeting of indifferent politicians! Nay, and the orator treads in a beaten round; the mat- ters he discusses have been discussed a thou- sand times before; language is ready-shaped to his purpose; he speaks out of a dry and cue
~j.
234
vocabulary. But you — may it not be that your defence reposes on some subtlety of feeling, not so much as touched upon in Shakespeare, to express which, like a pioneer, you must venture forth in zones of thought still unsurveyed, and become yourself a liter- ary innovator ? For even in love there are unlovely humours; ambiguous acts, unpar- donable words, may yet have sprung from a kind sentiment. If the injured one could read your heart, you may be sure that he would understand and pardon; but, alas! the heart cannot be shown — it has to be demonstrated in words. Do you think it is a hard thing to write poetry ? Why, that is to write poetry, and of a high, if not the highest, order.
Virginibus Puerisque. IV.
IT is a strong thing to say what one is, and Logic not be ashamed of it; even although it be in doubtful taste to repeat the statement too often in one evening. I should not admire it in a duke, of course; but as times go, the trait is honourable in a workman. On the other hand, it is not at all a strong thing to put one's re-
235
liance upon logic; and our own logic particu-*^ larly, for it is generally wrong. We never know where we are to end, if once we begin following words or doctors. There is an up- right stock in a man's own heart, that is trustier than any syllogism; and the eyes, and the sympathies and appetites, know a thing or two that have never yet been stated in con- troversy. Reasons are as plentiful as black- berries; and like fisticuffs, they serve impar- tially with all sides. Doctrines do not stand or fall by their proofs, and are only logical in so far as they are cleverly put. An able con- troversialist no more than an able general demonstrates the justice of his cause. But France is all gone wandering after one or two big words; it will take some time before they can be satisfied that they are no more than words, however big; and when once that is done, they will perhaps find logic less divert- ing. An Inland Voyage.
2S5
MEN AND WOMEN
I
MY acquaintance with grave-diggers, con- sidering its length, was unremarkable. One, indeed, whom I found plying his spade in the red evening, high above Allen Water and in the shadow of Dunblane Cathedral, told me of his acquaintance with the birds that still attended on his labours; how some would even perch about him, waiting for their prey; and in a true Sexton's Calendar, how the species varied with the season of the year. But this was the very poetry of the profession. The others whom I knew were somewhat dry. A faint flavour of the gardener hung about them, but sophisticated and disbloomed. They had engagements to keep, not alone with the deliberate series of the seasons, but with mankind's clocks and hour-long meas- urement of time. And thus there was no lei- sure for the relishing pinch, or the hour-long gossip, foot on spade. They were men wrapped up in their grim business; they liked well to open long-closed family vaults, blowing in the key and throwing wide the grating; and they carried in their minds a calendar of names and dates. It would be '*in
239
fifty-twa" that such a tomb was last opened for **Miss Jemimy." It was thus they spoke of their patients — familiarly but not without respect, like old family servants. Here is in- deed a servant, whom we forget that we pos- sess; who does not wait at the bright table, or run at the bell's summons, but patiently smokes his pipe beside the mortuary fire, and in his faithful memory notches the burials of our race. To suspect Shakespeare in his ma- turity of a superficial touch savours of para- dox; yet he was surely in error when he at- tributed insensibility to the digger of the grave. But perhaps it is on Hamlet that the charge should lie; or perhaps the English sexton differs from the Scotch. The "goodman delver," reckoning up his years of office, might have at least suggested other thoughts. It is a pride common among sextons. A cab- inet-maker does not count his cabinets, nor even an author his volumes, save when they stare at him from the shelves; but the grave- digger numbers his graves. He would indeed be something different from human if his solitary open-air and tragic labours left not a
240
broad mark upon his mind. There, in his tranquil aisle, apart from city clamour, among the cats and robins and the ancient effigies and legends of the tomb, he awaits the continual passage of his contemporaries, falling like minute drops into eternity. As they fall, he counts them; and this enumera- tion, which was at first appalling to his soul, in the process of years and by the kindly in- fluence of habit grows to be his pride and pleasure. There are many common stories telling how he piques himself on crowded cemeteries. But I will rather tell of the old grave-digger of Monkton, to whose unsuffer- ing bedside the minister was summoned. He dwelt in a cottage built into the wall of the churchyard; and through a bull's-eye pane above his bed he could see, as he lay dying, the rank grasses and the upright and recum- bent stones. Dr. Laurie was, I think, a Mod- erate: 'tis certain, at least, that he took a very Roman view of deathbed dispositions; for he told the old man that he had lived beyond man's natural years, that his life had been easy and reputable, that his family had all
241
The Talk of the Aged
grown up and been a credit to his care, and that it now behooved him unregretfuUy to gird his loins and follow the majority. The grave- digger heard him out; then he raised himself upon one elbow, and with the other hand pointed through the window to the scene of his life-long labours. "Doctor," he said, '*I ha'e laid three hunner and fower-score in that kirkyaird; an' it had been His wull," in- dicating Heaven, '*I would ha'e likit weel to ha'e made out the fower hunner." But it was not to be; this tragedian of the fifth act had now another part to play; and the time had come when others were to gird and carry him. Old Mortality. Memories and Portraits.
NOT only is the presence of the aged in itself remedial, but their minds are stored with antidotes, wisdom's simples, plain con- siderations overlooked by youth. They have matter to communicate, be they never so stupid. Their talk is not merely literature, it is great literature; classic in virtue of the speaker's detachment, studded, like a book of travel, with things we should not otherwise
242
have learnt. In virtue, I have said, of the speaker's detachment, — and this is why, of two old men, the one who is not your father speaks to you with the more sensible author- ity; for in the paternal relation the oldest have lively interests and remain still young. Thus I have known two young men great friends; each swore by the other's father; the father of each swore by the other lad; and yet each pair of parent and child were per- petually by the ears. This is typical: it reads like the germ of some kindly comedy. The old appear in conversation in two char- acters: the critically silent and the garrulous anecdotic. The last is perhaps what we look for; it is perhaps the more instructive. An old gentleman, well on in years, sits handsomely and naturally in the bow-window of his age, scanning experience with reverted eye; and chirping and smiling, communicates the ac- cidents and reads the lesson of his long ca- reer. Opinions are strengthened, indeed, but they are also weeded out in the course of years. What remains steadily present to the eye of the retired veteran in his hermitage,
243
The
Aged as Listen- ers
Old Ladies
what still ministers to his content, what still quickens his old honest heart — these are "the real long-lived things" that Whitman tells us to prefer. Where youth agrees with age, not where they differ, wisdom lies; and it is when the young disciple finds his heart to beat in tune with his gray-bearded teacher's that a lesson may be learned.
Memories and Portraits. Talk and Talkers.
THE second class of people are not anec- dotic; they are rather hearers than talk- ers, listening to the young with an amused and critical attention. To have this sort of intercourse to perfection, I think we must go to old ladies. Women are better listeners than men, to begin with: they learn, I fear in an- guish, to bear with the tedious and infantile vanity of the other sex; and we will take more from a woman than even from the oldest man in the way of biting comment. Biting com- ment is the chief part, whether for profit or amusement, in this business. The old lady that I have in my eye is a very caustic speaker, her tongue, after years of practice, in abso-
244
lute command, whether for silence or attack. If she chance to dislike you, you will be tempted to curse the malignity of age. But if you chance to please even slightly, you will be listened to with a particular laughing grace of sympathy, and from time to time chastised, as if in play, with a parasol as heavy as a pole-axe. It requires a singular art, as well as the vantage-ground of age, to deal these stunning corrections among the cox- combs of the young. The pill is disguised in sugar of wit; it is administered as a compli- ment — if you had not pleased, you would not have been censured; it is a personal affair — a hyphen, a trait d'union, between you and your censor; age's philandering, for her pleasure and your good. Incontestably the young man feels very much of a fool; but he must be a perfect Malvolio, sick with self- love, if he cannot take an open buffet and still smile. The correction of silence is what kills; when you know you have transgressed, and your friend says nothing and avoids your eye. If a man were made of gutta-percha, his heart would quail at such a moment. But _
Women as Talk- ers and Listen- ers
when the word is out, the worst is over; and a fellow with any good-humour at all may pass through a perfect hail of witty criticism, every bare place on his soul hit to the quick with a shrewd missile, and reappear, as if after a dive, tingling with a fine moral reaction, and ready, with a shrinking readiness, one-third loath, for a repetition of the discipline.
Memories and Portraits. Talk and Talkers.
THERE are few women, not well sunned and ripened, and perhaps toughened, who can thus stand apart from a man and say the true thing with a kind of genial cruelty. Still there are some — and I doubt if there be any man who can return the compliment. The class of man represented by Vernon Whitford in "The Egoist" says, indeed, the true thing, but he says it stockishly, Vernon is a noble fellow, and makes, by the way, a noble and instructive contrast to Daniel Deronda; his conduct is the conduct of a man of honour; but we agree with him, against our consciences, when he remorsefully con- siders "its astonishing dryness." He is the
246
best of men, but the best of women manage to combine all that and something more. Their very faults assist them; they are helped even by the falseness of their position in life. They can retire into the fortified camp of the proprieties. They can touch a subject and suppress it. The most adroit employ a some- what elaborate reserve as a means to be frank, much as they wear gloves when they shake hands. But a man has the full responsibility of his freedom, cannot evade a question, can scarce be silent without rudeness, must an- swer for his words upon the moment, and is not seldom left face to face with a damning choice, between the more or less dishonour- able wriggling of Deronda and the down- right woodenness of Vernon Whitford. But the superiority of women is perpetually menaced; they do not sit throned on infirm- ities like the old; they are suitors as well as sovereigns; their vanity is engaged, their af- fections are too apt to follow; and hence much of the talk between the sexes degenerates into something unworthy of the name. The desire to please, to shine with a certain softness of
247
lustre and to draw a fascinating picture of oneself, banishes from conversation all that is sterling and most of what is humorous. As soon as a strong current of mutual ad- miration begins to flow, the human interest triumphs entirely over the intellectual, and the commerce of words, consciously or not, becomes secondary to the commercing of eyes. But even where this ridiculous danger is avoided, and a man and woman converse equally and honestly, something in their nature or their education falsifies the strain. An instinct prompts them to agree; and where that is impossible, to agree to differ. Should they neglect the warning, at the first suspicion of an argument, they find them- selves in different hemispheres. About any point of business or conduct, any actual af- fair demanding settlement, a woman will speak and listen, hear and answer arguments, not only with natural wisdom, but with can- dour and logical honesty. But if the subject of debate be something in the air, an abstrac- tion^ an excuse for talk, a logical Aunt Sally, then may the male debater instantly abandon
248
hope; he may employ reason, adduce facts, be supple, be smiling, be angry, all shall avail him nothing; what the woman said first, that (unless she has forgotten it) she will repeat at the end. Hence, at the very junctures when a talk between men grows brighter and quicker and begins to promise to bear fruit, talk between the sexes is menaced with disso- lution. The point of difference, the point of interest, is evaded by the brilliant woman, under a shower of irrelevant conversational rockets; it is bridged by the discreet woman with a rustle of silk, as she passes smoothly forward to the nearest point of safety. And this sort of prestidigitation, juggling the dan- gerous topic out of sight until it can be rein- troduced with safety in an altered shape, is a piece of tactics among the true drawing-room queens. Memories and Portraits. Talk and Talkers.
NOTHING could be more characteristic of the two countries. Politics are the re- ligion of France; as Nanty Ewart would have said, "A d d bad religion"; while we, at
249
Wom- an's Value as a
Teacher appears most in Married Life
home, keep most of our bitterness for little differences about a hymn-book, or a Hebrew word which, perhaps, neither of the parties can translate. And perhaps the misconcep- tion is typical of many others that may never be cleared up; not only between people of different race, but between those of different sex. An Inland Voyage.
THE drawing-room is, indeed, an artificial place; it is so by our choice and for our sins. The subjection of women; the ideal im- posed upon them from the cradle, and worn, like a hair-shirt, with so much constancy; their motherly, superior tenderness to man's vanity and self-importance; their managing arts — the arts of a civilized slave among good- natured barbarians — are all painful ingre- dients and all help to falsify relations. It is not till we get clear of that amusing artificial scene that genuine relations are founded, or ideas honestly compared. In the garden, on the road, or the hillside, or tete-a-tete and apart from interruptions, occasions arise when we may learn much from any single woman;
250
and nowhere more often than in married life. Marriage is one long conversation, checquered by disputes. The disputes are valueless: they but ingrain the difference; the heroic heart of woman prompting her at once to nail her colours to the mast. But in the in- tervals, almost unconsciously and with no desire to shine, the whole material of life is turned over and over, ideas are struck out and shared, the two persons more and more adapt their notions one to suit the other, and in process of time, without sound of trumpet, they conduct each other into new worlds of thought.
Memories and Portraits. Talk and Talkers.
NOW, what I like so much in France is the clear, unflinching recognition by everybody of his own luck. They all know on which side their bread is buttered, and take a pleasure in showing it to others, which is surely the better part of religion. And they scorn to make a poor mouth over their pov- erty, which I take to be the better part of manliness. I have heard a woman in quite a
251
better position at home, with a good bit of money in hand, refer to her own child with a horrid whine as "a poor man's child." I would not say such a thing to the Duke of Westminster. And the French are full of this spirit of independence. Perhaps it is the re- sult of republican institutions, as they call them. Much more likely it is because there are so few people really poor, that the whiners are not enough to keep each other in coun-
tenance.
An Inland Foya^
The
Aged as Teachers
THE best teachers are the aged. To the old our mouths are always partly closed; we must swallow our obvious retorts and listen. They sit above our heads, on life's raised dais, and appeal at once to our respect and pity. A flavour of the old school, a touch of something different in their manner — which is freer and rounder, if they come of what is called a good family, and often more timid and precise if they are of the middle class — serves, in these days, to accentuate the difference of age and add a distinction to gray hairs. But their superiority is founded
252
more deeply than by outward marks or ges- tures. They are before us in the march of man; they have more or less solved the irking prob- lem; they have battled through the equinox of life; in good and evil they have held their course; and now^, w^ithout open shame, they near the crown and harbour. It may be we have been struck with one of fortune's darts; we can scarce be civil, so cruelly is our spirit tossed. Yet long before we were so much as thought upon, the like calamity befell the old man or woman that now, with pleasant hu- mour, rallies us upon our inattention, sitting composed in the holy evening of man's life, in the clear shining after rain. We grow ashamed of our distresses, new and hot and coarse, like villainous roadside brandy; we see life in aerial perspective, under the heav- ens of faith; and out of the worst, in the mere presence of contented elders, look forward and take patience. Fear shrinks before them "like a thing reproved," not the flitting and ineffectual fear of death, but the instant, dwelling terror of the responsibilities and re- venges of hfe. Their speech, indeed, is timid;
they report lions in the path; they counsel a meticulous footing; but their serene, marred faces are more eloquent and tell another story. Where they have gone, we will go also, not very greatly fearing; what they have en- dured unbroken, we also, God helping, will make a shift to bear.
Memories and Portraits. Talk and Talkers.
English man's Pride and Ig- norance
IN spite of these promptings to reflection, ignorance of his neighbours is the character of the typical John Bull. His is a domineering nature, steady in fight, imperious to command, but neither curious nor quick about the life of others. In French colonies and still more in the Dutch, I have read that there is an immediate and lively contact between the dominant and the dominated race, that a certain sympathy is begotten, or at the least a transfusion of prejudices, making life easier for both. But the Englishman sits apart, bursting with pride and ignorance. He figures among his vassals in the hour of peace with the same disdainful air that led him on to victory. A passing enthusiasm for some for-
254
eign art or fashion may deceive the world, it cannot impose upon his intimates. He may be amused by a foreigner as by a monkey, but he will never condescend to study him with any patience. Miss Bird, an authoress with whom I profess myself in love, declares all the viands of Japan to be uneatable — a staggering pretension. So, when the Prince of Wales's marriage was celebrated at Men- tone by a dinner to the Mentonese, it was proposed to give them solid English fare — roast beef and plum pudding, and no tom- foolery. Here we have either pole of the Britannic folly. We will not eat the food of any foreigner; nor, when we have the chance, will we suffer him to eat of it himself. The same spirit inspired Miss Bird's American missionaries, who had come thousands of miles to change the faith of Japan, and openly pro- fessed their ignorance of the religions they were trying to supplant. . . . The egoism of the Englishman is self-contained. He does not seek to proselytise. He takes no interest in Scotland or the Scotch, and, what is the un- kindest cut of all, he does not care to justify
255
his indifFerence. Give him the wages of going on and being an Englishman, that is all he asks; and in the meantime, while you con- tinue to associate, he would rather not be re- minded of your baser origin. Compared with the grand, tree-like self-sufficiency of his de- meanour, the vanity and curiosity of the Scot seem uneasy, vulgar and immodest. That you should continually try to establish human and serious relations, that you should actually feel an interest in John Bull, and desire and invite a return of interest, may argue some- thing more awake and lively in your mind, but it still puts you in the attitude of a suitor and a poor relation. Thus even the lowest class of the educated English towers over a Scotchman by the head and shoulders. Memories and Portraits. The Foreigner at Home.
256
. Index
Actor, the, as Artist, 163, 164 Adam, the Old, 136, 137 Advice to the Young Writer, 183-185 Age, Old, Invalidism is Premature, 69-72 Aged, the, as Listeners, 244-246 the Talk of, 242-244 as Teachers, 252-254 Antoninus, Marcus Aurelius, 180 Art, Choice of Words in Writing, 167-169
the Duties of the Writer as Story-teller, 194-198
of the Orator, 234, 235
Selection in, 165
of Speaking Well, 231, 234
Style in, 165
of Words, the Dialect of Life, 217 Artist, the Actor as, 163, 164 Aspiration, 123-125 Aurelius, Marcus, 180
B
Bivouacs, the Halts of Life, 104-106
Blind Bow-boy, the, 57-58
Books, are Letters to the Author's Friends, 190
257
Books not Everything, 222, 223 Bow-boy, the BHnd, 57, 58 Boyhood, Our, 54 Boys, Education of, 228 Business, Honesty in, 16
and Pleasure, 33 Busyness, a Sign of Lack of Generosity, 17
a Symptom of Deficient Vitality, 16-19
C Cathedrals, 166 Character, Good Traits in, 145 Child, and the Mother, must Part, 93, 94 Children, Realism in, 65-67 Child's Play, "Making BeHeve" in, 60-65 Convalescence, the Pleasures of, 75-77 Courage, Brave Deeds Breed their Kind,
31-33
Fears not Death, 21, 22, 27, 28 in Life, 95 Courtship, the Prologue to the Love-story
of Marriage, 80 Creed, Change of, 149, 150
258
|
D |
Index |
|
Dangers, to Reckon, too Curiously, 155, 156 |
|
|
D'Artagnan, Dumas's, 19Q-192 |
|
|
Death, 13, 14 |
|
|
Attempt the Leap though it Catch |
|
|
you in Mid-air, 27, 28 |
|
|
and Disease, i |
|
|
how to Think of, 33, 34 |
|
|
the Fear of, cowardly, 20, 21 |
|
|
the Last Thing a Brave Man Thinks |
|
|
of, 21, 22 |
|
|
Nature's Way in, 155 |
|
|
our Healthy Indifference to, 19-21 |
|
|
Rest after, 96 |
|
|
the Young Man and, 28-30 |
|
|
Deceit, 5, 6 |
|
|
Deeds, Great, Breed their Kind, 31-33 |
|
|
Modesty in, 143 |
|
|
Despair, the Poetry of, 181, 182 |
|
|
Disease and Death, i |
|
|
Doctrines, 236 |
|
|
Dogs, Affected by Society's Laws, 119-121 |
|
|
Dream, Romance the Realization of the Ideal |
|
|
Laws of the Day Dream, 185-187 |
259
Index
Dreams, by the Fireside, 56 Dumas, A., his D'Artagnan, 190-192
Education, of Boys and Girls, 228
often Nothing but a System of Catchwords and Formulae, 228,
229 in School and in the Street, 224-226 "Egoist, The," Meredith's, 174, 175 Endurance, Human, 143, 144 England, and France, 249, 250
the Englishman's Pride and Igno- rance, 254-256 Englishman, his Pride and Ignorance, 254-256 Esteem, Be not too Wise in your Own, 139 Evolution, our Dissatisfaction with the Theory of, 156, 157
F Failure, Success out of, 129-134 Faith, 38, 39
in Marriage, 38 Fame, 30, 31 Fireside, the Dreams by, 56
260
Fool, it Requires Brains to Make a, of
Yourself, 138 Forest, the, as Comforter, 209-211
and Ocean, 202, 203 Forests, and Woods, 201, 202 France, and England, 249, 250
French Independence, 251,252 French, Independence, 251, 252 Friend, a, is he who Knows you are No Good,
and is Willing to Forget It, 37 Friends, Truth of Intercourse between, 3 Friendships, Instability of, 34, 35
the Power and Ground of
the Power and Ground of, a
Mystery, 129 the Tender Link between Us and Life, 14-16
Generosity, the Death of, in the Prudent, 24 Genius, the, of Place and Time, 206-209 Girls, Education of, 228
Godwin, Hannah, her Requirements for a Good Wife, 43
261
Index Gratitude, 146
Grave-diggers, 239-242
H
Happiness, Dwelling with, lOi
to be Found in Social Life, 56, 57 Health, Better to Lose it like a Spendthrift
than Waste it like a Miser, 26, 27 Heroism, Dr. Samuel Johnson's, 25, 26 *'High Passion," the, not often the Cause of
Marriage, 42 Home, Letters from, 55, 56 Honesty, in Business, 16 Hope, 38, 39
in Marriage, 38
Ever Walk in, though there be no Goal to Reach, 79, 80 Human Endurance, 143, 144 Hurry, 141
I Idleness, 223
Apology for, 67-69
the Wisest are most Successful in,
Idlet, the Wisdom of the, 221, 222 262
Ignorance, Better than the Knowledge which " ** Brings Sadness, 182, 183
Imprudence, in Life, 2
Independence, French, 251, 252
Indiscretion, the, of Youth, 137, 138
IndividuaHty, 144, 145
Intercourse, Truth of, 2, 3
between Friends, 3 between Parent and Child, 3 between Lovers, 3, 4 between Man and Wife, 4, 5
Invalid, the, and his Joys, 72-75
Invalidism, Premature Old Age, 69-72
J
Jealousy, 142
Johnson, Dr. Samuel, his Heroism, 25, 26
K
Knowledge, 219-221
Ignorance Better than the, which Brings Sadness, 182, 183 Kindness, is Love's Essence, 10-12
L
"Leaves of Grass," Whitman's, 173, 174 Letter, from Home, 55, 56
263
Index
Letters, Books are, to the Author's Friends,
190 Liberty, the Price of Money is, 58, 59 Lies and Lying, 81-83 Life, Bivouacs the Halts of, 104-106 Courage in, 95
Friendship our Tender Link with, 14-16 Independence in, 2 its Highest Pleasures Brought by Love,
8,9 Live To-day the Day's, i, 2 Love of, 23
Our Divine Unrest, 158, 159 the Place of Money in, no, in the Price we Pay for what we Want in
Life, 58, 59 Social, Happiness to be Found in, 56,57 Success in, not Busyness, 18 the True Lover of, 24-26 Listeners, the Aged as, 244-246
Women as, 246 Literature, the Choice of, as a Profession, 215-219 the Duties of the Writer as Story- teller, 194-198
264
Literature, the Truth in, is Essential, 192-194 Logic, 235, 236
Love, Brings v/ith it the Highest Sense of the Pleasure of Living, 8, 9 Declaration of, 35, 36 the Essence of, is Kindness, 10-12 Falling in, 6-8 the Ideal Proposal is not Expressed in
Words, 36, 37 is not Blind, 37 the Lion of, hardly a fit Animal for the
Domestic Pet, 44 not often the Cause of Marriage, 41, 42 the True Love Story Begins with Mar- riage, 80 Lover, the, your Best Advocate, 5
the Happy, is the Condescending Gentleman, 9, 10 Lovers, Truth of Intercourse between, 3, 4 Lying and Lies, 81-83 Lying, Silence a Method of, 82
M "Making Believe," in Child's Play, 60-65 Man, his Dependence, 117, 118
265
Index
Man, the Self-made, 146
and Wife, Truth of Intercourse be- tween, 4, 5 Men, Great, Lack of Prudence in, 139-141 Marriage, its Advantages, 45
its Beneficent Effects, 49 Choice in, 40, 41 its Commonplaceness, 49, 50 Courtship is the Prologue to the
Love Story of, 80 Enlarging to Women, 50 its Experience Chastening, 51 Hannah Godwin's Acquirements
for,43 the Lion of Love, hardly a fit ani- mal for the Domestic Pet, 44 Marry in Faith and not in Plope, 38 the Modern Idyll of, often Writ in
Common Prose, 42, 43 not for Love, 41 our Presumption in Marrying,
to Refrain from, is Cowardice, 38 its Speculative Nature, 46, 47 Successful and Unsuccessful, 41
266
Marriage, the True Love Story Begins with, 80
A Wife is the Witness of your Life
and the Sharpest Critic of your
Conduct and Character, 52, 53
A Wife is the Domestic Recording
Angel, 53 Women's Value as Teachers best Shown in, 250, 251 Men, Representative, and their Works, 118,
119 Meredith, George, "The Egoist," 174, 175 Mind, Tranquillity of, 145 Modesty, in Deeds, 143 Money, the Place of, in Life, no, in
the Price of, we Pay in Liberty,
58, 59 Morality and Poverty, 54, 55 Mother, the, and the Child, must Part, 93, 94
N
Nature, the God of, 156
the Invalid's Pleasure in, 73 Night, Sleep in the Open Air at, 203-206 "No" and "Yes," Saying, 146
267
Index
o
Occupation, General, 35 Ocean, and Forest, 202, 203 Old Adam, the, 136, 137 Old Age, and Youth, i
Invalidism is Premature, 69-72 Old People, Talk of, 243
as Teachers, 252-254 Opinion, All, Stages on the Road to Truth, 112, 113 is the Tavern by the Way, in which we Dwell a little while on our Way to Truth, 1 1 4-1 16 Public, 217 Opportunities, Satisfy Those you Have before
Looking for New Opportunities, 59, 60 Orator, the Art of the, 234, 235 Over-wise, to be, is to Ossify, 23, 24
Pan, the Greek Idea of, 152
Pan's Pipes, 150-158
Parent and Child, Truth of Intercourse be-
^ tween, 3 Pipes, Pan's, 150-158 _
Place, the Genius of, and Time, 206-209 index
Play, Child's, ''MaJcing Believe" in, 60-65
Play, the, 176-178
Plays and Romances, 176-180
Pleasure and Business, 33
Pleasures, the Sense of the Highest, Brought
by Love, 8, 9 Poetry, the, of Despair, 181, 182 Poverty and Morality, 54, 55 Prayer, 159 Prudence, Death to Generosity, 24
Lack of, in Great Men, 139-141 Profession, a, the Choice of Literature as,
215-219 Proposal of Love, the Ideal, is not Expressed
in Words, 36, 37
Q
Questions, Putting, 112
R Railway Travel, 77-79 Reading, the Gift of, 226, 227 Realism, in Children, 65-67 Reporting, 217, 218
269
Index Representative Men and their Works, 1 18, 1 1I9
Respectability, 53 Rest, after Death, 96
after a Tramp, 99-101 '
River, a, 201 Romance, the, 178-180
the Quality of, 1 88-190 the Realization of the Ideal Laws of the Day Dream, 185-187 Romances and Plays, 176-180
Sabbath, the, 149
Sadness, Ignorance Better than that Knowl- edge which Brings, 182, 183 School, Education in, 224 Science, its Characteristics, 157 Selection in Art, 165 Selfishness, the, of Youth, 134-136 Self-made Man, the, 146 Silence, a Method of Lying, 82
in Speech, 94, 95 Sleep, in the Open Air at Night, 203-206 Soldier, the, and the Thief, iii, 112 Society, Laws of. Affect even Dogs, 119-121
270
Speech, the Art of Speaking Well, 231-234 ^^'^^
the Gift of, 229-231 Silence in, 94, 95 Street, the. Education in, 224 Style, 164, 165
Success, out of Failure, 129-134 Sweethearts, 10
T Talk, 84-92
Art of, 90, 91
the Art of Speaking Well, 231-234
the, of the Aged, 242-244
the Instrument of Friendship, 85
its Methods, 88, 89
Natural, a Festival of Ostentation, 86, 87
its Qualities, 84 Talker, a Good, is like a Good Angler, 85, 86 Talkers, Women as, 246 Teacher, Woman's Value as a, 250 Teachers, the Aged as, 252-254 Thief, the, and the Soldier, iii, 112 Time, the Genius of Place and, 206-209
the Value of, 95 Tour, a Walking, 106-110
371
Index
Traits, Good, in Character, 145 Tramp, Rest after a, 99-101 Tranquillity, of Mind, 145 Travel, 98
Railway, 77-79 Travellers, we are all, 99 Travels, Pleasure Trips in the Land of Thought and among the Hills of Vanity, 101-104 Trips, Pleasure, in the Land of Thought and among the Hills of Vanity, 101-104 Truant, Playing, 224
Truth, the, in Literature is Essential, 192-194
Opinion is the Tavern by the Way in
which we Dwell a Little While on
our Way to, 114-116
All Opinion Stages on the Road to,
112,113 Telling the, 96-98
the True Veracity is in the Spirit and not in the Letter of Truth, 83
U
Unrest, our Divine, 158, 159
272
Value, we Value what we Pay for, 57 Veracity, the True, is in the Spirit and not in the Letter of Truth, 83
W Walking, a Tour, 106-110 Whitman, Walt, "Leaves of Grass," 173, 174 Wife, the, 39, 40
a, is but a Woman; a Being of Like
Frailties as is the Man, 121-123 is the Witness of your Life and the Sharpest Critic of your Conduct,
52> 53- is the Domestic Recording Angel, 53 Man and. Truth of Intercourse be- tween, 4, 5 Wise, Be not too, in your own Esteem, 139 Woman, her Self-sufficiency, 116
her Value as Teacher best Shown in Marriage, 250, 251 Women, as Talkers and Listeners, 246-249 Woods, and Forests, 201, 202 Words, Art of, the Dialect of Life, 217 Choice of, in Writing, 167-169
273
Index Wordsworth, 175
World, the, our Experience of, 151 Writer, a, the Choice of Literature as a Pro- fession, 215-219 the, the Duties of, as Story-teller,,
194-198 the Young, Advice to the, 183-185 Writing, Choice of Words in, 167-169
Y
"Yes" and "No," Saying, 146 Youth and Death, 28-30 Youth, Indiscretions of, 137, 138 and Old Age, i Preserve the Quality of, 2 the Selfishness of, 134-136
4102
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