Cities and sea-coasts and islands

CITIES AND SEA-COASTS
AND ISLANDS

BY THE SAME WRITER

Figures of Several Centuries. 1916.

Poems (Collected Edition in two volumes). 1902.

The Symbolist Movement in Literature. 1899.

Cities. 1903.

Spiritual Adventures. 1905.

Studies in Seven Arts. 1906.

CITIES AND

SEA-COASTS AND

ISLANDS

BY

ARTHUR SYMONS

AUTHOR OF "TRISTIAN AND ISEULT," EtC.

NEW YORK

BRENTANO'S
1919

Copyright, 1918, by Brentano's

The Plimpton Prr^s. Norwood. }fass., Tf. S. A.

TO

AUGUSTUS JOHN

465383

LIBRARY

Contents.

I. Spain :

Seville 3

The Painters of Seville 24

Domenico Theotocopuli : A Study at

Toledo 49

The Poetry of Santa Teresa and San

Juan de la Cruz 64

Campoamor 82

A Spanish Poet : Nunez de Arce. . . 94

Moorish Secrets in Spain 100

Valencia 106

Tarragona 114

Cordova 119

Montserrat: 122

Cadiz 127

A Bull Fight at Valencia : 131

Alicante 138

A Spanish Music-Hall 145

II. London: A Book of Aspects 159

III. Sea-Coasts and Islands :

Dieppe, 1895 227

A Valley in Cornwall 249

vii

Contents

At the Land's End 265

Cornish Sketches 274

In a Northern Bay 295

Winchelsea : An Aspect 298

The Islands of Aran 302

In SHgo : Rosses Point and Glencar. . 328

From a Castle in Ireland 340

Dover Cliffs 345

Vlll

I.

Spain.

Seville.

I.

Seville, more than any city I have ever seen, is the
city of pleasure. It is not languid with pleasure,
Uke Venice, nor flushed with hurrying after pleasure,
Hke Budapest ; but it has the constant brightness,
blitheness, and animation of a city in which pleasure
is the chief end of existence, and an end easily
attained, by simple means within every one's reach.
It has sunshine, flowers, an expressive river, orange
groves, palm trees, broad walks leading straight into
the country, beautiful, ancient buildings in its midst,
shining white houses, patios and flat roofs and vast
windows, everything that calls one into the open
air, and brings light and air to one, and thus gives
men the main part of their chances of natural
fehcity. And it has the theatres, cafes, shops, of
a real city, it is not provincial, as Valencia is ; it is
concentrated, and yet filled to the brim ; it has
completely mastered its own resources. Life is
everywhere ; there are no melancholy gaps, vacant
spaces, in which a ruinous old age has its own way
desolately, as in most really picturesque cities ; as
in Venice, for instance, which it resembles in so
many points. It has room for itself, and it is not
too large for itself. And in living gaily, and in
the present, it is carrying on a tradition : it is the
city of Don Juan, the city of Figaro.

I am coming, more and more, to measure the
charm of cities, at all events their desirability for
living in, by the standard of their parks, public

3

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

gardens, and free spaces where one can be pleasantly
unoccupied in the open air. I want the town, not
the country, but I want the town to give me the
illusion of the country, as well as its own char-
acteristic qualities. Rome itself, without its villas,
even Rome, would not be Rome ; and Seville, which
is so vividly a town, and with so many of a town's
good qualities, has the most fehcitous parks, gardens,
and promenades (with that one great exception) that
I have ever found in a city. Gardens follow the
river-side, park after park, and every afternoon
Seville walks and drives and sits along that broad
road leading so straight into the open country,
really a Paseo de las Delicias, a road of trees and
sunlight. Turn to the right or to the left, and you
are in a quiet shadow, under lanes of orange trees
and alleys of acacias. There are palms and there
is water, and there are little quaint seats everywhere ;
paths wind in and out, roses are growing in mid-
winter, they are picking the oranges as they ripen
from green to gold, and carrying them in the panniers
of donkeys, and pouring them in bright showers
on the ground, and doing them up into boxes.
Great merchant vessels lie against the river-side, un-
loading their cargoes; and across the park, on the
other side of a wall, drums are beating, bugles
blowing, and the green meadow-grass is blue and
red with soldiers. In the park, girls pass wrapped
in their shawls, with roses in their hair, grave and
laughing; an old gardener, in his worn coat with
red facings, passes slowly, leaning on his stick. You
4

Seville.

can sit here for hours, In a warm quiet, and with
a few dry leaves drifting about your feet, to remind
you that it is winter.

Seville is not a winter city, and during those
months it seems to wait, remembering and expectant,
in an acquiescence in which only a short and not
uneasy sleep divides summer from spring. To the
northern stranger, its days of sunshine and blue sky
seem to make winter hardly more than a name.
Sun and air, on these perfect winter afternoons, have
that rare quality which produces what I should like
to call a kind of active languor. The sharpening
of a breath, and it would become chill ; the deepen-
ing of the sunshine, and it would become oppressive.
And just this difficult equilibrium, as it seems, of
the forces of summer and winter, adds a zest to
one's contentment, a kind of thankfulness which
one does not find it needful to feel in the time of
summer. How delightful to sit, perfectly warm,
under a tree whose leaves are scattered about the
ground, yellow with winter ; to watch the bare
branches, among these always green palms and
orange trees, remembering winter in the North.

But to enjoy sympathetically all that Seville, even
in winter, can be to its own people, it is not enough
to go to the parks and the Paseo ; one must go, on
a fine Sunday afternoon, to the railway fine which
stretches onwards from the Barqueta, along the
river-side, but in the opposite direction. The line
is black with people, at one hour going, at another
hour returning, an unending stream which broadens

5

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

and scatters on both sides, along the brown herbage
by the river, and over the green spaces on the
landward side. At intervals there is a little venta,
there are bowling-alleys, swings, barrel-organs, con-
certinas, the sound of castanets, people dancing,
the clapping of hands, the cries of the vendors of
water, shell-fish, and chestnuts, donkeys passing
with whole famihes on their backs, families camping
and picnicking on the grass, and everywhere chairs,
chairs on the grass, two sitting on each chair, in a
circle about the dancers, as they dance in couples,
alternately; chairs and .tables and glasses of man-
zanilla about the ventas ; and always the slow
movement of people passing, quietly happy, in a
sort of grave enjoyment, which one sees in their
faces when they dance. Here is the true puehloy
the working-people, cigarreras, gipsies, all Triana
and the Macarena ; and could people amuse them-
selves more simply or more quietly, with a more
enjoyable decorum ? As they turn homewards, in
another long black line, the sun is setting; a
melancholy splendour burns down slowly upon the
thin trees across the water, staining the water with
faint reflections, and touching the dreary, colourless
shrubs along the river-side with delicate autumn
colours, as sunset ends the day of the people.

II.

There are seven hundred streets in Seville, and
there is hardly a street which has not some personal
6

Seville.

character of its own, or which does not add one
more Hne to the elaborate arabesque of the city.
One of my favourite aspects, for it is an aspect from
which Seville looks most Eastern, is at just that
point of the Paseo de Catalina de Rivera where it is
joined by the Calle San Fernando. One sees the
battlemented outer wall of the Alcazar, with its low,
square towers, the Giralda, the brown turrets of
two or three churches, and then nothing but white
walls and brown roofs, with a few bare branches
rising here and there delicately against the sky,
between the sharp, irregular lines of the houses, all
outlined in bright white. One can fancy a whole
Kremlin or Hradcin clustered inside that low,
white, battlemented wall ; outside which the dreary
Paseo, and the dim green of the Prado San Sebastian,
seem to be already the country.

And it is from this point too, as one turns home-
ward from the river-side, that evening seems to come
on most delicately : those sunsets of blue and rose
and gold, as the sun goes down across the Gua-
dalquivir, and that rosy flush which encircles all
Seville after the sun has gone down, as if the city
lay in the hollow of a great shell, tinged with rose
at the edges. It is at just this hour that Triana
looks its best, heaped somewhat irregularly on the
other bank, in a long, white and pink line, above
the brown slime ; and from the Triana bridge, always
crowded with lean, beaten horses, dragging too
heavy loads, and lines of white donkeys with panniers,
nodding their jingling heads, as they wander along

7

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

by themselves, one sees the whole river, and the
Moorish Tower of Gold, and the crowded masts,
changing colour as the light changes moment by
moment.

The streets of Seville are narrow, for shade in
the summer and warmth in the winter, and many
of them, like the central Calle Sierpes, with its
shops, and clubs, and cafes, a street of windows,
are closed to wheels. Every house has its balconies,
and the older ones their barred windows on the
ground floor; and every house has its patio, that
divine invention of the Moors, meant, certainly, for
a summer city, and meant, as one sees it in Morocco,
for houses without windows, in which all the light
comes from the open roof above an inner court.
The Spaniards have both patios and windows, for
summer and winter, in their wise, characteristic
passion for light. All the doors, leading to the
patio, are of open iron-work, no two doors alike,
in their surprisingly varied, and often exquisite,
arabesques of pattern. This throwing open of one's
house to the street, yet with an iron door, always
closed, setting a boundary to the feet if not to the
eyes, seems to me again characteristic of these
natural, not self-conscious people, who seem often
so careless of their own dignity and liberty, and
are so well able to preserve them.

Seville lights up for a feast-day as a face lights
up with a smile. The night before the great feast
of the Immaculate Conception, I went into the
streets to find the whole place transformed, glittering.
8

Seville.

Crimson or white and blue cloths were thrown over
balconies, rows of lamps and candles burned above
them, and between the Hghts eager faces leaned
over, looking down at the eager faces looking up
at them. The pubhc squares were brilhant with
hght, and the whole place became suddenly filled
with people, passing to and fro in the Sierpes, and
along the streets of shops, which I hardly recognised,
so brilliantly lighted were all the windows. The
transformation seemed to have been done in a
minute, and here was the true Seville, idle, eager,
brilliant, moving gaily, making the most of the
world on the Church's terms of felicity for the
other world.

And yet this, if the true Seville, is not all Seville,
and I found another, silent, almost deserted city,
which fascinated me almost more than this hving
and moving one, whenever I wandered about at
night, in streets that sank to sleep so early, and
seemed so mysteriously quiescent, under the bright
sky and the stars. Night passed rarely without
my coming out of some narrow street upon the vast
Plaza del Triunfo, which holds the Cathedral, its
Pagan counterpart, the Giralda, the Alcazar, and
the Lonja. The tall tower of the Giralda was
always the first thing I saw, rising up, hke the
embodied forces of the delicate powers of the world,
by the side of the Christian Cathedral. Seen from
the proper distance, it is like a filigree casket that
one could lift in the hand, as Santa Justa and Santa
Rufina lift it, in Murillo's picture ; looking up from

9

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

close underneath it, it is like a great wall hiding
the stars. And the Moors have done needlework
on a wall as solid as a Roman wall ; far finer work
than that bastard splendour of the Alcazar, with its
flickering lights, and illuminations like illuminations
on parchment.

Looking back at the Giralda and the Cathedral
from the gateway of the Patio de las Banderas, one
sees perhaps the finest sight in Spain. The Giralda
stands motionless, and a little aloof; but by its side
the vast, embattled magnificence of the Cathedral
seems to change in every aspect, full of multiform
life, ordered to a wonderfully expressive variety,
throwing out new shoots in every direction, hke a
tree which grows into a forest in some tropical
country, or like a city grouping itself about a citadel.
It is full of the romantic spirit, the oriental touch
freeing it from any of the too heavy solemnity of the
Middle Ages, and suiting it to a Southern sky.
Above all, it has infinitely varied movement : yes,
as it seems to lean slightly from the perpendicular,
all this vivid mass might be actually about to mov^e,
to sail away like a great ship, with all its masts and
spread sails and corded rigging.

III.

Much of what is most characteristic in the men
of Seville may be studied in the cafes, which are
filled every evening with crowds of unoccupied
persons, who in every other country would be

lO

Seville.

literally of the working class, but who here seem
to have endless leisure. They are rough-looking,
obviously poor, they talk, drink coffee, buy news-
papers and lottery tickets, and they are all smoking.
They fill rows of tables with little companies of
friends ; they are roughly good-humoured, affection-
ately friendly with one another ; and their conversa-
tion echoes under the low ceiling with a deafening
buzz. The typical Andalusian, as one sees him
here, is a type quite new to me, and a type singu-
larly individual. He is clean-shaved, he wears a
felt hat with a broad flat brim, generally drab or
Hght grey, clothes often of the same colour, and
generally a very short coat, ending where a waist-
coat ends, and very tight trousers ; over all is a
voluminous black cloak lined at the edges with
crimson velvet. He is generally of medium height,
and he has very distinct features, somewhat large,
especially the nose; a face in which every line
has emphasis, a straight, thin, narrow face, a face
without curves. The general expression is one of
inflexibihty, the eyes fixed, the mouth tight ; and
this fixity of expression is accentuated by the
arrangement of the hair, cut very short, and shaved
around the temples, so as to make a sharp line
above the ear, and a point in the middle of the
forehead. The complexion is dull olive, and in old
age it becomes a formidable mass of wrinkles ; by
which, indeed, many of these old men with their
clean-shaved cheeks, bright eyes, and short jackets,
are alone to be distinguished from their sons or

II

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

grandsons. There is much calm strength in the
Andalusian face, a dignity which is half defiant,
and which leaves room for humour, coming slowly
up through the eyes, the mouth still more slowly
lengthening into a smile ; room also for honest
friendUness, for a very inquiring interest in things,
and very decided personal preferences about them.
Often the face runs all to humour, and the man
resembles a comic actor. But always there is the
same earnestness in whatever mood, the same self-
absorption ; and, talkative as these people are, they
can sit side by side, silent, as if in brooding medita-
tion, with more naturalness than the people of any
other race.

The Andalusian is seen at his finest in the bull-
fighter, the idol of Seville, whom one sees at every
moment, walking in the streets, sitting in his club,
driving in his motor car, or behind his jinghng team
of horses, dressed in the tight majo costume, with
his pig-tail drawn up and dissimulated on the top
of his head, his frilled shirt with great diamond
studs, his collar clasped by gold or diamond fasten-
ings, diamond rings glittering on his well-shaped
fingers. I once sat opposite one of the most famous
toreros at a tahle-d'hote dinner, and, as I contrasted
him with the heavy, middle-class people who sat
around, I was more than ever impressed by the
distinction, the physical good-breeding, something
almost of an intellectual clearness and shapeliness,
which come from a perfect bodily equipoise, a hand
and eye trained to faultless precision.

12

Seville.

The women of Seville are not often beautiful,
but one of the most beautiful women I have ever
seen was a woman of Seville whom I watched for an
hour in the Cafe America. She had all that was
typical of the Spaniard, and more ; expression, the
equivalent of a soul, eyes which were not merely
fine, but variable as opals, with twenty several
delights in a minute. She was small, very white,
with just that delicate hint of modelling in the
cheeks which goes so well with pallor ; she had
two yellow roses in her black hair, at the side of
the topmost coil, and a yellow shawl about her
throat. One wished that she might always be
happy.

More often the women are comfortable, witty,
bright and dark, guapa, rather than beautiful ;
almost always with superb hair, hair which is like
the mane or tail of an Arab horse, and always with
tiny feet, on which they walk after a special, careful
way of their own, setting down the whole foot at
each step, level from heel to toe, and not rising on
it. In Seville, more than anywhere else, one sees
the Spanish woman already mature in the child,
and nothing impressed me more than these brilliant,
fascinating little people, at once natural and con-
scious, with all the gestures of grown women, their
way of walking, their shawls, and, in their faces,
all that is finest in the Sevillana, a charm, seductive-
ness, a sort of caressing atmosphere, and not merely
bright, hard eyes, clean-cut faces, animation, which
are to be seen everywhere in Spain. They have

13

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

indeed that slightly preoccupied air which Spanish
children affect, and which deepens, in some of the
women, into a kind of tragic melancholy. Pass
through the Macarena quarter in the evening,
and you will see not the least characteristic type
of the women of Seville: strange, sulky, fatal
creatures, standing in doorways, with flowers in
the hair, and mysterious, angry eyes ; Flamencas,
with long, ugly, tragic, unforgettable faces, seeming
to remember an ancestral unhappiness.

There is a quality which gives a certain finish
to Spanish women, and which is unique in them.
It is a sort of smiling irony, which seems to pene-
trate the whole nature : the attitude of one who
is aware of things, not unsatisfied with them,
decided in her own point of view, intelligent enough
to be tolerant of the point of view of others, with-
out coquetry or self-consciousness ; in fact, a small,
complete nature, in which nothing is left vague or
uneasy. It is a disposition such as this which goes
to make life happy, and it is enough to have watched
the gay, smiling, contented old women to realise
that life is happy to most women in Spain. Look
in all these faces, and you will see that they express
something very definite, and that they express
everything, while Northern faces have so much in
them that is suggestion, or, as it seems to the
Spaniard, mere indefiniteness. The Southern
nature, for its material felicity, has retained the
Pagan, classic ideals ; the Northern has accepted
the unquiet, dreaming soul of the Middle Ages.
14

Seville.

But in Spanish women, along with much childish-
ness and much simphcity, there is often all the
subtlety of the flesh, that kind of secondary spiritual
subtlety which comes from exquisitely responsive
senses. This kind of delicacy in women often
stands in the place of many virtues, of knowledge,
of intellect ; and, in its way, it supplies what is
lacking in them, giving them as much refinement
as knowledge or the virtues would have done, and
itself forming a very profound kind of intelligence.
I recognise it in the mournful pallor, and that long,
immobile gaze, vv'hich seems to touch one's flesh,
like a slow caress ; that cold ardour, which is the
utmost refinement of fire. And these white people
carry themselves like idols. Singularly diff"erent
is that other Spanish kind of animality, where life
burns in the lips, and darkens the cheeks as if with
the sun, and bubbles in the eyes, the whole body
warm with a somewhat general, somewhat over-
ready heat. It is enough to have heard the laughter
of these vivid creatures. It is the most delicious
laughter in the world ; it breaks out like a song
from a bird ; it is sudden, gay, irresponsible, the
laughter of a moment, and yet coming straight
from the deep unconsciousness of life. The Spanish
woman is a child, but a mature Spanish child, know-
ing much ; and in the average woman of Seville,
in her gaiety, humour, passion, there is more than
usual of the childlike quality. Their faces are
full of sun and shadow, often with a rich colour
between Eastern and Western, and with the languor

15

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

and keenness of both races ; with something in-
toxicating in the quahty of their charm, hke the
scent of spring in their orange groves. They have
the magnetism of vivid animal Hfe, with a sharp
appeal to the sensations, as of a beauty too full of
the sap of life to be merely passive. Their bodies
are so full of energy that they have invented for
themselves a new kind of dance, which should tire
them into repose ; they live so actively to their
finger-tips that their fingers have made their own
share in the dance, in the purely Spanish accom-
paniment of the castanets. A dance is indicated
in a mere shuffle of the feet, a snapping of the fingers,
a clapping of hands, a bend of the body, whenever
a woman of Seville stands or walks, at the door
of her house, pausing in the street, or walking,
wrapped in many shawls, in the parks ; and the
dance is as closely a part of the women of Seville
as their shawls, the flowers in their hair, or the
supplementary fingers of the fan.

IV.

A significant quality of the Andalusians is the
profound seriousness which they retain, even when
they abandon themselves to the most violent
emotions. It is the true sensuahty, the only way
of getting the utmost out of one's sensations, as
gaiety, or a facile voluptuousness, never can. The
Spanish nature is sombre and humorous, ready to
be startled into vivid life by any strong appeal :
i6

Seville.

love, hate, cruelty, the dance, the bull-fight, what-
ever is elemental, or touches the elemental passions.
Seeing Seville as I did, in winter, I could not see
the people under their strongest, most characteristic
intoxication, the bull-fight; but I had the oppor-
tunity, whenever I went into the street, and saw a
horse dragging a burden, of seeing how natural
to them is that cruelty which is a large part of the
attraction of bull-fighting. And their delight in
violent sensations, sensations which seem to others
not quite natural, partly perverse, partly cruel, as
in the typical emotion of the bull-fight, is seen at
Seville in the cuerpo de baile infantil which
dances at the Cafe Suizo. These children of ten
or eleven, who dance till midnight, learned in all
the contortions of the gipsy dances, which they
dance with a queer kind of innocence, all the more
thorough in its partly unconscious method, and
who run about in front, sitting on men's knees in
their tawdry finery, smiling out of their little painted
faces with an excited weariness ; is there not a
cruelty to them, also, in the surely perverse senti-
ment which requires their aid in one's own amuse-
ment ? I shall never forget one particular dance
of two children, one of the most expressive gipsy
dances, danced in trailing dresses, inside which, as
inside some fantastic, close prison or cage, they
hopped and leaped and writhed, like puppets or
living tops, to the stupefying rattle of castanets ;
parodying the acts of physical desire, the coquetry
of the animal, with an innocent knowingness, as if it

17

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

were the most amusing, the most exciting of games.
One of them was a httle, sallow, thin creature, with
narrow eyes and an immense mouth, drawn almost
painfully into a too-eager smile; a grimacing,
Chinese mask of a child, almost in tears with nervous
excitement, quivering all over with the energy of
the dance. I went to see them, indeed, frequently,
as I should have gone to see the bull-fights, and
with the same mental reservation. They reminded
me of the horses.

All Spanish dancing, and especially the dancing
of the gipsies, in which it is seen in its most char-
acteristic development, has a sexual origin, and
expresses, as Eastern dancing does, but less crudely,
the pantomime of physical love. In the typical
gipsy dance, as I saw it danced by a beautiful
Gitana at Seville, there is something of mere gamin-
erie and something of the devil; the automatic
tramp-tramp of the children and the lascivious
pantomime of a very learned art of love. Thus
it has all the excitement of something spontaneous
and studied, of vice and a kind of naughty innocence,
of the thoughtless gaiety of youth as well as the
knowing humour of experience. For it is a dance
full of humour, fuller of humour than of passion ;
passion indeed it mimics on the purely animal
side, and with a sort of coldness even in its frenzy.
It is capable of infinite variations ; it is a drama,
but a drama improvised on a given theme; and it
might go on indefinitely, for it is conditioned only
by the pantomime, which we know to have wide
i8

Seville.

limits. A motion more or less, and it becomes
obscene or innocent ; it is always on a doubtful
verge, and thus gains its extraordinary fascination.
I held my breath as I watched the gipsy in the
Seville dancing-hall; I felt myself swaying un-
consciously to the rhythm of her body, of her
beckoning hands, of the glittering smile that came
and went in her eyes. I seemed to be drawn into
a shining whirlpool, in which I turned, turned,
hearing the buzz of the water settUng over my
head. The guitar buzzed, buzzed, in a prancing
rhythm, the gipsy coiled about the floor, in her
trailing dress, never so much as showing her ankles,
with a rapidity concentrated upon itself; her hands
beckoned, reached out, clutched dehcately, hved
to their finger-tips ; her body straightened, bent,
the knees bent and straightened, the heels beat on
the floor, carrying her backwards and round ; the
toes pointed, paused, pointed, and the body drooped
or rose into immobility, a smiling, significant pause
of the whole body. Then the motion became
again more vivid, more restrained, as if teased by
some unseen limits, as if turning upon itself in the
vain desire of escape, as if caught in its own toils ;
more feverish, more fatal, the humour turning
painful, with the pain of achieved desire; more
earnest, more eager, with the languor in which
desire dies triumphant.

A less elaborate, less perverse kind of dancing
is to be seen in the cafes, in little pantomimic
ballets, imitated from French models, but done

19

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

with a Spanish simpHcity of emphasis. There is,
in such things, a frank, devil-may-care indecency,
part of a boisterous hilarity, which has all the air
of an accidental improvisation, as indeed it often
is ; and this hilarity is tossed to and fro from stage
to audience and from audience to stage, as if a crowd
of lively people had become a Uttle merry at the
corner of a street. The Spanish (look at their
comic papers) are so explicit ! It is not cold or
calculated, like that other, more significant, kind of
dancing; it is done with youth and delighted
energy, and as among friends, and by people to
whom a certain explicit kind of coarseness is natural.

V.

Seville is not a religious city, as Valencia is ;
but it has woven the ceremonies of religion into its
life, into its amusements, with a minuteness of
adaptation certainly unparalleled. Nowhere as in
Spain does one so realise the sacred drama of the
Mass. The costumes, the processions, the dim
lighting, the spectacular arrangement of the churches
and ceremonies, the religious attitude of the people,
kneeling on the bare stones, the penitent aspect of
their black dresses and mantillas, intermingled with
the bright peasant colours which seem to bring the
poor people so intimately into association with the
mysteries of religion : all this has its part in giving
the Church its dramatic pre-eminence. And in
Seville the ceremonies of the Church are carried
20

Seville.

out with more detail, more spectacular appeal,
than anywhere else in Spain, that is to say, more
than anywhere in the world. All Europe flocks
to see the celebrations of Holy Week, which must
have come down unchanged from the Middle
Ages ; a piece of immense mediaeval childishness,
which still suits the humour of Seville perfectly.
And it is not only in Holy Week that one may
see the most characteristic of all these ceremonies,
the sacred dances in the Cathedral, but also at the
great feast of the Immaculate Conception, which is
peculiarly a Sevillan feast.

On that day, the 8th December, I attended Mass
in the Cathedral. The gold and silver plate had
been laid out by the side of the altar, crimson
drapings covered the walls, the priests wore their
terno celeste, blue and gold vestments ; the
Seises, who were to dance later on, were there in
their blue and white costume of the time of Philip
HI. ; the acolytes wore gilt mitres, and carried
silver-topped staves and blue canopies. There
was a procession through the church, the Arch-
bishop and the Alcaldia walking in state, to the
sound of sad voices and hautboys, and amidst clouds
of rolling white incense, and between rows of
women dressed in black, with black mantillas over
their heads. The Mass itself, with its elaborate
ritual, was sung to the very Spanish music of
Eslava : and the Dean's sermon, with its flowery
eloquence, flowers out of the Apocalypse and out
of the fields of la Tierra de Maria Santisimay

21

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

was not less typically Spanish. At five o'clock I
returned to the Cathedral to see the dance of the
Seises. There was but little Hght except about
the altar, which blazed with candles; suddenly
a curtain was drawn aside, and the sixteen boys,
in their blue and white costume, holding plumed
hats in their hands, came forward and knelt before
the altar. The priests, who had been chanting,
came up from the choir, the boys rose, and formed
in two eights, facing each other, in front of the
altar, and the priests knelt in a semicircle around
them. Then an unseen orchestra began to play,
and the boys put on their hats, and began to sing
the coplas in honour of the Virgin :

0 mi, 0 mi amada
Innnacidada!

as they sang, to a dance-measure. After they had
sung the coplas they began to dance, still singing.
It was a kind of solemn minuet, the feet never
taken from the ground, a minuet of delicate stepping
and intricate movement, in which a central square
would form, divide, a whole line passing through
the opposite line, the outer ends then repeating one
another's movements while the others formed and
divided again in the middle. The first movement
was very slow, the second faster, ending with a
pirouette; then came two movements without
singing, but with the accompaniment of castanets,
the first movement again very slow, the second a
quick rattle of the castanets, Hke the rolling of
kettle-drums, but done without raising the hands

22

Seville.

above the level of the elbows. Then the whole
thing was repeated from the beginning, the boys
flourished off their hats, dropped on their knees
before the altar, and went quickly out. One or
two verses were chanted, the Archbishop gave
his benediction, and the ceremony was over.

And, yes, I found it perfectly dignified, perfectly
religious, without a suspicion of levity or indecorum.
This consecration of the dance, this turning of a
possible vice into a means of devotion, this bringing
of the people's art, the people's passion, which in
Seville is dancing, into the church, finding it a
place there, is precisely one of those acts of divine
worldly wisdom which the Church has so often
practised in her conquest of the world. And it is
a quite logical development of that very elaborate
pantomime, using the word in all seriousness,
which the ceremonies of the Church really are,
since all have their symboHcal meaning, which
they express by their gestures. Already we find
in them every art but one : poetry, the very sub-
stance of the Hturgy, oratory, music, both of voices
and instruments, sculpture, painting, all the decora-
tive arts, costume, perfume, every art lending its
service ; and now at last dancing finds its natural
place there, in the one city of the world where its
presence is most perfectly in keeping.

Winter, 1898.

23

The Painters of Seville.

Spanish art, before Velasquez discovered the world,
is an art made for churches and convents, to the
glory of God, never to the glory of earth. "The
chief end of art," says Pacheco, the master of
Velasquez, in his treatise on the art of painting,
**is to persuade men to piety, and to raise them to
God." In other countries, men have painted the
Virgin and the Saints, for patrons, and because the
subject was set them; sometimes piously, and in
the spirit of the Church ; but more often after some
"profane" fashion of their own, as an excuse for
the august or mournful or simple human presence
of beauty. But in Spain pictures painted for
churches are pictures painted by those to whom God
is more than beauty, and life more than one of its
accidents. The visible world is not a divine play-
thing to them. It is the abode of human life, and
human life is a short way leading to the grave.
They are full of the sense of corruption, actual
physical rotting away in the grave, as we see it in
two famous pictures of Valdes Leal. And they
have also a profound pity for human misery, that
pity for the poor which is still one of the character-
istics of the Spaniard ; their pictures are full of halt
and maimed beggars, rendered with all the truth
of a sympathy which finds their distortion a natural
part of the world, a part to be succoured, not to be
turned away from. But Heaven, the Saints, the
Virgin, are equally real to them; and Murillo will
paint the Trinity, without mystery and without
24

The Painters of Seville.

dignity, with only a sense of the human closeness
of that abstract idea to the human mind. Thus we
have, for the most part, no landscapes, rarely an
indication, even in a background, of external nature
loved and copied, and brought into the picture for
its own sake, as a beautiful thing. Seriousness, and
absorption in human life, a mystical absorption in
the divine life, these qualities are the quahties which
determine the whole course of Spanish painting.

Emotion, in the Spaniard, is based on a deep
substratum of brooding seriousness ; some kind of
instinctive pessimism being always, even in those
untouched by rehgion, the shadow upon life. In
Velasquez it is the intolerable indifference of nature,
of natural fate, weighing upon those unhappy kings
and princes whom he has painted, from their solemn
childhood to their mature unhappiness. In Murillo
it is a tragic intensity of ascetic emotion, the dark-
ness out of which his sunlight breaks. In Zurbaran
darkness swallows daylight, and his kneehng monk,
contemplating the emptiness of life in the extrav-
agant mirror of a skull, in the midst of a great
void of night, shows us to what point this reUgious
gloom can extend. Ribera lacerates the flesh of his
martyrs, and tears open their bodies before us, with
almost the passion of Goya's cannibal eating a
woman. In Goya we see both extremes, the whole
gamut from wild gaiety to sombre horror of the
Spanish temperament. The world for him is a
stage full of puppets, coloured almost more naturally
than nature, playing at all the games of humanity

25

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

with a profound, cruel, and fantastic unconscious-
.ness. Rarely indeed do we find a painter to whom
,/ the idea of beauty has been supreme, or who has
loved colour for its own sake, or who has passion-
ately apprehended ornament. The moment the
sense of beauty is not concentrated upon reality,
or upon vision which becomes reality, it loses pre-
cision, passing easily into sentimentality, affectation,
one form or another of extravagance.

This overpoweringly serious sense of reality,
human or divine, to which everything else is
sacrificed, brings with it, to Spanish painters, many
dangers which they have not escaped, and gives
them at their best their singular triumphs. Their
broad painting, with so little lingering over detail,
except at times anatomical detail, their refusal to
pause by the way over the seductions and delicate
unrealities of beauty, point the way to the great
final manner of Velasquez. Velasquez, we say, is
life ; but life was what every Spanish painter aimed
at, and some surprised, agam and again, with fine
effect. All these painters of Martyrdoms, and
Assumptions, and Biblical legends, painted with a
vivid sense of the reality of these things : their
pictures tell stories, a quality which it is the present
unwise, limited fashion to deprecate ; that is to say,
they are always conscious of human emotion ex-
pressing itself actively in gesture — Spanish gesture
of course, which is very different from ours. Doubt-
less there is no aim so difiicult of attamment, so
dangerous in intention, as this aim at fixing life,
26

The Painters of Seville.

movement, and passionate movement, in a picture.
Doubtless, also, for the perfect realisation of this
aim, we have to wait for Velasquez, who sees the
danger, and avoids it, as no one had yet perfectly
succeeded in avoiding it, by an art wholly un-
traditional, wholly of his invention.

At Seville, where Velasquez was born, and did
his early, perfunctory, religious painting, there is
not a single example of his work, with the very
doubtful exception of the small picture of the
Virgin giving her mantle to Saint Ildefonso, which
hangs in the private part of the Archbishop's Palace.
But Velasquez, who was of Spanish and Portuguese
origin, and who worked almost entirely for the
Court, is not properly a Sevillan painter. The
painters properly of Seville, those who were born
there, or at no great distance, and did the main part
of their work there, from Juan Sanchez de Castro
in the fifteenth century, to Murillo and his im-
mediate successors at the end of the seventeenth,
can be seen very thoroughly, and can only be
thoroughly seen, in the Museo and the churches
of Seville. Out of Seville Murillo is an enigma,
Alejo Fernandez is unknown. And in tracing the
course of painting in Seville, we are not far from
tracing the course of Spanish painting, so few are
the painters, except the little group at Valencia,
who were born out of Andalusia.

Painting in Seville begins with pure decoration,
in the three fourteenth-century frescoes of the
Virgin ; the Antigua in the chapel named after

27

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

it in the Cathedral ; Nuestra Senora del Corral,
in San Ildefonso ; and S. Maria de Rocamador,
in San Lorenzo. All three come from a wise and
happy childhood of art, when painters were content
with beautiful patterns, the solid splendour of gold,
a Byzantine convention in faces, these long oval
faces, with their almost Japanese outlines of cheek
and eyebrows. S. Maria de Rocamador is larger
than life-size, she wears a blue robe and a mantle
of dull purple, spotted with golden stars and acorns,
and bordered with gold braid ; an arched or bent
coronet is on her head, against the glowing halo ;
she holds the child in her arms, and two little angels
kneel on each side of her head. The background
is all of gold, the Gothic gold, woven into a con-
ventional pattern. It is a piece of pure convention,
in which colour and pattern are felt delicately, as
so much decoration.

With the fifteenth century life comes playfully
into this artificial paradise ; and the first signed
picture in Seville, the Saint Christopher of Juan
Sanchez de Castro in San Julian, is a vast, humorous
thing, reaching nearly to the ceiling, more than
three times life-size, a child's dream of a picture.
It is painted in all seriousness, and, so far as one
can judge through bad repainting and subsequent
rotting away of the plaster, painted with no little
power. The Saint fills almost the whole of the
picture; he carries the child Christ on his shoulder,
leaning on a pine tree, and the hermit comes out
on shore with his lantern, in front of a little chapel,
28

i

The Painters of Seville.

and looks into the darkness. The hermit reaches
just above Saint Christopher's knee, and two pil-
grims, with staves and cloaks and pilgrim bottles,
are travelHng along his girdle, as he wades in the
deep water, which just covers his ankles. His face
is naive and homely, with a certain pensiveness in
the huge eyes; and the child seems to hold in his
hand the glove of the world, on which rises already
the symbol of his cross. The whole picture, with
its humour and yet solemnity, its childish sense of
the natural wonder of a miracle, is a quite sincere
attempt to render a scene supposed to have really
happened, just as it might have happened. It
may be contrasted with the other huge Saint
Christopher in Seville, the fresco of Matteo Alessio
in the Cathedral, where an ItaHan painter has
done no more than paint an unconvincing picture
of a miracle in which, it is evident, he had no more
than the scene-painter's interest.

Between Sanchez de Castro and his pupil, Juan
Nuiiez, there is a wide interval; for Nufiez, in the
wooden panel in the Cathedral, a Pieta, is completely
but very archaically Flemish, with quite another,
more formal, more awkward, kind of childishness
in design and colour. But he leads, quite naturally,
to Alejo Fernandez, and in Alejo Fernandez we
have almost a great painter, and a painter in whom
Spanish painting in Seville first becomes conscious
of itself, and capable of saying what it has to say.
In some of his pictures an archaic stiffness has not
yet freed itself from the golden bonds of that early

29

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

Gothic work of which his work so often reminds us ;
but Flemish models showed him the way which he
was seeking for himself; and, under that Northern
influence, always so salutary for the Spanish tem-
perament, he makes at last a new thing, profoundly
his own.

In the delicious Virgin of the Rose in the church
of Santa Ana in Triana, we see those early Virgins
of the fourteenth century growing human, but
in the same embowering decoration of gold and
stars. She sits with the child under a golden
canopy in a robe of elaborate pattern, an almost
Chinese pattern of leaves and stems, in pale gold
on brown, and she holds a white rose in her hand.
She holds out the rose to the child, who looks with
serious, childish interest into the open pages of a
brightly illuminated book. Two angels lean, a
little awkwardly, on each arm of her chair ; but with
a certain charm in their naive, pointed faces, in their
bright gold curls falhng over. Higher up two
strange figures, probably cherubim, stand, arrested
in flight, against the upper folds of the canopy.
At the back there is a glimpse of rocky and wooded
country in pale blue. A smaller picture in the same
church shows another Virgin and Child with the
same bright gold canopy, with little flying angels
holding a coronet above the halo ; and here, too,
in the pathetic eyes of the Virgin, in the child's
gesture, there is the same humanity, coming not
too sharply through a traditional form. In two
other small pictures, the Adoration of the Magi and
30

The Painters of Seville.

Saint Rufina and Saint Justina, we have this
dehcate, just a Httle fettered, sense of beauty; in
the Virgin, meek, and with flowing golden hair; in
the almost sly, Sevillan smile of the Patron Saint of
the Giralda. There is always the same delight in
colour and ornament : the bright swords and cloaks
of the Magi, their golden goblets, the elaborate
patterns of gold on brown in robes and cloaks ; and
it is precisely this quality which we find so rarely
in Spanish painters, never, indeed, quite thoroughly,
except in the pictures of this one painter.

In the church of St. Julian there is an altar-piece
in eight divisions (of which one is a copy), telling
many incidents in the life of the Virgin ; and in
this series of pictures we see Alejo Fernandez under
a somewhat diflPerent aspect, as a painter for whom
the visible world exists, not only as beauty, but as
drama. Natural feeling, a vivid and tender sim-
plicity, a curious personal kind of sentiment, dis-
tinguish these pictures, in which St. Joseph, for the
most part no very active spectator in the events of
the divine drama, is for once accepted as a natural,
prominent actor in them. In one, the Virgin and
St. Joseph kneel on either side of the newly-born
child, with a serene, homely unity of devotion. In
the Adoration of the Magi, Joseph leans over his
wife's shoulder, his finger-tips set together, watching
curiously. At the Circumcision, both hold the
child before the priest. As Jesus goes up the steps
of the Temple, to reason with the doctors, Joseph
sits reflectively beside Mary. And at the end, after

31

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

all is over, it is into Joseph's arms that Mary flings
herself, her face distorted with sorrow ; and it is
mainly with solicitude for her that his face is sorrow-
ful. Both grow old together, older in every picture,
the hair whitening, the wrinkles forming in the face
of Joseph ; and in every picture there is a simple,
earnest attempt to tell the real story, with thought-
fully and tenderly felt details. Whatever may still
be at times conventional in the painting, as in the
long oval face of the Virgin, there is no convention
in the arrangement of the scene, the way of telling
a story.

In the large Adoration of the Magi, and in the
three still larger pictures of the Birth and Purifica-
tion of the Virgin and the Reconciliation of St,
Joachim and St. Anne, of which the first is now in
the Sagrario de los Calices, and the three others in
almost impenetrable darkness in the Sacrista Alta
of the Cathedral, we see united in the same com-
position the half artificial beauty of the Virgin of
the Rose and the dramatic sense and human sim-
plicity of the altar-piece in San Julian. Here there
is the same solid gold and elaborate raiment and
jewelled magnificence : in the robes of the Magi,
for instance, and the elaborately arranged hair of
Melchior with its golden hair-pins ; but nowhere
else has life come so directly into the picture. Jan
Van Eyck might almost have painted the sombre
and suffering face of Melchior under the golden
hair-pins ; but it is Alejo Fernandez, now entirely
master of his method, who has brought a new beauty
32

The Painters of Seville.

into the face of the Virgin, as she kneels, in the very
act of hfe, in one of the pictures done in her honour.
Two serving-maids, in another of the series, have in
them the whole warmth and brightness of Seville,
and might have been painted from models of to-day.
And there are grave, bearded faces, the face of
Joseph, who stands beside Mary as the angel
descends out of heaven, in which life has no less of
the exact impress of hfe. Seeing these pictures as
I did, point by point at the end of a candle and a
bunch of tow, without the possibility of seeing them
as a whole, I can only guess at how much I have
lost, in compositions so finely imagined, so truthful
and full of tender human feeling, and at the same
time so gravely splendid in colour and decoration.

Here, for all the influence of Flemish art and of
the art of the unknown Spanish masters of the
fourteenth century, we have an art essentially
Spanish, going indeed beyond the usual Spanish
limits in its delicate care for beauty. The Dutch-
man Kempeneer, known in Spain as Pedro Campaiia,
whose painting is almost contemporary with that
of Alejo Fernandez, belongs to quite another world
of form and sentiment, and in his attempt, as we are
told, to imitate Michel Angelo, he becomes at times
almost more Spanish than the Spaniards. His very
vigorous, extravagant Descent from the Cross, in
the Sacrista Mayor of the Cathedral, with its crude
colour and powerful sense of action, was greatly
admired and extravagantly praised by Murillo. At
other times Campana shows us all his inequalities

33

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

at a glance, as in the altar-piece in many compart-
ments of the Capilla del Mariscal, where the meek
and serious heads of the donors, painted with
admirable Flemish realism in the lower compart-
ments, contrast with the exclamatory, spectacular
movement of the central scenes. I am quite unable
to understand the enthusiasm which still exists in
Spain for this painter, as I am unable to understand
the enthusiasm which exists for his more interesting
contemporary, Luis de Vargas. Just as I am told
that Campana is the Spanish Michel Angelo, so
Luis de Vargas, I am told, is the Spanish Raphael.
Luis de Vargas had been a pupil of Perino del Vaga,
perhaps of Raphael himself, and he brought back
with him from Italy many secrets of painting and
much of the manner of the men who came after
Raphael. Much of his work has perished ; the
famous frescoes have been washed off from the walls
of the Giralda, leaving only a few faintly coloured
traces of bishops' mitres and the outlines of kneeling
figures. I was unfortunate in not being able to
see his masterpiece, the Temporal Generation of
Christ (known as La Gamha), and the pictures
of the Altar del Nascimiento, so carefully had they
been covered during the restoration of the Cathedral.
The portrait of Fernando de Contreras, in the
Sagrario de los Calices, is a serious study after
nature, faithful to all the details of half-shaved
cheeks and the like, hard, unsympathetic, not
without character. But the large Pieta in Santa
Maria la Blanca seemed to show me a thoroughly

34

The Painters of Seville.

skilful, but an insincere painter, whom Italy had
spoilt, as just then it was spoiling all Spanish art.
Pacheco, in his Arte de la Pintura, tells us that Luis
de Vargas was " a rare example of Christian painters,"
that he confessed and partook of the sacraments
often, devoted a certain space of every day to
religious meditation, "and, with the profound con-
sideration of his death, composed his life;" after
his death, a hair shirt and scourge were found,
asperisimos cilicios y disciplinas. His pictures preach,
says Pacheco ; and indeed in this picture I am
perfectly willing to believe in his religious sincerity,
but I cannot believe in his artistic sincerity. The
painting is flat and smooth, the composition elegant,
with a curious mingling of Raphaelesque sweetness
with extreme realism, as in the careful anatomy of
the dead Christ, ghastly in death, showing the stains
of blood, the falling open of the mouth, the darken-
ing of the flesh of the feet. Here, the piety of the
feehng, the aim at telling a story, at rendering a
scene with dramatic emphasis, have produced only
unreality ; it is academic, not emotional ; we see
only an eff"ect that has been aimed at, and indeed
skilfully reahsed, not a story that has been told for
its own sake, as it might have happened.

The influence here is Raphael ; in el divino
Morales, a painter in whom religion seems to
darken into fanaticism, we see a more personal
originality evolving itself from a very eclectic train-
ing. In his early pictures, none of which are to be
seen in Seville, but of which the Prado has a charming

35

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

Virgin and Child and a Presentation in the Temple,
there is a certain naivete, a pale Italian elegance.
Later on, as he becomes himself, the colouring
darkens, the composition hardens, the emphasis of
expression becomes painful, the anatomical minute-
ness of this lean, brown flesh is like that of the early
Flemish painters, or hke that of German wood-
carvers ; might indeed almost be carved out of
brown wood. In such pictures as the triptych in
the Cathedral, or as the Pieta in the Bellas Artes at
Madrid, in all his figures of the Man of Sorrows
and the Mother of Sorrows, everything is sacrificed
to an attempt to express superhuman emotion, and,
among other qualities, the "modesty of nature" is
sacrificed, so that a too intense desire of sincerity
becomes, as it is so hable to do, a new, poignant kind
of affectation. Intensity of sentiment in these faces
is like a disease, sharpening the hneaments and
discolouring the blood, and putting all the suffering
languidness of fever into the eyes. They grimace
with sorrow more violently than the sorrowful faces
of Crivelli, or the most violent German emphasis ;
literally they sweat blood, they have all the physical
disgrace of pain; they are no longer persons, but
emblems, the emblems of the divine agony, as it
appears to the pious Spaniard, whom it pleases to
see the stains of blood on his crucifix.

In passing from Morales to el clerigo Roelas,
the sharpness of the contrast is slightly broken by
Pedro Villegas Marmolejo, who, in his pictures in
the Cathedral and in San Pedro, works very quietly
36

The Painters of Seville.

under Italian influence, not without charm, though
without originaUty. In Juan de las Roelas, who
is thought to have studied at Venice, the Itahan
Renaissance has done all it can do for Spanish
painting. Venetian in his soft warmth of colour,
in the suavity of his handling, Roelas is thoroughly
Spanish in his profound religious sentiment (he
was a priest, and died Canon of Olivares) and in
his simple and vigorous sense of human incident.
There is careless brushwork in his paintings,
spaces are sometimes left uncared for, the composi-
tion is at times a little awkward or a little con-
ventional. But he has feeling, both poetical feeling
and feeling for reality, all through his work, even
when he is least concentrated ; and at his best he
anticipates Murillo, not unworthily, in what is
after all only a part of his originahty. In the
Martyrdom of Saint Andrew, in the Museo, he is
a realist ; life abounds in those sturdy, deeply
coloured figures, who work or watch so earnestly,
with so little sense of the spectator. In the Death
of S. Isidore, in the church dedicated to that Saint,
the earnest, homely, expressive people who stand
about the dying Saint are thoroughly Spanish people,
and they are absorbed in what is happening; not,
as in the Pieta of Luis de Vargas, in what we are
thinking of them. And this group on earth melts
imperceptibly, almost in the manner which is to
be Murillo's, into a heavenly group, lifted on
vague, lighted clouds : child angels, and angelic
youths, singing and playing on guitars, and above,

37

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

Christ and Mary, who wait with crowns of gold
and flowers, and calm angels at their side. In
one section of an altar-piece in the University
Church, the Blessing of the Infant Christ, the same
elegant, softly coloured figures bring in the same
celestial gaiety, in these flights of singing and
playing angels with harp, viola, and guitar, out of
a golden open heaven, a cloud of delicate young
faces. And in the picture of St. Anne and the
Virgin, in the Museo, there is a singular gentle-
ness and repose, certainly more Itahan than Spanish.
The Virgin kneels at her mother's side reading
out of a book, doubtless the prophecy of her own
honour. She is crowned with a jewelled coronet,
over the flower in her hair, and wears many rings
and jewelled bracelets, and pearls sewn in the
border of her dress; St. Anne, after the fashion
of Seville, wearing many shawls, of diflFerent colours.
Angels crowd the space above them, looking out
of warm clouds, as Murillo's are to look, but with
less of his celestial atmosphere, less power of dis-
tinguishing vision, in painting, from real life. In
front of St. Anne's chair, over which hangs a
crimson curtain, is a httle cabinet, the drawer open,
showing linen and lace; a dog and cat, a very
natural cat, lie together in front, with a work-
basket near them. I find myself tiring a Httle of
Roelas, as I see picture after picture representing
incidents in the Hves of the Saints, always capably,
with natural sentiment and natural grace, but rarely
with any great intensity; here, in what is after all
38

The Painters of Seville.

his exceptional manner, and a manner which gave
offence to his contemporaries, notably Pacheco,
from the naive intimacy of its detail, he paints a
placid scene with a full sense of its beauty and of
its beautiful opportunities.

One of the compartments of the altar-piece in
the University Church, an Adoration of the Shep-
herds, by Francisco Varela, a pupil of Roelas,
shows the influence of Roelas on a more sombre
nature. It is singularly original in its effects of
hght and shadow : the stormy background, middle
darkness and sudden hght above the manger
roofed with a brood of angels. There is both
reahsm and a sense of beauty in the earnest group
in the foreground, the Andalusian shepherd with
a lamb on his shoulders, the inexpHcable woman,
half undraped and half in armour, who presents a
book of music to the laughing child. Another
and more famous follower of Roelas, Francisco
Herrera, scarcely chooses what is best in his master
to imitate, in his "furious," too vehemently Spanish
way. There are two huge pictures of Herrera
in the Museo, one on each side of the Martyrdom
of Saint Andrew; in the earher of the two, the
St. Hermengild, vigorous as it is, the sincerity and
simplicity of Roelas have already gone, the Saint
is an operatic tenor, every figure poses; in the
later, St. Basil, all is splash-work, extravagant
contortion, and hectic light and shadow.

It was from Herrera that Velasquez took his
first lessons, before he became the pupil of Francisco

39

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

Pacheco, an Italianised painter, whose series of
pictures in the Museo, the Legend of S. Pedro
Nolasco, has at least a certain quietude, flat, almost
colourless though they are. Pacheco was a better
writer than painter, and his Arte de Pintura, pub-
lished at Seville in 1646, is full of interesting theory
and detail. He is a strict traditionalist, and finds
a religious basis for the colours of pictures, the
position of Saints in them, and reasons of "the
different kinds of nobility that accompany the art
of painting, and of its universal utility." He
was chosen by the Inquisition as censor of pictures,
an office which he held with more impartiality
than some of his theories would seem to imply.
He even learnt to put a certain naivete which is
almost naturalness into his later pictures, perhaps
from the example of his pupil, of whose virtudy
limpieza y huenas partes, y de las esperanzas de su
natural y grande ingenio he speaks with such hearty
enthusiasm; finding in "his glory the crown of
my later years." Pacheco's pictures in the Museo
gain from their position, for by their side are the
coloured lithographs of Juan de Castillo, the master
of Murillo, and one of the worst painters who
ever lived. Alonso Cano, architect, sculptor, and
painter, who studied under Montanes and Pacheco,
has been admirably defined by Lord Leighton as
"an eclectic with a Spanish accent." There are
many of his charming, facile pictures in Seville ;
and in one of them, the Purgatory in the Museo,
he is for once almost wholly Spanish, as he is in
40

The Painters of Seville.

the curious, half caricature pictures of Visigothic
Kings, in the Prado at Madrid. It is a panel
representing souls burning in red flames ; four
men and two children, with others seen shadowily,
lifting their hands, not without hope, out of the
burning. It is a simple, dreadful realisation of a
dreadful dogma; it gives, without criticism, all
the cruelty of religion.

Francisco Zurbaran, in the thirty or forty pic-
tures of his which are to be seen in Seville, sums
up almost everything I have said of the typical
characteristics of Spanish painting; and yet, after
all, remains a passionate mediocrity, in whom I
find it impossible to take any very personal interest.
The Museo contains three of his largest, most
notable pictures, the Virgin de las Cuevas, the
Apotheosis of St. Thomas Aquinas, and the Car-
thusian Monks at Table ; yet even in these pictures
I find something hard, unsympathetic in his touch,
as he tells his story so adequately, so pointedly,
and with singular honesty in its emphasis. They
have all his solid, uninspired care for formal outline
and expression, expression counting for so much
and colour for so little ; though the Apotheosis
has, for once, caught a little of the warmth of
Roelas, of whom Zurbaran was a visitor, if not a
pupil. The monks, like all his monks, seem to
be reflected in a mirror suddenly placed in their
cell or refectory ; they have the very attitude of
life, letting something of a burning inner life come
through into their faces ; and yet, on these canvases

41

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

without atmosphere, they are not ahve. Zurbaran
achieves reahsm without attaining Ufe. He shows
us people, copied from hfe, in whom we discern a
brooding emotion ; but he paints them without
emotion. His severe and lady-hke Saints in the
Hospital Civil, in their fantastic dresses, with their
fixed air of meditation, are Kke Gothic statues painted
upon canvas. When he aims at an emotional
rendering of emotion, a very Spanish kind of in-
sincerity comes in, and he paints pictures like the
extravagant female saint in the Sacristia Mayor,
seated in a false ecstasy before a book and a skull.
His Crucifixions, in which a certain intensity finds
precisely the motive which it can render with all
the hard, motionless truth of his natural manner,
are scarcely to be called extravagant, if the horror
of that death is to be painted at all. Here the
painter of monks puts into his canvas for once a
kind of desperate religious ecstasy.

There is something of the spirit and manner of
Zurbaran in the early realistic pictures of Murillo,
in the San Leandro and San Bonaventura of the
Museo, for instance. Another early picture, an
An7iu7iciation, painted in the estilo frio, shows us a
precisely Sevillan type in the almost piquant Virgin,
black-haired, and with the acute hard eyes of
Spanish women. In an Adoration of the Shepherds
in the Museo, the dark young shepherd, who has
come first to the manger, looks at the divine child
with a frank, unrestrained, delightfully natural
curiosity, fairly open-mouthed, with the honest
42

The Painters of Seville.

peasant stare of amazement. In the Last Supper^
in Santa Maria la Blanca, with its passionate energy
of characterisation, Murillo is almost purely realistic,
realising the scene, certainly, with perfect natural-
ness. But from the beginning, and through all
his changes, his pictures hve. There is not an
example in Seville of what is most familiar to us in
his work, the genre pictures, the somewhat idealised
beggar-boys. But, with this scarcely important
exception, we see in Seville, and we can see only in
Seville, all that it is important to us to see of his
work. Among the six pictures which still hang
in the places for which they were painted, in the
church of that Hospital de la Caridad founded by
Don Miguel Mariara, the original Don Juan, as
it is thought by many, are the large compositions,
La Sed, and the Paji y Feces, in which Murillo
shows his mastery of the drama of a large can-
vas, in which many human figures move and
group themselves in a broad landscape. In the
Museo there are twenty-three pictures, and
among them the great Capuchin series ; in the
Baptistery of the Cathedral there is the St. Antho7iy
of Padua; and elsewhere, in churches, convents,
and private collections, I know not how many
further pictures, sometimes, like the Last Supper
in Santa Maria la Blanca, painfully darkened,
sometimes no more than a Christ painted rapidly
on a wooden crucifix for a friendly monk. But
in all these pictures, so unequal, and only gradually
attaining a completely personal mastery of style,

43

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

there is the very energy of Hfe, Spanish hfe, burning
at the points of its greatest intensity.

In Murillo the Spanish extravagance turns to
sweetness, a sweetness not always to our taste,
but genuine, national, and perfectly embodied in
those pictures in which he has painted ecstasy as
no one else has ever painted it. In the warm,
mellow, not bright or gHttering light of the St.
Anthony of Padua, vision sweeps back the walls
as if a curtain had been drawn aside before the
kneehng monk, and the glory is upon him : the
child, in all the radiance of divine infancy, as if
leaping on clouds of golden fire, and about him a
swirling circle of little angels, burning upwards to
a brighter ardency, as if the highest point of their
circle were lit by the nearer light of heaven. His
colour, in these ecstatic pictures, is a colour one
can fancy really that of joyous clouds about the
gates of heaven, jewelled for the feet of Saints.
And the little angels really fly, though they are
otherwise perfectly human, and of the earth. The
Virgin, too, has all the humanity of a young mother,
as she leans out of embowering clouds, or treads
on the globe of the earth, which whitens under her
among drifting worlds. She is Fray Luis de

Leon'j

Virgen del sol vesiida

De luces eternales coronada,

Slue huellas con divinos pies la luna.

and yet her gestures are full of human warmth;
she lives there, certainly, as vividly, and with as

44

The Painters of Seville.

much earthly remembrance, as at any time on the
earth.

The emotion of Murillo, in these pictures, is
the emotion of the Spaniard as it turns passionately
to religion. In such a picture as his own favourite,
St. Thomas of Villanueva giving alms, he has created
for us on the canvas a supreme embodiment of what
is so large a part of religion in Spain, the grace and
virtue of almsgiving, with the whole sympathetic
contrast of Spanish life emphasised sharply in the
admirable, pitying grace of the Saint, and the
swarming misery of the beggars. In such others
as St. Francis by the Cross and the St. Anthony
of the Museo, we are carried to a further point,
in which practical religion becomes mysticism, a
mysticism akin to that of St. John of the Cross,
in which the devout soul swoons "among the
lilies." This mysticism finds its expression in
these rapt canvases, in the abandonment of these
nervous, feminine Saints to the sweetness of asceti-
cism, in one to the luxury of supreme sorrow, in
the other to the ecstasy of the divine childhood.
It is precisely because these Saints of Murillo
abandon themselves so unthinkingly, with so Spanish
an abandonment, to their mystical contemplation,
that they may seem to us, with our Northern senti-
ment of restraint, to pose a little. In desert places,
among dimly lighted clouds, that rise about them
in waves of visible darkness, they are dreamers
who have actualised their dreams, mystics who,
by force of passionate contemplation, have attained

45

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

the reality of their vision ; and the very real forms
at which they gaze are but evocations which have
arisen out of those mists and taken shape before
their closed or open eyes. And indeed in these
pictures, in which the Virgin appears in a burst of
sunlight out of the darkness, treading on the dim
world and the crescent moon, or in which the
Trinity flashes itself upon St. Augustine as he
writes, or in which Christ comes back to the cross
for the sake of St. Francis or to the cradle for St.
Anthony, all is vision, vision creating vision; and
the humanity in them is so real, because it is so
powerfully evoked. Thought out of the void,
with such another energy as that with which Rem-
brandt thought his visions, more real than reality,
out of burning darkness, these rise out of a softer
shadow, through which the light breaks flower-
like, or as if it sang aloud.

To turn from Murillo to Valdes Leal is like
passing from the service of the Mass in a cathedral
to a representation of Mass in a theatre. He paints,
indeed, effectively, but always for efi^ect. His
painting is superficial, and has the tricks of modern
French painters. Shadowy figures float in the air,
apparitions seen as the vulgar conceive them, as
insubstantial things ; showy, dressy women parade
in modern clothes ; worldly angels twist in elegant
attitudes, the same attitude repeated in two pictures.
Even the picture of St. John leading the three
Maries to Calvary, which has movement, and may
at first seem to have simple movement, does not

46

The Painters of Seville.

bear too close a scrutiny : the figures grow conscious
as one looks at them. Drama has become theatrical,
and his St. Jerome in the wilderness, flinging his
arms half across the canvas, with the French ladies
about him, and a thunderstorm in the distance, is
far indeed from the honest dramatic sense of Roelas.
He is expressive, certainly, but he would express
too much, and with too little conviction. In his
altar-piece in the church of the Carmen at Cordova,
done before he came to Seville, an immense picture
in eleven compartments, architecturally arranged,
giving the history of Elijah, there is a certain
absorption in his subject, which gives him, indeed,
opportunities for his too theatrical qualities, fire
breaking out of the wheels of the chariot and the
manes and tails of the horses, and out of the sword
with which Elijah has slain the prophets of Baal.
He did not again achieve so near an approach to
spontaneity in extravagance. In his two famous
pictures in the Caridad, at which Murillo is said
to have held his nose, the Spanish macabre is carried
to its utmost limits. In one a skeleton with one
foot on the globe tramples on all the arts and in-
ventions of man ; the picture is inscribed In ictu
oculi. In the other a rotting bishop Hes in his
broken coflfin by the side of a rotting knight, in a
red and gloomy darkness ; the picture is inscribed
Finis glories mundi. Both are horribly impressive,
painted brilliantly, and with an almost literally
overpowering vigour. They lead the way to other,
feebler, later pictures, some of which may be seen

47

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

in a side room at the Museo, where, for instance, a
man in a black cloak contemplates a crowned skull
which he holds in his hands, while a cardinal's red
hat lies at his feet. Here Spanish painting, losing
all its earnestness and simplicity, in its representa-
tion of human life or of religious ecstasy, losing
direction for its vigour, losing the very qualities
of painting, becomes moralising, becomes em-
blematical, dying in Seville a characteristic death.

Winter, 1899.

48

Domenico Theotocopuli:
A Study at Toledo.

An entry in the books of the church of Santo Tome
at Toledo, recently discovered, tells us that Do-
menico Theotocopuli died on April 7, 1614, and
was buried in the church of Santo Domingo el
Antiguo : En siete del Abril 1614, falescio Dominico
Greco. No hizo testamentOy recibio los sacramentoSy
enterose en Santo Domingo el Antiguo. Dio velas.
The signature to a picture in the Escurial tells us
that he came from Crete. We do not know the
date of his birth ; we are told that he studied at
Venice under Titian; the earhest date which
connects him with Toledo is 1577, when the chapter
of the cathedral ordered from him the Disrobing
of Christy now in the sacristy. He is said to have
been not only a painter, a sculptor, and an architect,
but to have written on art and philosophy ; he was
a fierce litigant on behalf of his art and his own
dignity as an artist ; we are told of his petulance
in speech, as in the assertion that Michel Angelo
could not paint; there are legends of his pride,
ostentation, and dehberate eccentricity, of his wealth,
of his supposed madness ; Gongora wrote a sonnet
on his death, and Felix de Artiaga two sonnets on
his own portrait and on the monument to Queen
Margarita. The poet addresses him as Divino
Griego and Milagro Griego; but the name by which
he was generally known is the half-Spanish, half-
ItaUan name. El Greco. One of the most original
painters who ever lived, he was almost forgotten

49

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

until the present century ; the unauthenticated story
of his madness is still commonly repeated, not only
by the sacristans of Toledo, and it is only quite lately
that there has been any attempt to take him seriously,
to consider his real position in the history of art and
his real value as a painter. What follows is a per-
sonal impression of those aspects of his work and
temperament which I was able to note for myself
in a careful study of his pictures in Spain, and
chiefly of those at Toledo and Madrid.

Theotocopuli seems to have discovered art over
again for himself, and in a way which will suggest
their varying ways to some of the most typical
modern painters. And, indeed, I think he did
discover his art over again from the beginning,
setting himself to the problem of the representation
of life and vision, of the real world and the spiritual
world, as if no one had ever painted before. Perhaps
it is rather, as the legends tell us, with an only too
jealous consciousness of what had been done, and
especially by Titian, whose pupil he is said to have
been, and whose work his earliest pictures done
in Spain are said to have resembled so closely that
the one might actually have been mistaken for the
other. Real originality is often deliberate origi-
nality, and though the story is scarcely true, and
though it was no doubt Tintoretto and not Titian
whom he studied under, I should have seen no
injustice to Theotocopuli in accepting the story.
What it means chiefly is, that he saw a problem
before him, considered it carefully on every side,
50

A Study at Toledo.

and found out for himself what was his own way
of solving it.

He goes back, then, frankly, to first principles :
how one personally sees colour, form, the way in
which one remembers expression, one's own natural
way of looking at things. And he chooses, out of
all the world of colour, those five which we see on
his palette in his portrait of himself at Seville, white,
vermilion, lake, yellow ochre, and ivory black, with,
here as elsewhere, a careful limitation of himself
to what he has chosen naturally out of the things
open to his choice : style, that is, sternly appre-
hended as the man.

And he has come, we may suppose, to look on
human things somewhat austerely, with a certain
contempt for the facile joys and fresh carnations of
life, as he has for the poses and colours of those
painters of life who have seen life differently ; for,
even, Titian's luxurious loitering beside sumptuous
flesh in pleasant gardens, and for the voluptuous
joy of his colour. He wants to express another
kind of world, in which life is chilled into a con-
tinual proud meditation, in which thought is more
than action, and in which the flesh is but Httle
indulged. He sees almost the spiritual body, in
his search beyond the mere humanity of white and
red, the world's part of coloured dresses, the attitudes
of the sensual life. Emotion is somewhat dried
out of him, and he intellectualises the warmth of
life until it becomes at times the spectre of a thought,
which has taken visible form, somewhat alarmingly.

51

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

And Toledo, too, has had its influence upon
him, an influence scarcely to be exaggerated in the
formation of his mind. TheotocopuH, it seems to
me, is not to be understood apart from Toledo, the
place to which a natural affinity brought him, the
place which was waiting to develop just his particular
originality. Toledo is one of the most individual
cities in Europe. It is set on a high and bare rock,
above a river broken by sounding weirs, in the
midst of a sombre and rocky land. With its high,
windowless walls, which keep their own secrets,
its ascents and descents through narrow passage-
ways between miles of twisting grey stone, it seems
to be encrusted upon the rock, like a fantastic
natural product ; and it is at the same time a museum
of all the arts which have left their mark upon
Europe. Almost the best Moorish art is to be
seen there, mingled with much excellent Christian
art ; and the mingling, in this strange place, which
has kept its Arab virginity while accepting every
ornament which its Christian conquerors have
offered it, is for once perfectly successful. Winter
and summer fall upon it, set thus naked on a
high rock, with all their violence; even in spring
the white streets burn like furnaces, wherever a
little space is left unshaded ; the air is parching,
the dust rises in a fine white cloud. Walk long
enough, down descending paths, until you hear the
sound of rushing water, and you come out on a
crumbling edge of land, going down precipitously,
with its cargo of refuse, into the Tagus, or upon

52

A Study at Toledo.

one of the sharply turning roads which lead down-
wards in a series of incUned planes. On the other
side of the ravine another hill rises, here abrupt
grey rock, there shaded to an infinitely faint green,
which covers the grey rock hke a transparent
garment. Every turn, which leads you to the
surprise of the precipice, has its own surprise for
you ; there seem to be more churches than houses,
and every church has its own originality, or it may
be, its own series of originalities. If it had none
of its churches, if it were a mere huddle of white
and windowless Arab houses, like Elche, which it
somewhat resembles, Toledo would still be, from
its mere poise there on its desert rock, one of the
most picturesque places in Spain. As it is, every
stone which goes to make its strange, penetrating
originality of aspect, has its history and possesses
its own various beauty. To Theotocopuh, coming
to this austere and chill and burning city of living
rock from the languid waters of Venice, a new world
was opened, the world of what is most essentially
and yet exceptionally Spanish, as it can appeal,
with all its strength, only to strangers. Toledo
made Theotocopuh Spanish, more Spanish than the
Spaniards.

And Toledo was surely not without its influence
in the suggestion of that new system of colour,
teaching him, as it certainly would, to appreciate
colour in what is cold, grey, austere, without
luxuriance or visible brightness. The colour
of Toledo is marvellously sharp and dim at

53

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

once, with an incomparable richness in all the
shades to which stone can lend itself under
weather, and in sun and shadow; it is a colour
violently repressed, a thing to be divined, waited
upon, seen with intelligence. It is amply defended
against indifferent eyes : it shocks, and is subtle,
two defences ; but there it is, the colour of Theo-
tocopuli.

In the Museo Provincial there is a bird's-eye view
of Toledo by Theotocopuh which is the most fan-
tastic landscape I have ever seen, like a glimpse of
country seen in a nightmare, and yet, somehow, very
like a real Toledo. It is done with a sweeping
brush, with mere indications, in these bluish white
houses which rush headlong downhill and struggle
wildly uphill, from the phantom Tagus below to
the rushing storm-sky above. The general tone
is pale earthy green, colouring the hills on which
the city rests, and intersecting the streets of pale
houses, and running almost without a break into
the costume of the youth in the foreground, who
holds a map of the city in his hands, fiUing a huge
space of the picture. Toledo itself is grey and
green, especially as night comes on over the country,
and the rocks and fields colour faintly under the
sunset, the severity of their beauty a little softened
by a natural effect which is like an effect in painting.
It is just the effect of this phantasmal landscape;
and, here again, all Toledo is in the work of Theoto-
copuh, and his work all Toledo. Coming out from
seeing his pictures in some vast, old, yellow church,

54

A Study at Toledo.

into these never quite natural or lifelike streets,
where blind beggars play exquisitely on their guitars
in the shadow of a doorway, and children go barefoot,
with flowers in their mouths, leading pet lambs,
I seem to find his models everywhere : these dark
peasants with their sympathetic and bright serious-
ness, the women who wear his colours, the men
who sit in the cafes with exactly that lean diminishing
outline of face and beard, that sallow skin, and those
fixed eyes.

In his portraits, as we see them for the most
part in the Prado at Madrid, there is a certain
subdued ecstasy, purely ascetic, and purely tempera-
mental in its asceticism, as of a fine Toledo blade,
wearing out its scabbard through the mere sharpness
of inaction. There is a kind of family likeness, a
likeness, too, with his own face, in these portraits
of Spanish gentlemen, in the black clothes and
enveloping white ruff" of the period : the lean face,
pointed beard, deep eyes, thin hair, olive skin, the
look of melancholy pride. Seen at a little distance,
the black clothes disappear into the black back-
ground ; nothing is seen but the eager face starting
out of the white ruff", like a decapitated head seen
in a dream. Their faces are all nerves, distinguished
nerves, quieted by an eff"ort, the faces of dreamers
in action ; they have all the brooding Spanish soul,
with its proud self-repression. And they live with
an eager, remote, perfectly well-bred life, as of people
who could never be taken unawares, in a vulgar or
trivial moment. In their tense, intellectual aspect

55

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

there is all the romantic sobriety of the frugal
Spanish nature.

Look for instance at the portrait of the man with
a sword, his hand laid across his breast with a
gesture of the same curious fixity as the eyes.
Compare this portrait with the fine portrait by the
pupil of Theotocopuli, Luis Tristan, through whom
we are supposed to reach Velasquez. In Tristan
there is more realism, a more normal flesh; there
is none of that spiritual delicacy, by which the colours
of the flesh are dimmed, as if refined away by the
fretting and consuming spirit. In the portrait by
Theotocopuli, the light falls whitely upon the man's
forehead, isolating him within a visionary atmos-
phere, in which he lives the mysterious hfe of a
portrait. He exists there, as if sucked out of the
darkness by the pale light which illuminates his
forehead, a soul and a gesture, a secret soul and a
repressive gesture.

And these portraits are painted with all the
economical modern mastery of means, with almost
as black and hard an outline as Manet, with strong
shadows and significant indications of outline, with
rapid suppressions, translations of colour by colour,
decomposition of tones, as in the beautiful lilacs
of the white flesh. Individuality is pushed to a
mannerism, but it is a mannerism which renders a
very select and vivid aspect of natural truth, and with
a virile and singular kind of beauty.

In the earliest pictures painted under the influence
of the Venetian painters, as in the Disrobing of
56

A Study at Toledo.

Christ in the sacristy of the cathedral at Toledo,
there is a perfect mastery of form and colour, as
the Venetians understood them; the composition is
well balanced, sober, without extravagance. In the
Assumptiofi of the Firgin, over the high altar of
Santo Domingo el Antiguo, there is just a suggestion
of the hard black and white of the later manner,
but for the most part it is painted flowingly, with a
vigour always conscious of tradition. A Virgin of
splendid humanity reminds me of one of the finest
of Alonso Cano's wooden statues. The somewhat
fiercely meditative saints in the side panels are at
once Spanish and Italian ; Italian by their formal
qualities of painting, certainly Spanish by an in-
tensity of religious ardour which recalls and excels
Zurbaran. In the Adoration of the Shepherds and
the Resurrection, in the same church, we see already
sharp darknesses of colour, an earthly pallor of flesh,
a sort of turbulence flushing out of the night of a
black background. In the latter picture there is on
one side a priest, finely and soberly painted in his
vestments of white and pale gold ; and, on the other,
almost Blake-hke figures asleep in attitudes of
violent repose, or rising suddenly with hands held
up against the dazzling hght which breaks from
the rising Saviour. But it is in the Martyrdom of
S. Maurizio, ordered by Philip II, as an altar-piece
for the Escurial, and refused by him when it had
been painted, that we see the complete abandonment
of warm for cold colouring, the first definite search
for a wholly personal manner. Is it that he has

57

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

not yet assimilated his new manner ? for the picture
seems to me a sort of challenge to himself and to his
critics, an experiment done too consciously to be
quite sincere or quite successful. There is a wild
kind of beauty, harshly and deUberately unsym-
pathetic, in this turbulent angehc host, these figures
of arbitrary height, placed strangely, their anatomy
so carefully outhned under clinging draperies of
crude blues and yellows, their skin turned livid
under some ghastly supernatural light. In another
picture painted for the Escurial, and now to be seen
there, the Dream of Philip II., there is a hell which
suggests the fierce material hells of Hieronymus
van Bosch : a huge, fanged mouth wide open, the
damned seen writhing in that red cavern, a lake of
flame awaiting them beyond, while angels fly over-
head, sainted persons in rich ecclesiastical vestments
kneel below, and the king, dressed in black, kneels
at the side. It is almost a vision of madness, and
is as if the tormented brain of the fanatic who built
those prison walls about himself, and shut himself
living into a tomb-like cell, and dead into a not
more tomb-hke niche in a crypt, had wrought itself
into the brain of the painter; who would indeed
have found something not uncongenial to himself
in this mountainous place of dust and grey granite,
in which every line is rigid, every colour ashen, in
a kind of stony immobility more terrible than any
other of the images of death.

It was only three years after the painting of the
Martyrdom of S. Maurizio that TheotocopuU painted

58

A Study at Toledo.

his masterpiece, the Burial of the Conde de Orgaz,
which was ordered by the Archbishop of Toledo
for the tomb, in the church of Santo Tome, of
Gonzalo Ruiz de Toledo, Conde de Orgaz, who
had died in the thirteenth century. The picture
is still to be seen there, in its corner of the little
white mosque-like church, where one comes upon
it with a curious sensation of surprise, for it is at
once as real and as ghostly as a dream, and it
reminds one of nothing one has ever seen before.
The picture, as it takes hold upon one, first of all,
by a scheme of colour as startling as the harmonies
of Wagner in music, seems to have been thought
out by a brain for once wholly original, in forgetful-
ness of all that had ever been done in painting. Is
it that reality, and the embodied forms of the
imagination, have been seen thus, at a fixed angle,
instinctively and deliberately, for a picture, by an
artist to whom all life is the escaping ghost of art ?
Certainly its austerity, its spiritual realism, its
originality of composition, so simple as to be
startling, and of colour, the reticence of a passionate
abnegation ; the tenderness of the outHnes of the
drooping dead body, in its rich armour ; the mas-
culine seriousness in all the faces, each of which is
hke one of the portraits in the Prado, and with all
their subtlety, make the picture one of the master-
pieces of painting. The upper part is a celestial
company, arranged so as to drift like a canopy over
the death-scene below ; and these angels are painted
in swift outline, their blue and yellow draperies

59

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

sweeping the vehement clouds. Below, where the
warrior is dying, and his friends, with their dis-
tinguished Castillian faces, their black clothes which
sink into the shadow, the white rufFs about their
thin faces and pointed beards standing out star-
thngly, crowd about him, we have the real world, in
all the emphasis of its contrast to the spiritual
world. Every face lives its own life, there on the
canvas, assisting at this death as an actual spectator,
thinking of this and of other things, not as a merely
useful part of a composition. And the beauty of
beautiful things is nowhere neglected : the fine
armour, the golden and embroidered vestments of
the bishop, the transparent white linen of the
surplice worn by the tall man in the foreground,
the gracious charm of the young priest who stoops
over the dying man. The chief indication of what
is to be the extravagant later manner comes out in
the painting of the hands, with their sharp, pained
gesticulation, to which nature is a little sacrificed.
They must exclaim, in their gesture.

Madness, it has commonly been supposed, and
will still be told you by all the sacristans of Toledo ;
a disease of the eye, as it is now thought ; mere
insistent and defiant originality of search after w^hat
was new and powerfully expressive, as it may well
have been ; something, certainly, before long set
Theotocopuli chevauchant hors du possible, as Gautier
puts it, in those amazing pictures by which he is
chiefly known, the religious pictures in the Prado
at Madrid, in the churches and the Hospital a fuera
60

A Study at Toledo.

at Toledo, and in some galleries and private collec-
tions outside Spain. In the immense retablo of
Santa Clara, with its six large and four small panels,
its gilded and painted statues, the sombre splendour
of colour begins to darken, that it may be the more
austere; the forms and faces, so vigorous in St.
Jerome, so beautiful in St. Anne, begin to harden
a Httle ; but as yet leanness has not eaten up all,
nor a devouring energy consumed away the incidents
of the drama into a kind of spectral reflection of it.
In the Dead Christ in the Arms of God the Father ,
in the Prado, energy has grown eager and restless,
as the divine persons are seen couched upon rolling
white clouds, while a burst of golden sunhght
blazes upon the great white wings of God. In the
Ascension near it, where Christ floats upw^ards,
carrying a white banner, while the soldiers fall about
his feet, throwing their arms and swords wildly
into the air, the Hghts seem to hurdle to and fro,
catching the tips of noses, the points of knees, the
hollows of breast-bones, in a w^aste of clouds and
smoke. In the Baptism of Christ, the anatomies
grow bonier than ever, more violently distorted by
shadows, as a green and blue flood pours out angels
like foam about the feet of God the Father. There
is a Crucifixion as if seen by lightning-flashes, against
a sky crackling with flames, w^hile a poisonous
green light flashes upon the tormented figures
below. The hollow anatomy of Christ turns livid,
the Httle angels who flutter about the cross are
shadowed by the same spectral light, which sickens

6i

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

their wings to green ; another angel, at the foot of
the cross, is coloured like the gold heart and green
leaves of a crocus. This angel catches the blood
dripping from the feet of Christ in a handkerchief,
the Magdalen kneels beside him, holding up another
handkerchief to catch the blood ; the other angels
catch in their hands the blood dripping from the
hands and side of Christ. In this picture all the
extravagances of Spanish painting are outdone ; but
without a trace of affectation. All these emblemati-
cal details are like things seen, in a fury of vision,
by one to whom sight is a disease of the imagination.
In an Assumption of the Virgin in S. Vicente at
Toledo, the whole landscape seems on fire, with
flames of more than sunset, as an angel in a pale
saffron robe bears up the feet of the Virgin, one
gorgeous wing of ruddy brown spread out across
the sky, while flame-winged angels surround her,
one playing languidly upon a 'cello. And this
surging tumult of colour, wild, sensitive, eloquent,
seems to speak a new language, with vehement
imperfection. Here, as in the Baptism in the
Hospital a fuera, in which earnestness has become
a kind of dementia, there is some of the beauty of
an extravagant natural thing, of a stormy and in-
coherent sunset. It is as if a painter had tried to
embody such a sunset, creating fantastic figures to
translate the suggestion of its outlines.

And so Theotocopuli ends, in that exaggeration
of himself which has overtaken so many of those
artists who have cared more for energy than for
62

A Study at Toledo.

beauty. His palette is still the limited, cold palette
which we have seen in the hands of his portrait at
Seville, but colour seems to chafe against restraint,
and so leap more wildly within its limits. The
influence of Tintoretto is after all unforgotten,
though it is seen now in a kind of parody of itself.
Lines lengthen and harden, as men seem to grow
into trees, ridged and gnarled with strange accidents
of growth. That spiritual body which he has
sought for the reticent souls of his portraits becomes
a stained, earthly thing which has known corruption.
No longer, at all equably, master of himself or of
his vision, he allows his skill of hand to become
narrow, fanatical ; and, in his last pictures, seems
rather an angry prophet, denouncing humanity,
than a painter, faithful to the beauty and expressive-
ness of natural things.

Spring, 1899.

63

The Poetry of Santa Teresa
and San Juan de la Cruz.,

I.

"Here in Spain there are many poets," said a
Capuchin monk to me, as, on Christmas Day, we
stood together in the convent hbrary, looking
through the barred windows at the sunset which
flamed over Seville. "The people are the poets.
They love beautiful things, they are moved by
them ; that word which you will hear constantly on
their lips: Mir a! ('Look!') is itself significant.
They would say it now if they were here, looking
at the sunset, and they would point out to one another
the colours, the shape of that tower silhouetted
against the sky ; they would be full of excited
dehght. Is there not something in that of the
poetic attitude? They have the feeling; some-
times they put it into words, and make those rhymes
of which the greater part are lost, but some are at
last written down, and you can read them in books."
We had been discussing the Spanish mystics,
San Juan de la Cruz, Juan de Avila, Fray Luis
de Leon, Santa Teresa; and I had just been turning
over a facsimile of the original MS. of the Castillo
Interior in Santa Teresa's bold, not very legible,
handwriting, with its feminine blots here and there
on the pages. I had been praising the great poetry
of the two saints, and lamenting the rarity of really
sincere, really personal, lyric poetry in Spanish ;
and the monk's answer, as I thought over it on
64

S. Teresa and S. Juan de la Cruz.

my way home that evening, seemed to me to point
to the real truth of the matter. The Spanish
temperament, as I have been able to see for myself
during the three months I have already been in
Spain, is essentially a poetical temperament. It is
brooding, passionate, sensitive, at once voluptuous
and solemn. Here is at least the material for
poetry. But the moment a Spaniard begins to
write, he has the choice of an extraordinary number
of bad models, and, as in his architecture, as in so
much of even his painting, he has been readier to
adapt than to invent. Even Calderon, a great
poet, is a perilous model; and what of Gongora
or Garbilaso, of Espronceda or Zorrilla .? On the
one hand one finds extravagance and affectation ;
on the other, haste, homeliness, and lack of care.
In a sense, this poetry is often enough personal,
but when it is personal in sentiment it is not personal
in form, as in Espronceda, who indeed wrote the
poetry he was living, but wrote it in the manner
of Byron. The natural human voice, speaking
straight out of the heart, pure lyric poetry, that is,
cannot be found in Spanish literature outside the
mystics, and a final choice may indeed be limited
to Santa Teresa and San Juan de la Cruz. These
speak to God in Christ, the one as a mother to a
child, the other as a wife to a husband. For each,
the individual passion makes its own form, almost
its own language, so that Crashaw's brilliant line
of verse, "O 'tis not Spanish but 'tis Heaven she
speaks 1 " is really a subtle criticism as well. And,

65

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

singularly unlike as is the childishly naked simplicity
of Santa Teresa to the elaborate web of sweetness
in which San Juan de la Cruz enfolds his rapture,
each has the same supreme lyric quality : personal
passion moulding individual form.

And the poetry of the people, in its lesser, its
less final way, has this quality too ; so that in these
two great Spanish poets we see the flower at last
growing directly from the root. An unknown,
perfectly spontaneous poet of the people makes up
his little stanza of three or four lines because he has
something to say which hurts him so much to keep
in that he is obliged to say it. This of itself is not
enough to make poetry, but it will make poetry if
so intense a desire comes to life in a nature already
poetically sensitive, in a nature such as this of the
Spaniards. And the Spaniard, with that something
abrupt, nervous, which there is in him, is singularly
well able to condense emotion into brief form,
such as he has created for these popular songs,
which are briefer than those of most other nations,
an impassioned statement, and no more.

In the poetry of Santa Teresa we find almost
the form of the popular song, and a choice of words
which is for the most part no more than an in-
stinctively fine selection of its actual language. San
Juan de la Cruz, who lived habitually in an abstract
world, out of which only a supreme emotion could
draw him, has a more conscious choice of language,
subtilising upon words that he may render all the
subtlety of spiritual sensation ; and he uses largely
66

S. Teresa and S. Juan de la Cruz.

a favourite literary form of that time, the five-Hne
stanza in which, for example, the greater part of
the poems of Fray Luis de Leon are written. But
I am sure neither the one nor the other ever wrote
a line with the intention of "making poetry," that
intention which ruins Spanish verse to a deeper
degree than the verse of most nations. They had
something to say which could not be said in prose,
a "lyrical cry" was in them which they could not
repress ; and heaven worked together with earth
that Spanish lyrical poetry might be born and die
within the lifetime of two friends.

IL

The poetry of San Juan de la Cruz is meta-
physical fire, a sort of white heat in which the
abstract, the almost negative, becomes ecstatically
reahsed by the senses. Here, in a translation as
literal as I can make it, line for line, and with exactly
the same arrangement and repetition of rhymes,
is his most famous poem, En una Noche escura, a
poem which is the keystone of his whole philosophy :

Upon an obscure night,

Fevered with love in love's anxiety,
(Oh, hapless-happy plight!)

I went, none seeing me,
Forth from my house where all things quiet be.

By night, secure from sight.

And by the secret stair, disguisedly,
(Oh, hapless-happy plight !)

(>7

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

By night, and privily,
Forth from my house where all things quiet be.

Blest night of wandering.

In secret, when by none might I be spied,
Nor I see anything;

Without a light or guide,
Save that which in my heart burnt in my side.

That light did lead me on.

More surely than the shining of noontide.
Where well I knew that one

Did for my coming bide ;
Where he abode might none but he abide.

O night that didst lead thus,

O night more lovely than the dawn of light,
O night that broughtest us.

Lover to lover's sight.
Lover with loved in marriage of delight !

Upon my flowery breast,

Wholly for him, and save himself for none,
There did I give sweet rest

To my beloved one ;
The fanning of the cedars breathed thereon.

When the first moving air

Blew from the tower, and waved his locks aside,
His hand, with gentle care,

Did wound me in the side,
And in my body all my senses died.

All things I then forgot,

My cheek on him who for my coming came ;
All ceased, and I was not,

Leaving my cares and shame
Among the lilies, and forgetting them.

The greater part of the prose of San Juan de la
68

S. Teresa and S. Juan de la Cruz.

Cruz is built up out of this poem, or condensed
into it : the Noche Escura del Alma is a Hne-by-hne
commentary upon it, and the Subida del Monte
Carmelo, a still longer work, takes this poem for
starting-point, and declares that the whole of its
doctrine is to be found in these stanzas. The third
and last of the three contemplative books, the
Llama de Amor Viva, is, in a similar way, a com-
mentary on the poem which follows :

O flame of living love,
That dost eternally
Pierce through my soul with so consuming heat.
Since there's no help above.
Make thou an end of me,
And break the bond of this encounter sweet.

O burn that burns to heal !
O more than pleasant wound !
And O soft hand, O touch most delicate.
That dost new life reveal,
That dost in grace abound,
And, slaying, dost from death to life translate.

O lamps of fire that shined
With so intense a light.
That those deep caverns where the senses live.
Which were obscure and blind,
Now with strange glories bright,
Both heat and light to his beloved give.

With how benign intent

Rememberest thou my breast.
Where thou alone abidest secretly.
And in thy sweet ascent.

With glory and good possessed,
How delicately thou teachest love to me !

69

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

Thus the whole Obras EspiritualeSy 614 quarto
pages in my copy of the original edition of 1618,
are but a development of these two poems ; the
poetry, as it should be, being at the root of the
philosophy.

In that strange, pedantic "figure" which stands
at the beginning of the Subida del Monte Carmelo,
the narrow way which leads to the mount is
inscribed, "Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing,
nothing," and above, "and in the mount nothing";
but above that begin higher heights, inscribed
with the names of the ultimate virtues, and above
that the "divine silence" and the "divine wisdom,"
and the dwelling of the soul with God himself.
With San Juan de la Cruz the obscure night is a
way, the negation of all earthly things, of the earthly
senses even, a means to the final union with God ;
and it is in this union that darkness blossoms into
the glittering delights of the poems. Pierce the
dark night to its centre, and you will find light,
for you will find God. "And so," he tells us,
"in this soul, in which now no appetite abides, nor
other imaginings, nor forms of other created things ;
most secretly it abides in so much the more inner
interior, and more straitly embraced, as it is itself
the more pure, and single of all things but God."
This rapture of negation becomes poetry, and
poetry of the highest order, because it is part of a
nature to which, if God is what Vaughan calls a
"deep but dazzling darkness," he is also the
supreme love, to be apprehended humanly by this
70

S. Teresa and S. Juan de la Cruz.

quality, for which, and in which, he put on humanity.
To San Juan de la Cruz the idea of God is an idea
which can be apprehended mentally only by a series
of negations; the person of God can be appre-
hended only emotionally, and best under the figure,
which he accepts from the "Song of Solomon,"
of earthly marriage, the marriage of the soul and
Christ. At once the door is opened in the seventh
heaven of metaphysics for all the flowers in which
the earth decks itself for lovers; and this monk
can give lessons to lovers. His great poem of forty
stanzas, the Cancion entre el Alma y el Esposo, once
or twice becoming almost ludicrous in the hvehness
of its natural images, as when the Spouse drinks
in the "interior bodega" of the Beloved, has a
pecuHar fragrance, as of very strong natural per-
fumes, perfumes really made honestly out of flowers,
though in the fieriest of alcohols. Here, and in
the two mystical love-poems which I have translated,
there is an abandonment to all the sensations of
love, which seems to me to exceed, and on their
own ground, in directness and intensity of spiritual
and passionate longing, most of what has been
written by the love-poets of all ages. These lines,
so full of rich and strange beauty, ache with desire
and with all the subtlety of desire. They analyse
the sensations of the soul, as lovers do, that they
may draw out their sweetness more luxuriously.
In a merely human love they would be almost
perverse, so learned are they in sensation. Sanctified
to divine uses, they do but swing a more odorous

71

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

incense, in censers of more elaborately beaten
gold, in the service of a perpetual Mass to the
Almighty.

Of the Canciones there are but five ; and of these
I have translated another, somewhat more abstract,
less coloured, than the rest.

Well do I know the spring that doth abound,
Although it is the night.

That everlasting spring, though hidden close,
Well do I know whither and whence it flows.
Although it is the night.

Beginning know I not, for none there is,
But know that all beginning comes from this,
Although it is the night.

I know there is not any fairer thing,
And that the heavens and earth drink of this spring,
Although it is the night.

I know that end within it is not found.
Nor is there plummet that its depths can sound,
Although it is the night.

Upon its brightness doth no shadow come :
Well know I that all light cometh therefrom.
Although it is the night.

I know its currents are so hard to bind,
They water hell and heaven and human-kind,
Although it is the night.

The current that from this deep spring doth flow,
How mighty is its flowing, well I know,
Although it is the night.
72

S. Teresa and S. Juan de la Cruz.

This everlasting spring is occulted,
To give us life, within this living bread,
Although it is the night.

Here it doth speak to man, and say to him :
Drink of this living water, although dim.
Although it is the night.

This living spring, I have desired of old,
Within this bread of life do I behold.
Although it is the night.

But, besides the Canciones, there are five Coplas
and Glosas, still more abstract than this poem, but
brimful of what I have called metaphysical fire,
"toda ciencia transcendiendo" ; the ecstasy striving
to find immediate, and no longer mediate, v^ords
for its revelation. Finally, there are ten Romances^
of which all but the last are written in quatrains
linked by a single rhyme, the accommodating
Spanish rhyme in "ia." They are Biblical para-
phrases and statements of theological doctrine, and
reverence has not permitted them to find any fine,
wild liberties for themselves, like the other, more
instinctive, more emotionally inspired poems. They
have the archaic formahty of the fourteenth-century
paintings of the Madonna, stiffly embroidered with
gold, and waited on by formal angels. Some
personal sentiment yet remains, but the personal
form is gone, and they might seem to have been
really written in an earlier century.

73

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

III.

With Santa Teresa all is changed. Her poems
are improvisations, seem to have been written by
accident, and certainly with no double or treble
or hundredfold meanings concealed within them,
like those of San Juan de la Cruz.^ They are im-
petuous, incorrect, full of joyous life, almost of
hilarity. Many of them are little songs with
refrains ; some are composed on motives given
by others, many for special occasions, such as a
taking of the veil. One is a sort of paraphrase,
or variant, of a poem of San Juan de la Cruz. It
is interesting to compare the two, and to see how
in the very first verse Santa Teresa brings in an
idea entirely, and how characteristically ! her own :
"This divine union of love with him I love makes
God my captive, and sets free my heart ; but
causes such grief in me to see God my prisoner,
that I die because I die not." She gives herself
to God, as it were, with a great leap into his arms.
She has no savorous reflections, no lingering over
delights ; a practical swiftness, a woman's heart,
and that joy which burns through all her work.
"That love alone is that which gives value to all
things," none knew so well as she, or realised so
simply. "O pitying and loving Lord of my
life! Thou hast said: 'Come unto me all ye

' He can be as minute in his explanations as to comment on the first
three lines of the second stanza of 0 llama de amor viva: The Bum is
the Holy Spirit, the Hand is the Father, and the Touch is the Son.

74

S. Teresa and S. Juan de la Cruz.

that thirst, and I will give you to drink.' How,
then, can these but suffer great thirst that are now
burning in living flames in the desire of these
miserable things of the earth ? Needs must there
be much water indeed if it is not to fail and be
consumed. Now know I, Lord, of thy bounty
that thou shalt give it : thyself sayest it, and thou
canst not fail from thy words. Yet if they, used
to living in this fire, and brought up in it, feel it
not, nor have reason in their unreasonableness to
see how great is their necessity, what remedy, O
my God ^ Thou hast come into the world to remedy
even such great necessities ; begin. Lord : in these
most difl&cult things dost thou most show thy
pit3^ Behold, my God, that thine enemies make
much headway : have pity on those that have no
pity on themselves, now that their mischance so
holds them that they desire not to come to thee :
come thou to them, my God. I demand it in
their name, and know that when they shall hear,
and return to themselves, and begin to delight in
thee, these now dead shall come to life. O life,
that thou givest to all ! Deny me not this most
sweet water that thou hast promised to those that
seek it : I do seek it. Lord, and demand it, and
come for it to thee : hide not thyself. Lord, from
me, for thou knowest my need, and that it is the
true medicine of the soul wounded by thee. O
Lord, what manner of fires are there in this life!
Oh, how rightly do we live in fear ! Some there
are that consume the soul, others that purify it,

75

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

that it may live for ever, joying in thee. O Hving
streams of the wounds of my God ! How do ye
flow ever with great abundance for our maintenance,
and how securely shall they go through the perils
of this miserable life that are sustained by this
divine beverage." "O true lover!" she cries,
in her prose Exclamaciones, "with what pity, with
what softness, with what delight, with what tender-
ness, and with what great manifestations of love
thou curest the wounds that with the arrows of that
same love thou hast made!" And her verse, as
in this poem, is an outpouring of love which speaks
the simplest lovers' language, like a woman who
cannot say "I love you!" too often.

If, Lord, thy love for me is strong

As this which binds me unto thee,
What holds me from thee, Lord, so long,

What holds thee, Lord, so long from me ?

O soul, what then desirest thou ?

— Lord, I would see thee, who thus choose thee.
What fears can yet assail thee now ?

— All that I fear is but to lose thee.

Love's whole possession I entreat,

Lord, make my soul thine own abode,

And I will build a nest so sweet
It may not be too poor for God.

A soul in God hidden from sin.

What more desires for thee remain,

Save but to love, and love ap;ain.
And, all on flame with love within,

Love on, and turn to love again ?
76

S. Teresa and S. Juan de la Cruz.

Another division of her poems consists of songs
for Christmas, for the Circumcision, for the Virgin
as mother; and here, adapting to her use a form
already existing, she practically invents a new form,
in these httle lyric dramas, dialogues of the shep-
herds, in which the same shepherds appear, with
their strange names, Bras or Brasillo, Menga, with
Llorente and the invariable Gil. I have translated
three of them, with all the archaisms, accidents of
form, omission or reversal of rhymes, of the original,
and, in the refrain of the second, an assonance
exactly reproducing the original assonance.

Let mine eyes see thee,

Sweet Jesus of Nazareth ;
Let mine eyes see thee,

And then see death.

Let them see that care

Roses and jessamine ;
Seeing thy face most fair,

All blossoms are therein.
Flower of seraphin,

Sweet Jesus of Nazareth,
Let mine eyes see thee.

And then see death.

Nothing I require

Where my Jesus is ;
Anguish all desire,

Saving only this ;
All my help is his,

He only succoureth.

77

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

Let mine eyes see thee,
Sweet Jesus of Nazareth,

Let mine eyes see thee,
And then see death.

II.

Shepherd, shepherd, hark that calHng !
Angels they are, and the day is dawning.

What is this ding-dong,

Or loud singing is it?
Come, Bras, now the day is here,

The shepherdess we'll visit.
Shepherd, shepherd, hark that calling!
Angels they are, and the day is dawning.

Oh, is this the Alcade's daughter.
Or some lady come from far ?

She is the daughter of God the Father,
And she shines like a star.

Shepherd, shepherd, hark that calling !

Angels they are, and the day is dawning.

III.

To-day a shepherd and our kin,
O Gil, to ransom us is sent,
And he is God Omnipotent.

For us hath he cast down the pride
And prison walls of Satanas;
But he is of the kin of Bras,
Of Menga, also of Llorent.
O is not God Omnipotent ?

78

If he is God, how then is he
Come hither, and here crucified ?

S. Teresa and S. Juan de la Cruz.

— With his dying sin also died,
Enduring death the innocent.
Gil, how is God Omnipotent !

Why, I have seen him born, pardie.
And of a most sweet shepherdess.

— If he is God, how can he be

With such poor folk as these content .?

— See'st not he is Omnipotent ?

Give over idle parleying,

And let us serve him, you and I,
And since he came on earth to die,
Let us die with him too, Llorent ;
For he is God Omnipotent.

These and other ecstasies over Christ in the
cradle are the motherly instinct in her finding vicari-
ous satisfaction ; and though we have here an
instinct for which genius finds expression in art,
the whole force of the sentiment can be understood
only by one who has seen a monk or nun exhibiting
the conventual image of the infant Jesus to a sym-
pathetic visitor. I have never seen a livmg child
handled with more adoring tenderness than the
monk of whom I have spoken handled the amazingly
realistic "Bambino," who lay in a basket stuffed
with straw, in his Httle frilled shirt and baby's cap
with blue strings. Religion, any other controlling
force, can constrain, can turn into other directions,
but cannot kill an instinct ; and the adoration of
the divine child is the refuge of the childless, in
convents and in the world.

But Santa Teresa was not only a loving woman

79

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

and a loving mother, she was that great brain
and great worker whom we know; and she wrote
marching songs for the soldiers of Christ in their
war against the world, and songs of triumph for
their victories, and songs of warning for those who
were lightly undertaking so great an enterprise.
In all there is the same impetuous spirit, the same
close hold on reality, and one to whom religion
was not contemplation but action, or action even
in contemplation. In reading the poems of San
Juan de la Cruz, it is not easy to remember that he
too was a monastic reformer : ^ it would be im-
possible to read the poems of Santa Teresa without
seeing the reformer, the woman of action, in the
poet :

Caminemos para el cielo,

Monjas de Carmelo!

She sings, leading them, on that difficult way;
and in that "Offering of Herself to God that she
made," in the magnificent poem with the refrain
"What would'st thou do with me.f"" we see the
whole woman, "a woman for angelical height of
speculation, for masculine courage of performance
more than a woman," in Crashaw's famous words.
Here, in prose, are three stanzas out of the twelve :

What wouldst thou, then, good Lord, that so base a
servant should do ? What service hast thou given to this

^ He is described on the title-page of his works as "primer Descaho
de la Reforma de N. Senora del Carmen, Coadjutor de la Bienaventurada
Virgen S. Teresa de Jesus, Fundadora de la misma Reforma."
80

S. Teresa and S. Juan de la Cruz.

sinful slave? Behold me here, sweet Love; sweet Love,
behold me here ; what wouldst thou do with me ?

See here my heart, I lay it in thy hand, my body,
my life and soul, my bowels and my love; sweet Spouse
and redemption, since I offer myself to be thine, what
wouldst thou do with me ?

Give me death, give me life, give me health or sickness,
honour or dishonour give me, give me war or perfect
peace, weakness or strength to my life : to all I will
answer yes ; what wouldst thou do with me ?

This ardent, joyous simplicity, this impassioned
devotion to w^hich every height or depth of sacrifice
was an easy thing, this clear sight of God, not
through the intellectual negations nor the symboHcal
raptures of San Juan de la Cruz, but face to face,
w^hich give Santa Teresa her unique rank among
the mystics, as the onew^ho has seen spiritual things
most directly, find here their simplest expression.
Here, as in those poems of the people with which
I began by comparing these poems, a "flaming
heart" burns outward to escape the intolerable
pain of its reclusion.

Winter, 1899.

81

Campoamor.

Ramon de Campoamor y Campoosorio, who died
at Madrid on the I2th of February 1901, was
born at Navia, in the province of Asturias, on the
24th of September 18 17. His career covers almost
the whole century : he was the contemporary of
Quintana, Espronceda, Zorrilla, yet absolutely un-
touched by the influences which made of Quintana
a lesser Cowper, of Espronceda a lesser Byron, and
of Zorrilla a lesser Longfellow. Coming into a
literature in which poetry is generally taken to be
but another name for rhetoric, he followed, long
before Verlaine, Verlaine's advice to "take rhetoric
and wring its neck." The poetry of words, of
sounds, of abstractions, that poetry which is looked
upon in Spain as the most really poetical kind of
poetry, left him untouched ; he could but apply
to it the Arab proverb: "I hear the tic-tac of the
mill, but I see no flour." In his Poetica he declares
boldly: "If we except the Romancero and the
cantaresy Spain has almost no really national lyric
poetry." "There are very well-built verses, that
are lads of sound body, but without a soul. Such
are those of Herrera and of almost all his imitators,
the grandiloquent poets." In the simple masculine
verse of Jorge Manrique (whose great poem, the
Coplas por la muerte de su Padre, is known to most
English readers in its admirable translation by
Longfellow) he saw an incomparable model, whose
grave and passionate simplicity might well have been
the basis of a national style. "Poetry," he declares,
82

Campoamor.

in what seemed to his critics an amusing paradox,
*'is the rhythmical representation of a thought
through the medium of an image, expressed in a
language which cannot be put in prose more natu-
rally or with fewer words. . . . There is in poetry
no immortal expression that can be said in prose
with more simplicity or with more precision."
Prose, indeed, seemed to him not really an art at
all, and when Valera, a genuine artist in prose,
defended his own ground by asserting that "meta-
physics is the one useless science and poetry the
one useless art," Campoamor replied in verse,
defining prose as "la jerga animal del ser humano"
("the jabber of the human animal"). "What
are philosophical systems," he asks, "but poems
without images .? " and, protesting against the
theory of "art for art," and suggesting "art for
ideas," or "transcendental" art, as a better definition
of what was at least his own conception, he sums
up with his customary neatness: "Metaphysics
is the science of ideas, religion is the science of ideas
converted into sentiments, and art the science of
ideas converted into images. Metaphysics is the
true, reHgion the good, and aesthetics the beautiful."
By calling art "transcendental" he means, not
that it should be in itself either philosophical or
didactic, much less abstract, for "art is the enemy
of abstractions . . . and whatever becomes im-
personal evaporates," but that it should contain
in itself, as its foundation, a "universal human
truth," without which "it is no more than the

83

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

letters of tattling women." "All lyric poetry
should be a little drama." "In the drama of the
Creation everything was written by God in sympa-
thetic ink. We have but to apply the reagent
and hold it to the light. The best artist is the best
translator of the works of God." "It has been
my constant endeavour," he tells us, "to approach
art through ideas, and to express them in ordinary
language, thus revolutionising the substance and
form of poetry, the substance with the Doloras and
the form with the Pequenos Poemas." Beginning
at first with fables, he abandoned the form of the
fable, because it seemed to him that the fable could
only take root in countries in which the doctrine
of the transmigration of souls was still believed.
"The Dolor a, a drama taken direct from life, with-
out the metaphors and symbols of indirect poetry,
seemed to me a form more European, more natural,
and more human than that of the oriental fable."
But the Dolora was to retain thus much of the fable,
that by means of its drama it was to "solve some
universal problem," the solution growing out of
the actual structure of the story. Thus, in poetry,
subject is all-important, subject including "the
argument and the action." "In every pebble of
the brook there is part of an Escurial : the difficulty
and the merit are in building it." "Novelty of
subject, regularity of plan, the method with which
that plan is carried out": these, together with
the fundamental idea, which is to be of universal
application, "transcendental," as he calls it, are
84

Campoamor.

the requisites of a work of art ; it is on these grounds
that a work of art is to be judged. "Every work
of art should be able to reply affirmatively to these
four questions :

The subject : can it be narrated ?

The plan : can it be painted ?

The design : has it a purpose ?

The style : is it the man ? "

Campoamor was no classical scholar, and it is
but hesitatingly that he suggests, on the authority
of "a French critic, who had it from Aristotle,"
that the theory of the Greeks in poetry was in many
points similar to his. If we turn to Matthew
Arnold's preface to his Poems, we shall find all
that is fundamental in Campoamor's argument
stated finally, and in the form of an appeal to
classical models. "The radical difference between
their poetical theory" (the Greeks', that is) "and
ours consists, it appears to me, in this : that with
them the poetical character of the action in itself,
and the conduct of it, were the first consideration ;
with us attention is fixed mainly on the value of the
separate thoughts and images which occur in the
treatment of an action." And, further on in that
admirable preface, Matthew Arnold assures "the
individual writer" that he "may certainly learn
of the ancients, better than anywhere else, three
things which it is vitally important for him to
know : the all-importance of the choice of a subject,
the necessity of accurate construction, and the
subordinate character of expression." Is not this

85

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

precisely the aim of Campoamor ? and is it not as
a natural corollary to this severe theory of poetical
construction that he tells us : "Style is not a ques-
tion of figures of speech, but of electric fluid";
"rhythm alone should separate the language of
verse from that of prose" ; yet that language should
always have an inner beauty, "the mysterious
magic of music, so that it should say, not what the
writer intends, but what the reader desires"?
And so we come, not unnaturally, to his ideal in
writing: "To write poems whose ideas and whose
words had been, or seemed to have been, thought
or written by every one."

Upon these theories, it might well seem to us,
a writer is left at all events free, and with a very
reasonable kind of liberty, to make the most of him-
self. Only, after all, the question remains : What
was Campoamor's conception of subject and develop-
ment ; how far was his precision a poetical precision ;
did he, in harmonising the language of prose and
of verse, raise the one or lower the other ?

The twelve volumes of Campoamor's collected
poems contain El Drama UniversaU a sort of epic
in eight "days" and forty-seven scenes, written
in heroic quatrains, and worthy, a Spanish critic
assures us, of "an Ariosto of the soul"; Colon, a
narrative poem in sixteen cantos, written in ottava
rima; El Licenciado Torralba, a legendary poem
in eight cantos, written in iambic verse of varying
length ; three series of Pequeiios Poemas, each con-
taining from ten to twelve narrative poems written
86

Campoamor.

in a similar form of verse ; two series of Doloras,
short lyrical poems, of which I have already quoted
his own definition ; a volume of Humoradas, con-
taining some hundreds of epigrams ; and two
volumes of early work, brought together under
the name of Poesias y Fdhulas. Besides these, he
wrote some plays, the admirable volume called
PoHica Polemicas Literdrias and a contribution to
metaphysics called Lo Absoluto. Of his long poems,
only one is what Rossetti called "amusing," only
El Licenciado Torralba has that vital energy which
keeps a poem alive. With this exception we
need consider only the three collections in which
a single thing, a consistent "criticism of life," is
attempted under different, but closely allied forms :
the Humoradas, which are epigrams ; the Doloras,
which he defines as "dramatised Humoradas" ; and
the Pequenos Poemas, which he defines as "ampli-
fied Doloras."

Applied by a great poetical intellect, Campoa-
mor's theories might have resulted in the most
masterly of modern poems ; but his intellect was
ingenious rather than imaginative ; his vivid human
curiosity was concerned with life more after the
manner of the novelist than of the poet ; his dramas
are often anecdotes ; his insight is not so much
wisdom as worldly wisdom. He "saw life steadily,"
but he saw it in little patches, commenting on facts
with a smiling scepticism which has in it something
of the positive spirit of the eighteenth century.
Believing, as he tells us, that "what is most natural

87

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

in the world is the supernatural," he was apt to
see the spiritual side of things, as the Spanish
painters have mostly seen it, in a palpable detach-
ment from the soil, garlanded in clouds. Con-
cerned all his life with the moods and casuistries
of love, he writes of women, not of woman, and
ends, after all, in a reservation of judgment. Poetry,
to him, was a kind of psychology, and that is why
every lyric shaped itself naturally into what he
called a drama. His whole interest was in life
and the problems of life, in people and their doings,
and in the reasons for what they do. Others, he
tells us, may admire poetry which is descriptive,
the delineation of external things, or rhetorical, a
sonorous meditation over abstract things ; all that
he himself cares for are ''those reverberations that
light up the windings of the human heart and the
horizons that lie on the other side of material life."
Only, some imaginative energy being lacking, all this
comes, for the most part, to be a kind of novelette
in verse, in the Pequenos Poemas, a versified allegory
in the Doloras, or an epigram in the Humoradas.

Can verse in which there is no ecstasy be poetry }
There is no ecstasy in the verse of Campoamor;
at the most a talking about ecstasy, as in some of
the Pequenos Poemas, in which stories of passion
are told with exquisite neatness, precision, sympa-
thetic warmth; but the passion never cries out,
never finds its own voice. Once only in his work
do I find something like that cry, and it is in El
Licenciado Torralba, the story of a kind of Faust,
88

Campoamor.

who, desiring love without unrest, makes for himself
an artificial woman ("la mujer mas mujer de las
mujeres"), Muliercula^ to whom he gives

El dnimo del hello paganismo,

^ue, siendo menos que alma, es mas que vida.

Torralba is arrested by the Inquisition as a necro-
mancer and Muliercula is burnt at the stake. I
have translated the description of her death :

Midmost, as if the flame of the burning were

A bed of love to her,

Muliercula, with calm, unfrightened face,

Not without beauty stood,

And her meek attitude

Had something of the tiger's natural grace.

She suffers, yet, no less.

Dying for him she loves, broods there,

Within the burning air.

Quiet as a bird within a wilderness.

The wild beast's innocency all awake

Enwraps her, and as she burns.

The intermittent flaming of the stake

To the poor fond foolish thing now turns

Into a rapture, dying for his sake ;

And then, because the instinct in her sees

This only to be had.

Nothingness and its peace.

For her last, surest end, utterly glad,

With absolute heart and whole.

That body without a soul.

As if the bright flame brings

Roses to be its bed.

Dies, and so enters, dead

Into the august majesty of things !

There, in that fantastic conception of "la belleza

89

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

natural perfecta" of woman, as the thinker, above
all others, has desired to find her, I seem to discover
the one passionate exception to Campoamor's
never quite real men and women, the novelist's
lay-figures of passion, about whom we are told so
many interesting anecdotes. A witty story-teller,
a sympathetic cynic, a transcendental positivist,
he found the ways of the world the most amusing
spectacle in nature, and for the most part his poems
are little reflections of life seen as he saw it, with
sharp, tolerant, worldly eyes. At his best, certainly
most characteristic, when he is briefest, as in the
Humoradas, he has returned, in these polished
fragments, to the lapidary style of Latin poetry,
reminding us at times of another Spaniard, Martial.
Idea, clearness, symmetry, point, give to this kind
of verse something of the hardness and glitter of a
weapon, even when the intention is not satirical.
With Campoamor the blade is tossed into the air
and caught again, harmlessly, with all the address
of an accomplished juggler. He plays with satire
as he plays with sentiment, and, when he is most
serious, will disguise the feeling with some ironical
afterthought. Here are some of the Humoradas^
in Spanish and English. I have translated them,
as will be seen, quite literally, and I have tried to
choose them from as many moods as I could :

Al mover tu ahanico con gracejo.
^uitas el polvo al corazon mas viejo.

You wave your fan with such a graceful art.
You brush the dust off from the oldest heart.
90

Campoamor.

Las ninas de las madres que ame tanto
Me besan ya como se besan a un sanio.
The children of the mothers I loved, ah see,
They kiss me as though they kissed a saint in me !

Jamas mujer alguna

Ha salido del iodo de la cuna.
No woman yet, since they were made all,
Has ever got quite outside of the cradle.

Prohibes tu amor con tus desdenes.

Sin frutos prohibidos no hay Edenes.
Let your consent with your disdain be hidden :
No Paradise whose fruit is not forbidden.

No le gusta el placer sin violencia,

T por eso ya cree la desgraciada

^ue ni es pasion, ni es nada,

El amor que no turba la conciencia.
She tastes not pleasure without strife,
And therefore, hapless one, she feels
That love's not good enough for life
Which hales not conscience by the heels.

Si es fdcil una hermosa,

Voy y la dejo;
Si es dificil la cosa,

Tambien me alejo,

Ninas, cuidad
De amar siempre con fdcil

Difictdtad.

If too easy she should be,

I, beholding, quit her;
If the thing's too hard for me.

Trying proves too bitter.

Girls, now see,
Best it is to love with easy

Difficulty.

91

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

Niegas que fuiste mi mejor amiga?
Bien, bien; lo callare : nobleza obliga.

That you were my best friend, do you deny ?
Well, well ; noblesse oblige ; then so will I.

Te he visto no se donde, ni se cuando.
Ah! si; ya lo recuerdo, fue sonando.

Have I not seen you ? Yes, but where and when ?
Ah, I remember : I was dreaming then.

Te es infiel! y la quieres? No me extrana;
To adoro a la esperanza, aunque me engaiia

She's faithless, and you love her ? As you will :
Hope I adore, and hope is faithless still.

Vas cambiando de amor todos los anos,
Mas no cambias jamas de desenganos.

You change your love each year ; yet Love's commandment
Is, that you never change your disenchantment.

Por el la sinietria es la belleza,
Aunque corte a las cosas la cabeza.

Beauty for him was symmetry, albeit

He sometimes cut the heads off things, to see it.

I vv^ill add three short pieces from the Doloras:

Shamed though I be, and weep for shame, 'tis true,
I loved not good what evil I love in you.

They part ; years pass ; they do not see

Each other : after six or seven :
"Good Heaven ! and is it really he ?"
"And is it really she ? good Heaven 1"
92

Campoamor.

THE SOUL FOR SALE

One day to Satan, Julio, flushed with wine :
"Wilt buy my soul ?" "Of little worth is It."

"I do but ask one kiss, and it is thine."

"Old sinner, hast thou parted with thy wit ?"

"Wilt buy it?" "No." "But wherefore?" "Itismine."

In such work as this there is much of what the
Spaniards call "salt": it stings healthily, it is
sane, temperate, above all, ingenious ; and the
question as to whether or not it is poetry resolves
itself into a question as to whether or not the verse
of Martial, indeed Latin epigrammatic verse in
general, is poetry. To the modern mind, brought
up on romantic models, only Catullus is quite
certainly or quite obviously a poet in his epigrams ;
and his appeal to us is as personal as the appeal of
Villon. He does not generalise, he does not smile
while he stabs ; the passion of love or hate burns in
him like a flame, setting the verse on fire. Martial
writes for men of the world ; he writes in order to
comment on things ; his form has the finish of a
thing made to fulfil a purpose. Campoamor also
writes out of a fruitful experience, not transfiguring
life where he reflects it. If what he writes is not
poetry, in our modern conception of the word, it
has at least the beauty of adjustment to an end, of
perfect fitness ; and it reflects a temperament, not
a great poetical temperament, but one to which
human affairs were infinitely interesting, and their
expression in art the one business of life.

1901.

93

A Spanish Poet : Niifiez

de Arce. ^^

Poetry in Spain, when I wrote that article, was
represented by two admired and popular poets,
Ramon de Campoamor and Caspar Nunez de Arce.
The popularity of Campoamor may be inferred
from the fact that cheap editions of his works, and
cheap selections from them, are to be found every-
where in Spain ; but in the case of Nunez de Arce
it is possible to speak with greater precision. In
the preface to a poem published in 1866 he states
that no Spanish work has been reprinted, in this
century, so many times in so short a space of time,
as the collection of his poems ; and that between
1879 and 1885 a hundred and three editions,
varying in number from 500 to 2000, have appeared
in Spain, and nearly a hundred more in America.
It may be interesting to consider for a moment the
position of so popular a poet, the reason of his
popularity, and the degree to which he deserves
that popularity.

Nunez de Arce is one of those many poets who
expect to get credit for the excellent nature of their
intentions, who do for the most part get credit for
it, and who are genuinely surprised if it is pointed
out that in poetry intention counts for nothing,
apart from achievement. In the preface to El
Vertigo he tells us that all the poems he has hitherto
published are **tentatives in which I exercise my
forces and assay my aptitude for the various kinds
94

Nunez de Arce.

of contemporary poetry." Thus, La Ultima
Lamentacion de Lord Byron is an attempt to obtain
the epical tone in relation to a subject of our own
times ; the Idilio is an attempt to write domestic
poetry ; La Selva Osciira is an attempt to express
thought under a symbolical form ; La Vision de
Fray Martin is an attempt to unite, "under a grave
and severe form, the fantastic and the supernatural
with the real and the transcendent." In the Gritos
del Combate he develops a whole theory of the
mission of art, in order to justify a book of political
poems ; and in a lecture on contemporary poetry,
reprinted in the same volume, apologises for occupy-
ing himself with aesthetic questions at a time when
grave social problems are troubling the minds of
men.

This preoccupation with politics, morals, and
other problems more suited to prose than poetry,
is characteristic of Spain, where it has always been
so rare for a man of letters to be merely a man of
letters, and where poets have so often been political
leaders as well. Nufiez de Arce was appointed
governor of the province of Barcelona at the time of
the revolution of 1868; he has held other public
posts at intervals during his life ; and it is evident
that he looks at least as seriously upon what he
conceives to have been his services to his country,
as upon the poems which he has written with such
well-defined intentions of "fulfilling those sacred
duties, and carrying on that moralising mission,"
which he attributes to poetry. Nowhere, not even

95

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

in England, are these "serious" views received
with more favour than in Spain ; and a poet with a
mission, and with distinctly explained ambitions,
has an audience always awaiting him.

Nor has he only an audience : the critics are on
his side. Nunez de Arce is a typical instance of
precisely the kind of writer who is certain of an
indulgent treatment at the hands of the critics.
There is so httle to blame; yes, so little either to
blame or to praise. Here is a poet who takes
himself seriously, who produces good, careful,
thoughtful work, here impressive by its rhetoric,
there by its simplicity, always refined, always
earnest in its declamation, without vulgarity, or
extravagance, or artificiahty, so often the faults of
Spanish poetry; he can write vigorous narrative,
of more than one kind, as in Raimundo Lulio and
La Pesca; he can be romantic without being absurd,
as in La Vision de Fray Martin; he can write verse
which is technically correct, dignified, accom-
plished : is there not some excuse for mistaking so
apparently admirable a result for poetry ^. And
yet what avail all the negative virtues, and all the
taste in the world, in the absence of the poetic
impulse, poetic energy, the soul and body at once of
poetry ? It is Hke discussing the degree to which
a man who is certainly not alive is dead. Nufiez
de Arce has no intense inner life, crying out for
expression; his emotion is never personal, but
generalised ; he has no vision, only an outlook.
There is no singing note in his voice; every line is

96

Nunez de Arce.

intellectually realised, line follows line as duly as
in an argument ; but the exquisite shock or the
more exquisite peace of poetry is in none of them.
To be thoughtful is after all so slight a merit in a
poet, unless the thought is of some rare or subtle
kind, a thoughtfulness of the instincts rather than
of the reason. Let the quality of his thought be
tested by a glance at his epithets. In La ultima
Lamentacion de Lord Byron he invokes Greece :
"Greece, immortal Greece! Loving mother of
heroes and geniuses ! Calm fount of rich inspira-
tion ! Fruitful spouse of Art ! Eternal light of
the mind ! " Where, in these epithets, is that
"continual shght novelty" which poetical style
requires if it is to be poetry ?

And even his patriotic feeling, strong and sincere
as it is, is not of a fine poetical quality ; it is not to
be compared with the patriotic feeling of Quintana,
a poet whom he honours. Quintana, celebrating
the defeat of Trafalgar, could say : " Para el pueblo
magnanimo no hay suerte." But Nuiiez de Arce,
narrowly political, can but see "sad Spain, our
mother Spain, bleeding to death in the mud of the
street," because a Senate is Repubhcan or not
Republican. He discusses, he does not sing; and
for discussion poetry has no place. And his dis-
cussion is a declamatory discussion, as in the poem
called Paris, where a Bourgeois and a Demagogue
of 1 87 1 toss to and fro the arguments for and against
Anarchy, and are both solemnly rebuked by the poet
at the end of the poem. His verse is full of an

97

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

uninspired discontent, the discontent of an orator,
not the passionate or ecstatic discontent of the poet :

Hijo del siglo, in vano me resiste a su impiedad,
he tells us, with a sort of melancholy pride in repre-
senting, as it seems to him, so faithfully, a century
whose materiahsing tendencies he so sincerely
deplores. La Duda {Doubt) is one of his most
popular poems, read with applause on the occasion
of the "Juegos Florales" of the Catalan poets in
1868. "In this age of sarcasm and doubt, there
is but one muse," he tells us; "the blind, im-
placable, brutal muse of analysis, that, armed with
the arid scalpel, at every step precipitates us into the
abyss, or brings us to the shores of annihilation."
And it is always of this muse that he is uneasily
conscious, unwilling to follow, and unable to turn
aside. It has been part of his aim to write, not
merely poetry, but modern poetry. But he comes
to the task a moralist, a disbeliever in his own age,
whose influence he feels as a weight rather than as
an inspiration ; and he brings no new form, he adds
no flexibility to an old form. Himself no new
force, he has had the misfortune to be born in a
country lacking in original forces. For a Spanish
poet of to-day there is no environment, no helpful
tradition. He looks back on a literature in which
there is not a single great or even remarkable poet
since Calderon. He has been brought up on
Espronceda, Quintana, Zorrilla ; which is as if an
EngHsh poet of our days had no choice of models
but a lesser Byron, a lesser Cowper, and a lesser
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Nunez de Arce.

Longfellow. He looks around him, and discovers
no guiding light in other countries. In his Dis-
course on Contemporary Poetry, delivered in 1887,
Nunez de Arce gives his opinion of English, French,
Italian, and Russian poets, with a significant pref-
erence for English poets, and among them for
Tennyson, and a not less significant horror at what
seems to him the shamelessness and impiety of
poetry in France. But he is not content with even
English poetry. "Swinburne," he tells us, "some-
times sings as Nero and Cahgula would have sung
if they had been poets;" and he groups together
Atala7ita in Calydon and Anactoria as poems in which
"impure passion. Pagan sensuality, erotic extrava-
gance, acquire monstrous proportions, bellowing
Hke wild beasts hungering for living flesh." Of
Browning he has Httle to say, except "que no siento
por el admiracion alguna." Richepin he looks
upon as one of the typical poets of France, and he
repeats the usual vague phrases about the Decadent
School, without naming a single writer, and with
a perfectly ingenuous lack of comprehension. The
conclusion he brings back from his survey is that
"humanity has lost its wings, and walks along
unknown ways, not knowing whither it is going."
And his final expression of hope in a regeneration
of poetry, and of the world through poetry, is but a
phrase of the rhetoric of despair.

To all this there is but one answer, and the
answer is briefly given in a single line of Sidney :
Fool, said my muse to me, look in thine heart and write,

99

Moorish Secrets in Spain.

The Moors, when they were driven out of Spain,
left behind them, as if for some stealthy purpose,
many of their secrets. Wherever you walk, in the
south of Spain, you will come upon mosques,
palaces, towers, gateways, which they built to per-
petuate themselves in a strange land, and you will
find in ruined fragments upon hills and windowless
white houses under palm trees both actual remains
and persistent followings of their cool, secluded
way of building, meant for even fiercer skies and
an even more reticent indoor life. Often, as in
the Giralda by the side of the Gothic cathedral at
Seville and in the mosque into which a Christian
church has been built at Cordova, you can see
at one glance the conflict or the contrast of two
religions, of two theories of the universe. The
mosque has no solemnity, no mystery ; it is a place
of closed-in silence, shut in even from the sky, in
a paradise of abstract art. I think of the plumage
of tropical birds, the waving of palms, a darting
fugue on the clavichord, to figure to myself the
particular, after all unique, kind of fascination
which the masterpieces of Arab architecture convey
to one. Nothing so brilliant was ever imagined
by a Gothic carver, so full of light, so airy, so ser-
pentine in swiftness. A mosque, it seems to one
as one walks among its pillars, is not a church at
all, but rather a city, the arcades and alcoves of a
city of fiery people, in whom strength runs all to
delicacy. The Arabs did not build high, they

lOO

Moorish Secrets in Spain.

built wide; and they sent their imagination out
like arrows, hither and thither, in a flight at once
random and mathematical. How singular a con-
trast, is there not, with Gothic building, whose
broad base is set for a steady heavenward ascension,
yet whose caprices, in every entertainment to which
line lends itself, are all so material and of the earth !
And so it seems to me that the architecture of the
mosque is after all a more immaterial worship of
the idea of God than any Christian architecture.
Here there is invention of pattern, into which no
natural object is ever allowed to intrude, the true
art for art's sake, pure idea, mathematics, invention
in the abstract ; for it is the work of an imagination
intoxicated with itself, finding beginning and end
in its own formally beautiful working out, without
relation to nature or humanity. Christianity has
never accepted this idea, indeed could not ; it has
always distrusted pure beauty, when that beauty
has not been visibly chained to a moral. Hence it
has built its Bibles in stone, the Gothic cathedrals.
But Islam, for which God has never put on humanity,
worships an immaterial God in beautiful pattern,
which it appHes equally to its daily, its choicer
daily uses. Is not this more truly the worship of
the invisible and the unimaginable, of what is highest
in the idea of God, than the Christian worship which
we see under the same roof, with its divine images
tortured with sorrow, ungracious with suflPering,
which do but drag down the mind from pure con-
templation, from the eternal idea to its human

lOI

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

manifestation in time ? That, at all events, is one
of the secrets of the Moors.

And they have left other secrets. You cannot
walk through a little town in the south of Spain
without hearing a strange sound, between crying
and chanting, which wanders out to you from
behind barred windows and from among the tin-
kling bells of the mules. The Malaguefia, they call
this kind of singing ; but it has no more to do with
Malaga than the mosque at Cordova has to do
with the soil on which it stands. It is as Eastern
as the music of tom-toms and gongs, and, like
Eastern music, it is music before rhythm, music
which comes down to us untouched by the invention
of the modern scale, from an antiquity out of which
plain-chant is a first step towards modern harmony.
And this Moorish music is, Uke Moorish architec-
ture, an arabesque. It avoids definite form just
as the lines in stone avoid definite form, it has the
same endlessness, motion without beginning or
end, turning upon itself in a kind of infinitely varied
monotony. The fioriture of the voice are like
those coils which often spring from a central point
of ornament, to twist outward, as in a particular
piece of very delicate work in the first mihrab in
the mosque at Cordova. In both, ensemble is
everything, and everything is pattern. There is
the same avoidance of emphasis, the same continu-
ance on one level ; no special part starts out for
separate notice, as in Gothic architecture or Western
music. But the passion of this music is like no

I02

Moorish Secrets in Spain.

other passion ; fierce, immoderate, sustained, it
is like the crying of a wild beast in suffering, and it
thrills one precisely because it seems to be so far
from humanity, so inexplicable, so deeply rooted
in the animal of which we are but one species.

Moorish music is inarticulate, and so it brings
a wild relief which no articulate music could ever
bring. It is the voice of uncivilised people who
have the desires and sorrows common to every living
being, and an unconsciousness of their meaning
which is, after all, what we come back to after having
searched through many meanings. It is sad, not
because of personal sorrow, but because of all the
sorrow there is, and always has been, in the world.
The eyes of Spanish women have something of the
same fierce melancholy, and with as little personal
meaning. It is a music which has not yet lost
companionship with the voice of the wind, the
voice of the sea, the voices of the forest. It has
never accepted order and become art ; it remains
chaotic, elemental, a part of nature trying to speak.

The monotony of this music (a few repeated
notes only of the guitar accompanying it when
there is any accompaniment to the voice) gives it
much of its singular effect on the nerves. It speaks
directly to the spine, sending an unaccountable
shiver through one ; without racking the heart
or the brain, after the manner of most pathos, even
in sound. The words, it is true, are generally
sombre, a desperate outcry; but the words of
the three or four lines which go to make up a song

103

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

are repeated over and over, in varying order, linger-
ing out an incalculable time, so that the bare meaning
is changed into something of a pattern, like the
outlines of a flower in Moorish architecture. Yes,
abstract as their architecture, their music has none
of the direct, superficially human appeal which
pathetic Western music has. These songs are
largely improvisations, and a singer will weave
almost any web of music about almost any fragment
of verse : whether the words wail because Spain
has lost Cuba or because a lover has lost his beloved,
it is all the same ; it all comes from the same deep,
fiery place in the soil.

Singing and dancing in Spain are as the right
hand and the left ; and the same airs, throbbing
on a guitar, guide the most characteristic kind of
dancing. Here the meaning is more explicit ;
like the pantomime of all Eastern dancing, like the
shapeless jog-trot of the Soudanese, which you
can see at Earl's Court, like the undisguised mimicry
of the women in the Rue du Caire at the last Paris
Exhibition, it is wholly sexual. But in the dancing,
inherited from the Moors, which the gipsies have
perfected in Spain, there is far more subtlety,
delicacy, and real art than in the franker posturing
of Egypt and Arabia. It is the most elaborate
dancing in the world, and, like the music, it has an
abstract quality which saves it from ever, for a
moment, becoming vulgar. As I have watched
a Gitana dancing in Seville, I have thought of the
sacred dances which in most religions have given
104

Moorish Secrets in Spain.

a perfectly solemn and collected symbolism to the
creative forces of the world. Hieratic, not per-
verse, centred upon the central fact of existence ;
moving gravely, without frivolity, in a sense without
passion, so deeply is the passion rooted in the
nature of things ; the dance coils round upon itself
as the trails of music and the trails in stone coil
round upon themselves. It is another secret of
the Moors, and must remain as mysterious to us
as those other secrets, until we have come a little
closer than we have yet come to the immaterial
wisdom of the East.

Autumn, 1899.

los

Valencia.

Past the deserts, orange groves, and watered
gardens, winding up and down between low jagged
hills and the sea, which, against the red soil about
Cabafial and the harbour, is often blood-red, sud-
denly, turning inland, we are in Valencia. It was
dark when I reached it, and I have never seen,
except point by point in its midst, this city of tall
towers and blue domes. I have followed all its
windings, and on every side it dwindles out to
dusty and cheerless boulevards, a half-dry river-
bed, gardens with palms and all manner of sHm,
feathery trees, thirsty for lack of rain, and grey
with dust. It is a maze of tall and narrow streets,
in which houses of irregular height and size, and
colour and style, follow one another with a uniform
profusion of balconies, all with their shutters or
their persianas; here and there four or five streets
debouch into an oddly shaped square, for the most
part a mere space between street and street, and
for the most part with a church at one of its corners.
There are whole streets of shops, every shop with
its little oval signboard, painted with the image
of a saint ; every shop open to the street, and hung
outside with sashes, and plaids, and lengths of
cloth and velvet, and shawls, and blankets, and
every kind of long, bright stuff. And, stagnant
amidst the constant flowing of busy life, to and fro
in these vivid, narrow streets, a beggar stands at
every crossing; men with a horrible absence of
hands, men without legs, men doubled up, and
1 06

Val

encia.

twisted into strange shapes, hopping Hke frogs,
bUnd men, men sitting against the wall with cloaks
drawn over their faces, old men tottering with age,
women carrying sick children, or with children
running beside them with little tin plates in their
hands.

Valencia is both old and new, and much in it
seems to be at once old and new. The people
are busy, thriving, but they work with their hands,
not with machinery, and they work almost in the
open air, in shops laid open like Eastern bazaars,
in great doorways, where whole families assemble
with their chairs, or sitting on balconies, in the
Spanish fashion, with their backs to the street.
The women pass, bare-headed, in their bright
clothes, on their tiny feet, carrying pitchers to the
fountain, and pitchers of beautiful ancient form,
like two-handed amphorae. They pass, dressed in
black, with their black mantillas and their fans, on
their way to the churches, to which they are always
going, and from which they are always coming.
And in the men's handkerchiefs, twisted into a
turban, with a hanging tail ; in many of the faces,
in which brown blackens to so dark a shade ; in
fingers and finger-nails, stained like a negro's, I see
the Moors, still unconquered in Spain.

And the colour ! I have never seen so much
colour in any streets before, except indeed in the
streets of Moscow, where it hurts. Here it is
bright, moving, not insistent, and clothing gay life.
I like to walk in the market-place on a sunny

107

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

morning, among those white stalls, set up with
coverings like sails, at which brown women sit in
their comfortable chairs, laughing, calling to one
another, fanning the fruit to keep off the cloud of
flies and mosquitos. There is a ceaseless noise,
passing, sound of voices ; bright dresses, shawls,
aprons throng the pavement and the roadway ;
every one, as people do in Spain, is hurrying leisurely ;
they are at once serious and good-humoured, as
Spanish people are. And this coloured crowd is
moving under the shadow of the Lonja, with its
delicate fifteenth-century Gothic (still, as naturally
as ever, the Exchange), and before the barbaric
rococo of the church of Los Santos Juanes, in the
one spacious square of Valencia, where, in the days
of the Cid, tournaments were held, and men have
been burned alive.

This living on of the Middle Ages, in a busy
town, into the present, came home to me with singu-
lar force one Thursday morning as I went to the
Cathedral Square to see the Tribunal of the Waters.
Outside the Apostles' Door an iron railing had been
set up on the broad pavement, and, within the
railing, an old-fashioned sofa, semicircular in form,
had been placed ; and at half-past eleven six old
men, peasants, took their seats, bare-headed, in
their peasants' blouses. Then two peasants came
forward, entered the enclosure, and each stated
his case briefly. The case was heard, discussed,
and decided in five minutes. The six old men
sat there leaning forward on their sticks, listening
lo8

Valencia.

attentively, for the most part saying nothing,
tacitly accepting the judgment of their president,
a keen-faced, unhesitating man, who sat with his
head bent, and his eyes raised scrutinisingly, never
moving from the face of the man before him. His
decision has the force of law, and this tribunal,
which, since the time of the Moors, has sat here
every Thursday at half-past eleven to decide all
questions relating to the watering of the lands, is
a remnant of mediaeval democracy, peasants judging
peasants, which is not the least surprising of popular
survivals.

Another morning I seemed to myself more than
ever in the Middle Ages, as I attended a Latin
discussion in the cathedral, when D. Tariny Rafael
Torres propounded the thesis that three things are
needed for a perfect repentance : oris co7ifessioy
cordis contritio, atque operis satisfactioy and the Sres.
Martinez and Fuset disputed the thesis. Against
the entrance to the choir, over which hung a lighted
lamp, a carpet had been laid, on which was placed
a row of crimson-covered arm-chairs and a table
covered with crimson cloth. Opposite, imme-
diately against the door of the principal entrance,
a movable pulpit had been set up, also hung with
crimson, and standing on a high wooden frame, to
which steps led at the back. On both sides were
benches for the audience. Six church dignitaries,
in their crimson and ermine robes, sat on the seats
at the table, one or two others at the side, and the
disputants on an ancient leather-covered settle on

109

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

the right of the pulpit. The orator was led in with
ceremony. He spoke, seated, for exactly an hour.
After he had spoken, the younger of the two dis-
putants, a man with the face of an intellectual
fighter, rose with his first co?itra. He spoke rapidly,
almost disdainfully, with a suppressed smile, as
he proposed his difficult questions. I left after
nearly two hours, while the older of the two
disputants was proposing his objections. I found
Latin surprisingly like Spanish, when pronounced
with a Spanish accent, the Spanish lisp and gutturals :
nunquam, for instance, sounding hke the Spanish
nuncdy etiam like ethiam. And the audience, that,
too, reminded me of what those audiences must
have been that flocked to hear the Schoolmen. On
and around the benches, in a dense mass on each
side, were priests and students, a certain number
of men who had probably once been students, and
then boys, old men, women, beggars — people who
certainly could not understand a word that was
said, but gazing, and apparently listening, with
rapt attention, as if to a strange religious service,
quite out of the usual course, which it was partly
curious and partly pious to attend. One old
woman, not far from me, knelt.

The churches of Valencia, so numerous, and
filled during all the hours of service with so constant
a devotion, are of but moderate value architecturally,
apart from the curiosity of their structure, in such
churches as San Andres and San Nicolas, where
the original form of the mosques, out of which
no

Val

encia.

they have been built, still persists, almost unaltered.
Many churches, once Gothic, have been spoiled
out of recognition ; plaster and whitewash and gold
paint have been at work on almost every interior ;
and the few good pictures which might be seen,
the Ribaltas, Juanes, an interesting Goya, are put
into dark corners, where it is impossible to see
them properly. The Cathedral itself, built on
the site of a mosque, and seen at its best in the bell-
tower and cimborio, which rise very effectively
against different aspects of the sky, has suffered
restoration, and its principal entrance is now tawdry
with meaningless ornament. The one satisfying
piece of Gothic here is in none of the churches, but
in the Lonja, with its pillars spiring to the roof
and branching out into stone palm trees, with a
really broad effect of delicacy. Renaissance archi-
tecture is but just seen in the audiencia; and, in
the palace on which I am looking out as I write,
a terrible example of eighteenth-century barocco,
a very masterpiece of the art of heaping up the
unnecessary. The river of Valencia, the Turia,
which, strictly speaking, scarcely exists, is to me
almost the most fascinating thing here, framing
in the picture I make for myself of this intricate
place, with an effect that pleases me. The river
banks, with their stone quays, are wide enough
for the Seine, and the Turia is a thread of water
lost in the sand. The dry river-bed is a mass of
brown sand, like the seashore ; trees grow on each
side and grass about the trees ; the horse-market

III

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

is held here in the morning, carts pass to and fro,
cattle lie there on heaped straw, soldiers gallop
over it on their horses, black sheep wander along
it in a fantastic dark crowd, the dust rising whitely
from under their little hoofs. And there are
moments when the thin stream, flowing in and out
among the sand, touches all these colours with an
exquisite light, drawing into itself the green of
the trees, and shining daintily amidst the dust.
In such moments one seems to see Africa, the desert
and the oasis.

Under a stormy sky the river-bed has a wild
and savage aspect, its brown sand reddening under
the dark clouds, droves of black cattle roaming
over it, the wind stirring in the leaves of the trees ;
and one night I saw across it one of the most original
sunsets I had ever seen ; a sunset in brown. Stand-
ing on the bridge next beyond the Moorish " Bridge
of the Law" and looking towards the Gate of
Serranos, with its fourteenth-century battlements,
every line distinct against a rim of pale green sky,
I saw the clouds heaped above them in great loose
masses of brown, nothing but shades of brown,
and every shade of brown. It was as if the light
smouldered, as if an inner flame scorched the white
clouds, as flame scorches paper, until it shrivels
into an angry, crackling brown. Under these
loose masses of brown cloud the battlemented gate,
the tall houses, a square and narrow tower which
rose beyond them, darkened to exactly the same
colour in shadow; and all but the upper part

112

Val

encia.

vanished away into complete darkness, which
extended outwards over the trees on the quay and
over a part of the dry river-bed, coming suddenly
to an end just before the water began. The thin
stream was coloured a deep purple, where the
reflection of the clouds fell right upon it ; and
higher up, where a foot-bridge crossed the river,
reversed shadows walked in greenish water, step
for step with the passers on the bridge. It was
long before the light faded out of the clouds, which
sank to a paler and paler yellow; and I stood there
thrilled with admiration of those violent and daring
harmonies, which seemed to carry Nature beyond
her usual scheme of colour, in what I could not
help almost hearing as the surge of a Wagnerian
orchestra.

Winter, 1898.

113

Tarragona.

Seen from the sea, Tarragona is a cluster of grey-
houses, full of windows, on a hill rising steeply
from the shore ; and the grey houses climb to a
yellow point, the Cathedral. At the foot of the hill
the black line of railway crosses a strip of ruinous
land, from which the abrupt rock goes up to the
Paseo de Santa Clara ; and, leaning there over the
railings, one looks down on that strip of ruinous land,
whitened harshly by the great open square of the
prison, whenever one looks seawards.
^- And, indeed, all Tarragona is expressed in those
two words, ruins and the sea. Whichever way one
follows it, it ends in half-hewn rock, and in a new
aspect of the sea, and it is built out of the ruins of a
Roman colony. The Roman walls themselves, of
which such considerable ^fragments remain, rise on
the foundations of a Cyclopean wall, built of vast
unhewn masses of stone ; the Cathedral stands on
the site of a Moorish mosque ; a public square, lined
with houses, the Plaza de Fuente, still keeps the
form of the Roman circus. Most of the houses
in the old town are made out of the ruins of Roman
houses, modern windows break out in solid Roman
walls, left to end where ruin left them to end ;
there are Roman fountains in the squares, Roman
tombstones are built into the walls of the Arch-
bishop's palace, fragments of triumphal arches are
set into the walls about Roman gateways ; the
"Tower of Charles V." comes up from the tiled
roof of the Arsenal, and "Pilate's Tower," once
H4

Tarragona.

part of the Palace of Augustus, is a prison. And
out of all these ruins of great things there has come,
for the most part, only something itself dilapidated,
to which the ruins lend no splendour. They exist,
but half themselves, as if unwillingly made a part
of the stagnant hfe about them, unwiUingly closing
in the coloured movement of markets, the rapid,
short steps of Spanish soldiers. They have seen
narrow streets come up in their midst, twisting be-
tween them, winding up and down steps, and around
corners, and jutting out into irregular squares and
odd triangles; doorways, windows, busy iron bal-
conies, flat roofs, the whole idly active Spanish life
open to the street, or disappearing behind green
persianas; and they see the Spaniards still quarrymg
about them, restless, and leaving their impoverished,
fragmentary city still unfinished.

Yet Tarragona has its one marvel, the Cathedral,
as the Cathedral has itself its marvel, the cloisters.
Its fa9ade, coloured the brown of the earth, and
warmed with a tinge of almost ruddy gold, fills the
whole space of sky at the end of the steep street by
which one approaches it, whose narrow fines indeed
cut into the great rose-window, and the arched
Gothic portal, in which the Virgin and Child stand
in the midst of prophets and apostles, carved simply
and devoutly by the thirteenth-century sculptor,
who has set over them a Last Judgment in relief,
crowded with small, indistinguishable dead, while
the great saints — each saint distinct with his written
history beside him — rise visibly from their coffins,

115

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

and two flying angels blow long trumpets above
their heads. Walking round it, by ways which
lose and find it again, we see the long, irregular,
late Romanesque structure, like house added to
house, with its low octagonal turret, exactly the
deep, rich colour of plum pudding. Inside, the
church, with less of that properly Spanish mystery
which we find in the Cathedral at Barcelona, for
example, has an ample dignity, and at night, before
the altar candles are lit, becomes splendid in shadow.
In its detail, in the gradual accumulation of structure
and ornament, the statues of the retablo, the windows,
doorways, columns, it is in itself an almost complete
historical museum of Spanish art in stone. But it
is, after all, in the cloisters that one cares chiefly to
linger. To walk there, looking between the slim
white columns, with their history of the Bible or
of the world carved minutely and with mediaeval
humour on the capitals; looking past them into
that inner court where a garden of trees and shrubs
blossoms with many greens — the green of palm, of
cypress, of oleander; in that coolness under the
sunshine visible upon the foliage, is to surrender
oneself to an enchanted peace. Here Tarragona at
least still sleeps perfectly, in that permanent dream
of the Middle Ages.

Ruins and the sea, I have said, make up most of
Tarragona; and the sea here has some particular
charm of its own, new to me, after all I have seen
of the sea. A wide rambla, planted with trees,
where, in the afternoon, every one walks, leads to
ii6

Tarragona.

that iron railing at the cliff's edge from which, but
for the pedestal of a modern statue, one could look
right through the new town to the open country
and the vine-covered hills of the Priorato. To the
right is the harbour, with its long curving mole;
to the left, a little neck of land runs out into the sea,
making a kind of tiny bay ; in front, the unlimited
sea. At night the gaslight mole becomes a horseshoe
with golden nails, the little neck of land might be
the first glimpse of a desert island. Something in
the point from which one looks down on it, the sense
of being almost theatrically perched on the edge of
a great balcony, helps, no doubt, to make one look
on this view of the sea as a great spectacle, arranged
against a magnificent moving background of clouds.
Certainly I never saw the clouds dispose themselves
with so conscious an air of being scenery, a back-
ground, as about that vast plain of blue sea, pillaring
a kind of fleecy dome over it. And the strip of
black ruinous land made its own line of footlights,
dark-coloured for contrast with that watery, and
variable, and gentle brilliance.

It is certain that the expressive quality of Tarra-
gona comes out, not only in the union, but in the
emphatic contrast, of sea and ruins. And that
particular harsh spot on the shore, the great prison,
"El Milagro," has its own singular value in the
composition. One looks down, from those railings,
on the whole inner court, open to the sky, and painted
sky-blue, where a line of prisoners sits in the sun,
wearing broad-brimmed straw hats, rope-making,

117

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

and the others stroll about, drink out of earthen
pitchers, or sit on great stones, all over the court,
or with their backs against the doors of the prison-
chapel. They have hung up their coats on nails
in the wall, and they lounge there in their shirt-
sleeves, and white sandal-shoes, exactly as they
would lounge in their own doorways. Outside the
high white walls, soldiers, with fixed bayonets,
stand on guard ; and at night, after the prison is
silent behind its grated windows, one hears their
long cry of Alerta echoing other voices from up the
hill. And that centre of lives that have come to
grief, all that pent-up violence, is set there between
the city and the sea, for idle people to look down
upon all day ; and all day long, beggars, or children,
or casual passers, stand leaning over those railings,
staring down into the prison-yard. As many people,
I think, look at the prison as at the sea ; some of
them cannot see the sea for the prison, and their
eyes stop there on the way. And for every one
who looks at the sea there is the prison thrusting
itself between one's sight and the sea, more desolate
than any ruin, a wicked spot which one cannot wipe
off from the earth.

W inter i 1898.

118

Cordova.

Seen from the further end of the Moorish bridge
by the Calahorra, where the road starts to Seville,
Cordova is a long brown hne between the red river
and the purple hills, an irregular, ruinous Hne,
following the windings of the river, and rising to
the yellow battlements and great middle bulk of the
cathedral. It goes up sheer from the river-side,
above a broken wall, and in a huddle of mean
houses, with so lamentably picturesque an air that
no one would expect to find, inside that rough
exterior, such neat, clean, shining streets, kept, even
in the poorest quarters, with so admirable a care,
and so bright with flowers and foliage, in patios and
on upper balconies. From the bridge one sees the
Moorish mills, rising yellow out of the yellow water,
and, all day long, there is a slow procession along it
of mules and donkeys, with their red saddles,
carrying their burdens, and sometimes men heavily
draped in great blanket-cloaks. Cross the city, and
come out on the Paseo de la Victoria, open to the
Sierra Morena, and you are in an immense village-
green with red and white houses on one side, and
black wooded hills on every other side ; the trees,
when I saw it for the first time at the beginning of
winter, already shivering, and the watchers sitting
on their chairs with their cloaks across their faces.

All Cordova seems to exist for its one treasure,
the mosque, and to exist for it in a kind of remem-
brance ; it is white, sad, delicately romantic, set in
the midst of a strange, luxuriant country, under the

119

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

hills, and beside the broad Guadalquivir, which,
seen at sunset from the Ribera, flows with so fantastic
a violence down its shallow weirs, between the mills
and beneath the arches of the Moors. The streets
are narrow and roughly paved, and they turn on
themselves like a maze, around blank walls, past
houses with barred windows and open doors,
through which one sees a flowery patio, and by little
irregular squares, in which the grass is sometimes
growing between the stones, and outside the doors
of great shapeless churches, mounting and descend-
ing steeply, from the river-bank to the lanes and
meadows beyond the city walls. Turn and turn
long enough through the white solitude of these
narrow streets, and you come on the dim arcades
and tall houses of the market-place, and on alleys
of shops and bazaars, bright with coloured things,
crimson umbrellas, such as every one carries here,
cloaks lined with crimson velvet, soft brown leather,
shining silver-work. The market is like a fair;
worthless, picturesque lumber is heaped all over
the ground, and upon stalls, and in dark shops like
caves : steel and iron and leather goods, vivid
crockery-ware, roughly burnt into queer, startling
patterns, old clothes, cheap bright handkerchiefs
and scarves. Passing out through the market-
place, one comes upon sleepier streets, dwindling
into the suburbs ; grass grows down the whole
length of the street, and the men and women sit in
the middle of the road in their chairs, the children,
more solemnly, in their little chairs. Vehicles pass
1 20

Cordova.

seldom, and only through certain streets, where a
board tells them it is possible to pass; but mules
and donkeys are always to be seen, in long tinkling
lines, nodding their wise little heads, as they go on
their own way by themselves. At night Cordova
sleeps early ; a few central streets are still busy
with people, but the rest are all deserted, the houses
look empty, there is an almost oppressive silence.
Only, here and there, as one passes heedlessly along
a quiet street, one comes suddenly upon a cloaked
figure, with a broad-brimmed hat, leaning against
the bars of a window, and one may catch, through
the bars, a ghmpse of a vivid face, dark hair, and a
rose (an artificial rose) in the hair. Not in any part
of Spain have I seen the traditional Spanish love-
making, the cloak and hat at the barred window,
so frankly and so delightfully on view. It brings a
touch of genuine romance, which it is almost difficult
for those who know comic opera better than the
countries in which life is still, in its way, a serious
travesty, to take quite seriously. Lovers' faces, on
each side of the bars of a window, at night, in a
narrow street of white houses : that, after all, and
not even the miraculous mosque, may perhaps be
the most vivid recollection that one brings away
with one from Cordova.

Winter, 1898.

121

Montserrat.

Like one not yet awakened from a dream I seemed
to myself while I was still in Montserrat ; and now,
having left it, I seem to have awakened from the
dream. One of those few exquisite, impossible
places which exist, properly, only in our recollection
of them, Montserrat is still that place of refuge
which our dreams are ; and is it not itself a dream
of the Middle Ages, Monsalvat, the castle of the
Holy Graal, which men have beheved to be not in
the world, and to contain something not of the
world, seeing it poised so near heaven, among so
nearly inaccessible rocks, in the lonely hollow of a
great plain ? Solidly based on the fifteen miles
which encircle it, the mountain goes up suddenly,
in terrace after terrace, with a sort of ardent vigour,
close-pressed columns of rock springing step by
step higher into the air, pausing for a moment
where the Monastery stands on its narrow ledge,
2900 feet high, and then going on for another
thousand feet, ending in great naked fingers of rock
which point to the sky. The tall, bare buildings
of the monastery are built of yellow stone, and, seen
from a distance, seem to become almost a part of
the mountain itself, in which the grey stone is ruddy-
hearted, like the colour of the soil at its feet. And
as the monastery seems to become almost a part of
the mountain, so the rock itself takes the aspect of
a castle, a palace; especially at night, when one
seems to look up at actual towers overtopping the
tall buildings. And from this narrow ledge between
122

Montserrat.

heaven and earth, a mere foothold on a great rock,
one looks up only at sheer peaks, and down only
into veiled chasms, or over mountainous walls to
a great plain, ridged as if the naked ribs of the earth
were laid bare, the red and grey soil spotted dark
with trees, here and there whitened with houses,
furrowed by a yellow river, the white line of roads
barely visible, man's presence only marked by here
and there a little travelling smoke, disappearing
into the earth, insect-like, or, insect-like, crawling
black on its surface.

With all its vastness, abruptness, and fantastic
energy, Montserrat is never savage ; it is always
forming naturally into beautiful, unexpected shapes,
miracles of form, by a sort of natural genius in it for
formal expression. And this form is never violent,
is always subtly rounded, even when it is bare grey
rocks ; and often breaks out dehciously into verdure,
which is the ornament on form. There is some-
thing in it, indeed, at times, of the highest kind of
grotesque, pointing fingers, rocks which have grown
almost human ; but in all this there is nothing
trivial, for here the grotesque becomes for once a
new, powerful kind of beauty. From the height of
S. Jeronimo, the highest point of the mountain, a
whole army of beckoning and threatening rocks
comes up about one, climbing gigantically, among
sheer precipices, tumultuously, in that place of great
echoes. But they have the beauty of wild things,
of those animals which are only half uncouth until
man has tamed them, and shut them up in the

123

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

awkwardness of prisoners. And they are solem-
nised too, by the visible height to which they have
climbed into the serene air, out of a plain that rolls
away, curve on curve, grey and ruddy, to the snow
of the Pyrenees, and the broad, glittering, milk-
white line of the Mediterranean,

But the beauty of Montserrat lies in no detail,
can be explained by no analysis: it is the beauty
of a conscious soul, exquisite, heroic, sacred, ancient,
in the midst of the immemorable peace, dignity, and
endurance of high mountains. Without the mon-
astery, the pilgrims, the worship of the Virgin, the
chanting of the monks and of the Escolania (that
school of ecclesiastical music which has existed here
since the twelfth century), Montserrat would be a
strange, beautiful thing indeed, a piece of true
picturesque, but no more, not the unique thing that
it is. Quite out of the world, singularly alone, one
is in the presence of a great devotion ; and in the
pilgrims who come here, humble people with the
grave and friendly gaiety of the Spaniard I found
the only perfectly sympathetic company I have ever
found about me in travelling. Life is reduced to
its extreme simplicity : the white-washed cell, the
attendance on oneself, the day marked only by one's
wanderings over the mountain, or by the hours of
worship. I went one morning to the "visitation
of the Virgin," when the dark image is unveiled
for the kisses of the pilgrims ; and I saw in the
sacristy the innumerable votive offerings hanging
on the walls, moulded limbs, naive (indeed hideous)
124

Montserrat.

pictures representing the dangers from which the
Virgin had saved her faithful, httle jackets of
children who had been cured from sickness, great
plaits of hair which women had cut off and hung
there, in thankfulness for the saving of a husband.
And I went every evening to the singing of the
Salves at the Ave Maria, ending the daylight with
that admirable chanting, in those deep, abstract
voices of the monks, and with that sense of divine
things, that repose, which always deepened or
heightened in me, as I came out through the cloisters
into the court of the plane trees, and looked up at
the vast, obscure, mysteriously impending heights,
gulfing downwards into unseen depths, with a kind
of grateful wonder, as if all one's dreams had come
true.

And this sense of natural fehcity, moved to
astonishment, to the absoluteness of delight in being
where one is, grew upon me during those three
days of my visit, forming a new kind of sentiment,
which I had never felt before, and which modified
itself gently during the hours of the day, from the
blitheness of the morning chmb, through the con-
tented acceptance of the afternoon sunshine, to that
placid but solemn ending. For once, I was perfectly
happy, and with that element of strangeness in my
happiness without which I cannot conceive happiness.

I have always held that it is unwise to ask of any
perfect thing duration as well as existence. Supreme
happiness, if it could be continued indefinitely,
would in time, without losing its essence, lose its

125

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

supremacy, which exists only by contrast. When I
have seen a face, a landscape, an aspect of the sky,
pass for a moment into a sort of crisis, in which it
attained the perfect expression of itself, I have
always turned away rapidly, closing my eyelids on
the picture, which I dread to see fade or blur before
me. I would obtain from things, as from people,
only their best ; and I hold it to be not only wisdom
towards oneself, but a point of honour towards them.
Therefore, intending as I did to make a long stay
in Montserrat, and having provided myself, in case
of difficulty, with a letter to the Abbot, I left,
without regret, at the end of the traditional three
days, certain that I could get nothing more poignant
in its happiness than what those three days had
given me, and that by leaving at the moment of
perfection I was preserving for myself an incom-
parable memory, which would always rise for me,
out of the plain of ordinary days, like the mountain
itself, Monsalvat, where I had perhaps seen the
Holy Graal.

Winter, 1898.

126

Cadiz.

In the spring of 1899 I spent five days at Cadiz.
I was waiting for a summons to cross over to Tangier,
a summons which, as it happened, never came, or
was never obeyed. But that expectation gave me,
all the time I was there, a pecuHar sensation, a rest-
lessness, an unsettled feeling, as of one pausing by
the way. I was alone, unoccupied, I had one of
those dark, windowless rooms at my hotel, opening
inwards, which Spaniards seem to find quite natural,
but which it is not easy for a stranger to feel com-
fortable in. I walked about the streets all day,
and along the Muelle looking down on the harbour,
and along the Alameda and the Parque Genoves
looking down on the sea, and along the rough,
unpaved Recinto del Sur, against which the sea is
always tossing. If I walked long enough in any
direction I came out upon a great white wall and the
sea. I felt as if I were on a narrow island, waiting
for a ship to deliver me.

All Cadiz is tall and white, built high, because
there is only a neck of land to build on, and the
breath of the sea is in every street. Walking, even
in the centre of the town, one is conscious of the
neighbourhood of another, an uncertain and shifting,
element. The people who passed me seemed as
conscious as I of this restless friend or enemy at
their doors. Some of them had but just landed
from the ships in the harbour, others were just
going out to sea in them. Every day there were
different people in the streets; I had not time to

127

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

get accustomed to seeing them before they were
gone. No one seemed to be expected to stay there
long. I felt almost ashamed, as day followed day,
and I was still there ; I felt as if people were wonder-
ing why I, too, did not go on.

Every town, I suppose, in every country, has its
Sunday evening walk, along a certain route ; and
the Sunday evening walk at Cadiz is downward
from the Plaza de la Constitucion, through the Calle
del Duque de Tetuan and a series of narrow, twisting
streets to the Plaza de Isabel II., or to the Cathedral,
or to the slanting, queerly shaped market-place,
where the sea-wind, which you have been leaving
behind as you go farther from the bay, meets you
again, blowing up from the open sea. This walk
through streets reminded me of the winding prom-
enade of the Venetians, from the Piazza di San
Marco along the Merceria to the Rialto. Cadiz,
too, like Venice, an "all-but-island," comes natu-
rally to adopt the same way of pacing to and fro
within its narrow limits. Many of the people go
on walking until ten; some drop off into theatres
or cafes. A circus, when I was there, had taken
one of the theatres ; I stood by the entrance to the
ring among the jockeys, and heard them talking
English ; the sight of the horses put all thought of
the sea out of my mind.

On Sunday afternoon every one walked in the
park ; the women wore their best clothes ; and I
watched them pass and re-pass, with a feeling which
I was not used to feel in Spain. There was some-
128

Cadiz.

thing modern, fashionable, Parisian, in these toilettes,
an aim at Parisian taste — a little extravagantly
followed, it must be admitted. And these women
had a look (what shall I say ?) more French than the
women I had seen anywhere else in Spain. They
had, indeed, the perfect Spanish calmness, but with
it a slight self-consciousness, almost coquetry, with
less of the sleepy animal. Is it merely fancy, or the
unconscious prejudice of a Latin tradition, which
makes me think that the Gaditanae are really, in
some sense, "improbae," more than other Anda-
lusian women ? Perhaps it is only that they are
less absorbed in themselves, more attentive to those
who look at them, winningly aware of their sex,
as their eyes show. They are taller, slighter, and
fairer than the women of Seville, their faces are more
neatly finished, the nose more delicately curved,
the eyelids very arched, the eyes wide open and
very active. Here not only the women of the
upper and lower classes, but of the middle classes
as well, have more than the usual Spanish piquancy
in their smooth oval faces. Is there something in
the sea itself, or is it only the natural hazards of that
mixture of races which a position by the sea brings
about ? Certainly the women of Cadiz are not like
other Spanish women.

There is nothing to see in Cadiz, only the white
houses, and the ships in the harbour, and the water
surging and swinging against the walls. At night
I used to wander on the desolate stretch of ground
behind the Cathedral, pushing my way against the

129

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

wind until I leaned over the wall, and could watch
the grey waves heaving up and down with the long
roll of the Atlantic. They were white at the edge,
where they pushed hard at the wall, and sank back,
and pushed hard at it again, A chill wind blew
across them, with a dreary and melancholy sound.
I Ustened anxiously; for once the sea gave me no
pleasure. I wanted to be on the other side of it,
under the African sun, with the friend from whom
I was waiting to hear. I was impatient at being
still in Europe.

Spring, 1899.

130

A Bull Fight at Valencia.

I HAVE always held that cruelty has a deep root in
human nature, and is not that exceptional thing
which, for the most part, we are pleased to suppose
it. I believe it has an unadmitted, abominable
attraction for almost every one; for many of us,
under scrupulous disguises ; more simply for
others, and especially for people of certain races;
but the same principle is there, under whatever
manifestation, and, if one takes one's stand on
nature, claiming that whatever is deeply rooted
there has its own right to exist, what of the natural
rights of cruelty ? The problem is troubhng me
at the moment, for I was at a Spanish bull fight
yesterday, the first I had ever seen ; and I saw many
things there of a nature to make one reflect a little
on first principles.

The Plaza de Toros at Valencia is . the largest
in Spain. It holds 17,000 people, nearly 3000
m.ore than those of Barcelona, Seville, and Madrid.
Yesterday it was two-thirds full, and, looking from
my seat in the second row of boxes, that is, from
the highest point of the house, I saw an immense
blue circle filling the space between the brown
sand of the arena and the pale blue sky overhead.
The Sol, the side of the sun, the cheaper side, was
opposite to me, and the shimmer of blue came
from the gradas, where the blue blouses of the
workmen left the darker clothes of their neigh-
bours and the occasional coloured dress of a woman
hardly distinguishable as more than a shght variation

131

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

in a single tone of colour. Below me was the Presi-
dent's box, and halfway round to the right the band,
which, punctually at three, began to play a march
as a door in the arena, immediately opposite to me,
was thrown open, and the procession came in — the
espadas and banderilleros in their pink and gold,
with their bright cloaks, walking, the picadores,
pike in hand, on their horses, the chulos following.
There were to be eight bulls, four in plaza partida^
that is, with a barrier dividing the arena into two
halves, and four in lidia ordinaria, with the whole
of the arena. As soon as the men were in their
places a trumpet was blown, two doors in the arena
were thrown open, and two bulls, each with a
rosette on his neck, galloped in. The two fights
went on simultaneously, in the traditional three
acts — the Suerte de Picar, when the picadores, on
horseback and holding long wooden pikes with a
short head, meet the bull ; the Suerte de Banderilleray
when the banderilleros plant their coloured darts
in his neck; and the Suerte de Matar, when the
espada, with his sword and his red cloth, gives
the death-blow. Each fight lasted about half an
hour, and was divided into its three acts by the
sound of trumpets.

The first act might be called the Massacre of
the Horses. There is no pretence of fighting,
and the picador rarely attempts to save his horse,
although nothing would be easier ; on the contrary,
the horse is deliberately offered to the bull, with
the very considerable chance, of course, that the
132

A Bull Fight at Valencia.

picador himself may be wounded through his pads,
or as he rolls over with his horse. The horses are
old and lean, one eye is often bandaged, and if, as
they often do, they press back in terror against
the barrier, or become unmanageable, a red-coated
chulo comes forward and takes the bridle, and
another follows with a stick, and the horse is led
up to the bull and placed sideways to receive the
charge. The bull, who has not the slightest desire
to attack the horse, is finally teased into irritation
by the red coats and by the pink cloaks, which are
tossed and flaunted before him ; he paws the ground,
puts down his head, and charges. The pike
pricks him, and his horns plunge into the horse's
belly, or are caught on the loose wooden saddle,
or, as happened once yesterday, scrape the picador's
leg. The cloaks are flourished again, and the bull
follows them. Then the horse, if he is still on his
feet, is again turned to the bull. There is a great
red hole in him, and the blood drips ; but he is
dragged and beaten forward. The bull plunges
at him a second time, and this time he rolls over
with his rider, who scrambles out from under him,
his yellow clothes stained with red. Then one
chulo takes the bridle and beats the horse on the
head, and another chulo drags him by the tail, and,
if he can, he staggers to his feet. He is literally
falhng to pieces, he has not ten minutes to live;
but the saddle is thrown on him again and the picador
helped into the saddle. He makes a few steps, the
picador drives his heels into him, and then jumps

133

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

off as he falls for the last time and lies kicking on
the ground, a torn and battered and sopping mass.
Then a chulo goes up to him, hits him on the head
to see if he can be made to get up again, and, finding
it useless, takes out a long, gimlet-Hke dagger,
and drives it in behind his ear. Then, keeping
an eye on the bull, the chulo scrapes up the blood
clotted among the sand into a basket, and strews
fresh sand about. Meanwhile another horse is
being butchered, and the bull's horns have turned
crimson, and his neck, where the pike has stuck
into him, begins to redden in a thin line down each
side.

The trumpet sounds again, and if one of the
horses is still living he is led back to the stables,
to be used a second time. Now comes what is
really skill in the performance, the planting of the
banderilleras. The bull has tasted blood, he is
still untired, and but slightly wounded. Little
shouts of dehght went through the house, and I
could not but join in the applause, as Velasco nodded
to the bull and waved the banderilleras close to his
eyes, between his very horns, and planted them
full-face before he leapt sideways. And Velasco's
play with the cloak : the whole house rose to its
feet, in fear and admiration, once as he wiped the
ground with it, only its own length from the bull,
again and again and again, and then, wrapping it
suddenly about him with its white side outwards,
turned his back on the bull, and stood still.

The trumpet sounds again, and the espada takes

134

A Bull Fight at Valencia.

his sword and his muleta, and goes out for the last
scene. This, which ought to be, is not always the
real climax. The bull is often by this time tired,
has had enough of the sport, leaps at the barrier,
trying to get out. He is tired of running after
red rags, and he brushes them aside contemptuously;
he can scarcely be got to show animation enough
to be decently killed. But one bull that I saw yester-
day was splendidly savage, and fought almost to
the last, running about the arena with the sword
between his shoulders, and that great red line
broadening down each side of his neck on the black —
like a deep layer of red paint, one tricks oneself into
thinking. He carried two swords in his neck, and
still fought ; when at last he, too, got weary, and
he went and knelt down before the door by which
he had entered, and would fight no more. But
they went up to him from outside the barrier, and
drew the swords out of him ; and he got to his feet
again, and stood to be killed.

As the espada bows and renders up his sword
the doors of the arena are thrown open, and there
is a sound of bells. Teams of mules, decked w^ith
red and yellow bows and rosettes all over their
heads and their collars, are driven in, a rope is
fastened to the heads of the dead horses and to the
horns of the dead bulls, and they are dragged out
at full speed, one after the other, each tracing a
long, curving line in the sand. Then the trumpets
are blown, and the next fight begins.

I sat there, in my box, from three until half-past

135

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

five, when the eighth bull was killed in the half-
darkness. Two men had been slightly wounded
and ten horses killed — a total which, for eight
bulls, as El Taurino said next day, dice bien poco en
favor de los mismos. An odour, probably of bad
tobacco, which my imagination insisted on accepting
as the scent of blood, came up into my nostrils,
where it remained all that night. Out of the open
sky a bird flew now and again, darted hurriedly
to and fro, and escaped into the free air. Women
were sitting around me, with their children on their
knees. When a horse had been badly gored, a
lady sitting next to me put up her opera-glasses
to see it better. There was no bravado in it. It
was simple interest.

There were moments when that blue circle, as
I turned my head away from the arena, seemed to
swim before my eyes. But I quickly turned back
to the arena again ; I hated, sickened, and looked ;
and I could not have gone out until the last bull
had been killed. The bulls were by no means a
good ganado ; I could have wished them more
spirited. The odds are so infinitely in favour of
the bull-fighter; he can always count on the pause
which the bull makes between one rush and another,
and on the infallible diversion of the red rag. It is
a game of agility, presence of mind, sureness of
foot and hand ; dangerous enough, certainly, but
not more dangerous than the daily exercises of an
equilibrist. But there is always that odd chance,
like the gambler's winning number, which may
136

A Bull Fight at Valencia.

turn up — the chance of a false step, a miscalculation,
and the bull's horns in a man's body. The small
probability of such a thing, and yet the possibility
of it ; these, combined, are two of the motives
which bring people to the bull-light.

Yet I cannot help thinking, suppress the Suerte
de Picar, and you suppress the bull-fight. This
is the one abomination and the abominable attrac-
tion. I have described it with as much detail as
I dare, and even now I feel that I have hardly
rendered the whole horror of it. Coming away from
the Plaza, I saw every horse I passed in the street,
as I had seen those horses, with gaping and dripping
sides, rearing back against the barrier, and dragged
and beaten up to the horns of the bull. Well,
that red plunge of horns into the Hving flesh, that
living body ripped and Hfted and rolled to the
ground, that monstrous visible agony dragging
itself about the sand ; and, along with this, the rider
rolhng off, indeed, on the safe side, but, for the
moment, indistinguishable from his Hving barrier,
and with only that barrier between him and the
horns — it is this that one holds one's breath to see,
and it is to hold one's breath that one goes to the
bull-fight.

The cruelty of human nature — what is it ? and
how is it that it has struck root so deep ? I realise
it more clearly, and understand it less than ever,
since I have come from that novillada at Valencia.

Winter, 1898.

Alicante.

I REACHED Alicante during this last stormy night,
seeing something of the country we were passing
through by Hghtning flashes ; and when I went
out this morning the roads were heaped with the
mud of a night's rain. The sun shone, and bright
drops of rain fell, drying as they fell, under that
almost tropical heat; and as I found myself, sud-
denly, a dozen steps from the door of my hotel,
standing under a palm tree on a beach where bare-
footed sailors were dragging up the boats, with
the whole shining sea before me, green and silver
and pale grey to the abrupt edge of the horizon,
where blue-black clouds rose like a glittering wall,
I could have fancied myself scarcely in Europe. I
Hngered there for some time, making the most
of that sensation of friendly isolation which the
sudden, unexpected presence of the sea always
brings to me, and then began to walk slowly along
the Paseo, under the double row of palm trees,
watching the ships rocking in the harbour; one
of them, no larger than a fishing vessel, a Cornish
boat, the Little Mystery of Fowey. I walked under
the palms the whole length of the harbour, and
stopped when I came to the great mole and the
further beach, on which the waves were coming
in. No waves have the same way of coming in
on any two shores. These were stealthy, sudden,
rising unexpectedly out of a smooth surface, as a
snake rises out of the grass, and then gliding forward
with a rushing subsidence. I walked out on the
138

Alicante.

mole, and sat down at the very end, where an old
fisherman was paddling in his boat after crabs ;
and then for the first time I saw AHcante.

I saw, across the blue, swaying water of the
harbour, an immense, bare, brown rock, lined with
fortifications, crowned with a castle, and at its foot
a compact mass of flat, white houses, which trailed
off" to the left into apparently a single hne along the
water, white and blue and mauve and pink, on the
other side of that double row of palm trees, and with
a surprising eff'ect of elegance. Near the centre,
one or two blue domes, towers topped with blue,
square grey towers, rose from among the low roofs ;
two high banks of rock continued the central mass
to the right, with gaps between, after which a low
curve of bare rock ended the bay. Behind, a low
range of hills, rising and falling in peaks and broken
curves, bare for the clouds to paint their colours
on, shut off" this bright edge of seashore from the
world.

I have been lounging about the harbour all day,
merely drinking in sunshine and sea air, and as yet
I know nothing of Alicante. But to-night, walking
about these muddy streets in which the mud is
hke that on a deep country road, and watching
the people who pass to and fro at that hour of five,
when, in Spain, everybody is in the street, I figure
Alicante to myself as a rough, violent little place,
still barbarous. And, looking down from the high
Plaza de Ramiro, those singular, neat little cabins
on the seashore, bathing-cabins, I suppose, let for

139

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

the season, and at other times Uved in by the people
of the place, might be huts on a savage beach, as
they stand there under the palm trees. And the
clouds are growing stormier over the sea, stained
with bright, watery colours, green and rose, towards
the sunset ; darkness is coming on ; a steamer
glides out across the water, straight into the stormy
clouds, through which a soft, pink hghtning flushes
at intervals.

I am beginning to know Alicante. All this
morning I have been wandering through the bye-
streets, seeing the whole life of the place as I pass,
in doorways and at window^s, and in houses thrown
wide open to the street. I might almost be seeing
hill-tribes squatting in their caves. The streets,
rising from about the harbour, beyond the one or
two regular, level streets with shops, are planted
as irregularly as the streets of Le Puy or of St.
Ives. Often steps lead from one level to another;
and houses are of different heights, thrown together
at random, a one-storied house by the side of a
three-storied house ; and they rise or dwindle
upwards and downwards until they seem to merge
imperceptibly into the hill itself. As in the East,
women are to be seen all day long going to the well
with their pitchers, which they carry on their hips,
with one arm thrown round them. And these
women, the women who sit at their doors, sewing,
or making lace, or knitting, or reading, or talking,
have in their faces a ruddy darkness which I have
as yet rarely seen in Spain, the colour of the pure
140

Alicante,

Moor, every shade of colour, from a dead olive to
a black-brown lit as by an inner fire. Sometimes
the black blood shows in flat nose and thick Hps,
sometimes in bushy eyebrows meeting ; some-
times the outHne of features is almost MongoHan.
And there is not a hnk in the chain which joins
the Moor and the Spaniard, not a gradation in the
whole series of types, which is not to be seen here,
in these heterogeneous streets.

To-night, just before Vespers, I went into the
church of Santa Maria, which fills one side of a
little square, high up, from which, as from a lofty
platform, one can see the sea, over and between
the houses. It was quite dark as I entered, and,
feeling my way, I came through a side chapel to an
iron gate, which stood open, through which I saw
some one in a far corner with a lighted candle in
his hand, and, near to me, a long dark figure moving
mechanically, which I did not at first distinguish
as a man pulling a bell-rope. I stumbled forward
and looked about me. At first it seemed to me
that I had found my way into a crypt, with side
crypts all round. Gradually I perceived a Gothic
vaulting and the arches of side chapels, which
succeeded one another without division down the
whole length of the church. A tiny fight twinkled
here and there from a suspended lamp. I saw a
kneeling figure in black ; the sacristan passed on
the other side of the arches with his candle, which
he blew out, and the church returned to its silent
darkness.

141

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

This morning the sea has been magnificently-
joyous. I have been spending hours on the two
branches of the mole which closes in the harbour,
watching its bright extravagances ; and now, as
afternoon advances, the fishing boats are coming
home, like great white birds, one after the other,
with wings hfted. The first has already passed
me, entered the harbour. Never was there a
harbour so delicate, so elegant, with its ample
space, its whiteness, the exquisite lines which the
bare masts and yard-arms make against the palm
trees, which one sees through swaying cordage
and between half-reefed sails. Ships here are
what they should be, the humanising part of the
sea's beauty ; and they are still as much as ever a
part of the sea as they are lifted on these moving
tides, inside the harbour, and along the quay. At
night I am watching them again, under a sunset
blackening the West with darkness, and devour-
ing the darkness with flame. The whole harbour
burns, and the masts rise into the fiery sky, out of
the purple water, and across violet mountains.

And so day follows day in a happy monotony.
I spent yesterday at Elche, a little rocky town of
palms, thirteen miles off', which is really Africa in
Spain. High up a bare, crumbling bank, rising
from the yellow river, where lines of stooping women
are pounding clothes, one sees, looking from the
bridge, a crowd of squat, white square houses, set
one beside and above another, like the dwellings
of savage people, blank walls with a few barred holes
142

Alicante.

for windows; above, a blue-domed church that
might be a mosque. Palms overtop the walls,
rise in the midst of the houses, swarm in forests up
to all the outskirts, stretch into the country among
fields and groves of trees ; and along all the alleys
flow variable streams, arrested and set in motion
by an elaborate system of dykes. Under that hot
sun in mid-winter, following little paths between
the rows of palms, which ended in their tuft of
feathers and their cluster of yellow dates so high
above my head, hearing from that height the long,
Hngering, Moorish songs of the date-pickers, perched
there with ropes about their waists, the mules waiting
below with their panniers for the burdens, I seemed
far from even AHcante, really deep in the tropics,
and not (as I forced myself to reflect) a day's journey
from Madrid.

It is after all with relief, as if I have shaken
off some not quite expUcable oppression, that I
find myself back again at Ahcante. How perfectly
restful is this busy peace of the morning, in the blue
harbour, where sea-gulls, white and black, fly among
the ships ; and in the bluer bay, w^here from moment
to moment a great sail, passing close to land, blots
out the sunshine which hes glittering on the placidly
wrinkling water ! As the boats pass, the men
bending to their oars and stooping under the sail,
I can see them taking silver fishes out of dark nets.
Sails whiten on the horizon against a dull cloud,
and darken against clouds shining with sunlight.
The long plash of the tide coils in about the rocks

143

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

at my feet. They are loading the ships with a
slow, rhythmical roll of machinery. Across the
harbour a bell is tolling. All the rest is warm
silence.

Spring, 1898.

144

A Spanish Music-Hail.

I AM aficionado^ as a Spaniard would say, of music-
halls. They amuse me, and I am always grateful
to any one or anything that amuses me. The
drama, if it is to be looked on as an art at all, is
a serious art, to be taken seriously ; the art of the
music-hall is admittedly frivolous — the consecra-
tion of the frivolous. The more it approaches the
legitimate drama the less characteristic, the less
interesting it is. Thus what are called in England
"sketches" are rarely tolerable; they may be
endured. If I want a farce I will go elsewhere. I
come to the music-hall for dancing, for singing, for
the human harmonies of the acrobat. And I come
for that exquisite sense of the frivolous, that air of
Bohemian freedom, that rehef from respectability
which one gets here, and nowhere more surely than
here. In a music-hall the audience is a part of the
performance. The audience in a theatre, besides
being in itself less amusing, is on its best behaviour ;
you do not so easily surprise its "humours." Here
we have a tragic comedy in the box yonder, a
farce in the third row of the stalls, a scene from a
ballet in the promenade. The fascination of these
private performances is irresistible ; and they are
so constantly changing, so full of surprises, so
mysterious and so clear.

And then it is so amusing to contrast the Pavilion
with the Trocadero, to compare the Eldorado with
La Scala; to distinguish just the difference, on the
stage and off, which one is certain to find at Collins's

145

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

and the Metropolitan, at La Cigale and the Divan
Japonais. To study the individuality of a music-
hall, as one studies a human individuahty, that is
by no means the least profitable, the least interesting
of studies.

At the beginning of last May I spent a few days
at Barcelona, and one night I went to the Alcazar
Espafiol, the most characteristic place I could find,
extremely curious to see w^hat a Spanish music-
hall would be like. It was very near my hotel, in
a side street turning out of the Rambla, and I had
heard through the open window the sound of music
and of voices. I got there early, a little before
nine. The entrance was not imposing, but it was
covered with placards which had their interest. I
pushed open the swing-doors and found myself
in a long vestibule, at the other end of which was
a sort of counter, which did duty for a box-ofl&ce.
I paid, went down a step or two, and through
another door. There was a bar at one end of the
room, and a few small tables placed near two em-
brasures, through which one saw an inner room.
This was the hall. At one end was a little stage ;
the curtain was down, and the musicians' chairs
and desks were vacant. Except for the stage, and
for a gallery which ran along one side and the other
end, the room was just like an ordinary cafe. There
were the usual seats, the usual marble-topped
tables, the usual glasses, and, lounging sleepily in
the corners, the usual waiters. Two or three people
stood at the bar, a few more were drinking coffee
146

A Spanish Music-Hail.

or aguardiente at the tables. Presently two women
came in and began to arrange one another's dresses
in the corner. Two of the performers, I thought,
and rightly. Then a few more people came in,
and a few more, and the place gradually filled.
The audience was not a distinguished one. None
of the women wore hats, and few of them assumed
an air of too extreme superiority to the waiters.
Two fantastic creatures at a table next to me seemed
to find it pleasant as well as profitable to be served
by a waiter who would sit down at the same table
and pay open court to them. Women would appear
and disappear at the door leading into the next
room, the room with the bar. The red door by
the side of the stage — the stage-door — began to
open and shut. And now the musicians were
assembling. The grey-haired leader of the or-
chestra, smoking a cigar, brought in the score.
He sat down at his piano and handed round the
sheets of music. The members of the orchestra
brought newspapers with them. The man who
played the clarionet was smoking a cigarette fixed
in an interminable holder. He did his duty by his
instrument in the overture that followed, but he
never allowed the cigarette to go out. I thought
the performance remarkable.

The band, for a music-hall of no higher preten-
sions, was extremely good. It had the genuine
music-hall swing, and a sympathetic dehcacy which
I had not expected. The overture sounded very
Spanish. It was a potpourri of some kind, with

147

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

much variety of airs, a satisfying local colour. After
the overture the curtain rose on a 7nise eji schie of
astonishing meagreness. It was a zarzuela — a
"sketch" — called L'Ecrin du Shah de Perse, in
which the principal performer was Mile. Anna
Durmance, a lady who spoke excellent French on
occasion, but who looked and acted as only a
Spaniard could look and act. The Spaniards
have very little talent for acting. They lack
flexibility, they have not the instinctive sense of
the situation, such as every Frenchman and every
Frenchwoman possess by right of birth. The
men move spasmodically, as if galvanised. The
women place themselves — gracefully, of course —
in certain positions, because they know that such
positions are required. They use the appropriate
gestures, their faces assume certain expressions ;
but it is all done with the air of one who has learnt
a lesson. And the lesson has evidently been a
difficult one. The zarzuela was amusing in its
wildly farcical way — a farce of grotesque action,
of incredible exaggeration. There was a great
deal of excited movement, a series of rather dis-
connected episodes, a good deal of noise. Anna
Durmance was best in a scene where she came on
as a washerwoman. Spaniards, with whom the
washerwoman's art is of public interest, an element
of the picturesque, are very fond of personating
washerwomen, and they do it particularly well.
There were other moments when Mile. Durmance
was excellent ; certain gestures, a typically Spanish
148

A Spanish Music-Hail.

way of walking. But one was not sorry when,
in the usual sudden way, all the performers rushed
together upon the stage ; there were some ex-
clamations, some laughter, some joining of hands,
and the curtain was down amid a thunder of applause.
The next performer was really a Frenchwoman.
"Elle est affreuse," said a dark Southerner near
me, whose "meridional vivacity" was unmistakably
in evidence, "mais elle a ete gracieuse." I could
imagine she had once been very handsome. She
was by no means "frightful" now, but one saw
that she owed something to her "make-up." Her
voice, as she sang some well-known French comic
songs, in which my irrepressible neighbour joined
from time to time, showed signs of having once
been better. She was a great favourite with the
audience, and in the pauses between the stanzas
she would smile and nod to her friends here and
there. I did not share in the enthusiasm, having
heard the same songs much better given elsewhere.
When, after an interval, she came on the stage
again, dressed as a man, I was surprised to see how
well she could look. She was to take charge of
the Teatro Lilliputien, and she made her bow
before disappearing behind the curtain. The Lilli-
putian Theatre has not, I think, reached England,
though it has long been at home in Paris. It is
a contrivance after the style of a Punch and Judy
show, only, instead of marionettes who do all the
action, there is a combination between the operator
and his puppets. As in a certain sort of caricature,

149

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

one sees a large head supported by a tiny body,
with finikin arms and legs, which move as they
are worked from behind. The head is that of the
performer, the rest belongs to the puppets ; and
it is indeed comic to see the perfect sympathy
which exists between the head which sings, the
puppet hands which gesticulate, and the puppet
legs which dance. The repertoire of these minia-
ture theatres seems to be limited. The songs I
heard at the Alcazar Espafiol at Barcelona were
almost without exception the same that I had heard
at the Montagnes Russes at Paris. There was the
same red-haired Englishman who danced a horn-
pipe, the same "tenor qui monte le cou," the same
caricature of the chorus of servant-girls in the
Cloches de Corneville — " Voyez par ci, voyez par la."
More thunders of applause — Spanish audiences
are inconceivably enthusiastic — and the French-
woman was again bowing behind the footlights,
drawing back rapidly to avoid the curtain which
came down, as it had a way of doing, precipitately.
After this we had some more music, and the
curtain rose for the Baile espaiiol por las senoritas
Espinosa. This, despite its name, was not so
typically Spanish as I had expected. The two
girls wore ballet-skirts, which are never used in the
characteristic Spanish dances. They had castanets,
however, and there was something neither French
nor English in the rhythm of their long, sweeping
movements, their turn backward upon themselves,
their sudden way of ending a figure by a stamp on

ISO

A Spanish Music-Hall.

the ground, followed by a pose of unexpected
immobility. They gave us several dances. Be-
tween whiles one could see them, in the very visible
and haphazard coulisses on the prompt side of the
stage, chatting together, signalling to their friends
in the audience, giving a last twitch to their tights,
a final pat of adjustment to the saucer skirts.

As soon as this performance was over I saw
four of the women at the other end of the room,
whom I had already guessed to be some of the
dancers, leave their places and make for the stage-
door. The next entry on the programme was
Baile Sevillanas, por las parejas madre e hija, Isabel
Santos, y las hermanas Mazantini. Isabel Santos,
the mother, was a vigorous, strongly-built, hard-
featured, determined-looking woman of fifty. Her
daughter was slight, graceful, delicately pink and
white, very pretty and charming ; her face was
perfectly sweet and simple, with something of a
remote and dreamy look in the eyes. One of the
sisters Mazantini was fat, ugly, and unattractive ;
the other, a rather large woman, had an admirable
figure and a gay and pleasant face. The curtain
rose to a strange dance-measure. The four women
took their places on the stage, facing one another
by two and two. They raised their arms, the eight
pairs of castanets clanged at once, and the dance
began. Spanish dances have a certain resemblance
with the dances of the East. One's idea of a dance,
in England, is something in which all the movement
is due to the legs. In Japan, in Egypt, the legs

151

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

have very little to do with the dance. The exquisite
rhythms of Japanese dancers are produced by the
subtle gesture of hands, the manipulation of scarves,
the delicate undulations of the body. In Arab
dances, in the danse du ventre, the legs are more
motionless still. They are only used to assist in
producing the extraordinary movements of the
stomach and the hips in which so much of the dance
consists. It is a dance in which the body sets itself
to its own rhythm. Spanish dancing, which no
doubt derives its Eastern colour from the Moors,
is almost equally a dance of the whole body, and
its particular characteristic — the action of the hips
— is due to a physical peculiarity of the Spaniards,
whose spines have a special and unique curve of
their own. The walk of Spanish women has a
world-wide fame : one meets a Venus Callipyge
at every corner ; and it is to imitate what in them
is real and beautiful that the women of other nations
have introduced the hideous mimicry of the "bustle."
The Baile Sevillanas, with all its differences, had a
very definite resemblance to the Arab dances I
had seen. It began with a gentle swaying move-
ment in time to the regular clack-clack of castanets.
Now the women faced one another, now they
glided to and fro, changing places, as in a move-
ment of the Lancers. The swaying movement
of the hips became more pronounced ; the body
moved in a sort of circle upon itself. And then
they would cross and re-cross, accentuating the
rhythm with a stamp of the heels. Their arms
152

A Spanish Music-Hall.

waved and dipped, curving with the curves of
the body. The dance grew more exciting, with a
sort of lascivious suggestiveness, a morbid, perverse
charm, as the women writhed to and fro, now
languishingly, now furiously, together and apart.
It ended with a frantic tremoussement of the hips,
a stamp of the heels, and a last clang of the castanets
as the arms grew rigid in the sudden immobility
of the body. There were two encores and two
more dances, much the same as the first, and then
at last the curtain was allowed to descend, and
the women went tranquilly back to the corner
where they had been drinking coffee with their
friends.

When the curtain rose again, after a long in-
terval, the stage was empty but for a wooden chair
placed just in the middle. The chair was waiting
for Sefior Pon, who was to give us a concierto de
guitarra. Senor Pon, a business-like person, bustled
on to the stage, seized the chair, and placed it nearer
the footlights, sat down, looked around for his
friends in the casual and familiar manner peculiar
to the place, and began to tune his guitar. Then
he plucked softly at the wires, and a suave, delicious
melody floated across the clink of glasses. One
wanted moonlight, a balcony, a woman leaning
over the balcony, while the serenade rose out of
the shadow. But indeed one saw all that. Then
the melody ceased, and the business-like Pon was
bowing to the audience. There was a torrent of
applause, and he sat down again, and struck up an

153

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

imitative fantasia, in which one heard the bugles
blowing the reveille, the march music of the troops,
with clever reahstic effects, and a really wonderful
command of the instrument. The piece ended
suddenly, the musician sprang up, bowed, and
retreated with his chair, to avoid the irrepressible
curtain. But the audience insisted on another
encore, and when he had given it — a charming
air played charmingly — they howled persistently,
but unavaiHngly, for more.

Sefior Pon was followed by Senorita Villaclara,
a fair-complexioned woman, with dark, sleepy,
wicked eyes, and black hair trailing over her fore-
head, with little curls near the ears. The leader
of the orchestra began to play on the piano a brief,
monotonous air, and the woman — looking out
between her half-shut eyes — began the Malagueiia.
It was a strange, piercing, Moorish chant, sung
in a high falsetto voice, in long, acute, trembling
phrases — a wail rather than a song — with pauses,
as if to gain breath, between. A few words seemed
to be repeated over and over again, with tremulous,
inarticulate cries that wavered in time to a regularly
beating rhythm. The sound was hke nothing I
have ever heard. It pierced the brain, it tortured
one with a sort of delicious spasm. The next song
had more of a regular melody, though still in this
extraordinary strained voice, and still with something
of a lament in its monotony. I could not under-
stand the words, but the woman's gestures left no
doubt as to the character of the song. It was

154

A Spanish Music-Hall.

assertively indecent, but with that curious kind of
indecency — an almost religious solemnity in per-
former and audience — which the Spaniards share
with the Eastern races. Another song followed,
given with the same serious and collected indecency,
and received with the same serious and collected
attention. It had a refrain of "Alleluia!" and the
woman, I know not why, borrowed a man's soft
felt hat, turned down the brim, and put it on before
beginning the song. When the applause was over
she returned the hat, came back to the table at
which she had been sitting, dismally enough, and
yawned more desperately than ever.

The dance which came next was described on
the programme as a can-can. It was really more
like the chahut than the can-ca7i. Four people
took part, two men and two women. One of the
men was as horrible a creature as I have ever seen
— a huge, clean-shaved, close-cropped, ashen-hued
sort of human toad ; the other was preposterously
tall and thin, all angles. Of the women, one was
commonplace enough, with a seriousness worthy
of Grille d'Egout, but the younger of the two, a
piquant, amusing madcap, was as reckless as La
Goulue. The band struck up a lively air from
Madame Angot, and the quadrille naturaliste began.
It was very like the chahut as one sees it at the
MouHn Rouge, but there were differences, and the
Spanish dance was certainly the merrier and the
more like a quadrille, as certainly as it was a less
elaborate and extraordinary performance. Skirts

155

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

whirled, legs shot into the air, there was a posturing,
a pirouetting, and then each man seized his partner
and led her round the stage at a gallop. Then
the skirts rose and twirled again, the little shoes
waved in the air, and the merry-faced woman
laughed as she flung herself into the headlong
movement of the dance. Not the least astonishing
part of it was the series of hops by which the toad-
like man defied every principle of equilibrium, now
more than ever toad-like, as he squatted lumpishly
on his heels. Dance followed dance, as tune changed
to tune, and it was almost in a state of exhaustion
that the quartet finally trailed off" the stage.

There was still another dance to be given, and
by the performers of the Baile Sevillanas. It was
something between that and the can-can, with the
high-kicking of the latter, and the swaying move-
ment, accentuated by the heels of the former. In
response to an encore, Isabel Santos, the sturdy
old veteran, came forward alone, and it was indeed
half comic, and soon wholly impressive, to see this
incredibly agile middle-aged woman go through
the wild movements of the dance. She did it with
immense spirit, flinging her legs into the air with
a quite youthful vivacity ; she did it also with a
profound artistic seriousness, which soon conquered
one's inclination to see anything ridiculous or un-
seemly in the performance. I am afraid the pretty
daughter will never be such a dancer as the hard-
featured mother. Isabel Santos the elder is, in
her way, a great artist.
156

A Spanish Music-Hall.

After this — it was now past midnight — there
was nothing specially new or interesting in the few
numbers that a too Hberal management wasted on
the few drinkers who still sat about the hall. The
Proven9al near me had gone, in his turbulent way;
the two women at the next table were gathering
up their shawls ; nearly all the glasses were empty,
and no one clapped his hands for the waiter with
the two kettles, the coffee and the milk. One by
one the dancers left their corner and made for the
door; and when, at last, Isabel Santos and her
pretty daughter had said good-bye, I saw there
was nothing to stay for, and I followed.

1892.

157

II.

London : A Book of
Aspects.

I.

There is in the aspect of London a certain magnifi-
cence : the magnificence of weight, sohdity, energy,
imperturbabihty, and an unconquered continuance.
It is ahve from border to border, not an inch of it
is not ahve. It exists, goes on, and has been
going on for so many centuries. Here and there
a stone or the Hne of a causeway fixes a date. If
you look beyond it you look into fog. It sums
up and includes England. Materially England is
contained in it, and the soul of England has always
inhabited it as a body. We have not had a great
man who has never lived in London.

And London makes no display; it is there,
as it has come, as fire and plagues have left it ; but
it has never had either a Haussmann or a Nero.
It has none of the straight lines of Paris nor the
tall lines of Vienna nor the emphatic German
monotony. It has not the natural aids of Con-
stantinople, with seas and continents about it, nor
of Rome, with its seven hills, and its traces of all
the history of the world. It was set in fertile soil,
which has still left it the marvellous green grass of
its parks, and on a river which has brought beauty
along its whole course. Great architects have left
a few unspoilt treasures : Westminster Abbey,
the Banqueting Hall at Whitehall, an old church
here and there. But for the most part the appeal
of London is made by no beauty or effect in things
themselves, but by the sense which it gives us of
inevitable growth and impregnable strength, and

i6i

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

by the atmosphere which makes and unmakes this
vast and soHd city every morning and every evening
with a natural magic pecuhar to it.

Enghsh air, working upon London smoke,
creates the real London. The real London is not
a city of uniform brightness, hke Paris, nor of
savage gloom, like Prague; it is a picture con-
tinually changing, a continual sequence of pictures,
and there is no knowing what mean street corner
may not suddenly take on a glory not its own.
The English mist is always at work like a subtle
painter, and London is a vast canvas prepared for
the mist to work on. The especial beauty of
London is the Thames, and the Thames is so
wonderful because the mist is always changing its
shapes and colours, always making its light mysteri-
ous, and building palaces of cloud out of mere
Parliament Houses with their jags and turrets.
When the mist collaborates with night and rain,
the masterpiece is created.

Most travellers come into London across the
river, sometimes crossing it twice. The entrance,
as you leave the country behind you, is ominous.
If you come by night, and it is never wise to enter
any city except by night, you are slowly swallowed
up by a blank of blackness, pierced by holes and
windows of dingy light; foul and misty eyes of
light in the sky; narrow gulfs, in which lights
blink; blocks and spikes of black against grey;
masts, as it were, rising out of a sea of mist ; then
a whole street suddenly laid bare in bright light;
162

London.

shoulders of dark buildings ; and then black shiny
rails, and then the river, a vast smudge, dismal
and tragic ; and, as one crosses it again, between
the vast network of the bridge's bars, the impossible
fairy peep-show of the Embankment.

All this one sees in passing, in hardly more
than a series of flashes ; but if you would see
London steadily from the point where its aspect
is finest, go on a night when there has been rain to
the footpath which crosses Hungerford Bridge by
the side of the railway-track. The river seems to
have suddenly become a lake; under the black
arches of Waterloo Bridge there are reflections of
golden fire, multiplying arch beyond arch, in a
lovely tangle. The Surrey side is dark, with tall
vague buildings rising out of the mud on which
a little water crawls : is it the water that moves
or the shadows ? A few empty barges or steamers
He in solid patches on the water near the bank;
and a stationary sky-sign, hideous where it defaces
the night, turns in the water to wavering bars of
rosy orange. The buildings on the Embankment
rise up, walls of soft greyness with squares of
Hghted windows, which make patterns across them.
They tremble in the mist, their shapes flicker; it
seems as if a breath would blow out their Hghts and
leave them bodiless husks in the wind. From
one of the tallest chimneys a reddish smoke floats
and twists hke a flag. Below, the Embankment
curves towards Cleopatra's Needle : you see the
curve of the wall, as the lamps Hght it, leaving the

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Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

obelisk in shadow, and falling faintly on the grey
mud in the river. Just that corner has a mysterious
air, as if secluded, in the heart of a pageant; I
know not what makes it quite so tragic and melan-
choly. The aspect of the night, the aspect of
London, pricked out in points of fire against an
enveloping darkness, is as beautiful as any sunset
or any mountain ; I do not know any more beautiful
aspect. And here, as always in London, it is the
atmosphere that makes the picture, an atmosphere
like Turner, revealing every form through the
ecstasy of its colour.

It is not only on the river that London can
make absolute beauty out of the material which
lies so casually about in its streets. A London
sunset, seen through vistas of narrow streets, has
a colour of smoky rose which can be seen in no
other city, and it weaves strange splendours, often
enough, on its edges and gulfs of sky, not less
marvellous than Venice can lift over the Giudecca,
or Siena see stretched beyond its walls. At such
a point as the Marble Arch you may see con-
flagrations of jewels, a sky of burning lavender,
tossed abroad like a crumpled cloak, with broad
bands of dull purple and smoky pink, slashed with
bright gold and decked with grey streamers ; you
see it through a veil of moving mist, which darkens
downwards to a solid block, coloured like lead,
where the lighted road turns, meeting the sky.

And there are a few open spaces, which at all
times and under all lights are satisfying to the
164

London.

eyes. Hyde Park Corner, for no reason in par-
ticular, gives one the first sensation of pleasure as
one comes into London from Victoria Station.
The glimpse of the two parks, with their big gates,
the eager flow of traffic, not too tangled or laborious
just there, the beginning of Piccadilly, the lack of
stiff"ness in anything : is it these that help to make
up the impression ? Piccadilly Circus is always
like a queer hive, and is at least never dead or
formal. But it is Trafalgar Square which is the
conscious heart or centre of London.

If the Thames is the soul of London, and if
the parks are its eyes, surely Trafalgar Square
may well be reckoned its heart. There is no hour
of day or night when it is not admirable, but for
my part I prefer the evening, just as it grows dusk,
after a day of heavy rain. How often have I walked
up and down, for mere pleasure, for a pleasure
which quickened into actual excitement, on that
broad, curved platform from which you can turn
to look up at the National Gallery, like a frontispiece,
and from which you can look down over the dark
stone pavement, black and shining with rain, on
which the curved fountains stand with their inky
water, while two gas-lamps cast a feeble light on
the granite base of the Nelson monument and on
the vast sulky lions at the corners. The pedestal
goes up straight into the sky, diminishing the
roofs, which curve downwards to the white clock-
face, alone visible on the clock-tower at West-
minster. Whitehall flows like a river, on which

165

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

vague shapes of traffic float and are submerged.
The mist and the twihght hide the one harmonious
building in London, the Banqueting Hall. You
reaUse that it is there, and that beyond it are the
Abbey and the river, with the few demure squares
and narrow frugal streets still left standing in
Westminster.

It is only after trying to prefer the parks and
public gardens of most of the other capitals of
Europe that I have come to convince myself that
London can more than hold its own against them
all. We have no site comparable with the site
of the Pincio in Rome, none of the opalescent water
which encircles the gardens at Venice, no Sierras
to see from our Prado, not even a Berlin forest in
the midst of the city; and I for one have never
loved a London park as I have loved the Luxem-
bourg Gardens ; but, if we will be frank with our-
selves, and put sentiment or the prejudice of foreign
travel out of our heads, we shall have to admit
that in the natural properties of the park, in grass,
trees, and the magic of atmosphere, London is not
to be excelled.

And, above all, in freshness. After the London
parks all others seem dusty and dingy. It is the
English rain, and not the care of our park-keepers,
that brings this gloss out of the grass and gives
our public gardens their air of country freedom.
Near the Round Pond you might be anywhere
except in the middle of a city of smoke and noise,
and it is only by an unusually high roof or chimney,
i66

London.

somewhere against the sky, far off, that you can
reahse where you are. The Serpentine will never
be vulgarised, though cockneys paddle on it in
boats; the water in St. James's Park will always
be kept wild and strange by the sea-gulls ; and the
toy-boats only give an infantile charm to the steel-
blue water of the Round Pond. You can go
astray in long avenues of trees, where, in autumn,
there are always children playing among the leaves,
building tombs and castles with them. In summer
you can sit for a whole afternoon, undisturbed,
on a chair on that green slope which goes down
to the artificial end of the Serpentine, where the
stone parapets are, over the water from the peacocks.
It is only the parks that make summer in London
almost bearable.

I have never been able to love Regent's Park,
though I know it better than the others, and though
it has lovely water-birds about its islands, and
though it is on the way to the Zoological Gardens.
Its flowers are the best in London, for colour,
form, and tending. You hear the wild beasts,
but no city noises. Those sounds of roaring,
crying, and the voices of imprisoned birds are
sometimes distressing, and are perhaps one of the
reasons why one can never be quite happy or aloof
from things in Regent's Park. The water there
is meagre, and the boats too closely visible ; the
children are poorer and seem more preoccupied
than the children in the western parks. And
there is the perplexing inner circle, which is as

167

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

difficult to get in or out of as its lamentable name-
sake underground. Coming where it does, the
park is a breathing-place, an immense relief; but
it is the streets around, and especially the Mary-
lebone Road, that give it its value.

There remains what is more than a park, but
in its way worth them all : Hampstead Heath.
There are to be trains to bring poor people from
the other end of London, philanthropic trains,
but the heath will be spoilt, and it is almost the last
thing left to spoil in London. Up to now, all the
Saturday afternoons, the Sundays, the Bank Holi-
days, have hardly touched it. There are hiding-
places, even on these evil days, and if one fails there
is always another. And if one has the good fortune
to live near it, and can come out in the middle of
the night upon Judges' Walk, when the moonlight
fills the hollow like a deep bowl, and silence is like
that peace which passeth understanding, everything
else in London will seem trivial, a mere individual
thing, compared with it.

On the heath you are lifted over London, but
you are in London. It is that double sense, that
nearness and remoteness combined, the sight of
St. Paul's from above the level of the dome, the
houses about the pond in the Vale of Health, from
which one gets so unparalleled a sensation. But
the heath is to be loved for its own sake, for its
peace, amplitude, high bright air and refreshment ;
for its mystery, wildness, formality ; for its grassy
pools and hillocks that flow and return like waves
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London.

of the sea ; for its green grass and the white roads
chequering it ; for its bracken, its mist and bloom
of trees. Every knoll and curve of it draws the
feet to feel their soft shapes ; one cannot walk, but
must run and leap on Hampstead Heath.

169

11.

As you come back into London from the country,
out of air into smoke, rattling level with the chimney-
pots, and looking down into narrow gulfs swarming
with men and machines, you are as if seized in a
gigantic grip. First comes a splendid but dis-
heartening sense of force, forcing you to admire
it, then a desperate sense of helplessness. London
seems a vast ant-heap, and you are one more ant
dropped on the heap. You are stunned, and
then you come to yourself, and your thought revolts
against the material weight which is crushing you.
What a huge futility it all seems, this human ant-
heap, this crawling and hurrying and sweating
and building and bearing burdens, and never rest-
ing all day long and never bringing any labour
to an end. After the fields and the sky London
seems trivial, a thing artificially made, in which
people work at senseless toils, for idle and imaginary
ends. Labour in the fields is regular, sane, in-
evitable as the labour of the earth with its roots.
You are in your place in the world, between the
grass and the clouds, really alive and living as na-
turala life as the beasts. In London men work as if
in darkness, scarcely seeing their own hands as
they work, and not knowing the meaning of their
labour. They wither and dwindle, forgetting or
not knowing that it was ever a pleasant thing merely
to be alive and in the air. They are all doing
things for other people, making useless "improve-
ments," always perfecting the achievement of
170

London.

material results with newly made tools. They
are making things cheaper, more immediate in
effect, of the latest modern make. It is all a hurry,
a levelling downward, an automobilisation of the
mind.

And their pleasures are as their labours. In
the country you have but to walk or look out of
your window and you are in the midst of beautiful
and living things : a tree, a dimly jewelled frog,
a bird in flight. Every natural pleasure is about
you : you may walk, or ride, or skate, or swim, or
merely sit still and be at rest. But in London you
must invent pleasures and then toil after them.
The pleasures of London are more exhausting than
its toils. No stone-breaker on the roads works
so hard or martyrs his flesh so cruelly as the actress
or the woman of fashion. No one in London
does what he wants to do, or goes where he wants
to go. It is a suffering to go to any theatre, any
concert. There are even people who go to lectures.
And all this continual self-sacrifice is done for
"amusement." It is astonishing.

London was once habitable, in spite of itself.
The machines have killed it. The old, habitable
London exists no longer. Charles Lamb could
not Hve in this mechanical city, out of which every-
thing old and human has been driven by wheels
and hammers and the fluids of noise and speed.
When will his affectionate phrase, "the sweet
security of streets," ever be used again of London ?
No one will take a walk down Fleet Street any more,

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Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

no one will shed tears of joy in the "motley Strand,"
no one will be leisurable any more, or turn over
old books at a stall, or talk with friends at the street
corner. Noise and evil smells have filled the streets
like tunnels in dayhght ; it is a pain to walk in the
midst of all these hurrying and clattering machines ;
the multitude of humanity, that "bath" into
which Baudelaire loved to plunge, is scarcely dis-
cernible, it is secondary to the machines ; it is only
in a machine that you can escape the machines.
London that was vast and smoky and loud,
now stinks and reverberates ; to live in it is to
live in the hollow of a clanging bell, to breathe its
air is to breathe the foulness of modern progress.

London as it is now is the wreck and moral of
civilisation. We are more civilised every day,
every day we can go more quickly and more un-
comfortably wherever we want to go, we can have
whatever we want brought to us more quickly
and more expensively. We live by touching
buttons and ringing bells, a new purely practical
magic sets us in communication with the ends of
the earth. We can have abominable mockeries
of the arts of music and of speech whizzing in our
ears out of metal mouths. We have outdone the
wildest prophetic buffooneries of Villiers de I'lsle
Adam, whose "celestial bill-sticking" may be
seen nightly defacing the majesty of the river ;
here any gramophones can give us the equivalent
of his "chemical analysis of the last breath." The
plausible and insidious telephone aids us and
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London.

intrudes upon us, taking away our liberty from us,
and leaving every Englishman's house his castle
no longer, but a kind of whispering gallery, open
to the hum of every voice. There is hardly a street
left in London where one can talk with open win-
dovv'S by day and sleep with open windows by night.
We are tunnelled under until our houses rock,
we are shot through holes in the earth if we want
to cross London; even the last Hberty of Hamp-
stead Heath is about to be taken from us by railway.
London has civilised itself into the likeness of a
steam roundabout at a fair; it goes clattering
and turning, to the sound of a jubilant hurdy-
gurdy ; round and round, always on the same
track, but always faster; and the children astride
its wooden horses think they are getting to the
world's end.

It is the machines, more than anything else,
that have done it. Men and women, as they
passed each other in the street or on the road, saw
and took cognisance of each other, human being
of human being. The creatures that we see now
in the machines are hardly to be called human
beings, so are they disfigured out of all recognition,
in order that they may go fast enough not to see
an3rthing themselves. Does any one any longer
walk ? If I walk I meet no one walking, and I
cannot wonder at it, for what I meet is an uproar,
and a whizz, and a leap past me, and a blinding
cloud of dust, and a machine on which scarecrows
perch is disappearing at the end of the road. The

173

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

verbs to loll, to lounge, to dawdle, to loiter, the
verbs precious to Walt Whitman, precious to every
lover of men and of himself, are losing their currency ;
they will be marked "o" for obsolete in the diction-
aries of the future. All that poetry which Walt
Whitman found in things merely because they
were alive will fade out of existence like the Red
Indian. It will live on for some time yet in the
country where the railway has not yet smeared its
poisonous trail over the soil ; but in London there
will soon be no need of men, there will be nothing
but machines.

There was a time when it was enough merely
to be alive, and to be in London. Every morning
promised an adventure ; something or some one
might be waiting at the corner of the next street ;
it was difficult to stay indoors because there were
so many people in the streets. I still think, after
seeing most of the capitals of Europe, that there is
no capital in Europe where so many beautiful
women are to be seen as in London. Warsaw
comes near, for rarity ; not for number. The
streets and the omnibuses were always alive with
beauty or with something strange. In London
anything may happen. "Adventures to the ad-
venturous ! " says somebody m Contarini Fleming.
But who can look as high as the uneasy faces
on a motor-omnibus, who can look under the
hoods and goggles in a motor-car } The roads
are too noisy now for any charm of expression to
be seen on the pavements. The women are

174

London.

shouting to each other, straining their ears to hear.
They want to get their shopping done and to get
into a motor-car or a motor-omnibus.

Could another Charles Lamb create a new
London ?

175

III.

How much of Lamb's London is left? "London
itself a pantomime and a masquerade" is left, and
"a mind that loves to find itself at home in crowds"
is never without those streets and pavements to
turn by its alchemy into pure gold. "Is any night-
walk comparable," as he asks, and need not have
waited for an answer, "to a walk from St. Paul's
to Charing Cross, for lighting and paving, crowds
going and coming without respite, the rattle of
coaches and the cheerfulness of shops?" "St.
Paul's Churchyard!" he cries, "the Strand!
Exeter Change ! Charing Cross, with the man
upon the black horse! These are thy gods, O
London!" One has to turn to the notes on the
letters to find out that Exeter Change was "a great
building, with bookstalls and miscellaneous stalls
on the ground floor and a menagerie above." How
dehcious that sounds! But then "it was de-
mohshed in 1829." Temple Bar has gone, and
the griffin, which would have seemed to Lamb as
permanent as London Stone. Staple Inn would
have been less of an anomaly to him in "noble
Holborn" than it is to us, as it stands, with an aged
helplessness, not far oflF from the useful horrors of
Holborn Viaduct, a "modern improvement" which
has swept away the old timbered houses that used
to make an island in the middle of the street. Like
all old London, that is not hidden away in a corner
(as St. John's Gateway is, on its hill at the back of
Smithfield, and St. Bartholomew's Church, which
176

London.

hinders nobody's passing, and the Charterhouse,
which has so far held its own), they have had to
make way for the traffic, that traffic which is steadily
pushing down the good things that are old and
shouldering up the bad new things that will be
temporary. We have still, and for historic and
royal reasons will always have, Westminster Abbey :
the Beautiful Temple, as Lamb called it, when he
was religiously occupied in "shaming the sellers
out of the Temple." A church that is not in the
way of a new street, or does not intrude over the
edge of a new widening, is, for the most part, safe.
But we, who live now, have seen Christ's Hospital,
that comely home and fosterer of genius, pulled
down, stone by stone, its beautiful memory obhter-
ated, because boys, they say, want country air.
That was one of the breathing-places, the old quiet
things, that helped to make the city habitable.
Newgate has been pulled down, and with Newgate
goes some of the strength and permanence of
London. There was a horrible beauty in those
impregnable grey stone walls, by the side of the
city pavement. The traffic has fallen upon them
Uke a sea, and they have melted away before it.

Lamb saw London changing, and to the end
he said, "London streets and faces cheer me in-
expressibly, though of the latter not one known
one were remaining." But to his sister it seemed
that he "found it melancholy," "the very streets,"
he says, "altering every day." Covent Garden,
where he lived, has lasted ; the house he lived in

177

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

still stands looking into Bow Street. And the
Temple, that lucky corner of the City which is
outside city jurisdiction, has been Httle spoiled
by time, or the worse improvements of restorers.
But I ask myself what Lamb would have said if he
had hved to see tram-hnes sliming the bank of the
river, and the trees amputated to preserve the hats
of living creatures, in what way better or more
woitby of attention than those trees .?

I When I see London best is when I have been
abroad for a long time. Then, as I sit on the top
of an omnibus, coming in from the Marble Arch,
that long line of Oxford Street seems a surprising
and delightful thing, full of picturesque irregulari-
ties, and Piccadilly Circus seems incredibly alive
and central, and the Strand is glutted with a traffic
typically English^ I am able to remember how
I used to turn out of the Temple and walk slowly
towards Charing Cross, elbowing my way medita-
tively, making up sonnets in my head while I
missed no attractive face on the pavement or on
the top of an omnibus, pleasantly conscious of the
shops yet undistracted by them, happy because I
was in the midst of people, and happier still because
they were all unknown to me. For years that was
my feeling about London, and now I am always
grateful to a foreign absence which can put me
back, if only for a day, into that comfortable frame
of mind. Baudelaire's phrase, "a bath of multi-
tude," seemed to have been made for me, and I
suppose for five years or so, all the first part of
178

London.

the time when I was Hving in the Temple, I never
stayed indoors for the whole of a single evening.
There were times when I went out as regularly as
clockwork every night on the stroke of eleven.
No sensation in London is so familiar to me as that
emptiness of the Strand just before the people
come out of the theatres, but an emptiness not
final and absolute hke that at ten o'clock ; an
emptiness, rather, in which there are the first stirrings
of movement. The cabs shift slightly on the ranks ;
the cabmen take the nose-bags off the horses' heads
and climb up on their perches. There is an ex-
pectancy all along the road : Italian waiters with
tight greasy hair and white aprons stand less list-
lessly at the tavern doors ; they half turn, ready
to back into the doorway before a customer.

As you walk along, the stir increases, cabs crawl
out of side streets and file slowly towards the
theatres ; the footmen cluster about the theatre-
doors ; here and there some one comes out hurriedly
and walks down the street. And then, all of a
sudden, as if at some unheard signal, the wide
doorways are blocked with slowly struggling crowds,
you see tall black hats of men and the many coloured
hair of women, jammed together, and slightly sway-
ing to and fro, as if rocked from under. Black
figures break through the crowd, and detach
themselves against the wheels of the hansoms, a
flying and disclosing cloak swishes against the
shafts and is engulfed in the dark hollow; horses
start, stagger, hammer feverishly with their hoofs

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Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

and are off; the whole roadway is black with cabs
and carriages, and the omnibuses seem suddenly
diminished. The pavement is blocked, the crowd
of the doorway now sways only less helplessly upon
the pavement; you see the women's distracted
and irritated eyes, their hands clutching at cloaks
that will not come together, the absurd and anomal-
ous glitter of diamonds and bare necks in the
streets.

Westward the crowd is more scattered, has more
space to disperse. The Circus is like a whirlpool,
streams pour steadily outward from the centre,
where the fountain stands for a symbol. The
hghts glitter outside theatres and music-halls and
restaurants; lights coruscate, flash from the walls,
dart from the vehicles ; a dark tangle of roofs and
horses knots itself together and swiftly separates
at every moment ; all the pavements are aswarm
with people hurrying.

In half an hour all this outflow will have sub-
sided, and then one distinguishes the slow and
melancholy walk of women and men, as if on some
kind of penitential duty, round and round the
Circus and along Piccadilly as far as the Duke of
Wellington's house and long Regent Street almost
to the Circus. Few walk on the left side of Picca-
dilly or the right of Regent Street, though you
hear foreign tongues a-chatter under the arcade.
But the steady procession coils backward and
forward, thickening and slackening as it rounds
the Circus, where innocent people wait uncom-
l8o

Lond

on.

fortably for omnibuses, standing close to the edge
of the pavement. Men stand watchfully at all the
corners, with their backs to the road ; you hear
piping voices, shrill laughter; you observe that
all the women's eyes are turned sideways, never
straight in front of them ; and that they seem
often to hesitate, as if they were not sure of the way,
though they have walked in that procession night
after night, and know every stone of the pavement
and every moulding on the brass rims of the shop-
windows. The same faces return, lessen, the people
come out of the restaurants and the crowd thickens
for ten minutes, then again lessens ; and fewer
and fewer trudge drearily along the almost deserted
pavement. The staring lights are blotted suddenly
from the walls ; the streets seem to grow chill,
uninhabited, unfriendly ; the few hansoms roam
up and down restlessly, seeking a last fare. And
still a few dingy figures creep along by the inner
edge of the pavement, stopping by the closed doors
of the shops, sometimes speaking dully to one
another ; then trudging heavily along, and dis-
appearing slowly through the side streets eastward.
The part of London I have always known best
is the part that lies between the Temple and Picca-
dilly, and some of it no longer exists. When the
Strand was widened, Holywell Street, one of the
oldest and quaintest streets in London, was pulled
down, Wych Street went too, and Clare Market,
and many dingy and twisting lanes which could
well be spared. But I deeply regret Holywell

i8i

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

Street, and when I tell strangers about it, it seems
to me that they can never know London now. I
suppose many people will soon forget that narrow
lane with its overhanging wooden fronts, like the
houses at Coventry ; or they will remember it only
for its surreptitious shop-windows, the glass always
dusty, through which one dimly saw English
translations of Zola among chemists' paraphernalia.
The street had a bad reputation, and by night
doors opened and shut unexpectedly up dark pass-
ages. Perhaps that vague dubiousness added a
little to its charm, but by day the charm was a
positive one : the book-shops ! Perhaps I liked
the quays at Paris even better : it was Paris, and
there was the river, and Notre Dame, and it was
the left bank. But nowhere else, in no other city,
was there a corner so made for book-fanciers.
Those dingy shops with their stalls open to the
street, nearly all on the right, the respectable side
as you walked west, how seldom did I keep my
resolution to walk past them with unaverted eyes,
how rarely did I resist their temptations. Half
the books I possess were bought second-hand in
Holywell Street, and what bargains I have made
out of the fourpenny books ! On the hottest days,
there was shade there, and excuse for lounging.
It was a paradise for the book-lover.

It never occurred to me that any street so old
could seem worth puUing down; but the improve-
ments came, and that and the less interesting streets
near, where the Globe Theatre was (I thought it
182

London.

no loss) had of course to go ; and Dane's Inn went,
which was never a genuine ''inn," but had some
of the pleasant genuine dreariness ; and Clare
Market was obliterated, and I beheve Drury Lane
is getting furbished up and losing its old savour
of squalor ; and Aldwych is there, with its beautiful
name, but itself so big and obvious that I confess,
with my recollections of what was there before, I
can never find my way in it.

Striking westward, my course generally led
me through Leicester Square. The foreign quarter
of London radiates from Leicester Square, or winds
inward to that point as to a centre. Its foreign
aspect, the fact that it was the park of Soho, in-
terested me. In Leicester Square, and in all the
tiny streets running into it, you are never in the
really normal London : it is an escape, a sort of
shamefaced and sordid and yet irresistible reminder
of Paris and Italy. The little restaurants all round
brought me local colour before I had seen Italy;
I still see with pleasure the straw-covered bottles
and the strings of maccaroni in the undusted win-
dows. The foreign people you see are not desirable
people : what does that matter if you look on them
as on so many puppets on a string, and their shapes
and colours come as a relief to you after the uniform
puppets of English make .?

I have always been apt to look on the world as
a puppet-show, and all the men and women merely
players, whose wires we do not see working. There
is a passage in one of Keats' letters which expresses

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Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

just what I have always felt: "May there not,"
he says, "be superior beings, amused with any
graceful, though instinctive attitude my mind may
fall into, as I am entertained with the alertness of
the stoat or the anxiety of a deer ? " Is there not,
in our aspect towards one another, something in-
evitably automatic ? Do we see, in the larger part
of those fellow-creatures whom our eyes rest on
more than a smile, a gesture, a passing or a coming
forward ? Are they more real to us than the actors
on a stage, the quivering phantoms of a cinemato-
graph ? With their own private existence we have
nothing to do : do they not, so far as we are con-
cerned, exist in part at least to be a spectacle to us,
to convey to us a sense of life, change, beauty,
variety, necessity ? The spectacle of human life
is not only for the gods' eyes, but for ours ; it is
ours in so far as we can apprehend it, and our
pleasure and satisfaction here are largely dependent
on the skill with which we have trained ourselves
to that instinctive, delighted apprehension. To
a few here and there we can come closer, we can
make them, by some illusion of the affections,
seem more real to us. But as for all the rest, let
us be content to admire, to wonder, to see the use
and beauty and curiosity of them, and intrude no
further into their destinies.

It was for their very obvious qualities of illusion
that I liked to watch the people in the foreign
quarter. They were like prisoners there, thriving
perhaps but discontented ; none of them light-
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London.

hearted, as they would have been in their own
country; grudgingly at home. And there was
much piteous false show among them, soiled sordid
ostentation, a little of what we see in the older songs
of Yvette Guilbert.

London was for a long time my supreme sensa-
tion, and to roam in the streets, especially after the
lamps were lighted, my chief pleasure. I had no
motive in it, merely the desire to get Out of doors,
and to be among people, lights, to get out of myself.
Myself has always been so absorbing to me that it
was perhaps natural that, along with that habitual
companionship, there should be at times the desire
for escape. When I was living alone in the Temple
that desire came over me almost every night, and
made work, or thought without work, impossible.
Later in the night I was often able to work with
perfect quiet, but not unless I had been out in the
streets first. The plunge through the Middle
Temple gateway was like the swimmer's plunge
into rough water: I got just that ''cool shock"
as I went outside into the brighter hghts and the
movement. I often had no idea where I was going,
I often went nowhere. I walked, and there were
people about me.

I Hved in Fountain Court for ten years, and
I thought then, and think still, that it is the most
beautiful place in London. Dutch people have
told me that the Temple is like a little Dutch town,
and that as they enter from Fleet Street into Middle
Temple Lane they can fancy themselves at the

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Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

Hague. Dutchmen are happy if they have much
that can remind them of Middle Temple Lane.
There is a moment when you are in Fleet Street ;
you have forced your way through the long Strand,
along those narrow pavements, in a continual coming
and going of hurried people, with the continual
rumble of wheels in the road, the swaying heights
of omnibuses beside you, distracting your eyes,
the dust, clatter, confusion, heat, bewilderment
of that thoroughfare ; and suddenly you go under
a low doorway, where large wooden doors and a
smaller side-door stand open, and you are suddenly
in quiet. The roar has dropped, as the roar of the
sea drops if you go in at your door and shut it behind
you. At night, when one had to knock, and so
waited, and was admitted with a nice formality,
it was sometimes almost startling. I have never
felt any quiet in solitary places so much as the
quiet of that contrast : Fleet Street and the
Temple.

No wheels could come nearer to me in Fountain
Court than Middle Temple Lane, but I liked to
hear sometimes at night a faint clattering, only
just audible, which I knew was the sound of a
cab on the Embankment. The County Council,
steadily ruining London with the persistence of
an organic disease, is busy turning the Embank-
ment into a gangway for electric trams ; but when
I knew it it was a quiet, almost secluded place,
where people sauntered and leaned over to look
into the water, and where, at night, the policemen
l86

London.

would walk with considerately averted head past
the slumbering heaps of tired rags on the seats.

The gates on the Embankment shut early,
but I often came home by the river and I could
hardly tear myself away from looking over that
grey harsh parapet. The Neva reminds me a
little of the Thames, though it rushes more wildly,
and at night is more like a sea, with swift lights
crossing it. But I do not know the river of any
great capital which has the fascination of our river.
Whistler has created the Thames, for most people ;
but the Thames existed before Whistler, and will
exist after the County Council. I remember
hearing Claude Monet say, at the time when he
came over to the Savoy Hotel, year by year, to
paint Waterloo Bridge from its windows, that he
could not understand why any English painter
ever left London. I felt almost as if the river
belonged to the Temple : its presence there, cer-
tainly, was part of its mysterious anomaly, a frag-
ment of old London, walled and guarded in that
corner of land between Fleet Street and the Thames.

It was the name, partly, that had drawn me to
Fountain Court, and the odd coincidence that I
had found myself, not long before, in what was
once Blake's Fountain Court, and then Southampton
Buildings, now only a date on a wall. I had the
top flat in what is really the back of one of the old
houses in Essex Street, taken into the Temple ;
it had a stone balcony from which I looked down
on a wide open court, with a stone fountain in the

187

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

middle, broad rows of stone steps leading upward
and downward, with a splendid effect of decoration ;
in one corner of the court was Middle Temple
Hall, where a play of Shakespeare's was acted
while Shakespeare was aUve; all around were the
backs of old buildings, and there were old trees,
under which there was a bench in summer, and there
was the glimpse of gardens going down to the
Embankment. By day it was as legal and busy
as any other part of the Temple, but the mental
business of the law is not inelegantly expressed in
those wigged and gowned figures who are generally
to be seen crossing between the Law Courts and
their chambers in the Temple. I felt, when I saw
them, that I was the intruder, the modern note,
and that they were in their place, and keeping
up a tradition. But at night I had the place to
myself.

The nights in Fountain Court were a continual
delight to me. I hved then chiefly by night, and
when I came in late I used often to sit on the bench
under the trees, where no one else ever sat at those
hours. I sat there, looking at the silent water in
the basin of the fountain, and at the leaves overhead,
and at the sky through the leaves ; and that soHtude
was only broken by the careful policeman on guard,
who would generally stroll up to be quite certain
that it was the usual loiterer, who had a right to sit
there. Sometimes he talked with me, and occasion-
ally about books ; and once he made a surprising
and profound criticism, for on my asking him if
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London.

he had read Tennyson he said no, but was he not
rather a lady-hke writer ?

When Verlaine stayed with me he wrote a poem
about Fountain Court, which began truthfully :

La Cour de la Fontaine est, dans le Temple^
Un coin exquis de ce coin delicat
Du Londres vieux.

Dickens of course has written about the fountain,
but there is only one man who could ever have
given its due to that corner of the Temple, and he
had other, less lovely corners to love. I say over
everything Charles Lamb wrote about the Temple,
and fancy it was meant for Fountain Court.

More than once, while I was living in the
Temple, I was visited by a strange friend of mine,
an amateur tramp, with whom I used to wander
about London every night in the East End, and
about the Docks, and in all the more squalid parts
of the city. My friend was born a wanderer, and
I do not know what remains for him in the world
when he has tramped over its whole surface. I
have known him for many years, and we have
explored many cities together, and crossed more
than one sea, and travelled along the highroads of
more than one country. His tramping with me
was not very serious, but when he is alone he goes
as a tramp among tramps, taking no money with
him, begging his way with beggars. A little, pale,
thin young man, quietly restless, with determined
eyes and tight hps, a face prepared for all disguises,

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Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

yet with a strangely personal life looking out at you,
ambiguously enough, from underneath, he is never
quite at home under a roof or in the company of
ordinary people, where he seems always like one
caught and detained unwillingly. An American,
who has studied in a German University, brought
up, during all his early hfe, in Berlin, he has always
had a fixed distaste for the interests of those about
him, and an instinctive passion for whatever exists
outside the border-line which shuts us in upon
respectability. There is a good deal of affectation
in the Hterary revolt against respectability, together
with a child's desire to shock its elders, and snatch
a lurid reputation from those whom it professes
to despise. My friend has never had any of this
affectation; life is not a masquerade to him, and
his disguises are the most serious part of his life.
The simple fact is, that respectabihty, the normal
existence of normal people, does not interest him;
he could not even tell you why, without searching
consciously for reasons; he was born with the
soul of a vagabond, into a family of gentle, exquisitely
refined people : he was born so, that is all. Human
curiosity, curiosity which in most of us is sub-
ordinate to some more definite purpose, exists in
him for its own sake; it is his inner Hfe, he has
no other; his form of self-development, his form
of culture. It seems to me that this man, who has
seen so much of humanity, who has seen humanity
so closely, where it has least temptation to be
anything but itself, has really achieved culture
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London.

almost perfect of its kind, though the kind be of
his own invention. He is not an artist, who can
create ; he is not a thinker or a dreamer or a man of
action ; he is a student of men and women, and of
the outcasts among men and women, just those
persons who are least accessible, least cared for,
least understood, and therefore, to one like my
friend, most alluring. He is not conscious of it,
but I think there is a great pity at the heart of this
devouring curiosity. It is his love of the outcast
which makes him like to live with outcasts, not
as a visitor in their midst, but as one of them-
selves.

For here is the difference between this man
and the other adventurers who have gone abroad
among tramps and criminals, and other misunder-
stood or unfortunate people. Some have been
philanthropists and have gone with Bibles in their
hands ; others have been journalists, and have gone
with note-books in their hands ; all have gone as
visitors, as passing visitors, plunging into "the
bath of multitude," as one might go holiday-making
to the sea-side and plunge into the sea. But this
man, wherever he has gone, has gone with a com-
plete abandonment to his surroundings ; no tramp
has ever known that "Cigarette" was not really
a tramp ; he has begged, worked, ridden outside
trains, slept in workhouses and gaols, not shirked
one of the hardships of his way ; and all the time
he has been living his own life (whatever that
enigma may be !) more perfectly, I am sure, than

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Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

when he is dining every day at his mother's or his
sister's table.

The desire of travelHng on many roads, and
the desire of seeing many foreign faces, are almost
always found united in that half-unconscious instinct
which makes a man a vagabond. But I have
never met any one in whom the actual love of the
road is so strong as it is in my friend. In America,
where the tramps ride over and under the trains,
in order that they may get on the other side of a
thousand miles , without spending a lifetime about
it, he, too, has gone by rail, not as a passenger.
And I remember a few years ago, when we had
given one another rendezvous at St. Petersburg,
that I found, when I got there, that he was already
half-way across Siberia, on the new railway which
they were in the act of making. Also I have been
with him to Hamburg and Le Havre and Antwerp
by sea : once on an Atlantic liner, loaded with
foreign Jews, among whom he spent most of his
time in the Steerage. But for the most part he
walks. Wherever he walks he makes friends ;
when we used to walk about London together he
would stop to talk with every drunken old woman
in Drury Lane, and get into the confidence of every
sailor whom we came upon in the pot-houses about
the docks. He is not fastidious, and will turn his
hand, as the phrase is, to anything. And he goes
through every sort of privation, endures dirt,
accustoms himself to the society of every variety
of his fellow-creatures without a murmur or regret.
192

London.

After all, comfort is a convention, and pleasure
an individual thing, to every individual. "To
travel is to die continually," wrote a half-crazy
poet who spent most of the years of a short fantastic
life in London. Well, that is a hne which I have
often found myself repeating as I shivered in
railway-stations on the other side of Europe, or lay
in a plunging berth as the foam chased the snow-
flakes off the deck. One finds, no doubt, a par-
ticular pleasure in looking back on past discomforts,
and I am convinced that a good deal of the attraction
of travelling comes from an unconscious throwing
forward of the mind to the time when the un-
comfortable present shall have become a stirring
memory of the past. But I am speaking now for
those in whom a certain luxuriousness of tempera-
ment finds itself in sharp conflict with the desire of
movement. To my friend, I think, this is hardly
a conceivable state of mind. He is a Stoic, as the
true adventurer should be. Rest, even as a change,
does not appeal to him. He thinks acutely, but
only about facts, about the facts before him ; and
so he does not need to create an atmosphere about
himself which change might disturb. He is fond
of his family, his friends ; but he can do without
them, like a man with a mission. He has no
mission, only a great thirst ; and this thirst for the
humanity of every nation and for the roads of every
country drives him onward as resistlessly as the
drunkard's thirst for drink, or the idealist's thirst
for an ideal.

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Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

And it seems to me that few men have realised,
as this man has reahsed, that "not the fruit of
experience, but experience itself, is the end." He
has chosen his life for himself, and he has lived it,
regardless of anything else in the world. He has
desired strange, almost inaccessible things, and
he has attained whatever he has desired. While
other men have lamented their fate, wished their
lives different, nursed vague ambitions, and dreamed
fruitless dreams, he has quietly given up comfort
and conventionality, not caring for them,' and he
has gone his own way without even stopping to
think whether the way were difficult or desirable.
Not long since, walking with a friend in the streets
of New York, he said suddenly: "Do you know,
I wonder what it is hke to chase a man .? I know
what it is like to be chased, but to chase a man
would be a new sensation." The other man laughed,
and thought no more about it. A week later my
friend came to him with an official document : he
had been appointed a private detective. He was
set on the track of a famous criminal (whom, as it
happened, he had known as a tramp) ; he made
his plans, worked them out successfully, and the
criminal was caught. To have done was enough :
he had had the sensation; he has done no more
work as a detective. Is there not, in this curiosity
in action, this game mastered and then cast aside,
a wonderful promptness, sureness, a moral quality
which is itself success in life ?

To desire so much, and what is so human, to
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London.

make one's life out of the very fact of living it as
one chooses ; to create a unique personal satisfaction
out of discontent and curiosity ; to be so much
oneself in learning so much from other people :
is not this, in its way, an ideal, and has not my friend
achieved it ? What I like in him so much is that
he is a vagabond without an object. He has
written one book, but writing has come to him as
an accident ; and, in writing, his danger is to be
too literal for art, and not quite literal enough for
science. He is too completely absorbed in people
and things to be able ever to get aloof from them ;
and to write well of what one has done and seen
one must be able to get aloof from oneself and from
others. If ever a man loved wandering for its
own sake it was George Borrow ; but George
Borrow had a serious and whimsical brain always
at work, twisting the things that he saw into shapes
that pleased him more than the shapes of the things
in themselves. My friend is interested in what
he calls sociology, but the interest is almost as
accidental as his interest in literature or in phil-
anthropy. He has the soul and feet of the vaga-
bond, the passion of the roads. He is restless under
any roof but the roof of stars. He cares passion-
ately for men and women, not because they are
beautiful or good or clever, or because he can do
them good, or because they can be serviceable to
him, but because they are men and women. And
he cares for men and women where they are most
vividly themselves, where they have least need for

195

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

disguise ; for poor people, and people on the roads,
idle people, criminals sometimes, the people who
are so much themselves that they are no longer a
part of society. He wanders over the whole earth,
but he does not care for the beauty or strangeness
of what he sees, only for the people. Writing to
me lately from Samarcand, he said: "I have seen
the tomb of the prophet Daniel ; I have seen the
tomb of Tamerlane." But Tamerlane was nothing
to him, the prophet Daniel was nothing to him.
He mentioned them only because they would
interest me. He was trying to puzzle out and
piece together the psychology of the Persian beggar
whom he had left at the corner of the way.

196

IV.

When my French friends come to London they
say to me : where is your Montmartre, where is
your Quartier Latin ? We have no Montmartre
(not even Chelsea is that), no Quartier Latin,
because there is no instinct in the Enghshman to
be companionable in public. Occasions are lacking,
it is true, for the cafe is responsible for a good part
of the artistic Bohemianism of Paris, and we have
no cafes. I prophesy in these pages that some day
some one, probably an American who has come by
way of Paris, will set back the plate-glass windows
in many angles, which I could indicate to him, of
the Strand^ Piccadilly, and other streets, and will
turn the whole wall into windows, and leave a space
in front for a terrasse, in the Paris manner, and we
shall have cafes like the cafes in Paris, and the
prestidigitateur who has done this will soon have
made a gigantic fortune. But meanwhile let us
recognise that there is in London no companionship
in public (in the open air or visible through windows)
and that nothing in Cafes Royaux and Monicos
and the like can have the sort of meaning for young
men in London that the cafes have long had, and
still have, in Paris. Attempts have been made,
and I have shared in them, and for their time they
had their entertainment ; but I have not seen one
that flourished.

I remember the desperate experiments of some
to whom Paris, from a fashion, had become almost
a necessity ; and how Dowson took to cabmen's

197

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

shelters as a sort of supper-club. Different taverns
were at different times haunted by young writers ;
some of them came for the drink and some for the
society; and one bold attempt was made to get
together a cenacle in quite the French manner in
the upper room of a famous old inn. In London
we cannot read our poems to one another, as they
do in Paris ; we cannot even talk about our own
works, frankly, with a natural pride, a good-
humoured equality. They can do that in Dublin,
and in an upper room in Dublin I find it quite
natural. But in London even those of us who are
least Anglo-Saxon cannot do it. Is it more, I
wonder, a loss to us or a gain ?

This lack of easy meeting and talking is certainly
one of the reasons why there have been in England
many great writers but few schools. In Paris a
young man of twenty starts a "school" as he starts
a "revue"; and these hasty people are in France
often found among the people who last. In modern
England we have gained, more than we think per-
haps, from the accidents of neighbourhood that set
Wordsworth and Coleridge walking and talking
together. As it was England, and one of them
was Wordsworth, they met in Cumberland ; in
London we have had nothing like the time of
Victor Hugo, when Baudelaire and Gautier and
Gerard de Nerval and men of obscure and vagabond
genius made Paris vital, a part of themselves, a
form of creative literature. That is what London
has in itself the genius, the men and the material,
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London.

to be ; but of the men of our time only Henley and
John Davidson have loved it or struck music out
of it.

If we had only had a Walt Whitman for London !
Whitman is one of the voices of the earth, and it is
only in Whitman that the paving-stones really speak,
with a voice as authentic as the voice of the hills.
He knew no distinction between what is called the
work of nature and what is the work of men. He
left out nothing, and what still puzzles us is the
blind, loving, embracing way in which he brings
crude names and things into his vision, the name
of a trade, a street, a territory, no matter what
syllables it might carry along with it. He created
a vital poetry of cities ; it was only a part of what
he did ; but since Whitman there is no gainsaying
it any longer.

When I came to London, I knew nothing of
the great things that Whitman had done, or that
it was possible to do them in such a way ; but I
had my own feeling for London, my own point of
view there, and I found myself gradually trying
to paint, or to set to music, to paint in music, perhaps,
those sensations which London awakened in me.
I was only trying to render what I saw before me,
what I felt, and to make my art out of Hving material.
"Books made out of books pass away" was a sen-
tence I never forgot, and my application of it was
direct and immediate.

I have always been curious of sensations, and
above all of those which seemed to lead one into

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Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

"artificial paradises" not within everybody's reach.
It took me some time to find out that every " artificial
paradise" is within one's own soul, somewhere
among one's own dreams, and that haschisch is a
poor substitute for the imagination. The mystery
of all the intoxicants fascinated me, and drink,
which had no personal appeal to me, which indeed
brought me no pleasures, found me endlessly
observant of its powers, eff'ects, and variations.

Many of my friends drank, and I was forced
to become acquainted with the different forms
which liquor could take, so that I could almost
label them in their classes. Thus one, whom I
will call A., drank copiously, continually, all drinks,
for pleasure : he could carry so much so steadily
that he sometimes passed his limit without knowing
it : not that he minded passing the limit, but he
liked to be conscious of it. B. drank to become
unconscious, he passed his limit rapidly, and became
first apologetic, then quarrelsome. His friend C,
a man abstract in body and mind, who muttered in
Greek when he was least conscious of himself, and
sat with imperturbable gravity, drinking hke an
ascetic, until his head fell without warning on the
table, seemed to compete with B. in how to finish
soonest with a hfe which he had no desire to get
rid of. I do not think he ever got any pleasure
out of drinking : he would sit up over night with
absinthe and cigarettes in order to be awake to
attend early mass ; but though his will was strong
enough for that, the habit was stronger than his
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London.

will, and he seemed like one condemned to that
form of suicide without desire or choice in the
matter. D. drank for pleasure, but he was scrupu-
lous in what he drank, and would take menthe verte
for its colour, absinthe because it lulled him with
vague dreams, ether because it could be taken on
strawberries. I remember his telling me exactly
what it feels like to have delirium tremens, and he
told it minutely, self-pityingly, but with a relish ;
not without a melancholy artistic pride in the sensa-
tions, their strangeness, and the fact that he should
have been the victim.

There were others ; there was even one who
cured himself in some miraculous way, and could
see his friends drink champagne at his expense,
while he drank soda-water. All these I wondered
at and fancied that I understood, I admit that I
was the more interested in these men because they
were living in the way I call artificial. I never
thought any one the better for being a spendthrift
of any part of his energies, but I certainly often
found him more interesting than those who were
not spendthrifts.

I also found a peculiar interest in another part
of what is artificial, properly artificial, in London.
A city is no part of nature, and one may choose
among the many ways in which something peculiar
to walls and roofs and artificial lighting, is carried
on. All commerce and all industries have their
share in taking us further from nature and further
from our needs, as they create about us unnatural

20 1

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

conditions which are really what develop in us these
new, extravagant, really needless needs. And the
whole night-world of the stage is, in its way, a part
of the very soul of cities. That lighted gulf, before
which the footlights are the flaming stars between
world and world, shows the city the passions and
that beauty which the soul of man in cities is occupied
in weeding out of its own fruitful and prepared soil.
. That is, the theatres are there to do so, they
have no reason for existence if they do not do so ;
but for the most part they do not do so. The
English theatre with its unreal realism and its un-
imaginative pretences towards poetry left me un-
touched and unconvinced. I found the beauty,
the poetry, that I wanted only in two theatres that
were not looked upon as theatres, the Alhambra
and the Empire. The ballet seemed to me the
subtlest of the visible arts, and dancing a more
significant speech than words. I could almost
have said seriously, as Verlaine once said in jest,
coming away from the Alhambra : " J'aime Shake-
speare, mais . . . j'aime mieux le ballet!" Why
is it that one can see a ballet fifty times, always
with the same sense of pleasure, while the most
absorbing play becomes a little tedious after the
third time of seeing t For one thing, because
the difference between seeing a play and seeing a
ballet is just the difference between reading a book
and looking at a picture. One returns to a picture
as one returns to nature, for a delight which, being
purely of the senses, never tires, never distresses,
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London.

never varies. To read a book even for the first
time, requires a certain effort. The book must
indeed be exceptional that can be read three or
four times, and no book was ever written that could
be read three or four times in succession. A ballet
is simply a picture in movement. It is a picture
where the imitation of nature is given by nature
itself; where the figures of the composition are
real, and yet, by a very paradox of travesty, have
a delightful, deliberate air of unreality. It is a
picture where the colours change, re-combine,
before one's eyes ; where the outlines melt into
one another, emerge, and are again lost, in the
kaleidoscopic movement of the dance. Here we
need tease ourselves with no philosophies, need
endeavour to read none of the riddles of existence ;
may indeed give thanks to be spared for one hour
the imbecility of human speech. After the tedium
of the theatre, where we are called on to interest
ourselves in the improbable fortunes of uninteresting
people, how welcome is the relief of a spectacle
which professes to be no more than merely beautiful ;
which gives us, in accomplished dancing, the most
beautiful human sight ; which provides, in short,
the one escape into fairyland which is permitted
by that tyranny of the real which is the worst
tyranny of modern life.

The most magical glimpse I ever caught of a
ballet was from the road in front, from the other
side of the road, one night when two doors were
suddenly thrown open as I was passing. In the

203

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

moment's interval before the doors closed again, I
saw, in that odd, unexpected way, over the heads
of the audience, far off in a sort of blue mist, the
whole stage, its briUiant crowd drawn up in the
last pose, just as the curtain was beginning to go
down. It stamped itself in my brain, an impression
caught just at the perfect moment, by some rare
felicity of chance. But that is not an impression
that can be repeated. For the most part I like to
see my illusions clearly, recognising them as illu-
sions, and so heightening their charm. I like
to see a ballet from the wings, a spectator, but in
the midst of the magic. To see a ballet from the
wings is to lose all sense of proportion, all knowledge
of the piece as a whole, but, in return, it is fruitful
in happy accidents, in momentary points of view,
in chance felicities of light and shade and move-
ment. It is almost to be in the performance oneself,
and yet passive, with the leisure to look about one.
You see the reverse of the picture : the girls at the
back lounging against the set scenes, turning to
talk with some one at the side ; you see how lazily
some of them are moving, and how mechanical and
irregular are the motions that flow into rhythm
when seen from the front. Now one is in the
centre of a joking crowd, hurrying from the dressing-
rooms to the stage; now the same crowd returns,
charging at full speed between the scenery, every
one trying to reach the dressing-room stairs first.
And there is the constant travelling of scenery,
from which one has a series of escapes, as it bears
204

London.

down unexpectedly in some new direction. The
ballet half seen in the centre of the stage, seen in
sections, has, in the ghmpses that can be caught of
it, a contradictory appearance of mere nature and
of absolute unreality. And beyond the footlights,
on the other side of the orchestra, one can see the
boxes near the stalls, the men standing by the bar,
an angle cut sharply off from the stalls, with the
light full on the faces, the intent eyes, the grey
smoke curling up from the cigarettes : a Degas, in
short.

And there is a charm, which I cannot think
wholly imaginary or factitious, in that form of
illusion which is known as make-up. To a plain
face, it is true, make-up only intensifies plainness;
for make-up does but give colour and piquancy to
what is already in a face, it adds nothing new. But
to a face already charming, how becoming all this
is, what a new kind of exciting savour it gives to
that real charm ! It has, to the remnant of Puritan
conscience or consciousness that is the heritage
of us all, a certain sense of dangerous wickedness,
the delight of forbidden fruit. The very phrase,
painted women, has come to have an association
of sin and to have put paint on her cheeks, though
for the innocent necessities of her profession, gives
to a woman a kind of symbohc corruption. At
once she seems to typify the sorceries, and entangle-
ments of what is most deliberately enticing in her
sex :

Femina dulce malum, pariter favus atque venenum —

20S

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

with all that is most subtle, least like nature, in her
power to charm. Maquillage, to be attractive,
must of course be unnecessary. As a disguise for
age or misfortune, it has no interest. But, of all
places, on the stage, and, of all people, on the
cheeks of young people ; there, it seems to me that
make-up is intensely fascinating, and its recognition
is of the essence of my delight in a stage perform-
ance. I do not for a moment want really to believe
in what I see before me ; to believe that those wigs
are hair, that grease-paint a blush; any more than
I want really to beheve that the actor who has just
crossed the stage in his everyday clothes has turned
into an actual King when he puts on clothes that
look hke a King's clothes. I know that a delightful
imposition is being practised upon me; that I am
to see fairyland for a while; and to me all that
glitters shall be gold.

The ballet in particular, but also the whole
surprising life of the music-halls, took hold of me
with the charm of what was least real among the
pompous and distressing unrealities of a great
city. And some form I suppose of that instinct
which has created the gladiatorial shows and the
bull-fight made me fascinated by the faultless and
fatal art of the acrobat, who sets his life in the
wager, and wins the wager by sheer skill, a triumph
of fine shades. That love of fine shades took me
angrily past the spoken vulgarities of most music-
hall singing (how much more priceless do they make
the silence of dancing !) to that one great art of fine
206

London.

shades, made up out of speech just Ufted into song,
which has been revealed to us by Yvette Guilbert.
I remember when I first heard her in Paris,
and tried vainly at the time, to get the Enghsh
managers to bring her over to London. She sang
"Sainte Galette," and as I listened to the song I
felt a cold shiver run down my back, that shiver
which no dramatic art except that of Sarah Bern-
hardt had ever given me. It was not this that I
was expecting to find in the thin woman with the
long black gloves. I had heard that her songs
were immoral, and that her manner was full of
underhand intention. What I found was a moral
so poignant, so human, that I could scarcely endure
the pity of it, it made me feel that I was wicked,
not that she was ; I, to have looked at these dread-
fully serious things Hghtly. Later on, in London,
I heard her sing "La Soularde," that song in which,
as Goncourt notes in his journal, "la diseuse de
chansonnettes se revele comme une grande, une
tres grande actrice tragique, vous mettant au coeur
une constriction angoisseuse." It is about an old
drunken woman, whom the children follow and
laugh at in the streets. Yvette imitates her old
waggling head, her tottering walk, her broken
voice, her little sudden furies, her miserable resigna-
tion ; she suggests all this, almost without moving,
by the subtlest pantomime, the subtlest inflections
of voice and face, and she thrills you with the
grotesque pathos of the whole situation, with the
intense humanity of it. I imagine such a situation

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Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

rendered by an English music-hall singer ! Imagine
the vulgarity, the inhumanity, of the sort of beery
caricature that we should get, in place of this
absolutely classic study in the darker and more
sordid side of hfe. The art of Yvette Guilbert
is always classic; it has restraint, form, dignity,
in its wildest licence. Its secret is its expressive-
ness, and the secret of that expressiveness lies
perhaps largely in its attention to detail. Others
are content with making an effect, say twice, in the
course of a song. Yvette Guilbert insists on getting
the full meaning out of every line, but quietly,
without emphasis, as if in passing; and, with her,
to grasp a meaning is to gain an effect.

There was the one great artist of that world
which, before I could apprehend it, had to be
reflected back to me as in some bewildering mirror.
It was out of mere curiosity that I had found my
way into that world, into that mirror, but, once
there, the thing became material for me. I tried
to do in verse something of what Degas had done
in painting. I was conscious of transgressing no
law of art in taking that scarcely touched material
for new uses. Here, at least, was a decor which
appealed to me, and which seemed to me full of
strangeness, beauty, and significance. I still think
that there is a poetry in this world of illusion, not
less genuine of its kind than that more easily appre-
hended poetry of a world, so little more real, that
poets have mostly turned to. It is part of the
poetry of cities, and it waits for us in London.
208

V.

A CITY is characterised by its lights, and it is to its
Hghts, acting on its continual mist, that London
owes much of the mystery of its beauty. On a
winter afternoon every street in London becomes
mysterious. You see even the shops through a
veil, people are no longer distinguishable as persons,
but are a nimble flock of shadows. Lights travel
and dance through alleys that seem to end in dark-
ness. Every row of gas lamps turns to a trail of
fire ; fiery stars shoot and flicker in the night.
Night becomes palpable, and not only an absence
of the light of day.

The most beautiful lighting of a city is the
lighting of one street in Rome by low-swung
globes of gas that hang like oranges down the Via
Nazionale, midway between the houses. In London
we light casually, capriciously, every one at his
own will, and so there are blinding shafts at one
step and a pit of darkness at the next, and it is an
adventure to follow the lights in any direction, the
lights are all significant and mean some place of
entertainment or the ambition of some shopkeeper.
They draw one by the mere curiosity to find out
why they are there, what has set them signalling.
And, as you walk beyond or aside from the shops,
all these private illuminations are blotted out, and
the dim, sufficing street-gas of the lamp-posts takes
their place.

The canals, in London, have a mysterious
quality, made up of sordid and beautiful elements,

209

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

now a black trail, horrible, crawling secretly; now
a sudden opening, as at Maida Vale, between dull
houses, upon the sky. At twilight in winter the
canal smokes and flares, a long hne of water with
its double row of lamps, dividing the land. From
where Browning lived for so many years there is
an aspect which might well have reminded him of
Venice. The canal parts, and goes two ways,
broadening to almost a lagoon, where trees droop
over the water from a kind of island, with rocky
houses perched on it. You see the curve of a
bridge, formed by the shadow into a pure circle,
and lighted by the reflection of a gas lamp in the
water beyond ; and the dim road opposite following
the hne of the canal, might be a calle ; only the long
hull of a barge lying there is not Venetian in shape,
and, decidedly, the atmosphere is not Venetian.
Verlaine, not knowing, I think, that Browning lived
there, made a poem about the canal, which he dated
"Paddington." It is one of his two "Streets,"
and it begins: "O la riviere dans la rue," and
goes on to invoke "I'eau jaune comme une morte,"
with nothing to reflect but the fog. The barges
crawl past with inexpressible slowness ; coming
out slowly after the horse and the rope from under
the bridge, with a woman leaning motionless against
the helm, and drifting on as if they were not moving
at all.

On the river the lights are always at work
building fairy-palaces; wherever there are trees
they wink like stars through drifting cloud, and

2IO

London.

the trees become oddly alive, with a more restless
life than their hfe by day. I have seen a plain
churchyard with its straight grave-stones turn on
a winter afternoon into a sea of white rocks, with
vague rosy shore hghts beyond. But it is the
fog which lends itself to the supreme London
decoration, collaborating with gaslight through
countless transformations, from the white shroud
to the yellow blanket, until every gas lamp is out,
and you cannot see a torch a yard beyond your
feet.

There is nothing in the world quite like a London
fog, though the underground railway stations in
the days of steam might have prepared us for it
and Dante has described it in the "Inferno" when
he speaks of the banks of a pit in hell, "crusted
over with a mould from the vapour below, which
cakes upon them, and battles with eye and nose."
Foreigners praise it as the one thing in which
London is unique. They come to London to
experience it. It is as if one tried the experience
of drowning or suffocating. It is a penalty worse
than any Chinese penalty. It stifles the mind as
well as choking the body. It comes on slowly
and stealthily, picking its way, choosing its direc-
tion, leaving contemptuous gaps in its course;
then it settles down like a blanket of sohd smoke,
which you can feel but not put from you. The
streets turn putrescent, the gas lamps hang hke
rotting fruit, you are in a dark tunnel, in which
the Hghts are going out, and beside you, unseen,

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Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

there is a roar and rumble, interrupted with sharp
cries, a stopping of wheels and a beginning of the
roar and rumble over again. You walk like a
blind man, fumbling with his staff at the edge
of the pavement. FamiHar turnings, which you
fancied you could follow blindfold, deceive you,
and you are helpless if you go two yards out of your
course. The grime blackens your face, your eyes
smart, your throat is as if choked with dust. You
breathe black foulness and it enters into you and
contaminates you.

And yet, how strange, inexplicable, mysteriously
impressive is this masque of shadows ! It is the
one wholly complete transformation of the visible
world, the one darkness which is really visible,
the one creation of at least the beauty of horror
which has been made by dirt, smoke, and cities.

Yet the eternal smoke of London lies in wait
for us, not only in the pestilence of chimneys, but
rising violently out of the earth, in a rhetoric of its
own. There are in London certain gaps or holes
in the earth, which are hke vent-holes, and out of
these openings its inner ferment comes for a moment
to the surface. One of them is at Chalk Farm
Station. There is a gaunt cavernous doorway
leading underground, and this doorway faces three
roads from the edge of a bridge. The bridge
crosses an abyss of steam, which rises out of depths
hke the depths of a boihng pot, only it is a witches'
pot of noise and fire; and pillars and pyramids
of smoke rise continually out of it, and there are

212

London.

hoarse cries, screams, a clashing and rattHng, the
sound as of a movement which struggles and cannot
escape, like the coiling of serpents twisting together
in a pit. Their breath rises in clouds, and drifts
voluminously over the gap of the abyss ; catching
at times a ghastly colour from the lamphght. Some-
times one of the snakes seems to rise and sway out
of the tangle, a column of yellow blackness. Multi-
tudes of red and yellow eyes speckle the vague
and smoky darkness, out of which rise domes and
roofs and chimneys ; and a few astonished trees
lean over the mouth of the pit, sucking up draughts
of smoke for air.

213

VI.

Is there any city in which life and the conditions
of Ufe can be more abject than in London, any city
in which the poor are more naturally unhappy
and less able to shake off or come through their
poverty into any natural rehef? Those sordid
splendours of smoke and dirt which may be so fine
as aspects, mean something which we can only
express by the English word squalor; they mean
the dishumanising of innumerable people who
have no less right than ourselves to exist naturally.
I will take one road, which I know well, and which
every one who lives in London must know some-
what, for it is a main artery, Edgware Road, as a
parable of what I mean. Nowhere in London is
there more material for a comparative study in
living.

Edgware Road begins proudly in the West
End of London, sweeping off in an emphatic
curve from the railings of Hyde Park, beyond the
Marble Arch; it grows meaner before Chapel
Street, and from Chapel Street to the flower-shanty
by the canal, where Maida Vale goes down hill,
it seems to concentrate into itself all the sordidness
of London. Walking outward from Chapel Street,
on the right-hand side of the road, you plunge
instantly into a dense, parching, and envelopmg
smell, made up of stale fish, rotting vegetables,
and the must of old clothes. The pavement is
never clean; bits of torn paper, fragments of
cabbage leaves, the rind of fruit, the stalks of
214

London.

flowers, the litter swept away from the front of shops
and hngering on its way to the gutter, drift to and
fro under one's feet, moist with rain or greased
with mud. As one steps out of the way of a sHmy
greyness on the ground, one brushes against a
coat on which the dirt has caked or a skirt which
it streaks damply. Women in shawls, with untidy
hair, turn down into the road from all the side
streets, and go in and out of the shops. They
carry baskets, bags, and parcels wrapped in news-
papers ; grease oozes through the paper, smearing
it with printer's ink as it melts. They push per-
ambulators in front of them, in which children with
smeared faces pitch and roll ; they carry babies
under their shawls. Men with unshaven faces,
holding short clay pipes between their teeth, walk
shambhngly at their side ; the men's clothes are
discoloured with time and weather, and hang
loosely about them, as if they had been bought
ready-made ; they have dirty scarves knotted round
their necks, and they go along without speaking.
Men with thread-bare frock coats, ill-fitting and
carefully brushed, pass nervously, with white faces
and thin fingers. Heavy men with whips in their
hands, thin, clean-shaven men in short coats and
riding gaiters, lounge in front of the horse-dealer's
across the road, or outside dusty shops with bundles
of hay and sacks of bran in their doorways.

Here and there a gaudy sheet slung across a
window announces a fat woman on show, or a
collection of waxworks with the latest murder ;

215

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

flags and streamers, daubed with ragged lettering,
hang out from the upper windows. At intervals,
along the pavement, there are girls offering big
bunches of white and yellow flowers ; up the side
streets there are barrows of plants and ferns and
flowers in pots ; and the very odour of the flowers
turns sickly, as the infection of the air sucks it up
and mingles it with the breath and sweat of the
people and the ancient reek of clothes that have
grown old upon unwashed bodies.

Sometimes a pavement artist brings his pictures
with him on a square canvas, and ties a string in
front of them, propping them against the wall, and
sits on the ground at one end, with his cap in his
hand. At regular intervals a Punch and Judy
comes to one of the side streets, just in from the
road, a little melancholy white dog with a red ruff
about its neck barks feebly as the puppets flap their
noses in its face. On Sundays the Salvation Army
holds meetings, with flags flying and loud brass
instruments playing; the red caps and black sun-
bonnets can be seen in the hollow midst of the
crowd. Not far off, men dressed in surplices
stand beside a harmonium, with prayer-books in
their hands ; a few people listen to them half-
heartedly. There are generally one or two Italian
women, with bright green birds in their cages,
huddled in the corner of doorways and arches,
waiting to tell fortunes. A blind beggar in a tall
hat stands at the edge of the curbstone; he has
a tray of matches and boot-laces to sell ; he holds
216

London.

a stick in his hand, with which he paws nervously
at an inch of pavement ; his heel seeks the gutter,
and feels its way up and down from gutter to
pavement.

Somewhere along the road there is generally
a little crowd ; a horse has fallen, or a woman has
lost a penny in the mud, or a policeman, note-book
in hand, is talking to a cab-driver who has upset
a bicycle. Two women are quarrelling ; they
tear at the handle of a perambulator in which two
babies sit and smile cheerfully. Two men grapple
with each other in the middle of the road, almost
under the horses of the omnibus ; the driver stops
his horses, so as not to run them down. A coarse,
red-faced woman of fifty drags an old woman by
the arm ; she is almost too old to walk, and she
totters and spreads out her arms helplessly as the
other pulls at her; her head turns on her shoulder,
looking out blindly, the mouth falling open in a
convulsive grimace, the whole face eaten away
with some obscure suffering which she is almost
past feeling. A barrel-organ plays violently ; some
youths stare at the picture of the fat, half-naked
lady on the front of the instrument ; one or two
children hold out their skirts in both hands and
begin to dance to the tune.

On Saturday night the Road is lined with stalls;
naphtha flames burn over every stall, flaring away
from the wind, and hghting up the faces that lean
towards them from the crowd on the pavement.
There are stalls with plants, cheap jewelry, paper

217

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

books, scarves and braces, sweets, bananas, ice-
cream barrows, weighing-machines; long rows of
rabbits hang by their trussed hind legs, and a boy
skins them rapidly with a pen-knife for the buyers ;
raw lumps of meat redden and whiten as the hght
drifts over and away from them; the salesmen
cry their wares. The shops blaze with hght, dis-
playing their cheap clothes and cheap furniture
and clusters of cheap boots. Some of the women
are doing their Saturday night's shopping, but for
the most part it is a holiday night, and the people
swarm in the streets, some in their working clothes,
some in the finery which they will put on to-morrow
for their Sunday afternoon walk in the Park; in
their faces, their movements, there is that un-
enjoying hilarity which the end of the week's work,
the night, the week's wages, the sort of street fair
at which one can buy things to eat and to put on,
bring out in people who seem to hve for the most
part with preoccupied indifference.

As I walk to and fro in Edgware Road, I cannot
help sometimes wondering why these people exist,
why they take the trouble to go on existing. Watch
their faces, and you will see in them a listlessness,
a hard unconcern, a failure to be interested, which
speaks equally in the roving eyes of the man who
stands smoking at the curbstone with his hands in
his pockets, and in the puckered cheeks of the
woman doing her shopping, and in the noisy laugh
of the youth leaning against the wall, and in the
grey, narrow face of the child whose thin legs are
218

Lond

on.

too tired to dance when the barrel-organ plays jigs.
Whenever anything happens in the streets there is
a crowd at once, and this crowd is made up of
people who have no pleasures and no interests of
their own to attend to, and to whom any variety
is welcome in the tedium of their lives. In all
these faces you will see no beauty, and you will
see no beauty in the clothes they wear, or in their
attitudes in rest or movement, or in their voices
when they speak. They are human beings to whom
nature has given no grace or charm, whom life has
made vulgar, and for whom circumstances have
left no escape from themselves. In the climate
of England, in the atmosphere of London, on these
pavements of Edgware Road, there is no way of
getting any simple happiness out of natural things,
and they have lost the capacity for accepting natural
pleasures graciously, if such came to them. Crawl-
ing between heaven and earth thus miserably, they
have never known what makes existence a practicable
art or a tolerable spectacle, and they have infinitely
less sense of the mere abstract human significance
of life than the facchino who lies, a long blue streak
in the sun, on the Zattere at Venice, or the girl
who carries water from the well in an earthen pitcher,
balancing it on her head, in any Spanish street.

Or, instead of turning to human beings, in some
more favourable part of the world, go to the Zoo-
logical Gardens and look at the beasts there. The
conditions of existence are, perhaps, slightly worse
for the beasts ; their cages are narrow, more securely

219

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

barred ; human curiosity is brought to bear upon
them with a more pubUc offence. But observe,
under all these conditions, the dignity of the beasts,
their disdain, their indifference ! When the flutter-
ing beribboned, chattering human herd troops past
them, pointing at them with shrill laughter, uneasy,
preoccupied, one eye on the beasts and the other
on the neighbour's face or frock, they sit there
stolidly in their cages, not condescending to notice
their unruly critics. When they move, they move
with the grace of natural things, made rhythmical
with beauty and strong for ravage and swift for
flight. They pace to and fro, rubbing themselves
against the bars, restlessly ; but they seem all on
fire with a life that tingles to the roots of their claws
and to the tips of their tails, dilating their nostrils
and quivering in little shudders down their smooth
flanks. They have found an enemy craftier than
they, they have been conquered and carried away
captive, and they are full of smouldering rage.
But with the loss of liberty they have lost nothing
of themselves ; the soul of their flesh is uncon-
taminated by humiliation. They pass a mournful
existence nobly, each after his kind, in loneliness
or in unwilling companionship ; their eyes look
past us without seeing us ; we have no power over
their concentration within the muscles of their
vivid limbs or within the coils of their subtle bodies.
Humanity, at the best, has much to be ashamed
of, physically, beside the supreme physical perfection
of the panther or the snake. All of us look poor
220

London.

enough creatures as we come away from their cages.
But think now of these men and women whom we
have seen swarming in Edgware Road, of their
vulgarity, their abjectness of attitude toward hfe,
their ughness, dirt, insolence, their loud laughter.
All the animals except man have too much dignity
to laugh; only man found out the way to escape
the direct force of things by attaching a critical
sense, or a sense of rehef, to a sound which is neither
a cackle nor a whinny, but which has something
of those two inarticulate voices of nature. As I
passed through the Saturday night crowd lately,
between two opposing currents of evil smells, I
overheard a man who was lurching along the
pavement say in contemptuous comment: "Twelve
o'clock! we may be all dead by twelve o'clock!"
He seemed to sum up the philosophy of that crowd,
its listlessness, its hard unconcern, its failure to be
interested. Nothing matters, he seemed to say
for them ; let us drag out our time until the time
is over, and the sooner it is over the better.

Life in great cities dishumanises humanity;
it envelops the rich in multitudes of clogging,
costly trifles, and cakes the poor about with ignoble
dirt and the cares of unfruitful labour. Go into
the country, where progress and machines and
other gifts of the twentieth century have not wholly
taken away the peasant's hand from the spade and
plough, or to any fishing village on the coast, and
you will see that poverty, even in England, can
find some natural deUghts in natural things. You

221

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

will find, often enough, that very English quaHty
of vulgarity in the peasant who lives inland ; only
the sea seems to cleanse vulgarity out of the English
peasant, and to brace him into a really simple and
refined dignity. And, after all, though the labourer
who turns the soil is in unceasing contact with
nature, he has not that sting of danger to waken
him and cultivate his senses which is never absent
for long from the life of the fisherman. People who
cast their nets into the sea, on the hazard of that
more uncertain harvest, have a gravity, a finished
self-reliance, a kind of philosophy of their own.
Their eyes and hands are trained to fineness and
strength, they learn to know the winds and clouds,
and they measure their wits against them, risking
their lives on the surety of their calculations. The
constant neighbourhood of death gives life a keener
savour, they have no certainty of ever opening
again the door which they close behind them as
they go out to launch their boats under the stars.
Tossing between a naked sea and a naked sky all
night long, they have leisure for many dreams, and
thoughts come into their heads which never trouble
the people who live in streets. They have all the
visible horizon for their own.

And the sea washes clean. In the steep Cornish
village that I know best, I see, whenever I go out,
bright flowers in front of white cottages, a cow's
head laid quietly over a stone hedge, looking down
on the road, the brown harvest in the fields that
stretch away beyond the trees to the edge of the

222

London.

cliff, and then, further on towards the sky, the blue
glitter of the sea, shining under sunlight, with great
hills and palaces of white clouds, rising up from
the water as from a solid foundation. The sea is
always at the road's end, and there is always a wind
from the sea, coming singing up the long street
from the harbour, and shouting across the fields
and whistling in the lanes. Life itself seems to
come freshly into one's blood, as if life were not
only a going on with one's habits and occupations,
but itself meant something, actually existed. Every
one I meet on the road speaks to me as I pass ;
their faces and their voices are cheerful; they have
no curiosity, but they are ready to welcome a stranger
as if he were some one they knew already. Time
seems to pass easily, in each day's space between
sea and sky ; the day has no tedium for them ;
and they need go no further than to the harbour
or the farm for enough interest to fill out all the
hours of the day. They have room to live, air to
breathe ; beauty is natural to everything about
them. The dates in their churchyards tell you
how long they have the patience to go on living.

1908,

223

III.

Sea-Coasts and Islands.

Dieppe, 1895.

I.

I WENT to Dieppe this summer with the intention
of staying from Saturday to Monday. Two months
afterwards I began to wonder, with a very mild
kind of surprise, why I had not yet returned to
London. And I was not the only one to fall under
this inexplicable fascination. There is a fantastical
quality in Dieppe air which somehow turns us all,
at our moments, into amiable and enthusiastic
lunatics. Relays of friends kept arriving, I as little
as they knew why ; and some of them, like myself,
never went back. Others, forced to live mostly
in London, and for the most part content to live
there, went backwards and forwards every week.
What is it, in this little French watering-place, that
appeals so to the not quite conventional English-
man, brings him to it, holds him in it, brings him
back to it so inevitably ? Nothing and everything ;
an impalpable charm, the old-fashioned distinction
of a Httle town which has still, in its faded lawns
by the sea, in the hne of white hotels beyond the
lawns, something of that 1830 air which exhales
for us from a picture of Bonington. And then
Dieppe is so discreetly, and with such self-respect,
hospitable to us English ; so different from the
vulgar friendliness of Boulogne, with its "English
chop-houses" insulting one's taste at every step.
Dieppe receives us with perfectly French manners,
offers us politeness, and exacts it on our part, and
pleases a sensitive and appreciative Englishman

227

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

because it is so charming in such a French way.
And then hfe, if you will but abandon yourself to
the natural current of things, passes in a dream.
I do not quite know why, but one cannot take things
seriously at Dieppe. Only just on the other side
of that blue streak is England : England means
London. At the other end of a short railway-line
is Paris. But all that is merely so many words ;
the mind refuses to grasp it as a fact. One's duties,
probably, call one to London or Paris, one's realisable
pleasures ; everything but the moment's vague
immense, I say again, inexplicable, satisfaction,
which broods and dawdles about Dieppe.

At Dieppe the sea is liberal, and affords you a
long sweep from the cliffs on the left to the pier on
the right. A few villas nestle under the cliffs ;
then comes the Casino, which takes its slice of the
plage with excellent judgment. Built of peppermint-
coloured brick, it sprawls its length insolently above
the sea. It is quite nice, as casinos go ; it is roomy,
and has some amusing chandeliers hung up by
ribbons ; and the terrace is absolutely charming.
If you are insular enough to wish it, you can sit and
drink brandies and sodas all day; if you would do
in France as the French do, you can sit nearer the
parapet, with an awning stretched above your head,
and look out drowsily over the sea, which is worth
looking at here, opalescent, full of soft change.
You will see around you beautiful, well-dressed
women, princes, painters, poets, Cleo de Merode.
All around you, bright in the bright sun, there is
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Dieppe, 1895.

a flow of soft dresses, mostly in sharp, clear colours,
vivid yellows and blues and whites, the most wonder-
ful blues, more dazzHng than the sea. And there
are delicious hats, floating over the hair like clouds;
great floating sleeves, adding wings to the butter-
fly; all the fashions and fehcities of a whole
summer.

Ah ! but the plage, on a sunny morning in mid-
season, what a feast of colour, of movement, of the
most various curiosities ! The plage has its social
laws, its social divisions, an etiquette almost as
scrupulous as a drawing-room. All the space in
front of the Casino is tacitly reserved for the people
who subscribe to the Casino, and who are moving
up and down the wooden staircase from the terrace
to the beach all day long. Beyond that limit the
plage is plebeian, and belongs to everybody. Women
sit about there with shawls and babies and paper
parcels. Outside the Casino there are fewer people,
but one is more or less smart, and the barons and
beautes de plage are alike here. In front of the
double row of bathing-machines there is a line of
little private boxes. Smart women sit on exhibition
in every compartment, wearing their best hats and
smiles, sometimes pretending to read or sew, as if
one did anything but sit on exhibition, and flirt,
and chatter, and look at the bathers ! There is
a constant promenade along the shifting and re-
sounding pathway of boards laid over the great
pebbles ; chairs are grouped closely all along the
plage between this promenade and the sea ; there

229

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

is another little crowd on the estacade, from which
the bathers are diving. The bright dresses glitter
in the sunHght, like a flower garden ; white peignoirs^
bright and dark bathing costumes, the white and
rose of bare and streaming flesh, passing to and fro,
hurriedly, between the bathing-machines and the
sea. The men, if they have good figures, look
well; they have at least the chance of looking
well. But the women ! Rare, indeed, is the
woman who can look pretty, in her toilette or her-
self, as she comes out of the sea, wraps herself in
a sort of white nightgown, and staggers up the
beach, the water running down her legs. Even
at the more elegant moment when she drops her
peignoir at the sea's edge, before stepping in, it is
hard for her to look her best. Is it not with a finer
taste, after all, that in some parts of England the
women are not allowed to bathe with the men, are
kept out of sight as much as possible ? A senti-
mental sensualist should avoid the French seaside.
He will be pained at seeing how ridiculous a beauti-
ful woman may look when she is clothed in wet
and dragging garments. The lines of the body are
lost or deformed ; there is none of the suggestion
of ordinary costume, only a grotesque and shapeless
image, all in pits and protuberances for which
Nature should be ashamed to accept responsibility.
Between nakedness and this compromise with
clothes there is the whole world's length ; and as
for this state of being undressed and yet covered,
in this makeshift, unmilliner-like way, it is too
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Dieppe, 1895.

barbarous, Mesdames, for the tolerance of any
gentleman of taste.

II.

The Casino has many charms. You can dance
there, listen to music, walk or sit on the terrace in
the sun, write your letters in the reading-room on
the very pictorial paper which is so carefully doled
out to you ; but it is for none of these things that
the Casino exists, it is in none of these things that
there hes the unique fascination of the Casino, for
those to whom the Casino has a unique fascination.
The Casino, properly speaking, is only a gorgeous
stable for the little horses. All the rooms in the
Casino open into the room of the green tables ;
all the alleys of the gardens lead there. In the
intervals of the concert, if you wish to stroll for a
few minutes on the terrace, you have to pass through
the room ; you see the avid circle about the tables,
hear the swish of the horses, the monotonous
"Faites vos jeux. Messieurs. . . . Les jeux sont
faits. . . . Rien ne va plus," and then, after the
expectant pause, the number: "L'as, numero
un." And in time, however strong, or however
idle, or however indifferent you are, you will be
drawn into that fascinated circle, you will be seized
by the irresistible impulse, you will begin to play.
The fascination of gambling, to the real amateur
of the thing, is stronger than any other passion.
Men forget that a beautiful woman is sitting opposite

231

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

to them ; women do not so much as notice that a
more beautiful toilette than their own has just come
into the room. I have seen the most famous pro-
fessional beauties of Paris sit at those green tables,
and not a soul has looked at them except the croupiers
and myself.

I said the impulse was irresistible. I have proved
it on myself. Gambhng in the abstract has no
charms for me ; I can go to the races without the
slightest inclination to take the odds ; it annoys
me when little newspaper boys rush up to me as
if expecting me to buy their papers because they are
the first to shout "All the win-ner!" I lounged
about the room of the Petits Chevaux for weeks
without putting on more than two or three two-
franc pieces, which I contentedly lost. I saw my
friends winning and losing every afternoon and
every evening; I saw them leaving the tables with
their pockets bulging with five-franc pieces ; I
heard them discussing lucky numbers ; I saw the
strength of the passion which held them by the
urgency and the futility of their remorse when they
had lost; I heard them saying to me, "It will be
your turn next," and I laughed, certain of myself.
At last a woman, with a malicious confidence,
tempted me. I put on a few francs to please her,
and I found myself waiting with more interest for
the turn of her head than for the gesture of the little
horse who passed the winning post first. I knew
by that that the demon of play had not bitten me ;
I felt absolutely safe.
232

Dieppe, 1895.

Well, of course, I succumbed, and the sensation
I experienced was worth the price I paid for it.
While I played nothing existed but the play ; the
money slipped through my fingers, I gathered it
in, flung it forth, with an absorption so complete
that my actions were almost mechanical. My
brain seemed to act with instantaneous energy ;
no sooner had I willed than my fingers were placing
the coins here, and not there, I knew not why,
on the table. I followed no system, and I never
hesitated. I then knew for the first time the strength
of conviction for which there is not even the pretence
of a foundation. While my money lasted, and I
saw it flowing to me and from me so capriciously, I
felt what I think must have been the intoxication
of abandoning oneself to Fate, with an astonishing
sense of superiority over ordinary mortals, from
whom I was almost more absolutely removed than
if I had been moving in a haschisch dream. And
in the exaltation, the absorption of this dream,
in which I was acting with such reckless and cause-
less certainty, there was no really disillusioning
shock, either when I lost or when I won. My
excitement was so great that I accepted these
accidents as merely points in a progress. After
a time I did not even play for the sake of winning.
I played for the sake of playing.

After all, Petits Chevaux is the merest amateur
gambling; the serious people who play baccarat
next door, in the club, would laugh at it, and
rightly, from the gambler's point of view. The

233

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

interest of the thing is in its revelation of the universal
humanity of the gambling instinct, which comes
out so certainly and so unexpectedly in the people
who gamble once in the year, for a few scores or a
few hundreds of francs. And those green tables
are so admirable in the view they afford of the httle
superstitions which exist somewhere in the back-
ground of all minds. This table is lucky to such a
person, that column to another. The women swear
by the croupiers, and will take any amount of trouble
to get a seat by the side of the one they prefer.
And the croupiers, little miserable engines of Fate,
sit with folded hands and intent eyes, impassive,
supercilious, like Httle Eastern gods, raking in the
money without satisfaction, and tossing you your
winnings with an air of disdain. Yet they, too,
in spite of their air of supremacy, are entirely at
the mercy of a moment's caprice. They may be
dismissed if you win too much at their table ; and
here is the most imposing of all the croupiers offering
himself and his wife, as servants, to a lady who
played there.

III.

On certain afternoons there is a Bal des Enfants
at the Casino. You cannot imagine anything more
delicious. All around the room sit children, in
their white dresses, their little, thin black and
yellow legs set forth gravely. They are preoccupied
with their fans, their sashes, their gloves; their

234

Dieppe, 1895.

hair is beautifully done all over their heads, and
falls down their backs. The little boys, in velvet
and navy suits, march to and fro, very solemnly,
a little awkwardly, bow, and choose partners. The
bigger girls (some of them are thirteen or fourteen)
jump up, cross the room hurriedly, with the nervous
movement of young girls walking, tossing their
hair back from their shoulders ; they form little
groups, laugh and nod to the grown-up people
who stand about the door; and every now and
then pounce on a tiny sister, and pull about her
dress until its set suits them. In the middle of
the room stand two absurd persons ; the blond
Jew with the immense pink nose, the golden beard
and moustaches, who acts as master of the cere-
monies : he tries to assume a paternal air, his swollen
eyes dart about nervously; and the middle-aged
lady with the eyeglasses, who is more immediately
concerned with the children's conduct. She is
frankly anxious, fussy, and occupied. The or-
chestra is about to begin, and in the middle of the
room a httle helpless ring of very tiny children,
infants, begins to walk gravely round and round ;
the tiny people hold one another's hands, wonder-
ingly, and toddle along with their heads looking
over their shoulders, all in opposite directions.
The dance has begun : it is the Moska, with its
funny rhythm, its double stamp of the heels. Some
of the children dance charmingly, with a pretty
exactness in the trip and turn of the toes, the fling
of the leg. There are adorable frocks, marvellous

235

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

faces. They turn, turn, stop short, stamp their
heels, and turn again. The whole thing is so gay
and simple and artificial, these little, got-up people
who are playing at being their elders ; it is so pretty
altogether and so exciting, that I could watch it
for hours. Nothing is more exciting than to see
children masquerading. I am always disposed to
take them, as they would be taken, very seriously,
to think of them almost as of men and women.
As if they were not so far more attractive than any
possible men and women ! I hate to think of all
that floating hair being twisted up into coils and
bundled together obscurely at the back of the head.
I can see the elder sisters of these enchanting little
absurdities standing beside me at the door. How
uninteresting they are, how little they invite the
wandering of even the vaguest emotion !

IV.

But all Dieppe is not to be seen at the Casino,
and, perhaps, not the most intimate part of Dieppe.
I had the good fortune to live in the very heart
of the town, just outside the principal doorway of
the Eglise Saint-Jacques. I have never in my life
had a more genuine and, in its way, profound
sensation than my daily and nightly view of that
adorable old church, a somewhat flamboyant Gothic,
certainly, which I grew to love and wonder at with
an intimacy that was entirely new to me. To
look out last thing at night, before getting into bed,
236

Dieppe, 1895.

and see the grey stone flowering there before me,
rising up into the stars as if at home there, and so
full of soUd shadow about its base, broadly planted
on the solid earth ; to rise in the morning and look
out on the same grey mass, white in parts, and
warm in the early sunlight; there never was a
decor which pleased me so much, which put so many
dreams into my head. Every Gothic church is a
nest of dreams, and the least rehgiously minded
of men has his moments of devotion, of spiritual
exaltation before so delicate and so enduring a
work of men's hands in praise of God. Sight and
thought are lost in it; one feels its immensity as
one feels the immensity of the sea. And it was
as dear to me as the sea itself, this church of the
patron saint of fishermen, who leans upon his
staff", a sensual Jewish person with fleshy Hps and
a smile which is somewhat sneering in the arch of
the doorway.

During the first part of my stay, the fineness,
the supremacy, the air of eternity of the church were
curiously accentuated by a little fair, horrid, an
oppression, a nightmare, which installed itself at
the church's very base, in every corner of the many-
cornered ground about it. All day long, into the
late evening, the wooden horses went swaying
round to the noise of two or three tunes ; a trans-
formation show of Joan of Arc, just below my
window, had a drum and a cornet at the door; a
peep-show had a piano, and shots were fired all day
long in the "Tir des Salons," next door to the

237

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

"Theatre Moderne," which had a small band.
Then, all around, clinging still closer to the skirts '
of the church, were caravans and tents, in which
all these motley people lived and slept and did their
cooking. They swarmed about it Hke a crowd of
insects, throwing up their little mounds in the
earth; and the church rose calmly, undisturbed,
almost unconscious of the very existence of the
swarm, as the Eternal Church rises out of the agita-
tions and feverish coming-and-going of the world
and the fashions of the world.

V.

Very characteristic of Dieppe, I thought, and
certainly quite unlike anything you can see in
England, is the aspect of the Place Nationale on a
market-day, with its statue of Duquesne, so brilliant
and vivid in his great, flapping hat, standing there
in the middle; it reminded me somewhat of the
Good-Friday fair at Venice, which is held round
the Goldoni statue near the Rialto. But the
colours, despite the strong sunlight, are far from
Venetian. At the cathedral end of the square are
the butchers; then come the vegetables, splashes
of somewhat tawdry green, all over the ground,
and up and down the stalls. The vegetables reach
nearly as far as the statue; just this side of it begin
the clothes and commodities, which give its fair-
like air to the market. Stalls alternate with ground-
plots, all alike covered with cheap trousers, flannel
238

Dieppe, 1895.

shirts, heavy boots and carpet shoes, braces, foulards,
handkerchiefs, stays, bright ribbons, veils, balls of
worsted, shoe-laces, and, above all, dress-pieces of
every sort of common and trumpery pattern. The
women stop, handle them, draw them out, and the
saleswoman waits with a long pair of scissors in her
hand to cut off a slice here, a slice there. One
dainty little covered stall has nothing but white
Norman caps, laid in rows and hung in rows, one
after another. White-capped old peasant women
stop in front of it, compare the frilling with their
own, and try to make a bargain out of a sou. Not
for off is an open and upturned umbrella full of
babies' white caps and stomachers. A dazzling
collection of tin spoons and gilt studs lies on the
ground beside it, and the proprietors squat on
their heels close by. After the clothes comes a
little assemblage of baskets, brushes, and tin pails
and saucepans, dazzlingly white in the sun. Then
come the poultry, crates, and baskets of dead and
living fowls and ducks and geese, with a few outside
specimens ; and then, as we reach the street, where
the market flows all the way up and down, from
the quay to the Cafe des Tribunaux, we have the fruit
and flowers ; the fruit all in pale yellows, with the
vivid red of tomatoes : the flowers mainly white
and red, with a row of small palms along the pave-
ment. And as one follows the crowded alleys
between the stalls one elbows against slow, staring
country-people, the blither natives of the town,
the indiflferent visitors, and now and again a little

239

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

lounging line of sailors or fishermen in their sea-
stained drab or brown.

The second-hand section of the market is strewn
all around the cathedral, mainly about its front,
and along the Rue de 1 'Granger. Looking down
from my window opposite the great doorway, the
whole ground seems carpeted with old clothes, so
old, so dirty, so discoloured, that one wonders
equally how they could have got there, and how
those who have brought them can possibly imagine
that they will ever find purchasers. There are
coats and trousers, petticoats and bodices, stockings,
bed-covers, and even mattresses (once a whole
four-poster was placed on the pavement, which it
completely filled, just outside my door); everything
that can be folded is folded neatly, with a great
economy of space ; and at intervals are collections
of boots laid along side by side, eccentricities of
rusty iron, which always look so amusing and so
useless ; old books, prints, frames, vases, tall hats,
lamps, clocks under glass cases, crockery, and
concertinas. There is a collection of earthenware,
which is new ; and there are some new teapots,
ribbons, and tin pans. Beyond, where the Rue
Ste. Catherine narrows back to the arcade at the
side of the church, the market-carts are laid in rows,
resting on their shafts. Few people pass. I
have never actually seen anything bought, though
I would not take upon myself to say that it never
happens.

240

Dieppe, 1895.
VI.

The most absolutely romantic spot in Dieppe,
a spot more absolutely romantic to its square inch
than anything I ever saw, is the little curiosity-shop
in the Rue de la Barre. You look in through a long
sort of covered alley, lined on both sides with old
tables, and mirrors, and bookshelves, and huge
wooden effigies of saints, and plaster casts, and
scraps of modern carpentry, and you see at the
farther end what looks like a garden of antiquities,
in which all the oddities of the earth seem to be
growing up out of trees and clinging on to vines,
tier above tier. You go in a little way, and you see,
first, an upper floor facing you, all the front covered
with glass, in which are laid out the most precious
items, the inlaid tables, the Empire clocks, the Louis
XV. chairs. You go in a little farther still, and
you find yourself in the garden of antiquities,
which is even more fantastic and impossible than
its first aspect had intimated. It fills the square
of a little court, round which curls a very old house
trailed over with vines and creepers ; a house all
windows and doors, one of the doors opening on
a spiral stone staircase like the staircase of a tower.
At the farther end there is a glass covering, like an
unfinished conservatory ; creepers stretch across
underneath the glass, and, in a huge mound, piled
quite up to the creepers so that they are covered
with its dust, I know not what astonishing bric-d-brac,
a mound which fills the whole centre of the court.

241

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

There are chairs and tables, beds, bundles, chests,
pictures in frames, all sorts of iron things, and, very
conspicuously, two battered wooden representations
of the flames of hell (as I imagine), the red paint
much worn from their artichoke-like shoots. All
around the walls, wherever there is room for a nail
between a window and a vine-branch, something is
hung, plaster bas-reliefs and masks, Louis XVI.
mirrors, lanterns, Japanese prints, arm-chairs with-
out seats ; frankly, an incredible rigmarole. I saw
few desirable objects, but the charm of the whole
place, its unaccountability, its absurd and delightful
romanticism, made up in themselves a picture
which hardly needed to be painted, it was so
obviously a picture already.

VII.

One of the most characteristic corners of Dieppe
lies in the unfashionable end of the town, the fisher
quarter by the harbour, where the boats come in
from Newhaven. Where the basin narrows to a
close passage, just before you are past the pier,
and in the open sea, there are two crucifixes, one
on either side, guarding Dieppe. The boats lie
all along the quay, their masts motionless above
the water, and it is along the quay that the train
from Paris comes crawling in its odd passage through
the town. Arcades, reminding one of Padua, run
along the townward side of the quay; they are
stocked with cheap restaurants, and most of them
242

Dieppe, 1895.

have tiny balconies on the first floor, just under the
roof of the arcades, and all of them have spread
tables in the passage-way itself: waiters and women
stroll up and down continually, touting for cus-
tomers. From one of the little balconies you can
look across the fish-market, beyond the masts,
across the water, to the green hill opposite, with its
votive church on the summit. The picture is
framed in the oval of one of the arches, and it looks
curiously theatrical, and charmingly so, over the
heads of the fisher-people and townsfolk who
throng there. The crier passes, beating his drum ;
sometimes, about dinner-time, a company of strolling
musicians, a harpist, his wife and daughter who
play violins (the little one with an air of professional
distinction) hnger outside one of the cafes. Along
the quay, which stretches out towards the pier,
is a broken line of old, many-coloured houses ;
there are endless little restaurants, hotels, and cafeSy
meant mainly for the sailors, and two cafes concerts
of the seaside sort, with a piano (the pianist in one
of them has been an organist in Paris ; drinks, of
course, and reproaches destiny), the usual platform,
and the usual enormous women, hoarse, strident,
and decolletees, who collect your pennies in a shell
after every song. There is a night cafe, too, on the
quay, which you can enter at any hour : you tap
on the glass door, a curtain is drawn back, and, if
you are not an agent, you will have no difficulty in
entering. An agent, when he makes his tour of
inspection, has sometimes to wait a little, while a

243

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

pack of drinkers is hurriedly bundled out at the
back door. M. Jean's licence appears to be some-
what vague ; the report that an agent is at the door
causes a charming little thrill of excitement among
his customers. Some of his customers, who are
fishermen, I do not altogether like; their friendli-
ness was a little boisterous ; and, sometimes, when
they lost their temper, M. Jean would knock them
down, and roll them, quite roughly, out of the door.
On the other side of the water, on the PoUet, as
it is called, you find the real home of the fishermen,
in those little battered houses, twisting around all
sorts of odd corners, climbing up all sorts of odd
heights, some of them with wooden beams along
the front, all dirty with age, all open to the street,
all with swarms of draggled, blue-eyed, gold-haired
children playing around their doors. In a few
corners one sees women making nets, once an in-
dustry, now fallen into some disuse. The whole
place is thick with dust, faded with years, shrivelled
with poverty; but Dowson loved it more than any
part of Dieppe.

VIII.

The charm of Dieppe ! No, I can never give
the real sense of that charm to any one who has
never experienced it ; for myself, it is not even
easy to realise all the elements which have gone
to make up the happiness of these two summer
months here. It always rests me, in body and
244

Dieppe, 1895.

mind, to be near the sea ; and then Dieppe is so
placid and indulgent, lets you have your way with
it, is full of relief for you, in old corners and cool
streets, warm and cool at once, if you take but
five steps from the Rue Aguado, modern and
fashionable along the sea-front, dazzling with sun-
light, into any one of the little streets that branch
off from it townwards. And if the sun beats on
you again as you come out into the square about
Saint-Jacques you have but to go inside ; better
still, if you seek the finer interior of Saint-Remy ;
and, suddenly, you have the liquid coldness of stone
arches that have never felt the sun. And then the
sea, at night, from the jetty : the vast space of
water, fading mistily into the unseen limits of the
horizon, a boat, a sail, just distinguishable in its
midst, the lights along the shore, the glow of the
Casino, with all its windows golden, an infinite
softness in the air. I have spent all night wandering
about the beach, I have traced every change in sea
and sky from twilight to sunrise, inconceivable
delicacies of colour, rarities of tone. And what
dreams have floated up in the smoke of my cigarette,
mere smoke that would never reach the stars !
What memories I have evoked, what unforgotten
talks I have had, in the cool of the evening, on that
jetty ! And the country round Dieppe, rarely as
I went into it, that, too, means something for me :
Puys, where I went with Beardsley to see Alexandre
Dumas, in the house in which his father died, the
house where so many of his own plays have been

245

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

written ; Pourville, the road along the diffs ;
Varengeville, with its deep, enchanting country
lanes, its little sunken ways through the woods, its
strange, stiff httle pine-woods on the heights ; the
Manoir d'Ango, with its delicate approach through
soft alleys of trees, and past a little shadowed pool,
the palace degraded into a farm, but still with its
memories of Francis I. and Diane de Poitiers,
whose faces one sees, cheek by cheek, on a double
medallion; Arques la Bataille, with its Italian
landscape, so cunningly composed about the ruined
castle on the hill. There is nothing in or near
Dieppe which does not, in one way or another,
appeal to me; nowhere that I do not feel at home.
And the friends I have made, or found, or fancied
at Dieppe, men and women of such varying charm
and interest ! The most amiable soul in all the
world resides, I think, in the Anglo-maniac French
painter in whose chalet I spent, so agreeably, so
much of my time, in the studio where he paints
the passing beauties as they fly. Was there not,
too, the hospitable Norwegian painter, with the
heart of a child in the body of a giant, who lived with
his frank and friendly wife in the villa on the hill,
where I spent so many good-tempered evenings ?
And the young English painter, Conder, who was
my chief companion, a temperament of 1830, ne
romantique, in whose conversation I found the subtle
superficialities of a profoundly sensitive individuality,
it was an education in the fine shades to be with
him. The other younger Englishman, an artist
246

Dieppe, 1895.

of so different a kind, came into our little society
with a refreshing and troubling bizarrerie; all that
feverish brilliance, the boyish defiance of things,
the frail and intense vitality, how amusing and un-
common it was ! And there were the two French
poets, again so different from one another; elegant
and enthusiastic youth, and the insistent reflective-
ness of a mind always reasoning. And then the
charming women one met as they flitted to and fro
between Dieppe and Paris and London and Monte
Carlo ; the little French lady whose mother had
been one of the Court beauties of the Second
Empire ; her profile de mouton, with the hysterical
piquancy of a mouth, perfect in repose, which would
never rest : heartless, exquisite, posing little person !
And there was Cleo de Merode, with her slim,
natural, and yet artificial elegance, her little, straight
face, so virginal and yet so aware, under the
Madonna-like placidity of those smooth coils of
hair, drawn over the ears and curved along the
forehead ; it is Cleo de Merode, who, more than
any one else, sums up Dieppe for me. How many
other beautiful faces there were, people one never
knew, and yet, meeting them at every hour, at
dinner, on the terrace of the Casino, at the tables,
in the sea, one seemed to know them almost better
than one's friends, and to be known by them just
as well. Much of the charm of life exists for me
in the unspoken interest which forms a sort of
electric current between oneself and strangers. It
is a real emotion to me, satisfying, in a sense, for

247

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

the very reason that it leaves one unsatisfied. And
of this kind of emotion Dieppe, in the season, is
bewilderingly abundant. Is it, after all, surprising
that I should have come to Dieppe with the intention
of staying from Saturday to Monday, and that I
should have stayed for two months ?

Summer, 1895.

248

A Valley in Cornwall.

I.

Under the trees in the dell,

Here by the side of the stream.
Were it not pleasant to dream,

Were it not better to dwell ?

Here is the blue of the sea,
Here is the green of the land,
Valley and meadow and sand,

Sea-bird and cricket and bee ;

Cows in a field on the hill,

Farmyards a-fluster with pigs.
Blossoming birds on the twigs;

Cool, the old croon of the mill.

At Helston the last Cornish railway ends, on a
railed motor-track coming from Gwinear Road ;
and from Helston to Poltescoe it is a drive of ten
miles, for the last part of the way along the edge
of Goonhilly Downs. As we come into Poltescoe
Valley the road becomes steeper, and we climb
and descend through high green hedges, until, just
after the bridge, we turn aside into a narrow lane,
and, after passing a double cottage and a smithy,
come around a slow curve to the thatched cottage
standing inside a little garden. There are fields
on the slope of a hill opposite, and, lower down,
where the road turns around an edge of solid rock,
there is a stream, going by an old mill, and, beyond
it, a steep rocky hill, with clusters of trees, bracken,
gorse, and rough green foliage, rising up against
the sky, between the valley and the sea.

249

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

I have never lived in so peaceful a place, and
the old miller who Hves by himself at the mill —
"like a single plover," he tells me — says that the
people like the restfulness and do not willingly
leave it. The washerwoman who has part of the
double cottage along the lane says that she would
go mad if she went to live in a town, and that the
mere thought of it, sometimes, as she goes in and
out of her door all day long, makes her feel uneasy.
The miller says that the people do not notice the
beauty of the place much, because they are used to
it ; but he himself told me that, so far as he can
hear, it is the prettiest place in England.

The cottage has a few disadvantages. One is
that I cannot stand quite upright in either of the
lower rooms. When a labourer lived in it there was,
of course, a stone floor, and the wooden floor which
the new landlord has put in has brought the ceiling
lower. Where the ceiling is plain I can stand up-
right ; but there are cross-beams, and the doors are
lower than the cross-beams, and I have to go about
stooping, for fear of dashing my head against one
or the other.

Then there is that very decorative and in some
ways practical thing, a thatched roof. I have always
wanted to sleep under a thatched roof, but the actual
experience has chilled my enthusiasm. There is
the delight of looking at it from the hill going up
to Ruan Minor, like a corkscrew, on the other side
of the valley; and there is the delight of sitting
under the eaves and hearing the sudden soft rustle
250

A Valley in Cornwall.

of wings as the birds fly in and out of their nests
among the thatch. But when you find, on going
to bed, a Httle red worm sitting on the pillow ; when
black spots of various shapes and sizes begin to
move and crawl on the wall and ceiling; when the
open window, which lets in all the scents and
sounds of the country, lets in also whatever creeps
and flies among the bushes — sleep under a thatched
roof becomes a less desirable thing.

But for these slight drawbacks, which have their
compensations as one sits at night, reading by lamp-
light, in rooms so pleasantly and quaintly pro-
portioned, and the painted butterflies and sombre
moths come in at the window and dash themselves
ecstatically at the light : well, I can ask no more
of a cottage. And then, with the cottage, have we
not the indispensable Mrs, Pascoe, and is not Mrs.
Pascoe the contriver of all expedients and the journal
and encylopaedia of all local knowledge ?

IT.

All day I watch the sun and rain
That come and go and come again,
The doubtful twilights, and, at dawn
And sunset, curtains half withdrawn
From open windows of the sky.
The birds sing and the sea-gulls cry
All day in many tongues ; the bees
Hum in and out under the trees
Where the capped foxglove on his stem
Shakes all his bells and nods to them.

251

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

All day under the rain and sun
The hours go over one by one,
Brimmed up with delicate events
Of moth-flights and the birth of scents
And evening deaths of butterflies.
And I, withdrawn into my eyes
From that strict tedious world within,
Each day with joyous haste begin
To live a new day through, and then
Sleep, and then live it through again.

What gives its chief charm to the country about
Poltescoe Valley is its intimate mingling of two
separate kinds of scenery — the v^ildest scenery of
rocks, cliffs, and the sea, and the softest and most
luxuriant scenery of an inland valley. And the
two are not merely there side by side, but they
interpenetrate one another in an indefinite series
of surprises. Walking across meadows, one comes
suddenly upon a ridge of rocks, like a reef in the
sea, coming up out of the grass, and partly covered
with greenery ; sea-birds fly among rocks or stand
in companies on the fields ; one hears the sound
of waves dashing on unseen cliffs as one saunters
through a lane deep between hedges ; a wheat-field
stands out detached on a hill summit against the
white sails of a ship at sea.

Among these valleys and on the wooded tops
of the hills there are flowers around every cottage ;
flowers climb up the walls and about the door-
posts, geraniums, nasturtiums, red and pink and
veined roses ; arum-lilies grow in the narrow strip
of front garden ; there are clusters of fuchsia and
252

A Valley in Cornwall.

veronica, there are hydrangeas and gladiolas and
dahhas ; and the hedges are full of honeysuckle,
of foxgloves, of blue and yellow flowers. The air,
as one passes, is laden with sweets ; warm, aromatic
winds blow softly across one's face ; and the sleek
and shining cattle graze in fields green to the sea's
edge, and rest under the shadow of wide trees. At
low tide the cows come down from the fields to
Kennack Bay, and walk to and fro on the sand,
pausing and looking at the sea, the rocks, and drink-
ing from the streams of fresh water that run down
the sand. Slow cart-horses, that walk freely about
the lanes at all hours of the day and night, come down
to the bay, and trudge to and fro, and lay their heads
on one another's shoulders as they stand sleepily
together.

After sunset, if you go up the road as far as
Kuggar, and stand there between the fields and the
sea, you will hear the drones humming by the way-
side and throbbing about the flowers and gorse in
the hedges, red cows graze in green fields, and you
hear the deep, half-human sigh of some unseen
beast behind the hedge, or a few late twitters among
the branches. There is a moon in the pale sky
growing from faint silver to a sickle golden as ripe
corn; wide green valleys rising and dipping like
sea waves, almost to the edge of the clifi^s that go
down dark into the sea; and, as far as the rim of
the sky, the sea, grey-blue, motionless except where
it curls into abrupt white waves and breaks into
foam around the rocks or upon the beach. And

253

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

as you stand there, seeing only faint sights and
hearing only faint sounds, there is a dehcate loneH-
ness in things, not Hke a real feeling, not a weight,
but an impression, vague and dim-coloured and
wholly pleasant, like the sentiment, not of real
things, but of a picture.

From Poltescoe the nearest way down to the
sea is by Carleon Cove, but I only pass there on
my way to the cliffs leading to Cadgwith ; I never
linger there. It is disfeatured and defeated, an
ugly gash in the cliff-side. There is always some-
thing gloomy and uncomfortable in its cramped
bed of pebbles, the great dark cliff, covered thinly
with green turf, which rises to so steep a height
above it, and the broken and deserted sheds, chim-
neys, and water-wheel, where the serpentine works
had been. The water still runs along a wooden
tray from the river to the great wheel, and some-
times, by accident, the rusty thing begins to turn,
with a ghastly clanking, like a dead thing galvanised
into some useless and unnatural semblance of life.
The place is uncanny, like all solitary places which
men have spoiled and then deserted.

Kennack Bay, where there is always a stretch
of sand, and at low tide a long expanse of it, is like
a broad and cheerful face, open to the Hght. You
enter the bay by a latched gate, and then, at most,
seasons, cross a brook by stepping-stones. At
each end of the sand there are clusters of rocks,
beginning under the cliffs, and on one side going
out a long way into the sea, looking at low tide like

254

A Valley in Cornwall.

the brown ridged backs of crocodiles that have swum
to the surface of the water. On the other side the
rocks nearest to the chfFs are seen, as you go near
them, to be coloured as if the liquid colours of the
sea, its many greens and its purple stains over hidden
rocks, had been reflected and frozen in stone.
When the tide is out, the farther rocks, left bare
by the sea, are seen in strange outlines, sharp,
broken, as if hewn into cavities and suff"ering from
many rents and gashes. And there is one "cirque
of fantastic rocks," half enclosing a little sea-pool,
and flanked by a tall, broad, and twisted rock,
which is like the sea cavern in Leonardo's Virgin
of the Rocks. Animal content can go no farther
than to lie, after bathing, on a natural pillow of
hollowed rocks on the green edge of the cliff, and
to look out through half-shut eyelids upon the wet
sand of the beach, the dark semicircle of cliffs going
round to the Lizard, and the softer semicircle of
thin green meadows and wooded hollows inland ;
with the blue sky and the bluer sea, coloured like
the Mediterranean, all around and all over one,
glittering evenly in the sunlight. Little white
waves break on the beach, with a low continuous
sound of falling water ; a bird's shadow darkens
the sand, and if you lift your hat-brim you see the
white sea-bird ; sheep and cows bend over the grass
together in fields ; sleep hangs over land and sea
with a delicate oppression.

255

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

III.

The woodpecker laughed as he sat on the bough,

This morning,

To give fair warning,
And the rain's in the valley now.

Look now and listen : I hear the noise

Of the thunder,

And deep down under
The sea's voice answers the voice.

All the leaves of the valley are glad.

And the birds too,

If they had words to.
Would tell of the joy they had.

Only you at the window, with rueful lips

Half pouting,

Stand dumb and doubting,
And drum with your finger-tips.

Cornish rain is a cheerful, persistent downpour,
which comes down softly in a warm flood, washing
the whole valley and the trees, and burnishing the
grassy sides of the valley, and lying like a dark mist
over the faded headlands and the grey sea. The
stream that generally trickles over the pebbles by
the old mill has swollen to a yellow river, and takes
broad leaps from stone to stone. One can hear
the whips of the rain steadily lashing the hedges
and the trees. And, louder than the sound of wind
and rain, is heard the sound of the river rushing,
like the sound of the sea.

Going down to Kennack Bay, at high tide, after
256

A Valley in Cornwall.

a day of ceaseless rain, one sees a line of white foam
around the whole coast, edging a sea which has
turned to a strange leaden green, veiled with sea-
mist, which comes driving across it in a wet vapour,
which, as it floats up the valley, looks like a trans-
parent gauze. One breathes water, one sees scarce
anything but water, the sohd mass of the sea and
a racing vapour in the air ; one hears nothing but
water. The long level cliflF going out to Pedn
Boar has faded to a dim outline in a mist; white
mists settle on the upper fields in the valley : the
whole earth seems to melt away into a wreck and
image of water.

Walking, after the rain, on the cliffs towards
Cadgwith, the air is at once salt and sweet; the
scent of the sea and of the earth mingles in it ; and
it is as if one drank a perfumed wine, in which there
is a sharp and suave intoxication. Overhead the
sea-gulls curve in wide circles; you see them at
one moment black against the pale sky, then white
against the dark cliffs, then matching the flakes of
foam on the sea as they fly low over it. They poise
in the air, and cry and laugh with their mocking
half-human voices; and are always passing to and
fro in some rhythm or on some business of their
own.

Or, if one would taste a new sensation, neither of
valley, cliff, nor sea, one has but to turn inland from
Kennack and cross the downs. A path leads up
between hedges full of honeysuckle, gorse, and tall
white heather, among steep rocks covered almost

257

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

all over with green. Where the downs begin you
can see the sea, behind you, caught in an angle of
the land ; and then the moorland, barer and barer,
until green turf stretches flat to a hne of tall black
trees against the sky. A straight, flat, narrow
road goes across the downs, and as one walks along
it there is a sense of loneliness which is bare, severe,
but not desolate or unfriendly. The wind blows
across them from the sea, as from a living thing
not far off"; and there is the freedom, the unspoilt
homeliness, of the earth left to itself.

IV.

To live and die under a roof
Drives the brood of thoughts aloof;
To walk by night under the sky
Lets the birds of thought fly ;
Thoughts that may not fly abroad
Rot like lilies in the road ;
But the thoughts that fly too far
May singe their wings against a star.

Outside the valley you may walk from sea to
sea by land. If you go north-west, you will come
to Coverack, along cliff^s which grow barer and
barer as the trees dwindle and the road slopes down
to the seashore. If you go southward, you will
come to Cadgwith and the Lizard ; and, again,
as you leave the region of Poltescoe Valley, you
will find the cliffs growing barer and barer, and will
come north-west to Kynance Cove, and thence to
258

A Valley in Cornwall.

Mullion, which lies almost level with Coverack,
on the other side of Cornwall.

Coverack is a cluster of white houses built on
the side of a headland which goes out delicately
into the sea, curving round to the harbour, which
the lowest houses seem to go down into. Low
green land goes out across a breadth of water to
form a bay ; and you see the roads sloping precipi-
tately over the downs to the pebbles on the edge of
the blue water, and right above the roofs of the
houses. On the other side of the headland there
is another breadth of water ; one feels the open sea.

At Cadgwith you see the sea from the beach
as through the frame of a doorway narrowed to
that measure; and the cramped and peevish beach
is split in two by a rocky promontory, and gripped
on either side by a tall cliff, which on one side is
bare rock, and on the other a great swath of green,
as if combed upward by the wind. Sea-gulls sit
there, on the edge of the land, clustered like a bed
of lilies; or swoop downward and fly to and fro
over the beach, among the litter of boats and nets
and lobster-pots, when the fishermen are cleaning
the fish. Looking down from above, thick trees
and the fold of sloping green meadows cut off all
of the village but its brown thatched roofs and a
ghmpse of white-washed walls. It huddles there
in the cleft of the valley where the valley shps feet
foremost into the sea.

At Mullion Cove you are as if imprisoned, deep
down, inside a narrow harbour, no more than two

259

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

boat-lengths wide at the entrance, where the sea
chafes at the wall and at the rocks planted hugely
without, great black heights which cut off half
the sunlight as you pass into their shadow. Sea-
gulls sit there in shoals, crying against the wind.
There is a fierce seclusion in the place, disquieting,
and with its own narrow and unfriendly charm.

Kynance Cove, with its mysterious regular
daily appearance and disappearance, is like the
work of a wizard, who has arranged its coming and
going for magical purposes of his own, and has laid
this carpet of pure sand about the bases of fantastic
rocks and under the roof of sombre caverns, and has
set the busy sea to wash and polish and scrub with
sand and stones the smooth surface of the rocks
and caverns, until they glow with a kind of flushed
and fiery darkness, in which can be discerned colours
of green and red and purple and grey, veining the
substance of the rock as with the green of the sea
and the purple of heather and as with pale jade and
as with clots of blood. The cove is sunk deeply
between green and stony cliflfs, and the sea washes
into it from all sides, hissing and shouting in crevices
and passages which it has spht and bored in the
rock itself. It is a battle-ground of the sea, and a
place of wild freshness, and a home of sea-birds.
Man comes into it on sufferance, and at hours not
of his choosing. He sets his wit against the craft
of the tide, and wins no more than a humble edge
or margin of permission.

I came first upon the Lizard across heathery
260

A Valley in Cornwall.

grass smelling of honey and sea-wind, on a day
towards sunset when the sea lay steel blue to the
immense circle of the horizon ; fierce clouds rose
there like barriers of solid smoke, and where the
sun set unseen behind a cloudy darkness, throwing
a broad sheet of shining light across the water, I
could see a long line of land going out towards
Land's End, hardly distinguishable from the spume
and froth of rain-clouds darkening upon it. Un-
limited water, harsh rock, steep precipices going
down sheer into the sea; in the sea, fierce jags of
rock, with birds clustered on them, and httle circles
of white foam around their bases ; the strong air and
stormy light seemed in keeping with this end of
land where England goes farthest south into the sea.

V.

Leaves and grasses and the rill

That babbles by the water-mill ;

Bramble, fern, and bulrushes,

Honeysuckle and honey-bees ;

Summer rain and summer sun

By turns before the day is done ;

Rainy laughter, twilight whir.

The nighthawk and the woodpecker;

These and such as these delights

Attend upon our days and nights,

With the honey-heavy air.

Thatched slumber, cream, and country fare.

In the valley, across fields in which rocks like
the rocks on the seashore grow naturally, with ferns
and bramble about them, buried deep among old

261

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

trees, murmuring with rooks, there is a decayed
manor-house, now a farm, called Erisey : an
Erisey of Erisey is said to have danced before
James I. The road leads over many Cornish stiles,
and through farmyards where cows wait around
the milking-stool, or hens scratch beside the barn
door, or pigs hurry to a trough. The air is heavy
with scents from the hedges and with the clean,
homely odour of farms ; there is nothing in this
wooded place to remind one that the sea lies on the
other side of a few fields. And yet I have always
felt some obscure, inexplicable, uneasy sense or
suggestion when I come near this old house set
over against a little wood, in which Mehsande
might have walked ; the wood has a solemn entrance,
through curved and pillared stone gateways ; the
grass is vivid green underfoot, and the tree trunks
go up straight in a formal pattern. The old house
at the door of the wood seems to slumber uneasily,
as if secrets were hidden there, somewhere behind
the thick ivy and the decayed stone. The villagers
will not go that way after dark, because of a field
that lies on the road there, which they call Dead-
man's Field.

Sunset comes delicately into the wood at Erisey,
setting gold patches to dance on the dark trunks
of the trees. But it is from the downs, or from
the croft which lies between the cottage and the
sea, that I like best to see the day end. From the
downs, or from the road just above the cottage,
the sky has often that amber light which Coleridge
262

A Valley in Cornwall.

notes in his poems ; with infinite gradations of
green, and a strange heaping of sullen and bodiless
clouds against pure brightness. From the fields
at Carleon, between the valley and the sea, night is
seen touching the valley into a gentle and glowing
harmony. The valley, a deep dell sunk into the
midst of a circle of rocks covered with thin green
foliage, is a nest and bower of soft trees, which rise
cluster above cluster almost to the edge of the sky,
where the rocky line of the fields ends it. Above,
you see the bars of colour left over by the sunset ;
the moon hangs aloft between the valley and the
sea; and as the valley withdraws into the rich dark-
ness of the earth, the sea still ghtters with grey
light, to where white clouds come down out of the
sky and rest upon it.

Tidings of the outer world come but rarely into
the valley, except by way of the sky. Once a day
the old postman comes down from Ruan Minor,
and takes the letters back to the post-office. At
times the sound of a siren, like the lowing of a brazen
ox, comes paradoxically into the midst of the hot
inland scents. At times a farm-boy following the
cows, or a man sitting on the shafts of his cart, passes,
whistling; and the tune will be a hymn tune, "Jesu,
lover of my soul," or an air as old as "Rule
Britannia," taken very slowly. If you hear the
people talking to one another in the lane, you will
notice that they speak and reply in phrases out
of the Bible, as in a language of which they can
catch every allusion. They never pass one another

263

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

without stopping to talk, and every one of them
greets you with the time of the day as you pass.
All day long the tree before the door of the
cottage is filled with music, and at night, when the
moon is up, the sky before the windows is flooded
with strange shapes and motions of light. I have
never seen the moon's magic so nimbly or so con-
tinuously at work as upon that space of sky where
the higher ridges of the croft ended. Kingdoms
and seas of cloud passed before us under that calm
radiance; they passed, leaving the sky clear for
the stars ; the polar star stood over the cottage,
and the Great Bear flung out his paws at the moon.

Gold and blue of a sunset sky.

Bees that buzz with a sleepy tune,

A lowing cow and a cricket's cry,
Swallows flying across the moon.

Swallows flying across the moon.

The trees darken, the fields grow white;
Day is over, and night comes soon :

The wings are all gone into the night.

Summer, 1904.

264

At the Land's End.

The temperament of Cornish landscape has many
moods and will fit into no formula. To-day I have
spent the most flawless day of any summer I can
remember on the sands of Kennack Bay, at the
edge of that valley in Cornwall which I have written
about in these pages. Sea and sky were like opals,
with something in them of the colour of absinthe;
and there was a bloom like the bloom on grapes
over all the outlines of cliffy and moorland, the steep
rocks glowing in the sunshine with a warm and rich
and soft and coloured darkness. Every outline
was distinct, yet all fell into a sort of harmony,
which was at once voluptuous and reticent. The
air was like incense and the sun like fire, and the
whole atmosphere and aspect of things seemed
to pass into a kind of happy ecstasy. Here all
nature seemed good ; yet, in that other part of
Cornwall from which I have but just come, the
region of the Land's End, I found myself among
formidable and mysterious shapes, in a world of
granite rocks that are fantastic by day, but by
night become ominous and uncouth, like the halls
of giants, with giants sitting in every doorway, erect
and unbowed, watching against the piratical on-
slaughts of the sea.

About the Land's End the land is bare, harsh,
and scarred ; here and there are fields of stunted
grass, stony, and hedged with low hedges of bare
stones, like the fields of Galway ; and, for the rest,
haggard downs of flowerless heather, sown with

265

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

grey rocks, and gashed with lean patches through
which the naked soil shows black. The cliflPs are
of granite and go down sheer into the sea, naked,
or thinly clad with lichen, grey, green, and occasion-
ally orange; they are built up with great blocks
and columns, or stacked together in tiers, fitted
and clamped hke cyclopean architecture; or climb
rock by rock, leaning inwards, or lean outward,
rock poised upon rock, as if a touch would dislodge
them, poised and perpetual. They are heaped
into altars, massed into thrones, carved by the sea
into fantastic shapes of men and animals ; they are
hke castles and hke knights in armour; they are
split and stained, like bulwarks of rusty iron,
blackened with age and water; they are like the
hulls of old battleships, not too old to be impreg-
nable ; and they have human names and the names
of beasts. They nod and peer with human heads
and wigs, open sharks' fangs out of the water,
strut and poise with an uncouth mockery of motion,
and are as if mysteriously and menacingly alive.

This is the land of giants : there is the Giant's
Chair at Tol-Pedn, and the Giant's Pulpit at Bos-
cawen, and the Giant's Foot at Tolcarne, and the
Giant's Hand on Carn Brea. And there is a
mediaeval humour in Cornish legends which still
plays freakishly with the devil and with the saints.
Here, more than anywhere in Cornwall, I can under-
stand the temper of Cornish legends, because here
I can see the visible images of popular beliefs :
the Satanic humour, the play of giants, the goblin
266

At the Land's End.

gambols of the spirits of the earth and of the sea.
The scenery here is not subHme, nor is it exquisite,
as in other parts of the county ; but it has a gross
earthly gaiety, as of Nature untamed and uncouth ;
a rough playmate, without pity or unkindness, wild,
boisterous, and laughing. There is an eerie laughter
along these coasts, which seem made not only for
the wreckers who bloodied them, and for the
witches whose rocky chairs are shown you, where
they sat brewing tempests, but for the tormented
and ridiculous roarings of Tregeagle and the ele-
mental monsters.

In this remote, rocky, and barren land there is
an essential solitude, which nothing, not the hotel,
nor the coming and going of people in the middle
of the day, can disturb. Whenever I get right
out to the last point of rocks, where one looks
straight down, as if between walls of granite, to the
always white and chafing water, I feel at once alone
and secure, like a bird in a cleft of the rock. There
is the restfulness of space, the noise of sea-birds
and the sea, and nothing else but silence. The
sea-gulls cry and laugh night and day ; night and
day you hear the sea crying and laughing ; sails
and smoke pass on the sea, this side and that side
of the Longships lighthouse, which stands, beautiful
and friendly, on the reef in the water ; and along
the land, at morning and evening, nothing moves,
all is waste, wide, and silent. Little brown donkeys
start up among the rocks as you walk across the

267

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

cliffs at night ; fat slugs lie in the way of your
feet, black and burnished as coal ; you see a
vague movement, grey upon grey, and it is "the
slow, soft toads," panting and leaping upon the
stones.

In this solitude, away from the people of cities,
one learns to be no longer alone. In the city one
loses all sense of reality and of relationship. We
are hedged in from the direct agency of the elements ;
we are hardly conscious of the seasons but for their
discomforts ; we are in the midst of manufactured
things, and might forget that bread grew in the
ground and that water existed except in pipes and
cisterns. And the moment we leave the city we
come to remember again that men and women are
not alone in the world, but have countless living
creatures about them, not pets nor beasts of burden,
and with as much right to the earth and sunlight.
First, there is the life of the fields and the farm-
yards, a life attendant on ours, but familiar with
us while we spare it. Then there is the unlimited
life of birds, who, in these regions, have foothold
in the sea as well as on land, and have two provinces,
of water and of air, to be at home in. And, besides
these, there is the tiny restless life of insects : the
butterflies that live for the day, the bees with their
polished mahogany backs and soft buzz that they
call here "dummlederries," and that come out in
the evening, the toads and slugs that come with
the first dark, and the glow-worms that light their
Httle lonely candle of pale gold at night. The
268

At the Land's End.

world suddenly becomes full of living beings, whose
apparent happiness we are glad to be permitted to
share.

In this air, in this region, an air of dreams, a
region at once formidable and mysterious, every
hour of the day has its own charm and character,
which change visibly and in surprising ways. This
morning was impenetrable with mist, and the light-
house guns were firing until an hour after sunrise;
greyness blotted out the whole sea. At last the
brown reef of the lighthouse could be distinguished,
but not the hghthouse ; and then, suddenly, as one
looked away and looked back again, there was a
white, shining column, hke a column of marble,
glittering through the mist. As I started to walk
along the cliffs towards the Logan Rock, I walked
through wet vapours, soft, enveloping, and dehcious.
The mist faded and returned, showing one, in
glimpses and under dripping veils, headland after
headland, rivaUing each other in boldness, in archi-
tecture of strangely shaped and strangely poised
rocks, bare, spHntered, crimped at the edges, cut
into ladders, sheared into caverns, sundered by
chasms, heaped crag upon crag with a romantic
splendour. Now and then the path dropped to a
little bay of white sand, and in the fishing-creek of
Porthgwarra I met a little ItaHan boy with a con-
certina, who was quite alone, and spoke no English,
and smiled with complete happiness, though shyly,
as he told me that he did nothing, nothing. At

269

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

St. Levan I saw the little church, hidden in a hollow,
with its beautiful and elaborate wood-carving, a
whole monkish symbolism of bold fancy, and, in
the churchyard, the single grave where the frag-
ments of fifteen men, lost in the Khyber, had been
buried, hands and feet and bones, and two heads,
and one whole man, a Japanese ; and, near the
new grave, the old Levan Stone of splintered
granite, with grass growing in the gap, of which
the people say :

When, with panniers astride

A pack-horse can ride

Through the Levan Stone,

The world will be done.

The moorlands, in from the cliff, are all desolate,
covered with short grass and heather, strewn with
grey rocks, and cut into square patterns by stone
hedges. About the Logan the shapes of the rocks
become less grotesque, seem less strangely artificial ;
and the Logan point is Uke a house of rocks, chamber
beyond chamber, with its corridors, doorways, and
windows.

At mid-day I liked to go to Sennen Cove,
because the sand there is whiter than any other
sand, and the green slope above the sand more
delicately green, and the water bluer and more
glownng. At high tide the water comes in with a
rejoicing exuberance, as if drawing into itself all
the violence of the sun. It is exquisite, on a breath-
less July day about noon, to lie on the white sand
without thought or memory, an animal in the sun,
270

At the Land's End.

watching the painted sea, throbbing with heat,
purple, grape-coloured, stained with the shadows
of clouds and rocks ; seeing the steamers pass as
the clouds pass, with no more human significance;
curious of nothing in the world but of the order
and succession of the waves, their diligence, and
when the next wave \xi\\ obliterate the last wave-
mark.

Twilight comes on most exquisitely, I think,
over the cliffs towards Pardennick (the headland
that Turner painted), looking down on Enys
Dodman, the bare brown rock sheared off and
pierced through by the sea, which is the loudest
home of sea-gulls on the coast. There are rocky
headlands to right and left, and that rock in the sea
which they call the Armed Knight, but which to
me seems like one of the Rhine castles, stands
there, romantic and spectacular, not like any work
of nature. Be\'ond, with the t^^41ight-coloured sea
around it, is the hghthouse, like a red star alighted
on a pillar; far off, the golden light of the Wolf,
and the two hghts of Scilly. The sky, where the
sun has gone down, is barred with dark lines and
half-obscured outlines, hke the outhnes of trees
seen in some shado^^y mirror. Faint stains of
gold and green and pink remain in the sky, still
bright, and vet softened as if seen through water.
Opposite, the moon has risen, and hangs in the sky,
round and white ; the sea darkens and shines, with
strange glimmerings and dim banks of shadow,
under the two lights from east and from west.

271

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

There is one boat on the sea : I see the two brown
sails, and their shadows in the water. From the
island of the sea-gulls there is a continual barking
and chattering, as they walk to and fro, or stand
and shout against the land. The rock darkens,
and the white birds shine like white lilies growing
out of brown earth. The castle in the sea turns
black, and every peak and spire is sharply silhouetted
upon the palely gUttering water. Now it is like
a magic castle, Klingsor's perhaps ; or perhaps the
last throne and ultimate stronghold of the night.

Here at the Land's End one is enveloped by
water. The hotel, where I have been so well and
so quietly served, so much alone when the brakes
and motors do not come in to spoil some of the
middle hours of the day, is built on the farthest
habitable peak of land, and from my window I
looked straight down into the sea, which I could
see from horizon to horizon. Nothing was around
me but naked land, nothing in front of me but a
brief foothold of rocky cliff, and then the whole
sea. For the first time in my life I could satiate
my eyes with the sea.

In the country, between the grass and the sky,
one may taste a measure of happiness, and the sight
may be refreshed, rested, healed of many evils.
But it is as if one ate good food without drinking.
There is a thirst of sight which must wait unsatisfied
until the eyes drink the sea.

Is it not because it is always moving, and because
272

At the Land's End.

one is not moving with it that the sea means so much
more to one than any possible inland scenery ? A
tree, a meadow, though it grows and changes, grows
and changes imperceptibly; I cannot see it in
motion : it seems to be always there, irritatingly
immobile. But the sea is always moving past me ;
it is like a friend who comes and goes and is faithful ;
its motion is all I have to give me some sense of
permanency in a world where all things grow old
and pass away, except the sea. Byron was right,
though he spoke pompously: "Time writes no
wrinkle on thine azure brow." Every part of the
earth's body is growing old, and shows the signs
and scars of age ; only the sea is without that
symptom of mortality, and remains a witness to
the original youth of creation.

And the land too, here has in it something
primeval. On this height one seems to stand
among fragments of the making of the world ;
and, at so few hundred yards from the hotel, the
tea-house, the picture post-cards, the brakes, and
the motors, to be cut off from all these things by
an impregnable barrier; alone, at the edge of the
world, with the immovable rocks, and with the sea
which is always moving and never removed.

Summer ) 1905.

273

Cornish Sketches.

I. At Fowey.

As I entered Fowey, the little omnibus turned and
twisted through streets so narrow that the people
had sometimes to get into doorways to let it pass;
it plunged downhill and climbed uphill, the driver
blowing a whistle at certain points to clear the way ;
I caught, in passing, glimpses of an inch or two of
water in the narrow space between two houses, and
came out finally upon a high terrace from which
I could look down on the harbour with its masts,
the exquisite curve of Polruan across the harbour,
the wedge of green land, dividing the two branches
of the river, and outward, around the rocks, the sea
itself. There was not a breath of wind ; the sea
lay as still as the harbour; the afternoon sun filled
the air with dry heat ; some yachts were coming
in slowly, with white hulls and white sails, and a
Httle boat with an orange sail passed close to the
shore. I had felt, as the omnibus twisted in the
narrow streets, as if I were entering Aries ; but the
hills and valleys were new to me; and there was
something at once new and yet slightly familiar in
this southern heat on a little town of old houses,
spread out along the side of a hill which runs sharply
in from the sea, where the river comes down to make
a natural harbour. As I walked, afterwards, along
the roads, at that height, looking down on the sea
through trees and tall, bright flowers and green
foliage, I could have fancied myself in Naples,
274

Cornish Sketches.

walking along the terrace-roads at Posilippo. And
the air was as mild as the air of Naples and the sea
as blue as the sea in the bay of Naples. It stretched
away, under the hot sunlight, waveless to the
horizon, scarcely lapping against the great cliffs,
covered with green to the sea's edge. Trees grew
in the clefts of the rock, they climbed up the hill,
covering it with luxuriant woods ; deep country
lanes took one inland, and the butterflies fluttered
out of the bushes and over the edge of the cliff",
where they met the sea-gulls, coming in from sea
Hke great white butterflies. All day long the sea
lay motionless, and the yachts went in and out of
the harbour, and the steam-tugs brought in black,
four-masted ships with foreign sailors, and the
ferry-boat, rowed slowly by an old man, crawled
across from Fowey to Polruan and from Polruan
to Fowey. There was always, in those slow, sun-
warmed days, a sense of something quiet, unmoved,
in the place; and yet always a certain movement
on the water, a passing of ships, a passing and re-
turning of boats, the flight of sea-gulls curving
from land to land.

To sit at an open window or in the garden under
an awning, and to look down on all this moving
quiet was enough entertainment for day or night.
I felt the same languid sense of physical comfort
that I have felt on the coast of Spain, with the same
disinchnation to do anything, even to think, with
any intentness. The air was full of sleep ; the
faint noise of the water flapping on the rocks, the

275

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

sound of voices, of oars, something in the dull
brilliance of the water, like the surface of a mirror,
reflecting all the heat of the sky, came up to one
drowsily ; the boats, with white or rusty sails,
passed like great birds or moths afloat on the water.
On the other side, over against me, Polruan lay
back in the arms of the hill, with its feet in the
water ; and I was never tired of looking at Polruan.
It seemed not so much to have been made, as to
have grown there, like something natural to the
rock, all its houses set as if instinctively, each in
its own corner, with all the symmetry of accident.
It nestled into the harbour; on the other side of
the hill were the high cliff's and the sea.

At night, looking across at Polruan, I could see
a long dark mass, deep black under the shadow
of the moon, which sharpened the outline of its
summit against the sky; here and there a light in
some window, and beyond, to the right, the white
glitter of the sea. The harbour was partly in shadow
near the further shore, and the masts of the boats,
each with its little yellow light, plunged into the
water, almost motionless. The nearer part of the
river was bright, like the sea, and glittered under
the moon. An infinity of stars clustered together
overhead. I could hear, if I listened, a very faint
ripple against the rocks, and at intervals two fishing-
boats, moored together, creaked heavily.

September 7, 1901.
276

Cornish Sketches.

11. The Cornish Sea : Boscastle.

You might pass Boscastle on the sea and not
know that a harbour lay around a certain corner of
rocks. This twisting way in from the sea gives
something stealthy to the aspect of the place, as if
a secret harbour had been prepared for smugglers.
Few boats go in or out there now ; rarely a pleasure-
boat, more often a rowing-boat on its way to the
lobster-pots. Green hills rise up steeply on both
sides of the harbour, and a wooded valley follows
the course of the little river flowing between them.
The village is built around a single long, precipitous
street, which winds uphill from the old bridge over
the river, where you might stand looking seawards,
and see nothing but two folding arms of rock that
seem to overlap and make a barrier. Beyond the
village the land still rises, and, looking across at
it from the cliffs, it seems to nestle deep into the
valley, a little white streak in the midst of green
fields and green woods. From the higher part
of the village you can catch glimpses of the sea
across harvest fields or beyond Forrabury Church
with its brown and white grave-stones.

Boscastle tantalises one, if one loves the sea for
its own sake, by the height at which it sets one
above the water. From these cliffs one sees, seeming
to be close under one, the whole Atlantic; only it
is three hundred feet below, perhaps, and there is
not a beach or strip of sand on which to get level
with it. Here and there are rocks on which it is

277

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

just possible to clamber down at low tide; there is
a tiny cove or two, hard to reach at the best of times,
and at high tide under water; but this side of
Trebarwith, which is a couple of miles beyond
Tintagel, only a single sandy bay. Even at Trebar-
with the sand is covered at high tide, but when
the water is out there is a long broad road of yellow
sand, leading from the low rocks at one end of the
bay to the caverns in the high rocks at the other end
of the bay. On a hot almost still day, the waves,
coming towards the shore in long thin hnes white
with foam, are blown into fine dust as they curve
over. Seen from the sand, they can be watched
at more stages of their movement than from the
cliffs, where one gets only the final leap at the
rocks.

At Boscastle the sea is almost always in move-
ment, tossing restlessly, leaping at the rocks, whiten-
ing around them, flecked here and there with white,
and the whole sea moves, as if the depths under it
moved too. Even when there is not wind enough
to ridge the water into separate waves, some energy
seems to shoulder up through the surface and push
for shore. When the wind urges it, it heaves into
great billows, that rise up green and tilt over with
a little burst of white, and roll one over another
towards the shore, and as they come into a space
of curdling foam, curdle, and turn to foam, and
leap suddenly at the rocks, and hammer at them
with a loud voluminous softness, and fall back hke
a blown cataract, every drop distinct in the sunlight.
278

Cornish Sketches.

It is as if a dome of whiteness sprang into the air
and fell over with a crash of all its architecture of
bubbles. Sometimes two columns of foam meet in
the air, and pass through one another hke a ghost
through a ghost. Sometimes a great wave springs
higher at the rocks, seems to take hold there, and
then falls back, broken into spray, while the rock
streams steadily; and then, after a pause, a thin
white smoke-drift, incredibly thin and white, like
the reflection of smoke in a glass, is blown far out
from some corner or crevice in the rock that had
sucked the water deep into it.

I am content to sit on the rocks, as near as I can
to the water, and watch a few feet of sea for an hour
together. There is enough entertainment in its
recurrent and changing violence and stealthiness of
approach, its unexhausted and unnumbered varieties
of attack, the foam and disappointment of its foiled
retreats. Form and colour change at every instant,
and, if they return again, one is not conscious of
the repetition. I suppose many waves are identical
out of the infinite number of waves which break
on any point of shore. But some happy accident
of wind or tide or sunlight seems always to bring
in its own variation.

At sunset the sea warms and lightens into strange
colours. As the sun goes down in a ball of intense
fire, the round seems to flatten itself out to a long,
glowing bar, scorching the sea under it ; a pale
sunset leaves the sea chill, grey, uncoloured. The
shadow of golden fire in the sky turns it to lavender ;

279

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

a sunset of paler fire burnishes it into glittering steel,
or it lies like a steel mirror misted by a breath.
Every sunset here is a marvel, and the sea is a shining
floor on which the marvel is built up. I remember
a particular sunset after a day on which the rain had
poured continuously; the sun sank slowly behind
wet and shining clouds, through which it shone
like a light in a crystal. These white clouds rose
out of the sea, and their peaked and jagged upper
edges gradually shone into bright gold as the sun
sank lower behind them. Above, between them
and the darker clouds still swollen with rain, a
horizontal bar of gold glittered more faintly; and
across the darker clouds a mist of rosy fire began to
drift away, flushed softly Hke the feathers of a
flaming wing; and this rosy mist floated onwards
until it came to the edge of the furthest rain-clouds,
and drooped over a space of pale green sky, clear,
luminous, and transparent. The sea was the
colour of lilac deepening into rose, and it lay like
a field of heather washed by the rain, when the sun
shines into every rain-drop.

There is a point at Trevalga where I like to look
along the shore as it bends in an irregular curve,
rising sharply out of the water in a series of torn
and uneven crags, with, at some interval, the two
high and steep rocks which rise up out of the sea
some hundreds of yards away from the land, from
which they had once been rent. The sea washes
around the rocks and against the bases of the cliffs
as far as the distant, smoother line of coast towards
280

Cornish Sketches.

Bude, where the Cornish wildness dies away, and
it Hes out towards the sky as far as the eye can fol-
low it, an infinite space of unwearied water. Seen
from a lower point, the cliffs are mountainous, and
stand often against the sky like a mountain crowned
by a castle. Tall cliffs covered to nearly the sea's
edge by short grass and heather are indented by
gullies, hollowed out of their very substance, and
opening on the sea through a narrow and cornered
entrance. The whole land seems to have been
sheared into and sliced away at frequent intervals,
and the colour of the rock varies in each, from slate
to deep black. For the most part the rocks are
made up of layers of slate, shale above shale, and
they are cracking away and crumbling over con-
tinually; the sea picks at their bases, and hollows
out caves and holes and niches ; they stand straight
up out of the sea, still impregnable, like great walls,
black and jagged, and veined with yellow marble,
and patched here and there with streaks of living
green. They stand highest at Beeny High Cliff,
a sheer wall of blackness, and St. Gennys, which
rises less abruptly to a higher point. To the south-
west one can see the wavering line of the coast as
far as Trevose Head ; to the north-east a less rugged
line of cliffs curves into tiny bays, each with its
handful of grey sand, as far as the point of Cambeak.
Bracken growing intermingled with yellow gorse
gives colour to a wild expanse of green moorland ;
the steep grey cliffs rise to the moorland out of a
sea which should be seen, as I have seen it, not less

281

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

desolately grey, with a grey sky overhead. There
was a bitter wind blowing, which caught at one
furiously as one came to the edge of the cliflF. As
the sun sank lower, it began to scorch the dark
clouds about it, shrivelling their edges ragged;
it went down into the sea rapidly, half hidden
behind the clouds ; and the sea darkened to a sullen
colour, as of molten lead, that spread gradually
over its whole surface. A vivid and stormy dark-
ness hung overhead, weighing heavily on land and
sea. Down below the sea roared with a loud and
continuous noise. There was something disquieting
in the air, in the aspect of things. Long after the
sun had gone down into the water a bright flame
licked up the lowest edge of sky, and ran there, as
I walked homewards, like travelling fire behind the
bushes and tree-trunks.

September 14, 1901.

III. The Cornish Coast.

I wonder if there is any form of the mere accept-
ance of happiness, more perfect, more explicit
than that which I have been enjoying until some
uneasy energy within drives me to shatter it by
analysis ? I have been lying back on a high clifF
between Kennack Bay and Cadgwith, on a bed of
grass and heather, with my back against a rock
warmed by the sun ; the sun's shadow, as it sets,
282

Cornish Sketches.

is slowly creeping over the grass at my feet ; there
is a slight breeze, which I can just feel on my cheek,
but which is not nimble enough to stir the sea into
more than a faint criss-cross of lines, which melt
into one another before the eye has distinguished
one from the other, and go on wavering, level to
the horizon. Two white sails flicker near the shore ;
further out there are ships with white sails, a long
dark steamer, and, almost on the horizon, a thin
dark trail of smoke. Sea-gulls bark over my head
and laugh in their throats, as they sail on level
wings, the dark tips feeling their way in the sea of
air like the rudders of white ships. The waves
flash on the rocks below, with a gentle and sleepy
sound, and I can hear nothing else except that
rustle which the wind makes in the ferns and bracken
as it passes over them.

If I lift my head and look to the right I see the
southern point of the Lizard, with its white telegraph
poles ; if I look to the left I see the deep curve and
long straight hne of the cliff's ending far out at
Black Head. Looking inland, I can see nothing
but varying levels and varying shades of green,
with darker trees in lines and clusters against the
sky, beyond the fields and the downs. But if I he
still and do not raise or turn my head, I have enough
for my pleasure in looking straight across the sea
to the sky, letting sails or sea-gulls or clouds pass
like illusions of movement in a world which has
become stationary and which flows continually
past me, as my eyes rest on the motionless diamond-

283

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

like barrier of the sky and on the moving and
changeless grey-blue pavement of the sea.

The sea, alone of natural things, obeys Aristotle's
law in art, that for perfect pleasure there must be
continual slight variety. It has the monotony of
great art, and its continual slight variety. Every-
thing else in nature wearies one by its stillness or
its restlessness ; by a limit which suggests constraint
or by an open bareness which is but lawless and
uncultured. But here the eye travels easily on to
heaven ; there is only that diamond barrier of sky
between it and the end of the world. And the
world itself seems no longer to have a limit ; and,
by these gentle degrees, infinity itself loses its
horror. Only, as I lie here, I think none of these
thoughts, which are but after-thoughts in the wake
of sensation, and perhaps explain nothing ; and in
my acceptance of happiness I am hardly even con-
scious that to be thus, in body and mind, is to be
perfectly happy.

If I could choose a place to build a cottage,
where I could come and live when I wanted to be
alone, a place for work and dreams, I would choose
Kennack Bay, because there the land mingles more
happily with the sea and the rocks with the sand,
and the cliffs with the moorland than anywhere
that I know in England. All along the coast here,
from Kennack to the Lizard and from the Lizard
to MuUion, there is little that has been spoilt by
modern progress, little of the fretfulness, pretence,
and vulgar crowding of so much of the English
284

Cornish Sketches.

sea-coast. Fortunately Cornwall is a long way
from London, half hidden in the sea, at the very
end of the land, and the poisonous trail of the rail-
way has not yet gone all over it. Here there is
not a railway within ten miles. There is valley,
moorland, and cliff; the smell of heather mingles
with the sea-smell, and the cornfields go down
green and golden to the sea. If one goes inland,
roads wind up and down between deep hedges,
and, as one comes to the top of a hill, in the moment
before one goes down on the other side, there is a
glimpse of the sea between the branches of trees,
or coming blue and shining into a frame of meadow
and cliffside. Following the whited stones of the
coastguards, one can trace the whole coast-line, on
narrow paths high above the sea and across the sand
or pebbles of coves. And there is not a cliff where
one cannot lie down and be alone, and smell salt
and honey, and watch the flight of the sea-gulls,
and listen to the sea, and be very idly happy.

Yet, to me, Kennack is the most restful and
beautiful corner of the coast and the most enviable
to live in. Not long ago there was a plot against
its peace, and a gang of company-promoters had
schemed to build a big hotel there, and the plans
were made, and only the formality of buying the
piece of land remained. What happened is what
still happens in these parts, where Cornish gentlemen
still own and still keep their incomparable share of
Cornish land. The plot was scattered by a brief,
irrevocable letter from Lord Falmouth's agent,

285

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

and the company-promoters were left gasping at
the modern anomaly of a landowner who would not
part with his land for a profit.

And the people, too, in their measure, help the
land owners to keep Cornwall for the Cornish.
They do not encourage strangers ; they are not at
the beck and call of every one with a purse in his
pocket ; they reserve their opinions and their
independence. There is a motor-car now running
between Helston, where the railway ends, and the
Lizard, where the land itself ends in the Atlantic.
The people about here say that the motor-car is
doing them more harm than good : it is destroying
their roads, raising their rates, and disturbing their
peace and quiet. They have no keen desire to
make more money or to change the conditions
under which their fathers have lived. In the hands
of such landowners and of such tenants is not part
at least of Cornwall still safe ? .

August 27, 1904.

IV. St. Levan.

On the way from the Land's End to the Logan
Rock, just in from the clilF, after you have passed
Tol-Pedn, and immediately before the road drops
to Porthgwarra, there is a little valley, a big grassy
nook, with one cottage, a rectory, and a church.
This is the Parish Church of St. Levan, a fisherman
saint of whom there are many legends ; his path is
286

Cornish Sketches.

still seen by the track of greener grass that leads
out to the rocks named after him, where he fished
the traditional *'chack-cheeld" chad. There is
his stone, too, in the churchyard, one of those
ominous stones which, in Cornwall, are thought to
be the dials of Time itself, chroniclers of the hour
of the Last Judgment. The Levan stone is a rock
of granite, spht in two, with grass and ferns growing
in the gap between the two halves. The end of
the world will come, says the rhyme, when the gap
is wide enough for a pack-horse with panniers to
pass through. "We do nothing to hasten it,"
the rector said to me reassuringly.

All that you can see of the church until you are
quite close to it are the four pinnacles of its squat
tower, like the legs and castors of an arm-chair
turned upside down. It is hidden away in its
hollow, out of the wind which is always coming and
going on the wildest cliffs in Cornwall. Boulders
piled with a sort of solid ricketiness on one another's
shoulders (so old and grey and flighty!) climb
the cliffside out of the sea, or stand propped and
buttressed, holding on to the shelving edges of
green land. Some are bare, some clothed with
lichen as with a delicate green fur, and they lie
about in fantastic attitudes, as if they had been flung
together in the games of giants, and then forgotten
for a few centuries. There is, in these clusters of
vast rocks, that '* delight in disorder" which
Herrick knew in petty and lovely things; only
here it is on the scale of giants. The pale colours

287

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

of the lichen soften what might otherwise be harshly
jagged, rounding the edges and dressing the naked-
ness of the rocks. And the air, in which the scent
of heather and gorse and thyme mingles with the
salt smell of the sea, is tempered and made more
exquisite by the drifting mists and vapours which
come up out of the sea like a ghostly presence, and
blot out headland after headland, as by a soft
enchantment.

Inland there is barren moor, with here and there
a scanty plot of herbage ; and the moorland is all
patterned out into squares and oblongs by the stone
hedges which mark each man's property, little
properties of gorse, grass, stones, and perhaps a
patch of heather, meaningless as nought without
a cipher, but held jealously from father to son.
The skylarks have their nests in this rocky ground,
and you hear them singing in the air their ecstatic
hymns to light, while, below them, the sea-gulls
drift to and fro between land and sea, crying their
harsh and melancholy and complaining cry, the
voice of restlessness, the voice of the restlessness
of water.

It is in the midst of this eager and barren world,
where only a few fishers live here and there in the
creeks and coves, that the little church is hidden
away in its green nook, like a relic of other ages.
It is built in the Late Perpendicular style, and has
fine heavy pillars, painted beams in the roof, an
early font of some green granite, unknown in
Cornwall. But it is chiefly for its carved woodwork
288

Cornish Sketches.

that the church is notable. The screen, carved
thickly to the very beads of the mouldings, contains
a whole homily in wood, a minute system of Catholic
symbolism, in which the spiritual history of the
world from the Creation to the Passion is imaged.
There are the legged snakes of the first Eden, fiery
flying serpents, symbols of the Trinity, the pelican,
the Virgin's lily, the eagle of St. John; the sacred
monogram is repeated continually, and there are
the nail, the hammer, the spear, all the instruments
of the Crucifixion ; and there is an effigy of the
Virgin, who is represented with a foolish round face,
coiff^ed hair, necklace, and ruff', like a fine lady of
the period. The carvings on the ends of the pews
are less naive, more skilful. There are the two
fishes of St. Levan; the two cocks that crowed in
answer to one another when St. Peter denied his
Master; there is a palmer, with a cockle-shell (on
his hat ; there are knights and ladies, fierce heathen,
and there are two jesters. One of the jesters is
supposed to typify Good, because he looks to the
east smilingly, holding his cap and bells and ladle;
while the other typifies Evil, because he turns his
back on the altar, and holds askew a bishop's cro-
zier with an ass's hoof for crook. All are carved
patiently and hvingly by carvers to whom the work
was part of religion. "The soul of a man is in it,"
said the rector.

The learned and kindly rector told me, among
many stories of his lonely parish, that there had been
a rector once whose wits were none of the soundest,

289

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

and, as they were liable to come and go with violence,
he would be chained to his lectern when it was
thought they were likely to leave him, so that he
might read the Lessons without danger to his
congregation. In Cornwall madness is no un-
common thing, and, like deformity, is looked on
kindly. Most villages have their village idiot, or
one of those large-skulled dwarfs who trudge pain-
fully along the lanes with aged faces.

August 19, 1905.

V. The Colours of Cornwall.

The postman comes to me once a morning from
Ruan Minor, and asks if I have any letters to be
posted. If I go into the little shop of all sorts,
which is the post office as well, half an hour before
post time, I find him helping to sort the letters
behind the grocery counter. Ruan Minor is a
village without a street. Most of the cottages
are built by the roadside, some turn aside from the
road, along lanes of their own, and are built cross-
wise or around corners, to suit the natural angles.
Almost all are thatched, and have flower gardens
in front and creepers up the wall. One cottage
is built of corrugated iron, which is almost hidden
by trails of purple clematis. There is only one
shop besides the post office, though the shoemaker
and the blacksmith and the carpenter have each a
shanty. There is a church, and there are two
290

Cornish Sketches.

chapels ; but there is not a pubhc-house in the
village.

The cottage where I am staying is down in the
valley, and to get to it you must go down an in-
credibly steep and winding hill. I have once seen
a horse and cart go up that hill ; I have never seen
one come down. If you stop half-way, where there
is a cottage, and look across under the branches of
the trees, you will see a triangular patch of blue sea,
and, forming one side of the triangle, the high
straight cliflPs going out to Pedn Boar. Between you
and the water there is a high rocky croft, and when
you go down into the valley you will see nothing
but steep walls of green on all sides, which seem at
night to be built half-way to the stars, shutting out
the sea and the winds, and sheltering the valley.

On the hill behind the cottage there is another
village, Kuggar, or, as the people call it, Kigger.
It is smaller than Ruan Minor, and has no post
office, only a pillar-box, which is cleared once a
day ; no shop and no church. A steep road passes
through it which leads down to Kennack Bay,
winding between low hedges ; on the further side
there is another valley, with sloping corn-fields,
scarred by waste rocky places which no plough can
pass over, and green meadows where cattle graze ;
and then, beyond the first stretch of sand, yet
another valley, like a hollow cut out of the solid
earth, and now grown over with a soft multitude
of trees and gorse and heather, which rise into
rocks and drop to a stream flowing between reeds

291

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

on the edge of the sand. Beyond, in the eastern
bay, there is another valley, and then the cliffs
begin, and go on across rocky plains of heather to
Coverack, where they turn bare, and so on to
Pedn Boar and Black Head. The coast here,
seen from Kennack, is at once violent and soft, at
once wild and placid, with its broad outlines and
delicacy of detail, the variety of its colour, form,
and mingled rock and pasturage. Here things are
constantly falling into pictures ; nature here, though
opulent, is by no means indiscriminate. And it is
this touch of reticence, this fine composition, this
natural finesse, that saves a country so picturesque
from the reproach of an obvious picturesqueness :
these soft gradations, this mastery of fine shades,
nature's surprising tact in refraining from her
favourite effects of emphasis.

If, instead of turning to the right as you go
through Kuggar, you turn to the left and follow
a flat road going inland, you will come out presently
upon the downs. The road divides by the double
cottage where the four dogs sit in their four barrels
under the signpost ; one way will take you across
the downs to Mullion or the Lizard, and the other
way will take you to Helston, or, if you turn aside
from it, to a multitude of places with strange names,
Constantine, Bosahan, or St. Anthony in Meneage.
There is a walk from Gillan Creek, by the quaint
little church of St. Anthony, along the edge of the
clifF to Helford, which, in its mingling of sea and
river and forest, its rocks and sandy coves and
292

Cornish Sketches.

luxuriant vegetation, is unlike anything I have seen
in England. Leaving Dennis Head, from which
you can see Falmouth across the curve of the sea,
and following the broad Helford River by the
rabbit-warrens, you go, by a public path, along the
margin . of the grounds of Bosahan, where woods
carpeted with ferns come down to the sea's edge, and
narrow paths lead up between clustering hydrangeas
and exotic plants and grasses and tall bamboos, which
grow there exuberantly, as if in their native soil.

I am never tired of walking and driving across
the downs, though they are empty of shape, except
where a barrow heaves them or a pool lies among
reeds by the roadside. They are coloured with
the white and purple of heather and with the yellow
of gorse, and a wind from the sea passes over them
and goes on to the sea. You can see the sea towards
Cadgwith on one side of Cornwall and the Marconi
posts at Mullion on the other side of Cornwall.
And at night there are marvellous sunsets, filling
the whole breadth of the sky and building up
delicate patterns there, in colours like the colours
of flowers transfigured by light.

It is for its colour, largely, that I love Cornwall,
and wherever you walk, on moorland, croft, meadow,
or cHffside, there is a continual soft insistence and
alternation of colour. On the downs the heather
grows sparely, and is less like a carpet of Eastern
weaving than on the cliffs beyond Kennack, where
one's feet tread upon colours and scents, and all the
ground is in bloom. Grey rocks come up amongst

293

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

these soft coverings, and go down, tufted with the
elastic green and faint yellow of samphire into the
sea ; and the rocks are spotted with lichen of violent
gold, which is almost orange. Everywhere there
is the sharp white of cottage walls and the gentle
browns and greys of thatch ; flowers of all colours
swarm against the whitewash, and creepers catch
at the eaves and nod in at the windows — red, white,
purple, and yellow. White sea-gulls with their
brown young ones fly out over the water in circles ;
cormorants sit like black weather-cocks, each on a
solitary point of rock; inland, the crows cut black
patterns on the sky ; the grey sandpipers run over
the grey sand. And there are the many colours
of sand, sulphurous and salmon-coloured rocks,
painted rocks, with all the intricate colourings of
serpentine ; and there is the sea, with its warm blue,
when it seems almost human, and its chill green,
when it seems fairy, and its white foam of delight,
and the misery of its grey dwindling away into mist.
Autumn is beginning : the bracken is shrivelling
brown, and the heather darkening, and the gorse
drying to dust and flowering yellow, and the grasses
withering, and the leaves of the trees yellowing
and falling. The corn has all been carried, and
stands, golden beside the pale hay, in great solemn
ricks in the farmyards. All the green things of
the earth begin to brighten a little before they fade.

October 8, 1904.

294

In a Northern Bay.

I HAVE only seen the bay when the sea has been
gentle, at the most whitening a little against the
yellow sand, into a sliding pattern like white lace.
At sunrise, a steel mirror, coloured at sunset with
more sombre lights, half deep shadow and half
chilled into whiteness under moonlight, the sea
lies there before one, filHng one's eyes, as if there
were nothing else in the world but changing and
unchangeable water. Between the sea and the low
bank on which the village has grouped itself, there
is a narrow strip of sand, ending on one side in a
curve of rocks and a sandy clifF, and on the other
in a little rocky point running out into the sea, with
its old church, its few, huddled cottages, the fishing-
boats drawn up against it. Half-way along the
naked ribs of a wreck clutch the sand, where a
storm drove them deep into it. Cobles He eagerly
on the sand, with their delicately curved keels,
waiting, like impatient horses, to race into the sea.
Beyond the point lie miles of green moorland, along
which you can follow the sea into other bays, which it
does but drift into and drift out of, indifferent to
the land, which has here no hold upon it, as it seems
to stretch out ineffectual arms.

Between the house and the sea there is only a
slope of grass and the narrow beach. The little
world of the place passes to and fro under our eyes
along the narrow beach ; the fishing-boats and the
yachts go out over the sea ; nothing ever changes ;
there are always the same faces and the same sails.

295

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

Only the sea changes continually, like music, visible
cadence after cadence. One seems to hve with
dulled senses, fantastically awake under a sort of
exterior sleep, as if hypnotised by the sea. There
is something terrible in so much peace. It is
impossible that any one could be so sleepily happy
as one ought to be here.

The sea is a mirror, not only to the clouds, the
sun, the moon, and the stars, but to all one's dreams,
to all one's speculations. The room of mirrors,
in which the Lady of Shalott wove her fate, is but
an image of the sea's irresistible imprisonment of
oneself alone with oneself. Reflections enter from
without, but only reflections, and these too are
dimmed into the shadowy life of the mirror. The
sea tells us that everything is changing and that
nothing ever changes, that tides go out and return,
that all existence is a rhythm; neither calm nor
storm breaks the rhythm, only hastens or holds it
back for a moment ; all agitation being but a tempo
ruhato. Mountains give hope, woods a kind of
mysterious friendliness with the earth, but the sea
reminds us that we are helpless. In cities we can
escape thought, we can deaden feeling, we can
forget that yesterday mattered or that to-morrow
will matter. But the sea has no compromises, no
evasions, none of the triviality of meadows among
which we can be petty without suffering rebuke.
The sea is austere, implacable, indiflPerent ; it has
nothing to tell us ; it is an eternal question. It
comes seeming to offer us peace, a lullaby, sleep;
296

In a Northern Bay.

but it is the sleep of a narcotic, never quite releasing
us from consciousness ; and it is there always before
us, like the narcotic, with the fascination of death
itself.

Yet, as ecstasy is only possible to one who is
conscious of the possibility of despair, so the sea,
as it detaches us from the world and our safeguards
and our happy forgetfulnesses, and sets us by
ourselves, as momentary as the turn of a wave, and
mattering hardly more to the universe, gives us, if
we will take them, moments of almost elemental
joy. The salt taste of the sea-wind, the soft en-
veloping touch of the water, the little voice whisper-
ing among the rocks, the wings of a sea-gull, rigid
in the fierce abandonment of flight, the caress of
the sand upon one's feet as one v/alks slowly at
night under a great vault of darkness : these,
surely, are some of the few flawless sensations which
merely animal pleasure can give us. Happiness,
no doubt, would be to put off our souls, as one puts
ofF an uneasy garment, and enjoy these things as
it would then be possible to enjoy them. Or do
we, after all, feel them more keenly, since more
consciously, for the moment, because they are not
our inner life, but a release from our inner life ?

September 22, 1900.

297

Winchelsea: An Aspect.

We saw the pure lean harsh
Maid's body of the marsh,
Without one curve's caress
In the straight daintiness
Of its young frugal fine
Economy of line,
In faultless beauty lie
Naked under the sky.
Naked it lay and still,
Awaiting what new thrill
Of the ever-amorous light
In that austere delight ?

That, at least, was the question I asked myself as
I looked down from the highest garden in Win-
chelsea, that famous garden which has taken in
part of the old town-gate, and seems to set you on
a pinnacle and show you all the glory of the world.
There was an expectancy throughout all the empti-
ness of the pale, delicate, and severe plain which
lay there between the rock on which I stood and the
sea. It was waiting for the sun to envelop, intoxi-
cate, overwhelm it.

There is no other aspect quite like that aspect in
England, and it was with difficulty that I realised
myself to be in England. Across the marsh was
Rye, piled up and embattled on its rock like Siena,
with sharp red edges. The seashore might have
been Rimini, only there were no Apennines going
down fiercely into the sea. The meadows, white
flat roads winding through them, the glimpses of
water, of masts, of sails, of black rigging ; the cows
moving so formally through these meadows, in the
298

Winchelsea.

midst of these tokens of the sea ; all formed them-
selves into a picture, and I felt that one could gaze
down on it always with the same surprise at its
being there. It was so improbable and so beautiful.

All Winchelsea is like a picture, and has other
suggestions of Italy, as one looks down a brief
street between old houses, as one does in the Alban
hill-towns, and sees another Campagna, more
wonderful than the Roman, because the sea com-
pletes it. From Frascati one only sees Rome.

Winchelsea is built in squares and at right
angles. It is formal and self-sufficient, neither
town nor village, guarding one of the loveliest of
ruins, but without the general quaint ancientness
of Rye; a comfortable place, with trees and fields
everywhere, with hardly any streets, hardly an
ugly building, hardly a shop. One climbs to it
as to a casket set on a hill; it seems to await the
visitor like a conscious peasant in costume ; to live
in it would be like living in a museum. How much
longer will it remain unspoiled, when all the world
is so set on spoiling it ?

Though one begins by thinking of Italy, there
are signs by which this un-English place may be
recognised as English. There are no guides, not
even children, and it is clean. It seems astonishing,
so foreign are these corners, that one can loiter in
them without reluctance. Even the old houses that
are dropping into decay crumble gently. Every-
where there is a discretion in things.

There are souls in places, and places draw to

299

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

them people made after their image. The person
in whom I see Winchelsea may seem to have httle
in common with that windy height over the marsh
and the glory of the world that is shown there.
Yet that meekness and that outrageous beauty
which are in the place would have their counterparts
in the soul of the woman. She would live in a low
red cottage in a side street, with no view out of any
of the windows ; and she would be shy and reticent,
and no one would know why she lived there all
alone, or why it was that she seemed to be at once
so sad and so happy. They would see a small,
neat woman with greyish hair, who passed in the
street hurriedly, her lips moving as if she were
repeating something to herself, her eyes always
wide open, the humble and hungry eyes of the
fanatic. The backward quiet, the silence, collected-
ness, and a certain thrill in the simplicity of the place
would have passed into her, or seemed to find in her
a reflection. She too will have had her ancient
history, the romance that sometimes comes to those
who are no longer young, and that, w^hen it goes,
takes everything out of life but memory. I said
that Winchelsea is like a casket. She would have
chosen it as a casket in which to keep her memory
unspoiled. It has the likeness of all her recollec-
tions, as she sees them over again, never any greyer,
but with the heat still in them, carefully hoarded.
She has no associations with the place, but the place
makes associations for her grief; it shuts her
gently in with her grief, in an unbroken leisure,
300

Winchelsea.

where time seems to pause for her, in one of his
rare intervals. It is in this hushed, aloof, eager,
and remembering figure that I see the likeness of
Winchelsea.

October 13, 1906.

301

The Islands of Aran.

For two hours and a half the fishing-boat had been
running before the wind, as a greyhound runs, in
long leaps; and when I set foot on shore at Bally-
vaughan, and found myself in the little, neat hotel,
and waited for tea in the room with the worn piano,
the album of manuscript verses, and the many
photographs of the young girl who had written
them, first as she stands holding a vioHn, and then,
after she has taken vows, in the white habit of the
Dominican order, I seemed to have stepped out
of some strange, half-magical, almost real dream,
through which I had been consciously moving on
the other side of that grey, disturbed sea, upon
those grey and peaceful islands in the Atlantic.
And all that evening, as we drove for hours along
the Clare coast and inland into Galway, under a
sunset of gold fire and white spray until we reached
the battlemented towers of Tillyra Castle, I had
the same curious sensation of having been dreaming;
and I could but vaguely remember the dream, in
which I was still, however, absorbed. We passed,
I believe, a fine slope of grey mountains, a ruined
abbey, many castle ruins ; we talked of Parnell,
of the county families, of mysticism, the analogy of
that old Biblical distinction of body, soul, and spirit
with the symbolical realities of the lamp, the wick,
and the flame; and all the time I was obsessed by
the vague, persistent remembrance of those vanishing
islands, which wavered somewhere in the depths of
my consciousness. When I awoke next morning
302

The Islands of Aran.

the dream had resolved itself into definite shape,
and I remembered every detail of those last three
days, during which I had been so far from civilisa-
tion, so much further out of the world than I had
ever been before.

It was on the morning of Wednesday, August 5,
1896, that a party of four, of whom I alone was not
an Irishman, got into Tom Joyce's hooker at
Cashla Bay, on the coast of Galway, and set sail for
the largest of the three islands of Aran, Inishmore
by name, that is, Large Island. The hooker, a
half-decked, cutter-rigged fishing-boat of seventeen
tons, had come over for us from Aran, and we set
out with a light breeze, which presently dropped
and left us almost becalmed under a very hot sun
for nearly an hour, where we were passed by a
white butterfly that was making straight for the
open sea. We were nearly four hours in crossing,
and we had time to read all that needed reading of
Grania, Miss Emily Lawless's novel, which is
supposed to be the classic of the islands, and to study
our maps and to catch one mackerel. But I found
most to my mind this passage from Roderic
O 'Flaherty's Choro graphical Description of West or
H-Iar Connaughty which in its quaint, minute
seventeenth-century prose told me more about
what I was going to see than everything else that
I read then or after on the subject of these islands.
"The soile," he tells us, "is almost paved over
with stones, soe as, in some places, nothing is to
be seen but large stones with wide openings between

303

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

them, where cattle break their legs. Scarce any-
other stones there but limestones, and marble fit
for tombstones, chymney mantle trees, and high
crosses. Among these stones is very sweet pasture,
so that beefe, veal, mutton are better and earlyer
in season here than elsewhere; and of late there
is plenty of cheese, and tillage mucking, and corn
is the same with the seaside tract. In some places
the plow goes. On the shores grows samphire
in plenty, ring-root or sea-holy, and sea-cabbage.
Here are Cornish choughs, with red legs and bills.
Here are ayries of hawkes, and birds which never
fly but over the sea, and, therefore, are used to be
eaten on fasting days : to catch which people goe
down, with ropes tyed about them, into the caves
of cliffs by night, and with a candle light kill abund-
ance of them. Here are severall wells and pooles,
yet in extraordinary dry weather, people must turn
their cattell out of the islands, and the corn failes.
They have noe fuell but cow-dung dryed with the
sun, unless they bring turf in from the western
continent. They have Cloghans, a kind of building
of stones iayd one upon another, which are brought
to a roof without any manner of mortar to cement
them, some of which cabins will hold forty men
on their floor; so antient that nobody knows how
long ago any of them was made. Scarcity of wood
and store of fit stones, without peradventure found
out the first invention." Reading of such things
as these, and of how St. Albeus, Bishop of Imly^ had
said, "Great is that island, and it is the land of saints ;
304

The Islands of Aran.

for no man knows how many saints are buried there,
but God alone"; and of an old saying: "Athenry
was, Galway is, Aran shall be the best of the three,"
we grew, after a while, impatient of delay. A
good breeze sprang up at last, and as I stood in the
bow, leaning against the mast, I felt the one quite
perfectly satisfying sensation of movement : to race
through steady water before a stiff sail, on which
the reefing cords are tapping in rhythm to those
nine notes of the sailors' chorus in Tristan, which
always ring in my ears when I am on the sea, for
they have in them all the exultation of all life that
moves upon the waters.

The butterfly, I hope, had reached land before
us ; but only a few sea-birds came out to welcome
us as we drew near Inishmore, the Large Island,
which is nine miles long and a mile and a half broad.
I gazed at the long line of the island, growing more
distinct every moment ; first, a grey outhne, flat
at the sea's edge, and rising up beyond in irregular,
rocky hills, terrace above terrace; then, against
this grey outline, white houses began to detach
themselves, the sharp line of the pier cutting into
the curve of the harbour; and then, at last, the
figures of men and women moving across the land.
Nothing is more mysterious, more disquieting, than
one's first ghmpse of an island, and all I had heard
of these islands, of their peace in the heart of the
storm, was not a little mysterious and disquieting.
I knew that they contained the oldest ruins and
that their life of the present was the most primitive

305

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

life of any part of Ireland ; I knew that they were
rarely visited by the tourist, almost never by any
but the local tourist ; that they were difficult to
reach, sometimes more difficult to leave, for the
uncertainty of weather in that uncertain region of
the Atlantic had been known to detain some of
the rare travellers there for days, was it not for
weeks ? Here one was absolutely at the mercy of
the elements, which might at any moment become
unfriendly, which, indeed, one seemed to have but
apprehended in a pause of their eternal enmity.
And we seemed also to be venturing among an
unknown people, who, even if they spoke our own
language, were further away from us, more foreign
than people who spoke an unknown language and
lived beyond other seas.

As we walked along the pier towards the three
whitewashed cottages which form the Atlantic
Hotel, at which we were to stay, a strange being
sprang towards us, with a curiously beast-like
stealthiness and animation; it was a crazy man,
bare-footed and blear-eyed, who held out his hand
and sang out at us in a high, chanting voice, and in
what sounded rather a tone of command than of
entreaty, "Give me a penny, sir! Give me a
penny, sir!" We dropped something into his
hat, and he went away over the rocks, laughing
loudly to himself, and repeating some words that
he had heard us say. We passed a few fishermen
and some bare-footed children, who looked at us
curiously, but without moving, and were met at
306

The Islands of Aran.

the door of the middle cottage by a little, fat old
woman with a round body and a round face, wearing
a white cap tied over her ears. The Atlantic Hotel
is a very primitive hotel ; it had last been slept in
by some priests from the mainland, who had come
on their holiday with bicycles ; and before that
by a German philologist who was learning Irish.
The kitchen, which is also the old landlady's bed-
room, presents a medley of pots and pans and petti-
coats as you pass its open door and climb the little
staircase, diverging oddly on either side after the
first five or six steps, and leading on the right to a
large dining-room, where the table lounges on an
inadequate number of legs and the chairs bow over
when you lean back on them. I have slept more
luxuriously, but not more soundly, than in the
little musty bedroom on the other side of the
stairs, with its half-made bed, its bare and unswept
floor, its tiny window, of which only the lower half
could be opened, and this, when opened, had to
be supported by a wooden catch from outside.
Going to sleep in that little, uncomfortable room
was a delight in itself; for the starry water outside,
which one could see through that narrow slit of
window, seemed to flow softly about one in waves
of delicate sleep.

When we had had a hasty meal and had got a
little used to our hotel, and had realised as well as
we could where we were, at the lower end of the
village of Kilronan, which stretches up the hill to
the north-west on either side of the main road, we

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Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

set out in the opposite direction, finding many-
guides by the way, who increased in number as we
went on through the smaller village of Kileaney
up to the south-eastern hill, on which are a holy
well, its thorn-tree hung with votive ribbons, and
the ruins of several churches, among them the church
of St. Enda, the patron saint of the island. At
first we were able to walk along a very tolerable
road, then we branched ofi^ upon a little strip of grey
sand, piled in mounds as high as if it had been
drifted snow, and from that, turning a little inland,
we came upon the road again, which began to get
stonier as we neared the village. Our principal
guide, an elderly man with long thick curls of
flaxen hair and a seaman's beard, shaved away from
the chin, talked fairly good English, with a strong
accent, and he told us of the poverty of the people,
the heavy rents they have to pay for soil on which
no grass grows, and the difficult living they make
out of their fishing, and their little tillage, and the
cattle which they take over in boats to the fairs at
Galway, throwing them into the sea when they get
near land, and leaving them to swim ashore. He
was dressed, as are almost all the peasants of Aran,
in clothes woven and made on the island — loose,
rough, woollen things, of drab, or dark blue, or grey,
sometimes charming in colour; he had a flannel
shirt, a kind of waistcoat with sleeves, very loose
and shapeless trousers worn without braces, an
old and discoloured slouch hat on his head, and on
his feet the usual pampooties, slippers of undressed
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The Islands of Aran.

hide, drawn together and stitched into shape, with
pointed toes, and a cord across the instep. The
village to which we had come was a cluster of white-
washed cabins, a little better built than those I
had seen in Galway, with the brown thatch fastened
down with ropes drawn cross-wise over the roof
and tied to wooden pegs driven into the wall for
protection against the storm blowing in from the
Atlantic. They had the usual two doors, facing
each other at front and back, the windier of the
two being kept closed in rough weather, and the
doors were divided in half by the usual hatch.
As we passed, a dark head would appear at the upper
half of the door, and a dull glow of red would rise
out of the shadow. The women of Aran almost
all dress in red, the petticoat very heavily woven,
the crossed shawl or bodice of a thinner texture
of wool. Those whom we met on the roads wore
thicker shawls over their heads, and they would
sometimes draw the shawls closer about them, as
women in the East draw their veils closer about
their faces. As they came out to their doors to
see us pass, I noticed in their manner a certain
mingling of curiosity and shyness, an interest which
was never quite eager. Some of the men came out
and quietly followed us as we were led along a
twisting way between the cabins ; and the children,
boys and girls, in a varying band of from twenty to
thirty, ran about our heels, stopping whenever we
stopped, and staring at us with calm wonder.
They were very inquisitive, but, unlike English

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Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

villagers in remote places, perfectly polite, and
neither resented our coming among them nor jeered
at us for being foreign to their fashions.

The people of Aran (they are about 3000 in
all), as I then saw them for the first time, and as I
saw them during the few days of my visit, seemed
to me a simple, dignified, self-sufficient, sturdily
primitive people, to whom Browning's phrase of
"gentle islanders" might well be applied. They
could be fierce on occasion, as I knew; for I
remembered the story of their refusal to pay the
county cess, and how, when the cess-collector had
come over to take his dues by force, they had
assembled on the seashore with sticks and stones,
and would not allow him even to land. But they
had, for the most part, mild faces, of the long Irish
type, often regular in feature, but with loose and
drooping mouths and discoloured teeth. Most
had blue eyes, the men, oftener than the women,
having fair hair. They held themselves erect,
and walked nimbly, with a peculiar step due to
the rocky ways they have generally to walk on ;
few of them, I noticed, had large hands or feet,
and all, without exception, were thin, as indeed
the Irish peasant almost invariably is. The women
too, for the most part, were thin, and had the same
long faces, often regular, with straight eyebrows
and steady eyes, not readily changing expression ;
they hold themselves well, a little like men, whom,
indeed, they somewhat resemble in figure. As I saw
them, leaning motionless against their doors, walking
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The Islands of Aran.

with their deHberateness of step along the roads,
with eyes in which there was no wonder, none of
the fever of the senses, placid animals on whom
emotion has never worked in any vivid or passionate
way, I seemed to see all the pathetic contentment
of those narrow lives, in which day follows day
with the monotony of wave lapping on wave. I
observed one young girl of twelve or thirteen who
had something of the ardency of beauty, and a few
shy, impressive faces, their hair drawn back smoothly
from the middle parting, appearing suddenly behind
doors or over walls ; almost all, even the very old
women, had nobility of gesture and attitude, but
in the more personal expression of faces there was
for the most part but a certain quietude, seeming
to reflect the grey hush, the bleak greyness of this
land of endless stone and endless sea.

When we had got through the village and
begun to climb the hill, we were still followed, and
we were followed for all the rest of the way by
about fifteen youngsters, all, except one, bare-
footed, and two, though boys, wearing petticoats,
as the Irish peasant children not unfrequently do,
for economy, when they are young enough not to
resent it. Our guide, the elderly man with the
flaxen curls, led us first to the fort set up by the
soldiers of Cromwell, who, coming over to keep
down the Catholic rebels, ended by turning Catholic
and marrying and settling among the native people ;
then to Teglach Enda, a ruined church of very early
masonry, made of large blocks set together with

311

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

but little cement — the church of St. Enda, who
came to Aran in about the year 480, and fifty-eight
years later laid his bones in the cemetery which was
to hold the graves of not less than a hundred and
twenty saints. On our way inland to TeampuU
Benen, the remains of an early oratory, surrounded
by cloghans or stone dwellings made of heaped
stones which, centuries ago, had been the cells of
monks, we came upon the large puffing-hole, a
great gap in the earth, going down by steps of
rock to the sea, which in stormy weather dashes foam
to the height of its sixty feet, reminding me of the
sounding hollows on the coast of Cornwall. The
road here, as on almost the whole of the island, was
through stone-walled fields of stone. Grass, or
any soil, was but a rare interval between a broken
and distracted outstretch of grey rock, lying in large
flat slabs, in boulders of every size and shape, and
in innumerable stones, wedged in the ground or
lying loose upon it, round, pointed, rough, and
polished; an unending greyness, cut into squares
by the walls of carefully-heaped stones, which we
climbed with great insecurity, for the stones were
kept in place by no more than the more or less
skilful accident of their adjustment, and would turn
under our feet or over in our hands as we climbed
them. Occasionally a little space of pasture had
been cleared or a little artificial soil laid down, and
a cow browsed on the short grass. Ferns, and
occasionally maidenhair, grew in the fissures splin-
tered between the rocks ; and I saw mallow, stone-
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The Islands of Aran.

crop, the pale blue wind-flower, the white campian,
many nettles, ivy, and a few bushes. In this part
of the island there were no trees, which were to be
found chiefly on the north-western side, in a few
small clusters about some of the better houses, and
almost wholly of alder and willow. As we came
to the sheer edge of the sea and saw the Atlantic,
and knew that there was nothing but the Atlantic
between this last shivering remnant of Europe and
the far-olF continent of America, it was with no
feeling of surprise that we heard from the old man
who led us that no later than two years ago an old
woman of those parts had seen, somewhere on this
side of the horizon, the blessed island of Tir-nan-
Ogue, the island of immortal youth, which is held
by the Irish peasants to lie somewhere in that
mysterious region of the sea.

We loitered on the cliff^s for some time, leaning
over them, and looking into the magic mirror that
glittered there like a crystal, and with all the soft
depth of a crystal in it, hesitating on the veiled
threshold of visions. Since I have seen Aran and
Sligo, I have never wondered that the Irish peasant
still sees fairies about his path, and that the bound-
aries of what we call the real, and of what is for us
the unseen, are vague to him. The sea on those
coasts is not like the sea as I know it on any other
coast ; it has in it more of the twilight. And the
sky seems to come down more softly, with more
stealthy step, more illusive wings, and the land to
come forward with a more hesitating and gradual

313

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

approach ; and land and sea and sky to mingle
more absolutely than on any other coast. I have
never realised less the slipping of sand through the
hour-glass ; I have never seemed to see with so
remote an impartiality, as in the presence of brief
and yet eternal things, the troubling and insignificant
accidents of life. I have never believed less in the
reality of the visible world, in the importance of
all we are most serious about. One seems to wash
off the dust of cities, the dust of beliefs, the dust of
incredulities.

It was nearly seven o'clock when we got back to
Kilronan, and after dinner we sat for a while talking
and looking out through the little windows at the
night. But I could not stay indoors in this new,
marvellous place; and, persuading one of my
friends to come with me, I walked up through
Kilronan, which I found to be a far more solid and
populous village than the one we had seen ; and
coming out on the high ground beyond the houses,
we saw the end of a pale green sunset. Getting
back to our hotel, we found the others still talking;
but I could not stay indoors, and after a while went
out by myself to the end of the pier in the darkness,
and lay there looking into the water and into the
fishing-boats lying close up against the land, where
there were red lights moving, and the shadows of
men, and the sound of deep-throated Irish.

I remember no dreams that night, but I was told
that I had talked in my sleep, and I was willing to
believe it. In the morning, not too early, we set
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The Islands of Aran.

out on an outside car (that rocking and most com-
fortable vehicle, which I prefer to everything but
a gondola) for the Seven Churches and Dun Aengus,
along the only beaten road in the island. The
weather, as we started, was grey and misty, threaten-
ing rain, and we could but just see the base-line
of the Clare mountains across the grey and dis-
coloured waters of the bay. At the Seven Churches
we were joined by a peasant, who diligently showed
us the ruined walls of TeampuU Brecan, with its
slab inscribed in Gaehc with the words, "Pray
for the two canons"; the stone of the "VII.
Romani"; St. Brecan's headstone, carved with
Gaehc letters; the carved cross and the headstone
of St. Brecan's bed. More peasants joined us, and
some children, who fixed on us their usual placid
and tolerant gaze, in which curiosity contended
with an indolent air of contentment. In all these
people I noticed the same discreet manners that had
already pleased me; and once, as we were sitting
on a tombstone in the interior of one of the churches,
eating the sandwiches that we had brought for
luncheon, a man, who had entered the doorway,
drew back instantly, seeing us taking a meal.

The Seven Churches are rooted in long grass,
spreading in billowy mounds, intertwisted here and
there with brambles; but when we set out for the
circular fort of Dun Onaght, which lies on the
other side of the road, at no great distance up the
hill, we were once more in the land of rocks; and
it was through a boreen, or lane, entirely paved with

315

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

loose and rattling stones, that we made our way
up the ascent. At the top of the hill we found
ourselves outside such a building as I had never
seen before : an ancient fort, 90 feet in diameter,
and on the exterior 16 feet high, made of stones
placed one upon another, without mortar, in the
form of two walls, set together in layers, the inner
wall lower than the outer, so as to form a species
of gallery, to which stone steps led at intervals. No
sooner had we got inside than the rain began to
fall in torrents, and it was through a bhnding down-
pour that we hurried back to the car, scarcely stop-
ping to notice a Druid altar that stood not far out
of our way. As we drove along, the rain ceased
suddenly; the wet cloud that had been steaming
over the faint and still sea, as if desolated with
winter, vanished in sunshine, caught up into a
glory; and the water, transfigured by so instant
a magic, was at once changed from a grey wilderness
of shivering mist into a warm and flashing and
intense blueness, which gathered ardency of colour,
until the whole bay burned with blue fire. The
clouds had been swept behind us, and on the other
side of the water, for the whole length of the horizon,
the beautiful, softly curving Connemara mountains
stood out against the sky as if lit by some interior
illumination, blue and pearl-grey and grey-rose.
Along the shore-line a trail of faint cloud drifted
from kelp-fire to kelp-fire, like altar-smoke drifting
into altar-smoke ; and that mysterious mist floated
into the lower hollows of the hills, softening their
316

The Islands of Aran.

outlines and colours with a vague and fluttiering
and luminous veil of brightness.

It was about four in the afternoon when we came
to the village of Kilmurvey, upon the seashore,
and, leaving our car, began to climb the hill leading
to Dun Aengus. Passing two outer ramparts,
now much broken, one of them seeming to end
suddenly in the midst of a chevaux de /rise of pillar-
like stones thrust endways into the earth, we entered
the central fort by a lintelled doorway, set in the
side of a stone wall of the same Cyclopean architec-
ture as Dun Onaght, i8 feet high on the outside,
and with two adhering inner walls, each lower in
height, 12 feet 9 inches in thickness. This fort
is 150 feet north and south and 140 feet east and
west, and on the east side the circular wall ends
suddenly on the very edge of a cliff going down
300 feet to the sea. It is supposed that the circle
was once complete, and that the wall and the solid
ground itself, which is here of bare rock, were slowly
eaten away by the gnawing of centuries of waves,
which have been at their task since some hundreds
of years before the birth of Christ, when we know
not what king, ruling over the races called "the
servile," entrenched himself on that impregnable
height. The Atlantic lies endlessly out towards
the sunrise, beating, on the south, upon the brown
and towering rock of the cliffs of Moher, rising up
nearly a sheer thousand feet. The whole grey
and desolate island, flowering into barren stone,
stretches out on the other side, where the circle of

317

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

the water washes from Galway Bay into the Atlantic.
Looking out over all that emptiness of sea, one
imagines the long-oared galleys of the ravaging
kings who had lived there, some hundreds of years
before the birth of Christ ; and the emptiness of
the fortress filled with long-haired warriors, coming
back from the galleys with captured slaves, and
cattle, and the spoil of citadels. We know from the
Bardic writers that a civilisation, similar to that of
the Homeric poems, lived on in Ireland almost
to the time of the coming of St. Patrick ; and it
was something also of the sensation of Homer —
the walls of Troy, the heroes, and that "face that
launched a thousand ships" — which came to me
as we stood upon these unconquerable walls, to
which a generation of men had been as a moth's
flight and a hundred years as a generation of men.
Coming back from Dun Aengus, one of our
party insisted on walking; and we had not been
long indoors when he came in with a singular person
whom he had picked up on the way, a professional
story-teller, who had for three weeks been teaching
Irish to the German philologist who had preceded
us on the island. He was half blind and of wild
appearance ; a small and hairy man, all gesture, and
as if set on springs, who spoke somewhat broken
English in a roar. He lamented that we could
understand no Irish, but, even in English, he had
many things to tell, most of which he gave as but
"talk," making it very clear that we were not to
suppose him to vouch for them. His own family,
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The Islands of Aran.

he told us, was said to be descended from the roons,
or seals, but that certainly was "talk"; and a
witch had, only nine months back, been driven out
of the island by the priest; and there were many
who said they had seen fairies, but for his part he
had never seen them. But with this he began to
swear on the name of God and the saints, rising
from his chair and hfting up his hands, that what
he was going to tell us was the truth ; and then he
told how a man had once come into his house and
admired his young child, who was lying there in his
bed, and had not said "God bless you!" (without
which to admire is to envy and to bring under the
power of the fairies), and that night, and for many
following nights, he had wakened and heard a sound
of fighting, and one night had lit a candle, but
to no avail, and another night had gathered up the
blanket and tried to fling it over the head of whoever
might be there, but had caught no one; only in
the morning, going to a box in which fish were
kept, he had found blood in the box; and at this
he rose again, and again swore on the name of
God and the saints that he was telling us only the
truth, and true it was that the child had died;
and as for the man who had ill-wished him, "I
could point him out any day," he said fiercely.
And then, with many other stories of the doings of
fairies and priests (for he was very religious), and
of the "Dane" who had come to the island to
learn Irish ("and he knew all the languages, the
Proosy, and the Roosy, and the Span, and the

319

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

Grig"), he told us how Satan, being led by pride
to equal himself with God, looked into the glass
in which God only should look, and when Satan
looked into the glass, "Hell was made in a minute."
Next morning we were to leave early, and at
nine o'clock we were rowed out to the hooker, which
lifted sail in a good breeze, and upon a somewhat
pitching sea, for the second island, Inishmaan, that
is, the Middle Island, which is three miles long and
a mile and a half broad. We came within easy
distance of the shore, after about half an hour's
quick sailing, and a curragh came out to us, rowed
by two islanders ; but, finding the sea very rough in
Gregory Sound, we took them on board, and,
towing the boat after us, went about to the Foul
Sound on the southern side of the island, where
the sea was much calmer. Here we got into the
curragh, sitting motionless for fear a slight move-
ment on the part of any of us should upset it. The
curragh is simply the coracle of the ancient Britons,
made of wooden laths covered with canvas, and tarred
on the outside, bent into the shape of a round-
bottomed boat with a raised and pointed prow, and
so light that, when on shore, two men can carry it
reversed on their heads, like an immense hat or
umbrella. As the curragh touched the shore,
some of the islanders who had assembled at the
edge of the sea came into the water to meet us,
and took hold of the boat, and lifted the prow of it
upon land, and said, "You are welcome, you are
welcome!" One of them came with us, a nimble
320

The Islands of Aran.

peasant of about forty, who led the way up the
terraced side of the hill, on which there was a little
grass, near the seashore, and then scarce anything
but slabs and boulders of stone, to a little ruined
oratory, almost filled with an alder tree, the only
tree I saw on the island. All around it were grave-
stones, half-defaced by the weather, but carved with
curious armorial bearings, as it seemed, representing
the sun and moon and stars about a cross formed
of the Christian monogram. Among the graves
were lying huge beams, that had been flung up the
hillside from some wrecked vessel in one of the
storms that beat upon the island. Going on a
little farther we came to the ancient stone fort of
Dun Moher, an inclosure slightly larger than Dun
Onaght, but smaller than Dun Aengus ; and coming
down on the other side, by some stone steps, we
made our way, along a very rocky boreen, towards
the village that twisted upon a brown zigzag
around the slope of the hill.

In the village we were joined by some more men
and children ; and a number of women, wearing
the same red clothes that we had seen on the larger
island, and looking at us with perhaps scarcely
so shy a curiosity (for they were almost too unused
to strangers to have adopted a manner of shyness),
came out to their doors and looked up at us out of
the darkness of many interiors, from where they
sat on the ground knitting or carding wool. We
passed the chapel, a very modern-looking building,
made out of an ancient church, and turned in for

321

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

a moment to the cottage where the priest sleeps
when he comes over from Inishmore on Saturday-
night to say early mass on Sunday morning before
going on to Inisheer for the second mass. We saw
his little white room, very quaint and neat ; and
the woman of the house, speaking only Irish,
motioned us to sit down, and could hardly be pre-
vented from laying out plates and glasses for us
upon the table. As we got a little through the
more populous part of the village, we saw ahead of
us, down a broad lane, a very handsome girl, holding
the end of a long ribbon, decorated with a green
bough, across the road. Other girls and some older
women were standing by, and, when we came up,
the handsome girl, with the low forehead and the
sombre blue eyes, cried out laughingly, in her
scanty English, "Cash, cash!" We paid toll,
as the custom is, and got her blessing ; and went
on our way, leaving the path, and climbing many
stone walls, until we came to the great fort of Dun
Conor on the hill, the largest of the ancient forts of
Aran.

Dun Conor is 227 feet north and south and 115
feet east and west, with walls in three sections, 20
feet high on the outside and 18 feet 7 inches thick.
We climbed to the top and walked around the wall,
where the wind blowing in from the sea beat so
hard upon us that we could scarcely keep our
footing. From this height we could see all over
the island lying out beneath us, grey, and broken
into squares by the walled fields ; the brown thatch
322

The Islands of Aran.

of the village, the smoke coming up from the
chimneys, here and there a red shawl or skirt, the
grey sand by the sea and the grey sea all round.
As we stood on the wall many peasants came slowly
about us, climbing up on all sides, and some stood
together just inside the entrance, and two or three
girls sat down on the other side of the arena, knitting.
Presently an old man, scarcely leaning on the stick
which he carried in his hand, came towards us, and
began slowly to climb the steps. "It is my father,"
said one of the men; "he is the oldest man on the
island; he was born in 1812." The old man
climbed slowly up to where we stood ; a mild old
man, with a pale face, carefully shaved, and a firm
mouth, who spoke the best English that we had
heard there. "If any gentleman has committed a
crime," said the oldest man on the island, "we'll
hide him. There was a man killed his father, and
he came over here, and we hid him for two months,
and he got away safe to America."

As we came down from the fort the old man
came with us, and I and another, walking ahead,
lingered for some time with the old man by a stone
stile. "Have you ever seen the fairies.^" said my
friend, and a quaint smile flickered over the old
man's face, and with many ohs ! and grave gestures
he told us that he had never seen them, but that he
had heard them crying in the fort by night ; and one
night, as he was going along with his dog, just at
the spot where we were then standing, the dog
had suddenly rushed at something or some one,

323

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

and had rushed round and round him, but he could
see nothing, though it was bright moonhght, and
so Hght that he could have seen a rat ; and he had
followed across several fields, and again the dog
had rushed at the thing, and had seemed to be
beaten off, and had come back covered with sweat,
and panting, but he could see nothing. And there
was a man once, he knew the man, and could point
him out, who had been out in his boat (and he
motioned with his stick to a certain spot on the
water), and a sea fairy had seized hold of his boat
and tried to come into it ; but he had gone quickly
on shore, and the thing, which looked hke a man,
had turned back into the sea. And there had
been a man once on the island who used to talk
with the fairies; and you could hear him going
along the roads by night swearing and talking with
the fairies. "And have you ever heard," said
my friend "of the seals, the roons, turning into
men?" "And indeed," said the oldest man on
the island, smiling, "I'm a roon, for I'm one of
the family they say comes from the roons." "And
have you ever heard," said my friend, "of men
going back into the sea and turning roons again ^ "
"I never heard that," said the oldest man on the
island reflectively, seeming to ponder over the
probability of the occurrence; "no," he repeated
after a pause, "I never heard that."

We came back to the village by the road we had
come, and passed again the handsome girl who had
taken toll ; she was sitting by the roadside knitting,

324

The Islands of Aran.

and looked at us sidelong as we passed, with an
almost imperceptible smile in her eyes. We wan-
dered for some time a little vaguely, the amiabihty
of the islanders leading them to bring us in search
of various ruins which we imagined to exist, and
which they did not like to tell us were not in exist-
ence. I found the people on this island even more
charming, because a httle simpler, more untouched
by civilisation, than those on the larger island.
They were of necessity a little lonelier, for if few
people come to Inishmore, how many have ever
spent a night on Inishmaan ^ Inishmore has its
hotel, but there is no hotel on Inishmaan; there
is indeed one public-house, but there is not even
a policeman, so sober, so law-abiding are these
islanders. It is true that I succeeded, with some
difficulty, and under cover of some mystery, in secur-
ing, what I had long wished to taste, a bottle of
poteen or ilhcit whisky. But the brewing of
poteen is, after all, almost romantic in its way,
with that queer, sophistical romance of the contra-
band. That was not the romance I associated with
this most peaceful of islands as we walked along
the sand on the seashore, passing the kelp-burners,
who were collecting long brown trails of seaweed.
More than anything I had ever seen, this seashore
gave me the sensation of the mystery and the calm
of all the islands one has ever dreamed of, all the
fortunate islands that have ever been saved out of
the disturbing sea; this delicate pearl-grey sand,
the deeper grey of the stones, the more luminous

32s

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

grey of the water, and so consoling an air as of
immortal twilight and the peace of its dreams.

I had been in no haste to leave Inishmore, but
I was still more loth to leave Inishmaan; and I
think that it was with reluctance on the part of all
of us that we made our way to the curragh which
was waiting for us in the water. The islanders
waved their caps, and called many good blessings
after us as we were rowed back to the hooker,
which again lifted sail and set out for the third and
smallest island, Inisheer, that is, the South Island.

We set out confidently, but when we had got
out of shelter of the shore, the hooker began to rise
and fall with some violence; and by the time we
had come within landing distance of Inisheer the
waves were dashing upon us with so great an
energy that it was impossible to drop anchor, and
our skipper advised us not to try to get to land. A
curragh set out from the shore, and came some
way towards us, riding the waves. It might have
been possible, I doubt not, to drop by good luck
from the rolling side of the hooker into the pitching
bottom of the curragh, and without capsizing the
curragh ; but the chances were against it. Tom
Joyce, holding on to the ropes of the main-sail,
and the most seaman-like of us, in the stern, shouted
at each other above the sound of the wind. We
were anxious to make for Ballyline, the port nearest
to Listoonvarna, on the coast of Clare; but this
Joyce declared to be impossible in such a sea, and
with such a wind, and advised that we should make
326

The Islands of Aran.

for Ballyvaughan, round Black Head Point, where
we should find a safe harbour. It was now about
a quarter past one, and we set out for Ballyvaughan
with the wind fair behind us. The hooker rode
well, and the waves but rarely came over the wind-
ward side as she lay over towards her sail, taking
leap after leap through the white-edged furrows
of the grey water. For two hours and a half we
skirted the Clare coast, which came to me, and
disappeared from me, as the gunwale dipped or
rose on the leeward side. The islands were blotted
out behind us long before we had turned the sheer
corner of Black Head, the ultimate edge of Ireland,
and at last we came round the headland into quieter
water, and so, after a short time, into a Httle harbour
of Ballyvaughan, where we set foot on land again,
and drove for hours along the Clare coast and inland
into Galway, under that sunset of gold fire and
white spray, back to Tillyra Castle, where I felt
the ground once more solid under my feet.

Summer, 1896,

327

In Sligo.

Rosses Point and Glencar.

Rosses Point is a village of pilots and fishing
people, stretching out seawards in a long thin single
line of thatched and whitewashed houses along
the branch of the sea which goes from the little
harbour of Shgo to broaden out into the bay beyond
the edge of Dorren's or Coney Island, and the
rocks of Dead Man's Point. It is a lazy village,
where no one is very rich or very poor, but all are
able, without too much exertion, to make just enough
not to need to work any harder. The people are
slow, sturdy, contented people, with a singular
dislike of doing anything for money, except that
they let rooms during the summer to the people of
Shgo, who make it their watering-place, going in
and out daily, when needful, on the httle paddle-
steamer which plies backward and forward between
Sligo and the Point, or on the long car which takes
in their messages and their ma,rketing-baskets.
Very few people from the outer world ever find their
way here; and there are peasants living at the far
end of the village who have never been so far as
the village of Lower Rosses, on the other side of
the green lands. They know more of the coast
of Spain, the River Plate, and the Barbadoes than
they know of the other side of their own mountains,
for seafaring men go far. I have just been talking
with a seaman, now a pilot here, who has told me
of Venice and of the bull-fights he saw at Huelva,
and of Antwerp, and the Riga, and Le Havre;
328

In Sligo.

and of the coast of Cornwall, and Milford Haven,
and the Firth of Forth ; and of America and the
West Indies. Yesterday I saw a bright green parrot
on a child's hand ; they have been telling me of
"the black girl" who came here from some foreign
ship and lived here, and knew better than any one
else where to find the plovers' eggs ; and I have
seen the rim of a foreign ship, rising out of the sand
at low tide, which was wrecked here seventy years
ago, and is now turning green under the water.

Men and women, here at the Point, loiter about
all day long ; there are benches outside most of
the cabins, and they sit there, or on the low, rough
wall which skirts the road, or on the big stones at
the edge of the water, or upon the green lands.
Most of the women are bare-headed, none go
barefoot, and only a few of the poorer children.
And the children here are very proud. They will
row you about all day for nothing, but they will
not bring you a can of water from the well if you
pay them for it. That is a point of view they have
learnt from their parents, and it seems to me a
simple and sufficing one. For these people have
attained comfort, a certain dignity (that dignity
which comes from concerning yourself only with
what concerns you), and they have the privilege of
living in a beautiful, harmonious place, without
any of the distractions which harass poorer or less
contented people in towns, and keep them from
the one thing worth living for, the leisure to know
oneself. This fine laziness of theirs in the open air,

329

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

with the constant, subduing sense of the sea's peril,
its hold upon their hves and fortunes, moulds them
often into a self-sufficing manliness, a hardy woman-
hood ; sometimes it makes them dreamers, and
they see fairies and hear the fairy piper calling in
the caves.

How, indeed, is it possible that they should not
see more of the other world than most folk do, and
catch dreams in their nets ? For it is a place of
dreams, a grey, gentle place, where the sand melts
into the sea, the sea into the sky, and the mountains
and the clouds drift one into the other. I have
never seen so friendly a sea nor a sea so full of the
ecstasy of sleep. On one of those luminous grey
days, which are the true atmosphere of the place,
it is like being in an eternal morning of twilight to
wander over the undulating green lands, fringed
at the shore by a soft rim of bent, a pale honey-
coloured green, and along the delicate grey sands,
from Dead Man's Point to the point of the Third
Rosses. The sea comes in softly, rippling against
the sand with a low plashing, which even on very
warm days has a cool sound and a certain gentleness
even on days of rough weather. The headland
of Roughley O 'Byrne runs on, a wavering hne of
faint green, from the dark and cloudy masses of
the Lissadell woods into the hesitating line of the
grey waters. On the other side of the bay Dorren's
Island curves around, almost like part of the semi-
circle of the mainland, its sickle-point leaning out
towards the white lighthouse, which rises up out of
330

In Sligo.

the water like a phantom, or the stone image of
a wave that has risen up out of the sea on a day
of storm. Faint mountains ghmmer out to sea,
many-coloured mountains close in upon the land,
shutting it off from the world of strange cities.
And if you go a little in from the sea-edge, over
the green lands, you will come to a great pool,
where the waters are never troubled nor the
reeds still ; but there is always a sighing of wind
in the reeds, as of a very gentle and melancholy
peace.

Go on a little farther still, and you come to the
fighting village of Magherow, where the men are
red-bearded, fierce, great shouters, and not readier
to row than to do battle with their oars. They
come into Rosses Point, generally, at the regatta;
and at that time the Point is at its livehest, there is
much whisky drunk, and many quarrels flame up.
There is a great dance, too, most years, at the time
of the regatta. It is known as the cake dance, and
not so long ago a cake and a bottle of whisky were
hung out of a window by green ribbons, the cake
for the best woman dancer and the bottle of whisky
for the best man dancer. Now there is no cake
at all, and if there is much whisky, it is handed
over the counter in big glasses, and not hung out
of the window by green ribbons. The prize now
is money, and so the people of the Point, with their
fine, independent objection to doing anything for
money, are less ready to show off their notable
powers of dancing ; and the women, who, besides,

331

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

are getting to prefer the waltzes and quadrilles of
the towns, will not take part in the dance at all.

The regatta this year was not too well managed,
having passed out of the hands of the village pilots ;
and it was unwisely decided that the dance should
be held the same evening, outside the door of a
public-house where the crews of the losing boats
had been drinking at the expense of the captains
of the winning boats. It was very dark, and there
was a great crowd, a great confusion. A somewhat
battered door had been laid down for the dancing,
and the press of people kept swaying in upon the
narrow limits of the door, where only a few half-
tipsy fellows pounded away, lurching into one
another's arms. Everybody swayed, and yelled,
and encouraged, and expostulated, and the melodion
sounded fitfully ; and presently the door was pulled
from under the feet of the dancers and the police
shouldered into the midst of what would soon have
been a very pretty fight. The dance was postponed
to Monday, when some of the boats were to race
again.

On Monday, at about half-past six, I met eight
small boys carrying a large door upon their shoulders.
They were coming up through the village to the
green lands, where they laid down the door on the
grass. About an hour afterwards, as it began to
get very dark, the people came slowly up from the
village, and a wide ring was made by a rope carried
around stakes set in the earth, and the people
gathered about the ring, in the middle of which

In Sligo.

lay the door, lit on one side by a ship's lantern and
on the other by the lamp of a bicycle. A chair
was put for the judge, who was a pilot and a publican,
and one of the few Gaehc speakers in the village,
and a man of few words, and a man of weight;
and another chair was put for the musician, who
played on the melodion, an instrument which has
long since replaced the fiddle as the national instru-
ment of Ireland. A row of very small children lay
along the grass inside the rope, the girls in one place,
the boys in another. It was so dark that I could
only vaguely distinguish, in a curve of very black
shadow, the people opposite to me in the circle,
and presently it began to rain a little and still we
waited. At last a man came forward, and the
musician began to play a Hvely tune on his melodion,
keeping time with his feet, and there was a great
cry of "Gallagher! Gallagher!" and much shout-
ing and whistling. It was a shepherd from Lower
Rosses, a thin and solemn young man, who began
to dance with great vigour and regularity, tapping
heavily on the rough boards with very rough and
heavy boots. He danced several step-dances, and
was much applauded. Then, after a pause, an old
man from the Point, Redmond Bruen by name,
a pilot, who had very cunningly won the duck-hunt
at the regatta, stepped forward unevenly, and began
to walk about on the door, shuffling his feet, bowing
to right and left, and waving a stick that he held
in his hand. "When he's sober, he's a great
dancer," we were assured. He was not sober,

333

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

and at first did no more than shuffle. Then he
stopped, seemed to recollect himself, and the reputa-
tion he had to keep up, and with more bowing to
the public, began to sing, with variations, a song
popular among the Irish peasants, "On the Rocky
Road to Dublin." It is a dramatic song, and after
every stanza he acted, in his dance, the fight on
the road, the passage from Holyhead, and the other
stirring incidents of the song. The old man
swayed there in the vague light, between the two
lanterns, a whimsical and pathetic figure, with his
grey beard, his helpless gestures, and the random
gaiety of his legs ; he danced with a wonderful
lightness, and one could but just hear his boots
passing over the boards.

We applauded him with enthusiasm, and he
came and sat on the grass inside the ring, near the
children, who were gradually creeping closer in;
and his place was taken by the serious Gallagher,
who was quite sober, and who pounded away like
clockwork, holding his body quite stiff', and ratthng
his boots with great agility. The old man watched
him keenly, and presently got up and made for the
door again. He began to dance, stopped, flung ofi^
his coat, and set off" again with a certain elaboration,
variety, and even delicacy in his dancing, which
would have won him the prize, I think, if he had
been sober enough to make the most of his qualities.
He at least thoroughly appreciated his own skill.
"That's a good reel," he would say when he halted
for breath and emphasis.
334

In Sligo.

Meanwhile Gallagher was looking for a partner,
and one or two young fellows took the boards,
and did each a single dance, in pairs or singly.
Then a young man who, Hke Bruen, was "a grand
dancer when sober," but who was even less sober
than Bruen, reeled across the grass, kicked over one
of the lanterns, and began to dance opposite Galla-
gher. Then he pushed Gallagher off the board
and danced by himself. He was in his shirt-sleeves
and without hat or collar, and much of his dance
was merely an unsteady walking. He stopped
frequently, and appeared to think ; and, after much
thinking, it occurred to him that it was the music
which would not keep time with his dancing. So
he walked up to the musician, snatched the melodion
away from him, and marched off with it, I suppose
to find another player. He passed into the dark-
ness ; the melodion in his hands squealed out of
the darkness. Then he came back dangling it,
and was told to give it back again, which he did
sulkily, with exactly the look and gesture of a
naughty child who has been called to order. And
then Gallagher came forward again, and, taking
off his hat, said he would sing a song. He got
through a verse or two, chanting gravely in a kind
of sing-song, and then, coming to the line, "And
he said to the landlord," paused, and said, *'I am
not able to do any more." There was a great
laugh, and Gallagher returned to his dancing, in
which he was presently joined by a new rival.
Gallagher got the prize.

335

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

I was told that so poor a dance had not been
seen before at Rosses Point, and the blame was laid
on new ways, and the coming of the waltzes and
quadrilles, and the folly of young people who think
old things not good enough for them. And the
old people shook their heads that night over the
turf fires in their cabins.

Seven miles inland from Rosses Point the moun-
tains open, and, entering a great hollow called the
Windy Gap, you come upon a small lake with green
fields around it and mountains full of woods and
waterfalls rising up behind it. This is Glencar,
and there is a cabin by the side of the lake where
I spent a few enchanted days of rain and sunshine,
wandering over the mountain-side and among the
wild and delicate woods. Above the cabin there is
a great mountain, and the woods climb from about
the cabin to almost the summit of the mountain.
Fir trees rise up like marching banners, line upon
line; between them the foliage is softer, green
moss grows on the tree-trunks and ferns out of the
moss ; quicken-berries flame on the heights above
the streams ; the many-coloured green of leaves is
starred with bright orange, shadowed with spectral
blue, clouded with the exquisite ashen pallor of
decaying heather. Rocky steps lead from height
to height along the edge of chasms veiled with leafy
branches, and there is always a sound of many
waters, falling in torrents down black stairways of
rock, and rushing swiftly along narrow passages
336

In Sligo.

between grass and ferns. Here and there a bridge
of fallen trunks, set roughly together, and covered
with the adventurous soil, which, in these parts,
bears fruit wherever it has an inch to chng to,
crosses a waterfall just above the actual descent.
Winding paths branch off in every direction, and
in the soft earth of these narrow and precipitous
ways one can see little hoof-prints, and occasionally
one meets a donkey going slowly uphill, with the
creels on its back, to fetch turf from the bog. And
always there is the sound of water, hke the cool
singing voice of the rocks, above the sound of
rustling leaves, and birds piping, and the flapping
of great wings, which are the voices of the many-
instrumented orchestra of the woods. Here one
is in the heart of the mountains and in the heart of
the forest ; and, wandering along a grassy path
at evening, one seems to be very close to something
very ancient and secret.

The mountains here are whole regions, and when
you have climbed to their summit through the
woods, you find yourself on a vast plain, and this
plain stretches so far that it seems to fill the horizon
and you cannot see anything on the other side of
it. Looking down into the valley, which seems
scooped out of the solid mountains, you can see,
on the other side of the Windy Gap, the thin line
of Rosses Point going out into the sea, and the sea
stretches out so far before it reaches the horizon
that you can catch a yellow glimmer of sunlight,
lying out beyond the horizon visible from the shore.

337

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

The fields, around and beyond the pohshed mirror
of the lake, seem, in their patchwork of greens and
browns, like a little map of the world. The
mountain-top, which you have fancied from below
to be such solid ground, proves, if you try to cross
it, to be a great yielding bog, with intervals of rock
or hard soil. To walk over it is to move in short
jumps, with an occasional longer leap across a
dried-up watercourse. I like the voluptuous soft-
ness of the bog, for one's feet sink luxuriously into
even the pale golden mounds of moss which rise
between the rusty heather and starveling grasses
of the sheer morass. And it has the treachery
which is always one of the allurements of voluptuous
things. Nor is it the bog only which is treacher-
ous on these mountains. The mist comes down on
them very suddenly, and in that white darkness
even the natives sometimes lose their way, and are
drawn over the sheer edge of the mountain. My
host has just come in to tell me that last night there
was a great brewing of poteen on Ben Bulben, and
that many of the drinkers wandered all night,
losing their way in the mist, and that one of them,
not having the drunkard's luck, fell over a rocky
place, and is now lying dead on the mountain.

I had been thinking of such possibilities yester-
day as I cHmbed, peak after peak, the mountains
on the other side of the lake. Cope's Mountain,
Lugnagall, Cashlagall, Cragnamoona. They are
bare and treeless, crossed by a few donkey-tracks,
and I sometimes deserted these looped and coiling
338

In Sligo.

ways for the more hazardous directness of the dry
watercourses which seam the mountains from head
to foot. Once at the top, you look over almost
the whole county, lying out in a green plain, ridged
with hedges, clustered with woods, glittering with
lakes ; here and there a white cabin, a scattered
village, and just below, in the hollow of the land
and water, the little curving grey town of Sligo,
with its few ships resting in harbour, and beyond
them the long black line which is Rosses Point,
and then the sea, warm with sunlight, and, as if
islanded in the sea, the hills of Mayo. I have
never seen anything resembling the view from these
mountains ; I have never seen anything, in its
way, more beautiful. And when, last night, after
a tossed and blood-red sunset, the white mist
curdled about the heads of Ben Bulben and Knock-
narea, and a faint, luminous mist filled the whole
hollow of the valley, there seemed to be a mingling
of all the worlds ; and the world in which ships
went out from the harbour of Sligo, and the poteen-
makers wandered over the mountain, was not more
real than the world of embodied dreams in which
the fairies dance in their forts, or beat at the cabin
doors, or chuckle among the reeds.

Summer, 1896.

339

From a Castle in Ireland.

In the mysterious castle, lost among trees that
start up suddenly around it, out of a land of green
meadows and grey stones, where I have been so
dehghtfully living through the difficult month of
August, London, and books, and one's daily habits
seem scarcely appreciable ; too far away on the
other side of this mountainous land enclosing one
within the circle of its own magic. It is a castle
of dreams, where, in the morning, I climb the
winding staircase in the tower, creep through the
secret passage, and find myself in the vast deserted
room above the chapel, which is my retiring-room
for meditation ; or, following the winding staircase,
come out on the battlements, where I can look
widely across Galway to the hills. In the evening
my host plays Vittoria and Palestrina on the organ,
in the half darkness of the hall, and I wander between
the pillars of black marble, hearing the many
voices rising into the dome : Vittoria, the many
lamentable human voices, crying on the sins of the
world, the vanity of pleasant sins ; Palestrina, an
exultation and a triumph, in which the many voices
of white souls go up ardently into heaven. In the
afternoon we drive through a strange land, which
has the desolation of ancient and dwindling things ;
a grey land, into which human life comes rarely,
and with a certain primitive savager}^ As we drive
seawards, the stone walls closing in the woods
dwindle into low, roughly heaped hedges of un-
mortared stones, over which only an occasional

340

From a Castle in Ireland.

cluster of trees lifts itself; and the trees strain
wildly in the air, writhing away from the side of
the sea, where the winds from the Atlantic have
blown upon them and transfixed them in an eternity
of flight from an eternal flagellation. As far as
one can see, as far as the blue, barren mountains
which rise up against the horizon, there are these
endless tracks of harsh meadow-land, marked into
squares by the stone hedges, and themselves heaped
with rocks and stones, lying about like some grey
fungus growth. Not a sign of human life is to be
seen; at long intervals we pass a cabin, white-
washed, thatched roughly, with stopped-up windows
and a half-closed door, from behind which a grey-
haired old woman will gaze at you with her steady,
melancholy eyes. A few peasants pass on the road,
moving sombrely, without speaking ; the men, for
the most part, touch their hats, without change of
expression ; the women, drawing their shawls
about their faces, merely look at you, with a slow,
scrutinising air, more indiff"erent than curious.
The women walk bare-footed and with the admirable
grace and straightness of all who go with bare feet.
I remember, in the curve of a rocky field, some
little way in from the road, seeing a young woman
wearing a blue bodice, a red petticoat, and a grey
shawl, carrying a tin pail on her head, with that
straight, flexible movement of the body, that slow
and formal grace of Eastern women who have
carried pitchers from the well. Occasionally a
fierce old man on a horse, wearing the old costume,

341

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

that odd, precise kind of dress-coat, passes you
with a surly scowl ; or a company of tinkers (the
Irish gipsies, one might call them) trail past, huddled
like crouching beasts on their little, rough, open
carts, driving a herd of donkeys before them. As
we get nearer the village by the sea, the cabins
become larger and more frequent ; and just before
reaching it we pass a ruined castle, impregnably
built on a green mound, looking over the water to
the quay, where the thin black masts of a few vessels
rise motionless against the little whitewashed houses.
The road goes down a steep hill, and turns sharply,
in the midst of the grey village, with its thatched
and ragged roofs. The doors all stand open, the
upper windows are drawn half down, and from
some of them I see a dishevelled dark head, the
hair and eyes of a gipsy (one could well have fancied),
looking down on the road and the passers-by. As
the road rises again, we see the blue mountains
coming nearer to us, and the place where, one
knows, is Galway Bay, lying too low for any flash
of the waters. Now we are quite near the sea, and
in front of the house we are to visit (you will hear
all about it in M. Bourget's next nouvelle), a brown
mass of colour comes suddenly into the dull green
and grey of the fields, and one smells the seaweed
lying there in the pools.

I find all this bareness, greyness, monotony,
solitude at once primitive and fantastical, curiously
attractive, giving just the same kind of relief from
the fat, luxurious English landscape that these
342

From a Castle in Ireland.

gaunt, nervous, long-chinned peasants give from
the red and roUing sleepiness of the EngUsh villager.
And there is a quite national vivacity and variety
of mood in the skies here, in the restless atmosphere,
the humorous exaggerations of the sun and rain.
To-day is a typical Irish day, soft, warm, grey,
with intervals of rain and fine weather; I can see
a sort of soft mist of rain, blown loosely about
between the trees of the park, the clouds an almost
luminous grey, the sun shining through them; at
their darkest, scarcely darker than the Irish stone
of which the castle is built. Driving, the other day,
we passed a large pool among the rocks, in the midst
of those meadows flowering with stones ; the sky
was black with the rain that was falling upon the
hills, and the afternoon sun shone against the deep
blackness of the sky and the shadowed blackness
of the water. I have never seen such coloured
darkness as this water; green passing into slate,
slate into purple, purple into dead black. And it
was all luminous, floating there in the harbour of
the grass like a tideless sea. Then there is the
infinite variety of the mountains, sloping in uneven
lines around almost the whole horizon. They are
as variable as the clouds, and, while you look at
them, have changed from a purple darkness to a
luminous and tender green, and then into a hfeless
grey, and seem to float towards you and drift away
from you hke the clouds.

Among these soHd and shifting things, in this
castle which is at once so ancient a reality and so

343

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

essential a dream, I feel myself to be in some danger
of loosening the tightness of my hold upon external
things, of foregoing many delectable pleasures, of
forgetting many things that I have passionately
learnt in cities. If I lived here too long I should
forget that I live in London and remember that I
am a Cornishman.

Summer, 1896.

344

Dover Cliffs.

I.

Nature made Dover for her pleasure, and man
has remade Dover for his use. The cHfFs have
been tunnelled within and fortified overhead ; the
sea has been bound inside a vast harbour, and driven
back to make way for trucks and trolleys to carry
stones for its prison walls ; the smoke of funnels
has superseded the gentle motions of sails ; there
are forts and barracks and prisons, like great ware-
houses for human goods ; everywhere there is
action, change, energy; there are foreign faces,
people coming and going from the ends of the
earth, to whom Dover is a stepping-stone ; and it
is a gate, which can be opened to friends and closed
on enemies. A gate of England, one of the Cinque
Ports and the only one of them that has held its
own; it has always been a part of history; it is
our only port which has a natural magnificence
and a great tradition.

The sea at Dover, since the Admiralty has looped
it in with its stone barriers, can hardly be said to
have remained a quite wholly natural part of nature
any longer. It has been tamed, brought to serve
man meekly, and not at its own will. By day we
see the gap in its prison walls, and the ships going
in and out, to be caught or loosed. But by night
there is the aspect of a lake, and the gold and red
and green lights that go in a semicircle about it
seem Hke Hghts outHning a curving shore. The
execrable British pleasure-pier, with the "looped

345

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

and windowed nakedness" of its bulbed head
thrust, impudently ghttering, into the water, adds
the last sign to the deeper signs of man's domination.
Yet, by day or night, if you listen, you will hear the
Hsp of water on the pebbles, in a faint, powerless
affirmation : you will know, in that faint sound,
the sea's voice. But to see the sea, really itself,
and to hear it speak out at its own pleasure, you
must stand on the stone wall which binds it in from
the west wind, or look down from the cliffs, on
west or east. The cliffs share in its liberty ; they
have never consented to its bondage ; they endure
its buffetings with patience, as friendly losers do
in a game. When the wind freshens and the water
is whipped from green to white, and leaps at and
over the great stone pier of the Admiralty in showers
of white foam, the cliffs above it turn to the colour
of thunder-clouds. Under a faint mist cliffs and
sea suffer a new enchantment ; a bloom comes out
over them, seeming to melt them into a single in-
tangible texture. And cliffs and sea, in sun or
storm, are at one : the sea, the witch of destiny, at
all her passes, and the cliffs, English women, white
and tall and delicately shaped.

The loveliest of the cliffs is that one which should
no longer be called Shakespeare's, for it has been
desecrated by a foul black tunnel and the smoke of
engines, and a railway-train, which has devastated
the beach, goes through the tunnel to a bay beyond
where a black chimney gapes at the mouth of a
problematical coal-mine. This is one of the worst
346

Dover Cliffs.

things which man has done here in his struggle
to subdue nature. A harbour may add less beauty
than it takes from the sea ; but it is a vast, kind,
friendly thing in which the sea is not unwilling to
co-operate. A harbour is that refuge in which
ships that have come there from the ends of the
world lie at rest : men have built it for them. But
here, for the moment, man has beaten and defaced
nature; beauty has been baffled, so far as man
can do it. For the sea remains, and the cliff is still
a white eminence, with a few pebbles at its feet
and a thin green covering on its back. Broken
beauty is remembered even after it has been utterly
destroyed; and man and his works have their day
and pass over. Here, too, nature will outlast him;
and the sea waits, knowing that she will one day have
her revenge on these sorry makings of his hands.

11.

It is the cliffs that make the best beauty of
Dover. They are her crown, her support, her
defence ; they hold her in their arms as she sits,
white and long, with her feet in the sea. They are
beautiful, at all hours, with their white walls and the
bare green and brown of their downs ; they are
like fortresses, calm, assured, steadfast, and ready
to become impregnable. Everywhere towers, walls,
the heavy, square castle, suggest ancient defences ;
and the friendliness of the cliffs to the town, which
it holds against the sea, has a reticence of manner

347

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

towards strangers and foreign coasts. At night
they rise mysteriously against the sky, with rows
and patches of Hghts shining out of dull level walls,
turned now into candelabra for candles of gold
fire. The old, red, gabled, sordid harbour, seen
dimly, its lights striking like red and yellow knives
into the stagnant water, becomes a kind of fairy
thing, which one vaguely remembers to have seen
in foreign lands. Which ? Venice has no such
eager cliffs above her tamed water ; and Venice, for
a moment, has come into the memory, returning
there, as she does at most sights of houses looking
down into water. Is it Ahcante ? The palms
on the sand are not here, nothing of what is African
in that rare coast of Spain ; but I remember a certain
hkeness in the hill with its castle rising more abruptly
over a long, curved town whiter and stranger than
Dover.

To see Dover as a whole, you must stand on the
stone parapet above the landing-place, where the
steamers shde in gently, hardly touching the quay
with the wooden roofs over their propellers. You
must turn your back on the sea, which is there
really the sea, and not an enclosed bay, a harbour
made for ships to come back into; and you must
look across the black engine-smoke of the trains,
to the white cliffs, which with evening turn to a dull
grey, over the long curve of white-fronted houses,
with their dark-green balconies and flat windows
set at regular intervals ; going on beyond them
to the east, with many indentations, white, vast,
348

Dover Cliffs.

and delicate, shutting in the sea with its high walls,
and seeming to throw out long, thin piers to clutch
and imprison it; on the west, Shakespeare's Cliff,
and then smoke and the long mine-chimney, and
the cliffs turn the corner and are beyond your sight.
But, for the very heart of Dover, you must look
under you, where dock after dock lies motionless,
its long arms shut about its guests.

They are like most other harbour-docks, dingy,
with low, irregular houses painted with signs and
letterings; Hamburg-American Line, Hearts of Oak
Dining-Rooms, Cope's Tobaccos. There are red
roofs and gables and an old sordidness about every-
thing at the edge of this pale-green stagnant water,
which never moves except under some heavy hull, or
under the feet of that white bird sitting disconsolately
on the floating buoy. The inner and outer harbour
has each its big ships, stacked side by side, funnels
and masts together, against the same quay with
the same little old gabled low red houses with the
same modern signs. At night one sees beyond
them only the lighted windows of flat house-fronts,
showing nothing in the darkness but loop-holes,
as if nothing were behind them. Masts, taut rope-
ladders from mast to bulwark, furled sails laid by
in the sides of the ship, the sharp lines of ropes
stretched out in delicate patterns, it is these that
give beauty, even before the night has come with
its transformations, to this kind of sea-pool where
vast many-tentacled animals crawl, clinging like
limpets to the wet walls.

349

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

The ship's beauty was lost when sails went and
masts went, and funnels and boilers took their
place, as the modern machine has taken the place
of every beautiful thing that went on the wind and
was worked by human hands. The lovely shape
was lost when great bulges came for useful purposes
on either side of the carcase which they trampled
into speed. Figments of scarcely serviceable masts
remain, with a little of the spider's work of cords,
waiting for sails which are never to fly up and run
before wind. The wind is no longer, for those
who go down to the sea in ships, more than an
obstacle or a danger; it adds no swiftness to the
course of sails flying before it, but may delay or
incommode the steady indiflPerent progress of the
steamer. Does not its name betray it ^ the thing
that steams, a thing heated from within, a churner
of waves. It is no longer a ship, which was a light,
veering thing, like a bird, half tamed to a man's
hand, escaping from him and unpunctually returning.
Now, as I see a Channel steamer move slowly out
backwards from the dock and turn slowly in the
middle water of the harbour, I am reminded rather
of the vast slowly stepping motion of elephants.

III.

Dover under all shades of mists is personal, up
to a certain point beautiful. One night I saw from
the window a thick white mist come almost suddenly

3SO

Dover Cliffs.

out of the sea; the lights were blotted out, the mimic
guns, the bells, the fog-horns, snoring in different
keys, were heard all through the night. It was
the intermittent battle going on between the stealthy-
white forces and the resistant brain of man. The
fog lasted till early morning, when a blazing sun,
Uke one of Blake's, came out and burned through
the shivering vapours. On all the boats and planks
lying on the pebbles of the beach one saw, still
clinging there, as the sun lightened them, a white
wetness which the fog had left on them Uke some
sea-dew.

I write of it now as if it had been beautiful;
but I got my own share of discomfort out of it,
for I lay awake all night, unable to keep my mind
from counting the horrible iteration of sounds,
repeated with a monotony hke that of some torture,
between pit and pendulum. Every separate hoot,
shriek, or boom struck into my ears with a steady
violence, hke blow after blow from a great fist;
and what was most distressing in it was, not the
sounds, but their succession and the necessity of
counting them in my brain, waiting for them with
all my nerves. The big sound, like the thud of a
bomb, struck in with a measure of its own, at slower
intervals than the hooters; and I waited with most
anxiety for that shattering fall and rebound, whose
place I could never quite calculate, between two
or on the end of the second recurrent gasps. I
covered my ears, but the sound, a little deadened,
penetrated them in the same dismal rhythm; and

351

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.

in my mind there was only a great emptiness, in
which a vapour of suspense drifted to and fro.

But for those sounds I should have been per-
fectly happy in Dover. It is a place of winds, sea,
and cliffs; it is ahve, and the life in it varies with
every tide, the beauty in it comes and goes with
every change of hour or weather. The cramped
beach seems to have lost all that Matthew Arnold
found in it, except those

edges drear
And naked shingles of the world

which are still to be discerned there. And then,
one day, a wind brings back some of its motion to
the sea, and again, with Arnold :

you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sadness, however, is not the characteristic of the
sea at Dover, nor of the white cliffs, battlemented
and crowned with their castle, still alive. They
change colour and aspect daily and nightly, with an
uncertainty that is full of surprise and delight.
And the place, the streets, the people, is there not
some pleasant suggestion of France, not only in the
Calais and Ostend boats, persevering travellers to
and fro, but in the actual aspect of things .? The
streets are good to walk in, especially at night.
352

Dover Cliffs.

They are dimly lighted, and they have an old aspect,
some of them are dark and narrow, and all wind to
and fro, and some cHmb the hill or disappear under
archways or come out unexpectedly upon the
docks, or upon the sea-front. From the sea-front
you see the crude Hne of window-lights in the
barrack on the Western ClifF, and on the East Cliff
nothing but a leash of lights, dropping down from
the Castle like the tail of a comet. The people
walk at nights, in the wandering friendly way of
most sea-towns, up and down certain streets. On
market-day, which is Saturday, they walk up and
down past the noisy fish-sellers in the market-
place, sometimes turning down Snargate Street.
On Sunday night, after church-hours, all the young
men and women walk up and down on the sea-
front, or rather on the road and pavement which
keep them back a little further from the sea. The
Hghts are dim; over the sea they seem brighter
as they come and go; as they will come and go
all night; for Dover is never asleep. That gate
of England is always open, and there are always
warders awake at the gate.

1908.

THE END

THE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
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